“No thieves would leave a giant fish in the house while stealing nothing. And it’s not possible that someone threw the fish in through the window, as the door and windows were locked. All we can imagine is that the catfish somehow sneaked into the house in the time between us opening the door and then leaving for work.”
 — Why yes, there is a picture.

by Kriston Capps

What with Chloe Sevigny reading from the Pussy Riot closing statements tonight and a demonstration in New York’s Times Square this afternoon, maybe it’s no big deal that several dozen people assembled outside the Russian Embassy for a Free Pussy Riot rally in Washington, D.C. the other day. Congress is on recess and it was an August Friday afternoon: perfect conditions for checking out of the office to check out an Amnesty International event. Glover Park is far from everything, but between Russian diplomats and fussy residents, someone in the neighborhood was bound to take umbrage with so many signs reading “pussy.” What could go wrong? Maybe something!

The rally had a festival air to it, given all the D.C. and Baltimore punk bands wearing brightly colored sun dresses and balaclavas in solidarity with Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich. These are the women who were arrested in March for donning the same costumes and playing an impromptu punk show in Moscow’s imperious Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The rally in Washington was at least large enough to draw a few food trucks.

Despite healthy press attendance and even demonstrations in Moscow, Pussy Riot’s best defense has been taking shape off-stage, on the U.S. eastern seaboard, far away from the Moscow courtroom where they will receive a sentence tomorrow morning, our time. If the courtroom diary of Tolokonnikova’s husband, Pyotr Verzilov, is to be believed, the sentence is almost a certainty. The sympathetic punk rallies, growing trial coverage, and shout-outs from Jarvis Cocker and the Pet Shop Boys to Björk and Madonna (bozhe moi!) have turned Pussy Riot into a human-rights cause. Free Pussy Riot: It’s an outcome that at least one member of the group has worked toward her whole adult life.

International support, meanwhile, has evaded Voina, a performance-art troupe whose name means “war” and whose tactics often amount to performance-art as battle. To mark International Workers’ Day, members of the group threw cats at Russian McDonalds workers. Tolokonnikova, the putative leader of Pussy Riot and its most visible figure at trial, was a member of Voina when it staged one of its more famous actions. That performance went unnoticed in the moment: In the days before the 2008 election of Dmitry Medvedev, Voina members staged an orgy in a biology museum.

A protest orgy, just like that, and no one might have noticed — except that Voina has coupled its masculine 70s-era performance strategies with 00s-era media management, building a following for their performances through LiveJournal (it’s still a thing over there, since it was bought by a Russian Company in 2007), Flickr and streaming video. Voina uses its blogs for documentation purposes, never to advertise events or build audience, and also to post notice when their members are in trouble. And they frequently are: Leonid Nikolayev and Oleg Vorotnikov were arrested in 2010 for turning over an empty police car (as part of a performance). They and Natalya Sokol, another member, say that they were savaged by anti-extremism police following the men’s release from detention. Banksy posted their bail.

At one time, Voina counted among its own ranks many members of Pussy Riot, including the three women on trial. (Taking a nod from the Guerrilla Girls, Pussy Riot’s members are anonymous.) Voina activist and spokesperson Yana Sarna — because art-terrorist groups have spokespersons — says that Voina broke with the women after “our moral, ethic and aesthetic views became incompatible with theirs.”

In fact, Voina called for a boycott of the 4th Moscow Biennale last year because it featured a video by Tolokonnikova and Verzilov (and volunteers) exhibited under the name Voina. The piece, called “Kiss the Cops,” is an assault-y film in which the ex-Voina activists rush up to women police officers and try to smooch on them without consent (or warning). More damning, Voina further says that a video recorded and published by Verzilov of leftist and anarchist activities led to arrests among the groups. The beef with Verzilov has not led Voina to totally disavow Pussy Riot. Members of Voina have been outspoken in their demands that the women be released. Perhaps because they know what awaits them.

Meanwhile, Voina have taken on a curatorial role in the 7th Berlin Biennale. Their announcement included this bit of insidery anarchic positioning:

This doesn’t mean that as Biennale curators we are going to occupy ourselves with exhibition management, which in our opinion is rather useless: exhibitions harm contemporary art. All artists ever think about nowadays is what they can exhibit and where. Therefore the fewer art pieces the Biennale will have, the better.

