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things & stuff. people & arts

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PLUS: Mötley Spüe, Titanic ll, Adult Lego, Bill Hicks, Jim Thompson, Pirate Talk and more…

DIGITAL Killed Trash Video StoreWhy NATIONAL LAMPOON RockedYouTube Prophet: WEATHERBILLWhat GRETA GERWIG Won’t DoClicking With E-ROTIC LITOh, Say Can You See: 24 Hours Of USA TV

FREEIssue Zero. Sept 2010

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EDITOR’S Letter

Welcome to WordyMofo, our new free digital magazine filled with, well, whatever takes our fancy.

Here and now is probably the place and time to make manifesto-style statements about how e-readers are making it possible to rip publishing from the iron fists of faceless corporate overlords and thrust it into the hands of passionate people while also saving the earth from the pollution and waste associated with printing, distributing and disposing of traditional magazines, but I’m not even sure that’s true so I won’t. That said, this is beholden to no-one, used about 100 sheets of A4 paper to create, and looks the shit on the iPad, for which it is optimised but to which it is not exclusive.

WordyMofo burns first from a desire to get our ideas and interests out there the way we want to see them. We love magazines and we love the Internet and this is a bit of both. We’re about pop culture as a prism to our world as opposed to it being simply disposable content or not worthy of serious discussion. We’re not about weighty political commentary or breathless reality TV updates – you can get that done far better and much worse everywhere else. WordyMofo’s about the things and stuff, the people and the arts about which we’ve long been passionate – or have recently stumbled upon– and that we want to share.

Like the Love Boat, we hope you think

it’s exciting and new. If WordyMofo does that for you, do us a solid and pass it on? It’s easy to email stories, note us on your social networks, or just talk to someone about us. Our name has a cheeky etymology but it also riffs on word of mouth, which, let’s face it, we’re gonna need. If you don’t like us, well, at least we’re free and we’re not going to add to your recycling bin. So hush now.

As you will have noted in your forensic examination of our cover, WordyMofo bears an “Issue Zero” stamp. That’s because it’s an experiment that had to bubble over for us to see what would happen. We’re a work in progress, with great stories, departments and designs planned. Though this first issue is dude-heavy, rest assured we have chick contributors who have awesome features in the works from the wilds of occupied Palestine and opulent New York. Re “multimedia” in our pages? We’re on it. For now, enjoy a respite from the digital noise. MA

ContributorsWords: Michael Adams, Lachlan Huddy, Luke Goodsell, Dan Creighton, Rod Yates, Chris Murray. Layout designs: Steve Tierney. Cover and logo designs: Simon Houghton. Jim Thompson article opener by Dan Creighton.wordymofo@yahoo.com

Ingredients Word CountThings & StuffBill Hicks Resurrected 506Words include: documentary, film, prophet, cancer, justin, bieber. LEGO For Adults 311Words include: brickbuster, seattle, goliath, airships, you, buildBanned Books Week 679Words include: catcher, rye, kill, mockingbird, gossip, girlNew Truths About Pirates 619Words include: avast, fo’c’s’le, buccaneer, scurvy cockswain, milksop24 Hours Of American TV. On July 4. 2831Words include: bridezillas, obama, preacher, snooki, youthology, back2life

People & ArtsYouTube Prophet Weatherbill 3470Words include: predicts, massive, earthquake, september, 3, 2010National Lampoon Remembered 3031Words include: rick, meyerowitz, veteran, illustrator, new, bookThe Rise Of E-rotic Lit 3902Words include: erotic, romance, e-publishing, taboo, twincestDigital Killed Trash Video Store 2333Words include: titfuck, andrew, leavold, brisbane, store, mournedTitanic II: That Sinking FeelingWords include: mockbuster, asylum, shane, van, dyke, auteurThe Trouble With Jim Thompson 3524Words include: killer, inside, adaptation, difficult, savage, surrealAnother Mötley Spüe 1100 Words include: foursome, heroin, Vince, Neil, kickstart, heartLay Back And Endless Boogie 498 Words include: heaven’s, house, band, summer, stoner, vibe

Too Hard BasketGreta Gerwig 435Words include: ulysses, wintour, compulsive, striptease, internet

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All natural ingredients. Organically sourced and locally owned. Gluten and dairy free. Except where noted, in which case experimental emulsifiers, GE growth hormones, transcendental fats, (212, 976, X-KRs3) and riboflavin have been added. Optimistically contains < 1% typographical eras, <40% unfounded opinion and not more than eighteen (18) insect parts per page. As policy, all stories contain traces of nuts. Reading may cause gangrene in your unborn baby, seeds to germinate in your lungs, and reduce/increase your chances of a peaceful afterlife. Not to be used as a flotation device.*Find the 0.1% if you dare.** Advertisers: You don’t write, you don’t call?!10 PRINT “BUM”20 GOTO10

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WordyMofo is published by Michael Adams and Lachlan Huddy. Copyright resides with the writer and/or designer of each story.

WE AIM TO BE MONTHLY. YOUR SUPPORT CAN MAKE IT SO.

THINGS & Stuff

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Five Things We Thought About Too

INDIE CHICKSLisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right and Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone are two of this year’s finest films. Now, can Oscar prove that rewarding Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker wasn’t a one off?

MOTHER OF ROCKThis documentary about pioneering Aussie rock journalist Lillian Roxon is a revelation. She discovered everyone – from Bob Dylan to Iggy Pop – before anyone else and wrote style-setting prose that still snaps over 40 years later. Next showing at the Toronto International Film Fest.

We promised ourselves we wouldn’t do “Top 10” lists. It was number three on our “Not To Do” list. But we also initially committed to a triangular page design. So rules are meant to be broken. Even so, we only half did it.

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NICKELBACKThat their video for This Afternoon inspires a four-year-old female to marvel, “All the boys are playing music and all the girls are in the pool!” means Chad and the boys are headed for The Hague.

DRIVERSA Animate’s animation of Dan Pink’s speech “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” has 2.5 million YouTube views – representing one percent of the number of people who need to see it. Funny, insightful, inspiring, it’ll change the way you think about the way you think about the things you do. So, not safe for workplaces where ideas are treated like farts.

JOHN WATERS’ ROLE MODELS The Pope of Trash’s portraiture of the people who have inspired him sees Waters temper his usual giddiness with a more emotive investigation into the reality of the lives of his heartthrobs. Ace.

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PEOPLE & Arts

A highlight of the fourth Sydney Underground Film Festival, held from September 9th to 11th, is the chance to see American: The Bill Hicks Story. Michael Adams considers this documentary reanimation.

In the absence of an exhaustive stash of personal footage of the late comic renegade Bill Hicks, British filmmakers

Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas spent three years turning hundreds of still photos into animations to recreate his life in American: The Bill Hicks Story. These sequences extend from his childhood right through to his death from pancreatic cancer in 1994, aged just 32. The visuals work – though they’re overused and eventually repetitive – but American’s strength remains its subject. The interviews with the 10 people closest to Hicks – including his mother, brother and sister and oldest friends Dwight Slade and Kevin Booth – and clips of the comedian from his teenage gigs to last shows are what really resurrect him.

The idea of resurrection is fitting because Hicks, who considered himself a preacher, really does have followers more than he has fans. It’s where he bests Lenny Bruce and George Carlin. The former broke all the rules but died for our sins too long ago to be a Generation X hero while the latter lived long enough to be appreciated.

But Hicks didn’t get his earthly reward. Though popular in the UK, he struggled for recognition at home. By the time he started to get famous, he was dying. Even then he got shafted: his last-ever Letterman slot was cut from broadcast on orders from Dave himself. That he beat his addictions but died anyway only deepens the sense of martyrdom.

For someone who loved tragic rockers and black humour, Hicks would get it

better than anyone else and the longer he stays dead the more beloved he becomes, each year getting closer to the number-one spot on “Greatest Comedian Ever” polls. There’s no doubt he would’ve loved that his rants have made him a rock’n’roll star, though he might be disappointed they’ve not yet been elevated to testaments.

American will expand the ranks of Hicks apostles though it can’t quite claim to be the definitive gospel. Cynthia True’s 2002 biography American Scream burrows deeper into his darkness and death while 1994’s Just A Ride documentary offers a wider range of his material and more analytical interviews with contemporaries such as Jay Leno, Eric Bogosian and a contrite Letterman.

For faithful followers, American contains much that’s familiar. Not that we tire of hearing Hicks’s story, just as we can return to his routines time and again. And there are welcome new angles, stylistically in the hallucinatory sequences recreating Bill and his friends taking acid, and narratively in a clearer understanding of how the escape trajectory he later needed to break free from the gravity of drink and drugs was what shot him into the comic stratosphere as a fire-breathing prophet.

That he didn’t get to do it for long is both totally unjust and somehow right.

We wish him alive so we could hear what he’d say about Justin Bieber, American Idol and Iraq. Then we listen to his stuff and marvel that what he said about New Kids On The Block and American Gladiators fits perfectly.

BrickCon sounds like a right geezer from a Guy Ritchie gangster flick. It’s not. It’s a convention for Adult LEGO. And that doesn’t mean sexytimes action with little plastic guys. Though it can.

THINGS & Stuff

It’s tempting to call BrickCon 2010 proof that leisure time is far too common and even more expansive, it being the US’s

premiere convention and exhibition for masterpieces crafted from LEGO, those building blocks of (usually early) life. But get even a cursory eyeful of past BrickCon displays and one can’t deny the presence of a certain artistry – and the appeal isn’t as limited as you’d think.

SHIFTING BRICKS come their latest masterpieces. There are spaceships the size of tabletops, replicas of the Moulin Rouge, zombie-apocalypse cityscapes, fearsome Goliath Airships, fantastic steampunk contraptions and even sexy LEGO ladies modelled in suggestive positions. Is there anything LEGO can’t do? Well, flex, but never mind.

It Throws Down the GauntletBodacious brick believers, we know you’re out there. If you can’t make it to BrickCon but you burn with LEGO love, we want you to let it show. Do as good as or better than the spectacular builds you see here and send us a snap at wordymofo@yahoo.com

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It’s a Brickbuster EventFrom September 30th to October 3rd, the ninth annual BrickCon will cover 40,000 square feet of the Exhibition Hall at the Seattle Convention Centre in sunny Washington. Last year’s attendance would’ve made the frowniest of LEGO men smile, with around 375 builders and 9,300 brick-boggled guests, and that was a hefty increase from 2008’s 235 builders

and 6,900 guests. If you build it, they will come.

It’s Not Just For KidsIt’s not even mostly for kids. While all are welcome at the Public Exhibition, BrickCon’s website discourages the under-14 set from attending the Convention: “Although there are some activities younger persons may enjoy, most of our Convention events are meant for more mature persons, primarily adults.” Which is, like, so whatevs.

It Brings the WowYou’ve never seen LEGO like this. BrickCon attracts the Michaelangelos of plastic blockwork, and with them

THIS BANNED

rocksIf you like to spit in the all-blinding eye of censorship, then observe Banned Books Week, which kicks off September 25th, by taking pleasure in a few forbidden folios. Here are some helpful pointers to the pages some want to suppress – and a few celebratory ideas not nearly as silly as censorship itself...

What is it? Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 by Judith Krug, president of the American Library Association and a woman who spent her life in bookish battle with would-be censors. Krug, who passed away last year from stomach cancer, founded the Week “in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries”, according to the BBW website.

ChaLLENGEs? Challenges are merely an attempt to ban certain materials rather than the actual ban. That only comes after much misplaced righteousness and authoritative

absurdity, such as the 1978 banning of the American Heritage Dictionary by the Eldon, Missouri library because it contained 39 “objectionable” words or, even better, the 1931 banning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in China’s Hunan province on the grounds that putting animals and humans on the same level would be “disastrous”. Well, it certainly didn’t work out for Siegfreid & Roy.

sURELY NOt iN 2010... The American Library Association compiles an annual list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books to guide indignation. 2009 was a bumper year for young adult works – it often is – with no less than six YA novels making the grade. Perennial favourites The Catcher In The Rye and To Kill A Mockingbird made the midlist, while 2008’s winner, children’s book And Tango Makes Three, the true fluffy tale of two gay penguins rearing a daughter, was bumped to number two by Lauren Myracle’s IM series, novels written entirely in instant messaging parlance. Challenges are issued on a variety of grounds, says the ALA, but typically arise care of nasty treatment of racial or religious groups, nice treatment of gays, and sex and violence. There goes the fun, in other words.

While Banned Books encourages folk to “celebrate the freedom to read” by hosting banned and challenged book readouts and erecting displays, we think you can go further.

BaNNEd BOOks ChiCWhy not let your seamstress flag fly and add value by making this into Banned Books Fashion Week? Devise crazy couture divinely channelled – there’s no other way! – from your favourite verboten or challenged yarns! The vibrant colours of Harry Potter paperbacks are aspirational perfection for that pret-a-porter wizard’s cloak (sword-and-sorcery excess is the new little black dress) and the brooding red-and-monochrome Twilight covers just scream out to be a fetching hoodie for the emo tween set!

Just looking at these covers can cause corrupt thoughts.

Now go rinse your mind.

THINGS & Stuff

BaNNEd BOOks CREEkThat dangerous tome The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn got you dreaming of becoming a riverfaring adventurer? Then we’ve just the ferry ticket: rope hardback editions of it and other favourite banned books together and take yourself a merry trip down the nearest waterway. Twenty copies of any Goosebumps book – first challenged in Minnesapolis in 1997! – rolled up and glued together make fine barge poles, but be forewarned: waterproofing spray is your friend.

saNd BOOks WEEkCan’t make it to a readout but can make it to the beach? Then craft your very own banned book display sandcastle! A shrink-wrapped American Psycho is weatherpoof and will give it structural stability, while decorative shells will catch the eye! Should a censorious bully want to kick it over, whack him in the face with a Blood And Chocolate hardcover. Words hurt!

BaNNEd BOOks sEatFinished reading your banned books? Why clutter the furniture with them when you can make them into furniture? Instructive texts like It’s Perfectly Normal offer comfort and support as seat and back for a fine chair, but be careful when sourcing the legs: use thick blockbusters like John Grisham’s A Time to Kill rather than histories like Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America, which at 603 pages looks quite hefty but may not hold up to rigorous testing.

BaNNEd BOOks LEEkSome banned books are good enough to eat, so why don’t you? A hearty leek soup can incorporate pureed pages for sumptuous flavour sensations. Add a dash of any Gossip Girl for a saucy kick, or stir in some To Kill A Mockingbird for a meaty Southern broth, or include a dollop of The Joy Of Gay Sex for a pleasant fruity tang.

“Now Bend Over And Say Arrrh!”September 19th is Talk Like A Pirate Day. That it falls on a Sunday means you’re this year not obliged to listen to the office douche add “Pieces of eight!” and “Avast me hearties!” to his every utterance. Instead, stay in bed eating salmagundi and drinking bumboo and consider the true meaning of the holiday, helped by our somewhat exclusive mythbusting guide to little-regarded facts about the eighth-oldest profession.

SAy It RIght The word “pirates” is correctly pronounced to rhyme with “pilates”. When in need of coin and exercise, 17th-century wenches would put on their least restrictive corsets, rouge their futtocks and announce, “Well, guess I best away to do some pirates.”

