THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM

Athens meeting report, June 2011

2012-01-27T21:35:00.009Z

When one is overcome by demoralization and defeat, deeply depressed or on the verge of suicide, that is the time to open one’s Surrealist Survival Kit and enjoy a breath of magical fresh air.

Penelope Rosemont, ‘A Revolution in the Way We Think and Feel – Conversations with Leonora Carrington’ (2002)

In June 2011, when the city of Athens had already long been a beacon of both desperate hope and acute despair, members of the international Surrealist movement met in the Exarchia district, in the city’s heart, to build Surrealist Survival Kits. The rules of the game were simple: to assemble collections of poetic, magical, oneiric objects into portable kits, for the restoration of wonder and reinvention of hope when times are at their hardest. Responding to an invitation issued by the Athens Surrealist Group in July 2010, members of SLAG (Surrealist London Action Group) and the Stockholm Surrealist Group had travelled to Greece to join the Athenians for several days of hope and wonder. We constructed our Survival Kits – some elaborately prepared from beloved fetish objects, some improvised from detritus found on the spot, some individual, some collaborative – and welcomed local people to join us for their display and discussion at an evening of public talks, slideshows, film screenings, poetry readings and improvised music.

The international meeting was held against the backdrop of the deepening economic crisis that is tearing at the body of Greek society. This crisis renders the question of survival apparent in manifold ways. We may feel a spontaneous inclination to jump for anti‐capitalist joy and celebrate the prospect of the breakdown of the present order, but of course the crisis is not only a crisis for state and capital, but also a real crisis for the everyday lives of ordinary people: the claustrophobia of the horizon closing in, the uncertainty over whether one's home and livelihood can be sustained even for the coming months. The kind of survival in play here is one of necessity, of not bowing beneath the increasing organised misery, of preventing the destructive forces of capital from running through their regular routine. But on the other hand, when all options appear to be exhausted, when all escape routes have been blocked and the policies imposed upon us tend towards the ultimate degradation of all traces of life in society, there arises a utopian kind of survival in which imagining all other possible forms of life becomes a real force for resistance; where a basic, specifically Surrealist sense of survival regains its particular relevance. It was in the context of these two modes of survival, framed by massive popular demonstrations against austerity measures and a utopian spirit of playfulness, that the international meeting was held.

The public event was just one aspect of the stream of internal collective discussion and play that went on continuously for three days as we wound our way through meeting rooms, streets, squares, hills, bookshops, bars, kitchens, tavernas and apartments. The discussions were comradely, which means neither platitudinous nor polite: this was an occasion for asking questions, of ourselves and each other. In particular it was a time for hard thinking about the meanings of survival. It became increasingly clear to us that for Surrealists the survival at stake could not be the minimalist victory of simply making it through to another day, or the survivalist tactic of holing up somewhere to protect our treasure until the danger has passed: on the contrary, for us survival could only be, as the Athens group had expressed it in their invitation, ‘the hope for another life’.

As we reflected together on the unfolding results of our game, we understood that what made the kits significant was not the personal collection of ‘favourite things’ by individuals – ‘each one [...] different, for no two people are exactly alike’ in Penelope Rosemont’s words – but the process of assembling them, of finding or constructing oneiric objects from literally any old rubbish that was lying around, the transmutation of base matter into the gold of future time. In other words, our Survival Kit was not the objects themselves, but the ability to find and transform them. Surrealism is our survival kit, and as such is a necessary – though insufficient – condition for the social revolution that must come.

More than anything else, it was the depth and intensity of internal discussion that for us marked the importance – again we want to say the necessity – of the meeting in Athens. The meeting came in the middle of a series of international events, from the Destruction 2011 festival in Istanbul to the later exhibitions in Prague and Pennsylvania, but these were primarily geared towards the public presentation of works and ideas rather than to the development of Surrealist strategies. Events such as those in Istanbul, Prague or Pennsylvania are important for the structure of a group and thus for the international movement at large, but we must also open a space for a steadier process of international meetings. The need for international cooperation on a steady basis existed of course before our meeting; traces of it can be found in the efforts and talks concerning Hydrolith, for example. Our meeting in June was an extension and consolidation of our collective recognition of that need.

Thus the one‐night public event that took place during the meeting in Athens was just a part of the whole, and the collective task of creating it served simply to give energy and focus to our longer internal discussions and play. There was no predetermined agenda for those discussions; rather, the intention was for all participants to collaboratively shape the gathering itself. In exactly the same way, the three‐day meeting gave energy and focus to what has already become a richer, stronger collaboration between the groups that were able to participate. During discussions we were able to elaborate the history and current projects of the respective groups, thereby creating an understanding of the different conditions and the particularities of the groups present, as well as confirming our wide and unproblematic agreement. As the crisis deepens and the tear gas spreads, that richness and strength of solidarity will only become more essential to our survival.

Our intention is to continue to build on the relationships forged at Athens by holding regular international meetings on a similar model, and we hope to strengthen this sense of explicit, frank and serious discussion of the basis of our collaborations (and our arsenal of strategies) with other centres of Surrealist activity around the world, and to build those newly forged relationships outwards to encompass ever more participants from the Surrealist movement worldwide.

Athens Surrealist Group
Stockholm Surrealist Group
Surrealist London Action Group (SLAG)

Act now to defend the poet Angye Gaona!

2012-01-12T10:38:00.007Z

The poet and Surrealist Angye Gaona has now been charged formally by the Colombian prosecutors with the crimes of drug trafficking and "rebellion". The trial is scheduled to start on 23 January at the special criminal court in Cartagena de Indias, and if found guilty Angye could face a jail term of 20 years. She is wholly innocent of the charges against her.

In press articles and interviews Angye has passionately defended the cause of indigenous people (many of whom are being killed by paramilitary gangs on the orders of land developers – Angye has called this "genocide"), trade unionists and the working class (who are constantly being repressed by government-backed industrialists). She has also called the current Colombian government "a terrorist government". For these reasons she is considered a nuisance by the ultra-conservative government.

Angye was arrested in January last year on her way back to Colombia from a trip to Venezuela. At that point she was imprisoned without charge, but was later released following international pressure. After her release she was formally charged with drug trafficking. Once that charge was underway she was then also charged with "rebellion"; the prior charge of drug trafficking meant that she could not at that point apply to any foreign embassies for political asylum . Hence she had no choice but to face trial in Colombia. She is currently under house arrest in the single room she shares with her six-year-old daughter.

Her trial may have a very serious outcome if nothing is done. Colombia is known for its political trials. At the moment some 7,000 political prisoners are serving long sentences in terrible and overcrowded prisons. It is necessary therefore to make it clear to Colombia's judiciary that Angye's case is being closely followed worldwide.

To this end, Angye's friends and supporters are being asked to write to the examining judge in her case to request a fair trial. The form of words below is based on a text suggested by Cristina Castello. To increase the pressure you may want to send a copy of the letter to the Colombian embassy or consulate in your own country. It will also be helpful to the campaign – and be a morale boost for Angye – if you would contact the campaign to let them know that you have sent the letter.

Further information about Angye's case and the campaign to defend her is available on the following sites:

http://libertesconquises.blogspot.com/2012/01/mobilisation-pour-la-poete-colombienne.html (in French)
http://www.facebook.com/events/316979401670258/ (in Spanish)
http://angyegaonalivre.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/angye-gaona-acusada-de-liberdade/ (in Portuguese)

Al Sr. Juez de Conocimiento
Centro de Servicios Juzgado Único Penal del Circuito Especializado De Cartagena Adjunto
Centro Barrio San Diego
Calle De La Cruz No. 9–42
Antiguo Colegio Panamericano 2º Piso 
Cartagena de Indias
Colombia

Ref: Radicación or SPOA 13001-60-01129-2009-02149-00

Dear Sir

As citizens of the world and passionate defenders of liberty, we wish to express our concern at the situation of the Colombian poet Angye Gaona.

Angye Gaona is certainly no drug trafficker. She traffics only in words, and in a fierce determination to defend human rights in her own country.

In solidarity with Angye Gaona we therefore ask you to defy political pressure and exercise your faculties of justice and reason.

Her poetry and her humble living conditions testify to her innocence more eloquently than any lawyer. Her only "crime" has been to speak the truth through her poetry.

Poets are the soul of the people, and it is surely of crucial importance to Colombia that the life and liberty of its poets should be respected.

We hope that you will ensure a fair and balanced trial that will do honour to your country.

Yours faithfully

[names]

The Remains: a short film by Alexandre Fatta

2012-01-05T17:36:00.001Z

The Bell

2011-12-26T18:11:00.000Z

They rose to something now
To be honest one ain’t enough to go round
It’s one extreme to the other
He ate her
And we had that
If you had these little bits you had two of them
It means everything
I keep threatening her kissing
You need a rack
But they’re dead beneath the fur
I tried one, I skinned one out
Ha ha ha
Five minutes to go out, five past nine
Why not? Do you want to try?
With somebody that drinks here
Victorious, two hours victorious
Tricks, with tricks on spits
Straight onto the A1
This is what he says
No it’s coloration
No they say this
It’s wrong for a swan
But depends how –
Julie, she’s working Friday night at the festival, at the festival, at the festival
I’m just hoping that Christine will
She’ll have got a job in the morning
What are you thinking, Uruguayan?
She would on normal weekends
So is the wholesale – yeah, frustration?
She’s better off here than that
Whereabouts in Cornwall? I’ve no idea
They’re useless
I mean without saying, they’re ok
Not in – not in impact
You know, they want the criteria don’t they
Professional designed but in a more creative – sorry
Yeah hop on you know
And she said I do, I don’t
I don’t know
And it’s still broken, I haven’t sorted it out
She just likes the idea of a crane
A teashop, an exaggeration
It’s actually really, really interesting for ashore
A couple of lads were like interested
When you’re older a little bit
You’ve had experience haven’t you
Four daughters, if you can get the Spanish-type coffee
My patient will be a little
Is she out seeing a lot of him?
It’s about this here cane
You get a lease, pay a hut
It’s not a premises that’s been used for that
A lot of interest
But to be honest I’ve never been inside it
He has a lot of friends
It’s a very – you know, I said a cane
You see the wall shark
Two storey, they made contact
It was very nice in there
Parents like me and her mum to take up votes
The woken papering
When he starts this course of predominantly pills
Despair and shouldering his pecs
I know it was wormwood
Sixteen hundred she lost and eight new phone numbers
And casual conversation remotely
Yeah, remotely
I’m not painting any words

Merl Fluin

Three automatic drawings by Antonio Ramirez

2011-12-12T10:56:00.006Z

Reunión de vecinos

Huesos

Misterios de la oficina

November 30 is not enough

2011-11-30T04:30:00.001Z

Exquisite corpse

2011-11-27T13:52:00.003Z

Patrick, Aniano, Paul, Merl
Thursday 17 November

At the going down of the sun, we will remember them

2011-11-13T11:11:00.001Z

The SLAG e-zine has landed!

