OVO

Marx’s terrible picture of the economy of his time is only too true. But his law that misery must increase together with accumulation does not hold. Means of production have accumulated and the productivity of labour has increased since his day to an extent which even he would hardly have thought possible. But child labour, working hours, the agony of toil, and the precariousness of the worker’s existence, have not increased; they have declined. I do not say that this process must continue. There is no law of progress, and everything will depend on ourselves. But the actual situation is briefly and fairly summed up by Parkes in one sentence: “Low wages, long hours, and child labour have been characteristic of capitalism not, as Marx predicted, in its old age, but in its infancy.”

Unrestrained capitalism is gone. Since the day of democratic interventionism has made immense advances, and the improved productivity of labour – a consequence of the accumulation of capital – has made it possible virtually to stamp out misery. This shows that much has been achieved, in spite of undoubtedly grave mistakes, and it should encourage us to believe that more can be done. For much remains to be done and to be undone. Democratic interventionism can only make it possible. It rests with us to do it. [...]

Thanks to Marx’s prophecy, the Communists knew for certain that misery must soon increase. They also knew that the party could not win the confidence of the workers without fighting for them, and with them, for an improvement of their lot. These two fundamental assumptions clearly determined the principles of their general tactics. Make the workers demand their share, back them up in every particular episode in their unceasing fight for bread and shelter. Fight with them tenaciously for the fulfilment of their practical demands, whether economic or political. Thus you will win their confidence. At the same time, the workers will learn that it is impossible for them to better their lot by these petty fights, and that nothing short of a wholesale revolution can bring about an improvement. For all these petty fights are bound to be unsuccessful; we know from Marx that the capitalists simply cannot continue to compromise and that, ultimately, misery must increase. Accordingly, the only result – but a valuable one – of the workers’ daily fight against their oppressors is an increase in their class consciousness; it Is that feeling of unity which can be won only in battle, together with a desperate knowledge that only revolution can help them in their misery. When this stage is reached, then the hour has struck for the final show-down.

This is the theory and the Communists acted accordingly. At first they support the workers in their fight to improve their lot. But, contrary to all expectations and prophecies, the fight is successful. The demands are granted. Obviously, the reason is that they had been too modest. Therefore one must demand more. But the demands are granted again. And as misery decreases, the workers become less embittered, more ready to bargain for wages than to plot for revolution.

Now the Communists find that their policy must be reversed. Something must be done to bring the law of increasing misery into operation. For instance, colonial unrest must be stirred up (even where there is no chance of a successful revolution), and with the general purpose of counteracting, the bourgeoisificalion of the workers, a policy fomenting catastrophes of all sorts must be adopted. But this new policy destroys the confidence of the workers. The Communists lose their members, with the exception of those who are inexperienced in real political fights. They lose exactly those whom they describe as the “vanguard of the working class;” their tacitly implied principle: “The worse things are, the better they are, since misery must precipitate revolution,” makes the workers suspicious – the better the application of this principle, the worse are the suspicions entertained by the workers. For they are realists; to obtain their confidence, one must work to improve their lot.

Thus the policy must be reversed again: one is forced to fight for the immediate betterment of the workers’ lot and to hope at the same time for the opposite.

With this, the “inner contradictions” of the theory produce the last stage of confusion. It is the stage when it is hard to know who is the traitor, since treachery may be faithfulness and faithfulness treachery. It is the stage when those who followed the party not simply because it appeared to them (rightly, I am afraid) as the only vigorous movement with humanitarian ends, but especially because it was a movement based on a scientific theory, must either leave it, or sacrifice their intellectual integrity; for they must now learn to believe blindly in some authority. Ultimately, they must become mystics – hostile to reasonable argument.

It seems that it is not only capitalism which is labouring under inner contradictions that threaten to bring about its downfall…

From The Open Society and its Enemies Volume 2. Princeton University Press 1966

Wikipedia: Mike Diana

Michael Christopher “Mike” Diana (born 1969) is an underground cartoonist who became the first artist ever to receive a criminal conviction for obscenity in the United States.

