RESISTING THE VIRTUAL LIFE
“Beneath the media world lies our perceptual framework, and digital media
may change how we KNOW what we know”.
So insists Chris Carlsson in “The Shape Of Truth To Come” one of the more accessible of the 21 essays and political tracts anthologized within this book. And therein, in the theme “political”, lies the biggest problem
with this book. Everything revolves around post-modern socialist/marxist
philosophy.
“Resisting The Virtual Life” is very much a classic University text book with its own jargon, esoteric knowledge and politically correct jockeying for status. As dull, verbose, self-referential, opaque, presumptuous and complex in its structures and concepts as Scottish Freemasonry.
Don’t get me wrong, please, I myself am absolutely on the side of an immense skeptical suspicion of the “World Wide Web”. What a horrible title. Are we all the innocent little insects unwittingly trapped in a gluey
binary Armageddon of telephone lines? Who is the spider. Well, control of course. Corporations of course, increasingly insipid and acceleratingly effective bureaucratic governments.
The themes of enforced apathy and mobility of labor really circle each other like sumo wrestlers here. And it’s scary.
Which makes this the right time to re-assess the malignant cancer of personal computers; the intrusion into intellectual privacy and inner space; the surrender of autonomy; the detached prozac miasma of virtual passivity and loss of identity that comes with all this dull gray plastic.
Look at it this way, simplistic though it sounds. If “Virtual Life” is supported, proselytized and applauded by your worst enemies, and it is profitable for them, then why consent of your own volition to partake of this
“cure-all”.
No way is this medium benign! Far from it. It’s the greatest chance to survey all you can see from a great height, just like Jesus in the desert, and who was offering HIM that illusory empowerment?
Uh, uh. Please plow through this, despite the turgid and user unfriendly style and semantics. Because it will do you GOOD! The digital revolution is not benign. Don’t kid your self, or your SELF. You are as much fodder for this new economic miracle as your ancestors were when they were forced from the arable land to become a disposable raw material for the iron mills and cotton mills of the nineteenth century.
Worse still, once uprooted, they were trained to consume the surplus they were enslaved to produce. Now, with less need in the West for covert slavery, the primary purpose of the majority of the population is conveniently reduced to overt and insatiable consumption, in and of itself.
Oh, in case you wondered where the slaves are now. Well, occupied Haiti, Korea, Thailand and when the time comes Africa once again. It’s the perfect scam. Hell, they don’t even need a semi-educated and
minimally healthy immigrant workforce anymore. Why else did you think education and medical services are being encouraged to disintegrate?
A mediocratic middle class have unwittingly become the “new serfs”. They integrate enthusiastically with the insatiable “virtual life”. They are compelled to consume this quixotic future. They have even been trained to
measure their success by their acquisition of its artifacts and their access to an ever increasing amount of its software. Like lemmings they bless and feed the hand that signals the route to the final cataclysmic cliff.
As the introduction succinctly reminds us. Mobility of labor is the capitalist dream and computers realize the ultimate exploitative nightmare. All labor can now travel anywhere, without physically moving. Much cheaper and more efficient. Everything piped down a phone wire. Perfect! I don’t think so. Count me out. I unplugged my modem ages ago. Best thing I ever did for my creative mind. Unplug yours too. Read this book, privately. Think hard about it, privately. Practice talking, privately.
Showing posts with label BOOK REVIEW by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BOOK REVIEW by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE. Show all posts
Friday, May 28, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
BOOK REVIEW by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE: ED WOOD - NIGHTMARE OF ECSTASY by Rudolph Grey
ED WOOD - NIGHTMARE OF ECSTASY by RUDOLPH GREY
The movies of Ed Wood are really an acquired taste, though at this stage in the growth of his expanded cinema “cult” the peer pressure to claim to love them is almost as overwhelming as the ridicule they received when he first wrote and directed them. However, interest or not in his films has no essential bearing upon an appreciation the incredible life and times, obsessions and addictions exposed and celebrated in this book.
Of course, most of us know the movie based on this book featuring Johnny Depp, Bill Murray, Patricia Arquette and Martin Landau, but what becomes clear very quickly whilst reading through the original biography is how much hilarious and heartbreaking; courageous and eccentric material was left out. Needless to say much of this additional information centers upon sex and drugs and aberrant activities, making the plethora of supplementary anecdotes an unexpectedly sordid (which in this context is a positive value)
and fabulous bonus.
Take this little gem from the memory lane of writer, producer, director,Tony Cardoza for example:-
“In India they sent a 13 year old girl up to Tor’s hotel room. So he’s sucking her breast and it tastes kind of bad, and so he turns on the light, and finds that she was dirty, not dark-skinned! And her tit was white where she was sucking it.”
