An overabundance of furniture.

On Wednesday, I saw the APT production of "The Chairs," which involved dragging an ever-increasing number of chairs into a surrealistic environment...

Then, on Friday, I went to the movies for the first time in over a year, to see "The Backrooms," and it too involved a piling up of furniture in a surrealistic environment....

It's a bit much. A bit meta. Seemingly separate surrealisms are converging. In one week, I'm seeing 2 things playing out so similarly, and I can't think of any other play/movie where the furniture was so important. I didn't set out to experience plentitudinous furniture.

Watching both the the play and the movie and thinking about them afterwards, I thought a lot about whether we were supposed to think of the place as a fantastical external environment that contained the characters or whether it was a depiction of the deteriorating state of a character's mind. 

"My hero was my father, a closeted bisexual Army major general who, in the 1990s, argued in favor of gays in the military by reminding people that they’ve always been there."

"Yes, the military vibe could be depressingly macho, but it’s also about having your buddies’ backs, no matter their gender, sexuality or race. I spoke about the subject of my new play, Claude Cahun, a French Jewish Surrealist who, with her partner, Marcel Moore, broke into a church at night during the Nazi occupation and put up a banner, reading: 'Jesus is great. But Hitler is greater. Because Jesus died for people — but people die for Hitler.' Voilà, punk!"

That's an excerpt from "Today’s Young People Need to Learn How to Be Punk" by John Cameron Mitchell, the filmmaker (notably of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch").

The expression of the French Jewish Surrealist is something you can work out on your own, no? Key words: "during the Nazi occupation."

I want to focus on "closeted bisexual." Mitchell's father was married to his mother, so how does he count as closeted if he just kept quiet about who else he's sexually attracted to? That's the general practice among married people, not to speak out about your interest in anyone other than your spouse and not to do anything about it. It might be a more poignant case if the man married a woman but only felt attracted to men, but this, we're told, was a bisexual. Presumably, he was attracted to his wife. Where's the closeting in restricting your sex relations to your spouse? It's not as if heterosexuals feel free to speak out and act out about their sexual attraction to others. No one admires these adulterers for "coming out of the closet."

Anyway,  John Cameron Mitchell is reporting on his speaking tour, interacting with students. He told them: "Your homework is to stop canceling each other, find out about punk, and get laid while you’re at it.... Punk isn’t a hairstyle; it’s getting your friends together to make useful stories outside approved systems. And it’s still happening right now, all over the world." He says, "MAGA has adopted an authoritarian style of punk that disdains what Elon Musk calls our 'greatest human weakness,' empathy. But O.G. punk, while equally free of trigger warnings, is constructive and caring."

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality."

Wrote C.S. Lewis, quoted by David French, in "Four Lessons From Nine Years of Being 'Never Trump'" (NYT).

That's a free-access link, so you can see for yourself what 4 lessons French learned.

But I liked the C.S. Lewis quote in the abstract. It's so abstract! The "highest reality," eh?

And now, this blog has a theme today: reality. This is only the second post of the day, but the first post was about a NYT column called "Could Eminem Snap Gen X Voters Back to Reality?"

Is there a sense — at the NYT and elsewhere — that reality is at stake, that it's out there, eluding us, and we need to struggle to get a grip on it, and we are losing?

I am reminded of Trump's saying — on the Joe Rogan podcast — that when he became President, "it was very surreal." But: "When I got shot, it wasn't surreal. That should have been surreal. When I was laying on the ground, I knew exactly what was going on. I knew exactly where I was hit.... I knew exactly what happened.... With the presidency, it was a very surreal experience.... And all of a sudden I'm standing in the White House, and it was very, very surreal...."

I am reminded of Elon Musk's "There's no truer test than courage under fire."

And: "Reality, what a concept!"

Wake up and smell the instant coffee....

Yesterday, at 2:18 PM, 3 posts down, I was talking about "talking about instant coffee," and then, that evening, I was rewatching my old favorite movie "My Dinner with Andre" and that line jumped out: "we drank instant coffee out of the top of my shaving cream."

