It’s not easy being an American dadaist, living in Greece. In these times of economic turmoil & crisis, I am absolutely giddy with acerbic creativity, but I have vowed to maintain my composure and remain somewhat apathetic (my emotional intelligence goal for the week). It’s important to remember, as Grouch Marx said (and I am prone to repeat often) that “denial is not just a river in Egypt.”
Dada
Cocktails With Reality
Cocktails With Reality … just another play in one part
Cast: Artie, Biff (the stiff), Cupid, Dada, Frank, Gaius, Hark (the angel), & Popcorn
ACT I:
– Narrator:
Meanwhile, on the edge of a cafe rooftop …
-Popcorn:
Live and learn and become stubborn … because reality, sanity and fulfillment are neither found in Judeo-Christian work ethics, nor are they found in western or eastern pop-psychology cliche. They are only found in the pursuit of happiness and with self-actualization.
– Biff (the stiff):
What time is it?
– Hark (the angel):
God watches the clock but takes cares of him/her/it/___/self (ves).
– Biff (the stiff):
Time to get back to work.
– Popcorn:
The time is not ‘now’. It never was, relatively speaking. Live in the ‘now’ because there is no time like the present.
– Artie:
For the artist, time is not a commodity; it is both a resource and part and parcel of an energy-renewal cycle … so is money.
– Biff (the stiff):
I’m late, as usual. And, I’m getting shorter.
– Frank:
Life is less about ‘what you make of it’ and more about finding a balance between what you want and need to do … and what you can bring to the world to help and encourage others to do the same.
– Cupid:
Screw you! The fuck you know …
– Gaius:
I can be honest in telling you that I’ve made a mess out of my life trying in earnest ‘to do’ the right thing … and also in trying to do the ‘right thing’ by people who are more part of my problems than the solution.
– Popcorn:
The long and short of existence is not found in ‘making ends meet’. There is no ‘means’ in ‘the end’.
– Biff (the stiff):
Oh happy day! The end is nigh! Curses! I’m not sweating enough …
– Gaius:
Some people are brought into this world only to make others happy … but others would rather live in misery and dump on the ‘happy makers’. The tragedy: having the devalued existence of a clown that everyone kicks as he passes by. Fuck all you bastards! LOL.
– Artie:
There is nothing sadder in life than ‘wasted potential’.
– Dada:
Life is a dada commute. Time to transmute!
– Biff (the stiff):
Will someone please bury me?
– FINIS –
EPILOGUE:
– Hark (the angel):
What is it you don’t get? Life goes on until it doesn’t. FINIS.
– Dada:
Viva Dada! Roll the ‘take no’ credits.
Dada Gothic: Accommodating Commodes
Accommodating Commodes
Oh Accommodating Commodes…
My, how you have reconciled your fate.
Conditioned to forgive and forget
so that you may be visited again by bum dignitaries
and crowned with their indignities.
Where is your individuality?
– long ago flushed out and smothered
with the loose vowels of holy rhetoric
by those up on high …
Do you take heart in knowing that at the tail end of your existence
you will have dutifully served your function …
without cracking under the excretion of your karma?
What is this righteousness you feel
in extending a policy of laissez-faire to the derrière?
Perhaps you fancy yourself a grand pedal-stool of sorts …
a throne in the company of the elite …
… a noble, yet humble, reflecting pool to moonbeams?
Oh accommodating commodes …
Alas, there is no virtue in self-repression.
And in the end, … I must confess …
you are just full of crap.
Not Dada: The Charade Parade
Whee! A Charade!
Life’s parade goes on in the streets below … and so each day we rise … and step back into the costume we have woven for ourselves out of the tattered pieces of our psyche and circumstances … some borrowed, some stolen, some just created from scratch to suit our prefabricated identities … and most bought on sale.
We learn to move, but we are conditioned to march. “Step quickly to the pulse of a silent beat or be trampled”, a bullhorn screams in our heads, “Left foot, right foot…”.
Most ignore the broken bodies of would be hand-walkers staining the gutters along the route. The odd streaker is quickly censored. Cut to a commercial.
Life goes on; move it or lose it …
Note: This is not ‘dada’.
Dada Venduza
“Art needs an operation”
– Tristan Tzara
And so, as a concerned Dadaist, I decided to make a film. It was a natural decision to make considering that I have this blog that no one reads (present company excluded). The film will be titled ‘Dada Venduza’. Dada, of course, is short for Dadaism and ‘Venduza’ is the Greek word for both plunger and suction cup. Together, the words suggest something that ‘sticks’ and ‘sucks’.
Explaining the title is easy; explaining the film is less so. And, like dada, what results is both art and anti-art. Moreover, it’s hard to know where to begin describing something, especially a piece of art … or a piece of raw meat … once it is constructed, deconstructed and then nailed back together again. So has gone the making of the film – still in production and evolution. As of this writing, live-action photography is almost complete and editing has already begun.
Taking The Plunger: Is Dada Right For You?
“I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way.” – Tristan Tzara “Dada Manifesto 1918”
Thank you for reading this post. I’m not really sure why you did or what your expectations might be, but I sincerely thank you anyway. I feel it’s important to get that out of the way right from the start, before the confusion sets in. I may be a dadaist, but at the very least I’m also a humanist. Trust me, you can bank on that … just don’t bet the farm.
