PlaguePod New Variant Day 3

Thank you. Ergonomic Plague Pod. Good evening.

This is a telepathic transmission from the urbanomic bunker on planet Roma in the Covid-19 system. Step into my support bubble. Take off your mask. Get into your soft pants and your PlaguePod t-shirt. If you don't have a PlaguePod t-shirt, go to urbanomic.com now and buy one. Roll out the snack scene and gather close around less than two metres

because I want to tell you a story. It's the year 2021. Things are not going well. The islands formerly known as the United Kingdom, untethered from their European mothership, are floating out into the void. Locked in their houses, brains and bodies atrophying, unable to mail out books owing to confusion over customs and VAT tariffs. With McDonalds closed, supermarket shelves empty and Twiglets in short supply, living

in fear of the plethora of new variants of the killer virus that now infects one in fifty of the population. Masses of its malignant spores crashing down upon them in wave after wave, forced from In the now moribund and eerie streets of their cities, they cower beneath their duvets with only increasingly unhinged digital content for company. And that's just the UK. We'll get to the mess in the US later. This is Urbanonic Plague Pod Live, surfing the second wave all the way through lockdown 3. It's lockdown 3, day 3. I'm not sure which day it is according to the original Gregorian PlaguePod calendar,

but maybe someone can work it out. It's been a long time. And I kind of owe you an apology. I know people were really bugging for PlaguePod over Christmas and New Year, but oh my god, I really needed a rest, just as much as the rest of you. and so I've been putting it off till I've got a bit of energy to put into it you know they say they say that Christmas is a hard time for alcoholics right because there's alcohol everywhere but it's also a hard time for workaholics because you're not officially allowed any workahol at all so it's pretty tough but I think I managed to relax just in time

to get back to the nightmare that is 2021. But have no fear because we're streaming and we're going to have a good time. Hey, everyone's here. Everyone's here. Who's everyone? Everyone. Loads of people. Gary Wilmot. Okay. Sue Cook. Okay. Dale Winton. Okay. Ainsley Harriot. Okay. Julia Bradbury. No. Okay.

Philip Schofield. Okay. And Eamon Holmes. Right. Actually, can you say those again? Gary Wilmot, okay. Sue Cook, okay. Dale Winton, okay. Ainsley Harriot, okay. Julia Bradbury, no. Okay. Philip Schofield, okay. And Eamon Holmes, okay. Right. Yeah, so we've got so much stuff for you. Around about 11, DJK Hoistman is coming in with some hot new tunes. we have got Mr. Keith Tilford the Master of Chronosis and Iceland Bob with some more comic geekery we've got your calls I hope

coming in if you haven't called before then make this your first time and if you have called before call me and update me on what's going on in your part of the Covid Kingdom call in do a Corona Quest speed run we've also got some audio goodies that I managed to dig up this afternoon. An interesting little piece from Mark Fisher. Some hardcore time and non-being with Ray Brasio. Yeah, and some surprises too. Yes, surprises. It's good to be back. Relax, you're inside for the ride.

You know, don't repair your ass. There'll be plenty of everything. Washed by a doctor. Big Apple, Massive and Crew. Second grade one.

Shout out to all the PlaguePodmassive Vyislav in Warsaw David in Bologna Andre in Wales Bogman in Shanghai Dino in Guangdong Zhiyung in Seoul Grzegorz in Switzerland Bella in London Rosa M in London Vaporweave Atlantica in Penzance Did a podcast with Vaporweave Atlantica earlier today, it was D Vitek in Prague Paul C in Prague

Zachary in Brooklyn Adolfo in Brussels Rebecca Lambert de Renfort Lorenzo James in Lisbon. Nice one. Thank you.

Second grade. Unity, you and me.

I'm going to go. And no one dreams of you And no one dreams of you And no one dreams of you

you want to call in you know how to do it it's the sky the sky urbanomic no zoom no 5g And all I dream of is

Big up Lisa in the chat room. Big up Pulsating Shadow in the shower. It's day 313 from the original PlayPod calendar. 313. Big up the Xenogothic, gonna call in and tell us what's going on up north, I hope.

We also have a bit of a treat for the Fangnumina fans coming up later. Thank you.

Oh my god, and dust off crew is in the place as well. Hold tight dust off crew. This was a step of a member of Spectrum. Spectrum. Spectrum. Special executive of counterintelligence. Terrorism, revenge, destruction.

I'm sorry. We'll be right back.

Let me tell you, hold tight for some big tunes tonight. We'll be right back.

Thank you. We'll be right back.

Yeah, we got our first caller in. It is the Escalante. Hello. Hi there. Loving. How's it going? It's good to hear. It's going. It's going. Yeah. You know, the world is still spinning, apparently. And in Texas, there is no corona.

Oh, really? We are one of the few states where you are free to go about as you please. Sure, you've got to wear a mask. stay six feet away, but there's no lockdown. Our wheelchair governor is not going to lock us down. There is no corona. Oh, really? We are one of the few states where you are free. I'm sure you've got to wear a mask, stay six feet away, but there's no lockdown. Our wheelchair governor is not going to lock us down. There is no corona.

Oh, really? We are one of the few states where you are first. Is this actually a person or is it just a recording? It's in a way. There's no lockdown. That was the first night turn-off of the night. The auto turn-off. Yes. Dust off cruise in the house. Hello. Yeah. Yeah, man. Where have you been? There is no Corona. We are one of the cutest. We don't have Corona in my neighborhood either. This is like the quality of callers is really going downhill. We want horror stories.

Come on. If you go to the neighborhood next to mine, there's a lot of corona. Okay, let's go there. I'm not talking about numbers. I'm just talking about mental corona. Mental corona. In my neighborhood, I get mugged for wearing a mask, to be honest. They don't like it. Yeah. It shows you're weak. It shows you're weak, man. It's a weakness. Yeah, it kind of is. It kind of is. They don't like it too much. How have you been surviving during the whole episode, historical episode? I actually, I've been more than surviving. I've been prospering, actually. No way. Yeah, yeah.

It may be a first, in a sense. But, no, it's been a very good year, to be honest. Maybe I don't have the mental corona. or maybe i already had it or something i don't know you're you're already immune yeah yeah um maybe have you managed to kick the dust off you managed to kick the habit no well yeah sort of i transferred it safe clean safe clean only safe clean crew yeah i'm importing it from uh from 1996 right uh you know sort of like the the way like um future talks of the past i'm doing it in reverse but just just for safe clean in massive quantities okay maybe safe clean turns out to be the vaccine we should explain this this

is like an this is yeah right i don't know maybe it's not more entertaining for it not to be explained yeah so um oh well yeah with a computer cleaner in the 90s was it was like a recreational drug it wasn't it was a tape cleaner wasn't it not computer cleaner oh okay so i guess i used it to clean my uh tascam four track tape head cleaner yeah i mean tape head cleaner is definitely the same thing um in the what dust stuff was in the united states was like you got it at staples like eight to twelve bucks a can and it was an inhalant but it was like a hallucinogenic inhalant Like I would see kids sniff it and then fall right over. I saw a kid crack his head open on the side mirror. Yeah, it's essentially recreational asphyxiation.

Yes, exactly. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Feels good, man. And it rots your brain. And I guess we have to talk about what shit's been going down in the US of A. what's your perspective on this sir well they want they're trying to tell us they're trying to say the shit's hit the fan but um i uh i just think it's really that unexpected for that to have happened no it's not unexpected at all um i just i i just sort of think it's uh maybe i sound like a jerk but i just think it's kind of tv in a sense it's it's sort of um It's sort of all extreme simulation, just nonstop batter your brain into, I don't even know what they're saying.

And let me tell you a good story about this. Oh, yeah, please. I mean, as I said, I kind of managed to relax over the holiday. And then for some reason in the back of my mind, I had the unreasonable idea that somehow things were going to calm down because it was a new year, which is totally illogical. And so I spent the day dealing with Brexit and COVID bullshit. And then when this came on the news, I kind of just wanted to retire from the world. so I thought to myself I'll just go and lie down in the dark and I'll listen to some music and you know I've got this thing where I like to reward artists who I like so if I listen to

something over and over again on YouTube like I listen to it a hundred times I'm going to go to band camp and buy it because otherwise it's kind of unfair so I bought a few things last week and I thought yeah I'll listen to this this is going to be great I'll lie down in the dark listen to this great album. I've been listening to this a lot. An interesting artist, sonically appeals to me and has an interesting kind of ironic bookish synth pop vibe. And my last thought before I went to sleep was, well, I should start off Plague Pod playing a track from this album because that would be really good fun. And then I woke up the next morning to find out that John Mouse is cancelled yeah oh my god yeah um I so I I've only met him a few times

um but I have I have a couple like friends and people that I used to I guess collaborate with that are rather close with him I used to know um Ariel I don't want to say well but like two old roommates of mine were in his band for three or four years I mean I know I know I knew him pretty well 10 years ago um i think it's pretty insane the whole thing and like number one they've both always kind of been uh somewhat like at least they they project that they're kind of right wing like edgelordy like i mean it's not really wasn't um wasn't mouse left wing edgelordy uh he possibly was but he was like maoist badjusian ah yeah i see sometimes that stuff just goes like sort of goes over my head because like when you

get into edgelord territory it's sort of yeah it doesn't matter which way you go if you're on the edge yeah yeah in a sense in a sense and um i mean i i i i don't um i don't want to sound as if i'm throwing accusations here because i'm not and i thought i think this was i just think it's kind of insane a couple years ago ariel pink was accused of some sexual stuff and it never even really came to light and i don't think it was real i don't but i find it odd that that was just buried but him going to a protest is now like oh god we have like by the by the end of the day people were um people were tweeting at spotify to remove the fascist from their playlist yeah yeah i mean people are i was reading on facebook today people are like saying you know

they're worse than trump they're the two worst of them all somehow they did it they started the whole fucking thing they're responsible they're responsible for covid as well oh they did it they did it yeah it's reset pills that's what they're doing um yeah that it's it's kind of crazy because i think too like you know if you look at the pictures of them there they're they're clearly they're just like soak up the edginess and be a part of it like no matter what they say i'm not gonna look at those guys and be like those guys really are hardcore politically about anything they're they're it's they're about like media and image and getting people to fucking talk about them so maybe you know this is all part of it i i don't know but yeah it's pretty it's pretty straight up histrionic the way people are acting about yeah yeah right but um people like to cancel

don't they yeah yeah people do it's fun yeah people like to and i think um i think both these guys i think they're you know approaching it correctly where they're kind of like not they're not just not responding but they're both kind of like oh you're not going to cancel me i don't give a fuck yeah but there's then there's this whole like archaeology where you see all these people on um twitter who's like i've been listening to their music for 10 years but now i've suddenly realized i've i'm looking back and now i'm traumatized because i realized that um i i found out that my favorite song is a creepy uh creepy stalker evil fascist song that i mustn't listen to oh yeah so people in the chat are pointing it out yeah they were there with um alex moyer the girl who made that's right yeah yeah the girl who made the incel movie and uh

i mean i think all of i think you know i think it's they're all kind of they're doing the same thing i think it's uh america this is something that i kind of i tell all my friends in europe and in other canada and all that america is really weird right now even in just like the last six months it's it's uh it's it's very extreme it's not it's not abnormal to to like cut out most of your family because they told you at a dinner that they voted donald trump or whatever you know your grandmother is a fucking fascist now hey what we need is someone to inject some logic into this yeah yeah it's ergonomic canceled is that ergonomic was canceled a long time ago keep up exactly we've got Pete Wilson down yeah and hi I think they're doing it well

because they're kind of they both have this they're not going to cancel them they're not going to let you because they don't really buy into that bullshit and like it's I don't I I think both of them I'm not really fans of either in music but I think they make good music they have some songs I like and stuff they're cool um I uh I it's not really going to work to be honest with as hysterical as everything is right now, I also feel that like there are a lot of people are really kind of starting to be like, well, no, no. And I'm just going to calmly like tell you, or just calmly like explain why you don't need to be hysterical and emotional right now. Yeah. Let's hope for some more calm, for people to get excited about the right things at least. Yeah, exactly. There's this, right now people are told, you know, first of all,

they're told hate is good uh straight up and you know beyond that there's like this whole righteous anger bullshit going on and which like sure righteous anger is is fine at times but no one is no one is showing that people are just having like legit temper tantrums in public and this is like both the right and the left it's it's it they're actually like exactly the same it's weird mirror world crap but um hey here's here's pete pete can you hear us hi hi so i'm i'm coming into a conversation halfway through. Yeah, we're just moaning about cancel cancellations, cancel culture. I mean, I think there's good points on both sides here, but I want to echo the point about rage on both sides. So one,

I don't know if either of you guys have come across anything that David Brin has said about this. He's the sci-fi author. No, actually, no. He was sounding the alarm on this years ago. basically his position is essentially that righteous indignation is addictive and what we've done is sort of create a situation in which we're generating we're generating righteousness addicts people need to get their fix so that's obviously a dopamine thing isn't it yeah because it gives you a mission having a mission is very a very important um thing that's lacking in people's lives it's a kind of escapism where you know and i'm all for escapism for the most part but um but i mean this is where we we get from talking

about like um we we move to a sort of comparison with games right where you know now i think a lot people online are laughing yeah right you you've done i mean to be honest i haven't kept up with all of your twitter threads over the last week but you've made quite a return in in quite uh dashing style to the twitter uh scene um and one of the things i saw you you were writing about was yeah this thing about um social media being a kind of space where you can try out different characters essentially yeah like i i increasingly believe that so i'm trying to sort of develop this

theory of persona yeah oh this one is a roughly thought of uh you know that they're the people we are in different situations they're they're putting it in computational terms a kind of control structure for dealing with the sorts of problems we find within certain contexts and and a person is is kind of made out of a variety of personas that are stitched together and this is not meant to be a kind of frivolous oh we're all we all contain multiples we're all you know we all contain contradictions it's not it's not meant to be that but but crucially I think um what social media has done is to in some way formalize um this structure of persona generation

and cultivation in ways to give you to it puts in place a kind of structural system for people to experiment with it yeah so the thing i was saying was that i mean there was there was various things i would say but one of the things that i was saying was that actually you can go back to the sort of old philosophical and religious language and even psychoanalytic language of the multi-partite soul you know where you know you might talk about eight ego super ego or persona shadow and animus anima right or you know all of you going to chinese philosophy you know hun and paul and a variety of different systems for this or um katak and uh mummer

yeah i know the uh the the the good thing about the ccriu demonology is it has plenty of characters available i'm not i sound like i'm advertising religion or something all right hey maybe maybe people should advertise religion a bit yeah people people uh people bash people people want to kill it now um can i say something about what pete said that's like really a lot i've been thinking about i think about that all the time it's social media has this you know people people on the right love to use the term weaponized autism and that's definitely a thing but social media kind of brings out this um weaponized dissociative identity disorder and you see it very very much in people uh younger people where it's like just rapid switching between very very disparate personalities

it's um it's rather extreme to be honest it's it's it's um well is it more of a problem if people uh play with that and get into a state where they're not sure who they are or is it more of a problem if they end up buying into one of those identities and like going for it and becoming that person the thing i think we've got to appreciate is that this is just what growing up is in any context right like like yeah the process the process of of of maturation right and the cultivation of an autonomous individual from from infant to to whenever you think that ends be at you know you know 34 right um uh this process is taking the child through a series of sandboxes

in which we gradually increase the levels of autonomy that they have and these aren't just like general sandboxes but the the example i always use is seminars right at university we don't really expect students in seminars to use the concepts we're giving them in a fully authoritative way what we've done is we've stuck them in a sandpit and given them a few things and said you know play around with them right and it's not until they've played enough and acquired enough confidence however much we think that enough is that they ascend to the next level right but it does sound like somewhere along the line p what you're going to have to do here is draw some kind of normative line between uh let's say cognitively cognitively um

constructive play and something that becomes more pathological yeah yeah yeah and i and i'm i'm very open about that like i think it's really and and and crucially i think another distinction that's important to make here is like i think vagueness is is all over the place here like there's no really clear crisp lines to draw like i say with with with childhood when does childhood end right there's a legal line but we all know that that's a kind of compromise um you can't always draw hard lines often it's about best practices that are compromises but what you can do is articulate the normative principles that underlie those compromises like

you can you can understand the reasons why there's got to be compromises in these situations and that's what I'm kind of interested in I'm not not so much trying to adjudicate in every possible case you know like this person on on you know Instagram has become queerile right there they're gone right I'm I'm trying to sort of more generally say for instance right we can we can start to get a feel for when certain kinds of dopamine loops of self-recognition right um more like addictions than than you know living your best life right so maybe uh where this leads to is building systems for um dopamine irrigation systems or um you know systems

that that uh act that whose tendency is to spread out these flows of dopamine into exploratory patterns rather than to loop them back into themselves absolutely well i mean some some loops you want to reinforce right because selfhood is about that kind of continuous loop of self recognition you don't want it to unspool right yeah what you want well okay here's here's my pitch basically um i think that autonomy is self-control but what i mean by self and what i mean by control are more precise than what we normally think so what i mean by control is literally control in the cybernetic sense you know control systems right reference signals and

and um and you know um perceptual signals and notification and things like this um on the other hand what i mean by self is precisely what i'm trying to work out It's whatever it is that's creating a self-image that's integrating the various other cognitive fragments that your mind is constituted out of. Yeah. In a coherent and consistent set of behavior. Yeah. And the interesting thing about Twitter in a way is that the reason why so many of us hate it and leave it and return to it is because it's kind of all of these things. It's a loose enough system to promote both the best and the worst, the most interesting and the most banal behaviours.

