Bob Black

"Guy Debord once put out a book with sandpaper covers. The idea was to make it impossible to shelve the book with the rest without lacerating them. A good idea but Hakim Bey has gone Debord one better. He put the sandpaper inside.
Hakim Bey, the goofy Sufi, is the Marco Polo of the marginals milieu. An American, he journeyed to the East for the 70s while we homebodies bumbled along entropically. In Iran he went native. When that was not enough he went native again, this time in a country of the imagination, a Terra Incognita whose sea monsters hold no terror for him. Bey wants to put his homeland on the map - on a tropical island, an asteroid, somewhere.
Bey has a potpourri of penchants - anarchy, speculative physics, fanzines, dope, heretical Islam and comely boys - which are somehowall of a piece in his hands. Bey put the sin back into syncretism...."

"...Chaos is not a rehash of Sturm und Drang or Surrealism or anything like that, although it comes close in spots to the fantastic Orientalia of, say, the Fu Manchu pulps were they written by Nerval.
Not that he has no respect for the West - for his Maryland forebears Poe and Mencken, for the Luddites and Ranters and Haymarket bombers. The modern city is plainly the scene for the crimes and japes he proposes. But Bey has harsh words for the Occidental mandarins, the pedant provocateurs : "The Surrealists disgraced themselves by selling amour fou to the ghost-machine of Abstraction - they sought in their unconscious only power over others, & in this they followed de Sade (who wanted ’freedom’ only for grownup whitemen to eviscerate women & children)."..."
[http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/hakimbey.htm]