PlANk-WAlkINgThough popularised by Disney’s Treasure Island and Peter Pan, no such pirate punishment was ever recorded. But as a fate it might’ve been kinder than the endlessly inventive and cruel marine-based execution methods employed by sea-obsessed buccaneers. For instance, Captain Ampersænd “Fishchin” Gröôswòrt, the son of a Dutch sardinemonger who in 1723 answered the call to high-seas adventure and became the most famous raider of the fingerling trade which then sustained England, disposed of those who crossed him in his feared “Hungry Minnow Barrel”. Jerimiah “Lightning” Edison, a forebear of the famed inventor, was in the 1500s America’s most feared plunderoon. Reviled for preying on dhows working the waters between what is now Manhattan and Staten Island, he was also notorious for his merciless use of the “Electric Eel Chair” on captured child merchants. But not all executions were so swift. Lady pyrate Gigi “Booty” Marinara was an 18th-century Italian duchess who took to what was then only the sixth-oldest

profession after losing her family fortune in a financial scandal involving sea-bass bonds and doubloon default swaps. While she’d ultimately lend her name to the newly invented basic pizza, at the time her fame came from sentencing a man caught gazing at her shelf-like stern and at the globes she rested upon her escritoire to a decades-long torture she dubbed “Barnacle Ball Sack”.

the PIRAtIcAl IS POlItIcAlFar from being tyrannical enterprises, pirate ships operated as early democracies, with would-be captains campaigning for the votes of their shipmates. With many crews recruited from the ranks of escaped slaves, these pirate communities were also remarkably free of racism. As impressive and prescient: they practiced trickle-down economics mixed with progressive socialism. Raids would

sometimes net the captain a fortune equivalent to over $100m today but individual crew members stood to pocket sums well into the seven figures – much as in today’s corporations. Sadly, cabin boys and swabs usually invested in tulip futures on the South Sea Bubble Exchange. And as salaries and earnings ballooned, idealism broke down. Captaincy candidates spent huge fortunes on campaigns tainted

by cynically contrived logos (the short-lived Smiley Face & Cross Bones), vapid slogans (“A Brighter Fo’c’s’le” For All”) and illegal rebranding aimed at the “urban pirate” vote (Blackbeard and Blackbart hoped their focus-grouped nicknames would confuse the issue).

the MANhANdlINg Of the PARROtS Pirates did have hooks as hands and parrots as pals. What’s less known is that from 1780 parrots began to be used in the place of hooks. “Manhandling The

Parrot” involved wiring the tail of a bird to the stump of a handless swashbuckler. Recipients reported increased efficiency in flintlock triggering, stinkpot lobbing

and boil lancing but owners soon ran into trouble. Accusations

flew when stores of sea-biscuits – “crackers”

– went missing overnight. Bloody

conflict between a man and his bird was also common if the former tried

to get the latter to alleviate itching

associated with then-

rampant body lice, scabbard scabies and venereal diseases such as Milksop’s Cackle and Scurvy Cockswain. Similarly, a pirate who carelessly sought to “Shiver Myne Owne Timbers” in the privacy of his Poop Deck could expect a grisly result. (The later corrupted phrase “A Birde As A Hande Hurts Ye In the Bush” originated here). But what ultimately undermined the trend was less gory. The parrots were simply too mouthy and argued constantly, resulting more than once in a pirate shamefully suspending swordplay with an adversary to “Go and talk to the hand, arr.”

A 1674 survey revealed 79% of pirates carried the Black Spot virus but didn’t care.

What do you do when you’re new to Los Angeles and it’s Independence Day but

you hate the heat and despise patriotic holidays? Why not stay inside, watch TV

for 24 hours non-stop, flipping every three minutes to a new randomly determined channel, and see if you go mad? Brain

experiment by Luke Goodsell

THINGS & Stuff

Bored on the Fourth oF July

It’s just past midnight on July 4th, 2010. While much of the American empire is still in the throes of extra-special Saturday night festivities

— ahead of a slow-motion day of beer, barbeques and belching — the first moments of this national day are being marked televisually not by a live cross to fireworks or historical reenactments but by the demented smile of a young woman being directed to express gratitude as her hair is yanked skyward by a supposedly revolutionary curling wand. This is the first of the nearly 500 blipverts to which I’ll subject myself over the next day. The image makes perfect nonsense, though I don’t know it yet, because it’s about as coherent and meaningful as anything else I’m going to encounter – which is to say it’s neither. Welcome to my frightmare, enslaved to the cruel whims of cable TV for 24 hours that’ll seem to flash by in a mere 24 years.

Television: the boob tube, the idiot box, the drug of a nation. It made Elvis trigger-happy, caused Thomas Jerome Newton to overdose and sent countless rappers and punks a-ranting and a-railing at its evils – before, that is, they washed up on the shores of its reality shows or formula crime programs. TV even had The Boss earnestly grumbling that there were “57 channels and nuthin’ on” — a 1992 sentiment that feels about as relevant now as an episode of Howdy Doody. 57? OMG! Like, that’s soooo ancient!

But while there are now 500 channels

and our screens are the size of aircraft carriers, the medium’s place in our hearts and minds is getting smaller, like the picture shrinking to a white dot when you switched off an old cathode-ray model. The major reason is that other channels – websites, blogs, podcasts, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter – now number in their millions and are far freer in every sense of the word. TV was once the electronic hearth; today it’s just another brick in the wall of digital noise.

Even so, in a time when the web’s targeted ads all but pop up in your morning cereal and your Facebook and FourSquare updates are so datamined that Google already knows what you’re doing a week from now, television can look like a peacefully passive place, a head-lollingly spongy sanctuary a few clicks removed from the hyper-interactive Internet. Is it the abusive parent you once detested but now yearn for through the hazy lens of retrospect? Twenty-four hours of non-stop, randomised watching might be a way to find out, I told myself. Sure, TV marathons have been chronicled previously by a few hardy souls (and, I suspect, without fanfare by untold millions of shut-ins and couch potatoes) but I was curious to do it and see for myself — and see what it’d do to me. Would it return me to the bittersweet cocoon of my childhood or basically render me vegetative? Was it even psychologically possible — at least without firing an automatic weapon into the neighbors’ wall or, worse, updating my journey on Twitter?

3:36 a.m. Channels surfed: 72 “There has never been a better time to

start detecting!” – ad for a metal detector.I’m adrift in the early a.m., the morning

hours already bleeding into each other in a clichéd delirium, when I begin feeling the powerful psychotic urge to spend. Not on anything as consumption-bland as clothes or cars but rather on the stuff that’s really essential if I’m to upwardly mobilise my predicament, my person, my life, my lifestyle. See, while the number generator that sends me to a new channel every three minutes is random, at this time of day at least 80 percent of channels appear devoted to infomercials, so I’m

being relentlessly assaulted by news of contemporary marvels like Cookizza (cookies and pizza, together at last!), Youthology (an anti-aging serum that transforms you from a police mugshot to a police identikit), and iRenew (the revolutionary spiritual alignment frequency… in a bracelet!). But what I really want is a metal detector because let’s face it — as the commercial asserts, and to which I nod in agreement — “There’s never been a better time to start detecting!”

Yes! And maybe it is also time to treat myself to a Tanzanian Brown Zircon. And! And! If I place an order right now, I’ll be

“Backula” — but that might work, too, as it’d be just the thing for those forced to sleep in stiff, constrictive coffins.

Approaching the fifth hour of this – and still the randomness displays devilish order by delivering me only unto ads – I fear my IQ may be dropping. See, I feel primed to consume but the pitches are becoming perplexing. One moment a roid-raging cartoon of a human – or is he a human of a cartoon? – with abs rippling up to his larynx is shouting at me that the fitness regime, “SHAKE IS SCIENCE FACT! GET RIPPED! GET DEFINED!” I quake that if I don’t Shake he’ll burst into my lounge room and thump me – perhaps with an oversized Jack Rabbit. But seconds later, I discover there may be no need

7:51 a.m. Channels surfed: 157“Insanity comes with a 30-day, money-

back guarantee!” – an actual ad for Insanity Workout program.

Finally, a break in infomercial absurdity and something of patriotic value, in the form of a three-minute snatch of the program Grateful Nation, which shows how American soldiers wounded in combat have coped with their psychological and physical injuries through their love of hunting. The show is brought to us by Federal Premium Ammunition because “Every shot counts”. Now I’m onto a public service announcement for stroke sufferers – happily not sponsored by Eagle Drool Guards. That it jump cuts to a

By the sixth hour, crass ad epigrams are sounding like the utterances of sages.

taking the first step to making my love tangible – and by “tangible” we’re talking the Jack Rabbit vibrator, freely hawked here on the women’s network, Oxygen. Now there’s Cindy Crawford, spruiking her Meaningful Beauty range. Clearly it works— she doesn’t look a day over 1991. Speaking of copulating with inanimate objects, here’s the Back2Life spinal-massage machine, essentially a robot that the sufferer straddles in a continuous, passive motion for pain relief or sexual pleasure or is there really a difference? Initially, I misheard the brand name as

for Shake – or any other of the myriad diet-fitness miracles – because thanks to Instant Button, a system to expand your pants, I can achieve the effect of weight loss instantly any time I want! Nobody would ever know I’d gained 400 pounds if my jeans still fit, right? Shake or Instant Button? Are homo sapiens equipped to make such choices? Maybe this is what another earlier ad meant by “muscle confusion”. To think that I’d scoffed at that term as being medically dubious. Now, by the sixth hour, such crass epigrams are sounding like the utterances of sages.

documentary on amnesiac soldiers makes me think there’s some sort of supra-consciousness linking the clips. Wounded soldiers to brain injury to brain-injured soldiers! Then I’m reminded that it’s a meaningless universe as a hip hop clip featuring lascivious honeys segues into an ad featuring a sorry-ass looking white dude contemplating penile enlargement. Hang on, maybe it is all connected. Now a get-fit program announces itself as INSANITY, with customers hollering, “Before Insanity, I was nothing!”

Yes, I know now how it feels.

12:48 p.m. Channels surfed: 256 “Moses said, ‘God, I can’t talk good!’” –

TV reproduction of Biblical verse. There was an era, the TV equivalent

perhaps of the Old Testament, back when Snooki was just a clot in someone’s bottle of fake tan and Flava Flav remained a Public Enemy, that televangelism was mocked as the medium’s nadir. Since then, the holy rollers of the airwaves have had plenty of competition for bottom of the barrel from the likes of the tools of Tool Academy and the big fat fuckheads of Paris Hilton’s My Next BFF. But my July 4th Sunday TV trawl reveals that televangelists are far from a spent force – just so long as the faithful keep spending in force. “The King is coming!” beams a slick preacher, his beatific smile teetering

on the precipice of divine channeling and psychiatric ward mugging. “I say cancer back up!” bellows another, his traveling salesman rumbling ripped straight from an exorcist’s repertoire. “Disease and respiratory problems, begone — in the name of Jesus! Ain’t nuthin’ like the hand of your Lord being placed on your family and children!” Well, I’m quite sure child services would have something to say about that, sir.

After multiple coffees and plenty of high-fructose food to keep awake, my resistance is low and the religious squawk,

the ugly zeal pitched high to heaven, is particularly frightening. “Some people think that being a Christian means humility and that you have to live in poverty,” opines the ubiquitous Creflo A. Dollar, whose name would fit right in with a parody. A “Send money to…” appeal scrolls across the screen. I’m pleased I don’t reach for my Visa. There’s hope for me yet.

Or maybe not. I really begin to worry when the next vision appears on my screen. It’s Jan Crouch, a heavy-set female preacher of indeterminate age who’s apparently trying to reach the Lord physically with her big pink-hued hair.Her message, at least right now though I’ll learn otherwise after my ordeal, seems less about profit and more about radiating

a space-age aura. Something about her calms me on this dark mid-afternoon of the soul. If the DNA of solo-era Stevie Nicks and Miss Piggy had been genetically engineered in a David Lynch dream sequence, she would be the result, and I’m serious when I say she emits a strange kind of light that I find welcoming. Even her background music has the ethereal ambience of Angelo Badalamenti at his most tragic. Something about her reminds why people have faith — and/or Valium — and how that can translate into a kind of loopy transcendence. It’s a fleeting moment of respite and one that I’ll hang onto when things get more desperate.

5:12 p.m. Channels surfed: 352“Mom, if you bring a clown to my

wedding, you are not coming!” – Bridezillas.Ah, desperation. Ah, Bridezillas. It’s

quintessential modern TV: beleaguered fiancés preen and screech in reality-show self-abasement as they California-nail claw for attention and stiletto-stomp to a tacky Big Day and from there, presumably, onwards to Eternal Damnation beyond even Jan Crouch’s ministrations. But as I flick around I realise this show’s dismal philosophical mandate – anything is entertainment! - is barely distinguishable from the leering cleavage and booty and spa and vomit shots of Jersey Shore or the

A heavyset female preacher is trying to reach the Lord physically with her big hair.

inverted information pyramid over at Fox News, where they’re today promoting the hell out of top story “Hot Dog Arrest”, about competitive eating champ Kobayashi’s legal troubles. I random-surf to Holly’s Place, the Girls Of The Playboy Mansion spinoff featuring the blonde and buxom one whose distinguishing feature is being – um – named Holly. Anyway, when I drop in, her botox stylists or genetic engineers or lobotomy techs or whoever they might be are deep in a discussion about the difficulties of mocking Holly up in some kind of jungle scenario. Hooters Of Darkness, I guess, and no doubt a bitch to make seem, y’know, real. Hitting on CNN

next is to see that the gap between it and Fox – and maybe even Holly’s Place – has narrowed scarily. I chance on a bulletin about missing children, a subject that I humbly suggest just might be dramatic enough as is without CNN adding in muzak-version Dr. Dre beats and epileptic visuals. With it all leaching together in my brain, I can all but hear the segment’s voiceover intoning, “One of the challenges in the jungle scene, is we were trying to make Hotlydog look, like, wet before police arrived on the scene.” I wonder if my delusion is a glimpse of a future in which an infotainment singularity has been reached.

As the day wears on, a documentary on dementia is garbled between the hysterical mantras of yet more self-help wackos. Classic movies are chopped into tiny pieces and sprinkled with Twilight Burger King commercials. When I glimpse the actual President Of The United States on this Independence Day – Barack Obama, not Bill Pullman – he seems just another in the procession of instapundits, spokespersons, spruikers, gurus, mountebanks, messiahs and assorted Sham Wows talking down to/claiming to speak for We The People. Oddly — or

not — it’s the “Aye carumba!” antics of Latino soap operas that wind up the most coherent vessels for real emotional truth… or whatever version of it is buried within the canyons of static.

Admittedly, the three-minute viewing rule doesn’t help any program establish credibility. But then again, hasn’t television content pretty much always existed so it can be cut into little pieces and used to chum the commercial waters? Maybe the three-minute randomness is now the way to watch the medium, affording it the same sort of loyalty we show to web-pages or Facebook feeds, alighting briefly, absorbing a little infotainment that’s unmoored from surrounding context or continuity, and then clicking off away somewhere new.

Or maybe I’ve just lost it.

9:39 p.m. Channels surfed: 433“Did he break his leg?” “Dude, he broke

his pride.” - Deadliest CatchLeave it to Deadliest Catch — a reality

program dedicated to the exploits of Alaskan crab trawlers; because why not — to encapsulate much of what I am feeling at this point. Figuratively speaking, I might as well be adrift in the icy monotony of some Northern sea. The trawler tough guys at least are in the pursuit of delicious crustaceans – a kind of purpose to life from which I now feel distanced. I’m tired, glimpsing visions, and in exasperation

turning to Twitter. Usually it’s a forum for infuriating self promoters with microscopic attention spans, but after having paid scrupulous attention to over 400 random snatches from the unending television universe, a procession of 140-character messages actually now seems like a source of intellectual nourishment and interpersonal connection.

Still my indifferent master drones on, each click making me feel paler, as though my colours are being sucked up onto the plasma. On a sports channel a boxing match grinds to stalemate, the two fighters clenched together while jabbing pathetically to each other’s torsos. Click! “I’m fed up,” an elderly woman complains on the next channel, “I always have to put my bladder’s needs over my daughter.”

Barack Obama seems just another in the legion of pundits, gurus, Sham Wows.

Click. “Lubertha raised her net worth by 10,000 with our real estate program!” Click. “The lobsters have been dispatched and dismantled,” cheers the Iron Chef. Click. “Governor Schwarzenegger,” cries a protestor, “we call on your to prioritize education, not prisons!”

“Chill out, dick wad,” I find myself saying in Arnie’s voice. After all, as the high-octave vocalist is caterwauling now in an Independence Day highlight reel, “We shall overcome!”

11:57 p.m. Channels surfed: 479“There is no escape – don’t make me

destroy you.” – Darth Vader, The Empire Strikes Back.

It’s chattering, cannibalistic chaos out there. Viewed three minutes at a time, you see it clearer. Take refuge in your favourite “smart” programming if you like but know that its weight is but that of a feather compared with the elephantine mass of “dumb” shit out there. A belief that Stephen Colbert signifies a glimmer of hope is quickly corrected with a look at the ratings for American Idol, Dancing With The Stars or Two And A Half Men. Or even the briefest meditation on the billions of person-hours spent watching ads each year.

The notion that one might gaze upon culture and see only mostly a big, nasty void is the kind of existential nightmare

that many of us prefer not to consider. But after 24 hours of rabid pummeling, I’m feverishly considering a) moving to Europe to study Proust and paint decorative eggs; b) seeing if I can get a new chapter of the Weather Undergound going or c) ingesting my own recently-extracted eyeballs in the desire to go one better and witness the universe turn itself inside-out.

Nearing midnight, my final flip of the random-channel generator yields the spectacle of a bloodied Luke Skywalker

being slugged by Darth Vader’s mystically levitated debris. There’s our hero – named Luke! – smashing backwards through a circular window so he can plummet down an abyss into the unknown. Hyperbolic, absolutely — but I couldn’t have asked for a more fitting picture of how I feel at the end of the day’s ordeal. If only Vader had been around 23 hours ago to slice off my remote-control hand…

As I switch off the TV and stagger to bed, I think of Jan Crouch, that serene lady preacher, cutting a calm figure in the eye of the storm. That strange moment — her pixelated peacefulness amid the miasma of messages — means I can’t honestly write off the whole experience. I’m not sure why, but as I lay my head down to sleep, she makes me think, Well, maybe it’s not all bad. That and that it’s definitely time to get a metal detector.

