Is it just me or is there something really seductive about the strange, the bizarre, the unexpected?
I don’t claim to be an authority on the worldwide web of weirdness. My only qualification would be that I once tried to make a pet out of a slug, that I love assorted oddities, and that I buy Bizarre magazines whenever I can.
I had the slug – or "Sluggy" as my girlfriend called it – for three days only. I thought it was happy in its slimy little box littered with leaves and a bit of dirt. The little bastard escaped one day. Maybe it went back to the garden where I found it in the first place. How could something that moves an inch an hour get away from me so quickly? I wonder what went on in its small, slimy brain. Maybe it pondered its fate like a doomed protagonist in an existential play by Jean-Paul Sartre (No Exit, perhaps) or like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. Oh, well. It will come crawling back to me, literally, one of these days.
Speaking of pets, what about the Grendel monster from the Beowulf epic? I am being ironic, of course. I love the way author John Gardner post-modernized the epic by retelling the story from the viewpoint of the monster, thus allowing us readers to sympathize with a creature that makes breakfast out of villagers. Grendel is one of the books I would bring with me if I get exiled to the moon. (Try to get a copy of this, dear readers, and tell me what you think.)
In Gardner’s extraordinary novel, Grendel the man-eater contemplates the world of men, which to him ironically is brutal and beastly. In one incident, the monster raids the castle and muses whether to kill the queen or not, as the king shakes, makes lunatic noises and drools in terror. Grendel tells himself, "I would kill her and teach them reality…" But the introspective monster changes his mind. "It would be meaningless, killing her. As meaningless as letting her live. It would be, for me, mere pointless pleasure, an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity."
The most mind-altering character in Grendel is the philosophizing and pedantic dragon, who "sees from the mountaintop: all time, all space." And what does the fire-breather think of mankind?
"(Men are) counters, measurers, theory makers. Games, games, games. They only think they think. No total vision, total system… I could tell you a thousand tiresome stories of their absurdity. They’d map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories, their here-to-the-moon-and-back lists of paltry facts… They build the whole world out of teeth deprived of bodies to chew or be chewed on."
What a great image that would make: teeth stretching out to infinity.
The dragon even predicts the end of time as this: "A sea of black oil and dead things. No wind. No light. Nothing stirring… (And) it has (already) happened – in the future. I am the witness." The dragon speaks like Tiresias in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. He then turns to clueless Grendel (or to us uncomprehending readers for that matter, the same way that Albert Camus’ protagonist in The Fall was all the while directly addressing us) and says, "It must be very frustrating to be caged like a Chinaman’s cricket in a limited mind."
Whew. This is a killer book. Not like the overrated titles bathed with hallelujahs from Oprah. Gardner’s book is better than narcotics. Literature rocks.
Also hallucinogenic is the art of Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger. We all know the artist as the creator of the serial-killing extraterrestrial in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Inspired by Hieronymous Bosch, Salvador Dali and Ernst Fuchs, H.R. Giger, according to critic Stanislav Grof, has captured the soul of the 20th Century – its clones, robots, terrorists, aborted fetuses, aliens, unnamable creatures and other biomechanical horrors.
Working with an airbrush and cadaver-greens and post-mortem-browns, Giger has created an elaborate universe where there is a fusion of flesh, steel, sex and death in such works as the "Landscape" series, the "Passage" series, "Illuminatus," "Cataract," "Baphomet," "A. Crowley (The Beast 666)," "Li II," "Spell 1," and "Homage to S. Beckett," among others.
Customs officials, I forgot in which country, once thought Giger’s paintings were photos. "Where on earth did they think I could have photographed my subjects?" Giger wrote. "In Hell, perhaps?"
I have started to put together a nerdy collection of all things Giger – from Alien action figures (those limited-edition ones can be pricey) to books (everything by Taschen is a must, also Necronomicon II) to a piece of sculpture (my sister Jelly gave me a cast of "Spell 1," which is No. 373 of – dig this – 666) to DVDs.
Watching Alien directed by Ridley Scott, who also directed Blade Runner, you get the impression that outer space could be cold, claustrophobic and inhabited by chest-busting and face-hugging creatures. In the Alien documentary, the people who worked with Giger describe him as somewhat similar to Count Dracula, as he wore all-black outfits and was preceded by weird myths: that he kept the skeleton of his dead fiancée in his house, to name one.
