13 August. The Observer was in a flap. A new entity had arrived in its domain, sucking up all the surrounding energy. It had been deposited by a middle-aged female human, mid-afternoon.
On the human’s first attempt to launch the object The Observer had watched from a distance as the wind blew it up into the air, crashing back onto the pavement. As the human crossed the road, dodging the tourists with their cameras and rucksacks, she refolded the object in an attempt to make it more aerodynamic. Launching it again, however, the object failed to pick up a thermal and bombed onto a ledge of the bridge, lying wanly on its side, out of reach of everybody but the birds.
After a while watching from a window ledge on one of the human cliff faces, The Observer glided down to sit beside it, turning its head on its side in welcome, checking out the competition. There was no struggle, but also no eating on it. It was like a food wrapper, but without the lingering benefits. It lay there, sheltered from the prevailing wind, occasionally soaked, but then drying out despite the lack of sun in this shaded spot.
23 August: The Observer had forgotten about the new entity. It was enjoying the air currents, flying backwards and forwards under the bridge, listening to the buses above and the tourists’ wheeled suitcases below.
There were two elderly male humans, in plain black plumage, making their farewells. One tapped slowly up the steps to Waverley, the other gathering pace as he walked in the direction of Leith. He stopped suddenly, leaning his briefcase against the wall of the bridge, and loosening his outer layers. He removed a square of cotton from his jacket pocket and, after unfolding it carefully, shaking out some fluff, he dabbed at his forehead, lingering at a scab at the top of his head.
The Observer had flown its circuit under the bridge a dozen times, taking things in, quite relaxed by the rhythm of the tall male human’s gait. But on its next loop back towards Waverley Station, The Observer veered suddenly off course, aware of a threat incoming from above. It took evasive action, landing on the roof of a parked taxi. Hawkeyed, The Observer watched as the elderly male human bent down to pick up what The Observer recalled was a disappointing wrapper.
GANTOB tells me that Bill Drummond has been known to write about ley lines. Here is his off-the-cuff response to a journalist in a 1981 quote: “It is the interstellar ley line. It comes careering in from outer space, hits the world in Iceland, bounces back up, writhing about like a conger eel, then down Mathew Street in Liverpool where the Cavern Club – and latterly Eric’s – is”. Later in the piece (written in 2013) he identifies a specific manhole as a “gateway between the known, out-there physical world and the unknown, internal, imagined world”.
I am not sure if Calton Road has a manhole cover at the point where I first encountered GANTOB’s paper plane.
I am intrigued by Bill Drummond’s telescoping of ideas from interstellar ley lines to the internal workings of the mind. It reminds me of a book by Carlo Rovelli called Helgoland (2021). Rovelli covers a wide range of topics, from wave-particle duality to the relationships between quantum entities and the scientists studying them (the observer changing the behaviour of what they are observing), and ultimately between objects themselves. It is a disorientating read.
I think that I prefer Philip Pullman’s take on the topic in His Dark Materials, a trilogy of books that I noticed that GANTOB mentioned in her book (but in the context of the pain of being separated from one’s KLF collection). In these books Pullman writes about a material called Dust at a number of levels, but in each iteration it appears to be a sentient entity, guiding decisions, answering questions.
And that takes me to the scientific mysticism attempted by Jimmy Cauty with his standing stone project Local Psycho and The Hurdy Gurdy Orchestra. In an extraordinary claim that can only, I suppose, have come about via quantum physics, they state that “In a ceremony on Mayday the Hurdy Gurdy Song was embedded into the stone, playing it directly into the rock using powerful transducers”.
I think about this as I peer into the nooks and crannies around Calton Road, under Regent Bridge. With such outlandish assertions by Drummond about ley lines, and Cauty about encoding a standing stone with sound, is it so fanciful to read significance into the spot where I encountered GANTOB for the first time? And if so, who is who, which is which? GANTOB the particle? The Benefaktor the wave? And who is observing?
It is fair to say that GANTOB and I have had our fair share of disagreements.
The title of my second blog (DUALITY), and GANTOB’s mention of Schrodinger’s cat in The Kompanion Volume (Pamphlet 21: The Letter) might have tipped you off about at least one shared interest that GANTOB and I have identified: quantum physics.
