Travis Hedge Coke
There Is Nothing Left to Say On the Invisibles
3.05
Mob’s Death
by Travis Hedge Coke
“A brand new convertible is outa my class
But that can’t stop me from athinkin’ to myself
That car’s fine lookin’ man, it’s something else.”
– Somethin’ Else, Eddie Cochran, et al
Much has been said about King Mob. Anything we say now is excess.
But, this was King Mob. “They still talk about him.”
King Mob does not start out as the main character, is not pitched as the protagonist, but early in The Invisibles, Grant Morrison decided they were going to imitate Mob, blur the lines between them and Mob, and aside from a few brief moments, much of the comic after the first year focuses as much on Mob as the projected main character, Jack Frost. Various characters become, at times, reflections of Mob, or contrasts with Mob. They play off him and his plots, and the beginnings and ends of Jack’s life as an Invisible.
“What mob’s that?” the clever-man asks our Mob. He says Mob is smart.
King Mob is Jack’s fairy godmother, and ours.
Sometimes you flatter for deals.
Frequently – in my experience mostly in eurocentric circles – we frame magick as an equative exchange, a debt and a payment. Magick as commerce. Magic as physics, but the physics which capitalism presents as financial and feudalism pretends to simplify with a christlike adoption of the debt and a noblesse oblige diffusion of the payment.
In many cultures, what is rendered into English as “their kind of money,” is an art or a history, a sign of respect.
In many practices, spirituality or magick is not debt and payment, which is just eighth grade capitalism or eighth grade physics, but regardless of an absence of debt, still deserving respect.
“Still” may be a misnomer. To be respect, the respect has to outdo, to outperform a debt. Even a debt of respect.
Eurocentric blood libels, a continuous fascination with pretending other cultures commit ritual sacrifices, but white people do not, like the phrase “king mob,” are predicated on reproducing a political scheme which rewards and reiterates itself. “King Mob,” is a reification of royalism and royal doctrine, divinely mandated stratified hierarchies. The weight of the crown. The facilitation of power through a mortal instrument.
Just the other day, someone was telling me how mean it was of Quentin Crisp to have no empathy for royals who marry royals and suffer.
The conflict cycles our King Mob, Gideon Starerzewski, engages in, are cycles. Debt and payment. Debt and payment. King Mob, as a name, as an idea, only feeds the cycles.
Not every bald character is Grant Morrison and not every Grant Morrison is King Mob. Is the Area 51 invading Batman character, the Kook, a send up of Morrison? Of Mob? Of the Writer?
Thankfully, King Mob is a name which can be given up.
King Mob but gone wrong and twisted, the stunted growth King Mob called Jolly Roger, is supposed to die, a sacrifice to the universe, to balance a karmic account. And, that is why it is thankful that King Mob can be given up.
There are differences between destined to, have to, and fair.
There is an allure in self-importance, and in royalism, we all see ourselves as equal to or superior to the royal we see as superior to others. The toxicity is built in.
“His Majesty King Mob” was graffitied on the walls of Newgate Prison during the Gordon Riots of 1780. Riots over Catholic toleration in England and the nature of a divine rule and divine royal lineation.
In 1829, Margaret Bayard Smith opined that Andrew Jackson’s ascension to President of the United States signified, “the Majesty of the People had disappeared,” replaced with, “a rabble, a mob, of boys, negros, women, children, scrambling fighting, romping.”
Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story called Jackson and his run, “King Mob.”
At its earliest roots, what it then calls up is a specter of Jackson, or King George III, not only that a president or king can be overturned or supplanted or amok run besides their terms, but their existence and vibrance.
This is not necessarily bad. “To speak of racism is to revive racism” is nonsense. Sometimes calling up specters is good. Sometimes we need a good seance, a good exorcism or invitation. Sometimes old Andrew Jackson needs to stand before the court and the court is now.
The crowds before Jackson at his inauguration were also called, ““living beings, not a ragged mob.”
Sometimes the ghost we are explicating is Margaret Bayard Smith or Lord George Gordon, whose positions are, to this day, often presented to our children with the edges shaved away to make their positions palatable.
Ragged Robin taking on a King Mob look while Mob takes on faux naivety is not a ragged mob, but a living being.
The King Mob group in the 1960s and 70s, coming from the Motherfuckers and the Situationist International groups’ currents, used the title in direct reference to the Gordon Riots, with most of their planned outrageous actions not taking place. They did not blow up a waterfall. They did not deface a historical abode with poet-referencing graffiti. They did not hang birds.
“Same thing day after day- tube – work – dinner – work – tube – armchair – TV – sleep – tube – work – how much more can you take? – one in ten go mad, one in five cracks up,” was painted along a commuter route into London over about a kilometer’s space.
King Mob may have been the source for many of member Malcom McLaren’s techniques employed in the generation, promotion and bluff of his band, the Sex Pistols.
Poop will meat its sewn, as the phrase does not go. Looks like King Mob styled himself classier for Robin.
For 1987’s Love Missile F1-11, Pop Will Eat Itself sampled the Sex Pistols covering Eddie Cochran’s Something Else.
Our Mob is never explicitly cisgender or heterosexual. It is accepted, often, as a priori, as the unchallenged nature, but our fairy godmother is our fairy godmother and the challenge is ours.
King Mob is an identity, a guise, a slogan, a hauntology of overdubs and echo. The thinking muck’s revolution. Weal of innovation. But, then, some people will say anything to be thought of as interesting.
Like how long Gideon carries his last secrets, how long Kirk holds his final bomb revelations, we have no idea how long anyone else will carry the name, King Mob. We can have faith that they will.
*******
Nothing in There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles) is guaranteed factually correct, in part or in toto, nor aroused or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound, and the same is true of the following recommendations we hope will nonetheless be illuminating to you, our most discriminating audience.
The Spectacle of Disintegration written by McKenzie Wark, a gamer.
Eat-Man directed by K?ichi Mashimo, a magician.
The Beautiful Ones written by Prince, an illusionist.