Alfred Brendel is going Dada
mainThe retired pianist, now 85, is writing arts criticism for New York Review of Books. Chalenging stuff, as you’d expect.
Sample:
…as a child, I had unwittingly encountered Dada in its funniest form. At home, my mother sang, to her own embarrassment, a Berlin cabaret song from the 1920s that starts with the memorable lines “I’ll tear out one of my eyelashes and stab you dead with it,” and ends with the intention to order a fried egg “and sprinkle you with spinach.” It was much later that I realized that sense and nonsense need to be partners in order to mirror the absurdity of this world.
Read the full essay on Dadaism here.
He’s been writing for them for awhile.
This essay is a good reading, but I note that Mr Brendel was very, very light, really ppppp, about the scatological aspects of Dada.