Rudolph Grey has chosen to collect who knows how many interviews and then painstakingly sifted and assembled these to form a powerful and compelling biography that flows uncannily well. The fractured persona of Ed Wood, transvestite, dreamer, inept hustler and, probably, naive genius is scarily believable and contemporary. It might be easy in the 90’s with Ru Paul on national television and Hollywood making movies on a seemingly regular basis about drag queens and transvestitism to forget the recklessly courageous honesty exemplified by Ed Wood’s “coming out” in Glen & Glenda. No matter how kitsch his treatment might now seem, make no mistake, he was brave, and he was risking everything when he introduced us
all to the now mythologised pink angora sweater.
Apart from the fascinating interplay of wild and bizarre characters around Ed Wood, and of course his intense friendship with Bela Lugosi, we learn just how truly prolific he was. Apart from the central core of 32 movies that he more or less completed, there were at least 155 television commercials as well, and even more surprising and pleasing for me was finding out about 48 books that he wrote too. These in particular beg to be re-printed as seminal explorations of transvestitism, cross-dressing and 50’s era hustler
Hollywood.
Rudolph Grey prints a synopsis of all of these books, and they certainly give an impression from these descriptions alone of being the closest we’ll ever get to an autobiography of Ed Wood. Ostensibly written for a sexploitation publisher of cheesy paperbacks the excerpts selected suggest a richness and brutally revealing serial confessional that can only consolidate and increase the reverence in which we might hold this extraordinary man.
Ed Wood died an impoverished and delirious alcoholic, something that Tim Burton’s film really should have addressed to lend an agonizing realism to his demise. For, in the end, what really becomes most apparent and undeniable, and what makes this book and the heroic life it so vividly describes absolutely essential, is all the deeply serious implications concerning identity and self and artistic expression symbolised and personified by the conclusion we inevitably must draw that... it takes a real man to wear a pink angora sweater with pride. You gotta love him!
All hail Ed Wood, saint of the gender defused.
GENESIS P-ORRIDGE 620 Words
The movies of Ed Wood are really an acquired taste, though at this stage in the growth of his expanded cinema “cult” the peer pressure to claim to love them is almost as overwhelming as the ridicule they received when he first wrote and directed them. However, interest or not in his films has no essential bearing upon an appreciation the incredible life and times, obsessions and addictions exposed and celebrated in this book.
Of course, most of us know the movie based on this book featuring Johnny Depp, Bill Murray, Patricia Arquette and Martin Landau, but what becomes clear very quickly whilst reading through the original biography is how much hilarious and heartbreaking; courageous and eccentric material was left out. Needless to say much of this additional information centers upon sex and drugs and aberrant activities, making the plethora of supplementary anecdotes an unexpectedly sordid (which in this context is a positive value)
and fabulous bonus.
Take this little gem from the memory lane of writer, producer, director,Tony Cardoza for example:-
“In India they sent a 13 year old girl up to Tor’s hotel room. So he’s sucking her breast and it tastes kind of bad, and so he turns on the light, and finds that she was dirty, not dark-skinned! And her tit was white where she was sucking it.”
Rudolph Grey has chosen to collect who knows how many interviews and then painstakingly sifted and assembled these to form a powerful and compelling biography that flows uncannily well. The fractured persona of Ed Wood, transvestite, dreamer, inept hustler and, probably, naive genius is scarily believable and contemporary. It might be easy in the 90’s with Ru Paul on national television and Hollywood making movies on a seemingly regular basis about drag queens and transvestitism to forget the recklessly courageous honesty exemplified by Ed Wood’s “coming out” in Glen & Glenda. No matter how kitsch his treatment might now seem, make no mistake, he was brave, and he was risking everything when he introduced us
all to the now mythologised pink angora sweater.
Apart from the fascinating interplay of wild and bizarre characters around Ed Wood, and of course his intense friendship with Bela Lugosi, we learn just how truly prolific he was. Apart from the central core of 32 movies that he more or less completed, there were at least 155 television commercials as well, and even more surprising and pleasing for me was finding out about 48 books that he wrote too. These in particular beg to be re-printed as seminal explorations of transvestitism, cross-dressing and 50’s era hustler
Hollywood.
Rudolph Grey prints a synopsis of all of these books, and they certainly give an impression from these descriptions alone of being the closest we’ll ever get to an autobiography of Ed Wood. Ostensibly written for a sexploitation publisher of cheesy paperbacks the excerpts selected suggest a richness and brutally revealing serial confessional that can only consolidate and increase the reverence in which we might hold this extraordinary man.