2011-11-11T19:04:00.003Z

In these days of turmoil and austerity, dear reader, do you yearn for some rabid estranged juvenile delicacies?

Then yearn no more, but click here to download our new e-zine!

The House of the Stammerer: a short film by Alexandre Fatta

2011-11-08T12:29:00.001Z

Arcadia, lift off or full speed ahead

2011-10-25T18:08:00.000+01:00

Paul Cowdell

achtung superman

2011-10-04T20:37:00.001+01:00

achtung superman
this time when the assets were drawn
only the gun-paddle showing
sidling through train wrecks
worlds collide in my coat pocket
faster than a speeding enzyme
that punctures your lung on the tip of a shoehorn

Merl Fluin

"GREAT" Britain

2011-09-24T00:00:00.006+01:00

Cramp and Concrete: a short film by Alexandre Fatta

2011-09-07T19:45:00.011+01:00

Beneath the shelter of your cape is the unspeakable safety

2011-09-04T17:46:00.001+01:00

Paul Cowdell

The odour of lions

2011-08-12T22:00:00.001+01:00

Russian TV news coverage of the civil unrest over the weekend reported that the lions and tigers had escaped from London Zoo and could be heard roaring in the streets. In a few words this beautiful story conveyed more truth about what has been happening than the whole of the UK media coverage combined.

The ruling class’s version of events has been enthusiastically embraced by every section of the British press. Whether wringing their hands or shaking their pitchforks, the cry is the same: Call the cops! Call Supernanny! Call Broken Britain! But on the few occasions when any of these media wankers actually bother to ask anyone why they are out on the streets, the response is clear and immediate: they are angry with the police. It’s not about looting from a society that’s already looted their futures. It’s about the racist, contemptuous, murderous, out-of-control police whose job is to defend that society.

That’s what it all comes down to. On one side, several generations (it’s not all just kids, as the media lip-smackingly loves to remind us) whose tempers have given way after lifetimes of alienation, exclusion, criminalisation and contempt. On the other, a “big society” unanimous in its determination to respond to their anger with more policing and – if Her Majesty’s so-called Opposition had its way – more police.

And as police powers are ratcheted up and the armoured vehicles roll into town, the water cannon won’t just be aimed at a supposedly small minority of badly parented “trouble-makers”, but at anybody who gives the ruling class a pain in its currently rather tender arse. Don’t roll over and play dead. This is not a game of sleeping lions.

Collective drawing

2011-08-05T13:35:00.003+01:00

Aniano, Merl, Patrick, Paul and Wendy

APAUPA

2011-07-26T13:12:00.002+01:00

Collective drawing by Merl, Patrick, Paul and Wendy

Riding the veiled galleon

2011-06-26T20:39:00.000+01:00

by Paul Cowdell

Mahmou(th)*

2011-06-14T21:08:00.003+01:00

The night fed snakes in her arms
and their jaws rattled lightly like castanets
in the cold
'And what a chore this is that you ask of me young man'
I thought as I chewed
'You look shiny'
this is what the captain of pedigree told me in a friendly manner as he fizzed
as it has been written
Whatever the case, my greasy look did not stop comparisons
which all proved to be against me
And against you
And Againstyou
It's enough to pull your hair
and then cut it
When I grow melancholic I start shooting penalties

* The meaning of this word was instantaneously recognised by D.S.

Yiannis Golfinopoulos
translated by Alexandra Halkias

Yannis performed the original Greek version of this poem during the 'Surrealist Survival Kits' public event in Athens on Saturday 4 June 2011.

Symbiotic Lime-Stone Quarry Phantoms

2011-06-07T20:21:00.004+01:00

– Yes my marble eyes are still working

The Surrealist group in Stockholm, with friends, invite you to their exhibition
Location: Nationalgalleriet, Skomakargatan 3 in Gamla Stan, Stockholm
Opening: Saturday June 11, 6pm to 9pm
Opening hours: June 12 – 18, 3pm t0 9pm

Paintings, drawings, collective projects, sound, scents, video sculpture and poetry readings near the place of the skull.

Book table in the gallery with publications from the 25-year history of the Surrealist Group.

Sphinx Bokförlag presents the newly republished Swedish translation of André Breton's surrealist manifestos.

Participants:
Joel Abrahamsson
Christian Andersson
John Andersson
Johannes Bergmark
Peter Bigestans
Bukalemun
Paul Cowdell
Christofer Dahlby
Kalle Eklund
Jonas Enander
Kim Fagerstam
Çeren Findik
Merl Fluin
Mattias Forshage
GOMFILM
Patrick Hourihan
Riyota Kasamatsu
C M Lundberg
Robert Lindroth
Emma Lundenmark
Niklas Nenzén
Prismaginos
Sphinx Bokförlag
Theoni Tambaki
Tippi Tillvind
Ika Österblad

For full information:
http://www.surrealistgruppen.org/LimeStoneQuarryPhantoms.html
http://surrealistgruppen.org/kalkbrottsfantomer.html

Background info:
http://www.surrealistgruppen.org/experienceof.html
http://www.nationalgalleriet.just.nu/
http://sphinxforlag.se/surrealismensmanifest.htm
http://styxforlag.com/

Well, I don't eat cakes!

2011-05-28T22:54:00.000+01:00

Farewell to Leonora Carrington

Patrick Hourihan

2011-05-23T19:45:00.002+01:00

We are pleased to announce the launch of Patrick Hourihan's website:

www.patrickhourihan.com

Les Parfums de l'Incréé: animated short by Alex Fatta

2011-05-09T19:25:00.001+01:00

I got to keep moving, I got to keep moving

2011-05-08T21:23:00.002+01:00

Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail

Creation's Pleat

2011-05-08T18:28:00.000+01:00

capped by the fall-well
where apricots shine
under the skinny-flipped crust of angelus-stink
hopelessly falling
embezzled the sun
crustaceous, rapacious, colditz unbound
in the bedsores of night
in the carpet of dreams
golden-thighed and solemnly gasping
better grasped than tumbled
and finish the teat-weather
gumption leads to bliss

Merl Fluin

Gibbon offers you the open goal

2011-04-29T00:10:00.002+01:00

'Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule'

The Committee of Opportunist Jokers suggest you go ahead and score

Three animated shorts by Alexandre Fatta

2011-04-22T16:45:00.004+01:00

Rebus

2011-04-16T16:51:00.003+01:00

Edible sharp melody amalgamation secret and open
armory starred crystallized saints inside
antiques machete fossil hypnos colossal weapons
mountains growing mourning
the antithesis freezing endorphin
EDIBLE!

Aniano, Merl, Patrick, Paul, Wendy
5 April 2011

Edible Mayans

2011-04-16T16:49:00.002+01:00

Aniano, Merl, Patrick, Paul, Wendy
5 April 2011

Birthday

2011-04-04T11:53:00.002+01:00

There are moments in life when man with his louse-ridden hair casts wild staring looks at the green membranes of space; for he believes he hears, somewhere ahead, the ironic hoots of a phantom. He staggers and bows his head; what he has heard is the voice of conscience. Then with the speed of a madman he rushes out of the house, takes the first direction his wild state suggests and bounds over the rough plains of the countryside. But the yellow phantom never loses sight of him, pursuing him with equal speed. Sometimes on stormy nights, while legions of winged octopi, which look like ravens at a distance, hover above the clouds, moving ponderously towards the cities of men, their mission to warn them to change their conduct; on such nights the dark-eyed pebble sees the beings pass by, lit up by the flashes of lightning, one after another; and wiping a furtive tear of compassion which flows from its frozen eye, it shouts out: 'Yes, he certainly deserves it; it is only justice being done.' Having said that he reassumes his grim attitude and continues to watch, trembling nervously, the manhunt, and the big lips of the shadowy vagina from which immense dark spermatozoids flow unceasingly like a river and then soar up into the lugubrious ether, hiding all nature with the vast span of her bat's wings, including the solitary legions of octopi, now gloomy at the sight of these dumb inexpressible fulgurations. But all the time the steeplechase between these two tireless runners is going on, and the phantom hurls torrents of fire from his mouth ...

Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont
Born 4 April 1846

The Occult Panopticon

2011-03-15T18:27:00.006Z

High spirit of brine
overlooking this doll-size panopticon
Only parts of his face coming visible
Occultly visible
and soaking in brine
for seven years and seven nights
with limitless supplies of dried fish
I am not a doll!
they had all tried that argument
and gotten a glass of brandy for comfort

Mattias, Merl, Nikos and Paul

Wednesday 9th March

Exhibition: Jean-Claude Charbonel & John Welson

2011-03-15T17:36:00.001Z

Click on the image to see (and read) a larger version.

