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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The end time is upon us: Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey is about to administer the coup de grbce to Western civilization.
Sep 20, 2000 | Plump, suave and swathed in black, Adam Parfrey stands before me flipping through a gruesome stack of color photos depicting headless torsos, severed limbs and various bodies sliced and diced like mincemeat. Could be a Jeffrey Dahmer wet dream or the Hannibal Lecter cookbook -- take your pick. Suddenly, a small frown appears on Parfrey's face.
"I don't like the way this red looks here," he tuts. "Oh, here's an article we translated from Spanish titled 'Hacking Mom.' Seems the man attacked his mom with a machete. Macheteo a su madre."
We're standing in the detritus-strewn offices of Feral House, Parfrey's 11-year-old alternative press, and Parfrey's proudly showing off the galley of his next big effort -- a sort of Mexican "Faces of Death" coffee-table-style book due out in November titled "Muerte!: Death in Popular Mexican Culture."
According to Parfrey, the bloody glossies have been culled from "Alarma," a Spanish-language tabloid with a circulation of about 15 million in Mexico. You can buy "Alarma" at a Spanish newsstand near you. Just don't tell Joe Lieberman.
But I'm here to discuss a different Feral House book: "Apocalypse Culture II," Parfrey's just-published compendium of every manner of freakdom your little perverted heart could wish for: necrophilia, pedophilia, cannibalism, Satanism, Jews for Hitler, coprophilia and so much more.
"Some of this stuff's even hard for me to take," quips Parfrey, 43. "Now that's saying something."
You ain't kidding. Parfrey's first "Apocalypse Culture," published in 1987 with Amok Press (which he co-owned at the time), was a prescient anticipation of millennial times, focusing on many subjects soon to become dear to the hearts of Gen Xers and assorted underground types: body play, occultism, secret societies, Armageddon, man-as-machine, the writings of Hakim Bey, etc.
J.G. Ballard called it "compulsory reading," and referred to the anthology as "an extraordinary collection unlike anything I have ever encountered." The tome was adopted by freaks everywhere as their bible -- selling over 55,000 copies; Parfrey earned a place in the subversive pantheon right alongside his dead buddy Anton Szandor LaVey, "The Black Pope" of the Church of Satan, whose books are the pride of the Feral House backlist.
Now Parfrey's published the long awaited sequel to "ACI," arguing that apocalyptic thought is still with us, and more a state of mind than anything else.
"Apocalypse culture is the manifestation of far-gone apocalyptic thought," explains Parfrey, shifting gears and taking a seat behind his ratty old desk. "It's an end time situation. People do not feel or act as if there's a future. We're on the downward slope of Western civilization, for good or bad. It's almost Spenglerian. Total democracy seems to have won. But it's really some sort of masturbatory shake-off."
"Of course, I'm not sure I want a more civilized society," he adds. "Western civilization is tottering, and I'm just giving it a quick kick to help it tumble faster."
If I read Parfrey correctly, the point seems to be that as there are no longer any grand systems of thought dominating Western intellectuals, cerebral anarchy and short attention spans rule the day. Folks get mired in obsessional cul-de-sacs, which lead them nowhere. In this environment, the intellectual with the greatest freak show wins. Think of Parfrey as equal parts P.T. Barnum, Rod Serling and Hegel. The man can't be beat when it comes to collecting outri oddities.
Wasn't Parfrey concerned that the triumph of the swill, a triumph he foresaw, would make "Apocalypse Culture II" obsolete? The Internet itself seems a limitless reservoir of "apocalyptic thought," as defined by Parfrey. What's left that people haven't already encountered in some form?
"I was concerned about that," he admits. "But it turned out not to be a problem. New times come around and there are new problems. People are not centered. It's not like just because you show this new manifestation of weirdness and end beliefs that they won't come up in a new guise in 10 years. There's always a new guise. I'm not too impressed with the idea that everything's on the Internet. It's one thing to have a couple of creep-heads talk about something in a discussion group. It's another thing when you're talking about mainstream morality."
