So here we are.

The scene opens on what would appear to be a man. In this case the man in question is walking. Nothing dramatic. Just one foot after the other along the side of a road. There is no catchy tune synching perfectly with his steps (though you are more than welcome to imagine one). It’s dark and the air is cool. Judging by the temperature it’s almost certainly Autumn, at perhaps… 8:27 p.m. if I had to make a guess.

“Almost, perhaps, if I had to make a guess.” A good title for a relativist poem but a lot of hedging for one sentence, I know. Especially when that sentence is located smack in the center of scene-setting exposition. But really who can be sure about these things?

It’s a quiet night and there’s a definite chill in the air. That’s all I’m saying.
 
He’s slightly pigeon-toed, our walking man. His black lace-up shoes are nondescript but the toes scuff one another occasionally as he trudges along. So that’s something. A bit of “quirky” specific detail which we narrators are supposed to use in order to spice up the proceedings. Here’s another- he’s not a Black man. Not that you said he was. Neither does he appear to be Asian, Hispanic, American Indian, or of Middle Eastern descent. I suppose it’s possible that if you traced his ancestors back far enough you might find one or all of these races perched on limbs of his family tree. For our purposes let’s just say he’s a white guy. At least he looks kind of white… or ashen? More of a pallor possibly…

Put it this way- if you saw him passing by and wanted to get his attention, say to warn him of an oncoming truck, you might yell out “Hey cracker, watch out! ...Damned fool.” You could replace cracker with gringo or infidel… Your perogative really, but you get the picture. If you saw him and wanted to reach into your slur-bag you’d most likely pull from the “whitey” pile.

So our pigeon-toed cracker is wearing blue jeans and a grey sweatshirt, if your interested in that kind of thing, though it’s about as average an outfit as you’re likely to see. Which is to say it doesn’t tell you much about him, or more accurately it doesn’t offer you anything substantial to fuel your dependable ol’ assumption engine with. He’s of medium height and medium build, does not seem to have a limp, or club foot, nor does he appear to have any talent for swagger. He’s just kind of trudging along. All told there’s nothing much to distinguish him from from any other average looking whitish guy out for an evening stroll, except of course for the space helmet he’s wearing.

Did I neglect to mention that?

Yup. He’s wearing an out-of-date looking space helmet. Could be one of those helmets developed for “tomato worm” pressure suits back in the 1940’s. Or it could be a more modern lexan model without the visor assembly and silver coating. Maybe it’s some newfangled model which requires none of the additional do-daddery we’ve come to expect… Truth be told, more than anything, it looks like a giant, upside down, goldfish bowl.

I suppose your assumption engine jolted to life on the power of that little nugget huh?

“He’s a crashed astronaut wandering in an amnesiac haze trying desperately to put the pieces together and reveal his own identity!” OR “He’s a time traveller from the year 3014 returning to our time in order to find a genetically perfect bride, free of the Toe-Chewer virus so devastating in his own era!”

Yeah, maybe, but you know the old chestnut about making assumptions. It could be halloween and the guy’s got no flair for costumes. Or maybe he’s a prop comic on his way to a gig. Possibly he’s just a nut.
 
I can’t tell you much more about his looks. The helmet is a bit fogged up you see. All that warm breath inside and cool air outside. Only natural, science and all. He looks to have big dreamy dark eyes, though it might just be a shadow. What I can tell you with absolute certainty, however, is that he does not have the faintest idea where he is going. I know this because, being narrator, I’m privy to certain of his thoughts. For instance at this very moment he’s thinking:

...For both of them to say that… not one uncle but both, from both sides. The same exact thing… “Don’t think there’s much hope for you Bucky.” One while packing his pipe, the other gutting a fish… What a dick thing to say… I’d like to know the odds on them both saying that same exact thing! Had they spoken to one another? Group consensus? Towing the “uncle” party line? Bucky?! Who says Bucky? Bucko. Buckaroo maybe… Just bugs me… They are family so they’re not apt to just throw out thoughtless damning pronouncements for no reason are they? On the other hand they’re just uncles, not fathers, not so close that they would be blinded or compelled to bite their tongue for niceties sake…

