My visit to the Hermitage museum, formerly the winter residence of Catherine the Great, had left me with the impression that this was a woman of not inconsiderable accomplishment within the general sphere of astonishingly bad taste.

Nearly every part of Catherine’s winter palace is done in the style that modern scholars refer to as “neoclassical tacky,” with finishing details that drew from a wide range of influences such as Gothic Ugly, Baroque Repellent, and Early French Inelegant.

Catherine the First, however, was a woman of no small ambition herself, and was determined to leave an indelible mark on the world of architecture that could never be erased, even with flamethrowers, and would cement her legacy amongst the annals of history. To that end, she commissioned a new summer palace just outside St. Petersburg, which would be nowhere near as small, cramped, or frumpy as the old digs at Peter’s palace.

Her daughter, Empress Elizabeth, was not one to be upstaged by her mother, and upon clawing her way to the throne elected to have the palace entirely rebuilt, a process that required four years, 100 kilograms of gold, and nearly 3,450 metric tons of hideous. So Catherine the Great, when you get right down to it, was merely following in her mother’s and grandmother’s illustrious previous monarch’s footsteps.

We made our way out of the city toward this Altar of Awful, a trek that took us past a monument to the siege of St. Petersburg during WWII, Ford dealership, and a Wrigley’s chewing gum manufacturing plant. We arrived at last at the site of the palace, which is currently located behind a modern containment wall intended to help prevent the tacky from leaking out into the groundwater or contaminating the nearby environment.

The containment wall isn’t perfect, and a hint of appalling gold-plated onion domes can be seen beyond it.

When we stepped out of our Ford SUV, we were immediately beset by a small gaggle of street performers who asked us where we were from. Upon hearing the answer was “the United States,” they started playing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and then demanding a tip.

Had we perhaps more time, I could have made this into a learning opportunity for these pioneers of Russian free-market enterprise in the history of American geopolitics by pitching an artfully staged fit at their choice of music; “We are from the South! The South! Do you realize what an insult it is that you present us with this abominable music of the northern aggressors?” But I was in a hurry to have my eyes burned out of my head by pure concentrated awful, so I hurried along after our guide.

The palace is surrounded by a gold-plated iron gate (and God help me, I hope never to have to say those words again) that gives warning to the level of tacky awaiting the luckless bastard who ventures beyond:

The careful observer will note the ornate double-headed eagle atop the gate. The double-headed eagle was long a symbol of the Russian royalty, a token of their goal, through generations of careful inbreeding, to produce a double-headed heir to the throne.

Which they would have done if it hadn’t been for that meddlesome Lenin and those meddlesome Bolsheviks.

Upon walking through the gate, the casual visitor is immediately struck by the scale of the bigness of the palace, which is quite large in the hugeness of its size. It’s also quite colorful, in the sense that a collision between a truck loaded with raspberry ice cream and a van hauling a shipment of paintballs is “colorful;” there is rather a lot of color everywhere, but one has to believe that there was never any sort of real plan behind it.

Yes, the roof really is plated in gold. I’ll be saying that a lot.

Viewed from afar, it’s difficult to get a sense of the scale of the place. Yes, it looks big, but everything about it–the windows, the doors, the columns–is oversized, so it’s actually far larger than the picture makes it seem. Here’s a closer shot, with some random folks in it for scale:

I suspect these folks are locals, just by the casualness with which they walk along; they have, through a process of acclimatization brought about by constant low-grade exposure to the tacky, developed a natural resistance.

All the windows along the front of the building had these unfortunate statues between them.

I imagine that if they could speak, they’d probably be saying something like “Watch, as we hide our faces in shame behind unfortunate hats, so embarrassed we are by our regrettable leglessness!”

After the zany, exuberant excess of the Winter Palace, I was a little surprised by the grand foyer of the Summer Palace, which seemed almost tame in comparison, with the perhaps arguable exception of the paintings on the ceiling.

I’m not quite sure what the painting represents, but I think it is intended as a depiction of the popular festival in Russia known as The Celebration of the Naked Lady Shaking Hands With Some Dude Before Devouring A Small Child. You can get postcards in the gift shop.

The walls along the stairway were tasteless, sure, but not hte kind of high-octane, weapons-grade tasteless suggested by the outside of the building.

I mean, sure, the wall decorations are a little over the top, and I would perhaps have refrained from putting a clock in just exactly that spot, but it could have been worse. I actually kind of like the candleholders.

It does get worse, though. Much, much worse.

This…is the door into the ballroom. There is, if you can believe it, nothing special about this door. Indeed, compared to most of the doors in this place, it’s downright restrained. There’s no gold on it.

Nearly all the doors are flanked by sculptures of half-naked women, or perhaps more accurately, sculptures of naked half-women. I’m not quite sure what happened to their legs, except perhaps that their breasts were designed to be of such royal magnificence that nobody ever looked down any lower than that, so the artists didn’t bother to finish the bottom bits in a cost-saving move.

Why Elizabeth and both Catherines preferred to be surrounded by naked half-women is a bit of a mystery to your humble scribe, who can only speculate that perhaps Peter the Great’s problems may have been hereditary.

At least these ones don’t squirt at you.

The true horror of the place doesn’t start to become apparent until you venture into the grand ballroom.

Before guests are permitted in, they are required to place little clean-room-style booties over their shoes. Otherwise, apparently, bits of the souls of the dryads get stuck to your shoes, and if you track them outside the containment structure…well, let’s just say it might cause an incident.

Yes, that’s gold up on the walls–a recurring theme past the foyer. I don’t know what that is painted up there on the ceiling. The guide said something about angels and chariots and the hosts of heaven anointing the Tsarina with the divine blessings of imperial monarchy, the better to sell herself to the peasants, or something like that. I’ve always been deeply skeptical by an omniscient, omnipotent divine creator of everything who seems to find it necessary to validate human sociopolitical structures, often to the benefit of the very people who tell you that the omniscient, omnipotent divine creator of everything is validating the current sociopolitical status quo, but I’m just a cynic that way.

