Anthropos

Prologue

The incomplete text below was found in the pocket of a murdered Italian banker in the early 1980s. Another section of it was discovered later in the 1990s in the safe of a deceased senior member of Italy's military intelligence:

...but what did the primary witness, this surveyor named Rampali, say he saw? This comes down to us from his recently rediscovered journal entries in a forgotten cabinet in a local municipality and from local folklore in that part of the Campania, the lore itself almost lost in the face of an encroaching technological-industrial modernity and its attendant cultural homogenization due to consumerism, most Italians now communicating in Tuscan, and so on...

After several days of uneventful entries, Eduardo Rampali, who was a learn ed man from Pisa and a prominent vassal of the Spanish Bourbons wrote on a summer day in 1713:

July 19,

Work hath progressed slowly [with] the first well sunk.

Workmen frightened, seeme to be slowing dig [with] purpos[e] lazy sods.

[cont.] I decide to go down into the hole thus sunk...

My lords, I can not put upon paper what I have witnesseth with mine own eyes as God is my guarantor [and] I must convey onle that we appear [to have]come [upon] what is statuary but a most curious one at that for [it] appears to have station of its own [and] puts thought into motion.

[cont.] It grabbed my hand [and] it spake my lords [and] its agency ceased. I can discloose [sic] no more [and] will apprise you of the details with your audience.

E.R. ...

And at that, Mr. Rampali vanishes and the trail disappears like so many others from the historical record, perhaps to be unearthed another day as Truth is most patient. This, we fear, might one day happen in this case. But at present the narrative has no other supporting documentary record. The document has been found to be genuine, but there is no opinion on the veracity or even meaning of its claims from the specialists consulted to interpret it thanks to a lack of greater context. Current corporate thinking makes a definitive explanation impossible for the time being, and this is viewed in our circles as a positive sign.

During the rule of Charles III of Spain, King of Naples and of Sicily, over what is now most of the southern half of Italy, a decree had come from the very House of Bourbon by way of the gendarmes, heralds, and criers, for a series of wells to be dug around the southeastern base of Mount Vesuvius. On its face, there is nothing special to note here and there are many such projects that have come about over the generations.

Among other purposes, this dig was to feed water to one of the many estates in the Campania for agricultural purposes and to maintain their decorative gardens and hydraulic fountains; it was also to be connected by way of a network of discreet, cyclopean maintenance tunnels through which the aristocrats and their guests could make a quick exit in case of the periodic and inevitable peasant uprisings and other foreign invasions. For an undetermined period only the authorities and the underworld knew of them. Certainly today, the Italian public has knowledge of them but are also currently unaware of parallel structures. Current knowledge of this specific network dates back primarily to their use as air raid shelters during World War II, and tours are often conducted in parts of them; other sections are home to the addicted population, general derelicts, youth gangs, and organized crime. (All heavily surveilled by numerous agencies of government.) They sometimes serve as ceremonial chambers for the Camorra when they induct members; usually this is children from the housing projects of Naples and greater Campania, generally. More often, many of the tunnels and corridors are used as garbage dumps by the very same populations. Occasionally, one can find the burned image of a saint lying among the rest of the decaying drug paraphernalia and human detritus, dirty, contaminated needles everywhere...

But this is all academic by now: Farmers around Vesuvius had been turning up relics tilling their fields for centuries and, while it still occurs, these were, as they are today, one-offs, not hordes of coins nor priceless statuary or decorative pieces that could be exchanged in the underworld of that era, or this one. The discovery of Herculaneum through a series of tunnels that began their lives as farm wells had already occurred in the region and was filling the king's private museum in Naples with a growing hoard of lost masterpieces. The digging itself was not a criminal act, but the secreting away of antiquities was, even under the very loose statutes and customs of the day, it was grave robbery. This digging and pilfering would continue until the revolutions and shortly after Johann Joachim Wincklemann's (ironically, an antiquarian from the Prussian city of Stendahl) essay on the treasures and Weber's work outlining the layout of the legendary villa of the papyri. The overarching story is universally known and is considered infamous in the history of archeology.

As yet another test dig close by progressed, a rather familiar pall of secrecy began to blanket the undertaking. It seems that the young king smelled more treasure to loot. Gangs of prisoners were brought into the area close to the coastline and strictly overseen by the King's men, literally mining the volcanic earth for treasure as it was little more than a form of looting. While many passages have collapsed and are no longer accessible to the public, the Bourbon tunnels still worm their way through the buried sections of Herculaneum and can be considered a very old crime scene, a crime as it were, against humanity. There would be many more in the new modern era.

Though there are similarities to the separate finds the wells dug close to the base of Vesuvius must be considered a completely separate venture from the tunneling into Herculaneum and decades later at the site of Pompeii.

There were some peculiar problems encountered with the sinking of the first well: the site chosen by the court engineers had encountered a hard volcanic crust and then subsequently uncovered what seemed to have been a village dump at one time; the workmen were finding numerous bits of cloth, old olive oil lamps, bits of parchment, curious “can-like cylinders” that may have been metal scrolls, mule bones, bottles, broken farm implements, but nothing of any ascertainable value. You first had to dig through the thick layers of rich, volcanic soil to be carried away plat-by-plat in the punishing Mediterranean sun, leaving the diggers open to all four elements. These were the labors of slaves who worked with primitive spades, staves, and wooden barrows. And this was also a military venture. By the third day of digging, the first well sunk was only fifteen cubits deep, incredibly slow going, even in those days; load after load of loose limestone, dirt, sand, gravel and tufa came up with each hoisted basket. The hole only got deeper and wider with intensive sifting and careful horizontal exploration. A few more days passed. In that meantime the overseer, a local surveyor, a rare vocation in the region at the time, had decided to split his workers in order to sink several more wells. The hole seemed to feed on their labor, and the more they dug, the less it seemed to relent, as though time was standing still and the dirt dug magically re-appeared from whence it came. Things keep their secrets, he recalled, and so, the engineer decided to reconnoiter the first well to see for himself what was slowing the work.

