from nowhere to nowhere

ONE

On May 25^th, Luka Rocca Magnotta, real name Erik Newman, dispatched a video called “1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick” into the deep web. It was initially hosted on shock site Best Gore.com before spreading into the popular consciousness and being viewed by thousands upon thousands of eyes. The 10-minute video displays the Canadian ex-Gay porn star and hustler Magnotta’s dismemberment of the body of Lin Jun, a Chinese foreign exchange student. “True Faith,” a single by the band New Order, plays throughout. After the video was made, Luka mailed parts of Jun’s body to Canadian political officials and public schools.

Magnotta was apprehended shortly thereafter in Germany, while searching for news about himself at an Internet café.

Probes into sites like Best Gore and Encyclopedia Dramatica reveal a man with a history in social media self-promotion. On May 15^th, a Youtube account called “alexisvaloranreich” uploaded a short video called “1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick Video (Non-Graphic) Discussion Only.” The video is simply one still of a figure posing before the Casablanca poster later seen in 1 Lunatic, his face concealed by a hoodie. Magnotta holds the aforementioned weapon in a typical Killer’s pose. The uploader’s comment is “There is apparently a video circulating around the deep web called “One Lunatic One Ice Pick” Video. Does anyone have a copy of it? The first comments are from “alexis,” asking if anyone has any info because “im curious to see it.” There is another video posted with essentially the same gist, except the picture is a slightly different angle from the first (Luka is facing farther away from the camera). Because of the date of the uploads, it’s likely they were posted by Luka before he committed the actual crime. There’s a comment by “Genisismaster,” obviously another Luka account, reading “Apparently there is another video…of the same guy performing oral sex on a dead woman laying on a sofa?” Another upload is titled “Cannibal Serial Killer-Luka Magnotta,” with the account name “Rita VanVolkenberg.” The 3-minute video is a slideshow of Luka glamour shots. The song playing is “True Faith.” It was posted on April 22, 2012. There are dozens of “reaction” videos, people playing I Lunatic and taping their dazzled first impressions. Click on enough of them and you’ll hear the third generation fuzz of “True Faith” on a loop.

I’ve seen it. I wish I hadn’t, and I knew when I found it that I shouldn’t have watched it but I watched it anyway. As I was reading, as I was searching, my sister invited me upstairs to watch Food Network Stars with her. By the time the show was airing I had played “1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick” and later, when I decided to write this piece instead of soldering on with an essay that I’ve been planning for a while, an essay that means a lot to me and would be what you’re reading now if I wasn’t self-blocking myself on its progress, later I thought about structuring this viewing of Food Network Stars in the context of an article on Magnotta, maybe putting it at the end as the light in my night’s darkness, my redemption, washed up on the shores of the warm innocuous mainstream.

I could have used my sister in the way I used a dancing girl encountered in a Bagel shop last month, but that’s not how this is going to go. My sister’s room is sunnily illuminated and mural’d with posters for Say Anything and The Breakfast Club. The air-conditioning is breezy and members of the house’s plethora of animals usually slink inside and rest on her bed. I couldn’t concentrate. I found my gaze repeatedly pitched to the floor. A floor that was closer to the basement and screen where I had watched Magnotta stabbing Jun Lin even after he was dead.

I don’t want to describe this thing in detail, less out of consideration for any hypothetical reader than out of a desire not to give Magnotta any more free publicity, which I’m probably doing already just by writing his name. The only factor I can say in the positive is that he kills Lin early before desecrating his body. Watching “the real thing,” those few times I have, is always a deadening rather than truly horrific experience. “The Real Thing” leaves no place lower to go. The senses are dulled. The worst is happening, and it’s almost anticlimactic. His fixation on the New Order composition drags future listenings into what the gorgeous song could mean in the brainpan of a deviant:

I feel so extraordinary

Something's got a hold on me

I get this feeling I'm in motion

A sudden sense of liberty

This pop euphoria was absorbed by Magnotta as something mutant and contrasted from what most would take from the song. Then the chorus, which plays during the video’s most disgusting passages (I used to think that the day would never come/I’d see delight in the shade of the morning sun/My morning sun is the drug that brings me near/To the childhood I lost, replaced by fear) is stolen from complexity and joy, perverted forever by what transpires in this little room and the thoughts of narcissistic empowerment no doubt trolling through Luka’s mind-I feel so extraordinary…A sudden sense of liberty. 

The Food Network show ended and brought no liberty from Magnotta’s self-smear across the internet. Before 1 Lunatic he tried to gain viral notoriety from torturing and killing kittens. There are interviews on Canadian tabloid news shows where he talks about his experiences hustling under the name “Jimmy.”  Magnotta is also interviewed as a potential contestant on a plastic surgery program where, in an unexpectedly deep and authoritative voice, he discusses the work that’s been done on his too-smooth visage. After he fled Canada he posted update videos where he alluringly smokes and addresses “all my fans.” 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick has been removed from pretty much every site that once hosted it, but I knew where to look. He probably put it there, the viral spot where I dug it up.

Drive thirty minutes north and there’s a deluxe Price Chopper that stays open through the night. Enter at 3 or 4 in the morning and it’s just you unless you’re with friends, but tonight they couldn’t come, and you needed some product, some necessity they wouldn’t have at any of the 24/7 convenience stores back in town. The night owl is you, flying over stock boys and the store’s lone A.M. cashier. Walk to the final frozen isle where the lighting is operated by motion sensors. Walk through and florescent lights crackle at the whim of your passage.

Those lights, those living organisms, remind me of the sensation I get midway through night’s progress when something like Luka Magnotta or Ricardo Lopez triggers my Shock Site investigations. I get into a taut, uncomfortable space. I open links that fall to deeper links, some without a net. 1 Lunatic leads me to watch a prolonged murder video by Ukrainian mass killers dubbed “3 Guys 1 Hammer.” Yes, both videos are named, one colloquially and one intentionally, after “2 Girls 1 Cup” the old guard of reactionary sick, along with pictures and videos named so cryptically-“Goatse,” “Swap.avi”-they could be zines you find stuck under your foot as you walk across wet gravel after visiting an urban mallscape. When I’m in my unfortunate Shock Site roving mode, former darkness brightens to lives so cavalierly sharing death and snapshot anguish. I’m angry, at what our world can vomit forth, at the fact the site is called “Best Gore,” but I can’t do a thing about it (whatever “it” is) because I’m actively seeking out this content, I’m scouring Best Gore, I’m one of those tiny cars bumping against more cars in the metaphorical nexus of Web traffic. The agitation a monster like Magnotta inspires is grounded primarily in sandpit desperation. He wants all of this-our collective attention and disapproval and fear. And for the moment, he’s got it.

