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They should read some Charles Fort to cure them of this monstrous and rather lower-case plebian thinking concerning spanners and hammers. Either that, or this desperately uninspired Mr Frankson should stark taking what Prod admits he takes, or subscribe to Mirabelle, or fall in love with a river goddess. I mean how old is this fallen Worzel Gummidge ? I mean does this guy honestly think that Bennett creates all this by himself alone, sitting in a room and imagining things? Frankson’s need to disbelieve is most profound. For an acclaimed genius, Bennett is the laziest little git I have ever come across. Like all fiends, he hates the daylight. I have never known him get up until darkness falls, and then he doesn’t move for several hours. Even then, he just steps over the snoring corpses we always have around the place and staggers a hundred yards to get some curried hake from the all-night Hole in the Wall and a can of his favourite Diet Umbongo. Then he starts talking, and sometimes he doesn’t stop until dawn. Last night it was cosmologies that work and don’t work at the same time. Says he, the Ptolomaic system had no motion, Copernicus re-centred it, gave it motion, but could not measure acceleration along a curve. Newton’s Method of Fluxions (calculus) could do this, but lacked magnetism and electricity etc etc. The almost living and the half dead rising from blankets in the half-dark in the pre-TV dawn of the world, listen to all this in amazement. They blink in the dim light like creatures just popped out of eggs. I am going to capture some of these scenes in my novel, Memoirs of a Fallen Programmer. The week went something like this: Monday: Dr. Jack Sarfatti, world-renowned quantum physicist is on the phone asking Bennett if he would like to write a book with him. Bennett nearly killed by woman on Portobello Road. Tuesday: Uri Geller (yes, the man himself!) rings to say that after reading Bennett’s Politics of the Imagination he would like him to write an analytical biography. Wednesday: Bennett’s book An American Demonology confirmed by Head Press, with Introduction by Nick Pope, Foreword by Jerry Clark, and dedicated to George Hansen, author of The Trickster and the Paranormal, making four Magonian hate-targets in one book. This must be a record. Thursday: Scaffolders and fire brigade (no less) arrive whilst the Leader is being filmed and interviewed by Shashamedia. They are to make a CD about Bennett as a Head Press author, so you’ll be able to see us all when this comes out. However, I am sorry to disappoint my growing email Combat Diary fan club (ten a day) that I will be keeping my clothes on, at least on this sober occasion, although I might give them a break at Christmas. Friday: Police arrive to interview the Leader about the assault. Bennett gives them a talk on TechnoShamanism, Marshall McLuhan, Harpo Marx, and the Industrial Revolution. They left looking as if their sympathies were with his assailant.
I could go on, but George Mensche (the brother of Ron) has just come into the office, so I will let him finish off this billet-doux. Here he is, fresh from the Portobello Road Electric Cinema Bar and Bistro, where he is quite a celebrity amongst celebrities. Already the Frankson photograph is circulating there. Here is George’s response:
“Cor blimey, is this truly one of the soldiers of Brentford? I was expecting the usual subscriber to Magonia Magazine – a schoolteacher from Balham, or an assistant accountant from beyond the Watford Gap, and this piece of concept art turns up! Is he real I ask myself? My own guess is that this Frankson person has gone quietly mad teaching English in some tower-block inferno, where they are all pale-faced glue-sniffing ESN, or non-cerebral mutants found dead in piss-soaked lifts, their portable TVs still showing “reality” TV. You must move into town, BP, away from these leafy choirboys that write for you. You know it makes sense. Get smart. Surround yourself with some young modern hipsters for Christ’s sake, before you die of pelican grief out there in Brentford Leisure Centre, where even the pseudo-chicken slices are (like the ideas of most of most Magonian writers) made of Quorn pseudo-fungus (see the Brentford Diet section below). And drop this golem in drag, or whatever he is. He writes like a retired extra from a re-make of the Blackbirds of 1929. Should change his medication, that’s what I say.”
