Oddtober 2024: Catsploitation Zine, Part Three – The Black Cat edition

Clio will be so glad when Oddtober is over.

Told you I would revisit Catsploitation if I could. After discussing the first Catsploitation during ‘Zine September, I was eager to get my hands on more of these ‘zines for Oddtober but was worried I wouldn’t get them in time. Bast smiled upon me, and here it is, a look at Catsploitation Zine Part 3: The Black Cat Edition. Catsploitation Zine as a whole discusses fans of cinematic horror and their cats. This edition features fan reviews of horror films that feature black cats from 1934 to 1998, fan art and stories of the black cats owned by people who participated in the ‘zine in some manner. One of them is ‘zine creator Matthew Ragsdale’s memorial to one of his beloved cats, Mady.

‘Zines like this are difficult to discuss in depth because it more or less does what it says it is going to do. There are thirteen short film discussions with film-specific illustrations from fan submissions, and all of the reviews are helpful but succinct. Ragsdale found an interesting and diverse list of films to review for this ‘zine. I haven’t seen most of the films on his list, even though I am culturally aware of most them. This ‘zine will serve as a lovely playbill should I ever want to have a butt-numb-athon and spend a couple of days watching movies back to back.

I don’t want to spoil all of the films discussed, but I will mention a couple of them just to give an idea of the contents. Here’s a snippet from a discussion of The Black Cat (1934), which I am kind of ashamed to admit I have never seen:

Necrophilia, Satanism, drugs, a chess game of doom, torture, a black mass with human sacrifice, and a man being skinned the fuck alive. 1934’s pre-code The Black Cat is like a giant terror scenario onion that gets peeled back… sending us into a nightmare carnival of shadows with two mortal enemies locked in a game of death… and it’s marvelous.

This one is an early horror film two-for, starring both Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. I really am surprised I’ve never seen this film.

At the other end of the spectrum is Kuroneko (1968), a movie wholly new to me:

Kuroneko (1968) directed by Kaneto Shindo is best approached less as a horror movie and more as a dark folk tale. There is the horror of inhumanity, but it’s not a frantic fear fest. Kuroneko is eerie. It’s a slow burn. Some may call it boring but it’s more of a tense journey into deals with the devil and revenge for atrocity against women.

Another film on the list is a title that whenever I see it, I always think that I need to stream it but I never get around to it. Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972) is probably worth seeing for the title alone, but it sounds interesting beyond that:

Vice is a wicked delight; a slice of Italian Gothic dripping with atmosphere, psychological torment, and conniving characters practically begging for their comeuppance. Martino (and co-writers Ernesto Gastaldi and Sauro Scavolini) transposes the mood of a Mario Bava period piece into present day, and captures the insidious, um, vice of his characters. The Poe-Like mood is definitely there, even if the adaptation is loose.

But because I am one of those cat ladies that JD Vance is so worried about, my favorite part of this ‘zine is the section with pictures of people posing with their own black cats and telling stories about them. And it’s not just because it gives me a sort of perverse permission to share my own cat pics here. I just like seeing people expressing affection for their pets. The world is awful and it’s always nice to be reminded that there are so many kind people who adore animals.

Here at Chez OTC, we have two solid black cats, a tuxedo, a tortie, and a calico, and because the editor of the ‘zine included his tortie in the pics at the back because it’s his ‘zine and he can, I’ll share my own non-black cats because this is my site and I can.

He also goes by Booberry Cat, but you have to say it just like this in a high-pitched voice: “Booberry booberry booberry cat!”

This is Boo Radley. He’s named after the psychologically shattered character from To Kill a Mockingbird. He was raised with a golden retriever, and I took him on when my mother became terminally ill. He’s a big, skinny, shaggy wolf-cat and always seeks out a lap to sit in even though he finds it impossible to sit still. He’s our awkward, handsome boy.

Not even kidding. Clio is tired of Oddtober and my shit in general.

This is Clio. She’s a short haired, glossy black girl who has the attention span of a hummingbird and never stops purring. She is the happiest cat we have ever known. She is also a talker, constantly mewing and chirping, We adopted her with her sister Calliope.

Calliope is one of the most beautiful cats alive, fight me.

Calliope is a big, sturdy tortie who is quieter and probably smarter than her sister. She’s shyer but she also seeks us out when she needs attention. She went through a nickname progression, beginning with Callie, breaking off into Opie, which merged into Opus, which then became Opal, and now she’s often called “Opal Divine” after a fish and chips restaurant. She absolutely loves Paulie.

Puddin’ is partially blind, has no teeth, is 14 and has terminal cancer so she politely asks you to cut her some slack in regards to her rumpled fur.

This is Pretty Polly Puddin’ Pants, and she’s technically male but she was believed to be a female for so long that it seemed easier to just switch to Paulie, and mostly we call her Puddin’. She is absolutely the sweetest cat. Her nickname is Uncle Grandma because the three young cats in the house adore her because she really has strong maternal energy, and respect her because she’s a much older male. She is currently at home in hospice because she has cancer and her time is nearing. We adopted her in 2012 as an injured stray, with her sister Molly, who was also injured. Molly was solid black and died in January in 2023 from GI lymphoma.

She may look like a soft little bunny cat but she’s the cranky mothercat, even to the cats much older than she is.

This is Mirabelle, also known as Miss Belly. She’s a calico who basically despairs of us all and secretly runs the place. She does not like being held but she will crawl all over us when we are lying in bed because it’s harder to snitch her up and make her be the baby when horizontal. She, Clio and Calliope are all close. Mirabelle lived rough before we adopted her. She is very small compared to her peers, and lost all but one of her kittens once she was rescued. She’s beautiful and imperious.

Feel free to tell me about your cats, any color and breed, and if you would like your own copy of Catsploitation 3: The Black Cat Edition, you can get one here.

Oddtober 2024: 10 Best Horror Movies Directed by Women by APac

I discussed an APac ‘zine back in September, focused on the best revenge movies written by women. The list as a whole didn’t really ring cinematic bells for me, but the inclusion of the, frankly, terrible She-Devil, gave me the opportunity to hold forth on Fay Weldon’s The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil. So it all worked out in the end.

10 Best Horror Movies Directed by Women gives me a lot more to work with, as I’ve seen most of the movies included and one of them is in my own personal top ten list of the best horror movies of all time. However, I need to state again that the ‘zine creator assembled a master list of horror films directed by women so if your own favorites are not on this list, they are likely on the master list, and she worked hard to create a list that features films that hopefully alert the readers to at least a couple that may be new to them.

