Life is a Cabaret

Listen!
Listen,
if stars are lit,
it means there is someone who needs it.
It means that someone wants them to be,
that someone dreams those specks of spit
magnificent.
---Mayakovsky.

The bourgeois's hat flies off his pointed head.
The air re-echoes with a cry.
Roofers plunge and hit the ground,
and at the coast-one reads-seas are rising.
The storm is here, the savage seas hop
On land and crash thick dams .
Most people have a cold
Trains fall of bridges.
--Van Hoddis.

Life is a cabaret, the world is a stage. There are no more carnivals since everything has been turned upside-down, inside-out. Now we celebrate the non-carnival day, the utterly boring and predictable Sunday where nothing happens.
The exception has become the norm, and everywhere is the circus..at first the circus, the half-way sphere of outsiders, an unregulated world, was far from the flatlands of bourgeois sentimentality and respectability. Now:the periphery is the centre.

The Feuilliton, the Vienna cafe: all is linked in the dancing swirl of gaiety and lightness. the short essay: wit, brevity, topicality, contemporaneity, satire..all the characteristics of the age. Karl Krauss would say that the breezy superficiality and subjectivism of the press would bring down the solid world of the bourgeois. We live in an impressionistic age, where all we see are snatches of a life. the London papers are designed to keep one's interest for at least (but not more than) half an hour.

Mere fragments, these sketches are of rootless individuals, ..a fragmentary life. Existence for the modern man consists of atomized glimpses into the lives of others and bits of conversation overheard.

Life is a cabaret.
Don't think too much about it.
You penniless little ..
Before you know it, you'll be gone.
So sing with me this ridiculous song.
Life is short, life is fleeting.
Before you go, turn on the heating.

The philosopher emerges when man ceases to take himself or life seriously. Laughter as wisdom (Nietzsche). The Name of the Rose?

A desire to shock the establishment out of its conformity, its conventionality. But what happens when the shock doesn't shock? What happens when the shocking is the establishment view of things? The spirit of the Cabaret is that of the ships, the bars of international ports, fun fairs, working-class streets. It is a war of the sea-gypsies against the brown-eyed land-dwellers. The salons of the modernists, the avant-garde, produced a spectacle, a parody of social and artistic values. Nothing is sacred and everything is dissolved in laughter and ridicule. The Cabaret programme itself is discontinuous, thus mimicking real life, fed by swift actuality.

Laughter implies distraction and entertainment and an attack on the worn-out prototypes of the Beautiful, the Grand, the Solemn, destroys the Religious, the Sacred, the Serious. [After a while, after the initial thrill of revolting against something, these attacks become all too predictable and rather tedious]. Popular culture and the Variety Show, with their entertainment and humour, are a form of critique of Art and the socio-political. [ The times they are a changin'..yes, how very conventional Bob!]

Improvisation, ruptures, the discontinuous , speed and shock, shock and awe. At last: to give the body a home, to reject the metaphysical. The modern must shatter the classical [let's play the moonlight Sonata backwards..yes, how very original Leonard]. Realism must give way to the dream, the banalities of ordinary life must be smashed (philosophy with a hammer) , the real must be exploded into the surreal. You want reality...you can't handle reality. The deranged and the dissident, dissonance and the degenerate..the sea-gypsies have landed but it is a ship of fools.

At the Cabaret Voltaire there is liberation through laughter, the absurd, of all that cannot be systematized by the accountants and the calculators, by authority. The sleep of Reason brings forth nightmares. Life is life. A process, a journey, a series of bizarre happenings, a montage. Is the Cabaret the modern, the urban, form of Romanticism?

Hugo Ball: the next step is for poetry to discard language ..abandon the word, a radical, raucous negation of the past.

Is it so surprising that the Sprachkritik should arise out of the ruins of Empire, from the splinters of the belle epoque and, most importantly, from the cafes and the Cabaret? Existence precedes essence...Life is a cabaret, old chum.

[from Lisa Appignanesi's book. Reminds me of the snippets of Qutb:the "decadence" of Jazz?]