See? Not even paying attention to where he’s going. More interested it seems in this perceived synchronicity of uncle-judgement. Had I tuned you in earlier you’d have heard the part about his aunts. Both of whom evidently told him he’d be a “heartbreaker.” Some folks might take that as a compliment but not our space-helmeted, pigeon-toed, ashen-faced infidel here. He figured it was a prettied-up way of saying he’d be a disappointment to the women in his life; That he seemed to them either cruel and uncaring or fundamentally lacking something somehow. I’m paraphrasing. Point is he didn’t take it to mean he was handsome.

As is the peculiar ability of the living, his feet continue to come down one in front of the other propelling him onward, though his mind is elsewhere entirely.

A multitude of wobbly stars are winking above him. Below his auto-piloted feet dirt and gravel crunch. He’s walking beside a road. Not a very well-travelled road admittedly. Not a single vehicle has passed by. There are street lights every three hundred feet or so. When he passes below one his helmet glints, bouncing light across his brow. In the space of a few steps his shadow is born, grows, moves away, and dies out. He might have found it poetic in a certain way if he’d noticed, but he didn’t. Totally oblivious.

For instance if he were paying any attention at all he’d most certainly notice the orange glow up ahead of him, surrounding the gas station sign, and the smoke plumes billowing up into the darkness.

...If I’d been a gardener or a banker or anything else it’d all be different. Harriet would have stuck around. Or at least she’d have to be more imaginative about her excuse for leaving… Ridiculous… What did she expect this kind of life would be like? If I’d been something else, a mechanic, a grocer, anything, I wouldn’t be out here in…

A light goes on in that distracted mind of his and some curiosity about his surroundings finally dawns. It’s only coincidence that he stops right there under a street lamp, his helmet glinting. As I surmised he can’t help but notice the tell tale signs of catastrophe-by-fire up around the bend. All else is darkness so there’s not much else to notice.
 
What the hell’s going on up there? Fire? Geez does my head hurt… No more nights like this one. Can’t be. Can’t go on this way. What was I thinking?! I didn’t even use any protection. Stupid stupid… God that cloud is thick! A tire fire or something? I really out to be getting back… But where is everyone? Wonder what happened? Crap… Could be a crash…

Snapped out of his dazed, trudging revery, he sets off at a trot toward that glowing and crackling and billowing, mysterious only in its particulars. The street lamps pass over his head quickly. Generations of shadows are born and die out below his footfalls. He doesn’t get far. Turning the bend he almost tackles two guys standing dumbly in the middle of the road, their backs turned to him. He manages to put the breaks on before contact but the two are startled and wheel around to face him. Their clothes are singed and blackened and torn. One of them is missing a shoe. He also happens to have a gun which is pointed straight at our gringo. They both look freaked.

...Shit! They look freaked.

Luckily they each have inverted goldfish bowls on their heads as well. Recognition dawns on all three at the same instant.

-“Bill?”

-“Joe?”

-“Bob?”

-“Joe?”

They know one another. Judging by the names called out it’s safe to say our guy is Joe, while the disheveled and singed two are Bill and Bob. The gun is dropped, the gap between them disappears, and the questions begin in earnest.

“What the hell happened to you two?” asks Joe.

“Bob here fucked with the wrong bad-ass that’s what! Started asking him questions. Tried the ol’ ‘Take me to your leader bit.’ Gave him a little ray-gun action and the guy just blew the fuck up. Knocked us clear across the street into the woods. I told him not to fuck with the guy. He was built like a refrigerator and had a dick like 8 feet long! And I’m serious. That’s not a metaphor. “ Says Bill.

“Yeah, bad move as it turns out. I lost a shoe,” adds Bob. “What are you doing here? I thought you left last week.”

...Crap, here we go. thinks Joe, saying nothing.

“Let me guess. That letter from Harriet last week… Could you be out carousing? Screwing the natives? You’ve got a boot print on your crotch so I’ll assume you didn’t shoot over to New Mexico for your jollies like the rest of us do. Were you out probing primates in the middle of Minnesota Joe?! You sicko.”

