Destruction 2011

DESTRUCTION 2011
Surrealist Eylem Turkiye/Surrealist Action Turkey
Trailer by Altkomşu

The Woman and the Machine

At last! Miguel Almagro's short film The Woman and The Machine is available to watch online.

The Great Library will burn down Rome

Outside Parliament last night

New Alexandria

Sheets of paper, sheets of flame. The Romans are burning the Great Library again. Today the Liberals and Tories, the British ruling class’s oldest parties, are voting on their own plans to eat the young. Like the Labour government before them, they have realised that educating working-class youth is an unnecessary expense. University fees must rise, subsidies to support teenagers through school must go, and there need be no more pretence that education is for the benefit of anything other than capital.

While the MPs are voting, students will be protesting and resisting heroically, as they have been over the last few weeks, and the ruling class will once again send squads of riot police against them. Schoolkids whose future educations are being stolen from them will instead receive extra lessons in applied batons and horse charges.

As revolutionary Surrealists – and as students, ex-students and education workers, and people who have been taught to read and write – we hardly need to say that we are viscerally opposed to this assault on youth and education. We will fight these education cuts with all the means at our disposal. But we will not do so in the name of defending education. Britain’s education system in its current form is frankly not worth defending.


Cringing Liberals have been pointing to the post-1992 expansion of higher education to justify the fee hikes, arguing that the massive increase in student numbers has made the system unsustainably expensive. Many of those who oppose the rise in fees – including the so-called left wing of the very Labour Party which introduced tuition fees in the first place – say that this newly accessible university is precisely what must be ‘defended’.

But those of us who have worked and studied on these intellectual factory farms know that education in this country has been nothing short of a disaster, from Key Stage 2 SATS to the Research Excellence Framework. Children fed poetry that’s been reduced to the literary equivalent of Turkey Twizzlers; students told that politically flabby post-New Left bullshit is the way to make sense of ‘culture’; academics chasing ever-decreasing funding by publishing in elitist journals with ever-decreasing readerships… Defend that crap? Not on your life.

Where, in all of this, is the beautiful savagery of the mind? Where are the things that are appalling to know, that score the flesh with their uselessness and wonder? Learning is no commodity: it’s an acid to burn money. Bound in human skin, it’s the toxic arcane to be championed, explored, succumbed to, seduced by, conquered. It’s traced in golden words of fire that fall blazing from the page, flaring and dying as we read them, gone in an explosion of unknown suns.

The only library that we defend is the one that’s set alight by its own blazing. Sheets of paper, sheets of flame. The Great Library will burn down Rome.

Cthulhus, sir! Thousands of them!

by Paul Cowdell

Who fits up the Fitwatchmen?

Beating police repression after the student occupation

This is the piece which led to the Fitwatch website being suspended at the request of Acting Detective Inspector Will Hodgeson of CO11 (as part of Operation Malone).We are posting it here in solidarity with Fitwatch and the Millbank protesters. Please circulate and repost on your own blogs and websites, Spartacus-style.

The remarkable and brilliant student action at Millbank has produced some predictable frothing at the mouth from the establishment and right wing press. Cameron has called for the ‘full weight of the law’ to fall on those who had caused tens of thousands of pounds of damage to the expensive decor at Tory party HQ. Responsibility is being placed on ‘a violent faction’, after the march was ‘infiltrated’ by anarchists.


There are an encouraging number of intiatives to show solidarity with the arrested students – something that is vital if they are to avoid the sort of punitive ‘deterrent’ sentences handed out to the Gaza demonstrators. A legal support group has been established and the National Campaign against Cuts and Fees has started a support campaign. Goldsmiths lecturers union has publicly commended the students for a ‘magnificent demonstration’ .
This is all much needed, as the establishment is clearly on the march with this one. The Torygraph has published an irresponsible and frenzied ‘shop-a-student’ piece and the Met are clearly under pressure to produce ‘results’ after what they have admitted was a policing ‘embarrassment’.

51 people have been arrested so far, and the police have claimed they took the details of a further 250 people in the kettle using powers under the Police Reform Act. There may be more arrests to come.

Students who are worried should consider taking the following actions:

If you have been arrested, or had your details taken – contact the legal support campaign. As a group you can support each other, and mount a coherent campaign.