And here’s Marina “Cyber” Khan who has just joined us as Books Editor:
“Loved the photo of Frankson. Looks seriously disturbed to me. Obviously deeply tranquillised. Would certainly be arrested down Kensington High Street on a Saturday morning. Seriously BP, all of you should go on a postmodern course to bring you past 1955. Come on, you can get past the old left-wing Polytech “facts versus fictions” Prod-culture if you really try. Otherwise, your readers will be the only people who remember The Groves, Ena Sharples, or Max Bygraves. As yet, the Combat Diaries HQ, unlike Brentford Leisure Centre, does not have a single walking frame parked outside. I am afraid that at a rate of a thousand hits per day the much-vaunted “unreality” (as you call it) of the Alternative Fortean Times will eventually bury yourself, the Fried Slice, and your crew of ancient pistols in the sad provincial grave that D.H. Lawrence called dead England.”
Now isn’t that nice? She always had a touch of the poet, that girl.
Finally, here’s Margot Fontez, just back from her lunch hour:
“Is that an alien under his kilt, or is he just pleased to see me?”
Is there something Mr Frankson isn’t telling us? Other reactions to the photograph of Mr Frankson from the Electric Cinema Club Portobello Road celebs were, in brief: -Is she dead or alive? I think we should be told. -Is it stuffed, more like! -Look at her strut, the bitch! -I want summa dat shit she’s on, yah nah? -What a swinger! Positively pornographic if you ask me. -Should definitely change her medication. Or her agent. -Is this the result of lateral thinking? -But I thought Magonians didn’t like nutters! -Didn’t I once see her once in a circus at Maidstone? -Cool, baby! I’m gonna get me to da Leisure Centre right away! -Goodness, a rough trade pelican. And I thought they were all pure of heart, sane respectable. -My God, doesn’t this queen fancy herself! -She’s got a good thing going there, alright! Must rate private parties, at least. The cow must be worth a fortune. -Will the Leisure Centre ever be the same again, Colin? -Have they cloned Jimmy Connelly’s funny dad already? -Certainly beats Madame Tussauds. -This mother had better watch her pitch if she ever stalks Goldborne Road. -By the position of the alien between her legs, this act is a perv and a half, if you ask me. -I met something like this in the Salvation Army’s Last Chance Depot in Campden in 1972. Is this it after being rebirthed in the Elmborne Road, I wonder? -Is this the Duke of Mendoza? -Wow, you gotta secret, baby? -Is this gone bitch a John Rimmer joke? -Photoshop, certainly. A old graphic on packets of 1945 army suppositories. I think I’ve seen this geezer somewhere on the Tube next to the Holiday Tours posters.
Well if it is a joke my darlings, and this portrait was done by the Brentford Polonius on PhotoShop, they’ve counter-cybered us, and we’ve all swallowed it hook line and sinker. But whatever, she’s going to be a main feature character on the Combat Diaries in the future. Any more takers should step forward.
Leben alle. Auf wiedersein
Patricia “Unreal” Farson
(this alter ego is now going off with Sharkley1 to have a non-Allah ham sanni down the Portobello Road, but don’t tell my Jewish mother)
PS: By the way BP, I am American, which I must admit at the moment is about as unreal as you can get.
“Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal.”
(Eliot The Wasteland, 373)
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Betty Baxter
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Two (scenes left and centre) from Beatrice’s mime & monologue play, Me Gone Cargo. The theme of this work is that of the story of Hector and Andromache, as expressed by Chirico’s painting (right) of that name. In this play, Beatrice transforms herself from Aphrodite (centre) to one Ethel Bratby, (below, right) seen here as a young woman with her two long-dead elder brothers.
And below, as a much older woman, the subject of Me Gone Cargo which appears in Metatheatre 1 of Combat Diary 21 (see below)
Progress report on David the brother of Beatrice.
