AB issue 33 – Transcription of Multitudes – see it here 

* Tower (Blues Mondo). Tatyana Apraksina
“from the objectlessness of the inaudible”
* “Because They’re People.” Ella Molochkovetskaya, Olga Romanova
“Since it’s theater within theater, everyone is everyone there”
* Transcribers Anonymous. Tom Cobbe
“suites, sonatas and sets of variations. Oh dear. There go the holidays.”
* You Know Where They Are. John P. Rogers
“time will stop at nothing”
“something like a clock embryo in a shot glass”
* Chromatoplastics. On Color, Form and the Fundamentals of Fine Art. Olga Zemlyanikina
“A spot of color as a tool for conveying the type, character and direction of movement”
* Heeding the Calling. At the Black & Brown Comics Festival (Blues Report). James Manteith
“artists display comics with a blend of mysticism, prophecy and science fiction dubbed ‘Afrofuturism’“
* Eight Cemeteries. Sempa Dordzhe
“His head was in the southwest and his feet were in the northeast, and from them, eight great cemeteries arose in all the worlds”
* Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Blackbirds. Vladimir Verov
“True poetry is not subject to decay”
* Spanish Rock. The Beginning. Olga Romanova
“too rocker for punks and too punk for rockers”
* The Art of Whispering. A New Poetry Collection by Gjekë Marinaj.
“the poet lives in both hemispheres, constantly cultivating literary relationships”
* The Mind Finds Russia…. Translated into Japanese, Persian, Rebrew, Arabic, French, Romanian and Turkish by Anton Kiselyov
* An Old Novel’s Insights and Predictions. Ekaterina Ovcharova “the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries in Germany was marked by the appearance of two fundamentally different concepts of the eternal image — Goethe, who crowned the tradition with his two-part play, and Bonaventure, who opened the way to its deconstruction.”
“The hero has no soul to sell, and there’s no one to sell it to.”
* Car Stories. Bill Yake
“then I could see dancing shadows on the asphalt beneath the engine”
* Mail

“Apraksin Blues” invites everyone to a seminar

5 December (Tuesday)

ANDREI PATKUL,
author of the book The Idea of Philosophy as a Science of Being in the Fundamental Ontology of Martin Heidegger. SPb: Nauka, 2020

TEMPORALITY AS THE MEANING OF EXISTENCE IN THE ONTOLOGY OF M. HEIDEGGER

The seminar begins at 7 pm
Doors open at 6:30 pm

The editorial office address is the same:
Apraksin per., d. 3, kv. 3

The editorial office phone is the same:
310-96-40
Also: +7-981-015-37-21

“Apraksin Blues” invites everyone to a seminar

CYCLE “HOW THE TEACHINGS SEE THINGS” 
25 November (Saturday)

VAGID RAGIMOV

THE PATH OF SELF-AWARENESS IN TIBETAN BUDDHISM
The System of Mahamudra

The seminar begins at 7 pm
Doors open at 6:30 pm

The editorial office address is the same:
Apraksin per., d. 3, kv. 3

The editorial office phone is the same:
310-96-40
Also: +7-981-015-37-21

November 18 2023 (Saturday)

MARINA PAVLOVNA CHERNYSHEVA

THE NATURE OF TIME
Biological time

The author will try to answer the questions: What is TIME? Just a parameter characterizing the sequence and duration of events? Or something else — for instance, a type of energy that affects all living things, like light and mechanical energy, etc.? Is there evidence of this?

