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Hello and welcome to Disinfo Nation, I'm Richard Metzger. On tonight's show the man responsible
for warping more minds of this generation than any other lone individual. He's wanted
by the authorities for his frontal assault against reality
(A 'Wanted: Grant Morrison' poster from much earlier on in his career, when he still had
hair, flashes onscreen.)
and for various assorted crimes against reason. Lock up your women, it's that charming genius
of the comics world, Grant Morrison tonight, on Disinfo Nation.
Disinfo.Con 2000
Richard Metzger (Speaking to audience.)
I promised it was about to get 'wacky' and that shoe is about to drop. If there is anyone
who deserves to be called 'The Heir to William Burroughs' I think it's our next guest. The
possessor of one of the most incredible imaginations on the planet and we're incredibly lucky to
have him here as The Invisibles winds down to two last issues . . . Ladies and gentlemen
I give you, Grant Morrison.
(Applause. Metzger leaves to stage right, Grant Morrison saunters on, trying to look
like King Mob overdosing on cool, doesn't quite make it, as a little grin breaks at
the corners of his mouth. He heads to the podium, bends to the microphone, then screams.)
Grant Morrison
WOOOOOOOOOW! Here we are! Right! *** man, I tell you when I was a kid I read Robert
Anton Wilson and all this *** and here we are, we're standing here, talking about this
*** and it's real! OK, I'm pissed
(Holds up red beaker.)
and in half an hour I'm gonna come up on drugs, so watch for it!
(Audience laughter.)
I guess, I don't know, is there any practising magicians in the audience? Put your hand up
if we got any? Yeah? Come on!
(Puts his hand up.)
Bold! OK, a few. OK, by the time we finish this you're all going to be practising magicians.
This ***'s easy right?
I'm like you right? Basically, why are we here, right? Why are we here, at this time,
what's this all about, and by the way this is a Scottish accent so reset the filters
and pretend itsh Shean Connery talking to you OK? Double-Oh-Sheven. So, if you can follow
me, I'm just gonna talk the way I talk and *** you if you don't understand me!
The deal is this: I've been writing this comic for the last six years and the weird thing
is, like you, like everyone here, we're trying to figure, what's going on? Why do we feel
different? Why don't we fit into this world? Why do we think they're not telling us the
truth?
So, I went out and I read Robert Anton Wilson's books when I was 20 years old, which is 20
years ago now, and I figure, is this guy bullshitting me? He says we can talk to aliens, we can
talk to people from Sirius, is he talking crap? He said Aleister Crowley's got methods
for contacting alien intelligences and for changing the world, is he talking crap? So
I did it and, no, he's not talking crap!
Right, and we can all do it!
And this is, urr, by way of trying to demolish the counter-culture and replace it with something
useful. We're just gonna start here and see where we get to.
When I started doing The Invisibles, which is a comic book for people who don't - who
haven't seen the thing, it's a comic book which is kinda my attempt to explain what
had happened to me after I'd been abducted by aliens in Kathmandu in 1994 and the only
reason I was abducted by aliens in Kathmandu in 1994 was because I went to Kathmandu in
1994 to be abducted by aliens!
(Laughs.)
And it works right!
(Applause.)
And these ***, they will turn up!
INTERVIEW
Richard Metzger
Dateline - Los Angeles California. We track Grant Morrison, best-selling comics writer
in the world, to his room in the trendy Standard hotel on the Sunset Strip. It was here, against
the glittery backdrop of a Hollywood dream factory, where this interrogation took place.
(Onscreen Caption: Grant Morrison - Crimes Against Reason. The interview is done with
Richard Metzger in the foreground right, Grant Morrison diagonally opposite and they're sitting
by the window or on some sort of balcony and it's night.)
Richard Metzger
First up, what brings you to Los Angeles?
Grant Morrison Well, basically the idea is to try and make
some money you know? Because this is the place where *** turns in to money and that's
an area of magic that always interested me, just the idea of turning pure thought into
pure cash and this is the place where light becomes money. I think it's a very weird place
to be in, none of it connects, I mean, you're living here as well, but it doesn't add up,
but it's interesting that way because it's all of it an illusion, everything's a fake
here and I kinda like that and I kinda want to get involved in it and see if I can profit
from it.
Richard Metzger
What do you see right now as your relationship to what's being produced by the Hollywood
culture machine?
Grant Morrison
I think what's happening, in my terms anyway, is what I'm seeing is that ideas that were
once marginalised that normally I like to play with ten or fifteen years ago in the
comics books have become the mainstream culture, the lifeblood of the movies and the TV and
the records, everything we watched and listened to, you know?
There's Buffy on the TV, we've got The Matrix in the cinema, Gnostic ideas are burgeoning
everywhere, ideas about the supernatural, the occult, the power of magic, the disintegration
of reality and they're all come from this place.
They've become mainstream and they've been fed back in to our lives as 'the Spectacle'
you know? It's the best Spectacle we've ever had.
Richard Metzger
But why do you think these ideas have, all these marginal ideas, have become mainstreamed?
