Herberts

“No Fair! 

You changed 

The Outcome 

by measuring it!”

“When I was 16 

I left Home in search 

of My Misfortune and 

quickly found it. 

It was in Bermondsey. 

There’s enough misery in 

South London for everyone, 

it wasn’t as cool then as it’s 

meant to be now. 

There I holed up with 

some Lost Boys, 

two years older and 

a great deal wiser, 

and in My Mind

I made them Legends.

When I look back now at 

these 18-year-old lads 

I see that They were Herberts

but I needed them to 

Be Cool, so Cool

is What I Saw.”

— Brand.

“Perhaps Young Men like Me go awry 

because nobody can hold them. 

I don’t mean embrace, I mean 

in a parental sense, 

like parentheses ‘bracket’ them, 

To Stand as A Dam either side 

of the wayward lash and

unmovingly emit Care. 

The only Authority I ever 

knew was negative. 

Either inefficient or corrupt --

This is the consequence of 

Living with false ideals 

in a materialistic society. 

The Authority that I Give to Jimmy is Sacred, 

I know he is flawed but I am not consulting 

with the flawed part of him —

I am consulting with the part of him that is willing 

in spite of his own numerous obligations, Work,

 and Family to provide Loving Counsel for free. 

I Believe this relationship becomes 

a conduit for Truth, Divine Truth. 

That needn’t mean it’s all 

chocolates and roses. 

There’s a fair amount 

of ‘Suck it Up’ and 

‘Face Your Fear’, 

but it IS Truth. 

Perhaps we can take Truth 

to mean The Timeless, 

The Universal. 

Things that will not 

erode and fade, qualities 

I need to Live the Life 

I have moved into —

How Does someone who has never 

been A Father become one? 

How Do any of Us 

progress beyond 

our Temporary Limits? 

The Potential-Person 

We can Become •hums• 

in an invisible grid 

Within and Without Us. 

A Genius may actuate

by Intuition but 

All of Us need Heroes, 

Role-Models and Mentors, that 

We may See What is Possible, 

Living Mandalas 

to lock onto as We Inhale 

and Expand into new states.

TraumaZone

Adam Curtis on the fall of the Soviet Union's worrying parallels with mo...

Adam Curtis is a journalist and filmmaker. 

His latest documentary, 

Russia 1985-1999 : TraumaZone, 

is out now on BBC iPlayer.

80 Years

 

V: Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villian by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. (he carves a "V" into a sign) The only verdict is vengence; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. (giggles) Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.

Evey: Are you like a crazy person?

V: I'm quite sure they will say so.

(broadcasting from a captured TV station.)

V: Good evening, London. Allow me first to apologize for this interruption. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of the everyday routine, the security of the familiar, the tranquility of repetition. 

I enjoy them as much as any bloke. 

But in the spirit of Commemoration - whereby those important events of the past, usually associated with someone's death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, are celebrated with a nice holiday - I thought we could mark this November The Fifth, a day that is sadly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat.

There are, of course, those who do not want Us to Speak. I suspect even now orders are being shouted into telephones and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while The Truncheon may be used in lieu of Conversation, Words will always retain their Power. 

Words offer the means to Meaning and for Those Who Will Listen, The Enunciation of Truth. 

And The Truth is, 

There is something terribly wrong with This Country, isn't there?

Cruelty and Injustice... Intolerance and Oppression. And where once you had the Freedom to Object, to Think and Speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance, coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. 

How did this happen? 

Who's to blame? 

Well certainly there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But again, Truth be told...

if You're looking for The Guilty,

You need only look into a mirror.

I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War. Terror. Disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got The Best of You and in your panic, you turned to the now High Chancellor Adam Sutler. He promised you Order. He promised you Peace. 

And all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient Consent.

Last night, I sought to end that silence. Last night, I Destroyed The Old Bailey to remind This Country of what it has forgotten. More than four hundred years ago, a great citizen wished to embed the fifth of November forever in our memory. 

His hope was to remind The World that Fairness, Justice and Freedom are more than words - they are perspectives. 

So if you've seen nothing, if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you, then I would suggest that you allow the fifth of November to pass unmarked. 

