Salvador Dali on Outrageousness

Coco Chanel on Life

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Salvador Dali on Misfits

Salvador Dali on Success

Salvador Dali on Originality

Obama's Super Ego on Super Bowl Sunday

Two weeks ago, The New Yorker published an extensive article about President Barack Obama.  During this wide ranging interview, Mr. Obama was quoted as saying:

"I would not let my son play pro football … These guys [NFL Players], they know what they're doing. They know what they're buying into. It is no longer a secret. It's sort of the feeling I have about smokers, you know?" 

Not exactly a hardy endorsement of the sport, especially as there is a war on football.

Yet on Super Bowl Sunday, the Obama White House has the temerity to post this picture on Twitter

It is bad enough to have a politician being duplicitous.  But why does Mr. Obama feel compelled to insert himself  into every facet of popular American culture.   And we get to watch his interview with Fox New's Bill O'Reilly at 4:33 pm as part of the pre-game.

There is a name for a person who seems himself reflected everywhere.  It even has a mythological flare. 

The Metamorphisis of Narcissus by Salvador Dali (1937)

An Artistic Antidote to Miley Cyrus Twerking Travesty

As the world is on the brink of war pending action on Obama's Bloody Red Line in Syria, the American public is tittering about Miley Cyrus's titillating twerking performance at the M-TV Video Music Awards.

[F] Miley Cyrus [B] Robin Thicke at 2013 M-TV Video Music Awards

While the performance allowed 20 year old former star of Hannah Montana to certainly devolve from her Disney roots, the edgey "dance" was universally panned and made many  viewers wish that they could wash their eyeballs. 





Considering the surrealistic choreography which seem to resemble Build-a-Bear Workshops in Hell, the antidote to this aesthetic atrocity may be found in an artistic reductio ad absurdum. Let's see how Miley Cyrus's twerking contrast with other modern masterpieces. 

Edvard Munch's Expressionist work Der Schrei der Natur , a.k.a. "The Scream" (1893), has been compared to an individual suffering from depersonalization disorder, feelings of distortion of the environment and one's self.  Some have speculated that Munch was inspired by the proximity of a slaughterhouse and an insane asylum near his studio.  Or perhaps he had premonitions of Miley Cyrus' dad's achey breaky heart of watching his daughter deliberate debase herself in public. 

Pablo Picasso painted "Guernica" (1937) in response to the Nazi German and Italian Fascist bombing of the Basque village during the Spanish Civil War.  Picasso wanted to depict the suffering of people, animals and buildings due to the bombing of Guernica.  As Picasso worked on his painting in Paris, the artist opined: 

The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death?

It is only fitting that Miley Cyrus' twerking fits in with the death of art. Or maybe just grandly bombing.

Salvador Dali's famous "The Persistence of Memory" (1931) has several symbolic hooks which tie into Cyrus' M-TV obscenity dance.  The melted watches depict Dali's insight that one can not hold onto time (or music).  Deeper Dalian hermeneutics understand the appearance of ants to be a symbol of decay.  So the ants devouring a pocket watch means there is no permanence. Then there is the strange "monster" at the bottom center of the painting.  It looks vaguely human, perhaps an abstract self-portrait of the artist.  Docents from the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida recognize the figure as being  "The Great Masturbator".  There's a certain symmetry with Cyrus' desperate gyrations.  Personally, the "Great M" reminds me of a dead fish, which also has parallels to Cyrus' post VMA artistic career.  But in the parody piece, Cyrus seems to be  barking up the wrong tree. 

After ascending to artistic heights to put Cyrus' dirty dancing into context, it is worth considering the publicity hungrey celebutard's potential synergy in today's entertainment industry.

