The next outing for the gesamtkunstwerk that is our live version with audiovisual accompaniment of Three Men is January 18th at the Electric Kool Aid Cabaret of the Spoken Word held at Blu(what used to be Blaises) in Middlesbrough. More details soon.
My colleagues of the underground, Andy Croft and Paul Summers, are currently back in Moscow contacting translators and publishers for the next stage of the Myetro project: its possible appearance in Russian. Either that or they've gone to the Canary Islands and haven't tweeted me.
They've chosen to go at a time when the weather in the North East so closely resembles that of Moscow (give or take 10 degrees) that they don't have to change their outfits. (It's not clear that Andy actually can change out of that bloody jacket.)
No doubt we'll have news on this latest trip soon enough or indeed slightly later. In the meantime, the stubborn refusal of the squirrel meme to hibernate means that the stanza on the possibly-not-entirely-real station for the possibly-not entirely-there 'Squirrel Hills' demanded a successor:
Bronze panels show in Belichiy Gory
the war between the Greys and Reds --
Yeltsin's high station tells the story
that left ten million squirrels dead.
One side were Celto-Scythian rebels,
the others sleepless, alien devils:
Prince Nutkin, Tuftsky, Sasha Cheeks,
Tsar Timfy Tiptoes -- through these peaks
from birch-top fought to floor of forest,
while Greys made famine from Red's glut,
for every tree, each twig, each nut.
Why was this iconised by Boris?
While oligarchic fat cats feast,
democracy is for the beasts.
As real as Hollywood’s Ninotchka,
this station is an empty hoard
of bottles drunk by a red belochka –
stare all you want, they’ll still stay blurred.
A six foot squirrel, stark and raving
that none can see but those, half-shaven,
half-drunk, who wake in hotel rooms,
in snowdrifts, metros, Lenin’s tomb.
It tells you fables from an era
when men pissed vodka, wives shat eggs
and flies had four delicious legs.
It whispers, ‘You’re the true chimera,
a beast that thinks he knows he thinks?
No wonder wanderers turn to drink!’
Sunday, 5 December 2010
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