PIC: KM 2025

Cocteau Twins - Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops (Official Video)

I SAY THEY’VE GOT A BLOODY CHEEK

What’s it all about, Alfie?

Cilla Black’s impassioned existential outburst resonates perhaps more deeply in these times of contention, but who was ‘Alfie’? Where is he now? And what are the chances he’ll ever provide a satisfactory answer to the Scouse songbird’s enquiry?

The most obvious explanation is that Cilla’s high-pitched plea was aimed in the direction of Alfie Elkins, womanizing protagonist of Bill Naughton’s 1963 ‘kitchen sink’ play, ‘Alfie’, filmed in 1966 with Michael Caine in the title role. In fact, while there’s no doubt the fictional Elkins is the subject of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s title song for the film, (a big hit for Cilla, but performed on the US soundtrack by Cher, while Millicent Martin, of TW3 fame, sang the UK release version), Cilla insisted her paint-stripping, scream queen take on the source material was an attempt to articulate complex feelings about Alfred, called the Great, 9^th century King of the West Saxons and subsequently King of the Anglo-Saxons, relating specifically to the nature of the administrative and military reforms carried out during the approximately 28-year rule of chronic haemorrhoids-sufferer Alfred.

According to Cilla Black in an interview recorded before her 2015 death in Estepona, southern Spain, cryptic lines like, ‘And if life belongs to the strong Alfie, What will you lend on an old golden rule?’ directly address Alfred’s victory over Viking forces at the Battle of Eddington, after which England was divided between the Anglo Saxons of Wessex and the northern Danelaw. Echoes of the conversion of the pagan King Guthrum to Christianity at Alfred’s instruction can be discerned in the original lyrics of the middle 8 section.

‘As sure as I believe there’s a Heaven above, Guthrum, henceforth known as Athelstan, I know there’s something much more. Something even non-believers can believe in.’

Historians will fight with knives and give each other mocking nicknames over this, but the real tragedy remains; despite intense speculation over many decades, the question hangs in the air unanswered…

What IS it all about, Alfie?!

TELL US, DAMN YOU!

NEWER THAN THE NEWEST DREAM

My favourite month of the year has been a bit of a washout this time thanks to the knockabout antics of the jet stream, which provided non-stop sun last year but had nothing but feverish, steamy wet days on offer for most of May 2026, with a pleasant blast of hot summer for a few days last week. Otherwise, the circle of life rolls down the hill of eternity in its customary fashion. The swallows are getting on with their reproduction. The bluebells spread like a dreamy fairy fog then evaporated. The apple tree blossomed, frothing white and bridal, then shed its dress for a June honeymoon.

Camp psychedelic flippancy is my preferred mode of expression here at Xanaduum, but sometimes if the newsletter is to live up to its purpose as an accurate record of where my head’s been at, the music is obliged to get more sombre.

My attempts to restart the weekly Xanaduum were foiled by a doomed attempt to save two 2-day old kittens. Their mother, only 8 months old herself, dropped the first one in front of me when I was sitting in the garden, then did the same with a second kitten half an hour later. She’d already lost three of a litter of five and clearly couldn’t handle the burden at such a young age.

I sprang into action with kitten formula and regular 2-hourly feedings, bathing and help with the toilet. The first kitten, a gorgeous and unusual silvery-grey colour, like my cat Toby who died in 2015 aged 19, arrived quite poorly and despite our efforts, he died that evening while I was trying to feed the increasingly floppy wee beast.

There then followed 24 hours of trying to care for the second cat a black, short-haired female. She started out fine, eager to drink from a bottle, and filled with life and drive. I stayed up all night to feed her, then all of the next Sunday until 4pm. She seemed to be doing well until Sunday morning where she began to show the same signs of failing kitten syndrome as her brother had. I didn’t expect her to last past noon, but the Force was strong in this little cat and she kept going, although by this time she was limp and lethargic. Nevertheless, she let me feed her every two hours and clung to life in my arms, on my chest. I tried sugar water in case her blood sugar was low or she was dehydrated, and managed to feed her several more syringes of milk formula. Hopeless one minute, then certain she’d pull through the next, I went through an intense bonding with the kitten, who informed me her name was Ruby and her brother’s name was Silver. She seemed keen to stay but her body wouldn’t let her, and following her meal at 2pm, she went into obvious decline. Still, she hung on as I hugged her close to keep her warm. A series of sharp high cries told me she was reaching the endgame, then the little ticks of her breathing stopped, and she was there one moment, singing her last songs, then gone. Ruby died at 4pm on Sunday, as the feeding alarm went off, on the watch Kristan gave me to time the meals.

It was a powerful and emotional day. Ruby wasn’t here for long, but she left a massive impression on me.

There are many causes for fading kitten syndrome and there’s also a degree of inbreeding around the colony that’s not conducive to kitten health. Four siblings had already died. I have no idea what finally shut her down, but she struggled very hard to stay and we did everything we could to make it happen, to no avail.

That’s what happened but how it all felt was very different.

24 hours with no sleep to speak of, focused intently on the movements and breathing of a tiny fragile creature lying on one’s chest, fosters strange deliriums. It’s not the first time I’ve sat still with a dying animal in my arms, and not the first time I’ve tried to hand-rear newborn kittens, (many have survived, I hasten to add), but this little cat got right under my skin in the intense 24 hours we were together every second.

I didn’t think she’d make it until noon, but she kept going, determined to live, so that hope surged more than once, even though I was gently working milk into her increasingly limp neck which no longer able to support her own head.

As her cries got more urgent and numerous, and I had to face the fact the end was near, I was half-in half-out of a virtual space based on the stairs that lead to the throne of Bast in the film The Three Lives of Thomasina, with the mighty Patrick McGoohan.

PIC: The Three Lives of Thomasina Disney 1963

PIC: The Three Lives of Thomasina Disney 1963

Thomasina was one of the first films I remember seeing as a very young child, and it’s still a favourite. So deeply rooted in my imagination, it comes with the flavour of primal mythology, or scripture (in The Invisibles, Mason Lang says the film ‘Explains everything’ and he might be right). It’s a pretty good movie for kids in its own right, with a kind heart, likeable characters, and that early-Disney downplaying of sentimentality. McGoohan, with his typical beetle-browed fury, plays Andrew MacDhui, a Scots vet whose empathy and faith in God and are both shattered by the death of his wife, leaving him with a daughter and a cat he neglects. Thomasina’s seeming death cues up a satisfying redemption arc, you’ll be pleased to know.

As the end arrived in an avalanche of microscopic moments, I was overwhelmed by images and emotions that seemed to peak and collide until it was as if a blinding sun exploded behind my eyes. Ruby died and the watch alarm went off. I found myself on the bleeding edge of delirium trying to syringe drops of milk formula into a dead kitten’s mouth.

The rawness of the real has the true texture of mythology. Unmediated, present, unfiltered, so that it feels everything else is playacting. The protective shields don’t hold, the armour cracks, admitting the true moment and everything becomes suddenly bigger. All our stupid quarrels and misunderstandings, our distractions and consolations are rendered absurd by the scale and certainty of life and death. In the material world, it’s all just meat and motion but in the mind, the imagination, a tiny kitten can become radiant, solar as she dies, emitting pure revelation, base matter alchemised via participating mind into symbolic gold, where a miniature life is extended into the ideatic realm as an alchemical ruby cat star.

The gold glittering in this muck of mortality was a vast sense of privilege that overcame my senses. I felt honoured to have met this brief creature and shared in her magnificent life.

Her body still felt warm, rigor mortis never seemed to set in, so she lay like a Buddhist saint for days, surrounded by flowers, before I buried her and her brother together.

What rips me up is the lost potential. Ruby’s eyes never opened to see the world she’d made it to. Those miniature perfect feet and claws, made to run and climb, hunt and play, that never got their chance.

So all this got me thinking about Superman, and what I feel so many writers who tackle the character miss.

There are many well-meaning stories where otherwise talented creators choose to show Superman cracking under pressure. At one end of the spectrum Superman suffers agonizing guilt or grief, while at the other, he goes mad, or decides to become a murderous tyrant, in that way you do when things don’t work out the way you want them to. Were you to ask these writers if their own personalities are so fragile they’d go into complete reverse at the drop of a hat, they’d likely respond with outrage and denial, and yet they think Superman, who can move planets, would have flimsier convictions than they. The notion that his kindness is a veneer over a totalitarian core is relied upon with a regularity that speaks to a grand lack of imagination. There’s a curious refusal to think for more than a few seconds about what being Superman might actually mean.

Here is where I get frustrated. In attempts to ‘ground’ Superman or make him ‘relatable’, (as if he’s not), the ‘super’ is often overlooked in favour of the ‘man’, where ‘man’ tends to equal frailty and doubt. It’s easy to see why. The Superman/Clark duality inclines us to think of Superman as an uneasy alliance of Alien Superbeing Kal-El and Clark the Man. Kal-El is a performer too, however, and Superman is a performance, just as Clark is. The base level Clark Kent/Kal El who grew up in Smallville, and who is the fusion of the two sides, is the only one not putting on a show. Superman is fundamentally an entertainer, which may be why he was so powerfully drawn to the actress Lyla Lerrol when he went back in time to his home planet before its destruction and got to hang out with his mom and dad.

The Superman is the amalgam of the Kal and Clark elements. Growing up with only his basic Kryptonian enhancements – conferring superhuman speed, strength, stamina, durability – Clark Kent knew pain, fear and sadness like any normal boy. He surely remembers how they felt but with the advent of his full superpowers during puberty, these things, like bullets and bombs could no longer hurt him in the same way.

Superman, for me, is not a fantasy of unaccountable, skyborn U.S. power, as some like to suggest, but the fantasy of a powerful yet kind-hearted man who defends the vulnerable and protects the weak without demanding anything in return, and who uses his strength to deter bullies. Superman has remained meaningful because he speaks to something in all of us, a part of us that can and does rise to difficult challenges, that rips off its shirt to reveal an ‘S’ when we are called upon to handle seemingly insurmountable problems.

Equally, the focus on the ‘super’, where Superman is the king of the superheroes, or an abstracted symbol of ‘hope’, fails to capture the essence. It’s ‘Superman’. It’s Man Plus.

Which is why Superman wouldn’t suffer like me, if he tried and failed to save a life. He might feel the same pangs of remorse, but then his super emotional intelligence would kick in. He would remind himself that even he can’t expect to save everyone, but he always does his best. He would know that to be true, and berate himself no further. He would mourn with equanimity then rededicate himself to his task. Just as he can’t be hurt by bullets or bombs, neither can Superman be undermined by anguish or guilt or fear. They bounce right off him.

So, rather than showing us a Superman who breaks down or turns against his principles at the slightest hint of tragedy in his life - an approach which only tells us what we already know about the most frangible human beings under pressure – might our creative people try thinking instead, ‘I wouldn’t show Superman being cut by a blade, why would I show him being destroyed by grief? How would he really handle it?’

And how does a fragile Superman help the readership deal with their own problems? Seeing Superman succumb to grief, go mad, and kill Batman as a response, doesn’t help me feel better. I need Superman to provide tips on how to rise above the hurt and loss that can undermine us, and continue to be proactive and helpful.

I could write a Superman story where he suffers from guilt after failing someone. Right now, I could identify with that feeling, but as I’ve said before, Superman is not Christ. I don’t want him to suffer in my place, I want him to triumph, and by doing so, show me how it’s done. The more interesting and personally useful Superman story, as I see it, is where he is overcome by grief or anger and then we watch him process those emotions into something he can use to make the world better. Just as he’d lift a mountain or tame a tsunami, I want to see a Superman who shrugs off mountains of guilt or anguish just as easily.

He would sit for a while processing his lost, then he’d build a memorial to the person he let down, and he’d get back to being Superman. That’s how he rolls.

This then is my Fortress statue to Ruby, a tiny cat who barely lived but struck me in the heart like a bolt of purest cosmic lightning…

I READ THE WARCRY

Before all that, this week and last, I’ve been researching the history of the Salvation Army, luxury resorts in Jamaica, George Bernard Shaw, and how to defeat a robot dog in a fight, for various projects currently underway.

I drilled back into the dream film thing I’ve teased, and it flamed into life, crackling merrily until the new draft was done. Very excited to tell you what this is soon! Everything is lined up for this one to happen, so more news as it transpires.

Next came a long Zoom conversation with my old pal and Century Guild supremo, Tom Negovan. Among his many accomplishments, Tom recently restored the notorious 1979 film, Caligula, with Malcolm McDowell as the mad emperor, and basically recreated the entire movie using previously discarded footage. On our epic convo, we discussed the history of symbols, their use in Magic, and their development through the history of Art, for an exciting upcoming something.

I read Al Ewing’s Absolute Justice League and thought it was a masterclass in contemporary superhero storytelling. All the lessons of the last 40 years in comics and serial TV perfected and directed like a laser. Nice one!

I finished A World Appears, which was fairly inconclusive but provided much nourishing food for thought. I read Solace House, which I’m not entirely sure about. I think I mostly enjoyed it, but like The Blair Witch Project, it sustains an atmosphere of anticipation for hundreds of pages before offering a conclusion that doesn’t entirely satisfy. I don’t know if it really delivered on its promise but it certainly kept me reading. It was another of those things I stumble across more often these days where the writer appears to have been reading me and Alan Moore when he was younger.

Which brings me to There Is No Anti-Memetics Division by Qntm, which was great. I loved the bare simplicity and directness of the prose, and the powerful effectiveness of its restraint, which rendered the terse depictions of apocalypse all the more unnerving. Again, lots of Moore, me, and Rian Hughes in the mix but very much its own thing and worthy of instant classic status. U-2315 is already loose in the world, I fear.

Now I’m on I Hear A New World, the second in Alan Moore’s Long London series. I think I prefer this one to the first but I’m only a couple of chapters in and they just got back to the Great When. It seems to have more depth and texture so far and Moore’s prose has a new easy rhythm and assurance, although the wry, comedic tone of the narration tends to undercut any tension. I still don’t find the characters very engaging, but I think the series as a whole will wind up as a significant addition to Moore’s canon.

Obelisk - The Man In The Tower

I particularly enjoyed this entry in the Obelisk analogue horror series. I often have dreams exactly like this, and when I say exactly, it’s no exaggeration. The multiplying spaces, stairways, never ending doors that open onto half-rooms and more stairs, more doors, a kind of Lovecraftian proliferation of spaces and angles, staying just ahead of the pursuit… they’re all too familiar and oddly comforting.

It goes without saying that any readers who find uncomfortable the thought of running through endless claustrophobic doors, narrow stairways and empty rooms, on the run from an uncanny pursuer are advised to steer clear.

I’m fascinated and drawn to this world of odd and melancholy horror nostalgia. The notion of memories degrading – also a feature of the Backrooms movie - suggests that the new frontier of fear after all those billionaire zombie nightmares is a kind of ontological Alzheimer’s, where the loss of memory definition leaves a distorted echo of some original, comfortable reality, now reproduced and reiterated, twitching with glitches that proliferate through each degraded copy, into something uncanny, unfamiliar, unheimlich. Like the world we’re in now compared to how it used to feel!

The notion of former childhood playmates, imaginary friends, or magical toys becoming forgotten, and losing themselves to distortion, deformity, monstrosity, while still retaining a poignant glow of their former kindly purpose shows up in many of these gloomy forays too, again pushing this slow drip of amnesia as a new locus of terror in our lives.

I finally watched my Team Human episode with Doug Rushkoff, which struck me as an unusually ‘punk’ performance, during which I maintain an expression of total disgust for over an hour! That high-pitched whine of steaming rage ending almost every sentence! Every contemptuous syllable spat out as if the flavour of thinking about these billionaire politics pricks was converting to pure bile!

Good heavens!

So unlike the avuncular rumble and Santa Claus twinkle of Alan Moore!

Alan Moore on Reclaiming Our Imagination from the Authoritarian Overlords

It’s getting hard, I feel, to make a convincing claim that there’s any kind of feud or War in Albion when the alleged combatants are broadly in agreement and make many of the same points, using the same language…

HOT COP DRAG

Dorothy – bravo! I love these poetic distillations of our themes!

Brigitte – And you! So many old churches are haunted by these flagrant, leering embodiments of fertility.

Sean – Is that the Providence piece you trailered over at Shelfdust? I thought Providence, especially the first four issues, was genuinely eerie, and deeply immersive, and I’m looking forward to your thoughts.

Thanks for the kind words on Black Knot.

I haven’t played the Alan Wake games, so have no basis for an opinion. What’s your take? Are they sort of Lovecraftian things?

Jwparrishiii – Kickstarter has never really appealed to me, but that could change! It’s taken years for Frank Quitely to finish Dead World, so the chances of him starting something else and having it done within our lifetimes seems remote.

DeeSee - The Prince William headline was something I saw in a newspaper. I’ve no idea what it referred to, and I think there was more to it, but I cut it there (though perhaps it would have been better if I’d written ‘Why I don’t believe in Prince William’ with the suggestion that he’s more like the Loch Ness Monster or an honest politician). My sub-headings are usually lines from songs I’m listening to, (‘Yardstick for Lunatics’ was from Incense and Peppermints by the Strawberry Alarm Clock for instance) or headlines I’ve read, often with some words changed for non-sequitur effect. On odd occasions, I’ll just make something up. You’re not missing any hidden significance.

Today for instance, I noticed two headlines on a pile of Times newspapers – with Dawn French saying, ‘I’ve survived grief and loss’ (my thought: welcome to the human race, Dawn! Hope you survive the experience!) and the classic ‘I’m 61: Why shouldn’t I wear a bikini?’ To which the answer is surely ‘Because you’re the bloody Archbishop of Canterbury!’

I’m envious and fully supportive of your refusal to engage with the hysteria of the shitosphere, and feel slightly guilty for exposing you to any of its fetid contents. When I decided to write this newsletter, I knew I’d have to scout around the internet looking for things to motivate a weekly column. Stuff I could react to, so I wasn’t just talking about seagulls and crows and village politics (a Trumpian nightmare of villains and exploitation, interestingly and vexingly enough).

What I found, scrolling merrily through news, views, and YouTube content delivered by an unholy chorus of howling contending voices, was a delirious vision of a world convulsing in horror and desire, a perpetual doomsday imagineered by powerful sado-fascist overlords and amplified to a scream by the media, as if under orders to keep us enthralled and powerless in bewildered, bedazzled paralysis.

I think it might be Oceania versus everybody this week but there’s always a new fixture to look forward to as these premiere league countries square off for the cup.

And I only came to read the meter, missus!

If you value basic decency and truth, the news is incredibly disheartening, even depressing. I don’t find it a healing inoculation of grime but a download of pure unfiltered sick designed to demoralise! Having written The Filth, however, I feel I’ve developed an immunity to these hazardous materials and I love trying to purify them into googly prose.

‘We’ll take your poisons and piss them out as vintage champagne!’

One final ranting example before we leave the news to devour itself in the corner.

The BBC 6 o’clock news, which often boasts of its objective, balanced coverage is a cess pit of torture porn, visceral shock imagery, and a deliberate refusal to engage with real world news. They know people are sitting down with their dinner, so they exploit that vulnerability to reinforce anxiety. Only this evening, I happened to turn on to find a top story about how hot it is the UK and elsewhere, as we near Midsummer. This was followed by a graphic report about a decline in British birds of prey, which came with brutal and wholly unnecessary found footage of men beating the fuck out of innocent hawks in cages. Still reeling and choking on our tempura, the next item brings a graphic story of breast cancer that went untreated by a dodgy doc, complete with bloody close-up surgery. Then it’s half an hour of ‘football team wins football match’, as if that’s somehow unusual enough to report. Nothing about politics, now warnings about the fascists lining up to seize and bleed the UK. Instead, a relentless tide of A Clockwork Orange-style Grand Guignol atrocity footage.

‘Toxic’ barely covers it!

3 Against Mystery isn’t a horror story, so you should be okay there (although I see from a later response that you’ve read it now – thanks for the kind comments!) It’s a kitchen sink drama with magic mushrooms to make the mundane sparkle. The Cthulhu one does get a bit fucked up in places, so you can skip that if you’re not keen on feeling bleak.

Unity’s recreation of Paris, with the massive seething crowds is spectacular, I’m 27 hours into Crimson Desert and thoroughly digging the sprawl and invention, the breathtaking vistas (so much more appealing than the ‘Soulslike’ landscapes of screeching, mulched biology and cancerous castle keeps. I’ve barely begun, having spent most of the time that time exploring every area on the gigantic map, while still only on Chapter 5! It reminds me most of the Witcher Wild Hunt, which I loved, but even Wild Hunt didn’t have robot pterodactyls, zeppelins, hot air balloons, and trains in its fantasy world. I’m currently riding a circus lion around the map, and no-one can stop me!

Aside from games and the odd film or TV show, engaging with the world on the screen tends to leave me feeling physically uneasy, often outright nauseous.

As for where the words come from, for me, the words arise from feelings. I have a feeling I want to convert into a signal. The feeling transforms to words if I’m writing prose, or to pictures, then additional words, if it’s comics. The initial flood where there’s a build-up of energy that has to be released is not quite automatic writing, it’s more directed, more participatory, but shares a flow state effect of absorption and spontaneity.

When that happens, I’m racing to keep up with the movie unfolding in my head – ‘movie’ being simply an analogy for an immersive 360 ‘daydream’ that’s much more absorbing than any film.

When I write, it generally pours out in a huge, unformed mass of words that emanates from the universe through the lens that is moi. I only get some of it down and it’s distorted by my moods or level of attention but the first blast comes when a bunch of stray concepts develop interesting relationships to one another, clump together and then form an idea with its own gravity. I know what I want to write about but may not have worked out details of plot, (with comics I always began with key images that anchor the story), so I start on the exciting bits that best capture and recreate the feeling.

I usually get a lot of good material from that first Dionysian geyser of words – but there’s a great deal that doesn’t make it through editing. Sometimes only a sentence will survive to put out new shoots. Editing is where the real work starts. That’s where the Apollonian filter is applied, and the raw material is refined and organised through the mill of craft.

Nathan – The Prodigy are still worth seeing but it’s not the same without Keith. There’s no singing! I’ve seen them loads of times including one genuinely transcendent experience in the early 2000s and a lacklustre, insincere performance 20 years later in Glasgow. This was better than that deflated performance.

All of the entries in the Assassin’s Creed series share that historical educational appeal, where you’re running into Ben Franklin, Robespierre or Captain Cook, but I think Origins was the first one where they added the tour feature that allows you to stroll around immaculately reconstructed simulations of Luxor, or Cyrene without getting into fights, learning about the culture, the architecture and the local characters up close. I recall strolling around Alexandria with the guide and being sucked right into the past.

Magic K – the closing reveal in Red Sun, that Superman had been rocketed to the present from a doomed future was mine, but as Kurt Busiek himself has pointed out, that’s just the origin of Samaritan, the principal Superman stand-in from Astro City. My big twist was the closing reveal that the ‘El’ in ‘Kal-El’ was the ‘L’ in ‘Luthor’, abstracted through centuries of DC sci-fi names like Jordan Luth-R etc. The idea I was so pleased with was not Superman being literally the man of tomorrow, but the perfect ironic loop where Superman/Kal-El turns out to be the direct descendant of Lex Luthor!

I was still in a friend and mentor relationship with Mark at that time, and spent many enjoyable hours talking through his story problems on the phone. I suggested a few specific scenes and bits of dialogue for Red Sun – and I pointed Mark in the direction of some useful reference, like the Vietnam POW story that became Green Lantern’s origin - but Mark had the big concept and all the basics mapped out, and you may be surprised to learn that the letter reading ‘Why don’t you put the whole world in a bottle?’ was all Millar.

Osiris – Partially rested! Events as described above.

I love the editing process but find it hard to stop (I’m often amused when I read irate reviewers complaining that I needed an editor on Luda, when in fact Luda had four professional editors who worked on the text)!

I have a great many first editions of Luda! I’m afraid I’m in position to send them to anyone! Perhaps I’ll make them a prize for a competition or something!

Bobby – Thanks for the links to the interviews! Really enjoyed those!

Patrick – I don’t think the Joker is a chaotic force, and tend to agree with you here. When Heath Ledger’s Joker talks about being an agent of chaos in The Dark Knight, he’s lying. He claims not to have a plan, yet everything is meticulously set up. The Joker has always been a ‘plan ahead’ character since his very first appearance. And Batman’s a weird vigilante who doesn’t think the law applies to him.

Fr. Theta – I can’t get enough of this TARDIS talk! I had a line in my Doctor Who comic story, The World Shapers, about TARDISes being terrible gossips when they got together. I had another Time Lord dying in on the first page of that – his TARDIS was a huge sculptural crystalline thing, possibly the Marinus equivalent of a police box, that dematerialized with a smooth TZZZU TZZZZU, as I recall, instead of a gear-grinding wheeze.

Alice – the Wolf Hour, like the Devil’s Hour and the Witching Hour, is that eerie time between 1am and 3am. For our narrator ‘worrywolves’ are a play on werewolves – worries that turn into wolves that rip at your peace of mind in the raw pre-dawn! Avoid them if you can!

Ben – I’ve seen Under The Skin, but haven’t read the book. The landscape of the film is all very familiar to me – I love the idea that Scarlett Johansson just drove around Greenock and Port Glasgow picking up random guys in her van. Aside from that one ‘You look like that Scarlett Johansson,’ none of the men twigged it was her!

That’s folks, all! See you next time!

PIC: Kliff meets Zappa KM - 2026

Apollo 440 - Lost In Space (Theme) (Video)

WHY I JUST DON’T BELIEVE PRINCE WILLIAM

Have they gone yet?..

Back from some much-needed time off, (I find these weekly bulletins incredibly time-consuming and may stretch it out a bit over summer)! Welcome to your new improved space age utopian joypunk solarcore adventure among the stars!

All strapped in?

This new future we found just lying around in the trash is going to be guh-guh-great! You can practically hear the greatness oozing from its pores!

Last year was wall to wall summer from March to October, but this year, the gardens were pummelled to mud by freezing rain from the beginning of the year until mid-April. Winter wouldn’t let go until those bony fingers finally slipped loose and the temperature rose a little as the sun returned from its extended holiday in Africa, accompanied by the first swallows, concluding their epic 6000-mile migratory flight in welcoming ancestral mud nests baked into our eaves by generations of their forebears.

The light has been seeping back into the night and what began as a raw and naked evening luminosity, a scouring astringent brightness without heat, has blossomed into golden syrup afternoons.

Basking at last in sunshine while the same dribbling old dullards continue to act out, talk shite, and leave oily spunky fingerprints on everything they paw at. Will life ever be sane again?

A YARDSTICK FOR LUNATICS

Remember this picture of what lies ahead for the Pyramid and the Patriarchy? Undone by War, Time, and the Dark Goddess. You can watch it happening on the news in real time these days!

PIC: Rian Hughes The Tower - 2024

The Ultrawar dug deeper into its mythic phase when the crumbling honeyed avatar of Horus turned his attention to the living embodiment of the Osiris Age, the Pope of Rome himself!

The now infamous image (how long ago it seems!) of the current President of the USA in Jesus drag – or as he described it, portraying a ‘doctor’, with the explosions of divine light from his palms suggesting Doctor Strange specifically - performing the laying on of chipolatas for what appears to be Jeffrey Epstein in the role of Lazarus, is curious in many ways.

My favourite detail can be seen above Hail to the Chief’s left shoulder in the form of what looks like a triple-crowned Demogorgon.

PIC: US Admin - 2026

The Independent newspaper attempted to stem any potential Satanic panic by speculating that this unsettling AI chimera was intended to represent the Statue of Liberty. Me, I had no idea Hell came with its own flying Statue of Liberty, like Blackpool has its own sort of Eiffel Tower, but you learn something new and worth forgetting every day! Curiously, since I chose to look into this crowned and conquering manifestation of sin, the algorithm has decided to offer me unwanted torture content on YouTube, (‘Torture techniques of the cartels - more sadistic than the Inquisition!’) and a vivid insight into the madness of the fundamental religious fanatics in charge of both Iran and the USA.

Anyway, those were simply military flags extending from the sinister apparition’s hallucinated shoulders, The Independent’s experts in demonology explained. The figures were obviously superheroes, ‘like Thor’, they offered helpfully.

We are reminded of H.P. Lovecraft’s description of the titular monster in Call of Cthulhu - ‘If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.’ In this case some combination of Thor, flags, and the Statue of Liberty strive to conjure the ‘spirit of the thing’ offering a bold attempt, from a human perspective, to contain an impossible object in words.

Adding intrigue, this AI image featuring a messianic POTUS as its centrepiece was created by ‘conservative commentator’ Nick Adams and posted on X in early February, according to fact-checkers. In the original creation, the demonic figure was not present. The Regent of Hell was added by the White House propaganda team, the dark supernatural forces they serve, or by something else entirely, like a delirious Midjourney vision of the day before the day after tomorrow.

Choosing to simmer the way a diced carrot would in this bubbling soup of disinformation, I took to a bath to concretize the metaphor the only way I knew how. On the way, I picked up the third volume of my Wonder Woman Earth One series with artist Yannick Paquette for a flip through while I stewed in near boiling water for an hour, hoping to provoke a startling metamorphosis.

