Art from the Outskirts

I’m taking the weekend off… Have a great weekend! Funky Flicks returns on Monday.

My apologies to the Funky Flicks fans. A new movie will be back this Monday. Be well!

*Calling all bloggers, artists writers editors and all creative people* I’m looking for opportunities to write articles, interviews, transcriptions and books. Please contact me at the comment box for more information.

Thanks,

Mike

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Dear Readers,

I’ve been waxing poetically for Today since April of last year, in that time, I’ve written quite a lot about everything from Einstein, aliens, Mexico’s Day of the Dead, movies I’ve seen and books I’ve read and a few actual news events albeit they were at times, immersed, entrenched, double-dipped and deep-fried in my own quirky, semi-quixotic, idealistic, deeply- spiritual, neo-wheelchairian politically independent, culturally-speckled cult of personality. But with that comes the integrity of what I hope is a balanced opinion derived from and arrive at through, research, reason and 28 years of living - often as person somewhat outside himself as the only guy in a chair in most of my social groups - and the guy who finds that clipping his toenails (due to his Cerebral Palsy) is infinitely more difficult, or shall I say, arduous than writing a multi-chapter, Joseph Campbell- inspired poem deconstructing the origin of the Universe as being as dynamic as Star Wars and as violent and bold as a Jimi Hendrix-Jackson Pollock duet.

It’s time for a change. In the coming days, I will be deciding on several themes for my two blogs Waxing Poetically an Art from the Outskirts. However the current specials on each blog with remain as they are. Each day will have a theme. for instance, Waxing Poetically might now enjoy a day devoted to international news, while Art from the Outskirts might have a day just for crafts. It’s all up in the air a bit as of right now. Feel free to drop a line and suggest a theme.

Be Well,

Mike

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Designers Need To Eat Too! from Helen Olney on Vimeo.

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Due to a small power failure. I was unable to post today. My apologies. I would like to take this time ask your input on what you would like to see on this blog. As you may know I’ve been slightly less active in th forums and in my fellow bloggers comment boxes.

In other news, I’ve noticed my attention to this blog has made me slack in my freelance career a bit. Unfortunately, that means my poetic waxing and Outskirtishness may be taking a back seat. I love you all and I hope you understand.

Hi Folks,

I just wanted to let you know that this blog starts a full gallery mode tomorrow morning! In light of a recent slew of archives, I hope this format will please you. In the gallery format each peace will get its own post. This is in the hopes to monetize the blog a bit better and get a few more advertisers to the page.

Warm Regards,

Michael LaPenna

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*Calling all bloggers, artists writers editors and all creative people* I’m looking for opportunities to write articles, interviews, transcriptions and books. Please contact me at the comment box for more information.

Thanks,

Mike

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This work in the Public Domain under a Creative Commons License and is not my work in any way.

CHAPTER 10

I booked us ringside seats at the Polynesian Luau, riding high on a fresh round of sympathy Whuffie, and Dan and I drank a dozen lapu-lapus in hollowed-out pineapples before giving up on the idea of getting drunk.

Jeanine watched the fire-dances and the torch-lighting with eyes like saucers, and picked daintily at her spare ribs with one hand, never averting her attention from the floor show. When they danced the fast hula, her eyes jiggled. I chuckled.

From where we sat, I could see the spot where I’d waded into the Seven Seas Lagoon and breathed in the blood-temp water, I could see Cinderella’s Castle, across the lagoon, I could see the monorails and the ferries and the busses making their busy way through the Park, shuttling teeming masses of guests from place to place. Dan toasted me with his pineapple and I toasted him back, drank it dry and belched in satisfaction.

Full belly, good friends, and the sunset behind a troupe of tawny, half-naked hula dancers. Who needs the Bitchun Society, anyway?

When it was over, we watched the fireworks from the beach, my toes dug into the clean white sand. Dan slipped his hand into my left hand, and Jeanine took my right. When the sky darkened and the lighted barges puttered away through the night, we three sat in the hammock.

I looked out over the Seven Seas Lagoon and realized that this was my last night, ever, in Walt Disney World. It was time to reboot again, start afresh. That’s what the Park was for, only somehow, this visit, I’d gotten stuck. Dan had unstuck me.

The talk turned to Dan’s impending death.

“So, tell me what you think of this,” he said, hauling away on a glowing cigarette.

“Shoot,” I said.

“I’m thinking—why take lethal injection? I mean, I may be done here for now, but why should I make an irreversible decision?”

“Why did you want to before?” I asked.

“Oh, it was the macho thing, I guess. The finality and all. But hell, I don’t have to prove anything, right?”

“Sure,” I said, magnanimously.

“So,” he said, thoughtfully. “The question I’m asking is, how long can I deadhead for? There are folks who go down for a thousand years, ten thousand, right?”

“So, you’re thinking, what, a million?” I joked.

He laughed. “A million? You’re thinking too small, son. Try this on for size: the heat death of the universe.”

“The heat death of the universe,” I repeated.

“Sure,” he drawled, and I sensed his grin in the dark. “Ten to the hundred years or so. The Stelliferous Period—it’s when all the black holes have run dry and things get, you know, stupendously dull. Cold, too. So I’m thinking—why not leave a wake-up call for some time around then?”

“Sounds unpleasant to me,” I said. “Brrrr.”

“Not at all! I figure, self-repairing nano-based canopic jar, mass enough to feed it—say, a trillion-ton asteroid—and a lot of solitude when the time comes around. I’ll poke my head in every century or so, just to see what’s what, but if nothing really stupendous crops up, I’ll take the long ride out. The final frontier.”

“That’s pretty cool,” Jeanine said.

