And consider as well the unmistakable mutant charm of Linda Blair:
It’s worth remembering that, even in the lowliest slasher flick, filmmakers and casting directors in this none-more-patriarchal industry are predisposed to seek out the girls who are flawless and beautiful and charismatic and able to act with, at least, a competent, easily digestible proficiency. Which is not to say that Linda Blair lacks any of those virtues of course, but we’re so used to seeing women on-screen who exemplify this slightly stultifying ‘actress ideal’ that when someone like Linda, who’d probably get dropped at the first round of auditions for a leading lady role for just being a bit odd lookin’, a bit stroppy, a bit UN-actresslike, is able to pull rank based on her childhood notoriety and stomp commandingly across our screens. . . . well it’s just a plain beautiful thing to see, making the grown up Linda (kinda—she was eighteen circa ‘Exorcist II’) a truly distinctive screen presence. (http://breakfastintheruins.
blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/vhs-purgatory-exorcist-ii-heretic-john.html)
And of course, it sometimes works both ways; this aside on bad film legend Ray Dennis Steckler from the same site sounds like it could come out of Odd John itself:
Man, I love this guy so much. I know it’s a redundant and cruel thing to say, but he’s just so weird looking. Every time he’s on screen, it blows my mind. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a human being who looks, or moves, quite the way he does in my whole life. Was Ray Dennis Steckler born somewhere? Did he have a childhood? I’d prefer to think he just walked outta the woods one day, the emissary of a higher race. (http://breakfastinthe
ruins.blogspot.com/search/label/Ray%20Dennis%20Steckler)
And this is in a review of Wild Guitar, which features “Bud Eagle, a naïve would-be teen idol played with boggle-eyed, thug-faced grace by mighty-quiffed Arch Hall, Jr.” Of course, things aren’t entirely that simple, and I feel I must insert a warning here, lest anyone think of improving their chances on the dating scene by pulling a Gary Busey on their face. For example, although featuring Meg Foster, herself an excellent example, she’s a human collaborator but still human; They Live itself contains many more of the wrong kind of alien-ugly:
NADA: You see, I take these glasses off, she looks like a regular person, doesn’t she? Put ’em back on . . . [puts them back on] formaldehyde-face!
NADA: That’s like pouring perfume on a pig.
NADA: You know, you look like your head fell in the cheese dip back in 1957.
RICH LADY: [into her wristwatch] I’ve got one that can see!
[←272]
“Mentats, the human computers; know a Mentat by his red stained lips.”—Frank Herbert, Dune.
[←273]
Mulford would have approved: “Thousands live too much in the thought current of seriousness. Faces which wear a smiling expression are scarce. Some never smile at all. Some have forgotten how to smile, and it actually hurts them to smile, or to see others do so.” Thoughts are Thing, p. 41.
[←274]
One thinks of similar meditations on shape shifting, luminous faces in Hesse, especially in Demian or this from Siddhartha: “And over everything something thin, inessential yet existing, was continuously drawn, like thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a sheath or mold or mask of water. The mask was smiling, and the mask was Siddhartha’s smiling face. . . . Thus Govinda saw the smile of the mask, the smile of unity over the flowing forms, the smile of simultaneity over the myriad births and deaths. The smile was exactly the same, resembled exactly the still, refined, impenetrable, perhaps-kind-perhaps-disdainful, wise, thousandfold smile of Gotama the Buddha. . . . So Govinda knew, this is the way the Perfect One smiles.”
[←275]
Thoughts are Things, pp. 33, 38.
[←276]
Harry Partch, Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos, ed. Thomas McGeary (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
[←277]
James Grauerholz gives this as the title of the relevant section of Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader, ed. James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg (New York: Grove Press, 2000). See also Jamie Russell’s Queer Burroughs (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001) which discusses his “queertopias.”
[←278]
Timothy J. Murphy, Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 147. Cf. Alain De Benoist: “I am not against feminism. There is a good kind of feminism, which I call identitarian feminism, which tries to promote feminine values and show that they are not inferior to masculine values.” The American Renaissance Interview, http://www.amren.com/
features/2013/11/we-are-the-end-of-something/
[←279]
Perhaps because Burroughs associates physical attractiveness with reproduction? Is it a coincidence that the chief modern theorists of The Boy are Camille Paglia, “The Beautiful Boy as Destroyer” in Sexual Personae (New Haven: Yale, 1990) and Germaine Greer, The Beautiful Boy (New York: Rizzoli, 2003)?
