Selections from the works of Raoul Vaneigem (1934 – present). Basic Banalities (1962), Some Theoretical Topics That Need To Be Dealt With Without Academic Debate or Idle Speculation (1966), The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967), Contributions to The Revolutionary Struggle, Intended To Be Discussed, Corrected, And Principally, Put Into Practice Without Delay (1974) and The Book of Pleasures (1979).
I was supposed to link up with an old friend of Jack’s that afternoon. He’d been down to Occupy once, and he offered to go back with me. Trevor knows every inch of Portland. Obscure monuments. Weird iconography. Real history.
This tree stump? Look closer. It’s made of stone. It’s a grave-marker for a member of a forgotten Masonic order. That building over there? It used to be a speak-easy. They had an underground phone line straight to the local police precinct.
Trevor speaks in such a slow, deliberate manner, and in such a low tone of voice, that I have to listen. His whole demeanor is disarming. He has a kind of fastidious, algorithmic intelligence that makes me feel like a small dog barking at cars.
We wound our way through the city on foot. A few blocks from the park, I stopped to tear a piece of cardboard off a discarded box. I needed to make a sign. I pulled a felt tipped marker from my pocket, one I’d swiped from Trevor’s apartment, and wrote:
Afghanistan is the world’s largest deposit of Lithium.
If you own an iPhone, you are a douchebag.
It was subtle, I thought. Considering the fact that Generation Apple had organized most of the Occupy movement via social networking websites, like an Arab Spring for spoiled suburbanites, I figured there was a good chance I would offend virtually everyone I passed.
I didn’t want to debate the gross sociopolitical factors of their white, middle class existence or how it was or wasn’t fundamentally sustained by third world labor and exploitation at almost every level. It was all neo-Marxist bullshit to me, wrapped in a disingenuous skin of Libertarianism by a bunch of people who had never actually read Anarchy, State, Utopia.
I started mail networking in the fall of 1978 when I was 25. I’d gotten a list of names & addresses from my friend Cathy Gayhardt wch I later realized had been at least partially provided to her by “Blaster” Al Ackerman. I started by sending my 1st Mike Film Form Letter to the people I thought had the most imaginative names. These included Anna Banana (the editor of the great “Vile” magazine), & Cosey Fanni Tutti (a member of “Throbbing Gristle” whose “Second Annual Report” I wasn’t to hear until 2 yrs later). By a decade later, I was corresponding w/ 1,400 people. But long before then, certainly by 1984, such massive correspondence had gotten to be a huge bureaucratic challenge. I’d send out as much as 20 mailings a day & was keeping track of the often changing names & addresses of the people I was corresponding w/. In 1984, as a result of going to England & France for a mnth, partially for the 8th International Neoist Apartment festival, my ability to keep up w/ the correspondence began to fall permanently into arrears.
This was a very exciting time. The sheer quantity of outreach, the senses of purpose, the lifestyle experiments, these were phenomenal. I wasn’t much interested in the “Mail Art”, wch was often just a matter of sending out thoughtless objects for maximal presence in catalogs, as I was in finding other like-minded individuals – esp tricksters. Some of us used many different names & even different addresses & other strategies in order to keep our identities shape-shifting.
It was probably in 1985, while I was still in the thick of this networking, that Trevor Blake, the editor of this bk, & I 1st contacted each other. He sent me the 1st issue of his magazine “Surreal Estates” & I sent him the 3rd issue of my “DDC#040.002″ magazine. By early 1986, I had an interview in “SE” #6. Not long thereafter, “OVO” replaced “Surreal Estates” & by issue #2 I had some Mike Film in it. #7 had a bisected picture thing I contributed & #12 had my ‘resumé’ & an altered version of my “Lidznap” acct. It’s this latter that’s made it into this compilation from earlier issues.
All this fervent networking was beginning to bubble out of the underground into larger circulation & higher visibility. The Book of the SubGenius (1983) was, perhaps, the 1st of these to be of personal importance to me b/c of my inclusion in it. Remarkably, Rev. Ivan Stang made sure that even the most minor contributors, such as myself, got a royalty check. Such was his astounding integrity & the feeling of community & collaboration. “Re/Search” magazine put out its 1st “special book issue” in 1982 focussed on William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, & Throbbing Gristle – followed in 1983 by their “Industrial Culture Handbook”. Despite, or b/c of, the controversial content of such publications, they were widely distributed & eagerly sought after by many people of similar mindset &, as such, had some commercial success.
In the meantime, publications like my “DDC#040.002″, Trevor’s “OVO”, Bruce Andrews & Charles Bernstein’s “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E”, cris cheek’s “RAWZ”, Julien Blaine”s “DOC(K)S”, Rick Sugden’s “HOMEX”, Sheila Gostick & co’s “End Paper”, Judith A. Hoffberg’s “umbrella”, Alan Davies’ “A HUNDRED POSTERS”, the Church of the SubGenius’ “Stark Fist of Removal”, Donna Kossy’s “False Positive”, Linda Frye Burnham’s “High Performance”, Mike Gunderloy’s “Factsheet Five”, John Foster’s “OP”, Monty Cantsin’s “SMILE”, Nenad Bogdanovic’s “Total”, John M. Bennett’s “Lost & Found Times”, Rev. Crowbar’s “Popular Reality”, AMK’s “Hare/Hunter/Field”, Manfred Vançi Stirnemann’s “Work in Progress”, “Light Times”, Katherine Nichols’ “A. C. Gazette”, John Rininger’s “Phosphorusflourish”, Joel Biroco’s “KAOS”, Rupert Wondolowski & Alfred Merchlinsky’s “Shattered Wig Review”, Lloyd Dunn’s “PhotoStatic”, Stephen Perkins’ “Box of Water”, Chris Winkler’s “(S)CRAP”, the San Francisco Cinematheque’s “Cinematograph”, Mlacolm Dickson & Lorna Waite’s “Variant”, Michel Lefebvre’s “SOUS LE MANTEAU”, Michael Amnasan’s “ottotole”, & many, many other (a)periodicals were keeping discourse very lively indeed.
What had previously been underground became increasingly available thru bks that radically broke new ground: Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture (1987), Rev. Ivan Stang’s High Weirdness by Mail (1988), Stewart Home’s The Assault on Culture (1988), Bob Black & Adam Parfrey’s Rants and Incendiary Tracts (1989). One of the publications I’d looked forward to the most was “SEMIOTEXT[E] USA” (1987). I’d been reading ‘SEMIOTEXT[E]” since the 1970s & had always found it to be stunning in its intellectual brilliance. Alas, despite its size & thoroughness, by the time it came out I felt a sense of denouement – as if it had nothing new to teach me – for me, it was already dated. A German friend of mine, Florian Cramer, sd the same thing about the preceding “German Issue”. Of course, that wdn’t've been the case for people less saturated in the underground than myself.
But, of course, not every underground publisher had the desire or the wherewithal to put out a bk & get it distributed. Many of us held onto the notion that interpersonal networking was the most important & continued to mainly put out small publications that were mostly intended to be traded w/ other such publishers. The PERSONAL vs the COMMERCIAL. While publications like Re/Search’s “Incredibly Strange Film” were initially exciting, for people like me, at least, they only represented a faux cutting edge. Any truly incredibly strange film, such as my own, wdn’t be included b/c they’re not dumb enuf, they’re not LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) enuf. To a few of us, w/ little or no commercial aspirations, what was most important was finding & communicating w/ the secluded obscure people who seemed to be trying to free themselves from an oppressive society thru following their imagination w/o becoming herders of (sub-)pop-culture sheep. People who took their egalitarianism seriously.
Now, decades later, the ‘landscape’ of underground communication has changed considerably. Many of us who wd’ve previously used the mails now use the internet. But much of the thrill is gone, for me at least. Instead of getting a tape in the mail, I get Facebook announcements. People ‘friend’ each other more for the quantity of connections than for their quality – just like much of Mail Art, but NOT the mail I participated in. Print-On-Demand has, fortunately, come into existence & it’s financially more feasible for someone like Trevor Blake to put bks out w/o having to cater to sensationalist marketing to make the substantial investment back. As such, now we have oVo 20 JUVEN(a/i)LIA: a bk that wd fit in nicely from an information standpoint w/ the aforementioned bks from the 1980s w/ at least a few people that wdn’t've previously made the editorial cut but who were, nonetheless, highly active.
One of Blake’s strengths is his sincere & long-term communication w/ a variety of very vigorous people – many of whom were important to my own correspondence too. Alas, I have to say that his weaknesses are in design imagination & in proofreading. In my 2pp article alone he & his spellcheck added something like 40+ errors. Back to that later. In general, this bk is a vital addition to further bringing to light underground culture – mostly in the us@.
Trevor’s “Public Domain” & “Disclaimer” present an editorial anti-copyright position: “Dedicators recognize that, once placed in the public domain, the Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.” & such an approach is very much in keeping w/ the more radical proponents of freedom of information. The idea is pretty much that the creators of the works propose to pirate whatever’s out there for their own purposes & feel like it’s only fair to reciprocate in kind. Personally, I prefer non-commercial use w/ attribution. If someone’s going to make money off me, I prefer that they share it w/ me. Respectful friendship rather than exploitation.
The 1st paragraph of Blake’s intro claims that “All text and art appearing here was first published in OVO with the exception of the work of Thom Metzger and the work of Ernest Mann.” Alas, that’s inaccurate in my case. My “Lidznap” was published in its correct & complete form in my bk entitled How to Write a Resumé – Volume II: Making a Good First Impression (1st edition: Apathy Press, 1989 – see reviews of the 2nd edition here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2558817.How_to_Write_a_Resum_Volume_II_Making_a_Good_First_Impression_2nd_edition ) – 2 yrs before the OVO #12 that an abridged version later appeared in.
Blake’s intro goes on to mention some of the other publications that I’ve also mentioned above: Re/Search, Factsheet Five, & Apocalypse Culture. As Trevor explains: “OVO is a public record of my interests and inquiries. OVO is where I’ve taught myself how to write, edit and publish. Themed issues of OVO follow what I work to be less ignorant about. Contributors to OVO have nearly always been friends first.” There’s the emphasis on the personal again. His intro concludes w/: “Read with regularity outside your area of interests. Nothing will point out your own ignorance better than attentiveness to those who disagree with you, nothing makes what you know make sense like learning something unrelated to what you know. Take as many chances [as] you are willing to take lumps for. But most of all, get busy.” & it’s this philosophy that makes OVO highly worth reading.
There’s a drawing by Mike Diana at the end of this intro. For those of you not familiar w/ his work I strongly recommend the fantastic VHS release “affliction” edited by underground movie stalwart Mark Hejnar. Mike Diana got burned by the police state more than most of us. Here’s his contributor’s bio: “Mike Diana was born in Geneva New York in 1969. He started drawing at a young age. He is the first artist to receive a criminal conviction for obscenity in the United States. Based on drawings Mike made at the same time as his drawings for OVO, Mike was forbidden from any contact with children under 18, compelled to undergo psychological testing and enroll in a journalistic ethics course, pay a $3,000 fine and perform more than one thousand hours of community service. He was also ordered to cease drawing for personal use. To insure that Mike was not drawing, police were allowed to inspect his house at any time without warning or warrant. He escaped to New York City in 1996.”
Many of the ideas presented here have been far more important to many of us than may often meet the eye. Take Hakim Bey’s statement: “We might now contemplate aesthetic actions which possess some of the resonance of terrorism (or “cruelty,” as Artaud put it) aimed at the destruction of abstractions rather than people, at liberation rather than power, pleasure rather than profit, joy rather than fear. “Poetic Terrorism.” Our chosen images have the potency of darkness – but all images are masks, & behind these masks lie energies we can turn toward light & pleasure.” Well put!
I found Johhny Brainwash’s “Holding Games for Ransom” (published April 2008) to be interesting. It explains an alternative economic model for gamers & others akin to what are now kickstarts. Alternative economic thinking has always been important for people in the underground for various probably obvious reasons: not everyone in the world is by nature likely to ‘succeed’ in the economic conditions of the society they’re born into. “It takes money to make money”, as the saying goes, so if you’re born relatively poor you’re not as likely to ‘work yr way to the top’ as proponents of capitalism might have you believe. If you’re rich enuf to go to a rich university long enuf to get a PhD you’re much more likely to be shit out of the system straight into a position of privilege where it’s taken for granted that you deserve to be regardless of yr actual level of accomplishment.
Since poor people are much more likely to be more desperate than rich people are generally likely to understand, it’s no wonder that people wd seek out an economic system wherein their actual qualities & abilities have some value rather than the often unfair values assigned to them by people in power. Barter is very important. Hence we have “Indie Currency” as outlined in Klint Finley’s “The New Currency War” (OVO 18 Money(April 2008)). For an earlier article on the same subject, see Rita Rodentia’s “Money Schmoney – Alternative Currencies” (Street Rat-Bag #3, October 2000). I learned at least one unexpected thing from Finley’s article: “Pay Pal, eventually burdened with legal problems, banned the use of PayPal for gambling, pornography, and several other uses in 2004.”
Gerry Reith & Thom Metzger were both people I corresponded &/or traded w/. Reith, perhaps isolated more than most in Sheridan, Wyoming, committed suicide. Metzger & I didn’t correspond for long. I think I always figured that it had something to do w/ him becoming a somewhat ‘successful’ novelist. Therefore, it was interesting for me to see things by them in here that I may not’ve been previously familiar w/. However, part of what Reith wrote & what Blake writes later is something that I very much don’t identify w/. Reith 1st: “As anarchists: leafleting, speaking, proselytizing, agitating anarchists, we are continually trying to smooth over the inherent contradictions of trying to motivate people to act while disavowing any responsibility for their choice of action(s).” Blake quoting George Walford: “‘The overwhelming majority of those who have encountered anarchism have shown very clearly that they do not want to do what anarchists want them to do. They prefer to do what they are doing now. We have no reason to expect the others, when they meet anarchism, to respond differently. Can your anarchism accept this? Or do you feel bound to impose (however gently and rationally) your ideas of what it is good for them to do?’”
Now, I’m an anarchist & the reason why I consider myself to be an anarchist is very simple: I don’t accept rule from others & don’t want to impose rule on others either. Etymologically, it seems simple: “an” = without, “archy” means rule by. This is generally taken to mean ‘rule by someone other than yrself’ since it’s somewhat taken for granted that as an anarchist you think for yrself & take responsibility for yrself. Perhaps something like “esy-o-idios-archy” might be better or just plain “idioarchy” meaning “rule of yrself by yrself”. It seems that potentially etymologically applicable words like autarchy & monarchy are already laden w/ more dictatorial meanings. Anyway, my point here is that one of the things that I like about anarchy is that anyone self-declaring as an anarchist is hypothetically not going to proselytize b/c that wd mean trying to lead someone else & wd, therefore, be antithetical to “w/o rule”. Personally, I detest proselytizing & have no desire to “impose (however gently and rationally) [my] ideas”. So, WHAT THE FUCK?! I don’t even ask my friends whether they’re anarchists much of the time. If they try to proselytize to me chances are they won’t stay friends w/ me for long. I’d just find them too annoying. As such, I find this emphasis on proselytizing above to be very suspect.
Mike Gunderloy’s “The Meta-Network, or, A Battle with Footnotes” was one of the highlights of this “OVO” for me. Gunderloy’s Factsheet Five was the best meta-networking tool I’ve ever encountered & Gunderloy’s ability to write capsule reviews of hundreds or thousands of publications every mnth always struck me as qualifying him to be called “a human encyclopedia” – a compliment I rarely give out. His humorous approach in making this text have the footnotes quickly overwhelm the main text makes it even more enjoyable to me & smacks of parody of academia.
