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Underground > Creation >

The Life of Grant Morrison

  
  

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We're The Great Old Ones Now
10:27 / 17.05.02
What we already know:

Grant Morrison was born in Santiago in 1958. He was the son of an itinerant shoe-maker and one of two Benedictine Nuns. It is unclear whether Sister Maria Esposita or Sister Angela Vega actually gave birth to the child, as both remain to this day in the role of mother.

The young Morrison immediately showed an aptitude for welding,
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
10:31 / 17.05.02
...which might or might not have some connection to the strange birthmark on his left shoulder, which is in the shape of a plasma torch.
 
 
rizla mission
10:48 / 17.05.02
But a few weeks after the start of young Grant's education, his tutor informed the proud Sisters that "the boy has a great propensity for wandering". Wrongly interpreting this remark, they took it as an early sign of the lad's thoughtful and inquisitive nature. In actual fact, the remark refered to Grant's infernal habit, which he retains to this day, of pacing, strolling, walking off mid-conversation and generally demonstrating an inability to ever remain in place for more than a few minutes.
 
 
w1rebaby
10:50 / 17.05.02
(I have found a good biography recently so I feel I can now contribute.)

After a brief spell as an apprentice pipesmoker the young Morrison was encouraged, at the age of seven, to enter the service of one Senor Ignacio Valdez, a local landowner noted for his...
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
10:54 / 17.05.02
...alternative dairy farm, which produced pink yak milk and buffalo mozzarella. Besides these, people would come from miles around to view his lavishly decorated...
 
 
w1rebaby
11:00 / 17.05.02
...yet evil-smelling capybara, Horace.

The young Grant spent seven happy months polishing Senor Valdez's mozzarella, and, while doing so, learnt a skill that would be valuable throughout his life - the best way to...
 
 
Sax
11:18 / 17.05.02
...spin the cheese into a really thin but incredibly strong thread. By adding copious amounts of Dairylea to the mix, he found he could also make the cheese threads incredibly sticky. In fact, the entire concoction was strong enough to hold his entire weight and allow him to swing from the ceiling of his cramped room. Now only if he could work out a way to ...
 
 
w1rebaby
12:39 / 17.05.02
...make people interested in a young guy swinging from things using sticky threads. But who would be interested in that?

Disillusioned, the young Grant sold the concept to an itinerant goatsqueezer called Lee, and returned to his first love - welding. By the age of ten he was sufficiently skilled in the art of attaching pieces of metal together to catch the eye of...
 
 
grant
13:05 / 17.05.02
...the elderly Frida Kahlo, then on her final tour of South America.
It was she who inspired him, not only with stories of the peyote rituals in her native Mexico, but also with the germ of the idea that was to become the first of many failed business ventures: a bungee-jumping concession for the lactose intolerant.
The would-be mountaintop entrepreneur ran into trouble immediately, after...
 
 
gridley
13:29 / 17.05.02
... when the keys to a day-glo colored torture chamber came into his possession at a friend's barmitzvah. Grant immediately saw a way to make the start-up cash for his bungee operation. But first he would have to round up an incredible number of...
 
 
Aimes
15:02 / 17.05.02
...tapdancing cockroaches and train them in the gentle arts of origami. At first, all they could make were miniature paper elephants, but after many long months they were producing lifesized sculptures and were ready to exhibit. Nothing could go wrong. On the night of Grant's grand opening...
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
15:05 / 17.05.02
..........there was a strike by the Cockroach Elephant-origami Advocacy and Rights Union (CockEAR Union) which left Morrison with little more than a lot of paper elephants and a barely corroboratable story about special cockroaches. Grant would have settled the greivance leading to the strike but they were asking for..............
 
 
grant
17:19 / 17.05.02
...what amounted to control of all non-cattle cheese production in Chile. Unwilling to sacrifice his long-range plan, the plucky youth gathered his origami, and, much to the surprise of the wine-and-cheese scarfing social set,...
 
 
Sax
19:10 / 17.05.02
...announced that the delicately-folded paper creations slotted neatly together to make what he claimed was the world's first working time machine, which he planned to use to...
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
21:47 / 17.05.02
...return to 1980 and ensure that the world would never have to suffer puffball skirts, deely-boppers or Rick Astley. However...
 
 
Ganesh
00:10 / 18.05.02
... it didn't work. It was just a load of folded paper. Suddenly feeling acutely aware of himself and his shortcomings, the young Morrison...
 
 
A
02:47 / 18.05.02
...sank into a deep depression, locking himslef in his room and refusing to communicate with anyone except by releasing albums by his industrial group "The Order of Grumpiness". but then he was visited by a mysterious elderly gentleman, who revelaed to him the secret of...
 
 
Sax
07:37 / 18.05.02
...Greek wrestling, and there, on the rug in his loung, his limbs tangled in a kind of fisherman's knot with those of the sinewy pensioner, the young Grant experienced for the first time in his life...
 
