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More Surrealist Subversion

It looks like I’m still in the Synchronicity Zone. This PDF of the fourth and final issue of Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion turned up when I was searching for something that had nothing to do with Surrealism in general or the Chicago Surrealist Group in particular; inside there are yet more wolves and mentions of anarchy, although the two aren’t directly connected this time. The fourth number of Arsenal was published in 1989, thirteen years after the third issue, and at 230 pages is the most substantial number of all. Substantial and easily the best of the four, with a wide range of textual and visual material, and less concern with the aesthetic and political arguments of the distant past. There are some impressive collage pieces in this issue, as well as examples of work by painters that were unknown to me which I’ll be following up later.

The editorial tone is generally less belligerent than the earlier issues although Franklin Rosemont is still lobbing verbal grenades at the cultural figures who managed to upset him. As I said in January, you can’t expect much else from a magazine that names itself after a store of weapons. Elsewhere in the issue the writers attempt to compensate once again for André Breton’s dismissal of music as a vehicle for Surrealism although none of the discussion goes very far. The blues and jazz musicians mentioned are all dead ones, and mostly seem to be celebrated for their “liberatory” existence rather than any overtly Surrealist qualities in their music. The attitude seems to be: This music/person is liberatory; Surrealism is liberatory; therefore this music/person is Surrealist. The only reference to the vast ocean of popular music comes with a one-page eulogy to Bob Marley of all people, the safest choice in any discussion of Jamaican music. Reading this you wouldn’t know there was a whole world of deeply weird and very influential dub music out there. I’d argue that there’s more Surrealism in King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown or any number of Lee Perry singles than in the whole of the Marley discography. An opportunity was missed in this issue and the earlier numbers of Arsenal to show the ways in which music—especially the popular variety, not compositions for the concert hall—has been continually Surrealist from the rock’n’roll era to the present day. But this discussion is only a small percentage of the whole journal. If it fails here it leaves an opening for more detailed exploration elsewhere.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Werewolf of Anarchy
• Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion

The Werewolf of Anarchy

Synchronicity is as universal as gravity. When you start looking you find it everywhere.

Thus Discordian anarchist Stella Maris, making her first appearance in my re-reading of Illuminatus! (previously) in a week when more synchronicities related to the novel have been imposing themselves. “The Werewolf of Anarchy” (published on the 23rd of the month, of course) was a picture that turned up a couple of days ago when I was searching through the back issues of Punch magazine. Punch did a lot of this kind of thing, dropping the humour now and then for some heavy-handed pictorial comment about international affairs. Given my current reading the word “anarchy” was bound to catch my attention but the werewolf image is unusual—why not a regular wolf?—while being further bound to the novel via Robert Anton Wilson’s fondness for Lon Chaney Jr’s lycanthrope. I often wondered why Wilson used to refer to this as much as he did. Illuminatus! mentions the werewolf legend from the first Universal film in its grab-bag of cultural weirdness, and I seem to recall there being more references in Wilson’s later novels. In the 1980s Wilson was living in Ireland where he wrote a werewolf-themed song with a local band, The Golden Horde, one of the few (only?) Irish groups who can be counted as part of the fleeting psychedelic revival that took place in the middle of the decade. The Golden Horde’s first album, The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy, appeared in 1985, and ends with Lawrence Talbot Suite, a number which is “explained” with the following words: “Lon Chaney Jr, The Easter Bunny, The primeval sleeve note, red curtain, the stings, a crush-can dominates a scowling buddha”. Whatever that means.

