Ladies and gentlemen ! Witches and warlocks ! Watchers and waiters !
By popular demand, for one night and one night only ! For your amusement, edification and delight ! The Shadow Theatre presents the first exclusive images from 'THE 24th MOMENT'- Carl McCoy and the Nephilim's triumphant return from the 8th dimension ! Available this fall on DVD in Dolby stereo and dual format. 'Til then you'll just have to keep the faith and content yourselves with this brief reminder of the recent past and the promise of things to come...












Once upon a time giants walked the earth...










Tonight they walk again...






What rough beast it's hour come 'round at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?



" THE 24th MOMENT " starring CARL McCOY and THE FIELDS OF THE NEPHILIM!!!
COMING SOON 2 A SCREEN NEAR YOU!!!


As for that controversial episode in the auditorium and the resulting struggle outside I leave you with two frames to resolve this issue once and for all. Up close you can make out both the identity of the mystery heckler and his assailant who is undoubtedly one of the Astoria's in-house goons and not one of ours. My apologies to Tony, Steve and the Angels who stood wrongly accused. Idleness breeds gossip, gossip breeds evil and as we all know the sleep of reason breeds monsters...



....
Keep the faith ! Be vigilant ! Watch for the evil that steals like a shadow into our hearts and homes ! Above all be happy ! Rejoyce for summer is come again !
The Preacherman has returned to his flock in their time of need !
The walkin' dude sends the ancient sign of greeting and blesses you one and all, the righteous and the damned alike !
He is with us this night in our dreams...



There's a storm comin' in alright. OUR STORM !!!!
Stay tuned to this network for breaking news...




+++++++THIS IS RICHARD STANLEY THE LAST FREE MAN IN WEST LONDON SIGNING OFF++++++++++++TRANSMISSION ENDS+++++++++++++++

For a while there is only blackness, without form and void.
Then a ribbon of lightning splits the gloom, the flash illuminating a billion tiny raindrops spread like diamonds on the velvet viewing table of the night, suspended for an instant as if in a vast, motionless amber. A billion sparks. A billion tears. Then the light gone the droplets which paused as if to have their picture taken give themselves over to gravity's glamour and continue their downward plunge, pattering off the slanting rooftops of River City, squalling in warm gusts against the windows as I find myself alone with my weird thoughts, too damn many to sleep right now. Of course it could be worse. Like it could be raining spiders or I could be waking up inside a tent in Glastonbury still trying to figure out who the hell I was and how to get a ride home…



Time was you could have found me in the teepee field. I sometimes bumped in almost a week in advance to set up but mostly just sat around honing my hippy skills telling fortunes, giving backrubs, rolling joints, whatever. Of course the summers seemed warmer back then, the colors and tastes more vivid. Leastways it didn't seem to rain so much. I dunno. Maybe I just had a better hat. More often than not I came on foot, setting off weeks in advance, walking up from Devon or Cornwall following the ley lines from Saint Michael's Mount or the Cheesering on Bodmin Moor across ExMoor and DartMoor and up into Sommerset to St Michael's on Glastonbury Tor via Burrow Mump and King SedgeMoor's Drain. Other times I walked down from Surrey or Wiltshire via Avebury , over King's Play Down where my ancestors fought the roundheads, pitching camp at Oliver's Castle, the iron age hillfort that commands the way west before refilling my canteen at an unmarked medieval dew pond known as Mother Anthony's well and making a forced march across the flastlands to the Devil's Bed and Bolster at Rhode and hence to Pilton. I think I rationalized it as 'hitchhiking' but even then few civilians ever picked me up, not that I expected them considering my ragged coattails and out of control eighties level hair.

Of course my habit of skinning wings, paws or pelts from roadkill back then might have conveyed the wrong impression but it seemed a shame to waste those fresh carcasses. Beautiful and perfect in every way other than the fact of their killing. You probably know this but hundreds of thousands of badgers, foxes, hedgehogs and other confused beings perish on Britain's roads every year, all because humans feel the need to speed up between towns when they should be slowing down. If a fraction of the effort put into campaigning against blood sports was put into enforcing speed limits in the remaining woodland areas this slaughter could be significantly reduced, if we really cared about critters rather than the class struggle the anti-hunting lobby has come to embody. Nowadays hitchhiking is illegal too in most places and the only people who seem to stop for me are the police so I don't bother with the formality of sticking out a thumb. By walking you make your own destiny and it's still the only way to get to know a country, to become part of the landscape rather than simply gliding across it. Even in the post industrial wasteland of 21st century England it is still possible to navigate from one greenbelt to another, cutting across the occasional golf course or farmyard and staying out of the way of humans, give or take the odd bus ride if you can make the change through outlying commuter zones and other occupied territories.



Only when you abandon the car or get off the bus do you start to remember which country you're in. Startled hares go leaping across fields that moment's before seemed lifeless and barren, flocks of crows wheel overhead happily cawing messages of woe and village cats come out to greet you, keeping the wayfarer company until you pass safely beyond the fields they know. So many tiny lives continue silently amidst the hedgerows. How else would you seek to know let alone understand them? How else would you learn to recognize St John's Wort in the wild, let alone figure out a halfway decent cure for radiation poisoning ?

Things took a turn for the worse 'round the time of the 'Battle of the Beanfield' back in the eighties when they broke up the 'peace convoy' and drove the freaks out of Stonehenge.



After that I took to spending most solstices at Avebury, completing a circuit of the stones overnight and seeing in dawn from Silbury Hill where the West Kennet long barrow offered shelter as the rains became more persistent. As the fences went up around Stonehenge so they got higher each year at Glastonbury and when Michael Eavis banned the travellers after a pointless, farcical battle with site security the organizer's boasted of having finally 'eliminated the working class drongo element' enabling the event to take its place beside other seasonal fixtures such as Ascot and Henley presumably.

Paying for Glastonbury was like paying for sex. The thought seemed preposterous but it wasn't long before they came to roust me out of the teepee field despite me being the only one there with any bonafide native American blood. Can't remember which year it was but it was a wet one. I'd walked all the way up from Cornwall and it had rained every damn inch of the way from Nodman's Bowda to Castle Cary and I was soaked through and looking down the barrel of a 'mud year' at Pilton. In the end it wasn't security but a posse of so-called 'peace police' who told me I was no longer welcome on site. No reason in particular but I guess I was just too evil seeming for the new look nineties. I'd been spotted going around the stones widishins the year before and some of the toffs in the 'Pagan Federation' had decided I was a wrong 'un so a pack of nameless footsoldiers came looking for me with knives and pool cues. They were strangers which always makes these things tenser and were pretty wired, a wave of amphetamines edging out the psychedelics that were the common currency of years before.

The saddest part of it was losing so many friends so fast. I'd known some of 'em well nigh a decade and saved their asses on numerous occasions but not a dog man one of 'em stood up for me or said a word. As I looked around everyone else in the field seemed suddenly have something more important to do as if the confrontation wasn't really happening. Granted I didn't have a ticket but I had been invited which is different and these creepozoids were hardly uniformed security. I had a perfectly credible backstage pass and various color coded armbands accumulated along the way.
It was a long way and I was feeling too lazy to walk back in the rain.

But I made one friend more in the process. The only person in the field to stand up for me that night, a perfect stranger. A big, broad chested Scot's lad dressed and made up as Punch, the clown figure best remembered from Edward Woodward's final scenes in 'The Wicker Man'. His name was Mark Oxbrow. He had seen me at the Scala introducing a screening of 'DustDevil' and as a result of that famous battle in the teepee field the two of us fell to discussing what had become of England.



Mark was one of the founders of the 'Beltane Fire Society' and after breaking camp we sat out the grey dawn in the phony stone ring overlooking the miasma of tents and kiosks that Julian Temple would later describe as 'all that is best' in Britain. He told me that if the English didn't want me any more then I should go north and help him light fires instead, which I did for a number of years creating desired pyrotechnics for their Walpurgisnacht and Samhain celebrations, some of my best work I believe but it was done out of love and I refused to photograph or document it at the time.




It was hardly Glastonbury but with generous lottery funding the May Eve bash on Carlton Hill began to draw a crowd over about ten thousand which was all the audience we needed and at least the Beltane Boys were unfettered by the dogma of 'neo-paganism' that had taken root down south. I think my first instincts were to raise an army or orcs and retake the teepee field by force but wisdom comes with age, hence the modern cell based Shadow Theatre rather than the public displays dreamed of in youth. Anyone who was on the hill when we did that thing with the exploding goat will doubtless vouch for how much fun it was at the time. Events having grown in the telling it behooves me to point out that creatures involved were ingeniously constructed effigies ( using scavenged and 'found' animal parts ) rather than living beings. I love animals and would never condone suffering or bloodshed for religious practice or public spectacle, no matter what the gossip mongers tell you. But it was a terrible, obscene, mind shattering act and it burned its way into the retinas of all who were fortunate enough to be there.





