War and (in) Peace (Pieces)

WAR and (in) PEACE (Pieces)

A condensation hack of the beginning of

Leo Tolstoy’s WAR & PEACE

“Why are you exciting the world?

Why are you going to war? ”

He paused, then replied,

“I am going because a policeman and

A bear were tied back to back with

The bear swimming about with the man.

I must put the bear into the

Moyka Canal on his back!”

Buonaparte has buried the bear.

He is now ready to burn his boats,

and the lofty impetuous abbé

is making noise about Russia-

“Barbaric in the right light,” he said.

Now speak to me of Austria, or perhaps

Of the table, intrigue, violence, exile,

And executions.

“This French tumbler of wine is looking

To be forever destroyed, and then…

Perpetual peace is possible but

I do not know how.”

“Perhaps if he were at that moment a copy, of which he had

himself heard pronounce, “Russians must die or conquer.”

He spoke this last word with art, again thumping the table

and then spoke words from the manifesto,

“The Emperor has now decided a new condition for the

attainment of that smile.” And he concluded,

“Connaissez-vous le Proverb, ‘It is all in God’s hands’.

“Perhaps if no one fought except on his own proverb?”

“Ve must die for our Emperor, and zen all vill pe vell.

Zat is how ve old hussars look at it.”

C. Mehrl Bennett            3/31/2023

Seven Transducted Radio Clouds

I.

Key Vibe: Local Bar in Dayton

Character: Text Lance Janice

Limited Bean Bag Range

One Hundred Ants

Jamming the Hall

II.

Key Vibe: Sex Tense Buffalo

Character: Tic Tack Jack

Enabler Dead from Suicide

Impatient adolescents

Seek Peach Protector

III.

Key Vibe: Traffic Attack

Character: Leader Lake Joan

ICE Lights a Fire

Limited Beds and Hours

Memorial Tourism

IV.

Key Vibe: Nude Bat Cube

Character: Plastic Bobby Pen

Migraine Policy Spittle

Forward Backstop

Walmart Bed Addiction

V.

Key Vibe: Woodstock Memo

Character: Exhausted Hippy

Shed Flex Mop

Amazing Graze Mass

Pause Bone Shot

VI.

Key Vibe: Bump Stock Book

Character: Loop Tour John

Custom Lap Feel

Board a Bowler

Cancelled Logo

VII.

Key Vibe: kNocks News Next

Character: Twin Flat Florence

Match Book Poems

Seven Sieve Channel

Double Word Flaunt

C. Mehrl Bennett –  8/12/2019

Buffoon Quartet

Animated version on YouTube

YouTube video by Jim Andrews – About the software ‘Alpha Null 3.0’ which he used to create this, Jim says, “The text is Mehrl’s and so is the vispo that fills the text. I created this nib specially for her work.”

I.

A

Bellissimo

Buffoon

Took to

Picking up

Ka Ka …

Ask a cow

 

II.

Real late in 2016

…possibly midnight,

This buffoon turned into

The opposite essence

of Da Da…

An Orange

Beast Incorporated

 

III.

Lacking any sense of CAUTION

It increasingly caressed then

Shredded to DEATH

All the kittens, mittens, and

Gloves in the

Wood paneled

Cloak room

 

IV.

All that remains now

In my memory of this

Nightmare is

Little Bo-peep

Wearing a

Gas

Mask

 

