Development of my art skills stopped in the second grade when a teacher couldn’t recognize a watermelon in my drawing. However, I would have definitely applied more effort if I knew that a career in art allows for unlimited hours alone with nude women, who will not complain if their features will not look so flattering on the painting. It’s art, you know.
Life Magazine archives have some images of Thomas Hart Benton working on his painting “Persephone” with Imogene Bruton as a model.

The following photo located on Google server was deemed in violation of adult content policies by Google. Go figure. You can still see it by clicking the link.

Students sketching nude model in painter Thomas Hart Bentons studio class at the Kansas City Art Institute. Model is the same one Benton is using for his painting Rape of Persephone.© Time Inc. Alfred Eisenstaedt

Here is the final version:

More photos of Thomas Hart Benton and his works.

P.S. Nude models can apply here for free painting or just to hang out.

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I bet you didn’t know that the famous song “Don’t Cry for me Argentina” had more lyrics than the title. If Argentina had a peso for every time a tourist quotes this song, no  one would ever have to work for living there. But until then Argentina just charges Americans $140 to cross the border and lets them walk around all day humming this song off-key for no additional charge.

After this trip to Argentina my non-existent bucket list got a lot smaller:

Checked Off My Bucket List: Argentina
Checked Off My Bucket List: Buenos Aires
Checked Off My Bucket List: Colonia del Sacramento
Checked Off My Bucket List: Cataratas del Iguazú
Checked Off My Bucket List: La Recoleta Cemetery

If you are looking for a an interesting destination and don’t mind paying the price, Argentina might be a place to consider.

Contrary to multiple tour guides and websites, nothing in Argentina is an extreme bargain, except for the public transportation. Your meals will probably cost you about the same as here, maybe slightly cheaper depending on the restaurant. Clothing is more expensive, and although you can find high quality leather products, a good leather jacket starts at $250. Vodka and vine cost about the same as here. Electronic items are significantly higher but most of them are  unusable here anyway. I have no idea how much precious stones cost in this country, but I’ve been told that they are cheaper in Argentina where many of them are mined.

Speaking about food. Although I’ve never seen a similar density of cafes, restaurants, coffee shops, sandwich stores, ice cream places, chocolate stores and whatever food establishments one can imagine, food was somewhat a disappointment for me. Not because it was bad – it wasn’t – but because it was so ordinary and somewhat bland. I was shocked to discover that Argentinians are not fans of spicy food. Their famous grilled meats served in omnipresent parrillas are usually just seasoned with salt and lemon juice. The quality of meat is excellent and the servings are huge with beef, chicken, pork, several kinds of sausages including blood sausage, chinchulín (chitterlings) and mollejas (sweetbreads) served in one huge pile on a plate.

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“Sunset Over A Sea of Corn” would have been a title of a picture I should’ve taken but waited just long enough for the sun to finally dissolve in the eight-feet-tall waves of corn somewhere between Bowling Green and Laddonia.

Maybe I am compensating for not having a car for the first 23 years of my life and never taking a real road-trip until I was a grown man but I’ve been doing a double-duty putting some miles on my car driving around these here United States. It also helps me maintain a healthy-sized carbon footprint, adding my little share to the global warming and destroying the environment. Luckily my daughter doesn’t mind hours of driving as long as I don’t sing in the car, which is hard because the seemingly omnipresent country station is pumping out things like:

She thinks my tractor’s sexy
It really turns her on
She’s always starin’ at me
While I’m chuggin’ along

You should hear this stuff with the Russian accent, it will really “turn you on”.
Over the past weekend we added another 1,200 miles to my car’s odometer, going to Chicago and back. This time we took a different route cutting through the South-Central-Eastern Missouri and Central-Western Illinois in order to make a stop at Springfield,IL to check up on the Land Of Lincoln. Driving on the rural highways has a more intimate feel since you actually have to slow down in each little town on the way, you get to see people’s houses, rusted farm equipment, smell the manure, and pass a tractor or two on the way. Somewhere between the anti-abortion billboards, entertained by a single country radio station, another breed of American people goes on about their lives unconcerned by their standing in the social media.
We took our time driving through this area and if I actually stopped and took every photo I wanted to, we’d still be on the road. So here are a few I actually had a chance to take.
The General Store in Atlas,IL has this sign that is the most concise restaurant review I’ve ever seen: “Eat Here – Get Worms”.


Pike County Courthouse in Pittsfield,IL

Lincoln’s Home in Springfield, IL.

Lincoln’s Home is just a part of a larger historic site which preserved Springfield as Lincoln would’ve experienced it, sans tourist crowds. In front of his home Lincoln Troubadours perform the period songs.

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

Next the Illinois State Capitol (compare to the Kansas State Capitol):

Chicago always has the neatest-looking sculptures. This one looks like alphabet soup on acid:

Chimpotle’s likeness scares customers away near some local bar:

Obligatory skyline shot:

I guess you can find peace and quiet even at the busiest corner in the middle of the busy city:

This could be Chicago’s mayor and his wife, or KC’s mayor and his wife (after skipping a dinner or two).

Lincoln’s body is still there, tourists disappointed by the lack of a souvenir shop wandering around the cemetery.

View of the Mississippi from Louisiana, MO.

Louisiana turned out to be a very nice small town with several streets lined with Victorian mansions overlooking the river. Some in better condition than others.

Health-care debate goes on here as well.

After watching the sunset we finally got back on I70 and the countryside disappeared in an unending strobe-lights of trucks and road construction cones. We were almost home.

