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A Review: The Life And Times Of Andrew Loog Oldham
The Life And Times Of
Of The Rolling Stones
Oldham, Andrew Loog: Stoned, 2001, Vintage
Oldham, Andrew Loog: 2Stoned, 2003, Vintage
Oldham, Andrew Log: Stone Free, 2012, Escargot Books
Oldham, Andrew Loog: Rolling Stoned, 2013, Because Entertainment
Who Is Andrew Loog Oldham
Andrew In The Day
For those who know this introduction will be superfluous, but for those who don't know this essay will be an introduction to a man who through his exploitation of the Rolling Stones was an important influence on that memorable Sixties decade. Perhaps moreso than is commonly thought.
Out on the consuming edge of the record industry in those days the name Andrew Loog Oldham seemed to be displayed as prominently on the record covers as The Rolling Stones themselves. In the early days Andrew Loog Oldham might be known before Mick or Keith and certainly the other members of the band. Yet Oldham wasn't in the band so who was he? And then records were issued bearing the name The Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra. Where did he get that name Loog anyway? And just as suddenly the name Andrew Loog Oldham disappeared but the Stones remained. Who was this guy anyway?
In those days when information could be gathered, if at all, at the proverbial snail's pace, things have changed today when I can make a few clicks and see Andrew moving and hear him speaking; actually see his fabulous style of dressing as he described it. In addition he has written two thousand pages describing himself more or less in full. Now we can know who Andrew Loog Oldham is and what his relationship to the Rolling Stones was.
Andrew's, we'll take a familiar approach throughout, great tragedy is that his fated life opportunity showed up too early. He was only nineteen in 1963 when the opportunity that few ever get a chance to grasp showed up on his front doorstep, so to speak. That was the appearance of the London music group The Rolling Stones. In order to come into his inheritance as he was under twenty-one and couldn't legally act in his own name, Andrew had to find a surrogate to act in his stead. Chance provided an old reprobate by the name of Eric Easton. Eric was a plodder who had served as an organist at the resort town of Blackpool while representing two or three nondescript acts of which one was the redoubtable Mrs. Miller. While not a household name at the present time Mrs. Miller whose act consisted of being an amusingly terrible singer, had her moment in the spotlight both in England and the US. She did have records released and they did sell no matter how modestly.
Easton was slow on the uptake not realizing the cultural shift that was taking place with the arrival of the Beatles and would have been incapable of managing the Stones without Andrew's grasp of the changing cultural situation of the Sixties. However he was not too slow to understand money in the bank of which he made off with a fortune or two much to the chagrin of both Andrew and the Rolling Stones.
Andrew's four volumes are records of his vicissitudes being a young Lancelot reaching for the Grail. Andrew was green, he was. In ordinary times he would have been cleaned and discarded never to be heard of again but these were the Sixties and not normal times. Even in failure the times conspired to make Andrew comfortable by luxury standards, perhaps even rich, but not filthy rich. The marvelous Sixties did that for so many people most of them undeserving. By undeserving I mean takers with nothing to offer.
Well, this isn't a tale about justice but one of the Sixties in which the whole concept of justice disappeared like the vapor from a nuclear plant. As an extra special gift of the times to Andrew he is today still alive and kicking having passed the seventh decade barrier at 71 years of age. The good didn't necessarily die young just the unlucky. Andy is lucky.
He can be seen introducing his third book, Stone Free, at his Face Book site for those interested. Always the fashion plate he is a dapper impression of his hero Phil Spector, pointy nose and all. His hair is becomingly combed back on the sides making for a very presentable 71 year old young at heart gentleman. He wears a mint green light jacket and shirt, something of a cross between a butch femme and an effete hommy, but altogether passable. He projects a pleasant aura indicating little brain damage from his very legendary drug use. A look at him shows how Alex, the chief Droog of A Clockwork Orange may have looked as he made the passage from rough youth to a more dignified mature, the word 'old' does not apply to one like Andrew, or I might vainly say, myself.
Andrew Finds That Life Has It Hazards
Andrew: Is He Experienced?
I don't really envy the English kids that came along after my birth year of 1938. The war years were tough enough but then the long years of national poverty after 1945 must have been grating. I can't imagine a life without candy that the lads and lasses had to endure for nine long years. In my paradise in the US candy bars in those days at a nickel were monstrous. I couldn't eat a whole one at one sitting. Stuffed at less than a half. Andrew must have known hardship and suffered horribly.