Meanwhile, my RSS feed informs me that Pentagrams Of Discordia have just released a new album whose final number bears the title Planetary Radiation (RAW); Robert Anton Wilson turns up again at the end of the track to talk about Chaos Theory in relation to Discordian history. And the above item arrived in the mail this week, a two-disc CD release of a newly-discovered live recording of Steve Hillage and band performing at the Bataclan in 1979. I own a lot of live Hillage albums, along with all his studio recordings, and this is one of the very best. The concert is pertinent for including an early rendition of New Age Synthesis (Unzipping The Zype), a song that made its first appearance in 1979 on the studio side of Live Herald, and which contains what may be the first reference to Illuminatus! in song form (the album sleeve includes thanks “to Robert Anton Wilson for his intriguing books”). Hillage offered an explanation of the studio songs’ lyrics in his own mysterious sleeve note:

For those who find the lingo a bit strange—“unzipping the zype” can be defined as (rising organ music please!):—the spontaneous inner exorcism by which a person can neutralise the harmful, consciousness-distorting effects of the artificial elemental spirits (zypes) formed around each word of everyday language.

The zypes are built up by the identification process by which we manufacture “reality.” Occultists refer to them as “astral glamour,” yogis as “the web of Maya”—but no word is zype-proof, not even zype. Cherish this phrase—it’s a royal flush!

Hmm, okay… No indication there or in the lyrics as to how you go about “unzipping the zype”. New Age Synthesis is a call-and-response between Hillage and partner Miquette Giraudy in which Hillage recounts his experience with the zypes. In the first verse he mentions “word spirits” to which Giraudy replies “Egregores!”, an occult concept which—quelle surprise—has connections to Chaos Magic. In the next verse Hillage blames the existence of the word spirits on the Illuminati—”Paranoia!” responds Giraudy—only to discard this claim in the lines that follow: “It isn’t really them at all, but you and me”. Hillage’s albums of the 1970s are filled with all manner of New Age business—flying saucers, ley lines, mysticism of various kinds—but he isn’t a David Icke. Why werewolves? What zypes? Mysteries abound. This is a great album, anyway, in or out of the Synchronicity Zone.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Ewige Blumenkraft
• Twinkle, twinkle little stars

Ewige Blumenkraft

It’s that occult symbol again…

And it was suddenly all weird and super-freaky, like Godard shooting a Kafka scene: two dead Russians debating with each other, long after they were dead and buried, out of the mouths of a pair of Chicago Irish radicals. The young frontal-lobe-type anarchists in the city were in their first surrealist revival just then and I had been reading some of their stuff and it clicked.

“You’re both wrong,” I said. “Freedom won’t come through Love, and it won’t come through Force. It will come through the Imagination.” I put in all the capital letters and I was so stoned that they got contact-high and heard them, too. Their mouths dropped open and I felt like William Blake telling Tom Paine where it was really at. A Knight of Magic waving my wand and dispersing the shadows of Maya.

Adding to my suspicion that my footsteps are being dogged just now by the Chicago Surrealist Group, that there is a quote from the second chapter of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy. The passage occurs in a lengthy reminiscence by hippy-anarchist Simon Moon in which he remembers the continual arguments of his Chicago-anarchist parents. Having mentioned Illuminatus! in a couple of recent posts I decided to read it again, in part to see what might be thrown up by the very long hiatus since my last encounter. I read the novel rather obsessively from the age of 15 to 17—three times in all, I think—then set it aside while I followed Robert Anton Wilson into his other novels and non-fiction books. Simon Moon doesn’t mention the Chicago group by name—and the Rosemonts and their friends were more Marxists than anarchists—but, ya know… RAW enjoyed his coincidences (or synchronicities, or whatever) so I’ll take this as acausally significant. Will there be more? It’s a big novel so I don’t doubt it.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Eco calls on Cthulhu
• Going beyond the zero
• 23 Skidoo

Helix magazine, 1967–1968

Another underground magazine, this one originating in Seattle during the first wave of the counter-cultural publications that flourished from the mid-60s on. Wikipedia says that Helix managed 125 bi-weekly issues from 1967 to 1970; the Internet Archive has the first 42 issues which run to October 1968 (the uploader’s dates are out by a year each way). When so few of these magazines are available online this makes a welcome change. As usual, the passage of time means that the ads are just as interesting as the editorial material, while the quality of the art and design improves as the magazine evolves. I’ve been too busy this week to go through all the issues but I’ve picked out some of the more notable covers.

