Practically every day of the year is an anniversary of something momentous and important. People have been beating each other to a pulp apparently since the beginning of time, so nearly any day you choose is the date of and important battle, a significant war, or some sort of memorable conflict. The conflicts are memorable because of the number of people killed or the outcome of the battle, which usually led to some other battle and more people killed.
Then there are the changes in leadership. A monarch took a throne, or some other monarch lost one. The overarching story of history is generally that humans are excruciatingly incompetent at picking competent leaders. Some enormous proportion of them got to be leaders because of those battles I mentioned in the first place. Beat enough other people to a pulp and evidently that qualifies you to be in charge of all sorts of things. And for the most part, the pulp-beaters raised to the throne seem to have been about as good at leading as you’d expect from some thug with a strong sword arm. Or else they got the throne because of being born into the right family at the right time. That hasn’t seemed to be a particularly good selection system either.
Anyway, I’ve had enough. Sure, there were plenty of battles, transactions, meetings, ascendencies to thrones, and political maneuverings that happened on February 22, but today I can’t be bothered to care about any of it. Instead I want to talk about two of the weirdest things from history. They both happened today.
The first weird thing that happened was that on February 22, 1950, Neil Megson was born in Manchester, England. Neil attended the Solihull School, a venerable institution of learning that dates from 1560. They went on to study at the University of Hull, but dropped out and moved into a commune in London. It was the right time for that sort of thing; the end of the 1960s, and young people were both fed up and ready to experiment with other approaches to life. That particular commune pushed hard to get members out of their existing routines. Nobody was allowed to sleep in the same place two nights in a row. Food was served at unusual times. Clothing was all shared, and everyone wore a completely different outfit each day.
Megson went a bit further than most, and changed his name to Genesis P-Orridge. I’m afraid I’m not sure how to pronounce “P-Orridge;” it might be the way it looks with the P standing alone, or it might sound like “porridge.” I’m also not sure, from what I’ve read, whether Genesis themself would care one way or the other. I’m about 75% sure that it’s “porridge”, but I’m not about to trust pedestrian statistics in any relation to Genesis.
Genesis partnered with Cosey Fanni Tutti (whose birth name was Christine Newby) in 1969 to form COUM Transmissions, a performance art collective. The group staged shows that seemed to be designed to provoke as much outrage, disgust, and media coverage as possible. On the other hand, they held some of their performances at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and the ICA’s membership skyrocketed. COUM worked at being as weird, transgressive, and tasteless as possible. Genesis had come up with the idea of COUM, and never explained what it stood for. It just remained open to interpretation.
As Genesis and some other members of COUM began to think about moving beyond performance art, they formed the music group Throbbing Gristle in 1976. Forming a band was as natural a progression from COUM as possible, although the participants would probably object to the idea of a “natural progression.” After all, COUM’s performances had included one event where they were hired to play music, but arrived without any instruments. But COUM wasn’t just about music, the collective also produced at least one book, at least one film, and managed to get Genesis into personal contact with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, two pioneers in the landscape of the weird. Gysin, in particular, turned out to be one of Genesis’ biggest influences.
Throbbing Gristle was more recognizable as a music group. They were early innovators in industrial music, and they’re listed as one of the founders of the genre by more than one observer. As music journalist Simon Reynolds said, “"Being a Throbbing Gristle fan was like enrolling in a university course of cultural extremism.” Throbbing Gristle survived until 1981, when the members all moved on to other projects and ideas.
The project that Genesis moved on to was to found Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. It was an occult idea — never really an “organization” — accreted around the ideas of “chaos magic” and experimental music. Chaos magic is — or, well, seems to be — based on the idea that to get magical results, the point is to repeat some sort of symbolic process that somebody believes in. You, the practitioner, don’t actually have to believe it, as long as somebody, somewhere, probably does. As far as you know. I think. You see, this is the problem when you start to get closer to the frontiers of weirdness; normal language breaks down. Which is the whole point. Again, I think.
Anyway, the whole idea of an “occult” organization — even if it wasn’t exactly organized — frightened normal, conservative, establishment people. That was the whole point, too, but in the process Genesis got accused of child abuse. They were cleared, but as a result left the United Kingdom for good and moved to New York.
It was in New York that Genesis embarked their next tour of weirdness. They married Jacqueline Breyer, who became known as Lady Jaye, and the couple started the Pandrogeny Project. The idea was for the two of them to become a single entity, a “pandrogyne.” To get there they embraced the idea of surgical body modification. They were trying to become physically identical. Lady Jaye died in 2007, but Genesis kept going. They passed away in 2020, from leukemia, having stayed on the leading edge of weirdness for about 50 years.
If Genesis P-Orridge personifies weirdness for February 22 (and could do the same for any date you pick), Moose Murders is more of an organizational standard-bearer for the odd. It was a Broadway play that opened on February 22, 1983 in the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. It also closed on the same night, and earned a reputation as the worst Broadway production ever staged.
Moose Murders was billed as a “mystery farce.” It takes place at the Wild Moose Lodge in the Adirondack Mountains. The Holloway family (who have bought the place) are stranded there by a storm along with two “failed entertainers” and a nurse, and play a murder mystery game to pass the time. I gather that the events of the game begin to come to life. Or something.
The leader of the Holloway family is Sidney, an elderly man confined to bed (and apparently in a coma). Nurse Dagmar is on the scene to care for him. At some point in the production, though, viewers described a “mummified paraplegic” (Sidney) jumps up to kick a man in a moose costume. There was no such scene in the script, though. One critic described the show as “a show so preposterous that it made minor celebrities out of everyone who witnessed it, whether from on stage or in the audience.”
So what’s weird about such a stupefyingly bad play? It’s simply that a Broadway play doesn’t happen by chance. Dozens, if not hundreds of professionals review the script, there are months of rehearsals, and the production on opening night is not the first time the play is staged. A play can certainly fail to connect with its audience, but now did so many people miss so many chances to recognize something so stupifyingly bad? It either had to be a world-class episode of weirdness or, maybe, the intervention of chaos magic. With the emphasis on chaos.