Shovelware

WWDD?

Detourned image, courtesy Misha.

bOING bOING sprinkled holy water on my blog (I Am Not Worthy), and now faithful and godless alike are weighing in, with the usual signal-to-noise ratio: a handful of closely reasoned, well-argued responses and a farrago of spittle-flecked invective, Alpha Mensa threat-posturing, and off-topic maunderings from the flying snark monkeys. Like Dawkins, I have a day job (albeit a far less exalted one!), so I'm going to address the points raised by the more substantive commenters---whose insightful critiques leave me very much in their debt---sometime in the next few days, perhaps as late as this weekend. Until then...
...watch this space.

Devil's Advocacy

Image: Christian tract, Jack. T. Chick.

I heartily endorse the New Atheists' strategy of taking the firefight to the enemy's doorstep. As someone who is truly soul-sick of his fundie relatives' condescending, culturally arrogant prayers that he find The Light© before he's cast into the lake of everlasting fire, I'm thrilled by the new strain of what might be called "evangelical" atheism. Watching Dawkins or Harris or Hitchens hand Christian apologists their heads is my idea of fun for the whole secular-humanist family, a popcorn-friendly bloodsport that's as entertaining for the little ones as it is edifying. It's high time those proselytizing god-botherers who materialize on my doorstep every Sunday morning understand what it's like to have their beliefs treated as self-evidently absurd, the foundations of their world-view vigorously challenged by a devil's advocate who gives no quarter. Spread the love, I say.

But Dawkins and Hitchens (both of whom I admire immensely as vorpal swordsmen in the Enlightenment cause, Hitchens's intellectual glaucoma regarding the Iraq question notwithstanding) reveal an almost willful ignorance about religion as a social construction and American evangelical Christianity as a subculture. ]]> Following cultural studies, ethnography, and cultural anthropology, I believe it's important to understand the radically utopian impulses, unspoken yearnings, and unconscious desires that flicker through contemporary evangelical Christianity. Dawkins and Hitchens make short work of Christianity and all its bigoted, irrational works and ways, for which we owe them a debt of gratitude. But their analysis lacks subtlety, and their understanding of why so many are seduced by religion, especially in America, is millimeter-deep. To say that Christianity is a Bronze Age fable, a holdover from the primitive childhood of the species, may be deeply satisfying to those of us tending the Enlightenment flame in these new dark ages, but it's also thumpingly obvious. Harris and Hitchens may be right, but they're not terribly enlightening, at least to anyone not living on a flat earth, in a pre-Copernican cosmos.

Then, too, there's the obvious problem that Dawkins is a humorless prig, as sanctimonious in his unbelief as true believers are in their faith. (I'm with Cartman on this one.) He's on a Mission From God when it comes to prosecuting the atheist case---a one-man crusade so obsessively all-consuming it runs the risk of elevating his unfaith to a sort of faith. He makes an ornament of power, as the postmodern Marxist McKenzie Wark would say. Meaning: he so fetishizes the object of his critique that he ends up exalting it, giving it more power than it actually has. As for Hitchens, he's blind to the situational irony of his own position, namely, our most mordant critic of religion is, at the same time, a fervent fundamentalist on the question of Iraq. Buried under an avalanche of evidence to the contrary, he insists that our little imperial adventure in Iraq is a Just Cause; that all the blood and treasure spilled there is just the price of "sewing democracy" in the Middle East. If that isn't the limit case in blind faith, I don't know what is.

Christian tract, Jack. T. Chick.

Yes, the Enlightenment tradition of reasoned debate and the scientific method's appeal to fact trump evangelical Christianity's "faith-based" obedience to scriptural "truth," its cowering fear of the Deeply Disapproving Daddy in the Sky. Those points being eagerly granted, how much more interesting to excavate the historical, class-based, and economic roots of American evangelical Christianity, to understand it in all its oxymoronic complexity as a conservative counterculture. There is a reductionistic, black-and-white binarism to Dawkins and Hitchens arguments that, irony of ironies, replicates the very same Manichean dualism beloved of American fundamentalism.

(And no, I'm not echoing the sophistic argument, made with her usual blunt-trauma subtlety by Ann Coulter and with somewhat more nuance, on the left, by Chris Hedges. I'm not arguing that a dogmatic atheism is a fundamentalism by any other name; rather, I'm arguing that using the sledgehammer of reason to smash to smithereens religion's preposterous epistemology and its hypocritical morality leaves half the job undone. Conservative Christianity has little to do with theology and everything to do with the culture wars; making sense of it requires not just a rationalist-materialist critique but an ethnographic/anthropological angle of attack.)

Both thinkers forget the (admittedly done-to-death) Fitzgerald adage that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." Religion has been both the indefatigable enemy of our intellectual evolution, as a species, and an inspiration to the John the Baptists of social justice, from Gandhi to Martin Luther King to the liberation theology proponents of the '60s. American Christianity has spread the thought-killing viruses of misogyny and homophobia and anti-empiricism/anti-rationalism and it has, in African-American culture, rewoven the social fabric and ministered to the material as well as the spiritual needs of a community under assault from without and within, often as the only institution left standing in economically decimated neighborhoods abandoned to their social pathologies by the institutions of white power (codeword: the government, whether local or federal).

American evangelical Christianity is a perverse thing, much of it demonstrably extrabiblical if not outright contradictory of scripture. Arguably, this is because it's not about God; rather, religion is simply the only philosophical (or, if you will, mythic) language available to some Americans to articulate their discontent and their visions of social change. The Dawkins/Hitchens question---What's wrong with religion?---is far less illuminating than the question they might have asked: What are American evangelicals really talking about when they talk about religion? Following Tom Frank's argument in What's the Matter with Kansas?, I believe that Christian fundamentalism, American style (like its Islamic counterpart in the extremist madrasahs of the East and the Middle East), uses religion to articulate the social, political, and economic discontent and utopian fantasies of a certain segment of American society. It does so because religion is the explanatory narrative and metaphoric language that segment has used, throughout American history, to make sense of the social changes taking place around it. As well, religion has been that class's primary mode of public address in American culture.

Christian tract, Jack T. Chick.

Jesus is My Homeboy

Delivering a keynote in San Diego, this coming Thursday (March 20), at "The Sacred & The Profane," a conference at San Diego State University.

Ted Neeley in JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR. The Messiah as don't-harsh-my-mellow SoCal dude.

Official Blurb:

In Case of Rapture, Car Will Be Driverless: Waiting for the End of the World in '70s Southern California

In this lecture, equal parts personal essay and cultural critique, Dery---now a godless leftist---takes us on a Proustian flashback to his days as a teenage fundie---a Jesus Freak caught up in the "born-again" religious fervor that swept Southern California in the '70s. Excavating the SoCal history of that mutant strain of ad-hoc Christianity that Harold Bloom calls "the American religion," he'll deliver a fire-and-brimstone critique of the paleoconservatism, flat-earth fundamentalism, and deep-dyed anti-intellectualism that have made San Diego, throughout much of its intellectual history, not only a theme-park mirage in the Desert of the Real ("America's Finest City") but a Mojave of the Mind.

At the same time, Dery attempts to consider the "situated knowledges" and "lived experiences" of that lost world through his 15-year-old eyes and through his cynical, unbelieving 48-year-old eyes---to cast a gimlet eye on the creepy cultism and gape-mouthed credulity of the 'Jesus People' movement and acknowledge the fact that it brought him closer to a transport of metanoiac rapture than anything since.

No glossolalia for this boy, but I did have a few Theresa-of-Avila moments of spiritual ecstacy. One thing I really want to nail is the ineffable hippie sweetness of those lost times, exemplified by Ted "Jesus" Neeley's infinitely sad gaze in Jesus Christ Superstar, a far cry from the BATTLECRY/PASSION OF THE CHRIST right-wing pugnacity of the gen-whatever alt.Christianity of our moment...

VITALS:

When: 11-6:15. NOTE: I go on at 5:00 PM. For further details, contact Nathan Leaman (619.886.8109).

Where:
Scripps Cottage
English and Comparative Literature
Arts and Letters 226
San Diego State University
5500 Campanile Drive | MC 6020
San Diego, California 92182-6020

What:

(From the official website): "Sacred & Profane: Meditations on a World in Translation

Salman Rushdie once wrote, "human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions." In this interdisciplinary conference, we invite original works that explore the way we construct meaning out of historical, theoretical, and literary works.

Panels will include an interrogation of sacred texts, ranging from holy words to canonized works; the past as a sacred text; profane texts, which may challenge our definitions of literature as well as our tolerance for profanity; and issues involved in the process of translation, from one language to another or one time period to another. We invite submissions from visual artists that interpret or explore these topics."

If you drop by, be sure to tug on my sleeve. I'll be milling around aimlessly afterward, hoisting a margarita with faculty, grad students, and you.

"Sex Times Technology Equals the Future"---J.G. Ballard

What: Arse Electronika 2007, a conference about pornography in the Digital Age.

Speakers: the usual roundup of sexperts, theory jocks, gadget fetishists, smoke-shoveling cyberpundits, and hairy-palmed hangers-on.

When: I'm delivering a keynote lecture on Saturday, October 5, at 11 A.M. PST. Conference schedule here.

Where: Kink.com Porn Palace, 415 Jessie St. San Francisco, CA 94103.

What I'm Talking About: "Humanimal" Porn in the Age of Xenotransplants and Genetic Chimera." Executive Summary: "Humanimal" porn is calculated to blister the mind of even the most been-there, done-that pornsurfer. Armed with image-manipulation software, morph auteurs are conjuring up images worthy of a medieval bestiary or a postmodern Decameron. The result is Dr. Moreau's idea of Web porn: Hyperreal cheesecake in which nude babes with cow ears, tails, and udders suckle each other and naked werewomen flaunt donkey ears straight out of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Is this an absurdist attempt to push the envelope of fetishism to the point where not even devotees of this obscure desire can take it seriously? Or an earnest attempt to feed the fantasies of a vanishingly obscure market niche that would have flown under radar cover in the lost world before do-it-yourself Web porn? Or is it something more profound---a campy, tongue-in-cheek exorcism of our cultural anxieties about genetic hybrids and human-animal transplants in the age of pigs with human hemoglobin and babies with baboon hearts?