And I also feel like I should mention that the stylized drawings have an interesting asymmetry to them that adds to the unease most of us enjoy when considering horror films. That may seem like a “faint praise” comment but I often concentrate on talking about text more than visuals so I felt it necessary to say. These APac ‘zines have a very specific and interesting visual appeal.

I won’t spoil the whole list but I will say that I had no idea American Psycho was directed by a woman, and had never heard of the movie, La Captive, directed by Chantal Akerman. It is wholly new to me and I really want to see it now. It looks like I can only see it if I subscribe to the Criterion Collection, and I may just do that.

The movie that impressed me the most with its inclusion is Near Dark, directed by Kathryn Bigelow. It is one of my top ten, top five, actually, horror films. I was in high school when it was released and it was a revelation. Vampire movies covered a lot of cultural ground, to be sure. I was culturally aware of the campy Hammer vampire films but they were not easily available to rent or watch in suburban Dallas in the 1980s. I’d seen plenty of older Bela Lugosi/Lon Chaney vampire films and, of course, the grandfather of them all, Nosferatu. The vampire films that focused on female characters were of the campy sexy Hammer variety or overtly sexy variation on Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla story. All of them, even the American films, had a very British and refined air about them. Moody castles, hereditary titles, ancestral wealth – even the excellent The Hunger took place in a rarified place of wealth and privilege in a world foreign to Farmers Branch, Texas.

While I am sure there are films that predated Near Dark that focused on the common person’s experience with vampirism in settings far less luxurious than a well-appointed castle, Near Dark was the first one I ever saw and it was a revelation. Horror films with a democratized setting, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, existed, but Sally and Franklin were irritating and the cannibals were… unpleasant, to be sure. Near Dark’s characters were low-brow and decidedly southern, but were also good looking even as they were grubby. Set in Oklahoma, the environment was one I recognized, a place where you might have to worry about a Leatherface with a chainsaw or maybe a creepy serial killer wearing a burlap bag as a mask while brandishing a pitch fork, but not so much vampires. It felt new, adding dimension to old monster legends.

The film features two actors I’ve always had a crush on, Lance Henriksen and the late, great Bill Paxton. The radiant Jenny Wright plays a major role as the love interest, Mae, who turns Caleb, portrayed by a very young Adrian Pasdar, into a vampire. The group of vampires she travels with are none too pleased she foisted Caleb on them but agree to give him a chance. Things do not go as well as one would hope, though Caleb does at times acquit himself well, and the film is filled with blood, gore, fights, and southern charm that clearly inspired the presentation of its spiritual descendant, True Blood.

No spoilers here, friends. The above synopsis is barely a synopsis but if I discuss much more I won’t be able to stop typing. If you haven’t seen this film, you need to, and if you’ve seen it, you need to see it again. But I will direct you to one of the best scenes ever in a vampire film, the prelude to a massacre that should not be this funny but is. Bill Paxton was born to chew this particular scenery.

I know a lot of people consider this a “western” vampire film and they can have their opinions but this is a southern vampire film to anyone who has actually lived in the more western edges of the American South. Lance Henriksen’s character fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy. Characters have southern accents so thick you can cut them with a knife (or extra sharp spurs, as it were). It’s southern to me, and since I’m from the South, I feel comfortable with my assessment.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed the ‘zines I got from APac. I have several others I could potentially discuss for Oddtober, and if I get into a bind and need a quick list to go over, I may well do that. We’ll see. If you would like to get a copy of this ‘zine, you can get one here. The artist, Amèlie Paquet, has a considerable list of interesting horror and feminist ‘zines, so be sure to give her store a look.

10 Best Revenge Movies Written by Women by APac

I ordered this ‘zine recently because it was bundled with some interesting horror film ‘zines, but I am a sucker for these sort of top ten lists because I generally end up with at least a couple of pieces of new media to check out.

There are so many revenge movies that have female protagonists who seek vengeance for terrible things done to them, notably I Spit on Your Grave, The Brave One, and Ms. 45. I tend to thinkCarrie is as well. However, those films were directed by men and this list focuses on those directed by women, which ensured I would find a few films new to me.

Of the ten films, I have seen only three. One is Prevenge, directed by comedian Alice Lowe, which features a pregnant heroine seeking to kill those whom she holds responsible for the death of her romantic partner. I enjoyed it quite a bit, so much so that I watched it three times. My favorite scene is when the protagonist and one of her future victims burst out singing Nik Kershaw’s “Wouldn’t It Be Good.”

Another is Violation, directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer. I really disliked this film because I disagree with the essential premise. Should a perpetrator who misinterpreted sexual signs, who believed he had consent, be tortured and brutally slain because he got it wrong? None of this was helped by how unlikable the heroine was, because her behavior was so unpleasant that I almost walked away with the belief that she wanted to destroy her sister’s happy life and succeeded in spades. I’m not condemning her by implying she is a “bad victim” but rather stating that her aggressively sexual behavior with her partner and overall behavior with her sister made me think initially that she seduced the man she killed so she had an excuse to kill him. When we saw her perspective later and realized she did feel violated, I was surprised, which points in the direction of inconsistent characterization. If you loved this film, tell me why because I don’t get it but am willing to see other points of view

The third is She-Devil, directed by Susan Seidelman. This is one of the worst films ever made, taking a very serious novel with well-used black humor and turning it into a terribly unfunny slapstick comedy starring Roseanne Barr, Meryl Streep and Ed Begley Jr. I suspect the semi-positive reviews were down to Streep’s presence in the film. However, it was a delight finding it on this list anyway because the screenplay was “based” on the novel The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon. Though I have not reviewed any of her work on this site, I’ve mentioned her often, and it was painful seeing her work so terribly degraded because I am serious when I say the film adaptation sucks a’plenty.

Excuse me as I begin to go off on another tangent somewhat unrelated to the ‘zine in question.

But the book the film was based on is resplendent. No one handles revenge better than Fay Weldon did. In fact, critic Regina Barreca included Fay Weldon’s work in Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even. It would be a near-book length entry to discuss the things that happened to Weldon that caused her to seek revenge in her often autobiographical books, but she took some outrageous slings and arrows of fate and turned them into amusing, startling and provocative books. In the actual novel, Ruth, the fat and unattractive protagonist, loses her husband Bob to a beautiful romance novelist, Mary. Mary schemes to break up the marriage and succeeds and Ruth disappears with little more than the clothes on her back. She spends years making connections, earning money, and setting the stage for her ultimate revenge. Brick by brick, she disassembles Mary’s perfect life via her behind the scenes machinations and the coup de grace was several years of surgeries that left her looking identical to Mary. She even had lengths of her leg bones removed to reduce her height. Looking exactly like her defeated rival, she swoops back in to regain her husband who has been so broken by events that one is not sure if he understands he is now with Ruth, and we leave the novel wondering how much Bob is going to suffer for his callous cruelty and abandonment of his loyal wife.