Ed Wood died an impoverished and delirious alcoholic, something that Tim Burton’s film really should have addressed to lend an agonizing realism to his demise. For, in the end, what really becomes most apparent and undeniable, and what makes this book and the heroic life it so vividly describes absolutely essential, is all the deeply serious implications concerning identity and self and artistic expression symbolised and personified by the conclusion we inevitably must draw that... it takes a real man to wear a pink angora sweater with pride. You gotta love him!
All hail Ed Wood, saint of the gender defused.
GENESIS P-ORRIDGE 620 Words
BOOK REVIEW by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE :THE PRIVATE DIARY OF LYLE MENENDEZ by Mike Walker
THE PRIVATE DIARY OF LYLE MENENDEZ
Mike Walker also wrote “NICOLE BROWN SIMPSON-THE PRIVATE DIARY OF A LIFE INTERRUPTED” which tends to confirm one’s impression of him from this book, particularly from his introduction, as a self-serving and barely literate parasite.
As for the disgracefully adolescent Norma Novelli ... “What a pathetic loser she was!” I use a past tense in reference to her because she was nothing before she attached herself to Lyle Menendez in a menopausal crush, and she has returned to being less than nothing since.
Lyle’s conviction for the “brutal shotgun slayings” of his parents is supposedly exposed and analyzed by this tedious book and its unique angle of having reprinted “actual diaries”. The usual pseudo-psychological;
society’s right to know; prevention of future murder by familiarity with the “mind of a cold killer” and righteous curiosity reasons are glibly trotted out as justification. I resent having wasted my precious time, an irreplaceable part of my life trying to read this garbage.
Yes! A plague upon thee and all who doth sail in thee, oh morass of apathy and puss drenched conformity that be suburbia! I say. Oh, that feels better!
If you do seriously wish to enter uncannily into the existential world of a sociopathic serial killer and the obsessive mind of a sadistic pervert more completely and shatteringly than you could ever have imagined; complete with the inclusion of his journal entries, his drawings of death scenes and poems, even self-searching dialogues by the murderer himself. A lost soul chillingly and articulately trying to understand how it came to this, and what could possibly have possessed him, then I cannot recommend highly enough
“KILLING FOR COMPANY - The Case Of Dennis Nilsen” by BRIAN MASTERS published by Jonathan Cape in 1985.
After all, any right thinking person and socially sensitive observer would have to concur, that an all consuming, uncontrollable hatred for that very suburbia from which so many serial executors are drawn is really the primary common factor in all these sobering tales.
Furthermore, and potentially more disturbing to the self-deceiving, I must grudgingly suggest that any right thinking and sensitive person would also have to empathize with that hatred, whilst being careful not to condone necessarily these particularly gruesome expressions of it.
So, anyway, returning reluctantly to the onerous task I have pledged to fulfill; this is a vile book reveling in vicarious consumption on every possible level. It is a gratuitous consumer product in and of itself so
superficial and dull in content that it makes tabloids in the genus of National Enquirer sparkle like James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in comparison.
The Menendez brothers are consumed with such immature and ineffective greed compounded by a mental retardation that acknowledging this the only shocking aspect of this drivel. Suburbia was for the post-Warholian 15 minutes or so, consumed with vicarious fascination. Norma was consumed
with a blatantly self-deceiving obsession for Lyle (Of course this dreadful, dreadful housewife wanted to fuck him!). Erik and Lyle consumed the media attention. The public consumed the media sensationalism. And on and on...A typical American fable of rags to body bags.
Really, all you can say is. What a bunch of repulsive people. Stupid, mundane, unglamorous, uninspired, disposable, vacuous middle-class foolish, repulsive people. Bungling, masturbatory, opportunist, amoral,
vainglorious, unattractive, repulsive people.
Blessedly, this cast of idiots have either crawled back under the rank stones from whence they came, or been consigned officially under more architecturally demanding, but equally dank, official stones.
Which would be fine and dandy if it was an interesting tale well told. But it’s not. It’s a “crock of shit” as you americans would say, and I can only wholeheartedly concur, european though I am.
Genesis P-Orridge
Mike Walker also wrote “NICOLE BROWN SIMPSON-THE PRIVATE DIARY OF A LIFE INTERRUPTED” which tends to confirm one’s impression of him from this book, particularly from his introduction, as a self-serving and barely literate parasite.
As for the disgracefully adolescent Norma Novelli ... “What a pathetic loser she was!” I use a past tense in reference to her because she was nothing before she attached herself to Lyle Menendez in a menopausal crush, and she has returned to being less than nothing since.
