Snow had come to Vanadzor! It feels very much like back in the day in Chicago, admiring things covered in white. It actually is warmer when it snows hard. But you got to watch out for the ice especially in your own backyard. 

As usual, quite cheerful, well rested, well supplied, and sleeping a fair bit.   

Hello! Good to see you

-Heard you went to the movie yesterday

-Yes

-Was it good? Was it as good as the book?

-Yes?No

A Rococo Study

Saturday. A morning beautified with love, glittering with heavy precipitation from the sky. It was still snowing rather hard but the wind had died down, and the air at once felt moist and warm. I went to AELTA, its office beyond the smart lavender doors brightly visible from the end of the hallway amid the noise and sounds of grade school students, who apparently have sessions six days a week. This sanctuary is located, tucked away on a corner on the second floor of school number six, near the shuka, or the bazaar, depending on whom you talk to. It is a room of around two hundred square feet, its walls newly painted with lemon yellow from the ground up and a milky white above four and a half feet, the end point of a collaborative effort of a peace corps volunteer and the staff member of the association, a stern looking, cigarette smoking middle aged women with similarly severe looking black rimmed eyeglasses that matched, a chemical engineer by training, whom with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of area heavy industries found herself confined to this work space in this very corner of the building. The ensuring course of independence, there came massive, blanket unemployment, which had plagued the central Asian nation of A. ever since.

The office, I soon learnt, had until that very summer of restorative spurt of activity been, quite literally, a hole in the wall, all its walls dank and grayish green from the fervor of fungal activity, the air carnal and foul, moistened and spore saturated. The ceiling above the eleven cubic feet of space, meanwhile, had been darkened by rainwater along with the rich iron deposits it carried, water which, throughout the years numbering ten and five, have gradually found its way, seeping through the cracks of the roof of the school building, which had continued to serve its duty to house generations upon generations of changing faces with minimal, or should we say, non-existent maintenance.

While Russian educated S. possesses a native command of the country language and, of course, Russian, under her immediate disposal, her grasp over the elements of English was, at best, rudimentary. However, merely looking through the glasses of a casual visitor with the sole intent of catching a movie on one balmy Saturday morning, or better, a member of the Association who was there to say hello, one can see that S. has no lack of good company. For the three sides of the small room, was completely lined from corner to corner with sturdy four foot high shelves, its contents which, upon closer inspection, revealed that S. not only possess good company, but was blessed with a most elite company. Among the ranks: huddled as closely together as possible, numbering a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred, was Penguin classics of Russian, French, and British origin, their black coats shining under the gleam of the diffuse, slightly slanted beams of the wintry sun, beams uninterrupted by the double paned glass windows entering in from the east end of the room. Among the veterans were also spotted fresh, or not so fresh, faces: The mournful, sour-looking Steinback, side-by-side with the less seriously disposed, lighthearted, Hemingway, along good old uncle Faulkner, who, however unlikely it sounds, had found new acquaintance with Orwell, forever bent on telling of oncoming destruction, and deconstruction of tongues, of suffocation in the last days. Even the all-must-read-all-time-all-American, Twain, whos fame I could never decipher, can be found tucking along, together with various minor TEFL materials, thick "how to start a small business" manuals, periodicals and stock of all walks of life, their eager, closely cropped, freshly shaved faces and smoke tanned fingers moving about, anxious for action, any action.

Despite of the interesting juxtaposition between the old and the new, the contrasting lemon yellow and white interiors with the sub-zero weather outside blocked by the forever faithful glass panes, the room was well warmed. A wood stove sits quietly on the forth side of the room, proximal to the one baby piece of furniture--a twenty nine inch wide-screen Panasonic television, which, thanks for the apocalyptic visions of globalization, with industrious and resourceful, ISO-900X compliant mass-manufacturing ubiquitously dotting the coastal areas of the South China Sea, as asparagus sprout after the rains of spring, was complete with alumineric, unmistakably dirt cheap plastic paneling and a completely flat screen with a dust and abrasive-resistant hard glass covering. By this very time, L., my fellow volunteer residing in town, the facilitator of the event who had assiduously made preparations and all the organizational legwork for one of these joyous, dream-like, almost romantic, occasions, had quietly slipped into the room, bringing with him a refreshing dash of the morning cold with the opening and closing of the purple door. Accompanying him were a handful of first, second, third year students currently studying in the degree program in the V. Teachers Training Institute, smartly dressed, a little too provocatively dressed one might say, outgoing, intelligent young girls in their late teens and early twenties, faces gleaming with hope and as beautiful as flowers in bloom in late April and May, such that, my dear readers, there is not the slightest question that their seemingly mindless giggles, feigned na鴳et?and chattiness, may be, without condition, fully excused.

A Botched Diversion.

