Yes, enough Greeks for a bit, back to the Persians: Faren Taghizadeh – whose instagram account had introduced me to the shivering quills and eyelash-batting masks of Behnaz Farahi – has also shared the following short but bracing book review from performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon, whose findings were all completely new to me despite my previous professional toying with both angels and moustaches...
Alok's instagram is here, and if you're looking for some ungendered goodies of your own to put under the tree, my friends from the London Dungeon Charlotte and Nav have moved to Folkstone and opened this fantastic shop.
Helen, whose abduction famously precipitated the Trojan War, was one two daughters born to the mortal Leda after Zeus came onto her in the form of a swan. This heritage is subtly alluded to by the feathers round Helen's neck in the above still from Troy: Fall of a City, and less subtly alluded to in this illustration from Larry Gonick's far less trashy Cartoon History of the Universe:
One thing I didn't know about Helen though until I read the Odyssey, was that she had known all along about the Greeks' plans to conquer her adopted city with an army hidden in a huge wooden horse. According to her account to Odysseus' son Telemachus a decade later, she had bumped into Odysseus when he sneaked into Troy disguised as a beggar, immediately recognised him, gave him a
bath and then, somehow, managed to get him
to tell her the whole plan. But she let him go and didn't tell anyone because
she was sick of this now ten-year-long siege and just wanted to be taken back to Greece. Wait, I thought, why had I not heard his before? Was this the normal story? If this was the case, why didn't Helen just sneak out of Troy
with Odysseus and end the war there? Happily I was able to ask Natalie Haynes all this, and here is Natalie's reply:
"Ten
points for reading the Odyssey, but you lose a point for thinking
there is any such thing as the normal story. So, net gain: nine
points... The version of Helen in the Odyssey does say/do that (there is
a much madder bit, at least to my eyes, in some versions where, when
the Trojan Horse is found and the Greek soldiers are suspected of being
inside, Helen does a sort of Mike Yarwood thing and impersonates the
voices of the wives of the Greeks. She's so convincing she reduces
several horse occupants to tears... HOW MAD IS THAT?) I think the
important thing to bear in mind with Helen is that you can't necessarily
believe what she says - I think she probably did want to go back to
Greece, but the insult of her kidnap/abduction/adultery wouldn't be
removed if she just snuck off with Odysseus - the Greeks would still
want revenge on Paris and they'd still want to loot Troy, which is the
only reason a lot of them are there... So she might as well wait it out
in the city than in the Greek camp. But that's just my reading... Also,
Homer's Helen is a real plaything of the gods, esp Aphrodite, so she may
not have had the option of bailing with Odysseus - Aphrodite threatens
her quite pointedly in Iliad 3, when she says she's not that into Paris
anymore..."
So there you go! I now need to find out exactly what Helen did that made Odysseus talk. Might it have been her Mike Yarwood bit? If you have any mythology-based questions of your own, you can ask Natalie here.
How many things can YOU name that have nothing to do with either horses or Troy?
I've finally started reading The Odyssey, in the translation by Emily Wilson that I was hearing such great things about, and it's terribly good. I haven't met the Cyclops yet. I'm only on Book Five, so I haven't even met Odysseus, but I'm also glancing at the eighteenth-century translation by Alexander Pope to compare accounts, and I feel you're missing out if you've only read Pope. He makes no mention, for example, of Calliope's island being covered in celery.
Another account I'd like to draw readers' attention to however – in addition to the three film adaptations mentioned back in October - is this hour-long radio Odyssey penned by my landlord David Reed for his gang "The Penny
Dreadfuls", all of whose comedies have now been put online for ever, it seems. In allowing himself to dwell on the more absurd qualities of Odysseus'
heroism, David's adaptation unwittingly, but beautifully, illustrates
not only the many niggling questions Natalie Haynes would later let Odysseus'
wife Penelope voice in A Thousand Ships, but also Emily Wilson's reasons for working on her own translation. Robert Webb plays Odysseus in this one, and Elpenor - the crew member he meets as a ghost in Hades whom he hadn't even realised was dead - sounds pleasingly like Jim Howick's Pat from Ghosts. Finely focused comic adaptations rather than spoofs – although they spoof the clichés of adaptation very well – I recommend the whole "Penny Dreadfuls" oeuvre. They might make you cleverer. They make me miss writing.
