Showing posts with label 1999. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1999. Show all posts

Monday 3 July 2023

TraumaZone

Adam Curtis on the fall of the Soviet Union's worrying parallels with mo...

Adam Curtis is a journalist and filmmaker. 
His latest documentary, 
Russia 1985-1999 : TraumaZone
is out now on BBC iPlayer.

Thursday 27 October 2022

11 Minutes











GRACE:
This is amazing!

Life’s Champion :
 This is No Good. 
We don't even have enough auxiliary 
Power to move next door. 

(The Monitor is flashing Timing Malfunction.

Life’s Champion
The Beryllium chip. Grace. 

GRACE:
 Yes, Doctor. 

Life’s Champion
Careful 

GRACE
Yes, Doctor. 

(The Doctor opens a panel 
in the console.

GRACE
This looks pretty Low-Tech…. 

Life’s Champion
Low tech? Grace, this is 
Type-40 TARDIS, 
able to take you to any planet 
in the universe and to any date 
in that planet's existence

Temporal Physics

GRACE
Oh, you mean like 
interdimensional transference. 
That would explain 
the spatial displacement 
we experienced as 
we passed over 
the threshold.

Life’s Champion :
….Yes, if you like. 

(The Doctor gets the 
Beryllium chip attached.)

Life’s Champion :
 …Yes(The Cloister Bell stops.

Life’s Champion:
There! The Eye is closing. 
Now, let's see —

(He hits the console.)

Life’s Champion:
Come on! Oh, no. 


GRACE
What? 

Life’s Champion 
I've a horrible feeling 
we're already too late. 

GRACE
It's 11:48We still have 
11 minutes.

 Life’s Champion :
There is No Context. Hold on. 

(The Doctor throws a big lever and the ceiling turns into a representation of space.

GRACE
What are you doing? 

Life’s Champion :
I'm setting coordinates for 
one minute after midnight. 

GRACE
Why? 

Life’s Champion :
If this is True
The Eye has been open too long 
and There is No Future
I only Hope. Oh, no! 

(In the representation, planets start to explode.

GRACE
Is this thing reliable

Life’s Champion:
Whatever's Happening can't be stopped 
by closing The Eye.

GRACE
Well, how come you 
didn't know that? 

Life’s Champion :
I haven't opened 
The Eye before. 

GRACE
Now you tell me. 

Life’s Champion :
Grace, closing The Eye 
may not be Enough

We have to Go Back 
to before The Eye was opened. 
Maybe even before we arrived. 

GRACE
This is a Time-Machine….

Life’s Champion :
…with No Power. 

GRACE:
What? 

Life’s Champion :
The Eye being open so long 
must have drained the TARDIS. 

GRACE
Great! 

Life’s Champion :
I'm sorry. 

GRACE
You must have The Power 
to get back. You must

Life’s Champion
Not Enough

GRACE
What about all those 
glorious predictions? 
All that knowledge about 
What's Going to Happen to 
Gareth, to me, to This City? 
That must come from 
somewhere. Think

Life’s Champion
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!

…..are you any good at 
setting alarm clocks? 

GRACE
No!

Life’s Champion
Grace

GRACE:
I'll Try

Life’s Champion
Listen very carefully. 

GRACE:
 Okay. 

Life’s Champion :
We pre-set the coordinates 
just as I divert The Power 
from within The Eye itself 
into the time rotor, here

GRACE
We jump-start The TARDIS? 

Life’s Champion :
We jump-start The TARDIS.



millennial (adj.)
1660s, "pertaining to the millennium," from stem of millennium + -al (1). Meaning "pertaining to a period of 1,000 years" is from 1807. As a noun from 1896, originally "a thousandth anniversary." From 1991 as a generational name for those born in the mid-1980s and thus coming of age around the year 2000.
also from 1660s
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Trends of millennial

adapted from books.google.com/ngrams/
Entries linking to millennial

-al (1)
suffix forming adjectives from nouns or other adjectives, "of, like, related to, pertaining to," Middle English -al, -el, from French or directly from Latin -alis (see -al (2)).

millennium (n.)
1630s, "the 1,000-year period of Christ's anticipated rule on Earth" (Revelation xx.1-5); from Modern Latin millennium, from Latin mille "thousand" (see million) + annus "year" (see annual); formed on analogy of biennium, triennium, etc. 