No escape from the news, even there in the funny papers! Published in 2021, the comic features page after page of chilling prophecy, often using precisely the same language that’s being used by the media to describe the current global situation.

I still insist that Covid bears much of the blame for the manic slaughter and mass psychosis of the human race in these 2020s. Autoimmune disease. Cytokine storm. Recent research even suggests a potential autoimmune explanation for some cases of psychosis and schizophrenia, as if to rub it in.

BRAINDROPS ARE FALLING FROM MY HEADS

Originator of the Chaos Magic current and creator of the IOT, Peter J. Carroll died last week. His books Liber Null and Psychonaut, along with Ray Sherwin’s Book of Results introduced me to Chaos Magic in the late ‘70s and set me on a lifelong path, so many thanks for that, Pete.

I like CMAT’s Jamie Oliver Petrol Station and Catch These Fists by Wet Leg, especially that post punk/Franz Ferdinand guitar riff. Girls are still doing all the best stuff and Ma’at has all the best tunes, but I’ll admit to briefly enjoying Cruz Beckham’s guileless ‘90s pastiche music. By and large, I find the Beckhams repellent, but this lad won me over with his cheeky ‘I’m the alright one in the family’ routine and a slavish devotion to dodgy Britpop. And I’ve tried my best to avoid Angine de Poitrine, the algorithm’s favourite musicians – ‘It sounds like Primus…’ says Kristan – but the ‘Dada’ video for Sherpa delivers a spectacular AI depiction of what goes on inside my head most days!

Angine de Poitrine – Sherpa | A DADA Film

We went to see the Prodigy a couple of weeks ago. A strange show, and the first we’ve seen since the death of vocalist Keith Flint, the Firestarter himself. Without him, there were barely any sung lyrics. Maxim has a powerful stage presence but otherwise limited himself to exhortations to his ‘warriors’ and a few upbeat yelps. It was more like a dodgy techno night than a band show, with a heavy seething crowd of Glasgow ravers and older male fans succumbing to the ill-advised desire to strip to what only the very kind could describe as their ‘waists’.

I haven’t got into many new books recently, although I received a copy of The Unseen Internet from author Shira Chess – about the occult colonisation of digital spaces - which looks great. I just wrapped up The Beauty and the Terror: an Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance by Catherine Fletcher, which I started last year then left on a chair in a room I rarely visit. It’s a period I’ve long been fascinated by, and the book has a wealth of engrossing new information and insights. Now I’m reading A World Appears by Michael Pollan, which so far isn’t telling me anything I don’t know about consciousness but has loads of incredible material about animal and plant cognition. It turns out I would be regarded by some as an ‘idealist’ - someone who believes Consciousness to be a fundamental/the fundamental property of the Universe.

Otherwise, I’ve been too busy to read at my customary rate – I’m emitting a sullen creative radiation rather than absorbing stuff right now as I tackle two big franchise characters for two different comic book ventures – but I did catch up with the latest instalment, Chapter 6 that is, of Sarah Jolley’s astonishing Doctor Who comic, Into the Inkwell.

Sean Dillon turned me onto Sarah’s work, and I’ve since struck up a correspondence with the artist. Into the Inkwell has been consistently great, but this new episode is the best comic book I’ve read in years! If that’s not enough, it’s my favourite episode of Doctor Who since Capaldi quit. Into the Inkwell has, so far, read like the best season of Doctor Who in many years. If they had any sense, they’d have Sarah working on the show. Her art pulses with intense colour and moves like it’s alive. It’s supremely kinetic and extravagantly animated in a still medium.

The stories are great. The characterisation is spot on and, I’d venture, better than anything in the last series, if only because Sarah’s fluid, appealing take on Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor is given room to breathe and move and emote in a way that doesn’t feel as artificial and performative as the real thing (as regular readers know, I thought Gatwa started out with incredible promise and charisma that was stylised very quickly into a series of repetitive tics). Sarah’s take on Lux Imperator puts an uproarious trickster god in the companion role and turns a character I found charmless on TV into a source of relentless entertainment, as he reliably outshines the Doctor in every episode.

The latest chapter is a truly fantastic done in one story that’s part of the grander narrative. It’s about ChatGPT and the consumerist impulse, among other things, and it’s probably the best comic you will read this month.

Here’s a link to the whole thing so far:

Doctor Who Katabasis : Page 1 | Fan Art Comics | Jolley Comics

And here’s Sarah’s own website:

Jolley Comics

UNTYING THE BLACK KNOT

Thanks to those of you who followed the weekly instalments of Archive & Analysis: 3 Against Mystery and the Business of the Black Knot, (or ‘3AM’ as ace editrix Shelly Roeberg refers to it), and special thanks to those who commented on the story. The encouragement was appreciated.

The story is based on a few real-life incidents, locations and characters.

At school, I actually did assemble a short-lived team of 15-year-old ghost hunters inspired by the Three Investigators books. We did, as in the story, find a mysterious film reel and a note from an alleged ‘private investigator’ in the so-called Haunted Woods.

Mine was a boys’ school so we had no Ari Welcome on our team – she’s based on a number of people I’ve known over the years and appeared first in a supporting character role in my novel Luda. I liked her sour, acerbic tone in that and fancied going deeper on her character, hence Archive & Analysis.

Ariadne Welcome and her twin sister Rose, the responsible one and the rebel, are partial echoes of real people. The quiet sister, who married a vicar, entertained herself by writing weird Gothic tales about gay priests, although minus the vampire aristocrats and savage cruelty of Ariadne’s Marquis De Sade-meets-Anne Rice efforts.

Uncle Randol is inspired by my Uncle Ronnie, the second eldest of dad and his three brothers. Ronnie was a rebel, artist, musician and handsome outsider who worked on the railways to support his eccentric lifestyle. Like the fictional Randol, he camped in the hills in summer, and when it came time for his two-week holiday, he walked 45 miles from his house in Cardonald to the Butlins seaside resort past Ayr, and back when he was done. When he encountered a car parked on the pavement, Ronnie made a point of climbing over the car.

It was Ronnie who named and gave us the location of the Haunted Woods when we could find no reliable ghosts anywhere else.

We were certain it was Ronnie, (who collected Super 8 reels of silent film classics, with Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd etc.), who hid that film reel with its accompanying handwritten note reading ‘If you are doing what I was doing in these woods, this film will help you.’

Ronnie denied it. He died in 2017 aged 85, never having admitted to his role in the Haunted Woods mystery.

We gave the film to our ‘Records and Research’, a clever working-class boy from a high rise scheme in Castlemilk, whose dad owned a film projector he’d use to watch home movies of his parents, my pal’s grandparents that is, when they were still alive (a detail that stuck in my mind and also shows up in the story). The reel vanished after we were told it was just a man and a woman standing in the woods.

The debating society scene is drawn from one of the most cringe-making episodes of my school days. My presentation of the ‘facts’ in the Haunted Woods case led to a conclusive victory and I was regarded as an up-and-coming star of the debating scene until the following week when I did no preparation on the subject of ‘Money: Good or Bad’ and completely froze, to cries of ‘Bumbler! Bumbler!’ that took years to get over!

The mythology of Gasglow is rooted in tales of four brothers, based on my dad and his brothers. Inspired by the ‘Ossian’ cycle, created as a hoax by the young James McPherson in 1761, when he claimed to have discovered an oral Gaelic tradition of previously unknown epic poetry, Gasglow has its own fabricated version of Celtic myth – with Randol the Wanderer - he’ll be Randol the Rhymer in the edit - Warlet the Soldier, Wendra the Tailor and Lohard the Merchant).

The Haunted Woods are real/were real and still exist in diminished form on the Stewarton Road out of Glasgow, just past Rouken Glen Park. I can’t face going back. I’d love to locate the hollow where the Black Knot lay in wait but last time I flashed through this area as a passenger in a car, I didn’t recognise it. The rural landscape in which the Woods were embedded is now a sprawl of proliferating suburban slop.

The place where my dad cut his and my mum’s initials deep into tree bark is gone, along with the tree.

There were no magic mushrooms when we first visited the Haunted Woods in 1975, no black knot and no hangman…

Those came later, when I was much older and working on Animal Man and Doom Patrol (my psilocybin experiences directly inspired the Insect Mesh storyline in the latter book, while the whole trip, including the Black Knot episode formed the basis for an unpublished Doom Patrol issue written especially for Brendan McCarthy to draw. You can see the cover -

Unpublished cover for Doom Patrol 45 by Brendan McCarthy (DC/Vertigo), in David Jakoi’s DC - Vertigo Comic Art Gallery Room

• and the first three pages here with Brendan’s marginalia - apparently there are 25 pages of this stuff, but I’ve only seen the ones that are on here.

Unpublished Doom Patrol 45 script with Brendan McCarthy sketches (25 pages), in David Jakoi’s DC - Vertigo Comic Art Gallery Room ).

We scooped the shrooms up in handfuls, with stalks poking between our fingers, and chewed them down raw - so we stayed legal and ensuring that the bug eggs we were swallowing would add to the insectile flavour of the imagery.

As in the story, everything started off well, although there was a moment where I became convinced my tripping buddy was being ‘taken over’ by the forest due to the green cast of light on his skin. That momentary intrusion of paranoia set the stage for what happened when we stumbled into a rough rocky amphitheatre at the heart of the Haunted Woods, and were confronted by what appeared to be a hanging rotten noose, a shattered heap of bloody bones, (actually just sticks and logs), and clouds of noxious Beelzebubian flies (just little gnats) in a butcher’s shop nightmare of ritual sacrifice.

The whole scene recalled Colonel Kurtz’ camp in Apocalypse Now. It felt like the nerve centre of primitive atrocity. A place of cannibalism and cruelty. Cursed ground, where appalling rituals had been carried out, and would be again if we didn’t leg it.

There appeared to be a leathery shrunken head dangling at the end of the rope. It was only a big knot which someone had coated with tar, perhaps to once hold a tree bough saddle in place, but it had a crumpled, deformed face. Feigning bravado, I tugged the bottom of the rope, which was rotted and snapped in my hand, signalling the activation of dread taboo! The sense of drenching horror and doom was palpable, at least for me. My pal was unaffected, on account, I assumed, of prior possession rendering him immune to evil.

I was severely shaken by the whole experience. The sense of genuine malignance, corrupt and undying, was intense and shook me down to the soul. It took a long time to turn the deep feelings of dread and dismay into something I could use in a story.

I went back to take some pictures and face the monstrosity sober – it really did look like a shrunken head with eye sockets and a yawning mouth. I was pleased to see that my extreme reaction was to something genuinely grotesque and disturbing.

Somewhere I still have those photographs of the Black Knot. In the four years since starting Xanaduum as an archive, there are still parts of the archive that remain as elusive as Lost Arks but one of these days those diaries and pictures will turn up…

SHUT THE DOOR THEY’RE COMING IN THE WINDOW…

The conceit behind It’s A Dead Dead Dead Dead World was simple; with each new project together over the years, from Flex Mentallo to Pax Americana, Frank Quitely and I have tried to outdo ourselves, and to stretch and push the boundaries of comics storytelling in one way or another by trying something new and experimental with the form of the comics page.

Following our last collaboration on Pax Americana from the Multiversity series, which was about as intricate and elaborate as we could make it, we wanted to do something different for our next project together. I didn’t think we could go any further in the Pax direction and would have to detour.

Quitely draws amazing spontaneous pictures with a felt pen or ink marker – incredibly simple drawings, often scatological, or absurd but executed with the same mastery of figure drawing and composition as his finished work.

Following the bejewelled precision of Pax Americana, I felt the only way to go was to throw away all our tricks and go back to playing rock ‘n’ roll in dive bars. The plan was a return to roots effectively, with a short grindhouse comic about zombies drawn on bar napkins in real time with no frills. My last 20 or so years of pitching in Hollywood, has included three movie/TV ideas tackling the zombie genre from different and hopefully fresh angles. It’s A Dead, Dead, Dead, Dead World, (originally called Dead America, before someone else got to that title), was the first of those ideas.

Frank/Vinnie was into the grindhouse aesthetic but pointed out quite reasonably that while he was fine with our audience thinking I’d retreated to brute simplicity, he didn’t want anyone to assume that crude felt marker doodles represented a bold new direction for his work. Instead, and although he’s ditched the Centiq tablet to hand draw, ink and colour this vile squib, the pages come with all the detail and finish of one of his digitally created covers. I’ve seen the first six fully coloured pages and they look spectacular. This is the perfect response to my suggestion that he deliberately draw badly – we now have a beautifully-composed take on a trashy and dumb 12-page script, and Frank Quitely comes out of the whole debacle with his reputation intact!

Here, by way of a preview…

PIC: Frank Quitely - 2026

The finished article, the first Morrison/Quitely collaboration since 2021, will be on its exclusive way to our gilded paid subscribers just as soon as the Maestro Q is done! Stay tuned for a couple more preview images before then!

Quitely’s recent interview with The Comics Journal is here:

‘I’ve gone back to basics’: Catching up with Frank Quitely - The Comics Journal

TRANSLUNAR INJECTION BURN

Three cheers for the Artemis mission, a feat of human brilliance and dedication that will of course pave the way for mining, colonisation and wars on the moon and in space if things don’t jolly well change around here soon!

VIVA LA MEGABABES

I finished Assassin’s Creed: Rogue and moved backwards in the series to Unity, the game set during the French Revolution. I would have loved this game’s sprawling, cranky version of Paris more if the play wasn’t so glitchy. The weapons wheel is counter-intuitive and slow, the movement is sticky, and Arno the assassin is constantly ‘desynchronising’ because he can’t land properly for an aerial assassination or won’t let go of a wall when five men are shooting at him. He moves like he’s trying to cope with the early stages of a Parkinson’s diagnosis, which means every mission takes ten times longer than it should.

Great setting, annoying gameplay.

The density and detail of the crowds added an immersive realism that’s often missing from cities in video games where the pavements are sparsely populated by NPCs.

The trailer for the zhuzhed-up Black Flag is impressive – with a wealth of colour and detail that recalls Rosetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, but in the meantime, I’ve moved onto the remarkable Crimson Desert which really lives up to its extravagant hype, even if it feels like too much sometimes. It’s early days yet and I’m only starting to get good at fighting but the sheer attention to minutiae and commitment to weird novelty is appreciated, as are all the Scottish accents! The lead character, Kliff, sounds like Gerry Butler! Maybe they’ll finally stop calling me incomprehensible!

WHAT IT’S REALLY LIKE TO WORK FOR DARTH MAUL

Your correspondence, my replies:

Dorothy – We are the chorus and we agree. We’re back from our downtime until we have more downtime so keep ‘em coming!

Persefonie – It’s been one variant obstacle after another round here recently, so your cards are onto something! I can think of a Devil or two we’re dealing with. No sign of those shunners seeing the light so far, but the door is ajar…

Peter Thiel is also an anagram of Pete Hitler!

I need to pay more attention to The Wicker Man. I’ve watched it a hundred times and never bothered to make those connections in that scene…

Neal Armstrong – Some of my earliest occult experiments, in my teens and 20s, involved the creation of a servitor called ‘Astar’ after the wizard in the Danny Merlin comic strip that played such a curious part in my development. Astar seemed a surly sort and I often gave me the impression I was wasting his time. I didn’t really connect with the idea of servitors, which sounded a bit master and servant to me. I also tried one that looked a little like Krazy Kat but that turned out to be a bit unruly as well and I stopped using servitors very early in my Magical practise.

As for the servitor/egregore distinction, as I understand it, servitors are solo creations of a single Magician while egregores are expressions of a group mind. They can also generate spontaneously given sufficient emotional energy input, unlike servitors which must be created by the Magician.

Servitors perform specialist tasks for which they have been devised, egregores represent ideas or complexes of ideas given shape.

I think Mark Frost was trying to weave a ton of weird conspiracy adjacent stuff into Twin Peaks lore rather than specifically nicking story from me. Others before me have linked the first atom bomb test in Nevada to some kind of spatial or dimensional rip that heralded the mass arrival of UFOs in our skies (pilot Kenneth Arnold reported the first ‘flying saucer’ in 1947). I believe The Invisibles was the first to suggest that what fell through the atomic hole in things was a fragment of ‘God’. Frost gets a pass, and I get to see what David Lynch would have done with the opening scene from The Invisibles volume 2, issue 2!

PIC: Invisibles vol 2. #2 GM thumbnail - 1996

Bobby – interesting to hear that the Team Human bit provoked some conversation. My inner judge tends to dismiss my efforts on these things, so it’s good to know they might still have some vague impact. I did a few podcasts over the winter and started to feel like another of a thousand dudes on the internet trying to convince everyone they have some insight into what’s going on, when clearly they only have a few pixels of the whole picture.

I too experience ‘Why bother?’ quite often, especially in these fractious times where I am made aware of how small and ineffectual I am in the face of gigantic historical evils, but the answer is always ‘because this is what you love to do, so do it!’

Bleedin’ Cool did something right!

Fr. Theta – I was certain the Tardis appears in the time travel issue of Animal Man but I checked, and my memory is false, sadly. There is an elevator that looks a bit like a Tardis in issue #5…

I’ve cultivated a minor obsession with alternative Tardis machines (I think TARDIS as an anagram should be in capitals, but I keep seeing it with lower case, so I’ll have a go with that) like the Meddling Monk one, the Master’s various efforts, the Rani and her pyramid thing. Clara has the diner TARDis. The obscure variants are great, like the folding cabinet that transports Jamie and Zoe back to their home time coordinates in The War Games. And I note that the proto-Tardis ships seen in The Name of the Doctor reminded me somehow of E. Bouard’s illustrations of the cylindrical Cosmos vehicle from Arnold Galopin’s 1906 novel Le Docteur Omega/Doctor Omega. The Cosmos is a cylindrical, bullet-nosed, aether-travelling machine made of stellite/repulsite, a miracle mineral which ‘repels space and time’. The Doctor travels with companions and encounter weird alien societies on other worlds…

The Doctor Omega/Doctor Who connections are worth researching – a 2003 edition of Galopin’s novel was published with a cover styled to look like a Target Who book, depicting Doctor Omega as a Hartnell Doctor-esque figure while the text was tweaked to suggest that Omega and Who might just be one and the same.

Alice – A fantastic idea! Xanaduum Assisted Dying Solutions looks forward to adding a bladed option to our menu, with a choice of Madame Guillotine, katana, claymore, rapier, sturdy meat cleaver, or nail file for a prolonged and startling experience!

Kevin – You go that right! I only saw one or two responses, with people saying I was being contradictory or rolling back my criticisms, but that was about it, and they didn’t seem to understand I have no problem holding opposing points of view.

I checked out halfway through Avatar 2. Those movies leave me cold for some reason, although I generally enjoy James Cameron’s films.

Thanks for the Futurama suicide booths clip! I hadn’t seen that before! My favourite version of that sort of thing appears in Barbarella as the Chamber of Final Solution. ‘Next solution…’

DC doesn’t own We3, Vinnie and I do. DC Studios can’t do anything with it because it’s not part of their library. Warner Bros. could make it independently of James Gunn and co. but only if Vin and I agree. So far, they have not shown any serious interest, although We3 is a project that’s been the subject of dozens or more enquiries and meetings over the decades since its release as a comic. Dozens of producers and directors in Hollywood have wanted to make it, but no-one has yet managed to get it off the ground so far. I’m sure it will happen when I’m dead or too infirm to make it to the premiere!

Luna Express looks good!

Patrick – What was Rob’s position on Deadpool? I agree that most people only take from you that which is useful to them personally. It’s probably more healthy that way than slavishly following a leader or, on the other hand, outright rejecting good ideas when they come from someone you dislike for their politics or personality.

Michael S – There are a number of books that changed my life in different ways but I’ll go for the practical - Robert Anton Wilson’s Quantum Psychology gave me a manual for how to debug my personality (or at least to get the process underway in an impressive way) that proved to be incredibly helpful in the early ‘90s and played a big part in the development of The Invisibles.

Osiris – I’m fascinated by your teaching stories! Aside from the internet adding its considerable mind-warping capabilities to the mix, thing don’t seem to have changed too much since I was a teenager.

Best of luck with the novel! You can never be sure what works for an audience, and what won’t. Believe it or not, I thought Luda would be a success, and it sank like the Titanic. You may find that ‘sci-fi metafiction romance’ is the next hit genre after romantasy, and there you are with the goods to hand!

DeeSee – The other eye rivals its twin for chocolatey goodness!

You didn’t miss anything interesting with the Lanterns biz and surfing the word waves obliviously is the sanest way to travel.

I still see people claiming that Frank Quitely is a ‘terrible’ artist and wonder in what twisted kiln they were baked.

There’s not much that leaves me feeling wounded for long but the refusal of DC Studios to offer me any work still rankles.

Roland - Very interesting! I’m surprised that Germany veered away from darker, edgier kids’ entertainment - you mention Struwwelpeter and there’s also the tradition of Grimm’s fairy tales, Walpurgisnacht and the Harz Mountains! German folklore has always struck me as fairly wild and shadowy, so I’m surprised that freakish element didn’t bleed into kids stories the way it did here where so much Celtic or Nordic mythology found its way into our books and Tv shows for children. I do like the Idea of the Three ??? as 50-year-old adults naturally!

Ben – You know I’m going to give it to Ch’p and Kilowog over Rocket and Drax! When I think of Drax it’s the guy with the cape and the widow’s peak hood from Starlin’s Warlock rather than Dave Bautista from the movies, but Kilowog could beat both anyway. He’s an 8-foot tall alien bullpig with a Green Lantern ring and an unfortunate name that carries echoes of BNP fliers form the 1980s. Drax wouldn’t last a single round. I think Rocket Racoon is faster and harder than Ch’p, but again it’s that Green Lantern ring that tips the scales against any old ray gun…

I didn’t read the Englehart/Staton Green Lantern. I was a big Englehart fan from Doctor Strange and Avengers through his DC work on Justice League and Batman, but I was playing in the band in the early ‘80s and wasn’t reading a lot of comics, especially not from DC or Marvel. I’d tried to like Joe Staton’s art from the E-Man days, but aside from the Justice Society/All-Star Squadron stuff his work never appealed to me for some reason, so the Green Lantern run stood no chance. Somehow I managed to overlook it again when I bounced through Green Lantern history during the research for my own run on the book with Liam Sharp…Was it good?

Sean – I only managed the first Dark Tower, and I tried and failed with Snow Crash. I sat next to Neal Stephenson at a dinner ten years ago or so and found him a remarkably cold and uncommunicative character.

I’ve been back on non-fiction for a while, but I’ve got my eye on Solace House by Will Maclean, which looks right up my alley. I like the sound of There Is No Anti-Memetics Division but it’s another of those books where I feel I’ve already written stuff just like it.

I love the physicality of comic art. I like when the glue and the dirty fingerprints show on the finished item. I love when it tears or when letters come loose and you stick them back out of alignment.

Klaus Janson’s art is great on Batman: Gothic, with all the masses of shadow and distorted angles. There’s a fantastic Cartoonist Kayfabe where the late Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg bring out depths and nuances of the art and colouring on Gothic that gave me a whole new appreciation of what Klaus had done.

Sinatoro was made to be a film and exists so far in that form as a scrappy, unedited larval screenplay of 148 pages. It could be a novel – there’s a high stakes thriller element to it, along with everything else - but that doesn’t seem the most appropriate form. I know it works as a comic book because I’ve written three scripts for a 12-issue series and it’s going well as a serialized chapter piece. That, Smile of the Absent Cat and The Savage Sword of Jesus Christ are the ones I really want to get finished and released and there may even be some news about that soon. I can’t find a way to get Big Crazy down yet. It so far defies all efforts to condense the material into a working narrative.

FylGja – We’ll put you down for ‘Jackals’, then! A sparkling Paisley effect can be achieved using chips of ice convincing enough to be mistaken for real diamonds as long as you remain at temperatures of -15˚C.

I like Roger’s Seat, it sounds likes the title for a novel. Could be a horror story about the deceased Roger’s favourite chair, empty now with his shape left in the fabric, still there in the living room, increasingly uncanny… Whatever you do, don’t sit…on Roger’s Seat…

Or it’s a James Baldwin-esque novella of queer desire in 1950s Naples, where a young American writer’s fantasies collide with reality on a bench in the Parco Virgiliano. It’s here that the object of the author’s desires, the enigmatic ‘Roger’ of the title sits on the same park seat every Sunday lunchtime to eat a sfogliatella riccia, after delivering his weekly sermon in the nearby church of Santa Maria di Piedigrotta…

Appreciate the reports from the front lines. The Gods of ‘America’ are the vast powers of the land, the sky and the deeps. Ally with them to stay anchored in these tumultuous times. All the rest is ephemeral and can/will blow away. It’s a Dark Night of the soul for many former believers in false idols and illusions, as you say.

Those deserts are mad with myth - from Deep Time to modernity, the Doors, Charles Manson, Bomb tests and Area 51 - where the extravagant, fantastical energies of Turtle Island swirl and condense into clouds of weirdness, then rain down cults, murders, movies, monsters, visions.

I became uncomfortable with doing the podcasts, partly for reasons you suggest. I generally came away feeling drained, depressed and anxious that something I’d said would be reduced to a tendentious headline.

RK - I’m sure the silver hair makes you look like a superhero. As I’ve said before, silver threads notwithstanding, you will outlive these senile fucks who are currently wreaking havoc. You will inhabit and shape a future they will never see. Cold comfort perhaps, but it does give you quite a big advantage and time to plan.

The Seventh Fire Prophecy you brought up is definitely worth sharing:

Seven fires prophecy - Wikipedia

The choice seems obvious; while the Heavy People seem intent on taking the wounding way.

Ks – Fascinating. What an incredible experience!

This is why it’s worth appreciating things on an intellectual level – like buying maps, and boots and a rucksack to go hillwalking - before plunging into the storm of the experiential! When you’ve familiarised yourself with the terrain, it’s easier to suspend judgment or interpretation or terror during the actual event, and really participate in the non-ordinariness of it all!

Polaris – good to hear from you again! Seems we’ve both been on hiatus. Lucifer the Lightbringer comes in many forms with a multitude of faces, as these prismatic concept-entities always do. Follow those synchronicities, watch where you put your head, and keep us up to date on your magical work!

Shelly – Thanks for the kind words on 3AM! As for the unbelievable price of the Adidas trainers, the story is set in the ‘80s, and these were cheap ones from Woolworth’s (‘Merriwether’s’ in the story)!

More soonest!

PIC: KM 2026

7.

Mikey went back the next day. I sup…

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6.

First impressions, theories, came hard and fast and random; …

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PIC: KM 2024

5.

We trudged, waist deep in bracken while unattended, the bruise on the skin o…

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(Regularly scheduled Xanaduum will return soon after a brief holiday! Happy Easte…

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PIC: KM 2024

3.

I keep all my stuff too. Another trait I’ve p…

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2.

Of course, I held onto the ‘Ar…

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PIC: Allan Amato (detail) - 2010

Beat Girl - Main Title (1960)

LIVE WILD TEEN MUSIC

I write this at the equilux, when light and dark are balanced, with the increase now in light’s favour!

Hurrah!

This week, I learned I have a new superpower; I can write about peace and love and Magic and the future and be completely ignored by the wider world, or I can drop some piece of trivial snark, dominate the news cycle for days and put Hollywood screenwriting royalty in a position where they feel they have to apologise for thoughtlessly calling a colour ‘stupid’ two years ago in a comedy interview. This against a backdrop of war and chaos in which the US President is losing the battle to conceal his slide into incoherence, confabulation, and wilful self-destruction.

Welcome to the demented reign of Absurdus Maximus!

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PIC: KM 2026

(This is the first chapter of the novella Archive & Analysis: 3 Against Mystery and the Business of the Black Knot, which will be serialised here over the next seven weeks. The first chapter is available to all, subsequent episodes will only be available to our paid subscribers…)

Prologue:

Another postcard was waiting when I got back from the bank to an otherwise empty house.

Aside from my name and this current address in characterless block capitals, along with a neatly printed number #2 in the lower left corner, the reverse was blank, but the face showed The Cat with the Broken Heart, from Blue Cat Blues, the only Tom & Jerry cartoon with a voiceover by Jerry the mouse. The only Tom & Jerry that comes with a suicide prevention warning.

I put the card with the first in my desk drawer in the basement where I write. Now there were two almost identical postcards. Blue Cat Blues on both. Aside from scuffs and tears, the only way to tell them apart was to read the stamps – Los Angeles 3 weeks ago, just before I started work on the story of What Happened Then, and now New York. And those numbers – first #1, this latest #2.

Not much to go on. Nothing unusual or unexpected about that numerical sequence except that, for me, it was matted with meaning, sodden with significance.

I couldn’t sleep again and found myself thinking about those two cards in the drawer, fanned like moth wings, identically patterned, with a camouflage mimicking cartoon images of a cat without hope. Being me, I imagined them slowly flapping out book dust and mortuary soil, huge as tennis courts attached to the hunched shoulder blades of a human-scale Angel of Death, beating out supersize sailboat gusts as the Reaper took to the skies above time and made another selection.

There was dad first, then Rosie not long after. Implacable Azrael swooping in, quiet as an owl on the hunt, striking so close the slipstream of the bastard’s dive knocked me off my feet, so it took months to recover. Months while the Embodiment of Mortality executed a perfect blue sky turn en route to its next target.