Combat Viewers will remember that we last saw David wrapped in that wiring tangle he calls the real world. True to form, he became a corporate scientist. He obtained his hard-wired mortgage and his 2.5 junction-box family. He was given also a full set of personal consumer-confidences, and his newly injected common-sense credibility circuits assured him that he was a man of sincerity, substance, and social-democratic instincts. He was given also given a beautifully-engineered set of mediocre instincts for spiritual comfort. With these things his robotic mentors assured him would make a scientific “breakthrough” and might even develop a product range. Finally, upon presentation of his Ph.d he was assured that any resulting cancer clusters would be called “random.” But as we can see from the above police sketch of the event, something went wrong. The wiring tangles turned in on themselves. The result was that the pathways and the connections and pulsations went into a forbidden and extremely dangerous formulaic mode. The result was that David donned a rabbit suit and machine-gunned the 7.30 Breakfast Special into Warren Street Tube. David would have been perfectly alright if he had remembered that human beings navigate by those self deceptions which are the metaphysical oil of all reasoning. Therefore he reasoned by pathways and calculations, flows and quantities. He moved information about from point to point, and as if were a downtown furniture store manager, the kill-ratios of factual commerce finally melted his assets.
Prod No ufos please, We’re Magonians Tonto
For those Combat heroes and heroines who wish to follow the adventures of Prod and Tonto who contributed to Magonia 85, here are the Combat Archive references:
Another One That Never Wore Combat Diary 12 Chapter 3 Events at Batley Boiler House Combat Diary 13 Chapter 9 The Ron Mensch Interview Combat Diary 17 Chapter 4
With the sad death of UFO (UK) magazine in particular, and the equally sad almost total collapse of British ufology in general, Prod and Tonto have now passed from what little is left of the British UFO scene. They are now fading twilight figures, rather like Dave and Doug, the rural pair who made corn circles with ropes and planks. In some Valhalla no doubt they are still talking about “separating the facts from the fictions,” old Polytech style, a good English ritual, like the Barn Dance and trying to work out the universe sand grain by sand grain. I can hear them now, talking to anorak-folk about “case histories” down Memory Lane on some gods-forsaken “honest, sensible, and factual” British web site, or low-budget video, or low-budget local radio. We’ll hear the usual spiel called Commissar Polytechnic Rationalism, with a touch of Docubox: “Vera cum in at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, not nine o’clock in the morning as said in this article. Therefore the case is disproved. Vera didn’t see note, and in any case she’s on Prozac, and she’s a half blind old prat, and is not a credible witness at an angle of 45 degrees & Mafeking has been relieved & keep off the grass & and only the proles are real holy and 1900 and frozen to death times and dates and places and angles down provincial Memory Lane and bollox to all them there boorjois intellectuals and them there fancy wankers from London who dornt now note about nort and there the ‘ain’t no aliens in or above ‘artlepool no’ow. Arthur Scargill is 97.
May the gods bless these farm-boy Stalinists of a lost ufological era. May the gods have mercy on their workshop souls, their piles of Brentford case histories, and the straw behind their mundane Magonian ears.
Here is a brief look at the thrills in store for Viewers in Combat Diary 22. “Charles Fort is known as the rather jolly collector of minor curiosa. My favourite fortean things are certain tiny Malaysian molluscs. These are found only on a particular peninsular in the first week of the month of May in a rather inaccessible part of the old Penang peninsular. I travelled there with Cirus Finchboard-Cardus of the now-defunct Society of Peculiar Esoterica. It was important to us to see if these tiny molluscs had the same peculiar brown edge found occasionally within fairy rings in Nova Scotia. Complete with Baedekkers, hampers, umbrellas and spare dress suits we set orft on a fine morning on a steam packet from Dover beach...”
DEFENCE AND SECURITY
We have had to beef up the security team because sceptics are mounting increasingly powerful attacks by land, sea, air, and cyberspace.
