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St George’s Day, Bank Holidays, and Subbotniks

In the space of the last three years it’s been twice that I came across the appeal to vote to make St George’s Day a public holiday. The campaign is still going on, and this day is still not a bank holiday, as we all may guess because there’s no noise in the media about the success of the campaign, and we’re doing work. I do think it makes sense for the appeal to succeed, especially because Ireland and Scotland have bank holidays on St Patrick’s and St Andrew’s Days, respectively. In the light of this, it’s almost outrageous that St George’s Day isn’t celebrated in the same manner. Furthermore, let’s not forget about St David’s Day, celebrated on March 1st (St David being the Welsh patron-saint). Petitions to the Welsh council have been flocking since at least 2006, but still to no avail. I certainly think it’s time something comes out of all these efforts, which have indeed been stupendous. I voted for St George’s Day, and you can see the votes stats on the left (from St George’s Day site), but you can also join the cause on Facebook (see the image on the right). In fact, last year we tasted the benefit of running a cause on Facebook when Wispa chocolate bar made a surprise return. So, St George’s Day initiative may finally succeed next year.

Update: it was recently reported that the Government spent but £230 in five years on promoting St George’s Day as the national holiday. Curiously, the expenses fall in the last two years only. Even so, one can observe some increase in the sums spent. In 2007, it was mere £114; in 2008, it was already £116. I’m guessing that by 2012 (the Olympics year, if you remember) St George’s Day may finally become the public holiday.

While I was checking the data for Welsh public holidays, I came across a mention that in July 2007 the Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced his plans to proclaim July 24th the national day for celebrating volunteering, possibly also making it a public holiday. In Soviet times we often celebrated volunteering on the day of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)‘s birthday, 22 April. We’d gather on a so-called “subbotnik” (from subbOta – Russian for Saturday). The idea was pioneered in 1919, and May 1, 1920 saw the very first all-Russia subbotnik. The one in Moscow was attended by Lenin himself, who helped the clear the Kremlin grounds. The scene you can see on the contemporary photograph was widely commemorated in the Soviet art and parodied in the post-Soviet time.

Obviously, April 22nd wouldn’t be the only date for a subbotnik (or voskresnik, from voskresEn’e – Russian for Sunday). Depending on the time of the year, we’d either clean the classroom or the school yard. I would have my subbotniks at the turn of 1980-90s, when no special political meaning was any longer attached to the event. If PM Brown’s initiative is to be successful, I may be in for reliving some of those subbotniks experiences…

A note: in the Russian words, I capitalised the stressed syllables, to give you an idea of pronunciation.

Smell-o-Phones and the Study of a Scent

I read “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer” by Patrick Suskind twice, although I still haven’t seen the film. The opinions of some people whom I trust did play a certain role in delaying my watching it. However, upon recently reading an article in The New York Times I feel Tom Tykwer might have been a tad early in making the film. Then, of course, so were the generations of film directors.

“When Roses Won’t Do, E-Mail a Fragrance” is an article introducing the latest Japanese invention – a kind of “smell-o-phone”. As the authors explain,

“users will be able to select and send certain fragrance recipes to an in-home unit that is responsible for concocting and releasing the various fragrances. Each holds 16 cartridges of base fragrances or essences that are mixed to produce the various scents in a similar way that a printer mixes inks to produce other colors.”

This is the point where I don’t know if art imitates technology, or technology imitates art, as I read further:

“The first step is to choose a scent from the multitude of fragrance recipes available through an I-mode site on a cell phone. Once chosen the instructions on how to make the scent are then transmitted to the fragrance device through infrared from the phone, and from there the scent is quickly mixed and emitted.
If distance is an issue, the other option is to send the instructions to the device via an e-mail message. The message is intercepted by a home gateway unit that is latched to the home’s broadband connection and sends the instructions to the fragrance device at home. Using this method users can set the time and date of fragrance emission, so one can come home to the relaxing scent of lavender, for example.
There’s even room for creating customized scents, which can be shared with other users through the fragrance “playlist” on the Web site.
The technology is not only limited to creating a pleasant-smelling workplace or home. NTT also sees it as a way to enhance multimedia content. For example, instead of just sending an image of a bouquet of roses to a friend, one can boost the experience by sending the fragrance as well.”

In conclusion, “NTT Communications believes that fragrance is the next important medium for telecommunications, as more value is placed on high sensory information.”

As I was reading the article, I’ve been thinking of using telecommunications for viral perfume marketing. I think Jean-Paul Gaultier could use the idea very creatively: he could team up with a mobile phone manufacturer, to produce mobiles in the form of his famous perfume bottles (see image) and to have them emit the precious scents.

