Lançamento de Santa Camarão em OVAR

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Late Expresso x 2

texto de Nuno Galopim

escolhas de 2017

Espírito Fetra de Natal

Ontem foi Noite de Natal da Cafetra na ZDB, um verdadeiro "Muppetshow Fetrence" - estes putos querem mesmo alienar a malta. O mais incrível do evento era a mesa deles cheio de "merch": zines, discos, k7's, t-shirts, canecas, calendários e postais! Como é óbvio esqueceram-se das peúgas, um produto desvalorizado por muitos mas sem dúvida o mais útil deles todos! Tomem nota!
A música deles pode ser ignorada e desprezada por muitos, que seja, nem vou pensar muito nisso agora até porque ainda não consegui ouvir o último de Putas Bêbadas alto o suficiente. O que interessa é que estes putos (que vão deixar de o ser mais uns tempos) dão baile a tudo e todos, é a amizade e companheirismo num grupo de uma dezena de tipos e tipas invertendo a tendência da arrogância e egocentrismo que vivemos. Eles todos juntos criaram o espírito DIY mais puro e divertido (o Espírito de Natal que se foda!) com acções tão simples como fazer um fanzine de verão - Zine Fetra Verano - ou  um de Natal - Zine de Natal da Cafetra. Tal como a música as BD's são toscas (algumas nem se consegue ler), fotonovelas, brincadeiras, desenhos e afins. Sobressaí a Mariana Pita mas isso pouco importa para aqui. É a atitude e desbravar terreno sem medos e em colectivo que faz destas publicações uma curte.
A Cafetra dá estalada de luva branca e muito humildemente submeto-me a estes putos, mais uma vez é o Rock a ensinar à BD o que deve fazer. Se Tommi Musturi nesta entrevista ao Aaron $hunga afirma que há poucos livros de BD com interesse em comparação com a Literatura, também pouco se aprende com a BD sobre Sociedade. Estamos a dois meses da promoção do nosso concurso dos 500 paus - e a mês e meio para acabar o prazo - e até agora ZERO de propostas. Isto diz muito da sociedade portuguesa - e talvez da BD? - ou da sociedade ocidental, esta falta de capacidade de união para lutar por uma causa comum. Obrigado Fetras por nos relembrar a todos nós desta triste realidade. Não há Natal que nos safe...

Queercore Xmas gift: "Searching for the “core” in queercore"

Chili Com Carne is looking for foreigner publishers for the following book: Anarchoqueer? Queercore!

Guess what's the book about? Hell to you if you don't figure out. It's was written by renowed music critic Rui Eduardo Paes (or REP, his friendly acronym) and designed and illustrated by various Chili Com Carne artists: Bráulio Amado, Astromanta, Hetamoé, Joana Estrela, Joana Pires and Rudolfo. Fantastic dildoistic cover was done by Spanish artist Carles G.O.D.

The Queercore became empty in recent years, despite the existence of new freedom grants, despite the signs that the hecatomb of capitalism can happen and despite the nomadism of the sexes. Loads of very good and provocative Art was produced in the impulse to stick your fingers in warm and moisty places, but was it enough? The Hardcore Queer still exists, it resists because it's on the defensive and because it's weak. Like it's been genetically programmed to fail. Still, when we hear a shrill feedback of the Apostles or the Nervous Gender everything, absolutely everything, seems possible ... Let's believe on that, okay?


About the author: 

Rui Eduardo Paes is a rare example of something rare: a journalist whose work is as essential and informative as it is well-researched and passionate. - Dan Warburton (Wire, Paris Transatlantic)

Music critic and writer free-lancer. Chief-editor of the jazz and improvised music online magazine JAZZ.PT, after six years of editions in paper. Artistic director of the festival Jazz no Parque, produced by Serralves Foundation. Author of nine books about music mixed with multimedia, politics and queer theory. Collaborative work with Culturgest and the recording labels Clean Feed and Shhpuma. Co-founder, with Carlos "Zíngaro", of the artists association Granular, and member of its direction for 11 years, until 2013. Co-founder of the Ernesto de Sousa Fellowship (Experimental Intermedia Foundation / Luso-American Foundation / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) and member of its permanent jury for 20 years, until the last edition in 2013. Former assessor of the ACARTE Service / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's board of directors.

This is the first chapter, "Searching for the “core” in queercore", translated in English:

Dear Johnny Depp,

I hope this finds you well. It’s me, Brad, your greatest fan writing you again to say hello.

Well, it’s been a crazy, crazy few weeks. I guess the big thing is I finally made it out east to New York. Boy, that place sure is insane. The journey there was a trip. It took over two days on Greyhound bus to get there. Sleeping and eating was impossible so the only way to get through it was nibble on a little baggie of meth, listen to bootlegs of your band ‘P’(man, you guys were under-rated – get the band back together, dude!) and jerk off a bunch of times.

