Violent and irrepressible miracle

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MINDLESS EXPLORATION
Revachol, Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019)

Run. Run as fast as the body will allow. Colleagues will laugh about your endless tramping from here to there, but that’s mere professional deflection. After 40, even collecting clothes from a hotel floor can be deadly. You can’t run from what’s behind your smile but how you approach the mirror… that’s up to you.

Flashback through the murk. A boss whose incompetence you covered up daily, but who resented you for not having grown up with the same entertainments. “Did you ever think you’d grow up to be a…” Debt collector? Cop? Same system, different vectors of oppression.

Remember your training, tacit admission of culpability. “Ask yourself… Are you well? Can you do what’s needed? Is there a way to make this more disco?” One version of you, freshly promoted, asked how you coped. You said “By drinking too much,” still thinking you were joking. You covered for another version when he called in pissed, tried to make space for him to show he could be you, as though that was enough. And then: “You need to sit down now.” This organisation is committed to reducing the number of lives lost to suicide. 

Keep moving all the same, through nested crime scenes. A dead revolution, the hanged man out back, and then what? Care in the community? Karaoke classics? Radge techno collectivism? Still, sea breeze in your lungs, this new place - this new self - seems massive at first. Jokes. Side quests. Occasional moments of shared beauty. Flinch when you’re described as a “Can opener,” too familiar. Otherwise, a sense of forgotten possibility, of old mechanics grown strange: What the fuck is Inland Empire?

Then it all closes in again. Meet the new boss, worse than the old one. Remember your training.

Did you ever think you’d grow up?

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Alert

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MAN-ALIVE-MAN

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SONGS FROM THE BACKSEAT
1: Paul Simon, Crazy Love, Vol II

Paul Simon - Crazy Love, Vol. II (Official Audio)

There are other worlds you can travel to. There are spells that take you to them.

Fluorescent motorway lights strobe through the window; car vibrating to tire thrum on tarmac. Driving back from Nanna’s in South London on the long, strange scene-shift from suburbs to countryside. Time is elastic, unknowable. The journey ends when the car stops.

Lying in the backseat, in this coddled-meditative state, the lyrics come to me strange, suggestive, opaque. I am hurtled into a world of off-kilter adulthood. It isn’t boring, like parents talking about work, it’s something richer and more alluring. Something urban, cultured and vibrant is being suggested to me, though I don’t have the vocabulary for it.

For my generation, Paul Simon’s Graceland is the quintessential music from the backseat, an album of absolute parental automobile-ubiquity. Although the album’s lush sonic palette and infectious melodies hooked me, it was the lyrics that really snagged my imagination. I would ruminate on them silently, too young to understand allusion and metaphor, trying to unpack these mysterious, intoxicating words.

‘Crazy Love, Vol II’ is my favourite song on the album, partly for the lilting arpeggios of the guitar parts, the staccato rhythms, and the crystalline production that makes the whole tune feel like a cool breeze on a warm day.

But it’s mostly the lyrics.

‘Fat Charlie the archangel sloped into the room’

‘Somebody could walk into this room and say, “Your life is on fire!”

I had no reference point for this as a kid. Did everyone understand this except me? Yet, the places my mind went trying to comprehend it. Worlds of grubby, human angels filing for divorce; lives burning on the evening news. All of it sounding so normal, so every-day. Hum-drum absurdity.

The journey ends. The tape stops. Worlds come and go. 

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ANDREW AND STEVEN, THOSE AMUSING BROTHERS

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DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF FORGIVENESS/IMMOBILARITY COULD BE SOMETHING NEW BABY

Fiat Lux.

Capital moves problems, it is not in the interests of its generation to provide solutions  – I always imagined the immobilarity of Raekwon’s sophomore album as a black sphere of - ideally - anticapital, majority control to the associates, for the babies; it’s all coming back with Clipse naming various new songs after tax codes, hip-hop is global finance & in it’s Pale King era* and for some reason Paris is the capital of soft power now – you all saw what happened in the European Cup final!

*if you research US tax codes too much you will kill yrself.

(There’s a new Raekwon album this week and having talked of large character sets, a [my new favourite superhero is Mr.] Terrific surprise to see kingpin Carlton Fisk on a feature 31[!] years after bossing ‘Mr. Sandman’ [no Gaimo] on Method Man Tical: where have you been? “Just livin’”? probably… feels like finding the Moon-Dancers in Animal Man honestly. 

