OVO

Hand / Eye Supply presents Trevor Blake’s presentation on his book Portland Memorials.

[video]

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.

Read the rest at FKNONLINE.

See also Portland Memorials by Trevor Blake.

[This review of OVO 20 JUVEN(a/i)LIA is reprinted with permission from Good Reads.]

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.

Kate Mather, The Oregonian:

Daniel Rafatpanah thought he was going to die. A jittery gunman was marching the 29-year-old and two of his Southeast Portland housemates upstairs to the attic, a handgun aimed at their backs. None of them knew the man, who demanded Popsicles and alcohol before taking them hostage Monday afternoon. But when he placed the gun under his foot to change into a new pair of pants, they knew it was their only chance. “Everything’s in slow-mo, and I’m like, ‘It’s go time.’ It’s time to fight this guy,” Rafatpanah said.

Jonathan Mooney, 26, bearhugged the gunman from behind. Robert Steinfeld, 21, broke a beer bottle over his head. And Rafatpanah started throwing punches, his hands bloodied by the shattered glass. Everyone reached for the gun as the man fell. The man fired a shot as the struggle continued. Rafatpanah’s right hand got sliced open by the gun’s mechanism, and blood poured everywhere.

A neck hold wasn’t working. Not knowing what else to do, Rafatpanah bit the man’s ear. “Let go of the gun, let go of the gun!” he yelled through clamped teeth. “Let go of my ear!” the gunman responded. The two tore apart, and Rafatpanah spat out a bean-sized piece of ear.

“I tasted the blood of my enemy in my mouth,” he said. “And so at that point you realize the stakes have gone so much higher because blood is being drawn – my blood, his blood.”

Rafatpanah lunged toward the gun and wrestled it away.

Article continues, with video.

Previously at OVO:

Trevor Blake: Time Machine (after The Invisibles by Grant Morrison). June 2011. Model: Danny Chaoflux.

Portland writer Trevor Blake’s book, Portland Memorials, is a compilation of historical markers to be found by walking through the downtown area. Sound simple? Consider that the author must at some points have practically crawled on his hands and knees to transcribe dates and names from the thousands of “plaques, buildings, statues, benches and fountains” that were grist for his investigations. He even discovered that a few memorials touching on Black history were likely thrown into the Willamette River. The Skanner News traded electronic letters with Blake to get his story on how, and why, Portland has chosen to remember its past.

The Skanner News: Trevor what made you want to put this book together?

Trevor Blake: I wrote Portland Memorials for three reasons. The first reason is an echo of one of the memorials found in the book. The Shemanski Fountain is located at the north end of the South Park Blocks. It was a gift to the city by Portland shopkeeper Joseph Shemanski (1869-1951) in 1926. Shemanski gave the fountain to the city “to express in small measure gratitude for what the city has done for me.” And that is exactly the reason I have written Portland Memorials. I moved to Portland in 1992 and the city has given me as many opportunities, experiences and challenges as anyone could ask for. The second reason is writing a book is a good way to learn a subject, and I wanted to learn more about the architecture and history of Portland. The third reason is it provided some good exercise for the legs and the brain.

TSN: How did you research it, how many memorials are contained in it, and how long did it take?

Blake: I researched Portland Memorials the old fashioned way: I used my feet and my eyes. Over a three year period I walked around every block in downtown Portland, usually two or three times, and whenever I found a memorial I wrote down what it said and where it was using a pencil and paper. No special training or equipment was needed. There are a few websites and books that might have helped but I decided to see for myself what was there, and in doing so I’ve documented many thousands of memorials that are found in no other resource. I thought it would be a fine project for a Summer and include a few hundred items. It is a fine project, but it took three years and includes thousands of names. The best way to find a particular memorial is to look in the index, then find that page, then go to that memorial.

TSN: Can you talk a little bit about the Portland memorials that touch on the African American experience here?

BLAKE: I’m glad you asked this question. One of the most lively memorials downtown is for the Golden West Hotel at 707 NW Everett. This hotel was owned and frequented by African Americans from the early 1900s onward. Of all the memorials I found, this is the only one that includes photographs, text and a recording – the blind can enjoy and learn from this memorial, making it accessible to even more Portland citizens. The Walk of the Heroines on the campus of Portland State University includes the name of nearly thirty Black women civil rights pioneers. Strangely enough, there are three civil war cannons in downtown Portland. Two are in Lownsdale Square and were taken from Fort Sumter, the third was melted down and made into the church bell of First Presbyterian Church. There are some sidewalk plaques in the Old Town area that honor how the Chinese community has interacted with other communities, and one of them (on NW Flanders between 3 and 4) talks about how the Chinese and African American community mingled at the Royal Palm Hotel. There used to be a memorial park downtown dedicated to the Liberty Ships built by many African American workers in Portland during World War Two, but when that property was converted to condominiums most of what was in the park was thrown into the Willamette River.

TSN: What do you want to come from this book?

BLAKE: I want people to read about a memorial and go see it for themselves.  Not to read about it and forget it, not look it up online, but to go see it for themselves. It’s a reminder that each of us will just be a memory some day and that we’d best make hay while the sun shines.

TSN: What’s the most important thing about this town that you hope people take away from reading Portland Memorials?

BLAKE: Portland has preserved much of its history, and that can’t be said about many cities. Sometimes the preservation was by design of the city leaders, but often it was the efforts of individuals. In the 1950s many older buildings were torn down for being old fashioned.  The decorative iron work on the sides of some of these buildings was, shall we say, ‘privately preserved’ by individuals who couldn’t stand to see the art destroyed. Decades later, when Portland again appreciated its history, these works were returned to the city and can be seen in the Saturday Market area. I hope Portland Memorials is read for years to come by those who care about our city’s history.

TSN: Is there a website or other place people can access your book, or any other of your writings?

BLAKE: My book can be purchased in print or for Kindle at this address http://ovo127.com/ovo/ , where there is also a free sample chapter to download.

Originally published by The Skanner News on 19 December 2011.  Many thanks to Lisa and The Skanner.

Image c/o Retronaut.

Thanks to the following for linking to OVO.

Eithin links to Liberating Wednesday.
Monday Vatican links to The Concordant Story.
Financial Advices Blog links to The Bonus Army.
Rambone at Indiana Gun Owners links to The Bonus Army.
The American Book of the Dead links to Unspeakable Horrors.

Today, 25 November, was a special day in the life of Yukio Mishima.  May you have a special day as well.  I don’t want to do what Mishima did, I want to do what I do as fully as he did what he did.

“Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they’re just repeating what others before them have done.” – Yukio Mishima, After the Banquet.

OVO triumphus for Yukio Mishima for 2010.
OVO triumphus for Yukio Mishima for 2009.
OVO triumphus for Yukio Mishima for 2008.

… and more.

This review of OVO 20: JUVEN(a/i)LIA by Trevor Blake was written by Ferdinand Bardamu, and appeared at his blog In Mala Fide in November 2011.

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.

But the real prize is Trevor’s own writings, comprising the second half of the book. They include book reviews (including an exhaustive review of one of my favorites, L.A. Rollins’ Myth of Natural Rights), interviews with such diverse individuals as a bulimia sufferer and an expert on out-of-body experiences/bilocation, and my favorite, “Trajectory Through Anarchism,” in which Trevor tracks the evolution of his political beliefs:

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.

But most of all, get busy.

Followup to my 20 February 2003 post What Happens When a Public Hysteria Dies Out?

What happens when a public hysteria dies out? It seems that everyone agrees to simply not talk about it any more. Y2K created a huge stink – I confess I thought something would ‘happen’ – and now Y2K is all but forgotten. But what about Kelly Michaels, Gerald Amirault, Bernard Baran and Patrick Figured? All of them are currently in prison as a result of the public hysteria of the 90s, ‘ritual abuse.’ The satanic panic has subsided but they remain in prison, for things that they did not do and in fact no one did. Dozens of other people were ‘lucky’ enough to only serve extended prison sentences and lose their homes, friends, family and jobs – they are now out of prison and free to be ‘registered sex offenders’ in their community for the rest of their lives. With so much genuine misery in the world, it is criminal that some people are punished for crimes never committed and other people are made ‘survivors’ who were never victims.