Snerting at two of the three films in this ‘zine isn’t a slight against the list or those who compiled the list. Though these films are touted as the “best” ten revenge movies directed by women, the fact is that there are not that many films that meet the criteria. There are a couple of films on the top ten list I want to see, namely Promising Young Woman because I initially thought that it was based on the Caroline O’Donoghue novel, Promising Young Women. It isn’t but I adore Clancy Brown and the reviews seem good so I am eager to check it out. There are others in there that seem worth watching but I won’t spoil things further and instead encourage you to check out these ‘zine makers. I will be discussing another ‘zine from APac for Oddtober.

Though this list didn’t necessarily ring many “best film” bells for me, the creators took the time to search out films that weren’t immediate ringers that many have seen. I know they were trying to present more obscure films because they placed three of the most famous revenge films women directed in a sort of “honorable mention” list. I’ve definitely seen Baise-Moi, Monster and Jennifer’s Body, and excluding them ensured I got to know about more films I hadn’t seen. I appreciate the attempt to introduce the reader to something new. Also extremely helpful is a master list of all the movies they considered for this list and I was pleased to see that Carrie 2 was on it.

And I really appreciate the opportunity to redirect people from the terrible She-Devil to the darkly delightful Lives and Loves of a She-Devil.

Murder Can Be Fun, the Naughty Children Edition by Johnny Marr

I was hoping this black cat hovering over this ‘zine would create an air of menace. It didn’t work.

The Murder Can Be Fun ‘zines were my favorite ‘zines from the nineties. I let people borrow copies, never to get them back, and now all I have left is issue #17, which handles the topic of children who kill.

I believe I purchased this copy at the old Fringeware store on Guadalupe sometime in 1997 or 1998. At the time I was a walking, talking, fretting true crime podcast, though podcasts had yet to be invented, and when I saw this edition of my favorite ‘zine, I had to purchase it. (As an aside, talking about Fringeware, the alt.culture in Austin that began to die shortly after we moved here, the delightful feeling of finally finding people with similar interests on late nineties message boards, are my version of “I remember when you could see a movie for a dime and could leave the front door unlocked at night.” They are memories of a halcyon time when suddenly information became available and only a few of us knew it was out there.)

This ‘zine set off a maniacal attempt to find as much information about a youthful killer as I could. The only mention she has in Murder Can Be Fun #17 is in the quotes section, a sort of “Child Killers Say the Darnedest Things” where Marr collected some statements by killer kids. There were two quotes from an eleven-year-old girl named Mary Bell but she isn’t mentioned anywhere else in the ‘zine.

I’d like to be a nurse because then I can stick needles in people. I like hurting people.

and

Murder isn’t that bad. We all die sometimes.

There is a famous picture of a little girl who survived life in a concentration camp who is told to draw her home. She drew frantic, jagged circles and her thousand yard stare cuts viewers deep. Mary Bell had the same stare.

For the next two years I scoured the earth for mentions of Mary Bell. I was unable to find much but eventually tracked down a book by investigative journalist Gitta Sereny, who spoke at length with Mary when she was freshly convicted. Long out of print, I could only get a copy from the UT law library but after killer culture become much more popular, Sereny released another, updated book about Mary. Sereny said that Mary Bell endured some of the worst child abuse she had ever seen or heard of, and in general had a lot of sympathy for Mary.

Mary, with a friend named Norma Bell (no relation, strangely enough) strangled two boys to death. Mary was eleven and Norma was thirteen but Mary was the dominant of the two. Mary deliberately lured the two toddler boys to their deaths and wrote odd notes left in a nursery school taking responsibility for the murder of one of the boys, Martin Brown.

The most puzzling note Mary wrote said, “I murder so that I may come back.” Mary and Norma had a history of attacking small children, and after they killed Martin Brown, they enjoyed tormenting the family as they mourned. They took turns asking Martin’s mother if they could see him. When Martin’s mother gently reminded them her son was dead, Mary replied that she knew he was dead and wanted to see him in his coffin. At age 11 years and six months old, Mary was the youngest convicted murderer in the UK, a record she still holds.

Mary escaped confinement at least once but she was eventually let go from prison when she was 23. She had a baby, a little girl, in 1984 and lived in relative peace and without further offenses but in 1998, the press discovered the new name she was given upon release and outed her and her teenage daughter. Mary had to be relocated and given a new name, and Mary fought very hard to ensure her daughter was able to maintain anonymity.

I keep harping on this point, but the beauty of most ‘zines for me is the potential for larger conversations or to fall down rabbit holes. Mary Bell became a years-long rabbit hole for me because of two quotes in a ‘zine about murderous children.

This ‘zine covers several killers whose names may not ring bells with even the most seasoned true crime fans. The most “famous” of the children discussed was the terror Jesse Pomeroy but few others have much name recognition, like Hannah Ocuish, a mixed race child who lived in miserable poverty in the late eighteenth century, and she slashed another girl’s throat over an argument about stolen strawberries. Much of the book discusses “trends” in childish mayhem, like the amusing pastime of derailing trains and strange drownings. Very interesting to me were the stories of children who were executed for their crimes. Hannah Ocuish appears to be the youngest person executed in the United States, but there were two slave boys who were not too much older when they went to the gallows for murder. The youngest murderer recorded in the USA? In 1921 in Rhode Island, a three year old boy deliberately strangled his playmate because he didn’t like her anymore.

This is a fact-packed ‘zine, and though it is hard to find a copy, should you find one that is affordable, you could do worse things with your money.

Reflection by Compact Squirrel

If this were Instagram, there would be endless comments about how Basic Bitch my perfume tastes are.

Reflection is another artfully folded micro-zine that feels like someone is sharing both their talent and their passion directly to readers. It has the same level of intimacy I found in I Got That B-Movie Autism, and it has the same ability to provoke conversation. The drawings in Reflection are quite pretty, and the message is one that matters less and less to me but is an important one for young women (and possibly men, too) who are grappling with identity and how their appearance shapes their prospects in life. It can often feel like we have to take off our real selves and put on a new appearance as easily as we change clothes and this little ‘zine focuses on that issue in a visually appealing but creepy way.

