“I seem to be a verb” – Bucky Fuller
Buckminster Fuller
Can we find restored hope in transforming “drama” with artful imagination? Make new shit up? Transmute the genre? Find a new way? It is possible to invent a NEW form called “metaNONfiction.” Come on Venice, follow Winnie the Pooh: “People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” – A.A. Milne. I do nothing effectively every day in our ebullient Beachtown.
If the external world is an extension of the mind, then why do we have to recreate things in order to get them? William Faulkner famously said, “The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.” Might theater be the first human invention, as Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire (The Theater of the Oppressed) suggested?
They used theater as a means of promoting social and political change. The audience becomes active (“spect-actors”) and explore, show, analyze and transform the reality in which they are living. Judith Malina and Julian Beck (The Living Theatre) promoted: “We believe in the theater as a place of intense experience, half-dream, half-ritual, in which the spectator approaches something of a vision of self-understanding, going past conscious to unconscious, to an understanding of the nature of all things.”
Marcel Duchamp
I’m a “hippiecrit,” who follows Marcel Duchamp: “I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” And the big Mac – Marshall McLuhan quipped, “Carefully make plans, then do the opposite.” Yeah, right, good luck! Cheap out? Or smartness sublime?
Navigate between drama and trauma, between reality and illusion. Wallow in that resonant interval. Between science, art and religion? Direct your questions to Dr. A. Ma, she is the matristic fountainhead raining inquiries and exposition entities. And if you believe that, I got some swamp land just off the coast, my agent Professor Irwin Corey will sell you cheap.
Move on up to the mecca of matriarchy. Keep the flow of character development in systems theory storytelling. The narratives that take you places you could not imagine. A magic carpet ride to materfamilias mountains. Sonic tsunami. Transcend the single in singularity to smash all the Campbellesque (Joseph and comfort food soup) into pieces that respond with raucous righteousness.
Ardent candor calls for cautious command of “drama” culture. Maybe it is possible to contemplate Benjamin’s (Walter, not Ben’s): “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Go Venice wild?
Is drama time-based documentation of the human condition? Is conflict the human condition? What is untenable? Subliminal simultaneity?
Do you agree with LBJ? Lyndon B. Johnson said, “Art is a nation’s most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves and to others the inner vision which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.”
What better place to dissect, discuss, and interact with art than in Venice? Take action? Yes, take dramatic action. Consider the battle ground states and how to persuade swing voters.
Enlighten undecided voters. Avoid a fraudster, a criminal cheater & deceiver. Cancel one who talks piously, but is not pious at heart. What is false, faithless, perfidious, unfaithful, traitorous and treacherous? “But I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you.” – T.S. Eliot. Drama queen? Weird? The good book says, “There’s no truth in him.” What do you say? What are words for?
How do we compose the narrative of the drama of action itself? The drama of stillness itself? The drama of silence itself? Drama as an artifact? Action as an artifact?
Can art stop war? Can art stop fascism? In 1932, Albert Einstein, wrote to Sigmund Freud to ask: “Is there a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?”
Yes we can can. Take dramatic action to end war. Propagate peace. “They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.” – Howard Zinn.
“A Rainbow in Curved Air,” the amazing 1969 LP from the experimental composer Terry Riley includes a poem he wrote:
“And then all wars ended / Arms of every kind were outlawed and the masses gladly contributed them to giant foundries in which they were melted down and the metal poured back into the earth / The Pentagon was turned on its side and painted purple, yellow & green / All boundaries were dissolved / The slaughter of animals was forbidden / The whole of lower Manhattan became a meadow in which unfortunates from the Bowery were allowed to live out their fantasies in the sunshine and were cured / People swam in the sparkling rivers under blue skies streaked only with incense pouring from the new factories / The energy from dismantled nuclear weapons provided free heat and light / World health was restored / An abundance of organic vegetables, fruits and grains was growing wild along the discarded highways / National flags were sewn together into brightly colored circus tents under which politicians were allowed to perform harmless theatrical games / The concept of work was forgotten.”
Wise words from a musician. His compostions have made a significant impact on the public consciousness. Same with Frank Zappa.
Frank Zappa
Remember two classic Zappa quotes still apply: “Democracy doesn’t work unless you participate” & “Keep the government out of your underpants.” Decades ago, he started encouraging everyone to register to vote and TO VOTE. As Bill Mitchell, preeminent Venice activist, always promoted, “Direct democracy.”