Kelly Michaels spent five years in prison for crimes neither she nor anyone else committed. She was released in 1994.
Gerald Amirault spent eighteen years in prison for crimes neither he nor anyone else committed. He was released in 2004.
Bernard Baran spent twenty-one years in prison for crimes neither he nor anyone else committed. He was released in 2006.
Patrick Figured has spent nineteen years in prison for crimes neither he nor anyone else committed.  He is serving a life sentence, reduced in 1996 from three consecutive life sentences. He was denied an appeal in 1994. “I have learned one thing in here; they can’t do anymore to me than they have… I have lost everything as it is.”

It’s not easy to find up-to-date information on these men and women. The circus has passed and nobody wants to clean up after the elephants and the horses and the clowns. But here are the names I could find of those in prison for crimes neither they nor anyone else committed, all victims of the satanic panic of the 1980s.  What is a convincing argument that this could never happen to you?  That’s right.

Cheryl Amirault
Jason Baldwin
Jack Barnes
Linda Barnes
Damien Echols
Jesse Friedman
Frank Fuster
Robert Halsey
Danny Keller
Fran Keller
Jeanette Martin
Kristie Mayhugh
Jessie Misskelley, Jr.
Elsie Oscarson
Michael Parker
Bruce Perkins
Elizabeth Ramirez
Cassandra Rivera
Ryan Smith
Anna Vasquez
James Watt

Violet Amirault died in prison.
Earl Barnes died in prison.

Further reading
False Memory Syndrome Foundation
National Center for Reason and Justice
Wikipedia, File 18
Wikipedia, Day Care Sex Abuse Hysteria

Melissa is a friend who spoke with OVO about her eating disorder on 12 July 1991.

OVO: When did you first realize there was something wrong about the way you were eating?

Melissa: Last Fall. I was dating somebody and I started doing it a lot. I’ve noticed I tend to do it more when I’m in a relationship. I used to drink a beer every day because it would help me throw up. I came home from work and drank a beer really quick. I was in the bathroom doing my business behind the closed door and the person walked in on me. They suggested to me that l have a problem. I had thought so before but when somebody else confronted me with it I had to confront myself with it. That’s when I realized there was something really wrong with what was doing.

OVO: How long had you been doing it?

Melissa: It’s an on-again off-again thing with me, depending on how you define it. I define my eating disorder not by how long I’ve thrown up or how long ago I starved myself. I think I’ve always had an unhealthy relationship with food. It’s taken on different forms over the years. I can remember when l was young I was deprived of certain foods that my friends could eat because my mother was really into health foods. I would go over to my friends’ house or trade lunches at school, and horde junk food because I was fascinated by it and it was something that was forbidden to me. That’s the first example of it. Over the years it’s been bulimia, it’s been anorexia, there have been points where I’ve been a compulsive exerciser, but the most recurring and the problem I have now is bulimia.

OVO: What is that?

Melissa: It’s called binge-and-purge syndrome. When l start eating I don’t feel like I can stop, then I feel guilty, so to make me feel better about eating all that food I’ll make myself throw up. Or I’ll not eat for a couple days or I’ll exercise for a long time. Some people use laxative but I’ve never done that.

OVO: Was throwing up something you figured out on your own?

Melissa: Yes, it was really easy for me. I’ve always had a nervous stomach. I figured out I could do it and use it as a way of maintaining my weight.

OVO: What is the source of your concern about your eating? Why isn’t it a natural process?

Melissa: I hate to sound like “I have this horrible childhood” but I think that’s where a lot of it came from. We had a rule in our house my sister and l joke about now called the Clean Plate Club (my sister, by the way, is anorexic). We weren’t allowed to leave the kitchen table until we’d finished everything that we had been given to eat. From there I started associating food with reward and punishment instead of just what I needed, like sleeping. It became something else.

OVO: Do you think your mother has some kind of eating disorder?

Melissa: No. I think my mother getting into her health food kick was just something to occupy her because there were things going on in my family that were very stressful for her. It was a means of her being able to cope by being interested in something.

OVO: You go to a group where you talk about this with other women.

Melissa: Yes. Last spring I started group therapy and individual counseling for my eating disorder.

OVO: What are the other womens’ experiences like?

Melissa: Their experiences are very similar to mine. It‘s very interesting because a lot of the ways I react to other things, not just food, are very similar to the other women in the group as well. It’s like obsessive-compulsive behavior across the board, not just with eating. It’s a pattern that develops the way you deal with everything.

OVO: Do you or they see any kind of connection between your eating disorder and media portrayal of women?

Melissa: Yes, and that was what really invoked a lot of emotion in me because I’m very involved in feminism and the portrayal of women in our society. I think it has an enormous amount to do with that. I think that’s why it became such an obsessive thing for me as I got into my teenage years. I’m 21 now. I saw a commercial on TV the other day for a clinic for eating disorders where they called it “the national college womens’ plague.” It’s one of the biggest things that happens to women when they enter college. When l moved to Knoxville is when my eating disorder became the worst. I that has to do with being on my own and food being a focus, something that is a constant, that l could always depend on.

OVO: What is it that you’re the trying to achieve by going to group therapy and counseling?

Melissa: One thing I learned in group therapy is that we’re not there to find a cure. We’re there to give each other support and understand why we do it because that‘s more important. I’d like to think eventually I won’t have to do it. There are times now where I’ll go days or weeks or even months… there was a period not too long ago where I went a couple months without doing it and that felt good, like I had power over myself.

OVO: If it’s something that you’ve done for a long time and that a lot of women have done and do what’s bad about it?

Melissa: It’s dangerous to your health. I have medical problems now because of it. I have a stomach ulcer. You can damage your esophagus. I’ve been lucky enough not to. I’ve never had a cavity in my life and now I have seven because my stomach acid has corroded the enamel off my teeth in the back. It can cause heart problems The two effects it’s had in me have been my teeth, and I get heartburn a lot and I have upper intestinal problems now from stomach acid.

OVO: Why is this occurring in women more than men?

Melissa: I think there’s a stronger image for women to live up to. There is an image that men have to live up to but there’s more emphasis and pressure for women to look a certain way to be accepted our society. It’s contradictory because we offer women a double standard by showing her all these great things she’s supposed to eat and make in her lifestyle and then she’s still supposed to look that way, and it’s impossible.

OVO: Why is it offered if it’s obviously a double standard and impossible?

Melissa: I can’t answer that. I could say just another way for men to have control over women but I think that’s maybe not answering the question, maybe that’s just anger. I think its because women want to have a certain lifestyle that they’ve been given the opportunity to have now and yet they’re still supposed to look a certain way from the old world thinking, pre-feminist thought, and what men find appealing today in our society is thin women.

OVO: Is this a modem problem?

Melissa: The Romans and the Greeks had vomitoriums where they actually would purge on purpose, but I think that was a way of having a decadent lifestyle and there wasn’t any kind image put before them as a reason to do that. If you discount that that it is a modern problem.

OVO: A friend of mine said that anyone who has an eating disorder should have their television taken away.

Melissa: That’s a good point because that’s where the double standard comes from. Commercials. That’s where the image is the strongest, that’s where we see the women that we’re supposed to look like.

OVO: It‘s telling that if you look at an ideal for women (and I think having one is a bad idea in the first place) prior to television that ideal is very different. It‘s changed throughout history but I think there’s a strong connection between modem eating disorders and television. All the years of film before television didn’t inspire eating disorders but film is also a visual medium. The difference is commercials.

Melissa: The food industry has created a demand for the diet industry. It’s a vicious cycle. I notice when I watch MTV sometimes (I watch it when I’m getting ready to go to work to have some background none), that when I want to look a certain way the worst I know people who’ve told me that when they’re dieting that they watch MTV because it gives them inspiration to look like the women who probably have eating disorders themselves.

OVO: What would you want someone reading this who has an eating disorder to know?

Melissa: To know that they should want to get help because it’s not something you should want to do and that you can get help. And it’s dangerous. It doesn’t seem like it’s dangerous and it’s a really easy answer but I’m sure that I’ll be really regretting a lot of what I’m doing ten years from now. I’m sure I’ll have a lot worse problems. I don‘t have a problem discussing it with friends and that‘s where I get a lot of my support but maybe that’s because a lot of my friends have eating disorders. It’s a secret and we go into our rooms to talk about it. Everybody understands that what is said behind that door is not said anywhere else. That’s what defines an eating disorder, it’s something that happens behind closed doors.

OVO: Who defines the ideal image of a woman and the ideal image of a man?

Melissa: I think the media.

