anne magnuson was a rethinker -wig cult
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boring is love
anne "the chameleon" magnuson
performance artist from 90s NYC.
been in a psychedelic metal band and bankrupted her record company for fun.
most famous for owning the brothel in tank girl.
people either love her or think she is boring. the polarity of loving things or thinking they are boring was her central theme in her work.
she was sort of antecendant to Atlean Uhl's rethinkers encyclopspaedia. sort of cuz uhl never left the house and magnusun lived in NYC inhabiting the performance-mtv-weird nightclub scene. magnusons artistic aliances was with her wig cult she shared with her exact twin, sandra bernhart, and a few hundred drag queen. both performance artists song writer actresses claimed to identify as drag queens.
the wig cult is spread world wide and trades jabs with the cult of no eyebrows, both groups have strong representation in Cult of Elegance, Minkus / greater metropolitan, where Uhl and the rethinkers origionated.
made for TV is magnusons most cherished one woman film project where she asks the question "what if the only thing on television was Anne Magnuson ?"
and the answer is given " dont thnk that you know anything about me ! You don't know me. you cant pin me down. you try to tell me what i am then i will turn in to the opposite so fast you'll doubt your eyes. OH HELL YOU DO NOT KNOW ME. but i know every little vulnerability and quirk and flaw and weakness in you."
it is almost condecending to Magnuson's perfect embodiment of cartoonish shape shifting to claim her modus operendi as the rethinkers manifesto. Magnuson never looks like shes working to hard cuz she got in to your head immediately and is rumaging through your brain like a medicine cabinet.
made for tv is a no budget attempt to completly catolog and digest pop junk culture in 1984. junk culture emerged as magnusons vice favorite second only to bleak hopelessness ruined exponentially by mediocraty and apathy.
the rethinkers manifesto is 1400 pages long and doesn't say anything. it just posits fanciful improbable ideas and supports its claims with reasoned argument moddled on a car accident. the rethinkers real manifest steals mostly from futurists cuz they stole from dada ists and they do in fact structure their arguments based on 6 different kinds of car accidents,
the best description is in rethinkers most heard criticism. there is no way to tell if a rethinker is telling the truth or making shit up, if they are excited or passionless, if they have legitimate emotional involvement or feign it till its real.
Its like the manifesto of the rethinkers is to cultivate personality disorders (which is also mentioned in the encyclopspoaedia), to learn emotional responses by rote and respond perfectly to stimuli and deliver compelling emotionally loaded response scenes.
charector acting is satire and satire is noble. satire is delicious cuz it works from empathy with her victems. the first lesson of telling stories is to magnify simplify and make melodramatic.
i hope i sink in to the most listless passionless hatered cuz I fall in love to hard to often.
"why do i have to improve myself ? cant i just quit and die ? can't i just get high?"
-Anne Magnusson