Caveat: That's what I'm contracted to speak about, in any event. As always, there's a better than even chance I may just go off on some hairy-eyed rant about one of my current obsessions, such as: pathological masculinity in America, the country that brought you warporn, gorenography (a.k.a. "torture porn" in the Saw and Hostel vein), The Passion of the Christ (considered as Foucauldian fever dream), Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, and 300, that dyspeptic mix of homophobia and homophilia whose target demographic seems to be the sweet spot between Michael Savage and Tom of Finland.

Consider yourselves forewarned. And come up and tug on my sleeve if you make it to this thing.

Having a Senor Moment

Apologies, all, for the long silence. The fall semester has begun, and the professorial life (at NYU, where I teach) has swallowed me headfirst, taking the usual Great White-sized bite out of my time at the writing desk. Nothing but tumbleweeds blowing down the desolate main street of this blog, the batwing doors of the saloon making a lonely creaking in the furnace-blast wind... I'm thinking of re-naming this The Spahn Ranch Times.

In any event, an announcement: Salon just posted my personal essay "Remembrance of Tacos Past," a cultural critique-cum-social history of Taco Bell that asks the question clouding the American Mind: How can a partial-birth monstrosity like Taco Bell's Crunchwrap Supreme survive in a country flooded by Mexican immigrants, where the Real Thing (authentic Mexican food) is easier and easier to find, at least in most big cities?

I'm especially happy with this essay---the latest in a series I've been writing about what I pretentiously call the "cultural psyche" of Southern California---because it comes closer than anything I've written to realizing my vision of a polymorphously perverse cultural criticism that seamlessly stitches together journalism and critical theory, high style and lowbrow subject matter, snark-monkey humor and Deep Thoughts, and social history refracted (where appropriate) through the prism of personal experience.

It's a social history of white Californians' projection, onto Mexican food, of their nativist phobias about "dirty, greasy" Mexicans. It's also a cultural critique of Taco Bell's deracination of south-of-the-border cuisine, and of the fraught racial subtext of the company's glib use of Mexicanismo (Mexican-ness) in the mission-style architecture of its restaurants and in TV spots featuring a talking Chihuahua with a Speedy Gonzalez accent. Finally, it's a first-person, New Journalism-style meditation on the cultural politics of my obsessive quest, as an expatriate Southern Californian living in New York, for authentic Mexican food---a search that looks, at first glance, like Proustian time travel back to the San Diego borderlands of my youth but on closer examination turns out to be one white guy's problematic use of the taco as a metonym for a mythic Mexico whose use value, in symbolic terms, is that it is everything that middle-class Anglo culture is not.

For this essay, I worked the Proustian beat, dredging up my memories of eating, in the mid-'60s, at the first Taco Bell that opened in our San Diego suburb of Chula Vista. I reflected on the curious cultural alchemy that transmuted Mexican food, in my white, middle-class mind, into my food---the soul food of SoCal surfer-dude culture, the hybrid consciousness of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands wrapped up in a fried tortilla.

Here's a preview:

I'm having a senor moment. Dinner tonight is the unthinkable: a Taco Bell Original Taco and Burrito Supreme, abominations that haven't profaned this chowhound's palate since I was a kid in Southern California, birthplace of fast food. I'm committing this foodie felony partly because I'm a la recherche du whatever: the goldenrod-and-avocado-colored memories of my '60s-'70s youth, when dinner out, more often than not, meant Taco Bell.
Growing up white and middle-class in San Diego in those days meant that "cultural hybridity," as the postmodernists like to call it, was my birthright: Mexicans might have been "wetbacks" and "beaners," but our shared historical (sometimes literal) genes, reaffirmed on school trips to the region's Spanish missions, meant that Mexican food was "our" food.

Product Placement

Boy from Brazil: Ah-nuhld cathects the carrot.

Back from lecturing about sex, society, and Netporn in Porto Alegre, Brazil, for which I had prepared myself, as I told my audience, by screening the 1983 Playboy video "Carnival in Rio." Hosted by a helmet-haired Arnold Schwarzenegger, groping everything within reach of his pithecanthropoid arms and nudge-nudge, wink-winking (in his newly acquired frat-tuguese, which seems to consist entirely of come-on lines) about the delights of the mulatta and the bunda, the video is a cringe-inducing exercise in post-colonial cluelessness. It amounts to starring Conan the Barbarian in Black Orpheus. The section in which Our Man in Rio teaches a bemused Brazilian babe how to bite and suck a carrot---Freud-friendly close-ups of a carrot sliding in and out of heavily glossed lips, while Arnie chortles, "Good, yesss"---is enough to summon a righteously pissed Frantz Fanon forth from the tomb.

Anyway, Brazil was stupendous, a mind-stretching experience. With its cosmopolitan thinkers, fluent in colonial history and postmodern thought (at a churrascuria, my professorial hosts in Porto Alegre gave me the equivalent of a wine-fueled graduate seminar on the Brazilian cultural psyche); its stunning contrasts between amok urbanism and wild nature; and its mind-stretching juxtaposition of First World turbo-capitalism and Third World bricolage, Brazil pushed the boundaries of my thought. As a citizen of the Republic of Fear, where the air is thick with talk of terrorist threats and invading immigrants, and where the citizenry has been gulled into offering up its civil liberties as a burnt offering to the god of paranoia, I was thrilled by what Mike Davis would call the "magical urbanism" of Brazil's exuberant metropolises, and by the dark magic of its primordial matta---a smack-in-the-face reality check to laptop-toting citizens of American empire who think they've seen it all.

Some who attended my lecture have asked for hardcopy. Happily, a version of the text ("Paradise Lust: Pornotopia Meets the Culture Wars") has just been published in C'Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader by the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam. The anthology also includes my interview with "realcore" researcher Sergio Messina, which originally appeared on this site.

In unrelated news, the latest issue (June 2007) of ID magazine includes my "Rant" column on the cult of the iPhone, in which I inveigh, on behalf of the conscientous objectors I call iTheists, against the interminable, culture-wide geekgasm that has greeted the release of the iPhone. This hallelujah chorus is hardly a surprise, given "the brown-nosing obsequiousness of most tech coverage," complicit in "the lip-biting, teary-eyed, Moonie-mass-wedding jubilation that greets the release of every Apple product." You'd think this thing was the infinitely regenerating prepuce of the Risen Jesus, for chrissakes. Give it a rest, Pod people. The geeky paeans to God's little blobject, the helpful hints to Jobs about how to make it even cooler: You're getting a little too Raelian about this thing, and it's starting to creep the rest of us out.

Brasil '69

You are cordially invited to...

Another (!) lecture on Netporn, the subject that has captivated minds and moistened loins around the world.

This talk is part of the Frontiers of Contemporary Thought series, jointly produced by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), the University of the Sinos River Valley (UNISINOS) and Copesul, a private chemical company located in Porto Alegre. According to Copesul's website, confirmed speakers for the series include Bernard-Henri Levy, Peter Greenaway, Pierre Levy, Marshall Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Camille Paglia, and Michel Houellebecq. I am reliably informed, by one of my hosts, that I'll speak before "a selected audience of Brazilian scholars, journalists, and decision makers." In other words, I'll have the Ear of Power as I talk, preposterously enough, about...

"Humanimal" porn in the age of genetic chimera and xenotransplants; the cultural crosstalk between warporn and gorenography (Saw, Hostel, et. al.); pathological masculinity in Dubya's America; male bonding in the military, stalked by the ever-present specter of the Queer Within; Theweleit; Sontag; Foucault; Zizek; and what happens when Matrix "bullet time" meets PhotoShopped cumshots, among other things.

When: June 26, 2007 7:30 pm

Where: Porto Alegre, Brazil Federal University Federal University Lecture Hall

Stop by and say hello, if you're in town.

The Abyssal, Revisited

Humpback anglerfish (Melanocetus johnsonii).

Any more thoughts on the questions I posed? Still curious to hear your thoughts, especially on recent sightings of the squid or octopus meme.

In the meantime, a postscript to my last post:

Kristeva gave us the Abject. Baudrillard gave us the Simulacrum. Freud gave us the Uncanny, among other unforgettable theorizations, and Kant, Burke, and company group-hacked the open-source idea of the Sublime. The Abyssal, a philosophical subspecies of the Sublime, cries out for theorization, here and now.

]]> The Abyssal appears, in the mass imagination, as shorthand for the stygian, the cthonic---a lightless realm of bioluminescent nightmares, a Dalinian dreamworld populated by bathypelagic monsters unlike anything on land. Speaking of whom, Dali famously used the Abyssal as a metaphor for our collective dream life, delivering a lecture in a bell-helmeted deep-sea diving suit, the better to descend into subconcious (he nearly asphyxiated in mid-lecture) .

As Mikita Brottman implies, the Abyssal is its own binary, appearing in Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough nature documentaries as a hallucinogenic fantasia on one hand, all rainbow-hued tropical fish and Day-Glo coral reefs and kelp forests, gently rocked by the waves, and on the other as an inky-black underworld populated by grotesque creatures, some of them blind, albino monstrosities. (In this context, James Cameron's bathetic Abyss represents a mythopoeic attempt to reconcile visions of the undersea kingdom as celestial and cthonic.)

The abyss often figures, in the pop unconscious, as the dark doppelganger to space exploration: the race to the stars, reversed. And what about the aquarium, which domesticates the deep-sea sublime, offering a porthole on the Mariana trench for armchair Captian Nemos? When did bourgeois aquarium owners start putting divers, treasure chests, and the crumbling ruins of Atlantis in their aquariums? And what do they mean?

Random thought: Is our persistent vision of the Deep as a darkworld populated by monsters, a counterweight to the Jungian vision of the sea as nurturing memory of intrauterine bliss, an evolutionary hangover---a dim but troubling recollection of prehistoric horrors (see Chased By Sea Monsters by Nigel Marven)?

