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Essays from Beantown Presents
Mike Cusimano
Hello I’m Mick Cusimano your Professor of Surrealism. I’ve been making animated movies for 5 years almost as long as I’ve been doing the monthly comic strip for Imagine Magazine. Some of my Rooster Tails movies have been in a dozen film festivals including Boston Film night and just got picked up by the Spike and Mike Festival of Animation. Although I’ve taken twelve graduate courses at Harvard Extension I’m not really a professor…but it sounds good when introducin g my cartoons and movies.
It all started for me back in a little town called Buffalo, NY. growing up drawing cartoons and shoveling snow. While working for Real estate company in Rochester, NY the boss asked me if I wanted to transfer to Houston or Boston. I flipped a coin and headed East picking up a book about surrealism on the way out of town. This was 1984.
Arriving in Boston I met the sage Billy Barnum and a group of poets, showed them my book, and they asked me to do surreal cartoon posters for their upcoming shows. With nothing else to do working in Cape Cod in winter I drew this poster with Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. One of these poets printed 10,000 copies at his night job and hung them up all over town. I began writing poetry too and we called ourselves the Underground Surrealists doing hundreds of performances in Boston, NYC, RI, CT, etc. There are videotapes of us performing in 1984 that I eventually hope to track down and edit. One of my poems Archaeology got played on the Doctor Demento Show. I published a magazine of comics and poetry called Underground Surrealist Magazine, which was once distributed nationally by Tower Records.
 In 1989 one of these poets who called himself R.U. Outavit talked for months to 2 women poets and myself. His idea was that it would be a great idea to take our poetry to Paris for the 200th anniversary of Bastille Day. He swore that we would become internationally famous since millions of people would be in town for this historic event. It was truly an idiotic idea but it was a great excuse to see Europe for the first time. Spending thousands of dollars to cross the ocean and spend a month in Europe we arrived in Paris. After 9 months of planning RU Outavit stood up in front of the Eiffel tower and read his poems. None of the millions of French people in town paid any attention to him whatsoever…except a gendarme who walked up to him and told him to get off the grass.
The next day someone stuck their hand into the window of our rented apartment and dropped off a pamphlet. His name was David Belly and had just founded a group of French artists called M.A.I.N.S. Mouvement Artistique International des Nouveaux Surréalistes (The new Surrealists in English.) We met briefly and I gave him an issue of Underground Surrealist magazine and we corresponded every year around Christmas. David would send me collages in French which I didn’t understand and I sent him cartoons in English…which he didn’t understand. 
In 1994 I took a class about the French Surrealist movement at Harvard. There we studied Surrealist paintings, writing, music, and saw Un Chien Andalou and other of the Bunuel and Dali films. After the class was over I did research and wrote a 12-page cartoon magazine called The Surrealist Adventure about a rooster attending the famous Paris Surrealist art exhibition of 1938.
David Belly came to America for a few days in 1998 and asked me if I could introduce him to Steven Spielberg to make a film about the M.A.I.N.S. group. My continuous annual incomprehensible correspondences with David Belly continued every year until 2003. A letter arrived from Karine one of the French woman artists from the M.A.I.N.S group. She asked me if I would be interested in participating in a surrealist art show in Paris. How often in a lifetime does an artist get an offer like that?
 People told me I was crazy to go over there since the Iraq war was about to begin but I couldn’t pass up a chance so I drew a cartoon painting called the Night of Red Jazz and sent it to Karine. When I flew over there I was walking down the Champs Elysses wondering what the heck I was doing. I had met David for a few minutes 14 years earlier, couldn’t speak French and really had no idea what to expect.
Arriving at the gallery I saw the Night of Red Jazz hanging on the gallery wall along all the other wild surreal masterpieces. The 20+ artists, some who had returned from Slovenia or the countryside held a reunion in the gallery basement. They then introduced me not as just a guest but as a full-fledged member of the group. The next night 700 people showed up jamming the gallery for the opening. This one actress Maria arrived wearing a Mardi Gras mask. There were artist parties in the gallery all week with enough red wine to fill Napoleon’s boots. By the last day in Paris I was walking arm in arm with Maria along the Seine wondering if I was in a movie or a dream. 
The following year I made plans to return to see the New Surrealists and Maria. The day before the flight I bought a 3chip video camera for the trip. On arrival I took Maria to a party that the New Surrealists had thrown in my honor. I videotaped the artists at the party and afterwards.
Surrealism! People are always asking me what is Surrealism? You can read the manifestos of Andre Breton, the diaries of Salvador Dali, or you can shake your head at Magritte’s paintings. The simple definition is that Surrealism is the marriage of the dream and waking states into a super reality. For me it simply means taking the brakes off and letting your imagination run wild.
Last year I went back again and filmed Maria interviewing Jacky the French Surrealist sculptor of the group. Taking the photos from the first trip, the videos from the last two trips, and adding animation I’ve tried to somehow chronicle my encounters with this strange and wonderful group. I showed my first 11-minute cut at the appropriately named Ruff Cutz Film Festival in February 2007. The film is still very ruff and needs much more editing, new music, etc. I’m thinking of returning to Paris this summer to collect more footage of this group.
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