In the early 1990s, Mike Diana, a young man from Tallahassee, Florida, began producing the adult comic book Boiled Angel. This amateur comic contained graphic depictions of a variety of taboo and gory subjects, and it was distributed to only a handful of retailers. In 1991, while investigating a Florida murder case, a police officer discovered an issue of Boiled Angel and, desperate for clues, contacted Diana, informed him he was a suspect, and requested a blood sample. The real killer was soon apprehended, and Diana was not pursued. The officer in question, however, collected additional issues of Boiled Angel and sent them to the State’s Attorney’s office where they went on file. Two years later, the Assistant State’s Attorney, Stuart Baggish, came across the books and sent Diana a certified letter that said he was being charged with three counts of obscenity pursuant to Florida Statute § 847.011(1): one for publishing the material, one for distributing it, and one for advertising it. At this point, Diana contacted the non-profit First Amendment organization the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), which provided him, free of cost, with the services of several prominent defense attorneys and expert witnesses.

Diana was employed as an elementary school janitor at the time of his first notoriety. He had used the school’s copier to reproduce some of his comic books representing crude, graphic drawings of sexual molestation and limb severing. Some of the material was allegedly left there, and Diana was fired.

On June 4, 1996, after a brief trial, Largo, Florida, Circuit Judge Douglas Baird declared the comics Boiled Angel #7 and Boiled Angel #ATE to be obscene, stating that he found them to be “patently offensive,” and that “The evident goal of the appellant’s publication is to portray shocking and graphic pictures of sexual conduct so it will be noticed. If the message is about victimization and that horrible things are happening in our society, as the appellant alleges, the appellant SHOULD HAVE created a vehicle to send his message that was not obscene.” Diana was found guilty on all three counts, and was sentenced to a three-year probation, during which time his residence was subject to inspection to determine if he was in possession of or was creating obscene material. He was to avoid all contact with children under 18, undergo psychological testing, enroll in a journalistic ethics course, pay a $3,000 fine, and perform 1,248 hours of community service. He was also ordered to cease drawing for personal use, and his place of residence was to be open to inspection by the police, without warning or warrant, at any time, for illustrations violating this ruling. He was not sentenced to any jail time, but spent four days in jail between the dates of the verdict and the sentencing.

To fulfill the requirement of undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, Diana was informed that the doctor whom he would see charged $100 an hour, which he would have to pay for himself, and that his evaluation would take two hours. After the evaluation, Diana was informed the session would cost $1,200 because the doctor claimed to have spent 10 hours reading Boiled Angel in preparation. Out of funds, Diana was unable to pay, and the doctor refused to give her evaluation to the court, effectively making him in violation of his probation.

Two appeals to the State Appellate Court failed to have the case reversed or reheard in Florida. During the first appeal process, the prosecution used evidence gathered after the original trial, a move that, according to the CBLDF, is usually considered unethical. The only count of the three under which Diana was convicted that was judged incorrect was the conviction for “advertising obscene material.” The Court agreed that it was improper to convict someone for advertising material that had not yet been created since Diana could not, at the time, know the nature or character of the work. The courts refused to accept an amicus brief submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, and responded without comment to the second appeal. On June 27, 1997 the United States Supreme Court denied Mike Diana’s petition for a writ of certiorari without comment, effectively ending his legal options in his battle to overturn his conviction.

Diana moved to New York, where he was granted permission to serve out his sentence, and fulfill his community service obligation through volunteer work for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

OVO was one of the handful of publishers that printed Mike’s work before his legal troubles. My only trouble connected to Mike’s work was having OVO removed from the shelves of a magazine store in Knoxville, Tennessee. Mike also contributed original art to OVO 15 SPERM (February 2005).  Compare the style and content of Mike’s work in 1990 with the 2007 television program Superjail [wikipedia][google video].  What Mike paid the price for, Cartoon Network makes the profit from.