Beltane falls earlier in the season but I don't recall a single wet one as if the powers that be approved our various offerings. If any of you were in the crowd outside Edinburgh cathedral that Samhain to witness the symbolic slaying of summer and the arrival of the winter court you'll recall the way the first snowfall of the winter seemed to condense right out of the air as if on cue as the blue woman playing the Cailliagh unveiled herself and reached skyward in what remains one of the most exquisite displays of natural magic I have ever been privileged to take part in. But then I always was more of a Hallow'een person. Value for money too when you consider that despite the thousands of punters, the fireworks, over three hundred dancers, acrobats and stuntmen, torchbearers, stewards, paramedics, etc the entire deal was absolutely free of charge and free to all comers like Lewes in the old days when I used to march with Cliffe before they cordoned off the bonfire site and started flogging tickets, mostly to other Federation members.



I can hardly remember a year when it hasn't routinely pissed on the druid's sun wheel ceremony although this is probably something to do with shifting rainfall patterns. More rain in June followed by longer drier summers. Same deal that's all but wiped out the indigenous'shroom which needs that late season fall. But then the connection between Stonehenge and the solstice has never been particularly clear. Every generation re-invents the stones in their own image so what were once presumed to be skittles left behind by playful giants became star maps with the coming of science, a giant computer for calculating the precise moment of the solstice with the coming of the digital era and more recently the vagina of the earth goddess. Delete where applicable. Of course you have to overlook the unpleasant detail of the stones being realigned in relatively modern times when they were made safe by digging them up and resetting them in concrete. Add to this the fact that their true purpose was as alien to the druids as the modern neo-pagans are to their happy go-lucky flesh eating ancestors and what we're looking at is a bit of a busted flush, o my brothers. Speaking of which when was the last time you saw a black person at one of those sun wheel ceremonies anyhow…




Don't mean to be controversial ( moi? ) but the only ancient monument I've ever seen that actually does something at the moment of the solstice is the castle of Montsegur in the high Pyrenees. While the Cathar faith was not heliocentric the Albigensians seem to have built their greatest stronghold on the foundations of an earlier construction of unknown origin. Somehow at dawn on the 21st of June the eastward facing arrow slits in the lower chamber of the keep catch the first faint rays of the rising sun, channeling them into fierce red beams that exit through the westward facing openings, a display repeated like clockwork every year, dimmed only slightly by the pall of smog that has gathered above far away Toulouse since the industrial revolution .




As the sun climbs it marks out two brightening rectangles that move slowly across the chateaus's inner walls, gaping, infernal mouths whose jagged teeth close after half an hour like the shadow of a slow descending portcullis. It is far from the castle's only repeatable and readily demonstable 'paranormal' property but as Montsegur was identified by Nazi pseudo-archeologist ( more of a 'rogue philologist' if you ask me ) Otto Rahn as the Castle of the Holy Grail the place is so thick with Occitan nationalists, Catalan nationalists, boyscouts, legionnaires and genuine out and out neo-Nazis nowadays you can hardly swing a camcorder come sunrise in the keep. Ironic when you consider what the Cathars stood for but that's a lousy war for you…

Of course I wouldn't have started down the trail to Montsegur and my decade long enquiry into the Third Reich and the unsavoury underpinnings of the new age movement if it hadn't been for the 'peace police' and that sorry scuffle in the mud, the night Glastonbury died for me, an event that has come to assume the same personal significance as the cutting of the elm at Gisors. At the time I thought I was alone in my paranoid perception but I now realize my experience was symptomatic of a slow, glacial shift in western culture as the English speaking people under growing pressure from immigration and globalization groped for reassurance in the old myths of blood and soil, in a dream that never quite gives up, a deceptive fable of an ancient civilization where their white garbed ancestors lived in harmony with the land. Personally I have always felt a natural aversion to authority figures in white robes and placed in the same frame as those burning crosses from Lewes you don't have to close one eye to find them just a little familiar…





I waited until it was full light before taking my leave of Mr.Oxbrow and wending my way west through Babylon. The festival still had a day to run but the party was over and you've got no purpose being on site if you're not having a good time.




My feet were so wet I could hardly feel 'em and how can you have any good times when you can't tell the difference between busting your toe and a glass of beer? Yet in my solitude and bewilderment I felt the need to linger, to find a lift and take my leave of Worthy Farm in some manner befitting the energy I'd wasted on it. Perhaps I just wasn't ready to let go of the dream. Instead I joined the early morning clean up crew, helping the other survivors bag and bin the night before, doing penance perhaps. I dunno. Just then a 'chopper whirred overhead, a civilian air taxi bringing in the first act of the day, the clogged roads around the site having become impassable and I started towards the pyramid stage to see what the fuss was about. It had been raining all night and even the diehards began to disperse as they realized the only celebrity aboard was the Bishop of Bath flown in to conduct an impromptu Sunday morning address, a sop by the new look festival to the Christian community and Worthy Farm's belligerent neighbors who had erected a huge cross overlooking the site the year before to hold its heathen tendencies in check. Either way in the midst of that morning rain the last thing the bedraggled punters wanted was a fuckin' sermon. Blithely ignoring his dwindling congregation the Bish' got stuck in and delivered a good 'un anyway.

I admit I have a superstitious streak but even I might have wandered as the storm clouds thickened and the downpour grew heavier but the cleric's perseverance moved me, especially when the remaining audience began to jeer and heckle, hurling obscenities like stones. I don't think I've ever seen a speaker lose a crowd so badly and retain his stride but the Bish' chose his words well and I recall 'em vividly even now. He spoke about responsibility, hardly a popular subject at a rock concert, about what the present Pope calls 'the dictatorship of relativism', the constant need to invent and gratify 'pseudo-needs', to service our insatiable, media driven modern egos. He spoke about responsibility to our planet, our species, to our posterity, to our children…
" FUCK YOU !" screamed a shrill, bag lady voice, the mud people so angry now they seemed on the verge of storming the stage yet the cleric held his ground despite there being nary a minder nor Angel in sight, the hour being too early and the weather too dank for divine intervention.

I found myself stepping forward, frightened I might have to weigh in to defend the poor sap but then a figure stepped casually from the shadow of the pyramid, a man dressed much like myself, Durango originals caked in the same Sommerset mud. He was shorter and older than me but exuded the kind of presence mere mortals only dream of. ( Try to imagine the Henry Fonda character from 'Once Upon a Time in the West' as played by Joe Pesci. ) Either which way this dude could obviously handle himself if it came to rough n' tumble and had been watching the Bish's back all along like the benign, malificent daemon that he was.
And I looked down and saw he was holding a guitar…

Which is how I met Johnny Cash who had boned up on the local mythology and come all the way across the Atlantic to take in the pagan sites. He claimed he had come direct from stonehenge that very morning 'though I frankly doubted him but maybe the dude was just an early riser. Leastways the weather didn't seem to phase him one bit. He was in the trough of his mid nineties wilderness years and I'm not sure how many others knew or cared who he was that morning, the 'American Sessions'still just a twinkle in his dark, half familiar eyes. Then having said what he had to the Bish' surrendered his mike and the original man in black picked up his guitar and played 'Sunday morning coming down'. And it was and I was.

When Johnny passed a few years later I saw a clip of that set on the evening news and although they tried to cut around it you could see how painfully thin the crowd was. It's not hard to spot me, dressed as I am, the early nineties settling into the mud behind me, a shabby, drowned world populated by poor ghosts with unlikely hair, the spires of Babylon fading into the rain.

It took me forty eight to get home. And when I did I found a message waiting on the answering service. Apparently my father had died a few days previously on the 21st of June. His middle name was 'Gil' – like mine. I don't include this detail as a cheap ploy for sympathy or easy melodrama. It was just the way it fell together. Like I say I'm a Hallow'een kind of guy. Midsummer always made me nervous. I lost my dog on another solstice, Sweep, my first and favourite familiar and learned of my mother's cancer on the anniversary some fifteen years later. And each time I told myself the same thing;- " It would have to happen on the longest day of the goddam year…"

My mom's a tough customer but the news of her relapse a few days ago came as little surprise. Something always seems to happen this time of year and 2007 was no exception. As always I toyed with the thought of returning to Glastonbury just to see how much it has changed but the weather forecasts and attendant insurance issues when it comes to taking digital equipment into that human swamp effectively dissuaded me, backstage pass and VIP showers regardless. Besides I'm already up to my eyeballs in footage from the Astoria gig and am about to start cleaning up 'HARDWARE' for rerelease, a monumental restoration job that threatens to keep me preoccupied for the rest of the summer.

As we all know the digital revolution has turned out to be very much a two edged sword for the movie business. Initially the distributors embraced the change because of the short term savings inherent in cutting the costs of prints and shipping but in doing so they have created a market that favors piracy. Myself, Paul Tyijbits, Nik Powell and the remaining British contingent on 'HARDWARE' have spent so long negotiating the legal niceties with MGM, Buena Vista, the remains of Miramax and Subversive Cinema and the other DVD distributors that several pirate editions have already appeared on the market in a move akin to the Russian army occupying Pristina airport while the yanks and the Brits argued on the Kosovan border. In fact I have just received a copy of the so-called 'Red Edition' ( presumably because it looks as if you're viewing the screen with tomato soup smeared on your contacts ) which cheekily promises 'three deleted scenes' and comes from an unknown party named Eurocult, helpfully described on the box as 'an American company'.