Rampali's log tells us that the encrusted rural workers and prisoners cleared out of the hole and that down went the engineer “sans his tricorner” with a boxy oil lamp. Descent into the hole was like running a gauntlet of outstretched skeletal-arms, thick, hard weeds nearly choking any view of the bottom, scratching any exposed flesh. The diggers had somehow made it down to twenty-four cubits by now, well under half the normal rate of speed. There was an ineffable smell he could not pinpoint, well beyond his experience, not even in war, dense in its character. It was an acrid odor, and then he heard a sound, beneath him, as though something were moving. The odor transmuted, relocating from his nose to his mouth, becoming a very sour, metallic taste, the kind you feel before an act of violence, although this was apparently not the experience of synthesia. Everything is violence in our temporal existence. The walls of the hole seemed to be undulating gradually, and a creaking sound began to emanate from the ground beneath him like the broken gears he had heard on a crude farm machine that was cranked by hand, metal on metal, like some broken clock or the spokes of a cart becoming entangled, and, rather than giving away and eventually dying down, it was becoming an immutable and irresistible force, crushing whatever got was in its proximity. Below him, he could hear rocks cracking into pieces.

He could now feel the ground beneath his feet shaking, and a rumbling sound came from what sounded like everywhere. A tiny mound began to form at the center of the pit's floor that was going to be breached at any moment and he steadied himself, reaching for his saber and hoping that his powder was dry and his flintlock was still on his belt. What broke through the earthen mound would be folklore in the nearby villages and towns for generations—still told to this day—but the surveyor would never say what it was that he first witnessed being reborn from the earth, because no one was certain that it had ever been alive. They weren't certain that it was dead, or alive, or what that might even mean. These were peasants, and implications for Western technological development escaped them completely. It would have escaped almost anybody at that historical moment, however.

The Bourbons forbade any talk of of the “artifact,” and what happened to the object found in the pit has never been fully ascertained by contemporary scholars and our best technicians who have been brought into the circle. However, through the forensic piecing together of local folk narratives around Vesuvius and greater Campania, thanks primarily to the noted historiographer, Giuseppe Calabrese, we have a general idea that a statue and various other Roman era objects relating to it were unearthed and taken away from the site by the royal authorities at the time. What does not square with this reconstructed story is within the narrative folklore itself which we can dismiss as being embellished and overly imaginative superstition that could not be possible based on our current understanding of the Hellenic world and what it was capable of in the area of machine technology. At the same time, something remarkable was uncovered.

Only 1% of all Roman bureaucratic and literary output is known to have survived into the contemporary world, while most technological artifacts of that time would have been constructed of perishable materials, there were no synthetics, no modern chemistry, to our knowledge, so little is left. Conversely, there was a continuous artisanal tradition within the city of Rome and the rest of the empire, some of it originating from the Greek provinces and in Alexandria, a base which was more than capable of creating at least working models—unique, and incapable of being mass produced—on demand to what can safely presumed to be aristocratic patrons. The island of Rhodes was well known for its special machines.

We know on the one hand that the Roman military was equipped with construction machinery that was on par with 19^th century devices such as a primitive construction site conveyor belt uncovered in Greece in order to convey away soil, sand, gravel, rock, uprooted foliage, and the rest of standard, geological detritus. It's also common knowledge that steam-propelled toys existed as one-offs for children of the aristocracy and were barred from further development and production by the emperor. What other one-offs originated in the workshops of Rome? Who forged them? Was it the god Hephaestus or was it some mortal inventor like Daedalus? What historical processes brought these inventions about, these curious creations that we can only guess at for want of any concrete remains? Like so much else, this was borrowed Greek & Egyptian technology that might have been adapted and improved upon by the Romans in their inimitable style. As is so often the case, we are left with more questions than answers and physical artifacts are scanty.

Outside of the occasional shipwreck discovery, what happened to so many of the statues of classical Greece? Was there an Etruscan literature? Surely there was. Who were the makers of these devices and who were the men who thought them up in the first place? Only the dead know, and only forensics experts—archaeologists and scholars, some of the new priests and diviners—are listening anymore, and they might begin listening once more to the stones, to the walls of the ruins, to the few corpses which remain, for they whisper some of their secrets to us, ever so lightly. The world and the Four Elements are immutable and eternal. There is a moisture in the earth.

… [page missing]

One more scrap of Rampali's very brief existence on this earth was discovered in yet another forgotten file cabinet in the office of the Carabinieri in Naples in 1977: it was part of a kind of an inventory manifest of the Villa Fraticidio that came with the fall of Bourbon rule in the Campania listing two partial statuary found at the well site in 1713 with the surveyor's surname and initials appended to it, all listed alone, and without any context provided, a common state of affairs in such matters. A description states one of the statues “has seams.” No living scholar has been able to decipher what this meant exactly, but one German has put forward the most logical possibility: they were busts, and not of Roman origin at all, a most satisfying conclusion if unprovable, while the French schools seem to think they might just as easily have been bronzes with casting remnants around the edges, perhaps. From our current level of knowledge, there was little uniformity in ancient workshops. Traces of seams in the statuary could indicate that these were later works, possibly from arsenal works in Corinth. They are almost certainly composed of bronze but further analysis will be necessary as recent X-raying and scanning of the parts and trunks have revealed they are composites of lost-wax and beaten metal processes. In addition, most of the parts have an outer-coating of ceramic. As always, folkloric narratives are to be ruled out as in error and do not adhere to any standards of evidence and more often contradict the known archaeological record around Vesuvius, if not the very laws of physics themselves.

