Deep in a rabbit hole, I stumbled upon the proverbial one thing leading to another and ended up on Lung Leg’s Wikipedia page. Lung Leg is also known as Elizabeth Carr or Lisa Carr, and this is her fur-lined book titled Futility which features poetry and drawings she made in the mid-1980s and sent to me while I was living in Germany. The blur of time leaves me foggy, but I may have learned about Lung Leg from Nick Zedd and his Cinema of Transgression, or maybe from the Richard Kern video for Sonic Youth titled Death Valley 69, or it could have from someone in passing. I’ll never know.

During that age of Mail art and fanzines, it wasn’t always difficult to find the contact information for people in any of the nascent art scenes that were bubbling up, and it was that kind of searching that led me to Lung Leg, corresponding with Nick Zedd, and exchanging a couple of things with Costes, the French version of G.G. Allin. Through Costes, I learned about the work of Suckdog and a project called Psychodrama titled Something To Offend Everyone featuring the first (and only) projectile shitting I’d ever witnessed (on video).

Back then, the world was far away, exotic, and sometimes dangerous. At the fringe of society, I found others who were recording the filth, decay, and darkness that I felt was hidden behind a facade of fake normalcy. It turned out that while America is a hotbed for innovation where capital chases the fertile minds of genius, a vast underclass of people has failed to prosper. In that malaise, artists and creators find inspiration to document the horrors of their existence. Artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kehinde Wiley, and Keith Haring, musicians such as Eminem, Kurt Cobain, and NWA, and filmmakers Spike Lee and Harmony Korine were just a few of those who emerged out of poverty with messages that resonated with a wider population. While the likes of Lung Leg, Nick Zedd, Manual DeLanda, Jello Biafra, and Hubert Selby may have failed to capture the popular zeitgeist, they no less managed to inspire many an aspiring fellow creator with their grit, tenacity, and ability to share their truths.