deek anthology
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The Final Incident
Joseph L. Flatley
Jesse Hicks
Matt Stroud
(editors)
aBarbary Shore
book
This compilation is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-
No Derivative Works 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit::
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/3.0/
or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor,
San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
All content © its respective authors.
Published by Barbary Shore, Pittsburgh.http://barbaryshore.com
barbary.shore@gmail.com
START
3. THE FINAL INCIDENTJoseph L. Flatley
5. A MAN OF WEALTH AND TASTETom Bodine
WAR AND POLITICS
21. HOW TO KILL OR MAYBE, NOT KILLMatt Stroud
29. A VERY UNPLEASANT EXPERIENCE WITH A SOLDIER
Matt Novak
39. STATE OF THE FRAUDJesse Hicks
53. STAND UP AND FIGHT FOR YOURNON-BELIEFS.
Jesse Hicks
SEX AND DRUGS
79. RAPID DETOXJessica Robin
95. RETURN OF THE MILFCornelius Blackshear
101. STEALING SEXJoAnne Heen
107. TERA PATRICK HAS A COLDJesse Hicks
113. TO THE SIRENS FIRST SHALTTHOU COME
Joseph L. Flatley
121. GOOD FRIDAY IN PITTSBURGH'S CULTURAL DISTRICT
Mikhail Stafford
131. WHOREZelda Getz
137. LOVE AND LUST IN THE AGE OFMECHANICAL INTRODUCTION
Jesse Hicks
ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
159. HOW NOT TO FIND GOD WHILE WATCHING THE PASSION WITH A HEAD FULL OF ACID
Constantine J. Warhammer
169. LARS VEGAS: TERROR OFTHE SUBLIME
Carl Weathers
181. THE STRANGE TALE OFHUNTER S. THOMPSON'S SUICIDE
Joseph L. Flatley
191. REVIEW: MY NEIGHBOR'S BREAKUPAce Hurler
197. TUTTI FRUTTIJoseph L. Flatley
205. PHILIP K. DICK: GHETTO PROPHETJesse Hicks
215. THE HORROR OF BEING HUMANJesse Hicks
221. ORSON WELLES, THE UNREPRENTANTCHARLATAN
O.W. Jeeves
229. AN INTERPRETATION OF TIMOTHY LEARY
Joseph L. Flatley
239. A CONVERSATION WITH ROBERTANTON WILSON
Jesse Hicks
BRUTALITY
251. THE SEXUAL SADISTS OF CALAVERAS COUNTY.
Joseph L. Flatley
259. SNUFFOCATIONMatt Stroud
297. WHAT CHARLIE SAWJesse Hicks
START
The Final Incident
Joseph L. Flatley
Deek Magazine lived for a few years in the
middle of the “roaring 2000's.” This was a
tumultuous decade, even for sleepy Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. A needless war, an imploding
worldwide economy, disasters both natural and
man-made, and the return of that early-80s
phenomenon “punk-funk” were on everybody's
mind. And for a time, Matt Stroud and his gang
were plugged into the zeitgeist. Each issue of
Deek Magazine revolved around a specific
“incident.” War, Madness, Sex and The Future
were among the topics explored, dissected and just
3
plain ridiculed.
It has been a couple years now since Deek
announced its demise. Having not been there at
the inception, I have no idea what the original
inspiration for the publication might have been.
But as a fan, and eventually a contributor, I
recognized in it the same spirit as that of Barbary
Shore Publishing Company. Deek was a flawed,
impatient, do-it-yourself conspiracy. At its best,
the writing was bratty and insightful and skewed.
Deek Magazine is no more, but I am happy to
present you with a handful of my favorites from its
short, happy life.
4
A Man of Wealth and Taste:
How The Devil Tells It
Tom Bodine
“He’ll be right with you, I promise,” smiles
Thad Chimaera, the Devil’s assistant, from across
the lobby. “When you’re dealing with the Big Guy,
everything runs on Satan Time.” He has a slight
lisp, so it comes out, “Sthatan Time.”
The Los Angeles lobby of Lightbringer
Industries, the devil’s multinational conglomerate:
high ceilings and dim lighting give it a cavernous
feel, enhanced by a cool breeze from hidden A/C
vents. A Saarinen “tulip chair” adds a touch of the
modern. Thad’s desk is polished ebony, lit from
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above by a single recessed spotlight.
The place oozes a hyper-cool, business-like
atmosphere. But the Devil’s ironic touches are
there, too, from the wall embroidery reading,
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” to a
twenty-foot paint-by-number rendering of
Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death.
Between calls, I pick Thad’s brain. Thad’s
been with the company since the 1980’s, when the
Adversary made his big push into Wall Street, and
is Satan’s eyes and ears within the company.
Like nearly everyone I’ve interviewed, Thad
is intensely loyal to his boss. A strangely beatific
look comes across his face when he explains what
a “fierce competitor” is Lightbringer’s CEO and
guiding visionary. His eyes don’t glaze over,
exactly, but they do open wide and take on a shine.
It’s all a bit cultish, really.
For almost an hour I’ve been waiting here,
flipping through back issues of Esquire and
Outdoor Living or staring at myself in the high-
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gloss obsidian floor. Halfway through my fifth
article on men’s spring fashion, I hear the distant
growl of a sports car and what sounds like Outkast
playing at ear-rending volume. Thad looks up from
his computer, silently mouths, “That’s him!” and
makes exaggerated pointing gestures toward the
door. I can’t help sharing his excitement.
A minute later, the engine shuts off, the music
stops.
Silence.
The staccato of expensive shoes on pavement.
Then the door opens.
My first thought is, “Jesus, he’s big.” Six-six,
easily, and not just tall but solid, like he’s made of
denser material than the rest of us; light bends to
accommodate his form. He swaggers like the
popular kid who understands the power of being
noticed. He flashes Thad a smile, tosses him an
apple that seems to materialize out of nowhere.
Then he turns to me.
The Devil is all straight lines and sharp
7
angles; there’s not a curve anywhere. He’s wearing
a dark Richard James wool two-button suit
($1,100), a turquoise cotton shirt and matching silk
tie, also by Richard James ($225 and $110,
respectively), with black Calvin Klein shoes. A
pair of wrap-around Oakleys hide what I later find
out are piercing blue eyes. He’s grinning, a
welcoming smile that seems to reach all the way to
his meticulously disheveled, flaming-red hair.
He extends a well-manicured hand and says,
in a voice my eardrums file somewhere between
Vin Diesel’s and glass being crushed underfoot,
“Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my
name.”
Of course, he doesn’t always look like this.
He’s dressed for business, a piranha among men.
When he’s not working – if there’s ever a time –
you might find him lounging around the house in
sweatpants and a wife-beater, watching Tivo’ed
episodes of The OC on his high-definition plasma
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screen.
But it’s not just that. The thing I realize about
Mephistopheles is this: you never know what he
looks like. Richard James suit, Calvin Klein shoes,
Colin Ferrell smirk – it’s all part of the persona,
the mask. If you look directly at him, nothing
stands out. He’s just Joe Businessman in a fancy
suit. But every now and again during my time with
the Devil, I see him out of the corner of my eye.
It’s there that he wavers, like heat waves on a
desert highway, never quite still. He takes on a
dozen forms – the CEO, the politician, the
neighbor, even, at one point, the high school
cheerleader. What stands before me now is only a
glove; the hand that acts remains hidden.
Which is fitting for an entity who was around
before time was invented. He’s survived –
prospered, even – by constantly transforming
himself. For the ancient Sumerians, he was a she:
Ereshkigal, mistress of death and ruler of Aralu,
the Land of Darkness. Zoroaster’s Devil was
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Ahriman, the Lord of Lies and evil twin to
Ohrmazd. Faust knew him as Mephistopheles;
Richard Nixon just called him “Papa.”
So just who is Apollyon, Belial, Beelzebub, or
whatever you want to call him?
“Oh, you are going to burn for that, bitch,”
seethes Lucifer, giving the finger to a tan, blonde
woman who cuts him off on Sunset Boulevard.
We’re screaming through the streets at high speed
in a raven-black Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren
that, the Devil informs me, boasts a 600 hp, 5.4-
liter V-8. Honestly, I’m just looking for the
seatbelts as his Satanic Majesty sparks a joint with
one hand, dials his cell-phone with the other, and
negotiates the hellish LA traffic by force of will
alone.
He dials the home office for an update on his
media liaison, Ann Hanga, who’s supposed to be
shooting a new infomercial in Brazil. Infomercials
are a big part of Lightbringer’s success; they bring
10
in converts faster than Mel Gibson epics and are
far more cost-effective.
Between calls I get a kind of running-
commentary on the state of Heaven and Hell,
mankind, and the eternal battle between good and
evil. Of course, Satan doesn’t see it that way.
“Look at this – everywhere you go, it’s
‘Atkins-friendly’ this and ‘Atkins-friendly’ that.
Jesus. You’d think these people had never heard
the phrase ‘fad diet’ before. Do you think I’m the
one who made carbohydrates? Let’s not blame me
every time a housewife in Atlanta decides to treat
herself to that third helping of Rocky Road. Take
some personal responsibility, people.”
So you’re not behind the evil and suffering of
the world?
He snorts with laughter. The smell of
brimstone fills the car. “I wish I could take that
much credit! I don’t sit around thinking up new
ways to torment the human race. You guys are
good enough at that without my help. I’d love say
11
Carrot Top sold his soul for popularity, but I’m not
forcing anyone to buy tickets.”
What about disco music?
His eyes narrow. “You’ve done your
homework,” he smiles, sheepishly. “That was a
side bet between Loki and I. Back at the tail end of
the Sixties, I was big with groups like the Rolling
Stones. So Loki comes to me one night and says, ‘I
bet you can’t fuck up music for a whole decade
without using any supernatural intervention.’ Well,
I took that bet, and the next day I formed a band
called Fistful of Rainbows. We cut a 7” and next
thing you know, disco is blowing up! We even got
the Stones on board!” He cackles gleefully.
So you do contribute to the evil of the world.
He sighs. “Ok, listen. This is how it is.
Humans think the world is a battlefield, with God
and I both trying to rack up the most souls. Come
on. The universe isn’t a pinball machine. God and
I aren’t trying to see who can get the high score.”
Pausing to take another hit from his joint, he
12
turns up Britney Spears’s “Toxic,” saying, “Hate
me if you gotta, but I love this song.”
“Here’s the real deal. Most of the stuff you
want to blame me for – pain, suffering, all that jazz
– I didn’t choose to bring all that into the world.
We’re pawns in a chess game, with all the moves
plotted out in advance. Me, you. Everybody, man.
I fell for three fucking days! Do you want to see
where He ripped my wings off?”
He takes a sharp turn, pulling into his
nightclub, Inferno. Yanking the emergency brake,
the Devil brings the car to a screeching stop. He
turns and looks me right in the eyes. “Only a
fascist or a child would take the blank slate of
creation and start carving rules into it. I’m the
democratic response – that there be no
commandments, that’s my first and only
commandment. God’s a traffic cop; I’m an artist.
I’m not going to play the game anymore. I’m
gonna flip the board right the fuck over.”
Then he smiles and says, “Let’s go get some
13
drinks.”
Inferno is a renovated two-story warehouse,
decorated in red and black, with graffiti-art flames
licking their way up the walls. We enter through a
side door to the cheers of a well-dressed
Hollywood elite. I catch a glimpse of Ethan
Hawke talking to Paris Hilton. They both wave;
Paris blows an air kiss. Satan pretends to catch it
and clutch it to his chest, then winks and smiles.
Paris giggles in response.
Satan orders a Red Bull and vodka, then leads
me to the other end of the bar. An impossibly tall
man in an undertaker’s suit stands talking to a
dreadlocked, top-hat-wearing black man. Both are
drinking red wine and look up as we approach.
“Reporter man, this is Ghede and Ankou. We
go way back – they’ll keep an eye on you while I
run upstairs to take care of some business.” With a
hardy clap on my back, he’s gone, and I’m staring
awkwardly at the two men, who stare back. I don’t
14
even have a drink.
“Pleased to meet you,” says Ghede, the top-
hat man, with slight Haitian accent. He smiles and
I see the wine has stained his teeth.
Ankou leans forward to shake my hand. “And
I as well,” in an upper-crust Briton accent that
creaks like the binding of an ancient manuscript.
“So,” I stall. “Are you two Satan’s wingmen
or something? I see a lot of eligible ladies here
tonight.”
“Something like that,” smiles Ghede. I get the
feeling he’s sizing me up. For what, I don’t know.
“I imagine it’s pretty easy for him to walk in
here and have his choice of companionship for the
night.” They’re staring again, and I can’t think
straight with the multi-colored lights stabbing into
my eyes.
“Certainly he could,” answers Ankou. “But
he’s never really ‘rolled’ like that, to use one of
your clever American phrases. There was a brief
dalliance with Lilith back before your time, but
15
since then he’s poured himself into the work.”
“Is he lonely?” I ask.
“I wouldn’t say ‘lonely,’ per se. More like
driven. He puts everything into his Grand Project.
He, like all sons, is trying to impress his Father.
This whole rebel posture is just a way to get God’s
attention. I’m not sure even he believes it, but he
pushes on, talking about the ‘palace of excess,’ and
‘escaping the shackles of a flawed creation.’ I
think he smokes too much weed, frankly.” Ankou
looks suddenly bored with the notion of
conversation, sipping his wine and casting a
disdainful glance around the room.
After a few moments, Satan returns, with a
supermodel-quality woman on each arm. The
blonde, blue-eyed one on his left he introduces as
Jenny; the exotic Indian-looking one on his right
his named Thalia. He explains that they are part of
his plan.
“Bred without the limits of conscience,
created in my own image to be the ultimate party
16
girls,” he smiles again. “Girls, lift up your shirts.”
They do. No bellybuttons.
Twenty minutes later, we’re again roaring
down Sunset Boulevard. Jenny and Thalia giggle
in the back seat, unable to keep their hands off
each other. I’m due to catch a flight out; Satan has
agreed to drop me at the airport. We pull into
short-term parking and I look back at the two girls,
for the first time noticing their forked tongues.
I pull my suitcase out of the back and Satan
catches me by the arm. Again fixing me with those
piercing blue eyes and sharklike smile, he says,
“I’m going to win, you know.” He laughs, and his
girls laugh with him. Then he drives off.
Standing there alone in the dark, watching the
Devil’s tail-lights, like a pair of glowing eyes
retreating into the distance, it’s hard not to believe
him.
17
WAR AND POLITICS
How To Kill or Maybe, Not Kill:
A conversation with an unknown Marine.
Matt Stroud
Stroud: What would they teach you,
specifically, before the war?
Marine, eating, sitting across a restaurant table
from the Deek representative, chewing with his
mouth full, says: Well, ‘ey’d ‘ell ‘ou what (he
swallows) a bad guy is, what to do... rules of
engagement.
What, uh... what is a bad guy?
Well, they gave us an official... I guess you’d
call it a Bad Guy Identification Card, describing
21
what and who you were allowed to shoot and so
on. But, what it said was, basically, Aim for
anyone in an enemy military uniform... which was
brown, obvious looking. And the card described
the uniform in useless detail... It basically said,
Shoot any Iraqi that presents any threat to you.
What does that entail?
If they have a gun, shoot ‘em.
No shit?
No shit. If you ask someone on high if that’s
how they worded it, they’ll deny it till they’re blue
in the face, but that’s what they said. If you see a
gun in someone’s hand, shoot that person.
Fuckin’ crazy.
Yeah. And they had these white pickup trucks
that they told us to shoot no matter what. Because
that’s what Saddam uses, like Hummers. Our
original rules of engagement before we crossed the
22
border were, if you see a white pickup truck, blow
the fucker up. For real. But, when we crossed the
border, we were up shit creek, cause everybody
and their fucking brother drives a white pickup
truck.
So that went right out the fuckin’ window.
You gotta realize, the war did not happen how it
was supposed to. They can have Plan A through D
through Z through a hundred twelve, but they
never really know how anything’s going to
happen. They just never know. The white pickup
truck thing: I mean, if we would’ve shot everyone
in one of those trucks -- if we would’ve followed
commands exactly, we would’ve been killing men,
women, children, dogs, you name it. But we
didn’t.
Did someone in your unit have to fuck up
before they realized that?
Well, I know the first white pickup truck I saw
had twelve women in the back, in the bed... So it
23
was kinda obvious from the beginning. Someone
else may have (fucked up), but no one from my
unit.
Alright, you were in Iraq when the war started.
I want to know the first moment in the desert
when you pointed to God and said, It’s your
show now.
Okay... dramatic. I’ll tell you how we got the
wakeup call. So, we’re sleeping in these big tents –
the whole company’s in there – and, uh, they wake
us up at like three in the morning... And we knew
this was coming, mind you, but, uh... Here ya go –
this is the line.
Listen... you say and write the craziest things
before you go to war. People were writing death
letters next to me, black jackets... If I die, tell my
parents so on. Death letters; people writing letters
to girlfriends and wives and saying things you
normally wouldn’t or shouldn’t say. Like telling
girls that are going to have kids in 5 months that
24
you love them, or that you cheated or... stuff like
that. It was tense. A lot goes through your head
when you know it’s coming.
What did you write?
Well, just letters really. Telling people that I
don’t know when I’ll be able to write again. Cause
we didn’t know. But I wasn’t being fatalistic about
it. I had some faith that we’d be alright. But after
all, we didn’t know what the war was going to be
like, or what we’d see or run into. We didn’t know
how fast we were gonna be moving or if we’d
even get another chance to write, so...
Write to your mom?
Yea. My mom, Christine... Your mom. I wrote
one to work saying, uh, well, I’m going to war
today, so I won’t be in on... Saturday.
25
Yea, uh, could you guys pick up my paycheck
for me?
(laughing) Yea. Fuckin weird. I got a prior
engagement shooting people in hot sand.
Incredible... But anyway, it’s three in the morning,
right? And they call Revile Revile Revile; and they
say You are now on Zulu Time -- which
standardizes everything so the president can say,
you know, hey Marines, at... I don’t know, 5
o’clock in the morning, bomb the fuck out of this
spot. And you other Marines bomb the fuck out of
this spot. It’s just to keep everything synchronized.
Right.
So, we crossed the border after eating chow
and packing up all our shit... we didn’t cross till
like 9 a.m. The grunts crossed at, like, three. We
spent about 6 hours just packing, getting ready. I
mean... we knew that Iraq was one of the most
heavily mined countries in the world. There’s just
fucking mines everywhere. So the bulldozers and
26
the grunts went in and plowed through all that shit.
And we, uh... well, we followed, taking the
prisoners they captured, putting them into custody.
You should’ve seen the fucking border, man. Just a
giant hole forty feet deep around the entire border.
Fucking amazing. And inside the border, the grunts
had plowed a lane in the sand, real narrow... and if
you went outside that lane, chances are you were
going to hit a mine and blow up. But, so anyway,
we head in and there are DANGER signs
everywhere and then we hit the demilitarized zone.
And we just plowed right though that shit, no
problem. But... where was I?
I was wondering that, too. You were talking
about the first trek over the border.
Oh, right. So, we follow them in and it was
just fucking incredible. The oil fields as we entered
Iraq were lit on fire. Giant, unbelievable... like,
spouting fire just fucking erupting hundreds of
yards into the air. So we cross into this little
27
town... and one of the first things we see is this
crowd of probably fifty Iraqi soldiers held at
gunpoint, walking with their hands above their
heads toward a base that had been set up by MPs
that went in a few hours before us. We kept
driving, and, I didn’t see any bodies yet... not at
that point, but you see carnage –- blood on the
ground, parts of uniforms, and piles of ammo
casings –- the brass –- and weapons and piles of
clothes and other stuff that lets you know that, I
don’t know... That this is serious. And this is war.
So, just a quick question before you go on. Did
you, uh... Did you kill anyone?
Dude, you know I can’t tell you that.
Why not?
Does it really matter?
28
A Very Unpleasant Experience With A Soldier
Matt Novak
Drinking at a gay bar, I’m here to be
entertained by a friend’s variety act on Casio
keyboard. There’s a nonchalant, laid back sort of
verve, but it’s not as if flamboyancy has no place;
the way these guys are swinging their hips when
they walk, tick-tock, back and forth like a
pendulum timepiece, is making me... aware. One
guy stands out from the others, obviously straight
-- crew cut, buff (as in bulk and not sculpture).
He’s having a hell of a tete-a-tete with the keep,
demonstrative and voluminous, flushed, rousing
29
himself to guffaws. So I needle in a little. I’m
drunk on special L.I. Ice-T’s and gin.
There is a softness about him from the start,
but he is contrary and abrasive with a grating voice
and glare. We get to talking. “I just got back from
Iraq,” he says to me. Rapport develops by degrees.
“This guy,” he testifies, motioning the keep, “is
one of my best friends. He’s one of the greatest
guys in the world. See, I don’t care if you’re gay,
or straight, or Puerto Rican... whatever the hell, it’s
the same.” Equanimity. He tells me he’s come
from a strip club across the street.
“You mean in the back of that magazine
shop?,” I ask, ignorant, enticed.
“My girl,” he continues, “she strips over
there...sits on my lap. Head like you wouldn’t
believe.” He pauses to sip his drink, a vodka and
juice. I suppose I looked scandalized. “I take what
I want. Fuck you.”
I try not to let on anything, move on. “So you
were...”
30
He ignores me, shows me a scar on his
forearm. “Have you ever been shot?,” he fires at
me. “I was shot. Killed twenty-seven men.” It’s a
nasty, drawn-out tissue, lots of curlicued hair
lapping the outline. I must say no, I’ve never been
shot. I’m about to tell him I’ve shot a gun when he
interrupts me. “Are you gay or straight?,” he asks.
“I thought that didn’t matter,” I contend. “All
the same.” It pisses him off when I quote him. He
presses me, menacingly. “Straight,” I say, loudly,
eyes on the plain, featureless drywall behind his
head.
He asks me again. By this time there is a
smile in his eyes and a gut punch in my heart.
“You gonna go over there?” He gestures at the
strip club -- at his girlfriend. “You want some of
that?”
I nod, acquiescing, merely retreating from this
unsolicited onslaught. “Then I’ll see you tomorrow
night over there. And if I don’t see you....” he
leaves off.
31
“I just never heard there was a place there,” I
say weakly.
“We’ll see then if you want it,” says he. “I
take what I want. I do what I want.” He lifts his
shirt to show me the scar in his belly. “If someone
threatens me, I’m not gonna cross myself and pray
to God,” he illustrates; “when someone stabs you
in the belly, you shoot him. I nailed him.” He
smiles pleasingly. “Killed twenty-seven men.”
I wonder if he’ll ask me if I’d ever kill
somebody. I’ve often wondered on it. I’ve been
made to wonder on it. Clint Eastwood, Luke
Skywalker, Bruce Lee. It is the measure of a man.
I still don’t know if I could do it if I was thinking.
If I didn’t feel anything, as that seems best, would
it be because my heart had been seized in the vice
of my iron will, or because I was simply
paralyzed, my mind crippled by whatever ran
rampant through its fickle trenches?
“You won’t show up tomorrow night. And I
know that,” he reports. “You probably like
32
computers,” he waves, reducing all information,
all stories and reports and studies and pictures and
digitally conveyed art, and the so-called power to
the pen to a single, impotent meme. “Just stick to
your computers and wacking off.” He makes the
up-and-down claw with his hand.
“There’s a lot of that,” suddenly wistful,
distant, I admit, trying to hold with truth, brazenly
denying shame.
“Yeah,” he affirms, and runs his rough digits
through the shroud on my scalp. Toussels my hair,
petting me on the head. Who does this guy think
he is? I shrug and laugh it off.
Here I toss out my las t chance at
egalitarianism, that evenhandedness laudable in so
many estimable journals of the literate and
reasonably liberal, lending respect, and
believability, hell, likeability; gently encouraging
discourse, bestowing responsibility as a gift on the
reader to make up his own mind. Here I pick up
my stick and start beating with it. So I’ll borrow a
33
trick from those hypocritical bastards O’Reilly and
Limbaugh, and those cursed sons of bitches in
Washington, consummate professionals all, and lay
down a disclaimer before I go on tirade, which
nonetheless I don’t mean to be entirely insincere: I
fight all the time with notions of stereotype and
hold no court with didactic reductions and the
epidemic of oversimplification. I believe in the
notion of the individual, and the variety of the
species. That said:
This is precisely the profile of the American
civilian in the New World Order. Feckless, feeble-
minded, indifferent. Unable to concentrate.
Morally ambiguous. Tired, tired all the time,
watching the TV. Vegging out in front of the tube.
There is no memory of what was watched the
night before, and there likely will be none after
tonight is over. Why bother? People know
disposable. Nothing is said, and there is nothing
done. All’s done is done, papers filed, bills filed,
interest calculated, paper clips squirrelled away,
34
untangled, neat in a scrap of Chinese plastic,
stapler filled, pencils sharpened, calendar on the
close wall in the office, desk Windexed, porn in
the bedroom, bed made, ready for bed. Kids
washed, fed, in bed, sleeping, dreaming of getting
things, how childish; adults get what they have;
tired of desire, tired. Gotta get up early, do it
tomorrow, fight traffic.
This is precisely the problem with the
American soldier. Trained to kill, to hunt, not as an
instance, as a practice, but drilled, drilled and
cursed, so that it is a way of life. Sent to die, oh
vanity, oh vain, glorious valor. These men and
women do not think of themselves as sacrifice,
trained to consider killing in terms of numbers,
death in terms of bland euphemisms and double-
speak, stripped of this patriot poesy bullshit
bandied about on the nightly news by cush cush
patsy anchors with wet dreams of tear-jerk
emotional rhetoric, looking down on journalistic
integrity as the dreams of an insouciant, naive
35
child. Discouraged from a humanities education,
equanimity, enlightenment, sense of history,
consideration fomenting dissent, soldiers are
trained, trained and built, tough and taut, in using
tools and technology of war, without remorse.
Hunters. Not Seals, really. Wolves, spiders, snakes.
These are mascots of our boys’ divisions; these are
creatures of prestige, shock, and awe. Stalked,
stung, bitten, our enemy, beaten. What of the
civilian? What of this faithful, this hopeful, this
patriot, sentimental, model of civilized restraint,
Protestant self-control, carefully tallied expenses,
morally rationed appetites? What of the good flock
under President, under God, under Rule of Law?
What of these, sheep?
Which is to say that I’m there in a gay bar
sipping Long Islands on special and watching a
middle-aged funny gal play with electric keys and
stuffed animals, and the American soldier’s tossing
back a Coke, showing me scars, and then marching
off across the street to pick up his blond, pert-
36
tittied stripper and fuck her senseless. After petting
me on the fucking head. Bring our boys home, all
right.
37
State of the Fraud
Jesse Hicks
Episode 1: Home on the Range
White House officials do not deny that
they craft elaborate events to showcase
Bush, but they maintain that these events
are designed to accurately dramatize his
policies and to convey qualities about
him that are real. (The Washington Post,
December 4, 2003, referring to President
Bush's Thanksgiving Day appearance in
Baghdad, armed with a golden-brown,
fake turkey.)
39
Pay no attention to that man behind the
curtain. (The Wizard of Oz, 1939)
In 1999, Connecticut-born George W. Bush,
who grew up in affluent Midland, Texas and
Houston (pop. 5,180,443 as of 2004) before,
among other things, attending Yale, decided to buy
a ranch. In those early days of his first Presidential
campaign, then-Governor Bush purchased a 1583-
acre plot of land just outside Crawford, Texas.
(The ranch is actually closer to Waco, Texas, but
you seldom hear White House Press Scott
McClellan say, "The President is vacationing on
his Waco ranch, which, incidentally, was built by
members of a religious community from nearby El
Mott, Texas." Nor will McClellan refer to the
ranch as a "compound.")
The property, known as Prairie Chapel Ranch,
is a former pig farm. According to Deputy Press
Secretary Dana Perino, there are now "four or
five" cattle on the ranch. (Ranch, n. "An extensive
40
farm, especially in the western United States, on
which large herds of cattle, sheep, or horses are
raised.") The President, who wears a cowboy hat
but cannot ride a horse, paid an estimated $1.3
million for this rustic "slice of heaven," as he calls
it.
His home there is a 10,000 ft² limestone
single-level with a pool, just like the cowboys of
yesteryear used to have. Though its completion
was planned for November 7th, 2000 -- Election
Day -- the house didn't open until after the
President's inaugural. In 2001, President Bush
explained his "Western White House" governing
style by saying, "I think it is so important for a
president to spend some time away from
Washington, in the heartland of America."
