Be advised, I am currently fighting a deathly battle with a nasty cold so the rest of this entry might feel a bit foggy and poorly phrased. You were warned.

Burlesque, for those who don’t know, is a type of performance art much like striptease and other “exotic” dances, but on a far more refined level. Now I can’t say this for certain having only seen the regular sleazy striptease in person, but burlesque seems to be a far more enjoyable viewing experience than pretty much anything one could imagine.

What I love about burlesque is that a lot of it doesn’t even necessarily involve nudity, much of it is just damsels hopping about on stage in fancy dress with a supporting cast of burly men in drag. And there’s a lot of music, good music.

Striptease on the other hand is a bit of a meh, sure the broad gets naked, but it’s all so distasteful, so sleazy and rotten it’s nigh on unenjoyable …

Therefore I propose that we need to have more burlesque shows in Slovenia, especially because traveling to the US or London or whatnot just for a show of such nature can hardly be justified. I’m told that there have already been certain occasions of burlesque shows, but I’d be very glad if someone could point me to more such things … especially, you know, like before the event? Can do? Please do. The closest I’d ever seen to burlesque was Cabaret in MGL and in London, but it’s just not quite what I’m looking for despite being a supremely awesome show.

Now just for a quick taste, here’s some Miss Meow Meow, whom I’ve just discovered today and instantly fell in love with almost as much as with Amanda Palmer.

And since no post about burlesque can be complete without mentioning Dita von Teese. There. Dita von Teese. Hope you’re happy now.

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Some of you probably realise that I’m a bit of a steampunk and have been even since before I realised steampunk was what I was a fan of. Think I called it

To be honest, most of Galactica’s actors are rather average  looking (except for the cylon babes of course), nothing you wouldn’t find in an average gym, especially the pilots and other military personel. Sure they’re well built and whatnot, but they aren’t dashingly good looking. Even the humor is, surprise surprise, human. Never feels written, never feels repetitive and boring, just looks like plain and simple everyday arsing around.

But that’s not really what I love about Battlestar Galactica. What I REALLY love is the story. The story is fucking brilliant. Humans have a war with the Cylons, their creations with an overly developed sense of enslavement, their planets get nuked into oblivion and those who by some odd chance survive … leave in search of earth.

The brilliance here is that we’re actually only a few decades away from something like that happening on our own planet! And what’s more, in the series finale, after many somewhat predictable twists and turns we find out that the story isn’t that of a future. Not even that of a future reimagined and change in a few terms to make it seem like fiction. Oh no, it’s the story of our history. Everything, absolutely everything, we see on the show culminates in the humans landing on our Earth 150 thousand years ago and starting anew with the tribal humans already on the planet.

Now the interesting bit here is how nicely all of this ties up with factual history. Fact is, we know humans on earth at some point made a huge fucking jump from hunter-gatherer tribes to building pyramids and having large-scale civilizations. This of course hasn’t happened 150k years ago, but still, astounding stuff.

All I want to know after watching this marvelous show start to end is where can I buy this novel in book form? I want to read this thing as a book.

BUT! After a while I decided to do some writing since this big rush of ideas bubbled into my head, maybe I got smart ’cause I’m about to have a tumor eat my brain away, and I surprisingly managed to come up with five written pages of stuff, almost without crossing anything out, at Zeleni zajec over a cocktail. It was fun writing that much in one go after an extremely long time of not having been able to write anything of use. So over the last two days I managed to somewhat complete the tale, but put in a little cliffhanger at the end so I can continue this promising story about a dwarf and his wife at some other time.

I also went to a striptease club where many interesting things happened, but I probably shouldn’t write much about those experiences in such a public place. The fact that I’ve gone and that those things are a money pit should suffice. So without further ado, here’s the first paragraph and the link to The Lonely Dwarf:

There was once a dwarf called John who lived in a cottage deep inside the woods with his
wife Melinda. They led a happy existence full of daily little hurdles and exciting moments to
keep them going.

Their cottage wasn’t large, in fact you could say it was rather small, and it had
everything they needed. There was a large kitchen, so the dwarf could make his creations in,
 a small study for the dwarf and an adjacent library for them both. There was also a large
studio for Melinda to do her artistical musings in. She never really made anything of use /../

For the record, I do realise I once promised photowalking on a weekly basis, but I just can’t seem to manage that for some reason, must be all that silly work that tends to pile up and the shortnes of days. Pictures are much nicer when taken in well-lit conditions you know.

