Plasma Idolatry

With the Photon Gargoyle

Angye Gaona

Colombian writer and surrealist comrade Angye Gaona is accused of drug trafficking and rebellion by a police state regime, which could result in an up to 20 year prison sentence. In a tense political climate the case seems motivated by repressive interests as she is a well-known cultural critic and activist. Her trial is to begin on January 23rd. More international attention in the interests of solidarity with poetry and free speech is called for. Follow the links below for more information.


http://les-risques-du-journalisme.over-blog.com/article-mobilization-for-the-colombian-poet-angye-gaona-97064304.html


http://robberbridegroom.blogspot.com/2012/01/act-now-to-defend-poet-angye-gaona.\
html

http://www.facebook.com/events/316979401670258/

Bedroom Set

Inner Sound Masks

Sado-Masochism is an endless, so-small Crazy Jane that has not been the other manifesto amongst us in my drunk tankards which persist to listen entranced as a number of different senses.

Love's quest is the brooding abstractions bearing lone vast silence of freed inner sound masks in social villages, confirming totemic exile wilderness of distinct heresy behind the world-soul torture.

--Word collage based on dice rolls

Class War Karaoke #16

I've a short track included on the 16th edition of Class War Karaoke compiled by Anthony Donovan, Adrian, Jaan Patterson and friends. It includes 58 pieces of music, 11 short-films, and contributor texts.

Click on the title above to access the sounds and related links, or copy/paste this link to listen or download:

http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Classwar_Karaoke/0016_survey/


The texts are available here:

http://classwarkaraoke.blogspot.com/2011/08/0015-survey-31st-august-2011.html


The films can be found at:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL51540144A91D127D

Patricide 4: The Sound of Surrealism

Patricide 4 - 'The Sound of Surrealism' is now available as a book and CD
package.

The CD includes 42 tracks from Johannes Bergmark, Jude Cowan, Bedwyr Williams, Eric Bragg, Ribitch, Matthias Schuster, Minima, Daniel Lehan, Eze Chimalio, Richard Sanderson, Lesley Guy, Neil Webb, The Sonic Egg, Leona Jones, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Kevin Logan, the Patricide International, and more.

The book features:

Bill Howe : Automatic Texts
Johannes Bergmark : Music is a Verb! Music is Nothing
Jude Cowan : Orbyhage
David Berridge : The Ears of Claude Cahun
Brandon Freels : Bull's Eye
Joe Pulver : A Dull Clatter of Proper Teacups
Shibek : Noise Walking with Prepared Guitar
Vincent Dachy : Vocal Chords
Kevin Logan : I Need the Noises of Destruction
Richard Misiano-Genovese : Sleep Deprivation
Paul Buck : Spread Wider Than Before
Adrian Dannatt : On the Welsh Sound Scene
Ron Sakolsky : Unheard Soundscape

The book also includes extracts from and new translations of writings by
Edgard Varèse, André Breton, Virgil Thomson, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Erik Satie, Michael Vandelaar, E.L.T. Mesens, and more.

For ordering information, see

http://www.patricide.co.uk/

Question and Answer with random magazines

What's a trampoline?
A terrible error.
For magnets?
For snow!
How does it affect the funny bone?
It's the second guilty plea.
So what is the brilliant idea?
The jackass groin video.
Where does it snoop?
Your fragile, furious faith.

The Mime Reached Out Her Hand

They Lay In Wait

Desire in a Book show

Friends from the St. Louis Surrealist Group have put this exhibition together. Click on the image for a closer view.

Surrealism in 2012: Towards the World of the Fifth Sun

The Surrealism in 2012 show opens in January 2012 at the GoggleWorks Center in Reading, Pennsylvania. Click on the title for more information.

Joel Williams, Patricide, Oystercatcher

I recently received nearly a dozen smaller-sized books from Joel Williams. They are wonderfully colorful with titles like Red Skies, Serpentine, Anatomy, and Landscape. Many of the intriguing and playful drawings and collages suggest oneiric machines interacting with, and like, bodies on the sub-atomic level. Nudes features numerous spherical shapes arranged on various landscapes, which provokes a variety of complex and subtle emotions. Red Skies is probably my favorite book, with its glossy mixes of reds, orange and yellow backgrounds and perturbing constructions of surrational machinery, but all the books are a marvel. Williams has been in various exhibitions and collaborates with the Chicago Surrealists.

