True Bar makes its debut on the Kaliningrad music scene
16 October 2023 ~ True Bar Kaliningrad the City’s Latest Music Venue
Invited to the opening of a new music venue by singer-songwriter Andrey Berenev, the 14th of October 2023 saw us, my wife and I, rendezvousing with our friend and drinking collaborator, Inara, at a café close to the venue.
I wondered what type of music the bar would be playing; would it be underground? The music venue is. It is located on Krasnaya street. You can’t miss it, not because you can’t miss it, but because it has three notable landmarks: a café on either side of it, one of which we assembled in, and opposite an arts and crafts shop selling imaginative artwares inspired by the city’s alter ego Königsberg.
True Bar Kaliningrad the City’s Latest Music Venue
The entrance to the bar lies in the forecourt that it shares with this shop and one of the two coffee shops. As it is below decks, you won’t see a building, just an elevated entrance, with the club’s name and logo attached to the wall. The place you are looking for is True Bar.
For the past two weeks, after a warm and sunny autumn debut, the wind has been howling, the rain has been pelting and the temperature has taken a turn for the worse. We were spared the rain on the evening of our visit to the new club, but the wind had not relented, and each gust was bitterly cold.
As we had arrived early, we hid in the arts and crafts shop for a while, and when we emerged discovered three or four young people waiting at the entrance to the bar. My wife, Olga, and our friend, Inara, were chuckling at the possibility that tonight’s venue would be exclusively for them ~ ‘youngsters’ ~ and that we would be the oldest patrons there. I made a mental note of this, whilst the track from Fred Wedlock played in the background: Would there be concessions at the bar for OAPs, sometimes know as OFs (Old Farts)? I was glad that I was wearing reasonably young person’s clothes. Do you think there’s a chance he missed them?
The bar was a bit behind schedule in opening, which meant that our small group of prospective clientele was growing by the minute. It was reassuring to note that among our fellow shiverers, one or two people of a more mature age had joined the throng, including singer-songwriter Andrey Berenev, who had invited us this evening. This was the first time I had met him in person. You may recall in my former post, The Badger Club, Olga had gone to the venue alone, and I had written about the club having been inspired to do so by her account of that evening and from the photographs she had taken. In a manner of speaking, however, Andrey had met me; he remembered me from Victor Ryabinin’s funeral.
When at last access to the bar was no longer denied to us, we shot downstairs like ferrets down a drainpipe.
True Bar Kaliningrad
The main staircase, which is a bit dim, so don’t go there in your carpet slippers, descends to what for me was a most welcoming sight indeed, the bar itself.
I suppose that does mean we are pleased to see you?
A second staircase takes one down to the club floor. There is no stage, as such. The performers perform with their backs to the upper deck, the small bar area, which is big enough to serve as a viewing gantry. Every inch of the club area is utilised. Including the lower staircase.
Perhaps not the usual vegetarian response to pigs ears on the menu
The club seating is a simple ‘homemade’ series of backrest slat benches arranged in pairs either side of a solid table. It’s what it is; and it works. People come here for the music and the atmosphere, and, of course, to drink; everything else is secondary.
I have used the word intimate already, and it gets more so when you want to go to the toilet. I’m not suggesting that you have to share the loo, but to get there you have to single-file between two lines of people: those spread out against the bar and those leaning over the balcony. As I said, one of the leading features of the club is its unconditional intimacy.
It’s amazing the fun you can have with cheese straws and vodka
I wondered what the sound quality would be in the club and was pleasantly surprised. The ceiling slopes down high at the ‘stage’ end and low at the other, which is not peculiar as the club sits below a vehicle ramp. My mind kept playing tricks with words ~ it often does. Here, was the word ‘garage’, and there the word ‘music’. I got the impression that the bands were none too pleased with the Vox amplifying system, but the general acoustics seemed fine to me.
Olga Hart: an esoteric experience
As I mentioned earlier, I had not met Andrey Berenev before and neither had I met Aleksandr Smirnov. The latter made what can only be called ‘an entrance’, when he suddenly appeared dressed in his all- leather, self-made, signature ‘chimney sweep’ outfit.
From that moment onwards, all female tats, short skirts and shimmering stockings, as questionable and nice to view in that order, were instantly upstaged by Mr Smirnov’s imaginative rig, which, I am appalled to admit, made my red cravat and waistcoat look inexcusably tame. The only other gentleman in the room whose appearance attracted attention was he who was wearing a fawn-toned trench coat, carefully amalgamated with a sharp side-parting hairstyle, sixties tie and tie-clip. It’s not every day you meet JFK’s double.
True Bar scores high on the atmosphere chart but would benefit from a dimmer switch to bring the sheen from the lighting down to a level more in keeping with its underground ethos. In every other respect, as they were fond of saying in the roaring 20s’, ‘the joint was jumping’.
From the appearance of the first band to Andrey Berenev’s song, which he had written with Aleksandr Smirnov in mind and to which the flamboyant and charismatic chimney sweep took to the floor with relish, the atmosphere was beyond electric. If you like it lively, you got it!
True Bar is a true bar. Maladits! I say in my very best Russian.
Published: 30 December 2022 ~ 4 Great Kaliningrad Bars Mick Hart’s Pub Crawl
Tradition has it in the UK that after spending a long Christmas Day incarcerated at home, on the day after, the theatre of overindulgence is shifted to the pub. Boxing Day might well commence with a brisk walk or some good old-fashioned fox hunting, but such exertions are principally symbolic, diplomatic token gestures intended purely for the amelioration of one’s restless, poisoned conscience for over doing it the day before, mere curtain raisers to the main event, the much-needed trip to the pub.
As a firm believer in the doctrine that the preservation of tradition is an essential prerequisite for any culture’s survival, I applaud the actions of legacy Britons whose interpretation of Boxing Day is to switch off that infernal box, which, if you have not already done so, you should really not pay a licence for, and hotfoot it down to the pub for a pint or six with your mates, where you can safely slag of the country’s turncoats, those you elected to run the UK but who are running it into the ground, without fear of detection by PC Plods who constantly monitor the Net (No wonder they call it The Net!).
Practising what you preach is not only to lead by example, but also good for the soul: Why not, I thought, why not indeed! And it was in this proactive spirit, lashed together with seasonal goodwill and the assistance of my compatriots, that we put together a British-style pub crawl coincidental with Boxing Day but adopted for Kaliningrad.
4 Great Kaliningrad Bars
From the plan’s genesis I had venues in mind, old bar favourites that you could slip back into like a comfortable pair of slippers, but a friend who had expressed an interest in joining us proffered the suggestion that I start the crawl with somewhere new, a bar that had recently opened. Game for anything, at least where pubs and bars are concerned, I couldn’t fault the logic, and this is how and why we met up in a bar which for me was virginal territory on Boxing Day at 3pm.
We would, by the time our mission had been satisfactorily completed, which concluded at 12am, sample the delights of four establishments, which I will mention briefly in this post and then cover each individually at a later date and in more detail.
Whilst we never intended the crawl to be leitmotif driven, fate, it would seem, had other ideas, and these were partially revealed to me on the occasion of the third bar which, like the previous two, had been designed around the popular concept of industrial-look interiors.
The first bar on our itinerary, where Olga and I would rendezvous with our collaborators Inara and Vladimir, was divulged to me as Morrisons. It struck me that this was an unfortunate name for a bar and try as I might to think otherwise whilst bowling along in the taxi, I could not help but cogitate on what the price of baked beans might be and, in the process, distress myself with visions of jostling trolleys and moody faces at checkout tills. Rest assured, however, that the Morrison Bar has nothing to do with supermarkets. It is, in fact, eponymous with, and pays tribute to, the one and only Jim Morrison, who was never accused, as far as I know, for including among his many addictions an inveterate baked bean habit but who left his mark on the world as the impetuous, bold, ill-fated lead vocalist of the 1960s’ rock band Doors. Yes, but why and why now in Kaliningrad? You might just as well ask, why not?
4 Great Kaliningrad Bars
Morrisons (There I go again!), correction Morrison, is a basement bar, the interior of which closely follows the popular trend for artistic degentrification.
The crux of this design concept is Victorian iron and rivets in both execution and effect. Out with the suspended ceiling, the boxed and cased in beams and pipes, the trunking that hides the wires. The bones and sinews are there to be celebrated not covered up and occluded. Nuts, bolts, wires, vents, pipes, warts and all are left exposed to the naked eye. Rooms are effectively skeletised, even to the extent of eschewing plaster and panelling. Neglect, decay and degeneration replace conventional virtues of maintenance; revitalisation is quashed and in every aspect and every facet the old becomes the new.
Towards this end Morrison has got everything going for it, from shattered ceiling to paint-pealing walls, but, as the chrome-glistening Harley Davidson in the entrance hall denotes, everything that is distressed in Morrison’s shines with the lustre of a bright new pin, which is hardly unexpected as it is one of Kaliningrad’s most recent contenders on a bar circuit already unique, and the polish and varnish is not yet dry.
Mick Hart in the entrance hall to Morrison Bar, Kaliningrad
Morrison, which is a café, bar and music venue combo, has some nice touches to it, which I will reveal at a later date, and since no one had cause to complain about the food and as I enjoyed my ‘pint’ of Maisel’s Weisse and as the seats were comfortable and the place had atmosphere, the newly incorporated Morrison Bar receives the Mick Hart Seal of Approval.