This is a conversation that each new generation of women is forced to have, for a variety of reasons. It can be easy to place the blame for female self-image problems on social media, the male gaze, relentless marketing that makes young women feel as if they need to change their appearances to achieve what the current arbiters of beauty decide is the new standard. We are currently seeing a cultural shift in how American woman are supposed to look and women who made drastic changes to themselves will find it hard to meet new standards. For example, women who received brazilian butt lifts are out of luck as the thinner silhouette is gaining ground again, and over-filled lips are being replaced by more defined cupid’s bows. What will happen to all the women who got buccal fat removal when it becomes chic to have chubby cheeks?

It’s not lost on me how violent this image is. It reminds me of the skin suits Jame Gumb made in Silence of the Lambs.

However, while culture influences this sense that our appearances are coats we should shed as the world sees fit, the fact remains that what women experience today is what women experienced two thousand years ago. Makeup, hair dye, body henna, altering body shape with clothing, different hair styles from one generation to the next… It almost seems as if pursuing continual changes in appearance are an innate part of the female human experience.

Remarkably, I recall where I got this ‘zine and why I bought it. I got it from Compact Squirrel’s Etsy store and I bought it because the title and the artwork were appealing to me. I’m an Elder Hag so the beauty standards have little significance in my own life, but I’m going to tell you something strange about me: I don’t look like me. And don’t ask me to explain it because I’m not entirely sure what that means. When I talk about it, people assume I am describing some form of body dysmorphia or a lack of face recognition. Neither are at play for me. It’s just that I intuitively know that when I look in the mirror, the face that looks back at me isn’t quite right. Part of the problem is that I look so different from photo to photo that even if I did not have this “problem” I still wouldn’t see the “real” me in photos. But the main issue is that I have what seems like a memory of a face that is like the one I have now but different somehow so every time I see myself it’s startling. It’s not because I am aging because I recall thinking this way when I was a teen. I wonder if other women feel similarly and find it just as difficult to speak about it coherently. Perhaps my bizarre reaction to my face is secretly common and fuels youthful body and facial alteration. Probably not, but you never know until you speak about it.

Also I feel I need to mention that ‘zine authors are notoriously generous about sending fun freebies with a ‘zine purchase. Along with the ‘zine, Compact Squirrel sent me some tentacle stickers and what appears to be a glow-in-the-dark tooth sticker that I gave to Mr. OTC. Good times!

I Got That B-Movie Autism by @frankenart13

Mirabelle loves to curl up with a good ‘zine.

It’s a small relief to discuss another single-page ‘zine after Chris Mikul’s much longer, research-heavy ‘zines. I Got That B-Movie Autism is the work of an artist who goes by the moniker frankenart13 across various social media platforms. I really enjoy little ‘zines like these. They are artfully folded, reminding me of passing notes in school or carefully constructing cootie catchers so my friends and I could hopefully determine who we would marry or if we would be rich when we grew up. There is an interesting intimacy to these small ‘zines that draw me in, and I have a lot of them. I hope to one day find all the ‘zines I’ve stashed all over my shelves and stuck in drawers and behave as if I am collecting these little ‘zines rather than haphazardly accumulating them.

This ‘zine has a very specific mission:

If you’ve ever wanted to be recommended 3 obscure and amazing cult movies by an autistic queer dude, then this is the zine for you!

The three movies Frankenart13 wants to share are Reanimator, The Devil’s Carnival and Repo! The Genetic Opera, and I won’t spoil why he wants to recommend them in case you want to buy a copy for yourself.

I will, however, note that The Devil’s Carnival and Repo! The Genetic Opera are both directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. I enjoyed both films when I saw them, years ago, and had no clue who directed either, let alone that it was the same man, though it shouldn’t be surprising because the two films are clearly siblings with similar aesthetics and style.

I know about Darren Lynn Bousman because I became very interested in the Saw franchise last spring. With the exception of Saw 3D, also known as Saw 7 (because, shockingly, it was the seventh Saw film in the series) and Spiral, I found all of the Saw movies strangely compelling and compulsively watchable. I had dismissed the films as being little more than torture porn, and in a way they aren’t much more than that, but the character arcs, the plot twists and the grimy visuals ensured that even when the films were bad, they were still sort of good. I found myself watching tons of YouTube videos about the franchise, ranking the best and worst traps, best and worst deaths, best and worst characters, etc.

Saw II, Saw III and Saw IV were directed by Darren Lynn Bousman. Chris Rock brought him back into the fold after seventeen years away for Spiral, which was the worst film in the franchise, in my opinion, and I am unable to express exactly why it didn’t hit me the same way the other films did. Others tended to agree with my puzzled dislike. But Bousman’s miss was offset by Saw II, a film that some horror aficionados consider the best horror sequel ever made. They may be right, as I can’t currently think of a sequel that was as good as or better than the first movie. Saw II was pretty good, with interesting character development, some really grody traps (Shawnee Smith in that needle pit…), and some excellent twists. Bousman is a director with a very specific style that I never would have associated with The Devil’s Carnival or Repo! The Genetic Opera. I want to rewatch both and then rewatch Saw II for the umpteenth time and see if I can pick out details that are Bousman-like in all three.

Not all ‘zines will cause this cascade of reaction but it’s always fun when they do. This ‘zine is, in the end, just a piece of artfully folded paper but because of it I’m likely going to spend six hours watching films in a search that has nothing to do with the original content presented in I Got That B-Movie Autism. Good times!

Biblio-Curiosa No. 6 by Chris Mikul

There are a lot of reasons to read Chris Mikul’s work. He’s erudite and has a fondness for the strangeness that is the backbone of this site. He is able to look at terrible literature with a kind intellectualism that I would do well to emulate (there are a couple of books I eviscerated on this site that I want to revisit and see how they read with a more generous, less pedantic eye). He’s introduced me to some amazing books, not the least among them The Pepsi-Cola Addict by June Gibbons, which I’ve had in my possession for a while but have yet to read because I’ve wanted to read it for so long that I feel a weird sort of sorrow at the prospect of losing that feeling of joyful anticipation.

One of the best reasons to read him is his deep knowledge of writers who have more or less been lost to time. There are so many excellent and interesting books that for various reasons slip away from the public eye, and Mikul finds a lot of value in researching such books and the authors behind them. His articles that feature books that are lost or nearly lost to modern readers are fascinating, and at times maddening because I can seldom find copies of the books to read for myself.