Twitter now seems like a source of personal connection and intellectual nourishment

WordyMofo meets YouTube’s “Weatherbill”, who says a massive earthquake will kill hundreds of thousands on September 3rd. By Michael Adams

PEOPLE & Arts

The guy sitting opposite me on this crisp winter day in Sydney’s Belmore Park better not be playing with a full deck. That’s

because this mild-mannered chap named Bill Alder – though he goes by the handle “Weatherbill” – has talks with God in which he has been told that on August 9th and 10th and September 3rd the West Coast of the United States – and maybe as far north as Alaska and as far south as Chile – will be devastated by, respectively, a “Tsunami Warning” and then a “Mega Quake”. Remember that wild-eyed prophet of geographic cataclysm played by Woody Harrelson in last year’s disaster epic 2012? Well, meet his real-life equivalent.

No prizes for guessing that I found Weatherbill on YouTube. Two thousand years ago he might’ve been shouting his message outside Herod’s Palace in downtown Jericho. A century back his audience would’ve been limited to whatever multitude he could attract to his soap box in Hyde Park. But in 2010 folks like Weatherbill have potential congregations in the billions. Not that he’s doing the 250,000,000,000-view business that august personages Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and Charlie The Finger Biter clock up on YouTube. But with over 400,000 total plays for his various 10-minute prophetic monologues – the most popular attracting 78,000 hits – he’s no slouch, either. It’s a fair guess that more people have clapped their peepers on him

than did on J.C. back in the day.At first I thought that the Weatherbill

videos might be parody. After all, here’s a 43-year-old former hippie with a stoner drawl providing incredibly convoluted – not to mention confusing – explanations of how God gives him signs through computations derived from an ordinary deck of playing cards. There’s the use of naff green-screen backgrounds of tectonic hellfire, surging tsunami waves and cosmic spacescapes. Then there’s the “Miracle Testimony” transmission where he recounts how in 1986 he began to get turned onto God when he was hitchhhiking to a Grateful Dead concert and asked the Lord to provide lifts and concert tickets. Which God did. Then Bill dropped two hits of acid at a gig, hallucinated angels and demons reading his thoughts and wound up in a coma for five days. Then a few months later, and while not on acid, God spoke to him in a forest and laid out what he ought to do, advice that ranged from giving up drugs to eating more fresh fruit and vegetables. Now that definitely seems like something that the writers of a Saturday Night Live skit might devise. Same goes double for the video in which he analyses the past 10 Superbowls and sees in the match-up of the football teams’ emblems prophetic depiction of historical events. Remember Superbowl 34, when the St Louis Rams defeated the Tennessee Titans? Me neither, but it apparently predicted 9/11 because “the Titans” – that is, the Twin Towers – “got rammed”.

But Weatherbill is for real. And on this first day in July he’s sitting across from me, sipping hot chocolate as I drink coffee. Having watched his videos I’d become fascinated by his alternative universe that’d so soon be put to the test. I emailed him to ask if he’d do an interview. Oddly, he had already determined to emigrate to Australia and had booked a flight from the United States to Sydney so just a week after my exploratory communique we’re able to meet face-to-face. If Weatherbill sees the hand of God at work here, he doesn’t say. I’m guessing he does because he sees the Creator’s touch everywhere.

For instance, God acted as Weatherbill’s trip advisor to get him Down Under. He’d asked the Creator to send him a sign – in the form of someone offering him a shower – if him leaving the United States was part of the divine plan. Sure enough, a little while later, Weatherbill was having dinner with friends when one asked “Do you need anything? Like a shower?” Later in the conversation, the friend said, “You should just go and live in Australia.”

“Bullseye!” Weatherbill tells me. While it might seem an obvious kindness to offer a shower to a man who had been living in his van for a year, he sees such coincidences as “supernatural signs” and “prophetic confirmations”.

“That seemed like pretty good confirmation but I wanted more,” he continues. “So, one day when I was casting lots…” Casting lots – the ancient practice of cleromancy where the random selection of numbers or objects is thought

to reveal the will of God – is something Bill does a lot, asking for a sequence of cards correlating to certain options he’s already prayed upon. On the question of where he should live in Australia, Weatherbill decided that “the ace was for Sydney, kings were for Western Australia, Perth, and the Queens were for Queensland. I picked an ace, three kings, three queens – that’s beyond any coincidence. God was saying, ‘I gave you the pick of the whole continent – just get over there.”

Most of Australia, he says, is safe from the coming cataclysm. But that’s not the only reason he’s here: Weatherbill also

believes the Antipodean population is inherently more sceptical than his American fellows and thus if

Weatherbill with one of his DIY green-screen

backgrounds.

he can convince Aussies he’ll know he’s on the right track for a ministry. When he came through customs yesterday he wrote “Electrician/Christian minister” in the “Occupation” space of his visa form. “I want to be doing ministry but I have a trade to fall back on,” he says. Fair enough, I think. Jesus was a carpenter, after all.

Until a few years ago, Weatherbill was working as an electrical contractor in Tennessee, making good money, with as many as five housing projects going at once. But business regulations were “driving me crazy”, which drove him to dabble in penny stocks in a “little Russian oil company”. When much of the financial world was going belly up in 2008, Weatherbill made a tidy sum, which, when added to his savings, gave him enough money so he could follow

whatever calling the Lord would provide.Weatherbill opted out of the workaday

world and God came through soon after with confirmations of the coming megaquake and tsunami. It should be noted that this coming double date with disaster didn’t originate with Weatherbill but rather came from Christian minister Michael Boldea Jr, co-founder of Hand Of Help orphanage in Romania, who has written that one night in 2006 he and two of his fellows all had the same dream of the Golden Gate Bridge crumbling as San Francisco and much of the West Coast of the US were destroyed. Weatherbill is a follower of Boldea and Co. but what troubled him was that these guys weren’t providing a date for the disaster. “This could happen 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years from now,” he says. “So, I said to God: ‘What’s the deal here? We’ve got to know when.’ That’s what compelled me – just logic. Even unbelievers know the Big

Weatherbill on the road, putting official tsunami evacuation routes to the test.

One’s coming but if you could tell when it’s coming then they could say, ‘This is evidence that God is real’ and hopefully they’ll come to faith and believe.”

Weatherbill was thinking these thoughts in October 2008 while camping in his van on a friend’s land in Kansas and then, “September 3rd, 2010 popped into my mind”. A few days later, while fasting and staying in a friend’s basement, he randomly came across three playing cards on a floor – a 7, a 3 and a 10. “My mind was thinking seven is September,” he explains in his video, seemingly unaware of the numerical glitch. “I was thinking that’s too strong of a confirmation.” He

picked up the cards, shuffled, asked the Lord, “Show me how much time we have left.” He drew out a 2, which he took to mean, “God’s telling me we have approximately two years left.” The next day, Weatherbill pulled out two 2 cards in a row – which he took as 22 months from that date – November 3rd – which gives us September 3rd, 2010. A few months later, on January 1, 2009, another convoluted card shuffle produced a 6, a 10, and an ace, which was the Lord saying, yes, the earthquake would hit in 611 days – though an arithmetic error (from Weatherbill, not God) initially confused the number of days involved. Meanwhile, the August tsunami prediction was

An arithmetic error – from Weatherbill, not God – initially confused the number of days.

discerned from cards – beginning with a hand of 8, 9, 10, 5, 5, signifying August 9th or 10th, 2010 (5+5) – that he observed dealt in a game of Texas Hold ‘Em played at a Christian men’s retreat he attended.

Given that such hoped-for card combinations happen every day in Godless casinos, I ask Weatherbill why what he’s seeing isn’t just coincidence.

“The odds are incredible. I just feel that it’s far beyond coincidence,” he tells me. “The other thing is, I did pray, and all through the Bible it does talk about casting lots. Plus, in the last four or five months a number of people have emailed me with their supernatural signs.”

Such as?“Just recently I had someone who

was completely, instantly healed of a headache, a splitting headache, because he said, ‘God, if this prophecy of Weatherbill is real, heal my headache and I’ll take it as a sign.’ Stuff like that is coming in, testimonies from others.”

A headache sufferer isn’t Lazarus jumping up any more than a three of a kind is a loaves-and-fishes event but whichever way

you cut and count the cards Weatherbill has all the confirmation he needs that his prophecies will be fulfilled. “Who can predict an earthquake a year before

it happens? I can’t go into YouTube and change the dates. So this will be a very strong miracle that can compel people to have faith.”

As Sydney office workers stake out patches of grass around us for lunch in the wan winter light and commuter trains rumble into the underground city loop nearby, I guess I literally play Devil’s Advocate by asking Weatherbill what he’ll do if September 3rd passes just like this one: as another day.

“I’m pretty sure [the earthquake’s] gonna happen,” he says. “But if it doesn’t, I’ll get on YouTube, I’ll apologise. I’ll sit down and shut up and wait for the coming of Jesus because I’m not one to just go out and start prophesying like some of these guys – and then changing it up. I’m going off the evidence that God’s given me.”

If he’s right, what then? I ask him if he expects to be on the cover of Time or

Newsweek as “The Man Who Knew”?“I try not to think about that too much

because I really want to focus on what I can do now,” he says. “But I’ve thought a little about it and I would definitely be able to speak around the world and present this so people would know that Jesus is Lord. That’s really what it’s for – a sign for this generation.”

Weatherbill grew up in Philadelphia. His childhood was hard. He was eight when his dad went to New York

City on an errand and vanished from the face of the earth. His mom, meanwhile, was “in and out of mental hospitals. I think [it was] schizophrenia and she was abusing drugs and hanging out with a warlock biker gang.”

Now seems the time to ask Weatherbill whether he has ever been diagnosed as

Another spacescape and, above, detail from his Superbowl as prophecy vid.

mentally ill. The things he believes – that random numbers speak to him and that they’re pointing the way to a divinely inspired destiny – are respectively “ideas of reference” and “delusions of grandeur” and symptoms of psychiatric disturbance.

“Years ago, I applied for Social Security Insurance because I wanted money to follow The Grateful Dead,” he says. “I went to psychiatric evaluation in order to get that government money and they evaluated me as paranoid schizophrenic.” Weatherbill pauses. “It’s because I told ‘em I was hearing voices, demons – and I was, for a few years. Then the Lord just kept telling me, ‘Just totally ignore them

and don’t pay any attention to them.’ I did that and the voices slowly faded away and I don’t hear ‘em anymore. I haven’t heard them in close to two decades.”

Apart from the voice of God, of course, which he welcomes. I ask Weatherbill if he’s on meds and he says he’s not and never was because he “never needed ‘em”.

What of other drugs, specifically LSD? “People would say you’re an acid casuality,” I tell him.

“Well, I stopped doing it over two decades ago,” he says. Even so, he retains the convert’s conviction. “People have this hyped up opinion about acid in the media,” he begins. “Really all acid was...” He pauses. “It broke down your spirit to

where your soul and spirit were more connected than normal. You see furniture breathing, you laugh a lot, mindgames. It wasn’t anything like jumping out of a building. It’s just a basic drug and I haven’t had any after effects from it.”

“A lot of people would say this is the after effect,” I say.

“No, no, no – I have a very strong spiritual life because the Lord’s proven himself so much to me. If I was a tripping hippie, still drugged out, I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on an apprenticeship, learning the electrical code, which is very extensive. It’s not that I’m all veged out, like Ozzy Osbourne.”

We both laugh. If you use the former Black Sabbath frontman as a baseline for coherence then, yes, maybe Weatherbill’s doing okay. And though his beliefs fit into the criteria for mental disorder, he has a calm and self awareness you don’t expect from a fire-and-brimstone madman. He presents as pretty chilled and he gets that what he’s saying sounds nuts.

“When I started I was like, ‘Lord, this is weird, I’ve never had this before, this is telling the future, this is crazy but you’ve shown me it.’ It’s better that I say something and it doesn’t happen than say nothing and it does happen. I felt like there was responsibility on me to say, to tell people.”

Now’s the time to ask whether Weatherbill has been diagnosed as mentally ill...

I have to admit, Weatherbill raises an interesting point, both in that last comment and more broadly just by being who he is.

What do you do in his situation? Seek medication to make Yahweh shut the hell up or follow the instructions from on high as you perceive them? To think Weatherbill ought to be condemned (as do some other evangelical Christians who see his casting of lots as dabbling in the occult) or committed (as do secular haters on YouTube who mock his mental state) is also to indict much of that upon which our cultures and history are based. Most of the world’s presidents and prime ministers – and all of its religious leaders – align themselves with one or other of the ancient self-appointed messengers of God. Their billions of followers do likewise to one degree or another. Any

of these believers could justify chatting to the Creator as something done all the time in the holy books, but to do so would be to be called crazy. It’s a strange type of hypocrisy that it’s far more acceptable to believe God exists than that He or She does anything. And of the scoffing non-believers, how many can’t resist reading their stars, visiting fortune tellers, feeling spooked if they break a mirror or noting with a touch of mysticism that a subject in which they’ve recently become interested suddenly “appears” all around them? Weatherbill may be an extreme case but he’s also touched with something that’s in most of us.

The ways in which Weatherbill follows his calling are many. He’s a singer-songwriter – he gave himself his nickname

Weatherbill says this is entertaining speculation. Some might not see that.

“because I found myself writing a lot lyrics with weather metaphors and it just sounded good – with a bunch of sometimes surprisingly accomplished Christian tunes on MySpace. He explains his theories and experiences on numerous blogs. He makes his videos, including those in which he road tests established tsunami evacuation routes on the West Coast, finding many are “death traps”.

Like most everyone on YouTube, Weatherbill fancies himself an entertainer. So he’s serious about the tsunami and earthquake – and much garden-variety born-again Book Of Revelations interpretation besides, ranging from WWIII to the possible Chinese invasion of Australia – but the NFL as End Times barometer and prophetic commentary on 9/11, Iraq and more? Come on. “That was more speculation,” he admits with a laugh when I ask. “I freely admit that. But I thought, ‘Hey, that’d be fun and entertaining because I like videos to be a little entertaining.”

That is one very odd idea of entertainment though probably harmless as even the mushiest-minded conspiracy theorist

would be hard pressed to take that video with anything but a ton of salt. But the same’s not true of repeatedly saying hundreds of thousands of Americans are soon to die horrible deaths.

“The majority of people are going to

dismiss you as a crank,” I say, “but some people are gonna be really scared.”

Weatherbill agrees and advises them to make a precautionary evacuation. “Make it into a vacation, just keep it simple,” he says. “Take all of your money out of the electronic banking system, have hard cash, and go east a few hundred miles. Get out of California, Oregon and Washington, just for a few days. Plan your vacation around that time. That way people are not too inconvenienced but they’re still able to take the precaution.”

I put to him the hypothetical situation of a family of four killed on the roads while heeding that very advice and ask how that’d make him feel.

“I would feel terrible but you have to understand it all hinges on whether it comes to pass or not. If somebody gets killed when they’re trying to get away…”

Me: “… And it doesn’t happen?” “That would be hard.” It’s the first time in our meeting

The end of another tsunami evacuation test. Verdict?

They’re usually death traps.

I’ve seen something other than utter certainty. Then faith kicks back in.

“But we’re dealing with something in the realm of the spirit.”

The realm of the spirit: it’s where Weatherbill resides. I ask him how he relaxes. Does he go out to dinner and

catch movies, or is it all God all the time? He says he does see a film once in a while (for the record, 2012 gets the thumbs down and he didn’t identify with the Woody Harrelson character) but usually it’s just him and his Bible. Weatherbill says he has friends – back in the US, on Facebook – but “I’m not much of a people person.” He hopes to find fellowship with churches in Australia but they’ve so far ignored his emails. Weatherbill expects that to change when September 3rd hits and “incredible doors of ministry are gonna open”.

I wish him well as we say our goodbyes.

“If I’m right, you’ve got the exclusive,” he says with a laugh.

“And if you’re wrong, you can apologise,” I say.

“I will – I’ll sit down and shut up.”

As the weeks passed after our meeting, Weatherbill continued to make his videos in Australia. One had him

recounting the various testimonies from his followers, including one in which he

used a crude reverb effect to play the voice role of God. Another had him on Sydney’s streets, asking Australian youth if they’d come to Jesus Christ should his prophecy prove correct. The kids are surprisingly tolerant and good-natured, even a rather spacey chap whose reality seems stranger than Weatherbill’s.

August 10th (9th in the northern hemisphere) arrived and, just as Weatherbill predicted, brought with it a tsunami, albeit a 22cm wave originating near Vanuatu rather than a wall of water that inundated the West Coast of California. I wondered how Weatherbill interpreted this. I sent him a few emails. No response.

Then, on August 12th, he posted a new video. In it, he didn’t mention the Vanuatu tsunami but rather apologised – not for getting it wrong but rather for misinterpreting the cards about the dates. In one breath he said sorry for freaking people out and in the next he affirmed a tsunami was still going to hit the West Coast in late August. And September 3rd’s megaquake, he said, was still on.