Patricide 3: Surrealism and the Uncanny. This 200 page journal-sized issue examines The Place of Memory, Documenting the Uncanny, Revolutionary Moments, and Uncanny Poetics. Contributors include Neil Coombs, Nicholas Royle, Mattias Forshage, Renay Kerkman, Brandon Freels, Stephanie Skura, J.K. Bogartte, Joe Pulver, and others. Editor Coomb's essay on Buttes-Chaumont, Kerkman's piece on the Ouisi Board, and Forshage's commentary on horror cinema are among the high points so far. There is also a section on surrealism in the Middle East. Documentary photos include Portland's own sidewalk teeth. Go to www.patricide.co.uk to order a copy.

The Oystercatcher. An occasional magazine from Denman Island, Canada with a blend of anarcho-surrealist, creative, critical and regional material. Issue 8 features a Mayday introduction, collages and poems, reviews and commentary on Tunisia, the Ishmaelites, Haymarket Scrapbook, Surrealism and queer desire, Vanishing Art, notes on Vancouver counter-cultural history, and more. There is a collage by the departed Don LaCoss that springs the levers of objective chance. Send a donation for a copy; Ron Sakolsky, A-4062 Wren Road, Denman Island BC, Canada, VOR 1TO

Cthulhu and the Surrealist Djinn

ENCOUNTER

Leonora Carrington, Jean Benoit

I wanted to give a shout out to Leonora Carrington who recently died. She was 94, living in Mexico. Her contributions to surrealism and the creative world in general are immense; she led a colorful life of black humor and adventure, some of it tragic. Her imaginative works, critical spirit and intelligent revolt is an inspiration. So I honor her name now along with Jean Benoit who died last year. Let some of her paintings be placed randomly by Benoit's animated Sadean costume.

Jump From The Brain Orgasm They Do

The Return of Captain Shibboleth

Monkey Ears and the Golden Owl

You Will Be Apalled (Five Books)

I told him, instead of feeling it shift position, these modern Romans’ words belched in frenzy.

My attention was captured. You will be appalled, to say the least; one thing leads to another.

Incidentally, the Philosophers’ Stone! A coherent picture of the universe, this steamy carnival. Pale enthusiast, in a word-- Universal Analogy.

An intellectual construction sank heavily out of sight, beloved woman clinging to some balcony.

But Newport, 1765, a crime of my own, into emblems--core of a paranoiac illness.

For the child as entirely new, to take on a more disturbing bulk, a carved doorway, I can still see.

Possession of the minds of desire.

Driven by vague resemblance differently.

The child must learn what you least expect.


--Mixed phrases selected by chance (with minor edits) from the following books:
Wrong Numbers by Franklin Rosemont
The Custom House of Desire: A Half-Century of Surealist Stories, ed. J.H. Mattews
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
Juliette by the Marquis DeSade
Waking up Screaming, H.P. Lovecraft

sPE_0100

I've added a track to Peak the Source, suRRism-PhonoEthics' 100th release. This three volume project features dozens of improvised, ambient, electronic, noise/glitch, and unclassified sound artists. Click on the title above or copy and paste the link below to download or have a listen.

http://freemusicarchive.org/music/suRRism-Phonoethics_sPE_0100/

April Fools' Gesture

Playtime with the Jack of Hearts

Class War Karaoke #13

I've added a short track to Class War Karoake Survey #13 which is compiled by Jaan Patterson, Anthony Donovan and friends. You can listen or download the album by clicking on the title above.

For Madame Lepidoptera

The constant peal of rising and falling snake's eyes
Wraps the tail of a tiny comet
Launched by collisions of subatomic machinery

It finds a way to my kinetic egg
Shape of biological exuberance
Into its dark tunnels I flash
Winged in phosphorous and foliage

I will be whirlwind of play
In subtle mannequins of surrender
Leaving them to unfold
Like a paper box
In your ears of surprise

Don LaCoss

Don LaCoss, radical scholar and writer, and member of the International Surrealist Movement, died on January 31st at age 46.

While we never met in person, I appreciated his comradely correspondence over much of the last decade. His was a lively and friendly voice even in electronic messages. He generously sent multiple copies of his pamphlets, articles and collages for me to distribute locally. In the last several years, among other places, his writings appeared in Benjamin Peret: A Menagerie in Revolt (Black Swan Press, 2009) and in the pages of the Fifth Estate. He also wrote a pamphlet on the surrealist presence during the May 1968 Parisian uprising and was working on a book about Egyptian and Arab surrealism* as well as a forthcoming issue of Fifth Estate when he died.

