Kamwa Festival and Perm

This is a guest post from Wade Schuman of Hazmat Modine as part of The World’s blogging series presented by musicians and artists while on tour.

View from the stage in Perm (photo: Wade Schuman)

The stage is on the side of a hill in a beautiful valley surrounded by lakes and hills, so picturesque it was a bit hard to believe, like something from a hobbit movie, there were remarkable wooden houses and churches made of logs with onion steeples with wood shingles like fish scales, everything was very well maintained. The festival was about 40 kilometers from Perm

The bus taking us from Perm was bringing all the bands at once to the show. Many of the musicians came late or disappeared back into the building while we all sat waiting on the bus, which had no air-conditioning whatsoever and was sitting in the direct sun.

By the time we arrived at the festival we had been fried to a crisp and there was not too much time before we had to get on stage.

As we set up on stage they announced us before I was able to tune my guitar or fully set up the instruments, but we launched into the set, there were about 3,000-4,000 or so people on the audience, many in bathing suits and various states of undress.

As far as I could see in contrast to the city of Perm the event itself was alcohol free. For me it was a hard show. All the setup for sound check the day before seemed to be for nothing and I couldn’t hear myself and I couldn’t get the soundman to grasp the situation.

In the end, I did the whole show without really being able to hear myself. It is like walking up hill with rocks on one’s back. Sometimes when the sound on stage is so bad, it is hard to feel much but anxiety, especially because I knew the sound in the audience was very clear and I had so much trouble gauging my intonation, at these times one plays as much from memory as anything.

At the very end Sasha asked me impromptu to play a solo harmonica piece for the crowd, which I did.

After the show we spent the evening with the other musicians. Among them an old friend, Nina Nastasia, as well as new people that I had only just heard about over the years. At festivals meeting the other musicians is a gift. I am always astounded by how many people we all know in common and the vast community of people that musicians live in.

I also met the young poet Vera Polozkova who was co-MC of the event with Sasha. In Russia poets can still be somewhat like rock stars and often appear at big events as celebrities, Vera told me that she often recites for large groups of up to 3,000 people.

The evening culminated with a party at the New Museum of Modern Art, which was in a magnificent old building down by the river that had once been the train station. I was surprised and happy to see an exhibit of work by a good friend the Russian artist Alexander Malemid. I also met the owner of the museum Marat Guelman.

Guelman is a powerful person in the Russian art world, a roly-poly man with a beatific smile, and spots that appear to be a record of many meals covering the shirt on his ample belly. He was half shaven and had very crooked designer glasses. There is something charismatic about him. Guelman displays a profound confidence of purpose.

Guelman had decided that Russia for too long had an art world that existed only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and with messianic fervor has set out to make Perm the new and greatest center for art in Russia.

This would be a little like deciding that one would make Des Moines the center for art and culture for all of the US.

Guelman is a controversial figure, and as he said, he is not always “appreciated” by the inhabitants of Perm. Guelman lives in Moscow half the time and very much considers what he is doing as enlightening the aesthetic heathens of the Russian hinterlands.

Hard to talk about Perm. Such a strange mixture of the derelict and the sublime, beautiful northern light and old crumbling buildings, Soviet era and ornate old pre-Soviet wooden Russian houses with no right angles left, and hideous chrome and glass contemporary monsters.

People everywhere walking and drinking, but no one seems to smile. The driving here is Asian, everyone passes in the middle of the two-lane road and cars play a constant game of chicken.

They drive as if there is only one rule: to get there as fast as possible.

Never in my life have I seen so much drinking. Tonight we went for a walk in the crystalline 10:00 p.m. summer sun. Everywhere there men, women, teenagers, adults walking with beer, massive bottles clutched in the hands, women on seven inch heels and mini skirts teetering and clutching bottles, it’s one huge party everywhere you look.

All the promenades end down along the river like a flowing current, men without shirts and woman in clothing that would make most prostitutes look modest, and small children.

Rachelle, Michael, Bill and I walked down to the river. No one paid us much mind. The drinking is very earnest, no one smiles, this is something I can’t quite understand about Russia, everyone has a stern if neutral expression, even in the most intense celebration they all look so serious, or rather there is no expression at all, perhaps this a result of a totalitarian past.

It is so hard to say why.

We walked down the promenade, everywhere people dancing and bottles spilling on the ground. We stopped to look at some go-go dancers and then continued walking past two woman with horses and clusters of drinkers, suddenly without warning the horses at full gallop were on us, with Bill between them, they passed at full gallop on either side of him, one horse knocking one shoulder then the one hit the other shoulder so that he spun around.

In shock Bill lurched back and just then 10 feet away someone set off a huge display of fireworks directly overhead, the sound was deafening, shrieks and explosions, debris falling everywhere, none of this seemed in any way extraordinary to the people around us who continued drinking.

We then realized we were walking on a short straight horse race path that paralleled the walk way and we had to scramble away as the horse riders rushed back toward us again.

Shortly after this we came upon a small girl with a miniature pony and with a balloon tide to it. I stopped to talk with her, she spoke no English, through gesture and inference we found out that she was 13 and that she was selling rides to children on her pony.

She solemnly gave me the balloon and we fished around to find something to give her in return finally coming up with an American quarter.

Again I was struck by a seriousness of affect and that combined with her in-between age gave a very strange impression of a tiny adult.

The pony was also truly miniature; it’s hooves no bigger then a dog’s paw and it was perfectly cared for and seemed quit relaxed. It and had none of the nasty character that I had always heard Shetland ponies had, but it too seemed very somber.

We walked on and on past hundreds of clusters of drinkers and revelers it felt a bit like a Breughel painting with men fishing and people playing guitars and the rich midsummer northern light.