Not My Favourite Play

Like Gloucester at the end 

of his cliff, eh, Watson?

"The Universe — the entire space-time continuum, from big bang to heat death, no less — was not a linear stream of events 

with beginning, middle, and end. 

That was only how it felt from the inside. 

In fact, the totality of existence looked more like a ball of sphincters, constantly moving through itself in a way that was hypnotic and awe inspiring to observe. There was Shakespeare scribbling King Lear 

on one wrinkled fold, and just around the corner from him, 

forever out of his line of sight, was the Cretaceous period and tyrannosaurs padding past his wife Anne Hathaway’s cottage.

And, as if to confirm that ours was not the only universe, it was explained to me that what I was seeing was a nursery of some kind. In order to grow their “offspring,” the chrome angels had to “make” time, because, as they pointed out reasonably, only in time were things able to grow as I understood it. Time was a kind of incubator, and all life on Earth was one thing, a single weird anemone-like mega-Hydra with its single-celled immortal root in the Precambrian tides and its billions of sensory branches, from ferns to people, with every single detail having its own part to play in the life cycle of a slowly complexifying, increasingly self-aware super-organism. It was as if I had been shown an infant god, attached to a placental support system called Earth, where it could grow bigger, more elaborate, more connected, and more intelligent. 

Growing at its tips were machine parts; 

cyborg tools made from the planet’s mineral resources. 

It seemed to be constructing around itself a part-mechanical shell, like armor or a spacesuit. “It” was us, all life seen as one from the perspective of a higher dimension.

I was told to return and take up my duties as a “midwife” to this gargantuan raw nervous system. It was important to ensure the proper growth and development of the larva and to make certain it didn’t panic or struggle too much when it woke up to its true nature as a singular life form. Incidentally, what we experienced as “evil” was simply the effects of inoculation against some cosmic disease, so I wasn’t to worry much.

Sigmund Freud: 

Who am I, that your friends should wish us to meet? 

Sherlock Holmes: 

Beyond the fact that you are a brilliant Jewish physician 

who was born in Hungary and studied for a while in Paris, 

and that certain radical theories of yours 

have alienated the respectable medical community, 

so that you have severed your connections with various hospitals 

and branches of the medical fraternity, 

beyond this I can deduce little. 

You're married, with a child of five. 

You enjoy Shakespeare and possess 

a keen sense of honour.

Sherlock Holmes: 

I never guess : it is an appalling habit, 

destructive to the logical faculty. 

A private study is an ideal place for 

observing facets of a man's character --

That the study belongs to you exclusively 

is evident from the dust : 

not even The Maid is permitted here, 

else she would scarcely have ventured 

to let matters come to this pass. 

Sigmund Freud: 

Go on. 

Sherlock Holmes: 

Very well. Now, when a man collects books on a subject, 

they're usually grouped together, but notice, 

your King James Bible, your Book of Mormon, 

and Koran are separate, across the room in fact, 

from your Hebrew Bible and Talmud, 

which sit on your desk. 

Now these books have a special importance for you 

not connected with a general study of religion, obviously. 

The nine-branched candelabra on your desk 

confirms my suspicion that you are of the Jewish faith; 

it is called a menorah, is it not? 

Sigmund Freud: 

Ja. 

Sherlock Holmes: 

That you studied medicine in Paris is to be inferred 

from the great number of medical texts in that language. 

Where else should a German use French textbooks but in France, 

and who but a brilliant German could understand 

the complexities of medicine in a foreign tongue? 

That you're fond of Shakespeare is to be deduced 

from this book, which is lying face downwards. 

The fact that you have not adjusted the volume 

suggests to my mind that you no doubt intended 

referring to it again in the near future. (Hm, not my favorite play.) 

The absence of dust on the cover 

would tend to confirm this hypothesis. 

That you're a physician is evident when 

I observe you maintain a consulting room. 

Your separation from various societies 

is indicated by these blank spaces 

surrounding your diploma, 

clearly used at one time to display 

additional certificates. 