Lyle’s conviction for the “brutal shotgun slayings” of his parents is supposedly exposed and analyzed by this tedious book and its unique angle of having reprinted “actual diaries”. The usual pseudo-psychological;
society’s right to know; prevention of future murder by familiarity with the “mind of a cold killer” and righteous curiosity reasons are glibly trotted out as justification. I resent having wasted my precious time, an irreplaceable part of my life trying to read this garbage.
Yes! A plague upon thee and all who doth sail in thee, oh morass of apathy and puss drenched conformity that be suburbia! I say. Oh, that feels better!
If you do seriously wish to enter uncannily into the existential world of a sociopathic serial killer and the obsessive mind of a sadistic pervert more completely and shatteringly than you could ever have imagined; complete with the inclusion of his journal entries, his drawings of death scenes and poems, even self-searching dialogues by the murderer himself. A lost soul chillingly and articulately trying to understand how it came to this, and what could possibly have possessed him, then I cannot recommend highly enough
“KILLING FOR COMPANY - The Case Of Dennis Nilsen” by BRIAN MASTERS published by Jonathan Cape in 1985.
After all, any right thinking person and socially sensitive observer would have to concur, that an all consuming, uncontrollable hatred for that very suburbia from which so many serial executors are drawn is really the primary common factor in all these sobering tales.
Furthermore, and potentially more disturbing to the self-deceiving, I must grudgingly suggest that any right thinking and sensitive person would also have to empathize with that hatred, whilst being careful not to condone necessarily these particularly gruesome expressions of it.
So, anyway, returning reluctantly to the onerous task I have pledged to fulfill; this is a vile book reveling in vicarious consumption on every possible level. It is a gratuitous consumer product in and of itself so
superficial and dull in content that it makes tabloids in the genus of National Enquirer sparkle like James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in comparison.
The Menendez brothers are consumed with such immature and ineffective greed compounded by a mental retardation that acknowledging this the only shocking aspect of this drivel. Suburbia was for the post-Warholian 15 minutes or so, consumed with vicarious fascination. Norma was consumed
with a blatantly self-deceiving obsession for Lyle (Of course this dreadful, dreadful housewife wanted to fuck him!). Erik and Lyle consumed the media attention. The public consumed the media sensationalism. And on and on...A typical American fable of rags to body bags.
Really, all you can say is. What a bunch of repulsive people. Stupid, mundane, unglamorous, uninspired, disposable, vacuous middle-class foolish, repulsive people. Bungling, masturbatory, opportunist, amoral,
vainglorious, unattractive, repulsive people.
Blessedly, this cast of idiots have either crawled back under the rank stones from whence they came, or been consigned officially under more architecturally demanding, but equally dank, official stones.
Which would be fine and dandy if it was an interesting tale well told. But it’s not. It’s a “crock of shit” as you americans would say, and I can only wholeheartedly concur, european though I am.
Genesis P-Orridge
BOOK REVIEW by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE :“MAD LOVE” - by ANDRE BRETON
BOOK REVIEW by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE :“MAD LOVE” - by ANDRE BRETON
I recall sitting more than once with Brion Gysin in his Paris apartment discussing so, so extremely earnestly, the implications of his exploration and proseletisation of “Cut-Ups” as a metaphorical direction for the creative arts to follow in the parallel wake of splitting the atom. It seemed then, and continues to seem to me now, that this entire post-war, post-modern era can only begin to make sense, and through that making sense, function as a necessary “circumstantial magick”, in relation to an all pervading awareness
of the incisive cultural fragmentation grenade that “cutting-up” the matter of consensus reality has lobbed into our exterior and interior cultural immune systems.
Gysin knew Breton in the earliest surrealist group times. In fact Breton kicked him out of the very First Surrealist Show of drawings held in Paris in 1935, supposedly for an imaginal decadence and apolitical artistic approach.
I can only assume today, with hindsight, that Brion at some point early on read “MAD LOVE”. He was certainly in proximity to it, and fluent in French, unlike most of us probably on both counts. In fact, he often hinted to me that the radical structural seed, scattered with such abandon by Breton throughout “Mad Love”, could well have been the fecund source of what germinated within Gysin’s fertile first, second, and third minds in a direct line of genetic descent from this text.
Well, here is the other amazingly good news! This book is not the dogmatic surrealist stream of consciousness satirizing romantic love you might expect.
It is actually a deeply sentimental treatment of the chivalrous search for the biggest love possible. A love that explodes with “convulsive beauty” and represents from the depths of “ the human crucible” a preordained
demonstration at its most ecstatic and passionate vibrancy, decanted directly from the joyous melting pot of memory.
Mad Love moves anecdotally between Breton’s passionate search for ideal love; ideal art and ideal chance as a unifying factor and valediction of everything. This is dense and charming, clarifying and inspiring. It is so
refreshing to see romantic love included in the philosophy of revelation through “random chance”.