And next, of course, we’d be in for the new spin in film remakes. And that’s where “Perfume” enters the picture. The very first pages of the novel (sorry, I’ve got no English edition at hand to quote directly) paint us the portrait of Paris we’d rather ignore. We’re used to think of Paris as the capital of fashion, emitting fabulous aromas and scents. In the 18th c., however, the city was far from smelling nicely. Unwholesome vapours filled the streets and houses, and if you actually imagine the repertory of smells as you read through it, you’d be repulsed. Looking at the critique of the novel, it may be that this smelly Paris gets well past the noses of the readers. If, however, the Japanese venture gets to be used in multimedia and film, the remake of “Perfume” may set us on the right track to reading the novel. At any rate, making films smell will for once change our romantic outlook on many a historical epoch, which in turn will open an altogether new subject in both disciplines of History and Film: The Scent Studies.

Image credits: Glamour Magazine.

Working and Walking in Castlefield

I‘ve always wanted to work in the city centre. I also want to live in the city centre, if only to rectify the years I’ve spent travelling everywhere by bus, train, taxi, etc. But I realise that things don’t always happen as quickly as I’d like, so I’m pleased with the result so far.

Every time I travelled to Warrington I used to go past the apartments block along the Bridgewater Canal, and every time I was thinking of how good it would be to live there. I had this strange fascination with the glass walls of the flats. I’m sure you will agree with me that there is something futuristic, ueber-modern, and altogether fashionable about The Box Works building you can see at the top of the post (right).

Just a short walk from here is St Edmund’s church which has been converted into apartments. I had a conversation with a good friend of mine some time ago on the subject of which letting agent to visit and what to expect. Sitting in Odder Bar in Oxford St, we were sieving through the letting offers in one of Manchester’s property magazines. There was a studio on offer in St Edmund’s church, and we briefly contemplated on what it could be like: to live in a church. I’m not particularly superstitious but I’m probably not ready yet for such experience.

Every day I have to go from Bridge St past Granada TV and the Museum of Science and Industry across the bridge to my office. On my way to work I’m being hushed at by the geese (not the most pleasant experience, especially when a goose stands right in the middle of the walk – this way it should be you who’s hushing). On my way from work I’m inundated with runners who these days assemble in groups of 4-8 people. Before long I’ll be feeling like I’m trying to walk through the marathon…



And what it is really interesting is that, in addition to geese (and swans, too), there’s some cattle in Castlefield. At the bottom of the street where I work there is this Hindu cow (left). And not far from the Roman fort there is Sheep monument by Ted Roocroft (1986, right). Curiously, the monument stands not far from The White Lion pub. Sheep, Cows… but all Lions must be sleeping tightly in the Mancunian jungle.

The Labyrinth of Minotaur: UK Human-Cow Clone Created

Sarah Hills from Metro.co.uk reports that the UK scientists have finally succeeded at creating “hybrid embryos that are part-human and part-animal”. In November 2006, a group of scientists from the University of Newcastle applied “for permission to create embryos by combining human DNA with cow eggs. Their research aims to develop new therapies for human ailments such as strokes, Alzheimer’s and tissue damage suffered by spinal trauma victims.” The permission was granted, and now we’re in for a long debate over whether or not this is ethical. Hills explains that “the technique, called nuclear transfer, involves removing the nucleus of a cow egg – which contains most of the genetic information – and replacing it with human DNA. The egg is then encouraged to divide until it is a cluster of cells only a few days old”.

Ah well… Some people compare a “human-cow” to Frankenstein’s monster. For my part, I remember a brilliant novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, The Fateful Eggs (1925), about the ray of light discovered by Ivan Persikov, the Professor of Zoology (Russian text). This is the description of discovery from Chapter III of the novel:

“What had happened was this. When the Professor put his discerning eye to the microscope, he noticed for the first time in his life that one particular ray in the coloured tendril stood out more vividly and boldly than the others. This ray was bright red and stuck out of the tendril like the tiny point of a needle, say.
Thus, as ill luck would have it, this ray attracted the attention of the great man’s experienced eye for several seconds.
In it, the ray, the Professor detected something a thousand times more significant and important than the ray itself, that precarious offspring accidentally engendered by the movement of a microscope mirror and lens. Due to the assistant calling the Professor away, some amoebas had been subject to the action of the ray for an hour-and-a-half and this is what had happened: whereas the blobs of amoebas on the plate outside the ray simply lay there limp and helpless, some very strange phenomena were taking place on the spot over which the sharp red sword was poised. This strip of red was teeming with life. The old amoebas were forming pseudopodia in a desperate effort to reach the red strip, and when they did they came to life, as if by magic. Some force seemed to breathe life into them. They flocked there, fighting one another for a place in the ray, where the most frantic (there was no other word for it) reproduction was taking place. In defiance of all the laws which Persikov knew like the back of his hand, they gemmated before his eyes with lightning speed. They split into two in the ray, and each of the parts became a new, fresh organism in a couple of seconds. In another second or two these organisms grew to maturity and produced a new generation in their turn. There was soon no room at all in the red strip or on the plate, and inevitably a bitter struggle broke out. The newly born amoebas tore one another to pieces and gobbled the pieces up. Among the newly born lay the corpses of those who had perished in the fight for survival. It was the best and strongest who won. And they were terrifying. Firstly, they were about twice the size of ordinary amoebas and, secondly, they were far more active and aggressive. Their movements were rapid, their pseudopodia much longer than normal, and it would be no exaggeration to say that they used them like an octopus’s tentacles.”