absolutely i mean one one phrase just to you know what something which is very profound and yet it gets repeated enough that it seems not is with great power comes great responsibility right twitter and the whole space of like online social media is this whole range of extended capacities right but with those additional capacities comes a kind of responsibility not just to others but to yourself to wield them in a way that doesn't unravel you i can think of a president who ought to think about with great tweets comes great responsibility i want to play some music but um you've reminded me of something that i was working on this week actually um i was

hoping to get mark fell back on uh i think he's busy tonight but uh we've been working on a book with him and one of the pieces in the book is about types of listening and so he's addressing the Pierre Schaeffer's idea of reduced listening which is a kind of Husserlian bracketing out so you just listen to the sound itself and also Pauline Oliveros idea of deep listening and Mark is kind of as he's always at his best when he's oppositional and he's kind of opposing this and saying, look, do we really believe in the idea that we can just listen to something and suspend our cultural baggage and simply focus in on the sound itself in this way?

And he instead talks about method listening. So he says, when we listen to something, we always become a certain person. So we inhabit the character when we're listening to different types of music. And that kind of interested me because I've always, I've kind of kept coming back to this question about the tribalism of music. Like when I was a teenager and in my 20s, pop music was incredibly tribal. Like if you were into heavy metal, you really, really hated the people who are into synth pop. You know, if you're into punk, you really hated the people who are into a slightly different form of punk. and that's something that doesn't seem to be exist anymore in the sense that all of these

genres have kind of got mashed up and produced all manner of of hybrids and I was saying to Mark well somehow there's something in my brain where it doesn't make sense to me why would you listen to a type of music if you didn't think while you were listening to it it's absolutely the best music ever and everything else is worthless like that's just what i want to get out of listening to music what how can you listen to music and think this is okay and there are lots of other musics and they're all okay as well it does it's kind of alien to me uh this idea of method listening kind of like i could kind of get get into that the idea that you know you you listen to something in order to fully inhabit a character that belongs to that music i i used to not understand

that and i think that's um that's something that it's not only of this at all but it's something that comes from like kind of like heavy like deep dj based thinking or whatever where you start realizing like like i personally don't give a fuck i kind of don't even like the way this sounds but in this context it's it's great so yeah yeah and you do have to like kind of sort of like inhabit characters or like at least like play like uh like musical chairs with the multiples you have to figure that out you know what i mean so yeah um but then also to speak to pete's point a little um i was also discussing with mark the idea that it's kind of like um cuisine like food if you live long enough and if you actually make an effort you can actually get into that space

with any music like i've never been into country and western music but i'm sure if i concentrated and listened to it enough then i could listen to it in such a way that i wished all other music's banished from the world i haven't i i don't take myself to have good musical opinions in general but one of my opinions is that the best country music is spurned woman country music like like bad country music is i love my truck and good country music that sounds like a good song right like and so like dolly parton is fucking exceptional right uh really dolly parton is great dolly parton is amazing um but there's there's this one particular song by uh by a band called freakwater it's called sick sick sick and it's um it's like the song it's it's the sound of

toxic love and twanging on your heartstrings it's fantastic nice well send us that song we'll play at the end of the show oh yeah yeah um i'll see if i can find it cool i i think i i think with uh i think yeah like personally i i know a good amount about a lot of music i i don't really like and i've spent a lot of time like kind of figuring out you know just all the different all the different areas and angles of it things like that and um i get sometimes it's weird i i have this real kind of like like two different personalities with it where sometimes I spend months or years just you know uh dwelling on things I don't actually like and kind of learning about it and then I'll fall into a deep like what why the hell was I even listening to any of that

I hate that kind of stuff I just wasted a bunch of time like memorizing shit I don't really know so it gets to be a bit like it gets to be a bit taxing too in a sense but this is great I'm glad that other people do this kind of stuff too I thought like my fear is always that everyone else just had found themselves completely at ease with this kind of thing and they're just like okay just listen to different types of music who cares but i've always i think i've always been a method listener i mean i i i really like this i mean one other thing i'd say just to kind of channel reza for a second um uh you know i've got a little internal model of reza that i can i can the negrostani superego negrostani superego

and but one way to sort of make Mark's point is actually to say that the opposite idea the idea of this bracketed listening is very much like the idea of pure induction in science it's like a Baconian conception of listening, like forget all your preconceptions and just look at the facts right and and everything we know from the philosophy of science and even from uh you know uh the way in which human cognition actually works tells us that this is bollocks right like it just it's it's not possible to have this openness to pure noise right yeah right uh and and in fact i mean if if you instead of talking about sort of

say falsification as philosophy of science and you you go to say the predictive processing paradigm in neuroscience right precisely the way in which they describe experiences as anticipation it's as expectation and what you get from from it from sensation is only meaningful relative to that expectation so so any kind of method listening in which is is it is it it's a situation in which you're trying to generate a little internal model that can create the rough parameters right what you're listening yeah sorry i should have said that um he suggests method listening um in analogy with method acting right yeah yeah so it's like getting you're getting into the

character yeah you know i i'm totally in agreement with it it's really cool um the the thing i just kind of wanted to say is this one way of looking at this is to say this is why we end up getting songs trapped in our heads just as you occasionally get intrusive thoughts there's a person who you know and you just hear their voice telling you what they would say in that situation Pangolina Pangolina Pangolina a bit like that yeah go on you can get that with music even music you don't like right you can anticipate it well enough that it your little internal model just clicks on and

there you are you're you've got bohemian rhapsody stuck in your head don't why do you do that to us well there's also a thing there too and uh where so pop music does this thing where like i'm just going to give a really easy example but like the beatles or something where you hear a beatles song And you're like, oh, wow, that kind of typifies a quote, you'll say, emotion that I've never felt. And that really brought it to life. And it gives you this really kind of odd feeling you can't put into words, right? But what it's really doing is it's doing actually the opposite. It's creating a sensate that is so tangible you can't escape it. And it's really insidious in a sense. I mean, not to be kind of just basic, but it's like Burroughs-style virus shit.

yeah yeah the the air worm yeah yeah yeah definitely definitely um this is this is the true language of the meme that unfortunately uh the discourse on means coming out of richard dawson and the night rest of richard dawkins i should say uh in in the 90s uh were kind of broke i think i think we're now in a position where we we have enough sort of cultural awareness of these dynamics that we can actually start talking about these viroid, you know, forms of content. Yeah, man, this has been like the biggest and meatiest introductory chat ever. I'm just going to play some bad music and then we'll be back. Are you staying with us, Pete?

I know you've got another podcast to go to. I can be here till at least half eleven. Nice. Alright, let's listen to some very bad music. I'll never see her either I love those fucking eyes

And I still love the girl Time and time again I see them in my dreams Time and time again I see them in my dreams

Time and time again Time and time again I still love the girl from Bennington Even though I'll never see her eyes I love those fucking eyes Those eyes won't be mine

Just for one night And now I've been spent my whole life Just for one night Just for one night

Thank you. You are now wondering a hard pant.

reason. Like any other day I know I'll find a way And if ever I'm alone You'll say I'll be thinking about you I'll be thinking about you I'll be thinking about you

I'll be thinking about you I'll be thinking about you I'll be thinking about you Stay wherever you are because we have guns and we have tanks Yeah, we got so much stuff still to go.

We got Tilford and Iceland Bob talking about their top 10 comics. We got some amazing audio royalties. and Chief Fraggle Catherine Pickard from Sequence Press you know Captain KP don't you? Zach yeah oh yeah we know KP what do you think of that song Zach? good song damn it's a good one Hater so what are we going to talk about next I mean we've got a lot to talk about

there's a lot going on right now there is we've got another someone else has just joined the room Mr. Drouge yeah yeah and still him how's it going where are you and what's it yeah yeah i'm uh down in texas at my parents house uh i have to drive down here every three months for uh my psychiatrist and uh yeah i'm just kind of living it up honestly yeah quite distant well it's about three hours you know i'm uh i drive an automobile all across the nation you drive an automobile yeah oh yeah that's very advanced of you yeah i know right

well you know we've got this whole great infrastructure in america where you can just drive in a lot of roads yeah yeah but uh yeah i've been just chilling i just moved into a new house on the first set up my office uh had a good time on twitter yesterday or i guess wednesday at this point um and yeah i'm just uh kicking i enjoyed that conversation earlier about uh music like the effect of music on subjectivity basically yeah or like adapting your subjectivity depending on what music you're listening to yeah yeah i find that to be hugely the case um i i would you know induce like massive levels of alienation walking around campus as an undergrad

like just listening to like eric dolphy or like peter brotzman or something um as some kind of perverse coping mechanism maybe i'm not sure uh but yeah no i find that um there's a whole plethora of different subjective spaces depending on the tune right yeah hey pete um i know that you have uh penned some science fiction on the quiet in the past if you were to um rather than uh being philosophically analytic if you were to be um fictionally prophetic could you paint us a picture of uh how this uh toxic mix of uh subjectivity and technology is is going to change

our environment what do you see like in the far future i think it could go in a variety of ways there is there's i think there's a there's a very good future and there's a very bad future and there's actually variants of those two and it's not it's not even a spectrum it's a complex subtractor space but we can sort of like we can think about what the worst options are so i think the worst option is well actually not even not even the worst option right the worst option is in a certain sense the future as realized by the future implicit in amazon so like different different of the big sacks um they they in a certain sense a kind of hyperstitial and

hyperstitial engines realizing different futures so google is the sort of the eternal neoliberalism like at the eternal end of history right but it's you know it's it's it's at least got you know healthcare maybe right um amazon is proper digital serfdom um and um if if you were to extend that that position basically it would be a world in which everyone is divided into cognitive fragments and the mechanisms that integrate those fragments are not internal to them are not internal to them yeah basically i i think let me put it in a different way

where we are entering the era of the exo-self right yeah so this is the the individual integrated by an external mechanism exactly yeah right and and so the way i the way i put this very very uh glibly is facebook wants to be you right no one at facebook realizes this yet but it's the structure of facebook is designed to be the single form of authentication right that connects all of your different online personas and eventually everything in your life that's realized as a persona that has to be interpolated so you know to bring in a little bit Althasar you know Althasar

has this whole idea of interpolation which is the way in which the state addresses you as a unified individual between contexts right and in fact produces you as a unified individual as well exactly by interpolating you yeah what we're seeing the thing is is the big stacks are they're essentially nation states without geography right they they they they want to be that like the whole the whole direction of this kind of cognitive capitalism is not to monopolize the market but to become a market and if when you are the market you're essentially uh living on taxation um on the transactions that are happening within that

market you've created that's how basically the liberal nation state formed through the the provision of currency national currency as a means to collect tax right um the thing is is that we're moving to a situation in which the currencies that are at play aren't simply uh the ones we're familiar with that are that are relatively fungible and we can use to pay for certain goods in fact there are going to be non-fungible currencies of attention right and other similar cognitive resources that the basically the stack wants to extract from you

right and so this is this is my my sort of my sort of view and like i say the different stacks have a different they embed a different kind of future in the present uh the amazon one is the most horrifying yeah at the moment um the facebook one is still pretty bad i mean the facebook one is the Amazon one is horrifying because it's extremely impersonal, right? It's the individual taken to the extreme and who actually gets to have a self? Who can afford to have a premium kind of self? Do I get a free trial for prime self? Well, maybe. That's how they get you.

You have it right now. That's what it is. Is this what I'm living? Yeah, that's it. Right? It's the hook. I have a whole story about this as well. So I have this talk, which I call Autonomy and Automation. It's available on my blog. You can go and see it. Hopefully it should be coming out as a book at some point. But this is my sort of way of looking at the future, or looking at the long 21st century from a sort of acceleration standpoint. So I'm saying, look, these are the tendencies, which we can sort of see different competing futures um the question is what's what's the good version what's like the the one that we should actually try and realize rather than the

one we wish we'll be dragged into this is you know the left accelerationist yeah if you can kind of take um and my view is basically that we need to start building the tools for people to have their own exoself right or yeah I prefer call maybe a better self this is a it's a word that's actually I think me in the quality and basically the idea is it's it's a kind of you know a sort of superego you control yeah that can integrate now this this sounds very abstract but i think

it's a very concrete way to describe it and please tell me if i'm just ranting here but you are and we like it good good um so okay here's something that a lot of us really appreciate um amazon recommendations right yeah amazon keeps track of your purchasing history and then suggest to you well maybe you'd also like this or have you thought that maybe it's time to re-up on this thing you bought previously right and this is this is a cognitive hook right this is this is a a means to kind of capture a part of your system of selfhood and externalize it in a way that they they they have leverage on yeah sure this is just that marketing is now

well it's now neuromarketing my only complaint about that form of algorithmic marketing is that it's generally very poor I could do with actually being better at recommending me stuff that I actually want to buy rather than what I bought last week you can see similar things with like Spotify right, it's Spotify that learns your preferences, it makes the ones that you genuinely would like to hear hang on, can I just stop you there Pete is somebody here in the bath? What is this water sound? Sorry. I don't hear it. Who's in the bath? It's Matt.