Fortunately it turns out that most people who travel on Greyhounds are deviants so I got some help. I jerked off a couple of guys at once in the cubicle, which was a tight squeeze, but we managed and I had them cum on my face and in my ear, and I also got fucked in the ass by a real-life genuine native American Indian who had all this long ratty hair, real gnarly, a little like yours in ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean’, on the back seat at about 5am somewhere near Pensacola. His dick was big, but not too big and I was grateful for the distraction. Also, he never said a word to me, except for when he came he whispered “Krispy Kreme” in my ear, which was weird, but not that weird I guess. I don’t know, maybe it is weird. Or maybe it’s a cultural thing. This being my first trip outside of Lubbock, Texas I couldn’t really say.

So anyway, when I finally arrived in NYC I felt like Dorothy in ‘The Wizard Of Oz’, only instead of Toto I had a bag containing meth, weed and some lube. A quick bit of glory hole dick-sucking in Port Authority (where I tasted my first black cock – a lot like white cock) and I was on my way. I found a bar and got a little drunk on beer. I guess maybe I got spiked or something, because the next thing I remember is waking up in some street with my asshole itchy and bleeding, but with more money in my pocket than I started. Weird, huh? Hey, maybe people in New York aren’t as bad as they say. I sat there smoking a cigarette and the street signs told me I was in Brooklyn. Crazy.

I came to this other bar with posters in the window advertising a band that playing there and they were called – this is so weird – ‘GAY FOR JOHNNY DEPP’!!! It was like a sign from God or something so I paid the $5 fee and went in.

Inside there were all these kids jumping around with no shirts on, and just looking at all those writhing torsos got me so hot I just had to gorge myself on a nice greasy crank, which I did in the toilets. It was attached to some punker kid in a Fallout Boy T-shirt – hot! After he came in mouth he called me a fag and punched me in the face, which was also hot. His cum tasted like Dr. Pepper, so he was probably straight edge. Back in the bar I got a proper look at ‘GAY FOR JOHNNY DEPP’, who were actually four guys with guitars and shit, each of them pretty hot in their own way, though not as hot you, Johnny. Sometimes I can cum just looking at pictures of you, Johnny. I don’t even have to touch my dick.

Anyways. The more songs they played, the wilder the crowd got. When the singer guy took off of most of his clothes and jumped into the crowd I tried to get my tongue up his ass but he was too quick for me. They’re a really fierce band though and I’d happily blow them all for free. I guess I’d describe them as ‘hardcore’ and I bought a copy of their debut full-length CD ‘THE POLITICS OF CRUELTY’ on the way out.

Afterwards reeling out into the street, drunk and high, I bumped into a squadron of marines just back from Iraq, who took me back to their YMCA and took turns rimming, fucking and bashing me. At one point two of them tried to get both their dicks in my ass at once, while another skull-fucked me, and I jerked off two more. A sixth guy just stood there, drinking a can of Bud and filming it.

The weird thing was I hadn’t been to the bath-room all day – apart from to suck dick – so a couple of them ended up with all this runny shit on their cocks, which they weren’t pleased about, so they made me lick it off while they made out with each other. I guess this went on for about four hours, until I was covered in bruises and crusted US military jizzum which fell off me like snowflakes when I finally limped out into the dawn light feeling tired but pretty good. After a big breakfast at a Denny’s I had a little more meth, took a cab back to the station, blew the driver in some side-street, had a couple more cocks in the toilets then got on the bus for an uneventful 48 hour trip back, the boredom punctuated only by a few bouts of mutual masturbation with this guy and his son and eating the ass of a truck driver at a station somewhere in Tennessee. I belched cum and asshole all the way home.

I don’t know what happened to that CD I bought.

Anyway, that’s all for now, Johnny. I enclose a pair of my jockeys and some more Polaroid pictures of my dick and spread ass cheeks. Good luck with your next movie. Write me sometime.

Your friend,

Bradley

The letter above was not a genuine letter but rather the press release from a hardcore band from New York published in 2004 along with the “Erotically Charged Dance Songs for the Desperate” EP. The guitarist Sid Jagger (Joseph Grillo) and the vocalist Marty Leopard (Arty Shepherd) were the main mentors of this project inspired on a homo-erotic obsession for the actor Johnny Depp. This fixation resulted in lyrics such as «Cos I want my Johnny bleeding, fuck him in the ass», sung in a high pitched voice and against the backdrop of a wall of punk-metal distortion. Their first full-length album would come out in 2007 entitled “The Politics of Cruelty”.

