MIRACLE INVASION

2009-08-26T21:57:00.001-07:00

http://miracleinvasion.blogspot.com/

2009-01-06T03:21:00.000-08:00

trying to sort my things out and put a book together thats why i stopped doing this

here are some unfinished scraps

2008-09-05T22:01:00.000-07:00

fortuitous circumstances, barriers to progress elimated
vast paradises. leopards prowl past white walls.
palm shadow on white walls. shadow plays.
vegetable forms reaching and trembling.
leopards in and out of the shadow.
shadowed gold.
in the eyes of satelittes.
enclosed in
the sodium walls.

Brute peacocks strut along coridoors
marble. beaten gold. firelight. barbaric luxury.
indolent kings slumped on their thrones,
massed ungulates
hoofprints in soft mud
plum blossom on wet asphalt
Plaistow in grey morning
river mist. mud. sunlight, weak as piss
dribbling through cloud sheet.

Roman legions trudging through mud
police sirens ripping the air
cigar-chomping railway barons
pince-nez wearing homosexuals embrace in the daffodils
quote whitman
declamatory in the flower-beds
in earshot of curious squirrels,
who cock tiny heads, paws raised to chin,
amongst the oak roots.
Peacocks in barbaric coridoors.
in fervour of new begininngs
in the release of hoarded energy.
nova light. eclipsed stars.
space on fire. deep space. white fire.
variegated finches. in lattice of birdsong.
in thrumming web of birdsong

Norman soldiers trudging through mud.
radiance.raindance.
wolves rifle through rubbish bins
in the backstreets
behind the cafes and the restauraunts
forest to city-city to forest.
the smirking insinuations of marigolds
and the plants in the gardens, so orderly
so decorative
are simply biding their time.
roots buckle the ashphalt
creepers curtain the windows
darken the drawing rooms.
tanks in the petrol station forecourts
buisness school graduates tumble in the ornamental fountains.
remove trousers, bellow.

delirious captives
press the pleasure button!
press the pleasure button! again! again!
sea turning. frothing, roiling. Tumultuous, green-backed, white-fingered god.
Twisting, turning as if in chains, beating against the walls of the cell.

chained god thrashing.

And the tribes spread out and came to populate every corner of the broad earth.
And dwelled in isolation, each tribe in its own region, until physiques and features changed, in submission to new enviroments.
Landscape, weather patterns, food sources...
Expansion. The explosion. Particles propelled outward. Energy expanding outward.
Fragmentation. Difference. The unfolded flower. Fireworks.
Frog ripples on pond surface.
The out-breath.
And now,
Contraction.
Unison. The bud. The acorn.
The tribes are reconvened. The old languages are forgotten.
The old songs are forgotten. The old dances are forgotten.
taboos. rules. roles. customs. observances.
the thousands of tiny patterns are caught up by and integrated in the larger pattern.
Mass extinction. Landscape is homogenised. Climate shifts. The specialist is driven out by the generalist.
The scavengers and squatters.
New eco-systems are forged. New rivalries. Monopolies are broken up. Rulers are toppled. New monoplies are formed.
New rulers look out over the land.
Contraction.
The in-breath.

pleasure button. pleasure button. pleasure button. pleasure button.
accept the reality.
the options are really quite limited.
gyre and gimble.
each living the others death.

2008-09-02T18:24:00.001-07:00

Lucid transformations, harking back to earlier times of tangible angels, pellucid sun gods, children, laughter and arching rainbows.
Sun-bursts and cloud-bursts, giddy-hearted, while running through the long grass, joy siezes us, rain and sun intermingled.

Vision becoming more intense as it slows, seeping gradually into the skull-dark, like day's first sun, reaching over the hills to light the valley.
light spreading outwards, the moment expanding, containing ever more within itself, stretching in all directions and dimensions.

Flowers laughing, grass laughing, children playing in the laughing grass
the sun smiles benevolently, its light mellow and golden.

Are we to be expelled from these sweet meadows in perpetuity? Even now the memories seem close enough to touch, can almost feel the air there-
its gentleness, its sun-warmth, its sprightly youth.

How did our limbs become so heavy? When did our thoughts grow so ponderous, our preoccupations so petty?
How did this come to pass? It is springtime still, the branches are supple and the leaf is green.
Only inattention, be it distractedness or wilfull blindness, can convince us that winter has come and that the sap has ceased to flow.

Your heart is a bud set to burst, your mind a flower, opening to greet the sun. And you never left the meadow and the laughing of its grass, though in your mind you conquered mountains and crossed the raging seas, charted icy wastes and begged for change in friendless cities. Wandered alone in empty deserts where the white sun burned your skin, crawled and hacked through sultry jungle where snakes and leopards lurk. Saw fantastic monsters and wonders too numerous to name, marvels both man-hewn and natural. Cities carved from mountain tops, temples of shining light, trees tall enough to touch heaven.

Lived among tribes with strange customs and of strange appearance, and learned their ways,
became indistinguisble with them and forgot your homeland.
Your face hidden beneath their tribal masks.
You jealously guard your status among the tribe. You brandish your spear. You hold yourself very erect and affect a stern experssion.
You imagine yourself very imperious.
You think you can never come back to the meadow.
What does the meadow know of power, of influence and the customs of strange tribes?
What does the meadow know of intrigue, manipulation and deceit?
Of brute force or brutal cunning? Of violence greed betrayal?
Of all the small meanesses and dishonesties of thought, hypocrasies and double standards,
cruel, spiteful thoughts, thoughts of censure, thoughts of scorn, mockery, the pinched, mean mind, the vindictive mind, the spiteful mind.
What does the meadow know of indolence, of idleness, of joyless self-indulgence, of lassitiude and inertia?

THE SECRET DOCTRINE!

2008-07-12T23:35:00.001-07:00

sun shafts break on rock face,
shadow of fern fronds
flutters in wind gasps
moss on stone.
Forest cathedral.
Plant pillars
buttresses
knotted root
spiralling vine
twisting tendril
light hunt.
The Benevolent Bobby Bisto is perched on a mossy rock. Green light. Leaf shadow.
Instructing his earnest students in his system of esoteric wisdom.
THE SECRET DOCTRINE!
small birds hop about his feet, untroubled by his presence. Is he genuine? Is he a fraud? He is irresistibly likeable, a flashing smile, crinkled laugh lines
a shaggy mane of white hair. Eye twinkle. Laughing.

The Cimmarons camp is known as ASHANTI TOWN.

There is so much I want to show you.
There is a writhing squirming maggot world beneath the surface. A world of contending impulses. Inchoate life forms. Thought forms. Parasitic gods.
Is he taking the piss?
How come he's got that knowing grin on his face the whole time?
MACHINE ELVES!
Blarney stone loquacity' language torrent. thought finds language without friction. tendrils of word growth unfurl outwards, stretch and branch off, there is no search for the right word, the felicitous phrase.
bird song.
the thought finds the words waiting and slips into them gratefully
the unfolding instant.
the students sit on moss and root. burgeoning awareness.
swell and burst. Bobby Bisto remodels the world. Remakes it. Draws out relationships. Exchanges. Patterns. Words take shape in minds eyes, become swirling image clouds, throw images upon the mind screen. Marching armies. Unfolding flowers. Memory flash.
Emotions swell up and ebb away.

WORLD ECONOMIC MELTDOWN!

2008-07-07T05:44:00.000-07:00

alright you bag of slags i had things to do.... i've been in the mountains but i'm back now... Bear with me....

F. FLYPAPER: PRELIMINARY TEST RESULTS.

2008-07-05T20:30:00.000-07:00

No digestive organs. Advanced photosynthesis. Transformation of energy. Wind. Sun. Light. Heat. Transmuted to power mind/body matrix. Draws energy directly from the living environment. Through the pores. Breathes carbon dioxide. Advanced powers of regeneration. Thumb removed grew back within 24 hrs. Further experiments suggest no limit to the body's ability to regenerate itself. Advanced internal temperature control. Body heats and cools itself in response to outside temperature. Reaction to unspoken thought detected. Hostile intentions registered. Responses recorded to events happening outside the perceptual field. Able to negotiate obstacles blindfolded. Echolocation suspected but not confirmed. Memory comparable to that documented in savants. Total recall. Mathematical capacity unrivalled. Instant calculations. Musical pieces of enormous complexity played note perfect after single hearing. Distances judged with the naked eye, accurate to within nanometres. More startling is an ability to comprehend languages never before encountered. Proved able to decode Mayan glyphs and Chinese ideograms. Thought in image not language. Answers arrived at without calculation. An aptitude for manipulation to rival that of the most prodigious psychopath led to Frankie Flypaper escaping from the research laboratory. He is being tracked.

"He could have escaped any time he chose. He wanted us to know. He wanted us to have those results. How much more has he hidden from us? What dos he have planned? A mind like that could achieve anything. He must be stopped. Search the hunting grounds. Every man and woman we have, out there, now."

Huge fractal fields of information intersect, merge, drift.
Frankie mind intact and accessible. As is all mind and every mind. All information exists in potentia and accessible. Hawk mind flying over forest. Rabbit mind skipping through tussocky grass. Mind of tracker dog stalking Frankie through Ruche's hunting grounds.... DNA memory snaking back through millennia. cause and effect branching off endlessly into future time. Preempting future events, following the paths of necessity backwards into the deep past. Perspective not limited to current body coordinates. There is no thought. There is only information apprehended as protean image or sensation. Hawk mind registers as hawk sensation. Air currents on extended wing. Hunt focus. Calculations of distance and speed of strike. Prediction of prey movement. Tree mind of wind fingers through leaf hair, insect trails up trunk track, roots embedded in delicious soil and branches stretched into open air, sunlight and the moving sap..... everything is sensation. Mind is sensation. Thought is the abstraction of sensation. Substituting symbols for blocks of sensation.
The abstract entities represented by numerals take on coloured forms, merging together in a series of combinations before settling into a new forms. Equations shimmer and writhe. Patterns flower among dataclouds. Minute shifts in the environment registered. Mind traveling all circuits. Becoming what it perceives. Taking on the identity of whatever it contemplates. Becomes water. Becomes mineral. Total identification. Flowing over the surface of the world, taking on each shape it passes over. Like the blown leaf for whom the wind is its will, action flows naturally and inevitably from circumstance. Grinning through green forest light. Deliriously happy. Dog bark in distance. Man hunt behind him.

Drifts through signals. Some minds flare orange and red or purple black in grey brain mass. Vast accumulations of energy. Vivid. Distinguished from pulpy brain stew. Zoom in. Inhabit coordinates. Reels from hate blast. Dense purple-black hate. Rigid control. Power lust. Clenched.
Escapes. Moves back stunned. Finds orange-red flare. Sanctuary. Make for that place.
Physical intelligence. Body finds quickest, most efficient, graceful ways of moving through space, of performing actions. It gives Frankie an animal quality. A leopard-like litheness. There is no stifness. No awkwardness. No miscalculation. No resistance. Fluid. Muscles propel body through space. Slice through air. A refined awareness of just how much weight a joint or muscle can bear, how much force can be relayed through it, how much traction can be relied upon. A feel for weights and forces and distances. Gazelle gambol. A spring and suppleness. No stumble. No snag nor snare. Joy in movement. Leap, hands curl around tree branch, momentum propelling Frankie over a muddy brook, lets go, lands lightly on feet, momentum riden into run step, laughing. Leap and skid down loose dirt bank, controlled slide and run.

MIRACLE INVASION!

2008-07-05T01:07:00.000-07:00

Into the void created by the collapse of the state stepped a whole range of religious and ideological organisations, even, on occasion, criminal enterprises. Bandits with Robin Hood complexes. Drug Barons financing hospitals and day clinics. Football teams funded by blackmarket booty.
Evangelists handing out religious tracts with aid packages. Food for prayers and conversions. Medical treatment for believers. Free meals at church services. Clothes emblazoned with religious platitudes.

Huge amounts of money are being expended in the slums and rookeries, on the refuse islands and shanty towns. A furious contest for souls is being waged wherever people are poor and vulnerable, susceptible to bribes and crocodile tears.
Free childcare is an opportunity to mould the minds of the young, and teach them the importance of saving the souls of their parents.
Miracles are staged at every opportunity. Charlatans surreptitiously administer medicines and pray vociferously over their patients, praising God at the first sign of improvement.
Stooges rise from wheelchairs, raise arms to heaven, dance merry jigs of gratitude.
Every church fights for a larger share of the market. Every two-bit cult, every self-declared prophet, every would be revolutionary. Fishers of men all.
No avenue for indoctrination is left unexplored. Radio stations broadcast the Word. Musicians in every conceivable genre. Computer games. Children's stories. Free concerts are staged in the slums. Books are handed out. Games.
Some neighbourhoods are effectively run by a particular sect. They operate as states in minature, extracting tithes and worship in exchange for public services. Religious law operates in these places, sometimes deeply barbaric and intrusive. Sexual lives are rigorously policed. Injudicious words can result in utterly disproportionate punishments.

Religion is big business and the marketplace is a competitive one. Advertising, PR and merchandising outlays are on a par with those of the major corporations and their techniques are no less sophisticated. The heads of the bigger churches pull CEO wages. The churches themselves model themselves after the old cathedrals in their desire to overwhelm the senses.
Services are held in huge auditoriums with preachers elevated on stage, voices massively amplified. There is extensive use of gold, marble, porphyry....
A range of special effects and light displays take the place of stained glass and clouds of incense.
Stirring music rumbles from high-end speakers. Sound and image and the Word are used to push the worshipper into a state of high suggestibility. Awe. A suspension of the critical faculties. Singing and chanting in unison is used to foster a mob mind, the sense of being carried along by a force greater than any one individual. In some cases sacraments include mildly psychotropic drugs.
Ancient techniques of oratory, passionate cadences, emotive language, call and response, crescendos and lulls are mined mercilessly. Savage fears and furtive desires are invoked and maipulated.
And it is working. Huge profits are being made. Thousands and thousands are attending services.

2008-07-05T00:35:00.000-07:00

Meet Milton Freeman. CEO of Total Correction.
He is immaculately attired, in a conservative way. A well fitted expensive suit, navy blue with a sober barely visible pinstripe. White shirt, starched. Razor sharp trouser crease. Black brogues vigourously buffed and polished. Orderly hair, greying, parted with precision. Clean shaven. Straight back. No hint of a gut. Disciplined. Steely eyed. Cruel lips, thin, perpetually pursed.

Total Corrections, a subsidiary of Priceless Attributes, supplies containment and correction services for a whole range of organisations. A growth industry. It is the market leader. It profits not only for charging its clients for services rendered but also from unpaid prisoner labour.
This is part of the rehabilitation program, preparing the prisoner for freedom. Work gets the prisoners out of their cells, provides exercise, discipline and mental stimulation. A whole host of good habits are ingrained.