The war babies, mostly from '42 and '43 can have no memory of the war but the long ten years of rationed everything gave a cast to their psyches. When the war babies grew up and became rockers they laid out long tables of delicacies and then ignored them letting them go to waste. The pain was forgotten but lived on in the subconscious. Andrew was conceived in '43 and popped out in '44. Tragic for Andy, he should have born in '42 and been 21 in '63.
His was a special case. In a country in which the majority of men were US soldiers, normality had flown out the door in '43; his mother not unnaturally took up with one. It was a tough time. Andrew's father, Andrew Loog, was a soldier from Texas. He had a wife and son back there. As a younger man I applied my moral training to people in Andrew Loog's situation and condemned them but now hopefully wiser and certainly older I understand. As a soldier in an active war Andrew Loog could die at any time so why not a little happiness? Perhaps he cringed at violating his peacetime morals. In any event as a member of a bomber crew he didn't even make it across the Channel just after impregnating Andrew's mother with his future self. Big Andy hoped he'd dodge the bullets but as it didn't happen at least it resolved what would have been a difficult emotional situation.
Big Andy hadn't married Little Andy's mother so that made little Andy the bastard son of a bigamous father. Having been in the orphanage myself being a bastard means nothing to me. But society is unkind to bastards and orphans. Having read all four of Little Andy's reminiscences more than once it seems clear that his bastardy left its mark on Andy. He had stormy relationship with his mother, perhaps beating her frequently while in his late teens. She said he did but he says he can't remember doing it while it would have been wholly outside his character, however, he definitely admits booting her out of a moving car while she was pregnant. Those temper tantrums he had!
Possibly Andrew blames his mother for bringing him into the world as a bastard. He shouldn't, better a bastard than not at all. Now, Andy discusses this from different angles constantly in his memoirs so my purpose here is to try to put his mind at ease.
The war had a devastating effect on social life especially in England which was merely a staging area for US forces in those years. Churchill was merely a stooge of Roosevelt's. Just as in WWI a million or English men died or were incapacitated meaning that just that many women were condemned to spinsterhood or whatever. Oh, I know that the dyke Gloria Steinem said a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle but Steinem was an unnatural woman. Andrew's mother wasn't.
As she gave Andy his father's full name, that is Andrew Loog, I'm guessing that given the times and circumstances she really loved the guy so she named what surely must have been her darling Andrew, Loog, tacking on her name Oldham. Maybe I'm sentimental, but coming from the orphanage, I find that touching.
Now, Celia Oldham, for that was her name, was a Jewish girl. Andrew Loog I'm guessing from his name was probably of Dutch ancestry. Probably a Protestant but possibly a Sephardic Jew. Andy may know but I don't.
So, here Celia Oldham is post-war with the little tyke, Andy, and no husband or father for his child. There is a massive shortage of men after the GIs clear out so while Celia is attractive the mating pool is small. Celia did the next best thing and probably with Andy in mind did it well; she became the mistress of a wealthy man while including Andy in the equation. Not only was he wealthy he was a decent man who maintained her and Andy as a second family. No kidding. He kept them in relative style while putting Andy through the public schools. (Public is private in England.)
What more could a single mother with no prospects do? Perhaps Andrew's schoolmates were typical louts and ragged him continuously for being a bastard. I know that in the orphanage during and after was hell on wheels but that was the hand that was dealt and I had to play it; four deuces, trey high. Could have been worse. I'm not saying my psychology wasn't affected and as Andy tells it his sure as hell was.
My point is that life being what it is he should be grateful for a loving mother who made the very best of a bad situation.
Lost In The Ozone Without A Parachute
Andrew In Midpassage
As noted Celia Oldham was Jewish and while Andrew says that the religion didn't play a big part in their lives nevertheless the mother is the culture bearer. The culture she passed on to Andrew must have been Jewish.
Judaism is an identitarian faith. To be Jewish is to separate oneself from the 'gentiles', from all others, the rest of mankind. As the US Zionist Samuel Untermyer was to proclaim on nationwide radio in opposition to Hitler's claim that the Germans were the master race: We, the Jews, are the aristocrats of the earth. In other words, Drop this master race crap because you ain't it.