It’s easy to cynically place the Magnotta crimes within the same apocalyptic prism of the recent Miami cannibalism incident, where Rudy Eugene attacked derelict Ronald Poppo and consumed the majority of the skin on his face. These are two separate atrocities, but the allure of poetic maneuvering is eerily succumb-able.  At first people were making jokes about the Eugene attack being the first salvo of a zombie invasion. I would probably enjoy both of these crimes in a movie or work of fiction, the Magnotta slaying even recalls the gruesome fantasies of a gay chat room in Dennis Cooper’s 2005 novel The Sluts. I don’t know if these digressions to art and media serve as a palliative or not. Does making zombie jokes or comparisons to fiction render these somehow less raw? Why did Rudy Eugene and Luka Magnotta’s actions happen weeks apart? Because they did, that’s all, and that conclusion feels both final and weightlessly inadequate.

Eugene’s mauling of Ronald Poppo could have been any year and lost none of it's visceral impact; Magnotta’s entire personality has an aura of calculated Nowness. Like “Psycho” Sam McCrosky, Luka knew his way around a computer. Unlike Sam, he indulged in a heavy degree of networking to cultivate and promote his infamy. This signals the dawning of a new age of viral true crime, the BTK Killer’s letters shifted by technological advances into E-mails, status messages, parasites wriggling into the stream.

The image that stays with me above all others: the posed “promo” shot of Magnotta, the ice pick, the Casablanca poster, harsh light riding over it all. This bookends 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick, in fact it’s the last thing we see if we’ve managed to make it through the 11 minutes at all, right after still frames of Jun Lin’s severed body parts, including his decapitated head, which has yet to be recovered. Did Magnotta arrange and edit this footage? If he did, why does the Toronto PD claim to have a longer version locked tight in evidence? Did he send it to the police, a more graphically extensive version, just as he’d mailed Lin’s body parts around the country?

What if that protuberance of a face-red lips, jutting nose, stabs of hair- doesn’t actually belong to Magnotta?

Of course, it most certainly does, though in that terrible frame, just as, arguably, in that terrible crime, and the terrible video that emerged from it, Magnotta astral projected outside of himself and became “1 Lunatic,” an abstract being of blood watercolor and a keyboard. Matter changes to gigabits. Women with lives thousands of miles long are nothing more than “2 Girls,” now till the end of time. Sergei Yatzenko, the man bludgeoned and butchered by Viktor Sayenko and Igor Suprunyuck, has been subsumed into the pixilated chain-letter havoc of “3 Guys 1 Hammer.” 

RIP Jun Lin, who lost his life. What Magnotta took from the rest of us in comparison is microscopic. Our time, our comfort, our enjoyment of an old pop song-that’s meaningless compared to Lin’s fate and the suffering his family is enduring right now. Fuck Luka Magnotta, may he rot in a dank cell for all time. I could say that and try to walk away, pushing away the counterthought that you, I and Luka himself all know that because of Now he has triumphed. I want to reprimand something or someone. I want to go back to the human I was before.

That day will never come.

TWO

“I sit down and cut. And cut and cut. I lose sight of time, but that doesn’t matter, because I only do “it” at night. And nights are long…”

Glance back and there isn’t a soul with you, nobody manning the checkout lanes and not one customer in sight. You go forward. Around the corner the frozen isle doesn’t end but blooms out towards infinity. There’s darkness where the ice cream hides until you activate precoded light with yourself. Who are you? What happened to others? Suddenly the way to another person, the path to a connection, the potential for nectar and conquered time, holding and being held, smiling with rare holy joyous tears, the knowing, the great relief, dismay receding-all that is now as distant from you as the moon is distant from planet Earth. The intercom sounds like roughly thumping vinyl. A scary voice hawks gibberish and phlegm. You reverse direction and yet the way back isn’t what it used to be, merely one long chilly row. And when you continue on, you realize the freezers aren’t stocking the same products as before. There are different, unwelcome objects and entities through the glass now, slightly obscured by trails of frost that remind you while still darkened of static X-rayed bones.

Her name is possibly Joan. Encyclopedia Dramatica refers to her as the “Emo Cutter Girl.” The Girl surfaced on various websites and message boards around November 2008 with dozens of photographs chronicling her intense, detailed cutting and self-mutilation. She cuts so deep into her legs and arms the pictures vividly showcase The Girl’s cartilage and bone marrow. She markers a sentence into her arm that reads:

                                    RIDER ON A DOWNBOUND TRAIN

The Girl collects her blood, letting it soak into napkins or drip on the floor tiles. Her results evidence the passage of hours. The skin around a long gash beneath her knee is yellowed. There are stitched ripples near new cuts. She goes to the hospital and they sew her up but since she doesn’t commit herself The Girl can’t be put on suicide watch. So she goes back into the night after the healing efforts are complete.

The flesh on her wrist has been opened, a crimson portal stares back at us. Parts of the story become unveiled, against their own will or not, on the margins of her cuts. She wears a ring on her thumb. She has a tattoo of a rat in clear motion. The Girl doesn’t cut into her tattoos at all, as if she got them for the express purpose of having reprieves on her body, areas that will always be safe.

Dramatica is the only place to see all of The Girl’s photographs in one place. The first few have cheeky captions (“Frankensteinesque,” “worst period day ever”) but expand the gallery and soon there’s no more snark, only one thumbnail still after the other, silently speaking. There’s only one proper image of The Girl and it’s blurry, her emaciated, androgynous face achieving a nonchalant desperation through technical fog.

She wears a T-shirt with the logo of a band or club called “Lucky 13." Every wound is presented to us in deep, still focus. The atmosphere gleaned in the world outside the boarders of the frame is one of silence punctured by tap water drips, a ringing telephone overheard in the next apartment. She doesn’t hear any of this noise.

When she shared herself The Girl didn’t know, or care, who saw. They first landed on some obscure website whose admin also, allegedly, posted child pornography in his gallery. He wouldn’t give inquirers any pertinent details about who she was or how the photos were obtained. Armchair “Goon” detectives searched far and uncomfortably wide, discovering finally that she was 23 and lived in Regensburg, Germany. They supposedly got her some help. I don’t know if any of this is true, or if the text was something improvised around photographs that so disturbed the Dramatica writers they had to weave some remedial fictions to give them a story. A reason.

In writing about bluesmen like Skip James, Robert Pete Williams, Mississippi John Hurt, and rough-hewn musicians like Dock Boggs, rediscovered in the 1960s after a period too long in obscurity, Greil Marcus sums their passage back into the same vault as traveling “from nowhere to nowhere.”

To paraphrase a line he writes about Boggs’ singing, to bring it to The Girl's silent apartment, we could say, “She cut herself as if she could see her life as something that had already passed.”

