[Part 2] The Trickster tongue speaks comedy, and Marvel movies increase the dose every year, where comedy ranks second only to the CGI action. Consider Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man quips; Guardians of the Galaxy, Ant-Man, the recent Spider-Man films, and most certainly Deadpool movies. Putting the laughs first has made these some of the…
Have a good time. And don’t take anything too seriously… — Jerry Garcia Taika Waititi Photo: Gage Skidmore, Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons [Part 1] I have a longstanding debate with a close friend over the question Can ANYTHING be made fun of? Is it possible to…
Considered the greatest artist of the twentieth century, Picasso produced paintings and sculptures that frequently embodied playfulness…but he put art first, play second. Duchamp and dada lived the reverse ethos that put the release of play into daily life first, with works of art the mere residue. What fun Duchamp is having, what masterful play….
The J.L. Mott Iron Works The entry and rejection of Duchamp’s readymade, Fountain, would be a Declaration of Play, in art and in life. His humble porcelain piece would sow a vision of a world where war was not possible. Elegant and notorious, Duchamp confronted the art world’s establishment, creating street theater that is a…
What could possibly make a better case for a world of playfulness and peace than its opposite, stupid stupid war. Our nations’ elites have clearly failed to create peace in our or any time, nor have they doused the flames of environmental abuse that engulf the planet. The brutalities of human destructiveness most currently demonstrated…
In what were to become known as The Army-McCarthy hearings, the US Senate’s Subcommittee on Investigations wrestled with the chicanery of falsified documents while its forgers lied and hurled nonsense accusations of sexual perversion and radical leftism. The year was 1954, and I was living in Lincolnwood, Illinois, adjacent to Skokie, in a home built…