For vowel change, see biennial

General (non-theological) sense of "an aggregate of 1,000 years, a period or interval of 1,000 years" is attested by 1711. 

Meaning "the year 2000 A.D." is attested by 1970.

“[T]he men of the modern world — up to a generation ago anyway — saw 2000 as a millennial year in the light of science. Men were then to be freed of want, misery, and disease; reason and advanced technology would rule; all would finally be for the best in what would then be the undoubted best of all possible worlds.

— Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 
December 1962


millennialism
post-millennial
premillennial

Tuesday 23 November 2021

The Walls of Jericho






Are You Sure about This...? 
Trusting Our Fate to a Boy we Hardly Know...?


The Force is unusually Strong with Him.

He can See Things 
before They Happen.

Will I Ever See You Again...?

What Does Your Heart Tell You?

He can Help You.
He was Meant to Help You.


Anakin! DROP!!


Our Lady
Where were we? 

 JERICHO
I may have to write all this down

 Our Lady
Once this is over, 
be My Guest. 

JERICHO
But why are They attacking My House? 
What do They want? 

 CLAIRE
I think... me

 Our Lady
Why would they want you, Claire? 

 CLAIRE
 Because I'm one of Them. Look. 

(The skin on her hands resembles stone.

 JERICHO
Miss Brown! 

 Our Lady
This isn't possible. 
How long have you been like this? 

 CLAIRE
Er, physically, just tonight. 
But I hallucinated I had Angel-wings, 
and there was dust coming out of my eye. 

There's An Angel within me, Doctor. 
I'm certain of it. 

 Our Lady
 You're a Percipient, A Seer
You had a premonition 
of An Angel in Your Mind 
and now it's living there. 

That which contains 
The Image of An Angel... 
is an Angel. 
It's taken hold

 CLAIRE
Oh, my. But it keeps 
coming and going. 

Her hands return to normal. 
The Angels are heading for the cellar door. 



 JERICHO
 You're saying that because she had A Premonition, A Vision, 
it's taken psychic root within her? 
A real, genuine psychic manifestation?

Our Lady
Eustacius Jericho, proper Scientist. 
Under siege from The Impossible, 
doesn't even stop to be scared. 

Just wants to understand what's 
beyond his comprehension. 
 
JERICHO
Oh, I've seen many things 
Beyond My comprehension, Doctor.
 
I was one of the first British soldiers 
into Belsen at the end of The War. 

If you think a few stone statues 
will destroy my equilibrium 
you are mistaken. 

What do you need me to do


 Our Lady
We need a lot of eyes 
on a lot of Weeping Angels. 

Claire, I need you to look 
inside Your Mind. 

If there's An Angel in there, 
I need to get it out. 

Will You give me permission 
to enter Your Mind? 

 CLAIRE
Will it hurt? 

 Our Lady
I'll be as gentle as I can. 

 CLAIRE
Okay.
 
 JERICHO
You're going to place yourself 
inside Miss Brown's Mind? 

 Our Lady
Yes. 

 JERICHO
Let me take the readings, please. 
Permit me to record it

 CLAIRE
You're supposed to be 
observing the Angels! 

 JERICHO
Well, I can still do that. 
The Machines will record any activity. 
Please. This is unprecedented
An Experiment that goes 
beyond anything before researched. There. 

 (He has put the head sets on the women.) 

 Our Lady
Contact.






Phoebe Spengler :
Two Millimetres of plastic EYE protection -- 
are you sure this is safe?


Mr. Grooberson, 
Teacher of Science 
"Safe"...?! *
*scoffs*

HISTORY, is "Safe". 
Geometry -- THAT'S "Safe".

SCIENCE, is all 
Particle Accelerators 
and Hydrogen BOMBS.

It's giving YOURSELF The Plague 
and GAMBLING on The Cure.