If you fear you may be arrested as a result of identification by CCTV, FIT or press photography:

• DON'T panic. Press photos are not necessarily conclusive evidence, and just because the police have a photo of you doesn’t mean they know who you are.

• DON'T hand yourself in. The police often use the psychological pressure of knowing they have your picture to persuade you to ‘come forward’. Unless you have a very pressing reason to do otherwise, let them come and find you, if they know who you are.

• DO get rid of your clothes. There is no chance of suggesting the bloke in the video is not you if the clothes he is wearing have been found in your wardrobe. Get rid of ALL clothes you were wearing at the demo, including YOUR SHOES, your bag, and any distinctive jewellery you were wearing at the time. Yes, this is difficult, especially if it is your only warm coat or decent pair of boots. But it will be harder still if finding these clothes in your flat gets you convicted of violent disorder.

• DON'T assume that because you can identify yourself in a video, a judge will be able to as well. ‘That isn’t me’ has got many a person off before now.

• DO keep away from other demos for a while. The police will be on the look-out at other demos, especially student ones, for people they have put on their ‘wanted’ list. Keep a low profile.

• DO think about changing your appearance. Perhaps now is a good time for a make-over. Get a haircut and colour, grow a beard, wear glasses. It isn’t a guarantee, but may help throw them off the scent.

• DO keep your house clean. Get rid of spray cans, demo related stuff, and dodgy texts / photos on your phone. Don’t make life easy for them by having drugs, weapons or anything illegal in the house.

• DO get the name and number of a good lawyer you can call if things go badly. The support group has the names of recommended lawyers on their site. Take a bit of time to read up on your rights in custody, especially the benefits of not commenting in interview.

• DO be careful who you speak about this to. Admit your involvement in criminal damage / disorder ONLY to people you really trust.

• DO try and control the nerves and panic. Waiting for a knock on the door is stressful in the extreme, but you need to find a way to get on with business as normal. Otherwise you’ll be serving the sentence before you are even arrested.

"I am apples of God's eyes"

Found poetry at East London market stall
Object found on the ground beside the same market stall on the following day

Untitled drawing by Patrick Hourihan

West of Pure Evil

A collection of stories and poetry
by Josie Malinowski

Available as a free download,
or to buy in hard copy from the not-for-profit Surrealist publishing house
Oyster Moon Press

Irrational characteristics of a found object

Merl found an object in the street on the way to the meeting. Patrick, Paul and Wendy compiled a list of questions to ask the object, without having seen it or knowing what it was. Merl then revealed the object. Merl, Miguel, Patrick, Paul and Wendy collectively interrogated the object to uncover its irrational characteristics.



Where do you sleep?
I do not sleep. I only wait.

Are you allergic to light?
Light is my element and my weapon. I can see wavelengths of light invisible to humans.

Have you experienced death?
I have experienced death without dying – as larvae do.

Do you have a secret?
Not of my own. I preside over the secrets of others.

Do you have a mistress?
I'm never without one.

How do you speak?
At this point in the game, a strange man came shambling over to our table and asked us "Did I leave my case with you?"
I speak through the pronouncements of strangers.

Are you timeless?
I prefer not to say, but I'll outlast all of you.

Where are your gardens?
They are between the span of my legs. My gardens open up each time my legs unfold.

What do you know of the human condition?
Nothing, and I am not interested in it.

Have you ever been loved?
I may well have been. I simply don't care.

Do you like sweets?
Irrelevant question.

Do you rip?
I'm always about to.

Have you been abandoned?
I am not abandoned. I am escaped from.

Poetry must be made by awl

Make your mark this National Poetry Day

Sex Magic: The Invocation

Two stone angels are facing each other, their heads missing. The stone next to them shows what may once have been a family crest of arms; now is a green-tinged evil head.

Two stones that should have heads have none. Two creatures of God, two lovers of order, two insipid traitors who bow to obedience, unthinkingly, selfishly. And now they are anarchists.

One stone that should betray the last prayer of the man, and his wife; those panderers to hierarchy, those worshipers, now headed by the Green Evil.

It seems like the place at which to practice my magic.

