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‘Bare-ass naked’: The KLF and the live stage production of Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘Illuminatus!’


Prunella Gee as Eris in ‘Illuminatus!’ (via Liverpool Confidential)

In 1976, the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool mounted a 12-hour stage production of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy. It was a fateful event in the life of the show’s set designer, Bill Drummond, for reasons he’s detailed in the Guardian: for one thing, it was in connection with Illuminatus! and its director, Ken Campbell, that Drummond first heard about the eternal conflict between the Illuminati, who may secretly control the world, and the Justified Ancients of Mummu, or the JAMs, who may be agents of chaos disrupting the Illuminati’s plans. (Recall that in Illuminatus!, the MC5 record “Kick Out The Jams” at the behest of the Illuminati, as a way of taunting the Justified Ancients—or so John Dillinger says.)

Before they were known as the KLF, Drummond and Jimmy Cauty called themselves the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, appropriating the name for the eschaton-immanentizing hip-hop outfit they started in 1987. Over the next few years, they seized the pop charts and filled the airwaves with disorienting, Discordian hits, until a day came when you could flip on the TV and find Tammy Wynette singing “Stand By The JAMs,” or Martin Sheen narrating the KLF’s reenactment of the end of The Wicker Man.
 

Bill Drummond in Big in Japan, live at Eric’s (via @FromEricsToEvol)
 
After the Liverpool run of Illuminatus!, Drummond rebuilt his sets for the London production, but he suddenly bailed on the show, walking out hours before it was to open. I guess he missed the nude cameo appearance Robert Anton Wilson describes in Cosmic Trigger, Volume I:

On November 23, 1976—a sacred Discordian holy day, both because of the 23 and because it is Harpo Marx’s birthday—a most ingenious young Englishman named Ken Campbell premiered a ten-hour adaptation of Illuminatus at the Science-Fiction Theatre of Liverpool. It was something of a success (the Guardian reviewed it three times, each reviewer being wildly enthusiastic) and Campbell and his partner, actor Chris Langham, were invited to present it as the first production of the new Cottesloe extension of the National Theatre, under the patronage of Her Majesty the Queen.

This seemed to me the greatest Discordian joke ever, since Illuminatus, as I may not have mentioned before, is the most overtly anarchistic novel of this century. Shea and I quite seriously defined our purpose, when writing it, as trying to do to the State what Voltaire did to the Church—to reduce it to an object of contempt among all educated people. Ken Campbell’s adaptation was totally faithful to this nihilistic spirit and contained long unexpurgated speeches from the novel explaining at sometimes tedious length just why everything government does is always done wrong. The audiences didn’t mind this pedantic lecturing because it was well integrated into a kaleidoscope of humor, suspense, and plenty of sex (more simulated blow jobs than any drama in history, I believe). The thought of having this totally subversive ritual staged under the patronage of H.M. the Queen, Elizabeth II, was nectar and ambrosia to me.

The National Theatre flew Shea and me over to London for the premiere and I fell in love with the whole cast, especially Prunella Gee, who emphatically has my vote for Sexiest Actress since Marilyn Monroe. Some of us did a lot of drinking and hash-smoking together, and the cast told me a lot of synchronicities connected with the production. Five actors were injured during the Liverpool run, to fulfill the Law of Fives. Hitler had lived in Liverpool for five months when he was 23 years old. The section of Liverpool in which the play opened, indeed the very street, is described in a dream of Carl Jung’s recorded on page 23 of Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The theatre in Liverpool opened the day Jung died. There is a yellow submarine in Illuminatus, and the Beatles first sang “Yellow Submarine” in that same Liverpool Theatre. The actor playing Padre Pederastia in the Black Mass scene had met Aleister Crowley on a train once.

The cast dared me to do a walk-on role during the National Theatre run. I agreed and became an extra in the Black Mass, where I was upstaged by the goat, who kept sneezing. Nonetheless, there I was, bare-ass naked, chanting “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” under the patronage of Elizabeth II, Queen of England, and I will never stop wondering how much of that was programmed by Crowley before I was even born.

