The End of the World, Part 2

Since Apocalypse Culture first appeared, Parfrey's remained a key figure of independent publishing. He coedited the great Rants & Incendiary Tracts, kick-started the 90s Ed Wood fad with Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy and prefigured the cocktail culture with the retro-parody CAD, became Anton LaVey's publisher, and put out assorted titles like The X-Rated Bible, the black metal tome Lords of Chaos, Joe Coleman's Cosmic Retribution, Josh Alan Friedman's Tales of Times Square, Jim Hogshire's Pills-a-go-go, a new edition of Struwwelpeter, Jim Keith's Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas & Hidden History and various conspiracy tracts like Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A., along with a handful of grotesque death-and-disaster videos and his own CD, A Sordid Evening of Sonic Sorrows.

Now Parfrey has edited and published Apocalypse Culture II (Feral House, 458 pages, $18.95). Contributors include a rogues' gallery of outré types and fringe specialists: Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, actor Crispin Glover, Jim Goad, Colin Wilson, James Shelby Downard, Michael A. Hoffman II, Michael Moynihan, Boyd Rice, Peter Sotos, George Petros, Jonathan Vankin, Trevor Brown.

Apocalypse Culture II suggests that the world has only gotten darker and crazier in the decade-plus since the original volume. "Things had to creep me out in order to be included in the book," Parfrey says to me. It's both fatter than the original and, unless I've just gotten squeamish, more disturbing. For one thing, Parfrey has upped the visually disturbing gross-out factor, sprinkling the text with a smattering of autopsy photos and dismembered corpses. (A colleague came into my office the other day, flipped the book open, jolted like an invisible hand had slapped his face and threw the book away from him. He'd stumbled straight into one of those mutilated-corpse photos.) And there's an awful lot of material here on kiddie porn and pedophilia, including a long and really upsetting disquisition on the media's crypto-pedophilic JonBenet Ramsey fixation by a real pedophile with his own JonBenet jones, the notorious Peter Sotos.

Other extreme sexual perversions on display here include coprophilia, more necrophilia and sexual cannibalism. In that last category there's the fascinating story of Issei Sagawa, told by Colin Wilson. Sagawa was a mild-mannered young literature student at Paris University who, one day in 1981, invited a pretty fellow student over to his apartment, killed her, raped her corpse, ate one of her buttocks, then butchered her, putting the tastiest parts in the fridge, carting the rest out in two large suitcases. As often happens nowadays, morbid public curiosity and media obsession both in Europe and Japan made Sagawa more of a famous celebrity than a despised criminal; he became a bestselling author who's even appeared in a few movies. Ultimately, Wilson persuasively argues, the giddy public embrace of this man is perhaps as mad and ugly as his crime.

Another large section of the book deals with extremist politics. On this front, Parfrey might be called an equal opportunity editor. Contributors Boyd Rice, Michael Moynihan (the Lords of Chaos co-author who contributed several pieces here) and Michael A. Hoffman II (whom I interviewed a few years ago about his provocative revisionist history tome They Were White and They Were Slaves) have all been accused in the past of variously neo-Nazi and/or white power leanings. On the other hand there's Richard Green of something calling itself Jews for Hitler, Irv Rubin of the Jewish Defense League ("When Moses, our great teacher,/Saw a Jew who bled,/He didn't petition Pharaoh;/He smote the Egyptian dead") and eco-extremists like the Unabomber and the Finnish philosopher Pentti Linkola. Among the several conspiracy theories about subliminal advertising and mind control discussed in the books, my favorite is Project Blue Beam, "a secret government plan to use satellite-based lasers developed by NASA scientists to project holograms of the messiah in the sky to simulate the Second Coming and convince Christians that the Rapture is occurring."

One of the funniest pieces in the book is a rant in which Crispin Glover considers the beneficial social side effects of eliminating Steven Spielberg from the planet. (Apparently they've been enemies since Spielberg cut Glover out of the second and third Back to the Future movies.) It's a remarkable document coming from somebody who presumably wishes to maintain an acting career in Hollywood:

"Did DreamWorks, the megacorporate entity co-owned by Steven Spielberg, consider paving over the last remaining wetland in Southern California to create a studio? Does Steven Spielberg feel comfortable emasculating the natural? Is climbing the Alps, or is riding the Matterhorn rollercoaster in Disneyland, more attractive to Steven Spielberg? Is the theme park mentality of our culture, which is made to feel 'right' and 'moral' by the propagandizing movies of Steven Spielberg, helping to destroy individual thought processes and emasculate what remains of the earth?