Rider On A Downbound Train paints the word “ZOMBIE” in her own blood on the floor, decides to snap a photo of the lonely word even though, at that probable instant, she’s torn open enough major portions of herself, careful to avoid rupturing arteries so that she’ll stay alive and still be a victim of her surrender to the long, long night. The pictures I find hardest to closely observe are simply the ones without her in them. The Girl focuses on the silence and blood around her. She's exhausted herself.

These are dispatches from another place, a different dimension or planet. When The Girl is cutting and recording she is far away from the human race, in a different atmosphere of spotted cleanliness. Look around the room and it’s another normal room. But you haven’t seen the whole thing. Breath from somewhere. You’ve never heard a blink before now. 

When she was tracked down, her words, or the words of someone claiming to be her, were translated by the Goons. “…it seems like my judgment tends to slip during the ‘action.’ I can see that I am cutting on muscles, bones, nerves, tendons, that the muscles and blood vessels are tearing, but that’s exactly the point: my concentration is focused on the details.” Can she feel the pain, or is the pain silenced by the awe? And what are "the details" to her?

The Girl goes deeper into the zone where only committed artists and the hypnotized reach. This zone isn’t safe when accessed by the wrong person. The silence and the eroded limits augment into a searing majesty for The Girl. “…but it is really strange, to stand up when you’re done and see (sometimes shockingly) a wound or a ‘massacre.’ Was that really me…? Clearly. I know it was.”

She sits down and cuts. And cuts and cuts. She looses sight of time, but that doesn’t matter, because she only does “it” at night. And nights are long.

She claims to have Borderline Personality Disorder. She keeps her legs and arms mutely still when taking stills of “it.”

Joan holds a blood clot in her hand. It could be mistaken for a small rodent, like the tattoo on her arm that's forever safe.

She touches a red wet pool on the floor. The rings and bracelets on her gaunt hand are close to slipping off the minute she lifts her bloodstained fingers from the mess that used to be inside her.

Another scrawl: “I WANNA DIE, ASAP. RIP JOAN.”

There are so many pictures.

If she gets help, what happens after she comes home and she’s alone and it’s night again?

A user named “kamikaZi_blitz” on the Flamehaus forum says, “Id slip it in her arm.”

The Girl cuts until she’s gone beyond blood. She’s found masked whiteness and veiny pink anatomy.

She uses needles and syringes to extract more blood. The Girl jams a needle through her nostril and stares down the lens of a camera that is a vessel bringing her back here.

A toilet bowl reflects the massacre.

Trail of red napkins.  

Domino

The rain outside twanged our ground, and I had just rolled out of a sleep that felt the length of a decade. My head still ached and fogged. There was no question: I’d be up all night. The little lamp on the floor painted the room with Technicolor noir. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and saw a shaggy beast. For the last week I had been very sick, had felt the horror amass itself through my body during an uneven, ultimately good romantic comedy I watched in theaters on a day that would be the last day I could venture out for a long while. The symptoms were disgusting to the point of self-parody. I couldn’t read, listen, or even watch anything longer than a half hour sitcom. But in that lateness I regained something, a light momentarily twisted strange.

The monitor was closed but the viral universe inside it hummed and whirred like Shatner/Pine’s Enterprise flying on downtime between battles, between movies. All I needed to do was crack it open like a shine-reflecting book and spend the rest of the night in company with pop newscasts and a few hundred Facebook feeds. Facebook: the great novel about the representation of personality, written and drafted by most of the planet. Sometimes it sooths. That night, the prospect of logging on was disheartening. It would even be a defeat. Staying off Facebook is notoriously difficult. Last year I deleted my account and read Joyce Carol Oates and watched the UK comedy Peep Show for two weeks. Of course I came back. Facebook is a healthy place for people who have been found; its even an ok place for the lost because the lost might find each other there if lucky. But when you become one microbe, still lost, still repetitively checking for and instigating unwanted contact, the social network is dangerous, for other people, for yourself.

My friends were asleep. My friends were helpless to the grime demands of late shift blues. I wasn’t lonely, just alone. Not depressed, merely in a post state of numbness before the arrival of a life’s new currency. Plane tickets to Portland, Oregon had been purchased. I was leaving these moist Berkshires very soon. Beginnings and endings were coiled together like mating snakes.

I stepped out the door as teething rain from the back porch hit a little of me and the ground. Calling for the skittish, eccentric cat resulted in no cat-he appears when he wants to, maybe when I shoot Terry Lennox I can complain about this-so I went back inside.

I could feel my blue illness spreading its talons through my body during a showing of The Five Year Engagement, which had Jason Segel and director Nicholas Stoller pIaying a handful of Van Morrison songs and a few repulsive Van song covers. A few crappy days later I had the urge to dive back into Van The Man, listening to a few albums I’d either never heard before or given proper consideration to, and finally reading a massive biography by the meticulous Clinton Heylin I’d had dusting on the shelf for a year. My body was too wracked for movies and fiction, but the rollicking malevolence of Heylin’s bio (which could be subtitled Portrait Of The Artist as a Young, Middle-Aged, and Older Douchebag) and the tucked-away Van works like Veedon Fleece, Poetic Champions Compose and the monolithic Common One were just the ticket, so to speak. Morrison fans who come to Heylin’s tome are in for a traumatic experience, even if they knew beforehand the depressive mood swings and notoriously prolific-yet-uneven output of the artist who made Astral Weeks, the choice of many (myself included) as their personal favorite album. Heylin accomplishes hagiography's cosmic reversal. 2002’s Can You Feel The Silence: Van Morrison, A New Biography offers an epic portrait of a miserable, transcendentally gifted artist whose considerable accomplishments are buttressed by years of childishly sociopathic behavior and reams of contradictions and undistinguished, place-filler music. For the most part it reads not as hatchet job but the attempt of a serious journalist and critic to maneuver through the labyrinthine maze of a legendary man’s deranged personality. Heylin looses his cool only in the last few sentences that close out the book proper before the epilogue finally disengages him from this wretch for good. After freefalls personal and artistic (Heylin coldly relates Van’s flameouts with one confidante and band member after another alongside increasingly blah albums he seems to produce to satisfy workaholic OCD at the end of the twentieth century) Heylin’s disgust breaks through at Morrison’s treatment of vocalist and touring partner Linda Gayle Lewis (sister of The Killer). When relations between them break down he ends up calling her a “fucking cunt,” adding “Don’t fuck with me, I’m not a nice guy.” One of Heylin’s last paragraphs on his subject includes a critique beyond song reviews that we haven’t seen for the last 500 pages. The effect is devastating:

“It seems that the melancholia that has haunted the man from the days before rock and roll has eaten away the will to rise above it all, which once inspired so many of his best songs. As it stands, the intellectual blindness that has resulted from this condition seems to have left George Ivan Morrison with little left to say in song, and nothing more life-affirming than, “Don’t fuck with me, I’m not a nice guy,’ outside of them.”

