It’s not just Gary Glitter who discovered that a) the Net was there to cater for all sorts of whims and b) you should definitely do any hard disc repairs yourself. As the availability of PCs and web-access increases ever more, people with fetishes they consider less than normal (a relative term if there’s ever been one) are discovering they’re not alone, and that the Global Village contains maybe just a few like-minded yokels. And no, we’re not talking about people who value interesting views through coffee tables here. Now that really is weird.

Games of ‘bang-bang-you’re-dead’ played a part in many childrens’ early days, and while in these post-Michael Ryan times it’s a form of recreation now on a par with the dodgier version of doctors and nurses (you know, the one where they shag, rather than complain about lack of staff and funding), it’s no surprise that for a small minority this informed embryonic sexualities. Before the Net this would have resulted in a few solitary people who considered themselves stranger than most, mainly men who got off on tiny parts of Argento films, or women who imagined being discovered sprawled dead while covered in gold paint. But now there is worldwide communication; there is the discovery (as with many of the self-perceived extreme fetishes) that people are not alone. And, yes, there are the websites.

The Death Fetish has a variety of representations, depending on a wide range of factors. It’s difficult to make absolute statements about any of the people involved, and pinning them down to definite demographics is nigh on impossible. Yes, most of the women involved in the scene fantasize about being dead, but for every one who wants to be hacked apart by a mask-faced serial killer, there’s another who just wants to be discovered after some fatal domestic accident and then lovingly fucked by a partner. And yes, most of the men want to be the killers, but for every one who wants to gently asphyxiate a naked woman, there’s another who gets his rocks off from machine-gunning a jacuzzi full of bikini models. The Death Fetish is a particularly large umbrella, and those sheltering beneath it often have more differences than things in common, which makes for an interestingly divisive community with more flames than the Outback in the dry season.

The Web content of all this began in the mid-90s, with a newsgroup comprised of a few souls who’d managed to discover their crucial similarity. In 1996 the first actual website was formed – Necrobabes – run by a Washington-dwelling woman named Vicki. Had she not been brave enough to not only start the site but put up images of herself in various death poses, it’s possible this trend would have (ahem) died here. Certainly it gave her an accessibility – this was a real person practicing what she preached, rather than a website being set up by an opportunistic adult company – which gave people the courage to pay up and become members. It also meant that Vicki’s job and marriage were put at risk, and that she became the focus of much unwanted attention from men who define their ideal relationship as one in which the partner dies at the click of the fingers. Somewhat unsurprisingly, although Necrobabes continues to go strong, Vicki’s role is now considerably more background.

As its name might suggest, the Necrobabes site was founded for those into fantasy Necrophilia. Vidcaps of movie morgue scenes were popular, stories were written and shared, the message board got bigger, and eventually photostories were commissioned with glamour models and ‘adult entertainers’ hired to pose. The IRC chatroom for the site became a popular place to come and play. Or indeed vice versa. But Vicki was also into the fantasy of being killed (her pre-Columbine website details fantasies of being killed as a spy or soldier, Native American massacres, workplace gun sprees and so on) and as this aspect started to appear in Necrobabes, the dynamic began to shift. Many who’d been dissuaded by the fantasy Necro aspect (that joke about ‘some rotten **** splitting on me’ is never far away, is it?), or who simply just fantasised about killing, were suddenly attracted, and as the Necro aspect itself became less prominent, the membership increased massively.

This is where interests began to diverge, and resulted in the creation of a number of spin-off sites. For a start, those more into what happened after death than the act of killing itself began to feel they were being left behind. If they were lucky, a photoset had some handling or stripping after the death, but that was about it. In the other camp, few were happy with the deaths themselves, which is where it became clear that while many there were into roughly the same thing, they were different enough for it to cause problems. For example, shooting has its fans – unsurprising, seeing as many were turned onto this fetish by scenes in 70s’ cop and spy shows (Kojak and The Man From Uncle often quoted inspirations) as well as war movies and Bond. Knifings are a close second (all those hack-n-slash 80s films), with asphyxia not far behind. To this add the other interests: decapitation, electrocution, cannibalism, death-by-shark, and it’s soon clear that although as an abstract concept the Death Fetish is shared by a group of people, the specifics vary wildly. And even then we’re not through: the shooters will disagree wildly over where to shoot (head-shots or stomach hits?), the stabbers aren’t sure what weapon to use, and there’s no consensus about whether a body’s eyes should be open, or the tongue hanging out.

