An American friend of mine told me on a recent visit to Moscow that sure, I can marry a Russian man, “as long as [I] know what [I'm] doing.”

It wasn’t an ill-intentioned comment, but it threw me off-guard. I had already heard from plenty of Western expats that while Western men were entitled to date whoever they choose, Western women dating Russian men, let alone MARRYING them, “mostly isn’t done.”

“How dull,” I thought. “These people are missing out.”

The knowledge that such statements about Russian men are also freaking offensive came later. I always try to put off offense for as long as possible. After all, it doesn’t agree with me. I’m a fan of generalizations – especially darkly humorous ones. I use them all the time!

And yet, the same Westerners who would undoubtedly think it horrible to say something like, “And don’t ever marry a black dude – he’ll probably turn out to be a crack dealer,” have no problem saying what basically amounts to as the same thing when it comes to Slavic men, Russian men in particular.

Some of this stems from a familiar trope – the idea that there are these women out there who must, at all costs, be rescued by enlightened Westerners from their own husbands and boyfriends. Textbooks have been written on the subject. Anyone interested in the topic is probably better off reading one of those, as opposed to this column.

Then, there is pop culture. While the image of the Russian woman has been popularized in all sorts ways – many of them suggesting that she is an object of desire, even if it’s a dangerous desire (just look at the elaborate dance the media has done around Anna Chapman) – Russian dudes are mostly portrayed as thugs. Well, Viggo Mortensen in “Eastern Promises” was a pretty fine thug. But then again, nobody could seriously confuse Viggo for an actual Russian (could they?).

But then there is also the fact that in many ways, Russian men are simply in their element in Russia, in a way that most Western dudes aren’t. They aren’t seen as mouldable, unlike Russian women. If you wind up marrying one of them, you’re marrying more than just an individual – in the eyes of your Western friends, you’re marrying a system, an entire way of life. You might as well be chaining yourself to the Kremlin Wall.

I’m too unsettled to get married at the moment, but I also have a father. Who is half Russian and half Ukrainian. He is a big, blue-eyed man. When I’m back home, the two of us have vodka shots with lunch. We go out for shashlik together. When we’re in one of our collective mournful moods and sitting on the balcony of our apartment in Kiev, we sing a song about a black raven circling over a warrior.

I love my father. And I knew exactly “what I was getting into” when I was born to my mother and him – i.e. I am glad to have been born into this family, in this time, in this place.

When you insult Russian men, you insult my father and two grandfathers. You insult my kid brother, my cousins, my friends, the people I love. You insult who I am as well.

Cut it out, for God’s sake.

“China Girl” haunted my steps from my arrival. It showed up on shuffle on my iPod and as background music in coffee shops and bars and one lovely little left-wing bookstore, reminding me of a boy who pressed his finger to my lips (and nothing else) as he argued with me that no, really, it’s an ANTI-racist song. Because the girl tells Bowie “oh baby, just you shut your mouth.”

(And in the version on the Reality Tour record he sneers in her voice “oh baby, just shut the f*ck up.”)

I was in London to see friends, to escape the day job, to lose myself in a city I didn’t know and yes, to write. Because that’s always part of my plan, wherever I go. I didn’t go there looking for the ghost of David Bowie or some long-lost god of Glam Rock. But they were there waiting for me, regardless.  And each replay of “China Girl” made me, the American abroad, laugh at myself until I finally embraced it, told the story of the old crush and in doing so let it go, and went exploring by myself to the tune of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

*****

Back for a few weeks and Bowie hadn’t quite let go of his grip on me; I strolled into a used-book-and-record store in small-town New Hampshire and found someone’s Bowie collection left abandoned for me to find. And while I was thrilled part of me hurt for whomever let this much goodness go. Who abandons Young Americans, “Heroes”, Scary Monsters, Station to Station in great condition for someone else to find?

I put the records on my credit card and took them back to my hotel room (second hotel room in three weeks) and spread them out on the bed and looked at slim cocaine-redhead-Bowie face and wondered what secrets the angles of his cheekbones hold. I felt like Christian Bale worshipping the photo of Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Todd Haynes’ take on the Bowie myth, but for me Bowie has never been about sex. Not really.

*****

I walked into a record store—THE record store, really—with a new friend and between rows of vinyl I wasn’t going to buy and have to fit into my bags to get home, I decided that what I really wanted was some reading to go with the music in my ears, and taking a Bowie book with me on my cross-England train ride the next day was just what I needed. And so picked up Marc Spitz’s shiny new biography of the man (god) and carried it onto the train to lose myself in details I didn’t know and thoughts of songs I did.

So I learned that David Bowie is my father’s age and knew that he is in some way a father I’ve adopted. A father who never lived through Columbia ‘68 but instead was on a stage wailing as revolution rocked campuses across the world. Already a star.

I have grown up in his image even having resisted it for years, since the stern father-lover-villain of Labyrinth, the ultimate creepy older man wearing his virility in silver spandex (and perhaps of all things that’s what really scared me then about Bowie, that so-obvious sexuality, that bulge in those pants so often obsessed over).

80s Bowie was the first one I heard, and for years I’d mix up “Let’s Dance” with “Dance Magic Dance” from Labyrinth, if you want to talk embarrassing admissions. Outside tour Bowie was the first and only that I saw play live, and even more embarrassing is that I went to see Nine Inch Nails and didn’t appreciate Bowie in his disco-ball jacket. Earthling Bowie was the first one I embraced, in the arms of the first boy to really touch me, a Bowie lover with fluid sexuality that he couldn’t quite handle, with me or with his uncontrollable, embarrassing crushes on boys. A poor substitute for Bowie but one nevertheless who left me flushed with desire and semi-successful pursuit and with a love for Bowie that has transcended every boy I’ve been with. Certainly the ones who could never share a piece of the Thin White Duke or the longhaired befrocked queen of Hunky Dory. The alien. The Earthling. But it’s glam rock Bowie that I always come back to, that I look for everywhere, whether it’s a sweep of glitter eye makeup or a kiss I shouldn’t give.