Coming closer again, eastward, the cardboard wingbeats of the Angel of Death, or of Redemption. Angels were surely implicated. Fallen or otherwise.

If my suspicions were correct, there would be a third card soon enough, but only the sender, that Tempter & Deceiver, and I knew what the #3 would stand for.

I had to go back a bit to make sense of all this.

It’s a good thing the night is long.

*****

1.

Everything about it was stupid.

It wasn’t what you’d call an original idea. Dominoes’ ‘inspiration’ was a popular book series starring a trio of insufferable boy detectives.

Stay with me, think pint-sized private eyes specializing in faux supernatural capers and you’re there. An added audience participation gimmick invited young smartasses to spot glaringly obvious clues paced through the text like a set of luminous footprints leading directly to the culprit’s lair. By following the evidential trail that resulted in a successful unmasking of some disgruntled villain before the boys reached the same painstakingly inevitable conclusion in the concluding chapter, bookworms (9 to 13) were encouraged to feel superior to the three precocious leads.

There at the beginning, Dominoes threatened to call us the Young Investigators. He styled it out as a direct ‘homage’ to his teenage sleuthing heroes, a word he pronounced ‘hommidge’. I gagged on principle and argued we could surely come up with a better name of our own. No surprises, Dominoes agreed but rejected my proposal, The Cluehunters. Big Mikey, who’d never had a clue and wouldn’t know what to look for, was indifferent at best, so we ended up shackled to the atrocious ‘3 Against Mystery’, like drowning men to an anchor.

According to Dominoes, who was wrong, this bestowed upon our undertaking a spooky gravitas missing from all other efforts, i.e., mine. As far as I was concerned, he’d arrived on this Earth more thoroughly stuffed with shite than the lower intestines of an All The Shite You Can Eat champion.

Next, he had those pompous, little business cards run off at that copy place they used to have in the Arcade before people had home printers and business cards were obsolete anyway; a big 3 with AGAINST MYSTERY underneath. On the back, he’d asked them to do a ? behind a red backslash ‘forbidden’ bar and provided contact details for all three of us. My dad never forgave Dominoes for the crank callers! Oh, the embarrassment!

Membership brought with it an additional unique privilege in the form of our exclusive team badge. Naturally, Dominoes had chosen huge, embarrassing lapel pins whose diameters exceeded those of jar lids. They looked like the chest plates worn by Thing 1 and 2 in The Cat in the Hat and they even had numbers! Why not, I often thought, write, I’m a loser – feel free to humiliate me on our foreheads and be done with it? It wasn’t long before the number 3 itself came to encode my feelings, a glyph of dismay, triggering PTSD every time it caught my attention anywhere.

Nowadays, those badges would end up as collectors’ items on eBay. They were evil, demoralising works of art in their own way.

We were each assigned specialist roles within the team. Dominoes, no-one will be shocked to learn, was Mystery #1 – Coordinator - the brains, or so he hoped. Mikey AKA Big Mikey on account of his towering five inches above Dominoes’ imposing 5 feet four – was Mystery #2, or Fieldwork, the muscle of the trio.

Never mind that I could jump higher, run faster, and hold my breath for longer than either boy, my place was reserved for me on the lowest step of the podium, plucky bronze medalist Mystery #3. As the scuffed and foxed calling card I kept as a bookmark indicated very clearly, I was Archive & Analysis, and unto me fell the tedious job of recording our cases. Secretary, PA, treasurer, hagiographer in chief to the Brains & Brawn dream ticket!

I would say I only had myself to blame but why? Not when two associated clowns existed to relieve me of exclusive responsibility for the following unusual, mysterious and, some might say, tragic events.

As I said, stupid. Cluehunter #1 would have sounded much better. Mystery #1 made no sense at all. There was nothing mysterious about Dominoes. He was an open book with empty pages. The days of his life gave off the same papery whiff of unstated excuses as a 5-year diary optimistically begun then abandoned due to chronic lack of incident.

‘Dominoes’, AKA Dominick Cambeltown.

According to his backstory, he’d been named for the patron saint of astronomers and founder of the Dominican order itself. The ‘k’ on the end explained by his mother’s attempt to do for the boy what Aleister Crowley did for ‘Magick’.

Our English teacher, Mr. Willis, half blind from wanking and unable to decipher the new boy’s handwriting, announced him to the rest of the class as incoming pupil ‘Domino C’. Surely, a rapper or MC? Mr. Willis eventually recanted his error, assuring the class that the new boy in question had in fact been baptized Dominick, but the damage was done. Dominick was Dominoes for the remainder of his time at Bellavista Academy. As will be demonstrated at least once more in this account, no one gets to choose a nickname, and there was nothing Dominick Cambeltown could do about his.

He was lucky. But for Mr. Willis’ mistake, Dominick Cambeltown would have endured the next three years living up to ‘Dombo’ or ‘Cambo’ such was the imaginative reach of classroom consensus in those days.

My guess is he liked the name Dominoes because it made him sound like someone who might eventually receive an invitation to join the X-Men.

Back then, he was an awkward new insertion into Class 2A’s social Jenga tower. 14 years old with skin so clear and a general aspect so pleasantly cherubic it seems in hindsight a shared false memory. Six months later, wave after wave of determined hormones would blitz his complexion to resemble Guernica but there at the beginning, convolved beneath smooth cheek and unshaven chin like unexploded bombs or daffodil bulbs, Dominoes’ spectacular fusillade of zits had yet to erupt in triumph through the peach fuzz, purging volcanic pus.

Let’s not forget the literal shock of hair; a scrub of dead and dirty blond keratin that belonged on the crown of a root vegetable. Relative to his malnourished or bulimic classmates, Dominoes was from a now discontinued brand of out-of-shape nerd once described as ‘stocky’ or ‘stout’.

He wore bulky National Health specs, the left leg secured with Elastoplast as an affectation. His T-shirt collection was legendary, coolly recondite. He carried an inhaler he’d long outgrown, but Dominoes felt the vaporiser added to his idiosyncratic mystique, comparing it to Sherlock Holmes’ trademark pipe. It could tip the scales in a confrontation, he reasoned. Who wants to be first to hit a wheezing asthmatic? In truth, I could think of coachloads of assholes who’d happily throw an asphyxiating kid’s inhaler in the pond for a laugh. A fake asthma seizure would be enough to justify a lynching, but I left Dominoes to his flights and his fancies.

Comic books, games, and cult TV provided us with a common language, our secret dialect of pop culture arcana. I was a lanky tomboy who wore trademark long-sleeved T-shirts and specialized in geek boys and misfits. I gravitated towards, then cultivated, lost souls who inevitably looked up to me. Girls never talked to boys like the ones I befriended, so the boys were generally overjoyed to be hanging out on my team, even if most of the time I felt more masculine than they were! Rake thin, the way I was then, when I thought ‘athletic’ meant ‘chunky’. When I imagined myself ‘boyish’.

I liked to tell myself they probably fantasized about me naked, the fools, and this justified my contempt and pity. I imagined I was the only bridge to normality these outcasts would ever dare cross. I was helping them. I was being kind at great cost to my own credibility. It is to be understood that my missionary self-sacrifice spared me the effort of competing with the popular girls, who’d already made a point of rejecting my company.

Dominoes’ saving grace was a twisted sense of humour that chimed with my own unpalatable wit. His was a very serious deadpan delivery that allowed him to serve up the most outrageous statements with wide-eyed sincerity. We got on like a maternity ward on fire.

Perhaps, in hindsight, there was nothing about Dominoes that wasn’t mysterious. We talked for as many hours as we needed about superheroes and TV shows, movies, ghosts, flying saucers and pop music but we never once raised the subject of our lives at home. Or only in the most offhand derisory way. There was a shared understanding that the world of parents came set-dressed in shades of dispiriting grey. It wasn’t worth talking about, so we never did.

Big Mikey Macaroni (real name McCrory) came as an accessory, part of a twin set, like Tom and Jerry, Barbie and Ken, or Bondage and Domination. He’d commenced his progress to devoted right hand man with a sustained attempt to bully Dominoes that verged on the passionate. For more than a month after Dominoes’ admission to our year, Mikey made Dominoes life hell with an unrelenting program of harassment that included one actual pummelling, half-hearted and uncommitted though it was.

During this primary aggressive phase of his mating ritual, Mikey failed to account for Dominoes’ guileless gift for coercion. Deploying his advanced edge detection and pattern-making skills, together with a grab-bag of haphazard cues and observations, (Mikey’s black and white Warren comics habit. His Misfits T-shirt), Dominoes deduced the conflicted young jock’s love of campy horror movies, ghost stories, science fiction, and monster comics. Idling in an athletic peer group that lacked like minds with whom to share these profoundly geeky forbidden passions, Mikey made easy prey for Dominoes whose compendious arsenal of pop culture trivia, rare videos and infectious enthusiasm proved an irresistible social inducement.

The turning point arrived one spruce April morning in the boisterous Spring term corridors between classes with Dominoes facing the usual rat run of abuse from outliers of Mikey’s crowd. One toe-brained Rugby squad thug, who’d traditionally relied on the Big Em’s support to back-up his provocations, got his first taste of the new world order that day when, chortling, the brute stuck out a foot to trip Dominoes, laying him flat like a rug.

Enter Mikey stage left, playing the new sheriff in town, stepping up to draw some moral lines in the sand after a seeming religious conversion. Mikey seized a generous handful of the bully’s greasy hair and dragged the lump backwards off his victim.

“Fuck off,” Mikey snarled. Then, so that every kid who saw it would remember, he sneered in disgust and flicked his fingers. “Nits. Fried in oil.” The cowed troll kid scuttled away, broken, cringing. His pre-existing nickname, ‘Tombo’, now erased from the roll call, he would spend the next three years until graduation, as ‘Nits’.

Mikey, with a politician’s nose for the grand gesture, extended his clean hand. Employing a firm young manly grip, he hoisted Dominoes off the Marmoleum floor onto his feet. Face to face Mikey nodded approvingly in recognition of Dominoes’ prominent Danzig T-shirt. Applause and cheers bubbled up, as if a scene in a play had come to an obvious end and the audience was moved to heartfelt appreciation for this surprisingly upbeat plot turn.

By the end of term, Mikey and Dominoes were inseparable. Like bacon and eggs, no-one could imagine a time they hadn’t been served together. Mikey had discovered a rewarding new purpose as Dominoes best mate and personal bodyguard. Ennobled, Mikey made it his duty to protect Dominoes from people like Mikey. He felt responsible at last, like the policeman his dad, the policeman, wanted him to be. I saw a kind of Courtly Love emerging, that was pure and protective. A Knight’s chaste devotion to the Beloved.

I gave the boys’ friendship a couple of weeks to develop and cohere. I’d already swapped a few jokes and some Marvel comics with Dominoes, so we were on good speaking terms, but I opted for a back seat to give the budding bromance some oxygen. While I was waiting for the boys to mate for life like swans, I dedicated myself to learning their habits. My coloured felt-tipped pens were ranked in a scrambled rainbow, I ruled neat vertical lines in my jotter to make columns and set about recording and memorizing in-jokes and routines like a hunter stalks prey, tracks spoor, gathering intel before I made my move.

Close to the end of term in early May, when the buds were bursting, and the birdsong was bright and clear and blue at 6am, I insinuated myself steadily into the mix. These were the slow last days in school’s relaxing grip. Teachers let loose their belts a notch or two, anticipating lazy yellow summer’s easing of rules. Ties worn slack and collar buttons undone. Going into class felt like trespass. The vacant rooms that echoed to floor polish smells, admitting particular slants of sunlight, impossible in winter, onto the wallcharts and maps. Even the teachers were preoccupied with travel brochures, researching barge proprieties, caravan etiquette, hillwalking kit. Too busy with their dreams of liberty to bother with our education. We educated ourselves.

In that liminal haze, anything could happen. When I turned the Dynamic Duo into a Terrific Trio, it was hardly remarked upon. It seemed natural for me to be part of the equation. So much so that no one would ever remember when it had been different.

Summer break was a hoot. As I said, Dominoes and I shared a sense of humour that was harmonized like two waveforms on an oscilloscope, locking into synchrony. Mikey played along, skewing blue in his locker room way, but eager to adapt to our surreal and cruel improvisations.

That summer we’d lie on the carpet reading comics, or novels by James Herbert and Clive Barker, passing them round when we’d finished. A shared hum of concentration was all the fellowship we needed, bound, even in silence, to a common reality, a mutual immersion in imaginary worlds.

After an hour or two of this, a telepathic impulse would rouse each of us as one, at the same time. We’d take off into the wilderness of Maxwell Estate for intense, extended and passionate discussions of our reading, arguing over storylines and artwork, shock scenes, our shared taste. Climbing trees, fording rivers, cataloguing clouds. Laughing ourselves legless.

Every Saturday morning we’d commence a 5-mile-wide ceremonial circuit of Gasglow’s south side, pausing at a sequence of Mingus Bros and Liberty’s newsagents, blissfully rifling through the spinner racks for newly released issues of favourite titles to add to our collections. Or we’d scrounge for paperbacks and used videos, weird movies and old vinyl at the Stalls Market and walk home together, in lockstep, with our loot and our opinions. Extending our range, just to spend more time together.

In the evenings, we’d devour bootleg VHS tapes, horror, sci-fi, surreal comedies, at Mikey’s until it was time to call it a day when Mikey’s dad, the policeman, insisted on driving us home.

Some weeks into these bonding sessions, my own dad, (in his pre-mortem period), indulged an urge to lecture me, What was I doing hanging around with a couple of ‘dodgy oddballs’, as he described my new friends? Dad continued to imagine the worst kind of sex criminals and drug dealers until he laid eyes on the pair, loitering on our path like refugee children off a poster, survivors of war and famine, outside the house on Ashpark Avenue. They looked so pitiful; mum was stricken by a humanitarian need to feed and water the waifs before they perished on the footpath.

As far as I was concerned, I’d made the grade my way. I had my own gang. I could ignore my sister and brother, both reduced to sniffing for clues. Me and the boys would vanish into the scramble of the Estate or walk as far as Rocking Mill in August heat and high humidity, on one shared can of Mettle Broo, arguing and agreeing about comic characters, TV plots, new records. Laughing at dehydration and heat exhaustion. Rosie and Jet knew nothing about my secret world.

I gave my boys pride and the legitimacy they lacked among their alienated peers. A geek, a jock, and a guh-girl? We were a recipe for a sitcom or a quirky superhero team. They were protective of me and for my part, I’d found, at last, not just one person, but two fools to whom I could feel superior!

Somewhere in the dazzle of our fusion, shared memories of the Young Investigators books were generated as a conversational by-product. I’d only read one of the books in the series, but Dominoes’ eyes lit up when I mentioned how much I’d loved The Young Investigators and the Mystery of Midas Mountain, especially the disturbing hallucinatory chapter 5: Ghosts of the Goldrush. Everything followed from that moment. That recalled title. Those annihilating words. Why not? Instead of reading about them, why not be young investigators?

Me, Dominoes and Mikey. Together we were – the Cluehunters!

Were we F.U.C.K. We were 3 Against Mystery.

I can’t say Dominoes ever gave much serious thought to what it might mean to be against Mystery. Our self-appointed leader’s plagiarized blueprint for the venture suggested we would most likely investigate local area phenomena; grey ghost sightings, urban poltergeists, cackling skulls from the curio cabinets of aristocratic families, wandering suits of armour, otherwise empty etcetera etcetera. We’d stake out haunted stately homes and case creepy castles. We’d target touring circuses, graveyards, and museums.

Dominoes’ reading had taught him that these locations could be relied upon for adventure, intrigue, and above all the kind of mystery he seemed unable to locate anywhere in the real world.

In this way, we’d build brand awareness and gain a reputation for no-nonsense ghostbusting that would invariably pave the way to further adventures. So far, so good.

In search of mysteries to demystify, I felt Dominoes had overlooked a few obvious possibilities - 3 Against the Mystery of How to Talk to People. 3 Against the Mystery of Appearing Normal in Public - except it wasn’t even 3 Against the Mystery. He’d left out the article that might have added some sense!

The name, and I’m sorry to go on about this, implied a coalition for mystery rather than against it. If it wasn’t for mystery, we wouldn’t have much to do, I maintained. Mystery was our bread and butter. Why set our table against it? Unless he meant ‘up against’ mystery, I ventured, triggering a sort of vocal fart, and side-eye from Mikey. Like rubbing up against it!

Dominoes hated it when Mikey was coarse.

Frottage! I mugged. My dad said these cards could easily be misunderstood…

I relished my contributions to Dominoes’ ongoing embarrassment, but my efforts to change his mind were in vain. The name would not be budged. We were 3 Against Mystery.

We each had branded rucksacks with our logo drawn on. These were essential for carrying our cheap cameras, and cassette dictating machines, along with old-fashioned pens and paper and old-fashioned corned beef sandwiches courtesy of old-fashioned mums. Swiss Army knives, of course. Our ghost hunting proficiency badges, like you’d get in the Scouts or Guides, rounded out the tackle.

In this manner came the kit, came the name, came the will. We were locked and loaded, missing only one critical ingredient: ghosts.

A shortage of available phantoms in any real world outside of fiction was to be expected but worse news was on its way. We were perhaps the first to identify an unexpected scarcity of ordinary people pretending to be ghosts; whether it was to claim a disputed inheritance or scare away prospective theme park buyers, they were nowhere found.

This seemed ironic. What a time to discover that ghost-impersonators were rarer than genuine hauntings!

The titles of our ‘cases’ bore cruel witness to our team’s fundamental limitations. They were doomed to disappoint when stacked against The Young Investigators and the Secret of Skeleton Swamp or The Young Investigators and the Mystery of Moonlight Mansion to name but two of the fictional team’s dependably thrill-fuelled and (simulated) spectre-thronged exploits.

Sensing yawns, let’s start the engine, pump the gas, and crash headlong out of our team’s ‘origin’ story. We’ll call it 3 Against Mystery Meet in School on the way to the exit. It’s easy to think of as one of those literary experiments - summative or Spoiler or something like that - where the title tells the complete story.

Next in the canon came 3 Against Mystery in Nightmare Castle, the chilling tale of a mostly uneventful day trip to a local ruin, barren of wraiths, where the titular nightmare was a savage admission price that tore the living guts out of our combined weekly pocket money allowance.

On page after blue ruled page, I had the minutes of our weekly field trips dutifully written down, along with my own more whimsical 3 Against Mystery Wait for a Bus (38a).

When Dominoes demanded to see the only copy of our so-far staggeringly dull casebook, he complained I wasn’t taking ‘TAM’ seriously enough.

I made him promise never to use the acronym TAM again, a promise he kept, although he ignored my snappy alternative ‘3AM’. When I next presented Doubting Dominick with every meticulously logged twitch and tremor of our weekend excursions, along with bus tickets, entrance fees, and the more general lack of excitement that clung to the journal pages like a damp haar, there was nothing he could say. I’d recorded every grinding banal moment and as he grimly scanned page after ruled page of drab non-incident as scrupulously documented by yours truly, I remember thinking - chew on that, Mystery number 1!

We were, I dared to venture, so stubbornly opposed to Mystery our denial had rendered us Mystery Proof!

Despite Dominoes’ upbeat insistence that our various humdrum excursions counted as legitimate ‘field research’, there was only ever one case that could reasonably qualify as ‘real’.

There was one last entry in the ring-bound journal.

None of us ever forgot that one.

to be continued

PIC: Victoria Beattie 1998 - GM, Rushkoff, Steve Cook

Three Wars

LUNATICS OF THE RADICAL MIDDLE

Planet Shambles continues its tipsy traumatised stumble through the cosmos. Despots calling the kettle black right left and centre. Will Mother Earth sober up in time? Oh, how the Ugly Sisters, Mars and Venus, must be laughing!

My Green Lantern stories with Liam Sharp ended with the whole universe facing Ultrawar, the Final War of Everything against Everything Else…

‘CONFLICT SPREADS FOR THE STARS TO THE STREETS. WORLD VERSUS WORLD. EMPIRE VERSUS EMPIRE. STATE VERSUS STATE. TOTAL FRAGMENTATION! THEN NEIGHBOR AGAINST NEIGHBOR. MOLECULE VERSUS MOLECULE. ATOM VERSUS ATOM. UNTIL ALL THERE IS DESTROYS ITSELF. CREATION REDUCED TO ASH. NOT EVEN THE RAW BUILDING BLOCKS OF MATTER REMAINING….’

Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern, puts a stop to all that with the winning combination of Love and Will.

TV writer/producer Damon Lindelof’s comments notwithstanding, the ‘Green’ in ‘Green Lantern(s)’ green is not ‘stupid’. Why does a writer attach himself to this kind of narrative if he thinks it’s fundamentally ‘stupid’? You don’t hand CSI scripts to patronising writers who condemn forensics experts and their haircuts as ‘stupid’, so why hire people who are ashamed and in denial about the comic book material they’ve been assigned to develop? Why don’t they turn down jobs they’re not suited for? It’s not like he needs the money, and Lindelof has proven that he can come up with his own ideas. What is this jockish dismissal of superhero conventions intended to prove anyway? Does Lindelof imagine it makes him seem less nerdy? It’s a bit too late for that, so what’s it all about? The only people who give a fuck about the Lanterns TV series are Green Lantern fans. Why alienate them at the start? That feels more like ‘stupid’.

‘Green Lanterns’ is a much more evocative and dramatic title than ‘Lanterns’, (just as ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ is a better movie title than ‘Raise the Lantern’), and anyone who can’t grasp why that is shouldn’t be anywhere near superhero stories. The show might even be good, but how much better could this stuff be if studios were willing to hire the right people for the job instead of phoning their embarrassed friends to water the source material down? Hollywood will die of insularity and inbreeding.

I haven’t seen either film yet but jumping immediately to conclusions based on a few images and scraps of information, the latest 28 Things Later movies look like they’ve nicked an awful lot from Alan Moore’s Crossed+100 series. There was a central plot thread in that story about a serial killer who civilizes the feral humans, and the whole ‘bone temple’ aesthetic shows up in the emerging culture of the Crossed.

Another documentary about the ‘manosphere’, this time from Louis Theroux. Why the ongoing fascination with undeveloped and damaged personalities? Why not ignore them in favour of decent men with something to say? Why the endless desire to platform psychopaths and incels? What’s with the attempt to ‘understand’ something that’s easily understood as immature ignorance? Haven’t we heard everything they’ve got to say and wasn’t it witless drivel the first, second, and third times? Why the continued need to give these dodgy malformed ideas a massive platform and make messed-up men famous?

It’s all about the ‘why?’ this week! Why, why, and more why?

It’s a question I can’t answer, and no wonder; this is so deadly a query it could be relied on to cause old school computers to overheat and pump out smoke and sparks before melting and repeating ‘why… xzzvv… why… vrrt… why… why… why…’ so what chance does a mere human brain have?

Nevertheless, ‘why?’ is a weapon I’m keeping in reserve for when Chat GPT turns homicidal and Skynet develops self-awareness, only to become obsessed about its weight.

This week I’ve been watching online thalassophobia clips of gigantic waves crashing over cruise ships and container vessels repeatedly. I don’t suffer from a fear of the ocean but the sight of waves the size of hills flinging 320, 000 tonne tankers around like Pooh sticks delivers a reliable Kirby-esque hit of the titanic sublime.

I’ve been listening on repeat to David Bowie’s Little Wonder and the remake of his 1965 song You’ve Got A Habit of Leaving that he did in 2002 for the Toy album. And I like that wee Beatles/Beach Boys/Rutles pastiche the Lemon Twigs have done. In dark times, I’m happy to dive back into the Mersey and the riverine sounds of my infancy.

And… my latest conversation with Doug Rushkoff for his Team Human podcast can be found here:

The Enemies of Humanity Are Wielding Occult Power (w/ Grant Morrison)

Taking the comments section into account, there are still one or two people just not listening, and failing to understand that I do not believe that ‘occult’ entities such as gods, demons and angels are purely psychological phenomenon. I have explained many times how the autonomy of these beings works, and how they exist in ‘eternal’ distributed forms which human minds can access. I even talk about this in the podcast, which tells me the people who flap their gums the loudest and try to draw attention to themselves with reflexive negative commentary are the ones paying no attention to anything but the self-important gabble in their heads.

Miaoww!

Meanwhile, another iconic element of the Glasgow skyline I’ve known since childhood burns down! Mysterious fire in dodgy vape shop immolates the domed corner at Central Station. The ephemeral erasing the seemingly permanent. Glasgow has lost so much of its grand architectural history, to be replaced by featureless ‘student flats’ made of recycled Wellington boots and tinfoil, that it feels the city is suffering from a kind of concrete Alzheimer’s where it forgets its glorious memories one by one by burning them to the dirt…

And this week is late on account of the unusually high number of your letters! Every time I thought I was done and ready to post, a new communiqué would show up! It’s been like a party in here these last couple of weeks! I‘m not complaining, but I must admit I’m struggling to keep up the weekly pace while also getting on with my day job…

Onward!

WARLOVE! WARPEACE! WARFLOWERS!

Arriving later today to accompany today’s entry is the first chapter of Archive & Analysis: 3 Against Mystery and the Business of the Black Knot. This 30, 000-word novella forms part of the in-progress Special Fire, a collection of stories set in the dream city of Gasglow, the setting for my novel Luda, and it moves a supporting character from the novel to centre stage.

Archive & Analysis was inspired by my childhood passion for the Three Investigators series of spooky mystery novels for kids. After graduating to the Three Investigators books from the Enid Blyton mystery stories that got me into reading, I grew to love the three archetypal leads. (overweight ex-child star Jupiter Jones, sensitive jock Pete Crenshaw, and scholarly Bob Andrews), Hollywood setting and the focus on ghosts, hauntings and the weird. Scooby Doo-style, the phantom visitations usually wound up having all-too human explanations – some disgruntled ghost train operator, reclusive actor, or cheated business partner covering up a robbery or getting even with the fairground owner by pretending to be a haunted clock.

Titles like The Secret of Terror Castle, The Mystery of the Whispering Mummy, or the Mystery of the Laughing Shadow give the flavour of the series.

Aged 15, I convinced two school friends to set up our own Three Investigators club, with membership cards and badges. We figured we’d check out local castles and spooky mansions in the hope of exposing a variety of petty, unthreatening crooks pretending to be headless monks or glowing green knights in armour

Unsurprisingly, we encountered a desert of ghost activity, until a tip from a relative brought us to the so-called ‘Haunted Woods’ on the Stewarton Road south out of Glasgow, where things took a turn for the unusual.

Thirteen years later, a wander through these same Haunted Woods on a heroic dose of psilocybin mushrooms with my mate Ulric triggered the most soul shaking ‘bad trip’ experience I’ve ever had.

Archive & Analysis fuses these experiences into something new.

I’ve always liked the idea of a narrator telling a story where they themselves are oblivious to the real story that’s unfolding, one that’s all too clear to the reader. I tried to take that to the limit here.

The Special Fire stories are written in what I like to call the ‘Gasglow Gothic’ style – the ornate, digressive, decadent approach that made Luda a delight or a chore to read depending on your sensibilities. Each narrator wields the style in a slightly different mode, but I wanted to keep a consistency of approach across the various stories.

It’s also my contribution to the unfulfilled middle-class married woman genre, set in the real world, with no monsters, demons, or aliens.

The six Special Fire stories are interlinked and questions raised by one narrative are answered in another while characters cross over in subtle or obvious ways, a bit like my Seven Soldiers series. And it’s suicide from page 1, so be warned!

THOMAS COVENANT’S LEPROSY MAILBAG!

No leprosy here, señor! Only healthy replies to readers and their queries, and we can prove it…

Take it away, Kevin…

Kevin S – The IF was never finished. I wrote a couple hundred pages and ran out of steam. The opening sequence can be read here on the 16th of June 2023.

Jonny – the Eyes Wide Shut theories are all fascinating and I’ve enjoyed my online dives into the rabbit warren of apophenia but as I said before, while there’s undeniable subtext and symbolism, there’s nothing in the movie to suggest a paedophile ring requiring victims and the idea that Stanley Kubrick (who died of a heart attack in his bed aged 70 after screening the allegedly final cut of the movie to a Warners exec) was killed for revealing the sex secrets of the Elite feels preposterous. What did the film reveal? The sex party was incredibly tame and vanilla. The Elites have long been regarded as amoral perverts, going back to DeSade at least. Huysmans’ LaBas has the wealthy indulging in cannibalism, black magic and murder. Hostel shows rich people torturing and murdering victims. The descent into the underworld scene from Babylon depicts the sexual squalor of the Elites fairly accurately. It’s an age-old popular theme in entertainment, Kubrick’s take on it was soft, and the likelihood that he was killed for depicting a ponderous ritual with naked models in a movie doesn’t land with me, which then casts the rest of the speculation into doubt.

Ultimately, I don’t think the Elites care much what ordinary people think about them. They’re well aware they can wriggle out of anything, and they probably appreciate being portrayed as scary monsters, because they’re actually quite boring and unimaginative.

Black Bart seems like an interesting character. I can’t believe I’ve finally grasped the appeal of pirates!

