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[Alexandr Korol]

And this little thing — I brought it from Egypt, found it at a market, no one knows what it is, but it’s beautiful.” And you’re sitting there, taking all of this in — and you’re just stunned. And then you look around some more and see another unusual thing — a samurai sword on a stand. And the person says, “I love Japan. I’ve never been there, but I like swords, these katanas, I collect them. Also, my friends bring me books from Japan — I just collect them, I really like it. Oh, and do you want to see this new video game that just came out? The graphics are incredible, it shows Japanese culture so beautifully — it’s amazing.” And this person, girl or boy, shows it to you. Now imagine the shock if it’s a girl showing you all of this at 25 years old. I’d fall in love with her. I’d be completely stunned. And if she then picked up a guitar and said, “Look, I’ve just learned a new song. Tom Yorke released a new project called The Smile — let me play it for you,” and starts playing — then that’s it, you’re just in shock. Of course, anyone who doesn’t share this with me now and says, “What’s there to be surprised about?” — believe me, this is very rare nowadays, it’s in deficit. Back then, there were many such people — I remember that time. Every friend, every acquaintance I had was like that, and I was like that too, and we were all so interesting. That’s how it was before the rise of social media, before the rise of the social system. It existed then, this system, but it was weak. You know, it’s the same as when you’re in college and you see... well, let me not use college as an example — again I’ll refer to a film. An American movie, I often use them as examples — any American movie from the 2000s. Guys who play football, buff, handsome, cheerleader girls. And then they show all the others — the simple nerds. And they show — like in the movie “Transformers,” the first “Transformers” movie — it showed this really well. Shia LaBeouf, such a funny guy, gets up in front of the class and says, “You can buy this on eBay, these glasses...” and so on. He seems simple, but he’s interesting, and his life is interesting. I was always drawn to people like that, and I was always like that myself. And I never liked when all the girls or all the boys in school or college were the same. A song comes out that’s playing on the radio — they all listen to it, all have the same haircut — I never understood that. And that is the system, that’s the devil. And if I ever saw a person who was unusual, a truly individual personality, who was passionate about something no one else cared about — that was just amazing. But this social system, all these identical show-offs, they always called such a person “weird.”