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2002-07-24
What if my readers hijacked my text?
Jen got me hooked on Princess Superstar today.
It started out slow, laughing at "Bad Babysitter" and "Wet! Wet! Wet!", slid a little more addictively into Kool Keith and "Dichotomy" and, well, now...Found a t-shirt on eBay and I'm hooked, baby, hooked.
Crude, crass, smartass white girl with smoked-glass shades and a low-cut top. That's my kinda girl there. Hells yes.
Took the afternoon off of work, for various reasons. Got the hair cut, bought hairdye, generally lazed around for a bit looking at all the shops and seeing all the things.
Stopped into Page 45, the indie comic place and ended up picking up a pile of comics. Couldn't stop myself, really. Found one that I wanted, which lead to two, then three, then the next thing I know, I'm picking up as many issues as I can of Charles Burns' Black Hole.
I read some issues in New Orleans at a coworker's flat. I was hooked and I've been waiting forever to finally go "Right. I need these."
Am still missing issue 1 & 2, however. Will probably have to trawl eBay for them. But now I have this totally fucked up and glorious comic book. Mutating teenagers, sexually transmitted disease (and it ain't just herpes, kids), and the entirely painful yet stunning artwork style.
Man, it's a must-read. So y'all know.
Also got, and this is something that is currently blowing my mind in ways that I didn't think were possible without a lot of drugs and a lot of magic...
Anarchy For The Masses: An Underground Guide To The Invisibles.
This is annotations, interviews, biographies, reviews, whatever. This is the hot shit when it comes to The Invisibles. I read five whole pages of it, and I already want to crawl inside Mr. Morrison's brain in an attempt to see his master plan before it finally makes sense in mine.
Some choice quotes from the interview with him in the book (italics the interviewer, bold my emphasis):
THE INVISIBLES is a spell to create Invisibles.
Yep. It was a lot of things. It was a very complicated spell. I worked on it while I was in New Zealand. I drew [a sigil] on my chest and held it in my hand and I jumped off a bridge. I did a bungee jump to power it, and then threw it in the water and wiped it off. It was very wide-ranging. Initially it was just supposed to change aspects of my life I wasn't happy with, which it did completely, in a frightening, dramatic way. And it was supposed to create links with people around the world that felt the same way but hadn't spoken at the time.
Back then, it's hard to remember there was no 'X-Files,' there was no Internet. People weren't connected in that way. And through 'The Invisibles' I met Doug Rushkoff and Richard Metzger. All these people that were interested in the same stuff. And suddenly, from having lived in the 'Planet of the Apes' you finally meet people you can talk to. You can spend time with your own kind and talking about stuff that you know because you've experienced it. People aren't going to laugh at it or misunderstand it. Everyone's there talking. What does it actually mean? What are the gaps that we all know are there but no one ever wants to talk about? And all of the sudden the world's got this crazy international community of brilliant minds that I've now got access to.
I also wanted it to invade the culture, because I didn't like it. It was boring. I felt that if you could invade the culture with energies that I like... You know, guys in Jerry Cornelius coats. And then bang! You get 'Austin Powers.' You get 'The Matrix,' which is all Gnostic stuff and insect machines from other dimensions.If you cut out every panel of THE INVISIBLES and arrange them in a new order you can practically storyboard THE MATRIX.
Yeah. It is that close. I don't think they could deny it. After the inital rage, when I really went through it plot point by plot point and image by image... The jumps from buildings, the magic mirror, the boy who's being inducted called the One, the black drones, the shades, the fetish. The Kung Fu as well. The dojo scene. The whole thing -- the insect machines that in fact are from a higher dimension, which supposedly enslaved their own. The entire gnostic theme. It was so much of it.
But then I began to think, 'Well, wasn't that what the spell was supposed to do? Quit griping!' You see more of it in every Backstreet Boys video on MTV. Suddenly I felt my territory being invaded. That was stuff that nobody had even been doing in comic books or in pop culture. It was always there in the underground, because that's where I'd come out of. But suddenly it was everywhere; you kind of feel that the gazelles have come to your watering hole and are drinking in your water. So for me it was the end of 'The Invisibles'; a kind of farewell to that and trying to move forward into a different way of thinking, a different way of working. Because everybody was into psychedelia and drugs and other realities, the comic was becoming a set of clich�s -- you know, the group who opposed strange forces from another dimension. The initiated ones who stand between us and the dark side. So many of these things started to cop up.THE INVISIBLES is a story within a story...
The entire story is being told by Jack to Gaz. We see that early on. He's actually telling him everything the reader experiences. The reader is being Gaz as the story's being unfolded, who is the most wretched, most hopeless character, but yet dies in a glorious way.
And it's also being written by Robin. And it's also being written by Kirk Morrison, and Grant Morrison. There were people getting in touch with me. There was a girl who sent me her own version of things, and that sort of fed into it. It'd all become alive. Her interpretation of 'The Invisibles' was 'What if Ragged Robin wrote the whole thing?' What if my readers hijacked the text? Because that's what I wanted them to do. What would it become under someone else's hands? The last issue stems from the point of view where 'The Invisibles' has become more culturally involved than it is just now, and people know about it or whatever. That's written for kids in 2012 who have rejected this entire culture.
Oh my brain, my brain. He makes it all fucked up and yet all so right.
So as much as I am enjoying Goodbye Tsugumi, my new Banana Yoshimoto novel, I think I'm going to have to put a raincheck on it until I finish Anarchy For The Masses. Because...yes.
(Anarchy For The Masses is available from Amazon.com, but not amazon.uk. I don't know why. Just so y'all know.)
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