Left we see Boss Marvin on our emergency phone after hearing of an imminent attack by a sceptical task force heading out from Brentford Leisure Centre is Cyril Hawklight, awarded the Binman of the North Prize in 2002. Now free of the Corporation Cart, he described himself in his TV interview (everybody in Notting Hill has TV interviews) as a non-violent reformed freelance recidivist who says he runs Hackney Disposal Services as “a very tight ship.” It must be a very tight ship indeed, if only because at the moment Cyril is quite content with a straw palliasse in our old abandoned washhouse. Come night, he rests his broad head on his four signing-on cards in different names, and his stack of forged Giros cheques. He hopes that Indian Post Office clerks, cowering behind barbed wire, armoured glass, and a row of panic buttons, will be two scared to notice. On the right is Mole the Mute. He is a on a temporary engagement because he is far too dangerous to be employed full time. The patch on his forehead is an early experimental tracer unit. The batteries of this device failed in the 1970s, and Mole is thinking of having it removed for cosmetic reasons. Older than he looks, but can still clear the entire Colville Arms Bahamas Bar at twilight time with no trouble at all. Dines alone in the Panzerben kitchen due to appalling table manners. Marvin is confined to the garden shed due to equally appalling toilet training. His phone is retro-pantomime from Portobello Market. Where he got his Warsaw pyjamas from, the gods only know.
WARNING: none of the Combat Diaries Security Staff are fully trained. If a sceptical stick is poked up their nose, their reactions are somewhat unpredictable. Like their personal hygiene, politeness, patience and controlled professional restraint are not their strong points.
Books Editor
Marina Khan
ROVING REPORTER
Of late, we have started to receive requests for Colin Bennett’s 1996 novel, The Entertainment Bomb. In my opinion, this was the best British comic novel for many years. It has been reprinted, and is now available from the author. I include here a review that indicates regard from quarters not usually sympathetic to this kind of avant-guard work. The “respectable first novel” referred to in this Guardian review is Bennett’s The Infantryman’s Fear of Open Country published by Fourth Estate in xxx
I have collected other reviews of The Entertainment Bomb, which can be seen in the Book Review section of Combat Diary 21, along with an article on the book by Joe Gatt from G-Spot magazine. I have included also two short extracts from this quite remarkable novel. Though this book appeared eight years ago, as a book by a British author on consumerism and technology, glamour, media, and metaphysics it remains, to my mind, quite unequalled. Read it alongside the more recent Techgnosis by Erik Davis and George Hansen’s The Trickster and the Paranormal if you really want your mind blown. Do that, and you will never read a mainstream birthday-card novel again. George Mensche
THE GUARDIAN
23rd February 1996
This futuristic tale introduces junk-food boffin Dr Hieronymous Fields, who proposes founding “Entertainment State”, where pleasure means social control, predicated on the worship of popular entertainment figures. In this novel inextricably wedded to on-going media studies and postmodern theory, Bennett exudes vast cerebral power, and his thesis – that all social infrastructures now tend towards entertainment – is sound. A more robust and technocratic reader, who could stand the sense of being locked and abandoned in a university library, might love it. It is certainly a brave, superclever and experimental publication – one which fulfils the more positive aspects of small-press freedoms.”
Elmon Siedlitz
Our Chief Cook and his assistant, Siedlitz, are on their annual holiday. They were taken under Social Services escort to the Bingo Caravanserai Camp, with a good supply of their official medication for their compulsory annual (unpaid) re-socialisation. The Bingo Caravanserai Camp is one of a network of Social Security Holiday Camps specially reserved for those with enough dole vouchers to form what is unofficially termed an impeccable social security record. The Bingo Caravanserai Camp has Easy as You Go banners fluttering from the top of the razor-wire fence. One Step At A Time spelt out in wrought iron the entrance gates. Bull Pit dogs patrol the perimeter. The camp has Health and Strength programmes. There are courses for Designing you own Personal Social Adjustment Plan, and How to Relate to the Maladjusted in terms of Ethnic Analysis and Integration. There are Community games. Everything is Community. There is Community food and dining, Community walks, Community free time. If Elmon and Siedlitz have their way, there will also be Community screwing. So expect trouble, folks. Check out their previous holiday adventures in Combat Diary 15. Patricia Farson
PS latest- Elmon has been arrested. Siedlitz phoned us – says Elmon refused to cooperate on the Compulsory Community Rebirthing Course. Of this more later, no doubt. As Shakespeare said, all this for a Giro!
