Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12:1 (2021), 78-92 78 ‘Always for Pleasure’: Chicago Surrealism and Fashion An Interview with Penelope Rosemont Abigail Susik Willamette University Abigail Susik: Fashion is not something that necessarily comes to mind when I think of Chicago Surrealism. Yet, I do recall that former Chicago surrealist and present-day translator and scholar of the Marquis de Sade, John Galbraith Simmons, once pointed out to me in an interview I was conducting that there was a reason that most of the male members of the Chicago Group wore professional-looking suits and ties to the Second Telos International Conference at SUNY Buffalo in November 1971, where you met Herbert Marcuse: the Chicago surrealists wanted to satirically mock the hippie fashions of the day.1 In that case, what was the role of fashion, if any, in your group? Did you have more of an anti-fashion orientation? Penelope Rosemont: Anti-fashion! Well, anti-fashion is a “fashion” of sorts. We were all influenced by Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double (1938). The theater has its costumes, as does life, and we choose our parts when we can. We chose to be different from the 1950s ideal of what respectable young people should look like. In this way, we found others with similar ideas. Back in the Rebel Worker days, Dottie DeCoster asked me to write an article on fashion for a Rebel Worker women’s issue. I didn’t write the article. We didn’t do the issue; 1968 was right around the corner and I got involved in that instead. What I might have said at the time was that the leisure of Fourier’s utopia would bring all clothing to the level of an art. I would expect women to dress as they did in Sci-Fi movies…comfortable, silver jumpsuits that accented their slim bodies for everyday wear, and Isadora Duncan-style dresses for evening—as well as self-designed elegant robes and jewelry for the many special events and carnivals that would be organized. We were anthropology students run amok. Children born during World War II, we questioned a “civilization” that could create political monsters, wreak total devastation, and kill millions in a few short years. The ‘50s we grew up in were a time Abigail Susik: asusik@willamette.edu; Penelope Rosemont: peneloperosemont@yahoo.com Copyright © 2021 (Abigail Susik, Penelope Rosemont). Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. Available at http://jsa.asu.edu/ Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) 79 Fig. 1. Penelope Rosemont, untitled photograph, Left to right: Paul Garon and Franklin Rosemont at the Toronto “Conference on Madness,” February, 1972. Courtesy of Penelope Rosemont of fabulous prosperity, when everyone it seemed had a house, a car, a TV, a job, and a good, store-bought wool coat. Nevertheless, Franklin, David and John wore suits to the Telos conference probably just to stand out a bit and appear mature. It was the same thing when Paul Garon and Franklin went to the Toronto “Conference on Madness” in February of 1972 (Figure 1). AS: How did the other Telos conference participants dress, such as the members of the Italian workers’ movement or the Black Revolutionary Workers group? PR: Most people at the event just dressed as students. The Black Revolutionary Workers wore black T-shirts with slogans. Dashiki shirts with African prints were just coming into style. I wore a brown army shirt with front pockets. I had embroidered a camel on a sleeve (Figure 2). AS: Penelope, would you mind giving a brief description of the Chicago Surrealist Group for readers who may not be familiar with it? How did it all get started and what have its core goals been?2 PR: First of all, how did we find Surrealism? It was there: a definition in the “Reader’s Guide to Literature.” It was a shining star of attraction, a magnetic force, a breath of Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) 80 Fig. 2. Guy Ducornet, untitled photograph, From left to right: Penelope Rosemont, John Simmons, Herbert Marcuse. The Second TELOS International Conference, November 18–21, 1971, State University of New York, Buffalo. Courtesy of Penelope Rosemont laughing gas: “Elephants are contagious!” (A note I passed around at high school.) But did Surrealism still exist? Doesn’t this story always begin at a bookstore? In this case, it was most likely at Kroch’s and Brentano’s in Chicago. There, in the early 1960s, Franklin Rosemont came across Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) and Sun Stone (1957) by Octavio Paz. He found out that Leonora Carrington and Benjamin Péret were living in Mexico City. So Franklin and his friend Lawrence DeCoster set out for Mexico, by car, by bus, on foot. They were 19 or 20 years old. They were seeking Paz and Surrealism. When they arrived, they found that Paz was in India. However, the surrealist love of chance comes into play. They picked up a magazine and found an article on Leonora Carrington that mentioned a current exhibition of hers. The gallery put them in touch with Leonora, who put them in touch with other surrealists, and soon they were off to New York to see Eugenio Granell, Claude Tarnaud, Nicholas Calas, and Gotham Book Mart, which carried many surrealist publications. All