As the new millennium dawned, it was heralded by a wave of panoptic terror, cresting on a surge of globalism, fearful of the burgeoning unknown. Chris Carter’s timely television series Millennium explored themes, concepts, and styles that mirrored those anxieties, both real and perceived. Consumer technology’s proliferation, the spread of the Internet, uncertainties about safety, privacy, morality, and the threat of digital voyeurism were amongst the tangible threats evoked. “Real life” — and, at its core, the nuclear family — were constantly menaced. With an emphasis on the philosophical and psychological, a thoughtful protagonist in the form of Lance Henriksen’s Frank Black, atmospheric visual storytelling, and a penchant for transgressive subjects, Millennium was a stunningly prescient compendium of society’s nightmares.

Slasher stylings and the masked bogeymen of 1980′s horror cinema franchises had grown formulaic in their mindless slaughter of sex-crazed adolescents by the time the ’90s rolled around. Audiences were starved for psychological thrills, which is why the new decade’s serial killer phenomenon more than fit the bill. Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs ushered in the early 1990s with charismatic killer Hannibal Lecter, who resembled Millennium’s demonic Lucy Butler (first appearing in season one’s episode “Lamentation”). Lecter’s doctor and Lucy’s “nurse” demonstrated an omnipresent evil lurking amongst our caretakers and confidants while the world floundered in disquiet. It was potent.

Millennium’s pilot episode killer The Frenchman introduced the archetypal serial murderer of the show. Serving as a dark foil to Henriksen’s character, the antagonist reflected the grim side of Frank Black’s gift (or curse) with cryptic, poetic messages about a rising, blood-dimmed tide. “Lamentation,” however, was the show’s first authentic horror episode and a singular outing — even with its main character far away from home during the most crucial moments. Carter manipulated haunted house and slasher film tropes when Legion/Lucy, who stalked Catherine through the darkness, infiltrated the sanctity of Frank’s yellow house. Meanwhile, the abduction and literal dissection of serial killer Dr. Ephraim Fabricant toyed with body horror elements. Again, he was a figure reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter, though Fabricant traded antihero qualities with the beguiling Lucy Butler. Supernatural fright and the looming, biblical horror that tinted the series’ entire run was also nightmarishly palpable. The show’s creators turned another screw with the murder of Lieutenant Bob Bletcher. By killing off one of Millennium’s main characters — someone close to Frank’s inner sanctum — Carter reinforced the notion of all-pervasive evil. No one was safe.

Cementing Sarah-Jane Redmond’s role as a key player in the Millennium storyline was another solid horror episode. Season two’s “A Room with No View” found breathy seductress Lucy Butler turning her eye toward “ordinary” high school students to bend to her will. Her hunt reflected fractured American morality, societal pressures, and the underlying distrust of the country’s leaders during the 1990s that left people with little hope. The episode’s guidance counselor Teresa Roe was a despairing figure, demonstrating that even school officials had surrendered to ultimate corruption. The storyline made us wonder: with no strength of character and sense of conviction instilled in our children — thanks to the brainwashing of youth by an immoral “other” (Lucy) — who will lead us to a better tomorrow? This collapse of structure also mirrored the breakdown of the family unit — something signaled by the increase in divorce, and single or teenage parents during the 1990s. Lucy’s cruel, yet benevolent, treatment of her teen captives aroused questions about the idealized mythology surrounding nuclear families in the 20th century. The “cult of the child” transformed our treatment of the world’s youth during this epoch, particularly in America. Lucy’s abductee, Landon Bryce, dubs his mute cellmate “Ben Gunn” — a reference to the character in Treasure Island marooned on the titular isle by his crew, reinforcing the episode’s theme of isolation. It’s one of many subtle, smart references in the series that left a trail of breadcrumbs to bigger, entropic ideas. “A Room with no View” presented the terrifying realization that our collective apathy and deluded obsessions were actually the reasons for our downfall. Mankind sculpts its environment, but “A Room with no View” showed that, like Lucy, this construct threatens to turn on us and to extinguish the essence of humanity itself.