Or does the Abyssal represent the last terrestrial frontier, the rainbow's stubborn refusal to be unwoven by human knowledge? As the noted postmodern philosopher Donald Rumsfeld reminds us, there are known knowns and known unknowns and unknown unknowns---things we don't even know we don't know---into which last category must fall the undiscovered denizens of the deep. Is it the business of the Abyssal to be the inexhaustible account from which we withdraw our wonder and horror, the last great repository of awe in a world descralized by science, cynicism, and the media? If so, then embodied myths like Architeuthis and living fossils like the coelacanth are totemic animals, giving shape to the notion that monsters may still lurk in the far corners of Google Maps, that time travel may exist, that the dead may rise again, that science has not killed magic and mystery dead.

The Abyssal

Battle of the Titans: Giant squid (Architeuthis dux) and Sperm Whale locked in mortal combat in the vasty deep...of the American Museum of Natural History's Hall of Ocean Life.

When Clive Thompson ran an item on his brain-fryingly great blog, Collision Detection, about a colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) that fishermen hauled in off the coast of New Zealand---a 990-pound, 39-foot leviathan that is half as big again as the next largest specimen ever caught---one commenter wondered, "My question is: 'Why do we find so many NOW?! I mean, [these] things existed for thousands of years, it is CENTURIES [since we began] fishing in those seas and then BAM! We start fishing them up like sardines...Isn't it weird?'"

As Tom Wolfe would say, "But...exactly!" ]]> Of the 15 known specimens listed on Wikipedia, nine have been reported since 1979. A National Geographic.com story about the saucer-eyed colossus mentioned one explanation: Fishing boats are venturing, increasingly, into Antarctic waters, where Mesonychoteuthis is known to feed on Patagonian toothfish. Whatever the reason, close encounters with monsters of the deep seem to be on the rise, and the creatures in question seem to be getting bigger and weirder with each encounter. Time was when giant squid were the stuff of Peter Benchley beach novels, sufficient to clear the water at the Kennedy compound for weeks. When Japanese researchers filmed a giant squid in 2006, squid geeks were agog, and a video clip of the thrashing monster seemed to be everywhere, online.

But the giant squid is comic relief compared to Mesonychoteuthis, which with its razor-sharp beak and tentacles bristling with nasty-looking hooks (the better to hang onto its prey), is "not just larger but an order of magnitude meaner" than the mere giant squid, as New Zealand teuthologist Steve O'Shea told the BBC when a specimen was recovered in 2003. Kat Bolstad, a research associate at the Auckland University of Technology, put it bluntly: "This animal...is...something you are not going to want to meet in the water."

Where will it end?With the grotesque megasquid brought to CGI life in the Animal Planet series "The Future is Wild," which projected Darwinian evolution 200 million years into a posthuman future, where mammals, birds, and reptiles are extinct, but air-breathing, elephant-sized Megasquid roam the forests and tiny Squibbons (gibbon-like squid) scuttle through the trees? The series hints that Squibbons, being highly intelligent, may evolve into sentient beings, usurping the evolutionary throne from the humans who once dominated the planet. In other words, the calamari shall inherit the earth.

Deep in our imaginative consciousness, there may already be an, er, inkling that our days as top-predator are numbered. The squid meme is proliferating throughout alt.culture. At least one blog, Squid, trolls pop culture for squid sightings and has hauled up examples of squid imagery on neckties, cummerbunds, fine art, stuffed toys, and especially T-shirts. And what are we to make of the fact that the audience for tentacle hentai , a once-obscure species of Japanese cartoon porn involving wide-eyed nymphettes ravaged by giant squid, has mushroomed online, if the explosion of websites is any gauge?

One T-shirt vendor has the answer to all of these questions: "The cephalopod biomass is now greater than the human biomass. We don't know how many there are or how big they get. We are NOT ready. Play it smart." Playing it smart, in this case, means buying a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Welcome Squid Overlords" and a cartoon image of a giant squid. Or is it colossal?

Here's where you come in: I'm writing an essay for Discover magazine on this subject, equal parts hard science and cultural criticism. (The assignment won me an audience with the American Museum of Natural History's resident specimen of a giant squid, whose pickled tentacle I got to fondle, still dripping from the alcohol bath in which the leviathan reposed. Groping a kraken! How cool is that?) I'd love to hear your thoughts, here in the comment thread, on:

Why we're so obsessed with giant squid.
Why the image of the Battle of the Titans (giant squid versus Sperm whale) haunts the mass mind.
Whether you think the squid, giant or mere calamari fritti, is emerging as the totemic animal of the Screen Age, its morphology---all brain, hands, and saucer eyes---a metaphor for our increasing reduction to brains with eyes, in Matrix culture.
Any sightings of the squid meme you've come across.
And what's up with this tentacle porn thing?

(Naturally, if I quote you, I'll contact you for proper attribution---i.e., how you'd like to be ID'd---so be sure to leave your e-dress if you comment.)

My Dream Date with Bill O'Reilly

Where were we? Right, the blowback from my Los Angeles Times editorial ("Wimps, wussies and W.: How Americans' infatuation with masculinity has perilous consequences," May 3, 2007).

I learned a few tough-love lessons from My Dream Date with Bill O'Reilly. ]]> (By the way, The Radio Factor's transcripts and audiofiles are available exclusively to paid-up members of the Fox Nation. A subscription gives you all-areas access to Bill's World, not to mention a pitchfork, a chain-mail tunic, and front-row seats at Saruman's next Nuremberg rally. But for those of you interested in my gentlemanly smackdown with O'Reilly, send an e-mail and I'll send audioclips in RealPlayer format, as attachments. Of course, you'll have to have RealPlayer to play them.)

And I took a few pearls of wisdom away from the Reich-wing hate mail I received, much of it in screaming, spittle-flecked CAPSLOCK, all syntactical trainwrecks and grammatical spaz attacks, like those epic Sharpie-marker screeds that your friendly neighborhood Manson-eyed homeless guy used to staple to telephone poles when he was off his meds.

From O'Reilly, I learned that I'M MORE NAIVE ABOUT THE FOX NATION, BY AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, THAN I EVER SUSPECTED. For example, O'Reilly called me a "communist," like, five times, deadpanning, "I'm not using that in a pejorative way...I have nothing against communists," all because I say on the AUTHOR page of this site that I'm "deeply committed to a progressive politics whose calls for social justice, economic equality, and environmental action are founded on a tough-minded critique of the catastrophic effects of multinational capitalism." During the interview, I was at pains to point out to Mister Bill that, since Buchanan, Perot, and other nabobs of nativism have inveighed against the yawning chasm between CEO and wage-slave salaries as well as the global race to the bottom of the wage pyramid, calls for economic equity and critiques of multinational capitalism aren't exactly the Mark of the Commie Beast, right about now. Naturally, my argument was just so much static to Bill, who blinked, then recommenced shelling.

I was naive enough to think that this sort of paleoconservative red-baiting was buried under McCarthy's gob-streaked tombstone, or at least under Khrushchev's. I mean, Moscow fell to McDonald's without firing of a shot, China's parvenu bourgeoisie are buying up SUV's as fast as Detroit can turn them out, and Castro's playing Peter Falk playing a paranoid, cigar-chewing banana-republic dictator in that old Twilight Zone episode. The last of America's red-hot Marxists are either cowering under Bill O'Reilly's bed or tenured members of the professoriat; not since Eugene Debs walked the earth has the Archie Bunker demographic viewed the Left with anything but cordial contempt, if not the paranoid fear and loathing of the John Bircher, and I say that as a Leftist, for chrissakes. I mean, I love Mike Davis like a brother, and Terry Eagleton is my homeboy, but compare their royalty statements to Anne Coulter's if you want a reality check about how big a neighborhood threat Marxism really poses, beyond the fever dreams of a few swoony grad students. So how can O'Reilly use an Atomic Cafe-era smear like "commie" with a straight face? Is he just playing a throwback to the era of blacklists and bomb shelters, chuckling all the way to the bank? Or is the Fox Nation so cretinous that it really, truly equates calls for economic justice with being a "loopy" (unquote) commie? Clearly, I need to spend more time in O'Reilly Country, taking the pulse of the average orc.

I also learned, when O'Reilly asked if I was gay (because my LAT essay inveighs against homophobia), that ONLY GAYS CAN DECRY HOMOPHOBIA. In other words, if a public intellectual (a pompous sobriquet, but there it is) makes the case against an anxious American masculinity that defines itself in neurotic opposition to wimps, wussies, and fags, he's got to be a homo. Incredibly, neither O'Reilly nor his legions of flying monkeys seem to have Clue One about the homophobia inherent in the presumption that anyone arguing against homophobia must, by definition, be a homosexual. Somewhere, the founding fathers of the Enlightenment are weeping tears of blood into Diderot's Encyclopedie...

Finally, I learned that WHEN YOU PASS THROUGH THE COSMIC BUNNYHOLE BETWEEN FACT-BASED REALITY AND FOX REALITY, YOU FIND YOURSELF IN A PARALLEL WORLD WHERE IRONY IS AN ALIEN NOTION AND HYPOCRISY EXCLUSIVE TO THE LEFT. After thumping his tub angrily about "secular progressives'" underhanded tactic of smearing their opponents rather than debating their ideas, O'Reilly proceeded to invalidate my ideas by...demonizing me as a loony commie. The "hysteria building around the secular progressive movement has basically said, 'Look, if you don't agree with us...we're going to find a way to put a psychological tag on you that will marginalize you,'" said O'Reilly. "The only thing that you'll hear through all the cacophony is someone calling someone a nasty name." Then he proceeded to characterize me as "a communist" who "hates Bush," just some nutty professor who's "nothing," really, "just some bloviator down at NYU who wants the United States to be a communist country." That's right, Bill. I, and my dark hordes won't rest until the red flag flaps from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Karl is Lord, our godless atheism notwithstanding.

