argh organization!

[dragonlady7]

i just spent all day uploading the photos from Istanbul and Kyrgyzstan and it's only now as I was finishing up the organization that i was like... most of... the best ones... are missing???
and I realize now what must have happened:
I selected the 85 or so best of them to print out at the photo lab downstairs, and instead of copying them into that folder, I moved them. So i just went through the entire process with the best photos just not present. Argh.

Anyway now they're uploading.
I've also experimented with uploading the little short videos I took for Instagram Stories. They load and will play on Flickr. I feel like I should have them archived somewhere besides Instagram because you really never know when a platform is going to just entirely change its business model and wipe out all your archives. *shrug emoji*

So here are some pictures from that vacation, from the B-roll I guess. I still had a lot, I only picked the best-best-best ones to print, and some of those choices were made because of how I figured printing would work out.


A photo taken on horseback of "the Carpeted Valley" near Song-Kul; notably we were on the only ridge where you could get cell service near our yurt camp. I was riding a stallion that the excursion leader described as "kind".





In the yurt that served as a common area at the yurt stay at Song-Kul Lake. The family's daughter is making tea from the charcoal-fired samovar.



MANTY. Steamed, then deep-fried, dumplings containing mutton and onions. Possibly the most delicious thing I've ever eaten in my life.



This was a painting in the Kyrgyz National Gallery. It was wall-sized, those women were about life-size, and I have no idea what it was about. There's the Statue of Liberty in the background. The letters are O, B, O, N, and it's an acronym, clearly, but the English version of the label did not explain.
I badly want it as a poster but they didn't have it at the gift shop. I don't understand it one little bit but I love it wildly.



My dude, in a restaurant (on the outdoor patio) in Cholpon-Atta for lunch, waiting for our coffee to arrive.

Comments

[unicornduke]

Those photos are all so cool! I'm going to roll through your flickr now lol. And murder my parents internet probably

[dragonlady7]

Ha, Flickr is pretty good at only loading smaller versions of the photos until you click through, I think. The good pictures are up, now, I think!

[potboy]

Wow, what a place! Also I love the poster too. Very Soviet-feeling. And what are they up to with those sheep heads?

[dragonlady7]

oh the entire museum was a fascinating mix of indigenous nomadic cultural stuff, huge woollen tapestries and such, and then just-- literal tons of Soviet shit dumped all over it. It was absolutely riveting. And I couldn't understand a fucking word of it.

Dude just managed to Google enough about this painting to discover the Special Purpose Women's Squad. Oh my gosh this is darker than I was expecting.

[potboy]

It doesn't seem like something that ought to have a big public poster, does it? The Soviets seem to be very highly skilled in horrifying dystopian methods of controlling the populace. I want to know what can be done to counter all these things, or are we actually doomed once they end up being exported to us? (Perhaps they already do exist in our own societies and we just don't know?)

[dragonlady7]

It wasn't a poster, it was a painting. Some of the other works in the gallery were political; this one was directly across from an extremely harrowing painting about the genocide of 1916, when the Russian Empire consolidated their hold on Kyrgyzstan by squashing a rebellion among the tribes.

The OBON would not work in the US; it depends on the status held in Central Asian societies by the family matriarch. The household is ruled with an iron fist by the mother of the son, and it's both like a sit-com stereotype and the absolute gospel truth. I saw with my own eyes how an older woman in the correct garb was a figure of considerable power, even just in a crowd of random people. (I quite liked it, how people were obviously respectful of grandmotherly sorts, but a grad student we briefly traveled with who'd lived in the region a while explained the deeper phenomenon, which like all cultural things has its good sides and bad sides.)

In the US, old women are invisible, powerless. Police would not particularly hesitate to inflict brutality on a group of shrill old women if they transgressed enough. The cultural cachet isn't there. It would be bad optics, sure, but old women are figures of pity, not fear. The police would tolerate them, like they did the Women's March, but if they actually did anything, the tolerance would end. All of these "oh we must protect women" types very, very clearly indicate "while the women are behaving appropriately" as part of that; literally every person who says "i would never hit a woman!" clearly means "if she wasn't misbehaving" by that. Every single person. If women step out of line then they are to be destroyed. That's how American culture works.

Interesting, though, that this is probably where the "george soros is paying protestors" narrative is coming from. The US has very little history of paid agitators, but clearly, this is something the Russian consciousness would be aware of. They would easily have seen the Women's March as a massive OBON-style campaign. Who bought all those pussy hats indeed. (My mother made three, even though she didn't attend the March herself!)

[potboy]

Yes, I've no doubt that giving anyone in the family/society an almost absolute power to do things without consequences would be a double edged sword. But at the same time I can see the attractions of that power and authority being in the hands of women - particularly now that I'm in my mid fifties, of older women.

I find here in the UK that there *is* a power in being older - in being middle-aged, at least. There's nobody more respectable than a middle-aged married woman with children, and I think I'm aware of carrying that respectability around like a shield. If I go campaigning for Labour, I do it in my best clothes, and in the knowledge that the police are much less likely to see me as a target than a younger woman or PoC or visibly 'alternative' man. I am a matron, and while it doesn't give me absolute power, I certainly feel like I have more social cachet now than I ever did.

(Most middle-aged women seem to use that power for complaining in shops, it seems, but then that's a double edged sword too.)

But yes, I agree that even so respectability doesn't go very far when you are doing something that is not seen as respectable. OTOH, there is also a strong feeling that if grandmothers *have to* protest, then it's because something has gone very wrong with society.

So yeah, I would say we were somewhere in between the two extremes, but probably more towards the American end.