Phoebe Spengler :
(She Grins)  
Science is Reckless.

Mr. Grooberson, 
Teacher of Science : 
TOTALLY!! 

Yes! It's Punk Rock!

A Safety-Pin through 
The Nipple of Accademia.

Podcast :
(Deadpan)
Yeowch.

Tuesday 25 May 2021

The Battle of Serenity Valley




Captain Malcolm Reynolds :
We're close to gone out here. 

We get a job, we got to make good. 


Pvt. Zoe Washburn :

Sir, I don't disagree 

on any particular point. 

It's just... 


In The Time of War, 

we would've never left 

A Man stranded


Captain Malcolm Reynolds :

Maybe that's why we lost. 




“ Production came to an end 

on Buffy, Season 3 [1999], 

and over my Summer vacation,

I was reading 

The Killer Angels

about 

The Survivors of Gettysburg

and it immediately made me think 

of The Millennium Falcon.


You know, 

as most things do.”


— Joss Whedon


EXT. SERENITY VALLEY - NIGHT

We come into the middle of a battle. 

Soldiers are yelling and running, gunfire everywhere, 

stuff blowing up but good.


Camera focuses on a soldier in the silhouette 

of an explosion, running and dodging fire. 

He hits the dirt for cover. 


We PUSH IN and see that it's Mal. 

His face is dirty and he's breathing hard.


Mal's up again and running 

to rejoin his company in a makeshift foxhole.


RADIO OPERATOR

Sergeant, Command says air support is holding 

till they can assess our status.


MAL

Our Status is that we need some gorram air support.

Now get back on line and tell 'em to get in here.


ZOE

That skiff is shredding us, sir.


RADIO OPERATOR

They won't move without 

A Lieutenant's authorization code, sir.


Angry, Mal walks over and rips off the badge 

from a dead Lieutenant's uniform 

and gives it to the Radio Operator.


MAL

Here, here's Your Code -- 

You're Lieutenant Baker.


Congratulations on your promotion. 

Now get me some air support!


(to Zoe)


Pull back, just enough to wedge 'em in here. 

Get your squad to High Ground, start picking 'em off.


ZOE

High ground is Death  with that skiff in the air.


MAL

That's Our Problem. 

Thanks for volunteering.

(to Bendis)

Bendis, give us some cover fire. 

We're going duck hunting.


The foxhole is rocked by a huge explosion. 

Mal's group of soldiers are looking 

pretty young and scared. 


Time for a morale boost:


MAL

Just focus!

(beat)

The Alliance said they were gonna 

waltz through Serenity Valley 

and we choked 'em with those words.


We've done The Impossible 

and that makes us mighty.


Just a little while longer, 

Our Angels are gonna be  soaring overhead 

raining fire on those arrogant cod,

so you hold!

(yelling)

You hold! Go!


His soldiers take up their positions 

to lay down cover fire while Mal and Zoe 

prepare to take down the skiff.


ZOE

Really think we can bring her down, sir?


MAL

Do you even need to ask?


Mal pulls a necklace out from under his shirt 

and kisses the cross.


MAL

Ready?


ZOE

Always.


Mal takes off. 

Zoe prepares to follow, 

sees that no one's covering Mal.


ZOE

Bendis? Bendis!


She sees Bendis huddled across 

from her, scared stiff.


ZOE (cont'd)

(angrily)

Rut it.


Zoe grunts and stands up, laying cover fire for Mal as he moves down the hill. 


After a moment, she follows Mal down The Hill, 

taking cover with him behind some boulders. 


Mal fires into the bushes, 

causing the soldier guarding a bigass gun 

to move out of his cover and return fire. 


Mal shoots him dead.

Mal activates the bigass gun's targeting system 

while Zoe covers him. 


Mal locks a target on the skiff that's been 

killing them in the battle and fires. 


He makes a direct hit and stands back 

from the bigass gun.


MAL

Yeah!

(manly grunt)


Then Mal realizes that the skiff is outta control... 

and headed right for him. Oh, shit. Mal starts running.


MAL

Zoe!


