April 08, 2004

LA CityBeat - Notes from the Underground

By Mick Farren

Los Angeles is home to the most dangerous publishers in America. Feral House and Disinformation specialize in unnerving books on art, politics, the occult, dementia, and beyond. And with a cultural war raging in Washington, business can only get better.

Adam Parfrey has, at various times and in various places, been dubbed the “most dangerous publisher in America.�? He has recently moved into a bijou Silver Lake Castle Dracula with Teutonic woodwork and stained glass. The actual offices of Feral House, the publishing company of which Parfrey is owner and editor, are housed in a cinematographic guest house, up a hillside path where one could almost expect to meet Peter Cushing or a white wolf. The main drawing room is dominated by nosferatu candelabra, and a more-than-life-size oil painting of Josef Stalin. An exquisite ceramic hand grenade is displayed on a shelf.

In total contrast is Richard Metzger, who, with business partner Gary Baddely, runs the multimedia operation Disinformation. He lives in an anonymous apartment building off Ventura Boulevard, in a stark two-bedroom that would be ’60s Hefner but for the stuffed goat’s head, the crucified Batman, the big occult-math Paul Laffoley paintings, and the intricate works of artist Joe Coleman. The only toiletry in the spotless bathroom is a lone bottle of Elvis Presley after-shave. I don’t know if the apartment was ready-rigged for our interview, but I wouldn’t doubt that Metzger, frequently described as “the conspiracy theory poster boy�? and “the occult anarchist,�? would be beyond a detail of zen-pop mindfuck.

The total opposition in the styles of Parfrey and Metzger would make it hard to believe initially that they are in the same line of work. Apart from the cigarette readily to hand, Metzger might be mistaken for a suit-on-the-make, and has indeed been a privateer on the corporate high seas for more than a decade, cutting deals and shivering cyber-timbers in the wild woolly web world of the 1990s. Parfrey is far more the traditional bohemian publisher, with roots in postpunk, sex, drugs, body piercing, tattoos, and G.G. Allin. His 1987 book Apocalypse Culture became the bible of social deviants and rebels-without-a-clue in the terminal Reagan times of serial killers, Satanic conspiracy, Iran-Contra, and Michael Jackson as the Antichrist. If Metzger resembles the counterculture’s own Agent Smith, Parfrey is its veteran Jedi in black shirt and pants who wears weary resignation like a battle scar. “I keep thinking you can get to the bottom of human behavior, that it can never get any more sordid or pathetic,�? Parfrey says, “but I’m always wrong.�?

The bond between the two men is that they publish material major publishing houses would not touch without a hazmat suit. Their product plumbs the depths of the difficult, decadent, and disturbing, and neither is afraid to confront that old Nietzschean abyss, or present ideas so far out in left field that they might encounter aliens on the return trip. The cultural possibilities in this first decade of the 21st century have been made infinitely diverse by huge leaps in communications technology, and both men are pushing these possibilities to the limit. They create their share of shock, surprise, and consternation, which is no easy task in a world that attempts to encompass everything from pop mannequin Ryan Seacrest to young gay men establishing their queer identity by deliberately becoming HIV-positive. An added plus is that both Parfrey and Metzger have based themselves in Los Angeles, helping to negate the jibes of “less culture than yogurt.�?

One might expect a certain rivalry between Metzger and Parfrey in a counterculture that’s famous for its feuds, but Metzger can only express gratitude for the help he received from Parfrey, and Parfrey reciprocates in kind. They are comrades in subversion, plowing parallel furrows in a field where there’s more than enough subversion to go ’round, and it’s no disrespect to say that Metzger has built on much that Parfrey first established.

Investigation as Conspiracy

Metzger explains Disinformation in what amounts to a policy statement. “We want to get people thinking, to get them to begin to question what they see every time they read a newspaper, watch television, read an ad, or surf the Internet. We want to get across the idea that media is a mixture of truth and lies. It’s often incorrect, incomplete, and sometimes serving the interests of those who own it.�?

In a separate conversation, Parfrey comes at the same thought from a different angle when he expresses his concern that the Feral House political catalog – which includes books on the Yitzhak Rabin assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, CIA mind control, and the forthcoming 50 Reasons Not to Vote for George Bush --- is covering areas that 90 percent of the media either ignore or wish would go away. “Once I found out that the mainstream or establishment journalism machine was not at all interested in big stories if they didn’t run the line these huge corporations that own the newspapers wanted to present, then investigative journalism is suddenly known as conspiracy theory,�? Parfrey says. “I thought, ‘Why is this guy who puts out Satanic books and weird things and can hardly afford to buy shoelaces putting out this extremely relevant and great political research?’ Why is it up to me? I was aghast at that. I didn’t want to be that person.�?

