Shovelware

It's Too Late

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:04:52 -0500

As the only member of my southern San Diego bordertown's Class of '78 who was a card-carrying member of the Patti Smith fan club, I waited for Patti's vanishingly rare appearance in America's Finest City with the giddiness of an Opus Dei insider waiting for a papal audience.

Poster from May 16, 1978 Patti Smith concert, San Diego, CA. Author's collection.

In one of rock history's weirder harmonic convergences, the opening act for Patti's May 16, 1978 date at San Diego's California Theatre---a down-at-the-heel 1920's music hall hard by the transient hotels and tattoo parlors of the city's tenderloin---was Dixie rocker Les Dudek.

An hour or so before showtime, Patti materialized onstage, peering balefully into the auditorium. Les Dudek had cancelled, she growled, in a deader-than-deadpan New York accent that withered everything on contact. "If you got a problem with that, you can get your money back. But you gotta leave now. In the light. So I can see you. So I can see how much money I'm losin'." No one moved. Patti turned on her heel and, with an air of fuck-you-very-much satisfaction, disappeared through the slit in the stage curtains.

To fill the opening act-sized hole left by Les Dudek's unlamented departure, Patti introduced a last-minute replacement: "the guy who taught me how to write poetry," a lank-haired stick insect of a man whose skin was so luminously pale it seemed to glow. His name was Jim Carroll and this, I would later learn, was his first live reading with a rock band.

Carroll was a blur in my peripheral vision, one more frustrating delay before the Main Event. Near the end of Patti's set, she clambered off the stage, still singing, and walked up the theater's center aisle, bathed in the incandescent aura of the spotlight that followed her. Now. This was the time. Pushing my way down the row I'd been sitting in, I stepped into the aisle, face to face with Patti, and handed her a sheaf of poems I'd written, in my adolescent mind---a mind not unduly burdened by false modesty---a Work of Soul-Crushing Beauty and Manifest Genius, straight from the brow of Chula Vista's blown-dry Rimbaud. Patti accepted my tribute, blankly, and made her way back to the stage.

I waited for weeks that lengthened into months for the response I was convinced would come, an invitation---written in Patti's sprawling hand, on Radio Ethiopia stationery---to join the other pomaded loveboys in her East Village seraglio, there to languish in an opium-eaters' haze, like the dissolute bohemians in Nicholas Roeg's Performance, to sleep, perchance to dream, maybe even to star in the remake of Robert Having His Nipple Pierced as an after-school special. Crushingly, it never came, leaving me marooned in the cultural wastelands of '70s San Diego, where mullets ruled and ZZ Top's "Le Grange" jockeyed with Loggins & Messina's "Vahevala" for FM-radio supremacy.

Years later, after I'd moved to NYC and passed through an ill-advised but mercifully brief-lived phase as a Jim Carroll impersonator on New York's Lower East Side performance-poetry circuit, Jim and I would meet again, over margaritas, to speak of the Gnostic gospels and Catholicism and Bukowski and Catholicism and Hassan I Sabbah, founder of the cult of the assassins, and Catholicism, and Michael Jackson, unbelievably enough, and watching a cat eat a bird at the legendary Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. And Catholicism. Speaking of which, how is punk rock like the Stations of the Cross? Answer: "I said it on the Tom Snyder show when my first album came out, that punk rock is just like the Stations of the Cross. What could be more punk than this guy getting a crown of thorns, being scourged, carrying a cross up a mountain and being crucified?"

Read "Words I Want Carved on My Tomb: Jim Carroll, R.I.P.," my meditation on Carroll's passing here, at Mother Jones magazine.

Read my 1984 interview with Carroll here.

The Speedy Gonzales of Zoot-Suit Derrideanism

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:39:13 -0500

William Anthony Nericcio, Tex[t]-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" in America (University of Texas Press, 2006) .

The irony of William Nericcio's psychoanalysis (schizoanalysis?) of apparitions of The Mexican in the dream life of American culture is that Nericcio himself embodies---even as he appropriates and subverts---the stereotype of the Spanglish-speekeeng Trickster figure, tunneling under the heavily fortified borders between discursive zones. He's the Speedy Gonzales of zoot-suit Derrideanism. Better yet, he's the Mil Mascaras of critical theory, a masked semiotic wrestler pummeling multiple meanings out of the flotsam tossed up by our disposable culture.