So in London of course it was 80s Bowie that led me looking for Ziggy Stardust, from being afraid of desires to feeling them awaken to letting them go again. Because Bowie demanded more of me, required my attention to a lyric or a particular otherworldly crack and wail. I could give him that part of me and sleep with pretty boys who never got it. I kissed tattooed rockabilly boys and sweet nerdy boys and dangerous boys with hard muscle under that skin and watched some of them fall apart and each time went back to Bowie. Each time something or someone crumbled out from under me, left me alone again, he was there.

They never got what I drew from him. And I could never explain it to them, why it wasn’t about sex the way Jagger was about sex, Elvis was about sex. It was about monsters and magic. It was about  me. Or maybe I didn’t want to share.

*****

And standing in the liquor store line with my mother back in the States, buying wine that we would drink later and cry over, it came on again, “China Girl,” and by now the only thing those piano plonks reminded me of is the fact that they kept appearing to remind me of things. Suddenly I didn’t want to tell that story anymore.

Instead I laughed and told my mother another bad-date story and wondered what the soundtrack to my next bad date will be.

*****

I am never looking for Bowie-the-man because if I were to do that the streets of New York would be where I would find him, uptown Bowie with the beautiful wife who has grown more masculine, more comfortably father-figure now than ever before.  I like the idea of Bowie the man but what I wanted from London was the glam-rock god (or ghost), like a glitter shot to keep me going.

In the comic Phonogram: Rue Britannia Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie created a goddess of Britpop and so in their hometown and Bowie’s I wondered what the goddess of glam rock would look like. Would she have Bolan’s curls or Bowie’s mullet and why, after all, were there no glam rock queens? For a gender-bending moment there were no women until Siouxsie Sioux and her goth-glam.

No place in glam rock for my curves that don’t allow me any sort of androgyny. No, from miles away you see Girl all over the shape of my walk, as I wandered down a London street and turn onto the little half-street now choked with outdoor tables and vines like a particularly bourgeois jungle. I didn’t look like a Bowie disciple except for the faint shimmer in my military-inspired jacket but I was there just the same, to pay tribute and find inspiration in an old red phone booth moved around the corner from where it was on that record cover so as not to disturb pricey dinners.

The inspiration to make myself again.

*****

Almost time to leave London and I gave in completely to Bowie, strolled the streets of London tracing landmarks that struck me from the book with the wrenching beauty of “Five Years,” the swagger of “Ziggy Stardust,” the gender-bending “Lady Stardust” and the reassuring heartbreak of “Rock’n'roll Suicide” echoing in my ears. Taking distorted pictures of street signs and that red phone booth with a pink plastic camera that makes everything look slightly alien, magic, strange.

I sat in a Starbucks because I was not going to spend a ridiculous amount of money on food when I wasn’t hungry to be near a myth of David Bowie. (Somehow eating at all is too earthy an activity for Bowie anyway, even the thick sweet chai I drank instead is too much but cocaine-thin is another thing I’m not and never will be.)  I’ve walked and touched and thought and I’ll go back soon to that lovely city that liked me the way New York does, the way New Orleans did, because it’s been opening its arms to lost freaks and wandering children for hundreds of years.

I was within sight of the spot where rock stars sat and thinking about my love for populist-themed yet exclusive punk rock and pop idols who gleefully declared themselves superstars but who reached and spoke to millions. Both are themselves populist impulses—you must get big to reach those who haven’t yet escaped to the city, the ones who can’t stroll by the right hangout and find their new family hiding there. Those who can’t get on a plane to go looking for traces of the magic that glam rock left behind.

And yet to be a rocker of any stripe, any kind of artist at all, you need some barriers up to keep others from claiming too much of you. You need, despite all the giving and sharing that art and rock’n’roll require, to be a bit of a loner at heart.

*****

No, I didn’t find Bowie waiting for me around a corner with a red mullet and a wink, but that’s OK.  As I get older he’s less about the god anyway, though I still looked for a dusting of glitter in London alleys and communed with yuppified fallen temples (and wanted to purge them like some tattooed female American Jesus throwing out the moneylenders).

No, now it’s something else. Or maybe it always was. Maybe I saw more of Ziggy in the mirror as I slid on that striped jacket and slicked on red lipgloss, silver shadow, went out for one last night in town. Bowie taught me to redefine, to change, to keep pushing, and maybe somewhere in these songs, in the traces he’s left, he can teach me to be happy with what I have as well.

Thump. It takes a beat. Ellis’ words don’t seem to match up somehow; but the brevity is fitting. After all, Ellis named a book after something Pekar once said; “Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.”

No-one ever tells you where Pekar said that, but everyone tells you that, yep, he did. I don’t mind. Apocryphal or not, Pekar’s words sit at the heart of why people find something more in comics than four colours and lots of ink, why it’s so special a medium for so many.  Meanwhile it is his life’s work that’s compelling every comic creator I know to click the link, share the news, wait for their heads to catch up.

It’s strange to understand that, collectively, we’ve kind of lost something of our field’s heart and soul.

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Harvey Pekar by Joseph Remnant from 'Muncie, Indiana'

I’m in a library in Hampshire. I’m pretty young and I’m furtively glancing at some Robert Crumb pages I can barely remember now. I skim the pages quickly, swallowing the voluptuous grotesques guiltily. I’m not going to explain more in print.

On the shelf nearby in a library that, surprisingly, files this stuff near Dan Dare, is Pekar’s Our Cancer Year. The mood change is staggering. I stop flicking through and start reading, swimming in the words of a man who took the threat of death head-on. It’s emotionally tumultuous as he visualises his fears, has them realised, and staggers out of it the other side, totally thumped but not beaten.

I was way too young to absorb all of that – I still am – but the confessional, the honesty, was just searing. It changed comics for me, made them things to read, things you let sink in. If I was used to seeing comics made to reflect the impossible scale of superheroic feats then this was me seeing that comics could be used to level you emotionally.

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A few years later, and I’m using Pekar to do more things again. I’m taking American Splendor, the multi-award winning film that tours Pekar’s incredible life, and I’m using the opportunity to get my University class to think about comics. This proves a much harder feat than one might imagine. It’s a film theory class, looking at U.S. independent cinema, and they don’t quite get why the pictures aren’t moving.

