Sunday, October 30, 2011

Review! Disinformation: The Complete Series DVD

Disinformation exists today as a publishing house and a website. They put out a whole bunch of material on conspiracy theories and the occult, things like that. Very briefly Disinformation was a show on British TV, and the Disinformation:The Complete Series DVD contains the footage that exists of that, as well as footage from a conference they held in New York in 2000. I had the DVD back in the early 2000's, and my friends and I used to laugh at it. It was an inevitable that I would go back and review the Disinformation: The Complete Series DVD. My review of Howard Bloom's book The Lucifer Principle is getting more hits then I expected, my writing about how Genesis P. Orridge has been getting hits, and both Howard Bloom ad Genesis P. Orridge appeared on the DVD Disinformation: The Complete Series DVD. It was released in the early 2000's. Genesis P. Orridge gives a very long dull interview about what a genius he is-this was however, at least before his breast implants were put in. The Howard Bloom interview where he says "fuck the god of war" that I've discussed elsewhere is on that same DVD. Another reason Disinformation is timely to discuss right now is that if you go on their webpage, they have all kinds of Occupy Wall St. propaganda up. CBS news reported that American Apparel is donating clothing to the protesters. That almost makes me consider Occupy Wall St. youth-oriented marketing versus other modes of capitalism. As I've written elsewhere, I don't have a strong opinion about Occupy Wall St. because while plenty their are figures on the right- Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan for example-who have criticized Wall St. types and the bailouts, but most of the protesters are leftists and I'm certainly not a leftists anymore. I think it does make a review of the Disinformation: The Complete Series DVD timely, however. The above clip is edited down from footage from the same DVD. This is an interview with a woman named Brice Taylor that claims that she was placed under mind control and used by Sylvester Stallone to make pornography involving sex with dolphins. It was all part of a C.I.A conspiracy. She is either a.) psychotic or b.) a con artist. It feels like a stupid thing for me to bother to point out, but she doesn't provide any evidence that what she says actually happened or indeed that such things are at all possible. That's actually one of the more interesting bits on disk one of the show. There's a whole bunch of profiles on either new agers or conspiracy theorists on disk 1, and a lot of these people could easily pass for homeless. . There's an artist on there talking about building a time machine. There's a guy who says he's from outer space, of course. A couple of these people seem pretty self-assured in having been in contact with aliens. Other things are even more mundane than that. There's some documentary footage of a fetish event in Los Angeles. There's documentary footage of the AVN Expo porn convention in Vegas. I usually live in Las Vegas, I could have gone to the actual AVN Expo very easily if I wanted but I've never bothered. As absurd as the first disk is, I've never seen a greater example of artistic and intellectual failure anywhere in my life. If you can stand to listen to former Psychic TV keyboardist Douglas Rushkoff for ten minutes you have more tolerance and patience then me, but the section of this DVD with him speaking is a half an hour. He starts with a quote from Timothy Leary and makes less and less sense from there on in. The comic book writer Grant Morrison starts by saying he's drunk and he's coming up on drugs, and he then starts telling a story about being abducted by aliens. Grant Morrison goes on for 45 minutes from there. I'm not a big fan of psychedelic self-annihilation of the mind. Listening to 45 minutes of Grant Morrison on drugs is like water-boarding. I always got a kick out of the footage of Marilyn Manson on this disk. In it he whines about sports heroes and jocks in high school. It's sort of absurd that he still cared about the jock beating him up in high school after he himself became super-rich and famous, but that very clearly looks like what happened here. I think the time to get over it was long ago, Marilyn. The art critic Anthony Haden-Guest introduces the artist Joe Coleman by saying that Joe Coleman did some performance artist piece where he bit the heads off white mice, and that the white mice were real. Joe Coleman's speech makes no sense. I think there was a lot of drugs circulating backstage when they did this conference. The DVD ends with the late science fiction author Robert Anton Wilson, who starts be saying he doesn't have a vagina he has a "willy" and starts ranting about how you have to have a "willy" to be the pope. Robert Anton Wilson rambles for more than an hour. I think Robert Anton Wilson might have also been high. Either that or he was just a total drug burn-out. He talks about drugs on that video to the extent that you'd think his life completely rotated around them. The only way I could really sit through any of this crap now and truly enjoy it would be with a bunch of friend's mocking it. If Disinformation represents a counter-culture, I'll stay with the mainstream. I still don't have a clear sense of what the objective of their "revolution" ever was.

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