Dada Mambo

I got to see my dear pal Max today, which is always happy-making. You’ve heard me mention Max. If you get the chance, ask for his Marcel Duchamp stories. The cutesy-pie title for this post is misdirection. The meme du jour is surrealism.

Surrealism: melting clocks, chickens in shoes, whatever. To paraphrase Max paraphrasing Magritte: “Ceci n’est pas un blog.” Well yes, it is, but Max’s original joke is superb and I’m not telling it here. See his show. Now buckle up and hold on…

I had an interesting Twitter discussion a day or two ago. Put your eyebrows down, that’s not an oxymoron. @Neurasthenic is an intriguing and intelligent art student in Canada. We were talking about conceptual art theory and repressive authority structures.

The ideas somehow dovetailed with a novel I’m reading. One of the characters is a surrealist painter and former student of Andre Breton. Breton is the only surrealist I’ve ever read about in detail, albeit years ago, in the fiction of Lisa Goldstein.

Still with me? The last Goldstein book I read was called “Tourists” and had nothing to do with Breton or surrealism. But the clock of my life is melting; in a week or two we will be back in Las Vegas for our regular seasonal touristness. This is the Big One, folks. It’s Robert’s birthday! Don’t tell him he’s getting socks. Again.

Wait, I forgot. We were talking about surrealism. Well, that’s Vegas, baby. Juxtapose crude and elegant. Put a loud beer-drinker wearing a wife-beater and shorts inside an exquisite French restaurant. Stand in the Bellagio garden and be elbowed by someone who will only see the flowers when they get home and download the pix. Forget the Ugly Americans, though there are plenty, there’re also Ugly Everyone Else’s. My favorite haven is a bright, noisy, plastic-coated, delicious pit of despair that’s as separated from consensus reality as you can get without driving over yellow bricks.

I should be able to see Max once more before we leave. You can see him at www.maxmaven.com