Envy the Dead, Volume 4 was the last of the zines, and it was truly an epic undertaking. Aside from the sheer amount of writing and collaging necessary to flesh out its loosely thematic content (much of it concerned with nuclear holocaust), an extended collating and stapling session around the dining room table — with a crew including Monsieur and the Slickery Eel — remains a memorable stage of its production. Exhorting the reader, “for the sake of peace and stability in Central America…[to] stop the emerging women of country music from crossing over into hip-hop necrophilia,” this, the chunkiest ETD ever, weighed in at nearly 80 pages — not including the Fucksheet Five insert! — and offered “a most unpleasant, unpaginated sensory experience,” indeed.
Highlights of ETD4 include another ambitious Mac commentary — this time on the prospects for nuclear apocalypse (here, p. 13) — as well as some cracked Muzak reviews (p. 28) and one of my favorite pieces of ours, a co-written celebration of a fictional show by the mythic “performer” who went by the name of Gudding 2030 (9). (We were going to take the name Gudding 2030 to replace that of F-Kripz on the Puny album, which was under construction at the time of Mac’s death. Those songs never were released, but you can check out the initial mixes under the Puny category on the home page.)
I’m increasingly proud of some of the collage art in this one, too, though I must give Mac credit for the Manson-head-on-the-body-of-Too-Short combo in the opening pages. His talented sister Janet contributed the back page.
fargo planet 