The consequences thereof were frightening and disturbing. But, of course, the whole “human-cow” thing is not at all new, and the consequences are usually monstrous. In the past I mentioned a medieval tale about a lion who fell in love and made love a Parisian woman. In Ancient Greece, however, there was a different story. I quote from Pseudo-Appollodorus (from Theoi.com):

“Minos aspired to the throne [of Krete], but was rebuffed. He claimed, however, that he had received the sovereignty from the gods, and to prove it he said that whatever he prayed for would come about. So while sacrificing to Poseidon, he prayed for a bull to appear from the depths of the sea, and promised to sacrifice it upon its appearance. And Poseidon did send up to him a splendid bull. Thus Minos received the rule, but he sent the bull to his herds and sacrificed another . . .

Poseidon was angry that the bull was not sacrificed, and turned it wild. He also devised that Pasiphae should develop a lust for it. In her passion for the bull she took on as her accomplice an architect named Daidalos . . . He built a woden cow on wheels, . . . skinned a real cow, and sewed the contraption into the skin, and then, after placing Pasiphae inside, set it in a meadow where the bull normally grazed. The bull came up and had intercourse with it, as if with a real cow. Pasiphae gave birth to Asterios, who was called Minotauros. He had the face of a bull, but was otherwise human. Minos, following certain oracular instructions, kept him confined and under guard in the labyrinth. This labyrinth, which Daidalos built, was a “cage with convoluted flextions that disorders debouchment.”

Minotaur was widely commemorated in art, as you can see in the post (all images are courtesy of Theoi.com). The rest of the story goes along the lines of a heroic myth, with Theseus eventually arriving to Knossos and killing Minotaur. It is only the beginning of human-cow cloning, but who knows: the Greek myth may turn out to be more realistic and prophetic than we have ever thought.

Information about images (from left to right, clockwise):

Theseus and the Minotauros. Attributed to Leagros Group or to Group of Vatican 424. C6th BC. Museo Gregoriano Etrusco Vaticano, Vatican City.

Theseus and the Minotauros. Attributed to Apollodoros. ca 525 – 475 BC. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, United Kingdom.

Theseus and the Minotauros. Floor Mosaic. C2nd – C3rd AD. Universität Fribourg Bibliothek, Fribourg, Switzerland.

The First of April Puppy Memories

I feel incredibly good. It’s spring, the grass is getting greener on all sides of the fence, the sky is clear, the sun is bright. Even if or when it rains, I’ll still feel good. Because that’s how it’s got to be.

A Russian friend of mine told a joke, which I find rather funny, albeit poignant:

Q: Excuse me, is God there?
A: No.
Q: When will He be?

When I say I’m not religious I mean that I don’t observe the rites, visit the church, etc. But we all need to believe in something. So, I’m believing in spring. This is my religion for now.

My boss has brought a puppy in the office today. It’s been several years since I’ve realised how important it is that you don’t forget about childhood. I’m thankful to each and everyone who make me remember about it, relive it, who let me revive it in one way or another.

Sixteen years ago in late November I was presented with a puppy. The puppy was a fruit of sudden passion between a Boxer and a Riesenschnautzer. This fruit was incredibly mischievous: when my mother and I entered the friend’s flat, my present was riding on the back of the friend’s Spaniel, clinging on to the Spaniel’s ear for dear life. The Spaniel was frantically shaking its head, but the present was adamant it didn’t fall off the Spaniel’s back.

Never before did I have either a dog or a cat, so the friend’s present was unexpected, to say the least. But it was good, nonetheless. At the time my Grandma was in hospital, and I was staying at home on my own. It was 1992, not the most secure or peaceful time even in Moscow, and although I didn’t suffer from depression I certainly felt incredibly lonely.

Well, acquiring the dog changed things dramatically. I had to look after it, to feed it, to play with it, to clean after it (yes, we’ve all been there), and to turn chaos into order after many of its escapades. I’m saying “it” because this is a convention. It was a she-dog, in fact. At first, we struggled for a name for her. On the way home from the friend’s my mother and I sat on the tube, the dog being the attraction for everyone around. The next day my mother went to work, and I went to school. At that precise moment we didn’t yet have locks in the rooms’ doors, so I just closed them and secured them with a rope. The dog was left to stay in the corridor. When I came home, she was nowhere to find. Then I heard gentle moaning from behind the door. Upon opening the door, I saw the view which I’ve since never forgotten. The room was a proper battleground: two armchairs were overturned, a tape recorder fell off the glass cabinet (I still wonder why the cabinet wasn’t destroyed), as did two plants. I was just learning to knit at the time, so all the balls of wool were laying randomly around the room. The room was ransacked, which, oddly, helped to find the name for the dog. We called her Ronia, after the protagonist of the book Ronia the Robber’s Daughter by the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren.

