Gen's upcoming events and Misc.upcoming projects...





GENS MISC. UPCOMING PROJECTS: Heartworm Press are publishing “Collected Lyrics and Poems of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge – Volume One 1961 to 1971. Later they will publish Gen's first novel, written in 1969, “Mrs. Askwith”. Other books will follow.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Interview by Charles Neal -Tape delay 1987

~ PSYCHIC TV ~Interview from by Charles Neal taken from Tape Delay '87

"I was Elvis before he was."

"The D.A. would say, 'Hey man, you were trying for a record career'. I had a record career. I didn't want a record career. I'd just got out of one prison. I didn't want to go into another."
AN HOUR WITH CHARLES MANSON, BROADCAST ON KLX BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA 1983.
In 1974, correspondence began between Monte Cazazza, notorious for his early work within the San Francisco art world, and COUM Transmissions in London. They eventually worked together on numerous projects, including the Gary Gilmore Memorial Card and Monte's eventual recording on Industrial Records. Cazazza also engineered Mission of Dead Souls - the last live performance of Throbbing Gristle at Kezar Pavillion, San Francisco. Instrumental in the development of ideas of the Temple Ov Psychic Youth, Monte now heads Psychic TV USA and occasionally plays live with the group. Hilmar Orn, an Icelandic native, was once a member of the group Peyr, and also worked on various film projects and soundtracks for Icelandic Television. In 1984 he moved to London, where he began working full time with Psychic TV. Collectively and individually the present members of Psychic TV have exhibited their work in film, music and performance festivals all over the world. They have works in many major art museums and collections, and have published countless articles, manifestos and graphic works in numerous publications internationally.
Neal: When Psychic TV started, did encouraging a certain physical appearance contradict the idea of people being individuals?
Genesis: (pause) We experimented with people's susceptibilities. We always say in interviews that people don't have to look any particular way. We always stress that it is not, in fact, important. But in one way, if you set up a very particular image, it then gives you far more ways to sidestep - even on your own. All I have to do is grow my hair back and that's a radical move - and that changes the way people interpret the way that I look. You can draw an analogy with smuggling. If you send somebody through customs in front of you who looks smacked out of their brains and dubious, and you're behind them in a casual suit with a wife and child, the odds are immediately increased that the person who will be pulled first is the guy who looks like he is going to be into drugs. And actually they could be working together. But archetypes can be used. Once you understand that they're used anyway, then you can start to play with them to your own advantage - and also re-educate people as to what's done by other people.
Neal: Would you say that the ideas behind the music that you have been doing over the past few years have changed?
Hilmar: No, I think it's just the approach. Basically, all the Psychic TV albums have been really schizophrenic in their diversity, but that's also part of the camouflage. We maintain that if you have a limited set of strategies in your dealings with the world, you're obviously going to have very limited access to the world. If your world view is limited, your chances are limited as well. You can see that the group has been going over the whole spectrum basically. It has been doing classical things, it has been doing tongue in cheek things, rock and roll, teenybob, all sorts of things, and this is basically an exercise at the same time as being a statement that people will grasp subconsciously. And now the band has been slowly weeding out a lot of the influences which were peripheral or trivial and finding its own character.
Neal: What are the benefits of bringing all the aspects of Psychic TV together?
Hilmar: Well schizophrenia, to quote a good man, is, "a healthy reaction against a neurotic society" - that's one of the first points. Basically, Psychic TV can be seen as a mirror, it's just reflecting the image of what is happening around it. The second thing is coming to terms with this state around you and being able to manipulate your own way through it. The Temple Ov Psychic Youth is trying to link all these aspects together into a co-operative whole. For instance, with a lot of the anti-religious things or political statements and the tongue in cheek statements, we were sort of helping people to realize they shouldn't trust things on surface value. People have slowly begun to grasp the idea, they have come to terms with all these diverse things that are happening in Psychic TV and all these diverse messages being put out. So when they finally come out in one song, they may be a combination of messages of The Pope and John F. Kennedy and social and religious commentaries, while also including a nice sense of humour and a good piece of music. People will be able to interpret that instead of seeing it as a mish-mash of unconnected ideas, and we will be able to do more complicated things soon. I mean we are dangling very tasty carrots in front of people, no doubt about that.
