stockhausen, dario fo

Jasper Fidget fakename at tokyo.com
Wed Sep 19 07:21:38 CDT 2001


"Dude, what the fuck is wrong with German people?" --South Park: Bigger,
Longer, Uncut

This movie--some of which I watched last night--has a plot that couldn't
have been written after 9/11; the worrisome part of me watched it as a
satire of recent events (I didn't want to, I swear!), and therefore had to
turn it off.  Those truly disturbing words by Stockhausen reminded me of
that quote (repeated only in jest, damn it!  I love Germans.  Had sex with
one last night).

There is value in Stockhausen's words only for the cautionary lesson: not to
confuse art and life to the extent that we stop taking life seriously, and
instead see only art.  It could become tragic to lose track of life that
way.  (And thus is his act of speaking them also one of art???)  Or to lose
perspective on art, as artists obviously will.  (And it's a tempting line of
thought, of course; I was reluctantly reminded of something Vollmann once
said (which I recall only generally) about the liberating experience of
hopping freight trains, the sense of abandoning one's self utterly to the
vector of the train, and that the only thing he could imagine that would
surpass it would be suicide, an ultimate abandonment of choice and
determination in an *act* of choice and determination, the ultimate leap
into darkness that many artists seek, committing to the unknown forces of
the undiscovered country.  What then if you (and this is me now, not
Vollmann) what if you were also to abandon all morality in that same act
(speaking as observer here, not actor--who seems to have felt the opposite
about his morality, but who could comprehend that?...), if you--as
Stockhausen says--were to "herd" a mass of others along with you?  Would
that make the act purer somehow?  I'm curious--since this is translated--did
Stockhausen use the word "pure" in his statement (lauter?  rein?).  That
would *really* disturb me.)

>"it's
> the greatest work of art that there ever can be for the whole cosmos "

What of the cosmos itself then???  Or did he mean "act" of art?

(That second guy you mention is just too far over the edge--those corrupted
by art might be saved, but those corrupted by politics are simply
foresaken.)

Jasper Fidget

----- Original Message -----
From: "lorentzen-nicklaus" <lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2001 5:12 AM
Subject: 911: stockhausen, dario fo


> for some it is not only much but, obviously, much too much ... in a press
> conference which got taped by the nordeutsche rundfunk (northern german
radio),
> karlheinz stockhausen, the german composer of neue musik mentioned in
col49,
> said recently (the translations are my own from page 49 of today's faz):
"it's
> the greatest work of art that there ever can be for the whole cosmos ...
that
> spirits commit in an act something , about which we in music cannot even
dream,
> that people practise for ten years like madmen, completely fanatic in
> expectation of the great concert, and then die, just imagine what happened
> there! thus there are people, so concentrated on the presentation, and
then 5000
> people are hunted into the resurrection [dann werden 5000 leute in die
> auferstehung gejagt], in just one moment. i wouldn't be able to do so.
against
> this we are nothing, as composers." asked by a journalists whether art and
crime
> are the same, stumpfhausen said: "a crime it is, because the people did
not
> accept it. they did not want to hear the concert. that's clear." hello,
hello,
> is there anybody in there?! & there's more bad news. dario fo, that
fuckingly
> boring asshole writer, he told the world per e-mail: "the great
speculators take
> a lustful bath in an economy which, year by year, lets millions of people
die in
> poverty - what, taken this, are then 20 000 dead people in new york? no
matter
> who did this - this violence is the legitimated daughter of a culture of
> violence, hunger, and exploitation." fuck you once and fuck you twice
'cause
> you're just a little scheiß! kai frederik (selling kisses for the army
fund)
>
>




More information about the Pynchon-l mailing list