Scene Behind a Curtain
Setok / Aggression
The Scene Behind A Curtain
Everything really started out one
spring evening. I got a call from
somebody, probably Nosfe, to come out to a nearby pub - Sizzle.
Apparently everybody who was anybody was there, there was good
music and a Russian Spectrum scener. I considered this proposal
only for a moment. It's not every
day that you get to meet a Russian
Spectrum scener. I quite remember
how Pavel, or xPasha, decided to
meet Finland but there he was
anyway. The bar was hot and not
particularly pleasant, but they were not lying: the music was
good, so I decided to get myself a beer
and sit myself down.
Now the Russian scene was a real
mystery to everyone. The infamous
iron curtain affected people in more ways than one. Indeed, we
were barely even aware of a scene
there. Speaking with Pavel, I realised computing life there was
much more active than had previously been thought. I think an
interesting question is, how did the scene reach Russia? Did
some western ideas manage to seep in through the holes in the
curtain, or did the Russians develop their scene independently?
Perhaps the scene somehow reflects something more fundamental
about the nature of humans. Something that is built into us
genetically. The need to create, whatever the hurdles. The
urge to demonstrate our own achievements to others in the hope
of gaining respect. Maybe the only
mystery is how it happens in
exactly the same way across the
borders: tight code, design and
thumping music.
Nosfe and co. had been telling Pavel about this funny,
unimportant thing we call the Alternative Party in the hopes
that the word would spread to Russia and we'd see a nice influx
of sceners we knew nothing about. Pavel, in turn, was
telling us about CAFe. A Russian
party? With Speccy people? I was
interested. After all, that's how
I started with computers: on my
good old ZX Spectrum.
To cut a long story short I ended
up in a city called Kazan with my
friend, Tuomas Toivonen. In a
way it was quite a humbling experience visiting Russia for the
first time. Just over ten years ago Russia was under strict
communist rule. Entering would most likely
have been quite an operation. Yet,
it was not quite obvious how the
change had affected the people
themselves. How much was positive?
How much negative? Many towns we
passed in the train were really quite run-down. Paint was
peeling off the walls, old equipment rusting in yards and roads
turning to muck. That vast stretches of Russia suffers from
poverty was saddeningly obvious. Still, despite all that, most
whom I talked with said that even though times were tougher
now, they would get better. According to them, Russia will be
some day be better than ever before. I guess freedom, in all its
forms, is more important than we
realise in our everyday lives.
Once in Kazan itself, our reception was extremely welcoming. It
seemed as if everyone who was in
the area had come to help us off
the train. The friendliness was unlike anything we've seen
before. It continued in that fashion throughout our stay, with
people always willing to show us around or shake our hand. Some
even wanted autographs!
Obviously our first priority was
to get the bags somewhere, ie. an
appropriate hotel. It turned out
that there was a major Tatar conference taking place in Kazan
at the same time as CAFe, so finding a hotel room was
definitely more difficult than had been expected. A word of
warning for anyone planning a trip there next August: I
understand the conference will be held at the same time again,
so book your room well in advance.
That aside, we did get quite a
glance at the city and its architecture. It had that run-down
dusty feel that all Russian towns seem to have, but at the same
time change was clearly taking place.
Large construction projects were
commencing and buildings were being fixed up. With Tuomas we
agreed that there is a lot of potential in Kazan. They clearly
have the most important thing any place
can have: hope and belief in the
future. The will to make things
better. If you have that you can
accomplish anything. This was especially clear when walking
down the main street, where a lot of renovation was going on,
and some already complete. Just squint your eyes a bit and
marvel at the splendid architecture around.
Finally we managed to get a room
and could begin to relax. During
our trip we came up with a rather
crazy plan: as we were the first
Finns to visit (indeed we were the
first from a country which hadn't
been part of the Soviet Union), we
just had to make a demo. Note that
neither me nor Tuomas had ever
made a demo before in our lives,
although I've done the odd little
routine back in the good old days.
Still, we felt we had to contribute somehow. So quite a lot of
time was spent trying to get SDL to
work, creating music, playing around with routines and
desperately attempting to collect something together.
With our minds set on making a demo we reckoned the best place
to be was the party place. The party
hadn't officially started yet, but
we were kindly invited to come and
see the place while the organisers
were setting everything up. From
the moment we stepped in it was obvious that Russian parties
had quite stark differences from the Finnish and Western
European ones. The organisers had rented a hall
which had been an old theatre building and instead of the rows
of tables and computers one has grown
used to, there were only chairs pointing towards the spot where
the big screen would be. The real reason for this would only
later become clear. A BK demo or two later we were back at the
hotel, enjoying much-needed rest.
The next day we packed all our
stuff and headed off to the party
building again. Tonight, in proper
party fashion, we would sleep over
at the part building. This seemed
to please the Russians no end: we
were proving that we were truly
part of the crowd. The day was really hectic. We had our laptops
with us and spent a lot of the time coding. This was apparently
very strange for the people at the party. Apparently in those
parts of the world, people do not code
demos at parties, which is almost
the opposite of what we are used
to (although this is changing in
Western Europe too). Most people
were sitting around chatting and
enjoying themselves.
However, we weren't restricted to
work alone. During our time there
we had somehow become minor celebrities. Not because we're
particularly star-like but I guess simply for our long and
adventurous trip and because nobody from the "outside" had ever
visited. We even got interviewed by the local
TV-stations, talking about the
scene, our trip and even drugs. It
was also our goal to try and market our own event, the
Alternative Party, as we have yet to see any
Russian people there, or even any
Spectrum demos.