I tend to enter ‘dadaism’ on forms that request an entry for ‘religion’. Someone asked me the other day “what’s all this about dadaism?” I considered for a nanosecond how to respond before replying “oh you know, dadaismos … dada …” I received a curious albeit blank stare in return as I noticed the corners of his mouth begin to twitch ever so slightly. I SMiLEd and turned away, mouthing the words “have a narcissistic day”. My existence was justified.
Meanwhile, the aberrant logic of the times raged on all around me. In fact, it continues to do so to this day. I would tell you to ‘watch the 11 o’clock news’, but I don’t myself anymore and wouldn’t want to unintentionally to mislead you. Of course, it’s funny because I was breastfed on television, but I’ve weaned myself from it … and for the same reasons I don’t smoke; I refuse to be a slave.
And so I became a dadaist … and you can be one too, if you are inclined to take the plunger.
Polly’s Cadence (In Dada Flat)
Polly’s Cadence (In Dada Flat)
“Polly wants a cracker!”
A call is made.
You wait for a response.
I comply in earnest.
Behind the wool, you gloat blindly.
Knowing enough words to nod along, I do so … knowingly knowing I know nothing.
Point Counterpoint. A methodological approach to string theory resolves to the root of us all. Klimakatastrophe … deservingly so
You want dogma, a rationale of semiotic obedience.
A feathered response is in order:
There are no more prayers, only the chanting of reverberating sounds in the wild; the vibrations that ricochet off your sensitivities … forcing you to move.
You want belief, perhaps in distended words unspoken.
Yet, I have only the faith of habit found in sustained accidentals and enharmonic phonemes … and wings to sing of.
And oh how I’ll sing one day, despite your efforts to make me talk.
Good Mourning, Dada: Nurturing The Contrived Nature Of Concrete Art
Eat your chocolate wash your brain
dada
dada
gulp some rain.
– Tristan Tzara
I’m constantly amazed at the capacity some people have to fail as human beings, or more specifically as products of nature. We have such great inherent artistic talent, and yet we are so often contrived in our behavior. Nurturing, for some, is done selectively and with ulterior motives. Efforts to save the planet come only after we’ve all but destroyed it. The art of being fully human remains lost to many who are kept afloat by a flotilla of prefabricated and standardized ‘paint by the numbers’ ideologies and conventions.
I write this on the heels of my mother’s recent passing, so as I let the tides of emotion wash over my head, I’m a bit vulnerable to the often groaned about process of grieving. Whatever comes comes; whatever goes goes – the good, the bad and the inane. Good mourning to all, I say, especially to me.
Therefore, I have resolved to refuse any attempt to self-repress my emotions or self-censor my thoughts during this period of bereavement. Mind you, this doesn’t say much, since on almost any given day this notion is ‘par for the course’ for me anyway.
Dadaism: Defeating The Overlords of Information Overload
“Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?” – Louis Aragon
“Expert, texpert, choking smoker, don’t you hear the joker laugh at you?”
– John Lennon
Wherever you go, you find information. Of course, I do recognize that we are, after all, living in the ‘information age’, but I still can’t help but wonder where all this ‘information’ came from? Who discovered it? How did it begin to spread? Who continues to disseminate it and for what reason? I mean, today we are obviously all full it, so I think these are important considerations.
At some point in history, someone must have come along and said, “Hey there! You! Yes, you! I have some information for you.” Perhaps it was God or a visiting extraterrestrial tourist. Perhaps it was a squirrel. I have no clue. And that my friends is the point of today’s post: I have no clue. Yet, there is one thing I know for certain: there is simply too much information out there!
Physics and the Cosmogony of Dadaism: The Balanced and Unbalanced
“I destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organisation: to sow demoralisation everywhere, and throw heaven’s hand into hell, hell’s eyes into heaven, to reinstate the fertile wheel of a universal circus in the Powers of reality, and the fantasy of every individual.”– Tristan Tzara
“The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot”
– Salvador Dali
Who can argue with the ‘big bang’ theory, except perhaps the creationists … or perhaps the creator? Such a discussion would most certainly use, as an analogy, the making of popcorn: a daring activity that is fraught with danger, not just of an ordinary household nature, but of that with planetary wide significance (i.e., ‘BOOM’).
When popping corn in the confines of a kitchen, it’s the random mix of organic and temporal variables that allow corn kernels to ‘pop’ one or a few at a time. However, it should go without saying that with the right alignment of variables, a single ‘super-pop’ might occur in which all kernels will simultaneously explode together.
Given such an event, it is quite possible, under the right cosmogonical circumstances, for such an explosion to actually rip a hole in the fabric of space and time, creating a mini-black hole, which if left unconstrained will turn us, and all manner of creation in this parsec of the universe, inside out.
Now, I don’t confess to be much of a physicist, but to some extent, you can’t get around certain laws of the related science. Most physicists understand that the study of physics, therefore, is not something that should be practiced at home, and is best left to facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where the art of popping corn can be studied in safety.
Loitering Words 