of us who became the founding members of the Surrealist Group in Chicago met in college or attended a nearby college. I met Franklin Rosemont, Tor Faegre, Robert Green, Bernard Marszalek, Lionel Bottari, and John Bracey, Jr., at Roosevelt University. When our group started to come together we were taking all of the courses that St. Clair Drake taught in the anthropology department. Drake Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) 81 was an African American scholar and gifted professor who knew many of the great African Independence leaders. He was the author of Black Metropolis (1945). Basically, the Surrealist Group began at RU as the Anti-Poetry Club and the RU Wobblies. What we shared was a critique of everyday life and the contradictions between “what existed” and “what was possible” thanks to the developments of modern science and the improvements in manufacturing. Our friend Robert Green, who later became a Chicago surrealist, would say, commenting on the city, “How can you be satisfied with this? You could have a phantasmagoria!,” adding, “And probably for a lot less money” (Figure 3). Except for a few buildings, like the one that housed Roosevelt University and the Water Tower, and the old Victorian buildings, Chicago architecture was awful. The city had not changed since the 1930s and now bureaucrats were tearing down Louis Sullivan buildings to put up junk by Mies van der Rohe and parking lots, using urban renewal in a racist way. In our imaginations beautiful buildings were like sculptures; ponds and forests and fields replaced deteriorated housing; paintings sometimes were displayed in the forests; people dressed in swirling colors; the Maxwell Market Street expanded in size— and blues music was in the streets every day. People participated, were part of the process of building their homes, and made it their city. Down with suburbs! Down with urban sprawl! The city would be surrounded by green parks, and would be full of wolves, foxes, buffalo, great blue herons … etc. Of course, war would have to be abolished. It is ridiculous to call this polished war machine a civilization. Racism, an artificial construction that divides us, would have to be abolished. And, as members of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) we knew that labor exploitation would have to be abolished, too. We read Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and especially Herbert Marcuse— and believed that sexual freedom was essential to bring about an improved world. We read Charles Fourier, William Morris, and other utopian thinkers, and also plenty of anthropology as a plan, a blueprint— sort of a “How to Do It Yourself!” literature. Not only did World War II have a looming presence, but 1960 was also the 100th Anniversary of the Civil War. African Americans, many of whom had fought in World War II, still did not have equal civil rights, and a movement arose that became an inspiration to all of us. In college I read Freud, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Edward Weyer, Jr., along with Robert Theobald, Adorno, Paul Tillich, Erich Fromm, Reinhold Niebuhr, Thorstein Veblen, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. I also read Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (1960) while looking for answers about why war and prejudice existed. Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) explained the domestic sphere, just as Mead and Benedict spoke to questions of social structure. Veblen’s idea of conspicuous consumption was especially key to understanding the shallowness of our prosperity. And Theobald recognized that work must change. So of course, being young, we decided “to change the world” beginning Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) 82 Fig. 3. Alan Koss, untitled photograph, Chicago Surrealists planning the 1968 Bugs Bunny exhibition, Left to Right, Robert Green, Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, 1858 North Howe Street, Chicago, 1968. Courtesy of Penelope Rosemont with a small bookshop on Armitage Avenue…Solidarity Bookshop. We even had mimeographed publications. It was there that I read André Breton, Herbert Marcuse, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Norman O. Brown, Peter Kropotkin and Sun Chief (1942) by Don Talayesva. I would soon add Guy Debord and the Situationist critique to this list. Tarnaud put us in touch with André Breton and the Surrealist Group in France. In 1965-66 we spent nearly half a year meeting with the group. Eventually, we started our own surrealist journal, Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion. AS: So, it sounds like if we are to speak of “fashion” in relation to those Roosevelt University students who later participated in or collaborated with the Chicago Surrealist Group, any such concern for a certain kind of dress must be understood as subsidiary to the group’s engagement with currents of Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) 83 leftist resistance? PR: Yes, we spent money on books, not on clothes. On mimeograph printing machines and ink, not on fancy dinners. We did end up with a very fine collection of art books and surrealist books from France. In Chicago, 1965, Solidarity Bookshop issued a button