Now, Russians and other Eastern countries are famous in the
scene for primarily one thing: Spectrum
demos. The Sinclair machine has
mostly been forgotten by the western demo scene in its worship
for the Commodore 64. Not so for the
Russians. They have quite successfully managed to battle the
limitations of the platform like 8times 8 colour blocks and even
used them to their creative advantage to produce some astounding
and original demos. They would not
disappoint us this time either,
with the Spectrum demo compo clearly being the highlight of the
event. We really need to see more
of that at the Alternative Party.
It's not just the Z80 assembler
that amazes, either. The Eastern
scene is not content with the old
rubber keys and beeps of an original speccy. In fact, the real
Sinclair Spectrums are not even
that common there. Instead they have a bewildering amount of
clones and super-clones with hefty modifications.
I'll always remember the discussion I had with one Speccy
artist, whose name I have unfortunately
forgotten. It was like a scene
from the film Ghost Dog: he didn't
speak any English and my Russian
is even worse. Still, we managed
to get on quite well. He was very
eager to show his work and the paint program he uses on the
Speccy. I asked him why he was using an
emulator. I thought that was a
fair conclusion based on the fact
that the software was running in a
VGA monitor from a gray
mini-tower. The question had to be
translated, of course, but he then
looked at my strangely for a moment and replied, "It's not an
emulator, it's a Spectrum". Then the full realisation of the
Russians' ability to extend their speccies
hit me. Not only was this machine
in a mini-tower and connected to a
proper monitor, it also had a hard
drive and two 3.5 inch disk
drives.
Another interesting point is that
Linux really does not seem to be
very popular in Russia. With the
tight budgets there I would've imagined it to be a good choice
but the availability of pirated Windows copies really cancels
Linux's cheap price. However, many people
were fascinated by the Debian
installations running on our laptops so we did get a good chance
to spread the word. Unfortunately
we were somewhat unprepared in
one respect: we had only a few Linux demos downloaded and my
laptop would only work properly with
Fit's One Day Miracle, the others
requiring full-screen mode. Later
on we managed to get a few MFX
productions running too. Everyone
was very eager to see what Linux
could do and they crowded round
for the show time after time. Hopefully Linux, and other
alternative operating systems, will slowly become more popular
in Russia as they have around the world.
During the evening we were presented with the normal mixture of
compos: music, graphics, chip
music, ASCII graphics etc. A few
things can be said about these. It
was clear that Russians have quite
a different taste in music than many of my friends. Many of the
tracks were rock or metal and
anything that approached electronic music was deemed to fail. It
reminded me of the late 80s when I
came to Finland and everyone and
their grandmother was wearing an
Iron Maiden t-shirt. Not that
there's anything necessarily wrong
with that. It was just one more
difference in our cultures.
Another thing that I really have
to point out: they had ANSI and ASCII graphics competitions.
The only real difference here was that the ANSI graphics were
colour and so-called ASCII was two-colour black
and white ANSI. In other words, almost all the entries in the
ASCII graphics compo did not use ASCII
but ANSI characters (or perhaps
IBM). Just a small hint to the organisers for the future ...
As night arrived we realised why
Russian sceners don't need computers at their parties and what
the few tables were really for: vodka.
Oh, Finnish sceners drink at their
parties too but they still claim
the focus to be computers and coding. The Russians have quite
gladly ridden themselves of all those unnecessary extras and
have concentrated all their efforts on one thing. Poor Tuomas
and me were still trying with our symbolic effort to complete a
demo. Finally we just had to give up. Nobody else in the hall
was touching their computers and they were beginning
to think we were slightly queer.
So in the end we joined the merry
bunch sitting at the tables snacking, chatting and enjoying
their alcohol. The strong sense of friendliness continued and
our glasses were never left empty. In the morning we were
rewarded with friendly headaches.
There were few surprises in the results of the competitions,
including the fact that our demo did quite poorly. There were
several good Speccy demos with interesting concepts but the
most technically advanced, by a crew called Placebo, won fair
and square. On behalf of the Alternative Party,
we gave them one free train ticket
to Finland and free entrance. Unfortunately we didn't hear from
them after the party and for some
reason they didn't show up. Too
bad. I believe they would have done well in our demo compo.
After the party we had a couple of
days to get to know Kazan better.
We had a nice guided tour of the
historical fortress and heard stories of its past (thanks to
one of xPasha's friends - I'm really bad
at names). We also tasted a wide
range of local dishes, topped with
some cheap beer and vodka. As an
extra note I'd like to say I was
positively surprised by the Russian girls. Maybe we just looked
odd to them, but on several occasions they came up in a
friendly manner to chat - something I've never noticed
happening here. I also quite prefer skirts, especially of the
shorter kind, to the trousers everyone in Finland seems to be
wearing these days. Maybe we'll meet more of them in the future.
Well it was a hectic trip and we
were finally glad to be heading
back home. At the same time we had
really enjoyed being there and meeting all those fantastic
people. The experience is something I will
surely never forget and which will
enrich my life for years to come.
A great big thanks to everyone involved: xPasha, Max, Adam etc.
and to elph for inviting me to write this article, which will
hopefully still make it to the mag. I hope to meet you all
again.
References
[Http://www.altparty.org/]
