A chance to get famous(er) as Duncan Fallowell's music writer!
I learn that one of Madame Arcati's luminous friends, Duncan Fallowell, is seeking a Russian to set a song of his to music.
The work in question, taken from his St Petersburg travel book, is called Nevsky - these are the lyrics, click here. The first verse goes:
I am a Soviet queen
From behind the Iron Curtain.
Life is pretty obscene
But of one thing I am certain –
When you’re sick of revolution and find Lenin a bore
You can strut your polyester near Gostiny Dvor
And if you want a heavy hooey that is red and erect
Hang around at midnight on the Nevsky Prospekt!
Hooey-hooey
Hooey-hooey
You'll have to click the link to read all the words.
Post your entry on YouTube and the best one will be released as a single - do let us know, of course. You'll find a contact for Duncan on his homepage when you click through if you have any questions.
Do have a listen to his marvellous Le Weekend song on that link (click the muscle man pic there) - with one of Micky Karoli's most blistering guitar solos on it, after a deceptively oompah Kurt Weill beginning (play through real speakers and annoy the bastard neighbours and their howling dogs). It should be a Eurovision song entry - I must mention it to Jonathan King. Go on, get composing!
Oh, and read Pravda.
Oh, and let's not leave darling Dima out ...
72 comments:
Geordie Greig, who has a hotline to Russia, should get onto this
Le Weekend's crazy acid Abba. Who are these guys?
No Russian would dare go public with lyrics like that. They're still in the Dark Ages when it comes to self-expression.
I assume that the lyricist has coined a neologism in hooey from poppycock, a synonym. By losing poppy one gets to the point, so to speak. Thereby language grows.
I better explain about 'hooey'. We do have a slang phrase 'a load of hooey' meaning 'a load of rubbish'. The Oxford English Dictionary always said, re the etymology, that hooey was 'US slang 1920s, origin unknown'. When I went to live in St Petersburg in the early 1990s I very quickly discovered that hooey is standard Russian slang for penis. Obviously Russian exiles going to New York after the Revolution took it with them and it became an alternative to a load of old cock (n bull). I explained this to the editors of the OED - and indeed to Jonathon Green, editor of the most authoritative English slang dictionary, but I don't know if the explanation has - even after ten years or more - been incorporated into those publications.
Best wishes, Duncan Fallowell
I've emailed Simon N-B so we shall see.
Note for DF:
Chambers Dict. Slang (2008) p669/2
'hooey n. [? Rus. translit. hooey, sl. for penis, synon. for cock, thus 'load of old cock'; or cock n2 [= rubbish, nonsense]
and the first known 'hooey' cite:
1912 L. Kornbluh Rebel Voices (1964) 'Same old hooey in St. Looie; / And all the more in Baltimore'
JG
The first person to set these lyrics gets poisoned with a radioactive condom.
This would be a great techno liberation anthem in the Moscow clubs
Great!
Ought not Duncan's lyrics be translated into Russian, and why a Russian composer? Still the words in English are sufficiently meaningless as to be part of the lingua franca.
There's a huge gay scene in Russia - Putin's a pinup
http://www.gayrussia.ru/en/
Sadly I'm no good at collaborating and my (limited) strength anyway is more lyrical than melodic but I have a feeling Nevsky might very nearly fit Rah Rah Rasputin, that glorious Russian anthem by Boney M.
I must admit I've had quite a bit of Russian hooey in my time (when I was younger, dear, before the last world war).
JK
xx
Simon Napier-Bell organised the reunion of Boney M and had all their tracks remixed by Stock Aitken Waterman. Talking of old lags, what ever happened to Robert Stigwood? I bet Jonathan King knows.
Pravda's brilliant, just like the News of the World from Mars! Many thanks, Madame
ES Magazine today has London's Tsarina: Who's Who in the Court of Dasha Zhukova. Geordie Greig should be ashamed of his brazen self!
Yes, Geordie has moved from Tatler to Tatars.
Robert, or Miss Stigma as I fondly used to call him, is alive and well... well, alive... and living somewhere I gather.
Я люблю Вас
Would Anonymous Russian please give us hooey spelt in Russian. So we don't get confused in the Moscow Metro and get out at the wrong cock.
And even shorter is gay.ru
We've discussed the matter with Prince Dolgoruky and We shall be commissioning Herr Haydn . . .