Anonymous’ “23 Sperm Stories 23″ starts off like a dry scientific explanation of sperm & related reproductive elements. However, many people have emphasized the #23 as some sort of significantly recurring # – often w/ occult meaning. As such, the title’s a bit of a giveaway that something other than the dry beginning, wch might just be cut’n'paste from undisclosed sources, might appear – as indeed it does about 6 pages in:
“Reports of alien abduction often include claims of the harvesting of or depositing of sperm. The Christian religion claims that when a sperm cell enters another kind of cell, a soul is created. Casteneda (a 20th Century novelist), claimed that sperm went to the recipient’s brain, causing a pleasant sensation. Bardon (a 20th Century occultist) claimed that retaining sperm in a special container called a condenser could allow the manipulation of energy and magnetic fluid. The Temple of Psychic Youth claimed that placing sperm on paper while concentrating on a desired goal would make that desired goal occur.”
“A majority of the world’s economy, technological progress, art and culture are centered on extracting sperm from one or more human and putting it inside of or in proximity to one or more humans or images. The second most active engine of the world’s economy, technological effort, art and culture is the prevention of these activities. The entire history of humanity can be explained as the dynamics of these two forces.”
For me, this is overemphasis.
“In 1999 a subject in Prague tricked a human into donating sperm to a local sperm bank with the claim this was part of a medical process. The subject actually used the sperm to create two new humans, which the donor human was then required by [law? - word apparently missing here] to financially support”.
I find this last story a bit unbelievable in its current state. I found nothing about it online but I didn’t look very hard either. If the story’s anything but an urban myth I suspect that there’s alot more to it than in this telling. According to this same article, “No human has ever been generated without sperm; sperm is the agent of all life”. According to Wikipedia: “Parthenogenesis (play /ˌpærθənoʊˈdʒɛnəsɪs/) is a form of asexual reproduction where growth and development of embryos occur without fertilization. In plants, parthenogenesis means development of an embryo from an unfertilized egg cell, and is a component process of apomixis.” Even the article itself refutes its claim re sperm: “Scientists at the Reproductive Genetics Institute in Chicago created a means of creating new humans without sperm in 2002.” & “clearly the need to reproduce with sperm is an option and not a requirement.” The point is that while I found “23 Sperm Stories 23″ to be dubious in its logic at times, I still think it’s very interesting.
I found Feral Faun’s “Thoughts on Experimentation” to be somewhat representative of a general thrust of OVO: “I consider the past ten years of my life to be a constant process of experimentation”. This leads me to PM’s “Liberating Wednesday”: “So far people have tried to liberate countries, but the results aren’t very convincing. So why not try to liberate a day of the week?” Great idea! This, in turn, reminds me of Ernest Mann’s “I am wasting less of my time (LIFE) watching, listening to and reading THOUGHT LEADERS, ie, TV, movies, radio, music, newspapers, magazines, and novels.” Wch takes me to Karen Eliot’s (misspelled throughout OVO as “Elliot”) “Operation Negation”: “From 1990 until an undetermined point thereafter there will be an employment of the negation of all forms of work (and play).” In other words, all of these people are trying to look at their life & to experiment w/ it in a liberating way.
Ernest Mann, whose “Little Free Press” publications I once rc’vd frequently, was definitely dedicated to freeing himself: “I spent 22 years of my TIME (life) working as a Wage Slave. [..] I don’t want to do that anymore.” I found this memorial to him online ( http://www.oocities.org/msrrtnewsletter/may96.html#mann ):
“While half mast flags in April marked the death of U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, our thoughts instead were on [a] real people’s hero, Ernest Mann. The 69-year-old editor of what must have been the longest running zine in existence, Little Free Press, was bludgeoned to death in March by his teenage grandson who then took his own life. The two had been living together in a Little Falls, Minnesota, trailer court. Formerly a successful real estate investor, Mann (a.k.a. Larry Johnson), “dropped out” in 1969 to live a contemplative life and promote his quixotic “Priceless Economic System.” Described as “definitely the most idealistic, and arguably the most naive set of pamphlets” (High weirdness by mail, Stang, 1988), Little Free Press has been part crusade, and part autobiography about squirrel trapping, raft building, and grandson raising. Mann first received regional attention in 1978 when Minneapolis Tribune columnist Larry Batson wrote about his quest to promote freedom. By the time the national media noticed him (“A Thoreau of the city,” Christian Science Monitor, May 16, 1990, p.13), he was already widely known throughout the zine network. Mike Gunderloy’s September 1982 edition of Factsheet Five (#4) reviewed Little Free Press #41. Thirteen and a half years later, Mann was still at it, pumping out issue #138 and visualizing “peace on Earth and goodwill.” We were not alone in corresponding with Ernest and wish we hadn’t procrastinated with plans to interview him. Profoundly human, an enjoyer of books and simple pleasures, an anarchist and atheist who never ceased his one-person utopian experiment, he will be missed.”
Walter Alter’s yet-another person in OVO that I corresponded w/ in the ’80s. While I more or less completely disagree w/ his statements such as: “Meeting the necessities of biological survival is a piece of cake; an amoeba can do it.” “Technology is inherently democratizing.” “By visually representing and revealing the interconnectivity of events within a phase and, by extension, of all phases within our universe, technology becomes the most humanitarian of all human endeavors.” “When television is discussed it is always within the parameter of a single screen, much like cinema.” reading his article here made me want to listen to his “Air Bag!” tape that he’d sent me. Alas, I cdn’t find it but in the process of looking I was reminded of just how amazing the hundreds of tapes that I once traded for were. As for cinema being a single screen medium? I’d say: no more or less so than tv. There’re many instances of people experimenting w/ multiple projections. Take, eg, my own:
“Multiple Projections: 1978 to 2009″:
Trevor’s reviews are particularly useful for pointing people in the direction of obscure publications. The 1st of these here is about Mark Mothersbaugh’s 1975 bk entitled My Struggle published in 1978 in an edition of 100. While Blake mentions that “These small thick books have red covers to make them look the same as Chairman Mao’s Book of Quotations”, he fails to mention that “My Struggle” is the English translation of Hitler’s famous autobiography “Mein Kampf”. Also reviewed is a documentary called The Skin Horse “by and about disabled people and their sex lives.” Trevor notes that “Channel 4 (formerly Central Television) commissioned the 1982 film but does not sell it. No one sells it, not legally.” &, again, we have a central concern here for probably many of the OVO contributors: seek out & study obscure & obscured info.
After Trevor’s reviews come his interviews. I have a particular affection for interviews – esp w/ people that mainstream media might find unworthy. As I write in my essay entitled “On the Importance of Personal Archives” (not in OVO): “I’d rather live life fully with friends than vicariously thru the icons. Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous? How about Lifestyles of the Eccentric & Imaginative? Of the Intelligent & Visionary? Of the Friendly & Accessible? These may include the rich & famous but certainly aren’t excluded to them.” Blake’s 1st interview here is w/ a bulimic. Another subject of interest to me. In 1989 I made a movie called “Barfroom” that’s a parody of bulimics made w/ 2 ex-bulimic friends of mine. Another interview is w/ my old friend, long since lost touch w/, Yael Ruth Dragwyla. She discusses “varieties of non-physical travel”. I made a super-8mm film of her in 1986 performing ritual magick.
Perhaps most germane to the theme of underground publishing is Trevor’s interview w/ V. Vale, the co-editor of Re/Search. Vale’s philosophizing provides another good summary of a thread running thru the intentions & experiences of many underground publishers: “A lot of people just become criminals or whatever, or drug addicts, or they just can’t cope for a lot of good reasons. Society gives us plenty of reasons but it also provides the narcotics in the form of television and actual narcotics so that we can “adapt,” shall we say. And so yes, it’s definitely a struggle against mind control, against conditioning, against banal information. We were born with the birthright of curiosity and there’s nothing more natural than to be curious, but of course this faculty is extinguished early in life. It seems like society does everything it can to either extinguish this faculty or to channel it along channels of consumption rather than something creative on your own, something creative and original and obsessive and unique on your own.” BRAVO!!
Alas, at some point I have to critique the treatment that my own article, “Lidznap” rc’vd. Perhaps I shd preface this by explaining that from 1969 on I’ve used meticulously calculated d liberate d viations from conventional writing for encryption purposes, for abbreviation, for ambiguity, & for many other reasons. These d viations are always intended to expand the meaning of my text in a way that conventional writing wdn’t – & are rarely mistakes. The mistakes come along when editors & their machines ‘correct’ my writing – esp my puns, wch are often numerous & highly charged. Hence if I call myself a “psychopathfinder”, eg, some spell check program might ‘correct’ that as a ‘nonexistent’ word. Of course, neologisms have to begin somewhere & I’m an active force in birthing them. Explanations of my systems wd require too much space here. The reader is directed to the “Dos & Dont’s of Dating” & “l;a;n;g;u;a;g;e” chapters of my bk entitled footnotes ( see reviews of that here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2349153.footnotes ).
The original article wd’ve been sent to Trevor around 1987. It’s about an event & a project from 1979. The project involved a phone # that cd be called for somewhat unpredictable results. This phone # spelled TESTES-3. A reporter named Franz Lidz, whose early life has been represented in the Dianne Keaton movie Unstrung Heroes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstrung_Heroes ), expressed an interest in writing an article about TESTES-3, wch was operated anonymously. He wrote one article before he found out who we were & one after we led him on a wild ride. “Lidznap” is about that wild ride. My original begins w/ the title, followed by this subtitle: “Two Ironic Endings” followed by the section headed “Preface”. That’s followed by a photocopy of Lidz’s 1st article entitled: “For a Good Time Call TESTES-3 – Underground Telephone Network”. That’s followed by page 1 of the 2nd part of my text entitled “Lidznap” wch is followed by 2 relevant photos & the end of my article. Finishing the whole thing is a copy of Lidz’s 2nd article, entitled: “VD-RADIO Goes On The Air”.
When this was 1st published in OVO #12, it was called “Lidznap: Two Ironic Endings” & Lidz’s 2 articles were removed. Only a cropped version of one of the 2 original photos was left in. Trevor retyped my original, rather than photocopying it & cutting it into a form that wd fit his layout. In this original process, this sentence:
“Given that we considered anonymity to be essential to our functioning as mysterious catalysts & given that we wanted to put emphasis on TESTES-3 as a communally produced participatory phenomenon we reacted cautiously to his request in a way that we thought to be consistent with our principles.”
became:
“Given that we considered anonymity to be essential to our functioning communally produced participatory phenomenon we reacted cautiously to his request in a way that we thought to be consistent with our principles.”
Over a quarter of the sentence is missing: “as mysterious catalysts & given that we wanted to put emphasis on TESTES-3 as a”. Why? B/c in the original that’s an entire line & when Trevor was transcribing his eyes jumped from the preceding line to the following one & missed it altogether! That one mistake alone is enuf to make me cringe but there are many, MANY more. Any mistakes Trevor made in his original typing are then repeated & further compounded by the singularly ‘stupid’ & inflexible spell check program he must use. IMO spell checks shd be disabled in any text program used by any reasonably literate person. They’re mainly designed to be helpful for covering up the mistakes of the barely literate – like college students. Text programs will accept the wrong word if it’s spelled correctly, they’ll also ‘correct’ the types of meaningful d viations that I specialize in.
Hence, if one writes “CD” as an abbreviation for “Compact Disc” it might become “Cd”. If one writes “than” instead of the intended “then” it’ll stay that way. If one writes “4″ as a phonetic abbreviation of “for”, it might get changed. If a proper name is misspelled, it’ll never notice. If one creates a d liberate contraction, it might get changed: “awhile” might become “a while”. The list is endless. tOGGLE cASE is not permitted. Words like “typewriter” & “lawnmower” were once written as “type writer” & “lawn mower” until the 2 words became commonly enuf associated w/ each other to become one word. The intermediary stage is “type-writer” & “lawn-mower”. I often prefer to recognize these contractions as likely to occur in the future & to make them happen NOW. Hence, I write “alotof” instead of “a lot of” b/c “a lot of” is sd so often that it’s basically blended into one word in common speech even tho it’s not usually written that way. THIS IS NOT A MISTAKE ON MY PART but a spell check program will react to it as if it is.
Then there are things like the word “basically” that I’ve just used. This isn’t underlined as a possible mistake in the program I’m typing this in. However, the word “publically” is underlined as a mistake. So what’s the rule? When I was a kid, a rule was that when a word ending in “l” was having “ing” added to it, the “l” was to be doubled. Reading older bks will routinely present this spelling: “travelling”. These days, that’s considered ‘wrong’ & it’s to be spelled “traveling” – no more doubling of the “l”. My point here is that while I actually pay attn to many of these rules & try to either consciously d viate from them or to stay consistent, what’s considered ‘correct’ is actually a mess of irregularities that have no actual grammatical consistency.
I also d liberately do things like put punctuation outside of quotation marks. Yes, yes, I ‘know’ that this isn’t the conventional procedure. I cd give a shit. The people who teach/enforce these conventional procedures are generally doing so by rote, I’m actually thinking about the language. Fancy that! In general, I use punctuation as I imagine myself saying something. Therefore, if I imagine myself pausing, I’ll use a comma (“,”). If I imagine myself not pausing I’ll leave the comma out. SO, in my original article, I wrote “or “line” as we called it”. Trevor ‘corrected’ this by writing it as “or “line,” as we called it” adding punctuation that I didn’t want in there. Not only did he add the comma, he also put it w/in the quotation marks (” “) wch I wd’ve never done. To me, in my much more consistent & logical grammatical world than that enforced by convention, the word “line” shd stay isolated w/in the quotation marks & the comma shd come as a pause after it. Sentence #2 begins: “It was run anonymously” & Trevor changed that to “It was operated anonymously”. & so forth & so on – over 40 changes in toto. “John’s camera flashes added to their already substantially disoriented vision” becomes “John’s camera flashes added to their already substantially distorted vision”. Here “disoriented” is far more accurate b/c Franz was wearing prism glasses that I made that reversed his left-right, etc..
A common problem w/ editors who feel the need to to standardize their visual presentation is that the editors then have to retype all text into their computers. Unless the retyping is done very carefully, wch it rarely is, the result is a mess. Given that I’m a highly literate & careful person, it’s always painful for me to see something credited to me so full of mistakes that I seem very sloppy indeed. Esp given that my d viations are often symbolic, the actual meanings of my article become distorted. Take, eg, this bit from my original: “They’re coming to take me away, hoho, heehee, haha..” – in Trevor’s retyping this becomes “they’re coming to take me away, hoho, heehee, haha…”. 2 seemingly minor changes have been made: the beginning “T” has been made lower case – hence no longer showing that this is the 1st line of a verse of the song; the ellipsis at the end has been changed from having 2 dots (“..”) to the more conventional 3 dots (“…”). In my number symbolism I recognize the conventional 3 dot ellipsis as a symbol of the so-called “Holy Trinity” used, again conventionally, as a symbol of infinity. It’s Christian. I’m an ATHEIST & I detest Christinanity (pun intended, as usual – another word that wd be ‘corrected’ by a spell check program) – as such, I use 2 dots as my symbol of the fade-out &/or infinity. Once again, it’s d liberate! Reading thru this “oVo”, I find a near continual parade of typos. Some people probably don’t care – but to someone like myself, these typos can significantly change the meaning of a text.
Ah, much of what I feel I shd write next is even more difficult. I like Trevor & think that this issue, & others before it, have a significant enuf place in the history of the us@ underground to be worth reading. Still, there’re parts I find myself substantially critical of that I’ll address here. Trevor Blake’s “Trajectory Through Anarchism”, in particular. In this, Trevor traces his development as an anarchist & a post-anarchist starting w/ age 16 & ending w/: “Whatever I am, I an [sic] definitely not an anarchist.”