Zeno slides into the Skype chat in the bath. Sorry. It's getting a bit cold. Is that why you've called in? to ask us to call out the fire brigade to rescue you no no i'm having a great time actually it's a good uh it's a bad time listening i did i did i feel bad now for interest in the flow but i did actually have a i had i wondered if there was a there was a there was a conversation going online that's related to what you're saying pete um from a slightly different angle but there was this whole conversation around it was actually came from alistair Campbell of all people who was sharing Jacob Rees-Mogg's dad his book from was it the the 90s of the sovereign individual and he's putting it out as this like the blueprint essentially for

Brexit politics but there's this there's a strange tendency that people have been noticing around the pandemic where that the sort of strange libertarian fantasy where the state the individual becomes like a the stay in miniature but what are we are we seeing in the course of the pandemic that people are kind of embracing their brexit selves um in kind of having that lockdown subjectivity or something and how that i wonder how that relates to what you're talking about in terms of the amazon facebook selves that are emerging after that it's actually a really a really good segue so thank you very much um two points two points point one is what i've been talking about with regard to the

big stacks when i say that they're kind of like nation states what i'd sort of say is they're sovereign quasi markets right they have a certain kind of sovereignty right um which which hasn't been and you know the actual nation states and and consortiums are only now getting to the point where they're realizing shit we need we need to have better control over them you know antitrust and monopoly actions here but they're they're way too late um but the the other side the question of individual sovereignty i think we have to really not boo-boo i i i actually think sovereignty is the right concept um so to to explain this in different terms all of the ways in which people are thinking about the politics of data at the moment it revolves around

data as property data ownership right so you you should be able to own your data and oh maybe maybe there should be collective ownership of data right these frame the questions in completely the wrong way because what it does is it it puts on an equal footing like your your purchasing history and uh your password keychain right your password keychain is not a piece of data you own right it's a condition of the possibility of agency right selling your password keychain is the equivalent of selling your body but selling it virtually right we don't let people sell them sell themselves into slavery and you know in a future world in which you know systems of

authentication are going to be no longer dependent upon stupid things like where you live and what your signature looks like right when we actually get to the point where cryptographic forms of authentication are the norm which they should be um like you we should not let anyone sell than a virtual body and slavery right and in case it sounds like like it's way pie in the sky right i know people who would rather be cavity searched right then give over the password to their laptop at a border right because for those people the laptop is part of their body understood as the platform of their agency in the world right it's part of that that minimal circuit of extended mind

um and so sovereignty it's it's not not about ownership it's about data sovereignty what kinds of information and information processing uh prosthetic structures do you need right in order to be a sovereign individual. Right. We absolutely need to speak about that. Yeah. And this is basically what I'm saying with regard to this idea of a netter self. Yeah. Let me just add maybe one other angle on that, which is to do with the ways in which our involvement with algorithms can actually perhaps open up things to us that we wouldn't otherwise be open to

or would be accessible to us. I've just written a paper with Florian Hecker for the next book in the series that Francois Bonnet has published. There's three books, and this is the third book in the series, Spectres, which is basically like people working with music and technology and talking about their practice. So I wrote with Florian about a couple of works that we did together, fawn and inspection, which came out as a CD last year. And we were using this algorithm called the time frequency scattering transform. Now, I'm not going to go into the details of it, but the interesting thing about this is it's one of the technologies that's been developed

precisely for, or at least mostly funded by the companies who run things like Spotify, and who are interested in extracting characteristic properties of a certain signal, a song or so on. So one of the things that's very difficult is that the songs that you like may have something in common, but it may be very difficult for a machine to extract that. A machine can look at certain parameters and it may miss the thing that makes the music that you like exactly what gives its appeal to you.

And there are all sorts of ways of analyzing wave signals, of course. And the interesting thing about the time frequency scattering transform is that effectively it ends up that it's able to identify features of a temporal signal that are in effect outside time. So it's kind of looking, it's almost like you can imagine it's rotating the data in some kind of dimension that we can't really understand and picking out features. And those features may be things that we don't have a word for, right? There might be characteristics that this algorithm can identify that are common to two pieces of music. And they may be things which we have previously described in vague kind of touchy-feely ways or talked about timbre or the feel of something or the intensity of it or some kind of emotional term.

Or they may be things that we just don't have a word for at all. So the interesting thing is when you have that kind of machine recommending you things, we're kind of coming back to what we were saying about this feedback loop of identity. You know, Spotify can act as a feedback loop where it's just giving you more of what it knows you like and therefore you become more like what you are. But equally, as these technologies move forward, it may be that it's able to show you things that you really like and you don't even know why you like them. i mean i i agree and i mean there's just a couple sort of preface points before i make the real thing like uh one uh peli grets's work on vibes is really really useful here because what you're

kind of talking about is this sort of like gestalt thing that we can identify but but cannot really fully analyze and describe um he he would describe that as a vibe which is a certain kind of aesthetic but also epistemic worldview so like he thinks that when you when you read the major novels of the modernist canon say you're training up a little autoencoder in your head that can that can recognize this abstract surface of which is in the space of variables somewhere in the mathematical realm um but it's precisely a kind of implicit competence right you once you're trained up you can see modernism in place but that doesn't necessarily mean you can say how you see it

um what what these new kinds of technological algorithms do be it for recognizing or for producing music is they basically give us imaginative prostheses right they let us they let us do this kind of expective generation right or anticipation uh in ways that we can't just run solely on our own neural hardware right it's another kind of extension um but the the point that i want to make is and this is why i'm talking about this this meta self as opposed to the exo self in general right um the meta self should be about internalizing these things within

your own executive control loop right so very so so let's look at the spotify thing right um you should be able to build this like vector which is passing through the search space of possible music which is entirely under your control right you you should be able to be requesting this music from elsewhere but that that request should be completely anonymized right it shouldn't be clear like whether who all of these requests are coming from such that they can be bundled into a model of any one person and the same applies for your purchasing behavior right all of these things these generations of ways of exploring our preferences and exploring

ideas like these epistemic and aesthetic and libidinal sort of vectors of exploration this should be brought entirely within your control even if they're not within your head or even in your personal laptop even if you've blocked this stuff in the cloud somewhere right like cryptography should be able to be employed in a way that gives you control over your self development that's the right oh my god we're getting uh we're getting deep into it yeah yeah so go ahead with the thing pete was pete was saying uh before that with um just the idea of

the kind of like the exo self and uh you know the the slow loss of autonomy and just the even the idea of sovereignty um i i see this with with uh kind of younger millennials um they and and a lot of them you know it's a lot of the ones who you know are into a like communist type stuff they think they they really have this like there's no no like like no everything needs to be shared it's and it's you know it's a really weird yeah because it's it's a really selfish take on it you It's reverse style, like everything is now. But I see that with younger kids. And of course, too, it's just this extremely online variant that they jump into, and they get very worked up.

And it's not even just one variant. There's multiple variants that they play musical chairs with and switch all these different identities. I mean I if someone else wants to talk feel free to the children because I know I go ahead go ahead suck the oxygen out of conversations ahead but okay let me breathe deeply just just one one sentence so you're limited to like 25 minutes only Christ So let me Let me consider Shall I put some music on and then you can consider it Well let me say something briefly Go I have a lot of hope for Zoomers I've been teaching Zoomers

And you know what They are much better politically Than the students I've taught From the end of the Millennial generation You're one 700% right yep and um and so you know way up for the zoomers um big up the zoomers big up the zoomers secondly i mean i've written something about this recently there's a post on my blog called the going price of power if you want to look at it um and basically i think there's this like deep deep misunderstanding of marks that's that's embedded itself in the kind of left academia activist mindset um because it's very easy which says communism means no money like the end of capital is the

end of money right yep marx like marx none of this is implied by what marx thinks right like like and historically right money came along way before capital like money's been around for a long fucking time guys right exactly so it's it's you know and so the the idea of this like basically there's this like imaginary commune right that people have in their heads which i like this i like to call like uh paris commune alt history fanfic right that's exactly yeah yeah it is right and and and the idea is yeah everything can be shared in common and we're all going to live in these wonderful communes and the sociality of these communes is going to be perfectly fit to me and my particular kind of sociality right you know which which you know for anyone who is

an introvert or or you know uh on the autism spectrum or in a variety of different places in which that kind of sociality is really fucking bad right like it produces horribly incompatible politics it's it's the death of solidarity with people who are different from you right socially speaking um and anyway this is why i think in part zoomers are better i think the zoomers have a much more um much more wide-eyed and aware approach to the historical nexus they've been born into and their difference from generations before them whereas millennials have a kind of set of traumas um that comes comes with the the promises being made not being delivered on and that is

that's so true and it's it's also it's a it's a it's a fucking meme based understanding too that's part of it like they a lot of this shit is really like 100 percent learned through through looking at memes or looking at forums and stuff like that and it's it's it's like i i the big joke that like all like right wingers I know always tell me is like a lot of them will just read these like Reddit communism forums or anarchism and stuff like that. And they always fall apart. Though these left wing forums, because half of them are like extremely anarchist and half of them are extremely communist. It usually breaks down when the idea of like taxation and money itself comes up. And, and, but like, I remember I found this really weird or not weird, this really funny one where, uh, I think it was on Reddit communism. And, uh, someone was like,

well, look, like, and this was like some millennial, they were like, I don't understand why drugs will be illegal in a communist society. And of course, no one had like, no one had like a nuanced take, like, well, recreational drugs probably aren't a good idea in any sense. So, you know, if things were, if things were idyllically working like they should and everything is nice, well, we wouldn't have a need for drugs. And yes, there might be people- Are we talking about massive communism? Yeah, it just turned into this whole like, well, like people really didn't understand that they're not going to get, you know, digital currency to sit around and do drugs forever or, you know, look at porno forever or whatever it is people do now. It's, yeah, I think I'm not, I kind of want to run this back to an earlier point, if that's all right.

Of course. Like, essentially, as far as like agency within these platforms, Spotify is a really good example. I find it incredibly frustrating because I used to be big on like what.cd and you know like BitTorrent shit and I had like highly kind of organized music library and now I'm really unable to enact much agency I can't sort by genre even and I know they have this metadata associated with all the tracks but I just don't have the ability to do anything with it and I feel like the extreme example of this is TikTok, where like you can't even really sort things chronologically as far as I can tell. It's very, very difficult to navigate in any kind of repeatable way. Like

if you do the same search terms, you may get a different result the next day, right? And I find this very interesting. And the last thing I'll say is that like, well, first of all, yeah, of of course, big up the Zoomers. I feel like the millennials are like the lost generation, kind of like Japan style. But the last thing I'll say is like, when there was a controversy about TikTok getting shut down, the founder of TikTok posted a video, some blonde woman just being like, hey, don't worry, you know, we're going to figure this out. We love you, our community. In the background of this video on her bookshelf, the most prominently displayed book is a thousand years of nonlinear history um which i just i don't know i kind of like uh peek all that kind of stuff

i'm like that's weird uh but it's definitely um a non-linear algorithmic feed tick tock and it's i find it very frustrating for my millennial brain and so the thing that you describe of like an alternative like like some mode of actually being able to access this metadata and carve out my own space i this yeah i i guess i just want to say i totally vibe with that and it and it it answers an anxiety i constantly feel on spotify i mean i i know uh we want so i'll say this quick uh i mean i agree with you and i think this is this is the flip side generational split like the the latter end of gen x and and millennial got to grow up

or at least some of them got to grow up on the internet in in in the era that inspired the early cyber culture stuff right this is like and not like this increase the freedom through anonymity being able to look to yourself and being able to construct things like elaborate music libraries through piracy and it's like for me soul seekers is the key soul seekers Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The way in which they do it and the way in which we think about how we did it is quite different. Totally. And that's not to say, I do want to say that you can do a type of drifting through the Spotify algorithm. And it can take you to interesting places. But it's hard to trace that journey. And yeah, especially if you're trying to plug it into this old archive mindset. I find it almost impossible. Wow. you're listening to the Hour of the Wolf cheers guys for joining we've got so much stuff to fit into the pod tonight that I think we're going to have to

have a bit of music and then we're going to hook up with Keith and Bob thanks for joining us Monsieur Drouge Zach Pete and Louise are you still there? Quiet in the background No he's gone Yeah I'm sorry Cheers Hey thanks Pete And this one is going out to Matthew in the chat room Hold tight chat room crew Waiting for the beats Ergonomic Plague Pod

The End Wrinkles 8.5

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Thank you. This is a track by Kim Yan Lo. You should check out this guy if you're into the Hyperdub Continuum. From Congo, an amazing engineer and an amazing musician. Pretty unique.

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My sound, my sound, a sound killer My sound, my sound, a conqueror My sound, my sound, a sound killer My sound, my sound, a conqueror All up in the club, the in-beave everybody We'll be right back.

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Okay, let's all calm down. Thanks for that, Hoismans. Nice one. This is another track of Kim Yan-Lo's album, Zawadi. And we're gonna hear a bit of philosophy I think. And then we're gonna go for the top 10 comics. We need to have some snack chat as well. I haven't even had time to break into the snacks yet.

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There's something important to say about why nothing is important. why is it necessary to try to conceptualize the void or negation or nothingness? And it seems to me that it's intimately connected to the attempt to think time, because in a way, I mean, the classical kind of identification, as Heidegger and Berks and others pointed out, the problem is if you have an ontology, which, you know, an exclusively actualist ontology,

where you say to be is to be actual or to be exhaustively present without any gap or fissure or negation. You end up with like this Parmenidean block universe where it's impossible to account for becoming. And becoming indeed is relegated to the state of subjective illusion. So traditionally, the problem of finding a, trying to kind of come up with a kind of attractable conception of non-being is intimately tied to the status of time. How can you think time? How can you think time as that which is not, because it's not actual, it's not yet? So, in a way, both the 20th century philosophers

that both try to kind of radicalize the thinking of time and by insisting that it can never be the metaphysical tradition has erroneously either specialized time or reduced it to the... trying to deduce on the basis of a prejudicial determination of being as present, as presence of hand as Heidegger famously said. What Heidegger wants is a conception of temporalization, which would be a kind of a radicalization of the notion of ontological potency, something that can be a pure, as he said, a pure potentiality.

And being, especially, the mode of being, the mode of temporal being that is characteristic of the kind of entities that we are, which is to say conscious entity, is characterized in terms of this temporal ecstasy, which is never reducible to any moment of actual presence at hand. So the key thing, and it's interesting that the ontological difference in Heidegger, the distinction between beings or entities and their ways of being, their mode of being, It's interrelated to their temporality because it turns out that if time is the meaning of being, it turns out that the ways in which entities come to presence or kind of disclose themselves,

articulate themselves temporally, is inseparable from an understanding of time. So that's why being is inherently, the meaning of being is inherently temporal for the early five years. And that's what he's trying to kind of see though, that the being, which is irreducible to any actual present and representable entity, is time, is temporal inflection, temporal articulation. and it's crucial that Heidegger is also trying to rethink the nature of negation, the nature of what is not. He famously said in his lecture, What is Metaphysics? Being is nothing. Being is nothing but the crucial mistake of the positive as metaphysics,

you know, the tradition, et cetera, et cetera, is to think that there's nothing to think and there's nothing. The ontological challenge, as Heidegger sees it, is to try to grasp the think that the nothingness, the temporal nothingness of presence in it. As this, you know, the moment in which entities are, you know, spring forth into presence without ever exhausting themselves in their actualization. Okay, so already then in Heidegger you've got this attempt to this identification of being with a kind of nothingness, being in a strong ontological sense, being precisely in so far as it's intimately connected to temporalization.

And I think in this sense, the gap between potency and act, the discrepancy between potentiality and actuality, is this moment of non-being or some kind of negativity that needs to be philosophically conceptualized. And what Heidegger is trying to do is to try to think it, unlike Kegel, to think it not as a mode of conceptual negation, as a mode of conceptual negativity, that it must be irreducible to any negation in the context or contradiction in the context.