Not coincidentally, historian Douglas Brinkley
explained to The Los Angeles Times, "…[A] lot of
Americans like seeing him in blue jeans with a big
belt buckle, walking down a dirt road or clearing
brush. It's become a stage set for him."
41
It would be unfair to mention here that
Charles Manson, another controversial leader, also
lived on a movie set, the Spahn Ranch in the San
Fernando Valley. Unfair and irrelevant, because
Manson -- who once said, "I may be Jesus Christ. I
haven't yet decided who I am" -- implied that he
knew the will of God, and by combining the White
Album with the Book of Revelation and heroic
doses of LSD, predicted a coming race and nuclear
war. On the other hand, President Bush, like all
American presidents, is a secular humanist who
considers religion at best a comforting
superstition. He is a man who would never tell a
group of Amish leaders on July 9, 2004, "I trust
God speaks through me."
An entirely unfair comparison, so let's not
make it here. A question one might ask, though: Is
there a problem when the President of the United
States, whose job, one might argue, is to confront
reality in all its complexity and inconvenience,
spends much of his time on a movie set, a place by
42
definition unreal?
Episode 2: The Faith of a Patriot
But as specific orders began arriving to
the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50
Monday morning quickly was ushered
onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The
crew's first assignment: to stand beside
President Bush as he tours devastated
areas. (The Salt Lake Tribune, September
12, 2005, detailing FEMA's use of over
1,000 firefighters as unpaid extras in the
wake of Hurricane Katrina.)
Stay behind my aura! (Zardoz, 1974)
President Bush's cowboy swagger has a long
lineage in American politics; Teddy Roosevelt is
its first and perhaps most famous incarnation, an
asthmatic Eastern aristocrat who went into the
Dakota badlands and emerged a full-fledged
cowboy, able to rope and ride. Lyndon Johnson
43
owned and operated a 2,700-acre cattle ranch in
south Texas, and his country-plain way of speaking
clearly influences Bush II. Ronald Reagan also
knew how to ride a horse; as President, he often
cleared brush on his 688-acre California ranch.
So President Bush takes his place in this cycle
of diminishing returns. A faint echo of Teddy
Roosevelt, his character also borrows another
iconic bit of Americana: the Resolute Man of
Faith. Just call him God's Cowboy.
In combining these two resonant American
myths -- with a dash of the modern "CEO-as-
leader" trope -- into one convenient package, the
President offers Americans everything they want
to believe about themselves. With all respect to
Frank Norris, who once wrote that "California
likes to be fooled" -- and who can argue with their
Governator, a cybernetic organism sent from the
future where politics is one big special-effect -- it's
America that likes to be fooled. We liked to be
fooled, mostly about ourselves. We want to look in
44
the mirror and see something greater than simple,
human flesh -- we want to see a nation more
powerful, more loving, more just, and more
merciful. We want Sean Hannity to greet us all as
"great Americans."
And why not? The idea of America has
always been more powerful than the reality; the
phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"
sounds like nothing so much as the license to
dream, to build castles in the air. In an age of small
myths, when for most religion has lost its narrative
force, community ties have dissolved leaving us all
strangers in the crowd, and the great economic and
political battles of history all seem decided, it falls
to post-9/11 politics to revive that most comforting
of American myths: that of the great city upon a
hill, exceptional, with the eager eyes of the world
focused on its example.
The problem arises when you try to live in
those airy castles, in a land built entirely of
righteous abstraction. Just as the President's stage-
45
ranch helps him believe he is a cowboy, the myth
of American exceptionalism helps us believe that
we are that nation we want to see in the mirror. It
helps us forget that Abraham Lincoln's view of
America as the "last best hope" was not the picture
of a country already accomplished in its goals, but
of one still striving towards them. That's the
meaning of the word "hope." And hope has no
place in a fantasy where noble belief trumps
reality.
It's worth quoting the rest of Lincoln's thought
here: "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we
shall save our country. Fellow citizens, we cannot
escape history." No matter how many armored
fictions we send marching across the world, we
cannot stop the turning of the clock; when you try
to set up camp in Disneyland, eventually the world
comes knocking. We cannot remake our world
without unmaking someone else's, nor can we
unburden ourselves of reality, choosing instead to
live in a fortress America ruled by a seductive lie,
46
with actors manning the ramparts.
So as Sean Hannity tucks you in snug and safe
-- no terrorists under your bed, my quiet
Americans! -- remember that for all his
storytelling, "utopia," in Greek, still means
"nowhere."
Episode 3: The Bl inded Leading the
Blindfolded
The [senior Bush] aide said that guys
like me were 'in what we call the reality-
based community,' which he defined as
people who "believe that solutions
emerge from your judicious study of
discernible reality.' I nodded and
m u r m u r e d s o m e t h i n g a b o u t
enlightenment principles and empiricism.
He cut me off. 'That's not the way the
world really works anymore,' he
continued. 'We're an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality.
And while you're studying that reality --
47
judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again,
creating other new realities, which you
can study too, and that's how things will
sort out. We're history's actors ... and
you, all of you, will be left to just study
what we do. (“Without a Doubt,” The
New York Times Magazine, October 17,
2004.)
There is nothing wrong with your
television set. Do not attempt to adjust
the p ic ture . We are contro l l ing
transmission. If we wish to make it
louder, we will bring up the volume. If we
wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a
whisper. We can reduce the focus to a soft
blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. We
will control the horizontal. We will
control the vertical. For the next hour, sit
quietly and we will control all that you
see and hear. You are about to
experience the awe and mystery
which reaches from the inner mind
48
to... The Outer Limits (The Outer Limits,
circa 1963)
Unfortunately, you don't have to just take my
word for it. The ship of state, rechristened the SS
Unreality, its engines stoked by ideologues and
True Believers, has already beached itself upon the
rocks of uncomfortable reality.
I'm talking, of course, about Iraq.
President Bush has faked us -- and himself --
into believing he is a cowboy, specifically one in
the Dirty Harry rather than Gene Autry mold. A
studious examination of the Book of Revelation
has convinced him of the righteous inevitability of
his triumph over evil. Reality notwithstanding, he
seems to think it's going pretty well. Some people
disagree, but the fun in making your own worlds is
that we each get one. You stand over there, in your
world, where the liberation of Iraq has become a
q-------. I'll be over here in mine, where every time
an insurgent car bomb goes off, it sprays
bystanders with daisies. That's called "having
49
faith." Otherwise known as "staying the course."
And now we come to the final stage of the
trick. It's one thing to live on a fabricated ranch
and imagine yourself a cowboy. It's another to
blindly parrot the "this is the greatest country in
the world, bar none, without exception, all the time
every time!" line and resist even a sideways glance
into the shadowed corners of the American psyche.
Keep the world in soft focus and you can live your
dreams forever.
Just be careful when you try to make those
dreams into reality. The two don't mix well; the
final and most dangerous delusion is that naked
power and indomitable will can bend the world to
your whim. That's a rarity, and as Pol Pot and Mao
can tell you, people usually wind up dead. Or, as
George Packer puts it in his new history-thus-far
of the war in Iraq, "firepower and good intentions
would be less important than learning to read the
signs." No matter how well-armed your illusions,
they'll always bump up against something you
50
can't fake, or spin, or ignore. In short, the cosmic
bummer that is the world as it is. But as Lenny
Bruce once said, "Let me tell you the truth. The
truth is what is. And what should be is a fantasy, a
terrible, terrible lie someone gave the people long
ago."
This is a lesson that President Bush and
innocent Americans are just now learning. It's a
difficult one, and I don't envy their painful return
to the reality-based community. It's fun to believe
things. More fun still to trick others into believing
them, then line your pockets with the money they
didn't really deserve anyway. But like a visit to
Disneyland, it eventually comes to an end. You can
only ride the teacups so long before you get sick.
When I last saw President Bush, he was
having an "unrehearsed" (scripted! Ha! Words are
meaningless!) conversation with a group of US
soldiers stationed in Iraq. He stumbled through his
lines, fumbled for the right words, and was
generally out of his depth. He looked like a man
51
disoriented and empty, as though the string
connecting his soul to his body had been cut. He
looked like a man no longer able to fool anyone.
Not even himself.
52
Stand Up And Fight For Your Non-Beliefs
Jesse Hicks interviews R.U. Sirius
R.U. Sirius is probably best known as the co-
founder and original editor-in-chief of Mondo
2 0 0 0 magazine, the subversive cyber-culture
magazine that pre-dated Wired and featured writers
such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Rudy
Rucker. Mondo 2000 pioneered a unique blend of
computer culture, psychedelia, avant-garde art, and
sex that put the term "cyberpunk" on the map.
His latest book, Counterculture Through the
Ages, a historical survey of counterculture themes
in everything from early Judaism to the
53
Enlightenment, was just released in paperback. In
addition to hosting weekly podcasts on his
mondoglobo.net website, this November R.U. will
teach a course at the Maybe Logic Academy
(www.maybelogic.net), called the Question
Authority Project. He talked with Deek about the
countercultural spirit, the future of cyber-culture,
and finding passion in non-belief.
I read that one reaction you'd hoped for from
the more hip, less mainstream section of your
readership was passionate "objection." Have
you gotten much of that response?
No, not as much and not as interesting as I
would hope it would be. I think the environment
for public discussion changed when the internet
moved away from the bulletin board model --
where lots of different people would post topics
and create discussions -- to the blog model, where
an individual has his blog and people come in to
read it, and possibly post responses, and to engage
54
in conversation around that. That may be part of it.
I was on The Well for a long time, which I got
a little bit tired of, but there would be really
detailed and intricate discussions on The Well. I
did appear on The Well representing the book, and
that was kind of interesting, but on the whole
there's been less passionate response than I'd
hoped for. I think people's attention these days is
so distracted and drawn to so many different
possible areas that a lot of discourse tends to lack
real depth.
Mostly what you get is people whining about
the commodification of hip culture. That's the big
bugaboo of people who identify with alternative
culture: that the subcultural movement and
expressions that they like get fed back to them in
television advertisements and that sort of thing.
That's an interesting enough topic; Tom Frank
has written interestingly about it. But it's also a
pretty limited topic. I'm trying to show people
links between a certain type of spirit that's existed
55
between Sufism on the one hand, and the
European enlightenment on the other hand, and the
post-Christian transcendentalists on the other hand,
and Zen Buddhism in Asia -- you have all these
quotes from all these people, really manifesting
similar attitudes expressed around completely
different paradigms and focuses. To me, that's
pretty interesting. To always hear people complain
about Iggy Pop songs being used in television
commercials, and to always get hung up on that
discussion -- that's a little depressing, actually.
It's interesting that you mentioned blogs,
because in the book you intentionally shy away
from the lone iconoclasts in favor of true
counterculture communities. It seems that with
The Well and the early bulletin boards, you had
a true counterculture community, while blogs
are typically broadcast-style, iconoclastic sites.
It's a mix. Most blogs do have an area for
response, and there's some degree of back-and-
56
forth discourse, but the general vibe around that
isn't as strong as it was in the earlier virtual
communities. It seems to me that the idea of
virtual community is something that hasn't been
taken to its most interesting place.
I think that's the same problem with social
networks. There's a space for discussion, but the
environment, the vibe that's created around these
places, is more like, "Hey, come in and sign my
guestbook and I'll sign your guestbook and we'll
see how many people we can collect."
These things are all temporary shifts. I'm sure
deeper virtual communities will continue to exist
and will emerge in other forms.
That seems like a fairly obvious case of the
more consumerist aspects of cyber-technology
taking over.
People go where the money goes. While there
was some money in the creation of completely
non-heirarchical communities, there's more money
57
in the social networks. Although with the blogs,
people were just following their impulse to take
the medium and communicate in a way that
previously had just been vouchsafed for those who
had a publisher or an editor who they could
convince that what they had to say and write was
valid.
I totally support the idea the every individual
has the right to be a complete multimedia
broadcasting company. I strive to be one myself.
But I want to point out that this other thing seems
to have taken a backseat for a while.
Do you think the "everyone an author, everyone
a multimedia company" helps or hurts the
reincarnation of what you called the spirit of
counterculture?
I don't know that there's any need for a
reincarnation at this point. I think throughout
human history there's been an ebb-and-flow in
terms of whether there are people who fit the free-
58
thinking, free-willing, flexible, changeable, non-
ideological notion of counterculture that we
convey in the book. There may be periods when
there aren't any countercultures, and then there are
plenty of periods where there are, but I don't think
there's any question that spirit continues to exist on
planet earth today in the twenty-first century.
There's really no need for a reincarnation; it's just a
question of where we want to take the energies. Is
there some way to coalesce the energies into
something that helps to make the world a better
place? Or is that something we even want to do?
Or do we want to "stick apart," like the
Discordians -- you know, "Us Discordians must
stick apart."
I think everybody having their own media is
countercultural in essence, in the way we
described it in the book. Instead of having three or
four mediated realities managed by CBS, NBC,
and The New York Times, with a few people
reading Mother Jones or the National Review,
59
you've got tens of thousands of different realities
that people might subscribe too.
I've long said that the 'net represents a real
defeat for consensus reality. So in that sense it's
very positive in terms of what we described as
counterculture. One of the questions we raise in
the book is whether "counterculture" is really
"counter" -- when I talk about counterculture, I'm
talking about a particular set of values that I
ascribe to counterculture, but one doesn't have to
ascribe to it the requirement of being that far
outside the mainstream, anymore. It's a different
way of approaching the world. We see it through
history, and it probably has three billion
subscribers on the planet at this point.
The three ideas you define as the essence of
counterculture -- individual ism, anti -
authoritarianism, and the belief in the
p o s s i b i l i t y o f p e r s o n a l a n d s o c i a l
transformation -- you see those as far back as
60
far as Abraham, Socrates, and Taoism. Those
movements cast a fairly great shadow down the
ages. Today, obviously you see that animating
spirit, but do you see something comparable
that will cast a great shadow on the future?
I'm sure there are a lot of things going on right
now that will cast a great shadow. I think things
are thickening up to such an extent -- some people
talk about the singularity, where the rate of change
will reach a level beyond which it's almost
impossible for us to understand what being a
human being is. I think the work that people are
doing wiring together human beings through the
nervous system of the Internet casts a long shadow.
That emerged out of counterculture sensibilities.
That's woven into the technology -- the idea of
giving individuals power, of decentralizing the
power of thought and the power of communication
-- that's really written into the technology. I think
the biggest political shadow will be cast by the
"open source" idea, which is kind of a non-
61
coercive communism in some ways. It's post-
communism, post-capitalism. It says, "We have an
abundance of this stuff we call programming, or
thought, or whatever it is that underlies all the
things that we might create, and we're going to
share it openly. People can use it to make a profit,
or use it to make a commune, or use it anyway
they want."
I think that's a place where we're headed as
human beings. Hopefully as an economy, we're
headed towards a gift economy. Open source really
models what a post-scarcity economy should be.
Technologies like nanotechnology hold forth the
promise of actually eliminating scarcity, so when
you put those two together, you have a potential
model for the future. Why can't money be open
source? Money is a program. That'd be an
interesting leap for someone to take.
Other things that are going to cast a big
shadow on the future are the experiments with
maximum lifespan and the potentials for
62
performance enhancement in the human mind,
including the psychedelic levels of consciousness,
the potentials for pleasure, insight, and
compassion. I think the self-enhancement
movement -- which in many ways comes out of
the counterculture spirit -- is another arrow
pointing towards the future.
It seems as though you see present technology
as having a greater affect than present ideas.
The ideas go into the technology. There's a
feedback loop there. I'm sure the technology will
in turn create ideas. In the chapter on the
Enlightenment, we talk about how the change in
technology caused the distribution in literacy, and
then the distribution of knowledge, which
previously had been held by a small, elite group. It
ended up being distributed by the encyclopedia.
There's always this kind of feedback loop between
the technology and science of a time and the
philosophy of the time. But I do see technology as
63
being the thing that helps us to change the world at
this time.
Can you tell me a little about your Maybe Logic
course, the Question Authority Project?
Basically it's, "Stand up and fight for your
non-beliefs." The Maybe Logic Academy is based
around Robert Anton Wilson's idea of "model
agnosticism" -- the idea of not buying completely
into any model of reality, any particular paradigm,
but maintaining an experimental attitude towards
it. I think the Question Authority Project is an
attempt to model that idea as a form of activism, as
a counteraction to the tendency towards theocracy,
theocratic beliefs, and other very rigid forms of
politics that are becoming attractive to a lot of
people living in a very complex and confusing
time.
The idea came out of a course I was teaching
called, "Counterculture Through the Ages," about
the book. In the process of the course, we thought
64
rather than just talking about counterculture,
maybe we should be doing something. We batted
around some ideas for pranks and for creating fake
counterculture characters -- modeled on Hakim
Bey or something like that -- putting them on the
web and seeing what kind of perturbations that
would create.
I had this idea in the back of my head for the
Question Authority Project, as a political and
social organization. I threw that out there and
everyone, somewhat to my dismay, went for it.
This course is an active course to see if people can
work together to realize something like this. The
basic idea is really just to create a website that
brings together anti-authoritarian activists, to get
into non-denominational blogging that would be
interesting to anti-authoritarians or non-
authoritarians. Something that wouldn't be just a
libertarian blog or an anarchist blog or a civil
libertarian blog -- not something designed to
appeal that one particular slice of anti-authoritarian
65
reality, but something that would have a broad
appeal to people open to non-authoritarian
positions.
The basic idea is to create a sort of
clearinghouse, with links to non-authoritarian
websites, and to people who would be willing to
speak out and act out as non-authoritarians.
Possibly to create a pressure group to get anti-
authoritarians into a national dialogue, so when the
lunatic talk show host Joe Scarborough is having a
discussion of this or that, rather than always
having left vs. right, sometimes it might be more
appropriate to have the authoritarian and the non-
authoritarian view.
So we're going to work on it, work with the
class, and see if we can develop some manifestoes,
see if we can build the website. We'll see what
happens. I don't necessarily think the class will
succeed in starting something, but we'll all learn
something from the process.
66
It seems like now is both a very important time
for that kind of work and an extremely difficult
time to do it, given that mainstream culture has
so absorbed the "question authority" idea in
the service of selling shoes. Do you think it's
necessary to take back that idea, reinvigorate it,
and give it a new life?
In some ways it has been absorbed by the
mainstream, but it certainly hasn't been absorbed
to any great extent by the mainstream political
discourse. To some extent there's been some
reaction to some of the stuff that's happened since
the Bush administration got people objecting to the
PATRIOT Act and so on. I think probably for the
first time since Richard Nixon's war on crime in
the 1960's, you have some mainstream politicians
talking about civil liberties. Up until the Bush
administration, there was no help for a politician --
it did them no good to talk about being in favor of
civil liberties. The way for a politician to get ahead
was to be tough on crime, which is precisely the
67
opposite of that.
I think there's an awful lot of room for
questioning authoritarian assumptions that are
made by the mainstream of this society: that it's
good to send teenagers who disobey their parents
to boot camp-style places where rough, muscular,
bull-necked man scream at them to teach them
how to behave, for example. There are so many
ways in which the notion that people should
impose their will on other people is woven into our
culture at the political level.
In fact I think that's what makes this project
worthwhile. At the cultural level, the "question
authority" attitude is a pretty mainstream point of
view. At the political level, I don't think it is. In
specific ways, like being against the President or
against the war, being Michael Moore or Cindy
Sheehan, that might qualify as a sort of anti-
authoritarianism, but if you scratch Michael
Moore, you'll probably find he has an authoritarian
point of view himself.
68
So this question of coercion -- how much
coercion should be tolerated, if any, and under
what circumstance, is certainly not part of the
political discussion.
I can't think of any political movement that
meets the ideal of model agnosticism. How do
you go about translating that idea to the
political realm?
I think it would be a mistake to try to define it
too much, because then that becomes a model.
I think there's plenty of room within a strong
civil libertarian, democratic movement for a model
agnostic view to have its place. Certainly within
libertarianism and anarchism -- though people
within both those movements like to have
complex, Byzantine, highly-abstract, intellectual
ideologies that they cling to tenaciously -- there's
certainly room within those philosophies for a
model agnostic view. I know people in both the
libertarian and anarchist movements that hold
69
those kind of views.
I think it's something that a lot of people
subscribe to but don't know they do, because you
don't hear it expressed. Even at the level of
religion, mostly you hear arguments between
believer and non-believer, between believer and
atheist. The idea of agnosticism -- which seems to
me really obvious; you'd have to be an idiot not to
be an agnostic, to assume that in terms of the
nature of cosmic reality and all-and-everything, we
have the equipment or the information to know
one way or another -- but you don't hear that. You
hear the believers and the atheists going at it.
We don't seem to have a place for that third,
doubting voice, anywhere.
It's like I say, "Stand up and fight for your
non-beliefs." (Laughs) It's not that easy to be
passionate about not buying it.
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You point out in the book that the focus on
transcending easy dichotomies has almost
a l w a y s b e e n a m a r k e r o f t h e t r u e
countercultural movements.
I think that's exactly the case. That's implicit
in all the riddles and koans and teaching lessons
that you find in Zen, Taoism, and Sufism. You
even find it in Voltaire and other places. Socrates,
the great doubter, the great questioner of
everything -- they want to put you in a place where
there aren't answers. There are just questions or
there's just raw experience. That's definitely a line
that runs through the book.
That's a necessary aspect of what I would like
in a countercultural movement. I think a lot of
what has been labeled counterculture has not been
that. A lot of it has been another form of true-
believership: New Age forms of spiritual
absolutism, political forms of absolutism, various
expressions of a lack of tolerance and so forth.
There's a strong tendency towards purism within
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countercultural movements, which brings us back
to consumerism and seeing Iggy Pop ads on TV,
rather than wanting to have a more expansive
dialogue.
In the book you come down fairly harshly on
the 60's and 70's "revolutions" as anti-
authority, rather than non-authority, and really
full of itself, to the point of considering itself the
revolution. Why do you think that particular
strain of counterculturalism has become the
counterculture in many people's minds?
I think there's a majoritarian impulse toward
concretizing a movement around a dogma, rather
than constantly changing and allowing a creative
flow. Everyone wants to hang on to something,
saying, "This is the new one, and I'm going to be a
part of this movement or this reality," and then not
wanting that to change.
It's a fairly elitist thing to say, but it's probably
true, that the majority is not that creative. I think
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probably larger groups of people are becoming
more creative, but over the course of history that
hasn't been the case.
There's that and then there's real problems. In
response to real problems, people will find it
important to organize in a very hard, feet-on-the-
ground sort of way, and that will lead to a rigidity
of the mind and spirit. It doesn't have to -- one can
organize against a war or against a President or
against a war on civil liberties without becoming
part of a new, "alternative" regime. But it's much
more difficult. True believers organize much better
than non-believers.
Then it comes down to the "meet the new boss,
same as the old boss" phenomenon.
It's hard to believe Huey Newton being a
leader of America. Nothing against him --the guy
in his own way was a great spirit, but he just
wasn't ready to be the Supreme Commander or
whatever. (laughs)
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Do you see the Question Authority Project as
sort of a continuation of your earlier foray into
politics with The Revolution?
Well, in some ways it came out of that. Trying
to think about that idea of starting political party,
which I felt had become moribund. It was
probably stupid in the first place, and proved to be
way too difficult. This seemed to be something
more plausible.
In some ways it comes out of a little burr I
have in my saddle to do political work, just
because I look for things that nobody else is doing.
I think Buckminster Fuller said find something
that you think should be done that nobody else is
doing and do it. This idea of a non-rigid, non-
ideological, non-conformist, non-, non-, non-, etc.,
seems like something that ought to exist and
doesn't, so maybe I'll give that a try.
I generally regret having anything to do with
anything political at least nine times a day. I'd very
much like to just read science fiction and
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contemplate philosophy and maybe write my
biography. Again, I get this little burr in my saddle
that says, "Hey, here's something that's not being
done," and I try to do it.
Politics as a system often talks the talk as far as
tolerance, civil liberties, and giving people the
room to be individuals, but no political groups
really live up to that promise. None right now,
at least.
They would prefer not to have to. We talked
about the tendency of the majority to cohere
around rigid ideologies, but that's not the entire
story. There's also the tendency of those with
power and authority and wealth to want people to
cohere around rigid ideologies. That's another
means of control. So you have those two forces:
the majority and the elites both working very hard
to maintain those kinds of rigid systems.
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So can we expect a Question Authority Project
candidate for 2008?
No, nothing like that. I hope this will create a
clearinghouse for non-authoritarian views and help
to open up the national discourse. And I hope that I
don't have to be the leader of it. Hopefully with
this class we'll create something, a meme that will
go out there and people will be drawn to it, like
filings to a magnet.
76
SEX AND DRUGS
Rapid Detox
by Jessica Robyn
I might be a little on the naïve side. My dad
didn't really marry that bitch; my ex-boyfriend
doesn't ever like other girls; Pop-Up Videos will be
back someday. And detox? Rehab? Withdrawal?
It's all in a Saturday morning spent on my futon,
Gatorade and aspirin at my side, curtains drawn,
watching On-Demand and cursing Molson Triple-
X. Every once in awhile, however, I get a stabbing
reminder ignorance doesn't guarantee bliss. I've
seen the wedding pictures; I've heard about the
thing he had with the bartender; I've watched Best
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Week Ever. And, upon being asked to check out
the local methadone clinics for the magazine to see
just what rapid detox was all about, I had the
unwelcome feeling that I was again about to
swallow another unpleasant spoonful of reality -
something I generally have little patience for. I
reached for my box of crayon-colored Nat
Sherman's. I'm not a smoker; the first half-pack of
cigarettes had lasted me nearly a week. I wondered
whether the second would last me through the day.
I called the Health Department and asked for
the numbers of relevant local clinics, as well as
any information about heroin withdrawal or rapid
detox that they could give me. I was given neither,
only a number for someone who supposedly had
what I was looking for. Dialed it; same response.
(And this one was rather rude. Bitch.) Dialed that
number, got the numbers for five local centers, but
no direct information. So far, I was half-way
through a jade-colored cigarette, smoked more out
of frustration than nervousness. Maybe this
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wouldn't be so bad. I picked up the phone again.
Two of the five centers were closed for the
day (one of them closed at 1:45 each afternoon, or
so said the recording; who does that?). The
remaining three refused to talk, regardless of my
shameless attempts at charm, wit, and proverbial
dick-sucking. Not much for media coverage, eh?
Undaunted, I flicked around on the internet to see
what info I could find - more clinics, national
hotlines, articles. Finished the green, finished a
pink, and started working on a blue when I tried
calling the clinics again. Got the same reaction
from two of them - one asked me not to call again.
Why wouldn't they talk? What did they think I was
going to expose, unearth? I've got dirty little
secrets too, but I at least converse with the people
who fucking call me. Discouragement was setting
in; if I couldn't get anything out of the
receptionists, I was never going to learn anything
from the people administering the actual treatment,
much less the people being treated. I was pissed; I
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was on a mission, and these people were making
me fail. I had one center left to redial. I never
called.
The Narcotics Anonymous meeting was held
in the basement of a Baptist Church in Western
Maryland. Pittsburgh has its own local chapters,
but after the trouble I'd already had, I wanted to
see what was available in some other neck of the
Allegheny woods. Plus, I had a friend at my old
university who volunteered at these things. At the
very least, I was hoping she'd up my comfort level;
I was still apprehensive, and I was running out of
cigarettes.
I got lost on my way to the red brick building,
and got lost on the inside (ironic when you realize
that the people coming are looking for guidance
and direction) but finally wandered into the room
where the meetings were held. It was painted a
pallid and sickly green, the same moldy color that
will forever remind me of an elementary school
gymnasium. I read once that they use the color in
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public buildings because it induces a sort of calm.
Upon entering the room I decided that was
bullshit. What was I so uneasy about? Fortunately,
the only other person there so far was my friend
Becca, an undergraduate social work student doing
her senior thesis on drug intervention. We had
some time to kill, so I told her about the trouble I'd
had back in Pittsburgh - no one wanted to give me
any information. On anything.
"I'm not too surprised," she said, taking a red
cigarette out my box and lighting it. I followed
suit. (When in NA, do as the...) "Rapid detox has
only been around for about 15 years, and has only
been in its present form for less than half of that.
It's still a young treatment. And as is the case with
most medical procedures still in their adolescence,
it's surrounded by a lot of controversy. A lot of
places shy away from interviews and media
attention because they don't think any good will
come of it. Either their center participates in rapid
detox programs, and they don't want any criticism
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for doing so, or they don't offer it, and they don't
want any criticism for doing so. These are people
who do what they do because they believe in it and
want to help; they don't want their names or faces
attached to any sort of stigma. They practice a
different kind of medicine; it's not about money
and attention and trying to attract more patients."
