Chad Hensley's Esoterra fanzine was probably one of the greatest American sources of inspiration and mind fodder for the disgruntled subcultural youth of the 90s. Wowee! Some 20 (to ten) years have passed! Incredible! That's why it's actually so nice to flip through this newly published tome, Esoterra – The Journal of Extreme Culture (Creation Books, 2010). Not only for the contents in themselves, but also for the time capsule aspect of it all.
It's a nice-looking book, with 320 packed pages of, as the title hints, "extreme culture". Names like Marilyn Manson, HR Giger, Alan Moore, Adam Parfrey, Genesis P-Orridge, David Tibet, Thomas Ligotti, Leilah Wendell, Stephen O'Malley, Boyd Rice etc, etc (and then some) stir up disparate currents in an overall desperate soup. But it still tastes well, and I think there's a great deal of nutrition in there somewhere.
It is very much a Zeitgeistish anthology, in what people write and talk about, and how they do it. But yet it still packs a punch. Many of the phenomena and people are still "cutting edge", some two decades later. This brings us to the really interesting question here: Has nothing happened since the glorious heydays of Esoterra, in terms of radical and thought-provoking culture? Well, I can tell you one thing that happened. The Internet happened.
By sucking up young minds' attention and fragmenting them, the Internet sort of deflated a gazillion creative cottage industries of fanzines, record labels, book publishers, etc. It was a fast and huge deflation process that temporarily weakened independent thinking and fertile underground culture. I can see that negative spiral slightly halting now, mainly as a result of young people waking up to see that the body beneath the Emperor's New Clothes is just plain ugly and unstimulating, unsexy and just basically a fecal rollercoaster with a lot of digital bling. It is NOT mere chance that Blog rhymes with Clog, right?
I think Esoterra still has an important function in this day and age of individual intelligence versus mind-numbing (I mean that in a negative way) collectivist "transparent" tendencies. What Hensley and cohorts did was basically to scan the territory, contact the shining lights and put them all together in a context that signalled "beacon". That's not a "social network", that's how a real network functions. And the glue or (I hate to say it) "interface" was printed matter and real, "physical" records. In Esoterra's case, just a small fanzine with strikingly powerful screenprinted covers, that gradually turned into an occasional magazine. It was a joy to receive them (and, mind you, to be in them too!).
This truly wonderful anthology draws some pretty dark and disturbing elements out of our chaotic times and into the light. Those elements wont crack as trolls, but rather impregnate the contemporary, stagnant culture we dwell in. It's not a matter of whether you agree with all of the oddballs included in the tome. It's a matter of ingesting nutrition rather than forcefeeding youself on bellyfodder from the "Cloud". Yes, that's it: this book is a real fresh potato that you just took out of the (under)ground, and not one of those ultra-processed, pressed potatochips that all the human zombies crave (and get).
Well done, Mr Hensley! What we need now is just some more. Not more of the same though, but of the truly different.
“Esoterra – The Journal of Extreme Culture” Edited by Chad Hensley.
Creation Books, 2010. ISBN 978-1-84068-166-6
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