Mal and Zoe run as the skiff hits the ground and plows past them, exploding. Mal and Zoe hit the ground flat on their backs. Mal starts laughing. Zoe looks long-suffering.


ZOE

(entering foxhole, to Bendis)

Nice cover fire.


MAL

Did you see that? 

Green, what's our  status on...


Mal trails off as he realizes Green is pretty damn wounded, 

possibly deader than a dead thing.


MAL

Zoe.


She looks up. Mal points. 

Zoe moves to check Green. 

Mal moves to sit near Bendis.


MAL (cont'd)

Hey, listen to me. Bendis, look at me! 

Listen, we're holding this valley no matter what.


BENDIS

We're gonna die.


MAL

We're not gonna die. 

We can't die, Bendis.


You know why?

(beat)

Because we are so very, very pretty. 

We are just too pretty for God to let us die. Huh? 

Look at that chiseled jaw. Huh? 

C'mon.



There's a roaring sound overhead. 

Zoe is listening on the radio.


MAL (cont'd)

If you won't listen to me

listen to that


Those are Our Angels comin' 

to blow The Alliance to The Hot Place.

(to Zoe)

Zoe, tell the 82nd --


ZOE

(stunned)

They're Not Coming.

(beat)

Command says it's too hot. 

They're pulling out.

 

We're to lay down arms.


Mal's stunned, in denial. 

He looks at Bendis.


MAL

But what's...


Slowly, Mal stands and peeks over the top of the foxhole. 

His face is lit from their air support rising and retreating. 

Bendis stands next to him. 


Mal's in shock, watching 

His Last Hope pull out of The Fight.


Beside him, Bendis is hit by Enemy Fire 

and FallsMal doesn't notice.


PUSH IN on Mal's bloody face. 


On the disbelief.



Thursday 18 February 2021

X




“There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even Being Right feels Wrong. 

What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that Rain is Poison and Sex is Death? 

If Making Love might be Fatal and if a Cool Spring Breeze on any Summer Afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much •left• except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. 

Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.” 

― Hunter S. Thompson, 

A Generation of Swine : 
Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s 
(Gonzo Papers Vol 2)






Life is a Mystery
Everyone must stand alone


I hear you call My Name

And it feels like Home















“The K Foundation, as Drummond and Cauty called themselves when they stopped being The KLF, burnt their money in August 1994. 

The period of the early-to-mid 1990s is frequently overlooked in our cultural histories, yet it was far more potent and strange than it is usually given credit for. 

In order to understand why it is significant that Cauty and Drummond’s bonfire took place in this period, it is necessary to recognise what was so odd about those years. 

Our mental landscape was very different a century or so earlier. Victoria England had been, on the surface at least, a bastion of certainty. 

The Victorians had three immoveable beacons by which they could orientate themselves and their society: the pillars of Church, Empire and Crown. This, of course, was not to last. 

Charles Darwin had developed a scientific model that was ingenious and ground-breaking, but which had implications. Perhaps wisely, he kept it hidden away in a drawer for twenty years. But in 1859 he published. 

Mainstream scientists and philosophers in the nineteenth century believed that they understood how things were organised, and where the human race belonged, in the natural order of things. But Darwin’s work, in combination with breakthroughs made in the field of geology regarding the age of the planet, caused one of the unshakable pillars of Victorian certainty to crack. The teachings of the Church about the origins of life on this planet had been shown to be wrong

This was a severe failing for an organisation which exists to proclaim an infallible understanding of Truth. The great Churches of the world didn’t react to the new understanding well. In 1870, eleven years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, the Vatican formalised the doctrine of papal infallibility


This dogma asserted that the action of the Holy Spirit can remove even the possibility of error from the Pope. The Pope was right, in other words, because he was the Pope, who was right. 

This was clearly a form of circular logic, another of Robert Anton Wilson’s self-referential reality tunnels, and once that had been recognised the Darwinists found themselves outside the Church’s logic. They could no longer submerge themselves inside the Church and unquestioningly accept what it had to say. 