The gold-all-over-the-walls motif continues as a theme throughout the palace, even in the state dining hall. Which, in case you were wondering, looks like this.

Now, I can’t speak for the fashion of the time, but…eating in the presence of royalty who found it necessary to decorate the dining hall with paintings of dead animals would quite likely put me right off my lunch. PETA could build an entire Web site around this place, to go along with their Web sites suggesting that all household pets should be replaced by robots and campaigning to rename fish “sea kittens”.

It’s hard to get a sense of the real horror of the paintings–again, flash photography was forbidden, so I had to make do with what I could get–but the one on the right is a dead deer, and the one to the left of that shows a dead duck with its neck broken flopped over on the ground next to something–an albino peacock? I’m not sure–that seems quite indifferent to its presence.

These paintings line every wall, so the only place one can look without losing the will to eat (or indeed, the will to live) is either up or down.

Of the two, I suggest down. If you look up, you see this.

It seems Elizabeth and the Catherines really, really liked their ceiling art. Of half-naked whole women, wholly naked half-women, and/or any combination thereof. This particular piece is called “Cherub, go to your cloud.” Or that’s what I call it, anyway. It’s noteworthy as being one of the finest existing examples of a particular artistic style called Baroque Cthulhu; that frame, during certain times of the year near the winter solstice, can crawl along that ceiling into a dark corner and do awful things. Unspeakable things. Things to drive a strong man mad, and a strong woman long for dark sapphic pleasures.

Elsewhere in the palace, the ceiling art generally returned to the winged-beings-and-chariots leitmotif so often favored amongst royalty and despotic monarchs of all stripes.

I think this one is called “God Says I Can Do Whatever I Want and M. C. Escher Agrees, So There.” Apparently, violating certain normal conventions regarding perspective is covered by the “whatever I want” part.

A random niche in the side of a wall on a cupola or bell tower or something in back of the palace. Why, yes, they really are that magnificent, and thank you very much. Plus, as you can see, I have legs. Which puts me a leg up on those tarts inside by the doors. Get it? A leg up? Ah, I slay me.

Whenever I’m in a new city for the first time, one of the things I really like to do is walk the streets. I find that I can get a much better feel for a city when I can…err, you know, feel it.

So when our tour guide of the name that can’t be heard offered us a choice of yet another cultural center or an opportunity to walk around downtown St. Petersburg for a while, I voted for the latter. Since I seemed to be the only one with a strong opinion on the matter, I think I won by default.

St. Petersburg is a strange city. It’s kind of like what might happen if you took Detroit and gave it a real history. It’s a strange mix of palaces, soaring cathedrals, urban shopping malls, and squalor. The result is a weird and jumbled juxtaposition of things, almost as if some space alien had taken a number of architectural works from all over the world and set them down in the middle of Newark in an attempt to create a terrarium for its pet humans.

“See? It’s just like their native habitat! They have little roads to drive on, and little signs to read, and even a little church where they can pray to their gods or saints or whatever they call them!”

And statues. Lots and lots and lots of statues. You don’t often see a whole lot of statues in American cities, but St. Petersburg loves its statues, oh yes it does. Statues everywhere. Statues in the roadway. Statues on the bridges. Statues in little niches in the buildings, even.

In Soviet Russia, justice is not blind. Justice sees you quite well, Comrade. Justice knows exactly what you did last summer, and has even seen the videotape on YouTube. Justice does NOT approve. Justice thinks you should be ashamed of yourself. The gulag for you, Comrade! As for your family, Justice knows what to do with them, too.

Have a nice day, Comrade.

Why yes, they are that magnificent, and thank you very much. (At least these ones look reasonably natural, as if carved by a sculptor who has actually known the touch of a woman.)

This statue, according to our diminutive guide of the statistically improbable name, is the world’s largest bronze casting that’s only supported at two points.

Every town in the world can claim to have something that’s unique. Darwin, Minnesota has the world’s largest ball of string. St. Petersburg has the world’s largest bronze statue that’s only supported at two points. Juarez, Mexico is the murder capital of the world. Tampa, Florida is the lightning capital of the world. Newark, New Jersey is home to a record-breaking number of smells, whereas Seattle, Washington holds the title for the most shades of gray in any one sky. Coeur d’Alene, Idaho has more violent white supremacists per capita than any other city. And Portland, Oregon is home to more cute bisexual Subway sandwich makers with tattoos and facial piercings than any other city.

Some of these claims are, I think, more significant than others. For example, I prefer Portland, Oregon to Juarez, Mexico, on the grounds that (a) I have a fondness for cute bisexual women with tattoos and facial piercings and (b) I can’t indulge my fondness if I’m dead.

It is a cool statue, though. I’m not sure what the thing on top of his hat is.

St. Petersburg is also home to an enormous statue of Vladimir Lenin, erected before everyone discovered what a douchenozzle he was and then never taken down.

According to our tour guide, this particular pose was quite popular in images of the Great Douchenozzle. He’s supposed to be delivering a stirring lecture to the working class or inspiring the underprivileged or ordering someone to be executed or seizing control of an independent newspaper or something. Apparently, most folks think it looks like he’s hailing a cab.

Lenin wants you to be inspired. Not being inspired is treason. Treason is punishable by death. Are you inspired, Comrade?

The fall of the Soviet Union opened the doorway to Western-style street advertising in the Eastern bloc. It’s really only a matter of time until ClearChannel moves in, and then it’s curtains for the free world.

If Lenin were alive today, he’d be spinning in his grave.

Spinal Tap may be big in Japan, but A-Ha is huge in Eastern Europe. Huge, I say! And now I have that one song stuck in my head. You will too. Such is the malignancy of my evil.

