Rauschenberg's twist on Dada is his assumption of a medicine man or witch doctor's role in the creation of rituals and totems of 'healing'. In its earlier European manifestations Dada has been a more purely negative statement but Rauschenberg layers into it a very American syncretic Cabeza De Vaca heritage.
Glossolalia, 'speaking in tongues', shows up a little bit in Church history prior to the nineteenth century but my reading suggests that it really blows up about the 1820s in America as part of that nationwide religious revival that manifests itself in all sorts of curious ways, as in Mormonism, etc. ( I wonder if anybody's done anything on Mormonism and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books? Leading rather nicely into Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard...) I should imagine that this is the result of a new awareness of spirit possession resulting from the mixing of African and Native American cultures with the unhierarchical protestantism given new force by Methodists and by the Revolution.
When a Voodoo God takes possession of you you are called a 'horse'. 'Dada' is French babytalk for a stick horse.
When I am dead and my friends' curiousitee shall have me cut up they're gonna find some really pretty snapshots in my heart from the summer of 2001 which I spent stepnfetchin' out in Southampton. It was my 'Pauline at the Beach' summer. I had never in my white trash life had occasion to live so completely in sunny sandy Mermaid beauty. It was marred only by the fact that my baby dog of fifteen years, Sarah, was dying. (Finally the week after the Fourth of July I came home and found Beth trying to force feed the poor wasted beast with a turkey baster and I said 'baby, this is over' and the next day I carried Sarah into the vets and killed her. I cried sitting on Lexington Avenue waiting for our appointment. That's rare for me. I was not unaware of the fact that in doing so I made a good picture. I think of the Monet story where he analyzes the color of his dying wife's eye and hates himself doing it.)
Southampton is a beautiful place filled with insane weird people and more money than it is possible for a poor boy to get his head around. Though of course I try. New acquaintances, people you run into on the beach, will say:
"Isn't this a beautiful place?"
"Yes," you'll respond.
"Aren't the people horrible?" This casual recognition of the ever hungry status seeking social milieu and its nasty and remarkable effects is partly anti-semitic in character, but it's also the kind of inverse dysfunctional snobbery I think of when I read Evelyn Waugh. And then it's partly just realism. You need to remember that this is the summer that Grubman girl drives through the wall of that club screaming "White Trash". You gotta watch out 'cos some people's status seeking tantrums can kill you.
The teenagers in Southampton have nothing to do and drive the night aimlessly looking for trouble.
This is a phenomena pointed out to me by a Dominican chef I work with long before I ever go out to the Island myself. "The kids have so much money and they're so bored and unhappy," he tells me wonderingly.
Always I run into considerable opposition when I propose that Texas is the frontier of Modernity, but damn in my life if I haven't watched 'Dazed and Confused' spread across the world. Like 'Chainsaw'. Oh I cannot see this working out good.
2:45:31 PM [Macro error: The file "E:\www\#itemTemplate.txt" wasn't found.]
|
