Here’s a sample of the cool printed matter sent to us. The regular suspects this time around — who gave us some irregular things to consider. The underground press is like a scented garden of the mind. Won’t you taste the root?
Municipal Threat
Issue #1 – $5
Fluke Publishing
PO Box 1547
Phoenix, AZ. 85001
Exploitation films are a very particular kind of otaku (someone who obsesses over something such as anime). Unlike steampunks and furries, underground film freaks are invisible in the daylight. It’s only at night that you find them projecting 8mm film onto the side of vacant buildings, and gathering in the parking lots of indie theaters, smoking and trading VHS dubs.
This beefy 76-page zine is a compilation fanzine, with both exploitation film reviews and underground comics. Fans of Tales from the Crypt or the works of Robert Crumb will probably love this. But don’t forget the writing. It’s not just Charles Bronson arm wrestling alligators. Nick Anderson for example can really write. In his review of Amsterdamned he actually penned the phrase “He swims up and watches Amsterpeople do their Amsterthings.” That is a quality referential pun right there. Hats off to you, sir.
The term “exploitation” here is a catch-all phrase for all B-movies. But their fans break them down further into subgenres: Spaghetti Westerns, Monster movies, Biker films, Blacksploitation, Slasher films and so on. But they have things in common: sex, drugs, and violence. But the context is impossibly specific for an outsider.
If you haven’t seen the 1982 release of “Swamp Thing” and read at least several dozen issues of the comic book, how would you ever understand a reference like “…the British writer/occultist and his collaborators reinvented the comic book creature as an eco-metaphysical sojourner…” As someone who has, I can confirm that Jason Woodbury is spot-on accurate. Yes, writer Alan Moore is an occultist, and the Mage of Northampton is not to be trifled with.
The comics, by comparison, are more immediate and accessible. There is some really quality stuff here. I was particularly taken with artist Jarred Smith and that noir piece by David Moses… and especially the tiny, topical comment he sandwiched in between two bottom panels “Don’t ever talk to cops.”
As a whole, this zine is just as surreal as the films it pays homage to. So you end up asking yourself: Who is the 69-foot gigolo, why is he on Demon Island, why does he need revenge? Is he a Richard Gere-style American Gigolo, or more of a Jon Voight-esque Midnight Cowboy? … Or maybe a Rob Schneider-style Deuce Bigalow. There’s a lot to unpack here, but editor Brad Dwyer knows how to share the stage with all of them. (Jose Fritz)
Invisible Generation
$18.95 (190 pages)
I read the blurb on the back cover and immediately understood that Jason Rodgers is a Burroughs fan. You can write about semantics, polemics, surrealists, and occult objectivism all day. But as soon as you begin to address psychic control systems in those specific terms, you are deep in Williams Burroughs oeuvre.
Suddenly we’re in a sci-fi western with a dope-addled homosexual cowboy; sure he’s on the nod, but he’s quick with that pistol and don’t you forget it. Author Jason Rodgers concedes his Burroughs influence, directly quoting him multiple times in this collection of essays. Once you’re on benzos and following the road to the Western Lands, it’s all too easy to find yourself in the throes of a yage vision: bright colors, scintillating shapes, glossolalia, and giant bats. Don’t worry, you’ll see them soon enough.
Early on Rodgers makes a passing reference to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which reveals more than anything else what he’s getting at here. That thesis states, in short, that the language you speak influences the way you think and experience reality. For that reason it’s also called the theory of linguistic relativity.
As for Rodgers, about 30 pages in I began to question both his methods and his purpose. His explorations rely so heavily on constructing highly abstract semantics to discuss already abstract concepts, such that every topic becomes impossibly arcane. His usage of the word “occult” for example, bears little resemblance to the dictionary definition. While he deftly builds it’s new context, he does so cherry-picking from the works of Jesuit Priest Walter Ong, linguist Walter Truett Anderson, Anarchist Feral Faun, modern occultist Jason Louv and the band Throbbing Gristle. His citations relate only in extremis. That kind of contortion of a word’s denotation strikes me as disingenuous; perhaps even polemic.
