re: Korperwelt was RE: [A-List] UK state: Michael Portillo

["Mark Jones" <markjones011@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Subject: RE: [A-List] UK state: Michael Portillo
Michael quoth:

> His main function has been
> to act as a spoiler (not unlike Peter Hain's role within the
> Labour Party at present).

What has Hain done wrong? Contine my education please.

> In this respect Owen could emerge as a "statesman"
> taking on the mantle of national saviour

I'm about to book my passage on  the Isle of White ferry where I'll sit in
political exile if this happens, but surely the Owenites would be better
served finding someone less shagged-out and less well-known? My wife just
came back from the Korperwelt exhibition in Whitechapel, where Gunther von
Hagens' Bodyworld can be seen. It comprises dead human bodies that have been
skinned, dissected and positioned in lifelike poses, preserved using his
"plastination" technique, in which body fluids are replaced by synthetic
resins. Russian police are still investigating how 54 corpses and 440 brains
were removed from a medical school in Siberia and illegally transported to a
controversial embalming institute in Germany to make this all possible. It
is the hair on the flayed bodies: that and the grim smiles the erect corpses
(which are not enclosed but free-standing and can be touched, inspected
etc)display which is apparently most distressing (I haven't seen it and
don't plan to go).

Horrible, but  many people evidently seek this poserity for themselves. Von
Hagen has opened a factory in China (where else?) where he flays and
plastinates corpses for eventual display in malls in the US and elsewhere,
and just recently 24 British people were his guests there; they went to
inspect the production line where they themselves have already agreed to be
future raw material. It's an amazing thought that these recticent,
stiff-upper-lip Brits will one day soon have their hairy stiff-upper-rectums
on display to the prying eyes and prying fingers of East End kids in
Whitechapel museum. I suppose if this sort of thing is possible in pomo,
exhibitionist, Swinging UK, than anything else is, including the
vampire-like resurrection of that walking-undead mortician's trade sample of
1970's Brit politics, David Own: but national saviour? With this thoughgt I
have an incredulity problem. Speaking of which, I just got thru watching
Dubya lecturing the UN about Nations that Go it Alone, defy the law, act
unilaterally and need Regime Change therapy...


Mark