Saturday 26th March 2011. So-called “anarchists” ran amok in London, off the back of the march against public sector cuts. They occupied Fortnum and Mason, broke the windows at The Ritz and trashed a Porsche showroom. Bless. If only it was still 1986, the Establishment would have been shitting itself. I’m looking forward to next week’s poll tax riot.
You want to fuck with people’s heads? Hit The Guardian, a Buddhist temple and a branch of Planet Organic; force the Establishment to defend its enemies and turn the whole thing on its head.
Talking of fucking with people’s heads, allow me to commend “The Invisibles” to your kind attention… Very occasionally you read something that profoundly alters your view of the world. In September 1994, DC Vertigo published the first issue of Grant Morrison‘s “The Invisibles”. I was hooked from issue 1 and devoured every one of the subsequent 58 issues as soon as they were published. The Invisibles is a hand grenade tossed into Western culture, an epic story that ties together every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard and re-examines them through a prism of occult theory, Chaos magic, quantum physics, time travel and meta-fiction.
“The Invisibles” has a story and a pretty good, if convoluted and contradictory, one but that is almost beside the point. Grant Morrison isn’t telling you a story so much as he is giving you an experience; a work-out for your brain, an irreversible expansion of your world-view. The seven volumes of “The Invisibles” are a seven-step process towards enlightenment. I shit you not.
“The Invisibles” is a spell, a chaotic sigil designed to hack the software in your brain and make it process the world in an infinitely more interesting and rewarding way. “The Matrix” would never have been made without “The Invisibles” and you wouldn’t believe how heavily the movie cribs from the comic book. The idea that the “real world” can be hacked and bent to your will is central to both stories but “The Invisibles”, and the tangential research it inspires, shows you how.
Every frame of every page contains something challenging, something to make you stop and think, something that will have you firing up Google and expanding your mind. Referencing everything from arcane and contemporary magic to quantum theory, time travel, religion, politics, sex, the nature of death, parallel universe theory, UFOs, martial arts, Eastern philosophy, history, literature, movies, linguistics (terribly important, linguistics – a 26 character alphabet may seriously limit our ability to perceive all the facets of the universe), the nature of consensus reality, the nature of rebellion… The list goes on and on.
Everything you know is wrong. You are living a lie, a lie you don’t even understand.
“The Invisibles” is life without a perception filter, reality without consensus.
Open your eyes.
Nice and smooth.
