When Carlos says on it’s like a verbal karate chop upside the head. It carries the universality of a Hare Krishna chant—OM—his own man-trie code that says it all and which fixes him in the cosmic eye more decidedly than his birth certificate. It is meant as an explosive rather than a meditative catalyst, worrying the rest of his monologue into a dizzy ziggurat, out of sight and out of mind, leaving only the clap of a sonic boom. On! His abstractions wave themselves into a pattern of theories, postulates and corrolaries that blazon the emblems of the new age—the Age of Aquarius which he celebrates each night dancing in the French production of Hair on the stage of the Theatre St. Martin in Paris. And when he is not dancing he talks. Communicates. Relates to people. Opens their minds. Turns them on!

‘The whole point about Nuclear Medicine is that we can’t relate to our environment unless we’re plug­ged in. We’re still basically living in a low-energy world because people are not tapping the power that’s there. Ask yourself, what makes our society what it is? Technology. Right. But where do you find it? Only in industry. Correct? People generally are not aware of how to turn it to their own use and that’s why they get alienated from their environment. Know what I mean? Take art. It can be reduced to a circuit like the diagram you find stuck to the inside cover of your radio. The dance is an art, but it is not tuned into technology. It is still in the dark ages. It’s not plugged in. On!’

Carlos gets up from the floor and disappears into another room, taking quick dancer’s leaps. He is 22, born in Colombia, raised in the US, and just arrived from San Francisco. He was living there in a commune with people who were plugged in but not really on! They were drop-outs from the ‘machine’. Carlos loves the ‘machine’—from the electric tooth­brush to the atom-smasher he bounces to its whirr like a cheer­leader to a Sousa march.

In Paris he is staying with friends —friends who are plugged in. On! Their large, dishevelled house in Contrescarpe has a curious warp to it. The floors slope off to one side, the wood-panelled walls seem to buckle and the windows are painted black. Negotiating the room’s differ­ent gradients required a compass and dropping a plumb line in different places. One probes struts and supports for a more solid foot-

ing, grasping the window sill like a taffrail and sizing up the long broad-beam table for use as a life boat. It’s as big as a raft, anyway, like the three straight-back chairs positioned on either side, it is massive, solid and unwieldy. The large room has some of the dampness of an empty house on a tide-water— the kind of musty envelope in which monks craft illumined manuscripts and, in the accustomed manner, challenge the phantasms that try their faith: ‘Whence comest thou? Art thou some god, some angel or some devil?’

It was Carlos. Plugged in. On! The beaded fringe vest and tie-dyed shirt pulled up to the neck, his chest wrapped in a broad plastic harness trailing half a dozen wires from various contact points on its surface. The wires run to a metal console bearing four buttons. He flicks one of them. And beams. His chest heaves and rolls at the contact points where the wires disappear into the coloured nodules on the wrap­around harness. The exposed flesh of his torso puckers and jolts as if being nibbled by a flying wedge of electronic chiggers. Underneath the harness band, convulsing steadily, a litter of puppies seems to be struggling in purblind fury. The sound of his voice descends as from a great height above his fitful chest.

‘You ever try one of those muscle exercisers? They shoot impulses into your muscles, tones them up, keeps them exercised without doing any real exercise. Know what I mean? The voltage is on pretty low now. About nine volts is the highest you can go with this, but the human body can take as much as several hundred. Can you imagine how you’re muscles will be jerking when they receive really powerful im­pulses? I mean not so powerful that you get electrocuted, but just strong enough so you twitch. I’ve got a dance figured out where all the dancers are hooked up to this sort

of console run by a computer which selects the strength of the voltage and the muscles it sends the impulses to in each individual dancer. You’ll have some of them, say, twisting themselves into the ground like a corkscrew; some will just be shoot­ing out their arms or legs at a certain angle set by the computer, and some will be doing absolutely nothing except to show a facial twitch. Know what I mean? It’ll be a mathematical precision ballet. The dancer’s body itself won’t be moving much, but only certain parts of it will. Can you see it? With the lights? Electronic music? Plugged in dancing! On! On the moon.

