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I IVordinary quantity of nonsense in your head. But a widespread taste for the inane has long guaranteed a robust trade for the dealers in unorthodoxy: interpreters of cards, dreams, the stars, human and animal entrails, and virtually every other natural phenomenon which waxes, wanes or changes its shape; faith healers and experts in curses; utterers of oracles; readers of minds, palms, bumps on the cranium and, currently, random variations in the iris. And of course political weirdos of every hue and laterality.But of course in an important sense none of us really knows what’s impossible and what merely seems unlikely at the time. If you’ve been listening to the 1977 Massey lectures you’ll have heard the gruesome tale, from one of the world's leading experts in plate tectonics. of the venomous persecution ladled out less than 20 years ago to the heretics who thought there just might be something in the idea of drifting continents. Today, established truth; less than a generation ago, offensive madness. (Yet any fool, looking at a map, could see that at one time the continents had fitted snugly together. There’s other weird shit staring us in the face today, waiting for the belated nod and the establishment of university chairs.)Scientific understanding, Thomas Kuhn tells us, advances by revolutionary lurches. Each dislocation of the standard maps is followed by lengthy, boring consolidation. Then, just as the heretics arc settling their academic gowns about their shoulders, some bastard does it again. Mopping and mowing and gnashing of teeth.I think we’re on the edge of one or more such revolutions. The rogue data from some investigations of some alleged paranormal phenomena are screaming for inclusion in a fresh paradigm. 1 suspect the UFO evidence is one of these barely contained volcanoes. I'm quite certain that parapsychology is another. And there’s even a wisp of a hint (though it pains me to admit it) that the two are linked, and not just as the outpourings of mad minds and stoned dole bludgers.For starters: during the past decade or so, while Vietnam burned and the ecosphere choked and hundreds of millions starved and people with cash for paperbacks teased out baroque hopes of salvation from extraterrestrial Pygmalions, something stupefying seems to have happened in ESP research. A handful of investigators appears to have done for psi phenomena (pronounced “sigh”, not “pissy”) what Marconi did for radio waves and Von Braun did for rockets. They got it working with acceptable reliability, and in doing so I believe they’ve paved the way to a new post industrial revolution.By a curious irony, the recent upsurge of credulous enthusiasm for the occult makes this assertion at once banal and unbelievable. When the skies swarm with divine chariots, when plastic pyramids confer nameless energies known only to the ancients, when the girl up the street changes her name by deed poll so the letters give the most propitious numerological configuration, we all yawn and turn to the sports pages.What’s the point, after all, even if psychic supermen daily cause the wilting of cutlery? Even if weird shit is not entirely shit it’s undeniably weird, and where’s the percentage in weird already? :' Oh you dull swine. Have you noimagination? • 11 j“If. we knew a good method of educating and drawing out the latent faculty,” observed gentle Mr Gumbril, viewing his starlings in Huxley’s Antic hay, “most of us could make ourselves moderately efficient telepaths; just as most of us can make ourselves moderate musicians, chess players and mathematicians .l. . Look ,at the general development of the mathematical and musical faculties only within the past two hundred years. By the 21st century, I believe, we shall all be telepaths. Meanwhile, these delightful birds have forestalled us.”#•Actually I rather doubt that starlings commune on the cosmic vibe, but I have evidence that an authentic psychic revolution has beaten Mr GumhriTs estimate by a quarter of a century. In subsequent columns I’ll give you the details, or as many as the innumerate retards among you can cope with. But if the breakthrough has already occurred in putting ■ psi to’-'Work (and that includes accurateNATION REVIEW 12 - 18 january 1978premonitions of the future), it has less resemblance to the “education of a latent faculty’’ than to the design specifications of a radio telescope.fan, the future will be —: to a degree never before realised — in our hands.Its immediate fruit is going to be a technology of magic. No arcadian harmony with beast and bloom. I fear, is likely to grace the psi technology which confronts us. Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 dealt with a science so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. It’s my belief that any sufficiently advanced magic will be indistinguishable from technology.In general, though, there’s no call to get allgrim about it. Weird shit, like science fiction, is primarily intellectual play for the zest of it. Still, when Clarke published his haunting, flawed novel of a psychic apocalypse, Childhood's end, he prefaced it with the extraordinary note: “The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author.”Since SF is a species of fantasy where wild irresponsible speculation is grist to the writer’s mill, this disclaimer seemed peculiarly redundant. Evidently the man felt threatened by the occult drama he portrayed so movingly. I can sympathise with his forebodings. The vistas of weird shit are dizzying, and' for anyone schooled to the tenets of orthodoxy the predominant emotion must surely be dismay. A journey into the borderlands of science and parascience begins with furtive thrills and often concludes in sour-sardonicism.I was much taken when I read in The social contract a comparable disclaimer by Robert Ardrey, whose stock in trade after all is a conceptual recklessness to infuriate any scholar. Sometimes even his nerve fails.