Once upon a time (since 1952) there was a Melbourne International Film Festival, and once upon a time (around 2000) they rejected a film called Pearls Before Swine by a filmmaker called Richard Wolstencroft. So, because the latter is a grown adult and not a big sooky pissbaby, he started his own event just a few months later to showcase his film and his mates’ films, the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, or MUFF for short. Like I said, grown adult.

I remember following this bullshit back in the day cos at the time I was doing the film show on 2SER so kind of had to stay abreast of this sort of thing, cos it was a kind of big film culture event and we were supposed to be interested in that sort of thing on the show. As such, I’ve been following it on and off for 20+ years now, whenever it’s come back into the news. Which it just did again the other day:

Travis is a friend of various other friends of mine, one of whom is a filmmaker (hi Chris) and retweeted this, which is how I discovered the current situation. It is, incidentally, not just “someone else” who snapped up the name. But more of that in due course. This will be a long one…

Let’s talk a bit more about Dickhead, who was once described thusly by the Underground Film Journal: “…an Australian underground filmmaker and the founder of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, which he currently still runs. His own films frequently deal with issues of violence and degeneracy. When his film Pearls Before Swine was rejected from the Melbourne International Film Festival, he created his own fest as a counter-programming rival. Wolstencroft has also been a tireless advocate for the promotion of more genre-themed movies to be produced in Australia to combat his country’s decline in worldwide cinematic respect.” I don’t know when this was written, but it curiously ignores Dickhead’s other chief interest. That being: fascism.

Which leads us back to where it all began with Pearls Before Swine, which I have in fact seen and in fact own on DVD (I am not proud of this fact), and which I’m content to let Adrian Martin describe: “…an incoherent, idiotic, excruciatingly bad film that revels in the kind of fascism espoused by naughty schoolboys: prurient shocks, tasteless jokes about the Holocaust and rape, po-faced appeals to “man’s brutality”, paranoid fantasies about State control, and nonsensical slogans about the coming New Dawn in art, life and sex.” Adrian was not a fan, clearly. I’m with him on that.

The star of this thing is Boyd Rice, whose Wiki entry adequately summarises what a shithead he is; he plays Daniel, a hired killer assigned to find and assassinate a “subversive” writer called Morton Bugs (not the seafood). The thing is, as we discover at the end of the film, Daniel is Morton Bugs. (Yes, I just spoiled the end of the film and fuck you, you shouldn’t want to watch it anyway.) This… kind of completely undermines whatever Dickhead was trying to do with his silly film (and the characters weren’t originally the same person either, which makes it stupider), which also features such luminaries as Douglas Pearce from Death in June (keeping that fascist connection going), David (Dee?) Thrussell from Snog et al and Ross Wilson from Mondo Rock (what, and indeed, the FUCK, Ross?).

Thrussell merits a bit of side-exploration here, as I always found their participation in Pearls confusing. I don’t know what gender they are, to start with; they came out as trans a decade ago for Snog’s Babes in Consumerland album, but when I saw Thrussell perform as Black Lung some time after that, they were, well, not noticeably female-presenting on that occasion. I remain confused as to Thrussell’s gender status, and Wikipedia doesn’t help; they credit Snog with being formed by “Dee Thrussell”, but the latter’s individual entry calls them “David”, says nothing about the transgender thing, but uses both male and female pronouns. So fuck it, I’m going with they/them for neutrality’s sake, and David and/or Dee can clarify it for me if it bothers them.

ANYWAY, back in the dim dark past of April the 24th 2008, your humble scribe here was in fact one of the support acts for Snog when the latter played the Gaelic Theatre in Sydney:

This is kind of what it looked like to my old Nikon that had… problems with taking decent photos in these settings; handily, though, being part of the crew on the night meant I could go upstairs at the Gaelic and get some different angles than I usually did at gigs. There was us (the Inflatable Voodoo Dolls), Bleepin’ J. Squawkins and then Snog, which on that night comprised Thrussell (centre), Eleanor Rayner from Sobriquet (left) and Dave Foreman from Tankt (right), who complimented us on our nerve for playing the version of Severed Heads’ “Dead Eyes Opened” we’d worked out (it’s handy knowing people who know Tom Ellard is all I’ll say about that). None of this has any bearing on this story, I mostly include it to remind myself that, for a brief period in the oughts, I actually did things like this.