Now, what can it be that forces a man to remove 

these testimonials to his success? 

Why, only that he has ceased to affiliate himself 

with these various societies and hospitals and so forth, 

and why do this, having once troubled to join them all? 

It is possible that he became disenchanted 

with one or two of them, 

but NOT likely that his disillusionment 

extended to all. Rather, I postulate 

it is THEY who became disenchanted 

with YOU, Doctor, and asked you 

to resign, from all of them. 

Why, I've no idea. But some position 

you have taken, evidently a medical one, 

has discredited you in their eyes. 

I take the liberty of inferring a theory of some sort, 

too radical or shocking to gain ready acceptance 

in current medical thinking. 

Your wedding ring tells me of your marriage, 

your Balkanized accent hints Hungary or Moravia, 

the toy soldier on the floor here ought, I think, 

to belong to a... small boy of five? 

Have I omitted anything of importance? 

Sigmund Freud: 

My sense of Honour. 

Sherlock Holmes: 

Oh, it is implied by the fact that you have removed the plaques 

from the societies to which you no longer belong. 

In the privacy of your study, only 

you would know the difference.

People andThings I Will Salute & Stand Up For

Prince

The Marseilles

Father Jack

Howard The Duck

The Human Race

Bdr. Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart

Wales

Quill and The Guardians of The Galaxy 

Capt. Steve Rogers

Blake’s Jerusalem

Albion

The Idea of Law

One of the better attempts at a Statement of Intent and List of Demands anyone has put out there that I have seen - and I've known quite a few.

Realistic, pragmatic, not *excessively* utopian - I would have to say that I pretty close to being in 100% agreement with this.

Just one major caveat - a lot of people propose this and really mean it without thinking it through : Capital Punishment for elected leaders that pass or sign "un-CONsitutional laws".... Not cool. For one thing, you are attempting to impose and enforce your own morality through Law and Use of Violence (which is the very thing you are complaining about, thus keeping the Dæmon alive inside your own heart), but also because the CONstitution, nor any of the Laws of Man are suitable, correct or useful to apply as any benchmark for good or ethical behaviour, since they are always, at best, the thoroughly moderated end-product of consensus and compromise. Natural Law is the only standard applicable in every instance.

Besides, it wouldn’t work - Confucius once said that one should never write laws too precisely or have too many of them, but instead have leaders who know you (The People), and the history and culture of the land, because once you make anything rigid or precise, you have created a specific, fixed obstacle to someone's will and described its exact dimensions and scope, in terms of it's reach, application and power to effectively prevent, deter and punish the criminal behaviour it describes and the people of Free Will likely to commit those kinds of crimes if not discouraged or prevented from doing so by everyone else.

Putting up a solid wall in such a way also supplies the criminal with a perfect description for how high a ladder he will need to climb over it, or how many feet long a tunnel he will have to dig to go around it. By the act of creating a new law, you not only create a new crime (usually more than one), you also create a new loophole (again, often more than one) to avoid capture or punishment.

Sadly , you cannot achieve or encourage honesty or good moral behaviour in other people (yes, I include politicians and other elected leaders in that - they *are* also people, albeit venal, corrupt and depraved moral sell-outs and whores) by the threat or application of violent reprisals, up to and including public execution.

Laws are ideas, in the fullest sense in that, like any other kind of  Thought-Form, imagined fantasy or Tulpa, they are alive.

Once a law is created, it can be invoked, banished or ignored, but it cannot ever be truly destroyed for at least as long as there still remains any alive that can remember it, or any material, written record of it, and it's original nature still exists.

But once brought into being, like any person, a law is created with a Double-Aspect, it's Shaddow Self or Dark Heart, since in authoring the text of any law, you also create new and completely original crimes which had not up until that point existed, or were called into existence from bits and pieces of other, weaker parts of existing laws and made whole, focused and robustly strong ....