Promotional copies of the record were sent out to the media along with the supposed letter to Depp. Beforehand, the journalists had taken receipt of other promotional materials including condoms, gay erotic photographs, rubber gloves and bottles of amyl nitrate. In 2008, Gay For Johnny Depp made an United Kingdom tour in which they took to the stage wearing only a sock hung on their genitalia. They brought an end to the band in 2011 following the release of the album “What Doesn’t Kill You, Eventually Kills You”. A prophetic title undoubtedly…

The group in question was one of the few labelled queercore that, in more recent years, still justified the core part of this trend’s name. From the 1990s, at the peak of the queer-anarchist front to hardcore, through to contemporary times, the movement allowed itself to become contaminated by pop and by dance music. In many cases, this evolution was accompanied by the depoliticisation of the postures and the discourses even if with some important and notable exceptions. As a general rule, the radicalism of the beginnings faded with clear cases of accommodation and, if you can imagine it, even bourgeoisification. Fame and the accompanying money corrupt music and this proves just as true in the alternative and do-it-yourself fields. As G.B. Jones, perhaps the greatest anarcho-queer reference, stated, «rock was once rebel music but it has now become establishment».

Nevertheless, the still hardcore faction of queercore still remains certainly alive and very resistant. What we need to do is to search and separate the wheat from the chaff. Easy to find are examples such as Limp Wrist – information about them even appears in Portuguese due to their legions of followers in Brazil. The band is made up of four middle aged men with beer bellies and would be confused with bikers if their hands, precisely their hands, did not stretch out in such a way as any other faggot with self-respect. They play in leather and underwear, exploiting their daddy-like appearances in an environment that is above all youthful. Scott Moore, the guitarist, is very clear about the position that they place themselves in: «I am not some irritating gay, I am an aberration. I do not have the slightest interest in belonging to the world of the right-doers.» Limp Wrist transformed themselves into a symbol of punk purity in a scene that seems otherwise to have prostituted itself.

The group was founded in 1998 by musicians from different cities across the United States and who had already played in bands such as Los Crudos or Devoid of Faith. Their song “I Love Hardcore Boys, I Love Boys Hardcore” soon became a hymn for the queer cause. Martin Sorrondeguy, the vocalist, is also a cinema director and was the editor of a zine, Maximum Rock N Roll, thus continuing the tradition of this musical current getting involved in writing and social and political reflection. He has inclusively also become the spokesperson for queer Latinos who in Amérikkka experience the dual oppression of being sexual “deviants”, as Brad would say in the fake letter to Johnny Depp, and Hispanic in a highly racist society.

It is undeniable that Limp Wrist lack the affirmative character of the pro-socialist texts of Gary Floyd and the Dicks. A sign of the time perhaps. An awful lot of water has passed since they launched the single “Dicks Hate the Police” in the already far off year of 1980, with the Berlin Wall still standing and Perestroika yet to deliver Russia to capitalism and the nationalist right of Putin rather than achieving the old aspiration of Stateless communism. However, without the Dicks, without Floyd inviting the public to play with his penis against an explosive bed of guitar feedback, there would have been no Limp Wrist. These have, in fact, a song dedicated to Floyd and the other pioneers of queercore such as Randy Turner of the Big Boys and Joshua Plague of the Mukitteo Fairies – “Ode”.

There would also similarly have been no Dead Betties with their intense, even violent, music and their lyrics blowing away all the social mainstream norms ever since they were launched in Brooklyn in 2001 and taking their message out to emblematic venues such as CBGB and Knitting Factory, emerging out of niches at festivals such as Homo-a-Gogo and the LGBTQ Pride demonstrations. They have been portrayed as a queer version of Sonic Youth, due to the influence that the first, more punk phase of the now extinct group of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon had on the bass player and androgynous vocalist Joshua “Starr” Ackley.

Without the Dicks, there would also have been no Nü Sensae, a Canadian project founded in 2008 by Andrea Lukic and Daniel Pitout, the latter a known activist in the fight against AIDS and, according to one critic, «the cutest person on the planet». They gained in profile with their brutalist rock, practically noise, album “TV, Death and the Devil” and published a monthly newsletter printed typographically and sent out not by e-mail but rather in the old fashioned means used by extreme-left organisations: by mail. We would note that queercore was effectively born in Canada and along with another descendant of the Dicks, the Shearing Pinx of Vancouver.

The frontmen, Nic Hughes and Jeremy Van Wyck, picked up the hardcore essentialism and made it experimental, forging that which has come to be called “weird punk”. The Shearing Pinx recorded their improvisations in a jam style approach before sticking pieces of one and another together until they either had a theme or that they thought «lasted long enough», as the bass player Van Wyck explained. This was just what they did in collaborations with Nü Sensae and other bands with elucidative names such as U.S. Girls or AIDS Wolf, on the grounds of seeking to «interact with the community». There are occasions when they seem to display all the dissonance of industrial rock with others when they more closely approximate sludge-metal. «I’m not a violent guy» – said Hughes. «What’s happening is that this city is so very, very, very heavy, all the time and in such an extreme way, that we have to discharge all of this bad energy.»