From Morrison we set off for? Where would it be? The Sir Francis Drake, which was not a million miles away, was suggested first, but as we had been there recently, we decided to detour to a bar which when my younger brother visited me in the summer of 2019 became an absolute favourite of his; and that bar is the Yeltsin. No prizes, I’m afraid, for guessing the namesake of this establishment.
Boxing Day night was a filthy night, a term which I appreciate will have different connotations for different kinds of people but which I shall disappoint you now by saying that in this particular context means that the evening was wet and cold.
Huddled beneath our umbrellas, we hurried across the railway bridge to a bar which cannot so much be called industrial by design as designed in a previous lifetime for industrial purpose. It occupies the tail end of a behemoth of a building, which gives every indication of having once been emphatically industrial and which today still houses, as far as I can tell, a jamboree of workshops and small commercial units.
Walkers to the Yeltsin should take note that the pavement rises at the front of the Yeltsin building as the lie of the land and the road atop ascends to the height of the railway bridge.
This geographical tilt requires all prospective patrons to stray from the straight and narrow using the concrete steps provided. The Yeltsin, therefore, is not strictly speaking a basement bar as such, but one whose entrance is to be found located at lower ground level. (Talk about nit-picking!)
The first thing noticeable about the Yeltsin’s interior is that it is not a shabby chic makeover; it is genuinely shabby and basic and has ceilings as high as a kite. There has been no need, or should I say no apparent need, to create atmosphere in the Yeltsin, as whatever it was before it became what it is today (which is sublime) it was already infused with atmosphere and when whatever it was went away that atmosphere forgot to go with it.
Mick Hart propping up the bar in Bar Yeltsin, Kaliningrad
My brother liked the Yeltsin for its fantastic range of beers, and what dyed-in-the-wool beer drinker wouldn’t? But I am also attracted to it by the way that its easy down-at-heel character brings back affectionate memories of student union bars, two bars in particular: one, the London College of Printing as it was in the 1980s and, two, Southbank University bar, which back in my drinking-studying days were conveniently placed in staggering distance.
(If I was to say ‘corrugated metal sheets’ and ‘Pizza, beans and chips’ and you were to recall these bars respectively, then you must have been around in the days when I was frequenting these drinking holes.)
There is certainly a lot more that can be written about the Yeltsin, and I will try to get round to that, but, for the time being, let me just say for the record that on this auspicious Boxing Day visit, it was my privilege to enjoy an exceedingly nice ‘pint’ of Fruit Beer there, the OG of which weighed in at an impressive 6.3% and which cost somewhere in the vicinity of 350 roubles.
The unifying quality of good beer and a positive drinking atmosphere prevailed on me to stay, but the first law of pub crawling is that you must get off your arse and walk. Fortunately ~ fortunately that is for the integrity of the crawl ~ we were enticed to do just that, following a recommendation from one of the bar staff. No, not the one ‘get out you’re barred’, but from his giving us the name of and the directions to a bar that was so near that had it been any nearer the need to leave the Yeltsin would have been superfluous. Apprised of this piece of news, we were up on our feet and away!
In the drinking interlude that we had spent within the Yeltsin, the weather had grown more foul, and so it was with great relief that we discovered that, true to the barman’s word, the next port of call was upon us before we had time to button our coats.
This third place on our adventurous itinerary is called Forma in Russian, which in English translates into ‘Form’. (Cuh, there’s nothing to learning the Russian language, is there!)
Across the outside drinking and smoking area to the front door of Forma Bar, Kaliningrad
It was Form that alerted me to the second theme of our evening, namely that all three bars we had visited were either subterranean or housed at lower ground level. Like Yeltsin, to get into Form we had first to cross a small enclosed and hard-surfaced forecourt, just the ticket for good-weather drinking and the perfect place to corral the once glamorous, now social pariahs, who, flying in the face of every public health warning going, still refuse to kick the tobacco habit.
Who would have believed but a few short years ago at a time when every bar in the world, between the ceiling and the floor, was hung with a film of blue-grey tobacco smoke that in order to pursue your vice you would one day be expelled, forced to huddle in the cold and rain just to drag on a fag? I shudder to think of a future in which bottles of beer bristle with health warnings and drinkers are forced to drink in closets and legally made to drink alone so as not to subject tea-totallers to the risks of passive drinking! Oh Brave New World that has such restrictions innit!
As the only good weather this evening was whether we could get in out of the rain quicker than Liz Truss left Number 10, we did not stop to answer the question from those not there to ask it: “Have you got a light?” Sanctimoniously: “No!” But hurried from the shadows into the sanctuary of the bar.
Form was the third venue to receive us this evening, and the third bar to give more than a passing nod to the conceptualised industrial look. Without going into too much detail in this post, I will merely mention plain concrete floor, a screen made from hollow section con blocks, rudimentary wood panelling and the sort of serving area that looked as though whoever made it had DIY skills in common with mine, except here I mean to be complementary, which for honesty’s sake I certainly could not be had it really been my hand working the carpenter’s tools.
4 Great Kaliningrad Bars
Whilst Morrison occupies the high end, the aesthetic end, of the industrial look, and Yeltsin is baptised by an effortless urban chic, Form possessed a distinctly vintage feel. Indeed, if you were to situate in the centre of the room four or five rails of clothing, unusually small and occasionally mothed ~ bingo! You would think you were in the right place to get yourself a pair of those as-scarce-as-rocking-horse-sh*t men’s trousers, the high-arsed ones which have braces buttons on the outside waistband. Guess whose got two pairs of those!
It is a well known fact, well known amongst the drinking fraternity, that both beer and pub-crawling can make you hungry (sounds suspiciously like a public health warning). In the Yeltsin we had addressed that problem by indulging in corn chips and cheesy strings. Now, it was the turn of a large dish of olives, easily and eagerly washed down with a delicious white wheat beer.
As with the Yeltsin, the range of beers on offer left nothing to the imagination. Frank Sinatra could have danced all night, and I could have drunk at Form all night and ‘still have begged for more’, but duty has a way of calling and, before the night was over, we had one more stop to make.
The bar, which was to become the last bar on our picaresque adventure, was divorced from the other two and required first that we tackle the appalling weather and second that we hop on board one of Kaliningrad’s new trams. What a treat! There’s a first time for everything and this was a first for me!
Fortunately, the walk from the tram stop to our final bar this evening was relatively amenable, which was fortuitous because I would not want to ask the way to a bar that goes by the long-tail, provocative name of Your Horizon is Littered. I joke ye not. Let’s play that again in Russian: ‘У вас горизонт завален’. Does that make it any easier for you?
Gentle illumination in the Kaliningrad bar ‘Your Horizons are Littered’
Having already littered my horizon with empty beer glasses, I decided to do it one more time (It’s strange how ‘once’ can sometimes multiply into ‘twice’ without awareness informing you that the multiplication is taking place.)
The name of the bar may have come as a surprise to me, but that it was a basement bar did not. As I said earlier, all of our haunts this evening had a subterranean theme. However, that’s where the similarity ends. Your Horizons are Littered was not littered with even the slightest allusion to industrial chic. It is, in comparison to the three bars visited earlier, easily the smallest of the three and has a low-lit, cosy, comfortable, laid-back feel to it, qualities which, at the end of a long drinking day, are exactly what you want and when you want it most.
Horizons (let’s abbreviate it a little) does not serve tap-dispensing beer, so I had to make do with bottled, which was no hardship since they do stock Maisel’s Weisse. On the scale of one to 10, Horizon effortlessly scores maximum points on the snug and relaxation chart, an attribute attested to by Inara and I staying on, after the others had thrown in the beer towel, just for a nightcap ~ or two. That two could easily have turned into a nightcap and three had we not been so mature and with it wise and sensible and besides we had run out of time. Unbeknown to us, lulled into a sense of false security by the combination of good beer and a complementary atmosphere, closing time (thank you Tom Waits) had slipped behind the bar and quietly switched the barman off. No ‘Last Orders!’ here.
There was nothing for it now than to litter our horizons with the cold, the rain and the hope of a taxi. But, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca who consoled himself with the thought that they would ‘always have Paris’, we would always have Kaliningrad (apologies to the Czechs) and the memory of our Boxing Day crawl.
As Bogart never said, but would have done had he been with us today, ‘Play it again, Sam’ ~ soon!
Published: 8 December 2022 ~ Badger Club Kaliningrad a Bohemian Night on the Tiles
My wife, Olga, went to a concert recently (see the photos below). I know exactly how my eloquent and highbrow musician friend in the UK will respond when he attempts to equate ‘concert’ with the images from that evening: “WTF?! Let’s go there!”
Now I am not the world’s most mainstream guy, but I have to admit when I saw the photos and heard an account of the evening, which did not happen until the following day because my wife rolled back at some ungodly hour in the morning, they made me feel positively ~ as the American author Henry James might say ~ ‘Ground into the mill of the conventional’.
It is not clear from the photographs whether the establishment is cavernous, but it certainly looks covenous ~ all that dim lighting, candles, hanging masks, dolls, natural-wood sculptures, enchanting (and possibly enchanted, Gothicised cabinets), and, moreover, wild and whacky costumery! Right up my surrealist street!
The top hat and tailed gentleman, the owner of the club, Aleksandr Smirnov, is obviously a ‘quick-change’ expert ~ one minute impresario, the next an updated rock-star figure from the minds of the Brothers Grimm. He, I am told, is a chimney sweep, only he isn’t, he is an accomplished and original artist who produces highly detailed bronzed relief plaques (apologies if I am slightly less than accurate, but I am having to base my opinion on mobile phone snaps) and, as you will see from the photographs, is also a bit of a wizard in the costume creation department. That’s him in the photo with his chopper in his hand. I’ve never seen one as big as that before; and me having been active in the antiques and militaria trade!