with the newly invented phrase “Make Love, Not War.” Political buttons were a fashion statement and ours became wildly popular, creating a trend that expanded worldwide, along with “All Power to the Imagination.” This is probably our greatest contribution to fashion, the political button, “Make Love, Not War.” AS: When you met André Breton winter 1965–‘66 in Paris, he was fascinated with another button that you were wearing, one that said “I am an enemy of the state.” What exactly did he say about it? Did Solidarity Bookshop also produce and sell these anti-statist buttons, and were they as commonly worn as the “Make Love, Not War” button at the time? PR: We did make an “Enemy of the state” button. I think we were reading Sam Dolgoff ’s book on Bakunin at that time. In any case, we were thinking of Bakunin. I was for making “Neither God, Nor Master!” buttons, but we never got around to it. The London Immigration official did not like my “Enemy of the state” button and maybe that is one of the reasons why we had so much trouble trying to enter the UK for the first time at the end of 1965. But when André saw it he smiled and said in French, “Ah, the most beautiful enemy of the state!” So the button means a lot to me. AS: What were your impressions of the way in which the Paris Surrealist Group dressed or when you spent time with them during the winter and spring in 1966, just before Breton’s death later that year? PR: Many of the men wore suits. Jean Schuster often wore a green suit, tailored and well-made, with green-tinted glasses. He was slim and looked very good in it. I understand that Breton had worn a green suit when young. I remember Jean Benoît mostly in a white shirt. Of course, when I met him first at the surrealist New Year’s Eve party he was wearing a pink tutu. Jean-Claude Silbermann favored a fashionable sweater. Alain Joubert and Nicole Espagnol wore black outfits with turtleneck shirts. Joyce Mansour wore black, cut her black hair straight, and looked very sleek. Micheline Bounoure wore all black but accented it with a magnificent collection of Navajo silver and turquoise bracelets. Toyen wore white shirts and black slacks, always. Like other surrealist painters, Toyen expressed dreams, secret desires in her paintings. I remember her painting at the L’Écart absolu exhibition: on a dark background floated Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) 84 a graceful gown, gloves, and a golden mask... AS: Did the members of the Situationist International have a discernible approach to style when you met Guy Debord and Mustapha Khayati in the spring of 1966? PR: Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho dressed almost alike, entirely in black. It gave them a serious demeanor, even when they were laughing, and that was quite pleasant. We talked for a few hours, but the time passed very quickly since we were sharing enthusiasms and ideas at a delightful speed. AS: When you left Paris in late spring of 1966, you and Franklin went on to London to stay with Charles Radcliffe (who died in July 2021) for an extended period, collaborating on radical publications there. How was the London scene different from Paris at this time, in terms of fashion? Were you influenced by any trends you witnessed there? PR: Of course, it was spring in London and women were out in short mini dresses. I sewed one myself out of blue paisley linen and wore it with white lace stockings. AS: Jonathan Leake, of the ultra-left Resurgence Youth Movement (R.Y.M.), once told me about his mid-1960s satanic “666” shirt and shaved head. This struck me as rather unique for the era. What did you think of Leake when he visited you in Chicago during autumn, 1966? Was this proto-punk look occurring elsewhere in your circles? PR: We just accepted it as Jonathan. Jonathan was always astonishing and at this moment he was into the occult and also ideas of apocalypse, so the haircut went unnoticed. Frank Gould also kept his hair short. He aspired to be a radical journalist like John Reed, went to the Philippines and was killed with the rebels when the army swept through the area. It is hard to sum up Jonathan. A favorite poem he wrote early on in his magazine Resurgence was “Desire to be a Planet!” And he certainly rotated, had days and nights, North poles and South Poles and an aurora borealis, plus some rings like Saturn and several moons. Always fascinating; always on edge. Robert Anton Wilson put a composite of him and Franklin into Illuminatus (1975). AS: Were there any particular fashion accessories for ultra-leftist revolutionaries at this time? PR: Political buttons were the big fashion accessory. People would cover their blue Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) 85 denim jackets with them. Solidarity bookshop sold them as did the “Mole Hole” run by Earle Siegel on Wells Street. Wells Street in Chicago was in its heyday at this time. Paul Garon, Franklin Rosemont and Beth Garon all worked there, at Barbara’s Bookstore. At that time, Barbara’s was a great bookstore; as good as City Lights in San Francisco. Wells Street was packed on weekends and it was there that I often passed out surrealist tracts and leaflets. The crowd was an endless, colorful parade of young people. AS: Could you tell me a little bit about your personal relationship to the ritual of fashion? PR: Women in the 1950s wore very high heels, girdles with nylon stockings that self-destructed within hours, and French-rolled hair with lots of hair spray. I grew up with the freedom to run and swim, and so this style was not very attractive to me. My mother, who had her own dresses made by a seamstress, would sew clothes for me. One memorable dress was seemingly made of acres of light-blue tulle. It had bare shoulders and I wore it to the senior prom. My date had to stuff the dress into the car. When we arrived, every other girl was wearing a tight black sheath dress. I didn’t mention this to my mother who was quite delighted with the dress in her dreams for me. I pretended I was somewhere else and danced every dance. When in college, I began to request flowered dresses, which my mother made. I wore these with sandals in warm weather. The climate in Chicago forced us to dress like the Beats in winter, but with the warm weather came flowered dresses... When I traveled to Paris I wore a black-and-white fringed poncho made by Franklin’s mother and knee-high brown suede boots. With streaming long brown hair, I looked pretty countercultural. Luggage was limited, but I also had a paisley dress from a Lake Forest shop and a wonderfully warm 1950s suit of heavy wool tweed in black-and-white that may have been an old Chanel garment. We arrived in December 1965…but Paris had not yet been modernized. It was still the Paris of the 20s and 30s. I purchased a brown turtleneck sweater and turquoise velour slacks at a small nearby boutique on Rue St. André des Arts and felt warm and fashionable. In Chicago, 1968, for our visit to the surrealist show organized by Rubin,3 I wore a black antique shirt-waist jacket with tiny buttons from around 1900, a white lace blouse and dragon necklace that belonged to my aunt Daisy, antique Chinese jade earrings my mother bought for me, a black velvet mini skirt, fishnet stockings. and tall brown-suede boots. I was very fond of this outfit and wore it to several events. At Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), I wore hippie-style, short, flowered dresses made by my mother, or I wore jeans and a blue work shirt, very much like the other women there. By the 1970s, I enjoyed an orange peasant blouse by Yves Saint Laurent. Fashion was trying to catch up with [the] youth. Hopi (and Navajo) jewelry was Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) 86 much prized, and bead shops opened where one could make one’s own necklaces. I had a long Navajo layered skirt that I wore. AS: You and Franklin had long hair already by 1962, somewhat ahead of the broader trend countercultural trend of long hair as a rebellion against “square” culture. Was your long hair a response to Beatnik trends, or was it because of the group’s interest in British Invasion rock and roll, or something else? PR: I always wore my hair long. So the trend caught up to me. Franklin wanted to look like a Rolling Stone. He loved the song “Paint it Black!” We did not approve of the weekend hippies: those who bought their hippie clothes in expensive boutiques, put on wigs and smoked pot for two days, then put on business attire on Monday. AS: How did the other members of the Chicago Surrealist Group approach fashion? Were they influenced at all by particular friends in your community or participants in your events? PR: For the World Surrealist Exhibition in 1976, “Marvelous Freedom,” a jazz group was organized by Chicago’s AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) featuring Douglas Ewart, Hamid Drake, and others. They called themselves Douglas R. Ewart & Inventions, and the performance itself was called Sun Song. Their dancer Rrata Christine Jones put together a splendid costume out of newspapers that looked like something from a Cabaret Voltaire dada performance (Figures 4-5).4 Another highlight of the World Surrealist Exhibition was a dance performance by Alice Farley on the opening night of the exhibition (Figure 6).5 First, two young women came out dressed in almost Roman-looking grey dresses and oval face coverings, perhaps fencing masks. They enacted a parallel ritual. Next, Alice came out alone in a tight grey sack, which she stretched in every direction… an abstract sculpture come-to-life. In her last dance, she wore a nude body stocking and red veils and held multiple pairs of open scissors in her hands: the effect was hypnotic! Our group’s men had their unique styles. Bernard often wore a suit coat and vest with pocket watch and chain, much like my grandfather. He had a neat beard and mustache and he resembled Peter Kropotkin, whom he admired. Tor always looked as though he had just come from the woods. He loved the outdoors and wore plaid shirts. Franklin wore a black leather jacket, a white shirt, a white silk scarf and jeans most of the year, including when we were in Paris. In summer, he wore a blue shirt-jacket with embroidered bird images from Guatemala. Robert Green wore an Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) 87 Fig. 4. Michael Vandelaar, untitled photograph, Rrata Christine Jones (now, Christina Jones, left) and Douglas R. Ewart (right), performing