The Wu were and remain - purposively; cf: Johnny Blaze as an AE, or “swingin thru your town like your neighbourhood Spider-Man” - a Shaolin Island Marvel universe all to themselves; it is forever? Logo sat after Superman’s S shield in the ultra-alphabet, check out the W.)

Indeed the Mindless Ones ourselves are second or third tier Wu-affiliated cos The Man Dan McDaid done illustrated a(n other than the above, with a tie-in comic) Czarface album & their first album was a co-feature with the Rebel INS: NEW! CZARFACE - “DOUBLE DOSE OF DANGER” Comic x Soundtrack - Record Store Day 2019

How closely affiliated are you, maybe you should try harder.

KANYE WEST IS THE PATRON SAINT OF DIVORCED DADS, SEE ALSO: THE PUNISHER

Word is light. I have been thinking how I write differently now to MO 1.0, and what follows is a justification of no longer creating large hypertexts primarily because I am now (not to be a William Gibson character, but) allergic to most of the internet and ii. can’t be bothered - you on the folkloric internet now, post blogspot getting bombed out and the fragmentary decade of microblogs and reax that followed, a retelling and re/mis-remembering of the last couple decades’ legacy; still creating a hologram but with less hand-holding and direction, and it will mutate in the recount.

IYKYK/ IK,IK

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F For Fact

It's always difficult to find the borderline between fiction and nonfiction, and nobody knows that more than people who are trying to write nonfiction. A lot of the people who listen to my podcast will say things like that they're overawed by the amount of research I do, But reading the Correspondence From Hell that I linked last week, we find Alan Moore saying "As regards my self-deprecating tone during the appendices, it wasn't any kind of modesty so much as a gruff attempt at apology for having done such a fucking sloppy and unprofessional job. I mean, "I think I read this in some book somewhere but I can't for the life of me remember which one and I can't be bothered to look for it" is hardly the high standard of investigative reportage that From Hell is often touted as being, is it?"

The thing is, the research is the easy part of writing anything about the real world. The problem is selecting *which* details to include to tell your narrative. 

Writing, all writing, is storytelling, and you have to decide what story you're telling. Anyone with a modicum of ability can take the same set of facts and, by choosing to emphasise some and not mention others, tell a story that makes the same person the hero, the villain, or a nonentity who was completely uninvolved – and you can do that without in any way lying or being inaccurate. There's no one truth about any subject, or any event, but a myriad truths. 

And so this is the thing we need to look at when looking at these fact-based narratives – who is the narrator? Who is it that's telling the story, and why would they want to tell the story that way? And what are they trying to hide?

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Three Wizards and a Witch
Two: Violet Firth

Of Britain’s signature industries - financial services, naval architecture, weapons manufacture - Violet’s family money came from the third. The Sheffield Firths cut earth and smelted ore to build two empires. The Woolwich Infant, 35 tons, was the largest gun ever seen. Every explosion of unprecedented scale is indistinguishable from god.

Comanche, Chiricahua, Cherokee, then Alexandrian blood kept a generation or two in idiocy and indolence, spa people, but there was something about that one granddaughter. Violet suffered a brutal psychic attack from a schoolteacher, recovery from which involved a deep initiation into the western mystery cults, vegetarian food science, psychiatry and spiritualism. 

During the 20s she channeled the grief of the nation’s mothers, widows and those who would never now wed into a series of seances which brought from the inner planes the shade of one David Carstairs, a young man killed in Flanders but wise beyond his years and happy in the afterlife. The lifted veil revealed the dead flower of English youth, content with his service, sending home a chirpy message:
Keep Calm.

Mollified by Violet’s ministry, the women of Britain returned to their sacred duty of producing the next generation of bullet food. No record of a serviceman by Carstairs’ name has been found.

Firm, sober and celibate, Violet’s influence, discipline and organisational skills surpassed those of her more notorious peers, and when the war returned she was the only credible choice to lead Britain’s psychic defense against the Nazi lodges.

In enlisting an army of armchair occultists to erect an archangelic shield around the islands, she broke every vow of her order, disclosing a lineage of secrets dating back to Atlantis. Absorbing this karma, and the Reich’s thunderous malefica, she died on Epiphany of leukemia, less than five months after VJ day.

The short golden age subsequently enjoyed by Britain - under America’s atomic canopy - is seen by some today as the fulfilment of Violet’s sacrifice.