Mike Diana
http://www.testicle.com/mikediana.htm

(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)

Sondra London is a publisher and author.  Her publication history has included original fiction, non-fiction and art by convicted serial killers.  A solicitation letter for OVO 10 MAYHEM received this reply. In this letter, Ms. London makes reference to having dated Gerard John Schaefer in high school. Schaefer went on to become a serial killer, and Ms. London published his book Beyond Killer Fiction. My first book credit was writing the back cover blurb for Beyond Killer Fiction.  Ms. London was also instrumental in my publication of The Dreadlock Recollections by Kerry Wendell Thornley.

“I’d like to know what you mean about supporting serial murder and glorifying crime.  I’m sorry if it appears that the work I publish implies in any way that I condone violence, and if so I must take steps to correct that impression.  If you only knew what pitiful lives these killers live, you’d realize there’s nothing attractive about it, nothing that deserves to be emulated.  The essence of my quest is to make sense out of a tragedy that fate has made a part of my life.  I need to study the whole broad topic of violence and it’s roots in order to bring this research to bear on the man whose tears of rage, frustration and fear have wet my face.  I’m learning to see the world through the tears of a serial killer, and I’m hoping that the original material I have obtained will be used as a significant part of the quest to understand this very dangerous pathology.

“As to your question about why I’m doing what I am, I will close with a reference I hope you will understand.

‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’  Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?  And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, and when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say unto you, as you did unto one of the least of these my bretheren, so you did it unto me.’  Matthew 25:34-40

“Regards,

“Sondra London”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sondra_London
http://www.sondralondon.com/

(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)

Ginger Hutton was a friend of mine who worked in a used bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee USA.

OVO: Who buys true crime books?

GH: Everybody, it’s the fastest growing section in the store. A lot of times people will come up with a handful of Harlequin and historical romances and true crime. There are a lot of 40-year-old women who are overweight unhappy-looking housewives who are reading historical romances and true crime, and obviously getting a kick out of both because they keep coming back. It’s mixed as far as male and female but I think women buy more. All ages although again it’s older people mostly.

OVO: Are there people who just get true crime or do most people get the romances as well?

GH: There are people who just get true crime. Most of them are very normal and conservative looking, they don’t look like the kind of people who are taking a book home to study from it. But I have had people come up to the desk and recommend stuff for me. “Oh, if you read that kind of stuff this one’s really good, he does it with an axe.” l’m not sure that they’re distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction. I’m not sure that its real to them. It’s entertainment. And that’s what’s happening with ell these TV shows, America’s Most Wanted, Emergency 911, you watch them go out and rescue people who got hit by cars. Suddenly sick voyeurism is socially acceptable. I’m not sure why that is. Part of it may be that the world is starting to fall apart in more obvious ways. Crime rates are up all over the place, the environment has become so bad that it can’t be ignored, and I think what used to be horrifying to people when compared to all the other problems in their life is not at all horrible. It diverts them. If they can read about a serial killer in Seattle they don’t have to think about the drug dealers in their neighborhood. I think American culture is sick and has been getting sicker for a long time, and is finally reaching a point where it’s not concealed any more. When I started reading true crime it was something you snuck out of the store, like sex books. Now it’s everywhere, there’s no stigma attached. Which you could say is good because its more open but its also an indication of a dangerous trend in American culture.

OVO: When did you start reading true crime books?

GH: I started reading them when I was about 14, reading Reader’s Digest which always condensed the best crimes. I read about Bundy right after he was arrested. It was very scary and very compelling and something you didn’t talk about and something your parents didn’t let you watch on TV. I have always been fascinated with death, and violent death is more interesting than other kinds. That’s why I was attracted to it.

OVO: Why do most people read it?

GH: Most people are afraid of dying and afraid of crime. That’s the big issue now. The government is really pushing that, as if crime is the worst thing we have to worry about, which it’s not. People are afraid and this is a way of confronting their fears or overloading themselves. If you read about something long enough its not shocking or frightening any more. Maybe its a way of desensitizing themselves.

OVO: Do most of the people who buy these books progress to the books with more graphic descriptions and violent deaths?