One phrase that runs thru the article is “imp of the perverse” used as a positive term: “The same imp of the perverse that led me to read about anarchism pricks up his ears when he hears a friend say how concerned he is that another friend is reading Ayn Rand.” “I call up the imp of the perverse to see what other forbidden ideas might be out there.” “2005: The imp of the perverse continues to slip books into my hand”. I can relate to Trevor’s usage of the “imp of the perverse” as meaning his tendency to seek out ‘forbidden’ knowledge. I’ve been calling myself a “blatant pervert” for much the same reason for a long time. However, it might interest readers who don’t already know this, that this phrase probably originated in Edgar Allan Poe’s story of the same name that 1st appeared in Graham’s Magazine in July, 1845, & that Poe says this about it:
“We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out this our cloud upon the precipice’s edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall – this rushing annihilation – for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination – for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire to do it.”
As I mentioned earlier in this review, I find the idea of proselytizing for anarchy to be self-contradictory. Of course, people are self-contradictory all the time. But there’s so much written here about anarchy that I find inaccurate that I want to counterbalance it. This, even tho I’ve often sd things to the effect of “Sometimes I’m an anarchist. If other people say I’m not an anarchist &/or if the common notion of anarchy were to become too oppressive, no biggie, then I’m not an anarchist. 1st & foremost, I’m me.” In other words, let’s not get too attached to labels or let them get too attached to us. To my mind, one of the worst things that can happen to anarchism is for it to become a popular movement that people ‘join’ – not b/c it’s what they feel inside, but b/c they’re conformists & being an anarchist is part & parcel of whatever subculture they’re part of.
Trevor emphasizes his correspondence w/ George Walford, who I’ve never heard of:
“1993: From a letter by George Walford: “You remark the scarcity of ‘real live human being stories’ in anarchist literature. Very perceptive. But it’s not an accident. Anarchism is not about people as we meet them, it’s about abstruse principles and theories (and, even more, about the resistance these encounter). The real human stories appear in the literature at the other end of the range, in the popular romances, thrillers love-songs and — perhaps most of all — in tabloid newspaper stories, which go to extreme lengths to personalize (humanize) political events.”
Whew! Not only do I find Walford to be astoundingly un-self-consciously pompous, I also find his claims to be as far from my own personal experience as they can get. A “scarcity of ‘real live human being stories’ in anarchist literature”? It’s hard for me to imagine how any reader of anarchist literature cd find this to be the case. Arguably the most famous & widely read anarchist bk in English might be Emma Goldman’s Living My Life wch is, of course, an autobiography. Or what about Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist?
To continue w/ Walford:
“The dilemma of orthodox anarchism cannot be escaped by ‘practical living anarchy’ within present society. We cannot live without taking part in society, paying taxes and supporting capitalism by our consumption, and orthodox anarchism condemns all of this. The attempt to live the anarchist life is a living demonstration of the arid, empty, abstract unreality of orthodox anarchism; it cannot be put into practice, it is virtually nothing but theory.”
Again, I have to strongly disagree. 1st, it IS possible to avoid “paying taxes and supporting capitalism by our consumption” but if one’s born into a capitalist country, it’s certainly hard to do w/in that context. But, for me, that’s besides the point. It’s important to at least be conscious of the ramifications of one’s tax-paying & of one’s consumption. There’s a big difference between the guy who owns the factory that uses slave labor & the person who refuses to buy his product b/c he knows of these conditions. I prefer to be among the latter. I know that trees are destroyed to create bks but I still love & collect & read bks anyway. I have no aspirations to be ‘pure’ or ‘perfect’ but that doesn’t make me any less of an anarchist.
Trevor asks: “Where are the older anarchists in a movement that started in the 19th Century?” Well, he’s 13 yrs younger than me, so I’m one of those “older anarchists” & I’ve met a few older than myself. If one were to go to Barcelona, eg, one wd find much more continuity than one’s likely to find in the us@. Any study of us@ anarchist history will reveal a heavy suppression that led to many deportations & imprisonings. I’ve seen at least one documentary on the Wobblies where the few survivors expressed astonishment that anyone even knew who they were any more. It’s probably safe to say that from 1930 to 1970 this suppression thinned out the number of anarchists extensively. After the Spanish Civil War, members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade didn’t necessarily come back to the US b/c they were either criminalized or just disgusted by the US’s official non-opposition to the rise of Franco. The great player-piano composer, Conlon Nancarrow, eg, moved to Mexico instead. In 1969 or 1970 when I came across the term “anarchist” & realized that that’s what I was, I’d either never met anyone else who’d ever heard of anarchy or might’ve met ONE other such person once. It wasn’t until 6 yrs later that I met another one. Obviously, things have changed – largely as a result of the popularization of anarchy in punk culture.
Trevor goes on to ask: “And what has anarchism done… ever?” Wow! Such a question amazes me. Anarchist agitating is certainly centrally linked to such things as the 8 hr work day & the 40 hr work wk. Ever heard of “Food Not Bombs”?! It’s a pretty widespread free food program that most big cities, & quite a few small ones, have by now. In Pittsburgh, “Book ‘Em”, a bks-to-prisoners program run by volunteers, was founded by anarchists; “Free Ride”, a bikes project that teaches people how to build & repair bicycles & makes the opportunity available for kids to get a free bike by going thru a similar learning program, was founded by anarchists; “The Big Idea” is the local anarchist info & coffee shop. There are anarchist medics for protests where people take the risk of being attacked by police. There were anarchist volunteers who worked in New Orleans after Katrina. All of these things are typical & all of them are trying to improve society at the level that they can work at w/o having to create hierarchies.
More Walford replying to Blake: “‘Just as …’ in which you blame the personal inadequacies of individual anarchists for the failure of anarchy.” Does Blake do this? If so, I agree w/ Walford that “That does not stand up any better than blaming individual supporters of capitalism for the failures of that system.” I have no expectations of ANY human to be somehow ‘perfect’. However, there’s a higher probability that someone who at least tries to live by a philosophy of Mutual Aid is less likely to fuck me over than someone who believes that Dog Eat Dog is the only way to get what you want. Blaming individuals is a waste of time if one expects individuals to be some sort of ultimate representative of any philosophy. I don’t represent anarchism, I represent myself.
Walford: “Not only can anarchy not be practiced under the state, it can’t even be thought out as an independent social system, in any concrete way, without running into contradictions that, appearing in practice, would wreck the whole world.” Really? What a blowhard! I want to know more about Walford so I look him up online & find that he was a socialist. How many times do anarchists have to point out that Nazism was National Socialism & that Mussolini was a socialist before he created Fascism?! Statements like “anarchy not be practiced under the state” are based on the idea that anarchists are trying to set up a different type of ‘state’ “under the state” & that this won’t work. As an anarchist, I’m simply trying to live as close to my own personal principles as I can. I have no expectations whatsoever that my own individual anarchism is going to be able to function w/ absolute purist integrity w/in any particular social conditions. There will always be factors beyond my control & things that I disagree w/ & that’s just fine. In some respects, such a view of anarchism is ‘moderate’ more than it is ‘left’ or ‘right’ ‘wing’ b/c I think that the more people who live stable & satisfied lives the better off we’ll all be. In other words, I prefer to foster social conditions in wch interpersonal animosity doesn’t reach homicidal proportions. IMO, ANY system is likely to create bad conditions for SOMEONE so I prefer to choose NO SYSTEM AT ALL.
Blake: “1994: I define anarchism as the belief that it is possible and desirable to maintain the world’s population at the current standard of living without government and without a period of transition from the present to an anarchist world.” I, personally, DON’T define anarchism in that way, I just hope it’s more conducive to non-warring social conditions than most social philosophies. HOWEVER, I don’t think that there’s such a thing as an “anarchist world” nor do I want such a thing. I don’t want everyone in the world to be anarchists – just those who want to be.
Trevor’s “The Bonus Army” was one of the most interesting articles for me. It taught me about something that I knew nothing about AND it brought up a familiar historical figure who’s always fascinating: General Smedley Butler: “Butler went on to write the book War is a Racket.” I’d like to read that.
From pp98-100, there’s Blake’s article entitled “Multiple Name Identities”. This is a subject dear to me & one that I have alotof direct experience w/. I’ve always found the term “Multiple Names” to be misleading. I prefer “Collective Identities”. Both refer to the deliberate use of one name by multiple people, often for a common purpose. Blake’s article tells of such names previously unknown to me & claims a few things that I think are inaccurate.
Blake mentions Nicholas Bourbaki, Kenneth Robeson, Stefan Brockhoff, David Agnew, & Van den Budenmayer – none of whom have I ever heard of. THANK YOU TREVOR! To these I might add Ern Malley, an Australian hoax poet identity created by 2 poets who hated modernist poetry in order to parody such poetry & prank a particular editor. Trevor also mentions the children’s bk entitled The Little Engine Who Could & that: “The story is attributed to Watty Piper, which was the house name of publisher Platt & Munk. Many men and women wrote under the name Watty Piper.” To wch I add that this is somewhat common in kid’s bks insofar as publishers create series that they perpetuate far beyond the lifespans of individual authors. Hence we have Hardy Boys stories written by “Franklin W. Dixon” & Tom Swift stories written by “Victor Appleton”, etc..
Blake: “Since 1968, films which the director wishes to distance themselves from are attributed to Alan Smithee.” Many, if not all of these are porn & it’s not just the directors who use the name. People largely use it so they don’t ruin their otherwise more aboveboard professional careers. I made my own movie “Teenagers from Inner Space” under the name Alan Smithee in order to deliberately associate myself w/ the other Smithees.
Blake: “Rrose Sélavy was an artist and model in the 1920s, associated with a number of dadaists.” Trevor shd’ve researched this one a little bit better. Here’s what’s basically common knowledge in the art world as presented on Wikipedia:
“Rrose Sélavy, or Rose Sélavy, was one of the pseudonyms of artist Marcel Duchamp. The name, a pun, sounds like the French phrase “Eros, c’est la vie”, which translates to English as “eros, that’s life”. It has also been read as “arroser la vie” (“to make a toast to life”).”
The collective identities that Blake writes about that I know the most about are those of Monty Cantsin, Karen Eliot, & Luther Blissett. I’ve been all 3 of them at some time or another. Blake spells “Monty” “Monte” at times & “Eliot” “Elliot” at all times so I call attn to those errors. He also presents David Zacks’ version of the origin of Monty Cantsin wch is probably mostly accurate but one shd keep in mind that Zack was a diabetic who was often too much of a space cadet to be always keenly aware of what was going on around him. “Blaster” Al Ackerman’s somewhat different history for such things is helpful for getting a more general feel.
Blake writes: “Stewart Home has written about Karen Elliot, who appeared in 1985: ‘Karen Elliot is a name that refers to an individual human being who can be anyone.’” What Blake seems to fail to understand here is that Home was simply rewriting earlier texts done under the name of someone else explaining Monty Cantsin. This text did not entirely originate w/ Home. Parts of it may’ve been written by him, other parts definitely by others. Essentially, such texts are written by the collective identity that they’re written under. Hence, attribution to Home is both inaccurate in terms of ‘actual’ authorship & in terms of the spirit of the collective identity.
“Stewart Home, in turn, has seen publications under his own name that he did not write.” [..] “including “Anarchism is Stupid: How Luther Blissett Hoaxed Bakunin’s Idiot Children,” “Communism or Masochism? An Appeal to All Revolutionaries Concerning the Rubber Slave Larry O’Hara,” and “An Open Letter to My Avant-Garde Chums by Stewart Home.”" Ha ha! There’s more to this than meets the eye, eh! EG: “Anamorphosis: Stewart Home, Searchlight and the plot to destroy civilization” is credited to “Larry O’Hara” (w/ the quotes around the name), who’s a critic of Home’s, but it was actually Home “who contributes to and edited the pamphlet” (according to Home here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3901990-anamorphosis ). In other words, these faux creditings are part of a prankish interplay of political argument.
All in all, Blake’s article is remarkably thorough. I’d add a few more names: Emmett Grogan ( I highly recommend his bk Ringolevio – a Life Played for Keeps. See its listing on GoodReads here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1069602.Ringolevio ), Bob Jones (who may or may not be a fiction of Stewart’s), David A. Bannister, Jesus Christ, & Shakespeare. Now I don’t really claim that Shakespeare was a collective identity but there have been suggestions to that effect & there is a bk by Ralph L. Tweedale entitled Wasn’t Shakespeare Someone Else? that questions whether Shakespeare was a pen name.
Finally, on this subject, I tell a tale about a university professor friend of mine & of an action undertaken inspired by the Monty Cantsin collective identity. This friend, who I’ll call Monty, was hired to teach English or some such at a university. On the 1st day of class, he had a friend appear as him & teach the class, On the 2nd day of class he had another friend do the same thing. By the 3rd day of class. he actually finally appeared to teach the class. By then, the students didn’t believe him anymore. At least he got them to question more.
&, NOW for the most difficult of Trevor’s articles to critique: “Co-Remoting with the Thunderous”, his article about me. It’s difficult to critique b/c it’s extremely flattering in some ways & lardy knows I’ve had more than enuf hate directed at me to last more than a lifetime so such positivity is much appreciated – but it’s also not necessarily always accurate & it’s probably a little too filled w/ fantasy to be a portrait of a mere human who’s turning into an old man as he writes & who’s slated for mortality along w/ the rest of the meatbags.
The title, “Co-Remoting with the Thunderous”, is a truncated quote from the last line of the 1st edition of my bk Telepathy Receptivity Training (see it on Good Reads here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2598123-telepathy-receptivity-training ). The full phrase is “Dilating with the physical, co-remoting with the thunderous” & I very much like that Trevor used the latter part as his article’s title. All of the phrases in TRT are language thought of by me while half-asleep, usually when waking up. As such, they’re strongly evocative for me w/o being overdominated by conscious intention. That gives such a phrase an interpretive flexibility & Trevor’s use of it plays right into that.
One thing that immediately tickles me about Blake’s article is that he deliberately overuses the name “tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE” in its full form in sentences where the tOGGLE cASE is disruptive. When I originally conceived of the name (or the answer to the question: ‘What’s yr name?’) in 1975, I wrote it lower case so that when it wd appear in sentences it wd cause a sortof cognitive dissonance. EG: We were sitting there & tentatively, a convenience walked into the room. For someone who doesn’t know that “tentatively, a convenience” is a person’s name (originally conceived of as a collective identity by the by), that sentence wd be saying that “tentatively, a convenience walked into the room” – ie: “a convenience” wd be some sort of ambulatory thing capable of walking in a rm? ‘What sort of convenience?’, one might ask, etc.. Trevor’s use of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE seems to play right into that deliberate disorientation possibility.
Blake’s article reveals a truly substantial level of knowledge about some aspects of my ‘work’/play & makes a few mistakes too. Unlike almost everyone else in the world, one thing that Blake understandingly hones in on is my obsession w/ context. The article begins: “There is no context for the man whose name is tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE.” [..] “One of the many publications by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE was titled DDC#040.0 – dewey decimal classification number 0 (generalities) 4 (not used) 0 (no subject) 0 (miscellany)… just as a book with this dewey decimal classification number would stand apart from all other books, so does tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE stand entirely apart from all other people.” Thank you, Trevor – & when I was younger that might’ve been more accurate than it is now as I hurriedly type this before I have to rush off to work.
Trevor writes: “Re/Search magazine requested a photograph of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s tattoos for their ‘Modern Primitive’ issue, but the photographs were not used. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE does not fit the profile for a modern primitive. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has not modified tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s body to attach it more firmly to a tribal past – tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has propelled it forward to a sixth-finger future.” Thank you for writing that Trevor! It’s particularly perspicacious in a way that few, or no, other writers about myself & my projects have ever succeeded w/! For those for whom the sixth-finger reference makes no sense: I was once interviewed for a BalTimOre newspaper & I sd: “Normality is what cuts off your sixth finger & your tail” by wch I meant that normality suppresses extraordinary characteristics that might be useful but that are ‘abnormal’. 6 fingers, eg, wd be great for finger-picking for guitarists. The newspaper changed the quote to: “Normality is what cuts off your sixth finger & you fail”. Re/Search quoted me correctly in the back of their “Modern Primitives” issue. Thank you, V. Vale.
