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"your writing really bites"
Herewith the second installment of rabid "feedback" -- more like the projectile vomiting of a once fine intellect run amok -- from this fellow claiming knowledge of matters he clearly doesn't understand, and claiming moreover that they represent the views of "the rest of the world." What hubris! As far as we can determine, these remarks relate to our issue On Professionalism. His first spewings follow what follows, if you follow.
feedback from an alleged artistName: Rob Howard
Email: 71154.1232@compuserve.com
TO: Mr. Clocke-Panix
FROM: The rest of the worldWhat's with all those references to those lame-ass white boys in ZZ Top? What is this, National Retro Week?
If you want retro, why not revisit those hokey movies from the 40s. You know, the ones with a bunch of teen-age kids trying to save the farm and the dialogue goes something like... "Hey wait a minute, guys! Jimmy plays a great piano and Sally can dance, Eddy loves making set decorations and overdone makeup and June gives great blowjobs... so why don't we put on an off-Broadway musical and save the farm?" Well it struck me that you're just the person to ask for an opinion of why our chief executive has interns hanging on his zipper like remoras on a shark's belly (maybe that analogy is more apt than I think).
I ask that because you've either got the regenerative powers of a newt (after all, that was the third pre-frontal lobotomy we gave you in as many months) or that Clocke-Panix lad has been perpetrating all that retro writing in your name. Judging from the weepy tone of the writing (Saint John's Wort won't even scratch through the bi-polar ice floes of the functional psychotic's mind) it must be The Hyphenated Guy got loose at the word processor again.
First he drops those five-dollar words like "catechetical conspiracy" that he learned at that backwater community college when he was a member of the Special Olympics. Pretty soon he'll smoking cigars that cost as much as lighting up a pair of John Lobb shoes (and smell just as bad) and using words like "cthonian" and "apollonian" like a Camille Paglia wannabe. And what was all that shit about "personal incontinence, intellectual vacuum cleaners and moral turpentine?" Cripes, I thought he'd never get to the point.
And I was right... he never did.
I know that couldn't have been you who started quoting Neil Young, as though that Rump Ranger ever had a thought worth repeating. But it was that "Kurt Cobain is a genius" bit that really threw me off my feed and took several doses of Wild Turkey to calm me enough to stop me from shooting at the chimeras crawling up the motel wall.
After that Kurt Cobain delusion I imagine that graying hippie is probably getting a buzzcut, stuffing his pockets with quarters and getting ready to board that shiny new UFO parked behind the Hale-Bopp comet. It's obvious from his distorted view of the universe that Clocke-Panix hasn't had a meaningful bowel movement since the 60s or he'd never conceive the thought that Kurt Cobain had a scintilla more talent than... oh, let's say... Sonny Bono.
But it was when he wrapped up his anthem to those losers with that Kennedy-cum-Abby Hoffman "We speak not for you and your best interests here, but for your lost and disbelieving children," that he totally went 'round the bend. That was when I had to check out Queen's lyrics to see if he hadn't quoted those too.
The Hyphenated One is in serious need of professional help. I just haven't figured out what profession should be doing the helping (probably a plumber or a gas fitter), but my best advice is for you to get out of EGR. Just because he gives you free fries and Slurpees is no reason for you to stay. Some night, when you hear them turning up the vacuum on the interns at EGR Central, just kick out the basement window and make good your escape.
I swore that I'd never violate a doctor/patient relationship (especially since he's paid in advance) but he was the one who ordered all those pre-frontal lobotomies. The little bourgeois was tired of... shall we say... YOUR SPLENETIC FUCKING ADRENALIN POSTAL RUSHES whenever there is a full moon... or a half moon... or even a sunny day.
If you stay he'll put you up for more lobotomies until you're like JFK's sister and barely able to learn how to retrieve a pair of slippers... or he'll run you along the expert trail and into a tree (he's got this thing for The Dead Kennedy's... he even owns their only record). Now that the entire White House staff greets each other with "Hail Fellator, well met," he's developed delusions of adequacy and is trying to spruce up EGR headquarters into the next seat of world power.
Don't forget, he's a soi dissant anarchist who believes this government is sclerotic and needs a big shakeup (or as they say in Rwanda, a "cooty tah"). He's praying for a gut-shot president limping along for the next two years and also for more Kennedy's to ski into trees or turn into pickled white manatees like the senior senator from Massachusetts... speaking of skiing, too bad about Sonny Bono, he was a talent of the first magnitude. On a more serious note, do you think the fallout from all this will leave psychological scars on Chelsea, preventing her from becoming a White House intern and humming a few bars of Hail To The Chief while putting a lip-lock on the incumbent member?