For a group that has denounced exhibitions, Voina is adamant about attribution. Sarna is quick to credit Voina for the concept animating Pussy Riot’s performance itself, saying that the girls participated in a similar impromptu punk concert that Voina conducted in a courtroom in 2009. “All Pussy Riot performances are repeated remakes of this action, in which they took part as group’s followers.” He discusses Pussy Riot in tones that are in equal part critical and reverential:

Pussy Riot activists have to be freed. It can be said that the trial against them is a part of their action. By their provocation they managed to reveal the real ugly essence of the Russian Orthodox Church officials and state authorities. They tore the mask off them. In this sense Pussy Riot’s provocation was successful: they didn’t do anything illegal, but the authorities rushed at them as horrible monsters.

In this sense it was massively successful. The evolution of Pussy Riot — into a performance arena that is more feminist, less conceptual, more conversant with Western art, and more tentative with regard to the law — has not earned them proper credit with everyone. The prominent liberal reformist and Democratic Union chair Valeriya Novodvorskaya still condemns Pussy Riot and Voina with the same stroke, for example. If the world was ever ready for a reverse Sister Souljah moment, it is now.

Pussy Riot’s distinctive palette — so much more coherent to the West than Voina’s closed-loop agitprop — has earned them plaudits, even to a silly extent. “Pussy Riot’s communally conceived fashion attack is clearly visible in the YouTube video of the group’s performance on the altar of the church,” New York Times T magazine blogger Vivien Goldman wrote. “All the elements are there: gaudy, ripped-to-fit minis and shifts in contrasting solid colors with bright tights, boots and those haunting balaclavas.”

All the elements are there, no question: Pussy Riot have managed to connect the thread between the Russian conceptual art tradition and the Western punk tradition. And even though their protest speaks specifically to the relationship between President Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill I, they’ve arrived at a message that speaks to the victims of a global war on women. And beyond: Tolokonnikova has appeared for court wearing a “¡No pasarán!” t-shirt (“They shall not pass!”) — a simple gesture that puts Pussy Riot in common cause with French resistance, Spanish communists, and Gandalf the Grey.

By sealing them in a glass cage at trial, in the bizarre courtroom with barking attack dogs, Russian authorities have done their part to cement the image as well. To put them on display but then permit Tolokonnikova to say, in her closing statements, that the trial isn’t about them?

Essentially, it is not three singers from Pussy Riot who are on trial here. If that were the case, what’s happening would be totally insignificant. It is the entire state system of the Russian Federation which is on trial and which, unfortunately for itself, thoroughly enjoys quoting its cruelty towards human beings, its indifference to their honour and dignity, the very worst that has happened in Russian history to date.

This is to create martyrs. Martyrs easily recognizable from downtown Manhattan and Glover Park and beyond, especially in such “haunting” balaclavas.

Kriston Capps is a senior editor at Architect magazine.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

26 Poems by Emily Dickinson
translated by Paul Legault

700. My favorite way to interact with people is to read letters from them, completely alone, in a locked room.

701. Children are better than real people.

702. I wouldn’t be so sad if I weren’t Emily Dickinson.

703. The sun came up this morning, and I saw it.

704. Today sucks balls.

705. Although it’s kind of embarrassing to be an old maid, I’m glad I never got married to a human.

706. I cannot be with you because you would make me happy, and that’s not my style.

707. Obese people hate small things.

708. I’m obsessed with your face. I want my face to be welded to your face forever.

709. I have suicidal tendencies.

710. Humans can’t survive inside of the sun because it is in a constant state of combustion, which keeps it at a temperature of approximately five million degrees Celsius.

711. God tried to kill me.

712. I asked this guy to marry me, and it scared him off.

713. Thanks so much for the endless amount of pain you gave me. Really. I’m not being sarcastic. Thanks.

714. Angels are plotting to destroy you.

715. Dying is really trippy.

716. Just when you need it the least, you find a pearl. I told you to get away from me, pearl. Shoo.

717. The stars promised me they would last forever, but they lied. All stars will inevitably die as their potential energy is limited by their finite mass. I’m going to sue them.

