THE MAGIC NUMBER (by CAPT. APOPHENIA)

Many thanks to Capt. Apophenia, celebrated author in the world of all things K, for this week’s pamphlet. Handing over to the captain without further fuss.

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In the world of Mu, they say you’re never more than 23 feet away from a trilogy. On a long train journey home, I started to write them down and that’s when the apophenia really kicked in. 

WARNING: This goes deep. 

Rather than start at the beginning, let’s start before that.

Dallas, November 1963. Three deaths in two days. Kennedy, Tippitt and Oswald. The latter was a former marine alongside one of the architects of Discordianism, whose Principia Discordia was printed on the photocopier in the office of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who would later bring the only trial around the Kennedy assassination. 

A copy of Principia Discordia found its way into the hands of Robert Anton Wilson and led to writing of not one, not two, but three trilogies. Illuminatus, Cosmic Trigger and Schrödinger’s Cat. But a trilogy of trilogies is not so unique in our story. 

One way or another, the work of Robert Anton Wilson, inspired Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty to form The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, who did an awful lot of things in threes. 

As The JAMs, there was trilogy of LPs (1987, Who Killed The JAMs and Shag Times) and a trilogy of sample heavy early singles (All You Need Is Love, Downtown and Whitney Joins The JAMs).

These were followed by a trilogy of Pure Trance releases and a trilogy of ambient LPs (Chill Out, Space and Waiting). The latter was also part of a trilogy of VHS releases (Rites Of Mu, Waiting and Stadium House Trilogy) the latter being The JAMs first acknowledgement of trilogies. 

The Stadium House Trilogy (What Time Is Love?, 3am Eternal and Last Train To Trancentral) also forms part of a larger trilogy of trilogies of reworked songs. What Time Is Love? was released as Pure Trance, Live At Trancentral and America: What Time Is Love? 3am Eternal was released as

Pure Trance, Live At The SSL and KLF vs ENT. Last Train To Trancentral came as Pure Trance A, Pure Trance B and Live From The Lost Continent. 

This trilogy of trilogies appears to exclude one of their biggest singles, Justified & Ancient, but when we look, we see a career spanning trilogy of its own, that shares the same refrain (Hey Hey, We’re Not The Monkees, Stand By The JAMs and Jarvis Joins The JAMs).

Another apparently isolated track is It’s Grim Up North, but its crediting to The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, puts it in another trilogy of anomalous releases by The JAMs alongside Jarvis Joins The JAMs and 2023: A Trilogy. 

Speaking of books, of course there are three books (The Manual, K Foundation Burn A Million Quid and 2023). The Manual itself exists in three editions (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way, How To Build A Pyramid Of Stolen Shopping Trolleys The Easy Way and last year’s How To Build A People’s Pyramid The Hard Way) and 2023 can be enjoyed as a trilogy of hardback, paperback and audiobook read by Daisy Campbell. 

Away from The JAMs, Cauty and Drummond have continued to embrace the trilogy. 

As a teenager Jimmy produced a trilogy of Middle Earth posters for Athena alongside another trilogy of posters of sacred sites (Stonehenge, Glastonbury and Avebury). Later on, his RIOT Trilogy of Dismaland, Riot In A Jam Jar and The Aftermath Dislocation Principle followed. 

Bill has a trilogy of birthdays with The Man (ages 33 1/3), 45(45!) and The Life Model (70), he had written a trilogy of books with Mark Manning (A Bible Of Dreams, Bad Wisdom and Wild Highway), released a trilogy of books with numbers for titles (45, 17, 100) and given himself three jobs to undertake on his 25 Paintings World Tour (Make A Bed, Make Soup and Shine Shoes). 

Those of you with a keen eye for numbers will probs have been counting trilogies as we went along and will have probably settled on a satisfactory number of trilogies from world of Mu. That was entirely unintentional, but sometimes these things just write themselves. Remember, there’s no such thing as a coincidence. 

(All of the above may have been an influence when I wrote a trilogy of books in response to Welcome To The Dark Ages. The first book, WHATEVER, was never meant to more than a single book, but the thing about trilogies is that they have a mind and will of their own. Inspired by the successful launch of WHATEVER at the Burn The Shard event, my second book began to take shape and it’s wasn’t until I’d settled on TOGETHER as a title that the WTF TRILOGY revealed itself and then completed itself with the FOREVER TRILOGY. Still available to purchase and enjoy from Amazaba). 