I saw this spray-painted in a bunch of places all around St. Petersburg. It’s interesting to see graffiti in a language I don’t recognize. I kept wondering what it was asking.

For all I know, it says “Do you want new car? Check out Vladimir’s House of Cars!” I know there are at least three folks on my flist who can read it…

St. Petersburg was intermittently wet and rainy while we were there. I actually quite like the way a city looks after a rain. I think it’s a consequence of being a child of the 80s and watching all those episodes of Miami Vice where they would wet down the roads before they started filming, just because they liked the texture.

I particularly like the Coca-Cola logo in the foreground. Lenin wept.

We stopped for a while in front of this rather stern-looking building, which apparently was a government office under Peter the Great, then was converted to a government office after the Communists came to power, and now in the post-Soviet era has become a government office.

Government offices all over the world seem to share a similar architectural language. This building wouldn’t really look that out of place in Tallahassee or Seattle. (Well, the landscaping is a bit nice for Tallahassee, but you know what I mean.)

One look at the people who were patrolling in front of it, though, and you know you’re not in the United States.

Check out those hats. These guys mean business, and no mistake. Don’t let the jovial expressions fool you–those hats are all business.

The Hermitage houses a very large collection of Renaissance-era and Impressionist paintings, mostly located in long halls above the throne rooms that occupy much of the ground floor of the main building in the palace complex.

At some point, were I to live forever, I would dearly love to take the seven-year tour of the Hermitage. Even then, I suspect I wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate everything it has to offer, but I bet there are quite a few real treasures hidden in amongst the tacky bits and the bits that have gold all over them–but I repeat myself.

The main floor also houses the only Michelangelo in the Hermitage’s collection, this unfinished statue that had been commissioned by some church dude or other and then left half-completed when said church dude changed his mind and decided he wanted something else entirely. (I’ve had clients do that to me, and it’s enough to provoke a murderous rage even when I haven’t invested hundreds of man-hours into chipping away at gigantic blocks of stone with tiny hand tools.)

After being bitten and infected with the stone virus, he waits. Quietly, day after day, year after year, he waits. When the stars are right, and the hold of the virus weakens, he will drag himself free of his marble prison. Then he will shamble across the great halls of the museum at night, needing only the blood of the living to remove the curse and fuel his unholy desire for vengeance. On that day, they will pay, the ones who kept him caged here behind ropes of red velvet, a curiosity to attract the throngs of tourists. Oh, yes. They will pay.

This next sculpture has an interesting tale behind it, which lives on as a warning to artists of all stripes.

It was intended to illustrate a popular story about a dolphin who befrended a boy. Every day, so the story goes, the dolphin and the boy would play together in the water, venturing farther and farther away from shore as they frolicked in the salt spray beneath the warm sun.

Inevitably, of course, the dolphin’s knowledge of human physiology failed him, and he misjudged the length of time the boy could hold his breath, with the predictable result that the boy drowned. The dolphin was so devastated by this that he bore the boy away on his back until he, too, died, of loneliness or grief or syphilis or something.

Now, the first thing the astute visitor might notice upon seeing this sculpture is that there is no dolphin in it. The thing carrying the boy here looks like nothing so much as Daffy Duck suffering from ‘roid rage, with his body replaced by that of some horrifying half-fish abomination from the depths of the sunken city of R’lyeh.

This is because, apparently, the artist who carved this sculpture had never heard of a “dolphin” before, and knew nothing about them save for the fact that they were big and lived in the ocean, and they fed on the souls of mortal men whenever the planets aligned themselves properly in the night sky.

I seriously don’t know how the human race accomplished anything before Google and Wikipedia. Where did people go if they needed to know what a dolphin looked like, or who that really hot guest star was in that one episode of Star Trek: Voyager when they thought they had found their way back to the Alpha Quadrant, and then at the last minute it turned out they didn’t?

Strange Daffy Duck/fish-thing hybrid properly admired, we headed upstairs to the galleries above. Even the stairways in the place are richly decorated. No, scratch that. Even the minor secondary stairways are decorated with the most ostentatious, gaudy, over-the-top kind of junk you can possibly imagine. Like this statue in the stairway up to the second-floor exhibit halls, for example.

At least I hope that’s a statue. Don’t blink! They are fast, faster than you could believe. And they can throw a mean laurel wreath.

I found an open window on the top floor that looked out into the courtyard of the palace complex and some of the buildings behind. And I thought Portland was gray and rainy…

That huge, sprawling, elongated building I posted a picture of earlier? Yeah, that was only one building in the complex. Catherine actually lived here.

Our tour guide whose Name Can Not Be Uttered abandoned us to wander the artwork in the halls, partly so she could take a phone call. From a lover, I suspect, judging from her body language and the huge grin on her face when her phone rang. I don’t speak a word of Russian, but just her expressions alone suggest to me that she may have been having phone sex with whoever was on the other side. But I digress.

One of the first bits of artwork in the upper halls is this Rembrandt, showing an angel stopping Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac. He actually painted two versions of this piece (and several sketches and at least one etching), one of which hangs at the Hermitage.

This story has always disturbed me, even back in the days when I was actually Christian. Seriously, what kind of god tests a person’s faith by telling that person to murder his son? Surely an omniscient god already knows what the outcome will be, so the test itself seems like an exercise in petty cruelty.

But more to the point, what kind of person hears voices saying “sacrifice your son” and actually does it? Nowadays, we lock people like that up, and rightly so. Leaving aside for a moment how profoundly fucked up it is to murder your children because the voices in your head tell you to, and even going with the notion that the voice telling you to do this profoundly fucked-up thing is in fact the voice of god or some god-like supernatural entity, the cold and inescapable fact is that any god that tells you to murder your kids is not a god worth worshipping. Not at any price.

Even if he says “Haha! Just kidding!” when you actually go to do the deed.