Naturally enough, no one wants to be linked to this fetish. Everyone’s there under assumed names, and attempts in recent times to make the memberships more accountable (to prevent anonymous posters sparking flame wars) have been resisted simply because they might make it possible to trace people. It’s interesting to note that the phenomenon is acknowledged beyond these websites. A recent Cosmopolitan interview with a Hollywood madam spoke of a successful male actor who pays to have sex with call girls who have to play dead the entire time. There have been suggestions that singer Sheryl Crow might have leanings in this direction, with her cameo in The Minus Man ending in death, Tomorrow Never Dies lyrics (‘Darling I’m killed, I’m in a puddle on the floor, Waiting for you to return’) and several Necro poses in videos, though it’s all circumstantial and – in the main – wishful thinking. Even the work of some directors has come in for scrutiny, with suspicions that B-movie man Andy Sidaris has indicated Death Fetish leanings in many of his boobs-out Bond parodies.

Even in the brightest of times, there’s a sense of guilt lurking in the background of the message boards and stories. What had started off as a single woman’s interest has been taken over by the male membership and they’re not entirely sure what to make of it now they’re the majority. One of the most common postings is that ‘we respect and love women’ although you would argue that fantasizing about killing and then screwing someone is registering rather low in both areas. Many of the stories (both textual and photo) have the victims drawn as hookers, femme fatales, drug dealers, spies or bad girls, so that the murder aspect has an aspect of justice which absolves these feelings. Whenever the real world looms into these fantasies, the responses are always the passionately-stung reactions of the guilty-minded. For example, Columbine resulted in near radio silence on the boards for weeks after, and the presence of accounts/links about real world deaths (actual crime scene images, for example, or Jill Dando’s death, or shot policewoman Yvonne Fletcher) results in the sort of flaming not seen since London of 1666. There was, however, worse to come.

With mainstream film and TV coming under ever-increasing fire (excuse the pun) for any violence they portray – especially with George W jumping on the bandwagon pre-election – and moves to restrict material on the Internet all the time, obtaining new material is becoming difficult, and serving to strengthen the feeling within the community that society is Clearly Against fantasies like this. Twenty years ago shows such as Mike Hammer or even Hart to Hart were a source of furtive delight to those into aspects of Death Fetish. Now, the enthusiasm which greets the report of a moment in Xena or X-Files indicates how rare these sequences have become. Indeed, it’s the ‘if you want something done, do it yourself’ dynamic this created which has led to a number of the sites working to make such moments easier to find. Several contain MPEG libraries of death scene clips, from the swimming pool massacre of Magnum Force to death-by-broadsword in Hercules, while others have utilised the power of the PC to provide images created entirely by computer graphics, or custom scenes filmed using a combination of both old and digital techniques and then distributed electronically.

It was in late 1999 that police raided and arrested two Canadian brothers who had been filming scenes for sale through their own website. Their technique – the digital alteration of frames of custom-filmed footage – had created some incredibly realistic death scenes, and the site was doing a good trade in them. The raid was supposedly actioned when rumours of snuff movie making arose (despite several clips using the same model!), but this then mutated into charges of Hate Crime against women when the initial reasons fell apart. As accusations of police harassment were bounced around, the brothers found publicity deliberately being brought to bear on them such that family and friends were all made aware of what the police felt they’d been doing. Ironically, the server was located in the States and so – protected by freedom of expression laws – couldn’t be shut down, allowing this ‘evil’ site to get ever increasing hits as news spread. It’s not quite accurate to say that you can’t buy that kind of publicity; it just costs your entire social life.

Most interesting to note however was the Death Fetish community’s reactions to this attack against one of their number: it resulted in the sort of embarrassed silence you normally associate with a fart in a lift. Although a few people (largely people in charge of similar sites) started talking about Freedoms and Amendments, what became clear is that the strength of interest in pretend death is matched only by the sheer horror of being revealed as interested in it. It’s not often you get to see someone else experiencing your worst nightmare first hand, and the incident dominated all the sites for months. Even now, well over a year later, there’s a muted quality to what used to be boundless enthusiasm, and a suspicion of the future and all it holds. It gives a good idea of how much these people view themselves at the extreme-taboo end of the Fetish spectrum. Certainly it’s something you wouldn’t bring up in conversation (“Hi babe, fancy coming back to my place and lying on the bed with ketchup coming out of your mouth?”), and even those involved who are married or in stable relationships have rarely told their other half for fear of how it would be perceived.

