NEW ZINES LAUNCH.

 Dear friends, followers and anyone else who is still reading this blog after many months of inactivity -

I am writing today to let you know that, after an eternity of faffing about, I have finally printed up the first issues of two new paper fanzines - the current plan being that they will replace / supersede this blog going forward.

There are several reasons for making the move back to paper at this point.

Firstly, I need to face the fact that I’ve reached a point in life where I no longer have sufficient free time to produce regular, quality writing, as demanded by the weblog format.

As such, the zines I have put together contain about a 50/50 mixture of new writing, and stuff which I have previously published here (all substantially revised, or entirely re-written in some cases).

This is a balance I intend to maintain going forward, allowing me to draw upon the huge volume of stuff I’ve published here over the years, revisiting some highlights and hopefully presenting them to a new audience along the way. Combined with the possibility of publishing work from other contributors (submissions/ideas are very welcome), I hope that this will help me to put new issues together at a slightly quicker speed than would otherwise be the case - assuming that there are future issues that is (let’s see how these first ones go).

Secondly - let’s face it, the internet in the 2020s sucks. As anyone who has ploughed through the various warning screens and cookie pop-ups necessary to access these words will be aware, the blogger platform in particular has become increasingly obstructive and dysfunctional, and after trawling through the various aggressively monetized / homogenous sites which may have offered an alternative home for BITR… well, long story short, making stuff online is just no fun anymore, at least for a social media-eschewing refusenik like myself.

And, thirdly, from the POV of where I live at least, the world of DIY paper publications is actually thriving, counter-intuitive as that may seem. Zine fairs and such-like are regular occurrences, and whilst the personal & art-based zines which dominate them are generally not my thing, there have still been a number of great music / film / culture-based efforts popping up here in the UK in recent years, providing me with a blueprint for how this kind of thing can still be made to work, on a creative level at least.

So, to finally get the point -

The Beast with Two Paperbacks is a new zine about reading second-hand books.

 The first issue features writing on Simon Raven, Martin Cruz Smith’s ‘Inquisitor’ books (both re-dos of BITR blog-posts), along with a Pulp Non-Fiction piece on the Pelican punk rock classic ‘Knuckle Sandwich: Growing Up in a Working-Class City’ (new) and a compare/contrast between two novels by Ramsey Campbell and Doris Lessing (also new).

It also contains some badly structured sentences and a couple of glaring typos. I really should have done a final proof-read of the text before sending to print. But if you’ve persisted with this blog over the years, you’ll be familiar with all that I suspect.

Skull Time Movie Journal is a new zine covering fringe movies, genre movies, WEIRD movies - you know the score.

The first issue contains a re-do of my post on the Indonesian erotic horror ‘Cinta Terlarang’ (1995), a brand new review of the Johnny Cash scum-noir disasterpiece ‘Five Minutes To Live’ aka ‘Door-To-Door Maniac’ (1961/66), a round-up of ’50s/‘60s Japanese horror films with contemporary settings (largely re-written, although I’ve reviewed all of the films here in the past), and a lengthy chat with my partner about the career of Cynthia Rothrock (also brand new).

This one also has - I believe - fewer typos and better sentence construction, because I sent it to print after the other one, and hey, you live and learn.

Paper copies of both of these zines can be purchased here.

Or alternatively, PDF copies can be read or downloaded for free via Archive.org. (Which is totally cool with me btw - please don’t feel obliged to buy the paper versions just to show support or whatever.)

Also, I’ve put together a new Linktree to unite my various online projects / pages, so please do give that a look too.

If you hit the ‘FOLLOW’ button on the Ko-fi site linked above, I will send you occasional updates on activities related to these zines, but I will also hopefully continue to plug any new issues etc here too.

And finally, I’m also planning to start doing another mailing list, mainly just to keep in touch with friends and chat about music and stuff - very much TBC at this stage, but you’d be welcome to sign up if you’re interested, link on the Linktree page above.

And… that’s about it for now I think! Hope you’re all doing well, and as ever, thoughts and feedback are welcome.

Lovecraft on Film Appendum: Cthulhu Sex Magazine.

In the past, I’ve tried to follow up each of my Lovecraft on Film post with a brief supplementary post, either highlighting some ephemera related to the recently reviewed film or showing off some scans of relevant artefact from my collection. When it came to finding something to compliment the lascivious themes discussed in last week’s discussion of From Beyond however, I’m afraid I drew a blank. Instead therefore, I thought I’d share a few tantalising images and scraps of info concerning a publication whose issues are sadly entirely absent from my modest archives.

Published in New York City from some point in the 1990s up to 2007, the blunty titled ‘Cthulhu Sex’ is notable for the sheer lack of information about its contents and creators which has made its way online.