A big theme in this movie is whether, when things connect up, it's not just a coincidence but something mystical and important, such as when Andre — after feeling he's heard the voice of The Little Prince — runs across a copy of an old surrealist magazine with a page of handprints from 4 eminent men whose names begin with the letter A and 3 of them are Andres and the other one is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Wikipedia has this about Saint-Exupéry:

In The Little Prince, its narrator, the pilot, talks of being stranded in the desert beside his crashed aircraft. The account clearly drew on Saint-Exupéry's own experience.... On 30 December 1935, at 2.45am, after 19 hours and 44 minutes in the air, Saint-Exupéry, along with his copilot-navigator André Prévot, crashed in the Sahara desert....

See? A random Andre.

"But our best understanding of how reality works is entirely bound to finitude."

"Physics is all about conservation principles. There are no infinities.... Technical culture often longs for freedom from finitude. A profound truth, however, is that the greatest mysteries are found in conserved systems, which can become rich and complex, not in infinite ones, which stretch out like blank white sheets to the edge of the cosmos. And so another urgent question is whether people can enjoy the storied reality of finitude after coming down from the high of fake infinity. Can being merely human suffice? Can the everyday miracle of the real world be appreciated enough? Or will the future of culture only be viral? Will all markets become Ponzi-like fantasies? Will people reject physics forever, the moment we have technology that’s good enough to allow us to pretend it’s gone?"

Writes Jaron Lanier, in "Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us? Apple’s Vision Pro headset suggests one possible future—but there are others" (The New Yorker).

Because Mieko Kawakami’s novels "look squarely at the times she is living through, with an emphasis on gender and class"...

... the NYT Magazine writer thinks "Western readers may once more be ready for contemporary Japanese fiction that embraces the magic of realism itself."

I'm reading "'Breasts and Eggs' Made Her a Feminist Icon. She Has Other Ambitions. Will the Japanese novelist Mieko Kawakami’s stark explorations of class translate to American readers?" by Joshua Hunt.

What is meant by "once more"? Did something happen to us "Western readers" that alienated us from realism when it comes to work by Japanese writers? Well, that's actually the article writer's idea:

"You opened your eyes and looked around—supposing that you were young and critically alert, wherever you might stand in that constellation of twentieth-century urban centers—and a diagnosis suggested itself."

"You were witnessing an accountancy-driven compression of human potential within a global interlock of power, money, mechanization, and mass media. This condition, which Breton termed 'rationalism,' seemed to underpin all extant forms of governance, whether capitalist, Stalinist, colonial, or fascist. (A sliding scale, argued the Martinican Surrealist Aimé Césaire, for the violence the Nazis inflicted on Europe simply built on the precedent of violence inflicted by Europeans on others.) Surrealism offered a certain route out of that historical claustrophobia. Flaunting your anomaly—your disobliging, disagreeable x—you not only affirmed your personal intransigence but also signed on to an energizing counterconspiracy."

From "An Impulse Felt Round the World/A recent show and catalog on Surrealism proposes that the thoughts expressed in André Breton’s 1924 manifesto were latent in disparate urban centers, only awaiting his coining of a movement identity" by Julian Bell (NYRB)(reviewing "Surrealism Beyond Borders").

"The surrealists, that group of Paris-based painters and writers who reached deep into the newly fashionable unconscious for inspiration..."

"... were eager to claim the most famous artist of the day for themselves. The figurative but distorted forms that Picasso was producing resonated powerfully with the dreamscapes that paid-up surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and André Breton were producing. While Picasso was not generally a joiner, he agreed to design the cover for the first issue of Minotaure, the influential magazine of the movement that was launched in 1933. The mythical figure of the minotaur – part-man, part-bull – functioned more personally as an alter ego for Picasso, representing all his lasciviousness, guilt and despair."

From "A Life of Picasso: Volume IV by John Richardson review – stranger things/The final volume of biography by Richardson, who died before finishing it, is a thrilling survey of Picasso’s surrealist era" (The Guardian).

ADDED: The unconscious was once "fashionable," but it's rare these days — isn't it? — to hear anyone talk about the unconscious. And yet, in some ways, we're inclined to give priority to our dreams.

The University of Texas school song, "The Eyes of Texas," is disparaged as originating in minstrel shows.

I'm reading a WaPo column by Cindy Boren: "Texas players told to stand for school song, despite its origin in blackface minstrel shows." 

