If anyone speaks the language, could they translate the title and credits of this video in the comments? I know nothing about it. But it is exceptional.
Variety performers Natalya and Oleg Kiryushkin present the act “The Meeting” to an audience at The Art Theatre. Thanks to Elizabet Mihailova for the translation.
Here, there and everywhere, the deepening green
Of forests: tart scent of resin in the air.
These never-ending pines bring on hypnosis.
Parallel lanes keep flickering to infinity.
Metallic tints corrode each flaking carapace.
x
We go in search of the most hidden ponds,
Far from all bright parasols, quite off the route
Of any tarmac cycle path; the sands
There, where the snake discards its skin,
Trod only by the Fairy Melusine.
x
Here, there and everywhere, each placid dune
Deepens our sleep with hints of the Sandman.
Breezes bend her mass to the never-ending
Curve of the ocean. Motherly ways
Of completing things amend each soft relapse.
x
We drift across her crown, our hardened feet
Engulfed by grains which give underneath us
Leaving ephemeral tracks: they simply
Vanish in an hour or so; restoring ribs
Where pine-cones read as nipples.
x
Here, there and everywhere, the breakers glint
And steepen ultramarine, splintering
Vague plantations into carbonated spume.
It seems amazing that a thing could make a perfect form
Simply by collapsing on itself.
x
We sink before its equidistant line.
Close up, the waves choose to hover
Before they come down. Our pleasure then
Beats many another – bravely being
Bowled about like puppies by their mother.
x
Here, there and everywhere, behind the dune,
By tracks where children cycle at the side
Of jogging mothers, everyday more lean,
The forest breezes murmur of the sea
While breeding pigeons croon for Melusine.
x
*
From Dancers in Daylight, published by Anvil Press back in 2003
I am very happy that the Greens have identified Zionism as racism, but appalled by the nay-sayers who are condemning this as a mis-step. Of course the Greens should condemn Zionism. It is the root cause of the evil which is destroying Palestine. It is certainly NOT a mis-step. I know. The older, Jewish side of my family were all naive Zionists. My grandfather was head of US loans for Israel, my great uncle was leader of the liberal party in Israel and insisted on proportional representation. A hideous mistake, this, for it led to coalitions controlled by extremist splinter groups. My Jewish father rejected Zionism outright. He was a socialist. Zionism is national socialism for Jews. True socialists sing the International. Nazis are national socialists. If you make a special case for one supposed race (which is a load of bollocks anyhow) you lurch straight into fascism. The so-called left and the Labour party should all wake up FAST and condemn Zionism as well. That the naysayers are suggesting that British people are just too stupid to understand the meaning of Zionism is grossly offensive. We need to get beyond denying the complexity of issues because people are supposedly too thick to understand anything but a soundbyte. Yes, there is naive Zionism with its wishful thinking that a democracy can be formed in a state founded on racism located by colonial decree in a country inhabited by people of another religion, and there is the violent Zionism of the Stern gang, but the fact of the matter is that the one inevitably leads to the other. Now the terrorist splinter groups control the government, the indigenous people are getting slaughtered, the sabra boys and girls are conditioned to embrace a manichaeism that denies humanity to the fellahin. The one-armed bandit elite of Miriam Adelson controls the USA and Zionism is heading us into World War Three in Iran. Labour, the Greens, the Tories and Reform, we all need to condemn Zionism as racism, and be very loud and clear about it.
The Greens would get my vote – except for the fact that they support the dictator Zelensky and his Nazi goons. Sign of deep political naivety that Zac P is unable to see that Zionists and Zelensky are on the same side.
Tango class conducted by Anthony Howell. 7 pm Tuesday nights at The Room, 33 Holcombe Road N17 9AS. Followed by a two hour practica – practice time.
This is a class that will begin with the basics for beginners and progress as people progress.
I do find Alastair Crooke to be one of the most perceptive critics of the idiocy which has gripped US, British and European elites.
Alastair Warren Crooke CMG, born 30 June 1949, is a former British diplomat, and is the founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum, an organisation that advocates for engagement between political Islam and the West. Previously he was a ranking figure in both British intelligence (MI6) and European Union diplomacy.
Crooke was born in Dún Laoghaire, Ireland, to Frederick Montague Warren and Shona Ann Thomson.His elder brother was Ian W T Crooke, who became an SAS officer, eventually commanding 23 Special Air Service Regiment. Crooke was brought up mostly in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).He was educated at Aiglon College in Switzerland and at the University of St. Andrews (1968–1972) in Scotland, from which he obtained an MA in moral philosophy and political economy.
Crooke started his career in London banking for a few years.
Crooke later worked for nearly 30 years in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) under diplomatic cover in Northern Ireland, South Africa, Cambodia, Colombia, Pakistan and the Middle East. His early work included helping provide weapons to jihadists fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan and assisting in the Northern Ireland peace process.
In 1997, he became a security adviser to the EU special envoy to the Middle East, and operating out of the British Embassy in Tel Aviv was involved in British attempts to draw Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian groups into the political process. He was involved in negotiations to end the Israeli army’s siege of Yasser Arafat‘s compound in Ramallah and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. He assisted the negotiation of several local truces between the Israelis and Palestinians during the early 2000s. Crooke had good contacts with the Israeli military and intelligence services.
He was a member of the Mitchell Committee into the causes of the Second Intifada in 2000.