Neal: Would you say that you have used video to the advantage that you would like to?
Monte: No, we've just started. This is really just the beginning in a way. I want to be as big as Gulf and Western so that I can give them a run for their goddamn money, I'll tell you that. Mark Pauline said, "We want to compete with football games". We want to get out there so we can really compete. Personally speaking, in all kinds of events, I think that we can do just as good a job; I think that we have better motives and include more valuable information. And I want the quality of our work to improve and the quality of everybody else's work to improve.
Genesis: We want to be as demanding on the public as we are on ourselves.
Neal: Do you see a time when the public will be open for that demand?
Genesis: A percentage of them will. If you can change and mutate the popular culture and some of the more intellectual culture of the planet with no funds and about five or six people, then as the old adage goes, imagine what you could do with one hundred or six hundred. Six hundred is enough to completely change the planet - easily. You just have to work very hard all the time. You don't stop, you just work. And it pays dividends. Most groups, most jounalists, most TV and most record companies are very lazy, people are basically lazy. So it makes it easier to succeed in what we're trying to do because the competition is distracted with avoiding work. And I think that's wonderful. I like to see laziness in people I don't respect. It's the old syndrome of people being afraid to take a step forward. Basically, we're trained not to take risks. We are afraid of what any risk may do to us. We may of course end up with something unexpected and wonderful, but people are being brought up in a very pessimistic state of being. You're basically being put into a hypnotic trance about 150 times a day. There's no difference between an induction of hypnosis and stepping into an elevator with about ten people that you don't know. You block yourself out. If you go on the tube in the rush hour, you see that people have learned to switch themselves off. When I had to commute to work doing the book on art, I used to really watch their faces. And people appear normal, but as you look at their faces, they're quite obviously disturbed and neurotic. They've got all sorts of strange little mannerisms and twitches in their faces and hands which they are totally unconscious of - just the tension and stress of switching off coming out in another way. Everyone used to say, "Don't you hate the rush hour and commuting"? But I didn't because I was fascinated with the evidence of what was going on. I had a policy - you have to have certain rules. One is you should never run for a tube, never, that is the first step towards disaster because you're then letting the tube control you. And these commuters, if you notice, they fight to get on it, they don't just run, they fight to go into this demented state.People are trained to ignore their own memory facility. With that thing, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it", they do it - everyday. The thing that makes us angry about popular music or groups like Duran Duran or Boy George is that they deliberately exploit all those neurotic states, they actually exist through mental disturbance and through people's fear of what they've been educated to want. People who have been at school are trained not to want to maximise their potential. Basically kids are told, "Don't expect a job when you leave school... forever". That is a ridiculous state to be in. People are told, "Expect to be a heroin addict, expect to be depressed, expect to be on the dole, count yourself lucky if the dole is not stopped when the government gets bored". These are basically the options given to people now. And that's what they are told every day by someone who is supposedly a substitute authority for mum and dad.
Neal: So is your goal to make people realize what is happening to them?
Genesis: Our goal is to simply set up an example that is an alternative. We've been through the same conditioning process. We're not untainted, we are damaged, but we are victims, just like them, expressing what we see. And, if by random chance, luck, social education, or whatever, we've somehow come through, then the best we can do is function in that way and express and speak for people as equal victims. Then they can see what they've been told is patently untrue. You can have fun, you can learn to build this quite impressive cultural machine when you've been given no skills by the system you were born into. None of us were trained as musicians or anything. But we've learned how to rig up videos, and we've learned how to build scaffolding, and we've learned how to make instruments and play them. And that message in itself is always avoided by most people including "the business", and including other groups. Duran Duran and all those other people have a vested interest in perpetuating the legend that rock groups are somehow special. They actually know that they are not special, they pretend that rock groups are these ultra special beings - not normal humans - and that they are the technicians and the ones that can do pop music and you have to consume it. And the record company pretends that they're the only people that can produce records, or can sell them or can get a group famous or whatever. There are all these people lying to each other, and they all do it for their own ego gratification and their own profit at the expense of the public - the people they should respect. The thing that creates the most anger in me is the total disrespect for their fans, their audience, the people who buy their records. The patronising arrogance of them, when most of them are actually unintelligent, average morons who happen to learn to play the guitar.