You may have noticed that this blog has a number in its title. The accompanying blog will be published tomorrow. It will be called QUANTUM TWO. I had hoped that this pair of blogs would feature equal contributions from GANTOB and myself. GANTOB, however, does not feel ready to put pen to paper after her Amazonian efforts to complete GANTOB (The Book). She has asked me to write her perspective.
I suspect that GANTOB’s increasing distance from the work is down to my savage editing on the day we submitted the book to the publisher. GANTOB had lovingly inserted annotated evidence of each “drop”, cross referenced to a map. These were separated into sections on book, vinyl and pamphlet drops, and pamphlet planes, stretching to 23 pages. GANTOB is fixated on the number 23. I am not. As the funder of the project, and aware of the spiralling costs with increasing length of the book, I insisted on cutting it down to 3 pages and a table. I did not inform GANTOB of this change. GANTOB’s original page layout is shown below.
To bring this back to yesterday’s blog (BRIDGES), GANTOB gave extra space to the pamphlet planes (the last 4 pages of photos), launched from bridges. While unconvinced that pamphlet planes made an impact on recruitment of Kompetition Applikants, she was nonetheless pleased with the documentation that she and GANTOB surrogates (missiformation and lloydofthelongchamps) had captured in the act of performing the planes. They add an additional layer to the GANTOB story.
GANTOB’s second plane, conducted from Regent Bridge in Edinburgh, is a case in point. You can see the images and video captured from GANTOB’s two attempts to launch the plane in the links at the end of yesterday’s blog.
In the accompanying text GANTOB explained her specific reason for choosing this location, noting her admiration of Katie Paterson’s work “A place that exists only in moonlight”. There is a magic to this spot, the towering buildings crossing strata of Edinburgh’s history, the intersection of ancient routes, if not ley lines.
GANTOB is not going to be happy. I have gone through each of my earlier posts and inserted an image within the blog. I had not appreciated that the “featured” images that I had meticulously added when preparing blogs on previous days are only seen if you click into the individual post. A casual browser (not quite a “doom scroller” I feel) would just have seen the boring black and white text.
The image that you will hopefully see below, of a bridge, is key to today’s blog, and indeed the whole story of GANTOB and The Benefaktor(*). It has already featured, but from a different angle, in a previous blog.
To reach the bridge we will need to walk back from our last physical location (the Little Free Library at the bottom of Scotland Street), clockwise round Drummond Place, back up Dublin Street (my grandson used to call it “hating hill” when he was little), bypassing the bus station, and to the location of the Mog poster that I have just added to a previous post (James Craig Walk). I should mention that as it is Saturday, a day when I can afford to take my foot off the peddle just a little, I am listening to music while I type. So our walk is soundtracked by Max Richter’s repositioning of Vivaldi’s Spring, from his album Recomposed. This seems appropriate for a blog that stems from work for the KLF Re-enactment Society.
The Mog poster has gone, as has most evidence of Fringe. As we are waiting to cross the wide junction where Leith Street, Princes Street and North Bridge meet at Waterloo Place, we need to separate and go our separate ways.
I, The Benefaktor, will be turning down Leith Street, taking the steps as a shortcut past The Black Bull, then The Bunker, along Calton Road, to stand underneath Regent Bridge (pictured above). That is where I stood on 23 August 2023.
Meanwhile, our imagined GANTOB (who is actually still up in Badenoch) is walking along Waterloo Place, rifling through her bag, to find her carefully folded pamphlet 1 (The Kompetition), ready to launch it as a paper plane from the same bridge but ten days earlier and five floors up.
THE BENEFAKTOR
30 September 2023
(*) GANTOB would no doubt want me to highlight that it only had a peripheral role in her “solo” story, in two rather disappointing “pamphlet plane” launches (1|2).
I am kicking myself about errors I made in yesterday’s blog post. You probably spotted them.
In my developing knowledge of “all things K”, I made a slip about the incinerated money. It was not US $20,000, but a considerably larger quantity in pounds sterling. I am also informed it was not attention seeking, but a work of art. GANTOB notes her acts of “Destruktion” were in part a tribute. There is so much to learn.
GANTOB has advised, again, that I start at the beginning, which I have been attempting over recent days with help from YouTube and a John Higgs book.
