Finality

Excerpt from "The Art and Science of Knot-Tying", 1884, by Captain Percy Lockhart, GBE, KCB

(from page 6 of the Third Edition, Charles Banks and Sons Publishers, Edinburgh):

…oldest record of divinatory knot tying can be found painted on Phoenician pottery, where the ritual binding and unbinding of various kinds of knots through various and apparently rigorously codified untying strategies formed one of the cornerstones of “folk” religion.  Interesting, as reported in Frazer’s magnum opus “The Golden Bough”, similar customs have been observed among Breton fisherfolk, who also utilize complicated “knot-games” as a means of intuiting the propitiousness of putting out to sea for the day.

The knot, along with weaving, knitting, stitching, and various other examples of the fabric- and fibre-arts, reflects, perhaps beyond all other crafts, the intersection of human agency and divine influence, an ordering of nature that is simultaneously mystical and mundane, and therefore liminal and the domain of sorcerers and witches.  Literature is filled with examples of the mystical importance of knot-tying: Sigismund’s vision of a witch knotting a net along the banks of the mist-shrouded and wraith-haunted Danube; the unspeakable covenant forged betwixt Mordred and the Black Man of the Woods and symbolized by the untying of the bindings of Mordred’s sword belt; Marduk’s mastery of the winds, knotted through magic into a useful rope that allowed him to escape the belly of the World Fish; and countless others.

Then, too, there is the significance of the knot among practicing seamen, important well beyond its rudimentary function of lashing sails and lines, of fixing ropes and guides.  Sailors utilize the knot in their “Courts-at-Sea”, believing that a well-tied knot so orders the universe around them that no falsehood may be uttered when one’s hands are placed upon it, and so make them the centerpiece of their quant maritime judiciary. 

Similarly, sailors seal an oath with the ritual tying of a knot, believing that an oathtaker thereby binds themselves to the oath, and the consequences of breaking it, securely.  There is, of course, the famous tale of the Spanish Sailors who, having taken a British Galleon in the Caribbean, hide their treasure on one of the innumerable isles that dot that part of the world.  They place their treasure within a great box, each man wrapping a rope around the box and securing it fast with a knot, swearing that all men still living within a decade hence shall return and dig up their treasure, and untie their own knot.  Of course, a man, blinded by the lust of gold, breaks the compact within a year, and secretly returns.  He cuts the knots, a grave sin that severs in one strike both the physical and metaphysical threads that bind us together, thereby sealing his own doom.  Of course, we need not complete so famous a tale; sufficed to say, his end, including as it ropes of the famous Sargasso seaweed and the eels that nest therein, offers a hideous but cosmically pleasing symmetry to this gruesome tale.

Thus, we would ask that the beginning student of seamanship treat the following pages of this treatise with the seriousness that they deserve, for the art and science of knot-tying offers one of the scant pieces of safety to be found when Man ventures out to sea… 

Mark Chemtrail Episode IV: A Taste...For MURDER!

Odin

Volumes from the Crimson Hexagon: Urban Ecosystem Disruption: Theory and Practice

Urban Ecosystem Disruption: Theory and Practice

Author: Zeno Citium (pseudonym) 1962

Page Count: 424 pages + 45 page unusable index with incorrect page numbers and nonexistent topics

Publication History:

-1962: Originally hand-published and distributed by counter-culture groups based largely in California, Chicago, and Toronto; first recorded occurrence was at the conclusion of a “Guerrilla theater” performance outside the La Brea Tar Pits by a group called “The Wonderworkers”.

-1964: (run of 250) the “Orange Edition”, published by Calabaza Press, a now-defunct “alternative press” in San Francisco.  This edition included a foreword by someone claiming to be Jean-Paul Sarte; this “pseudo-Sarte” was actually proven to have been Arnold Lee Westerfield, a philosophy graduate student at UCLA.

-1967: The entire book (sans index) is published as 10 articles in the February-November issues of “Ch!nga” (v.2, issues 2-11), a radical leftist magazine published by Aleph Press (defunct).

-1971: 100 unbound copies of the “Orange Edition” are discovered in a storage unit in Bakersfield, CA.  These are bound and sold mail-order through magazine ads by an individual identified as “G. O. D. Harp”, though without “Sarte’s” intro.