Ronia became a friend, a family member, the kind of dog which you cannot imagine being substituted for another. She had this incredibly deep, wise look, and there was never any question as to her thinking abilities or abilities to communicate. Whenever there was an argument in the family, she’d always step in and barked, to silence us, to make us resolve the argument peacefully. She succumbed to cancer exactly in the Year of the Dog, in January 2006, and it was the first real loss I experienced in every sense of this word. I quite literally fell ill and took a sick leave at work. My mother and grandmother were inconsolable.

But I and the family and friends think about the dog as if she is. I somehow believe – did I say that we all need to believe in something? – that she is still there. It isn’t a naive hope; it’s a knowledge, as many of you may surely be able to agree.

The Art of Entarting (And Other Crafts)

I’m writing a copy about Belgium for a website, and I’ve come across the name of the Belgian actor and writer Noel Godin (left) who is famous for entarting diverse and sundry celebrities. The BBC states that the three reasons for the Entarteur to put someone high and mighty on his hit-list are: power, self-importance, and the lack of sense of humour. My printed country guide tells me that “… actor/writer Noel Godin achieved international notoriety in 1998 when he and his cohorts ambushed an unsuspecting Bill Gates and proceeded to cream the billionaire – literally. According to news reports, Godin and his groupies flung dozens of cream pies at the software magnate, scoring at least four direct hits” (Europe on a Shoestring). On the right, you can see the sweet result (apologies if this sounds slightly ambiguous!).

In 1969, the French novelist Marguerite Duras became the first target for Godin’s sweet revenge. Since then, his creamy anger struck against many a public figure, including the film-maker Jean-Luc Godard, the now French President Nikolas Sarkozy, and the now late choreographer Maurice Bejart. While being caked is undoubtedly humiliating, Godin seems to try and teach the celebrities a lesson in the importance of not taking oneself too seriously. It’s like he’s saying: don’t assume that everything that flies in your face is against you. Per chance, this pie was intended for someone else, and you simply happened to be in the way. Indeed, Sylvester Stallone apparently took being caked quite well (much to the surprise of the attackers), so he was crossed out from the entarteurs’ hit-list.
 
Mr Godin’s initiative is totally harmless and even gentle: he only uses traditional tarts, with whipped cream and possibly a bit of chocolate. But his many followers around the world realised that it’s best sometimes to use other kinds of tarts. In Britain, the BBC reports, the cakers preferred to use lemon meringue pies that held together well during the flight, as well as deep and large traditional custard pies. The caking groups take on “self-explanatory” names, like the original Belgian TARTE or London-based PIE.
 
Back in 2000, the BBC said that the caking movement took over America, targeting those worth of creaming on a twice-a-month ratio. For my part, I liked this episode with attacking the famous economist Milton Friedman. The attacker said: [Free market economists] offer us pie in the sky, but being a down-to-earth guy, I brought that pie and gave it back to him.” This is what I call the good sense of humour – witty and subtle.
I think we’ll have to wait now for the ultimate movie review site, Rotten Tomatoes, to take it to the letter. Of course, of course, to tomato a film maker or a movie star can be dangerous, if only because tomatoes can be fairly hard. But then cinema is all about entertainment, isn’t it, so a couple of bruises may well be justified by the maddening spur of publicity.
I was trying to remember, without diving into Google Search, about any incidents of caking, egging, appling, etc, of a public figure in Russia, but didn’t remember any at the moment. There was, however, an incident of cucumbering someone to death in Russian literature. The incident was narrated by Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) in his short story, What They Sell in the Shops These Days. The story below is quoted from the website of collected works by Kharms, prepared by Serge Winitzky, with translations in English and German.

Koratygin came to see Tikakeyev but didn’t find him in.At that time Tikakeyev was at the shop buying sugar, meat and cucumbers.Koratygin hung about by Tikakeyev’s door and was just thinking of scribbling a note when he suddenly looked up to see Tikakeyev himself coming, carrying in his arms an oilskin bag.Koratygin spotted Tikakeyev and shouted: – I’ve been waiting for you a whole hour!- That’s not true – said Tikakeyev – I’ve only been out of the house twenty-five minutes.- Well, I don’t know about that – said Koratygin – except that I’ve already been here a whole hour.- Don’t tell lies – said Tikakeyev – you should be ashamed to lie.- My dear fellow! – said Koratygin – Be so good as to be a little more particular with your expressions.- I consider … – began Tikakeyev, but Koratygin interrupted him:- If you consider . . . – he said, but at this point Tikakeyev interrupted Koratygin and said:- A fine one you are!These words put Koratygin into such a frenzy that he pressed a finger against one of his nostrils and through his other nostril blew snot at Tikakeyev.Then Tikakeyev pulled the biggest cucumber out of his bag and hit Koratygin across the head with it.Koratygin clutched at his head with his hands, fell down and died.That’s the size of the cucumbers sold in the shops these days!