Anyway, like I said, Thrussell’s part in Pearls always confused me, cos I was under the impression Snog was an essentially leftist project, righteously anti-capitalist and all that. Certainly that was still the case in 2008 when I played with them nearly 15 years ago OH FUCK IT ACTUALLY IS THAT LONG ISN’T IT… Er… fast forward to December 2022. MUFF is still going, and Dave and/or Dee (and/or Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Titch) has (have?) their very own sidebar of… conspiracy documentaries? Not sure if the introduction is by Thrussell or Dickhead, but here’s part of it: “Modernity has brought many bitter fruits to Australia. For me, one of the most poisonous of those ‘gifts’ has been the Extinction of Discussion. Simple, respectful, conversation has been all but abolished and replaced with a partisan, sectarian, landscape of division and enmity.” These were the films in question:

— The Real Dr Fauci [sic]
— My Son Hunter
— 2000 Mules
— Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe
— Vaxxed II: The People’s Truth
— The Great Global Warming Swindle
— Safe and Effective

Nothing partisan or sectarian about ANY of those, hey? I mean… these are not “modern heresies” like this sidebar was called, they’re just contemporary US Republican talking points. Incidentally, the MUFF site describes Thrussell as being from the “All Out of Bubblegum” podcast, which led me to the latter’s site, where I find Youtube links for the podcast but also links to where you can get the podcast on Rumble, Odysee and Bitchute, those outlets not at all used primarily by far right chuds. Oh Dave (and/or Dee). Perhaps you now understand why I have mixed feelings all these years later about having been their support act.

ANYWAY, back to Dickhead. The above selection of films is, obviously, dubious, but this isn’t as far right as MUFF has gone. Oh no, like I said, that’s just common Republican bullshit. Holocaust denial, now, that’s another matter. Dickhead has always been about controversy, so screening a David Irving “documentary” was as good a way to stir it up. I remember this happening at the time and went back to the research I did then. Basically, someone from the Jewish Community Council of Victoria wanted this and a video by Joseph Sobran pulled from MUFF 2003 on the grounds of racial vilification; my notes from then indicate he undermined his case by admitting to not having seen either, but let’s face it, this is David Irving we’re talking about, I was sure it was full of bullshit about THE JOOOOOOOOOOS!!!!! and I don’t know about Sobran but I don’t suppose it was much different.

Anyway, the “documentary” was apparently just a video of himself Irving had made pissing and moaning for 90 minutes about that time (1993) when Australia refused to let him into the country on the understandable grounds of him being an absolute cunt. To everyone’s surprise, though, the judge decided that, nasty thought it was, nothing in the video actually went against the law as such (at least not in Victoria; here in NSW it apparently was deemed to contravene the relevant Act). Indeed, some ten years earlier the OFLC had actually awarded the thing a G rating (narrowly beating out a few board members who thought a PG was more suitable and only one that thought it was completely beyond the pale). This was all about the same time that Ken Park was causing a fuss here; that was unfit for human consumption but Irving going off was theoretically safe for children. Odd, that.

Dickhead greeted the whole thing as a victory for free speech, though part of me feels he was probably also furious that he couldn’t now be a martyr to conservative censorship. (According to my notes, though, the screening never actually took place cos the venue scheduled to show it refused to do so. Weird how Dickhead didn’t fight that decision.) That said, MUFF would face actual censorship problems later down the track, all of which were, I’m sure, contrived by him to cause those very problems. But the Irving debacle was interesting in light of what Dickhead has said himself about his particular flavour of fascism… and, again, we need to go back to Piss Bile Shit (oh, YOU KNOW what I mean).