Listen, everybody - get on to Duncan Fallowell - LE WEEKEND by Irmin Schmidt & Duncan Fallowell absolutely MUST be the official Eurovision entry for RURITANIA at the Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow May 2009. Let's go for it, Ruritania!!! After all, Ruritania's far more European than Turkey!
Isn't Jonathan King some kind of child molester?
Will this song be an entry in the Eurovision 2009 to be held in Moscow ?.
I had a Russian grandmother who used to sing little ditties she composed but she was completely nuts.
с моей любовью x
veritas
IM рогатый для вашего петуха (I'm horny for your cock)
Hooey is ерунда
I absolutely love Le Weekend, I've been dancing to it this evening.
Hooey is not yerunda
I have red nose on my hooey thanks to mother nature
Please ask Duncan to do a Youtube clip of LE WEEKEND so we can click-vote for it!
10 Downing St, Ruritania city
Can anyone crash this party? My friend Nijinsky's got a few ideas for a dance number.
In Russian h is usually pronounced g
ie. Gamlet, Gitler, Victor Gugo.
So it's GOOEY
Geordie's memoirs soon. My Odyssey: from Tatler to Tartar. Ghosted by Fallowell presumably.
Dear Red nose hooey,
get that checked out, it sounds like you have a case of genital warts or herpes. Why do you insist on constantly badgering steph, BTW. I guess you must have some anger issues. It sounds like YOU need the therapist. Back off her. She is trying to get through a difficult time.
I'm sure Duncan has better things to do than ghost the memoirs of some silly old arselick. The Standard is already preoccupying itself even more obsessively with the wealthy - missing models and missing philanthropists one has never heard of. I wonder whether he knows there's a London outside south Ken. All this will reflect in a circulation collapse, mark my words. And backing Ken (not south) as next mayor won't help them.
But back to what really matters, the Urban Dictionary pronounces:
Hooey:
Phonetically, this word means "prick" (i.e., the vernacular for penis) in Russian, although it is better transliterated as "khuy" or "khui."
"A vot tebe khuy!" (Here's a prick for you!)
That was a joke. And I agree about the Evening Standard. It used to have some kind of authority which appears to have vanished overnight. It also feels like a give-away now - I think they changed the paper to something which feels as though it's been left out in the rain.
I know you were poppet, but Madame Arcati is a serious joker.
Does Duncan sing?
Re.DF - he almost sang. See his Wikipedia entry.
MA darling, I hope this thread has reached where it was going. I didn’t want to interrupt it with an ignoramus comment on this matter, for as I told you before, I love it when you hit on a subject that gets everyone going and turns it into a party, but I want to address the intrepid avenger that thinks I’m red nose hooey.
Dear anon/Steph’s friend,
I’m sure Steph appreciates your heart going out to her situation and believe it or not, I appreciate you also. That is why instead of telling you to put down your mask and cape on this one and mind your business I’ll tell you this:
If you were really paying attention (or as much as Steph does) you could see I’m Rudolph, but not Hooey. Hooey is just being his usual hooey self; probably the jackass that was yelling out nonsense a couple of MA posts ago (which makes me think it could be why MA posted in twitter his dislike for red noses) and maybe the same idiot that calls MA epithets and every so often makes silly/annoying threats (I’m not referring to the occasional playful “you’re a whore MA” comments that are meant to be endearing). I joked with MA because something seemed screwy for a split second, I got alarmed and I wanted MA to stop whatever was making the posts screwy that morning.
As to sweet Steph, despite MA’s claim to be Mme. Methuselah, I’m sure we are quite close in age and I’ve had my share of Steph’s throughout this physical existence – one of them gone by her own hand: Raquel. Steph can recognize my posts (like I said, she is only pretending to be stupid about it) and she attacks me every time she has a chance. When her attacks are not directed at me, I feel I don’t have the right to come to anyone’s defense, but when they are and the crazy is getting overboard, I feel the need to draw the line. I actually feel that those pointless, gratis attacks that lend nothing to the issue discussed are disrespectful to MA and the blog. Most of my comments are directed at MA in reference to what has been posted, with an occasional answer to whoever is making comments on my comments (like you?).
I’m telling you all this, because it is a great disservice to the Stephs out there to go around telling them poor little you and allowing them to lash out uncontrollably. Trust me on this: it lowers their energy even further and you are helping speedup what she fears so and is making her so angry. The Steph friends I have helped have thanked me for making them snap out of it and regain power over their lives even if their lives are not as long as one wishes they had been.