But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek... then I ask you to stand beside me, one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament -- And together, We shall give them a Fifth of November that shall never, ever, be forgot!

(disguised as William Rookwood, meeting with CID Inspector Finch (Stephen Rea).)

Rookwood : Our Story begins, as these stories often do, with a young up-and-coming politician. 

He's a deeply religious man and a member of the conservative party. He's completely single-minded and has no regard for the political process. 

The more Power he attains, the more obvious his zealotry and the more aggressive his supporters become. Eventually, his party launches a special project in the name of National Security. 

At first, it's believed to be a search for biological weapons and is pursued without regard to its cost. However, the true goal of this project is Power. Complete and total hegemonic domination. 

The Project, however, ends violently. 

But the efforts of those involved are not in vain, for a new ability to wage War is born from The Blood of The Victims. 

Imagine a Virus, the most terrifying virus you can, and then imagine that You and You alone have The Cure -- 

But if your ultimate goal is Power, 

How best to use such a weapon?

It is at this point in our story that along comes A Spider : 

He is a man seemingly without a conscience for whom the ends always justify the means, and it is he who suggests that their target should not be an enemy of the country, but rather the country itself. Three targets are chosen to maximize the effect of the attack: a school, a tube station, and a water treatment plant. Several hundred die within the first few weeks.

Fueled by the media, fear and panic spread quickly, fracturing and dividing the country until at last the true goal comes into view. Before the Saint Mary's crisis, no one would have predicted the results of the election that year, no one. And then not long after the election, lo and behold, a miracle! Some believed it was the work of God Himself, but it was a pharmaceutical company controlled by certain party members that made them all obscenely rich. A year later, several extremists are tried, found guilty and executed while a memorial is built to canonize their victims. But the end result, the true genius of the plan, was the fear. Fear became the ultimate tool of this government, and through it our politician was ultimately appointed to the newly created position of High Chancellor.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Finch: Can you prove any of this? V: Why do you think I'm still alive?

Fat Old Sun

"Kirby could throw away in one single panel a high concept that would keep others busy for years : Crippled Vietnam War veteran Willie Walker became the vessel for The New God of Death — a black man in full armor hurtling through walls and space on skis. The Black Racer was a twist on Kirby’s original idea for the Silver Surfer, here as an angel of Death, not Life. The Mother Box, a living, emotionally nurturing, personal computer was the fusion of soul and machine carried by all the inhabitants of New Genesis. Metron the amoral science god with his dimension-traveling Mobius chair. The Source was for Kirby the ultimate ground of being, like the Ain Soph Aur of Judaic mysticism, beyond gods, beyond all divisions and definitions. Genetic manipulation, media control, the roots of Fascism — Kirby was on fire and had something new to say about everything under the sun.

  The Fourth World cycle was to be a great interlocking mechanism of books combining to form a complete modern myth, while, as an afterthought, re-creating the very idea of the superhero from the ground up and infusing it with Divinity. It might have run for five more years.

  But then The Fourth World spun off its axis. Carmine Infantino, promoted to DC’s vice president, allegedly looked at sales figures and canceled the books, which were doing well enough but not as well as had been hoped based on Kirby’s name. The King was hit hard, and The World lost the conclusion to a Great Work. He went on to create more titles, of course. Hundreds more original, quirky stories burst from that relentless mind, but the great mythographer had been thwarted in the midst of his masterpiece, brought down by dark forces and jealous gods. Kirby’s personal vision, his avalanche of novelty and energy, was too new for a culture in retreat, looking back to the fifties, dreaming of sock hops and ponytails, in the happy days before ’Nam and Richard Nixon.

  When Kirby returned in 1985, older and more wary, to complete his story, he was given only sixty pages to wrap up a saga that warranted thousands more. Imagine God halfway through Exodus having to hurry it up. The Hunger Dogs showed the passage of time and the footprints left by the relentless march of cynicism. Still The King delivered. As a dreadful elegy for the hopes of the baby boomers and the stark truth of their lives—growing older, facing Reagan and Thatcher — The Hunger Dogs, Kirby’s completion of The Story, was bleak, unforgettable, and in many ways the only perfect end to The Fourth World saga.