Calls for the need to have ‘faith’ could no longer be met with reverent acceptance. Indeed, they were increasingly met with knowing smirks. Nietzsche was one who was brave enough to articulate publicly this change in the world. 

God is dead,’ he wrote in 1882, ‘and we have killed him’. This change in understanding may have been unsettling, but it was just a warm-up for the goodies that the twentieth century had in store. New ideas came thick and fast from the likes of Einstein, Planck, Freud, Picasso and Joyce

Every breakthrough seemed to be pulling in the same direction, that of undermining certainty. Things were no longer anywhere near as simple as they had been. Our most fundamental bedrocks – time, space, matter, the rational mind – were discovered to be nothing like as dependable as they appeared. 

We were steaming ahead into uncharted territory. The First World War erupted, and shattered any notion that there was glory in Empire. As the value of Church and Crown eroded in contemporary thought, the public’s need for an unarguable authority gave momentum to politicians, who quickly offered up The State as a candidate. 


They differed in the details, or course –the fascists thought the population should serve the state while the communists thought that the state was the servant of the people –but the methods used to enforce the centralisation of power were essentially the same. 

These ideas played themselves out to their horrendous conclusions during the Second World War. The notion that The State should be The Central Authority in our lives has never seemed credible since. 

As the decades rolled on the search for an unarguable touchstone to replace Church, Crown or Empire in our lives took on ever more urgency. 

For populations still traumatised by the conflict of the 1940s, enforcing social conformity in the 1950s made a lot of sense, yet this was stifling for the generation coming of age after the war. 

In the 1960s they sought liberation, but the philosophies that made so much sense on a personal level did not scale up well to the level of society. 

In the 1970s the attention shifted to the self, but the hedonistic self-indulgence grew to such unbearable levels that punk was needed to tear it down. 

In the 1980s they believed that money and the pursuit of material possessions was the answer. Wealth was pursued, but it did not have the power to satisfy us properly, and that, too, was soon discarded as a candidate for our unassailable personal omphalos. So what next? 

By the time we reached 1990 all options had been tried and found wanting. We could return to The Church, The State, politics, material greed, personal liberation or hedonism if we wished, but we could no longer see them without being aware of their faults. They were damaged goods, still significant but no longer permanent and secure. 

But what other options did we have? Did we have any? 

It appeared not. We were out of ideas. And so there was heard a global, existential gasp of generational fear. There was nothing to believe in. 

This awful period was brief, and we can date it quite precisely.

It arrived in mainstream culture in 1991, fully formed and simultaneously emanating from many different art forms. 

Douglas Coupland’s debut novel Generation X was published in March that year, and the generation it described suddenly found themselves with a name. 

Another label arrived in July, when Richard Linklater’s no-budget indie movie Slacker reached cinemas. 

The American comedian Bill Hicks’ career started taking off in the UK, and the generation found their philosopher. 

Then, in September, their anthem arrived. Nirvana released the single ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, and the story of alternative music was changed forever. 

Slackers were not well dressed, because there was no reason to dress smartly. Their uniform was old jeans, Converse trainers and warm, practical lumberjack shirts. They were not career-minded, for there was no reason to pursue the corporate dream. 

They were seen largely as apathetic, but it was an apathy born of a logical assessment of the options rather than just innate laziness. 

They were often well-educated and creative, and were usually portrayed as being talkative and self-obsessed. 

If they had a mission, of sorts, it was to work out how to move forward from where they were. 

With the Berlin Wall down and Thatcher and Reagan out of office, there was a clear sense that the old order had finished. 

Modern historians also draw a line at this point. The historian Eric Hobsbawm coined the phrase ‘the short twentieth century’ to cover the period 1914 to 1991, from the start of the First World War to the end of the Cold War. 

This is a useful time frame for a historian because it works as a complete narrative. 

Francis Fukuyama’s hugely influential 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man also recognised that a change of great historical significance had occurred. 

Fukuyama argued that an era of great political upheaval had ended and that Western liberal democracy was the final stage of human government. 

He was essentially unable to imagine what could possibly happen next. 

For that was the question that needed to be answered: ‘What next?’. 