You gotta laugh even if it does mean that by the time we finally get the authorized edition out the market may already be saturated with fuzzy, well nigh unwatchable dupes. Both my regular editors are out to lunch owing to tedious personal problems and while myself and Carl strive towards putting together the '24h MOMENT' without recourse to either producers or record company pirate tapes of the gig shot or recorded ilegally on the night have already surfaced as far afield as Jersey and New Mexico. And you guys wonder why we need angels ?






With the loss of Tower Records, Ventura Dist., Musicland, Blockbusters and the slow withdrawal from DVD of the larger distributors Wallmart and BestBuy with others soon to follow the business is not what it was, in fact it's hard to see how legitimate filmmakers or recording artists can ever hope to see a return, not that it matters as I never saw a dime in royalties from either 'DUSTDEVIL' or 'HARDWARE' under the previous dispensation either, no more than Tobe Hooper saw on 'TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE' or George Romero on 'NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, which has been in continuous distribution ever since it was released.

The revolution may well have placed the means of production in the hands of the people but while anyone with a digital camera or even a decent cell can harvest as much footage as they want effectively editing and distributing the material remains another matter. Screenwriters are routinely expected to work for free or to option their material on the never- never and actors, directors and camera dudes regularly work for food, points or just for the hell of it but post production personnel and the machines needed to redigitize the material at higher resolution or simply copy it from PAL to NTSC are another matter routinely coming in on my last few outings at between four to six times the cost of every other department combined, making it all but impossible for those working at the cutting edge of the production to survive unless they have some other means of support. Rich parents or trust funds seem a prerequisite. Either way it's hardly a meritocracy.

In fact this little long while has been a quieter time than many in the somnolent British film industry with most of the major producers and money men away at Glastonbury which has gone up market since I last put in an appearance. Most of 'em, including Michael Eavis who I ran into in a transit lounge at JFK a few years ago shrug off my account of the showdown with the 'peace police' as an isolated occurrence.
When I reminded Eski, close friend of Julian Temple who made 'GLASTONBURY – THE MOVIE' and wife of production mogul Jeremy Thomas (whose participation remains instrumental to 'VACATION's fortunes ) that some unfortunate caught without a ticket had to be taken to hospital the following year in order to have a pool cue surgically removed from their ass she simply shakes her head, rationalizing it with the Tyler Durdenish statement:- "When you build a Utopian society sometimes you have to break a few eggs.." Eski's the closest living descendant of Franz Kafka and having lost her entire family in the holocaust I guess she knows what she's talking about.

So I didn't go to the festival this year and missed Iggy and the Stooges who were apparently terrific. The last I see is from the Tor, the distant music and cries merging into a single baleful, joyous roar, the bellowing of a mythical, multi-headed beast that swells and lulls aimlessly with the ebb and flow of the wind, a fugue of futile loves and sorrows, of change and confusion, of promises made and broken. Then other voices sound above the chaos, Russian voices and turning I see the tiny ruined chapel behind me suddenly filled with children, heads shaven as if auditioning for some post-mortem Tarkovsky epic. A publicity stunt perhaps to promote the video game release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. ?
For a moment it is all too much and I start to giggle but the stern faced teacher accompanying the kids silences me with a glare. Turns out the tikes haven't had their heads shaved at all. Teach' mutters angrily that they're Ukranian cancer patients some of whose parents actually lived and worked in Pripyet at the time of the 1986 explosion, Chernobyl babies displaying the physical and mental stigmata of long term radiation poisoning on a day trip to the home counties as part of some mondo-weirdo exchange programme. Do the British kids get to go to the Zone in their place, that's what I'd like to ask? But I don't. Ignoring their increasingly irate minder I start down the steps towards the car park, trying hard not to smile. More children pass on the way and when I look back I see they have joined hands, laughing and singing along with the distant sound of the Stooges in a language I cannot comprehend, the soft rain falling steadily as they gaze happily out over this strange new world, over Pilton and the Pyramid Stage and Britain's green pastures rolling away and away into the gathering gloom…
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If the night is my mother then the moon was my first mistress, my first love calling me down the tree that grew outside my bedroom window when I was a pup, calling me out into the dark, to chase her down through silent forests and moon drenched graveyards, getting up to no good and doing all those weird things you do when you're pre-sexual and can't sleep. No doubting the moon's a lady though! Even now. She takes your breathe away when you first catch sight of her, riding high and graceful above the rooftops, transforming everything she touches, demanding worship. And of course if you don't pay attention, if you take your eyes off her even for a moment she's gone! Just like that and you might not see her for another month. Or two. And just how many full moons do any of us get to see in a lifetime?

All of which is to say I would've posted this entry sooner but couldn't face the keyboard until her majesty was well and truly set and I could chase her no longer. Been up on the roof until just a moment ago, listening to the fox cubs yowling on the overgrown lawn and watching the first full moon of the summer settle into the nicotine flavoured fug of the greater London skyline, seething outline swollen and inflamed as the eye of Sauron, red as the sands of Mars or something tossed off by Frank Frazetta for one of those early Warren covers.

June. 2007. The first breath of the Greenhouse Summer. Just under 48 hours now since George W. threw the remaining international efforts to control climate change into confusion, all but killing any hope of establishing an agreement at the coming G8 meeting, claiming the US intends to come up with its own package of initiatives and will apparently convene further meetings to discuss the subject by the end of the year if not by spring, 2008. And just over three days since Putin announced the deployment of a new generation SS 19 STILETTO warheads, purpose designed to penetrate North American defences, an inevitable response to the Bush regime's cheerful contempt for the non-proliferation treaty and the expansion of NATO's own nuclear capability.
Nice to see the Apocalypse firmly back on track after an early spring hiatus...

Now I ain't Nostradamus or nothin', let's be perfectly clear. I'm a science fiction fan and it merely seems to me that some scenarios are more likely than others. I'd put money on a probe finding protein molecules in the Martian permafrost and I'll eat my hat if we don't see some act of nuclear terrorism or even a limited exchange within our lifetimes.
No contest the way these bozos are running the show! And I ain't talking about Iran or North Korea. No point worrying about those guys. Even if they do build a bomb they don't have a delivery system, not the kind you'd need to penetrate American defences and developing cruise missiles ain't the kind of thing you can do on the sly. When the day comes, if it comes it's gonna come from inside the U.S, where the technology and the plutonium is freely available. We know al Quaida lacked that technology in 2001 and made a deliberate policy decision not to go nuclear by targeting power stations on 9/11.
Even if they have since reversed that policy it would take close to ten years by my reckoning to infiltrate the US nuclear industry and gather the wherewithal to take out Washington or Manhattan. I've broken into reactors myself before now and it ain't as hard as it sounds. In fact security is shockingly slack with hot cells proliferating faster than anyone is capable of keeping up with ( ie. Most modern campus's seem to have one hidden away someplace ) and fissionable material more freely available in the west than you'd care to think. In fact I have some on my kitchen table right now – suitably lead encased but it still shouldn't be here! Not in any sane, civilized world.

I've always been a sucker for American culture and despite these last few terrible years still love the country and forgive it almost anything in the the same way one might forgive or possibly even love folly in a child. On 9/11 a whole city cared for the lives of 3000 people. Just one itsy bitsy criticality and it could so easily be the other way. A few thousand survivors caring for a city of the dead and walking wounded. Tell your representative nuclear security should be job number one, dudes! Closely followed by some kind of plan for tackling the environment while we still have one. I recommended renting a Geiger counter for the day in an earlier blog. Don't bother. You'd be better off buying the thing. Nuclear wars are survivable and there are ways of tilting the odds in your favour if you ever have to do just that. While St John's wort, some herbal preparations and your basic antihistamines might take the edge off the immediate sickness I'd advise forgetting the organic, veggie solution and getting into chemicals.
As Doctor Moreau says ' if the imbalance was created in the laboratory then the corrective can be found there too.' If you know you're gonna be soaking up a potentially lethal dose you can probably reduce the long term cancer risk by dosing yourself with a simple Dimenhydrate/ Benacine/ Benadry / Dramamine/ Gravol combo on the big day.
Scout's honour! And remember you heard it here first!
If it doesn't save your life it'll significantly cut down on the vomiting and nausea you'll experience along the way. Could be quite heady if you cut it with a little morphine, if the going gets bad and you have to deal with flashburns too…

Sun's just coming up here in River City like a ball of fire in the east. The first traders setting up their stalls already in the market outside but everyone else is still asleep.
Skies clear. No cross winds. Looks set to be a hot one…

It's been a week now since the Nephilim made their tumultuous return to the public eye and between you and me downwind from the Astoria things are smelling good.
Those who were there will know already how Carl rose to the occasion and turned out to be everything he was supposed to be, no accident or flash in the pan, that boy. A living legend come into his own and give or take a few grey hairs strangely unmarked by all his years in the phantom zone. The bureaucratic chaos kept me busy right up to the last split second when training took over and I coasted through the brief seventy minute set on auto-pilot, doing what I had to, manning the main camera above the mixing desk while Lauri Loytokoski, the Great Dictator himself, fed me fresh tapes and Mr Horn and Nikolai coved the mosh pit and front of stage, not quite what we had in mind but the Astoria's manager banned the use of dollies or heavier equipment at the last minute, deciding he hadn't been bribed enough after all.