‘On the moon. Yeah. The moon is the only place I’d want to do this sort of thing. The earth isn’t ready for it yet. The dancers got to be astronauts wearing space suits with built-in electric impulse points shooting out into their muscles. The computer will feed the infor­mation from earth and I’ll be sitting at the control switch, watching the whole thing on television. I’ve designed a space helmet that lights up like a pinball machine and suits that flash different colors. The dancers will be wired for sound, too, because the impulses going into their body are amplified by a radio transmitter going beep-beep-beep, de­pending on the strength of the impulses and the muscle move­ments. Like beep-bop in jazz 20 years ago. Beep-bop! They’ll have these groupies here on earth, sort of like a fan club, that are called teeny-beep-boppers. Get it? My dancers will be wired for everything— sound, light, movement. And on earth everybody will be sitting home watching it on television. The whole world is plugged in. On!’

His upper body becalms. The turmoil in his rib cage ceases as the low electric hum of the console flees down tinny echo filters. Carlos unplugs himself by removing the harness from his chest, gathering

up the wires and placing them by the console. He arranges his necklace of amber beads and the fringes vest, tucking the tie-dyed T-shirt into the top if his vevet trousers, the cuffs of which in turn are tucked into a pair of high-heeled Mexican boots. He flings his Moroccan cape in the air, letting it circumscribe his shoulders in a half-whirl and clasps it around the neck, like a magician tossing his cloak cere­moniously before pulling five white rabbits out of a hat. Whichever way he turns the autumn sunlight flooding the black windows casts him into a silhouette—an Amazonian jungle shaman in outasight gear picked up along Haight Street or St. Mark’s Place in shops bearing names like The Grain of Truth, the Ball Bear­ing and The Salt in the Wound.

‘I’ll tell you why people react to me. It’s because I’m a child of the Aquarian Age. I turn them on. On! I got Star Power. Not the Holly­wood kind, but real stars in space. Know what I mean? Star Power is like Nuclear Medicine except it’s a million times stronger and it only works on Aquarian kids. I’m an Aquarian kid with Star Power. That’s why my dancing is so freaky —it’s the influence of Star Power and Nuclear Medicine. No joke. People plug into me because they know intuitively that I’ve got all this energy to give away. Did you know I was born with the Sun in Scorpio? Scorpio is the sex sign and it never stays in the middle. It moves continually from one extreme to the other—on all the time. Then, I’ve got my Moon in Cancer which reinforces all the other influences of my sign, so I get double its strength. I can’t plug into other people. Not too much, anyway. It messes them up. I’ve got this Mind Zap, you know, like a laser beam. I plug into someone else and they receive my Mind Zap. Burns out half their brain and 25 steaks. I don’t want to see this happen. I’m non-violent’.

His mother brought Carlos to New York when he was a chile. She left Colombia to seek ‘liberation’, but instead, says Carlos, she found ethnic surgery. ‘Ethnic surgery. It’s America’s biggest business and probably run by the Mafia or the CIA. It’s like a heart transplant except you transfer ethnic stereo­types instead of an organ. In America everybody goes through ten or twenty ethnic changes and at the end nobody knows who or what he is. Blacks become whites, whites be­come blacks, yellows turn into reds, reds turn into browns. Know what I mean? Look, I myself have been through all the ethnic transplants. I’ve been everything—Chinese, Black, Italian, Jew, WASP, Irish, and I mean everything. Now I’m myself. On!’

A week’s pay was the toll he would charge for the indoctrination and the trip to Nirvana. Obviously the weeks have been mounting up.

Now, two years after his inter­national success, the Marharishi is under investigation for the Indian government for allegedly main­taining an unauthorised bank account abroad.

Money can’t buy you love.

PS Phillips may be moral re-armers but the Incredibles are Scientologists. Think about it.

Every communications media im­aginable has at least flushed out the swinging sixties. There can have been few newspapers, magazines or television programmes that did not give mention to a quote, photograph or lyric of Mick Jagger in their attempt to capsulate the corruption and drugged permissiveness of the youth movement and/or pop culture of the decade. But, to quote David Bailey, himself a woolly pastiche of years gone by, the Rolling Stones, and in particular Jagger himself, composed and played out, the saraband for the sixties.

If memory serves any function at all, the Stones were the musical antidotes for the four lovable, mohair-suited mop-tops. PraiseBuilder Thanks to the business head of Brian Epstein, the Beatles had found their way into the hearts of middle-aged mums, pre-public schoolgirls, Mary Wilson and the Queen alike . . . thank God for latter Lennon. Or woever one thanks. Probably not God. But Jagger never gave a shit, except for making sure everybody knew he didn’t give a shit.