The moral, then...? Creating harsh and militant laws guarantee the ruthless depraved infamy of the criminals of the future - it's a mistake to raise the stakes so much and Ante Up on the deterrence and the danger factor of the punishment, since doing so likewise intensifies the thrill from the adrenaline-rush and the reward satisfaction  to the criminal if he in not getting caught, and on each successive occasion he does so. 

Lower the threshold of personal risk and that complicating factor largely goes away - you solve it simply by balancing both sides of the equation, and then the problems otherwise proceeding from that hardline tactic going in will never arise to trouble you.

A Generation of Cavedwellers

And now we come to the most alarming Delusion of all.

The Idea That Other People 

Don't Matter.

Their Feelings.

Their Needs.

Imagine A Cave where those inside never see The Outside World.

Instead, they see shadows of that world projected on the cave wall.

[MONKEY CHATTERING.]

The world they see in the shadows is not The Real World.

But it's Real TO THEM.

If you were to show them The World as it actually is, they would reject it as incomprehensible.

Now, What If, instead of being in A Cave, you were out in The World, except you couldn't see it.

Because you weren't looking.

Because you trusted that The World you saw through The Prism was The Real World.

But there's a difference.

You see, unlike The Allegory of The Cave, where The People are Real and The Shadows are false, here Other People are The Shadows.

Their faces.

Their lives.

This is The Delusion of The Narcissist, who believes that they alone are Real.

Their feelings are the only feelings that matter because other people are just shadows, and shadows don't feel.

Because they're not Real.

But what if everyone lived in Caves? 

Then no one would be Real.

Not Even You.

Unless one day you woke up and left The Cave.

How strange The World would look after a lifetime of staring at Shadows.

He Who Remembers

AMY: 

I killed someone. 

Madame Kovarian, in cold blood. 

RIVER: 

In an aborted time line, in A World That Never Was. 

AMY: 

Yeah, but I can remember it, so it happened.

The World is changed.

I feel it in The Water.

I feel it in The Earth.

I smell it in The Air.

Much that once was, is lost. 

For none now live, Who Remember It.

The Anti-Monitor, The Enemy of The Free-peoples of New Earth was defeated. 

The Speed Force passed to Wally West, 

and The Superman of Earth-1 had this one chance to destroy Evil forever.

But The Hearts of Men are easily corrupted. 

And HyperTime has a will of its own. 

It betrayed Hawkman to his death. 

And some things that should NOT have been forgotten, were Lost.

History became Legend

Legend became Myth

And for two decades, the Multiverse passed out of ALL knowledge. 

Until, when chance came, it ensnared an NEW Champion.....

The aliens are yellow because Animal Mans (original) Origin occurred in a back-issue, 20 years pre-Crisis (in 1968).

Non-acid-free paper turns yellow when it gets old.

 

“The “final crisis,” as I saw it for a paper universe like DC’s, would be the terminal war between is and isn’t, between the story and the blank page. 

 

What would happen if the void of the page took issue with the quality of material imposed upon it and decided to fight back by spontaneously generating a living concept capable of devouring narrative itself? 

 

A nihilistic cosmic vampire whose only dream was to drain the multiverse dry of story material, then lie bloated beneath a dead sun, dying.”

Excerpt From

Supergods

Grant Morrison

The Leader of The Gang

PERVERT MUSIC

That one scene in Joker where he climbs completely inside his own refrigerator and locks himself inside...?

It’s because he isn’t Done yet.

“A significant upturn in Cauty and Drummond’s financial circumstances occurred in May 1988, when they accidentally produced a hit single. It was called ‘Doctorin’ The TARDIS’ and they released it under the name The Timelords. It was a novelty record. It started with a desire to make a credible dance record based around the theme music of the science fiction series Doctor Who. 