The image above is taken from an ebay auction archived on the valuation site WorthPoint, whilst all other images and information in this post have been sourced from a series of entries on the zine on the SF/fantasy fanzine database site Galactic Central. Between them, these two links seem to provide pretty much the sum total of extant evidence concerning this publication’s existence.

The earliest issue which I can find a cover image for is Vol. 1, No. 13, published in 1998. This and a few subsequent issues seem to exhibit a raw, photocopied aesthetic, with splattery / grindcore style artwork that certainly doesn't hold back.

(Vol. 1, No. 13 - cover artist unknown.)

(Vol. 1, No. 14 - artwork by Paul Komoda.)

Soon thereafter however, the zine seems to have embraced a now very dated looking digital/DTP approach to design, moving toward a gothy/cyberpunky feel which is… less to my taste, shall we say. At least some of the extant cover illustrations from the MS Publisher era are still pretty cool though, nonetheless.

(Still working primarily in the realm of the monstrous to this day, cover artist Paul Komoda apparently went on to lend his talents to the 2012 remake of ‘The Thing’.)

(Vol. 1, No. 16 - artwork by Paul Komoda.)

(Vol. 1, No. 18 - artwork by Paul Komoda.)

(Vol. 1, No. 18 - artwork by Paul Komoda.)

During its second ‘volume’ in the early ‘00s, ‘Cthulhu Sex’ gradually became a somewhat more lavish, semi-pro type affair, even moving into colour, and featuring far less explicit / attention-grabbing imagery on its covers. A few examples follow;

(Vol. 2, No. 13 - artwork by ‘Popeye Wong’.)

(Vol. 2, No. 23 - artwork by Chad Savage.)

As to the actual contents of ‘Cthulhu Sex’, all we have to go on is a partial set of contents lists available on the Galactic Central database. Scanning through these, we learn that the pseudonymous figures of ‘St Michael’ (presumably credited editor Michael A. Morel) and ‘Father Baer’ seem to have loomed large over proceedings, with other contributors to the earlier issues including ‘Racheline Maltese’, ‘Abigail Parsley’ and ‘Oneroid Psychosis’. All of which gives me the pleasant (if likely entirely misleading) impression of some seedy clique of sun-shunning reprobates creeping around the back-streets Manhattan in the late 1990s, knocking on unmarked basement doors and whispering hoarsely to each other of ever more twisted new ideas for their next issue.

Later on, the sense of mystery dissipates somewhat, with a greater number of contributors using what may actually be their birth names (alongside some choice chatroom-era teen-goth alter egos). There are also what appear to be some interviews with bands (none of whom I’ve heard of, but imagine the sheer sense of accomplishment they must have felt when ‘Cthulhu Sex’ called them up to request an interview), along with the inevitable reviews section. More spine-chilling terror than any of the tentacle-sex based material is surely promised meanwhile by a regular column entitled ‘Gothic Nightclub Romance Monthly’.

The official website of ‘Cthulhu Sex’ appears to have been stone cold dead since the final issue hit highly selective shelves in 2007, but Horror Between The Sheets, a collection of writing taken from the zine, was published in 2005, and as of September 2019, a volume entitled ‘Letters to the Editor of Cthulhu Sex Magazine’ can sit proudly upon your shelves for only $16.99 payable to amazon.com, courtesy of e-book/print-on-demand publishers Crossroad Press.

Authorship is credited to Oliver Baer - Father Baer himself no less - whose other credits apparently include “..a history of the Wu Tang Physical Culture Association”. His Amazon biography furthermore informs us that, “he has performed as an unspeakable horror from the depths and his likeness has appeared on film in the documentary ‘Tai Chi Club’ as well as in videos of different sorts.” What a guy.

And, that’s about all the info I can dredge up on this subject for the time being, though of course I’d be interested to learn more about this unique zine and its contents, particularly those elusive older issues whose covers seem never to have seen the light of a scanner. In all seriousness, I hope that ‘Cthulhu Sex’ provided a lively and valued community organ (so to speak) for the select group of readers and writers bold enough to place it on the counter of their local underground bookshop and/or post their subscription cheque to the mag’s Grand Central Station PO Box, and it saddens me that I missed out on the opportunity to at least sample an issue or two.

Old New Worlds: September 1965.

To further mark the recent passing of Brian Aldiss, I thought it might be a good idea to revive my long-neglected ‘Old New Worlds’ thread [click on the ‘New Worlds’ tag below to view earlier posts] to cover the issue that was once, long ago, lined up as the next instalment – an issue that, as luck would have it, is almost entirely dedicated to Aldiss and his work.

At this point in time, New Worlds had largely dispensed with interior illustrations, meaning that this issue contains relatively little scan-worthy material, but we do at least have the wonderfully bizarre, unaccredited cover illustration (is it a photo, some kind of collage..?), whose distorted, sensuous landscape seems a clear reflection of editor Michael Moorcock’s campaign to gradually move the magazine’s aesthetic reach beyond the confines of the stylised spaceships and meteorites that were gracing its covers just a few months earlier.

