moscow doesn't believe in tears: Wet Hot Russian Summer

You could say that summer culture festival Afisha Picnic, hosted by hipster semimonthly Afisha last weekend at Kolomenskoe Park, is like Woodstock, minus the booze, counterculture, drugs, public sex acts, rock & roll, social harmony, hope or fun. That is, it's muddy and tickets are free. Though in the spirit of not wanting to poop on everything that Moscow does, you could also say that Afisha Picnic turned out nicely for some people, like the American guy who made 11,000 rubles selling his retired club clothing (vintage!). But go back to that first point to understand why it was a doomed from the get-go: no booze. Alcohol was forsaken, spurned, cast by the wayside.

Fields of Pills: You lie, Afisha!

But maybe sun could have saved it. Had it been like Victory Day or City Day, the Picnic could have been a lot more fun. There was a lot of promise: lawn games, an old Soviet arcade, cardboard village, food stands, live musical acts, a special little pit for the Nu Ravers, take a blanket and spread out on the lawn with the kids and a refreshing non-alcoholic beverage. But the Air Force wasn't seeding any clouds for a bunch of hippies. The result — 30,000 soggy, sober, shifty people.

Or drugs. There weren't any, despite the flier promising rolling fields of pills. This guy had the right idea, he brought his own stash, then took off into his own world to the envy of all around. Once, candy-flipping, I grasped for a second how trance music, shamanism, string theory, singular consciousness, lucid dreaming and the objective experience of DMT where everyone sees aliens who tell them to save the planet, are all interrelated. Then I lost it.