And I can understand that. Except for her
comment about the money - at about $15 grand a
pop, someone's certainly raking it in, and I doubt
it's the receptionists - most of what she had to say
fell in line with what I had read. Rapid detox is
essentially just what it sounds like: Literally, a
qu ick f ix . A he ro in add ic t a t t empt ing
detoxification opts for an intravenous blue
chemical cocktail of naloxone (an opiate blocker)
and anesthesia to inhibit the body's ability to be
further affected by the drug (a permanent result, if
the patient follows up with a daily dose of
naloxone, in pill form, for a year). Simple enough,
yes? The procedure itself takes less than half an
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hour; recovery, no more than a weekend. This, in
contrast to classic cold-turkey, wherein an addict
suffers pain, depression and some GI turbulence -
sometimes for a matter of weeks. I worked things
out in my head - a little pain (and excuse me if it
sounds like I am belittling anything here) for a
couple of days, versus veritable hell for the better
part of a month. And the problem was?
"Eh, you know. Some law suits back in the
early days, ethical questions about whether it's
right to speed up a natural withdrawal process so
quickly, the matter of the cost." Becca didn't seem
to have much more to say about it, and I didn't
have time to ask. Becca's weeknight crew had
arrived. It was meeting time, and what was more,
it was cigarette time. I lit a gold one. Seeing their
faces made everything very, very real. We weren't
talking about addicts, anymore; we were talking
about people.
Eh-hem. Sorry.
Aside from Becca and I, there were only four
85
others in the room. Two non-descript, blue-collar,
blonde-haired, twenty-something guys in work
boots, ripped and paint-adorned jeans, and t-shirts
who we'll call Keys (because he couldn't let go of
his all meeting) and Boner (because he couldn't let
go of his all meeting). There was Mama, a
pregnant woman of indeterminable age whose
stringy grey hair made her look much older than I
suspected she really was. She was soft-spoken
around the bubbly sorority girl who I recognized
from a class I had taken when I attended the local
university. I sat hoping she wouldn't recognize me,
although it didn't matter; Becca introduced me, and
told her four faithful attendants why I was there,
and that the first half of the meeting would be
devoted to my questions, should they feel
comfortable enough to answer them. I thought
they'd be disgusted, nervous, angry. I expected the
blonde to leave; old friends aren't people you hope
to see in rehab. Surprisingly, it was the sorority
sister (I'll call her Delta) who had the most to say
86
to me - for better or for worse.
Of the four there, only the two women had
gone the rapid detox route; Delta, twice. The boys
had each quit cold-turkey - Keys had been clean
for two months, and Boner for four, but had quit a
total of three times in as many years. All of them
had been addicted to OxyContin.
Since rapid detox was of the most interest to
me, I dove right into the subject; however, before
either of the girls could speak up about their
experiences, Keys caught me off guard. I hadn't
expected him to have much to say, so I only gave
him half of my attention - at first.
"I wish it wasn't so fuckin' expensive," he
lamented. For such a primitive sentence, my
attention has never been so commanded. The guy
had presence, and passion, and pain. I liked it. "I
quit, just quit, all at once, on my own, because I
couldn't afford that detox thing. It was hell. Nothin'
has ever hurt so bad. If I could go back and do it
the easy way, I would, but hell - $14 grand?
87
Something like that. Shit. I'm lucky if I make that
in a year."
"Sure, it's a lot," Mama said quietly, looking
down. "But it was just so, so worth it. I feel like I
can do anything now. I feel brand-new. I feel
almost scared, because I don't know what life is
gonna be like without the drugs. I'm wandering
into some real unfamiliar territory." I could
certainly relate; my nerves had yet to subside. "But
when you think about it, it's $14 or $15 thousand
dollars for the rest of your life."
"Exactly." Delta was joining in. "It's not about
money; it's about freedom from the Oxy. Whatever
it takes, you find the money. It's just something
you gotta do." I ask her where she managed to
scrape up $30,000 - remember, she'd done this
twice. "Oh. My parents. But I mean, still; to them,
it was just something that had to be done. If I ever
needed it again, I'm sure they'd do the same thing
for me. You can't put a price on your life, you
know?" Keys and Boner make some barely-
88
audible noises of disgust; a part of me can't blame
them. Boner sulks down into his seat and quickly
slips his hand over his erection; I pretend not to
notice. I ask what the rapid detox itself was
actually like. I didn't want to hear about Daddy's
money any more, and I didn't think that the guys
who couldn't afford a rapid detox session of their
own had much interest in the story, either. Mama
interrupts Delta's attempt at answering my
question; I'm amused. Thatagirl.
"They put you under, so you don't remember a
whole lot. When I woke up, though, it was the first
time in forever when I wasn't dying for a pill. I
kept waiting and waiting for the urge to come back
and I kind of still am. I know it won't come back,
as long as I keep taking my [prescribed] pills, and
I've still got two months left. it's still strange to
me." I want to ask whether the naloxone pills have
any projected effect on her unborn baby, but I'm
not comfortable enough to. I shouldn't have
hesitated; Delta jumps at the pause in conversation
89
to speak. I almost interrupt her but change my
mind - why am I being such a bitch? This is her
story too, and without hers, I wouldn't have mine. I
try to tolerate, try to listen.
"The first time for me was like that, too. I kept
wanting to want one [an OxyContin] because it
was just what I was used to. I mentioned that to
my nurse or my caretaker or whatever the hell
those people at the clinic are, and she just laughed.
She said I should be thankful. The second time,
though, was a lot different. I was in a lot of pain.
And I kept wanting an Oxy, but I don't think it was
because I was still addicted; I think it was just
because I knew it always made everything feel so
freaking good." I wonder if the pain is common in
repeat-rapid detoxers. No one has an answer for
me. Boner mentions that a friend of his reported a
dull ache after his treatment, but he'd only done the
rapid detox once. "No," Delta interrupts. "This was
no dull ache. This was like all of your bones were
swelling or on fire or something. It fucking hurt ."
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It was the only time in the entire meeting when she
made a comment without a smile on her face. Keys
mutters, "Now you know how we felt," glancing at
Boner before looking back at her. "A little."
And what about NA? Did it help? What was
the first time like? And how could they be so
open?
"I wouldn't have been able to stay clean if it
weren't for the NA," says Keys. "I don't have any
of those follow-up pills the rapid-D people've got,
so I need something. And it's this, or the
OxyContin."
Boner agrees. "The first time I tried to quit, I
didn't go to any meetings or anything. I think that's
the reason I went back to the pills in the first place.
But now, with the meetings and [Becca] and the
rest of the group, I'm doin' better. Hopefully I'll
stay better."
"It definitely helps, even with the naloxone,
the meetings help. But it was tough to come in
here for the first time." Delta's saccharine smile is
91
back. "I'm so young, and I'm not local either - I felt
like I would feel so alone. But then you realize that
everyone's got the same problems as you, and age
or hometown don't matter anymore. It's a matter of
support, and there's a lot of it here." She's like a
poster child for this. Her gushy praise for the
m e e t i n g m a k e s e v e r y o n e n o t i c e a b l y
uncomfortable; fortunately, Mama speaks up in the
squirmy silence.
"Of course it helps. And of course it was scary
coming for the first time. But new things always
are, and they don't usually turn out to be that bad.
Just like going in for the detox made me nervous,
coming here on the first day did too. But hey, 'no
pain, no gain,' right?"
Becca calls for a break; the first hour is over.
Most of us head outside to smoke. (Why we chose
to stand in the rain when smoking was allowed in
the building is unclear, but I blame that fucking
green paint). The first hour had raced by -
surprisingly - and I felt like I had so much more to
92
say (or really, to hear). I know they've got business
to get down to, though, and I don't want to take up
any more of their meeting time. I fish out my keys
and my box of cigarettes. Only one left - a pink
one. I ask to borrow Delta's lighter.
"Oh I love those cigarettes. I smoked,
seriously, like half a box before I came here for the
first time, I was so shaky and nervous. Scared of
that, can you imagine?"
For the first time all night, I don't hate her.
Another choking dose of reality - this girl and I
aren't so different. Both a little green on the vine,
but sometimes more scared of it than we should
be. I remember the empty box of designer
cigarettes in my hand and laugh. "Yeah. I can
imagine."
93
Return of the MILF
Cornelius Blackshear
Editor's Note to the Readers of the Future: You're
probably probably reading this by candlelight,
America having long since descended into post-
apocalyptic chaos. We will not ask who you killed
to get that candle, nor will we judge you for
having done what any rational human would do
simply to survive. To better your enjoyment of the
following piece, however, we encourage you to
replace the asterisk-marked names (*) with those
of the pop-culture hotties of your day. You do still
have pop-culture hotties, right?
95
Recently I was forced to watch several hours
of MTV Hits, as a freak encounter with a hay baler
had left me temporarily armless and unable to
operate a remote.
Eventually the sound of my own screams died
away, and as the blood cleared from my eyes, I
realized this could be an informative, if
traumatizing, experience: I’d learn something of
about the youth of today, about their habits and
mores, their tastes and fears. Most importantly, I’d
learn how to successfully bed them.
What I found was horrifying. Ye, I have
looked into the eye of the abyss and seen staring
back: the MILF-centric video storyline.
The MILF, from the Latin milfus proclivitus,
meaning, “mommy makes me feel tingly, down in
my pants,” has been with us for a long time, from
Oedipus – the original, if unintentional, MILF-
hunter – to Freud, whose MILFing about seriously
derailed male psyches for generations to come. But
96
the MILF-obsessed have always been a small
subset of the population, the ones sitting alone at
the prom, gazing lovingly into a picture of your
mother.
These days, though, the MILF Hunter has
gone mainstream.
Watch MTV Hits and it’s obvious. Exhibit
One: The venerable “Stacy’s Mom” video. This
Fountains of Wayne video stars Rachel Hunter* as
– you guessed it – Public MILF Number One. She
undresses while the band sings, “I’m not the little
boy that I used to be/ I’m all grown up now, baby
can’t you see?” ‘Fraid not, fellas. You may be
scraggly-alterna-rockers on the outside, but inside
you’re still 13. Say, is that your puberty floating in
my pool?
Next up, Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved,”
which opens with the lyric, “Beauty queen of only
eighteen,” making us think M5 is driving the
barely-legal bus to Paradise City. Don’t be fooled!
The post-pubescent poontang parading past singer
97
Adam Levine is just a decoy! I will boil this video
down for you, thereby saving you the discomfort
of another display of painfully earnest “emotion”
from these tastefully disheveled “neo-soul rock”
genitalia scrapings: “Hey, I’m with a pretty hot
lady friend right now, dancing real close-
like….WAIT A MINUTE! Who is that fine Mature
Honey? I bet she has squeezed a child through her
uterus, and that makes me want her…want her
BAD. Time to find a rainstorm where I can look
poetic. Then she will be mine.”
Sure, maybe we expect this kind of emotional
retardation from a band originally named Kara’s
Flowers (now, was that written on your high
school notebook in glitter, or pink highlighter?),
who is produced by the same guy who brought you
Michelle Branch and that number one reason to
repeal the assault weapons ban, the Goo Goo
Dolls.
But the MILF virus has infected our
bubblecrap punksters, too! Busted, a British
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“band” whose photogenic, twenty-something
members aspire to look thirteen, catches the MILF
express at the “hot for teacher” stop, with “What I
Go To School For.” What they go to school for is
Miss MacKenzie, a thirty-three year-old middle-
school teacher. I know she’s a middle-school
teacher because I, unlike the members of the band,
recognize the sweet fruit of just-blossoming
womanhood when I see it, and that class is ten
pounds of fine in a five pound bag. (With perhaps
an extra three pounds of underage naughtiness
busting out the top. Ha! Busting!) Unfortunately
for the girls, who swoon in vain, the boys of
Busted have eyes only for the pear-shaped Miss
MacKenzie. That, my friend, is a bitter, bitter fruit.
What is going on here? Have the events of
9/11 so shell-shocked our collective wang that the
only safety is the comfort of Mommy’s teat? Have
these musicians' genitals, already shriveled and
small, retreated entirely into their body cavities,
turtle-like, at the sharp existential thwack of the
99
War on Terror? Or is this just another variation of
the old, “Yeah, your mom’s pretty hot, but if you
take off your bra…well, that might get my
attention…” strategy? Perhaps more relevant:
Does the singer of Maroon 5 sleep with a blue
teddy-bear, or is it pink? (Excuse me, rose.)
It’s impossible to say, if only because I will
probably never get to ask the members of Busted,
much less murder them.
But that’s all a side show, really, next to what
I really learned. I learned that while the scrappy
Brit-punks of Busted, the artsy white-soul-meisters
of Maroon 5, and the tiny little Fountains of
Wayne are out stalking Stacy’s mom, Stacy’s home
by herself, with a broken heart.
And in this case, Stacy’s name is actually
Hillary Duff.*
Hillary, call me.
100
Stealing Sex
JoAnne Heen
When the fourth armed robbery in two weeks
culminated in a customer being shot in the parking
lot, the owners of the dirty book store where I
worked decided it was time to replace our current
security – a couple of Korean War vets – with
someth ing a b i t more , okay, a b i t less
grandfatherly. Not that Mitch, whose ability to
knock perps flying with his walker was not truly
awesome, but Dave, who set up surveillance on the
bus bench outside the store, spent too much time
negotiating blow jobs with the hookers who
101
worked that corner.
Soon the Guns appeared – five of the most
gorgeous testosterone-laden hunks of man-flesh
I’ve yet to see outside of a Chippendales show.
“Mine, mine, mine!” I chortled happily as the
store’s only female employee.
Since the company that supplied us with the
Guns hired only ex-military and law enforcement
personnel, I could pick between a State Trooper, a
Marine, a couple of police officers, and my
particular favorite, a mysterious Ninja-assassin
who told me his Number One Priority was to save
my ass.
“I’ll take a bullet for you, babe,” he said.
Encased in bullet-proof vests and wearing Batman-
like tool belts weighted down with all sorts of
crimefighting devices, I certainly expected all of
them to take a bullet for me; still, I baked him a
pie.
R o b b e r y , m u r d e r a n d m a y h e m
notwithstanding, probably the biggest problem at
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the store was dealing with shoplifters. Since the
store was big and crammed full of stuff, it was
almost impossible for the one or two clerks on
duty to police the entire area. Other than the tell-
tale sounds of a customer coughing up a lung to
mask the noise of a bag being ripped open and
shoved into a purse or coat pocket, there was little
else to indicate crimes were being committed right
under our noses. Okay, the guy who bent over to
retrieve a penny and had fifteen copies of Double
D Housewives spill out of his shirt was a gift, but
this was a rare thing.
“Where can I stow this guy?” asked my Ninja
late one evening, as he gently guided a very well-
dressed gentleman aged about fifty into the store.
I thought the man was sick until I heard the clink
of chains and realized he was handcuffed.
“Caught him stealing, babe. Where can I stick
him while I do some paperwork?”
“How about the break room? You can chain
him to the fridge.” I guess there are things more
103
embarrassing than spending two hours shackled to
a major appliance inside a porn store, but at the
moment, I’m hard pressed to think of any.
When the local cops arrived to take him away,
they made Mr. Well Dressed empty his pockets
and open his pants. Stuffed inside his slacks were
five pair of silk panties and a package of glow-in-
the-dark condoms. In his jacket pocket was a copy
of the novel Mrs. Porter Spanks the Milkman, and
in his left sock was a bottle of cinnamon flavored
massage oil.
“Did you steal this stuff?” one cop asked. I
thought it was obvious that he did, but apparently
the law walks a very fine line. If he had enough
money to pay for everything, he could claim he
was merely carrying it in an eccentric manner.
Luckily for us, he only had $6 on him, and he had
taken $88 worth. The cops led him away after
reading him his rights and it was just like being on
TV.
A few days later, I heard shouting out on the
104
sidewalk. When I peeked out the door, I saw two
of the Guns struggling with a little skinny guy. The
air was cloudy with pepper spray and invective.
“Want me to call 911?” I yelled, and one of
the Guns shouted back, “Ya think?” It looked like
pro wrestling, with the two big Guns twirling the
guy around over their heads. Every time they’d hit
him – POW – like a piñata, another item stolen
from the store would fly out of his shirt. Suddenly,
with a heart-rending shriek, the shoplifter threw
himself in the air, squirted through the Guns’
fingers like mercury, and was gone, disappearing
into heavy rush hour traffic.
105
Tera Patrick Has A Cold
Jesse Hicks
Tera Patrick has a cold. She's had it for weeks,
she explains as she changes out of her pasties and
into a black top and jeans. Its slowed her down:
Last month, during filming for her interactive sex
video, she was just too worn out to finish the day's
shoot. She flew home to New York and missed
four feature shows that weekend. She coughs
dryly. Moving from the faux-marble dresser,
talking, she heads to the bathroom and keeps
talking. She's a storyteller; she admits it. Finally
she sits on the edge of the bed, atop a pink
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comforter, and even though she's stopped moving,
it's as though all her kinetic energy is poised, just
waiting to be released.
If her cold robs Tera Patrick of that
uninsurable jewel, her aura of sexuality, it doesn't
show. Ask the men downstairs, who pay ten dollars
a head to be near her, to cocoon themselves in
wood-paneling and smoke, under dim, forgiving
lights, and watch her dance - they come to gaze at
woman who admits, "For a long time, I couldn't
dance. I thought I had to be in a chorus line. Now I
entertain myself up there. I'll go out and do
cartwheels, maybe do a split." Ask those who stay
for autographs, who smilingly give over $50 to
have a Polaroid taken with her and watch it
develop in their hands. Ask her husband and
manager, Evan Seinfeld, who dumps a pile of bills
- her haul from tonight's show - on the table and
begins to count it.
By any measure, Tera is doing ok,
moneywise. She's under thirty and bi-coastal, with
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homes in both Los Angeles and New York. She
drives a new Corvette and a customized Hummer.
She travels the world, though still wants to visit
Easter Island. She's chatted with Paris Hilton and
is good friends with a Baldwin; party organizers
pay her thousands of dollars to simply show up
and have fun.
Porn's been good to the woman who once
thought she might never work in the industry
again, after a bad contract left her with virtually no
income. It took a year-and-a-half of legal
wrangling and over $50,000 in lawyer's fees to get
out of it, but she did. She formed a company,
Teravision, which produces all her movies. She has
a personalized line of erotic toys and is pitching a
reality-tv series. Now she controls her own
destiny; the British-Thai girl who grew up in
Montana is now that newest of American Dreams:
the superstar entrepreneur who is her own product.
The "tangible celebrity" - the very-real yet
indefinable quality she exudes - translates into
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millions of dollars, and as her husband puts it,
"This is America. You can buy your own freedom."
"We're weird to people. People still think, 'Oh
my God, what's she like? She must be so weird
because she has sex on camera.' They think I must
be some kind of alien or something, because of
what I do." When she talks her eyes go wide with
emphasis, those brown eyes a little glassy, dimmed
by her cold and last night's long flight from LA.
She talks about the business of porn, of appealing
to her fans and her "couples demographic," and of
how many experts are consulted in order to turn
her into every man's fantasy. She loves her fans -
"They pay my bills. They throw money at me, so
what can I say?" I listen for over an hour to this
methodical dissection of the mechanics behind
porn, the calculus of sex and desire, and the only
thing I really wonder is: is this really you, Tera?
What is it you really want, now that you've bought
your freedom?
"I have a little dog, and I'd like to knit clothes
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for little dogs and open a little dog store. I'd call it
Dog One."
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“To the Sirens first shalt thou come...”
Joseph L. Flatley
To the Sirens first shalt thou come, who
bewitch all men…
(Homer, Odyssey.)
It is not too difficult to ignore the fact that
there is a war going on. Hell, society is predicated
on the fact that whatever we’re giving our
attention – whatever lay in front of our nose – is
what is real, and whatever lay safely at arm’s
length might as well not exist. This country will
give you a war if you want it, and it will give you
all the consumer benefits of a system that creates
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war, if you want it, while keeping the war itself
safely stashed away. And if you’re not satisfied,
you can always find a distraction. It’s not at all
difficult to pretend that you’ll find whatever it is
you’re looking for at Anthony’s Lounge, if
Anthony’s Lounge is all you got.
I was there last week. It was cold. The girl
behind the bar was wearing a sweater and big
warm boots. The other girls were topless, but the
cold didn’t seem to bother them much. The
bartender was the prettiest one in the room,
“leaving something to the imagination,” as they
say. The only customer was an African American
gentleman in Bill Cosby's sweater.
I stayed for an hour or two, marking time by
the song, by the drink.
Towards the end of my second Budweiser
someone called Lita walked out of the back room.
She had bare feet and a gym bag over her shoulder.
The manager assured her that she would no longer
be on the schedule. She just shrugged,
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disappearing from the security monitor above the
bar as her co-workers checked to make sure their
stuff in the back hadn’t walked off with her.
“Crack addicts will sell anything,” the girl
behind the bar says.
That’s not very sexy.
The sexual impulse is the favourite child
of nature; no matter how great the
demands on a man’s energy, the sex
impulse must have its share.
(Colin Wilson, Origins of the Sexual
Impulse.)
Everybody has their reasons for going to a
strip club. Of course, it all begins and ends with
sex… but how is that, when you’re not getting
laid?
According to Skye, an author and poet that
has worked strip clubs and peep shows on both
coasts (including a stint at the legendary Lusty
Lady in San Francisco), “the woman that makes
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the most money is often older, out of shape. She’s
also caring, affectionate, nurturing.”
“For these men,” she said, “it’s not about
idealizing a person’s body. The regulars are aping
a domestic situation. These men are paying for a
person’s time, paying to drink with them, make
small talk.”
“Guys want to feel like women are interested
in them... they just want someone to act like they
like them,” says Scarlet, at Pittsburgh’s own Club
Elite. “Saturday night is a much younger crowd. I
prefer the weeknights. We get to know the regulars
pretty well, and they definitely seem to be
interested in friendship much more than any kind
of sexual thrill.”
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I would have touched it like a child
But knew my finger could but have
touched
Cold stone and water. I grew wild
Even accusing heaven because
It had set down among its laws:
Nothing that we love over-much
Is ponderable to our touch.
(W.B. Yeats, “Towards Break of Day.”)
The most basic expression of the sexual
impulse is the one that most objectifies sex. The
adolescent male is Homeric, seeing life in the
terms of the epic. There is always a Hero, a
Villain, a Virgin, a Feat of Strength. This epic
involves exploration but is ultimately self-centered
and self-defined. Women are reduced to Playboy
pin-ups.
Everybody passes through this Homeric stage,
but we do not live in a heroic age.
At Club Elite, somewhere around 10:00 p.m. a
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co-ed birthday party makes its entrance. This is a
consumer crowd, the party as odyssey, the hero’s
journey from the suburbs; the men in khaki pants
and their women with the big ol’ birthing hips and
bad haircuts. They all seemed to be quite pleased
with themselves. The wives are having a real
“Girls Gone Wild” and crazy night, one they’ll
surely be talking about over coffee, come Monday.
And the husbands will be given plenty to fantasize
about, later, in bed with the missus.
A heartland-pretty blond girl takes a seat to
my right. She’s an actress, she says. I’m a writer. I
search those blue eyes for a connection, but
between my confusion and her “cool” there is a
language barrier. After a moment or two of
awkward silence, she asks, “Would you like a
private dance?”
Finding expression for your sexuality is the
burden of being a sexual being. The method of that
expression is up to you, in the broadest sense; it is
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a product of genetics and accidental “imprint” in
the strictest sense. But mostly, if you get it, it is a
lot of fun.
I’m thinking about all of this, at a café, as the
cutest blond doll keeps looking in my direction.
Hers is a smiling, open face, not burdened by the
detritus and dry rot of the sex business.
Of course, just because I am clutching a few
dollar bills, it doesn’t mean she has to be nice to
me.
Still, I think I’ll go say hi.
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Good Friday in Pittsburgh's Cultural District:
or How and When I Learned I Was A Panty-
Sniffing Stalker
Mikhail Stafford
Good Friday nearly gouged my eyes out with
a sharp image of nearly 3,000 14-year-old girls
screaming bloody-frigging-murder for a band
called The Click Five. But first, they screamed
louder for another band called Pepperville or
Pepperghost or Pepper's Ghost or Glasnost, or
something like that. Later, Ashlee Simpson
p e r f o r m e d . T h e s c e n e w a s g e n e r a l l y
overwhelming. Couldn't make heads or tails of it
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from the beginning, and was left tired and fragile
at its end. The drugs didn't help at all. Came down
hard before Ashlee finished her antics. And when
it was over, I felt paralyzed and astounded, like the
huge electric shock I had just experienced was
actually harmless.
But then I was tapped on the shoulder by a
little girl who asked me: "Are you a panty-
sniffer?" I knew it was done on a dare - she had to
be less than 12; and she sniggered toward her
friends after she asked. I laughed.
"Fuck off," I said, smiling. Then I took into
consideration the cashflow initiating this wave,
this harmless electric shock. Yeah, I thought. It's
initiated by all the little girls in here, paying
upwards of $50 a ticket. They're probably
wondering why a man in a Hawaiian shirt and
fisherman's cap, chewing an unlit Marlboro, is
hanging around the Ashlee Simpson show.
But then again, so am I.
The pornstar, Gauge, said "Hi" as she
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smirked, looked into my eyes, and pulled my face
close to hers. "You like my tits, huh."
"Well, uh." I had eaten sedatives beforehand
to prepare (shrooms had fallen through). But, in
retrospect, nothing could've easily prepared me for
this. Because, as I watched man after man
humiliate himself for this girl (at least 50 guys
forked over $20 for a Polaroid with Gauge, saying
the dumbest shit imaginable, like: "Can I lick your
ear, sweets?") it was as if the entire basis of
capitalism had materialized into a dildo, and I had,
in consecutive hour-long humps, sat on both ends:
Ashlee Simpson on the unused end, then Gauge.
The pornstar and I chatted. The first part of the
interview was not recorded because she didn't
want anyone to hear her voice on tape. "Yeah.
Your tits are nice," I said.
Ashlee Simpson's karaoke-quality live
performance didn't exemplify what you'd expect
from a triple-platinum artist.
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But you could've probably guessed that.
You could've guessed, too, that she giggled a
lot between songs; and that she didn't have an
acid-reflux attack. You could've also guessed that,
judging by the thousands of screaming teenagers,
her status didn't dive-bomb in one evening. Nope,
it seems that she is, instead, moving along with a
successful (however, probably short) career, in
accordance with Risk -like plotting by her father.
Her daddy's a former minister, by the way, who
has, from all indications, the intention of
overtaking pop music (by force, if necessary) with
his seed.
You could've guessed these things, yes.
They've been reported everywhere. She's been
panned, torn-down and mocked. Her father's been
ridiculed for everything from using his kids as
dollar-magnets, to looking funny on camera. And
since Ashlee's SNL lip-synching incident, The
Heartless Bastard Media (which doesn't include
Tiger Beat, et al) hasn't let up on either Ashlee or
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her father.
And it's really not fair.
But do you know why they haven't let up?
Do you know why every serious review of her
music seems negative?
Because [drum roll] Ashlee Simpson has no
talent.
See, Jessica, her half-wit sister, was bred to be
a performer from the beginning - she's a talented
singer and has obviously trained to fit the trite
celebrity role.
Ashlee, however, just fell into this shit. Her
dad was sitting around plotting, trying to figure out
some way to find someone to compete with Avril
Lavigne (who's also, since we're on the topic, evil).
And the only thing he could come up with was:
"Let's get my other daughter, Ashlee, on stage."
She's out of her element.
And:
She has co-opted the Anarchy symbol into her
logo (for fuck's sake).
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She said things on stage like, "This is about
finding your identity and being yourself," before
singing a song she almost certainly did not write
(no matter what her co-writing credits might
indicate).
And last:
She was somehow brought into town by the
Pittsburgh Cultural Trust - an organization with the
intent ion of encompassing "a complete
transformation of Pittsburgh's Downtown; from a
'red light' district with only two cultural facilities
to a vibrant animated area with over fourteen
cultural facilities, public parks and plazas, and new
and proposed commercial development."
Which brings us back to Gauge, who was
performing a block away, also in the Cultural
District, at Club Elite.
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So like, what do you think about when you're
getting Chinese-finger-trapped by two
random...uh, fuckers...?
Fuckers... yyyeeah... well, um, I like to be
professional so I just think about the scene, where
to go next - what looks best, you know?
Yeah, but do you ever get bored on that front?
Sometimes you look bored. Do you ever think
about, like, what's on TV while you're having
sex on film? Do you contemplate President
Bush's foreign policy decisions? Start
making...like, shopping lists in your head?
No, I just give head.
Ha ha, nice. Oral communications major, right?
