I have been …Weaponized

(Weaponizer logo design by Paul Sizer. This and similar goodies available here.)

One of the many creative offshoots of the Warren Ellis battery farm for genial artists, writers and other wonderful passionate madfolk that mortals call Whitechapel is the group writing blog Weaponizer. Under the kindly eye of Bram E. Geiben aka Texture, it’s set a very high standard of work in a short time.

So last weekend I thought I’d try submitting a piece for them, see if I was ready to play with the big boys and girls.

Seems the piece – Tribe of the Strange: Origin Myth – went down OK. Enough for Bram to invite me onto the team as a staff writer, working the Fortean and occult beat.

I am beyond chuffed to be doing this. I have huge respect for all there and hope my mad point of view finds a home among them.

First piece as staff writer – Frequently Asked Questions about Weird Shit – went live this evening. Hope you like my new(ish) direction…

(To come at WPNZR – more rumbling on about oddness and hopefully the birth of the Mason Lang Film Club!)

And here, the next Guttershaman – “…of Jedi and Jail” – coming soon.

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In Memoriam – John A Keel

When I was a boy, I read an awful lot of shite books about Fortean matters.

I ploughed through Erich von Daniken, dodgy tomes about the Bermuda Triangle and witchcraft and Earth mysteries. Like Stephen King described the process of reading/watching bad horror stories, I was prospecting through mud, seeking those few glimmers of gold.

Every now and then, I found something truly good, which asked hard questions and offered theories without falling into the trap of declaring their point of view as pure Truth. One of these was UFOs – Operation Trojan Horse, by John Alva Keel. It made a difference in how I looked at the world. Like Robert Anton Wilson (who I read about the same time), Keel showed me that ‘maybe’ was not a bad perspective to take – and that orthodoxy can so easily trap a mind.  In other works, such as Our Haunted Planet and especially in The Mothman Prophecies, his perspective and unapologetically personal approach were a breath of fresh air in the stale pulpiness of so much Fortean writing.

And now he’s gone. I’m startled at how sad this makes me – but perhaps I shouldn’t be. After all, we should mourn our ancestors when they pass, even (especially) when they aren’t blood kin.

…aaand we’re back! Meanwhile, people keep telling fibs

Fully broadbanded again, thankfully.

While I was out, there was an interesting little flap about an ‘undiscovered’ Amazonian tribe, with photos and everything.

Shame it was all bollocks…

“They are the amazing pictures that were beamed around the globe: a handful of warriors from an ‘undiscovered tribe’ in the rainforest on the Brazilian-Peruvian border brandishing bows and arrows at the aircraft that photographed them.

Or so the story was told and sold. But it has now emerged that, far from being unknown, the tribe’s existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that ‘uncontacted’ tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry...”

Well at least it was bollocks for a worthy cause. That makes it alright, doesn’t it?

Well, no. It fucking does not.