Justified

The KLF - Justified & Ancient (Official Video)

Ghetto Gospel

My Best Spoon

So maybe now The Dish and My Best Spoon
Are playing Hide and Seek just behind The Moon
Waiting there until it's time to show
Spring is like that now
Far beneath the snow
Hiding in The Place Where The Lost Things Go

Waters wrote the lyrics on The Road for the "Brain Damage" / "Eclipse" closing sequence as he felt the whole piece was "unfinished". 

The final words sung on the song and, indeed the album The Dark Side of the Moon, directs the listener,
Waters wrote the lyrics on the road for the "Brain Damage" / "Eclipse" closing sequence as he felt the whole piece was "unfinished".^[4] The final words sung on the song and, indeed the album The Dark Side of the Moon, directs the listener, "and everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon." Waters explained the meaning of these words as well as the entire song by asserting:

I don't see it as a riddle. The album uses the sun and the moon as symbols; the light and the dark; the good and the bad; the life force as opposed to the death force. I think it's a very simple statement saying that all the good things life can offer are there for us to grasp, but that the influence of some dark force in our natures prevents us from seizing them. The song addresses the listener and says that if you, the listener, are affected by that force, and if that force is a worry to you, well I feel exactly the same too. The line 'I'll see you on the dark side of the moon' is me speaking to the listener, saying, 'I know you have these bad feelings and impulses because I do too, and one of the ways I can make direct contact with you is to share with you the fact that I feel bad sometimes.^[5]

The doorman of Abbey Road Studios, Gerry O'Driscoll, is heard speaking at 1:37, answering the question: "What is 'The Dark Side of The Moon'?" with: "There is no Dark Side in The Moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all Dark. The Only Thing that makes it look light is The Sun."
 

Let's Think About This -

The Sun is Male, The Moon is Female 

Waters wrote the lyrics on the road for the "Brain Damage" / "Eclipse" closing sequence as he felt the whole piece was "unfinished".^[4] The final words sung on the song and, indeed the album The Dark Side of the Moon, directs the listener, "and everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon." Waters explained the meaning of these words as well as the entire song by asserting:

I don't see it as a riddle. The album uses the sun and the moon as symbols; the light and the dark; the good and the bad; the life force as opposed to the death force. I think it's a very simple statement saying that all the good things life can offer are there for us to grasp, but that the influence of some dark force in our natures prevents us from seizing them. The song addresses the listener and says that if you, the listener, are affected by that force, and if that force is a worry to you, well I feel exactly the same too. The line 'I'll see you on the dark side of the moon' is me speaking to the listener, saying, 'I know you have these bad feelings and impulses because I do too, and one of the ways I can make direct contact with you is to share with you the fact that I feel bad sometimes.^[5]

The doorman of Abbey Road Studios, Gerry O'Driscoll, is heard speaking at 1:37, answering the question: "What is 'the dark side of the moon'?" with: "There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun."

 

Waters explained the meaning of these words as well as the entire song by asserting:

I don't see it as a riddle. The album uses the sun and the moon as symbols; the light and the dark; the good and the bad; the life force as opposed to the death force. I think it's a very simple statement saying that all the good things life can offer are there for us to grasp, but that the influence of some dark force in our natures prevents us from seizing them. The song addresses the listener and says that if you, the listener, are affected by that force, and if that force is a worry to you, well I feel exactly the same too. The line 'I'll see you on the dark side of the moon' is me speaking to the listener, saying, 'I know you have these bad feelings and impulses because I do too, and one of the ways I can make direct contact with you is to share with you the fact that I feel bad sometimes.[5]

The doorman of Abbey Road Studios, Gerry O'Driscoll, is heard speaking at 1:37, answering the question: "What is 'the dark side of the moon'?" with: "There is no dark side in the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun."

SUBLIME

"...Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – 

like a new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants."

REBUILDING
AMERICA’S
DEFENSES

Strategy, Forces and Resources
For a New Century

A Report of
The Project for the New American Century
September 2000

---

ABOUT THE PROJECT FOR THE
NEW AMERICAN CENTURY

Established in the spring of 1997, the Project for the New American Century is a nonprofit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership. The Project is an initiative of the New Citizenship Project. William Kristol is chairman of the Project, and Robert Kagan, Devon Gaffney Cross, Bruce P. Jackson and John R. Bolton serve as directors. Gary Schmitt is executive director of the Project.

