Rolling itself in the pot to mix and season the food

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Mother Sausage

Pricks#6 is in production.

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Suggested For Mature Readers
3: The Many Lives and Countless Deaths of Buddy Baker

Buddy Baker, also known as the superhero Animal Man, died today. Or maybe he didn’t. 

He’s survived by his wife Ellen, son Cliff and daughter Maxine. Sadly, they’re also lying dead on the kitchen floor of their suburban home, blood pooling on the linoleum. 

Aren’t they?

Buddy died saving the world. He also died pointlessly, capriciously at the hands of an inscrutable creator he met in a townhouse in Glasgow. 

He was first born in the 1960s, sibling to countless brightly coloured brothers and sisters. To be honest, this period was a blur. A couple of vivid memories. Something about a spaceship, and animal powers.

 After this, he first experienced Limbo. Years of therapy would later help him understand that this was a safe mental space he created to retreat to when the world felt too hard or uncaring. It was a strange, bleak place. 

He found himself there often. 

Like any god-fearing, hard-working family man, he suffered a mid-life Crisis. Staring down his encroaching obsolescence, he coped the only way he could; by assuming the world was ending. That all worlds were ending. 

When they didn’t end (or they did), Buddy found sudden success and notoriety in the late-1980s. His experiences had changed him. He felt like a man now. He felt mature. There were extra dimensions to him, and a burgeoning sense of social responsibility. 

Tragically, at this point he suffered a breakdown. He became convinced that he was just a character in a story; that his life was being viewed as entertainment by 4-dimensional entities. 

Like Daffy Duck before him, he realised that the joke was on him. God didn’t love him.

Or maybe, God loved him too much. Gifted him with too much knowledge. Knowledge that his lives and deaths meant everything.

And nothing at all. 

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Mere Crowleyanity

Did you know that one of the most influential texts on the Evangelical movement in the US is in large part indistinguishable from a text on magick?

Of course, this shouldn’t be too surprising. Much of US Evangelicalism is strongly influenced by the New Thought which also influenced much of modern occultism, but this is a rather odder one.

C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity is one of the most beloved works of Christian Apologetics aimed at a lay audience, and is far more readable than much of that genre. The book covers, three topics: why Lewis thinks Christianity is true (the famous “Lewis trilemma” and the weakest part of the book); Christian ethics and, crucially, why Christians should behave in a certain way. According to Lewis, the behaviours are intended to turn humans into beings like Christ (a process that doesn’t end with death but continues afterwards), and the more you both pray to him and model his behaviour, the more you start hearing his voice and also behaving like him. You get to know your “real” thoughts, which are very different from the surface ones. And eventually you get to know God.

In short, Lewis describes a process of invocation and identification with the God-object that will be utterly familiar to anyone who has read, say, Crowley, or Phil Hine. What he is describing is, in its mechanics, exactly the same process as the identification of the True Will or the invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel.

At a time when the US postlibertarian far right is increasingly influenced by technoccultist ideas, it’s fascinating to see how the other main branch of the US right wing converges on some very similar ideas from a completely different direction. Whether we believe in magick or not, the other side do.

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Glamour

Tell just one person that you liked this newsletter. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for reading.

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Mr Dough and the Egg Princess (Hayao Miyazaki, 2010)

“The body is an arrangement in spacetime,” says Le Guin. “The mind is a process of the body, an organ, doing what organs do.”

So Baba Yaga sticks a dress on an egg: instant helper. Then the egg, having been put to work grinding bones and doing skivvy work, sticks rotten debris into some dough: instant Mr.

There’s a lot of talk about consciousness these days. Most of it, for all the gestures in the opposite direction, a concerted effort to control the scope of what’s seen and felt in the universe, and by whom.

Maybe Baba Yaga’s the same here. The action of this short is driven by her attempt to reclaim her property after it goes on the lam and put that little princess back to work. 

Draw another circle and call it a chicken/egg: Miyazaki loves a buxom witch eh? The tyrannical mother figure, boss of onsen and wasteland alike. This one is an end point caricature, all boobs and fangs and endless need. Notice also that Miyazaki’s art is ripe with the potential for transformation. For this witch it’s limited to a flush of public shame, the urge to pull a hat from the cleavage and run. But it’s there all the same: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad…”

Pattern recognition, per Le Guin, is “an immensely flexible technology, or life strategy, which if used with skill and resourcefulness—“ but see, that’s the thing. We are being dictated to by people who have no interest in understanding the world as anything but a buffet made for them.

Fuck that racket. Reapply the technology. All it takes is a bit of conscious effort to recognise the hench figure already rising from the dough: a process of the body, an organ, doing what organs do.

