It’s snowing hard in Paparazzi Bar, the heir apparent to Mix. Good, because scruffy Moscow club kids were lacking in recreational options beyond alcohol and cough medicine. The rich and fabulous can get yayed up ten ways from Sunday at their Dyagilevs and their Rais, but what about the little people? Can’t they get theirs?
"OMG, I'm falling in a k-hole"
Drug proliferation is the perhaps the greatest testament to the existence of a Russian middle class, you know, that great void between Roman Abramovich and the pensioners farming beets in permafrost with plastic McDonalds forks. If the unwashed hipster masses can afford narcotics and nice places with chairs and doors in which to do them, then things might not be so bad after all.
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.
Happiness is a Wet Hill.
Idle Conversation groupie shirts: "I Want to be Intimate with (promoter) Dima Loginov" "Be Sweet to Me Danila Polyakov," etc.
Nu Ravers confined to their own ecstatic little pit. The way it should be!
Not too long ago, Mix celebrated its 7th birthday. It's an after-party club, which is where people on drugs go after all the drunk people have passed out. As a result, Mix can be alienating for those who are not on drugs.
My friend Vlad once called me at 6 a.m., high on life, with a proposal. "MDBIT, I've always wondered what it would be like to wake up in the morning, and go straight to a nightclub before breakfast. I've been here all night, but you can wake up now, come to me at Mix, and tell me what it's like. Or you can go back to sleep." I chose social experiment over sleep because I am a scientist after all. Upon my 7.30 am arrival to the club, I was looked over in a way that an art director with a single dreadlock coming out of the back of his head should never be allowed to look at someone. But he let me in. I chose orange juice with my vodka, you know, because it was breakfast.
The kind of people one meets in a nightclub at 8 a.m. are the kind of people who claim to be 28 when they're pushing mid-forties. Moreover, they look like they've been pushing for a long time, and it's been quite the struggle. Dzaek (don't ask me) was just such a guy. Leathery to an extent that my dad can only dream to be, Dzaek accompanied me to Tapa de Comida when the club closed around us. At 9 a.m. he started the slow decline into his breakfast. Weighed down by all the years and earrings, his head made its way down into his breakfast salad, led by a trail of drool, until finally that leather bag met its lettucey pillow. Seems Dzaek had been partying for a long time (maybe 35 years) because it was impossible to wake him. So I left him there. As a tip.
Here are photos from the birthday party. All of these people are on drugs.
This kid sold drugs in my junior high PE class
Kurt Cobainov
"Shaddup, you don't know meeeee"