There are five articles in Biblio-Curiosa No. 6, and I am limiting myself to the cover story, but bear in mind that the remaining four articles are very much worth reading, especially the analysis of William Nathan Stedman, a poet very much in the running for the worst poet ever. I’m discussing the cover piece exclusively because it is such an excellent example of Mikul’s research chops as well as his affection for the topic as he ferrets out information about forgotten authors and their works.

Few know the name Frank Walford these days, and that is a shame because his books were both ahead of their time in terms of content and because the content itself was often completely lunatic. Mikul’s article focuses on Twisted Clay, a delightfully batshit and sordid book about a psychopathic teenage lesbian. This book was initially published in 1933, and contains violence and sexual implication one does not expect to find in pre-WWII literature.

I’ve noticed that people interact with my work more when there is a cat involved. So here’s Mikul’s ‘zine atop my baffled cat, Calliope.

Twisted Clay is narrated by its protagonist, Jean Deslines. She lives in New South Wales with her father and grandmother. She is, as Mikul points out, “sexually precocious,” and at age twelve was already behaving in a very provocative manner, swimming nude in front of neighbors and attempting to seduce the clergyman her beleaguered grandmother asks to speak to her about her exhibitionism (and it sounds like she very nearly succeeded). Jean is primarily sexually attracted to women and sleeps with the housemaid Jenny, and one wonders how her grandmother felt about having two lesbians in her prim household. Later, Jean’s cousin Myrtle, herself a lesbian, tells Jean that she doesn’t like men so she will likely never marry. When Jean pushes her for more details, she tells the fourteen-year-old Jean to look it up.

Jean reads the sexual arbiters of the time (think Freud and Havelock Ellis) and realizes she is a lesbian and is so appalled by this information that she seeks out a boyfriend, sleeps with him and promptly becomes pregnant. Her father arranges an abortion but this does not change Jean much. In fact, she begins to dress in a manner meant to attract men, and it succeeds, because when her Uncle Harry and Aunt Gabrielle come to visit, Uncle Harry develops a sexual attraction to his young niece, a situation that drives her aunt to despair as she tries to make Jean aware of the situation. Jean toys with the woman, fully aware that her uncle wants to have sex with her, but pretends she doesn’t. When she finally feigns understanding, she immediately accuses her of having a dirty mind. When everyone comes to see what the matter is, Jean adds fuel to the already incendiary situation and her aunt and uncle leave the next day.

Jean’s father speaks to the family doctor, Dr Murray, and they discuss what needs to be done with Jean. Insanely, the doctor recommends that she receive a sort of ovary operation to encourage more feminine behavior, as well as psychotherapy. Jean is thrilled at the idea of psychotherapy because she can “mystify the operator by relating imaginary dreams and fictitious incidents!” She is less enthusiastic about the operation, thinking it would kill her personality and that she would be justified in killing her father in defense to avoid such a death. And this is how this strange girl tries to dissuade her father from forcing the surgery:

“Daddy!”

“Yes, Jean.”

“Dr. Murray said, if he owned me, he would thrash me. Why don’t you thrash me, to see if it should do any good?”

“Don’t be stupid. You’re too old to thrash.”

“I’m not, I’m not! See, here’s your walking stick. Beat me with it, beat me hard!”

“Go to bed, child, and don’t talk nonsense.”

With a quick jerk, I stripped off my pyjama trousers, standing before him nude to mid-thighs, clad only in my dangling pyjama coat. “Beat me, Daddy, beat me hard, beat me till the blood flows. I want you to.”

Okay, so by now it should not surprise anyone that some of Frank Walford’s books got banned and that this book is unlikely to end well for anyone involved.

To avoid going to Europe for the surgery, Jean fakes interest in a grave site in which someone will be buried later that day. Jean’s father takes her to see the grave and she takes him out with a hatchet to the head and pushes him into the grave. But this was a “from the frying pan into the fire” sort of situation because Dr. Murray is given guardianship of her. Jean, once again with her back against the wall, decides to set up Dr. Murray. She senses he is attracted to her so she tries to seduce him and arranges for a policeman to see the good doctor throw himself at her. Alone finally, her father’s ghost appears to her telling her no hard feelings for killing him, but later she hears a voice that tells her she must go to the grave, dig her father up and wrap up his broken skull. She does so but realizes that she didn’t secure her father’s corpse, which could implicate her, so she pretends that she dug her father up because she had overheard Dr. Murray murmur something about killing him. This causes the town to consider Jean a heroine but the voice again speaks up, wanting her to return to bind his wounds a second time. This time Jean’s luck runs out and the police catch her in the act and arrest her. (The plot makes perfect sense if you don’t think about it.)

Sent to a mental asylum, she escapes and turns to prostitution to support herself. She is disgusted by the men she sleeps with but earns a lot of money. Later the voice comes back and tells her to start killing the men who lust after her, and yet again she does what the voice tells her. She runs into cousin Myrtle again, they resume their sexual relationship, but the voice tells her to kill Myrtle, too, and she obliges. Later Jean opens a beauty salon and a gangster takes a shine to her and wants her to join his criminal pursuits. She does and later finds that she is attracted to the gangster and becomes a sort of moll. Life is going as well as it can when one of the policemen who arrested her for killing her father sees her, follows her and manages to get a sample of Jean’s fingerprints. She kills the police officer, but this last murder has her feeling contemplative. She muses about suicide:

Life was not so attractive that I desired to cling to it like a limpet to its rock. I had tasted almost everything but death. Should I…? Why not?

Why not indeed? I leave the reader to wonder what she ultimately does.

This book sounds like a hoot, but the fact that the author was a hoot as well is the icing on the odd cake. Frank Walford was born in Australia in 1882. He was a gifted amateur boxer who could have gone pro had a horse not kicked him in the face, breaking his cheekbones and knocking out a few front teeth. He then decided to purchase a boat and traveled along the Australian coastline and three months later came back to land but the rough company he kept caused him to lose a job with a bank. He then returned to sailing again, and made money fishing and shooting crocodiles. (It’s right about here I need to mention that I am not making any of this up.)

Walton was pretty good with a knife and gun and got to prove his mettle with a knife after a man with a grudge stabbed him in the back, right in his kidney. After he recovered, he challenged the man to a knife fight and severed the tendons in his elbows, ensuring the man would never again stab a man in the back.