  But by the time it was released, Kirby’s hand-to-eye coordination had deteriorated significantly, making some pages appear ugly and rough-hewn. A more generous approach might imagine the artist embracing a new primitivism, a shorthand in which scale and perspective played second fiddle to the immediate expression of the ideas. But too many of the drawings were doodles that told the story with the barest minimum of effort. And his audience had flown. Fashion had passed him by. He was “Jack the Hack” now, an old man mocked and derided by the same people who had hailed his genius twenty years earlier and would again ten years later.

  The Epic had stalled and, like the great Aquarian youth revolution that had inspired so much of it, unraveled into world-weary cynicism. The Forever People had all grown up, gone bald, got jobs, and given up the struggle for a future among the stars. But Kirby had one final trick, one last visionary warning to leave his readers : A new superhero saga that would jump so far into The Future that it’s still reverberating and is more relevant today than it was when it was published to little acclaim in 1974...."

The Care Stare

Well, you young-heads missed that shit. You’re all too young. You don’t remember that. 

How old are you, young, man? You -

"Twenty-four." 

Twenty-four? You don’t know shit. You don’t know shit! You gotta Google shit that I lived through. See, this is why I lock motherfuckers’ phones up. Seriously. Because the young kids, you guys need to take a break from that – We all need to break just from that technology, just for a minute. You know, I’m from a different time, young man. A dark time to you. I’m from a time that I didn’t even used to know who was on the phone until I answered the shit. 

Like, when Tragedy used to strike.

I remember I was 12 years old, and The Teacher wheeled a television set into the classroom. You remember these days? And she turned it on to one of three channels. And she said, “Class, the space shuttle is taking off, and we’re all gonna watch it take off.” Man, that shit was going great for like, three to five minutes. That’s right. You remember. It fucking exploded! Right on television. Everybody on board, dead. Immediately presumed dead. It was so bad, the teacher looked at all the kids and was like… “You can go home.” It was a goddamn national tragedy. This was Cold War America. The Russians were laughing at us.

My point is, for a guy your age wouldn’t even know the pain, because in your generation, it’s like the space shuttle blows up every fucking day. How can you care about anything when you know every goddamn thing? I’m getting over one cop shooting, and then another one happens, and then another one happens, and another one happens. I’m crying about Paris, and then Brussels happens. I can’t keep track of all this shit. So you just give the fuck up. That’s the hallmark of your generation, and that’s fucked up, because your generation lives in the most difficult time in human history. This is the age of spin. The age where nobody knows what the fuck they’re even looking at. Did you know that Planned Parenthood was for abortions? It’s for people that don’t plan things out at all. That’s right. So, a guy your age doesn’t really know how he feels. Are you pro-choice? Are you anti-consequences? What does it all really mean? It’s easier not to care for you. But for us, we were trained to care. We were raised that way.

I used to watch a fucking cartoon when I was growing up called Care Bears. It was about a fucking group of teddy-bear people. They were like teddy bears, but they were like people, and they were all different colors, and they all fucking just walked around, caring. They cared about each other and everything else. They all had different designs on their stomachs, and the designs told you something about what they might be like inside. Very, very loving group of beings. And when shit got real bad, as nice as those teddy bears were, they didn’t get mean faces. They got determined. Hmm! And the leader would say, “Come on, guys. It’s time for the Care Bear Stare!” Remember that shit? And them little teddy bears would lock arms… and stare at the problem– and I’m not even bullshitting– actual love would shoot out of their chests… and would dispel anything that was fucked up. And when we grew up, we wanted to be like those bears. And then we got our hearts broken, because we found out that life wasn’t gonna let us do that and that it’s impossible to shoot love out of your chest.

However, I have shot love onto somebody’s chest before. I do it all the time. It’s the next best thing. You kids don’t know. Your generation is just determined to be angry, mad. Everybody’s mad. Back when we were growing up, only black people were mad. Now everybody’s just trying to get in on the act. I try to think to myself, “When did everyone get mad?”