Love Sex Fear Death: Can It Go Viral?

The Process Church of the Final Judgment was one of the more shadowy cults that sprang up during the 1960s. Much of its notoriety derives from a description by “Ed Bloody Sanders” -- as Timothy Wyllie, the principal author of Love Sex Fear Death, referred to him during the “Sabbath Assembly Ritual and Salon” held at Anthology Film Archives on October 4th to promote the publication of the book  -- of ties between The Process Church and the Manson Family, that Sanders was forced by legal action to remove from the U.S. edition of the book but which later appeared in the U.K. edition. 

The large auditorium in Anthology Film Archives held a sell-out crowd of mostly young hipsters, Goth fanciers, and fringe media types. Adam Parfrey, whose Feral House published Love Sex Fear Death, was the agile Master of Ceremonies for the evening.  The Feral House catalog is jam packed with controversial books on topics ranging from Nazi occultism to CIA mind control operations to sleaze sex paperbacks of the 1960s. Parfrey initially outlined the course of the evening, and then kept the performance on track even while incorporating a slight change in emphasis during the closing question-and-answer session, when a number of former Process Church members chose to speak about their own experiences in the cult.

Following this introduction there was an enactment of The Process Church Sabbath Assembly Ritual, consisting of hymns and recitations invoking Jesus Christ, Satan, Jehovah, and Lucifer. The Sabbath Assembly Band performed the hymns, with vocals anchored by the powerful metal-goddess voice of Jex Thoth. “Sacrifist” Genesis Breyer P-Orridge led the inter-hymnal recitations.  Following this Ritual, Adam Parfrey again took the stage to introduce footage from a documentary about The Process Church that was directed by William Morrison of the band Skinny Puppy. Most of the footage consisted of Timothy Wyllie talking on-screen. Adam Parfrey then introduced Timothy Wyllie, who in the next segment was on stage flipping through a slide show and talking. I found the slide show and recitative far more compelling than the film footage. Timothy is a larger-than-life individual and the framing of the film tended to minimize his gravitas. I would have shot him talking while sitting at his drafting board, and shown more of the graphics he created while he was art director of the Process Church publications, as well as the inimitable, otherworldly art works he has created in recent years.

The closing segment of the evening, which was less planned, consisted of a number of former Process Church members talking about their own largely positive experiences in the cult. The one exception was Malachi McCormack, whose spin on the cult was decidedly more negative. It was interesting that while Timothy Wyllie talked about Mary Ann de Grimston, the cult’s leader, being mauled to death by a pack of dogs at her post-cult animal sanctuary, Malachi McCormack talked about her dying of emphysema. Timothy stressed Mary Ann’s inner circle as a matriarchal cult with Robert de Grimston as a marginalized figure, while Malachi talked about a more dyadic leadership, at least until the latter days of the organization. I would eventually like to see a more scholarly examination of The Process Church. Perhaps Feral House will one day publish this.

Can Love Sex Fear Death go viral? The team promoting the book is filled with alternative world heavyweights. Nonetheless, it remains a long shot. A book tour hitting the most attractive locations is attracting a large audience from among the quite narrow segment of people who would typically be attracted to something like this but it is not breaking out into a wider demographic bandwidth. The wild card is the film. If it attracts a lot of mainstream media attention a larger book tour could possibly snowball the book into becoming a bestseller.

The big question I took away from my reading of the book and attendance at this event is as follows: What was the true nature of the “inner cult” Mary Ann or Mary Ann and Robert de Grimston presided over? My surmise is that it was at least somewhat derivative of the teachings of Aleister Crowley. This suggestion was perhaps triggered by the two young men (early-to-mid 30s), obvious occult lodge types, who were standing behind the crowd waiting to go upstairs into the auditorium, one of whom said to the other: “Ah, there are the sheep being prepared to be led to their slaughter.” I was the only person who heard them. I smiled and said to them: “I’m a friend of Timothy’s.” These two were neither part of the show nor part of the audience, but I think they are somehow connected to the successor of the magical lodge embodied within the The Process Church. That night I had the worst dreams of my entire life, in the course of which I was being tortured and dismembered over a long period of time. A couple of days later a friend pointed out to me that this is the result of my not believing in that particular set of gods.

Hopefully, whatever happens with this book, Timothy Wyllie’s oeuvre -- including also his other books and his painting -- will go viral. He is one of the most important artists and writers of his time.  You can explore his creative world at www.timothywyllie.com.