-1976: Barzai Press (Toronto, Canada) publishes the “Black Edition” in a run of 1000, with the “unusable index” bound upside down.  Only ~500 volumes were ever distributed, as the RCMP raided their offices and confiscated all remaining copies.

-1977: Direct Action Press (Chicago, USA) puts out a 250-page abridged version apparently taken from the Ch!nga articles, excising most of the “theoretical” chapters in favor of the more “practical” methods sections.  An initial run of 200 volumes sells out quickly at their Chicago area bookstore, and a second run of 600 volumes was ordered, though never delivered.

-1981 to 1986: Xeroxed, hand-stapled copies of the original 1962 “Wonderworkers” edition are advertised in the backs of numerous left-wing and survivalist magazines and pamphlets, sourced from a P.O. Box in Bozeman, Montana.

-1989: a text file edition of a work titled “Urban Disruption” appears on-line on several different bulletin boards; these editions quickly become intermingled with other author’s works and writings, resulting in multiple iterations of less-than-faithful copies of the original.

-1994: The “Handbook on Urban Disruption” is offered from Anachronism Press (Los Angeles, USA), a reprinting of Direct Action’s abridged edition plus a collection of largely unintelligible essays on “occulto-anarchism” written by a “St.-G.”.

-2002: digital copies in a variety of formats and of various official and un-offical editions of “Urban Ecosystem Distruption: Theory and Practice” are made available online.     

HISTORY OF “URBAN ECOSYSTEM DISRUPTION: THEORY AND PRACTICE”

“Direct Action” methods are those that attempt to proactively force social change, often through embracing Mao’s famous quote about power growing from the barrel of a gun.  The history of the countercultural movement in America can be viewed as a constant give-and-take between nonviolent, peaceful demonstrators and those for whom violence becomes a means to an end.  The history of many individuals within the countercultural movement can also be seen as a similar ebb-and-flow between these two poles, with some exhibiting greater or lesser flexibility for the use of direct action over the course of their careers.

The strategies, tactics, and methods employed by those bringing direct action into their social movements are a relatively little studied aspect of the history of the 1950s-80s.  To the FBI and CIA, it was clear that most of these techniques were ultimately sourced at the Kremlin as soviet agitprop and covert disruption operations, utilizing American-born counter-cultural warriors as tools for the spread of communism.  In some cases this may have been the case; afterall, some of the countercultural groups were explicitly communist, Marxist, or Maoist in political philosophy, and had contacts or members with international ties.  However, it is similarly demonstrable that some direct action techniques were gleaned from returning Korean and Vietnam War veterans who, having grown disillusioned with American Imperialism and military adventurism, simply transferred their government training to new spheres of operation.  Finally, it is likely that a great number of these techniques were developed experientially, hard won wisdom and skill gleaned from years of battling with the authorities on the streets. 

Occasionally, however, it appears that some proponents of direct action took it upon themselves to organize and disseminate advice and theory.  Indeed, for some groups, their entire purpose was seen as distributing manuals on social subversion; that is to say, teaching direct action techniques became their countercultural act.  Often these were in the form of hand-typed pamphlets, sometimes detailing the philosophical aspects of rebellion, but more often providing brutally efficient treatises on one of more “practical” fields of social disruption, including bomb-building, police evasion techniques, and breaking-and-entering guides.

One text, however, produced only in intermittent, limited runs, had a disproportionate effect on direct action groups.  This text, “Urban Ecosystem Disruption: Theory and Practice”, continues to be a source of information for anarchists, radical groups on the left and right, and rank criminals today.  A simple internet search provides numerous digitized versions available for free download.