It’s been argued that “fascism” is a word thrown about too freely these days to describe whoever we don’t like politically, and there may or may not be something to that, but in Dickhead’s case there’s no argument: he is one. We know because he ADMITS it. But it’s a very particular sort of fascism that he calls “transcendental”. He set out to make Pearls a fascist film of this sort, according to the long essay accompanying the DVD of the film, but he abhorred the racist fascism of the Good Old Days and the capitalist-materialist fascism he could see around us during the 90s. A new kind of fascism was what he wanted for his idiot film, and he credits Boyd Rice with influencing that along with his later study of Martin Heidegger. A sort of kinder, gentler fascism with the bad stuff like racism cut out. Which is why programming the Irving video at MUFF frankly looks odd. If Dickhead was trying to posit himself as a non-racist, why was he pushing one of the world’s most notorious anti-Semites? Or was he whitewashing himself, as it were…?

Enter, finally, Shane Lyons.

I don’t know exactly what happened between him and Dickhead, except that they go way back, at least all the way to MUFF 2001 when Lyons actually programmed a retrospective of Melbourne Super-8 filmmakers (Lyons having been one of them himself). But the research I mentioned above about the Irving video case also noted Lyons’ activity against Dickhead… so whatever happened must have done so between 2001 and 2003. The nature of the beef is something I’ve never really known, but it feels like there’s something more personal to it than just Lyons opposing his politics.

At any rate, the website Lyons had at the time basically constituted an act of character assassination, but it was one where he let Dickhead fire most of the bullets, screenshotting his Facebook posts and comments. The latter did not take kindly to Lyons’ work, and though he was unsuccessful at getting an order taken out against him for stalking and defamation, Dickhead did succeed in shutting down one of Lyons’ blogs about him around 2010 (the original version I saw having been a Geocities job that would’ve been long-lost by that point). But Lyons did get another one going on Blogspot to repost that deleted content that’s still up, and if you look at that… FUCKING YIKES.

I took this from that blog, it’s a list of Dickhead’s favourite writers as of 2010, which I find illuminating. Though quite why Lyons limited himself to highlighting those particular three is a puzzle, cos there’s far more red-flaggy names on there. Like, you know, HITLER for fuck’s sake. And Heidegger, Spengler, Celine, Mishima, Pound. Eliade, Lewis, Evola, Guenon, Bardeche, de Benoist, Goad, Hamsun, Benn, Brasillach, Maurras, Devi, Spencer, Mussolini, Goebbels… I am admittedly puzzled by the obviously not-right-leaning authors on the list (Marx?!), but maybe that’s to indicate Dickhead’s fascism also transcends left/right literary taste or something…

Well, at least it’s not just the downfall of Australia that concerns him, I suppose. I don’t intend to post any more from that site, but I will say I’m not really surprised by anything on it; whatever Dickhead says about his fascism being non-racist is, clearly, bullshit when he’s pushing it and he’s a racist.

And a homophobe, which brings me to the last thing I remember hearing about him. Dickhead went off near the end of 2017 when marriage equality finally became law in this country despite the best efforts of various political forces to prevent such a thing, which not only served to remind people he was still alive but also that he was a champion bigot. He duly apologised, but by the time the next MUFF rolled around, he’d decided we could all get fucked: ““I decided to make the film festival a radical free speech event. I can say anything I want. I can be as racist, homophobic, psychopathic as I wish to be,” he said. “I’m tired of political correctness.”” Again, so much for his fascism being non-racist…

Anyway, that was kind of where things stood for ages, and I don’t recall hearing anything else about him until the inciting incident mentioned back at the start of this epic, i.e. MUFF being deregistered as an association. I have no idea just what happened there, but the new MUFF website offers this:

SHANE FUCKING LYONS!

I could’ve howled when I read that. I don’t know about the merits of Lyons himself as a person, he could be the piece of shit Dickhead obviously thinks he is and there does seem to be something obsessive about Lyons beyond the understandable abhorrence of Dickhead’s dubious politics; I have no particular desire to find out and would rather be able to just go back to not caring about the whole lot of them. But YE GODS the sheer comedy of Shane Lyons now being the owner of the MUFF name (however he did it) after two decaces of going after Dickhead… that is the peak of hilarity. If Wolstencroft had to cross my field of vision one more time, I’m delighted that this was how he did so; it really is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in ages. And THAT, at last, is THAT. Didn’t think this would become quite the epic piece it did, but hey, discursive rambling is one of those things I do now and then…