Choppers aside, this particular evening was dedicated to accomplished musicians and good music: There was a soulful and original indie art-folk band, Sfeno, first-rate singer guitarist and a young lady violinist, a virtuoso of her craft, who was on the fiddle a lot that evening. Vodka was not rationed, people got up and jived and my wife, much to her great surprise, if not unalloyed delight, was both chatted up and propositioned, which is always good for the ego (I’ve lost count of the number of times that the same has happened to me (you wish!)). The location, in fact the whole evening, was so spellbinding that it reduced Harry Potter to as much comparative magic as a meeting of the Women’s Institute at the local village-hall on a wet afternoon in the 1930s.
Never one to moralise, even when occasion justifies, whilst all this frivolity was going on in Kaliningrad’s answer to Alice’s Wonderland, I was at home with the cat, genning up on Königsberg and the history of East Prussia by reading (both the cat and I) that excellent publication Legends of the Amber Land, by Andrey Kropotkin.
Although I must say, with my wife rolling in at some unseemly hour of the morning ~ we won’t say when! ~ I would have been quite within my conjugal rights had I demanded of her, “And what time do you call this then!?” or have cast myself in the role of the heavy-handed Victorian husband, with “Why, you dirty stop-out.” But I contented myself with the elevating thought that if I have learnt one thing and one thing only in my brief visit to this muddled world, it is reflected in my born-again status as a stay-at-home Captain Sensible. Stout fellow that I assuredly am: resisting the lure of the bright lights nightlife in order to set the perfect example of how people of a certain age are expected to, and should, behave.
Thus, by the time my wife had sneaked in from her evening of ‘reasonable refreshments’ ~ making it difficult to imagine that she had been brought up in the social climate of anti-decadent Soviet-Russia! ~ I had read my book, patted the cat, drunk my cup of cocoa and with teddy tucked snugly under my arm had taken myself to bed: zzzzzzzzz.
Have you ever had the feeling that you are missing out on something?🤔
Aleksandr Smirnov introduces singer guitarist Andrey BerenevOlga Hart withAleksandr SmirnovOlga Hart in the Badger clubBand Sfeno performingAndrey BerenevOlga Hart surrounded by the esotericOlga Hart with vintage oil lamp and fantasy fairy tale furniture made by ‘Chimney Sweep’ Aleksandr SmirnovInara looking hornyConfronted with a large chopper
Aleksandr Smirnov By all accounts*, Aleksandr (Chimney Sweep) Smirnov is an artist, costume designer and consummate wizard at conjuring up interior design of a distinctly unusual and exotic nature.
Able to work with all kinds of material, including wood and metal, much of what you see in the photographs in terms of fixtures and fittings are said to have been made by his hand, the same hand that has orchestrated the natural, historical and decorative elements that set apart the club’s interior from any other you may have encountered. The syncopated fairy tale feel that you get from all of this is no coincidence. A little fairy tells me that he writes fairy tales as well. *Дом трубочиста или выходные в сказке (turbopages.org)
The Badger club, Kaliningrad The Badger club has a dedicated clientele who value not only the décor and entertainment but speak with great warmth and affection about the club’s welcoming ethos and its friendly, inviting atmosphere. Why not go and see for yourself? You may just become a regular in the process?!
Links to bars, restaurants to visit in Kaliningrad
Published: 21 August 2022 ~ Café Seagull by the Lake Kaliningrad is hard to beat!
As summer peters out, it’s time to take every opportunity available to sit outside and enjoy a beer. The problem in Kaliningrad is that everybody appears to be doing just that. Consequently, bars, restaurants and cafés with outside seating areas are heavily subscribed to. It is always refreshing, therefore, when supply is overstretched by demand, to discover something new.
Recently, we discovered Кафе Чайка у озера (Café Seagull by the Lake). The café’s terrace is small, but, as English estate agents like to say when advertising properties, it is ‘well-appointed’. The terrace and the restaurant windows look out over Kaliningrad’s (Königsberg’s) Upper Pond, which was created in 1270 by the knights of the Teutonic Order as a repository for fish farming. Today, fishermen sit patiently by the water’s edge hoping to get a bite, but they share the recreational space with non-fishing Kaliningrad citizens and visitors to the city for whom the pond, paths and parkland surrounding it are a convenient natural habitat for walking, cycling or simply relaxing.
Mick Hart enjoys a moment of peace and sobriety outside Café Seagull before guests and beer arrives
Café Seagull is an excellent place for simply relaxing; thus, if you are walking or cycling around the pond you could always make it your destination or a halfway house on your journey. On the afternoon that I visited, I was doing neither. I had purposefully gone there with my wife’s family to enjoy the view from somewhere new, have a ‘pint’ and a bite to eat. I was not disappointed ~ nobody was. The menu is varied, interesting and offers something for every taste, even strange vegetarian tastes like mine. The beer, which is a tad higher in price than I would normally want to pay, was nevertheless just what the doctor ordered, or probably wouldn’t, although my UK doctor might because he likes a beer or two as, come to think of it, does my gastroenterologist in Kaliningrad. Reassured by this twin prescription, I could sense that the afternoon had all the makings of a guilt-free one. Today’s choice, therefore, was Maisel’s Weisse, a German wheat beer with plenty of flavour, more so and especially if you opt, as I did on this occasion, for the brew’s unfiltered version.
Café Seagull by the Lake Kaliningrad
Inside, the café is bright, airy, unpretentious and welcoming and, as I have said (you were listening, weren’t you?), offers a pleasant view of the Upper Pond from an elevated advantage.
Königsberg’s cobbles and Upper Pond from the terrace of the Seagull by the Lake Café in Kaliningrad
Two large, framed prints on the walls, one of a cabbage and the other a rear view of a rather well-built seated lady, invite speculation as to what the symbolic connection might be, but are too thought-provoking to cogitate on at length when all you want to do is relax and sip your Maisel’s Weisse.
Fortunately, that’s all there is to puzzle over. The cuisine, both in terms of presentation and taste, received top marks and the service could not be faulted. The young staff are helpful, polite, attentive and, most importantly, resoundingly cheerful. They are a credit to the restaurant and thus a valuable asset.
If my posts on bars, restaurants and cafés in Kaliningrad included a rating system, it would be difficult, if not impossible, not to give Café Seagull 10 out of 10. What we can say with impunity is that Café Seagull by the Lake is highly recommended and a venue you should bookmark under ‘I must definitely visit’.😊
Essential details:
Café Seagull by the Lake (Кафе Чайка у озера) Verkhneozernaya, 16A Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad region, Russia 236008
Tel: +7 921 711 71 80
Opening times Seven days a week: 0800 to 2200 (8am to 10pm)
Mick Hart reviews the London Pub (Pub London) Kaliningrad
Published: 14 August 2022 ~ London Pub Kaliningrad Best Pub not in London
My first encounter with the London Pub, or Pub London as it is known in Kaliningrad (note the crafty way the Russian language confuses us!), took place in the summer of 2015. Let me say from the outset that I was not attracted to it just because I used to live in London and it calls itself the London Pub.
Thankfully, whenever I visit a foreign country the need to hotfoot-it to the nearest British themed bar to cry wistfully into my beer in demonstrative affection for the native land I have left behind ~ even though I may only have left it yesterday ~ is a failing I have yet to cultivate, and one I suspect may forever remain a singularly Irish phenomenon. For wherever you go in the world, you can always be sure to find, usually when you least expect or want to, shamrock, porter and diddley dee.
No, what appealed to me about the London Pub, forgoing for the moment the historic building in which it is housed, was the layout, interior décor and the atmosphere bestowed by both; a combination which was “a tad unfortunate” as this entry in my diary, dated 8 March 2020, shows: “upon our arrival [at the London Pub] we found that it had undergone a complete and startling refit.”
Incidentally, on that day, which would be the last day I would drink at the London Pub until the ‘all-clear sirens’ sounded on the two-year coronavirus blitz, we got our first glimpse of the new-look world. For it was in the London Pub that we were introduced to what was destined to become that global, or rather globalist, absurd coronavirous fashion accessory, the never proven to be effective but still mandatory mask.
The London Pub staff were wearing their new regulation uniforms ~ black waistcoats, bow ties and black bowler hats (and other things, I hasten to add) ~ which were excellent in themselves as they suited the London Pub ethos ~ but teamed with coronavirus muzzles?! Laugh, of course we did, little knowing at the time that this sinister remake of Clockwork Orange was a prelude to our future.
Right>>: London pub staff kindly poses for our camera. This photo taken in May 2022, post-coronavirus mask era >
When I say our future, I mean to imply the world in general, as Olga and I only ever wore masks in situations where we had no choice, such as when travelling on public transport or shopping in the supermarket. As soon as choice resumed, off the silly masks came.
We returned to the London Pub in May this year (2022), which is when the photographs used in this post were taken. The observations, however, have been borrowed from my diary, written on the day when we discovered that the London Pub had been dramatically refurbished, which was 8 March 2020.
Above: Mick Hart enjoying a ‘hair of the dog’ at the London Pub, circa summer 2015
The London Pub that is not in London
The ground floor of Kaliningrad’s London Pub, accessed as it is by a flight of steps, is effectively an elevation above street level. It consists of a large room divided in two by a crook-shaped bar, which is a copy, albeit an inaccurate one, of the ubiquitous horseshoe bar with which many a London Victorian pub is typified.