In part, this longevity may be ascribed to the text’s rigorously tested practicality; unlike many so-called “cookbooks”, the techniques, practices, devices, and plans provided in “Urban Ecosystems” largely work as advertised.   However, an additional difference between it and its paler imitators may also explain its popularity, specifically the fact that “Urban Ecosystems” combines its practical chapters with intensely researched and well-written “theoretical” sections.  Thus, in a copy of the book, one may learn the art of lock-picking in one chapter, and then read a discussion on the philosophy and history of infrastructural integration in fast-growing cities.  Chapters on bomb-making are interspersed with chapters on the similarities between tropical forest ecosystems and urban ecosystems, complete with “trophic” energy flow charts and diagrams.  To be sure, even the theoretical chapters were written in the service of practical goals of social change and urban chaos.  For instance, the “trophic flow” of Urban Ecosystems helpfully points out bottlenecks in vital services that could be exploited, should one be so inclined.  Even so, these theoretical and academically rigorous sections provide a philosophical and moral, albeit a twisted one, underpinning to practical direct action largely absent in the other media on the same topic.  Similarly, while “anarchic-philosophy” tracts were thick on the ground in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, few of them also provided useful, practical guides alongside the bloviating.  For these reasons, “Urban Ecosystem Disruption: Theory and Practice” has remained the gold standard in direct action manuals.

Authorship of the text is in some doubt; obviously “Zeno Citium”, a reference to a famous ancient Greek Philosopher often touted as one of the first true anarchists, is a nom de plume.  Textural analysis of the chapters has revealed that there must have been at least four authors, although there is no clear pattern to who wrote what.  In other words, the same “author” is as likely to write about bombs and hotwiring cars as they are to deal with the underpinnings of kinematic wave theory for traffic planning. 

Additionally, the anarchic nature of counter-cultural book publishing as well as the subsequent explosion of digitally published versions of the book has resulted in some rather dramatic “mutations” in the text.  Some sections have been removed or edited or annotated by subsequent authors, sometimes to point of producing an unrecognizable “edition” of the book.  For the purposes of this brief history, however, we will adhere to the history of officially published versions of Zeno Citium’s magnum opus, with one important exception.

The first instance of the text being publically distributed was as a hand-bound book at a performance art event in southern California.  A “guerilla theater” group staged an un-licensed, un-permitted, and apparently sexually explicit performance of “Oedipus Rex” with live actors and puppets outside the La Brea Tar Pits.  Preceding the show, members of the troupe handed out approximately fifty copies of the book.  After the police arrived, a further fifty copies were tossed to the crowd and various bystanders along the troupe’s path of flight.  It is to these first hundred copies that all subsequent editions of the book trace their origins.  

Copies of this book, handbound with either thread or glue and cardboard, soon began to show up in other major centers of the counterculture, including Chicago, Toronto, and New York, and were similarly subject to “guerilla” distribution techniques (themselves described in the Book in a chapter titled “Spreading the Bad News”).  Importantly, these early editions included no forward or introduction, but did include the famously unusable Index, with incorrect page numbers and non-existent and bizarre topics making up the bulk (for example, “Lemuria” as a topic is cited on dozens of pages, but never once is actually mentioned in the text; similar treatments can be seen for such disparate topics as “Ethnobotony of Leng”, “Political Necrophilia”, and “Yarn”, to name a few).

In 1964 Calabaza press, a small-run “alt press” based in San Francisco, offered the famous “Orange Edition” with a Forward by “Jean-Paul Sarte”.  This dubious claim was immediately doubted by anyone actually familiar with Sarte’s writings, although it did gain the text some notice in the mainstream press as well as stern denunciations by commenters on the right, who used it as further evidence of the decadent and ultimately destructive politics of liberal higher education.  Eventually, authorship of the Forward would be determined to belong to a philosophy graduate student who, a few years after publication of the “Orange Edition”, would vanish in the Chihuahuan desert.

Calabaza Press would shut down in 1966, though one of its editors, Jane Athene Pisaro, founded Aleph press in Los Angeles, a radical leftist publishing house most famous for their magazine “Ch!nga”, which ran from 1966-1970.  Working off her own annotated “Orange Edition”, Pisaro would publish a series of 10 articles (under the penname Athene Loyolla) in the ’67 run of Ch!nga on “Urban ecosystem Disruption”. 

 These were largely verbatim sections of the original work, edited down and with some of the more dangerous instructions removed, and often bookended by her own introductions and conclusions expanding on her own ideas regarding direct action techniques.