The seminar begins at 7 pm
Doors open at 6:30 pm

The editorial office address is the same:
Apraksin per., d. 3, kv. 3

The editorial office phone is the same:
310-96-40
Also: +7-981-015-37-21

AB issue 32 – see it here

* The Place of Measure (Blues Mondo). T. Apraksina
* Great and Mighty. What the Old Seer Prophesied. N. Yarygin
* The Artist and the Rich Man (translated by A. Kiselyov)
* Osip Mandelstam and Martiros Saryan. Some Parallels of Artistic Thought. S. Saryan
* Would You Like to Meet Me? G. Caproni (translated by Y. Sventsitskaya)
* And I Sing of Love for You. S. Quasimodo (translated by Y. Sventsitskaya)
* The Musical Experience of the Listener. E. Cho
* The “Vijuaru Kei” of Japanese Rock. E. Molochkovetskaya
* For Soviet Rock. S. Vasiliev
* Step by Step Through the Season with “Blues” (Blues Reports): Keepers of the Postal Fleece. Meetings with Fast-Witted Fan. Punk Defense, Punk Ballet. Boogie-Woogie Biosphere and Ethnogenesis: Lev Gumilyov. Finding a Face Before Sound. J. Manteith
* The Idea of a University. J.H. Newman (excerpts in translation)
* The Essence of the Mind. Lama Gendun Rinpoche (translated by V. Ragimov)
* Stages of Formation in the Verbist Order (interview)
* The Positive Tensor of Curvature. V. Lyubeznov
* Ibn Ezra and His Chess Poem (translated by A. Kiselyov)
POLEMICS SESSION:
* Defending Dostoevsky. N. Orlova
Mail

Seva Logo And Guitar

Vsevolod Gakkel and His Songs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vsevolod_Gakkel

November 17, 2022 (Thursday)

 

8:00 pm,

Doors open at 7:30 pm

 

Apraksin per., d. 3, kv. 4

Phone:

310 9640,

+7 981 015 3721

Gate code #1469

 

All are invited!

 

Donations to musicians are welcome.

Thursday, May 12, 2022

Musical Zen

Contemporary music with a Japanese accent

 

Vladimir SHULYAKOVSKY (violin)

Nikita CHASOVNIKOV (shakuhachi)

Shulyakovsky Zen

Doors open at 7:30 pm

Concert starts at 8:00 8:00 pm

 

Apraksin pereulok, d. 3, kv. 4 (gate code #1469)

Phone numbers: 310-9640

 (NEW!!) +7-981-015-3721

 

Donations for the musicians are welcome

ГРОБЫ
Георг Гейм (перевод Галина Снежинская)

Гробы поживали в гробовой лавке со множеством газовых ламп. Там вечно сквозило, там холод стоял, — зима без конца и без краю. За дверью мартовский ветер шумел, а в лавке в ту пору ноябрь наступал. Мертвые листья без шума, без шороха падали вечно с балок гнилых. Случались и гости — из морга подружки, варили себе кофеек. Судили-рядили, судачили. А под потолком на тонких бечевках саваны сохли, сушились. И странные были разводы-рисунки на них, там, где мертвое тело лежало: острова в морях голубых, корабли на якоре, в бухтах. Саваны сохли, сушились долго, но досуха не высыхали. Тяжкими темными тучами под потолком нависали. И воздух был волглый, соленый, морской. И лампа мерцала бледной луной среди грозовых облаков.

Гробовщик был древний старик. Он звался Факоли-Боли, «Век-в-Тысячу-Лет». Борода у него была такой длинной, что он наступал на ее конец. Поутру он выходил в исподнем, и гробы желали ему доброго утра и щелкали жадно громадными челюстями. Есть хотели гробы. Гробовщик доставал дохлых крыс из угла, где было крысиное царство. Крысы в своей стране мертвечины не терпят, они выбрасывают мертвецов за шлагбаум на имперской границе. Гробовщик швырял дохлых крыс в зияющие черные пасти. Гробы переваривали, рыгали довольно, а он, укротитель отважный, расхаживал между рядами гробов, по жирным широким бокам их похлопывал и говорил:

— Потерпите уж, потерпите! Скоро будет вдоволь еды. Потерпите пока, потерпите!
Читать целиком https://www.apraksinblues.com/ru/apk-article/гробы-пе..

я

The conference will take place in St. Petersburg and remotely in mid-May, 2022.

The working language of the conference is Russian.

The theme of the conference is “The Petrine Era” (and everything that might bear some relation to it).

Articles (six pages with 1.5 line spacing) should be submitted around mid-March (the anthologies collecting these articles come out before the conferences).

More information will follow.

Questions may be sent to the AB editorial address.

The Encyclopedia of “Sweet N”: James Manteith’s presentation from the 50th International Scholarly Conference of the V.I. Startsev International Association of Historical Psychology — Historical and Psychological Aspects of the Fall of the Soviet Union: Historical Parallels and Attempts at Interpretation. Dec. 13, 2021

 

Among the goals of culture is to help people survive such changes of eras as the collapse of the Soviet Union. From this point of view, I’d like to talk about the perception of one song as a bearer of the healing power of cultural continuity.