GANTOB has mentioned two of her favourite tracks from the 1987 album, when they were not yet The KLF, but rather The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (JAMs). These are Me Ru Con and Next. I have not heard either track. Instead, I have been working through the album racily titled Shag Times (Circa 1987). I enjoyed Don’t take Five (Take What You Want). I loved the Dave Brubeck original, playing both sides of the 7″ to destruction in my undergraduate days in the early 1960s, the near-stumble of the extra beat in Blue Rondo a la Turk forcing things on.
I see the jazz influences in the JAMs track. The call and response, apparently improvised, between the “Red Clydeside rappers“. Or at least that is how I heard it on JAMs tracks while immersing myself in the topic over recent days. I liked the idea of two tough guys from the west of Scotland, no prior recording experience, battling it out over a microphone. I could see the parallels from my previous ministrations to congregations of dockers in Leith in the late 1960s and 1970s.
But my reading on the topic, including my growing mystification on reading the individual biographies of The JAMs/ KLF, has highlighted my second error in yesterday’s blog. It was only Bill Drummond (AKA King Boy D) rapping. Jimmy Cauty is not Scottish. So, it’s “Clydeside rapping” rather than “Clydeside rappers”.
I took this up with GANTOB. We agreed that the rules of Kreative Tyranny mean that we should not go back and “korrekt”. We should keep learning fool. But, accepting the contradictions, we also agreed that understanding The KLF’s output retrospectively, from the perspective of somebody who missed them completely until late 2023, could be the focus for some future blogs.
I fear I may have misled GANTOB’s social media followers on Tuesday evening. Though on Scotland Street that night, I was not attempting to link my daily blog with Alexander McCall Smith’s daily serial of the same name. McCall Smith is another elderly gentleman, but seven years my junior.
When going through GANTOB’s materials last weekend I noticed a number of metaphorical knots in the handkerchief. One was the commitment to leave a copy of GANTOB’s book “in a little free library close to a place with a connection to a member of The KLF” (the TLA that GANTOB has asked me to keep to a minimum, to aid her recovery). I asked GANTOB for a clue – what kind of connection, and Drummond or Cauty? All she said was that it was time to go back to the beginning. Which I did.
The very first GANTOB book drop was on the starting day of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe (4 August 2023). She had posted earlier that evening from central Edinburgh.
Almost three hours later (see X date stamps) she posted about the first book drop, on Scotland Street. This was GANTOB pamphlet one (The Kompetition), which we have already encountered (without naming it) in an earlier blog post. This copy was on yellow paper/ card and was inserted inside a Bill Drummond book called $20,000. I believe that is the sum that Messers Drummond and Cauty set alight on the Inner Hebrides, as a piece of attention seeking behaviour. Perhaps you can illuminate me.
Invoking Occam’s razor, on my morning constitutional I followed the most direct route that GANTOB might have taken, along James Craig Walk, across York Place, down Dublin Street, and then I saw it: Drummond Place. Not Bill but George Drummond. Greenock Mason, rather than half of the Clydeside rappers. That would have to do.
So, on Tuesday night I fulfilled GANTOB’s commitment, placing a copy of her book into the LFL, with inserts including completed Little Grapefruit bookmark, taking a book in return. By yesterday evening the GANTOB book was gone, as yet undeclared on social media.
GANTOB tells me that the book she took in return for $20,000 inspired some of the fictional embellishments she made to the life of her late father-in-law Curt Finks (not real name). Perhaps she will reveal more when she has recovered enough to reclaim the helm of her project.
I started balding when I was still a teenager. And yes, we were already familiar with the word teenager even in the 1950s. When my classmates learned of my career intentions they referred to me as “The Tonsure”. That is not a pseudonym I plan to use again in this blog. But at 82, comparing myself with my thinning male contemporaries (number, as well as hair), we have all ended up at a similar point on the hairline front.
The resulting exposure to the sun from an early age, and lack of awareness of the risks, have resulted in considerable difficulties with my skin. My GP calls it “solar keratosis”, my dermatologist “actinic keratoses”. The treatment is one of two three-letter acronyms, but neither the one that probably brought you to this GANTOB blog and associated book. Yesterday, I Destrukted my own copy of the GANTOB re-enactment, to use her terminology. I have since printed out the advance proof that she sent me hours before she was due to press the send button to self-publish the book (though ultimately that task fell to me).
