Friends from the St. Louis Surrealist Group have put this exhibition together. Click on the image for a closer view.
Sep 1, 2011
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.
Aug 17, 2011
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.
Jul 7, 2011
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
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
Jun 24, 2011
Jun 12, 2011
May 30, 2011
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.
May 15, 2011
May 1, 2011
Apr 10, 2011
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
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
Apr 3, 2011
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/
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/suRRism-Phonoethics_sPE_0100/
Apr 1, 2011
Mar 23, 2011
Mar 13, 2011
Feb 28, 2011
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.
Feb 14, 2011
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
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
Feb 4, 2011
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."
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."
Jan 16, 2011
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.
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.
Jan 7, 2011
Dec 25, 2010
Dec 15, 2010
Dec 9, 2010
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
--Improvised word collage from random newspapers
Nov 17, 2010
Nov 12, 2010
Oct 14, 2010
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.
Sep 7, 2010
Interpretive Images
Karl Marx Werewolf, Benjamin Peret Batman, Beelzebub and Friends in a Subway Tunnel
In the Night Forest
Airplane Ride
Aug 2, 2010
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
http://surrism.phonoethics.com/surrism-phonoethics_qkcofse_m.d.e_spe_0043.html
http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Qkcofse
Jul 21, 2010
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
Jul 5, 2010
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.
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.
Jun 24, 2010
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.
May 31, 2010
May 18, 2010
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...
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...
May 6, 2010
Apr 28, 2010
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.
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.
Apr 8, 2010
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
Mar 10, 2010
Feb 21, 2010
Feb 12, 2010
Jan 17, 2010
Jan 5, 2010
Dec 30, 2009
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.
Dec 24, 2009
Dec 14, 2009
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.
Dec 7, 2009
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.
*I first encountered the phrase 'Latent News' in an article by Franklin Rosemont who described the essential features of the game.
Nov 26, 2009
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.
Nov 3, 2009
Oct 18, 2009
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
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
Oct 9, 2009
Oct 1, 2009
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
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
Sep 22, 2009
Aug 28, 2009
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
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
Aug 23, 2009
Aug 18, 2009
Jul 25, 2009
Jul 7, 2009
Jun 10, 2009
May 21, 2009
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."
"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."
Apr 30, 2009
Apr 23, 2009
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.
Apr 14, 2009
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.
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.
Apr 12, 2009
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
--Collaged elements of a newspaper soap-opera TV guide column
Apr 3, 2009
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Mar 27, 2009
AORTA CLOWNS
Aorta clowns, aorta clowns, I know
Then laughter will have a place to go
A limbic owl twists the
Leaping tornadoes of chance
The glass bell of my mouth
Palindrome feet in a mongoose cha-cha
Aorta clowns, aorta clowns, I know
Then laughter will have a place to go
(song lyrics)
Then laughter will have a place to go
A limbic owl twists the
Leaping tornadoes of chance
The glass bell of my mouth
Palindrome feet in a mongoose cha-cha
Aorta clowns, aorta clowns, I know
Then laughter will have a place to go
(song lyrics)
Mar 20, 2009
DIFFERENT DRAGONS
With its newspaper and the factory
this expression of the adapted vacation
the solar earth
running parallel to it
The most serious city isn't done with different dragons within it.
The daydreaming was a strong, naive alleyway with restored laughter and characteristic corals.
Behind the ultra-jovial water sleeping with birds is a mischievous destiny. The remains of a small crowd.
The path to instinctive trenches is now merged with the ordinary sensation of convulsions.
--Chance dowsing from The Exteriority Crisis: From the City Limits and Beyond (Ed. Eric Bragg, Eugenio Castro, Bruno Jacobs; Oyster Moon Press, 2008).
this expression of the adapted vacation
the solar earth
running parallel to it
The most serious city isn't done with different dragons within it.
The daydreaming was a strong, naive alleyway with restored laughter and characteristic corals.
Behind the ultra-jovial water sleeping with birds is a mischievous destiny. The remains of a small crowd.
The path to instinctive trenches is now merged with the ordinary sensation of convulsions.
--Chance dowsing from The Exteriority Crisis: From the City Limits and Beyond (Ed. Eric Bragg, Eugenio Castro, Bruno Jacobs; Oyster Moon Press, 2008).
Jan 13, 2009
Jan 3, 2009
THOUSANDS OF SHOES TIE UP TRAFFIC (dedicated to the Surrealist Group of Madrid)
Miami--State troopers are looking for a charity to take thousands of shoes that were dumped on a Miami expressway, tying up rush hour traffic. Lt. Pat Santangelo said the Florida Highway Patrol received a call about the shoes friday morning.
Santangelo said he's not sure where the shoes came from. There were no signs of a crash, and no one stopped to claim them. He said he hopes someone will take them because he doesn't want to send them to the dump.