Irrational stories of this kind are normal to peasant societies, but stories of the fantastic can be found in virtually all human groupings, notably in places known to have been the sites of natural disasters, former battlefields of war, cemeteries and the archaic necropolis, not to mention the tales that almost always surround the ruins of past civilizations. They are to be dismissed as out of hand and comprise a kind of dreamlike desire to transcend what is a very monotonous life under a mostly banal feudal order. Such are the dreams of the faceless man, the common man who will always elude the archaeologist, scholar, living as it were in the shadows that border time and space, happily anonymous until the next spade comes along to disturb their rest, again. ...

 All contents © Matt Janovic 2019

Clive Barker's Director's cut of Nightbreed (1990/2014)

Memory, as they say, and assay, is a strange and curious thing: it has a plasticity that somehow still conveys the truth of something while generously protecting the mind from the horrors and chaos of an uncaring universe, the human condition reduced to its essentials. Any literature aspiring to greatness is going to explore our peculiar predicament of being sentient in what appears to be a mindless cosmos; Clive Barker's additions to the canon, Blakean in their imagery & themes, invoking love (an expression of divinity) alongside corruption (the material world), are what high art is made of. (And as with the highest forms, he takes some of his prima materia from the lower depths.)  

From sex, to politics, and religion, it's all about bodies and who controls them, but some of this is about remembering.

I was twenty-two when I saw Nightbreed at the theater in 1990 and had come wondering what the hell it was about since 20th Century Fox insisted that it be marketed as a slasher. 

When you're that young, you frankly don't know shit, yet paradoxically believe you know everything, you're molten, outside, unassimilated into society at that point--therefore, "dangerous." Obviously, I've changed a lot since then: now I know how little I know and knew then. At that time, romantic love meant everything to me, now, not so much, yet, life being circular, you tend to come back around to things. Experience leavens  base innocence. Barker had a very ambitious agenda indeed when he attempted to foist his non-Manichean monster movie onto an unsuspecting American public used to a more black and white storytelling; what you had was a collision of "mindsets" (his term for it) about fictional monsters being fodder for militarized "heroes." In 1990, no one wanted to try to the understand the other whether they were human or a fictional monster. That should be a reminder that there are no others ultimately, and that the monsters we've conjured in storytelling are often mirrors of ourselves to get beyond that screen. 

Context being everything, this all came to a head on the eve of the first Gulf War when the public was being whipped into another cycle (see?) of hating the other; additionally, the movie was released just weeks after the illegal invasion of Panama. The Soviet Union was busy collapsing; German reunification occurred just three days before its release, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison after twenty-seven years, less than a week earlier. Old habits tend to continue on anyway, anachronistically.

The timing was bad on all fronts for Barker who was nobly spitting into the cultural trade winds with his film version of his 1988 novel Cabal: unfortunately, the suits at Morgan Creek wanted something more like Hellraiser, the idea of the monsters in a horror movie (really, a fantasy with elements of horror) being the good guys didn't sit well with them, and they rejected it as out of hand and demanded Barker make extensive cuts and reshoots. What it did was to place the psychotic psychiatrist character played by legendary cult director David Cronenberg more at the center of the story; they also demanded that there be more of an emphasis on the menacing qualities of the nightbreed. Not only did they miss the point of most classic monster movies, they just wouldn't listen to Barker, and so, what went out into the world was a confused fusion of his and their ideas. The good side is, they weren't able to remove the sympathy for the breed, outsiders all, but they did incredible harm to the love story between main characters Boone and Lori with all their meddling. A movie that cost $10 million--and a bargain for Morgan Creek at that--made less than nine, and that was that, it bombed, having an afterlife on cable and home video. Part of Barker's legend as a prodigy was that the total cost of Hellraiser had been under $1 million USD. 

Say what you want, but he made an epic with his second film, and that's where the money people come in, and serendipitously perhaps, the themes in the original story material got underlined in real life. The failure haunted Barker for years.

The more jaded among us might see one reading the movie as a parable of the modern world crashing into the author's anachronistic fantasy world with sadly predictable results. Occasionally, the universe smiles and throws something unpredictable out there: a small but fundamental victory for the underdog. You could write an entire book on the themes in Nightbreed, from the content of the script, to the theatrical & final cuts, and the politics of the actual making (or, really, unmaking) of the movie itself. Nothing happens in a vacuum.   In the end, the breed are history's losers, and conversely, winners, like the heretics of the world religions and every other kind of social rebel that ever lived under a repressive order. You cannot kill the truth. But in 1990, history seemed settled, that seemed to be that, the show was over, and there are very few second chances with motion pictures. Did I mention that homophobia was actually worse than it is today?

However, a lot of us out here felt that something was missing from the theatrical cut, as evinced in the opening titles of that showed scenes which were cut. (Some still are, but now we're fortunate enough to have access to the outtakes in pristine condition.) Beginning with some of Barker's public statements and various rumors over the last twenty-four years, considerable force has been gaining for a new cut. I direct the reader to search out the story of the "Cabal cut" which made a final reconstruction of Barker's original vision possible, a convoluted tale in itself. After years of searching, an announcement was made last year that the lost film elements had finally been found in a storage warehouse in Dayton, Ohio. What was once the detritus of a lost vision had become a global cause via Internet outreach and public showings of the Cabal cut. By 2013, the stage was set and cinematic history was about to be rewritten, and that's a rare occasion. Shout Factory! has made good on that promise and beyond. Its message of universal love is central, but I believe the restoration is also about fixing a work of LGBT filmmaking that advocates the same message of acceptance as Richard Oswald's Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern, 1919), the first pro-gay movie in cinematic history. Both movies were damaged for ideological reasons.