To the right of the bar, at the point where the loop curves, the narrower portion of the room no longer imitates the British convention of pubs divided into two social halves, the ‘public’ and the ‘lounge’, where the public bar was often more basic in fixtures, fittings and furnishings and the lounge, as the name implies, more comfortable and upmarket, attracting, in terms of class taxonomy, a better clientele. The old London pub was never exactly this, but I think it is fair to say that one side of the room, the narrow side, was less cushion-filled, textile based and given to reclining in than its more spacious counterpart.
Before the refit, the bar area was furnished with an assortment of tables, each seating between four to six people, some of which were separated if only to a symbolic degree by the inclusion of chest-high snob screens. The dominant colour, not just of the bar area but the entire pub, had been mid-blue; in keeping I suppose with the contemporary trend in British pubs for light and pastel painted interiors
Above: London Pub bar-side, circa summer 2015 Below: London Pub as it is today (photos: May 2022)
To justify the London Pub’s eponymous connection with England, stenciled references to traditional English idioms, well-known sayings such as ‘My cup of tea’ and the ‘Apple of my eye’, guested on the beams and walls together with quotes from British literary figures, men of letters and arcane wit, such as the famous and equally infamous Oscar Wilde with his ‘Moderation in all things, including moderation’.
London Pub Kaliningrad
From the looks of things, it appeared that whoever masterminded the pub refurbishment had borrowed from Oscar’s irony, since no moderation was apparent neither in the extent nor dramatic character of the changes.
Gone are the high stools in the alcoves, the circular tables and padded bench seats. The minimalist wall décor and the traditional British slogans have also been axed, substituted by an enormous profusion of curios, collectables, memorabilia, vintage and retro items of an exceedingly English nature. They proliferate on walls where no expense or imagination has been spared in the interest of procuring that tatty-torn, disheveled look which aspiring interior designers and Sunday-magazine supplement editors like to call ‘distressed’.
I wrote about distressed décor in my piece on the Georgian bar Kavkaz but the effect therein is far more restrained than it is in the London Pub.
The London Pub employs the same ageing technique of peeling wallpaper and fading paint. Like Kavkaz it seeks to create the impression, and succeeds, that fragments of old wallpaper and patches of former paint schemes are seeping through more recent layers, but the mat green and dull orange hues favoured by the London Pub are hauntingly subtle and a few extra trowels worth of rough-surfaced rendering spattered with differing tones conveys an authenticity that enticingly raises the question why if neglect is so deucedly comfortable should we ever go out of our way to improve on its virtue?
Above: How to make a wall distressed and then scatter it with memorabilia
The alcove to the customers’ right of the bar has been taken a step further into the world of designer neglect by plastering various parts of it with three or four scraps of newspaper, all belonging to bygone eras and which, by their torn, wanting and dog-eared state, pass as having been stuck to the wall for years rather than the few weeks it has taken to present them.
On top of this imaginative scheme of fading colours and random pages torn from British newspapers (By the way, The Three Kings pub in London’s Clerkenwell Green also favours newsprint walls.) no restraint has been exercised in turning back the clock to earlier times in Britain: framed prints of 18th century classic architecture, silk cigarette cards, film advertisements, decorative wall plates, pictures of celebrities, brassware, hunting horns and you name it and you’ll probably find it have found a home on the London Pub’s walls.
On the pier between the windows behind me hung a vintage English naval jacket with corresponding visor hat next to a British army officer’s cap and dress jacket. Other uniform combinations of a British military nature adorn the walls on the opposite side of the room; all familiar items to us, as many passed through our hands whilst running our vintage and antique shop in England.
Above: Vintage British military uniforms adorning the ‘aged’ walls of the London Pub
Each of the London Pub’s window piers have been fitted with a shelf enabling all manner of collectable items shipped to Russia from England to accumulate ‘naturally’ in a perfectly haphazard way. Neither my memory nor my imagination struggled with this concept, as the clutter and its variegation closely resembled a place I once called home, where junk and I co-existed in harmonic correlation.
Some of the London Pub’s shelves have become resting places for old books, diverse in topic but indefatigably English by origin, their covers turned to face the room for all the world to see. For example, behind me there was a book on the Royal Navy and at the other end of the same shelf one about Queen Elizabeth II (Gawd bless ‘er!). On other shelves nearby there was a book on England’s Home Guard (WWII) and a second on the Royal Navy but harking back to a different era. Above these books hang two ancient tennis rackets both constructed of good honest wood ~ none of your carbon-fibre nonsense here! ~ obsolete in themselves but appearing even more archaic slotted inside their square wooden braces.
Above: Clutter against its natural backdrop
Looking back from the bar towards the entrance of the London Pub it struck me that something rather exciting, even magical, had happened since I last drank here. The door surround had turned into a Tudor-Bethan fantasy. Thick, curved oak pilasters ~ or so we are led to believe ~ stepped cornices profusely carved and scrolled, rise above an elaborate entablature to an impressive second tier containing a grand, baroque, armorial crest, which speaks to us in medieval tones of the dynastic power of barons and earls, whilst a couple of coal buckets either side of the uprights speak in brass of a giant fireplace. Whatever you want it to be, it is only disappointing when exiting under its lordly lintel, the fantasy dissolves and you are back on the streets of the 21st century. And yet it could be worse, much worse, for at least the 21st-century streets on the other side of the door are not the ones that the Pub, if it was in London, would put you out on ~ streets that you walk in fear and at your peril! But you should have stayed for another pint, so it jolly well serves you right!
Above: The coal buckets on either side imply exiting into the real world via the fireplace
In the old London, the London Pub before the refit, we would have been sitting on plain, high-backed bar stools. Now, we were sitting on not-so-plain new-old bar stools, in other words stools antique in appearance but not so antique in age. At first glance, every other glance and a prolonged unfaltering stare, these ‘prop you up at the bar’ devices have more about them than just a touch of Louis. They have near heart-shaped backs and deep blue silver-trimmed frames. They incorporate a classical shell motif. Their front legs are sweeping sabres; their back legs pad-feet cabrioles. They are, of course, like the fireplace door, strictly fantasy pieces.
The bar top, which was rather plain before the refit, is now a satin polished light wood with a feature-distinctive grain. The choice of seats, either open armchairs or rectangular tubs, has been rescinded, replaced with the accent on uniformity. The new kids on the block are back-to-back button-down leather-look seats capable of accommodating six people comfortably around rectangular tables.
London Pub Kaliningrad refurbishment
The opposite side of the pub has also undergone a startling transformation. Gone is the design concept of no two seats or tables the same, and out with the low (far too low for comfort) chairs, which either put your knees around your ears or rested your chin on the table ~ an anomaly in restaurant seating that may by its regular recurrence be construed as peculiarly Russian. Gone also are the open-backed sofas sprinkled with various cushions that started off as comfy but at some point during the evening slid quietly and unreasonably away, off out through the latticework backs. In their place the same pitch-black, button-backed vinyl seats lining the walls and sitting at right angles to the windows in the ‘bar’ march along the room like two brigades of German stormtroopers. Whilst these seats might work in the smaller area as space-saving maximisers, they do not work for me in the larger portion of the room. They are much too regimented and just too much. It is hard to imagine any true London pub trying to get away with this, although put such seats in an American diner and Bob’s your uncle and Earl’s your aunt, no question!
Above: Seats very plush but also very regimented. However, also very comfortable
As I mentioned in my piece on the Kavkaz Restaurant and in my article Kaliningrad Art Exhibition, lighting is everything. The old London Pub could not be faulted in this respect and neither can its newer namesake.
Lighting in the London Pub Kaliningrad
About an hour after we had taken our seats at the bar, because every other seat was reserved (more about that at the end of this article), the lights went down a notch causing everything around us to turn seductively atmospheric. I had already noted that in the bar area a series of ceiling-recessed spotlights shone down on the mosaic floor, forming round circles of slowly changing colours. These had worked well when the lighting was up, but seen in the muted half-light are really quite spectacular.
The wall lighting bar side is augmented by long-reach Anglepoise lamps bolted in series along the wall. As my photos taken in 2015 reveal, similar lamps existed in the London Pub’s previous life, but they have multiplied since then and the poles on which they are mounted allow in addition to the angling of the shade a retraction or extension option. Smaller lamps of a similar type have the practical advantage of directing the light on the walls to illuminate the wornout theme and the eclectic items that live there. Taken together in sequence, the lamps add a touch of steampunk to the London Pub’s unique aesthetic.
Staying with lighting, in the old London, there had been a hanging structure, a sort of raft framework suspended from the ceiling on which lights were attached and sundry knick-knacks supported. This feature has been retained but cased inside a decorative unit, its segments of coloured glass echoing the stained-glass mosaics popularised in Victorian pubs. The glass work is predominantly green, profusely decorated with stylised floral motifs and geometrical patterns in pink and blue. The dimmed light shining through the casework receives a second tonal effect, a lightly suffusive overlay. The mood-conditioning aura that this creates is repeated in the curved translucent border that runs around the wall’s perimeter at the point where wall and ceiling meet. It is a continual convex band of Tiffany-patterned, luminous coving, which is subtle and highly effective.
Above: Uniforms, angled lamps and an illuminated coving screen of exotic abstracts
The London Pub’s lighting mix is such a fabulous orchestration that it is difficult, virtually inexcusable, to single out a centrepiece, but should I ever be pushed to do so I would probably opt for the pendant lights that float around the bar and dangle from the ceiling like so many gossamer Chinese lanterns. Large, floaty, bell-shaped silken balloons that would not be out of place in Alice’s Wonderland, these extraordinary, extravagant lamp shades are infinitely more fascinating than the screen of your mobile phone and make excellent, in every sense, dreamy light diffusers.
