Apocalypse Culture (1988)

"Pod People aspire to a manicured destiny--soft, serene, controlled, filtering any information that does not impinge on their pre-fab gestalt. Their retreat from reality is tempered with enough minor but manageable worries and decisions to negotiate boredom and furnish the mirage of individual mastery. These narcoleptics find sublimity in a jar o mayonnaise. As a consequence of the atrophy of the survival instinct, the Pod People can only breed monsters. The disenfranchised offspring, along with an entire ageless class of human discards, know only that they are doomed."--Adam Parfrey, Apocalypse Culture, (1988)

I've read Apocalypse Culture, the late Adam Parfrey's seminal collection of "underground and counter-cultural provocations" more than once. But how to review such a book? That is the question.

No one is certain if such an anthology is to be taken literally, seriously, or as a figurative symbol of what was and is derailing in our post-nuclear world of computers, 24/7 "news, and constant media bombardment. Prfrey, in his opening essay, suggests a resurgent atavism, a re-emergence of the "wolf" inside; giving us the example of children raised BY wolves in captivity, but also quotes from Charles Manson and presenting us with Buchenwald as an example.

Following we have dozens of essays covering a range of bizarre and disturbing subjects. From the interview with Whitehouse musician and convicted child pornographer Peter Sotos ("Women are simply female dogs for my amusement") to the collections of quotes from obscure, buried, and incendiary writers that couldn't be tolerated in our age of correct political sensitivity.

An interview with "unrepentant necrophile" Karen Greenlee (Convicted of stealing and molesting a corpse in the early 1980s) alongside articles on the subliminal eroticization of breakfast cereals. Collections of "thought bomb" quotes, such as "Long Live Death" join biographies of John Whiteside Parsons, the inventor of solid body rocket fuel who was also an occultist, c connected with men such as Aleister Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard.

A rather pointed argument, 'The Eradication of Television Fact Sheet," shares space with "Are Afrikan people Subject to a Genocidal Plot?" There is a section of the writings of schizophrenic James Van Cleeve, whose book Love, Lithium, and the Loot of Lima redefines the meaning of "stream of consciousness," and reminds the reader that the "marquis de Sade was not a miser or a motherfucker. he died in a mental home."

A short article on a then-imprisoned G.G. Allin comes up against articles on performance art (grueling stuff), Hakim Bey's account of his journey to India to venerate the Kali Yuga (the ancient Hindu "End of Days"), and articles on the merits of hunter-gathering, as opposed to the slow slide society has taken since the invention of modern agriculture.

In the second half (the first also features articles on amputee fetishism, potential mass murder counts, and forced gluttony as a means to psychic attainment) none other than Dr. Anton LaVey holds forth his theories of weather control, food control, and general all-around occult subversion of "the Herd" in "The Invisible War."

Zionism and the Christian Right become a target in one article; another fingers Michael Jackson (the one-gloved wonder who "Moonwalks" to mock Christ) as the coming Antichrist (a bit late for that, innut?).

It is undoubtedly, though, the final two essays, "The Call to Chaos", by the late James Shelby Downard, and "Meditations on the Atom and Time", by Dennis Stillings, that give the millennial capstone to this eclectic collection of highly-charged and deeply personal, varied manifestos. Downard, a cracked conspiratologist, maintains that the "Great Work of the Ages" is still being enacted, albeit on a subliminal level, the meaning of meaning being redefined in the very fabric of our lives, even down to the names of the topography that dot the landscape from the Jornada del Meurte to Dealy Plaza. And Stillings, giving us a further glimpse at the demiurgos, the animating factor of the Holy Bomb (Think: Beneath the Planet of the Apes), the power center of creation and destruction as we bring the whole cataclysmic saga of humanity to its final, fiery conclusion.

Along the way, we have pornographers, cultists, amputee fetishists, corpse molesters, rock stars that cut themselves and eat their own feces, performance artists whose very lives are their performances; self-appointed experts on a variety of esoteric topics, and the writings of the, quite literally, schizophrenic.

" The cause of war is individual and collective maladjustment in social space. The release from Magnetic Straitjacket Seculsion by Graviy, Restriction, Vacuum, Constant Observation. They are free-showing-me how cunt crushes communism."

- -James Van Cleeve

The final conclusion of the editor seems to be that we, as a species, are going mad, waiting for the Second Coming, or the final, fiery end of ALL THINGS. Secretly suspicious that vast forces rule over us, manipulate us, and are fattening us up for some type of harvesting, be that physical, mental, or spiritual.

And who's to say they aren't?

Apocalypse Culture, like the Re/Search publications, came along at the right time: an era when punk was blossoming into hardcore, and industrial music was rearing its ugly, atonal head. The "underground", tattoos, piercings, Doc Marten boots, and Manic Panic and all, were just about to emerge to the surface of society. Now, in the latter throes of our Apocalypse Culture, they have not only subverted that culture, but REPLACED it in many ways. And that, more than anything, proves the point of this particular sordid collection of shocking writings from the social sewers, the fringes, the penny-ante, self-appointed experts, and other just all-around good folks.

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