When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. - Hunter S. Thompson

23 January 2007

Hello, Dalí: Surrealist RINO Sightings

There's a new batch of RINO Sightings, hosted this week by Eric at Classical Values, in which Eric attempts to channel Salvador Dalí, but instead (I hate when this happens) Dalí winds up channeling Eric.

Considering Dali's hatred of politics, why drag him into the RINO carnival? For several reasons, the first of which is that Republican politics have become so surreal, and what could be more surreal than dissenters from surrealism? As a dissenter from surrealism (expelled from the Surrealist movement for being too surreal) Dali is the perfect symbol. Moreover, there's Dali's paranoiac obsession with all things rhino -- which this essay sums up pretty well:

Artists, all through history, have been tormenting themselves to grasp form and to reduce it to elementary geometrical volumes. Leonardo always tended to produce eggs ... Ingres preferred spheres, and Cézanne cubes and cylinders. But only Dalí... has found truth. All curved surfaces of the human body have the same geometric spot in common, the one found in this cone with the rounded tip curved toward heaven or toward the earth ... the rhinoceros horn!

After this initial discovery, Dalí surveyed his images and realised that all of them could be deconstructed to rhinoceros horns.

Which means that we RINOs are onto something.
Indeed.

Here's my Fun RINO-Related Dalí Fact for the day: when he made an appearance on The Tonight Show, "Dalí carried with him a leather rhinoceros and refused to sit upon anything else."

RINO Sightings Carnival -- Surrealistic RINOCEROTIC Edition! @ Classical Values

Related: Dalí Gallery

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