A lot of artists of the time painted with religious themes. In some ways, artists have it easier than writers. Language is a living, breathing thing, and changes all the time; William Shakespeare is one of the very few people who I can truly say really is as brilliant as everyone says he is, in spite of the number of folks who tell you that he really is brilliant.

But Shakespeare gets a bit of a bad rap in part because the language makes him less accessible to modern readers. He really was the Quentin Tarantino of his day–witty, vulgar, more than a little bit crass, given to bad puns, and obsessed with Uma Thurman–but he seems very stuffy and highbrow to modern high-school students because time has weathered his words and made his particular brand of humor less visible.

Artists don’t have to deal with that. They paint a picture and it’s done. No matter what language the audience speaks, a picture is a picture.

At least to a certain extent. The visual language of art changes, true. But more importantly, the social context changes. Artists tell a story, and that story assumes a cultural framework understood by both the painter and the audience.

With religious themes, it’s a gimme. Someone can paint a picture of Moses coming down off the mountain and two thousand years later people will still understand the reference, because religious memes tend to stick like glue. But sometimes, even the cultural references change, and that’s a dangerous thing. When the cultural framework changes, and the audience becomes disconnected from the artist, the audience may tend to invent their own story.

And when that happens, things can get weird.

The story I put to this picture probably isn’t what the artist intended at all. I’m sure this refers to some kind of myth or fable or something that all the people he was painting for immediately understood, but me? I got nothin’. The story I put on this painting goes something like this:

Dude with wings: Look! I have wings. Let me fondle your breast.
Blonde chick in the dress: My, you do have wings! And what long and…feathery wings they are. I hear that big wings means a big…why yes, of course you may fondle my breast!
Cherub-looking thing: Ooh, look! Someone left a bow just lying around down here.
Effeminate-looking dude in the robe: Look at my fine wares! They are fine and…um, wares. I, too, wish to fondle your breast.
Cherub-looking thing: Dude, seriously, free bow! Just lying on the ground! It’s a bit too big for me, but still.
Blonde chick in the dress: Do you have a big…toga?
Effeminate-looking dude in the robe: Alas, my toga is of undistinguished size. Dare I say, pedestrian, even.
Cherub-looking thing: Of course, this bow has no bowstring…
Blonde chick in the dress: Then you may not fondle my breast. Girl’s gotta have her standards.
Dude with wings: Sorry, dude. Playaz play, losers lose.
Blonde chick in the dress: Come, fly me to the top of that building back there and I will give myself to you in ways that will make Abraham kick a hole in a cinder-block wall.
Cherub-looking thing: Forget the breasts for a minute. Free bow down here. Right down here!

This next painting…well, I’ve had weekends that look like this.

Of course, the weekends I’ve had like this, the people up for auction were there ’cause they wanted to be. Take out that element and it gets pretty messed up, you know what I mean?

And speaking of messed up, the Hermitage is home to a Rembrandt which, try as I might, I could not get a good picture of to save my life. This pic is taken from Wikipedia:

Back in 1985, a guy came into the Hermitage and threw acid all over this painting, doing so much damage that it took restorers eleven years to fix it. When asked why he’d done it, he explained that public depictions of nudity were obscene and pornographic, and he wanted to help purify the world or make it safe for children or some such thing.

Which is pretty messed up, in my book. I’m not quite sure how we go about making people so ashamed of their own bodies that they feel that level of disgust at the human form. That mindset utterly baffles me, to the point where I feel unable to connect even intellectually with it.

That’s not the only interesting thing about this painting, though. The other interesting thing about this painting is that Rembrandt used his wife as the model for the woman you see here, but put his mistress’s head on her.

Dude had it goin’ on, yo!

Art is a funny thing.

Whenever one applies the creativity of human intellect to the task of illuminating the human condition, one can reasonably expect to get some hits and some misses. And on top of that, what constitutes a “hit” or a “miss” is often a matter of who you ask. (I find both Picasso and Dali to be dreadfully boring and trite, for example, though I know there are a lot of folks who’d be appalled by that opinion.)

When Catherine the Great moved into the palace built by Anna, one of the first things she did was to start collecting works of art, so it’s perhaps inevitable that the palace eventually became a museum.

The collection at the Hermitage is mind-boggling, both in terms of its sheer scope and in terms of its diversity. It’s certainly reasonable to call much of the place “tacky,” and it’s the tacky bits I’m mostly talking about here, but it also has a lot of the things you’d expect from a world-class art collection anywhere–several Da Vinci sketches, a huge collection of both Renaissance and Impressionist paintings, and some bits of art that are just plain breathtaking.

This is an incredibly crappy photo of one of the most interesting things I saw. The photo is so crappy that I considered not posting it at all, in fact. What you’re looking at is one small part of the top of a round table, divided into wedges with an alternating jade (edit: malachite?) and marble motif, which contained a number of scenes of ordinary street life. (This and some of the other photos you’re going to see are crappy in part because much of the artwork can not be photographed with a flash, as flash photography can damage the originals; I took this picture by hand-holding the camera above the surface and doing a two-second exposure.)

Now, it’s a beautiful table, which I can’t even begin to give justice to in this picture. But what’s most amazing about it is that the surface of the table isn’t painted. Every bit of the table, including what looks like a jade or malachite or marble background, is actually a tile mosaic–using tiles that are 1/200th of an inch square, and all hand-placed on glass. According to our tour guide of the unknowable name, a skilled artist could produce about one such work every five years. The combination of artistic skill and raw technique that goes into this kind of art is just amazing.

Some of the rest of the Hermitage’s collection, or perhaps I should say some of the rest of the tiny sliver of the Hermitage’s collection that occupied the two floors of the one small part of the one building we saw, is also amazing, in an entirely different way. Parts of the collection push the line between “artistic” and “tacky;” other parts of the collection nuke the line into glass by heavy orbital bombardment, then come back after the radiation level has dropped, plow it under with heavy construction equipment, and build a McDonald’s and a Thomas Kinkade gallery on the spot where the line once stood.