Right! How'd you know?
Lucky guess. [she ranted about college minutes
ago, explained that she spent a stint in an
Arkansas community college before moving to
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Los Angeles. She got into porn by responding to
an ad looking for someone to perform sexually,
on film.]
Yeah right. Are you a stalker?
Well, kinda, yeah. That's my job. Sorta.
Stalker?
No. More like reporter. But, see, it's reall-
Cool, whatever. Do you want a t-shirt?
The point, I guess - cause I'm struggling to
find it - is that there are minimal differences
between a performer who signs autographs by
pressing her painted breasts against a white t-shirt,
and a performer who fakes her way through a
career, pretending that there is some musically-
oriented reason she's on stage, charging $40 for the
cheap seats.
Granted, Gauge can't sing. But Ashlee can't
dance.
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And, by my calculations, that makes them
even.
Actually, Gauge wins.
And I need to find better things to do with my
time.
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Whore
Zelda Getz
One guy wouldn’t stop talking about his 14-
year-old daughter, how pretty she was, and how
she looked like me. He’s the one who’d said he
could’ve come just eating me.
I wished he would have.
But that’s not what he paid for. And in the
end, they always got what they paid for.
Looking back on it, I’m floored at having
been so heartbreakingly naïve, but in a way,
astounded by my courage, my sense of adventure.
I’m only just coming to terms with the fact that I
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can count prostitution among the myriad sins of
my youth.
The ad, seeking “attractive young women,
with or without transportation, quick money”
appeared in the back of the college newspaper. I
think, to me, that lent it a certain degree of safety. I
mean, the school paper – it couldn’t be a sinister
thing.
Stumbling upon that ad couldn’t have come at
a worse time in my life. I was a college freshman,
new in the big city. I had been badly raped about
three weeks into school, bent over a 34 th floor
bathroom window. The money that relatives had
given me for high school graduation had almost all
gone to support my raging binge-and-purge habit.
Men paying money for my body seemed like the
ultimate stamp of approval, which I craved
desperately.
So I arranged to meet Shabir, owner, CEO and
product tester for Starr Escorts. I hopped a bus
Downtown, and he picked me up in a sleek black
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sports car. The “interview” was in his shitty little
storefront in the Strip District – three private
rooms had curtains across the door, and a stereo
that got turned up to drown out itinerant moans.
I met the other “girls”: a thirty-five year old
single mother with a broken toilet at home and a
fading bruise high on her cheek, and a mean,
pretty, clever girl of about 20 whose high ponytail
would have looked about right on a cheerleader.
They showed me where the extra sheets were, and
how to work the washer and dryer after every
client.
They asked what I was doing there, and when
I said I just really liked sex, they laughed at me,
coldly and without pity. I thought they were
laughing with me, because it was such a
precocious thing to say.
Shabir told me I was beautiful, but in his
wolf’s eyes, I was a commodity because I looked
like a child. Hell, I was a child; a skinny little girl
with jutting hipbones, tiny breasts and no idea
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what was going on.
Shabir told me I didn’t have to do anything I
didn’t want. There was a pricing scale, and full
intercourse would net me $75 and would net
Shabir $225. He said I had to bring my own
condoms if I was planning to fuck. I said I wasn’t.
Of course, I did, eventually.
My first customer was a regular – a fat guy
named Glen who liked having his nipples licked.
In a sense I felt sorry for him, for the way he
smelled of nervous sweat and Ivory soap and
wanted to fuck me more than anything, but
couldn’t afford it. His hatred was a shy, fearful
kind. He wanted love, and would never, ever get it.
Instead, he paid to eat my ass.
Another John wanted anal sex. I’d done that
once or twice before with a boyfriend and lots of
lube. I didn’t want to. He kept insisting, and told
me he’d give me a tip. For $100 extra, he plunged
into me, tearing me. I cried so much he finally
stopped, and threw the bill on the bed and left –
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but only after he came in my pussy. I had to
scramble and hide the bill, because Shabir forbade
tipping.
The other girls in my dorm wanted to know
what the hell I was up to, getting myself dressed
up like it was Saturday, leaving late on weeknights
and coming home with giddy amounts of cash.
I lied, and said it was like dancing. I think I
believed myself. I had a denim wallet in a drawer
in my desk that just kept getting fatter and fatter.
Finally I sort of cracked. I confessed, rather
hysterically and breathlessly, what I was up to to
the guy I was seeing. I hadn’t fooled him, as it
turns out. We rehearsed the phone call I knew I
had to make.
I called Shabir, terrified, to tell him I was
through. He told me I had an appointment that
night at a hotel party, and that the payout would be
phenomenal. I somehow stood firm. He let me go,
but called my dorm a few times in the ensuing
weeks to offer to take me back.
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The money tormented me – the physical
presence of all that cash was a palpable indictment,
quantifiable proof of my filth. I purged it, buying
extravagant gifts for my friends – I only bought
one thing for myself, and always hated it. It’s gone
now.
Seven years have come and gone since then,
bringing many addictions, lovers and shrinks. I’ve
come a long way. I have an acceptance of my body
that I never thought would be mine. It’s peaceful
not to hate the flesh you inhabit.
But there is no erasing the past. I could enter
into a convent, but there it would still be, branded
onto me with a permanence that my tattoos would
envy. There are things I’ve done that I am more
ashamed of, but none of them carry with them the
weight of that single word:
Whore.
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Love and Lust in the Age of Mechanical
Introduction:
or Adult Friend Finder and the Infinite Sadness
Jesse Hicks
One. Baby It's Cold Outside
The dream behind the Web is of a
common information space in which we
communicate by sharing information.
[…] There was a second part of the
dream, too, dependent on the Web being
so generally used that it became a
realistic mirror (or in fact the primary
embodiment) of the ways in which we
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work and play and socialize. (Timothy
Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide
Web)
On the left side of the web page is a picture.
This picture is an extreme close-up. The picture is
both low-contrast and slightly out-of focus, its left
and right sides defined by two tapering pillars a
color somewhere between ivory and almond. They
meet in the center of the frame, forming a "v." At
their nexus is a darker area, an arrangement of
vertical folds in russet and pink, labyrinthine but
without a center. They meet at the top, forming a
small ruby. Above sprout tiny, well-coiffed hairs
that from this Lilliputian perspective seem to loom
in mystery.
To the right of this below-the-waist portrait,
with its labial mountain ranges rendered in
satellite-imagery detail -- the overall package
about as erotic as a colonoscopy -- is the heading,
"Looking for Mr. Right."1 A short introduction
1 First reaction: "Holy fuck! A talking vagina!"
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follows.
Welcome to AdultFriendFinder.com, which
bills itself as "The World's Largest Sex & Swinger
Personals site." AdultFriendFinder (AFF) is part of
FriendFinder2, Inc., a collection of personal
networking sites that includes FriendFinder (a less
risqué version of AFF), ALT.com (for BSDM
aficionados), and Amigos.com (bringing together
Spanish/Portuguese members).
AFF boasts 18,654,919 members3, who find in
it an electronic version of the "key parties" and
swingers gatherings that have been around since at
2 Here it might be interesting to note the use of the word "adult" to mean "sex included" -- "adult industry," "adult entertainment," "adult situations." Is it surprising, then, that kids thinking fucking makes you mature? Or, if sex=adulthood, that we "adults" spend a lot of time being confused and insecure about it, even as it's supposedly our gateway into the grown-up world? Just askin', is all.
3 How many of these members are actual people is debatable. Personal experience leads the author to believe many of them are spammers and/or cyborgs. Also, this number is heavily weighted towards men.
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least the 1950's. The goal is typically quick
hookups with people who are clean and discreet,
and who know exactly what they want. Members
fill out a lengthy personality profile (used to find
potential matches), describe who they are and what
they're looking for, and typically post a picture. All
this and $19.95 a month (discounted for 3-month
and year-long subscriptions; more gets you a
"Gold Membership") earns you access to AFF's
database of eager swingers, many of whom are in
your area!4
AdultFr iendFinder, then, i s another
fascinating beast in the strange menagerie that is
the American dating scene. Through the wonders
of technology, you can make new friends and bang
them hardcore, with just a few clicks of your
mouse. (Well, not the banging -- not yet, anyway.)
You can participate in message boards with like-
4 With that exclamation point I may have veered into blatant promotion. Seriously though, YOU CAN GET LAID TONIGHT! I'm kidding. Or am I?
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minded swingers; the Pittsburgh board promises a
failed orgy at least once a month, and you'll thrill
to multiple postings of "April 1 gangbang -- who's
in?" followed by what seems to be, to the author's
ears anyway, the longest, saddest silence ever
captured in text form. And of course there're the
explicit pictures, many with blurred out faces if
that's your thing.5
Take out the sex, though, and you're left with
a site not all that different from more mainstream
Internet dating services such as Yahoo! Personals
or Match.com. AFF may be more up-front about
its members' end goals, but if you compare the
actual profiles, after correcting for the sex angle,
there's not a lot of difference. You'd be hard-
pressed to tell a profile on AFF from one on
5 I wanted to meet one of these girls and when she showed up with a (presumably) unblurred face, react with shock and horror. "By Allah's beard, this is not what I had in mind at all! I thought you had some sort of Ring-like deformity going on! That's what Poppa likes!" Sadly, those girls never responded to me. Touche, blur-faced girls. Touche.
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Yahoo! Personals.
In its single-minded pursuit of convenient
hookups, AFF has more in common with dating
services like It's Just Lunch or Speed Dating --
those that promise no-stress meetings with like-
minded people, typically professionals, who just
don't have the time for the inconvenience of the
dating scene. Eight Minute Dating, for example,
promises that you'll spend no more or less than
eight minutes with 8 different successful
professionals. Or, to express that in a more
efficient way that won't waste any more of your
motherfuckin' time: 8 Great Dates - 1 Fun Night!
If you're getting a weird little tinge at the back
of your head, something along the lines of, "Eight
minutes? I spend more than eight minutes test-
driving a car…then again a car is a big investment,
and this is just a night of fun dates and great fun
and probably some fun booze, which helps kill the
emptiness that sometimes wells up when I realize
I'm unable to feel anything beyond the need to be
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constantly fucking entertained by the world around
me, and should that entertainment fail I think I'd
just totally die!" then in that, at least, you are not
alone.
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Two. The Extremely Difficult Realization That
Someone Other Than Oneself Is Real6
Sex is not love. Love is not sex. But the
best of both worlds is created when
they come together. … The best way
for human beings to show love is to
love one another. It's the way we
spread love in the universe: one to
one. Love is something we make.
Madonna (not the Virgin), Sex)
You also wouldn't be alone in thinking AFF
looks a lot like eBay, or maybe Buy.com. You put
in your search terms, click a button, and a bunch of
matches pop up, be it for "antique Hummel
figurines" or "Pittsburgh, PA + female +pulse
-fatties." Then you may lean back. Put up your
6 Some sort of extended typo in this heading. This is supposed to read, "Daddy Goes Shopping For Love and Comes Home With a Bag Full of Nuthin."
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feet. Smoke a pipe, or pole, or pope. Realize that
before you scrolls a near-infinite variety of
consumer choice. The Internet is your shopping
mall, for love, for Hummel, for meat and for
sporting goods. Turn up your iPod, check the lock
on your gated community, double-check that your
Ford Armored Personnel Carrier is safe and
comfortable within its garage. This is your castle;
here before a crackling fire you are comfortably
numb -- you will find an Adult Friend, and it will
be one of your choosing, tailor-made to your likes
and pleasures.
And that, my friends, is really all we ask for
from love, isn't it?
For a nation of individualists, we are
surprisingly afraid of being alone. Yet we're also
afraid of being in the world7 -- we armor ourselves
7 Check out this advertisement for True.com. Look closely (she's not just a lithe, shapely ass, people) and you'll realize it's a picture of a brunette peeking out through the slats of her Venetian blinds. This is for a dating site. "Love might be out there, but for the love of all that's
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with iPods to shut out the noise of other people, sit
alone in our SUVs to avoid public transportation,
use caller ID on our cell phones to decide who we
talk to and when.8 This is the consumer paradise,
where every choice is up to you and your wallet.
Can't we just choose love, then; open up our
cocoon just enough to sneak another person in,
that we might not be so lonely in our fortress of
solitude?
Well, no. Here's how Clementine responded to
that idea in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
"Joel, I'm not a concept. Too many guys think I'm
a concept or I complete them or I'm going to make
them alive, but I'm just a fucked up girl who is
looking for my own peace of mind. Don't assign
me yours."
Clementine's spiel -- easily found on AIM and
Facebook profiles everywhere -- is partly right: If
holy, don't go outside!"
8 Max Frisch, "Technology is the knack of so arranging the world so that we don't have to experience it."
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you think you're incomplete, sex and/or love
p r o b a b ly w o n ' t ma k e y o u w h o le , a n d
AdultFriendFinder has little to offer you. (But if
we adopt Clementine's view as a life philosophy,
does that mean everybody runs around looking for
his or her own peace of mind while simultaneously
refusing to consider anyone else's? So, uhm, do we
just all retreat to our rooms to play solitaire,
leaving a note on the door saying, "Mind at Peace.
Do not disturb."?)9
T h e r e ' s a n o t h e r w a y, t h o u g h , t h a t
Clementine's speech is, if not wrong, certainly a
little sad in its impoverished view of love.10 Every
way of talking about love is unrealistic -- we either
end up talking nonsense or poetry or both -- but
how is Clementine's view unrealistic?
9 The other famous peace of mind comes, ha ha, in "Rest in Peace."
10 The l-word (and sex) often seem to dwell in that realm of "what we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence" which is transgressed, with varying degrees of success, by poets and fools.
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"I'm just a fucked up girl looking for my own
peace of mind."11
Peace of mind being the same thing used to
sell cars12 and insurance; peace of mind being, let's
be honest, the selling force behind every piece of
crap we're told will make us whole, or at least
enable us to cope with day after day of bone-
wearying monotony long enough to catch the new
episode of Law and Order. Hooray for love, then,
which promises us…peace of mind.
What's sad about Clementine's stance is that it
masquerades as a kind of hard-eyed realism. "I've
looked at myself," it says, "And I've realized I'm
just so fucked up. The world's fucked up. You're
11 Peace of mind being neither agony nor ecstasy. In other words:
© DC Comics12 Too much? How about this snippet from a
Saturn commercial: Girl complains about all the boyfriends she didn't love, then says, "And then I met Ben. I realized that you don't have to compromise. And that's why I bought a Saturn." Cue sound of author throwing up all over television.
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fucked up." Then it has nowhere to go. Once she's
stripped love of all its "illusions" -- denied the
fairy tale of white-horse-riding princes and long-
haired princesses -- she can't seem to believe that
the world might offer more possibilities than a
choice between fairy-tale delusions or her
"everything is dirt" "reality."
In other words, she thinks like a 15 year-old.13
In other words, by focusing on her supposed
"fucked-upness," she turns any relationship into a
salve for said fucked-upnesss -- exactly what she
chooses Joel of doing.14
13 See "adult" note above.
14 This is one of those scenes that works in context -- in the movie, Joel sees through Clementine's pose, and she, disarmed, is able to laugh about it. In real life, wearing your fucked-upness as a shield against having to feel anything -- well, that's just a refusal to admit that life is messy, people are complicated, and sometimes you're going to get hurt. It's a bit like cutting out your heart so you don't have to feel anymore. (See Prozac and self-narcotizing society.)
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Here you might be getting another one of
those twinges, something along the lines of "Wow,
it's almost as if we can relate to one another only
as pre-packaged products, the choice of which will
both define who we are and rid us of the burden of
this constant low-level anxiety15 brought on by
consumer overload.16 Unable to feel past our own
ineffable dissatisfaction, we make our lovers into
just another accessory, bit players in the Play
Called Me17…hey, is that a new Nokia cell
phone?"
15 No surprise, then, that Ambien and Prozac, the Nyquil-Dayquil tag-team of peace-of-mind prescriptions, are among the most successful drugs in history.
16 To learn more about American capitalism's vested interest in churning out generation after generation of emotionally crippled "adults," visit your local library.
17 Did you know the Greek goddess of love, Eros, is also the sum of all instincts for self-preservation? I have no idea what that means!
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Three. The Futile Pursuit of Happiness18
You're looking for the wrong person.
But not just any wrong person: the
right wrong person--someone you
lovingly gaze upon and think, 'This is
the problem I want to have.' I will
find that special person who is
wrong for me in just the right way.
(Andrew Boyd, Daily Afflictions)
The old joke is that, for men at least,
overdosing on pornography (say, 30-40 straight
hours) always ends with a guilty, sheepish phone
18 "The Futile Pursuit of Happiness," New York Times Magazine, September 7, 2003. The study of "affective forecasting" -- people's ability to predict what will make them happy and for how long -- reveals that human beings are pretty shitty at predicting their own happiness. Yet we all make decisions based on what we believe will make us happy in the future, or what will at least give us "peace of mind." See irony.
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call to Mom.19 (And this is a stretch, but you
explain it…) there's some primal need to reassert
the possibility of a woman as another, separate
human being, rather than simply a flesh-fantasy
playground.
Overdosing on AdultFriendFinder profiles20
19 "Hey son, what's up?""Not too much, Mom, just called to see what you were up to…I love you, you know.""Oh for God's sake. If you rented Rear Entry XII with my Blockbuster card, I better not be getting any late charges."
20 Say, when you're surfing AFF @ your shitty 11 PM - 7 AM job that probably, ha ha hmmm, didn't help you keep a girlfriend in the first place, and after sending your 250th email that month get a message saying you're over the limit and must send to the Gods of Customer Service the following plea:
From jesse@deekmagazine.comSubject Arrgh! I've used all my emails!To gold@adultfriendfinder.com
Hello. I seem to have used all my emails for this month. Admittedly I did go a little crazy trying to hit every available woman within 75 miles of Pittsburgh. But God Help Me, I'm so lonely.
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provokes a similar feeling, but one not exactly the
same. If a porn OD is like the inevitable crash after
a week-long coke binge, leaving you listless and
borderline suicidal, AFF profiles are more like an
acid-trip that starts out fine, then slowly, sneakily,
creeps out of your control and into a bleak,
existential void. Porn promises escape; AFF is all
too real. There's the attractive blonde from Ohio,
25, who's unhappily married and looking to find
real love in a hotel room (daytime rendezvous
preferred); there's the woman in Warren whose
husband is a sad loser who cannot satisfy her. She
quotes Ayn Rand, "I swear by my life, and my love
of it, that I will never live for the sake of another
man, nor ask another man to live for mine," before
challenging anyone who's not a "two-pump
chump" to take her on.
The more romantic profiles also seem
poignantly out of place. To the woman who writes,
"I'm looking for a Romeo to my Juliet," there are
two questions: First, you know how that play ends,
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right? One hint: it's not "happily ever after."
Second, are you sure you'll find Romeo on a site
whose "purity test" includes the question, "Have
you ever engaged with a hooker or gigolo?" Not to
be judgmental of either you or AFF fans, but this
might not be the place for Montagues and
Capulets.21 Unless that's your fetish; there's
probably a bulletin board for that.
Spend enough time reading profiles like, "I
made a New Year's resolution not to be lonely
anymore," and you start to feel you should call up
that one ex-girlfriend -- you know, the one who's
written you out of her life, your only connection
the fading ellipsis of things left unsaid, but when
one day you see her walking on the street with
another guy, his hand on the small of her back as
they pass, you crack into infinite jagged reflections
of that touch, the fingertip language of lovers, and
though you can't see her face because she is
walking one way, your bus going another, you
21 "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou purity rating a mere 48%?"
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hope she is smiling, and the silence in your chest is
the sound of your heart not beating -- and say
something. Anything. Apologize for the state of the
world, for being who you are, maybe -- apologize
that there are so many lonely people in the world
and then hang up.22
Then you go back to clicking away, still
searching for that one perfect vagina with the
personality that will make you complete.
22 This is probably best done at a time you're sure to get her voicemail.
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ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
How not to find God while watching
The Passion with a head full of acid
Constantine J. Warhammer
He was wounded for our transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities; by His wounds
we are healed. (Isaiah 53, 700 B.C.)
Mmmm, yawnnnn….and a stretch…crawl out
from under those pizza boxes and shake the
crumbs from your hair. Feel a dusty shaft of
afternoon sunlight hit your unshaven face. Smack
your gummy lips together – what is that taste?
Cigarette butts and alcohol?
It’s Sunday, 2 PM, and you know what that
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means: time to get high and fuck around with the
didgeridoo. Or: a leisurely perusal of this month’s
stack of pornography, a cup of tea and a baguette.
Survey your Xanadu, a one-bedroom apartment
with Green Day posters on the walls and dirty
needles on the back porch, and realize the world is
your candy machine. You can do anything you put
your mind to, and it’s time to put your mind to
conquering that last level of Splinter Cell: Chaos
Theory before taking a nap and then watching the
Simpsons.
Whoa, hold fast the reigns of your
imagination, Mr. Junior Captain of Industry! This
isn’t just any Sunday! It’s Easter Sunday! The day
we (chosen people) celebrate Jesus’s return from
the Afterlife, which according to Scripture looks a
lot like the fluorescent-bleached dreadscape of
LAX at 3 am. Jesus walked through the valley of
the shadow of death, came back and brought us
delicious chocolate bunnies. (Also: died for our
sins.) Did Zoroaster ever do that? No he did not, so
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kiss the ring! Kiss it! Close your robe! You never
know who might be watching. (God.)
It’s Easter Sunday and there’s only one proper
way to celebrate the death and rebirth of Our
Savior: take these two hits of acid and watch The
Passion of the Christ, or as I like to call it, “Teach
Yourself Aramaic in Three Hours.” Take two
because they are small and The Passion is very
long.
You’ll want to fire up the multimedia
projector so Christ will tower above you, 81”
across your wall. Remember when you first bought
that? Sure, the A/V geeks on the Internet said its
400:1 contrast ratio was unacceptable for the true
home-theater aficionado, but you knew how damp
the ladies get in the presence of a big TV. What
was that song you made up? “Let the Panties Hit
The Floor,” wasn’t it? How did those lyrics go?
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Let The Panties Hit the Floor
(to the “tune” of “Let the Bodies Hit the
Floor,”
by Drowning Pool)
Let the panties hit the floor
Let the panties hit the floor
Let the panties hit the floor
Let the panties hit the ...
FLOOR!
You are not very creative. You are the Weird
Al Yankovic of Suck.
About an hour into Mel Gibson’s theological
snuff film – no no no, that is too generous! Call it
“a 30 million dollar Faces of Death video drawn
out over two hours” – you feel the acid crawling
up your spine like two black electric umbilicals.
You must relax at this point. The room is about
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120 degrees, Jesus’s ribs are visible through his
bloody, flayed side, and you realize Mel Gibson
can’t get anything right except violence and pain.
He knows know other tone. His movie is small,
petty and self-righteous. He is a child playing the
symbols of religion without understanding the
meaning behind them.
As the acid claws its way into your brain, you
might feel on edge. Your teeth may grind, and you
may be reduced to a babbling Lady MacBeth,
“blood….so….much….blood!” This is how Mel
Gibson wants you to feel. His Jesus is a near-mute
slab of meat, scourged and bloody, ready to make
you feel guilty for simply existing. Resist this
impulse! You must endure!
And if you do find yourself deep in the pit of
existential discombobulation, do not turn to the
teenage girls on Instant Messenger for help. Their
hearts are too full of love and Hoobastank lyrics
for the likes of you. You might try IM’ing God,
though.
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RepententSinner69: u there?
Auto response from GDawg420: brb,
cleaning the many rooms of my mansion
RepententSinner69: how about now?
God is Permanently Away, and if we’ve
learned anything from the apostolic tradition, it’s
that religious experience in the age of mechanical
reproduction is nonexistent; our connection to the
divine is nothing but a copy of a copy of a copy …
and men in robes and pointy hats are guarding the
Xerox machine! Not even LSD can sidestep the
Pope when it comes to direct religious experience,
because the Pope knows the very best in Shaolin
kung-fu, including the Flying Tiger Claw and the
Palsied Shuffle.
No, God speaks to us through movies, and
Mad Max is His messenger. And if the torture of
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Jesus in The Passion is oddly reminiscent of that
scene in Lethal Weapon where Riggs (Mel Gibson)
is hung from the rafters and tortured with electric
shocks; or that scene in Payback where Porter
(Mel Gibson) has his toes smashed with a hammer;
or that scene in Braveheart where William Wallace
(Mel Gibson) gets drawn and quartered – well,
maybe it’s a sign of God’s divine plan for Jes…I
mean, Mel. Why, then, does Mel not get tortured
even a bit in What Women Want? Because that
movie was written by Satan, who takes the form of
bewitching temptress Helen Hunt.
Unfortunately, Mel’s Christ is a bit of a
bummer. He doesn’t smile much, laughs even less,
and his main teaching – “Love one another” – gets
lost in the fact that he spends over two hours
getting murdered. If this is the height of religiosity,
you might want to stick to drugs for your “spiritual
awakening.” Mel Gibson’s Christianity is a cult of
death presided over by a Morrisey-like dark poet
who seems sensitive and sincere at first, but turns
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out to be just a brooding, self-important loner
longing for crucifixion. [Note to former
girlfriends: If you were writing in to suggest I’m
projecting myself onto Jesus, beat you to it! Still
those furious pens, ladies!]
You’ll reach a point where Pilate, strangely
cast as a thoughtful, caring ruler instead of the
cruel warlord history marks him as, asks, “Can
someone explain this madness to me?” And by
now, drenched in sweat, shuddering in a fetal
position, you say, “Yes, Pilate! Yes, that is a good
question! What madness is this? Why don’t we ask
that of the snakes that’ve been crawling out of my
wall for the past half hour?”
It’s the madness of a religion that doesn’t
celebrate life, but worships death. It’s a madness
that can find meaning only in suffering, which
means its art can never be enjoyed, only endured.
In that sense, LSD is probably not the best drug for
experiencing The Passion. Better to deal with it –
if you must – the same way you would deal with
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church: by systematic, methodical application of
bourbon and painkillers.
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An Easy Drinking Game for Watching
The Passion of the Christ.
1. Drink a carbomb every time Judas
betrays somebody.
(That dick!)
2. Drink a cosmo every time Jesus
forgives somebody.
(That Messiah!)
3. Do a shot of Jameson every time
someone speaks Aramaic.
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Lars Vegas: The Terror of the Sublime
Carl Weathers
"I'm going to need the higher-wattage
halogen," the hanging man yells up to me, his
voice echoing off the surrounding cement.
Right now it's 2:37 AM and Lars Vegas [not
his real name; that's a whole other complicated
question we'll get into later] just went off the roof
of a 12-story abandoned book bindery. Black-clad,
with a miner’s light strapped to his head and a
customized paint sprayer slung across his back, he
disappeared over the side of the building like a
SWAT leader ending a hostage crisis.
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Meanwhile, I’m left shivering on the roof to
keep watch over the rappelling equipment and
lighting gear.
The muse has descended to Vegas -- 20
minutes ago we were aimlessly cruising in a
nondescript white van, listening to Mahler’s Tenth
and searching for the perfect canvas. “I need
something ruinous tonight,” he says, his ice-blue
eyes busy as he speaks. Mostly he drives in
silence, nestled into a pocket of introspection that
breaks, typically, in a wave of speech; he’s a solar
battery of ideas, picking up the resonances in his
environment and unleashing them in new,
unexpected forms.
That, of course, is the definition of art. But
where most artists work on a scale of feet, Vegas
works in yards. Where others create in a studio, he
turns the entire outdoors into his workshop. His
specialty: multi-story, abstract murals painted
under cover of darkness. He shows up in a
different city almost every month, does his thing
170
for a while, then takes to the road again. People
wake up the next morning, go to pick up their -
Post-Gazette or Los Angeles Times, and Vegas's
work is there, an alien artifact dwarfing all who
see it.
Tonight I ask him, for perhaps the tenth time,
to explain his work. What comes out is, “Cities are
the nodal points of the collective unconscious. In
this great density of humanity, dreams take on new
shapes; it's in cities that our new worlds are born.
My work taps into that, as a kind of psychic
acupuncture on the collective unconscious. I
midwife new realities into being." This is the tenth
different explanation I've heard from him.
Then he silently pulls into the gravel lot, eyes
the broken windows and rusting metal hulking
before us. Satisfied, he starts unloading. In fifteen
minutes we're on the roof, and he is asking for
more light.
