Political porn star Sarah Palin hopes to beat record of porn star Lisa Sparxxx

You have to love it when aspiring candidates dip their toes into the water to see whether the public loves or hates them. According to a recent AP poll, Americans almost roundly hate former GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin, but there she is, all over the media, all over the place, being handed microphones and positioned in front of the cameras like Dick Cheney and his diseased brood. I should mention that they hate Rudolph Giuliani as well, contrary to another unpopular delusion.

Say what you want about Americans, but being immersed in advertising 24/7 has taught them one thing: they know bullshit when they see it.

The rest is like dating and bad relationships where we kid ourselves that that special someone might change one day, something that's going on with President Obama right now as one campaign promise after another is discarded. It's not gonna happen. Like any bad relationship, you tell the bastards to change or get out; if you don't, you only have yourself to blame for what comes after that. But some relationships should never have been entered into in the first place...

Looking at Palin, it's obvious to all but the most delusional that we're being presented with yet another pile of shit in her and the message she's spouting is equally worthless and part of the past that got us into the mess we're currently in. The public at least senses this, but it's really down to the presentation and her attitude, something that most can't put a finger on, but know intuitively anyway. There's something atavistic about her, something one could identify squarely in Greek or historical tragedy, something about blindness and unbelievable hubris that finally wrecks a nation.

Palin has said that she would like to play a role in the 2012 elections, "if the people will have me." But the people don't want her and it isn't dissuading her from forcing herlself on them, just like most mainstream politicians. More importantly: Is she really capable of breaking the Gangbang World Record, and could this non-sequitur I'm writing ever be as leading as the memes the mainstream constantly bombards all of us with? "My ambition, if you will, my desire [clearly, her bloodlust] is to help our country in whatever role that may be [great, how about hostess?], and I cannot predict what that will be [I can, and it's not being president], what doors [the gates of hell] will be open in the year 2012," then she sacrificed a small mammal and made some bizarre utterances, and attempted to read its entrails, a little haruspicy for old time's sake.

Palin recalls the crazed Maenads, a cult to Dionysus, in her mindless drive to power, any power at all, for no particular purpose but her own. She most certainly isn't the Pythia of Delphi who only told those who came to her where they were screwing-up. What be the fate of Orpheus and Mount Parnassus? Ruins. Sometimes, even a little help from the divine and our genetic material isn't going to save us.

"I'd probably rather write than talk." This is true, but most men would rather fuck than eat, and Palin's looks are clearly a part of why she was chosen by a decidedly sexist and racist Republican Party leadership to run in the first place. Now she's "going rogue," something she probably did well when she fucked the football team back home in Alaska during her salad days. Welcome to the United State of America, not that Alaska's part of it. But ask anyone--any man--and they'll tell you that most of us wouldn't want to be in that gangbang line, huh-uh. Lisa Sparxxx claims to have had sex with 919 men, which is clearly depraved and as pointless as a Palin candidacy--but what's the point of it all? No one had to tell Americans that politics was masturbation. It takes a nation, and lubrication, but there's no lubricant on earth that's going put Sarah together again when she was never whole or sane in the first place and the public never wanted her, let alone knew who the hell she was before 2008. At best, she's helped us see what part of the public is as crazy and detached from reality as she is, and that at least is a good thing.

The ancient truly manifesting in the modern world can only be a disaster, but we might be better served with the Apollonian were there no other option. Sarah Palin is the Oracle without any eyes, the Blind Seer, a Shibboleth, the Hierophant. Don't underestimate her, she is walking, shambling death.

A.J. Weberman's Homothug (2008) review

“My books are worth more unsigned.”

--A.J. Weberman to the author, 2009.

In the hot summer of 1991, and in the midst of an unprecedented crime wave, there was a pogrom in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn that has been called “one of the most serious incidents of anti-Semitism in American history.”[i] The pogrom was over an accidental hit-and-run of a black child named Gavin Cato by members of the Lubavitch Community. Within this racially-charged environment, a Hasidic Jew named Yankel Rosenbaum was murdered by a mob of African-American vigilantes spouting anti-Semitic epithets at the victim. This crime--and countless other events in the city at the time--ignited widespread calls for a law and order agenda from City Hall. 

