Fight Issue EN by Meanstream

MEANSTREAM FIGHT ISSUE

PUSSY MEAN HERO

It had a lot to do with the fact that nothing seems to be happening right. It’s bad, it’s all bad. The internal politics of the country are like moshing with sumo wrestlers. Foreign policy is like Russia is moshing with it own sumo wrestlers.

id Pussy Riot’s performance at “Christ the Savior” cathedral earn it`s primetime coverage? We think everyone, who is ready to receive some police batons in his face, for the heck of it, should earn primetime. That’s real reality, pure emotion, an unfiltered drama for free on YouTube.

And you if you are just not stupid enough to be ok with it, you will find that no one will hear you until you mumble under your nose. That’s why a punk concert has to take place at a cathedral, to stop the system for a few minutes which extend themselves in the virtual environment and travel around the world while you are already in a police van. Internet provided room for new lows in what is being called punk, no one knows if these people will change history or just love getting beaten. One thing is for sure and that is you can’t be just anybody to start a Pussy Riot.

Pussy Riot confronted Vladimir Putin, his system, his church and his modernity. Some idealists saw it as a foot in the system’s arse, others defined it as pure, ugly and fat blasphemy. No one, though it appears, saw the little red flag. Who cares if the stunt turns out be a good PR at the cost of two years in jail? Who cares if some of the biggest names in the industry stood for them?

by Stransky

The fact that these girls exist and they do what they do is a sign that there is a gap in the Russian boat, it’s a sign that the ”new Russia” of Putin and his lackeys, is getting blurred in a familiar totalitarian sketch. Pussy Riot may be crazy feminists as they say, propaganda hooligans or agitators, nevertheless they showed “balls” that many others do not. Why would anybody risk 2 years in a Russian jail? PR and money?. Pussy Riot must have gotten other motives.

KRIS

ANTI MEA

SKO

AN HERO

Then a breakthrough came for him. In Bulgaria this means it is happening on TV. The big bad boy got into a big bad scandal. He had to bang a nasty b*tch and put it up the internet for everyone to see. Here his adventures made a turn. With his grin, in what we might call the best branded home-made porn video, he made a caricature of himself without knowing it. The clip mentioned is more of a failed toothpaste commercial than a felatio movie. Pretty lame stunt that begged for a half-as*ed PR solution to cover it. Something big, something reality-like. The lousy PR gave birth to a brilliant idea. What American gangster-rappers do when they run out of bullshit? Some survive, some don’t, and some go to jail.

ts no wonder why nothing is going right. Annoying and lousy brown-nosers have taken over on all levels, thus Krisko was created. He came into existence pretty much as the powerpuff girls - sugar, “spice” and everything with bad taste for music and incoherent lyrics. How was he able to attract even minimum attention is a mystery as great as to what is the talent, people like, WOSH MC and 100 Kila possess. You know what I think? It stinks. We are digging straight to China, filling the resulting hole with what is left of Bulgarian pop culture. Pop or Rap then finally Crap, turns out to be Krisko’s evolution, putting him as the missing link between Shamara and the new breed of musical half-wits which are about to brain rape us next summer. In the beginning there was nothing. Then brown light came from above (or below?), and just like Mr. Bean, a great comedian was spawned on a manhole cover in Mladost, with a dream of becoming a good musician. For some time something wasn’t going as it should. Maybe it was cheap drugs or the lack of nominal intelligence to write. Anyhow the themes of his songs were so ridiculous that another rap wannabe would later describe them as “Nose lumps”. In the beginning Krisko was just the flagman for wasted teens with no future. If he would only remain in his lair at the back ends of video sharing websites we would be spared the scene in which he becomes as popular as swine flu. Now his image defiles reason to become an epitome of endless puberty for rich kids.

