February 14, 2009 · 12:15 pm

unfantastic

The problem with these items is that none of them is sufficiently “bizarre”. This is a mysteriously 1960s aesthetic. In the 1960s, a stuffed fox was bizarre; now it is only a stuffed fox. & lost umbrellas ? Lost umbrellas are a Victorian index of bizarreness. They are about as bizarre as a caterpillar on a mushroom, or the “fantasy” in a typical fantasy series. I mean: come on. What’s really bizarre today is this. No one but the Guardian seems to have made much of a fuss about it. & yet it seems a quite startling turnaround, a quite positive event. Or am I just being naive ?

About these ads

15 Comments

Filed under fantasy, lost & found

Tagged as ,

15 Responses to unfantastic

  1. gElm
    February 15, 2009 at 5:24 am

    It does seem too good to be true. As I read the article I kept thinking: this has to be part of a prank by The Yes Men.

  2. John Fred
    February 15, 2009 at 7:33 am

    Positive. Part of a trend away from making intellectual property a sacred cow: Gutenberg changed the political and social dynamic. So will Berners-Lee…of course Witty may yet get torn apart by his contemporaries.

  3. kira
    February 15, 2009 at 8:24 am

    Caterpillars can sit wherever they like and retain, I think, a base quotient of bizarre. What Witty has done seems a total ideological flipflop (upisdown! rightiswrong! aaah!). Makes me wonder if there’s not some strange ethics-based virus going round and he’s opened up the patent pool to get some help in treating it. Bizarre, indeed.

  4. Martin
    February 16, 2009 at 10:03 am

    I’m fond of the attache case with the false teeth, looking like a box full of armoured bacon – but we’re all too sly, and it’s all too knowing. We’re looking at an aesthetic that’s been turned inside out, from shock to kitsch: every ad agency, every day, strives to get that lost umbrella to sit just so beside the sewing machine on the operating table for the money shot. We know it; the agencies know we know it; we know they know we know it; and so the exhausted cultural wink goes on. Strange but true? We’re all Ripleys now: we’re familiar with whole libraries of chance.

    Glaxo: I think it’s positive, too. You do wonder what will be seen as our cultural markers – the genome; 9/11. Or, when that worn-out aesthetic gets dumped, a completely different series of events that none of us has noticed yet. In twenty years, some of our children may be astonished that we didn’t realise Jade Goody was the messiah.

  5. lara
    February 17, 2009 at 7:01 pm

    I’m the other way around. I think the attaché case of false teeth is superbly and wonderfully bizarre, but I don’t trust the GSK man until it’s actually happening. I’ve seen this before with oil companies: they make a whole lot of statements about what they WILL do, but don’t actually do it. They then blame governments and other oil companies for prohibiting them from doing the thing they were going to do. But perhaps I’m just too pessimistic.

  6. uzwi
    February 18, 2009 at 9:25 am

    Hi Martin. I always thought Jade Goody was the messiah anyway. Hi Lara: depressing to think that the corporates’ technique has got so good. Hi Kira: Ok, fair enough, caterpillars have an irreducible residue of bizzareness (bizzarity ?).
    Maybe–& Martin gets near this–I was trying to ask: Is it bizzareness itself that’s over ? Can we do the bizzare anymore ?

  7. Martin
    February 18, 2009 at 10:47 am

    The problem of “doing the bizarre” is that so much of our sense of it goes back Freud and the unheimlich: literally, what belongs in our home and what doesn’t. Since then, “home” has been gutted, inverted, re-imagined as gnostic prison or Pinteresque refuge, and its walls stretched or demolished to admit everything from meerkats to -well, poor Jade herself. So perhaps the true issue is establishing a different sense of the familiar and acceptable, rather than invoking its shadow of “strangeness.”

    Conjuring the mundane – it could turn out to be the “new weird” after all.

  8. Krishna
    February 18, 2009 at 11:57 am

    I think mostly we just do the bazaar these days. Then we do the sights and at the end of the day we pour out of the DiskoNonStop in search of one last drink before we hit our pillows in one of the hotels under the Hilton umbrella.

  9. uzwi
    February 18, 2009 at 12:01 pm

    I can’t think why I started to spell that “bizzare”. I blame the internet.

  10. Mia Wolff
    February 18, 2009 at 12:57 pm

    I once watched someone I knew have a nervous break down in public in a theatrical/comical/scary way. The strangest thing about it was that I understood what she was doing and why and yet I also could feel the mental hairs on my skin standing up. The familiarity and the alien put together like that was truly unnerving.
    I think bizarre is just around the corner and has nothing to do with controlled events.
    Artifice rarely has that stunned effect, although often artists (advertisers don’t really want to alienate anyone) reach for it.

  11. orfanum
    February 19, 2009 at 8:10 am

    Perhaps it’s necessary to start spelling it “bizzare” just to reinvigorate the word; all that Dada and ultimately Surrealist stuff came out of the pure insanity of the real world that was 1914-1918, which exploded the Victorian worldview; now we have a virtual civilizational meltdown in binary figures, ghost-fingers tapping across the electronic aether: we are caught in an inverse equation – external reality trundles on as ever seemingly, and there are no discernable outward effects to juxtapose.

  12. lara
    February 19, 2009 at 11:47 am

    I tried to leave something a bit bizarre on the tube yesterday. An old object that fell apart in my hands on the way to a funeral. If you want to try and find it, it was on the Northern Line to High Barnet. Perhaps that’s an idea: leaving it and then encouraging you to go find it.

    But… but… I think ‘the bizarre’ has always been exaggerated anyway. Um, can I say this? I wonder if this is generational. Perhaps that’s why, um, oh, you and Martin have a shared understanding. Er… oh… maybe not. If you mean by bizarre what I think you mean. For me: it is precisely that where we are now in this planet is the bizarre. It is this. Or is that just lazy postmodernism?

  13. Martin
    February 19, 2009 at 2:09 pm

    Travelling underground to a funeral and an old object comes to pieces in your hands! The nightmare opening to an exceptional book; or a classic haiku.

    Perhaps I was only stating the truism that the dada/surrealist vocabulary is so familiar that the sting has gone from it. You can experience that kick in work which is still almost off-limits – such as Hans Bellmer’s dolls – but the thrill of discovering a secret object language that underlies the rational world (the uncensored dreams of Europe) has long since faded. The “bizarre” now seems either an unplanned by-product of text, or something so private that it’s inimitable and offers itself up for parody almost as soon as it’s written – for example:

    http://kickingandsquealing.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/what-i-believe-j-g-ballard/

  14. orfanum
    February 19, 2009 at 6:00 pm

    Hmm – if I had once been forced to live in a Japanese war-time camp I should think I’d have gotten off pretty lightly with only wanting to charm motorways…

    Another tack is this, perhaps: a lot of the Surrealists were Marxists, and there’s something that was politically and especially socially commited about some of the more esoteric, cabal-like societies of the 19th Century – Bread and Kabbalah, if you like. I’d hazard we are missing this aspect in the search for the bizarre; formulas are private, as you say Martin, which doesn’t mean that we should all leap into the mire of commonality: it might mean though that present-day incantations are just gobbledygook, and aren’t even intended to be effective operative fictions of the magical imagination – nothing of consequence is sought.

    Sorry, back to the minestrone soup.

  15. neweeks
    February 19, 2009 at 10:00 pm

    Not to be paranoid but may it be because it is in the company’s interest to keep the public good will as it produces dangerous (and helpful) products and also cause environmental and human damage in producing such products (India now has pharma in their drinking water). I’d love to believe they’ve grown a heart but it seems like more of a calculated move to me.