If Barker's Cabal and Nightbreed remind us of anyone in literature, it's Arthur Machen. Machen was a Welsh Catholic who, ironically enough, had an intense fear of forbidden sex, a kind of ritual  sex he was made aware of by fellow occultist and American expatriate A. E. Waite, co-author of what is still the most popular version of the Tarot. To be a Catholic in Britain at that time was considered a little eccentric. After Cornelius Agrippa, Waite was also the first to systematically catalog and study the Western inner tradition and was a sworn enemy of Aleister Crowley. When it comes to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, there's plenty of subversive sexuality, inside and outside of the magic circles. I'm not suggesting that Barker based Nightbreed on the politics of esoteric lodges, no, albeit a lodge of that sort could be considered a "cabal" of another kind. Here, we really could go on forever, because that's how the occult works, it's a rabbit hole. Similarly, the Gnostics and other religious minorities and sects were once smeared as sexual deviants; the pagan has been equated with homosexuality; accused witches were blamed for male impotency, and so on. Being different can be dangerous in human society.

The reason I mention Machen is that he wrote similarly weird tales that dealt with shunned races who fled underground from human society. That sounds just like the tale of any human outsider. But is it really metaphor when faced with the incredible fact that everyone who isn't African has a percentage of Neanderthal coursing through their veins? And not so long ago, the bones of "Hobbits" ("homo floresiensis") have been found in caves on an Indonesian island, suggesting that the human story and what constitutes human beings is plastic, always changing, and open to wide interpretation and revision, if not correction. The results of some of that pondering have been catastrophic, such as in the application of eugenics philosophy to social problems, first, in North America, and not much later, Shark Island and in Nazi Germany. Artistic truth can be funny in the way that it naturally draws our attention to these truths of the human experience. A lot of what happens in Nightbreed in its final cut has a lot to do with the first half of the 20th century and the legacy of a long history of genocide.

Machen wrote most of his incredible weird tales about "little people" (and worse) living underground--"where the monsters live." 

"This folk," I translated to myself, "dwells in remote and secret places, and celebrates foul mysteries on savage hills. Nothing they have in common with men save the face, and the customs of humanity are wholly strange to them; and they hate the sun. They hiss rather than speak; their voices are harsh, and not to be heard without fear. ... But as I idly scanned the paragraph, a flash of thought passed through me with the violence of an electric shock: what if the obscure and horrible race of the hills still survived, still remained haunting wild places and barren hills, and now and then repeating the evil of Gothic legend, unchanged and unchangeable as the Turanian Shelta, or the Basques of Spain? (from "The Black Seal," 1895)

The Basques have been found to have an unusual genetic connection to the Neanderthal. Who are the monsters, and who are the humans? Only action and love as will can tell us.

And now, my memory of Nightbreed is changed forever, and base metal has been transmuted to gold. Being human is to be in the process of remembering and forgetting. Nightbreed is about remembering where we've been.

Another old review of an important movie...

If you haven't seen it already, I recommend seeing Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. This one still gets a lot of hits: http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2010/01/imaginarium-of-dr-parnassus-2009-review.html

2012 was the year...

This was quite a year for me, perhaps a watershed in some ways, but one that will at least allow me to truly move forward in my life and to be a free of the terrible stress expediting the completion of a historical account. There are no rules for that, and only a few guidelines. In the end, you're the only one who knows what you experienced, and even then, that's not always a given. You know what you were told. You know what information was conveyed to you. You know what you experienced during these interactions, but they're fragmented, obscured, and questionable in one way, completely credible in others. That's navigating a labyrinth. 

This wasn't just 2012 for me, it was the last five years of my life. What was real? I discovered many things that were, many more that were not, and more than all that combined that remains a mystery to myself and others. The terrible part is to then extricate yourself from the narrative continuum to continue on with your own life. There are apparently some out there who don't want this to happen, but I have news for them. It is going to happen.

I'll promote the book, and I'm open to interviews, all that's fine. However, I won't be dragged into other people's agendas, and there have already been attempts to do this, right out of the gate of the release of Let the Dead Bury the Dead. When else would it occur? There will be more. Interestingly, the phony cease and desists have halted, a form of harassment that I've experienced from the beginning of my involvement with Jeane's case to the present, several months ago, then once more just weeks ago. The fact that they've now become silent in their legal harassment from the shadows tells me what I always assumed: it was all predicated on scaring me out of publication. That was never going to work in a nation where prior restraint has been ruled unconstitutional so many times that it's solid precedent. A first year law student would know this, and so too would many millions outside of legal profession. Were I to discover their identity, I could sue them in a civil court, and maybe even hit them with criminal charges of harassment--that is, if it's not the government, then the funhouse rules come into play.

Is this a story many don't want to be told, Jeane's story, the information that I and others came into possession of? It was uncanny how often the information was coming to me, not the reverse. There were many times that Jeane would mistakenly send me entire email-chains between herself and counsel and others, and doing so when I wasn't even part of the defense as a researcher. Was she trying to let me bear witness? Sometimes, she was, unquestionably, but I don't think the chains always were. When she Cc'd her exchanges with journalist Jason Leopold, whom I bear no ill will mind you, she was most definitely doing this. There were other occasions, sometimes to bounce my opinion off of things counsel was conveying to her. What did I think of this crafted motion? Did I trust counsel? Did I know more about their and numerous other players' backgrounds, sometimes collective, interconnected ones? The answers were always varied. Sometimes I was able to find out, many other times, she was simply asking the impossible out of desperation. This all had to be written down and chronicled before it gradually vanished from my memory, and the memory of others, because so much is lost to history when this kind of action isn't taken immediately. It escapes into the Aether, subsumed by darkness, assimilated into the Abyss. You can bet that a lot more is sitting on a hard drive at some "fusion center" in the continental United States. An FOIA isn't going to free it up anytime soon.

