I’m not someone who tends to read much fiction. Ever. As in never. I read a novel once every… fifteen years. I prefer documentaries to narrative films as well. I need to devour information—lots of it—and fiction just doesn’t offer me the sustenance I require. I’m not saying novels are bad things, they just aren’t for sir.

Recently I started listening to audiobooks in the car during my daily commute in Los Angeles. I especially enjoyed the audio version of SuperFreakonomics read by Stephen J. Dubner because 1) it’s a wonderful, thought provoking book, a genre unto itself even and 2) Dubner’s delivery is incredibly engaging as he reads his and Steven Levitt’s well-constructed prose. He really knows how to hit his script perfectly and charmingly animates the book’s clever ideas. Listening to an author read their own words, especially when the writing style is somewhat idiosyncratic, is for me a real pleasure.

Post-SuperFreakonomics, I had no immediate plans for my drive-time entertainment, but this problem was solved by the audiobook of Nick Cave’s novel, The Death of Bunny Munro arriving in the post, thoughtfully sent to me by Iain Forsythe, co-producer (along with Jane Pollard) of the set. The novel is read by the author over 7 CDs, accompanied by a moody (and effective) score by Cave and Warren Ellis. There is also a DVD.

For a guy who claims to hate fiction, it took me all of about ten minutes to become completely engrossed in The Death of Bunny Munro. Admittedly, I’m quite well-disposed towards Nick Cave to begin with, and come to think of it, one of the last novels I did read was his And The Ass Saw the Angel. But I had no expectations, and not much foreknowledge of what the new book was about. I think this was a good thing, but I doubt that anything I write here will spoil anything for anyone.
 

 
The Death of Bunny Munro is one of the most profane novels ever written. It makes Celine or Henry Miller seem timid in comparison. The title character, an immoral, middle-aged, door to door beauty products salesman and unrelenting lothario, drives his wife to suicide as the book opens. Upon finding her corpse, the first thought that pops into Bunny’s head is that her tits looked nice. Bunny, a character devoid of any redeeming qualities, scoops up his sweet nine-year old son and goes on a road trip to Hell. It’s all downhill from there as we witness his flailing flameout.

Read in Cave’s distinctive mellow bellow, his prose comes richly to life. Cave is a performer as much as he is a writer, of course, and his performance of his own novel is remarkable. The musical soundtrack, which at first I thought “slight,” is a grower and I came to love it. My interest never flagged for a second of its nearly eight hour running time. It’s really well-produced, with some sort of spatial 3-D recording technique that makes Cave’s voice feel like it’s in the center of your skull, and inventive sound effects.

What occurred to me as I enjoyed the audiobook of The Death of Bunny Munro so very much was the notion that the plain old book version is a lesser experience when compared to the audiobook. When an audiobook is done this well, inevitably the text-only version will come to be seen as the script of the audiobook. Of course not every author is a performer the caliber of the great Nick Cave, but as the audiobook form matures, why would the consumer choose to forgo the music and intimate storyteller aspect of authors reading their own work?

A word about the packaging: The UK version is a beautiful object, with the top photograph, taken by Polly Borland printed on a waxy, sturdy box that feels like a luxury item. The American version sucks. The idiot who chose to go with the packaging they used for the US version should get an award for shitty design (or else fired). The British version you would keep and display on your shelf even if you had no intention of devoting another 8 hours of your life to it for a repeat listen, the US version you’d just pass on to someone when you’re done like it’s disposable.

Nick Cave on his monstrous, funny Bunny Munro (Los Angeles Times)
 

Multi-disciplinary artist Rachel Rosenthal is one of America greatest living creators, truly a national treasure—although she chided me for saying this! For much of the past decade, we haven’t heard much from her, but now she has a new book, The DbD Experience (about her unorthodox teaching methods) and starting this weekend, Rachel Rosenthal is unveiling her new company, TOHUBOHU! Extreme Theater Ensemble in Los Angeles for three totally improvised performances on the 19th, 20th and 21st. Monthly performances after that.
Tickets at www.rachelrosenthal.org.

The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America. Original and necessary scholarship, one of the best books of the season. An in-depth interview with author Don Lattin.

Jon Reiss has been a pioneer of DIY film-making since the punk era and he shares what he’s learned in his new book, Think Outside the Box Office: The Ultimate Guide to Film Distribution and Marketing for the Digital Era.