The rioting took place under the administration of African-American mayor David Dinkins who ran on the race card in NYC’s 1989 mayoral elections, and appearances are everything in American politics. 

According to New York State’s Girgenti Report, Mayor Dinkins allowed the riots in Crown Heights to rage for three long days before doing much of anything about it, and his poor record in curbing crime created a backlash that grew over time. Things hadn’t gotten much better by the next election cycle when Dinkins ran against the Republican Rudolph Giuliani, and the perception was that Dinkins was “soft on crime.” At that time the Republican candidate was known for his record as an aggressive prosecuting U.S. Attorney in the Southern District (NYC region)—if he was known for anything at all. But did New Yorkers really know who—or perhaps what--they were voting for in 1993?

Did Rudy play to the outrage? You bet.

Political biographies are a minefield for any author, and especially when the subject is alive-and-kicking, and kicking his perceived enemies is exactly what Rudy Giuliani does best. As a matter of fact, sometimes it appears that it’s all that he does once in office--besides filling key governmental positions with his criminal cronies. First released in May 2008 on Amazon.com, Weberman’s profile of the former mayor of New York City was abruptly pulled by the online seller (who also printed the book through BookSurge) without much explanation, though it can be assumed there were threats regarding defamation of character. That’s rich considering the subject and the people he’s surrounding himself with over the years. According to Weberman, Giuliani’s own attorneys directed legal threats at Amazon.com, causing the removal of the book (still available @ http://yippiemuseum.org/homothug/ ) .

Was it Giuliani? Weberman appears to believe so.

There don’t appear to be any indications otherwise, but there are a few other characters in the narrative besides Giuliani who might have wanted the book pulled like the “defrocked” Monsignor, Alan J. Placa, an individual with a most peculiar attitude towards pedophilia and its relation to society and the law, and there are others who might have wanted the same. Placa handled charges of pedophilia against the Church on Long Island for several years, and doesn’t have a stellar reputation. Nevertheless, it’s safe to assume that Placa and Giuliani are still close friends and associates, if not two men who are stuck with each other thanks to mutual blackmail of some kind. According to Weberman and others, this is probably because Giuliani and Placa have had sexual relations with one another at some point during their youth, and therefore, they share secrets that are a threat to their power. Placa’s powerful? It helps to have powerful friends…

The author quotes Placa himself about his attitudes towards pedophile priests, and they’re not mainstream ones (the emphasis in the quote is Weberman’s):

“In my own experience, attempts to reintegrate people into the ministry have been quite successful. I have never been involved in attempting to reintegrate a clinically diagnosed fixated pedophile [MJ: he’s being very careful in his wording here] into the ministry, however, similarly, I have never been involved in attempting to reintegrate a person into the ministry after that person has been convicted of a criminal offense and has served time in prison. Such a move would be inappropriate, at the very least, for ‘public-relations’ reasons [MJ: the only real time the Church is concerned], if not also for clinical, legal, and moral reasons. With these provisos in mind, I report that my own experience (in many cases over the last six years) leads me to believe that most people who have engaged in the sort of inappropriate behavior we are describing here can successfully be reintegrated into some useful and fulfilling Church ministry…” [ii]

Yet, as Weberman points-out, and as anyone with any sense knows, you cannot reform a pedophile, making Placa’s written statements not only disingenuous, but bald lies that one would expect to come from a pedophile. For this reason and many others laid-out in the text, Placa has a very important place in Giuliani’s life and in the development of his character and his behavior. The author treats the other players in similar fashion since this is a study of a man’s character and how he came to have it. Assuming that Giuliani has character might be taking a wild leap of logic. 

Logically, Weberman also delves a little into the effects of heredity on sexual tendencies as well as the general effects of environment on Giuliani. Rudy’s father Harold was a convicted exhibitionist, a violent malcontent who consorted with other street criminals, and was a low-level organized crime soldier. What went on in the Giuliani home in front of little Rudy? We’re not entirely sure, but if you grow-up in a milieu of sexual depravity, violence, and organized crime, there’s a good chance you’re going to act in similar fashion later on. It appears that this has been the case throughout Rudolph Giuliani’s sordid adult life.