The thing is, Pekar’s a fabulous call to help illustrate what Scott McCloud calls ‘closure’ – the process of moving between comic panels and, essentially, filling in the movements in between. Pekar created comics from the point of view of someone who really just wanted to spit out stories. The transition, the movement, was at the core of what he wanted his work to do, because Harvey Pekar could not have cared less whether the comics you were reading were pretty or not.

They just had to tell a story.

His comics had moments where you literally moved with a blinking eye, where his face would sit still for what felt like pages at a time in total isolation. Then he’d flip, focusing on only the language, letting it flow and using the words to hang tiny illustrations off.

I haven’t got his books to hand, and it feels like huge disservice to say these things without scans, but The Pekar Project – an online home for stories by Pekar and fellow Cleveland creators – helps join some dots.

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Pekar by Sean Pryor from 'Kibbitzin' about how life got Incorporated'

Pekar was always about Pekar. American Splendor was always about Pekar, even when it wasn’t quite about Pekar. He filtered his experiences through crude illustrations and trapped conversations in speech bubbles, immortalising his interpretation of the lives around him. He becomes a harbinger of what the internet would do for a self-mythologising populace, his pen a lens for all of the most beautiful parts of his life, along with all of the ugliest.

Pekar’s this weird cultural filter, a human bridge between multiple strings of entertainment, pulling in the counterculture he started out in and the pop culture he stomped all over. By tangling his life into his work it was inevitable that his work would begin to create a feedback loop on his life – autobiographical creators everywhere get that – but he folded all of that right back into his work.

I can’t see the comics I love today without seeing Pekar’s invisible hand, and I’m not sure their creators could either. I can’t quite see Ellerbisms – British writer and illustrator Marc Ellerby’s nuanced take on his own life – without American Splendor. I can’t see Alec – Eddie Campbell’s thirty-year-long self-mythology – without Pekar. I really can’t see Fun Home or Lost At Sea or Meanwhile or Scott McCloud or Kill Your Boyfriend or Jimmy Corrigan or Tamara Drewe or every other comic that thumps down and proves something I haven’t seen done with a pen and paper before that doesn’t yet exist.

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It was late one night in the dying part of summer 2008. I’d been sending ideas back and forth with artist Julia Scheele for a few days about trying to do something around comics, something more than just writing and drawing, something more than telling stories. We wanted comics to seep through our lives and into others, in the way that we all know music or film can.

I was trawling the internet searching for names and there it is, staring up at me, Pekar’s quote: “You can do anything with words and pictures.” Real or imagined, it doesn’t matter; only Pekar could have joined up that exact combination of letters to sum all of the big and beautiful things that comics can do with the simplest tools.

We Are Words + Pictures, the group we formed, is heading to the a music festival on Thursday, bringing comic strips and illustration to families in a field in Suffolk. We’ll be there for Pekar, using just a pen and paper to teach people that they can do anything.

Harvey Pekar, Comic Book Writer, 1939 – 2010

This World Cup feels more diverse than in years past, and many of the tournament’s new stars are playing under the flags of countries like Germany thanks to improved immigration laws. It’s a welcome change, to see teams of insanely talented (and good-looking) young men that don’t appear to have been grown in Rocky IV-era science labs.

The less diversity-friendly narrative and legacy of this World Cup took place in the officiating. In a tournament with 64 matches, the first World Cup held in Africa, the calls that stood out, the calls that may finally lead FIFA to change its rules and adopt new review processes, were matches that went against the giants of the first world.

Every sport has its infuriating moments, times when it seems physically impossible for the officials to have missed the offense. But Alexi Lalas and Jim McManaman didn’t spend hours discussing the merits of calls of the South Korea-Greece match, but the disallowed US goal in its Slovenia game was egregious enough to warrant an expedited review of that match’s referee and technology-enhanced dissection. The outcry over England’s non-goal in its humiliating loss to Germany was almost enough to make one forget that the final score was 4-1.

This isn’t to say there weren’t mistakes in games played by nations less culturally dominant, but you’d be forgiven for forgetting that Mexico lost to Argentina thanks to a blown off-side call just after Germany pulverized England. There were plenty. They just came mostly during the early rounds, and they weren’t discussed on American, English-language World Cup coverage.

Saturday’s third place match escaped any of the intercontinental tension of the Uruguay-Ghana (and the earlier USA-Ghana) match, possibly because, for all the diversity on both teams, the captains of Germany and Uruguay looked like they could be cousins (they’ve also both won before). Perhaps it is so easy to applaud the varied ethnic makeup of this year’s World Cup elite because it makes it easier to cheer for the countries we know best.

The final match between Spain and the Netherlands could not live up to the excitement of Saturday, even with two teams killing themselves to win their first title. Aside from a few gruesome moments, it just wasn’t terribly suspenseful to watch the European champions play South Africa’s former colonial overlords. Maybe Paul the Octopus picked Spain because it just didn’t feel right.  The game’s lone goal came from Spain’s Andres Iniesta after nearly 120 minutes of fierce but personality-free play.  After so many heart-stopping finishes, the final score or 1-0 felt like anticlimax.

It was also depressing, but unsurprising, that it took until the last day of the tournament for the American television announcers to bring up the history that the Netherlands and South Africa share. Early rounds of the tournament coverage featured plenty of color pieces on the history of apartheid but managed to omit information that would have placed the policy, and the legacy of institutionalized racism in South Africa, into more context. To hear ESPN tell it, racism is simply a sad chapter in the history books.

The ebb and flow of fan support as teams were eliminated mixed with the commentary of the announcers to make villains of convenient targets. Flopping and diving is always an issue, but Ghana’s suspicious falls in its Round of 16 match against the US inspired vitriol normally reserved for Zidane-style headbutts. Algeria was also demonized for playing without honor for trying harder to stop the US from scoring than trying to score. 32 teams from all over the world came together, and the media narrative still managed to make cheaters and liars out of African teams.

The USA’s fans were hardly the only ones to create villains. The tens of thousands of boos directed at Uruguay’s Luis Suarez during the third-place game came from disgruntled supporters of Ghana, the last African team to exit the tournament. It may have been disappointing to hear people take out their frustrations in less than sporting fashion, but it was also a heartening glimpse at what the other stories of this World Cup are.

For the fans in the stadium on that Saturday, it wasn’t about colonialism or escaping shame at the hands of the press. It was as simple as revenge, honor, and the joy of simple, all-out, bloodthirsty competition on the field. Like the end of Rocky IV. But now with bonus vuvuzelas.

