Everything You Need to Know About the Foolish Oracle But Were Afraid To Ask, & News About Upcoming Projects
Terms and Conditions // Services Agreement
(1) This program was written by the Rogue Bureaucrat at the behest of the Foolish Oracle. Please visit us again on June 3, 2023 for our third episode and July 1st, 2023 for our fourth episode. Terms and Conditions apply. By reading these words, or even gazing vacantly upon them, you agree to our terms and conditions. (2) What is the Foolish Oracle? Armchair etymology reveals that the Foolish Oracle deploys the Speech of the Windbag (oracle driving from the Ancient Greek verb to speak, or something like that; and, Fool rides from I dunno Latin or something, and means “bellows,” bellows being those bags of wind that blow on fires and make noises not dissimilar to the noises of a silly village clown slobbering raspberries all over all our dear ideas). It’s cold in the room they’ve trapped me in. This is how I prefer it. I like small rooms with little light and no doors or windows. (3) On Freedom of Speech and Bellowing: You are free to read these words without compensating the writer. You are free to visit the Foolish Oracle on the First Saturday of every month at Bulldog News in Seattle Washington at 11 am without compensating the Foolish Oracle and the Foolish Oracle’s disloyal helpers and players. You are free to do these things, but know that the Foolish Oracle is in league with many demons and a very pesky wraith, and they will steal parts of your soul to gobble up. This does nothing to nourish the Oracle, but it nourishes the parasitic demons. Nothing nourishes the wraith because the wraith is like a hungry ghost. The wraith eats and eats and eats and is never satisfied. One could even argue, if one were so inclined, that feeding the wraith is in no one’s best interest. Furthermore, if you, the reader or the visitor to the oracle, continually partake in such festivities and publications without compensating for the work that went into such things, you will eventually have no soul. This is not a permanent condition. A soul can be regrown through giving, nurturing, and caring. Corny, I know. Souls are like kernels of corn. I don’t know how or why because I am a (rogue) bureaucrat, not a (rogue) farmer. Anyway, sometimes it’s good to have a few demons feasting on your soul, if you can come to a sorta symbiotic balance, a supernatural biomic harmony that does not shy away from pain and horror but relishes too in joy and beauty, in a manner that allows the strange plants, animals, and fungi creating said experiences (of joy, horror, et cetera, see above) to flourish. What it means to flourish is beyond the scope of this service agreement, but flourishing here relates not to flowers but to all life, and allowing for vitality even when a danger to you. What is life without danger? The rogue bureaucrat recognizes the tricky bind this puts us all in, and recognizes too that by this point, none of this makes a lick of sense, at least to me, the rogue bureaucrat, simply a messenger, Hermes to the Oracle’s divine windbaggery. (4) All dates reference the Gregorian Solar Calendar,which is not my favorite calendar. My favorite calendar is vaguely lunar, and used by some but not all witches. (5) We (the Foolish Oracle Helpers & Players, and me, the lil bureaucrat, ie Impostor in Residence) don't have a lot of money, and seek to put economic issues as they relate to arts and culture in Seattle (etc etc) at the forefront of what we do. We face potentially insurmountable challenges. I’m not paid to be pessimistic, which is to say, I am pessimistic, but I’m not paid for it. That’s fine. I live on hugs and the expectorate of the wraith. Others, though, need food, water, shelter, etc. Being something of an interdimensional imp (see: Gremlins), and without space~time, I don’t have the same worries as standard non-rogue mortals. (6.1) For the June 3 edition of the Foolish Oracle Variety Show, I, the undersigned Rogue Bureaucrat, will visit Host, the undersigned Josephine Kay. We will then precede through the Process. More on this I am not permitted to say without prefacing “spoiler alert.” But since I, the rogue bureaucrat, despise such petty jargon (and by despise, I mean secretly love, and by love, I mean secretly loathe, and by secretly, I mean of or relating to secretions), I will not be alerting you to any spoilage because no spoilage follows. Only secrets and secretions remain. What I can say is this: our third show, on June 3, 2023, is about issues pertaining to art, money, bureaucracy, and the like. (6.2) For the July 1 2023 show, inspired in part by proximity to so-called USA America’s so-called "Independence Day," the Foolish Oracle seeks to create a program around themes of origin and ancestry, moving past conventional and jingoistic narratives, toward something I dunno a little more accurate and interesting, diving certainly headfirst into a radical revision of national origins that does not ignore horror, atrocity, and injustice, but also embraces multiplicities, pluralities, and complexities, and takes part in manifestations of joy, weirdness, and ritual. Something like that. This project requires further elaboration, elaboration neither I nor the Oracle are capable of, because we cannot capture this (whatever this is) accurately (see, the inadequate words above) because we (being who and what we are) don't necessarily have the words for it, whatever it is. Other people might. Some of those words may not be words. This is a performance based variety show. Performance is what we're looking for. In particular, the Foolish Oracle seeks voices, whether these voices be windbags or not windbags, and whether these voices are actual out-loud from