"...Would the culture benefit from Steven Spielberg's murder, or would it be lessened by making him a martyr? Or would people then begin to realize their lives had become less banal and more interesting due to his departure?

"Because I think it is possible a beautiful piece of non-lingual music could well be written by an angry victim once Steven Spielberg becomes a corpse. It could be that this angry victim of banal and ruinous propaganda will have written an anthem signaling a new era, a new thought process, a new music, and a new culture that is desperately needed in the coming days, and forevermore."

(Parfrey appears in Glover's long-rumored 16 mm film project, What Is It?, in which he plays "an extremely psychosexual neurotic-psychotic who believes that vertebrates are lower life-forms and wishes that he was a snail?or Michael Jackson, one or the other. So he dresses up [in blackface] and muses on the topic." The film, which has made the rounds of weirdness enthusiasts in various incarnations over the last couple of years, also features retarded and deformed actors.)

I called Parfrey in L.A. last week and asked him why he'd decided to do an Apocalypse Culture II.

"The more I looked into it," he replies, "the more it seemed the nature of the world was changing, quickly, especially the nature of taboos," and that a new compendium was in order. He also says he's come to consider the original book "a piece of juvenilia." He's 43, and "when the first one came out I was 29, so I was 25, 26 when I first started on it."

Still, I say to him, that first book broke a lot of ground, at least along the social edges; a lot of the strange ideas and murky cults first covered there really bloomed into the mainstream within a few years: UFO lore, JFK conspiracy theories and body piercings, to name just three of the most obvious. And since the coming out of the Internet in the mid-90s, researching the fringe in general has become much more of a common spectator sport. It's not the obscure obsession it was back in the mid-80s when Parfrey, scattered zine types and a few nutcases were doing it.

"The original book I researched by mail?not by e-mail, not the Internet [which didn't then exist]?and in the New York Public library, going through moldy old books," he recalls. "Nobody, at that time, was interested in the very early conspiracy theories, eugenics, all that stuff. I was astonished that not many people knew about it, that it wasn't better known or researched or regarded."

Asked why there's so much about kiddie porn and pedophilia in the new book, he replies, "The first book went beyond that dotted line about civilized behavior. Any book about 'apocalypse culture' is going to show that, wherever the transgression comes." And the two major taboos to be transgressed today, he argues, are "in the realms of extreme politics and kiddie porn."

The latter he felt the book had to explore because it represents the prime example of cultural hypocrisy today, when the media can wallow in near-kiddie-porn with JonBenet Ramsey's painted lips and Britney Spears' belly button, then turn around and decry the dangerous perverts trolling the Internet for children to molest. And who better than a genuine pedophile like Sotos, he argues, to analyze and dissect all this perverse media coverage? "You get the idea after reading the article that not only is Peter Sotos a pervert, but the entire media consists of perverts, and that's the main point."

To illustrate the writing about kiddie porn, the book includes a fair number of sordid paintings and drawings, along with some other more generally perverse artwork. Here's a painting of a Keane-type waif peeing while a lecherous clown looks on. Here's one of Adolf Hitler getting a blowjob from a child. Here's a swastika of penises. This is some weird and disgusting material, I tell Parfrey. He says, what do you expect from a book called Apocalypse Culture? What's the point, if he didn't show readers the extremes?

Then again, he was partially prevented from doing just that. After a number of printers refused to produce the book, Parfrey finally gave in and agreed to have old-fashioned censor's black bars and circles placed on some of the most offensive images. The uncensored images can be seen at feralhouse.com.

Similarly, when I ask why I had to see the photos of the girl's chopped-up corpse in the Issei Sagawa story, he responds, "One of the most amazing things about that story is that Issei Sagawa is a huge star. Do I simply overlook his behavior, and play him up as a Japanese star? Or do you show the desperate, weird, horrendous side of him? If I had an article about the Manson family, I would have to show the crime scene, because otherwise you're making a star out of a guy who's committed a crime."

I ask him what he thinks all these nuts, perverts and extremists have to say about society at large. Is the lunatic fringe just the fringe, or does it have an impact on the larger culture?

"I've got to admit that I agree with a philosopher who's now largely discredited, and that's Oswald Spengler," he responds. "I do believe that we are seeing the total decline of Western culture." These extreme views from the fringes "percolate into mainstream manifestations," and that's the point of documenting and tracking them, he insists. Even if it's hard to look.