The lyrics to “The Eyes of Texas” were inspired in part by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, who after the Civil War was a teacher at what would become Washington and Lee University, where he made an impression on future UT president William Prather by repeatedly telling students that “the eyes of the South are upon you.”... 

Edmund T. Gordon, a professor of African and African diaspora studies and anthropology at Texas, said (via Texas Monthly) that Prather reminded his own students that “the eyes of Texas are upon you,” inspiring a pair of UT students in 1903. Their song debuted it at an annual campus minstrel show, according to Gordon, who said the students probably were wearing blackface when they performed it. 

The melody is based on “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” which has its own origins in minstrelsy and other stereotypical depictions of Black people. 

Football players have called for replacing the school song. I feel an instinctive resistance to breaking traditions, but let's think about that history. And look at the lyrics! The state has eyes and is always watching you: "The Eyes of Texas are upon you/All the livelong day/The Eyes of Texas are upon you/You cannot get away/Do not think you can escape them/At night or early in the morn/The Eyes of Texas are upon you/'Til Gabriel blows his horn."

There really is something wrong with this song. It's oppressive even if you don't know the background story. It speaks of surveillance and endless oppressive work. 

Maybe a lot of college kids think the song is just funny and surreal. Eyes that you cannot escape. 

"We were at once recipients of and contributors to the joy of witnessing the sudden appearance of creatures none of us had foreseen, but which we ourselves had nonetheless created."

Said the Surrealist poet Simone Kahn, quoted in "Explaining Exquisite Corpse, the Surrealist Drawing Game That Just Won’t Die."

It's a game you might want to play, during our long confinement, with all the concern about about our body.

Here are 2 fabulous examples by Man Ray, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Max Morise (in 1928):



If you don't know how to do these drawings and don't want to read the linked article, look closely at these images and see where the paper folds are. One person begins the drawing, then makes a fold that reveals only the ends of his lines, the next draws from there and makes the next fold, etc.

"The music keeps you healthy?"/"Yes, very much. Music and cats. They have helped me a lot."

"How many cats do you have?"/"None at all. I go jogging around my house every morning and I regularly see three or four cats—they are friends of mine. I stop and say hello to them and they come to me; we know each other very well."

Ha ha. From a New Yorker interview with the great writer Haruki Murakami, published a couple week ago, noticed today as I'm putting my Murakami tags in order.

I like that cats quote, but there's a lot of interesting stuff about writing in that interview:

The way people act in real life is disgusting compared to the way I behave in my best dreams.

Trump's dreams are lovely compared to reality.



Transcript:

But we have to take steps to harden our schools so that they are less vulnerable to attack. This includes allowing well-trained and certified school personnel to carry concealed firearms. At some point, you need volume. I don’t know that a school is going to be able to hire a hundred security guards that are armed. Plus, you know, I got to watch some deputy sheriffs performing this week. And they weren’t exactly Medal of Honor winners. All right?

The way they performed was, frankly, disgusting. They were listening to what was going on. The one in particular, he was then — he was early. And then you had three others that probably a similar deal a little bit later, but a similar kind of a thing.

You know, I really believe — you don’t know until you test it — but I really believe I’d run in there, even if I didn’t had a weapon. And I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too, because I know most of you. But the way they performed was really a disgrace.

And I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too, because I know most of you.... The delusion that the people you've met are the good people. The disgusting — deplorable — people are farther away.

When other people do something disgusting, you should wonder whether, in the same situation, you'd have been disgusting too.

But he's serving up high hopes of solutions that could work, and like his dream of how he'd run into a stream of bullets for the kids, these solutions are happening now in the realm of the imaginary. You see yourself running toward danger, and you see the "well-trained and certified school personnel" with their concealed firearms "harden[ing] our schools." What fine, brave, competent personnel they are! But they'll be school district employees, just human beings beset by the complicated, unpredictable failings that cause real life to play out in a manner so different from dreams.



That's "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening." That title was a clue in today's NYT crossword. The answer is Salvador Dali:

In this "hand-painted dream photograph", as Dalí generally called his paintings, there is a seascape of distant horizons and calm waters, perhaps Port Lligat, amidst which [his wife] Gala is the subject of the scene.... In the upper left of the painting what seems to be a Yelloweye rockfish bursts out of the pomegranate, and in turn spews out a tiger that then spews out another tiger and a rifle with a bayonet that is about to sting Gala in the arm. Above them is Dalí's first use of an elephant with long flamingo legs....