But back to my skin (I am an old person after all – but not The Elderly Gentleman – so I am fuelled by health-related chat). Recently I have taken to wearing a dressing on a vulnerable area at the very top of my head which broke down a couple of weeks into applying the 5FU (despite following the instructions). So, returning to the point where yesterday’s blog (The Sting) left off, I was rather mystified as to how an insect could penetrate the gauze. Reaching up gingerly, my hand brushed against a piece of paper as it drifted towards the ground.
I reached to pick up the litter, that was mine now by association. I stuffed it in my suit jacket pocket. It was only when clearing out all the flyers that I had been handed by fringe promoters that I looked at it again.
It was different to the other fringe materials. It was a plain piece of paper, of the poor quality now used to save the world’s resources, folded into a paper airplane. It was rather the worse for wear, clearly having been soaked in one of those Edinburgh Fringe flash floods, so the printed ink and the words handwritten in Sharpie scrawl were difficult to read. Nonetheless, I vowed to find out more.
GANTOB has been in touch. Here are her updates (copied and pasted from her email). She is:
kontent that yesterday’s blog met the kriteria defined under the principles of Kreative Tyranny (in this kontext that is 400 words per daily blog)
unsure that an unprimed audience will understand references to “GANTOB” and pamphlets such as “The Houseguest” and “The Letter”. After all, the book has only been received by a few people so far, including some highly kommitted individuals who have been avid followers of all things GANTOB
working hard at kompleting K Faktor (pamphlet 18*)
unhappy about the way the GANTOB blog handles – it’s ugly, difficult to navigate, and with such a long name (gantobandthebenefaktor.wordpress.com) is difficult to promote
* I (the Benefaktor) insisted that this was removed from The Kompanion Volume that accompanies the GANTOB book.
I (still the Benefaktor) am the first to admit that my computer skills are not up to scratch. Up until a couple of months ago my old desktop computer – a cast off from my son – had been used for some word processing, emailing, internet banking and browsing. I had never even considered using social media. In fact, had I been asked to give a considered opinion, I would have said that I hate the very idea of social media. Doom scrolling sounds like something from a very specialist wing of an American church.
But a few weeks ago (23 August to be precise) something happened that turned my attitudes on their head. I had just been at a most entertaining show called Eric’s Tales of the Sea, which was playing at a tiny venue called Just The Tonic (Just The Wee One), off the Cowgate in Edinburgh. I had met a friend there, and walked him back to Waverley, leaving him at the steps leading into the station at Calton Road.
It was, I recall, a very warm day. I stopped under the huge bridge that frames the route north. I unbuttoned my suit jacket, and used my handkerchief to mop my brow. I stood for a few minutes gathering my thoughts and planning the rest of the afternoon. An iced coffee and an hour or two with the current edition of the London Review of Books would hit the spot. Just as I set off I felt a sting on the top of my head.
In today’s blog I had planned to tell you about yesterday’s trip to see GANTOB at The Manse, Badenoch. This was going to be combined with some musings on five letter words that contain two occurrences of the letter K (for Wordle type games, before you ask).
However, after a long exchange of messages with GANTOB this morning, escalating to a slanging match by phone this afternoon, I have had to change my plans.
GANTOB is not happy with yesterday’s blog. I typed it up as soon as I returned to my Edinburgh flat last night, just missing the midnight deadline. I mentioned Kreative Tyranny early on, as previously agreed with GANTOB. It certainly felt that I was pushing my limits. At 82 years of age, after travelling approximately 260 miles by bus in a single day, without my usual frequency of refreshment, and far from adequate toilet options, I would have much preferred to go straight to bed. But I wrangled with the website and filed my copy.
GANTOB is not persuaded. Her background in sales, and her current obsession with Curt Finks, means that she wants strictly defined parameters. She was adamant that I choose a number and stick with it. She would not accept a range. After what seemed like hours of wrangling we agreed that I will stick to exactly 400 words per daily blog. Luckily, I am not bound by very rigid Finks-style criteria (e.g. the specified count of each letter and number that he imposed on himself for 20 years). And neither are there Ernest Vincent Wright-type rules on the letters that I cannot use (see Gadsby and the missing letter “e”).
Which leaves me just about enough words to explain how GANTOB and I met.
You might have read GANTOB’s pamphlet “The Houseguest”. The short answer is that I am the Reverend K_____.
Don’t worry: I am long retired, and no longer “do” religion. You are not going to be subjected to a Finks style sermon.