Caster Sugar

2011-03-10T18:00:00.002Z

This has been going on far too long, yet nobody seems to have the strength to stop it. Rabbits and toads have proved powerless in the face of the compulsive Black Prince's dog-smoking, and herds of ostriches are running around in a fundamentally unfettered way. We see no other option at this point but to dig up our long-buried tools for invoking rarely mentioned spirits, such as those of well-meaning polar bears and cute space giraffes. The tools in question comprise arctic terns' beaks, a full set of bicycle spanners, a golden key, and the flowers that grow from our shoulders. May the three-footed hart arise again, to reinforce the metals of the rage that we see no way of stopping from letting loose at this stage. It will make mushrooms erupt. It will feel strangely comfortable. It will gallop down the hill with a scream and a yell and a cry of coriandered frenzy. To its voice we will add our tree-worn fury, our confused sense of orientation and our longing for impressively fine-grained sand, and it will converge in a singular, not noisy, perfectly spherical lawn, sprinkled with dewdrops and gilly flowers. The endless sky of Cumberland will drip ether onto the soil below, the snow will burst upwards in the stride of a hatted man, and there will be hardly anything left to abandon. It's only then, when the moon has risen and the mortal folk have put their cares and their toys away, that our horses will race in riotous charge, the cavalier cavalry of our mountain health, and with this we trust our voice has already reaped its victims. Solemnly. Like the giraffe's lips.

Mattias, Merl and Paul
7 March 2011

Destruction

2011-03-05T12:50:00.002Z

The pink tulips lie abandoned on the lawn.
No black carrots are gathered together up a tree.
Cherries fall from the sky into a pool of sugar.
A martini glass climbs from the hole into a salt lake.
A lump of coal falls through the sand beside a freshwater stream.
A diamond jumps into a window over a salted meadow.
A shard of glass opens a hole and a sweet secret lies in the grass.
Thorns close a block of bitter juice on the pavement.
A fur blanket is swept aside to reveal a sweet pool of seeds in the sky.
A feathered bedstead is dragged over to cover a sour heap of dead plants underground.
Barbed wire falls across lush flesh in a meadow of sweetness.

Merl, Paul, Patrick and Aniano
1st March 2011

Collective drawing

2011-03-05T12:48:00.003Z

Aniano, Merl, Patrick and Paul
1st March 2011

Exquisite corpse

2011-03-05T12:47:00.002Z

Merl, Aniano, Patrick and Paul
1st March 2011

The Annular Projection

2011-03-01T23:14:00.002Z

pencil drawing
by Aniano Henrique

The Organic Process

2011-03-01T23:13:00.002Z

pencil drawing
by Aniano Henrique

The Mechanical Process

2011-03-01T23:09:00.003Z

pencil drawing
by Aniano Henrique

Ody Saban & Thomas Mordant: "Rising Sign"!

2011-02-23T11:56:00.003Z

The text below by Ody Saban and Thomas Mordant has been circulated as part of the discussions around Destruction 2011. This exhibition and series of events, in which SLAG is gleefully participating, is being organised in Istanbul by our friends Surrealist Eylem Turkiye.

Cliquez ici pour lire ce texte en français.

THEME PROPOSAL FOR A SURREALIST GATHERING IN ISTANBUL IN 2011

‘RISING SIGN’!

In the face of a prosaic mundanity helplessly mired in its own dying signs, in the face of the apparent triumph of capitalist barbarism, let us build a concrete poetic dialectic of destruction and creation, now when the threat of death is breathing down the neck of humanity.

The question at issue is precisely how the most apparently destructive negativity can help to overcome (marvellous Aufhebung!) apparently hopeless situations.

For some decades the dialectical relationship between destruction and creation has had a very particular quality, one that we could make more effort to understand. We have become accustomed to the idea that although the human race is not absolutely doomed, its survival in the short or medium term is no longer assured. The risks cannot be calculated, because they ultimately depend above all on the struggles of humanity as a whole, as well as on chance. For surrealists and social revolutionaries, the task is to draw paradoxical strength from this state of affairs.

A)
First, we can develop a more collective and more personal, more vivid and profound consciousness of the total reinvention of the basic conditions under which humanity today is called to act, and against which it resists. From a spiritual perspective these basic conditions include, for example, an autistic and pornographic contempt for everything, a nihilistic cult of nothingness, an unsublimated death drive temporarily contained within the cyst of polymorphous perversity, a religion of performance and maximum pleasure drained of meaning so as to be rendered compatible with generalised indifference and chronic ennui.

Read and reread the lunatic screeds of Milton Friedman and especially his teacher Friedrich Hayek (still the great phantom gurus of world powers dominated by the Olympus of financial speculators), which far surpass the lunacy of Mein Kampf in their absurdity. As is well known, for these lunatics the total war of all against all is no longer to be regarded as a remediable, temporary or manageable flaw in capitalism, but as a principle to be venerated with the greatest possible devotion. Chaos is the condition of perfect equilibrium, we are told in all seriousness and in the tones of those who command and are obeyed.

This massive intellectual breakdown among the high priests of Capital, and their crisis of legitimacy, can help us to remind us of the urgency, freedom and necessity to clarify, radicalise and make concrete the spirit of our utopias.

B)
Let us bring our pessimism into dialectical relationship with our optimism.

On the one hand, it is not necessary to have hope in order to act successfully: despair often has the blackly humorous quality of being more effective than hope. And the essential point here is that surrealism, revolt, revolutionary struggle, poetry, freedom and love are their own reward – and would be so even if those passions were doomed to total failure – because they are grand, just and beautiful passions.

But on the other hand, hope is itself sublime, dazzling and precious, the hope of a definite realisation of those passions, improbable and slender as it may be. How many lovers have dreamed in this way of being able to run their fingers, once only or once more, through the hair of their beloved! Something analogous is at work in all our passions. It is for this reason (and not out of a ridiculous optimism that is ready to bend itself to every kind of pragmatism) that we must not abandon the mad hope of love requited, of realising and sharing the Marvellous through creation, of the birth of a human race that is finally free, perhaps for only a few days but preferably for much longer, until this reconciled human race ceases to be (since ‘all that exists deserves to perish’) and disappears or metamorphoses into something completely unknown, perhaps something better.

C)
Lastly, the human race’s blatantly obvious current panic – whether latent or overt – can enable us to recognise the essentially desperate heart of these passions (which still, despite everything, turns its face towards hope) in which the surrealist movement, and each and every one of us, is recognisable.

What is all authentic creation, at its origin, if not a mad expenditure of energy to no purpose?

What is the birth in an individual of passionate love (and this birth can last a lifetime – those whose hearts are dead may laugh), if not the recognition that everything is pointless, if not the blinding flash of a light that it would seem entirely foolish to hope to attain?

What is the passion for poetic and/or social revolution, if not a wager on the improbable, on a future that will remain unknowable, because only ‘another world [that] is possible’ and another life on earth seem more beautiful and more just, even though all previous attempts have failed.

Ody Saban, French-Turkish surrealist, and Thomas Mordant, French-speaking surrealist of Gypsy descent. There are four million Gypsies in Turkey.
Paris, France, 28 November 2010

Translated from French by Merl Fluin, 18 February 2011

Excerpts from ‘Rising Sign’ by André Breton (1947, translation by Franklin Rosemont):

For me the only evidence in the world is commanded by the spontaneous, extralucid, insolent rapport which establishes itself, under certain conditions, between one thing and another, and which common sense hesitates to confront.

… a vital tension turned possibly towards health, pleasure, quietude, given thanks …

… mortal enemies the deprecative and the depressing.

… ‘A red dragonfly – tear off its wings – a pimento’, Basho substituted ‘A pimento – add wings – a red dragonfly’.

« SİGNE ASCENDANT » !

2011-02-23T11:49:00.003Z

Click here to read this text in English.

PROPOSİTİON DE THÈME, POUR UNE RENCONTRE SURRÉALİSTE A İSTANBUL EN 2011

Face au prosaïsme, empêtré jusqu’à la moelle, dans ses signes agonisants, face à la barbarie capitaliste, apparemment triomphante, construire la dialectique poétique concrète de la destruction et de la création, au temps du danger de mort, qui souffle sur la nuque de l’humanité.

Tout le problème consiste à apprécier, précisément, comment le négatif le plus apparemment destructeur peux aider au dépassement (merveilleuse Aufhebung !) de situations apparemment sans issue.

Les rapports dialectiques entre destruction et création ont pris depuis quelques décennies une qualité toute particulière que nous pouvons mieux commencer à comprendre. En effet, nous nous sommes faits à l’idée que l’humanité, sans être absolument condamnée, voit sa survie, à court ou moyen terme, ne plus être assurée. Les risques ne peuvent être calculés car ils dépendent finalement surtout des luttes de l’humanité dans son ensemble, et aussi du hasard. Il s’agit pour les surréalistes et révolutionnaires sociaux de tirer des forces paradoxales de cet état de choses.

A) D’abord nous pouvons prendre une conscience plus collective et plus personnelle, plus vives et plus profondes, de réinventer entièrement les bases sur lesquelles cette humanité est aujourd’hui sommée d’agir et auxquelles elle résiste. Ces bases sont par exemple, du point de vue de l’esprit, un mépris autiste et pornographique de tout, un culte nihiliste du rien, une pulsion de mort non sublimée et provisoirement enkystée dans une perversion polymorphe, une religion de la performance et de la jouissance maximum exemptes de sens pour être compatible avec l’indifférence totale et l’ennuie chronique.

Il faut lire et relire le délire de Milton Friedman et surtout de son maître Friedrich Hayek (eux qui restent les grands gourous fantômes des puissants de ce monde, dominés par l’olympe des spéculateurs financiers) et qui surpassent de loin, en absurdité, les délires de « Mein Kampf ». Comme on le sait, la guerre totale de tous contre tous est conçue, par ce délire là, non plus comme un défaut guérissable ou passager ou contrôlable dans certain limite du capitalisme, mais comme le principe à vénérer avec la plus extrême dévotion. Le chaos devient la condition de l’équilibre parfait, cela nous est dit avec le plus grand sérieux, et sur le ton de ceux qui commandent et se font obéir.

Cet affaissement intellectuel massif des prêtres du Capital et la crise de légitimité peuvent nous aider à ressentir l’urgence, la liberté et la nécessité de préciser, radicaliser et concrétiser l’esprit de nos utopies.

