:: Osculation Cessation ::

One of the less reputable Russian dailies has reported that Russian politians are being told not to go for the full-on snog when greeting each other. This long-observed manifestation of comradely affection symbolises for many the murky Soviet past, but the reason given for its prohibition is to save time. The famous mural of Brezhnev and Honecker kissing (here pictured in 2003) now forms a part of the preserved Berlin Wall East Side Gallery. I'm of the opinion that the defacement of this image over the past 10 years is an act of grave political vandalism. Its message, whilst rooted in the socio-political landscape of the late 20th century, must be preserved. The caption "Gospodi! Pomogi mne vyzhit' sredi etoi smertnoi lyubvi." (Mein Gott hilf mir, diese tödliche Liebe zu überleben!) translates as "My God! Help me to survive this deadly love." Neither the the German nor the English translation satisfactorily conveys the nuance of the original: the adjective smertny means not only "deadly" but also "mortal" (as opposed to eternal) and colloquially as an intensifier meaning "extreme". Amusingly enough this has a near-cognate in the (British) English dialectal usage - "dead good"...

...Oh dear, I'd better stop wittering about linguistics/semantics (despite the fact that it's supposed to be good for my career and love life and get back to the Brezhnev-Honecker image. That mural was painted by Dmitry Vrubel, whose portrait of Mother Russia is particularly arresting. The original photograph from which the mural was painted was also used in a Hungarian satirical poster. And full-on kissing in Hungary is no laughing matter. Perhaps I should start by informing the casual reader that Csókolom!, a formal, old-fashioned Hungarian greeting translates as "I kiss you!" When I stayed with schoolfriend's family in Budapest in the early 90s, I wasn't aware of the level of gusto required to kiss each newly met guest. I suspect that with the influx of Western European values and customs (and diets with considerably less garlic), this is one tradition which is sadly on the wane.

If you want a good fright for Halloween (other than these lovely costumes linked from Taxloss), have a quick read about Iranian & Chinese missile capability. Or simply follow my flatmate's lead and buy some horrid flowery wellies.

:: Sad and Spent ::

The Man Who Came To Dinner went well, but I'm now suffering from exhaustion after spending most of the past 5 days in one theatre or another, painting, knob-twiddling and trying to ignore the belly-aching of the Director and Designer. The first night of Midsummer Night's Dream was a success and now I'm back at work. So, a shameless plug for what I believe to be a great show (and my first professional theatrical outing):

So, I'm just sat here staring into middle-distance, munching on a morsel of Green & Black's Maya Gold and pondering yesterday's sad news. Still makes me want to cry...

:: Mind Mash ::

I'm off for a long weekend. "How delightful!" you cry. "Visiting mother-dear in Cumbria? Or a dirt-cheap city-break on the Continent?" Sadly the answer is neither. When I would like nothing more than to put my feet up on the sofa and watch trashy TV (more of that later), my time is to be consumed with theatrical activities. For the next three evenings I'll be strutting the proverbial (no prizes for guessing why I hate the poster) and from Monday I shall be working on lighting for a professional show (Oooh! Look at her...). So, don't expect any more posting loveliness from yours truly. Incidentally, why does MSWord always suggest "Yours Truly" instead of "Yours sincerely" when you sign off a letter (even in the British language version)? This is wrong and shit.

Follow up: with last week's news of the French jamming mobiles in performance venues it looks like we might have to put up with polyphonic r'n'b mind-piss on the tube too. Contributers to the LBL mailout have recently reported startling occurrences of mobiles going off on the Victoria line, it seems the Beeb picked up on this some months ago. Secretly, I have to admit to being quite impressed with my ability to text my friends from the world's deepest metro system last year. Some people are easily pleased, eh? I suppose the only way to guard against hearing a garbled rendition of Call On Me at the cinema is to hire this lot for a private screening, invite your friends and confiscate all mobiles on entry.

Origami news: Another amazing collection of origami models by Takashi Hojyo. Fave models:
  • Archangel Gabriel for the innovative use of pleating.
  • Turbaned man for startling and droll characterisation.
  • Nautilus for its geometric simplicity.
  • Aquarius for the best action sequence - I've never seen a comparable depiction flowing water!
  • Raijin/God of Thunder wins the special prize for all-round technical accomplishment. The technique of box-pleating (precreasing the paper into small squares) is one which has been developed and perfected over the past 30 years or so. Like a physical manifestation of CAD, this allows a design to be meticulously planned before the folds are realised to produce the 3-D model. Momotani's train also employs this method to memorable effect.

Obscene Cocktails: I can't deny feeling gleeful at the prospect of ordering one of these sweary concoctions, a surprising number of which seem to emanate from Australia (perhaps it's not that surprising, really):
fuck face shooter
cum in your mouth cocktail
fuck me sideways
shitface
cockteaser
fuzzy asshole
It's a shame that most of these seem to rely on semantics rather than substance. Surely the shock-factor would be improved if the ingredients were less mundane. As a general rule, I must admit to being fussy on the cocktail front: sweetness and creaminess are qualities I find generally repugnant, whereas the use of large amounts of well-mixed high-quality spirits can only be a good thing. Fruit is delightful if judiciously employed. Baileys is always wrong.