 

Robert Anton Wilson (via John Higgs)
 
In 2017, 23 years after they split up, Drummond and Cauty reunited as the JAMs. Instead of a new chart-burning house record, they released their first novel…

More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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02.27.2018
10:08 am
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John Thompson’s visionary artwork for Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘Cosmic Trigger’
05.17.2017
03:25 pm
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John Coulthart has done us all a service by reminding us of the wonderful art that appears in Robert Anton Wilson’s mind-bending follow-up (and companion) to his well-known Illuminatus! Trilogy, which bore the memorable title Cosmic Trigger with the subtitle Final Secret of the Illuminati.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy introduced readers to an incredible stew of ideas and influences that included Adam Weishaupt, UFOs, Wilhelm Reich, the number 23, John Dillinger’s penis, Carlos Castaneda, tarot, LSD—and did it via an enjoyable sci-fi/thriller plot—but Cosmic Trigger, while doing nothing to “rein in” the scope of Wilson’s occult interests, helped put some of the fictional trilogy’s meat on the bone in a semi-autobiographical context. Wilson not only told his readers how to get to the front door of Chapel Perilous, he also explained the secret “knock” required for entrance and what happened to you when you went inside.

As brilliant as he was, even Bob Wilson benefited greatly from having his ideas visualized in such a simpatico manner. John Thompson, a noted figure from the San Francisco comix scene, and someone very interested in mysticism and spirituality, was the ideal person to bring the visionary material to life.

Coulthart points out that not all editions of Cosmic Trigger included Thompson’s memorable cover (above), but most retained his internal illustrations. Here are some of those followed by a few of his other illustrations, which are just as creative and stimulating as the Cosmic Trigger material.

Daisy Eris Campbell’s Cosmic Trigger: The Play is currently being staged at The Cockpit in London. Buy tickets here.
 

Above, Thompson’s portrait of the author
 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.17.2017
03:25 pm
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‘Aleister & Adolf’: Douglas Rushkoff on his new graphic novel, Crowley and magical warfare


 
Aleister & Adolf is a new graphic novel from Dark Horse Comics, the product of the creative pairing of media theorist Douglas Rushkoff—Professor of Media Studies at Queens College in New York—and and award-winning illustrator Michael Avon Oeming.

In Aleister & Adolf the reader is taken behind the scenes of the capitalist spectacle and inside the boardrooms where corporate-occult marketing departments employ fascist sigil magick developed by the Nazis during WWII in today’s advertising logos. A place where the war for men’s minds is waged with symbols and catchy slogans. It’s a fun smart read and you’ll be much smarter after you’ve read it, trust me. And Oeming’s crisp B&W artwork is perfectly suited for getting across some often difficult and tricky philosophical concepts. He’s a unique talent indeed.

Rushkoff recently told AV Club:

“Swastikas and other sigil logos become the corporate logos of our world. And given that we’re living in a moment where those logos are migrating online where they can move on their own, it’s kind of important that we consider the origins and power of these icons.”

Grant Morrison even wrote the introduction to Aleister & Adolf. I mean, how can you lose with something like this?

I asked Douglas Rushkoff a few questions via email:

Dangerous Minds: Where did you find the inspiration for Aleister & Adolf?

Douglas Rushkoff: It’s almost easier to ask where didn’t I find inspiration for Aleister & Adolf. The moment it occurred to me was when I was in an editorial meeting at DC/Vertigo about my comic book Testament, back in 2005. The editor warned me that there was an arcane house rule against having Jesus Christ and a Superhero in the same panel. Not that I was going to get to Jesus in my story, but the rule got me thinking about other potentially blasphemous superhero/supervillain pairings. And that’s when I first got to wondering about Aleister Crowley vs. Adolf Hitler.

But as I considered the possibility, it occurred to me that they were practicing competing forms of magic at the same time. And then I began to do the research, and learned that the premise of my story was true: Aleister Crowley performed counter-sigils to Hitler’s. Crowley came up with the V for Victory sigil that Churchill used to flash—and got it to him through Ian Fleming (the James Bond author) who was MI5 at the time.

I’ve always wanted to do something about Crowley, but I’ve been afraid for a bunch of reasons. Making him something of a war hero, and contrasting him with a true villain like Hitler, became a way to depict him as something more dimensional than “the Beast.”

Did you think of the ending first? It’s a bit like a punchline, isn’t it?