With an even greater strength of reason, this is all that happens with the New Yorkers God is My Co-Pilot. This group, with its variable composition fronted by a bisexual couple, Sharon Topper and Craig Flanagin, managed to interweave the primary nature of punk with the shorn down sound of some free jazz, calling on partners including the saxophonist John Zorn and the guitarist Elliott Sharp, among others. «We are associating rock, a sexist language, with other musical styles, to better deal with the identity of the genre within the scope of its own terms of complexity», Topper clarified as regards the motivations behind the songs that, as a general rule, last less than three minutes. They very frequently take sex as their theme, whether the celebration of fist-fucking in “List”, lesbianism in “They Often Look Fr.” or moral patterns of behaviour in “Sex is for Making Babies”. There are no major “political” considerations coming out of their vocals – the anarchism of God is My Co-Pilot proves implicit. This, for example, involves Sharon’s usage of a vibrator to play the guitar strings.

More difficult to ascertain is whether the She Devils, from Argentina, and active ever since 1995, had any type of influence over queercore in the northern hemisphere, especially as the United States had thus far been well served by projects exclusively made up of women. Patricia Pietrafiesa, the lead member of the group, also got involved in the fanzine movement with the publication of Resistencia but this was written in Spanish and very probably did not reach any Hispanic readers in the empire of the stars and stripes. What we may be sure of is that their virulent punk led to the appearance of a band with the same name in Springfield, Illinois, with the latter less primary in their approach (their dark ambiences have already been compared to the Melvins) and worthy of the designation cuntcore. The themes of the original She Devils span feminism, homosexual rights, ecology and do-it-yourself. They engaged in the campaign to legalise abortion in their country with a record split with the Fun People entitled “El Aborto Ilegal Asesina my Libertad” and functioning as the front line for a wave of political-cultural agitation with the organisation of the Belladona Festival, open to female artists from whatever their respective field.

Far better known are Tribe 8, descendants via Leslie Mah of the old-school punk band Anti-Scrunti Faction. The connection was duly recognised by Tribe 8 when they made a version of the song “Slave to my Estrogen”, by Anti-Scrunti, called “Estrofemme” in 1998. In any case, there is the pioneering work of the also well known ASF who got certified in queercore with their mention in the fanzine J.D.s, which had originally launched this entire movement. Formed in San Francisco, the group Tribe 8 sought with this name not only to restore the English expression that had once been used to refer to women who like women, “tribade”, but also alluding to how queers also constitute a tribe, whether for the good or for the bad.

Even more so than Leslie Mah, taking a leading role in this collective was the vocalist Lynn Breedlove, a FTM (female-to-male) who performed in concert with breasts on display (and still having them today) and wearing a strap-on that would get offered from mouth to mouth of the audience members closest to the stage. The controversy generated did not end there: their songs dealt with issues such as sadomasochism, its attitude was a challenge to feminist and lesbian orthodoxies and on stage commonly simulated the castration of a rubber penis during the playing of a song about rape, “Gang Castrate”. When accused of inciting violence by event producers and women’s organisations who attempted to boycott their live performances, Breedlove declared, straightly and bluntly, that the use of force is always acceptable whenever somebody is being raped and so much the better if the perpetrator ends up dead.

«For us, to jump from one side to the other, screaming and brandishing knives makes us feel better. We are survivors of sexual abuse and censorship is always repression irrespective of however you justify it. If you don’t like my art, don’t look for it. What I would do if forced to match your concepts of art would no longer be art, no longer the expression of my life and my experiences. Whenever they censor some Tribe 8 record or they stick on those ‘parents advisory’ labels what I tell the kids is “they won’t sell you the record? Then steal it and steal a few beers to listen to it with”», commented the vocalist.

Breedlove believes that the censors seeking to stop Tribe 8 had the goal of avoiding the unavoidable: «They know that the kids are increasingly listening to more alternative music, that they are the future and that the future is revolution. It’s the same shit that has happened with rock‘n’roll ever since Elvis Presley. It’s revolution that they are scared of and one of these days censorship is going to take root in our homes. When that happens, it’ll be too late. But it’s a revolution that we are making, in the anarchist fashion, underground. “Do-it-yourself” is the key. We cannot accept any “help” from publishers and the media controlled by money and power on the risk of diluting what we have to say. This would overthrow our revolutionary objectives. We need to continue working in our network where we pass on our information and not them.»

Lynn Breedlove continued with this activity after Tribe 8 broke up. He published a book, “Godspeed”, performed in various films, including the one he himself produced, “Estrofemme”, and “The Yo-Yo Gang” by G.B. Jones and “Shut Up White Boy” by Vu T. and Thu Ha, and also starred in spectacles such as “Lynnee Breedlove’s One Freak Show” and “Man with a Vagina”. Furthermore, he has collaborated with United Genders of the Universe, organising support and education for transgender persons in the Bay Area as well as anti-racist initiatives and campaigning for stronger worker rights.

