Has the Internet Killed Merchants of the Bizarre?

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I remember my senior year in high school, rummaging through anything I could online to find weird materials to share with my friends. One of the things I slipped up on was a VHS tape called “Weird Cartoons.” Most of what I found on that VHS is now found on “Johnny Legend’s Complete Weird Cartoons,” which appears to be available on DVD.

When I found this VHS tape, it was for the most part unheard of in my area. Before the Internet was predominant, only a handful of people had personal computers, and cable television was virtually non-existent in the North Country. We had a few network stations and that was about it. If you saw what by today’s standards qualified as a “weird cartoon” it was probably because one of the older network television stations let one of the racist cartoons slip through the censors. That wasn’t the good kind of weird. That was just awkward, especially in retrospect.

But the Ladislaw Starewicz stop-motion WAS weird. “The Devil’s Ball,” which apparently was part of a longer film known as “The Mascot,” really got me excited about the underbelly of history that I’d missed in the textbooks and on network television. I had been exposed to very tame art in elementary and junior high, but watching The Devil’s Ball–in which a drunkard stabs Satan in the gut and rips a gold coin out of a monkey’s throat right before it is about to rape a ballerina–I discovered that there was a time where art existed before the censors did. Scroll forward to around 8:55 in the video below to see what I’m talking about:

I became a merchant of the obscure and bizarre in my hometown. I didn’t want money in exchange for what I introduced my peers to, however. I wanted notoriety. Even on a microcosmic, local level, that’s all I wanted. I just wanted people to acknowledge that I had access to the weird, that I knew where to hunt it down and find it.

At first, when I was one of the few people in my hometown to have cheap dial-up, that trend continued. I remember the day I found “shit eaters” online after I typed “eat shit and die” into my browser after a rough day at school. I had never heard of coprophagia before that moment. And I never looked back . . . incidentally, neither did any of my friends. Sure, they looked away. But they could never “unsee” what they saw on that fateful day.

Things are changing. Starewicz is on YouTube, and his work has a fair amount of views. It’s there for the folks who want to see it. The value of the junk collectors, the collectors of the rare and obscure, has been lost to the predominance of free-access information on the internet.

And maybe that’s a good thing. It’s just going to take a while for us folks who took pride in being merchants of shit, and merchants of the rare and obscure, to accept our fate. We’re becoming obsolete. We don’t mean as much as we used to.

Now, just as I’m coming to terms with this, everything is changing again.

The sad thing is, most merchants of the bizarre were happy with barter. But information, no matter how obscure, is being integrated into the corporate mechanism that has taken over our world. The golden age of free information online is gone, or it will be in the near future. With the barter system of the merchants, recipients never had to pay anything out of pocket. Simply by viewing, by being influenced, they inspired the merchants. That was our payment.

I think everything gets commodified one way or another, but when money gets involved, that’s when things get dirty. When some corporate entity expects people to pay for what the merchants offered for little to nothing, it’s a true shame.

It’s strange how in American culture, there is this element of ownership inherent in dissemination of information. I told one of my students about Westborough Baptist Church a few weeks ago, and he decided to do some research on the group. He won’t forget that I exposed him to that. I become the source of his search knowledge in a particular vein, and my occupation as teacher, as one who imparts knowledge, is thus validated.

So maybe merchants of shit are not as obsolete as we thought. The information is there. We become, like we always were, crossing guards, street lights that guide the folks down the information superhighway, towards information that appeals to them. But we’re not the only crossing guard, so we have to be the best at what we do if we hope to draw people in and acquire validation.

No matter how I try to make sense of the problem, it always comes back to the issue I raised in Uncle Sam. Either we introduce the old to a new audience, or we create something new for the old audience. One thing I never factored in was the fact that if something bigger or better is doing our job more efficiently, our efforts don’t matter either way.