GH: l don’t know. They tend to buy them buy the bunch, six or eight at a time. People are demanding more graphic true crime books because if you look at the latest ones coming out (I get to see them all at work) the photos are getting more and more graphic. The ones that came out ten years ago had no pictures at all, or if they did they had pictures of the victim and the killer before they were victims and killers. Whereas now you get morgue shots of somebody’s face blown away. People won’t buy them if they have no pictures in them, they’re disappointed. l’m assuming that this trend in publishing is somehow related to demand.

OVO: Have you progressed in your reading, starting with Reader’s Digest, which is rather sanitized, and now you seek out things that are more extreme?

GH: Yes, but I don‘t do it to shook myself. What l do is find something that interests me, a particular serial killer or a particular method, and read everything I can get on that subject. And I prefer that it be more graphic because then you actually know what happened. I don’t like the sanitized version because in the back of my mind it’s still a confrontation with mortality and you have to look it full in the face to get anything out of it. If you’re going to start digging around to find reality then you have to look at the whole thing, and it’s not pleasant, but the less pleasant it gets, at least with crime, the more real and true it is. That’s why I do it, that may be true with other people. Seeing the people who buy it I don’t think it is.

OVO: Does true crime media contribute to a sense of jadedness and to crime?

GH: To jadedness, yes. I doubt that it contributes to crime but it makes crime so common that there’s no horror to crime any more, it’s entertainment. Its creating some disturbing attitudes. Reading about crime and being fascinated by crime is one thing but thinking of crime and murder as entertainment is something entirely different. Most serial killers don’t think of murder as entertaining and it’s disturbing that that’s how its being billed in America, and that’s how people tend to look at it. Its just a TV show with a bad guy and a nice dead person.

OVO: Why do you think it is that most of the people who get these books are women when most of the people described as victims in these books are women?

GH: If you look at it as confrontation with your own mortality then reading about your own sex being killed would be that much more disturbing and that much more of a confrontation. I think part of it is that they like to read about people who kill women, then get caught, then get killed. I think its a way of extending hatred. The way most true crime books are written you can direct all your hatred at this one bad man and you can believe that everything is caused by bad men. In a way you aren’t responsible, and no one else is responsible. They hardly ever dwell on the circumstances that led this bad man to be bad. It’s an outlet that women don’t have. Women don’t generally go out and beat each other up. They don’t have as much of an organized focus for hatred.

OVO: What are things going to be like in ten years?

GH: We can’t even begin to imagine the number of serial killers we’re going to have. It’s been doubling or more every year for years. Ten years ago l think there were six. Last year there were thirty-five known serial killers. These are the ones that we know about. There are people disappearing who are certainly being killed. It’s going to continue to go up because child abuse is on the rise. Our culture has accepted violence as entertainment. Now kids who were going to have problems anyway can sit around every single night and watch people kill each other on TV. In spite of the moralistic tone, TV is like hypnotism, you sit and absorb, and if you’re hearing about this guy who sliced up ten women and this guy who’s wanted for killing his wife and two kids it gets in your mind and becomes acceptable because its just a TV show. I think that will contribute to a lot of murders. I think everybody ought to be doing more reading and preparing themselves.

(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)

The cypher the Zodiac killer mailed in three parts to three San Fransisco area newspapers was solved within a month of being printed in August 1969. This is not an explanation of how the cypher was solved (that information can be found in Zodiac by Robert Graysmith) but instead how to use it.  This is the only time the means to use the Zodiac cypher has been published. I backwards-engineered the code from the description in Graysmith’s book. Since the letters J, Q and Z were not used in the initial Zodiac cypher, there is no symbol for them in this explanation.

1. Write the source message to be encyphered, using poor spelling occasionally.
2. Replace the letters of the source message with cypher symbols in an ordered rotation. For example, go through the source message until you find the first letter A. Replace the letter A with the first symbol for A. The second time the letter A appears, use the second symbol for A. After you have used all four symbols for the letter A, use the first symbol again. Proceed to the letters B, C, etc.
3. Very neatly copy the encrypted message into seventeen-character lines, omitting all punctuation and spaces. Add letters at the end or at random within the encrypted message to insure each line has seventeen characters. Divide into equal parts as desired.