I think we all knew something special was happening that night, something that effortlessly turned back the years, folding space time as if the last decade never really happened, something that lunged towards true transcendence, that challenged the limits of reality. Carl seemed more relaxed, more confident than I've ever seen him as if he were an empty vessel, a lightning conductor allowing that energy to take hold and channel through him. At first there was an attempt at resistance, to somehow pour water on the fire, a few boos from the peanut gallery but we've learned from the past . Altamont and the Stones aside it was decided from the off that failure was simply not an option. There was too much riding on the gig for anyone to screw it up. You may not have noticed the Angels running the unofficial security or even imagined they existed here in River City but you probably recall how those hecklers fell silent, not to be heard again. Well that's what happened. Now I deplore violence an' all but like brother Carl I'm no peacenik when it comes to defending my turf. Not any more. Not post-'Moreau'. Ends justify means and quite frankly we don't have the time, budget, nor inclination to mess around. As you know there is a war on. The brief skirmish outside was one more factor contributing to the decision by front of house to close the gig down at the eleven o'clock curfew without so much as an encore. It was only afterwards that I learned one of the hecklers had apparently been ol' Tony, the guitarist from the original line-up. Funny how he'd always seemed such a quiet 'un too. If by chance you're reading this, Ton', I'm real sorry our association had to end this way but, hey, could've been a whole lot worse. The trolls might have insisted on taking your ears or trigger finger as a souvenir instead. Same deal for anyone else foolhardy enough to raise a fist to the extended tribe.

And there will be a next time. The Nephilim ain't going on tour. Nothin' so gauche but they might play a couple more dates this summer, feedback from the London gig being so positive an' all. Won't be in the UK though. The UK sucks. Germany perhaps? Or Paris?
We'll see which way this wave breaks. Footage from the first gigs just jim-dandy, got the makings of a first class concert film but you know that ain't enough. After all these years the fans deserve something more. Hold your breath just a while longer and you'll get it too, a few twists n' turns that'll take the 24th Moment one step beyond. A lot of people were anticipating Carl's downfall but the lad done good and is here to stay! It ain't the seventh day just yet but he's taking a well deserved break right now to catch his breath before making the next move.
Eden's birthday and time for a walk in June sunshine.

Fact of the matter is I've been resting up myself after some pretty continuous partying down. It was a pleasure to meet so many friends, to build new relationships and confirm and strengthen old ones. In particular I thank all who assisted in the show for your forbearance and stoicism in the face of countless, seemingly pointless delays and the convoluted security arrangements. I was spread pretty thin and accordingly scarcer than hen's teeth on the night. I know for all the people I managed to catch up to there were countless more I failed to see, Cobweb amongst them. Next time, dude.
When the stars come round to their right place…

Back in the world now and the film biz ain't changed a bit. Production folk are just filtering back into their offices after the low rent carnage that was this year's Cannes and news of varying sorts hovers in the pipeline. Been putting in some elbow grease on 'VIY', especially after receiving the disc from Dejan ( A deeply fetishistic Serbian adaptation of the classic tale produced in 1990 under the title 'SVETO MESTO' –'The Holy Place' ) and learning of a more recent Russian remake that looks ravishingly produced but which has thus far failed to show up on the genre radar. Stormclouds gather around the 'HARDWARE' release as a pirate edition appears unheralded in the US and 'VACATION' gathers some surprising new cast members. Oh… and some late breaking news, apparently a screenplay I worked on during a turn at Cinecitta a few years ago has gone into production. Keep an eye out for 'IMAGO MORTIS' from the wonderfully named Medusa Films and Gaia Film International. Sort of a neo-giallo taking off from 'Four Flies on Grey Velvet' by way of 'Spasmo' and 'DaVinci Code'. Expect persistent eyeball violence, weird accents and the usual spiralling, esoteric inside jokes.
Gothic art is a secret language or so they say, a self censoring secret available only to the elect, to those who live outside the accepted mores and structures of conventional society. The dark art is at heart the art of light.

And on that note I must take my leave. The foxes have gone home and the day's too warm to stay in doors. The sun too mad, the sky too bright.
This is Richard S, last free man in West London and all round weekend werewolf, signing off….

Darkness rules!
A vast thunderhead banks up over River City like a great black Manta ray, belly pregnant with lightning. There's a storm comin' alight. Big day and all. Long time coming and a hard coming it was for all of us at times! Goddam good thing I got these boots, I tell ya!
Been all over the place this last little long while, sleeping when I have to, running before the storm, feeding off static electricity. Wouldn't have it any other way, you know it!

"I don't care. I'm done! I'm through! If you can't show me the minimum fuckin' respect…"
" Hey, I'm sorry. I know we haven't spoken about this but that's because we've never actually met. If you could even tell me your name maybe?"
I turn in a semi-circle, cell to one ear. Mad Brian the doorman shakes his head, a knowing look in his watery blue eyes, suspended between humour, pity and boredom. Got me pegged by sheer age and hair alone as a fellow veteran of the rock n' roll wars. Too old to be much cop as a runner or roadie but if you can survive for as long as he has in a business this tenuous then you must be doing something right. He's certainly good at keeping me out of the Astoria, the dying venue on Tottenham Court road where this whole thing got started all those years ago, one of the first gigs Carl played back when 'Fields of…' were still just the Nephilim.
Now the world is coming to an end, the Astoria is closing down, scheduled for redevelopment and the watchers have returned to claim their own. It is the time of the mustering, the 24th Moment and we've been waiting so long we're ready for anything.

"I don't care! I want a thousand pounds! That's the deal. Right now! Before anything else happens!"
"If you could just give me your number. I…"
But the line is already dead.
Mr Horn loiters long sufferingly in the Astoria's foyer, probably worrying about just how much longer I'm gonna be running his cell. Probably worrying about the insurance, credit cards, transport ,the deposit on the cameras too not to mention the rest of the dosh
I.D in particular can be a problem when you don't exist.
"Who was that?"
" I dunno. He wouldn't say but I think it was the guy who owns this place."
"And?"
"He wants a grand cash. Otherwise they're not letting us past the door. No equipment, no nothin' "
Mr Horn nods. I like Mr Horn. He's quiet. We've been through a bunch of wars and stuff together and he doesn't need to say anything anymore.
" Gotta call front of house. If you don't mind me using the cell?"
He nods.
"Rock n' roll will never fuckin'die, man."

The anti-smoking laws don't come into effect for another month here in the greenhouse banana republic of River City but myself and Mr. Horn go outside to practise. It's just after eleven in the morning, I still haven't slept and this whole thing is threatening to get Kafkaesque on my ass. In a war all that matters is keeping your eyes open, sometimes just keeping moving is enough, so long as it's forward. It's the 24th moment, the eleventh hour as always. Defeat is not an option. In the end it takes all we can do, including personal intervention by both Carl and Seven Management to get the geezer on the phone down to five hundred bucks, only slightly less than the budget for our entire equipment package just to get a camera past the door but that's a lousy war for ya!

The walkin' dude can smell a venue waiting to die from a thousand clicks away and you can tell this firetrap's on the way out alright ( A sign hung on the counter of the 'Keith Moon Bar' reads: 'Gay Barman Wanted!!' ) but the faint energy of the collective past still lingers in the clotted air, so faint you can barely taste it let alone measure it but it's there alright, like the ingrained smell of sweat, piss and sour beer that grows stronger as we go through our 'Spinal Tap' moment, getting hopelessly lost in the labyrinthine tunnels backstage before emerging into the silent auditorium and then you've got to stop and take a moment 'cause it's a helluva thing to see from centrestage.

Perhaps I'll be seeing some of you tonight. I'll be wearing black. You can't miss me. Hopefully you won't notice the cameras either if I do my job okay. For those who care Mr.Horn will probably be down in the mosh pit manning the dolly. He's descended from some lost race of giants ( truly!) that once lived on the German/Polish border and can handle himself. Doesn't talk much but he's strong. The other Shadow theatre irregular, the tall, crazy looking one wandering about with the junior handheld rig is Nikolai, real life counterpart of the character eaten by the pigs in 'Los Abandonados' and veteran of the Iceland junket. Nikolai's a Russki and not just crazy lookin' but all the ways crazy so try not to get in his way or listen to anything he might try to tell you. Hopefully he won't be getting in your way. It's the 24th moment and you didn't come this far (Australia! Florida! NY! Cali! Finland! I know you're out there!) to see some hunched, acne scarred artisan lobbing a camera about so I've conspired to keep that crap out of your eyeline. Only one place your eyes are gonna be looking, I guarantee!

It's the end of the world as we know it but a new deal for us and a whole new line up for the Nephilim courtesy of Thule and the Hollow Earth, mutated, bleached and blasted by the light of the Black Sun, the phantom zone from which brother Carl is finally returning after a cycle of self induced exile, the condensed light that has preserved him unchanged and tireless since he first set foot on that stage, before this rinky dink venue was even a glimmer in River City's drug addled eyes!