Young readers of Silence who have had their lives changed by Moondance, Astral Weeks, possibly St. Dominic’s Preview will come away from it with a desire to sail into Common One. This 1980 Morrison release is all-but-forgotten today. In his novella-length critical study When That Rough God Goes Riding, Greil Marcus places Common One within the grid of a seventeen-year losing streak. Heylin disagrees. In fact, he calls “Summertime In England,” the second cut on the album, a song that is quite possibly Morrison’s best work. The book’s title comes from the song’s ending lyric. Lovers of “Madame George” and “Listen To The Lion” take immediate pause, but the book is very persuasive. In the throes of sickness I finally played Common One, and in the ensuing days I rarely stopped.  

The track is fifteen minutes long. A fifteen minute pop song. I won’t get into the rest of the album (which I like, even though Heylin hates the equally time-consuming final track “When Heart Is Open”) because, as moody and nourishing as cuts like “Haunts Of Ancient Peace” and “Satisfied” are, Common One is “Summertime In England.” The songs around “Summertime” don’t compliment it. The sequencing reminds me of Neil Young’s American Stars’N’Bars, which contains two of his best songs, “Like A Hurricane” and “Will To Love,” and others that are pleasant yet forgettable. Since being taken off the unreleased Chrome Dreams, the two masterworks needed a home on a platform where they wouldn’t be compromised by anything, good or bad, that could distract from them. That’s how I feel about “Summertime In England.” Either release it alone or with a merely good platter. It fulfills my top litmus test for music: the composition makes me ask myself, “How could I have lived without this song before?”

“Summertime in England” is about falling in love with someone and wanting them to fall in love with the things you have fallen in love with. Van claims the song is addressed to his daughter but, as Heylin notes, lyrics like “Can you meet me in the country in the long grass?/With your red robe dangling all around your body” are distinctly sexual, even fetishistic. Van asks her, this Venus in the long grass, “Did you ever hear about

did you ever hear about

did you ever hear about

Wordsworth and Coleredge, baby?”

He’s sat in a low-lit room reading these men, and now he’s met a woman he wants to share them with. He’s revealing his knowledge along with his heart. And he sounds as vulnerable as if he were standing before her fully disrobed. His conclusion doesn’t strain for anything beyond his typical scatting, “it ain’t why why why/ it ain’t why why why/ it just is…” The instrumentals gallop along with the giddiness of new love and new sharing. (Mark Isham was one of the session players.) I can see it all: the tall grass whipping past our gliding, Van leading the woman with the red dress by hand into his mind and heart. Now I want to hear the response, her song, what she plans to share with Van. We’ll never know. In the years to come, Morrison’s muse betrayed him, and in the duet album with the fairer Lewis the singers’ voices go together about as well as peanut butter and mud.

I listened to “Summertime In England” that rained-out night, again, for what is probably the twentieth time since I finally brushed cobwebs off the Amazon purchased MP3-good luck finding a physical copy anywhere outside Turn It Up. He just goes on and on. He’s uncontainable. “Yeats and Lady Gregory corresponded/corresponded/corresponded/and James Joyce wrote streams-of-consciousness books…T.S. Eliot joined the ministry…” The album’s title is free-associated, though it isn’t the song’s title (one thing Morrison does that I love-see also “In The Garden” from No Guru, No Method, No Teacher and “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push The River” from his second-best album, Veedon Fleece). “Summertime” isn’t obscure if your “Wordsworth and Coleredge” are movies, comic books, novels, video games, The Sopranos, sports, water sports, whatever, so much so that they’ve become yourself, and you want this new person in your life to drink these things, in essence drink you along with them. I realized that’s what the song was about that exact night, as outside it carelessly poured. I thought of the time I was in high school and screened Barbara Jean’s last song in Robert Altman’s Nashville for a girl I liked. Later, after she kissed me the first time, I said something about how recovering the lost footage The Magnificent Ambersons wouldn’t be better than that.

“Did you ever hear about, Welles and Cotton baby?”  

After “Summertime In England” I couldn’t listen to anything else. The song was rich enough for one night’s musical consumption. I went outside, stood under the back porch and called again for the eccentric cat. He vanishes for days and is suddenly at the door unless he’s roughing through an upstairs window ready to eat. I don’t worry about him like I used to, though I still got antsy when he didn’t materialize from the rain that looked like showering glass. This was a time of uncertainty. What was going to happen to all of us?  And I wondered if those Veedon Fleeces I couldn’t claim in the turbulent past were still attainable now that life had cycled itself to this voided placidness. I didn’t watch as many movies as before. Now I listened to albums, watched scores of TV shows (mostly comedies and a currently Golden Age period Mad Men) and wrote for this blog. When I was 15 I envied certain filmmakers for the amount of movies they’d watched. Now I tried not to envy them for being able to do what they were born to do and make a living doing it. I used to have a lot of opinions, now I had this: It only takes one person. I took shelter. No cat.

The Dark Side Of Porn was a rather dire series that used to air on the BBC, though you wouldn’t expect anything else from the sensational title. Dark Side was, as promised, a self-serious panorama limning the shadier alleys of an already shady industry (both here and in the UK). The first episode tilled the perpetually plowed field history of XXX’s shutdown in the wake of an HIV outbreak, spearheaded by Dr. Sharon Mitchell, quite possibly the only hero in porn. I’d seen a lot of porn docs, ranging from the HBO toe-dippers to obscurities like Gregory Dark’s astonishingly excellent Fallen Angels, and while there’s everything from gonzo reports on Gonzo (Louis Theroux) to moralizing finger wags (the ones that blast Bill Margold’s talking points far out of context) I hadn't encountered something like the BBC series before. This was objective disgust, which is paradoxically challenging to pull off. There has to be a thoroughgoing commitment to something one hates, which the producers of the show obviously do. They’ve been assigned this world against their collective wills, and everything from the shot composition, pointed narration and juxtaposed sound bytes make the hidden distain perfectly clear, yet I love how Dark Side doesn’t overtly preach despite all this. The program is from-the-trenches reportage, more Joan Didion than P.T. Anderson. (“A writer is always selling someone out,” she once wrote.) The second episode introduced me to a woman who needs her own feature film. In turn, I’d like to introduce you to Frankie.

Episode 2, “Porn Virgins,” chronicles the fortunes of Sahara, an affable young Muslim woman, and Frankie, a successful business woman, wife, and mother in her late thirties, who both want to change careers and become adult movie starlets. Sahara’s rise is just as meteoric as Frankie’s fall. Sahara, with her luminous brown skin, everygirl charm and rarity of type (not to mention her willingness to be on piss websites) is in demand right out of the gate. She can raise her asking price before she knows it.

