Boo! Scary Russian movie!

Early in Gruz 200 a girl — who has ill-advisedly gotten into a car with her best friend’s boyfriend and driven to an illegal vodka distillery in the middle of nowhere with a creepy guy lurking outside who looks kind of like Putin — is told by an earthy, world-weary woman to go hide in [...]

Not coming to a theater near you anytime soon

Novy Arbat is the worst street in Moscow. It’s like the neon-scarred main drag in every movie about the Scary Future, and there’s a big multiplex movie theater on it where last night I saw the #1 movie in Russia, Admiral.

Admiral is a spectacular- naval-battlescene-filled historical epic about the career and lovelife [...]

Busy day.

Sometimes I forget that Doree and Jessica’s blog of Mom emails exists and then something reminds me (my Mom sends me emails too, which I am not allowed to forward or discuss on pain of death) and I go look at PFYM and it’s still one of the funniest things on the Internet. For [...]

Borscht! Psych. Still, though: authentic Russian soup recipe. You are thrilled I’m sure.

I don’t know, maybe America’s wrong about only eating “food” as defined by Michael Pollan — you know, ‘nothing your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize, mostly plants’ — and getting enough fiber, and only eating dessert on special occasions, and drinking 8 glasses of water a day.  Maybe all that stuff is just myths and disinformation, promulgated [...]

I’ll make it anywhere.

“I lost two cities, lovely ones,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in her most oft-cited (by me) poem, ‘One Art.’ I love this poem in praise of “the art of losing” because it’s about breakups and also “the fluster” of looking all over the god damn house for your keys which you just had a minute [...]

“iTube,” Rutube

This review I wrote about former ‘lifecaster’ and current videoblogging persona Justine “iJustine” Ezarik is not my favorite thing I’ve ever written, in part I think because I was trying so hard to be fair that I ended up being wishy-washy. Justine is interesting, though — it’s always interesting to talk to someone who [...]

Sirok my world

Hi, were you wondering what the world’s best candy is?

Now you know.  A sirok is a little bar of vanilla cheesecake-type substance covered in a thin crisp shell of dark chocolate.  The middle part is lighter and better than cheesecake actually.  You can buy one basically anywhere.  In this sense, Moscow is better than New [...]