For some reason, the more avenues by which we can access that once-thought rare information, the more demoralizing this all becomes to me. The fact that exposure is quantified on websites like Youtube, that I can see the fact that 50,000 people have watched “The Devil’s Ball” is discouraging. The fact that “Coprophagia” yields thousands of results on Google rather than just a handful like it did ten or fifteen years ago, is disheartening. Someone already did my job, faster and more effectively than I did.  And in the near future, it’s likely going to go corporate.

The bizarre, the rare, the obscure, the pulp, it is making the transition to mainstream. I wonder what our place in tomorrow’s world will be when the underground is ripped from below and thrust above ground. Will it die a quick and painless death as so many trends before it? Or will a new underground movement sprout from the current trends?

Satanic Book Teaches Children How to Commit Suicide!

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A Scathing Review of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, aka The Children’s Guide to Passive Suicide

Before we go any further, a little context:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWpzxzDGxr0&feature=related

There are plenty of children’s books about self destructive impulses. In The Cat in the Hat, the children are seduced into destroying their entire house, which they know full well will result in mother’s unbridled scorn. Franklin the Turtle is always doing stupid shit and then whining about it when he gets caught. I don’t have a big problem with those books. They make sense to me because they follow three core principles: it’s ok to depict kids doing dumb shit, because their mistakes are generally inadvertent. The mistakes characters make should teach children about human folly and the lessons we can glean from the err of our ways. Finally, rarely, if ever, are the parents depicted as condoning the child’s self-destruction.

Not so with this piece of shit. The parents lead their children gently by the hand right to the threshold of death’s door. They take them to a bear’s cave as he is, presumably, in the midst of hibernation, when bears are at their most pissed off and hungry. There are only two options that come to mind when I try to discern author intention here: this book is either a treatise for parents “tactfully” trying to get rid of their kids, or the first in a failed series of books, the overarching theme of which is “let’s do stupid shit!”

 

Yeah. They're going on a bear hunt. Just like this zebra is going on a "lion hunt."

Then there’s the artwork. The artwork is impressionistic, evocative of my youth, particularly the memories I have of using the excrement in my diapers to paint on my bedroom walls. Much like the drawings in this book, I couldn’t distinguish between the characters in my own imagery either. Only two things could be said of it with absolution. It stunk, and you can’t bleach the images away once they’ve been burned into your memory.

 

How cute. She's going on an alien hunt. What a beautiful day!

Then of course there’s the suspension of disbelief. Our characters traipse across the four seasons and every environmental variation at every altitude possible, meet a bear, and then react in the most inappropriate manner possible. They’ve come equipped with absolutely nothing but ignorance and stupidity. They cross rivers with potentially dangerous undercurrents. They walk through snow in summer clothes. This book is a treatise on everything you should not do while hiking. And for all the reasons mentioned above, by the time I got to the end of the book, I f*cking wanted the bear to eat the characters.

Except the baby. That’d just be cruel.

The Antithesis of Artistic Elitism: Junk Treasures on Retro Bizarro

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In 1972, Marvel released a comic series titled “Night Nurse.” You may not have heard of it. I hadn’t until about two weeks ago. It faded into obscurity after a few issues, never to be seen again until Brian Michael Bendis incorporated the night nurse into one of his tales. The hokey dialogue, cheesy scenarios, and grainy three-color ink is a throwback to everything that is bad about comic books, everything that stands in the way of graphic novels being accepted as literature . . . and I want those issues.

I collect junk. I don’t care much for the philosophical and literary works that are being infused with hypertext and made available online for scholars. There are plenty of people who have committed themselves to sharing this information with the next generation. I prefer the limited run of Madballs to the countless volumes of Shakespeare. I’d rather read Clive Barker’s aborted Marvel creations like Hokum & Hex than another work by Nathaniel Hawthorne. And I know I’m not the only one. Along with Brian Michael Bendis, Neil Gaiman has incorporated obscure characters in his mainstream work as well, like the DC character “Prez” in the Sandman series.