 
Dangerous Minds pal, Chris Campion’s fascinating liner notes for More Of Cake Please

Three teenage girls are discovered singing along to records in a New York night club by two hotshot managers. They are rushed into a recording studio, signed up to a major label deal and whisked off to Hollywood in a matter of weeks where they are treated like stars and consort with rock royalty. It sounds like a story spun from myth. But all this did happen and more. The story of The Cake is one of the last great untold stories of the 60s; a real life ‘Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls’.

The Cake were the daughters of Sgt Pepper, a girl group baroque who wrote psychedelic madrigals and sang blue-eyed soul with rock ‘n’ roll attitude. This trio of brash and beautiful teenage New York City girls - Jeanette Jacobs, Barbara Morillo and Eleanor Barooshian - jumped onto the rollercoaster of the 60s music scene just as it hit its peak and spiraled into a downward curve. The Cake were formed in ‘66 and baked by ‘68, releasing 2 albums that have been cherished ever since by music enthusiasts as curios of the time. But their importance goes far beyond that.
 

 
Creatively, stylistically, and in terms of sheer attitude, The Cake were way ahead of their time. They were the first girl group to write original material as a group, and the first to have it released on a major label. This was not just a novelty at the time it was completely unheard of. They were also the first to break free of the stylistic yoke imposed by producers, songwriters and managers. In doing so, they bridged the gap between the pliable male fantasy of 60s girl groups and the advent of 70s girl bands who were doing it for themselves. The Cake are the missing link between The Ronettes and The Runaways, the Shangri-Las and the Go-Gos.
 

 
Accepted as equals by their peers in the rock world, The Cake palled around and were partnered with Jimi Hendrix, Skip Spence and members of The Animals. They also sang with Dr. John and The Soft Machine. Songs were not only written by them, but about them! The group had its origins somewhere far more mundane.

The Cake were formed in a New York bathroom; two bathrooms, in fact, located several months apart in the heady summer of 1966. The first is somewhere in Manhattan, where 16-year-old Jeanette Jacobs and 18-year-old Barbara Morillo find themselves sharing a mirror in an apartment that both of them are strangers to.

‘Being teenagers, both of us had stayed over at someone’s house,’ Barbara recalls. ‘Me, after hanging out at a disco. I don’t know where Jeanette had been and we weren’t even sure whose house it was. We just both woke up and were kind of in the bathroom at the same time. We hit it off really well; there was a chemistry immediately.’ (Cont)

Second installment of a two-part, in-depth conversation with cultural engineer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on the occasion of the publication of THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE: A New Testameant, a compendium of Gen’s writing on magick, the occult and sexuality. Part one is here.

Happy 2010! We’re starting off the new decade right with the first installment of a two-part, in-depth conversation with cultural engineer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on the occasion of the publication of THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE: A New Testameant, a compendium of Gen’s writing on magick, the occult and sexuality. Part two will be posted next week.

 
Although for myself, I can’t even comprehend not liking Bette Midler—for me it was love at first sight—I am told that she is an acquired taste; and one that my darling wife—who has great taste in music and everything else, I hasten to add—has not acquired. This morning, I was blasting her first LP, The Divine Miss M from 1972 while Tara was running errands—I haven’t heard it in years—and it simply knocked me out. Produced by Barry Manilow, Ahmet Ertegun and the Grammy-award winning producer Joel Dorn, with a crack set of session musicians and back-up singers like Cissy Houston and Melissa Manchester, The Divine Miss M is nothing less than the unveiling of a very major talent on the world, as Midler’s 40+ years at the top of her profession attest to. She didn’t write any of the songs, but trust me, she owns them all. She’s one of those people who just oozes talent and concerning the quality of her voice and its incredible power, well, she belongs in that smallest circle of all singing, all dancing, all acting diva divas, like Judy Garland, Liza Minnelli and the great Broadway talents like Ethel Merman. She’s got the lungs, no two ways about it.

This morning I was poking around the Internet reading about Bette Midler’s early career and there are a lot of interesting things I discovered, especially for those of you reading this who think of her more as the Midler-of-the-road songstress of From A Distance, than the raunchy, brassy young broad she started her career as.

The short story is that she was a talkative Jewish chick with a BIG personality who grew up in a mostly Asian neighborhood in Honolulu, who was probably dying to get out of there from an early age. She moved to New York in 1965 at the age of 20 and by 1967 she was playing the small role of Tzeitel in the original cast of Fiddler on the Roof, with Zero Mostel, Maria Karnilova, Bea Arthur and other notables.