Joe squirmed in place and Bob looked pleased. “I hope you were safe Joe, you know how filthy these earthlings are…”

“Leave him alone Bob,” offers Bill sympathetically.

“No. It’s fine. He’s right. I was bar-hopping. Stupid I know… Just didn’t want to go home.” concedes Joe, slouching a bit, the tips of his toes touching.

“But I bet you want to go home now huh? I sure do,” says Bill. “It’s always the same story, a night out to let off steam, some light probing, a little abduction… in the end you always feel… dirty; Always regret it.”

Joe stood there looking at his feet. The glow from the fire was dying down a bit. Their shadows, merged as they were into conjoined triplets, swayed back and forth across the blacktop. He didn’t regret it. He hated this damned planet and it’s ugly primates, but he was tired.

“Yeah, I’m gonna go I think. You guys probably should too, the fuzz will be along soon I’m sure.”

Bill nods. “We’re parked a little ways off, up there past the gas station, in a wheat field. We already layed down the circles. Wanna ride with us? Might as well. Harriet’s got your saucer right?”

Joe nods back.

Bob slides the ray-gun into his charred ray-gun holster, taking a last quick look around for his lost shoe. “Screw it,” he mumbles.

And with that the scene ends the way 59 percent of all scenes do, with a person, or a group of people, walking off into the sunset. Only in this case the people aren’t exactly people and the sunset isn’t really a sunset. Aliens walking off into the glow of a gas station fire is close enough though I think, and will do just fine.

Part 2- Comedy

An alien walks into a bar and sits down next to big guy in combat boots. After about ten minutes and two drinks the alien licks his finger and puts it into the guy’s ear. The guy gets pissed but sees the alien’s space helmet, figures he’s a nut, and holds his tongue.

Ten minutes and two drinks later the alien does it again. This time the guy shoves the alien away saying “If you do that again I will kick the shit out of you.”

Ten minutes and a ciggarette later the alien does it again. The guy jumps off his bar seat grabs the alien and sinks his combat boot deep into the alien’s crotch.

The alien is totally unfazed. He gets back up on his barstool and orders another drink.

The guy is freaked out and says “Dude! What the fuck? I just kicked you in the nuts and you didn’t flinch!”

The alien says “That’s because I don’t have any nuts.” and drops trou just long enough to prove it.

Now the guy’s really freaked. He says, “Jesus christ. You’ve got no nuts! How do you fuck?”

The alien licks his finger and puts it into the guy’s ear.

Meanwhile across town…

Two aliens, one who thinks he’s tough and one who thinks he’s smart, land their space ship and walk over to a nearby gas station. They both walk up to the gas pump.

The tough-guy alien looks at the pump and says, “Take me to your leader!”

Of course the gas pump says nothing.

The smart alien says “I dont think that is a good idea.”

The tough-guy alien looks at the pump again and demands to be taken to the leader.

The gas pump says nothing.

The smart alien says, “That’s really not a good idea man.”

Losing his patience, the bad-ass alien pulls his out his ray-gun.

The smart alien shouts, “No, you don’t want to make him mad!”

But before the sentence is finished the tough guy alien zaps the pump with his ray-gun.

There is a huge explosion that blows both of them clear across the street, where they land in a charred heap.

When they finally regain consciousness, the tough guy alien turns to the smart one and says, “What a mean motherfucker! He damn near killed us! How did you know he was so dangerous?”

The smart alien answers, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned during my travels through the galaxy, it’s that when a guy has a dick he can wrap around himself twice and then stick it in his own ear, you don’t fuck with him.”

The end.

-

Note: This post was one in a series of reworkings of old posts which date from before the redesign of The Nonist. The text has been edited slightly, and the images are new. I will be periodically adding these reworkings into the flow of new content in an effort to eventually remove all the old pages from circulation.

Below are reproduced a few fine examples from Sins of America. But be ready.

You’ll laugh!

You’ll groan!

You’ll be outraged!

You’ll drink more heavily!

You’ll feel a tingling sensation in unmentionable areas of your person!