Take this table, for instance.

I’ve faded out the background to help you get the full impact of this object, God forgive me. Yes, that’s real gold.

I want to do…things on this table. Obscene things. To a woman who’s tied to it. I won’t disturb you with the details. Suffice it to say the things I want to do are illegal in twenty-two states and the District of Columbia, and probably contravene parts of the Geneva Convention.

The table is in one of the central halls of the center part of the frontmost building of the palace. The hallway is generously illuminated by enormous arched skylights. In the classic over-the-top style of the time, the edges of the skylights and every inch of the trim along the top of the wall are generously decorated.

The figure here is a bizarre cross between an angel, a Greek god, and some sort of Hentai tentacle monster. I don’t quite know what the artist was attempting to convey with this rather confused bit of art, but it seems to be something like “I have flown from the heights of Mount Olympus in search of nubile Japanese schoolgirls hungry for a taste of some tentacle lovin’. Now watch, as I discourse on the nature of Fate and the roles of mortals in the affairs of the gods, while my tentacles invade soft, nubile flesh!” Or, err, something.

The paroxysms of artistic excess didn’t extend just to the decoration of the walls, but sometimes permeated into the very fabric of the architecture itself, kind of how tomato juice gets into clothes and you can’t seem to get it out. This is one of the halls where Catherine would address her subjects and, I don’t know, issue royal decrees or do whatever the hell it is that absolute monarchs with unquenchable lust for power do.

I post this picture mainly because I really, really dig the design of this stairway.

Some day, when I am wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, I will have a house. In that house will be a balcony. Rising up to that balcony will be a staircase that’s designed just like this.

Not too far from this hall are the royal throne rooms.

You see what I did there? I used the plural. You might infer from this that there are more than one throne room, and in fact you’d be exactly right. This is the monarchy that’s just like Texas, remember? All things to excess, and they execute a lot of people. This building has two throne rooms. I don’t know if there are additional throne rooms in the rest of the palace complex; we only hit just this one building.

The Royal Architect may have designed the entire palace with knobs that go to eleven, but he saved the most excited expressions of his particular art for the throne rooms, which take “over the top” and go just a little bit beyond.

This is the larger of the two. Yes, the ceiling is decorated in gold. It’s a motif that by this point had actually become somewhat tiresome. The floor is done in fifty-three bajillion different kinds of exotic hardwoods, each bit of wood coming no doubt from a magical faraway forest where each tree was felled by the hand of a virginal maiden who…never mind. Suffice to say that this throne room is the reason unicorns became extinct; the entire Enchanted Forest was felled just to make this floor. When you walk across it, you can still hear the sighs of the souls of the dryads forever pressed into its foundation. Catherine liked the sighs of the souls of the dryads. They lulled her to sleep at night.

The smaller, cozier throne room, where Catherine could sit before a select, private audience of only five or six thousand of her subjects, looks like this:

Here, the ceiling is lower, and the rich fabric coverings on the walls helps to give a more softer, more intimate character to the sighs of the tortured dryads as you walk upon the magical woods forever trapping them here in this plane of existence. The painting above the throne, whose frame bears the shape of a crown which echoes the crown wrought into the back of the throne itself, suggests to you that the person who’s sitting there is a monarch. You know, just in case you were unclear on that point.

On the way out of the throne room to head upstairs, we passed this thing.

Again, it’s a crappy picture, but it’s basically a gigantic statue of a pheasant in a tree, done (of course) in gold, and enclosed in a huge glass case.

It is also…

A cuckoo clock.

Pause for a moment, and let the horror sink in. This huge mechanical monstrosity is…a cuckoo clock. Periodically, when it was working, it would move and squawk and make all manner of noise.

Now, I am something of a skeptic, it must be said, of the notion of capital punishment. I don’t think its value as a deterrent has ever been satisfactorily demonstrated, for example, and I have certain misgivings about the arbitrary and capricious manner in which it is handed out, particularly by monarchs of unlimited power.

In this case, however, its utility as a means of making sure the person responsible for this thing never again commits so grave a sin against humanity is above reproach.

With all the noodling about we did at one of Peter the Great’s many winter palaces, I realized that I knew him half as well as I should like, and I disliked him less than half as well as he deserved. Monomaniacal thirst for unlimited power aside, he was actually quite a fun-loving guy, in a sort of bloodthirsty, “I’m a raving psycho who does pretty much whatever I want to do all the time” kind of way.

Our tour guide with the ear-bending name told us the story of the Punishment Flask he kept handy at all state dinners, for example. We got to get a look at it; a large, ornate crystal decanter which Peter kept filled with vodka. Apparently, or so the story goes, the last person to arrive at any state dinner, be it one of his generals or the visiting King of Prussia, would be made to drink all the vodka in the flask at one gulp.

So, yeah. Take a frat boy and give him limitless resources, and you get Peter the Great.

There is a statue of the man in the gardens of the first Winter Palace we visited, and I must say, I was quite astonished when I saw it.

Those of you who have a military background and are reading this will no doubt spot one small but nevertheless surprising detail on this statue: Peter the Great has a hat that sucks.

His hat is lame. Totally, thoroughly, irredeemably lame.

Now, given the Law of Military Hats I talked about earlier, you would expect this to mean that Peter’s military adventures would be more suitable as subject matter for Looney Tunes cartoons than for history books.

And you’d partly be right. His early experiments in military adventurism against the Ottoman Empire mostly resulted in him getting his spleen handed to him on the end of a fork. A finely-wrought, richly decorated fork, adorned with elaborate and intricate calligraphy reading, in Turkish, “Suck on that, you silly-hatted bastard!”

But Peter discovered a loophole in the Law of Military Hats, which would forever rewrite the history of the world and which would hold out a beacon of hope for other similarly unfortunately-hatted monomaniacal dictators for decades after his death.

