"Elias Nebula is practicing Japanese but no one knows."

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Apocalypse Gulcher (Open Letter to Laurence Remila)

Laurence - - - - -
I went to the Book Expo at the Javits Centre - you know, scrabbling around for free comics - THAT IS I MEAN I went picking up copies of the university press catalogues - - - to see what is forthcoming in my field - -

any-way you wudda laughed, because there was Adam Parfrey in the Feral House booth. The funny thing is he looked uncannily like Roger Cardinal. Has anyone spotted this before? Probably not. It's like my theory that whutzizname - Frodo Baggins - looks like Tatsuya Nakadai. Nobody cares except me.
Who shall attest to it, and I die?

Anyway I goe to Adam Parfrey, "SSSSSSOOOO... you still see Boyd Rice about town ever?" (This is my greeting to strangers everywhere, actually: Do you run into old BOYD?)
He says, Yesss... I goe, What whenddyou last see him? Like I'm in the CIA or something. Whuttzis last known address? Is he still shaving his head or has he acquired a toupee? As if to say, This man is wanted in four states for impersonating Nick Cave.

This man has brought Satanism into disrepute.

Heh... no... but... Parfrey's freebie giveaways were packets of poppy seeds, and he goes, Have a poppy seed on me.
I said, feh - I don't have a garden.

I beg your pardon...
I never promised you a rose garden...

I don't know if the grow-your-own-poppies thing is an allusion to heroin or not or if it is straight up and rather sweet horticulturalism. P____ says to him here, were these grown in Afghanistan? and laughed. He squinted and leaned forward and said, What? Were these grown in Afghanistan?
No...
I thought they only grew them in Afghanistan...
I was counselling her, no, they grow poppies in Cromer too.

I feel like last time I was at the expo (LA) Feral House was giving out seeds then too.
Tomato seeds I believe.

Back to the matter at hand, I then goe - in my now standard and familiar way of imposing on strangers - Meh. Uh, did you ever read Lisa Carver's book?
He goes Lisa...?... oh Lisa CARVER. No, I heard about it I didn't read it.
I said, Boyd Rice doesn't come out so well in that...
He reflected on that one and said, Well Lisa knew what she was getting into. She dated G.G. Allin...
Here the woman on the booth with Parfrey goes, Who dated G.G. Allin?!
I, being a scholarly pedant go, Well I don't know if you can strictly call it dating what they did...
Parfrey was saying, in essence, As ye sow so shall ye reap and I can't really fault that at this stage of my life. It's in the Bible. "Words to Live By." What G.G. - or Napoleon Hill indeed - probably would have called "The Golden Rule."

Speaking of whom, Parfrey says he has a bunch of letters from G.G. from when he was in jail that he is going to publish sensationally in his new autobiography; and he hands me a postcard. I said, "I used to e-mail Mykel Board for a while. Wanna trade?"
Would you like to exclusively publish my e-mail correspondence with Mykel Board, yes or no?
That was in 1994. Imagine; I've been e-mailing for fifteen miserable years.

I said, summing up, "Anyway: G.G, Boyd and Lisa they gave us lotsa great records that we listen to oftentimes to this day didn't they all of them?"

I could have stuck around and rapped some more...
("So... how's Crispin Glover?")
("Wanna buy a pristine unplayed Tards ten inch on Sympathy?")
...But amazingly I knew my cue - for once - and beat it, with postcards but sans poppy seeds. .
Anyway buddy I thought thisd MAKE YOU LAUGH.
I think we all need to laugh now and then and you more than most.
All right - speak to you in another year I guess - - -

FABIAN

Boring to Me (Revisited); Or, Contra Lycanthropy

A cry went out – a screaming comes across the sky – and was duly remarked by an one such as me. I heard it, I heeded it. It said: “We want more ‘Boring Comics’ articles!”
Pleasure to oblige—

CONTRA LYCANTHROPY

I was reading old Batmans (“Batmen”) and that familiar trusty sensor went off in my medulla oblongata, like a red telephone with Commissioner Gordon at the other end, that announced the arrival of The Boring again into our lives.
It was a story about that noteworthy curiosa Americana, the Man-Bat. I realized, hardly with the shock of the new, that lycanthropy and its variants are powerful dull to me.
Vladimir Propp might have summed the lycanthropy story up well:

Funktion / Aktion 1—Well-intentioned scientist stumbles upon chemical compound that turns him into a man-animal amalgam of some sort.