The World is a Giotto

1.

Art is the opiate of the masses.

2.

Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their canvases.

3.

There’s no business like art business.

4.

Paintings are a girl’s best friend.

5.

Art is just a four-letter word.

6.

Give me liberty or give me art.

7.

All’s fair in love and art.

8.

There is always more art.

Retrospective

About an hour after I read your latest email message my email logon got corrupted for the third time, and I once again lost all stored messages. I'm told that it was the Antichrist's Windows 95 operating system. It was the crowd though that prompted Ellen to lean over and ask: "Have we joined the Kiwanis?" I replied: "No, we joined the Shriners. At least we get to wear those cool fezzes." About ten minutes before the raffle a block of about a dozen tickets was found on the floor. An announcement was made that these tickets had been found, and of course the honor system would be used to give the tickets back to their rightful owner. That reminds me of a story a former Monitor Company colleague told me. A friend of hers was tutoring a seven-year old inner city African-American girl for the first time. The girl said her name was Portia, which Kristen's friend at first thought was a very amusing and innovative Shakespearian name for the parents to have come up with. But then she asked the girl how her name was spelled, and the girl replied: "P-o-r-s-c-h-e". Ellen's college friend, Chris Dickinson, a very tall and good looking gay blonde actor in some ways bears an uncanny resemblance to Butthead, a fact that has been mentioned to him by more people than he would ideally like to recall. Time to pack up the computer and go home. Then: the gym, dinner, work.

I’m puzzled by the timing of the arrival of the test message. It has to be one that's been hanging around for several weeks. Best as I can piece together it must have been stored in the Outbox of my cc:mobile program one or another time I couldn't dial in and then recently made it into the aether. Last time I used cc:mobile though was Sunday, which just confuses the situation even more. I woke up with a migraine and decided I needed to pound some of it away in the gym before getting back to presentation preparation. I have a client from Banque National de Paris coming in this afternoon, so it's not going to be a particularly productive day anyway. The Bills lost to Miami, putting the Colts plus the winner of next weekend's Bills-Chiefs game into the playoffs. The Nigerian Nightmare sounds absurd, appalling and a diversion (though not a pleasant one) from what you need to get done over there! It's a great vignette for you to drop into a piece of fiction, though. Yesterday after the meeting with First National Bank of Maryland I got to take a short walking tour of a lovely part of Baltimore I'd never seen before. Did you know that Bal'mor has its own Washington monument? The neighborhood around the monument has some very good art galleries, antique stores and early 19th century houses and churches. It was pretty beaten down fifteen years ago but has been pretty thoroughly restored. Just heard an announcement over the intercom that our email server is going down in a few minutes, so it's over and out for now.

Ellen realized you must have really been ill when I told her about your recent minimal alcohol consumption. A similar pattern of consumption tells me when she is really ill. Are you still in steady recovery mode? When do you get back from Budapest? "Hyper-hedonistic consumption" sounds like fun to me! My own tolerance for post-modernist fiction has diminished. There are a number of writers whose works, if I were in my twenties, I would have devoured but given my preferences now I've either not explored at all (David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollman) or find unreadable (Mark Leyner). You may recall at the time my having told you the story of Emma mistaking my voice over the phone for that of her new boyfriend and telling me all of these Tim Mahoney horror stories, and then telling her boyfriend the story, and upon hearing my name his asking her if I went to Columbia in the late sixties. I however didn't describe to you any of the antecedent relationships. I recall one occasion when my brother, then seventeen, and his girlfriend, sixteen, came to visit Apartment 42 (as it was widely known) and later claimed they couldn't understand anything we were talking about. We weren't even trying to be willfully opaque. I will reply to the rest of your message when this crushing headache and looming deadlines recede bit.

Sorry about the "charm" material. Too often I write before I think. You are most certainly not a fraud. You (not "one," but "you" specifically) are not capable of being a fraud. You are not rotted and polluting within, as you phrased it in your last email. The content of this back-and-forth is of course skewed to what is going on with you given my guardedness. In conversation I usually instinctively react to honest confrontation as one would to a mortal attack, but I am, I think, much less prone to do so in written exchanges. I have on a number of occasions written more revealing stuff about myself in emails to you only to erase those passages before sending the messages. The erasures are probably prompted by my worries about the strength of the firewall between written and spoken communications. One of the later erasures revolves around inventing a new product: self-folding socks. These miraculous items were made possible by combining two relatively new technological advances. Microminiaturized buckyballs empower the socks to fold themselves and fuzzy logic chips enable them to unerringly find their mate. Imagine the smile on the face of the poor harried TV commercial housewife when she dumps her laundry basket of socks on the table and presto, like magic, they rearrange themselves into perfectly folded pairs. I had a curious dream a few nights ago: I was in your apartment, and I don't know where it was. You had poured us both shots of tequila. I took a sip and it was very smooth. I asked you to pour a shot for Ellen, who was there but offstage. While I was speaking Ellen walked by us, went to your refrigerator, and took out and opened a large bottle of beer, without saying anything.