Lovers of electronic music consider this theme to be something of a classic, and the pioneering work of its creators, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, is much admired. The problem was that Cauty couldn’t get a standard 4-4 dance beat to work with it. After some experimentation, he came to the conclusion that the only drumbeat that would fit was the glitter beat. As a result, samples of Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock ’n’ Roll (Part Two)’, plus the odd bit of ‘Blockbuster!’ by Sweet, were added to the mix. 

‘Not until a couple of days into it did we realise how terrible it was,’ Cauty admitted to Richard King. Yet by the time they had added samples of Daleks quoting Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney character, it was clear that they had a potential hit on their hands. ‘We justified it all by saying to ourselves “We’re celebrating a very British thing here . . . you know”,’ Drummond told BBC Radio 1, ‘something that Timmy Mallett understands.’ 

Having accidentally created a potentially massiveselling novelty record, the question then became how to publicise it. Drummond and Cauty themselves were both in their mid-thirties and neither were natural frontmen for a mainstream pop record. They decided to claim that the record had been made by Cauty’s car. This was a huge American cop car that looked like a beaten-up version of the Blues Brothers’ Bluesmobile. It was, if nothing else, an original idea. 

No car had ever had a hit record before. Drummond and Cauty thought that this gimmick would make a nice gift for the newspapers, handing them an easy little story on a plate. The press did not agree, by and large, finding the idea idiotic and wondering, perhaps for the first time, if Cauty and Drummond were taking the piss. 

Regardless, the single sleeve was printed featuring a photograph of the car, now renamed Ford Timelord, complete with a speech bubble saying, ‘Hi! I’m Ford Timelord. I’m a car, and I’ve made a record.’ The name ‘Ford Timelord’ was an echo of Ford Prefect, a character in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by the Doctor Who script editor Douglas Adams. This was nicely fitting, as Ken Campbell’s follow-up to Illuminatus! was a production of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

In three weeks, despite not being playlisted by Radio 1, the record reached the fabled position of number one in the charts. It would go on to sell more than a million copies. A video was shot showing the car driving around locations in Wiltshire, including the Avebury stone circles. It included a couple of home-made Daleks which avoided legal problems by being so poorly constructed that no one could claim with a straight face they contravened copyright. 

Another problem was that the producers of Top Of The Pops believed that a car sitting by itself on stage for three minutes, flashing its lights in time to the music, would not make an interesting performance. The solution was to recruit Gary Glitter to front the performance, for which he donned a silver cape and hammed it up for all he was worth. His reward was to find himself on the cover of the NME for the first time in his career.”

“At that point, Jonathan King was not known to be a paedophile: only in 2001 was he jailed for the sexual assault of five teenage boys. 

• This makes him the third person in this story to have been sent to prison for sexual offences related to minors. 

• Gary Glitter, who appeared with Cauty and Drummond on Top Of The Pops, was jailed for possessing thousands of images of child pornography and charged with having sexual relations with a fourteenyear-old child. 

• Chris Langham, the Thick Of It actor and co-author with Ken Campbell of the Illuminatus! stage play, was jailed in 2007 for possessing child pornography. 

You might think this a remarkably high instance of such crimes for one story, and you would be correct. It becomes more uncomfortable in light of a character in Illuminatus! called Padre Pederastia, a paedophile priest who initiates new recruits into The Justified Ancients of Mummu by leading a satanic black mass. Not all the coincidences that circle this story are light and funny. 

After the Brit Awards, the actions of The KLF were quickly rationalised by journalists as ‘pranks’ or ‘scams’. They were nothing of the sort. They were an honest expression from the very core of Drummond and Cauty. As Drummond told the journalist Danny Kelly the next day, ‘There is humour in what we do, and in the records, but I really hate it when people go on about us being “schemers” and “scammers”. We do all this stuff from the very depths of our soul and people make out it’s some sort of game. It depresses me.’ 

Once again they had reacted instinctively on the deepest level they knew, and found their actions misinterpreted as some sophisticated Machiavellian media manipulation. They could not wound the industry, and they could not fight it. When they first decided to take on the mantle of The Justified Ancients of Mummu their intention had been to claim the music industry for themselves. Instead, it had swallowed them up. They had failed. They were in a very dark place. 

