The market, Salonica

The market, Salonica
The market, Salonica

Tuesday 26 November 2013

More strange things, or Penis Riot’s Biggest Hits

It’ll be on the web.  Most of my ‘jokes’ are, well before I post them.  After seeing the recent headline Artist nails himself to Red Square, another hack like me must have read about the artist’s arrest, thought up Criminal nails himself and posted it before I did.
 
Pyotr Pavlensky nailed himself through the scrotum.  It’s not just another cock and ball story.  One part of Red Square has earned its name.  We saw the photos.  Almost.  In one shot, kind police have put a blanket over the naked Pyotr.  In another, some thoughtful editor has cut off, so to speak, the offending organs.  Genitals with nails in them might get us all into a mess.  The borders of good taste need to be defended.
 
PP, an artist, said his "fixation" was a metaphor for apathy in Russia.  Now that’s a metaphor.  His balls just sat there and let it happenHe should have got a medal.  Instead, they carried him off to jail.  A fine name for an edgy boy band: Penis Riot.  Say hello to Pussy while you’re there.
 
Here’s the literal truth.  One of you will point it out anyway.  To say the criminal ‘nailed’ himself, that is, arrested himself, doesn’t make sense. To begin with, in this case no crime was committed before he literally nailed himself.  Ergo, no criminal, ergo, no arrest.  The artist only became a criminal once he had nailed himself in the cobblers. Cobbles that should read.  Who copy-edited this?  The police don’t normally arrest people before a crime has been committed, not this sort of crime.  He wasn’t plotting an attack on the Kremlin, not with a hammer.  And you can’t arrest yourself, can you?  Civic-minded criminals just hand themselves in – which brings me to my next pun.
 
The hammer and no sickle affair isn’t the only embarrassment of late for those whose job it is to handle extremities.  The press have taken up another artist and his physical integrity, Karipbek Kuyukov, and some different dangly things.  He was born without arms.  He was also denied a visa to enter the UK.

Handy publicity for the government, especially now that they’ve approved the building of a nuclear power station.  In the old Soviet Union, the Kuyukovs lived next to the main nuclear testing ground.  Karipbek was due to attend an anti-nuclear conference in Scotland.  After twenty years of campaigning, he must be an old hand at such events.

The excuse from the British Consulate in Istanbul, where he handed in his visa application: his “biometrics were of poor quality.”  Fingerprints blurred again?  Someone there needs glasses, because he made it clear on the form that he hasn’t got hands.  Just as well our failed visa applicant was not caught sneaking in through Dover, hanging on, somehow, beneath a lorry.  The bobbies wouldn’t have known where to slap the cuffs.  ’E looks ’armless to me.  (It must be on the net.  Let me know.)

Kuyukov holds the brush between his toes.  He also employs his mouth.  He is very skilled.  Most people use a hand if they are able.  But to judge from their work, a number of fully-equipped artists put their paintbrush somewhere else altogether.  I shouldn’t comment, though.  I don’t know enough about art.

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