For me, the incorporation of these characters into the work of top-selling authors is validating. Junk collecting is prominent among authors whose works sit on the shelves of literary elitists. It is relevant. It is significant. And I’m proud to be among the ranks. Nevertheless, marketing strategies are already being employed to manipulate the junk collector. So being a junk collector entails treading a fine line between true acquirement of the obscure, and falling victim to the perpetuation of the illusion of obscurity which many retailers use to manipulate collectors.

Junk collecting is relevant because it ensures that information discarded by artistic elitists gets picked up by the catcher in the rye of one’s culture. The junk collector takes the refuse of capitalist endeavors and keeps it until it carries alternative values, nostalgic, monetary, and historical. This is an important role. More important than the college undergrad collecting every work of literature featuring the academic stamp of approval. Everyone already knows Socrates is important, so who the hell cares if you have his works on your shelf? You’re just a cog in the intellectual system regurgitating the values of your predecessors. But if you have a few of the old depression-era Whitman Big Little pulps, then you’ve got something that has fallen off pop culture’s radar. And that’s important.

Junk Collecting in Brendan Mitchell’s Night Owls

Junk collecting is a phenomenon that crops up in a lot of underground works today. Brendan Mitchell’s Night Owls recounts the tale of a young man on a quest for the rarest of films. On his search he runs into Troma producer Lloyd Kaufmann, ass-kicker Shawn C. Phillips, and Ron Jeremy. Part 5 of the series is below:

Unfortunately, Brendan’s journey is one that ends in disappointment. The ass rape he endures to acquire the video turns out to be in vein, for the video he seeks is obscure for a reason: it sucks.

Junk Collecting in Jordan Krall’s Beyond the Valley of the Apocalypse Donkeys

A similar type of disappointment occurs for the protagonist of Jordan Krall’s Beyond the Valley of the Apocalypse Donkeys. Our main character, a film reviewer, strives to find a rare film which he only had the opportunity to watch once. Upon finding it, he loses it to a VHS player with malicious intent, or so it would seem. His search leads him down some dark and seedy paths. He almost dies as he gets caught up in the downward spiral that begins with a search for a rare and obscure work.

These two works point out the danger inherent in junk collecting. In some cases, we have the potential to lose ourselves to something greater. In other cases, such as depicted in Night Owls, we get “raped,” whether literally or figuratively, and we end up with trash.

The most recent pit I’ve fallen into is the acquirement of rare video games. One of the games that had been on my list for years, which I finally gave up on, was a CD-i, live action Zelda game. It’s rare as hell. The reviewers warn you that it isn’t worth the money. For some reason, every damned red flag that popped up along the way told me this was something I wanted. But was it something I wanted to spend over $200 dollars for? Probably not. Since copies fly off Ebay incredibly fast, chances are this game isn’t as “rare” as I initially thought. People are taking painstaking efforts to make sure this work is preserved, so it will survive the generations without my endeavor to acquire it.

When it comes right down to it, Night Nurse and Prez will live on as well. For me, the important thing is to spread the word about these obscure gems. They’re not literary gems, mind you, but they are nostalgic gems. They are a part of our history. They, like pulp softcovers such as my 1881 copy of “The Blunders of a Bashful Man” or my moldy copy of “Pinocchio in Africa,” are valuable in ways that highly visible classics can never be. And when I can’t afford the obscure “gems” I seek, I have a wish list here on Retro Bizarro.

The Future of Junk Collecting

Junk collecting has changed over time. Back in the day there were fewer works being published. A lot of today’s junk treasures were books whose publishers had hopes and dreams. The authors aspired to create commercial successes when their works were created and printed, but they failed. A lot of companies hoped the world would forget.

Atari buried millions of copies of this piece of shit in a New Mexico desert landfill in hopes that people would forget it existed. Despite that, somewhere out there, some jackass is willing to pay top dollar for this game.

With the possibility for digital publication today, there’s less risk involved, so failure doesn’t matter as much. And there’s less quality material today, so that reduces significance of the once-rare below-par works that peppered the literary world. Back in the day, it was refreshing and/or amusing to see errors in commercial products. Today, seeing errors in kindle books is so ubiquitous that it is just annoying.

