Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
of being fairly expansive, of being able to incorporate a lot of different people and ideas. It dwindled down – that was the most reductive point. But I think that’s often what happens . . . before something big happens, nothing has to happen. Everything slows down and stops and then things start to expand again – for me, it’s a fairly natural process. You could say it was a low point.” Once Penny had completed Reality Asylum, he printed it using an old gestetner machine that had been bought in the Exit days, inspired by old hippy broadsheets, themselves inspired by similar ventures on the West Coast of America. “Eventually I abandoned the gestetner and just used the gestetner sheets on the silk screen because it gave a nicer effect.” Hence, the cutely named Exitstencil Press was born. The room where the printing took place is to this day known as ‘the print room’. Eve Libertine: “I could relate to it in terms of the feminist angle. I’d read The Diamond Signature before that and absolutely loved it. I didn’t understand it particularly, but I loved it. I loved the way it flowed. Again, I related to it on a feminist level, though I was very wary and wouldn’t call myself a feminist, like I wouldn’t call myself an anarchist.” Christ’s Reality Asylum And Les Pommes De Printemps, to give it its full name, is a twenty-page barrage of philosophical prose (or is it poetry?) that seems to meander between a dialogue with Jesus, a dialogue with self and a dialogue with the reader. It’s, er, extremely difficult to understand: “Life is empirical/concept/matter/matterofconcept/ intellectual idea/no inherent integrity/exists beyond idea/outside life/life is destroyed within seconds of birth/my parents NEED ME/they die after ME/I was made a physical, intellectual and spiritual materialist, given a stolen universe and made to pay.THE REAL NEVER NEVER.WAS IT EVER?” And so on. The booklet was originally planned to contain a set of poems by Eve Libertine, but she didn’t get round to writing them. Despite the shocking antichrist tone, leading one agent to ask Penny if he was deliberately trying to tempt prosecution, there were precedents for such outspoken attacks on the personality of Christ,
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