In that last video, Weatherbill looked drawn and tense, a little like a man moving backwards and realising he has only corner behind him. He said he disabed comments on that YouTube post to stop the haters and bashers. Toward the end of the video, he praised empathy and lamented its absence in the world today.

Empathy is what I feel for him and I hope that his faith can see him through the difficult days ahead.

Four decades after the National Lampoon revolutionised the way we laughed, veteran illustrator Rick Meyerowitz’s book Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead

shines a spotlight on the geniuses who made the magazine so great. By Michael Adams

If You Don’t Read This Article, We’ll Shoot This Artist.

PEOPLE & Arts

This year marks the 40th anniversary of National Lampoon first smashing headlong into newsstands

in the United States, an upstart monthly magazine staunchly against comic compromise while also an avowedly commercial enterprise. This unlikely combination succeeded wildly on both fronts for the best part of a decade, circulating well over one million copies per month at its peak as it tickled the ribs and raised the ire of the left, right and the in-between.

In any given issue, you could expect sophisticated satire and scatalogical slapstick – or both in the same frame – deployed not just for the sake of entertaining silliness but also against the nogoodniks behind national disgraces like the illegal bombing of Cambodia and the Watergate break-in, against the peaceniks and freaks protesting “The Man”, and the huddled masses of middle Americans seeking refuge in the simple self-absorption of the emerging Me Generation. There had never been anything like National Lampoon before and despite its influence since, on everything from the raunch-com of Judd Apatow to riffs at Cracked.com, its verve and nerve have never been matched.

The magazine’s story has been told previously. Tony Hendra, one of its editors, charted the publication’s rise and fall in Going Too Far, his history of boomer-generation comedy. Dennis

Perrin’s Mr Mike, a biography of Michael O’Donoghue, the Lampoon’s bleakest wit, and Josh Karp’s A Futile And Stupid Gesture, which traced the short life of co-founder Doug Kenney, are also vivid and essential. But each of these books necessarily tilted towards its author or subjects, with other contributors’ presences usually felt when they intersected with Hendra, Kenney or O’Donoghue.

Now Rick Meyerowitz, the magazine’s most celebrated artist and creator of its iconic “Mona Gorilla” cover and the Animal House poster, has corrected that imbalance with Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers And Artists Who Made The National Lampoon Insanely Great. The hardback book alternates between his profiles of his old friends and colleagues and their recollections of one another. As importantly, Meyerowitz has painstakingly restored and reproduced not only some of the most famous and infamous stories and artwork but also a glorious selection of obscurities.

“Part of the reason I’ve done the book is that the magazine has been largely forgotten and suddenly I’m talking to 40 year olds and they have no idea what it was,” he says, sipping tea in the lush backyard of the West Village brownstone he shares with girlfriend and fellow author and artist Maira Kalman. At 67, Meyerowitz, who’s now best known for creating with Kalman The New Yorker’s best-ever-selling cover “New Yorkistan”, is no spring chicken. The Oscar Wilde locks and rounded features of

his National Lampoon days are long gone. Bald now, with a leaner face, he reminds me of a friendlier-looking William Burroughs, though that could just be a trick of the Skype.

What’s unchanged is Meyerowitz’s youthful passion for the magazine – and he hopes his book is a way of sharing that fervour with kids whose only knowledge of the brand is via it being whored out to shitty comedies, most hideously in the Paris Hilton vehicle spruiked as National Lampoon’s Pledge This!

“My whole goal was to reach younger people. The idea was to make a book that sparkled, that had a brightness and colour about it and not something that looked

like it was preserved in amber. I tried to not choose stuff that was so dated and so obscure that a new audience couldn’t appreciate it. A 40, a 30, a 20 year old: I want them to look at this and say, ‘This is fucking funny’. I hope what people learn is there once was a magazine that could challenge you, challenge those in power and maybe make us think a little differently about things.”

Meyerowitz’s other ambition was ensuring that the credit for National Lampoon was shared beyond the magazine’s more famous personalities. “Nobody remembers Gerry Sussman, a great friend of mine, who died suddenly

one day 20 years ago,” he says. “Many might say that of the Lampoon he was the funniest one. Why is he forgotten? The cartoonist Charlie Rodrigues died six years ago. No-one remembers Charlie. And he was amazing. So what I tried to do was re-establish who these talents were.”

The drunk, stoned and brilliant Kenney – who slipped to his death from a Hawaiian cliff in 1980 – and the equally wigged-out O’Donoghue – who died of a brain haemorrhage in 1994 – are, of course, well represented in the book.Just not at the expense of Christopher Cerf, Henry Beard, Michel Choquette, Sean Kelly, Anne Beatts, Sam Gross,

“A 40, a 30, and 20 year old: I want them to say, ‘This is funny!’”

Bruce McCall, Brian McConnachie and two dozen others. While alumnus P.J. O’Rourke has more or less stayed true to the rambunctious Republicanism of youth, the book also reminds that the very respectable George Trow, who made his name with The New Yorker, and Gahan Wilson, who this year marks 50 years as a cartoonist with Playboy, did some of their funniest and freest work for the disrespectable Lampoon.

“George wrote a very famous book called In The Context of No Context, which every intellectual in this country claims to have read. But what they didn’t know was that George had spent five years at the Lampoon doing amazingly funny stuff,” says Meyerowitz. “With Gahan Wilson, all people know is Playboy – they don’t know he had almost 20 years at the Lampoon.”

Each of Wilson’s Playboy cartoons, Meyerowitz tells me, is individually approved by Hugh Hefner, which is a far cry from how the Kenney, Hendra and other Lampoon editors worked. “Gahan told me that they’d call up and say ‘We need five pages and the theme is love. We need it in two weeks. See ya.’,” says Meyerowitz. “They went to these artists and writers and said, ‘We think you’re funny.’ The sense was, ‘We know who you are. You’ll do amazing work for us – go and do it.’”

Meyerowitz’s research began with him re-reading every issue of the magazine from its April 1970 debut. “I had them all but I’m not a ComicCon kinda crazy guy,” he says with a laugh. “As an artist, I was in almost everyone one – I did about 150 illustrated stories and over 600 illustrations – so I had a subscription and I saved them.” Each day, he’d take a stack to his neighbourhood coffee shop and make notes. “Every once in a while I would turn a page and I would burst out laughing because the thing that I saw was just outrageous and I’d totally forgotten it existed,” he says, amused again now. “I’d look up and everyone in the coffee shop was like this.” He mimics a shocked customer’s visage, eyes wide, mouth agape. “I realised I was the crazy old guy in the corner, cackling over a magazine with possibly a half-naked babe on the cover. But it gave me a chance to re-establish for myself the genius of the magazine.”

Then he talked to the geniuses behind the Lampoon – well, at least those who

don’t fit the last bit of the book’s title. Given the staff were notorious for their disputes and vendettas, it could’ve been a dicey proposition. “There were people who stopped talking to other people but apparently I was the only one who has stayed in touch with most of them. I’ve visited everyone in the past two years,” he says. Leaning forward, he adds with a conspiratorial smile, “Even a couple that’re dead.”

Does he mean he’s encountered their, um, spirits? Both Kenney and O’Donoghue’s biographers mention in passing these Lampooners’ proclivity for appearing posthumously in the dreams of their friends and colleagues. But Meyerowitz is talking more metaphorically about getting in touch

with them through their work, which lives and breathes still.

“I knew Doug pretty well,” he says. “Every once in a while when I was really deep into doing the work about him I could say he might float through my mind sometime during the night but nothing that I actually remember, nothing so you could write that. And Michael doesn’t come to me in dreams. If he did, he’d be wielding a stick… he liked the walking stick. He was a very particular guy, and a genius in his way, and totally nuts. I had some of his notebooks for a while and it was really off the wall stuff that only he

Meyerowitz’s book – the perfect Christmas gift for the

Two And A Half Men fan.

could’ve made into something coherent.” The co-founder still on this mortal coil

who wouldn’t play ball was Beard, who has for years lived in golf-playing seclusion near Big Sur on the Californian coast. “He doesn’t want to think about it, to talk about it or write about it,” explains Meyerowitz. “He didn’t say that in an unfriendly way – just as a statement that, ‘This is my life, that’s over for me. Thirty-five years ago I left the National Lampoon, why do you even want to talk about it?’”

But there is much to talk about about. Reading the profiles and magazine spreads in Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead

is to be struck by how acerbic, funny and talented these guys were. Kenney’s “The Undiscovered Notebook Of Michelangelo”, drawn by Daniel Maffia, a Renaissance recreation with whoopee cushion and vibrator jokes, will still be as ingenious in another four decades from now. The surrealism of Brian McConnachie’s drink-driving adventure comic “Heading For Trouble”, drawn by Francis Hollidg, is similarly timeless. And while American comedy was then a boys’ club, even more so than now, the male-dominated National Lampoon did give a voice to a true pioneer in Anne Beatts, who proved she could get into as much – or more – trouble than the guys with her infamous floating Volkswagen parody ad that innocently

pointed out that had Ted Kennedy been driving one at Chappaquiddick he would’ve been president. That one got them sued. Meanwhile, the centrepiece of Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, “Stranger In Paradise”, a Life-style photostory by Choquette and Beatts, which depicts Adolf Hitler’s dotage on a desert island where he’s a beneficent god to the natives, is more intricately amusing and inspired than all those Downfall mash-ups put together.

Everywhere you look there’s brains and ballsiness that’s rare in the media today. Scathing though they are of American

foreign policy mistakes, it’s difficult to imagine Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert doing anti Iraq war satire as savage as the “What, My Lai?” cover that turned Vietnam war criminal Lt. William Calley into MAD magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman or an updated Afghani version of the “The Vietnamese Baby Book” in which the horrors that war inflicted upon civilian kids are recreated as a keepsake. Just as unlikely, that anyone would run Henry Beard’s “The Law Of The Jungle”, a Supreme Court brief on that very notion, right back to the landmark case Brontosaurus v. Tyrannosaurus Rex. Meyerowitz has reproduced it in it’s 12,000 word entirety. “I’m putting this in the book not because I expect people to

It’s hard to imagine a modern Afghani-kid update of “The Vietnamese Baby Book”.

read it,” he laughs, “but because I want people to see that the Lampoon wasn’t just tits and ass. The parody of it was dead on and you can dip into it in any place and find humour in it and footnotes that are mindboggling. There was room for people to extraordinary things.”

What’ll also be extraordinary to sensitive 21st century minds is that back in these dark ages political correctness hadn’t been thought of yet. “I actually expect some trouble when I present this book to more conservative audiences – and I can’t wait,” says Meyerowitz. “I can’t wait to have somebody [say] ‘How dare you show me

something that has the word ‘nigger’ in it!’ or ‘How dare you show something so outrageous and so demeaning to women!’”

“The great thing about the Lampoon is it wasn’t left or right, it was an equal opportunity offender. Not just to offend, but to point out the ridiculousness of everybody, the pretentiousness of everybody, what humbugs we all are. Political correctness in the past 40 years has reached a level where people don’t want to talk about anything. They’re nervous – ‘I can’t say that, I can’t say this.’ The Lampoon said ‘Yes you can!’ Yes, you can insult women! It’s fun! But you can also insult men!”

Feisty though he is, there was one cartoon article, from his beloved Charlie

Rodrigues, that Meyerowitz was talked out of including, not so much for the offence it might cause as from a desire not to see his friend’s legacy besmirched by those unable to get the gag. The piece poked fun at the disabled for being just like us in every respect save their disability. One illustration has a blind man listening to someone whispering to him from a pew just as he walks down the church aisle to be married. Meyerowitz explains: “His bride is a black woman and she’s looking a little startled and the guy is like this, ‘A nigger! I’m marrying a nigger?’” The point, of course, is that it makes fun of

our prejudices in assuming a blind person couldn’t be racist simply because he can’t see – as if such intolerance is regulated by something as simple as sight. “You have to really look at it to see the joke,” Meyerowitz says, “but I was looking to show how great Charlie was, not to create a horrible controversy about him.”

Of course, one can’t speak of National Lampoon’s rude glories without also discussing its crude decline. Meyerowitz sees the decade until 1980 as the heyday and has only included two pieces published after that. But the slide began earlier – as it must, at the peak.

Quickly successful beyond anyone’s dreams, the magazine in 1975 had afforded O’Donoghue and Beatts a platform from

“I expect trouble when I present this to conservative audiences – and I can’t wait.”

which they could help launch Saturday Night Live, itself a showcase for hot new talents, including John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner and Chevy Chase, who’d cut their teeth on the Lampoon’s spin-off stage show Lemmings and its Radio Hour. “When that television program began you could suddenly get Lampoon humor someplace else, it wasn’t like you just had to buy the magazine,” notes Meyerowitz.

A few years later, Kenney kicked his career up to a new level when he wrote Animal House, which was partly inspired by his work on the stand-alone National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook parody. The movie, with its breakout role for Belushi, quickly became the biggest grossing comedy in history, in every sense

of the word. “By the time Animal House premiered in 1978 you were beginning to see Lampoon humour pop up in other places,” says Meyerowitz. “By the early 1980s they were making movies called Porky’s This and Porky’s That and now Lampoon humour was available in many places and the magazine began to settle into a kind of irrelevance.”

Meyerowitz says original owner Matty Simmons further watered down the formula. “He took from Animal House not that the movie was subversive, which it was, but Belushi peering at a woman getting undressed. That’s what he took as his aesthetic, assumed that the way they would make money is if they had more fart jokes and more tits on the cover. So through the 1980s it was foundering until it finally capsized, the funniest thing it had done in years.”

For a magazine that had thrived on lacerating phonies and idiots, still worse was in store for its legacy as the brand name fell into the hands of even more cynical owners in the 1990s. “If Paris Hilton made a movie and wanted to call it National Lampoon’s Paris Hilton Shitty Movie, five thousand bucks is all she’d have to pay for the name,” says Meyerowitz.

These days the prospectus of National Lampoon, Inc., as it’s known, describes in banalspeak its mission to “develop, produce, provide creative services and distribute National Lampoon branded comedic content through a broad range of media platforms”. Such products include National Lampoon’s Knucklehead, a

site for Girls Gone Wild style videos and advertorial blogs. And when CEO Daniel Laikin was busted in 2008 for his illegal stock manipulation scheme, the company’s share value dropped 80 percent in three days. That a sharp, smart and, in its own fashion, idealistic brand like National Lampoon would one day be associated with the dullest, stupidest and most criminal elements of our culture is a joke so black that even graveworm wit Michael O’Donoghue might’ve considered it too dark.

Meyerowitz resists the curmudgeonly urge to conclude that this fate is but a symptom of us all getting much dumber over the past 40 years. “I think we’re just distracted,” he says. “We’re doing a million things. People are spending their time on Twitter or on Facebook. The Internet is filled with stuff and there is humour out there but it’s incidental and it’s so dissipated that it’s hard to locate and people finally don’t have the time. Written humor exists but it’s mild compared to what it used to be.”

It’s TV where Meyerowitz sees the magazine’s true legacy most clearly, in the likes of Craig Ferguson and Bill Maher, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The Simpsons, for whom Lampooner Ron Hauge has worked since season eight, when he penned the landmark “Homer’s Phobia” episode, is another favourite whose DNA can be traced back to the Lampoon. But its true bastard child, Meyerowitz says, is South Park. “The outrageousness of it, the fact that they

talked about Muslims and in the middle of that cartoon business about drawing Mohammed,” he laughs. “South Park confronted that issue and I loved it. They got in trouble with the network but they went ahead and did it. If the Lampoon had been around, they would’ve had a Mohammed drawing contest right after that whole thing broke!”

Risking a fatwa to get a laugh might not be to all tastes, but Meyerowitz does hope that kids – and cheeky kids at heart like himself – who pick up Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead might be inspired to act out – even if just a little. “We should know about the magazine,” he says, “because we all have the capacity to keep doing this and I really believe that getting in trouble is a good idea.”

Rick Meyerowitz chats with WordyMofo over

the magic of Skype.

THE RISE OF e-ROTICLIT

PEOPLE & Arts

Curling up with a good book is taking on a new meaning as erotica and e-readers converge. Readers might be happy but not everyone’s getting satisfaction. By Lachlan Huddy

The image on the previous page is taken from the cover of erotic vampire e-novel A Taste Of Dawn

by Aubrey Ross, which is part of her Crimson Carousel series, itself found in e-publishing house Ellora’s Cave’s unsubtly titled “Twilight” strand – as distinct, say, from their “Aeon” or “Breathless” lines. It’s something you learn quickly when penetrating the world of erotic literature: they take their labels very seriously around here. Confuse the various strands of saucy storytelling or, Venus forbid, equate any of them with porn, and you’ll earn a prompt slap on the wrist – and not the fun kind, either.