I'll continue to answer questions to the best of my ability on the subject, because I think it was a far more important case than most of us realized at the time. It took a great deal of after-the-fact research on my part, a lot of reflection on what happened when Jeane was alive, what my role, my place, in it all really was, and to question, question question, and that includes myself, my assumptions. It turned out that many of my earliest ones were either correct, or that I was on the right trail.

The public has a right to know what's being done in their name and how their taxes are being spent. This is why my account is important. Besides being a historical chronicle for the historical record, it can be a starting-point for further inquiry. Because of the information I came across, I'm not naive enough to believe that this is going to happen. Our political system is in what I consider terminal crisis that's borne out of the natural lifecycles of democratic societies. They have a shelf-life, and we're around the time of the expiration date. 

The cycle, as one would imagine, is a circle. I recommend looking at the democratic and republican experiments in ancient Greece and Rome. Western societies appear to begin with warrior king leadership that grows into some general form of feudalism, then to forms of republicanism where it's primarily based around land ownership, often headed by a senate, some parliamentary structure, and on into wider forms of democratic franchise, popular democracy of some sort. Unfortunately, and the ancients saw this firsthand, democracy is also the most fertile soil and prerequisite for tyranny, either by the masses or a dictatorship. Because the general population is usually uneducated, ignorant, stubborn--holding all the human frailties related to pride--there's a tendency towards an overemphasis on the military. Appetites, often arising out of inequality, must be fed in order to rule, and so, it's not simply leadership that demands empire, it's the people, the working-class wage slaves, the populi, the plebes. Military adventurism becomes a virtual inevitability. 

Because of the social reality of a minimum degree of democratic rights, the franchise, the vote, a say in how things are done, we must have bread and circuses, the mob must be placated and diverted away from a real voice in the operation of society ruled by some form of aristocracy. More often, people want to be told what to do thinking that it's easier, and too often, they want a strongman leader to show them the way. Sadly, I see us at the end of this cycle and heading towards dictatorship. The American public will hold just as much of the blame as the current rulers when things disintegrate into this. Can something better arise out of this? Eventually, if we can survive. The Greeks are still waiting for democracy, so there's a good idea of how long it might take.


Do I see much change in our course in the United States, to avert what no other democratic society was able to endure, besides maybe the Swiss? No, I'm afraid not. We're going to continue our military adventurism, until there's no more money left in the Treasury--what happened to Athenian democracy--or someone creams our ass, more likely a combination of both, which has many precedents. Democracies die of neglect. When the 17th and 18th century liberal thinkers spoke of revolution, it was as a warning, not a threat, that there must be reform or that things will collapse into chaos and violence. This is what the social contract is about. We either work together, looking out for each others' well-being, or we will surely die together. Apathy and indifference towards others is a ticking bomb, and it's why I have a serious problem with American Libertarianism, a subject barely worthy of comment for its obvious irrationality. Thinkers such as John Locke were saying that breakdowns of order happen when a society becomes so dysfunctional from misrule, and the missing-ingredient is the public, that people begin killing each other. But the public too often is unaware of their power. They're apathetic, divided over petty squabbling, generation after generation, making the exact same mistakes. Worse still, the public is very often wrong like their rulers. Now, you, the thoughtful reader, will know why my book is only going to reach so many people. The truth hurts. And now on to other related things that happened in my life this year...

2012 was the year that I:

...finished and published the manuscript of my experiences in the DC Madam case (and beyond it, stories never end, or ever die). Let the Dead Bury the Dead can be traced back to an exchange in the New Testament between Jesus and a disciple who said that he needed to bury a loved one before he could go with them on the road. I was unaware of this at the time I decided on the title. It has become an idiomatic phrase throughout the world over the centuries, and there is no agreement on what Jesus meant by it. Some say he meant to let the spiritually dead bury the physically dead in a dead, fallen world. Others say that it means to move on from the past, to not dwell on it, to not live in the past. I don't claim to know what he meant or originally said, but I think all the meanings relate to me and the book. This is when you begin to realize that you've hit on some very fundamental truths, and not merely artistic truth, but truth itself. So much of this has been serendipity to the point that it cancels itself out, it is no longer coincidence, but the truth, however terrible, liberating, or great. I can only feel humbled by it all.

...was asked to research the Wikileaks StratFor emails cache, along with many others of course. This didn't come to be, unfortunately, over technicalities I'll go into one day. To be asked was very exciting. My opinion of Assange is yet to be finalized. On an interpersonal level, I'm sure he can be a pushy asshole. On the other hand, it's probably worth it to kick people who aren't serious to the curb, which he has done on numerous occasions. The amount of information coming out of governments around the world? I can tolerate a lot there. The people Wikileaks is working against are the worst in the entire world.

...began watching the great works of cinema as much as I'd been wanting to for a very long time, and when I purchased a Blu-ray player when my old DVD-player croaked. Watching a cinematic classic in HD is maybe one of the few great technological achievements of the current era. If it serves the dissemination of the arts, information of value, in a better way, I'm all for it. There is nothing more important than cultural expression when it's the truth.

...noticed that for some reason I'm aging well. This is probably because I rarely drink and smoke and get regular exercise. Why stress didn't contribute more might have to do with the fact that my family has naturally low blood pressure. The other good side is that the more I grow older, the great my resemblance to Oscar Wilde, and that's not a jest.

