Headzine 2.6 by Headpress

the contemporary grand guignol

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‘GRAND GUIGNOL ― a dramatic entertainment of a sensational or horrific nature, originally a sequence of short pieces as performed at the Grand Guignol theatre in Paris.’ Oxford English Reference Dictionary

The Grand Guignol, then and now. Top: Ticket stubs for the original Parisian theatre, from 1927, and [right] Todd Robbins in Play Dead, written and directed by Teller, coming to the London stage in 2012. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

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EDITORIAL

This is a holiday special bumper edition of Headpress in two parts. The first part is devoted to the contemporary Grand Guignol, and the second part the landscape of the counterculture by way of some of its books and publishers. In part one, David Kerekes takes to the London ‘blood scene’ (‘The Grand Guignol is Dead and Living in London,’ p 4), which also includes an interview with Tom Richards and Stewart Pringle of Theatre of the Damned (p 7). Stewart Pringle then talks about Frederick Witney, Britain’s forgotten master of the Grand Guignol (p 24). We turn our attention Stateside hereafter, to the roots of the Grand Guignol revival, by way of Kerekes’ own peculiar interest in the photograph that adorns this month’s cover and an interview with actor, writer and stage director Charles Schneider (p 16). We round out this section with a look at Grand Guignol horror film, notably an ode to H G Lewis’ existential The Wizard of Gore by John Harrison (p 31) and Joel M Reed’s filthy Blood Sucking Freaks by Dr Spike (p 35). Dr Spike also addresses Grand Guignol’s influence on the wider culture of Times Square and sleaze in 1970s America. As a very special Théâtre du Grand Guignol bonus, we have reproductions of pages from an original 1927 theatre programme tucked away at the back (p 98). The second part of Headpress 2.6 opens with James Reich discussing the work of Philip K Dick and its place in the California eugenics program (p 60), an article illustated by Michael Robinson. John Szpunar considers the so-called humour magazine Cracked (a mirror to modern culture and history), by way of an interview with Mark Arnold, the author of two very big books on the subject (p 67). Szpunar then teams up with Melanie Danté for an archive interview with V Vale of the inestimable publishing house RE/ Search (p 80), while Gavin Baddeley interviews Adam Parfrey of Feral House (p 93). Rounding out this section, Thomas McGrath dissects the latest in a growing line of writers he has known (p 74). Illustated by Dan White. The archive material this time is courtesy Wheezer McTeague, whose article here originally appeared in Headpress 6 (p 101). David Kerekes

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tel: 0845 330 1844 email: headoffice@headpress.com Editor: David Kerekes Assistant editor: Thomas McGrath Cover photo: Paul Zollo <www.bluerailroad.com> Play Dead photo (on page two) courtesy Shade Rupe Book design and layout: Mark Critchell <mark.critchell@googlemail.com> Headpress diaspora: Caleb, Giuseppe, Dave. Jennifer, and everyone else who has helped bring this book together. Text © respective contributors. This volume © Headpress 2012. Images are from the collection of the contributors or publisher unless noted otherwise and are reproduced in this book as historical illustrations to the text. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the respective artists, photographers and studios. All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, on earth or in space, this dimension or that, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Headpress 2.6 was published by Headpress in May 2012 What you hold in your hands is an extraordinarily limited edition. It deliberately carries no ISBN number and cannot be found in any bookshop or online retail outlet (unless we have put it there).

Top: The blood drenched exterior of the Théâtre du Grand Guignol, Paris, which ran from 1897 to 1962. go to our website

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PART ONE

The Grand Guignol Is Dead And Living In London!

Contemporary Grand Guignol Performance

by David Kerekes

An informal examination of the Grand Guignol today, comprising an overview of the London based ‘scene’ and in particular Theatre of the Damned — including an interview with its directors and playwrights, Stewart Pringle and Tom Richards — and the modern renaissance by way of Los Angeles based director, playwright and actor, Charles Schneider.

nyone with an interest in Grand Guignol, the theatre in Paris whose name is a byword for horror beyond horror, may care to know that its vicarious thrills are alive on the boards again thanks to some small dedicated theatre companies in London and indeed around the world. Unlike the Parisian playhouse, Théâtre du Grand Guignol in the Pigalle district, a dedicated playhouse whose seasons ran between the years 1897 and 1962, these contemporary productions are invariably short run (as little as three days) and take place once a year at around Halloween time. The companies behind them, independent of one another, perform the type of chilling short dramas for which the Grand Guignol is best known. These might consist of adaptations of classic horror plays, or they might be new plays that evoke the

spirit of the Grand Guignol. On occasion, they are not plays at all. In 2011, three theatre companies in London were performing such a show: The Sticking Place, Theatre of the Damned and Le Nouveau Guignol. Of these, Le Nouveau Guignol were newcomers, performing for the first time and whose show The Orgy In The Lighthouse And Other Dark Tales presented two original scripts with one urban equivalent that dealt with themes of intimidation, xenophobia and brutality in a sports centre’s female changing room. The Sticking Place and Theatre of the Damned on the other hand were returning in what has become for them an annual event. One group is slick and seasoned, the other not so slick but gritty and enthusiastic, and each with a different feel for the Grand Guignol. Their respective performances in 2010 were extraordinarily good. Alas, 2011 proved to be a mixed bag for Grand Guignol in London. Sticking Place, in conjunction with Seabright Productions, got confused over what constitutes a horror story. Terror 2011: Love Me to Death misfired badly with a sloppy Halloween short hand for pantomime type scares. Last year the venue for Terror was the Southwark Playhouse, located in a courtyard near London Bridge, where the overhead railway gave each performance an interesting ambiance. The plays were tight and creepy (and in the case of Neil LaBute’s The Unimaginable, dare I say shocking), while even the cabaret

Left: Kate Quinn in Crime in a Madhouse, Theatre of the Damned, 2010.

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interludes, which dampened the tension somewhat, were not entirely without merit. Terror 2011 by contrast, at the Soho theatre in the heart of Soho, saw the cabaret take over and the audience ushered to seats around small tables, having to contend with the lights going off every few minutes in what passes for spooky. The plays finished that way, too: the lights being extinguished in lieu of an ending. The opening play, Dave Florez’s The Waiting Mortuary, was the most formal of the evening and followed in the tradition of the one-act shockers of the Theatre of Grand Guignol. The rest was a grab bag of prose pieces and experimental writing (which reminded me of being at school), and for no good reason a striptease (the slavish reminders by the MC that this act was “burlesque” being the most unsettling thing about the whole evening). The performers handled what they’d got well. Ciaran Kellgren, who delivered the monologue The Gong (by Jack Thorne), was particularly good, while the songs by Desmond O’Connor and SarahLouise Young were tasteless enough to elicit groans, and one earnest gasp at a lyric that proclaimed the love of Fred West for his wife Rose and their poor children. But no doubt about it, Terror for the Sticking Place in 2011 had most definitely left the building. In complete contrast was the Theatre of the Damned’s Revenge of the Grand Guignol, at the Courtyard Theatre, Hoxton. This offered a more purist approach to Grand Guignol, with a series of plays that quickly eschewed the slim façade of rationality for barnstorming madness. The original Grand Guignol dramatists at the turn of the century generated great mileage from themes such as insanity and new technology, and Theatre of the Damned saw no reason to stray from the formula. The prolific playwright André de Lorde is one obvious and acknowledged influence. An adaptation of his play The Telephone was given a new twist, with its home invasion scenario being screened to a

loved one via webcam. It unsettled the audience in a way that the adaptation of another de Lorde classic didn’t, and I wondered why Laboratory of Hallucinations (co-written with Henri Bauche) had less of an impact, because it is no less a terror play. One possible answer is its forthright presentation as a period piece, instilling a distancing and dreamy quality. Personally I rather think this is greatly effective, as I do the prosaic dialogues about brain surgery and medical experiments, which don’t make much sense. It creates an unease that has tendrils down beneath the neuroanatomy of our twenty-first century knowledge and understanding. T

THE LEGACY OF GRAND GUIGNOL. Theatre troupes that are currently (or have been until recently) honouring the Grand Guignol in their productions: Exeter Alternative Theatre (Exeter, UK) Molotov Theatre Group (Washington, DC, USA) Le Nouveau Guignol (London, UK) The Sticking Place (London, UK) Theatre of Blood (Sydney, Australia) Theatre of the Damned (London, UK) Third Eye Theatre (Oregon, USA) Thrillpeddlers (San Francisco, USA) Vigor Mortis (Brazil)

Top: EJ Martin in The Laboratory of Hallucinations. Theatre of the Damned, 2010. Photos: Anna Soderblom. Contemporary Grand Guignol Performance

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Although I am aware that Stewart Pringle and Tom Richards, directors of the Theatre of the Damned, may not necessarily agree with this, as per the conversation that follows. Tom and Stewart met on a production of Othello at Oxford University, and soon found a kinship in horror movies and a mutual hatred for Star Wars Episode 3. Their own directorial debut opened on the Oxford stage in November 2005, with a version of the movie Top Gun (“the most ridiculous thing we could think to stage,” says Stewart). It played the Edinburgh Fringe the following year. A straight adaptation of Dracula was set to follow, but an unfinished script and administrative holdups led them to pursue another horror-themed performance instead. (The Dracula script was completed a few years later, but has proven too big and expensive to produce.) They found the answer in a book: Richard J Hand and Michael Wilson’s Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (University of Exeter Press 2002). “That was the first scholarly work I’d read on [the Grand Guignol],” recalls Stewart, “and it has, of course, ten scripts in the back.” But the scripts had “already been tinkered around with” so Tom, a student of French and philosophy, went back to the originals and translated a number of them. They also wrote an original Grand Guignol play together, but now agree it was rubbish. Stewart Pringle: Yeah, it was a terrible play. It was called The Canister, and it was about video nasties and snuff movies. It was about a man who procured women for porn movies in Manchester, who found his daughter had been pulled into this ring and murdered in a snuff tape. The Canister featured as part of an evening of shows, called A Night at the Grand-Guignol, staged in October 2006 at the (now gone) Old Fire Station

Theatre, Oxford. The performance also included new translations of Crime In A Madhouse, A Kiss Goodnight, The Guillotine and The Final Torture. “It was a very mixed bag,” admits Stewart, “but we felt there was a lot more we could have done with it” Having finished university and relocating to London, Tom and Stewart then came up with Theatre of the Damned. “We put together some scripts,” says Tom, “and we tried to assemble a national tour, but basically, we were a bit over-ambitious.” The formal launch of Theatre of the Damned took place at the Etcetera theatre as part of the Camden Fringe in August 2010. It brought new versions of A Kiss Goodnight and Crime In A Madhouse. The programme notes provided a statement of intent, which read: It is our intention to continue exploring the Grand Guingol’s formidable repertoire, as well as the potential of horror theatre in a wider sense. We believe that theatre is an exciting and underexploited medium for horror and suspense, and hope that you will join us for our future forays into the macabre.

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The show was a success, and Theatre of the Damned returned to the Etcetera that year for a longer run of three weeks, with Grand Guignol. This show featured a reprise of Crime In A Madhouse (mostly the same cast), a new version of The Final Torture (adapted by Stewart from a new translation by Tom), and an original play written by Tom and Stewart called The Art Of Death ― a dark comedy, set at the original Grand Guignol theatre, with André de Lorde and Paula Maxa as principal characters. Theatre of the Damned’s show in 2011, Revenge of the Grand Guignol, was part of a greater showcase billed as the first London Horror Festival. The festival was developed by Tom and Stewart to galvanise groups with an interest in putting horror on the stage. TOM RICHARDS: We knew there were other companies out there, doing horror theatre and this kind of work, and we thought it would be cool to create a kind of platform where everyone could do this sort of material at more or less the same time in the same place; see each other’s work, talk to each other about it, and get an audience in, get some press attention for it as well. So we created the London Horror Festival, which we staged at the Courtyard, from the last week before Halloween, through November. Theatre of the Damned was already moving more in the direction of new writing by this point, while retaining the style of the Grand Guignol, comprising short horror plays, and mixing comedy and horror. “We only had one original Grand Guignol script,” recalls Tom of Revenge of the Grand Guignol, “and even that was quite heavily adapted. And that’s sort of where we are now, really.”

elements of stuff which is very much faithful to the Grand Guignol: often cruel murders, unexpected twists, madness, and a fear of technology and advancement. We found that you can update some of those ideas fairly effectively into the modern day, and that there are still things like technology we’re afraid of. Tom: There’s also this combination of nihilism and playfulness, which I find really appealing about it. The Grand Guignol is a totally amoral world. But at the same time, it’s tonnes of fun. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s not shock for shock’s sake. It is genuinely frightening and disturbing, but at the same time, it’s entertainment, it’s meant to be thrilling and funny as well. T

David Kerekes: How would you describe what a Grand Guignol play is? Let’s say, a modern Grand Guignol play. Stewart: I think our version of a modern Grand Guignol combines Above: The Final Torture. Theatre of the Damned, 2010. Photo: Anna Soderblom. Contemporary Grand Guignol Performance

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Stewart: I think they find a new kind of catharsis. They’re not traditionally what you consider a cathartic play. Because they come at it hopefully just on the right side of sadism — in that they’re not intentionally cruel and sadistic, and because they can combine comic elements and things like that — they remain principally a entertainment genre; horror as entertainment. But within that, you can go to surprisingly bleak places. David: What are the obstacles in putting a Grand Guignol play on today? Tom: There’s the practical one, of not many people know what it is. People who do are always really excited to find out that you’re doing it. But if you say ‘Grand Guignol’ to most people – even quite a lot of people who are fairly into horror – they don’t really know what it is. So, having to explain that to people is certainly one issue. In terms of putting it together, I think one thing that we’ve learnt is that you have to be a little bit careful of a potential disjunct between a period feel when you do the original stuff, which can sometimes feel camp or kitschy to a modern audience, in a way that isn’t very helpful. Stewart: You’re battling against some preconceptions that

develop naturally. People who do know what Grand Guignol is, take with them a certain idea of melodrama – which is fine, because there are melodramatic elements to the Grand Guignol — but we don’t think that’s the core of it. There’s this whole idea of a vague fin de siècle Parisienne French feel, and a lot of people go to it expecting a sort of cabaret atmosphere. We consider the Grand Guignol much more grounded in naturalist theatre than we would something like melodrama or cabaret, or anything like that. I think the roots of the Grand Guignol come from the same roots as Zola or Ibsen; they’re about showing the unshowable on stage. Particularly at the time, it was literally showing those elements of real life which were never shown. Stewart: Especially when it started out, [founder Oscar] Méténier very much saw it as being that. He came from this background of Théâtre Libre that was just a naturalist theatre, showing gritty, darkly humorous plays about the life of the Parisienne underclass at that time. And as time went by, the Grand Guignol got bigger and sillier and gorier, more violent, but in some ways less nasty and more splatterific. We’re definitely interested in capturing some of the reality and nastiness that it had in its earlier years. David: Let’s talk about themes. People aren’t scared of cannibal tribes, radiowaves and rabies anymore. We’ve got new fears, with the exception perhaps of technophobia, which has remained a constant. Do you remember the TV miniseries The Mad Death [1983], which was about a rabies epidemic in Britain? I recently re-watched it and one sequence caught my imagination now as it did when I saw it years ago, which is the idea that you might drown in a glass of water if you have rabies. Yet, nobody thinks of rabies as a threat anymore. Stewart: There are ways in. A play like The Lighthouse Keepers, which is one of the original Grand Guignol plays, is a play about a man stuck in a lighthouse

Panny Skrivanos [top] and Ian Champion [left], The Laboratory of Hallucinations. Theatre of the Damned, 2011.