The movie commenced, with a few minutes of typical awkwardness and small talk, without much ado, thanks largely to the smooth operations of L., or better, the operations of his nimble fingers of his right hand, his fiddling of the colorful buttons of that foolproof remote control device. So, the batteries inside were not too tired from

over consumption, the details that unfortunately remain untold for brevity sake. In my humble opinion such proceedings ought to be kept within the very room where it occurs, but of course, as with some reminders and promises and future expectations of certain favors personal and/or financial, information from minor skirmishes off the coast, classic ou-target-me-I-target-you-back?scenarios to classified state secrets, kept under a multitude of lock and key tucked neatly and safely in those boring brown cardboard folders "labelled for eyes" only in some cabinet sealed semi-permanently in a facility built with so much concrete that it supposedly can withstand nuclear blasts in more difficult times, consisting of a labyrinth of multiple, interconnected, not very well lit tunnels stretching miles and miles towards the ends of the earth. It has to be under such conditions such documents were kept in the name of national security, or simply left there and not sought after, veered away from the center of attention due to the careful interactions between the passing of time, the lapsing of memory private and public, as well as the relevance of information, the truth, may we add, and nothing but the truth and the whole truth, can be readily assessed, or better, brought with someone offering to pay the right price.

But let us not further dive, at this moment, into the complex groups incentive systems that, in a truly classical economic sense, the "invisible hand" that pertained to the collection and dissemination of resources and information of all kinds, which, by the way, is bounded to be perpetually asymmetric, or even, as one might argue, inconspicuously kept esoteric. But enough is enough. Lets move on, shall we?

Actually, in all actuality

The actual showing of the movie, which is the crux of this essay, the story that it foretold, the longwinded journey that it takes its viewers in the following one hundred and six minutes, the duration remembered for the starting and ending times of the film was written, in black on white, on the board on the wall upon which the back of the television leaned against, yes, the precise spot which one would normally expect to be met with the facade of a clock of various shapes and dimensions, now is clearly written, in quite large fonts for all in the room to see, with the signature from L right hand, in a manner resembling disengaged, half dead, part-time proctors in public examination:

"10:30 - 12:16"

,and above that, the name of the movie,

"All is Illuminated".

All this had been done, so that, during the course in which the movie was shown, the mental concentration of other members of the audience would not be disturbed by that very question inevitable, one that, unlike most other things said, seem to make a more lasting impression then the rest, accompanied by a distressed expression, in a muttering soft enough but enough volume to be carried to all ears, "So, when is this [long, brutal, torturous, I-cannot-even-figure-out-what-is-going-on with the help of subtitles, sub-par, third-rate, "art"] film going to end?" That is to say, that it was a heartfelt hope that questions similar to such are, from the very moment that the words and figures are written on the wall, banished.   

As for the movie, it was, indeed, a production no less spectacular. Well, realizing that I was going a little to fast, lets take a step back, shall we?

Student news edition

December 2^nd . As for the movie, "All is Illuminated" (200X), an independent production which , judging from the title, gives off one of an unhealthily overstretched, abrasive, abusive, poorly casted (Illijah Wood behaving like Hoffman in Capote, go figure), clinging on to stereotypes, and relying on a snowballing of prejudices which had been built up, casted far and wide amongst the fish of souls, it is not a wonder the aforementioned, now operating in exile, question in the previous paragraph would get asked. All things considered, (what is up with that? as NPR does exist in this country, darn those imperialists trying to be bring what they call democracy everywhere and start wars acting like world police), and contrary to expectation, the movie is, anpayman, a splendid, almost heroic, effort. It is about a rigid search in a foreign land for roots and family history, the perpetuation of the family line, the "what happened?" with answers which, without it, the current, ritualistic but uninteresting life of the protagonist back in the United States would be, like the Japanese might say, "microbes suspended in liquid? or, like the Chinese (English?) would remark, "swallow without a nest"; "the lone orphan engulfed in the bitter seas". Another story also came into mind, that of the lone wanderer whom, while navigating the maze of Tokyo expressways lit by the green ghostly hues from office buildings and employees bent from overtime, the driver of the vehicle who might, or might just refrain from, in the two-and-a-half seconds before the impact imminent which would violently reduce the 280ps R32, and its sole occupant, into a heap resembling a curled up box of Marlboro Reds, mysteriously mutter, "Knock, the door gets barred from the inside. Seek, little shall ye find. Ask, and you are bound to get answers so painful you wish you had never been born?" Deafening crash. But of course, it is speculation; there is just no way anyone can say that in two and a half seconds right? Well, maybe the announcers in those drug ads can. But, all in all, there the big questions that were asked by ordinary people all the time. hy are you here??here are you from??here are you going??This movie, ll is Illuminated? dealt particularly with the one in the middle. Highly recommend. Do have some minor flaws, say Elijah Wood, but otherwise, a good one. 106 minutes. At the ALETA this Saturday 10:30. Again at the Y next Monday 14:00. D.B.

(Exeunt)

12.02.2006, Sat. 12:24. The day was young. The dues, which sustained the heating of the room during the course of the movie, were diligently paid, like one standing in line at the post for half an hour to clear the monthly phone bill, since over here the lines do get cut off when dues are not paid, bringing much inconvenience. The firewood in the stove smoldered, some nice white ones. The smart purple doors of the V. branch of the AELTA winged wide open; figures emerged, like fishes wading through the Big Reef. The air was cold, the very formal "Good bye? and "Until next time?heard briefly before dissipating into voices of pupils erupting from the corridors on the second and first floors of the school buildings. That very noise reminded me, and I sure would not forget that one, that hope does springs eternal. Until next time or never.

Epilogue

-Heard you met with the French girls yesterday

-I did.

-And later? So was it good? (nudge, wink, attempt to grab hands, pat shoulder)

-Yes?i>Huh?

(Its never too late, or rather, too early, but I wish all of you a MERRY CHRISTMAS, and HAPPY NEW YEAR. Roger out.)