Only the female band Fifth Column, from Canada, had a greater impact than Tribe 8. The name refers to a strategy deployed by Franco in the Spanish Civil War: the fascist fifth column operated inside republican Madrid, pretending to be by their side until attacking their troops with the element of surprise. Their first EP was launched in 1982, with the title “Boy/Girl – Monsieur Beauchamp”. Despite their hardcore affiliation, they also feature an arty facet: for example, their concerts include the showing of films, instruments relatively uncommon in rock such as saxophones, trumpets, flutes or violins, as well as a go-go dancer, Bruce LaBruce, who was himself one of those responsible for the boom of queer fanzines. Inspired by the International Situationist and by Guy Débord, the author of “The Society of Spectacle”, Fifth Column took an ironic stance and made recourse to cutting sarcasm as in “All Women Are Bitches”, from 1992.

The cineaste and fanzine editor G.B. Jones was one of the driving forces of the project alongside Caroline Azar. At the beginning of the 1980s, the existence of a band exclusively made up of women was still perceived with surprise despite the prior existence in punk of groups such as The Slits, The Raincoats and X-Ray Spex. And, naturally, the rumour swiftly spread that Fifth Column hated men. But no: they simply preferred women. Of course, the discourse of Jones went down a storm with the unpopular girls in high school: «When I was going through that, there in school were only stupid, ugly and talentless people who would grab at the only opportunity that they would ever get to convince someone to pay them some attention. Idiot girls that would become cheerleaders on their way to marrying, having children, mortgages, accounts, parents-in-law screaming at them, a job and then death. These were the best years in their lives and the worst in mine. We get many letters and phone calls from kids saying that, when they listen to us they feel good as they are not alone. I’m not saying that we raise the awareness of these adolescents because that would be pretentious, but it’s just as well there is somebody awake.»

Fifth Column strove to act as a collective resistance. «We resist the standards, the status quo, whatever is considered normal», specifies G.B. Jones. What proves curious is that this group emerges well before the rrriot girl wave and before Bikini Kill and the Indigo Girls. When there was still no feminist rock, when queer theory had still not taken root in universities, when there was still no perception that the gay movement was «assimilationist and bourgeois», there was already a queercore band. Hence, more than mere resistance, the Fifth Column were precursors. It was they, along with the zine J.D.s (J.D. as in Juvenile Delinquents, James Dean and J.D. Salinger), who created the scene. Everything else the scene created.

And in what way did they create that which came to happen? With the power arising from songs such as “The Fairview Mall Story”, an aggressive attack on justice and the media in the wake of a sad story of homophobia in the particularly difficult 1980s. 32 men were arrested for sexual acts in the bathrooms of a shopping mall in Canada, the Fairview Mall in St. Catharine’s and their names were leaked and published by the newspapers. One of them, married and with children, could not stand the scandal and committed suicide.

Other pioneers included Team Dresch with Donna Dresch, Jody Bleyle and Kaja Wilson, headquartered in Portland. The group’s gigs featured the particularity of including personal defence tactics sessions given by the instructor Alice Stagg, showing how to prevent attacks by rapists, jealous boyfriends and police officers suffering authority abuse syndrome. The collective launched in 1993 with the single “Hand Grenade” and then with the album “Personal Best”, even if they were not to see out the end of the decade. Nevertheless, they left behind an enormous influence on those who followed, which hardly comes as any surprise when knowing that Dresch had the very best of pedigrees in alternative American rock – previously playing with the legendary Dinosaur Jr. of J. Mascis.

One heir to all of the ground breaking work was undoubtedly Jane Danger, vocalist and guitarist of Three Dollar Bill, a name drawing on the American expression “queer as a three dollar bill”. This holding despite the Chicago band also including male musicians beginning with the other vocalist and guitarist, Chris Piss. Everything kicked off in the late 1990s and one of the group’s initial acts was to participate in the first Gay Shame, the 1998 alternative festival / march to Gay Pride that queer militants accuse of having sold out to political and economic interests, through taking receipt of financial support from companies interested in homosexual purchasing power and sponsored by city councils desiring to appear “progressive”.

As Jane states: «I always preferred hard rock and punk to any other type of music because they’re a very healthy and aggressive way of discharging energy and emotion. I even think that the rage of punk fits in with the emotions of the gay community and that it is a good way to connect with other men and our struggle for equal rights.» Furthermore, the song in the style of question-and-answer, “Parody of Pleasure” (2005), comes directly from a heterosexual punk group of the 1970s, the X.

