CHRISTMAS DANCE & GOOD CAUSES

There's something quite magical and addictive about this song. First it makes you wanna throw snowballs at the Christmas tree or set your grandma on fire while she carves her memories into the crib. Yet soon it soaks in and induces some sort of musicogenic epilepsy. If you follow through with it, you soon find yourself dancing in a tight circle with imaginary friends. It looks a bit like you're strangling a baby goose while holding an emotional speech in front of your deceased anchestors. Although this bastard of a song really knows how to avoid any deeper meaning, it asks to be hit with a hint of interpretation. We do feel that it should be used (or misused) for a greater good. Immediately we thought about a friend of ours who fights the good fight and needs your voice. Perhaps we just discovered the jingle to her mission.

Zoukez - a christmas song - by FL/AM & The Flamingoes from foufou koh on Vimeo.

The Evolution Of Mickey Mouse - Michal Dabrowski

Many of us are searching for new angles to look at the world, Michal Dabrowski can hook us up for good.

Walt Disney said about him: "Visionary Michal Dabrowski, based in Warsaw and Berlin, studied Applied Social Sciences. He makes graphics, photos and short movies. He likes it when art mixes with anthropology."

"The fittest will survive

The strongest won't survive. The fittest will. At least according to Darwin. Survival is a prize granted to those who fit best into the specific balance of a given environment, who have this particular set of characteristics, which sometimes are even invisible to human eye. Sometimes it's the speed. Sometimes it's the colour of the feathers. Sometimes it's the position of the thumb. Sometimes it's the amount of down on the fruit that protects it from parasites. But the environmental balance isn't settled once and for all. With climate change, quality and quantity of food, the number of representatives of given species or the taste of the audience, the favoured characteristics do change and individuals equipped with them start to have bigger chances for replication and gaining goods, which are always limited. And that's why we evolve. To adjust. And that's why Mickey Mouse evolves. To adjust. To us.

He is 62 years old. He had to fight for our attention with Felix the Cat, Popeye The Sailor, Bugs Bunny and plenty of others. And he survived. He changed a lot from the beginning, but he survived. His microenvironment helped. For example Felix the Cat didn't succeed because his microenvironment was silent (side note: the first words said by Mickey were „Hot dogs! Hot dogs!”). Innovative and skillful use of technicolor also helped our Mouse to establish his position.

He also had good lawyers. When together with his rival – Bugs Bunny they starred in „Who framed Roger Rabbit”, it was settled, that the length of their appearance was to be exactly the same to a microsecond. But all of that wouldn't have been enough. He himself also had to change. His head got larger. Just as his eyes. His jaw retracted. His tail disappeared and generally he got kind of rounded up. And he's not so rugged anymore. And he doesn't fight for a girl like working class heroes. He got boringly polite which actually goes much better with his falsetto (another side note: at first Walt Disney himself gave voice to Mickey but then all the cigarettes he smoked made him rather growl than speak). As Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his article ”A biological homage to Mickey Mouse”, Mickey more and more resembles a child. He's getting younger. He's evolving backwards.

According to Konrad Lorenz, that's how our perception of animals works. We see human traits in them. We tend to judge their mimics and behavior the same way we judge ours. So, when Mickey looks like a child, subconsciously we treat him like a child, and children are sweet and charming. Maybe that's the pattern that Disney's illustrators followed. Maybe even without being aware of these processes they tried to make Mickey look sweeter and more charming. If that is so, than we already have a part of this history. We know how and why he changed. But a much more interesting question still remains unanswered. How did we change? Because he's adjusting to us, isn't he? So, is it that now he is simply better adjusted and we are the same or maybe in the last 62 years something has also changed in us (or in the way we want to be perceived)? And if so, why do we want rugged men to grow into charming children? Why don't we want him to fight anymore? And why does Mickey have to wear those gloves all the time?"

Fine tunes, damn hot coffee, psychosexual moods - Adolph Pineland

A few minutes ago FUN CLUB's mailbox almost exploded when Professor Pineland's hail of words finally met their target. Still suffering from the collateral damage the elaborate and intense piece has brought to the Fun Club Burö, we're unable to decide if we should call it an essay, a review, a novel, a manifesto, a provocation of all senses that are still doing their job, a revelation perhaps or once again just a symptom of insanity incorporated in a poem that just got out of hand - won't meet the first and only criteria for poetry: its shortness. However, we are thrilled to publish Professor Pineland's discoveries:

"I would like to present a damn fine song that marked an era and had great influence on many great musicians and groups, such as The Wolfgang Press, Nick Cave, Smoker Jesus, Lydia Lunch, The Knife, ad nauseam. But I must profit from this casual suggestion to tackle some more pressing issues, however uncomfortable they may be. I must start by means of an anecdote steering as clear as possible from dithyrambic wanderings to whatever extent possible, lest this collective journey be made unpleasant. I also want to signal how cool one very particular and unique German artist actually became.