But politics is only a fraction of what is grist to both Feral and Disinformation, and the distance each is prepared to go in terms of subject matter is easily revealed by an examination of recent and successful titles. In It’s a Man’s World, Parfrey has lavishly preserved, in a single, gorgeously lurid volume, the raging covers of those 35-cent pulp magazines with titles like Stag, Male, and Daring, from the 1950s and 1960s, with their infinitely repeated formula of sadomasochism and Cold War dementia. Voluptuously painted young women in lingerie are ingeniously tortured by evil Nazis, equally evil Commissars, and even bearded-and-ruthless Cuban revolutionaries. Although, just to prove that the genre supported equal-opportunity titillation, the curvaceous cover girls were sometimes given the whip hand, with movie-heroic GIs and Sabre jet pilots being mercilessly flogged by SS she-wolves and Marxist-Leninist vixens from Hell. For decades, Stag, Male, and the rest were deemed so culturally reprehensible they didn’t even enjoy the eBay cachet of (say) Irving Klaw/Bettie Page bondage pics, and might have been lost to the modern world had Parfrey not stepped in. In the same way, Parfrey has also corralled the desperate/decadent graphic art of the pre-Hitler Weimar Republic in two equally lavish volumes --- Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon, and The Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin by Barbara Ulrich.

All three books could be dismissed as limited-edition retro-whipkitten sensationalism, only published because Parfrey likes that kind of thing. He freely admits that much of Feral’s output is “things that interest me, and that at least suggests there are others who will also be interested.�? Through half-closed eyes, however, a link is detectable. Germany in the 1930s was in pain/pleasure debasement-confusion between holocausts, and the U.S. in the ’50s was in Ward Cleaver lockstep with sexual repression and political orthodoxy as the Strangelove tools of control. At root, these curious coffee table items all feature the fringe graphics of societies being driven insane. But madness is a common theme in the publishing output of Feral House, a fact more than confirmed by The Gates of Janus, a study of serial killers by incarcerated Brit sado-slayer Ian Brady, or Lords of Chaos by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, which chronicles the lethal aberration of Scandinavian death metal with its murders and church burnings.

Described on the cover as “The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult,�? Richard Metzger’s Book of Lies charts a trail through what some might call madness and others define as Hell, commencing with H.P. Lovecraft and the predictable Aleister Crowley, and then on through the modern labyrinth of alternative religious thinking, linking William Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Terrence McKenna, Adolf Hitler, Anton LaVey, Genesis P-Orridge, and even Jim Morrison, all light years from the new-age occult churned out by the major publishers. Display copies of this book have been mutilated in bookstores by irate Christians, Metzger claims. The major difference between Parfrey and Metzger is that, while Parfrey is primarily content to stay with the print medium, Metzger is decidedly the multimedia whiz-kid. Disinformation product has a stark and uniform look, with its neatly stylized, horned-devil logo. Feral titles, on the other hand, stand on their own, with no visibly imposed house style. And this may be, in part, a result of the pair’s highly contrasting backgrounds.

Parfrey is far closer to the classic misfit who has always been a driving force in any underground. According to a 1999 profile in SF Weekly, his late father, Woodrow Parfrey, appeared as Dr. Maximus in Planet of the Apes and, earlier in life, was a World War II POW who developed an aversion to all things German. (Which may explain It’s a Man’s World, and other Nazi manifestations on the Feral list.) As a kid, Parfrey was an outsider. “I was not a surfer. I was not a motorcycle guy. I was pale with dark hair,�? he says. “So I was at home a lot --- maybe reading --- and I did not feel a part of that whole thing.�? Late at night, he’d dream of atomic catastrophe, spurred, he thinks now, by the duck-and-cover drills at school. “It was my recurring childhood game,�? he recalls in Apocalypse Culture, “to believe that I could avert disaster (car crashes, atomic bombs, etc.) by imagining the calamity while holding my breath.�?

He came up through, and learned his trade in, the world of ’zines, small presses, and “bad speed comedowns in San Francisco.�? In 1987, he and friend Ken Swezey, who ran the Amok bookstore in Silver Lake with his brother Stuart, launched Amok Press, which they saw as a latter-day Grove Press, and published a collection of essays about Charles Manson; a novel written by Joseph Goebbels in his student days, Rants; a collection of angry essays by Ezra Pound; works by the would-be Warhol-assassin and SCUM-founder Valerie Solanas; plus the writings of the fascist diarist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Tensions rendered Amok Press short-lived, but, with a share of the capital, Parfrey moved on to found Feral House. A chance meeting with Church of Satan leader Anton LaVey gave Parfrey a break. LaVey was a source of bankable publishing projects that made other Feral books --- conventionally considered weird and extreme --- financially viable. “LaVey was an individual. He didn’t rely on the mainstream ethic. And he had his own world. I can respect that kind of thing,�? Parfrey says. “Not that I’m interested in following Satan or something.�?