Workers using a front-end loader and a dump truck were able to quickly clear at least one lane by sweeping all the shoes to shoulder, but delays were expected until they could all be removed.
--From Associated Press
Santangelo said he's not sure where the shoes came from. There were no signs of a crash, and no one stopped to claim them. He said he hopes someone will take them because he doesn't want to send them to the dump.
Workers using a front-end loader and a dump truck were able to quickly clear at least one lane by sweeping all the shoes to shoulder, but delays were expected until they could all be removed.
--From Associated Press
Dec 24, 2008
Dec 8, 2008
THE PHENOL KYLIX
Iron pyrites' monanthous lymph emulsion stashes the modular hippocampus and fickle pyramids germinate belligerent lorgnettes. Quinic acid sparks a phenol kylix whose masks coarctate obverse prefixes tempting lucent nostrums' osmosis. An umlaut neuritis slides ticklish walls within parrotfish fractions.
--From dictionary dowsing experiments
--From dictionary dowsing experiments
Dec 2, 2008
OUT OF THE WAY AVENUES
Some ways I've tried to engage the world lately involve moving found objects around the city during walks and bike rides, and exploring long overgrown alleyways in the north and northeast parts of Portland. The alleyways cut through backyards and there are various points of interest, whether it be overhanging tree limbs obscuring the path, a broken down car that may have been someone's bedroom, cats, rats, possums, racoons, interesting piles of rubble, someone's trash, graffiti, overgrown weeds and crumbling concrete mixed with hard dirt trails, and so on. Some spots offer a feeling of clandestine passage due to fences and walls being on either side, and the glare of streetlights does not always penetrate. Thus the impromptu life of the city is shown in some of its aspects when one strolls through the out of the way avenues.
--From the 'Update' on the C.S.E. page
--From the 'Update' on the C.S.E. page
Nov 3, 2008
THE MASK BENEATH THE MASK
As I look at Halloween photos I can't help but feel a certain sadness at the lack of creative and dynamic interpersonal transformation in our society. People are glad to get away from their usual habits by dressing up in colorful, macabre, sexy or humorous costumes. Halloween is the one chance that consciously conforming people have to escape their own particular set of personal and social limitations, because 'everyone does it' and there's no risk in being stared at, insulted or rejected by those who are 'serious adults' in this world of capitalism, dispossession, and imposed identity. But what of the mask beneath the mask? When we stare at ourselves in the mirror after the costumes have gone to the landfill and the beer companies are that much richer, what mysteries lie beneath the apparently calm surface? Where can we express the feeling of having multiple personalities within us when things have returned to 'normal?' 'Humanity' is more often than not another mystifying abstraction that demands our fealty. If I want to be part bat, snake or frog, or even an atmospheric phenomena, who is going to play along? We have little room to develop ourselves beyond sanctioned pathways, and the superego has us on a chain called 'propriety and property.' Where does this reactive loop of domestication get broken other than in the customary alcoholic inebriation or in private hedonism? Beyond the frozen caricatures of our personalities we are still very much unknown to ourselves, and even afraid to admit it. The next time you see someone standing on the street doing nothing, remember--they could be shapeshifting while you shop.
Sep 29, 2008
Sep 18, 2008
QUASIRETINA!
The catnip foils the red birdhouse, whose chest is a flat book astride two skateboards. Cords bubble into arrows, leopard print drapery gloves into the hazelnut wind, blue pushpin plastic alfalfa, coat-of-arms sill, bean jar 2.4 rumples photos. Dice pasta thread busts red doll hair, the moon above them a hat without a crown. Ferrite grain sand sparkles blue. Diameter down the window, a tilted face, echo of the 11:07 stuck watch.
Desert sand purple milk wheel, eaten armchair handles stuffed thread, zombie thread ragdoll worn edge. Glass echo honeycomb window, cap contains silver smell, jar teakettle. Biting apple Louie Louie on the telephone instructions, blue sand. Dry paper door open paper bird, window lock safety pin chain. Black surf squash left shoulders the away, three-eyed plug. A lens is held by three hands, in a circle.
--Semi-automatic text created by imaginative reverie upon things seen in a given area, a method otherwise known as SURROUNDS. Originally printed in Stronger Wine, Madder Music #1.
Desert sand purple milk wheel, eaten armchair handles stuffed thread, zombie thread ragdoll worn edge. Glass echo honeycomb window, cap contains silver smell, jar teakettle. Biting apple Louie Louie on the telephone instructions, blue sand. Dry paper door open paper bird, window lock safety pin chain. Black surf squash left shoulders the away, three-eyed plug. A lens is held by three hands, in a circle.
--Semi-automatic text created by imaginative reverie upon things seen in a given area, a method otherwise known as SURROUNDS. Originally printed in Stronger Wine, Madder Music #1.