Slavoj Žižek on (Mis)Uses of Violence at the Leeds University

They say that the tickets to Slavoj Žižek ‘s lectures sell out almost as quickly as those to the pop stars’ concerts. The lecture at the University of Leeds on 18th of March was free, and the temptation to go and see and listen to one of the leading philosophers of today was too strong to resist. As a result, I know now that I can arrange an ad hoc trip from Manchester to Leeds (with an overnight stay) in less than half a day.

Thankfully, this knowledge wasn’t the only outcome of my trip to Leeds. I saw Prof Žižek on TV previously, but this was a different experience. It’s been a long while since I attended a proper University lecture, the “full house” one where you have to look for a seat (consider that I came directly from work, with a small suitcase) and where the staff, students and members of the public all sit together, occupying every available space – including the steps. In this sense going to Žižek’s lecture was like getting back to the old times when I was a student. But more than that, it was a wonderful intellectual stimulation. Slavoj Žižek’s current “tour of the North” of England (as aptly described by the “tour manager” Dr Paul A. Taylor, ICS, University of Leeds and Editor of the International Journal of Žižek Studies) serves to introduce his new book, Violence. The reviews of it that you may find on the web (The Independent’s Simon Critchley being perhaps the kindest) criticise Žižek, on the one hand, for calling for no action as the response to the “systemic” violence of the socio-economic order (the counterargument is how can someone be inactive in the face of injustice or war, etc.), and, on the other, for never taking the extra step to act himself. So, as he acknowledged from the start of his talk, this lecture is what he would add to his book, if he were to prepare a new edition.

The three-hour “performance” (and I’m not being ironic) included a short demonstration from the film Žižek!, and I’m embedding three short extracts from the lecture itself. The choice is purely personal, in that I chose the topics that I found most interesting. The first extract is about the problem of explicit and implicit ideological injunctions. Žižek starts by alluding to John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) as the story of how ideology works and of what it takes to liberate oneself from its throes. Liberation hurts, concludes Žižek, and there is hidden agenda underneath every ideological appeal. When he illustrates this with the examples from the Fascist past, it’s hard to disagree. Even when he says that the Catholic appeals to be a priest conceal a promise of paedophile pleasures, one can not only agree, but even bring in a supportive example: The Bad Education (2004) by Pedro Almodovar. It gets more contentious when he argues that behind appeals for humanitarian help there is, in fact, an urge to act without thinking, to contribute money rather than to treat the problem itself. As a result, people become indifferent to humanitarian problems. It is tempting to disagree, but again, I recall Andrew Marr’s deploring in his book My Trade the overflow of sentiments in modern journalism, which makes little more but decrease the tabloid sales. At the same time, the audience grows dispassionate, and – I can add – the phone-in scandals hardly help the matter.

Another extract is about appearances and freedom. The modern relationships between the master and subjects, Žižek claims, are much more oppressive. We simply don’t have the freedom of choice, even though it feels like we’ve never been freer than today. Elsewhere in his lecture Žižek underlined the fact that we’re often left without an alternative. We expect to choose between fundamentalism and liberal democracy, for instance, as if there is no other form of social organisation. I suppose this is what could be called the “unknown knowns” – exactly what Donald Rumsfeld has omitted in his (in)famous speech and to what Prof Žižek alluded a few times. The price for ignoring the “unknown knowns” is usually high, as Žižek didn’t fail to demonstrate. The potential aim of the war in Iraq, apart from freeing the world of Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction, was to create a secular state. The result is that the Iraqi state is now much less secular and more fundamentalist than it was under Hussein: the so-called intelligentsia has fled the country, whereas it is with the help of precisely this social group that the secular state can be built.

In the third extract Žižek speaks of the problem of the Big Other. He is preoccupied with the importance of such notion or object (the “chicken”), especially because it relates to the problem of trauma, as recently discussed by Catherine Malabou in her book The Newly Wounded (Les Nouveaux Blessés). What happens when the Big Other is erased? – is the question Žižek attempts to answer here. Trauma is evidently connected to violence, but he also made a point during his talk that Malabou concentrated too much on the “Western” type of trauma, a momentary trauma, whereas in impoverished deprived African states trauma is literally a state of existence.

Perhaps, many a critique of Žižek’s work could be dismissed by his own statement that, as a philosopher, he isn’t there to help us solve problems or to realise the expectations. His job is actually far more complex: he needs to explain to us whether or not our expectations are sustainable. It is possibly because of this that he prefers to retreat to the back bench. Maybe, instead of supplying us with the facts, he wants us to go and do the job ourselves. The question is not whether Žižek is right; the question is whether we are really ready for this. Already in a 2001 interview (following the 9/11 in America) he stated that there is something wrong with one group of people increasingly “moving” to live in the virtual space while another group of people (which he called “cutters”) maintain that they need to cut themselves in order to feel alive. Seven years later some pundits admit that, in spite of its universally binding force, the Internet (and social media, in particular) leaves you feel extremely lonely – perhaps to the point when you do start cutting your own flesh.