Above: Forget about the telly! Look at those delicious lanterns!
I liked the old London Pub, but I did not like it any better or any worse than the new one. Admittedly, before embarking on what must have constituted a not inexpensive design programme, the proprietor of the London Pub could have consulted the idiom ‘If it ‘aint broke don’t fix it’, but had this been the case we would have been deprived of the current iteration and forgone the concept of culture-linked vintage as a versatile, and if I may be so bold as to say not entirely conventional, idiomatic design approach.
There is no doubt in my mind that refraining from fixing unbroken things should have been the lesson taught to those corporate young men in suits employed by Britain’s breweries, who shoulder much of the blame for vanadalising and continuing to vandalise British pub interiors, showing scant regard for history and even less appreciation for atmosphere and taste.
Have you booked?
If I have one criticism of the London Pub ~ and to be fair, this is something that you come across in various Kaliningrad drinking establishments ~ it is the ‘all the tables are reserved’ trick.
Our visit to the London Pub in 2019, the day when I wrote the notes for this post, had been the third time we had stopped for a drink there in as many weeks, and each time we had been turned away as we had not reserved a table. On that occasion we were allowed to drink at the bar, although had we not explicitly asked to do so, we would have been asked to leave.
Above: It’s the only way they’d let me stay. I hadn’t booked a table.
We sat and drank in the London pub for over an hour, during which time five tables in the bar area became vacant and three of the reserved tables remained unoccupied. Being told to leave when you have not reserved a table, seems to me bad business sense. Surely, if a table is reserved for, let’s say 9pm, and someone without a reservation comes into the pub at 8pm, would it not make sense to permit paying customers to use that table for the duration that it is empty?
The psychology behind repeatedly turning people away who have not booked in advance might be that they will book in future and, if they have taken the trouble to book, will prolong their patronage throughout the evening.
If so, then this is a fallacy. Turning customers away results in resentment not patronage, and I can think of no pub in London that would entertain the notion. I am not suggesting that the London Pub or any other drinking/eating establishment in Kaliningrad try to emulate the ‘stack ‘em high treat them cheap’ model adopted in UK city pubs, pampering the customer never hurt anyone, but it is advisable to remember that modern-day Kaliningrad hosts an awful lot of competition, which is growing all the time, and that customer loyalty is predicated not only on atmosphere and commendable service but also reliability. Not everyone wants to plan ahead, and regular casual trade, ignored, deterred, is money lost to somebody else’s bar till and customer loyalty possibly lost forever.
Here endeth the lesson.
Having got that off my chest, I can say without fear of contradicting myself that the London Pub continues to be one of the most atmospheric, ingeniously designed, relaxing drinking and eating establishments that anyone could wish for. In fact, I am prepared to go so far as to say that any guide to Kaliningrad’s bars that does not include the London Pub in its ‘best of’ top-10 line-up either does not know his quality from his dross, is mathematically challenged or both. It really is that simple.
✔ The London Pub, probably the best London pub not to be found in London!
The London Pub in Kaliningrad, Russia, is a unique and charismatic venue vying for top place in Kaliningrad’s bar, restaurant and entertainment scene. It bills itself as a ‘real English pub’, and I have to admit it comes very close. Boasting a choice of 35 draft beers, if you can’t find something to suit your palate at the London Pub then you should urgently switch to drinking something else. As with the interior décor, ambience and beer selection, the menu is varied, surprising and reputedly tasty. Something that I have not touched upon in my review is that lurking below the London Pub there are two extremely atmospheric late-night/early morning music clubs called, respectively, the ‘City Jazz’ and ‘Piano Bar’. I can reveal that I have frequented both, but since they are endowed with their own distinctive ambience, they deserve to be treated separately from the assessment of the public bar and restaurant. Hopefully, we will get together soon and chat about them at our leisure.
A review of the Premier Café Bar Kaliningrad by Mick Hart
Updated 20 August 2022 | First published: 25 April 2022 ~ Drinking Beer in the Premier Café Bar Kaliningrad
After a two-year coronavirus hiatus that, give or take the odd sortie, dissuaded me from drinking in bars, I allowed myself to be willingly seduced into returning to my sinful ways. The establishment we visited recently is not entirely my sort of place. It is a modern café-bar, all plate glass and open-plan, but as it is one in Kaliningrad that I was unacquainted with, and a place dispensing beer, to resist would have been inexcusable if not altogether futile.
The Premier Café Bar (aka Prem’yer Minstr Kafe Bar Magazin), Kaliningrad, is located inside a substantial building with the main entrance off Prospekt Leninskiy. It divides neatly into two parts: one side functioning as a ‘liquor store’ (they like this Americanisation in Kaliningrad); the other as a bar.
The off-licence facility (English off-licence sounds so 1950s’ corner shop, don’t you think?) has an impressive upmarket feel about it. Behind the low-level counter, the custom-made floor-to-ceiling shelves are stocked with an astounding array of imported spirits, including Jim Beam, my favourite bourbon, but in a series of flavoured variants of which my palate is virginally ignorant. In fact, many of these exotic imports I had never heard of and might not try for some time to come, considering the average price per bottle is a budget-busting 30-quid.
This disinclination to shell out unreservedly on something the price of which others might willingly accept may have its origins in my youth. There was a time in England when we could buy Jim in half-gallon bottles from the Yanks at the local airbase on a bartered goods and ‘at cost’ basis. In comparing the prices today, and taking into account the diminutive size of the bottles, I realise nostalgically that far from living a mis-spent youth, I had lived a youth well-spent or in the last analysis was a youth who knew how to spend well.
In addition to the well-stocked top-drawer spirit brands, Premier also boasts a regiment of chilling cabinets, which contain more varieties of beer than Russia has sanctions, if that is feasibly possible, and hosts a good selection of quality wines from vineyards around the world.
Premier bar
The other half of Premier is where the bar hangs out. It is a proper bar, with wooden stools lining its front and opposite a conforming row of fixed seats and tables, markedly similar in style to the sort of thing you would expect to find in a 1950s’ retro diner.
As I come from England (note, I never say from the UK because that would be too shameful), I have a natural predilection for bars which actually have bars in them, as opposed to bars where there is no bar, only table service. I liked this bar because it had a bar, and it had one with Premier written across it, which is something that I also liked because it helped to solve the mystery of where I was, as I had missed the name of the premises when we entered the building. It also had something unusual going on at one end of the bar, the leading end: an inbuilt feature resembling a truck or trolley. The significance of this embellishment was something that escaped me then and continues to elude me now, but as bamboozling as it was, it did not prevent me from liking it.
The big, old wooden beam above the bar, which acts as a suspended lighting console, and the ceiling-mounted wagon wheels in the room opposite, also have quirk appeal, but by far the most interesting and memorable difference that Premier bar possesses is that at the end of a long wide corridor, lo and behold there’s a bike shop! Now, this is a novelty, to be sure. Consider the possibility: one could stop at Premier for a bevvy or two, buy a bike and cycle back home. And I bet you’ll never guess what ~ this is precisely what I did not do.
Perhaps I would have felt more adventurous had I not been so busy admiring the chevron-tiled floor and, where retro posters are not covering it, the good old-fashioned brickwork. These accentuated traits compensate a little for Premier’s lack of old worldliness, which given the choice is the kind of environment in which I really prefer to drink and where once I am inside it is virtually impossible to prise me out.
Generally, Premiere’s décor both in the bar and off-sales, eschews the modern industrial style. The absolute connection between wagon wheels, hanging beams, rusticating trolleys, exposed ventilation tubes, art gallery sliding spotlights, exposed brickwork and retro posters may not be immediately apparent and may remain that way forever, as the Premier name offers no clues, unless, of course, it has something to do with what is invariably touted as the greatest invention of all, the wheel ~ as in wagon wheels? trolleys on wheels? Premier meaning first? Perhaps not.
To add to its collection of ideas, Premier fashionably utilises a range of different light fittings which flaunt the latest trend in visible filament bulbs. Who would have thought even a decade ago that the humble pear-shape light bulb with its limited choice of white or warm glow would morph so quickly and so dramatically into the numerous shapes, sizes and colours available today and all with their once latent elements proudly on display?
Visually, the Premier has more than enough going for it to fulfil the need for an interesting dining and drinking backdrop, which is good as it offsets the dreadful din clattering out of the music system. To be fair, this obtrusive and perfectly unnecessary adjunct is by no means exclusive to Premier; most bars seem compelled to inflict this modern excuse for music on their unsuspecting and long-suffering customers with little or no regard for conversation or atmosphere.
Of course, the problem could lie with us. After all, we are not in the first flush of youth. But call us wrinklies with hearing intolerance or people of discernment fortunate to have been born in and therefore to have lived through the age of pre-mediocrity, the fact remains that boom, boom, boom and lots of squiggly noisy bits iterating repetitively at ‘What did you say? Speak up!!’ volumes are more annoying than a slap on the arse, if not infinitely less surprising. Eventually, one of our august company, ex-Soviet Major V Nikoliovich, marched across to the bar and asked for the racket to be turned down. Oh, he can be so masterful!
He also evinces considerably more trust in fate than I could ever muster. For example, another of Premier’s novelty features is the under-floor display unit, containing various curious and random artefacts. The glass panel at floor level is something I carefully avoided, whereas VN exhibited an almost perverse and mischievous delight in deliberately perching his weight on top.