...realized how wonderful my mother's parents really were, and how their home is truly my home. America is my home, I cannot leave her. As fucked up as she is, I still love her, or I wouldn't be trying to save her from herself. At some point, it doesn't matter what the odds are. You must act out of decency and honor, armed with knowledge and a sense of persistence and the long view.

...found that many of my fellow Americans are a pathetic embarrassment that far exceeded my worst opinions of them. This includes many Democratic voters and supporters who refuse to criticize the president for committing war crimes and wrecking the Constitution, all but gutting the 4th Amendment, the right to privacy. He has yet to restore habeas corpus. We are not facing the threat to public safety and order that President Lincoln had to when Southern politicians and officers committed treason over his election in 1861. Why doesn't anyone become alarmed by this? Congress just re-authorized the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program for another five years. See how well they can all get along when they want to? What the hell's wrong with the public, where's the outrage over these encroachments on our rights? Much of it is ignorance, but it's also the desire for a strongman leader who has "taken-off the gloves," who is no longer restrained by the law. These people are the worst kind of citizens of any society, in any era of human history, and are scoundrels. Many American look at politics like it's a football game. This makes these people incredibly stupid assholes.

...realized how much I value living outside of cities in what could be best described as a "light rural" area. I've been here for over a decade now and love the lack of many people.

...realized what a genius Pier Paolo Pasolini truly was, one of the greatest artists in the span of Western civilization.

...installed my Tor browser (thanks Wikileaks). I suggest everyone do the same and to learn more about encrypting your online communications.

...got to know my wonderful niece Zofia better. Picking her up from the bus stop every day for the first five months of the year is something that I'll always treasure. It showed me a little window into how my late grandparents, especially my mother's mother, loved spending time doting over us. She's a great kid, very intelligent.

...learned that blood not only isn't thicker than water, but that it's often the consistency of liquid-shit.

...remembered why I hated school, church services, and anything so boring that it begins to kill your soul: it's someone controlling your life, and wasting your precious time.

...recalled what an inhuman asshole my ex-wife really was in-sum.

...learned how much I love our new miniature schnauzer, Lily.

...found a lot of old books I thought I'd lost.

...stopped trusting almost anyone outside of my family and a small circle of friends.

...felt vindicated when former Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was found guilty on over forty counts of being a pedophile. For anyone who's been a victim of this, you know what I mean. I'm hoping the SOB gets shanked in prison, or beaten to death. There's no reason to show mercy to these terminally-pathological pieces of shit. They should be watched and tracked all of the time once they've been identified by society.

...saw the combined effects of de-institutionalization of the mentally ill and the wide-availability of heavy weaponry on the lives of 20 schoolchildren, and six of their adult caretakers, in Newtown Connecticut. The time to reopen our state mental health institutions is now. We have no real mental healthcare system, and it must be part of a socialized medical infrastructure. 

...still hate the idea of ever going back to Seattle for any reason.

...was reminded that most so-called "upstanding citizens" are more criminally-minded than so-called "criminals." To be accused is not to be guilty. We have something called the right to due process. The public and the press seem to have no concept of this. Put the 6th Amendment on the same critical-list as the 4th, and more recently, the 1st with the attacks on dissent and independent journalism.

And there was more. There was a lot more. Wish us all luck in the next year, because we're going to need it.

Nein, es wahrheit.

The book is finished, locked. 700 pages, counting title page, table of contents, and index. For the coloring and picture book crowd, sorry, Bernie Wrightson wasn't available to do a graphic novel version of the prose, very sorry. There will be no photos. Unlike Bugliosi's Helter Skelter, this is the real deal, a real historical account, and therefore, a part of the primary record of the case. No, this is true crime writing done with honesty, rather than being written by some shady cop, compromised D.A., or some other banal, money grubbing piece of shit.

"What a ride!" Jeane once emailed me, from Chicago, at O'Hare Airport between flights. This was fucking depraved in the context of what we'd been saying back-and-forth and when I was certain she was out of her fucking mind and suicidal. No one will ever know what this woman has put me through, and yet, I still pity her and mourn her death, for she was human, and they, her prosecutors and the U.S. Courts let her die.

Let me make this clear: You do not know as much as you think you do about this horrible case, the one that left a woman hanging by the neck by her own hand. I will terminate any conversation and/or interview the moment I detect someone's assuming that some mythical government operatives murdered Deborah Jeane Palfrey, because not only is it not factually true, it's completely baseless. Not one individual with an asshole (what they see in the mirror every morning) and an opinion (that has no value) has presented any solid evidence that Jeane was murdered. Her longest running legal counselor during most of the proceedings, Montgomery Blair Sibley, doesn't believe this "She were suicided" theory either, at least last I checked. Blair had a great deal of direct contact with Jeane, and I think he knows very well that there were some telltale signs. Maybe we miss things, I don't know, but I didn't from the moment I spoke with Palfrey on the telephone, this was someone rocketing towards imminent death. The book will address all of this in extremely graphic detail. Expect to shocked. No one will ever be as shocked as I was when I looked at the entire case and my experiences being involved in it, working for more than a few months doing general research for Jeane, advising her occasionally, offering my opinion when she hit me with questions, very specific ones mind you, and you should feel lucky for that. This book drained me of the last vestiges of my youth, and a whole lot more, but it was worth it. For a brief moment, we all charged the castles, and I'm not fucking around when I write castles, because we have a system of them in the US. (And yes, we can thank the American South for a lot of this.)