Midler really came into her own, however, in the cabaret of the Continental Baths, a pioneering gay bathhouse where gay and straight culture mixed in the 70s. An Aretha Franklin album hit Midler like a bolt from the blue and she decided to become a singer, mixing campy classics like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Leader of the Pack” with her wacky thrift store fashion sense, quirky personality and dirty jokes. A friend suggested that she might want to consider launching her unconventional stage show at an unconventional place and so Midler took up a residency at the Continental Baths, playing next to a waterfall to an audience consisting of bath house patrons wearing nothing but white towels around their waists and “chic” straight couples looking for an unusual night out.
 

 
It was here that Midler’s brassy “fag hag” persona (“I am the last of the truly tacky women”) took shape and it was imperative that she do everything she could to capture the attention of the Continental Baths clientele: after all, there was basically a Dionysian orgy going on all around her. When Midler opened her mouth, the orgy parted like the Red Sea. Her musical director for her formative years was the aforementioned Manilow, who would perform, it has been said, wearing only a towel himself, as he sat at his piano.

While this underground residency was going on, Midler was performing regularly on mainstream talkshows like David Frost’s, Merv Griffin’s and even the super straight (but unfailingly sweet) Mike Douglas’ show. Where her star really rose, though, was when Johnny Carson took Midler on as a sort of protege. She appeared on The Tonight Show quite regularly for 18 months and opened for Carson in Las Vegas. By the time The Divine Miss M came out, she was already a known quantity and Midler went on to win a Grammy that year, the album selling nearly a million copies.

Bette Midler is an important figure in the history of gay rights in this country. Not for any one thing that she did, more for what she stood for. When her show came to town, it was an excuse for her gay fans to come out in force, dress up and get their freak on, at a time there would have been few opportunities to do so in most American cities. With her big personality and “trash with flash” Midler became a rallying point for young gay men of the 70s, not in a political sense, but a cultural sense, Midler injecting sassy gay sensibilities into the mainstream via her megawatt talents.

Here are links to some clips of the Divine Bette performing at the Baths. Considering the scarcity of consumer video cameras at that time, it’s a wonder that any visual records of Midler’s performances there exist at all, but here they are, thank you to the glory of YouTube. The best two clips, “Marahuana” and “Fat Stuff” are not embeddable. “Fat Stuff” has a lot of stage banter. (I liked one of the YouTube comments: “Wow, this was back when you had to be talented to have a career!” Too true, too true…)
 

 
Short news story on Midler and the Continental Baths:
 

 
The Divine Miss M Tour (Bette on the Boards)

 
Betty Davis is one of the lost greats of 70s funk, but if there is any justice in the world her music will one day be as revered as it deserves to be. This woman was outrageous, sexy and she had mad musical chops! Originally a successful fashion model when she met trumpeter Miles Davis, Betty Mabry, as she was then known, traveled in circles that included Jimi Hendrix, The Chamber Brothers and Sly and the Family Stone. In 1968 she married Davis, but the marriage lasted just one year, breaking up, it was rumored, because she was having an affair with Hendrix (which she has always denied). In his autobiography, Davis credits Betty for opening his ears to the new possibilities inherent in the music of Sly and Jimi, and she inspired his music from Filles De Kilimanjaro (Mademoiselle Mabry is a tribute to Betty, obviously) to Bitches Brew (the title again alleged to reference Mlle. Mabry, albeit by then in a less flattering light).

After her divorce from Miles, Betty recorded two albums in the early 70s with crack backing musicians like Larry Graham, Merl Saunders (Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt), Neal Schon (Santana/Journey) and members of Graham Central Station, Tower of Power, even the young Pointer Sisters singing back-up. Davis was the original “nasty gal” creating the blueprint for suggestive “outrageousness” well-trod by today’s female chart toppers. One of her songs, the sexually forthright If I’m In Luck I Might Get Picked Up was so controversial that the NAACP condemned her.
 

 
Then she recorded another great record of hard funk in 1975 called Nasty Gal, but sadly, she never really caught on. There’s no good reason for it, but luckily her reputation has risen again in recent years due to reprints of her albums by Seattle-based label, A Light in the Attic Records, who recently released her recorded in 1976 but shelved ever since album, Is It Love or Desire.

(When I met my future wife, she had a Betty Davis CD in her car stereo. As a man who puts “good taste in music” approximately third on the list of what makes a woman attractive, I can assure you I was impressed).

The Sound of Young America: Betty Davis Interview ?