I don’t know why my foto was excluded from the Re/Search “Modern Primitives” issue. I sent a foto of my head getting its 3D brain tattoo. A drawing of a brain was inked on there 1st & the tattooist was following that. It may’ve looked like it was faked. It wasn’t. In my experience, I’m usually just a little bit off from what people are looking for when they’re looking for trend-setters. I try to sabotage trends in advance, I like to do things that I know are too complex & ‘uncool’ for conformists to want to have anything to do w/ them. “Modern Primitives”, despite how great so much of the body modification in it is, spawned a slew of cheap imitations. Piercings & tattoos suddenly became ever-so-much ‘hipper’. What a shame. I’ve still never met anyone else w/ a 3D tattoo like mine, tho.
So much of what Trevor Blake writes about here is stuff that I have long stories about. There’s certainly much more to the 6 fingers biz. Trevor notes that I’ve “appeared in public wearing a shirt that reveals [my] chest. It is not a normal chest, but one with six small sow-like teats.” The story behind that is that my fashion model friend (who I haven’t seen in decades – are you out there somewhere?), Eugenie Vincent, did an ad for jeans where she had a 6 titted chest modeled after her own breasts made, maybe by the same person who made the original Planet of the Apes masks or some such, & then she wore it over her own bare chest while in a doggie position overlooking a set of Rome. This was supposed to be a reference to the legend of the she-wolf who suckled Romulus & Remus – the mythical founders of Rome. As it turned out, the 6 tits & her position on all fours proved controversial & the ad either wasn’t used at all or it was only used in limited environments. Then Eugenie was kind enuf to give the faux teats to me & I sewed them onto a similarly colored short-sleeve sweat shirt that I used in performances in 1986.
Trevor explains that I “fashioned a suit of clothes made from zippers, which can be unzipped into a single. long strip.” Not quite, but close. I made pants in 1984 & a jacket in 1988 & the jacket’s arms can be unzipped as a long zipper. In 1989, on my 36th birthday, I washed these clothes & dried them & recorded the process so that I cd make an audio piece called “Drying Clothes Made Entirely of Zippers” wch was then used as part of “The Cassette Mythos Audio Alchemy CD/K7″. For decades I’ve heard “Man, you could make alotof money selling those!” to wch I usually explain that I prefer to be the only one wearing them. 20 yrs or so later I’ve heard of artists making dresses using only zippers but I’ve still never seen a jacket or pants. They’re much harder to sew & I did it by hand.
Trevor also writes that I “made a frightening suit of long-hair wigs of many colors and fashions, and shoulder bags of giant globes”. Regarding the former: the wigs are all pretty similar, I call it my “Hir Sute” or “Hair Suit”. Regarding the latter, it was actually my friend John Sheehan, under the name of Monty Cantsin, who took a moon globe & turned it into “NEOIST T.OREISTER Luggage” for me. It delights me that Trevor references things such as my 12 moustaches haircut or my use of false eyelashes as displaced facial ornamentation.
But, I have to disagree w/ his “Forbidden only by economic circumstance from actual genetic engineering” insofar as I’m quite happy w/ the genetic cards I’ve been dealt.
Trevor mentions that “One film shows tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE in a dog mask, walking on the hands and knees through the streets of London serving as a guide dog for his blind companion.” That film can now be witnessed on YouTube ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM92UGWzMPM ).
Over the decades I’ve sent thousands of things to over 1,400 people thru the mail & I don’t know of anyone other than Trevor Blake to ever so thoroughly compile the info in these into an article. THANK YOU. Despite the various mistakes, this is still truer to the spirit of my activities than most other articles. Importantly, Trevor writes:
“The most common mistake made by those attempting to classify tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is that he is an ‘artist,’ tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE understands art and has created art , but he is not an artist. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has used paint, film, video, sound and words in his research, but the process of the research and the results are science. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s attention to detail, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s willingness to carry out the research far beyond any hope of personal gain or safety, and the quality of his documentation, give credence to the title tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE gives tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE: mad scientist.”
Furthermore, he writes: “No fringe group will accept tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE – neither will any reputable institution. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has petitioned the international museum of the extreme, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, to exhibit tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. So far, they have refused.” Well.. considering that I’m a Saint in the Church of the SubGenius, I think it’s more a matter of as long as I’m a member of a group they stay lunatic fringe. As for Ripley’s? I approached them in the late 1970s & we actually had some dialog. They were friendly & open. Why my being put on display never happened I don’t remember anymore. It’s possible I just didn’t pursue it enuf. I remember some Ripley’s representative being open enuf to ask me about logistical requirements.
“for the most part tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has invented (that is, created from discarded or stolen items) the majority of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s life support systems.” Actually, I’ve worked – banal tho that is. What hasn’t been banal is convincing people to employ me, eg, in 1987 when I had my head shaved & w/ a 3D brain tattoo on it. Things have changed alot since then & it’s been people like me who’ve changed it. As for “tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE seems exceptionally unable to assimilate into normal society”? Well, for better or worse, I’ve spent my whole life being what a friend of mine calls a “Daffy Diplomat”. In other words, while “normal society” & I aren’t likely to ever mate, I have to interface w/ it all the time. I get pd to do things for other people, I pay the bills, that sort of thing. Other than that, I certainly don’t want to “assimilate”! “Normal society” is a tomb for the imagination.
As for my ‘bad reputation’ as a person prone to “violent tantrums and theft” & “indifference to others and cruelty”? Nah, I’m one of the most honest people I’ve ever known & I’m hardly indifferent or cruel. In fact, if I were ever even remotely as cruel as most people have been to me the world wd have to look out. Finally, Blake writes: “after an unsuccessful experiment in creating a book and record store (called NORMALS), tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has left Baltimore”. Normal’s is actually quite successful as a store & has existed now for 22 yrs. Here’s a link to their website: http://www.normals.com/
All in all, typos or no, this is an excellent bk. Blake’s strong point is his personality as a seeker & oVo is his Lost & Found.
This is a best-of collection of articles and artwork from OVO, a zine founded and edited by friend of the blog Trevor Blake, “a public record of [his] interests and inquiries.” It’s interesting, it’s weird, and I don’t entirely know what to make of it. I guess it’s because I’m too young to appreciate it – I was barely out of diapers when Trevor was printing up the early editions of OVO on his pal’s company’s copiers in the eighties. To someone of the Internet Era, where narcissistic self-expression is just a couple of mouse clicks away, the effort and dedication involved in compiling an entire magazine, from writing and gathering the material to binding the physical copies and mailing them out, is difficult to relate to.
Still, this is a great little collection of oddities, ranging from poetry to short stories to investigative journalism on offbeat subjects. They include “Holding Games for Ransom,” about how one tabletop game creator found a way to keep online piracy from cutting into his profits; “A Pit Stop Along the Inward Journey,” a stream-of-consciousness tale beginning with white guilt and ending with madness; and “23 Sperm Stories 23,” the longest article in the book, on just about every aspect of sperm, from its discovery, its function, and its future. Of particular interest to us in the manosphere are “Warbucks Intra-Family Communique” and “Becoming More Free” by Ernest Mann. The former is a satirical article on the emptiness and mindlessness of American consumerism; the latter is on how Mann unplugged himself from the Matrix of American culture:
I am wasting less of my time (LIFE) watching, listening to and reading THOUGHT LEADERS, ie, TV, movies, radio, music, newspapers, magazines and novels. These are like spectator sports. They cause me to live life vicariously, ie, second-hand, not real, only in fantasy. These mind conditioners are subtly designed to create not only fear and anger emotions but also create feelings of guilt and inadequacy. These feeling stifle growth and keep one securely in one’s rut. And of course the more visible purpose of the media is to create the desire to acquire (BUY! BUY! BUY!) and keep up with the Joneses. ‘Buying’ uses up my savings. I spent 22 years of my TIME (life) working as a Wage Slave. I helped perpetuate the status quo, ie a world of 98.6% Slaves and less than 1% Elite (Billionaires). I don’t wish to do that any more.
1996: Feeling free of anarchism and a little burned by what I now see was my own hooded thinking, I call up the imp of the perverse to see what other forbidden ideas might be out there. Ayn Rand is suggested, and I read her works. Having already shed one hood I’m less inclined to put another one on, and I do not become an Objectivist. But moving through Objectivism brings libertarian thinking to my attention. It’s something about the sovereignty of the individual… but I’ve walked down that path already and don’t sign on as a libertarian either.
Like The eXile, OVO 20 comes in a 8 1/2 by 11 inch size, to fit artwork and cartoons on the pages – I was particularly amused by “Attack of the Giant Killer Sperm.” One minor issue I have with the design is that all paragraphs in OVO 20 are punctuated with bullet points. I suppose they’re there to make the book look distinctive, but I found them mildly distracting, fooling my eyes into thinking I was reading a series of lists instead of articles.
Still, if you want to take an excursion into the bizarre and come back a little more enlightened, OV0 20 is a fun and informative read. If you’re still not convinced, Trevor maintains a free online archive of all OVO articles here. He also has some words of wisdom for aspiring writers and publishers:
…First and most important, get busy. Your time is already diminished by work and mortality, and neither of those situations is going to improve. Keep a printed copy of what you make and write down the date of when you made it. Large bodies of work and the pleasure they bring are made a few small pieces at a time. Learn about the history of what interests you. Novelty is rare and not always of value for being novel. Your friends are not being documented right now and you are the one who can do a good job with that. Read with regularity outside your area of interests. Nothing will point out your own ignorance and error better than attentiveness to those who disagree with you, nothing makes what you know make sense like learning something unrelated to what you know. Take as many chances as you are willing to take the lumps for.
Those who long to live in 1911 choose that year – really any year from 1890 to 1914 would be equally ok – just because it’s safely in the middle of that long lingering last “decade” of the long 19th Century – which was also the first heroic decade of true modern radicalism – e.g. – the Wandervogel, Stirnerite anarchism, the IWW and Jim Larkin, Ascona, Sex Radicals & Nudists – etc. And still far removed from the future of total war & totalitarianism to come – a time of utopian revolutionary hope.
Also of course it’s the Age of Decadence – final year of the Manchu Dynasty – opium ten cents a bottle at any country store – the Paris of J. K. Huysmans. Gaslight. Also: the last gasp of true agrarianism in the USA – age of Populism, the Grange, Farmers Alliance – the last rural decade.
But there’s another reason we choose 1911 (or thereabouts) for our little Golden Age. It has to do with technology. In 1911 almost all the actual conveniences of modern tech already existed: the car, the telephone, the electric bulb, the phonograph… Now we Luddites do not approve of cars or any of these inventions, which all subtract from the quanta of Imagination available to individuals & to the Social. But we have to admit – they’re convenient. In their primitive forms they’re almost likable. The only real convenience invented since then – the electric refrigerator – can be replaced by an Amish-built propane refrigerator – OR – we could re-invent the ice-box. We hope someday to learn to sing again, but till then we can accept a few hand-cranked shellac records (but no radio or TV). Computers are NOT in any way part of a revived 1911 however. It’s time to wake up & smell the rot of technopathology.
The telephone easily corrodes social presence & reduces selves to disembodies “voices of the Unseen,” as the Arabs called the invention. But again the primitive version, with its “party lines” & snoopy local Operators, had a social aspect now completely leached out of the medium. If we must be thus haunted let it be via one of these elegant sinister objects – a real murder weapon.
Full play of Imagination becomes possible only without modern technology, because tech has become the heartless operation of Capital, which hates all forms of sharing. Let’s work for a secular Anabaptism, bold enough finally to refuse everything back to the steam engine – at least. Whereupon we may resume human life.
The years between the death of Nietzche (& Queen Victoria) & 1914 constitute a dawn of Modernism that never happened into day. Instead it was smashed to nihil by the one long war (1914 – 1989) of the ghastly XXth Century. The liberté libre of trends like Symbolism, Expressionism, anarchism / socialism, lebensreform, Cosmicism etc. turned into the cynicism of dada, the fascism of Futurism & so on. Hope seemed dead.
L. Broadmoor III (who circa 1975 first turned me on to the idea of “living in 1911″) wanted to be an ordinary person in rural America (but with decayed millionaires as neighbors, hence his choice of Dutchess Co.) – he read only books published in or before 1911 that were truly popular at the time, such as novels with happy endings by long-forgotten lady novelists. In the 1970s you could buy old books like that for 25¢ a pound, yellowing & crumbling. Many by now must’ve disappeared completely.
I understand this “taste” or rather discipline as that of the spiritual dandy: an impenetrable cool of exotic ordinariness & secret impeccability. In effect one’s life becomes one’s art – completely. I could never aspire to such bodhisattvahood: fundamentally I’m simply not that serious. In fact neither was Broadmoor: he gave up 1911 & went into Reichean therapy. But still I take 1911 as a kind of metaphor or ideal double for my art, & to a certain extent my life as well. I’ve lived for 20 years now with no TV or other people’s cars – I pay people to use the internet for me (to buy books!) – & so on. I just don’t want to own the fucking things. I admire the Anabaptists for refusing electricity & infernal combustion in their homes. But you need communitas to live in that manner. You need place.
Even reading & writing is contaminated with Civilization’s technopathologies. Oral / aural culture would constitute the Luddite ideal. But as an isolated individual & lifelong print addict I can’t give up books – that necessary poison – like certain drugs… “Life in 1911″ requires books just as it might ideally include cheap & legal laudanum or tincture of Indian hemp.
Charles Fourier praised the Pigeon Post. It seemed quite modern in 1830, “utterly modern” as Rimbaud would say. In 1911 we’re allowed telegraph & even telephone, but our hearts still go into writing & receiving letters – handwritten, private, mysteriously brought to yr very door by unseen hand for only pennies per message, the money having been transformed into beautiful stamps. None of these pleasures are afforded by electromagnetic CommTech, which eliminates everything (including privacy) except text & image.
Imagine perfumed letters sealed with red wax & heraldic imagery, letters like Prince Genji used to write, or Proust, who could send little blue notes by pneumatic post anywhere in Paris. Think of mail-order degrees in Rosicrucianism. Yes, the POST – under the sign of Hermes – is sheer magic.
If only I could find a working mimeograph machine (or even better a roneograph, the kind that printed only in purple) (they had one in my high school in the 1950s) I’d certainly publish these manifestos on it. At least I can still use a manual typewriter, another surrealist-looking machine we enjoy here in “1911.”
American Renaissance is a monthly magazine that has been published since 1991. It has been called “a literate, undeceived journal of race, immigration and the decline of civility.” We consider it America’s premiere publication of racial-realist thought [...] Race is an important aspect of individual and group identity. Of all the fault lines that divide society – language, religion, class, ideology – it is the most prominent and divisive. Race and racial conflict are at the heart of the most serious challenges the Western World faces in the 21st century. The problems of race cannot be solved without adequate understanding. Attempts to gloss over the significance of race or even to deny its reality only make problems worse. Progress requires the study of all aspects of race, whether historical, cultural, or biological. This approach is known as race realism.
American Renaissance, based in [editor Jared] Taylor’s home in Oakton, Va., also publishes frequent articles on the discredited field of eugenics – selective breeding to improve human genetic stock. The foundation has hosted biannual conferences since 1994, and its website, featuring stories on black crime and the like, recently rose to one of the top 20,000 in the world after a makeover. In recent years, Taylor has added several budding racist intellectuals to his staff, including Ian Jobling, the website editor and E-list moderator, and Stephen Webster, assistant editor of American Renaissance. Even before he started the New Century Foundation, Taylor wrote on race, penning a 1992 book, Paved With Good Intentions, that argued because sterilizing welfare mothers would not be publicly accepted, authorities should instead provide such women with “five-year implantable contraceptives.”