In Parfrey’s cozily gothic drawing room, conversation wanders through advanced takes on the Kennedy assassination as an American Reichstag fire; books as cultural portals from the macro to the micro; and various recreational drug experiences, including how the consumption of a lot of methamphetamine at an early age might be considered as 40 days in the desert, and an antidote to a career and working for the man. (“Thank god that’s behind me�? --- Parfrey and I definitely agree.) The talk keeps returning, though, to the power of curiosity and how Parfrey --- who admits a gift for unlocking the energy of the obsessed, “I collect info on eccentrics,�? he writes, “like other people collect Pez dispensers�? --- is fascinated by “getting to the core of what’s happening,�? and is energized by the idea of curiosity.

“It’s amazing how little curiosity Americans have,�? he says. “I think people are fearful and paranoid about being considered weird and outside the norm, even people who are in the counterculture so called --- for example, it’s now tattoos, rock ’n’ roll --- it’s a proletarian idea that’s been around since the Middle Ages. When everyone has it at a certain age, that’s not countercultural, that’s cultural.�?

Dangerous Minds

The superficial might assume Parfrey is a radical thinker --- an intellectual desperado, if you like --- because of the subjects he covers both as a writer and a publisher (and a performer in projects like the movie What Is It? in which he costars with Crispin Glover and Steve Stewart). But that would be a serious mistake. Parfrey’s real radicalism is his approach to a subject, and the realization that the extreme’s always with us, slavishly exploited by the media, but, at the same time, served up in safely sanitized disguise. He is prepared to make the uncomfortable connections from which the mainstream routinely recoils. “In Apocalypse Culture II, I was talking about the weird pedophilia, JonBenet Ramsey obsession, Britney Spears thing, but nobody would really corner that idea. What’s it from? What’s it doing? Is it societal bad conscience, and focusing their obsession with it by saying, ‘Oh, these people are bad because they are pedophiles,’ not realizing that the whole of Geraldo Rivera and MTV is a pedophilic output?�?

Metzger, on the other hand, did once work for the man, but suffered a swift and early disillusionment. “I was working for Jerry Brown’s campaign, and I would go to these events, and then I’d read about it in The New York Times or some other paper and feel that their reporters had gone to an entirely different event. I’d see 10,000 people, not a reported 200.�?

Somewhere along the line, Metzger appears to have turned in revolt, but, instead of getting mad at corporate manipulation, he decided to get even, which, by a weird logic, could make Disinformation the next move after Feral. From the Brown campaign, he happened onto a CD-ROM project under the signature of Oliver Stone, but when the expected CD-ROM market never materialized, he shifted resources to the Internet; essentially to a search engine for the fringe culture, funded by the highly corporate Tele-Communications Inc. (later swallowed up by AT&T) and Netscape, which essentially didn’t know “what the hell they were paying for except it was somehow vaguely related to The X-Files.�? For Metzger and his partner Gary Baddely, the ultimate outcome was the Disinformation website, a magnificent compendium of alternative data that survives to this day, still running headlines like THE INVASION OF THE ELEGANT TROGONS and INDUSTRIAL MONEY LAUNDERING. But Disinfo.com only came into its own as the dotcom bubble was deflating, and TCI upper echelons were screaming: “What is this anarchist bullshit? Get rid of it.�? A combination of sleight of hand and cunning use of the labor laws enabled Metzger and Baddely to walk away with “an information system that was perfectly mobile,�? specifically designed “in anticipation that we might get canned.�?

An added boost to Disinfo.com was a growing pop-Jungian mass fascination with the occult/paranormal/conspiracy twilight zones. Y2K was on the way, and The X-Files pulled huge ratings. In 1997, the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cultists --- with its computer/UFO/comet-apocalypse connections --- blended with millennium unease to set the media and the public on a search for answers. For that breed of seeker, the neon pit stop on the Information Superhighway was Disinfo.com. Metzger jokes, “After Heaven’s Gate, we had a million and a half visitors in four days. I owe Marshall Applewhite my deepest gratitude.�?

Shaping Young Minds

Many of these Disinfo.com visitors were 12-year-olds looking for UFOs and mass suicide, but wandering into domains of Aleister Crowley and Terrence McKenna’s alien psychedelic fungi. For a while, Metzger was the media’s go-to guy for news of the weird. It would be nice to say that his own TV show came directly from the stir caused by Disinfo.com, but the TV concept was actually salvaged from the dotcom crash. “It was based on Rod Serling and Entertainment Tonight.�? Metzger grins. He knows I have uneasy thoughts about the near-subliminal ET. “A next-generation 60 Minutes; an examination of the hall of mirrors, of how the media works, that there’s truth in there somewhere, but where?�?