I take the cloth sack slung over my shoulder, grasp it around the neck, and smash it, once, twice, against the roof of the dead. It tinkles and shatters and crashes, the sounds most beautiful, like rabid dogs and the sound of my throat falling out of my neck after a grizzly has gorged my skin with its ferocious claws, with a fearsome growl. I sigh in joy. Carefully I lay down the sack upon the stone beneath my feet, allow the neck to open a little, to breathe the chilly night air. Tenderly I reach in a hand, caress the shards in there, cautiously enough not to hurt too badly, with enough abandon to nip myself a couple of times, and my gasping at the slight intrusion makes my cock throb a little. I reach into my trousers with my non-bloodied hand, and with the one I tend to the pain, and with the other, I tend to pleasure. As I work up a rhythm and my breath becomes hitched, I discover the delight of fidelity: I find a single shard of glass and grip it tight in my palm, so that as I come hard into the air and into my hand, at the same time a spurting of blood trickles over the other. The magic substances are here. I call to my helper.

She has been hiding in silence, eyes and mind closed to the world, behind a tree over there. At my instruction she has been concentrating all her energies on fantasy alone; every depraved thought she ever had, every sexual dream, every lusty encounter, everything she liked, everything she didn’t like, reliving them all, hands-free. At my call she stumbles over, aflame and wild, shivering. She sits before me, cross-legged. I hold out my hands. In the daylight she looks at the one, at the other, back at the one, and the other. Tenuously she licks the bloodied hand; tasting metal, she takes the antidote, and devours the hand sticky with semen, finishing up by kissing my worst wound, sealing it. Finally she takes my mouth, jumping at me like a stallion.

The Green Evil glows, and angels fall down. It is working.

She is on top of me. My hands, the tools, lay deadly still by my side; hers are the powerful ones now. She uses them both to render me stiff again, and, straddling me, she eases me into her, wincing slightly as her cunt stretches to take me. She starts riding me, and as her pace grows and quickens her little gasps evolve into frenzied breaths, then grunts, and screams, as she throws back her head and calls for Sou-ha-ha as her entire body shudders and she throws her orgasm out of her body onto my penis.

Immediately, before she can collapse onto the ground, I simultaneously leap up and slam her body back onto the stone beneath us, clasping my bloodied hand around her neck, and my spit-covered hand grabs the discarded shard of glass. She is almost unconscious as I thrust into her, and as I spill my final seed into her and her final breath escapes her, I take the glass, and, shouting “Brou-ha-ha!”, I plunge the tip into my heart.

Elva Jozef

"I fought the war for people like you"

(He's sorry he lost.)

Approved by the Committee of Opportunist Jokers

FAREWELL TO JEAN BENOÎT

Jean Benoît

1922 – 2010

Stand aside ....

The spreading of joy

It's a pigeon! It's got no legs! Poke it! It's fun!!

Untitled drawing by Patrick Hourihan

Kathleen Fox exhibition at the Freud Museum

A Rod for Run-Awaies

by Paul Cowdell

Some tidbits I dug up from a while back.....


“Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce.” (David Hume)

Razor-Blessed Impasto

1.
step into oblivion thunder awaits you to draw a red armied circle onto your rotting arm with razor blessed impasto, buried those perverse verses of undulating ribbons, pink, sewn softly onto leather impermanencies with striped uniforms lined up against a backdrop of satin and tartan beads and sani tized caps hearing the machine gun bullets to the rhythm of a drum, taken by surprise as they arrive to already closed eyes and silent ears and silences tongues and with only the sender to receive them as the rest of the sweating world has closed their minds to them and closed their faces to them and baptized their hands from them and with sharpened thoughts one manages to flee the border patrol without contraband subjectification of thought, tongues and minds shall no longer be arrested only phantom wages of the unpaid debts withheld from the billions who suddenly wish to rise to the boil and flood the dams that have damned the wretched of our shoes the faces to our soles and the cherries of our beans which we consume through monetary straws - it’s a different kind of high, very post-modern and pseudofashionable and liberally labeled ¡viva la ladino! and star spangled ‘cino and open orifices of purple stained fleshes and rebel confessions of militant clashes spread as terrorist wishes by the white-washed and Colgate-stained Celebration occupation and blinded by White Mouse Realism. The sheltered daydreams of perfectionist wet dreams…fleshy tendencies. Track marks the spot.