Looking to the past didn’t help; it didn’t have any answers and it was all out of ideas. 

The past shrugged as if to say, ‘Good luck. You’re on your own.’ 

At first, Generation X was linked to a sense of relief and a feeling that they had recognised the blind spots of the past and were now facing up to things with a refreshing honesty. 




But as 1991 rolled into 1992 and 1993, this honesty became less invigorating and increasingly unbearable. 

It started to become apparent that they were not going to find a focus for their narrative, or a way to repair the damage to their mental landscape. 

The sense of mounting horror came closer and closer to the surface. 




The nihilism reached its peak in 1994, the period of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the burning of the million pounds and the year Bill Hicks died. 

This was the point when the constant creation of new musical genres that had characterised the twentieth century came to an end. That era was over. 

By this point there was a desperate need for a way out. 
Any way out. 

The changes that signified the arrival of the next era began towards the end of 1994. 

In Britain, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had taken control of the Labour Party and had launched New Labour. 

John Major wrote in his memoirs that his victory in the 1992 general election ‘killed socialism in Britain’. 

Margaret Thatcher was of a similar opinion, as was, it seems, Tony Blair, whose first act upon gaining the leadership of the Labour Party was to remove the socialist ‘Clause IV’ from the party’s constitution. 

After Blair, politics would no longer be led by ideology, but by opinion polls. 

This was the ‘Third Way’, a political discourse dominated by spin, where it was not what you did that was important, but how that played out in the press

In Europe, the Maastricht Treaty paved the way for the modern European Union and, ultimately, the euro. 

In the United States, George W. Bush entered political life in 1994 as Governor of Texas. Netscape released the first version of their Navigator software that year, the first popular web browser, and Microsoft followed with a high-profile launch of their Windows 95 operating system the following year. 

The modern digital era began. 

The world of Google, Wikipedia and Facebook was coming into being. 

The old order was being ripped up. 

The new era was being born, and it was the Age of Networks. 

As the blogger Neuroskeptic notes, during the period from 1945 to 1990 new cults, religions and sects were springing up all over the place. 

This period gave us the likes of Scientology, the Hare Krishnas, Transcendental Meditation, the Moonies, Jesus Freaks, the Manson Family, Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown, the Kabbalah Centre, the Nation of Islam, the New Age, Neopaganism and Wicca. 

Why, he asks, did that outpouring of new religious groups dry up so abruptly and decisively, with hardly any popularly known groups forming after the Waco siege of 1993? 

The question points to a deep change in our culture, and once again marks the early years of the 1990s as the end of an era. 

It was not just new musical genres, it seems, that stopped appearing at that point in time. We can date the end of that era, what Hobsbawm called the ‘Age of Extremes’ to the end of the Cold War in 1991, and we can date the start of the information era to the first popular web browser in 1994

What, then, should we make of those years in between? 

They are boundary years, comparable to what anthropologists call a liminal state. They were a period when the old rules were gone, but before the new order was formed. They were a period, in other words, when normal certainties did not apply, when anything was possible and the strange was commonplace. 

As John C. Calhoun, the seventh Vice-President of the United States once wrote, ‘The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and the establishment of the new, constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.’ 

Being innate storytellers, we neglect this brief, confusing period and prefer instead the clearer narratives that surround it. 

If you Google each year in the last quarter of the twentieth century, you’ll find that each successive one has an increasing number of mentions online, as you would expect given the growth of the internet during this period. 

The only exception to this upward trend is the period between 1991 and 1994, when the number of mentions declines. 

The age of John Major and George Bush Sr, it seems, does not attract our attention. 

Our cultural narrative skips from the Stock, Aitken and Waterman late eighties to the Britpop and The Spice Girls mid-nineties quite happily. 

Even the Adrian Mole diaries skip these years. 

This boundary period is a cultural blind spot; we choose not to look at it. 

But there is much that can be learnt from such a time, and great art can be found there. 

