To spice things up for this week’s New Friend Friday, I get to bring you the cream of the crop, the birth of the cool, the tig of the bitty. That’s right folks! We’re all adults here, except the minors, so I expect you to be able to handle a little NC-17. Ok, now that I got you all worked up, meet this weeks New Friend Friday, Maxim Golomidov.(brought to you in the present tense) *tah-dah*
We met for a midnight rendezvous in front of the Coca Cola Cinema downtown. The red rope from a Chinese ceramic dragon grazes the top of my head as I sit in Maxim’s 95’ Honda. I quickly learn that the idea of anything Chinese grabs his attention and makes his eyebrows perk up; Chinese cinema, chopsticks, even bamboo-like trees. This all began when Max went to visit China last year. And now his obsession is reincarnated in green teas and dangling ceramic dragons. But now we are racing down a dimly lit Estonian street for a secret checkpoint.We arrive to a rickety tower near the harbor in Kopli and begin ascending. The night is cold and the metal freezing. One floor, two floors, five floors later, we’re above a large shipping dock and some sort of house of junk. Max is fiddling with a tripod and Valerie is taking light readings. The fluorescent lights illuminate the blemished street below us as the occasional car sends potholed water spraying over the sidewalk. Click.
We’re here because Max has a fetish with scenic places. By day he runs the digital media department at the Film Institute and by night he’s out climbing rickety ladders like this one. Click. His Russian accent adds a level of stealthiness to our mission and I learn that aside from English and Russian, Max also speaks Estonian and, yep you guessed it, Chinese.Max drops us off after a night of dangling off abandoned lookout towers and sneaking into train yards. Within minutes he is at his home in the old communist blockhouses of Lasname and sending photos from our adventure. All this aside he is also working on a screenplay that he begins shooting in May.
We go to the location for the movie the following day. Instrumental music falls out of the car speakers theatrically and it’s like we are already in the movie. Max pulls over by an abandoned shack with a hand-me-down looking garden. Seagulls hover and squak overhead due to the nearby trash dump. This explains the smorgasbord material for the makeshift assembled house. Max gives us a tour of his gem, which consists of a kitchen and a living room. We spend the next hour marching through forests of dead coniferous trees and rolling boulders down slate hills onto frozen rivers. I think Ice Cube puts it best when he states so gangsta-quently, ‘I must say, it was a good day.’

Since we survived our twentieth NFF I think we can bring the threat level down to gregarious. As my step-dad says, ‘take the rest of the night off.’ And I’ll see you next week.

Love,
erik