Continue reading “Helix magazine, 1967–1968”

Bugs Bunny meets Fantômas in the Aquarium of Love

Pop Surrealism, 1949.

More from the Chicago Surrealists. The discovery of the first item comes via a comment from Paul (thanks!) in the post about Arsenal magazine which directed my attention to Monoskop where there’s another publication, Cultural Correspondence, related to the Chicago Surrealist Group. Cultural Correspondence was a US journal which ran for 14 issues from 1975 to 1981. Searching around for more information revealed an archive of the entire run at Brown University:

A journal born from the collapse of the New Left and hopes for a new beginning of a social movement, but also of left-wing thinking about culture, Cultural Correspondence was in many ways a unique publication.

Its founding editors, Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, had both served on the editorial board of the journal Radical America, founded in 1967. Buhle had been the founder of that bi-monthly journal, creating it out of a network of activist-intellectuals in the Students for a Democratic Society; Wagner was officially “Poetry Editor,” but after its shift from Madison, Wisconsin, to the Boston area in 1971, he became a member of an expanded board of editors. Together they taught at the Cambridge-Goddard Graduate School, then Wagner left for Europe and Buhle left the editorial board, moving to Yonkers. An exchange of letters from these locations spawned the notion of a new publication. It was to be the first radical magazine put out by members of a generation that had since childhood watched television and appreciated as well as enjoyed a considerable portion of it, also films and “pulp” literature.

The issue at Monoskop was the penultimate one (numbered 10/11), guest-edited by Franklin Rosemont who took the opportunity to give the readers an exploration of “Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices”. The final issue (numbered 12–14) continued the theme with a Surrealist supplement.

Even without the Surrealist content, Cultural Correspondence is an interesting magazine, closer to the era’s underground magazines than an arts publication, especially in its attention to the underground cartoonists. Given my general antipathy to arts magazines I find this very much in its favour. The Rosemont-edited issue shows a different side of the Chicago group when compared to the more pugnacious Arsenal, with no sign of the scowling ideologues that fill the pages of the Surrealist journal. HP Lovecraft turns up once again (musings about Surrealism from his very last letter), together with Rosemont’s beloved blues musicians. Rosemont also reprints the short essay about pulp fiction by Robert Allerton Parker, Explorers of the Pluriverse, which appeared in the catalogue for First Papers of Surrealism.

Meanwhile, at the Internet Archive there’s Marvellous Freedom, Vigilance of Desire, the exhibition programme for the World Surrealist Exhibition which was staged in Chicago in 1976. Penelope Rosemont refers to this event several times in Surrealist Women so it’s great to be able to see some of the artworks which are only described in brief in the book. Many exhibition catalogues are mere lists of pictures with an essay or two but this one looks like it took the First Papers of Surrealism catalogue as its model, being filled with essays, poems, small illustrations and so on. The early Surrealist exhibitions were never satisfied with scattering artworks around an otherwise empty room, several of them extended their themes into the exhibition space in early manifestations of the installation or environment concept. For the Chicago event the visitor passed through “Sleepwalker’s Hill” into the “Corridor of the Forgotten Future”, which led to the heart of the exhibition and eleven “Domains of Surrealist Vigilance” dedicated to significant figures: Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the Duchess of Towers (from one of Andre Bréton’s favourite films, Peter Ibbetson), Sade’s Juliette, Harpo Marx, T-Bone Slim, Peetie Wheatstraw, Robin Hood, Bugs Bunny, Alfred Jarry’s Doctor Faustroll, Melmoth the Wanderer, and the Surrealists’ favourite master criminal, Fantômas. The imperishable wise-cracking rabbit had already appeared in the pages of Arsenal, as well as on the cover of the first issue of Cultural Correspondence, but this is where he becomes a genuine Surrealist icon.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion