Meandering Surrealist 1 Be Careful the Rocks That You Draw: Ernie Bushmiller's "Nancy"
"The Situationists want to forget about the past," it was insisted in 1952, virtually inviting Ernie Bushmiller to join the their movement-- and to push Surrealist propaganda onto the pages of the Sunday comics. Armed with dream weaver gags that fed Middle America's collective subconscious, Bushmiller took over the "Fritzy Ritz" strip in the 1930's, copped a Dada sensibility, bought a package of Speedball pens, made the women looser (and, yes, drew their breasts larger and higher), and unleashed his version of "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" onto the nation, all New York sass and urban verve. Bushmiller's Nancy delighted in disorder, and much-- no, most-- of that chaos derived from Nancy's frequent dreams. 1 Those visions revealed a remarkable depth of experience for an 11-year-old naif, conjuring images of cannabis abuse, sexual bondage and menages a quatre, to say nothing of a house she imagined looked like Adolf Hitler-- a Dada vision of international import. "Boredom is always counterrevolutionary," Bushmiller used to say, aping Claude DeBord and the Situationist International in France and anesthetizing the Eisenhowerites who no doubt made up the bulk of his fans. He understood the politics of boredom when the politics of boredom crushed virtually every comic strip of the post-Tintin world. Bushmiller understood the politics of boredom when politics were outlawed even from the op-ed pages of American newspapers. It is significant, then, that the French daily "Paris Monde" used to run "Nancy" along with four European strips on its editorial page. "Que'est que c'est le boredome de politique?" students were found of uttering the more overtly political '60's-- "What are the politics of boredom?" 2 Bushmiller ran counterrevolutionary, Big Ben ran counter-clockwise. "Baloney," Bushmiller probably uttered as he called the Situationists' bluff; he too thrived on one-line manifestos and he too hated the father (Surrealism) and loved the mother (Dada), but was the son of both. Nancy was apolitical. Nancy was a gas. "She pisses icy water on poetic mornings/Got to be cruel to be kind-- is this real life is it for life, can I change my mind/Is it too late to change my mind" 3 I consider it a personal triumph that my Masters students think of Nancy whenever they hear the above set of lyrics, turned in as an incomplete essay by a former Printmaking major of mine, Bruce Gilbert, in the squalor of the early '70's. I immediately knew what Gilbert was getting at, why he chose to illustrate his "portrait in humor" with one of Bushmiller's distorted funhouse images of Nancy from 1968. Bruce's Nancy art, blown up on a Toshiba copier at 241 percent, now adorns the Kampus Korner Inst-a-Art factory. And Wire's Chairs Missing LP is the only album I've ever heard wholly enjoyed by the Nancy cult. Nancy, NANCY, nancy, Nancy, Nancy. It's always the same, isn't it? Perhaps it is emotionally immature of me to say I can easily picture Nancy at a punk show, gleefully hurling beer glasses at skinheads whose resemblance to Sluggo would likely elicit a rousing display of slapstick violence that would push the better of the hardcore to play faster and louder. I can picture her spitting on club "officials" that demanded adult money, hurling snowballs because she was bored and because there were people to be pissed off. But while it is easy for one to picture Nancy watching others sing, it is impossible to imagine her taking part in the act herself. Emoting. Feeling. Forced to engage in dialogue that required more than an absolute dedication to the situation-- and that is precisely what the Situationists were pushing mass culture into in the 1950's. Ernie Bushmiller's "Nancy" became a rare, late-coming fly in the Surrealist ointment, a reminder that a pair of Speedballs can often be more obscene than a pair of Speedos, and that the mouths of children are more often stuffed with fruit flies than fruit cake. But Bushmiller was finally denounced in 1966, his unwillingness to join the Pompideau Centre riots the final straw. Bushmiller's "Nancy" leaves us with a ruthless critique of comic America that always suggested an anarchy, a lawlessness that the artist knew lay just around the comically-cathartic corner. Kennedy was shot = Nancy eats a slice of upside-down cake and walks upside down in her dream. . . Nixon is elected = Nancy stands upside down in her bed to turn her dreams right-side up. Is it too late to change my mind? Claude DeBord explained it best in 1957: "We have to multiply poetic subjects and objects, and we have to organize games of these poetic objects among these poetic subjects. This is our entire program, which is essentially transitory. Our situations will be ephemeral, without a future: Passageways."