While a civil partnership does not confer equality or full civil rights, but it shuffles in the right direction. The State will finally recognise the existence of gay and lesbian relationships. True equality, however, would involve gay marriage, adoption rights, and a host of other changes to existing legislation, which are not part of the Civil Partnership Bill.

There are many positive aspects of the Civil Partnership Bill. Financial arrangements will be more in line with the standard marriage contract. Partners will be able to benefit from the other’s pension rights. Joint income will be recognised when calculating tax benefits and a civil partner may be named on the other’s travel pass for the over 65s. Partners may now claim rights in areas such as inheritance, social welfare and a shared home.

After the Bill is passed in the Senate and has the autograph of the President For Life, gay marriages, civil partnerships and civil marriages from other jurisdictions will be recognised in Irish law. Recognised as civil partnerships that is, provided that the Minister for Justice approves of the legislation of the state in question. He has thirty days to rule on the decision.

However, there are significant gaps in the legislation, particularly with regard to the rights of children and adoption. The Irish Constitution regards the family “as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State” (Art. 41.1.1) but the legislation does not confer family status on same sex couples. As a result, you can love and care for the child of your partner from the moment of hir birth but you have no legal relationship with that child. You cannot adopt your own child. You cannot visit your child in hospital without the express permission of the bio parent. You probably will not even be permitted to attend parent-teacher meetings. If your partner predeceases you, your child loses both hir parents.

At some point in the future, there will be a referendum on the rights of the child, and perhaps the children of gay and lesbian couples will receive their rights at that point. For now, they remain in legal limbo.

Anything that is remotely connected with Catholicism brings out the extremist element in Irish society. Catholic extremists never seem to remember that Leviticus is in the Old Testament and that marriage predates Christianity. The hatemongers mount protests and engage in threatening behaviour outside the parliament.

Statements about the sanctity of marriage are hurled at passersby and politicians alike. There is a lot of gobbledegook about the special status of marriage and how civil partnership will destroy it. Re-interpretations of the words of Jesus Christ are being flung dunglike at an innocent public, distorting and misrepresenting words of a great social revolutionary.

In a desperate attempt to remain relevant, the Irish bishops have jumped on the bandwagon and released a pamphlet on why marriage matters. It is misleading and seeks to undermine the legislation while superficially ‘supporting’ gay and lesbian coupes. Perhaps, their contribution to the debate was to distract from the revelations of child abuse by any means necessary. Maybe the Catholic bishops have spotted the irony of the Church defending morality. However, all their words simply reassure the extremist elements of the congregations and alienate the majority.

Everywhere backbenchers sniff the wind, ever wary of controversy and potential elections. They whisper in the ears of party colleagues, perhaps make a few “no offense…” ‘jokes’ to test the lay of the land. The Government, which consistently leans into the prevailing wind, found “an Irish solution to an Irish problem”. In much the same way as the troublesome issues in the past, the Government equivocated, side stepped the issues and proved once again that some Irish people are more equal than others.

One positive outcome of the protests and whisperings is the refusal of the Minister for Justice to allow for a conscience clause. Such a clause was proposed by an opposition deputy but as Junior Minister at the Department of Finance, Martin Mansergh said

My view is that if one takes up a public appointment, one must carry out the duties that the law prescribes and those duties will change from time to time as the law changes. We should not give sanction effectively to homophobia for conscientious reasons

Public servants will not have the right to ‘morally’ object to performing civil partnership ceremonies. The notion of including such a clause would be impractical as well as ethically wrong. Imagine the precedent such a clause would require. Claims for moral injury by public servants would spread like blight.

Some might refuse to issue social welfare on the basis that sloth is a deadly sin. Doctors might refuse to treat patients under such a clause. The entire Department of Finance might refuse to work for greedy bankers on moral grounds. And for lawyers, there might be big trouble. Those who work in the public service cannot be granted rights to refuse to perform tasks that form part of their job on moral grounds. If their consciences are so troubled as to be unable to fulfill their position, then like all other employees, they can vote with their feet.

An Irish civil partnership is not a marriage and was not designed as such. The resultant bill represents the mealymouthedness, expedient nature of our glorious leaders. That said, it is step in the right direction. It can serve as a base camp to real equality.

The finalised version of the 2009 Civil Partnership Bill was passed in the Dáil (the lower house) on 1 July and discussion of the Bill takes place in the Senate (the talking shop) on 7 & 8 July before the senators break for summer.

You’d think that spy-fiction fans like myself would be thrilled by the exposure of 11 alleged Russian secret agents operating under false identities in the northeast United States. And I have to admit that it has been gripping to follow the story as prosecutors and the media have shed light on the methods of the SVR, Moscow’s shadowy foreign intelligence service.

But at the end of the day, my main impression has been a feeling of disgust at how incompetent this so-called SVR spy ring was. Before I moved to New York last month, I spent seven years working in Moscow and paying income taxes to the Russian government. And this is what they spent my money on?

To begin with, deep-cover agents aren’t supposed to know each other, so if one gets caught, he or she can’t expose the others. But according to the FBI’s criminal complaint, the spy couple based in Arlington, Virginia, was in touch with the spy couple based in Montclair, New Jersey, and another agent — “Christopher Metsos,” the one who has gone missing in Cyprus — paid regular visits to the East Coast to deliver money to both couples. I’m sure the FBI was happy that Mr. Metsos was so helpful for their investigation.

The Arlington couple, who went by the names “Michael Zottoli” and “Patricia Mills,” was especially hilarious. One neighbor told The Associated Press that both of them spoke with obvious Russian accents, even though he claimed to be born in Yonkers and she claimed to be Canadian. They have now admitted to being Russian citizens named Mikhail Kutzik and Natalya Pereverzeva.

But those are just minor quibbles. The main problem with the SVR’s operation is that it was utterly pointless in terms of its underlying strategy. From all the evidence that has been made public so far, none of these “spies” actually succeeded in obtaining any sort of valuable intelligence for Moscow. Apparently, the SVR assigned its agents to get close to U.S. economic and foreign policy circles and learn tidbits like, for example, the Obama administration’s position on nuclear arms talks with Russia — in other words, things that are perfectly available from open sources.