“As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world’s most preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievement of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?

“[What we require is] a military that is strong and ready to meet both present and future challenges; a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American principles abroad; and national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities.

“Of course, the United States must be prudent in how it exercises its power. But we cannot safely avoid the responsibilities of global leadership of the costs that are associated with its exercise. America has a vital role in maintaining peace and security in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. If we shirk our responsibilities, we invite challenges to our fundamental interests. The history of the 20th century should have taught us that it is important to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire. The history of the past century should have taught us to embrace the cause of American leadership.”

– From the Project’s founding Statement of Principles

 

 

“Sampling, as we now understand it, consists of taking individual parts of an existing record – a drum beat, perhaps, or a melody line and making something new out of them. It is about finding a loop or a beat that is good in itself, and using that to build something else. 

The JAMs, on the other hand, took whole sections of someone else’s record and used them as they were. They took things not for how they sounded, but for what they represented. When they took parts of ABBA and The Beatles it was not because of the quality of the sound, but very specifically because they were records by ABBA and The Beatles. 

The bluntness of The JAMs musical thefts can be seen as being an unsophisticated, early attempt at sampling. With the art or craft of sampling still being developed, this argument suggests, it is not surprising that these pioneering records have a naive quality. 

Again, this misses the intention behind what they were doing. A more useful model would be to view them as what the Situationists called détournements. The Situationists were a group of thinkers and critics who were active in the Fifties and Sixties, mainly in France. 

 

At the heart of their thinking was the concept of The Spectacle. The Spectacle can be thought of as the overwhelming representation of all that is real. 

 

In the simplest possible terms it can be understood as being mass media, but that simple definition should really be expanded to include our entire culture and our social relations. 

 

The Spectacle is both the end result of, and the justification for, our consumerist society. The Spectacle draws our attentions away from what is real to what is merely a representation. 

 

The Situationists saw in our culture a shift in our focus from being to having, and then from having to appearing to have. This is a process that the users of Facebook will probably grasp immediately. This absorption in the image of things, they felt, was the cause of our modern alienation. 

 

The Situationists were not keen on the spectacle, yet it is the central idea at the heart of their self-referential reality tunnel. The thinking behind Situationist détournements goes like this: every day we are bombarded by adverts, images, songs or videos. They are part of the spectacle of the system, distractions that keep us numb and alienated. 

 

Importantly, we get these whether we want them or not, for it is almost impossible to live in the modern world and not be subject to this bombardment. They are a form of psychic pollution, one which is forced on us by capitalists. As we cannot escape from this onslaught, the Situationists argued, our only honourable response is to fuck with it.

 

Détournement, then, involves taking the cultural images that are forced on us and using them for our own ends. It involves changing the text or context of an image in order to subvert its meaning. The Situationists altered cultural images in the pages of their pamphlets, perhaps by taking a newspaper advert for a consumer product and replacing the text with quotes from Sartre about alienation. 

These days it is more frequently seen in graffiti, or across the internet on Tumblr blogs and social networks like Facebook, where it is known as ‘culture jamming’. Company logos are a frequent target. 

 

The idea, as the Situationists put it, is to ‘turn the expressions of the capitalist system against itself’. The aim is to break their spell. In this context, consider the first JAMs single ‘All You Need Is Love’. 

 

As its title suggests, this begins with a steal from The Beatles’ song of the same name. The Beatles, of course, are the highest expression of the ‘proper band’ model and generally considered to be the unarguable kings of modern pop music. The highest point of The Beatles, many would argue, was their psychedelic explosion in 1967 and the highest point of this was ‘All You Need Is Love’. 

 

This song was the UK’s contribution to Our World, the first live global television programme. This event was made possible by the recent invention of communication satellites. For the first time in history, people around the world would come together and watch the same thing at the same time. For such a symbolic event The Beatles boiled down the message of the age into a simple melody and the beautifully sung refrain ‘Love, love, love’. 

 

Then, surrounded by flowers and the beautiful people of Swingin’ London, they sent that message, in the form of pop music, around the entire globe. 