 
True Art
17:54 / 18.05.02
...true love.
 
 
Tom Coates
19:32 / 18.05.02
"Wuv? Twue Wuv?"
 
 
Sax
17:37 / 19.05.02
...said the mysterious elderly gentleman, revealing himself to be a retired big-game hunter with the unlikely-sounding appellation "Elmer Fudd"...
 
 
Ganesh
01:02 / 20.05.02
He looked uncannily like Aleister Crowley, however, and Morrison was subsequently inspired to...
 
 
Sax
19:19 / 20.05.02
... take up mountain climbing as a hobby, clad in plus fours, stout boots, tweed jacket and immaculately-pressed shirt. Halfway to the summit of K2 he stopped for tea from his tartan thermos and cucumber sandwiches, all nicely packaged in a wicker hamper carried on the shoulders of a grumbling sherpa who was paid but a shilling a day for his troubles, when...
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
21:18 / 20.05.02
...attracted by the smell of the lanolin in Morrison's pure wool plus-fours, the Yeti appeared. It shambled towards our protagonist, a great reeking hulk of a creature. The Sherpa hurled down the hamper, crying "you can stuff yer poxy shilling!" and ran off.

Morrison rose slowly, crouched and ready for fight or flight, but the Yeti did not seem disposed to attack. Its fur was knotted and tangled, but as it approached, Morrison saw that the locks were braided with small shells and coloured pebbles. It wore a ragged loincloth, and a belt from which several pouches hung.

The Yeti stopped, and proffered an object that it had clasped in its hand. Morrison stared in shock as he recognised...
 
 
gridley
21:26 / 20.05.02
... his own nose! Unsure of how this cunning beast has stolen his nose with neither blood nor blades, Grant paused and scratched his head. The yeti laughed in a way that would have sounded friendly had the creature not just dealt him an oddly unnoticed disfiguring blow. With nothing else to do, Grant leapt at the yeti, wrestling him into position after position until finally his hand landed right in the yeti's....
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
05:40 / 22.05.02
..lap. "Ha! Fooled you! It was my thumb all the time!" laughed the Yeti, as it huggled him to its...
 
 
grant
13:34 / 22.05.02
...rank, hairy chest. That's when Morrison noticed the zipper...
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
14:11 / 24.05.02
..."No!" said the Yeti. "Don't pull it!"

But it was too late. Morrison opened the Yeti's chest, to reveal two members of The Backstreet Boys, Twiggy Ramirez and a Bolivian contortionist.

"So! You were the Yeti all along!" Morrison cried.

"Only when we weren't filling in for a couple of the Slipknot guys," confessed the pouting poptarts. "We let Twiggy come along because he's old enough to buy beer."
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
17:12 / 24.05.02
This incident is believed to have been the trigger for the now infamous Depilatory Murders, and possibly also for a series of bizarre culinary experiments performed on unwilling Fijians during Morrison's tenure at an island cookhut named Big Kim's.

The sad and violent events which culminated in the death of a group of hirsute apprentice tailors from Rekjavik have their roots, not in any residual genetic instability in Morrison's family, but rather in the pathetic wildlife impersonations of a trio of teen-beens.

It's a cautionary tale, given weight by Morrison's own account in his memoire, "The
 
 
deja_vroom
12:14 / 25.05.02
Hoop-la Hullaballoo", in which Grant reveals his crucial role as reformer of Afghanistan's national sport, buzkashi. Once played with a stuffed goat, now buzkashi is played with a life-sized inflatable doll of...
 
 
Ganesh
13:06 / 25.05.02
Pat Kane, formerly of Scots group 'Hue and Cry'. At the end of each game the inflatable figurine is ceremonially punctured, with much jeering and chanting.

Morrison's ambivalent relationship with hirsutism was soon to become flesh when, attending a wrestling symposium in Oslo, he encountered a young Alan Moore...
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
16:14 / 25.05.02
...later known as the creator of the Porthole operating system for his wife and business partner, Stephanie Gates...
 
 
gridley
22:38 / 25.05.02
...but who was now still struggling to finish his novel, a massive tomb, full of odd etchings of copulating monkeys, inscrutable song lyrics, and a bizarre repetition of the phrase "A skeleton horse!" Grant immediately saw a brother and lifelong companion in Alan, but Alan saw only a...
 
 
Mesmer
14:35 / 10.06.02
. . . small mouth appear on Grant's left nipple. "¿quién mira a vigilantes?" the mouth spake, and Moore left Grant to his bewildered stare and slack jaw, never to produce their collaborative master piece, "The . . .
 
 
Sax
14:43 / 10.06.02
Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks", which is just as well, as the idea was completely ripped off from Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs, and would have earned them critical brickbats, spelling the end of two very promising careers. But Morrison had other things to think about now, as the mouth on his chest yawned and said, in a voice strikingly similar to that of post-modern stage and television comedian Joe Pasquale...
 
  

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