I find one particular thesis very engaging. Žižek repeatedly blazes his critique against the modern multiculturalism, which, in his opinion, is just a new form of racism. Sounds odd, doesn’t it, especially when I’m writing this sitting in a city that prides itself on being diverse and multicultural? But I have only to think of some Mancunians’ attitude to homosexuality. They say there’s nothing wrong about being gay. They say it’s great that a person can be different. They accept and respect homosexuality – as long as they don’t have to visit the Gay Village, to mesh in the Gay Parade, to watch queer films, or to have a gay son or a lesbian daughter. Multiculturalism disguises indifference, which very likely conceals the deeply hidden disgust or fear. On the same note, it’s OK to respect the Hindus, Žižek said in 2001, but does this “respect” extend onto the Hindu custom of a wife burning herself following the husband’s death?

“What is it to be a human?” Žižek asks in his Leeds Lecture, answering: it is perhaps not what we can do, but something that is beyond our reach which we nonetheless are trying to grasp. To be human is to be driven, and indeed, “we endlessly care about things we cannot change”. Furthermore, he states, our innermost narrative (what we tell ourselves about ourselves) is a fundamental lie; we need, in fact, to concentrate on what undermines us. In simple terms, instead of looking at what is familiar to ourselves in ourselves, we should face the “unknown knowns”, things that exist within us but of which we are not immediately aware.

So, the thesis I find extremely interesting is that the true solidarity is not a solidarity in understanding – it is a solidarity in struggle, which manifests itself as the political universality, the only true universality (I guess we may need to retreat to George Orwell once again and his pondering on the political purpose of a writer). “Political”, however, is external, whereas what interests me is the application of Žižek’s thesis to the story of one’s self. I agree with those who say that one must first learn to solve their own problems before they attempt to solve the problems of the others. This is not an advocacy or apology for doing nothing but rather the understanding that the common insight (of which Žižek spoke in 2001) is hardly a matter of divine providence. It has to come from somewhere, and very likely the “somewhere” is within us. Learning to accept one’s personal hidden depths instead of alienating, pitying or victimising oneself in one’s own eyes is for me exactly the lesson of solidarity in struggle. It also exemplifies, powerfully and convincingly, that this struggle never ends, instead it takes on new forms and new dimensions.

The final thesis of Prof Žižek’s lecture that I also found interesting touches on the modern forms of proletarisation. In the modern capitalist world we’re deprived, he argues, of our ecological habitat (because the environment is overpolluted), of our genetic “identity” (through experiments with genome), and even of our intellectual property. The true utopia, however, is that capitalism can extend and reinvent itself forever. A clash is inevitable, but Žižek believes it is possible to do something about it.

Links:

Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

International Journal of Žižek Studies

Žižek! (a film by Astra Taylor)

Details of Prof Žižek’s lecture at the University of Leeds

International Journal of Žižek Studies Facebook group

Slavoj Žižek: “The One Measure of True Love Is: You Can Insult the Other” (@ Spiked-Online)

Violence by Slavoj Žižek

Žižek on Violence (Video) – the video of the Leeds lecture uploaded by Kishore Budha to Subaltern Studies – An Inter-Disciplinary Study of Media and Communications portal.

Reviews:

Simon Critchley, The Independent

Steven Poole, The Guardian

Julian Baggini, The Times

Chris Power, BBC

I’m grateful to Mark Thwaite from ReadySteadyBook for publicising Žižek’s talk.

Male Self-Portraits (Philip Scott Johnson)

A year ago I wrote about Women in Art, an artwork by the American digital artist Philip Scott Johnson (aka Eggman913). The artwork has taken the Internet by storm, producing a string of posts, analyses, and – alas – a few pirate versions, as well. Undoubtedly, though, this was one of the most creative works we’ve all seen, and, for one, it showed that all that social media stuff is not just for kids. It is a huge artistic and creative medium and milieu.

In the post in which I observed some obvious peculiarities of the way the Western art has portrayed women I also said:

“unless EggMan is already in the process of doing this, may we kindly ask him to make a film about men in Western art. This subject is no less beautiful, and the controversy that often surrounds it will only expand our perception of Beauty”.

I wrote this in May 2007. There was no communication between Philip and me, so you can imagine my surprise when I have just discovered that he actually produced a video on the subject. But – and this is what makes an artist what he/she is – he didn’t just make a morph of diverse and sundry male faces the Western artists painted over 500 years. This new video is about “500 Years of Male Self-Portraits in Western Art“.
Accompanied by Bach’s Bouree 1 and 2 from Suite for Solo Cello No. 3, this is a breathtaking study of Western vision of the artistic self throughout half a millennium. Opened and closed by the portraits of Leonardo and Picasso, respectively (the two men whose genius no-one seems to doubt), the sequence is visually stunning. Most importantly, however, the visual work penetrates deep into our thinking. It is by itself amazing to see how easily Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) diffuses into Diego Velazquez (1599-1660), or how deftly Jan van Eyck (1395-1441) blends into Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). But when you see Rembrandt’s (1606-1669) grey locks becoming Andy Warhol’s (1928-1987) famous white crop of hair, the story takes a completely different turn.

