Sergey Zadvorny

Sergey and Tatiana, April 2010...

Cliff's Bar

From before its rebirth as the Sky Lounge--although in one sense Cliff's was always the Sky Lounge.

Anna

Student life, reappearing like something out of 16th century Flanders...the dull homespun and worn heel, cloth the color of earth--brought together on a gray concrete floor, with only the tubular leg of a modern factory chair--a whisp of metal--to break the spell...

Weeks later, just before Thanksgiving, at an intersection near San Pablo--a figure on a bicycle, a woman with heavy load...heading uphill towards school. Also Anna...

Shtot meshugener, Mozyr

The shtot meshugener (town fool) of Mozyr, Belorussia, 1912-13. First encountered this as a photograph on the wall of the Jewish Museum in New York. What struck me was the man's face, and the gesture of his pose--something essential, as if known--and then (from the caption) that he was from Mozyr (my father's birthplace) and that the period in which it was taken would have also been while my father was still living there, eight or nine years old--all of which which meant that he probably knew this man, too...

The Sky Lounge

Up in the sky, someone is playing a trombone and a guitar.
Red is your tie, and in your velveteen coat, you hide a star.
Monica, Monica, dance the waltz
Monica, Monica, dance the waltz
Follow me, moon and sun
Keep time with me, one two three one...

Aleksandr Galich, "Nomera"

Russian video yesterday, late afternoon--Aleksandr Galich, Nomera, with old film clips of Galich--standing and singing, with guitar, in jacket and tie, later talking with young people, or alone, at a table, smoking thoughtfully, all beginning with a scene at his Russian Orthodox gravesite... And most mysteriously, the ice skaters in Moscow, grainy black-and-white footage, looped in place, in the same way the refrain from the song returns to a telephone number from long in the past--and a whispered invitation to go skating--"tonight, at eight...

- Пять-тринадцать-сорок три, это ты?
Ровно в восемь приходи на каток!

(Five--thirteen--forty-three, is that you?
Right at eight, come to the rink...)

* * *

For the full video: Александр Галич. Номера

(Note: for the image we're indebted to Mandelstam ("Leningrad")--but Galich's song is very much his own--and these things seem to be the property of all Russians...)