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with his son who has contracted rabies, and obviously they’re stuck in this environment. Used in that way — rabies as a shorthand for terrifying, body-seizing, degenerative disease — that still works. You can take what those out-of-date elements did dramatically. You don’t even need to update them; they still serve a dramatic purpose. It’s down to the strength of the writing and the individual play. When we’re coming to write a play, rabies wouldn’t be a consideration, but it can still work in a context. David: ...let’s write a play about rabies... STEWART: Which they did, clearly, all the time! It’s like ‘ah, shit, we need something bad to happen – rabies!’ TOM: Rabies is very popular in Grand Guignol. You couldn’t really do a play now about radiowaves, but I think it would be reasonably legitimate to do something about mobile phone signals. Stewart Pringle: : They’re radiowaves. To be honest, radiowaves are probably far more viable now, with wi-fi and mobile phones, than they have been for seventy years. David: If you did write a play that presented, completely matter-of-factly,

death by DAB radio, I guess people would accept it because people are shy of admitting they’re ignorant. Stewart: People are actually a lot more scared of these things than they might let on. The old Grand Guignol plays contain repetitive themes; repetitive themes, like radiowaves, or x-rays, and scientific operations – particularly lobotomies and brain surgery. This is largely due to the fact that André de Lorde worked quite heavily with Alfred Binet, who was his scientific advisor, and gave a lot of scientific advice for his plays. One would assume they had a lot of late-night conversations about the latest discoveries and how they might be adapted. Tom: And Binet was quite a major figure in the history of psychology – he more or less invented IQ testing, for example. He was quite a cutting-edge scientist. His influence on the Grand Guignol is pretty massive. I don’t suppose he wrote any of the dialogue, but there are quite a few de Lorde plays — especially the medically themed ones — where he’s credited as co-author. Crime In A Madhouse, I think we both agree is the best, certainly the best Grand Guignol play that we’ve yet found; it’s a brilliant piece. De Lorde was particularly fixated with medical horror, and most of all with psychological mental horror, with all the things that can go wrong when you start messing around with people’s brains. And with this connection between brain and mind, the brain and personality, that’s a huge, huge, theme – maybe the single biggest theme, actually, in the original plays. Stewart: What we did with our most recent production of Crimes In A Madhouse [2010] was to push the madhouse/lobotomy end, which I suppose is slightly more naturalistic. It has Gothic connotations, but it’s a bit more like the Hammer Frankenstein/ lobotomy-type world, rather than relying on lunatics. Rather than deciding that lunatics are scary because they’re impossible to understand. People aren’t happy with that anymore. T

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What’s actually frightening about madhouses isn’t that they’re full of lunatics, it’s that you might get lobotomised when you’re there. That’s something we managed to weave into what Crimes In A Madhouse was doing. There’s no reference to lobotomies in the original — there couldn’t have been actually because they didn’t exist at the time it was written. Tom found quite a clever dodge using leucotomies, which are still not contemporaneous, but leucotomies came in the mid to late 1930s, and having it set late inter-war instead of 1912, or whenever it was actually set, didn’t seem to us to harm the plot too much. There wasn’t anything in there about power relations or the class stuff that became a problem by moving it forward twenty years in time. To talk about the fact that Grand Guignol used madness a lot sounds like it might just buy into that late Gothic preoccupation with lunatic asylums, but it’s actually not, it’s actually very scientific. Most of the plays about madness in the Grand Guignol are not just playing around with the idea as a sort of trope, but engaging with it, sometimes incredibly accurately. Tom: There’s almost a bit of a sci-fi element to it. They’re talking from their point of view, reasonably sensibly, about what they think the state of medical science might be like in the near future, and what the consequences of that might be. Stewart: Something quite similar happened with EC comics in the fifties. Someone like Ray Bradbury would be scanning the scientific journals and writing his pieces using science fact as a springboard for science fiction. I think that same kind of thing was happening with medical fact and medical horror in the Grand Guignol. They wrote these plays very quickly, and they wrote a lot of them, so basically they wanted a springboard... Tom: Yeah – find the hook; find the twist or the kicker. Stewart: Because you can only really

have one. You’ve only got twenty minutes, possibly longer. Tom: Bit longer, they probably ran more like forty minutes, most of them. But even so, it’s not a huge amount of time. Stewart: The way in which the Grand Guignol originally functioned is that people would go and see a play based on word of mouth. There’d be a repertoire running but then there’d be a new play launched, and that new play would be added to the repertoire. You want people to be able to say ‘oh, that’s the one with x-rays, we should go and see that’, because everyone’s worried about x-rays. It all fed into creating what you now call ‘rapid reaction pieces’. Tom: Not quite a South Park level turnaround, but not that far off. David: Is it fair to say that the original plays were presented in a very stripped down way, with little by way of a set, possibly only a red light on stage? T

Top: Image by Malleus for Century Guild’s Grand Guignol art exhibition. Chicago, October 23, 2010. Above, and throughout this interview: Advertisements for the original Parisian theatre of Grand Guignol.

“What’s actually frightening about madhouses isn’t that they’re full of lunatics, it’s that you might get lobotomised when you’re there.”

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Stewart: I think there might be rather a lot more. Tom: I’d say they had at least as much stuff as we did for our last show, which is probably more than we would use for a future show. Stewart: I’ve seen pictures for a play called The Corpse Melters, or something like that. I can’t exactly remember what it was about... men who dissolved bodies in acid. We were saying, ‘oh, we’d love to do that one, it sounds great’. Then we looked at the pictures of their set, and it was incredible. They had this huge vat of acid that opened up and the bodies were put in and the skeleton was pulled out. And behind it, what looked like a very convincing laboratory set. Tom: They had some pretty complicated custom stuff: there’s the operating table for sawing the arm off that is documented in the film Ecco [1964]; it’s got a flip mechanism, a fake arm. Stewart: They were thinking about it play by play, I suppose. And, of course, they had that theatre all the time to themselves. Tom: Just reading the stage directions at the start of plays, when they talk about the set: they’ve got no reason to write anything they can’t do; they know what theatre they’re writing for, so you have to assume it’s pretty close to what was actually going to be on stage. It’s mostly detailed, naturalistic sets. They have lots of extraneous stuff, they have windows with views behind them, and lots of furniture and props. Stewart: Think about the period they were writing in as well: it’s not a period of understatement on stage. David: It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Grand Guignol wasn’t simply about plays of terror and fear. Tom: What interests me, is the way it seems to have changed over time. Because, as I say, when they started out, it was still very much rooted in this Théâtre Libre stuff, with a lot of true crime. As far as I can tell, the very early stuff didn’t have this stark division into horror and farce, and probably wouldn’t necessarily

talk about it as horror at all. It was more darkly comic ― not comedies, but plays with a considerable amount of dark humour, often with unhappy endings, but not always. Someone might get killed at the climax, but initially, all these kind of different elements – the psychodrama, and the naturalist drama about class and society, and the comedy, and the horror and violence, were all combined into one piece. And as time went by – quite quickly; by 1904, within the first twenty years — it’s already starting to break down. You are then getting this division between these farces that maybe contain elements of threat, but really aren’t that different to your average French sex farce of the period, of a type that might have been a bit more subversive but otherwise would have been seen in more mainstream theatre. Nowadays, of course, they don’t seem subversive, because society has moved on so much. But yeah, they found that audiences really went for ramping things further in different directions, and having loads of visceral laughter, followed by fear and the anticipation of awful things to come. Stewart: The actual sex farces themselves, from the surviving ones, particularly the ones that made their

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way to the English Grand Guignol,* around 1920 onwards, they were just pure sex farces. We’re not talking about any element of violence, any element of threat; there are plays within which the climax is the man gets drunk and reveals he has a mistress. That’s about the most feeble climax you can imagine now. It would a wonderful climax to an episode of Fawlty Towers, or something like that. Or, that tradition of British sex farce in the 1940s and fifties and on stage. They could almost be music hall patter routines. Tom: And the psychological dramas didn’t die out, they continued. They weren’t as prominent a feature as they had been, but these plays that were dark — not necessarily frightening or violent — were always a part of the repertoire. The true crime thing did persist. They mixed the playbill up, and a lot of the time they didn’t even climax with horror. A lot of the evening bills I’ve seen, the final play is one of the farces.

“I’ve seen pictures for a play called The Corpse Melters, or something like that. I can’t exactly remember what it was about… men who dissolved bodies in acid.”

Tom: When we adapt the plays we cut them down, reducing most of them quite a lot to get them down to maybe twentyfive minutes for each script. And that’s a lot of cutting in some cases. And we would do, at most, four plays in an evening. Stewart: Crime In A Madhouse in its original form is nearly fifty minutes, I would say. A Kiss Goodnight is about forty-five. Tom: ...with so much waffle at the beginning. They all have these incredibly elaborate set-ups. I wonder if, perhaps, audiences today are just a lot more T

* For more on the English Grand Guignol of the 1920s, see page 25. Below: Pages from a 1927 Grand Guignol programme. For more, see page 98.

David: Take a look at this lineup from a 1927 programme [pictured]. This was one evening at the Grand Guignol. Tom: I haven’t read any of those. Stewart: Man In The Night, The Prison Of Vice... they’re probably both horror, but might not be. The fact that they haven’t got enough notoriety to have made much way into the books suggests they maybe weren’t very horrific. You’re looking at a comedy heavy bill there. Also, what I find interesting — me and Tom talked about this quite a lot – is how fucking long an evening must have been at the Grand Guignol. Above: Kate Quinn, Christine Edwards and Scarlet Sweeney, Crime In A Madhouse. Theatre of the Damned, 2010. Contemporary Grand Guignol Performance

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“Quite honestly, some people were probably having sex in the boxes through parts of it.”

genre-savvy, and you can establish what this place is and who these people are, through tropes or conventions, more quickly than maybe you could have in the pre-television, pre-cinema era. Stewart: Being very generous about that line-up, I’d say that’s a AUTHOR BIO good three-and-a-half to four hours David Kerekes is a cofounder of Headpress of theatre. I also think that the way in which we go and see the theatre and co-author of the books See No Evil and has changed. You would not dream of going to the theatre and missing Killing for Culture ― any of it — well, you might, if you felt the comprehensively particularly bolshie. But I don’t suppose revised and most people saw all five of those in an updated edition evening; I imagine they certainly used being published by Headpress in 2012. He to have rooms where you could go and have a drink or a smoke in between. is the author of Sex Tom: Quite honestly, some people were Murder Art and more probably having sex in the boxes through recently the novel parts of it. Mezzogiorno. www.worldheadpress. Stewart: Or turning up late, or com turning up just to see The Prison of Vice, or something. Tom: I don’t think that they would have had this static, sit down, watch, interval, watch, leave. I don’t think that can have been how it worked. Stewart: Much more like a very long evening in a cabaret bar as a structure. Maybe they were just more patient. As much as I love the Grand Guignol, I would not sit through that evening; not in one day. David: It’s a commitment. Tom: It really is. Especially since the comedies might not have been very funny, I suspect. David: The architecture of the original theatre: You said there was possibly a bar. Do you think there was? Tom: There must have been somewhere they could buy alcohol. Stewart: There’s a seating plan for

it somewhere, but it doesn’t detail, obviously, backstage area. Tom: To be honest, I don’t know that it would necessarily be in the building. I suspect that it may have been more a question of people going out and getting a drink, and coming back in. When you think about what it was, which was a converted church, and the structure of the auditorium as we see it, with the cross arch, end-on seating and boxes, thinking about it practically, just architecturally, where would you put a bar? I’m not sure there would have been room for one. Stewart: I seem to remember, from somewhere, there was a room with seats, where you could go and rest between plays, nearby. You’d go and have a chat between shows, or while

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shows were going on, and come back for the ones you wanted. I think I read that. Certainly, by the time the Grand Guignol came to London, the evenings were a bit shorter. And the Little Theatre definitely had two bars. David: What are the common pitfalls of translating a Grand Guignol play? Tom: It’s fair to say I’m going to hate everyone else’s translations of anything, no matter what they do! One thing we try hard to do is make the translation specific to an English context: we generally substitute English names for French names, pick a region of Britain that serves as an analogy for the original French setting. We use the West Country for Normandy in Crimes In A Madhouse, for example, because of the rural, slow pace of life, and because a lot of the cultural connotations are the same. We are not interested in the audience feeling the experience is part of this ‘French thing’ or something exotic. Stewart: There’s also a tendency in some translations to try and capture something of the period through the theatrical dialogue, rather than the way in which people actually spoke. Tom: In De Lorde’s Final Torture, there’s a lot of casual racism in the original as there would have been, and we wanted to retain that racism — there’s a lot of reference to ‘yellow bastards’ and things like that. We wanted to retain that; I think it’s morally wrong to start re-writing how British or French people would have spoken at the time because it’s pretending that racism didn’t exist. What we did as a way round it was to move those lines to a character who was portrayed somewhat negatively, so we have this aggressive, intolerant character who voices a lot of these issues, rather than putting them in the mouths of your ‘heroes’ because then it becomes a very confusing moral world for your audience. N Jeffrey Mayhew [top] in As Ye Sow and Kate Quinn [above] in Crime In A Madhouse. Theatre of the Damned, 2010/11. Contemporary Grand Guignol Performance

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PART TWO

The Methods of Charles Schneider

by David Kerekes

efore I get onto Charles Schneider, I’ll tell you what happened. I stumbled across the above image (‘Grand Guignol Amy’) on one of my jogs around the internet. It is one of the most savage and arresting creations I have seen in a long time, and a beautiful representation of the Grand Guignol horror aesthetic. It’s a brave and hoary celebration of violence, or rather a celebration of a specific act of unlikely violence. The picture draws me back, as good art should. Only this

morning I found myself dissecting the composition yet again, delving into the shape of it and the minutiae, struck by such things as: The girl’s two fingers on her neck. The girl’s name: Amy. The likelihood of impaling Amy’s tongue during a fraças. The blackness beyond the gaze. The blood. The teeth of the man. Effectively it holds for me the same fascination as did the pictures in Mel Gordon’s book on the Grand Guignol. Published in 1988 by Amok, this book, The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and

Top: Amy O’Neill and Jared Sanford in a photo by Paul Zollo. <flickr.com/photos/zollo/>

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…men and women were gouging out eyes, sinking knives into skulls, strangling and setting fire to one another, or simply cross-eyed in psychopathic delirium.

Here’s what Paul Zollo says of Amy and the night in question:

Terror, was the first English language book devoted to the Parisian theatre, and because of it my own interest in the Grand Guignol was ignited. The capsule descriptions of the horror plays were clinical and chilling, but the pictures… I often wondered why the pictures in Gordon’s book haunted me. I was no stranger to brutal and disgusting cinematic atrocities, or tasteless photos splashed like bile across the pages of some of the more excessive zines of the day, but something about these posed shots for the Grand Guignol theatre disturbed me deeper. They were black and white and grainy for a start, and in them men and women were gouging out eyes, sinking knives into skulls, strangling and setting fire to one another, or simply crosseyed in psychopathic delirium. These weren’t shots for a movie production, but featured otherwise respectable looking adults play-acting for the stage. Somehow that made all the difference. Somehow that made it a kiss away from true delirium. And that, dear reader is what I see in Paul Zollo’s photo ‘Grand Guignol Amy.’ The photo was found on Flickr. It depicts a scene from Dr. Merlini’s Ghost and Spirit Show, performed at the Union Theatre in LA in October 2006.

Here’s the amazing Amy O’Neill onstage at the Union Theater on October 14th, as part of Dr. Merlini’s Spook & Magic Show [sic], written and directed by the very great Charles Schneider. Amy took part in a sketch written by Charles that was macabe [sic] and hilarious — here, yes, she has her tongue stabbed by her irate husband [Jared Sanford], who then pulls it out of her bloody mouth, causing her to scream hysterically and run around the stage, before he elaborately strangles her. It looks gruesome in this photo, but was very hilarious — because Amy and her co-star took it totally over the top in their acting — she was like Norma Desmond in a DePalma movie. So unexpected was the tongue-stabbing and ripping, that the audience was blown away, dying with laughter and horror, including your intrepid photographer and admirer of all things Amy, perched in the front row. It was the highlight of an amazing show, which also featured music, magic, much comedy and a finale of strange glowing objects floating and falling from the old ceiling. At intermission, outside on the patio, which was punctuated by orange Christmas lights, a lady giving Tarot Card readings, and a weird atomic freak behind a fence, hurling objects at onlookers, we drank hot cider and ate cookies, and Amy posed with her little brother and his pregnant wife wearing a very slick black fedora with a very bloody face. T

Unless noted, images and photos throughout this chapter are courtesy Charles Schneider. Contemporary Grand Guignol Performance

HEADPRESS 2.6 Charles Schneider as the murdered/bloody mute boy Michael in Peter Pandemonium.