OVO: Who controls the media?

Melissa: Are we talking conspiracy theory here? I think a lot of media is self-perpetuating. I don’t know who controls the media, I think that’s a whole other issue, but I think that by media offering something to the public and by the public response to that, it recreates the demand for it, like the economic law of supply and demand. It’s something that perpetuates itself.

OVO: What can we do about it?

Melissa: It should start with the individual. I try not to be influenced by images of women to look a certain way. I don’t buy the magazines. That‘s a way to start. It’s a choice the individual tries to make. By doing this interview I hope I’m reaching out to someone else. I think it’s important for us to let other people know that it‘s wrong. Know that it’s wrong ourselves then try to let everybody else know why it’s wrong and maybe beyond that do something about it together.

OVO: Like what?

Melissa: Like a support network.

OVO: What about after a support network, or in addition to it?

Melissa: That‘s when you’re ready to step into things on a big scale. I’ve written letters to fashion magazines telling them that their magazine portray images that are unhealthy for women and I think maybe a group could do that. I noticed the other day that there’s a thing on MTV where you can submit a video and tell them what you don’t like about anything. People have the option to complain about something that is on MTV that they don’t like. I thought it would be a fun thing for me and some friends to do, to make one and submit it to MTV and see if there’s a response at all.

OVO: MTV has realized that it can present any criticism of itself without changing. A friend of mine did an Art Break for them. Their contract said you have to have the MTV logo in the Art Break, and even if your Art Break is one minute of you ripping the logo up or seeing it on a TV screen and shooting it or in any way criticizing it, you still have to show the MTV logo. That‘s showing how media perpetuates itself. The problem and the solution are coming from the same source and you can’t hold onto either one of them and pull them away from yourself.

Melissa: Like Coke commercials that don’t have anything to do with the product but show the image of the product.

OVO: That’s why it’s important to boycott that kind of media completely, without exception, and simultaneously to create an alternative that people would hopefully find interesting and stimulating and life-affirming. A lot of what we’ve been talking about is good commodities versus bad commodities but eventually we’re going to have to come up with something that isn’t a commodity at all and return to something like “art” and figure out some way to make art that isn’t a commodity. It’s going to be difficult. That effort started many decades ago and it still hasn’t been achieved.

Melissa: Another example of the double standard is that the commercial I saw for the eating disorder clinic came on MTV. It portrays women as this certain ideal, then offers a solution, then help for the solution later. Usually if you notice on TV diet commercials follow food commercials.

OVO: How does education figure into it?

Melissa: That’s what’s really scary. When you learn about health and nutrition in school, usually the little pamphlets and flyers you’re given are from the National Dairy Board, who say it’s good for you to drink milk. My mother was a teacher and she said it’s because its so hard for the schools to get funding from the State that they will accept funding from corporations. I don’t take it too seriously when McDonald’s gives me a nutrition guide.

OVO: What do you think is going to happen in the future regarding eating disorders?

Melissa: I hate to say it but I think it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any getter. Maybe it will get so bad and so rampant that it will explode and will be like everything else in this world that’s wrong. It’ll just keep happening until something really horrible happens.

OVO: Or something really wonderful.

Melissa: And then we’ll stop and go gee, sorry. When Gloria Steinem came to the University of Tennessee she said more women have died as a result of bulemia than it’s ever been reported of people dying of AIDS. AIDS gets more recognition and I agree its a problem that needs recognition but… Even with me, I know how wrong it is for me to have an eating disorder and I still do it. Even as wrong as I know it is and even as much as I don’t want to be a victim of it, of the media and everything else, I can’t help it. When l go out and l see other people who look good or go shopping and l want to a certain kind of clothes but they won’t look good on me unless l look a certain way… It’s hard for me when people I care about have also have been fed this image that people should look like that as well, like my family. I recently took a family vacation and my aunt is really thin, and her whole family is thin, and it made me feel like I should be thin.

OVO: Have you talked with your mother about this?

Melissa: Yes. My mother was a lot more informed on the subject than l thought she would be. I was thankful for that. She was very supportive. It was a surprise for me to get that support. She agreed that a lot of what she went through on the health food kick maybe contributed.

OVO: How much TV do you watch?

Melissa: When I watch television and pay attention l am very critical. I sit there and watch it and get angry and critique everything. I’m glad I’m to this point now where if it’s on and it’s really bothering me and it’s disgusting I’ll turn it off immediately and I won’t just change the channel. I don’t like to watch a whole lot of television because I think it’s bad in ways besides just image. Sometimes I watch it before I go to work, sometimes I have it on to have in the background when I’m in the shower if nobody’s home. I like to have noise.

OVO: Do you watch TV while you eat?

Melissa: Yes, and it’s scary to notice how many other people do that.

OVO: Television destroys community and that’s another reason to boycott it if you’re trying to to establish a community of support for anything, for any sort of political project or personal improvement art or thought. You can’t just have the TV on all the time.

Melissa: That’s one reason I’m really glad I got a job. Some days I’d wake up and there was only so much in a day that I could do before I’d done it all and I’d find myself watching television. Especially since we have cable. We’re moving soon and I don’t want to get cable when we do. We have a VCR and that’s different. Selective viewing is different. There are a lot films that are worth seeing and are good movies I enjoy watching. That’s what is nice about cable, watching HBO. The other day one of my favorite movies came on and that was nice to watch.

OVO: What movie was that?

Melissa: Pretty in Pink. My housemate bought a TV Guide so that I wouldn’t have to turn on the TV when I was bored and I wanted to see if anything was good on because than if nothing was good on I’d find myself watching anyway. Now I look for things I might want to watch and watch those things only.

OVO: What is it that makes you bored?

Melissa: When l didn’t have a job and everyone else in the house would be at work, I felt that for that period of the day should be… I would clean the house every day, I’d get up and clean, and I was getting tired of cleaning. You can only clean so much until everything is spotless. Then I would wait for everyone else to come home. I was turning into a housewife! I’d make dinner and clean the house and write letters, I did everything I needed to do and there wasn’t anything else I could do, I was looking for a job but you know how that is. Now I’ve got my job and that’s nice but a bad thing is that sometimes when l get off from work I’m so exhausted l can’t think, so l want something to think for me, so I watch a box that tells me how to think. That’s really dangerous. Lately I’ve stopped letting that control me and I’ve only been watching selective television again. I watch Star Trek on Saturdays and I like the show Alien Nation because it deals with racism. When I first moved to Knoxville I didn’t have a TV for the first few months but I still had the eating disorder. I think it’s beyond television. Television influences so many areas of our lives that you can influenced by television without watching it.

from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)

[Postscript March 2011: Melissa is just fine now and has been for a long time.]

17 July 1990 interview with V. Vale, publisher of Search and Destroy, co-founder of Re/Search Publications.

OVO: What is the main source for the information that you publish?

VALE: We never tire of saying that our main influences were surrealism and situationism, and surrealism as you know placed a great deal of influence on objective chance and randomness and insanity and systems for deciphering the world that are a-logical systems We will admit that a lot of it is just purely chance. But of course through the years we have friends and our friends really help us. For example, the film book [Re/Search #10 Incredibly Strange Films] which was actually the first book that broke out of our small industrial music underground audience, that was done just because we got a letter from Jim Morton, who had been collecting these incredible films all his life but particularly since the advent of VCR. He wrote us, and then we went over to his house every Saturday night for years and watched two or three of four movies there and ate popcorn. It took four or five years he guest-edited the Incredibly Strange Films book and we put it out. We wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t known Jim Morton, let’s face it.

OVO: What is the purpose of Re/Search?

