 Volume
2 #1, 11" x 16" (27 cms x 40 cms), 44 pages, newsprint
Michel Berandi's Panik magazine is an adults-only
tabloid covering extreme music and related culture. Touching
on some heavy issues with a light hand, it is essential reading
for those who want to keep up with the darker and more biting
edge of alternative culture. Spiced with adverts for body
modification and fetishistic art, and combining 'Underground'
culture with political incorrectness, it's calculated to induce
disapproval across the conventional political spectrum.
Contents include an article on Hermann Nitsch's Orgies
Mysteries Theatre which captures the Dionysian excess of which
all modern celebration is but a pale shadow, an interview
by Michael Moynihan of Hitler's film-maker, Leni
Riefenstahl, Boyd Rice's account of a European
tour in the company of Albin Julius of Der Blutharsch
during which they (allegedly) attempted to steal Mussolini's
brain, items on Whitehouse and Dwid of Psywarfare
and a cartoon with text provided by the currently incarcerated
Jim Goad of ANSWER Me! fame - or perhaps that
should be infamy. Theoretical essays discuss the biology
of human attraction and the psychology of envy.
Devoted to a culture of transgression, Panik is today's
face of the Underground, a concept that has changed considerably
since I first encountered it in the late 1960s. The followers
of the 60s Underground are now wearing suits and, indeed,
nearing retirement. Attitudes once considered revolutionary
are now the reigning orthodoxy. This process of generational
inheritance of power has been both triumph and compromise.
A sort of 'social Marxism' reigns supreme but at the expense
of abandoning economic revolution.
And if the revolutionaries have become the new Establishment
exercising a new form of authoritarianism in the authoritarian
form of political correctness, it is no wonder that the 'Underground'
has shifted its political centre of gravity. But that does
not mean to say that it has signed up to stuffy political
reductivism. It's arty and bohemian, individualist and libertarian,
and I presume that its poses and pronouncements are at least
half in jest.
Rik - 6 October 2000 |