Neal: Do you see one of the purposes of pop music to be strictly for entertainment, as a throw away, disposable product?
Genesis: It's a purpose that was generated deliberately by people who could see a profit motive in it. There was no initial purpose in it. There is no pop music, as such, in older cultures. The nearest you get is the troubadour idea of passing on popular stories, which are usually symbolic of some moral to remind people of what has happened before - to learn from it. What our culture doesn't tell you is how to learn from the song - it's not connected with the history of the culture particularly, except in the most trivial, superficial way. And the nearest it comes is that Elvis used to wiggle his hips and now George Michael does. That's not very constructive for most people, it doesn't solve how they exist, how they live or how they survive. The question really is, "Can intelligence be put into pop music?", and we think it can. The big problem that we've all got is that the technology is still expensive. Therefore the people with access to that technology rip off what we're talking about and do a really stupid version of it. You can bet your life groups like Ultravox and Duran Duran would use it to portray Simon LeBon in his sports car, or on a yacht with Duran Duran, or in Vienna with Ultravox. But they would totally emasculate the power of what we're talking about. They would use it in a way that everyone is still using TV. And the groups who would make creative use of it are the ones with the least access. One of our jobs is hopefully, to be the crossover group that gets in quick and establishes ourselves as the theoriticians of new television, however spurious some of our theories may actually be. Then, maybe, we can get some sponsership and train them up in investing in more radical approaches - for their own research. And that's the only option we've got open at the moment for getting access to that stuff. And we don't want it to end up like a contemporary version of Yes or Roger Waters where you get to be this ungainly technological phenomena which is just a big showbiz thing. I mean, Laurie Anderson has become like Pink Floyd really. You know, equipment-mania, and it's so preconceived and choreographed that it's more like going to a West End show, which is OK, but I find it less interesting. I think something just a bit more shambolic, home grown and still steet level would work better. It has got to be kept a kind of guerilla warfare - not where the technology impresses.
Neal: What keeps ideas, within fields such as video, from progressing at a more rapid pace?
Genesis: Everybody want to own what they do. "Duran Duran are unique, and it's God given, and that's what make them brilliant and special" - and it's just bullshit. They're as much a result of their upbringing and their input as everybody else - and the sooner people stop worrying about who thought of it first and whether or not they're brilliant because of that, the better. What is useful? What functions? What seems to make sense? What is helping? That is what matters; and the reduction of that down to the tightest compilation of useful ideas, information and techniques. The sooner that happens, the better - without anyone having to commit themselves to an ongoing, suppressive dogma. You get Duran Duran who use a video screen, and what do they do with it? They have close-ups of them playing the guitar above them playing the guitar, very useful! That's a really worthwhile piece of machinery, isn't it? So what does it do? It just masturbates pubescent girls further, that's all.
Neal: But Duran Duran are now using a large video screen which gets out to an audience of twenty thousand people at one of their concerts. Don't they get the idea about the power of TV or video across to those people?
Genesis: No, because it totally emasculates it and reduces it down to tinsel. The Duran Duran programme that was on TV was the worst kind of directionless manipulation, in fact a very distasteful form of masturbation (because I actually hold that there are forms of masturbation which can be positive). If you listen to the music, it was a monotone. I think Boyd Rice is better dance music than they are because what he does is totally physical, and your body can't help but respond - even if you hate it. And that's real dance music, when your body has to respond to the frequencies and pulses.