My empathy to his family and friends.

You can read more about him on this memorial page.

There are also some tributes here.

*Some of his writings on Egyptian and Arab Surrealism can be found in issues 21 and 22 of the magazine Communicating Vessels which are available for a (cash) donation or postage stamps from PO Box 83408, Portland, Oregon, 97283. I also highly recommend the aforementioned book on Peret which features Don's afterword entitled 'Benjamin Peret and the Ecological Imagination' where he wrote: "Poetry wrings out the repression that saturates our words and phrases by turning them inside out and knotting them together into stormy new topological geometries."

CHILDREN OF DAGON

(This article previously appeared in the Seaside Surrealism issue of Patricide.)

When I think of Seaside Surrealism, Lovecraft, Lamantia, and Lautreamont answer. These writers don’t present a unified theme or idea about the seaside as such, but because of their oceanic actions, they trespass upon it. They have related to the ocean in ways which remain suggestive and interesting to me.

Dagon was historically a Mesopotamian grain god with multiple names, said to have come from the sea or space. He is pictured as a man wearing a fish skin, or as a man with a fish tail. Zoom forward several thousand years and Dagon, in pop culture, has become a demonic sea monster and a name for black metal bands, situated alongside Leviathan or Cthulhu in the popular imagination. Some responsibility must belong to H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft’s short story Dagon presents an aquatic humanoid being discovered in a giant ocean crater, while Stuart Gordon’s film Dagon, based more around The Shadow Over Innsmouth, has him as a sea creature served in a gruesome manner by cultists. The most remarkable thing is that people in the decaying seaside town are making the transformation into humanoid aquatic creatures themselves. Some are able to live both at sea and on land. Many of them, in fact, are children of Dagon via human mothers and are looking forward to returning to the sea. Despite being a monster, Dagon helps them desert the human race and protects them.

In Maldoror by Lautreamont, Maldoror has a relationship with the waves. He embraces and makes love with a shark at sea, turns into an octopus, and salutes the Ancient Ocean. He wants to be buried at sea. He compares its immense depths to the depths of the human heart, yet concludes that the heart is deeper. He asks if the ocean is Satan’s abode. Despite his appreciation for the ocean’s expansive, unruly violence which terrifies humanity, towards the end of his rapture he reveals he cannot give all his love to the ocean which forces him to live among humanity, ‘the most buffoonish antithesis ever seen in creation.’ Maldoror is humbled by the power of the sea which he admits to visiting thousands of times.

Philip Lamantia, in his poem Voice of Earth Mediums, invokes the ocean’s waves as a weapon against rampant industrialism and a complacent civilization:
“If the complete crowd-manacled machine isn’t dissolved, back into the earth from where its elements were stolen, we shall call on The Great Ocean Wave, Neter of waters, and the King of Atlantis and his snake spirits, otherwise known as Orcus, Dagon, and Drack, to send up calamitous tidal waves-- a thousand feet high if need be—to bury all the monster metal cities and their billion, bullioned wheels of chemical death.”

Lamantia has claimed the Flood myth to speak in the language of apocalypse, from a passionate motivation to purge himself of disgust at modern civilization. The ocean will inundate the seaside while those who called upon Atlantis are sheltered from the deluge.

In summary, Lamantia suggests a fantastic occult relation with the ocean, Maldoror can cross over between sea and land but cannot stay at sea, and the Dagon cult has integrated the ocean and land. I will look at them for a moment.

Dagon’s children gradually become something other from within the shell of their apparent humanity. Their physical changes suggest our desires to escape the limits of the human form, to really live with the imagination. They are dangerous gifts, methodical madness, and species treason. The blasphemy that the Dagon cultists embody is the literal ‘creepy’ advance down a road where humans fear to tread—into interspecies becoming. The basic expressions of fish or frogs unsettle us when transferred to humans. Of course human-animal hybrids are familiar to the creative person, dreamer, shaman and child, and appear in world myth. The film’s community in the remote seaside town pursued with dedication a real-time mutation or permanent shapeshifting. I find complicity with the idea of mutation pursued for love or pleasure, but not all the features of horror cinema necessarily.

Despite living under cover in the human world, and being under the sway of the authoritarian priests who encouraged herd-like cruelty, the children of Dagon found an innocent freedom at sea while learning how to use their new bodies. How strange the weight of land gravity must be for those who live in the ocean part-time.

When I head to Seaside, Oregon, just west of me, and dive into the ocean, I want to have my gills ready. I’m growing them beneath my clothes so no one will know.

