12/10/03: Not many people know this but there was, in a
sense, a historical "Robin Hood". One can find many 14th
century court cases against Robin Hood. He developed
quite an arrest record.
The thing about all these cases, however, was that they
weren't all against the same person, by which I mean the
same physical entity. It turns out that Robin Hood was a
pseudonym that was used by the entire British underclass
whenever one was to do an act of rebellion.
Nor was this an isolated historical anomaly. Four
centuries later, during the industrial revolution,
when anarchism first began to exist, there was a rash of
grand sabotages, all claimed by one Ned
Ludd. Again, this was a pseudonym used by many of the
underclass of the period.
Philip K. Dick wrote a short story entitled "If There
Was No Benny Cemoli" in which he illustrated this
concept.
During the 1980s, there arose a movement called "Neoism",
whose founder was Karen Elliot. Karen Elliot developed
quite the portfolio very quickly, for someone without
a Social Security number or an address, nor even a physical
body. Even now the movement continues, and artists are
encouraged to take either the pseudonyms Karen Elliot or
Monty Cantsin and fear no repercussions.
EVOLV

"If there was no Benny Cemoli, we would have to create him"
9/03/02:'You cannot will spontaneity, but you can introduce the
unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors'- William S. Burroughs.
Cut-Up techniques were developed from the modernist tradition of collage,
the use of found material mixed with traditional elements of painting. But
cut-up was used to advance the art of writing, simulating the white noise
barrage that assails up daily. The cut-up technique, the history of which I
will cover in a later entry, is an anti-rational attack on spectacle. When
the rational lifelines are cut, the subsequent associations become blurred.
In a free-trade capitalist culture where associations are weapons in the
hands of the advertisers, the cut-up is our anti-personnel land mine. Such
attacks burst the seams on the illusion of "control" over word and image
smugly assumed by commercial artists and writers.
8/28/02: This will be where I will place my experiments with
computer-generated text, cut-ups and collage. I'm still gatherin material for
this page, but I should have a suitable amount of material within the first
week of next month...see ya then...