This all started two months ago. In my
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neighborhood I started noticing a series of ornately
cartoonish slogans: "Wake up and smell the
chaos!" "Dieses ist Seelemord." "Reality is
provincial." "Who is John Galt?" There seemed
nothing spectacular about the content, but the
presentation caught my attention. No matter where
these little bits of urban enlightenment appeared,
they were styled to look as they whey belonged
there. More specifically, each was a miniature
trompe l'oeil that seemed to rise out of whatever
surface it'd been painted on. I'd find "Exterminate
all rational thought!" protruding from a park
bench. A bus seat would read "Evolve!" as though
the sentiment had pushed its way out of the fabric.
I started searching graffiti message boards,
avant-garde list chat rooms, Situationist discussion
lists, anywhere I might find a clue. Eventually I
came upon a group of people who'd noticed the
unique style in metropolitan areas across the U.S.
No one had any idea who had made them or why;
some speculated it was a new marketing ploy;
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others thought it must be a nationwide collection
of graffiti artists. We traded pictures and theories,
scrutinized the most minute details. It all got a
little cultish, honestly.
One Monday, while at work, I trolled through
the usual postings. "New sighting -- NYC,"
"Lichtenstein influence?", "Avant-pop marketing
meme/old hat" -- the usual collection of
conjecture, hunches, and little new information. It
seemed more important to talk about the mystery
than to solve it. I mentioned this on one thread,
adding that I'd considered writing an article about
the whole thing if I ever met our mysterious
author/authors. I posted the message and went to
lunch.
Two hours later, came a response: "Where &
when?"
A week later I met Lars Vegas in a downtown
parking lot. He was there before me, even though I
arrived 15 minutes early. I don't know who I
173
pictured, but the truth stood in front of me, maybe
six-feet tall in a black motorcycle jacket, thick
dark hair hanging down to his shoulders. Even
with the sun setting behind him, he wore black
aviator glasses -- later, he confessed his eyes were
overly-sensitive to sunlight. His face had the
slightly sallow, greasy appearance of a chronic
fast-food indulger.
He didn't move until I was almost directly in
front of him. Not a nod of recognition, or any sign
that he was breathing. I must've looked quizzical,
because he stepped forward, extended a gloved
hand, and said, "I'm Lars Vegas."
"Is that your real name?" I blurted.
He cocked his head, "It is now." Then he
walked to the driver's side of his van and opened
the door. "Are you coming?"
The first thing I realized about Lars Vegas:
this van was his headquarters. Along both sides
were row after row of spray paint; shelves
underneath held his customized tools. A laptop
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whirred away in the back. I saw where he'd
worked out new ideas, covering the van's interior
with phrases such as, "Art is terror. Sacrifice
yourself to the sublime." Then he pulled out of the
parking lot and put on The Doors's Waiting For
the Sun.
I started with the typical questions: how long
have you done this? Why? How'd you get into it?
For the first few hours I didn't get much of a
response; we drove through Waiting For the Sun,
the entirety of Tristan and Isolde, and The Velvet
Underground and Nico with only monosyllabic
dialogue between us. As "The Black Angel's Death
Song" came on, I tried another variation on the,
"So how does a guy end up driving across the
country leaving cryptic slogans in his wake?"
question before he cut me off.
"I used to be in day-trading," he said, in a
Te x a r k a n a d r a w l . " N u m b e r s . S y m b o l
manipulation. Lines of green, numinous signs
crawling their way across my terminal for eight
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hours a day. Pattern recognition. Turning faith into
gold."
I waited as the Velvets moaned about stone
glances and split didactics.
"I was very good. I could always see the
wheels behind the numbers. Intuitively. A good
trade was like a piece of music. Precise," he said.
"On another level I began to suspect I was
part of a wide-scale experiment in emotional
vivisection. The people around me had a
perpetually glazed look. The dead eyes of addicts.
I didn't know why. They'd stop talking to the
person in front of them to take a phone call, no
matter who was on the line."
"One day I came to work and found myself
physically unable to hear. It was like being
underwater. It terrified me. So I hunkered down in
front of my terminal and lost myself in the wash of
green light. I sat like that for the rest of the day.
Then I closed all my positions and walked out," he
said
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"That was, what, four years ago. I took the
money and walked out. It's not difficult to
disappear in America, if you want to. I've become
a connoisseur of non-existence."
When he talked about himself, it came out
halting and detached. Yet, when he talked about
h is work , i t was in a long s t ream of
techno-/psycho-/art- babble that would give L.
Ron Hubbard pause. Stuff like, "Cities speak to me
in my dreams. I let them in. Our collective
unconsciousness has been sandblasted smooth by
banality and repetition. I make the global brain my
canvas. In scribbling in the ruins, under cover of
darkness I remake the world."
I couldn't tell how much of it he believed. It
was like speaking to a swirling collection of
affectations in the shape of a person. He'd begin a
sentence with a slow, measured drawl somewhere
between Austin and Omaha, lapse into stoner argot
half-way through, and finish in the meth-fueled
discourse of a long-haul trucker. I had the feeling
177
our conversation was one long parenthetical within
the larger conversation inside his head.
He said, "I don't know what to say when
people ask about me. I made up an acronym to
give it credibility. IDD -- Identity Deficit Disorder
-- a kind of low-level, reverse autism. Rather than
being unable to identify with the minds of other
people, I'm unable to identify with myself. I wake
up feeling like a ragged jigsaw puzzle. I pick up
bits and pieces from here and there, remaking
myself out of the tools that present themselves.
People have difficulty understanding that. Women,
especially."
He paused to make a sharp turn, a streetlight
catching the momentary play of a rueful smile
across his face before it returned to shadow.
"Whoever I am at a given moment gets
splayed across a dead building and goes unsigned."
So why "Lars Vegas"?
"That's what you call someone built in the
middle of the desert, half mirage and half
178
wasteland."
And then he showed me his portfolio. The
sloganeering was a distraction, something to keep
him occupied until night fell. His real work
happened after dark: the portfolio was filled with
glossy blow-ups of murals two or three stories
high, each an intricate design of near-fractal
precision. Yet they were organic, the internal
repetition a natural rather than algorithmic
outcome. Each took on archetypal, suggestive
figures. In short, they were astounding.
To himself more than you me, Lars Vegas
said, "I believe not in epiphanies, but in
eventualities. In the short term, reality prevails, but
in the long run, bet on art. The universe's long arc
bends toward the improbable."
Dawn breaks and Vegas applies the finishing
strokes to tonight's work. It's a maelstrom of color,
the two-story testimony of one man's soul. I
simply have nothing to say; Vegas steps forward
179
and adds a two-foot long stretch of cerulean blue.
He steps back again, taking a long look at his
creation. At this moment he is completely
unreadable. He could be filled with awe,
satisfaction, despair -- any combination of these
and more. The moment stretches long and
impenetrable.
Then it passes. He turns and goes back to his
van. In a flurry of gravel Lars Vegas leaves,
heading east on a black asphalt vein into the
welcoming rays of the rising sun.
180
The Strange Tale of Hunter S. Thompson's
Suicide
Joseph L. Flatley
Hunter S. Thompson, celebrated journalist and
author, took his own life in his home on February
20, 2005, at the age of 67. Sources close to the
family have credited age, failing health and a
desire to "go out on top" as factors in his decision.
Still, this is the Information Age and every real
news story seems to have its own conspiracy
theory...
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One. Was it murder?
Conspiracy theorists have gotten considerable
mileage out of unconfirmed reports that
"Thompson seemed in good spirits and was not
known to be depressed" prior to his death. This has
since proven not to be the case.
One even ing , f o r example , a round
Thanksgiving, he matter-of-factly told me that
he was not afraid to kill himself - as his
authorized biographer, he wanted me to know
that for the record. (Douglas Brinkley in
Rolling Stone)
sources: "Suicide Fuels Conspiracy Buzz," New
York Post, Mar 4, 2005; "Contentment Was Not
Enough: the Final Days at Owl Farm" by Douglas
Brinkley, Rolling Stone, March 24, 2005.
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Two. Hunter S. Thompson: "snuff auteur."
Years ago a former state senator from
Nebraska, John DeCamp, wrote a book titled: The
Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and
Murder in Nebraska. This book is a favorite
amongst the conspiracy fringe for its “expose” of
Satanic sex cults and Republican homosexual
orgies.
In other testimony, Bonacci said that Larry
King was smiling and laughing the whole time
the film was shown, and that "the men with
hoods" were a Satanic group which planned to
use the dead boy in some sort of ceremony. He
also named the director of the snuff film,
whom they picked up in Las Vegas, as "Hunter
Thompson." (The Franklin Coverup, pg. 105)
source: http://abelahsimmons.gnn.tv/
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Three. Killed by the Saudi Royal Family.
According to an interview Thompson gave in
2004, Saudi Prince Bandar, who lived next door,
was a "pretty good neighbor."
Thompson's last words were "Counselor"
typed in the middle of a page. A counselor with
Aspen Counseling Center, a local organization that
provides support for victims at crime scenes, has
seen members of Thompson's family. Over the
years HRH Prince Bandar has donated upwards of
a million dollars to the Aspen Valley Medical
Foundation, which operates the Counseling
Center..
Following the logic of many a conspiracy
researcher (and many a schizophrenic), the
Thompson-Bandar link has thus been established.
"Bandar Bush," as he is known in the White
House, could certainly be counted on by the Bush
family to administer a hit, if required. But why
would the Bush family want Thompson killed?
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source: http://trunews.blogspot.com/
Four. Thompson was silenced before he could
blow the lid off the Satano-Republican
Pedophile Conspiracy.
In this version of the truth, Thompson is not
involved in the child sex rings (see above) but has
risked his life to expose them, with deadly
consequences. The "factual basis" for this theory
is a radio interview with Canadian author Paul
William Roberts.
JONES: Well let me just add this. I mean, we
have the New York Post: 'Top gay porn star
services moguls at Bohemian Grove ... I mean
I have Parade magazine articles, Spy magazine
articles from the '80s where, as I said they bus
in the gay prostitutes like Beluga caviar for
our "Christian conservative" leaders ... And is
that what Hunter S. Thompson was on to?
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ROBERTS: He certainly knew all about that
and I believe had written about it. I don't know
whether there was a book in the works, but he
certainly had published columns on it...
JONES: Well it certainly looks pretty
suspicious. Man let me tell you.
source: http://www.total411.info/
Five. Thompson was silenced by the shadow
organization that bombed the World Trade
Center and blamed it on terrorists.
We also have a dramatic re-interpretation of
Paul William Roberts to thank for this theory. In a
piece by Williams that appeared Feb. 26 Globe and
Daily Mail, Roberts wrote:
Hunter telephoned me on Feb. 19, the night
before his death. He sounded scared. It wasn't
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always easy to understand what he said,
particularly over the phone, he mumbled, yet
when there was something he really wanted
you to understand, you did. He'd been working
on a story about the World Trade Center
attacks and had stumbled across what he felt
was hard evidence showing the towers had
been brought down not by the airplanes that
flew into them but by explosive charges set off
in their foundations. Now he thought someone
was out to stop him publishing it: "They're
gonna make it look like suicide," he said. "I
know how these bastards think..."
That's how I imagine a tribute to Hunter S.
Thompson should begin. He was indeed
working on such a story, but it wasn't what
killed him. He exercised his own option to do
that. As he said to more than one person, "I
would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't
know I could commit suicide at any time."
Thompson has always voiced his anger and
confusion over the events of September 11, 2001
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(in print and other media), but no such article has
surfaced and no mention of any article has been
made by him. This story may be compelling, but
that's all it is—a story.
source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com
Six. Thompson was a pederast! His own son
said so. In code, of course. Sort of. And in Latin.
This is my favorite, due to its absurdity. In a
testament to the power of the 'blog, this theory
started as a comment on Canadian author Jeff
Wells's website, "Rigorous Intuition," but has since
taken on a life of its own.
That this quote by HST's son Juan has some
sort of meaning beyond the obvious: "He
stomped terra", which on the surface says
Hunter stomped the ground. But the word play
is obvious. He STomped has HST's initials
encoded. If you re-arrange it, it can say: "He's
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Tom PED Terra"... what could that PED refer
to? As for terra, you can combine it with PED
to get Ped-Terra, which is similar to pederast.
Pederast = pedterra? From the Oxford English
Dictionary: "Ibid. 332 A boy alleged to have
been abused *pæderastically."
People familiar with Thompson's work realize
that Juan Thompson was quoting his father's
obituary for Timothy Leary, "Mistah Leary - He
Dead." But apparently you don't need to be
familiar with Thompson's work to research the
"conspiracy" behind his death.
source: http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/
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Review: My Neighbors’ Breakup
Ace Hurler
With last night’s staging of It’s Over (Get
Your Stuff Out My Apartment), the My Neighbors’
Repertory Theater of 223 S Millvale Ave, Apt 2D,
concluded their trilogy, Our Gradual Decline Into
Mutual Disdain and Self-Loathing. Like the earlier
installments, it was a bold, draining performance, a
poignant lament for the fragility of the human
bond. Such a shattering comes along once in a
lifetime; it’s one this reviewer suspects will be
their last.
Sadly, many critics misunderstood our
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Players’ first two installments, and are likely to
have missed out on this daring conclusion. The
opening chapter, You’re Drunk, Again, went almost
unnoticed among the mainstream theater press.
Even Charles Isherwood, in a mixed review in The
New York Times, deemed the conclusion “too deus
ex machina.” He complained that, “The cops
show up, everyone goes home. Where’s the
resolution in that?” Isherwood’s devotion to
traditional (read: stale) theater once again blinds
him to the subtle intricacies of the work in front of
him. (Watch the play you are watching, Charles!)
Of course the police show up, but in You’re Drunk,
Again, there is no deus, only machina.
Audience members, too, seemed baffled. My
upstairs neighbor and unrepentant philistine, Jim,
for example, begged, “Would you two please shut
up? Some of us have to work tomorrow!” Jim and
I obviously differ on this point -- where I found
You’re Drunk, Again to be a provocative jaunt that
successfully melded Brechtian satire with a
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genuine, almost Tennessee Williams-like
sensitivity, my colleague heard only the constant
screaming and shattering of glass. Alas, Jim, our
aesthetic sensibilities may never find common
ground. Please, do all of us in the world of theater
a service and go back to your Andrew Lloyd
Webber.
Those not on board for You’re Drunk, Again
were probably even more mystified by the follow-
up: Where My Money At [question mark omitted].
Where You’re Drunk, Again offered the possibility
of meaningful resolution, only to yank away that
possibility in the third act, Where My Money At
refuses to offer even that narrative fig leaf. The
first installment leaned heavily on Brecht and
Beckett, but part two seemed almost Dada in its
refusal to cohere into a recognizable whole. Lines
were muffled, sensed more than heard as the make
their way through the uncooperative media of
drywall and faux-wood paneling; audience
members are left to project their own responses
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upon the flattened affect of our two players. A
sense of timelessness and dislocation hung over
the proceedings as, again, an unfamiliar male voice
repeated “Where my money at, bitch?”, the
audience was left adrift, wondering: Who is this
man? Where is his money “at”? Is there an implicit
critique of capitalist hegemony at work here? Is
the apparent absence of his money in fact a
presence? Heady questions to contemplate at 3
AM on a Tuesday.
The delayed resolution of parts one and two
finally paid off in Part Three: It’s Over. A near-
epic, it lasted a grueling three hours, from 8 to 11
PM on Sunday night, with no intermission. Yet in
contrast to the intensity of the first two
installments, it was remarkably understated – the
sign of a mature artist is the confidence to whisper
when appropriate. Some breakups are like an atom
bomb: one minute everything seems fine, the next
your clothes and comic book collection are out on
the grass, flaming. Others are more like a coal
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mine fire smoldering underground for months
before one breath of air ignites an inferno. It’s
Over is the latter type; its heat is just below the
surface, always threatening to ignite. The restraint
is fitting, then, with whispers, silence, and
miscommunication a recurring motif; the female
half of our doomed lovers, in response to queries
unheard and unremarked upon, simply utters,
“Whateva, whateva…whateva!” In that bare
repetition we can hear the passion, the loss, and
finally, the resignation that marks the trilogy’s end.
Kudos to the male lead for not stepping on that
line, even after the thirtieth time.
After three hours, the combatants are
exhausted, two weary boxers leaning on each other
as their arguments become increasingly
nonsensical. Toilet seat operation, inappropriate
restaurant glances, the constant presence of
hectoring Mother -- all the trivia gets dragged out
in a last-ditch attempt by both parties to score
points.
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The play concludes with our male protagonist
wondering aloud, “How did this happen?”
The woman responds, “What the [police
siren] did you expect, melonfarmer?”
When he answers in a low, surprised voice, “I
don’t know,” of course he means, “I expected us
not to end like this, in this moment I want to arrest
but cannot, should not, the puncturing evanescence
in which the gravity of need fails and we are so
obviously two once more, two foster-children of
Silence and slow Time, aglossia’s offspring with
the distance of an ellipsis between us, swaying
weary and wary at the end of semaphore’s long
and futile march, umbra sumus, two silent separate
shadows now again lost to one another and fading
into the gloaming.” I admit I cried.
Bravo, neighbors. Bravo.
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Tutti Frutti
Joseph L. Flatley
Little Richard was born Richard Wayne
Penniman on December 5, 1932 in Macon,
Georgia. The Deep South was a wild place in
those days. Richard’s father was a preacher and a
bootlegger, selling hooch and salvation as an
adherent of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church – a
sect of Christianity founded by a farmer named
William Miller, who once wrote a book with the
unwieldy title, Evidences from Scripture and
History of the Second Coming of Christ about the
Year 1843.
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Richard spent his youth on the dirt street
where hustlers of all types would hang out in the
hot, dusty Georgia afternoons, singing to snare
marks and move merchandise. There were old men
with vegetable carts, ward heelers making the
rounds, soap box preachers selling religion...
people hustled whatever they had to get by.
From an early age, Little Richard was too
damn wild to worry what others thought about
him. His queerness made him an alien in the
straight world, his blackness an alien in the white
world; but he possessed a sort of trickster quality
and manic exuberance that he used to lift himself
above racism and poverty. And his spirit was often
a strain on those close to him.
“Richard would holler all the time,” his
brother remembers. “I just thought he couldn’t
sing anyways, just a noise, and he would get on
our nerves hollerin’ and beatin’ on tin cans and
things of that nature. People around would get
angry upset with him yelling and screaming.
198
They’d shout at him, ‘shut up yo’ mouth, boy’ and
he would run off laughing all over.”
Little Richard, the youthful bundle of energy,
grew up fast. At fourteen he ran away from home
with Dr. Hudson’s Medicine Show. By fifteen he
had made a name for himself as a drag queen,
working for Alabama’s own Sugar Foot Sam. No
parent I know would want their lovely little boy
singing in blackface or prancing around in a dress
with someone called Sugar Foot, but these were
some of the few options available in the south in
the 1940s.
In 1951, at the age of eighteen, Richard won a
talent contest and was signed to a four disc deal
with RCA Victor. Those songs did little, some
becoming local hits before disappearing from view
forever. This is not to say that Richard was not a
dynamic presence; when he performed, it was
obvious that he possessed a measure of greatness.
But he had so far been unable to transform his
greatness into either Art or Money.
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Four years after his “big break,” Richard was
still plugging away… he was a popular musician
and had plenty of work. He was a rare talent,
playing to both black and white audiences. The
black crowds seemed to prefer a rawer, bluesy
edge to the music; the white cats didn’t mind
hearing something a little more whimsical. Little
Richard and his full-time band, the Upsetters,
could do either. But it was proving impossible to
capture that energy on record. “Bumps” Blackwell
was determined to change that. As an A&R man
with Specialty Records in New Orleans, he heard
promise in the tapes that Little Richard had sent
him. Hoping that perhaps he might have another
Ray Charles on his hands, he scheduled a session
for September, 1955.
Bumps booked a room in New Orleans with
Fats Domino's backing band. They spent days in
the studio, jamming, trying to find just the right
sound. Richard was a sight: face powdered, eye-
liner applied, hair piled high onto his head. And he
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was pretty, no doubt about it. But as the session
wore on, Richard’s legendary anarchic
performance simply could not be captured on tape.
He was mortified when they played the
performance back and he heard how polite he
sounded.
At some point, on the third day of the session,
the group broke for lunch. Inside New Orleans’
legendary Dew Drop Inn, Richard spotted a piano.
He pounded the keys, out of frustration more than
anything. He started playing a song he had written
while washing dishes at the Greyhound station in
Macon, Georgia, where he worked in between
tours.
And he sang: A wop bop a loo mop a good
goddam! Tutti Frutti, loose booty… if it don’t fit,
don’t force it/ you can grease it, make it easy…
The lunch crowd broke into laughter and
Bumps realized that he had a hit on his hands. The
music was perfect: joyful, exuberant, rushing with
the kind of manic energy that everyone who knew
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Richard instantly recognized. The lyrics, of course,
would need to be re-written.
Richard was skeptical, but he was under
Specialty Records' employ. Bumps got a local
songwriter called Dorothy LaBostrie to sanitize the
lyrics and soon enough the record was bounding
up the Billboard R&B chart (which had only
recently been renamed from the “Race” chart) to
the number two spot, and even scored number
seventeen on the Billboard Pop chart. This record
jump started the career of one of America’s most
beloved entertainers.
Little Richard remembers, “We decided that
my image should be crazy and way-out, so that
adults would think I was harmless. I’d appear in
one show dressed as the Queen of England and in
the other as the Pope.”
Rock historian James Miller, in his book
Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock and
Roll, 1947-1977, has what may be the last word on
the subject: “Emboldened by the success of his
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recording, Richard intuitively grasped the issues at
play. Being black and being gay, he was an
outsider twice over. But by exaggerating his own
freakishness, he could get across: he could evade
the question of gender and hurdle the racial
divide.”
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Philip K. Dick: Ghetto Prophet
Jesse Hicks
"The whole government is a fraud and the
President is an android."
Drug companies market their newest wares
with the slogan, "God promises eternal life. We
can deliver it."
"A paranoid incompetent has schemed his
way into the White House and convulsed America
in a vicious war against internal enemies."
These are the worlds of Philip K. Dick -- from
The Simulacra, The Three Stigmata of Palmer
Eldritch, and Radio Free Albemeuth, respectively.
205
Reading Philip K. Dick's work -- much of it almost
a half-century old -- in the year 2005 provokes a
feeling of vertigo, of passing rapidly through a
kaleidoscope of perspectives, each offering a
unique kind of truth. With his paranoid
metaphysics, dry existential humor, and ultimate
generosity of human spirit, Philip K. Dick offers
us a roadmap to a future not only stranger than we
imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.
Philip Kindred Dick was born in 1928, in
Chicago, with his twin sister, Jane. Jane died
shortly thereafter -- a trauma that haunted him for
the rest of his life. Soon after, Dick and his mother
moved to California, that last outpost of the
American Dream.
He briefly attended the University of
California, Berkeley, with a major in German, but
before long he realized college wasn’t for him.
Before dropping out, he’d taken a class on pre-
Socratic philosophy, which asked: What is real?
What does it mean to be a human? The class
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articulated questions he'd often asked; he began
writing, exploring those questions through the
"genre ghetto" of science fiction.
In 1952, he published his first short story,
“Beyond Lies The Wub,” in which a crew of space
travelers discuss mythology with a large, pig-like
creature -- the wub -- who they then eat. The wub,
offended not in the slightest, genially continues the
discussion from beyond death.
The story might seem more cute than
challenging, but Dick described his aim as creating
an “alien lifeform that exhibits the deeper traits
that I associate with humanity: not a biped with an
enlarged cortex -- a forked radish that thinks, to
paraphrase the old saying -- but an organism that is
human in terms of its soul.”
In 1953, Dick published twenty-eight stories,
including those about a dog who thinks garbage
men are invaders come to steal his family’s
precious treasure; a group of astronauts (again)
who encounter God, only to realize it’s not their
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God; and an android who believes himself to be
human.
It’s those early stories that Hollywood has
most easily grasped: Minority Report, Paycheck,
Screamers, a n d Impostor are all adaptations of
Dick’s pre-1956 work, stripped of their
metaphysical doubt and retooled as action-
adventure blockbusters. It took Ridley Scott to get
Dick right, in adapting 1968’s Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep? as Blade Runner, which critic
Andrew O’Hehir called, “The movie that invented
the future.” Yet for all its stylishness, Blade
Runner dropped Dick’s philosophizing in favor
of…Harrison Ford.
Still, Dick’s worldview has permeated our
culture, with Hollywood increasingly reflecting
that. The Truman Show, so widely praised for its
satirical take on our media-saturated culture, owes
a great debt to Dick's 1959 novel Time Out of
Joint, in which the main character lives on a
simulated early-60’s suburb, unaware that his
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world is an illusion created to keep him working
for the government. Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind’s selective memory manipulation
echoes 1966’s “We Can Remember it For You
Wholesale,” previously adapted as Total Recall,
and Sunshine screenwriter Charlie Kaufman wrote
a script of Dick’s A Scanner Darkly -- the 1977
novel now being filmed by Richard Linklater of
Waking Life fame.
If Hollywood strip-mines Dick's work (he
ranks second only to Steven King in cinematic
adaptation) it's because his stories -- long-form
thought experiments, really -- predicted a future
that we are only 50 years later coming to
experience. His anxiety about the very nature of
reality presages our own increasingly anxious
2005, a world of fake “authenticity” in which a
hyphenated contradiction like “reality-tv” -- the
ontological equivalent of combining matter and
anti-matter in the pursuit of higher ratings -- has
become commonplace, even trivial. When the
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ability to create reality -- through media,
technology, and genetic manipulation -- outstrips
the ability to comprehend it and, most importantly
for Dick, remain human, we are on our way to
becoming something else -- for better or worse.
It would have flattered the PKD of 1953 to
know the rest of us would catch up eventually. But
you can't eat prophecy, and in those early years
Dick made money selling stories to cheap pulps;
he eventually turned to amphetamines to speed his
output, bragging that he could type 120 words a
minute. He cranked out novels in weeks, locking
himself in a room with his typewriter and a supply
of speed.
The combination produced some of his best
work, and his worst. The Dick canon is notoriously
uneven: the great works, like A Scanner Darkly, in
which an undercover drug agent suffering from a
split-personality disorder is asked to spy on
himself, have to share shelf-space with the less
impressive Solar Lottery a n d Vulcan's Hammer.
210
His Hugo Award-winning The Man in the High
Castle, an alternate future story in which the Axis
powers won World War II, is followed the next
y e a r b y Clans of the Alphane Moon, best
summarized by "blah." The real tragedy of Dick's
confinement in the genre ghetto is that had he been
better paid, more of his 44 novels might rise to the
level of his talent.
Even so, virtually all of his work stands above
his contemporaries' rayguns and scantily-clad
astrowomen creations. Ubik, one of his best
novels, features a spraycan cure-all, named, of
course, Ubik. Ubik is the weapon of choice against
entropy, the force of time that grinds us all done
into nothingness. Dick opens each chapter with an
advertising jingle invocation of this miraculous
product: "Has perspiration odor taken you out of
the swim? Ten-day Ubik deodorant spray or Ubik
roll-on ends worry of offending, brings you back
where the happening is. Safe when used as
directed in a conscientious program of body
211
hygiene."
Where Ubik predicts the creep of advertising
lingo into every facet of our lives, The Three
Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch satirizes our
increasing reliance on consciousness-tweaking via
drugs. Palmer Eldritch is the anti-Prozac, a weird
pilgrim who invents a new drug, Chew-Z, which
promises to free users from their mundane lives.
Instead, it plunges them into a world controlled
entirely by Palmer Eldritch.
Eldritch is a frightening figure, Dick's
personal incarnation of the Adversary. But even in
his darkest novel, Dick, who died in 1982, well
ahead of his fame, offers our world some solace: "I
mean, after all; you have to consider we're only
made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go
on and we shouldn't forget that. But even
considering, I mean it's a sort of bad beginning,
we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith
that even in this lousy situation we're faced with
we can make it. You get me?"
212
Maybe not the most eloquent expression of
hope in the face of strange, grim realities, but an
honest one, worth remembering as we head into
whatever future waits to embrace us.
213
The Horror of Being Human
Jesse Hicks
Japanese director Takashi Miike doesn't make
movies about "normal" people. His characters are
always lost souls and outsiders. From brainwashed
Yakuza hitmen (Ichi the Killer) to near-insane
detectives (MPD Psycho) to shattered, incestuous
families (Visitor Q) and love-starved women
(Audition), they are people on the fringe, making
their homes in the dim margins of society,
respectability, and even sanity.
Perhaps best-known to American audiences is Ichi The
Killer, the story of a hypnotized Yakuza hitman.
215
Our introduction to Ichi comes from a squad of
Yakuza goons who complain they've been reduced
to cleaning up after the superstar murderer. The
next scene finds them in the hotel room of a rival
boss, marveling at the floor-to-ceiling explosion of
blood and entrails. It's always like this, they sigh.
With his comic use of gore and violence,
fascination with the criminal underworld, and
whip-smart dialogue, it would be easy to dub
Miike the Japanese Quentin Tarantino. But where
Tarantino's characters meticulously follow the
Elmore Leonard Handbook of Cool, Miike's
protagonists are often desperate failures; far from
romantic outlaws, they are outcasts and losers
looking for a place to belong. In Ichi we expect a
hyper-cool Yakuza assassin -- an Asian Leon of
The Professional -- but instead we find a pathetic,
emotionally stunted victim.
Again like Tarantino, Miike has made a
number of what would be called "genre films."
Ichi is his Yakuza crime movie; MPD Detective his
216
police thriller; One Missed Call his by-the-
numbers horror movie. But where Tarantino, ever
the obsessive video clerk, seems to have slipped
into a quagmire of too-eager film in jokes with
Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2, at the expense of his
characters and audience, Miike makes genre films
that fit no genre. Tarantino's strength, most notable
in Pulp Fiction, is his ability to reconfigure genre
tropes to create something relatively new; Miike's
total disregard for genre opens up entirely original
spaces.
His "horror movie," for example, One Missed
Call, begins as a Ringu knock-off and by its
(admittedly oblique) conclusion has morphed into
a meditation about the scars every family inflicts
on its members. Conversely, 2000's Audition
masquerades as a romantic comedy. For the first
two-thirds, we get to know a Japanese widower
who is finally ready to love again. He begins
dating a pretty, demure young woman, both
suffering the exhilarating awkwardness of love's
217
first blush. They seem destined for happiness, and
we want them to be happy. Only in the movie's last
20 minutes does it become truly horrific. Which is
not to say Miike plays the M. Night Shyamalan
card, turning all of his films into an ego-stroking
exhibition of his own "cleverness." They often
move strangely, unpredictably, but not in a way
that's illogical or dishonest.
Nor does Miike belong to the realm of
exploitative "shock cinema." Visitor Q, perhaps his
most taboo-breaking film, opens with an incest
scene. Shot on a handheld digital video and
punctuated with still frames, it's brutally real, but
doesn't revel in the apparent depravity of its
subject matter; in Miike's morally challenging
cinema, the "sick' and "depraved" are merely a
starting point in the search for essential humanity.
Visitor Q continues a satirical riff on the
reality-tv phenomenon, as the failed reporter who
has sex with his own prostitute daughter returns
home to an abusive son and drug-addicted wife.
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Accompanying him is a mysterious visitor, who
simply watches the decaying family. It would be
easy to turn that scenario into a plodding morality
play -- think Requiem for A Dream -- but the
director shows a genuine concern for his
characters. They prostitute themselves, get bullied
at school, continually fail to live up to their
dreams, but they remain human. It sounds strange
that the most comic necrophilia scene ever filmed
is the catalyst for healing this broken family, but
that's the kind of surreal logic Miike employs.
In an interview with midnighteye.com, Miike
explained, "There are terrifying things in life, too,
and they are all made by human beings.
Everybody has those things inside themselves. So
by filming human beings, it naturally becomes a
horror movie."
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Orson Welles, the Unrepentant Charlatan
O.W. Jeeves
In 1941, at the age of 25, Orson Welles co-
wrote and directed his first movie, Citizen Kane.
Welles, who’d already made a mark on radio and
the stage, was wooed by RKO Pictures into
c o m i n g t o H o l l y w o o d , w h e r e h e h a d
unprecedented creative control, including final cut
on Kane. The film, which many consider to be one
of the best and most influential in cinema history,
received nine Academy Award nominations;
Welles, in his first starring role, was nominated for
Best Actor.
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At the Academy Awards ceremony, it was
booed during each of its nine nominations.
William Randolph Hearst, whose life the movie
had been in part based on, banished its mention
from his editorial pages. Commercially, the film
did poorly; Welles’s three-picture, no-studio-
interference contract quickly soured.
His next film, The Magnificent Ambersons,
was hacked to pieces by RKO’s studio heads and
has never widely appeared in its original form; his
third RKO movie, It’s All True, had its funding
abruptly pulled, and the studio ejected Welles from
their headquarters. Word got around Hollywood
that Welles was a tempestuous genius who’d never
turn in a commercially successful movie.
Without major studio backing, the director
bounced from project to project, hustling where he
could, using acting jobs to pay for his own
projects. He spent decades in the wilderness,
practicing his art in solitude, or with a handful of
close friends. He later reflected, “I started at the
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top and have been working my way down ever
since.”
This brings us to 1974 and F for Fake. The
final movie Welles would both write and direct
before his death in 1985, it was finally released on
DVD this year, in a double-disc Criterion
Collection set. The two films bookend his career in
both chronology and theme: Where Citizen Kane is
a pure expression of Welles the artist, F For Fake
is a revealing portrait of the man behind the art. It's
a love letter to magic from a man who spent a
lifetime worshipping it.
The film began as a project by François
Reichenbach: a straight-forward documentary
about the infamous art forger Elmyr De Hory. De
Hory, a mysterious Hungarian who lived on the
island of Ibiza, had become known as "the man
who holds the art world to ransom" after
authorities traced a large number of impressive
forgeries back to his brush. The elderly fraud
carried himself like a landed baron, throwing great
223
parties for Ibiza's jet-set while French and
European police worked to put him in jail.
Among those party-goers was Clifford Irving,
who'd wri t ten Elmyr 's biography, t i t le ,
appropriately, Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory,
the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time. With a title
that bombastic, it's hard not to assume the contents
were an equal mix of fact and fantasy; Elmyr was
a notorious self-promoter -- as his fame grew, so
did his legend. Irving, perhaps enamored with that
degree of self-reinvention, later hatched his own
plan: he would rise from the ranks of b-list writers
to become the "authorized autobiographer" of
reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes.
He wouldn't do this by actually meeting
Hughes, of course. Instead, he'd fake everything --
i n t e r v i e w s , l e g a l d o c u me n t s , p e r so n a l
correspondence supposedly from Hughes. The
billionaire, Irving reasoned, was so publicity-shy
that he'd never come forward to denounce the
fraud. He sold his publisher, McGraw-Hill, on the
224
idea, and soon they had a draft and were selling
excerpts to news magazines.
It didn't last long, though. Soon Hughes
responded, via telephone, saying he'd never heard
of Irving and certainly hadn't hired him to pen an
autobiography. The voice on the telephone
convinced the media and the authorities; Irving
soon found himself in jail for fraud.
When Welles saw Reichenbach's footage of
all this, he couldn't resist. He took to the editing
room and created an entirely new movie, a "film
essay" on the power of art, magic, and the need for
lies that finally tell the truth. Elmyr, Irving, the art
world and its experts -- it all became a backdrop
for Welles's thoughts on the fine line between
fraud and magic. In the hands of a lesser talent it
would've fallen apart, but the great director's touch
is on every frame of the film.
Even more interestingly, for 1974, Welles
makes no bones about showing you exactly what
he's doing. In several scenes he breaks through
225
Reichenbach's footage to show himself sitting at
the editing dock pondering his next move. He
doubles-back, digresses, drops in blunt
foreshadowing and camera tricks, but never does
the movie lose its playfulness, its need for
mischief. The often smirking Welles puts every
ounce of his boundless enthusiasm into the frame.
At the same time, in playing with the divide
between stories and reality, fakes and facts, he
emphasizes the power of great art to transcend
those divisions. One of his characters asks, "If
there weren't any experts, would there be any
fakers?" but he knows the real joy lies in their
interaction, the constant struggle to define
humanity, because, finally, that too will end.
Welles intones in his deep, famous voice, "Our
works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some
of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two,
but everything must finally fall in war, or wear
away into the ultimate and universal ash -- the
triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes."
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Time makes ash of us all, but it's good that we are
here.
One has that same bittersweet sense of hope in
watching Orson Welles: One Man Band, one of
Criterion's extras. It recollects Welles's career as a
cinematic maverick and innovator, but it also
implies the great what if: What if he'd actually
been able to do it his way? Viewed from the
outside, his career looks like a series of
heartbreaks, plans left unfulfilled, promises
rescinded. Yet he never lost his enthusiasm;
commenting about his own outsider status, he
identified with those who shared his passion if not
his path. "In other words, I'm crazy," he said. "But
not crazy enough to pretend to be free."
Freedom's a relative thing; this is not a world
of absolutes. If Orson Welles was never free
enough, we can't blame him or the world as it is.
But in his unparalleled creativity, his drive and his
refusal to be compromised, he was freer than most.
Most importantly, he was free to see in a way that
227
most of us don't. As the man himself put it, "There
are never many, never enough of them, but there
are men born into the world with a gaze fixed on
the widest possible horizon. Men who can see
without strain beyond the most distant horizon,
into that unconquered country we call the future."
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An Interpretation of Timothy Leary.
Joseph L. Flatley
Did Robert Greenfield Do His Homework?
I saw my therapist again yesterday. She asked
me if I did my "homework." Cognitive Behavioral
Therapists love that word, "homework." I hate that
word. But who cares? She's hot.
"Yes, I did." My homework being to write for
at least an hour, three times that week.
"Really? What did you work on?"
"My blog."
After much tsk-tsk-ing, I promised to actually
229
write this week, and not just dick around on the
internet. Of course, this summer at the height (low
point) of my chronic medical-grade depression,
my writing was virtually nonexistent. But I could
read like a motherfucker, sometimes topping off
five books a week. I knew that I was in trouble
when I sat down on a Friday night with Robert
Greenfield's Timothy Leary: A Biography and
looked up Sunday night to realize I had read all
seven hundred pages.
The f irst exhaustive look at Leary,
Greenfield's book begins with a poignant opening
scene (where a young Timmy hides on the roof to
escape from his drunken father), and ends on a
note of righteous indignation. In between those
two poles lay a phenomenal amount of scholarship
and a phone book's worth of vitriol. Greenfield
obviously has some kind of searing hatred for
Timothy Leary, which he may be too much of a
gentleman to mention, but which nonetheless
bleeds onto every page.
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One could read the entire Greenfield book and
think that Leary never had an original idea in his
life… let alone author over thirty books (The
Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary itself
weighs in at over three hundred pages). True,
some of his work reads like mud, but even that
stuff will yield gold if you were to dig in.
A Holy Mess.
Timothy Leary's unindicted co-conspirator
Robert Anton Wilson writes (in Prometheus
Rising, his book-length exploration of Leary's, er,
theories) that the founder of Christian Science,
Mary Baker Eddy, “was fundamentally naive and
unaware of most of philosophy… she never
realized that you cannot speak or write about the
Ineffable. She therefore wrote about it at length. If
her writings are hard to decipher, if they often
sound like 'the ravings of a disordered mind'
(Aleister Crowley's description of mystic writings,
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including his own), they also have moments of
astonishing lucidity.”
Leary - who at times possessed perhaps a
willful naiveté - was never unaware of Philosophy.
I think that, like Aleister Crowley, he assumed that
everyone who read his work would be on his
wavelength. Either that, or he just didn't care.
And I think that the inability of many people
to get anything meaningful out of his work, along
with sheer scapegoating (let me ask you, Mr.
Nixon; how does Leary, whom you called “the
most dangerous man in America,” compare to
Vietnam? Cointelpro? Watergate?), has been at the
root of Leary's continued rough handling by the
media.
Really, what did Leary expect? He was part of
a tradition of neurological adepts, spelling out a
philosophy that could only appeal to a minority of
people, a philosophy that would necessarily
register as extremely dangerous to the vast
majority of folks (“status quo”), and he was taking
232
it to the masses, pushing it right in their faces.
Perhaps at first he was naive enough to think that
the sheer beauty of his message would transform
those who would hear it. And perhaps, by the time
of the great backlash, he was too addicted to the
media spotlight to let it go.
The High Priest and the Great Beast.
It seems that in Robert Greenfield we have the
same kind of biographer as John Symonds, author
o f The Great Beast: The Life and Magick of
Aleister Crowley.
Israel Regardie (in The Eye In The Triangle:
An Interpretation of Aleister Crowley), had this to
say about the Symonds book:
[Aleister Crowley] has too long suffered from
misrepresentation at the hands of uninformed
biographers. It is time finally to set the record
straight. This must be done, not merely out of
regard for the man himself, but even more
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importantly, because of the profound effect he
has had on countless thousands of readers, and
will yet have on countless thousands more.
John Symonds, his major biographer, evinces
t h r o u g h o u t h i s n a r r a t i v e a t o t a l l y
contemptuous attitude towards Crowley. This
attitude altogether invalidates his attempt at
biography. His book The Great Beast could
have been excellent since every opportunity in
the world was given him through access to
diaries and a mass of hitherto unpublished
material… However his personal prejudices
got in the way. His writing is cynical, showing
no glimmer of insight or the slightest trace of
sympathy.
Timothy Leary considered himself, after a
fashion, to be a reincarnation of Crowley, so it is
quite fitting that the above excerpt could just as
easily been written about Greenfield's Leary book.
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I Have America Surrounded.
I have finally read the other Tim Leary book,
I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy
Leary by John Higgs. If anything, his account is
more fair, and a hell of a lot more fun.
Forgotten, But Not Gone.
Where does that leave the Timothy Leary
legacy? In his Rolling Stone obituary, “Mistah
Leary - He Dead,” Hunter S. Thompson puts it like
this:
We sometimes disagreed, but in the end we
made our peace…
He is forgotten now but not gone.
The first time I read this ten years ago I really
had no idea what the hell Thompson was talking
about; but after Thompson's suicide it began to
235
make sense for me. With his final act Thompson
was released.
His legacy became part of all of our legacy.
And so it goes with Timothy Leary. Perhaps
the question is not: who was Timothy Leary?
Perhaps we should be asking ourselves what he
had to teach us… because I have found his work to
be endlessly entertaining and inspiring and every
time I open one of his books, or hear an old radio
interview or seem him on the television, I learn
something new.
So, will the legacy of Timothy Leary be that
of a defrocked Harvard Professor, a lousy parent
and bad actor? Or will it be that of a philosopher
and a teacher, a rebel in the grand tradition?
Because he will be with us always. That genie has
been unleashed. The only question now is, which
Timothy Leary will we remember… or which will
we forget?
Or, as Tim himself used to say, "everyone will
get the Timothy Leary they deserve."
236
John Higgs' book, I Have America Surrounded, is
now available in the US from Barricade Books.
Robert Greenfield's book, Timothy Leary: A
Biography, is published by Harcourt.
237
A Conversation with Robert Anton Wilson
Jesse Hicks
The Illuminatus! Trilogy seems to keep finding
new generations of fans since its publication.
How would you describe it to someone who's
yet to read it, and what do you think explains its
enduring appeal?
I like to call it guerilla ontology. If people
look blank, I explain that it's a Zen riddle in the
form of a detective story. In other words, a mystery
without a solution. What keeps it in print? I
imagine that every generation a few clear-thinking
people discover that the governments that rule us
239
just do not make sense rationally. And then they
hear about this weird book that knocks down every
attempt at a reasonable explanation of how this
planet operates and proves 1001 ways that only
insanity does explain it. Incidentally, as if to prove
this, sales have improved every year since George
Bush got appointed president. Sanity cannot
fathom such a sinister joke, but Illuminatus! buffs
can.
How does the world of Illuminatus! compare to
the "real" world these days? Much of the book
satirized politics on The Planet of the Apes;
lately you seem less oblique about the state of
American politics, calling Dubya "exactly the
ideal president for this time in history. Most of
the public is made up of C-students who are
incurious and uninformed. What Bush says
makes sense to them because they don't know
any more about the world than he does." Do we
live in a Wilsonian satire?
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I'd like to think so. The only alternative would
hold that we live in a Kafka allegory. Since my
"paranoia" contains more humor than his, I appeal
to a less morbid audience.
Kafka's "There is hope, but not for us,"
definitely appeals to a darker sense of humor.
How do you maintain a sense of optimism?
Pessimism seems to me a luxury I can't afford.
For instance, at age four, I became crippled with
polio for the first time, and got cured, or mostly
cured, by the Kenny method. Pessimism just
would not have helped at any stage in my therapy.
We don't walk on our legs but on our will, as the
Sufis say.
At 69, the damaged muscles quit on me and I
got crippled a second time. Once again, pessimism
and whining would not have helped.
My second partial cure proceeded nicely for
four years --until last month, when I suddenly
landed on the floor and stayed there conscious but
241
unable to move a muscle, for 30 hours before my
daughter found me and called an ambulance.
Pessimism has great value if you want the
praise of New York intellectuals, but I prefer to
fight my battles rather than whine about them. I'll
probably never get reviewed in the bon ton literary
journals, but I might get into the Guinness Book of
World Records as the first man to learn to walk
four times.
You mentioned the Kenny method for polio
treatment. How did your early encounter with
an "unorthodox" cure lead you to question
"orthodoxy"?
Well, I grew up with hard evidence -- every
step I took -- that the Kenny method worked, while
all the Experts continued to denounce her as a
quack and a charlatan. That did not encourage
ardent faith in Experts....
And did that lead into Maybe Logic?
242
Partially, but it could have led to a single
heresy -- the Kenny method -- in a brain otherwise
still confined to dogmatism.
I know many people like that-- they believe in
one unorthodox idea, but remain stuck in either/or
logic. Maybe Logic came from reading some
scientific radicals [John von Neumann, Anatole
Rapoport and Alfred Korzybski], plus some
Buddhists.
That includes von Neumann's three-valued
logic [true, false, maybe], Rappoport's four-valued
logic [true, false, indeterminate, meaningless],
Korzybski's multi-valued logic [degrees of
probability] and also Mahayana Buddhist
paradoxical logic [it "is" A; it "is" not A; it "is"
both A and not A; it "is" neither A nor not A]. But,
as an extraordinarily stupid fellow, I can't use such
systems until I reduce them to terms a simple mind
like mine can handle, so I just preach that we'd all
think and act more sanely if we had to use
"maybe" a lot more often. Can you imagine a
243
world with Jerry Falwell hollering "Maybe Jesus
'was' the son of God and maybe he hates Gay
people as much as I do" -- or every tower in Islam
resounding with "There 'is' no God except maybe
Allah and maybe Mohammed is his prophet"?
How does Quantum Psychology offer a counter-
viewpoint to that kind of anxious grasping at
what you've called "fictional certainties"?
Quantum Psyche offers a variety of linguistic
reforms that condition the mind against premature
closure. Some of these techniques come from
General Semantics, some from Nuero-Linguistic
Programming, and some from Buddhism. These
techniques used consistently over a period of fifty
years have made me, I dare say, a lot less stupid
and a lot less frightened than my condition in the
1950s. Those not as dumb as me can learn even
faster.
What do you think explains the current
244
resurgence of "faith-based" worldviews?
The robber barons imported "cheap labor"
from Europe in the late 19th Century. In other
words, they flooded us with an ocean of ignorant
and superstitious people, who could not
understand research-based organizations but
formed an ideal market for faith-based con artists.
Do you see any deeper explanation behind it,
other than faith-based worldviews being the
dominant mode of thinking for those currently
in power?
The acceleration factor in information systems
[documented by Korzybski and Shannon] means
that social changes happen faster and faster every
generation. People not trained in Maybe Logic feel
more and more confused, which leads to anxiety,
which means they'll swallow any line of hogwash
if it promises some certitude in a world they can't
understand.
245
Does it seem to you that other countries have
more fully embraced ideas present in Quantum
Psychology than has America?
I would not claim that, but the civilized world
in general has shown much less hostility to
research-based groups and has no Bush-style
revival of faith-based groups.
How does the Guns and Dope Party fit in to
American politics?
Our platform has 3 major planks:
1. Free access to guns for those who want
them; no guns forced on those who don't want
them [Quakers,Amish, pacifists etc.]
2. Free access to drugs for those who want
them; no drugs forced on those who don't want
them [Christian Scientists, homeopaths, Natural
hygienists etc.]
3. Equal rights for ostriches. (for further
details see gunsanddope.com)
246
What do you see for the future, in the short
term? In the long term?
In the short term, more power by faith-based
organizations. In the long term, the eventual
triumph of research-based organizations.
Inquisitions, whether by popes or presidents, only
slow progress in limited areas. They never stop it.
Stem-cell research, for instance, still moves along
rapidly, overseas in the civilized world.
In Reality is What You Can Get Away With, you
wrote, "The right wing will have nightmares in
the late '90s that will make the 62 Satanism
pan ics o f 1982-1993 seem sedate by
comparison." How much of the current political
environment would you attribute to the
inevitable right-wing response to that
nightmare, and how much to "Future Shock"
in general?
"Future shock" started with the first stone axe,
bu t due t o t he acce l e ra t i on fac to r, i t
247
discombobulates more people every decade. When
the civilized world, where research-based
organizations will soon start curing everything
with stem cells, our faith-based organizations will
want the U.S. to declare war on damn near
everybody.
248
BRUTALITY
The Sexual Sadists Of Calaveras County
Joseph L. Flatley
Officer Daniel Wright thought he was
answering a routine call, a misdemeanor
shoplifting. Soon police would learn that Leonard
Lake and his partner Charles Ng had raped,
tortured and killed at least twelve – maybe as
many as twenty-five – men, women and children
in the mountains north east of San Francisco.
Officer Wright approached a young Asian
man who’d stolen a vice. The man – later
identified as Charles Ng – took flight, disappearing
on foot into traffic. His bearded companion, who
251
seemed older than his identification indicated,
apologized and tried to pay for the vice.
Suspicious, Officer Wright conducted a search of
their car, a 1980 Honda Prelude. In the trunk he
discovered a .22 caliber handgun outfitted with an
illegal silencer. He brought the man in for
questioning. Soon, police traced the Honda’s
registration to Paul Cosner, who had gone missing
in San Francisco nine months earlier, and found
bloodstains on the front seat. When they
questioned the suspect about the blood, he asked
for a pen, paper, and a glass of water.
“Are you going to write a confession?”
“No, just a note to my wife.”
With his handcuffs removed, the man
scribbled a short note and placed it in his shirt
pocket. He then identified himself as Leonard
Lake, a fugitive wanted by the FBI. Then his eyes
rolled back. As officers watched, he began to
convulse. Lake had swallowed the two cyanide
capsules hidden under his lapel; he never regained
252
consciousness, dying in the hospital a few days
later. “I love you,” the note in his pocket read.
“Please forgive me. I forgive you. Please tell
Mama, Fern, and Patty I’m sorry.”
The bizarre suicide led police to Claralyn
“Cricket” Balasz, a teacher’s aide and Lake’s ex-
wife – the two had met while working at a
renaissance fair near San Francisco. She took
authorities to the remote cabin Lake had rented
with Charles Ng. The two self-styled “survivalists”
believed in an imminent nuclear holocaust. To
prepare, they’d built a bunker and filled it with
guns and food.
Investigators found a bedroom torture
chamber fitted with chains, shackles and hooks. In
a number of underground prison cells, they
discovered video tapes Lake and Ng had made of
their “sex slaves” – women they had tortured and
sexually abused before killing them. Police
estimated that at least twenty-five people died on
253
the property, including Lake’s best friend, two co-
workers of Ng’s, and two entire families.
Among the evidence were Lake’s voluminous
personal journals. From these, and from interviews
with people close to him, we begin to understand
Lake’s overwhelming misogyny. “The perfect
woman is totally controlled,” he wrote. “There is
no sexual problem with a submissive woman. Only
pleasure and contentment.” While his “end times”
philosophy gave Lake an excuse for his sadistic
brutality, at the most basic level he was a textbook
case of what psychologists call a “sexual sadist.”
At an early age, the sexual sadist begins to
retreat from reality. It is hard to say why, exactly,
though there is typically a history of both physical
and sexual abuse. A percentage of these criminals
also have a history of head trauma. The sadist’s
sexual impulse becomes intertwined with an
intense desire to inflict pain; as this desire grows,
so does the need to express it through elaborate
254
and grotesque fantasies.
At first, the sexual sadist will pursue his
fantasies with a willing person: a prostitute,
perhaps, or in the case of Lenny Lake, his wife,
who during their marriage participated in the
S&M-themed movies he wrote and directed. But
when the fantasy inevitably wears thin, the
irrepressible sadistic impulse finds other outlets.
As Mary Ellen O’Toole, a profiler for the National
Center for Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico,
Virginia, describes in Jim Fielder’s book Slow
Death: “once the predators start forcing
themselves on unwilling women, they continue to
repeat the same brutalizing rituals over and over
until they are caught.”
The sexual sadist is hopelessly miswired; he
has become conditioned to demand whatever the
pleasure of brutality, and Lake’s survivalist
philosophy merely enabled him to justify his
sexual sadism. Healthy human minds need self-
respect as much as healthy human bodies need
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food and water; if he couldn’t find self respect in
the real world, Lake would find it in his fantasy
world. As he put it, he would live life “with death
in my pocket and fantasy my goal.”
“The picture that finally emerged,” wrote
Colin Wilson in The History of Murder, “was of a
man who spent most of his time living in a world
of fantasy, who indulged in grandiose daydreams
of success without any realistic attempt to put
them into practice.” Lake lived a fantasy in
which he and Ng would be the only survivors of
the coming nuclear holocaust. What sort of state
was he in if he could find “nuclear winter”
preferable to his life?
Joel Norris, in Serial Killers, writes that “[in]
his final journal he described the unraveling of his
life after he moved to Blue Mountain Road [the
site of the compound]. His dreams of success had
eluded him, he admitted to himself that his boasts
of heroic deeds in Vietnam were all delusions, and
the increasing number of victims he was burying
256
in the trench behind his bunker only added to his
unhappiness. Lake had reached the final stage of
the serial murder syndrome: he realized that he had
come to a dead end with nothing but his own
misery to show for it.”
Lake’s partner, Charles Ng, fled to Calgary,
where he was arrested in another shoplifting
incident. After more than four years in Canadian
custody he was finally extradited.
Ng was something of an expert at delaying his
trial, and it wasn’t until June of 1999 – fifteen
years after his crimes – that he was found guilty of
eleven murders and sentenced to death. He is
currently on death row in California.
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Snuffocation
Matt Stroud
We were confident that right and truth
would prevail, and I would be acquitted
and we would devote the rest of our lives
working to create a justice system here in
the United States. The guilty verdict has
strengthened that resolve. But as we’ve
discussed our plans to expose the warts
of our legal system, people have said,
“why bother,” “no one cares,” “you’ll
look foolish.” 60 Minutes, 20/20, the
American Civil Liberties Union, Jack
Anderson and others have been
259
publicizing cases like yours for years,
and it doesn’t bother anyone... (the final
words of R. “Budd” Dwyer)
Robert “Budd” Dwyer was a state treasurer of
Pennsylvania who, on January 22, 1987, killed
himself during a press conference on live
television. It’s something you might’ve seen
randomly on the internet, or in The Many Faces of
Death, Part 6, or… somewhere else.
Story goes, Dwyer was scheduled for a court
appearance on January 23, 1987. He was to appear
before a federal judge to face charges of bribery
and conspiracy to commit fraud. If convicted, he
faced up to 55 years in prison, a fine of up to
$300,000, and the loss of his position in state
government.
On the day before his court appearance, at the
press conference, he insisted on his innocence, on
the hypocrisy of his government – “as we’ve
discussed our plans to expose the warts of our
legal system, people have said, ‘why bother,’ ‘no
260
one cares.’” – and then he handed papers to his
staff. In a matter of seconds, he pulled a .357
Magnum revolver from a manila envelope, and
shot himself in the mouth.
I’m thinking about this on a Sunday night in
2006.
I’m standing in falling snow on an uncovered
stoop just off Eighth Avenue in Homestead, PA.
I’m wondering about Dwyer’s wife – where she
went the night he killed himself. Did she cry? How
forcefully? Had she been expecting it? I wonder
about this. I wonder about the ensuing cleanup
after Dwyer killed himself. After the media fled,
who mopped up? I wonder about his kids and their
lives, and how they were affected. And I’m lost in
t h e s e t h o u g h t s , t h i n k i n g a b o u t t h e
commercialization of his death and how it’s been
distributed over and over again for profit. And, as
I’m thinking about this, I realize that, without full
consent from my brain, my index finger is actually
ringing the doorbell to a house that may or may
261
not contain a living person who may or may not
have a video tape documenting the actual murder
of a human being. I am looking for a snuff film.
And I’m wondering if I’ll find it.
Earlier that week, I had placed an ad on
Craigslist1 looking for “ rare and unique
pornography.” In the ad, I sort of referenced snuff.
I wrote: “I’m mostly interested in locating
extremely rare films and, if you got ‘em, films
where people are brutally murdered.”