[←280]
David Bowie had already noted the connection between Stapledon’s “Homo superior” and Burroughs’ Wild Boys, along with spiders and knives: “It was the era of Wild Boys, by William S. Burroughs. That was a really heavy book that had come out in about 1970, and it was a cross between that and Clockwork Orange that really started to put together the shape and the look of what Ziggy and the Spiders were going to become. They were both powerful pieces of work, especially the marauding boy gangs of Burroughs’ Wild Boys with their bowie knives. I got straight on to that. I read everything into everything. Everything had to be infinitely symbolic.” David Sinclair, “Station to Station,” Rolling Stone, June 10, 1993. When Bowie met Burroughs in 1974, at Rolling Stone’s behest, he claimed “No, I didn’t know that was their weapon. The name Bowie just appealed to me when I was younger. I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.” I suppose at some point Burroughs must have pointed out to the former David Jones that actually it’s “boo-ie” not “bow-ie” (“Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman,” Rolling Stone, February 28, 1974).
[←281]
Phil Hine, “Zimbu Xototl Time,” http://www.philhine.org.uk/
writings/flsh_zimbu.html
[←282]
Murphy, op. cit., p.161.
[←283]
See the remarkable material quoted in Alain Danielou’s Music and the Power of Sound: The Influence of Tuning and Interval on Consciousness (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995).
[←284]
“They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogen drugs–learn to make it without any chemical corn”—William S. Burroughs, Nova Express (New York: Grove Press, 1964), Preface.
[←285]
“[T]he Wild Boys themselves, bands of young homosexuals who reproduce by a kind of fantasmatic parthenogenesis. . . .”—Murphy, op. cit., p. 146. Perhaps Burroughs himself is a genetic experiment? “Kim Carsons, as an amalgam of trace elements gathered here and there, also represents the successful result of breeding, like a eugenic model. In Burroughs’s early work . . . the protagonist was someone much like Burroughs himself: a hard case, cynical and grimly humorous, with the junkie’s agelessness and the con man’s radar. In The Wild Boys (1971), this figure gradually receded in the face of the tidal wave: teen-aged homosexual guerrillas, precivilized, preliterate, parthenogenetic, like an all-male version of the Primal Horde. Afterward, the aging con man became available only for walk-on parts. The wild boy had triumphed, and he rides through Ah Pook is Here, Port of Saints, Cobble Stone Gardens, Cities of the Red Night, and the present novel” (Luc Sante, “The Invisible Man,” New York Review of Books, May 10, 1984).
[←286]
Like the narrator of Stapledon’s The Flames, Jacqueline performs her own kind of “relief work” in Germany: “During the war of 1914-18 she was drawn into overstraining herself once more. So man
y tragic cases came her way. And after the war, being wholly without national prejudices, she moved to Germany, where the need was greater.” See my essay on The Flames, “A Light Unto the Nations,” in The Eldritch Evola.
[←287]
See “The Fascist Dream,” http://www.counter-currents.com/
2013/10/the-fascist-dream-part-1/ and Greg Johnson’s “Remembering Maurice Bardèche: October 1, 1907–July 30, 1998,” http://www.
counter-currents.com/2013/10/remembering-maurice-bardeche-3/
[←288]
The colony is more like D’Annunzio at Fiume in 1920 than Brook Farm; see Hakim Bey’s “March on Fiume” at http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/03/march-on-fiume/ and more generally, his Pirate Utopias (New York: Autonomedia, 2003).
[←289]
“Black Knockout Game Attacks (Flash Mob Violence) are Politics by Other Means,” Stuff Black People Don’t Like, November 25, 2013, http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2013/11/black-knockout-game-attacks-flash-mob.html
[←290]
Murphy, op. cit., pp. 166-67. As we have said before, Guenon frequently points out that symbolism must be applied in an inverted fashion: the “defeat” of the ideal is its real triumph.
[←291]
See, for example, Gold in the Furnace: Experiences in Post-War Germany, ed. R. G. Fowler, Kindle ed. (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2013).
[←292]
The idea of his 12-tone system being appropriated, to say nothing of being attributed to a syphilitic madman, did not sit well with Mann’s fellow LA exile Arnold Schoenberg. Things must have been pretty tense around the poolside, until Mann agreed to add a prefatory note acknowledging Schoenberg as the owner of the system. Partch, of course, despised Schoenberg and the other “avant-garde” academics; he would have counseled Adrian that he was on the wrong track altogether, and would not have been surprised at his fictional crack-up. The Mann-Schoenberg kefuffle seems as silly as the time Columbia Pictures sued the maker of The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies because the original title, The Incredibly Strange Creature: Or Why I stopped Living and Became a Mixed-up Zombie, was “too similar” to Kubrick’s upcoming Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The filmmaker was: Ray Dennis Steckler!
[←293]
See Chapter One, “Green Nazis in Space,” above, and the literature cited there.