Drawing on post-colonial theory, Chicano/a studies, a deep knowledge of American history, a scary mastery of continental theory, and an undisguised delight in the retinal pleasures and greasy seductions of junk culture, Nericcio spins us around to face our image of The Mexican, and in so doing reveals it for the cultural mirror it really is, a funhouse reflection of Anglo America's anxieties and fantasies about the Other. Ask not for whom the Taco Bell tolls, Lou Dobbs; it tolls for ustedes.

Text{e}-Mex crackles with a manic energy and an antic wit that are rare in academic writing, most of which tends toward soul-crushing ponderousness. Like the French philosophers who've clearly influenced his work, Nericcio tosses off oracular pronouncements without op. cits or apology and rejoices in wordplay. At the same time, his willingness to open the throttle on the passions that animate his arguments and take his rhetoric to telenovela heights of soap-operatic excess, pushing the envelope of his tropes and intertextual riffs into the ultra baroque, seems (to this gabacho, at least) profoundly Mexican. Here he is decrypting a "startling gringo artifact"---packaging for a toy called the Sparkling Clay Factory, featuring a hysterically Anglo boy and girl: "Check out these cute gringo kids from my private collection of 'ethnic' types (in particular, look closely at the boy on the right, who has been digitally processed so much that his 'skin' takes on the texture of a Pixar-born(e) computer-generated-image offspring of a CGI wet dream by the in vitro-cloned hybrid child of Mengele, Geppetto, and John Lasseter)." He deadpans, "I am still trying to figure out what planet the depicted organisms on this torn box cover come from."

If you're the sort of intellectual border-jumper who thinks Zizek would make the perfect guest host for Gustavo Arellano's "!Ask a Mexican" newspaper column; if you fantasize about staging Foucault's essay "The Masked Philosopher" as an off-broadway production starring lucha libre stars; if the next two items in your Netflix queue are Derrida and Wrestling Women versus the Aztec Mummy, Text{e}-Mex is your answered prayer.

But don't say I didn't warn you: Early on, Nericcio warns us that he's an unreliable tour guide---("ok, remember that your author is a recovering Catholic Tejano---idealism and the apocalypse lurk around every paragraph")---and, like all the best intellects who run through the world like a Tijuana switchblade, he goes meta, stepping outside his own analytical paradigm to interrogate that, as well. "The germ of this book was a vendetta I had for an animated Mexican mouse by the name of Speedy Gonzales; but, in the end, I had to let the anger go," he writes, in the book's introductory chapter." Tellingly, he quotes Baudrillard, the always ironic John the Baptist in our Desert of the Real: "Baudrillard...says: `It is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum.' Look behind Speedy or beneath Freddy Lopez and one will not find Mexican-hating illustrators or Latino-loathing puppeteers...More often than not, one will find someone working sine dolo malo, "without fault, without an intent of evil...'" Text{e}-Mex is a cross between the red pill that gives Neo an ontological migraine in The Matrix and the worm at the bottom of the mezcal bottle. Nericcio shows you just how deep the bottle goes.

Fava Beans and a Big Amarone Fine Chianti

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:29:22 -0500

Head by Gaetano Zumbo, La Specola museum, Florence, Italy. Postcard.

My two-week stint as Boing Boing guestblogger ended Monday. Exhilarating, exhausting, ex...machina? Archives here, and here, and here, and here , here, for anyone interested.

Reliquary of San Valentino, Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome, Italy. Postcard.

I'm still picking the shrapnel out of my Kevlar backside. A rite of passage, to be sure. Anonymous posting seems to enable the most troll-tastic troglodytism or, worse yet, a Nitpicking Unto Death. But BB's hive mind is supersmart, so when the critiques were constructive, they were invaluable. I was mightily impressed by some posters' intellectual generosity of spirit, their willingness to share their wisdom and thoughtfully challenge my arguments. And the editors---especially the long-suffering David Pescovitz, who shoveled my screeds onto the site because Boing Boing's back end makes piloting an F-15 blindfolded look like a cakewalk---were marvelous.

Architectural detail, St. Peter's Basilica, Rome, Italy. Author photo.

