Back in the US of A! You don’t know how lucky you are. Ok, A doesn’t quite rhyme with “are,” but the Beatles song sure comes to mind. Speaking of the USSR, here’s a cool animation from Sergej Hein.
Two years ago, I was living in a block in Berlin on the opposite side of the street from where the animation is set. Living there remind me of my early childhood in Riga (Latvia) where the blocks were almost the same. I think Alexei Paschitnow, the inventor of Tetris, had kind of the same idea as me in Spring 1984. I bet he was looking out of the window of his Block in Moscow and thought, ‘how do soviet architects actually plan these buildings?’
Our views of Germany looked nothing like this, except in some severely-bombed-and-reconstructed parts of Frankfurt and Munich. There were many beautiful instances of old world villages, baroque architecture and Schloß. I thought this video funny, though, and oddly reminiscent of my current jetlagged state of mind, which is good for short, intense bursts of thought, hazy memories of Germany, Tetris and nothing else.
