See NOV 11 for my take on this event...
The Man Who Saw the World (From LA Weekly)
Feral House has made a reputation publishing subversive and transgressive literature, with subjects ranging from the occult to pop culture to Muslim extremists. One of its recent offerings (and the inspiration for the club Bricktops) was MEL GORDON’s Voluptuous Panic: The Sex Industry in Weimar Berlin. Publisher ADAM PARFREY kicked off a reading series with a salon featuring Gordon, and a Weimar dress code, which only chanteuse LYDIA LUNCH and members of THE VELVET HAMMER attempted to re-create. Gordon began his lecture on the decadence of Germany between the wars by handing out embossed boxes containing aphrodisiac Chinese herbs, a popular treat in Weimar Berlin. Gordon’s tales were full of rampant morphine and absinthe abuse, homosexuality, prostitution, and wanton female cabaret performers urinating onstage when the audience displeased them. There were film clips of nudist camps and opium dens, but most fascinating was Gordon’s dissertation on Erik Jan Hanussen, the subject of his latest book, Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant. Not only was Hanussen a mystic who made a number of accurate predictions, and published his own magazine, he specialized in a wildly popular nightclub act hypnotizing socialites and SS wives into a state of orgasm, without laying a hand on them. Mesmerized by Gordon’s tales (and no doubt all in a glowing state) were musicians HOWIE PYRO and JAMES INTVELD, filmmakers JULIAN NITZBERG and AUGUSTA, DJ SENOR AMOR, writer BRENDAN MULLEN, and ZAMORA THE TORTURE KING, fresh from his month long stint at Knott’s Scary Farm. After Gordon’s lecture concluded, Hollywood legend KIM FOWLEY (no stranger to decadence himself) shook his head and mused to no one in particular, “David Bowie saw all this shit first!”
—Pleasant Gehman
