Posts Tagged ‘Dada’
“All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain”*…
To Epictetus’ dictum in the title of this post, one might add “disdain”…
“That most deformed concept-cripple of all time.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche on Immanuel Kant
“Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer on Georg Hegel
“There’s no ‘theory’ in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find… some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a 12-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying.”
– Noam Chomsky on Slavoj Žižek
“Well, with all deep respect that I do have for Chomsky, my… point is that Chomsky, who always emphasizes how one has to be empirical, accurate… well, I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong.”
– Slavoj Žižek on Noam Chomsky
“Russell’s books should be bound in two colors, those dealing with mathematical logic in red – and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue – and no one should be allowed to read them.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein on Bertrand Russell
The hits just keep on coming at “The 30 Harshest Philosopher-on-Philosopher Insults in History” and “Philosophers’ Insults.”
Special bonuses: Monty Python’s “Philosophers’ Football” and “Dead Philosophers in Heaven.”
* Epictetus
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As we live the examined life, we might send porcelain brithday greetings to Marcel Duchamp; he was born on this date in 1887. A painter, sculptor, and conceptual artist, Duchamp was, with Picasso and Matisse, one the defining figures in the revolution that redefined the plastic arts in the early Twentieth Century– in Duchamp’s case, as an early Cubist (the star of the famous 1913 New York Armory Show), as the originator of ready-mades, and as a father of Dada.
In the 1930s, Duchamp turned from the production of art to his other great passion, chess. He became a competitive player; then, as he reached the limits of his ability, a chess writer. Duchamp’s Samuel Beckett, an friend of Duchamp, used Duchamp’s thinking about chess strategy as the narrative device for the 1957 play of the same name, Endgame. In 1968, Duchamp played an on-stage chess match with avant-garde composer, friend, and regular chess opponent John Cage, at a concert entitled Reunion, in which the music was produced by a series of photoelectric cells underneath the chessboard, triggered when pieces were moved in game play.
Duchamp (center; his wife Teeny, right) “performing” Reunion with John Cage (left) in 1968
“All the world loves a clown”*…
Nonetheless, circus folk fear that a national clown shortage is on the horizon. In a trend that only those who suffer coulrophobia could love, membership in the country’s largest trade organizations for the jesters has plunged, as an aging membership struggles to recruit new nabobs of the crimson nose.
‘What’s happening is attrition,’ said Clowns of America International President Glen Kohlberger, who added that membership at the Florida-based organization has plummeted since 2006. ‘The older clowns are passing away.’ He said he wouldn’t release specific numbers, citing the privacy of the members.
Membership at the World Clown Association, the country’s largest trade group for clowns, has dropped from about 3,500 to 2,500 since 2004. ‘The challenge is getting younger people involved in clowning,’ said Association President Deanna (Dee Dee) Hartmier, who said most of her members are over 40.
Read more in The Daily News [via NPR’s The Two-Way, from whence the photo above]
* Cole Porter
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As we stock up on greasepaint, we might send provocatively nonsensical birthday greetings to Hugo Ball; he was born on this date in 1886. Ball worked as an actor with Max Reinhardt and Hermann Bahr in Berlin until the outbreak of World War I. A staunch pacifist, Ball made his way to Switzerland, where he turned his hand to poetry in an attempt to express his horror at the conflagration enveloping Europe. (“The war is founded on a glaring mistake, men have been confused with machines.”)
Settling in Zürich, Ball was a co-founder of the Dada movement (and, lore suggests, its namer, having allegedly picked the word at random from a dictionary). With Tristan Tzara and Jan Arp, among others, he co-founded and presided over the Cabaret Voltaire, the epicenter of Dada. And in 1916, he created the first Dada Manifesto (Tzara’s came two years later).
The Domestic Lives of Great Philosophers, Part 6: Jeremy Bentham’s Recipes…
University College London proudly displays the remains of one of its founders, the Father of Utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham. They’re also anxious to display his works… but they comprise 60,000 manuscript folios– lots of handwriting to transcribe. The college has been at it since 1959, and the going has been slow– until relatively recently:
The genesis of Transcribe Bentham was in 2009, when the Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, Melissa Terras, was asked by the head of the Bentham Project, Professor Philip Schofield, for advice on procuring funding to digitise the 60,000 folios. “The days for getting funding for pure ‘scan and dump’ digitisation projects are over,” explains Terras, “and I wondered if we could do something more interesting.”
