And Now For Something Completely Different!
'When you bring in people who are only capable of "processing information", without imagination, without poetry, you're screwed. Your whole civilisation!'
Seán Tarpey as Jody in Long Black Coat, Bickerstaffe Theatre Company, 1994
ACT ONE
A large room, decorated ambiguously in terms of past and future. There is, centre rear stage, a window completely obscured by a wardrobe, half-filled with earth. The doors of the wardrobe are closed. Inside the wardrobe a man’s black coat is hanging, half-buried in the earth. Actors’ right of the wardrobe, against the side wall, is a half-constructed lean-to shelter, built of doors and lengths of timber, and piled high outside with household objects. At the other side of the room is a table, beside which are a number of earth-filled drawers, surrounded by piles of books.
There is a door actors’ left, leading off stage to a hallway. In the corner of the room is a helmet-style apparatus on a stand — a Virtual Reality Helmet, which has the appearance of an insect’s head. The helmet is actually a somewhat outmoded piece of technology, which does not function properly. Reception is erratic, and the transmission is received in fits and starts, giving the sense that the helmet has a life of its own. . . .
Stage directions for Long Black Coat, by John Waters, Cleere’s Theatre, Kilkenny/Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 1994
1. YouTube: Talking to Rick Munn on his new channel, Volition
In this baptismal episode of Rick’s new channel we talk about writing, the role of the unconscious in unlocking creativity, the demise of true journalism and the limits of artificial intelligence (AI).
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2. Podcast: On the Patrick Coffin Show: Interviews with influencers/Commentary about culture/Tools for transformation
Tools for transformation #420: The Abolition of Reality, with John Waters
From the Intro:
Host Patrick Coffin welcomes Irish journalist and author John Waters, whose eleventh book chronicles the ‘heinous crime’ of the past five years through Substack dispatches. Waters, a former Irish Times columnist and First Things contributor, frames the work in the style of Winston Smith’s diary from 1984 — a record for the unborn, preserving truths amid erasure.
Waters argues we’ve entered a copy of reality detached from the original, where politics, ethics, and truth dissolve. COVID lockdowns exemplify this: a health ‘crisis’ masking authoritarian overreach, with media flipping from truth-telling to industrialized lying.
Was COVID a dream, or did it really happen? Once the ‘land of saints and scholars,’ Ireland now embodies cultural collapse — abortion’s moral ecosystem shattered, fatherhood in apocalypse (echoing Waters’ 1994 play Long Black Coat), and institutional betrayal.
He laments: ‘I am an authority on the destruction of my country,’ wishing instead for skills in boats or squash.Waters dissects systemic wickedness: tyrannical police, corrupted judiciaries, silent abolition of laws. Beyond news events, Waters probes meanings — lost freedoms, fractured subjects ‘subdivisible to infinity,’ and humanity’s thieving under technocratic masks. Despite censorship (his book has been shunned by Irish shops), Waters sees Substack as resistance. Advice: Hold fast to the good; pass truth to posterity.