 
When I was growing up, I could read the Village Voice in the local library and fancied myself “up” on what was going on in New York, at the age of 14, even though I had never been anywhere even close to the island of Manhattan. Having said that, if I wasn’t exactly an expert on New York City per se, I was at least an expert on each and every issue of the Village Voice. (And you can tell a lot about a city from its alt weekly, let’s just say. Reading between the lines = very easy with the Village Voice. True now, and true then.)
 
But in my hometown, one thing I couldn’t experience, even vicariously, was the insane cable access world of Manhattan Cable, now known as the Manhattan Neighborhood Network.I’d read about shows like Ugly George, where a fat asshole in a silver-lame jumpsuit carried a video-camera (the huge old fashioned kind with the outboard decks) around New York and asked women to take their clothes off for him. Many did. Many more told him to fuck off and die. There was also Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party, which I longed to see, it was so glamorous sounding, there was Al Goldstein’s racy Midnight Blue, but most intriguing of all for me, living in Wheeling, WV where nothing ever happened, were Andy Warhol’s cable access programs. I loved the idea that anyone who wanted to have their own TV show could do so and saw myself having one myself one day (and I did, The Infinity Factory talkshow, which was on for over 2 years opposite ER!)
 
A great website I just discovered called Zamboni has files of a few of the Warhol programs for streaming and download. Other shows are knocking around out there, too. Many famous faces here including Halston, Pee-wee Herman, Debbie Harry and John Waters.
 

In honor of David Tennant’s final Doctor Who episodes, here’s a repeat of Richard’s interview with the outgoing Time Lord and Doctor Who executive producer Russell T. Davies, shot at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, CA in early August for Boing Boing Video. Read the original entry here. Dangerous Minds returns in the new year with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

Part 2 of my interview with Philip Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman and Philip Proctor, the legendary Firesign Theater. In the 60s and 70s, The Firesign Theatre’s smart, anarchic—and decidedly psychedelic—“theater of the mind” was embraced by the era’s counterculture. Their mind-bending humor paved the way for Cheech & Chong, Saturday Night Live and The National Lampoon. www.firesigntheatre.com

 
The name Steve Ditko probably means very little to you if you aren’t a comics fan, but if you are, then the name is well known to you: Steve Ditko is the co-creator of Spider-Man, the original artist who envisioned the character along with Stan Lee. The worldwide smash of Sam Raimi’s Spiderman franchise saw many Ditko-drawn Spider-Man classics republished and a concurrent growing fascination with the reclusive artist, who is still working in New York, at age 82.

Aside from Spider-Man, Ditko was also the co-creator, again with Lee, of the cosmic Dr. Strange, who was my favorite comic book hero as a child (as I am sure will surprise few of you reading this…). The comic panels of Dr. Strange were some of the most vividly psychedelic ever seen in comics, and they contrasted sharply with his rendering of Peter Parker’s drab world, which was almost Soviet in comparison.
 

 
In the mid-60s, Ditko began to chafe at Stan Lee’s dictatorial editorship of Spider-Man and eventually got Lee to agree to let him plot Spider-Man—unheard of at Marvel—while control freak Lee would write the actual dialogue suggested from Ditko’s stories. The arrangement did not last long. Spider-Man as originally written was very much a conflicted character as we all know, but the character also had a lot of anti-establishment appeal—he was a smartass—and this is one of the many reasons the character took off in the heady era of the ‘60s. At the time that Ditko’s grasp on Spider-Man tightened, so did his interest grow in the Objectivist philosophy of Russian-born novelist, Ayn Rand. When Rand’s humorless black and white moralizing started creeping into the Spider-Man stories, Lee balked and soon the two men were not speaking to each other. Eventually Ditko left, leaving behind a character that would go on to become a billion dollar enterprise with Sam Raimi’s films. He would never draw Spider-Man again and has essentially erased himself as much as possible from the character’s history.

 
It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that Ditko sees himself as a real-life “Howard Roark,” Rand’s fictional architect in The Fountainhead, a man who refuses to compromise his vision. Rand’s influence was even more obvious in his right wing vigilante character Mr A, who would throw someone off a building for disagreeing with him. His work became didactic, shrill, hectoring and far-right his influence waned. Mr. A was like Bill O’Reilly as a superhero. What teenager wants to be yelled at by a moralistic superhero? In the opinion of many, his work degenerated into fascistic rhetoric and lunacy from the late 60s onwards.

