Word: mondo
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...films have often made viewers feel healthy -- by default. The 1972 underground smash Pink Flamingos was about the "Filthiest People Alive" and climaxed with an act of coprophagy that still shocks; a Flamingos screening in Florida was busted last year. The film was so raw and assaultive in its mondo-trasho fashion -- a prime example of cinema sploshite -- that it made viewers feel it was made by those crude people onscreen. But no: Waters was using crudity as an ironic style. He was a gross-out Oscar Wilde, making clever comedies of bad manners...
...THEMES AND MOTIFS OF CYBERPUNK HAVE been percolating through the culture < for nearly a decade. But they have coalesced in the past few years, thanks in large part to an upstart magazine called MONDO 2000. Since 1988, Mondo's editors have covered cyberpunk as Rolling Stone magazine chronicles rock music, with celebrity interviews of such cyberheroes as NEGATIVLAND and TIMOTHY LEARY, alongside features detailing what's hot and what's on the horizon. Mondo's editors have packaged their quirky view of the world into a glossy book titled Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge (HarperCollins...
Largely patched together from back issues of Mondo 2000 magazine (and its precursor, a short-lived 'zine called Reality Hackers), the Guide is filled with articles on all the traditional cyberpunk obsessions, from ARTIFICIAL LIFE to VIRTUAL SEX. But some of the best entries are those that report on the activities of real people trying to live the cyberpunk life. For example, Mark Pauline, a San Francisco performance artist, specializes in giant machines and vast public spectacles: sonic booms that pin audiences to their chairs or the huge, stinking vat of rotting cheese with which he perfumed...
...MUCH OF MONDO 2000 STRAINS CREDIBILITY. Does physicist Nick Herbert really believe there might be a way to build TIME MACHINES? Did the CRYONICS experts at TransTime Laboratory really chill a family pet named Miles and then, after its near death experience, turn it back into what its owner describes as a "fully functional dog"? Are we expected to accept on faith that a SMART DRUG called centrophenoxine is an "intelligence booster" that provides "effective anti-aging therapy," or that another compound called hydergine increases mental abilities and prevents damage to brain cells? "All of this has some basis...
Parents who thumb through Mondo 2000 will find much here to upset them. An article on house music makes popping MDMA (ECSTASY) and thrashing all night to music that clocks 120 beats per minute sound like an experience no red-blooded teenager would want to miss. After describing in detail the erotic effects of massive doses of L-dopa, MDA and deprenyl, the entry on aphrodisiacs adds as an afterthought that in some combinations these drugs can be fatal. Essays praising the beneficial effects of psychedelics and smart drugs on the "information processing" power of the brain sit alongside RANTS...