LAUGHTEARS SALON- Gerry Fialka hosts discussion on philosophies, politics, culture, and the arts. Free admission. Second Wednesdays from 3 to 5 pm. For live meetings please RSVP for location by calling Gerry Fialka
310-306-7330 LAUGHTEARS (Email pfsuzy@aol.com for web sessions.)
These gatherings evoke the wikipedia entry on the word "salon" - "consciously following Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, ‘to please and to educate.’"
McLuhan's MEDIA FAST -
"We are polluting Art as fast as we are tidying up Nature. The people of the Earth are encouraged to engage in an experiment of utmost urgency. We must turn off the electric environment for a period of one week to perform a cleansing of mass-man's mind, body and spirit. We must get back to our bodies, lest we forget they are still there! Imagine the freedom to be experienced as the top-down cultural control of civilization is eradicated for even the briefest period! If everyone did participate in the Media Fast, how would we know it happened? Stay tuned" –Marshall McLuhan.
How? Why? When? What? Where? Wow?
From Cliché to Archetype (1970 book) by Marshall McLuhan and Canadian poet Wilfred Watson included the following:
THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE
CROSSROADS OF CIVILIZATION
REFUGE OF ALL THE ARTS
AGAINST THE RAVAGES OF TIME
ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH
AGAINST WHISPERING RUMOUR
INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE
FROM THIS PLACE WORDS MAY FLY ABROAD
NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND
NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER'S HAND
BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF
FRIEND YOU STAND ON SACRED GROUND
THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE
KEEP YOUR WORDS COMING TO US, please.
"You know we gotta stick together." - Frank Zappa.
"It's misleading to suppose there's any basic difference between education and entertainment. This distinction merely relieves people of the responsibility of looking into the matter. It's like setting up a distinction between didactic and lyric poetry on the ground that one teaches, the other pleases. However, it's always been true that whatever pleases teaches more effectively." - McLuhan, 1957.
"I am part Communist and part Fascist with a healthy dose of Monarchism in my Marxism, but at bottom an Anarchist with a passion for order." - Wyndham Lewis.
"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. There is only one of you in all time; therefore this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium. The world will not have it. It will be lost. It is not your business to determine how good it is, or how valuable it is, or how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, and to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction. A blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others." - Martha Graham.
"To define is to kill. To suggest is to create." - Mallarme.
McLuhan’s Tetrad: 1) What does it enhance or intensify? 2) What does it render obsolete or replace? 3) What does it bring back that was previously obsolesced? 4) What does it become when pressed to an extreme, what does it flip into?
Reinvent the axioms: "we shape our tools, then they shape us" and "breakdowns as breakthroughs." In this participatory ParaMedia Yoga Session, extend James Joyce's "epiphanies in everydayness" and expand Joyce's discovery "that all social changes are the effect of new technologies on the order of our sensory lives" - McLuhan. Where is the non-physical? How do we transform Bucky Fuller's "we are all crew, no passengers" into "the artists as antennae of the race?"
LA Times has called Fialka "the multi-media Renaissance man.” LA Weekly proclaimed him "a cultural revolutionary."
"I am very impressed by Gerry Fialka's energy in bringing together groups of people to think about ideas. That is very much in the McLuhan spirit, to create and foster interdisciplinary, living, educational projects in which people can talk about ideas. Fialka creates forums that bring together a plurality of critical perspectives into one multivalent conversation. " - Janine Marchessault, author of MARSHALL McLUHAN:COSMIC MEDIA.