Charles Schneider, who is the writer and director of the play, is also referenced in Mel Gordon book on the Grand Guignol. Gordon regards Schneider as a part of the Parisian theatre’s horror legacy, which is encapsulated in the book by a picture from another Schneider play, The Methods of Colin Spikes. ‘The Theatre of Fear and Terror Lives!’ reads the caption that accompanies the stark photograph depicting two men in close up. One appears to be ripping the face from the other. Digging a little deeper, I was surprised that I wasn’t already familiar with Charles Schneider. He has been zigzagging across the face of pop culture for decades, through horror theatre, publishing associations and film work. In the early nineties, he was one of the first to interpret the clandestine audio recordings of brawling alcoholic roommates Peter and Raymond, of San Francisco’s Lower Haight district. These drunken diatribes, circulating on cassette for years as Shut Up, Little Man!, and recently the subject of a feature-length documentary, were given to Schneider by comic artist Daniel Clowes. Schneider decided the material would make a great play, albeit one that necessitated a

violent finale with some mutilation and disembowelment. “I added a suitably Guignolesque ending,” determines Schneider. The performance took place sometime in 1991 at the Jabberjaw club in Los Angeles, with Schneider appearing opposite co-director Gregg Gibbs, screaming back and forth at one another on the small stage for fifteen minutes before physical carnage ensues. It’s indicative of a different approach to Grand Guignol from that of Tom and Stewart and the Theatre of the Damned, one that is more rooted in performance than storytelling. I am paraphrasing, I believe, authors Richard J Hand and Michael Wilson, authors of two books on the Grand Guignol, when I say that the play isn’t made for the players but the players for the play.1 But having seen a video of the Shut Up, Little Man! show, and read the scripts provided by Schneider of his other plays, there is evidence of a greater sense of performance in Schneider ― of the playful and absurd ― than that of the straight adaptations and plays moulded in the style of the original Grand Guignol. I asked Charles Schneider about this. 1: Richard J Hand and Michael Wilson, The Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror, University of Exeter Press 2008, and London’s Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Horror, University of Exeter Press 2007.

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Charles schneider: In my particular case I’d have to agree. I tended to create ‘living cartoons’ or grotesque farce, sardonic but with a knowing wink now and then to the audience. I am sure that other troupes — such as the current Thrillpeddlers in San Francisco — stuck and stick to the very straight and traditional format. This is wonderful and I would love to experience that: like going in a time machine right back to the original theatre. I like creating original, new works, which tend to spring from my subconscious. HEADPRESS: How did you find out about the Grand Guignol? Charles: I had seen the film Mad Love [1935], with Peter Lorre, and had heard of a horror theatre. Because of my generally macabre bent, a very good article on the Théâtre du Grand Guignol was called to my attention in about 1980 by my friend John Towsen. He is a teacher, performer and author of the brilliant historical book Clowns. He was also a pioneer of the new style of Commedia and Clowning. I met him, and his partner in clowning, Fred Yockers, at a summer camp in New Milford, Connecticut, in the 1970s. I was an enthusiastic learner the first year — and then the next year an assistant — in their Clown Workshop, which taught kids

circus skills. The issue Towsen showed me was The Drama Review, March 1974. I was immediately fascinated and had a burning desire to produce some of these shows. It would take me years before I did this ― although they were, for the most part, original, new works. HEADPRESS: When did you actually start to put on the shows? Charles: I was invited to join a performance art troupe in Los Angeles named Theatre Carnivale, founded by Stephen Holman and Aaron Osborne. This allowed me a weekly venue at which I could produce plays I’d written and directed, for very underground crowds. It was a delightful, grimy time. In a sense, I had been preparing since childhood. I made violent Super-8 films throughout my youth. T

Top left: Greg Gibbs as Mr. Punch in Schneider’s Punch and Judy. Above: Covered in blood and feathers: [from left] Schneider, Toni Oswald and Stephen Holman in The Irishman and the Jew.

Right and over page: Excerpts from Schneider’s handwritten script for The Methods of Colin Spikes. Contemporary Grand Guignol Performance

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Aaron Osborne in Psychopathia Sexualis ― the story of a murderous foot fetishist who has his perverse way with a decapitated club-foot.

One of the goriest was made in

collaboration with my friend Eric EXCLUSIVE from Headpress, SPECIAL HARDBACK EDITIONS of our latest HEADPRESS: What was the theatre I starred in the revolting role! titles, in dustForsberg. jackets. Not available in any shop orduring anywhere else scene like this period? Was on the The film was called It Took Guts. We www. Thesecreated books carry no ISBN number. Also available as a signed, it in some ways a reaction to, or all of the special effects from consequence performance art of the scratch and on the fly.numbered [It’s now the edition stamped and individually of fifty ofcopies only.

time, i.e. Karen Finley? unlikely backdrop of a dance track, see Charles: The theatre scene I links on the right2 — Ed.] was involved inof wasnew spontaneous, I started in the mid 1980s in Los join our mailing list and keep informed releases dangerous and riveting. We produced Angeles. I was incredibly lucky to have shows fast, but would work insanely two amazingly talented friends who hard on production values, props, were masters of special makeup effects. costumes. Half of my cast often This was Screaming Mad George and seemed to consist of fiends, lunatics Gabe Bartalos, both of whom went on and maniacs, the other half were achieve great fame for their film artistry. dedicated actors who wanted to push Their contributions to The Methods their own limits. And boy did they. of Colin Spikes and Scream, Clown, HEADPRESS: You mentioned The Scream were outstanding and incredibly * See interview on page 93. Drama Review article. How else in the shocking. eighties were you able to research the Grand Guignol? Charles: The article in The Drama Review opened my eyes to the genre and whet my appetite to learn more. I also learned a bit more from my involvement with Amok books and the bookstore, as well as through the publisher and writer Adam Parfrey,* who has always had an uncanny ability to root out and research the weird and the great. And then the colour Mel Gordon DO NOT MISS the hardback Headpress journal series. Full book came out in 1988. That was a real throughout, each amazing issue is STAMPED AND INDIVIDUALLY breakthrough. NUMBERED and limited to 250 copies only.HEADPRESS: These are available in Wasnot it difficult to ‘sell’ the idea them of Grandwhile Guignol you to the still audience? any shop or anywhere else on the www. Get can!

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HEADPRESS 2.6 Dance Macabre ― a short piece featuring Schneider as a corpse committing a loving act of carnal necrophilia upon his dead beloved. 2: Some Charles Schneider links: Shut Up, Little Man! http://youtu.be/Y8PcX-0Gslw It Took Guts: http://youtu.be/Uu4dqSxoo74 Help Is On The Way: http://youtu.be/XsjCH8uOywc

Charles: No, they were very open to see well-orchestrated mayhem perpetrated on the stage. HEADPRESS: Did you revive any of the original plays? Charles: Oddly enough, only one. The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Feather. The rest were tales with similar plot structures and themes, but with new characters – and sometimes more overtly sexual or explicit. Now that there is so much research available and new material surfacing, I’d love to produce some of the old plays. I am especially interested in interpreting the plays on film. A great new book came out filled with Grand Guignol stories by Maurice Level.3 HEADPRESS: What kind of reaction did your bloody and violent plays receive? Charles: Totally mixed reactions. Many people were very enthusiastic, because they went to see these shows knowing they would be put through an extreme experience. It was the right time, place and mood to create these works – and people drank it up. There was a sense of excitement and danger in the theatre. It was fresh and wild and anything could happen. You never knew what might fly off the stage and end up in your lap! In fact, a faux uprooted human tongue, covered in ‘blood’, once landed in a front row patron’s lap. T

Tom and Jerry cartoons: Freaky Tiki: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2JF8XIIpkMw Fraidy Cat Scat: http://youtu.be/6_wSQbcEkFM Abracadumb: http://youtu.be/bcFxvadYMVc Tiger Cat: http://youtu.be/dk2_NHhIEIk John Towsen’s blog on physical comedy: http://physicalcomedy.blogspot.com/

3: Maurice Level, Tales of the Grand Guignol, Centipede Press 2011. This limited run of 100 copies is now sold out.

Above: Colin Spikes’ brother, model work by Gabe Bartalos. The Methods of Colin Spikes. Contemporary Grand Guignol Performance

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Frederick Witney

Forgotten Master of the Grand Guignol by Stewart Pringle

Left: The Granville Theatre of Varieties in 1904. It underwent a significant refit in 1926, and vacillated between theatre and variety until 1955 when it became a television studio until its demolition in 1971.

few short weeks before the bunting went up for V E day, in the offices of theatre manager A A Shenburn, a writer and would-be impresario had signed the papers to hire the Granville Theatre of Varieties in Walham Green, Fulham to have another plug at one of his great passions: bringing the Grand Guignol to London. The Granville was a fine theatre designed by the masterful Frank Matcham (creator of the London Coliseum among others) with lavish glazed walls, and an eclectic classical design filled with mythological creatures and great allegorical paintings. It was a worthy match for its Parisian counterpart, with the perfect combination of faded elegance

Witney’s other submission, also accepted by Levy in 1922, is far more perverse, and more interesting. Coals of Fire, perhaps Witney’s first attempt at a horror play, was banned outright…

and gloom to set off the onstage horrors. There’s nothing left of the Granville Theatre now, it was demolished in 1971 in a blaze of controversy that finally saw London’s Victorian theatres accorded the respect they deserved, and until recently there was nothing much left of Frederick Witney, that writer of minor inter-war comedies who clung to the Grand Guignol with such tenacity. Guignoleurs, followers or enthusiasts of the Grand Guignol, will know the names of Oscar Méténier, who founded the great Parisian theatre in 1894, and of Max Maurey who brought horror to the fore of its repertoire and led it through great prosperity in the early twentieth century. They may know André de Lorde, the unassuming librarian who wrote so many of its greatest dramas, and Paula Maxa, the original scream-queen, who died a thousand violent deaths before Janet Leigh stepped into the shower. The London Grand Guignol has always been the poor cousin of its French counterpart, but even Jose Levy, who ran its eight series’ at the Little Theatre in the Strand from 1920–22, was awarded the Legion of Honour for his work, and Richard Hand and Michael Wilson’s great book London’s Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Horror has at last given Levy’s contribution to Guignol history the academic attention it deserves. Witney, on the other hand, has been reduced to little more than a footnote in theatrical history, though with the help of a handful of companies across

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the world, his work is gradually making its way back to the stage. In the short months it existed, Witney’s residency at the Granville contributed a chapter of Grand Guignol history which rivals Levy’s in the strength of material it produced, and which has been neglected for too long. Frederick Witney was not an insignificant playwright, he wrote a string of comedies which attracted some acclaim, though his name has often survived where his work has not, usually in the biographies of actors such as Mrs Patrick Campbell whom he worked with and who later rose to some prominence. A footnote again, then. His comic plays typically deal with the complications of romance and propriety, and his plays often wielded a wicked satirical edge, gleefully puncturing the class divisions and formal etiquette of British life. It was perhaps his success with these themes, and their clear relationship to French farce, which drew him to Levy’s experiments at the Little Theatre, where he quickly demonstrated a considerable talent for the other side of the Grand Guignol: the horror play. The story of Levy’s Grand Guignol is in many ways the story of British theatre’s battle against the censors, neither the bawdy humour nor the explicit violence which had defined much of the output of 20 bis, rue Chaptal washed with the Lord Chamberlain’s office, and his notorious blue pencil struck scenes, scenery and even whole plays from Levy’s ambitious programmes. Witney submitted two plays for the original London Grand Guignol, both were enthusiastically accepted by Levy, both were summarily rejected by the censor. Considering these two plays in light of the theatrical climate of the period, it is clear why they met with such instant disapproval. Anniversary, accepted by Levy in 1922, presents a woman on the day of her divorce (itself a scandalous subject for the stage of the 1920s) who reveals her concerns about re-marrying to her new lover and eventually works herself up into such a state of sexual excitement that she rushes back into the arms of her

divorced husband. The mere suggestion of infidelity and illicit sex was usually enough to condemn a play, and though mild by the standards of modern drama (or even 1940s drama) it had no hope of passing on original submission. Witney’s other submission, also accepted by Levy in 1922, is far more perverse, and more interesting. Coals of Fire, perhaps Witney’s first attempt at a horror play, was banned outright; though unlike Anniversary, it was later performed once the Lord Chamberlain’s office had relaxed their standards and loosened their grip over British theatre. The play involves a short duologue between a hideously obese wife and her T Above: Anniversary. One of Anthony Lake’s more absurd illustrations for Frederick Witney’s collected plays, Grand Guignol.

Drawings this chapter by Anthony Lake, used to illustrate Frederick Witney’s collected plays, Grand Guignol (1947). Contemporary Grand Guignol Performance

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Aaron Osborne in Psychopathia Sexualis ― the story of a murderous foot fetishist who has his perverse way with a decapitated club-foot.

One of the goriest was made in

www.worldheadpress.com 20 Contemporary Grand Guignol Performance This advertisement is removed in the collector edition

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in their climactic acts of violence. In Level’s play Henri seizes the wife he has savagely disfigured and bellows ‘Comme moi! Comme moi!’ (‘Like me! ‘Like me!’), here Witney takes it further, the burnt Companion feebly twisting its head like a brutalised automata, explicitly ‘subhuman’. It is a terrible moment. Following its (unsurprising) rejection by the censors, the play was in fact produced by Levy in 1927 at the Arts Theatre Club, a ‘private’ society developed primarily to evade the censor’s grasp, and perform banned works for a select audience of enthusiasts. In 1929, Nancy Price submitted the play to the censors once again, intending to stage it at the Embassy Theatre; the Chief Examiner of Plays, George Street, again rejected it, noting colourfully (though not inaccurately) that ‘Anything more horrible and disgusting can hardly be imagined.’ The power of Coals of Fire is witnessed by the fact that its first public performance actually took place in France, where the Lord Chamberlain and his blue pencil couldn’t reach it, being staged in translation as part of a gala performance at the Théâtre des Mathurins in 1937. When it was next performed, it was as part of the inaugural season of Witney’s own Grand Guignol revival at the Granville. Street had now retired from his censorial position, and his successor, Henry Game, was known to be far more lenient in terms of both onstage horror and lax sexual morality. Nevertheless, a particularly shocking moment of naturalism in which the companion spits on the wife’s monstrous face, together with the final few moments of unspeakable horror, were forcibly omitted before the play could be presented. The opening season attracted a flurry of creditable reviews, including one from Punch which singled out Coals of Fire ‘that catastrophe among the crumpets’, for particular praise. The fifth season at the Granville swapped Coals of Fire for Witney’s own version of Level’s La Baiser dans la nuit. Witney’s adaptation, The Last Kiss, is

…Chief Examiner of Plays, George Street, again rejected it, noting colourfully (though not inaccurately) that ‘Anything more horrible and disgusting can hardly be imagined.’

remarkable for its neatness and economy. Compared with Level’s, it strips away much of the blind man’s posturing and rhetoric, and replaces an unnecessary introduction featuring a doctor and nurse with a simple exchange between the revenger and his landlady. Not a single moment of the play’s grotesque power is lost; the twisted sexual overtones remain in place, as well as the horror of its climax. T

Contemporary Grand Guignol Performance

Below: Coals of Fire. The hideous wife gloats over the tastefully concealed char-grilled face of her love rival.

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Left: Images from the Exeter Alternative Theatre’s production of Witney’s Weekend Cottage from their 2011 Grand Guignol season. Photos: Alastair Dean.

AUTHOR BIO Stewart Pringle is the Co-Artistic Director of Theatre of the Damned and the author of a number of short plays. He writes frequently for Exeunt online magazine and holds literature degrees from Merton College, Oxford and Jesus College, Cambridge. oldfury@gmail.com

Exeter Alternative Theatre (EAT) brought Witney back to English shores for their 2011 Grand Guignol production, presenting home-invasion thriller Weekend Cottage, one of Witney’s finest dramas and one which has lost none of its power to shock. As company director Louis Ravensfield notes, ‘The fear of intruders entering your property to steal, abuse or rape is as intimidating and fearful as it has ever been.’ Even alongside Pierre Chaine and André de Lorde’s brutal Torture Garden, Witney’s play proved a firm favourite with audiences. Ravensfield reports that EAT are considering a dedicated Witney season for the near future, presenting three or four of his works in the manner of his original programmes at the Granville Theatre. Frederick Witney may not be the best English Grand Guignol writer, but in Coals of Fire, he may have written the best English Grand Guignol play. His other works are often mannered or even absurd, but there is much to enjoy and a spark of something macabre and modern in moments like the sinister finale of Weekend Cottage where our heroine kills one potential rapist only to have her escape confounded by another, or in the tragi-comic protagonist of The Celibate, who drives his wife to suicide through his addiction to porn. While that little book of his keeps circulating from Guignoleur to Guignoleur, Frederick Witney might make more than a footnote yet. N Thanks to Alex Zavistovich, Tara Garwood and all at Motolov Theatre Group. http://www.molotovtheatre.org And to Louis Ravensfield and all at Exeter Alternative Theatre. http://eattheatre.co.uk Material gathered from a variety of sources: Richard Hand and Michael Wilson’s London’s Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Horror, assorted periodicals of the 1940s and interviews with Louis Ravensfield and Alex Zavistovich.