Doesn’t the SVR have an Internet connection? Why go to such elaborate lengths and take such risks to get information that you could get by attending a brown-bag lunch at a think tank in Washington?

It’s hard to understand the Neanderthal mentality of the Russian officials who would conceive of such an operation, but having dealt with such idiots during my work as a journalist in Moscow, I will attempt to explain it.

Many of the bureaucrats who rose to prominence during Vladimir Putin’s presidency are, like Putin, cynical ex-KGB types who fundamentally don’t understand the concept of an open society. They believe that if a government official says something in public, it must be a clever tactical maneuver aimed at deceiving and misleading people. Nothing can be taken at face value; everything is wrapped in seven layers of intrigue. And since Russia is like that, America must be the same way.

This kind of delusional thinking comes across in the FBI’s communication intercepts, where the SVR issues orders and feedback to its agents. In one of them, the SVR praises “Cynthia Murphy,” half of the New Jersey couple, for a series of reports on the global gold market that she has gleaned from her day job at a Manhattan financial firm. The reports were “v. usefull” (sic) and were passed on to the Russian finance and economic development ministries, the SVR proudly declares. Mission accomplished!

This is painfully funny satire that even Gogol couldn’t dream up. First of all, everyone who follows the markets knows that gold has been rising in value and will probably continue doing so while investors are freaked out about the global economy. As a journalist, I would usually call an analyst to get information like that, and it’s hard to imagine that Ms. Murphy did anything radically different. Second, the Russian finance and economic development ministries are some of the more liberal, enlightened branches of the Russian government. These are guys who wear nice suits, drink cappucinos and travel regularly to London and Switzerland. I can just imagine the reaction they had when the SVR showed up with its “intelligence”…

(Cut to a brightly lit office where Russia’s FINANCE MINISTER is sitting at a desk working on his laptop. Suddenly, a team of SVR OFFICIALS bursts through the door, with one of them carrying a bundle of papers.)

SVR OFFICIAL: Comrade, we have obtained report from secret agent in America on state of gold market! You must buy gold, now!

FINANCE MINISTER (rolling his eyes): Uh, thanks, guys. Can you leave a copy with my secretary on your way out?

So what did the SVR accomplish? Amazingly, it seems that the main effect of this costly and elaborate operation was to allow a small group of Russians to lead comfortable lives in America, raising children in pleasant suburbs, growing hydrangeas and — in the case of redhead bombshell Anna Chapman — leading a party-girl lifestyle in Manhattan.

Naturally, all of this has been tremendously embarrassing for Russia. Initially, the Russian foreign ministry angrily denied the FBI’s allegations. Then it retracted its denial and put out an extraordinary statement admitting that the alleged spies were indeed Russian citizens who had “turned up on U.S. territory at different times. They did not carry out any actions directed against the interests of the United States.” Translation: Yes, they were Russian spies. But they weren’t very good ones. Now can we please forget about this as soon as possible?

Since the “spy ring” was so harmless, it is tempting to laugh off this whole affair and dismiss it as a silly, oddball story with no consequence. But that would be a mistake, and here’s why.

The SVR, along with its sister agency, the FSB, which handles domestic security, is a bastard child of the Soviet KGB. These organizations wrap themselves in patriotism and claim to be defending national security, but in reality they are aimed at destroying people.

During my seven years in Moscow, the Russian secret services repeatedly targeted human rights activists and opposition politicians. They lured Western diplomats into compromising situations and released sex tapes of them. They torpedoed the career of at least one journalist I know and frightened another friend of mine into fleeing Russia. Such spy games have a genuine human cost.

If the FSB had caught 10 American agents working secretly on Russian territory, you can bet that Moscow would be full of righteous indignation and that the affair would be turned into fodder for anti-U.S. propaganda on state television. Instead, the Obama administration is trying hard to prevent this spy scandal from erupting into a full-blown diplomatic scandal, and Russia has gotten off with a slap on the wrist. The Kremlin knows that we’re being nice, and I certainly hope that behind the scenes, America is getting something useful in return for its magnanimity.

I don’t think America needs to stop working with Russia to protest this spy scandal; it’s a tough world out there, and we have too many common interests at stake. But we should use this opportunity to mock and humiliate Moscow’s moronic spymasters. In the long run, it would only be doing a favor to Russia.

With luck, this scandal will cause heads to roll in the SVR, and perhaps it will even chip away at the paranoid Soviet mentality of Russia’s political establishment. It’s time for Moscow’s KGB spooks to go back to the pages of fiction where they belong.

I first discovered Forstner at the Hong Kong Art Fair. Galerie Zink of Munich and Berlin was representing him. As it was shocking for me to encounter his paintings, I decided to interview him to gain a better understanding of the inspiration behind his work.

First of all, I notice that you are half-French and half-Austrian. You were born in Cameroon. You grew up in Cameroon and Europe. Now, you live in New York. Has the experience of living in different places affected your art?

It’s hard to say. There’s this romantic thing we all have that for an artist if you are moving from place to place it should somehow influence the work. Actually I kind of like the idea, and it must get into the work somehow but it’s difficult to say how it affects the work exactly. For sure it has opened my mind, I’ve gathered many different sensations according to where I lived.

Also I never felt either French or Austrian though I do feel quite European culturally speaking. Now I live in Bed-Stuy-Brooklyn and I feel more comfortable here than in Paris for example or Vienna. By moving, you get the chance to approach the same things from a different angle, you adapt yourself.

I am now perusing your book, The Ship of Fools. The series “The Departure and The Waiting Room” surround viewers with green uniformed human dogs. I associate the dogs with Nazi soldiers. I also see them as soldiers in other wars, such as Serb soldiers in the war with Bosnia. Why did you employ dogs to symbolize the soldiers? Honestly, if I were you, I would use wolves to represent the soldiers, since generally by nature, wolves are more brutal than dogs.

Dogs in my work don’t especially represent soldiers, as I also used them to depict other behaviors or sensations. Dogs are easier to use because culturally speaking they have already a history of caricatures in newspapers and journalism, Churchill for example would be the Bulldog etc. So the unconsciousness of the viewer relates to it instantly.