[L] Miley Cyrus [R] Ashton Kutcher in Two and a Half Men

It's a pity that Two and a Half Men already cast the role of Charlie's long-lost lesbian daughter to Amber Tamlyn for this season.  Miley Cyrus' prior guest shots on the delightfully bawdy show were cute.  Now with her hedonistic reputation, Miley Cyrus  could follow in the footsteps of Charlie Sheen and star in a show which charmingly celebrates cultural depravity which nods to their trouble pasts while undergoing a personal public meltdown.

h/t: Buzzfeed

R.I.P Jonathan Winters (1925-2013)

Johnathan Winters, an improv comedian who's career spanned over seven decades, died at age 87. 

Jonathan Winters' stand-up comedy  was full of non-sequiturs and surreal jokes, influenced generations of comedians, notably including George Carlin,  Robin Williams and Jim Carrey. 

Winters was the first comic to recognize the video stunt, which utilized  videotape to allow one comic to play two characters bantering about apparently on the same set.   In fact, Albert Brooks tweeted "Beyond funny, he invented a new category of comedic genius."  In 1999, Winters was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

Jonathan Winters accepting Mark Twain Award in Washington, Oct. 1999

While Winters may be remembered for his slew of comedy albums, movie appearances and as Mork and Mindy's Orkan son, Winters' ought to also be remembered for a couple of heroic virtues in this day and age. 

Jonathan Winters was a Hollywood entertainer who was married to his wife for sixty (60) years, including 20 years when his wife was battling with breast cancer.  

Early in his career in the spotlight, Winters suffered two nervous breakdowns.  In 1958, he was institutionalized for eight months and also again in 1961 for what was later deemed manic depression.  Winters did not let these mental health setbacks keep him down, nor did he play the victim for sympathy.  Winters referenced not wanting to go back to "the zoo"  on his album "The Wonderful World of Jonathan Winters" (1960).  A couple of years ago, Winters participated in a small comedy  film "Certifiably Jonathan"  (2007) which plays off his depression as well as his painting, which had been deemed the missing link between Joan Miro and Salvador Dali.

Perhaps the best way for a humorous surreal zymurgist to honor Jonathan Winters passing his mortal coil is to share an "out of this world" 1962 Utica Club Beer video, one of the hundred of talking beer stein ads where Winters voiced Schultz and Dooley. 

Have a Surreal Halloween

Halloween originally was a pagan holiday that likely linked to the a feast for the  Celtic God Samhain, which was Old Irish for “Summer’s End”.  Other historians associated it with Paternalia, the feast for the dead to commemorate Pomona, the Roman Goddess of fruits and seeds. Either way, the festivals  recognized the fruits of the harvest and the unsettling change to the fallow fields of winter. Catholics tried to convert the pagan holiday into Halloween (Old Scottish for “All Hallows Eve”) in the 16th Century which evoked influences from purgatory.

Some traditions of celebrating Halloween readily spread through North America, like going door to door “guising”, but in the New World children did not beg for sustenance for All Saints Day or prayers for All Souls Day but “trick or treating” in costumes to get sweets.  As Erma Bombeck wryly put it “A grandmother pretends she doesn’t know who you are on Halloween”.  Back in Scotland, it was a tradition to carve images in turnips.  Those celebrating Halloween in the New World continued this tradition but they used the more plentiful and larger pumpkins for jack-o-lanterns.

 In the last twenty years, Halloween has also transitioned to being a secular pagan festival for adults, as it is the third busiest night at bars behind New Years Eve and St. Patrick’s Day.  So many adults now delight in donning costumes and spending an evening posing in another guise.

Surrealism is a style that juxtaposes familiar subjects in unconventional settings, hence it lends itself to the fantasy and phantasmagoria of Halloween.  Those who are not Salvador Dalí devotees might conclude that much of his oeuvre was Halloween-esque.  As Dalí himself once mused:  “I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous.”

SEE MORE at DCBarroco.com

Chicken Feed--Sick of Stimulus

This surreal Herman Cain is the political equivalent of Un Chien Andalou.  Did it convey  it's small government message effectively or was it more of a chicken feed curiosity?