Taking the threat of social terror further, season two’s “The Mikado” played on our fears of the Internet as a reckless, all-consuming entity and blended it with horror motifs surrounding dark sexuality. The information superhighway promised us an almost godlike omnipotence: the world at our fingertips. In accordance with Millennium’s ongoing duality, however, we were quickly reminded that the world wide web also directly connected us to a clandestine enterprise that was still largely feral at the time: pornography. Another case for Frank, another serial killer — but writer Michael Perry’s decision to base “The Mikado’s” Avatar on the real-life 1970′s serial murderer known as the Zodiac Killer tapped into the wellspring of our anxiety. Using the framework of Zodiac’s unsolved, true crime case, coupled with the grim myth of an underground snuff cinema network exploited fears over the intangible — that which we cannot grasp or see. Refracting this anxiety back onto the audience, “The Mikado’s” voyeuristic opening (a theme carried throughout the episode) depicted a group of boys surfing the Net for sex shows, but instead facing the brutality of Avatar’s horrifyingly perverse website. The episode’s use of handheld video cameras, web broadcasts, and grainy, low quality videos further added to the gritty textural medley. Initially, Avatar’s heinous acts existed in the nebulous depths of cyberspace, frustrating Frank due to his inability to connect with the killer’s subconscious. With a lack of crime scene and physical evidence inhibiting Frank’s ability to see what we cannot, there’s a primal, authentic uneasiness about “The Mikado” that is forefronted.

The later part of the ’90s saw the introduction of postmodern horror. Wes Craven’s Scream was a paradigm of self-aware parody, teasing horror’s clichés and amusingly deconstructing its metaphors for audiences. Season three’s episode “…Thirteen Years Later,” released only two years after Craven’s 1996 film, similarly interrogated spooky tropes. Knowing references to the fictional narrative twisting of Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths — read by Special Agent Emma Hollis, who also served as the episode’s victorious “final girl” — and canonical fright flicks like Halloween, Psycho, and Friday the 13th abound. These allusions paved the way for a case that reflected back on the pilot episode’s killer and the horror genre itself.

Though these are notable examples, Millennium is a series haunted by horror. Clearly riffing on cinematic precedents, Carter’s parade of baddies exploited underlying societal tensions, perceptively rendering collective anxieties as figures of fear. Exacerbated by turn-of-the-century doom mongering, his cast of antagonists espoused a dire prophecy — a succession of harrowing “What ifs?” that played out bleak endgame after endgame. Certain malaise of the series is confined to its historic specificity — locked in a 1990′s time capsule of terror — but other moments linger. Public and private boundaries continue to merge in the digital crucible, with fragmented, fluid identities undermining the notion of selfhood. Millennium’s success, then, is a measure of its very pertinence — a resonant pop-cultural psychoanalysis that collectively diagnosed the angst of millions. Y2K calamity may have been averted, but the show’s longevity — and emergence as a cult phenomenon — proves that its recurring bad dreams have lost little of their unflinching insight. A dim mirror for mankind’s ills, Chris Carter’s art of darkness endures.

[This essay was written to support the release of Back to Frank Black: A Return to Chris Carter's Millennium featuring introductions by Chris Carter, Frank Spotnitz, and Lance Henriksen. Purchase your copy here.]

“In Britain, in recent months, two of the most sensational murder trials of the century have involved discussion of the same rental video; namely, Child’s Play 3. The first case was that of James Bulger, a toddler who was beaten to death by two ten-year-olds; the second case was that of Suzanne Capper, a teenager who was kidnapped, strenuously tortured, and finally set alight by a clique of young acquaintances. Child’s Play 3 has therefore been much in the news, and therefore much in demand. It, too, has been set alight, semi-ritualistically, by public-spirited managers of video-rental stores. When my two children (aged seven and nine) noticed Child’s Play 3 in its package, up on a high shelf, they regarded it with reverent dread. In their schoolyard voodoo, Child’s Play 3 was considered potent, venomous, toxic. It was like angel dust — a ticket to frenzy. So one afternoon I duly settled down to watch a routine little horror film about a children’s doll called Chucky that comes to life and starts killing people. The modicum of horror it inspires can be traced by to Freud’s definition of the uncanny: ambiguity about the extent to which something is, or is not, alive. Equally conventionally, such frights and shrieks as the film elicits have to do not with very scary things happening but with mildly scary things happening very suddenly. As the credits rolled on Child’s Play 3, I felt no urge or prompting to go out and kill somebody. And I also knew why. It’s nothing to boast about, but there is too much going on in my head for Chucky to gain sway in there. Probably the worst that Chucky could do to me is to create an appetite to see more Chucky, or more things like Chucky.

