Sergei is coming...

I hired a driver to take me on a cruise of St. Petersbrug at dawn. The goal is to capture dawn in its varied and sumptuous colors. The sky here is a long exapnse broken by massive pancake buildings that the light struggles to overcome. That night that I drove Wendy back to the Astoria, and the driver went down Admiraltastvay, and I saw the sun crest over the top of the winter palace and hermitage floored me. I got the idea to do this then, and I'm finally going to make it happen. There is no way in hell I'll walk these streets at this hour with two thousand dollars worth of camera gear on my back, just not happening, I'm even a little nervous about getting out of the car with gear on my back, hopefully 19 year old Sergei is more of a man than me and will intervene with shit bag cops if the need arises. I'm going to pay him well, we still haven't settled on a price, but he's a sweet kid and picked me up at the airport, and since he's a friend of Katia's I trust him more than most other people. He has an infinitely cool car, called a Moskvich, only 500 were ever made, I'll take a picture so you can see, but its like a volvo, but smaller and sleeker, with tinted windows, a radar detector and a thumpin stereo. I'm going to give him copies of my CDs, just as a little thank you gift, my last ones, the rest have been dolled out... anyway, he knows the pink church with the stripes, I've been dying to find it for three years now, its at the ass opposite end of the city and will take forever to reach by metro, which is closed now, it happens to be near where he lives, hopefully its not skin head central.

I forgot to mention, I saw a cat with a swastika on his forearm, it was very disconcerting... he wasn't a skin head, rather he had hair and was rather handsome, but plain as day, there it was on his forearm with old english script, in German, around it. With what happened to this city because of the Nazis, you'd think someone would've cut this fuckers arm off and shoved it up his ass by now. I went to the siege museum, maybe this is what spawned this tiraed, but anwyay, it used to be 3 square blocks of the city, until Stalin shot the directors, it was started in 1944, before the war and the blockade was fully broken. The city was besieged for 900 days, 1.5 million people were starving and kept the Germans at bay for 3 years. During the first year of the siege the river, from which the Nevya flows, froze over, it was the 100 year freeze and they called it the road of life, as trucks would drive across it carrying supplies bound for leningrad. The last freeze happened during the Napoleonic wars, how very timely and convenient, no? The museum was filled with old guns, propoganda posters, military uniforms, and a display showing how a storng, healthy, atheletic woman, who before the siege was gorgeous and in the prime of life and one year into it, was reduced to looking as if she was in her 60s. It was frightening. Pictures to come of this and more. So based on just this, this reminder of the past, how could someone have a swastika on their arm here? I suppose assholes are everywhere, but especially here, it seems so very wrong. I ran into Resa shortly after this and she said, well, you have to have compassion even for the racists, as its the most extreme people, the ones least worthy of compassion that really test the limits and define an all inclusive compassion, she's right, but I'm not that zen. When I walked into the museum an old woman, one of the "guards" came up to me and tried to speak English, I finally convinced her that I speak Russian and she began to tell me the history of the museum, as I walked furhter back, she would come running up to me to detail how and what happened, it was really amazing, even more startling to find out that she was in 1st grade and remembered it. There's still memory walking this streets, still there, still a heart beats, and still someone cries, somewhere, in the dark of this darless night, for what happened here. I thought back to my grandmother and how her youngest brother starved to death in her arms during the war and just had to sit down for a while, I'm sitting now, and wondering if anything I do here as any real significance or meaning, considering what was done here. Eh... too much and too big for a small body and place.

wish me luck!