American Renaissance is a monthly racialist magazine published by the New Century Foundation. The magazine and foundation were founded by Jared Taylor, and the first issue was published in November 1990. A main theme of the magazine is a claim that non-white minorities pose a demographic threat to the United States and other Western nations. The magazine argues that the United States’ major social problems are due to racial diversity and a weakening of the country’s white racial heritage by increased non-white immigration.
When a white nationalist magazine announced a conference in Charlotte, anarchists and other groups vowed to protest or disrupt the gathering. But behind the scenes the conference apparently met an unexpected obstacle: Charlotte City Council member Patrick Cannon. On Wednesday, American Renaissance magazine said plans for its annual conference are now in limbo because the hotel where it was scheduled to take place canceled the reservation. An e-mail Cannon sent to a constituent early this week suggested he was lobbying local hotels to refuse to book American Renaissance. Cannon wrote that he had contacted hotels and that “they seem to be cooperating. An attempt was made for accommodations at another hotel but based on what I ask to take place they were denied again,” the e-mail said.
Charlotte City Councilman Warren Turner, Charlotte City Councilman Patrick Cannon and the NAACP plus other anti-racist groups have had the meeting of the American Renaissance Party cancelled. Councilman Turner sent out an email to all of the hotels in Charlotte informing them to alert the police if AmRen booked space with them. Councilman Cannon also advised these hotels to be in compliance with the law. When the Airport Sheraton Hotel checked its convention bookings it found that AmRen had booked under a different name for the dates in question. The Sheraton returned the deposit that the Shockleyite scum had put down to reserve the meeting room where the Nazi meeting was to be held. JDO is warning other hotels in the area to be on the lookout for anyone who tries to book for the same dates. JDO believes preaching racial inferiority can lead to lynchings, cross burnings and murder and mayhem.
Rev. William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP, said of the planned visit to Charlotte by American Renaissance, “Racial hatred, and those who promote racial animosity, has no place in our American society. Certainly people have a First Amendment right to have their views, but we think people should stand up. We stand opposed to any groups that promote white supremacy.”
This time, it wasn’t us who mounted the campaign against AmRen. Sure, we were the ones who alerted the Southern Anti-Racism Network, who took the lead in opposing the 2011 American Renaissance Conference, which was slated to take place Feb. 4-6 in Charlotte, NC. And yes, we have been meeting and planning for our opposition since November (we were actually in one of those meetings when news of the Tuscon shooting broke – which Fox News tried to connect to AmRen). And yes, our plans are still going forward at this time, even though AmRen’s plans seem to be meeting the same fate as in DC last year – squashed. Nothing is etched in stone, however. Jared Taylor & Co. have not officially announced a cancellation (probably trying to see if a TGI Fridays would hook them up with a back room or something), so we are still waiting to see what comes of this. But while we sounded the initial alarm, this was all due to the efforts of the community saying no to Taylor and his New Century Foundation. It is now being reported by local press that the hotel that Taylor tried to keep under wraps had been discovered, the hotel bounced them out, and other hotels won’t accomidate [sic] him! And before you say it, everyone who opposes AmRen has freedom of speech and association too. People had a right to alert area hotels that this was going to take place and they might not want to have this going on. Hotels have the right to close their doors to unwelcome elements. And we have the right to say that it doesn’t matter where AmRen goes. We will always be there to sound the alarm.
On July 29, 2010, New Century Foundation signed a contract with the Sheraton Charlotte Airport Hotel to host the biennial American Renaissance (AR) conference. (New Century Foundation is the non-profit organization that publishes the monthly magazine, American Renaissance.) We explained to the Sheraton that many people think the ideas discussed in AR are controversial. We explained that in 2010 a hotel that had agreed to host our conference came under pressure and broke its contract with us. The Sheraton agreed that it was therefore important to keep the location of the conference confidential. Our contacts said they understood what was at stake and that they believed in free speech. On January 25, the Sheraton sent us a one-line e-mail message saying that because of “recent disclosures as to the nature of your event” they were breaking their contract. Since then, they refuse to speak to us. The pretence that it did not know what might be discussed at an AR conference is a pathetic, embarrassing lie. Perhaps what the Sheraton actually found out was that Patrick Cannon, Mayor Pro-tem of the city of Charlotte, does not want AR to come to Charlotte. In an e-mail message to a constituent he wrote: “I have all hotels, motels, and gotels [sic] on notice and they seem to be cooperating well still.” The date of this e-mail was January 25, the very day the Sheraton canceled its contract. We can only imagine that the Sheraton must have come under very heavy pressure to walk away from tens of thousands of dollars in revenues – 100 hotel rooms for two nights, a formal banquet, bar and meal tabs – and to subject itself to a five-figure cancellation fee. [...] At an AR conference, middle-aged men in suits give speeches to other middle-aged men in suits. We have nothing to hide. Our speeches are videotaped and made available on our website, amren.com. If our ideas are hopelessly wrong, they should be easy to refute. They should be a threat to no one. Why is Charlotte in a panic about this conference? It is because we disagree with certain prevailing views and we have the courage of our convictions. Your city is not even attempting to understand our views, much less debate them. You are trying to silence us and drive us away. Are your citizens proud of what you are doing? In an era that claims to value “tolerance and diversity,” why do you have no tolerance for the most precious kind of diversity of all: the diversity of ideas? [...] We think better of Charlotte than this. We call on Patrick Cannon and Warren Turner to consider how their actions soil the reputation of their city. We believe they should support free speech. We believe they should take a stand for genuine tolerance of a genuine diversity of ideas. We call on them to issue an apology to American Renaissance and to make a city-owned property available to us to rent for our conference. It is still not too late to encourage the qualities that made America great, not the totalitarian impulses that Americans – at least traditionally – have always despised.
Articles continue at links. You know, it was only a few decades ago when I was the anarchist tearing down posters of groups I didn’t like from telephone poles. I made collage art (that’ll learn ‘em!) from the posters I tore down. And I was the anarchist preventing groups I didn’t like from marching in the streets. I thought of myself as a champion of freedom and as a protector of the people. But I wasn’t. I was (very, very slightly) lessening the amount of freedom in the world. If such a thing as “the people” exist, I did nothing to protect them. Protecting people from ideas is not something I advocate today, although I confess I did decades ago. I was (albeit with nearly no effect) close to the opposite of the person I thought I was. And so today I take some pains to do penance. I advocate freedom of thought and speech and assembly and association. And I try to advocate these freedoms for those I disagree with with as much rigor as I advocate these freedoms for those who think like me. Not as a natural right or as an American or as a Western man, but out of basic civility. Don’t want to go? Keep away. Want to air your differences? I’m guessing Mr. Taylor would be happy to debate you. Vigorous protest are entirely appropriate, for or against the Sheraton Charlotte Airport Hotel and for or against American Renaissance, if you have some vigor in you. Boycott or bankroll any group you see fit. But don’t do like I did decades ago and be the bully you think you’re beating.
It is annoying to attend religious services and annoying not to. One who has had deep feelings for some organized religion finally gives up on its extant and visible self, usually after bouts of non-involvement, aggrieved attendance, and conquering indifference.
“It is the evil of the age,” explains the voice of tradition. “It is the self-judgment of an illusion,” comes the modern explanation. Have we really no slicker attitudes to cop than these: a sour sense of personal purity or an embittered belief in our rational integrity?
The real culprit is the whole idea of organized religion, which ought to be stacked next to military intelligence, public education & jumbo shrimp in a museum of dizziness.
How could we have believed that we could walk into any mosque / church / temple – the spiritual equivalent of a waiting room – and find our undiscovered and secret desires? Shame shame shame on us for having tried to share our spirit with less care and precaution than we would ordinarily exercise in sharing our sperm.
The people with whom one can do religion are as rare as those with whom one can make love – and not always the same persons!
Better to make religion a beautiful personal solace, like masturbation, than to rely on paid priests / rabbis / imams, licensed by the state to practice unsafe spirituality and spread mental diseases, especially those which undermine the mind’s natural defenses and immunities against silliness.
Anyone will tell you that religion is a private thing – but I teach you that religion must be a secret thing! Fools, guard your dreams! The wise have none so beautiful as yours!
Therefore, Moorish Orthodoxy. Because the title is less cumbersome than Anarchopaganzen – Hebreaochrislam.
Moorish Science Monitor. Volume 2 Number 6. Winter 1987.
Multiple name identities are co-incarnations, individuals who exist in more than one body at the same time.
A few multiple name identities can be found in academia. Nicholas Bourbaki has written several influential papers on mathematics since 1935. A number of men were Nicholas Bourbaki. The theologian Franz Bibfeldt was also a number of men.
Most multiple name identities are found in the arts. No one knows who is the author of the 1930 book The Little Engine That Could. The story is attributed to Watty Piper, which was the house name of publisher Platt & Munk. Many men and women wrote under the name Watty Piper.
Kenneth Robeson was the creator and author of the Doc Savage character, who first appeared in 1933. Lester Dent and a number of men wrote the stories, all of which were published under the Street & Smith house name Kenneth Robeson.
Three German men were Stefan Brockhoff, author of mystery novels from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Kilgore Trout is a science fiction author who first appears in the 1965 book God Bless You Mr. Rosewater by science fiction author Kurt Vonnegut. Trout is modeled after the science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who in turn was born with the name Edward Hamilton Waldo. Philip J. Farmer wrote the 1974 science fiction novel Venus on the Half-Shell and attributed it to Trout.
Since 1968, films which the director wishes to distance themselves from are attributed to Alan Smithee. The Internet Movie Database lists more than seventy titles attributed to Alan Smithee.
David Agnew is a name used by the BBC as a shared scriptwriting credit since the 1970s.
Bruce Lee died during the production of the 1978 film Game of Death. Two other actors took on the role of playing Bruce Lee playing the character Billy Lo and the film was released.
V. C. Andrews’ 1979 book Flowers in the Attic was so successful that authors have published dozens of books under her name since her death in 1986.
Between 1988 and 1994, the Dutch composer Van den Budenmayer wrote the score for Zbigniew Prisner’s films. den Budenmayer was several men working under one name.
Nicholas Palmer wrote the 1990 book Fuck Yes! under the pseudonym Rev. Wing Fu Fing. On a lark, author Tom Robbins signed a copy of Fuck Yes! when a Robbins fan handed it to him. This started the rumor that Robbins was the secret author of Fuck Yes!, a rumor which helped Palmer sell 50,000 copies of the self-published book over the next four years. Fuck Yes! tells the story of a man who says ‘yes’ to every circumstance that life presents him. In 1996 Palmer sued Robbins, who agreed to never sign another copy of the book again. Palmer said: “It’s not just Robbins, the book is good. It has allowed him to take advantage of my anonymity.” In 2008 Jim Carry starred in the film Yes Man, which tells the story of a man who says ‘yes’ to every circumstance that life presents him. Yes Man is based on the 2005 book of the same title by Danny Wallace.
Actor Heath Ledger died during the production of the 2009 film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Three other actors took on the role of playing Heath Ledger playing the character Tony Shepard and the film was released.
The author Wu Ming is several Italian men who have published books since 2000.
There is a species of human behavior that is not quite art, not quite politics, and not quite as presumptuous as all that sounds. I prefer the term pranks. I first learned of multiple name identities from pranksters. Rrose Sélavy was an an artist and model in the 1920s, associated with a number of dadaists.
In 1960 the young Kerry Wendell Thornley worked as a desk clerk for the United States Marines. As a prank, he entered a false name in the training lecture roster: Omar Kayyam Ravenhurst. Over time Thornley and other Marines completed more paperwork for the non-existent Marine, giving him an IQ of 157 and fluency in 17 languages. Ravenhurst then got the blame when Thornley or one of his friends made a mistake on base, making Private Ravenhurst a multiple name identity.
A free music festival was held near Stonehenge in 1974. The audience decided to squat the location at the site after the performance. Eviction laws required naming each of the squatters, and so the squatters all adopted the same name to make the job of the police more difficult. Thus several dozen people became Wally. One of the Wallies, Wally Hope, was sent to a psychiatric institution for possession of LSD in May 1975. He was unable to detox from the forced drugging of the institution and died in September 1975. His free-spirited life and oppressive death was a central inspiration for Penny Rimbaud to form CRASS. Unrelated is the Stonehenge built by Wally Wallington.
David Zack has written about Monte Cantsin, who appeared in 1975:
Maris [Kundzins] and I were in Portland [Oregon]. We’d been working with a Xerox 3107 that makes big copies and reductions. We were making giant folios; monster folios and dinosaur folios we called them. And one night Maris started fooling around with the tape recorder, singing songs in Latuvian about toilets and traffic. Well, we decided to make a pop star out of Maris. But it had to be an open pop star, that is, anyone who wanted could assume the personality of the pop star. This open pop star would be the most talented in history, better than Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Sal Mineo and even Ry Cooder all rolled together in one. Pop stars have always been special to me, growing up the son of a symphony conductor the way I did. To me they stand for rebellion and acceptance, revolution and success and a whole lot of other things at the same time. We were mouthing Maris Kundzins’ name, and it came out Monty Cantsins. Then we got to saying can’t sin and can’t sing and quite a few other things to give the impression that this pop star could be a thief as well as a saint.
One thing I definitely did invent is “Monty Cantsin,” the open pop star. I did not do this alone, I did it in Portland, Oregon with the very first Monty Cantsin, an artist named Maris Kundzins. Maris and I sent a card to Kantor in Montreal, you are Monty Cantsin, the open pop star. Well Graf I have to assert what Kantor did with this simple postcard belongs in any history of art and also any history of the world. The idea that people can share their art power is a very good one I think. My own understanding of Neoism is that it is about sharing, about bash: cooperation between people, putting egos and tempers aside. Though not always seeming to. [1][2]
Stewart Home has written about Karen Elliot, who appeared in 1985:
Karen Eliot is a name that refers to an individual human being who can be anyone. The name is fixed, the people using it aren’t. Smile is a name that refers to an international magazine with multiple origins. The name is fixed, the types of magazines using it aren’t. The purpose of many different magazines and people using the same name is to create a situation for which no one in particular is responsible and to practically examine western philosophical notions of identity, individuality, originality, value and truth.
Anyone can become Karen Eliot simply by adopting the name, but they are only Karen Eliot for the period in which the name is used. Karen Eliot was materialised, rather than born, as an open context in the summer of ’85. When one becomes Karen Eliot one’s previous existence consists of the acts other people have undertaken using the name. When one becomes Karen Eliot one has no family, no parents, no birth. Karen Eliot was not born, s/he was materialised from social forces, constructed as a means of entering the shifting terrain that circumscribes the ‘individual’ and society.
The name Karen Eliot can be strategically adopted for a series of actions, interventions, exhibitions, texts, etc. When replying to letters generated by an action / text in which the context has been used then it makes sense to continue using the context, ie by replying as Karen Eliot. However in personal relationships, where one has a personal history other than the acts undertaken by a series of people using the name Karen Eliot, it does not make sense to use the context. If one uses the context in personal life there is a danger that the name Karen Eliot will become over-identified with individual beings. [3]
Stewart Home, in turn, has seen publications under his own name that he did not write. These include the books Stone Circle, Harry Potter and the Quantum Time Bomb, and essays including “Anarchism is Stupid: How Luther Blissett Hoaxed Bakunin’s Idiot Children,” “Communism or Masochism? An Appeal to All Revolutionaries Concerning the Rubber Slave Larry O’Hara,” and “An Open Letter to My Avant-Garde Chums by Stewart Home.” Someone anonymously suggested the (then) anonymous blogger Belle de Jour was Stewart Home. Not necessarily with his cooperation or consent, Stewart Home has become several people.