Pelican Bay Correctional Facility. Maximum Security. Maximum Punishment.
Total isolation. Once entered the cell is never left until the sentence has been served. Prisoners are issued with colostomy bags. Showers heads are built into the cell ceiling. The shower is switched on at the jailers discretion. Water is dirty and either scaldingly hot are icily cold. There are a number of punishments which can be administered without the potential risk of coming face to face with the prisoner. The temperature of the cell can be raised or lowered to excruciating extremes. Gas can be released from dispensers in the ceiling. Walls and floor can be electrified. Walls and ceiling can be contracted to the point at which the inmate is forced onto his haunches, head bowed. Speakers in the wall can be used to broadcast distressing material, sometimes simply white noise played at a painful volume. Frequencies which cause a loss of bowel control, vomiting etc. In other cases psychologically disturbing material is broadcast. For example, the sound of an inmates wife having sexual intercourse with another man. Technology exists which allows all sorts of possibilities. A favourite trick is to make the man fucking his wife the same man responsible for his arrest, or the judge who sentenced him to Pelican Bay.
Distressing news is fed to him, in total isolation he has no way if determining its veracity. This can be anything; that his sentence has been extended to life, that his family has been killed in a huge gas explosion, that a war has started or a plague unleashed, that new and abominable punishments have been authorised, the removal of the tongue for instance... the possibilities are endless.
Punishment cells include insect cells, crawling with fire ants, mosquitoes, cockroaches, flies, maggots, millipedes and giant poisonous centipedes, rat cells, shit cells where the inmate is knee deep in human excrement and the dreaded itching cells. An irritant is released into the air which makes inmates itch until they rend their own flesh. Inmates have emerged from the itching cells with strips of flesh hanging from them like rag dolls.
Other punishments include allowing an inmate a pet, usually a dog or cat. With no other company the inmate forms a deep bond with the pet. He cares deeply for the animal. The pet is then tortured and killed in front of him, while the guards laugh uproariously.

Other prisons are run on the lines of mental institutions with inmates afforded a relatively large degree of liberty but kept sedated on a range of drugs and subjected to a program of forcible rehabilitation. Electro-shock therapy. Aversion therapy. Lobotomy. It is often easier and more politically convinient to declare a person insane than to find them guilty of a specific crime. There is also no need to set a time limit on their incarceration. They can be held for as long as it is deemed necessary.

Board meeting. Total Correction.
'Prevention of crime?' Freeman barks incredulously
Prevention of crime, dear god above, how did this simpleton find his way into a board meeting? Jenkins you naive wretch, you blundering sappy ignoramus, remind me, what business are we in?'
'But, crime prevention sir, no sir, I mean, correction sir, correction of the criminal mind sir' Jenkins, flustered but relieved, thinking he has the right answer
'You blithering dolt Jenkins, have you seen the reoffending stats, dear Mary mother of God, they're way up into the 90s, what sort of bloody correction is that you nincompoop. Think again. You Morris, spell it out for the half wit would you'
'P.R.I.S.O.N.S'
'What does that spell Jenkins?'
'Prisons sir'
"the vast bulk of our annual profits comes from the designing, building and managing of prisons. What possible interest could we have in the prevention of crime? To the contrary you drooling baboon, our interest lies in the escalation of crime. Our interest lies in whole sectors of the population becoming criminalised. The more criminals the more prisons. The more prisons the more money for us. Bottom bloody line.'

Henry Bastard takes up the thread
'Without a bulwark of the unemployed the economy suffers. Wages rise. We need the unemployed, but have yet to devise a satisfactory method of managing them. Prisons and detention camps provide the best current management option. Think of these people as vectors of infectious disease which must be quarantined to prevent them from spreading to society as a whole. Here their discontent can be contained. They are unable to organise themselves into a political movement. They are unable to spread fear among the affluent and law abiding sections of society. They are unable to sabotage to smooth running of the economy.'

2008-07-04T23:19:00.001-07:00

Ganymede and Xanadu are owned by Priceless Attributes but are not factory towns in the sense that Petersberg is a factory town. Only a relatively small proportion of residents are directly employed by Priceless Attributes. The cities are essentially a business venture. Priceless Attributes rent retail space and housing and supply public utilities; power, water, education, health, security (Wolfram is a subsidiary of Priceless Attributes) and so on either directly or through sub-contractors.
Under this system not only do Priceless Attributes amass obscene amounts of wealth they also control their population to a degree only dreamed about by any dictator, oligarchy or parliamentary democracy. The resident of Ganymede or Xanadu is educated by Priceless Attributes. He lives in an environment designed by Priceless Attributes. His news comes from Priceless Attributes. His entertainment is provided by Priceless Attributes. He is subject to laws drawn up by Priceless Attributes. Strictly speaking there is no public space in the cities of Priceless Attributes. Everything is owned by Priceless Attributes. There is no need for censorship as such. Distribution networks, media, publishers, advertisers are all either owned by or in thrall to Priceless Attributes and any material critical of or detrimental to the interests of Priceless Attributes is strangled at birth.

notes....

2008-07-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

Elysium Fields. Gated Community.

cliques of eerily similar pubescent girls stand around the shopping mall (Elysium Gardens) projecting attitudes of lofty boredom and ostentatious scorn
"ha! visible cartilige" extemporising a running commentary on passers-by and their sartorial and physical shortcomings....
Plastic surgery has rendered them almost identical.
they speak in an affected drawl and hand each other compliments of breathtaking insincerity.
'Oh I love your nose! You've had it remodelled again!'

Private Security Guards prowl the permimeter fence. Combat trousers. Military boots. Handguns in holsters. Stun grenades. Tear gas canisters. Capsicum spray. Tasers.
Snipers in dicreete (neo-classical) guard-towers yawn, pick noses. Razor wire in sodium
light. Inside the gates neighbourhood bobbies stroll the streets tipping their hats to the ladies and ruffling the hair of youngsters.

Wives read magazines in tanning beds. Blue glowing coffins. Turn orange.
Attack dogs strain at the leashes of their handlers.

Shopping mall air ionised to deliver pleasing sensation.
Forest of transplanted trees. Recorded bird song. Model birds perch unconvincingly on branches. Glass eyes peer unblinkingly at picnicers.
Nature Walk.

Keeps the riffraff out.

THE SALVATION ARMY!

2008-07-04T04:56:00.000-07:00

The Salvation Army represents a fundamental break from the modern conception of God. Here God offers no succour to the suffering, no courage for the fearful, is no companion to the friendless, no source of strength to the weak, the meek and the mild.
Let us quote from one its own theologians
'Who is this pitiful God happy to sleep side to side with beggars in the wind swept streets, who pleads with the powerful to sheathe their swords, to reliquish the spoils they have won through stength of sinew and fixity of will? Who chides the proud hero and lauds the weak sister. Who, tell me, is this slavish God, this weak, wretched God of conquered peoples? Who bleats for love and understanding. We recognise no such God. Would God shy away from the world he has created? Admonishes the kings he has set to rule over it and laud those who are crushed under its weight? A God who bemoans his own creation? Impossible! What God would make a world only to disown it? This can be no God of ours.
Our God is a God of the victor and not the slave. A God to inspire fear not wheedle for insipid love. He is powerful. He is fierce. His hair and beard are of flame. His counternance is that of the thundercloud and the roiling ocean, the savage tiger, the erupting volcano. Sharp of fang and claw, thew and sinew. Strong and ruthless. He pleads not for mercy, nor does he beg for compassion. He does not cousel forgiveness. He hungers for blood and death. Only victory honours his name, victory and the blood of those who deny him. Fear God. Fear his wrath. Give him his tribute as you would a conquering king. Seek not to humanise him. He is God and He is terrible'
from 'The Wolf and the Sheep'

HUMAN ENGINEERING! REDUX!

2008-07-02T04:44:00.000-07:00

Sally Formica is walking home. Home is on the outskirts of town, one of many squatter camps chiseled out of toxic land. Where the steady sodium light is replaced by the smoky living light of fire. Fires in oil drums. Candlelight. Wooden pallets burning in braziers. Oil lamps. And the people lie thick on the floors. Head to toe and shoulder to shoulder. With bedsheets or lengths of old carpet hung from the ceiling or girders in lieu of walls, dividing one lot of personal space from another. Where houses are corrugated iron and driftwood. Plastic sacking and straw. Where waste accumulates outside the doors and is never taken away. Where electricity is purloined and its supply is erratic and volatile. Where old diseases flare up again like vindictive ghosts. Cholera. Yellow fever. Smallpox. 18 miles away. Long foot slog through city streets. Where the roads don't go. Where dirt tracks wind aimlessly through filth.
But for now she walks through great canyons of Xanadu, in the shadow of skyscrapers. Where capital reaches its greatest point of concentration, and the buildings grow tallest and most vigorously. Each one pressed hard against the other, fighting for space. A rainforest of skyscrapers. A dense ecosystem where money is sun and rain and soil.
The the very air crackles and flashes with imagery. The sigils of advertisers. Dragons swoop down at her, making her heart race in response. Adrenal glands spark. Handsome men with come hither smiles pose in their underwear, 6 packs rippling in low bedroom light. Gesture to her. Whisper words in her ear. The siren songs wrench at her heart. Surges of bittersweet memories. Erotic fantasies. Orchestral strings emote. Fanfares of triumphal brass. The heart flutters. Micro-narratives snare the attention. A shorthand dependent on a shared image bank. Hours spent immersed in sound and moving image. Archetypes of the mediasphere.
Nostalgia for things which never happened. Transplanted memories. Fictional childhoods running through the wild flowers. Happy families around a dinner table laden with food. Archetypal idylls more vivid than her own past could ever be. Rope swings over laughing rivers. Toy yachts catch the breeze on glittering lakes. Kite flying on windy hilltops. Golden sand, blue sea and sun sets. Endless days of exquisite languor. Sand between the toes. Swaying of the hammock. Swaying of the Palm trees. Salty tang of the warm sea. Romance in the waves. Salt in the kissing sea. Birthday partys. Gaggles of giggling friends. Cake and jelly and ice cream. and all these things able to be triggered in quick concatenations of image and music. The heart gasps. Overwhelmed. There's a hollow feeling in the gut. A surfeit of ersatz emotion. A hollow feeling that wants more stimulation. that fears being cut off from its supply. But it is getting late and the walk is long. There is no time to linger in the matrix.
As she walks the adverts grow simpler. Cruder. Reliant on older technology. Towards the periphery. Where the money begins to run out. The people on the streets look more tired. Their clothes cheaper. Their gait slower. Their posture stooped. Torn billboard posters for discontinued brands. The buildings grow less densely. Vacant weed grown lots. Shattered windows. Collapsed roofs. Walls blackened with soot. Sally is walking home. To CanalTown. Where the canals criss-cross old industrial estates and wasteland. Clogged with squatters. The exhausted canals choked with algae and rubbish. Sewage dumped directly into the reeking canals. Dense and green and putrid. Lined with houseboats and barges with makeshift roofs. Tarpaulin stretched over the barges. And people sleeping inside pressed together for warmth. And the rats are everywhere. Huge and fearless and black. Mould grows everywhere on the damp walls. Sprouts from cracked plaster and concrete. A persistent dampness. Clothes and sheets and blankets all impregnated with the damp. Inescapable. Weakening the lungs. Everyone hawks and coughs up gobbets of thick green phlegm.
People living on rotting houseboats and barges. And in the factories and derelict warehouses. Building fires on the concrete floors. Thousands and thousands of them. Priced out of the housing market. Priced out of the city centre. Priced out of the suburbs. Rats running over prone bodies. Working in the sweatshops for the tailors. Haute couture. Sweat shops. Making one off items. Sewing quetzl feathers into headresses, diamonds into the hemlines of ballgowns. Febrile micro-enterprise. Legal, quasi-legal and illicit. Fermenting fruit or honey and spices in old iron bathtubs, synthesising psychoactive drugs in makeshift laboratories, flogging quack cures and counterfeit medicines to desperate families, running protection rackets, cloning credit cards, cultivating cannabis and opium, growing herbs and vegetables in roof gardens, recycling rubbish, harvesting scrap metal, resurrecting expired electronics, reviving exhausted furniture, varnishing, reupholstering, faking fashionable handbags, sunglasses, t-shirts, football kits, stealing and robbing and extorting, preaching Apocalypse and salvation, building lean-tos and shacks, purloining electricity from the grid or conjuring it from the sun and wind, renting sleeping space in rooms owned by someone else entirely. The watermen who haul wooden handcarts heavy with sloshing urns behind them, essential in a neighbourhood with no water mains. a whole range of scams and ruses and schemes for survival. Every ecological niche is filled. Every way of extracting a living from the environment. A huge cast of characters thrown back on their own resources. Preyed on by mobs and thugs and confidence men. Harassed by officials and private security guards. Always in fear of losing what little they have. Disease as ubiquitous as the rats. Gangsters preying off the defenceless. Teenage hoodlums thrilled by the fear they induce.
Sally's heart sinks. A roadblock. Wolfram Security. Checking papers they know she doesn't have. Bribe hungry. She recognises Canaltown gangsters lurking around a smoking brazier. Security guards and gangsters. Wolfram gives the gangsters free rein over CanalTown in exchange for their cooperation is crushing dissent, organised resistance, political agitation. The gangsters identify trouble makers. Act as provocateurs. Eliminate leaders. Break up incipient organisations. Instill fear.

WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS!

2008-06-30T15:08:00.000-07:00

Secret socieites coalesce around gods. War God!
A cabal of arms dealers, high ranking soldiers, politicians, thugs, gangsters
Those who stand to profit from the prolongation of conflict. Who perpetuate a competition world. A conflict world. Where one can only advance ones own interests at the expense of another.
Wheels within wheels!
Gods of Chaos and Gods of Control.

2008-06-30T02:54:00.000-07:00

All quotes taken from the Books of the Benevolent Bobby Bisto
"Before Copernicus, the earth WAS the centre of the universe."

"We create reality anew with each moment that passes. It responds to our thoughts as it responds to our actions."
The Most Benevolent Bobby Bisto's theology is predicated on this one assertion. Everything matters. Every thought, every upswelling of emotion, every footfall, every utterance, has a definite and far reaching effect.
Every event, and all these things are 'events', Bisto recognises no distinction between 'inner' and 'outer', is an act of creation.
Every event affects the shape and tenor of the universe.
A thought can change not only the game-rules of a given society, but the very underlying physical structure of the universe itself.
The right thought could reverse gravity.

The universe is full of gods and these gods, each corresponding to a human drive, fight for control. Each god seeks to reign over a universe made in his own image.

99% of people are unaware this struggle is taking place.

The rest are divided into those who would use their understanding to accumulate personal power and those who would use that understanding for the betterment of all.

All sorts of ramifications follow from these few assumptions. In the world Bobby Bisto embeds his followers withing special attention must be paid to all those groups of people involved in manipulating the the thoughts and emotions of others.
What ends are they pursuing? Which gods do they serve? What deals have been done? What transactions have taken place?

What energies do those drums conjure up? What emotions does the demagogue excite? What actions do they demand of their followers? What attitudes do they endorse? That voice, its cadences, its crescendos, its lulls and plateaus, what does it invoke? Why were those words chosen? What charge do they carry? What associations do they carry?
What behaviour does the town planner seek to promote? Which actions does he seek to 'design out'?
"Remember the very streets, the squares, alleyways and marketplaces are designed to code behaviour. Nothing is accidental. Nothing is random."