It's time for Carl to strut his stuff, to make a stand and give what's his alone to give.
It's the 24th moment and time to draw the line! Party afterwards, if you can sniff it out.
Helluva thing. Been an age since I had a decent bash and as you may have noticed there's a storm on the way! Just wait 'til u hear that intro...

Relax.
Arms akimbo, hands empty, thumbtips hovering just above your hips.
Eyes alert but unfocussed, experiencing the world as a gestalt rather than concentrating on details. Don't even think about drawing down or pulling the trigger. Just let that happen naturally...

Big ol' moon waxing gibbous again, the vixens have fallen silent and here I am, your humble suicide blogger, hunched over this infernal machine, trying to figure out whether the last few weeks were really worth it. Time to peek beneath the soggy field dressing and examine the wounds to see if I have learned anything from the experience and  if there is really anything to be gained from airing the scar tissue.

Robert Altman once said that working in the film industry was like "getting to see the tits of the girl who's tits you don't want to see." At the time the statement seemed typically Altmanesque, glib, even funny in a sort of politically incorrect Seventies film maverick with a big dick kind of way. Now I'm a little older, a little more battle hardened I can see the grisly truth of  those words and of course it isn't funny at all. As Woody Allen put it-  "The truck arrives with fresh compromises every day."

'VACATION' sits ticking and steaming on the launch pad, every last detail planned, storyboarded, debated and duly dissected by a dozen different development executives, most of them barely qualified for their outwardly cushy looking jobs. I am ready to put my life, career and reputation on the line along with the potential cast members, several of whom would be instantly recognizable to you but the complexities of the situation prevent me from mentioning any names for now other than my own and Mr.Campbell's. Gotta keep some aces up my sleeve but if you knew you'd know why I was pushing so damn hard. None of us stand to see any renumeration for our services, working strictly for scale on the barest of bare bones budgets. We can prove on paper that at this scale the project cannot lose money even in a worst case scenario, even if myself and all involved lost their minds or died halfway through the production which is unlikely.( nonetheless the budget includes an understudy and contingency plan to cover this angle ) We are not intending to make some mondo-weirdo, foreign art movie. The marketing logic behind the poster image ( see ' My Pictures' on the public site http://www.myspace.com/richardstanley13 ) is impeccably low-brow. We have three quarters of the million dollar budget already in place leaving a deficit of two hundred and fifty grand. One hundred and twenty five grand sterling. A lot for you and me perhaps but bugger all in industry terms.And can we get it ? Well... there's the rub!

With the DVD biz headed for  X-box induced gottadamerung and  the dollar in freefall  cashflow is  pretty thin on the ground these days . Even a paltry figure like this is a pretty big deal for the British film industry to swallow in its current emaciated condition. There are several options still available to us, some of them so unlikely  you'd never believe me even if I was allowed to mention them. Suffice to say  I have been considering all-comers short of money laundering and organized crime but if we can't close this thing in the next fortnight I'm prepared to drop the other shoe even if my body does end up becoming part of  a support column in the new Olympic stadium.

And what's so big about the next fortnight you might ask ? Well after that the entire British film industry decamps to Cannes and takes their legal affairs departments with them. A lot of them never really  make it back to their offices and those that do usually arrive home with their memories all but wiped by the sustained ligging and schmoozing that has gone before. Any deal that isn't closed before the summer sabbatical is traditionally considered  to be a dead issue unless it can be somehow revived from scratch when the pulse of life returns to normal in October. Which is why we love America.  The film business may be on its knees but at least in the States its still a business, not an amateur sport for the casual amusement of wealthy dilettantes, trustafarians and other heirs to the kingdom. Don't get me wrong - I enjoy the conversation but I'd be out on a hilltop in California right now, howling at the moon with my Coyote brothers if it wasn't for continuing issues with Homeland Security. But they say there's always one partner in every relationship that's more in love than the other. I only wish that partner wasn't  me...
Getting back to the coast should have been simple enough. I'm not wanted by the law, have no criminal record or prior immigration issues but since the illegal investigation of my bank account ( see 'Breathing in'  for tedious backstory ) I have been informed I will require a visa. Nothing unusual there. The intelligence community Stateside has concluded after the recent spate of terror trials and ever more outlandish scares that the UK is in fact a greater threat to America's potential security than either Russia or Iran and are pushing to dispense with the visa waver programme, meaning all Brits ( not only Richard ! ) will be subjected to more stringent entry checks. Which makes some sort of sense. Except for one little problem. The entire process is run by a machine.

If you call the embassy you will be put through to a voicemail which requests your credit details before allowing you to proceed or book a physical appointment. If you visit the heavily guarded  building in Grosvenor Square  you will be handed a card bearing the same number and told to dial it from an outside line. No different from buying bucketshop plane tickets or booking seats for a gig. Except the machine only accepts certain major ( American ) creditcards which are trickier to come by, especially if your bank account has been subject to a moneylaundering  trawl, no matter how wrongful it may have been. ( my account having been picked out by another machine that randomly examines all SWIFT transactions) And there is of course one BIG catch to all this, which is why I'm bothering to explain the dreary details in the first place! Remember you heard it here first, companeros and be duly warned! If you dial that silly, sodding number and don't have the right plastic the machine will automatically record that your initial application has been denied - which WILL stand against you in future even if you do manage to get your hands on the correct state approved plastic!. Don't believe me ? Try it for yourselves! Find out what happens when a floundering superpower decides to replace its immigration and foreign affairs department with a telephone answering service! When social inclusivity, citizenship, patriotism and personal liberty are determined by your Experian credit rating! Here is wisdom! Let he that hath understanding count the Number of the Beast...

In the meantime, trapped in the UK, the devil makes work...

My services have been officially engaged as script doctor on a major British film production to be helmed by more established hands than my own. Having taken the Hypocratic oath I cannot for now disclose the patient's name or the production's title. Of course I'd rather be somewhere else, shooting my own material, preparing 'VACATION' or trying to track down my erstwhile co-writer, Ms. Moor who has recently taken herself offline along with the working copy of 'BLACK TULIPS' which has now been moved to a new site by her webmistress, Jen Welker, an increasingly loose cannon who was apparently responsible for posting the rough cut in the first place, a development that took both myself and Ms.Moor  by surprise!  A pleasant one, considering  the feedback that has come our way since otherwise Ms.Welker ( duly named and shamed ) would probably have been hearing from our lawyers. Maggie ( possibly the only person on the planet less techno-savvy than myself ) placed Jen in charge of her site while she was out of the country  and since then her former friend seems to have gone, well..a little funny. I've never met or spoken to the young lady although I have tried leaving messages at her site which seems to be a front for some sort of phony charity. ( something along the lines of donate your hard earned bucks to me and I will help restore peace and love to the world, resolve the Arab/Israeli conflict, global famine, whatever ) By all means check out 'BLACK TULIPS' if you so wish, know it is a rough cut with very temp sound not originally intended for public consumption but do not under any circumstances part with cash or credit card details. Ms.Welker is not a friend of mine, has made no attempt to explain herself and is acting entirely without charter from myself or the Shadow Theatre and its various cells..
Otherwise her bootleg can be viewed at it's new address -
http://www.maggiemoor.com/mv blacktulips.html
And if any of you should see her or speak to her let her know we'd like the disc back!

Would that I could get on the trail myself and catch up with the esteemed Ms.Moor but I've been here and she's been there and, frankly, we ain't had no time to drink that beer. Instead I find myself detained in Europe and ( hence the Altman reference ) forced to take on a project that has come my way quite randomly yet which could not be more carefully designed to confuse, diorientate and otherwise challenge my already tenuous grip on 'reality'.

The existing screenplay ( based on a book ) is a murder mystery, a sort of London bound giallo set on the peripheries of  the moribund film industry. One of the lead characters is a failing writer-director hyphenate named Richard who works out of West London and is sexually obsessed with an equally pathological American starlet ( with a missing passport! ) who ends up collaborating with him on a stalling on/off production, a spicy neo-noir thriller entitled: 'Little Black Dress.' The starlet  turns out to be on the con herself, intending to blackmail the production and take Richard for everything she can get but little does she know the hack film director is really suffering from M.P.D. ( Multiple Personality Disorder ! ) and is in fact at least three of  the lead characters one of whom is really ( cue: ominous drum roll ) the  Hammersmith and City Line Killer!!!  (  No! I am not making this up! Do you think I would invent a plot like this ? I'm not crazy! I mean not that kind of crazy anyway)   The American chick proves to be too beautiful to die and in a perfunctory climax  succeeds in luring Richard to his doom beneath a speeding tube train. The end.  Oh, apart from an equally perfunctory tag scene in which an 'expert' explains what was really going on in the rest of the plot.