While the homo-queer hardcore of Three Dollar Bill contains a melodic, almost pop side, the trans-queer hardcore of the New Yorkers Schmekel (“little penis” in Yiddish) displays a folk facet that also draws upon the importance of melody. This is a male quartet that were designated women at birth with the particularity of them all being Jews – the music follows the scales of the klezmer – and socialists, following principles of equality within the organisation of the band. The lyrics sung by Lucian Kahn would recall Frank Zappa intermixed with Mel Brooks and Groucho Marx were they not macho pigs. A good example is “Gay Shame”, which is partially reproduced below…

«You did what the HRC said you should / So gay yuppies and white old dudes / Can take over working class neighbourhoods / And buy organic groceries at Whole Foods. / Congratulations to the married men / And the runaway queers earing your hors devours. / I’m sure you invited them to the party / ‘Cuz we all know who “equality” serves. / GAY SHAME GAY SHAME GAY SHAME / GEH HEIM GEH HEIM GEH HEIM. / You say feminists are Delilah to your Samson / Busting your balls like a condom of lambskin. / Trans boy buddies, you say you’ve got a passel / But trans girls have elected you National Asshole. / You see me fully clothed and you’re scared of my man cunt / But there’s pictures of your nutsack on Grindr and Manhunt / Say you’re not sexist, just regular homo / If vaginas remind you of the whale that ate Jonah. / GAY SHAME GAY SHAME GAY SHAME / GEH HEIM GEH HEIM GEH HEIM. (…)»

Moving away from the punk core but still within its boundaries, there is also the Pariah Piranha of Andrea Shearer, a trio with two dykes and a hetero-queer who confesses an «incapacity to stick to any single tendency in rock», and the Gloryholes with their attraction to the “garage‘n’roll” sound and with a drummer answering to the name of Johnny Machine as well as a Holger Czukay with a waist rhythm moving to come-here-I’m-already-going. The latter boast of being the only queer band in Memphis, have an EP entitled “Like Us on Facebook” (2012) and a hilarious song about a transsexual who turns into a super-heroine, “Gloria Ho”.

The philosophy behind these hardcore practices is encapsulated in a text signed off by one E. Sebastian Snowflake, under the title “Decadence, My Frenemy”. «Decadence may be a marvellous weapon against the police that we have in our head. Anarchism and the spectre of the anarchist have always overshadowed the authoritarians of the right and the left that accuse them of being “decadent”. To them, we represent the corrupted, the uncontrollable, sex, violence, perversion, moral decay. We could not be happier with any of this.»

The writing, posted on the Net, purposefully seeks to gather together the combat by the queer currents represented by Stirner and Kropotkine: «Taking our lives as art, taking our tragedies to the stage, following our dreams of excess and pleasure as personal and social acts, we are recreating our very own selves. That is how we, queer decadent anarchists, struggle against oppression. We are decadent because our sexuality is not organised around reproduction, and inclusively the reproduction of identities and relationships of power that the racist and imperialist hetero-patriarch needs. In decadence, queer anarchism is simultaneously individualist and communist. We are destructive and creative. We are as if St. Sebastian, beautiful and martyrs at our own orgiastic deaths, brought down by the arrows that pierce our flesh.»

This black-and-red Snowflake further emphasises: «I aspire to a war movement capable of theorising the decadence of this horrible society and building places of pleasure that terrorise the dominant class with our ferocity and our humour. And how to ensure that revolutionary decadence does not get recovered by the system as happened to the LGBT front? We approach the collapse, rupture, perceiving how things only really become of interest when they are collapsing.»

This is, and continues to remain, the “core” of punk rebellion with the difference that it has lost the typically macho and misogynous tone of the original punk, replacing it with a pink punk. So much the worst, the better in a tactic of increasingly mirroring reality and exponentially raising chaos. Only in the context of a hecatomb are we able to organise pockets of liberty and equality, the first cells (wishful thinking) of a society built on foundations formed by free individuals and with multiple orientations in their means of interacting with each other. Not by chance, this proves the slogan hoisted by the duo Butch Vs Femme: Kimberli Aparicio and Chavez d’Augustine resolved to set to music their discussions on gender identity and the differences between butches (masculinised lesbians) and femmes (feminised lesbians). Their activities seemed to have come to a close in 2008 but they were back causing damage in 2014 because they think the campaign has yet to end. Is it really or is the revolutionary program of Snowflake but some fantastic delirium? Will the revolution not be swallowed by the black hole as with all of the rest? «There’s no future for us», as the song has already sung.

Visita de Estudo ao Milhões 2017 - Histórias de encantar dos alunos da C+S de Corvos (Anais) ESGOTADO

O fanzine que foi grátis no Milhões de Festa e para quem foi esperto o suficiente para visitar a NECROmancia EDITOrial!

A capa é do Rudolfo e participam os seguintes alunos: Ana Caspão, André Pereira, Gonçalo Duarte, João Silvestre, Joaquim Almeida, Marcos Farrajota, Ricardo Martins, Rui Moura, Tiago da Bernarda e Xavier Almeida.

Algumas BDs foram animadas no Fezesbook do Milhones - ver AQUI!

ESGOTADO

Arraste com os Fofinhos

A Feira Morta apresenta-se num formato pequeno e d'arraste para dar a conhecer com calma alguns dos trabalhos editados ao longo dos últimos tempos no campo das fanzines.

Nesta primeira edição Mariana Pita apresenta-nos o seu Lá Fora Com os Fofinhos recentemente editado pela Chili Com Carne. Estarão ainda presentes Gonçalo Duarte, o colectivo Clube do Inferno e Xavier Almeida que editou o mês passado o romance gráfico Santa Camarão também pela Chili com Carne.