Capt. Apophenia, 17 February

A Page 130 Pamphlet 

AKA #GANTOB2024 pamphlet 07

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GANTOB responds:

I wrote in last week’s pamphlet about the thread connecting the recent #GANTOB2024 posts by Urs Benefaktor, Stuart Huggett, A young man on Facebook, and Annebella Pollen. These were four unrelated writers, volunteering or approached to write pieces for a loosely defined art project, breaking out from the orbit of The KLF to explore new horizons. However, in attempting to branch out in the topics covered and the people involved we appear still to be caught up in a tornado that is pulling us ever closer to Kansas or some other K themed setting. JR, a previous GANTOB contributor, not connected to Dallas as far as I am aware, asked in a comment on last week’s blog whether this is coincidence. Who can say.

Now, I don’t do Facebook, but when I check on the weekly stats for the GANTOB blog I note that quite a bit of traffic is generated from Stephen Rennicks’ Searching for the White Room page (which is fortunately open to all, not just those on Facebook). He posted about Stuart Huggett’s William Blake piece on 25 January 2024, and a day later highlighted Capt. Apophenia’s excellent “Brit Pop” take on that English Poet/Artist/Prophet.

Capt. Apophenia has been a loyal supporter of GANTOB, contributing a question to the first book and distributing pamphlets in book drops from the earliest stages of the project. He is also an accomplished author. I approached him to contribute a pamphlet, and the next day he replied with an email titled Th3 M3gic Numb3r.  I read it, accepted it, and filed it away in my brain at The KLF end of the GANTOB scale. When I was writing my response to Annebella Pollen’s pamphlet last week, noting all the connections between recent pamphlets, I was thinking that Capt. Apophenia’s piece was a fire break, or should I say a fresh start. Perhaps, like Prof Grayling Muir’s story on the GANTOB blog last year: a KLF related curio that stands alone.

But when I read Capt. Apophenia’s contribution again, while making a personalised version of the pamphlet for him earlier this week, I realised that there was a lot more to his piece. The word “apophenia” for example. I must have skated over this the first time. I am sure that you will have looked it up yourself by now and will agree that it’s a great word. And JD Tippitt. I didn’t know about him either.

And Welcome to The Dark Ages? That was the 23 November 2017 event that Annebella Pollen wrote about last week, which followed on from the publication of The JAMs’ book 2023: A trilogy on 23 August 2017. The book that introduced GANTOB, a fictional character that I have been fated to re-enact, Sisyphean style. I must have been very bad in a previous life. It also links very closely with A young man on Facebook.

The Benefaktor will no doubt be delighted with Capt. Apophenia’s Schrödinger’s Cat reference, with his love of quantum physics. Though I am less well informed on that topic, I have made mention of it before in relation to the Curt Finks’ story Brent Goose Rock that was sent to the original recipients of my first GANTOB book. This was conceived as a snipped up story contained in a stuck down envelope, and was sent originally to a literary journal in 1987. The editor (or another reader) was to reconstruct the story word by word. We will never know what the editor thought of it, but it was not published. I wrote in the Kompanion Volume to the first book: “But perhaps there is a Schrodinger’s cat side to all this. The sealed item holds promise, and leaving it sealed avoids disappointment”.  Curt Finks, my late father-in-law, performer, writer. I was excited earlier this week to hear that one of his stories has now been published posthumously: “The A to Z of Curt Finks”, in the winter 2024 edition of Billy Childish’s Vipers Tongue Press Quarterly. How wonderfully unexpected (though I gave it a helping hand).

But back to Capt. Apophenia’s excellent piece. A contribution, made in response to a comment about William Blake, which brings together an incredibly diverse range of cultural references, educating us in the process, but also messing with our heads around coincidence, and always bringing it back to The KLF or their origins. We are very definitely in the same orbit as earlier contributions to the 52 Pamphlets (which of course will be the third GANTOB Books publication). Worried? No need. I will leave you with this quote from Psychology Today:

“Earlier descriptions of apophenia, also called patternicity, appeared in the literature in the 1950s by the German psychiatrist and neurologist Klaus Conrad. The term is the Greek “apo” for away, and “phenia” for display. Conrad described apophenia in psychotic patients who had perceptual distortions. Apophenia is not a disorder or a mental illness, it is a normal and common human experience.”

I’m off to a darkened room to think how Bill Drummond’s books 25 Paintings and $20,000 fit in, and whether they mess up Capt. Apophenia’s scheme. But then I realise that they have words or other symbols in their title. And indeed $20,000 is really called For Sale. I think that we’re alright and I can press print/upload.

52 Pamphlets is a free flowing and participative writing and art project as part of the GANTOBverse. If you are inspired to contribute then visit gantob.blog/pamphlet. If your work is accepted then, like Capt. Apophenia, you will receive a personalised pamphlet and a copy of the 52 Pamphlets book (January 2025).

GANTOB 17 February 2024