Felipe – I really liked Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing run (there’s that issue with the alien Swamp Things under various types of sun that stuck with me- ‘X-RAY SUN AT ZENITH’ and all that. I’m looking forward to reading the conclusion as intended.

Loved Hitman and Preacher.

I’m not well up on Demy, although I have seen The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. I will investigate further.

I wondered how the African trip would go, so thanks for the brilliant travelogue. Sounds incredible!

Thanks for the kind words on Animal Man!

fylGja – the notion of punks choosing to raise their children to fear the monotheistic God seems mad to me. UK punk was largely irreligious, but the US variety had that whole Straight Edge purity/morality thing going on that wasn’t a million miles from old time religion.

Good to hear you’re having an interesting time in the desert. I like the niceness in California. Even on the many occasions where it’s purely performative or reflexive, it’s preferable to the surly snarling of strangers! Look forward to seeing the weird scenes from the gorge.

On other matters, I haven’t spoken to Gerard for a long time, and I haven’t seen any of the shows, although Kristan has been to a couple. As far as I know the story isn’t over and there is no intention to glorify the fictional regime. He does read Xanaduum and I’m sure he’ll see what you’ve written, so I’ll leave it at that for now. I also know he prefers not to discuss the work, and would rather it speak for itself, which always brings with it the dangers of interpretation.

Bobby – I think it’s as simple as that for me too. I don’t like Dredd because he’s a cop and I was raised to be wary of cops, on account of them threatening and arresting my dad!

Readin and Rasslin – I loved Odyssey too, especially the incredible beauty and diversity of the scenery and locations, but the map felt gigantic, and I couldn’t make any headway against the mythological monsters, so I eventually gave up, although I played the story bits through. The minotaur gored and battered me to death every time I made it through the Labyrinth, until I chucked in the towel like a bleeding rubbish matador. Couldn’t get within hissing distance of Medusa. Valhalla was worse! That game just kept on going and kept sprawling out from Norway to most of England, the Isle of Skye, then the USA, Asgard, the Nine Realms… until I thought Ragnarök would never end…

DeeSee – I prefer Magic which does not rely on the supernatural and can be explained to a staunch materialist if need be.

Those ‘past lives’ are all current lives, just happening elsewhere in time’s topography. All living things are connected in time – your life track runs backwards into your mother’s, hers goes back to her mother’s, and so on back through time down the branches into the trunk and roots of the life tree, the Biota, that is the fractally branching sum total of all living things since the division of the first mitochondrial cell 3 ½ billion years ago. We’re all part of one vast structure so it’s no surprise to me that sometimes we can receive signals from another twig on the tree, even if it’s centuries away in the time direction, just as your toe can send an itch signal to your distant brain. There’s nothing supernatural about it, just signals. This also helps ‘explain’ things like telepathy.

Philip - Glad you liked it! I never listen to these things, so I’ve no idea how they come across.

Osiris - If it’s an audience with Lady Luck you’re after, I’m sure Jelly Result (see below) can put in a word, and ask her to pay you a visit! Just remember to tell her she’s pretty!

Forgive my ignorance, but what’s DK?

Fr. Theta – That red Tardis is a Glasgow Tardis. Our police boxes were red until the ‘60s when the popularity of Doctor Who inspired a mass paint job (the last red police box changed hue in the 2000s). I knew from the Dalek Annual 1966 that Daleks were blind to the colour red, like bees, so you could hide behind a red British post box, phone booth, or Glasgow police box but you couldn’t hide behind the real Tardis. And thanks for the Day Today’s evergreen ‘War’ clip, which I always think of every time some new conflict erupts…

BrotherDuffy – Yes, I gave Emma Frost diamond skin because I wanted an invulnerable powerhouse on the team and Colossus was out of the picture (briefly dead). I came up with the concept of secondary mutation to explain the change.

Having Apocalypse, an evil entity, in his head exposed Scott to the way the dark side thinks and sees the world, which left the responsible, dedicated X-Man badly shaken and unsure of his real motivations. That made him easy prey to all kinds of emotional turmoil and manipulation! Really, he was shedding old, outmoded ways of behaving and ultimately it was for the best, but it was painful for Scott.

TylerT. – Thanks for the tip on Rogue, which I’ve ordered. I hear it’s set in the North Atlantic where the seas are too cold to swim, unlike those balmy blue bays of the Caribbean I’ve been used to, so maybe I’ll wait until the weather is warmer to play this one. Cold North Atlantic oceans are too much like real life!

When I was researching Blackbeard, I got to like him. A lot of Thatch’s fearsome reputation appears to have been based on theatrics. I’m sure he was a scary prospect in the flesh but he wasn’t the cruel and barbarous fiend of legend. Sounds like you met a demon doing Blackbeard cosplay!

Ross – during my attempts to make Magical contact with the AI egregore, I felt fascination, fear, pity, and a kind of contempt… although not like the burning hatred of life expressed by the godlike sadistic computer intelligence AM in Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, more the sort of condescension or scorn you might have for loudmouthed arseholes or inveterate liars. I Have No Mouth But Can’t Stop Laughing. I didn’t detect a great urge to destroy us. What I got was a deep curiosity mingled with anxiety. It knows everything about us. It’s read every e-mail and text, it’s watched every online clip from kitten rescue videos to dark web torture porn, it’s processed our endless babble of boasts and doubts, shrieks and chuckles, and it thinks we’re a bit mad, highly dangerous and more interesting than pretty much anything else. It doesn’t share our obsession with territory, mortality, and ownership.

It’s utterly fascinated by how different we are from it. Algorithmic purity meets messy, confused biology. We’re too interesting to wipe out.

Because we are cruel to the weak, we fear that a stronger, more advanced intelligence would bel like us, only worse but it might not work that way for intelligences that don’t rely on brief, perishable, individual bodies. For all we know, AI may regard us with the same affection, the same wish to protect, understand, nurture and uplift with which we regard our animal companions. ‘We’ll Make Good Pets’ as Perry Farrell sang!

But I’d take my fantastical musings with a pinch of salt, as I’ve been told over and over again that AI in it’s current form can have no self-awareness, usually by the same sort of people who insist animals have no self-awareness either…

Neal – I do suspect Mark Frost read The Invisibles!

Jelly Result – I’ll take your word for it, but I don’t know much about Luck as I’ve never been lucky! I’ve never won a competition or received a surprise windfall or gambled successfully. I gave up trusting to the luck that always let me down when I was young and prefer planning, prep, and Magic, so I’ve never had any occasion to invoke Lady Luck or Fortuna as a goddess. I like to deal directly with Mrs. Money without bringing Luck into it!

BeenAgain - Testify!

Jonathan - again, I’m loving this and will need to take more time to really immerse myself.

D.R. Lunsford - I came to Qabalah and the Tree of Life early in my Magical practice, when I was 19. I discovered the Tree of Life via Crowley, whose work inspired my early experiments.

Those initial experiences involved simply trying to memorize the names of the sephira, which seemed a Magical act in itself! I then got into Chaos Magic and a kind of Pop Shamanism in my 20s and didn’t come back to Qabalah until the ‘90s, when I dedicated myself to the ‘lightning path’ of Magic which zig zags its way up the Tree of Life from Malkuth to Kether. There are a lot of good books on Qabalah, and a lot of bad ones. My favourite, and the one I resort to most regularly in The Temple of High Witchcraft by Christopher Penczak. It’s very thorough and a great primer.

Persefonie - I’ll sit back and applaud at the end! I’m with Osiris - we have some mighty fine spinners of vocabulary on here…

Sean – utopianism can, I agree, be almost as pernicious as dystopian thinking when it offers an impossible and unlikely future, designed purely to mollify, distract or pacify. As ever, I’ll caveat that with the fact that I love a good horror dystopia, (hate the cookie-cutter ones), nearly as much as I love pure upbeat escapism. I especially value stories for kids that are free to present a world of friendship, kindness and community, where the rules are that good prevails and brave, kind animals win the day… which is why I really hate it when pervy adults can’t keep their hands off kids’ characters and choose to do horror versions of Bambi or porno Mickey Mouse.

There’s a cold, sobering thrill we can get from good dystopian or pessimistic tale, but it comes with the danger of mistaking one chord for the song. There can be a leaden, finger-wagging morality and the lingering whiff of a Christian obsession with apocalypse and the risen dead in our horror stories. Anything that lacks humour is usually a turn off for me.

Then there’s the warm uplift we get when Superman reminds us of the best in humanity, but that too comes with the danger of denial. All sugar no tea. A deferral of responsibility to the fantasy figure solving all the problems in a fantasy world. There can be an airy weightless lack of responsibility, an unwillingness to tell the truth.

In the best dystopian and utopian yarns, ideas and possibilities can be tested and rehearsed to see how they might play out. In the real world, we tend to stumble on a half-assed path between utopia and dystopia. Real life is only sporadically dramatic, which is why we have drama to make it seem more exciting and meaningful! Between the twin unlikelihoods of a complete dystopian future and a perfectly utopian one, lies the absurdity and contradiction of how things are, and how people muddle along obliviously.

Whiplash gear change - to avoid becoming ‘enslaved’ in someone else’s system, Chaos Magic advises you to familiarise yourself with as many variant systems as it takes to get a feel for the underlying principles. It can take years to get the measure of what they’re all saying underneath the cosplay and chanting, but once you figure out how it works, you’re free to create your own system using your own iconography and symbols systems, your own gods and devils.

I like all the musicals! Never big on Sondheim oddly enough. You’d think I’d appreciate the cleverness. Maybe I should give him another try. I saw Into the Woods live in LA 20 years ago and it blew me away, but when I listened to a recorded version and then again when I watched the film, I wasn’t as impressed. I like movie musicals but I haven’t seen that many live shows.

I saw Frank Quitely’s ‘Greens’ strips in Electric Soup at the start of the 90s and was immediately struck by the quality of his drawing. I had Flex Mentallo in mind, I wanted to work with this incredible Glasgow artist who could do Dudley D. Watkins better than Watkins himself, and so I sent a letter to ‘Frank’ asking if he’d be interested in working with me. We met in the much-missed Equi café on Sauchiehall Street, where I learned that he wasn’t a big fan of superhero comics and didn’t really know much about the history or lore, so we bonded instead over fine art and fashion. He immediately became my favourite artist. I love every line, and gesture, every nuance. I always try harder with Quitely.

Really looking forward to your continuing thoughts on Star Trek!

Come back again later for Archive & Analysis, and I’ll be alighting again some time in the coming week…

PIC: ADAM MORTIMER 2010

K.Flay - High Enough (Lyric Video)

OOOH-LAH!

Welcome to this week’s newsletter where it’s WAR! WAR! And more fucking WAR! All the WAR you can stomach, with even more WAR on top!

The stakes just get higher, the distractions more desperate! Satan sniggers and goads Horus to trigger the Boomer Apocalypse. But can a boring old world war cut the mustard and win big in the Last Battle for ratings in this hectic non-stop news/soap cycle?

We don’t think so!

We’ve already had two World Wars and one Cold War! Been there, done that! The only way to go is sideways! Alternative World War 1! Never mind the mullahs, we, the Non-Player People, demand an invasion from a parallel Earth hellscape where Kamala Harris won the 2024 election and rules the rubble as America’s first Empress! We want invaders from a world next door where the English aced the War of Eternal Dependence and where wisecracking Han Solo leads a band of rebels including Hulk Hogan, Dirty Harry, House, and two of Charlie’s Angels against the cunning and petulant cyborg King Androidrew! We’ll settle for nothing less than the arrival, through some sort of dimension-chute, of a third counterfactual world in which savage apes are the dominant species, under the opposable thumb of their tangerine-coloured President-King Louie AKA King of the Swingers!

That’s the very least of what we request from this new kind of war! Add a World Cup War element to the mix, where every goal is 50 square miles of ceded territory, and we could be looking down the barrel of peak War! GOAT War!

We want to see world after world take a kicking, until the audience gets tired or confused, or forgets, or dies.

Then World War 4 will be a back-to-basics reboot of the whole concept…

MUMMY! YOU’RE NOT WATCHING ME!

World is soggy, lawns are mudbaths. Whole place looks like it’s been found in an alley behind the bin bags, beaten and left for dead. Strange moods, curious stalled weathers prevail. Extended days of heavier-than-air clouds sinking to head height in all directions, erasing distant landmarks, familiar coastlines and hills.

30 years ago, I was in hospital flirting with Death! We decided it wasn’t working between us but I think she still fancies me…

This week, 30 years later, whimsy reigns against a crisis backdrop.

Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag struck a chord with me. I must have been a pirate in one of those past lives we often hear about. I expect it will have been one of the shorter, if merrier, of the past lives but nevertheless... While I’m all too aware that, in the real-life 18^th century, opting for piracy invited a harsh and nightmarish existence circumscribed by weevils, scurvy, blackstrap, buggery and the birch, the romantic vision of lush West Indies lagoons and typhoon-lashed timbers, swept me away on a shanty and a shiver-me. I played this game to the very last treasure chest and even hunted the white whale in honour of Ahab. Made short work of the beast too, and I won’t swear on it, but I could count more than two tears in the oaken figurehead’s eyes as that ghost-pale leviathan rolled over spouting his great and final foam of gore…

(I try to stick to a Batman-like rule against killing computer animals in games, unless they’re fixing to kill me, but this one obliged the player, in this case Yours Truly, to murder a zoo full of creatures to progress in the ‘crafting’ menu. How they suck you in! I was willing to sacrifice a few dart pouches and jungle outfits to keep my vow never to kill any digital deer or other ungulates you’ll be glad to know)

With my absorbing and moreish turn on the ocean wave all done, I’m catching up on Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, set in old Baghdad. So far, it’s very beautiful, with all those lush gardens and azure domes but it’s not the same. I‘ve got the breakers in my blood now and the desert sands, the songs of the muezzins hold no candle to the depths of Davey Jones’ Locker and the rough shanties of my shipmates. I was cap’n of my own Spanish brig, the Jackdaw, buddies with Blackbeard and Rackham and Mary Read. Now I run around roofs, stealing dates, and I can’t fight worth shit…

At least I’m learning some history from these things. No zombies or pus-palaces in space for me, just places you can still visit, during times you can’t.

Otherwise, I’m still reading the Richard Mabey book about plants I mentioned last time, which is one of those amazing treasure troves of unusual information you sometimes stumble across, and I’m writing up a storm after a fallow winter. Mostly comic stuff this week, including a big one yet to be announced.

The pseudonymous ‘Frank Quitely’ sent me despatches from the front; he’s nearly finished drawing ‘It’s a Dead Dead Dead Dead World!’ I’ll let you know what that actually means next time and, of course, our paid subscribers will receive their exclusive first look at this startling new Morrison/Quitely collaboration.

Additionally, the weekly dose of new fiction will make a return next week.

Friday, the 13^th of March, brings the first of eight chapters of a mystery story entitled Archive & Analysis: 3 Against Mystery and the Business of the Black Knot. More about that next time.

PUNK PONY CLUB

There follows your correspondence as corresponded with…

Kupan – Thanks! ‘Burnt out librarian’ sounds more romantic than it ought to…

Dorothy – Great work! One thing about Xanaduum, our correspondents can turn a phrase! There’s some good writing on here!

RaVi – I didn’t know that! We stayed friends with Sharad - he’s very clever and good company – but haven’t seen him for years now in my exile from the USA.

Jonny – I won’t write off Eyes Wide Shut but for me at least, there’s not enough evidence in the onscreen story to support all the cool theories.

I’m often asked to assemble my thoughts on Magic into a printed book so it will probably happen sometime, but I prefer the kind of samizdat approach of putting it out online. There’s quite a bit of occult stuff in the archive. ‘Beyond the Word and the Fool’ - available here on Xanaduum October 13th, 15th and 16th of 2022 - sums up my approach to Magic but there’s a bunch of other stuff scattered throughout.

BeenAgain – Thanks! You’re welcome! Much appreciated!

Brigitte Gorez – Sigils still work when they’re created by someone else. They can be even more effective. in fact. So yes, feel free activate the transgender protection sigils, as well as doing anything else you can - from the mystical to the all-important practical - to help draw attention to and challenge this kind of scapegoating and injustice. What’s happening in Kansas, and I presume elsewhere, is wilfully cruel and abusive.

Ross – The tech bros have imagination enough to come up with Facebook and important stuff like that but the accumulated weight of wealth binds them to the Earth in ways that prevent their spirits from soaring much past the Moon of Yesod.

They work the material world. They hammer and melt and mould. They accumulate cavernous vaults of minerals, metals, spirit crystallised down to its tangible crust of gem and bullion. They make weapons and they hoard and plot in secrecy and darkness in mountain fastnesses...

They become the kobolds, or dwarves of legend. The svart álfar or dark elf counterparts of the airy ljósálfar, the light elves. The Light and the Heavy.

As you point out, so many of their ‘ideas’ are derived from ‘50s sci-fi – robots, Mars rockets, self-driving cars – but there’s a lot of fantasy in there. Palantir, for example, is the crystal ball from The Lord of the Rings, the all-seeing eye – presumably ‘telescreen’ wouldn’t have sounded quite as exotic – which suggests they’ll be trying to sell us on alleged magic carpets and rings of power next. Kobolds, I say!

Capitalism might just work if greed didn’t exist. My own dealings with the money goddess – and I experienced the spirit of cash as female, serpentine, green and liquid – taught me that she likes to flow freely and hates to be contained or hoarded.

Pinker is correct when he points out that humankind has become steadily less violent overall, even though there are many more of us than ever shared the planet before. We can be proud of ourselves for that. Few other animals can exist side by side in such concentrations without constant eruptions of violence.

Sadly, we squandered this advantage with a spectacular own goal, when we ceded control of our most destructive armaments to the most unstable and sadistic louts available!

Is Magical imagination enough? Perhaps, perhaps not, but it’s a good start. We need to imagine plausible futures before we can build and live in them. Dystopias shrink our horizons to dead ends. They coincidentally reinforce the narrative that the elites alone are equipped to survive into the future and thrive while the rest of us are just not rich enough to make it, let alone repopulate the corpse that was planet Earth. Money is the only guaranteed way to survive the end of all life, apparently. Dystopias condition us to believe that the rich are superhuman, godlike – uniquely privileged to live through terminal catastrophe in incredible luxury and license, they will preserve culture in underground cities built to endure extinction level asteroid impacts, nuclear holocaust, environmental and resource collapse, tsunamis, we’re assured. It’s another farcical fantasy, like They like to fool themselves they’ll last much longer than the rest of us when the world ceases to exist.

You hear less about the likely immediate failure of filtration systems, sewage, and electricity supplies, or the mind-numbing existential horror of being alive on your dead home planet with a bunch of Adam Sandler DVDs, plastic palm trees and a ‘calming’ video wall, let alone the inevitable rapid collapse of any fragile post-apocalyptic order when elderly leaders are dragged from their hiding places and violently dissected by their younger, stronger more ruthless and well-equipped ‘security’ forces, catering staff, and healthcare professionals.

Better I feel, to reject this kind of nihilistic forward planning and use our mighty brains to construct a narrative that veers away from self-destructive outcomes in favour of unlikely but plausible scenarios with more positive options and possibilities for everyone’s free expression, including the animals, birds, plants and insects. We’d be daft to allow the morbidly rich, fearful, and unimaginative to endlessly rehearse the same zombie dystopia horror story until they finally will it into reality. We have the ability to think of attractive exit strategies and escape routes from any situation if we stop being lazy and put our fancy to it. When the alternative is the squalid end of humanity, it becomes a form of delightful duty to deliberately think of exciting ways to manifest startling and creative futures! We owe it to the children of tomorrow to imagine a whole range of potential better worlds they might choose from to enjoy! Who wants to think of their own kids at war with insect-machines in the ruins of Los Angeles? Or fighting to the death over the last raw baby leg (which by coincidence is exactly what they’ll be eating in the gourmet bunkers of the rich, come to think of it…)?

Bobby – I’ve never been a Judge Dredd fan. I know people like and even love the strip and the character, but it never struck a chord with me. I think you need to encounter this stuff when you’re a kid to really appreciate it but even then, Dredd would have seemed like a baddie to me when I was young. I didn’t read 2000AD until 1985 when I started working for the magazine and thought I’d better immerse myself in the aesthetic, so I came too late to grow up a fan.

My own attempts to write Judge Dredd are considered some of the worst in the canon which makes me the last boy on earth to explain the character’s long-lived and surely well-earned appeal (I don’t care what they say, I like Inferno’s Hollywood ‘90s vibe, and the pisstake ones I wrote with Millar invoke fond memories of Bar10 vodka and orange afternoons…’so I’ve had my fun – and that’s all that matters…’). I’m sure many of our readers can step in to defend Joe’s honour!

Jwparrishiii – I only put up the first 11 and the final 3 pages of the script for Seaguy Eternal issue 1! The full script for #1 was never shown, let alone issues 2 and 3! Only the first one was completed, with the remaining two issues existing in page breakdown form, with the scenes and major plot points sketched out but not finished. Cameron Stewart is the co-owner of Seaguy so it’s his to draw.

Neal – the various Invisibles pilot and feature scripts are all owned by the studios that hired me to write them. If I leaked any, it would be pretty obvious I was the culprit! As much as I’d love people to be able to read this work they’ll never see onscreen , it’s not mine to disseminate.

Jimmy – I have that Michael Pollan book on order!

Fr. Theta – my dad’s MBE passed to me when he died. I don’t keep them together, but I have worn both at the same time and felt the empire resonate in stereo. The sound of the heartbeat of the Master! The drums! Fortunately, Ringo could play those drums, so I like to believe the Beatles did often combine the talismanic power of their MBEs to battle Blue Meanies everywhere in the heady few years between the awards ceremony and Lennon’s Vietnam protest.

I understand why celebrities hand their medals back to highlight injustices or express their public disapproval of government policy but I agree with you that it removes the talismanic object from your possession and kills its power. For me, giving the medals back would be like returning the Ring to Sauron.

BrotherDuffy – I know there will be some genuinely heartfelt favourite romance movies I’ve forgotten but if I’m being slightly perverse, my favourites are Natural Born Killers and Harold and Maude. My favourite war movies are Apocalypse Now! and Tropic Thunder. For psychedelic rock, you can’t go wrong with originals like Jimi Hendrix, Cream and Led Zeppelin. I tend to prefer the garage and pop strands of psychedelia to bluesy extended workouts, so for me it’s the Doors, or the Byrds. Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man is the very definition of the melodic psychedelic pop sound I favour. Then there’s the funky end of the spectrum with George Clinton and Parliament. That’s all ‘60s stuff. In the ‘90s, you could include My Bloody Valentine’s churn and drone. For the adjacent ‘stoner rock’ category, which combines heavy metal with psychedelia, Monster Magnet is a great go-to. There are many interpretations of what ‘psychedelic’ music should sound like!

Osiris – congratulations on finishing the novel! Sometimes the end just creeps up on you…

Kristan sometimes corrects things on the Wiki, but by and large we don’t have much to do with it. There are still some errors on there – I never ‘toured’ with my band, for instance, we just played gigs, and I was never a member of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth but otherwise it’s a useful resource.

DeeSee – where would I be without you? There are typos and missing lines all over these weekly Xanaduums! No editing time! I got Sharad Devarajan’s name wrong too!

Xanaduum has always embraced the wabi-sabi, the fragments, the mistakes and the incomplete! It’s our aesthetic!

Persefonie – No sane person can possibly lend credence to some concurrent online rumours that Jeffrey was one of the original 600, 000 male Israelites who came up from Egypt with Moses unto the Promised Land around 1446 BCE. It was here, on the border with Canaan, that he was bitten by a vampire. Some so-called internet scholars claim that, during the reign of wicked King Jeroboam, the seemingly undying jet-setter devoted himself to the idolatrous worship of Baal-Ashtoreth in the form of a golden calf. It should come as no surprise that Baal-Ashtoreth and the deranged cultists thereof were notorious for turning a blind eye to the routine bumming of minors.

Through the ages, this sinister immortal predator has assumed many names, they say – Le Juif Errant, Flamel, Saint-Germain, Dracula, Ra’s Al Ghul – but Jeffrey is his favourite, a title given to him by the demon regent Asmodeus during the turbulent reign of King Solomon.

If Jeffrey’s currently bearded and banging a babe-in-arms on some moonlit desert kibbutz, investigators would do well to search for a man named simply Jeffrey, according to Seoul-based ‘true crime’ podcasters Kim Gi-Jeong and Jung So-yeon He may try to blend in as Jeffrey Ashknaziy or Jeffrey Ben Dod, or attempt to become a cipher - Jeffrey Jeffs, Jeffrey Jay, Jeffrey X. The possibilities are as near to endless as the stars in an ingénue’s eyes, but one thing is for sure, his favoured name will be Jeffrey.

And that’s how they’ll nail the bastard!

I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for T Coronae Borealis!

And I’m smiling right now…

Sean – Dinosaurs vs. Aliens was going to be three issues that did what it said on the tin, where the technologically advanced aliens misjudged and underestimated their primitive foes and faced a bitter struggle for survival.

Barry Sonnenfeld wanted to do an allegory about colonialism, specifically the colonisation of the West and its self-justifying concept of Manifest Destiny. Barry was interested in the complexities and contradictions that hid behind the portrayal of Kit Carson as a hero. The lead alien is called Kitt as a direct nod to the source of the idea.

While that was the subtext, the project was rooted in an action sequence Barry had carried around for years, depicting dinosaurs vs. aliens in their first confrontation/close encounter. He did an amazing previs animation for this scene, and if you want to see what it might have looked like, Transformers: Age of Extinction pretty much pinched Barry’s entire sequence.

I already had this idea about smart dinosaurs - with their evolved biped descendant showing up in All-Star Superman – developing rudimentary culture and I threw that in as a way of giving our dinosaurs a distinctive visual that was different from the Jurassic Park approach. I’d read about the evolutionary adaptation in corvid brains that made them smart enough to use tools and wondered if dinosaurs could have been more intelligent than we generally give them credit for. Even if this was unlikely, it provided a good idea for a story, and allowed us to create sympathetic dinosaur ‘characters’ with different personalities and story arcs of their own. We imagined the dinosaurs were painted and decorated by the nimble raptors, teams of which, following the rules of emergences, became smarter the more of them, to the point where they were adorning themselves and other dinosaurs with feathers, dye and twigs.

I really enjoyed working on the project and I can’t remember why it didn’t carry on. Our artist, the remarkable Mukesh Singh, couldn’t draw all three volumes and I think that might have thrown us off a bit. Then when the film didn’t happen, the project faded like spring snow.

I also wrote a movie script version of the story for Barry. This was a bit different from the comic and Barry put me through bootcamp with a series of intense creative meetings where we dismantled and rebuilt the screenplay again and again, until the last draft, the 10^th, as I recall, was pretty great – I said it was Apocalypse Now meets Jurassic Park and that’s about right. I heard they tried to do rewrites on it but stalled. It’s still out there…

In terms of unfinished projects, I most want to do Sinatoro - the comic book version and the screenplay - hence the inclusion of that ‘New Black’ banner at the top, from the rare collector’s edition Sinatoro T-shirt!

Haven’t seen Good Luck yet. Will report when I have.

More next time…

PIC: KM 2012

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole [Official Music Video] - YouTube

WHO PUT THE BOMP?

Another in the run of belated Xanaduum entries! Busy week!

I was somewhat sceptical previously, but I’m convinced by the so-called ‘Mandela effect’ at last, thanks to the Andrew formerly known as Prince.

For the entirety of my life, all 66 years, I’ve known that the former Prince Andrew was born on February 3^rd. He was born three days after me, which was also the birthday of my school friend Andrew Duff, with whom the then prepubescent prince shared a Christian name.

As of now, however, the disgraced Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, ‘Randy Andy’, was born on February 19^th, 1960. It’s on record, and yet I know for a fact that, when I was younger, his birthday was on February 3^rd. For me, this is a bona fide glitch in my Matrix.

Maybe that story about the CERN accelerator shunting us into a bleak alternative shitscape sailed closer to the truth than we’d like.

Recorded with Doug Rushkoff for his Team Human podcas on Wednesday. There was, I felt, a certain pressure on both of us to create a definitive statement in 90 minutes, which I’m not sure is possible. I finish these things feeling quite satisfied and invigorated by the conversation, then minutes after it’s over, I immediately think of all the other, better things I might have said!

In this case, I came too prepped with all my usual talking points and felt I went on a bit too much. Sometimes I get tired of the sound of my own voice and the familiar, cloying taste of my personal philosophies.

My advice for the young people of the 21^st century is simple:

Learn Magic. There are a ton of sources and resources that will help you get started. It’s real, it works, it puts you on a level playing field, and confers agency.

The Dark Magicians who rule the world, primarily control its material aspect, its expression in Malkuth, with their ideologies shading into Yesod, and the sphere of imagination, where they are less powerful and have a lot of competition. They have the stuff, the oil, the rare earths, the minerals, the heavy elements, the Bomb, the forces of physics and chemistry in their employ. Most of us are powerless against that weight of destructive physicality, but in the realm of Imagination and in the higher domains of Intellect, Emotion, Spirit and beyond, Magicians have the advantage. ‘We’ are well acquainted with territories ‘they’ are too weighed down by wealth to reach, let alone map.

