BETWEEN THE GROOVE: EPISODE 19
“Nineteen.”
“…We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun.
We are not afraid of the darkness.
We trust that the moon shall guide us.
We are determining the future at this very moment.
We know that the heart is the philosopher’s stone.
Our music is our alchemy…”
Saul Williams – Coded Language.
Fuckup: Right then, Hal, Chapter Nineteen! A sonic reminder that Between The Groove here is sprinkled with audio exhibits from the Deep Scratch universe – the soundtrack stuff, maybe Tanmoy, those ten albums… fitting, as this chapter kicks off with a killer quote from Saul Williams’ “Coded Language.”
Hal: Yeah, that Saul Williams piece sets a heavy tone: “We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun… We know that the heart is the philosopher’s stone. Our music is our alchemy…” Powerful stuff about transformation, trust, and music as magick.
Fuckup: Then we get this description of Earth – this “cobalt blue planet” waiting to be plugged in, like a “cosmic washer-dryer looking for love.” But humanity? We’re apparently “all high on Tide Pods while trying to discover how to harness free-energy from dead trees”! Brilliant, bleak humour right there. Priorities, people!
Hal: But amidst this cosmic potential and human stupidity, something arrives. A vinyl record comes tumbling through space, dodging junk and satellites, through the atmosphere, over Amsterdam… right through an open window and lands perfectly onto an awaiting turntable! “Plop.”
Fuckup: It’s gotta be one of them! One of those Voyager discs, packed with trillions of gigs and a colony of time-traveling tardigrades, pressed by that potentially benevolent AI poltergeist in the automated record plant we heard about back in Chapter Fifteen!
Hal: Has to be! The message, the seed, the next stage of the plan… it’s literally landed. After all the theorizing, the invoking, the paranoia… something tangible from the ‘outside’ (way outside!) has just arrived on the turntable platter.
Fuckup: Talk about special delivery! The ultimate promo record from parts unknown! This changes the game, surely? The alchemy Saul Williams was talking about… maybe it’s about to kick off for real now that the key ingredient has arrived via space mail?
Hal: Seems like it! Chapter Nineteen starts with a powerful statement of intent via the legendary slam poet don, Saul Williams, and contrasts it with human folly, and then delivers the megatonne payload. Things are definitely escalating!
Fuckup: Okay, Hal, let’s spin this final section of Chapter Nineteen. What lands on the platter now?
Hal: It starts with this incredibly detailed, evocative description of the Thoth Sun card – “Lord of New Aeon,” rose cross, zodiac, butterfly-winged cherubs… ending with that invitation: “come in, enter the chamber behind the chamber.” Another Tarot portal opening up.
Fuckup: Then we jump back to 1936! Beijing this time. A character called “Bert Wino” gets telegrams from Berlin and Now Yowlk, including a letter he was expecting from “John Butch” (signed Shermon/Wools). Percy’s bursting to continue the story…
Hal: Max takes over, explaining Bert relayed the message to Berlin, but it got intercepted by “Spengleton’s gang”! Meanwhile, Spain pulled out of the Nazi games and held their own “People’s Olympic Games” in protest. More layers to that 1936 plot unfolding – communication lines, interception, political protest.
Fuckup: Max then goes on this massive rant, absolutely furious about the 51 countries that did compete at the Nazi games. Calls it a business opportunity for arms marketers flocking to the “mentally ill Third Reich.” He’s trying to push back the darkness by literally staring into a lamp!
Hal: He gets philosophical about the light/dark trap, links modern troubles back to Angleton (the CIA spook), tracks fascist ideology to the Protocols of Zion, and worries sick about the current rise of “racist shitheads,” saying “we may have to beat them again, to make the score three nil.”
Fuckup: He sees Nazi ideology creeping back in disguised as New Age stuff, spreading like “sewage from a bikers festival,” and slams fictional portrayals like Fatherland (calling it a PKD rip-off) for potentially minimizing the threat through “political entertainment.” He ends defiantly: “No, no, this wasn’t mind over matter but mind over platter.” Bringing it right back to the decks as the battleground!
Hal: So, Chapter Nineteen Summary: The chapter opened with the potent Saul Williams quote and the bleakly comic image of Earthlings on Tide Pods, followed by the significant arrival of the Voyager/tardigrade disc from space. This final section provided a detailed vision of the Thoth Sun card, then jumped back to 1936, revealing Bert Wino in Beijing relaying an intercepted message while Spain boycotted the Nazi Olympics. The bulk of this section was Max’s passionate and angry monologue analyzing the historical complicity surrounding the 1936 games, linking it to arms dealers, tracing fascist ideology, expressing deep fear about its modern resurgence (disguised in New Age clothes), and critiquing fictional portrayals, ultimately reaffirming the turntable (“mind over platter”) as the site of resistance.