Of course, being based on the Net presents that central dilemma; of wanting to have new blood (okay, so we won’t even ask for forgiveness on that one) but not wanting to be found out; a best-kept secret that you want more people to know. It’s ironic that something with its roots in games that many of us played is now seen as very, very wrong, so totallyevil. One’s tempted to suggest that the anti-violence moves in present day society are reaching further than we suspect, such that now even the thought of it is wrong. Alternatively, it could be that anti-misogynist measures are finally finding the right people and all their freedom of expression stuff is just guff. Who’d ever have thought that ‘bang bang you’re dead’ would ever get so complicated?

[“William Blake”]

Links

• The one who started it all: Vicki’s home page.
• A variety of the Necrobabe sites:
  The original
  Guns and horror fans
  Bag and rope brigade
  Chainmail bikinis and warrior women
• Fatal girls and fatality babes
• Free the Canadian Two!

Not an enormous amount to write about this week, but I figure I’d better get another editorial up there, before any more Southern customers stumble across the last one. 🙂 It has to be said, they were actually very nice, but I’m still a little nervous about the strange crossover between the bead-buying public and visitors to this site – which will probably only increase next week when we finally launch…ooh, in red, I think…www.trashcity.org. It’s up and running already, actually – feel free to visit. Next week, tumbleweeds will roll across this site, save for an automatic redirection until my Demon subscription runs out. Whenever that is.

Rather large lottery jackpot here this week: a mere $295 million, the result of multiple rollovers (it’s harder to hit the jackpot here since, while you still have to pick six numbers, you have to nominate one as the Powerball) and some seriously frantic buying in the past week. Only 20 states take part, so those living elsewhere have to badger relatives or drive over the border to their nearest convenient location. It puts things into perspective, however, that if you drive ten miles to buy a ticket, you are sixteen times more likely to die on the trip than to win the jackpot.

You don’t actually get $295 million either: if you want a lump sum, you’d receive about half that, otherwise the jackpot is paid over 25 years (a bit of a con given that inflation would be steadily chewing into it), and in both cases, you have to pay tax on your winnings. Still, even in a worst case scenario, that’s a tasty chunk of change, maybe $60-70 million and it’s difficult enough to get your mind round that sort of money.

With an unerring knack, the people who win always seem to be thoroughly undeserving – the elderly (who inevitably dole it out among their equally undeserving children), or even a convicted armed robber in this case, though on the plus side, I guess the chances of him reoffending have probably all but evaporated. The worst kind are those who say, “It won’t change me. I’m still going to keep on working.” What is that nonsense? Of course it’ll change you, and the first thing I would do would be to replace the entire Trash City site (business division) with a “CLOSED FOREVER” logo. Anyone who wants to keep on working when they no longer need to, is showing a total lack of imagination.

I firmly look forward to the day when we can kick back and let our children take care of us. To this end, Emily was auditioned by a model agency (that’s basically a pimp with a receptionist) a couple of days ago. Sitting in the foyer, watching all the beautiful, high-cheekbones, totally vacuous people drifting in and out, I couldn’t help wishing I hadn’t succumbed to the heady delights of the Mexican dessert known as Xango – prononunced ‘Django’, and about as deadly. I comforted myself with the fact that I was not on heroin. Anyway, Emily now moves on to the second stage, where she has to go to classes to learn all the essential skills necessary for being a model/actress/whatever. Whether bulimia is part of the course, only time will tell.

And with that, it’s off to double update, to Demon and trashcity.org. Thanks to Demon for a largely painless service, and here’s to Trash City, the next generation!

Customer service has never really been my strong suit. “Does not play well with others”, would have been the sort of phrase you’d have seen on my annual performance appraisal. But it’s a skill which I am having to acquire these days, as the commercial arm of Trash City (the bead and jewellery supply side – the bit that finances all the DVDs, trips to odd conventions, etc.) has gone utterly berserk over the past couple of weeks.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that this near-doubling in sales volume coincides with the end of the school holidays. I think that once people get their kids packed back off into academia, they can return to gentle pastimes involving crimps, rondelles and other things which this time last year were purely trade jargon to me. Now, while I can perhaps not quite distinguish between Picture Jasper and Picasso Marble, I can identify most US states by their zip-codes, and tell a valid credit card from a dodgy one purely by the sound the terminal makes.