Considerably cheered by the news that the Ferreiras have been told to fuck off, I started Tuesday TV-fest with grimy old 'Enders. The inevitable swich to Channel 4 rewarded me with the stomach-emptying Too Posh To Wash, followed by the first in the new series of Wife Swap. These programmes proved to me that the majority of current "entertainment" scheduling prizes masochism above all else. The latter was an embarrassing endictment of the xenophobic attitude of the English. Unprepared to learn anything about German language or culture, the lazy Brit housewife passed off her domestic inadequacies as a victory for Women's Lib. Rarely have my toes curled so much. Thankfully the mood was considerably lightened by the arrival of Ban This Filth. The sight of three home counties pensioners wading their way through TV's most depreaved excesses (so we don't have to) was a joy to behold. This is a worthy homegrown successor to Eurotrash.

And on to matters philological... WordCount provides an ananlysis of word frequency in the English language. Dry as it sounds, there are some fascinating features to this - I certainly spent some time finding words which I thought wouldn't be included. More interesting still is QueryCount, which analyses the frequency of words that users of WordCount search for. Still on words, this article from the Beeb last week posited a theory that short names are the strongest. Howver, I thought the comments about Stalin were a little misguided. It's important to remember that Stalin had more than one reason for changing his name, Dzugashvili, which sounds distinctively Georgian. Not only is it awkward to pronounce for most Russians, but the name Stalin means "man of steel". Lenin also changed his name (from ulyanov), but he chose to be styled after the Lena river, which you can see here in flood. By the way, those Earth Observatory images are highly recommended. In choosing a massive river, Lenin was following a fine 19th century literary tradition. Evgeny Onegin, eponymous hero of the verse novel, is named after the Onega. And in Lermontov's Hero Of Our Time, the protagonist, Pechorin, is named after the Pechora.

And finally, can I just say yay for Alan Hollinghurst, a deserving winner, despite his rather po-faced attempt to prove that he's not just a gay author. No doubt he would approve of this satisfying anagram.

:: The Certainty Of Chance ::

Are future actions predetermined? Can fate be manipulated to fulfil our own ends? These two unlikely questions popped up in my head as I sat in the theatre on Tuesday. Depending on your appreciation of the space-time continuum, the answer to the first question could be yes or no. But the second seems like some oxymoronic article of faith - the illogical extrapolation of an omnipotent God who advocates "Free Will" for humanity. Perhaps I've put my cards on the table too soon; my implicit judgement of George W. Bush's born-again Christianity is an immediate departure from the objective. Nonetheless, my quotation from the title of a chirpy Divine Comedy song requires explanation. Onto the play itself. Stuff Happens touches on areas which are so current as to push the play beyond theatre. This might appear to be hyperbolic praise, but rather refers to my hesitation at calling the piece a play at all. With a stark simply set and speeches quoted verbatim, I felt as if I were watching a combination of a documentary and Bremner, Bird & Fortune. In fact, I felt it contained considerably less of the "dramatic reconstruction" element than your average TV-doc. So the writer's skill must lie in the editing: this was more allied to photo-collage than a painting. We were led through a series of speeches (including Donald Rumsfeld’s remarks which gave the play its title) and offered precious little polemic.
My companions disliked the play for various reasons – some were put off by the political content (why the fuck did they come along?), but others, like me felt disillusioned at the apparent lack of authorial direction. This is an engaging digest of the political manoeuvring that led up to the Iraq war, the wheedling required to convince the queasy lily-livered detractors of the need to remove Saddam Hussein on grounds of human rights and (pre-emptive) self-defence. And above all, the knuckle-headed determination of one man to pursue his own agenda. Bush comes off better in this than one might have expected – his character, however objectionable, is the least equivocal and most faithful to its original purpose.
So, how would I rate it overall? In newspaper review-speak, I suppose 3 stars out of 5 would be fair enough. The set and some of the characterisations were brilliant, although I would have appreciated being somewhat closer to the action. My main quibbles are with the genre – and it was a tad too long at 3 hours.
Given the "controversial" nature of the play, Stuff Happens has been subject to a frenzy of reviews, both in the British Press and online. A selection of these is below:

Press:
Michael Billington in the Guardian.
Kate Bassett in the Independent.
Robert Hanks also in the Independent.
Benedict Nightingale in the Times.
Neil Ascherson in the Observer.

Online:
Brian Clover on Curtain Up
Alan Bird on London Theatre Guide
Peter Hepple on The Stage's site.
Ray Bennett on Yahoo News

Afraid I've got to dash, so frivolity will have to wait till Monday.