And the story isn’t just about troubled geniuses, the great eccentrics, the talents that continue to inspire virtually everyone up until now. The story is once again about their vision of themselves, and in this respect this video by Philip is an even greater achievement than Women in Art. I wrote about the latter that it was possible to make it partly because the artists were looking at their females from the more or less same angle. Now to see that the artists painted themselves in the more or less same manner makes the difference.

And I can’t help but speak about the merge of Rembrandt and Andy Warhol once again. Even taken on its own, it manifests the continuity in artistic expression, on the one hand, and the impossibility to pin an individual (let alone an artist) down to a certain image, on the other. If we can diffuse a smiling Rembrandt into an intense Warhol, the whole process can be inverted, and we can see Warhol becoming Rembrandt. This means – as far as I am concerned, at least – that there is little difference between a troubled genius and a happy genius. Each of them is an ocean of experience, thoughts and emotions, and thankfully, we have artists like Philip Scott Johnson to let us observe this.

For the list of artists and to leave a comment for Philip, please visit the YouTube page for the video.

My First Taste of Cable TV

I think it was 1988 when in my district in Moscow they began to lay lines. Naturally, everyone was curious, but the answers were vague: it seemed those were the lines for a cable TV channel.

Indeed they were, and this was the beginning of the “2×2”, Russia’s first commercial TV channel. The Wikipedia tells us the channel didn’t start broadcasting before September 1990, but my memory, which thankfully is still quite good, whispers that the channel began to broadcast before that date, perhaps already in 1988, and most definitely was already working in 1989. It is true that it evolved significantly between 1993, when it signed a contract with MTV Europe to translate some shows, and 1997 when it closed down.

Looking back at this time, I should say that all this wasn’t always a fine departure from the Soviet culture. Since the mid-1980s there were TV shows where they showed you the clips of such bands and artists, as Erasure, David Bowie; if I’m not mistaken, it was in the 1980s that I first glimpsed the laser music wizard, Jean-Michel Jarre. But the cable TV channel was in a different league. Something tells me that prior to 1990 this cable TV channel that I and my classmates saw being laid was broadcasting if not illegally then certainly with the range much wider than the Wiki describes. That preliminary stage is well imprinted in my mind for the sheer lack of censorship. My classmates were scared as hell but still watched Nosferatu and many other horror films. I tried to watch one of those films, too, but wasn’t very successful. There was no chance to stop kids from watching these movies because the film screenings would start at around 6pm.

I wasn’t successful with horror films (I was too afraid), but naturally I and my friends at school were quite interested in the films about the various aspects of procreation, and boy were we not disappointed! By the late 1980s there were quite a lot of families (in my district, at least) where they’d have several TV sets, one of these being in the children’s room. It was somewhat different in the case of my family, but nevertheless one evening I tried to watch Zalman King’s Two Moon Junction. I didn’t go too far watching it because my Grandma had a habit of checking if I was in the dreamland before she could succumb to sleep, so I was trying to watch the film while also tuning into her footsteps. Eventually, it just got too much, so I turned the TV off. But other children were luckier, and in the day at school they sometimes discussed what they saw the evening before. When my parents, who were by then divorced, found out about these conversations, they undertook a joint effort and each in their own way told me about sex as an occupation of two people in love and that there was no need to laugh at anything.

The point, however, is that such films were being shown to a very young audience. Only a few years after the story I’ve just told the same channel showed another film. It must’ve been the case of my doing the room with the TV working in the background, so I wasn’t watching the film. To this day I don’t know the name of it, and I have no idea whether or not it contained any X-rated scenes. I do remember though that it was daylight, and the scene I recall was of this couple riding in a car, when a woman made an indecent proposal to the man. Next moment she dived somewhere…

Obviously, these days I understand the whole meaning of the scene which back then had left me startled. But to take our mind off wondering at how such films could only be shown in daytime I’ll say that the film was dubbed, and the interpreter’s male (and very nasal) voice was jamming all phrases into one, so the whole impression of the scene is rather amusing to me.

The 2×2 channel has made a comeback to the airwaves in 2002, but since 2007 has been airing predominantly animated series. To check which ones, follow this link. From the drop-down menu on the right you can browse the English titles of the series. I’m afraid the synopsis will still be in Russian, but if you’re watching The Simpsons anyway, you don’t need to know what it’s about. 🙂

Earthquakes in My Life (Deux Hommes dans la Ville)

In August 2007 Robin Hamman reported on the BBC Manchester Blog about an earthquake in Manchester. He was rather surprised that very few of us, Manchester bloggers, noticed it. I didn’t notice it, no. But the Manchester earthquake was but 2 points on the Richter scale. The recent earthquake that hit much of the UK was 5 points, and I did feel it. Well, since this was the first earthquake I personally experienced I’ve got to write a memo of it. I was in the bathroom, and the door shook and rattled, but hardly anything moved, including myself. I thought it was a very strong wind which does occasionally visit the house where I currently live. You can easily imagine my surprise when in the morning I read about Britain being hit by its second strongest earthquake since 1984.