718. I have a vestigial third ear that I keep hidden because it’s kind of embarrassing.

719. Because you died, I have turned into a long, narrow excavation in the ground, the earth from which is thrown up in front to serve as a shelter from enemy fire or attack.

720. What if there were a sea inside of the sea that was inside of the sea that was inside of the sea that was inside of the sea…that was inside of the sea?

721. We cannot create a philosophy of abstract thought unless it is born out of the materiality of the concrete world.

722. Pallbearers are always the coolest people at a funeral.

723. Does anyone else have seasonal depression? If so, please raise your hand.

724. Everyone wants something even if they don’t want anything.

725. I don’t know.

The Emily Dickinson Reader was just published by McSweeney’s Books. Paul Legault is also the author of The Other Poems (Fence) and The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn).

Why settle for one poem when you can DRENCH YOURSELF IN POETRY? Click here to enter the archives of The Poetry Section! You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

by Awl Sponsors

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This fall, Bonobos is taking pants shopping away from the couples and the clueless and into the inbox. The online men’s clothing company is taking real guys and showing them the difference between wearing average, every-day clothes, and wearing better-fitting Bonobos. A Pantsformation, if you will.

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In a rare victory for common sense, a federal bankruptcy court has temporarily prevented American Airlines from ditching its contracts with its pilots’ union during its bankruptcy planning. (The flight attendants’ union is currently voting on its own latest offer.) American will now make a new offer and then also try again to cancel their agreement with the pilots’ union. It’s safe to describe American’s workers as “extremely pissed off” about this attempt to kick them to the curb. (Also? Kinda hard to turnaround an airline without, like, people to fly the planes.)

“A Norwegian driver who swerved his car on a rural road to avoid running into a moose hit a bear instead, authorities said on Thursday.”

Congratulations to former Goldman Sachs sorta-honcho Jon Corzine, who’s going to skate off somewhere (somewhere pretty far away from his former clients) after he beats the rap on his latest car wreck, accidentally evaporating A BILLION-PLUS DOLLARS of his customers’ money at MF Global. Now everybody there is suing everybody there, and Corzine is thinking about starting a hedge fund, but only after he “accepts the invitation” to testify with federal prosecutors. This is the pig who came on board at MF and fired 1400 people right off the bat, replacing them with some obvious incompetents, after a long career of skating by on risky trades and cocked-up positions, capped off by going neck-deep in crazy European debt positions. Guess what? You can actually pretty much do anything now! Just say it’s an accident and you just don’t know what happened. Unless of course you’re former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov, who has been arrested AGAIN, on state charges, after his federal conviction for “stealing code” was overturned. His crime: basically? Backing up his work.

Demonstrations in support of Pussy Riot begin now at the Russian Consulate, followed by a march to Times Square, with a rally there at 1 p.m.. Then a reading of their statements commences at 7:30, at the… Ace Hotel.

Part of a month-long series on the people and peculiarities of where we’re from.

List the twentieth century’s most iconic television characters for children. Some obvious candidates off the top of your head: Fred Rogers as Mr. Rogers was a gentle and avuncular mainstay for generations, as was the more colorful and whiskered Captain Kangaroo, portrayed by Bob Keeshan. Both were televised nationally — the Captain on CBS (for the first 29 years) pre-school mornings, and Mr. Rogers syndicated to your local public television station — and as such they were something all children had in common. If you were a little kid in America sometime between the 60s and the 80s, there’s a chance of somewhere a little bit above zero that you didn’t know who they were. That’s market penetration.

But if you grew up in Charleston, West Virginia, during that time, there was another character that was first in your heart. Every day after school you’d turn on the TV (channel three, WSAZ) and a man in a garish jacket (think something Bill Murray would wear to a not-quite-formal occasion), a hat that was sometimes a boater, sometimes a scrunched-up pork-pie, and heavy shades would bound out to an audience of kids sitting on bleachers and bellow, “HIII, CARTOONERS!!” The appropriate response, whether in the studio or at home, was “HIII, MR. CARTOON!” After which, it was time for, yes, some cartoons, plus also fun. Mr. Cartoon brought the fun.