What we have to imagine is a mind that, on exposure to Chucky, is already brimful of Chucky and things like Chucky. Then, even if you mix in psychopathology, stupidity, moral deformation, dreams of omnipotence and sadism, and whatever else, Chucky is unlikely to affect anything but the style of your subsequent atrocities. Murderers have to have something to haunt them: they need their internal pandemonium. A century ago, it might have been the Devil. Now it’s Chucky. When the killers tortured Suzanne Capper, they chanted the catchphrase ‘I’m Chucky. Wanna Play?’ When the two ten-year-old boys began to throw bricks, James Bulger fell down and stood up again. ‘Just stand there,’ said one of the killers, ‘and we’ll get you a plaster.’ And then he threw another brick. This is Chucky’s way: the worthless joke, the worthless swagger. Here was a mind that had seen a lot of things like Chucky, and had nothing much in prospect but more things like Chucky. Perhaps, also, the child who spoke those words didn’t understand the meaning of earnest. As a result, he was all too ready to play.”

Amis and Chucky. Huh.

From The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis, originally published in the New Yorker, 1994.

“He’s filming women sitting at a table reading literature. The twist is the things going on below the table. I like these sorts of things… As I start reading, my disbelief is suspended. I forget what is about to happen… ”

Wear headphones, unless you’re home alone and have accepted that your cat thinks you’re a piece of filthy human scum. On a friend’s recommend that I might like the book, I added Necrophilia Variations by Supervert to my read pile. [via i'll tumblr for you]

Alongside the recently passed exhibition Selling Sex, SHOWstudio launched Fashion Fetish — a series of multimedia projects, films, and essays by industry women. Ruth Hogben, Daphne Guinness, Liberty Ross, Aimee Mullins, Asia Argento, and Dasha Zhukova were a few participants who commented on the “contentious and provocative” fusion of fetish and fashion. Although the exhibit is over, the website indicates new works will continue to be posted.

“Fashion Fetish hands the power entirely to female fashion professionals, asking them to address the notion of Fashion Fetish and examining their individual visions of women. In contrast with Selling Sex, which reimagines the female relationship with sex, Fashion Fetish focuses on a woman’s relationship with clothing. Although as fashion historian Anne Hollander has asserted, the nude in art always wears ‘The fashion of her time’ — fashion’s influence can be felt across the naked flesh, her body as ‘fashioned’ as a corseted ball-gown. Dressed or undressed, this project offers a clear field, a blank canvas and an open mind to a selection of some of the most important women working in fashion today — designers, stylists, models and image-makers — inviting them to present their own interpretation of Fashion Fetish. Their visual interpretations of the Fashion Fetish theme are then used as the inspiration for a host of female authors, journalists, and cultural commentators to ‘unpick’ fetish in a series of accompanying essays, each written to correspond with a particular piece.”

Supermodel Lily Donaldson channels seedy, amateur erotic footage in a film inspired by Furries.

Directed by founder and editor-in-chief of Garage magazine, Dasha Zhukova, starring Chloë Sevigny and fashion writer Derek Blasberg.

Asia Argento created a series of mesmerizing video diaries.

This weekend I attended a party where the drink of choice was communion wine. The standards for sacramental wine are different than consumer wine, which is why — perhaps naively — I didn’t think you could purchase it online. Apparently you can, but it’s really just wine made to altar wine standards — grapes only and “uncorrupted.” True altar wine is not sold to the general public. Angelica wine is the most popular altar wine. It’s a sweet, high-alcohol dessert wine that is believed to originate in Los Angeles, produced by Franciscan missionaries. You can buy a consumer variety over here.

At the same party, I ended up talking to a man who believes he’s a werewolf. So, that happened.

Sister Janet Mead rocks. [Spotted via David E. Williams]

The Colonial Theatre

I paid a visit to The Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, which hosted its first show in 1903. Scenes from The Blob were filmed there. The balcony is still open to patrons.

James Bond

I’ve been writing a James Bond column for Movies.com and was excited to spot these Bond girl makeup tutorials from Sam and Nic of Pixiwoo fame. Their videos are always beautifully shot, and the artistry is admirable. I don’t wear nearly as much makeup (or smear glue stick on my face, ouch), but I always pick up a few things to try out and learn about new products. They love recreating theatrical pop culture looks.

This week I published New York artist Steven Hirsch’s mesmerizing photographs of alien abductees on Flavorwire. As I wrote, they’re eerily beautiful, and the stories that Hirsch was able to inspire his subjects to share really complete the pictures — as one of the accounts by HBO’s Cathouse star and Bunny Ranch prostitute Cami Parker proves:

“In my dreams I see strange men. You know I want to say men but they looked almost sexless, like not necessarily men but just beings, creatures that were poking me, examining me, almost like when I got my boobs done. They were looking at me, searching me and exploring me and it was very strange and honestly quite disturbing, but I felt like they had a higher knowledge of myself then I even had on my own.”