When he returned, minus his spleen, from his defeat at the hands of the Ottomans, he set about building a huge navy, the better to sail against the Swedes, who at the time controlled the Baltic Sea and all the trade therein, largely on the basis of shooting at anyone sailing across it who they didn’t like.

And it worked. As it turns out, a silly hat plus a huge naval armada beats a scary hat. Mathematically, it looks something like this:

Armed with this secret knowledge, Peter and his huge naval armada sailed into battle against the Swedes, well-equipped to hand those Swedish bastards their spleens on forks–a strategy refined by the Ottomans but perfected by Peter with the invention of the three-tined serving fork.

The ruler of Sweden at the time, Charles XII, refused to accept the notion that he could be de-spleened by a man with so silly a hat, and despite getting his ass kicked by Peter and his huge naval armada, kept on fighting until he himself was killed in battle. His people said “whoa, dude, we totally didn’t see that coming!” and conceded that Peter had in fact got the best of him, hat notwithstanding.

Once done, Peter turned his attention to matters of state, such as building great big gold statues of burly half-naked men with rippling muscles who gushed copious amounts of fluids from somewhere around their waists.

Peter the Great had problems.

We didn’t actually go inside the palace proper, or the palace improper either. Instead, we wandered around the grounds for a while, making snarky comments about Peter’s issues and marveling at the naked women with the strangely-shaped breasts, until our transportation arrived to take us back across the bay.

And what transportation it was! The heart of the eight-year-old that lives in my chest sang in joy when I realized we would be riding on…

…a hydrofoil! A real, honest-to-God, motherfucking hydrofoil!

Hydrofoils are cool. Take a normal boat, put it on skis, and when the boat starts going fast enough it lifts right up out of the water like some kind of ultra-cool science-fiction boat on motherfucking skis.

I was a bit perplexed, I will admit, by the drawing of the paddlewheel boat on the side of our hydrofoil. When you get right down to it, a paddlewheel boat is, technologically speaking, about as far as it’s possible to be from a hydrofoil while still being in the general class of “self-propelled things that float.” It’s a bit disconcerting, like stepping into an F-22 Raptor and finding a drawing of the Wright Brother’s plane on the instrumentation.

There are good reasons for hydrofoils, and I’m honestly a bit perplexed we don’t use them more often. When you are in a thing that floats, whatever it might be, your success at moving the things that floats through the stuff it’s floating in depends on two factors: the stickiness of what you’re floating in, and its density.

Below a certain speed, the viscosity of the stuff you’re floating in rules the math. The more viscous it is, the more energy you have to exert to push the thing you’re floating in through it. This is a constant factor for any stuff you’re floating in, and short of leaving and putting your thing that floats into a different stuff, you’re stuck with it. So you make your thing that floats as smooth as possible, to try to minimize the friction from the stuff you’re floating in.

Above a certain speed, though, the density of the stuff you’re floating in becomes more of a factor, because in order to get your thing that floats through the stuff you’re floating in, you have to shove the stuff you’re floating in out of the way. The faster you move, the faster you have to shove the stuff you’re floating in out of the way. Eventually, you reach a point where adding more and more horsepower to the thing you’re floating in doesn’t actually make you go any faster; it just makes a bigger bow wave in front of you, caused by the limitation in the rate at which you can shove the stuff you’re floating in out of the way.

Hydrofoils solve that problem by lifting the boat right up out of the water, so the boat displaces very little of it and there’s almost nothing that you need to shove out of your way. Because of this, they’re fast. However, unlike racing boats, which just naturally have a very shallow draft, they’re also stable. The skis-and-stilts arrangement prevents the boat from ending up head over teakettles whenever they encounter the slightest ripple, so they work well in calm seas or in rough seas. And did I mention they’re fast?

Anyway, back to the story.

I was even more excited by the prospect of riding in a hydrofoil than I was by the prospect of looking at a bunch of statues of naked women with odd breasts. I really do have the heart of an eight-year-old sometimes.

We sat down and pulled away, and the whole time I was thinking “Wow, these things are supposed to be fast, this is going to be so much fun!” So it was with some disappointment that I noticed, as we left the dock, that we really didn’t seem to be moving with any alacrity at all.

I remember thinking, just before I turned to look out the window, something along the lines of “Well, maybe the captain’s going to wait ’til we get farther out into the bay before he opens it holy mother of God!” And that was the weirdest part of the ride.

In a normal boat, you see, when you’re going fast you feel it. The boat jerks and bounces and heaves itself up out of the water, and you can tell you’re hauling ass.

Being in a hydrofoil doesn’t feel at all like being in a normal boat. There’s little sensation of speed at all. You get none of the bump-and-fall of a more conventional boat; instead, it feels a bit like being in a large passenger jet that’s encountered some very, very mild turbulence, just enough to make your coffee move a bit in your cup. And this despite the fact that we were hauling ass like Captain Kirk chasing some half-dressed Orion slave girl with green skin.

Another hydrofoil came whipping by us at about warp nine jillion or so, and I barely had time to snap a pic as it flew by:

And one of the most utterly bizarre things about it all was that even when we shot by a tugboat faster than Dick Cheney chasing an accidentally dropped quarter, we left no wake at all.

The whole experience was inspiring in the way that I’ve never quite experienced before. I came away from the winter palace of Peterhof with a feeling that when I grow up, I want to be a monomaniacal dictator with an insatiable thirst for power, just so that I can have a hydrofoil of my own.

And, y’now, spray people with spurts of liquid ejected from…err, never mind.

I’ve never been to Eastern Europe before. I’ve also never run naked through a plate-glass window before either, or been dragged behind a motorcycle through thumbtacks and rubbing alcohol either. Had you asked me, say, five or ten years ago, I’d have said that any of those options looked about equally appealing–and, to be honest, equally likely.