“There is a surmise so wild,” he wrote, “that none with a reputation to lose dares publish it. Yet it is a story so good that to deny it to readers becomes a criminal act. And so, since I lose my reputation anyway as regularly as oak trees their leaves, I present it here ... I do so, however, with the strict understanding that I do not believe a word of it.”Let his words be the keynote to this column.Will paranormal phenomena, on a controlled basis, have any impact on our lives? Try this scenario of 1990 on for size:Locked incommunicado in an Osaka prison for political detainees, a key japanese womens movement activist pursues an apparently senseless discipline. For hours after lights-out she remains awake. Each morning at lam she clenches first one fist then the other, drawing blood. There is pattern in her self inflicted pain. Her body is a psychic telegraph, and she is transmitting a coded message.At the same hour, in Tokyo, Sendai, Sapporo, Fukuoka and a dozen lesser cities, close to 12,000 women are throwing coins and matching the random patterns with runes in a modified edition of the I ching. Within minutes telephones are ringing in the homes of cell leaders. Information trickles, gushes, floods as it rises through the levels of the organisation. A definitive consensus emerges. It is identical with the pattern scored on the prisoner’s nervous system by the clenching of her nails.An ultimatum is sent to Tokyo. It is taken seriously; cabinet debate the proposal for hours, frightened of the possible repercussions, angered by the illegal group’s presumption. They reject the demand.Four days later, as the prime minister inspects, a reinstated US military base, an impossible sequence of short circuits activates two armed Jow kiloton nuclear missiles. Detonating in their silos, the warheads volatilise the PM, his staff, and most of the military personnel in the area. Twelve thousand women, sick with anguish, resolve and fierce headaches, seek out acupuncture needles and tea before switching on their TV sets to hear the government’s reaction to their massed psychic warfare . . .Total fantasy? Current psi control techniques are maybe only one ste£ back from that scenario. The forms in which paranormal technology manifests itself might not be as I have sketched them — but they might not be greatly different. The emerging paradigm of workable psi appears to differ • from Big Science in its reinstatement of community. When the weird shit finally hits theMUSICA boring wordBruce Elder1977 WAS a strange year for rock music. The pluralism which had been in evidence for the past couple of decades took on a decidedly national feel with Britain and. the USA (still the two major producers of rock acts even if Britain now runs a poor fourth after the US, Japan and West Germany in record sales) polarising into punk and west coast hip easy listening.Of course, in purely financial terms, hip easy listening won against all comers. With Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors selling over ten million copies, Boston’s debut album passing the four million mark, AI Stewart’s Year oj the cat pushing towards two million and the Eagles Hotel California passing the five million mark it was clear where America’s and, by dint of association, Australia’s musical sympathies lay.The whole hip easy listening ethos is offensive not because it is watered down, anemic sentimentality couched in the most mindless wallpaper schlock rock (which, by way of aside, it is) but because it tells us precisely what happened to the hippie idealism of the mid-to-late 60s. As Fraser is to the Whitlam era so Fleetwood Mac are to the Jefferson Airplane-Grateful Dead era — a travesty of idealism and a return to an absolutely mindless status quo cop out.In Britain, as you must already know unless this is the first paper you’ve picked up in the past 12 months, it’s been the year of the punk with Johnny Rotten as the resident messiah/savior/bete. noir/musical malignant/ anti royalist and general cult figurehead.Punk has been much more a media campaign than a hip pocket statement of intent by the record buying public. Only the Stranglers and the Sex Pistols can be considered com1 mercially successful and even then their sales figures — Rattus norvegicus IV — 300,000; Never mind the bollocks — 200,000 — look paltry beside their american competition.But for all this jingoistic slanging it’s really down to where your interests lie as to where the central musical experience of 1977 exists. Who am I to argue that 1977 has been the year of Abba? the year of the disco boom? the year of the australian band abroad? the year of bloody anything that takes your fancy?For me it’s been none of these things. It’s been the year of the recorded “fuck”. The year when the industry caved in to all sorts of censorship pressures and, as the Festival of Light are given to saying, “the yeair when the floodgates of filth were opened”.kecord censorship has always been a dicky issue. It’s very hard to work up £ a guy who goes into a shop anlt; cular piece of black vinyl with middle. The authorities can’t open it up and point to oceans of naughty words, there’s no visual feast of tits’n’bums and acres of pneumatic flesh. It’s just a piece .of black vinyl. It looks the same whether it is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or Derek ’n 'Clive.And as far as corrupting the masses is concerned when you have to purchase a record in a one to one situation and go home and listen to that record in a private room with an audience that rarely exceeds three or four, then the authorities are hard pushed to pin anything on you. A record is the ultimate mass media private transaction. Nobody buys records on spec or listens to records by accident. The industry just doesnt work that way.It is with all this in mind that I wish to address myself, with some seriousness, to the word “fuck” whose currency has rapidly risen from the dross of everyday conversation to the pure gold of the million seller. IIn the record biz in recent months, enthusiasm has been such that any new and aspiring band questing for acres, of free publicity, has merely to mention the word to have the minions of Fleet street fawning around the cuffs of their bondage pants.In that gloriously incestuous way that the rag bag, dirty mac end of the mass media tries to convince us that the doings of stars, starlets, starlettes and starstuds is NEWS; that Rod Stewart’s sex life will alter our destinies far more profoundly than any possible actions of Vorster, Smith, Sadat or Begin. *iThe first band — media-time not chronologically — to fall under the stem puritan eye of Fleet street was, no prizes for guessing, the Sex Pistols.After saying “fuck” on television — a regular occurrence in the up-market drama programs but the press seemed to ignore this — the Pistols guaranteed their supremo position as good copy. Their every word, thought, deed and action was guaranteed to have the good mums and dads of suburbia tearing their hair out in outrage and consequently (and this of course is what the game is really all about) sold*papers at such a rate that the forested areas of northern Europe were decimated within days.Logical end point of all this mindless media brouhaha was when the Pistols released their first album Never mind the bollocks here's the Sex Pistols. (An excellent album according to the bewildered 120,000 who bought it on its first day of release and the music journalists who fell about the place with ecstasy not daring to be unfashionable and admit they didnt like it. For me, well, it was interesting, but in the high energy and music stakes it was but a flickering candle compared to the power station goodies served up by such rock’n’roll tyros as Bob Segger, Little Feat, Bruce Springsteen and, in the good old days, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.)As I was remarking, Never mind the bollocks scored twice on the “fuck” marker, first, with the title which while not actually containing “fuck” contained the- equally offensive (to the delicate ears of the english constabulary) word “bollocks” and second, with a song titled Bodies which not only mentioned the offending word, but mentioned it in the midst of a lot of quasi sociological bullshit about abortion —Dragged on a table in a factory An illegitimate place to be In a package in a lavatory Died the little baby screaming Body a fucking bloody mess which added much evidence to the old jesuit aphorism about giving the church a child till it’s seven. Young Rotten, for all his anarchic posturing, was educated by the brothers of the cloth and they got to him long before Malcolm McLaren imbued him with good old fashioned jewish anti establishment radicalism.rThe badmouth UtiravoxRotten and crew were pursued closely by fellow Virgin Records stablemates Derek and Clive (alter egos for Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) who followed last, year’s successful Derek and Clive —- live! album with a little offering called: Derek and Clive come again, which boasted 174 “fucks” and 41 “cunts”and consequently captured a comer of the market by the good old sales technique of overkill (see Music, 15 december). • ' ■While the press were busy jumping up and down and feigning horror, three more offerings slipped on to the market but, tragically, they were ignored. The “fuck” syndrome seemed to have gang banged itself into oblivion.1First down the tunnel was a thoroughly ex-•cellent album by Ian Dury titled New boots and panties. This was one of the half dozen best albums of last year. Gloriously idiosyncratic in its philosophy, its music, its singing and its approach to subject matter, it deserved better than it got. It suffered from its sheer originality in the way that Kevin Coyne albums and John Martyn albums suffer. In an
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Cremorne Junction Nation Review
Cremorne Junction, New South Wales, AU
Thu, Jan 12, 1978
Page 20
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Clipped by
Boyd C.
KY, USA 09 Sep 2018
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