 

The song “Sweet N” was written by the Leningrad musician Mikhail “Mike” Naumenko, one of the first authors of artistically powerful blues and rock music in the USSR. Naumenko belonged to the Soviet Union’s unofficial so-called “second culture”. His songs initially had to circulate by amateur means, but quickly gained popularity and recognition, which have only grown since then.

 

One of Naumenko’s most famous songs — “Sweet N”, which appeared in 1980, was notably embraced by contemporaries as an “encyclopedia of life” in the author’s hometown and country. This definition implies a reference to Belinsky, who called Eugene Onegin an “encyclopedia of Russian life.” With this, the critic gave Russian literature an important symbolic yardstick, which remains in place to this day.

 

Such representatives of the second culture as Alexander Startsev, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya and Boris Grebenshchikov called “Sweet N” an encyclopedia of Russian, Soviet or St. Petersburg life, as different variants of recognition. That is, they agreed about the quality of encyclopedicity, which we can trace in the song at many levels, and about the song containing life as such. We might say the song has both facts and a sense of life, a characteristic search. In addition, these observers seem to have found it valid to compare this short, modest song from the late 20th century with the classic “novel in verse” of the golden age of Russian culture. And we can also surmise their feelings that in the song’s psychological space, Russian, Soviet and St. Petersburg life remains unified, and Leningrad’s life remains St. Petersburg’s.

 

Written in the style of a precise material and human document, the song forms at least a “short story in verse.” Naumenko made sure that the paths and perspectives of this story’s characters accommodate thoughtfully selected details which entrancingly convey typical second-culture realities: its settings, moods, habits, personalities, layers, manners of communication and relationships, its food and drinks, its economic life, and so on.

 

The song narrates a simple sequence of events. The main character, who tells its story, casually wakes up and goes outside, where he meets a second character, previously a stranger, on a bridge. They buy wine together, and the new acquaintance take the main character to visit a loft, where cursorily described bohemians are having a party. And at the end the hero returns home, where he claims he finds a sleeping woman, Sweet N, the character who occupied his imagination during the song. The way each of these scenes is described conveys a lively, direct notion of an alternative internal code for how people of the Soviet era — and of any era — might partition themselves from the official world’s categories and aspirations. This attitude has as much resonance with the legacy of classic contrarian thinking of earlier ages of Russian culture as with the Soviet equivalent.

 

Like the cultural movement it represents, the song focuses on observations about its own world, on the natural actions, feelings and dreams of its circle. A personal world becomes an environment for spontaneous artistic transformation. The song’s hero sets out without specific plans, but still winds up in an adventure. On the surface, he doesn’t spend his day constructively, but he guilelessly and observantly engages in making sense of his environment. And the song reveals his experience and orientation as containing a whole universe, into which listeners are invited, and to which they can relate.

 

Listeners’ attitude to the song shows that for many, literally every detail has an inspired resonance with their everyday lives. The sung testimony that exactly four rubles were spent on three bottles of apparently cheap wine in the Soviet Union during the stagnation period has remained poignant against the general backdrop of later financial vicissitudes. It’s also nice to learn that in the loft people are listening to Bach and discussing Zen Buddhism and flying saucers — an ironic, truthful eclectism not likely accounted for in the official reference books of that time.

 

Music helps to show the metaphysical scale that lies behind this dailiness, against whose background the hero remains preoccupied with his life’s meaning, embodied by the image of his muse, Sweet N. This harmonious dedication helps to give the song’s compressed encyclopedicity the expansiveness of a ballad or saga.

 

As with the cosmogony of Onegin and other classics of Russian literature, the dynamics and development of a life as diminutive and intuitive as described in “Sweet N” can easily affect a listener’s imagination even now. A thorough recollection of the norms of such a life in Soviet times provides an example for the present. The historical and current perception of the song tells us that the task of a person of the past, present and future is to find meaning and happiness where he is, and, if possible, to share his findings with the utmost encyclopedicity — that is, with artistic orientation on a reality independent of change.