Certainly, some members of the gay community are going to be offended by the title of this chronicle, but it has a very real urban basis to it, and Weberman didn’t coin the term, nor is he claiming to have. If even a fraction of what he and the Yippie Museum research team have uncovered is true, the term fits, especially looking at the smoke coming from Giuliani’s father, his own official behaviors as a prosecutor and Mayor of NYC, and his other questionable associations. 

In short, he seems to fit most of the definitions of an urban “homothug”:

5. homo thug

A male thug who has [a] sexual interest in both males and females. Lives an ag[g]ressive lifestyle ( a well known result of hood life), mentally unstable (most of the time) and can claim to be of heter[o]sexual orientation (or not); mainta[n]ing a reputation that can be associated with the life of urban minority men (aka thugs) in and around predominantly black neighborhoods (unless they are a celebrity). All the while attempting to remain the alpha male in people's perception of him, therefore having to sustain the life of a straight male, with only or mainly heter[o]sexual intents to be accepted into society without consid[e]ration.

"Tyshawn" is your typical average thug. He's flippin' weight in the hood, got a clique with niggas that don't give Shit about much. On the block all night, having sexual leasions with chicks and even has a 4 year old son. Nigga dresses fly, got a fly ride and is known by people who otherwise would more likely than not, be associated with a homo Thug. Tyshawn has a relationship with a pre-op tran[s]sexual("Tania") who passes quite well and looks and maintains herself better than a lot of females. She herself is also "notorious" in the hood (for her own reasons). "Tyshawn" and "Tania" have a sexual relationship period[i]cally but consistent. And all the while these sexual rendezvous occur[r]ing on the DL [MJ—“on the down low.”] with no knowledge of his actions amongst his family or his crew. [iii]

Giuliani’s social interactions have been described by former NYC Mayor Ed Koch in his contemporary columns as being like “Frankenstein’s” monster. Koch was hardly alone in his use of this word in describing Giuliani’s governing practices, this one coming from Former Deputy Police Commissioner John Miller:

"Frankenstein's monster was a misunderstood character [that] reached out to people and frightened them and they ran away. I don't think the mayor has made that much of an effort. He just kind of frightens them away without reaching them at all."

Miller, a former television newsman, said, "When a police department becomes politicized because it's being run by a shadow police commissioner who is the mayor, you have to question as to whether the department is acting based on what is right and what is lawful or whether the department has become a political arm."[iv]

Did they even know the half of it? Maybe…and maybe not.

Interestingly, the author spends the first one hundred pages of his profile of Giuliani by focusing on his lifelong relationship with Alan Placa and the former Monsignor’s very curious background and tendency to protect pedophile priests. According to Weberman and several sources, were it not for the statute of limitations (and very conscious legal motions by him in several other cases so that it would expire), Alan Placa would be a convicted pedophile. Looking at his sources, he makes more than a good case for it. Worse still, Placa might have been involved in negligence with a victim of a pedophile priest, perhaps leading them into a situation where their suicide was all-but-inevitable. The overall picture of Placa is not only bad, and if even a smidgen of it is true, he’s a dangerous criminal degenerate and a threat to the community no matter where he lives. 

So why hasn’t he run for public office yet?

As a matter of fact, it appears that Alan Placa’s pedophilia is very real and the author cites Suffolk County grand jury proceedings as well as his own interviews with one of the alleged victims of Placa, one Richard Tollner, to support the contention. Tollner’s accounts of molestation jibe with other parts of the public record in so many areas that one has to assume the only reason the former Monsignor is still walking around a free man is because he has friends in high places, such as Giuliani and the Church itself. The main problem for Tollner—and other victims of Placa and his network of pedophiles—has been the statute of limitations, which Placa used as a lawyer (a role he hid from the victims and their families, not to mention the authorities on many occasions).

