Alina Simone - "Just Here to Watch the Show (demo)". Saint Petersburg has been around much longer than me, and it will be here after I'm gone. It will be solid and regal under blue sky. It will be radiant and proud. It will let its gold domes wink at dusky midnight, it will hold a million people in its squares. The trees here are taller than the trees at home, and the forest around the Polytechnic is full of trilling birds. I imagine studying there, in vaultlike classrooms with peeling walls, all day spent staring at an exploded view. The diagrams would be on bright white paper, like the shafts of light in the central stairway, where great scientists have walked, have chewed on sandwiches. And in the evening I would go out from the Physico-Technical Institute, in among those tall trees and trilling birds, and I would just disappear into the capital, where my true love lives. [buy]

Brightblack Morning Light - "Everybody Daylight". This is my second experience of White Nights, after the short time I spent in Dawson City. St Petersburg bears the nighttime glow in a different way. It does not diffuse into grassblades, empty horizon. Instead it reflects off colonnades and palaces, dazzles down boulevards. The people on the streets do not have Dawson's weary drunkenness, staggering to white-lit beds. They walk upright and clear-eyed. They jostle on the subway. They laugh on the bridge. This is a city which remains lucid with fatigue: it would shoot its arrow straight, find the apt word. It would win at every winter. It would devour every spring. Sometimes summer is like a cool blue bead in the palm of your hand. [buy]

[photo by me, this week, in the Ioffe Institute]