“The sexual relationship [in erotic lit] is part of the story,” explains Raelene Gorlinsky, Ellora’s Cave publisher. “It isn’t just a story where you dump in sex scenes.” Perish the thought; the nookie needs a narrative point. “‘Did it help the characters develop their relationship or their understanding of each other? Did it somehow play into the plot?’ There has to be a reason for the sex scenes.”

So, no pool boys stumbling into lonely rich ladies’ vaginas then. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Those in the industry are at pains to demarcate between erotica and erotic romance, and it’s the “romance” part to which you need to pay attention.

“In typical romance, whether it’s mainstream romance or erotic romance, part of the definition of the romance is that there is what’s usually phrased as an emotionally satisfying, usually committed ending,” says Gorlinsky. “Doesn’t mean they rush off and get married, but the reader ends the book feeling that these people are together and in love and have a future together. In erotica, you don’t have to have that romance ending. The point of the story is a sexual adventure or growth rather than a romantic one.” So, sometimes the happy ending is a happy finish rather than a happy ever after.

Erotic lit might separate itself out with its sexual focus but there has to be a balance between, to put it crudely, the foreplay and the fucking. “Ellora’s Cave’s motto used to be ‘More sex, more sex, more sex’,” reveals Tracy Cooper-Posey, author, e-book authority and general erotic romance whiz kid. But, she goes on to caution, “they actually don’t say that anymore.” Cooper-Posey believes that readers are becoming bored with stories that are too sex-heavy, and are drifting back toward good old-fashioned yarns that offer as much back-story as backdoor action. It’s an industry forever trying to calibrate its product, with the sex-to-story ratio an ever-present challenge for authors. Too little and you’re a plain vanilla wrapper; too much and you’re porno without pictures.

That’s not to say there are too many limits when it comes to explicitness in erotic lit. A hallmark of the genre A

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as a whole is an insistence on frank language, the naming of body parts and “very explicit and graphic and detailed” writing, as Gorlinsky puts it. Forget those much-mocked Mills & Boon “heaving staffs” aching for “private petals”. Here’s an excerpt from the erotica novella Rendezvous by Lisabet Sarai, for example: “His cock churning in my ass was everything I had ever desired.” Yowser.And while the obvious taboos remain in place – no children, dead bodies, rape or animals – beyond that nearly anything goes, such as the popular sub-genre “twincest”, which is exactly what you’re thinking.

Most publishers employ a rating system for their books, from mildest to wildest, to help readers find stories within their comfort zone. So while erotic e-book purveyor Total-E-Bound

It’s not pool boys stumbling into lonely rich ladies’ vaginas.

offers the merely “total e-sizzling”, “total-e-burning” and “total-e-melting” classsifcations, Rendezvous scores the “total-e-taboo” classification and shares digital shelf space with those bro-on-bro tales, such as Good-Time Boys: Twin Temptations. The ratings loosely correspond to film classifications, with “taboo” the equivalent to an X for intense BDSM, same-sex partnerships, anal sex, etc.

But Gorlinsky explains that Ellora’s Cave have scrapped their similar system, feeling it’s more fumble than foreplay. “The ratings were really subjective. What one reader would consider an X-rated book another would go, ‘Oh no, no, that’s not so hot.’” She goes on to say that the ratings grew irrelevant over time – “Readers wanted more. And hotter!” – and that ratings engendered a fixation that prevented readers from finding good erotic fiction based on the more useful criteria of subgenre or author. “We just decided the ratings of heat level were more confusing to readers than they were helpful.”

While literary types might be tempted to snigger at this cliterary niche, erotic fiction is a lusty force to be reckoned with, one whose market has engorged significantly over the past two decades. Its very nature means it can expand in virtually any literary direction. Let’s face it, you can work erotic elements into any genre, from paranormal and science fiction to historical and crime – and authors often do. Peruse any erotic A

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publisher’s catalogue and you’ll see it neatly divided into sections by sub-genre, sometimes with a coy little nickname. Ellora’s Cave’s Westerns are the “Lawless” line, their Fantasies the “Xanadu” line, their Interracial titillaters the “Fusion” line. Often there’s crossover between genres – Shayla Kerston’s Angel Moon is an erotic gay fantasy/sci-fi actioner, for example. Such mash-ups, or admixtures of genres, can be set in any period with varying degrees of explicitness and still have no trouble finding an audience. “We have found our customers are very eclectic in their tastes. There aren’t many who say, ‘I will only read Historical or I will only read Vampires.’ They seem to try a lot of things,” says Gorlinsky.

That kind of variety’s the spice of life for e-rotic publishers and readers, but it also makes it difficult to quantify sales since titles are often lumped into the genres in which they are incorporated rather than measured on their own. Still, as a sign of rude health, a quick glance around the publishing world reveals most heavy-hitters have come out to play with their own erotic imprints over the past decade. Kensington have Aphrodisia and Brava; Random House acquired Virgin Books, who have Black Lace and Cheek, and who also ran the short-lived Idol and Sapphire imprints for gay and lesbian erotica respectively; Simon & Schuster have Strebor; and Penguin have Heat. Traditionally mainstream romance publishers have also brought out lascivious lines, Harlequin/Mills &

Boon with Blaze and Spice, and Avon with Avon Red. As Gorlinsky says, “It’s a huge market.”

Not only is it huge, but it has also gone from strength to strength in a time when the book publishing industry in general has seen a downturn care of crunching credit worldwide. Sexpert Brian Alexander, author of America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction, reported in an April MSNBC article that Kensington saw erotic lit as a “growing opportunity” and that Cleis Press, a publisher specialising in erotica and sexuality has “seen its sales rise by more

than 56 percent over the past three years”.

The e-rotic frontier looks as rosy. “The number of e-publishers offering it grows every day,” Gorlinsky says, and Claire Siemaszkiewicz, co-founder of Total-E-Bound, concurs: “We’ve seen growth month-on-month and I’m confident that’s just going to continue.”

It’s no wonder: e-book sales are on the rise all over. The International Digital Publishing Forum reports that wholsesale e-book sales in the US have

been rising steadily since 2002, and have exploded in the past two years, from $US53.5m in 2008 to $US165.8m in 2009. This year is going to make that look like chump change, with $US179m spent on e-books in the first two quarters alone.

Gorlinsky puts it down to the recent mass-market exposure of e-readers like the Kindle, Sony Reader and iPad. “I think the proliferation of the reader devices by the mega corporations has really been the driving thing,” she says. “There have been reader devices around for 20 years but they were from small companies. They weren’t very well-known.”

E-books and e-rotica go hand in leather glove for a number of reasons. While sales of individual titles are no great shakes – according to author Emily Veinglory’s sales comparison site erecsite.com, the average total sales for an Ellora’s Cave title in its first year of release is a mere 1031 copies – the speedy turnaround of digital publishing coupled with the appetite of the market allows for a much higher output than print, with lower running costs and larger profit margins. “We put out about 10 new e-books each week,” says Gorlinsky. Run the numbers. It’s a tidy amount of units shifted every year.

But such success for publishers, and the increasing proliferation of titles, has actually made things tougher for authors. Cooper-Posey explains: “The e-book industry, before it became ‘popular’ and

Ellora’s Cave puts out 10 new e-rotic books a week.

New York [publishers] decided they needed to shape it according to their vision of how things should go, was the new midlist for authors. You could make your living here. Because there wasn’t huge numbers of e-publishers out there, every time I put out a new title, I could expect to make around $2,000 in the first month on a full-sized book title, with a sliding scale of comparable earnings for smaller titles. There would be a steady drop for continuing months after that, until you reach a point of steady, slow sales month after month.”

Since e-books never come off the shelf, authors could build up a backlist of titles that would bring home the bacon, potentially, in perpetuity. “Eventually, as the backlist income built high enough, that author could reach a point where their monthly income was dependably high enough [that] they could quit the day job and write full-time, and their income would leap even higher.”

But all that is changing, contends Cooper-Posey. Once a full-time writer, she’s recently been driven back into the work force as a result of low sales, something she partly puts down to e-rotic lit falling victim to its own success. “There’s just way too many e-publishers,” she says. “There’s just dozens of them, they’re flooding the market.”

The other major factor – “This one’s the one that really cranks my chains,” growls Cooper-Posey – is the ever-contentious issue of book piracy, which

affected her latest novel, Beauty’s Beasts. “One hour [after its release] it was up on Astatalk.”

Cooper-Posey says opponents of the “piracy’s bad” argument often point to the music industry’s lawsuit loss against pioneering file-sharing program Napster as proof of piracy’s irrelevance. “They keep saying, ‘You should take a lesson from the music industry, the music industry’s recovered’. Well, we can’t give live performances of our books. We can’t give merchandising on our books.” She laughs in frustration. “What am I supposed to do? Hand out condoms?”

It’s a cruel irony that the web should be causing practitioners of erotic lit such grief, since the digital

dungeon was the place where the popularity really began. An obscure genre in the 1990s, erotic literature enjoyed only a handful of publishers, was sparse on bookstore shelves and as a result didn’t command much of a readership. Then came the Internet, a vast landscape of possibility waiting to be colonised by forward-thinking commercial interests. Erotica and erotic romance rode the wave, bouyed in particular by a nifty new idea: the e-book.

“The two sort of went together,” says Gorlinsky. “E-books were a way to inexpensively make available a genre that

did not yet have a big reader base, like erotic romance… And so as ebooks grew, erotic romance grew and vice versa.”

E-books also neutralised the curse of propriety, particularly in buttoned-down areas like the United States. After all, how willing were women – who comprise the vast majority of erotic literature readers – to front up to their local bookstore clerk with a tome whose cover art showed a nice young couple who’d lost their clothes but found some handcuffs? How willing were they to be seen on the bus perusing a book whose cover blurb ran, “Kink and taboo are

taken to new heights in this riveting story of unbridled lust and its shocking consequences”?

“There was no way women would have bought those sorts of books if they’d had to go and pick them up off the shelf,” says Cooper-Posey. “But because they could buy them online and it was all anonymous and they could just pay for it and nobody had to see what they were buying? Yeah, wouldn’t have happened any other way.”

But already such coyness seems quaint, with women now happy to flaunt their erotic lit love. “People are much more open and relaxed about sexuality these days and not as embarrassed to openly say that they read erotic

romance,” says Siemaszkiewicz.The success of erotic e-books has

meant that some electronic titles are now available physically as paperbacks – and apparently the discomfort over those racy covers has abated. “They’re completely open and frank about what they’re buying these days. My Ellora’s Cave titles are in paperback now, and [readers will] pick up a book and they’ll look at it and read the blurb and gasp, ‘Ellora’s Cave! Oh, cool!’ and they’re discussing everything. It’s like, ‘Is this a menagé?’ at the top of their voices. ‘Oh, it’s not?’ And they’ll put it back if it’s not.”

She laughs. “So it’s completely different 10 years on.”

Still, not everyone agrees that erotic fiction readers being willing to tout their turn-ons amongst a congregation of the like-minded points to a general broadening of sexual acceptance.

“There’s more sex in the media, perhaps, but if anything, I think people are less comfortable sexually than they used to be,” contends Llisabet Sarai, author of the aforementioned Rendezvous, though she cautions that she’s speaking primarily about the US. “The media have engendered unrealistic expectations about appearance and sexual performance that undermine a healthy and enthusiastic approach to sex.

“People are not as embarrassed to openly say they read erotic romance.”

Meanwhile, religious fundamentalism continues to grow, demonising individuals who consider that sex has any place outside of heterosexual marriage.”

The swelling sales of erotic fiction, Sarai thinks, have less to do with the breakdown of conservative sexual mores and more to do with big business being savvy enough to recognise a hot ticket and market it accordingly. “The bigger publishers have decided that sexually-themed books sell and so they have jumped on the bandwagon.”

Sarai says there may be a downside to the surging popularity, too; hard-

hitting erotica’s getting diluted by the mainstream. “Many of my colleagues in erotica lament the mass-market homogenisation of the genre. They feel that the days of truly original, moving or shocking erotic fiction are numbered. I’m not sure that I agree, but I do see a trend for ‘romance’ themes to invade what used to be viewed as ‘erotica’ imprints. Romance, with its insistence on a happy ending, may be smothering more edgy, exploratory erotic writing.”

The question of quality, particularly in erotic romance, also concerns Sarai. Erotic romance readers’ nymphomaniacal demand for titles, she thinks, has lowered the bar for publication inside the genre. “Readers

seem to want never-ending streams of the same popular themes and plotlines. Writers are happy to churn them out, and publishers to buy them. There are many talented authors in the erotic romance field, but I also find a distressing lack of originality in many books.”

The concern’s not unfounded. It isn’t unheard-of for some full-time authors to churn out a book a month, and while these are usually novella-length pieces no longer than 20,000 words, it’s tough to maintain quality control on that sort of conveyor belt. Certainly, in my travels across the erotiscape I

encountered ample chunks of bruise-purple prose – one author talked, without irony, about waves of pleasure that “crashed with abandon against the ancient cavern where all life begins” – and even a cursory examination of storylines confirms Sarai’s “distressing lack of originality”. Tales typically feature a woman caught between two men (or a vampire and a werewolf if the sub-genre permits); or a fiery, independent woman who’s really a vulnerable wreck inside just waiting for the right man; or a woman forced by circumstance into a one-sided relationship with a domineering gent who, wouldn’t you know it, turns out to be just perfect for her; or a recently-single older woman

“Romance may be smothering more edgy, exploratory erotic writing.”

caught up in a whirlwind romance with a much younger chap. And the clichés play on.

Still, the same could be said of any genre – let he who hasn’t guiltily enjoyed Dan Brown cast the first stone. And it’s not all sexy schlock. There are authors doing fun, interesting things. Take Sarai’s The Show Over De Moines (a free read on her website), which is an erotic parody of horror maestro H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Aping the master scaresmith’s technique flawlessly, Sarai manages homage, parody, creepy comedy and even a touch of titillation for those with an extra-dimensional tentacle woman fetish (you know who you are).

Even if the popularity of erotic fiction is increasingly care of big publishers and romance is impinging on progressive erotica, both still may be – if inadvertantly – expanding readers’ horizons, reaching and teaching wider audiences who’d never go for hard-hitting stuff from the margins. Says Gorlinsky: “We get comments from readers saying, ‘This has been great for our marriage’ and ‘We found out things we never knew!’”

Pushing the envelope a little further is the gay romance sub-genre which, perhaps surprisingly, is far from alternative in the world of erotic romance. Cooper-Posey, who writes male-male-female urban fantasies under her pseudonym Teal Ceagh, attributes the immense popularity of the sub-genre to, again, the Internet.

What optional extras do you think the ideal cyborg lover should come with?The cyborgs I write are muscular and really smart – two things that every cyborg should be. But if they had vibrating parts…I’m sure no one would complain! It’d also be really neat if they could download erotic works of fiction…and then act them out! Do androids dream of electric sleep?I hope they are dreaming about hot women who can melt their circuits.Do you see a future where humanity has access to thinking sex toys?I hope so! That just opens up the mind to endless possibilities in the bedroom. What’s one cybernetic upgrade all lowly human men should consider to become better lovers?I think men should download erotic romance books and see what women fantasise about. I think they could learn a lot about what women crave, how they enjoy to be touched, and realise that soft, sweet words and small, thoughtful gestures really turn a woman on.

Q&A with Laurann Dohner, author of robot e-rotica

“They’re huge,” she says of the sub-genre’s audience. “I mean, there’s some publishers for that category that have been around for 25 years that are suddenly getting a second life. They’re booming. They’ve moved online and they’re just going gangbusters.”

It isn’t just – or even mostly – gay men who are gobbling up the bromances. In a move that probably isn’t but sure seems like backlash against generations of straight men digging on Sapphic sensuality, heterosexual ladies are going gaga for boy-on-boy. “They love it,” Cooper-Posey says. “They can’t get enough of it. So suddenly there’s this cross-section of mainstream audiences

that are just sucking this stuff up.” Her choice of words.

Carol Lynne, an author of exclusively male-male erotic romances, agrees with Cooper-Posey’s outlook. “I have a Yahoo! group with over 500 members and the majority of them are women. I have several men on the group, but they are definitely in the minority.”

So the writing’s on the bedroom wall as far as straight girls’ penchants for homoerotic hotness is concerned, but what’s less easy to pin down is the source of the appeal—this isn’t porn, after all, and requires a far greater emotional and intellectual investment from a female

reader than Where The Boys Aren’t 14 does from a male viewer. For Lynne, the answer lies in one of the oldest of storytelling traditions: pure escapsim.

“I know when I read a straight romance book I tend to compare my own life with the lives of the characters depicted,” she says. “Needless to say, my own love life always comes up lacking. With a gay romance, I can enjoy the story and the love I see unfolding without having to compare it to my own experiences.”