VALE: The surrealists had a slogan, something like “Matter Over Mind,” but what it meant was it is a mistake just to assume that one proceeds from the idea to the material reality. Very often its just the opposite. You might say the material reality suggests the theory, shall we say, and frankly I got started publishing back in ’77 because of punk rock. Of course it wasn’t called that then but it was very exciting, as undifferentiated and undefined and unlimited as it appeared to be because it was revolt, it was the youth revolt or revolution (if you dare to use that word) of the ’70s. And I was involved right from the very beginning before it had become codified and more or less set in amber. And so for me it was like a vehicle, it was an opportunity to… I don’t know, I just did it. My main motivation was kind of anger at the status quo. I’d always been angry at the status quo anyway, but, you know, what do you do? 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 all 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 only along channels of consumption rather than you yourself doing something creative on your own, something creative and original and obsessive and unique on your own.  I don’t think society can really handle that, because it’s too destabilizing.  It’s like we’re in a vast consumption machine, we’re part of it, and society would function (it thinks) better if we would just go along with the programs.  And so obviously anyone who is a lover of freedom is going to go against that in all its manifestations.  And yet it’s not just enough to fight, whatever that means.  You have to eventually start doing something.  And in our case we more or less accidentally discovered that we could do something and sort of realize our own identities and destinies by becoming publishers.  Re/Search however is not the same as Search and Destroy.  Re/Search happened when I met Andrea [Juno] back in 1980, after we’d been very depressed for a year by what we thought was the death of punk rock.  It was certainly the death of punk rock as we knew it, that is as a viable underground, a microcosmos of society.  We were depressed for a year but then realized that this shouldn’t be the end of publishing.

OVO: Are the Re/Search archives open to the public?

Vale: No, because we’re not public figures.  If all we were to do were to run a library we’d never get any work done, and obviously our work comes first.  It’s hard enough as it is right now just to deal with all the business aspects let alone function as some sort of archive.  It so happens that we’ve been attacked by Jesse Helms [R-NC] and Dana Rohrabacher [R-CA] and entered into the Congressional Record because they don’t like our book Modern Primitives, which is yet another Re/Search publication which is advocating a certain theory of self-liberation or exploration.  That’s all it was intended to do, provide theory for this kind of activity, but apparently the powers that be would like to have this kind of theory and information repressed.

OVO: What kind of trouble have they been giving you?

VALE: Actually we should context this in a much wider overview that obviously America right now is under (thanks to less than probably one-tenth of one percent of the population) which is these very organized fundamentalist Christian fascists who have nothing to do with their lives but write letters all day to their congressman and call up advertisers threatening to boycott things like The Simpsons.  In other words, a minority group trying to pretend and camouflaging themselves as some kind of vox populi majority, which they are not. They’re mostly these very ignorant people in the South, people who have long since shut off any creative potential in their lives.  They’re just consumed by envy and they want to control all the rest of the population, who might be having more fun than them in some way. The Reagan agenda was to turn the country back to the McCarthy ’50s, since he was an informer for McCarthy, and to take away all the gains of the ’60s.  That complex agenda is still being realized. Every day there’s some new article in the paper on page 40 how 160 stores in the deep South took away Playboy Magazine from their stands. Little things like that don’t even get reported here on the West Coast. Thing like that are happening all the time but the more you find out about it the scarier it gets.

OVO: Yesterday a group called AIDS Response Knoxville had their office fire bombed. I just found out about that this morning.

VALE: If you could send me the clipping… see, that was not in our paper today. It doesn’t surprise me. So what you have now is a great deal of information containment going on. We’re living in the illusion that all the information is available, that were living in a global village and all that, but most people get their information from TV news, which is of course extremely compressed and bowdlerized and operates by omission. We should all be subscribing to our own little clipping services I suppose to get the kind of news such as the incident you told me about just now.

OVO: I didn’t find out about it from the paper. I found out about it from a friend and he said there’s only a tiny article about it.

VALE: That’s perfect, that’s exactly the way things happen and are happening. The propaganda techniques which Hitler initiated in terms of mass media control of the population, they‘re real good now. Helms is a master of negative campaigning, in which life gets simplified down to whether you’re for child pornography and obscenity or… Helms’ voting record is incredible, he’s a madman, the total enemy of liberty. But even when Helms is gone there‘ll always be someone to take his place. This kind of control mentality will apparently always be with us but yet we’re trying to do a small campaign so that all the minority papers across the country will at least have a copy of his voting record and also start to get a larger overview of all these isolated little incidents that’ve been happening, which together paint an extremely depressing picture of the abridgment of our freedoms.

OVO: Have there been specific incidents of you having trouble with Modern Primitives?

VALE: Knock on wood, no. We had two art shows based on the book, and that‘s how it started. If you don’t have any information on this I’ll send it to you.

OVO: No, I don’t have any.

VALE: Okay, I’ll send you the whole little press packet on that, with all the articles that’ve come out. See, that’s what l mean, someone as relatively hip and aware as you don’t know. Multiply this by about a thousand for all the little environmental groups all over. Their little news things never get reported. I just found out today that all the searches that the FBI did of all these Earth First houses, the people involved with Earth First because of two people blown up by a bomb, the FBI keeps reporting to the news that they blew themselves up rather than what they should be doing which is trying to find out who really did it. I didn’t realize until I read the paper today that all the searches the FBI did of people who deal with Earth First were all warrantless. To me that is really frightening. Did you know that? Do you think that means anything? And we only found out because our good friend Jock Sturges, a photographer, got busted recently. We’ve known Jock for years. For the last twenty years he has specifically focused on, shall we say, beautiful adolescent girls who are developing. But they are not pornography, he’s not the head of a kiddie porn ring by any means. He’s got the most incredibly beautiful negatives you’ve ever seen, eight by ten inch view camera negatives blown up to twenty by twenty-four inch prints that have a million gray tones in them. And we only found out from him that basically the First and Fourth Amendments are dead. The Fourth Amendment is unreasonable searches and seizures. Because the FBI just busted into his house without a search warrant. And this was all done, as Burroughs has kept us appraised of and warned us against all these years, in the name of fighting the “drug problem.” Because here’s what they can say now: they can come in because (a) they have a reason to believe you are about to destroy evidence and (b) they have a right to watch you because they have reason to believe you might try to commit suicide or commit harm to yourself. Isn’t that nice?

OVO: They’ve certainly got our best interests in mind.

VALE: Yes, of course.

OVO: How do you prevent Re/Search from becoming a part of the process of -

VALE: – co-option and assimilation? You’re dealing with what McLuhan called a very cool medium (or is it hot, I can never get that straight), but you’re dealing with a medium that is a book, and do you realize how few people read anymore? The numbers are incredible, how much reading has declined even though the population has doubled. When people do read, what do they read? They mostly lead these airport kind of books. It’s really frightening. The reason most people avoid books is because, let’s face it, there’s only a minority that reads any more, almost everyone else watches television and gets their information from TV. And in order to read effectively I find that l must have complete silence, as much as possible, and this is not the modem way. A lot of people these days, it’s like a conspiracy to keep them from thinking. As soon as they get up in the morning they have their radio blaring or put on a tape or something. We’ve all known people who’ve had the TV on eight hours a day. Of course we don’t know people like that any more, but they’re out there, like zombies or something. And so I still think that if you’re putting something out in a book you have more of a chance of making it with some kind of integrity. Because books aren’t you, Re/Search is not me or Andrea; it’s on its own. And if it has some ideas that light up your brain and catalyze in some way, which is the best that one can hope for… the books really do have a life of their own. And we’re just putting out a combination of information, images and ideas, hopefully, as well as trying to direct people to other books, which continue the same kind of inspiration.

Re/Search
20 Romolo Street #B
San Franslsco CA 94133 USA
http://researchpubs.com/

from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)

Update, February 2011
Jim Morton writes about films, pop culture, and advertising.
http://popvoid.blogspot.com/

Boyd Rice was formerly credited as guest editor for Re/Search #10 Incredibly Strange Films.
http://www.boydrice.com/

Andrea Juno founded Juno Books.
http://twitter.com/AnimaJuno

Jesse Alexander Helms, Jr. died in 2008.

Dana Tyron Rohrabacher is the U.S. Representative for California’s 46th Congressional district.

AIDS Response Knoxville served at least between 1987 and 1999 and may still exist.

Jock Sturges’ studio was the subject of an FBI raid on 25 April 1990. Accused of child pornography, a Grand Jury did not bring an indictment against him.

Wikipedia, Judi Bari Car Bombing:

In 1990, a bomb exploded in Judi Bari’s car, shattering her pelvis and also injuring fellow activist Darryl Cherney. Bari and Cherney were later arrested after police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation suspected that they had been transporting the bomb when it accidentally exploded. The case against them was eventually dropped due to lack of evidence. Bari died in 1997 of cancer, but her federal lawsuit against the FBI and Oakland, California police resulted in a 2002 jury verdict awarding her estate and Darryl Cherney a total of $4.4 million. Eighty percent of the damages were for violation of their First Amendment rights by the FBI and police trying to discredit them in the media as violent extremists despite ample evidence to the contrary. The bombing remains unsolved.