In 1971, several boxes of unbound copies of the old “Orange Edition” were found in a storage unit in Bakersfield California.  Whose copies these were, and how they got there, remained a mystery, although Pisaro did have family in the oil town of Taft, not far from Bakersfield, and as such seems the most likely candidate.  Similarly, it seems possible that Pisaro herself was “G.O.D. Harp”, the individual who had the copies bound and offered for sale in a variety of publications, although that is only speculation as her movements after Aleph press folded in 1970 are unknown.   Pisaro died of a drug overdose in 1980.

Regardless, the “Harp Edition” was an important moment in the book’s history, as up to that point it had mostly only moved through left-leaning circles.  Advertisements for this edition, however, included journals and magazines on both sides of the political spectrum, as well as the more politically neutral publications of the then nascent green living/survivalist/primitivist movement. 

Based on typographical errors and word choice, it is believed that one of the “Harp Editions” served as the base for the 1976 “Black Edition”, a volume put out by Barzai Press in Canada.  It is believed that this is the largest ever print run for the work, as Barzai ordered 1000 volumes of the book (sans the “Sarte” introduction). 

It was the “Black Edition” that brought the book to the attention of the law enforcement community.  First, copies of it were found in police raids on suspected “subversive” groups in both the pacific northwest and American south.  Second, it played a part in the famous “White River” murders, where pages of this book were used to wrap body parts and organs sent to the police in Cheyenne, Wyoming.  The pages used for this grisly purpose were exclusively taken from the more theoretical sections, including chapters on psychogeography, ecosystem theory, and liminality in the urban landscape.  At least nine individuals were murdered in the still unsolved case, and the “weird” nature of the wrapping paper fueled speculation about the murderer’s politics.  As a result of the largely negative publicity, the RCMP raided the offices and warehouses of Barzai Press and removed 500 copies of “Urban Ecosystem Disruption”.  It is believed that these copies were destroyed.

Direct Action Press put out a heavily abridged version of the book in 1977, apparently taken from the 1967 Ch!nga articles.  This slim volume was more concerned with the practical lessons to be taken from the book, and excised most of the more theory-heavy sections of the articles.  The initial run of 200 volumes sold out quickly, as “Urban Ecosystem Disruption” had by that point become something of a collector’s item for the counter-culturally inclined.  An additional 600 copies were order, but never delivered, as Direct Action press was shut down as part of a large-scale COINTELPRO operation in 1978, with most of its editors serving jail time for a variety of drug trafficking and obscenity charges.

Intermittently, Xeroxed copies were made available for sale in the backs of many “fringe” magazines, most of them coming out of Bozeman, MT in the early to mid-80s.  Most were apparently based on the Barzai Press Black edition.  The advent of Bulletin Board Systems in the late 80s saw the book’s transformation into the digital realm, the first instance of which was as a text file on a government conspiracy BBS titled, simply, “Urban Disruption”.  Subsequent versions of the file, as well as other iterations, soon began to make the rounds, culminating in the internet boom of the 90s, where heavily edited and annotated “editions” begin to pour from a variety of websites.

The most recent physical iteration of the book was offered by Anachronism Press out of L.A. in 1994, although its relationship to the original versions is noticeable strained by a number of bizarre and heavily occultic essays that have been added.  Most of these have a decidedly millennial or apocalyptic character, and deal with the author’s (a “St-G.”) synoptic and highly idiosyncratic worldview that ties government conspiracy, magic and occultism, and alien abduction phenomena into one overarching master theory.

As mentioned above, the text has enjoyed a relatively long life, a trend that will undoubtedly continue as we transition into a data-age maturity.  Indeed, it is largely this book’s history that has given it its cultural capital on what is otherwise a medium noted for its ephemerality.  The internet has also facilitated its sharing, well beyond the heyday of do-it-yourself printing and binding in the 60s and 70s.  It has been subjected to much editorial control beyond its originators sight, although this seems appropriate given its status as primarily a messenger of anarchy, both literary and otherwise. 