Finally, from the right-wing mouth-breathers who sent me mash notes from all over this fair land of ours, I learned that

THE IRONY OF ASKING IF THE AUTHOR OF AN ARTICLE ABOUT HYSTERICAL, HOMOPHOBIC MASCULINITY IS GAY IS LOST ON MOST CONSERVATIVE READERS, INCLUDING THE GUY WHO THOUGHT HE COULD SIDLE UP TO MY INBOX, WHEN I WASN'T LOOKING, AND SLYLY TRICK ME INTO REVEALING THE SORDID SECRET OF MY SEXUALITY WHEN MY GUARD WAS DOWN:

Sir:

I really enjoyed your article today in the LA Times. My question to you, sir, are you gay?
Alex ------

I also learned that

MY ARGUMENT IS INVALID BECAUSE WHEN YOU'RE GOING MANO A MANO WITH A TOWELHEADED JIHADI, YOU DON'T WANT A GIRLYMAN COVERING YOUR, UH, ASS

Mark,
Just read your LA Times piece. Very interesting. One quick question for which I'm sure you have an answer. If you were to go 2 on 2 with a couple of Islamofascists in a Baquba alley, would you pick a.) W., b.) Harry Reid, c.) Steny Hoyer, or d.) Dick Durbin? (Nancy Pelosi is not a vialble choice.)

You can only pick one. Hopefully, you wouldn't be flumoxed by the choice.

Regards,

John ------

No, John, I'm not at all "flumoxed" [sic]. But I can't help wondering why Pelosi isn't on our dance card. Maybe I've been cruising too many MILF sites, but I'd much rather spend a few idle hours in a Baquba alley with the leggy Speaker of the House than any of the gentlemen you mention, none of whom are my type.

Next, I learned that

The trouble with manhood "American-style" is that the wussies have indeed taken over and "balls" simply are not an important portion of the anatomy for anyone left of center in this country.
My best to you,
Sue, California

And my best to you, Sue! One thing worries me, though: Why the ironic quotes around balls? Are you implying that, while the Left has none, the Right has only faux balls---"balls," rather than true-blue balls? A scary thought! I don't know which is worse---no balls, or Stepford balls, just lurking there in the shadows between our legs, passing as the Real Thing. Spooooooky. Please keep me posted on the state of America's balls, Sue. I sleep a little better knowing you've got your unblinking eye on American manhood's low-slung undercarriage.

I also learned that I SUFFER FROM W. ENVY, because I had some mean-spirited, snark-monkey fun in my LAT op-ed with G. Gordon Liddy's approving remarks about the size of the Presidential Package in that photo of W. in a flight suit, I have "the hots for President Bush," according to some bottom-feeder on AOL. "Dery definitely seems to be in a crouch...over the presidential crotch." Maybe that's because liberal "men on magazine covers require air-brushing in the crotch area in order to create the illusion of having balls," whereas "W. didn't require any help in this area. In the pilot jumpsuit, his manhood spoke for itself. Lib men have to be airbrushed even in a Speedo in order to project their manhood. They must suffer from W. envy."

And there you have it, dear reader. The yahoos have spoken. Vox bacilli.

There is a silver lining to this cloud: According to his producer, Big Bad Bill rilly, rilly, rilly didn't want to like me, but just couldn't help himself. To his horror, he liked me, he really liked me, his producer confided. Could this be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

Testosterone Poisoning

First there was this ("Wimps, wussies, and W. : How Americans' infatuation with masculinity has perilous consequences," in The L.A. Times).

It features the following choice morsel, calculated to turn the nearest right-wing shark tank into bloody chum:

SO THERE'S a smoking crater where Don Imus used to sit. That's fine with those of us who never understood the appeal of his grizzled-codger shtick, which always sounded like Rooster Cogburn reading "The Turner Diaries" anyway. But if we're going to administer a ritual flaying to every blowhard who channels the ugly American id, why has a hate-speech Touretter like Ann Coulter escaped the skinning knife?

Then there was this, live from Darwin's waiting room, in my Inbox:

I recently read your sniveling article, Mark. Sounds to me like you got your panties in a wad, your freaking sissy boy. You better not bring yourself to Ann Coulter's attention, because she will rip your ass apart
John -----
Atlanta

Then there was this:

Homosexuals need to grow thicker skins. When are people going to come to the realization that most folks simply have trouble differentiating what somebody is (homosexual) from who he is. Unfortunately, many of the, so called, "girliemen" reveal themselves to be angry and hateful ultra-libs. Precisely the mirror image of those they accuse of being "homophobes." That aside, let Imus and Coulter toss insults all they want. There is a market for it. Just like there is a ready market out there for the kind of "wussy" tripe you just published in the LA Times.
Ken ------
Charleston, SC

And:

Dear Markie: If all American males were like you in 1941, half the US would be speaking Japanese and the other half would be speaking German. The America they hate gives wimps, wussies and faggots the best living environment on earth.
Dick ------
San Diego

San Diego! My old stomping grounds! The town Gore Vodal immortalized as "the Vatican of the John Birch Society!"

Anyway, you get the idea. There's more---much, much more---where that came from.

Then Bill O'Reilly's radio show called, asking me to be on today's show at 1 PM EST.

And I said yes, Bob help me.

Satan's Fetus Stalks the Suburbs

We interrupt the unending torrent of comment spam ("Hello people, your site is best! Nice site look this: teen lesbians showering!") to flog our product.

The latest, insect-themed issue of the cultural quarterly Cabinet is in bookstores and on newsstands now, and includes my essay on the ginormous Jerusalem Cricket, which is, in fact, neither a cricket nor from Jerusalem. (As Linda Richman used to say on Saturday Night Live: Discuss.) Titled "Armies of the Night: Satan's Fetus Stalks the Suburbs," the article is at once an overheated exegesis of the J.C. as myth and symbol, an eco-political critique of SoCal sprawl, and my attempt to exorcize the post-traumatic stress engendered by a nocturnal confrontation with one of these grotesque animals, an experience no Californian who has run across a J.C. in the dead of night will ever forget. (The Jerusalem Cricket, a.k.a. Stenopelmatus, ranges widely west of the Rockies but is ubiquitous in California, where sprawl's encroachment on the insect's habitat is giving rise to more and more confrontations between the insects and shocked-and-awed suburbanities. )

Look upon me and know fear, puny mortal: Jerusalem Cricket on the prowl. Photo copyright Takwish. Contact photographer at takwish at gmail dot com.

Here's a teaser... ]]>

In a jump cut, I was out of bed, across the room, switching on the light to reveal a crawling horror: a humongous insect, thicker than a man's thumb, maybe three inches in length. It had powerful, cricketlike hind legs and a caramel-colored abdomen, ringed with amber bands. Its head was dried-blood red, with the lacquered glossiness of a candied apple. It made me think of a skinned thumb, or the swollen head of an aroused penis, shiny with precum.
The creature was obscene in its ugliness. But what was it? David Cronenberg's idea of a partial-birth abortion? A stool sample from the man-eating xenomorph in the movie Alien? A nightcrawler from the cultural unconscious?
Sweeping the thing into a dustpan, I shuddered at its weight as I carried it to the bathroom. To my horror, the creature swam against the tide when I flushed, scrabbling frantically at the toilet bowl. I flushed. And flushed. And flushed. (Die, monster, die!) At last, it disappeared down the porcelain gullet. The toilet made a gagging sound. Trembling with revulsion, I laid the heavy ceramic lid of the toilet tank across the closed seat to ensure that no six-legged freak could exact revenge, even if it did manage to clamber up, out of the sewer. Not that I slept much that night. In the dark, I could still see those beady black eyes staring back at me unblinkingly as I sent the abomination swirling into Eternity with a final flush.

Sleep tight.

The Eyes Have It: Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen on the "Science of First Impressions"

Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen at home, NYC, 2006. Photo: Yoko Inoue. © Yoko Inoue. From my December 2006 ID magazine Q&A with the authors.

(In its December 2006 issue, ID magazine ran my interview with Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, two of our most incisive thinkers about the politics of images and the social history of consumer culture. But that wasn't the half of it. ID didn't have room for my intro, and had to truncate the interview for reasons of space. Here's the director's cut, with all of the insights that ended up on the cutting-room floor restored.)

Amid the cultural crossfire over illegal immigration, at a moment when 60 percent of the respondents to a Quinnipiac poll applauded the racial profiling of people who look "Middle Eastern," the visual-culture critics and social historians Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen are pulling our stereotypes up by the roots.

Their new book, Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality (Seven Stories Press), is a history of stereotyping in racist science and popular culture. (Poke your browser into the Ewens' spirited, intellectually omnivorous blog, "Stereotype and Society.")

Revealing the origins of the pictures in our heads—the powerful images that shape our attitudes toward "enemy aliens," the lower class, or anyone in a different skin—the Ewens make sense of our most pernicious myths by restoring their lost historical context: the eugenics of Francis Galton, the criminal anthropology of Cesare Lombroso, and other systems of scientific racism that molded the visual imagination of the modern age.

If that sounds like 497 pages of sternly self-flagellating political correctness, it isn't. Profusely illustrated with period images, the book is an intellectual thrill ride, rollercoastering from the sad tale of the Hottentot Venus to hidden agendas in Roget's Thesaurus; from the cannibal stereotype in King Kong to the deeper meanings of the minstrel show. In Typecasting, the Ewens open our minds by opening our eyes.

]]> Mark Dery: In Typecasting, the act of stereotyping turns out to be central to our attempts to make sense of the social worlds we inhabit.

Elizabeth Ewen: That's why we started with [the journalist and early writer on mass culture] Walter Lippmann. He says that first we define and then we see; what we see is already conditioned. Stereotypes become unconscious reflexes, ordering the world as you navigate it.

Stuart Ewen: Lippmann makes the argument that this repertory of presuppositions that we bring to interactions with other people is shaped by our culture. For instance, the first thing you see when you look at another person is this biological fiction—race—that gets in the way of other ways of seeing.

EE: There emerges this way of thinking that leads up to the ability of a culture to produce one image that represents a whole category of people. [The 18th century Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper, who classified humans according to a racial hierarchy], has this enormous array of skulls. One day, he pulls them down and fondles them and decides, on the basis of that, who has the proper facial angle and who doesn't. But it's based in each case on one skull representing entire groups of people. What it leaves out is as important as what's in the frame of vision.

SE: Every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. One of the things that is built into the way in which [the 18th century Swedish botanist Carolus] Linnaeus defines a species is that there's a single image that becomes the encompassing ideal of what that species is.

In [the sexual researcher Alfred] Kinsey's work, the picture of a species is not about a single ideal type but about multiplicity. He's been studying gall wasps forever, but what is the ideal gall wasp? In all of the hundreds of thousands of gall wasps he's seen, none of them are the same! So, in fact, the law of nature is not the ideal type; the law of nature is that there is no ideal type.

Part of the history that we're dealing with is the systematic intellectual and aesthetic tradition in which exclusivity—the ideal type—becomes the iron law of understanding. Notions of multiplicity are marginalized from what is considered to be scientific or aesthetic truth.

EE: The interesting thing is that these images work through juxtaposition. Every image has its counter-image. When you went to the phrenology museum, you saw the busts of presidents but you also saw the busts of miscreants.

SE: What we live with today is the intrinsic outcome of a process that's been going on for some time.

The repertory of fixed impressions that is developed in phrenology and criminal anthropology gets animated within Hollywood. The movies dramatized the ability to give you stereotypes that would allow you to know who the good person was and who the bad person was in an instant.

We have a whole chapter on King Kong, the most recent version of which portrays the natives of Skull Island as much more atavistic and less comical than they were in the original. It's closer to a 19th century vision of atavism as a primordial menace lurking within dark people. The inner core of stereotype is this fear that there may be a transgression, that the degenerate is gonna run away with your woman. Stereotype is how peoples' deepest fears about themselves get projected, imagistically, onto others.

MD: Or even onto a design aesthetic, which then becomes "degenerate," to use the Nazi term of art. I'm reminded of Adolf Loos's essay "Ornament and Crime" (1908). Loos, a modernist, is horrified by Art Nouveau—the "feminine" sexuality of its writhing lines, its "primitive" love of ornamentation.

SE: Modernism was predicated on certain ideal forms. It's incumbent upon designers to think about the extent to which certain aesthetic ideals may contain some of the same premises that taxonomies of human difference have reinforced in other realms. The notion that there are ideal forms—certain typographies that are ideal for producing this, that, and the other kind of response—is a particular way of seeing that designers really need to re-evaluate.

Let's go back to this whole question, well-discussed in the book, of taxonomies that are predicated on the idea that there are ideal types—"This is what a Negro is," "This is what a Caucasian is." The notion that Stephen Jay Gould argues in much of his work on natural history—that the ideal in fact is a complete obfuscation and that variation, not fixity, is the truth about form—would be a major challenge for design, because I think fixity is part of the kit bag of design traditions: "Here is this tradition, here's that tradition."

EE: If you're a designer, I think you have to think in new ways. You have to examine where popular culture is going and what images truly represent peoples' desires outside of the framework of stereotype, because if it's true that on the one hand conservatism has this hold on the culture, on the other there's a wide variety of diversity happening.

SE: Linnaeus's system for categorizing plants is based completely on physical structures—on visual evidence. Before Linnaeus, the taxonomy of plants was based on their use within human existence.

Design and architecture need to re-connect to the utility of those forms within human lives—the way in which they mesh with human behaviors, the passed-on "finger knowledge" that people on survive on. Rather than becoming students of design, designers need to become students of society—of the human uses of things.

For example, early forms of government-built public housing utilized nature as a grid and placed people's lives within it, leaving cars on the outside, creating pedestrian walks for shopping and leisure-time activities, with public meeting houses placed in the center.

The design world is still very much married to the logic of typecasting—the logic of ideal types. For the designer to really imagine the way in which the form connects to how people live, the kind of uses they make of things (I realize this is very hard within the world of the client) would represent a revolution in design.

EE: When you teach about mass media and mass culture, one of the things that you do is you ask people to freeze the frame, to think about what's in the image. Once they understand the composition of the image, they begin to see the world in different ways.

SE: What we're asking in Typecasting is: What does each generation pass on to the next that will prepare that generation to deal with the moment when they encounter people not like themselves? Do we hand them fixed taxonomies that are designed to serve the interests of power, which is what Lippmann and most of the people in Typecasting are talking about? Or do we provide them with tools to unpack these visual narratives—to be able to see themselves in others, to imagine seeing through other people's eyes?

Unpacking My Library

A while ago, the technoculture writer David Pescovitz---whose mind was probably elsewhere at the time---rashly asked me for a reading list. He was curious to know what was on my nightstand. (He'll rue the day he asked, before I'm done.) Typically, I have a half-dozen books I'm picking up and putting down, in my desultory way, reading a few pages here, skimming a chapter there. The presumption, at least subconsciously, is that this hodgepodge will form a sort of montage in my mind, inspiring intertextual conjunctions, juxtapositions, synchronicities. (At least, that's the theory...) Literary ADD meets Freudian free association.
]]> For example, I recently buzzed through Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen's Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality, a panoramic study of racial stereotyping in Western culture. For the Ewens, Baroque cabinets of curiosity, social Darwinism, eugenics, wartime propaganda, and pop culture (Roget's thesaurus, King Kong, minstrel shows) are vectors of transmission for racist fables of genetic predestination.

Every night, after doing some deep-breathing exercises with the Ewen book, I'd relax before sleep with some intellectual Fluffernutter. One night, while listening to an audiobook of Sherlock Holmes stories, I was fascinated to hear fictional echoes, in Holmes's snap judgments of human character, of the Victorian racial science critiqued by the Ewens.

Holmes's X-ray visions of the evils lurking in the minds of men are at once gothic in their morbid obsession with the ever-present past; Freudian in their sense of a libidinous self, at odds with the superego; and social Darwinian in their insistence on Victorian assumptions about gender, race, and ethnicity. The physiognomies and body language of Conan Doyle's criminals are indelibly stamped with the stigmata of inborn criminality, reminding us time and again that heredity is destiny. Of Holmes's would-be assassin, the murderous Colonel Moran, Dr. Watson observes,

I was able at last to have a good look at our prisoner. It was a tremendously virile and yet sinister face which was turned towards us. With the brow of a philosopher above and the jaw of a sensualist below, the man must have started with great capacities for good or for evil. But one could not look upon his cruel blue eyes, with their drooping, cynical lids, or upon the fierce, aggressive nose and the threatening, deep-lined brow, without reading Nature's plainest danger-signals" ("The Empty House").

Moran exemplifies Holmes's theory that ontogeny recapitulates familial phylogeny: "The individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors...[becoming], as it were, the epitome of the history of his own family." Likewise, Holmes's arch-nemesis Moriarty is of "good birth and...endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty," yet the man is inescapably blighted by "hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind," instantly apparent in his creepy habit of "slowly oscillating [his face] from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion" ("The Final Problem"). From the Italian jewel thief Beppo, a "simian man with thick eyebrows, and a very peculiar projection of the lower part of the face like the muzzle of a baboon" ("The Six Napoleons"); to the vengeful Jonas Oldacre, "more like a malignant and cunning ape than a human being" ("The Norwood Builder"); to the mad scientist Professor Presbury, whose use of a rejuvenating elixir (think: Victorian Viagra) extracted from "the great black-faced monkey of the Himalayan slopes" turns him into a missing link ("The Creeping Man"), Conan Doyle's stories are fraught with the anxieties of his age---the Xenophobic fear that the English gene pool was being contaminated by bestial immigrant strains; devolutionary nightmares inspired by Darwin's revelation that simians and Homo sapiens are branches of the same evolutionary tree; Max Nordau-ish worries about the moral degeneration of the ingrown nobility. Conjunctions, juxtapositions, synchronicities.

It gets weirder: Another night, I downshifted from the Ewens by reading The Colour Out of Space: Tales of Cosmic Horror. The title story, by H.P. Lovecraft, is a gothic sci-fi story about a meteor whose otherworldly influence, somewhere between radiation sickness and nameless evil, turns the farm where it landed into a "blasted heath" and the hapless family that lives there into "grey, twisted, brittle [monstrosities]." The Mark of the Devil, in Lovecraft's story, is color---ambiguous color, its promiscuous blending of pigments the outward manifestation of an unspeakable evil. Inside a fragment of the meteor, investigators find "a large coloured globule" whose color "was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all." On the poisoned farm, where mutant flora worthy of Three Mile Island has sprung up, "no sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen...but everywhere those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone..."

My curiosity piqued, I dialed up the Wikipedia entry on Lovecraft, and found the Ewens whispering in my ear again. Conjunctions, juxtapositions, synchronicities: According to Wikipedia, Lovecraft's fiction is shot through with racist sentiments. He expounded on racist themes in poems such as "On the Creation of Niggers" (1912); in his story "Herbert West---Reanimator," the author experiences a shudder of almost self-parodic revulsion at the sight of a dead African-American: "He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms that I could not help calling forelegs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life---but the world holds many ugly things." Too true, too true, and one of the ugliest stared back at H.P., out of his shaving mirror: According to his ex-wife, a stroll through the mongrel metropolis made Lovecraft apoplectic. "Whenever we found ourselves in the racially mixed crowds which characterize New York," she wrote, "Howard would become livid with rage. He seemed almost to lose his mind." Little wonder, then, that for the self-appointed Scourge of the Mud People, color---the multiethnic face of an ever more racially mixed America---should be synonymous with horror. In Typecasting, the Ewens sketch the background for Lovecraft's fulminations, a historical moment in which racial segregation is the law of the land, eugenics is sober science, and expert testimony before congress helps push through the Immigration Act of 1924, a bulwark against the pollution of Aryan DNA by inferior breeding stock from eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.