So, okay, so that's why I think there's this interest, that's why it seems that the nothingness, non-being, it kind of philosophically becomes, continues to be a pressing philosophical concept. And it's also, it's this attempt to think, interestingly, it's this attempt to think time is that which can never be kind of a hypothesized reified, which pushes philosophical conceptualization to the limits, you know, the kind of the precarious limits of abstraction. because the attention to try to think time is precisely without thinking it merely as another kind of present,

you know, actualized thing is what makes this exorbitant demand of the resources of philosophical conceptualization. Now the question is whether only philosophy or only the kind of, the peculiar kind of thinking that Heidegger kind of reserves for genuinely philosophical thinking is capable of thinking time without reaffining it, without reducing it to some form of, you know, without spatializing it, reaffining it, etc, etc. you're listening to urbanomic plague pod that was a an amazing recording i dug up from the archives today that was from a little conference organized in my god when uh 2008 and i guess at

the time um ray was actually working on his book nile unbound um but for anyone wanting a bit of introduction to his thought that's a pretty good one yeah and and we have with us right now iceland bob and keith tilford and since we're talking about palmenody and block time uh keith and i are very excited because uh chronosis is on a boat somewhere making its way towards somewhere where we can actually see it um and all of you people who have pre-ordered it thank you very much it really helps and i'm going to get that out to you as soon as i can brexit covid and other crises yet to be determined allowing so we had such a good time

geeking out on comics last time that i thought it would be fun for bob and keith to come on and and give us some specific recommendations so i should have got like some chart countdown background music or something for this but i'm not that well needed yeah you basically needed basically uh top of the pops 1980s background music yeah that's it yeah yes but next for next time maybe so yeah so what are we are you have you done them in order of preference are we doing an actual countdown or uh well i'm doing a countdown but what it is it's not like from 10 to one being the best because i think like keith when you asked us to do a top 10 it was like oh this would be easy but then after like two hours i was like panicking because yeah it was like oh but what about this

comic well so basically what i've done is i've done gone down the highly subjective route so my comics from 10 to 1 is kind of in the order i discovered them ah so this is like a biographical top 10 okay yeah so these are the comics that mine has no established hierarchy it's just a fucking list because i really can't you know pin down what's the most important okay fair enough organization is oppression so yeah true so who's who's gonna kick things off do we need any preliminary i think we did all the preliminaries about why we like comics last time didn't we oh yeah we can just go straight into it okay and it's 10 keith are we are we live

now yes we are live now you've been live for some time oh yeah sorry uh all right then um well i'll just come at you with something from left field then uh gi joe a real american hero number 21 from March 1984. Writing and breakdowns were by Larry Hama. Finishes by Steve Leoloa, if I'm saying that correctly. And just to preface, my selections are mostly based on the art because that's always what sort of attracted me to comics. And as I'm an artist, I've always followed artists more than writers. So it has that bent.

But this comic is important not because it's the first appearance of Snake Eyes, which I guess collectors give a fuck about. It's an expensive comic to track down if you want to buy it, probably $600 or something. But you can find it online. It's significant because it's the first mainstream silent comic. So there's no words at all. So it sort of really creates a problem with that idea that comics are defined specifically because it's the relationship between words and images. Although you could do the Solarzian thing and say, well, images are sentential by nature. So it's just a really great example of storytelling in comics.

And was it, do you know, like, was it a difficult thing to get it published as a silent comic? Was there kind of a struggle about making it happen? You know, I have no idea, but I would speculate that just because G.I. Joe was such a successful comic, because it was a fucking trifecta of, like, a marketing campaign of, like, a really successful costume and a really successful toy line. So the comics were basically, like, advertising the toy line and all of that relation there. So I don't think it had any problem getting published as a silent comic. Like they even did a second version of it, like a follow up that was a silent. I can't remember. I think it was one of the annuals or something. But yeah, historically, it's not the first silent comic.

I think some European comics probably beat it to that. But in terms of like a mainstream publication, it was certainly the first. And yeah, not the last. Cool. Bob, what's your number 10? Well, you know, that was so close because obviously Keith throws G.I. Joe and when I was looking about comics I grew up with when I was young, I was telling Keith about how UK comics culture was very, very different to American or European comics culture. And I could have gone for stuff like Commando Comics or Warlord or Victor for boys. Yeah, the small format ones. Yeah, the square ones. On paper. Yeah, but I decided no, I'm not going to go for them and number 10 I chose the Bruins Dudley D Watkins era

Because I grew up with those and coming from Shetland. I would actually get these as presents and My my mom would actually when she went to the charity shops, we would be there there's some of these things are worth a lot of money now, but But basically what it is, is that my mom would get these from the charity shop. And basically what people, if people don't know this, The Bruins was a comic that was basically made in Scotland. And it was created way back in 1936. And it's about a family called The Bruins. And it was created by a guy called R.D. Lowe. But it was mainly made by a guy called W.D. Watkins. And he was like an evangelical Christian who was basically,

He came from Dundee and it's basically a kind of small town East Scotland life. And look at it now. It's like looking into another world, you know, because it's all about, you know, working lower middle class families with like three, four generations under one roof. and when you looked at the style of drawing it was kind of like a very it wasn't kind of like the european clean line but it was a really lovely clean line stop rights drawing style the stories were all about like kind of simple generational stuff but if you ever look at these it's all in modern scots like jing's crevins and help my bob and um they had like the kids

the youngest kid she had two kids called just called the twins and the youngest child didn't even have a name she was just called the bern as in the child and i grew up with these comics and they appeared in the sunday post newspaper and alongside with a comic book character called and um and yeah they were kind of based around dundee it's it's it's funny now because you look at it it's like it's like the last of the summer of wine but in a comics form yeah and i grew up with them and i still look at some of these old comics and i'm just like it's it's like warming it's like wrapping myself up in a nice warm duvet of ovaltine and nostalgia and memories just like yes exactly but these were these ran for a long time didn't they like decades still running yeah

It's still running now, really. I didn't know that. Because the company that makes them, it was, oh, what was it called? The Sunday Post was named by, I'm just trying to remember the name of DC Thompson. So they were like a Scottish publishing house. And they were also the ones that did the Victor and Warlord and Commando Comics. and also they did like the Beano and the Dandy and all these comics in all in the set up until the 80s or 90s until they had to sell yeah yeah people though I mean all the all you kids and millennials and stuff like that you know with all your your power your textual stuff like this and your Marvel comics this is what we grew up with you know when the big story was all about you know

going to eat Julie sandwiches and getting a mug of tea with your mother's pride. Nice. Big shout out to the brooms in Ower Willie. Yes, there you go. Fucking English bastards. Marvel Comics Presents numbers 72 through 84. It's Barry Wensler Smith's run where he did the Weapon X story, which is the origin of Wolverine, not the origin of Logan, because they constantly recast this at Marvel, I guess. But, you know, this is a comic from the 80s that just it's it's unparalleled artistic virtuoso.

I mean, you know, all of my list is like filled with artists that like, you know, I I'm just never going to be as good as them. But then, you know, I also have to remember I've only been technically drawing comics again for about three years. So I guess I can still get better, but I'll never be as good as these people. Barry Windsor Smith is just like one of the best comic book artists of all fucking time. And that Weapon X storyline, which he wrote, drew, and even did the colors for it, is just some of the best comic art that exists, at least in mainstream comics. Yeah. Oh, definitely. that's a good one there cool tell us something about the storyline

oh so weapon acts I mean most of the storyline Wolverine is just submerged in a bat connected to a bunch of really cool looking tech and wires that Barry Winslet's met Drew and sort of unconscious but he has his healing factor so they're trying to inject and poke his bones with adamantium which is the indestructible metal that you know his claws and bones are made out of which is why he's ostensibly the most badass marvel character um that's kind of the gist of the storyline and you know it's it's about him just like waking up and killing people discriminately yeah nice

and it was basically the last ever decent marvel character well character that marvel made which was like over 30 years ago so there you go so for me number nine uh again going back to my childhood um eagle comics the 1980s uh so um yeah so as i got a bit older and i went from all this nice fluffy kiddie stuff um i started reading um comics i didn't get to 2000 ad um until a lot later but there was a whole bunch of um comics that were around in the 80s but eventually what happened was and they all kind of amalgamated into eagle comics which was a comics which had been going since

the 1950s to 1970 but then what they did was in 82 they uh relaunched it and of course but what was quite interesting was there was a lot of war stories and and dan dare was on it but the ones that really took me were the the horror stories from the 80s so you had characters like doom lord uh who was kind of a he was a shape-shifting alien that was here to kind of like you know um sentence humanity to death but he gets replaced by another alien who serves as the protector and then you had um the the 13th floor which was kind of like about like um yes i remember that yes yeah i remember that as being really spooky yeah yeah and so basically it's all and a lot of

these people i mean a lot of people that wrote and drew these were you know people like alan grant John Wagner and for those who don't know basically what it is um Matt it's narrated by the main character which is Max and he's kind of like an AI like Hal the Hal 9000 and he's basically the computer custodian of a block of flats uh but he has like a programming floor which means that in order to protect his tenants he will remorsely kill anybody who threatens the well-being you know um and that i had shows like that oh yeah wait a second he's getting a lot of echo that's probably me one second there you go um uh but it also had like stuff like you know people were talking you know we had like a lot of tie-ins with mask you know and uh go bots but you also had other stuff

like computer warrior which was basically a boy who could play computer games for real so it's like he would have special code and he'd be zapped into the game so they would play like a lot of action and horror games um but this was this kind of thing in the 80s where they were trying to make comics like their version of like ec comics so they were a little bit spooky and like to the eight and my eight and nine year old self it was kind of introducing me to what was basically the undercurrent of writing that like like you know everyone talks about 2000 ad but there was a whole bunch of other comics that were happening around the time that was like the feeding bed to your uh peter milligans your grant morrisons your alan moores uh your your warren ellis's you know

they all start they all started and they all cut their teeth doing these comics so i presume i mean i don't know that much about the history of the industry but i presume that so long as they sold a certain amount of copies they were quite happy for it to be kind to have quite a latitude and for it to be a kind of experimental test bed because i remember being very really kind of varied types of genres types of stories um oh yeah i mean they had like i mean for example one of the best ones they had there was um a strip called the house of demon and again this was written again by alan grant and john wagner from 2000 ad and this was about like a horror themed

house uh it was about a guy called elliot aldrich and it was for his wife cassandra so it's basically um it basically traps a group of people and they're trying to get out of it but it's kind of like a dream house where it's all everything changes um so the house apparently has psychic powers and you know for and this comic was marketed to like eight to twelve year olds you know and you also yes you did have your like yeah but this was the 70s right wasn't it when we were being served up all kinds of uh eerie horrors on tv as well yeah exactly just normal then you you traumatize children yeah this was the outcome of it and of course naturally they're

living the outcome of it right now yeah yeah and of course now you have all you had all your war stories your detective stuff your your sports and and of course some of them lasted for five or six issues if they didn't work toss it put another one in and some of them like you said some of them worked for a long time yeah so well let's um we need to move on swiftly we'll be here until like seven o'clock tomorrow morning but just quickly is that is it possible to get those uh the eagle comics in like a compilation does that exist it's it is quite hard to do i know there's been um there has been some of the stories like uh the house of demon got reprinted several years ago

um i'm just trying to see here uh it's no unfortunately it's really tough but you can go online to like the genesis library and basically download them yeah i'd love to read the 13th floor again yeah the 13th floor is never actually being reissued to my knowledge of course if someone knows any differently in the chat let me know so cool keith over to you all right um next up spider-man fever it's a three issue comic from 2010 it's a recent discovery for me because I basically didn't read comics since 2000, with a few exceptions, from 2000 until 2013 or so.

So there's a huge gap there. But this one was written with art also by Brendan McCarthy. Yes! who is just a phenomenal fucking artist that I only discovered by way of this comic. And little do you know, he had his hand in kind of everything. Film, cartoons, did designs for, you know, these wonderful 90s, 80s movies like Highlander and the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But he also co-wrote Mad Max Fury Road and did concept art yeah so you know this like uh the ditko steve ditko verse on mushrooms and

acid at the same time not that i would pretend to know what that's like but i would imagine that you know that's kind of that's his aesthetic um it's just really really full-on comics you know it's just it's great fucking art it's superb and the story is like super bizarre interdimensional dream world aesthetics so yeah highly recommend i'm going to check that one out spider-man fever i grew up with spider-man for i had spider-man uh delivered every week for many years so excellent like yeah okay so i take it um next then so right i'm gonna time myself because otherwise i'll talk

about these for hours so uh at number eight for me um i started getting you know into my teens um around the late 80s early 90s into 2080 stuff there was so much i could choose from there like slain or judge dread but my personal favorite has been for so many years is devil in war swimming in blood uh now if people don't know about this devil in war is he's a character who basically is he works as um how do you describe he's a estate a bomb vivant he's a gay muscle-bound athlete who is a priest with the vatican and he does exorcisms and this is probably his best known story where

he's basically called into this high-tech underwater prison called aquatraz and apparently this i know it sounds funny but um but what it is is that um he uh it's basically there's an outbreak of vampirism and what it is it has this super claustrophobic um kind of pace to the writing and the artwork was done by um sean phillips um and this came out in 1993 and of course i was um i was 17 when i got hold of it at my local library and it was it was kind of like you know it had a very similar kind of atmosphere to 30 days of night but years before that came out you

know uh because i and i was also had a very similar kind of feel to alien 3 you know so it's like a very cut-off place there's like um a vampire picking off the prison inmates and then you've got this person who is like i said this muscle roided uh like priest who speak he's got like a little mustache and with a smoke with a cigarette and he's just like oh behave and he's super gay and no no i mean he is he literally is um and yeah it's just got this weird mix of horror melodrama and high camp and i totally recommend it devil and war swimming in blood

so just to summarize high camp vampirism in undersea prison am i getting that right okay good that's definitely one to check out keith all right i'm gonna go with something uh Very important to me personally, but maybe slightly controversial, is Todd McFarlane's run on Amazing Spider-Man from the 90s. Because this is what really got me hooked on comics, what made me want to be a comic artist. And also thinking in terms of what Pete was talking about earlier in terms of method listing, I think there's something like method drawing, especially for comic book artists.

