19 March 2007

This and that

I am quite conscious of the fact that I am treating dadaism as a living idea, as if it still existed ... [T]here exists a kind of dadaist person, a dadaist fundamental way of life, which is not only characteristic of our time, but is congruent with many assertions of modern thought ... Decisive is the volcano and not the lava, the symbol-making power and not the rigid symbol, the ethical will and not the conventional morality, the individual in the mass and not the mass in the individual.

- Richard Huelsenbeck, 'Dada and Existentialism', 1957

I had a very productive weekend. Hopefully, I'll have pictures tomorrow. As well as painting, I finished reading Sartre's The wall, which is an excellent collection of short stories. I watched Kurosawa's The seven samurai again, and a couple of short Hans Richter films from the 20s.

Vormittagsspruk was brilliant. Four bowler hats get bored with their workaday routine and decide to bunk off for the ten minutes before noon. The other, Filmstudie, was a lot more formal but still lots of fun. I dug out an essay by Richter on his films, and ended up reading the essay by Huelsenbeck quoted above as well.

To top it all off, I'm pretty sure I experienced last night the event that a deja vu from a couple of weeks ago was the premonition of.

I'm off to Truffaut's Jules et Jim at the Film Society tonight. That too should be excellent.

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