Thus in a country nominally English, as Andrew describes his youth it was lived in an entirely Jewish community. As he describes it he associated with no one who wasn't Jewish. Like the Jewish Bob Dylan he is always surrounded by Jews. As he set out to find his way in life he chose the record business as his métier. I think Andrew wanted to be where it was happening and as his antennae flickered about sensing for that taste of honey he perceived that his future lay in records. The entire music business if not the entertainment business was in the control of his fellow Jews.
Andy took his sense of reality from movies. There are a couple influential films he refers to frequently. One is the American film The Sweet Smell Of Success which however is about two Jews, the one based on the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell and the other his sidekick and the other is the British film Espresso Bongo. Naturally I obtained both movies and have checked them out. Also naturally at this age and distance I do not see them through nineteen year old eyes.
In Sweet Smell Andrew concentrates on the character Sidney Falco played by Tony Curtis. Andy identifies with Falco as a hustler in US terms and a Wide Boy in English terms. Thus Andrew identifies himself as a Wide Boy. Falco was an unsavory character, a stooge of his boss J.J. Hunsecker played by the repulsive Burt Lancaster. Curtis played the role well. One laments Andrew's fascination with the character.
Espresso Bongo is a pretty decent rock film. It takes place I believe at the actual legendary 2i coffee house in which English rock was centered. The film puts you back in the day. The star is Andy's all time hero Laurence Harvey who also turns in a stellar role. Harvey has that downtrodden hang dog look that carried David Janssen through the US The Fugitive TV series so well. As I lived in a constant depression until I was forty I knew the look and it suited me well. I identified with both Janssen and Harvey. Harvey was one of my favorite actors too. Depression and Laurence Harvey go together
In Espresso Bongo Harvey plays a role of a hapless manager of a singer who gets away from him much as Andrew himself would let the Stones slip away from him.
All the managers were Jewish and all exploited their 'boys.' Perhaps the most famous of these, what the English amusingly call manipulators, was Larry Parnes. As England emerged from rationing in the fifties and the rebuilding of the infrastructure destroyed by the bombing of WWII created a sort of false prosperity those young people who survived the bombing and rationing were coming of age. The war had caused a generational break. Young England began creating an England in their own image. They rejected the pre-war England of their elders. It was a world they never made. Of course neither had their elders.
Parnes sensing the direction began creating an image of recording stars to gratify youthful yearnings, especially of young girls. He found god looking boys giving them great stage names such Georgie Fame, Billy Fury, Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Vince Eager and my favorite, Lance Fortune. There can be but little question that he exploited, not to say cheated, his 'boys.' Parnes was both Jewish and homosexual, a killer combination that dominated the industry.
For instance this about Vince Eager from the Widipedia entry for Larry Parnes
Vince Eager began to wonder why he had never received any record royalties. 'You're not entitled to any.' Larry Parnes told him. 'But it says in my contract that I am.' Eager protested. 'It also says I have power of attorney over you, and I've decided you're not getting any.' Parnes replied.
Parnes was of course both Jewish and homosexual. As he had many of these performers on salary he was cleaning up. Of course he had merely plucked them off the streets and set them up designing their acts, teaching them stage presence, choosing repertoires etc., they may have been little more than employees. However they did have 'contracts' although as the above quote indicates they were more than one sided making the contractees little more than slaves
The whole record scene was exploitative and homosexual. When London's leading criminals horned in on the record scene, the Kray brothers, Reg and Ron they were Jewish and homosexual while their older brother Charlie who was straight with no police record managed the business end of the record racket.
As Andrew was coming up through the years this was the situation he perceived. While he couldn't have broken into the Parnes style star system once the Beatles hit and the emphasis switched to groups an opening appeared. Parnes who had his star system going disdained the group thing leaving that open so that the Beatles manager Brian Epstein slid through the opening developing his group and star roster dislodging Parnes.
The market had expanded exponentially since the fifties when Parnes developed his system. Andrew, then, aquiver with the possibilities had his eye out for the new Beatles. He was told about the group working in Richmond called The Rollin' Stones. He went, he saw, he signed.
As Andrew freely acknowledges by his late teens he was experiencing mental problems so I am merely discussing what he has disclosed. He says he was suffering from manic depression. Probably so, but he must also have blended in a little schizophrenia. The stresses of his childhood were taking possession of his mind. I know whereof I speak. This combined with his disastrous choices of role models that would be joined in 1962 by his reading of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange issued that year made him something of a phenom. Burgess, there's another sicko.