As I wrote in my sign-off post (groaningly titled "Post Mortem"---sorry!), I had much, much more to say when the sands in the hourglass ran out:

If I'd had time, I would have walked you through the Museum of Pathological Anatomy in Florence and the taxidermic Eden of the Museum of Zoology in Bologna, its wall-eyed creatures leaking stuffing, unloved by anyone except the occasional devotee of what the postmodern theorist Steve Baker calls "botched taxidermy." Did I mention the bizarre, Ed Gein-ian anatomical preparations of the 18th century naturalist Girolamo Segato, in the anatomy museum at the Ospedale Carregi in Florence? (A "maker" after Boing Boing's heart, he crafted a handsome table, inset with what looked like polished stones but were, in fact, human organs, preserved, cut into geometric shapes, and fitted into a colorful mosaic. When Segato proudly presented a local noble with the results of his handiwork, the squicked-out noble declined.) And then there's the incomparable museum of teratology and pathology, just a building away in the same hospital, with its mind-altering waxes of skin diseases and its wet specimens of congenital deformities, a Boschian garden of unearthly (yet all too human) things, unforgettable, almost indescribable. And then there's the Museum of Veterinary Pathology and the Ercole Lelli waxes in the Palazzo Poggi, both in Bologna, and...and...

Happily, as I also noted in my last hurrah, I'll be taking up those very subjects here, whenever I can tear myself away from the writing desk.

The silverware glints, your place awaits, and the waiter is un-dish-covering the dish. But remember: It isn't etiquette to cut any one you've been introduced to.

Wonderful Things

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:01:49 -0500

Stuffed and mounted monkey, Museum of Zoology, University of Bologna, Italy. Author photo.

For the next two weeks, I'll be cheating on Shovelware, blogging about my recent Grand Tour of Uncanny Italy at Boing Boing, the self-described "directory of wonderful things" and the Web's fifth most popular blog, at least as of today's Technorati rankings. I'll be posting about a Few of My Favorite Things: Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels, cyclopean fetuses floating in jars and wax models of conjoined twins and spectacularly inept taxidermy---stuffed animals leaking sawdust, their brittle hides spiderwebbed with cracks, their glass eyes cloudy with age---and incorruptible saints and unfrequented reliquaries and the sublimated eroticism of religious kitsch. That sort of thing.

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:03:50 -0500

Obtainium. Found on the Web.

Out of the blue, a mail-art publication called Abe's Penny, which serializes disjointed, dreamlike narratives in postcard form, arrived in the mailbox, recently, to my enduring bafflement. As it happens, I've always regarded mail art, with the notable exception of the incomparable Ray_Johnson, as refried Fluxus, a harmless hobby for unemployed grad students who took Yoko Ono's Grapefruit a little too seriously. Something about the whole idea always struck me as little too twee, a little too hothouse, like so much of the artworld.

Nonetheless, the magazine's plucky spirit, its faith in the neo-Dada gesture at a moment when most art schools have enthusiastically embraced the Koonsian logic of branding, marketing, and self-promotion (any day now, they'll cast aside any pretense of anti-bourgeois radicalism and take their rightful places within the nearest MBA program), warmed my heart, or what remains of it, and I struck up a dialogue with the editors, an e-mail exchange that culminated in this curious little interview, whose scattershot fusillade of questions is part of its charm, a magpie mindset that animates the best of that little-noted and sometimes justifiably maligned microgenre, mail art.

A teaser:

Q. What lyric or stanza have you memorized? Please recite it.

MD:

Jesus, I am overjoyed to meet you face to face/ You've been getting quite a name all around the place/ Healing cripples, raising from the dead/ And now I understand you're God, At least, that's what you've said/ So, you are the Christ, you're the great Jesus Christ/ Prove to me that you're divine; change my water into wine/ That's all you need do, then I'll know it's all true/ Come on, King of the Jews.
"King Herod's Song," from the otherwise sachrymose Andrew Lloyd Weber's masterpiece of countercultural kitsch-cool, Jesus Christ Superstar. A formative influence during the '70s, when I flirted (briefly) with the Jesus Freak movement. The movie is beyond awesome, from its hey-kids-let's-put-on-a-Living Theater-show-in-the-middle-of-the-dead-sea plot vehicle---the whole film is, like, Aaron Spelling's idea of tearing down the fourth wall, with its metanarrative of a bunch of hippie thespians staging a passion play in some Israeli wasteland---to the Son of Shaft wah-wah guitar to Ted Neeley's angsty messiah to the Bronze-Age Syd & Marty Krofft vibe of the costumes (I want one of those high priest hats, the ones that look like Sacher-Masoch's idea of chef's toques). It's a genre of one: Christploitation. And "King Herod's Song" is a made-to-order battle hymn for the New Atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens)---or would be, if they had a sense of humor.