Sun Song by Douglas R. Ewart & Inventions, “Marvelous Freedom” World Surrealist Exhibition, Chicago. June, 1976. Courtesy of Christina Jones and Douglas R. Ewart Fig. 5. Michael Vandelaar, untitled photograph, Members of Douglas R. Ewart & Inventions performing Sun Song at the “Marvelous Freedom” World Surrealist Exhibition, Chicago, June, 1976. Top row, left to right: Hamid Drake, George Lewis, James Johnson, Reginald “Reggie Willis, Douglas R. Ewart. Bottom row, left to right: Rrata Christine Jones (now, Christina Jones), Gloria Bannister. Courtesy of the members of Douglas R. Ewart & Inventions Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) Fig. 6. Urba, untitled photograph, Alice Farley in her dance Windfall of the Accursed, “Marvelous Freedom” World Surrealist Exhibition, Chicago. April 30, 1976. Courtesy of Alice Farley 88 Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) 89 ancient brown leather pilot’s jacket, surplus World War II. Both had motorcycles and bicycles. Green had a huge Harley-Davidson, and Franklin had a World War II Zundapp. Green roared around all the time on his “bike,” as he called his motorcycle. Franklin’s “bike” became a huge knickknack in the center of the floor at Solidarity Bookshop since he never got around to getting a driver’s license. I often sat on it for no particular reason. I was sitting on it when we met Paul Garon, the Blues expert. AS: Why did some members of the Chicago Surrealist Group favor turn-ofthe-century dress? We start to see such proto-vintage dress fashions in the psychedelic rock scenes of Haight-Ashbury and also in London by the mid1960s. What did it mean for you? PR: They were beautiful and at the time were very cheap. Usually one-of-a-kind. Designs by William Morris, Pre-Raphaelite art, and Art Nouveau were popular with surrealists and hippies alike. We also favored the short skirts and fringes of the joyous ‘20s... Beth Garon received a treasure trove of old dresses from the 1890s. Her favorite was a flowered, floor-length dress with 100 buttons down the front worn with no constricting underwear. I got most of my vintage clothing from relatives, but there was also an antique store/ costume shop called “Lost Eras” that carried oddball clothes cheaply. I found a long, flowered, beige silk kimono with a red silk lining there. AS: Franklin Rosemont’s music tastes were highly specific: he liked jazz and blues, and only some rock and roll. Some years ago I came across a document at the Labadie Archives that divided a list of musical acts into “LISTEN” and “DON’T LISTEN.” The Velvet Underground did not make the cut for Franklin, for example! Did approved-of music cultures affect the group’s approach to fashion, as might be the case today for certain kinds of music fans? PR: Yes, Franklin was very specific about what he thought was revolutionary music. It included Sun Ra and Jazz, Howlin’ Wolf and Blues, the Rolling Stones, and Jimmy Hendrix. He wrote a pamphlet “Mods, Rockers and the Revolution” (1966) and he wanted to dress like a rocker. Summer evenings, 1966, a rock group formed that played on the sidewalk in front of Solidarity Bookshop, at that time on Larrabee Street just south of Armitage. It consisted of Tor Faegre, lead guitar, Tom Meisenheimer, bass guitar, and Franklin Rosemont on the electric piano. They called themselves, the “Enragés,” after a group of excessively exuberant revolutionaries of 1789. One day they were offered a “gig” playing at a party for $100. They took Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) 90 it and turned up at the location about a block north of the bookshop on Saturday night. They carried the heavy piano and amplifiers up the stairs to the fourth floor at 9 PM. The party was already going strong: the place was posh, and there was a giant deck filled with people. The Enragés played a few numbers. They did OK, but they were just beginners. People were dancing and drinking. Then they played “Louie Louie” and stopped. That was all they knew. The host came over and asked for “Louie Louie” again. They played it a few times and then began to pack up to go home...but the dancers wouldn’t let them go. They demanded more “Louie Louie”! Everybody including me danced like maniacs until 3 AM. “Louie Louie,” over and over. I’m surprised the police didn’t shut it down... But they would have had to walk up to the 4th floor. About this time, the Enragés noticed that a lot of people had passed out from drugs, liquor, or exhaustion. Quietly, they packed up and slipped away. The Enragés had one other adventure. They got tickets to the Rolling Stones concert at McCormick Place. Tor Faegre felt they needed something different, a touch of the unusual. He could do anything, so he used a sewing machine to create black velvet capes for the three Enragés. These were flowing capes that touched the floor; done just in time for the event. The four of us arrived at McCormick Place and swept in. This actually created too much of an effect. We were immediately surrounded by teenage girls, who hugged us and blocked the way, sure that the stylish “Enragés” were a famous rock group. Fame does have its downside! We were impressed by the concert, which burned through one’s bones. Franklin was less sure about