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Grand Guignol on Film

THE WIZARD OF GORE

HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS’ CINEMATIC ODE TO THE GRAND GUIGNOL by John Harrison

héâtre du Grand-Guignol exerts a powerful influence on the 1970 Herschell Gordon Lewis production The Wizard of Gore. The second-last horror film that Lewis helmed before disappearing from film production in 19721, it is not quite the most visceral title in his oeuvre in terms of extreme violence (The Gore Gore Girls [72] would top that nasty poll), but it is easily his most mind-bending contribution to the genre, and represents one of his few genuinely creative highlights (thematically, at least) as a filmmaker. Using his love of illusion and magic as a backdrop, Lewis weaves in The Wizard of Gore the disturbing tale of Montag the Magnificent (Ray Sager), a mysterious magician in the Grand Guignol tradition, whose grisly stage mutilations of female audience members have the unpleasant habit of becoming reality several hours after they leave the theatre. A woman who is cut in half with a chain saw later splits in two while sitting in a restaurant; another is drilled in the stomach with a giant punch press and is discovered that night as a bloody mess in her bed; a metal spike is pounded through another poor gal’s head, after which her brains are pulled out and her eyes poked in; another two ladies, forced to swallow swords, subsequently spew up their innards while travelling home. T

“Torture and terror have always fascinated mankind.” — Montag the Magnificent

1: The Gore Gore Girls, released in 1972, would be Lewis’ ultraviolent, misogynistic genre swan song, although he did make a belated return to low budget filmmaking in 2002 with Blood Feast 2: All You Can Eat.

Grand Guignol on Film

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Below: Ray Sager is Montag the Magnificent.

EXCLUSIVE from Headpress, SPECIAL HARDBACK EDITIONS of our latest titles, in dust jackets. Not available in any shop or anywhere else on the www. These books carry no ISBN number. Also available as a signed, stamped and individually numbered edition of fifty copies only. join our mailing list and keep informed of new releases As Montag’s illusions continue to become bloody reality, Sherry Carson (Judy Cler) tries to get the reluctant magician to appear on her daytime TV chat show, Housewives’ Coffee Break (try putting a show on television with that title these days!). When Montag finally agrees, he stares into the television camera and hypnotizes the viewing audience. Luckily, Sherry’s sceptical boyfriend, Jack (Wayne Ratay), who has avoided the evil magician’s deadly gaze on the tube, arrives at the studio just in time to push Montag into the raging inferno he had planned for Sherry and other studio personnel.

Just as The Wizard Of Gore looks to be heading towards a predictable happy ending, with Jack and Sherry enjoying a romantic glass of wine on the living room floor, Jack peels the skin off his face to reveal one more grande illusion to Judy — he is in fact, Montag! The illusionist begins to tear Sherry apart with his bare hands, but she merely laughs in his face, telling the confused and now terrified magician that he is in fact her illusion. Montag suddenly ends up back on stage where we met him at the beginning of the film, preparing to perform his first trick for the audience. Talk about your zen endings. Even by Lewis’ own infamous standards, on a technical level The Wizard of Gore is a very primitive production. The stilted acting is sub An obvious wig slides down one girl’s dinner theatre level and Ray Sager is face sheMISS is being spiked in the brain, journal at leastseries. twenty years toocolour young to play DOasNOT the hardback Headpress Full and newspapereach headlines areissue shown Montag, his INDIVIDUALLY youthful features hidden throughout, amazing is STAMPED AND under obvious makeup and dyed grey clearly peeling off the paper they have NUMBERED and limited These are he not available hair (to his credit, delves into the in been hastily pasted onto. to 250 copies only. any shop or anywhere else on the www. Get them youhaving still can! character withwhile enthusiasm, been

www.worldheadpress.com 32 This advertisement is removed in the collector edition

Grand Guignol on Film

HEADPRESS 2.6 Below: A victim of the Wizard of Gore.

awarded the role at the last minute when the original actor backed out). The gore effects are crude but revoltingly graphic. An obvious wig slides down one girl’s face as she is being spiked in the brain, and newspaper headlines are shown clearly peeling off the paper they have been hastily pasted onto. Many of the plot points make no sense or are never explained (what is the significance of the bloodstain apparition that appears on Sherry’s hand throughout the film, and for what devious purpose is Montag stealing the bodies of his victims from the morgue and cemetery?). In keeping with Lewis’ earlier gore films, Blood Feast (63), Two Thousand Maniacs (64), and The Gruesome Twosome (67), the many faults do nothing to dissipate frisson. In fact, its bare-basic production values, unrelenting seediness and just plain weirdness, combined with Lewis’ favoured use of location shooting (Montag’s performances were filmed in a Chicago high school auditorium during summer recess) give The Wizard of Gore an oppressive, grim ambience that is hard to shake once the film has ended. Forty years on, it has lost none of its power to revolt, fascinate and occasionally disturb (especially now that we know Lewis filmed one body snatching scene in an actual morgue surrounded by real corpses). The Grand Guignol was a dominating influence on Lewis that can be traced back to Blood Feast, his first foray into the world of gore cinema. Much like the splatter genre later popularised by Friday the 13th (80) and the like, Lewis’ gore epics were all about the effect, the messy pay-off, with characters written into the script purely to exit it in ever more gruesome makeup and prosthetic effects. But The Wizard of Gore was a more overt reference, placing the Grand Guignol up on the tattered and stained grindhouse screen, making it (along with Joel M Reed’s notorious Blood Sucking Freaks [76]*) the ultimate low budget cinematic interpretation of Oscar

Grand Guignol on Film

Forty years on, it has lost none of its power to revolt, fascinate and occasionally disturb (especially now that we know Lewis filmed one body snatching scene in an actual morgue surrounded by real corpses).

Méténier’s celebrated performance art. It is possible that the direct inspiration for The Wizard of Gore’s screenplay (penned by Lewis under the alias Allen Kahn) can be found in the Blood Shed, an empty restaurant in Old Town (then one of the main hippy hubs of Chicago), which Lewis turned into a cinema/live theatre in 1967. Here he performed crude but bloody Grand Guignol-esque stage tricks between film screenings (gore films, his own included, as well as Universal horror classics like Dracula [31] and Frankenstein [31]). In the book, The Amazing Herschell Gordon Lewis and His World of Exploitation Films (FantaCo 1983), one-time Lewis cameraman/jack of all trades Daniel Krogh recalls the setup of the Blood Shed: T

* See page 35.

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AUTHOR BIO John Harrison is the Melbourne based author of Hip Pocket Sleaze (Headpress 2011). He is currently working on two new books, one a noir fiction and the other a bio of seventies adult starlet Rene Bond. www.john-harrison. blogspot.com

A front window held a display of two mannequins, one a full figure, the other a bust, from whose eyes electrically pumped stage blood constantly flowed. Inside near the street door were the ticket booth, the stage, and the screen; a narrow hallway, which ran along the audience area, led to the projection booth, formerly a kitchen, and a small upstairs snack bar. In this humble setting, the tourists and citizens of Old Town were offered showings of not only Herschell’s films, but those of other directors in the goreexploitation genre. A live stage show highlighted by simulated throat slashings, as well as a recreation of Blood Feast’s notorious tongue removal scene, added to the taboo fun. The skits in the show were authored by Allison Louise Downe2, who also managed the theatre, and were filled with weird characters with names like Count Satan, Wanda Werewolf and Irving Vampire. A couple of out of work go-go girls worked as shills in the audience, portraying victims.3

Unfortunately, civil riots and general unrest put a rather quick end to the Blood Shed, and no photographic record of its brief existence seems to have survived. But its gaudy spirit lives on, preserved on the grimy 35mm celluloid frames of The Wizard of Gore. In 2007, director Jeremy Kasten remade The Wizard of Gore as a retropunk carnival splatter noir (now there’s a genre!), starring Crispin Glover as a very flamboyant Montag. Flashier and with more arty pretensions than Lewis’ film, the remake still retains the Grand Guignol spirit of the original. It features a typically eccentric performance from Glover, and captures a brief moment of cultural zeitgeist with the inclusion of several Suicide Girls amongst its cast. Availability: The Wizard of Gore is available on DVD from Something Weird Video, in a special edition which includes an audio commentary by Herschell Gordon Lewis and the original theatrical trailer. A Blu-Ray release is forthcoming. The 2007 remake is available on various DVD labels around the world. N

2. A former Miami probation officer, Allison Louise Downe was a long term Lewis regular who worked both in front of and behind the camera under a variety of aliases. She wrote the screenplays for Blood Feast, She-Devils on Wheels (1968) and Just For the Hell of It (1968), and acted in several of Lewis’ early nudie-cutie films under the name Vicki Miles. 3. The Amazing Herschell Gordon Lewis and His World of Exploitation Films by Daniel Krogh with John McCarty, FantaCo Enterprises Inc, USA, September 1983. Top: Montag hypnotizes the masses through television.

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Blood Sucking Freaks

Grand Guignol and Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s crisis in the 1970s The transposition of Grand Guignol to Times Square in New York, and its impact on one decade of American popular culture

by Dr. Spike

Grand Guignol on Film

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s the 1970s dawned in America, expectations were high. Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 with a pledge to bring an honourable end to the war in Vietnam, and the forthcoming national bicentennial prompted a wave of national pride and conservative patriotism. However as the decade progressed the Vietnam conflict dragged on and public trust in the political system

Nineteen-seventies New York City was the perfect mise-en-scène for downbeat exploitation films probing the city’s social and moral decay.

was undermined by Nixon during the Watergate scandal. In the following years the FBI and CIA, the nation’s iconic crime fighters, were publicly condemned for their illegal activities. In addition, the national economic decline, oil crisis and worldwide recession raised questions about the financial strength of the United States. Influential film critic Pauline Kael noted “There is no way to estimate the full effect of Vietnam and Watergate on popular culture, but earlier films were predicated on an implied system of values which is gone now, except in the corrupt, vigilante form of a Dirty Harry or a Walking Tall.”2 On a more individual note, during the course of the 1960s and seventies numerous aspects of human sexual activity came under legal scrutiny, especially in relation to entertainment and business interests, a political sideshow creating antagonism between liberals and conservatives but diverting attention away from more important social problems. The decade was especially unkind to New York City. In the late 1930s, the city was at its peak when Swiss architect Le Corbusier called New York the ‘world city’ but over the subsequent decades its status declined. By the late 1960s there was a significant shift from blue collar manufacturing to white-collar service sector employment, the crime rate in the city was high and the population was in decline. Even worse, New York City’s escalating financial problems were prominently reported in national and international newspapers. Nineteenseventies NYC was the perfect mise-enscène for downbeat exploitation films probing the city’s social and moral decay. Amidst the social disorder and economic stagnation, the Knapp Commission (1972) presented a disturbing picture of police corruption in the city and was quickly followed by criminal indictments against corrupt police officials. Even the opening of the World Trade Centre in 1972 was a short lived boost since its position as the tallest building in the world was quickly usurped by the

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1: The film went through several name changes and has also been exhibited under different titles such as House of the Screaming Virgins, and The Incredible Torture Show but for clarity it will just be referred to as Blood Sucking Freaks. Thanks to 42nd Street Pete, who provided some helpful information about New York in the 1970s and Sal DiGiacomo, a friend of Luis de Jesus, who contributed important biographical information after reading a previous article ‘Size Matters’ in Headpress 25 (2003) which I have incorporated into this article. 2: Pauline Kael, Reeling. Marion Boyars, London, 1977. 3: For example The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1970), The Owl and the Pussycat (Herbert Ross, 1970), Carnal Knowledge (Mike Nichols, 1971) and Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask (1972). 4: David Kerekes and David Slater, Killing For Culture: An Illustrated History of Death in Film from Mondo to Snuff. Annihilation Press, 1993.

There was something surreal and ironic about reading uncomfortably personal reviews of adult films in the New York Times during the 1970s…

interest in pornography faded but low budget exploitation films continued to incorporate violence and nudity to attract customers. Of all the low budget horror films of the 1970s one stands out for the hostile reception it received from critics, and the fascinatingly nasty film became a symbol for militant feminists and an icon of the US ‘video nasty’ panic a decade later. T

Sears Tower in Chicago. Notable films set in contemporary New York such as The Outof-Towners (1970), Little Murders (1971), Mean Streets (1973), Death Wish (1974), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975) and Taxi Driver (1976), could not depict the city in a flattering light. In the climate of economic decline and social decay a “kind of porno chic” was generated by the media attention devoted to Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat after it opened in New York in June 1972. ‘Porno chic’ was to some degree legitimised by a succession of mainstream films addressing the changing social values and conflicting ideas about sex and relationships,3 but because of the mainstream success of Deep Throat porn was no longer relegated to “flea pit peepshows or stag nights.”4 There was something surreal and ironic about reading uncomfortably personal reviews of adult films in the New York Times during the 1970s, as there is in reading pseudo-intellectual academic critiques of exploitation films. After a year or two, mainstream public Previous page: Acknowledging its Grand Guignol heritage ― a screening of Blood Sucking Freaks in France. Grand Guignol on Film

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“it has absolutely no redeeming values whatsoever; it’s sadistic, morally reprehensible, and Jerry Falwell would take a dump the size of Rhode Island in his trousers if he was forced to watch it — but it is definitely an item not to be missed by any deviant moviegoer.”

Above and opposite: Master Sardu and his girls in Blood Sucking Freaks. Says Joel Reed of the set photographs throughout this piece: “These pictures are unique. They are the only ones the still photographer took. He was drunk for ten days.” All images courtesy Joel Reed.

According to The Motion Picture Guide, which was wholly unimpressed by Joel Reed’s Blood Sucking Freaks (Joel Reed, 1976), the film must have “escaped” because “it couldn’t have been released,”5 and John Kenneth Muir condemned it as “a vile little film.”6 In contrast Steve Pulchaski enthused “it has absolutely no redeeming values whatsoever; it’s sadistic, morally reprehensible, and Jerry Falwell would take a dump the size of Rhode Island in his trousers if he was forced to watch it — but it is definitely an item not to be missed by any deviant moviegoer.”7 Joel Reed, the film’s director, even admitted that it “has no redeeming value. The only thing is the humour, the New

5: “Blood Sucking Freaks,” The Motion Picture Guide I (1985). 6: John Kenneth Muir, Horror Films of the 1970s. Volume 2. McFarland and Co., Jefferson, NC, 2002. 7: Steve Pulchaski, Slimetime: A Guide to Sleazy, Mindless Movies. Revised ed. Headpress, Manchester, 2002. 8: Jeff Frentzen, “‘All my movies are pretty crummy’: An Interview With Joel M. Reed,” Dark Waters online (2001). 9: Louis J. Kern, “American ‘Grand Guignol’: Splatterpunk Gore, Sadean Morality and Socially Redemptive Violence,” Journal of American Culture 19:2 (Summer 1996). 10: Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror. Revised edition. Da Capo Press, New York, 1997.

