Cloud Land

 

I think we are going to start this here.

The video above was separated into 7 chapters, with the first being about Escaping Illusions. I will not start with Plato's Cave since I don't wish to share this idea that human beings ever move out of. 

The next chapter (Renaissance moments) was about the possibility of cultural rebirth once "people" walked out of that cave into the light. 

Of course, every commentator or historian talking about surrealism will have to tell you that the word surrealist comes from Guillaume Apollinaire's surrealist drama, Les mamelles de Tirésias. Let's be short about this: None of the surrealists who attended that presentation enjoyed that play. "Dear audience, make babies!" (The war killed so many, you see...)

In a very typical fashion, it's almost impossible to find an english video about this poet. Those in french either don't have a subtitles option and if they do the Ai-generated auto-translator butchers the shit out of them. For the time being, this will have to do:

Before Apollinaire, there's a whole lineage of poets that most strictly-english speakers have also probably never heard about. You can find a few letters André Breton wrote to Geneviève Mallarmé, the daughter of this next guy. 

Imagine still being under the impression that a hundred years ago, the Roaring Twenties in Paris was only about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, or that Dali was even there during that period.

 

All this to suggest that before moving over the European Renaissance chapter towards that new Renaissance, perhaps learning a few things first could remove layers of crust on your beaten boots.

Moving to that fourth chapter, Romantic Revival. In the second manifesto of surrealism, André Breton had basically written that if the romanticism era is considered to have brought the good, and that surrealism comes in its tail (a so much prehensile tail), it tends towards its opposite effect. No idealism this time around. No one can preemptively know for sure what a "no borders" new sensibility will come to articulate.

You can trade the American transcendentalists for the German romantics instead and skip the fifth chapter (American Renaissance) entirely. 

Why did André Breton wrote that surrealism would be about the evil instead of the good? Because if you are a prehensile tail, instead of sending your thoughts exclusively into flight, you also need to know how to be anchor it. To find the supreme point of the Marvellous, you need to abolish the contradictions, to know the total opposites by exploring them both. And that's the modernity that Freud brought by introducing his concept of the unconscious.

In terms of exploring the Modernist Movement (Chapter Six), you are missing something if you can't acknowledge this, and it is something that commentators and historians of surrealism constantly struggle to understand. The understand how the exploration of the unconscious by surrealists works and what it's after is quite a bitch, isn't it? It makes you stammer, it makes you meander...

Either listen to the confusion right here or download the episode (in mp3) via this link.

So, these Non-Academics (last chapter) in the Surrealist Movement started more than a modernist avant-garde art school rising from the ashes of Dada in response to the horrors of WW1 by shocking the bourgeois and their use of the absurd and rejection of logic (WTF?).

Described that way, you make it all sound like a scam or look even more clownish than Dali ever could.

(Back to the old days when Mrs. Pearlmania didn't want to be in front of the camera)

But with that said, there are whole fields of radical imagination to explore out there. Fields that don't involve playing on people's gullibility for personal gains. Just people trying to inspire others to use their creativity. And again, that to some people it's so difficult to demarcate these type of explorers from grifters is just amazing. 

Heterodox thoughts, radical imagination, utopias... 

Thank you, Comrade Patinaud. You remember how I had abandoned that teenage novel I mentioned in the previous post? What is that famous surrealist slogan again? "Transforming the world, said Marx; changing life, said Rimbaud: these two directives for us make but one." You don't replace a world by another, you transform the existing one, the world that is already in place. And to change life, you first need to know what it's truly about and secondly how it has operated thus far. But you don't need a Renaissance.

After WW2 and all that took place during its course, that famous surrealist slogan added a third element: Remodel human understanding from top to bottom.

 

This translation leaves a lot to be desired (which is something I previously never paid a single mind cell to but came to notice in many instances during the last 5 to 6 years... if english speaking surrealists base their understanding of André Breton's thought from such janky translations...) but will have to do for the time being.

But also, during the WW2 exil of many surrealists to the United States, the idea of Creating New Myths, introduced at the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in 1942, and the initiatory journey proposed at the 1947 exhibition introducing the Great Transparent (the idea that humans might not be the fucking center of the Universe) first talked about in the Prolegomena to a third manifesto of surrealism or not (1942), are all about what Naomi Klein alluded to at the end of that interview.

For the "grand" Surréalisme exhibition in 2024 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (an exhibition not a single current surrealist was asked to contribute to.. and not that any would have), this is the only public presentation or conference that the museum made available online on their website and youtube channel, and besides a good understanding from Damien MacDonald, it's fucking insane. As soon as Gauthier Vernier starts talking, if you feel any tension forming in your jaw, I suggest you take a break and come back later. Don't punch your screen (this shit is expensive).