Monte: The whole thing is trying to get out of that circle that you're already born into. Society is already here before you're born into it. There's no way to say that anything is totally original. Obviously, you're influenced by many things that were here before you're even born. I think the whole idea is to try to escape and get out of that so that you can continue on with other things. And then start to see what your real potential is and what you can accomplish.
Neal: It seems that a lot of people think that to attract a mainstream audience Psychic TV must 'sell out' or compromise to a certain extent.
Genesis: I always thought that selling out was when you did something just for money and didn't have and motives or principles left. (laughs) That's what I thought it meant anyway.
Neal: I guess it's sort of elitism on the part of long standing Psychic TV or TG followers, when A-Ha or Duran Duran fans become interested in the same groups.
Genesis: I think that's a shame. Why does everyone assume that they know best, or that they're the only ones intelligent enough to understand something important. In my experience over many years, you can never tell who understands. Most mini-cab drivers have a much better understanding of British politics than politicians have of it. And most of the black people that I've talked to have a much better understanding of race than the white, liberal, Socialist Worker Party people. And if you're trying to do something which has a real effect on society, you have to be confident that it has the relevance to all of society - not just the easy, elite few who, for all we know, like us for completely the wrong reasons anyway. They maybe like us because they think that no-one else does. And that's not a very good reason. And I certainly don't think the way we play is in any way a musical compromise to pander to suburban people, and I don't think the content of the videos is pandering to them either. So what is selling out? Doing a concert which actually gets the authorities threatening to take you to court? If it means that suburban people actually have a more open mind and are able to develop and think and change, then I'm happy to have them. I don't care who they are or what intellectual class they're from.
Neal: I guess they feel it's a superficial invasion of a long standing trend.
Genesis: But that has always been true. We've always said that ninety percent of an audience that anyone gets you wouldn't bother giving the time of day to. There's no way you can say that I have to like everyone in my audience. I think you have to cast your net as hard as possible in the hope that one out of every five hundred is OK - you expect a great loss rate. And most of the people who tell you that they know what we're doing, don't - even though our motives are clarer than ever. We're doing what we said we were going to do, wereas before we weren't for a lot of reasons - suffice to say that other people held us back. And we may or may not be making a terrible blunder, but at least now we're going to experiment with the idea. I think what we're doing should be in the popular areana. I want to see the character of national television changed. Not all of the time, but part of the time. I want to see programs that you or I would make on television, even if it's only from midnight till two in the morning, so the public can have a choice. That's all we're ever saying - give people the choice.
Neal: In terms of religion, are you basically concerned with how the church has become a vehicle for other motives - such as political ones, or the church standing for something which has been developed over the years and now is struggling to maintain.
Genesis: Well, both and more. I'm against all inherited systems of belief and value. If it happens that one of those is the purest form of Christianity i.e., live and be nice to people, then I can just about handle it. The problem is that it's not presented that way, you have to take the whole package, and it immediately becomes dangerous again. I think that certain forms of Buddhism are a lot less obnoxious - although some of their beliefs are still pretty much rooted in their geographical aristocracy. Eastern religions actually suited the aristocracy in the East, and Christian ones the aristocracy in the West. I think the motives behind most mass religions are totally dubious, and obviously aimed at social control and the submission of the masses - so they don't get out of order and demand more than they've been told by God, Allah or whoever. They all have their passive side for the average man. You know, the Buddhist - he will be reincarnated and get better next time, so, "Don't complain now, stay in your place". The Christian - "Once you go to heaven, it will be great. It's God's will that your wife and child starve to death and just because Count so and so has a castle full of food, that's because God willed it that he was a Count". And with Muslims - "Allah willed it that you died". Hindu's the same; and they all have this thing that those without economic and other resources should not complain, because it's God's will. And those with the resources are chosen by God because they, like Mummy and Daddy, know better. And you'll be like them if you died enough times of starvation. It's quite patently bullshit. I don't believe anyone comes back. And I don't believe anyone goes to heaven either.