I always wondered about the artistic lineage of the “Cut-Up” for I felt sure there truly must be an essential missing-link between Gysin’s “Cut-Ups” and Breton’s Surrealist “fortuitous” automatism. Well, here, at long, long last we have it confirmed. “MAD LOVE”, therefore, absolutely insists that it is filed, well-thumbed, on your “Cut-Up” reference bookshelves right next to Brion Gysin’s “THE THIRD MIND”; “LET THE MICE IN” and “HERE TO GO”. These are the foundation stones of any and all credible past, present and future investigations of romantic art, romantic life, and romantic love; which are, you see, quite incontrovertibly and sacredly insisting that they are one and the same quest and process.
Anything built from or for less than total love, total gender and total war on any thing habituated as culture or character by our mindlessly billowing species is simply littering existence with cheap distractions that pointlessly extol built in obsolescence with the sole, paltry function of consuming forever the last traces of nobility and purpose.
As Brion Gysin, Andre Breton and the debacle of contemporary semantics so invitingly invite us to... ”Let’s cut it up, to see what it really says.”
FOREVER!
Genesis P-Orridge
I recall sitting more than once with Brion Gysin in his Paris apartment discussing so, so extremely earnestly, the implications of his exploration and proseletisation of “Cut-Ups” as a metaphorical direction for the creative arts to follow in the parallel wake of splitting the atom. It seemed then, and continues to seem to me now, that this entire post-war, post-modern era can only begin to make sense, and through that making sense, function as a necessary “circumstantial magick”, in relation to an all pervading awareness
of the incisive cultural fragmentation grenade that “cutting-up” the matter of consensus reality has lobbed into our exterior and interior cultural immune systems.
Gysin knew Breton in the earliest surrealist group times. In fact Breton kicked him out of the very First Surrealist Show of drawings held in Paris in 1935, supposedly for an imaginal decadence and apolitical artistic approach.
I can only assume today, with hindsight, that Brion at some point early on read “MAD LOVE”. He was certainly in proximity to it, and fluent in French, unlike most of us probably on both counts. In fact, he often hinted to me that the radical structural seed, scattered with such abandon by Breton throughout “Mad Love”, could well have been the fecund source of what germinated within Gysin’s fertile first, second, and third minds in a direct line of genetic descent from this text.
Well, here is the other amazingly good news! This book is not the dogmatic surrealist stream of consciousness satirizing romantic love you might expect.
It is actually a deeply sentimental treatment of the chivalrous search for the biggest love possible. A love that explodes with “convulsive beauty” and represents from the depths of “ the human crucible” a preordained
demonstration at its most ecstatic and passionate vibrancy, decanted directly from the joyous melting pot of memory.
Mad Love moves anecdotally between Breton’s passionate search for ideal love; ideal art and ideal chance as a unifying factor and valediction of everything. This is dense and charming, clarifying and inspiring. It is so
refreshing to see romantic love included in the philosophy of revelation through “random chance”.
I always wondered about the artistic lineage of the “Cut-Up” for I felt sure there truly must be an essential missing-link between Gysin’s “Cut-Ups” and Breton’s Surrealist “fortuitous” automatism. Well, here, at long, long last we have it confirmed. “MAD LOVE”, therefore, absolutely insists that it is filed, well-thumbed, on your “Cut-Up” reference bookshelves right next to Brion Gysin’s “THE THIRD MIND”; “LET THE MICE IN” and “HERE TO GO”. These are the foundation stones of any and all credible past, present and future investigations of romantic art, romantic life, and romantic love; which are, you see, quite incontrovertibly and sacredly insisting that they are one and the same quest and process.
Anything built from or for less than total love, total gender and total war on any thing habituated as culture or character by our mindlessly billowing species is simply littering existence with cheap distractions that pointlessly extol built in obsolescence with the sole, paltry function of consuming forever the last traces of nobility and purpose.
As Brion Gysin, Andre Breton and the debacle of contemporary semantics so invitingly invite us to... ”Let’s cut it up, to see what it really says.”
FOREVER!
Genesis P-Orridge
BOOK REVIEW by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE :MICHAEL JACKSON WAS MY LOVER
MICHAEL JACKSON WAS MY LOVER
Forget Lydia Lunch, Nick Zed, Henry Rollins, Michael Gira and all thosecontemporary writers trying to achieve an ultimate expression of sordid nihilism and depravity layer by layer. This is the shit! This book outstrips them all. Superstar diarrhea dribbling into shoes; tampons up the ass to plug the loose anal sphincter; physically damaging excessive enemas; paedophiliac consensual cocksucking; prostitution of their very own minors consummated via the feigned naivete of compliant parents; gross out greed and paltry pay-offs; a virile, rampant, eruption of egomania that makes Hitler’s megalomaniac ambition a withered stump by comparison, all this pure filth and Macaulay Caulkins warm, wet lips too!
