I wasn't looking for dastardly videos of gooey genitalia gushing and blushing or pictures of people drying their wet body parts on wooden clothespins or...any images at all. As rockist Peter Townshend once tearfully attested, I wuz merely doing research. I analyze blowbangs, among other niches of digivideo perversity, and the world needs to know how I do it, w/ or w/o a saw-fret comb I may choose to secret in cerebral parts unknown. Since I harbor ambitions to be the very first university professor to offer a class in "The Semiotics of Gonzo Porn", treating gp as a rarefied refinement of sexual performance art and moving beyond the usual borderliner dialectics that burden porn studies with pop-ed sociology, a review of what little we have between hard covers about the topic was in order.
After two pages of mostly obsolete (i.e., pre-millennial) titles, I experienced a new sort of thrill ride when i saw the first entry on page three. I knew that Michael "Mike Edison" Simberg, the drummer in Killdozer 85/Sharky's Machine, a rock band I worked with in the 1980's, had published a book. I didn't realize that I'd encounter a listing for two copies of his bibliopus in the hallowed halls of the HWLC. Hunting them down on the mustless bookshelves, I groped it free and skimmed the first chapter. There I wuz in the very first chapter. So wuz country music historian and satellite radio personality Jeremy Tepper. Edison related a lengthy and intentionally semi-fallacious anecdote about an evening almost exactly a quarter century previous. I'm jaded about many things but the feelings I had holding that book and squinting at its contents were fresh and complex. I felt like Lee Marvin witnessing Gene Hackman devouring a big plate of livestock entrails in the Dommywood classic "Prime Cut". You eat guts, Michael...well I knew it all along, I just didn't expect you to do it right in front of me, Mary Ann...
Two weeks later, I'm still unsure of how to react. Do I counter the Edison character's kayfabe storytelling with mythmaking of my own? Like his alleged nemesis Hulk Hogan, who seems to be increasingly hazy about knowing the difference between his in-ring persona and the artist born certified as Terry Bollea, Michael Simberg may no longer be able to grasp a verifiable fact without prejudice. I've been wondering that about him for decades, and I say this with no rancor whatsoever and no sardonic humor, just sadness and empathy for what I believe is a severe and verifiable psychiatric disorder.
His powers of observation give him the ability to find verisimilitude, corroborative detail intended to bolster an aesthetic argument. Verisimilitude is not objective, and I realize that Simberg provides a disclaimer in a title page that doth protest too much that his book is like pro wrestling and stuff, so don't take it as gospel truth. Hogan does that sort of thing too..."Dude, you know it's all a work, brother!"...after he destroys competing wrestlers' careers thru in-ring bigfooting and backstage backstabbing, slanders John Graziano and Nancy Benoit in the mass media when they're too crippled or dead to fight back, etc.... Strangely enough (no, it really figures in the inherently psychotic milieu of Old School Pro Wrestling), Roddy Piper, the pre-eminent WWF heel of the 1980's whose work we and millions of others adored, issued a dreadful 2k2 "autobiography" of his own which also sacrificed both art and reality in the name of kayfabe grappling with verisimilitude. Piper has eVinced Wonderful courage and honesty about the industry in recent years, and publishing "In the Pit with Piper" outside the WWE imprimatur gave him the option of telling it like it is, bullshit-free. He blew it, and while Michael's book is deftly stylistic and funny in its early going and gets very touching and genuine for about Five Pages at the beginning of Chapter Three, he duz Two.
I wuz revved up on FloDom fire when I first read "I Have Fun wherever I Go". It made me conceptualize the possibility of a parallel mythmaking piece. I could fairly easily write a page-for-page answer book in the vein of old pop answer songs like "Annie Had a Baby" and "He'll Have to Stay" w/ an identical word count. I have plenty to say about everything he writes about whether I have personal knowledge about it or not, and that would be a groundbreaking exercise in literary obsession. Has it been done before? Quick, somebody who knows Frank Bank, write a word count-for-word count answer book to "Call Me Lumpy", which is poop culture's ultimate autobiography and available at a dollar discount at used biblio vendors throughout the Anglo-speaking world...
I decided that I'd rather keytap about the great Dana DeArmond, a performance artist more fervid, talented and essential than any electric blues guitarist in history, getting her armpits fucked in a blowbang. I'd rather keytap about Annette Schwarz treating a 20-thug blowbang as a novelty B-side to her intensely gorgeous anthems of degradation craft. I'd rather keytap about Jake Malone, the Max Ophuls of powerporn, transforming yesterday's coke hag and to-morrow's boxcover starlet into D/s goddesses worthy of the von Sternberg Dietrich, w/ or w/o blowbangs. The art of parallel mythmaking is a pretty lexischeme in my keytapping fingers, but I'd rather stick to the truest mission of "The Daily Spot", which is to elevate orphan subcultures, not invent them. Besides, gonzo porn is the most innaresting and emotionally embroiling art form of the last five years in Uncle Sam's foreclosed America, driven by the tainted blood of its founder to collectively mindful purity...