Speaking of Chelsea's Dad, isn't he getting a bit long in the tooth to be scouting the intern pool for fresh meat? Let's face it, he had to initiate those little midnight snacks in the Oral Office. Can you imagine a young intern passing by the most powerful man on the planet and, rather than being struck with awe like any other college kid, rushing past the guards to say... "Mr. President, I'd like to suck your cock until the back of your head caves in." Not likely!
In any other situation, if the boss is caught fucking the kids in the typing pool every harpy from Eleanor Clift to Barbara Boxer has a cow (...whoops) and calls for his castration (remember Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas... and she was an adult). So what is it with Clinton that holds those crows at bay... and what's with his desire for Paula Jones? Sheesh, I've closed up some dives with some low-tide mamas and had the shit scared out of me when I saw them by dawn's early light (always followed by a a few million units of penicillin) but no one came close to looking like Paula (fortunately, no one looked like Hillary, either). Still, I have to admire Paula for toughing it out.
But why am I writing to you when I should be having my stomach pumped or be walking across hot coals at an Anthony Robbins seminar?
I must get out more. I must get out more. I must get out more. I must get out more. I must get out more. I must get out more.
Dr. Sygmoid C. Fleet
Father of Modern Psychoproctology
Center for Internal Hydraulics
High Colonics, New Mexico
...so this is the kind of mindless drek we get back after slaving all day over a hot text editor! This drivel apparently pertains to our issue on Death. We see lots of this sort of illiterate invective over here at EGR World HQ, but we've been too lazy to get it up, so to speak. Until now, that is. Rob Howard, wherever you are, we just wanted you to know: we're listening and we care!
Name: Rob Howard[Editor's Note: Mr. Howard purportedly moderates the Artists Forum on Compuserve. So what does he know?]
Email: 71154.1232@compuserve.com
TO: Mr. Clocke-Panix
FROM: The rest of the worldQuitcher bitchin,' you wimpy Baby Boomer.
I'm surprised that your altered ego, RageBoy, didn't slap the snot out of you before you made him take that big brody down The Tunnel of the Bright Afterlife.
Fer Chrissakes, the way you've been pissing and moaning you'd think you're the only guy who has shriveled away from the thought of turning 50. Alright, so people are beginning to call you "Sir" instead of "hey you" or "what-the-fuck-do-you-want-kid." So what if you look back over the past half-century and realise that, past the curious tastes you developed during your goat-herding days, you've got shit for any interesting personal life experiences. So you're a middle-aged boomer who has led a virtual reality life -- whadda ya want -- depth of character? Ruck up and get on with it, trooper.
Those are nerf balls Life has been throwing at you. It's the next fifty years where Life makes like Sandy Koufax and starts to pick up the pace with 90 mile-per-hour hardballs. What's worse, your eyes will be going and you won't even see that third strike coming.
Oh yeah... for once, could you just stop giving me those puerile philosophical ruminations on death? Cripes, you boomers are so damned predictable. You can't understand anything about death and its terrors unless you experienced this last New Year's Eve as I did...stone cold sober while watching 4 hours of David McCallum narrating Ancient Prophesies. That stuff was scary enough to pucker a pederast's asshole. For once, everyone from Nostradamus to Edgar Cayce to Paul Solomon to the Blessed Virgin to the Cabala and the Zohar are in agreement -- the end of the world is happening in the year 2000. The news is so bad that even the rabbis abandoned their Mosaic calendar and went mainstream for the occasion. So wake up and smell the calendar, there are only 720 more shopping days until Doomsday.
So you're disappointed that you're not a published author. Not getting your work published during an era of incredibly mediocre writing must mean that your writing really bites. But think about it. Do you really want to sit at some little table at Brentano's, getting writer's cramp, from signing books for sweet young things who call you "Sir" and make you feel like Methuselah? Take it from me, bunky, it's depressing having an ISBN or two under your belt. Everybody expects you to pick up the bar tab because you're a published author. Enjoy your lack of success. People will feel sorry for your unrecognised genius and buy you drinks. Enough of those drinks and the occasional substitute English Lit teacher from the local community college comes across with a charity fuck just to ease your racking sobs. Enjoy your failure. You've gotten good at it!
But, despite your bipolar personal shortcomings, there was no reason for you to try to kill off RageBoy. Just because he isn't going grey and he still has Rock Hard Abs doesn't give you license to try to snuff him...and in a public flower bed no less. Have you no shame?
