Word: dada
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...DreamWorks cartoon about the clumsy bear, employed in his father's noodle shop, who becomes a martial-arts expert and saves his village from a villainous tiger. Chandni Chowk is more a Kung Fu Pandit, with the oaf-hero Sidhu (Akshay Kumar), chopping away in the shop of his Dada (Mithun Chakraborty). Some visiting Chinese folks ID him as the incarnation of their nation's greatest warrior, Liu Sheng, and think Sidhu is just the fellow to rid their village of the oppressive Hojo (Gordon Liu). Accompanied by his raffish translator Chopsticks (Ranvir Shorey), Sidhu travels to the Great Wall...
Amid the relentlessly changing cityscapes of Beijing and Shanghai, a new kind of music is being made. In terms of its discordance and abstraction, it compares to Dada, or the New York City and Berlin avant-garde movements of the 1970s. Yet something about it - a certain urgency and iconoclasm - could only have been spawned amid the wild experiment that is modern China itself. The country's punk and alternative-rock scenes have been gushed over by excited commentators, eager to cite them as evidence of China's changing mores. But they are staid in comparison to that created...
...pals don trashy frocks to do Abba's greatest hits and a Greek chorus of villagers materializes as a backup group for practically every number, Mamma Mia!'s flouting of narrative and visual logic starts to suggest a cunning subversion. The film is not failed kitsch but triumphant Dada. It exists in an alternative universe, an Abbaworld, where 40 years telescopes to 20, the Seine is the Aegean, and Streep's outsize cheerfulness is the expression of a soul in mortal panic...
...these botched phrases - including real puzzlers like "the unreality of a shimmer at the bottom of a cascade of sunlight" and "pessimism encountered the warmth lingering in his hands from the night before in subtle billows of conflict" - inadvertently achieve a kind of prose poetry reminiscent of the great Dada-influenced poet Chuya Nakahara. Grumbling about their incomprehensibility just keeps you from enjoying their unwitting beauty...
Even evanescent events have a kind of art-history pedigree. Dada, the anti-art phenomenon that grew out of disgust with World War I, was as much a café phenomenon as it was an art movement. And more recently there has been Rirkrit Tiravanija, the Thai artist best known for cooking and serving meals for visitors at his gallery shows, at which the art was the shared experience of the meal. To serve and nourish, and to reflect on it while you are doing it, in a world that's gotten used to performance art--maybe that...