 


In short goodly reader… you’re pretty much sure to enjoy, sporting folk you are.

For more info on The National Police Gazette check out the following:

A Little Visit to the Lower Depths, by Gene Smith
The National Police Gazette at Everything2
The Sporting Life, at The Intimate Bachelor

To see how the Gazette eventually ended up see:

Cover Girls of WWII
Bad Mags
And the a modern, online version Here

Expect a follow-up with more. Hope you enjoyed.

Geographically and Thematically Related Is-

The Australian magazine NMA. New Music Articles was “formed with the aim of encouraging musicians, composers and sound artists to write about their work as a way of informing the general public, and creating a wider musical debate.” Each of its first 10 issues, published between 1982-1992, featured a companion cassette. “These cassettes covered a varied cross-section of experimental, electronic and new music from Australia produced over this period.”

Some descriptors used for the sounds therein include: computer-assisted music, tape work, environmental compositions, vocal, performance pieces, and improvisation. If those words in combination make you yawn to death or start bleeding from your ears due to some aural sense-memory, that’s understandable. Many people prefer to take in their avant art strictly through their eyeballs.

If you are on the other hand curious about 20 year old computer-assisted avant Australian sounds then let it be known all 10 of these NMA cassettes (as well as selected articles from the magazine itself) are available free online, as are other releases by Austrailian avant label Shamefile Music.

I was drawn particularly to a piece titled Schipsection Woodrelief, 2003. It’s the likeness of an actual cruiseship’s midsection which got parked in Rotterdam’s port across from Vander Ende’s studio-

Quote: In the Rotterdam port a new segment of a cruiseship lies ready for scrapping. The fifteen story high segment was recently (2002) built in Great Britain for an Italian shipping firm. It cost more than 70 million Euros to build. The 6500 ton giant, with 350 huts, a sun deck, and a shopping promenade, was meant to extend an existing ship, the Costa Classica. Because of problems at the yard in Liverpool the extension was delayed, causing the Italians to back out of the deal. The segment became superfluous and the shipyard went bankrupt. The segment will be stripped in Rotterdam for reuse. Furniture and inventory were sold to a theme park.

Here’s a shot of the actual ship’s section.

Evidently a group of local artists were allowed to tour the segment before it was stripped. Must have been a pretty phenomenal site. I can understand his being inspired.

Here are a couple of images of the piece being made to give you an idea of scale.

Here is the finished piece. Fine looking object that. Bravo Ron.

Hope you enjoyed.

Now I don’t think at this late juncture even a half-blind Javanese pre-teen, wearing a Shaq jersey and sipping a can of R.C. Cola through a Spongebob shaped twisty straw, would sit through his newest bootleg DVD and afterward feel compelled to praise Hollywood for its imagination. We locals know this, we see more of the reheated narrative slop than anyone. But this “writing on walls” thing? Sheesh.

Do rational minds have such a very hard time conceiving of ways to portray irrationality? Is this obsessive convoluted scrawl the only visual metaphor we can come up with for the interior of a troubled mind? Is the act of defacing that most comforting of spaces, the one within 4 shelter-giving walls, the most poignant non-lethal transgression we can conceive?

Tell me- Is it that unstable personalities are inordinately difficult to portray or is it simply that tame minds are ill-equipped to visualize the fruits of wild ones? When such a staggering percentage of the populace, though not exactly lunatic, differs substantially enough from the imaginary mental “norm” to require therapy and counseling and annually quadrupling dosages of anti-depressants, I find it hard to believe “the other” is quite so inconceivable.

From a creative standpoint, someone involved in the perpetuation of this goofy trope has to realize that the use of an instantly recognizable visual shorthand in the portrayal of abnormality is something of a contradiction. Also, from a functional standpoint, this fictional maniac is generally a killer or stalker or rapist, or some such horrible thing, and the desired reaction to the revelation of his/her insanity ought to be: “Holy shit! That persons insane! Yikes. Creeeepy.” Seeing something as familiar and comfortable to your psyche as the ass-groove of your own couch cushions, something like say a tired old cliche, does not inspire this reaction. Does it? I have to chalk it up to a simple lack of imagination. Which is ironic, ‘cause you know who seem to be extremely imaginative? Crazy people.