Douglas Rushkoff: I didn’t think of the ending first. The first thing I thought of was to have a young American military photographer get sent to enlist Crowley in the magical effort. I wanted us to see the story through someone like us—someone more cynical, perhaps—and then get to have the vicarious thrill of being drawn into Crowley’s world.

Then, I decided I needed a framing story - just to show how relevant all this creation of sigils is to our world today. So I created a prologue for the story, that takes place in a modern advertising agency: the place where the equivalent of sigil magic is practiced today. I wanted to set the telling of the story within the frame of how corporate sigils are taking life on the Internet today. So the outer frame takes place in the mid-90’s, when the net was being turned over to marketers. The ending is pretty well broadcast up front.
 

 
Aleister & Adolph reminds me a lot of Robert Anton Wilson’s Masks of the Illuminatus—which I think is his best book—because it sort of forces its ideas into the reader’s head like an earworm that you can’t resist. Also Crowley is a character in that book, too, of course. Do you see it as a bit of a RAW homage?

Douglas Rushkoff: It’s a RAW homage in that the story has verisimilitude—it is told in a way where it’s absolutely possible for this all to happen. There’s no supernatural magic here; it’s just the magick of Will. There’s the black magic of the Nazis. But however extreme the Nazis, it was real. It’s got the reality quotient of Eyes Wide Shut or Apocalypse Now.

And that’s the understanding of sigil magic I got from Bob. It’s all very normal. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Just that you have to participate in its perception. It’s just a different way of understanding the connections. So while the protagonist of the story starts off as a disillusioned atheist and ends up believing in magick as Magic, even Crowley (at least my Crowley) tries to convince him not to take it so literally.

I wouldn’t understand magick that way if it weren’t for Bob. It’s embedded in the fabric of reality. It doesn’t need to break the rules of reality to work. 
 

 
Are you aware of a recent trend among some alt-right types to organize acts of group 4Chan “meme magick”? Some of it’s just blatant harassment and bullying over Twitter, but there’s actually a sophisticated intent behind some of it. Pepe the Frog has become a hypersigil. I’m not being admiring of it—the idea that certain reichwingers would want start a magical war via social media is alarming to say the least—but the concept is a sound one magically speaking: They’ve figured out how to amplify their signal’s strength like a radio transmitter.

Douglas Rushkoff: There’s a real crossover between the alt-right and the occult. I knew a guy writing a book about it, in fact. And remember, it was one of Bush’s advisors who once explained that the future is something you create. And there’s an any-means-necessary quality to libertarianism that is consonant with chaos magic.

Plus, you’re talking about homespun propagandists inhabiting the comments sections of blogs and things. They’re not reading Bernays and Lippman. They’re waging hand-to-hand battle in the ideological trenches. A bit of NLP, rhetoric, and magic are what you turn to.

The interesting thing here is why the left does not use these techniques. It goes against our sense of what is fair. We know we’re “right” and so we want to win with the fact. Sigil magic feels like cheating on some level. So we have to ask ourselves, isn’t the full expression of our Will something we want to unleash? If not, why not?

This isn’t the freethinking/pansexual “Generation Hex” types who seemed to be on the horizon a few years ago, but rather like an evil skinheads contingent at Hogwart’s.

Douglas Rushkoff: Alas it is not. That’s partly because the freethinking pansexuals got a bit distracted by other things. And most of them worked alone. I don’t think there were nearly as many, either. That’s pretty rarified air. Back in the 80’s, there were more kids taking acid in the parking lot at AC/DC concerts than there were in the dorms of Reid College. And likewise - as a result of economics as much as anything - there’s more gamergaters throwing sigils online than Bernie Sanders supporters. Sometimes magic gets in the hands of people you’d rather not find it.
 

Photo of Douglas Rushkoff by Jeff Newelt

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.08.2016
10:46 am
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A young Steve Buscemi in ‘Borders,’ 1989 TV doc about the philosophy of Robert Anton Wilson
10.12.2016
12:22 pm
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In 1989 an hour-long movie called Borders about Robert Anton Wilson, author of The Illumnatus! Trilogy and the Cosmic Trigger series, was produced for public TV (WGBH Boston was one of the production companies behind it). The movie, directed by Merrill Aldighieri and Joe Tripician, is a blend of dramatic and documentary elements that also occasionally includes charmingly rudimentary computer graphics.