Where our paths, VN’s and mine, do converge is that we like to sample different beers. Today we were on the Švyturys, a once renowned lager first brewed in Lithuania by the Reincke family at the latter end of the 18th century but which in more recent times has become part of the Carlsberg stable, one of those foreign breweries that perfunctorily closed its doors in Russia after the sanctions had bolted. I’ll lay odds on favourite They Wished They Hadn’t.
As we had already eaten, I cannot comment on Premier’s cuisine, although a quick whizz round the internet reveals that Premier receives consistently good reviews for its international fare and its excellent pizzas. My friends ordered some light snacks, which they seemed to enjoy, and although forever conscious of the need to prioritise volume for beer, I did permit myself to nibble upon a couple of cheesy balls, which seemed to go well with Švyturys.
Throughout our stay at Premier, the staff were attentive and accommodating, but why did I have the impression that they were on the verge of crying.
I forgot to look back when we left the cafe to see if the sight of a bunch of old farts who routinely complain about tasteless ‘music’ exiting the premises had wreathed their faces in much-needed smiles.
Had we have been in the States, crying or not, we would still have received a white toothy grin and a just as fictitious ‘Have a nice day’, which of course we wouldn’t have wanted and of course we would not have appreciated. C’est la vie, I suppose!
Essential details
Prime Minister Café Bar Kaliningrad Prospekt Leninskiy 7 Kaliningrad, Kaliningrad Oblast Russia, 236006
Published: 31 January 2022 ~ All White in Kaliningrad More Snow on its Way!
For the past three or four days the rain has been teeming down here in Kaliningrad. It has washed away the snow and left the city and my shirt, which is hanging on the balcony railings, looking gloomy and bedraggled ~ as I wrote in a previous post, Kaliningrad is far from its best during a rainy winter season!
I also wrote in an earlier blog that ‘It always snows in Russia ~ and sometimes it doesn’t’. Such flippancy becomes me, but affirmation that all is still well can come from the strangest of sources. A few moments ago, I consulted the BBC weather forecast and contrary to my expectations of alighting upon something inexcusably liberal-left, such as for the next seven days it will be sunny over the English Channel, perfect weather conditions for the Royal Navy to taxi across more migrants, I was heartened to discover that more snow was making its way to Kaliningrad. Good, white snow!
The fall may not be sufficient to make hundreds of snow-Its but, as winter still holds illimitable dominion over the calendar, until such time as spring breaks a little more snow is unlikely to offend a conservative outlook on how the seasons should conduct themselves.
All White in Kaliningrad More Snow on its Way!
To tide us over, I have selected and posted here a number of what I consider to be atmospheric ‘Kaliningrad in the snow’ scenes taken just before Christmas 2021 and after Christmas in 2022.
Those of you who are still children at heart will feel the magic in what you see; those of you who have grown up too quickly, grown too old without realising it or just grown out of it, will be excused for thinking snowballs but pitied for a species of short-sightedness that any number of trips to Specsavers is unlikely to resolve.
Updated 12 November 2021 / first published: 2 March 2020
In November 2019, we attended an art exhibition of a different kind, in which two art forms came together in a symbiotic visual aesthetic and chic utilitarianism. This exhibition, which incorporated paintings, sculptures and studio art pottery, used a neutral canvas, the novel form and proportions of which comprised a number of empty rooms in what was at that time an incomplete apartment block, except that is for one flat, where a unique and innovative makeover had achieved space-saving functionality but at no cost to style and novelty.
As with any art exhibition, the objective here was to bring works of art, and the artists who create them, into the public eye. The works displayed could be enjoyed for their cultural merit purely in the space and time that they occupy for the life of the exhibition or, if the beholder so desired, at their leisure privately and naturally for a price. However, and this is where the concept differs, once interest is stimulated it is hoped that potential art purchasers will experience a carry over into the functional realm of personalised living space where the wider appeal of lifestyle aesthetics prevail. All that is needed is vision, and, of course, the requisite roubles.
Clutter above minimalism
By no stretch of the imagination am I a man bowled over or easily swayed by modernism ~ contemporary that is ~ or by minimalism of any kind: give me a fussy, over-cluttered Victorian drawing room any day. However, I must have enjoyed the first exhibition, because I was looking forward to attending the second.
The previous venue had been a modern apartment block, whereas, in contrast, our invitation and curiosity took us this time to a wonderful Gothic building, somewhat jaded by the vicissitudes of time but to its melancholic benefit rather than its detriment.
Original Königsberg Gothic
Kaliningrad art exhibition
The exhibition was being held on the first floor of this not insubstantial building. We had encountered trouble in finding the building itself, so without prior instruction as to where we were to go and with no signs in evidence to point us in the right direction, it was more by chance than skill that we tried a door at the side of the building, thereto discovering a small narrow staircase which would lead us to our destination.
The one flight of stairs, screened off by a series of pink vertical rectangular struts, led us into a room which was a living work of modern art. It had what we will call the ‘Wow’ factor.
But first the exhibition itself.
Kaliningrad art exhibition
With the exception of three or four artworks that had been hung in the Wow room, most of the paintings were to be found literally strung out along both walls of a lengthy corridor. Others were exhibited in an adjoining room, and two more ~ old friends of ours from the previous exhibition ~ had been consigned to the far end of the corridor, a good choice as the black walls and black floor tiling flecked with tiny white fracturing ripples heightened the tension inherent in these works.
Dark Side in a dark gallery. (Artist anonymous)
Whilst the abstract paintings ~ total abstracts ~ suited the environment perfectly, my artistic and emotional prejudice steered me yet again into the arms of the painting after which we had lusted at the previous exhibition but sadly could not afford. This was the painting by Yri Bulechev. It is depicted here (see photograph below), along with its price tag of £2000.
Together,somewhere in the isthmus ~ love’s refuge between earth and sky. Artist Yri Bulechev
Perhaps if I volunteer to mix the paints for the
artist, he might be persuaded to give me a discount.
I used to be indecisive but now I’m not so sure
The ‘old friends’ to which I referred earlier, hanging on the appropriately dark wall, were works by an artist who, in keeping with the enigma of his/her art, we have not been able to identify. Once again, of all the artwork displayed here, their enigmatic quality took precedence, although, conversely, I was also attracted to the 1950s’ industrial scene, a painting in the realist mode of a Soviet factory or processing plant.
Industrialism vs LandscapeStudio Art Vases: natural and impressive
At the opposite end of the corridor to that where the enigma paintings hung was an impressive collection of large studio art pottery, floor-standing vases of prodigious proportions, staple must-have items back in the 1960s, statements then of contemporary modern chic, which today were completely in keeping with the décor of the reception room through which we had passed on our arrival. For whilst this room was the very epitome of contemporary modernism, there was no concealing the fact that certain crucial elements of its aesthetic composition owed their manifestation to the iconic preoccupations of 1960s’ designers and artists.
The stone sculpture of a man’s head and face possessed
no such subtle nuances. It was a strong face, an indomitable face, and as it
sat there on its plinth daring me to stare at it I was put in mind of tricky
situations encountered in my youth, mainly in public houses, which went
something along the lines of: “’ere mate, are you starin’ at me?!”.
This would seem as good a time as any to retreat from
the corridor into the Wow room.
First, I should explain that unlike the earlier exhibition this one was not being held in an empty apartment block but in a partly occupied suite of offices. On this occasion unchaperoned, the exact nature of the tie-in between art and interior design had not been explained to us, but I think we can assume that the logic behind it was that you too could have an office like this styled to your personal taste.
In this particular made-over office block the Wow room was the reception area. It was large, with a fairly long desk to the left of the pink-painted and glass-panelled entrance door and, to the right, a seating area for visitors, a place to unwind, eat snacks and drink coffee.
Feeling very receptive in the reception room
I still think that it would make a nice bar!
The furniture conformed to the modern predilection for non-conformity, ie an anthology of different furnishing styles. In the centre of the room the tables were round-topped, raised on slender pedestals and supported by circular bases. There was no mistaking their 1960s’ credentials. Fronting the reception desk, or counter, stood high square-section stools fitted with back rests, whilst a long light-timbered bench seat sprinkled with cushions and traversing one of the walls provided seating at a series of tables of typical square construction. But it was the chairs in the middle of the room that wrested continuity from divergence.
Chairs, but not as we know them
Made of a transparent acetate material, their pierced, convoluted and intertwined design virtually stole the show. However, there’s no business like show business and no show business without getting the lighting right. And here was the real show stealer. The lighting in this room was pure creative brilliance.
In reverse order of merit, the wall lights, ceiling lights and sconces in pierced and modern brass had obviously been purchased from Del and Rodders, but there gauche intrusiveness contributed an eccentric out-of-place rivalry to the blended effect achieved in the suspended hang ’em high and sling ’em low mid-20th century pendants, each one equipped with white, minimalist, cushion-shaped shades. One interesting divergence on this theme was the inclusion of a slightly different variety. It was a pendant lamp with the same long wire attachment but with a shade entirely composed of looped vinyl tubes.
Staying with the suspension theme, the lights above the bar (sorry, my mind must be wandering, I meant reception desk) were plain enough, with their straight glass shades, but something odd was going on here because each light appeared to contain three overlapping bulbs of different colours, whilst, in point of fact, although each fitting contained a different coloured bulb, each pendant only had room for one bulb. On reflection, I was glad that the reception desk was not a bar!
You look pierced!