York humour. If people approach the picture too seriously then something’s wrong with them.”8 Unfortunately many people, even in New York, did not understand or appreciate Reed’s humour and they did take the film too seriously. Critical response was not really surprising since the film drew inspiration from earlier exploitation films and the French theatre of Grand Guignol, a tradition that “violated most of the literary and theatrical conventions of its time. It sought, through shock and the probing of the innermost recesses of fear, to awaken the deadened soul of its audience.”9 Not exactly a recipe for mainstream success and acclaim. Grand Guignol, like exploitation film, “was predicated on the simulation of the rawest and most adolescent of human interactions and desires: incest and patricide; blood lust; sexual anxiety and conflict; morbid fascination with bodily mutilation and death; loathing of authority; fear of insanity; an overall disgust for the human condition and its imperfect institutions.”10 On those terms Joel Reed’s creation was guaranteed to provoke outrage. Subsequent generations of film directors drew inspiration from Grand Guignol and over time many of the psychological aspects of it were

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incorporated into horror films as well as the showmanship and graphic depictions of violence, becoming familiar cinematic features. In 1889, prior to the commencement of Oscar Méténier’s one act play La Casserole (Stool-Pigeon), his colleague Andre Antoine warned the audience that anyone with delicate sensibilities should leave the theatre. A ploy that was adopted and adapted by showmen and exploitation filmmakers for generations to come.11 Noted film historian S. S. Prawer acknowledged the value of horror films saying, The terror film, with puzzling, disturbing, multivalent images, often leads us into regions that are strange, disorienting, yet somehow familiar; and for all the crude and melodramatic and morally questionable forms in which we so often encounter it, it does speak of something true and important, and offers us encounters with hidden aspects of ourselves and our world which we should not be too ready to reject.12 Suggesting that the amoral and degenerate world presented by Joel Reed should not be dismissed as abruptly as it had been by critics. Each generation challenges the taboos and traditional values of their predecessors, and even the iconic Edgar Allan Poe seemed tame in comparison to the writers who came after him. Belief systems and sensibilities had changed since the golden era of Universal horror films, and Blood Sucking Freaks reflected some of those developments. “Horror movies,” Judy Keisner observed “and

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specifically postmodern horror movies, are characterized by increasingly gory, graphic dramatization of the destruction of human bodies,” and that as a social function “Horror movies actively question a shared notion of reality by creating complex contradictions between good and evil, female and male, and pleasure and pain, forcing the viewer to question an understanding of the real.” 13 T 11: The Wizard of Gore (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1970) warned that squeamish people should leave the auditorium, and in exhibitions of The Cannibal Girls (Ivan Reitman, 1972) a bell would ring to warn sensitive members of the audience that an upcoming scene would feature graphic violence and nudity so they could close their eyes. The ‘Orgy of the Living Dead’ triple bill of Revenge of the Living Dead (Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, 1973), Curse of the Living Dead (Mario Bava, 1966) and Fangs of the Living Dead (Armando De Ossorio, 1968) offered an insurance policy to audience members that would provide a lifetime’s free incarceration at a mental asylum to anyone who went mad watching the three films. 12: S. S. Prawer, Caligari’s Children: The Film As Tale Of Terror. Oxford UP, Oxford, 1980. 13: Judy Keisner, “Do you want to watch? A study in the visual rhetoric of the postmodern horror film,” Women’s Studies 37:4 (2008).

the gospel according to unpopular culture

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And there is no doubt that Reed’s film is original and quirky. However, sometimes that sort of vision can provoke a negative response: Often [low-budget] films are eccentric — even extreme — presentations by individuals freely expressing their imaginations, who, throughout the filmmaking process improvise creative solutions to problems posed by either circumstance or budget — mostly the latter. Secondly, they often present unpopular — even radical — views addressing social, political, racial or sexual inequalities, hypocrisy in religion or government; or, in other ways they assault taboos related to the presentation of sexuality, violence, and other mores.14 EXCLUSIVE from Headpress, SPECIAL HARDBACK EDITIONS of our latest For all its faults and shortcomings titles, in dust jackets. Not available in any shop or anywhere else on the Blood Sucking Freaks epitomizes Vale www. These books carry no ISBN number. and Also available as a signed, Juno’s sentiments. who wrote and directed stamped and individually numbered editionReed, of fifty copies only. the film, was working on the pre-production of another project when he was asked by join our mailing list and keep informed oftonew releases some of his friends write a script after they had seen Gyles Fontaine’s nude S&M ballet. Nudity on stage was not new in the City. In the 1960s the Joffrey Ballet, America’s premier company based in New 14: V. Vale and Andrea Juno (Ed.), Incredibly Strange Films. RE/Search, York, featured simulated sex and nudity in San Francisco, 1986. some of their productions. The play Ché, 15: There were ballet scenes in Oh! Calcutta which played on Broadway about the revolutionary Ché Guevara, for twelve years and was released as a two-hour long video in 1971 with ran off-Broadway in the late 1960s with most of the original cast. The show had no explicit sex scenes but there an all-nude cast, and all of the male roles was lots of nudity. were played by females and vice-versa. On the opening night all ten members of the cast were arrested and charged with In their landmark book Incredibly obscenity, consensual sodomy and public Strange Films, V Vale* and Andrea lewdness. Also in the late sixties, during Juno argued for the merits of the more a performance by the Living Theatre eccentric independent filmmakers like Company at the Brooklyn Academy which Joel Reed, observing: featured sex and nudity, the critic from the The value of low-budget film is: they Tulane Drama Review, Richard Schechner, can be transcendent expressions of a stripped naked and ran onto the stage, single person’s individual vision and attempting to fondle members of the cast. quirky originality. When a corporation The musical Hair made its public decides to invest $20 million in a film, debut on 7 October 1967colour at the Public chainhardback of command regulates each journal DO NOT MISSathe Headpress series. Full Theatre off-Broadway, but performances step, and no one person is allowed throughout, each amazing issue is STAMPED AND INDIVIDUALLY quickly sold out and the show soon free rein. Meetings with lawyers, NUMBERED and limited 250 copies These are not available moved to Broadway before becoming in accountants, andto corporate boards areonly. shop or anywhere else onare the www. Get them while you still Los can! an international success. By 1972, what films in Hollywood all about. * Seeany page 80.

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…the critic from the Tulane Drama Review, Richard Schechner, stripped naked and ran onto the stage attempting to fondle members of the cast.

Angeles, London, Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Munich, Belgrade and Sydney all staged productions of Hair. Oh! Calcutta premiered in June 1969 at the Eden Theatre in New York City, and eventually became one of the longest running shows in theatre history. 15 Around the same time, the Yale School of Drama Repertory company did a version of Euripides’ The Bacchae which led to an off-Broadway production called Dionysus in 69, featuring nudity and simulated sex. In response to the trend of nudity and sex in theatre, LIFE magazine ran a cover story entitled “Sex in the lively Arts: How Far is Far Enough?” (4 April 1969). Obviously different sensibilities drew the line in different places, but theatre primarily catered for a much smaller and more elitist audience than cinema. A few years later, in 1972, the Netherlands Dance Theater performed the first nude ballet by a major company, Mutations, at the Brooklyn Academy. The New York Times critic Clive Barnes, while suspicious of the marketing tactics, covered the performances sympathetically, but New York Magazine noted the absurdity of the production saying, “nude dancing exposes certain appendages which, if left free to flop willy-nilly work against the beautiful athletic control that dancers are trained to exert over the rest of their bodies, thereby spoiling the over-all sense of grace and idealized movement.”

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Aside from Fontaine’s ballet, Reed was inspired by the exploitation films Ilsa, she wolf of the SS (Don Edmonds, 1975) and Ilsa, Keeper Of The Oil Sheiks Harem (Don Edmonds, 1976). While they were all cheaply made the first two Ilsa films and Blood Sucking Freaks also had similarities in the subject matter, all featuring perverse humour, nudity, inventive and graphic torture, sexual exploitation, and slavery. In terms of sadistic violence and gore Ilsa, Keeper Of The Oil Sheiks Harem (1976) is no more or less outrageous that Blood Sucking Freaks. It features eye-gouging, vicious castration and other imaginative tortures and murder performed with comparable special effects. Ilsa also features a demented dwarf who appears during the slave auction scene, but he is not as prominent or outrageous as Reed’s creation Ralphus or The Sinful Dwarf. T

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PHILIP K. DICK

VOIGT-KAMPFF & CALIFORNIA ÜBER ALLES

The Californian landscape of Philip K. Dick is littered with sinister objects, and cultural artifacts suggesting the fascism of ‘high culture’. With the majority of Dick’s fiction being written against the real-life backdrop of the Californian eugenics program, and with the emergence of fascist memorabilia within the counterculture, James Reich examines the anti-fascist content of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and reveals the real meaning of the Voigt-Kampff test. by JAMES REICH

n his brilliant critical safari I Think I Am Philip K. Dick, Laurence A. Rickels stalks Dick and his work with a loaded scattergun of mordant scholarship, self-wounding humour noir, schizo-analysis, grief, irony, pop cultural and all of the countercultural seriousness required for the game hunting of science fiction’s preeminent hot mess. In his introductory Introjection, Rickels makes a fascinating point: What is unique to Dick’s Californian future, however, is that the German introjects are psychically installed with ambivalence… In the future that Dick foretells, high culture, music, literature, science, philosophy, you name it, are overwhelmingly German, for better or worse. (Rickels, p.2)

Rickels’ observation of Germanicity, Illustration opposite by Michael Robinson. referred to as “the open book of evil

“Evil is real like cement” — Philip K. Dick.

politics in which Dick often inserts his place marker,” makes a seductive point. Interviewed by Mike Hodel for the Hour 25 radio show in 1977, Dick explains that the seven years spent in research for his 1962 novel The Man In The High Castle, studying Gestapo diaries from Warsaw at the Berkeley-Cal Library, embedded a trauma that only the catharsis of writing the novel could confront. But, forced identification with his subject, the medusa of German National Socialism, the occupation of the same body as evil — and here Dick says: “Evil is real like cement” — turned Dick to stone, induced nausea, paralysis. In a sense, and quite rationally, Dick flinches. Discussing his aborted attempts at a sequel to the novel, Dick explains that he lacked the guts or the stomach for it: “I could not do that again. That’s why my book is set in the Japanese part, you see, so I could deal with people.” Yet, crucially, in the same interview, Dick is simultaneously at pains to disentangle the idea of fascism from the Germanicity that Rickels refers to: I had created for myself an enemy that I would hate for the rest of my life: fascism, wherever it appears, F

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whether it’s in Germany, the United States, the Soviet Union… Fascism wherever it appears is the enemy… Fascism and Germany are not that intimately linked. Fascism is a worldwide phenomenon. It could hit a bunch of baboons swinging in the trees in Polynesia; they could all suddenly put on iron helmets and march around. Fascism is very much with us today, boys and girls, and still an enemy. Rickels’ reference to ambivalence is important. The composition of The

Fascism is a worldwide phenomenon. It could hit a bunch of baboons swinging in the trees in Polynesia; they could all suddenly put on iron helmets and march around.

Man In The High Castle was dictated to a profound extent by Dick’s casting of I-Ching hexagrams to determine plot elements. “And I’ve been sorry ever since…” Dick acknowledges that, in retrospect, this experimental structuring was deceptive, and failed him in the sense of having “no more to say” towards assisting him in concluding the novel. Repeatedly, Dick’s oeuvre evidences his personal oscillation between secular suspicion and credulous mystification. The experience of working through the I-Ching in The Man In The High Castle led to his abandoning it. “The I-Ching told me more lies than anyone else I’ve ever known.” But his use of it was another strategic avoidance of the medusa, of not looking directly at the ‘evil’ threatening his unconscious, or his fragile psychic wellbeing. In the early 1950s, Philip K. Dick dropped out of Berkeley and became employed at a classical music record store, Art Music, where his fascination with classicism and opera flourished. In terms of that specific environment, and in terms of academia and mainstream opinion, much of ‘high culture’ or ‘the canon’ remained a European export, and — to a point — inevitably exhibited a certain Germanicity. Dick’s immersion in the ‘high’ culture of northern Europe precedes his confrontation with “the open book of evil politics” in his fiction. But, it is also essential to examine aspects of popular, or ‘low’ culture in Dick’s Californian environment. Dick traversed the canon and the counterculture, and it was within the counterculture that the latent emblems of fascism surfaced in California, and were worn openly and ‘installed with ambivalence’. During the 1960s, Ed Roth, surf/hotrod artist, Ratfink creator and Mormon convert, created a ‘surfer’s cross’ based on the Iron Cross. Essentially, this was an Iron Cross with the figure of a surfer superimposed upon it, where Adolf Hitler had superimposed the swastika when resurrecting the ancient medal. The wearing of WWII

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Iron Crosses became associated with the non-conformity of surf culture, along with their display on, arguably, the quintessential emblematic vehicle brand of the counterculture, the Volkswagen, colloquially known as “Hitler’s car”. Of course, Disney also made attempts to rehabilitate Hitler’s car as ‘Herbie’, The Love Bug (1968), the benign red white and blue, Jewish wonder-car. But, Ed Roth also manufactured plastic helmets that were simulacra of Nazi helmets for surfers. Describing what is actually an ambivalent relation between authoritarianism, kitsch and avant-garde engineering, in Rickels’ chapter on Dick’s novel The Simulacra entitled ‘Umwelt, Mitwelt, and Eigengelt’, he notes: The second in the assembly line of robots in Dick’s earlier android novel We Can Build You, Abraham Lincoln was at the front of the line of animatron robots of American Presidents imagineered by Disney already in the 1960s, which now model the President of the future in The Simulacra is — Surprise! — made in Germany. Indeed this Californian culture of the future is immersed in Germanicity. (Rickels, p.249) Of course, the most successful, in terms of currency, of Dick’s Californian novels is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the 1968 novel criminally disregarded in the making of the iconic film Blade Runner. In considering it, we should recall that Philip K. Dick’s real-life California was the primary arena of eugenic sterilizations in the United States; and that eugenics had been conceptually imported to National Socialism from American programs, of which the Californians were the most fanatical. There should be no doubt that in this Randian climate (Dick’s novel refers to the “smug scientific vassal, The Rand Corporation”) one of Dick’s direct political intentions was to critique the fascism of the eugenics industry, which he does specifically through the sympathetic

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character of the “chickenhead” or “special” J.R. Isidore, and in general through the ambiguity of his human/ schizophrenic/android intercourses. With regard to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Rickels is correct in that the killing of the ‘high culture’ android Luba Luft, a Germanic opera star doppelgänger, arguably causes Rick Deckard the most ambivalent grief. Her death is the most complex and difficult to achieve, in part because of Deckard’s awe at what she represents in terms of his canon, but it would be wrong to claim that her assumed Germanicity is emblematic of anything specifically sinister. Dick’s androids are victims of fascism. F

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him to function as a writer — addressed obliquely, atmospherically, atavistically. Therefore, the killing of Luft as a cold ‘inhuman’ figure without affect or empathy could be integrated within Dick’s anti-fascist discourse. But, I think that this requires too much agility, and suspect that her presence in the novel reflects precisely what Dick would hate to destroy, and what he is at pains to disentangle during the 1977 interview. Dick does not equate Germanicity with fascism by default. In discussing Luba Luft’s antecedents, Dick, through Deckard, refers to the soprano Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. In a contested biography Schwarzkopf became, according to Michael H. Kater in The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich, an EXCLUSIVE from Headpress, SPECIAL HARDBACK EDITIONS ofactive ourNazi latest by choice. By the time of Dick’s writing titles, in dust jackets. Not available in any shop or anywhere else on the her into Luba Luft, Schwarzkopf had www. These books carry no ISBN number. left Also available as a signed, Germany and had been an Austrian citizen more than twenty years. Did stamped and individually numbered edition of for fifty copies only. Philip K. Dick, working at the record store, hear Schwarzkopf as a complicit join our mailing list and keep informed releases German Nazi orof as annew exquisitely talented Austrian? Deckard also alludes to German singer Lotte Lehmann who resisted Nazism, and Lisa Della Casa who was Swiss, and Schwarzkopf’s rival antagonist. Yet, again, did Dick consider Mozart nominally German under imperialism, or conventionally Austrian, and thus more distant from fascist allusions, as would have been the Certainly, Dick might have unconscious consensus (for what that is worth)? motives for installing Luba Luft as he did, But, further, Deckard’s identification preparing for her role in Mozart’s The with Luft not merely as a talented Magic Flute: Mozart is contemporarily Germanic android with no trace of an identified as Austrian, but Salzberg in accent, but as a posthuman being who 1756 was assumed part of the Holy he is reluctant to kill, depends upon and Roman Empire, the locus of which was is expressed through the screen of a pair Germany. Admittedly, it’s the kind of of paintings by Norwegian Expressionist inside joke that Dick would make, as Edvard Munch: The Scream and Puberty. he might also with the other ‘Austrian’ If Rickels’ sense of Germanicity is to be composer Deckard mentions later, taken in its wider sense, then it must Josef Strauss. This would be Germanicity also be understood that it is the screen applied in its wider sense, as employed across which Deckard sympathy by contemporary European and American journal DO NOT MISS the hardback Headpress series. Fulladmits colour for Luft and INDIVIDUALLY confronts his own latent and racialissue purists.is It could throughout,crypto-fascists each amazing STAMPED AND (Anglo) fascism as a cop. be argued that since fascism is Dick’s NUMBEREDmedusa, and limited to 250that copies are not available in Luba Luft aside, the androids — and his fascination, it is also only. These any shop or —anywhere on the www. Get themscience while— you still can! embodying assume or are and sometimeselse necessarily to allow

