Edgelord #4: Pimping the Pandemic, by Lev Parker and Luke Cohen

In between “Edgelord” columns, Lev Parker speaks to New York writer Luke Cohen about his “hysterical” new Covid-19 horror story

The author who uses the nom-de-plume Supervert says the new Morbid Books publication is “Hysterical. The first work of great Covid literature.”

Fourth Industrial Revolution Pimp (4IRP) uses comedy and horror tropes to navigate the social economy ushered in under the conditions of quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 10,000-word text is accompanied by photographs by Valya Korabelnikova that document the environmental changes that support this shift into the burgeoning Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The following conversation between Parker and Cohen uses the mission of the former’s press Morbid Books to recast the legacy of the politics and experimentation of Surrealism into our contemporary situation, as the backdrop to mark 4IRP’s publication.

Luke Cohen: Even after reading your text, there still remains considerable ambiguity: will you be getting, or have you had, the vaccine? 

Lev Parker: I guess it depends how you read the ending of the semi-autobiographical Fourth Industrial Revolution Pimp story—whether I end up scamming a fraudulent Vaccine Passport or not. Either way, I'm sure you're aware that Dr Anthony Fauci's current bioweapons—sorry, “viral research”—programs are a continuation of US mind-control experiments which have taken place since 1945. At the end of the war, Nazi scientists were brought over to the west as part of Operation Paperclip, and they were instrumental in MK-ULTRA and Operation Artichoke using drugs such as LSD and other “psy-ops” research. 

These weren't peripheral Nazis, apolitical scientists who kept their heads down during a dark moment in history. One of the key US captures in Operation Paperclip was Walter Schreiber, the former Surgeon General of the Third Reich who worked alongside Himmler and Göring, where his specialty was... now get this... developing vaccines! And not just any old vaccine, but those specifically aimed at curing a “plague epidemic”! Although it's ironic that while he was commander of the Training Division C of the Military Medical Academy, he actually denied Kurt Blöme, the head of the Posen research institute, permission to conduct “plague research”, because the Nazis were afraid that it might escape from the lab and cause an epidemic—something Fauci and his Wuhan crew obviously have no scruples about. The Americans have attempted to whitewash Schreiber's history by emphasizing that he reportedly objected to some of his colleagues’ experimentation on humans, and testified against Göring at Nuremberg, although he was convicted in absentia by a Polish court of “conducting gruesome experiments” on prisoners at Auschwitz. Before the US smuggled him back to America as a “Paperclip”, Schreiber worked at one of the allies’ own concentration camps or “black sites”, Camp King in West Germany, where he assisted with interrogation methods on German POWs—basically the beginning of MK-ULTRA and all its myriad horrors. 

So this is the context of the vaccine and the accompanying psychological warfare campaign that's been unleashed on the global population. It’s basically a Nazi program. At the moment it only has “emergency” authorization in the UK. Once it’s properly authorized, I might sample some of their German wine. Although they say you need two jabs for it to be effective, so I'll probably just take one, because I don't want it to actually work. With my love of totalitarian kitsch, having some vaccine particles in my blood would be a purely aesthetic choice, like owning a vintage Hugo Boss suit. 

The narrative of the identities you assume in 4IRP is interesting: you start as a “ghost”, and then return as a mannequin, as a rent boy, and finally as a pimp. Every transformation becomes a more absurd caricature with greater criminality. Formally, you lean into stereotypes and cliches. Perhaps you could say more as to how this relates to the inside / outside binary produced by medical discourse and disseminated through the media, which is present in your text. For example, you mention how Tiger King became the escapist TV show of choice, representing the therapeutic lawless “outside” to the quarantine. This is to say that the media produced not just “insiders” and “outsiders”, but also managed how the constructed “insides” and “outsides” of the environment match up. As 4IRP shows, this was also part of a project of remediating and reorganizing the human body on the “inside” as it relates to the “outside.” A literal example of this is getting a vaccine and having chemicals or “German wine” enter your veins, or how in your narrative you dramatize the interface by using a dildo as a prosthetic arm to avoid getting a shot. Your text chooses to engage the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” as it relates to this remapping of environmental and bodily territories into each other. The amusement park at the end of 4IRP that is turned into a COVID testing centre is a poignant allegory to the experience of the feedback of the continuous reframing of the scale of enclosure along this binary axis, from the drones you depict flying over the deserted coastline to the estrangement from once familiar domestic spaces.

To be honest, I didn’t have an “insider / outsider binary” in mind when framing the text, rather it is intrinsic to contemporary discourse, whereby those who have a “Vaccine Passport” are “insiders” and everyone else is a de facto “outsider.” 

The rebels of our time don’t often look like James Dean anymore. They’re more likely to be conservatives who became radicalized by the “new normal”. The finest example of this is Conservative Woman, which has torn the official narrative to shreds in a way you might have previously expected a publication like Rolling Stone to do. Conservative Woman, who I cite in the story, are so groovy I even wrote an article for them. 

