Chronicle Entries

November 11 - Moscow

We met again with Alexei, aka MD&C Pavlov, at his parents's apartment in the Southwestern district of Moscow. To our surprise, we learned that in addition to being the man who is credited with bringing rap to Russia, he is also a devout Hare Krishna. This quirky little twist to his story basically clinched any doubts we may have had about choosing him as our subject.

November 13 - Moscow

I've often read about marathon runners hitting "the wall"-- a point very near the end of the race when their legs turn to lead and, though they only have a short distance left to go, those last three or four miles become exponentially more difficult than all of the previous miles combined. Never having run a marathon, I've never experienced the dreaded wall...until now, that is.

It feels like putting this second-to-last story together has demanded more energy than the whole of the trip. We're already running on empty, and everything seems to be going wrong. To begin with, the weather has been bitter cold and the skies ominously dark, making for dreary days and impossible shooting conditions. Simple things like taking photos of Pavlov in a record store turned into ordeals when cranky store employees prevented me from shooting. Another photo opportunity--Pavlov in a recording studio--was lost when a taxi driver drove off--intentionally--with his producer's digital audio sampler. The "lowlight" occurred last night when using a borrowed flash, I totally overexposed all of the pictures that I shot of Pavlov during a guest apppearence in a Moscow nightclub. On top of this, for the first time we are having some serious technical problems. Our email has been down for the last couple of days and Lisa's computer has taken to crashing on a regular basis.

We just keep telling ourselves we have only a few miles more left to run.

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