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PHILIP K. DICK

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given ambiguously Nordic, Germanic, Russian, or westernized mutt names: Irmgard and Roy Baty, Max Polokov/ Sandor Kadalyi, Anders and Gitchel, Garland, Hasking, Pris Stratton, and Rachael Rosen. Amanda Werner, Luft’s inane and heavily accented (where Luft is not) trash culture anti-type, runs counter to the notion of the primacy of German high culture defining Dick’s landscape. Nothing is ever so straightforward in Dick’s fiction, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is Shakespearean in its ironies, impersonations, reflections and doppelgängers. In the alternate-mirror San Francisco police station run by the androids, Inspector Garland refers to their equivalent of the Voigt-Kampff test: the Boneli Reflex-Arc Test, which Dick may have named after the American baritone Richard Bonelli who he would likely also have heard at the Art-Music Record Store. …The future world of Philip K. Dick confirms, German is, inside California or Globalese, the language of the dead. (Rickels, p.2) Voigt-Kampff, Philip K. Dick’s extension, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, of Alan Turing’s tests of human-machine equivalence, is so overshadowed by its mechanical presence in the movie adaptation of the novel that one of Dick’s greatest ironies tends to go un-interrogated. Dick’s choice of the name is not arbitrary: the Germanic Voigt-Kampff is derived from ‘farm manager’ and ‘struggle/fight’. Voigt also puns Vogt in the sense of ‘overlord’. It’s a classic ‘Dick joke’ which refers to the jurisdiction and trials of the novel’s bounty hunter Rick Deckard, owner of the eponymous electric sheep. The novel, establishing a posthuman equivalence of animal, human, androids and ‘electric sheep’ in all their forms is about the elliptical journey from Mein Kampf to Voigt-Kampff, the encroach of fascist and totalitarian modes, and eugenics. Establishing that equivalence,

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or underlining ambivalence is vital to Dick’s quasipastoral anti-fascist discourse. The animal reference is of course deliberate, as is the description of Voigt-Kampff being developed from a prior test “devised from the Pavlov Institute in the Soviet Union” an allusion to the concept of ‘Pavlov’s Dog’. Implicit in the struggle of Deckard as both shepherd of his domesticated electric sheep and of the escaped Nexus-6 androids, is that this is also a literature of holocaust and confinement where the decolonized Earth and the colonised Mars are binary nightmares. It is a narrative of reflective barriers and traps. The androids are killed inside the confines of Deckard’s car, inside a claustrophobic elevator, within an office, a stairwell, and the final kippelized apartment. The novel opens with Deckard and his wife Iran arguing over the settings of their Penfield mood organs, prosthetic devices that will confine and dictate their dispositions throughout the day. The machine is a Penfield mood organ; get it? Pen / Field: considered properly, Voigt-Kampff applied to the androids and Penfield applied to humans, ironically erase human/animal-android F

It could be argued that since fascism is Dick’s medusa, and his fascination, that it is also — and sometimes necessarily to allow him to function as a writer…

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boundaries as Dick contemplates a more posthuman sympathy. All of the characters in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are products of the “flattening of affect.” The discriminating feature of humanist empathy, achievable only through mechanical interface — fusion with the Sisyphus-like entity Wilbur Mercer — is revealed by Mercer’s absurdist AUTHOR BIO pop culture anti-type, the android Buster James Reich is the Friendly, to be a metaphysical “swindle”. author of I, Judas (Soft (A mercer is both a type of German Skull Press 2011), a ‘shepherd’ dog, and if derived from founder member of French is a textiles salesmen; Mercer the post-punk band sells the false fabric of reality. One can Venus Bogardus and go too far with these things.) Here’s a contributing faculty another of Dick’s great jokes: Mercer, member of Santa Fe described by the androids as susceptible University of Art and to abuse by any “potential Hitler” is Design. revealed to be less a metaphysical www.jamesreich.net being than a pataphysical being in the alcoholic form of Al Jarry — a deliberate reference to Alfred Jarry, whose 1902 novel The Supermale is one of the urtexts of android/posthuman literature.

Mercer, described by the androids as susceptible to abuse by any “potential Hitler” is revealed to be less a metaphysical being than a pataphysical being in the alcoholic form of Al Jarry — a deliberate reference to Alfred Jarry, whose 1902 novel The Supermale is one of the urtexts of android/posthuman literature.

So, perhaps this Germanicity is more ‘sonic’ or linguistic than anything else; some of these ‘high culture’ or fascistic objects like the Voigt-Kampff test sound German, or are expressed in German (albeit with an extra ‘f’), but it would be an error to continue with the idea that Dick’s California is resolutely Germanic. Throughout his oeuvre, Philip K. Dick wrote about the fascism of objects, reified ideas and spectacular commodities in popular and ‘high’ culture, particularly the ambiguous fascism and fascination of simulacra and counterfeits. The superficial sound or appearance of German language in Dick’s fiction is not enough to make the implicit point that I think Rickels might be chasing regarding the relation between Nazism and the tyrannies of “high culture, music, literature, science, philosophy” manifesting to the proletariat protagonists of Dick’s fictions. As I hope to have explained, Germanicity, understood in Laurence Rickels’ Introjection as bearing a direct relation to fascism, and the “open book of evil” was in Dick’s real California, explicitly and ambivalently expressed through the counterculture. Its latency, in Dick’s mainstream view of ‘high culture’ should be addressed, as Dick would counsel, with some caution. In chapter thirteen of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Dick, via Pris Stratton, doppelgänger of the Semitic android Rachael Rosen who Deckard must both degrade and save, offers a satirical criticism of the Wagnerian aspects of science fiction (“huge monsters and women in breastplates that glistened”) or “pre-colonial literature” as a pulp fiction plagued by crass evocations of fascism; literally the pop culture of ‘space opera’ that Dick’s literature resists. Laurence A. Rickels does make a seductive point, but in the literature of Philip K. Dick, fascism is often insidious and perhaps more likely to be expressed through banality, ephemera and trash than it is through the more obvious trappings of a European ‘high culture’ for which he had some affinity.  PHILIP K. DICK

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SOMETHING FUNNY IS GOING ON HERE!

MARK ARNOLD IS CRACKED ! The humorEST FUNNY magazine in the world and an interview with the GUY who wrote a big, two-volume book about it.

BY John Szpunar

MARK ARNOLD IS CRACKEDâ&#x20AC;&#x2030;!

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’ll never forget the first time I saw an issue of Cracked. It was 1983, and I was sitting in the back of a classroom with a few of my friends. The kid sitting next to me slid a battered magazine out from under his textbook and passed it my way. “It’s kind of like Mad,” he said. I waited a few minutes before sneaking a look. We’d been caught passing comics during class before, and the result was never good. After a while, my curiosity got the better of me and I opened the thing. It looked like Mad, but it wasn’t. “What in the world is this?” I asked.

As a devotee of Mad, I was almost insulted by the thing. 68

“It’s called Cracked,” he said. I paged through the magazine, trying to figure it out. It wasn’t all that funny. Some of the artwork was good, but most of the writing seemed third-rate, even to a fourth-grader like me. As a devotee of Mad, I was almost insulted by the thing. Still, that same afternoon, I ran off to the corner store to look for more. It seemed like Cracked was always there. You could walk up to any newsstand, and it sat there next to Mad, almost daring you to take it home. As a kid in need of a monthly humour-fix, take it home I did. After a few months, I became familiar with the artists. John Severin topped the list. The guy seemed to illustrate almost every cover, as well as half of every issue. Bill Ward (who signed his work McCarthy) was there, rendering grotesque, gawking men whose tongues almost drooled off the page as they ogled his highly-fetishized females. There was a guy called Howard Nostrand who seemed to be a cross between Jack Davis and Wally Wood. A lot of the artwork was obviously reprinted. It didn’t take a lot to realise that. And as the months turned into years, I’d find myself asking yet again: Just what in the world is this? I read Cracked off and on until 1988, but as early as 1985, I noticed a change. Some crazy guy was writing stories under the pen-name Eel O’Brian. New artists suddenly appeared. I recognized some of them. In 1987, Don Martin left his long tenure at Mad and started doing time as Cracked’s “crackedest” artist. Steve Ditko’s artwork graced the pages, along with that of Bill Wray. And there was a new guy (Dan Clowes) who did something called ‘The Ugly Family.’ As Cracked’s masthead often touted, something funny was going on… “Eel O’Brian” turned out to be Cracked’s new editor, Mort Todd, who got behind the wheel at the young age of twenty-three and delivered Cracked from bankruptcy. As a magazine, Cracked ultimately lasted (under other editors) until 2007, when it morphed into a

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successful website. Still, there was little information to be found anywhere about the magazine itself. Who started it? Why did it survive? Where did it come from? Enter Mark Arnold, author of If You’re Cracked, You’re Happy! Divided into two massive volumes, the books chronicle Cracked from start to finish. I spoke with Mark on a warm September day about the history of Cracked, the changes it went through, and about the research it took to deliver the final word on “The World’s Humorest Funny Magazine.” JOHN SZPUNAR: When did you first become aware of Cracked? MARK ARNOLD: When I was a kid. I was always a comic book fan, and the first comic humour magazine that I discovered was Mad. That was back in 1974. And like most people who read Mad, I thought, “I can’t wait six weeks for another issue! There’s got to be something else out there!” So, I looked at the shelves. Back then, there were two or three different humour magazines going. And Cracked was one of them. HEADPRESS: Do you remember the first issue you saw?

MARK: Yeah, actually. It was number 125 and the cover date was July of 1975. Sylvester P. Smythe, the Cracked mascot, was straddling an earthquake fissure. The big movie that had just come out was Earthquake. HEADPRESS: What did you think of Cracked when you first saw it? The first issue I saw was from 1983 or 1984; The Dukes of Hazzard was on the cover. I was a big Mad fan and I remember getting kind of angry with the thing. MARK: [laughs] It didn’t make me angry. I was more disappointed than anything else. I was never a Cracked fan as much as I was a Mad fan. I tried to be. I’d say, “I’m going to buy Cracked every time it comes out.” And after a few issues, I would get so disappointed and discouraged that I would stop reading it for a year or two. And then they’d put in free stickers or postcards, or an iron-on or something. A movie like Star Wars would come out and they’d do a parody of that. I’d start buying it again. HEADPRESS: The first thing that I can remember reading on my own was an issue of Mad — the Clockwork Lemon issue. And Mad actually gave me a pretty good education; my dad had a fairly complete run, and then I started buying it. So when I was a kid, I knew about Kennedy, Nixon, and Watergate. I learned about pop culture from the fifties, Stanley Kubrick, and even Caspar Weinberger. Cracked seemed to be aimed at a younger crowd. I’m not all that familiar with the early issues, but — MARK: I know what you’re driving at. I never really thought that they were trying to gear things toward a younger crowd, one way or the other. But during the course of the interviews, more than one person confirmed that they were trying to target that demographic. At least in the initial stages. The surprising thing is that they did do a lot of political humour when Kennedy was president. Then, they kind of stopped completely until Nixon got through Watergate. And even after that, they didn’t do a lot of political stuff. Mad did it on a regular basis F

Top: The first book in Mark Arnold’s two-volume history of the world’s second greatest humour magazine. MARK ARNOLD IS CRACKED !

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If Mad does this, I’m going to do that. If Cracked says, ‘You can’t reprint that parody!’ I’m going to ask, ‘Why?’ Bring it on! Let’s get some lawsuits going!”

Crazy, which was obviously published by Marvel, and there was another one that Joe Simon started, called Sick. But I couldn’t connect Cracked to anything else. Mad had its origins in EC Comics — Tales from the Crypt, Two-Fisted-Tales, all those things. And if you went back, EC had its roots in the beginnings of comic book history. Cracked was always a mystery. It was published by Major but Cracked just tried to avoid it. It wasn’t Magazines. You’d look around and you’d until Reagan was president that they just never see anything else published by kind of said, “Oh, here’s the President. them. And who was this Bob Sproul guy? Here he is.” They did gentle ribbing; they HEADPRESS: When I was a kid, I thought didn’t go out and say, “He’s horrible!” John Severin was the guy behind the HEADPRESS: Were you aware of magazine. Cracked’s origins before you started MARK: [laughs] The only recognisable writing the book? I found it fascinating names were the artists. that Bob Sproul was publishing pulp HEADPRESS: Cracked went a magazines like Man’s Action and EXCLUSIVE from Headpress, SPECIAL HARDBACK EDITIONS ofthrough our latest lot of editors throughout the years. Was before he started Cracked. titles, in dustWildcat jackets. Not available in any shop or anywhere else on the this ever evident in the early days? MARK: I had no idea. After reading www. TheseMad books carry no ISBN number. Also available as a signed, MARK: There were some dramatic and Cracked, I became a huge shifts, later on.only. But when Bob fanindividually of humour magazines. I bought edition stamped and numbered ofespecially fifty copies Sproul was publishing it, Cracked was pretty consistent. The first ten issues join our mailing list and keep informed newHe releases were edited by of Sol Brodsky. had worked for Atlas Comics and he basically brought everybody over from there. So, artistically at least, it had the Atlas look. There were all of these high-quality artists who really weren’t accustomed to doing humour. But for fans of the artwork — hey, here they are! HEADPRESS: Atlas was about to become Marvel Comics. MARK: Yeah. And Atlas eventually took Brodsky back. Sproul kept Cracked going, and from 1960 to about 1985 — even though there were some artistic and editorial changes — it looked pretty much the same. It was just this bland humour magazine that went on and on and on. In the mid eighties, Sproul left the company and these new owners took over. They hired Paul Laiken. HEADPRESS: His name pops up a lot in the Cracked story. MARK: series. He was originally a writer and DO NOT MISS the hardback Headpress journal Full colour editor for Cracked back in the early throughout, each amazing issue is STAMPED AND INDIVIDUALLY sixties. But, unfortunately by this time, NUMBERED and limited to 250 copies only.Laiken These arehisnot available in was past prime. He developed any shop or anywhere else on the www. Get them while you stillhe’d can! a staff of cronies, and whenever

www.worldheadpress.com

This advertisement is removed in the collector edition

MARK ARNOLD IS CRACKED !

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start a new magazine, he’d just bring them along with him. Some were talented, some weren’t. That’s good for churning out material, but it’s bad if you want to have something truly deep and memorable. One of the new-hires that Laiken had on staff was Mort Todd. HEADPRESS: I started reading Cracked just before he came on board. MARK: Mort was a young guy in his early twenties and he just said, “This stuff is crap!” He actually took things in a new direction and edited it from 1986 to 1990. I think those were the best years for Cracked. He actually cared about the product and brought in artists that would have never even considered working there. He was the guy who brought Don Martin over from Mad; he got Steve Ditko to draw. Dan Clowes, Peter Bagge — a lot of people who have gone on to greater fame were brought in by Mort. And it was the only time that their circulation ever truly rivalled Mad’s. HEADPRESS: It seems like Mort kind of brushed up against William Gaines a few times. Kind of a ballsy thing to do! MARK: Mort Todd’s an interesting person. He’s only a few years older than me. He came on board around the time that I was graduating from high school. I was fascinated by how he took the whole thing and decided to go for broke.

MARK ARNOLD IS CRACKED !