Other encounters today included a brief one with Chloe, who I know vaguely from various neighborhood coffee shops and the gym. She is a Smith grad, spoiled, demanding, and a writer. One day several months ago she asked me to watch her laptop for a few minutes. The screen being in my line of vision I couldn't help reading about how surprised she was at her transformation into a slut. Yesterday in the gym Chloe was riding a stationary bike and called out to me as I came in. I said something about not seeing her for a while and she said she doesn't go to Limbo any more. We talked about other coffee places and she said she spends her time now at Cafe Pick-Me-Up (which seems somehow appropriate). Hey, are you familiar with that slightly cranky conservative commentator with his own inimitable take on the former communist world? Here is a short transcription of his latest tirade: "You see, your Vladimir Lenin was a true gourmet, he liked his human flesh tartare, boiled, pan fried or grilled. The big schism in International Communism came about because Trotsky was strictly a tartare man and Stalin insisted that human flesh should only be eaten boiled with potatoes. This was a grisly version of Jonathan Swift's little end, big end conflict.  Now your Chairman Mao, he took things one step further, deflowering twelve year old girls in the evening and having them for lunch the next day, served with snow peas and water chestnuts in a spicy Sichuan sauce." This guy would be a natural to replace Pat Buchanan on CNN when Pat runs for president again in 2000.

Linda and I approached the house from the back. In order to get to the door we had to navigate on all fours through a crawl space. In places the crawl space became too narrow to pass through so we were unable to proceed in a straight line. When we eventually got to the door I noticed that had we approached from the left we would have been able to walk upright virtually all the way and would only have had to stoop down slightly at the very end. I asked Linda why we didn’t approach the door from that direction and she said: “Oh, we never go in that way.” I'm glad the funding situation sounds more optimistic, though working through to April without a break and enduring the entire Azeri winter will no doubt be less than amusing. Vienna would certainly be a lovely interlude. I found especially funny the phrase "incest as a means of negotiating sexual subjectivity." To your point, what exactly is "early modern incest" anyway? And (I wonder) what would "neo-Futuristic incest" be? Perhaps some totally twisted episode of the Jetsons? The night after reading your last email, Monday night it was, I dreamed I was walking in a semi-industrial neighborhood down a path surrounded by goldenrod, ragweed and other pollen producing plants I don't know the names of, mentally composing a letter to you on the noxious effects of pollen (as if you weren't all too intimately familiar with said effects). One way or another I'll keep you informed about the playoffs, though I have to tell you, I don't have a good feeling about the final outcome. The next paragraph was written last night but the stupid remote server wouldn't pick it up.

The American Idol Complex

The insidious process of voting for "entertaintment" (deliberate typo) favorites pre-selected by lowest-common-denominator media companies (such as Fox) and then "crowning" the winners has brought about an even further dumbing down of our already previously quite dumbed-down culture -- Think of this as "The American Idol Complex."

That Was No Pussy

Yesterday evening I overheard this very funny conversation between two veterans of AA meetings while I was having a hot cider at Think Coffee on the corner of Bleeker and Bowery. I was reading and trying my best to be unobtrusive. The older guy, in his 50s, is an actor. The younger, in his 40s, is a photographer. They initially talked about AA. Much of the rest of the conversation was about women and what women are like. Both are kind of jaded and cynical and were making comments about things they don't like about younger women these days. After the conversation had gone on for a bit the older one started talking about how in days of yore women weren't hairless down there and that "if you ever saw a shaved pussy you knew it was no pussy, it was a man's asshole." It was all I could do to keep from busting a gut laughing.

Chase Community Giving

The hand in the Chase Community Giving logo looks suspiciously like the hand that recently looted the U.S. Treasury of many billions of dollars. I guess the "Giving" part is a manifestation of trickle-down economics?