Infernal Anecdotes
Gigs from Hell: Feral Dispatches from Rock’s Fetid Underbelly, ed. Sleazegrinder
Critical Vision, the publishing imprint attached to Headpress, the journal devoted to all that is strange and/or esoteric, are purveyors of fine books to discerning members of the counter-cultural community, but their outputtage falls into two distinct categories: first, volumes suitable for the more thoughtful participants in that grouping, such as their mind-stretching explorations of issues around Forteanism; and second, tomes accessible in terms of a more general sensibility. Gigs from Hell impacts — with a satisfyingly wet, squelchy splat — in the middle of the latter selection as editor/ring-master Sleazegrinder saddles the “feral beast” that is rock’n’roll, then cranks all monitors to über-bleed as he breaks the fetid crust on a swirling maelström of rock decadence that he himself first truly began to mine after a long-ago mid-interview epiphany:
Cutting the rock star off in mid sentence, I took an entirely different route of questioning. “Forget all that,” I said. “What I really want to know is: Have you fought your way out of a gig?” He hadn’t, but I pressed on. “Ever punch a cop? Fuck an underage groupie? Vomit right into your own drum kit?” This became my standard line of questioning.This drug-addled, crab-infested, tinnitus-nagged spirit — the urge to submerge in the raw bedrock viscerality of rock — informs the choice of ’most every story in this book, from NYC-based Porn Rock’s bare-assed, beer-drenched, blonde-braided clog-dancing at a rock festival in Holland to Canadian heavy-metal thunder-god Thor’s noxious narrative of a neck-brace-inducing encounter with a “400-pound woman” from his baying fan-community. “Will appeal to anyone who has ever picked up a guitar!” the promo hyperbolizes. Nah. These fetid dispatches from rock’s feral underbelly will impact all who have ever heard a six-stringed musical instrument.
out of five.
Say it Ain’t So, JOE
Dissecting the Deviant: The Headpress Guide to the Counter Culture, ed. David Kerekes and Temple Drake
Like internationally-acclaimed soccer club Manchester United, globally-hailed Headpress journal of esoterica and its publishing arm Critical Vision are localed in the British city of Manchester. But do the parallels run deeper? Many knowledgeable sports commentators predict Manchester United are now destined to live on past glories for an indeterminate period. While continuing to offer a radically heterogenous alternative to the voyeurism, cliché and Americanization of the mainstream, one struggles to eschew a similar prophecy for Headpress JOE and its contributors: several years have past since the feral brain-candy of e.g seminal “snuff” study Killing for Culture, unblinking necrophile movie probe Sex Murder Art, paradigm-smashing Fortean critique Politics of the Imagination and pop/rock-underbelly spotlight I Was Elvis Presley’s Bastard Lovechild. Agreed, the reviews in this collection cover an extremely wide gamut in terms of underground/counter-cultural material, but the essential element/component of surprise is often lacking: been there, done that, bought the director’s cut on special edition DVD. Akin to his long-term heroes The Beatles, editor/author/cultural-commentator David Kerekes’s background is north-west-British Catholic, but these days he seems less analogous to maverick genius John “I Am the Walrus” Lennon and more reminiscent of decent-but-dull boiler-plater Paul “The Lovely Linda” McCartney. Transnationally-lauded Manchester Utd coach Sir Alex Ferguson is in desperate need of fresh new blood for his soccer club; similarly-saluted writer/publisher David Kerekes arguably requires a not unidentical prescription for Headpress JOE and Critical Vision.
out of five.
Comet Atcha
The Headpress Pop-Up Book of Astronomy Studies, ed. Michael Welsh and Ji-Hu Li
A startingly original book even by the standards of this maverick/rogue publishing house: you’ll find yourself ducking as newly-invented pop-up-book technology seems to send comets, asteroids and white dwarfs hurtling at your head. The representation/imaging of the black hole on page 78 is particularly good: you can almost feel the gravitational pull on your earrings/fillings. Suitable both for kids but also astro-physics PhDs.
out of five (!).
