The Blindboy Podcast - Nine Inch Nialls

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

Satanic Ritual Murder, Charles Manson, Balloons and the FBI  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bring hugs and smiles, you nine-inch Niles. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. Before we begin this week's podcast, I'm going to read out a short piece of prose that was submitted to the podcast by Hollywood actor Gary Sinise. I haven't seen Gary Sinise in much recently, but I've always had a soft spot for Gary Sinise. He's like the thinking man's Jeremy Renner. spot for Gary Sinise. He's like the thinking man's Jeremy Renner. But recent acting career aside, who am I to turn down the prose of Gary Sinise when he sends it into this podcast? So this poem is called The Day I Poked My Belly Button by Gary Sinise.

One day when I was alone in my bedroom, I poked at my belly button. I thought about how it once tethered my umbilical cord as I swam in an ocean of amniotic fluid. To think that that sack of amniotic fluid was the known universe to me at one point. It must have been like being on Mars. I wondered if I could use my belly button to turn myself inside out. So I tried. I took both of my fists and I pulled as hard as I could, but it would not work. It was painful too, and all the skin on my belly was red. A bard appeared at the window. It was a kestrel.

I grew concerned that the bard had seen me trying to turn myself inside out. I grew concerned that the bard would tell the tabloidsids and it would end my career as a Hollywood actor. So I gave chase. I ran to the window and reached for the bird but it flew away. I fell out of the window and landed in my garden. A large puddle of water had broken my fall. I was drenched in mud. I reached for the garden hose and attempted to fuse it with my belly button as if it was my umbilical cord of yore. Water splashed all over me like amniotic fluid. Everything here reminded me of being in the womb. As I got up I saw my neighbour and I said, the garden has just given birth to me and my neighbour said could you repeat that please Gary powerful stuff there

by Gary Sinise if you're new to this podcast go back to an earlier episode to familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast so the weather in Limerick is irrational it's either boiling hot or furiously angry and windy. Although I gotta say I cycled in the rain the other day and it was beautiful. I got absolutely drenched. Do you know that thin misty rain? Bastard rain I call it. Bastard rain

where you look at it and you think ah that's only drizzle that's not going to get me wet and then you go out into it and and you're the wettest you've ever been so I cycled in that for about 20 minutes and got absolutely soaked and it was gorgeous it was beautiful because it was warm I was cycling absolutely soaking wet getting belted by the rain and at one point I remember I remember accepting the rain into my face and literally I thought to myself this is like a spa treatment and then the rain stopped I locked my bike and the sun came out with extreme ferocity and I just walked around like a steaming horse after a race. And I just dried.

I just dried in the ether. And I met somebody that I knew. Someone who I hadn't spoken to in years. Someone who knows me in real life from like my teenage years. And they thought I was unemployed. They'd never heard of the podcast. They had a vague recollection of the rubber bandits. But they'd never heard of my podcast or anything like that.

So they'd met me. And it was the middle of the day. So they just assumed I was unemployed. Steaming. Just this unemployed man. Steaming like a kettle. And I quite enjoyed the experience of it because when that person was like oh what are you doing with your life it was actually really humbling it was really humbling because it was initially hurtful it was initially hurtful and I

felt this urge to say to them well I've got this this podcast and it's actually quite successful have you heard of it it's called the blind boy podcast but but I didn't I didn't because I caught myself in the moment and realized when that person thought I didn't have a job it made me feel insecure and it made me feel insecure because I had attached part of my value and my identity as a person with my job and with my achievements so I said nothing there's a seagull I let the seagull say their piece I said nothing and just stood there steaming and asked them how are they getting on how's everything with you and I let them I let them think that I was didn't have a job and they weren't being mean it's just it was like 10 o'clock on a Wednesday morning and I'm wet with

steam rising off me and I was probably giving off not doing a hell of a lot with his life vibes but I was grateful for the opportunity just to be faced with that to be faced with a person who in their experience of reality they're not holding me in particularly high esteem actually I'm only noticing the synchronicity there or the fact that their comment did actually impact my self-esteem. While I was steaming, literally, my self-esteem was rising into the air. You see, the humility I get to experience with a situation like that

is a wonderful contrast to, like, ten minutes later I'll post something on Instagram and it'll get fucking 10,000 likes or I'll go and do a gig with my bag on and there'll be a thousand people in the audience clapping see that's all so dangerous just like I can't allow it to hurt me if someone I know thinks I'm unemployed and haven't achieved anything. Similarly, I can't think that I'm somehow worth more because I have this other identity where I receive quite a lot of external praise. Remember I've got that plastic bag so I have an odd life where my external achievements are something I choose to wear on my face rather than being my face but I'm always cautious and conscious of with the job that I do and to be motivated and to pursue the career that I've pursued

I need to focus on doing it because I love doing it. Not the insecure part of myself that needs other people to know, oh he's got a real successful podcast you know. He was on the New York Times there a couple of months ago. See that, that's an unfillable hole. That's an external locus of evaluation. That's what the psychologist Carl Rogers would call my ideal self. If I place my self-worth in how other people view me or how other people value me in those external things, it becomes difficult for me to truly know meaning and happiness. So to actually be confronted in the flesh. With someone I knew. Who literally was just like.