In The KLF’s field of music, for example, this brief period brought albums such as Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream’s ScreamadelicaSUPERMAN :, Automatic For The People by REM, Peggy Suicide by Julian Cope, U2’ s Achtung Baby and OasisDefinitely Maybe – all records that are considered the career best, or thereabouts, for those musicians. 

Considering the long careers of many of those bands, the fact that their highest achievements all fall within that narrow period does suggest that there was something in the water at that time, so to speak. 

In the moments that followed the withdrawal of one wave of history you could see, if you chose to look, a brief glimpse of the undercurrents at work in the late twentieth century. 

It did not last long, for the next grand wave arrived and drowned out these subtle workings with energy and noise. And that next wave was noisy. The escape route from the nihilism of the early 1990s was, in the end, mindless optimism. 

Things could only get better. 

Adopting this belief entailed not worrying about the details. And it was fun! 

This, then, became the 1990s that we choose to remember, a time of Cool Britannia, the Millennium Dome and the dotcom bubble. Ego-fuelling cocaine became the drug of choice, BritPop and The Spice Girls were on hand to entertain us, and the modern digital world created itself anew. 

Times were exciting again. 

We could not help but be swept along with that tide, and we found that it supported us to the extent that we no longer felt the need to worry about our foundations. 

How does the death of that era compare to its birth? 

Hobsbawm pinpointed the beginning of that era, the ‘short twentieth century’ of 1914–91, as the beginning of the First World War. This was when the age of empires collapsed upon itself and the political realities of the twentieth century began. 

It coincides roughly with what the American author and lecturer Susan Cain calls a shift from a culture of character to a culture of personality

This era’s birth couldn’t have been more different from its death in the 1990s when, having exhausted itself, it quietly laid down and died. 

The period of the First World War was a brutal, violent explosion, when the collapse of the Victorian system engulfed the whole world in sheer bloody horror. Everything –from our social structures to our relationship with technology and the nature of the human condition –was shredded before the unstoppable firestorm. Nothing survived. 

A time of mud, gas and unimagined mechanised slaughter, it is no exaggeration to call this exactly what it was: the darkest point in human history. True, the death toll was higher in the Second World War, but that war had been psychologically understandable in the context of the time. 

No one was in any way prepared for the actuality of The Great War, and there is no horror greater than the arrival of the unthinkable. This was the period that spawned the Cabaret Voltaire. 


As we have seen, the six members of this group share with Cauty and Drummond a sense of being haunted by what they did and an inability to explain or come to terms with their actions. This makes a strange sort of sense when we view this period as the liminal gap between eras. 

There was no narrative context at that point to explain their actions, because the old story had ended and the new one had not begun. 

If Cauty and Drummond had burnt their money earlier in the twentieth century, it would have been seen as a Surrealist act, or perhaps a Situationist one. If they had done it ten years later it would have been understood in terms of the global anti-capitalist movement. 

Doing it in the period between eras made in incomprehensible, for there was no surrounding context that could make sense of what they had done. 

Nothing is really explainable in liminal periods, as anyone who has attempted to understand the First World War using the Victorian world view will have discovered. 

How can you explain an act, except as part of an ongoing narrative? 

The movement that the Cabaret Voltaire created is known as ‘Dada’ –a meaningless, idiotic word which showed their contempt for art itself. Art, as they saw it, was the product of the society that gave birth to it. It was the finest aspect of that society, its highest expression, and by the nature of its transcendent qualities it could glorify and even justify that society. What, though, if that society was rotten to the core? What if you lived in a world so misguided, flawed and terrible that it could create the unthinkable slaughter of the Somme? 

Any art it produced would have to be treated with contempt. 

Any beautiful expression that could in some way redeem the society that formed it would be unacceptable. 

It had to go, all of it

The sensual Art Nouveau style that had so defined the preceding decades collapsed almost overnight. Dada was anti-art. It was negation, a creation that saw itself as destruction. 

Its very nature makes it seem impossible to define or pin down, but its echoes can be heard throughout the twentieth century in movements such as Situationism, Discordianism and punk. 

The word itself oscillates between being a verb and a noun, between having meaning and no meaning, between being an established movement of many years’ standing to being a spent force the moment the Cabaret Voltaire closed. 