My Duh

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:32:33 -0500

In an excess of Felix Ungerian fastidiousness, I accidentally vaporized dozens of recent comments while pruning my comment spam. If I disappeared your carefully composed remarks, apologies.

Urbs Aeterna

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 15:07:51 -0500

Another Advertisement for Myself:

This Sunday, I'll leave for Rome, to spend two weeks in the Eternal City as a scholar-in-residence at the American Academy, a venerable center for scholars and artists. While in Italy, I'll be researching a book-in-progress (in progress, but not yet sold, if any prospective publishers are listening) about a subject dear to my heart, or rather that wizened organ I regard as a heart: The Pathological Sublime, which constant readers will recognize from other posts in these pages. To that end, I'll be interviewing curators and taking private tours of medical museums in Rome, Florence, and Bologna. Of course, I'll be stopping in at La Specola, famed for its "Anatomical Venuses" (wax women---Baroque obstetric models, used to teach medical students about the mysteries of female anatomy and that Mystery of Mysteries, the womb).

On this busman's holiday, I hope to make a Grand Tour of Italy's legendary repositories of High Weirdness. Fellow connoisseurs of the weird, what MUST I see in Rome, Florence, and Bologna?

High on my list of morbid-tourism must-sees are any shrines sacred to the memory of "incorruptible" saints or mutilated martyrs, venerated reliquaries, eroto-goth masterpieces such as Bernini's "Ecstasy of Saint Theresa" (or any other manifestations of Catholic morbidity or the sublimated libido in religious drag), mossy grottos, lugubrious haunts, museums of true crime or implements of torture, psychogeographic ley lines and ectoplasm-spattered scenes of historically traumatic events, Italian fascist architecture (as opposed to, you know, German fascist architecture airlifted into the heart of Italy), addresses sacred to the memory of Surrealist or Futurist activity, and of course any natural history museums or medical museums I might have missed (extra points for museums noted for their pathological or teratological specimens).

Suggestions, please?

The Reluctant Afronaut

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:34:59 -0500

CREDIT: Obtainium. Excavated from the Web.

WHAT:"Solar Flare: Sun Ra's album covers were wild, inspired, and a universe away from Blue Note": my feature on the graphic-design sensibility of the jazz composer Sun Ra, Print magazine, June 2009, pps. 86-93.

WHERE: HERE.

ATTENTION CONSERVATION KEYWORDS: Afrofuturism, Sun Ra, graphic design from Alpha Centauri, black starliners, Afrocentrist UFOlogy, space jazz from Betelgeuse.

ATTENTION CONSERVATION PULLQUOTE:

"A world away from the smoky, cellar-jam-session cool of [most jazz] album art, the handmade aesthetic, do-it-yourself ethos, and ripped-and-remixed imagery of [Sun Ra's] album covers and promo materials are of a piece with [the composer's] bricolaged cosmology. Desperate to escape what Ra biographer John Szwed calls the 'racially possessed' America of the Jim Crow years, Ra built an alternate worldview from scratch, cobbling it together from Flash Gordon futurism, mail-order Egyptology, Biblical hermeneutics, and 19th-century occultism. Long before men walked on the moon, Ra knew, in his bones, that he was part of the 'angel race.' Like a trans-racial Marcus Garvey beckoning humankind toward his intergalactic starliner, he urged space migration for black and white alike. The El Saturn graphics are a part of this sprawling star chart, a cosmic Baedeker pointing to Other Planes of There."

