Mezzogiallo: Ferality. Fetidity. Eastern Europe., David Kerekes (TransVisceral Books 2014)
August 1956. Teenage anti-communist Mirima Kerekes flees to the West as Soviet tanks rumble into Bucharest to crush a desperate popular uprising. A month later, Mirima is in the sea-side town of Bootle, north-west England, finding her feet in a new country and a new culture. Soon she will have a son, David, future editor of Headpress Journal and author of acclaimed counter-cultural texts Killing for Culture (1992), Sex Murder Art (1998) and Backstage Bootle (2011).
But Mirima left a brother behind in Bucharest, also called David. He remains a distant enigma, a mysterious, rarely mentioned figure throughout his nephew’s childhood and teens. It is not until thirty years later, following the fall of feral dictator Antonin Ceauşescu, that the British David Kerekes is able to travel to Eastern Europe and meet his uncle for the first time.
Mezzogiallo is the story of that momentous meeting and its continuing consequences, an extended meditation on fate and free will as the British David struggles to come to terms with the horrific family secret he uncovers behind the former Iron Curtain. As he writes in his introduction:
Once I gained my uncle’s confidence he began to open up to me, but it was not till near the end of my initial stay in the country that he finally revealed the truth about his life under communism. I was aghast to discover the reason for my mom’s silence about her brother all those years: my namesake, my uncle David, had worked for the secret police throughout the years of Ceauşescu, photographing and recording people without their knowledge for the files of the brutal regime that had crushed private life without remorse or conscience. He told me that he had once driven 150 kilometres to look inside someone’s bathroom and take some hairs from their comb. But there was worse to come – a confession that shook me to my core.
Despite himself, my uncle revealed, he had enjoyed the spying and the prying and the sense of power they gave him. In stumbling words, racked by a deep sense of shame and futility, he confessed to me that photographing people, recording their private conversations, keeping files on their quotidian activities, had given him serious thrills. He described how he had once quivered with excitement as he hid under the floorboards of a private home, listening to someone exercise on a rowing machine. In short: he had been a dedicated voyeur, filling the emptiness of his own life by spying on the lives of others.
My horror was unbounded. Anyone who knows Headpress, the Journal of Strangeness and Necrophilia, knows that I have devoted my life to offering a fiercely intelligint, passionately non-normative alternative to the ever-increasing voyeurism of the British mainstream – the spying-and-prying peddled by The Daily Mail, by the über-ennui’d teens who take secret photographs and videos of others, then exchange them online with their like-minded peers. And yet here was my mom’s brother doing the exact same thing as had horrified me for so long in Britain. But could I condemn him for it? What if I myself had been born under communism? Might I too not have worked for the secret police? Might I too not have become a dedicated voyeur, gloating over secretly obtained photographs and recordings, relishing the sense of power they gave me?I could not deny the truth: perhaps I might. Shaken and disturbed, I constantly pondered the words of the great Romanian philosopher Eric Hoffer: “A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”
Did this not help explain my uncle’s behaviour? Had not communism, by destroying his individuality and sense of purpose, rendered life meaningless to him and forced him, in compensation, to become the voyeur he confessed he was? Deep questions. Dark ones, also. I knew that it would be years, even decades, before I could process them to my own satisfaction and write the book that they deserved. (Introduction, pg. viii)
Mezzogiallo is the book in question. David goes on to describe how, on future trips to Eastern Europe, he was able to examine the thousands of files created by his uncle for the secret police using cameras and microphones hidden not only in private homes, but also in libraries, banks, courts, schools, hospitals and more. He will be shocked by both the detail and the futility of his uncle’s activities – the prolonged, obsessive recording of the most minor details of everyday life. Yet David points out that capitalist society has gone in the exact same direction, both at the level of the state and at the level of the ordinary voyeuristic citizen. All David Kerekes’s books are characterized by feral intelligence and fetid honesty. But Mezzogiallo: Ferality. Fetidity. Eastern Europe. is arguably his ferallest, fetidest interrogation of the human condition to date…
Coming soon on Papyrocentric Performativity…
• A review of Nekro-Feral: The David Kerekes Story, David Slater (TransVisceral Books)
Press Release: Divided into three throbbingly thrilling thanato-themed sections – “Nekro-Kid”, “Nekro-Teen” and “Nekro-Dult” – Nekro-Feral is an intimate and revealing portrait of a transgressive icon by the man who was his simul-scribe on Killing for Culture, inarguably the most sizzlingly seminal survey of snuff-stuff ever set to cellulose…
Coming soon on Papyrocentric Performativity…
Not so soon, unfortunately. Dave S. has been injured while [censored] on the video-shoot for “Kaught with a Korpse”, so the book’s on the back-burner for the time being. But other stuff is comin’ on nicely… — Garry Guggan (TransVisceral C.E.O.)
(P.S. Dave’s even more upset coz this means he didn’t get a chance at breaking his personal best for the London marathon…)
That got really deep, especially for TransVisceral.
In the early days of the internet there was a young woman called Jennifer Ringley, who did stripshows (I believe). One day, she made the decision to leave the webcam on. It filmed her brushing her teeth, and eating pizza, and doing her homework, and broadcasted it to the internet.
