28/1 SACRED AND ARTIFICIAL

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!