Mellick III, Carlton. Punk Land. Portland: Eraserhead Press, 2005. 284 pp. $13.95. ISBN 0976249847.

A Scatalogical Review of CM3's Punk Land & Other Texts

Carlton Mellick is an obsessive and prodigious writer from Oregon with massive side burns or “mutton chops” who collects pickled sausages, zombie movies and Mr. T action figures. His bizarro style of literature features titles like The Baby Jesus Butt Plug, Satan Burger, Razor Wire Pubic Hair and The Haunted Vagina. His novel Punk Land, the sequel to Satan Burger, comes complete with puerile illustrations and ample requisite scenes of stoned out Sid Vicious punks sprawled in gutters, hardcore punk bands in every garage, dirty dog-eared cities, bin fires, rotting food, beer cans and moshing—I can already envision the Cronenberg film version. The hero of Punk Land is the blue-mohawked cop-eating shark-girl, inspired by Darenzia, a fetish model, who appears on the front cover. So when punks go to punk heaven, what do they have to rebel against?

The heaven of Punk Land is for those excluded and cast out from the saintly heaven. Goblin (Carlton's alter ego?), who collects dildos, is expelled from heaven for throwing a dildo at God and finds himself in Punk Land. Everyone in Punk Land is deformed, but Punk Land has formed its own idealized purity, entrenched in “The Complete Idiot's Guide to Being Punk,” which has become a ludicrous mammoth list of what is and isn't punk, a sort of punk orthodoxy. The punk purists, headed by Johnny Rotten, wield a totalitarian power exemplifying Foucault's concept of the ubuesque with their extravagantly cruel, indiscriminate, comically perverse and absurd order. The social structure of punk heaven affirms that any idealized purity inevitably leads to hierarchies of fascism. However, the outcasts of the outcasts are the underground rebels of Henry Rollins, GG Allin and Seth Putnam, all of whom are set to strike back. While Henry Rollins, previously of Black Flag, is fairly well known, GG Allin is perhaps less known. Born “Jesus Christ Allin,” he is infamous for bloody stage antics involving nudity, stage fights, self-mutilation and pissing and defecating onstage. Seth Putnam is the lead singer of grindcore band Anal Cunt and other side projects including Angry Hate, Cuntsaw, Shit Scum and Vaginal Jesus.

Why do we call it filth, and why do we indulge in it? According to Jack Sargeant, “It is in paying witness to the liquidification and stench of putrefaction, and through the act of chaotic sex that humans understand their relationship to being-in-the-world. Through these bodily events we come to know our own animalism and by extension the certainty of our mortality.” [2] Whatever puts the norms and conventions of a society into question always turns up in what that society demonizes. Which often makes what is labelled filth the epicenter of many forms of experimentation and liberation. Yet it is important to recognize that filth can be as much disruptive of social orders as it can also bring about a recoiling that only re-affirms exactly those social orders which were brought into question. Despite all the prohibitions, the paradox remains that man is forever tempted by the desire of the abject and taboo: horror films, religious crucification/sacrifice, kinky sex, apocalypse, war, murder, torture, drugs—any casual glance through history or the TV guide confirm this.

Mellick revels and delights in filth and horror using three principal mechanisms: inverting cultural values, merging the sacred and the profane into one, and evoking archetypal fears. In Punk Land, the sanctity of the child is inverted; no one wants to care for babies, so they are discarded. “The underground is swarming with infants. We watch them through the plexi-glass walls ... Piles of them fill the sewer system, crying and gurgling, crawling over each other.” [3] There is perhaps no better exemplar for the merging of the sacred and the profane than Mellick's The Baby Jesus Butt Plug. [4] The title came about because a company called Divine Interventions market fetish dildos featuring a baby Jesus butt plug, available in a multitude of marbled colors, including glow-in-the-dark. A couple buys a pet baby Jesus, all “greasy blubberroach," for use as a butt plug. In The Haunted Vagina, Mellick plays with our primeval fears when an eyeball pokes out of a vagina to peer about. [5] The corporeal fragmentation and uneasiness directly references Georges Bataille's scatological novella Story of the Eye (Histoire de L'Oeil) when Simone inserts Marcelle's severed eyeball into her hairy vagina.

Mellick submitted a “prose” poem titled Mrs. President to an online journal, which after all was not really much of a poem, but its rejection by the editor as misogynistic is far more illuminating. The poem was an absurd little tale about a pornstar president, possibly borrowing a little from Cicciolina, the Italian pornstar democratically elected into parliament in the Radical Party. While the pun on the legalization of the rape of statues (“statutory rape”) may have been somewhat lost on the humorless, the work was deemed immature and offensive. Given the multitude of possible readings, it is noticeable that the editor actively chose to elicit that interpretation which is the most explicitly offensive to him, a sort of auto-deductive masochism. As part of Mellick's insightful response, he wrote: “If you process information negatively it will affect you negatively,” followed by, “When somebody offends you, it is not the offender who hurts you, it is yourself.” [6] The abject is then in the eye of the beholder? What is abject to one is succulent to another? Apart from politics, Cicciolina achieves notoriety for appearing in a flick where a woman (not herself) performed fellatio on a horse and for marrying artist Jeff Koons with whom she produced a number of explicit pornographic works. Additionally, her pop music has been banned in Italy for it's explicit lyrics and she has offered to make love with Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden to broker peace.