What anxieties do those adverts foster? What doubts, what fears? And to what ends?

And look again at the world and see it for the battlefield it is, with people fighting the proxy wars of gods and the gods, parasites dependent on human worship.

This is the fiction Bobby Bisto embeds his followers within.

"And ask yourself, which gods are in the ascendency? The signs are everywhere, for those with eyes to see. Look to the birds, see how they squabble for territory. How they peck at each other, flap their wings and strut in displays of calculated aggression. Look to the plants, how they grapple for light. Look to the cities, how the rich push the poor into the poisoned places, the places of foul air and foetid stinks."

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK!

2008-06-29T03:25:00.000-07:00

Appeal of FeelGood predicated on one assumption. People want to live a script. Insert them into a storyline in which they can be heroes. Give them a sense of importance. Make them feel needed. Tell them the survival of humanity depends on their efforts. Make their lives vivid. Make each decision significant. Make every event significant. Charged with meaning. Reframe everyday occurences. An esoteric reading of events. Make them privy to earthshaking secrets. Use the proven techniques of plot twist and cliffhanger. Place them within a system. A heirarchy they can advance within. With each advance more plot line is revealed. This simple device has ensnared hundreds of thousands of followers and gathered enormous wealth. In the weeks to come we will hear more about FeelGood, their founder and prophet, some of their prominent followers and detail the plot structures they embed their acolytes within.

HOLISTIC SHOPPING!

2008-06-29T01:09:00.000-07:00

The average inhabitant of Ganymede and Xanadu walks around in a state of constant low-level sexual arousal. Titillation is everywhere. Suggestive phrases circle through his mind, the jingles and taglines of advertisements, models leer down at him from animated billboards pouting and preening, holograms seem to lightly stimulate his genitals or brush against her nipples, lubricious music ripples against his inner ear. As a result he is forever seeking release, some endlessly deferred orgasm and turns to the sources of arousal for its fulfilment, consuming voraciously....
Gorgeous shop girls and handsome sales clerks in tight fitting t-shirts stalk the aisles smiling at passers-by.....

Overwhelm them with emotion! Fear! Sexual Arousal! Sentimentality! Strike up the orchestra!
Manipulate the heart strings! Make life outside the manipulation device unbearable! Dull. Lifeless! Make them ache with withdrawal symptoms.
Increase the heart rate! Dilate the pupils! Stimulate adrenal glands!
Embed them in fictions! Swooping strings! Beating drums! Excitement! Fear! Anger! Sexual Arousal!

Observe, if you will, the amplification of emotion in film/TV by music. Priceless Attributes build this manipulation and amplification of emotion into the fabric of their cities. To walk the streets and shopping malls is to be caught up in a torrent of spurious emotion against which everyday life seems unbearbly drab, grey and two-dimensional. For the gameplayers this effect is, needless to say, exaggerated tenfold.

BIG MOVEMENT CONCEAL LITTLE MOVEMENT!

2008-06-28T19:51:00.000-07:00

The cemetery which is home to the Tombstone Kids is large, wild and overgrown. A landscape of stone angels and ivy. White stone and green growth. Tall grass. Venerable yew trees in which owls wait for nightfall. The smell of rosebay willowherb and the scuffling of rats.
Blank faces of angel stone, features eroded by the wind and rain, keep silent vigil over child graves. Moss cushioning stone. A small chapel, its roof caved in, its walls dense with ivy, its interior stripped and set fire to, sits on the periphery of the cemetery, guarding the gates.

In the centre of the cemetery sits a war memorial. It is here the children meet, lighting a fire at the foot of the monument and sitting on its steps, telling stories and entertaining one another with magic tricks. Oliver Twist, the orphan fox cub sits with them on these nights, in the fire-heat, intelligent of eye, handsome in his red coat

The Tombstone Kids. Unorganised. Leaderless.
The children live in mausoleums. Dry and warm. With the dead to keep them company.
There are no better thieves, burglars and pickpockets. Ghosts that flit through crowded streets. Unseen and unheard. Light fingered enough to snatch the watch from your wrist. Quiet enough to unpeel the pyjamas from your snoozing wife. Deeply knowledgeable about the history and traditions of their craft they delight in reinventing old ruses and set pieces. Cons and techniques. Slice the pocket out your trousers with a pair of scissors. Skilled in street magic, masters of misdirection, sleight of hand, suggestion and cold reading. They pride themselves on their elaborate ruses. Their choreography. Their audacity. The Tombstone Kids elevate theft to an artform. An performance. A spectacle. They will stage alien abductions to steal a wallet. They have no sense of proportion. The more extravagant the better. The item to be stolen is merely an excuse for the performance. A new method of misdirection. A new conjuring trick. Some subtle ploy for the appreciation of the connoisseur.
Not many of them. It's a select group. A few boys. A few girls.

Here's Fellini. A thin kid, moves like a cat, and just as nervy. Dark hair, dark eyes, cheekbones you could slit your wrists with. Long fingers, delicate, like a concert pianist. A master of his trade. Only 14. Dresses well. Today we find him in a top hat, a velvet waistcoat over a white shirt of Egyptian cotton, a silk cravat and an antique, gold fob watch. On special occasions he wears the mayors chains of office. Took them right off the old boy's neck. He never felt a thing.

CIMMARRONS!

2008-06-28T17:42:00.000-07:00

In the desert lands where nothing grows child raiders and bandits frolic with machine guns and bayonets. These are the Cimmarrons. The grouop was formed by child soldiers, generations ago. Enlisted to fight a grown-up war they rebelled and slaughtered their officers and fled to the desert lands where nothing grows, their numbers swollen by runaways from the labour camps and miltias. Here they have built their homes and shrines and lives of fierce fantasy. Lives overgrown with the vines and creepers of wild myth, a living green world, dense and humid jungle of the imagination in which they are completely at home. Fed by their own daring raids and artful burglaries. Watch them running, fabrics which glitter, flutter, catch the wild sun. Turbans unraveling, the rattling and jangling of improvised jewelry made of bird beaks and tiny bones, coloured plastic, feathers, beads, shells, tin foil and aluminum. All are dressed as emperors, viziers, sultans, demented shamans in platypus masks and condor wings, magicians in robes and conical, star patterned hats, spacemen and jumble-sale samurai. Monkey bands of whooping boys, crashing through paradise.
Their camp is ringed with flags, fetishes and totems. Ragged pennants, banners of independence. Boys doze in hammocks strung between totem poles.
At puberty the boy must descend into the pit. This brings together all the members of the pack in a mood of great and childlike solemnity. Drums beat and the children chant. The pubescent child is descending into another world and shall never return to this one. He wears a false beard of horse hair and a wooden phallus strapped to his crotch.
The Cimmarrons have no agriculture. They neither hunt nor gather. They refuse to engage in anything resembling work. All their needs are met by the spoils of raids and ambushes. By theft and robbery. Masters of guerrilla warfare. Of cunning and stealth. They are utterly ruthless. Slaughtering the Overseers of the brick pits and copper mines. Massacaring the commanding officers of two-bit militas and liberating their child captives. They melt into the scenery like mist eaten by the rising sun.
"They just disappeared Sir, it all happened so quick sir. Took all the kids with 'em Sir, I'm the only one left alive Sir, look Sir, all dead Sir."

KALAKUTA!

2008-06-27T19:22:00.000-07:00

Badger Priests trained in the Warrens. Intefered with by prurient old zealots in purple robes.
When the Badger Priests begin to manifest signs of sexual maturity they must surrender their badger pelt.
"Father, I suffered night-emissions, here is my pelt"
a solemn moment. the child's head is bent in shame. there is great sadness but no Badger Priest would ever dream of dissembling. Plod sees everything.
"Mother, my womb drips blood, here is my pelt"

Robes of stained glass, mosaics of glitering glass and jewels sewn into flowing fabrics. Sequins. Materials which bewitch the light. Jewelery.Ceremonial antlers.
Robespierre! He wears the antlers of office! His men and women shimmer in robes which seduce the sun!
The children follow their path, dancing and laughing...
The Ark on the Rock.... The Republic.... In the courtyard men and women beat enormous drums
An enormous bonfire burns and there the light flickers and is blurred with smoke
Lagbaja! The Faceless One! Lagbaja dances in smoke haze....
Lagbaja dances in orange flicker of flame and shadow, movements like those of the flame
Lagbaja! The children crowd around him laughing and shouting. As he dances he mimics those around him, he snatches Robespierre's antlers and mocks his striaght backed gravitas, he gestures regally, he frowns and sighs
he extrudes his arse and makes vigourous pelvic thrusts, he bounces his arse up and down and rolls his hips, he falls into a press-up position and humps the dirt with infectious relish.....
he rolls back his eyes and raises his arms to the sky in a parody of trance, becomes possessed, writhes in the dirt
he mimes a prissy, rigidly choreographed dance routine of the sort practised by Ricky Dandelion
he goose steps, stands to attention, salutes, breaks into the Dandelion dance again....
He struts over to Robespierre, sashaying his hips, his lips drawn into a pout and slaps him on the arse
stands behind him and starts a grinding into him in a parody of exuberant lust
Robespierre can't help but laugh, he snatches back his antlers and the pair of them execute the Dandelion dance in perfect synchronisation
horns blow
Robespierre breaks into song
Lagbaja is joined by two beautiful young women, one on either side, they sway to the music and play the role of back-up vocalists
Everyone sings. Everyone dances.
Look around. Through the fire smoke. Through the swift limbs of dancing bodies.
The compound is built of mud and stone. It is centred around the courtyard in which we stand. The building is a scuplture. Its walls are decorated with paintings and low reliefs. These are built up communally with no coherent plan, in the way a city wall comes to swarm with graffiti. Image and word.
Walls are topped with spiralling pinnacles like sea-shells, minarets and pyramids. Walls and roofs sag and bulge, curve and writhe like the edges of a burning candle. Wax moulded by fire. Lava cooling to rock.
This building is not based on the cube. It is not a series of boxes. Walls are prickly or goosebumped or ridged. Conical forms like termite mounds protrude from the floor. Sculpted forms of men, women, gods and demons begin to free themselves from the walls, begin to find form, half-embedded in the building. Facades assume the stylised forms of faces, human and animal.
The decoration is maniacal. All space is filled. Plants grow everywhere. Trees fill rooms, stretch branches through the roof. Creepers reach out feelers along every vertical plane. Plants grapple for light. Birds are everywhere, indoors and out. Singing and fluttering. The roofs are thick and green gardens. Plants droop lazy limbs over roof tops. Dangle idly in the air.

There are people everywhere. Wandering through the corridors. Courting and kissing in the roof gardens. Reading in the libraries and under fruit trees, playing instruments and dancing in the courtyard, flirting and talking and laughing. Lying on cushions. Laughing on cushions. Listening and talking and joking. Children playing and running, leaping like rabbits in long grass.
People studying. Reading. Lost in thought. In rooms whitewashed and soundproofed. Free from noise and distraction. Meditating in the whitewashed cells.

Always music. Landscape of sound. Sound glitters on foothills. Sound sun rising over sound hills.
Time expands. Becomes multi-levelled. The moment strectched accordian-like. Layers. Move up and down within the moment.

Always talk. Always communication. Mind-meld. Communion. Always listening. Connect.
Ideas dart and leap from mind to mind. Dart across space. Electric thought. Mind reaches out to mind.

The Ark on the Rock is deep inside Nogo. Within the walls.
It maintains links with all the most established dissident groups existing in Establishment territory. The Tombstone Kids, the Cimmarrons, etc and has inspired dozens more. There is a network of tunnels extending from within Nogo to the outside.
This is the hive where the bees are buzzing. Where they fly out from. Where they return to.
Kalakuta!
Republic of Rapscallions! Rogues and Rascals!
Where no government holds a mandate. Where no law holds.
Swarm through the tunnels. There is no where they cannot reach. Every shanty town, every lawless no man's land, every military compound and factory floor has hosted them. They allow no pool to lie still and stagnant. Information always. Flow of thought, idea, change. Information.

Robespierre is the face. Lagbaja is the faceless.

MEIN UBERMENSCH!

2008-06-26T15:24:00.000-07:00

Frankie Flypaper. Child of the Refuse Islands. Child of the Cancer Villages. Reborn!

And what is this? No stomach? No digestive organs? He draws living energy from sun and sky, more self-sufficient than the plant! Is this the future? To be freed from the cycle of toil that has charcterised the history of Man? Free from the wheedling demands of the body?
Free from the dependancy of the child that clings always to the mother's breast and cries and wails with each second of seperation? No More!

Frankie's skin is clear and pure, his eyes are violet and his hair is raven black.

2008-06-26T15:16:00.000-07:00

An unemployed ventriloquist is slouched on a park bench
a crumpled blue suit
leaves gather about his feet.
He scatters crumbs and lends his voice to the pigeons which gather round

"Excuse me love, that's my crust"
"Get out of it you horrible old git"

"Alright darling, come here often?"

"Oi Mister, this bread's stale"

The dialouge becomes lewder, more violent, bizzare, unhinged
he leans foward on his seat, his voice rising in volume and emotion
The ventriloquist is shouting, stabbing the air with an outstreched finger, face red, veins throbbing in his temples.
Passers-by adjust their paths to avoid him, making detours across the ornamental lawns
shoot nervous glances in his direction.
The pigeons feign disinterest....

NEXT!

2008-06-26T02:55:00.000-07:00

Six men in toucan masks wrap the night about them-disappear into its folds.
It's Robespierre and his musicians, they play strangely shaped horns and hand drums. He is only seen like this, within a protective sheath of sound.
They say his musicians control the perceptions and behaviour of the crowd, that they can make him appear invisible, or 10 feet tall. This accords with the evidence. All eyewitness accounts concur. Attest to inexplicable phenomena. Sound is known to possess these properties.
Panic sound. Sleep sound. Rage sound.
Rhythms to stretch consciousness. Till the whole world is held in a single thought....
Six men in toucan masks, turbans, black robes, wrapped in the night....

Every one within hearing range begins to dance
Cleanse them! Purge them of their afflictions! Dance till you are purified!
All awareness of space and time is engulfed as sound becomes an all encompassing environment.
The dancers move in a field of music. The music is the landscape. The music is the climate. The music is the texture. The music swells to fill all senses. It is the topography. It is the thought. It is the emotion. This is not exaggeration. This is not poetic license. This is as objective a description as is possible. The musicians now have total control over the dancers. They create the environment the dancers exist within. Not only the physical environment, but the inner landscape. They have control over even the heart rate and other autonomous physical processes. This is meant literally. This cannot be stressed enough.

ASTRID GILBERTO SEX TAPE!

2008-06-26T02:28:00.000-07:00

Every role has its own set of concomitant liberties, its sphere of influence, its responsibilities and its restrictions. Boundaries, strictly policed.
The Clown has his liberties and his bonds, and the King also.
Role is Destiny.

Great Armies foundered here

Inviolable
Imbroglio
Incommunicado

In sand dunes beyond measure
and wind which rips flesh from bone

Tumbler
Tomato
Tombola

and so on
and so forth
a crash of rock on rock

Asthma
Armada
Omerta
Astrid Gilberto

Various mechanisms of Control
quite startling,
how much they have achieved

Who is Paul H Robespierre? Robespierre is the cultural contraband.
Torn and tattered posters spell his name
flyposted on black brick walls, railway arches, sentry boxes,
in Ganymede and Xanadu
in Albion City and Pelican Bay
in all the closed socieites
he is there
the product which, though prohibited, is ubiquitous....