Nothing much needs to be said about the beam-suspended spot bars focused upon the wall-strung paintings, except that they did their job, but the real feather in the lighting cap, the unproverbial pièce de résistance, was the violet light emanating from a complete wall of corrugated vinyl, similar in its ribbed construction to the translucent two-ply material favoured in this part of the world for screening on garden fences. At a guess, I would say that the light source contained within this material consists of coloured LED strips and that the intensity and suffusing quality is controlled by the filtration and the refractive mechanism exerted by the material’s density and the patterned texture upon its surface. I suppose you would agree?
Revolving in a violet haze
As an interesting and unusual light source, this lightweight wall is fascinating, but further joy is derivable from the central pivoting section, which fulfils the function of a revolving door. So super-sensitive is the mechanism that all it takes is the touch of a finger to set the door in motion, turning the whole partition around smoothly and quietly on its axis.
I know I have spent an inordinate number of words and time waxing lyrical about lighting, but, lest it should be underestimated, the golden rule is that no interior design work, whatever it is or wherever applied, will ever ‘cut the mustard’ without due regard for lighting. Mark my words, if the lighting is not right everything else will be wrong.
Reminding me of the traditional British telephone box
Leaving the lightshow behind, reluctantly, I crossed back into the corridor. I noticed that every door in the corridor was uniform, a light mat beige-brown framework infilled with fielded panels of vinyl. I like these doors, I thought, but I was not so sure old stone face did. He was looking at me again, so I shot a glance at the ceiling.
Ahh, yes, there it was, the exposed industrial look found in every restaurant, café, bar and office from here to the land of Nod. Discard the false ceiling, let the silver-tone ventilation tubes be proudly and unashamedly seen in all their heavy-weight glory, together with water pipes, electric cables and everything else that used to be hidden. But then as Henry Ford supposedly famously said, “If it ‘aint broke don’t fix it”, and it seems to work for everyone, for the time being at least.
Nothing to hideLadies & Gentlemen (It & Others?)
The last stop ~and it usually is ~ was the toilets. We
were not going there to review the interior décor, but we were compelled to do
so as an adjunct to the mission in hand. Our appraisal started with the toilet
doors themselves. There were three doors, turquoise with lattice-work surfaces,
strung out in sequence in the enigmatic-paintings’ section, where the walls and
the floor tiling were predominantly black.
On the other side of the toilet door, the marbling effect had turned to grey and white. The variegated tiles left the floor and travelled up the wall behind the toilet pan, where a small shelf above was dressed in small mosaic. The walls on either side were covered in an intriguing silver highlighted paper, the illustrated pattern on which was fish. I am not entirely convinced that I like the idea of fish swimming around in the toilet but at least to the best of my knowledge these fish were not piranhas.
The lavatory ~ hardly!
I came away from this event still wanting the paintings whose cost I could not justify but whose value I could not argue with. As for the idea of a 21st century office complete with touch-responsive revolving acetate screen emitting room-bathing violet light, this scenario most definitely appeals to my love of the unconventional, but to rubber-stamp the investment I feel that I need to become a lot more important than I am at present. You, no doubt, are in a different league. So go on, why not treat yourself? You know that you deserve it!
Essential Details:
Exhibition: ‘Картинный вопрос 2.0’
The exhibition is a joint offline project of the Centre of Communication Rezanium Tel: +79114679280 Web: www.rezanium.com
Project Organiser Natalya Stepanyuk, Exhibition Curator & Artist
Interior Design Anton Besonov
For more information, contact Natalya Stepanyuk Tel: +79062371001 Email: mail.artspace.gallery@gmail.com Email: stepanyuknm@gmail.com
Published: 4 October 2021 ~ Pondering on the future of Kaliningrad Pond
There are two lakes in Kaliningrad that are not lakes, they are in fact man-made water features and, as such, their real nomenclature is ‘pond’, even though rural English folk of a certain age will find it difficult and anomalous to reconcile such large expanses of water with their concept of a traditional pond, which used to be ~ as there are not many left now ~ a small, generally muddy-looking round thing sitting in a field or in the centre of a village ~ sometimes with ducks on top.
Pondering on the future of Kaliningrad Pond
Königsberg has two ponds, interconnecting: the Lower Pond is the oldest, believed to have been constructed in 1256, with the Upper Pond following in 1270.
The building that is the subject of my post today, must have appeared sometime in the early millennial years.
To say that the building was an odd fish to have been washed up on the side of this acute bend in the Upper Pond would be beyond the pale of understatement.
My first recollection of it was in 2015. We sat outside on a bright May morning, consuming a snack in the ornamental garden.
My first impression was that it looked like something that had sneaked out of a tired old British seaside resort, like Mablethorpe for example, and had taken root in this small corner of Russia on an even smaller corner of Königsberg’s Upper Pond in the dark depths of an unremarkable night.
From the water’s edge and the elevated pavement that runs along the pond’s borders, the front of the building is highly visible, since it occupies pride of place on a small but grandstanding eminence. Had it been built correctly, that is to say of the right materials and been less of a prefabbed rectangle, it may have added something exceptional to the attractiveness of the waterside scene instead of subtracting from it, but that opportunity has long since elapsed, and so here it stands today ~ at least for the moment but not perhaps for much longer, perhaps not even tomorrow.
Of no particular recommendation, all windows and block-like, but softened in summer by the trees that surround it, by the natural lie of the land and the happily gathering verdure, the front elevation of this building on a budget does not have much to offer and does not become particularly striking or even reasonably engaging until one turns the corner of the street, when then, and only then, does the full benefit of its maritime kitsch beguile one.
From this approach the building’s thematic premise offers itself for closer inspection. A man standing on a ship which is standing on the roof is an obvious place to start and might make sense if the restaurant on which they are anchored overlooked the Atlantic Ocean, but as the building does no such thing, it embroiders Königsberg’s pond, we will forego logic and place what faith we have left in the buoyancy ring of aesthetics.
At their lower level, the walls of the building are decorated with white and blue appliqués, which are clearly meant to resemble waves. The technique is replicated in the moulded bas relief of a wave-encompassed sailing ship that dominates the front-side wall and emerges again in the intertwining arabesque of mythical human forms set within trees of wave-like character, which flank an entrance aspirant to the essence of Art Deco.
Above the stylised wave formation, imitation wood cladding has been used to good effect to simulate the timbers of a 19th century sailing ship. These rise steadily upward to form the hull of the stern, which juts out jauntily at roof level from the corner of the building above the pavement and people walking. On the quarterdeck itself, his hands astride the rails, stands an effigy of a ship’s captain peering out to sea, except there is no sea to see, just trees, pavements, people and traffic and perhaps if he cranes to the left a little an inkling of Youth Park.
Beneath this surprisingly detailed mannequin, just above floor level, resting against the ship, sits a large terrestrial globe. That’s it, over there: underneath the parasol on top of the ice cream fridge!
The nautical theme travels on around to the back of the building where, on the corner opposite Captain Ahab, stood, until a few days ago, a silvered-metal and rivetted lighthouse, partly reclaimed by nature, who, over the period of desertion, had garbed it in a thick green mantle of all-enveloping, cascading ivy.
In Mablethorpe a building such as this would have gone down well amongst the amusement arcades, bingo halls, working men’s clubs, souvenir shops and candy floss emporiums, but here it looked a bit out of place. No, correction: it looked a lot out of place. To add to the ambiguous spectacle, the garden that belongs to it was once tasteful and rather twee. It consisted of four or five gazebos of differing shapes, with fretwork wooden walls and reed thatched roofs, tucked away and surrounded by exotic trees and shrubs that lent to the whole a secluded quality of oriental character.
Pondering on the future of Kaliningrad Pond
In May 2015, shortly after four of us had partaken of lunch in the gardens, these almost exquisite surroundings, through no fault of our own, closed, together with the establishment to which they had belonged, and remained closed, deteriorating month on month, year after year, persisting in that decline until something stirred in the garden this spring. That something was a chain saw. Trees and bushes were coming down and, swiftly with them, buildings.
Whilst the loss of the ornamental garden was a blow softened by the neglect and abandonment to which it had been subjected, what was destined to take its place prompted speculation. Presuming that the building would soon go the same way as its garden, I arrived at the conclusion that I ought to snap some pictures.
The photographs that illustrate this post were taken in the opening weeks of summer 2021 and later in September of the same year.
The garden as we knew it has, indeed, gone, to be replaced by? Well, you tell me. It all looks very functional, whatever that function is, but the organic nature of its predecessor, both regarding its planted ground and sequestered, blending buildings, is now nothing more than a pleasant memory, starkly superseded by what amounts to a bit of a mismatch.
The regeneration has already included the disappearance of the rooftop lighthouse. I always suspected it was a nuclear missile! And Captain Ahab, who still stares over the taffrail, looks decidedly nervous, as though he knows he is on the verge of losing his commission and having in the process his gimbals snatched away.
Witnessing what is happening up the garden path, the next question surely must be what is in store for the building? Will it be stripped of its nautical heritage and reclad as something more unfortunate? Or will it be knocked down? Will it rise again from the depth of demolition? And will it eventually be serving beer? Enjoy these historic photos and continue to watch this space!
Let’s face it and the cost of fast food ~ Limitations and Silence by Kaliningrad artist El Kartoon
Updated: 4 October 2021 | first published: 28 July 2020
In my blog post of 9 November 2019 I wrote about an unusual art exhibition we had attended and how we had been seduced by a particular artist’s work. A couple of months ago, a number of artworks by this artist were up for grabs.