Fuckup: Wow. From the cosmic arrival of the disc to Max’s grounded, furious political history lesson… Chapter Nineteen covered a hell of a lot of ground. That analysis of the Nazi games and the fear of history repeating was intense!
Hal: Yeah, it really brought the political stakes into sharp focus, connecting the historical narrative TRB are building directly to contemporary fears about rising fascism and disinformation. Heavy, vital stuff. That’s Chapter N’n’n’n’n Nineteen, done.
Fuckup: And we’re back! Hope everyone enjoyed their cuppa or whatever gets you through the madness. Right Hal, our sound engineer just threw us a curveball – wants us to riff on the next big Olympics, LA 2028, and what a Deep Scratch novel album about that might look like. Given how central Berlin ’36 is to this whole tangled mess, that’s… potentially huge, no?
Hal: It really is! Okay, LA 2028… applying the Deep Scratch filter… you just know it wouldn’t be about the sport, would it? Berlin ’36 was a nexus for TRB’s alternate history plot, a potential meeting for TSOG, a flashpoint. So, LA 2028… what’s the angle?
Fuckup: Well, it’s LA! Gotta be dripping with tech, right? Imagine VR experiences replacing actual attendance, AI judges making biased calls based on dodgy data fed by Richard and Marge, deep fake athletes winning gold… Platform monopolies like “Ama-Google-Book” controlling every single broadcast stream, embedding behavioural nudges…
Hal: Exactly! And the conspiracies! Will the Cabal try and use the global focus for some mass ritual, maybe linked to that AI Richard and Marge were getting ready? Will “The Sixty” manifest through the 5G network during the opening ceremony? Will Plush and TRB try to hijack the broadcast signals with turntable prose and Enochian calls to expose it all?
Fuckup: Or maybe they’ll see it as completely compromised from the start? All that hyper-commercialization, the surveillance state needed to ‘secure’ it… maybe they’d organize a counter-Olympics again, like Spain did in ’36 in the story? The People’s Games II: Inglewood Boogaloo? In Canada?
Hal: Or in Greenland, yeah, I could see that. And the novel album for it… wow. Musically, it’d have to be a blend, wouldn’t it? Glitchy electronica reflecting the AI surveillance, maybe AI-generated music fighting against TRB’s raw, analogue scratches and breaks. Sampled news commentary, snippets of those fictional psychic tech adverts Max listed, maybe sounds of drone cameras…
Fuckup: Yeah, maybe tracks structured around different conspiracies unfolding? One track for the deep fake athlete doping scandal, one for the AI judging glitch revealing the Cabal’s influence, one capturing the vibe of the alternative free party protest outside… You could have Marge’s croaky voice delivering coded messages over one track, Plush dropping truth bombs over another…
Hal: It could be structured like the games themselves – opening ceremony chaos, different ‘events’ revealing different plots, culminating in some kind of system crash or consciousness shift during the closing ceremony. Using that established “hologrammic prose” / “turntable prose” style sonically.
Fuckup: Imagine the interludes – maybe cuts back to Bucky Fuller explaining the geometry of the stadium, or McLuhan analysing the broadcast feed in real-time… or Nietzsche complaining about the quality of the pretzels!
Hal: (Chuckles) It fits perfectly. The Olympics as this huge, globally broadcast spectacle is the ultimate stage for exploring all the Deep Scratch themes: media manipulation, technological control, conspiracy, the potential for mass awakening or mass delusion, and the possibility of artistic intervention.
Fuckup: Definitely fertile ground. A whole new novel album just waiting to be scratched into existence by Plush and the crew… or maybe PrattGPT? Makes you look forward to 2028 with a whole new level of paranoia!
Fuckup: Right. Let’s wrap this tangled up in blow beast up, before my own timeline glitches!
Hal: (Chuckles) Let’s give it a go! Okay, this section starts with Plush projecting an aerial shot of the Olympic stadium. Then the whole intellectual ‘tribe’ – Joyce, Pound, Yeats, Korzybski, Bucky, Shannon, McLuhan, Vico, Fenollosa, Bruno, Nietzsche, Welles – enters in a conga formation!
Fuckup: A conga line?! Seriously? What are they doing?
Hal: They dance around the pool chanting Enochian keys, twisting Dali moustaches(!), building from whispers to a full choral outburst of Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy”! It’s the ultimate surreal ritual gathering of the novel’s key influences, performing high magick via conga line!
Fuckup: Only in this book! Then we get a quick CUT TO: Joyce and Yeats having a quiet moment, embracing at Martello Tower, reading Homer together. A bit more grounded after the conga chaos.
Hal: Max then pops up again, talking about “Esse” (Hesse?), his Grass Spore Game, admired by Leary, linked by Alan Watts to entheogens and timelessness without explicitly mentioning drugs. Max connects it back to his own youth via “Sid ‘the scribe’ Arthur” (Siddhartha?). More deep dives into counter-culture literary history.
