Hell, you only have to mention fucking Joel Biroco and it all starts going off! Matthew Ingram and Paul Meme have been having a row. I have sort of ended up in the middle which is either incredibly diplomatic or just pathetic depending on how you look at it.

I’ve covered a lot of this stuff already, but will try to come back to it in the next few days (like a dog to its own vomit).

However, I do need to clarify that I was (probably) never in danger of arrest throughout the TOPY/Dispatches debacle. But at the time I was far more concerned with attention from the tabloids anyway.

It frustrates me that Paul can write such great emails but not take the extra 10 seconds to stick it in his blog so you get both sides of the story.

Oo-er. Jim of Cloud 23 points out that Joel Biroco has a blog.. It looks great. Mind you, he’s always been into handprinting stuff (mmmm marbled paper – some things just can’t be done online, can they?)

Joel used to edit a zine called KAOS in the 80s. It was easily one of the best zines, ever. KAOS was supposed to be about chaos magick with a nod to taoism (the I-Ching). But it was really about REAL magick/spirituality/exploration – ranting, rucking, feuding, character assasination, taking the wind out of the sails of the pompous.

I think I must have been about 17 when I saw an advert for KAOS in a little Coil booklet. It boasted coverage of subjects like “the anti-christ”, “the OTO’s secret of IX” and my immediate reaction was “Huh? What IS all this stuff?” swiftly followed by “There is no way I’m writing away for this”. It all freaked me right out, and this was a time when I was getting all sorts of weird shit through the post on a regular basis.

About a year later, I moved down to London. College and T.O.P.Y. beckoned. (It’s a moot point which taught me more, but now is not the time to go into that).

You could occasionally buy KAOS in (the now late and lamented) Compendium Books in Camden, though for some reason I was only able to pick up alternate issues. It was stuffed with great articles on all sorts of subjects, but the jewel in the crown was the letters – really intense, long diatribes filled with bile. People accusing other people of all sorts of misdeeds. People who you’d read books by, or owned records by. People like Gerald Suster, Bob Black, Hakim Bey, Ray Sherwin, Genesis P-Orridge.

It was all incredibly bizarre, self-referential, bitchy. Totally compelling.

In retrospect there was some merit to KAOS’ beef with T.O.P.Y. – trying to shake it up and see if there was any substance when the (optional!) Gen-worship fell out the bottom. Similar to my approach, in fact 😉

At the time I just wrote it off as more jealousy. We were young and we had a lot to prove, but (at least in the London Access Point) we totally came up with goods time after time.

It’s not like slagging off T.O.P.Y. was difficult, or anything! I remember a “meet the groups” bash at Talking Stick where all the usual suspects were given 10 minutes to talk about their grouplets (groupuscules! you gotta love that ultra-left denigration terminology!).

Jesus, some of those talks were interminable. Even the Illuminates of Thanateros (the de facto Chaos Magick group, who were supposed to be all innovative and exciting) mumbled on about some castle in Austria and not much else.

We decided the best option was to do 5 minutes in which the man Fred Carter delivered a completely scathing over the top theatrical denouncement of everything T.O.P.Y. was supposed to stand for – everyone’s rumours, misunderstandings, criticisms were paraded out there big style. It blew everyone else away.

Anyway, back to KAOS. There’s a lot to be learnt about human nature in those pages – self-styled “magi” who are only powerful in their own heads, the herd mentality of people in occult groups, the nature of “scenes”.

These days I have very little idea about what is going on in the London (and international) occult scene, but it seems distinctly less vibrant than the period in the late 80s and early 90s when all this was going off. These things go in cycles, however.

So… time moves on, and apparently Joel has said some nice things about the Association of Autonomous Astronauts at some point. As an ego-maniac, I regard the AAA as being something of a litmus test for occultniks. If they can understand how it fits in with what they are (ostensibly) doing then they might be alright. If not, probably better to leave them to their robes, dodgy goth jewelry and dusty old books.

I’m sure this entry will be goobledegook to a lot of people, but it’s still worth checking the Biroco blog because he writes well and there are some jewels for the general reader amongst the other stuff.

And it’s better than reading (wannabe) music journalists banging on about Big Brother, no? (Shit, this bitchiness is infectious. Aieeeeeeeee!)

The massive was massive last night.

But I’m not going to go into too much detail because we’ve all spent so much time cultivating our blogging mystique that I don’t want to let down the fans 🙂

As if to prove my point Dubversion steps up to the mic with an excellent blog entry about what he’s actually been up to. Given the tragic nature of (some of) what he’s writing about it seems wrong to say “keep it up, mate”, but I will.

Dude! It’s July, people got things to do. 🙂

Blogging as a medium seems to be very good at getting dragged down into the minutiae of introspection. Often this is one of its best features, but it can roll over into self-indulgent navel-gazing really easily.

So hardly surprising that when a week… a couple of days… a few hours… go by without someone whacking up a two thousand word essay, that people start to worry about the whole thing collapsing, or worry about “What It All Means”.

Inevitably, blogging is a mixed bag and this is precisely because of its accessibility and the fact that the vast majority of participants have other stuff going on in their lives.

I get as frustrated as the next man when I check a blog by someone who I know has a whole wealth of stuff they could write about (stand up Paul Meme and Dubversion!) and the last entry is the same one from 3 weeks before. But people have to go out there and live their lives to have something to write about.

Personally, I’ve always just bunged things out there*, so the discipline of doing a blog comes fairly naturally to me, work and sleepless nights at home aside.

I’m also fortunate enough to have pretty good feedback (and more is always very welcome indeed). Blogging can be a thankless task (especially if your blog is rubbish, heh heh). There are a load of people who read blogs regularly but don’t participate by sending comments. Which is a shame because it makes it all a bit one-way and passive. Which can be depressing for bloggers, which means less posts (or more navel gazing posts). Take note, dear reader – YOU can break this cycle…

Had a big ranty chat with Jason and the better half the other night about the general low-level of public debate. (I.e. specifically that you can have your say on everything that doesn’t matter: Reality TV, New Labour focus groups, etc.)

Jason was trying to fit blogging into this, because apparently it’s being heralded as some sort of revolutionary new form of publishing, blah de blah (which it ain’t – it’s just an easy way to update an website!). But he has a point when it all spirals into a downturn and there’s nothing to get your teeth into – everyone is checking everyone else’s blog to see who has updated and who is commenting on that update. This generates a feeling of having to catch up so you’re not left behind. It’s an insular world, baby.**

But there is potential for other stuff to emerge – new face to face relationships, collaborations, exchanges of music, whatever. I guess the key is not to invest too much importance in it all, but let\’92s face it, we\’92re all a little obsessional otherwise we wouldn’t be here, would we?

I can see that Matt is trying to give people a kick up the arse so there is more interesting stuff to read, which is cool. But maybe what I’m saying here is that things go in cycles. In ye good old days you had some fanzines that ran to 30 issues and some that disappeared after one. Sometimes the one-offs were the best, sometimes not. So it goes.

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* I used to do monthly updates to uncarved.org which were a bit like this. In the mid 90s I did a monthly personal zine which ended up being called “the sheets project” because each edition was a double-sided A3 sheet. It was basically a diary, reviews, clip art. Plus there was a bonus sheet of AKCT fiction by a mate, and other inserts. Compulsive ranter or self-obsessed nerd? You decide!

** And yes, this post is just adding to the pile of self-referential rubbish… I blame two sleepless nights.