Kerry W. Thornley
The Idle Warriors
Atlanta: IllumiNet Press 1991

Written between 1959 and 1961, The Idle Warriors is the story of a troop of Marines in the Far East getting laid, pulling pranks, eating and talking about life. It’s a story similar to any number of films and books from that time both in style and content. But there are two significant qualities in this book that set it apart from, say a Bowery Boys film (which is what it reminds me of the most).

First, it is written by Kerry Thornley.  I’ve been reading Kerry’s work since 1979 and have always found him insightful and interesting.  I also consider him a friend and it’s always good to see a friend make it.

Second, one of the characters in the novel, Johnny Shelburn, is based on a friend Kerry had in the Marines named Lee Harvey Oswald.  In his introduction Kerry said he was trying to explain why Lee defected to the USSR.  In hindsight he said he failed, and I agree.  But the book is still a sort of eerie novelty, like the appearance of Fidel Castro as an extra in a Busby Berkeley film.  Kerry’s introduction by itself makes the book well worth reading.

from OVO 11 CONTROL (September 1991)
see also OVO 17 The Dreadlock Recollections (January 2007)

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

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

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

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

“Regards,

“Sondra London”

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

(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)

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

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

(from OVO 10 MAYHEM July 1991)

Trevor Blake: The Residents. 1990.

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]

I published work by Karen Elliot in OVO 3 (1987)

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’s V 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.

Today (25 November) was a special day in the life of Yukio Mishima.  And it happens that today is also the US holiday of Thanksgiving.

No higher honour could have come to me than to have been permitted to partake of his stewed chicken.  Every morning, with profound gratitude in my heart, I ate the gizzard and the tough parts of the liver.  He ate only the soft parts, and I ate the rest. – Mishima, Five Modern Noh Plays

May you have gratitude in your heart as you eat the gizzard and the tough parts of the liver.

OVO triumphus for Yukio Mishima for 2009.
OVO triumphus for Yukio Mishima for 2008.

There is no context for the man whose name is tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE calls himself a mad scientist, a neoist, a SubGenius – Tim Ore, Karen Elliot, Monte Cantsin – a krononaut. One of the many publications by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE was titled DCC#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 entirely apart from all the other books, so does tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE stand entirely apart from all other people.

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. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s earlier tattoos consisted of a red and green brain over the greater part of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s head (creating the 3-D effect of actually seeing into his skull), crossed thigh bones over tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s chest and a DNA coil from navel to penis. Later, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE made a tattoo index of the various scars on tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s body. Using white ink, the scars were numbered according to when they were received and created a representational icon to go next to it (a tree on the forehead, razor on the right arm, window shade on the left thigh, etc.). tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has appeared in public wearing a shirt that reveals his chest. It is not a normal chest, but one with six small sow-like teats. Forbidden only by economic circumstance from actual advanced genetic engineering, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has advanced tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s evolution in other ways.

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE does not look like anyone else. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE fashioned a suit of clothes made from zippers, which can be unzipped into a single, long strip. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE made a frightening suit of long-hair wigs of many colors and fashions, and shoulder bags of giant globes with leather shoulder straps and hinged openings. With the understanding that ‘mustaches make a man,’ tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE shaved twelve mustaches onto tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s head to be twelve times a man (or twelve times more accessible to normals). At another point, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE shaved a ring of hair from the top of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s head, in front of one ear, under the chin, behind the other ear (by gluing hair behind the ear) and back up to the top of the head: the effect was someone with their face on sideways. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has worn displaced false eyelashes and adhesive stickers instead of ‘clothes,’ peanut butter instead of makeup.

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE does not live like anyone else. His home defies convention. For extended periods of time the majority of what would normally be open space in tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s room was occupied by eight-foot diameter weather balloons; to navigate, one had to work around them. I had the rare opportunity to visit his laboratory in 1987. The front door opened to the back of a metal shelf, forcing one to walk sideways along a wall to enter the room. And to enter the room, one had to walk across his bed which was lying on the floor. Inside the room were shelves and drawers and cabinets full of experiments, documentation and equipment, all cobbled together from the least expensive of sources.

The biological processes of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE do not appear to be fully human. For five months as a teenager tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE did not bathe, brush the hair or clean the teeth, urinated outside whenever possible and often refrained from wiping the anus after elimination. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has been a ‘professional asshole’ in medical schools, serving as a model in genital / rectal examinations, and taken untested drugs for pay during medical trials. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has been known to ingest toxins and receive profound physical injuries without apparent long-term damage. No child co-created by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is known to have survived.

Perhaps because tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is more, less or other than human, t tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has demonstrated on several well-documented occasions the ability to interact with animals to a degree suggesting a special affiliation with them. 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 a blind companion. When the two board a bus, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is not charged a fee – tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has, in the context of the bus, become what tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE appears to be. A videotape from the same European expedition has a nude tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE wearing a ‘Donald Duck’ mask to increase the animal appearance as tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE communes with seals on the coast of Scotland. These otherwise timid animals appear entirely at ease near tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE; they are intimidated by the camera operator more than the animal / scientist.

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is a magician, but of no previous school. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has demonstrated, time and again, that with only an application of thought and effort the marvelous can erupt in the mundane. In December 1979 tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE and several collaborators took two boxes of live crabs to a shopping mall in Baltimore, Maryland, where Santa Claus was meeting children. Prior to arrival they had tied the arms and legs of plastic babies to the crabs’ backs. They released the crabs around Santa’s cottage and stood back, watching the reaction of the crowd that gathered around the confused and weak crabs. “I’m glad someone’s doing this,” a woman was heard to say. The introduction of a random / magical element into the mundane world of Santa’s cottage at a shopping mall brought forth an even more random, even more magical response. The wizard gave a public demonstration of powers, and spontaneously a member of the crowd found herself ‘understanding’ it more, perhaps, than the wizard himself.

Mathematics has been advanced by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. Using stencils, tentatively a convenience initiated ‘folk math’ on the walls of public buildings in Baltimore. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE engineered a perpetual pataphysical calendar, and has performed music on synthesizers by reading the parameters of a patch created by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE (the mathematical information holding more potential for the listener than its application). Grammar and diction have also been accelerated by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE: here is an example of his own script:

i 1st met gayle at a halloween party in t he apt building turned commune
in wch she resided in wash d c wch was temporarily housing
a suggestion box i made t he ntrance 2 wch was made
from a simulated cunt made from rubber.
t he friend i’d given t he suggestion box 2
was wearing a dildo on his head like a unicorn horn
& gayle (wearing a black leotard) was sucking on it.
later t ha t nite i wsa playing w/ a computer connected keyboard & CRT
when gale came in2 t he room w/ an approximately 8″ in diameter
frozen wad of actual bulls’ eyes
& placed them next 2 t he keyboard at wch i was seated.
i was impressed.
t he computer room had a couch in it
& i later learned t ha t some1 had spent t he nite in t he room
w/out having noticed t he eyeballs
& upon awakening in t he morning 2 find them no longer frozen
& scattered about on t he floor of t he small room
ran screaming in terror thruout t he commune..

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE injects humor into his reports by revealing the hidden laughter in words – the becomes ‘tee hee,’ that becomes ‘tee ha (t).’ tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has transmitted information via telephone, television, radio, audio and video cassette, vinyl and computer – no medium is outside the parameter of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, but the use each medium is put it is always at the parameter of its abilities.

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 its 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.

Over the course of sixteen years, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE wrote down the word and phrases that appeared in the mind of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE while half-asleep. The resulting text was gathered into a book titled ‘telepathy receptivity training,’ and includes

blinkey modeling
i can’t see washing my hands in cake
something backwards, you have to have one of those things and two of everything
i call upon the rules and the grey moving sand…

For sixteen years work, the results are only ten pages of large-typeface text – not unlike the notebook of a botanist who searches for plants so exotic they are found only once in a lifetime. Few artists would be willing to present such a small return for so many years work, while any scientist would be proud of such dedication.