Why does Frankie want to enter this universe? She confesses self-esteem issues to the camera, enough psychologically to want to be there, yet reveals herself to be skittish with boundaries on set. She won’t do girl-on-girl and she won’t do a certain act illegal in some countries but a veritable prerequisite in XXX. She calls her supportive husband with the time he can expect her home. Frankie rides trains to mysterious amateur shoots with only the crew as her disapproving, arch companion (“Will you meet me in the country/In the summertime in England/Will you meet me?”). When she lands her biggest gig yet, a gang-bang under the eye of England’s top pornographer, the filmmakers cut to Frankie’s pounded shadow and recycle an earlier, gushing VO from the day she quit her job. “I feel so free!” she says, as our humble observers convey to us a nation of otherwise.

Frankie has curly blond hair and a face she’s allowing to age gracefully. There’s just so much unabated awkwardness. Frankie appears happy enough in her nude photos, but we know even then that she’d probably be more content simply as a nudist. She wanders around a dungeon set like a deer in headlights or a high school freshman. She doesn’t want to film a lesbian scene but makes enough of an effort, emptily poking her tongue in the other performer’s mouth. Talking with the jocular director after the gang-band, she hints that she might be interested in doing Anal next time, and plasters a mockery of a smile on her face as he gives her detailed techniques on how to handle it properly.  Dark Side makes a point of passing judgment on a business that has no room for someone as particular as her and not actually passing judgment on Frankie. She’s the only person that elicits a margin of sympathy from this austere crew. As she trudges on, Frankie becomes a figure out of Herzog, pulling the weight of herself and that old baggage up a mountain of disapproval in flesh. As the phone stops ringing and Frankie realizes its time to move on, it becomes apparent this isn’t underhanded journalism as much as it is a portrait of someone seeped in their own patterns of emotional masochism. Why is she doing this? We’ll never know. Where could she have ended up? And why write about her?

Because she kept my eyes open that night. I might have gone back to sleep if I wasn’t bleakly invigorated by her story. And I’m glad I stayed awake.

Frankie trainbound for a shoot.

Frankie, waiting for a ride from producers she's never met.

Getting in.

I checked my e-mail. I had one new message, from “Holly Bain.” Did I know a Holly Bain? The subject line was blank. The message read as follows:

The bad is over. We found each other. I liked you and you liked me, what a surprise, that never happens but it did right now. I was charmed by your hair and other things like your voice and infectious personality. We will touch fingers first then hands, palm to palm, and our skin will know what is happening before we do. Isn’t it lovely how this all worked out. And with me you don’t have to fret. There are no lines in me that you must read between in order to understand. There is no other shoe dangling hangman from my foot. No. This is this and the world is a greenblue globe. We will talk our lives out until the words form a third person who has been released from the shackles of us and who will leave us alone forever once we’ve ridden ourselves of him. I’ll cradle you and we’ll both cry. The tears will dart away like inchworms and follow the man made of words. We are finally alone, just together. I always wanted to lie in your bed. Your pillow is comfy but I fluff it anyway. And then finally you lay next to me and we don’t let go of each other for as long as we can. The only moment we break is when I tell you to put on some music. I rub the small of your back as you place a CD somewhere in the dark. The album reels us in after we’ve reeled in each other. You’re playing it loud. We accelerate together because of the music, as the stars outside your window tear away like outer space seen from within a ship on warp speed in the movies you loved as a child. If we let go one of us will get lost in the music and it could be centuries before we’re reunited again. The music brings me closer to you. I never thought I could get this close to anyone. I’m so glad it’s you! You tell me we’ve flipped over, that the bed is actually on the ceiling and we’re looking down. I open my eyes and you’re right. The music has flown up here with us, ducking a few feet away, crouched and sticky, a spider. You know, we’ve never kissed before now. Let’s remedy that. Ok? The lights from passing cars spilling through your window have been transferred by God into the twinkles of my eyes. Kiss them both and drink the light. That’s an order, my love.

I knew to keep scrolling. At the bottom of the page there was a link to a pay website past the message. Localsluts. A few years ago I might have been fooled. But I was beyond the capacity to get preyed upon by this Internet I’ve so scoured all these many years. I deleted it.

Who ate the time? It was morning already, a wet foggy morning. Outside it was slippery and a mess of green like the body of a toad. I would be up for a while to come. I was hungry. I went back to my lookout spot to smoke a Sherman and try again for the cat. The backyard was marshy, pre-civilized. He was hopefully sheltered in some turned-over glen. The rainfall was calmer but the sky was still dirty and sere. It took me a long time to force myself to live without being in thrall to someone else. I tapped ashes from the Sherman into an empty mug. Soaking birds chirped. I left the back door open a little for the eccentric cat.

I drove through the still-slumbering town to an excellent bagel place for breakfast. I’d driven past these streets, the same cemetery, the houses and apartments. I knew where to go. It was autopilot. I would make sure to get lost in Portland. Thinking was now the best way to cut through the familiar. How could an artist who made something as all-embracing as “Summertime In England” (playing then in the car) be such a loathsome human being? What did Frankie want? I hoped she was happy. I hoped she was still alive. When Van The Man repeats “oh my Common One,” he could be referring to her, or even Holly Bain, who was nothing more than a Tinkerbell forged in the cave of a man perpetuating an advance-fee scam and thinking he’d succeed by compromising the light of the suffering one.  

There weren’t many cars at the bagel place. There weren’t many people inside, but the radio was playing old songs as if this was that longed-for juke joint in a fifties heaven we’ve all imagined with winsome sighs and total disgust. The woman who took my order was the kind of virtual stranger you felt safe around, as I’d seen her many times before on the later side of midnight, hanging out in the 24/7 convenience store up the street and killing time before her morning shift began. I took a seat and waited for them to call my name.

I brought Heylin’s biography with me to rescan through some things. I read an insight about “Summertime:” Though the song passes through several tiers of consciousness, it always returns to the temporal state-a day in the country with his daughter and/or sweetheart. In this sense, “Summertime” resembles ‘Cyprus Avenue [from Astral Weeks]. Like its eminent predecessor, it concludes with the singer back in the present, though not alone, as he asks his companion a key question, ‘Can you feel the silence?’” Could Frankie feel the silence? If not, her documentarians felt it for her. It ain’t why why why, it just is. Holly Bain couldn’t feel the silence because she was the silence, another false Internet promise, the red dress with no body of a woman inside. We’ve all fallen in love with a keypad more times than we can count. It all comes down to a planet of want. Or whatever, I didn’t know, it was too damn early for all that.