Mark Pauline: Heavy Metal Theater of Cruelty (Giftware #3)

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 15:37:35 -0500

Mark Pauline and his dozen-odd, mostly male co-workers have stockpiled an arsenal in the machine shop where they live and work, on the outskirts of San Francisco's Mission District. One device, the Low-Frequency Generator, is a mobile, radio-controlled, reaction jet engine, modeled after the V-1 buzz bomb whose banshee shriek struck terror in Londoners during World War II. "We ran it and people heard it almost 12 miles away," says Pauline, with relish. "They had stories on the evening news asking anybody with information about the strange reverberations felt throughout the Bay Area to call the police. You can stand next to this thing and what it does to your brain is just...sublime. You feel as if there are rats in your chest. It shakes your eyeballs so much that they black out and come on again 45 times per second, creating a strobe effect. It's the sort of phenomenon that doesn't exist anywhere else on Earth."

Another shameless wallow in '90s nostalgia: a lengthy book excerpt uploaded to SCRIBD, this one from Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.

READ IT HERE.

BUY IT HERE.

From the SCRIBD blurb (written, again, in the Bob Dole-ian third person):

Although it was published in 1996, on the eve of the Digital Revolution, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century stands the test of time.

To be sure, some of its references have passed their sell-by dates, but much of Dery's cultural critique of the ideologies of digital subcultures---their political myths and religious subtexts---still rings true. Escape Velocity explores the '90s digital subcultures and popular movements that both celebrated and critiqued a newly wired world: cyberpunk SF, technopagans, transhumanists, cyber-hippies, and rogue roboticists such as Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories, to name a few.

PHOTO: CREDIT/COPYRIGHT SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES.

Love in the Time of Swine Flu

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:38:53 -0500

Newsflash: the June 2009 issue of The Brooklyn Rail includes "Love in the Time of Swine Flu," my feature on David Lida, pegged on the softcover release of First Stop in the New World, his addictively readable book about Mexico City.

Teaser:

Now that the epidemic seems to have peaked, with a global body count far lower than the Andromeda Strain horror scripted by the U.S. media, reasonable minds on both sides of the border are taking a hard look at the media etiology of the panic. When American anxiety was at its height, Right Wing frothing heads like Michelle Malkin and Michael Savage helped spread the hate, blaming the Creeping Pig Death on the engulfing tide of "uncontrolled immigration" (Malkin). "Make no mistake about it: illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico," Savage barked.

David Lida's affection for the city remains undiminished. In the new paperback edition of his justifiably acclaimed First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century, Lida rips and remixes the 'hypermetropolis, the ur-urb of the American continent' into a fast-moving mashup."

Even so, the book is no Travel Channel puff piece.

In the chapter on crime, 'Who's Afraid of Mexico City?' Lida describes his harrowing hours, in 1996, as the victim of what locals call a secuestro express (express kidnapping), in which a pair of goons held him and his then-wife at knifepoint on a cab ride from hell, trying his credit card at various ATMs.
Two hours is a long time under such circumstances, and we were able to engage in a little Stockholm-syndrome dialogue. The Gorilla was the most voluble. Soon after the joyride began he informed us that what was happening was not his fault but the government's, for turning its back on its neediest citizens and forcing them to steal to survive. [My wife] was quick to point out that neither she nor I had any connection with the regime. “Les tocó,” he said, in a perfect illustration of Mexican fatalism. Your number came up.

O Come, All Ye Unfaithful

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:54:35 -0500

Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, is out, and a handsome thing it is. Edited by the redoubtable Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau (of Killing the Buddha fame), the collection anthologizes essays with curiosity-piquing titles such as "Jew Like Me," "Zen Mind, Alkie Mind," "Agnostic Front," "I Was a Prepubescent Messiah," "Banana Slug Psalm" (is there a bandname in that, or what?), and the incomparable "Bible Porn" (sects sells!).

My contribution, a true confession about my brief-lived career as a teenaged Jesus Freak in the mid-1970s, is called "Jesus is Just Alright," a title that inspired Sharlet to write, in a note he enclosed with my contributor's copy, "I've been wanting to use that as a title for years, but never could figure out what. I'm glad you showed me the way."

Long ago, in the lost world of the '70s, when I never missed an opportunity to "witness" to the unsaved, I might have replied, "John 14:6: Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me.'"

Mercifully, I've seen the light.

Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque (Giftware #2)

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:07:52 -0500

WHAT: "Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque," a chapter from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999) uploaded to the file-sharing site SCRIBD.