Sep 13, 2008
DESCRIBE A ROOM
(This is a variation on the exquisite corpse and was
played by two people. The only requirement was to
'describe a room.')
The room was a curious mix of heaving bronze
airplanes, miniature statues and newspapers that bore
only one word: MINT.
The couch was flanked by two pigeons that looked more
like peacocks. It felt like liver.
The lamps were made from frozen juice, slowly dripping
as they melted onto the carpet which was wearing
something completely inappropriate and kept inching up
on the snail chair.
The chair kept moving around whenever new guests
arrived. They'd come through the front door, a wild
looking meat hook that swung on its hinges exotically
snatching cherry ribbons.
Next to the door was a coatrack that said 'ouch' or
'mmm' when people put their coats and hats on it.
Shibek & Nova
played by two people. The only requirement was to
'describe a room.')
The room was a curious mix of heaving bronze
airplanes, miniature statues and newspapers that bore
only one word: MINT.
The couch was flanked by two pigeons that looked more
like peacocks. It felt like liver.
The lamps were made from frozen juice, slowly dripping
as they melted onto the carpet which was wearing
something completely inappropriate and kept inching up
on the snail chair.
The chair kept moving around whenever new guests
arrived. They'd come through the front door, a wild
looking meat hook that swung on its hinges exotically
snatching cherry ribbons.
Next to the door was a coatrack that said 'ouch' or
'mmm' when people put their coats and hats on it.
Shibek & Nova
Aug 21, 2008
MECHANICAL FETUS ATOMS
The act of dissappearance could be a matter of image changing modern animal prosperity, often invisible. The rhetoric assumes that a complex dynamic is a false statement. Empty choices--'everybody does it.' Point blank strategies of rigid obscurity give meaning to the formulas. This is because decreased wages are the most widely exported racket. An extra myth had to put mechanical fetus atoms of a contradiction to work.
People will be specialized whirlpool zones, where the initial barriers fall back on the rotten expansion of affluent confusion. The pressure consists of untrusting invitation ready to unify the limits of ultra-exact false fronts, when revolutionaries can be everywhere moving through innovative obscurity.
--Composed by chance methods from an older issue of Against Sleep and Nightmare.
People will be specialized whirlpool zones, where the initial barriers fall back on the rotten expansion of affluent confusion. The pressure consists of untrusting invitation ready to unify the limits of ultra-exact false fronts, when revolutionaries can be everywhere moving through innovative obscurity.
--Composed by chance methods from an older issue of Against Sleep and Nightmare.
Jul 31, 2008
THE PINPOINT OF SILENCE
Sight is the feeble moon eclipsed by encyclopedic clouds
The dictionary dominates the rate of pulsation
And sad worms ponder their spines in fright
This polarity sphere, a cognitive dome, is hunted by re-animated cloth
Worn by self important lips taller than the house of You
I'm sucked into the straw of raw globulin, a silver spark on my hand
Books make good ladders to reach the ears
Where the act of naming spells hypnotic futures
Unravelling ghost gutters with stellar marble skates
These iconic boards bend in magnetic heat
A trapped image shudders
A creeper rings the facial envelope
Drumming the horizon's square nettles
Into a splash of word circuits
Which form dense molecules stammering in restrictive cineplex mufflers
But no silence will dare sleep on the pinpoint
Which moments of censored glue fail to bind
The dictionary dominates the rate of pulsation
And sad worms ponder their spines in fright
This polarity sphere, a cognitive dome, is hunted by re-animated cloth
Worn by self important lips taller than the house of You
I'm sucked into the straw of raw globulin, a silver spark on my hand
Books make good ladders to reach the ears
Where the act of naming spells hypnotic futures
Unravelling ghost gutters with stellar marble skates
These iconic boards bend in magnetic heat
A trapped image shudders
A creeper rings the facial envelope
Drumming the horizon's square nettles
Into a splash of word circuits
Which form dense molecules stammering in restrictive cineplex mufflers
But no silence will dare sleep on the pinpoint
Which moments of censored glue fail to bind
Jul 25, 2008
Jul 20, 2008
BETWEEN HICCUPS AND OBLIVION
Attaining consequence is reduced to internal visions of a sonorous volcano which formed mucus glands. A final experiment can be entitled 'exploitation' as one of the forerunners of the deferred legendary formless. The attacks are attempting to follow a tendency to suffer from amnesia. Three days of this justification seemed like a lot of evidence. We feel a rejection reveals its true worth. If that were abandoned, an initial reading between hiccups and oblivion is therefore obliged to become more and more perilous.
