Good times, bad times... how does that song go?

So the good news is that we found a spot in the mini hotel/hostel that I'm staying in, that has an internet hotspot. To be honest, its kinda rocking and totally free. You can't really complaint that much. The bad news is that it drops out every 10 minutes or so and since the uploads to FLIKR take so bloody long, it still seems as though I had better find a way to shrink the photos before I try and upload them, or find a land line over which to upload the photos.

Before I left I stood at the counter of looking glass photo with my heard earned money in hand. I had put a down payment on a D200, that had come in that afternoon. Accepting the fact that I was about to buy the most expensive piece of camera gear I had ever invested in was more than difficult to swallow. I wanted reassurance, I asked the girl behind the counter "its a good camera right?" Its like asking your broker, just tell me this is how people make money, or something like that. She said in a tender voice with just enough smile to make me feel calm and a bit more for added pleasantness "its a great camera."

Thus far is been a more than beautiful camera and I'm taking picutres like a madman when I bring it with me. The fact that I can delete things with the touch of a button, selectively choos what I want, and what I don't, take long night exposures without thinking this is a waste of film, using nothing more than beer cans for tripods, yeah man, this is a great camera.

So as for the program, well the readings last night were ok, the reading of the play was by far the best thing, Laura Maria Censebella read from a work in progress. It was about three generations of Italian women, discussing events during WWII as the grandmother claimed to have hidden jews and resistence fighters. The "mother" found it all quite unbelievable and continued to pretend drink from a wineglass while rolling her eyes. The "daughter" was desperate to find out the truth about her aged grand progenitor and her mother, the great grandmother, who had sent this girl away at one time. Censabella's reading voice was strong and the accent quite good as she tried to portray this 80 year old woman. Swafford's excerpt from his up and coming book didn't grab me. I spoke to several other people, they agreed, it had a nice ending, nothing terribly shocking, but it was storng in the finish and witty, but it didn't make me want to pick up the book and start diving in because the characters were written in an interesting fashion, something about it left me feeling flat. Binyavanga arrived two hours before the reading, if not less, he came in and read form his laptop, a kind of personal account of his experiences in Nairobi, with that wonderful African/British English where the R's roll off his tongue with the greatest of ease in the most rrrrrrobust tones. Still, it seemed a little too personal to really be comrehensible, it didn't grab either.

The parents called me this afternoon. They're at the hermitage, we have to walk a group of people over to the Ahkmatova museum for a reading in Russian. The address is 53 Litenny Prospect from which we're heading over to Nekrasova and Litenny to meet the folks for a little Uzbekistanian feast and allow my mother the pleasure of ordering for the entire group... WOO HOOO!!! I've been dreaming about this stuff for a year.

The group this year is mostly mellow, older, more mature, and sometimes even seperating out by age groups. I overheard certain conversations that lead me to believe that the generation gap here is strong and without a doubt divides our participants, but its always like that. Even art can't seem to bridge the gap between what once was revolutionary and now is simply archaic.

I'll see if I can post some pictures at the Players cafe tomorrow morning... for now... adieu... and shislivo...