This recently spotted on the Turkmenistan government’s website:

Day of Oil and Gas Industry Workers and Geologists is established in accordance with the Decree of the President of Turkmenistan.

The idea is to honor the workers who played a role in opening Turkmenistan’s pipeline to China last month. China is obviously a hugely important market and the pipeline gives Turkmenistan a stronger hand in dealing with Russia, which would like to monopolize the transit of Turkmenistan’s considerable gas reserves.

The official statement declares:

“Through the efforts to diversify the system of transit of gas to world markets the Turkmenistan-China gas pipeline, which is called ‘the energy bridge of XXI century’, was launched with the participation of the leaders of four states. This event will go down in history of the Turkmen people as the greatest accomplishment of the epoch.”

So every 14 December, Turkmenistan will pause to commemorate the “diligent and selfless labour of courageous oil and gas industry workers and geologists.”

We’re getting verklempt.

Estonia’s TV3 News is now my favorite news organization in the world. I have never watched TV3 news and haven’t a clue as to its journalistic quality or integrity. But check out this genius ad for the network’s evening news broadcast, a viral video hit that transposes the Simpsons credit sequence to a rural Estonian village.  Best. TV news. Promo. Ever. Or, as they might say in Tallinn, suureperane.

I will not post without giving credit where credit is due: thanks to The New York Times’ blog The Lede for pointing out this gem.

Uzbeks who want to see Sting play in Tashkent later this month will have to pay $1,000 to $2,000 for a ticket, according to a report on the EurasiaNet website, which in turn cites a CA-news.org report.
The brief says the cheapest ticket “will cost more than 45 times the average monthly salary in Uzbekistan.”
So ordinary Uzbeks won’t get to see Sting. (I know some people who would say, “Lucky ordinary Uzbeks.”) But come on, it’s crazy enough to spend $100, as I have, to go to a concert in the West. One thousand dollars to see Sting in Tashkent? This show clearly isn’t meant for ordinary Uzbeks.
To be sure, there are worse problems to be solved in Tashkent, and I don’t know exactly how those ticket prices came to be set. But this kind of tarnishes whatever reputation Sting had for having a social conscience, no?

Mega-sized rock ‘n’ roll stadium shows are not known for giving fans a chance for intimate interaction with their idols. So I thought I’d witnessed about as good an example as you could get of bridging that gap at Bruce Springsteen’s terrific 5 July show in Vienna, where a pleading young woman bobbing on her boyfriend’s shoulders in the sea of bodies near the stage got the Boss to play (for the first time in Europe) his achingly beautiful, rarely performed version of Tom Waits’ “Jersey Girl.” (See how here.)

But three Czech guys have managed to top that. As Radio Prague reports, guitarist Stepan Etrych, bassman  Cyril Strejc and drummer Michal Simek - collectively a tribute band called U2 Pop Tarts - attended U2’s 18 July show in Berlin bearing signs advertising their ability to play “Angel of Harlem.” When the band swung into that rollicking tribute to Billie Holiday (from their Rattle and Hum album), Bono spotted the trio and brought them onstage to back him up, casually informing the crowd, “This is an experiment.”

Here’s the kicker: This impromptu gig before 80,000 screaming fans was the Czech trio’s first public performance. They’d only ever played in rehearsal, polishing their chops while they searched for a singer who could channel Bono. Having played with the real thing, they might just have leapfrogged to the top of Prague’s considerable revival-band heap.

What does Prisoners’ dilemma a la bulgare look like? - To stay in prison or to run for parliament.
The Galevi Brothers (also the Galev Bros), Plamen Galev and Angel Hristov - two of the most discussed underworld figures on Bulgarian media - seem to have made a lasting mark on, intriguingly, the German public; more lasting than the unprecedented abuse of €7.1 million EU funds reveled last year.  Bulgarian online journal Novinite quoted outgoing German ambassador to Sofia Michael Geier saying that “he was shocked by the huge attention on the part of German people regarding the issue.”

the Galev brothers

The daily continues to explain that in mid-June, Plamen Galev and Angel Hristov walked out of jail after they were both allowed to run for parliamentary seats and thus received immunity from prosecution. Hristov was the only candidate in the western city of Kyustednil of the little known Party for Liberal Alternative and Peace PLAM (FLAME), and its majority candidate in the city of Pernik. His registration documents were submitted on June 12 with the Regional Electoral Commission in Kyustendil. On June 10, the Regional Electoral Commission confirmed that his brother Galev had also been registered to run in the upcoming general elections, as a majority candidate for his hometown of Doupnista. Galev and Hristov, had been investigated over a long period of time for various crimes in the southwest town of Dupnitsa, most notably racketeering and organized crime. The Sofia City Prosecutor recently officially moved the case against the Galevi brothers to the Sofia City Court and the two are charged with running an organized criminal group.

