by dada » Sat May 29, 2021 4:20 pm
Griz posted an image of a quote on the virus main thread, "art is dead, long live dada." I humbly accept the honor, genuinely, as I was taught to do. But there are two sides to humility, and one must follow the other for balance. Getting thrown off balance means falling off the "knife's edge path," losing a life and having to start over. No checkpoints.
A good example of the balance of humility happens early in the book, Dune. Young Paul has just killed his first man. It was a matter of tribal honor, a fight he could not escape. After the fight, as the rush is still with him, and the tribe is all now looking at him with respect, his mother asks him sharply, "So, how does it feel to be a killer?" This snaps Paul out of it, also having the effect of knocking him into a new sphere of his terrible, expanding awareness.
She delivers it with perfect timing and inflection, intending the result. Masterful control, a product of her bene gesserit training. She's so good, so much potential. How is it she could have fallen in love and messed up the genetic plan? All that work, generations in the breeding, spoiled in one by mad, passionate love. Abomination. That wasn't what I intended to put here, though. What I meant to say was this:
"While mass culture tomorrow makes its pitch to the mass consumer in the spirit of dadaist appeal, it must be remembered that it cannot be anything at heart but anti-dadaist. So the "true spirit of dada" can only appear then as anti-dada in spirit, as anything that fails to succeed mass culture must in the mass consumer's eyes have succeeded to fail.
Dada of course does not care and will never appeal to mass culture in the least, because it is not a thing or an objective. And so mass culture instinctively opposes it, as it opposes all phenomenological, hieratic translation of natural mass into its purely hylian and symbolified compositional form.
As stealer of all imaginary bread from mass culture's tables, while drinking all the imaginary wine and inhaling all the imaginary air for dessert, the threat to mass culture is real, and so we can't blame it for objecting loudly as its totemic dead mass is set spinning and vaporized like so much comet debris by the living goddess of sand." - M. Liminski
I'm not that kind of dada, though. I'm a defense against the dark arts dada. Like snape, the old potions master. Seen here on the catwalk in a knitted ensemble, fire-retardant material both inside and out. The knee-length overcoat is short but flowing and resistant to ice magic, all in simple yet elegant gothic black.
What I'd like to do here is maybe "break the fourth wall," speaking directly to the audience. So you have found yourself reading posts on an odd old message board, an early promotional venue for a book by Jeff Wells, a cast off. We have to assume that Jeff still pays the light bill for this reason, a bit sentimental, mostly commercial reasons.
And we love him for it. But the message board itself took on a life of its own, with its own momentum, long ago, pretty early on, in fact. It is a mass culture cast off, but what grows inside it is not mass culture. You can tell, because we don't advertise.
So we assume you were drawn here one way or another, but mostly by "following your nose," or intuition. As were most of us who are still hanging around.
Now you may notice that there is a surface of the message board, where social media waves crash and recede, but they have not totally flooded the plain. Some of the board members are clearly not speaking in the language of social media, but neither are they speaking totally academically, like the video game anthropology studies of Critical Distance, or in pure tech jargon, like they do on the science professors battle arena board.
The surface of the board floats on a sea of absolute nightmares. It may seem strange at first that the board members can continue to sail, knowing what is down there. The non-euclidian angles of the temple of cthulu, madness.
The board members on the surface have a responsibility, then, although they are only human, and some are forgetful slackers. But they do have the responsibility nonetheless, of passing on the navigation techniques that have allowed them to survive this long in such a harsh, unforgiving enviroment. Not with instructions and generalities, but in the language of surface post content, the methods should show. Do not forget the intuition that brought you here, is the basic idea. Taking dives into the knowledge base, follow your intuition, don't get distracted. And importantly, remember that there are threads back there that used to lead to unexplored productive avenues, that now have been rerouted to lead back into mass culture.
The rigor is for analyzing cell structure, and it is also an implication that you are examining a stiff, a corpse. Do not get lost, but follow your intuition back out to the surface, where there are living thoughts. And if you find some old buried treasure down there, be sure to show and tell. We love that stuff up here.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.