Apocalypse (Culture) Now!

There was a new sort of hip underground subculture that arose in the mid-80s and hung around until the early ’90s. That was about par for a new subculture’s lifespan in those days. In a way it evolved out of punk rock—which was hacking its last at the time—but it was neither musical nor political, not in the normal sense anyway. It was broader, darker, and more intellectual, with books usurping DIY cassettes as the primary medium of communication. It’s hard to thumbnail, but it involved a celebration of industrial decay, serial killers, the Jonestown massacre, sideshow freaks, William Burroughs, Satanism, dystopias, insane religious cults, the Challenger explosion, Manson, conspiracy theories, Ed Gein, B movies, extremes of human thought, behavior, art and sexuality, all things violent, transgressive, nihilistic and shocking. All of them, for the most part, appreciated from a safe distance. In a way it was related to the mid-19th century school of thought dubbed “Cultural Pessimism,” but instead of merely noting, predicting or tracking a civilization’s decline, this new lot was cheering it on, even looking for ways to speed things up. I was anyway.

One way to sum it up can be found in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s 1984 essay collection, “Driftworks”:

“Here is a course of action: harden, worsen, accelerate decadence. Adopt the perspective of active nihilism, exceed the mere recognition—be it depressive or admiring—of the destruction of all values. Become more and more incredulous. Push decadence further still and accept, for instance, to destroy the belief in truth under all its forms.”

It wasn’t a “movement” or “scene” so much as it was a shared attitude, a way of looking at a world in delirious collapse. It was reflected and documented by indie publishers like RE/Search, Amok, Loompanics and Feral House, magazines like ANSWER Me!, Search & Destroy and Seconds, and films like “Mondo New York,” a documentary about the city’s various late ’80s underground scenes, from performance art to S&M. Little storefronts even began popping up that catered directly to the Weltanschauung, selling the above-mentioned books and magazines, creepy knick-knacks, records, sideshow and serial killer memorabilia and the like.

It never had a collective name, but Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey came as close as anyone with the title of his 1987 anthology of essays and interviews, “Apocalypse Culture.” The whole mindset definitely had that Fin de siècle vibe about it, but with more wicked glee.

Like every scene, even if it was more a loose collective of the like-minded instead of an actual scene, there were a few prominent figures—artists, writers, musicians—who kept popping up in all the usual outlets.

* Parfrey was at the forefront. I’ve written about him a few times. Very smart guy. I thought of him as a cultural spelunker, always searching out those forgotten, dangerous ideas hidden in the shadows. Along with “Apocalypse Culture,”his Feral House published books about suppressed history and religious cults, books by and about criminals, paranoids and obscure visionaries, a couple volumes of crime scene photos and other outré subjects.

* Boyd Rice was a less-than-politically correct writer, prankster and musician who staged deliberately painful noise performances under the name “Non.”

* Artist and performer Joe Coleman, whose brilliant and obsessive paintings focused on marginal characters like Manson and Filmmaker Tod Browning, and whose performances famously involved geeking mice and blowing himself up.

* No-budget East Village filmmakers Richard Kern and Nick Zedd pioneered something they called (with straight faces) “The Cinema of Transgression.” Their short films went out of their way to try and shock audiences with outrageous levels of gratuitous sex and violence.

* There was Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV’s Genesis P-Orridge, who along with being a musician and artist was big into occultism and radical body modification.

* Finally there were RE/Search publishers Andrea Juno and V. Vale, whose thematic interview anthologies like “Pranks!” And “The Industrial Culture Handbook” spotlighted all of the above figures with the exception of Parfrey, who was their primary market rival.

Although in no way directly involved, David Lynch was the unofficial patron saint of, well, whatever it was.

I was in my early twenties when all this began to bubble up and coalesce. Not surprisingly I embraced it fully, not because it was new, but because it was so familiar. Much more than punk rock had, it gave form to what had been going on in my sociopathic little noggin since I could tie my shoes. Crime, disasters, nuclear war, all the worst the world had to offer had been personal fixations of mine for as long as I could remember, and now here were other people proudly and publicly admitting the same thing. I snatched up and consumed all the books as soon as they came out, with RE/Search’s “Industrial Culture Handbook” and Parfrey’s anthology in particular becoming personal bibles.

While not exactly “inspiration” in the technical sense, what we’ll collectively call apocalypse culture for simplicity’s sake certainly informed and enriched what my pal Grinch and I were doing with the Nihilist Workers Party and Pain Amplifiers. It also colored a lot of my seminar papers in grad school and, lord knows, my early writings for The Welcomat in Philly.