Funktion / Aktion 2—Said scientist embarks on a rampage. In the melee he possibly kidnaps his own wife or daughter or close family member.

Funktion / Aktion 3— He must be stopped.

Function / Aktion 4—In the nick of time, he is stopped. An antidote is found and duly administered. Customary humdrum reality is restored to the “polis.” Exeunt all.

Funktion / Aktion 5—Fall asleep out of boredom.

I think of Spider-Man’s boring foe The Lizard, as much as Batman’s boring foe Man-Bat. In the 1970s particularly, for reasons presumably allied to the horror revival that took place then, werewolves abounded in the comics alongside the kung-fu characters (deeply boring, and wholly inferior to the shinobi craze of the eighties) and Dracula (a snooze). I say nothing here about Frankenstein. Is there any one among the classic pantheon of horror monsters who is tolerable?
Perhaps the Mummy. Underneath his bandages, the Mummy is still anonymous (“androgynous”) – there is still room for improvisation and flux beneath the bandages, where with the others there is no such thing. The werewolf – or the Man-Bat – must behave in a certain way.
Dracula shall always be a bloodsucking leach on the poor.
Frankenstein shall always wreak havoc among the townsfolk and their laundry.
The Crypt-Keeper is always tedious company at parties. How he drones on.

I have been going through old DC comics of the Sixties lately, and I realize also that I am not particularly interested in the classic rogue’s galleries of most of the heroes. I prefer those stories where Clark Kent is compromised by Red Kryptonite, or by Lois Lane and Lana Lang’s snooping suspicions, or by Jimmy Olsen’s intentioned but frankly insane machinations, far more than a story involving the Parasite. (The exceptions are Mr. Mxyzptlk and Lex Luthor. The exception is not Brainiac.)
(Brainiac bores me.)
This could be the beginning of a very good suicide note:
Brainiac bores me, ergo I must die.”

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Om Shantih Aloha (Steal This Buddha)

The enigma in the face of Baby Lyssa.

I just watched the episode where Dog and his bounty-phrenzied kin rescued two stolen Buddhas and Dog said at the end, "I believe God will smile down on us tonight for saving the Buddha."
Some remarkable claim.
He'd already made some comments earlier conflating Buddhism and Christianity - he wanted to bend the theological facts so that his God presided over the Buddha. Dog went, "one time I saw some Buddhist monks outside their temple, praying, and they said -- We are praying for Jesus who is called Christ the son of God. Ommmmm shantih. Aloha." He didn't want to be working to redeem some pagan deities, is what it was, so he had to somehow warp the legends so that God and Buddha were shall we say partners in the celestial operation called LIFE.

Two crackheads had stolen some Buddhas from outside a Thai restaurant in Hawaii and the always-bushy-tailed Leland Chapman called in his family to get them back. I think the rest of the family is now residing in Colorado, so they all flew out there - with their black SUVs - at what cost? All to recover two measly Buddhas? I bought a Buddha's head in Norwich for 99p.

They ended up capturing and interrogating the two crackheads and they both "snitched" on each other. Nobody knew what to believe, but Beth predictably took the side of the girlfriend. I really couldn't say who was to blame in all this. Even the sage Buddha would be hard-pressed to resolve it!
When they got back the Buddhas they set them back in front of the Thai restaurant and Beth doted on the one Buddha - Gautama in his fat jolly Santa Claus aspect. She patted him on the tummy and said "Awww! Just to see that smile makes it all worth the trouble!"
I guess she wasn't impressed by the more ... let us say... severe, wise aspect of the Buddha, represented in the other statue. She simply couldn't relate to him.
I guess she hadn't been recently to the Rubin Museum on 17th Street at Seventh Avenue, where there are all sorts of aspects of the Buddha ranging from the silly playful ones to the wrathful and all-destroying ones.
Hers was the Buddha of Allen Ginsberg I fear.
I guess she hadn't seen the excellent Lone Wolf and Cub movie (with Tomisaburu Wakayama as Ogami Itto) when there are ninja assassins hidden inside Buddha statues in a shrine, and Ogami Itto slices the Buddha in twain. In White Heaven in Hell he kills the Buddhist monk by swimming underneath the boat and murdering him from beneath!
I guess she never saw that.

Also, isn't it the essence of Zen to say: "Steal this Buddha!"?
By this logic, those two crackheads were advanced students high along the path of Zen towards that perfect and desirable state of "wu-hsin" ("no-mind").
If you meet the Buddha on the road, bust him.