Oo-er. Jim of Cloud 23 points out that Joel Biroco has a blog.. It looks great. Mind you, he’s always been into handprinting stuff (mmmm marbled paper – some things just can’t be done online, can they?)

Joel used to edit a zine called KAOS in the 80s. It was easily one of the best zines, ever. KAOS was supposed to be about chaos magick with a nod to taoism (the I-Ching). But it was really about REAL magick/spirituality/exploration – ranting, rucking, feuding, character assasination, taking the wind out of the sails of the pompous.

I think I must have been about 17 when I saw an advert for KAOS in a little Coil booklet. It boasted coverage of subjects like “the anti-christ”, “the OTO’s secret of IX” and my immediate reaction was “Huh? What IS all this stuff?” swiftly followed by “There is no way I’m writing away for this”. It all freaked me right out, and this was a time when I was getting all sorts of weird shit through the post on a regular basis.

About a year later, I moved down to London. College and T.O.P.Y. beckoned. (It’s a moot point which taught me more, but now is not the time to go into that).

You could occasionally buy KAOS in (the now late and lamented) Compendium Books in Camden, though for some reason I was only able to pick up alternate issues. It was stuffed with great articles on all sorts of subjects, but the jewel in the crown was the letters – really intense, long diatribes filled with bile. People accusing other people of all sorts of misdeeds. People who you’d read books by, or owned records by. People like Gerald Suster, Bob Black, Hakim Bey, Ray Sherwin, Genesis P-Orridge.

It was all incredibly bizarre, self-referential, bitchy. Totally compelling.

In retrospect there was some merit to KAOS’ beef with T.O.P.Y. – trying to shake it up and see if there was any substance when the (optional!) Gen-worship fell out the bottom. Similar to my approach, in fact 😉

At the time I just wrote it off as more jealousy. We were young and we had a lot to prove, but (at least in the London Access Point) we totally came up with goods time after time.

It’s not like slagging off T.O.P.Y. was difficult, or anything! I remember a “meet the groups” bash at Talking Stick where all the usual suspects were given 10 minutes to talk about their grouplets (groupuscules! you gotta love that ultra-left denigration terminology!).

Jesus, some of those talks were interminable. Even the Illuminates of Thanateros (the de facto Chaos Magick group, who were supposed to be all innovative and exciting) mumbled on about some castle in Austria and not much else.

We decided the best option was to do 5 minutes in which the man Fred Carter delivered a completely scathing over the top theatrical denouncement of everything T.O.P.Y. was supposed to stand for – everyone’s rumours, misunderstandings, criticisms were paraded out there big style. It blew everyone else away.

Anyway, back to KAOS. There’s a lot to be learnt about human nature in those pages – self-styled “magi” who are only powerful in their own heads, the herd mentality of people in occult groups, the nature of “scenes”.

These days I have very little idea about what is going on in the London (and international) occult scene, but it seems distinctly less vibrant than the period in the late 80s and early 90s when all this was going off. These things go in cycles, however.

So… time moves on, and apparently Joel has said some nice things about the Association of Autonomous Astronauts at some point. As an ego-maniac, I regard the AAA as being something of a litmus test for occultniks. If they can understand how it fits in with what they are (ostensibly) doing then they might be alright. If not, probably better to leave them to their robes, dodgy goth jewelry and dusty old books.

I’m sure this entry will be goobledegook to a lot of people, but it’s still worth checking the Biroco blog because he writes well and there are some jewels for the general reader amongst the other stuff.

And it’s better than reading (wannabe) music journalists banging on about Big Brother, no? (Shit, this bitchiness is infectious. Aieeeeeeeee!)