Robert Anton Wilson
Ken Campbell: The Great Caper
Last week, that most respected of British broadcasting institutions – Radio 4 – let its hair down, took a huge toke of Alamout Black and briefly turned into Radio Fnord: Robert Anton Wilson was on Book of the Week. Well, indirectly at least. It wasn’t a serialisation of a Wilson classic like the Illuminatus! trilogy, [...]
John Dillinger Died For You
Seventy-five years ago today, the notorious American outlaw John Dillinger was shot to death by FBI agents as he was leaving the Biograph Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. The film Dillinger was watching was called Manhattan Melodrama, which went on to win Academy Awards for Best Screenplay, Best Original Story and Best Tasteless Marketing Campaign (1935). [...]
Hagbard Celine and the MPs’ Expenses Scandal
As an antidote to the relentless cavalcade of hubris, hypocrisy and moral indignation stoked up by the cataclysmic faeces-to-fan proximity problem that’s known locally as the MPs’ Expenses Scandal, here’s a little something from the satirist, guerrilla ontologist and former editor of Playboy, Robert Anton Wilson. Its the Third Law of Wilson’s fictional gentleman anarchist [...]
Read Yourself RAW
I’m currently re-reading – for the umpteenth time, I might add – the great (and, sadly, late) Robert Anton Wilson’s first Cosmic Trigger book. While the title might seem a tad hokey and dated (it was written in 1977), the book itself remains fiendishly clever, gleefully provocative and side-splittingly funny. Like most of RAWs oeuvre, [...]
MMIX
So here we are, at the start of a bright new year; and here I am, thumping the keyboard like a sausage-fingered caveman, trying to hammer out my first blog post of 2009. It’s also my first blog post in almost a month, but who’s keeping track of these things, anyhow? Something odd has recently [...]
"All that is, is metaphor"
From YouTube, a condensed version of Robert Anton Wilson’s Maybe Logic DVD: “RAW talks about the sanity of using maybe, E-Prime (the english language without IS or Being), imprinting and conditioning, optimism, awakening and how ‘the map is not the territory‘.” Well, whaddaya know. I didn’t even know there was a Maybe Logic DVD, let [...]
The Magnificent Seven
George Carlin was part of a very fine and very respectable American tradition – that of the painfully funny and dangerously smart freethinking foul-mouth. Many of my heroes belonged to this tradition, and it seems like most of them are now dead. Comics like Carlin and Bill Hicks – and writers like Robert Anton Wilson [...]
"Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends"
That, in case you don’t know, is a Waiticism – a quote by the legendarily quotable singer-songwriter Tom Waits. Like many of Waits’ lines I’ve used it at numerous society events and apologise now for giving anyone the impression that I’d invented it myself. I did, however, coin the phrase Waiticism. It’s not one I’m [...]
Many Small Worlds
I’ve liked the band Eels ever since I listened to their Beautiful Freak album ten years or so ago. I’ve never seen them live, but they’re touring now so I might try to catch them. The reason why I mention this somewhat tedious factoid is that I just saw a trailer on BBC4 for a [...]
Dirty Bristow issue 2 features stuff by me and is On Sale Now
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