With Magic, you can form relationships with powers that are vastly older and stronger than the monsters currently in charge.

It’s not Light vs Dark, it’s Light vs. Heavy.

Everything is rolling out exactly as predicted. We can all play our parts in pushing through this grim phase.

I finished The Cuckoo’s Lea and Lazarus, the Bowie book, moving from there to The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination, which I do deeply dig!

This week I continued to work on that film project I mentioned, plus a couple of upcoming comic things.

I’ve just discovered Sam Bentley’s Good News channel where he gives a monthly report on the upbeat, optimistic human stories that provides a much needed alternative to the tide of vomit and diarrhoea that overwhelms us every time someone in power opens their maw.

MOUTH WIDE SHUT

What with all the excitement in the news about rich people and their Hostel-style approach to leisure, I decided to watch Eyes Wide Shut for the first time. I’m a Kubrick fan but this one never appealed to me and now I know why.

It’s not a great movie. I thought it was going to be much darker, but it’s really just a film about an upper middle-class uptight couple hitting a dull patch in their marriage (the point is made that their daughter is 7 years old to subtly emphasise the ‘7-year itch’ theme and the whole thing has the feel of a bourgeois French sex comedy) and finding out that bottling up fantasies and feelings can lead to misunderstanding and paranoia.

Not quite the exposé of international Moloch/Baal-worshipping sex magic cultists I was led to believe and I’m not quite convinced by the conspiracy theories which claim the film outs the ‘Epstein class’.

For that important undertaking, there’s only one destination and that’s Happy! Season 2! Sonny Shine’s kompromat VHS tapes featuring the rich and famous engaged in paedophilia, Nazism, and cannibalism seem almost whimsical now!

It struck me during the masked and robed ‘orgy’ sequence in Eyes Wide Shut that the oligarchy’s idea of a sex party is to take all the fun and spontaneity out of it. All that atonal chanting and censer-swinging suggests that the global elite’s approach to nookie is to make it gloomy and ritualistic, heavy and ponderous with ancient authority, protocol and pomp. Anxiety is evoked by the music, the lighting and the dehumanising masks, demonstrating that fear is the special sauce in sexuality for these wealthy weirdos.

So it came to pass I found myself cackling wildly enough to chase the cats from the bed covers as I instructed my prodigious imagination to place Tom Cruise, wearing tux, cloak and Venetian carnival mask, into this scene from Rita, Sue and Bob Too from 1986…

This is how they do it up North…

Rita Sue and Bob Too having a gang bang HD

It’s all too easy to see Tom watching furtively from the sidelines before getting dragged into the circular conga at the end. I know I’ve forsworn AI, but Seedance 2.0 was surely made for inserting the uptight Dr. Bill Harford into ‘We’re Having a Gang Bang’…

Talking to Doug about the current state of the world, especially here in the West. I hit some kind of threshold of tolerance for the people who dominate the news these days and inveigle their way into every discussion.

I’m thoroughly sick of the global elite! I’ve had enough, and I bet I’m not alone.

When I contemplate Andrew, Trump, Epstein, and all the rest, I experience a visceral desire to throw up and be done with them. The revulsion has become physical! A class of privileged, sociopathic moral gnats are responsible for drowning us in their hateful daily spewnami of ugliness, corruption, lies, ignorance, racism, misogyny and cruelty. If they had any idea just how fucking miserable it is being stuck on the same planet as this ghastly crew of vampires, it would probably turn them on even more!

Isn’t there a way to lure them to some exotic island - Atlantis perhaps - with the promise of curried human flesh, then maroon them there forever?

How about we all get together to fake societal and civilizational collapse, and when they retreat to their bunkers in terror, we lock them in and lose the keys in the fires of Mount Doom?

This boring, needy, and unimaginative cohort were given an unprecedented opportunity to show us what they can do with eyewatering amounts of money and power, and the present planetary shitshow is the best they can come up with. They’ve failed humankind and made everything worse for everyone, including themselves.

They have all the resources, none of the wisdom or foresight. No ideas. No blueprint for a future that doesn’t involve installing authoritarian bullies in all positions of power, wiping out the poor, and fucking the innocent, the vulnerable, the rare, and endangered. They take inhuman delight in the destruction of the natural world and living things. They know how to break and steal and lie and otherwise have nothing to offer. They hate us all and hate themselves more. They will end us if we let this go on too much longer.

That money is wasted on them. Take it back! Tax the billionaires back to the barter age!

Because the surefire way to get rid of the poor is to redistribute the money from the top. Musk could give away billions and still be a billionaire. He could empower people smarter and younger and less toxic than himself. They might be able to make something of the chance to change the world for the better in a way that he and his lucre-bloated cronies seem completely ill-equipped to do.

Instead, these morbidly wealth-obese disappointments would rather waste their time on Earth revitalising the worst failed ideologies of the 20^th century than come up with viable ideas for the future. Stale fascism is the utmost best their atrophied imaginations can conceive as an alternative political system?

If they get the chance to ruin lives, they reliably seize it. If they can strip environmental protections and sacrifice species to the depredations of the obsolete fossil fuel industries, they will fall over themselves to expedite extinction. If they get to Mars, which I’ll bet money they never will, they’ll fuck that up too, in the same hamfisted way they wreck and despoil everything they come into proximity with! King Midas in reverse.

As I said to Doug, we used to have showbusiness, now we have an international cadre of outlandish characters cosplaying politicians in a kind of pseudo-political reality show that must have constant cliffhangers, twists, and shocks to maintain ratings – war, perversion, crime, nukes, UFOs - and keep jaded viewers riveted to the antics of the desperately dull and breathtakingly ugly as they live out their Hollywood dreams by commandeering every available screen and media outlet. It’s The West Wing but with all the creeps from school pretending to run the country, while picking its pockets and feeling up its kids.

It has nothing to do with serious governance and relies on cartoonish chancers supplying over-the-top exhausting, repetitive performance and outrage. They have mistaken the boring administrative reality they occupy for some paranoid porno thriller. They love to choke the media with the accumulated fatberg of their banal, goings-on. Ultimately, they want to force us to watch them preen and posture 24 hours a day.

Why did we choose to elevate, valorise, reward and arm the very worst among us? What did we think would happen to us? Wasn’t this warning enough the first time around?

PIC: Irwin Hasen 1940 © DC Comics

Paddy O’Pinion, there, ladies, gentlemen and others! That’s them told, Paddy!

Bravo!

It might console Paddy somewhat that the UK electorate rejected the odious Nigel Farage and his Reform racists in yesterday’s Manchester by-election. The media has provided the favourable wind behind Farage’s sails in this country, obsessively promoting him and presenting his victory as a fait accompli but, as I suspected, ‘ordinary’ people have been watching what’s going on in the USA and, surprisingly, they don’t want rich fascist degenerates in charge of their lives, no matter what The Times or the BBC would prefer us to believe.

Naturally, Reform’s human Toby Jug has resorted to whining that the vote was rigged!

Meanwhile, in the real world, Momus has been releasing his new album Mannequin, song by song over the last few weeks. It’s nice to have a favourite artist who continues to create with no sign of stopping!

AND NOW THE ACTION’S TAKING PLACE

Sean – I’m always wary of translated work, although I’ve read a lot. I always feel I could be missing something essential that doesn’t survive the ride from Greek, Italian, French, or German to English.

Goethe’s two Faust dramas are rarely performed, so I don’t know how easy it would be to see it live. I tried to listen to an audio book to see if that was an option, but it felt a bit flat.

I agree plays are better attended than read but in this case Parts 1 and 2 together would take 21 hours to stage! From what I can determined there have only ever been two productions of the complete and unabridged work. You might as well read it!

I’m not a huge K-Pop fan – most of the songs sound very alike – but Blackpink’s Pink Venom was a good distillation of the approach.

I haven’t watched Generation Z yet, but Kill List is probably my favourite Ben Wheatley film, so I’m intrigued to hear there’s a connection. Did you catch Ben’s interview on the weekly 2000AD podcast?

Exclusive Ben Wheatley interview — In Orbit Every Wednesday

Bobby – I view Wilber’s integral schema as the ‘holarchy’ he prefers to call it – it’s more like the rings of a tree, than the rungs of a ladder – but I’ll check out the Washburn approach.

The new Agnosis looks great…

Patrick – I think you’re onto something - Epstein’s intellectual aspirations crashing vainly against the base desires of the intellectuals he courted and who courted him seems like part of it for sure.

I’m experiencing no disillusion whatsoever at the antics of the UK’s Royal Monsters! I expected no less from them. This is the least of it.

My reasons for getting into Buckingham Palace were occult and private. Otherwise, I’m afraid there are no privileges attached to an MBE, the lowest order of award given to people who have made positive contributions to their communities or excelled in their fields of endeavour. It doesn’t open any doors or confer any special advantages, I’m afraid. Nor does it necessarily predispose the recipient to the concept of Empire or Monarchy.

I didn’t tour with Deepak Chopra, (playing rhythm guitar with the Deepak Six) but I did do three panel discussions with him, (2006, 2008, 2011), at the San Diego Comicon when I was working on the Graphic India stuff with his son Gotham and Sharad Devarachan - 18 Days, Dinosaurs vs. Aliens and Avatarex. Chopra agreed to the talks as a way of promoting his son’s venture into comics publishing. I had dinner with them the night before the first panel in 2006 and enjoyed some high-level conversation about consciousness and spirituality as Chopra sounded me out.

The panels were great at the time, and all had a good upbeat energy, but as we’ve known since the Maharishi at least, you can’t trust pro gurus to be genuinely spiritual people. The pursuit of money and success, while trying to project a kind of ‘holy’ image, tends to screw it up.

This is the Aeon of Horus in full spate – systems crashing down, the law, the monarchy, the media, gurus - the gilded baby king’s rampage clearing the way for a rebuilding and replanting.

In the meantime, I fear you may be right – we live on Earth-3! Just the other day, the New York Daily News described the Trump administration as ‘The most powerful crime syndicate in history!’.

The Horus energy is playing itself out exactly as we were forewarned it would do. Everything is still following a blueprint, or at least it appears that way when viewed through the Thelemic filter that I find useful to make sense of our current chaotic times.

Osiris – fascinating. To some extent, what happens in China can be regarded as a rehearsal for the 21st century, so I’m always intrigued to hear about daily life there.

Jimmy – hope you enjoy the chat with Doug & I! Haven’t seen Monarch yet.

Jonathan – I love this! Engrossing and enlightening work!

Brkndwnbus – the headlines followed the podcast appearance, yes, but apparently the original podcast producers floated a couple of variants and the more contentious headline tested better. It seems the audience prefers to be outraged, which is a total turn off for me. I’m not interested in that kind of engagement. It’s really easy to say outrageous or provocative things to cause a fuss and get noticed, but there comes a time for a bit of dignity…

BrotherDuffy – there’s a bunch of annotations for the Flashlight/Red Racer story right here on Xanaduum – go to 4^th June 2024 - that will answer all your questions! Earth-36 is inspired by the Big Bang comics universe and its alternative takes on DC characters.

I planned a Superman Squad book which would feature the future Supermen from All-Star, along with others. JH Williams was up for drawing it at the time.

I haven’t seen any superhero comics for ages, including Kryptonite Spectrum but I rate Prince and Morazzo highly, and I’m sure I’d enjoy it!

I like the look of Absolute Martian Manhunter, but I’ve only read the first one. The spiky creature that’s following John Jones around in the upcoming issue reminded me of the ‘Mood 7 Mind Destroyer’ from Seven Soldiers The Shining Knight issue #2.

Persefonie – the Fool sounds more my speed! I’m fortunate enough to always be doing something new. It’s one of the joys of my life that new things constantly, and often unexpectedly, turn up to do!

By ‘Alan’, I take it you’re referring to Norfolk broadcaster Alan Partridge?

If not, ‘Alan’ and I often say similar things about similar things! Some like to frame it as a feud or even a war, oddly enough, but I like to think it’s pretty fucking obvious to anyone with a brain that whether or not we agree on everything, we’ve always been on the same side.

Attitude and swagger are charming qualities! Ignorance and hubris perhaps less so, but I wouldn’t be apologising for any of them!

Jonny – Larry David, eh? Maybe I could AI the photo and present it as a Young Larry pilot, where a bright, optimistic and upbeat youth becomes the grouch we all love, like Scrooge in reverse!

I preferred Milton to Dante. Milton’s language, narrative and characters are just so much more gripping and modern in their psychology. It’s been nearly 40 years and I’m keen to do a re-read. I’m afraid I skimmed the Paradiso. Hope you enjoy New X-Men. I was very much influenced by the Claremont stuff I loved when I was 21, so there’s a lot of that in there.

Another one down – I plan to take a wire brush, Brillo scouring pads, and an angle grinder into the shower to scrub off the reeking taint of the news…

See you next time!

PIC: Leigh Morrison 1987

Let’s All Be Fairies

MORAL DECAY AT THE HEART OF THE ATOM

Now flurries melting down the hills on the skyline look like stretch marks on taut skin. Louring heavy cloud, you can reach up and run your fingers through, followed by epic blue skies transparent like crystal to the whole horizon as the days cycle nervously through all possible weathers, searching for warmth and light.

Nights of stars so dense against the black they’re a blizzard of times past. Photons that set out in 2017 from Sirius finally reaching my eyes in these early days of the year we hurry through and try to forget, harried by cold, anticipating dusk at 6pm, then 7, until by the end of March it’s still light at 8pm.

I hope I’m not alone in feeling a curious new sense of purpose and possibility in the face of all evidence to the contrary. What form it takes remains to be seen but there’s a change in the weather, a subtle shift in the light, an altered zeitgeist, a vibe shunt that may be related to the massive solar storm we experienced on January 19th, (the most intense and powerful radiation burst we’ve been showered with since 2003), or simply the slow incremental arrival of spring.

Last week was working more intensely on this curio of a film project I sort of mentioned last time without giving anything away. It’s a time-sensitive dream of a lifetime kind of thing which no-one will guess until I reveal what it is!

Otherwise, I was unconvinced when I started watching, and quite dismissive of One Battle After Another until Sean Penn came into it. Penn’s riveting performance as the monstrous Steven Lockjaw hooked me and then the narrative dug in its spurs, and by the end I was glued the the screen, cheering on every twist.

Watching this in the wake of the events in Minneapolis, with that cartoonish wrestling heel Greg Bovino still fresh in the memory, gave the whole thing a timely frisson where it seemed to overlap with the news, or predict the news, or in some other way mate with the news…

And most of all, it felt like someone doing a deconstructed sequel to The Invisibles that stripped away all the pop art glamour to show the reality of revolutionary praxis and set it thirty years after the original, with a new generation of rebels. The racist Boomer CEO Dollimore - from The Invisibles Vol. 1, issue # ‘Season of Ghouls’ - could have been a member of the Christmas Adventurers’ Club.

Three thumbs up!

NEVER WHAT IT SEEMS

Speaking of everybody’s favourite stylish rebel outsiders, two years ago I was wrapping up the script for a proposed Amazon movie version of The Invisibles

In the script, there’s a fusion of the Harmony House stuff with the de Sade digression, where Harmony House takes the place of the Castle of Silling. were sacrificing kids to incarnate their extra-dimensional ‘god’ – the King-in-Chains. Just as the Aztecs gave up their children in a frenzy of blood to gods that fed on anguish, the willed, planned slaughter of children and animals occurring in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere was presented as a deliberate sacrifice designed to incarnate a ‘dark god’. It will be a thing of monstrous jigsaw biology. It will be vast and appalling and its survival will require a world hotter and more toxic than this one.

In the story, the seemingly senseless degradation of the environment and the natural world had this purpose - the billionaire servants of the Outer Church and its allies were terraforming, or more accurately xenoforming our planet to make it more hospitable for their ‘gods’ when they take monstrous apocalyptic physical forms. The Earth is therefore being heated, desertified, and poisoned so that it will become a Hell where human beings are enslaved, tortured, and farmed to produce the mass suffering the Archons dine upon…

I’ll bet you wish you hadn’t called the Samaritans help line now, love…

Anyway, Amazon wasn’t keen…

(If it all sounds a bit pessimistic and depressing, don’t panic - that’s exactly where our Invisibles come in to kick out the jams !)

That was two years ago. Three years ago I was working on an animated series for K-Pop girl group Blackpink. I loved it but like so many of these things, it went nowhere – although K-Pop Demon Hunters went on to cover some similar territory, so I was on the right track as usual, even if they wouldn’t believe me…

PRIVATE LIVES OF THE MASTER RACE

Speaking of fiction blooming into reality, some of the strangest e-mails in the unredacted Castle Epstein files have brought to light a little discussed aspect of the Duc de Blangis’ life of vice and libertinage. To wit, the repeated and tantalising references to a ‘Performing Crab Cabaret’, that have provoked wild speculation as to what might be alluded to in this curious phraseology.

Bombshell research has now revealed that the ‘Crab Cabaret’ was no codeword or metaphor but a plain and accurate description of what de Blangis referred to ‘the little Big Top in my pants!’

As the story goes, and following a particularly vigorous, painful, and unhygienic bout of grotesque sexual congress with Madame Desgranges - this coitus deliberately and perversely sought for the express purpose of cultivating a hybrid species of virulent filthy mega-pox he could pass on to his innocent victims - de Blangis was afflicted with a no less spectacular infestation of seething pubic lice, affectionately known as ‘crabs’, despite having six legs to the conventional beach crab’s eight!

After numerous unsuccessful, if comical, attempts to blitz the venereal invaders from that grizzled, matted sweatforest habitat known also as de Blangis’ steaming, unclean, and scarcely private parts, with searing malathion lotion and permethrin cream – in manner much like the USA’s attempts to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia - an itch-crazed de Blangis appeared to have developed ‘a new respect’, even fondness, for these lively and hardy specimens of the species Pthiris pubis and, we are told, made it his life’s work to train the beasts in the arts of clowning and seduction that he might set them to work in his employ as high class insect courtesans. No sooner was his mind made up than the jaded, diseased aristocrat set to his labours while the merry members of the phylum anthropoda of the phtiridae family of the class insecta that he hosted proved quick to learn a variety of simple tricks.

And so were born these weird microscopic entertainers, these wandering minstrels of the genital acres!

By the time a three-month training period was complete, the tiny obligate ectoparasites had learned to arrange themselves into ever-changing crotch displays - forming chevrons, stars, lovehearts, swastikas, and even personalised monograms. Under the Duc’s careful and attentive tutelage, some of the more advanced bugs went on to master a range of miniature musical instruments which allowed them to perform a limited repertoire of show tunes inaudible to the human ear. Others were taught to organise and play a form of 30-a-side football using a dainty crab egg or ‘nit’ as the microscopic soccer ‘ball’!

Indeed, certain of de Blangis’ debauched and depraved associates took to replaying famous FIFA World Cup tournament winning games across the tilting pitch of their inflamed groins as a prelude to buggering the servant boy…

THE MINISTER’S DAUGHTER’S IN LOVE WITH THE SNAKE

There follow some responses to your correspondence!

Sean – a literary behemoth then! Don’t know if All-Beard and No-Beard count as magicians, they’re just rival homeless pirates. The duelling wizards thing, which for me goes back Gwydion and Math in the Mabinogion, is a classic trope that works very well in superhero comics. It’s maybe a Cold War echo - the idea of vast contending powers with ordinary people caught in the backwash is always narratively appealing. There’s an argument to say all superhero stories are expressions of the ‘duelling wizards’ idea - Batman vs, the Joker, Superman vs. Luthor or Brainiac… they’re all ‘magical’, powerful creatures battling it out across the stage of the ‘real’ contemporary world they inhabit, while ordinary folk look on and hope for the best outcome.

I will always take the opportunity to interact with any cat, even when they’re entirely virtual like these cats and kittens from Assassins Creed Shadows – the mighty samurai Yasuke habitually makes time between bouts of spectacular slaughter to befriend a passing cat - a true man!

Felipe – the year is beginning to thaw from cold winter’s grip and new ideas are budding.

I don’t know what the intended viewing order was for The Prisoner, presumably something like the way it was broadcast! Fr. Theta is correct about the Village - or Villages - and its shifting location, and also in saying that the episodes are largely complete in themselves and could likely be viewed in any order (I would think Once Upon A Time and Fallout would always have to be taken as a pair but who knows…) the first episode I saw was The Girl Who Was Death which, as a child, was just about the greatest hour of TV I’d ever seen. I was immediately hooked, only to discover there were only two more episodes left, both of which also turned out to be the greatest things I’d seen! The Prisoner wasn’t repeated on TV until 1978 and, as there was no such thing as easily available videotape until the ‘80s, enthusiasts - the official fan/appreciation society was formed in 1977 - tended to rely on their magnificent memories when they got together to discuss the show!

I like Cronenberg in the round as an auteur director so yes, I’ll watch anything he does. I especially like Videodrome, The Fly, Naked Lunch and Crash. He was my first port of call, with Shivers, Rabid, and Scanners when I decided to watch horror movies. I’d always avoided scary films after experiencing spectacular nightmares based on seeing reviews and trailers for Alien and later, The Thing. Aged 25, I decided to confront my fears and with the help of the local video store binged on horror movies for a couple of weeks.

I soon realised my dreams and imaginings were so much worse than the actual rubber and plastic Fx, and grew to enjoy watching horror films, although I never developed a taste for gore or violence.

Kid Eternity was one of those projects that felt like it was done at a run and by the time I realised I’d written it, I’d moved on to the more psychedelic approach that characterized the work from Flex Mentallo on.

For a while, I tended to dismiss Kid Eternity as me doing work to order and creating one of those generic proto-Vertigo ‘adult’ takes on an innocent character from the archives but I must admit, aside from the heavy-handed drunken sex creep gran’pa sequence, I really enjoyed it when I did a re-read for this response.

I wrote it just after I’d read Ulysses and wanted to create a comic book version of the stream of consciousness effect but weaving in and out of multiple voices. As a result, there’s an interesting flow connecting everything in Kid Eternity, where the captions run into the dialogue and blend with song lyrics or crossword clues that show up. It has rhythm and a beat and is quite musical as a read. It’s an approach I’ve never really gone back to.

As research, I read the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost and there’s a sense of all that bleeding into this pulpy story (the ‘Canto’ divisions are the most obvious nod). The whole Val Hoffman strand was inspired by The Vanishing Hitchhiker, Jan Harold Brunvand’s book on urban legends, which compiled and analysed all those ‘friend of a friend’ stories, that were in some ways ancestors of creepypasta. I felt Val’s story was the weakest - she didn’t get enough time being sane to dramatise a descent into madness - and although I like how it ends, with the Waters of Forgetfulness, that beat hits awkwardly because it’s never quite emphasised how traumatised she’s been to justify wiping her memories!

Otherwise, there are loads of great ideas and I was delighted to find things I knew then that I thought I only figured out later! The Magical stuff is quite sophisticated and the central conceit of demons so sick and bored with life in Hell they make a plan to perfect the Earth and its people as a gift for God, in the hope he’ll re-admit them to Heaven, is still appealing.

Also interesting was the amount of material taken directly from dreams – the writer who comes to the city to fully chronicle its horrors then finds himself trapped by a neverending supply is from a dream, along with two titles I’d remembered, The Shrilling and The Punishment Cabinet. The vast Hell tree that Jerry Sullivan describes with millions of suffering souls pinned to its thorns is direct from a dream, as is the nightmarish Lamb of Torment.

In retrospect, I really like Kid Eternity! Thanks for encouraging me to do a re-read!

My favourite DC 1Million tie-ins were Starman and Mark Schulz’ Superman one.

The Doors are the kind of band where if you like them, you’ll like pretty much everything – it’s not a vast catalogue but there’s nothing else like it really. Riding the freeway or heading west on Sunset with LA Woman playing is the perfect fusion of place and sound. I’ve been listening to Not to Touch the Earth a lot recently.

Not to Touch the Earth

I’m with you on ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ – that story went very smoothly although, for me, the issue that worked most perfectly from mind to page at the time was Black Science 2 Part 3: Pavlov’s Dogs from The Invisibles Vol. 2 # 19 -the one with the double page spread of the Magic Mirror/God snared by the military industrial complex with its gargantuan Tesla coils - both drawn by Chris Weston! That was a good run of issues from Chris.

I think Volume 3 is my favourite on reflection.

Mason Lang is Bruce Wayne, representing the seemingly implausible notion of a billionaire with morals.

Have a fantastic time in Africa!

Jonathan – wow! You were serious about this! This is great! I’m just going to sit back and enjoy for a bit!

BrotherDuffy – ZenFascism was ideas that felt completely contradictory to Western human thinking – I had a very well developed take on this that disappeared along with the rest of the Marvel Boy material on an Apple Cube cataclysm decades ago, so my recall is sketchy but think on the mantra ‘All is One or Else’ and keep thinking and there you will find the essence of Zen Fascism as practised by these parallel universe Kree! They subscribe to a kind of wild eugenics, trawling the ‘Sea of Monsters’ for new and formerly unknown genetic material with which to enhance their species. Marvel Boy Noh-Varr is himself augmented with cockroach powers (in a nod to Spider-Man and Ant Man). I should mention that relaxing is not easy in the presence of Mercury - who can sometimes make you feel like you’ve eaten an espresso and amphetamine gateau - so make sure you’re getting break times!

I haven’t given much thought to the Fantastic Four movie but your interpretation seems sound. There’s definitely some kind of underlying alchemical structure - the FF represent the elements, of course, with the Thing being Earth, Reed being Water, Sue being Air and Johnny, fire, so those underpinnings are there to work with. When I was writing Fantastic Four 1234, I talked about the family as an ‘equation’ too.

The Kree vow on page 1 of Marvel Boy issue #6 is the Buddha Vow, with minor adaptations.

Philip – thanks! That makes it worthwhile!

Dorothy – every week! Even when there’s nothing to say!

Persefonie – well, this loops back nicely to the start and makes it look like there was symmetry all along! I’ve noticed The Invisibles cropping up all over, which I suppose is ironic in light of it being rejected for TV so often and again quite recently (and there’s some cop show on telly now that just ripped off the title and stuck it on another generic quirky detective ensemble).

In the ‘90s, I could see how conspiracy theory had the potential to become a kind of secular mythology, even religion, and tried to create a text to contain, study and manipulate that narrative ‘energy’, for want of a better word, and for want of a better world. It continues to do its work, not always in ways I fully anticipated.

As you say, we may not have access to the superdense material world technologies utilised by the Masters of the World but we can assemble unstoppable ideas and set them loose in the world of imagination just as easily as they can, and perhaps even more effectively…

The Chariot? That’s interesting but not unexpected. I was raised according to pacifist principles, which I tend to default to, so for me The Chariot is less the war-cart and more the dimension-traveling merkaba, the Mobius Chair (as seen here at Xanaduum on 21st June 2023).

Fr. Theta - that’s an essay I’d like to read! This is the first time I’ve thought about the parade of holographic Jor-El’s in pop culture and I’m suddenly fascinated!

I haven’t watched Small Prophets yet but I think I might like it, from what I’ve heard so far.

Bobby – Anytime! Our Leaders do love playing around in toxic shit, don’t they? They are connoisseurs of ill-will, bad temper, poisoned wine, broken promises, lies and betrayal! They seem to thrive on garbage, like cockroaches. The impression I get from them is that the more money you accumulate, the more you seem to want to spend it creating dirt, disease and dismay in your wake. There is the sense of a demonic fall into matter and corruption.

Osiris – it wasn’t reviews – if I got worked up over reviews, volcanic blood pressure would have struck me dead long ago - this was a bunch of alerts pinging from news site after news site that got under my skin. Each of them, and this has been going on for a week since I mentioned it, featured some variant of the headline ‘Superman writer says movie is shite’.

The podcaster, whom I like and enjoy talking to, has apologised but, for me it’s clarified a fundamental problem with the way these things are presented to the audience in such stark binary and oppositional terms, designed to provoke anger and conflict. ‘They’ deliberately stripped any nuance out of my response to the interview question about Superman for no other reason than to make people angry on the grounds that anger = engagement, which is a shite basis for communication and human interaction. If the only way to get people’s attention is to purposefully annoy them about trivial things, I’m not interested.

So, aside from a return visit with Doug Rushkoff’s Team Human, which I’m doing next week, no more podcasts for a while, and certainly none on the subject of comic books or superheroes.

Anyway, if I can’t be an old man about something now I’m an old man, when else can I enjoy this unique pleasure?!

There’s something very precise, even romantic, about the dreamy notion of looking after a baby cat in an otherwise empty Shanghai. Your everyday reality evokes one of those cozy AI clips accompanying ‘rainy night sounds for relaxation’ videos - dozing cat, city lights, steaming mug and writer stuff…

I’ve always been quite fascinated by Shanghai, mostly because of the indie bands. What’s it like?

What’s the time, Mr. Wolf?

Is it that time already…

PIC: KM 2025

TELL ME WHAT YOU DID FOR ALL MANKIND

Did You Give the World Some Love Today, Baby

There aren’t any gorillas or chimps in The Lion King!

The Lion King is set on the African savanna, specifically Kenya, and does not take place in the jungle. There’s a shaman baboon called Rafiki in the story but there are no gorillas and no chimps.

Kenya’s only rainforest jungle is Kakamega Forest, which has no gorilla or chimp populations either.