Of course you don't. I've read your full-frontal prose and I shouldn't have asked. You're shameless -- and you're depressed -- and you're depressing. Just think of how much more depressed you'd be if you had invested in a Macintosh system. Those poor bastards have gone from being delusional to having their faces frozen into the same grins we see on paintings of the Early Christian Martyrs (secretly thinking that Jobs Blows). Count your blessings -- and stay away from any MacWorlds until the Prozac works its way into your system.
But I digress. I only began to enjoy your writing after you snapped out of your torpor and realised that your petty jealousies have gotten the better of you. It was only then that you tried to make amends by returning RageBoy to life after 13 minutes of visiting the Heaven's Gate members behind the Hale-Bopp comet (next time you see him, ask RageBoy if he learned why they had their pockets full of quarters). Knowing full well that he would have suffered some brain damage from lack of oxygen, you decided to bring him back to life as a Guy Kawasaki clone. You sadistic sonofabitch! Is there no limit to your depravity?
That's when you made your traditional abrupt, and unplanned, segue (lurch is more like it) into that tiresome jeremiad about the direction of the web and The Road Most Traveled. Give me a break! What did you expect when they handed out virtual printing presses to Everyman...the rebirth of English literature? The internet is reflective of the pinnacle of current American culture. It became a shopping mall with Everyman donning the loud checkered suit of the travelling snake-oil salesman...HURRY, HURRY...Experience This New Hair Growth Miracle While Stuffing Envelopes Online And Making Up To $25,000 A Day. Don't forget, we're a nation of immigrant's kids whose grandparents changed their names from Smegma to Smith. Beneath those Armani suits beats the hearts of vulpine hucksters or doric rubes.
So what's so bad about trolling for rubes? It's probably because we've never had an aristocracy or learned class that we've developed snake-oil sales into a fine art. Hell, it's gone beyond that to become the very foundation of our capitalistic society. Eyewitless News would have us believe that the entire fate of western mankind hinges upon the volume of Christmas sales (did you do your part for the U.S. economy and max out your credit cards?). So we sell our hand-knit tea cozies on the Web. Doesn't the 27th Amendment protect that?
And why were you bitching about all of the high profile advertisers who've developed websites? That's what we do. We co-opt every revolution and turn the energy in them into another motive force for selling...get your Ted Koszinski T-shirt with his entire 312 page screed printed on it in explosive ink...how about a nice set of six matched Jomo Kenyata coffee mugs...or a Limoges replica of the Red Book, showing how Peking and Mao Tse Tung were transmogrified into Beijing and Mao Zedung. Hey man, that's what we do. We do it on TV, on the radio, on roadsides, on the sides of buses and blimps...so why are you so exercised when we do it on the internet?
You're beginning to sound like the testicularly challenged dweebs who reminisce about those halcyon days on The Well when everyone spoke arcane dialects of UNIX. Now the internet has become junked up with sweating, breathing humans speaking...quelle horreur...Anglais et (even more horreurs) Americain! Even worse, they aren't supported by university grants and they even pay for their own connect time (insert more horreurs and a declasse). And to top it off, some of them are actually trying to solicit private funds from individuals or showing pictures of their genitalia (some are even soliciting private funds for pictures of their private parts). It's the Silicone Revolution...everything from mammaries to motherboards. It's all for sale, and because you haven't got a viable product you're missing the point.
Those dweebs have as much life experience as you and the rest of your New-Age-hyphenated pals do, Clocke-Panix. They just continued to do what we all did in kindergarten...but they've managed to hornswoggle most of us into believing that staying in school is something one does in lieu of pursuing a useful career. So they drop those leaden utterances about continental philosophy, deconstruction or the terrible state of the internet and how we've got to build another one that doesn't have all of that sweating and breathing going on in the background. Then you pick up on that crap and complain because Twinkies and Orville Reddenbacher have their own websites. Thank God that they do, otherwise the web would be as dull as you'd be if RageBoy had succumbed to your crude literary machinations.
Now that you're an over-the-hill middle-aged, unpublished, whining ex-goatherd, I don't mind telling you to keep your mitts off of RageBoy. The transformation you wrought with your 13 minutes of oxygen deprivation must be reversed. Thus, under separate cover you will find three doses of Dr. Owsley's Magick Elixir, which is made by mixing some well-preserved tabs of Owsley Purple with our own proprietary mixture of amphetamines and a dollop of adrenaline extracted from enraged hyenas. Please administer those dosages according to the enclosed directions. Fail not of thine own peril.
Yr. Humble & obt. Svt.
The artist formerly known as Rob Howard