Let's move to New York City and visit the legendary Kitchen.

Hoping you paid attention during F.D Signifier's video on Beyoncé (included in this blog's Tying out loose beginnings), what I was interested about the most in that video was the topic of yapping, which Legacy Russell also just talked about, but Legacy's presentation is connecting as well to what Annie Le Brun was working on before her death. 

(Here the AI struggles once again to auto-translate properly, but I will provide proper subtitles as soon as I can. And I'll provide a tutorial about how to use all that stuff. That's where we are, gang.)

When Aurélien Bellanger mentions how a television studio set worked like a secret society's inner circle, outside of the left and the right divide, I just thought about the publication of André Breton's Les pas perdus, the book containing his essays prior to 1924, marking the end of his earlier and Dada periods separating it from the newer surrealist period he was just getting into. In english, this book's title is translated by The Lost Steps. But do you know what this book title even represents?

During the post-revolution era of restoration in France, those designated as "les pas perdus" were those who were "not lost". It's the separation from Tzara and Picabia, outside the Unobtainable Chamber. Make what you will of this analogy.

 

Guys of the Société Anonyme, Inc. (Duchamp and Man Ray) remained during that period of confusion.

Just think about if the Duchamp collection wasn't kept intact at the Philadelphia Museum of Arts and instead of that Schwitters Merz-art work, Jeffrey Epstein had connected Ronald Lauder to Leon Black over purchasing Duchamp's Fontaine.

This is the first Sun Ra album I ever bought. A limited pressing that has very likely been out-of-print ever since. This live recording came courtesy of the archives of John Sinclair.

This is my own vinyl rip done with my trusty Ion USB turntable on Windows XP around 2010, when I had the genius idea of selling my entire library. I only kept copies of the vinyls and CDs and a few scans of the surrealist journals and reviews I owned.

Pictures were found on the internet.

Here's a little something more for you, and what we have is the Ratchet Orchestra celebrating the Sun Ra centenary and Marshall Allen's 90th birthday at FIMAV in 2014.

Not really sure where this comes from. It's definitely a soundboard recording. I found it on a blog a few days after the festival ended. According to a discussion I've had about this with Xilèf, this may be courtesy of the trombonist Jacques Gravel's personal blog. Anyway, here's the line-up:

Guests from the Sun Ra Arkestra (bottom left corner of the picture):

Marshall Allen - alto saxophone, Steiner EWI, voice

Danny “Pekoe” Thompson - flute

The Ratchet Orchestra:

Lori Freedman - clarinets, WX7 Wind MIDI Controller, voice

Ida Toninato - bassoon, baritone saxophone

Damian Nisenson - saxophones, shenai

Yves Charuest - alto saxophone

Jason Sharp - bass saxophone, flute

Ellwood Epps - trumpet

Scott Thomson - trombone

Jacques Gravel - bass trombone

Joshua Zubot - violin

Guido Del Fabbro - violin, recorder

James Annett - viola

Chris Burns - guitar, voice

Guillaume Dostaler - piano, JX-3P synthesizer

Ken Doolittle - percussion, voice

Michel Bonneau - percussion

John Heward - drums

Isaiah Ceccarelli - drums

Nicolas Caloia - doublebass, Maxi-Korg synthesizer, music arrangements 

2014 was also the centenary of William S. Burroughs. And there's a new film at the Nova Convention '78 that just came out last month.

Here's another oldie (in terms of "Zoom" online conference) from 2013.

Afrofuturism has been mentioned several times throughout this blog but I just wanted to bring it back again since it's definitely also not interested either in working on a new Renaissance. And I love it.

*******

Here we are with the second single Stereolab released during their latest tour in America. 

We are going to complete and put an end to this blog with the next posting, featuring the last song from Stereolab's Instant Holograms On Metal Film album as well. So, be there for the grand finale. 

Stereolab · Cloud Land

History of solidarity

Between struggles

In dire love

A colonial project serves imperialism

Brutal divide to rule

When struggles become a touchstone of international

Fight against colonialism

Recognize my struggle to yours is identical

Relay my power as you fight

Retransmitting bonds of courage

Impart the forms, unite

Impart the forms, unite

Relay, transmit, unite

Correlation between struggles

Retransmitting the energy

Sisters and brothers our struggles mirror each others

Recognize you, recognize me

Mutual support, unite