2.
Take it take it take it wholly not impartial to fluorescent fluctuations but when time hits thunder all inside jokes and hoax explode unto leveling mechanisms of spatial statistics and organic transformations of organizational tumescent knowledges and totalitarian appendages and rotting dialectics of radioactive trips and flying hinges of elastic concubines and dispensable razor eunuchs. Turn it over, turn them over and fry the other side, the proper side, the red site and token blackened genetically malfunctioning malefaction of dusty roses and spring-time clashes. Silver transvestite bureaucratic bonobos taking tax incisions from wealthy blood owners.


The Body as the Site of Evil

1.
Motorcycle stare. Black-painted stares, draped ivories beneath hidden velvet. Five seconds of familiar understanding, polar climaxes crusading against the fall. Beautiful androgynous flesh, connected on the spur of a bridge. Beautiful unknowable. Black entrails embroidered in my yearning.
“We may all look different on the outside, but on the inside…we are all beautiful.”
A catwalk of anatomy. Flawed expression of selfhood. Humanity reduced to a perverse cannibalistic masquerade. An add-on of approval and appreciation. Vicious corporation, Capitalizing on murder.

They tried to reinvent my reality. Photos replaced posters…and he warned me about the red between my teeth and the sparkle powder on my jumper.
“Don’t let them see that on you. You best take it off.” Perfected through defection.
It glistened through the stones and cement particles. Forty shades of grey tattoo on my shin. My skin beneath the tattoo was crawling and it hit me that I had contracted the tattoo bug – bugs evolved to the purpose of tattooing humans. The tattoo, however, vanished with the bug.

Bell sounds, “round ‘em up!”…get them in designated ‘punishment’ area: the lower back. If you ran then any area is a punishable area. In my case, this was the thigh. Insert needle first, protest barbarism later.

Fucking formalities bathed in banality. Six week sabbat matrimonial slaughter. Rabid neon veins ethereal pulsating fluid to sink a ship into. Swim my bible bell chamber. Red lids to match red lips and black eyes in disguise. Deep breath intervals as his mind escaped, cold white; hard-pressed, can he still hear us?

“Isn’t it obvious? The Ghost. The Holy Ghost.” Jealous were all others as he took his place of martyr. Unsuccessful, a woman screamed. Forty percent of his body mass was missing, blown off though his limbs were still in tact. His chest bared decaying flesh, brown, old blood, bone. He cried as he had been suddenly deprived of purpose.

Acquired obscenities. Gothic consumption of Middle Eastern Royalty. Young meat rolled up in a Havana, pass the designer orange: everybody experiences a radically different effect. Winding stairs down an immaculately decóred dungeon. Fucking phenomenal! Seating arrangement on the altar of monarchy cheaply propositioned to party. Each filtered with a different taste.

How did I get here? Is he, as yet, enlightened? I think not pretty puppy. Rum and absinthe-filled absence; Just ‘something else to feel shitty about.’ A little honey and locker-room fantasy. Canvas prequel.

Crippled sexuality. Gyrating meat. Assembled on a line of plasticity. Act upon it. Objectified flesh tender in its own making. Disturbing in its movement. An obituary of sexuality. Elongated beauty in different shades of pink. Pink bits shatter the illusion –flesh covering brutality. Mimic normality beneath the shades of disguise…cruel, violent flesh. “…once upon a time I could love you.”


2.
Head sunk at the bottom of the television screen. Intestinal engraves plugged into copulant machines floating in the space above their soap-stained bodies. Diaper attire limited to a nose picked bellybutton sickle. Catheter in the open stomach gash, retrieve and reprocess black bile blackened for nutrition. “…it was so much easier when I was cruel.” Back to the woman at the bottom of the television screen, sunken head withdrawn of colour, palliative eyes, “where’s my mum, where’s my mum, where’s my mum, where’s my mum?” Haunting….Epileptic fit. He. Never. Says. Anything.
I said “what would happen if that monument suddenly rolled off its base?”
“It’ll come crashing into our house,” she said, “but don’t think like that.” One, two, three…
“You mean like that?” House on a pier crashed and sunk at the bottom of the ocean. Mother led us to the Cliffside: father dived off. It felt natural.

I’m on the border icicle stretched between words, oscillating personaes, emotions of disruption and false pretense. A veil of normality with the subservience of reality. Something’s pressing at me to remain tame. Between emotion and numbness objectivity always unifies scattered- disparate selves. Reification of memory in present speculation. It’s all he becomes: a memory to be evoked and observed and speculated upon with a detached gaze. Locking prior fears for they have been reified. A person is very strong and very weak at the same point. Survival demands suppression, until a note, a word, a feeling triggers the whole fucking tidal wave. “His name was Charlie…”


Wendy

Book launch, Saturday 12th June

BOOK LAUNCH & POETRY READING
Saturday 12th June
3pm
Izzy Young's Folklore Centrum
Wollmar Yxkullsgatan 2
Stockholm

EMMA LUNDENMARK
Organica Fläktrum
published by Styx

MERL FLUIN
The Reality Binge Trick
published by Head Louse Press

HYDROLITH COLLECTIVE
Hydrolith: Surrealist Research & Investigations
published by Oyster Moon Press

Turner Prize shortlist 'the worst ever' say critics

'I think it really is disgusting' - P. Kropotkin (Prince), London E1
'Talentless daubers' - A. Hitler

Hydrolith: Surrealist Research and Investigations

A new anthology of recent texts and images from the international Surrealist movement, published by Oyster Moon Press.

The anthology has been put together by an international collective of six editors (including two SLAG members) and features work by over 80 Surrealists from around the world.

This book is now on sale in hard copy, and can also be downloaded in pdf format, from here:

http://tinyurl.com/hydrolith

The hard copy of the book is available at a special discount price until the end of May 2010. The download is free.

Happy Lautréamont Day

Automatic text

Ashmolean kissbalance crosswind under juice-pelted astrolabes gorging hannibals.
Carpentlicued and risen in the east unless the wet leaves of serpentine gold-laced breathing flaps are undone by the gaudy eyelashes.
Fissured oakstems struggle with worms.
Paperfaced garble-mongers spanking the squeamish conquest like an apple-biter.
Pish-pash predicaments mouldy with lead.
Hand-formed under carlights.
The speckled angels clutch each other and tumble through clouds of grass.
Carpet-bombers and king sliders sell their medicines to children from supermarket trolleys parked in rows along the banks of the Seine.
The severed head of the shaman’s uncle inflates like gum.
Animal hides scarred by rotating blades are used to smother the nightflies.
Here come the rolling firework-mules, a battalion of thieves.
Stretched across five toppled storeys of brutalism, the sleeping giant dreams of pistachio belts and yellow-baited rabbits, while high above his head the vulgar foxes rummage the walkways in search of twinkletoes.
His hair is a mudchute of traitor-chimes falling watered and growing wild.
The livid auditorium eyeballs the Greeks impassively.
Clip-clopped architraves wrestle diggerbeams to the ground, minted.
Sullen artists and bigbirds look on over carnival scenes.
A kiss-arse, a cotton bud, a diamondback cuddly wuddly, strewn with goldflakes.
Porcupines flare like tobacco in a skylight.
The custodians of the behemoth condescend to untie the apron strings surrounding the throat of a sea-eagle.
Their flawless complexions are testament to their ceaseless plenitude.
United in starlight-envy, they cluster at the foot of the shining wheatfields that rise in an arc across the sky.
Their galloping skeletons are marshalled under iron.
Their mothers turn mangle handles in the laundries of the Cities of the Plain, perfectly conscious of everything that is about to come next.
Their heads talk.

Merl Fluin
(originally written as part of a SLAG collective automatism game)

Untitled drawing by Patrick Hourihan

The Most Impenetrable Place (Part 1)

“Most impenetrable,” the sign reads, pointing towards the doors to my right. Since I’m being chased by my boyfriend, whom I’ve only just discovered is in league with the creature of the sea – the thing that emerged from the uprising blobs and acquired consciousness, and a desire to see me dead – I’m glad to see it. Impenetrable is the way I like my hide-outs to be. I let myself in (assuming the place becomes impenetrable after the person in need enters, of course), and find myself faced with a small boy. He greets me, and his colouring and accent suggest he comes from India, but there is something odd about his eyes.

“You’re staring at my eyes, aren’t you?” he asks.

Startled, I reply – “Are you blind?”

“It was my mother’s idea,” he says, and then I see it: where his eyes should be are not eyes, but tattoos of eyes. And not normal eyes, either – cat’s eyes, blue.