As Drummond told Danny Kelly, ‘Looking back, we realise we don’t really know what our motivation was. All we know is we’ve got, as well as everything else, this dark side to our personality. We looked into our souls and entered into the same area that [Charles] Manson must have entered . . . and that bloke who shot up Hungerford.’ Here Drummond was referring to the mass shooting in 1987 by a lone gunman called Michael Ryan, which led to the tightening up of Britain’s gun laws. Kelly challenged him on this because, if it was hyperbole, then it was in terrible taste. He asked Drummond if he really meant it. ‘I do actually. Yes I do,’ Drummond said. ‘It is the same area. Somebody recently used the phrase “corporate rebels”–about The Manic Street Preachers, I think–and both Jimmy and I didn’t want to be just corporate rebels because there’s just so much of that, shameless, in the music business. We felt we were headbutting . . . headbutting . . . trying to push at what’s acceptable. It was completely pointless and you don’t know why you’re doing it but it has to be done. And that’s what Michael Ryan did; he just woke up one morning and thought “right, today’s the day I go out and get the bastards” and went out and shot the bastards . . .’ 

A number of journalists from this period came away from interviews speculating as to whether or not Drummond was on the edge of a breakdown. What next? Where could they go from there? They had been on a journey deep into the very heart of the beast. They had failed, and they might never feel clean again. They had to get away, but was it possible for a group that successful to escape from the industry? 

In 1992, The KLF were massive. The previous year they had sold more singles than any other act in the world. They had had a string of global number one records. They had hits in America. The critics adored them. How could they escape from the industry? How could they become forgotten? 

How could they reclaim their souls?”

Los Angeles, 2019

“ On the national scale, that same thing – 

self questions self; self encounters not-self; 

equals borders, war, destruction.. that’s where it goes. 

That’s where it ends. That thing ends in disaster.

It ends in neurosis on a personal level. 

And it ends in War on the national level.

So I began to think: “What could we replace that with?” And I was looking at these poor MPD fuckers. And I realised they just don’t have a context.

What would happen if we decided to abandon The Personality, and replace it with 

a Multiple Personality Complex? 

Because as we all know – everyone in here, I’m sure.. I mean, I feel as if I can say this for certain, knowing human beings as they are: sometimes you do things that you don’t want to do. Sometimes you do things that are contradictory to what you think. Sometimes you fuck yourself up.

Why? Because there’s not one person in here; there’s hundreds.

And if you start giving them names, and you start shuffling them about; if you start playing with them, you become a bigger human being. Because you’ve no longer allowed yourself to stop at your boundaries.

Imagine the personality as… let’s choose Windows, even though that’s a contentious one. Imagine the personality as Windows. Instead of the personality.. there’s so many people, I’m sure you’ve met them.. you talk to them, and they say “No, this is the way I am. I’ve worked on this. This is me. And I won’t change. And you’ll just have to work with that. This is me; this is important; this is what I’ve come to, 

and this is What I’ve Made Of Myself.”

Bullshit. It’s a trap. They don’t 

go anywhere; they’re stuck there.

What if those same people were 

then given Personality-2000? 

Which is an upgrade, and an add-on? 

And here’s a bit of your personality that likes hip hop? 

Here’s a bit to your personality that likes ballet? 

And because we’ve all got them. And we’ve got the fucker.. 

we’ve got the serial killer inside; we’ve got the wonderful new-age bastard… we’ve got whatever we like. 

We’ve got James Bond in there. 

We’ve got Pussy Galore in there. 

They’re all there.”

Big Mandy

BEST – FANDOM – EVER :

Big Mandy collects Still-in-The-Box Original Mint Condition Promotional Stuffed Toy Meerkat Family Meerkats from CompareTheMeerkat.com and keeps them in a little shrine in the corner of her guest bedroom at home.

And then she ‘ships them.