So cry out the clarion call in joyous song. In his “Funky President (People It’s Bad),” James Brown sang,
Our own songbird Suzy Williams belts out her original song “Hallelujah Street!” –
“Oh well, I’m walkin’ down Hallelujah Street, Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
Smilin’ at all the people I meet, Hallelujah Street USA
Oh well, I’m struttin’ round Hallelujah Town, Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
High-Fivin’ everybody up and down Hallelujah Town, USA
We gotta new Prez…and a brand new day
There ain’t nothin’ can take that away
Sing Kamala like Sister ‘Re: “Let the bells Freedom Ring!”
Yeah! Oh well I’m cake-walkin’ down to Hallelujah”
Also, check the video of Kamala Harris pulling a Parliament Funkadelic founder George Clinton Funko doll out of her shopping bag. “So you want to know that I got the George Clinton doll. Does everybody know who George Clinton is?” Harris says. She also buys some impressive jazz selections, including: Charles Mingus’ Let My Children Hear Music; Roy Ayers’ Everybody Loves the Sunshine, which Harris called “one of her favorite albums of all time;” and Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s 1959 album Porgy & Bess. Kamala Harris knows the funk. In the liner notes of the Funkadelic 1981 album The Electric Spanking of War Babies, Clinton recommends the important political book Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management (1980) by Holly Sklar. That is an essentail reading recommendation. Strategize.
Accentuate “We the people.” Breathe in the communal atmosphere. Give birth to the collective well-being. “I’m gonna let it shine.” “I” is communal. Give birth to togetherness. Celebrate the divine goddess is us all. Honor our ancestral spirits,
Sweet_Honey_in_the_Rock
RIP (Rest In Power) the rip-roaring Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the all women acappella group, Sweet Honey in the Rock. Their rousing version of “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” urges the audience to lean into the call-and-response.
“You have to actually sing this song,” she said. “You can never tell when you might need it.”
She rightfully declared, “I come as a ‘songtalker’, one who balances talk and song in the creation of a live performance conversation with those who gather within the sound of my voice.” . . . “Sound is a way to extend the territory you can affect. Communal singing is a way of announcing you are here and possessing the territory. When police or the sheriff would enter mass meetings and start taking pictures and names, and we knew our jobs were on the line, and maybe more… inevitably somebody would begin a song. Soon everyone was singing and we had taken back the air in that space.”
Janis Joplin proclaimed that Bessie Smith, “showed me the air and taught me how to fill it.”
Let us claim our air and raise our voices as one. Let’s evoke dramatic action. Go beyond and flip “dramatize into “democratize.” Enliven the Bucky Fullerness verbage.
Bernice Johnson Reagon claimed, “I was here before I came and when I die, I am not leaving.”
We salute Selma Benjamin, inspired and inspiring Venice poet who passed at age 104 recently. Also, one of Venice’s sweetest souls departed, Eileen Bryant Archibald. Her light will always shine. Her generous contribution to our community resonants forever. “Death lies not in not being able to communicate but in no longer being understood.” – Pier Paolo Pasolini. Recall Eliot:
“We die with the dying
See, they depart,
And we go with them
See, they return
and bring us with them”
Back to Bucky Fuller: “I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.” Marshall McLuhan reinforces integral awareness with his quote: “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” Become active dramatically. Get involved.
The last two essays for this paper written by me were entitled “CAN ART STOP WAR?” Parts One & Two. I still await any answers, and feedback from all y’all. I continue to ask my community this question.
Well, actually, activist supreme Zool Zulkowitz did contribute, “I think it’s fair to say that art has not stopped war (as of yet), but I think the record is clear that war has never stopped art.” If you don’t have dreams, your dreams can’t become true.
“A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.” – Wendell Berry.
Hello, is there any readers out dare? Dramatize and democratize and ?
Thank you, Gerry Fialka pfsuzy@aol.com Laughtears.com
Upcoming LAUGHTEARS.com Events
*** Sun Sept29 at 4pm Gerry Fialka hosts Venice Culture Salons (VCS) at Venice Heritage Museum 228 Main Street – every 4th Sunday. Bring your stories and tales about Venice, FREE, (The previously scheduled Aug25 salon is canceled).
*** Join in JAMES JOYCE, Marshall McLuhan and CARL JUNG Reading Groups. Our weekly online discussions every Monday, Tuesday & Wed, at 1:30pm (pacific, for 40 minutes). And some Saturdays we go from 1 to 2:30pm. LZS (Laughtears Zoomin’ Salons) probes the hidden psychic effects of human inventions and how they shape behaviour. Arts, literature, film, activism, new media, poetry, funk, jazz, avant-garde, new media, performance art, politics, coding, tales, cosmic wisdom, jokes and more. “Life is short, break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that made you smile. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain. Laughtears.com Tune In, Turn Around, Drop By…