Another of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s projects is ‘mike film.’ In the late 1970s tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE conceived of a way to transmute a certain number of artifacts he had created into a context easier to transport and store and which lent itself readily to further research by others. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE made a Super-8 film of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s possessions, processed the film, gave away or destroyed tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s possessions, and proceeded to cut the cells of the film into individual photographs… approximately 46,800 photographs. The ‘mike film’ (mike as an abbreviation for microscopic and suggestive of microfilm) was then bundled in small packets and distributed to individuals and organizations all over the world. The recipients were then encouraged to distribute the film in the most creative way they knew, document the distribution and return the results to tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. Every few years tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE publishes a ‘mike film distribution form’ which serves as a scientific journal on the dissemination of mike film. Mike film has been deposited in art brut museums, launched from balloons, consumed, worn as pasties, hidden in national monuments, smuggled into prisons and dropped in the ocean. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE dreams (with advance knowledge of the future?) of an archaeologist discovering mike film and examining it under a microscope.

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. A very small amount of advance funding or sales has supported tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s research, but 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.

What evidence is there that tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE comes from the future? tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has in the past affiliated himself with the Krononautic Society, an international and informal society of time travelers. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE seems exceptionally unable to assimilate into normal society while being entirely familiar with its customs – and yet year after year, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE survives and continues the research without funding, a steady income, and sometimes without a home. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has exhibited the ability to change tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE and tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s environment in ways that appear magical but are in fact based on a superior technology of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE own creation.

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is outside normal definitions of benevolence and wickedness, although tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE does have a highly articulated definition of both as applied to tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE. There have been reports of violent tantrums and theft by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, of indifference to others and cruelty. It is difficult to evaluate the behavior of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE by any but tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s own standards.

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE lived in Baltimore for many years: after an unsuccessful experiment in creating a book and record store (called NORMALS), tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has left Baltimore and is currently in perpetual transit in North America. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE has been spotted in several cities, each time sending out a progress report just before the circumstances of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s residence are suddenly altered (sometimes by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s design, other times by a host’s intolerance of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE’s experiments). While the rest of us advance backwards towards the future, tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE is simply returning from whence he came. What will happen when the present and the future intersect, and the world of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE and our world become one?

- 1997, previously unpublished.

See also:
OVO 12 Science (November 1991)
OVO 7 Information (October 1989)
OVO 2 (July 1987)

I was a used and rare bookseller in much of the 1990s. Selling books was a life-long goal and I am glad I was able do it. In January 1995 I had the chance to catalog a wonderful collection that disappeared soon after. This is that weird tale.

When I arrived at work that morning my boss said he had a project for me. Someone had brought in a major collection of works by and about Clark Ashton Smith, and I was to catalog what they were for sale. I spent several days doing nothing but that, each item more exciting than the last.

The day after I finished my catalog my boss said that the police had come asking about the collection. The seller, it seems, had stolen them from the rightful owner. The books disappeared back into the collection from whence they came. I have no record or memory of who the rightful owner was, I have no way to get in touch with him, and anyone who asks me to do so will be charged a five hundred dollar consultation fee.

What I do have is the catalog I prepared. This catalog has never been published, and I’m guessing that some of the items listed here have also never been published. Here is the catalog, errors and all, one of the many weird tales of my days as a bookseller.

- – -

I – ART

LOVECRAFT/GARCIA by MIKE GARCIA – OUT OF PRINT
Ken Krueger North Hollywood 1975, 1st thus 4to wraps np, fine condition. HPL-inspired artwork from The Library Lovecraftian, reissued & enlarged in an edition limited to 995 copies.

HALLOWEEN IN ARKHAM by HARRY O. MORRIS – SIGNED COLOR PRINTS
Portfolio of fifteen 11″ x 8.5″ color prints in glossy folder with numbered matching envelope. Small stain to cover, smudges to envelope. There is an ocean of bad collage; these are not among them. Good use of color and perspective, very high quality prints.

MAGIC LANTERN by CHRISTINE PASANEN & HARRY MORRIS – OUT OF PRINT
Esoteric Order of Dagon APA Albuquerque 1981, 1st edition 8vo oblong wraps np, fine condition. Story by Pasanen, collages by Morris, color cover, very dreamy.

ORIGINAL DRAWINGS BY CLARK ASHTON SMITH
Eleven original drawings by Clark Ashton Smith, generally 4″ x 3″, individually mounted. Profiles of human heads, some Arabesque, some portraits, some grotesques, all signed. ‘A Slave,’ ‘The Gorgio,’ ‘A Gentleman of the Renaissance,’ ‘Leopardi,’ ‘Parisians,’ ‘Alastor’ and five untitled drawings.

THE FANTASTIC ART OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH by DENNIS RICKARD – OUT OF PRINT
Mirage Press Baltimore 1973, 1st edition 4to wraps @ 48 pp, fine condition. Published in a single edition of approximately 15,000 copies, this book concentrates on the weird sculpture of C.A.S.: tiny stone fetishes with names like ‘Tsathoggua’ and ‘Mysteriarch.’ Accomplished, wish I had one. Introduced by Gahan Wilson.

GROTESQUES AND FANTASTIQUES by CLARK ASHTON SMITH – OUT OF PRINT
Gerry de la Ree, Saddle River 1973. 1st edition, 8vo wraps 40 pp, very good condition. Previously unpublished drawings and poems by C.A.S. from the personal collection of Gerry de la Ree. Printed in a first edition of 600 copies, of which this is #241.

CLARK ASHTON SMITH – ARTIST by GERRY DE LA REE – OUT OF PRINT
Hyperborian League, nd. 4to wraps 12 pp, very good condition. An appreciation of Smith as an artist, commercial and not-so-commercial. Illustrated.

CLARK ASHTON SMITH DUST JACKETS
Dust jackets for Lost Worlds, The Abomination of Yondo, Genius Loci and Out of Space and Time from UK publisher Neville Spearman. Folded once along spine, light wear else very good.

II – MAGAZINES

THE ARKHAM COLLECTOR – COMPLETE RUN AND DUPLICATES
Announcements of present and coming publications, bibliographical notes, art, poetry, letters, photographs, reproduced manuscripts, recommended reading, etc. Each 16mo issue contains a great deal of uncollected Arkham lore. Duplicate copies of Numbers Seven through Ten.

Number One – Summer 1967 – 24 pp – some underlining.
Number Two – Winter 1968 – 52 pp – some underlining.
Number Three – Summer 1968 – 88 pp.
Number Four – Winter 1969 – 124 pp – light smudging.
Number Five – Summer 1969 – 156 pp – light smudging.
Number Six – Winter 1970 – 180 pp – light smudging.
Number Seven – Summer 1970 – 220 pp – light smudging.
Number Eight – Winter 1971 – 256 pp.
Number Nine – Spring 1971 – 300 pp – light smudging.
Number Ten – Summer 1971 – 348 pp – light smudging.

FROM BEYOND THE DARK GATEWAY ISSUE FOUR
Silver Scarab Albuquerque 1977, 4to wraps 36 pp. HLP-ish fanzine with contributions and reprints from Campbell, Bloch, Morris and others.

INSIDE ISSUE TWO
Jonathan White New York 1963, 16mo wraps 54 pp.
Science fiction magazine including Maya by Clark Ashton Smith.

NYCTALOPS
Edited & with art by Harry Morris, high quality printing and lots of color art. All issues 4to size. Cockcroft, Garcia, Lumley, Morris, Sidney-Fryer, Wilgus – und Lovecraft, Lovecraft, uber alles. Scholarly, not just cheerleading. Watch the gothic aesthetic being born in these nine issues.

#9 – 1974 49 pp – errata page, rear page detached.
#11/12 – 1976 122 pp – good condition.
#13 – 1977 45 pp – very good condition.
#14 – 1978 52 pp – very good condition.
#16 – 1981 52 pp – very good condition.
#17 – 1982 63 pp – fine condition, duplicate, promotional card.
#18 – 1983 68 pp – fine condition, duplicate.

WHISPERS
Bloch, Campbell, Drake, Garcia, Howard, King, Lieber, Lumley, Russell, Wilson and plenty of HPLphilia. All issues 16mo.

V1 #2 December 1973 64 pp – very good condition.
V2 #4 December 1975 68 pp – duplicate, errata sheet, color plates, very good condition.
V3 #1 December 1976 67 pp – very good condition.
V3 #3-4 October 1978 132 pp – square bound, color plates, very good condition.

III – BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS

FANTASY COLLECTOR’S ANNUAL 1974 – MAKES YOUR JAW DROP
Gerry de la Ree Saddle River 1971, 4to wraps 64 pp, very good condition. ‘In the 36 years I have been active as a reader and collector in the fantasy and science fiction fields, I have amassed a great quantity of rarities and unique material. These are, of course, part of the joys of collecting. But to let such things merely collect dust in file cabinets or on bookshelves seems rather pointless.’ So de la Ree published this volume of glimpses into his truly astounding collection: unpublished letters, poems and art by E. A. Poe, Mahlon Blaine, H. P. Lovecraft – get the idea? Number 232 of a limited first edition of 500 copies.

