Credit Cruncher Joke of The Day

Q:
What are the fundamental differences in the parlous state of the finances of Iceland and Ireland?

A:
One letter and about six months.

REALLY dirrrrrrrty gurrrls!!!

*** This email has been sent from the MEDIA ARTS AND DANCE email forum. To respond to all subscribers email MEDIA-ARTS-AND-DANCE@JISCMAIL.AC.UK. ***

Dear All

We are happy to announce that burlesque theatre practitioner and academic,
Gwendoline Lamour will be presenting the second keynote at this year's
postgraduate conference 'Journeys Across Media' (University of Reading). Her
paper will be on 'Romanticizing the Female Form'. More information on Ms
Lamour's performances can be found at: www.gwendolinelamour.com/

For more information on the conference (17 April 2009) feel free to visit
the University's website at:
http://www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/pg-research/ftt-pgrjam.asp

Kindest regards

Tim Vermeulen, Harper Ray and Reina-Marie Loader

"Miss Soapy T*t-Wa*k gets an Ology"

Far from "Romanticing the Female Form" - Burlesque always was and to the best of my knowledge in its 21st century Lap-Dancing incarnation, still is an amateur divertissement "entertainment" provided by whores for johns visiting knocking shops while they decided which sex slave to schtup.

I am not entirely sure which part of their "Form", 13 and 14 year old Victorian and latterly, often under-aged eastern European and Oriental prostitutes, will find quite so "Romantic" as they are being pawed by dishevelled and occasionally drunken eighteen stone men smelling of yesterday's kebab and week-old underwear.


Perhaps they will get to enlighten us when they attend the above brilliantly thought-through Conference. If they ask nicely enough, their pimps will probably be entirely happy to sponsor their attendance, in order to give us their view on the subject.



Maybe Gwendoline Tushylush and her silken ilk will bring us back their breathless and death-defying reports from the field?

Burlesque in its current form, is a dressing-up hobby, a lacy-veiled pretext for wobbly and untrained Trustafarian Fionas and Arabellas to stumble around in fans and fetish pumps, getting their tits and bits out for grinning City Boys in artfully designed retro-bordellos from Hoxton to Ladbroke Grove.



Let's face it, only these types and furtive c-list TV presentas can afford the entry and bar prices in these monumentally misguided forays into infantile degeneracy. Colour, movement, fur coats and no-knickers, - the perfect antidote for ex- junk-bond salesmen, week-end fetishists and the terminally spoilt wall-eyed children of Rock Stars and Advertising tycoons.

In isolation, what the spawn of Sodom and Gomorrah do of a night-time really could not matter less.
However, notwithstanding a terrifying lack of associative thinking, dignifiying Burlesque with publically funded academic legitimacy of any description, borders on the morally bankcrupt.

For Burlesque proudly to be presented as a pukka extension of Performance Art,pace Gogol Bordello, Shunt et al - whilst demonstrating no shortage of chutzpah, betrays the level of ingenuousness and lack of intellectual rigour usually accorded people who become musicians because they think there is money in it or those who enter politics in the belief they can change things.

There is something not quite nice about being invited to attend a scholarly dissertation on "Burlyscew" be it ever so post-modern and ironic, while thousands of women a day are continuing to be impregnated by HIV positive partners and millions more starve in Africa.

Perhaps it might be a fun and far more spontaneous alternative to just cut to the chase and actually get to live the Experience of Burlesque by running around the conference hall knocking over chairs, spilling vodka and chanting - Get Yer Charlies Out Darlin!

Art - v-mammon - the debate rages

The prevalent evaluation and co-option of the arts as predominantly a series of commercial considerations is probably the single most debilitating influence on genuine creativity in the UK, actually throughout the world at the moment.

