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If fewer chickens than ever are shedding their blood on the altar of cheap special effects, they have only Joe Christ to thank. Horrific modes of sexually transmitted death and stubbornly resurgent infectious diseases have revived rites and taboos thought to have gone the way of leeches, bleeding bowls and stigmata. Unflinching artists and performers including Communion in Room 410's video vixen Mary Loehr have colonized a zone of metaphor that exceeds even Hollywood's powers of representation -- notifying us that the road to the millenium will be splattered with gore. It's a market share as big as America itself, it's growing all the time.
Mark Kramer's proposed Joe Christ review for Screw.
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"Just what the fuck" Screw's longtime managing editor Manny Neuhaus wants to know, "do you call this?"
Neuhaus gestures accusingly with a fistful of typescript as he sways like a nicotine-bearing vine on the threshold to associate editor Mark Kramer's grimy, flyspecked cubicle.
"It's a review of that movie by that Dallas guy who slices a fat girl with razor blades and drinks her blood."
"I'm not doing a story on any friends of yours, Kramer."
"He's not a friend. He's just some guy from Texas trying to break into the big-city sleaze circuit."
In fact, the leeringly hagiographic Film Threat review describing Joe Christ as "the cutting edge of underground filmdom...A cut above all the rest" -- is proving to be one of the more evocative texts to come across Kramer's desk that season.
"And just what makes you think", the inquisitorial Neuhaus wants to know, "that our readers want to read about some redneck punk who cuts up fat girls and drinks their blood?"
Some of answers to this question reside in the typescript that Neuhaus brandishes like a scourge.
Concludes Kramer's text: It's a market share as big as America itself, it's and growing all the time.
Conversely, the circulation of Screw -- still described on its own masthead as "The World's Greatest Newspaper" -- had plummeted under Neuhaus' editorship from a quarter-million copies sold per week to fewer than 14,000.
As if to summarize Screw's incredible shrinking erotosphere, there on Kramer's bleary office wall was a promo poster for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the words "Who Will Survive -- and What Will Be Left of Them?".
Meanwhile, a throbbing vein of exasperation in Neuhaus' forehead signals a change of topic.
"There's something else, Kramer. I just got off the phone with Richie at Show World and he says your write-up miscalculates the value of their tokens. We need "Naked City" to rereview all the 42nd Street peeps ASAP and make changes in time for the next issue."
"And don't forget your stopwatch this time, Kramer", advises Neuhaus.
"Also, make a note to line up another "Dirty Diversions" for next week because I'm spiking your Joe Christ piece of shit."
As Kramer contemplates another summer day spent stewing in 42nd Street's fleshpots, and countless other New Yorkers prepare to sweat, cringe and die in the miasmic crack-and-piss scented shadow of the city's highest-recorded homicide rate ever -- on East Ninth Street the spectacularly redheaded female known as Mary Eva peers cautiously streetward through the paisley bedsheets that serve as the Temple of The True Inner Light's draperies, scanning the ragged sidewalk topography for signs of the blond lurker with his werewolf-pup beard and the rooster in his bag.
At this very moment, to the southeast on Suffolk Street, the lurker named Daniel and a clutch of youthful anarchists huddle in a smoky splotch of daylight that leaks into the abandoned, city-owned tenement they'd liberated the night before. Before them is plywood table on which a quarter-pound of commercial-grade marijuana is -- in theory, at least -- being broken down into nickle bags and loose joints to be sold around around the Tompkins Square Park bandshell over the coming weekend.
Daniel's incessant babble blends with the throaty sounds of his slumbering fowl as he describes his plans to invest the marijuana profits -- which he and his band of misfits are presently smoking up -- in his church of 966.
"You think Missing Foundation are the Satanists? Hah! I've got the look, I've got the hair, and with each of 25 women I'll sire five children to create a master race that will murder cops, loot Federal treasuries and give money to the poor. I would have nothing against whole military places blowing up if they would, like, try to deny this, you know, serious reign to a person."
Daniel pauses to gaze benevolently upon Fat Bertha, Little Liz and the other urban crusties whose practiced fingers nimbly comb Daniel's diminishing supply of herb. This tableau of domesticity reminds Daniel of the 14-year-old Mexican bride he married in Edna, Texas -- and whom Daniel lassoed and tied to a refrigerator shortly before thumbing his way to New York five years previous.
Suddenly Daniel's rooster awakens. With a penetrating shriek, it squeezes like a feathered turd from the opening of Daniel's stinking shoulder bag and hops onto the table, demanding to be fed. And before any of the room's human inhabitants can act, the wind generated by a single flap of the hungry rooster's wings blows every remaining scrap of Daniel's precious marijuana off the table and onto the filth-strewn tenement floor.
A block and a half east, Swiss dance prodigy Monika Beerle, just off the morning shift at Billy's Topless, makes her sinuous way through Tompkins Square Park towards Hector's "laundromat" on East Seventh Street.
Making her pliant way through the acrid, festering sprawl of tents, leantos and shanties, Monica emits the auroric glow that is the sole province of off-duty strippers on their way to score dope.
Hammering the park's soupy, fragrance-heavy air is by an unscheduled Missing Foundation soundcheck in the bandshell. The jagged sonic thud that Peter Missing's ensemble of outlaw dystopians wrings from such found percussion as scrap-filled oil drums, PCP hoses and smoke alarms reminds Monica -- only recently back from an eight-city European tour of her danceworks -- of Einstuerzende Neubauten. Monica's yearnings soar back to Zurich's Needle Park, from which, at tour's end, she'd miraculously emerged -- still in possession of a plane ticket back to New York and little else.
Hector and his crew liked having the patronage of strippers because their undulant presence commanded even more respect for his "laundromat" in the already awed, fearful eyes of neighbors -- and in stoking the porcine greed of Ninth Precinct cops on the take. All this added up to a generalized understanding that any pendejo who messed with the delicate human ecology of Hector's public dopemart would be fed to his pitbulls.
Monica thus traveled under a cloak of invulnerability protecting her from even the park's most desperate elements, right upon until that very moment she was served to them by Daniel Rakowitz as soup.
Coming soon: "Penecto Me, Penecto You"
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