INDEX TO THE VERSE IN WEIRD TALES by THOMAS COCKCROFT – OUT OF PRINT
Thomas G. L. Cockcroft, Lower Hutt NZ 1960, 1st edition, 8vo sq. wraps 16 pp. Arranged by title, then by author, as well as verse included in fiction, Virgil Finlay’s poetry series, Oriental Magic, a magazine index and The Thrill book. Signed by the author, limited to 500 copies.

A HISTORY OF THE NECROMOMICON by H. P. LOVECRAFT – SPECIAL LIMITED EDITION
Necronomicon Press West Warwick 1977, 16mo wraps np, fine condition. The first edition of this title was limited to a printing of four hundred and fifty copies, fifty copies of the original five hundred being lost by the U. S. Postal Service. This edition, the second, consists of five hundred numbered copies, of which this is #113.

H. P. LOVECRAFT: A SYMPOSIUM – OUT OF PRINT
Riverside Quarterly Los Angeles, 1st edition, nd 16mo wraps 17 pp. Robert Block, Arthur Jean Cox, Fritz Leiber, Sam Russel and Leland Sapiro on HPL, transcribed from the 24 October 1963 meeting of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. Annotated by August Derleth.

THE OCCULT LOVECRAFT by H. P. LOVECRAFT
Gerry de la Ree Saddle River 1975, 1st edition 8vo wraps 40 pp, fine condition. First appearance anywhere of two essays on the occult by HPL, with stellar artwork by Stephen Fabian, introductions by Frank Belknap Long and Samuel Loveman, and occult commentary by Anthony Raven. Limited to an edition of 990, of which this is #182. Just try and find this one anywhere else. Buy it before I do, please.

THE LAST OF THE GREAT ROMANTIC POETS by DONALD SIDNEY-FRYER – OUT OF PRINT
Silver Scarab Press Albuquerque 1973, 1st edition 4to wraps @ 26 pp, very good condition. An attempt to define the romantic tradition from its beginnings in the Middle Ages to modern times, firmly placing the Smith / Lovecraft / Howard circles therein. Illustrated by Herb Arnold.

THE FANES OF DAWN by CLARK ASHTON SMITH – LIMITED EDITION
The Fugitive Poems / Second Series – Fourth Volume / Xiccarph Edition 1976, 8vo wraps with special envelope, np. Book in as new condition, envelope very good. A total of 303 copies of this edition were printed, of which this is #28. Eight poems. Errata sheet.

SEER OF THE CYCLES by CLARK ASHTON SMITH – LIMITED EDITION
The Fugitive Poems / Second Series – Fifth Volume / Xiccarph Edition 1976, 8vo wraps with special envelope np. Book in as new condition, envelope lightly smudged. A total of 325 copies of this edition were printed, of which this is #28. Eleven poems.

THE BURDEN OF THE SUNS by CLARK ASHTON SMITH – LIMITED EDITION
The Fugitive Poems / Second Series – Sixth Volume / The Burden of the Suns. Xiccarph Edition 1977, 8vo wraps with special envelope np. Book in as new condition, envelope very lightly smudged. A total of 295 copies of this edition were printed, of which this is #28. Eight poems.

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY PUBLISHED BY ARKHAM HOUSE AND MYCROFT & MORAN 1939 – 1976 by DICK SPELMAN – OUT OF PRINT
Institute for Specialized Literature, North Hollywood nd, 10 pp 4to wraps, very light wear. Indexed by author and title, date, pages, copies and original price of the two publishing houses listed, cross-indexed by title.

IV – MANUSCRIPTS

ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS OF CLARK ASHTON SMITH
Predominantly poems, some translated prose and poetry; one page of English language text with date unless noted. Includes typed and mimeographed manuscripts, some with tape repairs. Dates range from 1915 to 1929.

ONE
Artemis – poem, signed, tape repairs.
Autumn Twilight – poem with corrections, signed.
Baillement – poem, signed, tape repairs.
The Barrier – poem with corrections, signed.
Beauty – poem with corrections, signed, tape repairs.
Beauty Implacable – poem, signed, notation at bottom, tape repairs.
Chance – poem with corrections, signed, tape repairs.
The Chimera – poem with corrections, signed.
Connaisance / Similitudes – two poems, signed, tape repairs.
Dead Love – poem with corrections, signed.
The Desert Garden – poem with corrections, signed.
Desolation – poem with corrections, signed.
Enigma – poem with corrections, signed.
En Sourdine – poem with corrections, tape repairs.
The Ennuye – poem with corrections, signed.
Exotic Perfume – poem, signed, tape repairs.
Faun-Lilies / Plum-Lovers – two poems, signed, tape repairs.
The Garden of Dreams – poem with corrections, signed.
Impression – poem with corrections, signed.
Incognita – poem, signed, tape repairs.
The Incubus of Time – poem with corrections, signed.
Inheritance – poem with corrections, signed.
Laus Mortis – poem, signed.
Le Mauvais Moine – poem with corrections, signed, tape repairs.
Les Aveugles – translation with corrections, signed.
Les Hiboux / Le Coucher d’un Soleil Romantique – two translations w/corr., signed.
Loss – poem, signed, tape repairs.
Maya – poem, signed, tape repairs.
Memorial – poem with corrections, signed.
Mirage – poem, signed.
Mirrors – poem with corrections, signed.
Mystery – poem, signed, tape repairs.
Necromancy – poem with corrections, signed, tape repairs.
Nocturne – poem with corrections, signed.
Moon-Dawn – poem with corrections, signed.
Nightfall – poem, signed.
A Prayer – poem with corrections, signed.
Psalm – poem with corrections, signed.
Query – poem with corrections, signed, tape repairs.
Reclamation – poem with corrections, signed.
The Refuge of Beauty – poem, signed.
The Remorse of the Dead – poem, signed, tape repairs.
Satiety / Song – two poems with corrections, signed, tape repairs.
Secret Love / Forgotten Sorrow – two poems, signed, tape repairs.
Solution – poem with corrections, signed.
Suggestion – poem with corrections, signed.
Vaticinations / The Autumn Lake / Harmony – three poems on a single page.
hall Meet / Brumal – two poems, signed.

This collection also includes envelope to Samuel Loveman from C.A.S. dated 5 March 1919 and 8 February 1980 letter from publisher / collector Gerry de la Ree to ‘John’ regarding the sale of C.A.S. poems.

TWO
Alexandrins – poem, French, signed with notation.
Canticle – poem, signed.
Clair De Lune – poem, correction.
Cumuli – poem, signed.
The Denial of St. Peter – translation, signed.
En Sourdine – translation, signed.
February – poem, signed.
L’Amor et le Crane – translation with notation.
L’Amour Supreme – poem, signed.
Le Faune – poem.
L’Imprevu – translation, two pages, signed.
Madrigal of Evanscence – poem, signed.
Paiennerie – poem, French, signed.
Solvet Seclum – translation.
Sonnet Lunaire – poem, French, signed.
Spectral Life – poem.
Sufficiency – poem- signed.
Une Vie Spectrale – poem, French, signed.
The Vampire – translation, signed.
Vaticination – poem, signed.

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.

Article continues.

A true personal experience by Nabil Shaban. Nabil is about to embark on a full time postgraduate Masters degree in Psychology Research Methods, and upon hopefully successful completion, will move on to Ph.D research in Parapsychology.

During the winter of 95, I was on a theatrical tour of England and Scotland. I was starring as Volpone, a lecherous old con artist, in a new adaptation of Ben Johnson’s play. (You probably know Ben Johnson was a contemporary of Shakespeare). Our theatre company, Graeae, had created a radical version which was entitled FLESH FLY. The poster was a colour photo of me, semi-nude in kinky bondage gear and a gag-ball in my mouth, suspended from the ceiling. People who came to see the show often complained of being disappointed that I didn’t actually appear on stage as depicted in the poster. I guess it was just a cheap advertising gimmick… not my idea, I hasten to add… but I did enjoy going along with it.

All the actors in the production had a disability… Graeae, which I created with a friend in 1979, is a theatre company of disabled performers. Although I left the company in 1981, I occasionally return to do the odd production. FLESH FLY was the last show I did with them.