because you talk to anyone in the field, and we all learn by imitation. And, you know, as a young teenager, I was just like, didn't want to read or look at anything else that wasn't drawn by Todd McFarlane. And I constantly, like, tried to emulate his style. But, you know, he got a lot of flack when he was drawing this, because, you know, I mean, it's no secret he has no fundamental skills. Like, he doesn't know anatomy at all, really, and never bothered to fucking learn it uh but he's a brilliant fucking designer um just you know comes from a background of graphic design and just has this this great design sense of like how to make something look cool and so he completely revitalized uh spider-man as a

character you know gave you know these iconic like big guys and at this point in my life it's like it's not my favorite version of spider-man there are all kinds of different versions of spider-man from different artists throughout that whole the history of that character um but it was at the time and i think he did something that was that was truly unique with the character and and his his ability to tell a story is also something that's that's worth highlighting i mean he he just he did some story visually yeah i mean he just did really innovative things with with panel design um things like that it's you know it's it's just it's good comics is this kind of thing

like something that you learn over years to discern and to appreciate or is it something that anyone can with a few pointers can like open a comic and see yeah this is what this person's doing and this is why it's good yeah kind of like connoisseur thing it's a little bit of both because i think you know for me especially like as a as a young aspiring artist comic book artist i was you know i i immediately was able to recognize that he was doing something different you know most other comic books being produced at the time were just cut and dry and like they weren't fucking with how to design panels they weren't changing the way that characters looked you know and i think that he was really doing that and you you can see that there there is like a

innovation in what he did on that on that run with amazing spider-man right um so there's the connoisseur thing too it's like you have to come back and look at it and of course my evaluation of it now is like I can look at a lot of it and say well some of this is crap but you can also see why it was like really a significant development and like you can also track how other people copied all of the shit that he did and he himself was was a total swipe artist you know he was putting you know when when he when he started his uh you know after he got super famous on Amazing Spider-Man and Marvel gave him the you know his solo Spider-Man title which he wrote and drew um you know he was like he was he was swiping otomo cityscape backgrounds

from akira like into his panels so it's just this weird back and forth between like how artists steal from each other in that medium yeah great sorry and what what year was that keith the 90s what era was this the early 90s yeah that's the 90s mid mid early yeah i'll say just very quickly um the thing about what i liked about the talk mcfarlane era is everyone talks about the eyes but it's also the little incidentals like the webbing the webbing was it because it looked like ropes yeah it looked like climbing frames the point of controversy i i don't think okay so the

spaghetti yeah i love it too i mean you know and his excuse for it like in conflict with the editors was that like you know they were like well you can't draw the webs like this like no one draws spider-man's webbing like this it just and well he was like well then how do you how are you supposed to get the webbing to move towards the camera if you can't perspective you know let's hey let's not get too far into the controversy over the depiction of spider-man's webbing because i really don't want to get comic canceled i think it was eric larson who did it first anyway i just will say that and eric larson was the one who followed him on his run on spider-man who also is a great artist who i hated at the time but i've come to appreciate now really like him nice i don't know where we are in the list but uh we're at number seven for yeah okay so very

quickly except my time okay so number seven for me um as i got older in the 90s and as i got a bit like I said, my knowledge of comics drew a lot more. I realized obviously that obviously while in the 80s, I was listening to a lot of the, what's I reading, all the Dandy and the Beano and the kids comics. The 80s in the UK was this really febrile time for kind of experimentation in comics in terms of form and story. And they were introducing stuff like politics and a lot of very controversial issues. And, of course, you had, especially in the Middle East 80s, I had all these comics that lasted for a few years,

like Revolver and Crisis. And they would have stuff like Graham Morrison would do the New Adventures of Hitler. No, I think I had one issue at least of both of those. I don't know if they went beyond one issue. No, no. I mean, Crisis went on for like 60 issues. Revolver only went on for like about nine, seven or eight issues. But it was very popular. But like you said, these artists were trying to like, you know, everyone talks about the British invasion, you know. But even before they came to the US, they were trying to do vibrant stuff. They were trying to drag comics in the same way in France, where comics are a valid part of the cultural conversation.

They're not seen as things for children. So I could have chosen a lot of stories, but I chose for number seven. And this one is also a comic that was drawn by Brendan McCarthy. It's Skin. Yeah. Yeah. Skin is this. It's basically a one off graphic novel written by Peter Milligan. and it talks about this uh it's pretty messed up it's basically about um a 15 year old skinhead called martin and it's set in the 1970s london and the thing with martin is he's a skinhead but he suffered from um a thalidomide the birth defects and so he basically is this incredibly angry and resentful and just bitter skinhead he's just like you know and he's just angry

with the world you know he he doesn't feel he can love or be loved and even when he gets like opportunities when there's a female skinhead who actually quite likes him he can't accept this love and it also talks about things like commercialization and gentrification about corruption because because obviously when he realizes that he can't choose the world He decides to direct his anger at the medical company CEOs that put thalidomide on the market. But as Keith Wobby went, yeah, I mean, this was written by Brenda McCarthy. Sorry, drawn by Brenda McCarthy. And it's got this really hot, vibrant, surreal, almost mushroom, magic mushroom, trippy color schemes to it.

but what it is it's it's like you said it's very heart-rending you know um your heart goes out to this character but he's not like an angel i mean he basically is a nasty piece of work but you empathize with him because like you said he's born with birth defects you know he's by me pushed around all his life and it's at the time um even 2000 ad um they were planning to publish it in crisis but because it had lots of swearing and it had lots of violence in it they refused to publish it and then eventually it came out on this diy publishing in 92 and then dark horse comics they reprinted it in 2013 but it's like a real testament to kind of the anarchic and

politically astute comics writing and artwork that was coming out from the uk in the 1980s and of course naturally a lot of these writers went to the US some went earlier like Alan Moore but effectively yeah this is the rest is history I totally recommend it if you can get hold of it great and I just want to say for my benefit and for I think a lot of people listening we've got to put a list together of these with some links on the website afterwards I will definitely do that don't worry I've already got mine made Keith I guess maybe since I don't have since my list isn't really

any sort of hierarchy I'm going to go with to follow up on this From Hell from Alan Moore yes is this your Alan Moore comic yeah you only allowed one Alan Moore each in the list I think I have one more on my list people in the chat were wondering which ones are they going to talk about this one's great because it's Moore did a bunch of historical research on this and then injected his own weird occult vibe into it but it's the story of Jack the Ripper and Eddie Campbell's illustration is just fucking brilliant It's like this old timey, like, you know, early 20th century sort of illustration style to, you know, to get this story across.

And I don't know. I don't know if there's you don't really need a hard sell on this. I mean, it's it's fucking Alan Moore. Alan Moore is great. Just, you know, funny at the time, though, when Form Hell came out and he was doing a lot of work with Eddie Campbell. a lot of fans hated Eddie Campbell's drawing at the time now we look at it and it's just like masterpiece but people really it was very polarizing his style at the time because they were all used to the kind of like you know the the superhero vibe you know you know because he just come out of like doing Watchmen and all this stuff and he was going born to DIY so a lot of Alan Moore's fans were expecting that nice,

that nice clean line, heavy, you know, colored style. And then you've got this and they were like, the hell is this? And it's like, you're a bunch of idiots. Pretty fucking weird. Chat's also wondering about Mobius and there's no Mobius on my list because clearly everyone knows about Mobius. You can just go look at it. So yeah, I've got no Mobius on my, I, well, I was thinking of whether to put in the Inkle in mine, but I decided I've only got 10. so sorry guys so yeah oh the snacks there let's carry on i'm eating some honey flavored twist snack from uh nongshim in i think that's a korean company and they're really dry so it's making

me drink a lot of vodka just to warn you okay well i better move on then to my uh number five so um so of course you know we get one alan moore and i chose one grant morrison and i was like do i choose we three because it still makes me cry but no that's on my list ah okay well i'm a kid of the i said that to robin robin has yeah right yeah yeah great work um so i i was like okay i'm a child of the 90s i grew up around all the kind of the the 90s music the millennial vibe and so my number five is the invisibles yes i went there you know it was one of those ones where like in a

similar but in a far more direct fashion it mirrored to me at the time it mirrored the way like how you get in the 80s um if you were to read stuff like melody maker or the enemy and they would give interviews to an artist or a band and they would ask like what's what are they reading what music are they listening to what are their favorite films and you get all these little cultural signifiers like oh i should go and check out this book and i should check out this artist and check out this writer and this musician and which you don't get nowadays because most musicians and artists are fucking boring but one of the things i found with the invisibles was it's like you had to bring out a whole separate book um to just talk about the the cultural um notes that

were in each of the panels and what things were referring to it was so densely with like a smorgasbord of like end of the 20th century counterculture from all the way back to the 60s yeah i think this is i think this is something that i really cherish in comics is when you get that kind of density because um you know much as i love it it can often be a medium that doesn't last long enough nothing lasts long enough and to be able to go back and to find new new stuff and to be able to uh discover the the references and um to kind of for your view on the story to change over time uh i think that's uh yeah it's a rare thing and you know so the thing with me like you

said it's that whole thing of this was all very pre-internet so you had these links to these counter-cultural artists and writers and you're like what is this and you had to go and find what this stuff was and you know i mean naturally as well um you also see a lot of the time you know grant was very interested in counter-cultural stuff he was very big to chaos magic and he was hanging on with richard metzger of the disinfo um of course naturally now if we talk about the the mad cultural the magic war between alan and grant i think i'm team alan all the way i'm team more because i think in terms of knowledge and density you know i don't think that

I don't think that Alan Moore would have a comic invention devoted just to himself I think he would go that's a bit too much but yeah this I have all six books on my shelf and I still flick him through them and it's just yeah it's so dense you get new stuff from it every time so cool one more Keith and then let's have a break for a bit of tunes yes I've got the hard APM cut off oh yeah of course maybe I could just run through what number are we at no idea let's just speed run through the rest

why don't I just speed run tweet your favourite comics I was going to go 5 I could go real quick we'll see we three I'm just going to say Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly more for Frank Quietly than Morrison because Quietly I think is like just a fucking amazing artist second yeah and that's not his real name it's an anagram for quite frankly for those that don't know we three is just is fucking fantastic because not only is there like really innovative storytelling with this with one in particular with like a CTV camera and then another sort of like bullet scene with like weirdly perspectivized panels in 3d space

i mean you're just gonna have to like go and look at it but the story does really interesting stuff with time and the panel layout and i mean you know it's about uh it's a you know it's it's like a kind of disney movie story involving animals except that they're cyborgs who are maliciously killing people what was it someone called it was the incredible journey with high grade military orders yeah um but you know as a tangent on that like also like morrison and quietly working on on the new on new x-men so their run on new x-men is is is fantastic um it's it's a great x-men storyline i've always loved the x-men and number 121 is especially significant

because it's also a silent comic. And this was recently by Jonathan Hickman and Russell Douderman, who's another fantastic contemporary newer artist. They kind of did an homage to this with Giant Size X-Men, which just came out in the last few months. Beyond this, Bill Sienkiewicz on New Mutants. He got a lot of flack when he started working on comics because he was just, you know, ripping off the old guard. But then suddenly when he started working on the mutants, he created this, like, you know, at the time, really innovative style that a lot of people think is, you know, quasi-influenced by abstract expressionism. And he's also pulling in influences from illustration,

which is, like, you know, comics and illustration are not, at least at the time that he was drawing, were, like, really distinct fields. So he was like looking at people like Ralph Steadman and like then bringing that stuff into the comic form. So that's also fucking fantastic. And someone in the chat was like, Jardewowski is insane. Travis Cheris in Jardewowski's Weapons of the Meta Barons. Cheris is one of the most phenomenal comic artists that has ever come along. And he influenced an entire generation. who started out kind of like cold doing like you know weird dc stuff and doing covers and doing you know marvel short stories and then when image was created in the 90s when all of marvel's

top artists left uh he got signed on to to do this series called wildcats um not the best comic but like some of the best comic book art that i've ever seen and like his his the he kind of doesn't do any work anymore i mean this does covers for marvel and doesn't work analog anymore he only seems to work digitally but all of that old work is analog and it's like you know took an insane amount of time to produce and i think it's just some phenomenal artwork um beyond that jim staranko outland uh it appeared in heavy metal magazine sci-fi noir adaptation of a film and And Steranko is just like one of the gods of comics, even though he's, you know, questionable political these days, it seems like.

But absolutely worth a look at. And probably the last thing I want to mention is Kirby's adaptation of 2001 A Space Odyssey. And you have to get the Treasury Edition, which was issued by Marvel in 1976. It'll cost you about $150. It's oversized and entirely worth it. Is that your cat? Yeah, that is, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's all I've got. Nice one. Yeah. Well, I better run through my ones. Yeah, go for it. So as I mentioned, I missed out a lot of stuff, especially the European comics from France and some of the Swedish ones and also from Italy. So the one I did miss before I talked about The Invisibles,

well first off is Hellraiser this was the comic that got me really into comics I discovered it when I was 18 it was in my first year at Glasgow Uni and I started going to the Forbidden Planet in Buchanan Street and aww and aww anyway the cat's giving a shout out to Dexter yeah this cat this comic just had it all what's his name? Chase hey Chase right so Hellraiser had all this stuff it had John Constantine or John Constantine

there's a bit argy bargy about the UK or the US version it had magic it had politics it had like class consciousness and it also had huge amounts of like horror and a real cynicism to it um uh everyone talks about like especially the garth ennis uh dangerous habits but like the early editions with jamie delano were incredible um even just like the little runs like grant morrison again he did issues um if i remember quickly 25 and 26 and it was just this full-on horror about um similar to like pontypool but with um but with ref bases and in like in uh yorkshire and these tiny small towns and it was it's it just blew me away you know

and um all his engines as with peter milligan uh they recently relaunched it because they did this whole crappy stuff with the justice league dark and stuff with uh they relaunched it with size and it was really kind of it felt a lot like the the politics had come back into it but with an intelligence but unfortunately dc fucking cancelled it because they're a bunch of idiots and even as it was winning awards as well you know um and it was cancelled after 12 issues go and get them uh basically the first i i mean they're all great they're all of them are good they're separate stories but yeah um next up um my two manga ones my first one of course is

lone wolf and cub um on my list ah was it okay well basically um lone wolf and cub um i started getting into this i watched the movies first before i got into the manga um so i got into that first and then i realized that i read the dark horse omnibus editions i got them in the early 2000s or the mid 2000s and 10s and it's just the the artistry is great but it's just kind of this wonderful long but kind of still incredibly intense just road movie of death you know if you know anything about lone wolf and cub yeah yeah i don't have to sell it so

yeah uh the next one is i had to have a junji ito so i yeah so i did uzi maki now i love to i had the enigma of the amegara fall yeah now one of the thing with junji ito is is that i love his stuff but sometimes he gets quite he can get a bit sloppy with his storytelling on the short stories But the other one I would probably recommend is Gyo, which is this absolutely bonkers off the wall story about these kind of mecha sharks and fish that end up taking over the entire world and just destroying everything. But yeah, Uzumaki is just absolutely full-on cosmic horror of the abstract kind.

This leads from cosmic horror of the abstract kind to cosmic horror of the body horror type. Number two, Lord Horror, which is... I still don't even know how to describe it. And the whole background to Lord Horror and Savoy Publishing, the publishing house, that could be done on a separate podcast as well. But to cut a long story short, Savoy Publishing was this underground publishing house that did books, records, and comics in the 80s. It was consistently being raided by the police in Manchester. Britain in the 80s was a very weird place to be. And in response, they created these novels about Lord Horror. And Lord Horror was based on Lord Haw Haw.