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Some time ago I decided that this blogging thing is becoming too much of a burden and not as much of a recreational activity I envisioned it to be, so I relied on Forrest Gump to convey my feelings on the subject and stopped. Surprisingly the Earth didn’t stand still, and, according to a humorless fellow Pitch commenter, everyone is probably better off without me “spouting some inane half literate garbage off the top of (my) head, without offering a single new fact, based on things (I) read courtesy of the hard work done by the good folks in the “dead tree media”” . In the meantime, I entertain myself trading one-liners on Twitter and mostly keep my opinions to myself. Once in a while I see a subject, an image, a story and just like in the old days I think: “This could make a good post”, too bad I don’t feel like writing it. In the past weeks for various reasons I thought about death and dying, love, P&L made-up controversy du jour, almost typed something up in defense of Nadia Pflaum, who I don’t even know and rarely read, almost wrote something about Obama, auto industry, weather, movies and pickling of a watermelon (that may still show up some day). I thought about writing about these things but I didn’t because no one really cares what I have to say and to prove that, my blog is still getting about the same number of clicks I used to get when I posted something every day.

I guess nothing prompts me to actually sit down and write something like a cattle-like public support for the Iranian opposition, complete with blogs, facebook messages, re-Tweets, green-tinted avatars, etc.  Here is a video of the public racing to support the “democracy” in Iran.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzvO9x2H7ZA

For the record I don’t care who gets elected in Iran because in Iran “…Supreme Leader … has the final say in all matters”; Iran’s current president may be an angry Holocaust-denying degenerate with a potential access to nuclear weapons and no love for America but I can make a similar case for many other world leaders and, to some degree, for many people in the US congress and some former presidents. Let me make up some facts for you.

1. Until last week you’ve never heard of Mousavi.

2. You think he is better than the current president because an angry demonstrator with a green mask on his face told you so.

3. You have no idea what his platform is and if he is planning to stick with it.

4. You found out from Twitter that there was election fraud.

5. You felt that the opposition needed your personal support.

6. You painted your avatar green and now it says “where is my/their vote”

7. Mission accomplished.

8. This doesn’t seem ridiculous to you at all.

I am sure after being beaten and sprayed with tear gas the Iranians come home and find satisfaction in the “sea of green” faces on Twitter. You played an important part in the supporting of democracy, give yourself a good pat on the back.

It’s no secret that the tactic of indiscriminately supporting pro-American opposition didn’t always work out in the long run. One doesn’t have to look back 30 or 50 years to find another failed example of a misguided American foreign intervention. Both the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia were enthusiastically supported, encouraged and financed by the United States but produced neither the expected results nor any significant political and economic improvements. Few years later the new opposition is clashing with yesterday’s revolutionaries demanding their removal from power. Today, Ukrainian and Georgian people resent the United States for interfering in their affairs and egging them on into hasty action.

That’s why President Obama should continue with the policy of leaving Iranian people to resolve their election problems for themselves, while making sure that their Twitter is in perfect working order.  United States’ support of the Shah is in no small part responsible for the current situation in the country so if there is a time to stop interfering – it is right  now. It is painful to watch the beatings, bloody clashes and murders but there is no guarantee that if the opposition wins they will not kill and loot like their neighbors in Iraq. Who will you support then? So far the number of casualties is comparable to an average year in Kansas City, I don’t recall  a huge wave of Twitter indignation for our local beatings and murders.

In the meantime all the clueless do-gooders can continue their self-gratifying support for the Iranian demonstrators and protesters, changing time zones for conspiracy and painting their faces green. Election fraud and stolen elections apparently happen to the best of democracies (just Google “2000 election stolen“), no reason to get hysterical about it. Especially if you live 7,000 miles away and it takes you 3 tries to point Iran on the map.

In the famous words of Klaatu:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNu1Bj3oR00

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Continuing with the old Soviet photos, the next batch was taken at a typical school.
Wood-shops were very popular in schools even in my day, not to mention 30-40 years before that, when people were still rebuilding after the war.
In this photo the kid is learning pyrography or wood burning. Many parents received these works of charred art as presents, but due to my lack of talent and patience my parents had to satisfy their decorating needs elsewhere.

 

Another tool for patience development was a coping saw (I had to look this up in the dictionary). Hours of trying to follow the intricate ornaments usually ended with an ugly piece of plywood with holes and a pile of sawdust.

I don’t want to get repetitive here but I sucked at the wood lathe as well.

This looks like a biology or natural sciences classroom. Sometimes there was a fish tank or a pet hamster to add to the atmosphere of learning.

By the time I was going to school the uniforms changed to a less military style but the pioneer ties and bows in girls’ hair remained.

This looks like the 1st or 2nd grade…

…4th or 5th…

and this is probably the 8th grade.

After-school pioneer meetings were pretty common, but for the life of me I can’t remember what we discussed. Another type of a meeting was a “political minute” when kids presented current news and world events, usually positive happenings from our socialist friends and exploitation news from the capitalist countries.

Musical schools were separate from the general education and required mostly talent-based admission, so the music lessons in a regular school were mostly singing and learning about composers.

Nurse’s office:

Some extra-curricular activities:
Chess was huge, Soviet chess champions were treated as national heroes and people closely followed and replayed championship matches.

Dancing:

Although I entered the school in 1976 it’s amazing how relatively little the things have changed since the 50’s. I still learned to use an abacus and a slide rule, and ballpoint pens were still considered an enemy of good penmanship. Mine was probably the last generation to get a complete Soviet school experience.

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