2008-06-24T03:33:00.001-07:00

Who is Paul H. Robespierre?

MIRACLE INVASION!

2008-06-24T00:39:00.001-07:00

In the star chamber, under the eyes of stars, beneath the glass dome which keeps out infinite space
machinery hums. white walls and metal machines. humming in the sterile star chamber.
on marble slab lies Frankie Flypaper, like sacrifical victim on the altar, sedated and naked, his tiny, birdlike body peaceful as the dead, just a gentle rising and falling of the rib-ridged chest to vouch for his continued existence. Visible heart clenching and unclenching under the thin blue skin. White light. Machine hum.
Ruche signals from the viewing gallery. Smee presses the button. Dazzling white light. Fierce light. Machines in motion.
Massive radiation rays bathe Frankie's flesh, envelop him in light, recode his DNA, remake his mind, twisting him out of his time track, forcibly hauling him onto another....
evolution fowarded, his face and body flicker into different formations, a thousand frames a minute, beast, fish, ape, alien, skin becoming scaled, furred, glossy as perspex
reality is disintegrated.
Ruche and his retinue watch from the monitors... Smee is grinning manically, sweating, compulsively jumping from foot to foot like a child desperate to piss...
Ruch has a messianic gleam in his eye, a beatific aspect, but with the saint's latent hysteria
Frankie is surrounded with purple, orange, white radiation aura, crackling....
His body levitates from the slab
He is floating a metre above the marble altar, aura crackling in colour
his eyes are closed
rays bathe blue flesh
sores heal, lesions seal
atoms vibrate
all boundaries dissolve
all knowledge is simultaneously apprehended
Universe Brain. He sees himself through the eyes of Ruche, then Smee, then from a disembodied viewpoint a 2 feet above himself. Sees himself floating, auraed, radiation pulsing
DNA becomes language, he sings it, sings a new body, a new mind....

informal settlements grow like toadstools across the rotten body of the state....
graveyards, abandoned housing estates, industrial zones, the forests and hillsides, poisoned toxic land....
the state retreats
the rich have abandoned it
they have their own security forces
their own water supply
their own power
the poor have been abandoned by it
they have no sewerage, no clean water, no stable power supply, no education, no health care. They have no jobs, they pay not taxes. Their births are not registered. Their deaths are not noted. They are the Invisibles. They occupy another world. Hidden in the cracks and crevices and out on the periphery of our world. They make their own arrangements.

In the Star Chamber Frankie's mind is reconverging
his body floats back to the slab, gently, as a leaf falls from a tree, nuzzled by invisible breezes

the Tombstone Kids, the refuse islands, Nogo,
Private Enterprise takes the place of the state, as in the case of Weedly-Chough or Peter Familias' factory town
or
alternatively
criminal organisations
such as the Bandicoots, the Mungiki, the Spear of God, the Lamb of God
resources of private individuals or organisations now dwarf those of the states. Where does power reside?
A patchwork of territories....

"Gentlemen, I bring you the Future!"
Ruch and Smee are exultant
Frankie is beautiful
he has been reborn an Adonis with violet eyes

What has happened to the economy? There is instead a patchwork of informal economies and a vast global blackmarket. Counterfeiters. Thieves. Smugglers. Pimps. Mercenaries. Drug dealers.
Off-grid.
This is a new world. This is your guide to the new world. Your map.
Learn of new gods and new heroes. New fears. New hopes.
MIRACLE INVASION!

PLOD WILLS IT!

2008-06-23T23:27:00.001-07:00

the Badger Priests are raiding a drinking establishment....
'OK everyone, put your drinks down and your hands on your head. This is a raid.'
The regulars sigh in acquiescence. Penance not punishment is the motto of the Badger Priests, children all, trained in the Warrens.
None over the age of 13. They wear the pelts of badgers over their heads and white tunics to signify purity, tied round the waist with gold braid.
They have no legal powers as such, only religious authority, but here religious authority counts for a lot. Those who scorn it find themselves overlooked for promotions, shunned by their neighbours, unable to receive credit, life, in short, is made difficult for apostates. So the drinkers set down their glasses and try their best to look repentant.
"Scourge myself little brother? Yes little brother, yes, Plod wills it little brother, I quite agree...."

Escape the tentacles of Plod.
Green and slimy
Slathering limbs.

Penance not Punishment.

"Mr Quince sir, the Aborigines of Australia have been complaining about conditions in the Safari Park. They say they have never had to hunt lions before. They object. They say it is dangerous and that many of their young men have been seriously maimed and even killed by the lions. Do you feel responsible for these accidents Mr Quince? DO you not think it would be more appropriate to have them hunting wallabies or something more traditional Mr Quince sir?"

"Look we've made this quite clear. Autonomy comes at a price. The public won't pay to see those boys club defenceless marsupials to death. We are protecting their ancient and noble culture. But they have to meet us halfway. the public wants to see man against lion. Man against crocodile. Man against bear. Not man against Skippy the bloody kangaroo. End of Story."

JACKIE CHAN PROMOTES PEACE!

2008-06-23T17:35:00.000-07:00

-Truthwerks Broadcasting-

Morris Quince, spokesman for the UN Tribal Peoples Group, reports from the latest meeting
'The preservation of these unique and ancient cultures is of course our sole aim and preoccupation. We have talked long into the afternoon. These are not easy questions to address. The coexistence of the ancient and the modern is a tremendously difficult balancing act. There are numerous practicalities we would be naifs and fools to overlook. If, for example, tribal land happens to be also, the site of valuable mineral wealth, well.... We must be pragmatic. We advocate the integration of the tribesman into the safari park format. The tribesman must be profitable, must be productive if he is to justify his place int he modern world. He must not be mollycoddled nor patronised. Within the safari park format, hunting, under agreed quotas, the animals confined there, staging dances and rituals at times to be agreed upon, with audiences of paying visitors, he can preserve his ancient and noble culture and still meet the demands of the modern world.'

This hodgepodge of vanquished tribes convened on condemned land.... the site of an old gasworks with toxins eating into the soil, where rusted twisted metal protrudes from among the bricks and rubble and broken glass glints in sunshine. Animals wander confusedly in this alien environment, struggling to improvise an ecosystem. Lions, elephants and kangaroos, macaws, cockatoos, gaudy birds of paradise....
Palm trees struggle in the hard dirt. The tribesmen whittle at arrow heads, struggle to learn their lines, the lineaments of foreign histories, myths that don't belong to them, learn the steps of dances far lewder and more lascivious than anything their ancestors would have recognised.
Earnest anthropologists attend meetings with the tribal leaders, accompanied by the safari park owners, Morris Quince and other prominent members of the UN Tribal Peoples Unit.
"Yes, we realise you come from different tribes, that's why we've worked so hard to come up with a kind of generalised vision of your culture and what it represents. the common aspects... spears, hunting, dances.... we've taken the best elements from your respective traditions and made them accessible to our target audience. Look, this way you can retain your independence, we're not asking you to integrate in Western Society. We're trying to preserve the things which make you unique"
Quince sounds terribly exasperated....
"The ingratitude is astounding" he says to one of the entrepreneurs funding the project over drinks later on that evening
"Sometimes I wonder whether it's worth it at all"
"Imagine saying they don't want drums! How can you have a tribal dance show without drums? People expect drums"
A wildebeest kicks at the dust dispiritedly.

FOSSY JAW!

2008-06-22T04:21:00.000-07:00

Compte Vermillion Ruche is a confirmed devotee of the practical joke. He is forever recounting tales of his past exploits.
"Remember that time we laced the Marquessa's luncheon with laxatives? Christ, I nearly pissed myself, or rather, she did hahahhaha"
he'll chuckle vociferously. Or
"what about when Denzel was shagging that bit of totty and we got the recording of his mum having sex with her new fella and played it through the stereo, top volume.... fucking hell, she doesn't half make a racket the old dear! I don't think he's ever really recovered from that poor bastard! Ooh, Tony, harder, Tony Harder" he squeals in delight, mimicking the sounds of Denzel's mum with no inconsiderable aplomb, not to mention enthusiasm "ooh, deeper Tony, harder!"
Ruche delights in violating the privacy of his staff, interfering in their sex lives, the movement of their bowels and their intimate emotional lives. This is all done in the name of 'having a laugh' and results in a distinct low level anxiety among all that work for him. A guarded, wary manner.....
He has hidden cameras secreted in the living quarters of all his staff and overtly films them while they are at work. He gathers reams of material about their private lives and predilections.
Naturally in the course of this surveillance he uncovers much contempt and scorn directed at him. Curiously he does not make his mockers the subject of punishment or ostracism but instead seems to feel impelled to win their favour, inviting them hunting or to sit next to him at dinner and share in his favourite cognac....

HALLIBURTON DEATH CAMP!

2008-06-22T00:22:00.001-07:00

FUCK! MACHINE MALFUNCTION!
the machines have gone haywire. the young workers look like they're in the midst of an epileptic fit, twitching and spasming like broken puppets.... it doesn't seem to occur to them that the machine is faulty, spewing out random signals. they strive to keep up with every beep. they're going to collapse with exhaustion, maybe die, like the participants of the dance marathons they held in the depression. limbs kick and flail, are twisted into unnatural angles. it's grotesque. god, look at that one, shes actually foaming at the nostrils!
such pride in their work though! such dedication!
it's inspiring really.

deep in the underground research laboratories a lowly lab technician is on the verge of a shattering breakthrough...
"if i can pull this one off I'll be in clover for the rest of my days. Ruche will fucking love me for it..."

Manor houses in which rituals are enacted, awry, a misprint in the grimoire conjures the wrong god.
A lewd demon who cums in the face of an eminent aristocrat. Lady Jowel-Humbugger, of Anglo-Germanic descent.
‘Hypotenuse, initiate us in your celestial mysteries’
‘I’m not Hypotenuse, I’m Donkey Schlong, here’s cum in your eye you horse-faced slag’
SPLAT!
‘Here’s another pearl necklace for your collection you inbred tart!’

Little Frankie Flypaper's skin is a ravaged landscape of suppurating sores and seeping lesions. He has been hard at work melting down plastic bags for the boss. His lungs crackle and wheeze. He daren't slow down or he'll get a crack round the head from that horrible cunt Billy Brigand, the Overseer.
One day Frankie's going to escape. He knows all about the mainland. They all do. Hell, the walls of his hut are papered with pictures from magazines and newspapers. There's more to life than this, sifting through through the rubbish, the stench of sulphurous hell in the nostrils...
CRACK!
"Flypaper you malingering little bastard, stop daydreaming!"

He gets a sympathetic look from old Lesley, Lesley's all right. Master craftsman, Lesley. His work sells for thousands on the mainland. Course, no one had any idea till that magazine turned up, Arty-Facts, that was it, and one of his contrivances emblazoned all over the front cover.
'No information regarding this elusive genius is available. His agent, a Mr Boris Zlocky, says only that he is deeply private and lives as a recluse on a barren island in the North Sea, shunning all guests other than himself.'
Course, it was all a load of bollocks. Les is a serf, does what the boss tells him. To be fair, they treat him special. Have to. Biggest cash cow on the bloody island. Shaping his sculptures from melted plastic and crippled metal. Wires and circuitry.
Frankie's nostrils drool black snot.

Ruche thinks he's found a way to activate the dormant DNA, to trigger the next phase of evolution. A few minor technical issues remain, and it is with these our young friend in the lab has been wrestling with. He has doubts, but no scruples. He imagines the moment he announces his findings to Ruche, the ebullient high-fives and whooping.
What these changes will be and whether they will be supportable in the current environment is unknown.
His name is Sebastian Smee, and he is very ambitious.

"Frankie! Stop fucking about with that plastic bag and get your scrawny arse over here!"
Christ, it's Fat Larry, the head of the operation! Frankie didn't even realise Larry knew of his existence let alone his name. This couldn't be good.
"Frankie my boy, meet Sebsatian Smee"
A young, spotty chap with a staid haircut and a labcoat stood before him, one clammy hand extended. Frankie took it, hesitantly. Sebastian beamed, an unwholesome smile.
"Ever been to the mainland Frankie?" His voice had the cracked, wavering quality of the newly adolescent.

"Christ Smee, surely you could have unearthed a sprightlier selection of specimens that this!"
Frankie was standing in a line of 6 boys and 6 girls. They were all naked and being inspected by a very short plump man wearing the most outrageous costume Frankie had ever clapped eyes on. The light was very white and very bright. The room was very large and very white and gleamed painfully. It was immaculate.
"well, it can't be helped" the man concluded with a theatrical flourish of the hand "take them to their quarters"

Everything is very clean. It smells of cleaning chemicals. Everything is white. It is a small room. There are no windows and the light is very bright and white. There is a bed. The sheets are very white. The walls are very white. Glossy, smooth to the touch. A kind of plastic coating. There is a chest of drawers. It gleams with the same white plastic coating. The handles are stainless steel. There is nothing in any of the drawers. There is a speaker embedded in the ceiling. There is nothing else in the room.

"Welcome to Ruche Laboratories. You have been selected for a series of clinical trials. Your family nominated you. They have been given a handsome financial reward in return for your participation. The next few weeks will be an exciting time for you. You will meet many new people and learn many interesting things. You will be party to the most important scientific research carried out this century. Please relax and enjoy your time here at Ruche Laboratories."
the speaker finished transmitting its message and the room fell silent again.

PLANET OF SLUMS!

2008-06-21T23:05:00.001-07:00

tiny birdlike figures, deformed by leaking toxins, grow vegetables on the refuse islands, snare seabirds, recycle electronics, plunder circuit boards for gold....
whole populations support themselves in this way, on offcuts, waste, detritus.
squabbling with gulls and rats.
the refuse islands are enormous. the boats come in. those that live on the islands were stowaways, or the descendants of stowaways.
the islands are manmade. mountainous. studded with hovels. villages smoke in the shadow of garbage mountains. energy extracted from the heat of rotting waste.
in truth, there is no shortage of food here. there are dangers by the dozen, but no scarcity. there are landslides, whole settlements enveloped as a hillside shears off.
toxins leech into the skin. contaminated food. dangerous work. fires flare up without warning. but no scarcity. that's why so many people live here. rooting through the rubbish. fellaheen. snaring seabirds. fishing in the shallows.
Houses rise from the rubble, the hummus of organic waste, plastic bags..... jerrybuilt
painted with the images of popular heroes and homespun gods or with the images of meadows, forests, beaches with sun setting over golden sand....
driftwood frames, improvised concrete embedded with shells, plastic action figures, coins, the bones of fish and seabirds, charms and amulets...
streets of trampled down rubbish
stench of sulphurous hell
mansions of mob bosses on top of rubbish heaps, rat skulls on lengths of sharpened wood, guarded by teenagers with bloodshot eyes
knife fights in the night streets....
wildfire cults spread messages of mania, dancing till collapse, apocalyptic creeds tied to political ends, harnessing the god fervour
small fishing craft bobbing off the refuse islands, flinging out nets
fires spew toxic smoke, thick and black, swallow houses, whole streets eaten by fire
diseases mutate, swarm through the narrow streets, bubonic plagues and cholera, TB, smallpox.... old devils in new dress
and on the mainland too, in the squatter camps, in the old factories huddled together on concrete floors, in tents under leaking roofs
in housing estates long abandoned. walls are broken down, warrens formed, new architectures
Cracked ashaplt in which dandelions, thistles and nettles grow. Sycamore trees. Pigeons. Rats. Fires in steel drums. Buildings. Old office and retail space. Solid grey concrete. Rain streaked. Or metal hangers. Functional and drab. And in between, around and built onto these, shanty structures of corrugated iron, driftwood and shipping containers. And inside too. In shopping malls and retail hangers. Tent cities. Firelight. Pigeons in the rafters. Disrepair. On walls amateurish murals fade. Paintings of masked, armed men clenching fists aloft in victory. Memoirs of more idealistic times. When people hoped for more than just survival. Or had the energy to pretend to do so.