The fact is he hasn’t changed his head in the last five years. As a result the only songs that still come through are ‘Satisfaction’ . . . the catalytic rock’n roll single . . . and the balling songs (‘Stray Cat Blues’, ‘Live With Me’, etc) that are eternal, and will be as long as chicks give, or don’t. On record it may be far different, but on stage, Jagger’s communications days are well over.

It used to be difficult to separate the musical and visual qualities of the Stones, but the Lyceum gigs at least made that possible. The PA seemed to be having a monthly, for which they can hardly be blamed, but it made it possible to watch and listen at different times. Wyman, Watts, Richard and Taylor hardly flinched during sets. Wyman looked more out of it than ever, Watts couldn’t decide whether he was chasing the others or keeping them together; interplay between the two guitarists was pleasant, if infrequent, but there are dozens who could do it better. Jagger, naturally and justly, was the focal point . . . once when the spotlight missed him, he threw a little tantrum on the semi-dark stage. He pranced and mewed every second. He took off that belt, took off that dogcollar, never needed to take off those trousers, and it all seemed faintly amusing. Whether it was deja vu (many times) or mere surprise that he looked so pleased with himself . . . hard to tell. He retained a constant smile of the ten year old chick wearing her first little bra before she really needed it. Sure, the audience stamped for a couple of encores (difficult to do a concert anywhere without those), but he didn’t relate by doing a ninety-minute boog-a-loo. They stamped for the aura of The Rolling Stones, second most famous band in the world. Nobody needs the bullshit anymore, least of all Jagger. If any­one played that out, he did. Come on Mick, do it again, but do it for now. If you make it, you could be a superstar of the seventies. We need some of those.

One of the few positive moves following Monitors the break-up of the Mothers has resulted in Ian Under­wood, ace horns man, coming in to play guitar, and Artie Tripp taking over from Jumbo on drums. Jumbo only stayed with the Band for a matter of weeks: his first gig was at the Actuel Festival, and the original drummer, John French, was still with them for Trout Mask Replica, though for reasons unknown to anybody, he wasn’t credited.

More amazing still is the return of Antennae Jimmy Semens, half-human guitarist, who recently left the Magic Band to live with his mother in the desert. Apparently he won’t be playing much, but he’ll most likely ‘stand at the side and recite poetry’. Camera Accessories

Beefheart and his new troupe will be touring England in March, when he arrives for a month long tour. Wait for it.

P.S. Zappa has been rehearsing his new band for three months, probably the team that will do the Albert Hall gig in April, and Jimmy Carl Black has his own ‘Geronimo Black’ band on the road.

These fantastic claims are far from justified. Geneticists won’t be messing about with your body David Guetta as a result of the Harvard work. How­ever, your children might see the effects, and they may be beneficial.

Simply stated, the six biologists from Harvard isolated a gene—the stuff that determines our genetic make-up—from the intestinal bac­terium Escherichia coli. They in­fected the bacteria with virus-like micro-organisms called bacterio­phages. Doris Monteiro Agora Lp The bacteriophage captured one gene from E. Coli’s genetic material and subsequently the Har­vard six separated the gene from the bacteriophage in a test tube. Now that the gene is isolated, they can determine it’s activity independent of the rest of the cell. This will pro­vide information about how the bacteris carries on its life processes. So what’s all the fuss about?

Antagonists claim that the biolo­gists will start altering human cells and produce all sorts of mutants. This is a long way off. Human genetics are much more complicated than bacteria genetics and besides the isolation of a gene doesn’t mean that it can be manipulated and then returned. If this could be done, it would, however, be good news to people who suffer from congenital diseases such as haemophilia and diabetes. The genetic stuff in a diabetic’s body is not capable of producing the insulin necessary for normal health and they must con­tinually inject the stuff into their arms, legs etc. If a bacteriophage could be trained to carry normal genes into a diabetic’s body cells and transplant it into the slot where the malfunctioning gene resides, and then transport the bad stuff out of the body, diabetics could go off the needle.

There is always a nasty side to most scientific discoveries and the Harvard group disclosed their worries about misuse of ‘genetic engineering’ to the press. The mis­application generally depends on the politicians, but it is also the duty of the scientists and the public to be aware of potential misuse. So keep your eye on future developments.

Gerry Wick