Rockituri...
Blood on the Tracks: A Suicide Squad of Underground Scribes Assail the Ramparts of Rock, ed. Phil Jarrig; Now He’s Sixty-Four: Headpress Salutes a Seminal Hero of Rock/Pop, ed. Derek Colgate; Backstage Boogie: A History of Groupie Culture from Hep-Cats to Zep-Rats and Beyond, ed. Harry Gilligan; Deaf Certificate: Forty Years of Worship at the Shrine of Led Zeppelin, ed. Hansi Draper and Udo Queenan; Puke, Pills and Pussy: On the Road with America’s Wildest Punk-Rock Performers, ed. Olga Trebor
There are disappointingly — or fortunately? — few publishers of whom it is possible to say of them that their productions release a genuine frisson of authentically visceral/pheromonic menace... and for whose volumes/tomes I’ve literally gone without food to purchase them. Feral House of San Francisco are one of this select groupage. Creation Books of London (and also San Francisco) are another. And Critical Vision of Greater Manchester are a third. With these literary W.M.D.s, Critical Vision stake their claim to be considered arguably the key player in this synapse-fusing triumvirate. If you think you’ve seen a bear-slide state-side, think again: you’ll pick up these books with veridical — or vi-ridical — apprehension, interrogating yourself uneasily: “With this much subterranean talent packed between two covers, is it safe to open the fuckers?”
Well, it is... and it extravaviously isn’t. “Clichéry” and “soporificism” just aren’t in the vocabulary/lexicon of the suicide squad of underground scribes assemblaged here. Each is a scarred veteran of trangressive mind-combat, using words as weapons to leave your consciousness lying bruised, dazed, and bleeding in the gutter of post-imagination. Having counted them up, literally dozens of well-thumbed texts/manifestos by the first two aforementioned publishers (Feral House and Creation Books) jostle for pecking-order on my shelves. Each has been a necessary document of personal mind-expansion and transgressive engagement. But with more material like this, my as-equally-as-well thumbed Critical Vision collection will be starting to nudge/edge clearly into premier place in my hierarchy of heresy. As Nietzsche says: «In der Schwärzung des Himmels wurde nur ein Wort gesprochen, und das ist... Methuselem.» “In heaven’s darkness only one word is spoken, and that is... Methuselah.” No other books in my experience have taken these words more conscientiously to heart, and likely no other books ever will...
out of five.
Splatterfamilias
Killing for Culture: A Seminal Survey of Death Film from Mondo to “Snuff”, David Kerekes (simul-scribed with David Slater)
When David Mitchell penned in A Serious Life, his study of Manchester-HQ’d Savoy Books, of how “alternative culture” in Britain is a sterile wasteland/desert absent his subject’s input, a single thought/objection must have yelped urgently in the brain-pans of literally dozens of his readers: “But what about Headpress journal and/or Critical Vision, locationed in the exact same metropolis?!” Agreed, Killing for Culture: A Seminal etc isn’t in actuality a Critical Vision tome, being publicationed by über-maverick post-literary London-locus’d Creation Books... but I like to think of it as the feral flagship of the Headpress/Critical Vision brand/esthetic. Certainly it’s guaranteed to stir even the most hardened members of the corpse-cinema-aficionado community, and nary a moment’s perusal will confer that drinking buddies Kerekes and Slater have crafted a visceral gauntlet for all death-film researchers destined to spadework in their fetid wake, displaying a dedication to their topic-area above and beyond the call of duty. More than 99.99% of the human race has/have never seen even a fraction of the dankly-disturbing death-footage microscoped here, and it’s indubitably true that this headcount of the homo-sapiens-community just couldn’t have handled the full menu of maggots’n’mutilation. But, not only do Kerekes and Slater absorb countless hours of mind-reaming imagery in terms of death’n’decomposition and come back (more or less!) sane, but they’re also equipped to unleash razor-sharp insights that will go off like sulfurous depth-charges in their readers’ sensibilities for years to come. As the Davids (nearly) used to chant in their mid-to late teen years on soccer-franchise Manchester Citys’ world-famed Stratford Lane terraces: “Come and ’ave a look if you think you’re ’ard enough...”
out of five.
