Interstellar Theme Park by Jack Skelley: Reviewed by Ben Tripp
Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing
by Jack Skelley
Review by Ben Tripp
BlazeVOX, December 2022
200 pages / $22.00
Jack Skelley’s new collection has a menacing glimmer about it, like an archeological find unearthed after four decades of excavation. His many years as a journalist with Salon, The Atlantic and Los Angeles Times, plus his output as a musician, songwriter and guitarist with the surf rock band Lawndale (represented by the iconic proto-Indie record label SST Records) are all brought to bear here throughout Interstellar Theme Park. This marks the first time that so much of this writer’s poetry and literary prose has come together in one place, much of it never before published. Bits and pieces of his underground classic experimental novel, Fear of Kathy Acker, appeared in little magazines here and there throughout the 1980s. Excerpts from another now rare book that was published around that time, Monsters, from Dennis Cooper’s Little Caesar Press, also appear in this collection. Overall, the book exudes a sense of both timelessness and its opposite, where historical factoids and celebrity guest stars of various eras mingle with Skelley’s lyrical flights of fancy.
He plays well with genre, and writes poems of eternal love to consumer products. There are lyrical odes to his hometown (Los Angeles’s “slender palms and aureate smog”). Skelley unabashedly embraces the mythic in the everyday. He admits to a lifelong “love/hate liason” with commodity culture at large. Interstellar Theme Park is divided into eight distinct sections: more classical-seeming verses that look like they could have been written by the precocious teenage Arthur Rimbaud during his Latin School examination days appear in the first three sections: “Planet of Toys,” “Product Placement” and “Artificial Heart.” However, Interstellar’s new cast of updated characters here includes some inanimate supermarket favorites such as Lemon Pledge, Crazy Glue, Botox, and then The Ramones. Later, in the remaining prose sections of the book, we encounter more household names of yore like Dennis Wilson and the Manson Family. When it comes to cultural reference points, Skelley doesn’t put too fine a point on them. It is a refreshing subtlety; for instance, the Vietnam War makes kind of a spectral cameo appearance that is never mentioned outright.
It is in the excerpt from his famed “secret legendary novel,” the rather auto-fictional Fear of Kathy Acker (forthcoming in full as a new edition by Semiotext(e) later this year) called “What’s Napalm?” where Skelley writes of growing up in Los Angeles not far from the Union Carbide chemical plant and refinery:
[…] the refinery flare burns and burns from the refinery, which is like a condensed city with all those lit-up platforms and tiers and towers, and there are all those refineries scattered around Torrance and Carson and Compton and Long Beach and San Pedro and they are all like distant orange Ozs seen from the freeway coming home late Sunday from old Aunt’s and Uncles houses […]
The tone suggests a certain feeling of living through the autumn of the late post-war patriarchy as an adolescent, with its spare, somewhat sardonic pastoral rhythm. In this featured excerpt from that novel, the young Skelley first wonders just what is the orange glow beaming into his bedroom every single night; he asks his Dad and his Dad first openly admits it’s where they make Napalm. Skelley doesn’t know what that is; he asks again and his Dad explains how it is a substance, “a chemical they make,” something that “when it lands on your skin…nothing can make [it] stop burning.” Later in the excerpt, when an older Skelley asks again, his Dad denies having the conversation at all. In the passage, Skelley remarks ominously that maybe his Dad had “wiped it from his mind.” Or in an even more Philip K Dick-esque way—perhaps a tongue-in-cheek science fiction twist—he mentions that maybe he can’t be sure of who the person he is talking to really is after all; he thinks, “Maybe it wasn’t my Dad.”
Alongside the writing, several full-color collages by artist Erin Alexander nicely echo these themes and many characters, icons, villains, heroes and the like. This pantheon includes ’50s era leggy pin-up girls, leftover TV dinner turkeys, the 40th president of the United States in his element on the television, impossibly sublime automatic kitchen housewives with confectionary hairdos, father figures in gray flannel suits with the heads of toy robots, children as docile passengers on an all-express blind ride through the newfound Atomic Age towards empty promises, cartoon food mascots liberated from their usual shelves, bygone actors of the black & white cinematic past take on the role of religious icons, if not politicians, ersatz saints and apostles.
In “Disneyland,” the book’s sixth section, Skelley writes poems that are non-fictional, more appropriation-based poetry—a kind of “sampling” if you will of real statistics, irrefutable evidence culled from public records. One such bullet-pointed list poem, unfurling in a matter-of-fact deadpan, is simply called “7 Deaths at Disneyland:”
1. Matterhorn Beheading (standing up for a low overhang)
2. Crushed in the Wheels of America Sings (attendant dies to “Yankee Doodle”)
3. Stabbing in Fantasyland (assailant was apprehended in Frontierland)
Skelley trawls through the historical record of this fabled place, expressing a certain ambivalence, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome with the ’50s, the nostalgia that comes also with a certain knowing-better-upon-reflection. The false utopia of Disneyland is its own refinery of sorts, churning out a certain kind of hyperbolic propaganda, showing a world always just out of reach, yet constantly ever-glowing on the horizon, frozen in an impossibly idealized time-space.
In the next section, “Toxic Assets,” he fast-forwards to the millennial era. This trenchant litany would seem to reference the 2007/08 Financial Crisis era. It is a whole other advanced goon squad of holier-than-thou corporate shysters and sly management class owners in the new digital capital age:
It wasn’t the implants and it wasn’t the sycophants.
It was neither the hedge funds nor the wedge issues.
It wasn’t the overnight financing of longtime short-sellers.
It wasn’t accounts without accountability, or lying with liability, and it wasn’t
insecure securities.
It wasn’t the under-the-counter bonus parties for the over-indulged “counterparties.”
It wasn’t excessive hemorrhaging from excessive leveraging.
It wasn’t the uninsured immigrant at County hospital when gang-green set-in.
[…]
It’s that they were all insured against failing.
The subtle metaphor of the human body and psychology is amusing and also harrowing. It’s an allegory of plastic surgery, different kinds of security, the obscenity of money speech and its appropriation of medical speech—its coldly smooth euphemistic ease. People are no longer “fired,” they are “let go;” companies do not “cut back,” they “downsize.”
Interstellar Theme Park offers Skelley’s unique diagnosis regarding this peculiarly all-American fate written in neon. The poems and short-stories are finely-wrought, meticulous, playful and deliberately profane, reveling in a kind of bacchanal, a miasma of sensory experience, music, sex, myths, personae. The author sets up his alibi in the introduction: “One lifelong, obsessive theme persists: a perverse celebration of pop iconography.” Upon reading Interstellar Theme Park and attempting to fully fathom its meaning, one can only conclude that it is entirely unlike any other book of poems today. Skelley stokes a psychedelic campfire in true scout form, borrowing something from the ever-churning wilderness of mass culture and its artifacts, leaving the site better than he found it.
Jack Skelley is an author known for Monsters, Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson, Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing, and The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker, which was just published on June 6th of this year. With over 25 years of writing and editing experience, he is a contributing editor for Modern Luxury publications and writes for Form magazine, Huffington Post, The Architect’s Newspaper, and more. He is also part of the psychedelic surf band, Lawndale.
Ben Tripp (b.1987) is a writer and performer from Passumpsic, Vermont, currently based in Queens, NYC. His poems, art & literary criticism and experimental fiction appear with Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Hyperallergic and Heavy Feather Review among many other venues. He was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2021 and received a NY Artists Corps grant that same year. He blogs at https://benjamintripp.wordpress.com.
30 August 2023
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