Another unique facility of the House of Panzerben.
Carla Jones Margot Fontez
George Shenston, and his assistant, Mavis Powell are on summer leave. Sister Margot Fontez is now in charge of newly constituted Panzerben Belief Casualty Unit. Margot has been joined recently by sister Carla Jones, a district nurse from Sheffield. Margot herself is a dropped-out professional shrink from Nottingham, and will no doubt have a lot to contribute. We do hope that this splendid pair will continue to run the Panzerben Rescue & Reform Scheme for UFO & Parnormal Unbelievers (environmental grant applied for). Carla Fontez will specialize in taking good care of our unique collection of fallen manic-depressive nail-biting po-faced sceptics, dazed and confused humourless rationalists, and all those who suffer from exposure to deadly fundamentalist doll-radiation from the wide-screen Nikon, this being the only alien invasion that counts. The need to disbelieve is one of the great afflictions of our society, though this sickness is not discussed in media or the press.
The Brentford Leisure Centre Fungus Food Crisis
Both Margot ad Carla report that increasing numbers of distraught pelicans are leaving their Magonian breeding grounds at the Leisure Centre and arriving for belief-crisis treatment at the House of Panzerben. The problem has been caused by eating the fungi food available there, a soya-weave on a base of slaughter-house offal and spent tractor lubricant. Here we see a typical victim of the Brentford Leisure Centre Fungus Diet. These poor people are known to stumble into hospital emergency units and casualty departments all over the south of England. The food in the Leisure Centre in particular is apt to produce a condition of dementia in which a person thinks they have at last discovered what they call the real. Having assured themselves that they have reached the end of the quest of all philosophy, they stumble around touching to assure themselve of what they call solidity, and this can cause problems in Tube trains and crowded restaurants. The Brentford Quorn Fungus Food (Sceptiburgers, pelican ice-cream, Doubt sannis, Imposter Cream Horns) causes personality problems through a surfeit of scepticism. Hence the eccentric dress of this particular victim, caused by complete self-scepticism and hence neglect of his “real” person. It is though that this patient raided a theatrical costumier, hence his ammunition bandolier and his curious rosette. The hollow cheeks ia typical physical that this poor man has eating the fungus-based Quorn sceptical burgers. A surfeit of these results in burst of sceptical rationalism such that an individual believes that an observer is separate from his observation. The final state of this malady is called objectivity, a condition in which psychopaths think that the screams of their victim have absolutely nothing to do with them.
This particular dazed and confused person was found wandering about Waterloo station and taken into a cell for the night. He had obviously had a nasty belief crisis, for which ittle can be done by conventional social workers or psychiatrists. Such vagrants cannot live by themselves, and as addicts for scepti-fungus they will do anything to get it. The Brentford Quorn Fungus in particular causes rationalism which is a unique form of sceptical dementia. The male eaters of Brentford Fungus profiteroles succumb to dementia of all kinds and the women usual turn suicidal. With such cases, Combat Counselling is essential and through a course of intellectual sex obtainable from the Alternative Fortean Times, all rationalisations (which are a unique form of senile dementia may be put aside. Throughout their life however they all still have a tendency to levitate on occasions when such a thing is uncalled for. Our course of disbelief and self-deception frees them for a better health and a good life formed between endless approximationsto the mechanical truth. No more will they be found wandering the city looking for certainties.
Below is yet another Quorn Fungus casualty. His doomed or certainty and mechanism has led him to our haven.
This pelican, much dazed and confused after a belief crisis, was snatched from the Leisure Centre by a squad from the House of Panzerben. A bad case of Magonian scepticism here, certainly. One of the worst we have seen. See the preliminary notes attached to this photograph by Margot and Carla. And here is another bad sceptical Quorn Fungus Casualty that came in during the night. A real bad Leisure Centre victim this one, about which we have few details at the moment. What a pelican is this chappie!