There have been almost no interviews, ever, with Steve Ditko. While really not a hermit or a recluse, he’s an intensely private person and refuses all interviews, although there are stories of him speaking to a fan ballsy enough to ring his doorbell, but always standing in the doorway, never inviting them in to his studio. In his recent BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko, otaku British talkshow host Jonathan Ross tracked Ditko down in New York City and called the artist on the telephone. Ditko politely refused his request for an on camera interview. But when Ross (and Neil Gaiman) showed up on his doorstep, he did in fact entertain them, although not on camera.

 
I may be a little late to the game on this one, but I recently got a copy of Blake Bell’s Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, a coffeetable book published by Fantagraphics last year and it is a wonderful and fascinating look at Ditko’s life and work. Kudos to Bell for putting together such a volume which was clearly a labor of love and unique erudition. I can’t imagine how much shit he had to go through to be able to put together such a book. I’m sure Steve Ditko was no help!

Below, part one of Jonathan Ross’s wonderful BBC documentary Searching for Steve Ditko:
 

Charles Ludlam and Black Eyed Susan in Eunuchs of the Forbidden City, 1971. Photo by Leandro Katz
 
A fine book came out a few years back, 2002 to be exact, about the great American absurdist dramatist, Charles Ludlam. Ridiculous!: The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam by David Kaufman is certainly one of the best books I’ve read this decade and I wanted to tell you about it. I feel it’s a book that deserves a far wider audience than it originally got. Even though it tells the story of a very particular person and of a very particular “scene”—in this case Ludlam and his gender-bending Off Off Broadway troupe of drag queens, druggies and bohos—like a biography of say, Andy Warhol, the canvas is so widescreen and cinematic that it tells the tale of an entire era, not just the story of one man and his orbit. Ludlam’s story—which Kaufman spent a decade researching, interviewing over 150 people who knew the playwright—is simultaneously the history of Off Broadway theater in the late ‘60s to the late ‘80s, it’s also the story of pre and post-Stonewall gay life, the anecdotal histories of certain types of “only in NY” culture vultures and media mavens and, of course, the life of the complex and exasperating force of nature that was Charles Ludlam, a self-created character if ever there was one.

Charles Ludlam should in many ways be seen as the American Moliere. He was the proprietor, creative genius, task master and (one of) the star attraction(s) of The Ridiculous Theatrical Company, who called a small theater at One Sheridan Square—at Seventh Ave, where a street sign commemorates Ludlam’s memory—their home for many years.  For several years, I lived a block away. I only actually saw two Ludlam shows—The Mystery of Irma Vep (I still have the Showbill) where Ludlam and Everett Quinton played all the characters, male and female, their frenetic costume (and gender) changes part of the play’s berserk charm, and Salammbo, where Ludlam played the high priestess of the Moon, surrounded by muscle men. The play also featured live doves and an extremely obese naked woman—she had to be 400 lbs—with massive breasts and… leprosy. It was absolutely outrageous. Imagine a mutant cross of Shakespeare, early John Waters, Flash Gordon serials and Arsenic and Old Lace and you’ll kind of be in the right ballpark.

A few years later, in 1987, Ludlam was dead of AIDS. When a theatrical company shuts down, theater being what it is, there is usually not much left over to remind us that its performances ever existed. It’s an extremely ephemeral art form. You’d think that there might be some videos of Ludlam and the Ridiculous showing up on YouTube, but so far, nothing. Which is not to say that Ludlam has been forgotten, far from it: His plays are performed with ever increasing regularity on college campuses and several scholarly works have been written about his 29 plays and influence on American culture (Bette Midler and the original cast of SNL, are two examples, according to Kaufman’s book). When Ludlam died, his obituary made it to the front page of the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt from another appreciation from the TImes:

To be Ridiculous is to be a step beyond the Absurd. Ludlam defined his form of theater as an ensemble synthesis of ‘‘wit, parody, vaudeville farce, melodrama and satire,’’ which, in combination, gives ‘‘reckless immediacy to classical stagecraft.’’ That recklessness led some people to misinterpret his work as anarchic. It was spontaneous, but it was also highly structured - and always to specific comic effect. Though Mr. Ludlam was a titanic Fool, he was not foolish. He knew exactly what he was doing, whether the object of his satire was Dumas, du Maurier, the Brontes, Moliere, Shakespeare, soap opera or grandiose opera - or himself.