Luther Blissett (born 1958) is a professional footballer, manager and coach. His name was adopted by the Luther Blissett Project as an open reputation in the 1990s. Blissett the footballer is aware of the other Blissetts and has taken his open reputation in stride.
I enjoyed several people being me in the early 2000s. A number of my friends in Portland were on a site called irreality. They encouraged me to join, but I had enough internet time in my day and didn’t want to. Some time back I’d heard that David Bowie had hired actors to play his press agents, and Bowie confirmed whatever exaggerated claim they made about him. Inspired by this story I encouraged 2-3 of my friends to set up an irreality account for me and post to it as if they were me, promising I’d confirm anything they posted as my own. For a year or two these friends would mix some of my own writing (from ovo127.com) with original writing of their own and post it at irreality. When I’d meet up with those who thought I’d posted what they read at irreality attributed to me I’d confirm it. Some of the friends I made on irreality are friends to this day, perhaps only now learning I wasn’t necessarily who they thought I was at the time. Irreality closed shop in 2008.
The second-most influential multiple name identity is Anonymous. Although Anonymous began as an internet meme around 2006, Anonymous is also the name of many individuals who have appeared in public. Inspired by a scene in Allan Moore’sV for Vendetta, Anonymous appears in numbers wearing the mask of Guy Fawkes. As of December 2010, Anonymous is conducting successful attacks on major credit card and communication companies around the world in retaliation for slights against wikileaks.
The most influential multiple name identity is St. Nicholas / Father Christmas / Kris Kringle / Santa Claus. Every December for over a century, Santa has appeared around the world, wearing the same clothes, carrying out the same actions, exhibiting the same demeanor, claiming the same home-base and promising to return at the same time next year. A significant part of the world economy is shifted when Santa Claus comes to town. In the late 1980s the Orange Alternative of Poland held a parade of seventy-seven Santas as part of their absurdist protests against Communism. The SantaCon / Santarchy tactic appeared again in 1994, carried out by Suicide Club of San Francisco.
“You should never run out of people to be.” – Genesis P-Orridge.
The Anarchist’s Guide to the BBS
Keith Wade
Port Townsend: Loompanics 1990
8vo paperback 90p
There were two main reference points I used to evaluate this book. First, as an anarchist [1982-1994], did this teach me anything about BBS? And second, as someone with a little knowledge of computers, did this teach me about anarchy? The results were mixed but worth the read to find out.
The Anarchist’s Guide to the BBS is written for the novice to computers, containing several chapters of introduction to terms and procedures that are well written and build on each other nicely. The book centers on computers as telecommunication devices but I learned more about computers in general than I’d known before. In this respect the book is exactly what it claims to be, a guide to the BBS, and does its job well.
But as an anarchist’s guide to the BBS I found it lacking. Like The Anarchist’s Cookbook (which Loompanics dropped from its catalog many years ago as dangerous and misleading), The Anarchist’s Guide to the BBS confuses anarchism with criminality. The reasoning something like this: anarchists oppose government, governments write laws, therefore to break a law is an anarchist act. This reduces anarchism to the loyal opposition of the state, dependent on authority to tell it what not to do rather than a movement that could create an alternative to the state. There is little or nothing in the Guide about breaking into government or corporate computer networks for fact-finding or sabotage purposes, the decentralized nature of BBS communication and its relevance to anarchist theory, or the debate on the role of technology in the anarchist struggle in the future. Not only are these ideas not explored in a book about anarchy and computers but there is no exploration or analysis of anarchism at all. There is plenty of information on use of credit card numbers that aren’t yours and running a prostitution service over your BBS but not even these ideas, which have been debate in the anarchist press for years, have any theory behind them. It is enough to scam the state; no need to use that power to achieve anything other than increased wealth and power for yourself. If I read this book as a computer user with no background in anarchism there would be nothing to contradict the state (amass wealth at the expense of others) nor the state perspective on anarchists (those who amass wealth at the expense of others without going through the proper channels). A change of title to “The Criminal’s Guide to the BBS” would bring the book more in line with its content and improve the ability of the book to be what it claims to be.
If you pick up some crap book about the history of punk rock, chances are there will be about 90 pages dedicated to Joe Strummer’s jackets but only two sentences about Crass. This is despite them selling millions of records, singlehandedly creating the DIY punk blueprint, and maintaining their hard-line libertarian and anarchy principles even as they reach their mid-60s today. A lot of you reading this will be aware of their logo and the fact that they were a punk band, but not a lot of people know their actual story. Because it’s so inspirational and so “anti-music” (in the sense that it was a total revolt against the established music industry of the time) we feel that everybody with even a passing interest in punk rock should hear it.
And so we interviewed founding members Penny Rimbaud and Steve Ignorant for a brief history of the group and to procure their ideas surrounding this issue’s theme. During the talks between myself and Penny that preceded this interview I discovered that the unthinkable has happened and that Crass, the most anti-authoritarian, anarchy-endorsing free spirits in the history of punk music, are on the verge of going to Crown Court to ask lawyers and judges to intervene in a huge row over some remastered CDs. Despite our efforts to include all sides of the story here, a couple of former members of Crass declined to participate. [...]
What was the reason the band folded?
We always all had the idea that ’84 was the mythical, Orwellian thing. And I think it largely folded because I was becoming interested in something broader than punk. Our interests were going out, and really it was after we’d done that last gig in Aberdare which was so disillusioning and so sad, which was the fucking result of Thatcher’s vicious Britain. And I think all of us felt that jumping up and down on a stage saying “No more war!” was a joke in light of the poverty and desperation we saw that night.
What happened?
It was a benefit gig for the sacked miners in Aberdare. We went down in the van as we usually did, loaded with bins of food because people were literally starving in those villages. It was inevitably raining, which it always does in those valleys, and it was just so sad, the sense of destruction and the sense of despair. There were lots of men who didn’t know what they were doing anymore. Lots of men who just didn’t know what had happened. It was horrible. And the gig was great and everyone enjoyed it, but it was still just so sad. It was the next morning that Andy came through and said, “I’m leaving the band, Pen,” and I didn’t react because I thought,“Fine, I completely understand.” So he sort of initiated what I think would’ve inevitably happened anyway. It was 1984 and we had said we were going to end then, which is what the countdown was all about in our catalog numbers. We’d said everything that was to be said in that context, fucking hell. The fact that it’s still just as pertinent today is indication that nothing’s changed. You can’t say more than what we’ve said, really, except possibly offering a few answers. But you know, I’m still looking for them. And they’re certainly not ones that will be found in the context of punk rock. I think within the context of punk rock we did everything we possibly could.
We’d been doing it since 1977. It had been all those years, nonstop. We lived at Dial House, the doors were always open, and who we were onstage wasn’t any different from who we were in life. It wasn’t like we could come off tour and have a week’s holiday. We were doing it all ourselves and running the other label, Corpus Christi. Pen was always in the studio; I was doing vocals with Conflict or something like that and writing songs for other people. And it wasn’t like a nine-to-five job. It went on and on forever. When Margaret Thatcher came in, it all went up a notch. It was endless. Looking at horrible images, living in a horrible time, dealing with things like the Falklands War, the miners’ strikes, unemployment. It was a horrible time. There was violence at gigs; I was wearing black clothes all the time. I got fed up. If I went out for a drink there was an unspoken responsibility I always felt that if I went and got drunk I couldn’t show it. If I fell over in the gutter it wasn’t just me falling over in the gutter, it was Crass. So there was this responsibility to not fuck it up.
A lot of “punk” was being proud of falling in the gutter. People would pretend to do it even if they weren’t drunk. What made Crass different?
Well, we thought that the message was important enough to make people come and listen and buy the records. We couldn’t shit all over that by being idiots in the pub afterward.
So it was anti everything that rock ’n’ roll stood for.
Yeah. I never got all that. I have been around people who should know better. I mean, throwing a TV out the window, nothing new. I have seen people throw food around, and that really annoys me. I mean, someone has taken the time to cook the stuff. I have seen people onstage giving it all large about “nonviolence,” and the next minute they are in the street fighting with someone who comes from Manchester because they are from down south. Complete and utter bullshit. I have never been into that rock ’n’ roll image. Yeah, you get a bit of adulation; fair enough, I can deal with that. But the limousines and paparazzi and all that? You can stick it! Stick it as far as it can go. Bullshit! I have seen musicians who have so many people around them telling them they are great that in the end the idiots actually think they are and that they can tell people what to do.
Did that ever happen to anyone in Crass?
No. But it happened to a couple of close friends of mine. So, in that sense, for us it was never about being a part of a rock ’n’ roll band, though sometimes I did want some of the things associated with it. I wanted the blonde girls and the free drinks, which I never got. The only people I spoke to at gigs were spotty blokes in anoraks asking me about anarchy.
Haha. But that’s what you signed up for. Do you regret that?
I suppose sometimes it’s a little thing, I don’t know. It would have been fun for it to happen now and again. Regret it? Not really, we did what we did. As you said, that’s what I signed up for. It was a commitment; and my own fault, really. [...]
And now you’ve remastered all the albums and Gee’s done new artwork and Southern is going to release it, but that’s all caused a bit of a hullabaloo, right?
Yes, well, in the remastering I’ve been doing of the Crass material, I’ve incorporated stuff which is otherwise only available as bootleg. And why is this stuff only available otherwise in bootleg? It’s because we never bothered to do it ourselves. We’re to blame, not the bootleggers. So what we’ve done now is to sort of reclaim that, give really good sound to it, as good as we can, and then put it out so that if people want our version of it they can buy it. The bootlegs will probably still be there.
I discussed the plan to remaster everything with John in the year that he was ill. I was visiting him once a week or so. We talked a lot, obviously, about the future and that. We fantasized about going in to remaster the entire catalog, remaster a lot of my own works like Acts of Love, do new material, but I have to say that most of the time I knew it was a fantasy because it was quite obvious he wasn’t going to survive. When he died, Southern had a lot of trouble coping with it all and during that time I spent a lot of time worrying about what the fuck was going to happen to our material because with John there’d never been any formalities, nothing had ever been signed, who owned what, what owned who. There was nothing to go by. What I was really worried about was the receivers being called in. I thought, “Well, if Southern goes down, they’re going to go in and all the fucking stuff’s going to get nicked. I want to know what’s ours so we can have it.” I sort of made halfhearted attempts, but really the place was such a fucking mess that I thought, “OK, I’ll back off and let them sort whatever they need to sort out, and then we’ll go from there.” That coincided with trying to stop the house being taken over by a lot of property investors, so I got very embroiled in a big legal battle.
Who has the house now?
We do.
You nearly didn’t?
Yeah, you know, several times over. During the era of the band, we could have sat down and said, “Look, we don’t own this house. Why don’t we buy it?” We could easily have done it, but it never even occurred to us. Every time we got any money we were like,“Oh, we’ve got a grand! Let’s go ask those people down the road if they want to put out a fanzine!”
It was the same when we did fucking gigs, actually, which I’m not so pleased about. Like we’d go and do a gig, pick out a place somewhere, hand all the money over to people in need or charities or whatever, and then realize we hadn’t left enough money to buy supper that evening. We were that stupid, seriously. We didn’t look after ourselves. If we had looked after ourselves, the house would’ve been ours and Gee and I wouldn’t be living in what’s close to poverty most of the time. We’d have looked after it, but we didn’t, and that’s because we weren’t interested and we’re still not interested, so I’m not complaining, it’s just that’s a fact. [...]
I was a 35-year-old man when a 17-year-old boy turned up and wanted to form a band, and the band that he and I formed together denied him everything he should’ve had. He should’ve been fucking the groupies, snorting coke, and having a laugh. He never had a laugh; he never had a fucking adolescence. It was denied him by our hard line. I realize that now, I didn’t realize it at the time. I thought we were having fun, but Jesus what fun it was. I mean, I suppose I could get more fun out of it because my fun has always been more cerebral and intellectual, so for me some of the conflict that we created with the state and that sort of stuff was fun. But Steve wanted to be having proper fun, and I can completely understand that now. And also I can’t actually believe that he is so underappreciated. I think the guy was brilliant, among the best of the punk voices.
Why do you think Pete is so opposed to the rereleases?
When the band broke up and we no longer had that common ground, it increasingly became obvious that there were distinct differences between the various members. That didn’t rest well, and so certain conflicts started developing in the house. Notably I would say between those who didn’t see the folding of the band as a collapse of security, the individuals who were secure in their own being and quite happily got on with whatever it was they might be doing or not doing, whereas another part of the band was worried, like: “Where’s the future now? Our security has suddenly been taken from beneath our feet.” I think that was the root of the conflict, but it became expressed in lifestyle arguments. I created this house as a center for anything anyone wanted to do with it, in a way. It wasn’t for me to define, it wasn’t for me to judge, it wasn’t… I’d found the house, I was quite happy to finance it, and everyone could do what they wanted within certain parameters. I’ve since been accused of standing back when I should’ve helped a situation. So the objection that Peter’s making, by his own admittance, is that I would not give support to his criticisms, some of which were probably just, but in large number were bloody infantile or impractical.
Such as?
Well, one infantile one was to not recognize a natural authority. A natural authority is one that produces 65 percent of the material that you’re making a living from. Not for their own ends, but for a genuine belief that there’s a shared purpose here, which is why I wrote all those Crass songs. I don’t take kindly to someone turning around and being critical of that authority when they’re not directly benefiting in the way they want to directly benefit, while at the same time benefiting in all sorts of ways in which they continue to benefit. I don’t think that’s graceful. I think it was infantile to feel that one could change a situation by stamping your foot and being rude. It’s not how to do it. I’m willing to sit and listen if someone is willing to sit and talk, but I’m not willing to be insulted by anyone. I don’t think it’s very graceful of people not to acknowledge that; to live somewhere for seven years, rent free, for fuck all, to use every little iota of space which could’ve been mine in a selfish way, and then to make a big cacophony about it all. [...]
There’s no question that during the period that we lived 15 people in the house with 25 cats there was unbelievable accord. Obviously there were occasional rows about something, but they were very, very rare and we managed somehow. We couldn’t have done what we’d done otherwise. However many albums, all of the stuff, it ran like a machine. We did it at the cost of our emotional lives, and we were very good at it. But when it all ended the emotional baggage wasn’t properly dug out from all the dark holes around the house and dealt with by us. We should have deprogrammed, but we didn’t. We deprogrammed in our own slow way and within that a lot of bitterness formed. [...]
No contracts were ever signed.
There’s no contract, there’s no written anything in the history of Crass and Southern, and there never was between any of the bands that Crass recorded. It was done on trust or it was not done at all. And in fairness to John, I think that was a principle he kept on Corpus Christi. If Pete wants to play the law, in the real sense of the word, it’s a very foolish line to take. If I were to play the law on a 65 percent ownership of the songs of Crass, I could be sitting with a swimming pool just close to us, rather than a cat bowl, and he would have to work a little bit harder at whatever part-time jobs he does now. That’s the truth of it. [...]
When was the last time you saw Pete?
I think it was the week John was dying. He knew he was going to die and I bumped into Pete at the studio, and I said, “Pete, we really need to talk,” so we went over to a café and sat down, and it was cordial enough. I said, “Look, John’s going to die, we need to sort out our material.” He said, “No we don’t, it’ll be all right.” He just wouldn’t even hear of it. [...]
To my mind, the dispute has its root in ideological differences that existed between the individual members of the band. In my understanding, Pete was fundamentally a socialist, and socialists like wagging their fingers at anyone except themselves. He claims to be an anarchist. Well, I claim to be an anarchist, but I’m fundamentally a libertarian and a fierce individualist. I think that does fit into an arena of anarchistic thought. I certainly draw a line at all this stupid anarchistic organization of industry and that sort of stuff, because I’m just not interested. If people want to do that, then I’m not going to criticize them. But frankly, it’s not my thing. My thing is rising with the angels and flying in the sky.