Seguirse-á um curto concerto da Moxila com chá e bolo e Dj set natalício de unDJ MMMNNNRRRG. Quando baterem as nove, a música fica a cargo da Halyne, que fará por assegurar as delícias de quem quiser ficar a ler zines até mais tarde.

Tudo isto na Pequena Notável, Sexta-Feira 15 de Dezembro

Anarchist Xmas gift: "Gilles Deleuze and the Poisoning of Beethoven"

Chili Com Carne is looking for foreigner publishers for the following book: "a" maiúsculo com círculo à volta - or is you prefer: Caps "a" with circle around. 




It's a book about music and anarchy written by renowed music critic Rui Eduardo Paes (or REP, his friendly acronym) and illustrated by various Chili Com Carne artists: Joana Pires, Marcos Farrajota, André Coelho, Jucifer, Bráulio Amado (also Designer of the book), José Feitor, David Campos, Daniel Lopes, André Lemos, João Chambel and Ana Menezes.

Often, and in a few cases if not abusively, Punk is identified with Anarchism. In another music areas, there's the usual analogies of the so-called "free-improvisation" with libertarian principles, even if some of the players are musicians with political and social perspectives influenced by Marxist currents such as the Trotzkism and Maoism. There are more connections between music and Anarchy that meets the eye and that's what this short book of Rui Eduardo Paes will reveal... In it, REP lists the music of norwadays like jazz, improvisation, pop-rock, noise or experimental electronics. Daniel Carter, Lê Quan Ninh, John Cage, Fela Kuti, Frank Zappa, Thom York (Radiohead) and Nicolas Collins are some of the figures portrayed by his analytical writing with philosophical dimension, often with humor and provocative thoughts has this essayist and editor of the online magazine jazz.pt is known for. Among the topics covered throughout the ten chapters widely illustrated are the occult, spirituality, science, science fiction, technology, love and sex, with reference to authors as Robert Anton Wilson, Hakim Bey, Murray Bookchin, Starhawk and Ursula K. Le Guin.

About the author: 

Rui Eduardo Paes is a rare example of something rare: a journalist whose work is as essential and informative as it is well-researched and passionate. - Dan Warburton (Wire, Paris Transatlantic)

Music critic and writer free-lancer. Chief-editor of the jazz and improvised music online magazine JAZZ.PT, after six years of editions in paper. Artistic director of the festival Jazz no Parque, produced by Serralves Foundation. Author of nine books about music mixed with multimedia, politics and queer theory. Collaborative work with Culturgest and the recording labels Clean Feed and Shhpuma. Co-founder, with Carlos "Zíngaro", of the artists association Granular, and member of its direction for 11 years, until 2013. Co-founder of the Ernesto de Sousa Fellowship (Experimental Intermedia Foundation / Luso-American Foundation / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) and member of its permanent jury for 20 years, until the last edition in 2013. Former assessor of the ACARTE Service / Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's board of directors.

This is the first chapter, "Gilles Deleuze and the posining of Beethoven", translated in English:

We are experiencing interesting times in the history of anarchist thinking. The avant-garde in this field has gained the designation of Post-Anarchism due to having internalised contemporary critical reflections such as those proposed by philosophers in the post-structuralist school, in particular Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault.

At a time when Anarchy no longer needs to be adverse to the divine, when we may encounter a flourishing Christian anarchist movement, defending the return to a savage state, and an anarchist Paganism, with incursions into Shamanism and ritual recourse to narcotic substances, these “new persons” (as the Russian Nihilists of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries first got identified with the term surviving to identify their intellectual descendants) have delighted in the discovery of occultism and all its speculative potentials.

There is thus the clear pleasure that Christian Kerslake found in one of the first texts written by Deleuze, published in 1946, when the author was just 21 years of age. This represents the preface to an obscure book written by a physician and occultist in the Romantic period, of whom we today hear so little reference, one Johann Malfatti de Montereggio, an Austrian of Italian origins.

“Mathesis: Studies on Anarchy and the Hierarchy of Knowledge” provides the title to this introduction, immediately leading to the suspicion of something other than a prior anarchist influence on the French philosopher. While the term mathesis universalis was advanced by the rationalist Descartes in order to designate a science capable of explaining everything, we may nevertheless be certain that its justifications prove platonic, theological and esoteric and it was within this scope that Malfatti applied the term.

What the author wrote and what Deleuze himself considered of “Mathesis” in this prose illuminates many aspects of his later work Anti-Oedipus, co-authored with Félix Guattari, such as the essay Difference and Repetition and the concept of a «body without organs».

The fact remains that Gilles Deleuze would never again mention Malfatti irrespective of applying the idea of mathesis in his essays on numerous different occasions. Furthermore, he did not authorise the republishing of any of the writings from his youth and a motive explaining the surprise of Kerslake. Those had remained safeguarded from the majority of readers.