Certainly it cannot have failed to escape the notice of anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the history of art that wealth, patronage and the Fine-Arts-to-Order market have usually gone hand in hand. There's nothing like a Divine-Royal Charter

The fundamental difference was that the Medicis, the Borghias et al were still believers in, or at least occasionally intimidated by, a hazy notion of "God".
They supported artists with vision, years of training discipline, an ongoing drive to continually develop their talents and a sense of investment in the temporal to the greater glory of the spiritual, as a means by which they might help get their Patrons around Christ's severe admonishment concerning, rich men, eyes of needles, ease, camels and getting into heaven.

One could ask whether the faux-spiritual was a better motivation than the current predominantly dreadful Art the Super-rich now patronise as a hedge investment against the day their usual incomes from Girls, Guns, Drugs and dodgy Siberian resource pipelines dry up. Not much has changed since the Doge's day.

The question is whether patronage inspires great art, or whether great art, as an extension of the idea of the Divine, inspires the necessary patronage to support its creation?

In fact neither matters, as long as the common denominator is great art, rather than the ongoing and relentlessly overhyped High Value Fast Moving Consumer Goods which currently pass for meaningful and important in a Serotaesque sort of a way.

Charles Saatchi is an advertising man. His stock-in-trade is edgy, conceptual, tax-deductible throwaway storyboards and design resources for client pitch purposes. Much of what he now passes off as art has been hithertofore used in the flogging of oven-chips, mars bars, sanitary towels and the other useless consumptive detritus that his dreadful little business is engaged in forcing on us Droolers, Toilers and Couch-surfers of the world.

Using his high-priced help in marketing black-arts for perceptual infiltration and manipulation, artifically to inflate the inherent values of this mostly inconsequential conceptual "stuff" to the status of importance and value by giving it a name "Young British Art". By further sticking it on pedestals in galleries shows chutzpah and a remarkable gift for stealing the product of cess-pits and selling it back as soap.

Art's funding equations will never balance. Making good art is not easy. It can't be, by definition.

Perhaps, however, once we claw our way out of the looming depression, there will result in a far more positive Artistic legacy than we ever imagined. Less market and more ideas driven.
One in which only the committed and truly inspired will survive.

In the final analysis, and with a nod to Mr Darwin's bi-centennial, on the basis of natural selection this might be good for "the arts" of every genetic strain and disposition.

PEE PEE DUCKIE, POO-POO daahhhling and the REALLY DIRRRRRTY GIRRRRLS- THE PEE-PEE, POO-POO CLUB GOES MAINSTREAM

http://www.duckie.co.uk/


Just wanted to draw the attention to the Arts Council England logo in the bottom right hand corner.
The Amateurs nite programme (FLIER as above) funded by this august organisation is marvellous darling, simply marvellous, but WAIT til you catch the real professionals' performances.

I think the highlight may be the woman who shoves a plastic funnel into her anus and gives herself an enema as the finale of her show, but no, come to think of it the stripping Person of Diminished Stature comes close, or maybe.....no I've got it!! The Trann, er Person of Indeterminate Gender, whose entire act consists of punching holes in a door with a hammer and then pissing onto the audience through the holes.

Brilliant, and we all thought the Arts were dying..........

Check out the video on their site (ADDRESS ABOVE) and admire the contemporary dance sections. Now that's what we call inclusivity.
There is a whisper that the Royal Ballet Company is thinking of lending a couple of artists for forthcoming shows since they and DUCKIE share quite a number of patrons within their audience constituency.

Rather than funding this farrago ( we have actually been to one of their Burlesque nights and got sprayed by someone whose act consisted of absorbing the contents of a washing up bowl of soapy water and blowing them over the audience from her vagina - and that one of the less hard-core acts) would it have not made more sense for the ACE to provide further, broader, performance opportunities for the flower of British contemporary dance in some kind of context relevant to the development of dance and dance audiences in the UK - rather than the moist gratification of a coterie of scatologically infantile degenerates clearly all suffering from chronically ineffective toilet training habits.

It would seem that choreographers are now being forced to throw their lot in with amateur nite at the Pee Pee, Poo-Poo Club in their desperation to get their work seen.

Unless we are all VERY careful, it is going to become increasingly difficult to distinguish between any of the creative output of UKplc.