First let me say that both shows were very much fun and not only because I love anything theatre more than many other things. Both had wonderful actors and wonderful music and everything else wonderful. Kabaret is by far the best play/musicle I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing in a slovene playhouse and, sadly, is the only such I’ve ever seen in a foreign playhouse. But whatever, rules of the internets say I’m an expert after seeing something once.

The biggest difference I noticed is that Kabaret replaced front-row with proper actors and had a set of six patrons embedded into the stage with a table and chairs and everything else to make it look like a proper kabaret. Mostly they just sat there in costume, but at certain points of the musical they partook in the acting. Which is both a stroke of genius and a shame. A stroke of genius because it really brought out the idea that we’re not looking at something that’s supposed to be real, but at something that is in fact a depiction of something acted. But the sad part is that now front-row people didn’t get the handshake from the lead like I did in London.

Another striking difference is that in Kabaret the backup dancers were actually females, and one really hot one at that, whereas in Cabaret they were men. I feel MGL dropped the ball with this move because they went too far into realism. Maybe it’s a misinterpretation on my part, but I understood the musical to be a humorous depiction of 1930’s Berlin and mostly that all modern cabaret is a satirisation of real cabaret. In fact, in no other cabaret, video or real, except in Slovene Kabaret, have I seen the girls to be depicted by anything other than funny men. Guess I had more to look at in MGL, but having men do the female roles (except Sally Bowles) would be funnier and more entertaining.

Other than those two differences I really couldn’t find anything that would strike me as odd or too different, even the translations of all the songs were quite nearly perfect even though I noticed they screwed up the meaning on a few points to help the sound. But no biggie, it was lovely hearing the songs in Slovene and I am still quite impressed by the whole musical’s mixing of different languages. Quite fun.

Having read the book and somewhat understood the story, I can’t seem to quite figure out what it was about. Oh I know what it talked about. Seeming as how it’s real art, however, there’s supposed to be a meaning to it. Something it was about.

At first I thought it was a sort of guide on corrupting young souls through paradox and too great an insight into the intricacies of life. This was inspired by Henry Wotton’s corruption of Dorian Gray and I should say throughout the story I identified a lot with Harry. What does that say about me? Probably nothing, perhaps a lot. What’s more interesting is that when Dorian became a more important part of the story and Henry was just mentioned sporadically my opinion of what the book is about changed. Now it was Dorian that corrupted others, in fact he corrupted them even more than Harry ever did because he could hide his evil under the mask of youth. Interesting isn’t it? Corruption is greater when coming whence we don’t expect it.

So perhaps the book was a poltical comentary? There is so much corruption everywhere around us these days, but most simply fail to notice it because it comes under the guise of good … Anyhow, that’s probably not what the book is about. My final idea is that it was about the burden of guilt. Dorian, because of his looks, can do much more bad in his life than any normal person ever could. But it also means he is never physically or otherwise burdened by his actions, it is only his intellect that suffers. See, when normal people do something bad it shows in their face, others notice, others help carry part of the burden by, for example, moralising and nagging at you.

But for Dorian nobody could help cary the guilt, nobody even believed he was capable of anything bad and it eventually got to him. He could no longer suffer nobody believing in his true nature (that’s quite a burden to cary I believe) and killed the picture – the image of his guilt I think was what he called it.

Therefore, I believe the underlying story of The Picture of Dorian Gray to be that guilt is much harder on an individual when nobody is around to burden you with it.

Beautiful design, however, often goes unnoticed. People don’t see the code, managers don’t care for beauty and sexy, all they care about is productivity. This is why, with this piece of art, I sought to point out the clash between what a programmer wants and what they are forced into doing by circumstance. The roses depict seeking ultimate beauty while the small and scattered chrisantemes try to show how much random nuissance comes into play with development.

Scattering the pieces of paper with code amongst the beauty I tried to show the way a true programmer thinks – constantly scraping code that is less than perfect, constantly thinking in several threads, keeping wildly different parts of the project in their mind at all times. These papers then try to live amongst the petals in hopes of learning from them, in hopes of improving, of becoming as beautiful and perfect as The Rose.

The background is transparency, the foreground a computer GUI, these depict clairvoyance to see far ahead – predicting problems before they arise, and the basic tool of every programmer.

Good code is poetry.