If I remember, Richard Joyce, who was this Irish-British fascist. And he basically would do these propaganda radio programs, Berlin Calling. And basically this premise was that basically Nazis won the war and took over the world. But basically when they started these comic forms in the 90s, they were banned and raided and it came together on the reverb storm. and just the styling of well i mean it was written by if i try to remember now um it was written by david britain but it was written it was drawn by john coltard and the prologue chapter alone is just full on it's too much it's got this black and white pen strong style but it's bordering onto

full-on black metal Lovecraftian style but it's like imagine just a planet as an endless death camp if you can imagine that it's getting easier to imagine yeah oh yeah but it's like like you said it's just imagine like Auschwitz the size of Europe you know just this kind of wall of death And it was, I mean, it was banned. It was hated upon. Muriel Gray, who's a British culture broadcaster, just said, only it's dangerous because teenage boys will get this and they want to blow stuff up. But the cult comics, it's totally nonlinear. There's no plot. In a similar way to Dave McKean, it has numerous literary and musical and cultural references

mixed with sodomy, rape, cannibalism, drug abuse, violent murders, and just the pulverisation of billions. We've come a long way from the brooms. Yes. And last but none the one is my Alan Moore, Providence. Yes. I really love that. I went for Providence because people, when we talk about dense storytelling of the likes of the invisibles the more i read providence um because people have to understand it all started from uh alan moore writing the courtyards um which was a um a poem he did back in a pro story sorry in 1994 and this anthology the starry

wisdom uh tribute to hp lovecraft and then when he went to avatar comics it got adapted into kind of a graphic novel and then was followed by Neonomicon and then with Providence it's incredible this kind of working of the Cthulhu and the Lovecraft mythos into this tale but just realizing that it was kind of a story that's like 27 years no over 20 years in the making yeah just that kind of a long arc when you read the end and especially if you've read the courtyard and neo nomica when you capture the end of providence and you realize just what the end game is in more stories world the ending is just the story is just like oh my god you've

just completely abriturated consensual reality alan you bastard but seriously um it's like people are talking now a lot about um lovecraft country and about like taking the mythos in certain ways and styles and people talk about like the the racism but you have to look at the mythos and about how i mean the whole ccru the whole urbanomic gangs and stuff like this they'll tell you if you want to talk about hyperstition you have to get your head around lovecraft but the great thing about what Moore does in Providence is that it's both inside the mythos and it's outside

you know analyzing it and in a sense it's like a fragment of the great American novel written by an Englishman you know it's about history and it's about America and it's about political oppression and so on it's about so many things but somehow he manages to also stay inside the mythos so it's like um yeah like that analytical level actually intensifies the horror this is what the british comic uh writers were able to do in a way that until until the last 15-20 years the american comic writers couldn't do now you can call it post-modernism but they could both work from inside and outside the world of the the comic itself so obviously

you know this is what alan moore's always been doing he did it with um swamp thing he did it with um he did it with like watchmen with the league of extraordinary gentlemen uh um warren ellis did it with planetary and what they were doing was they were deconstructing uh pop culture of the 20th century you know in their various ways you know the different characters they were creating these special little meta histories as a commentary yeah as a commentary on the politics and the same thing with from hell you know him he takes the jack the ripper mythos and tells it into the story of politics culture uh class um gender um and he's and he was still doing that and he did

this with lovecraft you know and like i said you know comic the comic industry has really hard done by Alan Moore. Yeah, I mean, we don't need to go into it, but the fact is, he was still you know, the fact he is still able to eke out stories like this. The density and intensity I'm sure I read an interview at some point where he said he only did Providence because he had a huge tax bill that he needed to pay. Hey, you know what? Michael Caine did Jaws 4 so he could pay for his house in Beverly Hills, you know? I think it's interesting to note just here, like, if anyone out there still has, like, an arg.org

you know, login that, you know, Warren Ellis' injection is listed on there as CCRU fan. Oh my god, W-Q-I! Wait, is Stephen Fry in the house? Yeah. Hey, Robin. Rob, just before I step out, to anyone out there in the listening land who wants to hear good coverage of comics, go to Cartoonist Kayfabe. because that's run by Ed Piscor and Jim Rugg, who are both Eisner Award-winning cartoonists. And they were really like the background battery

while I was inking and colouring and lettering all of Chronosis. And they do amazing coverage and interviews. They do a shoot on Skin, which Bob mentioned. So they've got good stuff. Cool. Can you write that into the chat so people know? Yeah, sure. I didn't quite get that thanks very much Keith thanks for joining us Keith you were a pleasure to talk with enjoy and very quickly before I head off as well in terms of comics this was actually in Matt Xenogothic's discord it's actually a long running blog by Elizabeth Sandefere called The Last War in Albion where she basically talks about the rivalry

between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison from their earliest days you know it's been a lot it's like a a long-running blog that's been going up on for like eight years and it's in two books um and so if you want and so if you read this you'll get to know a huge understanding about the british invasion of u.s comics great also just about this underground u.s comics that's like uk comics culture that happened in the 80s because it's It really is very different. It has a whole different kind of political, social valence and origin than the American comic scene of the same. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you have to understand this. I mean, nothing against the underground comics in the US,

which did have politics and did it, but it was kind of mixed in with the beat scene. Can't diss the furry freak brothers. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. If they had that whole thing of the furry freak brothers, it was that kind of like, hey man, countercultural style. Whereas the comics that started appearing in the 70s in the UK, I really reached their apex in the 80s were really much more about the politics in terms of class and race and gender. There was not a lot of hedonism. But having said that, as we were talking through Skins and through a lot of these comic books, the drawing style, so it wasn't just in terms of the content,

which was very political. The form and style was also very psychedelic as well. Yeah. It was just like way more capital P politics. But there was also, yeah, psychedelic, but there was also like extreme gothic stars like what how about nemesis the warlock there's nothing like that in american comics oh yeah yeah it's it's like and of course naturally each one had their own style like i said you know like french science fiction in comics have this really unique style which um comes and also like of course the european had the what they call the clean line style which from the early days of her gay with tintin and all those guys um and some some drawing styles in the uk had that but you had but yeah i mean you had these two three styles you had the

kind of what we call the the um masculine comics that were about war and sports and boys doing boy things which i'm sure you had in the us then you had these like i was speaking to keith about wizard and chips you know but you had all this stuff like this comics you know what um i gave a talk uh i guess it was the beginning of last year where i was talking about the origins of collapse and i was talking about how um you know when we started doing collapse well i started doing collapse um one of the inspirations was um the calle d'analyse you You know, this like kind of chapbook journal that was put together by Badiou and his Althusserian friends in Paris.

But then I go on to say that, in fact, the real inspiration comes from Whizzer and Chip's annuals and Doctor Who annuals. Because of this kind of, you know, they used to get them once a year at Christmas. And it was this kind of heterogeneous mix of different forms of, you know, you had, I guess, stories. comics uh puzzles photo montage yeah right stories yeah and yeah you had all these things um like you also had people um you also had this member magazine called looking oh yeah of course yeah yeah yeah but there was looking but then even more exciting at the time um we're gonna get into peter k territory now aren't we we're like do you remember do you remember polos yeah um no but uh

Flexi Disc was very exciting. It used to come with like Flexi 45 on the front. I remember that very distinctly. Yeah, I mean, those for a pre-internet age, these things were these incredible kind of information resources that you looked at again and again and went back to. And so that kind of feel was like what I wanted to recreate with Collapse, unconsciously at the time, I think. Well, that's kind of partial. I'm kind of doing in terms of my PhD, the section on renegade academia, because there's a lovely book by a guy called Caspar Obstrup. And he was talking about the invisible, not the invisible insurrection, but it's called The Way Out.

And basically what he talks about here is I'm just going to find it very quickly. um but essentially he talks about um wait a second just finding it on here the way out and here we go so um yeah so he starts writing about uh invisible insurrections in the UK from the 60s to the 1980s so he talks about like the anti-university in the 1960s the uh trocky sigma Project, Academy 23 from Burroughs. But then he started to see how these things were taken up by the Temple of Psychic Youth in the 1980s and about how they were creating these kind of alternative networks.

A lot of these people would basically say that they were like human versions of the internet before the internet because people would move around various spots in the Temple of psychic youth and they would bring their information and share it with each other in terms of magic and music and politics and um just like you know how to build a bomb and all this type of stuff and one of the fun things and of course one of the fun things about which we talk about here with regards to uh what i mean you probably will know yourself through the ccr you in the 90s was you know in a very similar way to what the temple of psychic youth was doing in the 80s was like was tapping into this like on the current of cultural activity that was trying to create these new subjectivities,

mutant subjectivities Ed Berger talks about, you know, through avant-garde art, underground music, zines, tactile media, whether it's like zines in the 80s to the new computer media of the 90s. and the whole thing about this is is trying to imagine uh new people new subjectivities for this new impersonal world that we're living in to try and kind of like well break control as burrows would call it yeah right and comics were a huge part of that because many because many of the comic book writers peter milligan brant morrison alan moore were heavily involved in the esoteric and the occult at the time as well.

You know, it was... Yeah, and this goes back to what I was saying about the eagle, was that it's one of those kind of spaces of popular culture where at least for certain periods, there's been this kind of latitude where people can really get away with stuff and experiment. And maybe, sadly, that may not be the case in mainstream comics at the moment. Yeah, yeah. But it has been. Also, I think the problem here is also, well, yeah, people could say, oh, there's loads of comics out there now. But it's happened in the same way to what happened with a lot of independent and alternative music in the 2000s and early 2010 with Pitchfork.

So what they're basically doing is that in terms of they're sort of kind of interested with comic book styles and it's also kind of more insular and more subjective like an inner space as such but it's more kind of it's more decadent it's not really linking into kind of the world out there no and kind of structural problems you know so um so i read some of these like independent books or independent comics and what there seems to be is like i mean I heard about what happened earlier with the Wolfman and others talking about the righteous anger. And it's you are right about that. You know, it can be addictive.

But at the same time, there's like what we talk about this big no, you know, in comics. And it's about how this no gets translated and articulated through art. Yeah. You know, and now it's like, no. Thank you.

definitely want to have a list of those of the your picks and keys too Thank you.

Transcription by CastingWords You are listening to Urbanomic Plague Pod. Third lockdown, second wave. My apologies to Bob. I pressed the wrong button there. Didn't mean to send him off in quite such an abrupt manner. We got a lot of stuff still to come. Stay locked.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Bye.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

So, a hyaluronic, you know, I think would insist that it becomes clear that not only the metaphysical tradition incapable of thinking being, thinking that being is presently, it might be that even we have to kind of abjure insofar as the resources of conceptualization are contaminated by these, you know, prejudicial kind of determinations of the, that always

reduce present thing to present, then we have to forge a radically new way of thinking. This becomes Heidegger's kind of problematic. Even conceptual thought for Heidegger is constitutively incapable of thinking the non-being, the unactuality of time, of temporalization. One of the things that I'd like to suggest is that I think this is a... It's too quick. Heidegger is too quick to assume that the resources of conceptualization will necessarily always prove inadequate to any attempt to think that which is not, trying at that which is not.

One of the things that I'm interested in is one is the possibility that it turns out that our intuitions about and a way of acknowledging the possibility that it may be that scientific conceptualization may yet forge new conceptual resources that allow it to think what has but precisely, I think, so far as it assures the prejudices of pre-theoretical common sense, which is to say phenomenological intuition, which is to say that Contra, Heidegger, but certainly Bergson as well to a certain extent, are intuitions about what is the experience

time cannot be relied on to understand what is going on, what time is basically, or the being of time. And this is why I think that I mentioned the possibility that science itself may need, may necessarily, and that, you know, the, any kind of viable attempt of what's taken scientific research needs to grant to science the possibility of thinking nothing, nothing, it's a knowing nothing more precisely. So the question is can science know time or is it necessarily, is all scientific conceptualization necessarily enthralled a set of transcendental or quasi-transcendental conditions which,

you know, derived from our pre-scientific, you know, experience, psychological experience or understanding of time of temporal beings. Now, in Heidegger and Bergson, interestingly enough, to claim that scientific representation, the reason why scientific representation is incapable of thinking time, thinking, you know, nothingness, nothingness of time is because it's always subservient to practical activity. It's always like a, you know, in Heidegger kind of ultimately the bottom line is that scientific representation is an extrapolation from, you know, two views from the ready to

hand. And in Bergson, famously, Bergson wanted to show that both the reason that science, you know, the pernicious spatialization of time, which prevented from grasping the real nature of duration, to what is most intimate to our being, is a direct function of the illegitimate extrapolation of practical categories, practical imperatives to action into theoretical discourse. So that's why in the famous creative evolution, you know, very soon,

and basically makes a very strong critical case for against the possibility of thinking nothingness. He thinks that nothingness is just a kind of a spurious abstraction which generates nothing but pseudo-problems. He said we can either imagine or conceive of nothingness precisely because it turns out that when we think that we're... What is involved in trying to think nothing is actually a kind of superimposition or an addition of something rather than a subtraction. He said, this is a quote from Brooks,

being unendowed with memory or provision would not use the word void or not. He would express only what is and what is perceived. Now what is and what is perceived is the presence of one thing or another, and never the absence of anything. There is absence only for a being capable of remembering and expecting. So, crucially then, it's because you don't find what you wanted to or expected to find, that you then secondarily, you know, arrive at a recognition that you put it superimposed upon this disappointed expectation, the idea of an absence.

But the absence itself has no real kind of ontological or dismalogical valence for Berkson. So, and he carried on his argument, that's what he said, that since there's no discernible difference between conceiving a thing and conceiving the same thing as existing, because existence is not a real predicate, as Kant has shown, so when you conceive of an entity, you necessarily conceive of it as existence. We cannot conceive of anything as non-existing because we can't tell the difference between what it is to conceive of something as existing and to conceive of the same thing minus as existing. What happens when we think we're doing this is that we're surreptitiously adding something

onto this supposedly non-existent intent. Specifically, we add to it the idea of an exclusion of the particular object by reality in general. So, to think the object as non-existent means first to think it as existence because we can't help but think it as existence and then to think of its suppression by another reality with which it is incompatible. And this is very different, incompatibility will turn out to be significant. I think this is a The acts by which we declare an object unreal posits the existence of the real in general.

I'm not sure what I'm doing. Locked on to the plague pod.

Corona Quest has been booted up if you want to try your luck at a speedrun. Relive the good old days. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

I'm going to go ahead and put it in the middle of the room. Good day.

Turn to the mythical zone, scar, unit tone, high five. The mythical sound of the floor in the town, let me ride around. Keep on moving, y'all. We'll be right back.

I find. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Good day.

I'm out. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. so

so Thank you.

so so

so Check, check, check, check.

Thank you. you're listening to

Abnomic Playpod DJK Heismans and now something special Whatever ultramodernity places under the dominion of signs, postmodernity subverts with virus. As culture migrates into partial machines lacking an autonomous reproductive system, Semiotic subsides into fire techniques.

0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 Yes no yes no yes yes no Longer what does it mean, but how does it spread? Having no proper substance or sense beyond its replication, yes no no usage of virus is ever metaphorical. The word virus is more virus.

Postmodern culture chatters out virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 Virus, viroductile, virogenic, immunosuppressor, and, and, or, meta, or, or, and, or, hyper, virus 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 Hyper virus eats the end of history.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0

0101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010 coding for cyber positive processes auto intensify by occurring. A cultural example is hype. Products that act, act, trade on what they will be in the future. Virtual fashion on off, imminent technical standards, self-filling prophecies and and

or and artificial destinies. Anticipating a trend and and acc acc acc acc acc accelerates it, which is in itself a recursive trend. Hyping collapses SF into K-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A- destined for war.

In place of mess, message content is assembled, bled from asignifying materials with at-at-at-at-atalytic or positively disproportionate efficiency, intruder passcode, locational zip code, pseudogenomics substitute instructions, mutational junk, complex but latent segments, and garbage. Redundant scrap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap crap Bio virus targets organisms hacking and reprogramming cellular DNA to produce more virus virus virus virus virus virus virus virus its enzymic cut and paste recombinant wetware splicing crosses singularity when retroviral reverse transcriptase

clicks in enabling ontogenetic DNA RNA circuitry and endocellular computation. Go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go A hypervirus targets intelligent immunosecurity structures, yes, yes, no, yes, no, nomadically abstracting its processes from specific media, DNA, words, symbolic models, bit sequences,

and operantly re-engineering itself. It folds into itself, involutes or plexes, by reprogramming corpuscular code to reprogram, reprogramming, reprogramming, reprogramming. ROM is melted into recursive experimentation. 011011101010101 Recording devices, copiers, faxers, samplers, case, stammer, reruns, cross-cut by orphan drift. Repeat Infection. All hypervirus strains are plastic and interoperative.