Now I did point out to the production company involved that there were certain uncomfortable resonances at play in this weird farrago, like had they noticed the killer just happens to have my name and lives in what appears to be my fuckin' house?  ( according to both the novel, published over a decade ago, and the current draft) But no. No one had noticed and the funny thing is I believe them.. It's what you might call a 'coincidence', albeit a pointedly metatextual one. The creator God having a little joke with your humble blogger, trying to teach him a thing or two about so-called 'free will'. And that ending sucks! But, hey ! There's still time to fix it in the rewrite...
 
And of course by the time you've thought about it its too late.
Think about taking aim and you'll only lose form. The longer you point that piece the heavier it's gonna get 'til you haven't a hope in hell of hitting the target. Form is all that counts when you pull this sort of gesture. On that turns how we live and how we die.
Relax... Nothingness is not different to form. ..

First light coming fast and it looks like against all odds it's going to be another beautiful day. Computers booted up and all systems are running A-okay! Still not sure about this MySpace thing though. A virus took me effectively off-line for close to a fortnight. Only Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos knows where it really came from, possibly my flatmates internet research for her dodgy Lebanese documentary. Some sort of memory crunching superbug that proved so ressitant to spyware that I could only get rid of it by transfering my files to an external drive and reinstalling the entire system. ( Sort of like having to blow up the whole mothership in order to kill one alien) But despite the hassle and all those hours wasted in a fruitless bug hunt, repairing and rebuilding ever more complex firewalls and failsafes, digging new and deeper rabbitholes in the info-verse for those crazy or bored enough to bother finding and following them it's been a blast. While still at odds with the technology I've relished the feedback and the opportunity to interface with old friends and find some new ones.

It was with an almost palpable shock that I recognized a face at a party the other night as one of my MySpace friends and once I got over the weirdness of actually conversing with her in real time found to my relief that actual conversation still has its place in this world. Like dancing. Like sex, drugs and rock n' roll and all those other good things that make summers so worthwhile and conspire to keep us as far away from our keyboards as possible.

We hit the local supermarket just after dawn, my new MySpace friend and I,  looking for cigarettes and booze to discover  we were the only customers in the store with five working tills to choose from. We were blatantly on a spree and despite our attempts to keep a straight face collapsed into hysteria when three of the tills in a row malfunctioned, making it increasingly impossible to actually pay for our reckless and somehow morally reprehensible purchases. The fourth clerk to take responsibility for the situation was a longsuffering matron who shook her head sadly as she tallied the bill as if  somehow knowing our chaotic energy was the real cause of the mechanical breakdowns dogging the normal smooth running of  her day. 'Enjoy it while you're young, dearie!' She muttered, eyes down. 'Enjoy it while you're young...'

 Breathe in. ..hollow..
 Form is not different to nothingness. Loosen...

 Breathe out...

Darkness reigns, the streets fall silent, the last revellers draining away, the asphalt still radiating the heat of the first real day of Summer, 2007. The first breath of the furnace, premature for April but that's the brave new world we're living in, folks! I don't have to tell you it's gonna get a whole lot hotter before this thing is over. George and Tony still haven't bit the bullet and come up with any joined up solution to the west's runaway fossil fuel addiction and the only alternatives on the table are plainly a crock. My grasp of physics is pretty flaky but am I alone in seeing the obvious flaws in Dr. Lovelock's thinking when it comes to the plans endorsed by both the opposition and my personal nemesis, Mr.Brown, the Prime Minister in waiting?
For the uninitiated Dr. Lovelock is the creator of the GAIA theory, the notion that the Earth is a living organism, capable of defending itself if human activity threatens its stability, ready to wipe us out if necessary to restore the so-called 'natural balance'. The theory was widely promulgated in the United Kingdom by Troy Kennedy Martin's extraordinary and sadly prophetic BBC miniseries 'Edge of Darkness' which remains the single most powerful and provocative one-off drama to have ever been commissioned by a mainstream station. ( Take a look at the Bill Gates style technocrat giving his speech to the directed energy weapons conference at Gleneagles in the final episode and see if it doesn't chill you to the bone, even now, two decades later. As for the shows astutely cynical view of the eighties anti-nuclear and environmental lobbies you need look no further than former CND supporter Blair and his wholehearted embrace of the new generation of warheads now set to replace Polaris )


All of which makes Dr. Lovelock's defection to the resurgent nuclear industry as outlined in his current pop-science bestseller 'The revenge of Gaia' seem like an even deeper betrayal, a derelection of responsibility however well meant that calls his entire theory into question.
Allow me to elaborate. I'll be very brief and put it as simply as possible.
The book correctly surmises that the situation may be a lot worse than we think with runaway global warming threatening to destroy not only us but pretty much all mammalian life on the planet, not in one hundred years but within the next two decades, well within our current lifetime. This makes the need to cut carbon emissions an immediate imperative.
As there is no apparent alternative the good doctor surmises that we have to look to the nuclear industry as a fallback position, literally mankind's last hope of survival. ( Do you think they paid him to write that? Or did they just suck out his brains with a straw?)
Oddly this mirrors current thinking in Whitehall and the plans endorsed by both the opposition and sitting government. Quite possibly the US will take the same path of least resistance if and when the American leadership finally get to grips with the problem. Because both nations are effectively bankrupt no-one can afford to look to new plants, technologies or potential alternative energy sources for an immediate fix. Instead Blair and his running dog propose to recommission the existing stations and reprocessing plants, effectively a financial coup for the nuclear industry, possibly the only lobby more morally bankrupt than the oil and arms goofs who have been running the world up to now. And here's the rub. Remember you heard it here first. God knows why but no journalist, mp or activist seems to have publicly pointed out the obvious Catch 22, the fatal flaw in their thinking, the black fly in Gordon Brown's Chianti. They are recommissioning the existing facilities to combat global warming which they now admit not only exists but is a clear and present danger. If they accept that, as they seem to, then they have to accept water levels will inevitably rise, even in the currently projected best of best case scenarios, if not catastrophicly at least by a few feet which means every one of those power stations and waste dumps urgently needs to be resurveyed if not closed down immediately. All the current thinking is based on safety reports that are twenty to thirty years out of date! Most of the plants, such as Sellafield, are coastal and if the oceans rise the subterranean watertable will rise as well. Until someone finds a way to split the atom cleanly or invent a polymer strong enough to make a space escalator viable so that this shit can be dumped off world the preponderance of the west's spent fuel is stored in deep level mineshafts and inaccessable cave systems.( Seen as a slightly less suicidal proposition than simply dumping it in the sea and pretending it doesn't exist ) You can see where I'm going with this, right?

The watertable permeates the earth's crust at a certain level and although much of it would appear like solid rock to you and I it behaves as if it were a lake or any other large body of unbroken water. Contaminate one part of it and before you know it the Nation's dwindling aquifers could start coming up hot all over leaving the very soil lethally radioactive for what amounts to hundreds of thousands of years. ( Damn stuff's got a halflife on it, I'll tell ya!) and posing a far swifter and more certain apocalypse than any threatened by Dr.Lovelock's resurgent GAIA.

Okay, glad I got that off my chest. Sounds cranky, I know but here's a little experiment you can try at home. Do yourself a favour and try renting a geiger counter. They're perfectly legal albeit pricy at around fifty pounds sterling ( Approx. One hundred bucks ) a day but worth the insight. I guarantee what you find will be scarier than anything currently playing at the local multiplex. Basicly the infrastructure of our modern, urbanized world is already hotter than Hades! Go take a walk or catch a subway train, visit your local supermarket and check out the fresh fish and those organic vegetables and you'll see why Jill in 'Hardware' thinks its stupid, sadistic and suicidal to have kids right now.( In point of fact the sinister ticking you hear in the film when she measures the rads emitted by Mo and Shades were produced by running a geiger counter over the Nescafe instant coffee granules, by far and away the hottest thing we could find in the recording studio) Cancer, anyone? I mean I'm sorry if this is coming across as a bit of a downer but that's my job, professional doomsayer and affictionado of the end times that I am. If you don't want to know about it then try another blog, or religion, or the mainstream newspapers, or better drugs. Or something. If you stay with the programme be warned! This is only the begining, I promise. The lemon next to the pie...

As for moi ? I'm good. Still kicking anyhow and waiting on a response from two new sources of potential revenue who have shown up on the radar since this blog began. Intriguingly this includes the first backer to have become interested in 'Vacation' because of its rounded Muslim characters, an element ignored by previous readers. The character of Arshad, the hotel caretaker and his son Karim who try to shelter the doomed Americans are easily the most sympathetic figures in the screenplay and have all the best lines, a small but telling factor hitherto overlooked thanks to the typically western assumption that the two fugitive tourists must somehow be the heroes by virtue of ethnicity alone. An easy enough mistake and kind of the point of the whole project, being a war on terror analogy. Sort of like assuming Deckard in BladeRunner is the good man and that the replicants are baddies simply by virtue of being replicants rather than humans. Good to feel the beast is gaining momentum and if this blog is helping to spur it on then it makes my push into cyberspace all the more worthwhile. Fingers and toes still crossed for that late summer start date!