As for the geography of dissonance produced by COVID, there is as you mention plenty of this in the text, which is set in a once-familiar seaside town that already had a haunted aesthetic before the pandemic. But when people ask me why I fled London a day before lockdown, I often state rather glibly that it was coming to resemble the Gaza Strip, with its boarded-up storefronts, dwindling supplies and atmosphere of caged misery. I’ve never been to Palestine, so perhaps that’s an insulting comparison to make, but the pandemic certainly affected our inner territory in more ways than one, as you mention, whether it be the body or the landscape. Ballard and Cronenberg explored the subconscious blurring of the two, and this project continues in that vein. 

And on the topic of caged misery, I have to say, wasn’t there something wildly ironic about how Tiger King became so popular during lockdown?! Because that was hardly Joe Exotic’s television debut—Louis Theroux, for example, made a show about him some time back—and yet Joseph Schreibvogel could only become truly iconic under these conditions. If there are masters of the universe pulling all the strings, beaming a show about deranged zookeepers at a population who were crawling up the walls in compulsory “quarantine” was a stroke of sublime, evil genius. 

“Camp,” as an operation, runs adjacent to, if not directly through the center of politics. In recent years its more pronounced and simultaneous appearance and denial as a political strategy in itself ultimately has emboldened practicing career politicians and new actors entering the “official” political arena. This further politicization stemming from the narrative around “camp” as an immanent threshold is often staged around upsetting moral boundaries. I am directly thinking of Susan Sontag’s famous statement of the camp sensibility as that which “converts the serious into the frivolous.” To this one can find corollaries and plot a narrative from Andy Warhol to Boyd Rice. Could you speak more about this process of establishing equivalences as a way of navigating how restrictions are set around what and how to read and write? I ask this because the way you use your sources undermines the boundaries between conspiracy theories, science, literature and drugs, and the comforts they respectively present. I also think this relates to your statement about getting just one Covid vaccine shot for “aesthetic reasons” and equating it with owning a vintage suit by Hugo Boss.

Indeed, I regard myself first and foremost a humorist. But not all humor is camp, of course. I don’t think what we’re doing at Morbid Books is particularly camp, although there is a certain theatricality to the way I embody my role as a “bad guy” or “Edgelord.” Maybe I’m just puerile with low impulse control, or I have ADHD, or both, but I don’t hold back from pulling pranks and doing things that other authors and publishers would regard as silly, stuff you’re not supposed to do if you want people to take you seriously as a writer or press, like getting my friend Curly Joe to “model” the books playing the banjo naked—an image that is apparently so powerfully lurid, it has enticed an adult actress to fly all the way over from America to spend two weeks in quarantine with our very own Joe Exotic. (Growl!)

Reading and writing, and to a lesser extent making images have always been a game, a way of amusing myself and my peers, so I’m intensely grateful to other independent publishers who present their work—and themselves—so blandly that with a few notable exceptions, I don’t waste my time reading their books. My friend and graphic-design maestro Luke, a self-confessed aesthete, admitted that he chooses what he reads based on the author photo, or what the writer posts on social media—and it’s actually great advice. I mean, if an author thinks a picture of their salad is worthy of publication, is it worth bothering to tune into their other broadcasted thoughts? Probably not. 

I also have no scruples about abandoning books I don’t find enjoyable. That’s not to say I have to find literature, history or memoir amusing to like them. But I definitely get a perverse thrill from reading the texts you’re not supposed to read. 

That part in 4IRP about me spending two months of lockdown exclusively reading David Icke books is true. I set myself the task of reading them all in reverse chronological order. So literally every waking hour not occupied by an essential task was spent transfixed by his most recent massive book The Answer, and then his even bigger treatise on 9/11, The Trigger. Contrary to what you might think if you’ve only seen his Alan Partridge-esque videos or live performances, he’s actually a brilliant, engaging writer who can hold the attention and test the imagination for a thousand pages. I had to stop after 2,000 pages because I was becoming physically and psychologically addicted.

Can his critics do that, all the NPR types who snootily explain away “conspiracy theories” like some strain of intellectual virus that only affects the moronic? Of course not. Because a man who claims to have seen the light, or another dimension, is infinitely more fascinating than the conformist who simply parrots “reality” back at you, whether in the form of podcast or novel. There are societal forces coming to get these guys, agents witting and unwitting out to ostracize and ridicule them, fence off their ideas outside the boundaries of acceptable opinion, to divert attention from the weakness of their own vision. There always have been and there always will be. 