Living in the modern world, is there anything left to horrify us? The French feminist and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva analyzes the cultural manifestation of the abject in The Powers Of Horror. [7] For Kristeva, the abject is radically excluded and elicits the collapse of meaning; it is what disturbs identity and order, what does not respect borders, authorized positions or rules; it is the unformed, unbounded, uncategorizable and incomprehensible. The abject is that which is not in its proper place, that which muddles order and hierarchies and cuts across or in between blocks of regulated matter and thought. The abject doesn't confirm or aspire to the ideal, doesn't fit in and is opposed or dysfunctional in regard to the commodified and beautified aesthetic. When we consider what horrifies us, we should remind ourselves of the context under which Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School was banned in Germany on the basis that it was considered harmful to minors. Apart from the incestuous and sado-masochistic elements in the novel, what seemed to equally frustrate and disconcert the censors was the novel's supposed inability to make sense; the incorrect grammar, the drawings, the typography, fragments in Persian, theatrical structures, the author commenting on themselves and the indiscernibility between dream, reality and other narratives. [8] Acker's poignant reply is simply stated: "The only reaction against an unbearable society is equally unbearable nonsense.”

Kristeva's concept of the abject is, however, problematic in it's wallowing in the usual Lacano-Freudian constructs. For Kristeva, it is critical, even essential to maintain the abject, as language and social order at large are riveted to and built upon this precept. Kristeva's abject is a primal repression resulting from the initial ejection from the mother at birth before any subject/object or identification of self has taken place. Not unlike Christianity, psychoanalysis only reifies the primacy of repulsion at the very essence of nature. Nietzsche reminds us: “It was Christianity, with its resentment against life at the bottom of its heart, which first made something unclean of sexuality: it threw filth on the origin, on the presupposition of our life.” [9] On the other hand, modern capitalism is anything but horrified. It is adept at nullifying the power of the abject by simply labelling it and turning it into a commodified image, ripe for a new market niche.

Bataille, the infamous “excremental philosopher,” was originally associated with the surrealists, and his concept of informe has gained precedence recently, even though he wrote little more than a short definition of it in the surrealist journal Documents 7. Informe or “formless” offers us another perspective on what filth is. Informe is that which “brings things down in the world,” “has no rights” and gets “squashed everywhere.” [10] Informe destabilizes the organizing principal of form, bringing about the undoing of order, collapsing ideals and rupturing limits. In The Pornographic Imagination appended to Bataille's novella, Susan Sontag writes: “It's well known that when people venture into the far reaches of consciousness, they do so at the peril of their sanity ... one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness ... and reporting back what's there.” [11] Mellick's investigation into the filth of madness, perversion and the obscene, not unlike Bataille, offers an insight into writing at the limits of reason, from the zone of filth, delving into the forbidden and unknown, offering shafts of light into the experiences of the profane and monstrous. These writers show us that the horror and uneasiness of witnessing the obscene spectacle intensifies the body and propels us into a heightened state, perhaps with an accompanying loss of self. This is exactly why sexuality is closely associated with the obscene and what disturbs us, driving us to a thrill point that threatens the stable confines of selfhood.

For Bataille, however, there is no interest or need to abolish the taboos: “transgression piled upon transgression will never abolish the taboo.” [12] Without the taboo there is no transgression and therefore no pleasure. Even Bataille wants to keep the sacred/profane dichotomy firmly in place. The fantasy of a free-for-all of sex would bring about a total breakdown of the power structures of sexual relations, the decimation of sexual hierarchies and the orders governing who can have sex with who and how. But, for Bataille, the orgies of Dionysus must necessarily always be crime rather than unbridled freedom. He quotes de Sade: “The best way of enlarging and multiplying one's desires is to try to limit them.” [13] For Mellick, then, filth is not merely confined to it's illicitness. It is what is directly corporeal and perversely expressive; it reeks of every madman's absurd cackle.

References

[1] Foucault, Michel. Abnormal Lectures at the College de France: 1974 -1975. New York: Picador, 2004, p. 11.

[2] Sargeant, Jack. "Hot, Hard Cocks and Tight, Tight Unlubricated Assholes: Transgression, Sexual Ambiguity and 'Perverse' Pleasures in Serge Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime moi non plus." Senses of Cinema 30 (Jan.-Mar. 2004). <http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/30/je_taime_moi_non_plus.html>.

[3] Mellick III, Carlton Punk Land Portland OR: Eraserhead Press, 2005, p. 97.

[4] Mellick III, Carlton. The Baby Jesus Butt Plug. Portland: Avant Punk, 2004.

[5] Mellick III, Carlton. The Haunted Vagina. Portland: Avant Punk, 2006, p. 38.

[6] "The Rejection of Carlton Mellick III's 'Mrs. President.'" <http://eyeshot.net/rejection1.html>.

[7] Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University, 1982.

[8] Acker, Kathy. Hannibal Lecter, My Father. New York: Semiotexte, 1991.

[9] Nietzsche, Friedrich. "What I Owe to the Ancients, Twilight of the Idols." Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ. London: Penguin Books, 1972.

[10] Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 31.

[11] Bataille, Georges. Story Of The Eye. London: Penguin Books, 1979, p. 92.

[12] Bataille, Georges. Erotism, Death & Sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986, p. 48.

[13] Ibid.

—Robert Lort