(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)

As the pillars of Western culture collapse (replaced by institutionalized alienation) schizophrenia and violence cease to be deviations and instead become survival characteristics. The apocalypse culture has bred a new form of death, the multiple (serial or mass) murderer. Death sports, murder clubs and snuff art may have existed only in fiction or as isolated instances in the past, but accelerated decline in social order coupled with spectacular un-living creates new possibilities for such to flourish and federate. The multiple murderer is an agent from an increasingly inevitable future.

Heralding the multiple murderer is a support system of mayhem fetishists and media. This is not an exposure of deviants but a warning about what is to become as “normal” as any slasher movie, comic book or pornography.

Anyone seeking to understand the roots and effects of modern alienation would do well to study multiple murderers. There is a wealth of information about multiple murder in the mainstream and alternative press that has not been assimilated into an anti-authoritarian critique. This issue is offered as a summation of research into multiple murder from a variety of perspectives, as a contribution to the struggle against the apocalypse culture.

(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)

Stuart Swezey is co-editor with Brian King of the AMOK Fourth Dispatch, an essential guide to extremes in print. This interview was most kindly granted on the 23 May 1991, after many hours of miscalculation of time-zone differences between Knoxville and Los Angeles. I offer much thanks to Stuart for his patience and interest.

OVO: The next issue of OVO is not about multiple murderers but about people who follow them, either as sociological studies or evil heroes or somewhere in between, especially in print, like the MAYHEM section of the AMOK catalog. ls there an an average type of person who buys the books in that section?

SS: I don’t know. It could be everybody from people who are into it on an industrial music level to people who are Marines. We get so many different types of people its hard to say what the average is. This stuff is getting more and more popular. Every week there is a new TV movie about a murderer. Last Gasp carries true crime stuff and they never used to. So I guess it’s getting trendier than it used to be.

OVO: What about at the store, are a variety of people buying it there?

SS: We had a woman who worked for the coroners office come in when we had the John-Wayne Gacy paintings up. She thought that was pretty neat. I can’t really classify it at all. You should really talk to Brian, because he’s much more into this stuff than me. He’s working on a compilation of work by murderers writing and artwork that we‘re going to be putting out in a year or so.

OVO: Are there more mayhem books coming out now than ten year ago?

SS: There are definitely more of them. We’re not interested in many of them. A lot of them are in the genre of inter-family murders or the mob. Compilations from True Detective magazine and magazines like that. Definitely not good writing or good journalism. A lot of good stuff is coming back into print like the book on Albert Fish called Cannibal. It seems they’re reprinting more of the classic stuff.

OVO: Is this increasing in the small press as well?

SS: Maybe very peripherally. We carry a book called They Called Him Mister Gacy, which we think is put out by his attorney in Illinois, which is basically a photostat compilation of letters to Gacy. There was the Mansonfile book that Amok Press put out. There’s not a lot. I don’t see a lot of small press stuff put out along those lines. But something like Silence of the Lambs has become big business.

OVO: I was thinking of something more like PURE, something tiny and photocopied.

SS: On a Factsheet Five level.

OVO: Right.

SS: We don’t see a lot of that.

OVO: I just put out a few feelers out for that and it’s not stopping. There’s more of it out there than I ever wanted to know about.

SS: So what do you think of this stuff?

OVO: I think its indicative of what Colin Wilson was talking about when he said we’re entering the age of the psychopath. These people feel alienated and more aware than the people around them but they’re making a mistake when they think that these serial killers are “getting things done” and “manifesting their will.” l think they’re confusing random outbursts with a cognitive critique. Things that show up in the small press tend to come out in mainstream later, and I’ve seen so much of this in the small press – and in the mainstream media – that it indicates to me that it’s going to get even more common and acceptable.

SS: I never know but sometimes I feel like this serial killer stuff is going to be almost passé as a cultural thing, a rebellious stance. You better back it up by either killing somebody or cotton to the fact that it’s as trendy as anything else within a year or two. After Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer that’s not going to happen to every movie that comes down the line that deals with this subject mater. They’re not always going to praise what I think was a glorified student film as brilliant. The room for that is going to be gone. That won’t really effect the murderers. We’re really interested in the interplay between culture and the criminals. How Ed Gein could have inspired the Psycho book, which leads to a great film like Psycho, and how these murders do in certain ways have repercussions that are felt by everyone.

