Technoccult

I was just going to add this as a comment to the earlier Grant Morrison interview, but I think there’s enough going on here to warrant its own post. Grant Morrison interview:

‘Sigil’ as a word is out of date. All this magic stuff needs new terminology because it’s not what people are being told it is at all. It’s not all this wearying symbolic misdirection that’s being dragged up from the Victorian Age, when no-one was allowed to talk plainly and everything was in coy poetic code. The world’s at a crisis point and it’s time to stop bullshitting around with Qabalah and Thelema and Chaos and Information and all the rest of the metaphoric smoke and mirrors designed to make the rubes think magicians are ‘special’ people with special powers. It’s not like that. Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. ‘Life’ plus ‘significance’ = magic. See Pop Mag!c for more.

Perhaps “Hyperstition“?

There’s also an interview with Human Traffic writer Craig McGill who is working on a biography of Morrison.

Grant comes from Govan – which is a hellhole in Glasgow. It’s truly one of the most deprived parts of the city and also the country – terrible housing, squalor. I mean politicians have written off a lot of these people – something for which I think some of them should be brought up on charges of dereliction of duty for. Not many go to
University, many more end up with drug habits, poor health. For many, social aspirations is getting their next benefit cheque or being a drug dealer. Basically, there’s not much hope and what there is can be snuffed out by day-to-day life. That’s not to say there’s not a lot of good people there – there are, but the environment they are in stacks the odds against them.

Grant came from that and more or less off his own back, is now mingling with celebrities and is relatively comfortable. Don’t get me wrong, he probably couldn’t afford to stop working tomorrow and never type again, but he owns a quality house and is certainly doing a lot better than many from his generation. In his own way he’s a role model. He shows that there’s a way out. You can live your dreams, even if you can’t go down the traditional route of being a sportsman. We should be shouting about people like Grant from the rooftops. He’s the boy who done good. Now I know he’s not unique by any stretch of the imagination in that regard, but it never hurts to highlight another success tale.

And there’s also an interview with the Filth artist Chris Weston and a review of Anarchy for the Masses