References:
1: Maldoror and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautreamont, p.41. Translated by Alexis Lykiard. Exact Change, 1994.
2: Bed of Sphinxes: New and Selected Poems 1943-1993, by Philip Lamantia. City Lights, 1997.

To The Lighthouse

THE SKELETAL DOMINOES

GIFT TO A DEAD DOCTOR

For big cash and prizes, the White House says 'just one minute.' The etymology is the reason speculation would deny incomprehension. A former nobody discussing hyperpolarized refined sugar said practical solutions disturbed the statistics. "There's no point in exposing kids to ignorance." It's not clear if the defrocked soldiers would be considered a free gift to a deceased New Zealand physician.

--Improvised word collage from random newspapers

THE ADVENTURES OF SILVER-HAIRED PLASMA

Cassette Cover

Steel Imp of Purpose

Soon the aspects of inter-cerebral dynamism will reroute the plants. Inwardly a doppelganger, outwardly a flying bicycle yearning for the moon's secret limbic in the dread goblet of panting noumena sorcerers. The birth mark of unheard squeaks in the ambient crystal butterfly, as in, turn the radio down with your foot. The diatomatious circle of wolves, sleep cone society vortex hog. Wrecked pace of humid goats. I am all that, and her lingering breath, too. There's not a spider without a faraday, my heated steel imp of purpose.

Interpretive Images

Karl Marx Werewolf, Benjamin Peret Batman, Beelzebub and Friends in a Subway Tunnel




In the Night Forest




Airplane Ride

Qkcofse: Molecular Detournement Egregore

My album Molecular Detournement Egregore has been released on the suRRism-Phonoethics netlabel and the Free Music Archive. M.D.E. features improvised, ambient and harsh noise tracks constructed from processed recordings, electronics, prepared guitar, voice, box flute, found sounds and amplified objects. The suRRism-Phonoethics and Free Music Archives links have been added to the sidebar. Many thanks to Jaan Patterson. Click on the title or copy/paste the links below.

http://surrism.phonoethics.com/surrism-phonoethics_qkcofse_m.d.e_spe_0043.html


http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Qkcofse

Moby Dick Jr. on behalf of the Ancient Ocean

Photo provided by Paloma Werner (see link for story)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100721/od_yblog_upshot/beware-of-jumping-whales-when-sailing-off-the-coast-of-south-africa

Tales of the Tongue

My tongue bounces into secret rivers with a quartz laugh overthrowing phantasmic doppler hyenas. Vowel sounds of unearthed roots merge with the toes of disgust to produce realms where the dance lives in sweet waves of sparks that drench me in time travel boats lashed to moon habitats where blood's theater pulsates into oblivion's heavy eyelids which close around the invisible world of microscopic cosmos.

Human meat slaves of boredom lock up the granite dust vipers to the peril of glass slipper roots pouring from the shoulders of iron mice. The second act of creation destroys the first as easily as a hand grasps the dark tombs of disquiet. Temptation's morphic swings heave in a sandstorm of cubes. Meteor showers ignite plasmic dust and take flight across the plains of wow.

My nose is a dream's kiss which jumps into the midst of thickening pods of sound which caress my ambiguous flame on your lava bed of goat skates. The walls open for me to find my way to your long fingers, where the stellar heights arc through doors of sidereal approximations. Sonic grasses of mountains bend in the wind's hollow hat in perplexing visions of ghost robes.

Scary Neptune Players

On the grim threshold of humor I deploy the subterfuge flowers in blue flame, waving echoes of sonar to enhance the gill-breathing ones, the scary Neptune players of interstellar babies.

Translucent Quickness

Hydrolith Chance Poems

Uftulata driving intoxicated cosmopolitan anomaly, giving rise to feel port of volume 34...believers can be seen of his snakes, to another light, to respond with a basic understanding.

Steam in the hair moved when oh foam terra will soon swing the contemplation that she hid in a hurry if not synchronic aegis by her locks.

That range, to this point, freeing up a dubious connection to which the half eaten layers black in the hands and the ego density their thesis...

The Aquatic Libertine

Dear Unknown letters part one

Dear Unknown,

The letters you sent were carved from stone fish eyes in some inexplicable submarine galley and I've eight minutes to read the hour. This is why I could walk through walls on the way to the neck of that star in your breath. Humor that you'll ever volcano walk, slowly footstep the drinks, and my nights float in a polarity of obelisk cats.