She became an internet sensation. Traffic blew in like a hurricane. She got featured on national daytime TV shows. This was in 1996 or so, before reality TV shows like Big Brother became popular. There was something very exciting about a person filming herself 24 hours a day, sharing her entire life.
Once I thought tabloids like the Daily Mail were popular because they “humanise” celebrities. If you don’t have millions of dollars, its nice to think that people who do have millions of dollars are also miserable.
Now I think that’s only part of the story. Jennifer Ringley wasn’t a celebrity. She wasn’t even very pretty. But somehow we love invading peoples’ privacy, and it doesn’t matter who that person is. You could probably run a successful Daily Mail clone that features random nobodies on the street (and there’s sites like The Dirty that do exactly that).
That got really deep, especially for TransVisceral.
Dark, also.
In the early days of the internet there was a young woman called Jennifer Ringley, who did stripshows (I believe). One day, she made the decision to leave the webcam on. It filmed her brushing her teeth, and eating pizza, and doing her homework, and broadcasted it to the internet.
She became an internet sensation. Traffic blew in like a hurricane. She got featured on national daytime TV shows. This was in 1996 or so, before reality TV shows like Big Brother became popular. There was something very exciting about a person filming herself 24 hours a day, sharing her entire life.
Opium of the peephole. But it would have been even better if she hadn’t known she was being watched or if she had known and not liked it. CCTV has opened huge vistas of excitement for employees in libraries, banks, supermarkets, train-stations, etc.
Now I think that’s only part of the story. Jennifer Ringley wasn’t a celebrity. She wasn’t even very pretty. But somehow we love invading peoples’ privacy, and it doesn’t matter who that person is.
Yes. Invading a plant’s privacy offers no thrill because plants don’t mind. But the higher up the biological scale one goes, the greater the thrill of imposing one’s will on the target:
In the beginning, the thought-police got the thrill of power by taking secret photos and recordings of Winston. That was the hors d’œuvre. The main course was served at Miniluv.
You could probably run a successful Daily Mail clone that features random nobodies on the street (and there’s sites like The Dirty that do exactly that).
Yes, that’s the kind of thing Dave K. and the Headpress community are resolutely opposed to. It’s so mainstream, so mundane, so bored-teen-with-empty-life-ish. The sort of thing non-feral folk in Nowheresvilles are excited by. But as an inoculation against mainstream voyeurism/trivia-tropism, it helps (obviously) if you’ve got a passion or (even better) a passion. Inter alia, Dave’s passion/passion is/are corpses and all things pertaining thereto. He’s honed his feral intelligenec and fetid honesty on them for decades, so teen-typical spying-and-prying have no attractions for him… That’s why the thought of the British Dave K. quivering with excitement as he listens to someone use a rowing-machine is so… counter-intuitive. Sorry: counter-intuitive.
N.B. Judicious deployment of italics is another key component of counter-culturality. As (of course) are trailing… dots… Optimally, one combines the two… (Stewart Home is a master… (Srsly…))
But I think the object has to be relatable, too. I don’t know if it would be voyeuristically fun to spy on God (or an alien superintelligence, if you don’t believe in God). Aside from the fact that we might not understand anything He’s doing, even if He’s capable of embarrassing himself, it probably wouldn’t seem embarrassing to us.
How about trailing dots that are also italicised? Other methods/strategems of counter-cultural awareness include writing in the second person present, writing entirely in fragments (“Wake. Breath. Listen. Etc.”), adding lots of line-breaks for some reason, working Radiohead and Arcade Fire lyrics into the text so that people know you have good taste in music, and, most importantly, not using any capitals.
Capital letters (more like capitalist letters, amirite) are the bourgeoisie fatcats of the written word. Just look at how much space they take up. Their use reinforces oppression across numerous axes/axii, and they deserve orthographic guillotining via the delete key. True revolutionaries don’t even use capitals in their names, (see bell hooks and e.e. cummings).
But I think the object has to be relatable, too. I don’t know if it would be voyeuristically fun to spy on God (or an alien superintelligence, if you don’t believe in God).
I don’t think spying on God would work because it would mean you were more powerful than God, in which case you wouldn’t be interested in voyeurism. See Romanian philosopher Eric Hoffers’s remarks on “business, one’s own, minding of”. This quote explains voyeurism too:
How about trailing dots that are also italicised?
Not obvious enough. Subtlety is not a key, or indeed core, component of counter-culturality.
Other methods
Modes…
/strategems
Strategic deployments…
of counter-cultural awareness
Commitment…
include writing in the second person present, writing entirely in fragments (“Wake. Breath. Listen. Etc.”), adding lots of line-breaks for some reason, working Radiohead and Arcade Fire lyrics into the text so that people know you have good taste in music
No, that’s hipsters. There is a cross-over, but RH and AF are far too well-known and mainstream for genuine counter-culturarians. Throbbing Gristle, Merzbow and Sunn O))) are more like it. However, Dave K’s tastes in music are run-of-the-mill. He is coded as counter-cultural by his commitment to corpses. It is also possible that Dave is using run-of-the-mill musical tastes as camouflage for the true extent of his counter-culturality dot dot dot