CREDIT: Obtainium. Excavated from the Web.

WHAT:"Solar Flare: Sun Ra's album covers were wild, inspired, and a universe away from Blue Note": my feature on the graphic-design sensibility of the jazz composer Sun Ra, Print magazine, June 2009, pps. 86-93.

WHERE: HERE.

CREDIT: "Boldly Go," by Abdi Farah. (For more about this astonishing work, go HERE.) COPYRIGHT: Abdi Farah, all rights reserved.

ATTENTION CONSERVATION KEYWORDS: Afrofuturism, Sun Ra, graphic design from Alpha Centauri, black starliners, Afrocentrist UFOlogy, space jazz from Betelgeuse.

ATTENTION CONSERVATION PULLQUOTE:

"A world away from the smoky, cellar-jam-session cool of [most jazz] album art, the handmade aesthetic, do-it-yourself ethos, and ripped-and-remixed imagery of [Sun Ra's] album covers and promo materials are of a piece with [the composer's] bricolaged cosmology. Desperate to escape what Ra biographer John Szwed calls the 'racially possessed' America of the Jim Crow years, Ra built an alternate worldview from scratch, cobbling it together from Flash Gordon futurism, mail-order Egyptology, Biblical hermeneutics, and 19th-century occultism. Long before men walked on the moon, Ra knew, in his bones, that he was part of the 'angel race.' Like a trans-racial Marcus Garvey beckoning humankind toward his intergalactic starliner, he urged space migration for black and white alike. The El Saturn graphics are a part of this sprawling star chart, a cosmic Baedeker pointing to Other Planes of There."

CREDIT: Dave Muller, "WHAT WOULD SUN RA DO?" Acrylic on paper, 2004. COPYRIGHT: Dave Muller, all rights reserved.

PHOTO: SRL MAYHEM. CREDIT/COPYRIGHT: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid; ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Mark Pauline and his dozen-odd, mostly male co-workers have stockpiled an arsenal in the machine shop where they live and work, on the outskirts of San Francisco's Mission District. One device, the Low-Frequency Generator, is a mobile, radio-controlled, reaction jet engine, modeled after the V-1 buzz bomb whose banshee shriek struck terror in Londoners during World War II. "We ran it and people heard it almost 12 miles away," says Pauline, with relish. "They had stories on the evening news asking anybody with information about the strange reverberations felt throughout the Bay Area to call the police. You can stand next to this thing and what it does to your brain is just...sublime. You feel as if there are rats in your chest. It shakes your eyeballs so much that they black out and come on again 45 times per second, creating a strobe effect. It's the sort of phenomenon that doesn't exist anywhere else on Earth."

Another shameless wallow in '90s nostalgia: a lengthy book excerpt uploaded to SCRIBD, this one from Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century.

READ IT HERE.

BUY IT HERE.

From the SCRIBD blurb (written, again, in the Bob Dole-ian third person):

Although it was published in 1996, on the eve of the Digital Revolution, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century stands the test of time.

To be sure, some of its references have passed their sell-by dates, but much of Dery's cultural critique of the ideologies of digital subcultures---their political myths and religious subtexts---still rings true. Escape Velocity explores the '90s digital subcultures and popular movements that both celebrated and critiqued a newly wired world: cyberpunk SF, technopagans, transhumanists, cyber-hippies, and rogue roboticists such as Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories, to name a few.

PHOTO: CREDIT/COPYRIGHT SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES. Continue reading "Mark Pauline: Heavy Metal Theater of Cruelty (Giftware #3)"

Couple, Mexico City. Photo: David Lida. All rights reserved.

Newsflash: the June 2009 issue of The Brooklyn Rail includes "Love in the Time of Swine Flu," my feature on David Lida, pegged on the softcover release of First Stop in the New World, his addictively readable book about Mexico City.

Teaser:

Now that the epidemic seems to have peaked, with a global body count far lower than the Andromeda Strain horror scripted by the U.S. media, reasonable minds on both sides of the border are taking a hard look at the media etiology of the panic. When American anxiety was at its height, Right Wing frothing heads like Michelle Malkin and Michael Savage helped spread the hate, blaming the Creeping Pig Death on the engulfing tide of "uncontrolled immigration" (Malkin). "Make no mistake about it: illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico," Savage barked.