Just two examples, Constant Reader, of the hypertextual connections---the intellectual crosspollination---encouraged by literary channel-surfing.

Which brings us, by twists and turns, back to The Reading List. Here, then, are some gleanings from recent readings.

Note: Some of the titles that follow are books that have always intrigued me, but which I have yet to read. Nothing odd about that: Some of the best books are the ones we haven't read. Some of the most cherished volumes in my library are titles that have gone untouched since the day I bought them, no less loved for that. Anatole France, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Derrida are thoughtful on this subject. Asked if he'd read all the books in his library, France famously replied, "Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china every day?" In his essay, "How to Justify a Private Library," Eco writes, "The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: 'And more, dear sir, many more,' which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration." Derrida's zinger, in the documentary Derrida, is more gently witty: "No, I've only read three or four, but I've read them very, very well." Of course, I have every intention of reading the books in question some day; I bought many of them out of the neurotic fear that the dissident and the deviant will be black-market commodities in the not-so-distant future, when a home-schooled creationist ascends to the presidency with the 10 Commandments in one hand and a Left Behind potboiler in the other, exhorting the faithful to start readying the lighter fluid and the faggots for the secular humanists and their godless, sodomite lit.

To the stacks, then.

1. A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Svendsen. Never read it. Love the fact that there's a painstakingly scholarly study devoted to boredom, with every op cit and ibid spit-shined to a blinding luster. Even better, the book is by all accounts gripping. An edge-of-your-seat deconstruction of the deeper meanings of boredom! What could be better? Unbelievabll, there's another book on the subject: Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind by Patricia Meyer Spacks. Unfortunately, it's "actually, well, boring," in the words of one Amazon reviewer.

In any event, I love these obsessive-compulsive social histories of little-studied subjects, such as The Encyclopedia of Stupidity by Matthijs van Boxsel, and The Anatomy of Disgust by William Ian Miller (and its conjoined twin, On Disgust by Aurel Kolnai, Carolyn Korsmeye, and Barry Smith).

Speaking of the disgusting, the Miller and Kolnai/Korsmeye/Smith books are scholarly studies, whereas Dominique Laporte's uneven History of Shit and Paul Spinrad's incomparable, inexhaustible RE/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids engage more, er, viscerally with the subject at hand. By contrast, Wim Delvoye: Cloaca (which I also haven't read) with contributions by Dan Cameron, Dieter Roelstraete, Gerardo Mosquera, Georges Bataille, and Milan Kundera (!), looks suitably bizarre, while Divine Filth: Lost Writings by Georges Bataille and Filth: Dirt, Disgust, And Modern Life, edited by William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, bring a scholarly approach to an abject subject.

2. Albertus Seba: Cabinet of Natural Curiosities---The Complete Plates in Colour, 1734-1765, edited by Dr. Irmgard Musch. Another breathtaking wonderbook from the German publisher Taschen. From the Amazon blurb: "In 1731, after decades of collecting, Seba commissioned illustrations of each and every specimen [in his wonder closet] and arranged the publication of a four-volume catalog detailing his entire collection---from strange and exotic plants to snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, insects, butterflies and more, as well as fantastic beasts, such as a hydra and a dragon. [These] illustrations, often mixing plants and animals in a single plate, were unusual even for the time. Many of the stranger and more peculiar creatures from Seba's collection, some of which are now extinct, were as curious to those in Seba's day as they are to us now. This reproduction is taken from a rare, hand-colored original." Once seen, never forgotten, these hand-painted dream photographs from the Baroque capture, with stunning vivdness, the aesthetic of wonder.

3. The Strange Case of Edward Gorey by Alexander Theroux. Theroux is a gossipy, waspish writer who never misses an opportunity to flaunt his (admittedly prodigious) erudition, sneer at the booboisie, name-drop, or score-settle (especially with his vastly more celebrated brother, for whom he nurses an undying grudge). Bitchy, affected, and too clever by half, his style aspires to Oscar Wilde but more often approximates Paul Lynde. For all that, The Strange Case is an addictively readable book, stuffed with scandalous morsels of gossip, witty table talk (Gorey and Theroux were friends), and sharply perceptive insights into the mind and art of the incalcuable, eccentric Gorey. A poisoned bon-bon of a book.

4. J.G. Ballard: Quotes by J.G. Ballard; edited by Mike Ryan, V. Vale. Slapdash in comparison with the indispensable RE/Search #8/9 (the Ballard issue)---"unknown" is a too-frequent citation, and the loving inclusion of every possible variation on a given quote, culled from decades of interviews, is calculated to appeal to the devout fan only---this is nonetheless a bottomless font of insights and inspiration from the incomparable Ballard, a visionary novelist whose black-comedic critique of the postmodern condition is more trenchant, and wittier by far, than anything French philosophy has to offer. Read Baudrillard and Virilio as science fiction, and Ballard as philosophy or, better yet, self-help guru for the irreparably disaffected. I begin every day with a quote, chosen at random, from this book of daily affirmations---or, more properly, daily negations---and go forth with a spring in my step, intellectually well-armed to do battle with my local megamall, multistory parking garage, and other Ballardian horrors come to life.

5. Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture by Regina Janes. The fact that there's an entire book devoted to this subject gives meaning to my life, and almost convinces me there's a god.

6. Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body by Armand Marie Leroi. The Two-headed Boy, And Other Medical Marvels by Jan Bondeson. The Last Sideshow, a book of photographs by Hanspeter Schneider. Inside the Live Reptile Tent: The Twilight World of Carnival Midway, text by Bruce Caron, photographs by Jeff Brouws. Monsters: Human Freaks in America's Gilded Age: The Photographs of Chas Eisenmann, edited by Michael Mitchell. As these titles remind us, we've lost the ability to stare without Puritan guilt or the intellectual agonies of Political Correctness. In these pages, we find ourselves face to face with the Utterly Other. Stare, and stare some more, and be forever changed.

7. My Last Sigh by Luis Bunuel. As sublimely dry and sophisticated as the martinis whose virtues he extols, the great Surrealist's breezy, effortlessly charming memoir is a time capsule from a lost world, when conversation over cocktails was an art. A master raconteur and wicked wit, Bunuel regales us with tales of Dali, anti-clerical bon mots, and profound insights into the filmmaker's art. Before you know it, you've reached the bottom of the martini shaker and the book is over. What's not to love about a chatty, self-deprecating autobiography that includes an entire chapter on the vital importance of the martini in the creative process and a detailed recipe for the author's own variation on that immortal theme, the Bunueloni? Favorite passage: Bunuel's description of the ideal martini, in which a shaft of sunlight passes through a bottle of Noilly Prat and thence into a brimming glass of Bombay gin, as "the generative powers of the Holy Ghost pierced the virgin's hymen."

8. The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz. One of the strangest little books ever published. From the Amazon blurb: "Bizarre and utterly fascinating, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death is a dark and disturbing photographic journey through criminal cases and the mind of Frances Glessner Lee--grandmother, dollhouse-maker, and master criminal investigator. Photographer Corinne May Botz stumbled across the "Nutshell Studies" while making a video about women who collect dollhouses. On the suggestion of a collector, she visited the Baltmore Medical Examiner's Office, where Lee's miniature reconstructions of crime scenes were on display. The macabre dioramas fascinated and repulsed her: "I was entranced by the details: the porcelain doll with a broken arm in the attic, the grains of sugar on the kitchen floor...I was also riveted by the miniature corpses. Shot in bed, collapsed in the bathtub, hung in the attic and stabbed in the closet; all were eternally frozen in miniature rooms that had become their tombs." Can you believe it has a competitor? The Dollhouse Murders: A Forensic Expert Investigates 6 Little Crimes by Thomas Mauriello, Ann Darby; photographs by John Consoli.

9. The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators by Gordon Grice. A mordant masterpiece, in which the author invents a genre all his own: Nature Gothic. The chapter titles---"Tarantula," "Recluse," "Mantid," "Black Widow," "Rattlesnake"---tell it all. Fascinated by the alien ways of the nonhuman world, Grice combines the sardonic deadpan of noir fiction with the best naturalists' unsentimental scrutiny of animal behavior and a rural midwesterner's applied knowledge of the predator-prey relationship. A Jean-Henri Fabre for literati who drive pickups with rifle racks.

10. Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung, edited by Aniela Jaffe, translated by Clara Winston and Richard Winston. Recently, I had an inexplicable craving for this book, which I first read when it was assigned by a high-school Teacher Who Changed My Life. In the name of time famine, I opted for the abridged audiobook version, read by Michael York---a fateful decision, as it turned out, since the contrast between York's plummy, uppercrust English accent and Jung's retelling of his "personal myth" (not his life, but his inner life) is as uproarious as it is surreal. Shove one of these tapes into your car stereo and let the man who channeled the Collective Unconscious, psychology's answer to Lemuria---a consoling fiction that laid the cornerstone of the New Age (and obliterated beyond repair the notion that psychology was even remotely scientific)---provide a wonderfully incongruous voiceover to the geography of nowhere (Wal-Mart, Target, Costco, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Wal-Mart, Target, Costco...) as it flashes past.

Thrill to Jung's formative childhood dream of a giant, one-eyed phallus sitting erect on a king's throne---a monstrous thing "made of skin and flesh, and on top there was something like a rounded head with no face and no hair. On the very top of the head was a single eye, gazing motionlessly upwards." Gird up your loins for a week of fear-crazed bedwetting: "The thing did not move, yet I had the feeling that it might at any moment crawl off the throne like a worm and creep towards me." The one-eyed trouser snake of locker-room lore, as reimagined by H.R. Giger! Pure terror! Listen, in rapt fascination, to the account of the female patient who believes she travels to and from the moon, where the moonpeople are threatened by a hypnotically beautiful vampire, who turns out to be a buried memory of sexual abuse, risen from her childhood nightmares. Laff until the tears run down your cheeks as Jung recounts the Battle of the Titans, in which he and Freud struggle for control of the historical narrative of psychoanalysis, each interpreting the other's dreams as maliciously as possible---as evidence of sublimated sexual pathologies, death wishes toward the father figure, or worse! (Profoundly unsettled by Jung's interest in the then-recently discovered mummies of pre-Christian "bog people," Freud is convinced that the Swiss analyst's obsession with "these corpses" masks a death wish toward him, and faints dead away at the dinner table.)