Dogs are closer to our domestic image than wolves, and therefore more interesting for me. In my work, they come from these popular illustrations from Sarnoff and Coolidge of dogs playing pool or poker that you can find in all the game clubs worldwide. I used to play pool myself to relax and was surrounded by those illustrations, I became fascinated by them because they looked really dumb and very precise in the same time, like caricatures in general.

Then they appeared to me as contemporary scenes of 17th century painters that I’m very fond of, such as Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Adrian Brouwer (etc) from the Netherlands – depicting human behaviors in taverns, domestic environment and painting for the bourgeoisie of the time.

As I was fascinated by those illustrations, I decided to copy one for myself as a kid would do when he likes an image but cannot get the original. So I did it in a huge scale – it’s now part of the collection of the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain in Paris.

Then, it all started from a joke at the studio: “What should I do next now that I have made this image mine? OK! They’re going to beat the shit out of them! It will become a freewheel play, a sort of playground where no moral judgement will interfere! I’m a painter, not a soldier. I’m a lucky guy, I don’t kill to make a living, I make paintings!”

Coming back home (tea for two), 2008

Nevertheless, there came massacre scenes, but with joyful feelings, the pool sticks became weapons, etc. I wanted to do something that was both an enjoyable and monstrous event for the viewer. He could have the guilt of laughing or being entertained at something there’s nothing to laugh about or be entertained with.

With “The Departure and The Waiting Room,” what would you like to tell the public through the characters in the works including soldiers, victims wearing gas masks, hangmen and Nazi soldiers in skull bones?

I don’t think a painter makes a painting to tell anything to anyone. I have a sensation, I try to find ways to objectify this sensation. Hopefully while painting, I find a new sensation I wasn’t aware of and if I’m lucky the viewer finds something that is meaningful to him also.

My work, generally speaking, is about absurdity. I’m painting because I don’t understand what I’m doing on Earth. When I was a child I had an image of God laughing while looking at us from above. Long after that early sensation, I found in the laughter of Democritus the same feeling of absurdity regarding human activity. With my “Nazi Dogs”, people might get stuck to the war thing and not go further, but that’s the game, there are always different ways to look at things.

Those paintings for me are about my feelings for my father (“The departure- Oedipus at work, 2008”, “The ship of Fools-Father and son going fishing, 2009”), or the blanks left by my family about my grandfather who was in the SS, as I have very litltle information. They are also a tribute to the generation of Baselitz, Lupertz, the Café Deutschland of Immendorf, for example.

Furthermore, it’s also depicting the human tragedy in a very classic way as it is the case in the Greek mythology. Humor is always there in the work, but you know, sometimes I find one of my paintings “funny” and someone else finds it tough or doesn’t get the point. Of course, I play with those issues consciously, knowing some misunderstanding might arise.

I‘m always suspicious when everyone agrees on a painting, whether they like it or not, I like to keep the doubt in the viewer’s head so that he has to go back and forth to make up his mind.

You appear to be interested in Nazi legacy. Do you try to deal with your family history through depicting the crimes of Nazis?

I’m not particularly interested in Nazi legacy. Basically, it interests me like anyone else, not much more. But my grandfather was a SS officer, so I grew up with his pictures, the stories or the lack of stories surrounding him, plus my grandmother used to tell me I looked more like him than my father did.

Being a kid, I was quite proud somehow, because he looked good in those propaganda Nazi black and white photos with “Blick am west”! I cannot ignore all this as an artist. But you know for a German or Austrian grandson of today, there’s nothing exceptional to have a Nazi grandfather, uncle, and so on, in the family.

I’m an artist, so it came into the work without me looking for it, almost by “mistake.” Unlike Baselitz, Lüpertz or Immendorf, I’m the third generation dealing with those issues. I never felt the so-called guilt like the generation of my father.

Somehow these artists were pushed by history to make something out of it to survive as artists, social persons, they were born with it, and that’s how it became understandable, acceptable and acclaimed. I have a great respect for those artists, they did something very important. On my side I cannot justify those paintings the same way, plus I put humor into it, which is for some people not acceptable or not well understood.

The point is the themes of these paintings are not just Germany or war in general, but they work as shared entries of cultural and historical acknowledgment, through which I try to create a specific sensation. It’s a common history from which a certain relation to the world asserts and questions itself, especially through memories and history told by “fathers”. It is, amongst other things, a principle of transmission and interpretation, it is questioning the way a subject creates itself from this memory.

And most of the time, the subject only has a remote and anecdotal connection with that memory. Generally speaking I try to set up things in a way that the viewer wants to know more about the mystery within the paintings, but I’m also interested in the same time to have the viewer experience the subject with the possibility that there would be nothing beyond, nothing really but just the fact that painting this or that is already an event by itself.

What are your current projects?

Right now, I’m participating in two group shows, one at Parker’s Box gallery in Brooklyn (“Ten years Hunting”) and another one at Thomas Rehbein galerie in Cologne – “Liaisons Dangereuses” curated by Ludwig Seyfarth who wrote an essay of my work in the catalogue “The Ship of Fools”-Musée de Grenoble-2009.

Recently I’ve been I’m working on a new body of work with a new archetype: “The Happy Fisherman.” I guess these works could be called allegorical. A black fisherman dressed up to go to church and not fishing for fish; instead of having fishing gears, he still has those sticks to play pool from the previous paintings, as if they were still lying on the floor of my studio ready to be picked up and placed in the new paintings. He uses those sticks to play with women like the dogs were fooling around before. The humor is still there and I play with stereotypes, though because there are no puppets anymore, it’s less obvious, the image is more direct, you can’t escape from it.

When I talk about humor, I see it as the contradiction of different feelings and not necessarily as something just “funny.” When one is so used to think of a work of art with certain common criteria of today, you need to give the paintings some time so that the layers unfold one after the other to allow a more open, genuine approach. Painting is about time!

In these paintings, I deal with sexuality but without complacency vis-à-vis the viewer unlike porn would do. If there is seduction it must be because the painting is good not because there’s a naked woman or you can see an ass or a dick. It’s always about contrary feelings, once again, I want to install a doubt in the viewer’s head.