So it was with a considerable sense of irony that I approached Russian passport control in St. Petersburg, our next port of call after the Note From zaiah That Broke My Sister’s Brain incident, with my American passport in hand. He who laughs last, laughs all the way to the politburo, or something like that.

My first impression of St. Petersburg outside passport control was about what I expected the former Eastern bloc to look like: nondescript concrete apartment buildings, still under construction, shrouded in gray fog.

I was surprised to find the rest of St. Petersburg was quite colorful and lively. We had a tour guide whose name I didn’t catch either time she said it, who was actually quite a cutie, and tended to wear very American clothes. Including, at one point, a jacket with “Washington State” printed on it.

St. Petersburg is not technically named after Peter the Great, even though he founded the city. Apparently, or so the story goes, that level of arrogance would not have been accepted by the Russian people, a proud (but not that proud) folk who valued the principles of humility, modesty, and monomaniacal lust for power in a leader. It would not be until the Bolshevik Revolution that the Russian character would be tempered sufficiently for a city named directly after a political figure, which is why St. Petersburg would later be renamed Leningrad, before everyone realized what an astonishingly colossal douchenozzle Lenin actually was and changed its name back again.

All of this was explained to us, minus the word “douchenozzle,” by our tour guide of the unpronounceable Russian name. We zipped out into the city in the back of a Ford SUV, which fact by itself says almost all you really need to know about the fucked-up geopolitics of the dying days of the twentieth century. Once the many names of St. Petersburg had been illuminated with a harsh white light, we set out on our way to find out how Peter the Great (whose name only coincidentally happened to share a passing similarity with that of the saint of the saint he chose to name the city after, just so that’s perfectly well understood) actually lived.

The answer, as it turned out, was “rather like a fraternity brother with unlimited wealth and unlimited power, and more than a few…confusions about his sexual identity.”

Our driver, Igor, drove us through the streets of St. Petersburg past Stalin-era office buildings toward the old Winter Palace of Peter the Great.

Or perhaps I should say, toward a Winter Palace of Peter the Great. He had several, you see. When he got bored with one, he built another, and it should probably be mentioned here that Peter the Great appeared to have a case of attention deficit disorder that gave him the attention span of a lightning bolt, at least with respect to residences. It’s remarkably easy, as it turns out, to build a whole bunch of palaces when you have 200,000 slaves to do your construction work for you.

Anyway, the particular Winter Palace we visited was situated on the Gulf of Finland, which is basically a cold body of water that points more or less toward Sweden. According to our guide, building a palace on the water’s edge was Peter’s way of thumbing his nose at the Swedes, with whom he’d fought a war or something.

And what a palace it was. The Swedes may keep a stockpile of ostentation in reserve at the carefully-guarded Royal Palace in Stockholm, but Peter put his ostentation everywhere.

When we got out of the SUV and rounded the corner, through the gates and down a hill, I wasn’t quite prepared for the sort of ostentation that leaped out from behind a nondescript bit of wall and ambushed me like a strung-out mugger trying to carve a name for himself on the cold Russian streets armed only with an attitude, a bag of lead shot, and a strategic stockpile of ostentation that’d give Liberace a stroke.

This is what you see when you walk around the main building and then stop. Which you will, when your brain figures out what your eyes are telling it.

Yes, it’s real gold. The statues, nearly all of which spurt a constant spray of water forty feet in the air, are covered with it.

The roof of the building is covered with it. The architectural detailing is trimmed in it. Hell, the wildlife wandering the palace grounds is plated in gold. The squirrels shit little droppings gilded in gold.

There are worse jobs than being a groundskeeper here.

And this isn’t really even the full effect. As you move around, the ostentation runs up to you on quick little cat’s feet and punches you in the eyes.

Our buddy Peter had an obsession with huge, larger-than-life statues of mostly naked men with bulging muscles and rippling sinew, performing manly feats of manliness. He also had an equally consuming obsession with fountains that spurt–nay, gush–huge pulsing jets of water high into the air.

Yeah, it’s like that.

And what statues they are, too. Husky, well-built men, reaching down with powerful hands to pull hard at the jaws of fearsome monsters, from whence issue great spurts of frothy white water, in wet spurts of testament to their manly manliness:

It goes without saying, I think, that Peter the Great had problems. Though in his defense, you might too, if you were named after male genitalia.

The fountain above, our lovely guide explained, was a symbolic reference to Peter’s wartime victories over the Swedes. The strapping and virile man of the muscles and sinew represents the Russian nation; the lion represents the Swedish nation; and the huge jet of water coming out of the lion’s mouth represents Peter the Great’s penis. Or something.

This same general motif carries through most of the fountains, like this one here:

This particular statue, in which a perhaps bit over-muscled sea god tears open the jaws of a sea monster, is symbolic of Russia’s naval victories over Sweden. The surrealistically buff sea god represents Russia, you see; the sea monster stands for Sweden; and the jet of water represents…well, you get the idea.

As for this one:

…well, I’m not quite sure what the turtle represents. But the way its suspiciously elongnated neck spouts a frothy jet of water, I think it’s safe to say that it probably stands for…

Yeah, did I mention Peter the Great had problems?

Now, to be fair, not every single statue on the grounds was of a strapping man who spent way too much time at the gym or engaged in combat that caused water to spurt from somewhere down around waist level. There were, in fact, a handful of statues of the fairer sex, in similar states of undress.

Though I couldn’t help but notice something very odd about them.

All the statues of women, and I do mean all of them, have the same breasts. And they don’t look quite natural, if you get my drift.

Now, I am aware that breasts come in all shapes and sizes, and I have seen some remarkable breasts in my life. Breasts to cause temperatures to rise and trousers to fall. Breasts to make the Pope kick a hole in a cinder-block wall. And I say this as objectively as any person really can, as I’m not even that much of a breast man.