Jung's account of his childhood crisis of faith is worth the price of admission, all by itself. In it, we accompany the author on his way to school. Rejoicing in the chirping birds and exquisitely blue sky, he offers a silent prayer of thanks to the Creator God: "The world is beautiful and the church is beautiful and God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and...and...and..." Suddenly, our narrator is struck with A THOUGHT TOO MONSTROUS TO THINK! Tormented for days by this soul-shriveling blasphemy, he finally decides, after much agony of mind, that God must have intended him to think this scaldingly sacreligious thought. This revelation "liberated me instantly from my worst torment, since I knew that God himself had placed me in this situation." Abandoning himself to divine will, Li'l Jung allows himself to think the unthinkable: "I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hellfire, and let the thought come." (Pregnant pause by York.) "God sits on His golden throne, high above the world and under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder." (That, Virginia, is why they call it a throne.) "I felt an enormous and indescribable relief; instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me, and with it an unutterable bliss." (Where are the Farrelly brothers when we need them? Do not go in there!)

Let that be a lesson to the morbidly religious among you---not to mention those bibliocentrists who turn up their noses at the obscure pleasures of the audiobook.

Naked Lunch: Talking Realcore with Sergio Messina

(Note:Graphic sexual imagery ahead. Not work- or child-friendly. Proceed at your own risk!)

"Tom, thank you for the shoes." Amateur fetishist. Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina. Used by permission; collection of Sergio Messina.

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Sergio Messina. Used by permission.

Sergio Messina has seen the future, and it's sticky. Messina, 47, is the Margaret Mead of alt.sex on the Net.

Imagine Mead as a shaven-headed intellectual with a drawing by Michelangelo tattooed on his back and Italian street cool to burn, dauntlessly spelunking into the dizzy depths of the pornographic imagination in amateur communities all over the Web, and you've got an inkling of why this open-source anthropologist rocked the 2005 Netporn conference in Amsterdam with his lecture---more of a dance remix, really, with freestyle riffing and mind-curdling slides---on the online amateur porn he calls "realcore."

Born in Rome ("where we hate the Catholic church with great vigor") and now based in Milan, Messina is a pirate radio DJ-turned-anti-copyright activist, electronica musician, and freelance journalist (his technology column has appeared in the Italian Rolling Stone since 2003). He's at work on a heavily illustrated book about his investigations of amateur sexual subcultures on the Net, titled Realcore: The Digital Porno Revolution, which he describes as "a brief history of realcore, a new brand of sexual images that appeared in the late '90s thanks to the then-new digital tools. [Realcore is] a pornography that...goes beyond [traditional hardcore], striving to portray the reality of the [amateur] scene and the true desires of the participants. New and interactive sexual practices, extreme digital lifestyles, a true gift economy, Web personalities: the future is here...and it's sweaty, it's sticky, and it swallows."

Messina will be lecturing on August 25, 17.00h, at the Central Museum in Utrecht, and on August 26, at 15.00h, at the same location. If you're in the area, don't even think of missing Messina. And be sure to bring your cigarette lighter. His live presentation, a headspinning fusillade of unforgettable images and hilarious one-liners, is to academic sexology as Norwegian death metal is to American Idol. "Realcore isn't exactly a lecture, nor is it just a presentation of a book," he notes. "It's the main 'product': a stand-up anthropology show. The book will be like the live album of a rock band: useful to repeat the experience, to digest the songs, but nothing like the original." (Messina encourages anyone interested in booking "a live Realcore gig" to e-mail him directly: dire AT daridire.net.

(NOTED: I conducted the following interview with Messina via e-mail, in July 2006. I have debugged his English, throughout, correcting, compressing, and in a few instances rephrasing for clarity and concision. He has approved every edit, and has carefully vetted this transcript for factual accuracy. M.D.)

Realcore image, found online by Sergio Messina. From the collection of Sergio Messina; used by permission.

Mark Dery: Give me the historical backstory of realcore. When, and how, did you first encounter it?

Sergio Messina: I got online in early '96 and realcore was starting to happen. Web porno was already huge; "amateurs" (regular looking folks) and "fetish" were two thriving genres. Back then, "fetish" meant anything from femdom to watersports.

The amateur fetish boom hit in '97-'98, as digital photography became widespread. (The first digital camera for the consumer market that worked with a home computer via a serial cable was the Apple QuickTake 100 camera, which came out in 1994). Also, free Internet space became available and easy to use. Yahoo/Geocities, MSN, and so on all tolerated porno. And, obviously, so did the Usenet newsgroups. The hierarchy of newsgroups, devoted to special interests, favored the division into subgenres. The first visit to the complete hierarchy makes you dizzy.

Corduroy fetiishist. Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina. Used by permission; collection of Sergio Messina.

MD: What weird wormhole led you into the parallel universe of Usegroups?

SM: In the '80s, in Europe, there was a wave of amazing BDSM movies (the early Pain and Slavesex series) that were different, and not only because of their content, which consisted of long, unedited sequences of real BDSM practitioners, in actual dungeons instead of sets. Formally, these movies were very low-res, and the overall feel of the productions was more like underground films, made by and for BDSM people. I had seen some of these movies, which were very hard to find in Italy, and I was looking for more. Usenet seemed like the right place to start.

Slavesex video.

"The first 20 titles of each series, SlaveSex and Pain, were really unbelievable," notes Messina. "About the same time there was another, more fetish-oriented series (with mostly the same 'actors'), called Hard Games, which featured many porn-video firsts: first scat, first serious bestiality, first needle play. You can find some covers at dvids.com. The covers say 'original ton deutsch,' which suggests that the videos were made by Germans. The production seems to be by Scala. Martina [pictured above] was the true star of the genre. Her screen name was Martina, but her real name, apparently, is Anita Foeller or Feller; she did some stuff under this name, too. But her name was stolen by another, much weaker, pornstar. So if you look for her you'll find the other..." Fetishists beware!

MD: How did you hack your way into these Usenet subcultures? In my experience, gaining access to porn-related newsgroups is massively time-intensive. You have to apply to the moderator for membership, keep nudging the (inevitably unresponsive) moderator, and so on.

SM: First, you have to find out from your provider if you have Usenet access; it's likely you do. Then you need a newsreader. There are millions of freeware programs you can use to read newsgroups---for example, Mozilla is also a newsreader (but not Firefox). And your ISP may have a news service, with an address that goes something like news.yourprovider.xx. Once you have this set up (very simple, much easier than setting up e-mail), you configure it so you can see the full group list.

If your provider is good, you'll get a very long list. These are the upper parts of newsgroup hierarchies; think folders. You go to "alt" and open it; you'll see another immense list, the second level of the hierarchy "alt." Then you open "binaries" (images), and inside you select the folder "pictures."

I'll give you an example:

alt.

alt.binaries

alt.binaries.pictures

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.anal

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.asian

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.bodybuilder

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.bodybuilder.moderated

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.chubby

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.hardon

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.oral

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.oral.cumshots

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.piercing

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.shirt-and-tie

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.tattoos

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.male.underwear

There are thousands of newsgroups in the "alt"
hierarchy, like alt.sex.bondage (same folder as
the one in the example, but not in the subfolder
"binaries"; it's in "sex").

Within the hierarchy alt. binaries.pictures.erotica (which is infested with spam---spam makes up over 50% of all Usegroup posts, but you learn to spot it), I suggest you look into the .interracial, .transvestites, and .wives groups, just to get an overview of this stuff and its history (many people repost older pics and collections). Also alt.personal.bondage is sometimes quite amazing (watch out: explicit images!).

I should also say, since not many people ever visit certain newsgroups, that the chance of stumbling across objectionable material (from violence to child porn) is very high. One way to avoid it is to subscribe to one of the many Web Usenet services (such as www.pictureview.com) that remove child porn before displaying images from these groups.

In addition to Usenet, Yahoo hosts groups that archive amateur porn. For a while, Yahoo was the best source of self-produced, self-published sexual imagery. Now, it's much harder to find it since Yahoo stopped listing such groups. They're there, but they're covert; you have to know exactly where to look, and there's more moderation.

MD: How, as an accidental anthropologist, did you penetrate the perimeter defenses of these groups? Were they wary of outsiders insinuating themselves into their subcultures?

SM: If you see a set of images with a subject line like "comments please," these are new images, and often the e-mail address on the image or in the message (all images have a space for messages, although they're often empty) works. If you mail someone, they always reply. Also, images often have URLs written on them; I follow those URLs. So I didn't find many "perimeter defenses"; after all, these are exhibitionists!

MD: Let's return to the timeline you were unraveling. You said amateur fetishism first hit, online, around '97-'98, enabled by digital photography and free Web hosting. What were the cultural reverberations of the amateur fetish boom?

SM: You had the fetish people finally seeing (and making) images that weren't available before---people like vomit fetishists, who turned out to be unexpectedly numerous.

MD: What was the effect, for amateur-fetish porn people, of suddenly discovering that they weren't the only ones in the sexual universe with their obsession, in some cases an obsession so rarefied they thought they were its only examples?

SM: Let me quote from the splashpage of the very first hiccups lovers website, circa 1997 (hosted on Tripod and no longer online):

Welcome to the Hiccup Lover's Web Site. We are a group of both male and female lovers of the hiccups. We have found one another through the power and anonymity of the Internet. Most of us had one very basic thought when we found one another: that we were strange or weird or that there was something very wrong with us because of our attraction to the hiccups, either in others or in ourselves.

By finding others who share this powerful attraction, we found that we are not alone. We are not strange or odd and there is nothing wrong with us.

By the way, the site discussed various methods for getting the hiccups. Naturally, it had no pictures---just sound clips!