 

So when The JAMs started their first record with fifteen seconds of ‘All You Need Is Love’, this was no mere sampling. 

 

The way they ended the sample, by slowing down the final ‘love, love, love’ refrain until it collapsed into nothing, can only be seen as a rejection. This was a statement of intent. It was about claiming – and then dismissing – the height of The Beatles and, by extension, pop music as a whole. 

 

Such were the ambitions and the acts of the two men who had taken on the name The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. That intro was followed by an MC5 sample, the shout of ‘Kick out The JAMs, motherfuckers!’ which Robert Anton Wilson had discussed in Illuminatus!. This was followed by a sampled voice which states ‘Sexual intercourse no known cure’, and introduces the lyrical theme of the track. This is a song about AIDS, a disease which had only become known to the general public a few years earlier and which brought an end to the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s. 

 

The Beatles’ historic expression of the 1967 Summer of Love had been détourned and subverted into an opposite, more contemporarily relevant message. This basic principle, that you have the right to do what you like with whatever culture is thrust at you, is made explicit in their reworking of The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s ‘Take Five’, which The JAMs retitled ‘Don’t Take Five (Take What You Want)’. 

 

The idea would later take on a more political tone in the internet copyright wars of the early twenty-first century. It is the (frequently unspoken) heart of the philosophy behind torrent sites such as the Pirate Bay and related political organisations such as the Pirate Party. It is an argument that is still being digested by our culture. 

 

The finished record was shit, of course. There are very few people who could listen to it today and say, with hand on heart, that as a record it has merit. This is all the more apparent if you play it after listening to The Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’, which retains its innate quality to this day. 

 

As Drummond and Cauty’s press agent Mick Houghton told Richard King, ‘[Drummond] came up and played me The JAMs and I thought it was absolute rubbish . . . I just couldn’t take it seriously because it was a racket. It was Bill Drummond pretending to be some kind of Glaswegian dock worker over a load of Abba samples, and I thought it was complete tosh, seriously, I really did and I may or may not have said that to him.’ 

 

Faced with the difficulty of promoting such a band, Houghton made it clear to the press exactly who The JAMs were. The pair had adopted pseudonyms – King Boy D for Drummond and Rockman Rock for Cauty – and were trying to hide behind the persona of Scottish dock workers, rapping in the pronounced accent that Drummond used on his solo record. 

 

The revelation of their true identities was a wise move on Houghton’s part, for the press knew of Drummond and Cauty and knew enough to be curious about what they were up to. The press were intrigued by the mystique that The JAMs were beginning to weave around themselves. 

 

Drummond’s first lyric on ‘All You Need Is Love’ was ‘We’re back again’, not a typical opening line for a debut single by a band that had only formed a few months earlier. 

 

The rap continues, ‘They never kicked us out, 20,000 years of “shout, shout, shout”.’ Again, it is not usual for rap artists to announce themselves as a continuation of a 20,000-year history. 

 

The line ‘They never kicked us out’ is a clue here. It is a direct reference to Illuminatus!, and to the Illuminati’s attempts to kick out the Discordian splinter group The Justified Ancients of Mummu. 

 

By 1987, Illuminatus! was not widely read. Even those who had heard of it were unlikely to read it, for by then it had the unacceptable air of a hippy text. Yet without knowledge of this book, The JAMs’ lyrics appeared to be extraordinarily enigmatic, and certainly unlike anything else around. 

 

Even their name was otherworldly – ‘Justified?’ ‘Ancient?’ These were not words used in pop music. Their strange mystique seemed to have an internal logic to it. It wasn’t meaningless or surreal nonsense, but it somehow meant something on its own terms. Even when their name was explained as being taken from Wilson and Shea’s books, as it was in almost every article written about the band, this didn’t reduce the mystery, for very few people went on to read the books. 

 

Discordianism was largely unknown then, as indeed it remains to this day. In this context wherever The JAMs were coming from wherever that was – seemed to be somewhere new. For the music press, this was all good. Journalists are, by necessity, more drawn to something that is good to write about rather than something that is good to listen to. 

 

And there was much about The JAMs that made good copy. Their habit of publicising themselves using graffiti – another nod to the Situationists – or creating crop circles was something else that the press approved of, for the resulting story would automatically be more interesting than an announcement made by a press release. 

