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.



The second 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

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 part has portrayed its 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.

"Women in Art" at the annual YouTube Awards

I've just gone to check upon some of my YouTube subscriptions, only to find out that Philip Scott Johnson, a digital artist from St. Louis whom you may already know under his nickname eggman913, is nominated in the Creative category at this year's YouTube Awards. His tour de force, Women in Art, which featured in Los Cuadernos both in English and in Russian, is up against several other videos. Obviously, I'm all for a fair competition, but please feel free to support Philip's work.

YouTube Awards

The Word (Reading Heidegger)

I want to love you, but I know not, how;
To call your name - but is there such a name
That may become you? To the spheres above
I now entrust the knowledge of the same.
I barely hope and yet I almost fear,
They will have found the word, and then (alas!)
I will gain power over you to bear -
The power that no mortal ever has.

(English translation © Julie Delvaux 2006)


(Хочу любить, но как – не знаю сам.
Хочу назвать тебя, но что за имя
Мне назовет тебя? Я небесам
Вверяю свое знание отныне,
Едва надеясь и почти боясь,
Что слово для тебя они мне явят,
И с этим словом обрету я власть
Над тем, чем я совсем не в силах править.

04 апреля 2006 г.

© Жюли Дельво 2006)

While this poem probably reads as a love poem, it was, in fact, inspired by several essays by Martin Heidegger, particularly Wozu Dichter? (1946), translated into English as Why Poets? or What Are Poets For? The theme I picked upon was the immanent limitations of the language, which, however, remain unknown to people. It is through poetry as the most symbolic and historic genre that people can access the past and therefore establish a link between their time and the time-before-Time, i.e. eternity. It is thanks to this linguistic, poetic link that the mankind exists, although it is by no means close to understanding of the essence of things.

So, in my poem I attempted to look at my object of affection as if I was aware of these limitations. Because our world has reportedly begun with the Word, it is important that we find a -potentially - precise description for our object. It is all the more important, if we want to express our love for them, for apparently we want to underline the uniqueness of this person through a particular verbal expression. How can you possibly "boil" someone down to but one word? How can someone, being an individual and invariably a complex person, be pushed within the boundaries of a single word? Is there such word at all? The limitations of the language are the limitations of our knowledge, and if there is someone who may help us, they have to reside in the "spheres above". In the original Russian text I use the word "the skies", which can be interpreted as either Cosmos or God.

I entrust these spheres to return me the answer to my question. And then I am torn between the hope to receive the answer - for I want to be able to love this person, and so to name them, to describe them, - and the fear. Why fear? Because if such word is to be found, such will be what we would conventionally call the divine knowledge. Again, it can be called the secret knowledge or cosmic knowledge. Whatever we call it, this is something that doesn't really belong to this world. The idea I express in the last two lines is that an individual carries a universe within themselves, which no other individual can rule or comprehend on a purely rational (in this context - mechanical) level (i.e. through a single word). Yet with such word we bring the universe down to a tiny particle, thus imagining that we have known and understood it. This is not possible, and therefore, if the spheres above do return me the answer, I will appear as if I have gained power over something, which in fact will always remain a mystery.

Some Heidegger links:

Ereignis - an excellent English-language source of articles and publications by and about Heidegger, plus useful links, collected by Pete.

Martin Heidegger - a German site, without the actual works, as I could gather, but with a full bibliography.

Heidegger.ru - in Russian, many texts available in Word format documents.

Martin Heidegger at Evene.fr - in French.

Heidegger Association of Tokyo - in Japanese.

The bibliographic details for the essay What Are Poets For? are:

Heidegger, Martin. “What are Poets For?” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by
Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971.

Wozu Dichter? - a full German text in a .PDF file.

Michel Polnareff - Tam-Tam

It's been a while since I posted any translations from the most adorable Amiral, so I'm about to rectify this omission. I've only recently discovered this hit song from 1980s and, as it happens, fell head over heels for it - to the point that I was doing the Google AdWords Professional exam today with this song in my earphones. I already passed the GAP exam successfully before, but I had to do this once again. I can testify that l'Amiral's songs are very, very effective!! Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Polnareff!

Tours Eiffel, échafaudages et dix heures par jour de trime
Ca n'est pas une plac' pour moi
Matins gris sur macadam et marteaux-piqueurs en prime
Vraiment pas une place pour moi
J'en ai marre, j'en ai marre de voir les animaux dans les zoos
J'en ai marre, j'en ai marre de voir des monuments, des drapeaux

J'veux partir
Redevenir un homm' préhisto
Avec rien sur la peau
Jouer du tam tam tam tam tam

Aspirines et papiers bleus et cachets pour pas dormir
Ca n'est pas une vie pour moi
Vitamines et intraveines ou tablettes pour se nourrir
Vraiment pas une vie pour moi
J'en ai marre, j'en ai marre de lire des trucs moches dans les journaux
J'en ai marre, très très marre qu'on m'dise c'qui est laid ou ce qui est beau

J'veux partir
Redevenir l'homme préhisto
Avec rien sur sa peau
Jouer du tam tam tam tam tam

Au secours!
J'veux savoir où sont les filles bronzées en photo,
Au secours,
J'veux savoir où il fait beau, il fait toujours chaud

J'veux partir
Redevenir l'homme préhisto
Sans télé ni journaux
Jouer du tam tam tam tam tam

J'veux partir
Redevenir l'homme préhisto
Bye, bye moi vouloir
Jouer du tam tam tam tam

Eiffel Towers, scaffoldings and ten hours a day of slavery -
This is not a place for me.
Grey mornings on the pavement with jackhammers on top -
This is really not a place for me.
I'm tired, I'm tired of watching animals in zoos,
I'm tired, I'm tired of looking at the monuments and flags.

I want to leave,
To be a prehistoric man again,
With nothing on the skin,
And to play tam-tam-tam-tam-tam.

Aspirin, and blue paper napkins, and tablets against sleep -
This is not a life for me.
Vitamins, intravenous or the food supplements -
This is really not a life for me.
I'm tired, I'm tired of terrible things in the papers,
I'm tired, so-so tired of being told what is ugly and what is beautiful.

I want to leave,
To be a prehistoric man again,
With nothing on the skin,
And to play tam-tam-tam-tam-tam.

Help!
I want to know where the tanned girls from the photos are.
Help!
I want to know where that place is where it's nice and always hot.

I want to leave,
To be a prehistoric man again,
Without a TV or papers,
And to play tam-tam-tam-tam-tam.

I want to leave,
To be a prehistoric man again,
Bye-bye, this is me, wanting
To play tam-tam-tam-tam-tam.

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 "2x2", 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 left me startled. But to take our mind of 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 2x2 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. :-)