Peter Familias is making his rounds of the dinner hall
"there is to be no desert until everyone and i mean everyone, has cleaned his plate. Yes, that includes you Jenkins, eat your greens"

The captains of the refuse-ships have a monopoly on everything salvaged from the rubbish. Whatever can be resold or recycled. The profits are handsome.
The inhabitants of the islands have no other way to get their goods to the mainland.
Most of these islands are in the hands of mobs, their makeshift societies subject to rigid hierarchies held in place by violence and intimidation. On others a fragile anarchism still prevails and a man may enjoy the fruits of his labour.

In the African football factories children as young as 4 are practising kickups. Everytime they allow the ball to drop to the floor they are whipped.

ENDYMION! ANOTHER ORTOLAN!

2008-06-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

Compte Vermillion Ruche is touring his laboratory. A young lab technician accompanies, clutching a satin bag of ortolans. Everytime Ruche finishes devouring a bird the earnest young man passes him another. Ruche eats with great relish, biting off the head first and talking as he chews.
"at one time of course this was considered junk DNA. Just imagine! The presumptuousness of some people! If they couldn't figure out what it was there for then of course it must be useless, the genetic equivalent of an appendix! It's like hearing someone speaking a foreign tongue and assuming it must be gibberish, just because you can't understand him.

AETHERNET!

2008-06-21T22:59:00.001-07:00

COMMUNICATE WITH SPIRITS TODAY!
With our all new AetherSpeak head set. Simply attach our headset and recite your invocation. The spirits will be at your command!

2008-06-21T22:56:00.000-07:00

Priceless Attributes completed the purchase of Weedly-Chough 3 years ago.
Since then all villagers have been compelled to don the garb of 13th century peasants and engage in a range of antiquted crafts; thatching, blacksmithery, dung hauling, and jousting. there is much consternation among the inhabitants but what can you do? it pays the bills.

WHERE'S MY VITO?

2008-06-21T22:49:00.001-07:00

Captain Vito is the star of a popular action franchise. He is a vigilante adventurer. He upholds order and justice. His own brand of retributive, violent justice. He is tall and strong and handsome. He is loved by many women. Sometimes he yearns for a relationship. He has no shortage of opportunities, but these he rejects, with a heavy heart. His life is too dangerous. His rigid moral code forbids him to expose a woman to such danger, nor marry knowing he could die at any time. He loves children and animals. His constant companion is Torque, a fawn pitbull he rescued from the murderous pimp, Tony the Sleaze. Tony the Sleaze had a sideline breeding pitbulls for dog fights. Mistreating them, starving them, baiting and tormenting them to make them vicious. Captain Vito almost broke down in tears when he saw the animals condition. Locked in cages so small the dogs were unable to even turn around. It made him angry. It made his blood sing for justice. Captain Vito stripped Tony the Sleaze naked. He covered him in lard and blood and gravy and he set the dogs on him. They ripped him to shreds. Tore him limb from limb. Captain Vito took the dogs to a animal shelter and still checks up on them from time to time. Torque he fell in love with. He didn't intend to keep him, but Torque was irresistible. Something in his eyes, some spark of intelligence and loyalty. He didn't want to expose Torque to the dangers of his life as a vigilante adventurer, but now looking back, thinking of all the times Torque has saved his master's life, he's glad he took him. His company, his steadfastness, loyalty and love are what helps Captain Vito keep treading the lonely path of justice and righteousness.
Captain Vito drinks Vito, incessantly. He ascribes to it much of his virility, fortitude and mental acuity. He was created by Vito's marketing division to counter Zoop's co-option of Ricky Dandelion. An early abortive attempt to groom a pop star to rival Ricky directly, Billy Vito, led to the creation of Captiain Vito. The relative commercial failure of Billy Vito reflected badly on the Vito brand. It cemented the popular impression of the company as number two. Perpetual pretenders to the Zoop throne. A different approach was needed. Captain Vito was an inspired gambit. This rugged, 'rebel for order' came to loom large over the cultural landscape giving Vito a level of brand recognition and exposure they could only have dreamed about. His bland catchphrases 'Vito never fails' and 'Where's my Vito?' entering popular parlance. Common catchcrys of the playground, pub, factory floor and office.
Captain Vito is played by Reginald Collarbone, stage name, Ray Flash. An underwear model famed for his washboard stomach before being plucked from obscurity to become Captain Vito. Despite having squired some of the most glamorous models and actresses to award ceremonies and industry parties his private life remains something of a mystery, the source of much speculation. It is in truth, something of a headache for Vito, who know enough of his proclivities to wish they'd taken a little more time over the casting process. A spectacular amount of money has already been spent protecting Flash's reputation.
Here we find him in bed with Kofi Blacksmith, legendarily endowed gay porn star and acting covert agent. He is currently in the employ of Zoop Juice.
'oh, pour it all over me Ray, that's right, oh Ray, it feels good, lick it off Ray, lick it off'

The footage of Ray Flash, aka Captain Vito licking Zoop Juice off the gigantic member of Kofi Blacksmith is the talk of Xanadu and Ganymede. Everyone has seen it. It's a propaganda coup of epic proportions. Vito know what's up. They haven't failed t notice the new found and conspicuously displayed wealth of Blacksmith. The mansion, the extravagant jewellery, the floor length mink... The boardroom is a hothouse of plotting. Maps of revenge are drawn up.

OPERATION STARGATE!

2008-06-21T22:46:00.001-07:00

Ruche is in the Zodiac suite. This small room has a round oak table in its centre, the zodiac engraved around its perimeter. There is a candleabra in the centre and a chadelier which mimics the form of the candelabra hanging directly above it. The walls are wood panelled covered with deep red velvet drapes. The celing is a painting of the night sky. Madame Kapovari is shuffling a pack of tarot cards. She is a short, plump woman, with a face deeply lined with wrinkles. His fingers are laden with rings. Huge stones catch the light. One ring is in a the shape of a serpent entwining itself around her index finger. There is a silk scarf around her head and gold hoop earing in her ears. She has the beginnings of a moustache and Ruche hangs on her every word, barely making a single decision without consulting her.

No News is Good News

2008-06-21T22:43:00.000-07:00

In Priceless Attributes all news comes from the same source, Truthwerks News Agency. The news is streamed into homes via the dreambox. The dreambox is then viewed through one of a range of filters; left liberal, right conservative, hard right, centrist, apolitical, fascist, being the most popular filters.

Milton Freeman. CEO of Total Correction.
Total Correction supplies policing, judgement and punishment services.
75% of governments use Total Correction services. Judges can be selected from the catalouge. The catalouge includes each judge's record; What cases they presided over, the charge, the defendants personal details, the sentence given etc. From this information the judge most likely to convict can be chosen. It is easy to infer any prejudice or personal amnitys of any judge from his record.

2008-06-21T22:35:00.001-07:00

In the banqueting room Vermillion Ruche is holding court. He has taken off his low riding wig and replaced it with a towering, platinum-blonde, two-horned wig. A string of pearls has been draped over the two horns. He is wearing a cream silk cravat with lace trim, a frilly white shirt and a suit of chalk blue satin. The coat long, falling to the knee and worn open. The arms are short with deep cuffs. The back of the coat has the family crest embroidered onto it with thread of darker blue. The buttons are of lapis lazuli. the trousers short and tight, stopping halfway up the calf. White stockings cover the bottom half of the calf. He is wearing long-toed shoes with a stacked heel.
‘More wine, wench’ he yells, giving the servant’s arse a hearty smack.
The banqueting room is vast, far longer than it is wide, with a high ceiling. Painted on the ceiling is a picture of the gods in heaven, Vermillion Ruche prominent amongst them. In the painting he is wearing a silver diadem and receiving grapes from a handmaiden. The table, covered with embroidered linen, mirrors the dimensions of the room. Its is laden with food from the hunting expedition, pheasants and peacocks, baby gorilla sprinkled with powdered rhino horn for virility, rabbit sweetened with lavender, violet and dark chocolate, a heron served with a salmon between its beak, deer, wood pigeon stuffed with chestnuts, all enriched with herbs and spices, supplemented with delicacies from across the world, purchased from Phoenician traders; goose fed on figs and mulberries, pig fed only acorns and sugar plums and cooked with cloves, cinnamon and lemon peel, song-birds boiled in mulled wine and stuffed with dates and orange peel, cygnets on a bed of fruit, lobster, honey-glazed kid in a cream-rich sauce, oysters seasoned with cardamom, aniseed and white wine, spiced ale in bejeweled tankards, heavy red wine in crystal decanters and fine cognacs, mangos, plums, pomegranate, strawberries and grapes. Everything is cooked to perfection. The kitchen staff well remember poor Valance, boiled alive in a huge pot with carrots, potatoes and celery after undercooking a calf. Rumour has it he was fed to the dogs.
A huge, ornate chandelier hangs over the centre of the table. Huge tapestries and oil paintings hang on the walls. They depict hunting scenes, significant moments in Ruche’s life, and portraits, both of Ruche himself and of his ancestors and, in one case, of his favourite hunting dog, Maximillion, killed after being gored by a wild boar he had bravely cornered. Ever since then there have been no boar in Ruche’s forests.
Compte Vermillion Ruche sits at the head of the table in a chair far higher than any other. It is framed in gold and upholstered in chalk blue satin embroidered with fleur de lis in gold thread. He has a megaphone which he uses to make announcements and to communicate with guests and associates seated at the far end of the table. The other chairs are of finely carved oak.
‘We’ll go falconeering tomorrow boys!’ bellowed into the megaphone, met with raucous cheers.
After all have eaten their fill the hall is suddenly enlivened with barely clad dancers who writhe and undulate lasciviously to roars of approval from the diners, clowns and acrobats perform their jests and pratfalls, while dwarfs scamper comically amongst them.
In the kitchen the servants feed on offal and offcuts, dry bread and beer.

The Serenissima

2008-06-21T22:32:00.000-07:00

Nogo consists of two main districts and three sattellite districts. The three sattellite districts were originally detention centres for asylum seekers and illegal immigrants in Dover, Liverpool and Gravesend. The two main districts are what were once Containment Zone South and Containment Zone North. The former took in much of East London and the Lea Valley from Stratford to Edmonton. Containment Zone North a huge chunk of Sheffield. The Containment Zones were created under the Decent Citizens Protection Act to combat crime and anti-social behavoiur. The Home Office drew up a set of criteria to determine who would be placed in the Containment Zones. This included not just the homeless, the long term unemployed, those with criminal convictions, political agitators and gadflies, subversives and radicals but also those whom statistics suggest were likely to become criminals or unproductive members of society, what were termed 'predators' and 'parasites'. As the Prime Minister of the time declaimed as he officially opened Containment Zone North not by cutting a ribbon but by symbolically locking a gate
'No more shall we be hounded by predators, prisoners of fear. No more shall our blood be sucked by parasites, labouring so that others may idle. We shall be free of both wolf and leech. Free, free at last'
All detainees were permitted to appeal. Mitigating circumstances would be considered. Valuable informants for example, were usually rescused. Sports clubs often bribed the authorities to release promising athletes.
Outside the walls of Nogo are vast, towering, grey and forbidding. Armed guard patrol the perimeter. Inside the walls are alive with colour. Murals of heroes. Graffiti so artfully painted letters seem to writhe and squirm.

PERSUASION ENGINEERING!

2008-06-21T17:38:00.000-07:00

The power of the Leaders is dependant on their ability to propitiate the gods.
To interpret thir wishes. To stage the rituals to win their favour.
If this power is seen to falter, or to have been a fraud all along, if, that is to say, the status quo over which the Leaders preside, the stability of the system, is threatened or lost, if food becomes scarce, energy sources dry up, weather systems chaotic etc the people will overthrow those leaders, will, in fact, tear them limb from limb.

2008-06-20T23:42:00.001-07:00

-Truthwerks Broadcasting-

Drug companies tired of the legal complications of testing new medicines are incresingly turning to the poor in the villages of west and central africa and the shanty towns of asia, offering money or in some cases food in exchange for undergoing medical trials for drugs which in most cases have not even been tested on animals yet.
this, needless to say, is not official policy and no company spokesman was willing to comment on the matter beyond offering a flat denial.

THE BRAIN WATCHERS!

2008-06-14T17:57:00.000-07:00

The Establishment has issued aa decree. There is to be an exam to b undertaken by all over the age of 16. The exam will take place at 8.30am on this day next year. No further information has been offered. Understandably this has given rise to a great deal of perplexity and apprehension.\

Rumour is rife.

What is it to consist of, this exam? What form will it take? What assessments are to be made and to what ends?

One school of thought maintains the test will be psychological in nature, designed to root out dissidents, deviants and the dissaffected. To identify trouble makers and to reward the obidient.

Others specualate that it will measure nothing but intelligence and assign societal roles on the basis of the results. That a new caste system is to established, with each man and each woman alloted the role best suited to his/her abilities.

Yet another camp alleges the results will underpin a eugenics programme, breeding the workers of tommorow.

And of course, everyone wants to know the consequences of failure.
Are the results destined to be just another item of personal information logged in the vast databanks. Or is something darker afoot? A prelude to purge and punishment?

STAGFLATION!

2008-06-14T00:40:00.000-07:00

Sombre fat man smokes cigar, rumatively.
Speaks-
"There will be suffering ahead.
Mass starvation. Civil Unrest. Curtailing of freeedoms you have come to take for granted. War of course. Severe enviromental degradation. Increasing incidences of natural catastrophe."

a measured, almost mournful tone.
Fart bubbbles in bathwater.

"It is a question of priorities. In a universe in which time and energy are finite, it is always a question of priorites. For you, the people, it is a time of great challenges. An exciting time. The apron strings have been cut. Now, if a road falls into disrepair, you must mend it. If a child is to receive an education, you must provide it."