MA darling, I’m no musician, but like most, I like music. May I go on to the issue at hand and comment on this post of yours?
Oh, Steph and I have an understanding. We've been round the block and the corpses are many. Now what would you like to say about Duncs and his Nevsky?
Is Steph Madame Arcati's virus, the bug this site can't rid itself of?
Now don't be like that, Steph's a great friend of this site and if you trawl through all her comments/interviews etc, you'll see she has shed much valuable light on the Fowler/Spacey family and greatly infuriated all those sad people who deify someone just because they've got some talent. I think it's time someone set up an anti-talent org to draw attention to the fetishising of talent. There's too much of it about.
I was just hoping drf had paid attention to Monroe’s comment that Techno is the way to go on this one, for the lyrics’ forward theme. Bulgaria was behind the iron curtain too… wasn’t it?
www.myspace.com/dimitarnaydenov
I kind of had the same question about Duncan as Ms. Squires’: Would he be too modest/ self-conscious about singing the lyrics himself? I don’t know what he sounds like when he sings, but I love his speaking voice and I would like to hear at least the demo, if not sung, recited by him with higher tone voices chanting in the background something like hooey-hooey, heavy hooey (I know, it makes me giggle too) as well as other techno sound effects.
If he eventually finds a Russian (preferably gay) singer that can sing it in a really low (Baritone) voice (against the high sounding backgrounds), I can see it becoming quite a club cult classic (hordes of gay men declaring themselves citizens of the Republic of Hooey… he, he).
On a side note, the academic lesson on slang and linguistics, the websites, magazines and the Russian classes are brilliant. Please keep them coming (in more ways than one).
Fallowell's turning into a 21st century Cocteau just in time to collect his pension
I do dislike the word pension, and why would a practising author want to draw a pension or retire? It's not as if he's been toiling at t'mill all his life. In any case I'm sure he's not 65 yet, he can't be.
Could there be a gay Mamma Mia called Bona Mia? Stringing together the hits of Boney M, with Lenny Henry taking the Michael Ball part as a black Divine.
I have fallen in love with Dima, oh that song! I'm already planning a holiday in Russia. I want hooey and I want Dima's.
Durdóm is Russian for looney bin and that's what this place is, króme shútok.
Fallowell should team up with Mastodon. They've just released a whole album about Rasputin on Reprise Records.
The music's nothing like my Ozzy's, who you think you are, Mozart or something? Where's my fuckin vodka and do ya know the way to ITV Centre cos that Dannii's gonna get it.
Is there a really naked pic of Dima to share with us?
Mastodon! Wild! Out where? Says March 23rd
Please release me as a single
Trust me, Nevsky prospekt is a VERY dangerous place to pick people up
Yea never go home with strangers in Russia - unless you can read the street names
Lee sends her love Duncan, met her last night at Bibendum and we had a most amusing conversation. I don't think she will be picking up any Russians, especially Gemini ones.
Yes, Stewart Lee's a darling. Very well hung too.
I can't imagine who this Stewart Lee is. The tone has definitely taken a southerly direction.
Stewart Lee has his own comedy show on BBC2! Madame, who loves down-to-earth surrealism, will love him.
Dima's Eurovision entry will be huge
Dima's balls are what is known in the trade as sling-backs. Prefer them pert and chubby myself.
Yea, luv Stewart Lee
xx
xx
When exactly is the Eurovision Song Contest and what is the Russian connection? I can't find a website that tells me.
Dorothy Squires! Get outta here!
You couldn't have tried very hard, dearie - I keyed in "Eurovision Song Contest" into the Google search box and voila! Top of the list: http://www.eurovision.tv/page/home.
Yes - but it doesn't say WHEN IT IS
I suspect you're not really looking at all, my sweet, just glancing. The dates, including that of the final (May 16), are near the top of the homepage.
It's not for me to say but the internet is a wonderful resource if used with at least a small degree of application.
How did I miss it? It's like one of those tests where a lorry drives through your bedroom - but you don't notice because you're trying to scratch an itch on your shoulder. Many thanks. Now to the Picasso Exhib.
xx
xx
It's ages yet. We'll have forgotten all about it by then!
I'vejust met Robert Stigwood's ex wine dealer. Is that gossip?
Well I suppose it is goss, but do you have anything to report? - did the wine dealer say anything about Stiggy? Where is he? Just write down everything.
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