In my Russian LiveJournal I wrote about this experience, since it was really the experience, and I’m very grateful to the reader who sent me their support, even though I didn’t suffer any damage (unlike some people and households in England). In my turn, I hope that none of my friends or readers was affected by the force of Nature.

Although this was the first time I experienced an earthquake myself, it wasn’t the first earthquake in my life to which I had to react somehow. On December 7, 1988 when I was at the second form at school (still primary school), a devastating earthquake hit Armenia. As I gathered from browsing the Internet, it is now known as the Spitak, or Gyumri Earthquake. You can easily guess by looking at the date that this catastrophe occurred while the USSR still existed, and I believe it was a common initiative across all Soviet schools to organise sending some humanitarian aid to the families, and most importantly children who suffered from the earthquake. In my childhood I’ve had a lot of toys, and my Mum and I collected a huge bag of different dolls to send to children in Armenia.

I must be honest, though, and admit that the empathy upon which I focus so much these days and about which I write so much, – well, this empathy wasn’t something I had had back in 1988. I don’t know, perhaps it was normal since I was a child, and I have noticed in the recent years that some childhood experiences are relived much more sharply when I recall them some 15-20 years after they’d happened. With the Spitak Earthquake, I vividly remember smiling sceptically at my grandmother and mother, for I couldn’t understand why they were crying, as my family never had any relatives in Armenia or adjacent areas. Obviously, these days when I look at these photos and there is a whole pool of similar experiences to remember I take their reaction differently. Although I guess that there is a reason for my then reaction, I’m ashamed of it, and my parents did reproach me for it.

That was in 1988. These days I realise that I haven’t always been so detached, and that something had touched my profoundly long before the experience I’m about to relate. I told you in the past about the effect the Russian adaptation of Conan Doyle stories had on me, and there are a few more films that opened me up from one side or another. I feel that in many ways these experiences were brought by some external force (I’m not religious, but this is where I become fatalist and a mystic) to unravel my inner feelings and callings that otherwise would lay dormant.

Occasionally I feel also that when myself or whoever else speak about art, there is a more or less substantial group of people who are extremely sceptical about the ability of art to influence anyone. I don’t know about “whoever”, this is when I’m speaking entirely from my heart and my own memories. It was 1994, I was in the 9th form at school (the last year at secondary school, for you to have an idea), and because it was before my birthday in December I’d still be 13. In the summer of 1994 I read Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, which had a profound effect on me. As I don’t remember exactly how I was reading it, I doubt this effect was such that it made me cry, but it certainly made me think.

It was probably October or November 1994 when they showed Deux hommes dans la ville on Russian TV. The film is known in the English-speaking world as Two Against the Law or Two Men in Town (Due contra la città in Italian), it was made in 1973 by José Giovanni and starred Jean Gabin and Alain Delon. The plot, in short, is about a bank robber (Delon) who returns home after ten years of imprisonment, makes his best to escape the old pals, but falls victim to the harassment of a cop from his past. Gabin’s character is trying to help and save the unfortunate young man, but the tragedy unravels. The film touched on social injustice, capital punishment, and the inability of an individual to outpower the Law.

It was the first film when I sat in front of the TV set and never moved. It was the first ever film with which I sympathised. I’ve seen a few films with Delon previously, but back then I sometimes relied on the perceptions of my family, and my mother who probably looked at this actor through his performances in Borsalino or Zorro didn’t develop any affection for him. Naturally, it was different with me, and since 1994 I’ve seen many films with Delon, including La Piscine, Once a Thief, and Il Gattopardo.

But back in 1994 I was totally devastated and destroyed by the feature. I was crying throughout the last part of it. As if that wasn’t enough, I woke up in the night, instantly remembered about Delon’s character in the last scenes, especially those in the death chamber, and once again I cried. I thought of the character’s girlfriend… I knew perfectly well that nothing wrong happened to Delon. I knew that this could be just another “story”. But I was inconsolable for the rest of the night, very much moved for a few days after, and am still under the effect of the film, almost 15 years later.

Naturally, I’m thinking exactly what it was that moved me so much. The more I think about it the more I’m inclined to believe that I felt pain from my inability to change anything. Even if such story did take place in France in 1960-7os, I was sitting in Russia in the 1990s, and it was pointless to contemplate on what could be done because there was no capital punishment in France by 1994. Lars von Trier raised the same problem in Dancer in the Dark just a few years ago, although for me it was a film “in context”, whereas Deux hommes dans la ville was the first film of such topic.

So, the devastating effect of Giovanni’s feature had to do with my understanding of my “calling” or desire to be involved – be that involvement in art or in helping people. It could never take place without the actors, the script, the directing, and the whole gamut of other factors involved in film production. And while my experience as a film aficionado has grown far and wide since 1994, it is this film that I will be invariably getting back to when thinking of when and how I realised that whatever books, films, melodies, paintings tell us, they ultimately tell us something about ourselves.

Needless to say, I am deeply indebted to the cast and crew of this film. Deux hommes dans la ville was my own earthquake that shook me and threw me out of a void of detachment. I can never be thankful enough for this…

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