B) Dialectiser les rapports entre notre pessimisme et notre optimisme.

D’une part, il n’est pas nécessaire d’espérer pour agir avec succès: le désespoir a souvent cet humour d’être plus efficace que l’espoir. Et, pour aller à l’essentiel, le surréalisme, la révolte, la lutte révolutionnaire, la poésie, la liberté, l’amour, valent pour eux- mêmes- y compris dans l’hypothèse où ces passions sont vouées à un échec total sur le plan des réalisations - parce que ces passions sont grandes, justes et belles !

Mais d’autre part, l’espoir est lui-même sublime, éclatant et précieux, l’espoir d’une certaine réalisation de ces passions, aussi improbable et aussi ténu soit-il. Ainsi, combien d’amoureux et d’amoureuses ont-ils rêvé de pouvoir effleurer, ne serait-ce qu’une fois ou une fois encore, les cheveux de l’être aimé ! Quelque chose d’analogue est à l’œuvre dans toutes nos passions. C’est pour cette raison (et non par un optimisme ridicule prêt à se plier à tous les pragmatismes) que nous ne devons pas abandonner l’espoir fou de la réciprocité dans l’amour, de l’accomplissement et du partage du merveilleux dans la création, de l’accouchement d’une humanité enfin libre, ne serait-ce que pour quelques jours, mais de préférence pour beaucoup plus longtemps, jusqu’à ce que cette humanité réconciliée cesse d’être (puisque ‘’tout ce qui est mérite de périr ‘’) pour disparaitre ou pour se métamorphoser en quelque chose de totalement inconnu, peut-être meilleur.

C) Enfin, l’actuel et criante panique humaine, latente ou déclarée, peut nous permettre de reconnaitre le fond essentiellement désespéré (mais tourné - malgré tout - vers l’espoir) de ces passions, dans les quelles le mouvement surréaliste, et chacun de nous, s’est reconnu.
Qu’est-ce, à l’origine, que toute création authentique, sinon dépense folle d’énergie en pure perte ?

Qu’est-ce que la naissance chez un individu de la passion amoureuse (et cette naissance peut durer toute la vie- les esprits engourdis pourront rire), sinon la reconnaissance que tout est vain, sinon la fulgurance d’une lueur qu’il semble tout à fait déraisonnable d’espérer atteindre ?
Qu’est-ce que la passion révolutionnaire poétique et/ou sociale, sinon un pari vers l’improbable,
pour un futur qui restera inconnaissable, parce que seulement « un autre monde possible », une autre vie sur terre, paraissent plus beaux, et plus justes, bien que toutes les précédentes tentatives aient échoué.

Ody Saban surréaliste turque et française & Thomas Mordant surréaliste de langue française et d’origine tsigane. Il y a quatre millions de tsiganes en Turquie ! Paris, le 28 novembre 2010

Extraits de « Signe Ascendant »
Texte d’André Breton 1947
« Pour moi la seule évidence au monde est commandée par le rapport spontané, extra-lucide, insolent, qui s’établit, dans certains conditions, entre telle chose et telle autre, que le sens commun retiendrait de confronter.
(…) une attention vitale tournée au possible vers la santé, le plaisir, la quiétude, la grâce rendue (…)
(…) ennemis mortels le dépréciatif et le dépressif.
(…) ‘’Une libellule rouge- arrachez lui les ailes- un piment’’ Bashō y substitua ‘’Un piment- mettez lui des ailes- une libellule rouge.’’ »

Don LaCoss

2011-02-03T20:18:00.002Z

We are shocked and saddened to hear of the death of our Surrealist comrade Don LaCoss on Monday. He was passionate and tireless and will surely be missed by all of us in the international Surrealist movement.

A short announcement of Don's death and a tribute to him by Ron Sakolsky can be found here.

A memorial blog where people can share their memories of him has been set up here.

Our condolences go to all of Don's friends and family.

Untitled drawing by Patrick Hourihan

2011-02-03T16:05:00.002Z

Senegal and goodbye

2011-01-17T22:45:00.000Z

Why do you think I went north and south
Why do you think I went by
Why do you think I went north and south
Fly little one fly

Senegal and goodbye
Run before you finish the war
Don’t ever fuck with that door

I want you to win but not at that price
The smell of hospital pitch
Trickle of flies
You think you can –

Merl Fluin

Commodity fetishist

2011-01-12T12:05:00.001Z

by Paul Cowdell

Destruction 2011

2010-12-23T12:43:00.003Z

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

The Woman and the Machine

2010-12-10T14:58:00.004Z

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

The Great Library will burn down Rome

2010-12-10T14:00:00.003Z

Outside Parliament last night

New Alexandria

2010-12-09T12:38:00.003Z

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!

2010-11-23T11:34:00.001Z

by Paul Cowdell

Who fits up the Fitwatchmen?

2010-11-16T21:07:00.005Z

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"

2010-10-31T18:47:00.004Z

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

2010-10-24T22:27:00.002+01:00

West of Pure Evil

2010-10-21T13:30:00.003+01:00

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

2010-10-10T17:29:00.004+01:00

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

2010-10-07T00:05:00.000+01:00

Make your mark this National Poetry Day

Sex Magic: The Invocation

2010-09-15T11:09:00.004+01:00

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"

2010-09-03T11:09:00.004+01:00

(He's sorry he lost.)

Approved by the Committee of Opportunist Jokers

FAREWELL TO JEAN BENOÎT

2010-08-24T12:00:00.004+01:00

Jean Benoît

1922 – 2010

Stand aside ....

The spreading of joy

2010-08-21T14:29:00.001+01:00

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

Untitled drawing by Patrick Hourihan

2010-08-07T19:00:00.002+01:00

Kathleen Fox exhibition at the Freud Museum

2010-07-31T14:31:00.002+01:00

A Rod for Run-Awaies

2010-06-24T15:45:00.000+01:00

by Paul Cowdell

2010-06-07T21:54:00.003+01:00

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

2010-05-27T14:07:00.004+01:00

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

2010-05-06T09:57:00.009+01:00

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

Hydrolith: Surrealist Research and Investigations

2010-04-25T19:10:00.002+01:00

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

2010-04-04T12:25:00.000+01:00

Automatic text

2010-03-30T14:55:00.001+01:00

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

2010-03-30T12:59:00.001+01:00

The Most Impenetrable Place (Part 1)

2010-03-16T12:45:00.000Z

“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!

2010-03-16T12:29:00.001Z

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

2010-03-07T16:04:00.004Z

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

Letter from Portugal

2010-02-23T16:04:00.001Z

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

2010-02-19T15:02:00.003Z

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

2010-02-12T12:25:00.009Z

A new film by Miguel Angel Almagro

Click here to watch the trailer.

Tin Man Appointed to Head Costa Jury

2010-02-02T16:56:00.004Z

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

2010-01-27T13:03:00.002Z

Photos by Miguel

The Army of Dreamers

2009-12-21T14:24:00.007Z

Experiments in collective dreaming, November – December 2009
Miguel Almagro, Paul Cowdell, Merl Fluin, Aniano Henrique, Patrick Hourihan

1. The collective dreams: Cut-ups of individual dream texts

As she reached the last line of the song, she put her hand over my mouth so she could sing alone. She looked at me to indicate that this was nothing to do with my singing. I was reading a newspaper with the headline that Julie Andrews was terrified to give the song a greater dynamism at its end. Friends sitting on large comfortable leather chairs looked as though they thought this was about my singing. I was inside a room with a nice naked woman in the bed, under the blanket. After that, some noise and movement near her stomach made me think that there was an alien inside her body, and then a very beautiful bird flew out from underneath the blanket, but the bird started to scream and say some words which I couldn’t understand. Black smoke had darkened the sky. I could hear the sound of flying engines, the sound of the fireworks camouflaged the noise. Behind the curtain of smoke I spotted stronger lights moving in our direction, getting brighter as they approached us. I pointed with my finger at the aeroplanes, thinking they were part of the show. Two projectiles made impact with a nearby building, blowing up everything. I could feel the heat of the distant flames on my face. More planes were bombarding the city. We all started running downstairs looking for protection. I ran fast down the four floors to the street covered with an oily film. Picking up a hammer, I smashed part of the body shell and was horrified to find it full of blood and shit. Eventually we turned right, into the heart of the building, and went through an arch covered with a curtain. When we came into the central room, there was a large group of people watching a speaker at a flipchart. They all turned to look at us as we entered. There were lots of rabbits running around in the grass and through the fences, which Alis managed not to run over as we went slowly along. The campsite owner referred to them as her ‘guinea pigs’. We heard small children. Each room was separated from the next by a kind of arch. We had a gone a long way round the building, speeding up. It was very strange that there were no people (some of whom may or may not have been my sisters). Suddenly I could see a flight of rickety stairs, winding and making their way around the branches and ever upwards. As I started to climb them, the feeling of wanting to get higher grew, and I could soon start to see the sky. Reaching the top, I was inside a lorry (truck) cabin, a really tall large-scale lorry, three or four times bigger than any normal lorry. I was not driving and beside me were two or more persons whose identity I can’t remember. I was really pleased to see them after all these years, and very amused to see them driving this massive rig which somehow suited them so perfectly. I was with a former workmate, Lisa, and another female friend. They were both pushing pushchairs containing small children. My hands were shaking but I tried to focus, looking through the viewfinder. I could see that the enemy was myself on the front getting ready to shoot us again. I had to decide to kill him or save my girlfriend. At the last second I shot and killed him, blowing off his head. I ran looking for Tessa. Now the creature had become even bigger, no longer an insect but something a bit like a schmoo, with a pear-shaped fleshy body. Many of its bodyparts, though, were also inorganic – it had a long hard curved plastic tube coming out of its mouth, and many metal joints, clips, small parts etc in its body and between its legs, which were weirdly conspicuous as my mother wrapped the creature up inside a piece of cloth. Some of them said ‘We are here because we are going to kill you,’ and I saw one of my old friends taking a huge knife from the back of his trousers. Very disturbing and scary at the same time. I just said afterwards ‘I’m going, if you want to do that it’s up to you.’ We left on the bike, my friend without a face and I, and when we arrived in front of my house he just said to me ‘Never trust in the mirrors.’ I had gone into a house just across the road from this spot. I was applying to look after an elderly woman’s house. I was looking out of a large window with a night sky and a powerful moon. The air was full of flying and screaming in the hall outside the door. A caterpillar was out there too. I went out to help the children, carefully closing the door behind me.

