The English Channel

Long live Nadsat! The artificially invented language has taken on a life of its own and is formatting reality, prompting readers to act: to decode the familiar language, to write their reviews, and even to return purchased books. This is very postmodernichnenko.

Покупатели крайне разочарованы переводом книги Энтони Берджесса «Заводной апельсин», о чем сообщают в отзывах на маркетплейсах. Читатели не понимают, почему половина слов «pishetsya vot talk» и занижают оценки книге.

What a great metaphor! When it comes to careers, society is like your great uncle who traps you at holidays and goes on a 15-minute mostly incoherent unsolicited advice monologue, and you tune out almost the whole time because it’s super clear he has very little idea what he’s talking about and that everything he says is like 45 years outdated. Society is like that great uncle, and conventional wisdom is like his rant. Except in this case, instead of tuning it out, we pay rapt attention to every word, and then we make major career decisions based on what he says. Kind of a weird thing for us to do. Taken from this fundamental post. Link to the translated version — in comments.

Watching well-known movies in black and white is defamiliarization in action, a method of seeing things out of their normal. It's like how writers play with unconventional language to tell stories. Or how cathedral architects use light, sound, and scent to estrange worshippers from earthly matters. Or how Russian teachers of IMO use English to connect with their (predominantly) Russian students.

Here’s my selection for watching in black and white. Can you guess all of them? Austin Kleon, who inspired me to try this noir-ish filter with my unforgettable movies, gives a manual for watching: “I opened the picture settings on the TV, turned the Color to zero, set the Contrast all the way up, then turned down the Brightness down to about 40/100. I couldn’t believe how good it looked…”

​​Have you ever said to yourself, 'I wish I could watch this movie for the first time again!' To relive the thrill of meeting the characters, the suspenseful build-up, and the excitement of the ending. Don't worry, once you are 35, you'll forget most movies and get to enjoy them all over again. But what about those unforgettable films? The ones you’ve watched dozens of times and can recite the dialogue line-by-line. Here's a tip: watch them in black and white. It gives a fresh perspective, as black-and-white creates the necessary distance, or detachment. So it estranges you from a familiar movie and can even remind of neural art. It's like seeing “The Lord of the Rings” reimagined by Akiro Kursawa, or “Star Wars” as a silent film from the 1920s.

Happy Women's Day to all ladies here! Wishing you the freedom to pursue your own agenda and make choices that bring you joy and fulfillment. May you always have the support of trustworthy relatives, friends, and like-minded people who uplift and empower you. May your skills and knowledge be a constant source of self-assurance and inner strength 🌷

For me, those cups are a metaphor of the artist’s body of work. Letterman works on air, and - I want to believe – collecting paper cups helps him visualize his elusive job. Of course his shows remain on video and online, but have you noticed how imperceptible things become in our digital world? 12-15 years ago, I had a clear visual representation of my work. It came in the form of class journals, stacked in eight A4 notebooks, safely tucked away in a closet at my workplace. Those notebooks symbolized years I spent teaching at the children's center. I could see the stack growing larger with each year of my work. Of course, it gave a faint idea of the dozens of pupils, hundreds of lessons, and thousands of learning events I had dealt with over the years. But it served as a tangible reminder of my labour and experience. But now, in this digital era, everything has changed. My years of life and work are no longer physically present. They exist as folders on my computer and in cloud storage, as classes in LMSs, and as digital photos scattered across various devices. Even the textbook that my colleagues and I were developing for months exists solely as a PDF file and a single pilot printout. As I reflect on this shift, I wonder how I can visualize my work in this intangible digital landscape. Where are the physical manifestations that once served as evidence of my labor? Perhaps, in this new reality, only coffee cups hold the answer ☕️

Alma mater studiorum & innovatorum 👨🏻‍🎓 Советский модернизм и гризайль — бешеная эклектика, всё как я люблю.