My secret awesome tipsters (who are everywhere) alerted me about an exhibition of canned food sculpture at the Union Station.

CANstruction, is a design-build competition, that showcases the talent of Kansas City’s creative community as they create unconventional, astounding structures using only canned and other non-perishable food items.

After the exhibition is over, Union Station will use cans and other non-perishable items to build an army of robotic employees to replace those recently laid off.

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Key West is an island infested with drunks, roosters…

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There are two kinds of people in the world – selfless dreamers and the rest of us. Selfless dreamers are busy dreaming up ways to make the world better, feed the starving, enrich the poor and keep the Earth at some temperature that they know to be perfect for all of us to live happily and comfortably. The rest of us are lazily pointing out why these dreams will never come true and why they shouldn’t, at the same time hoping that there is enough medication to keep selfless dreamers sedated or at least writing another unsellable book. Sometimes the dreamers manage to convince the weakest-minded among the rest of us to follow them and that’s when we end up participating in wild social experiments like the one in the USSR that lasted for over 70 years.

I am sure in 1917 the idea of communal living sounded great: rich people where enjoying palaces and nice apartments with heat and indoor plumbing, while the poor where huddling in shanties, dorms and dirty cramped tenements with no running water and freezing outhouses. People reasoned that they could use an upgrade, kick out or downsize the rich oppressors, move into their posh apartments and share the amenities with their working class brethren. Thus was born a “kommunalka” or a communal apartment where many families were crammed together in a formerly single-family apartment. I am not sure how many days it took the new kommunalka dwellers to realize their mistake, find the dreamers who promised to make their lives better and beat them senseless, but they and their families had over 70 years to regret that move and some are still facing their neighbors every morning in the line to use the restroom.

I guess it takes a generation to grow up without knowing any better to have a completely opposite reaction to something that would normally be considered abnormal. I’ve seen all kinds of living arrangements but I never thought that any of them were weird, no matter how ugly, overpopulated or cramped some of these places looked I always thought that was business as usual. I wrote about communal living before and originally planned to expand on the subject but I found a virtual museum with plans, photos and videos, with English captions and transcripts which thoroughly covers every aspect of life in a kommunalka. You wouldn’t find any of this in the glossy cheery photo albums that somehow made it into this country.

However, for your enjoyment I uploaded and tagged a video clip from the movie Russian Dolls in which the characters arrive at the typical apartment in St.Petersburg.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HcNmpEiNdU

Another clip is from a recent Russian movie Stilyagi which also depicts a huge communal apartment, although it may be a dorm. I think in real life the happiness was dialed down a little (or a lot). Also notice neighbors always being in your business and a lot of times in your food (imagine your office fridge times 10).

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyGOf0jdOoQ

Thin walls, whole families in the same room with kids and grandparents, often separated only by curtains, fights, hate, backstabbing, stealing, it wasn’t a communal dream that the dreamers promised. But at the same time there was love, care, lifelong friendships, memorable times and helping hands – some things cannot be killed by years of inhuman living conditions.

Here is another post on the subject.

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When I was growing up© the ultimate summer non-alcoholic drinks were kompot and kvas. Kompot is a fruit drink made by boiling available fruits with sugar and then letting it chill. I am not sure if there is any recipe for a kompot, almost any imaginable fruit and berry can be used. Apples, peaches, plums, pears, strawberries, blueberries and especially sour cherries make the most delicious drink in about 20 minutes. Just cut the fruits (you don’t even have to peel the apples if you don’t feel like it) and add all of the ingredients to the pot of water. It still should be mostly water, it’s a drink not a meal. When it boils, add sugar to taste. Cover and cook for 10-15 minutes – no need for the fruits to disintegrate. Turn the heat off and leave covered to cool down. Kompot is the best when chilled and it only gets better after a day or two. In winter dried fruits can be used but dried fruits sold in this country are infused with sulfur dioxide to make them more presentable which coincidentally kills their taste.

Kompot tastes so good that people used to preserve (can) it for winter when not too many ingredients were available. It’s not some colored chemical compound that kids drink nowadays. Give it a try, you won’t go back!

Soon I will be making kvas and will post about it then.

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Continuing my previous post about the comparison of the American and the Soviet education systems I will now post a few photos of Stephen Lapekas – Alexei Kutzkov’s American counterpart.

According to this article:

Lapekas became a Navy pilot, then a commercial pilot for TWA; I am told Kutzkov works for the Russian equivalent of the FAA.

Despite the seemingly different education systems in the Soviet Union and the United States, the article didn’t mention that the most important factor was not how the students were educated but how their country utilized their talent and knowledge after the graduation. In the USSR the graduate was likely to be drafted to serve in the military and after eventually graduating from college be assigned a low-paying job anywhere in the country. Most of the intellectual jobs such as engineering, science and medicine were paying less than manual labor to maintain the socialist class hierarchy, where intelligentsia was not considered a class like workers and peasants, but was tolerated as a mid-layer in order to serve the cause of the working class. Therefore, a welder was making more money than a doctor or a scientist with a PhD.

In the end, the quality of life was probably better for the fun-loving American kid, than for his serious Soviet counterpart, whose abilities could not deliver him the material success he deserved.

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