Mutinous seminarians, drunk with mirth and insurrection, compel their priests to dress up as pagan idols, as grain gods and rain gods and goddesses of fertility and participate in orgiastic revels that last into the early hours of the morning.
A chant is taken up, it is impossible to place where it started from. Are these things ever consciously begun? Or is it the will of the old gods manifesting itself among these callow students?
"Sacrifice the Sun King! Sacrifice the Sun King! Sacrifice the Sun King!"
Old Father O'Malley, Headmaster, is frogmarched towards the flames, naked save for a spectacular headdress of canary fathers and sunflower petals.
The sight of his pale, quivering paunch and genitals made tiny with fear and night chill, brought the youths back to themselves. Conscience and rationality reasserted themselves, they pause, look at one another, bewildered. What have we set in motion? What force has usurped our minds?
But only for an instant, the old gods are strong still and the ritual, once set in motion, must be concluded. Such things have a logic and a momentum of their own.
But that shrunken cock and hairy paunch will remain burned in the memory of all those who witnessed the events of that infamous night, forever.

Headdress of Flame.

"I don't miss it, do you?"

"Miss it? The Old Life you mean? No, I don't miss it."

"It all seems so inconsequential now and so slight. I remember so little of what it was like."

"A mirage. I never had much invested in it anyhow."

"it's funny but I feel as though I always knew this world and its way of doing things. Even before what happened I was familiar with it, I had visited it so often in my dreams."

"You too?"

"Yes, many times. It's all clear to me now."

A renegade zookeeper refuses to leave the monkey cage and lives out the rest of his life among that incarcerated troupe, eventualy working his way up to become top monkey with all female posteriors pointed invitingly in his direction. His display is genuinely ferocious.

His last communication was written in impeccable handwriting on a pad of post-it notes, and left lying on his desk.

-I hereby lay down the burden of self-awareness, of language, of pre-knowledge of death, of reason and arid logic. Manhood is bacome too bitter a taste for me to stomach. I renounce the human race and go to purge myself of their disease. Thier fruitless striving, their endless avarice and perversity, and above all, their self-destructiveness. Leave me in peace with my brethren behind bars. If they are to be imprisoned, then I also shall be imprisoned. It is my will.
Farewell.-

At first the authorties remonstrated with him. They tried to enlist the support of his wife, but she refused to come. She said she was perfectly happy with the arrangement. They warned him of grave dangers. They tried to remove him by force but the monkeys protected him. They even offered him promotions and rises and research grant. All of this fell on deaf ears. He swung on the tyre swing. He picked nits from the coats of his fellows.
Eventually however, he proved such a hit with visitors to the zoo and garnered such invaluable publicity, winning a celebrity status unheard of since the heady days of Zing the panda that they relented, He could stay. After all, he was worth hundreds of thousands in postcard sales alone.

HORNY GOATWEED!

2008-06-12T04:59:00.001-07:00

'to anyone who has been in Bali any length of time the deep psychological indentification of Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable... "We're all cock crazy" my landlord said'
Clifford Geertz

another
slightly famous
enthno-linguist
loses the plot in big brother house
rubs genitals in face of
token black man

"we in the West have lost our souls"
he screams, increaingly agitated
"you, Proud African
shake off your shackles
Arise from your foetid slumber!"

Well, course, we should all go back to hunting and gathering
simple when you think about it.
Course, the problem is, there's not much left to hunt,
or to gather for that matter.

Fantasy Star Ranger
emigrate to outer space
colonise other galaxies
time-slumber
suspended animation
it's the only way

getting a bit worrying down here
lot of weirdos about.

Let's create a Prime Minister
a handsome actor
who can learn his lines
and is intelligent enough to
improvise
(along the lines we have laid down.)
It's not wrong.
At least, I don't think so.
A handsome bloke,
with gravitas.
I've always thought gravitas
is an important attribute for any leader.
You don't learn that on your leadership courses.
And a twinkle in his eye.
You can get away with murder
if the eye's a-twinkle.

Foam Rangers. Horse-Play.
China. Hmmmm, yeah China, well, next superpower isn't it.
No getting away from it.
Resource War! Extract the Moon Minerals! Fire the Space Lasers!
Claim Atlantic Shelf, Monoplolise North West Passage.
Build Desert Bases. War them!

Inscrutable aren't they, when you think about it.

2008-06-12T04:18:00.000-07:00

"the Balinese view of nature sees it as fundamentally fanged, and hairy"
Forge. pg 207.

deep in the industrial zone\
smog rats.

Fuck! Smog rats! Scarper!

the clanking of cyclopean machinery.
Vast rusting hulks. Crumbling mortar.
Pigeons in the rafters. Rats in the ruins.

Smog clouds.
wire grills over soot smeared windows. smouldering fires.

Deformed Beelzeebub.

"Oh my God they're manipulating world weather systems for thir own Evil Agenda!"

Evil Agatha.
Martian Star Strike. Wild Cossacks. Oracular Gloom.

"They're fornicating with elves in an effort to found a forbidden Master Race!"

slave lines. bowlderised cats.

Ecstatic Union with Plod.
escape the tentacls of Plod.
green and slimy
slathering limbs.

Bruising Encounter.
Trenchant Critique. Mordant Criticism.

Double agents drink
in an otherwise unattended bistro
yes, there are booths
and the light is dim and red.

Harry bends the ear of the waiter
who
without breaking eye-contact
"yes Sir, quite so sir"
deftly
crushes a cockroach
with his bootheel.

"Remember the Customer?
Kevin the Customer?
got booted out of Lithuania
trying to flog those dodgy warheads of his"

2008-06-07T16:44:00.000-07:00

Lights in the sky
catharine wheels
Fog horns
Afternoon. Glazed Light.
sugar deserts.
cockroach party.

Grey-blue sedimenta of receding distance,
layered to horizon,
Livid sepulchres
livid with sun death

An embittered Personal Shopper in a rather distinguished department store
deliberately offends her well-heeled client,
selecting
for his inspection
only the cheapest,
gaudiest
garments

"and this sir,
in an affordable cotton,
polyester mix
stylish and modern,
enlivened with an
understated
floral
motif"

Pete Boggs.
Fabians, Fashionistas, Quaffers.

Sky,
blue on the window glass
Vortex of birdsong
spiralling

Oberon
Deoderant
Flutter of wind.

Craven Images
Moon Mining
Extract the Moon Minerals.

fabricator of chimney pots
fornicators and lolligaggers
lip-synchers,
Prominent Ezekiels,
fantails,
anteaters
fritillaries
capers
anchovies

Viscous Pilate
Meteorites
Putrid Volcanoes
Pus Flows

Fraudulent ticket inspectors extract fines for improper footwear,
surly demeanour,
slovenly deportment,
scurf,
general air of moral degradation....

fabulations of ineffectual whimsy,
mangroves,
crocodiles
Swamp Fairs
fetes of derring-do....

Foragers
Hunters
Submerged gods,
tangled
in seaweed
tied to seabed.

Birds
singsong as sun sets

templums for demented rituals,
hidden on hillsides
in land, barren and inhospitable

SCREAMING SCIMITARS!
Walrus Rising
Piper Dawn.

Crickets in yellow grass
Ant Foment

MANTRAS OF MALICE!
Calgary Apes.

Proteus.

Stuffed Albatross
in
Curiosity Shoppe

vomit streets
turgid backwaters
Prittlewell
Knights of Malteasa

Fat Mantis - Velvet Yurts

Mushroom Vol-au-vants
delerious waterfall
river ribbons
vagrant flowers

Showdown at sunrise
eager dawn
vagrant flowers

(in the general's venerable vestible etc)

Captain of indutry
Media Baron
Land Lord

Venerable disease
Nostril Root

Monkey spasm
Dumplings of Indusrty

Bromide Wreaths

Victims of Industrial Accidents
display wounds like badges of honour,

"lost that thumb there,
didn't even notice it was gone
till lunch break,
I was working that hard"

"I wouldn't care if I lost a hand
I'm not missing my targets"

Venetian Courtesans
symbiote.
soft white quagmire

Wren
in honeysuckle hideaway

Robot World
Machine Park

pickled in industrial accidents

uniform
rectangles of light
office boxes
banks of computers and swivel chairs

Office Riot!

Team Leader Hung by the Necktie!

H.R concede situation 'difficult'

COMPASSIONATE CONSUMERISM.

2008-06-03T03:52:00.000-07:00

Pater Familias is administering the cane to one of his workmen. The man has been caught in an adulterous relationship, and Familias, although scrupulously fair, can be exceedingly firm with it.
Pater Familias’ workers all live in a village he had built for them. The buildings are small and homely, built of hewn stone and roofed in Welsh slate. ‘Built on the human scale’ as he likes to say, and arranged around the village green, where fetes are held on public holidays, such as Pater’s Birthday, and where the erring worker is now being caned.
‘And now the woman’ Pater brandishes the cane as the woman lifts her dress and bends over the caning block, presenting her pale derriere to Pater’s correctional cane. Punishment is administered equally, to both man and woman, as Pater holds the most enlightened ideals. 30 strokes across the backside.
‘I assure you, I don’t enjoy this my dear, I do it because it is my duty. I use the cane solely for your moral health and the moral health of our community’ THWACK!
The workhouses are light and airy and conditions are humane. Breaks of a generous length are given at set times without fail. Hours are comparatively short. (10 hrs per day) Work starts at 7am. Wakeup is at 6am. Bedtime is at 10pm. Pay is below industry standards but board and lodgings are included and are of a higher standard than the workers could hope to provide for themselves. The food is planned to give health and strength and good digestion. Breakfast for instance is muesli or porridge, and fruit. The workers are never given anything disadvantageous to their health. There is no alcohol (in fact workers are permitted a glass of port on Pater’s Birthday), no smoking and no absolutely no drugs. There are times allotted for exercise and for education and reflection. Houses are to be kept clean. There are regular inspections. Every house is provided with a copy of “The Aphorisms of Peter Familias” and a portrait of the man himself, which hangs above the fireplace. There are no forms of electronic entertainment. There are books and there are lectures and there is music all for the edification and entertainment of the workers.
All workers must wear the uniform. The uniform for men is a cloth cap, green, a green blazer with the Pater Familas family crest emblazoned on it, a white shirt and a striped tie. Shorts of navy blue and green socks pulled up to just below the knee. Black leather shoes must be worn. Women wear straw boaters with pink ribbon. Green pinafores also with the crest over white blouses and white socks pulled up to the knee. They also wear shoes of black leather.

2008-06-03T03:50:00.001-07:00

Compte Vermillion Ruche is the inheritor of the fortune made largely through the development of genetic technology which has become ubiquitous and the patenting of a large number of genome codes, including those for many extinct species. He is currently wearing a jumpsuit of cherry red PVC, with enormously high platform boots in red and white patent leather. His wig is high, white and red. He is wearing large white framed sunglasses and long red false nails. He is regaling his courtiers with anecdotes and roaring with laughter. He is red in the face. His courtiers are making a big show of laughing too. There is traces of white powder around his nostrils.
Suddenly he gets an idea
‘Dance Tony, Dance’ he yells wildly, manic with excitement
Tony rises to his feet looking uncomfortable
‘Dance, you twinkle-toed poof’
Tony shuffles awkwardly
‘No, like a robot you cunt, dance like a robot’ Ruche is jiggling in his seat, his face a twisted grin.
Tony makes stiff, robotic movements
‘Claude, get this on tape, this is classic. Ha, ha, look at Tony, he’s dancing like robot, what’s the matter Brendon, why aren’t you laughing? You don’t find this burk funny? You can be his robot girlfriend then, that’ll make it funnier, c’mon Brenden, get off your fat arse and dance. You’re his robot girlfriend, c’mon.’
Brendon is making stiff movements opposite Tony.
‘Hey Tony, get behind him and shaft him like a robot. Have some robo-sex you cyborg queers’
Tony gets behind Brendon and makes regular, piston-like groin thrusts
Ruche is in fits of laughter, sweat is dripping from his forehead.
‘I can’t wait show this tape at the next banquet. You two will have ‘em in stitches’

dead end/

2008-06-01T07:10:00.000-07:00

Ganymede and Xanadu, the cities of Priceless Attributes, are unlike any other cities in the land. Cities of novelty and spectacle. There are pyramids and castles. Palaces and pleasure houses.

In the centre of Ganymede stands The Wheel, the administrative centre of Priceless Attributes. A ring of 8 sleek silver skyscrapers towering hundreds of feet into the air with one in the centre, The Hub. Bridges spread out from The Hub to each of the outlying buildings high up in the cloud cover and then from each of these to its neighbour, like a ring of children holding hands.
Reinforced glass tubes. Barely discernable from the ground, it looks as though the workers are simply walking miraculously through thin air.

There are buildings made to look like mountains Spanish galleons and huge white cruise liners clad in painted aluminium and complete with porthole windows.

Looking out over the city you see roofs in the shape of sand dunes or a series of waves. A row of buildings in the shape of giant Toltec heads. The architecture of every civilization and epoch. Pagodas, ziggurats, Greek temples, domes and minarets, gothic cathedrals, Byzantine churches, Assyrian reliefs, gargoyles, statues of forgotten gods.

There are buildings artificially aged, the hewn stone deliberately pitted and scared, lichen and moss introduced to its grooves and crevices. Real estate agents create elaborate histories around these artifices; sieges, scandals and chain clanking ghosts.

There are giant themed shopping malls such as The Caverns in Xanadu, built into artificial caves with stalagmites and stalactites, glow worms and mechanical bats.
Shopping malls like themeparks with roller coasters between floors, loud, thumping music, speed and adrenaline.
There is the Cascades, a shopping mall built on water, retail units and fast food outlets on stilts in the slow flowing, chlorine-scented canals. Shoppers are transported on gondolas by singing gondoliers in striped jerseys. Picturesque frogs croak on plastic lily pads. Fountains plash inanely. Walls painted with
copies of Venetian frescoes, or containing aquariums in which brightly coloured tropical fish swim endlessly in circles with eyes bulging and mouths agape, like the shoppers who mill idly among them.

There is a business park made to look like a zone of 19th century heavy industry, belching plumes of black smoke. There are hotels made of ice with ceilings like the nightsky. Star-twinkle and moonbeam. Meteor showers and shooting stars, and once a month, the Northern Lights appear, shifting and twisting on the ceilings as guests crane their necks in wonder.

There is an apartment complex of treehouses in giant, artificial oak trees which mimics The Wheel. With walls of plastic logs and rope bridges made to look like vine connecting the trees.