Hirsch shared another great photo series with me that he captured in Crystal, Nevada. The Cherry Patch Ranch is an abandoned brothel and apparently haunted — perhaps by the 1970s if the decor is any indication. A Google search shows that infamous Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss was going to be the “madam hostess” of Cherry Patch several years ago.

Click the images in the gallery to enlarge, and then visit Hirsch’s other great work over here.

“I took a second leave of my master; but as I was going to prostrate myself to kiss his hoof, he did me the honor to raise it gently to my mouth.”

—Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

Culturcide’s Mark Flood has brought his “anarchic humor and disturbing visions” to New York City. The best way to discover his work is through the friends and people that have known him since “the hateful years” — also the name of his show at gallery Luxembourg & Dayan. The exhibition opens today and will be on view through September 12. I asked my friend and collaborator, Generack Butylstumpf of Rubber (() Cement — a follower of Mark’s since the ’80s — to share a few thoughts about his work. Big thanks to Luxembourg & Dayan for sending me a preview of the exhibit, which I’ve posted in the gallery below. (Click the images to enlarge.)

‘Sacrificial Eyecons in the Crosshairs of Dissonant Monsters’

In a city of parking lots, highways, and billboards, Houston has had a lampooning, cynical beast in the creations of Mark Flood. His tools in the ’80s — and his experimental rock vehicle Culturcide — were the tableaux of disposable culture. The Culturcide LPs came out criticizing society and described the Texas cultural landscape as it choked itself in a sea of mediocrity, anti-art attitude, and people commuting to their 9 to 5 cages.

The city was populated with puerile spoon-fed non-art. And then there was Flood — a dark figure (in a regular T-shirt) moving through the punk corridor, criticizing and redecorating the omnipotent media (while looking you in the eyes) with distortions and melted effigies. Money was the cause of life, living, and function. In his cave painting style as a Pont d’Arc (with an inter-brain Matisse stroking an M16 paintbrush), he took groups of heads, figures, and arms letting them function as hateful nexuses ready for a society to react to the strange relationship on canvas. His next step in the ’90s was to get rid of art all together, and sell ad space on his canvases — which spoke to the United States’ view of the art world.

In the ’80s there was the “bumper sticker” phrases — which he still pursues — featuring loud capitalized words on sprayed or painted surfaces, declaring billboard-type slogans: “MASTERBATE OFTEN,” “FEEL WORTHLESS,” “PRETEND TO BE IN LOVE,” “HAVE FUN,” “DESTROY THE ENVIRONMENT—CREATE MORE JOBS,” and “EAT HUMAN FLESH.”

The “FLESH” poster ended up in a drug den that was busted, with the local Houston media in tow, making the poster a most wanted item in the semiconscious part of the Texas community. This “satanic” dealer’s item — described as such, because of a pentagram found on the floor at the bust — and it’s residue made Mark more of a small celebrity since it was featured on three different news networks. This show, from what info has come through the graveyard, is a reflection on the Vex World warehouse-club room Flood had filled with repainted products and faces, along with his discarded loose change, old mattress, and instruments of critique.

—Generack Butylstumpf, Rubber (() Cement

More Mark Flood:
http://glasstire.com/author/clark-flood/
http://www.lulu.com/shop/clark-flood/clerk-fluid/paperback/product-4811853.html

More information about the exhibit:

New York… Since the 1970s, Mark Flood has occupied the role of an “artist’s artist,” a protected insider’s secret for those who have encountered his work or known his band Culturcide. Working in relative obscurity in his native Houston, Texas, Flood came of age in a Big Oil town in boom times and witnessed at close range the onslaught of corporate and celebrity culture that came to define America in the 1980s. Situated at the intersection of art, music and social critique, his art rescues the relics of abandoned popular culture from the realm of waste in collages that transform celebrities into grotesque caricatures; altered advertisements stripped of their commercial identities; and found ephemera transposed across canvases. Every corner of American mass cultural output provided fodder for Flood’s early works; no popular culture figure or brand—whether David Lee Roth or Newport cigarettes—was safe from his scissors or microphone. Funny and irreverent, but also pointed, poisoned, and poignant, Mark Flood’s early work is both an enduringly powerful lens on America and a sophisticated, anarchic continuation of high art’s love affair with the readymade.