For the benefit of those born after the advent of cable television, let’s look into the phenomenon of local television. From the birth of the television medium, local stations had to produce a lot of programming. The three networks (CBS and NBC from the beginning, with ABC joining in the 60s) did not provide programs to cover the entire broadcast day, so the local networks had hours of non-primetime to fill. Some of the schedule was filled with syndication, some old movies on the weekend days, but much of a local station’s programming was produced in house. After all, what better way to tailor a show for a sponsor than to make it for them, drop their name on it, mention the product or service copiously, etc.? And somewhere in there, it was discovered that children took to TV like cute little junkies, so amidst the farm reports, the local news and the professional wrestling, portions of the broadcast day were filled with shows aimed at the kids.

Not that all children’s shows were local. In the 50s and 60s, both Buffalo Bob Smith (with Howdy Doody!) and Soupy Sales created successful local shows that were broadcast across the country. And before them, Bozo the Clown, while a national figure, was (but for a short time in the late 60s) not being produced nationally or syndicated but rather franchised, so that there was a constellation of local Bozos all over the country, each on a station paying for the right to do so, each played by a different member of that station’s on-air staff.

So here it is, the sign that you came of age in Charleston: that you remember the moment you realized that Mr. Cartoon and the morning weatherman, Jule Huffman, were the same person. Because they were. The practice of the time, at the local television stations, both large market and small, was that if you were employed as a broadcaster, it was not just as a newsreader, or a sports anchor. Broadcasters were utility infielders, and where there was a need the broadcaster filled in. Hence, the kooky personalities hosting kid shows all over the country had secret identities of the grown-ups who communicated the news to the other grown-ups. As explained by Tim Hollis, author of a history of local children’s television, Hey There Girls And Boys!, in a 2002 NPR interview:

There were very few programs that were able to get by without using cartoons or any sort of film features. It was easier to buy the cartoon package and then dress up a station announcer as a sea captain to host Popeye, or a clown to host Bugs Bunny — any number of variations. Anyone who could be pressed into service to do those kinds of things usually did. Sometimes it could be the weatherman, sometimes it could be the news anchor.

So if you are over a certain age, chances are good that a grown man (or woman) dressed up like a crazy person for the purpose of speaking to you through the television set. In between cartoons these hosts would interview the kids sitting in the bleachers, or run little skits with other characters (played by other employees of the station). Birthdays were huge. Every day the host (in my case, Mr. Cartoon), would run down the list of birthday boys and girls in the audience and then everyone would sing, “Happy birthday.” For a four or five year old, it was must-see television.

So Mr. Cartoon. Jule Huffman was a career broadcaster from Cincinnati that made his way to WSAZ via radio and TV gigs in Ashland, Kentucky and Huntington, West Virginia. He had a voice, and had gotten himself into the field because of it. He was working as the TV weather man when the original Mr. Cartoon shuffled off to another market in 1969. Huffman took the job. And that voice, man did it work on kids, a mellow baritone, clamping down on those consonants before they could run away. He wasn’t goofy or amped-up like a cartoon character himself, no matter how many old jokes and riddles he’d drag out. He was cool. He was the purveyor of the cartoons.

Here he is in the late 80s — after my time, but still a representative snippet.

What happened in the studio while the cartoons were playing? I never was a guest of Mr. Cartoon, although that was the dream of all the kids at Ruthlawn Elementary. My friend Chip Bennett, who was a year older, did get to go, with his Cub Scout troop. Chip had a crew cut, like his dad, a state trooper, and when Mr. Cartoon got to Chip, he complimented Chip on his hair and ran his hand back and forth over Chip’s scalp: “Smooooooth.” When I saw Chip the next day I never did ask what they did when the cartoons played as I was too cowed by Chip’s nascent celebrity, being on TV, getting his head rubbed by Mr. Cartoon like a genie might come out of Chip’s ear. I always figured the kids got to watch the cartoons too.

These were not educational programs in the least, at all, unless memorizing cornball jokes could be considered within the purview of the school system. There was children’s programming that did have an educational bent, thanks to the groundbreaking efforts of the Children’s Television Workshop, which introduced “Sesame Street” in 1969, the same year, as it happened, that Huffman inherited the Mr. Cartoon jacket. The local personality-driven after-school programming was pure fun, more in the vein of the kid shows hosted by the aforementioned Bozo, Buffalo Bob and Soupy. But that did not stop Mr. Cartoon from ending every episode with a little advice, asking if we remembered the four magic words (answer: “please, thank you, you’re welcome and excuse me,” which are seven words, but four expressions, so no harm, no foul). It was not quite a parental presence that Mr. Cartoon, but you did feel that those prescriptions should be followed because you would not want to let Mr. Cartoon down.

