friday, september 3, 2010
WORD’S In the Spotlight: Sex Shows WORTH By Anna Malpas
T H E S T. P E T E R S B U R G T I M E S
Everyone knows that during a thunderstorm, you wait for a bolt of lightning (молния) and then count the seconds until you hear the clap of thunder (гром). If you’re in Russia and there are five seconds between light and sound, the storm is five kilometers away. If you’re in the United States, the storm is five miles away (about eight kilometers). This shows how much our two great nations have in common. It also shows that our folk storm-tracking systems are pretty lousy. Long ago in Russia, folks seem to have been a bit confused about thunder and lightning. In some expressions гром means молния. For example: Однажды в сильную грозу убило громом несколько человек. (Once during a heavy storm several people were killed by lightning.) Or: Я остановился, как громом поражённый. (I stopped as if I’d been struck by lightning.) When you want to swear to the truth of your words, you can say: Разрази меня гром, если буду не прав. (May lightning strike me if I’m wrong.) And finally, there is the expression как гром среди ясного неба (like a bolt from the blue). Apparently all of our ancient ancestors believed that lightning only strikes during a storm, and so a bolt of lightning in a blue sky described something utterly unexpected. For example: Телефонный звонок раздался, как гром среди ясного неба. (The telephone call came out of the blue.) But sometimes thunder is just thunder, as in the common expression пока гром не грянет, мужик не перекрестится (literally, “until there is a clap of thunder, a man doesn’t make the sign of the cross”). Many commentators insist this is the essence of Russian mentality: В России эта истина подходит практически к любым ситуациям. (In Russian this truth can be applied to almost any situation.) But others assert that this is just part of human nature. I vote for the latter assertion. The adjective громкий means loud or noisy, but громкое имя (literally “a loud name”) is a famous person. Среди членов оргкомитета не оказалось громких имён. (There weren’t any celebrities on the organizational committee.) When the adverb громко (loudly) is combined with the verb звучать (to sound), the result is not so much an increase in decibels as an increase in significance. Доктор наук — за рубежом это звучит громко. (Outside Russia the title Doctor of Science sounds really important.) Молния also undergoes some metaphorical transformations. It can be the sharp glint of anger in someone’s eye: В его глазах сверкнула молния. (His eyes flashed with anger.) If you are furious, you can throw around bolts of lightning and thunder clouds. Правительство мечет громы и молнии, а цены растут. (The government rants and raves, but prices are rising all the same.) Where’s Zeus when you need him? Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator. A collection of her columns, “The Russian Word’s Worth,” will be released by Glas in October.
revealed how she takes part in S&M role games with a client who crawls and barks in a dog collar. Despite her lack of citizenship, she managed to find work at “one of Moscow’s best erotic clubs,” the voice-over boasted. Finally, three men eyed two girls as they picked out seductive underwear. The girls went for unrevealing flowery combos, while the men chose some scratchy net underwear, which the women then had to pose in. Men prefer underwear that is transparent and covers the least possible area, Chekhova concluded, sipping a margarita.
Nerdy Viktor stroked his sex doll, Anzhelika, whom he said had consoled him after his wife left him. “I’ve gotten used to her. I can’t say she’s like my wife — that’s a different feeling — but I don’t have to worry about her,” he confessed, sitting in front of a cupboard full of dusty china. My only comfort is that I used to read the casting ads for “Sex With Anfisa Chekhova” on TNT’s web site, and there is a sporting chance that Viktor was just an actor down on his luck. In another section, Cleopatra, a 19year-old stripper from Uzbekistan,
The show is a far cry from the groundbreaking show about sex on Russian television, “About That,” which was hosted by Yelena Khanga in the late 1990s. Its title shows the buttoned-up attitude to sex that was prevalent at the time. Nowadays, such shows are not so much about breaking taboos as mildly titillating late-night male viewers. Another long-running show, “Naked and Funny,” shows busty women losing their clothes at inappropriate moments as male passers-by — really actors — drop their jaws in amazement.
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5 The festival’s jury has reviewed more than 900 short and animation films from 30 countries and has selected almost 100 works which will compete in the official program in four categories, including fiction, documentary, animation and experimental films. Jury members have included film director Boris Khlebnikov, producer Vyacheslav Telnov, film critic Mikhail Ratgauz, philosopher and writer Alexander Sekatsky, documentary filmmaker Pavel Medvedev, and filmmaker Étienne Desrosiers. A special “Panorama 360” screening which will run concurrently with the competition presents the best collections from the world’s leading short film festivals, including the Oberhausen International Film Festival (Germany), the Recontres Henri Langois International Schools Film Festival (France), the Brussels Short Film Festival (Belgium), the ECU European Independent Film Festival (France), the Suzdalfest — Open Russian Festival of Animated Films (Russia), the Brest European Short Film Festival (France) and the Anifest International Festival of Animated Films (Czech Republic). The Oberhausen festival, which will present a selection of six fiction and animation works, is one of the oldest film events in the world and is widely regarded as being one of the most respected short film festivals in
‘About a Bird,’ dir. Olga Kudryavtseva
the world. The event served as a springboard for such internationally acclaimed filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, George Lucas and Wim Wenders. “There can be no doubt that the Oberhausen Short Film Festival has written film history...The short film has kept itself young, and so has Oberhausen. This atmosphere, this creative power, are what continue distinguishes short films today,” said former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in a statement now posted on the festival’s website. Traditionally, the festival offers a Parallel Competition which consists of movies that haven’t scored enough points to enter the main contest. This time, these works are divided into three programs subtitled, Great Expectations, Other Lands and No Anesthetic. For more information, visit: www.artbereg.ru
FOR SPT
Молния: a lightning bolt, a news flash, a zipper
‘Rain Since Yesterday,’ directed by Valentin Olshvang.
FOR SPT
By Michele A. Berdy
Every night, TNT airs a show called “Sex With Anfisa Chekhova,” whose curvaceous host promises that she knows “everything about sex.” In a show this week, a man confessed to replacing his wife with a rubber doll, a stripper called Cleopatra took a barking man for a walk on a leash, and a focus group of men explained why women should wear seethrough underwear. This month, a woman from Moscow sued the show for 3 million rubles ($97,404) in moral damages, saying it used footage of her semi-naked without her permission. The woman, Natalya Melnikova, thought that she was taking part in a casting session to be a double for bombshell actress Zhanna Friske, Life News reported. It posted a video of the prank, filmed on the bustling tourist street Arbat, an unlikely spot for a real audition. The news caused a bit of confusion as journalists phoned up the television channel for comment and found out that “Sex With Anfisa Chekhova” in fact closed last year. Since then, the channel has been fobbing viewers off with repeats, but no one has really noticed. Chekhova began hosting the show in 2005, gamely showing off her impressive cleavage and becoming one of the nation’s favorite pin-ups. Lately though, her performance had become somewhat perfunctory. In a show aired this week, she typed on a laptop as she read the intro for each section, seemingly with little enthusiasm for her subject. That did not put off viewers, who sent in badly spelled messages of love and passion to run along the bottom of the screen, at 75 rubles ($2.40) per time. “Girls, I want sex,” one wrote bluntly, managing to spell the word “girls” wrong. The show’s co-host, Denis Morozov, got all the best lines. He showed off a horrifying cheap sex doll that looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “You need either very poor eyesight or a very good imagination,” he said.
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‘A Game of Hide-and-Seek,’ directed by Alexandra Nemchik.