An irreverent tribute to an irreverent man.
By: Jimbo X
@JimboX
"I prefer people with imagination: dictators, serial killers, schizophrenics, assassins, skinheads, drug lords, violent bikers, devil worshipers. To me, these are the interesting people. To get its edge back, I think what America really needs is more evil. Intense, unalloyed, concentrated evil."
- George Carlin (2004)
"I want to get dangerous information out into the world. I think it's necessary for people to make up their own minds other than some publishing house saying what's right and what's not."
- Adam Parfrey (1988)
"Δ S = S [final] - S [initial]"
- Formula for measuring change in entropy
In my lifetime, I've had maybe 10 or 12 people I can safely say I've idolized.
Obviously, the three biggest inspirations on my writing style are Joe Bob Briggs, Jim Goad and Matt Caracappa. My sense of humor (and in many ways, my philosophical outlook on the world) was shaped by George Carlin and Richard Pryor. And that plucky, "fuck everybody else, I'm doing this shit MY WAY" indie sensibility o' mine was quite clearly forged by visionary assholes like Al Davis, Paul Heyman, Lloyd Kaufman and Ian MacKaye.
And on May 10, one of the very, very few individuals out there I can genuinely call one of my heroes bought the big one.
Read it and weep, children — Adam Parfrey, 61, is dead. As in, pushing up daisies, turning into worm-food and having all of his mail delivered via groundhog.
The man deserves better, people, and if nobody else is going to give this guy the glowing public eulogy he deserves, looks like I'm gonna' have to step up to the plate and do the media's work for 'em ... again.
Long story short, Parfrey was the Charles Mackay of our generation. This is a guy who had his finger on the pulse of modern absurdity better than anybody who has lived on planet earth in the last 50 years. This is a guy who saw the unseen horrors lurking beneath the hoi polloi's banal behaviors, and conversely, a man insightful enough to capture the small glimmers of absolute truth contained in the rantings and ravings of bona fide maniacs.
Nietzsche once warned the masses to avoid looking into "the abyss." Meanwhile, Parfrey didn't just invite it to a staring contest, he practically snorkeled in it while wearing Mickey Mouse flip flops.
Apocalypse Culture II absolutely blew my mind in college. Here was a compendium of essays, articles and prose on the most disturbing and nihilistic shit you could think of — necrophiliacs and child rapists and cannibals — but it was a look at the dark side of existence through a truly anthropological lens. This wasn't just the usual Faces of Death and Rotten.com juvenalia, this was downright beautiful philosophizing on the insanity of contemporary society. After reading all the letters from psycho stalkers and interviews with aspiring mass shooters and the surprisingly eloquent lamentations of professional porno reviewers, it's almost like I walked away with an opaque realization of a universal truth I had never acknowledged before. It took me years and years to figure out what that was, but in hindsight, I recognize what Parfrey was: the world's first dedicated beat reporter for the subject of social entropy.
That's the recurring theme of the Feral House bibliography; as great as things may be going on in modern existence, we're STILL bound for terminal ruin — and if you look very closely at the world around you, you can pick up the subtle, subtle cues that cultural collapse is all around us.
Parfrey is a man who recognized the heat death of humanity in bubblegum pop music. The big crunch of civility through allegations of rigged NFL games. The cold, icy implosion of social life as we know it through things as seemingly insignificant as Ed Wood movies, black metal, Internet websites about poop and standardized student testing — this, in addition to the stuff hidden in plain sight (radical Islam, high-powered pharmaceuticals, the expansion of the surveillance state, etc.) that for some bizarre reason, we've somehow managed to convince ourselves really aren't that big of a deal.
No, Parfrey wasn't just a publisher who made a bushel recycling the profundities of John Zerzan, Smedley Butler, Anton LeVay and the Unabomber. This was a man who literally dedicated his life to exploring, analyzing and assessing the slow deterioration of the species, chronicling the sundry ways Western Civilization is killing itself through rock and roll, heroin, breakfast cereal and post-post-modern art.
Not a whole lot of people ever picked that up about Parfrey. They just thought he was a weird dude that published stuff about pedophiles and corpse-fuckers and Japanese serial killers because he liked to shock people. No, Parfrey's intentions were much, much deeper than that. His writings — either the ones he himself personally wrote or the ones he published on behalf of others — give us key insight into the end of all that is and all that ever will be. Those ghastly little glimmers of horror and inhumanity, he reminds us, don't exist in a vacuum; indeed, books like Apocalypse Culture paint a vivid portrait of how "normal society" breeds, creates and ultimately encourages such disgusting and disturbing things.