This was not smooth, I know. But considering
1Craigslist, if you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple years (as I tend to), is an online classified ads resource. The following is from New York Magazine: “Craigslist.org is changing everything. A simple and free online classified-ad service started by the gnomish Craig Newmark in San Francisco [in 1995], Craigslist is (a) where young urban people conduct much of the traffic of their lives, including renting apartments, finding lost pets, and getting laid in the middle of the day, and is (b) thereby destroying classified revenues for big-city newspapers, which are already in crisis, and so it has become (c) the symbol of the transformation of the information industry.”
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what a snuff film is,2 I couldn’t quite think of a
better way to explain what I was looking for
without getting too windy… or too weird. It’s
debatable whether or not I succeeded.
More background: I had scheduled three
interviews for that week, on consecutive days,
after work, all with “collectors” who had implied
that they owned vintage movies, and nothing
more. Via e-mail, when I said I was writing an
article for a magazine, they all asked to remain
anonymous. This was the third of those interviews.
The first was with a tattoo shop owner who
collected fake snuff – movies like Guinea Pig:
Flower of Flesh and Blood, Cannibal Holocaust,
and the more recent Meat for Satan’s Icebox,
which I watched and came to the following
conclusion: Fake snuff is often pretty dumb.3
2It does not, necessarily, have anything to do with sex.3From Video Universe: “A slaughterhouse in the town of Satan grinds its meat from human prey in this brutal shocker. A teenage couple wind up there after some unfortunate events occur in their lives,
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The second interview was scheduled and
cancelled, but I later found the potential
interviewee’s website, and noticed that he mostly
specialized in early 60s nudie mags.
So anyway, I’m staring into this house
through a screen door and a broken window and
I’m rubbing my hands together, shaking my head,
wondering why I’m here. I hope no one answers
the door…
But I know someone will. Because, inside, I
see that there’s a black man rocking back and forth
in a chair facing away from me, next to a kitchen
with tile and cabinets.4 He’s watching television –
a football game – but I can’t tell who’s playing.
but the tragedy is only just beginning as they look on in horror at the deviants who greet them in Satan!”4Remember Videodrome? It’s a David Cronenberg film about a cable TV operator (Max Renn) who discovers a Snuff broadcast on Channel 83. Max initially thinks the broadcast is based out of Malaysia. He later finds out it’s based in Pittsburgh – where I am, right now, looking for Snuff. HAHAHA! Haha! Ha. Oh, coincidence.
264
In a second, he’ll stand up and keep his eyes
on the television (walking backwards, trying to
catch one final play before he answers the door).
But when he does this, he’ll get tripped up, and
he’ll accidentally step on what looks like a pink
and yellow stuffed animal on the ground behind
him. That’s when he’ll bump his head on one of
the cabinets, clumsy, like he’s on a sitcom, trying
to keep his balance. In pain, he’ll yell loud… but
I… I am totally detached. I won’t care if he’s hurt
or not. He’s in there; I’m out here. But as he
approaches, it begins to hit me: I am not a fetishist.
I am not sure why I’m here. This is all a very
elaborate sociology project. I’ll be too scared to
think. I’ll be too confused to move. And I’ll be too
shocked to laugh as he staggers toward the door,
swearing, holding his head in pain…
But, again, I don’t know this yet. I don’t know
anything at this point. All I see is a television, a
huge black man, a white door and brightly-colored
stuffed animals.
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“Snuff” is defined as “a filmed account of an
actual murder, specifically commissioned,
recorded and supplied for the gratification of the
paying spectator(s).”5
The concept has been attributed to Ed
Sanders, who wrote a book called The Family: The
Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack
Battalion. “Brutality film” was Sanders’ initial
term for snuff, as a concept. The expression “snuff
film” was later mentioned in the book – an
extension of the word meaning “to die” (“snuff
it”).
I n The Family, Sanders claims that the
Mansons actually filmed murders for personal
entertainment purposes. But this is uncorroborated
– none of these Manson films have ever been
proven to exist.
For that matter, no snuff film (under the FBI’s
5David Kerekes and David Slater, Killing For Culture: An Illustrated History Of The Death Film From Mondo To Snuff (London: Creation Books, 1995)
266
most stringent definition of the term) has ever been
proven to exist. In the past quarter century, there
have been countless rumors that such films have
been produced,6 but none have actually surfaced.
Which arguably makes snuff an urban legend – an
interesting rumor – and nothing more.
So the question then becomes: Why is snuff,
as a concept, so widely discussed, so often the
topic of (generally bad) films, articles and
discussions? Why is snuff so inherently
interesting? And, more importantly, since it seems
so obvious that someone, somewhere, a t some
point would’ve arranged and filmed a murder, why
6Examples include, but are not limited to 1) John W. Decamp’s The Franklin Coverup, which reports that a man named Paul Bonacci filmed himself raping an underage boy. He further alleges that the boy was murdered on film, and that he and a different boy were forced to have sex with his dead body. 2) In 1982, Susan Hamlin, a resident of El Dorado Hills, outside Fresno, California, intimated that members of a Satanic cult tortured her for three weeks straight. She claimed that her abductors had a stash of child pornography and Snuff films. Neither claim was proven.
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have none been found? How can we possibly
accept that none have been made? Are we missing
something?
It's after I’m invited into the collector’s home
– after I find out his name’s George; after I’ve
shaken his hand; after I’ve told him my name –
that I become truly aware of how ridiculous this
pursuit is. I am not in a movie. I am not a private
investigator hired by a rich widow. I’m not even
getting paid. And, beyond that, if snuff exists, will
some random peon (me) be able to publicly extract
the first ever real snuff film from an arbitrary
private collector (George)? Answer: not likely.
I know this.
It’s at this point where I start to understand
why a snuff film has never been found. First: if
one surfaced, chances are, the director would be in
some deep, deep shit – in prison for life or hanged.
No one wants to set the standard for the breed of
punishment that crime would cause. Second: if
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y o u have one of these films and you haven’t
shared it yet, you’re probably not going to share it
or flaunt it to anyone you don’t completely trust.
And so on. I have thought these things out. I’m
aware that, chances are, no one’s going to show
me a snuff film for the asking…
But my larger, more abstract goal, is to find
out why the so-called Snuff Urban Legend
continues to surface in our society. My plan is to
basically act dumb, visit with avid pornography
collectors, ask to see a snuff film, see how they
react, then talk about the concept of snuff and the
dehumanization these kinds of films represent
(regardless of whether they exist or not). It’s all
supposed to lead into a discussion about the way
we look at (and share our experiences of) life.
And, I’ve come up with this whole grand scheme
here about the state of violence in America, about
our unending, underlying national pursuit toward
hidden vices and veiled emotions and blah blah
blah, and it all seems workable in my head, but
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George is heading toward me, so it’s time to perk
up.
He answers the door politely, laughing,
holding his bald head. “God damn man, I hope you
didn’t see that.”
I smile and tell him: “I didn’t see you hit your
head on the kitchen cabinet.”
He laughs and invites me in, offers to take my
coat. We exchange brief pleasantries – “It’s damn
cold out there,” et cetera – before he asks what he
can do for me.
“Actually, I guess I’ll just cut to the chase
here.” I hand him my coat. “Do you have a snuff
film I can watch or buy?”
He stops. “What?” He’s not a big man –
maybe 5’9”, 160 pounds. From what I can tell,
he’s alone in the house, though that doesn’t explain
the stuffed animals.
“I’m not a cop or anything.”
“You’re askin’ me if I got snuff movies?”
“Well… yeah.”
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“Real ones?”
“Yeah. I mean… I realize it’s illegal. I’m just
more or less interested to see one. I figure that—”
George shakes his head no, stops me. “That’s
not what I collect.”
“Oh, I know. I was just curious if—”
“No, man. I’m into sex. Not murder.” He says
this slowly, deliberately.
I say “Oh, alright,” but I guess my tone
indicates something close to disbelief because his
gaze quickly turns cold.
“What do I look like to you,” he says. “A
killer? Someone who watches killers”
“No, I just—”
“You just what.” He’s angry now. “You think
just ‘cause I collect movies I’m into some sick shit
like that? Man, that’s fucked up. And that’s not
what I’m into.” He pauses for a second to gather
himself, reaches up and rubs his scalp again.
“Listen. If you was lookin’ for somethin’ like
that you shoulda told me before you showed up
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and I’da let you know I didn’t have nothin’.”
“Yeah,” I say, realizing that I have misjudged
the issue. My confusion is based in something very
simple, fraudulent and invalid. All film, literature,
and art, attempts to take us to a place we’ve never
been before. And since I assume that anal sex,
bondage, masochism and even (what I would
consider) torture will be prominently featured in
his collection, I assume that, as a collector, he will
be interested in what I understand as an extension
of those acts – murder. This is untrue. This is not a
generalization one can make. What I don’t
understand right now is that, for this collector –
and for many collectors – there is a rigid barrier
between what I consider dehumanization and
killing. Regardless of the victim’s concession. And
there’s also, along those lines, the implication that
violent pornography doesn’t necessari ly
dehumanize; there is always the probable
possibility that, not only do actors agree to their
work, but they also find joy in acts considered
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taboo – that they derive pleasure from abuse,
torture, bondage. Whether this is a legal or moral
issue…? Well, that’s debatable. And I’m not going
there. But what’s not debatable is that everyone
has varying interests. And that you can almost
never tell what’s appropriate and what’s not. And
after going through all this in my head, all I could
muster for George was a pitiful “Yeah, I know.”
“You do now,” he says. Then he adds: “And
don’t you know that if I had one, I sure as hell
wouldn’t show it to you?”
He laughs after he says this. I’ve got nothing
to say in response.
“Now do you want to see what I got or what?”
Movies are a flexible medium. It’s
easy to simulate death on film, which
is partly why people think snuff films
exist. They’ve seen simulated
versions and believe they’re genuine.
I think it’s conceivable these films
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exist, but whether they do or not is
less important than the public’s belief
that they do – their willingness to
believe in an evil fantasy. That’s
what’s interesting here. Paul
Schrader, director of Hardcore.
According to Killing for Culture, there are
fairly strict definitions for movies that feature
actual death on screen. They are:
The Death Film.
Centers on the depiction of dead and
dying people … for shock value. The
difference between this and the Snuff
film, is that in the death film the victims
would have died anyway, (i.e. an
execution, for instance.) the filming
having no bearing on the act.
Examples: The Zapruder film of John F.
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Kennedy’s assassination; autopsy films such as
The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes; driver
education films; incidents where people commit
suicide live in front a camera (like the case of
Budd Dwyer).7 These films don’t “count” as snuff, per
7More info on Dwyer (because it’s fucking interesting). The following is from Wikipedia.com: “During the early 1980s, employees of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania overpaid millions of dollars in FICA taxes. As a result, the Commonwealth began requesting bids for the task of calculating refunds to each employee. One firm, California-based Computer Technology Associates, was owned by a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania native named John Torquato Jr. Torquato used his Harrisburg-area connections and a series of bribes to obtain the contract, worth $4.6 million. An anonymous memo then reached the governor’s office, describing the bribes that had taken place. In late 1986, Dwyer was charged as having agreed to accept a related kickback of $300,000. Dwyer never actually received any money. A plea bargain made for Torquato and William Smith [Torquato’s attorney] required them to testify against Dwyer. This coupled with the government’s refusal to name unindicted co-conspirators in the case, made it difficult for Dwyer to defend himself, though the unindicted co-conspirators are believed to have been
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se, because, again, they are accidental – the death
is not choreographed specifically for film.
Republican staffers who ran the Dauphin County Republican Party. During this time, the local United States Attorney offered Dwyer a plea bargain that carried a five year maximum sentence in exchange for a one-count guilty plea, resignation, and cooperation in the investigation. Dwyer refused the offer, and was later convicted but continued to vehemently protest his innocence. Under state law, Dwyer would continue to serve as state treasurer until his sentencing…” He killed himself before this could happen.
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The Mondo Movie.8
Contains general documentary
material from around the world,
generally aimed at shocking the
audience with scandal. As the years
progressed, competing film makers
had to out-scandal the competition.
This one-upmanship led to the
inevitable inclusion of already-dead
bodies, and ultimately actual death
on screen.
8 Also from Wikipedia: “The fad started with Mondo Cane (1962) by Gualtiero Jacopetti and proved quite popular. Mondo films are often easily recognized by name, as even English language Mondo films included the term often “Mondo” in their titles. Over the years the film makers wanted to top each other in shock value in order to draw in audiences. Cruelty to animals, accidents, tribal initiation rites and surgeries are a common feature of a typical Mondo. Much of the action is also staged, even though the film makers may claim their goal to document only “the reality”. Today, Mondo films are generally considered to be camp.”
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Examples: The Mondo Cane Collection,
Faces of Death, Shocking Asia, Part 1, Real TV.
These movies are not technically snuff because 1)
they often feature campy, fake representations of
death (or other “shocking” topics like Strip Clubs
for Fatties and Granny Sex), and 2) the “real”
death they present is recorded rather than arranged.
The goal of these films is to elicit shock before
you yawn and turn off your DVD player (because
you are completely detached).
The difference between a Death Film and a
Mondo Movie is, essentially, that Mondo is made
to be feature length. Mondo is a collection – it is
meant to be put together and sold in a neat little
death package you can show at parties. Mondo
movies are often comprised of many Death Films.
The sad part is that one can imagine the
reaction to Mondo films or Death films wouldn’t
be much different than the reaction to true snuff. In
terms of genre and topic, the discrepancies are
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minimal – “Death Accidentally Caught On Film,
Then Collected Into A Movie And Sold To
Blockbuster Video” (Mondo) versus “Orchestrated
Death Funded By Some Very Rich Person For
Personal Gratification” (Snuff).
The Snuff Film.
We’ve been over this.
Examples: Supposedly none.
Ken Lanning, cult expert at the FBI training
academy at Quantico, Virginia, said: “I’ve not
found one single documented case of a snuff film
anywhere in the world. I’ve been searching for 20
years, talked to hundreds of people. There’s plenty
of once-removed sightings, but I’ve never found a
credible personality who personally saw one.”9
It should be mentioned here that we are
absolutely not, as a matter of course, considering
9Ibid.
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feature films like Snuff10 and 8mm11 as anything
even close to “real snuff.” These films help
establish the concept of snuff in popular
consciousness,12 but they’re fiction – they help fuel
the belief that real snuff exists when, from all
indications, it doesn’t. Their existence is more
10Tagline: “A film that could only be made in South America, where life is CHEAP!” Directed mostly by an unaccredited Michael Findlay, Snuff began life as a cheap Argentinean feature entitled Slaughter (1971). Allan Shackleton (head of distributor Monarch Releasing Corporation) added a coda directed by porn filmmaker Carter Steven, in which a female cast member is seemingly murdered on camera.11“Joel Schumacher’s excrementally piss-poor thriller … finds Nick Cage farting around in his most stylish disheveled chic as a private investigator attempting to track down a ‘real’ Snuff movie. This is a well-trodden path for low-budget, exploitation B-flicks, and anyone who’s seen such straight-to-video bilge as Final Cut, Fatal Frames, Cutting Room Floor, et al will already be familiar with the material.” – Mark Kermode, BBC film critic12Neil Jackson, “The cultural construction of Snuff” (Kinoeye online, http://kinoeye.org/03/05/jackson05.php)
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fueled by, as Shrader says, “[the public’s]
willingness to believe in an evil fantasy.”
But this brings us to an interesting point:
That word: fantasy. We want to believe snuff
exists because Snuff exists in our fantasies. Why?
Because, as previously discussed, you can look at
snuff as the logical extension of what all film,
literature, and art, attempts to do – take us to a
place we’ve never been before. Death is the final
chasm of the unknown. A century ago, people used
to believe that the eyes captured the last moments
of the dead person’s life; detectives would
photograph the eyes of murder victims in hopes of
catching a glimpse of the killer. It seems like snuff
films are similar, in an attempt to catch death at his
appointed errands. In controlling the moment of
death, snuff attempts to bridge that gap between
life and death. We cling to this – this glimpse of
final terror; this concept of evil (and life) captured
in an instant.
And movies like 8mm are produced because
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we can not look away from that ultimate human
snapshot. And, to go further, we’re infatuated with
the idea of truly evil humanity – with a person
willing to kill without guilt. And yet, 8mm is a
perfect representation of how Hollywood deals
with America’s penchant for horror and death:
Specifically, Hollywood is forced to turn 8mm
into a battle of “good” versus “evil.” Nicholas
Cage is the “good guy.” He has an attractive wife
and a small child. He is hired to find the “evil
man” who created a Snuff film for an old widow’s
dead husband. The story unfolds, and you can
probably guess the ending (I’ll give you a hint:
Everything works out just fine). Main point: The
good guy is a necessary evil – he allows us to
explore the more interesting character (who
happens to be “bad”).
But real Snuff theoretically eliminates the
“good guy” from the equation. And it eliminates
sympathy, too. It eliminates pathos and
consideration and condemnation and politics and
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money and CGI and… everything emotive a
director or production company can potentially
offer. In theory, it brings the viewer to a point
where she or he is forced to supply their own
emotions. And that might be the scariest (and most
alluring) aspect of Snuff – that there is not an
emotional template in place for the viewer.
Religion and social mores tell us that, when we see
someone killed, we should react with horror and
revulsion, disgust and dread.13 But how would you
honestly react if you saw someone really killed on
screen? What if you weren’t prepared to see it?
13All you need is that one moment where one person snaps; where one person decides that all of our most revered morals – I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, you shall have no other gods besides Me; Do not make a sculpted image or any likeness of what is in the heavens above; You shalt not swear falsely by the name of the Lord; Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy; Honor your father and your mother; You shall not murder; You shall not have sexual relations with another man’s wife; You shall not kidnap; You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor; You shall not covet your neighbor’s house – are worthless and meaningless and vapid.
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What if you didn’t know it was coming? What if
you were alone? What if you knew their death was
commissioned?
Would you find it hideous? Would you turn
away? Or would you be curious? I don’t mean to
imply that you’re a sick individual, I’m just
saying: Would you want to see what happens at the
moment of someone’s death? Would you want to
watch the victim’s eyes turn back into his head,
knowing that you had nothing to do with it – that
you were completely innocent; that you had
randomly stumbled across a video of his untimely
demise? Would you want to know the victim’s last
words? Would you want to know his name? His
last thoughts? His last inclinations? Would you be
curious about these things? Would you wonder if
he had done something wrong? If he had done
something stupid? If he had deserved it? If he
hadn’t deserved it?
Would you rewind it and watch it again?14
14And I guess I should have some sort of conclusion to offer here – some answer to these
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Nicholas Evan Berg was a 26-year-old
American businessman. He sought work in Iraq
during the U.S.-led occupation. He was captured
and beheaded in May 2004 by Islamic militants.
His decapitation was the first in a series of
questions; some sort of direction you should go; some rationale for why murder happens, or why we wonder if it happens on film… Or why we’re so obsessed. But I really don’t have anything concrete to offer you. Because, to me, there is no tangible solution. And I find myself awake at 4:30 in the morning, knowing that I have to finish this article as soon as I can so I can get just one hour of sleep before I go to work; and I’m trying to understand why these things happen, and I’m surfing MySpace and I’m stuck in webs and webs of links leading to people from my high school – people I haven’t seen in years – and I’m wondering as I pass by each one of them, realizing that we’ve all taken the exact same direction in life – high school, college, confusion, alcoholism, acceptance, settling – I’m wondering how much it would really matter if one of us died, or was killed, brutally, and who it would affect. Would it affect me? From The Third Man: Martins: Have you ever seen any of your victims? Harry Lime: You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things.
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similar killings of foreign hostages in Iraq. Berg’s
beheading received worldwide attention, not only
because it was filmed, but also because the footage
was widely distributed on the Internet. The
rationale for the murder? His killers claimed that
his death was carried out to avenge abuses of Iraqi
prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison.15
Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays.
Only, I’m thinking, if I was killed. And so I’m left here in this story, wondering how Snuff films happen, and then, in a similar moment, wondering why more don’t happen. And it leaves me nowhere, questioning, confused, hopeless, wanting to give you something more. And I wait for that to happen... I wait for that moment. And then it hits me.15For the purposes of this article, we are assuming that the Nick Berg decapitation video was genuine. The following quote ran in La Voz de Aztlan, five
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His death gives us much to consider – a lot to
throw into this stew of information. Searching for
a Snuff film seems a lot like waiting for some sort
of depraved Messiah: After so long, after so much
debate, it’s almost as if you’re not sure what
you’re looking for. And when something remotely
genuine comes along, you’re conditioned to
believe you’re looking at a fake, simply because
days after the Berg film was released: “There is now ample evidence that the video showing the decapitation of 26 year old Nicholas Berg of Philadelphia by purported Al Qaeda members is a complete fraud. The real Nick Berg may or may not be dead, but the heavily edited video is nothing but a fake. This is the conclusion of La Voz de Aztlan after a frame by frame analysis and the conclusion of hundreds of film, medical and other experts world wide who downloaded, viewed and analyzed the video as well. Literally thousands of persons world wide requested the video, which is rapidly disappearing from the Internet, after our news service published “Nick Berg decapitation video declared a fraud by medical doctor” on Wednesday May 12 and which was linked by other independent news services on the World Wide Web.” Its disputed existence well fits the Snuff discussion, doesn’t it?
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you’ve built up the moral and semantic
stipulations so high that they’re almost impossible
to reach.
Could Nick Berg represent the first real snuff
film?
Here’s the definition we set earlier:
“‘Snuff’ is defined as ‘a filmed account of an
actual murder, specifically commissioned,
recorded and supplied for the gratification of the
paying spectator(s).’”
“a filmed account of an actual murder” (Nick
Berg was killed on camera.)
“specifically commissioned” (We are lead to
believe his death was choreographed for filmed
production.)
“recorded and supplied for the gratification of
the paying spectator(s).” (This is tricky. Who is the
paying spectator? On a base level, it would
probably be The Guy Who Filmed It. But because
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of its political implications,16 because it was so
widely distributed, because it was so widely
discussed, the paying spectator becomes… you.
And me. And everyone else who saw it. I know
this because it was posted online.17 And because,
when released, it received substantial coverage
across mediums. So it was used to sell
advertisements. It acted as a top story, a main
headline, a way to capture your eyes and ears. And
I want you to consider this. Consider that the
internet brings the search for Snuff to a new level.
There are more avenues available today for
personal thought distribution than ever before.
Anyone with a few dollars can get online and
share. And while this is generally constructive,
giving us more information to consider, affording
16Remember when Fox News commentators suggested everyone should see it, to know the horror of what “we’re fighting” [in Iraq]?17 On May 11, 2004, the website of Islamist group Muntada al-Ansar allegedly broadcast the Nick Berg video with the opening title of “Abu Musa’b al-Zarqawi slaughters an American.”
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us the opportunity to learn more, it also expands
the already sizeable avenues we have for viewing
mayhem and terror and evil. If the internet didn’t
exist, would Nick Berg have been killed?
Probably, but maybe not. The beauty of the
internet is that it’s virtually boundless – it
transcends continental barriers. Would his killers
have bothered to kill Nick Berg on tape if they had
merely planned on sending it to a television
network? Again, speculation – maybe. But it’s
interesting to contemplate – maybe the web’s
enormity encouraged Berg’s killers to produce
something vile, just because they could. Just
because the internet allows us to see it, rewind it,
tell our friends about it. And so, yes, I suppose it
could be argued that, if no one were looking at the
internet, this video would’ve gone hidden, unseen.
But because so many people wanted the
gratification of seeing Nick Berg decapitated by
masked men – because we want to be taken to a
place we’ve never been before … well, that makes
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it significant. That makes it real. That makes it
Snuff.
…because we so desperately want
[snuff] to exist and there is no way to
prove that it doesn’t exist, snuff – for
all emotional and intellectual means
and purposes – exists. And it only
stands to reason that the existence of
a demand – particularly a demand
over two decades old – has already
or will eventually lead to a creation
of a product to fill that demand.
(“The Morbid Urge,” Daniel Kraus,
Gadfly, July/August 2000)
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Snuff is the Frankenstein monster of
the media age, the boogeyman that
lurks at the crossroads of unchecked
media freedom and commercial
demand. Each time a new technology
makes questionable entertainment
more accessible and moral standards
are questioned, the monster is
awakened and the angry villagers
ignite their torches. With the new
world of the web, the myth seems
ready for an upgrade. (“Final Cuts:
The History of Snuff Films,” Geoff
Smith, Fringe Underground)
So is Nick Berg the easy answer? Yeah, I
guess he is. It definitely would’ve been more fun
to battle George, the Big Black Guy with the
Stuffed Animals and the Porn. It would’ve been
fascinating to step into his basement and hand him
ten thousand dollars to purchase a film starring
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someone killed on tape…
But that’s the idea, isn’t it? That’s precisely to
the heart of why snuff is so captivating: because
it’s senseless; because it’s vile – because, in terms
of Western morality, it’s absolutely the worst thing
one person can do to another person. It trumps
whatever evil we’ve ascribed to terrorism or other
arguably unnecessary forms of extreme violence.
Because not only is there no sentiment behind it –
not only is the act, in theory, based on a complete
disregard for life; not only is it the ultimate
example of dehumanization – but it’s also
inherently capitalistic. It’s done, in concept, pretty
much solely for money or fame or, in the case of
Nick Berg, just to prove a point to millions of
people.
Which brings us to this:
Unfortunately, living in a society where war
and sex and celebrity dominate our headlines,
murder captures our deepest, most sheltered
interests. Why else would serial killers captivate
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audiences so thoroughly – in fictional portraits, as
well as real life? It’s because transgression,
especially towards a degree of control not afforded
ordinary members of society, always captivates.
Killers act as god.
And heartbreak sells magazines. And death is
the basis of horror films. Depravity and sadness
are the bases of heart wrenching books, soap
operas, even reality television….
Unfortunately, what we’re dealing with here –
with snuff – is potentially the idea that anything
can be bested, and that we, as a society, constantly
desire to leap into the next level of evil – to not
only kill someone, but to film it as it happens; to
distribute that visual document for all to see; to not
only watch someone get hit by a train, but to see it
from their perspective, in complete, true reality.
So does Snuff exist? Yeah, I think so. But
what matters is that we’ve come to the point in our
development where you can readily access the
real, hired killing of a human being online – in
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Torrent files, or if you search hard enough on
Google – whenever you want. It also matters that
there’s a market for everything…
The screen shows five men wearing mostly
black, covered head to toe with cloth, accept for
their eyes (which we would see if the film quality
wasn’t so poor and grainy; the scene looks like it
was filmed on a cheap home camera).
In front of these five men, another man – a
prisoner, dressed in what look like orange scrubs –
sits on the ground with his feet tied together in
front of him. His hands are tied behind his back.
The man on the ground introduces himself
eight seconds into the film. He says his name is
Nick Berg. Shortly thereafter, one of the masked
men reads a pronouncement in Arabic.
After more than four minutes, one of the
masked men attacks Berg with a knife. Berg is
then surrounded; we hear screams; he is held down
and beheaded.
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Five and a half minutes into the film, the head
is presented to the camera, dripping blood. It is
then laid on a headless dead body, wearing orange
scrubs. The tape ends in coarse blackness.
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What Charlie Saw
Jesse Hicks
It was hot.
One hundred and ten degrees in the sun,
ninety-eight in the shade – Texas-hot, the sticky
end-of-summer heat rippling the morning air. As
the sun approached its apex on August 1, 1966, the
horizon blurred and shimmered, a distant
unreachable mirage. The sky was cloudless blue.
Under the Austin sky Thomas F. Eckman
walked with his girlfriend, Claire Wilson, a
freshman anthropology student at the University of
Texas at Austin. Eight months pregnant with the
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couple’s son, she’d just finished her morning class;
afterwards, the two 18 year-olds sat drinking
coffee at the Chuckwagon, the student diner and
café. Deciding they'd better put another nickel in
the parking meter, Thomas and Claire passed from
the oak-shaded perimeter of the university’s South
Mall onto the open cement of the upper terrace,
where the punishing sun awaited them.
They passed the heart of campus, the Main
Building bearing the inscription, "Ye shall know
the Truth and the Truth shall make you free."
Above them rose Paul Phillipe Cret's 307-foot
Spanish Renaissance monument to the spirit of
human achievement, the University of Texas
Tower, iconic centerpiece of the University and of
the Austin skyline.
On the Tower's 28th floor observation deck,
Charles Joseph Whitman, Eagle Scout, former
Marine, and University of Texas architecture
student, lowered a bright blue eye to the M8-4X
Leupold Scope mounted on his Remington Model
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700 bolt-action rifle.