Beginning July 18, 2012, Luxembourg & Dayan will present ‘The Hateful Years,’ the first survey ever devoted to Mark Flood’s seminal work of the 1980s. Curated by Alison Gingeras, the exhibition brings together more than one hundred of the artist’s paintings and collages, which will fill the gallery’s entire townhouse at 64 East 77th Street.

‘The Hateful Years’ will remain on view at the gallery through September 12, 2012. The show will be bracketed by an introductory contextual installation of Flood’s, specially made new Lace Paintings on the gallery’s ground floor and an ‘80s mise-en-scène on its top floor. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Alison Gingeras; John Dogg; curator and critic Bob Nickas; art critic Ellen Langan, director of Maccarone; and Alissa Bennett, art critic and associate director of Luxembourg & Dayan.

Less a series of appropriative gestures than an act of resuscitation, Flood’s riot of ‘80s art in ‘The Hateful Years’ examines the vapor trails of culturally exsanguinated people, places, and objects in order to take the measure of culture. Though his technique ranges from craft-intensive collage and painting, to found objects assaulted by heavy-handed alterations, the artist’s work consistently functions without benefit of ironic distance. He knows and loves his subjects, and whether we are presented with images of pop singers whose faces have been decimated or found landscapes transformed into crudely rendered advertisements for fast food and gasoline, Flood’s concerns are specific to American desires and their resulting waste.

Whether through Culturcide’s signature deadpan lyrics sung directly on top of mainstream pop songs, or the artist’s elaborately collaged “muted” magazine advertisements (such as ‘Muted Car Ad,’ ‘Muted Detergent Box,’ and ‘Muted Coke Bottle,’ all on view in ‘The Hateful Years’), Flood’s work involves a very specific brand of cultural appropriation and critique. While such peer artists as Richard Prince and Sherri Levine were casting a cold, detached gaze on their “stolen” pop material, Flood’s use of purloined images always projected something hot and inflammatory, mutating things at once familiar and foreign. Capitol and commercial culture are frequent and crucial themes in these early works. In a series of text collages made in the early ‘80s while he was a file clerk for Texaco, the artist used company letterhead as the base for works such as ‘Service Your Master,’ a piece that features a cut up and re-purposed Master Card ad, which repeatedly incites the viewer to apply for a card and then submit to the bondage of debt. Though the text element of ‘Service’ is a transparent critique of consumer culture, the act of constructing it out of office materials while working at Texaco has the more complicated affect of reconfiguring the power relationship between worker and corporate employer. These works subtly deactivate the American mythology that labor offers spiritual and moral redemption.

Flood’s porn collages are his most complicated interventions. As befitting what for many will qualify as obscene and demeaning (i.e., pornography), the artist savages and heightens the obscenity with incredibly vulgar and outrageous, but humorous, insertions. This body of work within Flood’s oeuvre removes porn from the realm of titillation and insists, by way of grotesque collage, on just how interchangeable and commodified our body parts can be.

In the work on view in ‘The Hateful Years,’ there are no pretensions to mastery. Flood availed himself of found materials, particularly in terms of painting. Many of the works on view at Luxembourg & Dayan were painted additions to, or an obscuring of, a pre-existing image. Flood has often used found paintings—sourced from flea markets, garage sales, and dumpster diving–to fashion anti-billboards for his America. And here the artist set his sights on antagonistically engaging the art world itself, critiquing its self-congratulatory, self-reflexive tendencies. (Culturcide’s first single, “Another Miracle/Consider Museums as Concentration Camps,” was released in 1980.) Irreverent, independent, and political with an aesthetic edge, the works on view in ‘The Hateful Years’ evolved and accumulated outside the reach of the New York cognoscenti while foreshadowing many of the themes and visual strategies now common among a generation of high profile contemporary artists, including Nate Lowman, Joe Bradley, and Josh Smith. Flood’s legacy is at work in the current production of these younger artists—practitioners who have “discovered” his work over the last years through group and solo exhibitions since about 2008.

Located at 64 East 77th Street, Luxembourg & Dayan is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 10AM to 5PM.

Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator

Idris Khan, Mozart…. Requiem (Venice 2005)

Kate MccGwire

Miwa Yanagi

Andrew Smith

Nadine Byrne, Evocation of my Demon Sister

This is a “filmbookette” mentioning the vampy Ingrid Pitt and her 1970 movie The Vampire Lovers in the January, 1976 edition of Famous Monsters of Filmland. (Here’s my ancient review of the film on Moviefone, then Cinematical.) I’ve created a downloadable PDF file, but if you have problems saving it, drop me an email for a copy. Enjoy!