:: Ars Magna ::

So, I finally made it to the Klütterkammer installation on Sunday with Tigger (plus new-ish other half) and Lava Lamp. Arriving early (and in anticipation of Tigger's tardiness), LL and I settled down to games of chess - both normal and the suicide variant. We decided to venture into the exhibition after a while, although Tigger and friend had not yet turned up, and were not disappointed. Crawling like overgrown hamsters through tunnels and up ladders into "exhibition" pods turned out to be one of the most enjoyable Sunday afternoon activities on record. Some of the items on show may have been included for the gross-out factor (fishy genitalia, anyone?), but nothing could match the joy of clambering up to a kind of tree house made of straw bales, in which a projected film of a seal colony seemed to regale the onlookers with Wagner. The exhibition aside, an enjoyable afternoon slid seamlessly into an engaging evening as Taxloss appeared out of the blue in search of solace. Sadly this wasn't on offer, but we did have a wide-ranging conversation covering the forthcoming US presidential election, linguistics/typesetting and the odd substitution of marmalade for chutney on the cheese platter LL and I had ordered.

This evening I shall don my newly arrived oh-so-political t-shirt and head to the National Theatre to watch Stuff Happens. I wonder if the play will touch on the BBC's current liking for this image of Scary Blair? No doubt the events of the evening will lead me to wish that the French innovation of jamming mobiles in theatres and cinemas had made it over La Manche

If I weren't at the theatre, I might be indulging in a little Danish Art House or simply musing over the question: What the fuck was Derrida about, anyway? It's seems even the experts aren't sure...

:: Foreign Affairs ::

Today's post is in honour of Ananova's "we're not racist but we like laughing at silly foreigners" policy.

The size used to gild every available surface in Russia's imperial palaces was made from an unlikely combination of sturgeon and vodka according to a Guardian article. Since isinglass is one of my favourite words in the English language (together with "plinth"), I wasn't overly surprised. However, I regret not having visited Oranienbaum Palace when I lived in St Petersburg.

Eastern European resilience was again tested when a man survived fighting off a bear and shooting himself. I can only think that this was the result of an drink-fuelled wager.

And finally, I leave you with the sad news that brandy-bearing St Bernards are becoming obsolete and that a contingent of Austrian GPs in South Yorkshire is to be provided with dialect training...

:: Just One Word Today ::

ARF!

:: Dirtbox Wednesday ::

Last night I received a text from a drunken friend, who shall remain anonymous (name starred out):

Hello darling. Would you mind passing the following message to ******? 'Would you like to come on my face?' Thanks very much. xx

In honour of the bare-faced cheek of such a request, today's post is dedicated to filth. Puerile and scatological it may be, but some things just have to be cleared from your system. Oh, I've started already...

Surprisingly enough, only one of the links is NSFW; this is marked with an asterisk.

We begin with the news that a Japanese inventor has come up with a kind of anti-fart generator. If the opposite effect is required, there are plenty of trump mimicking devices available on the interweb. Viz might seem to be the obvious place to snuffle around for dirt, but their fart generator's gone, so you'll have to make do with the fab Roger's Profanisaurus.

Another reliable source of smut and obscenity is b3ta. Over the years, there have been some delightful quizzes* and confessional questions of the week about defecation and misguided masturbation. The tird is less rude than it sounds.

What with a "controversial" new film depicting puppet oral sex, I wonder whether the Tory party conference will descend into a maelstrom of dirty copraphagic bumsex. Prominent conservatives certainly seem to be trying their hardest to turn people's reputations to shit, if not eating it too.

And of course, what passes for entertainment on (channel) five these days is Rebecca Loos wanking off a pig.

:: Friday Mixed Bag ::

No particular theme today, so a jumble of links. I hope some of them amuse or engage...

•  Article of the week, Part 1 (Economy): House Prices. A fairly resounding argument against the Daily Mail-fuelled house-price obsession. Surely it must be obvious that the only people this kind of over-inflation serves are those who are selling property but don't need to buy a new one to live in.
•  Article of the week, Part 2 (Politics): Larcenous Racist Scum. Gerald Kaufman bites back. I'm beginning to wonder whether the whole Town/Country debate is pushing us towards the Conurb/County divide of John Christopher's The Guardians.
•  Article of the week, Part 3 (Sport!): Martin Amis on Diego Maradona. Even a writer of Amis' standing can't make me love the "beautiful game". If anyone managed to finish this, please enlighten me.
•  TV News: Casanova on BBC3. The appropriately named Peter O'Toole is to play one of the leads.
•  Local bar of the week: Escape. This place doubles as a bar and art gallery. Some of the art is amusingly NSFW.
•  Revenge Story of the week: Shrapnel frenzy. I seem to remember that using a simliar tactic at university got Wilverine banned from the College Library for a term...
•  Art Installation of the week: Klütterkammer at the ICA. Was planning to go anyway, but the highly favourable Grauniad review has provided an extra incentive to make use of my membership. Anyone else fancy joining me for a tunnel-crawling, ladder-scaling bonanza on Sunday?

And finally...
•  Revived Eco-Slogan of the week: Please Take Your Litter Home. Or rather, pick it up off the beach then send it back to the country of origin. Art or eco-vigilantism?