MD: Speaking of arcane obsessions, I still can't get that hilarious, fascinating image from your presentation at the Netporn conference in Amsterdam out of my mind: the sneaker freak---the guy with his cock in a running shoe!

Sneaker fetishist. Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina. Used by permission; collection of Sergio Messina.

SM: The Web inspired people. You had regular people posting images that for various reasons hadn't been available, images of real people enjoying themselves in various ways, some of them predictable (the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica newsgroups are still full of self-portraits of people just having missionary sex), some unusual, like the sneaker fucker.

Via the Web, the white couple into well-hung blacks who hosts a gangbang in an Austin apartment can arrange it a lot more easily, and probably got the idea from images posted by happycouple69 (happycouple is a popular nickname) from Dover, England, who will get very horny when they see the images posted by the Austin couple...and so it goes.

Mandingo fetishist. Fan of well-hung black men advertises her obsession. "Very often, realcore people
communicate online (or advertise themselves) by writing on their bodies and then posting the pictures," says Messina. Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina. Used by permission; collection of Sergio Messina.

MD: What inspired you to coin the term "realcore"?

SM: During the '90s, there was a strong trend toward "reality," culminating in today's reality TV shows. I'm thinking of the Rodney King video, shows like Jackass and Cops. In this genre, there are some aesthetic factors, such as low resolution, unsteady camerawork, and unedited footage, which we gladly accept because of the so-called reality of what we're seeing. We wouldn't believe the Rodney King footage if it was shot by three cameras with adequate lighting. Only 9/11 is an exception to this rule, and many people objected to the cinematic editing of news coverage of the attacks and their aftermath exactly because it made things look unreal.

Now, cellphone cameras allow people to film in adult theaters, parking lots, cars, or wherever. And, as in the case of Rodney King, you exchange good, high-definition photography (cold, in McLuhan's terms) for imagery that is low-res but indisputably real (very hot!). This is why I call it realcore. Softcore was simulated sex, hardcore went as far as actual sex, realcore goes beyond: it strives to portray, without too much interference, people "actually" fulfilling their desires, often fully clothed.

Realcore is all about the reality of what you see, the truth of these images. It's about the desire to see someone doing something because they like to be seen. They're filming it because you are part of the game as well. You're the audience. They get horny because someone is getting horny over them. As Dante said, "Amor c'ha nullo amato, amar perdona" (Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving).

MD: Cultural theorists might argue that realcore goes beyond Baudrillard's Nostalgia for the Real, crossing over into a fetishization of the real---a fetishization that is only possible in a Matrix world where the air is thick with simulacra, from the digitally retouched celebrity faces on magazine covers to the surgically perfected flesh of the millions who whittle themselves to fit those images; from Bush's Last-Action-Hero photo ops (Mission Accomplished!) to the Hollywood blockbuster titling and pumped-up theme music cable news shows slap on war-porn footage of bombs bursting in air.

If this is so, then the gross-out nature of some realcore practices, and the stunning ugliness of some realcore practitioners, begins to make a certain sense: realcore's grossness and ugliness---its irrefutable corporeality, and its frequent delight in what Bakhtin would call the pleasures of the "lower bodily stratum"---heightens its reality, making realcore realer and therefore rarer in an age of simulations.

If you've got it, flaunt it: according to Messina, this realcore swinger is trolling for playmates by baring her assets---banana breasts and a jones for nicotine. Fetching. Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina. Used by permission; collection of Sergio Messina.

SM: That might be part of it. But think of these TV shows where you see police chases, car accidents, rescues, bungee-jumping gone wrong, etc. For most people, there is something very compelling in watching these shows, much more so than in watching a reenactment. Is it because the TV channels are thick with fiction? Partly. But reality TV fulfills other needs, touches some of the same strings that realcore does. Jenna Jameson-type industrial porno, which is becoming a bit more extreme every year, is to realcore what reality-TV police chases are to Hollywood cop shows. It's like Independence Day compared to Robert Frank's Cocksucker Blues. In the first movie, you know where it's going and you enjoy the FX; but in the second, anything, literally anything, can happen---and does.

I agree about "the gross-out nature of some realcore practices, and the stunning ugliness of some realcore practitioners." Realcore stuff such as gloryhole pictures, amateur gangbangs, and sex in adult theaters often ends up on "tasteless" sites. Scat, for example, was extremely popular on gross-out sites like Rotten.com. That's because realcore is shot in a way that proves the stuff is real: unedited equals immediate, actual, true---qualities treasured by gross-outers and fetishists (and millions of reality-TV fans) alike. For scat fetishists (and there are quite a few of them), knowing that the shit in the photos is really shit and not chocolate (that's another fetish!) is very important. This is why extreme-fetish porno tends toward realcore. The very first people to understand this were European BDSM moviemakers in the '80s; reality was very important for them, too.

Asked about the unapologetic ugliness of some Usegroup realcore-ers, Messina counters, "It isn't ugliness, it's normality---a shopping center stripped bare, you could say. The ultra-fat or extra-ugly are us." Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina. Used by permission; collection of Sergio Messina.

MD: What do realcore people themselves say about the "realness" of their auteur porn?

SM: I've tried to bring up the "reality" subject a few times, in e-mail exchanges, but it seldom bounces back, conversationally. They say that they got online, and they found these different images, and that's how they got involved in the scene. This is a common story: Realcore seems to be more satisfactory than porno because it isn't passive, it's interactive.

In my lecture (which isn't exactly a lecture;it's more of an edutainment show, a cross between stand-up anthropology and an X-rated Discovery Channel feature), I talk about "tributes." A woman posts her picture, some guy downloads it, prints it, cums on it, takes a photo of the results---the tribute---and posts it back into the newsgroups. She gets comments, requests to wear specific items---her home suddenly becomes public.

Photoshopped tribute. Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina. Used by permission; collection of Sergio Messina.

It's a whole game, involving mostly two or more people, where the first post is only the opening move. Once the tributes are made, the person portrayed in them collects all these images and makes Photoshop collages that also end up online, on the person's website or in the newsgroups. The more tributes he/she gets, the greater the glory.

You don't do this with just any image: tributes tend to involve portraits of faces. And there are often specific requests for "tributes."

What a digital, complex, multi-stage way to please each other! Real, then virtual, then real again (and
sticky), then virtual again, then sticky again...

Tribute. "A different tribute, very evocative," notes Messina. "He is getting a hard-on over another newsgroups user, and maybe he's even online, at that very moment..." Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina. Used by permission; collection of Sergio Messina.

MD: Again, very Baudrillardian: the precession of the stimulacra. Or is it sem-ulacra? (Forgive me, J.B.) And, in its own way, Freudian: I'm reminded of that passage in Freud's essay, "The Uncanny," where he talks about the survival, in the modern psyche of the "atavistic mental activity" that he calls "the omnipotence of thoughts"---the primitive belief that subjective mental processes can affect external reality. The "tribute" has something of the occult about it; it's a kind of sympathetic magic---what I do to your image, I do to you.

How has being part of the realcore scene affected the people in it?

SM: Many people have seen a change in their sexual lives, from "spiced up" to "turned upside down"---at least, that's what they say. Most of them started downloading first, and then they got cameras and started taking pictures themselves. So emulation plays a role: they like what they see and make similar stuff. Almost all the ones I've contacted were unaware of the implications---social, networking, futuristic---of what they were doing. They didn't have much to say about the images in terms of cultural-critical insights, but were happy to give juicy details on the setting in which the images were taken: many even kept online diaries (for members)---long texts, intended to accompany the images, that serve as further evidence of their reality.

MD: You mentioned setting. I was particularly taken, during your Amsterdam lecture, with your reading of the image of the woman proudly displaying her new trophy breasts. As you noted, the surgical results were underwhelming, if not grisly. But you focused (brilliantly, I thought) on the real subject of her self-portrait, namely, the sociological subtext hidden in the backdrop she had chosen. The image was really a sort of status-symbol porn. It was about the erotics of consumer desire---the tokens of the good life this woman had managed to amass, proudly and prominently on display in her petit-bourgeois livingroom. Her newly augmented breasts were just her latest acquisition.

Realcore image found online by Sergio Messina. Used by permission; collection of Sergio Messina.

SM: That image is very realcore: it has no center, everything is equally relevant, from the picture
on the TV to the vases on the shelf, the carpet, etc. There's an almost Renaissance quality to the image---the new breasts proudly displayed with the other house commodities.

MD: It reminded me of a Dutch master's portrait of a self-satisfied burgher, surrounded by the creature comforts that proclaim his status.

SM: Many couples stress their respectability: "We might do gangbangs (black cocks only, inseminate my wife), but we would never cheat; we do this within the sacred institution of marriage." Interesting and exotic to me as an Italian, but probably more understandable in the U.S. I always love details---bookshelves, pictures, whatever.

Realcore people are seldom aware of the photographic beauty of their images; they're always surprised to hear me say that. In most cases, they don't seem very aware of anything else but the sexual side(s) of what they're doing. (Personally, I find this attitude very refreshing!)

MD: Do what extent do you---and/or they---see their autobiographical or documentary porn as a rebellion against, or a critique of, mainstream porn, whose unblemished glossiness rejects the Rabelaisian grossness and ugliness we've been talking about?

SM: They aren't aware of the changes they, along with the rest of the digital revolution, have induced in the porn industry. New mainstream porn genres have been born out of realcore, such as point-of-view movies. I guess it's a bit like everything else digital: we just do it, and analyze it later. Yet, as in the blog phenomenon, there is an awareness, and often a pride, in differentiating what they're doing from the mainstream media---in this case the unblemished glossiness of magazines or corporate sex websites. They know they are different, because they look different, and in their images they stress this difference.

They're also aware of the different temperature of their porn: in realcore, the camera is inside the action; most of it is shot by one of the partners, and eye and voice contact with the camera is almost a rule. So I would say this: they might not be "aware" of the rebellious quality of their stuff, but the images tell a different story.