I was a child again, looking up amazed by the explosions of colours all about us. Fountains of light illuminated the dark night and the other roofs in front of us. The explosions were loud and I was afraid, then I noticed that my mother was holding my hand and I could see my father right next to her also looking up at the fireworks. Other neighbours were also around enjoying the show. I could smell the gunpowder, at the time unfamiliar to me, but my hands were getting covered with the oil and the smell was sickening. One of the beetles slipped from my hands and fell to the floor with a heavy thud. Every time we tried to lower our voices to speak discreetly, a workman brushed right up against us. He was stretching building site tape around a hole in the ground and a telephone box. I called through the door to my mother for help, because I was now too afraid to deal with this on my own. Mum came out and a doctor was looking at her surprised with a bullet in his hand. When I asked him if she was all right, he said that the bullet inside her came out through her bloodstream. She was laughing, telling me that I did not believe that she was superhuman in her dreams. A panic broke out when we spotted a large hairy caterpillar crawling across the floor. Afterwards I saw some other bizarre buildings and some highways open to traffic just ending suddenly in a river or something like that. I noticed that in the streets all the cars had no wheels, they were like snowmobile machines slipping on the streets at an amazing speed. One of the adults caught the thing with a pair of tongs. Everyone was horrified at the idea that we might have an infestation of the things. Upstairs, we looked out of the back window. She pointed out into the garden to a greenhouse, and told me that she kept a lot of her things out there. Then I noticed that the room I was sitting in had walls that were shelved with hundreds of brown shoebox-like containers. Feeling very panicky, I caught more of the insects and found a way of dismantling them, and started to store the body parts in the boxes. The picture showed a boy wearing a wooden tunic, while a stick struck him on the chest. The campsite owner was a rather sour little woman with short grey hair. Urban scene: I was inside a car going into this town, the only access road to which passed inside an old power station. All the time some street was passing inside and through some factory and past the window of my vehicle, and I could see some workers and the production in the factory. In the next second I realised that I was already outside the building. I was somehow able to walk on the treetops and view the new amazing landscape. The air was full of fantastic and exotic birds in flight. I was in a large open air carpark, riding an old lady’s bicycle with a friend whose face I can’t remember. He was seated on the back seat of the bike. In some corner of my home town, a guy just started to run after us and we stopped. It was my old friend with two more friends from different periods of my life. Dreadlocks were growing like a climbing plant from beneath the bottom of a closed door. They were growing so quickly that I could actually see them, writhing and climbing. Some of them had thick dark fingernails at the ends. I was looking at a black and white comic. I managed to climb up, open the door and get into the passenger seat. Alis drove out of the carpark and through the grounds of a massive camping site where I had been staying. I went out into the garden to have a look. Along the edges of the garden were huge stone walls, with open window spaces, like gothic church cloister walls. Through them I could see a school to the right of the garden.

When I looked back at the house, it was very narrow. This was odd, because the front had been of standard width. There was no text, just single frame portraits of Princess Diana as a wolf. I was in a sitting room, on a sofa next to the singer Lal Waterson. She and I were singing a duet. On the left of the garden were some lean-to structures, with workbenches. I looked briefly at these, then moved towards the greenhouse structure at the end of the garden, which backed onto some open scrubland. In a house full of people, including my mother, and several babies and children, I twice stopped at a page in a book showing wooden body armour for children to wear while fighting with sticks. The children were adults again when I got out and met Tessa. The city was covered with soldiers running everywhere, tanks, guns, helmets. We also ran, and we approached a soldier in charge. He told us that everything was under control, nothing to worry about. We were so superior that it was like a training exercise for future, more intimidating, enemies. But on the front I could see the enemy assembling a machine gun and firing at us. A soldier next to us, who was shooting at the front, died, and Tessa was hit by a bullet. I found myself taking the position of that soldier and pointing the gun at the enemy. We were on an escalator in Harrods. I said ‘Let’s go to the second floor.’ When we got off the escalator it opened onto a series of long empty rooms running in a circle around the edge of the building. My friend Alis pulled up to give me a lift in a huge lorry. She was sitting up in the cab drinking coffee. Inside there were many wooden drawers. These contained things belonging not just to the woman I was applying to, but to other local residents, too. After that, another similar lorry got closer to us. It was a police lorry vehicle and everybody was very impressed, not because it was the police, but because we couldn’t ever have imagined that another similar vehicle could ever exist. After that the lorry trailer of the police beside us was transformed into a level of a building with a row of windows. I was walking through a dense forest and started to climb one of the trees. There was a sudden urgent sensation of wanting desperately to get to the top of the tree, but after climbing for a while I still could not see any sky above and became very despondent. The person showing me the garden pointed out which drawers were hers. I opened one, and found a dark fur wrap. This movement I found frightening – it was like the out-of-control bumping around of a daddy longlegs. I could see men and women walking at the same pace close to the windows. Some of the guys gave me a silver revolver and I was shooting in the head every person walking in those windows, but even after a deadly shot in the head, the person would still walk five or six steps until they dropped dead and stayed out of my sight. I was standing on a street corner in Penge, talking to another woman. She was saying ‘I know you’re heavily involved.’ As we watched, the caterpillar turned into a large insect shaped like an enormous hornet, its body honey-coloured at the front and stripy behind the wings. It jumped up and flew low to the ground in short bumpy hops, as if it was too heavy to take off properly. An arrow pointed under the arm of the armour, and bore the caption ‘Elasticated Sides’. This we immediately recognised as a particular kind of creature, disgusting and frightening and very dangerous to babies. In a rather squalid crowded room containing several babies’ cots, beetle-type insects were casting large shadows on the ground below. But suddenly I noticed that the insects were quite large, about the size of a grapefruit. I caught one in a net. The body was hard and dark blue in colour and had a human voice, like an old witch, screaming and laughing loudly, and after that he started to attack me in the face, and then I woke up.

2. Portraits of the collective dreamer: drawings by Paul Cowdell, Merl Fluin and Aniono Henrique, and boxed construction by Patrick Hourihan

Paul Cowdell

Merl Fluin

Aniano Henrique

Patrick Hourihan
(photo by Miguel Almagro)

3. Tentative conclusions

The remarkable preponderance of eyes and/or goggles in our portraits of the dreamer – which were all drawn/constructed separately and without any previous discussion – leads us to the preliminary conclusion that our group egregore may take the form of an enormous disembodied eyeball, and/or have special optical powers.
Investigations continue.

Untitled drawing by Patrick Hourihan

2009-12-09T15:09:00.002Z

2009-11-25T21:14:00.001Z

A silvery darkness came into the room
He escaped by boat and calmed a storm
“The riding crop is for your next visit,”
And when I was seated on it,
He watched the obscure corners of the planet
And took out the trunk coated in velvet
“With the end of my breath, the beginning of yours,
You are at the position of the old sorcerers”.
And he never heard a philosopher farewell,
And whispered tender obscenities in my ear.

Elva Jozef

Belgrade 6 charged with international terrorism

2009-11-20T13:27:00.002Z

News has been confirmed that the six anarcho-syndicalists from Belgrade, arrested and held in confinement since 5th September, are to be tried for international terrorism. They face 15 years in prison. They are accused of being the authors of graffiti painted on the Greek embassy on 25th August, and of having thrown a petrol bomb which only damaged a window. The fact that the comrades deny that they had anything to do with these events clearly does not worry the Serbian State in its obsession to find someone guilty. Indeed, from Paris to Belgrade, the international police are all very much alike… They must have had the same instructors…

So, the comrades are being charged with international terrorism. For the immediate future this means they will remain incommunicado in jail for at least several months.

Those comrades who are still free are trying to see if there is any way to appeal the decision.

Meanwhile, the worst case scenario has now happened. The battle will be long and difficult and these comrades will need all our support.

Lawyers’ fees will obviously be extremely high, so anyone who wishes to contribute financially to solidarity efforts can send a cheque made out to the CNT AIT, with the words “Solidarité Belgrade” on the back, to the following address:

CNT AIT
108 rue Damrémont
75018 PARIS

Information from the Free the Belgrade 6 website, which can be visited for continuous news updates on the case and information about the campaign.

International Surrealist Declaration for the Imprisoned Serbian Anarchosyndicalists

2009-11-01T14:24:00.004Z

We hereby declare our unconditional solidarity with the five Serbian anarcho-syndicalists who have been imprisoned since September the 4th, facing the charge of “international terrorism.” Tadej Kurep, Ivan Vulović, Sanja Dojkić, Ratibor Trivunac and Nikola Mitrović, all members of Sindikalna konfederacija Anarho-sindikalistička inicijativa (ASI), were arrested some days after an action of solidarity with the Greek activist, and then-hunger striker, Thodoris Iliopoulos. The target of this action was the Greek embassy in Belgrade.

The Serbian authorities used the slight damages caused to the building of the Greek embassy as a pretext in order to exercise their repressive powers, labeling the members of ASI as “terrorist” and detaining them with no substantial evidence of their actual involvement in this so-called crime of damaging the façade of a building. It is not the building, of course, that concerns the Serbian police; neither is it the symbolism, per se, of an attack against the embassy of another state: the real impact of international solidarity and radical politics, with a view towards social emancipation, is what makes them transgress the limits of their supposed democracy, so as to imprison militants through farcical procedures.

Ratibor Trivunac, one of the accused, is a friend of the international surrealist movement. But surrealism is not an exclusive club of personal relations, any more than it is one of mere aesthetic affinities. We consider as our brothers all these five persecuted Serbian militants (and the sixth, Ivan Savic, who was arrested some days later) because their cause, their choice to live and to struggle for another, liberated life, is one that we share. When a state lays its oppressive hand upon one of us, we must all feel the threat to our freedom, we must all take a stand with those who risk being deprived of their elementary freedoms because they are determined to fight, here and now, for real universal freedom.

