Zimzim Urallala

Posted on February 18, 2006 in Humor? Reading

Harper’s(March 2006) had this posted under the title “That’s the Matter With Kansas”. Personally, I like this proclamation which was issued on December 27, 2005 by Lawrence Mayor Dennis Highberger. The only thing he’s missed is “mania and depression” in the third Whereas clause. (Bipolars are natural dadaists.):

WHEREAS: Dadaism is an international tendency in art that seeks to change conventional attitudes and practices in aesthetics, society, and morality; and

WHEREAS: Dadaism may or may not have come into being in the summer of 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire at 1 Spiegelgasse in Zurich, Switzerland, with the participation of Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Emmy Hennings, Marcel and Georges Janco, Jean Arp, and Richard Huelsenbeck; and

WHEREAS: The central message of Dada is the realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole; and

WHEREAS: Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions; and

WHEREAS: zimzim urallala zimzim urallala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Dennis Highberger, Mayor of the City of Lawrence, Kansas, do hereby proclaim the days of February 4, March 28, April 1, July 15, August 2, August 7, August 26, September 18, September 22, October 17, and October 26 as “International Dadaism Month.”

DADA!