In 2001, British ambassador to Israel Francis Cornish described him as “a person who worked with the security apparatuses of both sides. He went into action after they stopped trusting each other and developed a special skill to persuade them of the logic of things and to bridge the lack of confidence between them.” He had a central role in establishing a Hamas ceasefire in 2002.
More about him on Wikipedia.
Crooke is never hysterical, always balanced in his view, incredibly well informed, with all the necessary facts at his finger tips. In an insane world, he exemplifies sanity.
THE FALSE AND FAITHFUL GREEN
x
You no longer await me with a heart
Mean as a clock’s. Doesn’t matter if you broach
The misery or just stare it out. Hours remain,
Bristly, bleak, with branches that drub
Impulsively against the panes of your window,
High as it is, above two streets of cloud.
What’s left me is the slowness of a smile,
The dark sky of a dress, the rust-coloured
Velvet wrapping you up to the hair
Which melts around your shoulders, and that face of yours
Sunk as in a brook that hardly moves.
x
The flap of coarsely yellowed leaves…
Birds of soot. Other leaves
Chafe at the branches, fretful to slip off
In some entanglement: the false and faithful green
Of April, with an open sneer
Assured of its own flowering. You don’t flower.
Your days don’t sprout nor does one dream
Remain of our “once”… over there.
You have lost your child eyes, gone the tender hands
Reaching for my face which still evades me.
Left is the shame of writing notes in the diary now,
Or chucking out a yell into the void
Of that implausible heart which
Wrestles still with its own precarious time.
O MIEI DOLCI ANIMALI
x
Now that autumn spoils the hillside’s greenery,
Oh my darling beasts, once more
We listen, at the start of dusk, to all the final sorrows
Of the birds, feel the smoky plain’s allure
That leads us to its rendezvous
With the deep’s murmur, the odour
Of rain-drenched timber, odour of each den.
How lively it is among houses,
Amid men, my darling beasts…
This face that slowly rolls an eye,
This hand that gestures to a sky
Where thunder rumbles; these are yours,
My wolves, my burnt, my bloodied foxes.
Every hand is yours, each face.
You’ve taught me just how pointless
It has been – days washed away by
Relentless waters while some children’s song
Issues from the gardens – its hour
A long way from us though. Hardly even its shadow
In the air. Here is your voice – though I may guess
That maybe all of this has never happened.
AGRIGENTO’S ROAD
x
That wind persists which I recall obliquely afire in the manes
Of racing horses viewed from afar; wind that stains and gnaws
At the sandstone hearts of these lugubrious columns
Flung down on the grass. Ancient soul, grey with rancour,
Turn to that wind, inhale the delicate scent of moss
Coating the giants horizontal to the heavens here.
x
In the space still left to what remains, how alone they are!
This is all the more poignant should you hear the detonations
From the distant sea which Hesperus already streaks with dawn.
Sadly the Jew’s harp twangs in the carter’s mouth as we
Make slow progress up the slope cleansed by the light of the moon
While the Saracen olive boughs continue with their murmuring.
Salvatore Quasimodo
I guess it was in 1966 that Salvatore Quasimodo invited me for tea in his apartment in Milan. I was twenty-one, had left the ballet suffering from a broken heart, my love unrequited. An Italian boy who had been on an exchange at Leighton Park, the school I went to before the Royal Ballet School, had welcomed me to his home in Mantua, and when we visited Madrid had found the poet’s number, and so my visit came about. I was already an admirer of Quasimodo’s hermetic, abstruse yet mysteriously compelling verse, and I appreciated its subtle musicality. The renowned poet was affable, and, as I recall, extremely proud of his art collection, and of the well-known artists who had made sketches of him. I returned rejuvenated from Italy, and thus began my career as a poet.
“A piano in the bushes” is a Russian expression for an obviously prearranged or implausible coincidence presented as if it happened by chance—especially a convenient plot device that suddenly helps the characters.
Example: A character needs to escape, and suddenly there’s a working helicopter hidden nearby. That’s “a piano in the bushes.”
Sergey Lavrov used this phrase when just recently interviewed by Judge Napolitano. Parts one and two are available on his channel.
***
Charlie Chaplin was once questioned about an event in a movie – Surely that is too much of a coincidence! Charlie replied, It is a coincidence, but does it help resolve the story? No, his interlocuter replied, it makes it far more complicated. Oh, then that’s ok, said Charlie. I don’t mind coincidence. I can’t stand convenience.
***
Pithy, eloquent, absolutely to the point. Lavrov is the greatest diplomat of our time.
Check YouTube for Part 2 of this formidable interview.
Grey Suit Editions was originally a magazine on VHS videotape. This was back in the nineties. Years later, the British Film Institute helped us to digitise all thirteen hours of video material – featuring performance art, poets reading, experimental film and installation.
Here is a link to the catalogue.
Google keeps flagging this as unsafe which is bullshit. It is mainly on my vimeo.
Grey Suit Editions also has a website for the books it publishes.
Tango Schumann not only danced tango to classical music, we also enjoyed dancing to jazz, and this was a performance Lindi De Angelis and I did in Brighton – back in 2010.
Nick Wood – formerly Lecturer at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama gave a talk today – Anthony Howell: the world turned upside down
In the conference on Critical Costume 2026 at The London College of Fashion
An international conference and exhibition
Co-convened by Donatella Barbieri, Jessica Bugg, Nadia Malik
London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London
9 – 11 September 2026
With wonderful talks by other speakers including Maelisa Singer and Phoenix Ariel Thomas.
I felt honoured to be part of this!