A. Getting More Free Time:
1. I am wasting less of my time (LIFE) watching, listening to and reading THOUGHT LEADERS, ie, TV, movies, radio, music, newspapers, magazines and novels. These are like spectator sports. They cause me to live life vicariously, ie, second-hand, not real, only in fantasy. These mind conditioners are subtly designed to create not only fear and anger emotions but also create feelings of guilt and inadequacy. These feeling stifle growth and keep one securely in one’s rut. And of course the more visible purpose of the media is to create the desire to acquire (BUY! BUY! BUY!) and keep up with the Joneses. ‘Buying’ uses up my savings. I spent 22 years of my TIME (life) working as a Wage Slave. I helped perpetuate the status quo, ie a world of 98.6% Slaves and less than 1% Elite (Billionaires). I don’t wish to do that any more.
2. l am talking less ‘trivia.’ I will try to take responsibility and lead conversations into areas that are meaningful and interesting to me (or l will find someone else to talk with). This will give me more meaningful input and more free time, to think about what l would really like to do with my life, to experiment with different ideas and to experience the ones l like best. I wish to discover what it would be like to be a “Natural” human being (instead of a “Normal” one, who conforms and obeys) to see it I would like that better. I plan to spend more of my time trying to discover what makes ME happy.
B. Got rid of all my debts and credit cards.
C. Getting rid of my surplus possessions.
D. Getting my rent down as low as I can.
E. Teaching myself how to choose my thoughts, so that I can choose not to linger on self-destructive thoughts, and I am learning to focus on thinking about creating more freedom and happiness for myself.
G. Learning ways to live happily on very little money, ie, becoming more independent. (People with lots of money don’t need to do this. In the present system – MONEY IS INDEPENDENCE).
H. Experimenting with food. I’m discovering which foods and how much my body prefers. It tells me when I pay attention.
I. Got rid of my vehicle as soon as it felt like a burden.
J. Won’t attempt to gain Power over anyone. A slave’s chain has two ends.
K. Striving to be free and happy. I share my methods of happiness with others if they are interested.
L. Overcoming the fear of being alone. I realize that loneliness is only a thought and I am gaining control of my thoughts.
M. Worrying less about what people (including mother) think about me.
N. Starting to try some new things, friends, places, skills, routes, foods, areas, etc.
O. Absorbing new and useful input into my biocomputer and avoiding much trivia helps me surpass my old programming of “garbage in – garbage out” ie my old way of life.
Each has the potential to become a genius in some area. But most are astray with trivial diversions.
“Plow your furrows deep while sluggards sleep, and you shall have corn to sell and keep.” – Benjamin Franklin
How much is too much?
What portion of my conversation is trivia?
How can I expect to accomplish anything but TRIVIA if I allow that to be my major focus?
(However, at this point in my evolution, I seem to need some trivia. My ability to focus on the important is still limited).
DEMOCRACY IS NOT FREEDOM (Except for the Elite)
I was programed to feel reverent whenever I heard, saw or thought the word democracy. Tears would almost form in my eyes. I assumed that Democracy was a wonderful thing to have. l never looked it up in the Dictionary. I never thought of it as ‘Government and Bureaucrats.’ I thought of it as an entity; being there to protect, care for me and give me FREEDOM! What an ignoramus I was. I had no notion that there was any “alternative” except some worse kind of government. I took it all for granted. I assumed I (we) controlled it because I (we) had voted. It was DEMOCRACY! How naive I was. Just another one of the “suckers” Barnum said are born every minute.
Websters New World Dictionary:
Democracy: Government by the people, directly or through representatives.
Government: The exercise of authority over a Slate (of people), organization, etc.: control; rule.
The “Rule of the Majority” is a farce! In practice it has always been “The Rule of the Minority” ie the manipulators ie the Elite. No thank you! You can have them both. I don’t have a need or desire to be ruled by either or anyone!
DEMOCRACIES and other governments have kept people in wage slavery for the past 5,000 years or more. ALL GOVERNMENTS are basically the same – they RULE! Rules create conformity. Rules create the status quo. Rules create slavery. Rules stifle creativity. Rules prevent INDIVIDUAL freedom! I do not desire to have people rule me directly or through representatives. I am not a cow or a sheep. I refuse to remain domesticated. I am fully capable of ruling myself. I do not desire to rule anyone. I just want to be FREE! And I am getting more free because I’m not playing their games much anymore. I no longer GIVE my consent to be ruled, I no longer vote for a Ruler or for Laws!
My chosen work right now is writing and publishing. I give my work for free. My past 18 years of payless working has been far more fun than my previous 22 years of paid working. We volunteers are in control of the how, when, if, where, why, what and who we give our work to. Volunteers have more freedom than paid workers. When everyone is a volunteer everything will be free for me, and for everyone else as well!
I’ve become jaded of late and convinces of the impossibility of achieving anything worthwhile. Concerning the modern state, I cannot see any way out or around or through, and it strikes me that one’s time is better spent seeking after the little (and the great!) pleasures of camaraderie, art and study.
Although not a mystic, I appreciate some of the tactical insights of Taoism… I think once the critique of organization is firmly assimilated, the whole political project of “anarchism” is exposed as a fraud. As anarchists: leafleting, speaking, proselytizing, agitating anarchists, we are continually trying to smooth over the inherent contradictions of trying to motivate people to act while disavowing any responsibility for their choice of action(s).
If we toss over organization and hierarchy (as we should) we are left with the prescriptive task of anarchist propaganda, and must face the emptiness of our individual lives, the emptiness activity was intended to mask and failed to fill. There is still the joy of provoking and of communicating, but this begins more and more to fall into the older modes: humor and art.
We must stop thinking in terms of issues, power struggles, programs, policies, and projects (state and social) before we are going to be able to not anywhere, and this means an end to most of what the modern anarchist movement consists of. Being an exemplary person is the most difficult thing; it is why so many of us are lured into prosperous schemes for publishing: promoting and capitalizing on, non-monetarily, of course, discontent with a dying culture and an oppressed world. It vanishes into the mist on some rainy afternoon, and the aftertaste is bitter. But why when grown, do we mourn for our childhood games? Let’s invent new, better ones, that don’t have this built-in self-destruct mechanism.
October 1983, published Spring 1985 in VULTURE No. 1 (Montreal). with French translations; the title presumably supplied by its editor.
1982 (age 16): I find Factsheet Five and by way of that magazine I find Kerry Thornley. By way of Kerry and Factsheet Five I find many anarchist periodicals and pen pals. Anarchism seems smart, strong, right. Looking back, I used the word to describe what I liked and wanted and what was ‘mine.’ It’s something about the sovereignty of the individual, or you can’t tell me what to do, or something in between. Somewhere in the back of my mind I think that these ideas are so good that the only reason they aren’t in practice now everywhere is that they haven’t been tried. Or perhaps tried just right. Or perhaps the ideas aren’t widely distributed, and if people only knew about anarchism they would sign on.
1987: I find an anarchist poster on the campus of the University of Tennessee and by way of the poster I find The Alternative, an anarchist group in Knoxville. We talk and do things, but anarchism does not flow out from us like a river. And while we’re all on the same team against a much larger and more powerful team, we certainly do bicker.
1988-1989: I attend anarchist events in many cities. I meet with anarchists in the South and on the East Coast. I am a guest lecturer on anarchism at the University of Tennessee. The same imp of the perverse that led me to read about anarchism pricks up his ears when he hears a friend say how concerned he is that another friend is reading Ayn Rand. Not that the friend is signing on as a true believer, but that the books themselves are wicked. Noted.
1991: I write “Anarchist: Think for Yourself,” published in the book Anarchy and the End of History. A high point in nine years of letters, essays and art published in anarchist magazines around the world. Factsheet Five continues to create contacts for me, including an unsolicited letter from George Walford in England. I correspond with George until his death in 1994.
1992 (age 26): I move to Portland, Oregon and find radical bookstore Laughing Horse Books. Make a friend who volunteers there.
1993: From a letter by George Walford: “You remark the scarcity of ‘real live human being stories’ in anarchist literature. Very perceptive. But it’s not an accident. Anarchism is not about people as we meet them, it’s about abstruse principles and theories (and, even more, about the resistance these encounter). The real human stories appear in the literature at the other end of the range, in the popular romances, thrillers, love-songs and — perhaps most of all — in tabloid newspaper stories, which go to extreme lengths to personalise (humanise) political events. Your own view of anarchism has it that people should be free to do what they want. The overwhelming majority of those who have encountered anarchism have shown very clearly that they do not want to do what anarchists want them to do. They prefer to do what they are doing now. We have no reason to expect the others, when they meet anarchism, to respond differently. Can your anarchism accept this? Or do you feel bound to impose (however gently and rationally) your ideas of what it is good for them to do? The dilemma of orthodox anarchism cannot be escaped by ‘practical living anarchy’ within present society. We cannot live without taking part in society, paying taxes and supporting capitalism by our consumption, and orthodox anarchism condemns all of this. The attempt to live the anarchist life is a living demonstration of the arid, empty, abstract unreality of orthodox anarchism; it cannot be put into practice, it is virtually nothing but theory.”
1994: My friend from Laughing Horse Books and I attend a meeting. The meeting is made up of people who want to start an anarchist bookstore in Portland. The bookstore is to be called 223. I offer to help write the mission statement, including a definition of anarchism. Not trying to define a thing into existence, not trying to exclude, not trying to control, just trying to clarify our goals and means and provide a base to start from. Having a definition of anarchism is discouraged, as it will be divisive and we all know what we mean anyway. Anarchism is smart, strong, right. I notice that in twelve years of being around anarchists, most of us are under thirty. Where are the older anarchists in a movement that started in the 19th Century? And what has anarchism done… ever? I work on a definition for myself, looking for the first time with any degree of seriousness into the history and accomplishments of anarchism for source material.
1994: From a letter by George Walford, responding to my essay in Anarchy and the End of History: “I have to say one or two things about the content. You ask one of the crucial questions: ‘if anarchy is so great, how come we’re not all anarchists?’ You ask it, but you don’t answer it, sliding off into discussing whether individuals can live as anarchists — also important, and certainly connected, but not the same question. Your omission is not surprising, for that question cannot be answered within the orthodox anarchism which your article accepts. The position is in fact even worse for anarchism than that sounds, because that is only half the problem, the other half being that some people, few but enough to form a movement, have become anarchists. A differential explanation is needed, and significant, enduring, social distinctions between groups of people orthodox anarchism cannot accept. Third (this one we’ve had before), your first new para on p.128, the one beginning: ‘Just as …’ in which you blame the personal inadequacies of individual anarchists for the failure of anarchy. This does not stand up any better than blaming individual supporters of capitalism for the failures of that system. In each case the failure is sufficiently constant and widespread to indicate a structural source, something built into the position. The only way to get past that sort of difficulty is to move on to another position. Examples of anarchist successes will be springing to your mind, but if you examine them you will find that (so far as they are successes in any field other than theory and argument) they are not distinctively anarchist. This of course links up with the first problem raised above. They both arise because orthodox anarchism, far from being “so great” is extremely limited. Not only can anarchy not be practiced under the state, it can’t even be thought out as an independent social system, in any concrete way, without running into contradictions that, appearing in practice, would wreck the new world.”
1994: I define anarchism as the belief it is possible and desirable to maintain the world’s population at the current standard of living without government and without a period of transition from the present to an anarchist world. The moment I put the definition on paper, I ask myself if that is what I believe and I answer myself no I do not. Thus I am not an anarchist. I go to my anarchist friends to see if they can find an error in my thinking – they run away from that conversation, and my doubts are not lessened for it.
1994: I read extensively in the works of George Walford and his peers. The idea of the ‘mass rationality assumption’ hits home. People project their values on others, and this includes intellectuals. Intellectuals think that most people would prefer to solve problems with intellect, and most people are capable of solving problems with intellect. Neither are true. Intellect and reason aren’t forbidden to most people, they just aren’t valued as much as convention and passion. Assuming otherwise is what keeps intellectuals in the political minority.
1995: One of George Walford’s best critics, David McDonagh, writes me. David proceeds to poke holes in my thinking from that point onward. Looking into what David considers good thinking, I am introduced to the works of Sir Karl Popper. Popper’s book Conjectures and Refutations causes the bottom to drop out of everything I knew about science, rationality, history and politics. What a rotten foundation it was. David also directs me to “The Impossibility of Economic Calculation under Socialism” by David Steele. This essay kicks the chair out from under socialist economics. I start reading about economics. What a fool I’d been, thinking I’d understood it before.
1996: Feeling free of anarchism and a little burned by what I now see was my own hooded thinking, I call up the imp of the perverse to see what other forbidden ideas might be out there. Ayn Rand is suggested, and I read her works. Having already shed one hood I’m less inclined to put another one on, and I do not become an Objectivist. But moving through Objectivism brings libertarian thinking to my attention. It’s something about the sovereignty of the individual… but I’ve walked down that path already and don’t sign on as a libertarian either.
2001 (age 35): September 11th. I’m at work at a homeless shelter. The base nature of much of humanity stops being abstract and my appreciation for individuals who are basically decent increases. The idea that we can all just get along stops scratching on its coffin lid. The need for having hard men on the payroll to keep away other hard men makes sense. I support the State, the army, the police as better than the alternative.
2005: The imp of the perverse continues to slip books into my hand, emboldened by the importance I place on reading one’s critics gained by my reading of Popper. Nothing seems more important than finding critics who will point out errors in my thinking – friends who think like I do never will. I read extensively about right wing politics and pay more attention to mainstream politics. All houses poxed long ago. That being said, when a fact or idea rings true I don’t turn up my nose if the source is otherwise unpleasant.
2010: What am I now? I try to be a good person and keep out of harm’s way. I hammer at the chains of religion and theocracy. My atheist efforts are small, but I’ve seen small changes from them and that is satisfying. I think humanity’s best hope is the open society described by Sir Karl Popper. I lean towards the free market and small government and the sovereignty of the individual, but I don’t see these as flawless or always appropriate. Whatever I am, I’m definitely not an anarchist.
It doesn’t happen often, but it happens more than never. Sometimes people in power use legal means to remove some of their own power, or share their power with others and thus diminish their own power.
Wikipedia: Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (519 BC – 430 BC?) was an ancient Roman aristocrat and political figure, serving as consul in 460 BC and Roman dictator in 458 BC and 439 BC. Cincinnatus was regarded by the Romans, especially the aristocratic patrician class, as one of the heroes of early Rome and as a model of Roman virtue and simplicity. A persistent opponent of the plebeians, when his son was convicted in absentia and condemned to death, Cincinnatus was forced to live in humble circumstances, working on his own small farm, until he was called to serve Rome as dictator, an office which he immediately resigned after completing his task of defeating the Aequians. His immediate resignation of his absolute authority with the end of the crisis has often been cited as an example of outstanding leadership, service to the greater good, civic virtue, and modesty.
Wikipedia: Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus [...] was Roman Emperor from 20 November 284 to 1 May 305. [...] Diocletian appointed fellow-officer Maximian his Augustus, his senior co-emperor, in 285. He delegated further on 1 March 293, appointing Galerius and Constantius as Caesars, junior co-emperors. Under this “Tetrarchy”, or “rule of four”, each emperor would rule over a quarter-division of the empire. [...] Diocletian retired to his homeland, Dalmatia. He moved into the expansive palace he had built on the Adriatic near the administrative center of Salona. [...] Galerius assumed the consular fasces in 308 with Diocletian as his colleague. In the autumn of 308, Galerius again conferred with Diocletian at Carnuntum (Petronell-Carnuntum, Austria). Diocletian and Maximian were both present on November 11, 308, to see Galerius appoint Licinius to be Augustus in place of Severus, who had died at the hands of Maxentius. He ordered Maximian, who had attempted to return to power after his retirement, to step down permanently. At Carnuntum people begged Diocletian to return to the throne, to resolve the conflicts that had arisen through Constantine’s rise to power and Maxentius’ usurpation. Diocletian’s reply: “If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn’t dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed.”