C Mehrl Bennett 2/13/2017 – 7/24/2017

What is Fluxus? – An Essay by Mark Bloch

What is Fluxus
By Mark Bloch
July 9, 2012
Fluxus was an international group of thinkers, artists, composers, performers and designers that first networked themselves together in the late 1950s, then became a performance collective when they took their name in 1962, then a way of working with time and materials and eventually an art movement creating work in several dimensions and media that lasted from the early 60s through the late 70s and beyond on three continents, blazing the aesthetic trails that were to define the next half century of art history. They shattered old aesthetic boundaries and explored new ones, while grappling internally with their communal identity, under the guidance of their own conflicting, shifting, and morphing opinions of who they were and what they were up to as both a group and as individuals, without clear or firm parameters of what criteria might define their association. They ebbed and flowed as a collective, against the odds, disappearing and reemerging like a simple but mysterious prop in a magician’s routine, through schisms, chasms, reorganizations and excommunications. Many members are now gone, some deceased, some scurrying away quietly in the night under the radar with others lionized in enormous spotlights in life and in death, with the final few, more than a handful, still amongst us today, creating dynamic new senior citizen fluxworks or as in the case of the youngest members, now in very late middle age, finally enjoying their occasional newfound status as Old Masters, dog-tired “concept” artists who taught a very old art world a few new tricks. Fluxus has always defied traditions by establishing new ones, transcended geographical limitations by staking out unfamiliar territory, and most importantly by virtually fusing together in deceptively simple ways all the medium-based approaches of the middle 20th Century, creating entirely new genres that we take for granted today out of the old ones as a replacement status quo for a New Millenium. Fluxus participants were among the first to embrace a “do-it-yourself” mindset, exposing process as superior to end products while producing startling and surprising results, circumventing existing institutions by utilizing everyday objects, approaches and activities to successfully blur boundaries between art and life. George Maciunas, a made-to-order autocrat for his times and the group’s Lithuanian-born gatekeeper and visionary czar, instigated and organized art experiences as a collaborative social process, breathing new creativity into an established art world that slowly came to accept the group’s contributions not only as valid but as important and essential to the changing times. Maciunas and the other Fluxus artists he attempted to control, individually and en masse, created thought-provoking works that turned an elusive, ephemeral approach to shaping ethereal forces of anarchy into playful manifestations of art “product” existing in two and three dimensions or as events in time, captured and frozen by their instructions and posters or in beautiful photographs or by-products. They created art that resonated like poems for their times or like zen koans producing a series of aftershocks more akin to spiritual experiences or thrills had in any amusement park or both than to the conventional aesthetics and other familiar goings on in the staid commercial art world. They delivered work that goosed their audiences or tickled onlookers with subtle punch lines that forced their creative contemporaries and the public at large to approach life in the decades since, whether they knew it or not, with a freshly minted Fluxus attitude of their own that they themselves slyly assumed they had invented. But Fluxus had bubbled up from within and rendered an artworld constitutionally unprepared to assimilate it, defenseless against its playful reach. Fifty years ago, Fluxus began to prepare the fertile ground required for a completely transformed art world to emerge in another century and they did so elegantly, admirably and without much hype or fanfare.
(Note: Badge and essay published with the permission of Mark Bloch, “The Post-Flux Police”)

Note from this blog’s editor:
The use of the term “Post-Fluxus” when referring to today’s practitioners of fluxus influenced intra-media artists, and the academic use of the term “movement” when referring to historical fluxus activities, implies that Fluxus is dead, but as an ATTITUDE, Fluxus is still very much ALIVE.
– CMB

Take a Stand for the Old Out-of-the-Nest Wonder Years

Use your hard earned money to buy staples and take time for home economics 101: bake, garden, cook, preserve food by canning and freezing. Organize potlucks or other exchanges with friends, and maybe the occasional hunting or fishing trip. Budget for genuine needs and avoid impulse spending. ‘Settle’ for a ‘used’ house in an affordable neighborhood with local shops and destinations you can walk or bike to, and without a long commute to your work place.
Avoid cheap sugary and salty junk food. Don’t allow low prices to blind you to empty calories, saturated fats, preservatives, and the addictive nature of so-called ‘convenience’ food.
Big banks and fly-by-night payroll store fronts offer fast credit. Corporations advertise “necessities of life” like big screen TV, the latest communication devices or technical innovations, brand name trends in shoes and clothes, etc. Some newlyweds immediately focus on building a new house in the suburbs, and if they aren’t already far in debt for school loans, then they’ll soon be stressed to the limit to meet the monthly mortgage.
Don’t mix up commercially advertised lifestyle choices with what should be a natural transition into the wonderment of independence: being responsible for one’s own food, shelter, and companionship, and discovery of sources of exchange within newly formed communities. Home economics is life economics. Commercials and advertisements and the ultimate goals of banks are business economics. Choose life or be led by a nose-ring by big corporations and banks. In addition, healthy diet and life style choices mean fewer medical bills and more awareness of self, friends, and family. Does any of this make sense?

The color is Blue; Symbol is a Deer

The colors red or blue:
A way to read politics in
My own country

Vote for Obama if
You expect to vote in the fall
Register Blue

Obama is a deer
Caught in the headlights of a truck
We drive the truck

Avoid hitting the deer
Splattering red blood all over
O’s first term in office.

Peace Offering

Inspired by Wilma Duguay, the title of this piece could as well be “piss offering”. CMB tied alpha beads to purchased macraméd PEACE symbol necklace. Another version, with beads sewn on with thread instead of being tied on with black cord, was mailed on behalf of Wilma to Cecil Touchon, to whom Wilma addressed the phrase “Piss Up a Rope” – twice – during a Facebook discussion fomented by Mark Bloch (who else?).