By
Jonathan Vankin
iFuse.com - Popculprit
Feb. 21,2000I 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.