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That's the matter with Kansas

By Dennis Highberger

From a proclamation issued December 27, 2005, by Dennis Highberger, mayor of Lawrence, Kansas, which calls itself the “City of the Arts.” The thirteen days of commemoration were chosen by rolling dice and picking numbers out of a hat.

WHEREAS: Dadaism is an international tendency in art that seeks to change conventional attitudes and practices in aesthetics, society, and morality; and

WHEREAS: Dadaism may or may not have come into being in the summer of 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire at 1 Spiegelgasse in Zurich, Switzerland, with the participation of Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Emmy Hennings, Marcel and Georges Janco, Jean Arp, and Richard Huelsenbeck; and

WHEREAS: The central message of Dada is the realization that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong together as necessary parts of a whole; and

WHEREAS: Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions; and

WHEREAS: zimzim urallala zimzim urallala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Dennis Highberger, Mayor of the City of Lawrence, Kansas, do hereby proclaim the days of February 4, March 28, April 1, July 15, August 2, August 7, August 16, August 26, September 18, September 22, October 1, October 17, and October 26, 2006, as “International Dadaism Month.”

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SEE ALSO: Dadaism; Kansas; Lawrence; Lawrence (Kan.)

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