(part 2)

I can draw a line from Carnival of Souls to The Addiction, and feel that this describes a definite quality that has not yet been given a name. In literature, such works as The Orators or Maldoror raise similar questions. Leonard Cohen has a song on his live album, "Please Don't Pass Me By," where aesthetics seems to break down completely, and something like evangelical fervor (stripped of religiosity) replaces it instead. In the landscapes of Baja i have felt the same thing: this place so utterly inhuman its very harshness took on the lineaments of a personality. So, too, can one take pleasure in the on-sense of computer-generated writing, or the acceptable category of Guilty Pleasures (mine include the movie Johnny Guitar, and pulp authors Emil Petaja and Mickey Spillane)> And finally, this is not only a matter of the polymorphously perverse in mandarinland; even pop music has admitted emotionally ambivalent hits, on the broadest scale: Fleetwood Mac, for example. Is not Dark Fantasy and/or Supernatural Romance, already a mainstream taste? Can "jale" (David Lindsay: a color meaning 'dreamlike, feverish, & voluptuous') & "ulfire" ('wild & painful') be far behind?