Around the same time, the MPs expenses scandal had broken in the UK, and Terras noticed something interesting: “The Guardian newspaper had built a platform to allow their readers to sift through the thousands of pages of MP’s receipts and I wondered — could we do the same? Could we ask people to read these manuscripts?”
The answer is a definite “yes.” Transcribe Bentham has been a certifiable success, and continues to grow in scale. With funding from the Mellon Foundation, the project has now expanded to encompass the British Library’s collection of 12,500 manuscript folios by Bentham…
[Read the whole story at Gizmodo.uk]
As the digitization has proceeded– in many cases, the first reading of Bentham’s scrawls– some interesting discoveries have been made; the exploration has shed new light, for instance of his stance on animal rights. But perhaps most surprisingly, volunteer readers have discovered a tranche of recipes (complete with the costs of their ingredients) from the great thinker. An excerpt from the manuscript page above:
1/2 lb—
The husks of ripe
walnuts at the time
They separate most
easily from the walnut
& before they begin
to rot—
6 tb — 1d
Salt 1 tb 1
Labour 1/2
21/2Pound the husks adding the salt when they are nearly bruised into an uniform mass so that it may be perfectly mixed. This & all other pickles must be kept in close vessels, casks headed down, jars with bladder tied over the mouth, or cloth or paper covered with melted pitch &c. When a stone vessel is opened it should be emptied into smaller ones, so that no more than sufficient for two or three weeks consumption may be put into each.
See Bentham’s other culinary creations– and the rest of his work– at Transcribe Bentham.
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As we clear our palettes, we might send unorthodox birthday greetings to Otto Gross; he was born on this date in 1877. A psychoanalyst by training (he was an early disciple of Freud), Gross became a champion of an early form of anti-psychiatry (“depth psychology“) and sexual liberation, and an anarchist. His impact on psychology was limited (though Jung claimed that Gross “changed [his] entire worldview”); but he was an important influence on D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and other artists– including the founders of Berlin Dada.
Printers’ ink is the lifeblood of a democracy…
… cable news, not so much.
More sips from the seemingly-never-ending stream that broadcast journalism has become at Cable News Chyrons.
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As we cathect on Colbert, we might recall that it was on this date in 1918 that Tristan Tzara read the “Dada Manifesto of 1918“– the second, but arguably the most important, of the Dada manifestos*– at Meise Hall in Zürich, Switzerland.
* Hugo Ball had written an earlier manifesto in 1916.
All the views that’s fit to print…
June 20, 1965: “Young fans holding aloft bats they were given by the Yankees yesterday at the stadium,” read a caption the day after the team lost a double-header to the Minnesota Twins. The crowd, numbering 72,244, was the largest in four years, provoking the organist to serenade fans with the tune “We’re in the Money.”
For generations, most of the photographs housed in the newsroom archive of The New York Times — known affectionately as “the morgue” — have been hidden away from the public eye in filing cabinets and manila folders.
There are exceptions, of course. The newspaper runs archival photographs every day. Then there are those photos Lens has featured in “The Lively Morgue,” an occasional series we introduced in September 2010. So far, we’ve published 17 collections, ranging in subjects from saucy publicity shots to the art of washing windows.
But we haven’t even made a dent. If we published 10 of our archival images everyday, it would be at least the year 3935 before we’d shown off the entire collection. That’s one of the reasons we launched “The Lively Morgue,” an all-archives, all-the-time feed on the social blogging site, Tumblr…
An archival photo from The New York Times shows news pictures being sorted in the newspaper’s photo “morgue,” which houses millions of images. Here they are — several each week — for you to see. Welcome to The Lively Morgue.
The Lively Morgue is here.
As we express our gratitude to the Gray Lady, we might recall that it was on this date in 1919 that a less successful editorial venture launched in New York City: Man Ray published the first (and only) issue of TNT an anarchist journal. An aspiring artist, he had been moved by the famous 1913 Armory Show, and had befriended Marcel Duchamp. For the next six years or so, Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky) had done his best to marry his political convictions with his creative impulse (e.g., contributing illustrations to Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth). But with the failure of TNT, Ray turned more fully to art; his next whack at publishing was New York Dada, a collaboration with Duchamp. That too failed to make a second number– and Ray departed for France… where he became part of the Surrealist circle– and an important practitioner of and influence on fine art photography.
Salvador Dali and Man Ray in Paris (source)
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