I first encountered him in performance 17 years ago when he was playing ‘‘Bluebeard’’ far Off Broadway - with a beard like blue Brillo and a diabolical glare in his eye. This was a distillation of every mad-doctor movie ever made. In his role as Bluebeard, he said, ‘‘When I am good, I am very good. When I am bad. . . ,’’ and he paused to consider his history of turpitude. Then he concluded, ‘‘I’m not bad.’’ As hilarious as ‘‘Bluebeard’’ was, it gave no indication of the body of work that was to follow it. Almost every year, sometimes twice a year, there was another Ludlam lunacy on stage. As a critic who reviewed almost all of his plays, I must say that Ludlam was always fun to watch and fun to write about. His flights of fancy could inspire a kind of critical daredevilry, as one tried to capture in words the ephemeral essence of Ridiculous theater.

Looking back on our debt to him, one remembers his rhapsodic, hairy-chested ‘‘Camille’‘; the Grand Guignol vaudeville of ‘‘The Ventriloquist’s Wife,’’ in which he spoke both for himself and for his back-talking dummy, Walter Ego; ‘‘The Enchanted Pig,’’ a helium-high hybrid of ‘‘King Lear’’ and ‘‘Cinderella’‘; ‘‘Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde,’’ a Molieresque send-up of minimalism; ‘‘Galas,’’ with Mr. Ludlam as the title diva. The range ran from ‘‘Corn,’’ a hillbilly musical, to ‘Der Ring Gott Farblonjet,’’ a three-Ring Wagner circus. There were also sideshows - a Punch and Judy puppet theater in which he played all 22 characters, and ‘‘Anti-Galaxie Nebulae,’’ a science fiction serialette.

‘‘The Mystery of Irma Vep’’ (in 1984) was a tour de force, a horror-comedy in which he and his comic partner, Everett Quinton, quick-changed roles in a scintillating send-up of ‘‘Wuthering’’ and other Gothic ‘‘Heights.’’ For Ludlam, ‘‘Irma Vep’’ became a breakthrough of a kind. The first of his plays to demonstrate a broader, popular appeal, it has been staged by other companies, in other countries as well as in America’s regional theaters. Not all of Ludlam was equal, but his batting average was extraordinarily high -as author, director and actor.

His acting was, of course, his most noticeable talent. As a performer, he unfailingly enriched his own work, as he charted a chameleonesque course, specializing in satyrs, caliphs and fakirs - as well as playing the occasional damsel. He was also an expert teacher of theater, as I discovered some years ago when, over a period of several months, I took an acting workshop with him. In these intensive sessions, we studied and practiced physical, visual and verbal comedy. He was most informative about what he did on stage. For example, he thought of his body as a puppet; through his imagination, he pulled his own strings.

Bedlam Days

My report on Ridiculous Theater

Ridiculous Theatrical Company

Black-Eyed Susan: La Dame aux Ridiculous

Black-Eyed Susan

A long article I just wrote about the bizarre, hallucinatory, sickening, purgatory, Bardo-like experience of browsing 4chan has just been published on R. U. Sirius’s h+ Magazine blog. Check it out!

In the last decade, we’ve seen the increasing acceleration of information (a la Terence McKenna and Moore’s law) heralded as the key to new business development, though it has, in fact, so ruined our attention spans that it is almost impossible for modern man to get any kind of productive work done. We’re too lost in the datastream, too focused on taking in new information to complete a task that takes more than a few minutes, at best. I think a direct correlation can be made, for instance, between the rise of social media and the fall of the economy. The kaleidoscope of the Internet is more endless, more distracting and more mutating than even the most potent psychedelic drugs could have ever prepared us for. And 4chan is the ultimate, final trip.

If the mainstream Internet-using world has driven itself to distraction and insanity with social networking, the denizens of the Chans have upped the ante past all conceivable boundaries, like switching from a light alcohol problem to crushing and injecting Oxycontin. This is the place where all senses are deadened, where the mind cannot function because it is trapped in its own overstimulation. This, I am sure, is where media theorists from Marshall McLuhan to Neil Postman to Douglas Rushkoff assured us that the inherently liberating force of information technology was leading us. And though I am sure they knew that the filth and fury would follow, I’m not sure they ever expected it to look quite like… this.

My own 4chan addiction crept up slowly. Once a casual user of gateway drugs like icanhascheezburger.com, ytmnd.com and Encyclopedia Dramatica, I followed a link to the black hole itself one day and—sucked past its event horizon—have since been unable to escape. Stuck there now, I am clicking back and forth from this article to peruse the halls of 4chan’s /x/ forum, afraid that I might have missed the latest spew from the Internet’s collective maw. It is the car crash that cannot be looked away from. Ever.

(h+: Lost in the Filth Simulacrum)