That's the secret brilliance — and terror — of Parfrey's work. He's letting us know that all the wacko conspiracy theorists and drug-addicted sex maniacs and remorseless ax murderers of the world are cut from the very same social fabric as you and I, and maybe such regrettable individuals aren't mere abnormalities, but a vision of what will one day be the new normal.
All civilizations collapse eventually. And considering all the social carcinogens within American culture right now — all of those grisly and kooky things Parfrey spent his entire life writing about — it's probably a lot closer to happening than any of us would care to realize.
Shit, just take a look at the names of Parfrey's books. Rants and Incendiary Tracts, Cult Rapture: Revelations of the Apocalyptic Mind, The End is Near! Visions of Apocalypse, Millennium and Utopia. This is a man who knew that the laws of thermodynamic equilibrium applied just as much to social states as it did molecular systems, and his writings clearly showed us the proverbial writing on the walls was all around us.
Matter and energy remains constant, or else it dies. That's a General Systems truth that governs literally everything we know about the universe, but for some reason, humanity has convinced itself our majestic societies are somehow immune to that.
Well, after reading Parfrey's works, it's impossible to go back to thinking things are just hunky-dory in these United States. We might feel that we're civil and progressive and that we're hurtling towards utopia any day now, but each step forward is ultimately but one stop closer to our own cultural death. Forward movement can only go on for so long; eventually, the cultural apex has to be reached, and from there? It's all downhill, folks ... real downhill.
I admired and envied Parfrey because he was covering EXACTLY the same material I would be covering if I had my own imprint. Parfrey's milieu was destruction and decay and degradation and degeneration and decadence, but it was still objective. His stuff was the most deliberate and level-headed look at absolute madness I've ever read in my life (eat shit, Foucault) and even now I stand in awe of his impressive oeuvre.
Strangely enough, just a day before his death on May 10 I was thinking about whether or not he would release an Apocalypse Culture 3 while walking my dog. That should show you the indelible impact and import of Parfrey's work on my life — here I was, enjoying a beautiful summer day and getting a ton of fresh air with my puppy, yet in the back of my head ... way, WAY in the back ... I was still sub-subconsciously chewing on the subject of social decomposition, that even though everything seems just peachy, EVERYTHING around us is slowly-but-surely dying.
It's still my biggest dream as a writer to one day launch my own social entropy-themed publication, some sort of magazine or website or imprint wholeheartedly dedicated to all things adharmic about the current cultural order. And that's precisely because of Parfrey's work — something that has influenced me not only as a writer, but as a human being in general.
It's a shame Parfrey will probably only be remembered for hanging out with Satanists and that one concept album he made after the Rodney King riots (which, to be fair, actually is pretty fucking awesome.) Indeed, Parfrey should be remembered as our greatest custodian of modern popular delusions, the paramount historian of our contemporary social psychoses and the premier chronicler of the late 20th century and early 21st century's paranoia and hysteria-fueled mass media.
Half publisher and half prophet, Parfrey shone a light on the other side of the human experience, that part of our nature we prefer to think we've outgrown cerebrally and out-evolved socially. He wasn't afraid to hold up that mirror and reflect our own ugliness and vileness back on us (which, proving his point, become maligned as neo-aestheticism by the supposed enlightened ones and decried as pornography by the alleged moral majority.)
Some might call him a fringe fetishist or a pop cultural pariah or a conspiracy wonk, and some might even call him glib, superficial or — dare I say it? — a "proto-hipster." As is with everything in life, there's probably a kernel of truth to those accusations (after all, this is a man that started selling fucking coloring books in what we would now call the empennage of his life and career.)
Still, it's hard to not appreciate and admire a man who wasn't afraid to tackle topics not only considered unspeakable, but through a hard social science approach that — intentionally or unintentionally — revealed the greater philosophical truths of our own impending demises.
That's who and what Adam Parfrey was — the bastard love child of Emile Durkheim and Larry Flynt. The mutant offspring of Talcott Parsons and Al Goldstein. Zizek and the Zodiac Killer rolled into one person.
And if you haven't hit up his finest works, you don't know what you've been missing, folks.
All I can say is hanks for the memories, pal — we're all going to miss you, especially in today's world.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.