Alice Doll
Vol. 1
I’ve come to the conclusion that Japanese pop culture is inbred. They live on an island and don’t let anyone in, so their fashion and music culture is not an interesting hybrid of Japanese vs. international influences, it is simply a bastardization of international influences. Just like what would happen if your brother and sister had a baby. Take their “gothic lolita” thing for example. Dressed as pre-pubescent, Victorian, virgin sluts these girls walk around with black leather stuffed rabbits covered in skull pins. What the fuck are they doing?
Darren Alberty
Madonna
Andrew Morton
St. Martin’s Press
Madonna, An Intimate Biography
J. Randy Taraborrelli
Simon and Schuster
It was inevitable. And leave it to Vogue, one the world’s most unimaginative rags, to declare Britney Spears as Madonna’s heir apparent. Wrong. Can you picture Britney stumbling out of a NYC cab in the late 70s with nothing but a hankie full of money and a rabid quest for fame? Sleeping in churches with smelly, untalented musicians? Making out with Basquiat? Rocking Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs? Flying to Paris with Belgian pervs? Posing nude for a sandwich and twenty bucks? Getting raped on a tenement rooftop? Having abortions? Can you even PICTURE Britney with armpit hair?
As both biographies point out, Madonna was punk before punk was punk. This is something we forget. At the bottom of the pile of carefully orchestrated press which Madonna has amassed over the last twenty years, there is something called “authentic roots.” Britney, on the other hand, was spat out of a Dr. Seuss-like cartoon tube, exactly the way that a body makes poo. Say what you will about Madonna’s mediocre voice, derivative sound, crappy acting and pot-boiler love life—she’s still the real deal. She took risks (that sex book?). She fell on her face (that sex book). She survived.
Morton’s bio promises salacious details, but tanks. Taraborrelli’s is the better book. Unfortunately, neither biographer achieves the one thing that unauthorized accounts require to become memorable. Neither can pin regret on its subject.
“I have nothing to be ashamed of,” Madonna declares, when dirty pictures of her are unearthed days before her wedding to Sean Penn. You can practically hear the foundation of the Catholic Church, and the foundation of both these books, crack and buckle. Maybe it’s true. Maybe Madonna is God.
Lisa Gabriele
Badaboom Gramophone
Issue Number 5
Reading Badaboom Gramophone is like having an after-dinner conversation with your smartest and most savvy friends who have aged more-or-less gracefully and without losing their sense of humor. This book is a labor of love, published sporadically, that is equal parts pop culture connoisseurship and grad school aesthetics. I was blown away to read a rundown on the best books on avant garde (mostly American) cinema: This is very obscure film fare and including its presence here gets Issue Number 5 some major highbrow points. Add to this an essay on Sartre’s Huis Clos, Guide to Renting Porn, on “Self Consciousness, Autonomy and the Avant Garde” and “Voice Modification in Popular Music,” Badaboom Gramophone proves that intelligence is making a comeback.
Bill Alvi
How We Became Posthuman
N. Katherine Hailes
University of Chicago Press
The Mechanization of the Mind
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Princeton University Press
There was a time in the 1970s (mostly), a weird anomalous period, when the history of science was perceived as being bloody sexy. The theorists were mostly French, jovial and brooding at the same time, usually had sordid personal lives, and seemed to have the wisdom of the ages at their fingertips. The problem was that they usually got the science part all wrong. Two new books (one newer than the other) are part of contemporary work that reverses that trend by combining a critical attitude with a solid history of science. Both books deal with the Macy Conferences, a series of conferences held in New York from 1945-1956 — the place where the word “cyber” was first coined. It was at these conferences on the brand new field of “cybernetics” that scholars got together to theorize a crazy idea: Could we build a machine that could manipulate an abstract set of symbols? Then they had an even crazier idea: What if the human brain is really like some kind of program, kind of like the programs that run our machines that manipulate abstract symbols? The first idea became the computer, the second became cognitive psychology and modern neural science. Humanity has been stuck somewhere in between both since then. That’s the problem that these new books are trying to explore. Between the two, Dupuy’s is the more solid historical breakdown of all the participants and the major themes of the conferences, while Hailes’ is the more critically adventurous. Both are worth reading, even though they aren’t as sexy as those 70s dudes made the topics seem. Actually they aren’t sexy at all.
Eddy Moretti
The Gates Of Janus
Ian Brady
Feral House
Most books about serial killers are formulaic, nasty little affairs written by alcoholic ex-crime reporters with too much time on their hands. Totally disposable, they’re usually good for a sick laugh but that’s about it.
If you really want to get your hands dirty, you should get a copy of The Gates Of Janus. It’s arguably the sickest, most controversial true crime book ever published.
The book’s author is Ian Brady, one of the most cruel, calculating, and notorious child killers ever.
Now 61, the ultra-sadist made his name as the Moors Murderer in the 60s by co-ercing his girlfriend Myra Hindley into helping him kidnap, rape, and torture young children. The couple would then bury the bodies of the children on the harsh moors of northern England.
A big fan of Hitler and the Marquis de Sade, Brady lovingly recorded his crimes with photographs and audio tapes. Where most serial killers limit their literary endeavors to scrawling things like “Die bitch!” on the walls of their victims’ bedrooms, Brady’s written eighteen scarily persuasive chapters on “serial killing and its analysis,” documenting famous cases like Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, you know the rest…
As queasy as reading a book by a man who delighted in the torture, rape, and murder of little children can make you feel, it’s an extremely compelling read and, as straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth insight into the mind of one of modern society’s monsters, quite frightening.
A loner from a bad background with a history of crime from an early age, the odds were stacked against Brady from day one. Predictably, he rails against the prison system, the government and the church and— this is the main crux of the book—points out that there are many, MANY more with backgrounds and views just like him, just WAITING to come and get YOU at any second. You could even be one of them yourself.
“Even so-called ‘ordinary’ people have a morbid curiosity and atavistic urge to experience what it would be like actually to kill someone,” he argues. “The urge is buried inextricably within the human psyche.”
It’s important to realize that, despite his way with words, Brady’s a master manipulator-turned-twisted old-age pensioner now who hasn’t known life outside of a high security mental hospital for decades and decades. It’s something I kept reminding myself of every time I started nodding in agreement at his arguments. I’d advise all future readers of the book to do the same.
In the book’s afterword, author, Whitehouse member and one-time self-confessed Brady “fan” Peter Sotos says: “The child rapist and murderer and pornographer will obviously lie. And, because he wants to believe you need to hear more and see more than you’ll ever actually do, he’ll even start to enjoy telling you he’s lying.”
Despite attempts by Ashworth Hospital, Brady’s victim’s families, and victim support groups all over the world, The Gates Of Janus is now on sale through Feral House.
Peter Sotos recommends you buy it. “(It’s) a perversely oblique cut into a very interesting and unique character. I can think of no one else in Brady’s circumstance that speaks with such eloquence. It, above all else, strikes me as a very human book.”
Apparently Brady’s donating the proceeds towards the upkeep of his elderly mother Margaret. How sweet.
Andy Capper