Valya Korabelnikova’s photographs are very effective complements to your narrative. The depictions of Margate that accompany the text parody and recall an apocalyptic setting as in Chris Marker’s La Jetée.  It would be interesting to relate this to your interests in Surrealism. As you know, Eugene Atget was a favorite of the surrealists for his self-reflexive understanding of the documentary nature of photography. Although I think formally these photographs are different, perhaps you could say more about the status of the “document” as it relates to the issues you are engaging in this text.

Thanks for comparing this filth to one of the greatest artworks of the 20th Century, if not all time, in La Jetée! 

Quite simply, Valya came to Margate for a day to visit me during that twilight zone between lockdowns, and she has a stealthy way of capturing people that reminds me of Vivian Meier, so I didn’t even know I was being photographed while I was gooning around. We certainly weren’t staging anything. I guess the photos are the “documentary” version of the world that is distorted in the text. But as with Atget’s photographs, or Meier’s, or the ones Breton included in Nadja (although his weren’t especially good), the best documentary images reveal something uncanny that the naked eye cannot see.

How do you relate or distinguish the approach to the image in 4IRP from the DAU project, which mirrored some of the conditions of quarantine? In particular, temporality, as from what I understand, DAU tested and expanded the experience of duration. And from what I read about how it was publicly presented, it also was about testing and screening its audience. I ask this because I understand you and Valya met through the DAU project.

Yes, I met Valya through the DAU project. I only came in at the very end, so never visited the set in Ukraine, but she was there for quite a while and even appears in a couple of the films. Still, working with Ilya Khrzhanovsky and his crew for three months, making their official magazine DAU Bulletin, was a life-changing experience. I don’t know if it altered my perception of reality, but it definitely gave me a vital insight into how far an artist can intervene in reality—fundamental concepts such as time, space, identity. Because only something as grandiose as a religion or a cult can really do that. And most of the rumors about DAU being a cult were pretty much true. As soon as you stepped into 100 Piccadilly, where it was based during the seven-year editing process, you were in a sort of portal between the Soviet Union and contemporary London. That’s why Ilya wasn’t in a hurry to release the films, and seemed quite happy to keep them screening in this environment which was, in itself, a huge artistic construct, where time and space were warped. By controlling not just what viewers saw and in what order—there was a compulsory six-hour “first contact” rule for screenings, which he had to personally approve—the DAU project became a form of captivity for the audience, the staff, but also its director. Because if the funding wasn’t cut, I don’t think he would ever have left that strange hybrid of fantasy and reality, and I’m not sure if I would have either. 

Surrealism is often associated with deconstruction in its engagement with media for showing how opposites are intertwined and ultimately of the same impulse and desire. This separation is itself the product of systems of inscription. There is a narrative arc from Surrealism’s historical engagement with photography to the uses of social media today that is helpful in thinking through the mediation that is productive of our current social and political landscape. In your text there is an understanding of this, which manifests through presenting many reversals, such as police officers appearing as burglars, but also the paranoia around friends and colleagues as informants. Or in your opening statements for 4IRP warning, “How a society obsessed with health can in fact be sick.” In this regard, I’m also thinking of your comments for the new introduction of Takeaway, in which you discuss how under the conditions of quarantine anarchists were calling for the police to strictly enforce “lockdown”…

If there’s one idea I want to emphasise and bring to people’s attention more than any other, it’s one that also appears in My Week Without Gérard: enantiodromia. 

It means when a system becomes its opposite. And that’s exactly what has happened to our society. We’ve gone through the looking glass. Radicalism and conservatism seem to have changed places. So if you live in France and want to reverse the tyrannical Covid mandates, your best hope apparently is to vote for the National Front. Because liberals such as Macron have become tyrants and the far right are, in some cases, the closest we now have to civil libertarians. In America, the religious “right” are now more entertaining than Hollywood and the liberal art elite, making raucous fun of their pro-vaccination logic and Satanic fashion shows. 

I can’t recall if Jung says enantiodromia is inevitable, or merely possible, but when you zoom out and look at the really big picture, the analysis of “hidden hand” theorists seems more alluring than those still constructing their narrative from a “materialist,” economic or political perspective. While there is clearly some truth to all of them, Marxist, liberal and conservative analyses are all too limited. Even without getting too metsphysical, technology seems to have a life of its own. There’s a “ghost in the system,” so to speak. 

Those guys who told us to look at the bigger picture, the “conspiracy theorists” were ridiculed for saying it until very recently, but the evidence for alien space craft in Area 51 is now very compelling. So if humans aren’t the most advanced life forms, then David Icke’s theory that we’re ruled by a species of psychopathic aliens masquerading as humans who invented both capitalism and communism seems a lot less ridiculous than it did ten or even two years ago. 

In relation to 4IRP and the desire to forge a new identity, one that transcends realism: I guess if you can’t beat them in their shapeshifting, join the reptilian motherfuckers!

Fourth Industrial Revolution Pimp is available from Morbid Books online store, and comes as standard with membership to the Temple of Surrealism mailing list.