He eventually married and had children and began to write. He became involved with a group of writers who called themselves the Blue Mountaineers. Interestingly, the only other member of the group who had some success writing penned a novel that featured an atypical heroine who thinks about suicide when life got too boring. His novel Silver Girl sounds absolutely lunatic. It features a passage wherein a side character realizes his wife gave birth to the protagonist’s child. When the protagonist comes to visit with his new wife, the side character grabs the infant and uses it as cudgel to beat the protagonist’s wife to death.

During WWII, Walford served in the Voluntary Defense Corps and became an avid anti-Communist and continued to write. Mikul observes that it is very difficult to summarize Walford’s style.

He could be coarse…, morbid and willfully perverse, but when he chose to, he could write with great sensitivity and feeling. He had a journalist’s eye for detail, and the settings for his stories are always vividly imagined, no matter how wild the plots became.

I can’t help but marvel that Walford’s work was published, especially Twisted Clay. He really was pushing boundaries, and even now, it seems very likely social media would have come for him and cancelled him had his books been released today. I’ll probably spend the weekend looking for copies of his books and pray they are affordable if I find any.

Check back tomorrow for another Mikul ‘zine before I pivot back to non-Mikul content. Should you decide to purchase a copy, contact Chris at chris.mikul88@gmail.com.

ETA: Holy crap, it turns out that Amazon carries Twisted Clay!

Bizarrism No. 13 by Chris Mikul

Chris Mikul, in addition to authoring several books and the ‘zine Biblio-Curiosa, editions of which I have discussed many times on this site, also authors another ‘zine called Bizarrism. While Biblio-Curiosa focuses on strange or arcane books and the people who write them, Bizarrism is more diffuse, discussing unusual people, places and ideas. For fellow travelers, there is guaranteed to be something in Bizarrism that appeals to their interests.

Before I discuss the content of Bizarrism No. 13, I want to mention how visibly appealing this ‘zine is. Artist Glenn Smith, who has worked with Mikul on other projects, notably his book that documents unusual people, The Eccentropedia, provided illustrations for one of the articles, and Mikul’s photographs from his travels in Singapore are featured in his discussion of Tiger Balm Gardens, as well as on the front and back covers.

Bizarrism No. 13 has nine articles, and five of them earn the description of what I like to call “price of admission,” which means they alone make the ‘zine worth reading. Any piece of media that has one price of admission element gets a thumbs-up, so having five of them in one ‘zine issue is outstanding.

The ‘zine begins with a well-researched article about the fairly famous Somerton Man case, “The Man on the Beach: The Enigma of Somerton Man.” For those interested in unsolved mysteries, they may also know this as the Tamám Shud case. In 1948, a dead man was found sitting back in the sand on a beach in Adelaide, Australia. There were no obvious causes of death and later his death was chalked up to a heart attack. No one had any idea who he was, all possible avenues of identification were either non-existent or led the investigators down labyrinthine paths that never wholly cleared up who he was. Because this man had no clear cause of death, no identification and had taken steps to hide his identity – even the tags and cleaner marks had been removed from all his clothes – there was some belief that he was a spy from the United States.

Also feeding into this theory was a piece of paper found in his pocket. It was ripped from a library edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The page had the phrase tamám shud printed on it, which means “it is finished,” with what appears to be an encrypted, very short hand-printed message on the other side. The message has yet to be decoded. Investigation showed links to a woman named Jessica Thomson, a woman who may also have been involved in some sort of espionage, and later her granddaughter, married to researcher Derek Abbott, believed strongly that the Somerton Man had an affair with her grandmother and was her biological grandfather. Later DNA tests disproved this theory, though Jessica revealed in private conversation that she knew the identity of the Somerton Man but would never reveal his name. This article appears to have been written before 2022 because eventually Somerton Man’s identity was discovered and I am not going to spoil this mystery solution here out of respect for any newcomers to this case.

The second article is “A Visit to the Tiger Balm Gardens.” Mikul visited this strange garden in Singapore, filled with bizarre, unsettling sculptures that represented what would happen to certain sorts of sinners when they died. It read like a southeast Asian take on Dante’s circles of hell. For example, one of the statues represented in fairly gory and violent detail how those who engage in selling slaves are cut in half. This was a “price of admission” article for me because I’d never heard of it before and Mikul’s photographs were captivating. In addition to showing his readers this unique and bizarre garden park, Mikul tells the story of the family, specifically two sons, who created this garden after making a fortune selling “Tiger Balm.” Truly a fascinating look at something wholly new to me.

This is followed by a charming, short article called “Nature vs. Nurture.” Here Mikul presents two drawings, one he drew and the other drawn by his father, marveling at the similarity between his and his father’s artistic talents.

The fourth article is another price of admission piece. “Jimmy Savile and the Process Church” was unsettling because it showed that Jimmy Savile left all kinds of little breadcrumbs that if analyzed properly showed who he was and what he was about. For those unfamiliar with Jimmy Savile, he was a British entertainer who had ties to politicians and the royal family, and after his death was revealed to have been a profligate pedophile and necrophile. He spent his life protected from repercussions from his acts, though it seems plenty of people in the British entertainment industry had followed the bread crumbs but couldn’t speak out due to the powerful people who protected Savile.

This article discusses an interview that Jimmy Savile did with the Process Church in 1968 that was printed in the cult’s SEX edition of the magazine they published at the time. The Process Church, undeniably a cult, is seen as either a font of absolute evil that encouraged the Manson murders and Son of Sam killings (Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil details that belief) or a strange but mostly harmless cult that later became Best Friends animal rescue in Utah. Regardless of what the Process Church is or isn’t, the fact remains that the interview, given what we now know about Savile, is creepy

“Eternal Life – Guaranteed” was my favorite article. It discusses Guy Ballard, a miner who evidently stumbled across an ascended master who inspired him to start his own sect that promised immortality. And it makes perfect sense that he was inspired to create his church, which he called I AM, after meeting that particular ascended master because evidently Ballard canoodled with Comte St. Germain. Ballard borrowed heavily from or was inspired by Helena Blavatsky of Theosophy fame, and a lot of the vocabulary and terms used in her beliefs come up in Ballard’s credo. Ballard and his wife, a genteel-appearing harpist, traveled the country with their son to recruit people to his sect. They called themselves Mommy and Daddy and managed to amass a decent following while making a lot of money, and as we all know, money leads to taxes and debtors wanting their share, which never bodes well. This is a whacked religion mini-masterpiece.

“My Favorite Dictators, No. 7: Gaddafi” was, ironically, my least favorite article in the ‘zine and I don’t know why. It’s not the article’s fault, though, and for the right person, this even-handed synopsis of Gaddafi’s life would be a great entry into studying the late dictator. I just despise Gaddafi to the point that I prefer not to think about him. A lot of people in Scotland feel the same way. Luckily, he’s dead now so… yeah.

