Slowly but steadily making my way through all of the Studio Ghibli films, I recently watched Howl's Moving Castle. It made me remember the wooden skyscraper in Archangelsk I wrote about before.

Apparently the skyscraper is still standing, although it looks like it has deteriorated significantly. I cleaned removed the old broken links from my old article about it and got permission from Nikolai Gernet aka nixette to use one of his photos. Archangelsk has a rich history of wooden architecture and nixette has more photos here and here as well as many other interesting pictures from Archangelsk and of Sutiagin's wooden skyscraper in particular.

It's interesting to note that both Russia and Japan have a rich tradition of wooden architecture.

While looking for info about this, I found another gem: the conceptual design called Ruskyscraper by Eugene Staune who works for Arhitekturium architectural firm. It's supposed to have 25 stories of 10.8ft each made primarily out of wood and glass. The articles describe it as economical, but I really doubt that-- if there's anything that I've learned from watching The New Yankee Workshop, wood can be very expensive. This project would probably use laminated engineered lumber, so I guess it could be doable.

The floor plan seems to be rather wasteful, but hey, this is a concept design, not something that is probably going to be built.

Digging in old photos I found three pictures of my father, grandfather and great-grandfather, all wearing military or military-style clothing. I took a picture of myself in my favorite NYPD-style jacket and created this list of four generations of my family. Notice the three repeating familiy names (reflected in first names and patronymics)-- Mihail/Michael, Yakov/Jack, and Zinoviy/Zalman.

Lost Generation:
Zalman Mihailovich Krakovskiy, my great-grandfather, civilian, in his late forties.

Greatest Generation:
Yakov Zalmanovich Krakovskiy, my grandfather, Senior Sergeant, Red Army, in his thirties. The picture seems to be taken in front of some crates of Lend-Lease equipment in 1943.

Baby Boom Generation:
Zinoviy Yakovlevich Krakovskiy, my father, Lieutenant, Soviet Army, in his late twenties.

Generation X:
Michael Zinovievich Krakovskiy, myself, civilian, almost 30.

I never received any musical instruction. My mother always believed that I did not have any musical talents. In fact, she used a Russian saying "медведь на ухо наступил" ("a bear stepped on one's ear") to describe my musical aptitude. When I was little, I assumed the bear story to be literally true.

When I became a little older, I realized how lucky I was--many of my friends had to spend many, many hours studying music, and every one of them hated it. Those who studied music further, hated their lessons even more. I had one friend, for instance who used solfeggio as a curse word.

To this day I do not regret not getting a musical education: I feel that all that reading, fishing and playing that I've done instead of music lessons was a better use of my time. Besides, I think my mother wasn't very much off in evaluation of my musical ability.

Having married into a musical family (my mother-in-law is a piano teacher and father-in-law is a senior tuner at Steinway and Sons), I have more music thrust in my life than I ever thought possible. My wife, an amateur organist, took up almost half of the living room space with an organ and a harpsichord. The mother-in-law and her take turns in bringing my baby daughter, whose entire vocabulary is limited to "papa", "mama", "baba", and "kaka", to the harpsichord keyboard and letting her hit the keys. My father in law has absolute pitch, but at this point it's unclear if little Natalie inherited it or my own "bear-stepped-on" ears.

While a harpsichords and an organs are hardly common instruments, I bet every one of you has encountered a well-abused piano situated in a classroom. Invariably, some kid pulls up a chair and starts playing a simple melody. In the United States it's usually a Chopsticks, in Russia--Dog's Waltz.

It turns out that Chopsticks is actually called The Celebrated Chop Waltz and it's composer is known. Dog's Waltz's, composer, on the other hand is unknown, but the tune has a wider international influence (also, musically, it's a more interesting piece than Chopsticks).

Dog's Waltz, as I learned from the Wikipedia article, is one of those things that has different names in different cultures. There are many examples of this: Russian roulette is known as American roulette in Russia, Mk 2 grenade is known as "pineapple grenade" in the US, but was called "lemon grenade" in Russian, cocks being called roosters in the US (for understandable reasons) and so forth.

The cultures don't agree in what the said roosters sound like, with versions ranging from "cock-a-doodle-doo" to "goh-geh-goh-goh" to "chic-chi-ri-chi" and so forth. Cat sounds vary from culture to culture as well, and so do dog sounds.

In the similar manner, Dog's Waltz has a multitude of names in different cultures, ranging from Cat March to Flea Waltz, Donkey March, Fools' Polka, and The Little Monkeys. The Japanese, take the prize by calling it Neko Funjatta--I Stepped on the Cat. Interestingly enough, this tune is relatively unknown in the US.