In 1962, Dalí said this painting was intended "to express for the first time in images Freud's discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up. Thus, as a bar might fall on the neck of a sleeping person, causing them to wake up and for a long dream to end with the guillotine blade falling on them, the noise of the bee here provokes the sensation of the sting which will awaken Gala."

An elephant with long flamingo legs. That could be the new symbol of the Republican Party, the Republican Party that dreams.


Detail from "The Temptation of Saint Anthony" by Salvador Dali.

Dreams! They're not just for Democrats anymore.

Surrealistic Breakfast.

The photo — with the post title — feels (retroactively) inspired by the famous "Object" by Meret Oppenheim:

I intentionally wrote 2 posts about Salvador Dali today, and — surrealistically — he made a random appearance in a third post.

The 2 posts that are intentionally about him are "What could be more surrealistic than exhuming the surrealist?" and "His moustache is still intact, [like clock hands at] 10 past 10, just as he liked it. It’s a miracle."

Those 2 posts happened today as a result of a real-world event: The corpse of Salvador Dali was exhumed to cut out some body parts to test to determine whether he was the father of a woman who's seeking a chunk of his estate.

In between those 2 posts, there was a post that came into being solely because the word "instigator" popped up in conversation. (And it wasn't a conversation about Salvador Dali.) The word makes me want to hear the old song "Something in the Air," which begins with the line "Call out the instigators," which is the name of the post where I embedded the video. I had not watched the video all the way through, so I hadn't noticed what a commenter — Kassaar — pointed out: "Dali is in the Thunderclap Newman video... Coincidence?"

Let me clip out the precise point:



Either that's a coincidence or the awakened spirit of Salvador Dali is haunting me.

(Interesting lorgnette, by the way, with the handle in the center like a slingshot.)

What could be more surrealistic than exhuming the surrealist?

You might say, no, it's not surrealistic. There's nothing more down to earth than digging a decayed corpse out of the ground. But Salvador Dali — the surrealist in question — was extracted not from some graveyard, but from a crypt within his own museum.

Here's the NYT article about the exhumation, done according to a court order in a case about whether Pilar Abel, "a 61-year-old Tarot card reader," has a claim to "the worth hundreds of millions of dollars that Dali left to the Spanish state." So it's not as though Dali avoided writing a will. He tried to give all his money to the government. (Am I wrong?)

The tombstone was lifted with a pulley to allow access to the painter’s coffin below. Forensic experts then collected hair, teeth and nail samples, as well as a couple of bones...

Are they making a collage?!

... which will be replaced once the DNA testing is completed.

Ms. Abel wants to be recognized as Dalí’s daughter, born as a result of what she has called a “clandestine love affair” that her mother had with the painter in the late 1950s in Port Lligat, the fishing village where Dalí and his Russian-born wife, Gala, built a waterfront house.

Dalí died at 84 in 1989, seven years after Gala, with whom he had had an unusual and childless relationship: Gala moved to a castle overlooking Púbol, another Catalan village, and Dalí could only visit her there if she extended a written invitation....

Gala was 10 years older than Dali. From her Wikipedia page:

Due to his purported phobia of female genitalia,* Dalí was said to have been a virgin when they met on the Costa Brava in 1929. Around that time she was found to have uterine fibroids, for which she underwent a hysterectomy in 1936. She was Dalí's muse, directly inspiring and appearing in many of his works.

Here's the most prominent image, "Portrait of Galarina":



What path did your eye take and how many points of interest did you take in before you saw...

"Why had I dragged my family — my wife and our Snapchatting 12-year-old daughter and our longhaired, talkative 9-year-old son — away from work and school to see, of all places, Mount Rushmore?"

Asks Sam Anderson in a NYT Magazine article with a title that caught my attention, "Why Does Mount Rushmore Exist?/This gargantuan shrine to democracy has never felt so surreal." How does anybody know the how surreal Mount Rushmore has felt over its close-to-one-century existence? Whose feelings have counted and why does Sam Anderson — speaking of feelings — feel that he should behave as if he's the arbiter of surrealism?

