Issue 2 of Power Cut literary magazine is here!

Featuring; Ricky Monahan Brown, David Partington, James Bone, Irene Cunningham, Marka Rifat, Iain Bain, Kris Haddow, Laurie Donaldson, Jesse Hilson, Ike Attah, Kristina Stevens, Esther Arthurson, Alexis Somerville, Liz Kendall, Peter Newall, Stephen McQuiggan, Cormac Culkeen, Christina Curran, Jason Jawando & LG Thomson.

For the uninitiated amongst you, Power Cut is a literary and arts magazine, based in Scotland, UK, with a love for 20^th century culture. Issue 2 follows the same winning format as Issue 1 with short stories, poetry, memoir, art, retro recipes and a column from our resident bibliotherapist and foot dominatrix – Madame Bruttipedi.

Provocateurs Are Provoking!

Issue 2 kicks off with the superbly creepy ‘Artiste’ by Esther Arthurson. Set in a psychiatric/forensic unit it explores the boundaries of sanity and madness – while giving off serious Silence  of the Lambs vibes!

The theme of Issue 2 is ‘provocateur’ and Jesse Hilson’s drawings/artwork and both provocative and subversive. ‘Miss Scarlet’ flow nicely on from ‘Artiste’ and before we can take a breath we are into the work of Cormac Culkeen. Cormac has contributed two poems that don’t take any prisoners in their intensity,

                   where our mind was a consumptive’s and we were motes dancing over an open grave’s howling

                       maw, our gazes and hearts narrowed to blurred horizons.

                                                                                  (Recollections by Cormac Culkeen)

His second poem ‘Detail of an Uninvited Guest, 2003’ is written in prose style and charts the desperation of someone searching for escape and release.

Vintage Style

Our vintage ads provide some light-hearted relief from all the intensity and the first one taken from ‘Practical Householders’ demonstrates how to build your own fridge.

Marka Rifat features some beautiful poetry that evokes childhood memories, nature and electronic music pioneers Daphne & Delia.

‘Rochester Vibes’ by Liz Kendall has us consider the similarities between Axl Rose and Mr Rochester. Never again will you think of one without the other creeping in next to him.

‘Spirit’ by Kris Haddow opens up a moment in time in an unnamed Scottish city and reflects on the fragility and interconnection of life that often goes by unnoticed.

Laurie Donaldson’s poetry has a cultural edge and opens up brutalism, the work of Nam June Paik and the bursting of the Dom Aquarée in Berlin,

bunched shoals slowly rotating

  to freefall, clownfish, batfish,

surgeonfish tumbling in gravity’s

         sudden embrace.

‘The day the fish were free’ is curated with ‘Drift’ by Ike Attah, a painting in acrylic of the shoreline at Redcar beach, in the northeast of England.

The next story is a tongue-in-cheek re-imagining of a Famous Five story with a modern-day twist by David Partington. See what happening when the gang investigate the local milkman!

Gen-X, Nudity and Horses

Kristina Stevens’ prose poetry explores protest and anti-establishment lifestyles and leads us into Ricky Monahan Brown’s blistering take-down of (or tribute to?) Gen-X in ‘Phantom Limbs’. Things get intense and raw again in ‘The Father, The Scum and The Holy Spirits’ by John Tinney which describes a man torn between his role as a father and his corporeal desires. Warning: it contains nudity. James Bone and Irene Cunningham serve up some much needed poetry before Peter Newall takes us back to post-war Germany and the cost of our innate need for freedom, in ‘All the King’s Horses’. Madame Bruttipedi provides the comic relief this time as she takes a trip to Comoros to open a library and train a burlesque troupe in Hahaia (yes, it’s a real place).

LG Thomson has written a beautifully honest and touching essay/memoir about growing up and her affinity with and love for the American new wave band, DEVO. The photograph of the author in her yellow plastic DEVO suit alone is worth the price of the magazine!

We move on to odd behaviour next with Iain Bain’s ‘Horses Mostly’, a story about the ultimate grifter, anxiety and hating Marcel Duchamp.

Surrealism and Recipes

Finally – we get to what everyone has been waiting for, the retro recipe. I’m not going to give any spoilers, but it involves bananas, boiled ham, mustard and cream.

Jason Jawando’s story ‘Tupac is Dead’, is a farcical encounter involving a bicycle and a Chinese  takeaway. And then things get really surreal in ‘Lobsters’ by Alexis Somerville which continues the burlesque vibe in a rundown seaside town.

‘Eldorado Nights’ by Christina Curran is a surreal photograph which highlights how everyday objects can create beauty if we are prepared to change our perception. The odd and surreal continues in our last story, ‘Win the Headlines’ by Stephen McQuiggan. After reading this you will always be wary of free newspapers. Issue 2 ends with the poem ‘Boat the the May’ by Marka Rifat,

Sand eels, the only glint of light, held in serrations.