“Thanks,” Dan said.

“You’re not kidding, are you?” I asked.

“Nope, I sure ain’t,” he said.

They didn’t invite me back into the ad-hoc, even after Debra left in Whuffie-penury and they started to put the Mansion back the way it was. Tim called me to say that with enough support from Imagineering, they thought they could get it up and running in a week. Suneep was ready to kill someone, I swear. A house divided against itself cannot stand, as Mr. Lincoln used to say at the Hall of Presidents.

I packed three changes of clothes and a toothbrush in my shoulderbag and checked out of my suite at the Polynesian at ten a.m., then met Jeanine and Dan at the valet parking out front. Dan had a runabout he’d picked up with my Whuffie, and I piled in with Jeanine in the middle. We played old Beatles tunes on the stereo all the long way to Cape Canaveral. Our shuttle lifted at noon.

The shuttle docked four hours later, but by the time we’d been through decontam and orientation, it was suppertime. Dan, nearly as Whuffie-poor as Debra after his confession, nevertheless treated us to a meal in the big bubble, squeeze-tubes of heady booze and steaky paste, and we watched the universe get colder for a while.

There were a couple guys jamming, tethered to a guitar and a set of tubs, and they weren’t half bad.

Jeanine was uncomfortable hanging there naked. She’d gone to space with her folks after Dan had left the mountain, but it was in a long-haul generation ship. She’d abandoned it after a year or two and deadheaded back to Earth in a support-pod. She’d get used to life in space after a while. Or she wouldn’t.

“Well,” Dan said.

“Yup,” I said, aping his laconic drawl. He smiled.

“It’s that time,” he said.

Spheres of saline tears formed in Jeanine’s eyes, and I brushed them away, setting them adrift in the bubble. I’d developed some real tender, brother-sister type feelings for her since I’d watched her saucer-eye her way through the Magic Kingdom. No romance—not for me, thanks! But camaraderie and a sense of responsibility.

“See you in ten to the hundred,” Dan said, and headed to the airlock. I started after him, but Jeanine caught my hand.

“He hates long good-byes,” she said.

“I know,” I said, and watched him go.

The universe gets older. So do I. So does my backup, sitting in redundant distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that space or age or stupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write out my life longhand, a letter to the me that I’ll be when it’s restored into a clone somewhere, somewhen. It’s important that whoever I am then knows about this year, and it’s going to take a lot of tries for me to get it right.

In the meantime, I’m working on another symphony, one with a little bit of “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” and a nod to “It’s a Small World After All,” and especially “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.”

Jeanine says it’s pretty good, but what does she know? She’s barely fifty.

We’ve both got a lot of living to do before we know what’s what.
Acknowledgements:

I could never have written this book without the personal support of my friends and family, especially Roz Doctorow, Gord Doctorow and Neil Doctorow, Amanda Foubister, Steve Samenski, Pat York, Grad Conn, John Henson, John Rose, the writers at the Cecil Street Irregulars and Mark Frauenfelder.

I owe a great debt to the writers and editors who mentored and encouraged me: James Patrick Kelly, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Martha Soukup, Scott Edelman, Gardner Dozois, Renee Wilmeth, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Claire Eddy, Bob Parks and Robert Killheffer.

I am also indebted to my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and my agent Donald Maass, who believed in this book and helped me bring it to fruition.

Finally, I must thank the readers, the geeks and the Imagineers who inspired this book.

Cory Doctorow

San Francisco

September 2002
About the author:

Cory Doctorow is Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, www.eff.org, and maintains a personal site at www.craphound.com. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing at www.boingboing.net, with more than 250,000 visitors a month. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards. Born and raised in Toronto, he now lives in San Francisco. He enjoys using Google to look up interesting facts about long walks on the beach.
Other books by Cory Doctorow:

*

A Place So Foreign and Eight More
– short story collection, forthcoming from Four Walls Eight Windows in fall 2003, with an introduction by Bruce Sterling
*

Essential Blogging, O’Reilly and Associates, 2002
– with Rael Dornfest, J. Scott Johnson, Shelley Powers, Benjamin Trott and Mena G. Trott
*

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, Alpha Books, 2000
– co-written with Karl Schroeder

Thanks for reading for the Outskirts!

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Today’s feature is revisited from October 15, 2008 but deserves featuring once more as it is a very funky flick indeed!It is the 70s arthouse adventure The ABCs of Dada!

Dadaism may be the definition of “art from the outskirts.” It is an all arts movement of the political turmoil of the first World War and a rebellion against the rigidity of the established definition of art during the time. The term’s origin is unclear but it is suggested that it is a nonsensical word to mark the “anti-art” feel of the style.

Dada was a provocative and irreverent art movement, founded in Switzerland in the early twentieth century, in which a seemingly chaotic, spontaneous, and pessimistic aesthetic influenced painting, sculpture, theater, literature, and film. The movement’s name is a willfully nonsensical word, intended to punctuate the meaninglessness artists saw in their contemporaneous worldview. Dada filmmakers such as Hans Richter, Man Ray, and Viking Eggeling were challenged by the developing technology of filmmaking in the 1920s. This confluence of technology and aesthetic experimentation suited the Dadaists’ passion for the machine-made object. The visual disruption created by the Dada filmmakers in the 1920s provided a legacy of aesthetic language for the cinematic experiments of future generations of avant-garde artists (MoMa.org).

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Credit to YouTube user OttOmOlOtOv for this film.

Bonus: “How One Wages War with a Scissors” by Amy Lipson,
a Satirical bio of John Heartfield

Dada is from the Outskirts!

Next week’s flick: Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi

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