-

I hereby decree that if this cliche must be used then one of more of the following 3 items must be adhered to-

1. The individual who created the room covered in scrawl must be either a 13 year old (and at least 65% of the scrawl must take the form of band logos and song lyrics,) a graffiti artist (in which case the writing must be applied with something other than plain black ink / white chalk / blood,) or a set designer (who curses under his breath at the director continuously for making him create such a lame set.)

In emergencies when scripts must be turned in within 24 hours the individual may also be a disgruntled typographer, novelist, graphic designer, illuminated manuscript restorer, stenographer, or naughty grade school pupil.

The exception here is an individual who lives in a Lower East Side dive bar bathroom.

2. The handwriting must be neat and finely executed rather than angular chicken-scratch. Someone who spends hours every day writing screeds all over every surface of their room, no matter how batshit crazy, has had plenty of practice and ought to be able to lay down some readable handwriting. (A few storiated initials at the beginning of paragraphs, or some handsomely proportioned looping script would be nice.)

The exception here is if the individual doing the writing is limbless and holds his sharpie in his mouth or between stumps. The individual may also be blind, but in such a case the writing should be in neatly composed braille.

3. Police officers must canvas neighborhoods, going to apartment landlords, motel managers, and concerned parents, carrying not a suspect sketch but the image which began this post. “Have you come across any rooms that look anything like this?” they must ask. “Because if you have… that’s our man.” Clerks at the local art supply store should also be questioned.

If these guidelines are ignored filmmakers must be charged, post haste, with “aggravating assault on a deceased equine” and have their equipment impounded while they await trial… and atomic-wedgies.

-

Lastly, since I fully realize my edicts over the film industry do not carry as much weight as they should, I’d like to take this opportunity to announce my new venture:

Are you too busy scouring the earth for creepy porcelain doll heads, rusty farm tools, 18th century family photos, broken mirrors, and over excitable kittens to really get your wall-scrawling crazy on? Well breathe easy set designer, because we’ve got you, and you’re murderous lunatic’s walls, covered!

Introducing Scrawlpaper®©™ the finest collection of dingy scrawl-covered wallpapers available on the market today.

Have You got a loony whose interior struggle needs to made painfully obviously clear to your brain-dead audience? Kidnapper? Religious nut? Obsessive masturbator? Repressed sister-lusting rapist? Multiple personalitied self-flagellator? Satan worshiper? Rouge Priest? Brilliant but morally bereft doctor? Cannibalistic asylum escapee? Hey, we’ve got the pre-crazied wallpaper just for you!

Scrawlpaper®©™

(Coming soon.)

“Of all that was attempted this side of nothingness, is anything more pathetic than this world, except for the idea which conceived it? Wherever something breathes there is one more infirmity: no palpitation which fails to confirm the disadvantage of being; the flesh horrifies me: these men, these women, offal that moans by the grace of certain spasms; no more relationship with the planet: each moment is merely a vote in the urn of my despair.

What does it matter, whether Your works leave off or continue! Your subalterns cannot complete what You ventured without genius. From the blindness into which You plunged them, they will emerge nonetheless, but will they have the strength to take revenge, and will You to defend yourself? This race is rusty, and You even rustier. Turning toward Your Enemy, I await the day when he will pilfer Your sun to hang it in another universe.”

-E.M. Cioran. From A Short History of Decay, translated by Richard Howard.

-

What can I say?
Just tickled me and thought I’d share.
That last line? Gorgeous.

Looking back on the visual legacy of the American Eugenics movement is quite fascinating. Aside from the historical photographs (always of interest) you are faced with a seemingly endless array of statistical data, a prospect which you’d intuit to be a rather dry affair. In looking, however, you find yourself alternately offended, amused, repulsed, empathic, and generally engaged. When was the last time a powerpoint pie chart made you uncomfortable or the bar graph in the margins of a trade magazine pissed you off?

