Manifesto Karaoke

MANIFESTO KARAOKE
by GORDON WINIEMKO

Before I move on to giving a Shout Out to the other orgs that I work with, I have to give a big Shout Out to Gordon Winiemko's Manifesto Karaoke that he performed last Thursday at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The performance was part of Artists InSight: Sampling Oakland and included presentations by Sean Fletcher & Isabel Reichert (Death and Taxes, Inc.), Packard Jennings, Sue Mark & Bruce Douglas (WE Riders), Luther Thie, and Gordon Winiemko "for an evening of short performances and presentations of conceptual-based art. Part salon, part cabaret, this event features investigations of urban and cranial space, corporate and pop cultural constructions by Oakland-based artists curated by Sarah Lockhart and Darren Jenkins of 21 Grand. "

Gordon, who lives in Long Beach, blew the event away! Following several long conceptual presentations on pseudo corporate projects that included Fletcher and Reichert's discussion on how they've turned their lives into a corporate venture (I can't even begin to comment on this) and Luther Thie's brain drain corporation (I can't even remember the name of it), Gordon stepped up to the mic and truly performed and entertained, while giving us all food for thought. It also didn't hurt that Gordon actually has a great voice.

From Gordon:
I used 16 of the top 20 from this list:
http://www.rhino.com/rs500/songs_1_50.lasso

It starts out like this:
Sing it like you're dissafected, from seattle, and like you are actually dumb enough to buy into neil young lyrics, among other things:

Utopia's something
That's hard to produce

But I'd rather try
And possibly lose

So here's my list
Give it a whirl

Of things I'd like
To see in the world

******************
About midway through:
Sing this part like you're a pretty boy pop star who is trying to hold his apathetic band together at the end of a tumultuous decade:

And one kind of person that
Alienates me especially

Is the one that doesn't want change
Urgently

They say they value art but for them
It is just a kind of sport

Oh is it clever
Is it smart

Does it please
To think wanting more is naive

It's hard to think of a greater enemy

***************
Sing this bit like you're a hard-living, womanizing, legendary architect of
rock n roll:

And let's admit that there are some people that we hate
Who make the quality of life disintegrate

What's at the root of all those things they do we abhor
Well at the base of it all is just wanting more

You say that it is just a matter of degree
But tell me how you draw the line exactly

More more
Gimme gimme
More more

*************
And sing this last part of the song like you're a guy from minnesota who changed his name, imitated woody guthrie, and then after being embraced as some kind of prophet, got castigated for being "inauthentic":

The fact remains however much I complain
The perception of a simple problem's one that's
Idealized

And however much one might applaud the bold
Faced demand for change doesn't mean it will ever get
Realized

Now at the risk of sounding trite
I'm reflecting on the dictum of a man who
Abandoned might

Somehow he liberated
a whole nation
All just by following this simple notion

The one that goes the change that you want in the world

You must be