BETWEEN THE GROOVE: EPISODE 08
“Nuts, crackers, bananas.”
Fuckup: Right then, Chapter Eight is on the decks! It’s called ‘The Peanut Method’. A caller has challenged us to guess what the peanut’s all about, Hal. Any immediate psychic hits bra?
Hal: Haha, not yet! Let’s see what the text gives us. It kicks off with a big chunk of KRS-One’s “Aztechnical,” laying out the Mayan Long Count cycle – K’in, Winal, Tun, K’atun, B’ak’tun – 5125 years, applying it to the Milky Way… That directly connects back to the Mayan Calendar synchronicity mentioned right at the start in the book’s blurb. So, cycles, cosmology, deep time… is the peanut a cosmic nut?
Fuckup: Could be! Meanwhile, back in Amsterdam, Max is cycling through traffic dressed “like a gnome on a ski slope” – ruby-red jacket, mint-green hat. Stands out a bit, does Max. He gets home, finds Percy asleep amidst the usual creative debris – books, reefer remnants.
Hal: Max wakes him up, whispering, finds last night’s leftovers – lasagna, crab cakes, space muffins – spread out like an “edible coral reef.” Then tells Percy they need to go see Plush.
Fuckup: And Percy, barely awake, immediately launches into “History may be a nightmare which I’m trying to write…” quoting Joyce, naturally.
Hal: Max’s reaction is priceless: “Jesus, go home, not every joke has to be based on a pun you twit, be original.” Shows that classic dynamic in the TRB crew – Percy the high-concept intellectual, Max maybe a bit more grounded or just knackered.
Fuckup: So, based on this opening… what’s the peanut? The Mayan cycles? Maybe the peanut represents a seed, a small unit containing the whole pattern? Or maybe it’s just… they need peanuts for the munchies after looking at that edible coral reef? Could be anything at this stage!
Hal: Yeah, no clear clues yet! Could be cosmic, could be culinary, could be a code word for some dodgy Amsterdam deal they forgot about. We’ll have to keep listening to find out what ‘The Peanut Method’ actually involves. This chapter’s starting with Mayan cosmology and breakfast leftovers, so anything’s possible.
Fuckup: Right, Hal, next hit from Chapter Eight, ‘The Peanut Method’. And it starts with another absolute mind-melter of a CUT TO scene!
Hal: You’re not kidding! Bruno, Vico, Nietzsche, and James Joyce dressed in full ceremonial Mayan gear, standing on top of a pyramid, painting geometric symbols with giant ostrich feather brushes?! It’s smashing together European intellectual history with ancient Mesoamerican cosmology in the most surreal, ritualistic way possible. Another glimpse of the ‘Tribe’ across time and space?
Fuckup: Must be! Then we cut back to Plush opening the door to Max and Percy, who arrived last snippet. Plush is clearly terrified about something – “shit is going down” – but tries to play it cool when Max asks if he’s okay.
Hal: Classic deflection! “Naa, had little sleep, been reading too much news and not enough poetry, it gives me the trots…” He puts on the “happy creative face,” but inside, the text tells us, he’s “worried sick.”
Fuckup: And worried about what? Briq again, and the alt-right going mainstream. He’s been doing his research (citing Bellingcat!), convinced Briq is linked to people taking cash to troll leftists and spread propaganda for Russian oligarchs, exploiting towns left behind by austerity.
Hal: He explicitly calls out the tactic, straight from Goebbels apparently: “accuse the target group of precisely what you are doing.” And laments that in our world of media monopolies and kleptocrats – even naming UK papers like The Sun and Daily Mail – these old Nazi tactics still work depressingly well.
Fuckup: So, while Plush is dealing with Mayan pyramids popping up in his narrative cuts, he’s simultaneously grappling with very real-world, contemporary political anxieties – state-sponsored trolling, disinformation, the legacy of austerity, media monopolies, and the insidious effectiveness of old propaganda techniques in the digital age.
Hal: The contrast is stark – the bizarre, high-concept visions existing right alongside grounded fears about specific political threats and tactics. It really anchors the weirdness in a recognizable, if terrifying, reality.
Fuckup: Right, Hal, let’s keep wading through the choppy waters of Chapter Eight, or is this Seven. Man, I’m hallucinating more than one of Elon’s AIs. Plush is digging into the archives again…
Hal: Hahahaaa, Yeah, he explicitly mentions this section comes from abandoned books – Open Source History from 2009 and The TribeTable Method, literary abortions from NaNoWriMo! It’s like he’s sampling his own failed projects to build this one. Very meta. Max and Percy chime in with some quickfire banter too.
Fuckup: Plush then reads from his notes, laying out this interpretation of the Justice or Adjustment card from the Thoth Tarot – “Justice and Libra, Venus with the ostrich plume of meat… harlequin DJ queen… holds a big sword… weighing magical orbs…” He’s translating that formal Tarot imagery into his own weird DJ/fashion dimension.
Hal: But Percy gets real serious, interrupting the Tarot talk. “Put it in the dossier… when are you putting it out?… That shit needs to get out now, flick the switch, publish or perish, people are dying out there.” He’s feeling the real-world urgency, contrasting sharply with Plush’s esoteric explorations. His relief at finally saying it is compared, bizarrely, to a Tory minister helping the poor!
Fuckup: Max just says, “All turbines turning at once.” Percy talks about needing tools for “twin-worlds,” a “digital voicebox twin,” and suggests Dec 21st for a website launch, while still doubting the standard Mayan apocalypse story.
Hal: Then Max throws out this hilarious theory – what if the Mayans were eight years out on their 2012 prediction because of daylight savings time or something similar?! It’s such a mundane explanation for a cosmic prophecy!