Wax venus (Baroque obstetric mannequin) from La Specola, in Florence, Italy. Photo: Joanna Ebenstein; all rights reserved. For more of this sort of thing, see Ebenstein's stunning wunderkammer, Morbid Anatomy.

THE OFFICIAL VERSION (SCRIBD ENTRY): In "Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque," a chapter from his meditation on the millenial zeitgeist, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999), cultural critic Mark Dery analyzes the abject aesthetic he calls the New Grotesque, exemplified by the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin and Rosamond Purcell, Nine Inch Nails videos such as "Closer," David Fincher's movie Seven, and most notably the obscure subculture of medical-museum tourists whose mecca is the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. "If the Enlightenment ushered in the 'disenchantment of the world,' as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it, postmodernism returns us to the age of wonder---and terror," writes Dery. "Now, as we return to a world of gods and monsters, there's a burgeoning fascination, on the cultural fringes, with congenital deformities, pathological anatomy, and other curious from the cabinet of wonder."

Drawing on Lawrence Weschler's study of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder), Gwen Akin and Allan Ludwig's seminal essay "Repulsion: Aesthetics of the Grotesque," Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject, Wolfgang Kayser's landmark study of the grotesque, and Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1845 paean to "worshippers of morbid anatomy," Dery theorizes the Pathological Sublime, an aesthetic emotion that is equal parts horror and wonder, inspired by works of art (or nature) that hold beauty and repulsion in perfect, quivering tension. The Pathological Sublime is the sensation Emily Dickinson had in mind when she wrote, "'Tis so appalling---it exhilarates..."

NOTE: Author reserves all rights. However, users are free to download this PDF for their own use and to circulate it freely AS LONG AS they do not post the entire PDF online or publish the entire PDF in print. (Feel free to blog this page and link to it, though! And linking to the Amazon page for the book would be The Right Thing to Do.) No re-use or re-publication of this PDF FOR PROFIT, in any medium, is permitted.

Photo: Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy.

Delirious Urbanism

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:31:16 -0500

"I knew Sterling when he was an Aztec pimp": the SF writer and Fine Young Ballardian Chris Nakashima-Brown, quoting William Gibson talking about Bruce Sterling. Neither of us could parse Gibson's one-liner, but it had a certain corkscrew logic to it.

La Nave de los Monstruous. (Ship of Monsters)

Nakashima-Brown and I were in Mexico City last week, along with Sterling, Christopher Priest, M. John Harrison, and Linda Nagata, for "Parallel Worlds," part of the venerable Festival de Mexico en el Centro Historico. (I gave a lecture titled "Myths of the Next Five Minutes: A Science Fiction of the Future Present," which used Ballard's 1974 introduction to the French edition of Crash as a jumping-off point for some speculations on the cultural role, and literary possibilities, of science fiction after the extinction of the future and the obsolescence of utopia.)

Outside the Tlaltelolco conference hall. L-to-R: M. John Harrison, Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, Chris Nakashima-Brown, your host, Christopher Priest.

Mexico City is the capital of the 21st century, to borrow the subtitle of David Lida's First Stop in the New World, an addictively readable, pants-splittingly hilarious dérive through the world's second most populous city (Tokyo is the first) and undeniably one of its most vibrant. Lida's book is an intellectual luge ride through The Labyrinth of Solitude; a videogame for virtual flaneurs, based on Benjamin's Arcades Project but relocated to the D.F. (Distrito Federal), with a nonstop Mex-tec soundtrack.

Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns (Giftware #1)

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 14:42:09 -0500

Recently, while ego-surfing GOODREADS, I stumbled across a review of my 1999 meditation on millennial America, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium:

"i re-read this book and enjoyed it as much the second time. its focus is really on some of the darker threads of the fin-de-millennium american culture. end of the century apocalyptic schizo kinda stuff. killer clowns, branding, post humanism, aliens, and conspiracies. it is just as relevant now as it was when i first read it at the end of the 90's. it confirms to me that somewhere near the end of 2001 time started running in reverse..."