Indeed, Malfatti ended up playing an important role in the secret societies of European occultism of the 19^th century, among the Martinists, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Illuminati and Theosophists. As a physician, he was a follower of the methods advocated by John Brown: all the therapies involved the administration of drugs such as opium, arsenic, camphor, wine or cinchona from Peru. It was not then rare to find, in the General Hospital of Vienna, patients in extremely advanced states of drunkenness, stumbling along the corridors or lying, prostrate in their beds…

Previously a theologian, Brown turned towards medicine after having cured the gout he suffered from through the consumption of opium. He put into practice with his patients the theory that the human organism functions through a combination of external and internal stimuli with the symptoms of any disease caused by imbalances in them. Recourse to opium simultaneously functioned as a stimulant and a relaxant for the excitability of the body.

For somebody with a contemporary perspective, this might appear strange. However, we need to take into account how two centuries ago psychotropic substances were perceived as the best of panaceas and commercially freely available and subject to prescription…

Not even the circumstances of their patients dying along the way, whether through the lack of any more effective cure or through an overdose, demotivated Brown and Malfatti from using those drugs and, as the chronicles testify, both displayed behaviours typical to drug addicts. Indeed, still furthermore, the latter became the clinic of preference for princes and the bourgeois. And also by artists: his name is now best recognised as the physician to the composer Ludwig van Beethoven than for any of his other activities. Still better: as the physician who killed Beethoven.

However, we shall get there soon enough… For the meanwhile, we need to be aware that the understanding prevailing in that period was very different to that kind of moral judgement we might hand down today. According to Schelling, the father of the then emerging natürphilosophie and also an inveterate smoker of Chinese pipes, Brown «was the first to understand the uniquely genuine principles of all the theories of organic nature». For example, those of «somnambulism» and «animal magnetism», which official medicine would later let fall by the wayside.

The «artificial fireworks» adopted by Malfatti to stimulate the «bodies without organs» has experienced the longevity that we know and encountered other defenders in philosophies of more recent influence, such as the psychedelics Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna, both, to a greater or lesser extent influenced by the anarchist movements and, hence, by Romantic occultism. Gilles Deleuze counts himself as among those radical thinkers that engaged in experiments with drugs and thus joining a list that stretches back to the post-Marxist Walter Benjamin and the anarchist Ernst Jünger in the final years of his life.

The orientalism of Leary and McKenna in the years between the 1960s and the 1980s was already present in Malfatti over the course of the years between 1790 and 1800, plunging into Hindu mysticism like few other of his contemporaries and from which he derived the notion of a «hidden anatomy» ordered according to polarities, powers and plans. Mathematical factors but from an incredibly old, stretching back millennia, metaphysical mathematics.

The name Malfatti would prove the delight of the hirsute bearded nihilists in their intentionally dirty clothing who, later, would not rule out any means to assassinate the czar of proud Russia. In every language, such is translatable as «Bad Deed» or «Badly Intentioned». Much gets discussed around what really did happen. Might the enlightened doctor have planned the death of Beethoven by poisoning, raising the dosage of arsenic in the potions he would prepare him? Might this not have been a simple accident even if foreseeable with such a dangerous medication? Might it even have been the composer himself who exaggerated in the quantities ingested?

What nevertheless remains certain is that mathesis took the life of Beethoven. He, at least so it would seem, was not actually infirm; he did however need some kind of stimulation in order to compose and this was the role played by the occultist physician. Arsenic contains aphrodisiac properties and these, when turned away from the act of sex, thus when sublimated or “transcendentalised”, generate a recognised creative potential. Beethoven was stimulated up to a level of absolute non-excitability. In a certainway, he was symbolically deposed from his conditions of genius.

The great irony to this story, which has Gilles Deleuze as its mediator, stems from how another great name in music, the Zen anarchist John Cage, sustained his entire musical theory on the negation of Beethoven. His affirmation that the latter «was wrong» has become proverbial. And he was wrong, in his opinion, because Beethoven defined sections of a composition by harmonic means and Cage not only spurned any relevance to harmony but also had a personal incapacity to deal with it.

Knowing the affinities between Post-Anarchism and science fiction as well as the fantastic literature of writers like William Burroughs, we have here all of the ingredients to imagine how Malfatti de Montereggio was mandated by a Deleuze turned time traveller through magical means, on the occasion of his death in 1995, to exterminate the person responsible for the authoritarianism of harmony in music, Beethoven. Consider how this would have made feasible the existence of a Satie, of a Webern and, of course, the inventor of the prepared piano…

The secret imposed by the post-structuralist thinker as regards his intellectual interconnections with the Italian born pre-nihilist of Vienna might, in this context, be interpreted as indicating complicity in a crime. It now remains to identify just who was the brains behind this Anarcho-esotericism driven conspiracy. Hakim Bey? For all of the consequences that we might wish to draw from this, the most mediatic of post-anarchists does have a criminal record. He is a publicly assumed paedophile.