This concludes with me back in the present, though not alone, as a smattering of elderly couples and early bird students occupied other tables nearby. There was a mirthful ding as more customers entered. A woman and her two children, a young boy and a girl I pegged was just entering teenagehood. Her green eyes were clean and watery. She had slept through the night. Her brother poked her but she maturely ignored him. While their mother ordered for them, the boy opened the cooler to get drinks. The girl wore a sweater that matched the color of her eyes, and a cap that concealed most of her hair. From the girl’s light complexion I assumed she was blond. A song began that really bopped and shimmied. I didn’t know it, and I wish I could say it was Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” but that came on later, after the trio was gone. Then, at that moment, the girl started dancing to this corny old song, jutting her shoulders forward and back, letting the movement propel her across the room. The Woman is the child of the Girl. She didn’t care who was watching, though most likely nobody was beyond me. Her shoulders gyrated front to back. Her little head was delicate in motion. I focused on Heylin's book, smiling silently, and by the time my breakfast was ready the girl and her family were gone. I never caught her name. So I decided to call her

Eroticons 3

                                                 Click To Enlarge

"I love you"

Awe and Splendor

Scare

"I'll miss this the most"

Protector

"Another planet."

Violence

338

Last things

"When we part, just promise you'll never forget me. Ok?"

For you.

Video Violation

“If were [sic] on next week our guest will probably be someone else.”-End credits of The Howard And Eli Show

Back in January I wrote a probably-too-long essay that covered Shot On Video (SOV) genre movies from the eighties, specifically the batch restored and collected in Camp! Video’s wonderful boxed set THE BASEMENT. Obviously if you descend deep you can tell the piece is about way more than that. “The Basement Tape” was written during a hyper-productive yet extremely conflicted gulch of my time. The thing turned out longer and weirder than I’d expected it to, with a great percentage written while under the influence of a demonic yet efficient mix of cheap white wine and grape juice. The allure of being inebriated shares DNA with the joys of being a playful carefree child, in that you can do silly things like hop around and inanely talk back to whatever you might be watching and the actions, to your mindstate, are not only fascinating and fun, but also necessary. I had never written drunk before.  Episodes of VERONICA MARS and WONDER SHOWZEN were transferred into lava-lamp gunk. (In the case of SHOWZEN, it really is only worthwhile smashed, unlike the dead brilliant output of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim.) Rereading the stuff in the next sober day I went against any sane instinct and decided to keep it all in. Why not? The manuscript of the essay reached 20 single-spaced pages. Some of it contained the exact kind of writing I envisioned for this blog. The tangents, ramblings, obscure references to specific incidents and personal interpretations that nobody save myself and a few absent people would understand, all that detritus was essential. It was a weird week. I had planned to include capsules or longer investigations of every film in the box, and for the most part I succeeded. Giving ample room to the highlights, VIDEO VIOLENCE and CANNIBAL CAMPOUT and shorter considerations to the likes of CAPTIVES and THE BASEMENT, I planned to include VIDEO VIOLENCE 2 in there, but by the time I finally watched it (on a Saturday) it was right before my self-imposed deadline. Even during the first five minutes of Gary P. Cohen’s film I realized I would have a lot to say about it, plus “The Basement Tape” was already unwieldy-for a blog entry at least-(my fault since I wouldn’t make any judicious edits to all that liquid prose) and pitched somewhere between a Rue Morgue write-up and this elegy for a lost generation that probably never existed anywhere outside of my brain. I slapped a “To Be Continued” at the end and moved on to an assessment of a certain few musicians that turned out to be longer than Basement (I had to unroll it in installments, if you remember) but a lot more coherent and with the guts of my soul better hidden.

It’s been a month since I posted anything substantial. What do I want out of life? What do I hope will be the endgame of my writings and my social life? What’s the secret to fear? After virtually three months of hard work I stopped the motor. Disengaging was easy enough-writing all the time is replenishing but a pain in the ass-and after a week of not producing a new article I wondered if I would ever strive to complete another. In this very Word document I have the beginnings of at least 3 “comeback” pieces. There’s some words about a Buckethead concert I attended that might find a home someplace, but not in a blog devoted to nasty things (I want to write about the negation of joy, and it was a great experience). For the simple reason that I can’t find the book I was going to get my hands dirty with I decided to return to this platform with a continuation of “The Basement Tape” wherein I finally unwrapped VIDEO VIOLENCE 2.

The title of this entry is “Video Violation”, which was actually my original title for “The Basement Tape” until I saw VIDEO VIOLENCE 2 and decided to reserve it for the essay you’re currently reading right now. I think you’ll agree it works better in this scaly context. Cohen’s film is about violation through videotape. It exploits an elemental dread in our relationship with television, namely, the question of what happens with protocol is overridden.

Watching television presupposes we make a contract with ourselves and whatever we’re watching that the signal won’t be rerouted, and the data won’t become unpredictable and compromised by insidious forces. This is the base fear that provides the memorable scene in Stephen King’s THE STAND when a group of black radicals take a live talk show hostage. It remains the only passage in King that has actually inspired in me a nightmare. Just as my only phobia seems to be of long corridors in well-lit hallways (what’s on the other side?) another instant Tingler chill is pirated television. This is why even the pretty innocuous 1986 Captain Midnight HBO jamming gives me the willies. The upset of comfortably middlebrow programming could cause a rift or rupture in the static interzone of television. What could escape into our world when that rift is left open?

The monster that emerges from between two parted curtains of TV snow is the laffs and snuff variety hour from Howard And Eli (Bart Sumner and “Uke”), two psychopaths who played a minor role in the previous film. Now they’ve become an urban legend that periodically manifests itself through jacked television retinas. The opening credits roll beside a boxed image of a newsman (director Cohen) reporting on this outlaw program, where viewers are encouraged to send genuine murder tapes to our hosts. His image begins to fuzz off. He knows it’s time. They’re coming. Is this Captain Midnight or Captain 3 a.m.?

The program broadcasts from a makeshift TV studio that looks to have been converted from a high school gymnasium or brightly lit dungeon. Our hosts, the scruffy Eli and rotund Howard sit on a hastily constructed stage of a few chairs and banter with, on the sidelines, their Paul Schaffer, a rubber-faced phantom pianoman called Gordon. The lights burn down on them all too brightly. The walls sweat porous video mange. Eli, the more Carnival Barker of the two, cracks macabre jokes and engages in scuzzy repartee with an unmiked, barely audible Gordon. Tech guys huddled around now-antiquated equipment look on.  Where did they come from? The hosts promise a special guest and a wealth of gory clips. This illegal channel is dubbed “W.G.O.R.”

I find this all quite more sinister than it was probably intended to be. Television is burdened with a self-fulfilling addiction to egregious sparkle. Imagine how hellish this is, to emptily entertain and feign affection for someone just because they’re hosting a show that might pool you into the homes of a public that could hypothetically further the capital of your career. When the stream is tampered with, like Crispin Glover and Joaquin Pheonix’s respective Letterman appearances, the public goes a few degrees of apeshit, yet why doesn’t culture get angry over thousands of forgettable “interviews” where nothing goes wrong and subsequently nothing is revealed. The door to the Black Lodge stays locked.