According to the law, as official MP candidates, they would have received immunity from prosecution and the Court would not have been able to set a date for the trial until after their term is over. The Irish Times commented that “on the opposite corner of Europe” running for parliament is the new escape route for prisoners. Fortunately, the Galev Bros failed to make it to Bulgaria’s 41st General Assembly. The City Prosecutor did not, however, throw them back in jail:  the two were released on bail because they had not given any indication they would try to hide before the trial.

Novinite quotes prosecutor Nikolay Kokinov, who said that “In order to ask for their detention they must violate bail - fail to appear before the court, or hide. If we receive proof they tried to pressure witnesses this would become a new circumstance that would give us the reason to request a measure other than the bail. However, I doubt they would display any such behavior because they spent enough time behind bars and would be cautious now.” The Prosecutor further announced that the trial against the two would be scheduled as soon as possible by the Regional Court in the western city of Kyustendil, adding that after Galev and Hristov no longer have immunity their case should be tried by the local court instead of being returned back to the one in Sofia.

The Irish Times completes the list of all crime bosses who tried the escape route/legislative loophole this spring.

Alexander Tomov in Court

Starting with Alexander Tomov, whose embezzlement trial as the former director of the insolvent Kremikovtzi steelworks was suspended to allow him to run in June’s European Parliament elections. Like the Galevs, he was also a candidate in the national vote on July 5th.

Ivailo Drazhev, left

Another almost-MP is Ivailo Drazhev, the former head of the Chernomorets soccer club, who is awaiting trial for drink-driving and causing the death of two people in 1998; and who is also charged with siphoning off cash from a Bulgarian company.

Vesselin Danov

The notorious father and son, Vesselin and Hristo Danov, who face jail for crimes including extortion, money laundering and luring people into prostitution also hoped to run for parliament in the Black Sea city of Varna, where they are both councillors.The tiny Alliance of Bulgarian Patriots, on whose list they would have run, complained about a court’s decision not to grant the Danovs temporary immunity.

While these fledgling politicians insist they are innocent and want to enter parliament only to help their compatriots and their homeland, their involvement in the election has prompted President Georgi Parvanov to lament the legal loopholes that allow them to run for office. The Irish Times quotes his in saying that “If we now allow people burdened with heavy sins [to enter parliament], this would not only blacken Bulgaria’s image but would also hurt our perception about democracy profoundly. That is why every voter must use their conscience.” The president’s vote by conscience message seems to have been heeded by Bulgarian voters, who rushed to vote in unprecedented numbers on Sunday.

Or maybe it was rather the obligatory warning which accompanied every campaign message and adorned every campaign poster this year (”The buying and selling of votes is a crime. Vote by conscience!”), to the shock and dismay of  OSCE observers, which led to the high turnout - again, to the shock and dismay of many more election analysts.

Above: Bill Clinton Boulevard in Pristina.
Below: George W. Bush Street in Tbilisi.

Thanks to Greg Dubinsky for the photo of Bill Clinton Boulevard!

The history of the Czech film poster is a curious example of creativity under constraint. According to czechfilmposters.com due to the high cost film posters were rarely imported with the film, so Czech typographers were given the chance to unleash their dark and quirky style on posters for movies like Hitchcock’s the Birds and Psycho, Fellini’s 81/2 and La Dolce Vita, as well as hip Hollywood hits such as Hopper’s Easy Rider and Badham’s Saturday Night Fever.

Czechfilmposters.com offers a comprehensive history of poster art that I am more or less going to summarize.

The Czech film poster of the 1920s and 1930s almost exclusively used realistically painted characters and scenes from the film and screamed the names of its stars often in letters larger than those of the film’s title.  Towards the end of the 1930s, photos of the main character started appearing in the film poster design – usually on a painted background, complemented by lettering created by the poster’s designer. The film poster art lost most of its bite and glamour during the Nazi occupation. The Czech film industry was nationalized as early as August 1945 – two and half years before the Communist takeover in February 1948, and was promoted by mostly fully painted and heavily censored posters. The second wave of nationalisation brought an end to the independent graphic design studios and artists worked full time for a promotional department.

The decade between 1948 and 1958 was dominated by communist propaganda in all aspects of life and film was one of its main tools. The two main cracks in the uniform surface of socialist realism in both film and the accompanying film poster were the exhibition in 1954 of Polish film posters (way more creative than the Czech) and Khrushchev’s criticism in 1956 of Stalin’s cult and methods of governance. The “thaw” after 1956 enabled artists to organise themselves into groups and be independent rather than film distribution yuppies. A new modern style sneaked into Czech film posters in 1958. Black and white photographs of main characters appear on strikingly modern painted backgrounds or the whole artwork is painted in a style that would now generally be called Mid-Century Modern. The commissioning editors at the state film distribution company UPF (Ustredni pujcovna filmu – Central film distribution agency) even started shifting the majority of poster commissions to freelancers. Modern Czech film poster art was born.

