
The Dash Snow Thing
by Jim Hayes
This started as a record review of the first song on the Dangermouse David Lynch Sparklehorse thing. It’s sung by a Flaming Lips guy, Wayne Coyne: “Revenge”. I bought a new copy of the hipster rag “Wired” for 25 cents in a cheesy “bibles for missions” thrift store. Inside was an article about this specific rock and roll record which pointed me in its direction. I’ve been thinking a lot about Dash Snow and how his death is a turning point in the history of Western Pop culture. Why not? Michael Jackson’s death sure wasn’t. Perhaps it was Allen Klein’s death. Certainly Allen Klein’s death meant something. It was around this time I first heard this song called “Revenge”.
Dash Snow overdosed hours before Bastille Day. He was an artist that made collages and photographs documenting the New York bohemian lifestyle. He turned his life into an art project. For this I see him as an avatar, a product of his own time as well as a low link in a theatre chain to the pugilistic Dadaist Arthur Cravan.
“I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train! I’d shine my light through the cool Colorado rain. I know you rider, gonna miss me when I’m gone.” The song first appears in Alan Lomax’s “American Ballads and Folk Songs” in 1934. It could be about Dash Snow, it could be about Michael Jackson; maybe Ted Kennedy or you. The protagonist is saying in spite of it all, you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone. There are plenty of people that I miss today. Plenty. I don’t want to be someone that other people miss. (“There’s still time to change the road you’re on,” from the penultimate version: Seattle 7-17-77).
I’m thinking about Dash Snow as a touchstone and a shew-stone of high art, High celebrity and HIGH reality. Where is the third place that walks beside you?
To answer a question before it is asked. Am I trying to cash in on Dash? When I read about Mr. Snow’s passing it made me sad. I wanted to write about him because I felt I imagined an affinity. I only write about things that interest me. I’m only interested in things that show some sort of grand pattern or intelligent design. All cultural work is designed to be consumed in one way or another.
While I understand that Mr. Snow was a living breathing human being, I mean him no disrespect by writing about his life and work. I wish to take nothing away from his memory. I’m interested in him as a piece of paper that Joseph Cornell and Kurt Schwitters would find on the street and re-integrate through their next piece, their next collage with the symbol of the avatar.
Dash Snow was an interesting artist and his passing in close proximity to Mr. Jackson deserves his work to be looked at more microscopically. I wanna beat Schnabel and make my own movie about Dash Snow, starring myself (as myself) but in homage to Dash Snow as only Dash Snow could be Dash Snow.
This summer, on envelopes, I stamp the Mona Lisa in duplicate. I arrange one just off center from the other. Then I stamp “Dash Snow” over the top in royal purple. This activity in the service of cultural accommodation (the use of the mail to distribute art) is a high end depiction of his work. The name, the brand above another brand of high art links these affinities forever.
Meanwhile a Russian tourist hurls a recently purchased gift mug at the actual Mona Lisa. The mug hits the bullet proof glass and shatters to the floor. The French doctors held the woman for psychiatric observation. A psychosomatic illness, the Stendhal Syndrome occurs when an individual has a panic attack after being exposed to multitudes of art. Just last summer a woman kissed a painting by Cy Twombly leaving a large red smudge. She was sentenced to community service after being diagnosed as suffering from the dreaded stinkfoot Stendhal Syndrome.
You just have to accept that some people aren’t going to reply. The day the Mona Lisa was attacked by a coffee mug bought in the gift shop like a piece of scrimshaw, I sent out some letters. I did a double rubber dubber of the Mona Lisa with “Dash Snow” on top of it-because now Dash Snow is in the pantheon, a blurred double reflective grade that can be accessed at will. “How much talent does it take to cum on a copy of the New York Post anyway?” Maybe if Dash Snow had cum on the bulletproof glass of the Mona Lisa he would have been correctly diagnosed.