Yippee! Nobody can ever compete. Everyone should at the very least have this book in their toilet for guests as a matter of decadent etiquette. Perfect water closet reading for the closet cases.
Forget the relentless character assassination of Goldman’s Lennon book. Or any Elvis expose. Here we have achieved a nirvana of the gratuitous. Thank you Victor, Oh, thank you Victor!
All my life I hoped that a book that proclaimed it told you “the whole unexpurgated, shocking story” would really do it. 50 years after my birth, here it is. This is the most perfectly fabulous and amoral book about the
excess and undeserved privilege accorded the celebrated, successful and rich in America ever to be inked onto dead trees. Everything it claims to contain is contained within its hallowed bowels, and more, and more.
Fantastic. I can’t believe that it’s not exposed prominently in every cornershop Bodega, supermarket and bookstore chain across America and number one in the best sellers lists everywhere! As the back says: “The Boy Reveals how he got to know Jackson (and sex);
Trips to Foreign countries with Jackson (and sex); What he saw when Jackson got naked in front of him (and sex); the sexual games he played with Jackson (and more sex). There are snapshots, love notes, depositions, even spindly drawings of Michael’s malodorous and “smelly” penis by the boy; (oh, “the boy”, by the way, is Jordie Chandler who rather surprisingly is credited with having co-written the screenplay for “Robin Hood-Men In Tights” with his father at age 10. Go figure!)
It has to be noted however, that, falling temporarily prey to his acute sense of social responsibility and his principles of investigative journalism with integrity, Victor M. Gutierrez does dwell a little too much upon the mundane legal ramifications and maneuverings of all the parties involved for my prurient tastes. Although, I guess, upon reflection, I am forced to concede that it probably is, in the end, important to be led through the opportunist treacle that glues every character forever together in Michael “Willy Wonka” Jackson’s sexual Chocolate Factory.
After all, this is a real-life (real?), fairy-tale with multiple professedly happy endings. A terminally degraded Michael Jackson gets his man, or rather his boy, and gets away with it. Jordie Chandler gets his man, or rather his paedomorphic superhero and millions of dollars in perpetuity. Daddy Chandler gets his boys, notoriety and access to millions of dollars. Mummy Chandler gets vacations with her endearing superstar, nice gifts of expensive watches and jewelry, and the rewarding parental pleasure of seeing her beloved son taken good care of by the man, or rather boy, Jackson. Victor gets his man, mother and boys, and, I sincerely hope because he deserves to, his own share of dollars. Yes, sirree, it’s that good old fashioned American success story once again.
This kind of shameless self-corruption is what made America great; and I for one am deeply grateful. There is something calming, and infinitely reassuring about having ones deepest cynicism about human nature and its
innate badness confirmed so rapidly, uproariously and completely. I can sleep better now, safe in the knowledge that the poor scum get banged up, but that the rich and famous scum are, and will always remain, pillars of the community in any truly democratic, and free, society. All hail the American
dream.
Genesis P-Orridge
Forget Lydia Lunch, Nick Zed, Henry Rollins, Michael Gira and all thosecontemporary writers trying to achieve an ultimate expression of sordid nihilism and depravity layer by layer. This is the shit! This book outstrips them all. Superstar diarrhea dribbling into shoes; tampons up the ass to plug the loose anal sphincter; physically damaging excessive enemas; paedophiliac consensual cocksucking; prostitution of their very own minors consummated via the feigned naivete of compliant parents; gross out greed and paltry pay-offs; a virile, rampant, eruption of egomania that makes Hitler’s megalomaniac ambition a withered stump by comparison, all this pure filth and Macaulay Caulkins warm, wet lips too!
Yippee! Nobody can ever compete. Everyone should at the very least have this book in their toilet for guests as a matter of decadent etiquette. Perfect water closet reading for the closet cases.
Forget the relentless character assassination of Goldman’s Lennon book. Or any Elvis expose. Here we have achieved a nirvana of the gratuitous. Thank you Victor, Oh, thank you Victor!
All my life I hoped that a book that proclaimed it told you “the whole unexpurgated, shocking story” would really do it. 50 years after my birth, here it is. This is the most perfectly fabulous and amoral book about the
excess and undeserved privilege accorded the celebrated, successful and rich in America ever to be inked onto dead trees. Everything it claims to contain is contained within its hallowed bowels, and more, and more.