But I have never in all my days seen breasts shaped quite like that. Yet all the naked statues of women I encountered on my entire time in Eastern Europe–and believe me, there are lots of naked statues of women in Eastern Europe, as I will probably talk about in another installment of this travelogue–have the exact same breasts.

The artists seem to quite like this particular mammarian architecture. Not only are all of the statues of naked women in Eastern Europe cut from the same cloth, chesticularly speaking, but they often seem to wear similar expressions, as if to say “Why yes, they are that magnificent, and thank you very much.”

Which is all more than a little weird, and maybe just the slightest bit creepy. Just a smidge, you understand.

Even the bizarre mutated deep-sea lifeforms that swam the depths of Peter’s fevered imagination would seem to agree. Take a look at this fishy fellow, who might have just swum from some Cthluhu-inspired undersea lair to swallow the souls of the mortal, had he not been struck down by the chesticular magnificence of our young lady of stone here:

“Indeed they are, ma’am. Now watch, as I cover your delicate flower of womanhood with my wet and slimy tail, the better to…”

Okay, I admit it, I got nothing.

Ahem. Anyway, back to fountains. It seems Peter the Great’s obsession extended beyond plumes of water pumping high into the air. He was also quite fond, evidently, of seeing jets of water gushing all over his guests. And, in classic frat-boy-with-unlimited-wealth-and-power style, he planted booby traps throughout his fountain gardens just so he could spray all over unsuspecting people.

The fountain on the left is pretty straightforward. Normally, the water is off; there’s no sign this is actually a fountain. However, when an unsuspecting mark–say, one of his mistresses, or the visiting King of Prussia–sits on the fountain, water starts spraying from all around the edge of the umbrella…and it doesn’t stop when the unfortunate mark stand back up.

The one on the right is tricksier. It’s a metal sculpture that looks like a stylized tree that shoots water. Pretty, huh? Now, see that little cobblestone pathway on the left-hand side? Some of those cobblestones are rigged. When a mark steps on a rigged cobblestone, water jets hidden beneath the edge of the little white benches there start spraying all and sundry in the area with powerful blasts of cold water. (Some tourists set it off while they were waking along the path. Great fun.)

It bears repeating, I think, that Peter the Great had problems.

Peter the Great really loved his navy, by which I mean he really loved his penis. This statue of the sea god Neptune occupied a prominent place near the guest quarters:

The statue, according to our tour guide, represents Russia’s naval might. The long, stiff, hard trident he holds firmly in his hand represents…

I can’t. It’s too easy. At this point, I’m shooting fish in a…never mind. Let’s just call the whole thing off.

I was sad to bid goodbye to Stockholm, that beautiful if inconvenient jewel of the North, where nuclear-powered icebreakers are required just to get in to the office for three months out of the year.

Our next port of call was Helsinki, which doesn’t have a syndrome named after it, in Finland, which does. Finland, the place where you need a nuclear-powered icebreaker just to get from your kitchen to your living room for eleven months out of the year, is known mainly for being the Soviet bloc’s answer to Canada. It’s a wintery nation covered mostly in snow and ice, politically married to its powerful neighbor on account of ’cause when your only exports are hockey, ice weasel pelts, and rhinovirus, dissing the superpower to your south is economic, and possibly literal, suicide.

I didn’t get off the ship in Finland, owing to an unfortunate early-morning mixup with the tour plan. For some reason, I thought we were going on the Finlandization tour, where Princess Cruise Line passengers are forced into close proximity to a Disney Cruise Lines ship and tacitly threatened with military invasion if they don’t switch their allegiances. My parents thought they were going on the Helsinki tour. It turns out they were right, on account of cause there is no Finlandization tour.

So I took advantage of my unexpected day aboard ship to make some self-portraits for zaiah back at home. No, you can’t see them.

About this time, and possibly as a result of exposure to Finland’s ice weasels, a norovirus scare swept through the ship. Noroviruses are a family of extremely contagious viruses that cause all sorts of unpleasant gastrointestinal distress, and apparently, when it happens on a ship it is A Big Deal.

So the captain made several announcements throughout the day that anyone who felt ill should call the ship’s medical officer at once.

Now, I don’t know what exactly the poor sots who felt ill expected would happen if they called the ship’s medical officer. In fact, I didn’t know myself what would happen to a poor sot who called the ship’s medical officer. Turns out that what happened to these luckless souls, of whom I thankfully did not number myself, was right out of that one movie where the CDC comes and barricades all those people who have contracted the zombie plague in that one building, and they spent the rest of the movie killing each other or being eaten by zombies or something, only without the zombies.

Seriously. People showing symptoms ended up being quarantined in their rooms for the duration of the cruise. Like, as in “not allowed to leave” quarantined. I have no idea if they got refunds on the cruise or not. I imagine the vacation pictures were frightfully dull.

Though I could be wrong about that, I suppose. zaiah quite liked the pictures I sent her from my stateroom while I was aboard. So you never know.

The following day was spent at sea, as shipgoing folks say. To break up the monotony of a day spent at sea, which I rather thought was the whole point of a cruise in the first place, the crew declared that that evening would be a formal evening, with all the passengers expected to dress in suits and ties and such for the evening’s mediocre meal.

Did I mention the food? You’re always supposed to talk about the food when you talk about a cruise. It’s in the requirements. Section 117, paragraph 9, subparagraph 3. Cruise line operators have perfected the fascinating and arcane art of taking food that sounds heavenly and making it taste like something you’d get at a high school cafeteria. It’s incredible! I don’t know how they do it.

So anyway, I’d been warned of this possibility in advance, and I had in fact brought a suit.

To be fair, I didn’t actually bring it because I was looking forward to eating institutional food while wearing it. That was only the excuse. The real reason I brought it was to see how seinneann_ceoil looked in it. The answer, as I had suspected, was “quite ravishing.” I even have proof!

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