A Clockwork Orange Boy, there was a Satanic book if there ever was one. The book took a certain mentality by storm, organized it and gave it expression. Its history is intimately connected with Jagger and Richards.
As influential in its limited sphere as the book was, Stanley Kubrick's 1971 movie was perhaps the most destructive Satanic movie ever produced. It set the tone for the years that followed. The movie just tore a certain type of mind apart; Alexes by the dozen, nay, hundreds, thousands moved roved out every night after it was shown, snatching girls off the street. Clockwork was seconded by the movie The Collector that appeared about the same time. The book of Clockwork was less powerful but would still influence Andrew and through him Jagger and Richards. The other Stones led separate lives not involved with Mick, Keith and Andrew's antics.
The Mad Andy Warhol
So Andrew's brain is in a complete turmoil as he tries to find his way through the maze of life. Influenced by the real Larry Parnes and the fictional Johnny Jackson for a modus operandus he went in search of an act to manage and found his way to The Rolling Stones. Having discovered his mother lode, having a clear vision of what to do he was stymied by being only nineteen in shark infested waters without a cage.
Short of twenty-one he had to team up with a shark. As he was renting an office from an inoffensive appearing shark, Eric Easton, he convinced Eric to essentially through himself represent the Stones. Eric may have been a pretty sincere stodge but he was no fool when it came to his self-interest. He may have been close to a bottom feeder but that didn't mean he hadn't learned most of the tricks of the Great Whites. The ins and outs of contracts presented no problems to him while dizzy Andy and the naïve Mick and Keith probably hadn't considered the existence of contracts. Give them a pen and dotted line under their name and they would sign. But, really, it was never a fair fight.
As Pretty Boy Floyd the Outlaw is alleged by Woody Guthrie to have said: Some will rob you with a six gun; some will use a fountain pen. Oh boy! Those contracts. The advantages are all on the side of the contractors; contractees beware. As Larry Parnes said: I've also got your Power Of Attorney and I say you don't get anything. Revoking a Power Of Attorney is simple but how many amateurs think of it.
But legally contracts don't really matter unless money is involved. There wouldn't be a lot of money for a few years but when there was Andrew and the Stones not unsurprisingly got the bum's rush.
Andrew's brain was a regular pinwheel especially as in addition to his youth and mental condition he imbibed drugs freely. If your brain's not already a mess drugs will certainly paint it black.
Even though Andrew chose poor role models he got the drift of what had to be done to make stars of random stones. Very few performers, they only become artists after success, know how to get from point A to point B and beyond. That's where the manager, if he's any good, comes in; he recognizes the possibilities of the raw talent and nurses them through the actual birth process. Believe me: this is worth a lot.
It is somewhat like Larry Parnes. He sensed what the teen public wanted and rather than wait for it to come to him, he created it from the rawest material and then took more than the lion's share or the benefits. But then, he also inadvertently gave his 'boys' lives. There were actual careers awaiting them after Parnes had scraped off the cream.
The question then is were the Stones too talented to fail? I don't think so. Not without Andrew to shape them and point the direction anyway. Andrew couldn't sing or play but he could turn dross into gold not too much differently than what Larry Parnes had done with his 'boys.' The Stones were the evidence.
The key to the Stones' success was when they learned to write songs. Would they have learned to write songs if Andrew hadn't literally forced them into it? I would answer with a clear cut negative. The Stones playing nothing but crappy old Chicago blues and would have sank without a trace. In that sense Brian Jones insistence on playing 'pure' R&B would have led to dismal failure. But then, maybe that is what Brian wanted.
Let me point out here that in the US all this crappy old blues stuff was unlistened to but by a very small minority. Nor would the stuff ever have gained popularity without the English influence. Even today very few listen to that junk. 'I woke up this morning, lordy, lordy…'
While Mick, Keith and Brian were boggling their minds concentrating on the 'music' Andrew realized that teen age girls (the Parnes influence again) weren't going to get too enthused about grizzled old Negroes complaining about how their mama wouldn't drop down. Does anyone think sprightly young teenagers looking for a good time are going to wallow in anybody else's misery? Not likely.
So Andrew directed his 'boys' toward a more pop sound alienating the ever insistent 'purist' Brain from Mick and Keith. Bill and Charlie were pretty much just boys in the band.