The first few minutes of Borders is an extended scene involving Ted, who is possibly a scientist named Ted who is doing something to subvert the company he works for—something like that. Whatever it is, his lack of integrity is enough for his girlfriend to leave the weekend house he has lined up for them. Unfortunately, we never find out what Ted’s situation was all about, because we’re never shown a second sequence to flesh out the promising start.

At first blush, the title Borders seems inapt for a documentary about a figure whose intellectual reach is as impressive as Wilson’s, but in short order its true significance becomes clear. As Wilson says, in his life he has passed through many conceptual borders—leaving the Catholic Church for Trotskyism, only to abandon that for agnosticism—and integral to his thinking is the project of detecting, decoding, and resisting the various “borders” that mankind erects for itself to keep up separated.

Early in the program Wilson expands on this idea:
 

Borders are a basic mammalian territorial imperative. All mammals want a territory, and they claim it by making excretions that make a topological outline, that’s the territory they claim. That’s why your dog pees on every tree when you take him for a walk. That’s the way the dog is marking his territory. Chimpanzees mark their territories with excretions too. The difference between human beings (or domesticated primates) and the other mammals is we mark our territories with ink excretions on paper—land titles, peace treaties, and so on. Every national border in the world marks a place where two gangs of domesticated primates fought until they were exhausted, and then made a territorial mark. That’s how national borders are created. We don’t throw excretions at each other like the chimpanzees, we throw chemicals and bombs and so on, but it’s basically the same mammalian process. The only intelligent way to discuss politics is on all fours.

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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10.12.2016
12:22 pm
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Read the comic book of Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘Illuminatus!’ online


 
I know how it is: you read the trilogy of sci-fi novels, saw the play, listened to the audiobook, even picked up the card game, but you still can’t get enough of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s conspiracy epic, Illuminatus! Where is the balm that will soothe your hurt?

Back in 1987, underground comix publishers Rip Off Press—the persons responsible for the fourth edition of the related sacred text Principia Discordia, not to mention The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers—put out Eye-n-Apple Productions’ comic book adaptation of Illuminatus! A few months ago, Eye-n-Apple (which seems to be identical with one Mark Philip Steele) announced plans for a digital reprint on its Facebook page:

Good news, folks, the ILLUMINATUS! comic I published back in 1987 is now in e-comic format, including text commentary. It’s a zip file available for download, and may end up at other sites in other formats. If you’re interested, download the comic and contact me about it. Some of the comments MAY be posted in further editions. There was one self-published issue, then 3 with Rip Off Press, and an unpublished 4th issue. Plans are for us to release one a month from now till we’re done.

No word yet on subsequent numbers, but you can download a free PDF of the first issue here, and it seems this is the space to watch for updates. Below, Robert Anton Wilson and Rev. Ivan Stang of the Church of the Subgenius discuss the consolations of the Discordian faith on Hour of Slack.
 

 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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10.08.2015
09:45 am
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Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘punk’ album: ‘YOU’VE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR MINDS!!’
12.11.2014
10:42 am
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In many of Robert Anton Wilson’s books, the “about the author” page mentions that Wilson recorded a punk rock album called The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy. This is one of those records I would have given a tooth for in the pre-filesharing era. I’ve still never come across a physical copy of it, but a glance at the Discogs.com marketplace suggests it’s not as rare as it once seemed.

Recorded while Wilson was living in Ireland in the mid-‘80s—avoiding Reagan’s presidency, if memory serves—The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy is the first LP by Irish garage-psych rockers the Golden Horde. Wilson contributed vocals (spoken) to most of the songs, and he wrote the lyrics to “Black Flag” and “Lawrence Talbot Suite.” Unless you are a hardcore Nuggets person, it might take some imagination to hear this as “a punk rock record.” To me, the Golden Horde often sound like a less proficient Rezillos, which is a beautiful thing, but fans of the Queen Haters might be disappointed. These vinyl rips are not of the finest quality, though I doubt this LP was ever destined to deliver an audiophile experience.