HYDROLITH

The international surrealist book Hydrolith, which I was one of the six editors for, has been released by Oyster Moon Press via lulu.com and is available at a discount for two months. There's also a free pdf at the lulu site. Click on the title above or copy/paste the link below:
http://tinyurl.com/hydrolith

What they're all talking about

there was a tiny hole in the bag and when I moved it this rapidly poured out onto the counter

from Rite of the Dragonfly, butoh inspired dance

STILL FROM PARANOIAC FILM

MITOSIS INSECT LANDSCAPE

LILITH AND SAMAEL (interpretive image)

ORIGIN OF HUMANITY

My knives have met the limpid air and crumbling spectral minarets. Would the scourge of mediocrity sully a fine mist with crashed regenerative torches? I can't see why easy answers won't wash away like flowers on a submarine, but I've been something else during grotesque measurements. When iconic transmogrify comes to the sleeping, ruminate how ice is an inert gas. I'll be there at the origin of humanity. Then we'll know who laughs first with rose bubbles of volcanic cellulite.

WORMHOLE BEACH

OROBOROUS EYES

Triskelion birds inhale oceans with lizard ears and vanishing footprint geysers. Black silver meteors fly as moth lair photisms amidst caterwaul sitars. Concave meanings raise hollow lightning ships, my oroborous eyes.

LATENT NEWS BLOG

Stuart Inman and I started a blog dedicated to Latent News, a surrealist game which seeks to 'disorder the mystification called news to reveal something of its latent content.'* The texts posted there are a result of cut and paste or optical collage-like actions done with newspapers or other media. Improvisation and chance creates a new sequence of events which is then related in a news-like fashion, with the only rule being the formation of grammatically correct sentences. Click on the title above to visit the site.

*I first encountered the phrase 'Latent News' in an article by Franklin Rosemont who described the essential features of the game.

BLACK FRIDAY

Look at the contrived charade being promoted as 'Black Friday.' A big shopping day makes the culture take notice. The message is that we are fulfilling ourselves, finding a purpose within our 'all being in it together.' The bottom line is the hook to destroy the wings of the fish and real domination lingers on in haunted heads of colonized flesh. 'Black Friday' is the loose nose of a breathless sack of garbage in a brain-scum fingered into 'unique' ladders of triggered remorse, sartorial gargoyle brain-dis, the waste of words for imaginary fountain of fools.

DJINNS OF EROS

BOOK DOWSING

What is a will to be well?
The incurable crisis of civilization
It's being transmitted from this yacht
It's the caressing action of fried oysters by their parents
In that redoubtable wood of monstrous circumstances.

Serves the presupposition of convincing our pupil, the horses in the seed machine, the old arcades of her past with a powdered wig, just as if the events were happening to him. On my belly I know the dead silently glow to the east before scrying dancing blue fishtail.

Her face again I realized I desired;
Neandertals dissected Fourierism.

--Chance text made by selecting random words from books

HOMO LUDENS (short paranoiac film)

THIRD OWL NEBULA

The slick zygote moth
wades in and out of my tongue

the third owl nebula
a synthetic constellation of footprints

My space-station mouth
with a venomous sponge
from the dark ocean floor

where diamonds form in a hot minute

UNDULATIONS FOR THE GOLGI

NO WAR ON THE MOON!

NO WAR ON THE MOON!

In Defense of the Dark Side of the Moon


"But, for myself, the Earth's records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization."--- Edgar Allan Poe, The Colloquy Of Monos And Una (1850)

Twenty years before a powerful syndicate of military-industrial criminals conspired to plant a US flag on the Moon, a similar clique of fiends plotted to fire a nuclear warhead-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile at the lunar face. Code-named "Project A119," this plan devised by Cold War-era Air Force and weapons manufacturers called for a massive nuclear explosion that would be clearly visible from anywhere on Earth. Researchers struggled in vain to find any pretext, any shred of legitimate scientific value, to glean from this sickening display of militarist impunity. But the sole objective of Project A119 was to terrorize into submission every human on the planet (especially those who had never heard of Hiroshima or Nagasaki) with a demonstration of how the US ruling class was technologically adept and morally bankrupt enough to commit such an unimaginable poetic atrocity.

And now, once again, there are plans to bomb the Moon. This time the unilateral strike is aimed at the Moon's South Pole and the payload will be delivered by the LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) spacecraft; the excuse given is that this is an effort to find water deep under lunar surface. The craft was launched in late June and is currently orbiting the Earth until it finds its target; if all goes according to plan, the M-Day bombing will be 8 October 2009.