“I’m going to get the artists and writers that I’d like to see work on this thing. If Mad does this, I’m going to do that. If Cracked says, ‘You can’t reprint that parody!’ I’m going to ask, ‘Why?’ Bring it on! Let’s get some lawsuits going!” HEADPRESS: At one point, James Warren expressed interest in publishing Cracked. How do you think he would have handled things? MARK: According to Jim Warren, it would have been like the other Warren magazines — all of the editorial material up front, and sixteen pages of Captain Company advertising in the back. He would have probably brought in other talent; he was able to do it for Creepy, Eerie, and everything else. Who knows, you might have had Archie Goodwin writing for Cracked. Or Reed Crandall doing artwork for Cracked. As Jim said, the thing that would have hurt him the most was knowing that he’d always be number two; he’d never be able to outdo Mad. And because the deal fell through, he was always able to remain friends with William Gaines. He liked that friendship. HEADPRESS: Let’s back up a little bit. Why did you want to write a book on Cracked in the first place? MARK: Well, my first book was about Total TeleVision Productions, the F

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Die Ballade vom Earl und Ursula

Nasty Mirrors* THREE

*Or, writers I’ve known. [Names have been changed to protect the author.] by Thomas McGrath

he surprising thing about my friend Earl Epsom was that, for years, and despite the fact that he was by trade merely an unpublished poet, he almost always had money. This was, to be sure, thanks only to a combination of the JSA, housing benefit, and working cash-in-hand at an arts café alongside his girlfriend, Andrea, who also shared his accommodation on the sly. After eventually crossing some threshold that singled him out to The State as a categorical shirker, Earl was obliged to attend fortnightly ‘back-towork consultations’, an inconvenience that, coupled with increased scrutiny and correspondence from his local Job Centre Illustration opposite Plus, spurred him forth to the discovery by Dan White that he could simply sign off, continue to claim housing benefit, and forgo all such bureaucratic impositions. It was around then that Earl met Ursula Klinke, an elderly Austrian gallerist and art critic who began …I was to episodically employ struck, sitting him (cash-in-hand too, opposite of course) when she her in the needed help mounting corner of exhibitions around their narrow London. Before long she exhibition invited him to Berlin for space, at a few months, where the way her she was starting a eyes flashed gallery in a part of town flirtatiously called Wedding. At the while she back of this gallery, Earl rabbited on told me, there was a room he’d be able to about public stay in rent free. transport…

In the light of this, some mutual acquaintances reexamined the preceding years of Earl’s professional life through a sceptical lens, doubting all his avowed apathy and seeing instead a tenacious focus on getting a foothold in a congenial creative industry, now allowing him to shed his rags like Odysseus, to reveal the exemplary young professional hidden beneath the apparel of a bum. My own understanding of the situation, however, was influenced by my having actually met his employer – at an art fair in Islington where Earl was working one November night. Ursula Klinke was a shrunken, grey, tense Austrian in her late sixties. Her manners and dress were suprabourgeois, though there were hints of bohemia in her chunky jewellery and boyish haircut. While her conversation was dull enough, I was struck, sitting opposite her in the corner of their narrow exhibition space, at the way her eyes flashed flirtatiously while she rabbited on about public transport, the English royal family and other conversational staples of those reared by the last World War. I soon surmised that blond, tall, pretty Earl, his presence so manifestly supererogatory (we had just taken a very leisurely tour of the fair), was employed for reasons other than his professional prowess, a costly indulgence of some wanton portion of Ursula’s venerable unconscious. All this was at the back of my mind when I turned up in Berlin that December to visit Earl, who had by then been there for a couple of months. He met me outside Wedding’s small overground station. F

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The circumstances regarding the gallery, he explained as we paced through the abrasive cold, was a bit of a joke. Though it looked and felt no more monotonously eerie than the rest of that odd capital city, Wedding was Berlin’s least fashionable corner, a predominantly Turkish area those occasionally quite racist Germans disdained as an outright slum. Lately, a handful of councillors and developers, seemingly lured by Wedding’s stubborn anti-charisma, had launched a half-arsed effort to gentrify the place, so far consisting only of renting out some studio spaces to willing gallerists for cut prices. The problem with this was that no one ever passed through Wedding, or would think of making the trip to such a Hounslow in order to look in on the handful of small galleries gamely floundering there. Recently, while Ursula ran errands in Munich, Earl had sat behind his small desk for five long days without anyone even stopping to peer through the gallery’s glass front. (Precluding, that is, some of the local Turkish kids, who rarely neglected, on their way home from school, to make obscene gestures through the window.) “We’d just better pop in for a bit and say hi to her actually, then we’ll dump the stuff and head out…” said Earl, as we turned the corner of their street. He came to a standstill and gave me an apologetic look. “Also, it’s Ursula’s seventieth birthday tomorrow and we might have to go out for dinner with her. If so, don’t worry, she’ll pay. Thing is, I was supposed to be going with her to Nuremberg The only for the weekend, but I reason cancelled becuase you people ever were coming.” had money “What, was it like a troubles, it work thing?” “No, just to celebrate appeared, was her birthday.” their inability The sterile gallery to sit quietly space was about the size in a room with of a tennis court, with someone a dividing wall through they hate.

the middle. Earl and Ursula spent most days sat at desks on either side of this wall, twiddling their respective thumbs as another afternoon quietly expired. Ursula, who was wearing a slightly spooked expression when we entered, appeared concerned that I was going to cost her more of Earl’s company. She brightened up, however, when I accepted her hasty invitation to the following night’s birthday dinner. “That will make three of us,” she gushed, all wooden joie de vivre, “a real party! Of course it will be my treat…” Her enthusiasm (in which I briefly espied that same lecherous gremlin I’d witnessed in London) seemed to embolden Earl enough to risk a premature escape. “We’ll probably get going now then Ursula,” he said, giving me a conspiratorial nod, “and we’ll see you in the morning…” A splinter of distress swivelled briefly in Ursula’s eyes, but we were allowed to leave without any ado, and I followed Earl through the neighbouring gallery to his quarters – a small, austerely furnished room looking out onto a grim courtyard. I dropped my bags and we headed into town. Ursula, who hadn’t interested me much at the art fair, was now someone I was curious to hear more about. The least word from me opened the floodgates, and a couple of months of cabin fever, further abetted by Earl’s living in a city where he spoke only a smattering of German and had no other acquaintances, meant that I was promptly inundated with spleenful analysis and detailed invective. The gentlest occasional prod kept this geysering for the next few hours, during which we traversed the fragmentary wall, intersected Berlin’s surreally morose centre, and eventually penetrated the city’s boozy eastern denizens. Egomania, snobbery, racism… to hear Earl tell it, Ursula had spent her life accruing psychological maladies. “The worst of it though,” he went on (and on and on), “is how she’s becoming about money, especially since she hasn’t been

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selling any paintings. We’ll go out for dinner together a few times a week, and we both know, really, that there’s an arrangement, that she’s basically paying for company, that she has to pick up the cheque because otherwise nobody would spend any time with her. But she insists on making these constant little allusions: ‘Oh Earl, it’s as if it’s just me doing all the giving here…’” “And what do you say?” “I tell her something like: ‘Well, there are some people in life who give, like the trees. And there are some people who receive, like the ground. And the trees drop the fruit into the ground…’ Whatever. But we both know why I’m there. She just can’t help herself from indulging the illusion that we’re friends. And then she gets resentful.” Once you factored in all the meals and minibreaks, Earl was spending almost all his time with someone he detested, something everyone else I knew (myself included) would find as intolerable as he did traditional forms of employment. For Earl, however, it was all uniquely appropriate: not only was sitting for hours on end in an empty gallery as passive a way to earn coin as you could imagine, but his aversion to spending money (the shadow of his aversion to earning it) was assuaged by his not having to pay any rent – and even anything at all… so long as he kept Ursula company. On top of this, it turned out he had had the easy-going audacity not to cancel his housing benefit before leaving London. The only reason people ever had money troubles, it appeared, was their inability to sit quietly in a room with someone they hate. It had been dark for a couple of

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hours when Earl finally steered us into a dilapidated, cheap and charming cocktail bar, and I was reminded that, while London had the clear edge on exterior beauty, Berlin owned interiors. We settled into a dark corner with a pair of whiskey sours, and within a couple of rounds I was relaxed enough to indirectly raise the issue of the world’s oldest profession, the parody of which (or so I at least assumed) Earl seemed to have made his livelihood. “What does Andrea think of Ursula?” “Oh she can’t stand her. Thinks she’s unbearable.” “Sure. But does she ever get, you know, suspicious or even… a bit jealous? What with you and Ursula practically living together out here and everything…” “No way,” spat Earl, disgusted. “I don’t know what I’d do if Andrea actually thought me even capable of something like that. I’d probably have to kill myself.” I mentioned how things might at least appear. Earl paused, then smiled ruefully, extinguished his cigarette and finally began to speak on the topic it was quickly apparent preoccupied him more than anything he’d spoken about that day. Specifically, how absolutely everyone Ursula and he ever came into contact with assumed that the handsome young man’s relationship to the rich old art dealer was not as nebulous as it happened to be. Well, if not everyone jumped to this conclusion, enough had to reduce Earl to a state of pathological selfconsciousness whenever he and Ursula were in public together. “There’s this look that I get from waiters, like this…” Earl scrunched up his eyes and pursed his lips, imitating a look of salacious inspection. It was clear that all this was a source of real agony to my friend, and that these F

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presumptions had combined with his general chronic dislike of Ursula to create an almost gagging disgust, which gave added pathos to his employer’s obvious infatuation – one, ironically, that found its only available source of satisfaction in lighting fires of provocation as quickly as Earl could douse them, Ursula oftentimes exploiting (with unconscious élan) Earl’s desire to convince people that they were anything but lovers. She had recently, for example, started referring to Earl, when ordering for him at a restaurant (which his scant German made necessary) with a phrase that translates as “young man” – but Earl suspected that, particularly when presaged (as it always was) with the first person possessive (“and my young man will have…”) it carried the very connotations he was so constantly keen to dispel. “Ursula,” he would say, after the waiter had departed, “I don’t know if you should be using that phrase to refer to me.” “What do you mean?” “It seems to make people think that maybe, you know…” “No? What?” “That, you know, me and you might sort of be…” “Don’t be ridiculous Earl! Hold on…” Then, reverting to German, and ignoring Earl’s protestations, Ursula would call the waiter back over and check that the phrase “my young man” didn’t connote anything …it was to in particular, thereby transpire that not only confirming that Ursula’s young the two of them were man birthday not, say, grandmother windfall was and grandson, but also incapable of creating such ambiguity encouraging about the precise nature her to spend of their relationship that the sordid possibility she more than seemed to be refuting twice the was really raised to a figure she degree it could never usually would have otherwise hoped on Earl.

to attain, leaving wincing Earl scrutinising his crockery in avoidance of the waiter’s loathed look. THE NEXT AFTERNOON, having dropped by the gallery to wish Ursula a happy birthday, our repeated promise to come back and pick her up that evening enabled us to again escape for the day, by the end of which I was looking forward to what I idly assumed might be a fairly lavish feed. But, disappointingly, it was to transpire that Ursula’s young man birthday windfall was incapable of encouraging her to spend more than twice the figure she usually would on Earl. Such was obvious as soon as the three of us reached the designated fifth rate Austrian restaurant – a regular haunt of theirs. We opted for one of the morose booths along the far wall, Earl and I sliding in opposite Ursula, whose mood – remembering that the birthday marked the inauguration of her eighth decade (of the Biblical limit of twelve) – was now understandably maudlin. She wasn’t even able to get much joy out of the waiter’s doubled distaste, and sank back into terse despondency as soon as she’d volubly ordered for us all (“… and my young men will have…”). Meanwhile Earl re-read the laminated menu, distastefully sipping his house red with the bored, petulant air of a middling gangster’s moll. Discussing Ursula earlier that day, Earl had mentioned (by way of illustrating her essentially nineteenth century soul) the interest he’d expect her to take in my mongrel European heritage, and how its bits and bobs would likely form a corresponding patchwork of prejudice in her mind. Earl raised the topic while we waited for our main course (following a disgusting prawn cocktail I washed down with a gallon or two of tap water). “What do you think he is, Ursula?” he asked, after morosely applying a paper napkin to the edges of his lips. “What do you think he looks like?” Staring straight at me, Ursula leant forward a few inches

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and squinted. “He looks like… an Italian gigolo!” she announced, in a tone of matronly reproach saucy enough to make me blush and Earl loudly scoff. He spent the rest of the meal alternating between ignoring Ursula and eyeing her with real hatred. With timing too convenient to be coincidental, he vanished a minute before the waiter unceremoniously dropped the bill on the plastic tablecloth. Regardless of Ursula’s invitation the previous afternoon, I felt obliged to offer to contribute. Although it wasn’t exactly expensive, the fifth rate restaurant was priced like a third rate one, and not only was I running short on funds, but had endured such a lame evening that the prospect of paying anything was anathema. “I’d be happy to…” I mumbled, stroking the edge of my wallet. If Ursula had seen a more empty gesture in the course of her seventy years, I’d be stunned. (I was actually ready, if she accepted my offer, to just walk out.) Fortunately, she declined with a wave of a tiny hand, pulled out a pile of new notes and placed them neatly on the silver plate. “And that is it, now I have no money. Look…” This was no idle offer, and to accompany it Ursula slipped all eight fingers inside her slim purse, tilted it towards me, and yanked it open, revealing that, beyond a cash card, it was indeed empty. Precluding the unspeakable dimension that saw me avert my eyes from the wrenched oval, this bizarre gesture principally belonged to another more sanitary series of Ursula’s eccentricities: her constant protestations that, rather than being a woman of relative means, she was “just a pensioner, on a pension.” Alongside other like assertions, I saw that particular tautology (uttered that very morning), as symptomatic of her terror of spending

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money, rather than her lack of it, a phobia you always find in the worst spendthrifts rather than the genuinely frugal. In which category I would readily volunteer Earl, who returned to the table moments after the waiter had swept away Ursula’s ‘last’ euros. I RETURNED TO LONDON the next day. Earl ended up following not too far behind, apparently having exhausted his impressive reserves of patience. While they had not parted friends, Ursula persisted in seeking a professional (and thereby personal) rapprochement, culminating in Earl agreeing to do some work for her when she came back to London for an art fair in the spring. They met at a café for lunch in Victoria, after which Earl accompanied Ursula back to her nearby hotel, where they had to pick up some sculptures from her room. He followed Ursula back into the foyer, and the two of them were heading towards the lift when, without warning, Ursula suddenly veered off course, making a beeline for reception and leaving Earl looking on open mouthed. “Excuse me,” she said, distracting the receptionist from his computer, “this young man is just going to accompany me up to my room, where we have some business to take care of. We won’t be too long. I presume that is acceptable…” This was enough to make the unassuming receptionist glance at Earl, whom he caught frozen in horror and blushing wildly, causing the receptionist’s own cheeks to colour before he abruptly resumed the study of his screen. Ursula, with an obliviousness not devoid of hints of victory, continued her brisk totter liftwards. Earl – whose housing benefit, following an internal investigation, had recently been discontinued – hesitated a few moments before following reluctantly on. 

AUTHOR BIO Thomas McGrath is a twenty-nine year old writer currently living in exile in Walthamstow, London, along with his wife and cat. He is yet unsure exactly what he did to deserve this, but is certainly sorry. thomas@ headpress.com

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RESEARCHING RE/SEARCH

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SPEAKING WITH V VALE

RESEARCHING RE/SEARCH

AN Archive interview with V Vale, founder of RE/Search, a publisher that HAS helped shaped the look of the modern counterculture. by John Szpunar and Melanie Danté

e arrived in North Beach via cable car. The day had started out foggy, but the sun took care of that soon enough. It was a little after ten in the morning and we were walking up and down the streets, trying to kill time. I’d never been to San Francisco before, but Melanie had and she suggested that we step into the Vesuvio Café for a while. “It’s right across the street from the City Lights bookstore.” A drink in the bar that Kerouac frequented seemed fitting, and before long we were standing at its doorstep. The shadow of City Lights followed us as we walked inside. The place wasn’t very crowded, but then again, it wasn’t even noon. A few people wandered in and out and we made conversation with the woman behind the bar. She told us that Romolo Street was just up the road. With a half hour to spare, we thanked her and headed out. 20 Romolo is the headquarters of RE/Search publications. Founded by V Vale in 1980, its library includes Modern Primitives, Incredibly Strange Films, Pranks!, The Industrial Culture Handbook, and Modern Pagans. Vale’s in-depth interviews with writers (J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs), pranksters (Boyd Rice, Barry Alfonso), musicians (Jello Biafra, Henry Rollins, Genesis P-Orridge) and artists (Joe Coleman) are the things of counterculture legend. Meticulously researched and beautifully designed, his books provide an essential key to unlocking and exploring all things “different”.

It took less than ten minutes to reach the address, but when we got there, we were greeted with a warm welcome. Tea was poured and lunch was sent for. And somewhere over North Beach, in a room filled with records, books, and cultural artifacts, this conversation took place. JOHN SZPUNAR: Let’s talk a little about the state of independent publishing — how are things these days? V VALE: There’s a control process going on. This is what happens when you just have a couple of corporate chains. They’re mapping out America by demographic and income. And F

AUTHORS’ NOTE: This interview was recorded at the RE/ Search offices on July 1, 2002, just prior to the passing of the 9/11 Homeland Security Act. The political climate of the time informed the mood of the discussion.

Above: V Vale and unfinished Fender jazz bass. 1980. RESEARCHING RE/SEARCH

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they’re systematically wiping out every independent bookstore in the country. The major bookstores are now part of the corporate chains. And they don’t order my books. JOHN: Why do you think that is? VALE: In the first place, the whole book industry is hurting. Because, guess what? No one reads anymore. There’s not that much money in books. Books, over the last few years, have mutated into these horrible hybrids that seem to be part television. Flashy …I saw the graphics and dumbed down text. very first No long interviews anymore. issues of JOHN: And why aren’t people Interview. It reading? was very raw. VALE: There’s a lot less time. The There was corporate real estate lobby finally no editing in triumphed in this country; the the interviews. rents almost everywhere have Imagine gone up to outrageous amounts. Just to keep from being homeless, transcribing you have to work so much more. this tape with When I started publishing, my all of the rent was $37.50 a month. I shared “ums” and a three bedroom flat, and each “uhs” and bedroom rented for $75. So my pauses. girlfriend and I split the cost. It was

a three bedroom flat with a living room. That’s when I was publishing Search and Destroy. I only worked twelve hours a week at City Lights Books. At minimum wage. But, I got food stamps, and it seemed like I lived great. JOHN: How could you afford to publish? VALE: The price of printing was raised by benefits. And outright gifts. I have to restate that Allen Ginsberg gave me my first $100 to start publishing at the beginning of 1977. And then, Lawrence Ferlinghetti gave me $100. An old doctor friend gave me $200. The printing bill was $400 for 3,000 issues of Search and Destroy. I mean, it’s always been difficult financially to do publishing because it’s very difficult to get whatever you’ve published out there. JOHN: You were working at City Lights? VALE: As a clerk, not editorial. But I did have a Bachelor’s degree in English. I went to UC Berkeley on a scholarship in English. JOHN: Who or what sowed the seeds for Search and Destroy? VALE: I was a huge fan of Andy Warhol. He was my role model. MELANIE DANTÉ: What was he working on when you first became aware of him?

