Talk loud enough, not shouting really, it’s more a matter of putting physical feeling behind your words; and people will listen. The checkout lane at the grocery store is a great place, aim a few witty words at whatever starlet has managed to land on the covers of those delightfully informative magazines that demand your attention.

This post is based on an unintended happening that I found myself in the other evening, and with my ever watchful eye clocking the reactions of all those around me, I decided that I’d finally found the follow-up to my post, don’t worry it’s only art. I wrote that in utter sincerity, and since then, the staff and entourage here at Lewd Cognoscenti have had more then a few nearly idyllic chats regarding the possibilities of various fresh spectacles to present to a society grown stagnant on spectacular things.

The fact that there have been no slew of posts about this idea is indicative primarily of the fact that the environment in which we are working is currently cold and not conducive to the sorts of mischief we foresee… do not fear… madness and merriment will be forthcoming. But in the interim, I’ve been giving this whole thing a thought here and there, as my often distracted mind crossed paths with the notion, and what’s come to me is that you’ve got to start small. You go to huge and you run the risk of alienating your intended targets, and perhaps the best actions towards subverting culture will leave the audience wondering whether you’re serious or not.

Understand that this is not intended to be critical of overt demonstrations and protests; we need plenty of those too, but what’s been swirling around in the back of my brain lately is this concept that perhaps the best way to catch people’s attention is when they’re not really paying attention. Imagine the various reactions you'’d have to; a shouting protester waving a sign, and an overheard conversation. As far as the sign waving goes, what’s probably going to occur is a sinking in of ideals that you already have, either for or against whatever is being protested. Now what you ‘overheard’ a conversation that brought out contemporary issues, aren’t you more likely to listen? This can work either intelligently, or by parody, hamming up the inherent stupidities of contemporary culture to the point where that stupidity is obvious, and somebody is going to laugh.

Start a conversation in utter sincerity about how you cannot wait to get to the checkout lane because it’s the only place you can catch up on the real news these days. Gasp in disbelieving horror at the fact that some teeny-bopper has started to put a bit of weight on her skeletal frame, bemoan the great social reverberations that this will have. Loudly lament the fact of divorce number whatever for whomever it was that just found out once again that good looks and money aren’t enough to buy perpetual happiness; whatever has become of social standards in the world today? Or take an intelligent stand on the cult of celebrity, and do it just loud enough so you can be overheard. Better yet, start out hamming it up, and then swing it around, that’s what happened to me the other day; I was just goofing with a friend, didn’t even mean to make that kind of scene, but once it’d been started I couldn’t help notice that people were casting those sideways glances and I swear I saw somebody nodding.

Ok you get the point, hopefully you’re even laughing. It’s an exercise in overacting because you want to make your audience laugh. Take a moment to entertain someone and toss in a few notions about our ridiculous social obsessions. It’s just planting thoughts, that’s all it really is.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 16th, 2006 at 3:36 pm and is filed under indiscriminate, guerrilla theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.