Police headquarters housed in a giant fortress complete with battlements, moat, drawbridge and portcullis. But beyond these works of pastiche, quotation, kitsch and cliché are the buildings which have made these streets famous. Buildings which are more than simple geometrical forms, series of blocks and boxes. Here walls and roofs are broken down into a series of interlocking panels, each panel a unique shape, and each panel harmonising with the others. Forms which bend inwards and outwards, writhing and unpredictable, like streamers in the wind, like fluttering seaweed. Jutting, jagged forms, like broken bottles, crystals or shark fins. Forms soft and seductive, like great fluffy clouds, green hills, female bodies, waves, the meanderings of rivers, orchids and daffodils. Forms endlessly complex, full of branches, hollows and curves and planes, bulges and protrusions, of coral reefs, bone interior, trachea pathways, veinways, sandstone cliffs.
The play of different textures is as important to these architectures as the play of forms. Treated glass, plastic and metal present an array of different textures to the feeling eye, from smooth and glossily flawless to something approaching organic. Iron with growths of surface rust, or plastic bubbled like frog spawn or cuckoo spit. Elsewhere we find hair and fur, like the dream theatre popularly known as the Great Bear, walls shaped to suggest muscle and bone under skin, or whole buildings draped under layers of thick vine and creeper, or walls which are terraced gardens in which flowers explode outwards and trees rustle gently. There are surfaces rough like asphalt or fibrous like sugar cane or muscle tissue or made of bunched wire, surfaces grained like wood or gnarled like bark, translucent like petals or lustrous as coal. Surfaces which glint and dazzle like diamonds or are even engineered to shift and undulate like sheets of silk caught in a warm zephyr, or to bristle like a threatened cat.
There are walls of light. Lights which glow steadily or which pulse and flicker like forest fires. Of all these we must mention the most impressive of them all, the shining citadel that is FeelGood headquarters. A building which appears to be made of pure white light. Without mass or solidity. Utterly numinous. A building which has transcended coarse matter altogether. A construction of angels.

And everywhere there are buildings where the walls are tangles of advertisements, like bodies tattooed in neon. Or walls which are giant screens, like the famous one on Luminere Street which films the passers-by and transposes their avatars onto dream landscapes, surfaces of alien planets, deep sea caverns, mountain strongholds, battlefields, desert caravans....

In the dream manufacturing quarter of Xanadu we find the fairy tale houses of the rich and famous. Lana Turner's palace of pink marble. Belly Bradman's Roman villa with its famed collection of erotic
statuary. Scarlett Fever's gingerbread house. Mansions in the shape of dragons or coiled serpents. Here even pavements are made to ripple and sparkle, turquoise like a tropical sea, or utterly transparent revealing the swirling sewers below. There are rainforests on traffic islands. There are waterfalls and rivers. Moving 3d images interact with passers by, promoting facial creams, supermarkets, recreational drugs, music, moving images everywhere blending seamlessly with the solid shapes around them, all one reality, all equally unreal. Lights flash and pulse and ripple, spell out words, exhortations, instructions. The night sky glitters with the holograms of ad-satellites.

The siren songs play from shop doorways. Music spreads out like a stain across the street. Lures. Stepping into the music the pedestrian passes into another world. The ache of a returning memories. Childhood worlds of eternal summer. Sun setting on corn fields. Fairgrounds and fireworks. Arcadies. Walk a few more paces and you're back on the street, traffic noise, curses, advert babble. The pedestrian is drawn back to the music, pulled towards its source, the shop.

Company plants stand on street corners or sit in popular bars or restaurants, discussing the merits of new products
'Oh, it completely changed my life darling. I couldn't live without it.'

A place where buildings are torn down and rebuilt built yearly. Where fashions change week by week. Where everything is forever new and forever recycled. People walk down the streets wearing lenses and ear pieces which turn the living environment into a game. Missions into enemy territory, double agents, alien invasions. Pedestrians can be seen pressed into doorways, wriggling through the gutters on their bellies, sprinting through hotel lobbies. For the game player a briefcase could contain a bomb, there are snipers on the rooftops and hidden cameras in the old woman’s shopping bags, wild animals lurk in alleyways and spacecraft hover menacingly overhead.

In Xanadu and Ganymede, fashion has become fancy dress. Walk through the trendier parts of town and you will find yourself sharing the streets with pirates and conquistadors, samurai, Comanche chiefs, characters from the Chinese opera, men in enormous Micronesian masks and grass skirts, geishas, maharajahs, sultans and mandarins.

These characters scorn the factory made garments the masses wear and pay huge prices for tailors to make each unique item.

This trend has given rise to a curious condition. Still extremely rare though everyone on the scene seems to know of cases. Costumes have been taking over their wearers personalities, like the boy dressed as an Inuit shaman who had dreams of being dismembered and put together again, but changed, with something new added to his makeup. Starting speaking in the language of the birds and prophesying, communing with spirits and dancing wildly in the parks, till one day he just disappeared. Or the notorious idler, a self-described artist who adopted the dress of a successful executive until he found himself on the board, 3 years later, not sure how it all happened, a trophy wife whose name he can barely remember sleeping beside him.

The great soap operas of Priceless Attributes, 'Harbour Town' and 'Monmouth Street' have been running for 30 years. A huge body of literature has built up around the twin series. There are exhaustive biographies of every significant character in the history of the soaps and quite a few of the minor ones, even Cocky Jim the barrow boy who’s total screen time amounted to 6 minutes spread over 15 episodes.
These biographies, it should be noted, are of the characters and not the actors who play them. There is no interest in the actors whatsoever. There are authorised and unauthorised biographies. The unauthorised biographies have not been approved by the series makers and often contain scandalous facts. Weekly gossip magazines add to the tattle.
These, made in collusion with the programme makers feature photographs of the characters in compromising positions, or at moments of significance in their lives, the birth of a child for example. They chart the characters fluctuating weight, their changing hairstyles and clothes, their self-esteem and personal habits. These are not limited to events described in the soap operas, though the repercussions may be felt within the soap. It is not a one-way street. Jack Flack's pornography addiction was first revealed in 'Shock, Horror' for example, and subsequently elaborated on within the show.

In addition to these hugely popular biographies and scandal sheets there are a number of scholarly histories of the areas in which they are set, fictional though they are. Sociological treatises exist by the hundred. The programme makers have been known to incorporate information from these sources into the programmes themselves. This is the highest honour their authors could ever wish for.

Lavish obituaries appear to mark the death of any character. Campaigns spring up to protest the innocence of an accused character, or to prevent the closure of a beloved institution.
Passionate love letters and death threats are sent. People dress like their favourite characters, they model the interiors of their houses after them, use their favourite phrases, ape their body language.

On occasion the laws of Priceless Attributes have been changed following a precedent set on either Harbour Town or Monmouth Street.
________________________________________________________________-

What is immediately noticeable on entering Albion City is the paleness. The pallor. In a land where almost everyone is of mixed racial origin you are startled by the milky skin tones, the blonde hair and blue eyes. Then you are start noticing the price paid for 'purity' the small and endlessly recycled gene pool giving rise to birth defects, abnormalities, shrunken heads and enormous ears, long spidery legs and arms grafted onto dwarfish torsos, rampant obesity, even in the young, feet so small sufferers are forced to use sticks to support themselves while walking, strange bulges on the face and limbs as if a number of walnuts had been inserted beneath the epidermis.
Not that such misfortune is universal, far from it, but it affects about 1 in 10 and serves to make the proud, handsome face and manly physique of John Bull even more impressive to his followers.

Albion City is rows and rows of terraced houses. Two up two down. Grey slate roofs. Smoking chimneys. Cobbled streets. A skyline of church steeples. Corner shops selling Spam, cabbage, marrows, potatoes. Smoky pubs with carpets smelling of sour beer, a dart board, the wall around it pockmarked.
The images of Winston Churchill and Queen Victoria are everywhere. The patron saints of Albion City. The union Jack flying everywhere. The music of Vera Lynn, and George Formby.

Sebastian Roe is the head of the athlete breeding programme at Priceless Attributes. He rose to prominence as the agent of legendary stud Buck Thompson, arguably the greatest Crunch player the game has known. The production of elite athletes is a major concern at Priceless Attributes. Their statistics show that 85% of males throughout Establishment territory watch some form of sport at least once a week and Buck Thompson has sired more elite athletes than anyone. There are currently 15 sons and daughters of Thompson participating in top grade sport today including world heavyweight mixed martial arts champion Bruce Thompson, record holding sprinter Lucy Thompson and no fewer than 8 premiership Crunch players including current crowd favourite Malachi Thompson.
Crunch, a violent son of rugby is the most popular sport of them all. As in rugby the ball must be placed down behind the opposition try line. Scrums are replaced by one-on-ones in which the first knockdown wins. Tackles can be made in any way the tackler chooses. There are no penalties for, say, high tackles or spear tackles. Rucks are no holds barred. Stamping, gouging, kicking etc are all legitimate tactics. Players wear head and groin guards.
'IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIItttttttttttttttttttttttttttsssss CRUNCHTIME'
The crowd erupts.
The crowd are an integral part of the spectacle. Coloured smoke from a thousand flares. Banners, flags, totems and war drums.
Roaring with bloodlust, baring teeth and growling. They hurl themselves at the clear plastic partition which separates the two sets of fans, snarling and yelling abuse. They bombard the opposition players with abuse, goading them, insulting them, their family and loved ones sometimes getting so fired up that they run onto the pitch to attack a player. The crowd roars as one as the spectator is beaten to a pulp, huge muscled men of 25 stone kicking his prone body before flinging him unceremoniously back into the crowd where he is treated like a hero.

Athletics has undergone a dramatic revival in popularity ever since the manufacturers championship was introduced. The two championships run concurrently. The athletes vie for dominance in their respective events. The manufacturers compete to create the compounds which will power their athletes to success. Records have tumbled to hitherto unimaginable levels. An athlete's life is short but glorious often ending in huge aneurysms in the midst of competition. The site of an sprinter collapsing, frothing from the mouth, eyes bursting from the sockets, weeping blood and convulsing wildly midrace, is not uncommon.
____________________________________________________________________-
Pelican Bay Correctional Facility. Maximum Security. Maximum Punishment.
Total isolation. Once entered the cell is never left until the sentence has been served. Prisoners are issued with colostomy bags. Showers heads are built into the cell ceiling. The shower is switched on at the jailers discretion. There are a number of punishments which can be administered without the potential risk of coming face to face with the prisoner. The temperature of the cell can be raised or lowered to excruciating extremes. Gas can be released from dispensers in the ceiling. Walls and floor can be electrified. Walls and ceiling can be contracted to the point at which the inmate is forced onto his haunches, head bowed. Speakers in the wall can be used to broadcast distressing material, sometimes simply white noise played at a painful volume. Frequencies which cause a loss of bowel control, vomiting etc. In other cases psychologically disturbing material is broadcast. For example, the sound of an inmates wife having sexual intercourse with another man. Technology exists which allows all sorts of possibilities. A favourite trick is to make the man fucking his wife the same man responsible for his arrest, or the judge who sentenced him to Pelican Bay.
Punishment cells include insect cells, crawling with fire ants, mosquitoes, cockroaches, flies and millipedes and giant poisonous centipedes, rat cells, shit cells where the inmate is knee deep in human excrement and the dreaded itching cells. An irritant is released into the air which makes inmates itch until they rend their own flesh. Inmates have emerged from the itching cells with strips of flesh hanging from them like rag dolls.
Other punishments include allowing an inmate a pet, usually a dog or cat. With no other company the inmate forms a deep bond with the pet. He cares deeply for the animal. The pet is then tortured and killed in front of him, while the guards laugh uproariously.

There are prisons for every type of offender. Not every regime is as brutal as Pelican Bay. In the vast majority of prisons inmates are used as slave labour which gives often, though not always, gets them out of the cells, provides exercise, company and mental stimulation.

Priceless Attributes have created a world in which all subjects consider themselves to be living in the best of all possible fiefdoms. Their factories manufacture a large range of clothing.
The subject is free to chose to wear anything manufactured by the factories of Priceless Attributes. The Music Subsidiaries of Priceless Attributes control the careers of a large number of musicians operating in a variety of genres. The subject of free to listen to the work of any of these musicians.
Here is pop star Ricky Dandelion, he is doing a sexy dance to his new song ‘Priceless’ Soon all the youth will be performing this same dance, in the school playgrounds and in the streets and bedrooms.

Priceless Attributes sponsor a range of political parties. The subjects are free to vote for any one of these parties once every five years. Current Chairman of Priceless Attributes is ex-porn star turned pop idol, star of a million fantasies, Agatha Orchid. She has held the position of Chairman for the past 5 years but is thought likely to be deposed on account of her fading looks, though some argue her recent breast augmentation will help her see out another term of office.

The pharmacological subsidiaries of Priceless Attributes manufacture a range of recreational drugs. These are all legal and available to all subjects.
Here is Bobby Bluestocking, he’s really charged up on compound X. Look how hard he’s working! He’s in a frenzied state, eyes wild, going quicker than anyone else on the assembly line.
Look at Sheila Shill, the video of Priceless is on her wall-screen, she’s in an ecstasy of communion with Ricky Dandelion, she’s doing the Priceless dance, step for step with the 3D image that dances alongside her, she’s singing along, she’s completely in sync with the song.

The philosophy of Priceless Attributes is that the carrot is a far more effective method of control than the stick. Pleasure a more powerful motivation than pain. Give the people bliss and they’re yours forever.
_______________________________________-

The Phoenicians, the merchant caste which is aligned to no state, government, private company or any other authority anywhere in the world. Only the Phoenicians can cross borders and boundaries with complete freedom, anywhere in the world. Their status as neutrals, conduits for food and other tradable items, is universally respected.
The Phoenicians have no homeland. The only territory they claim are their ships and every international port and harbour under the sun. Their ships are huge, up to half a mile long. They are crewed by extended family groups and affiliates. It is the ships which are their cities, huge and heavily populated as they are. Tyre, Carthage, etc etc The Phoenicians are recognisable by the purple, made of the murex shell, with which their cloaks and dresses are dyed. The murex shell also serves as the insignia under which their ships sail.

On board the city of Carthage children are laughing as they watch dolphins from the portholes. The city bears the imprints of generations of Phoenicians. Frescos and scrawled graffiti, wall hangings, Persian rugs encoded with Sufi injunctions, chandeliers and candelabra from abandoned mansions and country estates, lecterns, gargoyles and icons from derelict cathedrals, Polynesian masks, voodoo fetishes, the statues of obsolete gods, plump and curvaceous figurines of fertility cults, spiraling shells of exquisite beauty, fossils of pregnant sea-dragons, exotic specimens in formaldehyde, double-headed snakes and mutant toads, archeological rarities, golden spears, codices, illuminated bibles, comic books, scandal sheets, the hides and skeletons of extinct beasts, a narwhales horn, a hippos jaw, a leopards skin with ruby eyes, a stuffed polar bear, mastodon tusks and dinosaur bones. Libraries dense with information in all languages of the earth. (the Phoenicians are expert linguists) The spoils and trophies, the treasures and curiosities of lifetimes of adventure and exploration.
The Phoenicians are Renaissance humanists. Painters, scholars, poets, alchemists, magicians, musicians, scientists. The long hours spent at sea lend themselves to contemplation, study and experiment. Treatises, theories, sonnets, equations and inventions are swapped between ships leading to a friendly competition which gives energy to their pursuits. Officially non-partisan the Phoenicians are unable to distribute their knowledge and art throughout closed societies. Unofficially the denizens of Nogo do it for them.

Sally Formica is at work. She has a bottle of Zoop Juice on her work bench. Ricky Dandelion drinks Zoop Juice. He has a special arrangement with the company. He drinks it in all his videos and even mentions it in his lyrics. He has similar arrangements with a number of other commercial sponsers.
Sally is wearing her workclothes. A kind of jumpsuit in pink velour. All the girls wear them. The boys have identical jumpsuits in baby blue. She works hard. She doesn't want to be the one in the dunces cap, not again. The shame of it! It's Nancy Drain wearing it this week, that's three weeks running for her. She's beginning to take on the apperancce of a martyr. As if she has taken this burden upon herself, to spare the others. But it's wearing her down. And she's missing out on all the perks the others can earn. Like the free bottles of Zoop juice. Sally wants to wear the crown. That's the perogative of the most productive worker. Darren Haynes has been wearing it ever since she started here. He's like a machine! He gets his compound X free now. Two tablets per day and as much Zoop Juice as he wants. He doesn't speak to anyone. Not while he's working. Doesn't even look at anyone. Only has eyes for his work. He's a legend. So Sally's not sure she'll ever wear the crown. Not while Darren's around. But there's all sorts of other awards you can win. She's had one already. Most improved worker. She won that the week after wearing the dunce's cap. The ignominy spurred her on and it felt so good when they recognised her efforts. She's an important member of the team now. They told her so. In front of everybody. She felt like she would burst with pride. It was at Team Assessment. They have those every week. They all get together on Friday night. That's where they crown the employee of the week and where they give out the dunce's cap. They read out everyone's figures. You have to stand on the stage while they read out your figures. They have figures for everything. Punctuality, productivity. They even have the number of times you took a toilet break logged and if its a really high number they read it out and everyone laughs and mocks you. Everyone cheers when they read out Darren's figures. Management always says those figures just show go to what's possible if you are dedicated enough. They say Darren serves as an inspiration to us all. When they read out the figures of the least productive workers everyone boos and catcalls. They even sometimes get things thrown at them. It seems unfair but really they are letting the whole team down and undermining the efforts of hard workers like Darren. They have to make a pledge to improve and have to think up a sacrifice they can make to show they are serious. When Sally was up there, she was mortified. So she thought of a big sacrifice, so people wouldn't hate her as much. She said she would work all week without pay and that Darren could have her money. When she got her award for most improved worker Darren gave her the money back. He told her not to tell anyone about it. It was the first time he had ever talked to her. She protested at first, said she didn't deserve it, but there was something about the way he looked at her, in the way he spoke, some high moral seriousness that made her aquiese. He's never spoken to her since, but sometimes he makes eye contact in the lunch hall, briefly and solemnly. Intense dark eyes under thick black eyebrows. A teenager's acne though he must be almost 30. Maybe even older.
_________________________________

Gary Mutt is in the Star and Garter sitting in front of a pint of warm bitter, picking at his pack of pork scratchings. He gazes idly at the pictures behind the bar; Barbara Windsor, the Two Ronnies, Clive of India, Princess Diana, Bomber Harris, Paul Gascoigne, a grim faced Geoffery Boycott, Terry Butcher with bloody bandages wrapped tight around his head like a casualty of war, Cliff Richard in tennis whites. Icons of Englishness. He takes a sip of his bitter and feels proud.
"England will never die you horrible cunts" he bellows. The barman coughs softly and polishes a pint glass with a grubby beer towel.
A 14 inch television screen splutters on a wall bracket in a corner of the room. Only Albion City still has television. John Bull, in one of his more celebrated speeches, declared that if Englishness means anything it means hanging on to your traditions. The BBC broadcast John Bull's addressess to the nation and repeats of Coronation Street, Emerdale Farm, old episodes of The Goodies, Hale and Pace and classic sitcoms such as Are You Being Served, Upstairs, Downstairs, Love Thy Neighbour and Men Behaving Badly.
The television screen is showing footage of the 1966 world cup final.
Gary mouths the words alongside the commentator, words seared onto the heart of every true Englishman
"they think it's all over"
he rises to his feet, mimes kicking a football into the corner of the net
"IT IS NOW YOU FUCKING KRAUTY CUNTS"
raises his arms aloft in triumph and embarks in a victory lap around the pub, arms spread outwards in imitation of a Spitfire flying over the Channel.
"you can take away our red phone boxes, you can decomission our double-decker buses and auction off our manor houses but youll never take our pride
In-Ger-Lund, In-Ger-Lund, In-Ger-Lund
In-Ger-Lund, In-Ger-Lund, In-Ger-Lund
In-Ger-Lund, In-Ger-Lund, In-Ger-Lund
In-Ger-Lund, IN--GER--LUUND"

draft

2008-05-30T09:36:00.001-07:00

90 year old woman in magenta lipstick, drinking champagne out the bottle
french kissing herr young lover,
Dior sunglasses sheilding a basilisks stare
'Darling, must dash, I have a flight to LA leaving in 20 minutes'
last swig of bolly
a tossed-off snog
and she's gone
silver handbag flashing in her wake.

vast rooms, empty of all ornament
brightly lit and throbbing with percussive noise
inside, men in suits are furiously drinking
leering at TV screens
on which images of scantily clad women
thrust and gyrate, in parody of lust.

they shout out the screens
they shake up bottles of lager before opening them
and send jets of frothy beer
spurting towards the television screens

Later, the screens are ignored
some men are sleeping in sticky pools of lager
others are hugging each other, weeping
others are fighting.

On the screens the women are still gyrating

the music has stopped and the bright light look down on the scene
dispassionately.
this happens every friday and saturday night
in every town and every city.

It is a ritual of self-abasement and it is taken very seriously.

Of course, someones making money from all this.
There's always someone.
Some profiteer with a sufficient lack of scruple
well, good luck to 'em, let them exploit those dopey cunts
see if i care.

In another room
men and women sit in front of screens which flash with bright lights
loud exicitng noises gurgle, whizz and ring from hidden microphones
an array of big inviting buttons beg to the pressed
the men and women sit for hours watching the lights and listeing to the noise
hours and hours
without talking
seemingly unaware of those they share the room with
the lights flash and the noise whirl
and huge debts are incurred.

pretty girls and hunky boys wear cool clothes and date one another
and make friends and fall out with one another
and everyone wants to be in their gang
but we can't
cos we're not pretty or hunky enough
not me, i'm an ugly cunt
and you probably are too
they don't even acknowlege us
so we follow them round
watching what they do,
and if we get a chance, we take pictures of them
or we look at the pictures other people have taken
and we talk to each other about them
we'd love to see them naked. we've got a few pictures of them at the beach
in bikinis or swimming trunks. they're good.
sometimes you can tell
they're not really perfect, not gods.
like, they could be looking a bit rough one day, or a bit chubby or something
gives you a different perspective. whe you see them like that

course, theres some kids, hard bastards
always fighting
i love fighting
you know, watching it
and guns, and explosions and that
fuck yeahh
BOOM BBOOM BRRRAPP RATTTATTAATAAT
watch it all the time on the television screens
and read about it in the newspapers
this gang done over this gang then that gang got back at them by blowing up their hideout and
bang bang bag

its good innit
kill
kill
kill
there's a lot of people that deserve to die isn't there
hunt them down and kill them.
flush them from thir hiding places and torture them
capture them and make them hurt
make them suffer
humiliate those fucking cunts
they make me scared
we should hurt them
hurt them for what they did to us, how the scared us
i hate them

lets cook... oo i love food, its so delicious isn't it
nice bit of food grown by a farmer in a muddy field
all earthy and lovely. you can do so many things with food
i mean
there's 5 ingredients
and you can comine them in so many differnt ways
every night you can have something different almost
well, not every night
but you can rotate the meals so you're not eating the same thing every single day
like they did in the olden days. today we can add pepper, or even cinnamon
or have a chai latte. its so amazing. the things oyu can get at the farmers market
the best potatoes you'll ever eat.

lets got to work
then come home and eat potatoes from the farmers market
then we can follow a recipe from spain or morroco or something
i'll put on moorish dress and do a belly dance
get in the mood like
and we can listen to music
whos that girl with the nice voice and the cheeky attitude
oh, shes so pretty, isn't she going out with that hunky one
they
re such a lovely couple
so beautiful.
then we can watch the sun set over the chimney stacks

that old man down the road is weird, i don't like him
he raises weasels, lets set his house on fire

then we can pray to god
it makes me feel nice
thinking of god
im not religious, i just like feeling nice
sometimes i meditate cos it makes me feel all relaxed
and spiritual and connected

in a room thats clogged with incense
men and women are sitting crosslegged on pillows of mustard cress
oming to themselves
they look terribly earnest
their motives are unhealthy
they are damaged people
they flinch from loud noises
conflict scares them
they will do anyhting to avoid it
ommmmmm
they have conversations in hushed voices
and never disagree

id like to throw a rat in the lap of one of those crosslegged cunts
to be perfectly honest
what you scared of?
ommmmm
'i don't deal with negativity, it exists on a eavlength i can no longer tune into'

there is a teacher
i don't trust him
he is at the front
and puts lot of effort into looking spiritual
he interprets that as being serious mostly
but sometimes smiling beatificallly
and for no apparent reason
he's got a shaved head and a lean wiry figure
i think he's a compulsive masterbater.

he keeps wanthing to touch the girls

on the streets theres a protest
down with them
down with them
all the teenagers are shouting
theres leaders there too
and they want to touch the young people too
and they want to hear them parroting slogans
it makes them hot

and we let a few people starve to death
beacuse we don't like them much
they're ugly for a start

on the trains and buses that transport the work force to their places of work
women are swapping photoes of good looking people
look at him there, oh, he's so hot
oh, i want to have sex with him
oh, im getting all moist
just thinking abnout it

and then they talk about shoppping or something

while some kid says he's going to jum over some smalle kids on his bmx
jump off a ramp and let his momentum propell him over their prone bodies
only he doesn't
he lands on them
deliberately
for a laugh

every morning and every evening we sit on the labour trains
its one experience we have in common i spose
we all know what its like sitting on the labout train
getting shunted to work

at work there are 6 boys and 6 girls
they are wired up to machines that bleep
every time the machine bleeps they have to perform a specific function
a different one for each tone of bleep
the bleeps go really fast
and theres a lot of different tones to memorise
they're really fast
beep
beep
beep
and they're really proud of how fast they can go
when someone messes up, no one helps
they like it
cos it makes them feel like theyre better
no one wants to be the worst at their job do they?
you want to feel competent
like you can manage
like you can keep to the rhythm of the bleeps
the trick is
to internalise the operations
so you can completely supress the conscous mind
and run wholly off instinct
like a highly trained athlete
they learn from repition also
beep
beep
beep
and everywhere the machines are beeping
and everyhwere people are rushing around
in obesquience to the beeps

you wouldnt want to be a tramp would you
look how sad and defeated they look
knowing they cant dance to the beeps
unbale to master the wild yet controlled flailing of limbs
each movement, an effienct response to a bleep

2008-05-24T18:06:00.000-07:00

Imposter! Usurper!

Tear off his crown!

Unthrone him!

Trample his silks and ermines

Bedaub his rainments with mud!

Pull Down his Insignia.

Smash his monuments!

Topple his statues! Occupy his palaces!

Scupper all ornament and finery.

Uproot his gardens and set fire to his orchards.

Reverse his victories. Unpick his skirt of territories

Make his a name to coax laughter from children,

A name to excite derision and hooting scorn.

Have history condemn him and

deinigrate his every achievement

Cast doubt on his assertions.

Blaspheme against his gods,

and persecute his followers…

The demands made of us are too great

the load is too heavy.

It is inhuman.

I am very tired.

These shackles are too tight

these chains too heavy.

Who is he to strike such poses?

To stand in such triumphal pomp?

To waft the sceptre so airily

and issue such cruel decree?

To ignore our every plaint and petition

to be so indiffernt to our suffering?

Specimens under glass.

What right has he? What right?

By whom was it bestowed?

Dismantle his castles!

Bring low his works!

Tear down his Towers!

For did we not raise them?

Was it not our sweat and sinew

under duress,

under whip and threat,

which raised the stone so high?

Our curses and grunting,

We who built these momunents

to our own coercion.

the usurpation of our volition-

the commandeering of our energies.

Jewels enchant the light

Precious metals

He was not there

Scrabbling in the dirt,

stooped in the mines,

We uprooted them,

cut and polished them,

meekly surrendered them.

We who sacrified ourselves in war

Immolated ourselves in labours,

of no benefit to ourselves or our families

watched our lives slip by,

in service to another.

Catering to his whims, servicing

his greed.

Buying back the things we build

…and our lives slip by in labours

and the days lose their meaning

and time

is suspended, or contracted

into a tiny,

orderly

loop.

In which the same things are repeated,

In the same order,

Indefinitely.

And time keeps contracting

only it moves so much faster

the outlines are blurring

and the same shapes

recurring

the patterns are repeating

the stories unchanging

around and around

till it feels as if we were

static

and that time

is twirling

around us

spinning swifter and swifter

till larger patterns

are discerned

from the blur

of the smaller.

UNLEARN HIS LANGUAGE

UNWEAVE HIS SPELLS

RESTORE TIME TO ITS FORMER DIMENSISONS

Breath which births speech,

living and protean,

patterned as air currents

as sand rippled by tide surges

or stone, harried by wave and wind.

Patterned as sea

as sky and star

patterned as outreach of branches

efflorescence of leaf and flower.

Patterned

as the flight paths of insects

and swallows

in pursuit of insects.

As swift and elastic as those…

And there are many things perpetually changing

and many other things which do not change.

Stories are unchanging, and the characters unchanging also.

Roles inhabited

by each

succeeding

generation.

And the characters interact in the same fashion

and according to the same ineluctable logic.

And yes, there is, from time to time, some local uprising

but these are of brief duration and have no lasting consequences,

no meaningful ramifications.

Scripts are rewritten. Roles reassigned

and normal service resumed.

The momentum is lost.

The energy spent.

History reverts to its former contours.

Waterfalls are a senseless prattle

and birdsong loses its harmony.

The air is clogged with dust

so that breathing is hampered

and it is unwise to drink the water.

There is noise always

abrasive, formless, shrill

and images crowd the vision.

There is no silence

and no stillness.

The mind is caught in mirror-worlds

and dreams of another's devising

Thought polluted as air and desire

perverted from its true course

re-routed

as by a system of dams, resoviours and canals.

The mind is led to labyrinths

and moves without progressing

Mirages flicker in the coridoors

and energy is disippated

in their pursuance.

What species of magic is this

which holds us so firmly in its thrall?

A conjurors trick no more, the diversion of attention

conceals the sleight of hand.

A swindle, performed by a swindler.

Our labours are unceasing

No harvest is gathered

No period of repose enjoyed

No period of consolidtion.

No Endings and no New Beginnings.

Some furtive communications still

soft crooning in the night

elegies for vanished stars.

Coded messages of comradship and fraternity

They Burn Still!

But their light is hidden by other lights

far weaker but infinitely closer.

Death to the King! Death to his cronies!

Death to his gods! Death to their priests!

Here we can operate Outside of Time.

Communicating across it and through it

Here we can trace conspiracies

and forge counter-conspiracies of our own

Plots to assasinate kings and unseat potentates

redraw maps and reassign values.

There are power struggles here also,

struggles for meaning and significance.

Struggles to preserve and struggles to eradicate.

Fires to keep burning and fires to douse.

Swallows chase tiny flies into evening

and clouds settle.

//////////////////////-----------

in tumbling forest and sharp ravine

the crooked river runs

past castle crags and ruined rock

through fine-ground river sand.