Yet, Giuliani has been zealous and consistent in defending his lifelong friend, often referring to him as an asset to the community. Is Placa blackmailing him? It’s a good question, and we should remember that there’s no honor among thieves and criminals, generally. It’s even money that Placa got a lot of practice in this area of dodging the law through his little game of protecting himself and other pedophile priests and clerics from accountability. Yet, Giuliani calls him a “friend.” Sometimes, “friends-for-life” takes on a different meaning, a dark one.

Consorting with know criminals and the corrupt, ruling with brutality and an iron fist, and ignoring the law while claiming to uphold it was all part and parcel of “Giuliani time.” To truly know someone, you must judge them by their actions, not merely by what they say. Weberman’s approach to Giuliani is that it’s all about character, a perspective that he shares about the troubled mayor with former NYC mayor Ed Koch, and he’s right in doing it. The man’s background and the people he surrounds himself with suggest that Rudolph Giuliani is a criminal, if not an unimaginably compromised individual, and that he is a fool who’s simply useful to the establishment and the criminal underworld. It’s hard to say what’s worse.

When held against the authoritarian mayoral record of the Giuliani years, the author’s text comes off like a very professional police dossier and will likely become a part of the permanent historical record regardless of the tactics unleashed to suppress it. It is thoroughly researched, indexed, and footnoted, and the author draws on the public record while adding primary sources of his own from interviews with various players in the narrative, like the inimitable FBI informant and City Hall “fixer”, Larry Ray. In other words, Homothug isn’t just some second hand retelling, but a part of the primary record. It’s a chronicling, if you will, of what genuine corruption looks like, how it behaves, and it wisely delves into where it comes from. The sad truth is that it comes from social injustice, that gift that keeps on giving. 

There’s a genuine yearning on Weberman’s part to try to understand why Giuliani and the people he’s surrounded himself with over the years are such irredeemable scumbags, and that’s being charitable referring to them as such here or anywhere. True, there are pointed and personal jibes in the text, but they are well-earned ones considering the targets involved. 

Many of Giuliani’s lieutenants were and are—in fact—career criminals with mafia connections and a skill for gaming the system, even on Wall Street. As Weberman notes, Giuliani himself grew up in an organized crime milieu, and his own father was a low–level mafia soldier as well as a general sociopath. But to Rudolph Giuliani, acute moral degeneracy appears to be that credential for being one of his “wiseguys,” making it a reminder to all that our political system is based on mutual blackmailing, more often than not. That’s not just an epitaph for New York City and Giuliani; it’s one for a very troubled American polity trying to find its way back to the light, and a flimsy sentimentalism isn’t going to fix things.

Perhaps former Mayor Dinkins was “soft on crime,” and there are good arguments for it (according to Weberman and others, Giuliani is “soft” in other areas these days after prostate surgery). But: was Giuliani a better alternative? It depends on who you are. If you’re part of the economic establishment, sadistic lower-level police officers, corrupt cronies, and organized crime, “Giuliani time” was a trip back to Eden and the joys of crony machine politics. Rudy had all their backs, but he didn’t have the backs of the people of New York City. 

Having run one of the most worst presidential campaigns in American history in 2008 wasn’t the only thing that sank his monomaniacal ambitions: It was the intuition of the American public that not only was Giuliani an uninspiring demagogue who used the events of September 11, 2001 to his political advantage, but that he was also corrupt, thanks-in-part to the scandals surrounding people who were close to him. The most familiar name would be Bernard Kerik, when the corruption-ridden Bush II administration chose him to head the Department of Homeland Security. As Weberman makes clear, Kerik was just the tip of the iceberg in the life of a very pathetic, deluded, and crazed individual who should have never held public office.

Homothug will be part of the epitaph of a very sick and deluded individual who should have never held public office. Therefore, it’s also an epitaph for the times he came up in.

---

[i] Shapiro, Edward S. (2006). Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the 1991 Brooklyn Riot. Waltham, Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, University Press of New England. xi.

[ii] Weberman, A.J. (2008). Homothug: The Secret Life of Rudy Giuliani. New York City: The Yippie Museum Press/BookSurge Press. 83.