Do these changes make junk treasure a thing of the past? Will tomorrow’s world see junk treasure the same way my generation does? It’s likely that the trash-to-treasure phenomenon we encounter today will always manifest in some way or another, but it is changing fast.

What kind of junk from your childhood do you strive to re-acquire now that you’re older? What do you collect?

Stone the Penis & Burn the Breasts! An Argument Against Conservative America’s Flawed & Oppressive Morals

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I agree that this is symptomatic of a series of problems in our society. But is it "dirty?"

After the release of the 2012 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, I was reminded of how much resistance this annual gets, particularly when it appears in grocery stores on the magazine rack. There are hundreds of justifications for not supporting the swimsuit issue, many of which I can get behind.

It perpetuates the objectification of females, and further instills our culture with the notion that female perfection only comes in a few shapes and sizes, most of which require surgical enhancement, exercise, not to mention a hell of a lot of waxing and plucking. It sends the message that only a few avenues of social power exist for women, and advocates beauty over brains.

One objection some have to this magazine that I can’t get behind, however, is the argument that images of females who are scantily clad or naked are “bad” or “dirty.” One of the most disturbing quotes I saw on Facebook discussed how . . . oh fuck it. Here it is:

On another website, Gofatherhood.com, the author called the magazine “pornographic,” and said he threw it away in lieu of letting the magazine come into his house. To each their own . . . speaking of which:

I have never been able to understand why the female body is considered “bad” or “dirty,” or why nudity is dirty, for that matter. I see this shit all the time. Women are taught from a young age to feel shame about their bodies. On one end of the spectrum, they’re taught to be ashamed if their bodies don’t meet the aesthetic standards of our society. On the other, they’re taught to be ashamed if their bodies do meet the standards, because they’re “seducing” with their physique or “being dirty” if they reveal too much of their body. There’s still this sense of accountability, this idea that it is the woman’s responsibility to veil her body to squelch the desires of others. It becomes the woman’s fault, for some reason, that her body prompts a certain response from others.

Whenever I start thinking about this, my mind always turns to looners*, those folks who are sexually attracted to balloons. The same people who consider the female body “dirty” approach fetishism from the opposite end of the spectrum, i.e. when a man is attracted to a nude woman, the woman is dirty. However, if a man is attracted to a balloon, he is dirty, not the balloon. I don’t need a Facebook update to prove this. Show me one person who calls a balloon bad or dirty because a person is sexually attracted to it and I’ll stand corrected. The accountability changes for some reason.

So maybe it is a matter of intent. If the female intends to arouse an audience through wearing little to nothing then that is dirty. Since the balloon has no intention of arousing the looner, the looner “perverts” the balloon’s aesthetic value to fit into the looner’s sexual desires, thus the looner is at fault. I don’t agree with this evaluation, but I can see the logic behind it. Unfortunately, there are so many circumstances in society that contradict the rationale that intent is the factor that provokes some people to dub nudity and scantily clad “bad.”

Countless works of art, which celebrate the human body and have no implication of sexual intercourse, have been destroyed and censored throughout the ages. Venus de Milo was convicted, fucking convicted, for nudity in the mid nineteenth century. Adding to the absurdity, as most of you already know, is the fact that Venus de Milo was a fucking statue. Michaelangelo’s “David,” both the original and reproductions, has been stoned, maimed, disfigured and censored throughout the ages. These instances, as many others mentioned on THIS WEBSITE show it doesn’t matter if sexual provocation is the intent or not. The problem is that the sexualization of nudity, coupled with the moral estimation that sex is wrong, has resulted in some pretty conflicted and repressed individuals.

What is the first thing you think of when you look at this image? If it is "stone the penis!" then you'd fit in perfectly with the residents of Florence who saw this in the early 16th Century . . . and probably the Westboro Baptist Church.

Maybe it is a matter of context. The nudity is ok behind closed doors, but not in a public setting, not on the shelves of Wal*Mart stores or other “family-friendly” retailers.