Neal: What happens?
Genesis: You just die. It's like any other animal. (laughs) Speaking from my own experience of being physically declared dead twice; but the Christians would argue that God knew I was going to come back so he didn't let me know what it was like - so there's always a way out. It's possible that the brain is so powerful that we don't know all of its qualities yet, that it could leave some sort of reverberation,. Another thing that might be possible is that in every brain there's a certain part of everyone's subconscious mind which is linked completely like a blanket. We all actually join up, in some neurological way, which can explain the moments of telepathy or the amazing things that Aborigines, American Indians and Amazon Indians can do with, or without, peyote. It would certainly explain the things you get with LSD when you open up certain channels. Most people, even Christian mystics that starve themselves in the desert long enough, get this feeling that there is almost a common mind - and that's what they call God. I think it's probably a biological thing and everyone can be potentially linked with it. But nobody, except for a few Shamans and mystics, have any control of how to travel with it. You get astral porjection as an example - people saying that you can train yourself to do that. If that's true then maybe you can leave a residue in that mass section of the unconscious, which means that somebody could think that they've experienced previous life. It could explain a lot of the phenomena of contact with, supposedly, dead people etc., or even the idea of psychic attack from outside. That would be the way that you could begin to pursue it in a vaguely scientific way. I haven't drawn a conclusion. I always like to think of the nearest functional explanation that I can. At the end of the day, the only thing I'm confident in is that the human brain is the root of everything. And most of what we think of as being odd phenomena are just manifestations of brain activity which we have no control over, no knowledge, of, or no language to describe yet. I re-read the introduction to 'The Final Academy' document that I wrote about dreams, and I was really pleased with it because that was saying how people dismissed them now, but once the King of Egypt had a bloke just to interpret his dreams, and Moses became the dream interpreter and got his power that way. And so-called primitive cultures, which are actually incredibly sophisticated - like in New Guinea, or the Aborigines, American Indians and Eskimos - give dreams equal credence with reality. And I think that's important. We are very much dream orientated in everything we do. A long time ago when I had just left school, somebody's mother asked me, "What do you do, and why do you do it?" And I said, "I just take my dreams far more seriously than other people. I daydream, and then try and make the daydreams real". And that's really all I've ever done. Most of the best art of this century is connected with the unconscious. This is the age of the subconscious mind. And that's why there is a revival of interest in magick. It's an intuitive feeling. The unfortunate thing is that most people try to mimic old magick rooted in the previous era, instead of trying to find a contemporary form of magic that is post-Jungian, post-Freudian and deals with Polaroid cameras, cassette recorders, televisions, and what we know about the brain. The ultimate aim in my whole life is to try, with other people, to collaborate on some kind of manual which is a hypothesis for a contemporary form of neurological magick; a book that updates it all and sweeps away all that confusing mimicry, and says that the idea of magick as practiced by some of the so-called primitive cultures is essential to human survival and development. That a combination of primitive and pagan with technology is the only means of survival and growth. Without it we're doomed. If we don't reconnect with dreams and the unconscious mind, I think that's the end. I think the only path for human evolution now is a magickal one in it's truest sense, based on the whole brain - asleep and awake. And if it doesn't happen, there's nothing left to do - it's the only path left, mistakes and all. Whenever it appears that I am ruthless, it's because I will not tolerate less than an obsession with that. And as soon as people waver, I'm not interested. I don't mind them going off and doing whatever they want, but I can't work with anything less than an obsessive interest in mankind and the search for an expression of hope. (pause) I would like to take the best people everywhere and put them in one place and blast a very big hole in society's structure - psychological and social. We're not so interested in economics - because that's just a result of psychology anyway. Social conditioning and psychology dictate the rest of the structures basically. That's another mistake that so many people make, they go for the material mechanics instead of thinking that actually what is happening is the basics. With anything - if you pick the right spot and chop away at that one spot, one mega bridge can fall.