Lynne also sees the gay sub-genre as a powerful tool for the promotion of sexual acceptance. “Never in a million years did I think I would receive

email from women in their sixties and seventies, but I do. I think the introduction of same-sex relationships has not only expanded the romance genre but the minds of many people. I get email forwarded to me on a daily basis from female readers asking me to sign petitions for marriage equality. It makes me wonder how many of these women would have done something like that before discovering the gay erotic romance genre.”

While the genre’s practitioners don’t want to be trivialised as porn, nor do they want to overstate the importance of what it means to our social evolution.

It isn’t gay men gobbling up bromances: women are going gaga for boy-on-boy.

As Sarai points out, “I think that the Internet is a bigger influence on current sexual mores than either erotica or erotic romance. Let’s be honest, the number of individuals who read erotic fiction is trivial compared to the number who look at dirty pictures or videos.”

Still, even if well-written rumpy pumpy can’t rival the skin sites for socio-sexual swing, e-rotica is playing some part, however small, in shaping the pop cultural and wider societal landscape as it feeds into and feeds off evolving social and sexual mores. The sexytimes, they are a-changing. Perhaps the most telling proof of that comes from an anecdote of Cooper-Posey’s.

At the recent Romantic Times Booklovers Convention, she was tabled with a group of fellow Ellora’s Cave writers, all of them, “yukking it up about menagé and God knows. And we were quite loud about it and we suddenly realised that this very quiet group of women next to us were listening. You sort of know who everyone is, and the author beside me nudged me in the ribs and said, ‘They’re Christian writers.’ And we shut ourselves down, and she looked over and said, ‘Oh, sorry, we didn’t realise we were so loud. We’ll shut up.’ And one of the Christian writers looked over at us and said, ‘We’re Christian writers, you know. We quite like sex. We just like religion too!’”

Another sub-genre in the making, perhaps…

We all know vampires turn us on but what’re the worst turn-offs about ‘em?Could it be their diet? [Laughs] Having a lover with an oral fixation can be a real advantage, but actually drinking blood sounds pretty disgusting to me. Vamps in fiction are often featured alongside werewolves. Who’d have more body issues in the bedroom?Pasty skin is simple to deal with: just turn off the lights. Excess body hair, that’s an entirely different story. Who’d make the better partner – Count Dracula or Edward Cullen?Don’t get me started on Edward Cullen! If I were still 13, I might understand. All of my vamps are Alpha with a capital A. Edward is so Beta I want to shake him until he can’t “sparkle” anymore. Give me Dracula... as portrayed by Gerard Butler. What’s a great chat-up line to get a hot vamp’s attention?“I want to taste eternity, but only for one night.” Or how about, “Bite me baby, bite me?” Okay, so I suck at pick-up lines! I’ll leave the comedy to Charlaine Harris.

Q&A with Aubrey Ross Author of vampire e-rotica

OVERNIGHTHIRE

THE SHOCKING STORY THAT CAN ONLY NOW BE TOLD ExCLuSIvE TO STEREO HOmE vIDEO!

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Wordymofo visits with Andrew Leavold of Trash video in Brisbane just as the store dies the death of 1000 downloads. By Lachlan Huddy

DIGITAL KILLED THE vIDEO STORE

PEOPLE & Arts

t was almost “Titfuck!” – exclamation mark

mandatory. “Schlockbuster” was another name that jockeyed

for the prize, as did “I Spit On Your Video” and “Video Sleazy”. In the end, though, simplicity carried the day, and Brisbane’s first, finest and filthiest alternative video store was baptised Trash Video.

“It’s a good filter,” says owner-manager Andrew Leavold of the evocative moniker. “That kind of passive, mindless consumption that categorises most movie-watchers. It’s a good filter to scare them off.”

Since 1995, Trash has been the proud purveyor of everything beyond the flow of cinema’s mainstream. Shock, schlock, art, grunge, indie, cult, foreign, rare, grotesque or sublime – if it exists outside the realm of casual moviegoing, Trash is the place to find it. Burning to take in Microwave Massacre, the self-declared worst horror movie ever made? It’s in the Trash stash. Can’t track down Leni Reifenstahl’s 1930s Nazi propaganda Triumph Of The Will for that modern history essay? Pick it out of the Trash. And while you’re there, why not indulge some nostalgia and plump for the Twin

Peaks Season Three double-VHS pack? Yes indeed, Trash is everything the modern video shop isn’t: cluttered with obscurity, disorganised, and bursting with character.

But to speak of Trash is to speak of Leavold, its indefatigable founder; the store is but an extension of the man himself, for whom the creation and consumption of culture – popular and otherwise – is more than a business or pleasure: it is a way of life. And has been for a long, long while.

“Basically this was an idea that I had when I was 10,” Leavold says. It’s a July afternoon and we’re talking over the counter of Trash’s current store in Brisbane’s West End. To the left sit neat piles of rental DVDs stacked 30 and 40 high; to the right the store computer is nearly buried under posters and VHS and other bric-a-brac your local Civic would’ve sold off circa 1995. There’s a touch of gloom in the air, but we’ll get to that later – for now there’s only Leavold in a Coney Island T-shirt, with his errant blonde hair framing a wild-eyed face, telling Trash’s tale. It is, he says, “a story of childhood obsession taken to ludicrous extremes.”

Arabic television, Leavold took his first step along the road to Trashy treasure with the advent of Betamax (a videotape format, for all you post-Gen X-ers). Late-night gems like “old fucking Vincent Price films” and “the most grotesque horror films that were just coming out as part of the Italian New Wave” infiltrated the Middle East through pirate video networks, the “Betamax grapevine”—and found a spellbound audience in 10-year-old Leavold.

“The Indian guys who used to run the local video store used to wait for me to come in,” he recalls fondly. “I’d pedal up on my bicycle and they’d go, ‘Ah! We have

“We have a new zombie

film for you. But don’t

tell your mother!”

he son of a civil engineer, Leavold spent his early years

globetrotting with a father who tended to accept “filthy overseas

jobs” throughout the Middle East. Starved of pop culture care of the slim pickings on

a new zombie film for you. But don’t tell your mother!’ And they would feed me fucking vile garbage… It got to the point where my mother had written to every one of the video shops I was a member of saying, ‘Do not give my son any more horror films’.’”

But it was too late for little Andrew: an idea had taken root. “All the time, I kept dreaming about having a video shop that had all these movies that I loved in it. This kind of anal obsession, as a 10-year-old, to control culture.”

It was an obsession anal enough to persist throughout high school and into his first job, during which he was “blowing every fucking paycheck on a

pile of VHS.” When his trove hit critical mass – at somewhere around 2000 tapes – Leavold went public and Trash Video was born, its first home a little walk-up over indie music club The Zoo in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. It was a fine neighbourhood to raise an alternative video store: grungy, unpretentious and not quite suitable for the under-12 set. But time waits for no cult film fan, and after five years, when Trash’s stock had more than tripled, the Valley had mutated.

“Trendy fuckheads on bad drugs,” Leavold laments. “When all of a sudden you find yourself surrounded by stores that sell $80 fucking can openers, it’s time

OVERNIGHTHIRE

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to go. The lease was up; we thought it was either sink or swim time. We either try to do this somewhere else on a larger scale or give up. And luckily one of our readers on our email said, ‘Why don’t we try West End?’ That was 10 years ago.”

And what a decade it was. Trash’s stock swelled to a stash of more than 16,000 tapes and discs; a silent partner came onboard as co-owner; a 2003 documentary—Escape From the Planet Of The Tapes—was made about the store and about Leavold; and a loyal, close-knit community of renters entered Trash’s orbit. In the few hours I’m here, Leavold greets every walk-in with a smile, easy conversation or a few flicks reserved just for them: “Have I got something for you?” is a regular refrain. No clinical efficiency here; just a shared love of the movies, a gentle reminder of how unifying a force cinema can be.

Still, this is a business. It can’t all have been sugar and spice and everything nice. Can it?

“I’ve seen you rip up someone’s membership,” a friend and regular customer says to Leavold, smirking, before quoting, “‘Just get out! No! No, I don’t care what you say! Just get out!’”

Leavold is reflective. “Yeah. There have been a number of those public meltdowns. I hate a lot of people for years. I carry grudges. Anyone who transgresses the rules of politeness here.”

And what are those, I wonder?“It’s based on ever-changing brain

chemistry,” Leavold grins, with a good-

One elderly gent asked for father-daughter rape-themed vids...

natured twitch of the nostril.There’s one particular memory, of

course, that stands at the top of the Trash heap. “Worst customer experience,” says Leavold, “was probably having an elderly gentleman ask for rape-themed videos, specifically rape between a father and a daughter.” Ugh.

When not dealing – or duelling – with Trash – or trashy – customers, Leavold’s extracurricular activities over the past decade have further cemented him as a cult-cinema guru. Until 2006 he ran Film Club, which were weekly screening nights across Brisbane to showcase the best, worst and weirdest of Trash’s back

catalogue. He also launched Schlock Treatment, his weekly cult film TV show on Brisbane’s Channel 31.

But Leavold doesn’t just rent and show and talk about movies. He makes them, too. His 2003 debut feature Lesbo-A-Go-Go was a no-budget homage to 1960s sexploitation auteur Doris Wishman, a woman oft-referred to as the female Ed Wood. The film – “porn without porn” – is a cheap, tawdry faux-morality play that propels hapless heroine Sugar from one hideous travail – cemetery rape, drug addiction, rape-during-abortion – to the next before she’s finally stabbed with a syringe and condemned by a priest as she lies dying on the footpath. Mostly shot in grainy black and white and without sync sound – but also with a kick-ass soundtrack and a frankly awesome colour psychedelic sequence! – Lesbo is as trashy in its delivery as it is vile in its content. As a tremendously fun in-joke, it leaves you in need of a shower and a stiff drink – right on the money, in other words.

Like any cult film worth its salt, Lesbo offended audience sensibilities and ignited the ire of the moral majority—particularly after Leavold gave a drunken interview to Brisbane newspaper The Courier Mail that left the mistaken impression that there’d been more than just simulated sex going on during a shoot at Toowong Cemetery.

“The article basically said we were filming gangbangs on open graves,” Leavold deadpans. “And immediately there was a shitstorm.” Quite sensational

for a film which, Leavold thinks, could have scraped in with a PG-rating. “None of what you see on the screen is explicit. There’s no profanity whatsoever. There’s no onscreen salaciousness. It’s all implied.”

fter three years the shitstorm had blown over enough to allow Leavold back

behind the camera for 2006’s Bluebirds Of Peace and Destruction,

a fictionalisation of the real-life lesbian “vampire” killing in Brisbane’s Orleigh Park in 1989. With $2000 from a generous Trash customer, Leavold set about crafting the tale of three damaged women who abduct a family man and murder him to drink of his blood.

“I thought, right, the only way to do this is to totally improvise it,” Leavold says. “Get two genuine…” He pauses, selecting his words.

“Crack whores?” offers the teenage work experience girl, familiar with the story.

“I wouldn’t say ‘crack whores’,’ Leavold replies. “No, I would say, ‘Two girls who are no strangers to the sex industry’.”’ He cackles infectiously.

The girls may be no strangers to the sex industry, but they’re no strangers to credible emotion, either; Bluebirds’ documentary aesthetic is complimented by engaging naturalistic performances from its lead actresses – friends of Leavold’s then and still – and a fantastically foreboding score. Assembled with taut editing, it’s a snappy, authentic

and brutally effective ride into Brisbane’s seamy underworld.

Then there’s the upcoming The Search For Weng Weng. If there’s a magnum opus in Leavold’s life so far, this is it: a guerilla doco about Weng Weng, star of For Y’ur Height Only, a Filipino spy thriller about a kung fu-kicking midget James Bond.

“Weng Weng was, I think, one of those catalytic moments where cinema changes forever,” Leavold says. “A bolt from the sky.

“Weng Weng was one of those moments that changes cinema.”

I’d never come across a film that was so inadvertantly a masterpiece. Somehow that absurd image of a kung fu-kicking midget had a weird kind of humanity about it and I wanted to know where he came from, what his real name was, I wondered if there were other Weng Weng films.”

Filmed over four years and as many trips to the Philippines, Search is now in post-production, Leavold struggling to, “get across the surreal nature of the Philippines and the bizarre way that things just fell out of the sky during the search for Weng Weng, in order to piece that story together – that layer of weirdness and serendipity that covers everything.”

In the meantime, his work on Search gave birth to Machete Maidens Unleashed!, the new documentary from Not Quite Hollywood’s Mark Hartley, which had its premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival in July.

“I signed [Search] over to a producer here,” Leavold explains. “She approached ABC. ABC went, ‘We’d rather have a more conventional, essay-based documentary on B-filmmaking in the Philippines, like Not Quite Hollywood, so why don’t we get that nice chap who made Not Quite Hollywood to make it?’” Leavold sighs. “I went, ‘Fine’, graciously stepped aside, and Mark came onboard.”

Leavold’s times in the Philippines also seeded the idea for a fittingly spun-out feature film, which is now at second draft stage and seeking funding. “It’s about an

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Australian who goes to the Phillipines to try and make a dwarf kung fu remake of The Harder They Come, the Jamaican Spaghetti Western. Ends up losing his fucking shit, you know, Francis Ford Coppola-style.”

As balls-to-the-wall schlocky as that sounds – in the best possible way – Leavold’s exhaustive research into Weng Weng has also led, of all places, to academia and a place in a doctorate program. “Griffith University said, ‘Why don’t you just turn it into a thesis? You’ve done all your research. Now just write the damn thing.’” So the directorial credit for The Search for Weng Weng will likely end up reading “Dr Andrew Leavold”.

It’s an impressive juggling act. But how, I ask, does he keep all these balls in the air – and still have time for the store that started it all?

There’s the rub: he no longer can.“You know,” he says, gesturing around

the shop, “you spend seven to 10 hours here every day and you have very little enthusiasm for anything else.”

According to Leavold, digital has finally killed his video store. After 15 years, the past few of which have been a constant battle to stay afloat financially, Trash Video is closing it doors for good at the end of August. The changing media landscape – especially the likes of Foxtel IQ, Netflix and Bigpond Movies – is rapidly rendering video stores – from Trash and other one-man operations right up to the big franchises like Blockbuster – all but obsolete.

“The idea of an old-fashioned video shop has well and truly had its day,” Leavold says, and it isn’t the voice of bitterness, nor defeat, but the voice of a man content to move on with his many other things. “The onus now is on ownership. It just means that we’re consuming culture in a different way now. Much more immediate. And, I think, with the switchover of technology, that’s our cue to exit as gracefully as we can.”

ith the day winding down, I finally take my leave from Trash. I’ve stayed far

longer than I’d planned, but it’s an easy place in which to get

lost. I pause, peering down the aisles at the rows and rows of VHS and DVD, thinking of the films inside each, the weird, the enchanting, the scandalous. Somewhere here is the mutant fish baby from Corman’s Humanoids From The Deep; the mad, murderous, Buddhist Jew-burner from the nutso Czechoslovakian horror The Cremator; the prehistoric stop-motion wonders from dino-western The Valley of Gwangi. Many will soon be sold off, dispersed to the homes of loyal customers or anonymous internet bidders. They may be cherished but they’ll no longer be able to be shared as they have been at Trash Video. It’s a mournful thought, and I almost feel that words should be said, some goodbye prayer.

“Titfuck!” Leavold chirps to me in parting.

Says it all, really, doesn’t it?

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THINGS & Stuff

TITANIC II. They said it couldn’t be done.

Shouldn’t be done. WordyMofo speaks with writer-director-actor

Shane Van Dyke. Who did it anyway.

Describe the brainwave for Titanic II.Well, it wasn’t originally my idea. I

had heard The Asylum were interested in doing it. I wrote a one-paragraph pitch and started working with them on an outline and then I got the go-ahead to write it. For years there have been rumours about people in reality rebuilding the Titanic and following the same voyage and doing a memorial cruise. That is where the idea came from.

Would you personally get on a boat called Titanic II?

I don’t know. Probably not!

Even though mental mini-studio The Asylum is famous for its “mockbusters” – from Snakes On A Train to The Da Vinci Treasure – taking on James Cameron’s epic seems particularly audacious. Were you nervous about riffing on a film that won 11 Oscars, made a lot of money and has a squillion rabid fans?

No, what we were doing really has nothing to do with James Cameron’s movie. We weren’t trying to make anything that’s bigger than it is. We had his same budget, just minus about 13 zeros. I knew the name alone would draw attention. Although it’s not a sequel – the

title’s based on the name of the ship – I knew it would draw a lot of interest. I thought it’d be a fun project to work on.

How seriously are audiences meant to take Titanic II?

All The Asylum films are just meant to be fun, entertaining movies. A lot of it is tongue in cheek. It’s fun entertainment for the SyFy crowd and people who like that sort of B-movie action. I encourage people not to take it too seriously. But we had a small budget and we did the best we could with it and everybody who worked on it took it very seriously, myself included. We try to make the best movie possible with what we have.