Insert. Hyper prefixing semiotic sectors tag tags them for transfer into abstract non-linear trans-codable machinic systems, tuned to virtualities or hyperspeeds, futural currencies independent of de-futuralization. Hypermedia configure every implementation with a specific medium or territory as a sub-function of extraterritorial processes. Going hyper dissolves being into activity, a material desubstantialization. On, off, on, off. Hyperprocesses spread like Heraclitian fire, although there are no analogies or metaphors in hyperspace. Being cages flow within memory. Functioning as a real anti-ontology, viral

amnesia machinically realises and dissolves biological cultural and technological anemic structures, chopping up hierarchic generational descendancy, collapsing phylogenetic tick frozen code into ontogeny, and immunitizing the past into operative current. Its competitive just-in-time innovations delete storage capacity, fluidizing energetic and informational stocks onto and and or and and or orphan vampire, r r transversal one zero one, zero, one, zero, one, biro biro biro communication processes. Expressing a surplus value of code, content, xenoreplication behaviour, and or con-e-tic-dis-dys-junction.

As war increases in-in-intelligence, it becomes softer. By trashing their hosts, crude viruses feed back negatively upon themselves, auto-limiting their range of re-regenerative infiltration. Crazy vandals like Ebola bodies dissolved quickly into slime aren't ever going to make it big. General principle for viral takeovers in the media? The more unsophisticated the contagion, the bigger the splash. Diversionary tactics accepted.

Copy. Cut. Paste. Subtle viruses are slow, synergic, flexible and elusive. They execute sensitive behavioural control that prolongs the life of the biomachinic resources, maximises opportunities for propagation, infiltrates and disables hostile security systems and feeds back positive minus plus minus plus plus plus minus plus plus plus in innovation technoscience. In the macro version, a VR prey animal hid in its enemy's head. When hunting, the hypervirus look okay okay okay for its primary host species, which will

be undergoing logistical behavioural sophistication, indexed by an explosive increase in communicative intensity, population density, sexual disorganisation, cultural promiscuity, and technical sub-sub-sutilisation, to neurogenomic feedback and fluidization on off on off off on of all hard wiring into cybernetic fluxes. Any plane planet net net one zero one zero one zero one hosting such an event is about to flip over. Catastrophic zero or zero degrees K-virus and RT retroscripts. Kobe, Tokyo, Oklahoma, Koresh, Kernke.

Apocalypse spread by the coke machine. Tomorrow's news brews up in Korea and Kosovo. Climbing out of a recombination apparatus of tape recorders and cut-ups. Hypovirus infected Burrows in 1972 at the cusp of K-K-K-K-Andradia wave 9, the threshold of post-modernity. It rapidly reprocessed its target into an intelligent, no, yes, yes, no, no, Nova War laboratory, volatilizing the history of language into involutionary word virus. Mutation rat rat rat rat rates jump. Vector switches through Butler, Gibson, and Cadigan, fine-tune its synergic inter-excitation,

silt up cybershift inducing kwang potential and Treadlock onto K-punk pulses, with telematically accelerating neoreplicator, plicator, plicator contamination. Looking for a hit of snowcrawl. As post-modern culture crosses to hypermania and stop stop go stop go stop go go goes nova,

it singularises multiplicities cities cities of invasively auto-replicating auto-replicating plexo-weapon system. that are nothing beyond their war against security. This is no longer a quest drawn on-off-on-of ideological representation, exogenous political mobilization, theoretical critique, or strategic orientation, but of decentralized cultural diagrams functioning as imminent forces of antagonism. K-War derives its sole coherence from the unity of its bow. Return.

Anacadab. Switchcar br-br-br-brant. Off-brand. K-Zero. EACHE HEXAGRAM 49 REVOLUTION MOLTING LEAVES NOTHING IH CONTACT CYBERZERK REPELTING SLIP IT INTO DARK SIDE DISTRIBUTIVE ROM SCRAMBLING TACTICS Zero, program

We'll be right back. Thank you.

The best you know, the more seem to be the same. Not to care, you seem to be smart. When you subtract from any equation, from any situation, from any location, the result is always hurt and pain. For all time. That is parents.

That is parents. That is parents. Let it burn. Let it burn. Let it burn. It's not too late to make a difference. They look what they taste.

Thank you. The less you know, the more seemingly game. Not to care is deemed to be smart. I need to track no from any equation, from any situation, from any location.

The result is always hurt and hate. For all the time. Oh, God. Now we need to make a difference. The less you know, the more easy things. Not to care it needs to be a part. I'm going to track so on any equation. So many things wait, so many lovin' Life is always hurt and pain

On all times Oh God Oh, God. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. This is Urbanonic Plague Pod and that's Ryan Trierner. And before that you are listening to Hypervirus from a book called Fangs Numenau.

Once a busy city inhabited by wealthy merchants, Dunwich attracted less savory types as it was gradually reclaimed by the sea. A pamphlet of 1652 describes, in Manichaean terms, the desperate efforts of the local people to drive out a number of cultist fanatics who had descended upon the town, morbidly attracted by the dread process of decay that was slowly eroding its very foundations. The Church of Dagon, which in fact was more of a syncretic cult, saw in the sad fate of

Dunnage Town a confirmation of their long-held belief that in the twilight hours of humanity the waters would rise up and the so-called old ones would return from the depths to reclaim the earth that was once their dominion. Good afternoon, Mrs. Fletcher. Good afternoon. Watch your interview on the morning show. Your new book sounds terrific. Well, thank you. Believe me, Mr. Phelps, it's a lot easier to write a book than to promote it. Tonight on Murder, She Wrote.

Al, you're killing me. Look, all we're talking is another 5,000 copies. End of the month. You have my word. Al, Al. Al, why don't you let me worry about the paper suppliers? You stick to the printing and the binding, okay? Okay, thanks, buddy. You're a prince. Bastard. Bear me, Ross. It's all smoke. The blockbuster titles, the name writers coming back. Lynette. Please. I'm bringing back the man who started the company. He's in jail for murder. Mr. McKay, I'm sorry. One of our paper suppliers is on line four. They're refusing delivery unless they get a check. Tell him to hold. and again on the bottom of page 234 it feels as if you're rushing the scene let it run its course well that's about it mr nolan

i don't know what's going to be happening here but my advice is to find another publisher you're too good and so is your book excuse me uh mr mckay your meeting tell them to wait Yes, sir. Guess who's here?

Yeah, it's time to trip publishing. Hey, Pete. Hey. Hard day on the road, trucking. But you came through for us. Yeah, I'm on the 5G this time. No, no, keep away from the 5G. No, I'm on the 5G, but that doesn't mean that I'm not going to cut out.

Sorry I'm four hours late. Yeah, that means nothing in Plague Puddle. time remember when I left my computer at the karaoke bar yeah yeah and I had to go through multiple layers of bright no no we I look I had a similar situation it was very um mad bad and sad you know yeah but for those who don't know mad bad and sad that's mad bad and sad a history of of women in the mind doctors the mind doctors yeah okay so I was on the truck today for about five hours. Yeah. And Tales from the Road. I saw there was a golden retriever who was driving a box truck

on the 478 West. Right. Not the one that you're in. Well, you're one wasn't being driven by a dog. Oh, God, no. Right. Absolutely not. Okay. The reason why I know he's actually driving is because he had a copilot, he had someone in the passenger scene. Right. A human. But, uh, so what did I miss? A poodle. What did he miss? Lots of comics talk. Epistemology talk. God, all sorts of things. Hypervirus. Yeah.

okay so it turned out that my speechless well because it turns out that my computer was actually not being held by the Chinese mafia as it was the last time it was just on my desk so I'm four hours late but I'm here that all makes perfect sense so I have a question actually for the listeners I've just received an email from my mother the subject line is question right is it in capitals normally I wouldn't open this email but now I'd like to get some audience feedback do I open the email what else are you going to do you can't just delete the email

from your mum Robin okay I'm ready for are you going to read it out live no I want to know if I should open this email or not. What's the alternative? Not opening it. Okay. Yeah, open it and read it on air. That seems to be the consensus. Yes, open, open. Open? What are you afraid of? What question is it you're afraid of? I think maybe that's something that you should be asking yourself, is what don't you want your mother to know? It seems as if you're afraid of something.

Well, I don't want my mom to know is that John Mouse was actually at the Capitol building because he's shooting a film. Yeah, obviously. Yeah. Oh, so I missed a lot. I assume that's what he was doing. something of that ilk. I couldn't imagine that he would turn from being an ultra-Maoist Badjusian political science PhD to a Dukes of Hazzard. Just in that short of a period. But you know all about John Mouse, don't you? You've got a lot of mouse info. No, so I do have some news though, which is this.

the sequence, the urbanomics sequence series design in the spirit of everything that's been going on the last 48 hours in this country is there's been a radical change to the design. Could I just point out at this juncture that I have not approved this design change? No, you haven't. I've accepted it grumpily, but I haven't approved it. And that's because Cavallier's book is just so short and dense.

I don't think we have any more. Do we have any new publishing news since last time? We haven't really done anything since last time, have we? no but i think everyone's uh everyone's waiting for that news about whether the the title is written vertically or horizontally that's what everyone's here for wow they've been listening for four hours just so they can hear the radical news about the spine title well there's i've got two words for you lateral moves robin lateral moves that's all we make in life and that's That's essentially all that a graphic designer can do. I say if you want to make it in the COVID era, you have to be ready to pivot 90 degrees at any moment,

any given moment. Oh, Amy Ireland. Let's get her in here, please. She's hiding, I think. She's hiding in the chat room. Okay, so all I really have is what I wanted to tell you is that there was, in fact, a golden retriever driving a box truck, and that's not a lie. Did you see his paws on the wheel? Rob and I have pictures. I'll send them. And then I also had to go into a fabric shop next to the falafel place. Okay. Rubric? Apparently, Jay-Z and LeBron James get their suits done in Long Island City,

which is news to me because if I had that kind of money, you'd think that they'd be more in the saddle row side of things. Right. But I was in the suit shop. Maybe they have a trusted supplier. They were there. Yeah. What were you doing in the suit shop? That's what I'm more interested in. What were you picking up? No, it's a fabric store, Robin. It's a fabric store. keep up keep up sorry fabrics um so i had to get you know i had to buy some i divide two yards of black fabric and that's for the next podcast um i can't tell you what i'm doing to make your covid cloak um yeah but you'll see

all right I'm opening the email yeah I think all of our bets are on grandmother when am I going to become a grandmother oh this is not this is not good news no oh this is horrible seriously why would it say question she's a real minx my mother wow she really the minx strikes again she really got me in there this time

question seriously uh let's go to a let's go to a music break i've got some emailing to do okay call me back call me back right remember it's called mad bad and sad a history of women and the mind doctors is that published by urbanomic and sequence press um it's in the same family we're one of the majors so it's a kindred spirit okay i'll i'll be back i'll be back you heard it here first

you you

you Now you know that love is dreaming Now you know that love is dreaming Now you know that love is dreaming Now you know that love is dreaming Now you know that love is dreaming Now you know that love is dreaming

Now you know that love is dreaming Now you know that love is dreaming Now you know that love is dreaming Now you know that love is dreaming Now you know that love is dreaming Now you know that love is dreaming All I need. All I need. All I need. All I need. All I need. All I need. All I need. All I need. All I need. All I need.

Yeah, yeah Shout out to new essential worker

Braving a COVID ridden grocery store For the rest of us Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

so Thank you.

Thank you. What's going on?

She can't leave us with a cliffhanger like this. I played you just for fun Thought you were the one for me Thought you were the one for me Thought you were the one I played you just for fun Had you on the run Shot you like a bullet from a gun Well you're gone Yeah, I just got to keep on Having my fun And you just got to keep on Having your fun And I just got to keep on, got to keep on Having my fun And you just got to keep on, got to keep on

Having your fun Go, go.

No, no. Thank you.

I'm going to go. I'm going to go.

Thank you. Press up, press up, and they look at Press up, press up, where the girl have love over them Press up, press up Down for the girl, where we look at And up, rub and shiny brush With the killer with the walker

Me and me wine, and me look at me, bro One other, you but the girl, then push it up and ride Down for the girl, where we look at And up, rub and shiny brush With the killer with the walker Me and me wine, and me look at me, bro I'm just thinking about it I'm ahead of my room, but I can't stop trying.

I can't give up hope, because I feel one day I feel. I feel like I'm in love. And the day it feels, and I'm crying. I have no fear, I'll be right there

It's strikingly lacking in what we try to back here. And I think the comparison of Beckett's come up a couple of times. And I do see an affinity, a strong affinity, actually, between Beckett's work and John's work. but that's partly to do with the purgatorial for me which this piece sort of captures rather than the kind of resolution and release that you might get through tragedy and the possibility of catharsis instead one of the things I take from this work

is the kind of eerie purgatory of drive there's a kind of inexhaustibility, repetition the fact that there is nowhere to go so the model for this for me would be not the tragedy so much as the Sisyphean repetition actually and this put me in mind of a post that I wrote about Beckett which I think you actually quote in the book, Ken which was where I was saying there's just an unsatisfactoriness about any actor portraying Beckett in order to get Beckett done properly in order to get the correct degree of choreography and the right kind of flatness of that affect, you'd really need a simulation to do it.

And I think maybe we can see John's work as the beginning of this construction of this Becker engine, which ultimately can perform his work better than any actor that has so far managed to do. But anyway, to come back to Baudrillard's take on simulation. So we see there in his writing on Apocalypse Now at the end of the 70s a certain stage in his thinking about simulation, a certain stage of simulation itself. Here the analogy is with, it's more than an analogy, I think part of the issue of simulation is a move beyond analogy. The connection is with cinema, a scene which is awaiting the cinematic but already presupposes it in a certain way.

But I think, as John was saying last night, and as Ken has already said, I think we're in the era of the post-sinematic now. And so Baudrillard's later work then on the Gulf War is really about, I think, this post-sinematic phase where we're in a sense of televisual time now. This was a war, as well known, which was synchronised for CNN. But also that we're in a game space, a gamer time. with a seamless interfacing of simulation and weapon systems, so that the same keyboards, monitors, etc., that you use for simulations, will use in actual battle. War literally becomes like a video game, and almost is safe for the Americans anyway.

One of the great examples in the Gulf War did not happen, being the one about... It's actually safer statistically to be a soldier in the Gulf War than to stay at home in America. You're more likely to have been killed in a car accident than you were to have first been killed out in Iraq. But I think poetry arts remarks are prophetic. if we approach them in the right way. We have to remember that his account of the hyperreal then is not as commonly rendered as some form of the unreal.

The hyperreal foreboding is not marked by the pathos of distance in respect of the real, but by the fatal proximity to the real. And a hyperreal emerges whenever the distance between the real or rather the real is pursued too closely. and his example which I think is one of the ways in which his work remains highly precinct for our own time is reality TV, what we now call reality TV which he was talking about in terms of its earliest kind of iteration which was the so called Fly No More documentaries the American one, the Loud family which as he said the question which we now commonly pose about reality TV or would this have happened if the camera wasn't there?