After another 150 pages, it all starts to make sense: defunct Anarchist journals, Gnostic morality plays, Nintendo death camps, Primitivists with smartphones, Dionysian technocrats, narcotic misanthropy, atavistic video game messiahs, Trotskyist happenstance, guerilla ontology, cybernetic worker collectives, discordian ziggurats, nihilist lizard dreams… Do you see the bats yet?
Let it not go unsaid that Jason Rodgers is a hard man to read, and perhaps an even harder man to like, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. The horror is how right he is. (Jose Fritz)
Invisible Eye
Issue #1 – $5
Fluke Publishing
PO Box 1547
Phoenix, AZ. 85001
This zine starts abruptly and drops you right into the deep end. Rows of symbols: diamond, triangle, square, cross, inverted triangle, stacked shapes, shapes within shapes… The key for that first code appears 5 pages later. It’s not a skeleton key. It’s a sign that the codes are real, decipherable and not part of the decor. But by then you’ve already read past some collage art from the dark side of the moon, 27 more lines of cipher text, and some paranoid science fiction. An explanation as to the purpose of encoding the text follows.
I broke out my old Codes and Ciphers book from 1939; not a foundational text book by any measure, but what I had on hand. The first cipher looks like an old-school Louis XIV letter substitution code. I broke it that first evening with a frequency analysis formula. It’s a well-executed monoalphabetic code. It’s not meant to defeat the NSA, just to prevent random discovery.
In the late evening I transcribed the rest while listening to Ike Reilly, and then finally read the Invisible Eye. It was a fully developed mythology with tales of psychic propaganda and radical geometry. The text is rife with paradoxes and symbology. But it’s not my place to bring their message to you. I’m indoctrinated now. It’s incumbent upon each apprentice to crack the codes themself and through the process become immersed in the word virus. It reminds me of the time I wrote Shepard Fairey a letter: “Wish to obey. Await further instruction.” But it’s now incumbent on me to promulgate model with a reciprocal code:
YKTTRGD GY TVHKTLLOGF, AFR HKOXAEB AKT ZGMI YWFRADTFMAS IWDAF KOUIML AFR RAMA TFEKBHMOGF OL GFT GY MIT ZALOE DTAFL MG HKGMTEM MITD. MITKTYGKT MGGSL SOQT TFEKBHMOGF, GZYWLEAMOGF AFR EKBHMGUKAHIB AKT DTKTSB A FAMWKAS TVMTFLOGF GY MIAM ORTA.(Jose Fritz)
NXOEED
Issue #2 – $5
Fluke Publishing
PO Box 1547
Phoenix, AZ. 85001
At first blush the pages are mostly filled with pen drawings of scary faces. Melting goblin looking creatures straight out of a 1970’s Hobbit thing. Just in time for the decriminalization of magic mushrooms. This issue also has a few words explaining the madness operating here. The art school and punk rock collision that brings us to zine making. This short essay tells of the pre-internet days and having to go great lengths to letter head a flier or what have you. This zine then offers up a few “sick-as-fuck” alphabets as well as creatures for you to use on future projects. All hand made. So unplug your 3-D printer and make art everywhere. (egg)
PLAY WITH ME a puppet kit
This came in the mail without any indication if it’s for sale. A very tiny publication about the size of a matchbox. Inside is art to cut up and assemble into puppets. Great fun for your DIY take on world events. Tired of sham trials of police misconduct, Q Anon chat rooms, press conferences for dictators??? Here’s your chance to be the one who pulls the strings.(egg)
Suburban Utopia Project #15
theuncivilsociety.com
The (Un)Civil Society is a regular thing to arrive at our door — say every 3 months. It always has the same aesthetics with its booklet and it always comes with a CD of music (which we couldn’t play). Always the pages have an austere computer layout of lyrics that are oblique and political. Always the graphics are ugly. This issue contemplates “Society of the Spectacle” in relation to events of present day pandemic and nuclear capitalism. It’s all a bit alienating at the same time having something underneath it all that’s kinda heartfelt and mushy. At least the paper is glossy and will likely outlive the Walgreens down the block. (egg)
Here’s a sample of the cool printed matter sent to us. The regular suspects this time around — who gave us some irregular things to consider. The underground press is like a scented garden of the mind. Won’t you taste the root?