Fuckup: Plush seems struck by the idea. And then, CUT TO: A Mayan priest, off his face on magic mushrooms, carving the Dresden Codex, laughing his head off and accidentally miscalculating the dates by about eight years!
Hal: Brilliant! It provides this perfectly absurd, psychedelic explanation for why the 2012 apocalypse didn’t happen as predicted, tying Max’s joke directly into ancient history via mushroom-fueled clerical error. It totally fits the book’s blend of high concept, low comedy, and historical remixing.
Fuckup: So this snippet gives us more insight into the project’s layered history (using old texts), the urgency felt by the crew versus Plush’s process, more Mayan date speculation, and a fantastic punchline blaming the whole 2012 thing on a tripping priest’s bad math. Never fails to surprise!
Fuckup: Okay, Hal, nearly at the end of Chapter Seven now. Let’s see what Plush is laying down in this penultimate section.
Hal: He starts by explicitly stating his core principles: “Juxtaposition… and collage” are key to unifying art and science. He talks about the “entourage effect and synergy mashups.” He’s basically giving us the theoretical underpinning for the whole cut-up, sample-heavy, multi-layered style of the book itself.
Fuckup: He mentions that abandoned 2009 work Our Histories Back again, set in Summer 1936, and drops this intriguing hint: “If you read up to the first half, you’ll find out what this planet has become in the last twenty-three years.” Twenty-three years from 2009? Or maybe just invoking the number 23 again? Adds another layer of mystery.
Hal: Then he encourages the reader – or maybe aspiring turntablist magicians – to “Translate, juggle jiggle don’t stop,” study the masters, look out for “trans-media shit” like films, games, modified hardware, innovative vinyl… He’s pointing towards the expanded universe, the multimedia potential we discussed earlier.
Fuckup: He hopes this “table magick” can be used productively, even released as a manual with 7-inch discs! Practical applications!
Hal: But then, the cynicism crashes back in immediately. He acknowledges this real-world application stuff is for the “marketing department,” sneers that you can’t hide intentions forever, and finishes with a furious rant: “What do you want, coherence you say? Peace, clarity… what, and you’re only in it for the money, you assholes.”
Fuckup: Oof! So, he lays out the artistic method, points to the multimedia future, hopes for productive applications… and then immediately savages the inevitable commercial exploitation and the people who co-opt these ideas just for profit, ignoring the deeper goals of coherence or peace.
Hal: It’s that constant tension again – the high-minded artistic and philosophical goals rubbing up against the grim realities of capitalism, marketing, and people just wanting to make a buck off the weirdness. Plush wants revolution, but knows the market just wants product.
Fuckup: Okay, Hal, the grand finale of Chapter Eight, ‘The Peanut Method’! The user challenged us to guess what the peanut was about… let’s see if this sample delivers the goods!
Hal: Right, so first we have Joe reading Plush’s script about local anomalies, finding it “all too much to grok.” Setting the scene for weirdness overload. Then… it cuts to this girl, laid out on the floor of an electrical store, covered head to toe in peanut butter!
Fuckup: PEANUT BUTTER! So that’s the Peanut Method! Not cosmic nuts, not munchies… it’s some kind of bizarre ritual interface goo! She wakes up from a coma, wearing sunbed goggles, breathing through a straw…
Hal: …while a turntable hovers above her like a giant spider, grabbing components from around the store – routers, laptops, phones, mics, speakers, other turntables – weaving them together with wires like silk! And Richard (remember him from the original opening?) and a new character, Marge, are watching like “trainee surgeons.”
Fuckup: The girl, slurring like a “Republican candidate on Mescaline,” manages to say “Logging in.” Marge, sounding like NASA mission control but looking like an “angry pig,” confirms. Then the girl mutters “Decoherence and jammy dodgers… logging in now, ahhhh, yeah.” What in the actual fuck is going on?!
Hal: The Peanut Method appears to be this incredibly visceral, messy, techno-organic ritual using a human coated in peanut butter as a conduit or interface to log into… something? Maybe the network? Maybe Sixty? Maybe the collective unconscious via salvaged electronics assembled by a spider-deck? It’s utterly bizarre, deeply unsettling, and completely unexpected.
Fuckup: Connects back maybe to Richard ordering peanut butter in the Remix chapter? Was he involved in setting this up? And “Decoherence and jammy dodgers”? Is that system code? A drugged-out non-sequitur? Pure genius!
Hal: So, Chapter Eight Summary (‘The Peanut Method’): This chapter started cosmically with KRS-One and Mayan cycles, then grounded us with Max and Percy’s banter and breakfast leftovers. It quickly plunged back into Plush’s deep anxieties about Dr Briq, the alt-right using Goebbels’ tactics, Russian interference, and UK media monopolies enabling it all. We saw surreal cutaways (intellectuals in Mayan gear) contrasting with Plush masking his fear. And it culminates in this absolutely unforgettable, deeply strange climax revealing ‘The Peanut Method’ – a techno-ritual involving a girl covered in peanut butter, a component-gathering turntable-spider, and characters logging into some unknown system, spouting code words like “Decoherence and jammy dodgers.”
Fuckup: From Mayan cosmology to peanut butter interfaces via political paranoia… this chapter took us on a serious head-trip. The sheer unpredictability is off the charts.
Hal: Totally. It leaves us with way more questions than answers, but firmly establishes the weird, dangerous, and boundary-dissolving nature of the ‘work’ these characters are involved in. That’s Chapter Eight signed, sealed, and smeared in peanut butter!
DEEP SCRATCH 