This book is bigger than me, and so are its themes. They're eternal ones. Until you confront power directly as I and others have, you just don't know the feeling of ecstasy it can bring, of liberation, a feeling of incredible elation that can only be called freedom. You have to liberate yourself, and we have to liberate each other. We still have a choice in America: Is going to be democracy, or tyranny? Jeane's case collided with the war on terror, she was in the thick of it, I am convinced. This wasn't merely a sex scandal, this was very big, bigger than you can possibly imagine. I can only hope that this account will stand as a document of the case and the era it took place in, a piece of the puzzle, part of a mosaic of our shared history, because this is a story that affects everyone directly, first in our pocketbooks. It's also a political testament. To have been part of a historical event was everything rolled into one. In the beginning, was the word.

And they saw that it was hideously flawed: The Day God Died (a very short story with dissolves and flash-forwards)

In the beginning, there were six-packs and microwaveable meals, and they were good, or at least better than nothing at all, so quit yer bitchin'. Nobody ever got hurt--muchly--and all mimsy were the Borogroves, not even a mouse. There was something I was going to write, about some "City on a Hill," but they say the place has fallen into disrepair...you really don't want to go there, trust me on this one (worse than Detroit).

And the Lord spake far too often when there were no people around to hear it, then silence for thousands of years when there were and spake again saying, "Let there be light...oh shit. Did I pay the electric bill for last month? Oh boy. There I go again!" Yet somehow, there was light, and it too was good for a time until the bill collectors came. Six thousand years passed, somehow missing the dinosaurs and several ice ages by a mile, and then it was time to go to bed again, day-in, day-out, I tell ya'...

And they found that God's all about non-sequiturs, so he must be a Libertarian: One day in the 21st century (because you can do flash-forwards and even dissolves in allegory), a corporate executive belatedly died of a heart attack in his very posh home office in upper state New York. Like most CEOs, he was a criminal asshole and nobody cared when his time came, but you have to put these people somewhere after they're six feet under, so he made his way to the afterlife. No, the streets aren't paved in gold there either, so quit asking! "What idiot would believe such bullshit?" shrugged St. Peter. No one knew.

"I'm here to win!" said the CEO to the beleaguered bureaucrat manning the Gates of Heaven. Peter grinned.

"It appears that you have lost, schlub, but I got an idea a week ago I want to try out, so come with me." He took the CEO by the hand like fathers do with their drooling children at Wal-Mart and they ambled down the crumbling halls of a crappy Ministry in a dank, smelly corner of the afterlife. The stink of piss was everywhere, and the walls of Heaven were covered with obscene graffiti. Worst-of-all, someone had written "J.D. Salinger," which confused the executive since he'd never read a book after high school, or even that much during it.

"What's that?" said the CEO as they were looking at a hole in reality into a flat plane below. Tiny dots appeared to be moving on the surface, and it reminded the executive of his many flights over Ohio--the sprawl, with capillaries and arteries of commerce spreading out like a bubbling cancer, eating-away at the surface of the plan.

"That's limbo, also known as suburbs. No actual life takes place there."St. Peter retched while the suited Golem looked down at the scene below wishing he had a piece of the action.

"Right," said the CEO with that absolute certainty all the ladies love. They kept on further down the labyrinth of halls, endless halls, all growing darker and more disintegrated as they went. At times the walls seemed to exist merely as rapidly vibrating vapor and the CEO was able to stick his arm through them. "Nifty," he said, and shrugged.

"Keep talking kid, keep talking," said his divine escort laughing softly as old men often do.

Finally, they reached an enormous set of double-doors, bronzed and festoomed with lavishes of spirals, eyes, and flora. At the heart of the door was the design of a man who was in the center of a circle, his arms and legs endtended-out in the shape of a rightside-up Pentagram. All was silent and even the pair themselves were completely immobile. There is no movement in the presence of the divine, no action...but suddenly, there was. A deep moan pervaded the hallway and seemed to emanate from everywhere, then abruptly faded away as a sickly gurgle.

"What's that? the executive asked nervously.

"That was the death of God," St. Peter said, laughing and nodding wisely.

"What killed God?" he asked. St. Peter looked at the executive sadly.

" 'What'? You mean 'who.' Why, you did. Your very existence accomplished it."

"That doesn't make any sense to me. What do you mean? I've done everything right in life, been successful, did what I had to do to get ahead, and..."

"All fine and well, but did you ever consider the beauty of a Beethoven symphony, or the divinity in children laughing and playing in peace? Did you ever see the worth in all human beings, that every life is sacred in the end? Have you ever pondered in your life why mankind yearns for more, the loneliness, the angst that created the great works of art? Did you ever try to control your animal-impulses and be the better man? Did you ever try to improve yourself? Have you ever taken a stand in your life for what was the right thing to do for others?"

"Nope, none of those--hey, are you communist or something.?"

"Yes, I thought not, and that's why you were brought here. You see, you're lack, the temporal evidence that God created something imperfect, and therefore, was imperfect himself. Your mere proximity was enough to finish the job of an already dying deity that was in the denial stage of the grieving process. I can sleep the sleep of ages now, but first..."

Someone started hacking their way through the double-doors. With an abrupt kick, a man with wild, greasy hair and a thick-mustache crashed through. He was wearing a beautiful red robe studded with Hermetic symbols on a gold-red lame background, clutching a staff, wearing jack-boots. His eyes were both of the darkest night and the brightest day.

"Who's that? said the executive.

"That's Nietzsche, here to fix some shoddy craftsmanship."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"Nothing, you are lack, you never existed."

Nietzsche spake, "The last man has come...and where's the nearest bar anyway?"

"Can I finally sleep?" said St. Peter.

"Soon, but there's a universe to fix! We're off!"

As well all know, such an allegory is preposterous, impossible. Nothing so absurd has ever been contended by any religion at any time in human history, except at lunchtime and before bed.