The Happy Fisherman, 2010

Something unbearable, monstrous is something that is detached from its original environment and thrown into an environment where it doesn’t belong. Monstrosity only exists from a point of view, not by itself. Monstrosity cannot be detached from fascination; as a painter and image maker, it’s very interesting to me.

The transition is “The Ship of Fools” theme, where the landscape, the sea and the boat going nowhere were already there. “The Happy Fisherman” stands like a new archetype in my work taking the place of the fools and dogs, the first related “American archetype” after I came to the USA, I believe. Maybe, as you suggested, geography has started to influence the work!

A fervently Catholic gynecologist might put his beliefs into practice on the delivery table. He might choose to save the life of the child over the mother, or regardless of consequences make sure the woman would conceive again, or choose to mutilate a woman’s body rather than allow the idea that the woman might choose contraception in the future.

In the grand tradition of submission to the catholic church, Irish doctors used the surgical technique of symphysiotomy, long after the rest of the developed world had discredited its practice. Symphysiotomy was developed in 1597 and was routinely used to widen the pelvis during childbirth. By dividing the cartilage of the symphysis pubis, the pelvis can be widened by up to two centimetres.

Known complications include haemorrhage, injury to the urethra or bladder, vesicovaginal or urethrovaginal fistula, stress incontinence, sepsis, and pelvic osteoarthropathy. In some cases women experienced difficulty in walking and an unstable pelvis.

The technique was largely abandoned in the late nineteenth century after improvements in the hygiene and clinical practice of Caesarean section. It is still practiced in developing countries when Caesarean section is too risky and it can save the life of the mother and/or that of the child.

However, in Ireland, women were subjected to symphysiotomy without consent for religious reasons, even though Caesarean sections were relatively safe. It was thought that women subjected to repeated Caesareans might be tempted to use contraception and that could not be allowed to happen.

[Dr] Alex Spain was the champion of symphysiotomy at the National Maternity Hospital. In 1944, he revived the technique because Caesarean sections might lead to “contraception, the mutilating operation of sterilisation, and marital difficulty.” At that time Caesarean sections were perfectly safe and symphysiotomy had fallen into disrepute. Spain admitted his decision went against the weight of the entire English-speaking obstetrical world’.

From 1944 to 1983, 1,500 women underwent this unnecessary and traumatic surgical procedure leaving many in pain for the rest of their lives because of the religious beliefs of a few men. Many survivors have spoken of feeling the saw cut through the public bone and seeing horrific injuries on their newborns. These are just two stories:

“I’ve been in pain ever since. I’ve still attending hospitals with back pain and kidney problems. I’d go to bed one night and would be ok but the next day I would not be able to get out of the bed, I wouldn’t be able to put my feet to the ground, all because of the operation, and I didn’t know at the time. I had x-rays taken of my legs to see what was wrong but they couldn’t find anything wrong.”

and

“They gave me hardly any information, whatsoever, until I got to the theatre. The only thing I remember is the nurses saying I had lovely red hair. They showed me the saw. It was an ordinary hand saw, they showed me where they were going to open the pelvic bone. They didn’t explain — they said: “You are going to have your baby now.” It was such agony, a terrible severe pain.”

Women were subject to this outdated practice because Catholic doctors believed that women would not choose to undergo multiple Caesarean sections. Such women might turn to contraception, the idea of which was unacceptable to those doctors at the time. These doctors saw themselves as upholding the laws of the Catholic church and those who are still alive show no remorse. They deny the damage they inflicted.

Records show that in 2001, the issue of symphysiotomy was being discussed in Government Buildings

It now appears that hundreds of Irish women, over at least a 20 year period, had to undergo this brutal, experimental operation. It has left many of them suffering permanent health problems. The operation, known as symphysiotomy, was carried out – as far as we can determine – in Dublin maternity hospitals between 1944 and 1964, and it could have gone on as late as 1975. Evidence is emerging which suggests it was also carried out in a number of Cork hospitals.

The operation – and the details are not for the squeamish – involved sawing through the woman’s pelvis so that it opened like a hinge. International medical experts repeatedly criticised this practice. They stated that caesarean section should have been the preferred option for difficult pregnancies. Some Irish doctors persisted with symphysiotomy, because they apparently believed that women who underwent Caesarean section would use contraception to avoid pregnancy. The use of contraception, of course, conflicted with the prevailing Catholic ethos.

Survivors of symphysiotomy have called for a review of the cases but Minister for health Mary Harney has said that reviews are carried out for improved care of patients and since symphysiotomy is no longer in use, a review would serve no purpose.

Exposing the extent of religious control in Ireland does not seem to be on the agenda. Religious dogma has no place in an operating room, any more than it does in government or export. The Catholic Church talks of forgiveness and individual acts of evil but subjecting women to urethral and bladder injury, infection, pain and long-term walking difficulties is an example of the institutional harm done to women in theocratic Ireland.

Survivors have called for the Minister’s resignation. The Minister will not resign. With the abuse of children in care, unsafe vetting practices, unread x-rays, cancer misdiagnoses and the suppression of information in the Irish health care system, the survivors of symphysiotomy are finding it difficult to have their voices heard.

To this day not a single additional penny has been paid by the eighteen religious congregations that committed crimes against children. I say additional because the Irish Government struck a shameful deal with the religious orders in 2002. The then Minister for Education Michael Woods and Attorney General Michael McDowell struck a secret deal. It was never put before parliament and there was no vote. In short, religious orders were awarded indemnity against all legal claims provided they supplied €128m in cash and property. The idea was that if there was a shortfall, the taxpayer would provide. Woods expected around 2000 claimants and a total cost of around €300m.

Fast forward to 2010, and 14 000 claimants have come forward. The bill is expected to be around €1.3bn. And the religious orders have not contributed a single additional penny. The congregations claim that the Irish Government had not yet provided the details of what further contributions are required.

In addition, the Catholic Church, which runs 92% of the primary schools in Ireland have ordered the schools to pay €4.75 per pupil to the church each year to begin at the end of May. There is no reason given for the charge and the church requires immediate payment. Given that many primary schools in politically-disadvantaged areas are in dire conditions, this demand for money is particularly egregious. Students were requested to bring tolls of toilet paper from home because of budget cutbacks in one Cork school. Several schools have repeated rat infestations. 50 000 students are being educated in prefabs – some for over twenty years. Granted, that these failings are also due to the indifference of successive Education Ministers.