What you might also know is that GANTOB sometimes writes two versions of her pamphlets (see, for example, Antiklimax).
After GANTOB’s shock discovery that I had worked out her identity in The Houseguest, we exchanged a series of emails and established something of a rapport. These emails became an unreleased version of GANTOB’s The Letter. How I identified GANTOB’s identity in the first place is another story.
I am sorry for the late hour. I will polish this up another time, but for the moment Kreative Tyranny calls, as GANTOB might say if she were in a fit state to say anything.
I have just arrived back from an unexpected trip to Badenoch to see GANTOB (the person) and retrieve her book. If you haven’t heard of GANTOB before, check her Instagram page or X feed. Though it appears that for the time being I will be taking care of that as well.
I have not written a blog before. I am going to have to do some scene setting, because a lot has happened in the days since you last encountered me in GANTOB’s writing. Not that you would necessarily know that, unless you have read the GANTOB Kompanion.
GANTOB had called me yesterday, distraught. Everything had seemed to be going to plan, until that morning. Her consignment of books had arrived on schedule on Friday 22 September, and she had worked until the early hours of Saturday morning making up packages that included the book, some Little Grapefruit bookmarks, a reproduction of a Curt Finks Edinburgh Fringe flyer, and an interactive version of a Curt Finks short story. She had signed and numbered each copy, and worked out how to print addresses on labels to save time. The numbered copies match up with answers to questions that “applikants” sent in asking GANTOB how to improve the rest of 2023. Having discussed some of the questions over the past couple of weeks, and the life changing situations they referred to, GANTOB and I agreed that we must meet the promised deadline of 23 September.
On the Saturday morning GANTOB caught a lift with her neighbour into the village and lugged two full bags of parcels along to the shop that doubled up a convenience store and post office. There was a modest queue. She shuffled along with her 41 packages. The minute hand seemed to accelerate as they headed for closing time, which was set by the time the post van passed. She might be able to post at least some of the books. But the van arrived before she had a chance, and there was nowhere to store parcels until Monday. She would have to take the two increasingly heavy bags away with her. With the Highland transport links as they are, there was no way that she would be able to get to Aviemore or Kingussie before closing time. If only she still had the company car.
So GANTOB called me up. Let’s call me The Benefaktor for the moment. We’ll see how that works. I had another name in the GANTOB Kompanion. I will explain more as this blog progresses. After I heard her sorry tale, I packaged up the complementary copies of the GANTOB book that had been sent to me as funder of the project. I printed off sheets that GANTOB emailed me, folded and cut them following her instructions, and packed them up in card backed envelopes. I hurried to the main post office in central Edinburgh and managed to post packs to a couple of GANTOB kompetition applikants from England, and one from Republic of Ireland. I messaged GANTOB to let her know that the mission was accomplished, if we accepted that posting at least some copies of the book on 23 September was enough. I agreed to use some of my remaining copies for local deliveries, and persuaded one of the food delivery cyclists you see dotting around cities nowadays to make deliveries to Stockbridge and Leith. A little later on I also had a consignment ready for The Tillerman and The KLFRS Board, delivered in a fish and chips bag. That felt like a healthier number of copies delivered on publication day.
But that still left the problem of completing the rest of the deliveries. As the day had progressed GANTOB was becoming less communicative. By the evening her husband Ali described her in a fugue state. I agreed that I would do what I could to retrieve the situation. I will describe today’s activities in tomorrow’s blog. To summarise briefly, it involved a lot of free bus travel (owing to my age), word games from the Sunday papers and then on my phone, a surprising number of words with the letter K, travel sickness, negotiations (successful in spite or perhaps of the desperation) and a race to catch the last bus back to Edinburgh.
On the way back home tonight (keeping GANTOB’s parcels as dry as I could in the downpour), I realised that there is still road in the GANTOB story, including my role.
With 99 days left in 2023, I commit to writing ~400 words a day about my contribution as The Benefaktor (GANTOB imposed the spelling) on this blog. With the 400 words of new story that I have persuaded Ali to relinquish, that will make at least 40,000 words by 31 December.
Tune in tomorrow to hear more about today’s exploits as an elderly gentleman in Badenoch, but not The Elderly Gentleman as I feel compelled to highlight having read GANTOB the book.
GANTOB blog 