Wikipedia: Peter Kropotkin was born in Moscow. His father, Prince Alexei Petrovich Kropotkin, owned large tracts of land and nearly 1200 “souls” (male serfs) in three provinces. [...] “[U]nder the influence of republican teachings” he dropped his princely title at the age of twelve, and “even rebuked his friends, when they so referred to him.”
Wikipedia: Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin [...] was a well-known Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism born in the Russian Empire to a family of Russian nobles.
Wikipedia: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon [...] was a French politician, mutualist philosopher and socialist. He was a member of the French Parliament, and he was the first to call himself an anarchist.
Wikipedia: Richard Milhous Nixon [...] was the 37th President of the United States (1969–1974) and is the only president to resign the office.
About John Robbins: The only son of the founder of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream empire, John Robbins was groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps, but chose to walk away from Baskin-Robbins and the immense wealth it represented to “…pursue the deeper American Dream…the dream of a society at peace with its conscience because it respects and lives in harmony with all life forms. A dream of a society that is truly healthy, practicing a wise and compassionate stewardship of a balanced ecosystem.”
Wikipedia: At least four of the fifteen post-Civil War Constitutional amendments were ratified specifically to extend voting rights to different groups of citizens. [...] Abolition of property qualifications for white men, 1812-1860; Non-white men, 1870; Women, 1920; Native Americans, 1924; Residents of the District of Columbia, 1961; Poor, 1964; Racial minorities in certain states, 1965; Adults between 18 and 21, 1971.
Wikipedia: Solidarity was the first non-Communist-controlled trade union in a Warsaw Pact country. In the 1980s it constituted a broad anti-bureaucratic social movement. The government attempted to destroy the union during the period of martial law in the early 1980s and several years of repression, but in the end it had to start negotiating with the union. The Round Table Talks between the government and the Solidarity-led opposition led to semi-free elections in 1989. By the end of August a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed and in December 1990 Wałęsa was elected President of Poland.
Wikipedia: Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev [...] was the second last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, serving from 1985 until 1991, and the last head of state of the USSR, serving from 1988 until its collapse in 1991. [...] Gorbachev’s attempts at reform as well as summit conferences with United States President Ronald Reagan and his reorientation of Soviet strategic aims contributed to the end of the Cold War, ended the political supremacy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Michael Meyer, The Picnic that Brought Down the Berlin Wall: in Hungary itself, a new generation of reform-minded communists had taken charge. Almost overnight, they wrote a U.S.-style constitution and began speaking openly of a free press, free markets and free elections. Emboldened, a small group of local Sopron activists decided to celebrate the new spirit. Their modest aim: put up some tents, hire a brass band and let the beer and good vibes flow. One of the organizers came up with an especially inspired idea – to briefly open a gate through the barbed-wire frontier to Austria, allowing people to casually stroll back and forth across the border for the first time in four decades. They called it the Pan-European Picnic. Because anything involving the border was a matter of extreme sensitivity, their request for a permit came to the attention of Hungary’s young prime minister, Miklos Nemeth, the man behind so many of the Gorbachev-like changes taking place. Immediately, a light bulb went off in his head. [...] Nemeth hoped to unleash a flood. He believed that a mass escape of East Germans from Hungary would pose an existential threat to the regime of Erich Honecker, the dictatorial boss of the German Democratic Republic. He also believed that if Honecker fell, it would bring down the Berlin Wall – and with it the entire communist bloc. Amid the chaos, he could realize his true goal. Hungary too would gain its freedom.
This book has been called a “Manual of terror” by Max Geltman, writing in National Review (July 22, 1971). I find this phrase aptly descriptive, but not in the same sense that Mr. Geltman would have us believe.
This “cookbook” consists of three basic parts: an introduction by Professor Bergman entitled “Anarchism today,” and two much longer sections by William Powell on drug and explosive manufacturing.
If ever there were an example of Orwellian doublespeak, this is it! “Anarchism Today” is basically an interpretation of the philosophic roots of anarchism, awkwardly coupled with sketchy references to current events. Almost all of the intellectuals discussed are from the Nineteenth Century; and there is virtually no mention of the writings from 1930 to present. This may be expected from someone who appears to have briefly studied the topic while at college during the 1920′s, and thereafter relied only on superficial newspaper accounts. Bergman should have been aware of Albert Jay Nock, for example, and anarchists today are certainly aware of Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, etc.
Bergman considers Nihilism to be a form of Anarchism, and Anarchism a form of radical revolutionism. He interprets Marxism in an anarchistic light, and correctly suggests that Communist governments today are feudal / reactionary. However, his emphasis on the Marxist element in anarchist intellectual tradition is clearly one-sided. A more through and fair analysis can be found in Native American Anarchism (1932) by Eunice Minette Schuster.
Bergman’s emphasis on the Nihilistic and destructive aspects of Anarchism I find disturbing. This emphasis seems to arise from the axiom that the State is all, so to oppose the State is to oppose everything. Anarchists do not have to propose a concrete alternative because that would be authoritarian.
The rest of this book consists mainly of drug and explosive recipes relayed to us by William Powell. His motivation for doing so is supposedly to allow the “silent majority” access to information which he claims only the radical groups now possess. The idea of a “silent majority” comes from classical Greek literature and in that context referred to the dead who are the real majority. If you follow the steps outlined in these recipes, you may soon join them! the Library Journal (March 15, 1971) puts it this way:
“Much of it is so sketchy as to be harmless, but there are a number of booby traps still for the nitwit who wishes to try them. There are drug making recipes…that may make one very ill…there are also a number of stunts which could backfire on the idiot who tries them.”
Let’s get down to specifics.
Ed Rosenthal told me that he had spent a lot of time trying to track down the rumors of pot growing in New York sewers. Well, I just may have stumbled on the origin of the “New York White” rumors. Despite what Powell may think, plants are not as adaptable as alligators and need light to grow. Another choice quote: “…strangely enough, insects ignore marijuana and do no harm.” Strange indeed.
The DEA has a Precursor Control Program watch list. This means that if you buy large quantities of the common precursors to illegal chemicals, the Federal Government may take an interest in your activities. Several of the chemicals on this list are used in Mr. Powell’s LSD recipe, such as Acetonitrile, Trifluoroacetic Anhydride, Dimethylformamide, and Diethylamine. Benzene is also on the list, and my also arouse the interest of the EPA because it is a known cancer-causing agent.
Much the same can be said of many of his other recipes, and in some cases the precursors are as hard to get as he final product. For instance, his recipe for DMT starts out with indole, which is quite hard to get. Much better methods using L-Tryptophan (available in most health-food stores) are covered in “Synthesis” (1973 – present).
Powell suggests ground up nutmeg for a psychedelic experience. Nutmeg has a poor dose/toxicity ratio! However, the oil extract of Nutmeg, containing myristicin, can be used in the synthesis of MMDA – a better and mellower high than MDA. See Journal of Psychedelic Drugs (Vol. 8, #4, October-December 1976).
On page 58 of Powell’s cookbook, Nalline is described as “…a freak – a drug someone forgot to make illegal.” Perhaps they forgot because Nalorphine is a powerful narcotic antagonist, which tents to produce violent convulsive reactions in morphine addicts. (See the Merck Index.)
For more information on drugs, see “The clandestine Drug Laboratory Situation in the U.S.”, Journal of Forensic Sciences (January 1983, p. 18- 31.) This article, obligingly written by the DEA chief, reports that none of the 17 labs busted the previous year were successful in producing what was intended to be produced. The busted chemists were relying on recipes from popular “underground” drug manufacturing books. It was noted that such books contain errors which prevent the manufacture of the desired chemicals, while at the same time drawing the attention of government authorities because of the precursors recommended.
Let’s now examine his recommendations for manufacturing explosives:
His methods for producing Mercury Fulminate is incomplete and dangerous. Between steps 2 and 3, the solution should be cooled. Do not breathe the fumes. See A Dictionary of Applied Chemistry by Sir Edward Thorpe.
Powell’s recipe entitled “How to Make TNT” is also quite dangerous and incomplete. In step 1, mixing sulfuric acid and nitric acid will likely result in fulmination and red toxic fumes. Also the crude method he describes does not cover the removal of the Ortho-Dinitro groups. If this were not done, the TNT would be extremely unstable. However, they can be removed with great ease by heating the crude material with aqueous sodium sulfite. See Chemistry of Explosives by George Wright, University of Toronto, in Organic Chemistry (p. 974).
The description of picric acid does not sufficiently emphasize its unstable nature. For example, storing it in a cracked glass container may cause it to explode. See “Thorpe’s”. However, on page 120 he describes two relatively safer and easily obtainable chemicals (potassium bichromate and potassium permanganate) as very sensitive, unstable, and too hazardous to work with.
He does have a couple of pages on general safety precautions, but the language suggests that they have been lifted from a military manual. Also, he uses the German spelling for some chemicals. If you attempt to order chemicals from an American company using German spelling, your order would likely be looked at with suspicion.
The Anarchist Cookbook was originally published in 1971; the review by the Library Journal, which exposed these dangerous errors, came shortly thereafter. I wonder why it has gone through 26 printings without these errors being corrected. My theory is that Mr. Powell is not an anarchist, but in reality is spreading disinformation to potential enemies of the government. At the time of original publication, Mr. Powell was an unknown 21-year-old college freshman. Where did he get access to this “information?” He says, from radical friends on both the left and right.
The Minuteman Manual is listed in the bibliography. The original Minutemen were colonial American revolutionaries. In the ’60′s there was a radical offshoot of the John Birch Society called the Minutemen; they have since been disbanded by the FBI. It is not likely that the 1960′s Minutemen would have handed out their manual to a long-haired 21-year-old college freshman. Also, the John Birch Society and the Minutemen are opposed to the United Nations, and Powell’s father was a powerful bureaucrat in the UN propaganda ministry (see Newsweek, April 12, 1971.) Things are getting curiouser and curiouser!
This same William Powell has also written a book entitled Saudi Arabia and its Royal Family (1982). It consists of interviews with members of the Saudi royal family and other observations gathered while teaching at the University of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It does not seem likely that the Saudi royal family would give such generous treatment to a real anarchist. Reading the Saudi book, I came across some interesting quotes (p. 17):
“Were something or someone to cut the flow of oil from the Arabian Gulf, the result would be truly apocalyptic or the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and much of the developing world…In a worst case scenario, all gasoline available would go to essential services such as the military, the police and fire departments, and the transportation of foodstuffs. Most nonessential businesses and industries would close. Unemployment would skyrocket.”
“All major cities would, in all probability, have to be placed under martial law. Curfews would be enforced at gunpoint…Inflation would metamorphose…into a lethal epidemic. We would enter a wheelbarrow economy like that of Germany prior to Hitler’s rise to power.”
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. While his pessimistic analysis does not take full account of the market’s ability to conserve and switch to alternate fuels, I think a more important point is that Powell seems to believe that government is as essential as the transportation of foodstuffs, and that it can help solve the fuel crisis through the draconian methods he describes. If governments were to run out of gas tomorrow, anarchists would be dancing in celebration.
(Mr. Powell’s talk of martial law is not fantasy. Executive Order #11490, signed by Richard Nixon in October 1969, allows the president to assume dictatorial powers after declaring a “national emergency.”)
It just doesn’t add up, unless an alternative theory is developed to explain these anomalies. My attempts to get the other side of the story from the publisher were met with a stone wall of silence. My suggestion is that much of Powell’s disinformation and influence may have come from the Trilateral Commission and / or the CIA. A U.S. Air Force combat controllers group studying theory would seem to dovetail with the National Review article which presented The Anarchist Cookbook at face valued and even included a patronizing reference to “the boys at Harvard.” It is well known that W.F. Buckley, the National Review editor, is a Yale graduate and once served the CIA in Mexico. (E. Howard Hunt, of Watergate fame, was CIA paymaster in Mexico City at the same time Buckley served.)
I would like to quote Mr. Powell from the April 12, 1971 issue of Newsweek: “My book places power in the hands of the individual, where it belongs. The right calls it communist, the leftists call it profiteering, the liberals call it Neo-Nazi.”
First Edition. 300 numbered copies. November 1988. B&W photocopy, 56 pages. 8.5 inches by 5.5 inches.
Second edition. 20 numbered copies. March 1989. B&W photocopy, 56 pages. 8.5 inches by 5.5 inches. New introduction.
Third / Grey Area edition. 200 numbered copies. May 1989. B&W photocopy, 56 pages. 8.5 inches by 6 inches. New introduction.
Toronto Anarchist Gathering, Nadzrealizem versus Anarhizm, spray paint stencil art, Grey Area. Printed on two continents. Pages 29-48 were reproduced without permission from copyright protected sources and do not appear here.
[01] Cover.
[02] Statement.
[03] Introduction.
[04] Stencil.
[05][06][07][08][09][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] Toronto.
[19] What Can You Do With This Page.
[20] Nadzrealizem versus anarhizm.
[21] Brian.
[22] T-Shirt.
[23] Stencil.
[24] People with AIDS: The Government is Not Your Friend.
[25] Image taken from the first edition of The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan.
[26] Recommended Contacts.
[27][28] Ovoglyph.
[49][50] Announcement of OVO 7 INFORMATION.
[51] Catalogue.
[52] Collage.
[53] Back cover.
OVO is a collection of new works in the public domain edited and published by Trevor Blake since 1987. New issues are in progress.
November 1987. Twenty-four pages, 4.25 inches by 3.6 inches. Black and white photocopy inside envelope with stencil and hand made stamp exterior, stencil art on page torn from first edition of Queer by W. S. Burroughs. Copy art, BBS, surrealism, Neoism, Lunalogue by Cunnichant Night Owl.
[Front Cover] Scratched photocopy.
[02] Statement.
[03] Introduction.
[04][05][06][07][08][09][10] Art Poetique by Andre Breton and Jean Schuster. One of my favorite surrealist poems. “I have seen neither majesty in a king nor ministry in a priest. I have attracted attention to the mockery of the sceptre, the slime of the sandal. I have attacked things broadside.” That notion has certainly held true, decades later.
[11] More About OVO.
[12] Collage.
[13] Cut-up text from Queer by William S. Burroughs.
[14][15][16][17] Operation Negation by Karen Elliot. I received this text and ‘Give Up Art, Save the Starving’ by Karen Elliot (published in OVO 14 SUFFERING) at different times and in different states. Karen Elliot was a name shared by many people around the world. Years later the particular Karen Elliot who wrote those two essays revealed herself to me. The Art Strike was described by Stewart Home the next year in chapter 16 his recommended book The Assault on Culture.
[18] Collage.
[19][20][21] Lunalogue by Cunnichant Night Owl. I first heard of what would be known as AIDS in 1981, when Judith Hooper wrote an article in OMNI magazine about a mysterious ‘decreased resistance’ to disease among gay men. In 1987, when OVO 3 was published, I did not know anyone like the people described in this story. I published it because I could tell Cunnichant Night Owl was describing something important. She disappeared from my mailbox soon after. Who she was, how she found me, why she wrote me and what happened to her are all mysteries.
[22] text by Andre Breton.
[23] Back cover.
OVO is a collection of new works in the public domain edited and published by Trevor Blake since 1987.
A photograph which purports to show Republican militiamen shooting at the statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus at Cerro de los Ángeles near Madrid, Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The photograph was given wide distribution by the Nationalists during the war. [Been looking for this image for 10+ years. I think it's fake, but still... ]