Sandwiches, held in gloved hands, forgotten in the whirr.

You can purchase Power Cut here

You can also give yourself the gift of an A3 print of the inimitable Madame Bruttipedi or – if you are feeling brave – a personal bibliotherapy prescription from her! 

Let’s Start With Your Stripper Name

The first thing we need to know about burlesque dancers is that they all have exotic names – Gypsy Rose Lee, Tempest Blaze, Blaze Starr, Immodesty Blaize (I’m detecting a pattern here), Lili St Cyr, Dita Von Teese etc. No one, except Bettie Page, seems to have hit the big time in adult entertainment with a pedestrian name (ok, I’ll concede Josephine Baker also). Every so often a meme will come round on social media to generate your stripper/burlesque name. A common ‘formula’ is your first pet’s name plus your childhood street name; however, this gives me the stripper name Buster Riddell. Buster Riddell is more likely to be a burly inmate of HMP Belmarsh than an alluring femme fatale selling out The Crazy Horse in Paris.  Another formula is to pair the colour of your underwear with the last thing you ate: this time I would be Grey Cheese, again, not sexy.

It is said that striptease and burlesque are sisters not twins. With the former the focus is all on the nakedness, burlesque however focuses on the story, the tease, the imagination, the art.

History of Burlesque

Historically there are two well known forms of burlesque – Victorian Burlesque and American Burlesque. The word itself derives from the Italian burlesco, which in turn derives from burla meaning ridicule or mockery. A burlesque show has its roots in vaudeville and variety performance, popular with the lower and middle classes as a way of lampooning the culture of the upper classes. It could be argued that there was a political element to burlesque in the form of social commentary, unlike stripping which was purely for male sexual gratification. Burlesque arrived in America in the 1840s and developed from ‘hoochie-coochie’ dancing, a form of provocative belly dancing. Millie DeLeon id said to be the first American Queen of Burlesque and created her act when she ‘forgot’ to wear her tights on stage.

The golden age of burlesque was 1900-1930, the time when Josephine Baker was performing at the Folies Bergère in Paris. It was here that she wore her (in)famous banana skirt. In addition to being an exotic dancer, she also worked for the French resistance and adopted 12 children from around the world. Baker was the trailblazer of the ‘rainbow family’, long before Madonna and Angelina Jolie.

Burlesquing the Burlesque

In Issue 2 of Power Cut, ‘Lobsters’ by Alexis Somerville is a story set in a rundown British sea-side town where dancing and glamour have long parted company,

“…I performed in second-rate shows at the end of the pier, dancing into the stark cool nights in a place run by an old bloke who fancied himself the Hugh Hefner of breadline Britain, decades after the golden age of striptease when Gareth’s dad had opened the club, with those stunning burlesque stars whose photos now lined the walls, and the son wouldn’t shut up about those halcyon days as he slapped us on the arse…”

 

The Lobster Girls of Langton’s satirize the era of all female dance troupes and the objectification of female performers. All burlesque dancers have a prop or gimmick – Dita Von Teese performed in a large martini glass, Lili St Cyr her transparent bubble bath, and Blaze Starr often had a black panther on stage with her. In ‘Lobsters’ the twist at the end makes all these props pale in comparison.

Power Cut has another link to the burlesque world in the form of Madame Bruttipedi, our resident bibliotherapist and foot dominatrix. In Issue 1 of Power Cut we learn that Madame used to work as a burlesque dancer until her feet got too sore and she retrained as a bibliotherapist. Madame Bruttipedi is, of course, a parody or burlesque of the burlesque conventions of beauty. She looks like a stereotypical 1950s pinup girl apart from her hideous feet, challenging beauty norms and expectations. In Issue 2 we see her jetting to Comoros to train burlesque dancers in Hahaia, and she also offers us another highly entertaining bibliotherapy prescription.

Vintage Vibe or Stereotype?

The neo-burlesque of the 1990s kick-started the burlesque revival with stars such as Dita Von Teese and Immodesty Blaize. Driving this resurgence was a nostalgia for the glamour and spectacle of days a different era, and burlesque continue to have a vintage aesthetic and association. But is there still a place for burlesque dancing in today’s world? Like everything burlesque has evolved – there is now boylesque (male-fronted performance) and, of course, drag shows. Do these 21^st century interpretations offer us anything new or simply serve up stereotypes in contemporary costumes?

Madame Bruttipedi appears in Issue 1 & 2 of Power Cut magazine. If you are new to Power Cut and want to get up to speed on her exploits, both issues can be purchased here.