Meantime, though temporarily short-staffed, we still maintain 24-hour emergency service for Confessions from casualties from all the sceptical chapels. Camp beds are reserved for difficult moments of doubt about the Real. Cold Turkey isolation, hot cocoa and sick bowls are available free of charge for all crises of belief in Fact and “concrete evidence.” Special care facilities are available to treat the nightmares of garage-rationalists, boot-and-braces sceptics, and the fear of the over-educated, fallen left-liberals, and any other suchlike who come to the House of Panzerben for holistic relief. We have now proved that we are strong enough to cope when crises of Belief occur and Magonians try to snatch back fallen pelicans, as Christians try to snatch back converts who have wandered into infamous "cults" and have to be replugged into the wide-screen Nikon immediately. Our thanks and greetings go also to others too numerous to mention who pour in and out of the House of Panzerben seeking comfort, shelter, and what little treatment and advice is ours to offer. These faces cannot be shown due to many issues and considerations and mishaps extraordinary. These mainly involve Social Security, Probation officers, Social workers, the banks, the police, the judiciary, psychiatrists, the Law, alien abductors, Men in Black, the Security Services, and in certain cases Parents, film & TV producers and parents. Many of these young escapees are suffering from bad liberal burn from the everlasting idiot’s lantern, and conversations about gearboxes, DIY, sport, and something called the Economy. Unfortunately we have to hand back many of those who have made it successfully over the perimeter wire, if only for a moment to see living screens that offer better viewing and in most case at least, have no license fee. All live within a square mile of the Martyr's Memorial, Portobello Road, and only leave it on pain of death. Come night, and we all pull the beautiful devastation over us like a magical cloak of forgetting.
After all that, you will all be ready for your Combat Diaries Archive Box Number 1. Press HERE to download this box, which includes selections from previous Combat Diaries:
1. Deconstructing the B-29 Colin Bennett 2. The Latex Princess Colin Bennett 3. Another One that Never Were Alan Goss-Custard 4. Fortean Times and the New Cromwellians Patricia Farson 5. New Criteria of Diagnosis Carole Smith 6. Roswell Reverse Engineering Bill Sherman 7. Memetics Jack Hardy 8. The Great UFO/Crash Retrieval Syndrome Betty Baxter 9. Microchip Implants Luukanen-Kilde
But before we leave you folks, here is the latest News from Brentford Magonia, Pelican Sceptical HQ, fresh from the Leisure Centre Tea Bar: Fidella's Pelican Journal of England ... Tuesday, 22
December, 1998. We drove back up to Brentford to see B&G
before they leave on ... We went with him to the beach and saw seals and
pelicans and a humming ... ... Alex Alavi's House, Montreal,
Québec, Canada, 06/21/04. The Bricklayers Arms, Brentford,
UK, 06/21/04. ... Two Pelicans Pub & Grub, Aguila, AZ, 05/08/04. ...
... Brann. Brann Bergen. Brasilia.
Bratislava. Bregenz. Brentford. Brescia. Brighton. Brimingham. Bristol C.
... Paris SG. Parma. Partizan. Pattijoki. Pelicans. ...
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The very same Combat
Diary team that brought you such classics as Events at Batley Boiler
House now present the soul-stirring story of a day in the life of the
Strutting Tuffty of Waddling Parva. This is written by Diana Melody Ash-Greenham
of Ladbroke Grove who has just joined the team of Panzerben here at Hog
Productions.
And here’s Marina “Cyber” Khan who
has just joined us as Books Editor. She says: “forget the
non-controversial Fortean Times. The Combat Diaries are The Future. We are
faster on our feet, and already we have nearly two-thirds the readership.
The Fortean Times is doomed pre-cyber, a pretty piece of corporate
plastic. Here, you get street voices, street books, and wonderful smell of
motherfuckin’ sulphur, and you don’t have to pay nearly four bloody quid
for your fix!”