This seems to lead neatly into a short ‘appreciation’ of Aldiss by Edmund Crispin, which kicks off issue # 154.* Crispin here crowns Aldiss “The Image Maker”, drawing an interesting distinction between science-fiction (which “..can be good even when its visualisation – of a Martian, a metropolis, a mutant – is relatively sketchy and commonplace”) and science-fantasy (in which “..the quality of the visualisation is the all-important thing”), and crediting Aldiss as one the most gifted proponents of the latter strain, despite his embrace of the surface trappings of the former. “Aldiss has a painter’s eye”, Crispin concludes. “Compared with him, almost all other sf writers (take the ‘f’ whichever way you like) work in black and white.”

In his editorial meanwhile, Moorcock gets a little more personal in his praise;

“Apart from being admired for his talent, Brian Aldiss is also amongst the most well-liked of sf writers; charming, ebullient, fluent, not unhandsome, a gourmet and man of good taste and humour, he is as interesting to meet as he is to read. His criticism, in The Oxford Mail and SF Horizons, is intelligent and pithy, matched only by a few.”

If that weren’t enough, we even get a third, quite lengthy, appreciation of Aldiss’s work, from Peter White, who muses;

“However much he may attack the priggish inhumanity of bureaucrats, moralists, and politicians, and suggest that we should take life as it comes, he always deals with sadness more vividly than joy, and his very choice of subjects is mournful. Many of his heroes […] are intelligent plebeians; too repressed to be earthy, and without the well-bred grace to be aristocratic. Filled with a vague sense of loss, they search for a better life. Nearly every one of his major novels takes the form of a quest without any real conclusion. Perhaps it is this that makes his writing seem so valid to the world now, where the bright lights, dark and crowded dance halls, high-speed along the bypass, casual sex and beat music, all seem like drugs to keep us going until we can get hold of something real.”

White also sees fit to note that Aldiss was born in Norfolk “within a stones throw of F.L. Fanthrope” (no prizes for guessing in which direction he might have preferred the stones to be thrown).

For all these fine words though, perhaps the most pertinent summation of Aldiss’s approach to life in this issue comes from the man himself, who is quoted by White as follows;

“I wish to continue to write as I want, and to be published, and to earn a reasonable income, and perhaps in this way to make a contribution to the rich and wonderful culture into which I was born and which, despite all its horrors, never ceases to delight me day by day.”

Gifted as we now are with the knowledge that that is indeed what he continued to do for over fifty further years, I feel this is as good an epitaph as any for what I am certain was a life well spent. R.I.P. Brian.

Elsewhere in this issue’s non-fiction pages, ‘James Colvin’ (previously unmasked in these posts as a beard for editor Moorcock himself [note the initials]) waxes lyrical on the qualities of J.G. Ballard’s recently published ‘The Drought’:

“It is an intellectual and visionary novel of marvelously sustained power and conviction, […] reminding one constantly of the burning landscapes of the best surrealist painters. Its approach to Time and Space produces a sense of the ultimate merging of physics and metaphysics in that intensely individual way of Ballard’s, where grotesque, tormented characters inhabit and reflect a bright nightmare world that is at once unreal and yet real in the sense that it totally convinces on the level of the unconscious, cutting past the defenses of the outer mind and reaching the core of the inner mind, evoking responses that the reader did not know he had and, perhaps, does not understand even as he experiences them.”

Significantly, the talented Mr. Colvin pops up again elsewhere in #154 with what perhaps could be interpreted as one of his own humble attempts to evoke similar responses in his readers - a sixteen page story named ‘The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius’.

Described in Moorcock’s editorial as “an experimental story of a kind [Colvin] believes hasn’t been tried before and which, he says, is ‘meant to be enjoyed, not studied’”, this story actually turned out to be an extremely important turning point in Moorcock’s writing.

Beginning with the image of ‘Minos Aquilinas’, “the top Metatemporal Investigator in Europe” clambering through the war-torn ruins of an alternate-world Berlin, the story posits that murder has been committed in the unnaturally verdant garden of the city’s police chief, Otto Van Bismarck, and that Bismarck’s personal assistant, one Adolf Hitler, is up to his neck in suspicion.