Neal: What would your reaction be if somebody were to say that the ideas of Psychic TV were brilliant on paper, but the darker nature of the ideas and interests tend to overshadow the original ideas?
Hilmar: I would think that they didn't have enough capabilities of grasping the situation really. It's this thing that people demand beauty and consistency in the sense that they want something that will move them only in the direction they want to be moved in. We want to do something more than that. We want to tear structures down from beneath, which means we have to link in with a lot of fears that people have, and we have to deal with areas which are repressed and forbidden for many people.
Monte: If you're talking about a fully integrated personality which can rationally express aspects of its existence, it has to incorporate all aspects of its existence and integrate them. In the jungle, there are nice flowers, but there are also a lot of really violent things happening. If you try and pretend that they're not happening, either you're going to get destroyed or you'll just ignorantly go about destroying all types of others things because you pretend that you don't have those tendencies in yourself to begin with. You have to admit that you have them in order to be able to control them.
Genesis: The motives for what we do with anything are always the same. The motives are to reveal the nature of things so that people are able to deal with them. And also so they learn how to analyze, choose, and then construct something more positive.
Hilmar: In psychological terms, making the individual whole won't happen until he has finally come to terms with the darker side of his shadow. And if he doesn't do that, if he doesn't recognize that he has instincts which are presently being labelled as basic instincts, animal instincts or whatever, he is always going to project them into his surroundings. He will see his worst qualities in other people - and that will irritate him. He will hate these people because they are, in a way, a manifestation of what he hates in himself and doesn't want to see.
Genesis: We don't say, "This is good, this bad". And when you call it "the darker side", I even question that. Is it darker to pretend that everything is wonderful? Or is it darker to be factual and not be scared of it and still see it optimistically? I think our view is very optimistic and not at all dark. What they're doing is experiencing the residual effects of conditioned morality. They've been trained to think that certain things which might be dealt with or hinted at or implied by what we do are inherently dark or bad, when I would question that. Do they mean sexuality? Is it bad? Of course not! Sexuality is sexuality. What's bad?
Neal: Are enough people at a gig open enough to make a judgement like that?
Genesis: How many is enough? We're doing a long term re-education programme, training people to become aware of their subconscious and their irrational responses which is what most people are going through - which is the first stage if you like. Other people who have been once or twice, thought more, read inerviews and so on, go into, if you like, another phase which is no longer just emotionally responding and just taking that as truth, but actually thinking, "Why am I responding this way, what does it mean? Am I tricking myself, is what is being presented perfectly reasonable?" There's one basic thing going on at many of our events now; if people are listening intently, then the films and videos are immediately slipping into their subconscious, and vice versa. So, at any given moment, people are absorbing information subconsciously and therefore not even aware of why they're responding or what's happening. And it takes time for those images, ideas, sounds, rhythms and patterns to germinate in the subconscious and come through, and sometimes they can create a minor crisis in somebody. But I think the fact that people even discuss things on that level after one of our concerts is an incredible compliment. We are aiming for a mature, constructive, ongoing discussion about what is really possible; the potential that both the audience and the group can have together. And what that can grow to be and the power that it can unleash, and the fact that it becomes a way of life. You can look at the world differently. You can look at other people differently. And that is what we're trying to do. We are trying to encourage people to ask questions. To try to look at the structures behind things, the way that they behave, the way they respond. Of course our enemies are going to try to think of anything that they can to discourage that happening because it's the most dangerous thing that can go on in any society - to get people awake, thinking, and saying, "No", or "Why?". Anything as basic as that is much more potent than a bomb. People really wanting to understand the biggest threat that control has. Because control is based on non-thinking backed up by physical violence. That's basically how it works, it's as simple as that. That's why people in the more overtly fascist states start with nurseries - they train kids just to babble dogma as soon as they can talk. And it's not because they want them to say the words, it's because they want them not to think. At the bottom line, it's about thought and not thought, doing and not doing. And that's why, at the very basic level, we are more political than any of those groups that go around spouting cyclical politics, that actually believe in the sham of the political system. They just give the excuse for law and order and everything else. There is actually always a route around the obvious. And we're trying to find a route around a lot of obvious things simultaneously because there's not enough time to play those games. Hilmar was saying earlier that each age generates its own culture to mirror what's happening, and now it is quite patently television. And any group which is not dealing with the nature of television is basically already redundant.