I am a Camera
Sex Murder Art: Inquisitioning the Necrophile Œuvre of Berlin-Based Auteur Jörg Buttgereit, David Kerekes
Human beings are imperfect... and David Kerekes’s innate honesty will not allow him to draw a fetid veil over the defects his unblinking post-voyeuristic gaze engages in terms of the close-knit artistic community centered around Berlin-positioned death-director Jörg Buttgereit. From the Teuton necromeister’s own tic to an actor’s sliminess to the bogus bonhomie of an über-famed rock/pop icon to (arguably most disturbing of all vis-à-vis unsettlingness) the woman who sits next to strange men at the cinema — David observes and records all these and more, skilfully utilizating them as a visceral counterpoint to his tumidious critique of the German auteur’s exploration of issues around that universal human flaw: our mortality. Notions around death, decomposition and dead-sex are the central concerns of his subject’s filmic career and David excavates each to its purulent epicenter, scattering acute critical observations like some kind of feral confetti. Not a tome for the squeamish, discerning adult members of the death-film community will long treasure its no-compromises confrontationing of theoretical concerns around the deepest, dankest and darkest aspects of the condition humaine.
out of five.
Over the ’Wall
Ghouls, Gargoyles and Gory Deeds: Celebrationing the Dark Genius of Skywald Comics, David Kerekes (con. ed.)
If you want to engage the coolest, gandest and most maverick individuals/persons in any medium-to large-size English-language-using urban conglomeration, there’s a very simple way... Just track up where the Headpress-journal-reading community hang/hangs out. And if you want the fetid crême de la crême of this feral èlite just search off the Skywald aficionados amongs them... In a way I kinda have a love-hate relationship in terms of issues around what this book has done for SKywald. Okay, on the one hand it‘s brought the long-deceased company out of the shadows and into some of the feral limelight it/they have long deserved. Then agauin... I wanted the visceral infection of that copyright “Horror Groove” to be my secret, shared with only a few like-minded horror-comic freaks who, like me have treasured, this unique comix corporation and it’s incendiary publications since adolescent days. But all kudos go to Critical Vision for once a gain digging down a little-frequented highway-and byway of pop-culture and dragging rogue artifacts, kicking and struggling, to the surface for the benefit of we special few with the insight and sheer-damn never-say-die counter-cultural contrariness to recognize their inner worth... Like Headpress itself, you don’t grow outa Skywald, somehow retaining the feral capacity to shock-and-awe members of it’s rabidly loyal fan-community as much at fifty as it did at fifteen. Long may it “reign inblood.“
out of five.
Future reviews will engage the following essential texts... Probing the Personal: The Headpress Guide to Intimate Espionage, David Kerekes (con. ed) (forthcoming); Nuancing the Necrofilmic: Two Shell-Shocked Horror Veterans Survey a Century of “Splatter”, Kevin Humphreys and Maxi Ferguson (ed.) (forthcoming); Softer Machines: A Fetid Tribute to William S. Burroughs, David Kerekes (ed.) (forthcoming); Feral Beacon: The Early Years of Headpress Journal and Critical Vision, David Kerekes et al (forthcoming); Maverick Messiahs: 23 Visceral Visionaries for the Kali Yuga, Jason Henderson (ed.) (includes pieces on Burroughs, Lovecraft, Kleberson, Foucault, Nietzsche and “Necro-A-Go-Go: Interrogating Themes of Thanatotropic Alterity in the Œuvre of David Kerekes”) (forthcoming).