Also factoring in appearances by Kurt Weill, Albert Einstein and Eva Braun, and presenting the titular Felipe Sagittarius as a cultivator of lethally hallucinogenic, erotically scented greenery, this extremely strange first person detective story may be sketchy in the extreme, but it nonetheless introduces us – possibly for the first time – to the kind of temporally/spacially unmoored dystopian vignettes that would go on to define the style of the Jerry Cornelius mythos that Moorcock unleashed a few years later, as well as prefiguring the pungent aesthetic decadence that would characterise his experimental fiction as a whole, and even hinting at the kind of perverse alternative history scenarios that would increasingly predominate in his work through the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Clearly recognising the story as a bit of a ‘skeleton key’ work in this respect, Moorcock later revised it (under his own name, natch) when he came to compile his series of “Eternal Champion” compendiums in the early 1990s, re-christening the protagonist as a member of his Von Bek dynasty and placing it in the very first volume of the series, alongside several much later novels.

Confusingly, there was also a third iteration of the story at some point, this time with the narrator identified as “Simon Begg”, but, leaving such delving into the labyrinths of Moorcock’s literary revisionism aside for now, it is certainly a thrill to see ‘The Pleasure Garden..’ appearing for the first time here, hot off the presses and straight from the young editor’s fevered brain.

*A gentleman of of widely varied talents, Edmund Crispin is probably best-known for his series of ribald comedy-mystery novels, including ‘The Moving Toyshop’ and ‘Unholy Orders’, which I can highly recommend. Wikipedia also informs me that he wrote the score for The Brides of Fu Manchu, of all things, as part of an extensive composing career under his birth name Bruce Montgomery.

Japan Haul: SM (‘Suspense & Mystery’) Magazine (June 1969)

Although it purports to offer readers an experience in “suspense and mystery”, Japanese periodical ‘SM’ seems to have been fairly blatant in aiming it’s contents at an audience seeking an entirely different kind of ‘S’ and ‘M’.

Whilst this isn’t the kind of material we’d normally go out of our way to feature on this blog, what I find remarkable about SM is that it is a magazine entirely dedicated to sexual titillation (often of a slightly questionable nature) that features no photographic or overtly pornographic content whatsoever. Instead, SM - on the basis of this copy randomly discovered in a Tokyo second hand bookshop, at least - chose to illustrate its various stories and articles with an astounding array of original artwork, much of it veering heavily toward the abstract and psychedelic.

A immediate demonstration of this daring  policy comes immediately after the contents page, as furtive browsers get their eyes seared by eight full colour pages of Masao Kawamoto’s mind-melting collage artwork – a “FOR MADMEN ONLY” sign on the door if ever there was one, and, needless to say, a guarantee that this little magazine was going to be leaving the shop with me, regardless of what the rest of it contained.

Unfortunately, I can find very little online about Masao Kawamoto (was he the same Masao Kawamoto who wrote these two seemingly innocuous guides to watercolour painting..?), but searching using his name’s Japanese characters did at least turn up this Tumblr post, wherein another motherlode of his artwork (from a 1968 publication entitled “Crash Comix”) can be enjoyed.

Credits for ‘SM’s other interior illustrations are sufficiently vague and scattered that I’ve been unable to find many of them, but the illustrations themselves are all rather wonderful, with a different artist seemingly being assigned to each of the magazine’s numerous pieces of erotic fiction. Of course, I’m unable to read these stories, but I think the pictures below succeed in giving us the general gist of where this magazine's focus lay.

After all that's over with, the end pages of ‘SM’ widenstheir focus to include a few factual articles and reviews. Worryingly, there is a lengthy piece entitled "Joys of the Torture Chamber" detailing the practices of the Catholic Inquisition, illustrated by faded reproductions of familiarly icky Western wood-cuts. We don’t really need to dwell on that here, but, more interestingly, the magazine also features significant coverage of saucy movies, and particularly those imported from Europe, if the predominantly caucasian features of the pictured actors is anything to go by.

Whilst I don’t immediately recognise any of the productions featured, a special fold out section reproduces variety of publicity shots depicting the kind of grisly exploitation business that, whilst it had become commonplace in European films by the mid ‘70s, was still pretty rare in 1969, leading me to wonder just where the hell these images of close-up gore, weird bondage scenarios and nasty Nazisploitation / WIP type goings on originated.

There are also a few longer text reviews of some comparatively genteel looking movies that I’m equally unable to identify, so, just out of interest, readers who can place any of the following images are encouraged to get in touch via the usual channels.

Even more interestingly (to me at least), ‘SM’ also features a few pages dedicated to reviewing the latest American smut paperbacks – see for instance these no doubt insightful write-ups of ‘Horizontal Secretary’ and ‘Hillbilly Haven’.

To my knowledge, no English language publications ever bothered discussing the content or merit of these books, so the mind boggles trying to imagine what a (presumably) bilingual Japanese reviewer might have found to say about them.

Maybe one day I might find out, but as my darling wife is currently busy with a some rather more pressing translation-related endeavours, I’m reluctant to bother her with demands to tell me what some guy in 1969 thought about ‘Hillbilly Haven’.

Below are a few double-page scans of those Kawamoto collage pages, for all your desktop wallpapering needs.