“The Fabulous Adventures of Denisa, Lady Newborough” is my second-favorite article in this ‘zine because Denisa was wholly new to me and I adore stories of wild women. Much of Denisa’s life cannot be verified, but Mikul still found evidence that showed that at least some of the time Denisa was telling the truth. Born in Serbia in 1913, Denisa ran away to join a circus at age six and learned to walk the tightrope but two years later a family member recognized her and she was sent back home. She continued to run away, eventually making her way to Budapest where she became a nude dancer. She traveled Europe, taking lovers, amassing jewels and even apartments that wealthy men gave her.

The tales of her travels and activities are a hoot but there are a couple of absolutely batshit claims that I just want to believe are true. One is that after she saw his face on a magazine, she realized the man who tried to sweep her off her feet on a train to Rome was none other than Benito Mussolini. He might have succeeded if only his five o’clock shadow hadn’t scratched her neck. Later she claims that she met Hitler and he was very taken with her, declaring that he wished she were German because her beauty was of the Aryan variety. She met Hitler a couple of times but he bored her, gurned his mouth in a way that she found revolting, and she upset him because she smoked. Mikul tends to think Hitler had no interest in a Slavic woman of questionable virtue, but who knows. He managed to pander to Unity Mitford, a tiresome, pudding-faced woman who wore too much makeup, smoked and loved eating meat. There is so much more to this article that I cannot hope to discuss, and I now need to find a copy of her autobiography.

In “The Venice Biennale – 2013” Mikul shares his dismay when he saw what was considered art in the various countries that submitted work to the show. He says, “Depressing is hardly the word for this parade of absolute rubbish masquerading as art.” The entire experience was a let down and Mikul’s disgust and dismay at the state of contemporary art was a pleasure to read. It’s a known fact that bad excursions generate far better stories than good ones and this was strangely satisfying to read.

The final section reviews several books, the most interesting to me being his take on Eugenia by Mark Tedeschi. Eugenia Falleni was a woman, born in 1875, who assumed a male identity and married a woman with a son. It appears as if the wife discovered that Eugenia, who assumed the name Harry Crawford, was really a woman. She later died under very suspicious circumstances and Harry received the death penalty for the murder. The sentence was later reduced to a life sentence and Harry was paroled in 1933. This book review stood out to me for the stupidest reason – Harry Crawford bore a startling resemblance to disgraced talk show host Ellen Degeneres.

There are a lot of modern magazines that wish they could be as interesting, well-laid out and as visually appealing as this one-man ‘zine (though maybe I should say two-man because Glenn Smith’s drawings add to the value). If you would like to order this or any Bizarrism back issues, contact Chris at chris.mikul88@gmail.com.

A Day in Rennes-le-Château by Chris Mikul

Chris Mikul is a guru of the weird and bizarre and I’ve said before that I want to be him when I grow up. I probably won’t be able to move to Australia and make a living writing about weird people, odd books and strange places, but I can discuss his work and that’s a decent compromise, I think.

Chris is the author of several books, three of which I’ve discussed here. He also produces amazing ‘zines, notably Biblio-Curiosa and Bizarrism. Because the former deals with odd books and the people who write them, I’ve discussed several editions of Biblio-Curiosa on this site, and this week I finally will discuss a couple of editions of his equally delightful Bizarrism. Today, I want to share with you a one-off ‘zine he published, A Day in Rennes-le-Château. Should you want to order any of the ‘zines I discuss here, contact Chris at chris.mikul88@gmail.com.

This ‘zine is an intelligent and eminently readable synopsis of the ideas that make up the famous conspiracy that authors Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent, and Richard Leigh shared in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which led to Dan Brown’s bestselling book, The Da Vinci Code. A nice bonus are the sketches that Chris Mikul drew when he visited Rennes-le-Château and saw first hand the weirdness that inspired the belief that Christ was married to Mary Magdalen and she bore him children who carried on Christ’s bloodline. Two of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Lincoln was not a party to the lawsuit) tried to sue Dan Brown for using (rather heavily) their research to create his fictional work, but in the end they were hoisted by their own petard. They insisted that their book was a recitation of historical fact, but historical fact cannot be copyrighted, and that was why they lost the lawsuit.

I have to admit that I often get a bit tangled up discussing all the history involved in this conspiracy theory because it is pretty labyrinthine, but Mikul does an excellent job breaking it down. Short version but not really: A priest named Bérenger Saunière in 1891 renovated a completely run-down church in the Languedoc region of France. Inside of what is described as a “hollow pillar” he found four “parchments.” Two had been written by a priest, Abbé Bigou, and the other two parchments were much older. No one knows exactly what was on those parchments, but after the discovery, Father Saunière became wealthy.

As Saunière displayed his new wealth, it caused people to wonder exactly what Saunière found in the old church, leading them to believe one of the parchments told the location of a treasure. Many people began to dig around and under the church to find hidden treasure, eventually causing town officials to ban digging there because there were fears that all the tunnels dug under the town could result in collapse.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail examined the significance of the church’s location in the Languedoc region, where Cathars, a medieval sect of Christianity, were sought out and persecuted, eventually being exterminated in a “mountain top” fortress. Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh believe that a few of the Cathars smuggled out all the Cathar treasures and possibly secreted them at or near Rennes-le-Château.

Alongside the theory that Cathar treasure was the source of Saunière’s sudden wealth, is the Knights of Templar connection. The Knights of Templar was created to protect Christian pilgrims as they traveled to the Holy Land. The group grew in power and wealth and eventually the King of France decided to wipe them out in order to take the group’s land and riches. Some believe the Knights knew they would soon be attacked and made moves to hide and protect their most precious relics. One of those relics may have been the Holy Grail, the cup Christ drank from at the Last Supper. Another was possibly proof that the bloodline of Jesus was represented in the Merovingian dynasty that ended in 679 AD when King Dagobert II was assassinated. The Priory of Sion, founded at the same time as the Knights Templar, maintained in secret the records that purportedly proved Jesus was the patriarch of the Merovingian dynasty.

The Merovingian angle was the crux of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, but later that thesis was disproven when it was shown that the records the Priory of Sion were protecting were forgeries. But even with that revelation, there were still plenty of things left to ponder, chief among them: how did the penniless Saunière acquire his wealth (probably by selling Masses)?