The opening of nearly every masterful episode of The Larry Sanders Show has, over credit black, the audience-lubricating joke told by Larry’s beleaguered sidekick “Hey Now” Hank Kingsley (a rarely better Jeffrey Tambor). “See that sign, it says…Applesauce! No, just kidding, it says ‘Applause.’” The psychology of Hank-his hypocritical, passive-aggressive mess of a personality-could very well have roots in his numbing commitment to the inane Applesauce routine. I’ve seen the Applesauce grimace over the entire TV spectrum, from late night promotional skimming to the early Styrofoam pastoral of faux potted plant infomercials.

Because video smacks of the local, no matter the production zone, Howard and Eli’s Applesauce derangement takes me back to the years I worked for my high school’s regional public access show. I didn’t cohere with the too-tightly knit crew, possibly because I was a standoffish prick who corralled the station into airing my two-part Paul Schrader exegesis. (Wonder where I found time to read THE STAND in little under a month? The second year, when I “reviewed” movies, I was only needed for about fifteen minutes a week and had excess time in the lounge area. I also read some Salinger, ANGELS IN AMERICA; first confused exposure to Burroughs.) I saw VIDEO VIOLENCE 1 during a broody and webbed February 2004 and, since Impoco’s didn’t carry the sequel, waited eight years to encounter Cohen’s follow up. I wasn’t even sure the movie existed as more than a name. 

When I finally watched it during my week in exile last January, that intake coincided with a reading in March of THE MARBLED SWARM, Dennis Cooper’s new novel. Cooper’s book is a kind of formal galleria exhibiting hidden passageways in ornate houses spooked by decadence, cannibalism, voyeurism and streams of strategic firefly language impossible for our lead character to bottle. In one audacious instance, the narrator (22, heir to a fortune, possibly the illegitimate son of actor Pierre Clementi) stops the narrative cold-though perhaps there is no narrative: after all, he has compared the act of reading an early paragraph to standing as a guest in his Chateau-to instruct the reader to go home if they are reading in a park or somewhere outside. Literally, put the book down until you are safely(!) walled in. Now pick it up again. Look at the wall closest to where you’re sitting. Notice a pinhole there. The narrator is on the other side of that wall, hidden, spying on you through the pinhole, sequestered in a private corridor. I happened to read that chilling passage while waiting for friends in a Pittsfield Barnes and Noble that did not in fact carry THE MARBLED SWARM. The only thing I could think of was fucking CTSB and was there a room beyond the official room of wires and Lurch-like cameras where, scarily, The Howard And Eli Show was taking place under cover of a newer, depraved reality or dimension allowed by the evil ether of Television, the same sphere entered by Captain Video and commandeered by Howard And Eli to break through our regularly scheduled programming. Was this same cold place built into the studios of Letterman, Jay Leno, Chelsea Handler? If Cooper’s book had existed back then I would have known to stand from the porn-set lighting of my pompous movie cubicle, head towards a vent or a secret door that would have deposited me to the other side of CTSB to the wizards of gore themselves, Eli shuffling the official materials of Captain Midnight with Howard as his First Mate Midnight, and we would have sailed the rainbow static together.

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There are Video Violence Mythos. Part 2 expands on the community of malevolent townsfolk who populate the Video Studio Mom’n’Pop and ardently catch Howard And Eli whenever they happen to manacle the airwaves. This ur-coven sends them the genuine snuff, and we’re reintroduced to such characters (and “characters”) as the first film’s geriatric sheriff-here showing off his handmade electric chair zapping a kidnapped thug in a display of basement frontier justice (watching this is truly jarring right after Werner Herzog’s almost awe-inspiringly sad INTO THE ABYSS)-and the jocular deli manager who has put together some Cronenbergian body mutilation tools (hand slicer, blood sieve, etc.). Kind of like the ham-radio town in Jonathan Demme’s CITIZEN’S BAND, but gashed. There’s more, as this is essentially an anthology film. Robot roll call:

-A commercial for the Wilber Doll, a monstrous construction that comes to life and takes a bloody chomp out of it’s boy owner’s neck. A bit of Joe Dante consumer satire, the TV Spot mirrors the forever epidemic of recalled products, company write offs, “must-have” gifts like Tickle Me Elmo, Furby, Turboman, ads from the same period shilling utter xasthurs like Atari’s E.T. videogame.