The sequel, Aliens, directed by James Cameron is like a Rockstar: Supernova contestant doing a cover of a classic Who or David Bowie song. (What did Gilby Clarke do in Guns N’ Roses, anyway? Play C# and F# chords when Slash did his hot solos? Now, Gilby is supposed to be a rock ‘n’ roll legend telling wannabe rockers how to rock?) Alien III by David Fincher is more philosophical, although it drags a bit, while Alien Resurrection – featuring Winona Ryder as an android, the cutest in the history of sci-fi cinema – is a good, albeit not great, way to end the saga. Just the right movies to watch on a rainy night, like David Cronenberg’s Videodrome or Naked Lunch.
As expected for someone who dabbles in occult images, Giger has had his share of H.P. Lovecraftian moments.
Years ago, Giger bought a 100-year-old wooden devil’s head covered with human skin that was used as a ritual object for black masses. When he complained afterwards of severe depression, gallery owner Bijan Aalam advised him to stow the devil’s head away. Which he did. But one day Giger took out the ritual object again and attended a party. His friend’s dress suddenly caught fire and she suffered third-degree burns. Coincidence or not, Giger decided to put the devil’s head in a plastic back and took it down to the cellar.
Four years later, Giger decided to include the object in an exhibition in an alchemy symposium. He put the devil’s head in a six-foot-high cabinet filled with objects that were either banal or magical. As Giger was talking to his friend, lightning struck his large cherry tree and nearly killed his neighbors who were in their garden. The devil’s head hasn’t left Giger’s cellar ever since.
A magazine that belongs to the cellar and stored along with ritual objects and dark secrets is Bizarre.
Ever since I stumbled upon a copy of this UK magazine in Book Sale, the frayed ends of my sanity have become, well, more frayed.
Here is a random list of people, events, places and whatever things that readers would encounter in the Bizarre world: an African boy with a face that eats itself (he suffers from a gangrenous infection of the mouth that spreads up the face, destroying flesh as it goes); an eyelid weightlifter (self-explanatory); a Walrus Orchestra (I wonder if they play The Beatles’ I Am The Walrus, goo goo ga joob); freak-show pinups; torture tools such as the heretic fork, the iron maiden, the Judas cradle and "The Rat" (a cage, hot coals, and hungry rats placed on top of a prisoner’s belly); lesbian vampire killers (self-explanatory); a Houdini wannabe who once escaped through a cow’s anus after sewing himself inside the cow; a cat piano (cats, piano keys, sharp spikes and very high C’s); serial killers Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz; people deformed by diseases; and evil doctors like Dr. Robert J. White (who carried the first mammalian head transplant on a rhesus monkey) and the Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele (who injected the eyes of prisoners of Auschwitz with blue dye to create the "Aryan look"). Dr. Mengele also sewed together the veins of two people to create Siamese twins. (And I thought the dentist who treated me 10 years ago was a sadist.)
The works of taxidermist-with-a-difference Scott Bibus, a member of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermist, really caught my eye. His works are not Natural History Museum pieces. Rather they are like something you would find in a John Carpenter movie: a zombie chicken, muskrat eating its own feet, snapping turtle eating a human eye, Siamese frog, frog eating a finger, and other animals that are skinned, flayed, dismembered, or altered by skilled hands with an all-consuming goal: not to simply gross people out, but to "use taxidermy in new, exciting, and often disturbing ways."
Bizarre asks Bibus what his favorite piece is. He says, "Nothing gives me a laugh like really bad taxidermy. I have a goose I mounted in school I like to call ‘The Big Bastard.’ It’s truly horrible, but damned if it isn’t the cutest retarded goose you’ve ever seen."
How bizarre. But you know what are the weirder things for me? Paris Hilton; Tommy Lee on Rockstar: Supernova; MC Hammer on Dance Fever; televangelists; rockers selling shampoos; 10,000 goddamn singing contests; politicians who typify the Homer Simpson adage that every time they learn something new, it pushes the old stuff out of their brains; and the list is endless. One look at them and even Giger’s aliens would run back to their planet with their tails between their legs.
A symphonic black metal band called Livyathan is looking for a male vocalist. The band is influenced by Dimmu Borgir, Old Man’s Child and Children of Bodom. For information, call Hendrik at 0919-238-2901.
For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja_ys@yahoo.com.