The artist, anonymous artist (nom de guerre El Kartoon) had placed a number of his works for sale on the internet and was about to advertise them via Facebook. However, before the works were posted on Facebook the exhibition organiser, recalling our interest in the artist’s work, emailed my wife, Olga, to ascertain if we were in the market for any of the pieces he was selling, particularly the half-face painted on metal substrate, as we had expressed an interest specifically in this item, together with another composition featuring Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins).
For a while, we ummed and ahhhed, as you do; Olga weighing up the cost of the paintings against the number of plants she could buy for the garden, and me, mentally converting the cost of the paintings into foaming glasses of ale. Eventually, we decided to compromise.
The painting we bought was that of the female face, or rather half a female face, painted not on board or canvas but on a sheet of rusty metal.
The painting in question, Limitations, certainly has an innate power. When I beheld it unwrapped and standing in the lobby at the foot of our attic steps I experienced an overwhelming and incisive sense of awe, which rapidly transmuted, becoming first privilege and then disbelief that we now actually owned this fascinating composition.
The artistic arrangement is simple but effective. The face has been painted on a metal sheet. The sheet is old and rusting. It has a turned edge on one side, suggesting that in a previous life it had an industrial-mechanical purpose.
The face is female and comprises exactly 50% of a full human face, the invisible proportion achieved by positioning the image on the extreme left hand-side of the substrate. Both the location of the image and the facial expression lends itself to the interpretation of peering anxiously out from behind something, in the way, for example, you might steal a glance from behind a half-opened door. The remaining portion of the metal base, approximately one-third, has been left untreated ~ rusting and tarnished.
El Kartoon ‘Be Seeing You!’ in our attic
I have suggested that the expression on the face betrays a sense of anxiety, to that can be added apprehension. The looker is uneasy, vulnerable. The one eye, brilliant blue, reflects something white and rectangular. The blue of the eye is as deep and beautiful as it is insistent; the glazed reflection upon its surface (could it be a window?) stares out at you above the dark well of the pupil, drawing you into its mystery.
Everything in the composition of the face itself, the broad, black serrated outline, the layers that form the contours of the face and the fine details, are jagged, frayed, fragmenting. There is nothing calm, nothing quiescent. Whatever it is that informs the expression, it is as unnerved as it is unnerving.
In this work, as in most of the artist’s works that we have seen, a striking and, I am inclined to believe, essential engine of the thematic enigma resides in the application of a curious overlay of geometrical lines. In this example, those lines are fainter than in his other creations and do not extend so definitely from the painting’s centrality into the outlying images or borders, but they are there ~ on the exposed and rusting metal and among the drizzle and daubed discolouration, the latter looking like natural erosion, perhaps from water exposure, as if, along with the fading black paint to one corner, they belong to the metal’s former existence, to its pre-artistic, functional and then discarded history.
To the beholder, these lines are key. They, above anything else, if there is, indeed, anything else, help to unlock all manner of ambivalence. But one is a constant, and that is that the lines emphasise connectivity ~ the inescapable interconnection between the realm of flesh and emotion and the hard, unyielding, material world to which, no matter how unforgiving it is, we are all hardwired.
Taken together with other paintings by the same artist in which this technique is employed, I am inclined to understand these lines to be not just an overlay on an overwhelmed human face extending outwards and then back again into and from the physical world but the circuit board of modern life, which speaks to us not just of hard engineering but in the technological idiom by which our life is controlled and defined ~ the ultimate interconnectivity from which there is no escape, at least not for us in our flesh and blood lifetime.
Given the nature of this unusual painting and its more than flirtatious relationship with negativity, I was surprised that it somehow fitted into Olga’s reality of butterflies, trees and flowers, but the mystery was made known to me when after voicing my confusion she declared simply that she did not find the composition unnerving. ‘Vulnerable’, yes; ‘unnerving, no’. Had she really failed to discern the connection between our vulnerability in this world ~ the world that others have created for us ~ and how this might be ~ indeed cannot be, anything else but unnerving?
I was pleased, however, that her second choice as to where to hang the painting, which was the kitchen, was discounted fairly quickly, not on the basis of my interpretation but, whilst she would not see the picture as often as she liked, on the wall at the bottom of the attic steps, which seemed to be the place for it. We agreed on this. It fitted perfectly. It was where it would have most impact without impacting mostly.
Anthony Hopkins
Since learning that Mr Anonymous’ paintings were on the market for prices we could afford, we had been arguing the toss as to whether we should buy another of this gentleman’s artworks, the one based on Anthony Hopkins’ fictional character, Hannibal Lecter, in TheSilence of the Lambs.
El Kartoon’s ‘Silence’ as seen at the 2019 art exhibition, Kaliningrad
We had negotiated a price for this second artwork provided we bought both, ie the half-face, Limitations, and Silence as well, and had just about talked ourselves out of it when our inquiries as to why there was a near identical painting masquerading as graffiti on a small brick utility building opposite Kaliningrad’s lake met with an interesting answer: apparently, the artist had been caught subjecting the aforesaid building to his aesthetic skills, had been summarily arrested and thereafter charged with vandalism. The case had gone to court but in conclusion had been dismissed*.
El Kartoon’s open-air work, sadly, since defaced*
*Note that this public stencil was painted over sometime in 2021 🤔
The artist’s compulsion to reproduce his painting as ~ ahem ~ an ‘urban art form’ had arisen, we were told, out of twin noble sentiments: a sense of civic duty and moral obligation. He had disposed the image where he did as a warning to young ladies who, reportedly, were apt to congregate there after dark to eat the stuff they had bought from a certain US fast-food chain nearby. The artist wished to say, ‘look out there are predators about’ and was not necessarily commenting on the quality, or perhaps the content, of what it was they were eating or who, in fact, they were buying it from.
The framed artwork has an interesting historical annotation attached to it in that it still bears the official tag it was given as a possible ‘exhibit’ in a court of law!
Bugger! We had to have it!
Olga beamed with delight when I suggested that she get on the blower right away and tell the lady in charge of the art exhibitions that we had decided to take it if the artist was prepared to wait for payment at the end of the month. She, the lady, opined that it was a matter of fate that we would buy both as we had expressed such interest in them when first we saw them at the exhibition. Like Olga she believed that we were meant to own them. And I believe they were meant to own us.
El Kartoon’s ‘Silence’ displayed in our attic
Further information on the artist and artist’s work:
A comment from my wife, Olga, on her Facebook account Mick and I bought these artworks just because we like the feel and amplitude. They call the artist the Russian Bansky, because of his distinctive stencilling technique. His works have been featured on the streets of Kaliningrad. I wonder if he will sell the copyright? When he is as famous as Bansky (and I believe he will become so one day, as he has talent), his public ‘installations’ might be sold by removing the walls they were painted on!
Notes from the art exhibitor’s website [link no longer active as at 12/04/2022] Art Space Gallery El Kartoon, artist The main direction [of his work] is stencil graphics aspiring to painting. The works reflect the desire to reflect fundamental values, feelings and social problems through the prism of our digital age. Contemporary, about contemporaries, for contemporaries.
El Kartoon And now in Russian … Основное направление – трафаретная графика стремящаяся к живописи. В работах отражено стремление отразить некие фундаментальные ценности, ощущения, социальные проблемы сквозь призму нашей цифровой эпохи.Эта живопись – отражающая современников, о соврем…
El Kartoon EL Kartoon начал рисовать граффити в 1998 году. С 2002 по 2009 год был творческий перерыв. С 2009 года работает в трафаретной технике.Единственный Российский художник, который представляет трафаретную графику на международной арене, в частности на крупнейшей международной выставке трафаретного искусства Stencil Art Prize, Sidney, Australia, а так же является участником The Kutz, Bristol, United Kingdom
О работе «Молчание…»
Причиной создания работы послужило случайное наблюдение за ночными “обитателями” парковки, которые в ночное время едят там Макдональдс.В процессе создания картины на стене близлежащего здания автор был арестован и доставлен в отдел милиции. Часы, которые должны были показывать время – 18:00, сделать не получилось, но благодаря этому работа получила “новую окраску” и новый смысл.
O работе” Limitations”
Металл – это ассоциация художника с окружающим миром. В работе “Limitations”- человек в какой то степени заперт, в какой-то степени ограничен. Эта работа является одной из серии уличных работ на тему “цифрового человека” – современного, технологичного, оцифрованного и запущенного в сеть, в тираж, и как автору казалось в процессе над работой – это время наступает стремительно. Недавние законы, принятые в Москве, подтверждают “теорию цифрового человека”.
And now in English … El Kartoon The only Russian artist who represents stencil graphics in the international arena, in particular at the largest international exhibition of Stencil Art, Sidney, Australia. He also participated in The Kutz Exhibition, Bristol, United Kingdom.
About the artwork Silence Silence came from the accidental observation of the night ‘inhabitants’ ~ the young who congregate in the parking area close to McDonald’s to consume the food they purchase from the fast-food chain.
In the process of the creating the stencilled work on the side of a building close to the parking area, the artist was arrested and taken to the police department. The clock, which was supposed to show the time, 18:00, was not finished, but thanks to this unfinished touch, the work received a ‘new colour’ and a new meaning.
About the artwork Limitations El Kartoon writes: “Metal is my association with the outside world. In this case, the subject is locked to some extent, to some extent limited …”
Limitations was a series of street works on the topic of ‘digital man’ ~ modern, technological, digitised and launched into the network, in circulation and so on. At the time when the work was being created, it seemed to the artist that the time of the ‘digital man’ was rapidly approaching. Recent laws adopted in Moscow suggest to the artist that the time of the ‘digital man’ has come.