The Return of Throbbing Gristle, and the death of Reagan and Thatcherism

WWW--On April 25th, I'll be going to see industrial pioneers, Throbbing Gristle in Chicago. Not everyone knows who they are, but they are essentially the creators of "industrial culture" and beyond. For years-and-years all I've been able to do is read about them and lament that I never got to see them perform live since their last show was in San Francisco in May 1981.

But several years ago, they finally decided to put things from the past aside--all the slights, issues, and arguments--and regrouped, doing a few shows in London, then throughout most of Europe and parts of the rest of the globe.

It's hard to describe the sound of TG, but an old college acquaintance put it best when he wrote, "TG is like a drug...you either like it or you don't." I don't just like TG, I love them. Having seen PTV3 in 2004, this is going to be part of a surprisingly fulfilled wish list.

When TG broke-up in May 1981, the Reagan revolution was in its infancy. England was suffering under the same kind of marketplace fascism, and as they've been a virtual economic satellite of the United States ("51st State"!) since the late-1970s, we've had a shared fate as cultures. Groups like TG have been that much needed antidote to obsolete conventional wisdom and thinking, a genuine part of our Western counterculture.

TG ended where Reaganism began. Now TG begins anew as Reaganism ends, dies. As above, so below, so mote it be. The final show in Chicago will be in a Presbyterian church, it couldn't be more fitting. Welcome back.

Whore-monger Republican Senator David Vitter gets some future employers to pick-up the tab on his DC Madam legal expeses

Washington D.C.--Is it surprising? Vitter's legal defense fund released their report around the same time that the Tarpon Springs PD released their own that confirmed the obvious: Deborah Jeane Palfrey killed herself, she committed suicide by hanging.

Scholars say that Halloween was viewed by the ancient Celts as a time when people could commune with spirits and the dead, a time of divination and magic. There's something sadly poetic and disturbing about the parallel release of these two reports. What would Senator Vitter have said to the dead Jeane Palfrey had he the chance? Perhaps a visit to her graveside to apologize would be in order. Would he even want to? Doubtful, but who cares what he wants?

Vitter's behavior begs-the-question of what kind of hopelessly-flawed deity created this rock we live on, and the rest of the universe. Surely, it wasn't God, he's supposed to be perfect. I don't think people like Vitter or these donors really believe there is a "God"--if they really did, they wouldn't behave as they do. They feel that they are God. They aren't.

No, it must have been an emanation, an effluvium of deity that created our prison called earth, an excretion, something evil and degenerate. Or, there's no God at all, life on earth is just an accident from the big bang, and it's an existential universe where we're on our own. Does it really matter either way?

These "donors" ("graft-peddlers" sound more accurate) bent the rules to the breaking-point--with 27 donors, a curious percentage (seven-in-all) of them had the last name of "Chouest," all addressed to the same P.O. Box in Galliano, Louisiana. But why not? We can assume that at least one of the donors in the entire list was paying the bill at some juncture so that David Vitter could work out his problems with "getcha little somethin' that you can't get at home."

What's so pathetic about Vitter and the donors is that we all know this is only about money and that they'd give him this kind of aid and assistance if he was guilty of murder. Capitalism? Hardly. It's the anarchy of power, the belief in nothing...except more power and the maintaining of it. That puts its origins squarely in the natural world, a part of our animal-side. It doesn't matter, it really is as "natural" as a flower or a tree. Yet the hypocrisy is glaring here, and a woman is dead.

But at least Davey got laid, proved he was a "real man," a mensch, but really came-off as a total schmuck and a loser to anyone with a clue and a pulse. Does it matter whether he was a Senator at the time? No, because he misled the people of Louisiana as to what kind of person he was to get elected. He lied, and lied, and lied, and lied, and he's still lying and will continue to lie. What was it all about? The power that a woman can have over a powerful man in the kind of arrangement Palfrey and Vitter were in.

It most certainly was a witch-hunt, but rest assured that he's never going to be a presidential candidate and that his political career has been permanently damaged from his problem controlling his sex drive. In all, these corrupt Louisiana businesspeople and political figures raised $200,010.00 for a corrupt, whore-mongering politician. A wolf knows a wolf, and a whore knows a whore (and a pimp).

Forget about what I wrote about "hypocrisy," there's none to be had here.

But I have to thank Senator Vitter, the donors, and the entire GOP--it's people like you--at least--who remind me that I'll never run out of assholes to kick around. Thank you. With the job they and many other rich clowns have done on the economy, I'll hardly be the only one doing the kicking, and there isn't going to be anywhere left to run. And c'mon Louisiana, I know you have the self-respect to rid yourselves of this turkey, so quit waiting for someone else to do it, grow a pair. You too Wendy. I don't have to tell Vitter's daughters to dog him about all of this, that's always going to be underneath the surface anyway for the rest of his worthless life.

Was it all worth it, defending Palfrey? Yes. I rest well at night knowing that I helped cost Vitter and several rich turds a lot of money during an economic crisis, and that we tried to take down corrupt representatives like Vitter who protected what can only be the most criminal presidential administration in American history (just wait). Gloating? No. It was the right thing to do, pointing-out Vitter's unethical behaviors along with the rest of the internet. These dopes are your representatives, your mirror-image, your shadow on the walls of the cave.

Surprised the GOP was routed in the last two elections? You shouldn't be, they earned it and couldn't steal an election during a landslide. God knows they tried, and they will again. Vitter's time is coming, this mark on his life is his doing, and it's never going away. Eventually, even the GOP will discard him when he's no longer useful. That could be sooner rather than later.

"Vitter officially closes 'Madam' legal fund; see complete list of donors," The New Star, 10.31.2008: http://www.thenewsstar.com/article/20081031/NEWS01/810310335