This page: Search & Destroy no. 9. Next page: V Vale and friends, 1978.

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VALE: He put out a fabulous book around ’65 or ’66 that I saw at someone’s house. It was filled with all sorts of different things. I don’t think it’s in print any more. I remember one thing — it had a little flower in it. You could put it into a bowl of water, and it would blossom. It had cut-outs — I forget the name of it. I don’t own it, I wish I did. It was an amazing book. But, by working at City Lights, I saw the very first issues of Interview. It was very raw. There was no editing in the interviews. Imagine transcribing this tape with all of the “ums” and “uhs” and pauses. That’s what was in there. And also, there were no celebrities. It wasn’t celebrities interviewing celebrities like it is now. That didn’t even exist then. It was just Warhol interviewing anyone. He used to do a lot of the early interviews himself. He didn’t delegate them. He was one of the first people that I know of who always took a tape recorder and a camera wherever he went. All his little lunches, breakfasts, or whatever he went to. Everything he went to was recorded. What a legacy that is yet to be transcribed. So, Interview gave me the blueprint for my punk publication called Search and Destroy. It was exactly an imitation of that. I knew that I wasn’t a writer, but I knew that I could do good interviews and edit them to be compelling. That’s been my mission statement of publishing ever since. F

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EXCLUSIVE from Headpress, SPECIAL HARDBACK EDITIONS of our latest in drugs and communes. titles, in dust jackets. Not available in any shop or anywhere else on the JOHN: Drugs seem to creep into every www. These books carry no ISBN number. counterculture. Also available as a signed, VALE: fact copies that drugs only. are so stamped and individually numbered edition ofThe fifty

important is very dangerous to the lasting efforts of any social revolution. And, join our mailing list and keep informed of releases unlike the Please Kill new Me history — JOHN: The book by Legs McNeil? VALE: Yeah. That’s so saturated in heroin JOHN: Let’s talk about the seeds of punk use. and publishing. MELANIE: That was an east coast thing. VALE: When punk started, I was in a very VALE: It’s an east coast thing. But when privileged place. I was in San Francisco the movement started here, there wasn’t and I knew about it from the get-go. In heroin use. ’73, I heard about Patti Smith and JOHN: Why do you think that was? CBGB’s. You guys were barely VALE: Because San Francisco, more than alive, but take my word for it — New York, was the birthplace of the big nobody knew about it then. And You’d meet hippy movement. It was here that we had nobody knew about the early in the city the big love-ins. It was here that you had Interviews, either. They were just and then the communes. No one could afford that black and white. Very minimalist; go buy land drug stuff here. kind of ugly looking, almost. where you MELANIE: Upstate New Yorkers… They were on newsprint. I knew could afford VALE: Manhattanites, more than that. it couldn’t be that expensive to it cheaply. In Social movements happen in big cities, print something like that. And not in small towns. When Marx was the country. so, when punk started, the main writing, he was writing in the British Where you motivation for publishing was Museum library. He wasn’t out writing outrage. Anything that came out could be in some cottage in the country. Social about punk was disparaging. nude and movements happen in cities. the so-called counterculture DO NOT Headpress journal series. Full colour grow pot. MISS The theAllhardback MELANIE: Didn’t most of the communes were stillissue sleepwalking downfall of eachpeople throughout, amazing is STAMPED AND INDIVIDUALLY start out with people meeting in cities through the decline of the hippy the hippy was NUMBERED limited such to 250 copies These areoutnot available and then going into these really in as it was. The only. born in its and revolution, anyDNA… shop or anywhere else on the www. Get them while you still can! weird and remote areas of California? hippies were very much grounded Above: Vale as a member of Blue Cheer. Haight and Ashbury, 1967. Photo by Ethan Russell.

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VALE: That was the general pattern. You’d meet in the city and then go buy land where you could afford it cheaply. In the country. Where you could be nude and grow pot. The downfall of the hippy was born in its DNA — the movement was so closely affiliated with drug use. It used to be every ten years, you’d see some type of revolt. And punk was kind of a revolt against the moribund hippy era. I remember over here, if you smoked pot, all these people would attack you. “You hippy!” It was good natured, but serious at the same time. And if you drank alcohol, you were being like your parents. MELANIE: Is that why all these people started doing speed? VALE: Speed was a hippy thing, too. In the initial year of punk in San Francisco, there really wasn’t much drinking or pot smoking. Almost no heroin use, unlike New York. But there was an awful lot of talent. Partly because weirdos and artist types have always gravitated to San Francisco. And this place has always been very supportive of minorities. MELANIE: You’ve featured Genesis P-Orridge in a lot of books… VALE: That’s because he has so much to say. MELANIE: How did the two of you meet? VALE: Punk rock. I put him in Search and Destroy. The explanation for the philosophical foundation of all my publishing is very simple: punk rock was way more than people thought it was. It was a great cultural revolution. It wasn’t just about a few punk bands. It led to the complete questioning of everything we regarded as important, which includes books, films, music, clothes — everything

RESEARCHING RE/SEARCH

we consider culture. Basically all of the ideas that were in Search and Destroy were just given more amplification in various issues of RE/Search. Again, it wasn’t about shock value. I was kind of an amateur anthropologist in my publishing. I went through this phase where I tried to read every book in English by Claude Lévi-Strauss and the people who he studied, including Marcel Mauss. In the Search and Destroy interviews, I tried to do things like an anthropologist would do. I wouldn’t take things for granted; I would list the books on their shelves. I would list the clothes in their closet, if I had access. JOHN: What books were on your shelf at the time? VALE: Going back to 1969, I happened upon an article in the Evergreen Review. It was a huge excerpt from what would become The Job by William Burroughs. It’s still my single favorite William Burroughs book, way more than Naked Lunch. JOHN: That’s the one with the series of interviews? VALE: Yeah. By Daniel Odier. There were so many ideas in that book and in the Evergreen Review article that I just studied it for months. There were so many books recommended to track down; it took me years to find most of them. I did get almost all of them. Then, in 1973, I discovered J. G. Ballard. I found The Atrocity Exhibition in a used F

HEADPRESS 2.6 Thanks to V Vale and Marian for images, and to Mike White for proofing.

VALE: Well, I’m in favour of any kind of dissemination of my content. At the same time, I would like it to be done with integrity; not sliced, diced, and spat out in a misleading way. All I know is that whenever you deal with a corporate, they censor “Evil” is like you. Every single time. And “god”. God everything’s been subsumed doesn’t exist by the global corporate and evil profit motive: do whatever doesn’t exist. it takes to make maximum Good doesn’t profit as fast as possible. exist either, MELANIE: So how do we for that combat that? matter. That’s VALE: First of all, you essentializing reverse some 1896 Supreme abstractions; Court decision that gave that’s a corporations the same rights control trick. as human beings. It gave corporations all of the rights of people, but virtually none

of the liabilities. This is very bad. This has made so many evil things possible, even though I don’t believe in “evil”, per se. JOHN: It’s all over the news, these days… VALE: One of the things that Burroughs said is to fight against is dualism; the dualistic patterns of language. Evil, good — all of that. There is no such thing as evil. “Evil” is like “god”. God doesn’t exist and evil doesn’t exist. Good doesn’t exist either, for that matter. That’s essentializing abstractions; that’s a control trick. And I think that we should free ourselves, as much as possible, from the conditioning and indoctrination that we don’t even know we have. The most insidious things are the invisible ones. Our goal should be to carve out as much freedom for ourselves as we can — not only in our behavior and activities, but in our thinking, as well. So yeah, I think that’s our goal. As living, thinking, breathing humans on the planet, we should really work against hierarchy and authoritarianism. Really work on our own language and concepts, rigorously. Because you have to start with yourself, and it’s always in the direction of more freedom and more consciousness for more people… 

RE/Search books are available directly from the publisher at www.researchpubs.com

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Adam Parfrey interview

PUBLISHING RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW

As part of a series that reflects upon contemporary culture and its shifting mores, here’s a short interview with the editor and publisher of the seminal Apocalypse Culture. And Ian Brady’s Gates of Janus. BY Gavin Baddeley

eral House is a legend in the realms of underground publishing, though the man behind the outfit disdains the tag. Over the past couple of decades, Adam Parfrey has successfully captained the imprint from the fringes of outlaw culture to become an ominous presence lurking just beneath the surface of the

Adam Parfrey INTERVIEW

mainstream, rather than nestling in some comfortable subcultural niche. Feral House’s mission statement is not so much about setting information free, as unleashing the wildest, most disturbing and provocative products of modern thought into the cultural arena. It’s freedom of speech red in tooth and claw, sometimes frightening, sometimes exhilarating — libertarian ideals in action manifest in paper and ink. Parfrey opened proceedings by editing the book Apocalypse Culture in 1988, founding Feral House the following year. In an age when the most unspeakable imagery and outrageous ideas are freely available at the click of a computer mouse, it’s easy to forget how groundbreaking the essays and articles compiled in Apocalypse Culture were when first published over two decades ago. The seething package of wilful sexual deviance, delirious conspiracy theory and taboo philosophy was authentically shocking, not only setting new standards of literary outrage but also offering bold readers a challenge. The gauntlet was thrown down for the broadminded to think the unthinkable in the unsettling realms of uncensored information. Feral House survived and thrived because it went beyond the adolescent F

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“Additionally I was digging myself out of a gloomy speed addiction, and I was in a particularly dark state of mind.”

urge to shock by publishing well-written volumes that defied easy categorisation. Parfrey published occult books such as texts by the San Francisco Satanist Anton LaVey, alongside pioneering history, like Voluptuous Panic, a suitably lavish volume detailing the

Above: Adam Parfrey on the cover of Seattle Weekly, November 2010.

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decadent culture of 1920s Weimar Berlin. Lords of Chaos, investigating murder and mayhem in Norway’s metal underground in the nineties, was instrumental in establishing black metal as the perhaps most vital force in modern cult music. Nightmare of Ecstasy confirmed Ed Wood Junior as the definitive trash movie auteur, while Radical Islam dared to put into print the venomous Islamist propaganda many Western commentators would rather had remained untranslated. The Gates of Janus, a study on serial murder, is perhaps Feral House’s most controversial title, in the UK at least. Largely due to its author, Ian Brady who, as one of the infamous Moors

Adam Parfrey INTERVIEW

Murderers, is arguably Britain’s most notorious convicted criminal. Adam Parfrey defended his decision to publish in the face of widespread condemnation to the BBC. ‘What is the best way to deal the horror of Ian Brady’s crimes?’ he observed in a statement that echoed the sentiments of many involved in disseminating information others would rather see silenced. ‘By consuming tabloid exploitation? Or by examining the crimes more clinically and realistically? Perhaps this is too Jungian a remark, but one cannot come to grips with human behaviour and reduce its malevolent aspect simply by reacting to it, and acting out with further hate and aggression.’ F

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“ Part of the game is putting up with a certain percentage of assholes.”

HEADPRESS: Apocalypse Culture remains a landmark tome. Did it put Feral House on the map, and what inspired such a bold and innovative project? Adam Parfrey: Apocalypse Culture became a keystone project… hated and misunderstood at first, and hated and misunderstood today. Partly kidding about that… The book was first published under the imprint Amok Press, which I did back in the mid eighties with Ken Swezey… and began Feral House with a revised edition of Apocalypse Culture. EDITIONS of our latest EXCLUSIVE from Headpress, SPECIAL HARDBACK The inspiration for Apocalypse Culture was titles, in dust jackets. Not available in any shop orignorance, anywhere else on the frustration with Kultur… and people’s www. These books carry no ISBNinability number. Also available as a signed, to come to grips with the realities of the world. Additionally was digging myself out of a stamped and individually numbered edition ofI fifty copies only. gloomy speed addiction, and I was in a particularly dark state of mind. HEADPRESS: How did you become involved with join our mailing list and keep informed of new releases Anton LaVey? Adam: Boyd Rice introduced us. I was suspect of the guy at first… That’s a big thing to take on, and it seems to narrow one’s possibilities. But after I met Anton, I started to understand his film noir perspective a lot better. He was hilarious and wanted me to meet his daughter Zeena, who visited my Echo Park apartment with a bottle of Stolichnaya as a way of introduction. At the time Zeena was great fun and full of good spirits. HEADPRESS: Many of your titles are provocative to say the least. Have you experienced much unwelcome attention from individuals or the authorities over the years? Adam: Part of the game is putting up with a certain percentage of assholes. It is tiresome. HEADPRESS: Do you have any favourite titles from your back catalogue — what makes them special to you? Adam: I do have favorites for various reasons. I think Voluptuous Panic totally reconfigured the way modern European is approached. Deathcolour Scenes opened DO NOT MISS the hardback Headpress history journal series. Full

throughout, each amazing issue is STAMPED AND INDIVIDUALLY NUMBERED and limited to 250 copies only. These are not available in any shop or anywhere else on the www. Get them while you still can!

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Adam Parfrey INTERVIEW

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Right: Lynn Conley and Adam Parfrey (blackface) in Crispin Glover’s film What Is It? (2005) Photo by Robbie Caponneto.

up the ability to publish images in a new way. Apocalypse Culture seemed to crack open the minds of many. Perhaps I shouldn’t be happy about this, but Killer Fiction might be the most sickening book ever published. It’s by the cop turned serial killer G.J. Schaefer, who finally got removed from this planet by another prisoner. I feel that publishing Gates of Janus by Ian Brady was a coup of sorts. It wasn’t easy to publish Technological Slavery by the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski… I do love Lords of Chaos by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, and co-wrote a screenplay of it. It’s likely to become a movie this year. I believe that Lexicon Devil: The Short Life and Fast Times of Darby Crash and The Germs is the best punk rock book ever published… I love many others, too. HEADPRESS: What are you excited about among current and upcoming Feral projects? Adam: I’m working on a book called Ritual America, which is subtitled: “Secret Brotherhoods and Their Influence on American Society,” which is a visual approach to a huge subject. I discovered in this book’s research about how insane and sadistic American

behavior was. Nearly everyone belonged to a secret society. Why is this, and what the fuck did they do? This book answers that question with quite a visual perspective. I think it will help reconfigure people’s concepts about American society. HEADPRESS: Is there a Feral House ethos — it clearly seems more than a business — do you think maverick publishers still have an important role to play in a world increasingly dominated by the internet as the source for dissenting views and information? Adam: On financial issues, I think that Libertarianism is kind of crazy, but Feral House has a libertarian, freedom of information point of view. Open it all up! 

Throughout this chapter, unless noted otherwise, a selection of Feral House book covers. Adam Parfrey INTERVIEW

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PAGES FROM A 1927 PROGRAMME for the original Théâtre du Grand Guignol, Paris, the first to see print in an English language publication. Two cancelled ticket stubs from this same performance can be found on page two of this book, while the line-up of plays and further discussion are on page thirteen.

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Pictured: (A) Jack Jouvin would take over from Camille Choisy as the theatreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s director, but in 1927 they are clearly partners; (B) AndrĂŠ de Lorde wrote many of Grand Guignol plays, including some of the more notorious ones; (C) Ms Camille Choisy endorses the Panhard and Levassor motor company of Paris in F

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DO NOT MISS the hardback Headpress journal series. Full colour throughout, each amazing issue is STAMPED AND INDIVIDUALLY NUMBERED and limited to 250 copies only. These are not available in any shop or anywhere else on the www. Get them while you still can! this advertisement; (D) A list of plays, possibly upcoming? Plus, the secret of the theatreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s success,

www.worldheadpress.com which basically boils down to its dramas being poignant, presenting the reality of life, unleashing its

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brutality as well as its beauty, while its comedies are always literary and spirited. ď&#x201A;Ľ This advertisement is removed in the collector edition

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FROM THE ARCHIVES. Wheezer McTeague was a sometime contributor to the early issues of Headpress. This particular nugget of his appeared in Headpress 6 (1993), edited by Davids Kerekes & Slater. F

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the gospel according to unpopular culture

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