 

It did not hurt, of course, that many of their records quickly became unobtainable. 

 

Within a month of the independent release of ‘All You Need Is Love’, three major record labels had taken out injunctions. The court order they obtained required the record not merely to be withdrawn, but that all existing copies be destroyed. In this instance, they were too late. Only five hundred copies had been pressed, and they had all been sold. All this created great publicity for the release of a subsequent version, which had reworked or rerecorded all the samples in order to make them more or less legal. 

 

This legal attention took The JAMs by surprise. ‘We just thought that no one was going to take any notice of [the record],’ Drummond has said. The JAMs’ legal problems came to a head with the release of their album 1987: What The Fuck Is Going On?, which included ABBA on the track ‘The Queen and I’. 

 

‘Included’ is probably not the correct word here, for so liberal were The JAMs with their use of long chunks of ‘Dancing Queen’ that it would be more accurate to call it an ABBA track that featured contributions from The JAMs. 

 

ABBA’s lawyers were having none of it. Shortly after the album was released, Drummond and Cauty were contacted by the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, or MCPS.  

 

‘One of our members, whose work is used substantially on the 1987 album, is not prepared to grant a licence in respect of their work,’ the MCPS wrote.  

 

‘We must therefore insist that in respect of this record you 

 

(i) cease all manufacture and distribution, 

 

(ii) take all possible steps to recover copies of the album which are then to be delivered to MCPS or destroyed under the supervision of the MCPS, 

 

and 

 

(iii) deliver up the master tape, mothers, stampers, and any other parts commensurate with manufacture of the record.’ 

 

Drummond and Cauty took legal advice and were informed that it would cost them £20,000 to fight this in court. And that they would lose. 

 

Publicity-wise, of course, this was terrific. Drummond had initially thought that if he met with ABBA and explained his reasons, then they would be able to come to an agreement as artists. It quickly become clear that no meeting would ever be granted. 

 

Nevertheless, Cauty and Drummond headed to Sweden with the NME journalist James Brown in tow. Here they played the offending song outside ABBA’s publishing company and presented a fake gold disc (marked ‘for sales in excess of zero’) to a prostitute who, they argued, looked a bit like one of the women from ABBA. 

 

They then destroyed most of the remaining copies of the album by setting fire to them in a field and were promptly shot at by a farmer for their trouble. On the ferry home they threw the remaining copies into the North Sea and performed an improvised set on the ferry, the only known live JAMs performance, in exchange for a large Toblerone. 

 

This was the start of Drummond and Cauty’s reputations as being masters of the publicity stunt. 

 

It is worth noting the gulf between this reputation and how they actually behaved. The traditional role of media manipulator is a scheming, cynical one, where intricate plans are mapped out in advance and followed to the letter. The archetype of the manipulative producer is perhaps best embodied in the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. This presents the story of the Sex Pistols as a grand scheme by their manager, Malcolm McLaren, who is shown manipulating the band like a sinister puppet master for his own financial gain. 

 

In contrast, The JAMs, on adventures such as the Swedish trip and others, are simply winging it. The impetus here was that they had to destroy their stock of the album and they wanted to make that act a thing in itself, something symbolic and interesting. Beyond that, they were scrabbling around for ideas and just trying to make something happen. 

 

Hindsight may fix these events into a narrative that makes them appear symbolic or almost pre-ordained, such as the way the bonfire of their debut album mirrors the later bonfire of their money. But while they are being enacted, they are chaotic. They lack aim and purpose. To quote one of their press releases, ‘The plot has been mislaid’. 

 

Drummond now had a band that had the mystique he looked for in Echo & the Bunnymen or The Teardrop Explodes. But there was still something missing from the picture, and that was the very something that had seduced him into the music industry in the first place. This was the magic of a perfect single, the creation of a single slice of plastic containing a song so universally appealing that it speaks to everyone, outlives its creators and makes the world a better place. 

 

Critical mystique was nothing to be sniffed at, of course, but it was a shame that their records were so shit. 