A production assistant on the show was a woman called Teresa… her boyfriend was acting in the play with me. After a week or so, I noticed that Teresa was paying a lot of attention towards me… I had a feeling she was somehow attracted to me. She was always making me coffee, sitting next to me in the bar… then when we stayed in hotels with indoor swimming pools, she would volunteer to teach me how to swim, she would ask to go in the sauna with me and often ask me to go shopping or to the cinema with her. All the time I was feeling a bit awkward because I could see that her boyfriend was getting quite stressed by our friendship. I was determined to keep the relationship platonic. I didn’t want to hurt my colleague and I didn’t want to jeopardise the play. I try to stick to my rule never mix business with pleasure… I try not to get sexually or emotionally involved with people I am currently working with. But… I still couldn’t help falling in love with Teresa and desiring her. However, I kept these feelings and yearnings to myself… except…

One day, when we were in Aberdeen, Scotland… it was now January 96…  I was driving through the city to the theatre. It was the afternoon and we had a performance that evening. I was thinking intently about Teresa… wanting her badly, wishing that I could have a relationship with her without having to hurt anyone… I wanted her to somehow “feel” my love, know that I was thinking about her. As I drove I kept thinking her name, pouring all my emotion into an mental image of her.

I was convinced she would be aware of my sendings… because I had been successful before with another woman I had been madly in love with several years previously. I mean, I had managed to send a telepathic message to a fellow student when I was at university. At the time I was having a bad trip with a load of magic mushrooms I’d taken. I was feeling very sad, alone, depressed, paranoid and I was desperate for love of a woman. There was this Pakistani girl (her name was Bangla) I had fallen in love with. We were friends and she had told me she was psychic. She had once heard her father’s voice calling her name in her room when they were thousands of miles apart. Minutes afterwards the phone rang and it was her father asking if she was alright… he had had a feeling she was in deep trouble and she was. Since I knew she was psychic… .and I knew that certain hallucinogenic substances can enhance telepathic abilities because there had been successful ESP experiments with people on LSD and magic mushrooms… plus – it was well-attested that love as energy was a powerful booster to psychic transmission… I concluded that with all these conditions present, if I tried to communicate to Bangla, there was a high probability it would work. So, I kept calling “Bangla” in my mind, calling her name over and over again, pleading with her to come to me. It was 3 o’clock in the morning… well, she didn’t come when I mentally called for her… so I eventually went to my room and crashed out. Then at nine in the morning there was a knock on my door and in walked Bangla. She looked at me strangely… deep concern was etched across her face. She asked me if I was alright. I said “yeah, fine, thanks.” She sat down on my bed and kept staring at me. She asked again if I was okay because she thought I looked a complete mess. Had I been drinking heavily? Was I suffering from a hangover? I said No but I had spent the night tripping out on magic mushrooms and now I’m just coming down to earth, chilling out, man. Everything is fine, I feel cool.

She laughed and then frowned and shook her head. “Something weird happened last night” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah – well, actually it was this morning, early this morning. I was still up at my desk, trying to finish this essay which I have to hand in today” she said, still staring hard at me, but mainly out of the corner of her eye.

“Yeah, did you get the essay written?”

“No, because what happened really disturbed me… I haven’t been able to concentrate since.”

“What was it that freaked you out?” I asked, intrigued.

“As I said I was writing at the desk… when I heard a voice in the room… behind me.”

“You heard a voice?”

“Yes… right in the middle of my room, behind my back. It kept calling my name – Bangla, Bangla, Bangla… ” she said.

“That’s amazing,” I exclaimed “What time was this?”

“I don’t know exactly. Around three o’clock, I think.”

“That is fantastic!” I then proceeded to tell her of my attempts to psychically transmit a plea for help to her. “And that was about three this morning” I added.

“Yes, I thought it was you. The voice was like yours except it was more childlike… it sounded like you was a child in trouble. But it was definitely your voice. That’s why I thought I’d better come and see if you were alright.”

That was one of the most important experiences of my life. It was proof of paranormal abilities, of being able to use them at will. I realised it was totally possible to develop and exploit the latent skills of telepathic communication.

However, I chose never to try it again… until that day in Aberdeen, 7 or 8 years later. This time without the narcotic boost of magic mushrooms… just LOVE. I concentrated hard on Teresa.

Well, eventually I reached the theatre and went to the dressing room and got ready for the evening show. I saw Teresa before the show but she didn’t say much except that there was a party after the show in the bar. I’m a bit of an introvert and I don’t drink alcohol (I stopped back in ‘82 when I could see the writing on the wall warning me not to go the way of the likes of Richard Burton and Oliver Reed… not that as an actor I was in their league but I could have been as a drinker), so I don’t normally socialise after a performance. I usually prefer to go straight back to the hotel room and read a book. I’m so boring, aren’t I…

This night, however, I decided to be different. I like to be unpredictable. I surprised everyone by appearing at the party. Teresa was particularly pleased when someone told her I was around, hiding in a corner. She sought me out and asked if she could sit in the empty chair next to me. I was overjoyed. “Yeah, of course” I said.

“You save it for me, then?” she asked mischievously.

“Nah, you must be joking. There’s this tall leggy blond, I’ve got my eye on.” I lied. “Can’t you see… her name is carved on the back of the seat.”

“Well, I’d better not hang around, then. Don’t want to ruin your chances, eh?”, she said, grinning, giving me a sharp dig in the ribs.

“Nah, it’s alright… she won’t mind you having the seat for five minutes. She’s not the possessive type.”

Suddenly, there’s a serious expression on Teresa’s face. “Are you really reserving this chair for someone?”

“Nah, just joking.”

“Because I’ve got to tell you about something that happened this afternoon. Something really weird.”

“Oh? What was that, then?” I asked, intrigued.

“You don’t mind me telling you about it? I know you like to be left alone after a performance. I’m not disturbing you, am I?”

“No, of course not. What was the really weird thing that happened?”

“Well, I was in your dressing-room, gathering your costume together to put it in the washing machine and have it ironed before this evening’s show.”

“About what time this afternoon?” I asked.

“Hmm… something like two-thirty.”

“Oh right”, my mind was racing… I had a feeling I knew what was coming next.

“Well, you know on the back of the dressing room door, there’s this full length mirror?” Teresa says, watching me intently.

“Yeah… ”

“Well, as I picked up your washing, I turned and looked at my reflection in the mirror… and this bit is really weird… I swear it happened. It was as clear as I see you now.”

“What?”

“I saw my reflection and then suddenly, my head disappeared and was replaced by YOURS. Your head was on my body. You looked straight at me and smiled. Then your head disappeared and mine came back.”

“You are joking?”

“No…  I knew you wouldn’t believe me.” Teresa sounded depressed.

“No, I do. It’s just… I’m amazed. So… I mean… did you just imagine my head on your neck? Was it an image you superimposed in your mind’s eye?”

“No. I had nothing to do with it. It just happened. One minute I saw my face in the mirror… and the next I saw yours. It was a real reflection. It wasn’t like an hallucination.”

“How did you feel when you saw me in the mirror?”

“I was shocked at first. But I felt calm. Seeing you didn’t worry me… except… ”

“What?”

“Well, I’m just left wondering what did it mean? What do you think it happened?”

“Got no idea,” I lied. I was too embarrassed, too scared to tell her that I might have put the image in the mirror. It would have meant declaring my love for her. And I couldn’t possibly do that. I couldn’t rock her boat. “Its all very strange” I said quietly. I really wanted tell her that she saw me because we loved and wanted each other… that there was a special psychic connection between us… but I felt it would have been irresponsible of me to do so… and besides, I might have been mistaken. And I didn’t want to upset my fellow thespian, I didn’t want him to be heartbroken if I ended up taking his girl.

I couldn’t look at Teresa as I denied knowing why she saw me in the mirror. As she got up to rejoin her friends, she asked more emphatically “Why have you got into my head?”

“I don’t know. Do you know?”

“Perhaps it’s best not to know.” she said walking away.

“You could be right, there.” I said feeling both sad and elated. Sad because it was a cop out… an easy retreat… we were both aware of something extraordinary happening between us but neither were prepared to admit it, and take the consequences. Elated because I was privileged to witness another example of the paranormal power of love.

Love and Telepathy copyright © 2000 Nabil Shaban