The Riot of a Pussy

Moscow. Friday. Raining. +9C.

I was prepping myself for an early morning business meeting at a café close to the offices where the meeting was to take place. The usual stuff: last-minute notes, strong coffee and a croissant which will be instantly exposed as a Russian spy if it ever decided to travel to France.

A man in his late 50s was sitting at a table to the right of me, writing something clever (or at least something that required a lot of brow-knitting) in a thick lined pad. Casual Friday look, receding hairline, unexpressive face. His choice of clothes signaled he either had an inflated ego or had recently lost a half of his weight. ‘No, it must be the ego,’ I though, ‘otherwise he’d be a multi-millionaire weight-loss guru, and he obviously isn’t one’.

Other tables were occupied by grey suits of 50 different shades with male office folks shoved inside. A few girls, less boringly attired, were chatting away over their cappuccinos, while the men were debating the consequences of Microsoft buying Nokia over their double espressos. The chats were mixing up.

‘Falling capitalization of shoes I saw yesterday can’t stop Nokia from dumping their cheap phones until they give me my bonus when I could buy them on sale of assets in Finland’, was what you’d hear were you listening.

Distracting, if you need to write a few more notes to your presentation, and awesomely surreal otherwise.

I dwelt for a misogynic minute on the functional dependence of girlish giggle volume on the proximity of an attractive young male. When the two girls next to me who were channeling their giggles towards the only handsome guy among the debaters left the cafe, I realised I missed my chance to write a few more notes. A stream of unadulterated managerial wisdom began interfering with my thinking. I felt a few synapses pop out of existence in what would be qualified as a suicide by the brain police. Come on! The MS boss just asked his secretary to get him a new phone, not an iPhone (god forbid), perhaps, Nokia. So they went out and got him Nokia. A textbook case of miscommunication.

And then a beautiful blond girl of 20 walked in.

The handsome guy and all of the less fortunate straightened their backs while some of the least fortunate sucked in their bellies and cursed all the beer and Big Macs they’d consumed previously. And before previously.

I wanted to thank the lady. Her appearance killed the merger debate. Well, all debates, actually.

The girl went straight to the remarkable ego disguised under unremarkable appearance.

She was beaming with smiles and bouncing with expectations.

She sat down, kissed the owner of unremarkable appearance on his run-of-the-mill lips and started talking. Loud. Incessantly. Never stopping to inhale. Freedivers of the world, beware. There is a girl who can reset all of your world records the moment she learns you exist. She can beat a zombie in a breath-holding competition. Beating the male record in static apnea (11 minutes) would be an opening joke for her.

She told him about what she was doing last night, last day, this morning and generally since the last time they met, which I suspected was last morning.

Because she missed him, wanted him to be with her, knew he wanted the same, but understood he couldn’t, that is right now, but the time would come. Right, sweetheart?

When the audience got the general idea of what kind of relationship was played out in this theatre, the air of mass disapproval expelled the air of mass disappointment and the single whiff of hope that was coughed up by the only handsome guy, on first sight, and obviously by mistake. The kind of mistake that had turned out to be fatal to the “sweetheart”, at least in the eyes of a casual observer, if not the “sweetheart” himself.

The girl kept talking in a raucous voice of a forlorn Juliette who caught a cold because her Romeo was warming a different bed (yes, some lovers need to die young to avoid later disappointments). In half an hour her voice went all the way from sexy-husky to the “zweeet-harrrrt” often heard from a door in need of grease.

With the heavy rain outside, and my umbrella being a parody of kippah, I felt trapped. Extra notes resolved to stay unextracted from my mind.

The sugar daddy kept chewing his pastry, looking less sweet and more sour by the minute.

It took the girl 40 minutes to debrief her grand-dad-boyfriend of her whereabouts, thereabouts, and willbethereabouts.

I realised my initial intention to thank the girl was a bit premature.

Most men wondered if it had been worth it for the unremarkable guy. The 40-minute ordeal was definitely a full-time hell for him. Two men said, ‘No, I don’t think it was worth it!’ when the door shut behind the pair, and I am sure they were not discussing the merger, even though the same logic could apply to Microsoft – Nokia relationship.

I thought about famous lovers. Mme Pompadour, Marilyn Monroe, Modigliani, Picasso, a few others, and about the drawing of a cat that the Russian President left on the interactive whiteboard when visiting a school on the first day of a new academic year.