He's saying it was simply undecidable, we don't know. So we enter this kind of Heisenberg's uncertainty space. And this is the space of hyper-reality itself. So for Baudrillard, the simulation is, and I think for all of us really, it's important to remember that simulation is more than a copy. And this distinction then between simulation and dissimulation, which Baudrillard makes great play of with an example of illness. He's saying, you know, if you pretend to have an illness, if you're dissimulating, then, you know, that's all very well and good. But if you're simulating, then you assume some of the symptoms of the illness. And that's part of the difference between the deception of dissimulation

and simulation proper. And, of course, then, so what is it that separates out simulation from being merely a copy. One is the modelling, as we've seen in many examples today. The modelling directly samples the actual. It doesn't merely copy it in a second order. Then there's the causal efficacy of the simulations. A simulation enters back into a network of cause and effect. Just to rehearse this in terms of D'Ambodrillard's three-order simulacra, and the famous three orders. First of all, then, is the straightforward copy,

the order of representation, where there is a very clear kind of distinction between the original and the copy. The second order, which is, as Baudrillard put it, the industrial simulacrum, where the criteria is functional. So that's the... This, then, as he says, is the age of the classical robot, where the robot does the work that a human being can do, that functionally replaces the human being. The third order, then, is where the distinction between original and copy fatally collapses, and examples that he gives, the clone is one of his most favourite examples, which he keeps returning to.

The clone which is both more and less than an actual copy. you could also think of digital files I think I like this, a digital copy is not really a copy it's the same sequence of ones and zeros I'd like to extend this really to thinking about in terms of work because I think the relation between the second and third order simulacra can be thought of in terms of the difference between forwardism and post-forwardism perhaps and new sort of regimes of work. Second order work is that the forwardest work requires no subjectivity. Whereas I think one of the sort of cutting edges of simulation now, the task of simulation

is not the functional simulation of work but the simulation of subjectivity itself. And this is something that emerges I think in films like iRobot which in a way was interesting about a robot one of the things that's interesting about it is the way in which it combines these elements of the second and third order simulacra in a way that you have the form of the robot I don't know how many people have seen this film which wasn't that popular I think but I think it's well worth seeing the form of the robot the robot has this kind of metallic body which is clearly there for performing acts of brute strength but it also has a face and a voice and one of the uncanny things about Sonny,

the lead robot in the film, is this preternaturally kind of calm voice, which is all the more sinister for its calmness, which is inevitably recalling Hal, of course, from 2001, which was in a way one of the first cases of this kind of simulation of subjectivity. And of course then this fits the kind of work typical post-forwardist labour, which is often affective and caring labour. And I think another film that's also sort of relevant to this, somewhat underrated now, sort of forgotten at the end of the 90s, is Cronenberg's Existence, which we're also confronted with,

I think Existence has become kind of increasingly what our everyday life is like, where in a way the worst aspects of games in many ways transfer over into everyday life. So that when you... One of the funniest elements of the film is when you get these game characters you try and engage with them but unless you come out with the right line of dialogue then they won't talk to you. And some of them go into these game fugues where they just lull their heads until they have the correct trigger. And of course this is like dealing with automated telephones, systems, call centres. And there's this kind of convergence between the call centre worker themselves who has to become increasingly more robotic

and the actual robotic software which is intensely frustrating to deal with. you know, comedians make jokes about trying to order tickets from those automated cinema hotlines where they inevitably can never get it right. Which suggests that in a way the ideal worker in some ways would be a robot capable of improvisation really, because if a call centre worker is too robotic, if a human call centre is too robotic, that doesn't work because they haven't simulated enough of a response that don't seem as if they're really responding to you at all, and that's frustrating. But if you

deviate too far from the script they've been given, then that's not permissible either. So an improvising robot is the ideal work of it. And there's sort of interesting resonance with that, and Sherry Turkle's latest book, the first half of it, which is a very interesting book in all of it, where she, the second half is devoted to sort of social networks, particularly, and mobile phones, etc. The first half is about robots, because I think she was troubled by the prospect of, well, I think it's already started to happen, of robots coming into sort of care homes to take on a kind of caring capacity. And she did a lot of work, particularly with children, I think,

and her interaction with robots. And she found actually that only the most minimal components are required in order for subjectivity to attribute it to these robots. So having some sort of face and turning the head towards the individual will make the individual feel that there must be a subjectivity there. And I must have felt the same last night watching those films of that carrying thing. Big dog. Yeah, that big dog thing. When it was being pushed really violently, I thought, ah. That's not even got a face. So, how am I doing with the time? Rough off.

I've got a whole other set of stuff on mencing and all that, but you can leave, I think, and that one. But, yeah, so I think that for me, this was revealed by sort of IRO, of iro but some of the issues around that either and to some extent existence is this role about the simulation of the face and the voice and that well that's another dimension that's interesting isn't it how uh unconvincing voice simulation is that we're assailed by this all the time and the rail network in britain anyway it's full of these simulated voices which are slightly grating and um you know i think that'll be the some of the leading edges is to make that kind of simulation and some more convincing action but um okay leave it

well hi it's about that time of night when my mic starts switching off all the time that was a talk by Mark Fisher from 2015 that's in the book Simulation Exercise Operations which also has contributions from a huge amount of really interesting people Antoine Busquets, James Dadarian, John Gerrard's art is the kind of centrepiece of the discussion which you heard Mark talking about at the beginning, Mark Hansen, Anne-Francoise Schmid, Mackenzie Wark, Eil Wiseman. It's a really interesting one. It's a kind of transcript of a discussion from 2015.

And I just discovered that that was still there on the hard drive. So I'm going to play some more music and charge up my batteries. And then Catherine's coming back. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Hello. Hello. she's back look if I disappear it's because my batteries run out again so then you'll just have to take over well I only have one hand now

what do your hands have to do with it well because one of my I injured one of my hands it's bleeding because I just wrote the longest email of my life and actually in the span of the 15 minutes of drama the lighter couple showed up outside my apartment the the couple that fights about who's got the lighter oh yeah you haven't introduced those to us i don't think before um anyhow all quiet on the western front i'm afraid yeah people want answers about the email

no I told you I just summed it up what did I cut out the 5G is it's giving me problems no I summed it up here all quiet on the western front okay so but speaking of thematically actually that reminds me i wanted to go back to jean cavallis and by the way mention that i think we have to acknowledge nox who suggested he wasn't being acknowledged oh no one I just thought it would be nice

to give him a Knox Peden a tribute Knox Peden suffered beautiful translation yeah he suffered for this text he had to read massive quantities of Husserl and French Husserl scholarship in order to discover the exact nature of the bafflingness of this text and to describe it so beautifully in the introduction. And I do think it's actually kind of an important time to, you know, okay, let's bring up the fact that not once but twice Kevyes was captured. Yeah, a war prisoner, yeah.

And still managed to pen this text. It's a very good reminder that sharp mines cannot be contained. I saw that on a bumper sticker in San Jose, California of all places. If it's applicable, it's applicable. That's what I always say about bumper stickers. Yeah. Well, I'm a professional tourist, so I have to plug the bumper sticker. Well, hey, I've got another, there's another urbanomic book I could talk about briefly. so the one I was just talking about with Mark in is part of this redaction series and over the last couple of years I've been trying to catch up with the two first announced books in that series

one of which was Hydroplutonic Curnow which came out and next week Secrets of Creation is going to be out that's from a project that we did I'm not even sure what year it was 2010 I think with a mathematician Matthew Watkins who some people know from Collapse and an artist Conrad Shawcross who also has been in Collapse a couple of times and we basically put them in a room together and asked them to discuss whether artists what artists role could be in making mathematical or scientific concepts accessible,

which was, in retrospect, on reflection, seemed like a very stupid question, but in asking a stupid question, we got to quite a lot of interesting places, and it was really good fun going back. No, and that's not true. It wasn't at all fun having to go back and transcribe a whole week's worth of tapes, but when I got to editing it, It was fun. And it's pretty amusing, this book, because when you shut people in a room for seven days in Falmouth, it does strange things to their minds. So all I can say, I think, is if you want to know how you get from prime numbers to quantum chiology

to the question of whether you can crossbreed hawks and boars, then this is definitely the book for you. You can't. Well, don't be so sure of yourself. Well, you might be able to crossbreed hawks and boars but more likely you will see a crow fly away with a rat from the second floor story. Is that out of Nietzsche? Sorry. Yeah, right. And again, this is a tale from the road. That's in New York Nietzsche. New York Zarathustra. How is New York at the moment?

How's it feeling? Sorry, I missed it all. That was the 5G. I'm back now. And, you know, my dinner is here, so I have to go now. Your dinner? my dinner is being served to me this evening. By the butler. It's called Late Plating. Late Plating. It's Mediterranean style over here. Nice. On Orchard Street. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you, as always. Yeah. Be sure to come back next time. Thanks so much. It's always a pleasure. I love you and all of that. See you tomorrow. Yeah? Okay. Bye. Bye! Well, let's play some little extracts from Secrets of Creation.

I just went through the tapes today and tried to pick out a few things that would give you a flavour of it. 17 is a single prime, 18 is 2 times 3 times 3, 19 is a single prime. Is mathematics a language or is it actually something that we're just uncovering? Reamens, eta, zeros are frequencies of vibrations, we just don't know what's doing the vibration. Some kind of mysterious, as yet undiscovered, chaotic, time irreversible, dynamical system, and no one knows where the hell that came from. A brace nut times a least nut. Well, we've got a commutativity in the multiplication. So is it a least nut or brace nut?

No. A least... Is it a brace nut or brace nut? Or brace or least nut. Does a nut become twice? No, we shouldn't do. I mean, if you have six nuts. But because this is the first non-prime number, we have an element of choice. or so you have community activity. Well the ball nut is just a peanut, it's just another way of talking about it. And the ball ball, but it has been one. And the ball ball ball ball ball ball ball can be a famous ball, wouldn't it? It's just multiplying by one. Well this, I mean this one here is just a... It graphics everywhere, it's a famous ball without having any effect. So at least Bracewalk is equal to a nap nap nap nap nap nap nap.

No, because you can't, and that can never be transmuted into a law. I think unless anyone else is going to call in, it's soon going to be time for a wish to fall slot and then bedtime. yes someone did have to transcribe it I had to transcribe the whole thing many hours and you should therefore

buy the book tell me if it was worth it I'll just tell you this track is by Swimfall and what you want to do is

is get on Bandcamp and go and look for Boxed. Boxed is a night that's run by Mr. Mitch and Slack in London. It's a very good night and they've got this compilation. It also includes the Proc Fiscal track Megabus and it's great. It's got like about 20 tracks on it and you just pay what you want to pay. So go there and give them some support and get a whole bunch of tracks for a reasonable price. It's a great compilation. It's just called Boxed 5.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Run! Go! Get to the chopper! Thank you.

Yeah! Now as we enter, once I'm going to see the one

We should know to all of those white men faces Now as we enter, once I'm going to see the one We should know to all of New Guadalajara city Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. I love brothers to the man I've got to live in my life I've got to live in my life I've got to live in my life

I've got to live in my life I've got to live in my life I've got to live in my life I've got to live in my life I've got to live in my life I've got to live in my life I'm going to go to the next episode.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Yes, don't worry, we'll be back again with more new variant Plague Pod, as long as the Plague continues.

This is a track of a new double release by Mark Fell and Will Guthrie. Pulled infoldings. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

My name is Blood. I would like to talk to you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. I want to explore you I'm gonna get under your skin So you can feel me running through your veins I want to examine every inch of your frame

The pressure points that cause you joy and pain Thank you. Now I can really mess around with your heart And fill it to the brim with broken dreams

All of the ghosts under the knife Two lives may be saved And if I pull this off, I'll refuse the mobile price Instead, I will look into your eyes If I pull this off, your whole body will be mine And I'm prepared to work throughout the night Our love goes under the knife

Nothing is debout Here on the cutting edge of science Too much information, I feel I'm getting lost Absorbed into the fiber of your soul

Deep within the abattoir of your entrails, your insides Lost in you forever, far from home Our love goes under the knife Someone got too close Our love goes under the knife Your heart was rejected by the host

Set the straight man to the late man Where have you been? I've been here and I've been there and I've been in between I talk to the wind My words are all carried away I talk to the wind

The wind does not hear The wind cannot hear I'm on the outside Looking inside What do I see? Much confusion Disillusion All around me I talk to the wind My words are all carried away

I talk to the wind The wind does not hear The wind cannot hear You don't possess me, don't impress me Just upset my mind Can't instruct me or conduct me Just use up my time I talk to the wind

My words are all carried away. I took to the wind. The wind does not hear. The wind cannot hear. Thank you.

I talk to the wind My words are all carried away I talk to the wind The wind does not hear The wind cannot hear Said the straight man To the late man Where have you been?

I've been here and I've been there and I've been in between guitar solo I was walking down the road the other day when I hear a little youth man say, him say,

you know, see me situation. We don't have no accommodation. We have to sign on at the station at six in the evening. I was walking down the road another day

When I hear another youth man say, him say, me not walk fin up to dance, me not draw them assistance, me used to run a little racket, but what, the police them did stop it, and the hard was to happen. Still, me have to make a race Cause me come off the age And me want to go real I was walking down the road yet another day When I hear another young man say

Him say Me have to pick a pocket Take a wallet from my jacket Me affi do it real crabby And if I lock it, me affi pop it And if I see if me affi crack it I'll trap it with me hatchet But me affi make a race Cause me come off the page And me want to go live

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

Speak alone Darling, speak alone Our summer day withered away Too soon, too soon Speak long When you speak love Our moments drift like ships drift

We're swept apart Too soon Speak low, darling speak love Love is a spark lost in the dark Too soon, too soon And I feel Wherever I go Tomorrow is near Tomorrow is here Always your soul

Speak love When you speak love How someday withered away Too soon, too soon Speak low, darling, speak love Love is a spark lost in the dark Too soon, too soon

And I feel wherever I go Tomorrow is death, tomorrow is hate A waste of time We are late, darling, we are late.

The curtain descends, everything ends. Too soon. Too soon. Too soon, too soon In our wings, yes darling I wait Will you speak love to me, speak love to me

And so I miss the old And love's the grave I miss the old And love of faith Speak love to me darling Speak love to me Speak love to me And so Love Love Love Love I got something to say, something to say Alright Can you feel me? Come on Can you fill me in?

What you want? What you want me? Ready Can you fill me in? Let's talk about it I was checking this girl next door when her parents went out She gon' say, hey boy, come on right around So I knock at the door, you were standing with a bottle of red wine Ready to pour, dressed in a long black satin, lace to the floor So I went in, then we sat down, stopped kissing, caressing Told me about jacuzzi, sounded interesting So we jumped riding All calls diverted to answer phone Please leave a message after the tone I mean, me and her parents were kinda cool But they were the fine line between me and you

We were just doing things young people in love do Parents trying to find out what we were I took and saying Why were you creeping down late last? When did I see two shadows moving in your bedroom? Now you're dressed in black When I left you were dressed in white Can you feel me? Called my blood into answer phone Red my bottle, half the contents gone Midnight returns, your clues you turned on Can you feel me? Whenever the coast was clear and she'd ask me to come out I'd say, hey girl, come right around Stushing out to the door, I was standing with the keys in my hand

Did a 4x4, jumped in my right, checked in and nobody saw The club we went in, we got down, bowed, bowed to the rhythm I'm sorry it was early morning, thought we better be leaving So I gave you my jacket for you to hold Told you to wear it cause you felt cold I mean mean I didn't mean to break the rules I weren't trying to play a mom and dad for fools We were just doing things and people in love do Parents trying to find out what we were to say Why can't you keep your promises?

Thank you. Be checking up on you, baby Watching your very move Think something they might approve, baby

Why were you creeping round a glass I see two shadows moving in your bedroom light Now you're dressed in black When I left you were dressed in white Can you feel me in? Can you feel me in? I've got ready to answer phone Red wine bottle, half the contest call Red wine returns, your clothes you turned on Can you feel me in? Can you feel me in?

Thank you.