Thursday, February 16, 2023

BLAZING SLIPPERS

by George Salamon


The choreographer Marco Goecke with his dog 'Gustav' in a photograph from his Instagram account.


Marco Goecke has been suspended from his position as ballet director at Hanover’s main opera house after he smeared excrement on a critic’s face." —The New York Times, February 13, 2023


High culture's going
to the dogs, to the
dachshunds in Germany
this time, where once the
learned scholars
marched step in step with
thugs in brown shirts.
Vulgarity can still be bracing
or honest, at its most violent
expression it often swings
from rhetorical bullshit 
to the berserk Bolshoi 
acted out in Hanover.


George Salamon thinks Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles is one of the funniest movies ever made. The real violence on the Frontier was not too funny, perhaps only to those who conquered it by the gun.