[iii] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=homo+thug

[iv] http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1995/07/27/1995-07-27_mayor__frankenstein___ex-cop.html. Marzulli, John and Sheridan, Dick. “MAYOR ‘FRANKENSTEIN’ EX-COP BIG CALLS RUDY CONTROL FREAK,” New York Daily News, July 27, 1995.

Michael Alig's mom is in my area and zip code (last I knew!)

Michiana--I keep threatening to do this, but it might have to come-to-pass: an interview with Michael Alig. Michael's mother--Elke Blair--lives just miles from our home here. In watching the documentary, "Party Monster," I was stunned at how similar our experiences living around here were.

I'm not gay, but it makes me shudder to think of the abuse that Michael had inflicted upon himself by others in the area. It makes for a better understanding of why he did what he did. Living here, I am completely unsurprised that Michael's life ended-up the way it did, and look at the entire story as a tragedy. You couldn't find an uglier place for real outsiders than this region.

It could have worked-out differently, though I have to wonder if he would have had the drive to accomplish what he did with the club kids without the rage that began here in the South Bend/Mishawaka area.

Being a kid around here in the 1970s-80s was a extremely violent time for a lot of us. It was another era entirely, and if you didn't fit-in you were a target. There was no escape from this existentialist hell, and like today, adults were unwilling to take any responsibility for this atmosphere. Many of them actively encouraged the hunting-down of the "others" who were "different." The violence was rife, ubiquitous, and everywhere as a daily-occurrence.

What constituted that difference usually didn't matter. I can recall a memory from those times of watching in horror as a well-known family of young malcontents literally enslaved neighborhood children into building a kid's "fort" for them through violence and intimidation. The examples are numerous and similar. It was like a war zone.
There is a theme of revenge, or a desire for it, in Alig's life that must surely spring from this context. Who were his predators during his childhood, the individuals who victimized Michael Alig? "Party Monster" outs a local preacher, but also hints at homophobic tormenting and bullying by other children in this area (as well as general climate of violent bullying). This should be examined more thoroughly.

What Michael did was wicked, evil, and wrong by any standard, but I don't think the surface was remotely scratched by documentarians Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. They should have gotten more of a feel for where Alig grew-up. It's probably the shortest-part of "Party Monster-The Shockumentary" (1998). Watching it on its original broadcast, I nearly fell off of my couch! I never saw it coming. But how does one summarize a life?

That's not entirely their fault, it's a tall order. James St. James has done a good job in these areas, and I agree that the filmmakers were probably a little too enamored with their subject, being too seduced by the glitz and glamor they were party to. It's not unlikely that Michael Alig became his oppressors in some way through dehumanization and constant humiliation. We should find-out who these people were, because they could be doing things that are far-and-away worse than what Alig did, even today. I believe the preacher is deceased, but what of Alig's peers from those early-years before his move to NYC?

Who are they? What are they doing today?

For myself, the club kids were something you saw on Springer, Sally Jesse Raphael, or Geraldo. They were a visually interesting and bizarre part of an ugly and boring decade. I liked them in their Kabuki-style poses, though I would learn later that much of it was copped from UK designer Leigh Bowrey. But there was also something very intriguing about their androgyny and free-spiritedness, it was interesting and appeared very fresh. The ladies attached to the scene were pretty hot. It all looked very sexy and subversive.

Hilariously, I once received a Richie Rich single in the mail for a little zine' I was doing during that period--there was no context for it at all! Frankly, the single was hilariously bad dance techno with helium-vocals. The Club Kids weren't exactly talented, they just became very famous overnight. What's amazing is how long it all lasted. Where it all went wrong was that many of the participants couldn't face that these scenes only last a for a time, and then they're gone. Normally, they don't last more than a couple years, which is what made this countercultural scene so unique. But holding-on to something that must inevitably end is when the demons arise from their hiding-places.

