THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
012
WARREN ELLIS


Welcome to planet Earth.

A California fisherman pleads guilty in court to stabbing a sea lion through the heart with a steak knife because it tried to steal his bait. Around the same time, 18-year-old Emily Sander disappears from a Kansas college, probably in the company of a 24-year-old man and his 16-year-old pregnant girlfriend. Her corpse is found in the tall grass off Highway 54 a few days later, by which time it's been revealed that Sander was also an internet nude model using the name "Zoey Zane." Somewhere nearby, there's a motel room full of blood. Her ex-boyfriend -- who dumped her when she started doing the topless stuff -- said of her, "She wanted to choreograph music videos. That is the only reason she did the Internet thing -- to get a little exposure."

There's a hole in the universe a billion light years across, called the Cold Spot. According to theoretical physicist-cosmologist Professor Dr Laura Mersini-Houghton, the hideous gaping void from beyond space lurking in the constellation Eridanus is "the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own."

In North Carolina, scientists have driven electrodes into the brains of monkeys, analysed the specific signals sent down the nerves for leg movement, and then driven them over the net to a pair of robot legs in Kyoto. The monkeys make the robot walk. This is not the same robot that's been constructed to feel pain. Simroid, in Tokyo, is a robot used to train dentists. It breathes. When a student presses its teeth too hard, or slips with a tool, it twitches with pain and exclaims in spoken language.

Elsewhere in Tokyo, technicians are nursing baby robots. Robot babies that cry and burp and probably shit oil and broken cogs. They're designed to help teach prospective human parents what to do with babies in a society with a birthrate falling so hard that "opportunities to see kids in society are decreasing."

Welcome to planet Earth, where, within a few years, we will all have been entrained to raise robot babies that we have designed to feel pain. Soon, they will reach their toddler years, powered by a vast array of monkeys wired up to the internet. We will send them out into the world, where they too will go on to the internet and show the world their chrome nipples and the sleek pink hatches of their robot vaginas before being shanked to death in motel rooms by vengeful, pregnant sea lions.

And, across the vast expanse of spacetime itself, an entire other universe is showing us its billion-light-year-wide arse.

* * * * *

I opened my new message board the other day:
Whitechapel. All are welcome. Don't piss on the floor.

THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
010
WARREN ELLIS


The "Hot Carl," apparently, is where a mentally ill man loosely stretches cellophane across the open mouth of a mentally ill woman and then defecates on to the surface of the cellophane, which of course sags around the weight of the stool and thereby lowers a fresh shrinkwrapped turd into the mentally ill woman's mouth.

America broke sex.

Due to my small notoriety, people send me information that they say they believe is useful research material but which in actuality they hope will hurt my brain. They send articles, anecdotes, pictures and clips. Due to having written a couple of things related to the American porn industry, I get sent a whole bunch of stuff related to that, and so build up a vague picture of what's going on. And America has broken sex.

In my novel CROOKED LITTLE VEIN, I lightly fictionalise a TV interview with a male porn performer. In the novel, he says:

“Anal sex was edgy. It wasn’t a mainstream thing. But time was, cum shots were edgy. And there was a response to cum shots, and then every porno had cum shots, and now there’s bukkake. Same with anal sex. Big shock when it was first shown, and now anal sex is in every movie. The audience takes that on and then says, what’s next? What’s new? So all this stuff, that was hidden away for years, is mainstream now. You know what else? There was a movie in England last year, an arty movie, based on a literary kind of novel. And it has blowjobs. The actress – and this was straight actors and actresses, not adult performers – had to suck the actor off on camera. Porno’s already crossed over, man. We’re mainstream American shit now. If people out there want to worry about something, tell them to worry about what comes next. Worry about what comes after us.”

I was softening this more than a little (despite the mention of bukkake, as chilly and dehumanising a spectacle as you'll find). It's early in the novel, and people didn't need to be beaten in the head straight away with the actual state of commercial American porn. This is male porn performer Dick Nasty discussing the 2002 film ASS CLOWNS 3:

"I kill Osama bin Laden by cutting his head off with a knife, and we shoot everybody else that's with his little group of murdering cutthroats... There's lots of blood, and there's lots of, basically, rape; they all rape the American journalist before we go in and save her. I play a British Special Forces guy going in with an American Special Forces guy, and then we d.p. her, but when we do it, she's [consenting]."

Obviously, this is a retarded film and these are all performers and all consenting: Extreme Associates, who produced the thing, like making films that simulate murder, rape and child-fucking. Also, sex in a walk-in shower room filled with piss. Their latest is evidently called WHITE TRASH PIECES OF SHIT.

A couple of months ago, I viewed a clip from the seamier end of the "gonzo" (near-plotless, amateur-ambience, cheap-and-nasty) market, where a guy lays out a plastic sheet before inducing a woman to gag on his cock, explaining that she could puke on the sheet if she has to. Which she did, which is of course why some bastard sent it to me. But the more of these things you see or read of, the more you realise that American porn now has no relationship to sex. Seriously, when was the last time you laid out sheeting for your girlfriend to throw up over in between blowing you? When was the last time you punched your girlfriend in the back of the head while you were coming in her?