It may sound a schisophrenic kind of thinking. No. It is pure logic. Let’s follow it.

There are three groups of people for whom having lovers is OK. The public have been looking with condescension at love affairs of French kings (currently extinct), politicians from the Kennedy clan (on the brink), and artists (available in never-ending quantities and qualities).

Historically, French kings married for political gains. Historically, other nations agreed to provide France with those gains only in exchange for the French agreeing to marry the most unattractive bride. I mean, if a princess bride is not only good politically or financially, but is also beautiful, there’s no point in marrying a French king, because they were known to be promiscuous bastards legally entitled to an official lover. French people agreed that their king, usually married to an unattractive woman, had the right to romantic love, and thus was entitled of an official lover. A pretty vicious circle, to break which people had to revolt and cut the heads of their king and queen. The French Revolution was the first to be defined by a beauty crisis. Stick your tongue at anyone who thinks otherwise.

Kennedy couldn’t be blamed because you can’t blame a man for falling when he’s hit by a truck, and Ms Monroe could do that to men. Were Ms Lewinsky anywhere in the range of Marilyn’s beauty, no one would say a word against Bill.

Artists to accumulate lovers for artistic purposes. It is one of the job hazards, not perks. Be it otherwise, we’d have 90% less of nudes by Picasso or Modigliani, and 70% less expression in, say, Rodin’s work. We don’t want that, right?

There is just one guy who stands out, and who does not belong to any homogeneous professional group. The Russian President, who must have a lover, at least an imaginary one.

First, a double headed eagle on the Russian banner implies that the double-headedness is not exclusive to the upper part of its body, and it would be a waste of resources to use only one of them extra tools.

Second, the king of a homophobic country has to convincingly and continuously prove his heterosexuality to his people. A king can’t be weak in the department of prince-production.

Third, if there’s no freedom of the press, it must be replaced by the liberty of rumor to prevent the society kettle from going Kaboom.

The Soviet KGB is said to have written 90% of all the jokes about communism and party leaders. I am sure it’s NOT a mere gossip.

Now, look at this cat again.

Freud might tell us that a cat doodle can be just a cat doodle, but we’ll take the art critic approach, leaving the psychology of Putin’s graphics to those who want to go beyond the obvious phallic symbolism.

There are a few clearly defined shapes, and very exact and fine lines in this graphic work.

Which means, Putin has practiced a lot, and recently.

His daughters are well past the age when fathers can attempt to entertain them with cat doodles.

The Russian President was practicing for his own pleasure.

Or revenge.

I am sure you noticed this is a very unusual POV on the cat issue. The stylized feminine legs (two instead of four) make the cat an anthtopomorphical model walking down a catwalk. This is obviously a woman. Her tail is up, the two pairs of ears are alert, the wiskers are bristling with anticipation. I wonder why she has two pairs of ears though, but a work of a genius is meant to send audiences reeling with questions.

The black dot just where the legs connenct, and immediately before the tail begins is indicative of the author’s attention to phisiological detail, firmly affixing the artist in the famed school of Russian realism. The artist does not want to evade unpleasant questions, showing that the truth is not to be twisted, even if the audience consists of 7 year olds on their first day at school.

The cat’s head is blown out of its normal proportion to the body. She’s a smart pussy. 

When one of the puzzled first-grade schoolgirls asked Putin, ‘What is this?’, he answered with a wink, ‘This is a pussy from behind’.

This is the answer. Remember the Pussy Riot affair? Putin tells us that we should not take a pussy at face value, it must be taken from behind.

The Putin’s pussy is walking but not walking at the same time. Her legs are not, actually, moving. Isn’t it a nice metaphor of being imprisoned? She is clever and alert, but the artist has the power to expose her to himself at her most vulnerable. So, it is a picture about power over pussy (regardless of how clever she may be) as well.

The rich symbolism in a seemingly primitive picture allows me to put Putin firmly in the ranks of contemporary artists of the highest caliber. It is good he is guarded 24 by 7, and not just because he is the president of a country.

I only wish I could help the 7 year olds caught in the aritst’s imagination.

It shouldn’t surprise you that the moment the drawing was shown on TV, it was converted to a new coat-of-arms for Russia, taken from behind:

One of the best political cartoonists couldn’t miss the chance to expand on the topic:

You see, a genius work of art always sparks immediate controversy and artistic dialogue, which existence becomes another proof the work of art is seminal.

P.S. A Daily Prompt can be helpful even when it is not the same day!