Inside he'd left five bodies. Edna Townsley, 47,
the observation deck receptionist (mother to sons
Danny and Terry), lay unconscious and bleeding
on the floor, her skull caved in by Whitman's rifle
butt. Marguerite Lampour and Mark Gabour lay
dead in the blood-splattered stairwell, victims of
Whitman's shotgun blasts. Mark Gabour's brother,
Mike, his shoulder riddled with shot, lay
unconscious next to his critically-injured mother,
Mary. Above them, Whitman had barricaded the
28th floor door with a heavy desk and chairs.
How long he looked down from the
observation deck is uncertain. Those moments are
lost, beckoning lacunae, always slipping through
our restless sifting of history. How many students
his crosshairs passed over before settling on Claire
Wilson: this is also unknown.
Claire Wilson and Thomas Eckman held hands
as they walked. This we know. How they looked at
one another, what possible futures their eyes held
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on that end-of-summer morning, how they were
and might have been: this we do not know.
At 11:45 AM, as measured on its gold-plated,
12-foot clocks, the Tower's 17-bell carillon rang 12
times. Over the campus resounded the Westminster
Quarters, with their echoing supplication, "Lord,
through this hour/Be thou our guide/For in thy
power we do abide."
What Charles Whitman, former parishioner
and altar boy of Sacred Heart Catholic Church,
Lake Worth, Florida, thought as he heard those
chimes is unknowable. Whether, as he chambered
the 6mm Remington cartridge, his mind raced or
was still, sere and blankly serene as the Texas
badlands; whether his thoughts were collected,
methodical, or the white-noise rush of unhinged
rage; whether his actions pivoted on impulse or
calculation: these questions have no answers.
There are other answers. Other facts can be
excavated. Pfc. Whitman's United States Marine
Corps shooting score, for example: 215 out of a
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possible 250. Recognized with the degree of sharp
shooter, he was "an excellent shot who appeared to
be more accurate against moving targets."
The sun beats down on Charles Whitman as he
sights down the scope. A white headband keeps the
sweat from his eyes. The Tower clock stands at
11:48 as he takes a breath, holds it, a caesura
before beginning. He sights and slowly slides back
the trigger, exhaling with the rifle's delicate wisp
of smoke, a low, whimpering report, and lead
launched on fire spirals downward at 3,000
feet/sec, outpacing explanation, accelerating past
comprehension, meaning, toward Claire Wilson,
becoming now an electric lance moving through
her, searing its path through her hip, her stomach,
her colon and uterus before claiming its target, the
skull of her unborn son. Claire Wilson screams and
falls. Her blood pools on the hot cement, drying to
a deep crimson.
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“No se puede mirar” (“One can’t look”)
(Francisco de Goya, Disasters of War)
This is bright young Charlie, age 12, playing
piano. His limber hands dance across the white
and black keys; at each touch of his fingers a
hammer rises, striking steel strings and making
them quiver. The vibrations are inaudible as they
pass through a wooden bridge to the long, thin
soundboard. They spread through the soundboard's
mass and into the air -- the motion of quarter
notes, half notes, whole notes that begin his
reading of black-and-white marks on a page. He
sees; he translates; he acts, and there is music in
the world. This is how Charlie conjures.
The notes coalesce into a lyrical, melancholic
tune, the third movement of Claude Debussy's
Suite bergamasque for solo piano. The movement,
titled “Claire de Lune” is an Impressionist piece in
D-flat major played mostly in pp -- pianissimo,
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quietly, with tenderness. Charlie's song wanders
through the rooms of the house in middle-class
Lake Worth, Florida.
This is his father's house. Large, wood-framed,
best in the area, with impressive awnings shielding
its windows from the heat; the landscaped front
yard dotted with fruit trees and immaculately
maintained; the backyard swimming pool, the
finely furnished rooms and the upstairs apartment:
this is what Charles Adolphus “C.A” Whitman has
provided his family. He does not hesitate to remind
them of this fact.
He is a self-made man, who grew up in an
orphanage to become a driven entrepreneur. A
strict disciplinarian, he satisfies his family’s every
material need, expecting only obedience and
excellence in return. “With all three of my sons it
was ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir,’” C.A. says later, in
early August of 1966, “They minded me. The way
I looked at it, I am not ashamed of any spankings.
I don’t think I spanked enough, if you want to
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know the truth about it. I think they should have
been punished more than they were punished.”
C.A’s use of physical punishment extends to
his wife, Margaret. “I did on many occasions beat
my wife, but I loved her … I did and do have an
awful temper, but my wife was awful stubborn,
and we had some clashes over the more than
twenty-five years of our life together. I have to
admit it, because of my temper, I knocked her
around.”
This is Charlie’s family. Pictures of them hang
on nearly every wall of the house. Next to many of
those pictures hang guns, rifles mostly. “I’m a
fanatic about guns,” C.A. tells reporters, “I raised
my boys to know how to handle guns.” Charlie
and his two younger brothers, Patrick and Michael,
learn to shoot as soon as they’re physically able;
before he enters grade school Charlie has shot his
first gun. “Charlie could plug a squirrel in the eye
by the time he was sixteen,” the father boasts.
Charlie begins piano lessons at seven, just
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before enrolling at Sacred Heart Catholic Church’s
grade school. By twelve he has mastered the
instrument. In 1952, at his father’s prodding,
Charlie tries to join the Boy Scouts. Told the
minimum age to join is 11, he attends meetings
anyway. Fifteen months after his eleventh birthday,
Charlie attains the rank of Eagle Scout, having
earned 21 merit badges in just over a year. (Later
he claims to have been the youngest Eagle Scout
in the world, though no such record exists.) To
make money – and to satisfy his father’s demand
that he be financially independent – Charlie takes
on one of the largest Miami Herald paper routes in
the area. To his teachers he’s a model student with
an IQ of 138.9 – “Very Superior,” according to the
Stanford-Binet intelligence scale. He ranks in the
top 5% on national standardized tests.
For all these early accomplishment, Charlie’s
high school years are relatively undistinguished.
He’s just one of the guys by his friends’
recollections, neither particularly good nor bad,
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and not particularly memorable. Maybe a little
more eager to take a dare, a little more eager to
please. Ray Roy, a friend from Saint Ann’s High
School, later recalls Charlie’s need to impress:
“They had a tower at Saint Ann’s with some sort of
circus act. It was a real tower and someone bet him
he wouldn’t go up; we were in the tenth grade. He
went all the way to the top.” His sense of humor
tends toward the morbid, but he has normal
relationships with several girls and while not the
school’s most popular student, has no trouble
making friends. He grows into his father’s ideal,
becoming a pitcher for the high school baseball
team and manager of the football team.
But like many high school students, Charlie
slacks off in his final two years. His grades suffer;
his attendance falls. When he graduates in 1959,
his final GPA is 3.30.
To celebrate his graduation, Charlie goes out
with a group of friends and gets drunk. When he
returns home, C.A. is waiting. There’s yelling,
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violence. C.A. loses his temper. He throws Charlie
in the pool. Charlie, drunk and unable to swim,
nearly drowns. Soon after, on June 27, 1959, just
three days after his 18 th birthday, the fed-up
Charlie enlists in the U.S. Marines. This is how
Charlie escapes.
He enters the Marines, trading one system of
regimentation for another. Again Charlie finds
comfort in ceding responsibility to another, larger
force. After basic training and a stint at
Guantanamo Naval Base, Charlie qualifies for the
National Enlisted Science Education Program and
received a scholarship to the University of Texas-
Austin.
There, in February of 1960, he meets Kathy
Leissner, an education major. He would later write,
“Her eyes are like twinkling stars, they are what
fascinated me on our first meeting … I can
honestly say that she is the most versatile women I
have ever known.” This is how Charlie falls in
love. On August 1962 the two get married.
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The next four years are a strenuous time for
the newlywed Whitmans. Charlie, with no one to
instill a sense of responsibility in him, lets his
grades slip once more, and the Marines revoke his
scholarship. He finds himself back in active duty,
hating it, and missing Kathy. C.A. eventually steps
in to have Charlie’s military commitment
shortened. Charlie returns to school with a new
dedication.
Then, in early 1966, Margaret Whitman leaves
her husband. She flees to Austin, putting Charlie
between his mother and father. C.A. is enraged;
Charlie’s studies again begin to falter. At one point
he decides to abandon school completely, leave
Kathy behind, and simply bum around the country.
Only the intercession of Professor Barton Riley,
himself a former Marine, keeps him from leaving.
At Riley's house, Charlie returns to the piano.
For a long time he'd refused to play, even when
urged by family and friends. This time, though, for
whatever reason, he can’t resist. He sits down at
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the baby grand and again plays Claire de Lune.
Debussy’s movement is based on a poem by Paul
Verlaine, a stanza of which reads:
The while they celebrate in minor strain
Triumphant love, effective enterprise,
They have an air of knowing all is vain,--
And through the quiet moonlight their
songs rise
But Charlie’s notes come out all wrong. They
don’t dance, but thud loudly and too strong. Yet as
he plays, Charlie's stress seems to ease, and
Debussy's lyricism returns.
Only a few months later, on the evening of
July 31, Charlie's hands move across the keys of
his typewriter. "I don't quite understand what it is
that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to
leave some vague reason for the actions I have
recently performed," he writes. "I don't really
understand myself these days. I am supposed to be
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an average reasonable and intelligent young man.
However, lately (I can't recall when it started) I
have been the victim of many unusual and
irrational thoughts."
He mentions failed attempts at professional
help with his rising violent impulses, how he's
tried to face his demons alone and lost. He writes,
"It was after much thought that I decided to kill my
wife, Kathy, tonight after I pick her up from the
telephone company." So he does, stabbing her five
times in the chest as she sleeps. She dies instantly.
"I love her dearly, and she has been as fine a wife
to me as any man could ever hope to have." He
continues, "I intend to kill her as painlessly as
possible."
"Similar reasons provoked me to take my
mother's life also. I don't think the poor woman
has ever enjoyed life as she is entitled to." Charlie
visits his mother's apartment just after midnight on
the morning of August 1, where he strangles her
with a piece of rubber tubing. On his unfinished
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note Charlie scribbles, "8-1-66, Mon., 3:00 AM.
Both Dead."
He spends the morning preparing. He loads his
Marine footlocker with ammunition, his
Remington bolt-action rifle, a Sears 12-gauge
shotgun, a Remington 35 caliber pump-action rifle,
a M-1 30-caliber carbine, a .357 Magnum, a 9mm
Luger, and a 6.35mm Galesci-Brescia automatic
pistol. He rents a dolly and dons a pair of overalls.
As he wheels his dolly into the elevator at the UT
tower, everyone assumes he is a janitor. Vera
Palmer, the elevator attendant who would've
replaced Edna Townsley at the observation deck
45 minutes later, says to Charlie, "Your elevator is
turned off." She flips the switch to enable elevator
#2, and Charlie mumbles with a polite smile,
"Thank you, ma'am. You don't know how happy
that makes me." The elevator begins to climb.
This is how Charlie comes to his Tower.
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SOME POSSIBLE CAUSES?
[1] DRUG ABUSE AS PSYCHOLOGICAL
DETERMINANT.
Overwhelmed by a 14-credit college
schedule, his part-time job as a research
assistant, and an increasingly fractured
family life, Whitman began binging on
Dexedrine, a powerful amphetamine that
he used to stay awake, often for days at a
time. Whitman took the pills “like candy”
in order to have time to complete his
studies; perversely, the lack of sleep
ruined his concentration and he fell
further behind in his schoolwork. When
he could, he took another pill, Librium, to
help him sleep. Though it’s uncertain just
how extreme his drug use became, he
often suffered headaches, mood swings,
and extreme nervousness – his nail-biting
habit returned and worsened. He seemed
oblivious to the danger of the drugs he
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took; even unaware of the effect they’d
have on his body. Armchair pharmacists
have suggested that August 1 found
Whitman in the grip of “amphetamine
psychosis” brought on by his drug abuse.
As his bodily fluids were not
substantively analyzed during the
autopsy, evidence for this is lacking.
[2] THE TUMOR AS PSYCHOLOGICAL
DETERMINANT.
The autopsy revealed, in addition to
an “unusually thin” skull, a grayish-
yellow brain tumor 2 x 1.5 x 1 cm in
dimension just below the thalamus. The
Connally Commission, a task force
assembled by the Texas governor to
review the events of August 1, concluded,
“the relationship between the brain tumor
and Charles J. Whitman’s actions on the
last day of his life cannot be established
with clarity. However, the highly
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malignant tumor conceivably could have
contributed to his inability to control his
emotions and actions.” This verdict failed
to quell the speculation that the tumor’s
compression of the amygdaloid nucleus –
the area of the brain most related to
emotion, especially fear and rage –
eventually propelled Whitman into his
killing spree. The killer himself made a
final bid for biochemical absolution,
writing in his final note, “After my death
I wish that an autopsy would be
performed to see if there is any visible
physical disorder. I have had tremendous
headaches in the past and have consumed
two large bottles of Excedrin in the past
three months.”
[3] PSYCHOLOGICAL DISINTEGRATION.
On March 29, 1966, Whitman met
with University of Texas psychiatrist Dr.
Maurice Dean Heatly. Heatly’s notes
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describe a “massive, muscular youth …
oozing with hostility” who believed
“something was happening to him and he
didn’t seem to be himself.” During his
first and only visit to the psychiatrist,
Whitman, “self-centered and egocentric,”
complained about his inability to surpass
the domineering father he hated. Despite
having reached a level of education and
marital success that his father never had,
Whitman envied C.A.’s financial success.
He spoke vaguely about such feelings.
He did, however, make “a vivid reference
to ‘thinking about going up on the tower
with a deer rifle and start shooting
people.’” He wept. Dr. Heatly scheduled
a follow-up appointment for the next
week. Whitman never appeared.
[4] DISREGARD FOR SANCTITY OF HUMAN
LIFE.
A. MARINE CORPS: The USMC,
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some later argued, turned Whitman into a
killing machine. The Marine Corps
training installed in him the belief that he
could take lives at will and without
consequence. This attitude is satirized in
Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket,
when Gunnery Sergeant Hartman
commends the skill of Whitman and
Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald,
saying, “Those individuals showed what
one motivated Marine and his rifle can
do.” To make the connection among the
God of Death and Marines even more
explicit, he says, “God has a hard-on for
Marines because we kill everything we
see! He plays His games, we play ours!
To show our appreciation for so much
power, we keep heaven packed with fresh
souls!” Whitman, from his perch in the
high tower, became like a vengeful
demigod, an architect of fear packing his
“heaven” with souls.
B. RELIGIOUS BELIEFS:
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Following his abandon-ment of
Catholicism, Whitman developed his
own religious worldview. It was a
mélange of Hindu pantheism, St. Thomas
Aquina’s proof of the existence of God as
the Uncaused Cause, and the Law of
Conservation of Energy. Since energy can
neither be created nor destroyed,
Whitman speculated, it must have a kind
of omnipotence. Human beings partake
of this energy; therefore, God is within
mankind, in the form of individual
conscience. And since energy cannot be
destroyed, there must be an afterlife to
which a person’s energy returns after
death. This was Whitman’s heaven; his
hell was Earth. Death – for his mother,
for his wife, for him – was a gateway to a
better place.
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[5] FAMILIAL EMOTIONAL PRESSURE AS
PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINANT.
Since the beginning of 1966, the
score to Whitman’s life had descended
into a minor key, his future ambitions
played in perdendo. As his parents’
marriage disintegrated, he and Kathy
were caught in the middle. C.A. called
constantly, demanding to speak to his
wife. Meanwhile, Whitman’s vague buy
seemingly always-frustrated ambitions
gnawed at him – his diaries are filled
with life plans and money-making
schemes that never went anywhere. He
worried that his wife provided more
financially for the couple than he; he
worried that he’d never best the father he
hated so passionately. The note Whitman
wrote after killing his mother, addressed
“To Whom It May Concern,” lays
responsibility for the murders directly on
C.A.: “The intense hatred I feel for my
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father is beyond description. My mother
gave that man the 25 best years of her life
and because she finally took enough of
his beatings, humiliation and degradation
and tribulations that I am sure no one but
she and he will ever know - to leave him.
He has chosen to treat her like a slut that
you would bed down with, accept her
favors and then threw a pitance [sic] in
return.
“I am truly sorry that this is the only
way I could see to relieve her sufferings
but I think it was best.
“Let there be no doubt in your mind I
loved that woman with ^all^ my heart.”
The father’s sins of domestic abuse
and pathological ambition had become
the son’s, and on August 1 they erupted.
[6] UNHEALTHY OBSESSION WITH
FIREARMS.
He grew up with guns; an infamous
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photo published in Life shows a two year-
old Whitman at the beach, balancing
himself on two rifles that stand taller than
he. C.A. Whitman said after the shooting,
“Those guns aren’t to blame for
anything,” but had his son’s rage been
channeled into less innately violent
avenues, or had Charles Whitman been
unable to stockpile such an arsenal, the
argument goes, August 1 might have
passed as any other day.
[7] PREDESTINATION
A. HEART BORN DECEITFUL: By the
Hyper-Calvinist doctrine of double
predestination, Charles Whitman is an
egg with a rotten yolk, destined for
damnation. Psychologically, he’d be
diagnosed with antisocial personality
disorder: incapable of feeling empathy,
disdainful of social norms, and prone to
impulsive behavior. The high-functioning
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APD individual learns to imitate a
concern for others, but knows no aim
other than self-satisfaction. Reporter
Zarko Franks wrote soon after the
shooting, “The mad sniper was a
chameleon. He was the boy next door
you’d want your daughter to meet. He
had poise, looks and intelligence. And he
had a club foot in his tortured mind.” The
Charles Whitman known to others – the
one with “all the standard appellations of
a high school yearbook. He was easily
the ‘Best Looking,’ ‘Friendliest,’ and
‘Most Mature,’” as his college English
professor put it – was, in this view, a trick
of the light shrouding his heart of
darkness.
B. THE STARS: In Whitman’s
astrological chart, Mars -- the planet
associated with action and aggression,
named for the Roman god of death and
war -- dominates the top half.
Specifically, it draws energy into the 12th
House, the realm of psychological
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disturbances and self-undoing. Even
more ominously, Pluto, the planet of
extremes, of all-or-nothing ambitions,
forms a Square Aspect to the Ascendant
Mars. Two planets in the Square Aspect
oppose one another, causing unhealthy
stress within the individual. By the star
charts, while the specifics of Whitman’s
disintegration could not be divined, that
he would tear himself apart is obvious.
[8] "MAYBE HE WAS JUST MEAN AS HELL,"
WRITES GARY LAVERGNE, AUTHOR OF
THE SNIPER IN THE TOWER.
[9] HE WAS MAD AT THE WORLD.
[10] HE WAS CRAZY.
[11] HE WAS EVIL.
[12] IT WAS HOT.
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Crutches have long figured in Dali’s
paintings. He has said they represent
dualism, the world split into opposites.
They also serve to open windows
between realities, as in the Tower. There
the crutch holds up a section of the
crumbling dark stone, allowing us to
glimpse the light of a further mystery
beyond the images we know and think we
understand. (Rachel Pollack, Salvador
Dali’s Tarot)
What in the midst lay but the Tower
itself?
The round squat turret, blind as the fool's
heart
(Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the
Dark Tower Came")
Hier ist kein warum.
(Guard, Auschwitz.)
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Is there meaning here? In On Aging:
Revolt and Resignation, Jean Amery writes that
“death cancels the sense of every kind of reason.”
In the face of death’s absurdity, reason shivers.
What are we looking for within this collage of
grim explanation? To enter the yearbook eyes of
Charles Joseph Whitman, penetrate the too-thin
skull and illuminate the shadowed spaces of his
mind – what would it offer us, the survivors?
Consolation?
Reconciliation?
At some point this stops being about Charles
Whitman. His bullet are simple, their paths straight
and easily traced. They promise clarity,
predictability. They promise the possibility of a
proper accounting in which, when every fact is
assembled and in its rightful place and context, a
picture will emerge. It will remain appalling, but it
will be whole, comprehensible. It will be
powerless to beckon with its dead zones and
known unknowns, a picture in which all shadows
324
are named and thereby made impotent. The
shadow of death will yield to the judgment of
reason and we, the humans, will once again be in
control. As Susan Neiman writes in Evil in
Modern Thought, “To seek a frame in which to set
evil is to seek something less than a full theoretical
explanation for it. For an exhaustive theoretical
explanation would restrict our room for freedom.
To claim that evil is comprehensible is not to
demand a full account but to make a commitment
to naturalism. It is also to claim that our capacity
for moral judgment is fundamentally sound.”
And yet still there is Charles Whitman, shade
without color, another mirage in the overheated
Texas air, climbing the tower like a man ascending
a throne, dark sovereign of the twilight kingdom.
From his Tower he held Austin hostage,
firing round after round from the 28th floor. When
Claire Wilson collapsed, her boyfriend knelt beside
her and said “Baby--” just before Whitman fired
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his next round. It caught Thomas Eckman in the
shoulder; he fell dead next to his girlfriend. But
Claire was alive. She spent the next horrific hour-
and-a-half on the hot cement as bullets impacted
seemingly everywhere within a 500-yard radius of
the Tower. Dr. Hamilton Boyer was the next to die,
as a 6mm round tore through his left kidney.
Whitman moved around the observation deck
as he shot, leading witnesses to believe there were
multiple snipers. Many others were slow to realize
the popping noises coming from the Tower were
gunshots. As a result, for the first fifteen minutes
of his spree, Whitman had his choice of virtually
any target he could see. And if he could see it, he
could hit it. He shot Thomas Ashton, a Peace
Corps trainee, in the chest. Ashton died at
Brackenridge Hospital.
When reports of gunfire reached Allen R.
Hamilton, Chief of University of Texas Traffic
Control and Security, he dispatched two policemen
to the Tower. They reached the 27th floor by 11:55
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AM, but neither was armed. M.J. Gabour, father to
Mike and Mark Gabour, husband to Mary Gabour,
staggered toward the two, saying, “Give me a gun,
he has killed my wife and family.” The offices
closed all Tower exits and warned people to stay
out of sight.
Meanwhile, Austin Police officer Houston
McCoy made his way toward the campus. All he’d
understood of the dispatcher’s garbled radio call
were the words “University Tower” and
“shooting.” On arriving he too assumed multiple
snipers. The possibility that Austin was under
attack by a well-armed radical group crossed his
mind.
In the time it had taken him to reach the
university, Austin’s citizens had taken matters into
the i r own hands . Wi tness Bi l l Helmer
remembered, “A friend of mine was glued to the
TV at the San Jacinto Cafe, near campus, when a
guy with a deer rifle ran in, grabbed a six-pack of
beer, and ran back out.” Shooters peppered the
327
Tower with bullets.
Whitman, though, had the high ground. He
used the observation deck’s concrete parapet for
cover, firing through rainspouts, which made him
nearly impossible to hit from the ground. He fired
another 6mm round in the direction of policeman
Billy Speed. The bullet found a narrow opening in
Speed’s own concrete cover, mortally wounding
him.
Houston McCoy was getting impatient. The
Austin Police Department was in disarray; nothing
like this had ever happened before. Though dozens
of off-duty officers had arrived to help, there was
little communication among them, and no coherent
plan.
McCoy reached the 28th floor reception area,
where he met fellow officer Ramiro Martinez.
They both eyed the observation deck’s glass-
paneled door, having no idea what awaited them
outside. Martinez kicked the door repeatedly,
eventually dislodging the dolly Whitman had used
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as a barricade. They waited, listening to the
gunshots and trying to decide their next move.
Martinez had a 38 revolver; McCoy a 12-
gauge shotgun. As shots rang out from the
northwest corner, Martinez resolved to open the
door and enter the deck from the south. McCoy
backed him up as the moved around the southeast
corner. Martinez warned the tall, lanky McCoy to
stay low as ground fire struck over their heads.
Martinez rounded the northeast corner and
saw Whitman seated with his back to the
northwest corner, carbine aimed at the observation
deck door. Martinez fired a quick six shots from
his revolver as Whitman brought the rifle around.
He fired.
Yet this time he missed. The bullets
disappeared into the blue Texas sky. Houston
McCoy turned the corner and looked Whitman
directly in the eyes. Then he pulled the trigger,
aiming for Whitman’s white headband. The 12-
gauge roared and the pellets tore through
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Whitman’s head, through his blue eyes. McCoy
chambered another shell and fired again. Martinez
grabbed the shotgun and charged, firing a third
time into Whitman’s now prone body. Blue-eyed
Mr. Death didn’t move. At 1:24 PM, 96 minutes
after it had begun, Whitman’s spree came to an
end. In his last, desperate act, he had taken 15 lives
and wounded 33 others.
In his diary Whitman once wrote, “I have
thoughts [sic] very much about the concept of
‘death.’ When it overtakes me someday I must
remember to observe closely and see if it is as I
thought it would be.” Whether it was as he thought
it would be is unanswerable. What he thought as
the 00 buckshot silenced his mind; whether he
went to his death like a soldier; whether he felt
himself transform into a form of pure energy;
whether he, having plucked the gossamer thread of
history and knowing he was now of consequence,
felt all his ambitions satisfied: this is unknowable.
Maybe he thought nothing at all.
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Charles Whitman is dead; his body laid to
rest in a simple ceremony, an American flag
draped across the former Marine’s coffin. His body
and his secrets are buried beneath a simple metal
plaque in West Palm Beach, Florida. He is dead
and we are alive. Just as Claire Wilson survived
his bullet, Austin, America, the human world
outlived Whitman’s rage.
But Claire’s son did not survive. The
possibilities his life held have vanished, and with
that death a different world replaces the one he
might have known. Charles Whitman with his
crosshair benediction gave us a different future,
one in which the low, attenuated echoes of his
shots are still felt at Columbine and Jonesboro, in
the flippant turn-of-phrase “going postal,” and by
every high school student who cringes at the sound
of a car backfiring.
William T. Vollmann, writing in the voice of
the revolutionary terrorist, captures the
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hopelessness of Whitman’s thinking: “The fewer
possibilities I have, the more urgently I must
imagine.” Whitman’s world of possibilities had
shrunk to the size of a gun barrel, and his revenge
is a final act of conjuration, of making imagination
manifest: with a single bullet he moved the world.
The culmination of his urgent imaginings is an
enlargement of what sociologists call “the social
script” – the historically- and culturally-defined
collection of possible human actions. Where once
we could not imagine a lone gunman in a tower
firing at random, or a disgruntled postal clerk
taking violent revenge on a system that’s betrayed
him, or a pair of misfit high school seniors plotting
to destroy the school whose students refused to
accept them – envisioning these acts is no longer
beyond us. They are options available to every
angry young man whose incandescent rages flames
from the inside out until, like Charlie, it burns us
all. It’s impossible even to recapture the horror of
Whitman’s act, because the world it ended is so
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alien to us, so fast-receding, that it might very well
seem “utopia” – “nowhere.” We cannot even feel
bitterness, or anger, or sadness, as the wound of
August 1, 1966 fades to a pale white scar on the
collective unconsciousness. Yet it remains. From
that reality reason offers no shelter.
From his high tower Charlie saw a future,
and with his bullets he pushed us into it. But here I
want to counter his dead imagination. He was
human, but we do not have to forgive him, or
overestimate his power. He did not birth a new
kind of evil; epochs do not turn on one angry man
with a gun. Postlapsarian worlds are not born with
the whimper of rifle shots, and Charlie is only one
more flower of evil on humanity’s long, snaking
vine. But as long as we are alive and human, we
can imagine bigger than he could. We can imagine
Charles Whitman and Claire Wilson – C.W. and
C.W., Claire and clair obscura – twinned at the
moment of a world’s conception, linked down the
barrel of that Remington Model 700. In this
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moment “if” becomes a talisman, the focus of our
yearning for that other unscarred world, the one
that didn’t happen, where Whitman’s ambition and
rage failed him and Claire and Thomas complete
their walk across the South Mall. That other world,
most directly, is one inhabited by Thomas Eckman,
Paul Sonntag, Claudia Rutt, Robert Boyer, Billy
Speed, Roy Schmidt, Edna Townsley, Marguerite
Lamport, Mark Gabour, Harry Walchuck, Thomas
Ashton, Thomas Karr, Roy Dell Schmidt, Margaret
Whitman, Kathy Whitman (linger over their names
if you can, an incantation for the dead and the
nameless). It’s a world with an impoverished
vocabulary of violence, a place where the phrase
“going postal” has no gravity. This is the world of
that morning, August 1, 1966, where the heat
shimmers in the air and couples walk hand-in-hand
over green grass and under shaded trees. It is a
world very far away in time and possibility, but as
all doors to the past are only windows, it is a world
still visible, if only through shattered glass, darkly.
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