We demand the immediate release of our five comrades and friends!
The passion for freedom is stronger than any of your prisons!

Athens Surrealist Group:
Grigoris Apostolides, Giannis Golfinopoulos, Manolis Daskalos, Alexandra Halkias, Diamantis Karavolas, Vangelis Koutalis, Sotiris Liontos, Helias Melios, Lefki Mossou, Makis Perdikomatis, Nikos Stabakis, Theoni Tabaki, Marianna Xanthopoulou, Giannis Xourias.

Nicosia: Kostas Reousis.

Leeds Surrealist Group:
Gareth Brown, Stephen J. Clark, Kenneth Cox, Luke Dominey, Jan Drabble, Bill Howe, Caroline Jeffs, Sarah Metcalf, Mike Peters, Peter Overton, Martin Trippett.

Surrealist London Action Group (SLAG):
Paul Cowdell, Merl Fluin, Aniano Henrique, Patrick Hourihan.

Grupo Surrealista de Madrid:
José Arias Taboada, Eugenio Castro, Manuel Crespo, Javier Gálvez, Jesús García Rodríguez, Vicente Gutiérrez Escudero, Bruno Jacobs, Lurdes Martínez, Julio Monteverde, Noé Ortega, Antonio Ramírez, José Manuel Rojo, María Santana y Ángel Zapata.
and its friends:
Sonia Ayerra, Rag Cuter, Andrés Devesa, Jesús González Gómez, Paul Hammond, Inés Mendoza, Emilio Santiago, Leticia Vera and the Anarchist Group Al Margen.

Groupe Surréaliste de Montréal:
Jean-Maurice Brouillet, Dominic Tétrault.

Le Groupe de Paris du mouvement surréaliste:
Michèle Bachelet, Alfredo Fernandes, Jean-Pierre Guillon, Michaël Löwy, Marie-Dominique Massoni, Dominique Paul, Michel Zimbacca.

La Vertèbre et le Rossignol (ville de Québec):
Enrique Lechuga, David Nadeau.

on behalf of Grupo Surrealista del Río de la Plata/Buenos Aires-Montevideo:
Juan Carlos Otaño.

on behalf of Skupina Českých a Slovenských Surrealistů:
Frantisek Dryje, Katerina Pinosova, Bertrand Schmitt, Bruno Solarik.

Surrealistgruppen i Stockholm, Johannes Bergmark.

Sürrealist Eylem Türkiye

Chicago Surrealist Group:
Penelope Rosemont, Paul Garon, Beth Garon, Gale Ahrens, David Roediger, Joseph Jablonski, Joel Williams, Jan Hathaway, Irene Plazewski, Janina Ciezadlo, Renay Kirkman, Tamara L. Smith.

Portland:
Brandon Freels, M.K. Shibek.

The St. Louis Surrealist Group:
Richard Burke, Susan Burke, Andrew Torch, M. M. Morose.

Eric Bragg (www.surrealcoconut.com)

The Marvellous is popular

2009-10-25T20:44:00.008Z

This weekend saw the launch of Black Lightning, our aggressively lo-fi new zine celebrating the Marvellous in popular culture. In issue 1 we present our cheerfully plagiarised manifesto "The Marvellous is Popular", alongside other delights including edible teeth, limbs on the loose, and a long-overdue appreciation of Jackie Chan as popular cinema's greatest poet.

Most Surrealists are understandably reluctant to evangelise for the movement, but we believe that the practice of occultation – the refusal to seek fame or success, or to turn one's work into commodities for the cultural market – should not, must not, mean a denial of the powers of the popular imagination. Some of us have perhaps been a little too fond of repeating the mantra that "Surrealism will never be a mass movement" when the late-night TV schedules (especially, in the UK, on Five and ITV4), the cheap grab-bags in mainstream comic shops, the world of straight-to-DVD movies, and even the pick-and-mix sweet stands in pound shops and supermarkets, all attest to the public's unconscious but insatiable appetite for the Marvellous. How can convulsive beauty be regarded as a minority interest, when Prison Break averages over 9m viewers a week in the US alone, and Harper's Island is broadcast in almost 40 countries? How can hypnogogic landscapes be regarded as Surrealists' special domain, when Igglepiggle and his friends are at play in Night Gardens all over the world, every night of the week? We know scores of Surrealists who lionise the silent films of Feuillade and the Gothic paroxysms of "Monk" Lewis, but outside of SLAG's own meetings we never hear any paeans to T-Bag, Michael Scofield, John Wakefield or Henry Dunn. We find this neglect inexplicable, and with Black Lightning we want to go some way towards putting it right.

If Surrealists these days are sometimes too quick to dismiss current popular culture – especially when it's made for TV, especially when it's from the US – then conversely, of course, the public is usually too quick to consign Surrealism to the gallery, arts cinema or prestige documentary. Friends and acquaintances learning that we are Surrealists are more likely to ask us our opinions on Buñuel, Švankmajer and indeed (sigh) David Lynch than on DC comics or Wilkinsons sweets. We cede to no-one in our love for Buñuel and Švankmajer, or for that matter for the other "classic" Surrealist heroes like Fantômas, the Marx Brothers or Looney Tunes cartoons. But the Marvellous is popular remains our watchword in the face not only of (some) Surrealists' disdain for TV's plebeian pleasures, but also of (most) people's assumptions that Surrealism is for art buffs and cinéastes, or that poetry is none of their concern. Poetry is everyone's concern, always and everywhere – and we Surrealists can help to bring that concern to consciousness by highlighting the extent to which poetry is, if not exactly commonplace, then at any rate present, and alive, and astonishingly beautiful whenever its black lightning flashes, which is still more often than most people think. The entertainment-industrial complex undoubtedly seeks to stupefy the public's imagination into consumerist docility. But as it grubs down towards the audience's lowest common denominator, it must inevitably also grub down into our unconscious commonwealth – of beauty, terror, desire, passion, and the longing for freedom. In that sense the entertainment industry is constantly sowing the seeds of its own destruction, and Surrealists can help to germinate them in the heart of every consumer.

We are optimists, but not idiotically so. Of course we know that the overwhelming majority of commercially-produced popular culture is irredeemable shit; of course we will never stop repeating that poetry must be made, and not merely consumed, by all. But the dialectics of culture, even under the depredations of the most advanced form of consumer capitalism – especially then – means that sometimes, at least, the slickest and/or stupidest productions are also those which fail most conspicuously to conceal the raw bones of desire moving behind the screen. Poetry, like lightning, must ever appear, to some men hope – and to other men, fear!

Special thanks to our friends in the Leeds Surrealist Group for their help with the distribution of Black Lightning no. 1.
To receive a copy of Black Lightning no.1, email us.

charming underneath this disguise

2009-10-14T12:27:00.003+01:00

Paul Cowdell

Demonstration in defence of Rata Trivunac and comrades, Monday 28th September

2009-09-27T20:03:00.009+01:00

Serbian authorities have arrested and detained five anarchists, including our friend Ratibor Trivunac. As well as being a prominent anarcho-syndicalist, Rata is a long-standing supporter of the international Surrealist movement with a wealth of knowledge about the often-neglected history of Surrealism in Belgrade. Members of SLAG who had the pleasure of meeting him in London two years ago are horrified at the news of these arrests.

Details of the five's arrest below are from Libcom.

The five, Tadej Kurep, Ivan Vulović, Sanja Dojkić, Ratibor Trivunac and Nikola Mitrovic, are activists in or associates of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Initiative, the Serbian section of the International Workers’ Association (IWA).

The arrests are allegedly related to a direct action which took place at the Greek Embassy on Aug. 25. Negligible damage was done; a crack in one window, a tiny burn mark on the facade and a circled-A graffiti on the embassy as an act of symbolic solidarity with Greek hunger-striker Thodoros Iliopoulos. The prosecutor however imagines this as an act of “international terrorism” and would like to charge our comrades with such. If the state allows such charges to be pressed, they could be facing 3-15 years in prison.

As it is, the five were arrested, harassed and are to be held in custody for at least one month while the case is organized.

Although one of the accused, General Secretary of the IWA Ratibor Trivunac, clearly and publicly declared that he knew nothing of the action, he was arrested. It is not the first time that authorities have come after him or his comrades for no other reason than the fact that they are radical critics of the state.

A demonstration in support of the five was held outside the London Embassy of Serbia and Montenegro on Friday 11th September.
There will be a second picket of the Embassy of Serbia and Montenegro on Monday 28th September, 12-2pm.
The embassy is at 28 Belgrave Square, London, SW1X 8QB. Nearest stations are Victoria, Hyde Park Corner and Knightsbridge.

Click here to send a message of protest to the Serbian government.

Untitled drawing by Patrick Hourihan

2009-09-25T16:13:00.002+01:00

Pareidolia in the boudoir

2009-09-05T17:37:00.003+01:00

Two different people's interpretations of the figures appearing on the same patch of a roughly painted bedroom wall.

Chance Report

2009-08-15T15:57:00.006+01:00

In the middle of July, our comrade Nikos Stabakis came to London for a visit, bringing with him some new publications from the Athens Surrealist Group, including the latest issue of Klidonas. Two of us met him for a drink in the evening. We didn't really have time to look properly at any of the publications he gave us, because we were up very early the following morning to catch a plane to Stockholm.

Almost three weeks later in Stockholm, we went with some of our friends in the Stockholm Surrealist Group to a book launch party, and during the evening we proudly showed off the copy of Galerie du Mystère's Guide de Paris Mystérieux (1966) which we had found in a charity shop the previous afternoon. Flipping through the pages, Mattias Forshage suddenly stopped at an illustration on page 230 and exclaimed "But I saw this image somewhere else yesterday!" After a few moments he worked out that it must have been in the copy of Klidonas we had brought him as a present from Nikos, and which we still hadn't had time to look through properly ourselves.

