Word: minding
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What the spy trade calls ELINT (for electronic intelligence) seems limited only by the range of the human imagination; it is a tinkerer's dream so long as intelligence wizards bear in mind the unofficial motto of space age spying: think big and think dirty. But all their gadgets, no matter how effective and sophisticated, are unlikely to make the man in the trenchcoat obsolete. Satellites and planes and bugs might dig up secret information faster, but HUMINT (for human intelligence) is needed to interpret it, and to decide what to do next...
After surrealism, new channels for the creative mind...
...conditions of life. Dada promised, in the words of its mercurial chatterbox poet, Tristan Tzara, "to destroy the drawers of the brain, and those of social organization; to sow demoralization everywhere." A surrealist declaration, issued in Paris in 1925, announced: "Surrealism ... is a means of total liberation of the mind and of everything resembling it. We are determined to create a revolution...
They contain raw material: alchemical treatises and Renaissance architectural tomes, anatomical figures and worn kachina dolls. New Hebrides masks, pulp novels, turn-of-the-century store cata logues from which Ernst cut the engravings for his haunted collages - the vast flea market of the dreaming mind, here emblematically reduced like a ship in a bottle...
...essence of the surrealist enterprise - like that of the 19th century romantics - was to open new channels for the creative mind. It produced, above all, an art of subject matter - a trait transmitted to its American offspring, abstract expressionism. "Beauty will be erotic-veiled, explosive-fixed, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be at all," ran Breton's famous description of the surrealist ideal. Much of the power of surrealist rhetoric does not survive translation: its use of blasphemy, for instance, and its passionate anticlericalism were authentically shocking within France's Catholic tradition, but resemble a charade when...