Recent Discoveries

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepak_takraw
http://sorry.coryarcangel.com/

And the Men by Tony Hoagland

And The Men

want back in:
all the Dougs and the Michaels, the Darnells, the Erics and Josés,
they're standing by the off-ramp of the interstate
holding up cardboard signs that say WILL WORK FOR RELATIONSHIP.

Their love-mobiles are rusty.
Their Shaggin' Wagons are up on cinderblocks.
They're reading self-help books and practicing abstinence,
taking out Personals ads that say
"Good listener would like to meet lesbian ladies,
for purposes of friendship only."

In short, they've changed their minds, the men:
they want another shot at the collaborative enterprise.
Want to do fifty-fifty housework and childcare;
They want commitment renewal weekends and couples therapy.

Because being a man was finally too sad—
In spite of the perks, the lifetime membership benefits.
And it got old,
telling the joke about the hooker and the priest

at the company barbeque, praising the vintage of the beer and
punching the shoulders of a bud
in a little overflow of homosocial bonhomie—
Always holding the fear inside
like a tipsy glass of water—

Now they're ready to talk, really talk about their feelings,
in fact they're ready to make you sick with revelations of
their vulnerability—
A pool of testosterone is spreading from around their feet,
it's draining out of them like radiator fluid,
like history, like an experiment that failed.

So here they come on their hands and knees, the men:
Here they come. They're really beaten. No tricks this time.
No fine print.
Please, they're begging you. Look out.

Communism as a Cargo Cult

"Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine firmly supports a simple but shocking theory of Communism: It was the largest cargo cult the world has ever seen. Communist revolutionaries were great at seizing power, but if power were their sole aim, the horror would have ended once they were firmly in charge. Alas, the Communists saw absolute power as a mere stepping stone to their true goal: Mimicking a few random characteristics of advanced economies, no matter how many lives it cost."

Read the rest at http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/02/commie_cargo_cu.html

The Cry of the Menstruating Female Poplars

Due to a poorly planned city beautification project in the 1930s, there are too many female poplars and too few males in Moscow. Every May-June, the unwilling spinsters issue a collective cry for help, a summer blizzard of unfertilized seeds. "Give us men or cut us down." Actually, it's even worse than that, because the window during which male companionship would be useful has already passed. It's not a cry for help, then, but a lament that for the 60th year running it didn't arrive in time. Check this out for more on the poplars.



The heat, the smoke, the cold, the power, the iron water — this city goes from calamity to natural calamity. It's like we're at plague 5 of 10, and the Almighty still can't get anyone's attention, and the Jews have mistaken their chains for fashionable bracelets.

From “What the Men Talk about When the Women Leave the Room”

by Dionisio D. Martinez

Stieglitz

The room itself. The women. The absence of women
in the room. What the absence of women does
to a room. The sound of all those women getting

up and leaving; all of them at once, like wild
birds or hunger. How the world can be conquered
if only … Just don’t tell the women.

What the absence of women will do to men
eventually. Fears. Men talk about fears, bad
dreams, women leaving, the room swelling with

the absence of women. Bad dreams have a way
of walking in the room when the women leave.
Each dream is an afterimage of a woman leaving.

In What is Now Belarus

Several years ago there was an exhibition of Russian art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. It spanned the entire length of Russian history and took up the entire main hall of the museum. I remember they had this one exhibit called "The Man Who Flew Into Space". It told the story of a man who'd built a device and propelled himself into space. The artist, Ilya Kabakov, 'recreated' the man's tiny Russian apartment, its walls covered with Soviet propaganda posters and sketches of space device, an impossibly simple spring-loaded slingshot which you see suspended from the ceiling. Shards of drywall are strewn about the room and there's a hole in the ceiling through which where the man presumably exited on his way to space. I took the whole piece to represent the lengths that this man would go to escape the Soviet Union, outer space being the ultimate free space (ironic that the Soviets pioneered it).

The only reason I mention this is because I noticed that Minskovites have a fascination with spaceflight, 1960s style, and also happen to live in what is often called 'the last dictatorship in Europe'. Coincidence? I won't overplay my hand; I'm basing this entirely off the preponderance of space-themed nightclubs (escape via euro-trash?) and my hotel, the 'Orbita', an escape for any Belorussian woman who managed to pick up a foreigner there (I spent an hour talking to an Australian and his not-quite-mailorder bride). But my point is not that Minskovites love spacetravel more than potatoes (impossible, I think), but that because they have the bare necessities of life, and do not face anything like the Great Terror of the 1930s, Belorussians' perceive their lack of freedom as irksome and boring more than oppressive. The four Belorussians I talked with in any depth freely criticized Lukashenko's regime and the command economy and speculated on the future. My cab driver to the train station complained that his wife would be lucky to make $300/month as a secretary, but between the two of them they would get by. A local museum director couldn't find the words (in Russian or English) to describe how frustrating it was to get through the red tape so that she could add an addition onto her museum. Everybody else seemed to be buckling down, waiting out the Lukashenko regime in the hope of better days. Irked and bored people don't overthrow governments. It will have to get a lot worse before things change.

What Remains of Jewish Vilnius

Photo 1: The only remaining synagogue (still functions).
Photo 2: The heart of the small Jewish ghetto (there was a larger one).