The plan is this: the LCROSS first shoots off its 2,300-pound spent booster-rocket at the lunar target zone. Four minutes later, in a scheme apparently inspired by fanatical terrorist airline hijackers, the rest of the robotic LCROSS craft slams into the same area. Like crazed kamikaze paparazzi, the craft will snap photos and transmit data on the first strike back to NASA's mad bombers before immolating itself in a second explosion. This violent hi-tech sci-fi spectacle will cost anywhere up to $600 million, a price tag that is an outrageous insult to the millions of working people unable to feed, house, or medically treat their families. (As Gil Scott-Heron lamented in 1974: "How come there ain't no money here? Hmm! Whitey's on the Moon!")

Of course, there is much more behind this attack than casual scientific curiosity on whether or not there is water on the Moon. First of all, since the long-range accuracy of intercontinental ballistic missiles has never been proven to work, the LCROSS suicide mission serves as a live-fire test exercise for US war strategists with an interest in the precision of orbiting satellite weapons--in other words, the southern hemisphere of the Moon will be turned into a firing range, making this mission one giant leap for the global reach of space warfare. Secondly, LCROSS has been promoted as "the vanguard" for the US military-industrial-entertainment complex's return to the Moon: according to NASA, finding water is a necessary first step for "building a long-term and sustainable human presence" there. Historically, the purpose of exploration has always been the exploitation of resources and the colonization of territory without regard for ecosystems or indigenous peoples, and clearly the Moon is the next territory coveted by imperialists.

Only people with colonized minds believe these things are positive, or that this type of "progress" can be beneficial to anyone beyond a small circle of exploiter-elites. And, as to be expected, there is no end to the number of those who seek to compensate for their own personal impotence by over-identifying with these grotesque displays of obscene state-corporate power. You can hear them chattering on the Internet: "Flying a rocket booster into the Moon at 5,600 mph to trigger a massive explosion is just flat-out cool," says one, while another sneers "Public discussion? Why should there be a˜ 'public discussion' about a NASA experiment?" Such remarks challenge our contempt. There should be a discussion, not only by the public, but also by oceans, weather patterns, plants, and all sorts of other living things; the most uninformed know enough about the "butterfly effect" to realize that changing one part of any system is going to have a cascading effect on all those things dependent upon that system.

This so-called "NASA experiment" is a hostile act of aggression and a violent intrusion upon our closest and dearest celestial neighbor. Does any love song or poem or fairy tale worth its salt not mention the Moon? Who can take a walk in the Moonlight with a lover and not feel the romance to your very soul? At night, when the Moon rules, we sleep, and we can visit the Moon in our sleep with ease. The Moon is our night light, our blanket, our grandmother, our mother; it is woman, child, domestic life, tides, bodies of water, liquids, circulation, comfort, nurturing, paintings by Remedios Varo, stories by Jules Verne, and so much more.

Let us assume that ignorance will rule the day and plans go forward. What can we as surrealists or lunatics or astrologers or naturalists or anarcho-primitivists or Greens or werewolves or pagans or psychics or UFO groupies or other concerned members of the general public do? We must soothe the Moon, we bandage her. We implore other celestial bodies and entities to aid her. We will not let her endure this crime or its grim aftermath alone.

We need to communicate to the Moon. Talk to her in our dreams, trances, or meditations, and prepare her for this shock and wound as best we can. Hold her, send out imaginative protection to her, and put our dream bodies out there in front of the bomb. Collectively, we can sabotage the bombing by imagining all manner of things going wrong, or encouraging the Moon to increase her own magnetic shields. Sing to her. Give her back just a tiny portion of all that she has done for us. We are all created from Moon dust.

We pledge solidarity with the Moon and promise we will do everything that we can to help heal her and to prevent any further such stupid, short-sighted, self-serving, man-made acts of obscene violence against her.


Gale Ahrens, Guy Ducornet, Beth Garon, Paul Garon, Joseph Jablonski, Renay Kerkman, Don Lacoss, David Roediger, Penelope Rosemont, Joel Williams

Surrealist Group in the US.

