11/2 DAYS LIKE THESE

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!..