Add tons of hard drugs, and stir! There are so many rumors and allegations surrounding this story, and while I would trust James St. James over Michael Alig in most areas, it would be healthy for Michael to finally finish that autobiography ("Aligula"), and in a shorter form than he's been promising (a staggering 5,000 pages). It should be clear and manageable for readers, and direct. My hope is that he finds someone to help him edit it into something readable and accessible (paging Michael!).

Some very bizarre rumors and allegations surround the murder of Angel Melendez, and the government's investigative role in Gatien's clubs doesn't add any clarity. One is that Alig and his roommate "Freez" cannibalized Angel's body. This sounds very hard to believe. What's certain is that Gatien's clubs were teeming with law enforcement who were incognito.

If the Feds knew the answer to this question, they certainly were keeping it secret, as it appeared they intended to use Alig as a Prosecution Witness against Peter Gatien. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office surely knew also, but they have a long history of hiding from the public information about crimes involving the Occult. Further investigation proved that Michael Alig and Freeze were involved with the Occult; Michael being a ‘dabbler’ whereas Freeze was heavily involved. (Americanmafia.com, 'The Agony Of Ecstasy: The Fall Of Sammy Gravano And Peter Gatien, James Ridgway de Szigethy. September 2002)

Peter Gatien's story is also basically untold, and by all appearances, he was probably railroaded by the federal government in all of this. Consider that for a long-time, they didn't even care about Angel Melendez's murder, and that they just wanted to take down Mr. Gatien and the Limelight club, the Palladium, Club USA, and other venues he owned during the 1980s-90s. Gatien is now living in Toronto (2008).

Law enforcement even ignored an early confession of Alig to Melendez's murder and allowed him to roam free for weeks. Sound familiar? But what Gatien and Limelight, and his other clubs, can be seen as are victims of former NYC Rudolph Giuliani's campaign to "clean-up" the city (for organized crime?). The murder probably was--and is--unimportant to law enforcement at all levels. None of this is in-defense of Michael Alig. Four-years-ago this 21st of August, Peter Gatien was deported to his native Canada. He currently resides in Toronto, sans his distinctive eye-patch.

Again, there could also be a much larger and untold story in this area known as Michiana regarding Alig's background. Remember that Michael grew-up around Penn High School (a place swarming with rednecks), the very same stomping-ground as that of "Heathers" (1989, written just a couple years after Alig left for NYC) scribe Dan Waters. Watch that film, and you'll see that the connections to Alig's life are there.

My own experiences in the educational system around here echo the movie in many respects (no, not literally in what Christian Slater's character does to his tormentors), so I know that Michael's environment was almost identical to my own, and that of many others.

Waters was an astute social observer: he really nailed the rage and anger experienced by outsiders around here. It's all about the pecking-order. Such are the roots of Columbine, and all the other tragedies, the elephant in the room that everyone's afraid to acknowledge. Part of the reason is that many parents and other "trusted" authority-figures would be going to jail for life.

That elephant is how horrible we all allow others to treat one another, and the price of tolerating the pathological bully, the pederast, and the child abuser. That price is too high for our society. How many murders were there in the Haight Ashbury district after the Summer of love? A lot. It would dwarf the body count of the club kids, and handily, yet that's not the picture we usually get of that scene.

The whole thing about these scenes is that it's an ongoing tragedy about young people wanting to have acceptance and to escape from the alienation of the modern world by creating their own space. They just wanted to create another life, a better life, and as wrongheaded as many of them were, it's not an evil motive at all. As these ersatz Edens crash, the hard drugs strat playing a role. But someone had to provide the drugs, and that brought in the criminal-elements and the cops.

Alig was one of the "two Michaels" hired by Gatien in the late-1980s to promote the Limelight, the other being Michael Caruso. Caruso became a DEA informant after being popped sometime during the early-1990s.