In Guide de Paris Mystérieux, the image is subtitled "L'homme volant" de Restif de Bretonne, and is an illustration for the Guide's entry on the Quai de Conti, where in 1580 an Italian man constructed a set of wings and attempted to fly across the Seine (he ended up in the water, apparently unharmed).

In Klidonas the image appears on page 96 as an illustration to a text by Sotiris Liontos – which, because we cannot read Greek, we are unable to decipher, apart from the English epigram from Shelley's Ozymandias.

(For one of us, the symbolism of this image is perfectly clear, particularly in light of another coincidence which took place the day before we found the Guide in Stockholm but which we did not find out about until after we returned to London. But that final stroke of objective chance must remain unpublished, "to protect the innocent" as the saying goes.)

Aussies in Alaska

2009-08-05T05:13:00.001+01:00

Yesterday I packed a bag full of newspaper and hitchhiked to Alaska, where awaiting my arrival were eighteen perturbed Australians.

“You should have been here three weeks ago,” one of them shouted as I walked into the bar and ordered a pepsi.

“So should you,” I retorted, to which he seemed to want to say more, but he shut his mouth and parked his butt on the seat of the stool.

“What you got for us, then?” he finally asked, clearly having decided that my tardiness negated the need for small talk.

“Money first,” I said, equally blunt.

“You’ll get it. Let’s see the shit.” I sighed. There were eighteen of them and one of me. I had to trust Onca’s word that these gentlemen would pay up and not rob me. I opened the rucksack a peep. The talking Aussie peered on and gasped. He grabbed his groin and ran out the room, seventeen pairs of Aussie eyes, plus mine, following his progress. I shrugged.

“You couldn’t have chosen someone with a bit more reserve?” I accused them, and no one spoke.

“You,” I said, pointing to a small one, who looked not unlike an Irish featherweight boxer. “Come and look. I haven’t got all fucking night, I’ve got a trucker coming back in an hour.”

The Irish Aussie sauntered over, trying to look all casual. He didn’t speak but looked down into the bag. I saw the breath hitch in his chest but he managed to swallow down his reaction.

“All right?” I asked. He nodded mutely. “Money?” Irish-Aussie clicked his fingers at two of the Aussies standing by a trunk. They heaved it over and plonked it at my feet. One fiddled with the lock, his attention drawn by my bag which still laid open a tad, so I shut it and the trunk lid was lifted.

“What the fuck is that.”

I looked accusingly at the trunk-opener. He looked helplessly at his mate, who looked at the Irish Aussie, who looked in relief at the groin-grabber, as he re-emerged, looking distinctly dishevelled.

“Payment.”

“I don’t want that shit.”

“It’s all we got.”

“Then I’m outta here.” I swung the rucksack back over my shoulders. I turned my back on them, knowing they could easily jump me, take my shit, and, if they fancied it, murder me and throw out my corpse for those who love the carrion. Bears and such. Irish-Aussie called:

“Wait. We must have something you want.”

I whipped back around. “I’ll take an Aussie. I don’t care which one.”

He glared. “What in the hell for?”

“That’s my business.”

Irish-Aussie exchanged looks with his seventeen pals, each of them looking longingly at my bag. Maybe they assumed I was armed, and they weren’t. I don’t know why they didn’t attack me. After a few more silent exchanges, all eyes fell on one Aussie. He was thin and pointless-looking. The Aussie nearest him nudged him, and soon all seventeen of them were jostling and pushing the thin one forward, till he was at the front of the pack, looking at me in fear.

“Deal?” I asked the Irish-Aussie.

“Deal.” I chucked my rucksack on the floor, and jerked my head at the thin Aussie, my think Aussie, who, with a final look at his mates, forlornly followed as I led the way out of the bar.

*****

But the truth was I didn’t want that fucking Aussie for any reason, prurient, wicked, or otherwise. I just wanted to test those fuckers, to measure their desperation. What sort of clan, I figured, would give up one of their own number for a little hit? Because what I’d given them was little, insignificant to what you could get back in the States proper – but this was Alaska, they were hooked, broken, and broke. And stuck there, probably until they all died. And they just given me, exchanged with me, a life, a comrade, for a hit. It sickened me to my core. I had some real trouble getting my trucker to take him on board, too.

“He’s an addict.”

“He hasn’t had a hit in weeks.”

“So he’ll be getting them attacks soon.”

“Withdrawal symptoms?”

“Yeah, them.”

“It’s possible.”

“Definite.”

I hesitated. “Probable.” Our own form of haggling.

He grunted. “I’ll take you to Vancouver.”

My heart sank. Just an hour ago he’d agreed to take me to Nevada.

“I can get you whatever you need in Nevada. Anything, Mick.”

“I ain’t taking no addict over the border back into the States. Do I look crazy to you?”

The question was redundant, because Mick, with his huge goggle eyes and is thick glasses making them appear even bigger, looked as crazy as they came. I didn’t bother to answer, but sighed and agreed to Vancouver.

I sat between Mick and the thin Aussie. Mick treated him like a ticking bomb. He refused to put music on, whispering loudly that it might set him off. The thin Aussie remained mute, either by volition, or necessity, or perhaps it was one of the withdrawal symptoms. He just stared out at the road, his thin white hands limp in his lap, his staring, fearful eyes fixed on the tarmac, but perhaps seeing something else.

Josie Malinowski

John Welson exhibition, 31 July – 30 September

2009-07-23T16:08:00.000+01:00

THE RETURN OF COFFIN JOE: a review of Embodiment of Evil (2008)

2009-07-13T22:09:00.006+01:00

Here I am, back in the world ....

Coffin Joe, undefeated as ever by the forces of either death or narrative logic, is back on the big screen, in the final part of what turns out to have been a trilogy. Shamelessly falsifying the ending of the previous instalment (and unrivalled masterpiece) This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967), Coffin Joe emerges from the bowels of darkness to continue his frenzied search for a perfect woman, a son, and the continuity of his own blood. Relocated this time to the favelas of São Paolo, his delirium rages against everything in its path – his lovers, his followers, his tormentors, his own soul, and above all the cops and priests who rule the filthy world against which he hurls his unstoppable fury. The mayhem alternates between new scenes of inspired brutality – particularly, as always, against women – and horribly beautiful hauntings by both his previous victims and the afterlife whose existence he so vehemently denies. Snakes, spiders, cockroaches, rats, cannibalism, necrophilia and an Aladdin's cave of torture provide sumptuous confirmation that Coffin Joe can still work the old voodoo. Embodiment of Evil, it has to be said, feels at times a little like a greatest hits compilation; but it's hard to be churlish about it when the hits are so dazzlingly great.

The first part of the Coffin Joe trilogy, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul (1963), has been hailed as Brazil's first horror film, and according to the film-maker himself came from the real world of his nightmares. But perhaps inevitably, in contrast with the pure fever vision of the earlier films, Embodiment of Evil bears some minor scars from the 40 intervening years of popular culture. Before, when the audience laughed, it was with exhilaration, amazement, and sheer Sadean delight – not just at the feats Coffin Joe could get away with, or at the ways in which he was punished for those he could not, but also at our own voluptuous complicity in his crimes. Now, in this new film, the exhilaration and complicity remain, but there are also a few unexpectedly knowing and easy laughs; scenes which, instead of poetically delirious images (glowing fingernails emerging from cell door), serve us with mere signifiers (a depraved priest's tattoos and nipple clamps); moments when we suddenly feel that we are not, in fact, experiencing a demented vision of blood, but merely watching a horror film. Such moments are still relatively few and far between – José Mojica Marins has not degenerated into Wes Craven – but they ultimately prevent Embodiment of Evil from ever quite reaching the same heights, or depths, as its predecessors.

But despite the lapses, the compromises, the occasional pauses for a breather on his own laurels, Coffin Joe's Gothic imagination still blazes with the same black light – spurting with lust, incoherent with rage, thrilling, beautiful. As he tells his assembled lovers in the film's final scene, he knows as well as any of us that true creation lies at the "pole of tension" between good and evil. His own pole of tension bears up pretty well too. By the end of the film his superiority might not have proven quite as immortal as he had hoped, but it's made for a very fuckable corpse.

With eternal thanks to Sparty Mills for giving me my first introduction to the world of Coffin Joe

OPEN WINDOWS: an exhibition by Patrick Hourihan

2009-07-03T13:55:00.000+01:00

6th – 12th July 2009
11 am – 6pm daily

5 Blenheim Crescent Gallery
Notting Hill, London W11

Fantastic Duet
(acrylic on canvas)

A Manifesto for Surrealist London

2009-07-02T12:14:00.000+01:00

'The matter of our work is everywhere present', wrote the old alchemists, and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a stone's throw of King's Cross Station.

~ Arthur Machen, Things Near and Far.

The SURREALIST LONDON ACTION GROUP (SLAG) is not simply a group of Surrealists who happen to live in or around the London area. SLAG is a group which celebrates the Surrealist city, and actively seeks the SURREALISATION of London and of the lives of all who live and work in it.

The Surrealist approach to London is psychogeographical first and foremost, but it is NOT the pseudo-poetic, romanticised, nostalgic, all-too-fashionable – and ultimately conservative – approach of, say, Iain Sinclair or Peter Ackroyd. ‘Psychogeography’ in the commoditised form has become indistinguishable from tourism, and ‘secret London’ just another current in the constant stream of images which alienate us from each other, ourselves and our surroundings in the Society of the Spectacle: a vision infected with what André Breton in the Second Surrealist Manifesto called ‘a cancer of the mind which consists in thinking all too sadly that certain things "are,'' while others, which might well be, "are not".’