With experience, my telephone manner has certainly improved, even if the phenomenal level of unsolicited sales calls here is something I’m coming to terms with. In Britain, they were a sporadic occurrence, and almost a novelty. In Phoenix, the average day will have half a dozen cold calls, or attempts to send a fax through a voice line, offering us everything from mobile phones to business websites – and I take a pitch for the latter as a personal insult. My favourite approach is “Give me your home number and I’ll call you back later”; funnily enough, this usually seems to do the trick.

Fortunately, Chris has been here to help handle the trickier actual customers – largely those from South of the Mason-Dixon line. My basic rule of thumb is, if their state ends in a vowel – Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky being the main offenders (I adopt a relaxed attitude to vowels, please note) – she gets to talk to them, just as soon as she notices my frantically flailing arms and steadily increasing volume OF SPEECH. I’m sure they’re very nice people, it’s just that every time I hear them speak, I imagine I can hear banjos duelling in the background.

It doesn’t help that certain customers seem unaware of the time-zone differences here in the States. Just now, the East coast is three hours ahead of us, which means a brisk 9am call to them is ringing the bell here at 6am. And to someone like myself, who has a questionable approach to customer service at the best of times…well, let’s just say that 6am definitely does not count as said best.

This may partly explain the communication difficulties, with a large percentage of the conversations consisting, on both sides, of “What did you say?”, “Sorry?” and “Could you repeat that again?” Two countries, divided by a common language – and a couple of weird accents as well. Indeed, accents have a terrible habit of rubbing off on me; after the weekly phone-call home to my parents in Scotland, I unconsciously pick up on their speech patters, to the great amusement of the family here. I fondly hope that somewhere down in the Deep South, a customer who has just placed an order for beads with us is now unintelligible to her friends, as she now talks, at least temporarily, of “lifts”, “pavements” and “petrol”.

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“So this is it, I’m going to die.” In my 35 years on this planet, that isn’t a thought which has crossed my mind very often. Thus, while perhaps not something I’d like to do every day, I suppose it was refreshing to find myself contemplating the prospect of my imminent demise. On the whole, I’d rather do so tucked up in bed, than sat just behind a Joe Don Baker lookalike, piloting a neo-microlight aircraft above the Grand Canyon, with a fuel gauge which appeared to have hit zero several chasms ago.

Can’t say my entire life flashed before me, but the bits which had caused me to be in my current predicament, certainly did. We were accompanying friend Andy, who was visiting us as part of his first trip to the States. With limited time, we’d opted to take him to Las Vegas and then fly out to see the Grand Canyon, so booked a day tour there which included a flight there and back as well as a coach once we’d got there.

The first sense of unease was climbing aboard the courtesy bus to North Las Vegas Airport. We were the only non-Japanese speaking participants, and I feared Godzilla was going to swoop down and use the bus as a toothpick. This feeling of alienation increased at the tour terminal with a mainly Japanese staff and announcements given first in Japanese, then (somewhat grudgingly) in English. My neck hairs really began to do the lambada when the few Westerners were syphoned off to our own plane: I wondered if the Japanese annoucement went something like, “Honoured travellers from our homeland, please wait in the lounge, while we dispose of the Yanqui Mothra-flickers – at last, revenge for Hiroshima! Banzai!” Or perhaps it was an elaborate plot conceived by my Japanese psycho-ex girlfriend, now sniggering quietly from behind the smoked glass?

“Who wants to sit beside me?” were virtually the first words out of our pilot’s mouth – Chris’s hand shot up, a decision she was later to regret, and we climbed aboard the ten-seat Piper plane. There’d be no duty-free catalog here, nor stewardesses, and the safety demonstration was perfunctory, though opening the emergency doors seemed to require eight different operations simultaneously, and thus might have been tricky for non-cephalopods. I made a mental note never to fly on any craft without drop-down oxygen masks again, providing I survived this ordeal. But where had I seen the pilot before?