 

You can see this lingering love of the great pop single in the second JAMs single, ‘Whitney Joins The JAMs’. This begins with the Mission: Impossible theme, with the impossible mission presented by the song being persuading Whitney Houston to join their band. During the early parts of the track Drummond pleads with Houston over a bog-standard dance rhythm (‘Whitney, please! Please, please join The JAMs. You saw our reviews, didn’t you? Please, Whitney, please!’) This builds until Houston’s biggest pop single, ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’, is dropped into the mix. Again, this is no normal sample, but a wholesale stealing of the track. But that is not how it is presented by the logic of the song. 

 

On The JAMs’ terms, this is Whitney Houston deciding to join their band, and Drummond sells this angle by whooping ‘Whitney Houston has joined The JAMs!’ with such excitement that you can’t help but feel delighted for him. It is tempting to see this as a turning point, the moment when the anti-music hip-hop band The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu started to turn towards the pro-music dance band The KLF. 

 

Certainly, you can no longer see the Houston sample as an act of détournement in the style of the 1987 album. Unlike the Beatles or ABBA samples, this is not subverting the meaning of the spectacle. It is about celebrating how brilliant the song they are stealing is. Many critics viewed this lauding of Houston’s single as ironic, but it was nothing of the sort. 

 

It grew out of an attempt to make a credible record that sampled the ‘Theme From Shaft’. They booked a studio for five days and Drummond went to the record shop to buy the Isaac Hayes record.  

 

‘In the window [of the record shop was] a big cut-out of Whitney Houston,’ Drummond has said. ‘I love that track, and I loved Whitney Houston then, and I just said “Wow”, and bought the album . . . We just played that track over and over again, and we just thought, “There’s no point us making records when such fantastic records as this have been made.” And that’s how that track [. . .] grew into a celebration of Whitney Houston.’

Every Living Thing

YOU, are Becoming GODS. 

There's a new Master of Creation, 

and it's YOU! 

You’ve unraveled DNA --

and at the same time you're cultivating bacteria strong enough to 

Kill Every Living Thing! 

 

D’you think you are ready for that much Power? 

You lot? You lot? 

Y’Cheeky bastards!

“Iain Spence published Sekhmet Hypothesis: The Signals of the Beginning of a New Identity as a book in 1995, but it wasn’t until two years later that I came across his ideas in an article he’d written for the magazine Towards 2012. As an illuminating way of reconsidering the familiar, I’m particularly fond of the Sekhmet Hypothesis, which never fails to get people talking at parties. 

As usual, please remember that this is just a framework; a way of ordering information into meaningful patterns in the service of creative lateral thinking, if you like. 

Nineteen eighty-eight saw ecstasy, or MDMA, as the favoured drug, accompanying long-form trance, ambient and dance music, Manchester “baggy” fitness wear as street wear, grunge beards, and a return to long hair. 

In comic books, this was the time of Deadline, Doom Patrol, Shade, and Sandman.”

“I'm a bit upset with the art now that John Ridgway's not doing much and Tim Perkins is taking over. I like working with John but he's just too busy now to devote much of his time to Dr Who. I don't know if I'll do any more Dr Whos, but I quite enjoyed it. 

I really liked Colin Baker's Doctor, but he was never given a decent storyline. The potential was wasted. 

I'm nervously waiting for the reaction of the readers to my new comic story, because there's a lot of stuff about continuity and I'm afraid I screwed it up. 

I based the story [The World Shapers] on a text piece I remembered from an old annual - I think it was 1966 - which I thought was set on the planet Marinus. 

Recently I discovered the annual at a comic mart, and when I re-read the text story it wasn't set on Marinus at all and it wasn't anything like I'd remembered. 

So, I've messed with the continuity and I've also brought back Jamie as an old man, which will probably bring in some flak from the die-hards. 

Thing is, if you're going to do it, you might as well make the effort to try something different. 

I think if I'd written for the T.V. series and brought back an old Jamie, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece; because it's the comic, they'll probably say 'You're messing with sacred stuff!'

There was a Dr Who story they wouldn't let me do last year. 

I came up with this idea where the Doctor meets two future versions of himself, a sort of 'Three Doctors' thing. 

I thought, 'I won't do two Doctors from the past, I'll do two from the future', to make it a bit different. 

One of them was a woman and they wouldn't let me do that at all. They said the readership wouldn't accept it. There was some big controversy."