In September the billboards put out the rumor that Krisko was crying and whining behind bars, busted in the colorful misery of the Central Rail Station.In jail. For coke. It almost looked as the poor rerun of a gangster rap movie. The badly written excuse of the homegrown rap superstar didn’t look like a part of a tough lifestyle but rather a fall in the midst of the fall, base-jumping for some cash and fame. Now Krisko wants to sue the press. He isn’t a drug user, even the reefer makes him sick (on the picture you can see that he’s having a bad time). He also gets sick of all the online pirates who sabotage him on his way to release a debut album. He’ll be back though. In the next episode Krisko should try to be like DMX, slamming a car in the airport lobby yelling that he’s an FBI agent. by Stranski

YOU AREN

SPIRITUAL

N’T BANKSY

L FATHER

Where do you find your ideas? I fell upon the “You are not Banksy”’s idea during some bad riots in London in the summer of 2011. I thought it would be interesting to recreate a riot scene with Banksy’s flower throwers.

lease introduce yourself. I’m a 48 year old British photographer, born in London and now living in Los Angeles with my Boxer dog “Ziggy”.

What is your dream project? Probably something that most people would run a mile from, I get inspired by human tragedy either on an individual basis, maybe the loss of a loved on or on a mass scale, like and earthquake or war. I love to show the emotion from those situations.

How did you become a photographer? Photography has been a part of my life for as long as I remember. I didn’t go to school to study it. I always love photography anything I saw. On my 30th Birthday I was sitting on a beach in Spain and I decided to quit my job and become a photographer.

What is your worst vice? Good whisky, ideally a Highland park 18 year malt.

What was your very first influence? Robert Capa and his images of the D-Day Landings.

Are you religious and who is your God? I’m and Atheist... I hate religion, it should be banned. It is the cause of so much injustice, pain, death suffering, and class deprivation. How “intelligent” people can believe something that there is not one piece of evidence to back up mystifies me.

Who are your favorite artists? Richard Avedon, Ansel Adams, Elliot Erwitt and Eugene Richards. Today, what is your strongest inspiration? Life itself to capture that minute moment in a photograph and to convey the emotion from the single point in time.

What do you think about the end of the world this year? I must remember to cancel the newspapers. How do you think photography will have changed by 2050? We will all have cameras embedded in our heads, taking continuous pictures of our lives, while we sleep they images will be downloaded, so that when we die someone can see everything we saw.

Can you tell the craziest experience you have had in your work? I broke into prison once to get some photographs (and broke out again). And Courtney Love tried to seduce me. What is the feeling that you wish to communicate in your work? Whatever feeling there is at that point in time and space. Photographs are about convey emotion. If a photograph doesn’t that then the photographer has failed.

Could you recommend some new photographers? No, sorry... Some old photographers?

Everyone should view Richard Avedon’s work and the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and portraits or Yosuf Karsh. All iconic and timeless. A website about photography? VIIphoto.com – the photographers at VII are really pushing boundaries with some great work. A movie about photography? The Killing fields. A book about photography? Read them all. You can learn something from every book on the subject. That’s what I did, I went to my local library and started at one end of the photography section and worked through to the other end. A picture everyone should see? Nick Ut’s Napalm girl. An artist, that would you like to see in this interview section immediately after you? Banksy I guess! Good luck! interview Saint Eugenius

MEAN MUSIC

Seventeen years after the debut of Chan Marshall as “Cat Power” and six after the last album with original content here comes “Sun” – her ninth studio album. But let’s leave the maths here. The album constitutes everything that happens when sensitivity and logic live through one wild maturity – everything looks and sounds like as if you still want to fly high at 40. In almost every possible way “Sun” is a Declaration for Independence. You can almost feel the stuff that gave spirit in the recordings - the scene fever, the drug overuse, the intermissions, the creative demons. The first tries of Cat Power to sound different from something you might hear on the radio. 20

MEAN MUSIC

The “XX” album by the “XX” is one of those records that fill empty space in a way you don’t realize what is there in the first place. The singers Romy Madley and Oliver Sim treat the songs as if they were a secret to be whispered in low, hurtful intimacy. The low muffed down voices from the process of emotion extraction created the bold feeling of vast spaces. Without those guys we would listen to Weeknd and Jessi Ware’s music with a different set of ears. Well, things haven’t changed in the new “Coexist” album. Of which, I’m starting to think, I took too much the last weekend. 21

MEANSTREAM NEXT ISSUE: 1 NOVEMBER 2012