Take-off was smooth enough – it was the moment we left the ground that the interesting bit started. I’m used to planes going up and down, but being in one which falls sideways was a whole new dimension (literally). Air-conditioning was limited to a nozzle, carefully positioned so that the breeze went 0.5 inches in front of your nose, and Andy (more used to the heat of Lancashire than Arizona), was soon pouring cold water over himself. Chris, in the co-pilot’s seat, was unable to move a muscle, for fear of nudging the duplicate controls and sending the plane plummeting. And I was unable to appreciate the wonderful scenery outside (and quite a bit down) because my eyes were fixed on the fuel gauge, which had gone from full to 3/4 empty in about twenty minutes. Willing it to stop, and trying to understand my recognition of our pilot, was better than browsing any in-flight movie.

As the gusts buffeted us around like a cat playing with its prey, and the fuel needle began to wrap itself around ‘E’, I prepared for a crash landing, and looked down to see if there were any flat, unforested areas that even remotely resembled a runway. Hello! This is the Grand Canyon: we don’t do flat and unforested! And then I remembered where I’d seen the pilot. Four years ago, on my first trip to the place, I’d taken a bus tour. I am prepared to swear blind that the man who drove the bus on that occasion, was now the one perched at the controls of our flying coffin. At the risk of repeating myself: “So this is it, I’m going to die.”

Then, just as I was about to bring to the pilot’s attention, the little matter of our imminent fuel shortage, he flicked a switch, and I learned something that will always be engraved on my brain, in letters of stone. Light aircraft have two fuel tanks. The needle swung back to ‘F’, and I immediately revoked all those frantic promises to God that I’d been making, particularly the one about masturbation.

At the risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious, we landed safely, if a little more laterally than I’d have liked (re-enacting an old joke about the airport announcement: “the plane now arriving at gates 5, 6, 7 and 8…is coming in sideways”). But after that traumatic journey, the Grand Canyon seemed a little larger, deeper and more life-affirming than ever before. Particularly, for some reason, watching the Japanese tourists cavorting precariously on its edge…

John Leguizamo
Celebrity Theatre, Phoenix, Arizona
10th July, 2001

John Leguizamo’s first one man show, entitled SPIC-O-RAMA, A Dysfunctional Comedy, showed his diversity and talent. He followed that with another one man show, Mambo Mouth, which introduced a slew of new characters to terrorize, disgust, and thrill us, and it seemed as if he found his niche. But artists are never happy are they?

Movies were the next logical step – and a mistake in my opinion. His film career has included roles in Casualties of War and Carlito’s Way (both directed by Brian de Palma), Revenge, Hangin’ with the Homeboys, Regarding Henry (Mike Nichols), Whispers in the Dark, Super Mario Brothers, Pyromaniacs: A Love Story, Executive Decision, Spawn and The Fan, staring Robert DeNiro and Ellen Barkin. Not exactly thrilling.

It was his breakout role as Chi Chi Rodriguez in the drag comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, that earned him a Golden Globe Nomination for best supporting actor. Although I enjoyed To Wong Foo…. that was only because I was reminded of his character “Manny the Fanny” from the Mambo Mouth tour. Movies are not his forte. I think he’s more at home on stage. . and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

It’s obvious from the onset that this is going to be an ethnic showcase. John Leguizamo is a melting pot of Hispanic culture and it shows. His mastery of the diversity of accents, body language and colloquial phrasing is unbelievable. He comes on stage with an anger, an intensity and a Ritalin-needy persona, introducing the audience to different cultures simply from the dances they did as teens, growing up in the 80’s in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York. Having had the advantage of also growing up in the 80’s in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, it probably made more sense to me, than to 90% of the audience, but they were all still captivated by his recounting of life.

His biography of exactly how dysfunctional his family was, provided vivid portraits, all told frantically, of his ancesters and immediate family, without the usual play-like characterizations that audiences have come to expect from him. Leguizamo reveals his exceptional talents as he portrays dozens of different ethnic characters he has encountered – Italians, Irish, Germans, Koreans, Jews, Latinos and West Coast “white dudes.” Sometimes it’s difficult to determine if there’s more than one person on stage. He allows us to view issues, such as abuse, neglect and peer pressures from a funny, straight to the point, view. Each event is unfolded, first as a story, then physically acted out, and concluded.

There are morals in there, or just maybe a giant think-tank of observations, in the hopes of coming to terms with his childhood problems. I think this tour is possibly a suggestion from his therapist, in order for him to vent his issues as he progresses forward into the future with his own children. A saving grace perhaps? Maybe…

Chris Fata
Trash City Magazine