Honestly, I was just curious what people's first instinct is when putting on a glove puppet – I'm talking about the Emu-like variety, whose muzzle requires a whole hand, not the Sooty-like, arm-waving variety – because mine has always been to have the puppet turn towards me first of all, then face the front and open its mouth like it's going "wow", and I wondered if this was a universal instinct, or if some people immediately went crazy and started chewing the air with it, and what might this say about people, so I was looking for an image, or short clip, to accompany this question, and I had vague memory of a puppet show called Pipkins, whose unorthodox look might fit the bill, and I looked it up and found this, but it is cursed, so do not watch it. The Ancient Greeks had a word with no English equivalent, meaning crime, or sin, or pollution or stain, but I can't remember what is, just please do not watch this. Please do – if you like – post in the comments what your first instinct is when donning a beaked glove puppet, because I'm genuinely interested. But please do not ask where this show is meant to take place, or in what, or who furnished whatever it is, or what lesson it's trying to teach, or why Hartley Hare has those Donald Trump reverse eye shadows, or what... or what... or what the puppets are even made of... because that would mean you had watched the video. And you must not watch the video.
What is this? Is this "Folk Horror"?
But it's in a city. Is it in a city?
Don't answer. Don't watch it.
(Post Script: Once my spirit had recovered, I researched the career of long-suffering presenter Wayne Laryea, and learnt he hosted another kid's show called Zig Zag which I also vaguely remember. I looked that up, but the first clip I found was from a... Canadian?... show with the same name, which is, remarkably, even more mind-scouringly whatever-that-Greek-word-means than Pipkins. So PLEASE just answer the nice question about puppets and DO NOT WATCH THIS EITHER!)
Basically, what these depictions of the blinding of Polyphemus prove is that it's hard to paint a cyclops from the side. Representing the physical world in two dimensions, like impersonating Christopher Walken, is something we can only to do it once we've seen how someone else does it, and at the time these vases were painted, 27 hundred odd years ago, clearly nobody had yet drawn someone from the front. I'd love to know what anxiety, if any, was felt by the artists who had to depict a famously one-eyed creature under these restrictions. Once the first Cyclops had been attempted, was the heat off, the precedent set? I can't find out which of these vases was the first though, nor whether the artists had seen each other's work, or simply decided independently to stop bothering.
Gorgons were painted face on! And they date from as far back as the vases! So artists did know how to paint a face from the front. But only if it belonged to a gorgon? How did that work? And is this actually a face seen from the front? Or is it...? Let me just cover up one half with my hand... Is it just two profiles stuck together?
I wonder if the ancient Greeks had fun making these with a mirror.
A few years before Disney's chastely fleshless skullbot, the LA-based Iranian artist Behnaz Farahi designed a less humanoid but also far sexier eye-contact-responsive item called "The Caress of the Gaze". It was admittedly designed to be worn by probably quite a sexy human. Most fashion is. According to this article, a camera beneath the top's mesh of quills registers not only whether or not the model is being looked at, but also the gender of the onlooker, and potentially even their age, possibly to stop the piece responding too sexily. Seduction doesn't seem to be the point of the piece however, so much as the creation of an article of clothing that can respond involuntarily to its wearer's environment, both physical and social, like hairs rising on a second skin. This is almost the exact opposite of the intention behind Farahi's most recent piece, and the piece that introduced me to her:
Taking its title from an article by Giyatri Spivak, "Can The Subaltern Speak?" is a work about not being looked at. The Barandi masks that inspired it were said to have been worn as a protest against Portuguese colonists. Its eyelashes flutter not in response to the male gaze, but to communicate in a secret language, like the American soldier who blinked TORTURE in morse code while filmed hostage in Viet Nam. As Farahi herself explains however, it is not in fact the wearers of these masks who will be communicating with each other in this language, but the masks...
The video on Behnaz Farahi below goes into a little more detail about "The Caress of the Gaze" mentioned in the previous post, and also touches on her work as an architect. This is what reminded me how easily I can be fooled into misdiagnosing intelligent life. The Mummenschanzy juddering of "Aurora"'s reactive ceiling panels may not remind me of anything alive specifically, but they do remind me of puppets, and my brain still expects puppets to have a puppeteer. In the introduction to the second term
of Gemma Brockis' online university's History of the Kiss (which now has its own site), snogging's origin is traced back 540
million years, to the deuterostome Saccorhytus Coronarius who let its spittle drift from tiny mouth to tiny mouth in the ocean. Even if there never had been such a thing as puppets, seeing any object react to you would probably still read as a sign of Life, regardless of how little Life actually reacts to you.
Isn't it great what you can do with a 3-D printer?
