Mass Culture Vol. 4 Reading / Release Party

On Friday the 13th of last month, I gave a reading at Gebo House in Brooklyn for the release of Vol. 4. (It also served as a party for my birthday, which happened earlier that week.)

By the time I arrived, I was already running late. I'd gotten about three hours of sleep the night before, having spent the past couple of days printing and assembling copies. (Yes, I edit and manufacture Mass Culture entirely by myself. As I lack steady employment, it's less expensive in the short term, not to mention the fact that I wouldn't trust someplace like Staples with some of my content.)

My voice is a little dry and hoarse in much of this footage thanks to dehydration and sleep deprivation: in order to combat both, I can be seen sipping from a shiny green tall-boy of Four Loko throughout the reading. That would be an original pre-ban Four Loko, which I'd saved in my fridge for a special occasion: I'd originally planned on drinking a nice bottle of Scottish seaweed ale as I read, but that evening I decided to fuck being classy because I badly needed the caffeine.

It's safe to say I was a bit wired during the proceedings. I didn't even realize the mic wasn't working, hence why the sound is somewhat muffled on video.

The projection of M in the background was someone else's impromptu idea, though it works well enough considering Vol. 4's theme of historical lustmord.

The first piece I read was "Hideous Things: An Act of Love," from Vol. 4, which was accidentally not recorded. After that came an excerpt from "Kindly Carcass":

"Kindly Carcass" appeared in Vol. 2, "the cannibalism issue." It was largely inspired by the case of Armin Meiwes, in which he solicited a man on the internet to take part in consensual cannibalism. Other influences include Krafft-Ebing-documented "necrosadist" Sergeant François Bertrand and my perennial favorite serial killers, Dahmer and Nilsen. The narrative alternates between the protagonist's recollection of a night with one of his victims and his rather dull daily life in an institution for the criminally insane.

"Dumbslut (Look How Pathetic)" appeared in Vol. 1. As I somewhat drunkenly attempt to explain in this video, a major catalyst for my writing this piece (performed here in a truncated version) was having recently read a biography of John Wayne Gacy, much of which was written in Gacy's vernacular (e.g., redundantly calling people "dumb and stupid"). That book, Buried Dreams, also demonstrates how Gacy would project his own deep-seated insecurity and self-loathing about his sexuality onto his preferred victims: all-American teenage twinks.

I also wanted to write a story in which the subject's background and experiences, which are seen as so normal, typical, and desirable as to never warrant any real questioning, are interrogated and exposed on the most absolutely base, disgusting, abject terms. It also serves as a polar inversion of the surrealist-poetic psychosexual romances I've written between, say, a serial killer and his prostitute victim (as in "Hideous Things"), or a lonely morgue worker and a beautiful corpse ("Erotopsy," below).

"Erotopsy (Tanzler's Revenge)" was also in Vol. 1, very loosely (I would even say subconsciously) inspired by the case of necrophilic German radiologist Carl Tanzler (as detailed in the video). It was written on an acid trip with only very minor subsequent edits. I've previously performed this with sound accompaniment as Madame Deficit. Audience responses to this piece typically range from nausea to arousal.

The necrophile in this piece is described as resembling Alfred Kubin, an Austrian artist of perverse imaginations whose work Der Todessprung was reproduced in the credits of Vol. 3.

"Bieber Rape Story," from Vol. 1, is probably one of my more infamous bits of writing. It was sparked by a particularly ignorant quote about rape and abortion that teen popstar Justin Bieber had recently given in a Rolling Stone interview. It could have been written off as an isolated case of celebrity idiocy but for the fact that, around the same time, adult politicians with real legislative power started working en masse to put those views into law (. . . which is still happening in America: in the video I mention that, if written a year later, it would have been called "Santorum Rape Campaign"). I actually could have taken this piece a lot further and gone into a lot more detail, but I kept it short at the time due to spacing limitations.

I reference St. Lidwina of Schiedam towards the end: curious parties are advised to seek out Catholic-convert JK Huysmans's book on the subject, wherein he describes her many grotesque afflictions in such lovingly-graphic detail that the work was almost considered sacrilege.

"Asking For It," from Vol. 3, was a sort of encore. You'll notice that my audience has gotten increasingly drunk and rowdy by that time, and I myself am shown here drunkenly telling them I don't care if they masturbate while I read and giving instructions on how to purchase amyl nitrate ("go to an adult bookstore and ask for 'head cleaner'!"). Apparently one satirical piece about rape wasn't enough for these fucking perverts, so I read this story, inspired by media coverage of the Cleveland, TX gang-rape of an anonymous 11-year-old girl around March of last year. Alert readers and viewers will note that the victim here is depicted as belonging to the demographic most likely to read Mass Culture: a young, white, vaguely-misanthropic city-dwelling man who favors "dark," "extreme" musical genres like metal and noise. Unfortunately the last few lines of this piece have been cut off due to the camera running out of memory.

After the reading came a fair amount of intoxication and debauchery, but no cameras were out for that as far as I know.

The Flooding of Nordstrand

As I live in Brooklyn, I was not unaffected by Hurricane Irene, though my preparations amounted to collecting tap water in jars and taping cardboard over my bedroom windows. My neighborhood didn't happen to lie in any of the three "danger zones," and the hurricane only appeared last night as a rather windy rainstorm sans thunder and lightning. No damage to my apartment, no power outages, etc., though other parts of the city experienced flooding and loss of electricity. I tend to be rather stoical in such situations, as I was with that brief earthquake aftershock I also experienced a few days ago: "Well, it didn't harm me or any of my belongings, nor did it disrupt my schedule. Right, then, I have other things to do."

I'm reminded, though, of the Burchardi flood in October of 1634 that enveloped and basically destroyed the island of Nordstrand, off the Jutland peninsula. One of the oldest branches of my family that I can definitively trace came from that island, a fact I discovered while doing genealogical research a year or two ago.

The area itself was already going through a fairly shitty time, recovering from a plague epidemic that had occurred some three decades before and getting their asses handed to them by Frederick III in the Thirty Years' War. This was also not the first flood to hit the area during that timespan: only the most destructive. All in all, not the best time to be a Nordstrander.

After the dikes burst on the night of 11 October: "The sea swallowed more than half of the island. A total of 6,123 people drowned, and 1,339 farms and houses were washed away, as were 28 windmills and 6 clock towers."

The flooding was so great that it permanently altered the entire geographical makeup of Nordstrand Island, creating a cluster of smaller islands in its wake, one of which was also called "Nordstrand." This being Europe in the 1600s, it was naturally perceived as evidence of God's wrath. (Perhaps some influential 17th-century Dutch pastor blamed it on all the sodomy.)

On a more personal level, my ancestor Volkje Jurians was a native of Nordstrand. Evacuated to the nearby mainland town of Husum in Schleswig-Holstein, she met a young sailor called Jan Fransse; the two ended up marrying about four and a half years later. (It would be nice to think they were a love match, though considering marriage at the time was largely a business transaction, it may well have been an arranged act of charity since Volkje had been orphaned by the flood and presumably whatever dowry she'd accumulated had sunk to the bottom of the sea. They did have nine kids over two decades, though, which might speak for itself.)

A short time later, they emigrated to a settlement that would later become Albany, NY, and went on to produce the family line that led to my dubious existence. So, you see, I'm not being facetious when I describe myself as "the residual byproduct of a 17th-century mass drowning"!

It's rather striking to think that, if this island had not been destroyed and thousands of people killed, I wouldn't be alive today.