Fantastic. I can’t believe that it’s not exposed prominently in every cornershop Bodega, supermarket and bookstore chain across America and number one in the best sellers lists everywhere! As the back says: “The Boy Reveals how he got to know Jackson (and sex);
Trips to Foreign countries with Jackson (and sex); What he saw when Jackson got naked in front of him (and sex); the sexual games he played with Jackson (and more sex). There are snapshots, love notes, depositions, even spindly drawings of Michael’s malodorous and “smelly” penis by the boy; (oh, “the boy”, by the way, is Jordie Chandler who rather surprisingly is credited with having co-written the screenplay for “Robin Hood-Men In Tights” with his father at age 10. Go figure!)
It has to be noted however, that, falling temporarily prey to his acute sense of social responsibility and his principles of investigative journalism with integrity, Victor M. Gutierrez does dwell a little too much upon the mundane legal ramifications and maneuverings of all the parties involved for my prurient tastes. Although, I guess, upon reflection, I am forced to concede that it probably is, in the end, important to be led through the opportunist treacle that glues every character forever together in Michael “Willy Wonka” Jackson’s sexual Chocolate Factory.
After all, this is a real-life (real?), fairy-tale with multiple professedly happy endings. A terminally degraded Michael Jackson gets his man, or rather his boy, and gets away with it. Jordie Chandler gets his man, or rather his paedomorphic superhero and millions of dollars in perpetuity. Daddy Chandler gets his boys, notoriety and access to millions of dollars. Mummy Chandler gets vacations with her endearing superstar, nice gifts of expensive watches and jewelry, and the rewarding parental pleasure of seeing her beloved son taken good care of by the man, or rather boy, Jackson. Victor gets his man, mother and boys, and, I sincerely hope because he deserves to, his own share of dollars. Yes, sirree, it’s that good old fashioned American success story once again.
This kind of shameless self-corruption is what made America great; and I for one am deeply grateful. There is something calming, and infinitely reassuring about having ones deepest cynicism about human nature and its
innate badness confirmed so rapidly, uproariously and completely. I can sleep better now, safe in the knowledge that the poor scum get banged up, but that the rich and famous scum are, and will always remain, pillars of the community in any truly democratic, and free, society. All hail the American
dream.
Genesis P-Orridge
BOOK REVIEW by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE: SATANIC CRIME
SATANIC CRIME
Presumably this book is intended for the fundamentally handicapped.We are severely morally challenged and our gullibility retarded if we evenconsider this any more than preaching to the willfully converted. It’s a bit
like books for people who construct model airplanes, but only model airplanes of Rhodesian Biplanes built between 1924 and 1925. Unless you have an obsessive vested interest and need confirmation of your mania, it’s meaningless.
Oh, and by the way, the factual and even circumstantial evidence, of a thriving Biplane Construction Industry in Rhodesia between 1924 and 1925 is far more compelling and believable than this!
GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
Presumably this book is intended for the fundamentally handicapped.We are severely morally challenged and our gullibility retarded if we evenconsider this any more than preaching to the willfully converted. It’s a bit
like books for people who construct model airplanes, but only model airplanes of Rhodesian Biplanes built between 1924 and 1925. Unless you have an obsessive vested interest and need confirmation of your mania, it’s meaningless.
Oh, and by the way, the factual and even circumstantial evidence, of a thriving Biplane Construction Industry in Rhodesia between 1924 and 1925 is far more compelling and believable than this!
GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
Thursday, March 25, 2010
BOOK REVIEW by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE:WHO KNOWS by FRANCIS PICABIA (Hanuman Books)
WHO KNOWS by FRANCIS PICABIA (Hanuman Books)
It becomes fairly clear that Francis Picabia had a rather volatile and patchy talent as one reads this trite book immediately after “YESNO”. The impression that this entirely compliments the vagaries of his personality is
further confirmed by the many references to his friend Picabia by Marcel Duchamp in the book of dialogues reviewed elsewhere in this source book. However, where “YESNO” reinforces the meticulous humor of Picabia “WHO KNOWS” illustrates his weakness and redundant artifice.
A review of “WHO KNOWS” needs such a preface in order to lend comprehension to the dismal nature and paltry tedium of this Hanuman book. Twice the size and a fifth the satisfaction of “YESNO”, “WHO
KNOWS” proves once again, though unnecessarily, that size is no guarantee of pleasure. Where “YESNO” sparkles and shimmers; eliciting merriment and jaundiced guffaws of misanthropy, and is an exigent treasure trove screaming for consultation on even the most degrading of commutes and unfriendly of days; “WHO KNOWS” is a weedy, paltry, pathetic and pitiful collection. Concise is replaced with overblown; astute observation with blind sentimentality and wit with indulgent banality and torpor. Yes, dear reader, this small tome is a chilling example that most disastrous of collections, the vanity emasculator. Glamour has putrefied to leave an awful and tasteless stinking, brown sludge.