Thus faced with the overwhelming competition of the Beatles, the lovable Mop Tops, Andrew made the fatal choice of turning Mick and Keith into his criminal Droogs, taking the low road and leaving the high road to the Beatles. Alex in A Clockwork Orange called the members of his gang Droogs. In a sense Andrew tried to make the Stones Andrew and the Droogs.
All very well but as Andrew got a little money his brain went from a pinwheel on a stick to real fireworks where pinwheels shoot flames. His brain was really in a whirl. He was passing out at parties. He became self-absorbed. He became interested in other projects that took his time, setting the Stones more or less adrift. His protégé Mick was no fool while being a quick learner. Why, Mick said to himself after becoming successful should I pay all these dufuses for what I can do myself. He couldn't of course do it himself but it seemed like it at the time. He slammed the door in Andrew's face.
Where's Strength And Wisdom When You Need It?
Andrew: The Story Of His Life
The four years Andrew was with the Stones could have been a couple three or four lifetimes for the changes Andrew was forced through. Success is rightly called the bitch goddess. You'll never know until you've said hello. The time from when he and Eric Easton signed the Stones to the time Andrew sold the Stones out to that Devil In Disguise Allen Klein nearly destroyed Andy. Allen Klein wasn't in that much of a disguise either.
The trajectory of Andy's career was so rapid it was hard to follow. It wasn't so much that he bit off more than he could chew as that he tried to chew without biting it off. First things first, Andrew.
Anthony Burgess: Droogmaster General
Obsessed with A Clockwork Orange he moved in with Mick and Keith where he gave them lessons in Droogism. Both were apt pupils. This is difficult to follow but his brain captured and sensing what seems to have been the book's importance Andrew approached Burgess to buy the movie rights. Burgess told him the rights had already been sold but he wouldn't tell Andy to whom.
It turns out that the rights had been sold to David Bailey the fashion photographer who had made Mick his 'mate' and possibly bought the rights jointly with Mick. If so, one wonders where Mick got the money. Sometime in 1963 the pair split with their rights to New York City to interest Andy Warhol in a film project. This also is rather remarkable because Andy was not yet that prominent while he hadn't made any kind of stir with his puerile movies as yet. Somehow the rights passed to Warhol and finally to whoever acquired them to make Kubrick's movie.
Warhol did make a film based on the book although the connection seems tenuous while not being worth watching. More importantly Alex and his Droogs had a profound effect on members of Warhol's group. The group left Warhol's atelier, the Factory, at night on their predations a la Alex and his Droogs. I believe Bob Dylan is referring to them in this lyric from his 1965 song Desolation Row:
Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew
Come out and roundup everyone that knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the [F]actory were the heart attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders…
For some reason both Oldham and Bailey thought Mick was the perfect Alex while the Stones could be the Droogs. It didn't work out but Mick and Warhol bonded like superglue. They would be very close friends until Andy died in 1987 when Mick flew to Pittsburgh for the funeral. Not only did the Stones practice Black and Blue at Warhol's Montauk compound but Andy did two or three covers for them most notably Sticky Fingers. As a result of Mick and Warhol's friendship the Stones always had the key to Greenwich Village.
So Andrew lost out on his bid for A Clockwork Orange. But then his brain racing a mile a minute and wanting to be a record magnate he founded Immediate Records. Not one for details Immediate stretched him pretty thin. I know we're talking ancient history here, or at least ancient technology, so the reader will have to let go of the present to imagine the impact of Immediate Records on the cognoscenti of the time. I modestly include myself in that number.
Andrew was on the far edge of flamboyant; his ideal Larry Harvey who he met about this time thought him arch camp so Andy in his eye makeup and fey manners must have cut a startling figure. A lot of people thought he was queer and not just ambiguous. The Immediate label was an astounding pink, almost fluorescent seemingly confirming homosexual tendencies. It got your attention but in those days you almost had to apologize for buying a record with such a label. His covers were all good, in a class with the best and perhaps…. He signed and produced a lot of very good groups. The label's production values may have prevented him from having any smashes, at least I don't remember any.
I'm sure few will remember the Nice or even have heard of them but the first Nice was a pretty good record while the members went on to greater things. The sound wasn't as immediate as it could have been. I worked it in my store but couldn't get anywhere with it.