“This is how I used to look,” he says, handing me a photograph. In it he has large brown eyes.

“But…why?”

“My mother said it would make me more employable.”

“To whom?” I ask, aghast.

“Her Royal Majesty, Queen Katherine XIV.”

For the first time, I see beyond the boy and discover there is a regal-looking suite behind him. He hurries off to prepare a huge bed-like seat. There is a man beside it, watching, waiting. He is dark-featured and handsome. When the seat is ready, he turns to me and says, “Come on then, my queen. The show’s about to begin.”

“What?” I take a step back, but I don’t bump into the door. Turning around, I see the room has become vast, and there is a stage where I thought there was a wall.

“Who are you? Where am I? I thought –”

“My love,” he says, lowering his voice, “I am yours. I am Jareth, King of the Goblins. You are my Queen, Katherine XIV. And if we do not sit soon, we shall keep everyone waiting!”

I look to his left and right and see that we are in the middle of an audience, whose faces had hitherto been obscured, because the only lights in the house are on our suite, in the centre of the audience.

I sit down. The play commences, and I watch a familiar tale - the story of mine and Jareth’s union.

It was in the days that the country had no unified rule. Rich men, tyrants and bastards ruled motley bunches in disparate lands, and those who just wanted to live a peaceful life had to toil until their backs broke, to keep the rulers off them. Jareth, in those days, led the Goblins in the rocky mountains, in the east. He often fought with the nearby gangs – the Angels, the Dogs, the Bastards, and others – and every leader desired nothing so much as extending their power. I belonged to a very poor family working the land for Jareth, but I was headstrong, and arrogant, and I refused to spend my life working like my parents. I stole away one night, at the age of fifteen, and headed up, up, up into the mountains where I knew, somewhere, Jareth lived. Through trickery, wile, and cunning I snuck into his inner lair, a pool of water surrounded by step rocks, where the older boys, the most cherished members of his gang, played after a battle. At the top, Jareth’s home. At the bottom of the rocks I hid behind some bushes, but there boys there were more observant than the guards in the outer regions, and I was caught. Angry and petulant, I struggled in my bonds as I was brought before Jareth. Before he could give the command to have me killed, I shouted that that I wanted to join his gang. He laughed coldly, but saw some sport to be had, and told me that if I want to join, I must mug a mugger. And not just any; the most fearsome and feared in the land. This man wore a gold locket, a relic of the lover he murdered in unfound jealousy, and was the only thing he would not put a price on.

I stole that locket, took it back to Jareth, and was admitted to the Goblins. From that moment on, I became his lover, and with my power combined with his, the Goblins became untouchable. There the story closes on stage, but I feel that something is missing, that the story lacks its proper ending, but as I can’t remember why I think that, I simply smile at my lover and let him caress me.

As the actors leave the stage, a nurse brings my son to me, though it is only now that I remember I have one. He had lots of blond hair and a few baby teeth. I take him and, cuddling him, announce proudly to the room, “I made him myself”. Everyone applauds, and Jareth looks at me fondly. I feel very weird, suddenly. I look at Jareth. He is wearing a jacket just like the one my father used to wear. “My father…” I say slowly, and then I realise – Jareth does not own a jacket like that – but I’d described it to him once, when I was missing my father – and I know this is not real, I am in a fiction, and I need to leave immediately. I jump up, shove the baby in Jareth’s arms, and, thus encumbered, he cannot chase me as I flee the room, running through the first door I find.

I’m in the castle gardens, and it’s daylight. Not wanting to wait to find out if what’s behind me can give chase, I hurry through the vast, elegant grounds. I pass a gang of wolves devouring a carcass. Some of them have shiny black coats, but most of them are mangy with patchy fur. They look up as I pass but either recognise me or are too busy with their meal to care. I run past them and only stop when my heart is on fire. I rest by a tree and try to right my thoughts: what really happened with Jareth and I?

Elva Jozef

Molière is having a soirée!

Molière is having a soirée!

He invited me, I’m Rio Marè

He’s holding it in the underground church

Where the wartime fruitbats lurch.

He serves up shots of tequila-milk

Which crackle in the throat and taste like filth

And at about a quarter to three

He made an honorary pass at me.

“Being a sailor is a profession, not a career,” (he said)

As he stroked the cum on his mushroom head

And I felt a tingle in my sexual cells

And I showed him how to ring my blueberry bells.

