About Me

My name is Anastasia Kashian. I am an artist and sometime writer, living in the twin states of Limbo and Penury, somewhere within the bounds of the European Economic Disaster. I like Turkish coffee and Russian tea, and in the field of gastronomy, I love to devour both the Raw (in terms of charcuterie and pungent, plague-ridden unpasteurised cheeses) and the Cooked (in terms of the catholic variety of Slimy Things that once Crawled With Legs Upon a Slimy Sea - bring me your Molluscs and Crustaceans, Mud-Dwellers and Bottom-Feeders, that I may saute them with garlic in olive oil, and a good slug - how appropriate - of cheap white plonk. Had I mentioned that Mediterranean cooks love tentacles more, even, than do Japanese Manga pornographers?) And of course - read carefully the Subtext - you spotted it already, didn't you? the title of my blog is an arch, wry, pretentious sidewards nod to my distant roots as an Anthropology graduate, back in the heady and ground-breaking days of Post-Post-Something or Other. Note, if you will, my precise, wide-ranging vocabulary. See, Jane, see, Peter, see my Vocabulary. My Vocabulary is Wide-Ranging. That is a Low-Brow Popular Culture Reference. (And sufficiently out-dated to show how really Au Fait I am with what's Moving in the World Today). Look, Jane, look at the Low-Brow Popular Culture References. I have a Wide-Ranging Vocabulary and I can make Low-Brow Popular Culture References. I could carry on in this vein for pages, because I am intellectually moribund, but I shan't, because I am also very, very lazy, and have the attention span of a cartoon animal. (You're thinking about that one now, aren't you? The capacity of the human mind to find meaning in vacant trivia continues to grow unabated. It's one of the things that keeps me going.) I am writing a blog primarily to find storage space for the numerous opinionated rants to which I am prone, on a variety of subjects about which I know little to nothing, and on which my aforementioned opinion is rarely, if ever, sought, making me as qualified to Discourse as the majority of writers who get Paid for doing it, my wider purpose being to release overcrowded space in my brain (it seeming impossible to re-allocate this material to the empty, whistling prairies within that organ which nature must have intended, before abandoning the project, to fill with useful skills and practical information), and also, (possibly a matter of more immediate importance) the file space on my hard drive. Art being my Day Job, when I want a creative leisure outlet more active than hunching over a dying laptop trying to watch subtitled Cine D'Auteur or listening to obscure music, I cook. That's about it, really.