Yes, here we are at the Donkey Punch: smashing your girlfriend in the brains so that she involuntarily tightens and spasms around you while you're dribbling your grey, poisoned little load up into her anal cavity. And DONKEY PUNCH, the movie, where you can see a man violently beat a woman in the side of the head while she begs him to stop. It's been since alleged [1] that the woman had a weak spot in her skull from surgery and the (ring-wearing) man was in fact repeatedly targeting it. One of the producers later says, on camera, "There's no wrong spot to hit a woman." The woman was, of course, contracted and consenting -- although she plainly wasn't acting during the beating. You'd ask yourself why anyone with a weakened skull would sign up for that kind of gig -- but if you did, it'd mean you have no idea how life is lived down in the porn business.

The Donkey Punch was actually made up for a book called "The Complete Asshole's Guide to Handling Chicks." It is, or was, completely fictional. But someone in America said, what's next, what's new? Triple-penetration anal has been done already. Who goes home and says, honey, can you call two of your friends, because I'd really like it if all of you could turn my arsehole into a twelve-inch semen tote tonight?

This is how you know you're living in the future: when the pornography bears no earthly resemblance to sex as even the filthiest of us know it. You may as well be renting DVDs of aliens fucking. And America, as Martin Amis once said, is where they road-test the future.

Anyway. I'm off to saw through my knob with a pair of rusty scissors. If I had any sense, I'd switch on the webcam and put the whole act behind a pay gate...

THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
009
WARREN ELLIS

"A love letter to alternative culture, written in an era where alt culture no longer exists."

This is the opening statement for COILHOUSE, a magazine by three friends of mine (Meredith Yayanos, Nadya Lev and this site's own Zoetica Ebb, who is presumably one entry down wearing something she cut off the skins of Japanese children right now).

"This is an idea I’m presently trying out, like a new pair of shoes that are slightly uncomfortable, that you have to wear in a bit: the idea that we are now in different times, or more profoundly, living with a different sense of temporality. Indeed, have been for some while... a sense of temporality changing radically, the fading or disruption of a former sense of forward propulsion through time…"

In the same month that COILHOUSE launched, I find this notion in BRING THE NOISE, a collection of the music writing and theory of the excellent Simon Reynolds (and I'm horrified to realise I've been following his work for twenty years now). He actually wrote this on his website Blissblog a couple of years ago and somehow I missed it, but anyway.

Does one tie into the other?

One of the few people in music who seem to me to be really leaning into the future right now is Burial, the reclusive lofi dubstep wizard whose work conjures fantastic images of a drowned London and haunted electronics. He's doing his bit to save 2007 from being a complete fucking disaster by releasing a new album, UNTRUE, next month. In a new interview with Kode9 (who is also pretty interesting), he says this:

"I don't want the music I love to be a global samplepack music... I like Underground tunes that are true and mongrel and you see people trying to break that down, alter its nature. Underground music should have its back turned, it needs to be gone, untrackable, unreadable, just a distant light."

Why doesn't alt culture exist? Perhaps because it's been devoured by the mainstream monoculture. It's a hungry bastard, after all, and it'll choke down anything that'll fill its stomach. That we see things in Hollywood movies and tv now that were limited to experimental film twenty years ago is only the nature of the beast. It's not an evolution of Hollywood culture -- it's simply the beast widening its diet because it's eaten everything else in reach. You might not like the look of that weird foreign food, but if there's fuck all else on the table and you're still hungry, you'll gnaw on Korean film, Dutch film, Thai film and any other goddamn thing. And you can yank "Hollywood" out of that equation and replace it with fashion, music and half a dozen other things. The DIY-ambience in portrait photography that this very site pioneered is now meaningless because it's everywhere.

Partly that, maybe? Partly because we're in Reynolds' "anachronesis" -- living in a time of constant, delusional recursion, in a limbo of a dozen different pasts. Re-enactment, like living as a medieval soldier for a never-ending Renaissance Faire. Being Lenny Kravitz. Being the White Stripes. Record collection bands. People who like Amy Winehouse. Reynolds again: "Things under the sway of anachronesis are just nothing. You might as well be dead." Half the excitement about the online steampunk revival seems to source from the fact that it's only been done once before. That's what it comes to, in the anachronesis condition: it's exciting because it's only a bit old.

And partly, I think, because people just don't make it anymore. Every corner of the web is blitzed with the light shone by thousands of curational blogs whose job is to parse the internet for their readers. I mean, I hunt for research material all the time and store it on my website, I'm as guilty as anyone. But at some point producing actual content on the web went out of fashion -- almost all of the top one thousand blogs are reportage and linkblogging sites. At some point people have to stop checking to see what happened yesterday and start thinking about tomorrow. And it's that that "alternative culture" comes from -- the drive to do what's next and the impulse to make the sound no-one's heard yet. That's just not where we are right now. We're still suffering exhaustion from the most utterly mad and brain-burning experience in human history -- the Twentieth Century.

Maybe Burial has a point. Maybe you just don't grow alt culture in the light. The alt print culture is largely gone, migrated to the web but often missing the crucial element of networking. (Back then, of course, we called that "letters pages," and "classified ads.") But with the rise of private social networks -- Ning, and Facebook groups and gated message boards -- maybe some dark rooms can be generated. The global comeback of the PDF magazine shows some promise, too. Another dozen great netlabels like Miasmah would be nice.

Start making things. Tilt into the future. Or get the eternal past you deserve.