It all happened as I woke up to an unusually chilly morning of -30, somewhat shaken from a caustic dream. I urinated in the pot and it felt good and the sound of the stream hitting the water reminded me of my youth and of the girl with the flaxen hair. After shaking off the last drops that seemed to rid me of my dream I thought of coffee and walked over to the stove. I reflected on my life as I walked by means of manly, heavy steps (although I felt lighter after having relieved myself):

"it is hard to be cutting edge for a long time, yet my blade had not yet rusted or become blunt, yet blunt was my stride."

A little maxim for us revolutionaries of indifference. The coffee was ready. I sipped my damn hot and fine coffee and walked outside. It was summer. Not. It was only summer in my head as I imagined warm furs engulfing me. Summer by furs. So it went on this morning of minus thirty in all its psychosexual glory and it was these very small bursts of thought that brought my dream back to prominent consciousness.

My dream: I had dreamt of a fighter plane that after showering the land with fire collided into a mountain of hamburger meat and bone. The pilot was propelled out of his metallic husk of death-making and lay mangled and battered at a great distance from the once killing machine, near the base of the mountain. This all occurred in an exotic land somewhere between Russia and Germany even though it was most likely all in my head. The pilot was naked yet covered in fat, and as a moderately oversized, furry bunny attempted to sodomize the unconscious soldier, his body (the pilot) burst into many little boys at the moment the bunny's paws spread the ass cheeks hoping to facilitate penetration. It became clear to me as I sipped my damn hot coffee that the man of my dream was non other than Joseph Beuys (for those of you who may have trouble following my lightning fast and ultra sharp wit: boys = Beuys. That was quite obvious a giveaway; such are the workings of the unconscious. But there are other motifs that helped my epiphany).

I realized that I was going to tread dangerous grounds but with my caffeine high and the cold low and the stiff virility of my dream I decided to march along this line of reasoning. Joseph Beuys was a cute little Nazi in the Luftwaffe until he smacked into the ground and was wrapped in fat and fur by a Tartar (to avoid confusion with the popular sauce or some shitty college teams (pre 21st century) that have nothing to do with this anecdote, I will switch to the preferred spelling: Tatar). The Tatars, especially those of the Crimean Khanate (were Beuys smacked into the ground) were known for their prowess in gardening and good looks. If in any doubt, take a look at Charlie Bronson, albeit a Lipka or Polish variation of the fine Tatar clan, which does not affect looks but gardening, which may explain the inconspicuousness of Charlie Bronson's gardening skills. Anyway, the Crimean Tatars were a kind people, yet somewhat naïve, but they also enjoyed engagement in greasy activities such as playing with grease and cheesemaking. In all good will they decided to save this badly mangled pilot and also launch his artistic career, thus killing two birds with one stone. Two things are shown by this incident. Not all Nazis were necessarily rotten to the core and were often complex human beings (albeit all guilty but they have Jesus to answer to for that), and secondly, how could a former killing machine become an art machine? Just as my damn hot coffee scalded my tongue, the shock of the crash and the grease incubation that followed knocked some sense into the fine Joseph Beuys and he left dropping bombs on people for exploding onto the art scene.

After this politically correct and academically sound assessment of this dream and its connections to life, I can move on to presenting the song I had in mind to begin with. Ronald Regan is a character all too often left out of musical adventures, and we have Mr. Beuys to thank for not omitting him from a marvelous song that has inspired and proved most influential to many musicians, and still stands as a landmark of fine music, singability and just plain old killer groovin'."

Thoughts On Houses - Robin Pineda Gould

TA: Mr. Pineda Gould, amongst many other things you have been labeled "avantgarde musician", "singer-songwriter", "movie director", "writer", "poet", "philosopher king", "religious leader" and "insane"? Despite the fact that some of these labels imply a bit of irony, which one of them feels like home to you?

RPG: I feel compelled to state that fist and foremost, a house is not (always) a home, but in all these constructions, or so called labels, a certain house has been constructed for those of us Dyonisians trapped in the nomadic path of creative dementia praecox. At many times I feel the necessity to find the hearth of this structure, load it with the dry, sensual wood of creation, and illuminate that very hearth and its surrounding construction in the flames of the tortured muses that at times are chained to me. I can make my home in any label, and I find the "singer-songwriter" in particular quite piquant.

TA: Now that we addressed the matter of different houses within the landscape of art, thought and religion, what is it exactly that makes them false fronts in a way? In regards to art, thought and religion as houses themselves, I might add the question if they are at least somehow stable and if yes in what sense?