Under this regime of the Spectacle, with its tourist ‘experiences’ and its media image-fetishism, many people feel that they know what to expect of London, just as they feel they know what to expect of Surrealism. Superficial aspects of London have been turned into media images, just as the superficial (‘mannerist’) aspects of Surrealism have been adopted by the media and culture industries- this is ‘surrealism’ reduced to style (i.e. 'surrealism' with a small ‘s’), with little or nothing to do with Surrealism as a movement. Genuinely Surrealist London, like the Surrealist Movement itself, is in constant flux, just as reality itself shifts, mutates and so reveals its inconsistencies: ‘a world that some call reality but which is only an incessant discovery; a mystery reborn indefinitely’ (Pierre Mabille).

Surrealist psychogeography is in an altogether different vein. Our expeditions through space and place operate not at the level of the image, but at the level of the encounter, at once more fleeting and more visceral than the mythopoesis-lite of tourism and nostalgia. The city for us is not a passive background or external world to be mapped, recorded, classified, and ultimately rationalised in the spirit of Augustan taxonomy; something to serve us with the illusion of gaining control over the uncontainable, but an active subject, to be conjured as one might conjure an egregore and explored as one might explore a lover. Our encounters with London are not just with its physical locations but also with its dreams, desires, fears and loves, its premonitory horrors and revolutionary hopes: in short, with its SURREALITY.

In London we station ourselves on the periphery of the comprehensible and are taken to the realms of the improbable and beyond, to encounter Imagination grappling with Reason, or to be more precise, Imagination avenging itself upon Reason, joyfully and without mercy. In our 'elective places' - fixed points, multiple magnetic poles in the space-time continuum around which (r)evolve Surrealist place and Surrealist life: the secret roads, ancient subterranean rivers, plague pits, those tear-jerkingly poignant junk shops of the Holloway Road and stalls of Cheshire Street, the murky waters of the Serpentine, the reality-check architectural contrast between the Square Mile and Bethnal Green, the soon-to-be-defiled loveliness of the Lea Valley; and such street names as Bleeding Heart Yard (EC1), Cornflower Terrace (SE22), Black Lion Lane (W6), The Ring (W2), Crutched Friars (EC3), Gothic Road (Twickenham) and Candy Street (E3) - we embrace perpetual correspondences and submit to objective chance, conduct an archaeology of the present and future, discover points of departure into the infinite depths of London's erotic universe. We haunt the city and are haunted by it: we love its absurdity, its sublime kitsch, its artificiality, we delight in its playfulness, no less than its fevers and migraines, capricious cruelties and abominable debaucheries, tantrums and seizures. Marvellous phantoms haunt London: a stroll in the park can become an event of eternal significance, an unfolding of myth, marked by strange encounters, talismanic found objects and chance provocations.

Of course our methods are not confined to London. They can and should be copied and adapted to reproduce the encounter with Surreality in any environment, in any city, town, village or field, elsewhere, anywhere or (with the Surrealist atopos) nowhere. But the SLAG takes London as the centre of its Surrealist explorations and experiences. It is the place where we live Surrealist life. Marooned on the city’s rocks, we dive into the ‘mystery and melancholy of the streets’, and moving like a ‘blind swimmer’ (Max Ernst) we seek out the wonders, the signs and portents, concealed behind the surfaces of the everyday. Ever in pursuit of the ineffable, something that lies just over the horizon of the visible, the habitual, the predictable, the banal – something that endlessly mutates and proliferates, something that ultimately is not a ‘thing’ at all but is movement itself, analogical restlessness, the permanent revolution of metonymy –the Surrealist is like the hero of Georges Limbour’s Le Cheval de Venise, ‘never lost, for the path he takes is always towards what he does not know.’ The Hunting of the Surrealist Snark, the pursuit of Surreality, ought not to be undertaken in the shallow, tainted pools of art books, of paintings in galleries or objects in museums, but in the city streets, in the very heart of the demonic angel where desire is paramount and ‘dream’ and ‘reality’ are indistinguishable, become one. Here we may be privileged to observe the transfiguration of the ordinary into the fabulous.

French Surrealists have seen Paris as both a 'soluble city', and as a woman; the late, Leeds-based Surrealist Anthony Earnshaw saw his city as a slattern; we see our city as a multi-headed OVERLY-EMOTIONAL HERMAPHRODITE, with putrescent erogenous zones, vulvae gaping wide in tunnels and doorways, clitorises in the street furniture, arseholes in alleyways, dildos throbbing and phalloi bursting from the erectile-gherkin architecture. With its myriad snapping jaws and delirious mouths kissing itself with cannibal tongues, London is a city continually devouring itself, digesting itself in an unstoppable act of MAD LOVE.

Cthulu waits beneath the streets

2009-07-01T13:51:00.000+01:00

START THINKING SOLDIER

2009-06-22T19:36:00.007+01:00

THINK THE WORLD OWES YOU A LIVING? You’re not far wrong. The bosses and politicians owe you for all the things they’ve taken from you: the intelligence and curiosity they bored out of you at school; the adventures you should have been having when you were stuck behind a desk or a counter, or standing on an assembly line or a dole queue; the food, housing and “free” time they made you sweat to pay for when they should already have been yours by right. Now they’re offering to give it all back to you – money, education, job security, housing, even a sense of purpose for your aimless life – but on one condition. Before you can get your hands on what’s rightfully yours, you have to be willing either to kill or to die for it. And now that they’ve wrecked the economy and destroyed the job market, they’re banking more than ever on working-class kids joining the army – so that they can keep making money from oil, gas and the global arms trade while you’re dodging their profitable bullets.

START THINKING, SOLDIER. Think about all the things you knew when you were a child, back before they started trying to make you stupid with the National Curriculum. That sense of magic and wonder – a whole world ruled not by violence or profit, but by the powers of play and imagination – it’s real. It’s infinitely more real than their lies about peace and security – as real as the love that claws at your heart – as those glimpses of elsewhere that come to you in your dreams – as that late-night yearning for something you can’t name but which you know MUST BE. It’s a reality which refuses to separate work from play, day from night, dreaming from knowing, sleeping from waking, necessity from desire… and it’s yours for the taking, if you can only find the courage to leave behind your timidity, conformism, pessimism and simple fear of ridicule.

DON’T GET US WRONG. It’s not that we’re against war. We were born in a war, and we’re fighting to win. It’s just that joining the British Army is not the way to win it. The ruling class want you in the army so that they can make a profit from your body, dead or alive. But that body of yours is a multiverse. It’s made of the same stuff as the all the suns of the galaxy – and it blazes just as fiercely, across light-years of desire. Don’t just fight with it, fight for it, because it’s more real than anything they can offer you.

So are you going to fight to live, or will you just make do with survival? Stay alienated from yourself, or face up to the reality of your own desires? Your dreams are an arsenal. Start dreaming, soldier.

Transition

2009-06-11T19:28:00.003+01:00

by Patrick Hourihan

Bridges

2009-06-07T16:42:00.010+01:00

Inspired by the ‘exteriority’ concept from the Madrid Surrealist Group, from their response to Mattias’ letters, and from the phrase 'Surrealists as Urbanists', I felt compelled to write this:

Let me tell you of a case that is happening right now where I live, and that started long long ago. A couple of thousand people included me live in the last town of a row of three. My town, that I call the Village of the Eastern Bay ends very beautifully with the shores of the ocean. The other two towns that go inland are the Arty Town, the one next to mine, and the other that I call The Sleepy Town. They go inland until reaching the city of Providence through a highway.

The three towns link one another through the bridges built in between them. So, we have a bridge that links my town to Arty Town, and a second bridge that links Arty Town to Sleepy Town. Two bridges. But not really. When I leave the Village of the Eastern Bay every morning with the bus to go to the city, I cross a bridge pointed as in use and temporary according to urban legends, because a second one right next to it is under construction, naked yet with wooden ribs. The urban legends move from mouth to mouth and reach my ears often and they tell that that bridge, that second one, appeared taking form ‘ since I first started smoking. I was 17 and now I am 35’- said a woman long ago in a bus ride. The papers and the internet also talk about it. There is a blurred suspicion about the whole construction project. The peoples all look at the sky and wonder when the bridge will be finished. I can see that is true: riding on wheels over the bridge in use, the busy one, I look at the unfinished one to my left when I leave the town, to my right when I return, and I see everlasting stillness. I see stop- ness. I see ‘nothing happens’. I see trails of working and construction intentions, like yellow signs ‘ under construction’, and very rarely, really, two or more men eating doughnuts standing still, some sitting on bricks. But mostly, that mysterious bridge that resists growing to touch the other side is left alone, solitaire.

But the story goes on with the ride towards the second town and towards the other bridge that allows the kissing between the Arty Town and the Sleepy Town. Here the case of resisting bridges triplicates. One rides over the middle bridge, again, the one in use, the busy one, and if one is heading towards the city, can see the sophistication of the claim of resistance of movement, construction, creation…. when turning the eyes to the right. There is one bridge, the villagers call it the original bridge. It is considerable smaller, as the water in between the land runs in narrower space. It is made of dark wood. It is pretty and no one can ride a car or anything besides bicycles and rolling skates. It is the bridge for the feet. And for the fishermen. Then, turning the eyes to the left, one can see that sort of path of cement that sustain itself with grey, solid short columns above the water, and one more time, that thing from memorable times. So, we have the old bridge, the one in use in the middle and the one that will be for the future. Days after days, mornings and evenings for half a year I have looked and now I wonder what that all mean. I am certain that I have come to hear what the bridges under construction say out loud and their thoughts have pushed me hard to put it on writing. They say they are not needed. They say they are the picture that titles ‘creating needs’. They say that the towns want to have their space, and indeed, they shout the towns want more and more water in between them…only if they could be lost inside the ocean! The bridges say they don’t want to be finished, that there is nothing to be built or to complete as they are already what they are. They are, they say, the question. And this is the end.

Carolina

Dreaming Squires

2009-05-30T00:46:00.006+01:00

You, Ruth! are rather insolent, you know
At being disappointed in your wish
To supersede all warblers here below,
And be the only Blackbird in the dish;
And then you overstrain yourself, or so,
And trickle downward like a stream of pish,
Still able to render service to your class,
By beating your padel on its flatulent arse.

Charles Darwin swoons at the discovery
that genetic stock can go down as well as up.