GM,

After-Image,

January 1988

“He turned to the computer and touched one of its graphics display keys. Instantly, Peri was replaced by another tortured figure. The Doctor recognised Dastari. It was a perfect holographic forgery, he thought.

He touched the key again and another figure appeared that he didn’t recognise. A rather scruffy person in an ill-fitting tailcoat and black string necktie.

The Doctor switched off the machine and sank back into the control chair with his mind racing. Although he would instantly recognise The Brigadier or Leela or any of his past companions, he scarcely had any recollection of how he himself had appeared in past forms. 

Nonetheless, he thought, it was all Lombard Street to a China orange that the chap in the tailcoat was himself. In that case, not only had his sartorial taste improved, but at last it was all beginning to make sense."

— Robert Holmes,

The Two Doctors

“From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, making a Doctor Who record appears to be an obvious populist choice. It is, after all, one of the most successful and best-loved series on British TV. 

This was not the case in 1988, when ‘Doctorin’ The TARDIS’ was released. 

At that time, Doctor Who was largely considered an embarrassment, by both the BBC and the viewing public at home. 

If Drummond and Cauty had been drawn to it for populist reasons, their timing was out.”

“If we take Alan Moore’s model of IdeaSpace seriously – if only for a moment – and look at the idea of Doctor Who, we see an extremely detailed fiction. 

The Doctor is one of the great line of British folk heroes; a character in the tradition of Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. Whereas American folk heroes tend towards cowboys or gangsters who take what they want from the world and end up either rich or winners, British equivalents are very different. 

They are anti-Establishment figures, even when they work with the Establishment, and they save the day not for personal gain, but because it is the right thing to do. 

For generations of British school kids, Doctor Who was the myth they grew up with. 

They had only the most superficial knowledge of the likes of Zeus, Odin or Jesus, but they knew all there was to know about Davros, The Master and Cybermen. 

The Doctor is the first British folk hero of the TV age, and the nature of his TV origins make him unusual. There is no definitive creator standing behind him, no Arthur Conan Doyle, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ian Fleming or J. K. Rowling. Instead, he popped out from the space between many minds. 

There was a succession of different actors, writers and producers who all invigorated the character for a short while before moving on or burning out. 

The character is defined by his ability to regenerate and change his personality. He can change all his friends and companions. He can go anywhere, at any time. He is, essentially, the perfect, never-ending story. He will survive long after you, me or anyone currently involved in making the series has died. 

He adapts, grows, mutates and endures. In this he fulfils much of the standard definitions for A Living Thing. 

This is not bad going, for A Fiction. 

Already, there are untold thousands of Doctor Who stories, which, for a character of fiction, is almost unheard of. There have been hundreds of stories on TV, and many, many more available as novels, audio CDs, comic books, films, stage plays, webcasts, fanfics and radio programmes. 

The growth of the story, compared to any other fiction from the same period, is deeply unusual. Indeed, it has become arguably the most expansive and complex non-religious fiction ever created. 

According to Moore’s model of IdeaSpace, this fiction may be complicated enough to act like A Living Thing. 

Note that this is not to say that Doctor Who is A Living Thing, for that would sound crazy. 

It is to say that it behaves as if it were A Living Thing, which is a much more reasonable observation. 

Of course, if you were to then go on to try to define the difference between Something That is Living and Something That Behaves Like it is Living, you would be a brave soul indeed. 

The programme’s expansion through all possible media was begun by its first script editor, David Whitaker. 

Although Doctor Who has no definitive ‘creator’, Whitaker can be said to be the man who nurtured the heart of the series, sculpting the peculiar mix of humour, morality and wide-eyed imagination that makes the series so unique. 

He was involved in the creation of most of the iconography of the show, from introducing the Daleks, to making the TARDIS in some way alive and the Doctor able to regenerate into a different actor. 

He also spread the life of the character beyond television, for he wrote the first novels and annuals and co-wrote the Peter Cushing Dr Who movies from the 1960s. Whitaker’s work on Doctor Who was particularly influenced by alchemy, a subject that he claimed to be ‘very fond of’. 