The third saddest thing about the Mike Edison book--the saddest being his disinclination to connect the blindingly pulsating dots between his relationship with his family and every major decision he's made in his life (which makes him like me and almost everyone else, but if he admitted that he'd be Michael Simberg again, not "MIke Edison", and he can't allow that)--the second saddest being the relentless re-re-re-branding of the Old School Mike Edison gimmick that seems as fresh and relevant as the daring denim jacket and fedora look he dons for the most important photograph of his life, the dust jacket shot (Bert Sugar Jr. goes to a Dead show)--is how callous he continues to be as he makes up shit about our band KIlldozer 85/Sharky's Machine, a seriously flawed but unique and generally good-to excellent young group. Some of what he writes is very true, some partially true but exaggerated, some utter mooheap. That's not the issue.
Let me take a deep breath here. Mmmm. Unlax. OK.
THE ISSUE IS THAT HE NEVER FUCKING CONSULTED ANYONE IN THE BAND ABOUT ANYTHING HE WRITES ABOUT US!!!
HE GETS YEARS WRONG IN OUR CHRONOLOGY!!! WE WERE TOGETHER FROM 1984 TO 1989!!! WE WENT TO EUROPE IN 1988 AND 1989!!! HE CALLED KRAMER A CHILDFUCKER, NOT A RATFUCKER!!! HE DOESN'T EVEN MENTION KILLDOZER 85, OR OUR ENTIRE 1ST LP--WHICH FEATURES HIS OWN BEST COMPOSITIONS!!! WE PLAYED NEARLY HALF THE SONGS ON THAT LP LIVE FOR FIVE YEARS!!! I WAS IN A BAD MOOD ALL THE TIME TOWARDS THE END BECAUSE I HATED WORKING WITH HIM SPECIFICALLY!!! ALEC AND TONI DID TOO!!! WE WOULD HAVE FIRED HIM AND REPLACED HIM IF WE'D STAYED TOGETHER AFTER THE SECOND TOUR--I HAD AT LEAST THREE CANDIDATES IN MIND TO REPLACE HIM!!! ALL HE WANTED TO DO IN REHEARSAL WAS SMOKE WEED!!! HE HAD A MANCRUSH ON THE ROLLING STONES--HE WANTED ME TO BE MICK JAGGER AND WEAR EYELINER AND BLOW HIM WITH MICKLIKE HARMONICA-SUCKING MAMBO LIPS (well, the last part's metaphorical, not literally true, but fuck the mancrush on those pathetic junkies already)!!! HE WASN'T THE BANDLEADER, WE SHARED THE POWER!!! IT WASN'T HIS BAND TO BREAK UP!!! I NAMED THE BAND "SHARKY'S MACHINE" AFTER THE KILLDOZER NAME DEBACLE DRAGGED OUT INTERMINABLY--THANX, WILLIAM DIEHL--AND HE HAS THE SHIT-STAINED BALLS TO CALL HIMSELF "SHARKY" FOR 20 YEARS WHILE BADMOUTHING US EVERY CHANCE HE GETS???!!!???!!!??? HE NEVER HAS A GOOD WORD TO SAY ABOUT ALEC, WHO'S A MORE TALENTED MUSICIAN AND SONGWRITER THAN HE'S BEEN FOR OVER 20 YEARS???!!!???!!!??? WHEN WILL HE ADMIT THAT HE CAN ONLY PLAY IN BANDS WITH COKEHEADS WHO PLAY SIMPLE CHORD PROGRESSIONS BECAUSE HE USED TO BE AN EXCELLENT HARDCORE PUNK DRUMMER WHO BECAME TOO DRUG-ADDLED AND BORDERLINE TO PLAY CHALLENGING MUSIC AROUND 1987???!!!???!!!??? YOU WISH YOU HAD MADONNA'S TALENT AND CHARISMA, SKEEZIX!!! MAUREEN DOWD KICKS YOUR ASS INTO THE MIDDLE OF NEXT WEEK, AS A POP-ED WRITER, SONGSTRESS, ROVING COCKSMITH AND 5TH AVENUE FASHION PLATE!!! YOU'RE THRU, NANCY, YOUR ARTISTIC VISION IS COMATOSE AND YOU KNOW IT--THAT'S WHY YOU WROTE YOUR OWN FUCKIN EPITAPH ON TREE SHAVINGS AND HAD THE COVER ILLUSTRATED WITH CARTOONS OF DEAD PEOPLE!!!
I'd luv to correspond w/ Michael Simberg, the charming young adult I met at Rubin Hall. As for "Mike Edison"...
"DIE, MONSTER, DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
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