Category Archives: Fluxus
The Hole Truth
Here the narrator points you back in time towards Larry at the Colony Bar.
Now back to the present and the two characters in the Swiss bar, or beer hall in Basel drinking Uli beer and smelling the pungent aroma of alpine Hempf. She is alone at the bar when he comes out of the door marked Herrenand announces, “I just had a great beer shit.”
“I’ll inform the media,” She said.
“I don’t know what it is, but sometimes beer is like a laxative… I feel like I passed a whole cheese cow.”
“Too much information,” She said. “You’re not Bukowski.”
“No, but I just shit like him… and who needs to write when….”
“Right.”
“Write.”
And they were silent and smelled the marijuana and he inhaled and on a T.V., C.N.N. had Rumsfeld on and he said, “Does anyone else think it’s strange that Rumsfeld seems to dress himself to look like MacNamara? The resemblance grows greater the deeper in the shit we get.”
“It is kind of uncanny.. Who is the stylist on this war anyway?”
“MacNamara was supposedly brilliant and all, but doesn’t anyone remember that we lost Vietnam?”
“No,” she said. “They remember Rambo… or Rambo Three…. or what was the last Rambo? We’d like to think we won it somehow.”
“Was it a concious decision to look like MacNamara, or is it just the look that all meglamoniacal men get when they are making huge blunders that they refuse to see or accept?”
“I haven’t smoked pot in forever,” she said smelling it in the bar and Frank Zappa came on the juke box as C.N.N. cut to the war footage and he said, “You never hear Zappa on a juke box in the States….”
“I think he’s more famous in Europe… Moon Unit and Dweezil are more famous in America.”
“Why?” He asked. “What did they ever actually do other than be his kids?”
“They were younger than Frank and in Hollywood…that is how you get famous.”
“What? Be young in Hollywood?”
“It’s a start anyway.”
“Didn’t Vaclav Havel make Zappa his culutural emissary or something?”
“Yeah, but he got cancer.”
“Which one?”
“Both actually…they both got cancer.”
“Always the great ones.”
“Hmmmmm,”she nodded and thought and said, “Dweezil had a cooking show with Lisa Loeb…. and wasn’t Valley Girl Zappa’s only hit?”
“Probably…. Another Beer?”
“Let’s try something else”
Fin, or True Faux, or Fin Flukes, or Day For Night, or Dough Fin, or This is the End, or Doors in a Wall, Apocalypse Wow, or "But What I Really Want To Do Is Direct", or I Could Go On and On…
The characters are on set… We’ve got some rinky dink stack of cardboard dressed up as a Chalet and we’re shooting day for night. The problem with cinema is the problem of painting is the problem of fiction in genaral: IT’S ALL PHONY.
It’s a lie; a big non truth … albeit with the proviso that it tries to illuminate the truth… it is lying to get at the truth. Much of the avante garde practice I am interested in, is an attempt to tell the truth from start to finish… to avoid illusions and subterfuge (but often you end up avoiding the audience too which seems to like a good lie now and again), but we are more or less at the finish… the end of the line; the zed to the A; the omega to the alpaha; and so we start where the blog began two years ago:
“Silence,” Yells the assistant to the director. “Quiet Everyone… this is a Take”
The Characters are behind us: Alexandre and Sylvie (or was it Pat and Katherine, or just he and she?) and M. Tristan waiting in the wings.
“Speed!”
The Ghost walks before the lens like Disney on the “Wonderful World of…” and speaks:
“Ladies and Gentlemen I give you: OMegg!”
Not much of an introduction, to be sure, but tonight is all hollow‘s eve and hollow things have a way of bobbing to the surface, like the ghost-white whale rising up from the lower depths to breach and blow and sing and sink again in the dark.
Magic And Loss
In the first full day of The Library Project, there are 221 members of the flickr group and The first half finished book has been posted by tararossstudios. I thought the color would go well with this vlog covering the last few days in all their magic and loss. I altered it digitally to bring out the color contrast that spoke to me of Taoism. Not sure If I’ll be the one to finish this painting, but it sure will be fun to work on for whoever does. I also like that she painted the enitre surface of the cover, but in a half finished style (as that’s a different approach than most). This famous postcard from Topor was published in 1967, the year of my birth. I have always been facinated at the way a book reflects the essential structure of a human… the way it is split down the middle and held together by a spine annd how it opens up and takes you in and births a whole new reality for the reader. A sensual thing, a book: like sex and cigarettes and stylish shoes…
The dog has Le Cancer… which is whole nother story, but somehow seems related.
Three Meals and Three Drawings
Paikage Delivery
Pax Cerveza (or The Yale Years)
Laughing It All Away (or Elegy for the Spanish Republic)
The whole thing ended in dancing and Sophy went to dip and Tom dropped her on the floor with the cat and she started sneezing like a bell chiming right at midnight and we were all laughing untill it stopped at twenty one… and we had one more Guiness and Tom sat down on the couch and closed his eyes and whispered to me, “Could you get these people out of my apartment please… I want to sleep” and Sophy blew her nose and crawled up the loft ladder and lay down, but Tom stayed on the couch where Sylvie kissed him once goodnight on his smiling bald head and then I started hearding the hangers on like cats out the “Get Smart” labyrinth of doors and stairs and more doors and more stairs, till the unruly crowd hit the sidewalks and burst like a breaking beer bottle – going off in all directions. A few of us climbed up the hill past the Gothic arches of the great bridge towards the 2 and 3 and you could hear all of New York like the white noise buzz after the bells have all rung.
The other Tom was talking about Italy and the wine and the Italians in California and how they’d brought all that Viticulture with them and I went off on the German Barbarians and their Beer and how the fithy drunken hoard had brought down the whole fucking empire with all it’s arches and aquaducts and roads. ..so we went off on the merits of wine and beer and the other Tom walked by yelling, “UP THE IRISH!”
I was thinking about George Macuinas and all his Atlases and I thought it would be interesting to see one that traced the flow of wine and beer and hempf and I thought of all those Nazis fighting in the Spanish Civil War and painting Guernica with chordite and iron. Did they bring their own beer? I’ve never tried Spanish Cervesa…only some from their colonies in Mexico and Peru, etc. Did the Spanish have hashish with all those Muslims there? Some one should draw a map.
Chimes At Midnight (or: "She Owes Me O.K.")
Connect The Dots (or Plato's Retreat)
There is an excellent article that touches on fluxus by Dan Visel at ifbook: Finishging Things. Also, I ran into my old pal Scott Boldin (aka DJ. Skizum) during the weekend and he’s off on a facinating political tangent: My America Too. His sticker designs reminded me a little of George Macuinas.
