In the mid-1990s, my dear pal Terre Thaemlitz, a transgender/transgenre computer musician, wrote a piece for bOING bOING Digital titled “How MAD’s Dave Berg and Roger Kaputnik Introduced Me To
Post-Modernity.” Yes, you read that correctly. I recently happened upon the piece in our archives and it’s timeless.
It was some time during my eighth or ninth year – still living in the void of preconsumerism – that books from MAD’s “Dave Berg Looks At… ” series began mysteriously materializing on my shelf. I was living in a Catholic household in a micro-burb outside of the suburb of West Saint Paul, Minnesota. The only people of color that I knew were a Ugandan college exchange student who had lived with us briefly, and my sister who had been adopted from a Korean orphanage. From what I heard, issues of ‘race’ and ethnicity revolved around a rivalry with the upscale, primarily-Jewish subdivision across the highway. Class issues ditto, only to be confused by the fact that my mother grew up in a Jewish ghetto because her family was too poor to live in the Catholic Italian ghetto. Immersed in my youthful White middle class aspirations, I found Roger Kaputnik, Superliberal, very funny. As I grew older and began to blossom into a gender-blending post-n freak (wherein n=any ideological variable), my other MAD books by Don Martin and the rest of the “Usual Gang of Idiots” were gradually abandoned – even disavowed at times. Yet I still found myself reading Berg’s books over and over again. For years I’ve tried to take this at face value – a random pre-adolescent thread woven lengthwise through the tapestry of my life. But in my relentless mania to uncover the ‘nurture’ behind my nature, to decipher the third-party political agendas behind my most subjective whimseys, the fact that Berg has been on my shelf “Looking at… ME” for two decades has to be big.
“How MAD’s Dave Berg and Roger Kaputnik Introduced Me To
Post-Modernity”