The best part of this ‘zine is Mikul’s discussion of his trip to see Rennes-le-Château, where he made sketches of the church and the weird stuff inside of it. For example, Saunière installed a giant statue of Satan that held the fount of holy water. The statue of Satan at one point held a pitchfork but it was removed for safety reasons. Painted on a wall near the statue is Christ ministering to followers with a bag of money on the ground. The signs of the cross were arranged counter-clockwise. Statues of Joseph of Arimathea and Mary, standing side by side, are each holding an infant. One depiction of Jesus shows him wearing Scottish plaid, and there is a depiction of Jesus being taken into the tomb at night rather than the afternoon as the bible describes.

Mikul goes on to outline various problems in Saunière’s story, softly debunking the story of Jesus’ descendants without being as pedantic about it as I would be had I written this ‘zine. Even so, I find the Merovingian Jesus theory interesting and entertaining, and thoroughly enjoyed reading this ‘zine. Mikul included a “further reading” list, and I’ve read them all. The most entertaining of them all is Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail. Rat Scabies, the former drummer for The Damned, goes to France to hopefully dig up the Holy Grail. He even procured a metal detector for the search. The book caroms from one ridiculous situation to another and you should probably read it.

More Chris Mikul gems will pop up this week. See y’all soon.

CRY; or Where Did I Get This and Why Did I Buy It?

At times it is unsettling how many books, magazines and such that I have that I absolutely do not remember buying. Sometimes the media is something Mr OTC purchased that ended up in my various shelves and stacks, but this is not one of those times because CRY is definitely not something he would be interested in. He’s ex-military. He has very little interest in human carnage. While I have less and less interest in the visceral nature of violence, I suspect the hook was the synopses of accidental and lonely deaths rather than the violent and sexually disturbing collages that make up half the content in the ‘zine.

Don’t ask why there is a pig reading a cell phone while using the toilet in our true crime section. I don’t know the answer to that either.

This is a provocation ‘zine, a descendant of very shocking provocative ‘zines that drew me in when I was much younger. Opinions will vary but the apex of provocation ‘zines was during the eighties and through the mid-nineties. Though a lot of provocation ‘zines are still a thing, the fact is that the early generation used images that were genuinely shocking. Late Boomers and Gen-Xers had a lot of fears – nuclear war, AIDS, the specter of shorter lifespans and worse economic fates than our parents experienced, the sudden rise of serial killers, among them – but we didn’t have the non-stop barrage of horribleness that has become common today. ‘Zines that showed us horrible images alongside horrible text, be it fiction or non-fiction, still had the power to shock.

The shock often came from a place of incompleteness. For instance, I had of course seen victims of the Holocaust in movies and knew there were CIA-funded wars happening in Central America. But I had never seen photos of bulldozers pushing emaciated corpses into pits or naked men being attacked by dogs while members of the SS garrison stood watching and laughing. I had not seen the broken and buried bodies from the El Mozote massacre. But ‘zine makers had access to such photos (and how some of them got their hands on some of the rarer photos is still a matter for discussion) and they shared how it is that even the most shocking violence is almost always far worse than we could imagine and that there is an ocean of cruelty, misery and horror we don’t know about. Provocational ‘zines were how I learned about the ways animals are treated in the food industry, and those pictures of torture I could barely imagine then haunt me to this day.

Such shock is useful to the reader. It was certainly helpful to me. It was part of becoming an adult, of raising the curtain and seeing what is really happening.

In the case of CRY, I don’t find much that is helpful, probably because I’ve reached the point to where I’ve seen every sort of atrocity outside of child pornography so it’s pretty hard to provoke me. However, it is important to remember that sometimes even provocative ‘zines are less a desire to punch the audience in the face than an attempt to communicate inner turmoil or to share links between social phenomena that few others can see.

The purpose of this ‘zine is unclear to me and that I don’t know who created it doesn’t help. Google “cry” and “‘zine” and let me know how it goes for you. I do know the ‘zine was released after 2015 because the first collage featured in the ‘zine contained stills from a video that became notorious in gore and criminal justice spheres online. In 2015, a fourteen-year-old girl in Rio Bravo, Guatemala was brutally beaten by a mob and then set on fire. Townsfolk believed she was involved in the murder of a taxi cab driver, but whether or not she was really involved is still open for debate. The two men she was with fled and left her behind to deal with the angry mob. The creator of this ‘zine opened with images of her, without any explanation, so clearly her story has some larger purpose grounding this ‘zine.

The Rio Bravo images are followed by a disturbing collage that incorporates human faces and spiders, which itself is followed by another collage, featured in black and white on one page and in color on the other. The images in this collage are from gonzo and humiliation porn, with images of snarling dogs, genital torture and, most disturbingly, the face (and only the face) of a little girl. The women in these images are vomiting, dressed as barn animals, covered in feces, and screaming. The title of the piece is “Smile for the Camera.” This brutality is followed by a two-page color collage of a woman’s face covered with what appears to be an aborted baby.

After the collages are four news-style stories about death. Minimal research of the names involved lead me to believe all these deaths were made up, which makes the meaning in them all the more important. The stories are about a father who accidentally ran over his daughter when she fell off the boat he was driving, a father and son who died drowning while on vacation, a nightcrawler who ended up recording his own death in a car accident, and a man whose suicide isn’t noticed for weeks.

Since the author created these sad stories, they aren’t just sad stories about unexpected death with a heavy emphasis on parents who wished they could have saved their children. Where I run aground is trying to marry the four stories with the collages that come before them. Is the theme the notion that parental love cannot stop atrocity, be it saving a child from drowning, from mob violence, or from being abused in extreme porn? If so, it’s sort of a tenuous link.

Outside of that shot in the dark, I am unsure what the creator was going for. And the hell of it is, maybe he or she had no greater goal than to present upsetting images and stories that show the futility of existence, or perhaps there is no greater idea behind the desire to shock or upset, a valid goal for reading such ‘zines. In the end I have no idea. Which is sort of fitting since I have no idea who made this ‘zine, where I got it, and why I bought it.

But also in the end, artistic endeavor has value in itself outside of the meaning people like me ferret out of it. That’s a hard pill for me to swallow because my life is dedicated to ferreting out meaning but however I look at it, CRY forced me to interact with the content, and that has a value to it as well.

Next week expect some Chris Mikul ‘zines to be discussed as I gather steam to tackle the very intense and wordy Q-Anon-ish ‘zine that I both dread and am strangely excited about reading. Wish me luck.

Odd Things Considered

Tag: ‘zines