larynx and lips voices, or instead voices from body, from gesture, from symbol or signal, or manipulations of color and light, etc, the Foolish Oracle seeks people and voices verbal and nonverbal outside of what some might consider the typical version of USA’s origin story. This can be, if one wants to be cynical (are you paid to be cynical?), characterized as a politically correct maneuver meant to assuage white guilt or meant to help us be accepted by our hip liberal peers. Let me assure you, as a rogue bureaucrat representing a foolish oracle, the last thing we want to be is correct or accepted. Bring us your tired and your hungry, your lonely and your abandoned, your sad and your weird and your wired and your fried, your outsiders, your incorrections. Welcome to the Malforum. Bring us all the wrong people. Bring us people gleefully wrong. Bring us new normals and previously unseen normals and forgotten normals. Bring us people who don’t want to be normalized. Normalization is a form of cultural imperialism, a colonization. As a bureaucrat, I adore saying such things even when I don’t know what they mean. To continue: bring us your skins of brown and black, your neurologies divergent from the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders definition of “Order,” your socio-sexual-spiritual orientations and inclinations that do not accept typical binaries, trinities, or even typical pluralities; bring us your multiplicities, your mutated doppelgangers, yours aliens, sickos, weirdos, freaks, loners, sadsacks, rebels, luddites, anarchists, tricksters, con artists, nerdowells, and ghosts, bring us your feral bodies, your wild scary minds, still in the cave of shadows. Come here and we will let you perform, not just in July but in any or all of the months to come, if you can agree to our terms, of which we only have a few (see below and above, particularly #8, wherein we outline the parameters of acceptable behavior under the general rubric of being against what we will clumsily call Banal Human Evil, so ie: no narcs, squares, bullies, fascists, supremacists, etc.). Thank you. (7) We (see above) don't want to be another "art" thing that can't adequately support and compensate artists and performers (including ourselves). As a rogue bureaucrat, I am paid in hugs and the expectorate of the wraith, as suggested above. This is why I am so very cold. The expectorate makes me cold. Then I am warmed by hugs rather than smothered by them. Others need money to live. It will take time to build a fair and worthy vessel, and I guess it might be impossible, given other factors, and so I throw up my arms in frustration, but I am only mirroring the Foolish Oracle, who’s in the room now pacing back and forth slamming their head against the wall. Anyway, without letting a cloud of crippling pessimism choke me, maybe we can all talk and figure out something that works for everyone. A friendly sharing of ideas if nothing else. An organizing or trading of skills (the Foolish Oracle insists that they have no skills, and I, being a bureaucrat, can only assist others with skulls I mean skills, having nothing inherent to offer but my humble and loyal servitude). We could think of this as a creative alliance against the forces of… well you know… Banal Human Evil (see 8). Being a staged production, we embrace melodramatics. (Melos just means "song" I think.) (8) Nonbanal Evil is here defined as like supernatural things that have every right to be evil, like evil gods and demons and devious woodland sprites etc, who, in their defense, are often more mischievous and playful in their cruelty. At least they don't treat us as means to an end, you know?, So is it more of a kinky erotic thing for them? I can’t say, but we would be naive to ignore that they are also often terrifying and soul devouring monsters. Banal Human Evil is the evil we encounter every day but doesn’t resonate as fantastical and interesting in a storybook sorta way. Racism, misogyny, authoritarian impulses, general unnecessary jerkishness: we don’t want any of that. Nonbanal evil is okay in prescribed doses. You may bring your demons. You may conjure devils. You may come on the show and curse us with poltergeists. But you cannot be (and this is my least favorite part of the job, as a bureaucrat, to have to say that which should be obvious): bullies, racists, etc. I’m not even going to list all of the things you cannot be. I’m not going to do it! I’m so tired! If you are it, we will just send you away. We owe you no explanation. We reserve the right to see through your charade. We reserve the right to desire people fun for us to work with. You may be dumb and you may be difficult, but if you’re both dumb and difficult, get a job in the private sector I guess. In the opinion of the Rogue Bureaucrat (non-binding), the Foolish Oracle is neither dumb nor difficult, but silly and confusing! (It should be noted that I, the rogue bureaucrat, am very open minded and forgiving, kind to a fault, willing to see past quite a bit. The Foolish Oracle, being sorta lost in the clouds, lets a lot slide too. So if we’re not letting it slide, you might rethink your life path. We reserve the right to shun banal evil humans. (9) Why is this so long? Because I've dumbly swallowed the lie that writing words can make sense out of the universe. That's obviously not what language is here to do. Senses make sense. Words are just sounds or squiggles. They are senses too, but not all of the senses. Why am I still typing here? Melodramatics? Song? Can I be let out of my small room now so that I may frolic with the other rogue bureaucrats? My bestie the feral cleric is knockin on the door. The demonic ecologist is calling for me from her window. I want to play now.