1. Nancy's Dreams and Schemes, Ernie Bushmiller, 1990 2. Lipstick Traces, a Secret History of the 20th Century, Greil Marcus, 1989 3. "Too Late," Wire, Chairs Missing, lyrics by Bruce Gilbert, 1978 4. Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, William Rubin, 1990
Meandering Surrealist 2 The Hugo Ball Dictionary of Soul
"The Dadaists were coming into the knowledge that what had been forgotten could be remembered, even by accident; they were realizing that the language everyone knew how to speak was capable of forming only those truths they didn't want to hear. They didn't know what they wanted to hear, so they made a sound they called, 'Medieval Bruitism,' 'noise with imitative effects,' a simultaneous poem, all the acts appearing at the same time, but no longer acts. It meant wails, the bass drum, glissandos, prehistoric harmony, cries of pain and hilarity; if the Dadaists did not replace God, they replaced themselves." 1
Anthropologist Edward Hall has suggested that one's own culture was only recognizable whenever different-- and conflicting--- cultures were present to dislodge it from consciousness. An American businessman's notion of time, for instance, would only become readily apparent to him when directly confronted with a Japanese businessman's slower, less structured sense of meeting the same end. 2 But what about forms of communication that need no specific sense of culture, or background, or geography: the unsaid sounds-- the hallucinatory splice of Everyman's consciousness? When French Dadaist Hugo Ball dressed up as a sorcerer for a Cabaret Voltaire piece in 1916-- chanting the "reputed occult virtues of sound. . . especially those producing a buzzing or humming sound"3, he laid the foundation for a form of communication that simply cut across the sectored sensibility of the Self to another land entirely: '60's soul music. "Blago bung, blago bung, bosso fataka, schampa wulla wussa olobo, eschige zunbada," Ball chanted to his enlightened audience, producing what his crony Richard Huelsenbeck would later refer to as "Negro poems." With his chant, Ball envisioned "himself drawn back to the cadences of a priest celebrating the mass as he, little Hugo, knelt with his mother and father two decades before; the years rose up and died."4 But what of those in his audience that night? What mental images did Ball's guttural sounds and seemingly meaningless vocalizing produce in their collective minds? Students of anarchist history consistently point to the thread of shared babble as a Dada / youth culture unifier-- "I can't understand what they're saying" 5 could apply as derisively to dour faced revolutionaries in 1916 as it could to any rock 'n' roll singer from Anytime, Anywhere. It's an easy argument to make, and a convincing one given the dynamics between primitivism and enlightenment. In 1966, fifty years after Ball's legendary performance, an American record company, Atlantic, would vainly attempt to explain the vocabulary of Untapped Consciousness on the jacket of "The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul." Some examples presented there:
Ou-yea: "To give in; a reply to get what one wants. (adverb)
My-my-my" "No longer yours; goody three times." (poss. adjective)
Ou-ni: "To hurt so good." (adverb)
Ni: "To do very quickly." (adverb)
Leetle: "Just enough to make one want more" (adjective)
Ou: "Ouchless excitement" (noun)
Yea-ni: "An agreement to give in very quickly" (adverb)
Oh-mi: "To get it very quickly" (interj. + adj. comp)
Weel: "Desire to give it or get it" (noun, verb, etc.)
Gotta-gotta: "Not able to do without it" (verb)
Give it: "Absitively, posilutely not" (verb + pron. comp)
Oh-naw-naw: "To let oneself go, under any circumstances" (interj. + adv. comp.)
Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa: "Sad song" (phrase)
Ou we ni: "Getting gooder by the minute" (phrase)
Naturally, Atlantic's tongue-in-cheek interpretation missed the mark. Redding's melismic sounds meant not one thing, but an infinite number of things; as many things as there were people to interpret things. That the record company felt compelled to explain the unsaid says more about pop art consumerism of the period than the willful use of random symbolism (at the time of this particular Otis Redding LP, the Georgia-born singer-songwriter had not proven himself a racially "crossed-over" commodity to the overly literal-minded white American middle class). Redding would have to die prematurely in an airplane crash to win over the pop audience (sentimentality breaks dead rock stars as stone breaks scissors). A grunting black soul artist of the era whose art consisted mainly of unspoken consciousness, Redding's lyrics meant less than his refrain's inevitable punctuations of voweled, primal moanings and unexplained throat poetry: "Gotta-Gotta haveta nah, yea-ni, O-yi, naw, naw. . ." Playing scratched vinyl copies of "Otis Blue" and "The Immortal Otis Redding" for my Surrealism 101 elective, I ask my students for their interpretations of Redding's coarse sounds-- imploring them to hear the subliminal. They shut their eyes and listen. Tina says that Otis is searching for something, Glenn replies that Otis has found what he's always wanted and is ecstatic, and Leon deduces that Otis is seeing a premonition of what is to be and is resigning himself to that fact. I cannot grade them on this assignment because even I don't have the right answer. Like Ball and his cohorts in the artistic underground of the early 20th century, Redding understood that unleashed consciousness need have no specific meaning to explain the basic tenets of existence-- "words that cannot contain facts can dissolve facts." The attitude is purposely undefined, after all, like the unicorn, whom legend endows with wondrous attributes, but whom the empirical eye has never calibrated. 6 In other words, Universal Truth is within Everyman's grasp-- but it is only his and his alone to understand and recognize. Defined words can only serve to illuminate a subjective point of view-- a political slant, an educated opinion, a childhood memory, a prejudiced outcry. Like the hyper-realist Phillip Marlowe, hallucinating from a Mickey Finn and conjuring up a surreal experience, in "Farewell My Lovely": "They built the pyramids and got tired of them and pulled them down and ground the stone up to make concrete for Boulder Dam and they built that and brought the water to the sunny Southland and used it to have a flood with." Or, to be less specific: "Blago bung, blago bung, bosso fataka, schampa wulla wussa olobo eschige zunbada, O-yi-nea oh-mi Ni. Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa. . . "
1. Greil Marcus, "Lipstick Traces" 2. Edward Hall, "Beyond Culture" 3. Benjamin Walker, "Gnosticism: It's History and Influence" 4. Marcus, "Lipstick Traces" 5. Parents everywhere, since 1954 6. William V. Spanos, "Abraham, Sisyphus & the Furies"