Alumini

L’Épouvantail is a collective of like-minded individuals who use the global village as their home and the ether as their oyster. They meet at least twice a year in the flesh for a week of food, drink, the exchange of intellectual trivia, shared tales of debauchery, the discussion of favourite reading lists, the dissemination of the meaning of important works of cinematic art released in the preceding months, an update on the collective’s current unearthing of interesting, previously discarded works of human theory and art and a day-trip to the closest Theme Park of note or failing that [such as location- the bi-annual conference was once in Iceland] a day visit to a geographical feature of note [e.g. a volcano].

L’Épouvantail, whilst in it’s totality an amorphous, ever shifting alliance of minds, it has at it’s core four personalities who sit as the collective’s presidium. They are:

Anton Dubbelyou, of mixed French and Algerian blood, lives on a Paris-New York axis although maintains an office in Soho, London from which L’Épouvantail operations are based and a small mews house in Mayfair. He specializes in the study of Religious Records and Icons. His hobbies include compiling and researching a compendium of bizarre sex practices and unusual forms of human sexual expression. As the accepted chairman of the Presidium, he manages the overall direction and ethos of the L’Épouvantail Collective. When working, he lives alone [apart from a staff of thirteen] in a Burgundian château. When social networking and enjoying recreational pursuits such as sailing his yacht ‘Le Jeune Fleur,’ he is based in New York in a Greenwich Village brownstone, which he shares with the famous agony aunt Fiona McCluster who is twenty years his senior. This relationship began before and has continued after his wife and young family were mysteriously killed in the unexpected explosion of the car they were traveling in, in the French countryside, a mysterious ‘accident’ for many years a fascination of those intent on tracking down and exterminating the activities of Satanic Cults.

He is sanguine about reaching the end of his current four decade on the planet, and looks forward with resigned puzzlement to the next four.

Lynx Exeter resides in Hermosa Beach, LA during the summer months, her autumn in either an Icelandic Spa or a Nepalese temple retreat dependent on the form and level of recovery she requires from the type and intensity of the excesses she has enjoyed during the summer and spends her winters in a small, invariably damp cottage in the English Cotswolds. She is an accomplished thriller and chick-lit writer, basing most of her work on her experiences at an younger age in the Southern Californian porn industry. Without fail she spends every summer solstice in the woods outside of Ukiah CA celebrating with a Hindu sect, and every winter solstice chained for twenty four hours to a standing stone in Avebury, Wiltshire, England.

Whi is an accomplished alumni of the National University of Singapore where she studied medicine and was expected to become a leading neurosurgeon after her ground breaking Doctorate thesis. She however was intent on pursuing more esoteric areas of research and practice which has involved developing the world’s leading database of unexplainable phenomenon which has become a bible for Ufologists, a detailed biography of her father who was a leading activist during the ‘Nanyang riots’ during the founding of the National University of Singapore’ and who was shot by an anarchist during the ‘Curriculum Crisis,’ a time of heated protest and debate over the rights of mandarin speakers to have their own language curriculum handbooks and courses, and has recently completed an epic poem over three volumes that includes every word in the Collins English Gem Dictionary.

She is an habitual user of halucegenic drugs which she sees as a vital part of her everyday experience; once told she will die at thirty by an Azerbaijani mystic she is intent on finding a door into a parallel brane where she is destined to live for longer. it does however have unusual but harmless periods of debilitating side effect whereby she believes she is a Shanghai skyscraper which a restaurant in her brain for considerable periods of time.

The Zedster was born and still lives in Liverpool, England. Spending most of his childhood within institutions, first for basic child care purposes then for juvenile delinquency control, by his late teens he escaped the grasp of local police and villains to collect glasses and bottles in an Ibizan nightclub. Applying his drug dealing expertise learnt on Merseyside sink estates to the Balearics, he soon had made enough money to open his own nightclub at the age of twenty-one, with his own famous Friday night ‘Penguin Interference’ DJ set. Similar problems to back home however soon stalked him and within two years he turned himself in to the Spanish authorities for incarceration, which was safer than the option of staying on the outside.

In a decrepit prison in Alhambra, against the odds, he became fluent in Spanish, Portuguese and Russian, learnt the science of musicology, became an expert on advanced computer filing techniques [and hacking] after becoming the prison librarian and developed a keen interest in astronomy and the Ancient Mystics. He also at that time had the words ‘Never Confuse Information With Knowledge’ inscribed across his shoulder blades, Everton FC around his left bicep, Real Zaragoza around his right bicep and a large penguin on his left inner thigh.

Upon release he returned to the UK and undertook a degree in Information Technology in which he received a First Distinction and his thesis on creating the ultimate rhythm was widely acclaimed. Determined to stay close to his roots, this did not however distract him form some recreational drug dealing ‘to keep his hand in,’ and through which he met Lynx Exeter on one of her length Beatle’s pilgrimages to the city of Liverpool. He was quickly absorbed into the collective and is a key source of information on the occult and mystical symbolism as well as being the invaluably skilled party organiser for the biannual Collective conferences.