Flying Stone

The Portland Surrealist Group proclaims its utmost resistance to the promotion of aesthetic elitism, drive-by art appreciation, and capitalist idiocy by the First Thursday pimps, not to mention our outrage at their economic bond with the gentrification of the Pearl District. We also announce our absolute lack of confidence in the mechanical and domesticated creativity of Portland’s privileged as they suffer from bouts of estranged snobbery. What explorations of the imagination found within these galleries cannot be amplified a thousand fold by an inspired uprising in the streets?

In solidarity with the street performers and sidewalk outsiders we protest the city’s permit requirement, and long for an unauthorized creative atmosphere with an empowered, revolutionary essence. We dream of endlessly fluxing interactive galleries, and transient celebrations evolving from intoxicating play, impulsively overwhelming streets and cities. We long for the creation of voodoo vandalism and child-like chalk art, and slow dancing in burning churches and bubble baths!

Long live Don Pedro!
All power to the hermetic guerrilla!
It’s time to unleash the autoerotic muse!

First Thursday is a phenomenon that occurs every month in the Pearl District, where aesthetic elitists and bourgeois fuckheads meet to celebrate their enslavement publicly. On June 6th several members of the Portland Surrealist Group, accompanied by five fellow travelers, descended into the depths of the Pearl to distribute a flyer that announced our objection to this repetitious event, declared our solidarity with the street performers, and called for an uprising of liberated creativity, which can only exist outside the dome of artism.

With hopes of creating a fiery, aggressive contestation of our own, the flyer paid tribute to Don Pedro, a voodoo priest that invented the violent and frenzied Petro rituals, which gave the slaves of Haiti the power and inspiration to mount their own victorious insurrections of the late 1700s. In honor of the rebellious Petro spirits the flyer was called Ze Rouge, a suffix often added to the names of Petro spirits meaning “with red eyes.”

Our protest eventually landed at NW 11th and Glisan, where we decorated some of the street corners with the vèvè of Papa Legba la Flambeau, an intensely flammable spirit. Several of the protesters wore masks and one painted her face. Shibek annoyed the crowd with a thunderous duck call, and several of the wine-filled fellow travelers hollered insults at the passing snobs as we distributed nearly two hundred flyers. At some point a horrendous odor overtook the area, and in the distance a black cloud could be seen. Apparently something large was burning! Later two plastic firemen hats were discovered and worn.

Brandon Freels