his pamphlet, “Mods, Rockers and the Revolution.” The relationship between music and hysteria is pretty clear, and the one between music and revolution is even more subtle. AS: The long capes at the Stones concert reminds me of the story of Bernard Marszalek wearing a priest’s clerical collar and throwing pairs of women’s underwear during the Chicago Surrealist Group’s protest of the opening for Rubin’s show “Dada Surrealism, and Their Heritage,” which traveled to the Art Institute in 1968. It’s clear that costumes and performance remained important for international surrealists during the 1950s and 1960s. Why do surrealists gravitate toward costumes and performance? PR: Surrealists love to play. Bernard, besides writing an introduction to his recent edited volume of Lafargue’s essays, including “The Right to Be Lazy” (1883), also often writes about play and the possibility of converting work from drudgery into play.6 It is a surrealist obsession and was one of the reasons surrealists loved Charles Fourier, who wrote about play, and devoted their 1965 exhibition L’Écart absolu to him. We have also probably been influenced by glorious birds like laughing thrushes and blue jays who do fancy mating dances. Cultures always feature figures Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) 91 who dance: dance to enhance their status, dance to demonstrate their stamina and strength, dance especially to impress the women, dance as if their lives and all the lives around them depended on it. That was the 1960s; there was magic to it. Surrealists are interested in play and freedom in all its expressions. In Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices (1980), Nancy Joyce Peters wrote a review of Les Blank’s film Always for Pleasure (1978) and discussed the Wild Tchoupitoulas of New Orleans: African Americans who accomplish a year-long ritual of costume building in anticipation of Mardi Gras. Peters comments, “these images convey a sense of another time, almost another dimension, recalling the great rituals of tribal peoples or old pagan festivals with their periodic abandonment of social constraints, public drinking and feasting, ecstasies and masks. Above all, they convey an imperative of life over death, a recognition that pleasure is a human necessity.”7 In the volume Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination (1982), Peters returns to this subject in her piece “Traditional Arts and Untamed Genius.” She comments on the achievements of the Hopi as, “germinal for our future, too. How to live the ideal of peace, how to channel physical and psychic energy into arts of surpassing beauty, how to fuse poetry with everyday life.” In brief, why did we do it? For pleasure. Always for pleasure… Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12: 1 (2021) 92 1 See Abigail Susik, “Direct Action Surrealism in Chicago,” in Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, by Abigail Susik (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), 182–237. 2 Thanks to Penelope Rosemont, Michael Vandelaar, Alice Farley, and members of Douglas R. Ewart & Inventions for image rights permissions. For selected recent publications on Chicago Surrealism, see: Joanna Pawlik, Remade in America: Transnational Surrealism 1940–1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021); Penelope Rosemont, Surrealism: Inside the Magnetic Fields (San Francisco: City Lights, 2019); Ron Sakolsky, Dreams of Anarchy and the Anarchy of Dreams: Adventures at the Crossroads of Anarchy and Surrealism (New York: Autonomedia, 2021). 3 “Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage,” an exhibition curated by William Rubin, travelled to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1968. 4 Douglas R. Ewart & Inventions performed Sun Song at the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago, “Marvelous Freedom” (May 1-June 20, 1976; Gallery Black Swan, 500 North LaSalle Street). There were two performances. The first occurred on Saturday, June 19th, 1976, and the second took place the following night on June 20th (both at 9 PM; entrance fee, $3). Members included: Gloria Bannister, vocals, costume design and fabrication; Hamid Drake, drums and percussion; Douglas R. Ewart, reeds, percussion, Ewart bamboo flutes, costume design and fabrication; Rrata Christine Jones, choreography, dance, costume design and fabrication; James Johnson, bassoon and alto saxophone; George Lewis, trombone; Reginald “Reggie” Willis, bass. 5 Alice Farley performed the dance composition Windfall of the Accursed on the opening night of the “Marvelous Freedom” exhibition, at 8 PM on April 30th, 1976, at the Black Swan Gallery. The title of the dance performance was based on a poem by Laurence Weisberg, with an original electronic music composition, Ring Précis (based upon Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, 1857), by Hal Freedman. 6 Bernard Marszalek, ed., The Right to Be Lazy: Essays by Paul Lafargue (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2011). 7 Nancy Joyce Peters, “Long Live the Living! (Les Blank’s film, Always for Pleasure),” in Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices, special issue of Cultural Correspondence nos. 10-11 (Fall 1979): 109–10.