-A sketch, already sketched in “The Basement Tape,” of three ladies who watch a typically gruesome Howard and Eli kill (of a woman, natch) and decide to turn the tables. (I won’t press this, but all the “amateur” videos sent into the show are in fact edited and scored to music. Who cares.) They are meant to be sorority sisters but all of them, though attractive, don’t look a day under 30. They call in a pizza delivery boy and seduce him. This is getting dangerously close to porno, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’d been exposed to the clichéd “Pizza boy” thing. (Know how you can tell the difference between people like me and people with like, say real jobs and real responsibilities and an average upbringing? They can joke about Pizza Boys in porno but could not with a gun to their heads name a single XXX title with a delivery guy getting sucked and boned. I can not only list some titles-Married With Hormones, Taboo 3 (“Pizza twins, we deliver!”)-I can give you a tape where the Pizza Boy had an absent, ghostly resonance for my friends and I. When we were all in Middle School I used to spend so many wasted hours with the guys as Sam’s sad house, once the shelter of a large family lately broken. There was room after room where a hive of secreting older brothers used to live. In the slipstream of dirty socks and karate trophies from 1994, beside closets that for some of Sam’s brothers were metaphorical in nature, lay the boxes of tapes that forever imprinted and decided our perception of and fear of what sex was presented to us as being. The first tape off the pile was called ANAL ASSASSINS. It was initiation for us, not only into the moist awkwardness of guys alone together aroused and hiding their arousal because outer release was available but we had all been reared in a townscape that ran on the unofficial slogan Hetero Or Die, but an initiation into the double-edge of dated erotica. I couldn’t really get off because I knew the names of the producers and performers, rendered in the same plastic PBS font that would later be employed to annotate my name on the CTSB channel, weren’t their actual names. (This impersonal shroud of stage names still upsets me for some reason. I haven’t one right to know, but I feel a little offended that I can’t have that personal information, especially after the intense experience these folks have given me.) At any rate, there was a threesome. I won’t paint it graphically for you because family members have been very supportive of my writings and they might read this. One of the participants leaves the room, saying he’s going to go “Wait for the Pizza Boy.” Either because there was no actor or the team ran out of ideas (ANAL is suspiciously underpopulated and kind of ends in a nebulous void) the Pizza Boy never shows up, never meshes himself in the action, never delivers a pie. Beyond the bleak of Sam’s house, we made numerous references to ANAL ASSASSIN’S Pizza Boy. He became shorthand. Any teacher who was late, any tardy student became the Pizza Boy. We turned around and shared glances. We subtly mocked those excluded from the fold. How were they to know? It was our stupid secret.) When the Pizza Boy drops in the women convince him to stay and dance with them. The screen deteriorates into blocky slow motion, primitive A.V. room SFX that would evolve into Final Cut Psychadelia decades later. They flash their boobies and soon cut into him. They hack into the victim’s fish-eyed POV. Look, women can be sick. I don’t mean in a woe-is-me heartbreaker way. I mean hungry for transgressive content. An old girlfriend of sorts (I can’t seem to get into any involvement with someone that’s simple and doesn’t only makes sense after tons of linguistic uncoiling) watched rapt while I screened IRREVERSIBLE for her, and didn’t even wince a twitch during that scene. I actually saw her December last year in a theater lobby as I waited for a highly anticipated show to start. She told me she “liked Dark,” though I had already known that almost ten years prior. There’s another gal I used to be pretty tight with who, back in highschool, in the cluttered arena for the public access show, made me read to her selections from AMERICAN PSYCHO. Later, she allowed me to drench her in blood for a now-lost short movie that might be the basis of a future memoir essay. She’s avoided any attempt I’ve made in recent years to get back in touch. I understand. Apparently those were bad years for her. I’m a human reminder of stretched limits in dire times. In college I found a handful of women who brightened with great St. Elmo’s Fire at the simulated underground horror I described. One very cool person I’m thankfully still in contact with practically throttled me into lending her my copy of AUGUST UNDERGROUND. (Remember that? It’s the first movie I reviewed on this blog. I’m planning something with the sequel, MORDUM.) Later, at another college, a group of us trekked to the school science building to wrangle a big screen and watch a DVDR of the infamously vile ‘Nam Vet “rape porno” roughie FORCED ENTRY. A woman was the instigator of that screening, pulling us from a private dorm and the boxed computer screen. Later, she promised to make T-shirts of some of the film’s choicest lines (“Scummy hippies!”) but never delivered. Just as well. She’s supposedly very religious now. Well. I apologize, because I’m not. The last such engagement with a woman similarly inclined is a matter I won’t discuss (“but you’ve been so candid up to now!” Yea, I hate that too, when people shove that one piece of intrigue in the dumbwaiter and pitch it ascending. But if I did, I would lose. Part of the reason I didn’t write anything for a month was because I would only have been able to write about that shit, and therefore would have lost). The segment is prophet for a generation of pale shlock nuts who go down blind alleys in pursuit of romances founded on a common lust for the blood porn.

-A murder in the Video Studio. Poor young coed goes there to “rent some tapes” for her sorority and the owners and costumers restrain her, seal her face in plastic wrap and set the blowdryer on high.

-A commercial in the style of those “Greatest Hits Of The 50s” album comps with a comprehensive list of snuff titles from the citizens of the town where Howard And Eli originated. Tens of tape names scroll s-l-o-w-l-y across the screen. Sadly, Howard and Eli can’t actually give an address where you can send away for these, so titles like “Two Ghouls For Sister Tara” and “Electrocuting Rita” stand as gigantic teases. In the writing of “The Basement Tape” I hoped to convey how insular and isolated the appraisal of SOV Horror can be, and this segment does a much better job because Cohen isn’t trying to articulate inarticulate routines on former friends and small town melancholia. Under the scrolling text is a showering woman who turns to see a man dressed as all the principle movie murderers. She spins, he’s Michael Myers and advances. Back to the front, she spins, he’s Freddy Kruger and advances. Jason Vorhees and finally, appropriately, dragged-out Norman Bates. Clearly, this nude victimous woman is a part of the Secret Society. Now, in the endless list one stokes serious embers. “…And this announcer’s personal favorite, The Deaths Of Mr./Mrs. Emory.” If we’ve seen the first VIDEO VIOLENCE we recognize the names of that film’s protagonists who met their end at the hands of Balzac and Rivette’s Thirteen multiplied into a destructive Star’s Hollow. I doubt if Cohen realized how layered and intricate these few minutes are. The montage of horror characters represents the genre’s mainstream iconography, while the list of clandestine snuff trades reveal the counterworld hidden beneath these “acceptable” monsters. This is the juxtaposition of Friday The 13^th: The Final Chapter and the flickers of child pornography scalding the eyes of a Hitman in the fantastic British import KILL LIST. The inside reference to VIDEO VIOLENCE rolls the boulder in front of the crypt. Like Burroughs in Tangier, I have hallucinations while stumbling around this movie. One after the other after the other.

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The wraparound scenes reinforce Cohen’s dank media satire, years before NATURAL BORN KILLERS harmed female bodies in search of The Truth. Howard and Eli lure a woman to the “studio,” an aspiring actress. There’s a brief, condescending interview. (“Have you done any Beckett?” “I did a car commercial, is that Beckett?” “It sounds absurd, so close enough.”) They give her a script. While doing the sides she accidentally reads the stage directions out loud. Soon enough they pounce, tie her to the chair, and she realizes there isn’t an audition or a movie. Following a clip, they cut into her wrist and pull the nerve endings to ensure she gives the segment a rating with her fingers. Howard removes an eyeball and pushes the severed whites toward the camera. The life wriggles out of her as they mug and laff. The videotape doesn’t save her. Celluloid would, but video leaves her to suffer and die. If I would only have strained from the brick-hard CTSB seat, taken off the mic and walked into the studio’s private counter-room I could have saved her, but I was confined to my fringe sector of that media cubby.

The last fifteen minutes of VIDEO VIOLENCE 2 (…The Exploitation) are kind of stupid, as if Cohen decided to pull back because things were getting a little too unnerving. As far as we’re concerned you can turn it off after the “show” itself ends, with credits that don’t know if they are crediting the last episode or not. Howard and Eli will have to find another basement that inhales the feed. Yet I feel like I’m watching their antics at every piece of Network soul death. Just the other day (after I’d finished the first page of Video Violation) I caught the last few minutes of The Insider right before a new episode of COMMUNITY. One of the hosts was interviewing A-Rod. All that was demanded of Mr. Rod was to name celebrities whose faces were partially obscured in pictures where they drank his endorsed health beverage. Then he was lobbed some softballs about ex Cameron Diaz. When we cut back to the female host, the Blond Whatever shook her head pensively and said, with all the fake awe she could muster, how that was “so revealing.” It wasn’t. Make of that and VIDEO VIOLENCE 2 what you will. They both scared the hell out of me.

I forgot to mention the prologue, where the filming of a vampire movie turns into an actual murder of the lead actress, much like an analog cousin of Roberta Findlay’s SNUFF. This doesn’t really have a place in the rest of the soup, but its there, as elliptical as television, as writing, as humans are.