You've done fuck all with yourself yeah. You're doing nothing with yourself. That's what you're up to. It was real humbling to get that. To actually live through that in the moment. And to sit with it. And to notice in myself oh that was hurtful there now

and the part of me that wanted to tell them about everything I'd achieved to take out my fucking phone and start showing them statistics of how many listeners I have I didn't I sat with it and I said

this actually doesn't matter because this person they're not particularly interested in what's happening in the world of entertainment or culture. They'd get most of their information from TV, newspapers or the radio. Because in Ireland, if you're not working with one of the newspapers, one of the radio stations or one of the TV stations. The media kind of pretends you don't exist because you're effectively competition. So the consequence of that is you don't get mainstream notoriety and they don't use social media. So yeah, the last time this person heard

of me was probably 2018 or something when I was on the Late Late Show. The fact is, am I doing what I love doing? Am I getting to fill my time. Exploring my passions. Yes. Then what the fuck matters. What else matters. Who cares what anyone thinks.

And also. Around that humbling experience that I had. I wouldn't have been able to sit with that in the moment. And not react to it. The way I did. If I hadn't previously have been able to sit with that in the moment and not react to it the way I did if I hadn't previously have been practicing mindfulness on my bicycle. See, I'd cycled into town and it started to rain about five minutes into my cycle. Now, that's not ideal.

You don't want to be on a bike and it starts raining. In fact, that's quite a shitty position to be in but when it happened I accepted there's nothing I can do about the rain I didn't dress for it and I accepted you're gonna get wet you're going to get wet now you're gonna get soaking that's what's happening now do you want to get angry about it do you want to react to something that you can't change or instead do you want to accept the unpleasantness that you can't control and notice it and that's what I did and as I noticed the rain and accepted it it actually became beautiful when I didn't entertain such thoughts as for fuck's sake it's raining I'm soaking now

it's gonna take ages to get dry I'm gonna look awful all wet oh this is terrible this is the worst thing that can happen what if I bump into someone and I'm covered in rain oh this is so bad I didn't entertain any of those thoughts I accepted that it was raining. I noticed it and when I did that I actually realized that it was beautiful. Yeah I am getting fucking wet. Isn't it wonderful to be alive? And it's kind of warm too. This is gorgeous. So what if I'm fucking soaking? So what if I look like a rat? Who cares? This is beautiful. Isn't it great to be alive and to be on a bicycle and to be healthy isn't this wonderful that was the mindful experience of being rained on when I'm cycling a bike and only because I did that and allowed the steam to rise off me only because I did that

did I put myself in the type of mindful headspace and when I meet a person and they say something triggering to me such as do you not have a job it doesn't affect me because their words became the rain I noticed it I accepted it and I let it wet me and I let it rise off myself as steam and then I was dry and I was grand. So I think I have a little hot take this week. I have a hot take which. I don't know is it a full hot take. But rather. It's a meaningful coincidence in culture.

That I'm curious about. It's a thread I want to unravel. Like Gary Sinise poking at his belly button fluff. But as I was researching this week, just patterns started to emerge. And the patterns that excite me, they're what I'd refer to as Jungian synchronicity. Events that are so bizarrely coincidental that they feel supernatural. I want to begin by talking about Charles Manson. Now, Charles Manson, not necessarily Charles Manson the person,

but the media circus and the culture around Charles Manson is always something that fascinates me. I'm not into this business of glamorising or fetishising cruel murderers. I'm not into this business of glamorizing or fetishizing cruel murderers. I am interested in how culture and the media specifically responds to these people. So 1969 was known as the summer of love, especially in San Francisco. 1969 was a very important year culturally. The 1960s felt like a legitimately important time. You had the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, you had hippies, you had the free love movement, you had people experimenting with drugs. The 60s felt like a time when young people tore up the rule books of previous generations

and said, we legitimately want change. Charles Manson was like a hippie cult leader, and he had a cult called the Manson family. And on August 10th, 1969, members of the Manson family committed a gruesome murder in Los Angeles they murdered the actress Sharon Tate

and her friends Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wachek and Stephen Parent so members of the Manson family went into a house in Cielo Drive in Los Angeles and brutally murdered a bunch of people and Sharon Tate because she was famous she was a movie actress and she also had an unborn child

within her she was brutally murdered by the Manson family by these cult Charles Manson's cult members in this house in the Hollywood Hills and the word pig was written on the front door of the house in Sharon Tate's blood. This murder is considered the day the 60s ended. It was so shocking and so terrifying and so widely reported within the media. That the darkness of it all. Collapsed. The hippie movement. And that sense of. Collective hope.

That the world had. During the 1960s. The Manson murders. Ended that culturally. And was really shocking. Now the reason the word pig was written. On the door of that house in Sharon Tate's blood is because Charles Manson wanted to frame the murder on the Black Panthers to create a race war. He wanted the media to think that Black Panthers, Black revolutionary groups,

who were not outwardly violent, they were defensive groups, they were defending their communities from police brutality. Charles Manson tried to frame the Black Panthers as having gone up to the Hollywood Hills and murdered a bunch of famous white people and this would start a race war that he referred to as Helter Skelter, which was the name of a Beatles song. The word pig would have been associated with African American vernacular at the time. Pig is what? The Black Panthers would have called police.

Now, a book I would urge you to read, because it's just fucking brilliant, it came out in 2019. It's a book called Chaos by Tom O'Neill, who's a journalist. In 1999, which I think was the 30th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca killings by Charles Manson and his family, on the 30th anniversary, Tom O'Neill was given a job by, I think it was Rolling Stone, to write something about these murders 30 years on but as Tom O'Neill investigated this he ended up unraveling things about Charles Manson and the Manson murders that had never ever been investigated before he ended up opening a can of worms that was long closed

and his journalistic investigation which was just supposed to be for this one article in 1999 the can of worms he opened was so great that it ended up turning into a 20-year project of serious journalistic investigation into Charles Manson. And if you want to find out everything about that, get the book Chaos by Tom O'Neill. It came out in 2019. It's astounding. So here's what Tom O'Neill unearthed. So the media and culture at large had always viewed

Charles Manson and the Manson family as an evil cult. An evil cult. An evil cult that might have been satanic. And they were crazy. Manson was a crazy person who acted alone. But what Tom O'Neill started unearthing was covert CIA and FBI programs that were in operation around the 60s. So I mentioned there about the 60s was a time of huge social change. Civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War protests. You had students getting out there and looking for social change.

This stuff was genuinely threatening to the capitalist fabric of America, hugely threatening, especially in the context of the Cold War. A lot of these students were anti-racist and Marxist and they wanted equality, racial equality, and they wanted principles within society that were a bit more akin to socialism a bit more equality and this was hugely threatening to the money in America to the capitalist racist structure of American society so the FBI started a covert program known as COINTELPRO and what this program was was loads and loads of money behind it a very very secret covert fbi program to infiltrate american left-wing groups student groups infiltrate anti-vietnam

protesters infiltrate african-american revolutionary groups infiltrate these groups fuck them up shut them down through spreading disinformation and creating conflict what the FBI were most afraid of were middle class white liberal kids finding common ground understanding and solidarity

with African-American liberation groups and also Hispanic liberation groups. The FBI did not want white people, brown people and black people coming together as a unified force. So they secretly set up this COINTELPRO to disrupt that, to fuck it up, to get people fighting with each other, to really disrupt. At the same time, the CIA had another operation called Operation Chaos, which more or less had similar aims. Get at these left-wing, get at the hippies, get at the students, get at the

anti-Vietnam protesters, get at the Black Panthers, get at the Hispanic get at the anti-vietnam protesters get at the black panthers get at the the hispanic groups infiltrate them get them fighting with each other make sure this does not work fuck them up and martin luther king the things they used to send to martin luther king sending him notes urging him to take his own life real Real evil stuff. And this isn't conspiracy theory. All of this stuff came to light in the 1970s. So Operation Chaos by the CIA and COINTELPRO by the FBI, this is fact.

This is fact. You can see the evidence for this stuff now. It was highly secretive in the 60s, but it's fact. This is what the FBI and the CIA were doing to the people of America. They couldn't allow the dream of the 60s to succeed because that goes against American capitalism. But Tom O'Neill when he was investigating Charles Manson in the 90s he started to Christ, you know, Charles Manson's plan to murder

these rich, famous white people and then pin it on the Black Panthers, fucking that, that sounds a lot like what the FBI and the CIA kind of wanted to do at the time, doesn't it? So Tom O'Neill went on a journey to investigate this to see is this possible and when he went looking and looking a bunch of mad shit started showing up. The biggest one of all being is when he looked at Charles Manson's records. Charles Manson was a petty criminal for most of his life. Very sad upbringing and engaged in criminal behaviour from a young age. And when Tom O'Neill went looking at Charles Manson's records in his late teens and his twenties, he found that Manson appeared to have like a get out of jail free card. When he would get involved in scuffles

or rob cars and do criminal shit, at a certain point in his life he wasn't getting convicted. Manson's record was the record of someone who was being minded. When he was committing crimes and then not getting convicted he looked like someone who was an informer, someone who was protected, someone that when they did get arrested. Someone powerful stepped in and said. Not this guy. He's ours. And Manson's record appeared to demonstrate this pattern of behaviour.

And then Tom O'Neill went looking at. Who was Manson's parole officer. And when he looked at Manson's parole officer. The man who appeared to get Manson out of jail all the time, he found that his parole officer was also a researcher in this place called the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. Now Haight-Ashbury was an area in San Francisco which was the epicenter of the hippie movement. So there was this funded, government funded free health clinic in the middle of the hippie district where Charles Manson's parole officer worked as a researcher. And this free medical clinic, the Manson family were there all the time, usually getting treatment for syphilis

and venereal diseases. And then when Tom O'Neill went looking more, he found that in this free medical clinic, in the epicentre of all the hippies, where Charles Manson and the family were going, a fella called Joel and Jolly West also had an office as a researcher at this building. Now Jolly West, it emerged in the 70s, was the mastermind behind our incredibly secret CIA program called MKUltra. He was a psychologist who worked secretly with the CIA to try and explore how LSD could be used to control people's minds and get them to commit murders. I understand this sounds insane, but this is real. Look up MKUltra. It's an actual thing that the CIA did from the 1950s to the 1970s. This is real. This happened.

It's not conspiracy theory. It's conspiracy. So the CIA spent years trying to use LSD specifically and different other techniques for interrogation they were trying to find a truth serum and they were trying to find what was known as a Manchurian candidate can we can we drug a person or can we brainwash a person so that they can assassinate someone can we control them against their fucking will so that they can assassinate someone? Can we control them against their fucking will so that they can assassinate someone if we tell them to do it? And if you're thinking,

why would the fucking, why would the CIA, why would the US government do something as fucked up as that? Because it was the Cold War and they were thinking, well, maybe the Russians are doing it too. So maybe the Russians are learning

how to use drugs to control people's minds and get them to be assassins. So maybe we should do it as well. So basically Charles Manson and his family throughout the hippie movement of the 60s because they were a hippie commune. They're going to this clinic where the fucking CIA head of MKUltra has an office. Tom O'Neill can't prove it in the book. And this is a solid book with solid journalism and solid researchNeill can't prove it in the book and this is a solid book with solid journalism and solid research.

He can't prove it but he's pointing out this is a bit fucking strange, isn't it? And it's a bit strange that Manson and his family are going to this place where we know the CIA are operating with this real fucked up shit just to show you how fucked up this is. Jolly West, the fellow who had an office in this clinic,

he was also the psychiatrist of Jack Ruby. Jack Ruby is the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated President Kennedy. So the psychiatrist, who's working secretly with the CIA about how to use LSD to make people assassins just happens to be the psychiatrist of fucking Jack Ruby

and then the same dude is working at this clinic where Manson and the family are there the whole time long story short Chaos by Tom O'Neill the book it lays out multiple smoking guns, really, really strange coincidences that would lead one to think, knowing the stated aims of the FBI's COINTELPRO program and the CIA's Operation Chaos, and also knowing that Manson appeared to be protected in some way

as an informant, and knowing the proximity that people like Jolly West had to Manson, he kind of hints that Manson was being trained or controlled by the FBI and CIA to administer and brainwash his followers with LSD using CIA techniques so that they would murder with the stated aims of Operation Chaos and COINTELPRO basically that they would go and do something horrendous and that this could be pinned on the Black Panthers.

It didn't go as planned, things got fucked up, and then when it all went to trial, CIA and FBI completely disappear, and Charles Manson and his family just look like lunatics operating by themselves. So the book is called Chaos by Tom O'Neill, and you should definitely read it if all that sounds interesting, because it's not batshit conspiracy

theory it's a lot of stuff where there's real evidence and it's fascinating but what really makes the Charles Manson phenomenon unique is it was 1969 it was the era of television and the news media made Charles Manson and the Manson family into celebrities. The news media at the time they didn't treat it as this incredibly sad tragedy which is what it is people lost their lives it's unbelievably sad and tragic. Instead, the news media reported it in a way which incorporated entertainment and made two Charles Mansons and made two Sharon Tates. There was the real people, which is a horrible tragedy, and then the hyper real version, the celebrity version. They made a celebrity out of Charles Manson and his family. The 60s ended, hippies became evil and for the 70s and 80s Charles

Manson was the archetype of evil. Charles Manson was there, there was Hitler and there was Charles Manson and this is what the media portrayed as the two great evils to the point that Manson when he was in prison even got a swastika tattooed on his forehead he had bought into how the media represented him but the Manson family were a cult they were a cult with Manson at the head of it and And he manipulated very vulnerable young people, mostly young girls, and manipulated them into doing what he wanted them to do. And the Manson murders also created in American culture what was called the Satanic Panic. Manson and the cult had been,

they were portrayed as Satanic. These were Satanic hippies who worshipped Satan and the Tate-LaBianca murders were a Satanic ritual. And it had been reported upon so much and created into such a hyper-real spectacle that it created in America the seeds of what was known as the satanic panic and this lasted well into the 1980s. The satanic panic was a period in the 1970s and 80s where there was an irrational unproven fear of satanic cults performing ritualistic satanic abuse and murder. There was very very

little evidence of it actually happening but the fear and the panic was so great that even law enforcement started to find it happening when it didn't exist. There were multiple cases in daycare centers in America where they believed that children were being ritualistically, satanically abused. And investigators would interrogate children and freak them out so much that the children started to use their imaginations to fabricate things because they were terrified. So they would... There was kids saying that their teacher could suddenly

fly around the room and stuff like that mad shit but because american culture was so obsessed with satanic ritual abuse being a real thing these things were taken seriously there would have been multiple murders throughout the 70s and 80s real I mean murders awful terrible things but when it would go to trial some people were falsely accused because they were accused of being satanists and that this murder that happened was actually a satanic ritual. This was all very heavily driven by Reagan, Ronald Reagan and also driven by Christian fundamentalists and the satanic panic started to leak into culture. They believed that heavy metal music in particular was actually the music of the devil so if a teenager was listening to

heavy metal then parents should be deeply concerned that they're getting involved in a satanic cult. They brought heavy metal musicians and they brought them in front of fucking American Congress accusing them of having hidden satanic messages in their music. These groups became convinced that if you played certain records backwards that you could interpret the lyrics

to mean satanic messages all utterly insane shit that that had no grounds in rationality because it was a moral panic but then what happened by the mid-80s is all of these Christian fundamentalists Ronald Reagan, Tipper Gore they had freaked out the parents of America so much about the risk of their kids becoming involved in satanic ritual abuse and the parents are just thinking back to Charles Manson, that's all they're thinking because the thing is when the media made a circus out of Charles Manson in, they didn't just show Charles Manson but they showed the Manson family and these were mostly young white girls who had been brainwashed and the parents of America said oh my god what if that was my child, what if my child went off and joined a

satanic cult and turned into those Manson family kids and murdered people so that was what was in every parent's mind when by the 80s they're saying if your kid listens to heavy metal if your kid plays Dungeons and Dragons they're at risk of a satanic cult the parents are just thinking oh my god are they going to murder someone but then the teenagers being teenagers are like this, now that you mention it, this satanic shit is pretty fucking cool. Because my parents hate this. They're terrified of this. So then

the heavy metal bands started to literally get a lot more satanic in their imagery as a as an ironic thing. To be ironic. Because there wasn't really satanic messages, like fucking Black Sabbath, they're just a lot of lads from Birmingham, they're just normal working class lads from Birmingham, they didn't give a fuck about Satan, they just want to smoke a bit of

hash and have long hair and play unbelievable music, that's all Black Sabbath wanted to do, even though their name is Black Sabbath, which is a fucking satanic mass but they were playing with this imagery because they thought it was cool it was harmless it's just fun art but the bands really started to lean into this and they became explicitly satanic and then the kids were like I like this satanic shit it's real funny because I don't give a fuck about satan but my dad's terrified and when my dad is scared I now have a sense of identity but what you get out of all of this is it's quite sincere the 80s and the 70s were a sincere time for parents to be clutching their pearls genuinely believing that heavy metal music is satanic. There's quite a lot of

sincerity in that. So then the late 80s come around and the 1990s which is the time of irony. Generation X irony. This is where I want to speak about the utterly bizarre meaningful coincidence that I unearthed this week during my research and it concerns the band Nine Inch Nails. Before I get into that I unearthed this week during my research and it concerns the band Nine Inch Nails before I get into that I think it's time for an ocarina pause I think what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna I've been starting a tradition recently where I pick a book off my table and then hit myself into the head with it because I get to give you a little book recommendation while I'm doing it so the book I'm gonna pick this week is another short story collection

by Raymond Carver who's one of the one of the most prominent short story writers I think of the 20th century and a wonderful little collection of short stories called What We Talk About When We Talk About Love which what I love

about this collection is they're like little scenes. The stories aren't so much complete stories. They're like scenes. It's like you get to dip in and out of a scene and you come away from it searching for your own narrative. It's a great little book. Raymond Carver, what we talk about when we talk about love. So I'm going to hit myself into

the head with this book so that you don't get a big surprise when an advert comes on. So here's the Raymond Carver pause. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone.

Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil.

It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother. Mother of what? is the most terrifying 666 is the mark of the devil Hey!

Movie of the year It's not real It's not real What's not real? Who said that? The First Omen Only in theaters April 5th Nice soft book

for hitting myself into the head not too hard it's not a hardback Quite a pleasant experience Nice soft book for hitting myself into the head. Not too hard. It's not a hard back. Quite a pleasant experience. So that was the little. Ocarina pause there.

Support for this podcast. Comes from you the listener. Via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash. The Blind Boy Podcast. Do forward slash the blind buy podcast do you enjoy listening to this podcast does it bring you solace does it bring you joy

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I fucking love and adore that I get to present this podcast to you speak about what I want to speak about what I'm genuinely interested and passionate about and no cunt gets in the way and tells me what the fuck to talk about I love that so if you also love that consider becoming a patron all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, that's it if you can't afford it

don't worry about it, you can listen for free you can listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free everybody gets a podcast I get to earn a living it's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness um my new collection of short stories topography hibernica is coming out in november you can pre-order that book you can pre-order a signed copy you can do that right now please do that if you are considering getting the book rather than waiting for it to come out in November if you want a link for where you can pre-order topography hi bernica worldwide follow

me on instagram blind by boat club go to my saved stories at the top of my page and that will have all the international links for my book also I've got an audiobook that I just released which is a mixture of a collection of some of my short stories from my first two books that's called Small Bones and a Fist and that's available on wherever you get your audiobooks. Okay do I have any gigs to promote? Let's promote a couple of gigs here. Do a little bit of a gig promotion. Right let's see what we have here. Oh, fun, fun, fun, when I try to decipher all the letters and turn them into words.

August. On the 26th of August, I'm in the Cork Opera House for the Cork Podcast Festival. Check out that festival, as well as my gig. Then on the 28th of August, I'm in vicar street up in dublin yum yum that's going to be a fun monday gig then on friday the 1st of september i'm in barmingham at the masley folk festival then on the 9th of september i'm in the pavilion in dunleary beautiful dun Leary then Patrick Cavanagh weekend in Monaghan I have a great guest

for that I won't tell you who it is yes but someone I'm really looking forward a writer who I'm really looking forward to speaking to

at the Patrick Cavanagh weekend in Inishkeen in Monaghan on the 30th of September and what have I got Waterfront in Belfast, on the 18th of November,

and there's a UK tour, somewhere there, and you know, I'm gigging in Galway, on the fucking, sometime in 2024, I don't know when the day it is, but it's in,

I think it's called, the Town Hall Theatre, is it, I don't know, right, but I'd say, if you look at that theatre's, website there in Galway,

there might be an old, blind boy gig, coming up, I haven't gigged in? But I'd say if you look at that theatre's website there in Galway, there might be an old Blind Boy gig coming up. I haven't gigged in Galway in fucking years. I should be doing more gigs in Galway. Is that everything? Support independent podcasters, whatever podcaster you listen to. Support independent podcasters, either directly or share their stuff,

talk about it, share it on your social media, because the independent creators that are truly doing their own thing being passionate about what they're doing those independent creators are not getting media coverage it's that simple so if you've got a podcaster that you fucking love and they're fucking bringing you joy every week go and support that podcaster directly to keep it alive and then you won't have to be worrying about why the radio is shit and why the tv is shit fuck all that go directly to the podcaster that you love who's making independent content right the hot take i thought this was

going to be a fucking short hot take but actually it's after bleeding into the second half so this is actually a decent enough hot take so this is about media and culture mainly that's what this podcast is about and i spoke about charles manson and those horrendous murders in 1969 the murder of sharon tate and her friends and how manson and his cult were elevated to celebrity status celebrity status by the media to the point that they stopped being real. They became completely separated from the actual horrendous things that happened and all the pain and sadness of those real events. The media turned Manson and his family into hyper real celebrities and they took Sharon Tate's humanity and victimhood away from her and just made her a plot point in a greater media narrative an entertainment media narrative

so by the 1990s you have this strong post-modern irony and one example of this is is Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. Now Marilyn Manson has multiple allegations of sexual abuse and cruelty against him, so I'm not lionising Marilyn Manson in any way, but I am mentioning him for two reasons. The first reason is the name Marilyn Manson tells us a lot about postmodern irony and the Charles Manson murders Marilyn Manson got his name because he was a child so he would have been a he would have been born in the 60s so when he was a kid Marilyn Manson real name Brian Warner was growing up watching Charles Manson and the Manson murders becoming these hyper real

celebrities on his TV screen so when Marilyn Manson was deciding on his name he says I'm going to take Marilyn Monroe who's this really glamorous famous icon and I'm going to mix her with Charles Manson this horrendous murderer because as I see it the media has elevated and lionized these two icons as equal one is a beautiful glamorous woman and another one is a murderer but within the hyper real media narrative they're one and the same so I'm Marilyn Manson and his guitar player was called Twiggy Ramirez Twiggy after Twiggy the famous model from the 60s and Ramirez after Richard Ramirez the serial killer so what you see there by the 90s is Charles Manson had become meaningless Charles Manson was an ironic hyperreal projection. He was an icon of fame that the media had created.

And Marilyn Manson, the singer, was ironically holding a mirror up to that. There was another artist called Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor. Came out in the late 80s. Pioneer of industrial music metal new metal Nine Inch Nails were a very important band in late 80s early 90s I like Nine Inch Nails music I love Pretty Hate Machine Downward Spiral I love these albums this is where it starts getting weird so like Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, they would have been buddies in the late 80s, early 90s. And the house that Sharon Tate was murdered in

by Charles Manson's family in 1969, this house in CLO Drive in the Hollywood Hills, obviously no one wanted to live there. Who would want to live in that house where these terrible things happened especially with the satanic panic. People believed that there was evil energy there but then Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails in an act of hyper real irony decides I'm gonna put my studio in that house so Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor moved his moved into the house in Cielo Drive where Sharon Tate was murdered by Charles Manson's family Nine Inch Nails went there and he set his studio up in that house. Now I don't agree with that. I think that's fucking sick. I think it's immature. When I heard it really turned me off.

Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor said that he was being ironic. The one thing you have to remember. Like this is before the internet. So Trent Reznor would have grown up as a kid with the Manson murders and Sharon Tate not being presented as a real actual thing that happened not being presented as real human misery but the famous icon it was like it might as well have been a film so Trent Reznor moved his fucking studio into the house where

sharon tate was murdered marilyn manson recorded his first album smells like children in that fucking studio in the house where the charles manson murders occurred now you have these ironic 90s industrial metal heads who are fetishizing charleson and fetishizing Satanism in an ironic 90s way now you have him literally in the fucking house where the murder happened making the music in Trent Reznor's defense after he did it Sharon Tate's sister confronted him and said are you making fun of my sister's death are you making fun of my sister's death? Are you profiting from my sister's death? And Trent Reznor said

when he met her actual sister he felt like a piece of shit. That was the first time that he went oh my god Sharon Tate was a human being who was brutally murdered for no reason and here is her sister a living breathing grieving human being and she is a victim of all this and now I feel like an asshole because yeah I kind of am capitalizing off your sister's death and treating it as a kind

of a weird little joke I kind of am doing that and what I'll say is that the 90s are a kind of a weird little joke. I kind of am doing that. And what I'll say is that the 90s are a bit of a different time. In the 90s, if someone would have heard that Trent Reznor's studio is in the Manson House, a lot of people would have thought, wow, that's so cool and ironic. In the age now of social media, we don't have cultural scarcity anymore. When something tragic or horrendous

happens now we can go on social media and literally see and sometimes even speak to the victim or the immediate victims we have that ability to touch something horrendous that's happening right now and it's much more difficult for it to be portrayed as this hyper real version of what actually happened like when those people were trapped in a submarine a couple of weeks ago one of the kids of the men who was trapped like his son started going viral for being a an ape shit online so we now have these mechanisms today these these ways of communicating where when something tragic happens we can directly see the impact of people who are grieving via

social media and it becomes very real and we have much more awareness around respect for those issues but in the 90s Sharon Tate getting murdered in the 60s to someone like Trent Reznor who grew up watching that as a circus on TV she was not Sharon Tate wasn't a real person and neither was Charles Manson and it took meeting Sharon Tate's sister for him to go holy fuck this is a real woman however again and and this is what I don't like this either. He left the studio and said, right, I don't want to record in the Manson house anymore. This is kind of fucked up. But he took the front door with him.

He took the front door where Sharon Tate's blood had been used to scrape the word pig. And he took it to his new studio. So, fuck Trent Reznor. And it's not that I believe that the door has any spiritual. It's just how about not doing that. How about having respect for a victim. Even if you don't believe in an afterlife or anything like that. How about just being a decent person.

So here's the bit that I want to get to. That I've been building up to. The very fucking bizarre meaningful coincidence. decent person so here's the bit that I want to get to that I've been building up to the very fucking bizarre meaningful coincidence so here you have Trent Reznor who's pals with Marilyn Manson and Charles Manson is part of their mythology and satanism is part of their creative mythology and identity as artists and you've Trent Reznor literally making music in the Manson fucking house. It's completely unrelated to that.

Trent Reznor is recording a Nine Inch Nails music video for their song Down In It in 1990 and they didn't have a huge amount of budget for this video and the music video for this Nine Inch Nails song it's kind of gruesome and it's fucked up and Trent Reznor is in it and he's being chased by two fellas who are wearing leather jackets and then he he's chased by them and then he jumps off a building and his dead body is on the ground while these people are around him.

So it's this edgy, low-budget music video. And when they're shooting this Nine Inch Nails music video, they wanted to get a shot of Trent Reznor's dead body. So Trent Reznor is lying on the ground in shitty makeup. Makeup that's, it's literally flour. He puts flour on his face to make his body look decayed and trent resner is lying on the ground and they wanted to get a shot from above his body with the camera moving but the thing is in order to get a shot like that in 1990 you would have

needed to have had a mechanism called a crane which would it would have our wires really really expensive way to film someone from above using a crane so nine inch nails didn't have that money so they had to get creative so trent resner is shooting this video in chicago in 1990 and he does himself up as if he's dead and lies down on the ground and then they're like okay we want to get this shot where the camera is moving up how can we be creative here so they get a video camera and they attach a lot of helium balloons to the video camera on a string so the idea is the camera is dangling on these helium balloons and then trent resnor's dying on the ground, or lying dead on the ground. So the helium balloon lifts the camera into the air and then

they use a string to pull it back down. So they go great right we have the final shot for this music video. So Trent Reznor gets on the ground, lies dead wearing the makeup. They get the the camera. And the helium balloon. Lift it up. It floats into the air. And then fuck. The helium balloon. And the camera.

Float off. Into the sky. So now they're like fuck. We're after losing our camera. This Nine Inch Nails music video can't get finished. The camera is floating in the air. So they'd used so many helium balloons. the camera that the camera floated 100 miles in the distance over to rural Michigan.

So now the Nine Inch Nails camera for the video is floating on balloons over this farmland. Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails think nothing of it they just go what a crazy thing happened today we put our camera on a balloon and it blew away and we're never gonna see it again Trent Reznor forgot about it so the camera floats a hundred miles away on the balloons over farmland and a farmer sees it but this farmer in rural Michigan in the farms nearby people had been growing cannabis so the farmer reckons ah that's a camera that belongs to the police and the police now have that camera on those balloons because they're trying to catch people growing weed so I'm going to get that camera and I'm going to bring it back to the police because they definitely own it. So the farmer gets the camera when the balloons drop, takes it to the police and then the police

go, we don't know what this camera is, but we're going to look at it. So the police look at the footage on this camera and get it developed. And then they go, oh my my god this is actual footage of a ritualistic satanic murder what else could this be there's a dead dude on the ground and there's a bunch of people around him who look like satanic cultists i think we finally have it i think we finally have the footage a snuff film of an actual satanic murder we have it so the police in michigan are like this is insane we have this footage there's definitely a murder going on here this is 1990 and this is a shitty camera as well you have to realize so the footage isn't going to be the best so the police in michigan are looking at it and they're going we gotta ring the fucking fbi we gotta ring the fbi this

is above us so then the fbi get involved so now the fbi and the michigan police are like yeah we've got this fucking footage here and that whole satanic panic shit there for the 70s and the 80s i think we finally have it on footage we have a video here it's a dead dude and this looks like a satanic ritual murder we have it we just got to find out where is it happening and who is it so the fbi for like a year or longer are pumping all their resources into this piece of footage off a camera that came off a balloon they send it away to get it fucking digitally enhanced in like 1990 spending millions on it trying to find out who is the person that's murdered in this video who are the cultists that are doing this satanic ritual and having spent

all that time on it they use facial recognition to do everything they can with technology at the time they finally find there's a gentleman here and he's dead and our records show that his name is trent resner and they're having a fucking clue who trent resner is so they search around they search around they get nothing then they put footage of what they believe to be the satanic snuff film around high schools in chicago and this teenager who's watching mtv goes that footage looks a bit like this nine inch nails video so then the fbi ring up nine inch nails and say is trent resner in your band and they're like yeah well he's dead and we have a video of his murder can you can you send him to Chicago to prove that Trent Reznor isn't dead and hasn't been ritualistically killed so Trent Reznor's manager goes look we're not doing that he's here

beside me he's alive and then they go oh yeah we shot a music video there about two years ago and one of the cameras was on balloons and we lost it so i think that's what you have fbi so i just find that nuts i find it mad that complete accident a fucking nine inch nails camera floats away and then the FBI think they finally have footage of a ritualistic satanic murder and what I find succinct about it is going back there to you know I started the podcast talking about how the FBI and the CIA may possibly have been behind the Manson murders and this climate of satanic panic and they may have been behind this meanwhile Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails grows up as a child watching all this satanic panic through the 70s and 80s on television watching it get blown out of proportion to the point that it becomes

meaningless he ends up fetishizing the Charles Manson murder house and recording his albums in there the FBI accidentally find his footage and start believing their own bullshit going finally we have proof of satanic ritual murder on camera i just feel like in the media sense in the hyper real sense if charles manson's if that murder like ended the hippie movement movement and ended the 60s then that incident there with the nine inch nails video on the fbi ended the satanic panic. That version of it at least because unfortunately it's back now with QAnon and all that shit. All the modern conspiracy theories that are going around the internet now, they're just an updated version of the satanic

panic. So that's this week's hot take, which I thought was going to be a short one. That was actually an entire podcast. I hope that was cohesive there because I went into the flow for some of that it felt right when I was doing it alright wink at a magpie prepare porridge for a goat upgrade your cat's food I'll catch you next week with

I don't know what dog bless God bless. the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the toronto rock hosts the rochester nighthawks at first ontario center in hamilton at 7 30 p.m you can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play come along for the ride and punch your ticket to rock city at torontorock.com. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Продолжение следует...