We each had a bolus of mianserin

And he said, “It’s all about connecting things,”

As he carefully joined together two spider webs

With his gentle, sticky fingers.

Elva Jozef

The Holborn Golems

Aniano, Merl, Miguel, Patrick, Paul & Wendy
Tuesday 2nd March

Letter from Portugal

Dear surrealist friend,

As a Surrealist and partisan of freedom, poetry and love, I declare having nothing whatsoever to do with the so-called "big surrealist event" exhibition organized in Coimbra in the incoming month of 2010 by a certain Santiago Ribeiro whose name you may have seen as a participant in the Surrealist Exhibition that I organized in 2008, in the same city, under the title: O REVERSO DO OLHAR . His participation in my exhibition was an imposture: Mr Santiago Ribeiro is a clever but ignorant fraud who has never heard of the existence of André Breton's Surrealist Manifestos and thinks that Surrealism is just a fashionable "ism" with which he can earn some money. The "Gallery" in which he organizes his "event" will take place at the Bissaya Barreto Foundation, named after the fascist doctor of Salazar and none of the advertized artists "discovered" by Santiago Ribeiro, who use the “surrealist” label, have anything to do with the Internacional Surrealist Movement. The latest international surrealistic exhibition just took place at the Salvador Allende Museum (Santiago de Chile) organized by the surrealist group Derrame, last November-December 2009.



Miguel de Carvalho

editor of DEBOUT SUR L’OEUF - surrealist editions
Coimbra, Portugal





Caro amigo(a) surrealista,



Na partilha da tríade da liberdade, da poesia e do amor, declaro nada ter haver com uma tal exposição classificada de “grande evento surrealista” e organizada em Coimbra (nos próximos meses de 2010) por um tal de Santiago Ribeiro, cujo nome não lhe é estranho como participante na exposição de surrealismo actual que organzei em 2008, na mesma cidade, sob o título O REVERSO DO OLHAR. A sua participação foi uma fraude: o Sr. Santiago Ribeiro habilidoso quanto baste e um total ignorante que nunca tomou contacto com a monumental obra de André Breton, incluindo os seus Manifestos do Surrealismo, utiliza o Surrealismo como uma moda, uma estética e um “ismo” com o qual poderá ter retorno económico. Um dos locais que seleccionou para o seu “evento” é a Fundação Bissaya Barreto, personalidade sobejamente conhecida como médico e benemérito do período fascista português, mas nenhum dos artistas participantes “descobertos” pelo Sr. Santiago Ribeiro, que usam o rótulo “surrealista”, têm algo haver com o Movimento Surrealista Internacional. A última exposição surrealista internacional teve lugar no Museu Salvador Allende (importante lutador anti-fascista) em Santiago do Chile organizada pelo grupo surrealista Derrame, nos passados meses Novembro-Dezembro de 2009.



Disse,


Miguel de Carvalho

editor de DEBOUT SUR L’OEUF - edições surrealistas
Coimbra, Portugal

The Reality Binge Trick

Collection of poetry, short prose and automatic writing
by Merl Fluin.

Available as a free download, or to buy (not-for-profit – cost price only),
from Head Louse Press.

The Woman and the Machine

A new film by Miguel Angel Almagro

Click here to watch the trailer.

Tin Man Appointed to Head Costa Jury

At a packed press conference last night it was announced that the Tin Man had accepted an invitation to chair the jury for next year's Costa Book Awards.

A beaming Tin Man said, "I am thrilled to have been given this opportunity to reflect the nation's literary tastes and to represent the views of tin-eared poetry lovers everywhere."

Asked if he had any tips on next year's winner, he replied, "Of course we are all hoping to discover a poem as good as Four Weddings and a Funeral, something that ranks alongside the greats like Yeats, Browning and Patience Strong. Truly great poetry moves us by starting each line with a capital letter, satisfying our prior expectations, and striking our emotions like a dinner gong.

"I used to think I was just a sociopath who didn't have a heart, but this year Christopher Reid has taught me that great poetry, like Ritalin, is a balm for the human condition."

In other Costa news: Naked South London engraver and angel-botherer barred from award contest "for obvious reasons", say judges.

Invisible objects

Photos by Miguel