As the sleeve notes say, “COSMIC BUBBLEGUM EXISTENTIALISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE….....YOU’VE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR MINDS!!”

“Black Flag” by the Golden Horde with Robert Anton Wilson:

 
And the rest of the LP:

The Chocolate Biscuit
Young and Happy
Communist for the FBI
Little U.F.O.
Lawrence Talbot Suite
 

 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.11.2014
10:42 am
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Robert Anton Wilson, David Cross talk LSD & Timothy Leary with Bill Maher on ‘Politically Incorrect’


 
In 1996, Robert Anton Wilson, David Cross, Mama Michelle Phillips and then-SPIN magazine publisher Bob Guccione Jr. appeared on what was intended to be a sort of Timothy Leary-themed discussion on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect, and supposed to include Leary himself. As he was so near death at the time, Bob Wilson stepped in to take his place (and did a wonderful job). Everyone on the panel, including Maher, were personal friends with Leary, and offered charming anecdotes about their fading friend.

Unsurprisingly, much of the discussion was about drugs, in particular LSD, which Cross, RAW, Phillps and Maher are all rather strongly in favor of. Guccione Jr., on the other hand, sees drugs in a negative light, and says some stupid stuff about acid until it is pointed out to him that his opinion on LSD is about as worthwhile as the Pope opining on sex.

What is surprising is how timeless this show is. Aside from some Bill Clinton and Bob Dole references in the opening monologue—and Bill Maher’s lapels—it holds up surprisingly well. There’s a particularly good point made by David Cross who explains how it was possible for them to sit there on a TV show and say “We love acid, acid’s great!” without any fear of arrest or reprisal, largely because of Timothy Leary’s fearless advocacy of the psychedelic experience during the 1960s.
 

 
Bonus clip, Bill Maher rants about LSD and psilocybin in 2011:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.02.2014
12:08 pm
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Robert Anton Wilson audio and video pack, free bit torrent download
01.16.2013
12:51 pm
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“Mr. RAW’s Psychedelic Hand” by Dimitri Drjuchin. Acrylic on canvas.

Joseph Matheny writes:

I plan to commercially release four more pieces from my Robert Anton Wilson archives later this year, so in preparation for that, I have put the last four I released into the public domain. After a sufficient time, I will do the same for the four I will be releasing in 2013, and so on, until I have exhausted my archives and they are all in the public domain.

Everything except “The I in the Triangle” video is hosted on Archive.org. Unfortunately, Archive.org can’t seem to facilitate a decent sized MP4 of the video, so I have included it in an all-inclusive torrent pack here.  Included in this batch is:

TAZ: Temporary Autonomous Zone: A night of ontological anarchy and poetic terrorism captured live at the Komotion International in San Francisco in February 1993. Introduced by Joseph Matheny and featuring Rob Breszny, the elusive Hakim Bey reading from his unpublished manuscripts, Nick Herbert performing his Quantum Tantric poetry, and Robert Anton Wilson rounding out the evening with his RAW witticisms.

Robert Anton Wilson Remembered by Douglas Rushkoff, Antero Ali, Tiffany Brown, David Brown, Zac Odin, Joseph Matheny, and Alan Meridian.

Robert Anton Wilson: The “I” in the Triangle: Wilson introduces this lecture as a discussion of “The Western Hermetic Tradition”…and it is, but from Bob’s unique point of view. Its sweeping scope covers centuries of individuals and groups from the Illuminati of Bavaria and the Freemasons to the Priory of Sion and the Bilderbergers. Carl Jung, Philip K. Dick, Rajneesh, Jean Cocteau, Aleister Crowley, the Gnomes of Zurich, Harvey’s 6-foot white rabbit and many more all play a part. Along the way there are the strange connections among Nostradamus and the earthquakes in Los Angeles, the Merovingians and extraterrestrials from Sirius, Rastafarians and the Cult of the Black Virgin, Atlantis and Satan, the Vatican Bank and the Mafia and much, much more. Educational? Definitely. Informative? Absolutely! Truly a roller-coaster ride that will leave your head spinning and your sides splitting!