OVO: The success of Psycho led to the film Dementia 13, which was blamed for some murders.

SS: There’s a lot of that happening, but what about Catcher in the Rye inspiring Mark David Chapman to kill John Lennon? Who hasn’t read Catcher in the Rye?

OVO: What do you think the effects are of the increased accessibility of true crime books and other books formerly considered too graphic and horrendous to be read as entertainment?

SS: I think its pretty reasonable. I don’t think its necessarily unhealthy. People are fascinated with violence and to a certain extent the books are slanted in a way that something like PURE isn’t, in that they’re very moralistic. Cops are glorified, cops solve the crime, there are a lot of things the writers do to distance themselves and the reader from the murderer. People like the reassurance of that, that they didn’t do it. It gives them this titillation and a raw experience even if it is once removed. Kind of an “I can take it” thing. I think its weird that it’s cropping up at the same time as we‘re blowing up whole populations like in Iraq and you don’t even see it. I think that that’s a strange state of affairs that people are going out of their way to find this graphic violence and yet we’re not allowed to see as a national policy the kind of havoc that we wreak.

OVO: Do you think there are any trends that can be used to spot what kinds of books and magazines are going to come out in the future on this topic?

SS: Obviously there are some murderers that haven’t been completely covered. It took so long for a book to come out on Richard Ramírez. I think the idea of looking at the actual artwork and writing of these murderers as we’ll be publishing in Lustmord, that’s what a lot of these supposed experts have that you and I as individuals don’t have access to. It’s going to be an interesting twist to give people these actual crazed writings, to look at them as art brut, I think a lot of people will respond to looking through an alien mind in terms of their writing. Sometimes it’s insightful and sometimes it isn‘t but that‘s all you have to go on because no matter how many of these fanzines come along or how much violent fiction is sold the average person can’t even begin to understand the psychopath. This is just an attempt to try on people’s part, whether they do it in a sarcastic way or idealistic way or moralistic cop-loving way, it still shows the vast chasm between someone who can perform these kinds of things and someone who can’t.

OVO: Somebody who can buy a magazine about it.

SS: Right, and that’s all they’re doing. Violence is at the root of so much literature… Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, some violent act usually occurs. Somebody gets murdered in most of our supposedly great works, so there’s got to be something in this catharsis that we need as a culture. I find true crime is more informative than fiction but that doesn’t mean you have to identify with these people. It’s more tragic. If people enjoy that its not necessarily bad at all. It is mind boggling the extremes a human being can go to.

OVO: And survive.

SS: And justify to themselves in some bizarre manner.

I’ve been compiling photos from forensic journals for the AMOK Journal that I’m working on. I want to use them in the form that they’re found. I stayed away from murders to cover other terrains of really graphic bizarre shit like auto-erotic fatalities and things about amputation and self-mutilation, things people do to themselves. I find that is more disturbing for people to look at and talk about than murder for some reason. l’m very intrigued with what Ballard called the hidden literature of medical and psychiatric journals. There are great stories in there that will never see the light of day in an actual book. That’s why you get to the point of collecting medical books. We used to sell a lot of copies of The Color Atlas of Forensic Pathology, considering it’s a $70 book. Some do want to see more and more and more but I don’t know that the average true crime reader does. We just got a promo from a publisher about a murderer who was picking up Marines in Orange County and murdering them. In the book they used actual police forensic photos and I don’t remember seeing that in a regular true crime book before. You can’t get much more graphic than that. I don’t even begin to project where things are going. I just see things peek at some point, then people are saturated and they look for something else. A lot of people who are heavily committed to this will back off and say they weren’t really into it.

AMOK Books
1764 N. Vermont Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90027
United States

Fax: 323-550-8833

http://www.amokbooks.com/

(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)

From the 1906 book The Outbursts of Everett True by A. D. Condo and J. W. Raper. With thanks to Barnacle Press.