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, I appreciated his comradely correspondence over the last decade. He generously sent multiple copies of pamphlets, articles and collages. 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.