Here’s where I start to understand the “dirty” mindset a little. I remember watching films with my parents and being bombarded by unexpected sex scenes. That shit was awkward, incredibly so. I wouldn’t want to walk through a store or a city street and see people fornicating all around me, especially if I was walking into town with my kids. But if there was a marble statue depicting a nude woman or man, that would NOT be a problem. Subsequently, if someone sees a nude statue and gets aroused from it, that is also not a problem. If said person begins to fornicate the statue in public or masturbate, then this might be a problem. But we can’t control the responses people and objects elicit. But we can control how we act upon feelings of arousal.

I feel like the folks who want to censor Venus de Milo, David, and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition don’t trust their ability to control their responses to potentially arousing stimuli. That’s what I’d like to believe, anyway. But there’s a high likelihood that the moral estimation that sex is wrong or dirty has, for some, caused a reaction that prefigures arousal. The nude, rather than a depiction of aesthetic beauty or an arousing image, becomes instead a conduit through which the viewer becomes tainted.

She has breasts! Let's tear her arms off, put her on trial, cover her nipples with tape, and destroy all reproductions! That's obviously a much healthier response than getting an erection!

Internal obstacles pertaining to moral climate transform the plowshares that sow personal fulfillment and satisfaction into barbs against the self. In the circumstance outlined above, the obstacles keep people feeling shame instead of autonomy. The obstacles control. Anyway, nothing R.A. Wilson and thousands of others haven’t said before.

* – to learn more about looners, visit the following website, created by Mr. MotoX aka Northwestlooner: http://www.blow2pop.com/wp/?paged=2&tag=hug-pop

Is Expression A Hopeless Endeavor?

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The description I give could easily be interpreted as an, albeit weak, attempt to emulate in words what was done in image here. But what I'm experiencing right now is way more beautiful than this picture, which makes my description even more disappointing.

The wind drives clouds across a black canopy punctuated by stars. The breeze coming in through my living room window stings like winter, tastes like spring, and smells like summer. Trees dotting the horizon across the river are still dead, so the lights from my distant neighbors stutter inconstant through dancing branches. This is rural to the extreme, but the song that best encapsulates how I feel is called “Suburbia” by Matthew Good:

It’s not the lyrics. When I actually focus on those, this song is about something entirely different for me. But the music reminds me of all the things I describe above in a multitude of contexts. It’s a two-way phenomenon too. Sometimes I see, feel, or hear something and it reminds me of the song. Sometimes I hear the song and it reminds me of something I saw, felt, or heard in my past. “Suburbia” reminds me of the years I spent in nearby towns during the transitions between seasons. It reminds me of the subtle scent of cow shit, which you acquire an appreciation of when you come from the north country. It reminds me of the sun setting on distant bodies of water, and the fascination with nature my friends and I could afford when we were younger. It also reminds me of the nights my friends spent driving along the back roads in Gouverneur, or walking through the graveyards, picking up the plastic Virgin Mary statues that other kids our age scattered about. There was something incredibly tranquil about that.

What I’m getting at–by taking the longest route possible apparently–is that it’s weird how sounds, smells, sights, etc., accumulate connotations. It’s something we seem to just ride with. It’s part of what keeps life interesting. You throw on a CD or in today’s case an MP3, and it can take you in one hundred different directions. They say our taste buds change every time we eat something, I think the same can be said of any input we encounter. It changes our senses and perspectives.

The whole chain of thoughts also gets me thinking about how a single experience, consisting of all senses and a combination of emotions, can never be conveyed through art or any form of expression. Multimedia will never be able to emulate human experience, not in the foreseeable future anyway. Boil it down to a series of 1′s and 0′s. The code won’t mean shit to me. Every stimuli carries with it a vast array of connotations. You splice those together with other senses, emotional connotations of sensory input, the words we try to formulate to express that sensory input and emotional output . . . then the connotations of those words . . . The only equation I can come up with is that all of this = isolation. We’re completely alone in this world and all we can hope for are shallow intimations of full connection. But I think that’s the curse and blessing that drives artists forward. We’re hoping to find that perfect phrase that encapsulates a particular human experience or the perfect image that encapsulates how we feel about something. At best I think we find a means of expression that speaks to us as creators and viewers, but it likely speaks to the creator and the audience in a different way.