However, this is the same government that promised €2 million for the funding of counselling services for the survivors of institutional rape and torture. Organisations like the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and One in Four have received no extra funding to date and have had their budgets cut by 5.8% despite a government commitment not to do so. Organisations that provide counselling services have been and remain overwhelmed. There is now a nine-month waiting list for one to one counselling at One in Four.

Numerous reports have come out about the cover-up of the sexual abuse of children, yet bishops named in the Murphy report remain patrons of primary schools. The primate of all Ireland, Seán Brady engaged in a conspiracy to cover up serial child rape and refuses to resign. He still holds that position. The leader of the Catholic Church in the Vatican covered up child rape. Benedict XVI was revealed to have ordered bishops not to report child sexual abuse to the correct authorities – the civil authorities – yet he is still lauded by millions.

There has been no information about the children who died in care and were allegedly buried in mass graves. The only information in the public domain is that in 1993 an order of nuns in Dublin sold part of their convent to a real estate developer. The remains of 155 inmates, who had been buried in unmarked graves on the property, were exhumed and, except for one body, cremated and reburied in a mass grave. There has been no other information. Children were murdered, starved and worked to death but we do not even know their names.

The Irish state has not prosecuted those priests, nuns, monks and lay personnel that committed the crimes of rape, torture, neglect, starvation and slavery described in the report. The names were redacted. It was part of the compensation package. If a survivor who was financially compensated by the Commission, names the rapists and abusers, that survivor is liable for prosecution and all monies will be retrieved. That is part of the pact.

Michael O Brien, 77 years old, is going on hunger strike when he is released from hospital. Mr O Brien was detained in Ferryhouse industrial school for eight years where he was raped and beaten repeatedly. He has spoken out about his abuse.

Indymedia has more information on the hunger strike.

A member from Religious Truth Abuse will start a hunger strike outside the Bishops residence in Drumcondra, Dublin on Monday 17th of May to high light the lack of investigation by the Gardái and Government.

Since the release of the Ryan and Murphy report last year there have been no investigations or arrests, all but one. A man was arrested outside of Dáil Eíreann last May 09 as he made a protest at the gates of the Dáil single handedly. That has been the only arrest. Minister for Law reform and Equality Dermot Ahearn said publicly “We continue to pursue relentlessly the perpetrators of abuse, to bring them to justice, the justice they deserve”. It would seem more obvious that abusers freedom is more important than actually bringing them to court to face their crimes against children over the last 80 years.

There has been no information from other media sources. What will it take to remove the Catholic Church from our primary schools? What will it take to find and name the children that never grew up? What will it take to get justice for our citizens?

What exactly is a “home grown terrorist?” Young Muslims cloned in specially controlled vats hidden in secret greenhouses under guard day and night from elite seven-foot tall Al Qaeda warriors? Deep in his super cave, between watching Arsenal get beat and planning the downfall of “The Great Satan,” does Bin Laden activate his newly matured creations and let them loose on Western society?

Or are they men like Omar in controversial satirist Chris Morris’ new film “Four Lions?” Omar’s married to the beautiful Sophia, has a gorgeous son, owns his house and has an understanding boss who lets him go to Pakistan at short notice for an “emergency wedding.” So why does he want to martyr himself and, in reality, go to a terrorist training camp with the blessing of his wife and child?

Morris has said of his film that it will do for Islamic terrorism what “Dads’ Army” did for the Nazis making them, “scary, but also ridiculous.” In actual fact “Four Lions” more closely resembles an episode of “Citizen Smith” – as if Paul Greengrass directed it. Like Wolfie Smith, Omar leads a comic bunch of misfits and losers as they plot to strike a blow against the corrupt capitalist British government.

Wolfie himself, a lazy, unemployed dreamer whose crimes amounted to upsetting sleeping babies and shooting up some garden gnomes, essentially hamstrung the plans of his revolutionary “Tooting Popular Front”. As confused and unable to articulate his anger as Omar, is he is without doubt a doer and his drive and energy will inevitably lead his cell of bungling incompetents – “they can’t stir a cup of tea without smashing a window” – to commit acts of atrocity that are tragic for both terrorist and innocent victim alike.

The “Four Lions” are in fact five: Omar, his dim-witted best friend Waj, terrible master of disguise and Crow fancier Fessal, a radical white Muslim convert Barry and his wack rapper recruit Hassan. Morris highlights the group’s plans as both preposterous and monstrous leading to some hilariously uncomfortable laughs from jihad video bloopers, Party Puffin Chat rooms and a police marksman debating if the Wookie they just killed counts as a bear or not, “It must be the target because I shot it.”

Crucially we never find out what, if anything, radicalised the “Lions.” Morris intelligently leaves that for the audience to decide, as all five are as much products of Great Britain as they are of Islam, perhaps more so. Even when they describe their martyrdom they reference the very symbols of the capitalist culture they wish to destroy, comparing heaven to the “Rubber Dinghy Rapids” ride at Alton Towers or using “The Lion King” as an allegory for the struggle against the West.

“Four Lions” was always going to be controversial due to the subject matter and the man who once opened a “Brass Eye” special with the words, “Welcome to Paedogedon” when tackling the media’s hysteria surrounding paedophilia. Its release date is on the same weekend as Victory in Europe day, and so soon after the London Marathon, the setting of the climatic scenes of devastation in the film, and it has certainly got under the skin of some of the media.

A few members of the families who lost relatives in the July 7th bombings in 2005 have also urged cinemas and audiences to boycott the film. Graham Foulkes whose 22-year-old son David was killed by the terrorists agreed that satire had a place when dealing with terrorism but said of “Four Lions”:

“It’s very specific. It’s aligned to what happened in 2005 and they talk about bombing in London. That’s not parodying or being a satire about terrorists. It’s making money about a specific attack.”

“Four Lions” is not the biting savagery of “Brass Eye” or the dark surrealism of “Jam,” but a film that is very funny, terrifying and deeply moving in parts. Mr Foulkes went on to defend Morris’ right to make “Four Lions” and so should we. Morris is our one true comic genius and if we can’t trust him to make a thought-provoking movie on this most complex issue facing Britain in the 21st Century then who else do we turn to?