
“Is not advisable, nor was it ever advisable, to lead a Dada
life. It is and it always was foolish and self destructive to lead
a Dada life because a Dada life will include by definition pranks,
buffoonery, masking, deranged senses, intoxication, sabotage, taboo
breaking, playing childish and/or dangerous games, waking up dead
gods, and not taking education seriously."
So
writes Andrei Codrescu, who
has written the definitive Posthuman Dada Guide, a far more useful
circum-navigational tool than the Luxe City Guides if you ask me.
Dada would chew the ear off Monsieur Luxe and use his children to
feed rabbits in the train station kiosk.
Such a life, lived even without the handy advice of Dr.
Codrescu, has nevertheless been chosen, it seems, by a little old
woman with a big smile called Mirka Mora. A women who threatens the
legal system with poetry, and is known to sometimes, perhaps not
often enough, appear almost naked in public.
I was a young boy when I first saw her. It was evening and my
father was breaking into a large case of wine, without a bottle
opener. (These were the years before screw tops, a thought we would
have gasped at then.) There was an old goods-lift, which took us up
one floor to the art gallery above, which was already full of
people. If felt hot and dangerous up there, airless and drunken.
Suddenly a women, she must have been sixty five at least, climbed
onto the table and began speaking loudly above the crowd, languidly
pealing off her clothes till she stood, amply and slightly aglow,
in her lingerie. If I was writing a coming of age story about
surfing, I’d say that this was my first erotic encounter.
Fully clothed, Mirka Mora dropped by this week to inspect her
Mural with Sabine Cotte, above, who will be restoring the image on
Mirka’s behalf. The wall was damaged when a person with very sharp
ears ran past at about 100km an hour, a futurist I believe,
enamored by destruction.
This is an artist's impression
of the culptrit.
That art gallery where my erotic education began is closed now.
The bookstore below is a Pharmcy , where the light has that
mysterious quality that always makes one feel as if they are about
to be experimented on. Sometimes I look behind the mouthwash
shelves, for a book which might have fallen down, years ago, or a
left over bottle of wine. Sometimes it is good to wake up the dead
Gods.