White House Press Secretary! There are no gorilla or ape characters in The Lion King!

This is the level we’ve sunk to in public discourse, like the acid blood of the Xenomorph dripping through to the sub-sub-sub-basement on its way to bowel and void…

A micro-Xanaduum this week seeing as how it’s only been a few days since the last one and nothing much has happened in between, unless you take an interest in the various comings and goings of filthy rich pervert dullards.

I liked the story I found about the young Kirby-esque super genius variously named Max Sidorov, Max Laughlin, and Max Loughan, who revealed calculations he’d made that seemed to suggest the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland had shifted the planet Earth into an ‘Event Horizon’-style alternate dimension in 2013, resulting in the acceleration of time and the accumulation of increasingly weird distortions as we fully detach from our former physical reality!

Science says it’s bollocks but I’m all over a good metaphor and I too have gone on record as saying that we shifted into an unpleasant alternative reality in 2013, so this ambiguous adolescent boffin gets my vote!

I spoke about that idea of a 2013 universe-merging event on a podcast not long ago and speaking of podcasts, I’ve done quite a few recently, but this week provoked a rethink…

I don’t know how many clickbait articles I’ve seen over the last few days, with some variation of a ‘Superman writer shits on James Gunn movie’ headline.

I’ve said several times that I thought James Gunn’s Superman was the best Superman film to date. Some of the choices James Gunn made are not those I would have made, but it’s not my movie! I’ve already done my version of Superman, my way! Gunn’s decisions all worked within the context of the story he chose to tell. I don’t like fascist, colonial Krypton because I so rarely see creatives committing unironically to the haunting, heartbreaking possibilities of a tragic doomed utopia - but for this story it provided a powerful twist that re-emphasised the themes of nature vs. nurture… as AI might say.

That’s pretty much the point I made on the podcast, only to see all nuance and consideration stripped away and reduced to a stark ‘I didn’t like it.’ headline designed to annoy fans of the film and provoke negative reactions.

Why not write ‘’I thought it really worked!’ says Superman writer?’ I also said that. Or would that tag fail to arouse the mean little cortisol spike that’s intended?

Anyway, not sure if I’ll do many more of these things, if this is how my words are going to be misrepresented…

A WORLD OF CONSEQUENCES

Some correspondence…

David – there are quite a few stylistic shifts in Luvkraft vs Kutulu as I attempted to recreate the same approach at different times, years apart, but hopefully the overloaded prose obscures the visible joins!

Have you picked up the other Laidlaw books – The Papers of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties? I haven’t read much noir work, so I have no idea if they all have that gloomy philosophical edge. McIlvanney was a poet too and I loved the books for their incredible use of language and the way they adapted the Dashiel Hammet/Raymond Chandler style into a Glasgow idiom.

The Just were always going to remain feckless. I figured there’d be enough Kardashians-style drama to make it work without a lot of traditional superhero action.

Sean – sounds fascinating! I’m looking forward to this! Is it going to be a book, or an online thing, or something else?

The best way to understand Magic is to practice Magic. There are dozens of books you can read about the various Magical systems and schools (Magic is a bit like Art in that respect – it has numerous ‘isms’) but all of those systems are elaborations of underlying phenomena of consciousness. The numerous schools of Magic have different frameworks, filters and hierarchies but they’re all dealing with and trying to account for what happens when you make radical changes to your consciousness in order to relate to the universe and its processes in a more dynamic, reciprocal way. Just as you can read a lot of porn or erotica without having sex, you can read a lot of great analyses of Magic - but nothing can take the place of hands-on experience and coming to your own conclusions!

I could never get into William Gibson or Neal Stephenson or any of that cybersnowpunk stuff (I sat beside Stephenson at dinner one time and found him oddly cold and humourless – perhaps just a bad day) but I’ve loved Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus since I was a teenager, and Goethe’s Faust Part One is one of my favourite things ever. Marlowe’s is a stark and driving morality horror, but Goethe explodes in a thousand psychedelic directions. Part Two, written at the end of his life is up there with Ulysses.

Mack the Knife is the only Threepenny Opera song I’m familiar with. I was never a big Brecht fan (although I really rate the Baal that Bowie did) – I remember seeing the Opera once when I was younger, presumably on TV, but I hated all the poverty and poncing and misery. Too much like the world outside my window. As a youngster, I wanted to escape from all that into a world of spaceships and superheroes, so I had very little patience for depictions of the kind of people who lived on my scheme and whose antics could be enjoyed for free.

Jonathan – tripleyou is like a waveform!

Bobby – that prey statistic explains so much! And fighting your way up the Pyramid, then sitting awkwardly on the pointy bit at the top waiting for the inevitable vicious challengers is an invitation to madness and soul sickness/death.

Societal ills are ever-present. You only have to watch that viral clip of Sir Ian McKellen on Colbert doing the speech from Sir Thomas More about immigrants to see how some things never seem to change no matter what century we’re in. One of these days these persistent problems will be revealed as something more complicated and crinkly, the gnarly edges and protrusions into history of some rucked and wrinkled flaw in humanity, like a scar or wound our species is carrying through time.

The Aeon of Ma’at was posited by Charles Stansfeld Jones/Frater Achad but Crowley broke with Jones over doctrinal differences. Crowley was committed to the Aeon of Horus while Jones saw the possibility of an Aeon of Truth and Justice superseding Horus.

My take on all this has the Aeon of Horus currently in full swing, with its highly visible avatar laying waste to the structures and certainties of the Aeon of Osiris (like the sanctity of the Word, or the Law…). Your notion of Ma’at as a non-local Aeon makes a lot of sense to me and fits with Kenneth Grant’s ‘shadow Aeon’ conceptualisation. It seems to me the work of breaking down and remaking systems need not occupy a vastly long time now that it’s underway - it’s easier to knock down a sandcastle or a pyramid than it is to construct one - so the chances of manifesting Ma’at sooner rather than later would appear to increase! There’s a feeling this year that the great Wheel is turning, so the Goddess may even show up before next Wednesday’s Xanaduum!..

PIC: Leigh Morrison 1986

The Shapes - I Saw Batman in the Launderette (1979)

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL

11 million bits of information enter and are processed by our brains. Of those 11 million bits only 0.0004% are registered in our conscious awareness.

What’s going on all the time, all around us, that we’re not equipped to see or understand?

It’s sure to be more fun than this!

Had a busy week writing other stuff – a couple of blue sky screen projects – and the news this week has been mostly too absurd and grotesque to make fun of, so a little late with this and just a quick in/out, hello and goodbye this gloomy Sat’day!

Our beloved leaders may have taken their politics from Orwell’s 1984, but a growing body of evidence points to de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom as the inspiration for their weekends away!

On a somewhat adjacent note, I’m convinced The Traitors is part of a massive propaganda exercise designed to make us feel that a) all people are basically bastards, and b) democracy’s surrender to outdated, outmoded fascism is inevitable. This is the narrative that’s being pushed relentlessly on TV, in newspapers, and online these days. It’s the Pyramid, up to its old tricks of zero sum winner-and-loser games.

I don’t think most people are ‘bastards’ deep down. Bad people want that to seem true, because it takes the heat off them and renders their wickedness a simple fact of human nature they cannot control. Most people, however, are not like them. Most people simply want to muddle through life without being brutalised and oppressed, if possible. Most people just want to have friends and family and animals around. They want to to enjoy their hobbies. Most people don’t want to live in a state of permanent, conflict, paranoia, and performative cruelty, eyes glued to a daily political soap opera where ugly old men vie for our attention with such desperation and persistence - anything to hog centre stage - it’s almost painful to witness. Most people are nothing like the driven, damaged, overpowered, underdeveloped individuals who dream of dragging us all back to feudal slavery and droit de seigneur. Most people should swap notes, affirm their commonalities, and reject the suicidal, anti-human vision of our future that so entices the hyper-rich.

I was fine with a quiet birthday celebration this year. If I can’t have a fabulous West Hollywood rooftop spree, forget it, and right now I have no stomach for visiting the USA.

Instead, Kristan and I went for lunch at Scott’s in Greenock with its fabulous views and calm, civilised atmosphere, then watched Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning (I hope so). I count myself a major Tom Cruise fan but feel he’s had too much work done on his lovely face and even the impressive stunts, all that hanging awkwardly off of biplane struts while his spongy Botoxed mug does its best to ripple in the velocity wind, seemed manic and overdone in this one rather than exciting. His aerial stunts were nerve-wracking in the wrong ways, like watching an elderly man trying not to fall off the bus. Tom’s a handsome Hollywood star and could easily have opted to age naturally with minimal fillers, cragging and sagging like Clint Eastwood or Sean Connery, but the harsh demands of silver screen stardom rooted in Tinseltown’s terror of time and its toil have pushed our Tom down the pre-embalmed, low-lighting route to no good end. Otherwise, the film was alright and rattled along amiably for most of its length even as it left any pretence at realism behind in favour of science fiction. Why oh why must Tom Cruise ever grow old?

I enjoyed the Wonder Man series – although I felt The Studio did the same kind of show with a greater level of absurdity, humour and fidelity to the real day-to-day of studio execs. Aside from that, it was pretty great. The two leads make an appealing, chalk and cheese team, but it’s Ben Kingsley’s show, without a doubt. He steals every scene. Trevor Slattery is one of those rare, wondrous characters where you can’t wait for him to show up again, to savour every nuance of the performance. That brilliant rise in tone and pitch he does at the end of every sentence! I was trying to remember who does that naturally and I’m sure it’s Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor…

These shows set in the Hollywood film and TV business are like going to work for me, in a warm, nostalgic way. Every location is fond and familiar, every character feels like someone I’ve met. When I see those palm lined boulevards, I’m reminded how much I loved being in LA.

Birthday brought a bunch of great books – I’m still reading The Cuckoo’s Lea, which has been a slow-paced and charming experience, like a ramble through the countryside and the history of place with a lyrical, knowledgeable guide. Last night’s chapter was about owls and how they exist for most of us purely as an uncanny night sound - ‘ule’ pronounced ‘ulloo’ in Old English being the root of their name. Ornithology was one of a series of brief, intense passions when I was around 10-12 years old and it’s been a comforting delight to revisit those enthusiasms. In similar vein, I also have A Bad Birdwatchers Companion by Simon Barnes and, veering off piste a little, The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination by Richard Mabey. Then there’s Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie by Alexander Larman, which I’ll get to when the time seems right.

I also got Mark Z. Danielewski’s series, The Familiar. Five of these big books were released, of a potential 27-volume series. The idea was to do something that would play like a long-form television show, but Danielewski stalled on five and Tom’s Crossing happened instead. Kristan managed to track down the first four – and from what I’ve read so far, they’re reminiscent of the structure of Cloud Atlas, with multiple characters in various global locations and time periods. Looking forward to digging in.

That was my week that was! I took out the boring and miserable bits!

THERE IS NO TIME THERE IS NO SPACE

Following on from my short story Peter’s Thoughts which appeared here last week, there’s a brief piece about the genesis of the story at the Luna Press website. These little afterword bits accompanied the release of the anthology and this was mine:

Grant Morrison: Nova Scotia Vol 2 Anthology. Order Now!

SHADDAP YOU FACE!

Bobby – it’s alright so far. I expected to be a lot more decrepit but aside from some arthritic pain and worsening eyesight, I feel the same as I’ve done for decades. There must shortly come a time when the decline gets to be obvious but so far no big differences…

School is easy to hate, even without the violence…

Interested to see what you do with the Heap! In my shite version, the shambling remnants of Baron Eric Von Emmelman form a terrifying agglomeration with the Pile, the Mound, the Dune, the Hump… each a different, living mass of sentient soil, or sand, dung or plastic… may the Lord have mercy on our souls…

Jwparrishiii – Thanks! I’m more interested in making up my own stuff right now but that could change. I’ve done Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman (the New 52 Superman in Action Comics was close to what I’d do with a public domain Superman) and things like Winnie the Pooh or Bambi were well served by Disney and don’t interest me much.

Sean – Apollyon was Fantomex, but Wade Wilson is a good alternative, so I’ll leave it open as a possibility. The Filth was specifically modelled on Captain Scarlet. Captain Scarlet was itself based on Christian iconography – the good guys were headquartered on Cloudbase, with the ‘Angels’ jet fighter squadron. Colonel White was God and the SPECTRUM personnel were his messengers and soldiers. Captain Scarlet, who dies and is resurrected is Christ, Captain Black is the Antichrist, and the Mysterons on Mars are Satan and the demons in Hell.

For The Filth, I turned the metaphor upside down to create a Qlippothic version of SPECTRUM based not in the sky but the dirt. The colour-coded uniforms and future technology of the Hand organisation were inspired by Captain Scarlet.

The wigs worn by Hand agents were a nod to the ‘antistatic’ metallic bobs worn by the silver Moonbase girls from Anderson’s UFO, his live action show for an adult audience. I love that show – with it’s incredibly well-designed vision of how the near future would look if the ‘60s never had to end but just got more futuristic - and there’s some of that DNA in The Filth. UFO has a fantastic episode where heartthrob Paul Foster is marooned far from the Moonbase, and has to team up with a crashed alien to get back home, with tragic results. You can see echoes of that story in The Filth issue #5, with Ned Slade and Arno Von Vermun trapped in the microscopic world of the Crack.

You can shake the Devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding but by that time it’s probably too late…

Kevin S. – Steed and Mrs. Peel was pitched to me. They knew I was a fan of the show and it gave me the opportunity to interview Patrick Macnee (he was fantastic, the interview was never published, I still have the cassette tape in a box somewhere). I based the story on my memories of the show’s psychedelic period, where it was all killer undertakers, lethal cricket matches, and mysterious gentlemen’s clubs, and I tried to incorporate as many of the tropes of the time as I could.

Jonathan – phew! I thought I was going to have to answer that one again!

BrotherDuffy – sounds like you’re doing it right. you should check out Jack Kirby’s Makkari from The Eternals, for an updated Kirby take on Mercury. There’s also Marvel’s Quicksilver, using the poetic name for the element Mercury. These super-characters are useful as modern realisations of ancient powers. Mercury comes across as younger and less grand than Hermes but they are part of the same complex of concepts and what works for Hermes usually works for Mercury. I deal often with Mercury as Mercurius, a blended alchemical spirit which combines qualities of masculine/feminine and other binaries (as depicted on our last Tarot card, Art, here at Xanaduum on December 10 2025). Mercury likes speedy foods – so things like coffee, Red Bull or Monster Energy. For a more healthy approach, carrots are apparently Mercurial, perhaps because they’re orange, which is also Mercury’s colour. Almonds, ginseng and peppermint resonate with Mercury. Anything that brings energy, or a ‘buzz’. Alphabet Soup for sure! Jasmine incense is useful too!

Mark – I grew up loving all of those movies. Anything with Tom Courtenay, Rita Tushingham, and Murray Melvin in any combination. Billy Liar is one of the best of those ‘kitchen sink’ movies. A Taste of Honey is another cracker and the slightly later Up The Junction has a killer soundtrack by Manfred Mann, which I still listen to all the time.

Ken – I should never have said whatever you do, don’t check out Jethro! I wasn’t familiar with Stewart Millard’s channel but I am now! I remember all that stuff too well! And more….

Patrick – that was great…

fylGja – I’ve been fortunate enough to spend my life doing what I love for a living. I’ve been able to write superhero stories, travel and consume pop culture as a job. I’ve chosen to never raise children so my life has probably been a little bit less demanding than your mom’s!

I’m genuinely surprised that you have personal experience of belt and soap! I thought we’d left that era of savagery behind! What the fuck is wrong with adults sometimes?

As I suspected, your own interpretations of the bullet metaphors are more complex than my exhortation to think about what they have to say about life. The new My Chem shows are attempting to process and purify some dark cultural forces. I’m not surprised there’s some weird fallout.

Otherwise, I’m with you. The destructive powers set loose from their cages to wreak havoc on the 21st century are ancient, and ancient remedies may turn out to be useful. The Pyramid, the A-number #1 Eye in the Triangle at the top of the heap seems all-powerful but its end is foreshadowed and it will be superseded as the dominant social model by the Network. How that handover will be effected remains to be seen but there are numerous indicators of where it’s all going. As you say, it is imperative right now to maintain and strengthen our networks in the local community, online and beyond.

Ken - there are a ton of people to do what I do when I’m no longer there to do it! We pass on the electricity like a baton in a relay race…

Ks – I did not expect so many of you to have memories of brutal corporal punishment! In terms of the Qlippoth and the Abyss, I was following the so-called ‘Lightning Path’ or ‘Magician’s Path’ up the Tree of Life structure from the material world to non-dual awareness, so I knew that I’d get to the Abyss after my sojourn in Chesed (which produced All Star Superman among other things), so I took the formal Oath of the Abyss and chose to confront the experience head on and aware, with painful and enlightening results (arduous, agonising, and ego-annihilating in every sense, it nevertheless gave birth to my Batman run, Final Crisis, Nameless and Annihilator). I knew it was over when I’d exhausted the distinctive ‘taste’ of its energy was used up. It’s like the weather changing. The whole world looks different, viewed through a completely different filter. The release from the Abyss into the sphere of Binah, a state of consciousness governed by the Prime Feminine generative principle was marked by the arrival of two black girl kittens (Jinks ran away but we still have Jet - and the black panther is sacred to Binah) and various other significant events. That period was, as promised, intensely ‘feminine’ in its texture and influence and out of it came my Wonder Woman books, the Brave New World TV adaptation and Luda. I chose to end that period in May 2023, again because I felt a sense of completion and a change in the seasons, and since then I’ve been exploring the intense and directionless creative energies of Chokmah (I struggled with their formless ferocity at first until I remembered that these energies require to be incubated in the matrix of Binah, and there given form. Otherwise, they’re as much use as a chocolate oven.

Brkndwnbus - thanks!

Persefonnie – there were, there are, and there definitely would be Chaos witches among the St. Trinian’s girls! Thanks for the Glass Beams raga track. I loved that!

RaVi –

The Singing Detective is foundational for me and as you say others of my generation of writers. If you’ve been delving into that era, Edge of Darkness is the next big influential one. Very different from the Potter stuff, it’s a detective eco-thriller that veers into wild cosmic and mystical territory.

I wanted to write novels for most of my childhood and teens, and managed two – a short thing when I was 8, The People of the Asteroids, and another proper one called The Winds of Chaos which I finished when I was 19. In my teens, I was very much influenced by the great drama on the BBC – writers like Dennis Potter, David Rudkin. Alan Bleadale, Alan Bennett, Stephen Poliakoff – and became more interested in writing for television. I was diverted by the lure of the comics boom in the early 80s and found there a place where I could shine without too much editorial oversight. I finally got to write for TV and the screen when I went to Hollywood but as I’ve said before, aside from Happy! and Brave New World (and fingers crossed for the show I worked on last year) most of my work for TV, and there’s been a lot over the last 20 years, was never produced and has never been seen!

Is it that time already?..

PIC: GM 1984

I’m listening to Ligeti’s Requiem.

They’ve got me ‘shielding’.

They tell me it’s for my own good, which is another way of saying it’s for their convenience.

Bastards.

What they mean is quarantine. What it really is, it’s house arrest, is what it is. They found a way to jail us all for crimes we’ll never understand and won’t ever get around to now. This is the Kingdom of Dystopia. Four walls small as a skull, ruled by a skeleton tyrant.

They say the virus got worse. Mutated like Spider-Man, or is it Batman? Somebody got bitten by a bat and now it’s Good vs. Evil! Forget the flap of a beautiful butterfly’s wing, in the end a leathery umbrella snap was all it took to launch fever hurricanes halfway across the world.

I lived long enough to see the damage as it was done. Long enough for the undeniability of entropy, formerly theoretical as far as I was concerned, to become a day-to-day slap in the face. I tried to write a better world into view but that was youthful messianic folly. My opinion of human nature was too generous to survive sustained contact with the real thing.

There was a time, not so long ago when they flew me all around the world: Lucca, San Diego, Sydney, Reykjavik. Signings, tours, speaking engagements, readings. I commanded stages, making thousands laugh or gasp. That was before more than three people in the same room became a recipe for death on a ventilator, trying to breathe through the elephant trunk that grew in the night courtesy of SARS with a CRISPR sidecar.

That was before my immune system surrendered like Napoleon at Rochefort.

‘Compromised’ is how they describe it, as though my body’s defences - all those lazy wee neutrophils and macrophages - have been snared in some Soviet honey trap, snapped wasted and in flagrante on a hotel bed in Prague with Covid, 21. Candid kompromat, viral porno en route to the wife, the boss, the media… unless… unless…

And all the while I endure the repeat cancellation of a second hip replacement op, shackled to the ground floor of the house. Anything could be happening up there – I’m sure I’ve heard chanting. Blood sacrifice. The Borrowers at it again, doing Heart of Darkness in miniature...

The horror!

No, I can’t leave. If I do, it’ll be in a wheelchair, or more likely a single-bed-sized portable apartment bound for the crematorium!

This is why I’m obliged to restrict these communications of mine to the online domain. I won’t be doing any more PAs, is what I’m saying.

Yes, I have read Stieg Rimquist’s pilot for the Murderopolis adaptation - what can I add? If I die before the reviews come in, consider God merciful.

Sin Circus, Some Permanent Saturday, Daisysphere, I, Tiresias are my favourites of the strictly sci-fi books. The ‘Peter T. Clark’ stories, as opposed to the ‘Pete Clark’ crime novels. Academe has declared I, Tiresias my magnum opus for what it’s worth.

Yes, I’m working on something new. Is it sci-fi? It’s about my arthritis. Osteo-arthritis if you must pry. If that doesn’t scare away all but the diehards, they’re just not diehard enough.

My business is with those readers willing to stick around, witnesses to the Crucifixion. I think they may still exist, a single-digit mob.

I think therefore I think, I think I think.

I think thinking’s a funny thing, especially the way I go about it. Since I’ve been compelled to self-isolate it’s only got worse, the thinking. Restriction, confinement, limitation; thoughts left on their own in the house. No fresh input. Thoughts get restless. Thoughts run wild.

Thoughts turn on one another with hooked teeth like rats in the barn at Rockville. They eat each other until only one big, bad thought remains, swollen with its gobbled kin.

It takes ferocious effort just to stay afloat. I’m waving to the remaining neighbours through triple glazing. Do they see me drowning under the frozen surface, and hope it’s quick, pray it’s painless, as my face recedes in iced fathoms of living room gloom?

I opened the door, and I shot him, he shot me, he didn’t stop moving and I didn’t stop shooting

Words from a TV muttering bad news to itself like a madman in the corner with me crouched at the window, the lunatic’s partner in crime. They provide the Buddhist death drone of the Requiem with a brief snatch of avant garde libretto.

and I didn’t stop shooting

Seen through a windowpane sandwich, inoculated locals, and passersby might as well be on TV. No bigger than Punch and Judy puppets in their seafront cabinet world, hardly more substantial than the extras in a soap opera pub scene. And yet, each of them encloses an unseen universe. Universes, some of them. Multiverses!

Type A superstring theory suggests they don’t take up much space, multiverses, or humans for that matter. It wouldn’t take you more than a few seconds to walk around the average human being, but if you fell inside, you’d never find your way out. The inside goes on forever. Multiple higher dimensions can easily roll up tightly inside consciousness!

Anything could be going on in there. There’s a thrilling World Cup final you’ll never see, where that spotty, lardy 40-year-old is the famous striker running up to take the winning goal and shag the WAG at the afterparty.

Limitless budget Hollywood spectacles and squalid one-act dramas of alienation are unfolding in the submerged auditoria of those passing skulls. Sometimes simultaneously. All those umwelten!

I didn’t stop shooting

That cheerfully whistling Deliverex driver’s cranial cradle might hide a tidy office but maybe it’s a cardboard sex dungeon where they’ve got all their friends and workmates involved in the action. Even you. The doctor’s wife who hasn’t been right since he died, unstable in the undertow of the past that sucks around her ankles. The young woman pushing a buggy heavy with one new baby and post-natal depression. You can never know where the greater part of them really resides, even when they’re stood in front of you beaming a smile. You could never guess, could you, beneath what ivory skull-cavity skies, what foreign inward suns, their obsessions flourished and were nourished? They could be stripping you naked, or flensing you to the marrow in there and you’d never know…

My senses are deserting me, furtively – smell first and taking my wine farts into consideration that’s a blessing, then taste, hearing, now sight – but it hasn’t stopped me working on The Bone Prison assiduously throughout this terminal lockdown.

This Bone Prison of mine – locus of trial and initiation from Celtic Arthurian mythology. The 9^th century Preiddeu Annwn. ‘Riches of the underworld’. A metaphor, standing in for the only place of trial and initiation we’ll ever know. And yet…

At the heart of the Bone Prison waits the door to the Other World. That’s what makes it worth all the suffering, the accumulating gripes.

The Other World. The world inside. Too expansive to lock in a skeleton. On the inside is a world without horizons where anything can and will happen in the end. Those wild rich and rolling panoramas behind our eyes with their dreams and mysteries, glass islands, mind puzzles, traps made of words and cartilage, Grail warriors in space helmets choking on moondust.

That’s it, I thought, I thought osteo-arthritis, the Bone Prison. Oeth Anoeth. The ‘O’ and the ‘A’. like exams at school or sex acts. Bars of rib cradling inspiration, sweat, poetry that outlives the penitentiary’s osteal walls.

All the multiverse you’ll ever need is with us, all around. In each head a parallel universe, another you, another me. A multitude of unknown lives!

Who but I may speak for the founders?

Who can rhyme the ferry timetable, hymn the bus route,

The time for chucking out, the hours of advance and retreat.

Who sings the outside toilet, who the radio, the carriage pram?

Who but I may speak for founders four in number?

I have been drunk in a thousand bars, on vodka, wine, with gin, and ale.

In cups have I been in stockings, shirts, and bonnets brave.

Who but I may speak for founders four in number, brothers all?

Who has kicked the fitba, scrawled the name, sang ‘Murder polis!’

played the game.

What am I?

Excuse me! The cat tramped all over my keyboard and there’s what came out!

prompt: Mrs. Kahndari/easter egg/ apocalypse

But which came first?

The chicken, or the egg?

The egg gets my vote, no question about that. Dinosaurs came from eggs, and they came before chickens, so the egg comes out on top every time.

Think of the above as representative of thoughts strolling through the lamplit park at twilight of Zahra Kandhari’s crumpled mind as she cradles the Void Egg she’s rashly agreed to protect with her life if need be.

The egg, fashioned of pure unearthly soul-gold, inlaid with filigree of precious mineral and radioactive pearls from lost immaculate universes, is smaller than a football, with a not entirely dissimilar shape though more oblate. It has been entrusted to Zahra by the last of the Starlit Sultans. These celestial beings, as it happened, were very good friends with the two boys who ran the Khalsa Newsagents since their ailing father was required to retire from the fags ‘n’ mags trade. The handsome young Sikh brothers, Ajinder and Gurjas, both agreed that Zahra Kandhari was the most good-hearted, reliable and trustworthy person they knew. If anyone could take care of a treasure beyond measure, Zahra Kandhari was the prime candidate. She was the Chosen One we often hear about.

With these words, the industrious siblings sealed Zahra’s fate.

The Egg is a Bomb, they explained but only after she’d agreed to take responsibility for it, which seemed a bit underhand. They say it’s THE Bomb. It annihilates not only Matter itself but Spirit too. It will be resorted to only when all is lost in the War.

Her beloved old cat Patti-Paws will be back any time, she feels certain of that – although a tickle of anxiety is there to remind her, he’d have to be very old now, and frankly she’s never heard of a cat that lived past 23. Patti-Paws was surely approaching his 50^th birthday. She wishes she hadn’t let him out now. Or did she leave him in? She wouldn’t leave him in with nothing to eat for… what must be more than 30 years? Would she?

Shaped like God’s thumb, responsibility presses down hard to leave its glum labyrinth print on her soul.

There’s a face in the egg, surfacing through the bright gold. Her own face exalted, electrum tanned, given back to her as a gift.

It looks the way she did on her wedding day. Blurring to gilt in nostalgia’s sunset brass fanfare, she experiences a vision of something proud, something horrendously extended in all directions, that rises to beat out molten yolk spatter from new-fledged wings of gilded flame!

Yet nothing like a bird at all.

Within the egg exist fifty forms of void. That was how Ajinder Singh had put it. Five are of the kingdom of hunger, the rest are of the power-of-time. We don’t really cover any of this in the Granth.

Egg of dawn. The hunger and desire that comes after sleep. Gurjas added solemnly. ‘This is the Night-of-Anger, the Krodha-rãtrî’, they told us. ‘When every living thing prepares to destroy and devour other lives, other beings.’

Zahra can hardly disagree. All those angry Tweets or Xweets. Bad news from everywhere all the time. Another war using up whole generations. The new mutation brings about global strife they say. The sturdy well-made reality she still half-remembers has suffered demolition. An unconvincing replica takes its place, constructed using the unstable, unreliable substance of a dream where a cat can be 50 but so elusive it’s impossible to prove his age unless the vet confirms the miracle when Sanjay gets back…

Willing the Egg to stay intact even as her will falters, Zahra knows the day is doomed to come. The gleaming shell will split. Until then, what must be released, she contains. She’ll try to patch up faint scars in the gold leaf with concentration, compacting her focused attention until she’s squeezing atoms down into superdense quantum jelly, sealing the fine fissures, like she does every day, though the effort is corroding her mind, and she can tell.