You keep referring to the size of the budget. What was it?

I’m not really at liberty to say. Let’s just say it was a small, small fraction of what James Cameron had.

Let’s talk about Shane Van Dyke, leading man. What do you think when you rewatch your (spoiler alert!) death scene?

I think about how claustrophobic it was. We shot all that underwater stuff in two nights we spent in a big swimming tank that was about 20 feet deep. We shot it out in the desert and it was freezing. I was the only person who wasn’t in some

sort of wetsuit because the character didn’t have one in the scene. It was pretty gruelling. I was going down on an airhose, sometimes underwater for 10 or 15 minutes, 20 feet down, the pressure building in my ears, eyes burning.

You should’ve complained to the director.[Laughs] And the writer.

Speaking of the writing, how do you go about scripting Street Racer or The Day The Earth Stopped? Do you have one eye on the original on your TV and the other eye on Final Draft on your laptop?

“What we were doing really has nothing to do with James Cameron’s movie. We had his same budget, just minus 13 zeros.”

Shane Van Dyke as heroic Hayden Walsh. With friends,

aboard Titanic II

The way I work, I’ll talk to producers and they’ll give me a very brief idea of something they want. From there, I try to come up with an original story. For movies such as Street Racer or The Day The Earth Stopped – the so-called mockbusters – I try to not associate myself in any way with the actual movies. If I haven’t seen the Hollywood version, I don’t even watch it because I figure I just try to come up with an original story and make it entertaining. The key is just to put in as much action as you can. That’s the goal: to keep it always moving.

Can you gauge how successful one of these movies will be based on the YouTube views of their trailers?

Mega Shark Vs Giant Octopus clocked up 2.8 million hits and Titanic II’s done 450,000 so far (580,000 by upload time).

It’s a good thing. The title alone gets people’s interest. They want to know what it is and they’re curious about it. Hopefully, that indicates it’ll do well and people will like what they see.

Most people get that your movies – like Titanic II or Paranormal Entity or The Day The Earth Stopped – are riffs rather than official spin-offs. But have you had any backlash from people who’ve been genuinely confused and felt ripped off?

Of course, you always have people out there online, who’re angry and trashing

these movies, but ultimately I think people realise we’re doing it all in good fun. Everybody knows what The Asylum is and it’s following in the vein of Roger Corman, trying to make B action movies. We’re not trying to steal somebody else’s work by any means.

You got Oscar nominated Bruce Davison for your other lead in Titanic II. Is he happy to be doing low-budget stuff like this now?

I was so thrilled to hear we had Bruce on board. He came onto the picture and was just always pleasant to work with and had fun. He took it seriously, he did his best, he didn’t walk through it in any way

and it shows in his performance in the movie.

And what about Brooke Burns of Baywatch and Hair Battle Spectacular? What audience does she guarantee?

Any guys between 12 and 50 are gonna like Brooke Burns. Same thing with her, she came onto the picture and was really fun. She put everything she had into it.

Your grandfather Dick Van Dyke is a big name. Have you asked him to play a role in any of your films?

Not yet. We’ll see on that one. I’ve

worked with him in the past and I loved working with him. Who knows? If the right script came along and the right character…

Has he expressed any interest in doing the CGI for you? I understand he’s quite the enthusiast.

Yeah, he really is. When he found out I was doing Titanic II, he was just so interested and curious to know about all the CGI and the process. He’s a real enthusiast. He spends hours on his own computers doing it just for fun. So hopefully one day we can work something out where he can use his love for that and put it into a movie.

When you’re at the multiplex, are you always thinking, Hey, I could do a version of this!?

I did think like that for a while. I would hear about upcoming movies and I would ask ‘Are you going to do The Asylum version of this movie? If you do I want to be on board.’ But at this point I’m more interested in producing original concepts for them and working in the genres I like.

So we’re not going to see Shane Van Dyke’s Avatar II?

Not that I know of. But you never know. I’ll never say never.

To paraphrase Judd Apatow, shouldn’t this guy should be shooting at Bruce Willis? “Everyone knows what The Asylum is and

it’s following in the vein of Roger Corman, trying to make B action movies.”

Jim Thompson lured his readers into the world’s oldest trap. Fifty years later Hollywood falls

in again with The Killer Inside Me

PEOPLE & Arts Much was made of the graphic

beatings and sexual violence in Michael Winterbottom’s

controversial 2010 film adaptation of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. Less commented upon but more intriguing is how, yet again and despite the best of intentions, a talented filmmaker failed to capture the essence of the author’s work. Sure, the meat and bones of the pitch-black noir novel were on the screen – Casey Affleck’s sociopathic deputy sheriff Lou Ford presents a mask of benevolence to a small Texan community while leaving a trail of murder, mayhem and madness in his wake – but its evil soul was nowhere to be seen.

Movie directors have long been in awe of Thompson. Stanley Kubrick described The Killer Inside Me, first published in 1952, as “the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered”. A few years later, he used Thompson to craft much of the script and dialogue for his first studio film, The Killing, and the two men would collaborate further on Paths Of Glory and the unrealised Lunatic At Large. Sam Fuller, director of Shock Corridor, praised Thompson’s The Getaway as “the most original gangster story ever written. I could film it without a script.” But when it did eventually go in front of Sam Peckinpah’s cameras in 1972, Jim Thompson’s own faithful screenplay adaptation was ditched on star Steve McQueen’s orders with the result that the book and film are wildly

different creatures. Other attempts have similarly missed the mark.

So why is it that Thompson’s none-more-black pulp noirs have proven so resistant to successful Hollywood adaptation? To answer the question is to look beyond the surface detail of the books – bad men doing bad things – and realise just what sort of writer Thompson really was. And to do that we need to know a little about the man.

James Myers Thompson was born in 1906, in the Caddo County Jail of Anadarko, Oklahoma, where his

father, “Big Jim” Thompson was Sheriff. One year later, warrants were issued for Big Jim’s arrest, there being irregularities in his bookkeeping to the tune of $30 000 – serious money considering his annual salary was just under $1500. Fortunately for Big Jim, his deputies refused to serve the warrant and he escaped on horseback to Mexico – but not before putting his young family on a northbound train.

Thereafter, Jim Thompson’s childhood oscillated between periods of extreme poverty and wealth as Big Jim’s various moneymaking schemes – the criminal charges were dropped in 1910 – paid off or went belly up, usually the latter.

Big Jim’s failures and setbacks caused him to sink into a funk of depression and inertia that would darken into dementia and it fell to young Jim to become the family’s main breadwinner. Still in high school, he took whatever work he could find, eventually landing a night job as a bellboy at the Hotel Texas.

Hotels in the roaring ‘20s were rarely models of propriety or sobriety, and the Hotel Texas was no exception. Amidst professional gamblers, hustlers, criminals, revellers and whores, Jim Thompson worked eight hours a night for $15 a month. In reality, not yet 18, he was earning about $300 a week as he learned “short-con” grifts and supplied guests with bootleg liquor, drugs and call-girls. This dangerous and degenerate environment – Jim was once dangled over an elevator shaft by aggrieved professional gamblers – would inform much of his later fiction, including hotel novels like The Grifters, Wild Town and A Swell Looking Babe.

Thompson was able to keep up this hectic schedule for two increasingly alcohol

sodden years, though his schoolwork and health suffered, culminating in hospitalisation. In Texas By The Tail, Thompson assigns one of his characters this autobiographical fragment:

“...As far as he was concerned the world was a shitpot with a barbed-wire handle and the further he could kick it the better he liked it... He was now 19 years old. He was suffering from tuberculosis, bleeding ulcers and chronic alcoholism”.

Eventually released from hospital under strict instructions not to work for several months, Jim’s homecoming was sullied when he discovered his father had “borrowed” and then lost the savings with which he had planned to support the family.

Not long after, Jim Thompson lit out for good. He hitch-hiked to the West Texas oilfields where he lived as a hobo for several years, working as a gambler, wildcatter, salvage contractor and labourer. It was here that he met Harry “Haywire” McClintock, writer of hobo anthem, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain”. McClintock inducted Thompson into the Wobblies, introduced him to the writing of Karl Marx and encouraged Thompson’s writing.

These early years – family betrayal, drink, drugs and disease, hard labour and crime’s easy payoff, madness and Marxism – were an education that’d serve Thomspon the rest of his days. But though he’d use his experiences to write noir fiction so savage and uncompromising it would never be surpassed, he was unable to escape a fate as bleak as any he’d devise for his characters.

When Thompson died in 1977 he was alone, alcoholic, abandoned and about as far out of print as it is possible for an author to be, at least one in sunny LA. He didn’t even have copies of his own books. In his final years, he’d arranged with a local second-hand book store to buy his own novels whenever they came in. Thompson would then Xerox the pages and send them to uninterested publishers and producers.

The chaplain at his funeral said he’d written over 200 novels but in reality 70 is probably closer to the mark. At least 12 of these were written in an early 1950s alcoholic white-heat in which Thompson completed one novel every six weeks, including Savage Night, The Killer Inside Me and After Dark, My Sweet. These vicious, unrelenting, bible-black noirs in which unreliable narrators are plunged into vertiginous hells of their own devising cast a long shadow. Though they comprise his legacy, Thompson’s prolific nature is pointed up by the fact that he also penned an exhaustive though ill-fated history of workers in the Okie dustbowl and acres of prose for city newsdesks and True Crime magazines. Then there were his numerous teleplays, radioplays and screenplays, including those for Kubrick for which, shamefully, he received no credit.

Thompson may have passed in near anonymity but he was never entirely forgotten, not even in

those last penurious days when he would bitterly claim, “I’ll become famous after I’m dead about 10 years”. It’s fitting that Orson

Welles – in the 1970s also on the skids and approaching the heroic corpulence of Nick Corey, the tricksy sociopath narrator of Thompson’s Pop. 1280 – was in possession of one of those tattered Xeroxes of A Hell Of A Woman and was adapting it into a screenplay to be entitled The Dead Giveaway. It never happened.

Given that American film noir had been first appreciated by French academics in the 1940s, it’s no surprise that Thompson’s books remained in print in France, where he was regarded as something of a pulp existentialist Camus. It was this lifeline that led to his posthumous cult.

The author Barry Gifford – who would later go on to write Wild At Heart, which would be adapted by David Lynch – recalled entering a Paris bookstore some six

years after Thompson’s death:“...and there was a whole shelf full of

Jim Thompson.... I said, ‘Jesus, I read Jim Thompson when I was 12 years old in Tampa Florida.’ So I bought a bunch of them. I brought them back and said, ‘We should start with these kinds of books’ because Thompson was a visionary, and there was virtually no Thompson in print in those days.”

That “start” was Gifford co-founding Black Lizard, a publishing imprint specialising in série noire , and acquiring 13 Jim Thompson novels for “next to nothing. Because we had nothing”. The Black

Lizard reprints were largely responsible for the rediscovery of his work, and while Thompson’s bleak prophecy was out by a couple of years, 1990 saw two film adaptations; the Martin Scorsese produced/Stephen Frears directed The Grifters and James Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet.

Alive, he was wan and ailing, a Hollywood pariah who struggled to get a crapola gig writing a Dr Kildare teleplay. Dead, all of his books have been optioned and Jim Thompson has no shortage of rich, famous and powerful fans, including Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Tom Cruise, Walter Hill, Bruce Willis, and Stephen King, who declared him

“My favourite crime novelist – often imitated but never duplicated.” Sean Penn, meanwhile, claimed The Killer Inside Me was the best book he’d ever read.

Despite the calibre of these admirers, movie adaptations – and there are three more in the works, including Lunatic At Large – have proven problematic.

It’s here that the 1972 film version of The Getaway proves instructive. Though it was the only adaptation Thompson would live to see, the author bitterly condemned it to friends and family. He had an ally in Sam Peckinpah, who was reportedly so irate when he viewed star-producer Steve

McQueen’s final cut that he stalked up to the screen, pissed on it and announced, “This is not my film”.

Thompson was just as entitled to claim it wasn’t his book – his own screenplay adaptation had been ditched by Steve McQueen, who brought in writer Walter Hill for a more upbeat take. Hill truncated the book, stopping it at the point before McQueen and Ali McGraw’s characters actually make their getaway, and the vicious, surreal and ironic joke that forms the conclusion is revealed.

In Thompson’s book – and in his screenplay – the getaway involves the characters being buried alive in nightmarish underwater tunnels, getting

In an early 1950s alcoholic white heat, Thompson wrote a book every six weeks, including

The Killer Inside Me.

trapped in a house made of shit and escaping to the Kingdom of El Rey, “which appears on no maps” and in which you “tell yourself you have died – you, not the others – and have waked up in hell. But you know better... There is an end to dreams and there is no end to this”. The kingdom of El Rey is a symbolic nightmare worthy of Kafka and Beckett, in which it is strongly intimated that the protagonists will need to cannibalise each other in order to survive. There is no getaway, and they have entered a symbolic and actual hell far worse than that which they escaped.

Blaming a vainglorious celebrity

like Steve McQueen for not following Thompson down this black hole is hardly the point. The author’s work goes where few filmmakers – outside of the likes of David Cronenberg, Takashi Miike or David Lynch – would dare to tread. Thompson’s fiction – and particularly their conclusions – often present such insurmountable challenges to their adapters that the endings are elided, bowdlerised or airbrushed away. At least two such endings – to Savage Night and A Hell of A Woman – are probably entirely unfilmable, at least in any way that could be made explicable to the viewer.

Jim Thompson was fond of saying, “There are 32 ways to write a story, and I’ve

used them all, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.” With their lurid straplines - “She Lured Him Into The World’s Oldest Trap”, “He Used Two Women To Feed His Brute Cravings” – and covers featuring buxom dames, Thompson’s books seem to be salacious pulp entertainments.

In reality they are trojan horses whose interiors house terrible hells, and into which Thompson smuggled experimental writing that defied and even exploded the conventions of genre. If you think The Human Centipede or Inception push boundaries, try imagining film versions of these.

SAVAGE NIGHTReviewing Savage Night in 1953, the critic and novelist Anthony Boucher noted that the book sheered off “from realism into a peculiar surrealist ending of sheer Guignol horror. Odd that a mass-consumption paperback should contain the most experimental writing I’ve seen in a suspense novel of late.”

Originally, Thompson had intended to write the tale of consumptive midget hitman Little Bigger using, “just 500 words, 500 basic words, because I think that will reduce it to what I want to reduce it to” – and while this stricture was abandoned, this grimly realist boarding house novel spirals off into one of the strangest and most apocalyptic endings

“There are 32 ways to write a story, and I’ve used them all, but there is only one plot – things are not

as they seem.”

in all of fiction. Early in the book, Bigger relates encountering a degenerate writer, quite clearly Thompson himself, who owns a farm in Vermont.

And on this farm, old Farmer Thompson grows some of “the more interesting portions of the female anatomy”, rows of them, attended to by howling wild goats. Bigger and Ruthie, another inmate of the boarding house, end up at this ranch, now abandoned by Thompson’s authorial doppelganger, who has left behind a smashed typewriter and heaping drifts of torn up books arranged in Burroughsian cut-up on the floor:

“And the Lord World so loved the god that It gave him Its only begotten son, and thenceforth he was driven from the Garden and Judas wept, saying, Verily I abominate onions yet I can never refuse them. “

Outside, the vaginas “sway and wiggle and squirm” and the howling goats parade up and down the rows, into the house and over Bigger and Ruthie, now reduced to “grunting and gesturing and pointing at things” as they become more and more unmoored from reality and each other. Before the book’s end, things will get really strange.

A HELL OF A WOMANInitially appearing to be a simple tale of kitchen-sink criminality in the manner of James M. Cain, fault-lines begin to appear in the first-person narrative of Frank Dillon – an unimaginative, venal and self-deceiving misogynist – as the psychic weight from his crimes bears down. Driven by greed, Dillon commits and botches a double murder. The unravelling of the original crime sets in train the usual noir descent into a maelstrom of yet more terrible tragedy and crime.

What makes A Hell of a Woman unusual is that Frank Dillon begins to interrupt his own narrative – via a book within the book with chapter headings like, “Through Thick and Thin: The True Story of a Man’s Fight Against High Odds and Low Women...by Knarf Nollid” – often retelling events in a manner designed to show himself in a better light. Knarf ’s awkward prose is glutinous with self righteousness, and

swollen like a boil with self pity. When Knarf relates an experience we have not encountered in the first person narrative, a sick feeling of horror mounts, as his saccharine behaviour is so at odds with earlier events – and often in direct contradiction of events with which we are familiar.

