lost paws:

The old masters of modernism used to write manifestos like they meant it. The phantom of Marx’ manifesto haunted a whole generation of intellectuals in Europe, and another generation in the states, and it got to be that sooner or later most of the *great* artistic minds were possessed by this phantom, or at least its possibility. Everyone had a polemic, a patricide, a system to crush like a cockroach, a bourgeoisie to alienate (or integrate, depending on how you look at it) – Marinetti wrote the manifesto on art & violence, Breton wrote the manifesto on art & madness, Tristan Tzara wrote the manifesto on art & anarchy, Amiri Baraka wrote the manifesto on black power in the arts. Everyone was so angry. So angry that they never considered one of the great tenants of modernism: entropy, that is, the cosmic inevitability of decay. With time paper would deteriorate, structures would crumble, minds would drift, and what began as heedless cultural rupture, would never see the light outside of the singularity it had created₁, and after a while all the great friendships ended, the great loves split apart, and now we look back at our *golden age* with a deep nostalgia for its failure.

Why the nostalgia for the years of the manifesto? Perhaps we are attached to the idea, like all great villains, of revealing the entire plot, then not succeeding, then spending the rest of our days following the bread-crumb trail we left in the process. Perhaps the current cultural climate has made us too languorous for all that legwork, all the new vocabulary that must be created or redefined, the neuroses, but we still love the idea of having failed. The idea of failure justifies itself, so ingeniously so that it has become a consumer trend in the art, literature, music, etc…, having done nothing we often reach, what we believe to be, a sturdy, objective judgment on the limits of human possibility. This is a *huge* generalization, I know, but one I am comfortable incubating in. The word is: there are still real, first-class failures out there, those who have attempted to achieve startling originality, and did not. I’d like to think of this space as an incubation period in that grand idea.

¹Perhaps Marinetti was vaguely aware -- his manifesto suggested that his own head be raised on pikes outside the town gates ten years from the date the manifesto was written, but it doesn’t seem that he really wanted it that bad.