The basic alchemical principle, that a physical object can be affected by the manipulation of a symbol of that object – the idea of it, if you prefer – is used explicitly in his 1967 story The Evil of the Daleks (which is also a strong contender for the story that invented steampunk.) The Evil of the Daleks is about a pair of Victorian scientists who accidentally build a time machine out of 144 mirrors (the number ‘144’, or 122, being alchemically significant). 

This basic alchemical principle is still used in the programme today, for example in Steven Moffat’s claim about his monsters the Weeping Angels: ‘The image of an Angel is an Angel.’ 

In Whitaker’s Doctor Who, when the TARDIS broke down because of a problem with the ‘mercury in the fluid links’, there was specific alchemical symbolism in the choice of mercury. 

When the first Doctor, William Hartnell, was replaced by the second, Patrick Troughton, Whitaker gave him a flute and an obsession with hats in order to echo the classical god Mercury (Hermes to the Greeks). 

All this would have meant little to the children watching in the 1960s. Nevertheless, Whitaker seems to have been consciously shaping the character of the Doctor into a mercurial, Trickster figure. 

When the current Doctor Who writers claim that they only became writers because of Doctor Who, they usually credit the series of novels which Whitaker started and which young boys devoured during the 1970s. 

There is another explanation, however, which comes from the very format of the programme. 

In the original series, episodes built towards a climax and ended on a cliff-hanger in which the Doctor or his friends appeared to be in inescapable danger. 

Of course, the children watching knew that the Doctor would somehow survive. He always did. The Question, then, was not ‘Would he escape?’, but ‘How?’

What could possibly happen to get the Doctor out of that situation? 

There would be much debate about this in school playgrounds after each episode. 

And as the kids thought about the problem, their imaginations were being stoked. 

They were thinking like writers. 

Indeed, they were trying to write the next episode themselves. 

What we have here, then, is a character of fiction, neither created nor ‘owned’ by any one imagination, who is actively creating the very environment – writers’ minds – that it needs to survive into the future. 

Not only is Doctor Who a fictitious character who acts like a living thing by constantly evolving and surviving, it is also a self-sustaining living thing that creates the one thing that it needs to survive. 

From an evolutionary point of view, that’s impressive. 

There is no requirement for those affected by an idea to be aware of any of this. 

When the media critic Philip Sandifer writes that ‘David Whitaker, at once the most important figure in Doctor Who’s development and the least understood, created a show that is genuinely magical and this influence cannot be erased from within the show’, he does not mean that any of the hundreds of actors and writers who went on to work on the programme saw it in those terms. 

Or, as Sandifer so clearly puts it, ‘I don’t actually believe that the writers of Doctor Who were consciously designing a sentient metafiction to continually disrupt the social order through a systematic process of détournement. 

Except maybe David Whitaker.’ 

From Drummond and Cauty’s perspective, the story of Doctor Who is irrelevant. All that was happening was that they were exploring their mental landscape, and they were fulfilling their duty as artists by doing so more deeply than normal people. 

This is a landscape with many unseen, unknown areas where who knows what might be found. The KLF explored further than most and, if we were to accept Moore’s model, it would perhaps not be surprising that a fiction as complex as Doctor Who could encounter them in Ideaspace and, being at its lowest point and in dire need of help, use them for its own ends. 

For Moore, and other artists such as the film-maker David Lynch who use similar models, The Role of The Artist is like that of A Fisherman. It is his job to fish in the collective unconscious and use all his skill to best present his catch to an audience. 

Drummond and Cauty, on the other hand, appear to have been caught by the fish. Lacking any clear sense of what they were doing, they dived in as deeply as Moore and Lynch. They did not have a specific purpose for doing so. They just needed to make something happen – anything really, such is the path of chaos. 

‘It was supposed to be a proper dance record, but we couldn’t fit the four-four beat to it, so we ended up with the glitter beat, which was never really our intention but we had to go with it,’ Cauty has said. ‘It was like an out-of-control lorry, you know, you’re just trying to steer it, and that track took itself over, really, and did what it wanted to do. 

We were just watching.’ 

This lack of intention is significant, from a magical point of view. 

One of the most important aspects of magical practice is The Will. 

Aleister Crowley defined magic as being changes in The World brought about by the exercise of The Will, hence his maxim ‘Do what thou Will shall be the whole of the Law’. 