David Lida's affection for the city remains undiminished. In the new paperback edition of his justifiably acclaimed First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century, Lida rips and remixes the 'hypermetropolis, the ur-urb of the American continent' into a fast-moving mashup."

Even so, the book is no Travel Channel puff piece.

In the chapter on crime, 'Who's Afraid of Mexico City?' Lida describes his harrowing hours, in 1996, as the victim of what locals call a secuestro express (express kidnapping), in which a pair of goons held him and his then-wife at knifepoint on a cab ride from hell, trying his credit card at various ATMs.

Two hours is a long time under such circumstances, and we were able to engage in a little Stockholm-syndrome dialogue. The Gorilla was the most voluble. Soon after the joyride began he informed us that what was happening was not his fault but the government's, for turning its back on its neediest citizens and forcing them to steal to survive. [My wife] was quick to point out that neither she nor I had any connection with the regime. “Les tocó,” he said, in a perfect illustration of Mexican fatalism. Your number came up.

Couple, Mexico City. Photo: David Lida. All rights reserved.

Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, is out, and a handsome thing it is. Edited by the redoubtable Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau (of Killing the Buddha fame), the collection anthologizes essays with curiosity-piquing titles such as "Jew Like Me," "Zen Mind, Alkie Mind," "Agnostic Front," "I Was a Prepubescent Messiah," "Banana Slug Psalm" (is there a bandname in that, or what?), and the incomparable "Bible Porn" (sects sells!).

My contribution, a true confession about my brief-lived career as a teenaged Jesus Freak in the mid-1970s, is called "Jesus is Just Alright," a title that inspired Sharlet to write, in a note he enclosed with my contributor's copy, "I've been wanting to use that as a title for years, but never could figure out what. I'm glad you showed me the way."

Long ago, in the lost world of the '70s, when I never missed an opportunity to "witness" to the unsaved, I might have replied, "John 14:6: Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me.'"

Mercifully, I've seen the light.

WHAT: "Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque," a chapter from The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999) uploaded to the file-sharing site SCRIBD.

Wax venus (Baroque obstetric mannequin) from La Specola, in Florence, Italy. Photo: Joanna Ebenstein; all rights reserved. For more of this sort of thing, see Ebenstein's stunning wunderkammer, Morbid Anatomy.

THE OFFICIAL VERSION (SCRIBD ENTRY): In "Nature Morte: Formaldehyde Photography and the New Grotesque," a chapter from his meditation on the millenial zeitgeist, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (Grove/Atlantic: 1999), cultural critic Mark Dery analyzes the abject aesthetic he calls the New Grotesque, exemplified by the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin and Rosamond Purcell, Nine Inch Nails videos such as "Closer," David Fincher's movie Seven, and most notably the obscure subculture of medical-museum tourists whose mecca is the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. "If the Enlightenment ushered in the 'disenchantment of the world,' as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno put it, postmodernism returns us to the age of wonder---and terror," writes Dery. "Now, as we return to a world of gods and monsters, there's a burgeoning fascination, on the cultural fringes, with congenital deformities, pathological anatomy, and other curious from the cabinet of wonder."

Drawing on Lawrence Weschler's study of the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder), Gwen Akin and Allan Ludwig's seminal essay "Repulsion: Aesthetics of the Grotesque," Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject, Wolfgang Kayser's landmark study of the grotesque, and Oliver Wendell Holmes's 1845 paean to "worshippers of morbid anatomy," Dery theorizes the Pathological Sublime, an aesthetic emotion that is equal parts horror and wonder, inspired by works of art (or nature) that hold beauty and repulsion in perfect, quivering tension. The Pathological Sublime is the sensation Emily Dickinson had in mind when she wrote, "'Tis so appalling---it exhilarates..."

NOTE: Author reserves all rights. However, users are free to download this PDF for their own use and to circulate it freely AS LONG AS they do not post the entire PDF online or publish the entire PDF in print. (Feel free to blog this page and link to it, though! And linking to the Amazon page for the book would be The Right Thing to Do.) No re-use or re-publication of this PDF FOR PROFIT, in any medium, is permitted.

Photo: Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy.