The verse-chorus form: an archaic relic as despicable as the three-arc story structure. Existing between the simplicity of minimalism and the complex intricacies of a modernist concert work, our music structures will be culled from the inscrutable logic of dreams, weather patterns in foreign regions, a series of scents we pass on the street, the architecture of foreign temples, the folds in the clothes of our beloved… Repetition legitimises, but discontinuance can reinforce too.” Like (say) Brian Evenson, Lane can slip us the essential details in an artful and economical fashion. “The Night Won’t Go” starts: There’s nothing wrong with writing a lousy book. Just make sure it’s really lousy. There is nothing worse than competence.”

In other words, a non-future. In the realm of Decadence—or Neo-Decadence—one can, of course, speculate and write intoxicating techno-apocalyptic languages inspired by, say…a future junked Tesla, for instance!The hotel hasn’t changed. Same tired-looking woman behind a reception desk cluttered with paperwork. Same outdated optics behind the bar. Same obscure, faded pattern on the carpet. Same feeling that not only the air but the light has gone stale. I remember Nathan standing there, uttering to me: ‘This is a place where people come to die.’ THIS ANTHOLOGY INCLUDES: at least 60% more sex and violence than earlier editions, making it especially appropriate for younger readers.” Antoine D’Agata is a contentious character in the worlds of photography and art. Signed up by the Magnum photo agency in the period when they started to realise there was little money in photojournalism, his work’s brutal and self-destructive content has a habit of upsetting people. Writing can be neither sincere nor authentic; these are the cliches of the ranks of the dead. Style is a mute scream in symbols—that’s all.” We welcome expressions of interest for papers of 15-20 minutes long. Please send your abstracts to [email protected] by July 2nd, 2017.

Do you know, I can’t remember the name my mother gave her? All I can remember is my secret name for her, Sara. Without an “h”. It was my sister’s name. When the bus came, he touched my cheek and said, “Thanks. I couldn’t have done that on my own.” Surprised, and briefly upset, I watched the lights of the bus diminish as it sped downhill and on through the night. If I could, maybe the city would let him go. Without necessarily exceeding the bounds of the law, platonic enemies should be expected to discourage each other in all things, which will, of course, require regular monitoring of each other’s activities. News of misfortune must be greeted with triumph.” Conference Committee: Ellis Hanson, Elisha Cohn, Jane Desmarais, Kate Hext, Caroline Levine, Kristin Mahoney, Alex MurrayLascivious cyphers in hexadecimal Kabbalah will be scrawled in the margins of the apocrypha; we’ll craft expansion modules for electronic toys that elucidate our maxims in the language of the birds; our initials will be carved in luminiferous aether and every manner of arcana will be attributed to the letters, then we’ll permute them, weigh them, transpose them, and combine them to form an alphabet of artifice and triviality. We’ll pepper our canticles with preposterous lies and blatant contradictions. Only when the Akashic Record has been thoroughly falsified may our axioms be read between the lines.” What is Neo-Decadence? A paradox, for starters, but what exactly are the aesthetic forms of Decadence in the present siècle? How do they evoke the styles, themes, and ironies of the Decadent Movement of the 19th century? Why this return, why this departure? Why is J.-K. Huysmans turning up in novels by Michel Houellebecq and D. B. C. Pierre? Why are there new movies or plays about Colette, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde? What is Neo and Decadent about Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology? Covering my entire torso is a partial ink reproduction of the Infernal panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. It is the only tattoo I have and is the only transmutation of my flesh I am willing to indulge. Thus my ears are also virgins to the piercing spike — when circumstances present themselves, I will even refuse surgery. I got it done because I had the means and the desire; there’s little else to be said about modifying the human body.” There’s a disastrous and funny band interview with a gay rag, highlighting the complexities involved with being queer in (largely) non-queer music scenes, and making art in forms that do not have large queer audiences. It’s one of the few sections in the novel where Lane really let loose and had a little acerbic fun.

The collection ends with “In the Brightness of My Day”. The promise of sexual encounters is enticing, but the outcomes are amorphous and disturbing. Interactions between characters can be intimate and even fleetingly beautiful, but an ominous detail will skew everything in a much darker and even dangerous direction. The performance is episodic, progressing through a series of loosely connected tableaux and routines: from the haunting image of three hanging witches that opens the performance, to the narration of grotesque fairy tales, infantilized pastiches of lesbian fantasies, physically demanding dance routines, and flagellation with the tentacles of an octopus. I will be looking closely at four examples in what remains of this article, each of which bears relevance to the occult, and serves to illustrate how decadence might be embodied or enacted as a ‘subversive tactic of choice’, to recall Faxneld: corpse-like commodities, fetishized corpses, artificial hair, and the birthing and consuming of an eye. You know little about Baphomet’s Ballroom beyond the fact that it’s the sole brainchild of owner, founder, and curator Xander Hellmann, the self-declared Anti-Pope. It’s unknown whether he intends that term in the historical Roman Catholic sense. Press and social media photos show him with lips set in a grim line, oddly contrasting with a fluffy Warholian mop of lavender-rinsed platinum-bleached hair that may or may not be a cheap fright wig. Behind an omnipresent pair of dark sunglasses, he cultivates a bug-eyed stare that falls somewhere between Manson (either one) and Avida Dollars-era Dalí.” You’ve spoken in the past about photography not being art. What are your thoughts on photography as art? Can you explain how you see photography as opposed to art?Now, in quarantine, our only future is the present. “Decadence” – decay – decline – a declyining – cadēre – a fall. You also find it difficult to pay attention since, at least once a minute, Teddie/Anger presses a button on his megaphone which unleashes a grating version of the opening strains of “Für Elise.” I was talking to Colby Smith about this on the phone the other day, and I told him one thing I like about the group/movement is that “dissent” is allowed and even encouraged. Batting things around, discussing things, having different ideas and perspectives. All of that is welcome. No toe the line or get out stuff. I mean, hell, they accept me, that’s evidence enough, no? LC VON HESSEN is a writer of horror, weird fiction, and various unpleasantness, as well as a noise musician (as Madame Deficit and an auxiliary member of Smell & Quim), multidisciplinary artist/performer, and former Morbid Anatomy Museum docent. Their work has appeared in such publications as The Book of Queer Saints, Your Body is Not Your Body, Neo-Decadence: 12 Manifestos, Hymns of Abomination, Beyond the Book of Eibon, multiple volumes of Nightscript and Vastarien, the upcoming It Was All a Dream and Stories of the Eye, and the ebook collection Spiritus Ex Machina. An ex-Midwesterner, von Hessen lives in Brooklyn with a talkative orange cat. Late Style: Formal considerations of style when time has run out: Baudelaire or Verlaine or Huysmans on the style d'orat the end of empires, the crepuscular Debussy, late James, Wilde after the trials, Aschenbach at the beach, Don Fabrizio at the ball, time regained in Proust, final cigarettes in film noir, Djuna Barnes or Jean Rhys or Lawrence Durrell or Tennessee Williams or Thomas Pynchon or Martin Amis after the lover has left in a taxi, you see where this is going.

The Neo-Passéist type is a recognizable fixture of the current psychosocial landscape. There are, among others, meliorative Neo-Passéists, nihilist Neo-Passéists, spiritual Neo-Passéists and literary/artistic Neo-Passéists. All are creatures of glaring internal contradictions, and while contradictions are useful for producing interest when ground together intentionally (as this manifesto itself does, being the work of multiple authors with differing views), the unwitting Neo-Passéist is a mere vector or vehicle for ambient market forces and their associated manners, unaware of how ridiculous they appear. The absolutely sincere, guilty, anxious and agonized cast is characteristic of most current art. Fig. 2 Lauren Barri Holstein, Krista Vuori and Brogan Davison collapsed beneath the weight of their wigs in Notorious, by Lauren Barri Holstein. Fierce Festival, Birmingham, 2017. Photograph by Manuel Vason. Image courtesy of Lauren Barri Holstein. Fallen Cities: Sodom and Gomorrah, Babylon, Pompei, Rome, Capri, London, Paris, Venice, Berlin, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, you've been there.

FIN du GLOBE: Decadence, Catastrophe, Late Style

Photographer and filmmaker Antoine d’Agata explores the world of prostitution across the globe from his singular viewpoint through 25 monologues and encounters with sex workers.’ Decadence is a theory of the fall of empires, and Ancient Rome is chief among them. As Oscar Wilde wrote, however, "Nero and Narcissus are always with us," and the insight is and has been instructive for just about every capital in the modern world. How is Decadence a theory of modernity, about the ends of our own civilizations, about British or French imperialism, or about American or Asian cultural hegemony and decline? How do Decadent endings figure in the styles we call modernist, or postmodernist, or whatever has come after? Disturbanc Decadent Endings: Considering "catastrophe" in the literary sense as the unraveling or denouement of a drama, what is distinctive about the endings of Decadent texts, Decadent events, Decadent careers, Decadent lives, or Decadent civilizations? What is or was modern or modernist about Decadent conclusions? Ah, my dear," cried Lady Narborough, putting on her gloves, "don't tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one knows that life has exhausted him . . . .” --- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray