Less is Moore

or Stop Masturbating in Public

Eleven thousand, one hundred and sixty-seven words.  That’s how many words it takes Alan Moore to reach climax while being serviced by his own ego.  It’s like a less physically demanding form of auto-felatio.  Seriously Alan, you have some jizz in your beard.  I read Fossil Angels when it was first released on glycon, had a very angry couple of hours and then drowned the whole dirty thing to death in rum.  Suddenly, I am seeing it everywhere again and much to my personal dismay people seem to actually be crediting this sticky wet mass of tissue with value.

I’ll spare my erudite readers the long tirades about how there is literally no difference between Harry Potter and Promethea except the fanciful symbolisms the story is dressed up in.  You will also be spared verbose refutations of the claim that the Golden Dawn was first and foremost a writers' circle, since that is patently and hilariously erroneous.  I will choke back a long-winded example of how the teenagers throwing slumber parties and wondering if they can get their boyfriend back with magic made Moore millions of dollars and are his primary readership.  And I will most certainly not make the personally biased statement that Morrison’s the Invisibles is the greatest comic about magic ever written (yes I will, Morrison’s the Invisibles is the greatest comic about magic ever written).  I am not going to do any of those things I just did because I am classy like that.

What I will do however, is point out that Alan Moore has no fucking idea what he's talking about.  Fossil Angels is a sprawling, arrogant display of a complete ignorance regarding the state of the world and how you as a karcist might serve it.  I started out all the things he reviles, a teenage chaos magician doing practical magic.  Only the circumstances of my journey are nothing like he describes.  There were no make-over parties beneath the Spadina Overpass, or freezing to death hitch-hiking the Trans-Canada through the Rockies.  There is no mention of the violent and corrupt cops of the Markets now defunct 52^nd division or the painful humanity of the sex industry.  Manipulating the world is predicated on accepting it just as it is.  

So to Mr. Moore I say, don’t super-impose Thelema’s failure to give you the power to manipulate the manifest world onto me buddy, it’s not my fault the giant calcified ego they left you with is getting in your way. 

Perhaps you sir are the one who is a writer first and a karcist second and perhaps that’s why you’re not very good at it.  Perhaps that’s why when you look at the Occupations on the news and see Guy Fawkes you have confused it with your own reflection.  You will not belittle the roll of the bokors, los Muertos, the Palo and the Hoodoo because they are the heart of the West and when its mechanics break down it is to these practical, accessible sorcerers that the world turns, (politicians, scientists, bankers and the stars of popular media, we have worked for them all.)  They do that because they can turn a court proceeding, an immigration hearing because they can assure a safe income from a dangerous life and because sometimes even the Kings of the Earth want their girlfriends back.  They turn to the seasoned rootworker and not the arrogant comic-book author because the rootworker can actually help them, is capable of seeing around their own ego long enough to perceive the simple romance in a heart-break or the daring bravery of an unlikely gamble.

I am not going to give Fossil Angels ten thousand words.  It’s a joke, an aging Thelemite descending into New Age platitudes about how were all beautiful artists in the fresh undergrowth of a new dawn and you are the world’s greatest sorcerer if you can turn a door knob.