Cheese Danish #35

[Dave Monroe]

... okay, this has been bugging for for the past couple of hours.
Always seem to forget those little things I set out to say.  But, in the
case of those post-Abstract Expressionists, those pre-Pop Artists, and
I'm thinking here particularly of, again, Jasper Johns and Robert
Rauschenberg but also James Rosenquist (JJ, RR, JR), note in particular
the heterogeneity, hybridity of their work, both in terms of form and
subject matter, and, esp., "low," "popular," "pop" subject matter.

Johns' flags, targets (and I'm doing a little something on the Union
Jack in pop culture, esp. music, esp. mod, if anyone has any ideas),
Ballantine cans, objects imprinted on, attached to canvases;
Rauschenberg's collages, assemblages, that tire-encircled goat, for
example, his painted mattresses (and cf. that mattress/matrix in The
Crying of Lot 49); Rosenquist's increasingly overwhelming and intricate
(I mean, this guy is now knocking of 11' x 87' canvases on a regular
basis) allegorical imagery collisions, F-11 alone, the warplane, the
hairdryer, the little girl, the spaghetti (cf., later, David Salle,
Robert Longo).  If ever there's a de-luxe illustrated ed. of GR, I think
Rosenquist oughtta be commissioned ...

But, hey, perhaps we'll get around to not-at-all-violently agreeing on
some of this when we eventually do get to Chapter 10 there, jbor.  And
thanks for the links, if anybody's having trouble calling 'em up, you
might be losing the tail end of the address to the next line of text
(they're pretty long addresses), so just cut'n'paste 'em into your
browser instead (at least that's what I had to do).   Sorry to have
skipped ahead again, folks, but I gotta get this stuff out when I can,
when it comes to me, before I forget, before I'm no longer able or here
to do it anymore ...

In the meantime, anybody actually finish de Chirico's Hebdomeros?  I've
never even started it, but probably should.  There's a small press outta
Seattle--indeed, it's on the SubPop website--run by Damon and Naomi,
formerly of Galaxie 500, currently of, er, Damon and Naomi (with a stint
as Pierre Etoile--"rock star," geddit? geddit?--along the way), which is
doing the Lord's work in English translations putting surrealist et al.
back in print.  Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet, Louis Aragon's
Paris Peasant,  Alfred Jarry's The Supermale, Giorgio de Chirico's
Hebdomeros ...

http://www.subpop.com/bands/damon+naomi/website/xchange/xchange.html

... now if they'd only make Raymond Roussel's very wonderful Locus Solus
and Impressions of Africa readily available in English again as well
(got lucky, scored John Calder eds. whilst they were still around).
There are excerpts in the EC RR (er, Raymond Roussel, here) anthology,
How I Wote Certain of My Books, but ... and that Bianchi anthology
(again, thanks for the reference, that's one I might never have come
across) seems to be out of print, but that's not much stopped me before,
so ...