I am, this day, a broken man. For I have missed the Wall
of Vagina.
It was built, this aforementioned wall, inside the majestic, staid
and stately Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City on Saturday night, Feb.
19, 2000. It could only have been part of Disinfo.Con 2000, the 11-hour
festival of weirdness and marginalia brought into the world by Disinformation,
the popular Web portal for all things freaky and far-out. Disinfo.Con was
the only place to be last weekend if what's hip today is yesterday's fish-and-chip
paper to you.
Disinfo's head honcho, Richard Metzger termed the con a "CyberPallooza,"
which I guess is as good a description as any. I was, believe it or not,
gentle reader, one of the panelists at the event which was part seminar,
part performance, part revival meeting, part, well -- Wall of Vagina. Which,
dammit, I missed because someone from the British paranormal publication
The Fortean Times was asking
me about my favorite conspiracy theories. But that's another story. And
it's much less interesting than the Wall of Vagina. So let's talk about
that.
But what was this Wall of Vagina? First of all, you have
to understand that while it was certainly the most eye-catching moment
of the Disinfo.Con, it wasn't the weirdest, I mean, face it, you can mosey
on down to the corner video shop and lay eyes on a Wall of Vagina any day.
That is, if your corner video shop isn't a Blockbuster. (And make sure
you're over 18, punk!).
The weirdest moment didn't even come from Marilyn Manson, who appeared
via satellite from Los Angeles. In the wake of Columbine, the erstwhile
anti-Christ now preaches peace-and-love messages, apparently, if his Disinfo
address was any indication. He also delivered such pithy insights as "Is
adult entertainment killing kids, or is killing kids entertaining adults?"
and "Bad parents make bad kids." Some guy in the audience kept screaming
"Shut up!" and "Fuck you!" at the digital image of Manson who, being 3,000
miles away, couldn't hear him. That was pretty weird, too.
I'd go so far as to say the weirdest moment was not even watching
various conference attendees -- who ranged from New Agey hippie types to
Silicon Alley Netheads (and who paid $99.95 to get in) -- trying to catch
a psychedelic buzz from the "Brain Machine." That's a perforated metal
tube with a light bulb inside. You sit in front of it and close your eyes
while it spins, causing strobe-like flashes to go off behind your eyelids
and into your brain. Like, trippy, Dude! The scent of burning blunts
occasionally wafted through the hall, perhaps from people attempting to
enhance the Brain Machine experience. Or maybe they were just trying to
endure Marilyn Manson.
Y'know, I can't really say what the weirdest moment of Disinfo.Con
was. There were so many.
Maybe it was "apocalyptic" artist Joe Coleman igniting a wad of
firecrackers attached to his chest while projecting a Diamond Vision-size
video of himself dissecting a corpse. Maybe it was shiny-headed Scottish
comic-book scribe Grant Morrison espousing the virtues of ritual magic
("Try it! It works!") then spilling a slurp of his screwdriver all over
the podium (which was adorned with massive, bright red Devil's horns) and
shouting, "Punk rock, man!" Maybe the weirdest moment was the screening
of an excerpt from Uncle Goddam, an actual video of drunken rednecks
tormenting their much, much drunker uncle by lighting his pants on fire,
squirting pepper spray up his nose and spray-painting his face -- to which
the besodden uncle can only reply, "Goddam" while he lolls side-to-side
like Terry Kiser in Weekend at Bernie's. Pleasant.
There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of such moments in the darkened
ballroom Saturday. And how could there not be? Especially when other speakers
included Genesis P. Orridge (the man who invented the term, and the genre,
"industrial music"), Paul Laffoley ("the 21st Century's Leonardo Da Vinci"),
Adam Parfrey (editor of the way-ahead of its time anthology Apocalypse
Culture) and mega-publicist/mass psychology expert Howard Bloom who
delivered his message via videotape from his Brooklyn bedroom because he
suffers from "the world's worst recorded case of chronic fatigue syndrome."
These people are the alternative to the alternative and if the Disinfo.Con
proved nothing else, it showed exactly how meaningless that term has become
in pop culture over the past few years.
In fact, one major worry of the conference, annunciated in an early
morning address by cyberculture pundit-laureate Douglas Rushkoff and echoed
in overheard conversation at the downstairs beer-and-sandwich stand throughout
the day, was the supposed "sell-out" of the underground. Though the grand
old auditorium was perhaps only half-full, it seemed like half of the people
there were from the media. Metzger was quick to admit that this inaugural
Disinfo.Con (Disinfo.Con II may take place as early as October) was primarily
a "marketing" phenomenon (as opposed to a moneymaking one). Its purpose:
to inject the Disinformation "brand name" and all the out-there ideas and
personalities that go along with it solidly into the mainstream. But when
the underground goes above-board and society's self-appointed apostles
of the weird find themselves celebrated, packaged and merchandised, what's
left for the fringe to claim as its own?
Rushkoff was unconcerned. His take: when you're ahead of the hip
curve and you see your clothes suddenly turning up at the mall, your music
appearing on MTV, your politics turning up on The X-Files, that's
not a sell-out, that's a victory!
Maybe. Myself, I'd buy a "Wall of Vagina" T-shirt in a minute. I
mean, I freakin' missed the real thing because, after I appeared on a "Conspiracy
Panel" (because I wrote a couple of books on conspiracy theories) this
chap from the Fortean Times wanted to interview me. Unfortunately,
he didn't get around to it until about 10:30 at night. That's when performance
art/punk rock troupe "The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black" took the stage.
Reconstructing the scene from eyewitness accounts, I understand that after
dancing around a bit, the five women in the "band" stripped down to their
collective bare ass, clad only in full-body blue and red paint, spike heels
and thigh-high stockings. They then proceeded to lie flat on top of one
another, facing away from the audience, legs akimbo. Voila! The
Wall of Vagina.
I only wish I'd seen it. Because what I learned last weekend is
once you think you've seen it all, there's always the Disinfo.Con.