A May 2000 Village Voice article offers some clarification of his role in the club kids scene:

Two years ago, as he sat on the witness stand at Limelight owner Peter Gatien's drug-conspiracy trial bawling his eyes out in a badly fitting blue suit, Michael Caruso's life seemed effectively over. The big-time promoter—the man who first brought techno music to Manhattan and turned Staten Island on to Ecstasy—confessed to a string of brutal crimes: bank robbery, home invasions, extortion schemes, kidnapping attempts, wholesale drug trafficking, and more. These should have put him behind bars for 20 years. But in exchange for leniency, he became the centerpiece of the government's case against Gatien [Ed.-Instead of Michael Alig?], betraying a man who he'd told associates was closer to him than his own father. Caruso's testimony about the inner workings of the Limelight's drug network, which he himself created, not only provided a glimpse of the seamy underbelly of club culture—the violent demimonde of dope peddlers, gangsters, professional party-goers, and police informers hidden behind the superficial veil of fun and fabulousness—but helped put behind bars many of his former colleagues. (Village Voice, 'Wu-Tang Clan are Sumthing ta Fuck Wit,' Frank Owen. May 24-30, 2000)

Well-intentioned Edens fall. This shouldn't be an unfamiliar theme to anyone. One can hardly blame James St. James in his wish to move-on from this whole affair. It's a sad story filled with animosity, subterfuge, and several unexplained deaths and a few explained murders. Utopian experiments rarely end well, and we should be examining why this is so. The seeds-of-destruction are usually already in-place, often coming from that "outside world" the participants are desperately trying to escape.

Watch Heathers again sometime, and consider what you have read here. Add informant programs and other elements of criminality added to-the-mix (not DJ Keoki's!), and it only gets uglier. It didn't have to end the way it did, but it did. What can I say? It looked like so much fun, and it could have been so good. It could have been so very good.

Lightly Revised and Corrected, 09.12.2008

MONDO NEW YORK (1988) review

What a documentary this could have been! I first saw this in 1989 on home video, right before I was off to college. At the time, it was pretty shocking to these Midwestern eyes, but then, I was 21. There are only a few reasons to watch this at all: Karen Finley, Lydia Lunch's prologue rant, nutsoid artist Joe Coleman, Annie Sprinkle naked, some good poetry, and even some interesting looks at gay culture at that time in NYC.

However, embarrassing segments like the ones with John Sex and Phoebe Legere doing some really dumbass air guitar to a tape of her godawful 80s song called "Marilyn Monroe" sink this film. I've never been to New York City, and I don't see why I should anymore. That city is gone, and those of us who never saw the place never can now. It is gone. At least director Harvey Keith was there to document some of it, he just managed to miss most of the interesting-parts. Somehow, I think that was the fault--once again--of the money people (the Executive producers). Also embarrassing in Mondo New York are the 80s styles and fashions (the haircuts being the worst). There's no real nostalgia here, except for the New York City that is no more. There is no more cultural nexus like Greenwich Village anymore, a place where artists of all mediums can germinate naturally. It's all been cleaned-up and gentrified. Soho is the same.

A friend of mine saw Allen Ginsberg's final walk through Central Park around 1994, and he also witnessed the Village die, succumbing to gentrification. It's gone. So are the scarlet streets (where the whores were), live sex shows, and the glory that was Times Square. It's now the bureaucratic hell that Herman Melville saw it becoming back in the 1850s. The job is now done, and Big business and old money can now stew in its own self-imposed Apocalypse of meaninglessness.

No more grindhouse theaters, no more venues for independent art and music, no more revival houses, nada. Zip. Just a playground for the rich. Record stores? They're almost all gone throughout the nation. Bookstores? Who reads anymore? Some of us, but not many. If there is any nostalgia to be had, it's for a NYC that was once a free-for-all cesspool that was affordable. It was oddly refreshing in its freedom. There are certainly contemporary pockets there where scenes exist, but NYC is no longer the center of American culture, especially since Giuliani and the internet. And that's why Mondo New York isn't relevant today, and merely a so-so social document of some of the weirdness that was once allowed to flourish within the city limits of NYC. That's over.

Watching this, I had to wonder: "Where's Sonic Youth? Where's the Knitting Factory scene, the Jewish jazz scene, the hip-hop, and where's Bill Laswell, John Zorn, the Swans, and the wave of postpunk artists who were doing well at that time?" Where's Keith Haring? Where's Jean Paul Basquiat?