Worst case scenario, we continue to strive towards forging connections with others. How can that be a bad thing? Art is a win/win situation. Once you consider the inevitable element of loss and futility inherent in creation, you can begin to accept the blessing of ambiguity that expression affords us.

Screw You, LolCats!

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I have never understood the appeal of lolcats. I have never understood the appeal of cats period. My wife found a feral cat under her mother’s house a few years back, and we brought the little prick into our home. He didn’t stay long.

I’m still finding random objects strewn about the house with bite marks in them. I’m hopeful that we’ve at least discovered all of his “litter boxes” that he so kindly took upon himself to create in our home. My favorite was when he decided that my old comics would make a nice litter box. I try to think about how some of these scenarios might play out in the world of lolcats. “I’s Gon’ Piss on Your Stuff!” or “Oops, I made a yellow wee wee.” It’s just not cute, no matter how you render it.

The cardinal rule of lolcats seems to be that the creator must spell everything wrong. Apparently mentally challenged cats are cute. That or slaughtering the english language is just so damned funny that it compensates for the pictures of skanky cats in the background. In an attempt to understand that which I loathe, I decided to make a few lolcats:

Wook at dat cute widdle kitty wid him gutz all overs. Isn't he cutez?

Cute widdle Sparkles, he jus ain't gotz it in him anymeow. He so tuckewed outz dat he's los' da will to live.

Oh Snickers, looks like you got yourself in a real bind this time.

Whiskers callz it like he sees itz. Cats = Excrement.

Recent and Upcoming Publications from Kirk Jones

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Death Head Grin

I wanted to write a brief post about some upcoming publications, and some which were released earlier this year that I haven’t had a chance to announce yet. First, my story that was to appear in The New Flesh: Episode I will be appearing in Death Head Grin. The story sets in motion a mythos sustained in the book I’ll start working on very soon, so I’m really excited that this has found a home. I’m also really happy to start getting some longer material out there that people can access for free. I’d like to get more out by the end of this year, so people can gauge my evolution as a writer without having to sink any money into it. It’s honor enough that people spend time looking at my work online.

NEW FICTION IN TWO ANTHOLOGIES FROM STATIC MOVEMENT: Early last year I submitted a few stories to Static Movement. The acceptance rates there are pretty high most of the time, and they push out a lot of anthologies. I liked the idea of writing a few season-related pieces and submitting them to relevant anthologies. I also wanted to practice writing for specific anthologies, and Static Movement was a great place to give that a shot. Anyway, the anthologies I submitted to were released in January. The winter variant is below. It features a story about an old man who gets snowed in during a seemingly perpetual winter. It’s a tale which I hope captures the essence of a claustrophobia-inducing setting:

NEW FLASH FICTION ON BIZARRO CENTRAL: I’m honored to now have a second story up on Bizarro Central as well. While living at my current residence for the first two years, I often found myself out back snaking the septic. The pipe was bent and it led to all sorts of problems. But septic waste is kind of like a second home for me because I replaced septic tanks with my father for a summer. They say to write what you know, so I wrote up a brief piece on pipe obstructions, cranky old men, and a shit load of severed hands. Click the shoddy stock photo of a rubber hand below to read it.

I have two more publications to announce, but I want to wait until the editors announce the ToC’s before I say anything. I’m really excited about both, and I’m happy to be getting back into non-horror bizarro again as well. Keep stopping by, not for my obnoxious self-indulgent updates, but for future interviews with interesting authors. In the near future I’m hoping to interview Vince Kramer, NBAS author, death metal journalist, and action figure porn artist extraordinaire.