14/1 POWER, FORCE, STRENGTH

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!