The will or intention of a magical act is important because the magician opens himself up to all sorts of strange powers and influences and he must avoid being controlled by them. 

Drummond and Cauty were not exerting any control on the process, and so they made themselves vulnerable to the who knows whats that live out of sight in the depths of IdeaSpace. 

For this reason, you could understand why Moore would think that Bill Drummond was ‘totally mad’. 

All this only applies if you’re prepared to accept the notion of Magic. 

Nevertheless, it is worth noting because there is another fiction that is important in Drummond and Cauty’s story. This one is more significant, because this is the fiction that they became, taking on its title and performing their actions in its name. It is also the source of our whirlwind of synchronicities. 

We are talking, of course, about The Justified Ancients of Mummu. The question then becomes: did Cauty and Drummond choose The JAMs, or did The JAMs choose Cauty and Drummond? A possible clue will come later, when we look at what the founding purpose of The Justified Ancients of Mummu actually was.”

HE'S BACK.

The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast #9 - Jordan B. Peterson - Family Update Ju...

Welcome to the Mikhaila Peterson Podcast, episode 9. This is a brief podcast with my dad Jordan Peterson about what happened to him and my family in the last year.

The following are links that may help elucidate some of the topics we discussed in this episode:

Paradoxical reaction to benzodiazepines – a condition dad was diagnosed withhttps://www.acep.org/how-we-serve/sec...

Akathisia - something dad really really really suffered from - https://w-bad.org/akathisia/
- “Many medical professionals don’t recognize akathisia or that it’s a drug-induced state. Instead, they write off the symptoms as a “worsening of mental illness” or other condition. Sometimes they even raise the dose of the offending drug and when the patient’s condition worsens as a result, they may prescribe more medication which can sometimes further exacerbate the problem or that fail to offer relief. If the medical professionals you encounter are ignorant about akathisia or attempt to blame it on “something else”, present them with medical information on the condition or search until you find a knowledgeable physician.”

Catatonia and benzo withdrawal -
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8835707/

Suicidality and benzodiazepines -
https://www.psychiatrist.com/PCC/arti...
“The majority of studies identified in this review report a positive correlation between prescribed benzodiazepines and attempted or completed suicide.”

https://www.healio.com/news/psychiatr...

Dependence vs. Addiction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSdYl...

Benzodiazepine use and dementia risk - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...

Benzo prescription rates:
“More than one in eight U.S. adults (12.6 percent) used benzodiazepines in the past year”
https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/n...

Examples of severe benzo withdrawal from prescribed benzos:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakin...
http://www.benzo-case-japan.com/my-st..
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...

A particularly heartbreaking experience
http://www.zakstein.org/for-meghan-te...

Celebrity deaths involving benzos:

Anna Nicole Smith, Whitney Houston, - https://www.thestar.com/life/health_w...

Heath Ledger
https://edition.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/...

Michael Jackson
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article...

Philip Seymour Hoffmanhttps://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsul...

Amy Winehouse - https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/270...

Tom Petty - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-relea...

Benzos and early death:
The study’s results state the statistically significant chances of early death double with the prescription of a benzodiazepine. https://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g...

Overdose risk of benzos with opioids:
“Yet over 30 percent of opioid-related overdoses also include benzodiazepines. One study published this year showed that using benzos with opioids increases overdose risk five-fold compared with using opioids only.”

https://www.upmc.com/media/news/opioi...
https://www.drugabuse.gov/drug-topics...

Warnings for benzodiazepine usage:

“If benzodiazepines are needed daily, people shouldn’t take them for longer than two to four weeks. If used long term, then it’s best only to take them two to three times a week.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/02/antia...

The Ashton Protocol – how some people get off of benzos – not something Dad could tolerate given his paradoxical reaction and akathisia https://benzo.org.uk/manual/

Collecting duct carcinoma - the cancer mom miraculously recovered from - https://www.currentoncology.com/index...

Sodium metabisulfite allergy symptoms – the original cause of the benzodiazepine prescription - https://foodallergycanada.ca/food-all...

Other links about benzos:

https://medicatingnormal.com/benzodia...

https://www.theinnercompass.org/learn...

https://www.benzobuddies.org