The answer on the music-side: the morons who produced the documentary had cheese-head/coke-head Alan Douglas overseeing the music in the film. Douglas is the guy who gave Al Hendrix $30,000 for the rights to Jimi's music after 1970.

Some rumors have it that he's hopelessly-addicted to cocaine to-this-day, with one story involving a garden-hose... Also, the score is really horrible and was done by Luis Perico Ortiz and Johnny Pacheco. I think a Casio keyboard and those godawful Yamaha DX-7s (digital piano, ugh!) were used, so it sounds incredibly dated and trivializes most of what you see in the documentary. Perhaps this was "to take the edge off" for Midwestern audiences at that time, I don't know, but it's a great case of how not to score a film.

We see cock-fights, a voodoo ritual--creepin' Christ, there's a lot of dead-chickens in this one, that's for sure. We see Joey Arias do a bad impersonation of a woman singing the worst rendition of "A Hard Days Night" that you'll ever hear. We see a junkie shooting-up, possibly for real. We see a Black comedian (the late great Charlie Barnett) make racial jokes to an audience in Washington Park that wouldn't float nowadays! Ann Magnason is pretty funny with her performance art shorts. Probably the best part of this whole mess is Joe Coleman, known for his folk art/iconographic paintings of serial killers and other sundry criminals and nut-jobs. What's great is his performance-art pieces. He comes out as his persona "Professor Mombuzu," and begins a rant that makes a certain sense, and then whips-out two white-mice named "Mushmouf and Pumkin' puss."  Coleman then bites their heads off and flies into a complete rage. But he isn't done yet: once the audience are sufficiently scared and outraged, he pulls-out a fuse from his 19th century gambler's-vest and blows-himself-up! You couldn't do it today after 9/11.

Seeing shots and hearing references to the World Trade Center just makes this a really sad reminder of how things are worse than the 1980s. This is something many of us never would have imagined back then.

The 1980s sucked, and Mondo New York reminds us of this fact, but it also reminds us that things have gotten much worse since then and that a cultural American Spring is badly needed. If this was our Weimar cabaret before the fall, we really suck, folks! Trashy doesn't really do any service to most of this, and why the dopey blonde as the thread that takes us through all these locations and scenes, why the need for a narrative? If you're going to be titillating, go-for-broke. Like the 80s, it's just another half-measure, with no ejaculation at the end. The viscera needs to be serviced on occasion, and the Devil given his due.

So this is Babylon--how boring, how banal and predictable. No Nick Zedd, Bill Laswell, no hip-hop, no Nowave (NO), no Swans, no Diamanda Galas, no Marc Ribot, no Ornette Coleman, no Rockets Redglare, John Zorn, no Al Goldstein, Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca, Jim Jarmusch, no Quentin Crisp, no vice squads and police brutality, almost no street musicians, no Moondog, no real street crazies, no Allen Ginsberg, canned audio for the CBGB's footage, no reflections on the end of the nightclubbing scene after the death of Andy Warhol, the fallout of AIDS, and no Richard Kern. The hookers are on screen all-too-briefly. There's not much of the best of the 80s underground here, which was the real freak show! Where are the sex clubs? There was a subculture where people just went to these underground clubs and fucked each other, even after AIDs. Where are they? After the end of most of this, we got Michael Alig and the club kids. We know how that one ended.

Postscript, 02.09.2013: Appropriating the term "Mondo" couldn't save what is mostly a disastrous plunge into the inane of NYC in the 1980s. Eliot was right that the world ends with a whimper. Were it not for Joe Coleman and Karen Finley, none of this could rise to the level of Jacopeti and Prosperi's original Mondo documentaries, not even close, but it wasn't an entirely wasted effort. We at least get Lydia Lunch at the beginning, the Santeria, but a lot of this is simply embarrassingly stupid and unimportant. Interviewing bums around the Bowery would have been better--and where is the fucking Chelsea?! At least they documented aspects of the gay community, and in the arts. Heavy Metal magazine was doing a better job reporting on the underground there at the time, several years earlier. I could go on forever, and I wasn't even there at the time. Oh well. I blame John Waters.