RPG: They are false fronts to the extent that art is a false front. The word false itself has a pejorative connotation, but that is not the case here. It is an asset. Most artists have trouble being labeled, when this is the best thing in the world. If someone says to me: you are a singer-songwriter , I readily reply: yes. And so on. There is nothing more stable than the emptiness of words made solid in the instance of the utterance. Religion is a stable house, but not a stable home. And so it goes. Art is nothing but embracing the falsity of things, but that very good, beautiful falsity that needs at least two people to become. That is why many artists are quasi-pschizophrenics (another great label by the way).

TA: Love has always been a main theme within your work as well as in your life. Set aside the boring fact that I could say similar things to most other artists, I would like to ask how your (now not anymore so) private love life manifests in your work? Perhaps there is a certain development that occurred in both "realms" simultaneously? Asking this I do not necessarily assume that a woman guided/guides your ways through the creative process, it might just be as well the other way 'round.

RPG: Love is so prominent, because as you so well put it, I am often intoxicated by this phenomena. I am somewhat hungry at this point, so talking of love becomes complicated. So capricious is love. But for the past year I have been submerged in the glorious nasality of French; a serious trickster when it comes to love. In the baroque excess of the French language, many men fall captive, and cannot avoid becoming lost on the jagged rocks around our modern day Sirenum scopuli. Like Odysseus, we must find the wax to put in the ears of our friends and the ropes to tie ourselves to the phallic mast of love, and let the siren rape us. Is love an intoxication? It is indeed. Is it worth dying for? We do it every night. Birdwomen of the world, do not launch yourselves into the water just yet, as we must all sail by again. Did Jesus know what to do with love? No, he never wrote a song.

TA: You are half Mexican, half American, have strong bindings to the German artistic scene and now you're living in Montréal, Canada, where you share an apartment with two French twins. I hope you don't mind me asking if what other magazine's labeled your "inspiring neverending identity crisis" can be traced back to such simple facts of life? (I might add that Deleuze once said in regards to Kafka that the devil is the duplication itself.)

RPG: Simplicity would require finding a home. But this is more the case of a house. Yes, it is this simple. If that is what he (Deleuze) said of Kafka imagine what he would say of Wittgenstein. Symptomatology can be very poetic indeed, and satisfactory. But as we probe further we realize that the causes themselves break down into ever more complex elements. The fact that my father has origins traceable to Tangiers and the Ivory coast and my mothers Austrian heritage become significant with further probing. Whichever house you choose.

TA: Now that we addressed your girlfriend Séverine Lombardo and her twin sister Élodie Lombardo as entities first, I would like to dive back into real life. You're working on a dancing performance together with Séverine and Élodie right now, can you tell us a little more about that?

RPG: The name of the piece is Petites Pièces de Poche, choreographed and conceived by Séverine Lombardo. I like to call it by its anglophone eponymous name: little pocket pieces. I am collaborating with another musician in this work. Speaking for myself and what this work means to me I would say that my part is understanding the dynamic impetus in someone else's brilliant vision, and try to find a way to make the work live and come into being through its aural counterpoint. More than anything, it is a test and testament to my capacity to rid my work of all masturbatory elements (something that has been both criticized and celebrated in some of my work); it represents the creation of art that is functional in feeding and improving upon another individual's work. These are the serious moments in life, when what you do as a compulsion becomes organized and must submit/interact with the wills of others. That is the "work" aspect of it, what makes it exist in the world, where some money can come from these actions. I don't believe this is necessarily a good thing, but it definitely is pleasurable and leaving philosophical beliefs aside it is something I will defend. Especially when the work in question is so significant. The work plunges the audience into pitch black, where spasms of light, movement and music will overtake their sensory experience. It is a work of fragments and delicate abstraction, something that moves beyond trends and fads of any kind. From out of the darkness we reach out and assault, to fade back into the darkness once again and recommence the assail from another side. Highly recommended, if I may say so myself.

TA: Mr. Pineda Gould, thank you very much for this interview, it was a pleasure tasting some of your thoughts. Now as a last request, I would like to ask you for your retrospective on the year 2010. What will have been the most important things that you did and did not do in 2010?

RPG: Being that everything is what it is, there are no important actions. Once we attack that belief we realize that things are both important and not important at the same time, and to different degrees. The rhizome comes into being. In 2010, there will be much excitement. All acts of artistic creation are not important, albeit necessary (paradox included). Things to be considered truly important. Important: being a good man involving my family and friends and maybe even strangers. Detrimental: not learning German. Improving my French will be very important as well. Making music, film and poetry; those are only gifts.

Love is a Weapon, by Robin Pineda Gould from Robin Pineda Gould on Vimeo.