But of course we mostly tuned in for the cartoons. And, at least during my time with Mr. Cartoon until my family moved away in 1977, I can vouch that the cartoons played on the show, the old short feature cartoons produced from the 30s on up into the Chuck Jones period of the 60s, were the actual, unexpurgated classics. If you can find, say, a Road Runner cartoon today, you will notice that all the points of impact, the anvil-misshapen coyote noggin, or the puff of smoke at the bottom of the ravine into which Wile E. was in the process of plummeting, have been edited out. Some authority has deemed these exaggerations as too traumatic for the young viewer to experience. This was not so at the time. They were works of art, and the fact that history has deemed them worthy of censoring sucks.

After we moved away, there were other local TV personalities. In Pittsburgh, there was late-nite monster movie host “Chilly Billy” Cardille, and in Rochester there was Tim Kincaid a/k/a Ranger Bob, who left Rochester for Florida when I was in college. But Mr. Cartoon was the first, and Mr. Cartoon was the best.

I never thought to think about what happened to these local shows until now. I guess I assumed that the rest of the world outgrew them in the same way that I did. And the intuitive answer is that the industry changed: local stations began to carry more and more syndicated or network programming, and the hours the local station had to fill shrank. The world just stopped being local. According to Tim Hollis, part of what killed the kids show was that the syndicated programs, the reruns of old sitcoms, were just plain cheaper. And on top of that, the industry changed the rules on locally produced programs. Since its inception, these local shows made their profit off of local ads and sponsorships, and this was not always in the form of commercials. Local hosts would hawk wares on screen, read ads and even testimonials. In 1973, under pressure from protest groups, the National Association of Broadcasters forbade member children’s show hosts from being directly involved with advertising (which at the time could be as egregious as plying the entire studio audience with whatever sugary snack or beverage that sponsored the show and then leading the kids in chants in honor of the product). After this, the local programming got a little bit less lucrative, which in this day and age is a wasting disease.

Mr. Cartoon actually kept at it for a lot longer than many of his peers, retiring in 1995. And he is still around, Jule Huffman, retired and living in Huntington. He’s getting up in years (can’t see much and hearing’s gone in one ear), and his wife passed away last year, but he’s got his kids around to look after him. When I called him, he picked up in three rings, and after the first syllable I could tell it was him. “How’d you get a hold of me?” he asked amiably, and I explained that there weren’t that many Jule Huffman’s in the United States. It was an awesome conversation, much of it chit chat, much of it Huffman sharing whatever memories that came to mind. For example, he learned his meteorology on the job. The station gave him the gig and a stack of books to read, which was his education. A large part of the conversation was Huffman giving credit to those that mentored him into broadcasting, other legends of broadcasting in West Virginia, and an even larger part talking about his faith. He converted from Judaism as a young man and is today an ordained elder at a Presbyterian church. He is an awfully nice man. And I certainly freaked out, quietly, to be talking to Mr. Cartoon.

Huffman presided over his cartooners with sincerity and something that I could only identify in retrospect: an absolute lack of cynicism. His show wasn’t on the air to spawn a feature adaptation or a line of merchandising. He was there to hang out with the new generation of latchkey kids for that time between the end of school and when the folks get home from work. I consider myself lucky to have grown up with him. So I told him that. And I asked him if he had anything to say to all the cartooners out there that might remember him. And he answered: “I work with children, and I wanted them to have something good, and they liked it. And I liked them. And I asked ’em, ‘How come you like me?’ And they said, ‘Because we know you like us.’”

Previously in series: “How Often Do You Get Bitten” A Chat With Sean Casey, Brooklyn Animal Rescuer

Brent Cox is all over the Internet.

“Women who might think twice about a summer trip to a national park can now officially rest assured: it turns out that menstrual odors do not attract bear attacks, according to a paper by the National Park Service.” But watch out for polar bears, who “were found to consume used tampons, while ignoring unused tampons.”