Surrealistmovement-usa.org

HEART-HEAD, CLOSEUP OF A FINGERPRINT, EXQUISITE CORPSE, INTERPRETIVE IMAGE, SURRATIONAL COMIC, FRINGE SCIENCE LAB

SCENES FROM THE HAUNTED HEAD HOTEL

RACE THE EGREGORE TO THE EXIT

THE ORGONOME

FOUND OBJECT DISPLAY

CONVERSATION

"My past slips out a wormhole brain so I can exhale like a horse"

"And dance forgetfully in spiral conch shell caves"

"Lining the cliffs by the ocean's bony phantasms"

"Where teeth rise to the top layer of soil"

"With a red wine laughter boat..."

"Racing the dusk."

"I'll wear electromagnetism, and practice levitation"

"Shrinking like a slug's antenna..."

"To hitch-hike on the cloth rays of wasabi engines."

PARANOIAC FIGURE

ANDREW TORCH SHOW IN ST. LOUIS

I was able to briefly visit a small show of paintings, images and objects by Andrew Torch of the St. Louis Surrealist Group. It was held in a frame shop in St. Louis, where one room was devoted to paintings and objects. The most striking was a large painting ‘A Real Life Allegory...’' whose use of dense imaginative color commands the attention as ambiguous layers co-habitate in the substance of a seven-year process one can fall into. There was a box object nearby which created an optical synthesis through a special lens, as a bird-headed being lurked in the narrow box. A larger object-box featured elephants coming and going while the viewer found their eye and chin split up visually into a kind of humorous 'cubomania' when they looked into the system of relays within the box. I feel this may have helped provoke a dream I had later that night where it seemed I had another face, which I discovered in a mirror on a telephone pole near a house I lived in nine years ago. Another object at the show which I enjoyed featured an antique clock infiltrated by a small di. The random factor of chance is 'salt' in the wound of linear time. I also couldn't help but wonder about the old heating vents in one corner of the floor, beneath a wire grate. What sort of experience could happen down there, I thought quietly.

FRANKLIN ROSEMONT 1943-2009

I want to take a moment to honor Franklin Rosemont who died on April 12th. I first encountered his writings in Arsenal #4 (Black Swan Press, Chicago: 1989) around 1991. Although I had read Breton's Manifestos of Surrealism and a handful of other works that were translated into English, I was not aware that the Surrealist Movement still existed in our era. After seeing parallels between surrealist poetry and my internal experience I tried to find everything I could that appeared in English, and Franklin's works were some of the most interesting and well-researched. In a period when too many works about surrealism in English were poisoned by falsehood and academic necrophilia, it was great to read Franklin's energetic and modern perspective that provided an aggressive counterpoint to the Salvador Dali imitators and the uptight art museum myopia. I have several signed copies of his books, including The Apple of the Automatic Zebra's Eye, Wrong Numbers, and Revolution in Service of the Marvellous, the latter two which he sent to the Portland Surrealist Group several years back.

My condolences and solidarity to Penelope Rosemont, the Chicago group and its affiliates.

A message from Inter-Activist Info-Exchange is reproduced below.

Franklin Rosemont RIP April 12th, 2009
David Roediger, Paul Garon, and Kate Khatib

Franklin Rosemont, celebrated poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and surrealist activist, died Sunday, April 12 in Chicago. He was 65 years old. With his partner and comrade, Penelope Rosemont, and lifelong friend Paul Garon, he co-founded the Chicago Surrealist Group, an enduring and adventuresome collection of characters that would make the city a center for the reemergence of that movement of artistic and political revolt. Over the course of the following four decades, Franklin and his Chicago comrades produced a body of work, of declarations, manifestos, poetry, collage, hidden histories, and other interventions that has, without doubt, inspired an entirely new generation of revolution in the service of the marvelous.

Franklin Rosemont was born in Chicago on October 2, 1943 to two of the area’s more significant rank-and-file labor activists, the printer Henry Rosemont and the jazz musician Sally Rosemont. Dropping out of Maywood schools after his third year of high school (and instead spending countless hours in the Art Institute of Chicago’s library learning about surrealism), he managed nonetheless to enter Roosevelt University in 1962. Already radicalized through family tradition, and his own investigation of political comics, the Freedom Rides, and the Cuban Revolution, Franklin was immediately drawn into the stormy student movement at Roosevelt.