An infatuation was raising a very high error, a description of the circumstances whose ruse is the very beginning. We have always been simply without mental reservations in this affair--a child under ten. I assure you, those in power because of elegant ulcers can be said to fit the criteria of didactic intention. This egocentrism is a vaunted dichotomy restrained and separated from the umbilical determinism.
Chance text collage
An infatuation was raising a very high error, a description of the circumstances whose ruse is the very beginning. We have always been simply without mental reservations in this affair--a child under ten. I assure you, those in power because of elegant ulcers can be said to fit the criteria of didactic intention. This egocentrism is a vaunted dichotomy restrained and separated from the umbilical determinism.
Chance text collage
Jul 13, 2008
BLIND BREAKFAST DRAWING
While eating breakfast today I made two drawings with my other hand, without looking at the paper. Then I did a quick interpretation of each image. Here is the one I liked better:
Beehive hair and flying palm, she dances with a dense melange of an oil lamp, and crackling angles carry the charge of her internal wombat
Beehive hair and flying palm, she dances with a dense melange of an oil lamp, and crackling angles carry the charge of her internal wombat
Jul 11, 2008
SCHIZOTYPOGRAPHY
INTROVERTED ANHEDONIA
Galaxies' fingers suffocate my grizzled wasp, asp of a sudden lake spelling with a sedan the coiled letters of the sonic sun aimed at the heaving flame that drips across fasciculating mountains wrapped by snug time machine dust smashed into a net. Flinching elbows stain the ear plunged into a lime tree's how-to-do angina ripped wildly out of restless doors scored by mockery salt.
LABILITY OF AROUSAL
Smug advertisements for broken antennas cling to violent figs hurled into a treehouse where nosebleeds paint the lunar eclipse with bay leaves which are the clothes of a mandrake.
IDEAS OF REFERENCE
The static sea undulates with lyrical invocations to my infantile ribbons, olive eyes stung by robot news stuck in the exhaust.
Galaxies' fingers suffocate my grizzled wasp, asp of a sudden lake spelling with a sedan the coiled letters of the sonic sun aimed at the heaving flame that drips across fasciculating mountains wrapped by snug time machine dust smashed into a net. Flinching elbows stain the ear plunged into a lime tree's how-to-do angina ripped wildly out of restless doors scored by mockery salt.
LABILITY OF AROUSAL
Smug advertisements for broken antennas cling to violent figs hurled into a treehouse where nosebleeds paint the lunar eclipse with bay leaves which are the clothes of a mandrake.
IDEAS OF REFERENCE
The static sea undulates with lyrical invocations to my infantile ribbons, olive eyes stung by robot news stuck in the exhaust.
CELIA GOURINSKY
I didn't know Celia Gourinsky, but I want to offer my condolences to the members of the Rio de la Plata group.
Jul 8, 2008
Jul 2, 2008
TELEPHONE TAG BLUES
Inspired by a video of George Melly making random calls from phone booths in England to recite poetic and humorous phrases, I decided to dial several completely random and probable 'wrong numbers' to ask if certain friends were at the place being called. I planned to improvise on the results, if there were any, but my first call went to an answering machine. As I was wanting to connect with a human being, I dialed another number which turned out to be the voice mail system for my entire high school. Thinking it amusing, I intended to leave poetic messages for an old teacher or two, but I was unable after several tries to enter a valid mailbox number. My third and final call was answered by a computer modem extending its screaming electronic palm towards my eardrum. I thought it oddly reflective of our times that I was unable to reach a single human being during this whimsical experiment in telephonic chance.
Jun 27, 2008
CHANCE DICTIONARY
A variation on Question and Answer or Definitions, but played using a single dictionary, or alternately, with one or more books.
Modern--of or like a lion
Shiite--an American shrub which bears small black or blue berries
Ratio--an organ of certain flowerless plants which bear reproductive cells
UNESCO--the state of being hypnotized
Prohibit--a cold blooded, aquatic vertebrate animal
Megalomaniac--insect, very destructive to wood
Lime--half light preceding sunrise
Legislate--a portion of a circle enclosed by two radii and the arc which they intercept
Warble--without form
Skeleton--a mercenary soldier who sells his services to any country
Modern--of or like a lion
Shiite--an American shrub which bears small black or blue berries
Ratio--an organ of certain flowerless plants which bear reproductive cells
UNESCO--the state of being hypnotized
Prohibit--a cold blooded, aquatic vertebrate animal
Megalomaniac--insect, very destructive to wood
Lime--half light preceding sunrise
Legislate--a portion of a circle enclosed by two radii and the arc which they intercept
Warble--without form
Skeleton--a mercenary soldier who sells his services to any country
Jun 11, 2008
MAGNETIC SYRUP
If the heat lightning on your knuckles means cocoons will envelope your glass house, if rocks are laugh meters chummy with a tree vole, and if my hands are dynamos of strobe pools, giant trees carry magnetic syrup.
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