Over the years I came to know a few of the central players. Parfrey became a friend early on, and over the years we talked about collaborating on one thing or another for Feral House, but nothing ever came of it. Then we had a mighty falling out (long story) about a month before he died. Thanks to some mutual friends Joe Coleman was one of the first people I knew in New York. Having read so much about him already at that point (and having seen his mouse geeking segment in “Mondo New York”) I was both star struck and a little intimidated. We were chummy for a long time, though he seemed more fascinated with my fading eyesight than anything else. I met Genesis P-Orridge at a New York Press party and we had a brief correspondence after that. Another incredibly smart and fearless man. I’m glad I was blind when we first met, as the encounter took place after the sex change operation that left him looking like Carol Channing. I also apparently had a long-running feud with Boyd Rice, but I don’t really know what it was about. He took it far more seriously Than I did. I found it all kind of funny.

Even if my general mindset hadn’t changed much, by the mid ’90s, as always seems to happen, the idea of apocalypse culture as any sort of loose collective of the like-minded fizzled. It wasn’t that it had burned itself out like punk rock, nor that it had become dated and irrelevant. It was more banal than that.

I think the death knell came with the publication of RE/Search’s “Modern Primitives,” a collection of pieces about various forms of body modification. The book took off and was singlehandedly responsible for mainstreaming tattoos and piercings. It was kind of ironic. Like most scenes the whole apocalypse culture thing was extremely hermetic. Those involved thought they were out there shocking society, but they were mostly just trying to out-shock each other. Society wasn’t paying any attention. If it did pay any attention, it was briefly confused at best. But when some radical thing you’ve been whispering about for years is suddenly co-opted by the proles, it sucks the air out of everything. I mean, when you have 14 year-old girls lined up outside shopping mall tattoo parlors thanks to some “dangerous and subversive” book you put out, you’ve kinda lost your edgy outsider cred, haven’t you? So that was that.

Parfrey and Boyd Rice continued to hang around as elder statesmen of a sort. Both later became tangentially connected with neofolk, an apocalypse culture-inspired musical subgenre with Neo-fascist underpinnings. The rest just kept doing what they always had, some (like Joe Coleman) finding wild success, most retreating into shadowy obscurity.

In 2012 or thereabouts I saw an announcement that Parfrey, Joe Coleman and a few other familiar faces from the olden days were giving some sort of lecture/performance thing in NYC. Instead of rushing out to snag tickets I thought, “Oh, that’s so sad.”

Well, a few weeks ago I decided to look back thirty-five years to what I’d considered an important and formative period for me. The hardcore scene never would’ve existed without Ronald Reagan, and I wondered if I might be able to glean any socio-historical subtext for the emergence of apocalypse culture in post-Reagan America.

Well there might be something in there, but after returning to Parfrey’s “Apocalypse Culture” anthology and “Mondo New York” I decided it wasn’t worth the psychic energy to speculate.

What seemed so shocking and outrageous when “Mondo New York” came out in 1988 now seems, well, quaint. And pretentious. And silly. In one segment performance artist Karen Finley comes out onstage, takes her clothes off, pours a bag of smashed raw eggs over her head, then rants about yuppies.

“Well good for you,” I thought. “Stick it to those darn yuppies.”

When I re-read “Apocalypse Culture”—or tried to re-read it anyway—I was a little mortified. For one thing, I’d completely forgotten how many of the essays focused on Aleister Crowley, “magick,” the occult and other such religious drivel that never interested me in the least. To read an essay in which Parfrey was clearly taking the late-’60s SF-based hippie cult The Process Church of the Final Judgment seriously? Jesus, come to your damned senses lad—how is that bullshit any different from the bullshit you’re trying to shatter? Supposedly shocking interviews with a self-proclaimed necrophile and self-proclaimed lycanthrope not only reeked of delusion, they were dull. Being dull in that context is the worse of the two crimes. Most of the essays, looking at them now, are trying way too hard, and fall flat as a result. It was, yes, quaint and pretentious and silly, the same adjectives I’d easily apply to that “Cinema of Transgression” folderol, which was ridiculous and dumb when I first saw a few examples of Mr. Kern and Mr. Zedd’s work at a basement screening in 1987. Worse, or funnier, the films weren’t nearly as shocking as the filmmakers seemed to believe they were.

How could I have taken any of this fiddle-faddle seriously? I thought I was smarter than that back then. But I guess I was young, relatively naive, excitable and nihilistic. Yes, it was a reflection of what was going on in my head, but what was going on in my head was better and darker, and the pranks Grinch and I pulled were funnier.

I’ll sum it up this way. I’m glad punk rock was around when it was. I was the perfect age and it was what I needed at the time. Same with the apocalypse culture thing. Looking back now, a little wiser and with clearer eyes, yeah, it was all pretty stupid. Or maybe it strikes me that way because our present dystopia is so much darker and funnier than any of us could’ve imagined back then.

by Jim Knipfel