Elsewhere in the Shadow Theatre late, late news roundup, my agent Natasha Galloway is in negotiation with the Recorded Picture Company over the screenplay to a new horror/thriller ( basicly a London Giallo ) and the Fortean Times are considering running a series on my continuing investigation of the Rahn affair. ( see 'Secret Glory' for backstory )
I have been pretty tied up giving interviews and working through the inevitable backlog but will continue to post new short films on the site at irregular intervals. The latest posting 'Children of the Kingdom' borrows its title from T.E.D.Klein and acts as a bookend to 'Sea of Perdition', sort of male and female, his and her versions of the same story, a descent into a shared unconscious and a continuing assault on the ego and superego, this time filmed ( as a result of a bet made with Torstein Neumann at the Oldenburg festival ) in a single 24 hour period in the undercity beneath London for a slender ninety-nine Euros, mostly spent on yachting flares and the tube tickets necessary to access the system in the first place.
The film was shot by the inimitable Mr.Horn, cut by Marco Jacson and scored by my old mate, guitar hero Craig Gawler who improvised the highly effective soundtrack in a single sitting.
Although my cyber-skills are increasing as I steadily breadboard more and more gizmos together here at Shadow Theatre Central I have run up against a few annoying glitches, chief of which is the habit of the MySpace messenger to lose some of the messages en route, often the longer ones for some reason as if it can't handle more than a couple of paragraphs at a time. For this I appologize to Dragon, Patrick and Vesna to whom I tried to send various screeds and failed horribly. Keep the faith and stay tuned until I have the chance to try again. Thanks due to James too, for reminding me of Bob Clarke's pointed and very creepy 'Nam analogy 'Deathdream', a gem whose existence had temporarily slipped my radiation addled memory. James is spot on in suggesting it would be a interesting choice for a remake but would the current system allow a film that radical to escape into distribution in our enlightened times? I have had a vampire film of my own, 'Viyi', ( originally intended as a collaboration with Troy Kennedy Martin, writer of 'Kelly's Heroes' and 'The Italian Job' whose name bubbled to the surface earlier ) stalled on the launchpad for some years because of similar content. Basicly Royal Irish Marines contracting vampirism after being posted as peacekeepers to an obscure Bosnian Muslim enclave, an exploration of vampirism as a metaphor for xenophobia and a justification for genocide, an ancient blood libel.( I mean why is it that the finger of suspicion always falls on the gypsies and supporters of the old Ottoman empire like Vlad Tepes or Vlad Dracul who helped bring Islam to Serbia and Moldavia and who didn't drink wine because it is of course 'haram'? )

With regards to the TALON project Dragon is correct in pointing out the obvious parallels with 'Hardware's B.A.A.L system Mark.XIII. As far as I can work out the truth is darker than you might think. To this effect I have placed a graph illegally downloaded from the US Army's Joint Robotics Masterplan on my public site, unlabelled and resting nonchalently amongst the cheesy snapshots on the MY PICTURES slideshow crawl. Check it out. It's no joke, I promise. They're anticipating a fully auto-independent, self repairing, self regenerating, heatseeking hunter-killer war 'droid by 2020. Only they're going to be fitted with microwave weapons instead of powerdrills or chainsaws, all the better to fry people right through walls without having to get up close and personal. As for the recently announced MARSUPIAL system and the remote controlled shark, let's leave that for another day. The hour grows late and I'm starting to scare myself.
The foxes are having a go at the garbage bags outside.
The vixens are in heat again and I need to put in a little work on HARDWARE II GROUND 0, while I still have time. 'Til later, then.
Blessed be and may the kind angels watch over all of you as you make your way between the dark and dark, through this bright space which is no wider than a coffin, yet not as peaceful.

This is Richard Stanley, the last free man in West London, signing off....

24 hours can be a long time in this biz, especially if you're a werewolf and that big ole' moon is shining down. No point trying to sleep so I've been cutting loose, making like the apex predator and trying to bring home the bacon. Not without some success, I'm pleased to add.  In fact things are looking pretty damn peachy for a change. Coming up roses, you might even say.

A new backer has emerged for 'Vacation', adding a further 250 grand to the pot, bringing the total to three quarters of a million dollars, three quarters of the figure we need to actually shoot the beast. For the first time the odds seem to be stacked in my favour and although I hate to count my chickens  it looks very much like we'll be rolling camera come October, Inshallah. Still a million miles of rough road ahead but with three quarters in the kitty and Bruce Campbell in the wings the project is finally gathering steam. Seems the Film Council's allergic reaction might even work to our advantage by amping up the screenplay's scandalous reputation and putting a little more blood in the water.

Can't see what all the fuss is about personally. We've had some rare sunshine here in River City so I've been sitting on the roof, rereading the script, trying to figure out what people find so offensive about the damn thing. Initially my insticts had been to try and clean it up but it frankly seemed so lame I've been taking it the other way instead. You can count on me to try and put out fires with gasoline. Besides the last thing I want to do is bore anyone...

Even at one million dollars, given the current rate of exchange, it's hardly going to be a walk in the park. There are too many careers hanging in the balance and too much at stake for it to be any other way. All I know is I'm ready to roll those dice, to give what's mine,  to be a director again, to see clearly what needs to be done and to do it, without fear or hesitation, without apology.

At best, with luck, the grace of God and fair winds 'Vacation' will still take at least a year to reach the cinemas, if cinemas still exist by then, if western civilization somehow stays on its feet long enough for me to cut the beast and distribute it. The world may be in chaos but chaos has always been kind to me. The shoot promises to be a short, sharp descent into the bottomless pit of everlasting hellfire, a nightmare of suffering beyond endurance but hell is my natural habitat and suffering a teacher. Born and bred in the briar patch, see.   We may be living through the death spasms of the Kali Yuga, the long, dark age but chaos has its own rhythm, its own pattern, its own alchemy.  Those who dance to the song of Kali may taste her age of steel as if it were gold. We have clear invitations to that dance and like it or not our names are on the door.   Dance with me! Why not?  Still time for one more number, I reckon, before the lights come on.

Hardware's fortunes also seem set for an eleventh hour upturn. With the DVD rights now practically worthless as a result of the industry going slowly but steadily down the tubes Miramax ( or what remains of it) has finally agreed to come to the table. It's early days yet but just getting the various parties talking is akin to getting the Israelis and the Palestinians to sit down together.
There's unlikely to be any money in it but if I can crack this particular Rubik's cube we could see a director's cut scheduled for an autumn release. I'm hoping to drop the crappy ADR lines added for the initial cinema run ( mostly to soften the characters and make them seem more in control ) as well as reinstating a couple of teeny, weeny yet oddly telling things omitted at the time.
Keep watching this space for breaking news.

 Looks to me like there's a storm comin' in alright. Red sky in the morning and the sun coming up like a ball of blood above the chimneytops. But before I sign off  it behooves me to mention Bob Clarke's passing. Just got the news myself. The director of the original 'Black Christmas', the blueprint for 'Halloween' and all the carbon copy slasher movies that followed was killed in a car accident stateside along with his son who was driving the vehicle. Apparently another car went out of control, crossed into the wrong lane and hit them head on. Alcohol related, according to local sources which is really all that needs to be said. Those of us who have worked in the genre over the last couple of decades all owed him a trick or two which makes it doubly sad to see him go the way he did, even if he did direct 'Porkys'.  For those who have never had the experience of being totally creeped out by his work seek 'Black Xmas' out. The remake sucked on every concievable level but the original scared the pants off me when I was a kid and retains the power to shock and unnerve despite having been imitated to death by practically everyone. In pace requiescat, Bob. We're thinking of you.

Ayi bobo. And so it begins, the full moon staring down like the eye of a lunatic and yours truly, alone again, trying to order my scattered thoughts. Like so many of my peers I find myself high and dry on the steel beach of the 21st century, trapped in a world that increasingly resembles my adolescent nightmares yet increasingly unable to express myself in any commercial medium. I was lucky to get the first two features made at all, coming at the very end of rep cinema and the days of independent distribution, before the eye in the pyramid tightened the screws and took full control of the medium.

First a little theory to clear up my motivation. ( webheads who have never lived outside western society or taken anything stronger than a joint can skip this paragraph ) I believe that consensus reality is maintained in part by the holding pattern of the mass media, a collosal act of shared dreaming that creates the deterministic prison that ensnares us anew each day. Whoever controls or has access to that media has the power to shape reality by shaping the belief systems of the viewer. Call it mass hypnosis or guided visualisation, whatever tag fits the bill. The Catholic church knew this when they sought to control the printed word and Rupert Murdoch knows it now.

My mother was an artist and my first love was fantasy fiction but I chose to pursue a career in film because it seemed to be the most powerful and expressive medium currently available to us, a fusion of all that had gone before, drama, music, photography, design, you name it. And for that very reason the powers that be have made it unavailable, keeping costs artificially inflated so it remains a rich man's game, operating a monopoly that would be illegal in any other industry, giving the keys to the toybox only to the chosen few prepared to bend over the bonnet of Satan's long white limmo and spread their cheeks.For those of us who choose to keep a tight sphincter its a different matter. Kids who want to make movies these days have about the same chance of making the cut as your average aspiring astronaut. Practically nil, unless you're rich or born into the biz. Old news, I know but the stakes have never been higher. After all there is a war on and time, I believe, is running out to all of us. Let's be clear I'm a creature of western culture like yourselves, a liberal and when necessary a libertine, I enjoy the music and colours as much as anyone else but if the powers that be prevail they will destroy this world, quicker and more completely than we can easily imagine.