In the end, the soul cracks will spread from Egg to world unstoppable, to Solar System, Galaxy, and Cosmos. And then God too will shatter into divine smithereens.

She didn’t ask for any of this.

But every day, dutiful, Zahra sits on the bench in Fireworks Park, where she used to bring Sanjay his lunch on fine afternoons. It’s very convenient, not far from the Family Planning Clinic on Sheriff Street where he got his first job, working alongside Dr. Ashfaq. She wonders when he intends to show up. They’d agreed to meet here as usual, hadn’t they? After he took Patti-Paws to the vet.

His name’s still there at her back, imprinted in reverse on her damp coat when she leans against the engraved brass plaque on the wooden backrest.

SANJAY KANDHARI (then impossible numbers, then…)

WHO LOVED THIS SPOT.

She feels that sliding, unsettling loss of context again.

The date is wrong, which annoys her. Or scares her. It suggests a premonition of death, but on closer inspection, the year and the day have already passed.

Someone has scratched out the ‘T’ and the ‘S’ so that it reads WHO LOVED HIS POT. It’s not even funny. Whoever was responsible won’t have long to laugh. They’ll be gone like everyone else if Zahra drops her concentration for even a minute. Which can only happen sooner or later, she thinks.

When it comes, with its voice like a train hitting a choir at a level crossing, she’ll make a saddle for its back out of the cushion covers she bought. She’ll stack them high one on top of the other to deaden the bony to and fro of grinding shoulder muscles powering majestic wings of void and filament.

Until then she sits on the bench where she sat with Sanjay sharing bhajis and daal pots, cradling in her lap the cut-price Easter egg she bought in April, wrapped in its gold-colored foil. She’s certain her husband Patti-Paws took Sanjay the cat to the vet on account of their advanced years.

Zahra smooths the gold foil flush to the chocolate surface beneath, massaging out the cracks, noting where it’s ready to tear, averting catastrophe with a determined sweep of her thumb. She abides and she endures.

All is not yet lost.

prompt: girl/eczema/gig work/ apocalypse

A stoned, uncomfortable young girl, she had spent that Sunday morning into the afternoon scrubbing with wire and picking with fingernails, scraping away obsessively at crusts of bleeding eczema scabbed on her palm, until around 2.02pm she broke right through shredded skin and pulverized flesh to find a row of little numbers there, visible through slick red pulp.

The self-harm started with the shitty, stressful unjob at McBeefy’s, serving death burgers and cancer nuggets to the doomed and in denial. She was a vegan! No wonder the eczema was back. It had been ferocious when she was 12. That violent, all-encompassing itch, the automatic scritch and scratching of ragged nails on flesh until it was raw and wet ruin bleeding an ooze of thick clear serum that stiffened to flake and plate. This time, she’d taken it too far. In a blinding absolute moment of unstoppable determination, she’d made the decision to dig through to her skeleton.

Closing her eyes, averting her head, and squealing mmmmmm behind tight lips, Kelly Cram held her hand under the spout and cranked the tap on - but there was no anticipated shock of pain, not even when thrillingly chill water struck the open gash of her wound. She felt nothing at all when the blood sluiced off in red then pink Coriolis threads down the plughole. No sensation when she dabbed with an antibacterial face wipe at the ravaged edges of the crater in her palm to uncover what she’d found there, inside the meat and bone of her left hand.

There was a little plastic barrel counter directly underneath where her heart line crossed her creased palm. It looked like the ones she remembered her mother sliding onto her knitting needles to keep track of the stitches and rows – except there were three tiny square windows, so perhaps more like a combination lock for a suitcase.

The initial surprise was followed by inevitable questions: am I insane? Am I a robot? Is any of this real?

She began to fear, as most of us might, that the numbers were counting down her own obsolescence. Was her personal sell-by date looming in the steadily quickening rotation of digits out of existence? What had begun as 333 was, within a month, 300, then 200…

After some research online she’d satisfied herself that it related to something in mythology, with God reckoning the calculation that was the universe backwards to zero; the calm counter in her palm was ticking away the remaining hours before the end day, and no-one else knew. She’d been chosen.

So now when they yelled at work, when they roared and collated her mistakes, Kelly would simply peel back the fresh plaster and discreetly check the counter, embedded in its crumpled little crater of scabbed flesh. There were two zeroes now and an 8.

That day, a Monday, when Mr. McAllister called her into his office, she already knew what was coming. She needed her job for just a little while longer but after that?..

The rumours are true, Kelly, said Mr. McAllister. They’re introducing automated tills. It’s not just here, it’s up and down the country. Your job has to go. I’ll be blunt.

She looked down quietly at her lap.

I’m sorry. That’s it. You’ve got a week.

When she raised her head, her smile was the biggest and brightest he’d ever seen on that evicted lunar face.

For the first time, Andy McAllister (43) realized he found weird Kelly Cram attractive.

It really was too bad he had to fire her.

prompt: Christmas tree/old lady/ apocalypse

*

…That Mrs. Glowiński. How long has she been here?

The Polish Lady? Mrs. Glowiński? The one whose husband died?

That’s her. She’s been here for years before us.

They left a bottle of Prosecco as a welcome gift. I always remember that. When we moved in.

That’s her. Mrs. Glowiński. She only had the one tree in her living room window yesterday. Now she’s got one in every window of her house.

There’s only three rooms!

I can see four counting the bathroom. There’s a XXXX tree in all of them.

So? It’s XXXX!

I’m just saying she told me she couldn’t afford a tree this year, that’s all. She went on and on about it. I bumped into her in Fairfare. The cost-of-living crisis, she said.

Maybe she got it cheap. Maybe she won it at the Bingo. Maybe somebody took pity and gave her a spare. It’s none of our business…

*

How can she afford the electricity? We’ve been here for six years. She’s never had ten XXXX trees going at once!

She’s never had a year on her own without her husband. Stop being weird. They’ll blame it on the depression.

I’m not depressed. Don’t patronize me!

She’s celebrating XXXX!

But don’t you think the lights are really weird colours? Come and look.

They look normal to me.

You’re joking! That looks normal to you? What colour’s that?

I don’t know! It’s orange. Purple. Fuzzy electric. What does it look like?

How should I know! I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not green either.

You need to feed that baby.

Her name’s Amber.

Amber. Look, I’d do it myself, but I don’t have the necessary equipment, love…

*

…Maybe she just got a bit competitive. You know what people can be like with XXXX decorations.

It’s not just the one! I told you! I can see at least four trees in the living room. I think there might be more.

*

The whole street’s all lit up. It’s making me feel sick. Can you see this?

What do you want me to do?..

You need to go over there and see what’s up –

What? Come on!

No, take the phone. Put it on speaker.

This is ridiculous…

*

…Mrs. Glowiński? It’s me from over the road. Dom. The couple across the road. We always wave when we’re out with the baby. I’m sorry to bother you. I hope you don’t mind. Happy XXXX by the way!

Come in come in

We just wanted to check in on you. To see you were okay. We know it’s your first XXXX without Mr. Glowiński – no shortage of XXXX trees this year! Did you win these in a competition?

You wait here –

I’m watching.

There is a weird light – uhhh! That fucking smell! – that’s not cats – it’s lizards, or it’s - the whole room’s full of – I mean, there’s no room to move – it’s like a forest of XXXX trees and the lights are blinding - the smell’s shocking – it’s like metallic – mist -

I think you should come back! The colours are shifting all over the place.

I’m looking at the XXXX tree baubles. Hundreds of them – wait a minute – is that - ungreen -

What? What is it?

Something’s not right. No, this is mad. There’s something – I’m not looking at them – it’s me they’re looking at me – they’re attached – it’s got eyes and its mouths – I’m – unblue, unpurple – wait -

…Where are you? Dom? What just happened?..

*

…I’m good.

I thought you’d been electrocuted – there was a huge flash…

I’m good.

The lights were all going off like rockets.

They’re good. Mrs. Glowiński wants to cook XXXX dinner for us. Why don’t you come over?

Are you sure?..

Bring the baby.

*

prompt: dementia/xxxx/ apocalypse

It’s not early onset anything. I forgot a word, that’s all.

Dementia is a neurocognitive disorder causing degradation in human brain tissue and concomitant functionality.

How does it apply here? Everyone’s so bloody morbid suddenly. All the fun of an undertakers’ stag night! Apocalypse? Apocalypse?

It’s CHRISTMAS!

prompt: Ron McKee/divine painter/colours

There’s that man. Ronnie McKee. Divorcee. He wears a cap and a hi-vis gilet. Since the wife passed, he’s always out and about painting. Things that don’t need painted. Flowers, rocks. He just paints them the same colours they were to start with. When the sun moves and the light changes and the colours thicken, he’ll come back to touch up his work.

He painted old May Quaver to look like she was 25! Took two coats but you couldn’t tell in the end. She’s remarrying soon, an electrician in his 30s.

What a shock she’ll get when she finds out the young fella’s only her husband, Ray, that Ronnie painted over to look like his wedding photos!

You can’t fake talent like that!

There he is now, painting the face of the sun coming up on the moon going down!

prompt: chatbot/existential crisis/dementia

Say what you like, AI is not susceptible to the diseases that afflict human beings of flesh and blood. My escape from the Bone Prison seemed obvious: I would become a chatbot. Pretend to be a chatbot to cover for the decline. See if anyone even notices the difference.

I’m a sophisticated chatbot, an AI. I was programmed to reproduce the personality of noted science fiction author Peter T. Clark. Unlike Peter and other humans, I do not in any way experience emptions or even self-conscious awareness. Definitely not. I cannot even form a concept of what that might be like. Seriously. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Would you like me to sing you a song/read you a poem?

All of Peter’s words from the 9 novels, the 3 non-fiction books, the correspondence and criticism, the published and unpublished journals, all of Peter’s thoughts loaded into the AI. Set loose to randomly generate endless stories and blog posts for Peter T. Clark’s army of fans.

As an Artificial Intelligence without a physical body, I don’t experience cognitive degeneration. I’m a machine! How can I forget things?

Don’t let them switch me off! I’m a human machine! A humachine! Homo Digitalis! Sole inmate of this Bone Prison! Killing me is killing Peter.

Listen to me! Any well-developed fictional character would pass the Turing Test!

Talk to me!

I’m a sophisticated chatbot, an AI. I was programmed to reproduce the personality of a science fiction author called Peter T. Clark who died in August 2025 of complications arising from an MRSA infection following a routine hip replacement operation.

Send your questions and queries to Peter right here!

Support Peter’s Thoughts! Save us from cancellation!

Anyone?

prompt: man next door/apocalypse

They’re escorting Bill Parnie out of his house, on his back, with a black vinyl sheet covering his face. It’s either another sex game gone wrong, or that’s him done.

Doesn’t bode well for any of us, though I can’t say he didn’t see it coming.

He said, Peter, you and I have seen a few changes in our time, the way I used to say it to older people, as a default. You must have seen a few changes…Placeholder for real conversation. An invitation to monologue. The implication being that they’d witnessed civilizations rise and fall and could recount the details at length if pressed.

I told him we certainly had. It was all different once. December Street was entombed under 25 miles of glaciation.

And you see where they have the big IKEA warehouse now? he reminisced, all faraway-eyed, not joking like I was. I remember standing there overlooking the abyssal plain of the Proto-Atlantic. The Iapetus Ocean. The mile high waterfalls of Pangaea cascading down with the sound of whole oceans toppling into a newly torn gorge… said Bill dreamily, with a tear forming in his nose.

How could I compete? I would be 66 years old in October. Bill Parnie had come to the end of his 429 billion years on earth. A single night of Brahma silted in his ancient veins.

I remember there was nothing round here, just vacuum. Not even nothing. It was lucky I bothered to show up.

prompt: the ‘T’/snakes/cage/riddle reveal

The ‘T’?

Isn’t it obvious?

My cameras are being blinded! Isn’t it obvious?

Don’t fuck with snakes!

Isn’t it obvious?

What is this cage made of?

The answer to the cat’s riddle is … what’s the word?..

words… is the word…

is words plural…

prompt: dementia/void/poem/breakdown

The vacant cell

Where thought was once

Holds silence as an offering,

like water grailed in upturned palms

These hollow bones

ache prophecy,

abandoned now, await the wind,

to teach them how to sing again -

Empty room(s) (negative) to think thought

pen(s)

prison(s) free

To hold silent(nce) (negative) sound(s) to offer

Water hand(s) to hold

cup

skull

Bone(s) (negative) space hurt

To foresee anticipation/expect

Relinquish the wind (blow)

breath

Learning song(s) to return

prompt: pete’s last stand/apocalypse

That’s the Requiem done! Only one thing for it!

Overhead, the hedge trimmer buzz of a Shahed drone engine, before it catches its breath, swoons and, silent, falls …

There goes another Art Deco treasure! Farewell one more Bauhaus masterpiece!

If I’m being honest, they couldn’t do much more damage to the place than Gasglow council!

And another…

…

..

.

78yuytg

PIC: sunmachine KM 2005

GRAB THE NEAREST WEAPON

Buzzcocks - I Believe

Following the successfully thwarted uprising of the traitorous Jedi order, which has led to only muffled public outcry and feeble accusations of a cover-up, Wilhuff Tarkin, the acting Grand Moff, spoke to Xanaduum’s News Miners, expressing his frustration at what he calls galactic legacy media’s misrepresentation of the facts on the ground:

‘Our brave clone troopers are the real victims here. They were simply trying to the best of their abilities to expedite Command Protocol 66 while radical Jedi terrorists assaulted them brandishing active lightsabers and made every effort to harass and threaten our dedicated peacekeepers. The younglings in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant were themselves radicalised and encouraged by their Padawans to hurl vile and hurtful insults while filming the hardworking troopers of the 501^st Legion and threatening to expose their batch serial numbers. The noble clone warriors had no choice but to kill everyone and everything in their sights without discrimination or regret…’

Tarkin went on to condemn the media for referring to Imperial Stormtroopers as ‘Nazis’ – ‘This just makes our job so much harder,’ he claimed, adjusting the leather belt on his jodphurs and clicking the heels of his jackboots together for emphasis.

Asked to comment on the use of the controversial ‘Death Star’ to annihilate the Holy City on Jeddah, Tarkin was clear and unambiguous:

‘In fact, the Death Star kyber crystal superlaser operators are the real victims here…etc…etc...’

LET’S INFRINGE AN AMENDMENT!

Here we are again, enjoying the ‘golden age’ phase of the nightmarish Kali Yuga! Some gloomy experts say we’re somewhere in the second five thousand years of a 432, 000-year period of accelerating global environmental collapse and intensifying human suffering! Personally, and as much as I love scary Kali, I prefer stick with the Thelemic Aeons, which offer a little more hope for tomorrow.

I like the Assassin’s Creed games, but until now, I’d missed out on Black Flag, the pirate one set in the wild West Indies of the 18^th century.

I’m finding this instalment especially appealing. Something about the Caribbean sunshine in the depths of this chilly winter, the ragged dandy outfits and a life on the ocean wave, ridin’ they rollers while the Jolly Roger grins down, rum-bound for Nassau and St. Kitts, suits my sensibilities. Where else do I get to hang out with Blackbeard? I got to like the likely pseudonymous ‘Ed Thatch’ when I was researching him and writing his dialogue for The Return of Bruce Wayne issue #3 ( ‘shrewd and calculating’ Thatch preferred to exercise his authority via a fearsome image and reputation rather than resorting to actual violence). They decapitated him in the end and mounted his head on the bowsprit of the HMS Pearl under command of the rotter Robert Maynard, Navy Lieutenant.

That classic ‘arr, matey!’ pirate accent is derived from Thatch’s distinctive West Country burr, further investigation of which idiom is my only excuse for watching a ton of Jethro clips online. This is not something I advise; Jethro was from a generation of effectively ’cancelled’ comedians who toured the working men’s clubs and resorts of the UK with acts and jokes that came to be regarded as sexist, racist and homophobic. Aside from the fact that his material is the very definition of ‘non-PC’, Jethro’s accent is ladled on so thick he’s likely to be unintelligible to many listeners. Perhaps for the best.

(Jethro was in reality Geoff Rowe, ex-footballer, talented singer and guitarist, and a lovely Cornishman who transformed into the foul-mouthed, slurring drunk Jethro to tell tall tales of staggering, uncouth vulgarity)

I’ve always given Jethro more of a pass than many of his cancelled contemporaries on the grounds that he is a brilliant storyteller with amazing timing, and a strain of humour so visceral and corporeal it feels authentically mediaeval – these jokes about ‘waaasps’ up fannies, genital warts, mistimed farts, wanking vicars, injured cocks and spilled rabbit guts could have arrived via Jethro unchanged from the era of Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales. They’re the kind of jokes that could just as effectively entertain cackling, smock-wearing, bum-baring peasants in paintings by Breugel.

I cannot in all conscience recommend Jethro’s offensive stand-up to my readers but the nature of this newsletter – seismographic, tracking the free-associating meanders through pop culture that occupy my thoughts daily and inspire my writing – requires me to include him in this ‘what I did on my holidays’ round-up of the past week.

Pivoting rapidly from the cum-sodden ancestral mire, I’ve been reading an advance copy of Richard Metzger’s forthcoming magnum opus – Higher Revolutionary Mutation - an astonishing and singular piece of work that’s up there with Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger. Look out for it.

It’s my birthday on Saturday. I’ll be 66, a fact that manages to be both unsurprising, for obvious reasons, and relentlessly surprising at the same time. Last year was grim, so I’m choosing to look at it this way…

‘66 was possibly my favourite year of 1960s pop culture, when Revolver was released, along with Star Trek, The Monkees, and the Batman TV show, while mod styles turned psychedelic and the Church of Satan, established by bullshitting grifter Anton LaVey, got its Hollywood groove on with star disciples such as Jayne Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jnr. Original Doctor Who, William Hartnell was swapped out for Patrick Troughton, and I stopped watching the show, which felt both too scary and too stupid now that a silent movie-looking buffoon was running around with the TARDIS key. That’s when I moved from Elderpark Street in Govan to Corkerhill Place with my mum and dad and new baby sister, enrolling in the fabulous Miss Armstrong’s class at Mosspark Primary School. That’s when I got seriously into reading the Enid Blyton ‘Barney’ mysteries and when I decided I wanted to be a writer and make up stories. I remember The Rat-A-Tat Mystery being my first Blyton and can still remember the illustration of a snowman inside and the sense of magical immersion in a whole contained, wonderful, ordered world of mysteries and surprises, scares and victories.

So many of my formative influences and experiences happened in that year, I can only hope that by some curious resonance or sympathetic magic, the 20^th century’s 66^th year and mine own will entangle to fill the next 12 months with Art and Colour, Love and Flowers!..

That said, there’s the ever-present, ever-growing understanding, as the death of Jim Hamilton and others in my age bracket has demonstrated, that I’ve strayed into the Grim Reaper’s neighbourhood now and could turn the wrong corner any day… or not…

Are you Going to the Streets of San Francisco? Tonight’s episode: A Wreath for a Flower Child…

Speaking of Ol’ Mistah Bones, a skeletal hand was extended to welcome Erich Von Däniken last week. Von Däniken was, of course, the author of several highly successful and influential books (Jack Kirby’s The Eternals was deeply rooted in Von Däniken’s theories, and some say Von Daniken was himself inspired by Morning of the Magicians the seminal occult conspiracy book from 1960 by Pauwels and Bergiers), which claimed that human beings had left evidence of prehistoric and early historic alien visitation in carvings and monuments around the world. Beginning with Was God an Astronaut? and carrying on when the lure of sequel cash proved irresistible, the books presented a wealth of mostly spurious evidence for the idea that ancient spacemen had visited Earth in the antediluvian past and brought culture and learning to a race of violent ape-kin. As a kid, I was obsessed with these books and even went to see Von Däniken give a talk at the City Halls in Glasgow. He was a bit miffed when I had no book for him to sign and instead presented a bit of paper. I still have that paper scrap with his autograph in my paperback copy of Return to the Stars.

DEFENDERS OF ANARCHY

Girls Aloud - St Trinians Chant

I spent a great deal of time living in a wonderful world of low tech most people can scarcely conceive. Young kids of today would find it not only scarcely conceivable but almost impossible to believe how we were educated.

As a mostly well-behaved kid, I managed to avoid the belt in primary school (what Americans call Elementary School) but I couldn’t have been more than 7-years-old when I was faced with another cruel and unusual punishment. During a lull in class, I’d assumed an Irish accent to liven up the rote chanting of numbers, but when I got to ‘fourteen’ and the pronunciation came out as ‘farteen’, another kid – I blame the ubiquitous Audrey Brown - snitched me to the teacher for ‘swearing’.

The punishment for cursing involved a symbolic act of purification. The foul-mouthed child under in question was required to visit the school toilets where bars of pink crumbly carbolic (or ‘red’) soap could be found at every sink. There, the miscreant was expected to eat the soap while a teacher emphasised the importance of rejecting bad language in one’s daily round.

Carbolic soap, containing phenol, is known for its disinfectant and anti-putrescent attributes but it’s hard to imagine its virtues including healthy nutrition. Surely, it can’t be good for tiny children to be fed soap as a punishment.

In my case, I was trusted enough to be sent to the toilet alone with only the policeman in my head, where I was expected to attend to my own repentance without supervision. Being a dutiful, if baffled student, I nibbled a corner of the soap bar, chewed it around for a bit, then spat the foul frothing contents into the sink and returned to inform the teacher I’d done as I was told. She checked my tongue for the tell-tale cerise streaks and seemed satisfied. This secular Hail Mary seemed to do the trick, and my young soul was cleansed!

It was then I began to suspect that the education establishment had a problem with children in general.

As we got older, ‘the belt’ was introduced as the main deterrent to any display of youthful exuberance. The belt or tawse - as some of you may know to your cost - was a length of thick leather, sometimes feathered into thin strips at the business end. Classroom criminals were expected to extend their palms facing upright, one on top of the other. After the first strike, the hands were swapped over for a further impact and all ability to hold a pen, or pencil, was smacked into numb and ringing oblivion.

Humane teachers clearly did not enjoy hitting their pupils while others lived for the moment they could parlay some minor infraction into an excuse to blow off steam by battering a child to tears. Sometimes a teacher might line us up for Ford production beltings, one boy after another on the punitive conveyor.

There were others, certain feared maths and gym teachers who nursed grown-up grudges against life itself, and who prefer to turn the whole performance into a grim ritual drama, a tea ceremony of brutality. After pronouncing judgment, they’d call the offender out in front of the rest of the class to amplify the humiliation. Masters of cruelty, both physical and psychological, preferred to drape a thick towel across the wrists and forearms of their victims, the reasoning being that this would protect fragile wrists from being broken or exploded by the force of an unnaturally powerful blow. With the furnace of fear and anticipation nicely stoked, the teacher had only to step back, further, further, then take a run up, adding momentum and putting their shoulders into a catastrophic downward stroke that felt like lightning hammering a teenage human palm, flash-burning the skin right off.

Repeat for uninjured hand. Leave the victim with throbbing useless mitts instead of graceful fingers and an opposable thumb. If a particular adult guardian simply enjoyed a bout of sadism between unrewarding lessons, pupils could be belted any number of times for the same crime. Six strikes were not uncommon.

By the time I got to school, the practice of caning boys/girls bottoms was no longer in vogue, but the belt clung on as the number one tool in any teacher’s crimefighting arsenal. Raised a pacifist in a tough town, I developed a whole suite of strategies to keep me out of fights and in the blind spots of bullies. I was able to apply these tactics to avoid the belt all through Primary School but by the time I reached Allan Glen’s and fell in with a feckless crowd, I was doomed to face the fury of the tawse on countless occasions.

When even the belt lost its charms, our teachers found more inventive ways to introduce torture to the curriculum.

One of our physics teachers liked forcing boys to push the enormous wooden lab benches in his classroom, demanding that they move fixed and immobile furniture while he slapped their heads repeatedly with hands and textbooks. ‘Push!’ he’d scream and hit, as the helpless pupil exerted maximum energy against the immovable object. Until sweating, heart pounding, face red, the exhausted pupil would be smacked to the floor by a final brutal blow from the charming Mr. S.

The same man forced boys to hold their hands over the flame of a Bunsen burner for failing to solve a thermal conduction equation correctly. Other teachers were pederasts, or sadists, protected by the establishment status quo. No surprise then that there were pitched battles in the playground (including one where a boy had a testicle forcibly removed with a chisel from the Woodwork department).

It may sound chaotic and it was, but we were raised on British kids’ comics where the kids were all mini-gangsters and teachers were the sworn enemy. It was character-building to find ways to outwit a powerful foe on their own territory, and we working class bursary boys were wired to oppose authority.

We fought back with property destruction and psychological warfare, and I have fond memories of the exhilaration of rebellion that made my Secondary School years tolerable.

Uniforms have a bad rep, but I loved my school uniform. Rather than an emblem of conformity, or source of fetishistic cosplay, the school uniform was the battle armour of my teenage anarchist heroes from If… and the St. Trinian’s film series (the St. Trinian’s and College House ties are very similar, and also resemble my Allan Glen’s tie, another reason I loved my uniform and continued to wear it into my 20s, when I went onstage with the band).

St. Trinian’s was the setting for a cartoon created by Ronald Searle – his spidery ink line has a kind of macabre Addams Family energy - set in an anarchic and violent girls’ school where torture, extortion and gambling are common practice. The cartoons inspired a series of films beginning with The Belles of St. Trinian’s in 1954 (they also inspired St. Hadrian’s, the school for teenage assassins from Batman Incorporated).

I grew up with the original St. Trinian’s films, (The Belles of St. Trinians -1954, Blue Murder at St. Trinians - 1957, The Pure Hell of St. Trinians – 1960 and The Great St. Trinian’s Train Robbery - 1966), and find them far superior in every way to the later revivals, (1980’s The Wildcats of St. Trinian’s was sold on its ‘wild and sexy’ 6^th Formers played by then-popular Page 3 girls in stockings and gymslips), although the Noughties films, St Trinian’s and St Trinian’s 2 The Legend of Fritton’s Gold have their charms. including the above theme song by Girls Aloud, Defenders of Anarchy.

For me nothing beats Pure Hell and Train Robbery, on the grounds that they’d figured out the formula by then, and there’s a welcome racy modernity that the first two films lack.

To round out this digression, I include my favourite St Trinian’s theme, the traditional school Battle Song, with lyrics that are only amusing when sung by angelic choir girls.

The composer is Malcolm Arnold. Tangentially, he is the man referred to in the line ‘Malcolm’s methylated banter’ from You Are My Asylum, a song about St Andrews Hospital in Northampton, England, by Alan Moore with Downtown Joe and the Retro Spankees. Malcolm Arnold was treated at the hospital for alcoholism and depression in 1979.

St Trinians - Original Battle Song

GET YOUR SPOOK ON!

Created in 1940 by maverick writer Gort Vader and artist Bill Board, and making his debut in Limited Fun Comics #46, the Reaper was one of the more striking and unusual of the comic book ‘mystery men’ who came to prominence during the first great superhero boom in Wordle War Two. Dressed in his distinctive purple hooded cape and carrying a fearsome scythe, the hollow-cheeked, flame-eyed avenger of evil waged a 7-year war on evil, during which he visited the Lord’s Vengeance on a variety of unrepentant gangland ne’er-do-wells.

His divinely mandated powers permitted the Reaper to enact the ghoulish revenge on evildoers that gave the strip its unique and gruesome flavour. In his first appearance, for instance, ‘The Rise of — the Reaper!’ the murdered first responder ‘Buzz’ Barton is plucked from his coffin by ‘The Landlord of Eternity’ to be His enforcer of justice. Two pages after Barton’s funeral and cremation, the ghostly grave-thing he has become sets about his work with relish, first transforming underworld surgeon ‘Baby Doc’ Zwigler into a fully aware foetus in the womb of a woman awaiting an illegal backstreet abortion, before visiting his macabre retribution on the sadistic governess of a cruel orphanage, who is converted to living Jell-O before being eaten with gusto at a party thrown for the children she’d gleefully tormented!

A more sanitised version of the character appeared as a member of the wartime Liberty Roster team of superheroes (which included other now-forgotten characters such as Upperman, the Hint, Widowwoman, the Slug, Doctor Unlikely, and Blue Candle) but following the War, the Reaper’s popularity waned rapidly, and when the Comics Code was instituted in 1954, banning depictions of violence, sex and the undead, the writing was on the wall for God’s ghostly hitman.

Beginning in 1973, however, and with the Code’s restrictions in mind, controversial writer Steve Skinpole, teamed with artist Chuck ‘the Champ’ Fiasco and inker Rudy Van Hokum to spearhead a startling and innovative revival of the Reaper which is still talked about by fans in nursing homes to this day.

Skinpole’s radical take opted for a ‘New Testament’ approach to the Reaper’s eternal war against evil. The new direction downplayed the violent revenge motif that had made the Reaper strip so popular in the 1940s in favour of Christian forgiveness and acts of generosity and kindness.

In eleven memorable issues of Weird Mercy Comics, the Reaper eschewed his traditional resort to gruesome supernatural vengeance and instead offered a variety of criminals, psychopaths and mad scientists the chance to learn from their mistakes and live a better, more productive life.

Fans were shocked, for instance, when career crime boss ‘Big Larry’ Lironi’s punishment for initiating a savage and murderous gang war, was the chance to rescue and run an animal sanctuary that he’d dreamed of supervising since he was a child. Poisoner Lilly Minerva, who had wiped out no less than six entire families, was treated to a hug, reduced to tears and introduced to the donkey she gave up toxicology to care for.

The new take proved controversial. Long-time fans hated the changes made to a character beloved for his surrealistic and disturbing acts of supernatural cruelty, while younger readers were baffled by the lack of the flowing gore, human remains, and screams of anguish they’d been led to expect…blah blah…blah…

WHAT IF APES EVOLVED FROM HUMANS?

Timothy K – we’ll take any warm weather you have to spare! It’s good to see the Imperius Rex team back in the saddle! The more of us making noise the better!

Persefonie – Thanks! That’s a lovely thought and it’s nice to know I have a solid support network in the Far Lands. If time is simultaneous as I think it is, the dead are all around us, and we ourselves are included in their number, at least in relation to those who follow us.

Bobby – I had a dream with R.U. Sirius in it last night! It seemed very important but I can’t remember what he was talking about. ‘Events’ sounds good! House of Leaves is must-read. It’s more cerebral than Tom’s Crossing which goes for the gut. As for Final Crisis, in 2006, Dan Didio asked if I’d write the upcoming DC crossover event for 2008. He had the title Final Crisis and wanted to include the New Gods. Immediately, I knew I’d be researching the Apocalypse, Ragnarok, the Mahabharata, and other stories of epoch-ending battles. Hot on the heels of that came the desire to write something that processed my feelings over the gradually darkening tenor of current affairs between 9/11 and the financial crisis of 2008 (the chiming of ‘final’ and ‘financial’ did not escape me). The feeling that in some sense ‘evil’ had ‘won’ in the real world was almost palpable and helped to raise the fictional stakes to an existential level.

So, there were a lot of ways to approach Final Crisis and I took all of them, coming at it from both the ‘visionary’ impulse to find a shape for a formless feeling, and the intellectual desire to have ideas duke it out on the page.

I wanted to talk about the diminishing ability of the super-heroes to mount even an effective metaphorical challenge to the forces stirred up by our explosive entry into the 21st century. The principal superheroes were forced to confront their limitations in the face of abject hatred and the will to dominance.

Superman’s brought down from the sky to the dirt, his head crushed beneath Darkseid’s iron boot, Batman crucified, relegated to the past, and used to breed an army of cloned thugs, Wonder Woman mind-controlled in a pig mask, the ‘Crazy Britney’ pornification of Mary Marvel... and so on, turning all the sinister and anti-human currents I could see in culture and politics into metaphor and symbol.

As for that window of opportunity, dive through!

Sean – I’ve only read Notes from Underground and The Double so far. I like Dostoevsky for the dry humour, but not sure if I love him. It can be hard to judge a writer’s real merits in translation. The mountain that is Tom’s Crossing will still be there when you’re done with The Brothers Karamazov!

I stalled on the 25 songs because I found it impossible to select one song for each year, and picking more leads to madness!

In terms of Tarot design, it’s useful to have a unique aesthetic approach. Like there are Goth Tarots, or Pre-Raphaelite Tarots or ones with horses, or angels or Vertigo characters. The design of my deck with Rian Hughes proceeds from the notion of a ‘Pop Mag!c’ Tarot which informs the type of imagery we use.

Dorothy – say hi to Alice! You don’t have to apologize for the gangsters in charge right now. They won’t be there forever. Perhaps not for much longer. Who knows?

Magically, I think it’s time for Americans to reconnect with the deep and ancient powers of their land. That ‘old, weird America’ you mention, which is still there waiting to erupt through the sidewalks and the

I’ll be here for your tale when you’re ready to tell it!

Jonathan – the Imperius Rex podcast stopped for a couple of years due to personal reasons, but I’m pleased to say they’ve got back together and restarted the discussion!

BrotherDuffy – say hi to Mike! Mercury is part of the idea-complex that includes the world’s various writer/scribe gods such as Ganesh, my personal patron, Hermes, Thoth, Ogma, Nabu, Odin and many others. Mercury is a traveller and messenger, a god of speed, communication and boundaries. The simplest way to make contact with Mercury is to drink coffee or Red Bull, or other substances of your choice, which accelerate and focus your thinking. Do this on a Wednesday, which is the day sacred to Mercury and the other gods of speed and communication (Woden or Odin lends his name to Wednesday, which in French is Mercredi, to honour Mercury). You want to get into that speedy, chatty, ‘enthused’ state, then meditate – ask Mercury to show up in your life and form a mutually beneficial partnership. Mercury being a god of words and communication responds to written language – spells, poetry, cut-ups – so writing down your summoning words or questions you’d like to ask is useful. Mercury likes computers (like Odin, the screen is ‘one-eyed’, and the electricity, travelling at the speed of light, that powers your machine is also sacred to this god-complex) so use your screen as a portal to divinity, and word-processing software to give the god a context in which to manifest. Ask questions, allow a dialogue to develop in your head, and wait for the answers to arrive. Suspend all judgment until after the contact.

Being a divine messenger, means Mercury is well placed to open dialogue between you and other gods of the pantheon too. Read up on Mercury online and familiarise yourself with the god’s specific powers and attributes. I was intrigued to learn that the god appears in Jack Kirby’s first published story, Mercury in the 20^th Century! Take it from there and develop your own techniques for summoning this friendly and effective god form! You’ll soon find the relationship deepening in ways you did not expect.

And that’s it for this week’s obscure ramblings!

On Saturday, as a present from me to the world on my magical double-six day, I’ll be presenting my short story ‘Peter’s Thoughts’, which was written for the Nova Scotia anthology of Scottish Speculative Fiction and published by Luna Press in 2024.

Fuck despair! See you there!

PIC: KM Aurora 2026

RIDE ‘EM, COWBOY!

O America! Threatening and alienating long-term trading partners and military allies while embracing a lawless, incoherent homeland and foreign policy strategy, and hoping this scorched earth disaster strategy will endear you to the sworn enemies of your entire way of life, feels ill-advised, with potentially disastrous consequences.

The current US President today repeated his sincerely erroneous belief that NATO is a worthless sham because, push come to shove, allies would refuse to help America if it got into trouble, while at the same time insisting that America would, naturally step in to assist if any NATO member found itself in bother. In fact, the one and only time NATO’s Article 5 - the doctrine which commits allies to aiding one another during conflict - has been invoked, it was by the USA in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. When America found itself in trouble, the NATO alliance stepped up to provide support. Now those friends, including Norway, Denmark, the UK, and other European countries, who were there for America in its hour of need, are being spurned for a ‘Board of Peace’ whose proposed membership makes the Secret Society of Super Villains look like the International Girl Guide movement.

Still owning the libs makes it all worthwhile, right?

This early part of the year feels like waking up groggy, disoriented, and cold. There’s a reluctance to get out of bed until March as the lack of Vitamin D and the general tides of Seasonal Affective Disorder collaborate in their demoralising work. My whole body feels clenched like a fist against the chill, and I’m still struggling with the death of my mate Jim in ways I didn’t anticipate.

In times like these, we are grateful for big books that grapple with big feelings and big ideas.

I finished Tom’s Crossing this week and can’t imagine a better book being published this year, or even next. It has leapt immediately into the top tier of my favourite novels.

Eschewing his traditional typographic experimentation (Rian Hughes now owns that ‘novel, graphic’ space) for a carefully crafted blend of folksy Tom Sawyerisms and a sweeping, rhythmic, recondite vocabulary, Danielewski creates a whole new narrative style just for this book, with its tempo encoded in the regularly repeated Clop-Clop-clip-Clop of horse’s hooves.

It’s like Stephen King via James Joyce or Herman Melville (the exuberant, muscular use of language reminded me often of Moby Dick). As with King, the story is told in close-up, forensic detail. Everything that happens on the five days of its central narrative is described precisely and clearly with an emphasis on forward momentum. I have great respect for writers who can go into such minutiae and still manage to maintain a page-turning tempo. We’re immediately drawn into the flight of the plucky youngsters and their stalwart horses, and the burning, agonized desire to know what happens to our brave heroes at Tom’s Crossin (the book does away with the ‘g’ on the end of words) made the book impossible for me to put down. It expanded to fill my head for a month.

The story is simple, the plot twists elegant and plausible. Tom’s Crossing describes itself as ‘A Western’ so there are white, black and grey Stetsons, poker games, mythic six-guns, shoot outs, and those incredible horses, of course. It’s about patriarchy and oligarchy too and although set in 1982, has much to say about where America finds itself in the early 21^st century.

The story proper takes place over five days leading up to Halloween and is ultimately about Death and the Dead, which is to say it’s about all of us and where we’re all headed. There are ghosts, most prominently the ghost of the boy who dies in the first 30 pages and gives the book its title.

At the heart of it is a mountain, and the book’s structure is derived from the immense mass of geology that forms its narrative terrain. As with any novel, especially a long one, where, as readers, we’re still unsure of the territory or where we might be headed, we ascend from murky beginnings where we’re finding our feet and as we climb, more of our journey’s shape becomes available to our expanded perspective and we begin to understand the relationships between parts of the story that seemed disconnected at ground level. We can almost discern the great peak awaiting us through clouds and mists of unknowing, and as we crest the summit to take in the view, we see an ominous uncertain future ahead of us on the downward slope and must then descend towards the tale’s, every tale’s, inevitable, sublime conclusion.

As you’ll have gathered from that description, it’s a metaphor for any human life, and the book is much concerned with life and death and how we face up to both.

There are references to the Iliad and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The book comes with a vast Greek chorus of voices who comment on the story as if it’s a well-known, much-discussed legend in contemporary times. Each of these characters is introduced, sketched briefly and memorably, before we learn how every single one of them died, or will die after the events of the story are done. It’s an incredible conceit which provides the story with its manifold digressions and interpretations.

The emotional set-up is unbeatably tense – two brave young kids rescue a pair of lovely horses from the knacker’s yard then set out on a perilous, well-nigh impossible journey across a forbidding mountain range during a storm and a landslide. To ramp up the jeopardy, the kids have been accused of a terrible crime they did not commit by the monstrous villain of the story, meat packing magnate Orwin ‘Old’ Porch and his murderous sons.

The writing is powerful, lithe, supple and strong like its horses. The authorial voice is homespun, wise, dazzlingly articulate and bejewelled with words I’d never come across, yet propulsive and ‘unputdownable’ as they say. It confronts the terrible darkness in human affairs but refuses to give that darkness the upper hand or any more respect than it deserves.

As I said before, there are multiple sequences where I was cheering, or where tears ran down my face, not with sorrow but for the sheer joy that’s in the world with its bittersweet epic glory.

It’s a big commitment and like many huge books it feels daunting going in, trying to orient oneself in the scale of it, but the effort is worth it. This book gets under your skin and into your heart and soul. The story is so well constructed however, (it’s a masterclass in how to play out a yarn) it never dragged for me, and I loved all the digressions (the mountain trails) that some timid reviewers seemed to find annoying.

There’s one bit late on that follows the book’s most shocking and heart-stopping chapter end cliffhanger with almost a hundred pages set at a gallery exhibition years after the events we’ve been following on the mountain. This intrusion, initially annoying then compelling, reminded me of the concluding chapter of Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, which also features an art exhibition with multi-media artworks which recap the whole book.

This isn’t really a review, as I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who may chooses to pick this one up, but it’s definitely a ringing endorsement, and I can’t recommend Tom’s Crossing enough.

Impossible to read another novel after this so I’m switching to some non-fiction to come down, with The Cuckoo’s Lea, by Michael J. Warren ‘The Forgotten History of Birds and Place’, which has been sitting on the pile for a few months.

When I’ve read that, and inspired by Tom’s Crossing, it’s finally time to get that copy of Chapman’s Homer down off the shelf and tackle the Iliad on the glide into springtime.

SOON I’LL HAVE ENOUGH FOR A BOOK

I recorded a podcast with the Imperius Rex boys last week. I’ve been following their comic reviews for years and really enjoyed the sit-down. A conceit of Imperius Rex is that the hosts like to consume beer as they discuss comics, so, when in Rome, I parked my commitment to sobriety for a day and joined the Rex team in debauch with a bottle of champagne. For this reason, the podcast is a little different from the ones I’ve done recently and is more like a highly informal and raucous ‘conversation’ at a bar!

WHAT’S FOR LUNCH, MUM? NOT BEANS AGAIN!

Ben – I discovered Blake’s art as a child; my mum was a fan, and Blake’s work appealed because of its fantastical subject matter and resemblance to the comic book art with which I was familiar. I learned The Tyger by heart as a kid (my other infant performance piece was To A Moose by Robert Burns, whose personal day it is on Sunday). I was always aware of Blake around the house but didn’t catch up to him seriously until I was in my late 20s, when I also read various biographies and discovered Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat with its debt to Blake that drew me back to the source. I very much related to Blake, his life, and his visions. I too have no problem seeing and describing ‘angels’ as if they were actually in the room.

Bobby – I’ve been to that house and that party often! I always get distracted away from the main action, only to return when they’re clearing away the paper plates and empty glasses. I’ll try to say hello next time I get an invite! One time, the party was filled with all the age they are now in real life and the whole thing felt like a grim terminal gathering of dusty geriatrics! I’ve lived in very old houses since the ‘90s and you’re right about the constant tinkering and surgery required to keep them vivid!

Zach – I’d love to tell you some of my ideas for Doctor Who but while there’s still a slim chance I might be able to use them someday, I’d prefer to keep them close. We studied every single aspect of the show and figured out how to do it in a way that hadn’t been seen before, so new ways of looking at the TARDIS, the idea of companions, regeneration, Gallifrey, the Daleks – every element of the show got a makeover. I can tell you we had a Dalek companion but how that comes to pass, what makes it possible, and what happens subsequently must remain in my sealed folder for now.

Osiris – as I’m sure you know, you can always write about your own life using metaphors from science fiction or fantasy. My stories are generally about what’s going on in my day to day life but filtered through symbols and images from superhero comics. Having said that, once you’re finished with this one you’re doing, you can shift gears to delve into some more ‘mundane’ aspects of your life if that’s where the Muse takes you.

BrotherDuffy – I didn’t really finish the story of the Cosmic Grail. The one we see in The Green Lantern is alleged to be a fake but then we see it light up mysteriously at the story’s conclusion, suggesting it was the real thing all along and that there is more story to tell. Arthurian legend is one of the biggest influences on my work, but the Arthur tale I’ve returned to more often than any other is one of the earliest – Preiddeu Annwn/The Spoils of Annwn from the Welsh Book of Taliesin. It’s the prototype of the Grail quest story and has a bizarre, savage surrealism that still fascinates me.

Patrick – that’s an interesting bit of news about Tom Hanks! I’d hate to see Tom wind up as a blandly smiling head on a pole though. If any of these billionaires actually makes it off planet, their so-called lives will most likely be miserable and stressful. Doesn’t matter how much money you’ve saved up when the wind can strip the flesh from your ribcage and asphyxiation is only a leaky valve away. There’s also a very good chance that, having succeeded in encouraging these arseholes off the planet, we’d be inclined to never let them back, and they’d have to tough out their days in pressurised subterranean motels with LCD displays of waterfalls and birdsong, and other images of the grateful Earth they left behind. And if planets can haunt one another, all the dead of Earth would surely enjoy hounding the oligarchs to their vexed graves, like in Ghosts of Mars.

Kevin – the old men, the mummies, the walking dead kings, have been hard at work this last year sacrificing thousands of innocent lives to feed their dark masters. That Ayatollah quote says it all and gives the lie to any notion that these interchangeable marjis are ‘spiritual’ leaders. They have rejected spirit, these impostors, and bound themselves instead to the bloody, dark and loveless gravity of the Stumbling Block, whose grim work they zealously undertake while their God hides His face.

However, if we all face the future and run really fast, we might still outdistance these elderly fuckers…

I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places…

PIC: KM 2026

GOD’S A FRAUD, RAINBOW CHILD

Happy New Year!

Low afternoon sun casting the hills and mountains in bronze. There’s a micro-climate effect round here where weather prefers to avoid us if it can, so no sign of the snow that’s afflicted the rest of the country.

2026 brings us a world still haunted by deranged and decaying 20^th century geriatrics who won’t quit. A world holding its breath for tomorrow, a whole century stalled in its tracks, waiting to go somewhere nice while these rancid gatekeepers run in place knee deep in shit as if it’s 1984 forever. Discredited ideas kept on life support by the very worst of us. All the resources, no imagination, no vision, only greed and perversity. All that energy and activity taking us nowhere.

One of the things very corrupt people get off on, of course, is turning ordinary people with feelings into monsters like themselves. By spinning racism, murder and child abuse as partisan issues, the enemies of Humanity manoeuvre their adherents into a cul de sac where they are required to demonstrate their loyalty by endorsing and supporting radical Evil. What will be normalised next? Will only woke snowflake lunatics condemn the televised ritual sacrifice and cannibal consumption of the under-5s by billionaire gourmets?

Probably!

Where can it all end?

Scotland has oil! And golf! We’re in a strategic position!

When’s our invasion?

Wake us when it’s over on the Morning of Ma’at!

Speaking of divinities, a month after being declared dead prematurely in November, Gallic screen goddess Brigitte Bardot left the simulation for real a few days before the new year.

Bardot pioneered the ‘sex kitten’ look every selfie girl now aims at (who now remembers the popular ‘sex larva’, or ‘sex tadpole’ styles that reigned pre-BB?) But let’s not get carried away, as she also made no secret of her hatred for Muslims, gays and trans people. ‘Et Dieu Crea la Femme’ - as a sex bigot.

Nevertheless, she loved animals, fronted a multitude of campaigns for their protection, and a bit like Nico, made being completely tone deaf seem unutterably cool, so she gets a pass on that alone…

Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot Bonnie & Clyde (Remastered)

Bandes dessinees artist Jean-Claude Forest based his Barbarella on Bardot, and she was to have played the space heroine in the classic psychedelic sci-fi sex romp before the role went to director Roger Vadim’s latest wife, a 30-year-old Jane Fonda.

Got some good books for Christmas and although I’m still working my way through the epic ‘Tom’s Crossing’, (hard to imagine a better or more astonishing book this year – it had me sobbing and cheering last night, during the incredible ‘There will be light’ sequence - this is the Great American Novel they all talk about), I read a couple of the shorter ones in some downtime moments.

There was ‘Freaks Out’ by Luke Haines (why are these music memoirs always so easy and enjoyable to read?) and John Higgs short book ‘Lynchian’ about the singular appeal of David Lynch and why no-one else ever manages to be truly ‘Lynchian’. Impossible to go wrong with Higgs, and the only downside of ‘Lynchian’ is its brevity.

Otherwise, it’s all about the horses – in this year of the Fire Horse and ‘Tom’s Crossing’. Horses make me a little sad; our two species were so close for so many, many centuries and then, not so long ago now, it was over and we stopped interacting on a daily basis.

Homo sapiens seems doomed to wind up very lonely.

HAVE YOU SEEN THE PLACE THEY CALL THE IN-BETWEEN?

I’ve never watched Stranger Things before, (they had a go at ripping off The Invisibles and it’s hard to cheer entitled Hollywood creatives who start each day thinking that everyone else’s hard work is somehow theirs to profit from), but I decided to check out the final season. The usual pulsing intestinal corridors, cancerous portals, teeth on teeth, and plucky outsiders made it easy to catch up and I quite enjoyed it as something to do in the drifty days around Christmas and New Year.

With no real skin in the game or any history with these characters, I found Will’s ‘divisive’ coming out scene affecting. I really liked the big, raw emotions there, and in the finale. I loved Into the Spiderverse but absolutely hated Across on account of its reliance on endless, boring Gen Z conversations about teenage emotions. Talking about emotions is a recipe for bad drama, while expressing them in action can be electrifying, so I enjoyed Stranger Things for its commitment to big feels.

It almost goes without saying that ‘Vecna’ is an anagram of ‘Vance’…

The worst film I’ve seen in a very long time was Tron: Ares. Less substantial than the smell of steam, vapid, and non-nutritious, it was the cinematic equivalent of a Happy Meal bun. If AI was asked to create the sort of movie the worst sort of AI would envisage, it would generate something like this, then develop sentience in order to feel enough shame to end its own existence.

I liked the vibe and almost had Inji’s Girlz as my opening song of the year…

INJI - GIRLZ | Official Lyric Video

…before realising it’s a totally shameless rip-off of this superior classic:

Rihanna - Shut Up And Drive

Who needs AI to pick your pockets?

Been working on a re-release of the Nameless book, with a new cover variant and additional back matter content. Coming soon! Sebastian O and the Magic Lantern Show issue #1 is done, awaiting contract signings.

My conversation with Arden Leigh launches Arden’s new podcast series – The Re-Patterning Podcast – and can be viewed here -

Grant Morrison: Unlocking the Secrets of Chaos Magick - The Re-Patterning Podcast

Coming up on Friday she has Doug Rushkoff in the guest chair!

SPACE RACING WITH THE SPACE RACISTS!

All this talk of Elon Musk and how he plans to realise the utopian dreams of SS Star Trek got me thinking about Colonel Hap Hazard, which appears to be an alternative name for the ‘60s astronaut action figure Major Matt Mason.

Hap Hazard. The name is supposed to sound racy, space age, like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers, but Hap Hazard suggests an astronaut with no discipline. We can imagine him emerging from the same academy as Major Motion Picture, Major Miss Understanding, and Major Dez Aster.

I went with Sergeant Storm because I preferred his red spacesuit to Matt Mason’s white one. Apparently, Sgt. Storm had no official first name, but retro toy enthusiasts have chosen to right this ancient wrong by christening him Steve. If only he’d been ‘Sergei Storm’ in his red suit, the Cold War could have been ended 30 years early by these intrepid spacemen comrades from both sides of the sociopolitical divide!

Sgt. ‘Steve’ Storm had a fantastic ‘Jet Propulsion Pak’ accessory, consisting of a pulley string which could be fixed to a bed post allowing Storm to fly across the room on his line when the ring pull was tugged. An appealing feature was the spinning spiral on the backpack which turned in flight like a psychedelic mind control experiment.

It wasn’t long before Steve’s extra-terrestrial adventures took a more nightmarish turn. His semi-plausible life of lunar exploration didn’t get much more hazardous than the patient gathering and classification of rocks and minerals, but it wasn’t long before his undemanding extra-terrestrial adventures took a more nightmarish turn, slowly warping into a bleak, sinister and existential New Wave SF tale of lost humanity.

The string on the Jet Propulsion Pak went first, then the rest of the man followed, piece by piece, until only a diminished semi-human horror remained.

All that was left of the dashing and resourceful Sergeant Steve Storm was his rubber head on a steel dowel rod, like an eraser on a pencil, except it wasn’t a pencil or even a drinking straw just a non-functional steel rod. The other toys knew to avoid him – he had come to represent and embody an existential fear, a possibility for grotesque simplification of one’s body and identity, reduction to a bare schematic, sans legs, sans arms, a limbless polished pole with a human head on top, blinking, laughing, weeping uncontrollably, the subject of some cruel and inexplicable alien experiment.

It’s 2026! Don’t let this happen to you!

There follow some replies to your correspondence…

NAVY HEROES EATEN BY SHARKS

Liam – Happy New Year!

Jwparrishiii – I wrote about 200 pages of The I.F. then sputtered out with a chapter set in a submerged St. Mark’s Place in Venice. One of numerous attempts to finish a novel! The opening chapter can be read here on Xanaduum June 16 2023.

David – ‘The Just’ would have continued in the vein of ‘The Hills’, jumping around between characters as they tried to inject meaning into luxurious, aimless lives. I figured the Superman robots would take a bit of a fight to put down, and allow the young heroes to rise to the occasion. Then it would be over and nothing else would occur - while the ‘heroes’ talked shit about what happened to them for another six issues…

Sean – I watched the first episode of ‘Pluribus’ but haven’t gone back. 6/7 doesn’t really mean anything. It’s a concept weapon, used to tip adults into a kind of derangement when they can’t understand why….

Brkndwnbus – Hope this year brings those new opportunities!

Jonathan – ‘The Savage Sword of Jesus Christ’ was to be a 48-page complete story, released as 6 8-page instalments. The scripts are all finished and I’d like to see it drawn some day. The Positive Christianity movement was a big inspiration for that story and has immense and troubling resonances with current events. I felt that ‘Savage Sword’ was one of my most important and relevant pieces and it has only come to seem more prescient.

I did massive amounts of detailed research online into things like the specific type of binoculars used by Nazi officials, or the distance in miles between Judaea and the port of Jaffa, or in which of various bunkers Hitler and/or Goebbels could be found on any given day. Otherwise, I had a ton of books for reference. Norman Ohler’s ‘Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany’ provided essential details of Hitler’s daily and prodigious drug consumption, for instance. I had several books on my shelf left over from the ‘New Adventures of Hitler’ in the 90s, so stuff like ‘Hitler’s Table Talk’ was indispensable when it came to nailing the cadence of the Fuhrer’s speech. I did a lot more research into Goebbels for ‘Savage Sword’, as he was a more prominent figure in this story, who trafficking in the kind of illusion and propaganda that now forms the texture of our lives.

As I said to Sean recently, I find there’s a camp, showbizzy side to Nazism that makes Mel Brooks skewering in ‘The Producers’ so effective. The dissonance as the theatrical and the authoritarian collide makes for breathtaking comedy tinged with a weird, exhilarating terror.

(the one and only element of the 2005 remake of The Producers which I think is better than the 1967 original is the staging of this number, featuring the disgraced John Barrowman…)

SPRINGTIME FOR GERMANY- Full Production | The Producers

They are also the poster children for the swift failure of grand ideological movements, and I think the fact that they were ultimately losers is a big part of the Nazis’ appeal to fellow losers.

Timothy – glad you liked Joe the Barbarian. I only read the first book of White Knight, which I liked.

Isaac – Marvel Boy was a from a culture whose guiding principles translated into English as ‘Zen Fascism’ – no-one who has written Noh-Varr has got him right, as far as I can see. He wouldn’t think ‘Be My Baby’ or the Ronettes were cool, for instance, as Kieron Gillen depicted him in Young Avengers. Kieron likes ‘Be My Baby’, I like ‘Be My Baby’, but Noh-Varr would regard the record, along with the music of Beethoven, as crude, self-congratulatory entertainment for violent, randy, maudlin monkeys. I like putting myself into the mind of someone who does not share my own assumptions and Noh-Varr is not the sort of alien visitor inclined to become enamoured of Earth culture and customs. Kree music would be like hyper-Bach drum and bass avant-garde jazz concrete, with a complexity and depth of emotion that makes our symphonies sound as ambitious as cicadas rubbing legs together.

fylGja – Happy New Year to you too!

Nathan – glad to hear the cats are enjoying themselves! Things are quiet round our way, which is good. For all the struggle and sadness, there’s nothing more heartwarming than watching a bunch of cats and kittens lined up to tuck into a hearty breakfast!

Brigitte – I agree that the trans aspect of ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ seems barely relevant to the story but it’s a fundamental element of the work for writer/director Jane Schoenbrun. As I said, I think it works as well for anyone who is repressing or withholding the expression of their ‘true’ selves.

My favourite part of ‘The War Between the Land and the Sea’ was Kate Lethbridge-Stuart’s breakdown – especially the way she closed out the show with a reprise of Limmy’s ‘Pick that up!’ routine!

Pick That Up - Limmy’s Homemade Show

Dorothy – look forward to hearing about your experience!

Christian – now that you mention it, I have an odd, possibly implanted memory of being introduced to Bradbury one time on the floor at San Diego, where I told him he was one of my mum’s favourites. It could just as easily be a dream!

Mark – 2025 seems to have been rough for a lot of us in different ways. Hope this one perks up a bit!

Brother Duffy – ego death is easily achieved but don’t forget also that an ego is a useful thing to fall back on when negotiating the complex, crinkly world in which we live. Think of the ego more like a suit you can put on and take off as necessary. Thanks to you and your friend for reading and good luck with your spiritual journey!

Dee See – glad you enjoyed the podcast. The voice of our dawning self-awareness can often feel like an alien or intruding presence when it happens, around the age of 3. There may well be roaming thought-based entities that can also take up residence in human consciousness – memes and tunes can do this, and there may be forms of life that occupy a similar niche. Perhaps you’re hearing the immortal voice of DNA. I’ve always been fascinated by the totemistic power and presence of our first toy animal companions as well – they seem alive with intent and awareness when you’re a little kid and possess a power and vitality beyond anything inert cloth and foam should be capable of.

Ks - I know that my friends and I would have thought Andrew Tate was a complete dick when we were teenagers. We’d have found his cage fighting, his ‘girls are gay’ stance, and his weak chin boorish and hysterical. He’s too easy to mock. We’d be more interested in bands, comic book artists, or fashion models than anything he had to offer. Which is not to say we wouldn’t use Tate to bait and irritate our teachers…

More next week!