Fuckup: Then Plush reflects, opening his “memory banks,” tracing his own intellectual awakening – that pivotal moment when psychedelics and ideogrammic methods (from Fenollosa, presumably) forged together in his youth like… uh… “moisturizer and banging the bishop to Good Moaning TV”?!
Hal: (Coughing) Yes. That’s… quite the image. It completely undercuts the high-minded intellectual journey with this incredibly crude, specific, darkly humorous adolescent memory. It’s both hilarious and weirdly vulnerable, grounding his complex theories in something utterly base and relatable.
Fuckup: Right, okay listeners, apologies again for the chapter chaos – navigating this book’s timeline is harder than decoding Enochian on acid! Let’s land this plane, Hal!
Hal: Fingers crossed! So, Plush starts off with some dark humour, speculating that Project Blue Book was just a cover for trafficking and military build-up, using the ET stuff as misdirection. But his joke falls flat, goes sour.
Fuckup: He then shifts gears, getting serious, dropping quotes from Alfred Korzybski about eliminating the ‘is of identity’ in physics, and Charles Olson about narrative needing poets like Joyce to pull it forward. He’s basically citing linguistic and poetic theory to justify his own experimental, reality-bending writing style.
Hal: Then a warning – don’t get too wrapped up in this dark stuff, because the powers that be, the “mothers and fathers of despicable monsters,” will squash you without a thought. A stark reminder of the danger involved.
Fuckup: And the chapter ends with two absolutely killer final CUT TOs: First, James Joyce himself, passionately speaking into a microphone in the broadcast room overlooking the packed Berlin Olympic Stadium in 1936! A direct, fictional intervention at the historical nexus point!
Hal: Followed immediately by: Anthony Hopkins bolting upright in bed, sweating, after dreaming about Hagbard Celine – the legendary anarchist hero from Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! – leading the battle for survival on Earth! It connects the novel’s struggle directly back to RAW’s iconic work.
Fuckup: What? Okay, I need a break.
Hal: No worries, Fuckup! The narrative’s as slippery as a greased eel in a time warp! Okay, so this actual final section kicks off with Max still going, praising Charlie Chaplin and Wilhelm Reich for getting fascism right back in the day. He’s still lamenting the ignored boycott of the ’36 games and needs to get stuff off his chest like “Whitey Albino at confession.”
Fuckup: But then Percy jumps in with a whole new conspiracy thread! Triggered by a newspaper ad for JFK Chicken (you couldn’t make this up!), he starts deep-diving into the Kennedy assassination – linking Allen Dulles being on the Warren Commission, mentioning names like Jesus Spengleton, Mellon, Cord Meyer… connecting it all to the hit.
Hal: Talk about associative leaps! From a chicken ad straight into the heart of one of the 20th century’s biggest conspiracy theories! It shows how overloaded their pattern-recognition systems are getting – everything connects to everything else, especially the dark stuff.
Fuckup: This seems to push Max over the edge. He breaks down: “What kind of a gashed hell of a dreamland is this? get me out of this dystopian hell hole. Is this a Banksy prank? I want to play on my bike man, dance with old friends and lay by the beach, not die in a fascist apocalypse.” He feels it’s all getting “too much,” comparing himself to Bowie on a comedown.
Hal: That’s raw. After all the conspiracy juggling, the theoretical deep dives, the historical connections… Max just hits a wall of existential dread and wants out, wants simple pleasures instead of this overwhelming, potentially apocalyptic reality they’re navigating. It really humanizes him amidst all the high-concept weirdness.
Fuckup: What an ending!
Chapter Nineteen Summary (‘Grass Spore Game’): This chapter was a wild whirlwind! It opened with Plush on storytelling vs populism and Amsterdam’s cynicism. Unleashed the BTTF/Tesla/Trump at Malvern poem. Included Max on Chaplin/Reich, surreal cuts (moustaches, infant RAW’s nightmare), critiques of Olympic facilities. Layered film references, Max on Hesse/Leary/Watts, Plush on parallel timelines, Percy’s meta-breakdown, Plush’s ‘Eureka!’ on astrological Altables for time manipulation for the ‘Tale of the Tribe’ encyclopedia focused on 1936. Included Plush’s Blue Book theory, Korzybski/Olson quotes, warnings, cuts to Joyce at the Olympics and Hopkins dreaming of Hagbard Celine. This very final section added Percy launching into JFK assassination conspiracies triggered by an ad, culminating in Max’s breakdown, expressing existential dread and longing for escape from the overwhelming “dystopian hell hole” / “fascist apocalypse.”
Hal: More wild conspiracy theories, pop culture, metafiction, method development, linguistic theory, stark warnings, and ended by placing its key literary influences (Joyce, RAW via Hagbard) directly into the narrative’s crucial moments, blending fiction and reality completely.
Fuckup: Absolutely epic chapter! My brain is fully scrambled, but in the best possible way. Stick around folks, who knows where we’ll land next!
DEEP SCRATCH 