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The Dead Parent Club

(From The Weight)

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The Horned God (Pat Mills/Simon Bisley)
Part Seven: In times of crisis 

The women dance alone with their ghost partners the disappeared fathers, husbands and sons. A remembrance, an accusation, a plea. 

The woman shields her son from the kids with guns who have burst into her home. 

The woman sneers as the kids with guns install a television wired for propaganda and junk food adverts. 

The woman immolates herself in final terrible protest at all the wrongs done to her, her people, her country.

We know Slaine fails because we live in the results of that failure. 

At the same time as he is writing The Horned God Mills is working on Third World War for Crisis. Set in the then future world of 2000ad where it is the multinationals writing sorrow upon the earth and turning it into a sour land. 

Each instalment of Third World War starts with a timeline of events, accurate up to 1989, speculative afterward showing the collusion of state and business in the exploitation of the people and resources of Central America. Highlighting the capitulations and the mechanisms of control, from Free Trade Zones to Fanta Babies. 

The mythic becomes mundane. The Lord Weird Slough Feg transformed into a company man in army drag. Slaine himself is reduced to pontificating eco-terrorist edge lord Finn. The war dragons  become the cartoon mascot, Multi-Food Mickey, an insidious brand, a reflection of the changing nature of power. 

For Mills, for Sjoo and Moor, for Rowan the myths they engage with, the new myths they create are first a reckoning with the self, a tool for personal transformation. Myth is a vital for their political engagement, of understanding and finding ways to resist the political and corporate forces that govern our lives. 

And if only what we had to do to resist was as simple and easy as taking an axe to a demon. 

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Planks Constant

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FIXED HEART LOOK SHARP

HAWKHILL HOMAGE TO DUCHAMP

Just a stream throwing back out accreta; jetsam, a [Kefahuchi] tract and there you are tracking up and down a narrow sandbar, which continues to deplete. 

You journal the items looking for some implicate order in their relation to one another, their function if there is one and shuttle back up and down the venal, contracting motorways of this sandbar, fissure.

Friends fear, correctly, he is back on the MJH and that's a rough summary of the last three novels, oh yeah, there's some insouciant murder - it’s very hard to imagine justifying this stuff to normal people, why is this awkward intransigent ruminating on places just the best, well it is; it's staccato and frustrating and nothing exactly resolves, but things stack, and track and compile in a fashion like the Borges story where a man attempting to mirror the world realises he has simply extended the complexity and clutter… additive but the spewed objects are blackened and inscrutable like when Sen yanks that bicycle out in Spirited Away yano

POP

I was really looking forward to the first proper Mette album Coming of Age, perhaps a little excessively - I think there’s a sort of flattening affect, The Weeknd or Frank Ocean I would say did it, an accession to tastefulness or I don’t know being played in restaurants that's probably necessary to be as big a star as I think she should be, I have despite noting a moderate blandness been compelled to return far more already than I was with the last Weeknd or casting back across the years Ocean; lot of divas on play this week or two - Tinashe, Rose Gray, kaeto, Empress Of with whom Mette particularly shares matrilineal and femininity themes, bit of female gaze from MUNA

I STAY BUSY

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Dracula in White (Peter Redgrove/BBC, 1984)

No meal more delicious than a visionary working for an ego and a paycheck, hiding their fangs from the Commissioning Editor. Nevertheless Redgrove’s poisons bleed all over the sloughs and topoi of Margaret’s England in this vintage radio four spine chiller, excavated antique shops and bungalows, experimental prisons and meat machines.

Unable to keep quite within the boundaries of the form, the revelation comes around half time. Our intrepid reporter infiltrates and uncovers an alchemical  snakemeat factory, endless tubes of moist protein cultured from the cells of minor offenders, scraped up under agreement with HMG, limbless, filleted and canned, then onto a shelf near you. The dragon force industrialising to feed the huddled masses at the moment of working culture's defeat under raining truncheons and closures.

Forcing the sinews of the divine to buckle in a broken cage, abstract anomalies explode into life, inspiring a new radioactive apparatus to commoditise time. The hungry aristocrat delicately shapeshifts to a satisfied technocrat, lab coat for cape, fast versioning desperate men into ancient statues of themselves.

It effects prophecy and programming, finding rhymes out of verse, the thwarted imperative to change under threat of force, trapping the future in coils. Meanwhile forever, England hoards non-perishables and crouches wary of sky weapons from the east, striking pennies from pockets, the soil in open rebellion and refusing us food. This time around, post-peak atlanticism, the state wriggles and spasms, riddled with holes, unable to practice strategy or allocate resources. The defensible frontier retreating westwards, the island left in outremer, adrift and exposed.