The 1960s became the golden age of the Czech film poster. While the American and Western European film poster primarily served the film, in Czech and Polish film poster art the film served the poster. The art of the poster went far beyond the mere capture of the public’s attention. The fact that the text on the poster was usually limited to the film title, name of director and the leading actors, without logos of film distributors and sponsors, quotes lifted from reviews, studio information etc., also helped.

While the Polish film poster was predominantly painted, the palette of techniques utilised by the Czechs included artistic typography and print, photo-montage, image manipulation and collage – often combined with or superimposed on painted backround. The art work not only presented the film but also interpreted its meaning.The artists were usually shown the film in an advance screening but sometimes all they had to work from was a couple of photos and sometimes only a synopsis. Among the leading poster artists of the 1960s were Jiri Balcar (La Strada), Bedrich Dlouhy (8 ½), Milan Grygar (Blow-Up), Karel Vaca (La Dolce Vita), Zdenek Ziegler (Psycho), Karel Teissig (Les Grandes Familles), Josef Vyletal (Il Vangelo secondo Matteo), Olga Vyletalova-Polackova (Une Femme Douce) and Karel Machalek (Oidipo Re).

The decade of hope ended with the Russian invasion in August 1968. Paranoid aparatchiks searched for anti-communist propaganda where there was none – film poster designs submitted by artists were often rejected or had to be reworked for bizarre reasons. In her article “Czech Film Poster from 1945 until today” published in the book Czech Film Poster of the 20th century, Marta Sylvestrova writes about a commissioning editor getting fired because of a claim by a communist official that the space between the legs of elephants pictured on a poster for the film “Surrounded by Elephants” looked like a swastika. According to Sylvestrova Zdenek Ziegler was interviewed by the secret police about where he got the 100 USD banknote he used in his design for the 100 Rifles poster and Josef Vyletal had to obscure the US flag on the back of Henry Fonda’s jacket with smoke from one of the passing motorbikes on his poster for Easy Rider(above).

100 rifles, Ziegler

This was the so called “normalization” atmosphere, writes Marta Silvestrova, characterized by the return of censorship and self-censorship. Many poster artists emigrated, and two very talented personalities, Richard Fremund and Jiri Balcar, died in tragical car accidents. Posters became more metaphorical in their spirit as shown in surrealist posters by Josef Vyletal (Hitchcock’s “the Birds”) and Zdenek Vlach, while many other artists used grotesque drawing (Jiri Salamoun, Petr Pos, Vratislav Hlavaty).

In the early 1990s, the decline of film poster creation started with the demise of the Central Film Distribution Center, when free market opened again and American film distributors established their branches in the Czech Republic. Together with their films, they also brought original American poster designs. There was only limited space left for Czech designers. Now they can only promote Czech films, and even there the Hollywood style of manipulated photographs has affected Czech designs. In terms of creative personalities, the present-day Czech film poster is predominantly associated with the names of Ales Najbrt and his graphic design studio (Cosy Dens); Eva Svankmajerova´s surrealist style in the posters for Jan Svankmajer’s animated movies; and Slovak film director Juraj Jakubisko, who continues designing posters for his own movies as well as for Kytice (Wild Flowers).

Eva Svankmajerova for the film Alice

For a more comprehensive gallery I strongly recommend this website.

When we think of Central European sport, we think beer-barrel rolling. At the 13th annual World Barrel Rolling competition, held Tuesday in the tiny West Bohemian town of Chodova Plana, teams from six countries maneuvered 100-pound barrels down a 600-meter, four-turn track in as little as 2 1/2 minutes, using nothing more than sticks and their often beer-soaked wits. Herein we offer Reuters’ video account of the event, in part because it’s good fun but also as a shout-out to one of our favorite small Czech breweries, Chodovar, the excellent family-run outfit that hosts the event (not to mention the country’s first beer spa).

It all started with that Louis Vuitton ad…

Now in addition to shilling for luxury travel accessories, Mikhail Gorbachev has released a debut album, which went for a whopping £100,000 at a recent auction to benefit the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation, named after his late wife.  The album is composed of romantic Russian ballads dedicated to Raisa, who died 10 years ago.  The Raisa Gorbachev Foundation is devoted to helping fight childhood cancer.

Apparently, Russian kids watch too much of the OC. According to this report from state news agency RIA Novosti Moscow on 17th June, Russian schoolchildren would love to make like Ryan Attwood and lounge around in pool houses overlooking the pacific, while working for one of America’s Corporate Giants (not McDonalds, if that’s what you were thinking).

