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Inside: Cultural Sausage. ~ Ludic Lists. ~ Skullbucket. Outside: This piece originally appeared in issue #3 of the excellent monthly newsletter, located right here in Chic, known as Noxious Minutiae, publishe by the vibrant and viscous Tim Miller. And it finally has its own website! Where you can find out how to get a copy of your very own! And you should. Now. "Nightwing wallpaper" "negro sexual prowess" "Eternal Sunshine reflection" "Christian Metallica" "caught in bed with a fox" "midget struck by lightning" "cock stuffing" "dog tails butt plugs" |
08.12.2004
Each month in this space, Leonard Pierce reviews the latest textual offerings, with a special emphasis on the underworldly, the demimondaine and the justly neglected. A particular interest is paid to local publications both imaginary and half-dreamed. The Book of Eibon (Expanded Edition) (PaRappa the Editor [ed.]; Amour Art Publications). The occult books community was rocked last year by a revelation from the small art books imprint Amour Art that they had fully restored a copy of the legendary Liber Ibonicus. Long thought to be one of the most dangerous and powerful repositories of hidden mystical wisdom, hinted at in ominous whispers in the same breath as notorious tomes like von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten and the Necronomicon of the Mad Arab Abdul al-Hazred, the Book of Eibon had only before been seen in fragments, but Amour Art claimed to have unearthed a complete edition while looking through a cache of long-lost Picasso sketchbooks that had been unintentionally misfiled in the Juvenile & Young Adult section of the Jackson Hole, MT public library between two paperback copies of Sweet Valley High: 14-Cheerleader Carnage. Finally released this month to great fanfare, many were disappointed that the full version of the ghoulish book contained not forbidden secrets of summoning unspeakable demons of dubious provenance, but furniture restoration tips. However, these critics, in their endless quest for ‘authenticity’, are overlooking a very important point: they are quite excellent furniture restoration tips, of inordinate value to cultists of dead gods and weekend handymen alike. Commander Caldwell’s 53rd Annual Guide to Guides to Expired Calendars (Commander Ignacio X. Caldwell; St. Expiry Press). Since 1951, the Commander Caldwell series (still written by the now 104-year old Ignacio Caldwell, a naval commander during the Korean War who made a name for himself by inexplicably torpedoing seventeen Indian cargo ships) has been the final word in expired calendar guidebook reviews. Each year, Caldwell painstakingly reviews hundreds of books that concern themselves with various aspects of out-of-date calendars and mooted date-books, grading the guides on how comprehensive, complete, easy-to-use and feature-laden they are as well as ranking them by price, visual appeal, weight, and smell. A purist, Caldwell concerns himself only with the guidebooks themselves and not to the calendars to which they refer; the books are thus completely free of graphics aside from the occasional bar graph. The fact that none of the expired calendar guidebooks are currently in print and may never have existed in the first place hardly diminishes the thoroughness of the project; reading through any one of the more than two dozen Guide Guides in the series harkens back to a time when no smart-set American would be caught dead on a train or in a Christian Science Reading Room without an expired calendar. The fact that this time is imaginary does not lessen and may indeed increase its simple appeal. From Ooh to Aah: Remembrances of a Pornographic Screenwriter (Lu-Shin Valiant; Comestein Media Services). Everyone loves pornography, from old men of 119 to young girls who only left the womb when I started writing this paragraph. But few people give much thought to the screenwriter – the forgotten hero of the blue movie industry who weaves the fantastic, magical scenarios that our favorite stars act out in the wettest, stickiest way possible. Lu-Shin Valiant is one of the best, a veteran porn screenwriter who, between his first film (1962’s Manchu Ryan, Candid Date) and his last (2001’s Dude, Where’s My Cock?), worked on an astounding six hundred and twenty three skin flicks. But Valiant was no scenario hack or bottom-shelf dialogist; he was a specialist. His job was writing the verbalizations made by porn stars during a sex scene. So effortless and masterful was his work that many people simply assume that these sounds are improvised when in fact, as Valiant reveals in this ultimate behind-the-behinds tell-all, each one is scripted, often up to six months ahead of time. Readers seeking an in-depth look at the craftsmanship that goes into even the smallest details of the art of smut would be well advised to pick up this amazing memoir of the man who coined some of the world’s best-known sex noises, from “Unnh” to “Huuuh-aaaaaah” to “Fffffffuuuuh---OH, gnnnh!” Classics Illustrated’s Ulysses (Helmut Redegar, based upon the novel by James Joyce; Comical Funnybooks). The good folks at Classics Illustrated have done a journeyman’s work in translating some of the greatest novels of the western canon into comic book form. But until today, they’ve never attempted to take on Joyce’s proto-postmodern masterpiece, Ulysses. Many fans feared what such an adaptation would mean, and the choice of German graphic novelist Helmut Redegar (Himmler My Himmler; You Will Purchase, Read and Enjoy My Latest Comic) has shown their fears to be more than justified. While Redegar is a consummate craftsman whose fantastic design sense, incredible abilities as an illustrator, and keen eye for period detail makes the adaptation a visual treat, he is a confirmed classicist who is on record as calling such modernist innovations as the interior monologue and the stream of consciousness “cheap gimmicks”. Hence, he has made the dubious choice of eliminating all non-external narrative from Joyce’s work, with the end result being that a good 75-80% of the book’s bloated 804 pages consists of Leopold Bloom and/or Stephen Dedalus walking silently around Dublin, stopping from time to time to look at something that is happening just off-panel. Useful as a measure of sheer bloody-minded endurance or as a reference book to no-longer-extant Dublin storefronts, the Classics Illustrated Ulysses must be judged an artistic failure, even when one takes into account the free Tootsie Rolls that accompany it. Hitler Was Right! (Donald Moleciccio; Revisionista Publications). Skokie-based Revisionista Publications is no stranger to controversy; indeed, the small press, which operated out of the basement of a large synagogue until someone found them under the old blanket in the corner next to the paint cans, has at times seemed to deliberately court outrage, as when it published books such as Josef Stalin: A Hell of a Dancer and The Forgive-and-Forget Pol Pot Coloring Book. Their latest offering, by hardcore historical revisionist and dead-animal-pickup technician Donald Moleciccio, succeeds in a way these previous books never could: it’s indisputably accurate on every page. Revisionista has crowed about the inability of mainstream historians to dispute any of the fact contained within its 223 pages; despite their best efforts, opponents of the provocative publisher have so far been thwarted in every attempt to disprove Moleciccio’s painstaking research. The author went through hundreds of thousands of hours of notes taken by Traudl Junge (Hitler’s private secretary) and Rudolf Hess (Hitler’s assistant and deputy Fuhrer of the Reich) in order to produce this shocking and paradigm-shifting work, in which the man thought to be history’s greatest monster makes a number of points that cannot be argued – from “Eva has gone to the shops to purchase a new hat” to “we had cold fish salad for dinner last night” to “I’m sure the sun will rise in the morning, just like always” to “the war does not seem to be going well”. Those who have learned through generations of rhetoric that Hitler was wrong will be shocked to hear him utter such unchallenged truths as “I locked the door before turning in last night”, “this is my dog – her name is Schatzi”, and “I’ll have a glass of water”. As inconceivable as it seems to the postwar generations, the book lives up to its name: whether it was reporting on current levels of precipitation after opening a window or describing the outfit that he wore the previous evening to the cabaret, Hitler indeed was right. |
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| TODAY'S DRIFTWOOD: "Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short." (Adam Hochschild) |