Robert Anton Wilson: The Lost Studio Session Recorded in Chicago in 1994, this previously unreleased audio session with the renowned Robert Anton Wilson has been stored away for fifteen years…and almost lost entirely. If Bob knew how many synchronicities surround the rediscovery and release of this “lost” studio session, he would be chuckling in that half-jolly, half-mischievous way of his. If you believe in any kind of afterlife, maybe you can imagine him laughing right now. I like that image: Bob the laughing Buddha, still having one over on us from the great beyond. -Joseph Matheny (from the liner notes)

Also included in the torrent file are some bonus ebooks.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.16.2013
12:51 pm
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Robert Anton Wilson on Aleister Crowley
01.03.2013
05:53 pm
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Perhaps this will only prove of interest to really hardcore Crowley buffs (and not necessarily RAW fans who aren’t Crowley nuts) but this is, for sure, the best Bob Wilson interview on the topic of Aleister Crowley that I’ve ever heard.

I’m pretty sure this comes from the CD box set of interviews with Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything: (or Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance) that came out in 2005.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.03.2013
05:53 pm
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Dean Cavanagh: Exclusive interview with the writer and director of ‘Kubricks’

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Dean Cavanagh is that very rare breed – a maverick whose talents have been successfully proven over several different disciplines.

He is an award-winning artist; a screenwriter and playwright, writing the highly acclaimed Wedding Belles with Irvine Welsh and the forth-coming movie version of the hit on-line series Svengali. He has also been a journalist, with bylines in i-D, NME, Sabotage Times and the Guardian. Dean is also a documentary-maker, a film and TV producer and a musician, with along list of collaborators, including Robert Anton Wilson.

Now the multi-talented Cavanagh has written and directed (with his son Josh), his first movie - the much anticipated Kubricks.

In this exclusive interview with Dangerous Minds, Dean talks about the ideas and creative processes behind Kubricks. How he collaborated with Alan McGee, and developed the film with his son Josh, discussing his thoughts on cinema and synchronicity, and explaining howKubricks came to be filmed over 5 days, with a talented cast this summer.

Dean Cavanagh: ‘Stanley Kubrick has always fascinated me in that he was clearly trying to convey messages through symbols, codes and puzzles in his films.

‘For me his genius was in the way he presented the ‘regular’ audience with a clear narrative structure and for those who wanted to look deeper he constructed hidden layers of subjectivity. He was clearly a magician working with big budgets in such an idiosyncratic way that it’s hard not to be intrigued by him and his oeuvre.

‘I’ve been following Kubrick researchers like Rob Ager and Jay Weidner for the last few years and I really wanted to dramatize a story based around Kubrick as an inspirational enigma. There is a wealth of material about the esoteric side of Kubrick on the net and Ager and Weidner are great places to start the journey from.’

DM: How did you progress towards making ‘Kubricks’?

Dean Cavanagh: ‘I’ve been writing screenplays and theatre on my own and also with Irvine Welsh since the 1990’s. Up until last year, I never really had any desire to direct a film but Alan McGee encouraged me to have a go. He offered to produce a film if I would write and direct with the emphasis being on us having total control. This was music to my ears after having mainly dealt with people who are always looking for reasons not to make a film.  Alan’s credo was “just do it and let’s see what happens”. There’s a great freedom in working with him.’
 
Read more of Dean Cavanagh’s exclusive interview, plus free ‘Kubricks’ soundtrack download, after the jump…
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Alan McGee: Talks Magick, Music and his new Movie ‘Kubricks’


 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.16.2012
07:57 pm
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Robert Anton Wilson tribute: ‘Mr. RAW’s Psychedelic Hand’ by Dimitri Drjuchin
06.13.2012
02:02 pm
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This trippy tribute to Robert Anton Wilson, “Mr. Raw’s Psychedelic Hand” is by New York City-based artist (and Dangerous Minds pal) Dimitri Drjuchin. Acrylic on canvas.

Stunning, isn’t it?

Posted by Tara McGinley
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06.13.2012
02:02 pm
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Robert Anton Wilson meets Ayn Rand!
06.04.2012
06:32 pm
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Dangerous Minds pal Steven Otero hipped me to this…

From RAW’s Cosmic Trigger, Volume II, 2nd ed, -pp.133-134:

“The first new dogmatism I embraced after rejecting the Marxist BS (belief system) was Ayn Rand’s philosophy (not yet called Objectivism in those days.) _The Fountainhead_ had exactly the appeal for me that it has retained, decade after decade, with alienated adolescents of all ages. (The average youthful reader of _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ decides he is the Superman, and the average youthful Randroid decides she is an Alienated Super Genius.) LIke most Randroids, I went around for a few years mindlessly parroting all the the Rand dogma and imagining I was an ‘individualist.’

“Some years later, after becoming a published writer, I actually was invited to meet Ayn Rand once. (I was ‘summoned to the Presence,’ as Arlen said.) I confessed my doubts about certain Rand dogmas and was Cast Out Into the Darkness forever to wail and gnash my teeth in the Realm of Thud. It was weird. I thought the Trots and Catholic priests were dogmatic, but Ayn Rand made both groups look like models of tolerance by comparison.

“I thought she was a clinical paranoid. It was nearly 30 years later that I found out Rand was merely on Speed all the time, which creates an effect so much like paranoia that even trained clinicians cannot always tell the difference, and some even claim there is no difference.”

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.04.2012
06:32 pm
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Full Robert Anton Wilson lecture at The Prophets Conference
04.04.2012
04:01 pm
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RAW by Bobby Campbell

I was actually in attendance at this talk, held at The Prophets Conference, a New Age confab held in various cities about fifteen years ago. This one was held in Palm Springs in mid-December of 2000. I wrote about it a bit on Boing Boing, in my contribution to their Robert Anton Wilson week:

The RAW fans contingent in Palm Springs were totally distinct from everyone else present (goths and cyberpunk vs New Agey senior citizens who wanted to hear about Pleiadian prophecy and 2012 Mayan stuff, which Bob just hated). Bob got really ripped on hard alcohol before his talk and swore like a sailor, which seemed to deeply offend the organizers of the event. We ended up hanging out in his hotel suite, smoking pot. A young guy had given him a bag of these black psilocybin mushrooms which he’d managed to smuggle into America from Ireland, which Bob didn’t really seem to want and gave to me (my god were they strong). It was in Palm Springs that I got to see firsthand how bad his post-polio syndrome had gotten. He was getting pretty wobbly on his feet, but this did not seem to dampen his enthusiasm in the least for copious amounts of Marlboro reds, whiskey and weed.

Mentally he was certainly as sharp as ever, that never changed, but his health seemed to go downhill quite fast in the years I knew him. The aforementioned “enthusiasms” were often consumed with rapacious gusto for a man of his age and he once revealed to me that since nearly everyone who he had ever loved in his life was already dead, he was going to smoke as many cigarettes and pound back as much Scotch as he damn well pleased. Bob’s your uncle!

Read more of Wilson and I, by Richard Metzger (Boing Boing)

I’m not sure how ripped Bob appears to be in the video, because he could hold his liquor pretty well, but trust me, he was fuckin’ bombed
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.04.2012
04:01 pm
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Wilson and I: A personal recollection of Robert Anton Wilson
01.16.2012
02:32 pm
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A pop art RAW portrait by Bobby Campbell

An essay that I wrote about Robert Anton Wilson has been posted as part of Boing Boing’s special “Robert Anton Wilson Week,” joining pieces by Douglas Rushkoff, Erik Davis, Antero Alli, Ivan Stang, Gareth Branwyn. Paul Krassner, R.U. Sirius and others:

As “outsider” teenage readers of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s classicIlluminatus! trilogy in the early 1980s, it seemed to some of my friends at the time (all big Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan and Philip K Dick fans, too) that the novel’s authors were trying to communicate something “in code” to their readers, like it was a message about “the conspiracy” that was coming from an underground resistance group. I thought that was bunk and fanciful nonsense, but it goes to show how strong of an effect that book had on kids’ imaginations back then.

Illuminatus! was a touchstone for freethinking weirdos of that era, one of the rare books that even attempted to make sense of being born into an ever increasingly surreal world still reeling from things like the JFK/MLK/RFK assassinations, Watergate and the Vietnam war and where Ronald Reagan, a bad actor who once worked with a chimpanzee, had just become President.