Neal: Would it be possible to get a Psychic TV video on MTV?
Genesis: There will be a way round it, we'll find a way around it which might mean that we get a one hour documentary about our activities on National TV there anyway. It's like in England just recently, National TV has accepted us as we are. The great compliment is that they want to ask us what we think. They don't ask us for promo videos, but they want to hear what we have to say. After they've talked to us, they usually go away at least neutral and often allies because what we say makes sense to them. And they're surprised becuase they usually come prejudiced against us. And the more people there are working within television coming on to our side who are at least prepared to always listen, then the stronger we're getting. Because at the end of the day, we're better off on national television than in NME every week. We can get twelve million people in an hour on TV. It would take five years if we were in the NME. And it would actually only be about two hundred thousand because it's the same readership anyway.
Neal: Do you feel that your audience is beginning to change?
Monte: I hope so. If they're not going to change, we're just gonna have to change them. It's the hard way or the easy way and I don't care which way it is. I think we're getting a more diverse cross-section of people which is what I'm interested in. I'd like to really see a wider cross-section from younger to older. Then I'd feel we were making more progress.
Genesis: What we are dedicated to more than ever now is cultural mobility - to present live events where the public are given a chance to see and hear music, ballet, writing, films and videos. So a ballet audience hears music they'd otherwise ignore, and rock fans hear writing they'd otherwise not read, and so on. In a real sense, education by presentation. It doesn't matter whether the audience like it all, at least their information is being widened and challenged. That has to be a healthy development. Also, it puts a little life back into live events. Most of us feel that going to a gig isn't very exciting anymore. We know what's coming, the moves and the time length. So now Psychic TV are co-ordinating the method to revitalise live events, where you have to be there to experience it - no system of documentation can capture it. A technological and contemporary application of what was tried in the sixties with happenings and mixed media extravaganzas. Our video projections expand and challenge concepts of TV, and television is, in our opinion, the most potent force shaping human social culture, political and economic culture, possibly even affecting evolutionary mutation in the brain. Our name is no mistake. It's a deliberate declaration of intent politically. We don't live in an isolated world. I have never been interested in working on my own because to me that seems to be the old way - and also the dangerous path. You only have to look at somebody like Jim Jones or Charles Manson to see how that kind of thing can end up - given even a marginal amout of charisma or ideas. But it also just seems a very unsatisfactory way of working. If what you're thinking makes any sense, there have to be other people who feel the same. And what you should do is look for those people and develop a network of collaborators, and then just maximise the effect of the work you can get done. I don't have to read all the books that Hilmar has read because he has read them. He can save months of library work in an hour. And I can probably do the same for him in certain areas, and Monte, and so on. I'm sure there are things that you know which we don't know which saves us time. The less time we waste, the more we get done. I think there has been a turn around. I think people are beginning to listen again. There are more pieces to the pattern, and as Hilmar said, "The organisation has been tightened up a lot", so I think inevitably, that will have its reverberation - like ripples. People will feel that all these changes and reorganisations have been for a purpose - which is to make the whole idea closer to the original concept. And just by watching and observing and listening, they'll see what we say is what we try and do. That as soon as we get access to funds, we spend it on more of what we want to do. And the more funds, help, and support we get, the more we'll get done. The only thing I'd like to leave behind at the end is just a philosophical manual that was the equivalent of having everything that everyone has done in their lifetime in one place. And you could just take and use whatever was still appropriate. That's the most useful thing that you can leave people - actual ideas that make life have more sense.

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