But now I'm wondering why he's taking his children out of school to go on a trip? Is truancy just some concept relevant to other classes of people than those who write for the NYT?

Here's Anderson struggling with the question in the post title:

I couldn’t say, exactly. All I knew was that I seemed to be suffering a crisis of scale. America was taking up a larger part of my mind than it ever had before. It was dominating my internal landscape, crowding out other thoughts, blocking my view of regular life. I couldn’t tell if it was reaching its proper size, growing the way a problem tends to grow just before a solution is found, or if it was swelling the way an organ does before it fails and bursts.

Is this about Trump? Wait. I get it. America, growing way beyond its proper size and failing and bursting. Big President heads carved out of a South Dakota rockscape in the 1920s and 30s are showing us the horror of Donald Trump's dangerously swelled ego that's about to blow.

And it began to seem foreign to me, our American obsession with size. We are born a fantasy of bigness. We are tall and strapping, with big hats and big hair and loud clothes and booming voices....

We are? 

Why does goodness have to be huge? It is a dangerous belief....

But who believes it?

On "Face the Nation" today, the panelists seemed to be playing a game called: Talk about Trump as much as you can without talking about Trump.

The moderator was John Dickerson, and his actual question was: "You are an assignment editor. And you have to assign coverage for the year 2017. How do you deploy your forces? What’s the story?" Obviously, the story you've got to cover is President Donald Trump. But they're not going to say Well, duh, John, we've got to cover the damned Trump presidency.

Our first contestant is Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic:

JEFFREY GOLDBERG:  Well, the story is-- there’s one overarchingly huge story. A very big league story, as Michele might say. The-- the-- the story is-- the-- the story is the upending of American politics. The story is of the outs coming in and the ins going out. --The story is trying to explain to the American people what’s happened to their two main parties. And-- and the deeper story, also, I don’t want to forget this -- the deeper story is globalization, and technological disruption, and anxiety born of-- of rapid change, rapid, destabilizing change, the fragility of institutions. All of that is-- is there undergirding the larger, more immediate story, which is how did Donald Trump become president of the United States....

Bzzz. Goldberg mentioned Donald Trump. He had a great run going — the outs coming in and the ins going out... anxiety born of-- of rapid change, rapid, destabilizing change, the fragility of institutions... Great stuff. There's overarching and undergirding — construction to go along with the destruction. It was mindbending. I was ready to give him the prize, but then he said the name. Wipe out.

Let's get the next contestant up here. Michele Norris, a journalist affiliated with something called the Race Card Project:

"Here's a guy, Sergeant Bergdahl. We get Bergdahl, a traitor, a no-good traitor, who in the good old days would've been executed, and they get five killers who are right now out on the battlefield."

Said Donald Trump — one quote of many in a Business Insider piece titled "Donald Trump just gave an amazingly surreal speech in Las Vegas."

Is that headline an attempt at humorously emulating Trump's way of speaking? It must be, and I'm wondering at what point the strategy of regarding him as a clown will be abandoned. I'm giving up my failed strategy, which was: If I don't view him as real, he is not real.

Accidental surrealism...

... via iPhone panorama photography.

"Come January, fifteen University of Pennsylvania creative-writing students and I will sit silently in a room with nothing more than our devices and a Wi-Fi connection..."

"... for three hours a week, in a course called 'Wasting Time on the Internet,'" writes Kenneth Goldsmith.

Although we’ll all be in the same room, our communication will happen exclusively through chat rooms and listservs, or over social media. Distraction and split attention will be mandatory. So will aimless drifting and intuitive surfing. The students will be encouraged to get lost on the Web, disappearing for three hours in a Situationist-inspired dérive, drowsily emerging from the digital haze only when class is over. We will enter a collective dreamspace, an experience out of which the students will be expected to render works of literature....

Nothing is off limits: if it is on the Internet, it is fair play. Students watching three hours of porn can use it as the basis for compelling erotica; they can troll nefarious right-wing sites, scraping hate-filled language for spy thrillers; they can render celebrity Twitter feeds into epic Dadaist poetry; they can recast Facebook feeds as novellas; or they can simply hand in their browser history at the end of a session and present it as a memoir....