Naturally, the thought that everything old is new again gives hope to those of us midlist authors languishing in the remainder bin of history. Then, too, there is an almost '90s-style sense in what was once referred to (in all seriousness) as our American empire, that the gyre is widening, the center cannot hold, and the tassel-loafered Wall Street swine jostling for space at the public trough should be driven off the nearest cliff. On bOING bOING, Dan Gillmor sounded a portentous note:

"Like lots of folks these days, I find myself speculating about whether we're heading into something worse than a bad recession, such as the kind of calamity that tests civilization. Back in my younger days I played music for a living. [...] At one point, gloomier than usual about humanity's future, I wrote a song about how people like us would (or wouldn't) get along when the apocalypse happened, something I feared might be imminent. It wasn't, then, but I'm wondering again."

Deep in the comment thread, a reader named Dainel wrote, "All this talk of doom reminds me of 1999. Don't anyone remember that? Is every one here less than 20 years old?"

True, the militia movement seems to have switched into dormant mode (although white supremacists still fantasize about bringing The Turner Diaries' Mother of All Race Wars to a bloodbath near you). And the omens of millennium that darkened American dreams a decade ago---alien autopsies, black helicopters, Heaven's Gate suicide cultists, Timothy McVeigh-style Angry White Guys, Unabombers who just wanted to watch industrial society burn---have given way to a low-lying despair, the deepening sense that the United States of the near future is going to look a lot like the Weimar republic in its last, hyperinflationary days, when people were using banknotes as wallpaper and postage stamps had a face value of 50 billion Marks.

Still, Wired is once again waving the techno-libertarian flag, though its triumphalism is a bit frayed around the edges and looks depressingly like garden-variety neo-liberalism (with a dash of Gladwellian screw-the-spotted-owl contrarianism to validate its cubicle-warrior coolness quotient). 24 is the new X-Files. Unfrozen CyberGuy Kevin Kelly---who was wondering, not so long ago, "Say the Dow hits 100,000 by 2010. Would that surprise you?"---is back with yet more musings on the Unabomber. The inimitable Terence McKenna is no longer with us to hawk his '90s vision of the Coming Singularity at the End of Time™, but a flock of McKenna epigones---the Marjoes of the magic mushroom set, the Robert Schullers of psychoactive alkaloids---are barnstorming the Esalen hot tub-and-Burning Man circuit with suspiciously familiar-sounding talk of a zodiac mindwarp in 2012.

What better time for me to catch the last wave of the '90s revival, disaggregate The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, and offer up a few chapters for your delectation, in PDF form, courtesy Scribd?

Here, then is, my first donation to the Creative Commons:

"Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns," from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink.

(I still hold copyright to this essay, obviously, but encourage readers to re-post and re-publish it at will, as long as you add the following boilerplate:

©Mark Dery; this essay originally appeared as a chapter in The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink.

A link to the online bookseller of your choice, or to the Pyro page on this site, would be the right thing to do.)

In the Scribd blurb, I synopsize it as follows (in the Bob Dole-ian third person):

Using as his point of departure Lon Chaney's chilling observation that "there's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight," Dery deconstructs the postmodern archetype of the psychopathic clown. In this perversely funny, closely argued essay, Dery ranges broadly over the psychic geography of American culture. Balm for the souls of those scarred for life by childhood encounters with balloon-twisting bogeymen in fright wigs.

Keywords: evil clowns, clownaphobia, John Wayne Gacy, Cacophony Society, culture jamming, Batman, The Joker, R.K. Sloane, Shakes the Clown, Jim Knipfel, The Fool, Stephen King's IT, Quentin Tarantino, American pathologies, Bakhtin, the carnivalesque, Arkham Asylum.

"Can't sleep, clowns will eat me..."

(Thanks to Gareth Branwyn, for his kind words about my essay---the inspiration, in part, for my decision to donate it to the Gift Economy.)

Always Crashing in the Same Car

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:40:00 -0500

All together now: "Warm leatherette/ Melts on your burning flesh/ You can see your reflection/ In the luminescent dash ..."

For the fervent Ballardians, especially the obsessive completists among them, who enjoyed last week's post, I've archived PDFs of the various versions of my lengthy, in-depth interviews with JGB and director David Cronenberg, published in 1997 to coincide with the American release of Crash, Cronenberg's film of the Ballard novel of the same name. (The files in question are actually housed on the free, brutally cool document-sharing site Scribd, which David Pescovitz of bOING bOING brought to my attention. (Thanks, David!, as they say on bb.))