Grant Morrison
I think it has to happen. Even in the sense that we've all grown up with and can now make
them mainstream, and that's exactly what we seem to be doing, we're selling weirdness
back in to the culture and the culture does demand it. The culture has come to us, looking
for ideas once they would've hidden under a mossy stone and ignored.
Then suddenly, y'know, things got boring, they ran out of heroic muscle men, they run
out of Rambos, they run out of the entire Reagan-Thatcher's driven philosophy that we
were all going on, and suddenly they've turned to the freaks and the weirdoes and the outcasts
and the geeks and the beatniks and the hippies and whoever's left to provide some infusion
of interest into a flagging culture. And it seems to be working.
The interesting thing is that it's bending their culture towards our culture to the point
where the two things become interchangeable. There's no difference between them I think.
Richard Metzger
When you started The Invisibles in 1995 what was your intention? There was a grand idea
behind it.
Grant Morrison (Nods.)
I mean, the comic had two starts, one was a false start where all I wanted to do was
a William Burroughs version of Jack Kirby's The Boy Commandos because I thought it was
such a cool name and DC owned the characters so you had Boy Commandos that just sounds
like a Burroughs story, so it started out as this basic notion of psychic boy scouts
and Baden-Powell was involved in it at one point but, it just completely changed and
they said well this is so far from the original that why should they leave the title and why
don't you just make something up and I went through Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and
Fable and found the 'Invisibles'. So that was it.
The first four issues I knew it was gonna be a boy's initiation in to this occult secret
society. Then in issue 2 I went to Kathmandu and had basically an alien abduction experience.
And that changed the entire series because what I then wanted to do with the series was
to make something that was alive rather than just tell a story, I wanted to do something
that was a spell, that actually moved, that people who'd read it would be changed by it
or would be led in to situations whereby they might be changed.
And also, ultimately, to simulate the experience that I had in Kathmandu, which I don't have
any explanation for and in The Invisibles I went through every possible one: I read
Whitley Strieber, I read Philip K. ***, I read everyone who'd reported this type of
unusual experience and the parameters are all the same, all their nervous systems reported
slightly differently and used their own sci-fi language or technological language or mythological
language depending on who they are.
But ultimately the thing's the same and it's like the shamanic process whereby you appear
to be taken out of reality into a higher dimension, the body is stripped and destroyed and then
you are put back with extra knowledge which then leads in to weird synchronicities and
unusual experiences which began to proliferate as The Invisibles was being written so the
whole thing - I was living that comic as a diary, as it was being written and the occult
stuff in it and the martial arts, that's all real stuff and as it was happening it was
going in to the comic so it's probably about 60% biography in there.
Richard Metzger
I'm gonna pry open that last answer a little bit here.
First up, what happened to you in Kathmandu? What was the alien visitation experience like?
Grant Morrison
The short version is that I was sitting up on the roof garden of the BajaRat Hotel and
this thing happened and - it's hard to describe, we're going into areas that are unusual, so
all I remember is getting back downstairs and laying on the bed and - some unusual things
happened, and then it seemed like there were entities in the room it was like those silver
morphing blobs you see in rave videos. It was like computer generated things and they
claimed to be cross-sections of fifth-dimensional entities as expressed through four-dimensional
spacetime and they claimed that I was one of them and that I had to come back and see
what the old homestead was like. And that was when I felt like I was peeled off the
surface of spacetime and they took me out of my body and then to what seemed to be the
fifth dimension because I could see the entirety of space and time as a dynamic object in which
Shakespeare was over here, and I was over here and the dinosaurs were here and we were
all in the same object, and time was a thing.
So, I appeared to be in a fifth dimensional fluid, an information space that I could say
was maybe kinda bluish, extending out infinitely. These things swam through it and interacted
with it and they told me that what the universe was, was a larval form of what they are, which
is fifth-dimensional entities. And the only way to grow a fifth-dimensional entity is
to plant it in time, henceforth our universe.
Richard Metzger
I remember you telling me this story once before and you were saying it was like you
could pick lint off of your sweater and then throw it up in the air and it would surround
you in a different kind of environment.
Grant Morrison
I was trying to describe how they make universes and they said they could make them by detaching
parts of their substance and plugging them into the surrounding fluid, the medium, the
fifth-dimensional information fluid that we're all swimming through and when you did that,
when you plugged in a fractal component of yourself into the universe it would grow around
you and become another one of these universes and the idea was that those of us who knew,
who had this experience were supposedly midwives for this larva. Because we remembered and
you'd go back and you're constantly trying to encourage the larva forward because it
has to go, I mean it could die, it could just as easily die, but this one seems to work,
I've got a feeling this one works.
Richard Metzger
So it wasn't scary.
Grant Morrison
Not at all, no. It was monumental, it was soul-shaking but it wasn't scary.
disinformation: grant morrison transcript by Richard Metzger/Transcribed by Loz of Barbelith.com
- November 10, 2002
Richard Metzger (Grins.)
What was the next day like?
Grant Morrison
The next day was the oddest thing. I was buzzing, I wrote like 200 pages in a notebook to try
and get it down. And then tries to explicate it for the next six years.
(Laughs.)
And now you know I can just dismiss it.
Richard Metzger
Now you can turn it in to a big Hollywood film and make a couple of million dollars.
Grant Morrison
Well hopefully!