Via Sean Kinsell, I learned that Jeff Percifield of Beautiful Atrocities (who's incidentally now back after a too-long hiatus from blogging) has a letter to Camille Paglia published in her Salon.com column. Excerpt:

Longtime fan here. As a Reaganite homo, couldn't disagree with you more on politics, but who cares? Surely a drag aficionado like yourself has heard of Verka Serduchka, the Ukrainian Cinderella and Dame Edna of the Ukraine? She's the alter ego of comic Andriy Mykhailovych Danylko, very famous in Russia for her hit songs and brilliant videos.

Verka is a parody of a loud, pushy, bourgeois Ukrainian matron, always accompanied by her doddering lush of a mother. To the horror of Ukrainian nationalists, her song Danzing Lasha Tumbai placed second in this year's typically trashy Eurovision contest and later crashed the British Top 30 and French Top 10! Her videos are comic gems in which Almodovar meets Warhol, and she even ran for Parliament in September's elections.

I'm behind the times, as I'd never heard of Verka Serduchka. As a public service, though, I thought it my duty to link the YouTube video.

Go Ukrainian drag queens!

Hey, anything that upsets Russian hegemonists (who complain that Verka Serduchka is "a direct assault by a wayward neighbour on Moscow itself") is fine with me.

Amazingly Verka is even running for office! (At 2% she's outpolling Alan Keyes.)

I don't know what to make over the fact that the band wears outfits suspiciously evocative of the new Brooks Brothers look that I proposed for John Edwards:

But I guess that's just a coincidence. The above is probably too militaristic for Brooks Brothers. Or Edwards.