It was also an interesting experiment in mass occult initiation—sold at shopping malls across America—that satirically tore away the veils of the modern world and (actively, not passively) imprinted a skeptical worldview on the reader. Read those books from cover to cover and there was virtually not a chance in hell that you’d be a normal person ever again. The Illuminatus! trilogy really made quite an impression, let’s just say.

Wilson’s non-fiction work, Cosmic Trigger, was of even greater interest to me with its cheerful speculations on Timothy Leary’s channeled communications from “holy guardian angels,” psychedelic drugs and Aleister Crowley. The so-called “23 enigma,” I was familiar with already because of The Third Mind by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, but it was explained in greater depth in Cosmic Trigger. It was the first place I’d read of Robert K. Temple’s book The Sirius Mystery and it was also the first time I heard the name Terence McKenna. I can’t tell you how many weird and wonderful things that book exposed me to.

It was instrumental in forming my worldview. Simply put, it’s in my DNA. Cosmic Trigger is one of the UR-documents of my life (and career!).

The first time I met up with Bob Wilson, in the flesh, was at a day-long event called “Millennial Madness” that took place in the Scottish Rites Masonic Temple on Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles. It must have been around 1993. He was speaking at the event on a bill with Timothy Leary, medical marijuana guru Jack Herer and Paul Krassner. RAW was outside having a cigarette and I nervously offered him some of the spliff I was smoking, which he happily accepted and we chatted for a moment.

Read the rest at Boing Boing:
Wilson and I

Below, Robert Anton Wilson at the DisinfoCon, February 19, 2000, at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.16.2012
02:32 pm
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Robert Anton Wilson on money: ‘It’s a semantic hallucination’
07.22.2011
04:35 pm
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“A system which consigned me to poverty at birth and Nelson Godawful Rockefeller to riches, is demonstrably insane.”—Robert Anton Wilson

A blog devoted to collecting vintage—and often very obscure—interviews with Robert Anton Wilson posted a long portion of what is apparently only one of three parts from a publican called New Libertarian Notes , issue 39,” from September 5, 1976.

Here’s a gem plucked from deep within it where Wilson discusses the illusion of wealth, one of his favorite topics:

RAW: Of course, my position is based on the denial that money does store wealth. I think it’s a semantic hallucination, the verbal equivalent of an optical illusion, to speak at all of money containing or storing wealth. Such thinking should have gone out with phlogiston theory. The symbol is not the referent; the map is not the territory. Money symbolizes wealth, as words symbolize things, and that’s all. The delusions that money contains wealth is the mechanism by which the credit monopoly has gained a stranglehold on the entire economy. As Colonel Greene pointed out in Mutual Banking, all the money could disappear tomorrow morning and the wealth of the planet would remain the same. However, if the wealth disappeared—if squinks from the Pink Dimension dragged it off to null-space or something—the money would be worth nothing. You don’t need to plow through the dialects of the debate between the Austrians and the free credit people like Tucker and Gesell to see this; any textbook of semantics will make it clear in a few hours of study. Wealth is nature’s abundance, freely given, plus the exponential advance of technology via human intelligence, and as Korzybski and Fuller demonstrate, this can only increase an an accelerating rate. Money is just the tickets or symbols to arrange for the distribution—either equitably, in a free money system, or inequitably, as under the tyranny of the present money-cartel. As you realize, a cashless society could exist merely by keeping bookkeeping entries or computer tapes. Money is a primitive form of such computer tapes, serving a feedback function. If we are not to replace the present banking oligopoly with a programmer’s oligopoly, in which the interest will be paid to computer technicians, we must realize that this is all a matter of abstract symbolism—that it exists by social agreement and nobody owns it, anymore than Webster owns the language. Why is it, incidentally, that the Austrians don’t follow their logic to its natural conclusion and demand that we pay interest to the dictionary publishers every time we speak or write?

You have to watch people playing Monopoly, and see them begin to “identify” the paper markers with real value, to understand how the mass hypnosis of Capitalism works. Fortunately, the Head Revolution is still proceeding and more and more people are waking up to the difference between our economic game-rules and the real existential situation of humanity.

Illuminating Discord: An interview with Robert Anton Wilson (Cleveland Okie)

Below, Lance Bauscher’s enjoyable documentary portrait of Robert Anton Wilson, Maybe Logic:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.22.2011
04:35 pm
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