The lingering power in much of the Eugenics material can be attributed to the fact it was aimed at a “general” audience. A large swath of it was created in an effort to sway the general populace toward its position. In as much there is often a strange marriage of dispassionate math with the visual language of tabloid journalism. The result being a surprising kind of statistical provocation that feels more akin to propaganda than science.

The diagrams and brochures and flash cards, meanwhile, which were not necessarily designed for public consumption, having been drawn up in a time well before our current notions of political correctness, seem to jump off the page in their bluntness, challenging our accepted decorum. In other cases the notions of heredity being explored, in this age prior to advances in genetic research, often juxtapose traits and classifications which illicit involuntary guffaws.

In few cases are the materials simply bland.

At bottom I’d say this is because the materials are always focussed on the one subject we, none of us, can ignore, which we all have opinions and ideas about- ourselves. Our favorite subject, and by extension our second favorite subject as well, how others are different from ourselves.

In any case having come across the mother load of visual material that is The Eugenics Archive I thought I’d draw your attention to just a few representative items in their collection for your offense, amusement, repulsion and engagement-

At this point, so many years later, these items fascinate not particularly because of the data they convey but because of their method of conveyance- surely a failing from a statistical standpoint, but not from an ideological one. Which it could be argued was really the whole aim of the enterprise anyway. They sure push all the age old buttons don’t they? The same ones which our politicians and ideologues, not coincidentally, are still pushing.

Taken on the whole, with the parade of references to insanity, albinism, neurosis, sex crimes, feeblemindedness, gigantism, larceny, “pauperism,” schizophrenia, “idiocy,” achondroplasia, promiscuity, murder, epilepsy, hypertrichosis, and “natural ventriloqual power,” immersion for any period of time in these materials makes you feel as though you were wandering through an Hieronymus Bosch painting. ‘Course, I always thought Bosch had an almost preternatural talent for capturing the reality of humanity in his fantasy, so perhaps that’s as it should be.

Hope you… enjoyed?

This would point then to in-between periods as well, when cumulative chemical reactions allowed colors to begin making their entrance en masse, when the Earth might have appeared in very tight, limited color palettes.

Perhaps from a vantage point in space it would have appeared grey and black and ivory with some smatterings of super-saturated volcanic orange? (A bit like a certain much-beloved website now that I think of it.)

Or maybe the entire surface appeared as a sort of liver colored mixture of grey and brown and purple which, as if moving a slider in a photoshop effects panel, smoothly brightened and became more saturated?

Maybe the coloring of the earth proceeded outward from relatively distinct areas, some green, some yellow and ochre and copper with a few bursts of wild vermillion? Maybe these grew and blended at their edges like a watercolor on grey paper?

Maybe for a million years or so, when viewed, from say the distance of Mars, Earth might have appeared as a pointalist-like body with small “dots” of color creating the illusion of a smooth continuous shift?

Maybe the color was built up like layer after layer of semi-transparency, deepening and becoming more rich, until distinctly colored shapes emerged that looked, from afar, like moo cows or Victorian courtesans or 1973 Dodge Charger’s with their hoods popped- life forms and objects that wouldn’t exist for a few billion years yet?

Perhaps for a million years or so, when looked at from just the right angle, the entire surface looked like the face of an unshaven tramp clown, with sad dark grey eye sockets, a down turned ashen-grey mouth, and a giant red volcano nose?

Could have been any damn thing.

Over time, obviously, with the evolution of bacteria and algae and parrots and gay pride parades down 5th Avenue the Earth transformed into the spectacularly rich and varied Technicolor extravaganza we love so well today.

Which brings me to my final thought- 

If there were indeed Creators, (or alternately, infinitely patient alien entities looking on, waiting for a life form to evolve advanced enough to invent pitless mangos and a cure for herpes) they might very well think back to that grey Earth of yore in the exact same way we moderns look back on our black and white movies, just a bit mournfully, sentimentally, with an aching nostalgia for a “simpler” time.

(Chromatically at least.)

!!!

Enjoyment was intended.

(All images portioned from the magnificent bounty of here. All machine elucidations, fully actual! Happy courtesy of the babelling fish.)