‘Pataphysics has fascinated me ever since childhood, when it was suddenly thrust into my innocent and unprepared young mind by our old friend John Lennon.<\/p>\n
It may all be Yoko’s fault. The cross-cultural relationship between John Lennon and Yoko Ono was an intriguing phenomenon. Once upon a time, countless milliions of Beatles fans became incensed when their beloved Beatle royal was distracted from his art by Yoko. But of course it was all perfectly symmetric. From the point of view of the high art world, it was Ono who was the royal in the marriage – a high priestess of the radical Fluxus<\/i> movement deigning to share her incandescent intellect with a mere pop star.<\/p>\n
The truth, of course, was that they each influenced the other in wondrous ways. Once John began spending time with Yoko, he started sneaking high art concepts into the songs. Hence my introduction in childhood to music concrète<\/i> in the form of “Revolution 9” – not a genre that anybody would have expected to show up on a pop album in 1968.<\/p>\n
And hence John Lennon’s shout-out to Alfred Jarré’s ‘Pataphysics movement in the opening verse of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. It took me many years to realize that other people didn’t know about ‘Pataphysics. For some reason I had just assumed that if something showed up in the lyrics of a Beatles song then everybody would know about it.<\/p>\n
Case in point: Several years ago my friend Jon and I took a subway ride uptown to see the french philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who was giving a talk at Columbia University. When Baudrillard mentioned ‘Pataphysics, and asked who was familiar with the term, I raised my hand, assuming everyone else would as well. After all, who doesn’t<\/i> listen to the Beatles?<\/p>\n
Yet it turned out that in a room filled with several hundred Columbia students, only a few of us were conscious of the existence of ‘Pataphysics. Of course pretty much everyone in that room had heard of ‘Pataphysics, since they had all heard the lyrics to “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. But apparently almost nobody knew<\/i> they had heard of it.<\/p>\n
What could be more perfectly pataphysical: An idea that everyone has heard about is an idea that nobody has heard of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
‘Pataphysics has fascinated me ever since childhood, when it was suddenly thrust into my innocent and unprepared young mind by our old friend John Lennon. It may all be Yoko’s fault. The cross-cultural relationship between John Lennon and Yoko Ono was an intriguing phenomenon. Once upon a time, countless milliions of Beatles fans became incensed … Continue reading “Pataphoria”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}