They’d also like to abolish the English language and scratch America, a.k.a “Georgia’s Henchman, “off the map…

(FYI: CocaCola would remain unaffected)

Article:

Russian schoolchildren regard the USA as an enemy but still want to live in Beverly Hills on the Pacific coast and work for Coca Cola. These are the results of the opinion poll “Political conscience of teenagers” carried out by the State University - Higher School of Economics. 

In October-December 2008, the political research laboratory of the State University - Higher School of Economics carried out a poll among 300 teenagers, aged 13-18, residents of Moscow. Of them, 150 live in stable families and go to prestigious schools, and 150 are runaway children, the so-called street kids, whom the researchers met at railway stations, markets, hostels and isolation wards.

To abolish the English language and conquer the USA: Forty-eight per cent of Moscow schoolchildren and 23 per cent of street children believe that the USA is Russia’s “enemy”, first deputy head of the faculty of applied political sciences of the State University - Higher School of Economics Valeriya Kasamara said at a news conference at RIA Novosti. Twenty-three per cent of children from stable families believe Russia has no enemies. The teenagers also named Georgia as Russia’s enemy (19 per cent of schoolchildren and 19 per cent of street children). Kasamara said the poll was carried out in October, when the press was still actively discussing the Georgian-Ossetian conflict. Moreover, the children described the Georgians as the Americans’ henchmen. 

The street children see enemies in Fascists and people of non-Russian ethnic backgrounds from the former Soviet Union (Azeri, Kyrgyz, Tajiks and Chechens), whom they regard as rivals (10 and 13 per cent respectively). Asked how Fascists could be considered as modern Russia’s enemies, Kasamara said that many street children spend only three to five years in school, and their answers show their inadequate knowledge of history.

The Moscow schoolchildren offer the following ways to oppose America: to abolish the English language, remove the USA from the position of world dominance or at least stop being dependent on the USA, or even such radical measures as wiping the USA off the face of the world. At the same time the children say they dream about owning a house in Beverly Hills on the Pacific coast and working as managers for Coca Cola. The street children believe that the ethnic issue can be resolved by dividing Moscow into quarters for the rich, the poor and ethnic non-Russians. Their peers from stable families want to ban foreigners from working in Russia to help Russians to find jobs more easily. 

Both rich and poor: The majority of the teenagers, 79 per cent of schoolchildren and 58 per cent of street children, have a positive perception of Russia. They regard it as a big, beautiful, powerful and rich country. Eighteen per cent of the schoolchildren and 32 per cent of the street children have a negative perception of Russia. However, the adjectives the schoolchildren used were softer and calmer than the street children’s opinion, Kasamara said. For instance, schoolchildren call Russia dirty, strange, incomprehensible, poor, hungry and unfair, where the government is not thinking about the children and everyone takes bribes. The street children used the words unfair, not free, destitute, immoral, dirty, a dump, cruel and criminal and say they want to leave it.  The children offered two optimistic forecasts for Russia’s development - “a technological breakthrough”, during which technology, medicine and education will develop, and a “great power scenario”, when Russia will instil fear in the whole world. Among pessimistic forecasts were a crisis, collapse, decline, a break-up of Russia when it is conquered by other countries, a catastrophe, a nuclear explosion, and the end of the world.

President = Stalin + Mikhalkov :The majority of the children believe that Russia’s ideal president must be a middle-aged Russian man. He must combine two qualities - kindness and toughness, i.e. to be kind towards its people (the idea of a paternalistic tsar who loves his people) and tough towards officials, Kasamara said.  The majority of the Moscow schoolchildren named Vladimir Putin as an ideal president. Some named [Liberal Democratic Party leader] Vladimir Zhirinovskiy. The street children believe an ideal president must be like film director Nikita Mikhalkov, showman and body builder Vladimir Turchinskiy or Joseph Stalin.

Medvedev is more intelligent than Putin: The schoolchildren value Putin’s political mindset, the lack of bad habits and the fact that “he still runs the country”. Kasamara noted that their perception of the current prime minister often resembles children’s stories about Lenin. Street children say they are “used to Putin”, whom they like for his policies more than Medvedev and note that “as soon as Medvedev appeared, a war started”.  The children say the president has circles under his eyes and this, in their view, means that he works harder than his predecessor. They also believe that Medvedev is more intelligent than Putin.Asked what they would do if they become president, children from stable families said they would provide social support to pensioners, resolve the housing problem in the country and invest in public health and education. If the street children had this opportunity, they would collect all homeless people, build a house for them, and open a bank which would give money to orphans and homeless people. They believe the president must travel round the country and write articles about the problems of children and homeless people.

Are these 300 children alone in their love-hate relationship with America? And will Georgian grief satiate their appetites for Applebee’s?