Looking back on those days, Franklin would tell anyone who asked that he had “majored in St. Clair Drake” at Roosevelt. Under the mentorship of the great African American scholar, he began to explore much wider worlds of the urban experience, of racial politics, and of historical scholarship—all concerns that would remain central for him throughout the rest of his life. He also continued his investigations into surrealism, and soon, with Penelope, he traveled to Paris in the winter of 1965 where he found André Breton and the remaining members of the Paris Surrealist Group. The Parisians were just as taken with the young Americans as Franklin and Penelope were with them, as it turned out, and their encounter that summer was a turning point in the lives of both Rosemonts. With the support of the Paris group, they returned to the United States later that year and founded America’s first and most enduring indigenous surrealist group, characterized by close study and passionate activity and dedicated equally to artistic production and political organizing. When Breton died in 1966, Franklin worked with his wife, Elisa, to put together the first collection of André’s writings in English.

Active in the 1960s with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Rebel Worker group, the Solidarity Bookshop and Students for a Democratic Society, Franklin helped to lead an IWW strike of blueberry pickers in Michigan in 1964, and put his considerable talents as a propagandist and pamphleteer to work producing posters, flyers, newspapers, and broadsheets on the SDS printing press. A long and fruitful collaboration with Paul Buhle began in 1970 with a special surrealist issue of Radical America. Lavish, funny, and barbed issues of Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion and special issues of Cultural Correspondence were to follow.

The smashing success of the 1968 World Surrealist Exhibition at Gallery Bugs Bunny in Chicago announced the ability of the American group to make a huge cultural impact without ceasing to be critics of the frozen mainstreams of art and politics. The Rosemonts soon became leading figures in the reorganization of the nation’s oldest labor press, Charles H. Kerr Company. Under the mantle of the Kerr Company and its surrealist imprint Black Swan Editions, Franklin edited and printed the work of some of the most important figures in the development of the political left: C.L.R. James, Marty Glaberman, Benjamin Péret and Jacques Vaché, T-Bone Slim, Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, and, in a new book released just days before Franklin’s death, Carl Sandburg. In later years, he created and edited the Surrealist Histories series at the University of Texas Press, in addition to continuing his work with Kerr Co. and Black Swan.

A friend and valued colleague of such figures as Studs Terkel, Mary Low, the poets Philip Lamantia, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Dennis Brutus, the painter Lenora Carrington, and the historians Paul Buhle, David Roediger, John Bracey, and Robin D.G. Kelley, Rosemont’s own artistic and creative work was almost impossibly varied in inspirations and results. Without ever holding a university post, he wrote or edited more than a score of books while acting as a great resource for a host of other writers.

He became perhaps the most productive scholar of labor and the left in the United States. His spectacular study, Joe Hill: The I.W.W. and the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture, began as a slim projected volume of that revolutionary martyr’s rediscovered cartoons and grew to giant volume providing our best guide to what the early twentieth century radical movement was like and what radical history might do. His coedited volume Haymarket Scrapbook stands as the most beautifully illustrated labor history publication of the recent past. Indispensable compendiums like The Big Red Songbook, What is Surrealism?, Menagerie in Revolt, and the forthcoming Black Surrealism are there to ensure that the legacy of the movements that inspired him continue to inspire young radicals for generations to come. In none of this did Rosemont separate scholarship from art, or art from revolt. His books of poetry include Morning of the Machine Gun, Lamps Hurled at the Stunning Algebra of Ants, The Apple of the Automatic Zebra’s Eye and Penelope. His marvelous fierce, whimsical and funny artwork—to which he contributed a new piece every day—graced countless surrealist publications and exhibitions.

Indeed, between the history he himself helped create and the history he helped uncover, Franklin was never without a story to tell or a book to write—about the IWW, SDS, Hobohemia in Chicago, the Rebel Worker, about the past 100 years or so of radical publishing in the US, or about the international network of Surrealists who seemed to always be passing through the Rosemonts’ Rogers Park home. As engaged with and excited by new surrealist and radical endeavors as he was with historical ones, Franklin was always at work responding to queries from a new generation of radicals and surrealists, and was a generous and rigorous interlocutor. In every new project, every revolt against misery, with which he came into contact, Franklin recognized the glimmers of the free and unfettered imagination, and lent his own boundless creativity to each and every struggle around him, inspiring, sustaining, and teaching the next generation of surrealists worldwide.

TUNE IN TOMORROW

Daisy was shocked to set a small fire in the farmhouse just as Kevin was pistol-whipping Jeff. Edmund went into a rage and smashed the music box she was moving out of the mansion. After talking to specialists who had been knocked out for his latest project, Stephanie had second thoughts about nearly making love with Maxie. She had to have blood tests when Philip arrived home and said she received a job offer from the Vancouver Opera House.

--Collaged elements of a newspaper soap-opera TV guide column

AQUA LIZARD TREE