Hold you close like you my antidote

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Suns out, guns out

If you’re anything like me your everyday is now vaguely horny. It’s the sun. Its first appearance makes this blasted Isle go giddy. It quickens the blood. 

Already things are getting out of hand round my way, hundreds of ‘school age children’ gathered at Southbourne Beach making police fearful of escalating social disorder. The press carried pictures of the devastation. 

Seriously, leave those kids alone 

It could have been worse, riot police moved in on a peaceful free party in Lulworth putting boot and stick in with gusto. 

In Crowley’s Tarot The Sun is a manifestation of the Rosy Cross shining on two figures dancing upon the earth, eternally young, eternally innocent. But I keep thinking about Robert Fludd, another Rosicrucian adjacent. A devotee of the new sciences of anatomy and optics but one who preferred to keep his mathematics mystical. He drew intricate diagrams of the powers of man, a triangle reaching up into the heavens, and the powers of God a triangle reaching down into the earth and in the lens created by the overlap he located the sun. 

Fludd believed that the spirit of god that animated life on earth in Genesis, was physically located in the heart of the sun, travelling to earth in the sun’s rays.  His belief in the relationship of the celestial macrocosm to the material microcosm creates a mirror in the human heart. The spirit of god pumped around our bodies in our blood by the cardiovascular system,  animating our organs, powering our lungs, and kidneys and brains. What does that do to you to sincerely believe that? What does it do to your view of people to believe that a spark of the divine is literally pumping through your heart? To believe that God's spirit lives in the sun?

Maybe my horniness is just the spirit of god in my veins calling out to the spirit of god in yours. 

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Cooper-Human

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Out here gettin commas

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“But the frogs die in earnest” - Catch Me If You Can (Steven Spielberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, 2002)

Despite a lack of visible orcs, the second most popular American movie of Christmas 2002 was also a lavish fantasy, albeit one with its roots in autobiography. As a slow cinematic spectacle, Catch Me If You Can follows its boy protagonist’s con artist eye for what is attractive – a world from the pages of an old DC comic, where women swoon over men in uniform without ever really knowing who lives behind the mask. 

Another way to trace this screwball lineage: cut the film to 22 minutes and you’d have an unusually restrained episode of Seinfeld.  

Spielberg being Spielberg, the second fantasy is domestic. The nuclear family goes into meltdown and while DiCaprio’s Frank Abagnale Jr. is playing in the fallout, Tom Hanks’ federal agent Carl Hanratty introduces fatherly consequences to the game. Some of us may struggle to imagine finding love and care while chasing down a ropey paperwork merchant, but maybe it’s different if your work nemesis is the guy who couldn’t quite make ET sexy enough for you.

The third fantasy is fundamental. It would feel quaint if not outright naive to complain that a professional liar added an obscuring sheen to his life story, especially in a world of aspirational grifts and the suffering they necessitate. Spielberg’s movie only captures the queasiness of this fiction for a moment, during a dinner table scene where it seems Abagnale Jr.’s potential father-in-law has his number. Lies stack up, the product of a compulsion that exceeds the con: he’s a doctor, a Lutheran, he studied law at Berkeley! The bottomless appetite for distortion should make the thought of more seem impossible.

Somehow, in the movie as sometimes happens in life, the genuinely beautiful desire to believe in another human leads us to ask what unjust desserts are on offer. 

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Andrew and Steven, Those Amusing Brothers

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Trash Valedictory XXXXVII

In a continual quest to age disgracefully I have got right into rage, or perhaps that’s RAGE music - please shut up grandad, you may think as one guy who I complimented on playing the eponymous Lil Uzi Vert Luv Is Rage 2 out his phone in the overpass by Tesco a few years ago evidently did; I just said “great album” man… It is a great album. 

(I have no idea why he has a Newcastle scarf on)

While the point of this column is genre is a lie, there are areas where things develop and are febrile, a type of sound - it’s handy to have a name for that, and I think useful to subset rap music which for example the recent Playboy Carti album only loosely belongs to - Rage is borne of Trap is borne of rap, these are umbrella terms and this music exists in that rough matrix but there are crassy intersections with rock and an incorporation of the doomer youth aesthetics that genre monopolised when we was kids. Lil Tecca is quite pop, loud arcade sounds.

Rage is - this is perhaps a childish instinct but I like music that is abrasive, I always have, and I think of the many many people these discordant, cheap synths and heavy beats will annoy (such as my awful upstairs neighbours who I hear daily) and that’s like… 40% of the enjoyment? Oh it’s bold, it’s brassy, obvious and too much… it’s déclassé - “I like what I like” the great artist Paul Milne once told me, words to live by, why do you think I like Gladiators or superheroes mate

The wrong people will hate this. 

It’s not lyrical, it is - the more I write these the more convinced I am Future is correct in terms of influence to call himself Hendrix - foundationally based on his work and drawing melody from chaos.

Apparently you are supposed to mosh to it but I am 47 now and can’t really figure it out.

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Liber al vel Legis (Aleister Crowley, 1909)

Meanwhile eastward, in the orthodox calendar, the eleven year Great and Holy Wednesday-All Fools-Solar Maximum fell this week, when - appropriately - the Emperor’s strategic feint to disannul the cradle of the magi bore fruit, successfully generating the casus fugae he secretly sought.

April 8th also brought Spy’s Day into alignment with two conjoined anniversaries, the signing of the Anglo-French entente cordiale in London in 1904, and British agent Aleister Crowley’s reception of the Book of the Law in Cairo. Primarily concerned with the allocation of colonial powers in north Africa (and the clandestine isolation of Germany, setting a path which would take another decade to culminate), the agreement declared the crown’s control of Egypt just days after Crowley’s invocations in the King’s chamber of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

British state security services had exercised a monopoly on sorcery since the first Elizabethan age, with codemakers, necromancers and spellworkers like Dee, Gilbert and Spenser leveraging its uses as a force multiplier to subjugate indigenous resistance and confound imperial competitors. Working class cunning traditions were outlawed and lethally suppressed until only those with access to lens grinders and algebra codices could seek the spirits’ favours.

Al’s Book is the entente cordiale’s shadow product, acquired from a cretinoid superintelligence called Aiwass, speaking in the ugly, lightless language characteristic of Crowley’s literary work. Even he hated it, despising its influence over his life and legacy.

Its prophecies have snared generations of hapless seekers within its talmudic sadism, drowning them in abyssal ciphers. Few ever think to reconcile its riddles with an understanding of the author’s day job, running psyops and blackmail for the cleverer big brothers of the boys who raped him at school. Jerking Crowley like a puppet, Aiwass’ words encode the abstracting teleology of capital and empire, the cowering and abasement of human social foundations beneath the onslaught of avarice and terror.