Nonsense!

Men in suits. Dadaism and photography.

One of my favorite songs of all time is I Zimbra, by the Talking Heads. The lyrics go like this:

Gadji beri bimba clandridi
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
A bim beri glassala glandride

You get the idea. It goes on like that. You’ve probably have seen David Byrne singing it like a fugue state or magic spell, at the point of Stop Making Sense where he’s sweated through his big gray suit and is down to his shirtsleeves. God, I love that song. It’s a wiggly, obsessive boogie woogie that makes me feel alive and electric.

At first glance, I Zimbra seems like it’s written from another language, or like overhearing a shouting match from another room. If you’ve heard David Byrne speak about the making of I Zimbra, he credits the lyrics to Hugo Ball’s Dadaist poem Gadji Beri Bimba. I’ve been thinking about Dadaism a lot lately, a movement created in Switzerland during World War I in response to the absurd horrors of war and the soured promises of systems that promised to make life sweet. They mocked the nonsense of brutality by making nonsense art. It protested how the powerful attempt to make war and exploitation seem logical, when such cruelty can only be illogical. When the world seemed fucked up, they responded by just fucking around.

If David Byrne is my favorite guy in a big gray suit, Paul Reuben’s Pee Wee Herman is my favorite guy in a little gray suit. I’m from a Pee Wee family, where I watched Playhouse while home sick and we danced to Tequila! on our tip-toes at my cousin’s wedding. I’ve had to come to the defense of Paul Reuben’s many times, a man before his time: someone who chose a creative life of queerness and absurdity, often at the cost of his personal life and reputation. In the documentary that came out at the end of May, “Pee Wee as Himself,” a lot of dedicated fans like myself got to see some of his early ventures into artistic weirdness as a young person. As Pee Wee, he created a cheeky, kooky guy that has his own absurd world of play. His character give permission for other people to be strange. That’s how to live fully, I think.

Sometimes I find myself feeling a little panicked. Where is Dada when we need it? The world feels blisteringly absurd and scary: are we meeting it with enough weirdness? Are we waving our freak flags high enough? Did we misplace them or digitize them or hide them because they’ve become contraband? I have a pin from a local artist that says, “support your local weirdos.” I think I’m pretty weird, but I could get weirder. I want to grow, but I don’t want to soften too many of my edges.

I’ve been mulling over what dadaism could look like in photography or photojournalism. I know what it looked like historically: it looked like Man Ray’s famous surrealistic images, Mina Loy’s love of lampshades as artistic muse, and Hannah Höch’s collage universes. I question if photography is a medium that applies itself well to Dadaism. Is there room for a silly protest within imagery now? Honestly, I have no idea. I fail at visualizing how I could make it within my current creative style. It’s fun to think about. And I like starting with the idea that dada, or a generalized embrace of nonsense could be a life skill, coping mechanism, or mindset. Dada almost feels like the antithesis of anxiety. There’s something powerful about being a goofball freak in the face of fear.

When I can, I go to a weekly craft night down the road from our home in rural Maine. I’m not a particularly crafty person but I’ve been using scraps of fabric and thrifted ribbon to make rosettes, which look like awards for nothing. Every time I show them to someone they always seem baffled, like, “Huh, what are they for?” I make them for fun! For nonsense!