It cloaks itself in gnomic pronouncements that make it appear more of a disembodied conscious presence than an art style. 

‘Before there was Dada, Dada was there . . .’ the painter and sculpture Hans Arp, one of the founders of Dada, has said. 

This is usually about as clear as it gets. 

The more you look at the Dadaists’ attempts to define Dada, the more you are reminded of Daoists attempts to define the concept of the Dao. 

The Dao is the central concept in ancient Chinese thought, usually translated as the ‘way’ or the ‘path’.

It also oscillates between being a verb and a noun, between having meaning and having no meaning. The Dao De Jing, the Daoist central text, begins by declaring that the Dao that can be named is not the Dao. 

As first lines go, this can throw the reader a little. What it means by this is that the Dao is everything and, because a name or definition is a small part of everything, that name therefore cannot be the thing itself. The all cannot be accurately defined, as any definition is limiting. Dao is, by definition, beyond definition, beyond ‘is’ and ‘is not’.

When Arp said ‘Before there was Dada, Dada was there’, he echoed The Dao De Jing which states that the Dao is all heaven and earth, and that the Dao existed before heaven and earth. In light of these comparisons, the Dadaists’ attempts to describe Dada appear as if they are describing something fundamentally similar to the Dao. 

This may initially appear counter-intuitive, of course, because the Dao is associated with peaceful acceptance whereas Dada is violent negation. But Dada emerged during the First World War. The Dao, at that point, would also have been violent negation. One point that many commentators make about Dada is that, while its intention is to destroy or negate, it is still the product of the very thing that it is fighting against. It is a creation of the society that it rejects, and can only exist alongside that society. In the words of Greil Marcus, ‘Dada was a protest against its time; it was also the bird on the rhinoceros, peeping and chirping, but along for the ride.’ 

Marcus also discusses the philosopher Henri Lefebvre, ‘. . . an old man, whose life’s work had been the investigation of “modernity,” he said so queerly that what was truly modern about modernity, what was actually new, what was really interesting, was not its works –technology, abundance, the welfare state, mass communication, and so on –but the peculiar character of the opposition modernity created against itself: an opposition he still called “Dada.”’ 

A Daoist would be amused by Lefebvre’s observation, for a thing to carry its own opposition is anything but modern. This is one of their most fundamental principles and it is depicted in the best-known Daoist symbol, the Yin-Yang. This icon shows a circle, half white and half black and seemingly rotating as if the black and white elements were continually replacing each other. This constant flow between opposites is, in Daoist thought, the fundamental nature of the world. In the centre of the black there is a white dot, and in the centre of the white there is a black dot. This symbolises that each state carries the seed of its opposite –that the Yin always contains the birth of the Yang that replaces it, and vice versa, just as Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminati carried the seed of the Discordians and the music industry gave birth to The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. Mathematicians also recognised this truth, once they gained a grasp of the nature of chaos. Whenever they looked inside chaos, they found order, and wherever they looked closely at order they found it to be riddled with chaos. Dada can be thought of as a form of Dark Dao, a path that was as sick and feverish as the era that formed it. Dao is an ungraspable concept that contains both the very nature of the world and also the way the world will unfurl. In this context it is no wonder that Dadaists could not define what they had done, as Dao both contains and is more than any single definition. In this liminal period, in this time between eras as the old ways destroyed themselves and before the new order emerged, there was only this fundamental nature of the world remaining, an unnameable Dao that could only be implied by the meaningless noise ‘dada’. The subsequent shift of eras during the early 1990s was a mirror opposite, a small, quiet death that has almost disappeared from history. It was here that The K Foundation, with their meaningless name, performed the act that they could never explain or get over. How different, then, was the fundamental nature of their act of destruction? How close to the underlying nature of the world were they working? The undercurrents that were so briefly visible in the gap between two eras were still exposed. And because the money was burnt in this liminal space between two waves of history, the meaning of the act was not absorbed or dissipated by either of them. The timing, in other words, was perfect. The subconscious was fully exposed when the deed was done.