Death and Taxes describes the latest development in exhibition art works.
Sleeping Beauties†in heavy make-up and long white nightgowns are lying on beds at National Art Museum of Ukraine, waiting to be kissed by the general public. Each girl has signed a contract with artist Taras Polataiko, promising to marry any man who can open her eyes with just a kiss.
And any unmarried male suitor over the age of 18 who comes to view the exhibit has to sign a similar contract: if the Sleeping Beauty opens her eyes during the kiss, he’ll be her husband.
While installations involving real people are always weird, this one is something special: How does one open a sleeping person’s eyes with a kiss without actually prying her eyelids open with his mouth?
One of the beauties explains: “If it’s my true love, I will feel it on an intuitive level. Secondly, if I don’t feel it, I won’t open my eyes. Anything can happen in life. And suddenly it’s fate. What if it’s the only way I’ll meet my soul mate?†Which means the kisses will be mouth-to-mouth, and she’ll be choosing a husband based entirely on his kissing skills.
St. Clement Cave Monastery, Inkerman, Crimea, Ukraine (click on picture for larger image)
I usually consider myself terribly well-informed, but every now and then along comes some glimpse of new oceans, new continents, entire new worlds of history and detailed information.
A Facebook acquaintance from the Czech Republic posted this picture of the Cave Monastery of St. Clement at Inkerman in the Crimea, which allegedly held the relics of the martyred 4th Pope until they were transferred elsewhere by Sts. Cyril & Methodius.
At BoingBoing, David Pescovitz posts a theory tracing the origin of abrasive and deprecatory Jewish humor, and the characteristic attitude of the City of New York, to a disastrous event of the 17th century.
According to UC Berkeley theater arts professor Mel Gordon — author of Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman and Voluptuous Panic — it goes back hundreds of years before the Borscht Belt. Gordon argues that the Badkhn, a jester-like comedian figure common at weddings and Purim celebrations in East European shtetls, was the father of what we know as Jewish humor today. The Badkhn act was only one of many styles of Jewish comedy popular in the shtetls. Then, in the mid-17th century, 100,000 Jews in Ukraine were killed in a pogrom carried out by Cossacks. The ultraorthodox Rabbis of Poland and Ukraine decided that the pogroms were a punishment from God and that Jews should lead stricter lives and not have as much fun. So comedy acts had to go. But on July 3, 1661, the Badkhn was given a special exemption. From the Jerusalem Post:
…A rabbi asked his colleagues, what about the badkhn? He’s not really funny, the rabbi said. In fact, he’s abusive.
The elders agreed, and the badkhn was exempted from the ban — he wasn’t a merrymaker and wasn’t encouraging levity. And that’s how the badkhn became the only Jewish comic permitted in the shtetls, Gordon says, and how his particular brand of sarcastic, bleak humor set the tone for what we know today as Jewish comedy. Before the 1660s, the badkhn was the least popular Jewish entertainer – now he was the sole survivor.
“Jewish humor used to be the same as that of the host country,†Gordon said. “Now it began to deviate from mainstream European humor. It became more aggressive, meaner. All of Jewish humor changed…”
Little remains of the badkhn today outside Chasidic communities, where they are the stars of the yearly Purim spiels. When Gordon lived in New York in the 1980s, he would take journalists to Chasidic synagogues in Brooklyn every spring to witness these raucous celebrations.
But the badkhn’s influence is still felt in mainstream culture, Gordon says, from the Borsch Belt humor of the 1920s and ‘30s, to contemporary Italian and African-American comedians who trade in barbed insults and self-deprecation.
“Even today, almost all Jewish entertainers have badkhn humor,” Gordon said. “Sarah Silverman is completely badkhn.
24-year-old Kseniya Simonova moved the audience of the Ukraine’s Got Talent (Україна має талант) television program to tears with her sand painting depicting the impact of the German Invasion during WWII on the lives of ordinary Ukrainians. She won the competition, and the YouTube video of her performance has attracted more than 2 million viewers.
European Union Commisioner, and Vice President, Günther Verheugen, in response to a journalist’s question about the future of the European Union, dismissed the aspirations of Ukraine (the largest segment of the Partitioned former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose Western region, Galicia, had been part of Austro-Hungary in the 19th century), subsequent to her liberation, to inclusion in the community of Eropean nations, saying, “In twenty years all European states will be members of the EU, with the exception of the successor states to the Soviet Union that are not yet part of the EU today.”
Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovyh, whose novel, Twelve Rings was recently translated into German, reacted with pain and indignation in his acceptance speech for this year’s Leipzig Book Prize:
In December 2004, in that miraculous moment between the completion of our Orange Revolution and the repeated round of presidential elections, I was offered the opportunity to address the members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. The essence of my speech was a plea to the parliament and the European community at large to help a certain cursed country save itself. I told them roughly what I was hoping to hear: that Europe was waiting for us, that it couldn’t do without us, that Europe would not be able to realize itself fully without Ukraine. Now it is finally clear that I was asking for too much.
Since then, fifteen months have passed and I have spent two thirds of this time among you. That is – forgive my sarcasm – in Europe. During this time I gave dozens of interviews, agreed to participate in dozens of debates, round tables and even more literary readings. In these public appearances I became the re-broadcaster of a single idea which wasn’t really that absurd – the idea that we too are in Europe. These five words are a quotation, first formulated at the end of the nineteenth century, one hundred and ten years ago. With these words the writer, essayist, and translator Ivan Franko wanted to draw the attention of thinking Europeans to the intolerably marginalized, outsider position of the Ukrainians of Galicia and of the Ukrainians generally. This is a rather painful statement, just listen to it: We too are in Europe. A lonesome call in the dark.
So, one hundred and ten years have passed, and the need to re-broadcast this slogan is still there; in fact, it has become greater. I tried to take every opportunity to talk about it, because your assistance to this cursed country in whose language I write and explain myself is of vital importance. And this assistance need not be fantastically difficult, it consists merely of one thing: not to say things that kill hope.