It took Channel 4 in the U.K. to actually bring Disinformation the TV show to fruition and a first-season time slot right behind Ally McBeal. Metzger --- in his Agent Smith suit, and with the slogan “If you don’t wonder if we made this stuff up, we aren’t doing our job right�? --- energetically hosted segments that included revelations on transsexual glamor chic; Brice Taylor, the alleged CIA brain-slave (who claimed Sylvester Stallone made her have sex with dolphins); and the high-tech, alien-connected Montauk Project. Metzger’s favorite artists, Joe Coleman and Paul Laffoley, were featured, as were segments from the notorious Uncle Goddamn, a mentally challenged and brutally extreme version of Jackass. (And that’s gotta be brutal.) In the second season, with universal media schizophrenia, the Brits at Channel 4 simultaneously urged Metzger and Baddely to go more outrageous, but shifted Disinformation to a late-late slot that killed the audience.

Shopping the show to U.S. cable was met with “a resounding silence,�? until the Sci Fi Channel offered $200,000 for four one-hour, reedited specials culled from the Channel 4 material, but then went negative ape at stuff like Brice Taylor and Uncle Goddamn, which they had supposedly already seen and approved. Metzger was forced to admit that the Sci Fi Channel version was never going to happen, and tell them bluntly, “You bought Caligula. You did not buy Mary Poppins.�?

In concluding the sad story, however, Metzger suddenly grins like a gambler who has successfully bluffed on a king high. “So far, the whole thing hasn’t cost us a dime.�?

So, while Disinformation the TV show looks for a new home and the Sci Fi edition is released on DVD, the major thrust of this operation-in-the-black is now to publish books. Some might see a concentration on print as a philosophical and technological retreat after a website and a cable show, but Metzger is very aware that fabulous projects --- especially on the Web --- stand and fall by the direct sale of old-fashioned, hard-tangible items. “It was one of the goals to put out books, DVDs, generally,�? he says. “You can’t make money off the Web; you have to sell stuff. I knew it back then, I knew it in ’91. I was being asked over and over again: How do you make money from this? And I know you can’t make money. You can’t support a website with advertising. It’s was true then, and it’s true now.�?

Disinformation’s book list is relatively slim. In addition to Book of Lies, it offers Everything You Know Is Wrong and Abuse Your Illusions, two volumes of buried news stories, outright lies, and stuff government and governing corporations don’t want us to hear, both edited by master media sleuth Russ Kick. Then there’s also Gary Valentine Lachman’s revisionist work on the ’60s, Turn Off Your Mind, and Why Do People Hate America? by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, along with the DVDs R.I.P. Rest in Pieces: A Portrait of Joe Coleman, and Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War.

The much longer-running Feral catalog is positively imperial. Titles tumble from the website: The X-Rated Bible; Lexicon Devil, the story of Darby Crash and the Germs; True Vampires by Sandra London; Extreme Islam. (See Feralhouse.com for a complete list.) The handy volume Tortures & Torments of the Christian Martyrs by Rev. Antonio Gallonio could provide background for the hordes flocking to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. A book on the Suicide Girls will soon be in stores, as well as the aforementioned 50 Reasons Not to Vote for George Bush.

That such insane diversity can exist here in 2004 makes the two operations points of bright, if at times hellish, light in a world that seems at grave risk of being smothered by a miasma of uniformity. As Clear Channel takes over rock ’n’ roll, and religious pressure groups seek to impose a reactionary and wholly impossible social conformity, Feral and Disinformation are happy purveyors of heresy.

In a final phone call to each, I asked Parfrey and Metzger how they viewed the possibility of the Bush/Ashcroft cultural agenda continuing clear to 2008. Wouldn’t its latent taste for book burning at least make their business difficult and, at worst, force them into some outlawed heretic underground? To my surprise and delight, neither seemed overly bothered by such a development. As publishers and entrepreneurs, their stance is “damn them, bring it on.�? Parfrey says he invites it: “The more squeamish, cowardly, and craven the country becomes, the better it is for what I’m doing.�? Metzger echoes the sentiment: “The country is so polarized right now that it is the best possible time to be in the business.�?

Metzger is even dreaming of bigger and better things, like a heretic cable channel. “There’s a natural progression there,�? he says. “Somebody, at some point, is going to say, ‘Let’s do an underground culture channel or a counterculture channel’ or like a ‘freak-out’ channel. It’s one of the few voguish categories that hasn’t been mined yet. Why wouldn’t an underground culture or counterculture channel do as well as a Comedy Central? Somebody’s going to think of this, and they’re probably going to call me and Gary to program the motherfucker, and that’s when our plans become truly realized, when we are the anti-Fox News. Who else are they gonna call?�?

Who indeed, Richard? And let this old Bolshevik give you his number, just in case you pull it off, and there’s a psychedelic Andy Rooney gig open.

by Mick Farren
lacitybeat.com article

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