Reproduced below is the table of contents from the original Orange Edition, Calabaza Press, 1964:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FORWARD by J-P. Sarte………………...……………………………………….vii

Psychogeography of the Urban Landscape: Reconnoitering the Enemy’s Territory…1

Picking Locks 101.............................................................................…32

Tricks for Scaling Fences.................................................................................41

Urban Ecosystem Theory: Form…....................................................................48

Picking Locks 201……………………...……………………………………….65

Urban Ecosystem Theory: Function………………………………...……………………70

Infrastructural Analysis……………………………………………………………..……95

Building a Redbox…....…………………………………………………………………..111

Hotwiring a Car……….….………………………………………………………………133

Spreading the Butter Thin: Disrupting Emergency Services……………...…………136

Manufacturing KNO3 for Fun and Profit.………………………………………………145

Distillation……………………………….………………………………………………..150

Fuses, Primers, Fun………………………………………………………………………160

Lingua Legis: Police Codes and Terminology…..………………………………………164

Napalm, Just Like Mom Used To Make Back On The Farm…..………………………172

Institutional Aggression and The Individual………....………....………………………..180

Fake IDs…..………………………………………………………………………………..195

Chemical Equivalencies…..………………………………………………………………203

A List of Slang and Cant……………………………………………………………………209

Molotov Variants…………………………………………………………………………..214

Tennis Ball Bomb…………………………………………………………………………..225

Liminal Acts in Liminal Spaces: A Primer of Urban Decay……………………………….229

Forbidden Communications….……………………………………………………………..260

Gaming the System: Post Offices, Phone Booths, and Public Address Systems…..278

Smoke Bombs……………………………………………………………………………296

Improvised Weapons………………………………………………………………………313

Evading Surveillance………………………………………………………………………..330

Flash Powder………………………………………………………………………………343

Black Powder……………………………………………………………………………..346

Weird Drugs……………………………………………………………………………….350

Co-opting a Demonstration………………………………………………………………..357

Co-opting a Movement……………………………………………………………………369

Spotting a Narc………………………………………………………………………………377

Raiding a Lab…………….....……………………………………………………………….383

Spreading the Bad News…………………………………………………………………..387

Some Basic Tradecraft……………..………………………………………………………394

Urban Ecosystem Collapse……………………………………………………………….400

INDEX……………………………………………………………………………………..424

Mark Chemtrail, Episode III: The Destruction of Jared Syn

A Diabolical Pact

Here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is a page written in backwards Latin, supposedly codifying the agreement between Catholic Priest Urbain Grandier and a whole bunch of Demons, including Lucifer, Satan, Astaroth, and a few others.  Apparently, in exchange for his soul, Grandier would become completely irresistible to women, would have the friendship of the rich and powerful, and would himself receive more than his fair share of worldly power and pleasure.  This document was used as evidence for Grandier's diabolical powers in his trial, eventually sending him to be burned at the stake.

Themis

Mark Chemtrail EPISODE II: The Legend of Curly's Gold

Always Judging...

Practical Solutions to Elf Problems

Being a Tale Originally Told Upon Twitter, in Thirteen Parts

     The Elves would come every full moon, stealing young men from the village and dancing them to death in the forest.  Priests prayed.  Wizards chanted.  Witches tried to trap them in silver circles.  Nothing worked, and they danced on.
   
     "Superstitious crap," scoffed Auntie.  "We need less magic and more thinking," she said, heading for the clocktower.  Auntie spent all day disassembling the clock's mechanism, hamming and welding and cursing and wrenching.
   
     The moon rose, and the piping began.  But when the young men stumbled towards the woods, a new figure followed.  Auntie and I watched from the clearing's edge.  Her clockwork man, tall and bronze, gleamed in the torchlight.  The Elf Queen's cat-eyes glittered.  He bowed.  She kicked off her unicorn-hide moccasins and took him in her arms.  Pipes and drums echoed.  She was dark and fluid, he was cool and metallic.  She laughed at the moon, and they danced.
   
     All night he clicked along, the Queen sweating, her people stamping feet and cheering.  The moon sank, the sun rose.  The elves left at dawn.  The Queen led the clockwork man into the wood.  Auntie threw her his key.  The Queen waved.
   
     The elves still dance, but now they don't take our young men.  You can hear pipes, and laughter, and his ticking.  For saving them, Auntie had her pick of the young men.  I don't believe she's decided on one, just yet.
   
     That's when I developed my love of science. Thanks for considering my application to your University's program.

Oooooowww!

Huh!?

Rota Fortunae

Mark Chemtrail Episode I: The Awakening