Surely, something terrible has happened. And sure enough it has, but surety becomes an increasingly slippery thing as the dual stories of Frank and Knarf begin to bleed through into each other in the form of italicised fragments. By the tail-end of the book, Frank Dillon is living in Oklahoma under an assumed name and the narratives of Fred Jones and Derf Senoj have fractured, fused and bifurcated entirely. The final two pages of the book feature alternating lines of text:

“good all day. And then evening came on, and I didn’t

and it was just like always only worse. the worst tramp of

laugh any more and feel good any more.all, the worst fleabag of all. and I

couldn’t take it. the endBecause it was quite a tragedy, when you

go tohad to be better than this, so we drank

the wine. wethinking about it: and I guess you know

dear readersmoked the hay. we started sniffing the

snow. they sayI’m a pretty soft hearted son-of-a-bitch...”In Thompson’s bleak avant-garde

Choose Your Own Adventure, the narrative

culminates with Frank/Knarf/Fred/Dorf, either:

...having his genitals lopped off with a pair of shears by the mysterious and shape-shifting Helene. Who tenderly smiles at him, and says, that’s much better isn’t it? And laughs or screams or both.

or...deliberately sawing off his own genitals

on a broken window-pane in a junk-sodden haze. Which he then throws himself out of.

There are moments of terrible tragedy and poignancy in this book, largely disguised or dropped in one shattering sentence. An awful sadness permeates the best of Thompson’s books, and this may be his saddest.

Which brings us to The Killer Inside Me. Though Thompson’s most famous

novel doesn’t go to such extremes, neither is it as straightforward as Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation. In the book, as in the film, Lou Ford is the outwardly affable and well-liked deputy sheriff of Central City, so given to dispensing homespun wisdom and homilies that folks are apt to think him a little slow – “Dumb ole Lou from Kallamazoo”, as he puts it. But his down-home sayings are part of the disguise Lou uses to cloak

his intelligence, as well as a means of torturing his fellow citizens by subjecting them to utter tedium and banality – Ford calls this, “The Needle”.

Ford’s sadomasochistic relationship with a prostitute he has been instructed to run out of town reignites his darkest impulses – he calls it “The Sickness” – and sets in motion a series of murders and his psychic disintegration.

But again the first-person narration is tricky and unreliable, and there is a distinct possibility that Ford is playing and deceiving us as to his motives and actions, just as he toyed with the local citizenry. At several points he appears to be taunting the reader, larding his interior monologue with tedious banality and repetition. The uncertainty reaches its apotheosis in the

final lines, which read like dimestore Tom Joad, as Ford perversely allies himself with his victims;

“All of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little, that meant so good and did so bad. All us folks. Me and Joyce Lakeland, and Johnnie Pappas and Bob Maples and big ol’ Elmer Conway and little ol’ Amy Stanton. All of us.

All of us.”Not that you’ll get much of this from

Winterbottom’s version. While it’s a handsome, outwardly faithful adaptation,

it’s also rendered unworkable by the miscasting of Casey Affleck. He’s a decent actor who closely resembles Thompson’s description of Ford, but his twitchy performance is one in which sociopathy and neuroses roil so close to the surface that you wonder how his character could buy eggs and milk without being institutionalised, let alone last a single day as Deputy Sheriff.

Shorn of the disguise of stolid, amiable stupidity – and also of “The Needle” – Affleck’s Ford fatally inverts Thompson’s maxim that “things are not as they seem”. Things are exactly as they seem; Affleck’s Ford looks like a psycho, acts like a psycho and quacks like a psycho.

Though rarely noted, The Killer Inside Me was filmed before, in 1976 by director

Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me is rendered unworkable by the miscasting of Casey Affleck.

Burt Kennedy. It’s even less worthy, save that Stacey Keach comes closer to Ford’s off-kilter amiability in a film entirely unworthy of his talents. Oddly, the most faithful adaptation came from Texas rapper MC900ft Jesus whose “The Killer Inside Me” from the 1991 album Welcome To My Dream was composed mostly of Lou’s verbal needles. Meanwhile, the most controversial song from the album, “The City Sleeps”, was a first-person narrative firebug-hymn indebted to Thompson and supposedly the cause of a spate of arson in Texas.

Of the Hollywood adaptations, most are worth a look with the proviso that none carry the soul-blasting horror of authentic Jim Thompson. While Frears’ 1990 adaptation of The Grifters garnered several Oscar nominations and is the best known, it’s surpassed by Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet, starring a never-better Jason Patric, Rachel Ward and Bruce Dern. Roger Donaldson’s 1994 version of The Getaway is a remake of Peckinpah’s film rather than a return to the source material, but offers a splendidly sleazy performance from James Woods.

Two other filmic adaptations are as elusive as Thompson’s books once were. The Alain Corneau-directed and Georges Perec-scripted Serie Noire, based on a

A Hell Of A Woman, is rare, though the Criterion DVD of Oscar-nominated Coup De Torchon, in which director Betrand Tavernier transposed the Texas setting of Pop. 1280 to 1930s colonial West Africa, can be had on import.

But maybe direct adaptations of Thompson aren’t the place to look for the true, unfettered Hippocrene of his bleak hells. His mark can be seen everywhere, though it does not carry his name. Cormac McCarthy occupies significantly more rarefied literary air than Jim Thompson ever dreamed of, though

Stephen King thinks No Country For Old Men is “a book Big Jim could have written”. Thompson’s uncompromising fatalism has overtaken the more romantic vision posited by noir progenitors like Chandler, and he has profoundly influenced modern filmic masters of the form, as well as the writers who came after him.

Largely ignored in his lifetime, forgotten for over a decade after his death, Thompson once penned a profile of himself as a courtly, kindly, old fashioned Hollywood screenwriter. It was wishful thinking but by most accounts he was a kind and decent man. His demons may have fed from him but his art fed from his demons: ugly, unerasable and perhaps ultimately unfilmable.

Most Hollywood versions are worth a look, with the proviso that none carry the soul-blasting horror of

authentic Jim Thompson

Hot on the platform heels of The Dirt, Tommyland and The Heroin Diaries comes the even gnarlier Tattoos & Tequila, Vince Neil’s effort at one-upchuckmanship.

Rod Yates riffs on the rise of the rock tell-all.

PEOPLE & Arts

In Vince Neil’s autobiography, Tattoos & Tequila, the Mötley Crüe vocalist poses a question most males will at some point have considered: “You

might ask,” he begins, “just technically speaking, how does one man service three girls in a foursome? Could one man possibly even be up to that task?”

The answer to the second half of that question is “yes”, and his name is Vince Neil. The answer to the first part? Well, it goes something like this: “There’s a lot of switching off. You’re with one of the girls while the other two girls go at it; then you change up. There are periods of resting and hanging out in between, I suppose, which

makes it as fun as the actual fucking. There’s lots of laughter and talking.”

The point of all this is… well, there is none. Even Vince Neil’s forced to admit as much. As he closes in on the end of his 288 pages, many of which chart his excess-sex-success exploits, even the author struggles to justify himself: “By doing this book, I hope to accomplish… I don’t know.”

Which makes you wonder, what is the point of the tell-all biography? Bookstores are littered with such tomes from rock stars who’ve indulged every sinful sense and somehow survived to tell their stories, tall and true. Often such works are framed as “cautionary tales” when they’d be more truthfully called “brag books” designed to

extract from faithful fans a premium for front-row tickets to decades of debauch, including the ever-popular reprise of “greatest intravenous hits”. This, after already having fleeced us out of our hard-earned with all sub-standard “mid-period” albums they recorded while on the nod!

Mötley Crüe have become something of a cottage industry in the artform of such autobiographies, with bassist Nikki Sixx having released his own tell-all memoirs, 2007’s The Heroin Diaries, and drummer Tommy Lee unleashing 2005’s Tommyland.

The catalyst for this literary outpouring – perhaps unexpected from an outfit previously best known for the lyric,“Whoa, yeah/Kickstart my heart, give it a start”

– was 2002’s The Dirt. The Neil Strauss-penned Mötley Crüe biography was so lascivious it was immediately heralded a classic, taking its place in the hedonistic pantheon beside Led Zeppelin’s odyssey Hammer Of The Gods – a book which features a story about that band’s manager inserting a fish into a groupie’s vagina. Not to be outdone, Mötley Crüe went one better and placed a phone inside the vagina of a willing fan, and then made her call her mother while it was in situ. Boys will be boys.

Perhaps the band’s addiction to putting their thoughts on paper is because they’ve kicked their dependencies on every other substance – although that didn’t stop Neil

from getting arrested last June for DUI, despite proclaiming his sobriety in this book. (And this is a man who, in 1984, crashed his car while drunk, killing the passenger, Nicholas “Razzle” Dingley, of the band Hanoi Rocks.)

A more likely reason, though, is that the famous filth of The Dirt pretty much saved Motley Crüe’s career. Doing absolutely nothing to deflect critics’ suggestions that they’ve always been a better idea than an actual band, the book came at a time when the Hollywood quartet were, if not at the bottom of their career, hovering only centimetres above it. The multi-platinum sales of the late ’80s and early ’90s had withered away in a maelstrom of line-up

Mötley Crüe placed a phone in the vagina of a fan – then got her to call mum.

changes and lawsuits, not to mention the coming and going of new musical trends.

Once The Dirt was shoveled onto shelves, though, the renewed interest brought with it a best-selling greatest hits album, talk of a film version (Kiss’s Gene Simmons wanted to buy the rights), and arenas that had not long before been only half-full for the Crue suddenly started displaying sold-out signs.

That this has inspired memoirs from Lee, Sixx and Neil is a mixed blessing. Lewd, crued and tattooed one and all, but ultimately they’re variations on a similar theme: “While you were stuck doing your stupid school and your stupid job, look at the shit we got away with! But we don’t recommend you try any of it at home…”

There are, of course, pitfalls to the rock’n’roll lifestyle, as best essayed in Sixx’s book. This diary of a smack addict is as monotonous as you’d expect – shot up, nodded off, shot up, nodded off – but is punctuated with unforgettable, dunderheaded details, such as: “At 3 this morning I was crouched naked in my closet thinking the world was about to burst through my door. I peered out the closet and saw myself in my mirror. I looked like an Auschwitz victim… a wild animal. I was hunched trying to find a vein so I could inject into my dick. Then the dope went in my dick and I thought I looked fucking fantastic.”

The appeal, of course, is that we get to live such low highs without sacrificing livers, veins or sanity. The downside? Well, now everyone’s getting in on the act.

Renowned guitarist Slash, formerly of Guns N’Roses, is one of the higher-profile musos to follow The Dirt track with his book, 2008’s Slash, and admittedly it’s an enjoyably roughshod ride through life in one of the “most dangerous bands in the world”. Seriously, who could tire of an author who confesses to regularly being so drunk he pisses himself, once even in a hotel lobby? But there’s a festering booklist of contenders for the crown – or case of Depends, as the case may be. Some have stories to tell – Motorhead’s Lemmy, Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis, Aerosmith vocalist Steven Tyler – but lighter in the air if you’ve any idea who Rudy Sarzo is* or why you’d be interested in what Aerosmith’s drummer Joey Kramer or Ratt’s sticksman Bobby Blotzer have to say. At least six-string nobody Stacey Blades (who plays with an incarnation of late-’80s glam metal also-rans LA Guns) had the decency to call his book Confessions Of A Replacement Rock Star.

It’s enough to make you wonder, is being an author now the calling card of the true rock star? Have you only seen a million faces and rocked them all if every backstage encounter has been chronicled on the page? Or, is a band merely the opening act in a career where becoming an author represents true headline status? Are Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling in fact today’s real rock stars? Stash the Jack Daniel’s and leathers and break out the reading glasses – we’re going to the library! *Give up? Bassist for Quiet Riot and Whitesnake

Forget your puny pop muppets who tailor their measly three-minute tunes so they’re easily turned into tinny ringtones. Instead, embrace the verbosity and grandiosity of Endless Boogie, a bunch of don’t-give-a-damn middle- aged dudes who think one good riff deserves another – and another, and another. Chris Murray gets lost in their recent opus, Full House Head

PEOPLE & Arts Should I pass through the pearly gates,

I’d rather not be greeted by a horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing, acoustic-

guitar-playing vegetarian folk singer. Rather, trusting that the Creator doth get down with his good self (“The rock was Christ” – 1 Cor. 10:4), I expect Hendrix and Morrison to be fixtures, alongside Elvis and Lux Interior. And though I wish them many years of long life, I reckon Endless Boogie have a shot at being heaven’s house band. When their time comes.

Named after the must-have John Lee Hooker/Steve Miller album collaboration of 1971, the Brooklyn quartet is comprised of long-haired Paul Major on guitar and vocals, guitarist Jesper Elkow, bassist Mark Ohe and drummer Chris Gray. You probably also ought to know they’re known by their respective nicknames of “The Governor”, “Top Dollar”, “Memories Of Reno” and “Grease Control”. Around as an outfit for 13 years – working day jobs for indie labels or running their own second-hand vinyl shacks – they have only recently released two albums, 2008’s Focus Level and now Full House Head.

These recordings literally stretch the limits of CD technology in that the band fill discs to within a kilobyte of capacity with tracks that can last over 20 minutes. Why? Same reason they only play gigs if they’re “invited” – that’s just how they roll. The aesthetic is Captain Beefheart’s basement, Canned Heat’s choogle’n’squeak, and Velvet Underground’s mind-washing repetition, just reverbed for a fun six-pack rather than a fatal eight-ball.

Full House Head’s one-two openers, Empty Eye and Tarmac City, make for a quarter-hour of bare-chested fury that also conjures Creedence’s studio spontaneity and the loose swagger of Mick and Keith infecting the French Riviera. Let’s call it derivatively inspirational, freshly timeless.

Wherever they come from, the songs are about how they make you feel – or maybe what you might airbrush on the side of a panel van, given the chance. Mighty Fine Pie is freedom, wonder and defiance. A soundtrack to corrupting a preacher’s daughter and stopping off for pizza on the way home. Wearing double-denim and leather. This is music for driving a beaten-up Chrysler, for scaring the cardigans off hipsters, for putting on the iPod before you tell the boss to fuck himself.

Whatever. These guys exude a vibe that says they don’t give a shit how I review them, or whether you like ‘em or not. Their holy grail is not vindication based on our satisfaction – no, no, no – but on their self satisfaction.

That indulgence – at 22’ 36” the final track, A Life Worth Leaving, can’t be classified any other way – is your ticket to fun. All good things take time – who wants to rush a summer sunset spent on a porch with friends, booze and other stuff? – and Endless Boogie are the sweet stoner rejoinder to flash-frame Generation Gaga. Grab a six-pack, some buds, set the alarm knowing you’ll ignore it, and tumble in.

Early ZZ Top had the right idea: why cut your beard if you don’t have to? Why indeed.

lAy BACK And BooGIe

Greta Gerwig

&A

Too Hard Basket

From her car in the parking lot of a Whole Foods in Los Angeles, Greta Gerwig, star of Greenberg, told us about the pinch-herself moments she still experiences as a result of her rapid rise from Mumblecore obscurity to “It Girl” status. Bottom line: the 27-year-old star hopes that the present hype – and landing big projects like the Arthur remake – just means she can keep on acting for a while yet. Very impressive, but what WordyMofo needs to know is what’s in her Too Hard Basket?

What’s the one burning ambition you’ve been too afraid to fulfill?Finishing a play that I’ve written that gets shown to a paying audience and angry critics. I’ve been working on things but I’ve not taken the plunge on sending it to theatres and saying, ‘I want this to be out there in the world for public consumption’.

What would you never do on screen? I… haha… I would never? God! What would I never do? Unless it was funny, I would never do a striptease with any seriousness. I would never do something that was purposefully seductive.

What’s the classic book you have tried but been unable to finish? Ulysses. I’ve tried on a number of occasions but I’ve never quite gotten through it. It’s a bit shameful. I’ve gotten a good three-quarters of the way through. But the thing is you feel very triumphant half-way through but when you get to three-quarters the way through you think, Shit, I’ve still got another entire quarter! You give up. Or I’ve given up. Maybe that’s gonna be my summer reading project.

Which current-affairs subject do you pretend to know more about than you really do? The sub-prime loan crisis. When you get into the details, of bundling debt and

selling it and all that stuff, I pretend to have a better grasp on it than I actually do.

What mistake do you always make when you’re in the kitchen? I don’t check to make sure I have all the ingredients before I start.

Which public figure would you be too nervous to speak to if he or she was ahead of you in the line at the supermarket? Anna Wintour. If she was ahead of me in the supermarket, well, first of all she would probably think that I was not thin enough. And then she would look disparagingly at my food basket – lots of bread products!

What’s the bad habit have been unable to conquer? Compulsive Internet use. It’s really awful. Just trawling around on music websites, reading reviews of bands and listening to songs. It’s a terrible waste of time. It comes and goes. I think when I’m happy and employed and enjoying my life, I do it very little. But when I hit those rough patches – where I’m unemployed and don’t have anywhere to be – I can wake up and lose two hours on it.

What rudimentary skill should you have mastered by now? I should know how to change a tyre but I haven’t mastered that because I lived in New York, where there’s no need for car knowledge at all.