It is as if Picabia falls victim to a particularly modern folly of believing his own “hype”. Perhaps the editor and compiler Remy Hall became too enthused with the charm of the deceptively spontaneous one-liners of
“YESNO” and decided to demonstrate for posterity (which is, after all, 50% reliant upon the spectators engagement in this process if we are to believe Marcel Duchamp and others. And we DO!) the intellectual weight and acuity divinely possessing the “supermale” Francis Picabia in a feeble attempt to re-engrave his literary tombstone with an intellectually overextended and far more pretentious inscription. So disappointing. So disillusioning. So sad. So sad.
Now, don’t get me wrong! I maintain my position that one should always acquire ANY Hanuman Book no matter how obscure, dilettantish or brief as an absolute matter of principle. Certain heroic and obsessional activities transcend individual subjectivity. Nevertheless, this volume constitutes a somber reminder that there will inevitably be dross and ineffective artifice to file along the Hanuman way.
GENESIS P-ORRIDGE
BOOK REVIEW by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE: YESNO by FRANCIS PICABIA (Hanuman Books)
YESNO by FRANCIS PICABIA (Hanuman Books)
BOOK REVIEW by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE
Hanuman Books are sweet strawberries covered in the most delicious creamy chocolate in this feast of literature. I adore them. They are petite and firm, exotic and very, very sexy little items, guaranteed to add secret glamour and sophisticated depth to even the most shallow of pockets.
“YESNO”, by “dadaist” and painter Francis Picabia, is 47 discerning midget pages of evanescent aphorisms. Gems of cynicism, melancholy observation and caustic comment, worthy of any aspiring, or asp-like, queen’s tiara of wit. The brief messages, warnings and considerations are drawn from his journals and notebooks over the period 1939-1957.
“Beauty is relative to the amount of interest it arouses.” quoth she.
This is an anthology from the revered lineage that includes the dandyish sublimity of an Oscar Wild; the fastidious camp of a Quentin Crisp; or even the more obscure English Edwardians like James Bertram and F. Russell whose Victorian misogyny and skepticism were illustrated more exquisitely than the “corpse” itself by Austin Osman Spare in “The Starlit Mire”. Yes, aphorisms are a justly grand tradition of which one can only approve, given that one is a reasonable person. And, in this age of advertising slogans and soundbites; bumper stickers, and designer corporate logos as street fashion, a reminder of the priceless art of word games. The contradiction, collision and collusion in fresh revelation that twisting and pummeling the material of words can supply, in order for us “to see what they really say” as Brion Gysin so prophetically indicated in his “cut-ups”.
“Art is the cult of error” - Picabia.
We are able to gorge ourselves on discriminating morsels for the discerning palate from the palette of Picabia’s ascerbic acuity. To savor the menu of resident connoisseur Picabia’s palette of human tinctures and emotional flavors. As you have rightly guessed, dear reader, all is artifice, contrivance, and bouquet.
“Serious people have a slight odor of carrion” - Picabia.
“YESNO” is sublime evidence for one of the essential and supreme conclusions of any intelligent culture made in the 20th century; that “Art” has been distilled repeatedly and most thoroughly until it may quite rightly only be perceived and defined as an attitude of and to Life ( yes, complete with an “IF” right there in the middle) Furthermore, that attitude towards “Life” that some remain obliged to label “art”, is no more than an inevitable and unenviable condition of detached awareness of, and dispassionate concern with, all aspects of, and manifestations of, the exponentially increasing actions and reactions of said absurd in that Life, and all lives.
“Many artists devote their time to their painting, I ask myself why are these people so fond of bad company?” - Picabia.
There are strong arguments to suggest that “art” is merely an expression of a neuroses given space in our persona by the luxury of free time thanks to the advent of tools, technology and overt, or covert economic systems of slavery and privilege. “Art” has no biological source, no survival imperative. What was once a “craft” for making functional and magical “things” is now a dubious and unnecessary post-existentialist requirement of taste. Nothing more than that. Just an obsolete but amusing symbol of a fantasy of neurological superiority.
“Art is a pharmaceutical product for idiots.” - Picabia.
By the way, don’t worry if the word “art” never enters your vocabulary! This simply means that you are extremely culturally healthy, and/or blissfully and justifiably elsewhere. So, at that next soiree, or opening, or dreadfully dull social occasion, nip into the bathroom, sneak out your well worn copy of “YESNO” and just try substituting any old power word, or enemies name for that tired old word “art” and you will be surprised at the good time you shall have.
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