 I concieved and founded the Shadow Theatre, the overarching entity that controls and when possible funds my efforts, some 23 years ago as an organization dedicated to the infiltration, subversion and sabotage of the consensus based illusion through the dissemination of information that challenges its legitimacy, that inspires independent thought. I saw the shadow theatre's ever shifting team of strolling players as foot soldiers in a campaign to recapture  reality by whatever means available. A youthful fantasy perhaps yet sadly the issues have never been more clearly cut.

23 years later and where am I now? As a confirmed medievalist it took some doing 2 finally bite the bullet and get my ass on line. Finishing up 'Sea of Perdition' over Xmas forced me to learn the necessary technical skills and engage with the digital medium more fully. No other choice when your full production budget for an interplanetary epic comes in at under three grand sterling.
( Three tickets to Iceland 4 myself, Mr.Horn and the delectable Miss.Moor,
car hire, pot noodle and tape transfers )

'Perdition' had been simmering in my mind some 17 years, at least since I first heard the name. For some reason Martian topography abounds with references to the classical afterlife such as Mount Olympus and the Fields of Elysium which has recently turned out to be an ice lake the size of the north sea, its mantle quite possibly harbouring life.

I have never been terribly impressed by the way Mars has been portrayed on film, partly because studio sets are by their nature man-made and can never convey the otherness of a truly alien landscape. The full screenplay'The Sea of Perdition' ( based upon an unpublished novella by Grebhtor Smoo )concerns efforts to terraform the planet by seeding the atmosphere with gm lichen spores in the hope of changing the nitrogen balance. Needless to say it all goes horribly wrong.

We shot the taster sequence ( available in grungy low-res elsewhere on this site) in the caldera of an active volcano just inside the Arctic circle, Mount Kufla, drawing heavily on the notes and diaries of Otto Rahn to pin down the precise location, a sort of ante-chamber to the hollow earth replete with Hyberborean crypto-archeology that I have no honest to God explanation for. The Martian faces carved in the rocks are very real and quite beyond my own limited skills to recreate digitally. Unfortunately the low-res medium renders the pictograms on the interior walls invisible but with luck and the grace of Smoo I hope to access the necessary gizmos within the next few days to upload sharper images along with more current material. In the meantime praise due to Immo and Maggie for enduring the most extreme working conditions of our mutual careers. The scalding mud and natural geysers posed a real and constant threat while the temperatures at -7 on the day of the shoot were only a few degrees warmer than the mean average for Mars itself.

Back in the world now, back in London and none of us are having any luck.
The British Film Council recently withdrew support for my most cherished project claiming the screenplay was the single most offensive document they had ever read. The phrase 'morally repugnant' lingers in my short term memory. 'VACATION' is a low budget sci-fi horror penned by myself and Miss Moor. Bruce Campbell ( of Evil Dead and Bubba Hotep fame ) fell in love with the script and passionately wants to play the lead man, Bryce, an aging banker who still fancies himself as a surfer and ends up trapped with his lap dancer girlfriend in a shabby, middle eastern beach resort after an apocalyptic solar storm destroys the west, forcing the luckless Americans to come to terms with a medieval, year zero environment and a hostile culture that holds them responsible for the world's pain. Sort of Lord of the Flies with credit cards. Oh, and Muslims.Them too. Which was probably a step too far for the Film Council but a necessary one. Of course it might go easier on me if I stayed clear of hot issues but think of how we react now to period German film-makers who pretended to ignore the holocaust?

Budgeted at one million dollars VACATION is the simplest, cheapest and meanest thing we could think of whilst simultaniously being able to guarentee a return on the investment. Half that figure, 500 000 sterling, has been in the war chest since January thanks to a patron in Monaco but with the British producers still turning in circles ( currently dithering and getting cold feet over the film's percieved morality ) the project remains in limbo along with my on-off relationship with Miss.Moor. Maggie as you might have realized is a very talented individual whose own career is just getting into gear with a recording contract dangling before her at the very moment my own fortunes have taken yet another dramatic downturn. And there are deeper issues at stake here than box office returns and affairs of the heart.

Thanks to my dealings with Miss Moor and the so-called 'intelligence' community who came knocking after 9/11 the department of Homeland Security has taken an unpleasently personal interest in my affairs. I don't know if you've ever seen a movie called 'Enemy of the State' with Will Smith? Well, that's essentially what I'm living through. You may have heard the rumours. Now get it from the horse's mouth. At least as many of the odious details as I can post in a public forum.

My bank account and personal credit lines have been frozen for over a year, all plastic revoked making everything from visa applications, through travel bookings and broadband service virtually impossible. The long and the short of it is that I was wrongly investigated for allegedly funding an American jihadi group. In fact I was funding Miss Moor, a perfectly old fashioned state of affairs that somehow rubbed the spooks up the wrong way. At least it gave them the excuse they needed to impound my savings and steal the interest along with the interest on all the other British bank accounts currently caught up in this, some 4.6 million British banking transactions according to figures published in the Guardian and they did it in direct contravention of the data protection act not to mention Article 8 of the European convention on human rights. This act of outright fraud was directly sanctioned by UK chancellor Gordon Brown who personally confirmed that he was aware of the 'arrangement' and in a written parliamentary answer last year said that the British government could not guarentee " the privacy of Uk citizens who may have had their financial transactions viewed as part of US counter-terrorism investigations in conjunction with Swift." Basicly someone out there in Homeland Security is reaming us, just one of God knows how many outright scams perpetrated in the name of the war on terror. Of course I have taken due legal action and brought the case to the attention of the British banking ombudsman, a bureaucracy whose wheels grind even slower than those of the Film Council although I don't honestly hold out any real hope of winning the day. Simply retaining the accounting team and the lawyers necessary to stay in the fight is enough to syphon off the remaining funds long before this whole tedious matter wends its way to the European High Court.

In the meantime I am keeping myself busy with a polish on the official HARDWARE sequel and the first draft of a novel for older kids, 'THE GREEN AVATAR', an everyday tale of genetically engineered animals, absentee parents and fake messiahs. Don't know if any publisher on earth will touch it but it's kept a smile on my chops through those long, winter nights.
Other irons in the fire include continuing action on the long stalled Afghan epic 'THE BONES OF THE EARTH' and ongoing efforts to retrieve HARDWARE from another legal limbo so the beast can be digitally remastered and made available to television and DVD. Ideally I'd like to see it get the same treatment as Dust Devil Stateside, with an extended director's cut and boxkit of its own, preferably including a cheesy comic book in which George W. and crew get torn apart by Mark 13 drone soldiers. But don't hold your breath. Rescuing HARDWARE is another Herculean labour and right now I'm not getting a lot of support in this area with the original producers permanently out to lunch and Norm Hill's Subversive Cinema teetering on the brink of oblivion as new computer technology and high resolution downloads speed the official death of DVD as a viable, commercial format.

Elsewhere in the news I am reliably informed that reports of a mutant virus in the UK were greatly exagerated although according to the broadsheets 17 people did pop their clogs in East Anglia. Some kind of killer diarhoea apparently but it mostly effects the elderly and thus far only those with a Norfolk accent. Meanwhile the US military continue to pour bucks ( 127 billion dollars to be precise) into their joint robotics masterplan, described as "bringing movies to reality" by a US general quoted on their site (http://...com/yl7s52) A new firewall was recently put in place to keep out civilians but anyone with halfway decent hacking skills should find it a doddle. The TALON system was first tested in Afghanistan in 2001 during the failed Tora Bora operation and is undergoing field trials in Iraq. The current model is still vulnerable to hacking and viruses but stay tuned 2 this channel 'cause u ain't seen nothin' yet. Artificial intelligence is on it's way, like it or not. Future Combat Systems (FCS) the manufacturers of TALON intend to replace one third of America's fighting force with fully autonymous, drone soldiers by 2035.
After all, it's the 21st century, guys! And guess what's about to become planet Earth's most endangered species?

Full moon's low in the sky. Just touching the rooftops and taking on a nasty, reddish hue. And what was that outside the window? The fluttering of wings ? Surely not?

R.S. Passover. 2007.

Hey, Hey, folks! Rise 'n shine!! I have an update here on the conflict we all know and love!!! Civic authorities have put London hospitals on stand-by after nine more victims of an apparently highly contagious 'mystery' virus were admitted overnight. As nuclear conflict looms and the west stumbles headlong towards its downfall 'Hardware' writer/director Richard Stanley has renounced his vows to stay clear of digital technology and broken surface on the net to air his views and find out once and for all whether he is the last free human being in west London. Richard and his occasional writing partner, the celebrated nanophysicist Grebhtor Smoo, will be posting an irregular weblog on this site intended as a series of lively, first hand observations on the build up to world war three and how to make the most of whatever time we may still have. Stay tuned to this network for further updates...