[←294]
An anonymous bit of “Trivia” at the Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv
[←295]
Each of the main three would have featured Peter Sellers, playing the “Only Sane Man” each time, “but a sprained ankle prevented him from getting into and out of the B-52 set, so Slim Pickens was added to the cast to play ‘King’ Kong,” http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki. php/Main/ActingForTwo%20/%20http:/tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ActingForTwo
[←296]
“Precisely one female character appears in this movie. General Turgidson’s mistress and secretary, heard in one scene and seen in a bikini in another. She is also a Playboy centerfold,” http://tvtropes.org /pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FanService%20/%20http:/tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FanService
[←297]
Like the “Tuskegee Airmen,” black pilots are a modern Liberal myth; see Paul Kersey’s Stuff Black People Don’t Like, passim, such as “Black History Month Heroes—Sky Marshal Tehat Meru of Starship Troopers,” http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2010/02/
black-history-month-heroes-sky-marshal.html.
[←298]
Kong’s “yippe-yi-ay” on the bomb, Turgidson’s “Blast off!” to his secretary, Strangelove’s iconic Risus sardonicus. Ripper’s suicide would not seem to fit; this is why, as noted, the segment has two endings. When “Bat” Guano takes the Coke stream to the face, the audience can be expected to laugh—it’s a “black comedy” after all—and this ties in with what Murphy said about the Wild Boys’ smiles—they invite the audience into participation.
[←299]
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WorldGoneMad
[←300]
“A Father to His Men: When the base falls Ripper feels let down and remarks that the soldiers were like his children. It rings as true as anything else he says. Mandrake manages to obliquely mock him.
MANDRAKE: I’m sure they all died thinking of you, every man jack of them . . . Jack.”
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AFatherToHisMen%20/%20http:/tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AFatherToHisMen
On the contrary, I would suggest that “man jack” suggests the utopian union of Jack Ripper and his boys, symbolized by Mandrake, as does Mandrake’s fake nostalgia for earlier helping Ripper with the machine gun: “You said, ‘feed me’ and I fed you Jack . . .”
[←301]
And we know where that’s going: “No Sense of Personal Space: As Ripper gets drunk, he starts getting uncomfortably close and hands-on toward Mandrake, suggesting a possible explanation for his sexual issues,” http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoSenseOf
Persona Space%20/%20http:/tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/
Main/NoSenseOfPersonalSpace
[←302]
At the time a well-known hobby horse of the Right, it’s surprising how it continues to be a kind of cargo cult on the Left. Concern about using early PR techniques “after the war” as Ripper correctly notes, to convince local governments to allow a poisonous industrial waste product into the water supply, seems tailor made for the Left, especially after all the Rachel Carson business and modern concerns with GMOs etc. Apparently, the “commie plot” angle led it to become a shibboleth, like the “innocence” of Hiss or authenticity of “folk” music, constantly invoked as a test of loyalty (oddly enough, the Right had the same idea about loyalty tests). Only Alexander Cockburn, Stalinist that he was, seemed to have the guts to challenge the Left. Indeed, good-thinking sites like HuffPo now attack anti-GMO activists as “creationists of the Left”; GMOs, fluoridation, and even circumcision, if not climate change, seems to be one of those “scientific facts” only known to American Leftists, puzzling the rest of the world.
[←303]
“Dangerously Genre Savvy: General Ripper may be demented but he knows his trade; he’s shown as an experienced and competent leader who invokes, anticipates and discusses very relevant tropes,” http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DangerouslyGenreSavvy
[←304]
Even a light-hearted romp by a Catholic author ends with Lord Peter himself recommending, successfully, suicide to the club bounder in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Bellona_Club
[←305]
The bathroom suicide recalls the one in Advise and Consent which I discussed in my “Mad Men Jumps the Gefilte Fish” articles in End of an Era: Mad Men & the Ordeal of Civility (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).
[←306]
The comedy is so deliberate that “the actor’s head was too high when the stream began to spew toward him, and he can be seen lowering his face down into it to produce the full comedic effect.”—IMDb, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/goofs?ref_=tt_sa_1
[←307]
“Bombers on the Screen: The primary purpose of The Big Board,” http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BombersOnTheScreen%20/%20http:/tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BombersOnTheScreen
[←308]
“Dark Roots: Humor and Tragedy in Doctor Strangelove” by Caran Wakefield, http://www.nyu.edu/cas/ewp/wakefielddark05.pdf
[←309]
No one since seems to understand WTF Kong is talking about, but I note the connection to the harelipped “Tooth Fairy” in Manhunter, which I referenced before in discussing the ugliness and deformity of Odd John’s horde.
[←310]
Green Nazis in Space: New Essays in Literature, Art, and Culture Page 25
