olha pryymak

An excellent publishing house, making books for kids from 2 to 102. Most of their books are true pieces of art and come mostly in Ukrainian. And even an old-time classic “Night Before Christmas” by Mykola Gogol came out in translation/adaptation by Maksym Rylsky. In my mind the translation missed some particularly juicy parts that Russian version carried… Although I am a big Ukrainophile, this seemed to be a bit much. The book was illustrated by celebrated Kost Lavro. Any of his books is a must-have souvenir from Ukraine.

Another beautiful publication of theirs – Anderson’s “Snow Queen” – won awards for best design (pic on the left). Lately I got “Lisa and Her Dreams” – a book tailored to Gapchinska work (a notorious Kyiv artist that I should write more about in a separate post), written by the publishing house owner – Ivan Malkovich.

Yesterday I visited the photo studio of Kyiv top advertisement photographer Aleksey Abramov. He boasts in his portfolio with tons of Ukrainian celebrities pictures and can make you look much more better in a photo then you really are . Even though he has shown us the ins and outs of the classical studio portraiture, I would be much better of hiring him for the shoot. The mass of skill and equipment necessary is overwhelming.

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Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies has put out a comparatively good resource on art, history etc.

Afisha by Kyiv Post is the most established and wide-ranging publication on Kyiv market so far. Its parent English-language Kyiv Post has its own weekly Guide section in English. Both magazine and paper are for sale or offered for free at many coffee shops and restaurants around town.

10 Days is comparatively new magazine (one year old) and has very navigable webpage.

TimeOut just started its bi-weekly on Kyiv! Let’s see what it brings us.

Other lesser cultural guide magazines are Zefir, What’s On (the latter is also in English), section in Kommersant newspaper, etc.

This fall walking advertisements grabbed everyone’s attention in Kyiv. The young people in quirky company colored and styled garb walk around the city, sometimes handing fliers. Flower hats, stripy scarves, kinky policemen outfits – even segways are common means of commanding attention. Cheap labor by poor college students probably provides great savings to companies’ advertisement budget, billboards go at world-class rates in these parts. In addition it gives a new face to the streets of Kyiv. In the future I’d like to put out a set of pics featuring these laborers in action

The Santa Clauses on this pic were many in number, walked briskly carrying flags, chanting the new promotion deal for the paying telephone company.

Technorati Profile

Two extremes occur when it comes to the opinion of how much should the country’s arts be organized. On one side it’s bold and pragmatic social engineering, on another one – total cultural fragmentation. With the democratization of art and advent of information revolution the shape of artistic tendencies became much fuzzier to pin down. In some way the government already can have little say over what the cultural tendencies are. Over are the times where Moscow would dictate what magazines to read and what movies to watch. These days the information airwaves are much more polluted with information. Our attention span got much shorter. The cultural satisfaction became very much more short-term. And even if the government makes a very clumsy attempt to push an envelope (see “Mamo, chomu ya urod” ads) it reaches little to influence the mass.

What is it in Ukraine like today? It’s hard to say because of the spontaneous and erratic nature of our government’s efforts – to be mild, but let’s say the arts are let go to be at the mercy of the Market these days. TV stations and glossy magazines define those things…

Marginal culture magazine in Ukraine www.sho.kiev.ua calls itself a magazine of cultural resistance, very much in tune with our national anthem lyrics, which goes like this: “Ukraine has not died yet..”.. for fifteen years now. Hope the definition will loose its actuality the same way and become just as redundant as the anthem lyrics, and converts more masses to their idea, because the guys write quality stuff. They offer an alternative spin on the current culture to commercial mags like Afisha, 10 Dney, What’s On and Zefir. SHO does not specialize in current event listing, although runs some ads. Looks like they put out most of their print content online. The site is great, although it’s pleasant to hold an intelligent glossy in your hands. I even forgive them for writing in Russian.