An Important Election Day Message

by rageboy 

         ...carnival images closely resemble certain artistic
      forms, namely the spectacle. In turn, medieval spectacles
      often tended toward carnival folk culture, the culture of
      the marketplace... But the basic carnival nucleus of this
         culture is by no means a purely artistic form nor a
      spectacle and does not, generally speaking, belong to the
       sphere of art. It belongs to the borderline between art
         and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped
               according to a certain pattern of play.

               Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World
                 http://www.rageboy.com/carnival.html


                The dog trots freely in the street...
                        and the things he sees
                           are his reality

                        Lawrence Ferlinghetti
             http://www.boppin.com/poets/ferlinghetti.htm


Valued Readers:

I sing mere anarchy loosed. Of wildness and wilderness. Of a deeper
ignorance too long ignored.

We own however much of the world we can embrace, maybe even understand
-- not in an analytic way, but by feeling deeper into some magic that
is beyond understanding. We create maps and visions, work them out in
our heads -- constructs to show each other. Here, do you see? This is
a picture of how it works. We begin with bare diagrams, flowcharts,
abstract models. See? we say, do you see how this part mates to that?
How the pieces fit together?

But not until we are able to populate the streets of these models, see
exhausted workers, dreaming lovers, posturing punks and preening
fashion plates walking their byways and back alleys, cops on the beat
and shifty characters dodging into doorways, proud hookers and
disapproving matrons sizing each other up, retired bankers reading the
day's news over coffee, girlfriends giggling over you can only wonder
what, shopkeepers hawking fruit and fish, children running, calling to
each other, dogs sniffing at curbs and hydrants -- not until then does
evening fall and the wheel of night begin to slowly turn, the eyes of
the statues opening once again. Only then does the bare abstraction
open into carnival.

Culture is a palimpsest. We write over it, over and over. It must not
be too dear, too untouchable. The smoke from the Alexandrian library
is our wealth, our burnt and blinded legacy. More where that came
from. Nostalgia for the past is the beginning of the end of heroism.
Museums preserve what once was. For those cut off, for those who no
longer touch the earth or dirty their hands with the fallingdown
world. When everything has a price, nothing is precious.

Homage hidden between the lines, sampled and reworked into something
we can recognize, as if for the first time. The civilizations of the
Australian dreamtime, of Egypt and Africa, of China, India, Greece,
the Aztecs, Incas, Maya, Navaho, Hopi, Sioux. Pyramids, temples, holy
roads and rivers, sacred forest spaces, gateways through which the
spirit of the people opened into the infinite. All these were created
with a fraction of the power we command today -- godlike knowledge,
inconceivable wealth, technologies indistinguishable from magic. And
what have we created with this power? What monuments have we erected
to the imagination of our race? McDonald's, Yahoo, Disney World.
Absurd simulacra bought with the ransom of 10,000 kings.

But it is not over. Not some cheap trip down memory lane. We do what
we do and will continue. We do what the world asks of us when it gets
no answer elsewhere.

Take heart.

The Management

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