In those days British imports were all the rage on the West Coast while US records were despised. When I first went to England in the early seventies I was astounded to find the fans waiting for American pressings because they were thought better. Oh, I said, how strange. What makes them better? In so many words they said production values. In still other words they thought they had more immediacy. So Andy's Immediate records lacked immediacy. I thought they were great anyway and they were always the first of the new releases I auditioned.
But, the devil is in the details, and Andrew wasn't much on details so he went broke although he did hang in there until 1970. Not a bad record for an independent. He doesn't tell us what happened to the masters but they must have been worth something.
By that time Andy was not only deep into drugs he was legendary. In Stoned and 2Stoned he has some great descriptions of being out of it if you like that sort of thing. His first two books were based on the oral biography method of Jean Stein's biography of Edie Sedgwick called Edie. In that book acquaintances were interviewed and then cut and pasted to form a continuous narrative. Knocked out by 'Edie' Andrew did the same with the exception that he commented on the interviewees' comments.
Rolling Stoned begins in a straight autobiographical style then begins to wander and meander. Andrew is always a good read but unless you want to read three different four hundred page books covering the same ground with variations I would recommend his most recent, Rolling Stoned, or perhaps 2Stoned. Still, I don't mind…
Posted in America, Bob Dylan, Folk Music, Jews, Psychology, R.E. Prindle, Reviews, Rock And Roll, Subconscious, Unconsciousness, Writing | Tagged Allen Klein, Andrew Loog Oldham, Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra, Andy Warhol, Cinema, Films, Keith Richards, Little Andy, Mick Jagger, Movies, Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stones, the Stones | Leave a Comment »
A Review: The Rock And Roll Circus Movie Of The Rolling Stones
The Rock And Roll Circus Movie
All Dressed Up For The Party
In December 1968 Mick Jagger decided to make a film, or rather, he shot the film having decided earlier. Perhaps he was inspired by The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour of the previous year. These years from 1966 to 1968-69 were a tumultuous time for Jagger and his sidekick Keith Richards. Not least significant was that Mick had taken up with the songstress Marianne Faithfull. Then in 1967 there was perhaps the most famous drug bust in history at Keith's Redlands house.
The boys had been pushing the drug envelope hard more or less inviting a crackdown and it came in 1967 involving Mick, Keith and Marianne with devastating results for all three characters in the drama.
As the authorities wished to make an example of the baddest boys of rock and roll Mick and Keith received prison sentences of which however they only served two or three days. Nevertheless their psyches had been criminalized, changed their views on their role in society.
While the arrest and jail time were merited in society's eyes, Mick and Keith who were among the legions marching to Altruria on the wings of pot convinced that their elders had irrevocably messed the world up while they were going to set it right under the influence of marijuana, LSD, amphetamines and whatever else was handy, saw the bust and conviction as unjustified interference in their dreams of perfection.
The revolution was on as far as they were concerned hence they began a string of songs along the lines of Street Fighting Man and Sympathy For The Devil, unintended consequences of the bust.
Oh yeah, Mick and Marianne, Keith and his main squeeze Anita Pallenberg had become involved in Satanism which was going around like the flu. Not necessarily dilettantish either like, say, I just read a great book by Satan, but the real kind as fostered by the Great Beast 666 Aleister Crowley himself as interpreted by his epigoni Kenneth Anger and Anton LaVey, not to mention the Process Church Of The Final Judgment. Mick and Marianne disavow any serious interest in Satanism but the Rock and Roll Circus contradicts that.
Combined with these irritants in their lives Mick had just starred in a Satanic movie, Performance, and Marianne had had the misfortune of a miscarriage. To say that they weren't suffering at the time they made their movie would be a understatement.
In this hazy mental state, compounded by too many drugs, Mick cobbled together his Circus.
What is the meaning of the title Circus? Ostensibly it meant literally a circus, after all it had a fire eater and trapeze artists. However it could also be a double entendre. Just as the title of their 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, parodied the Queens request on passports so the word Circus also parodied the name the British intelligence agency gave to their gig. The title can be construed as a challenge to the establishment. It would seem clear then that Mick was still seething inside because of Redlands.
His film is negligible as a movie but a good concert film. The symbolism is non stop as the guest audience in dressed in some sort of Munchkin costumes. The cast was bizarre to say the least. While little more than a musical oddity Jethro Tull led by Ian Anderson in his disgusting dirty old man persona opens the show while he was followed by the Who caught in pre-Tommy persona. Never one of my favorite bands, others thought they were a good performance while we are treated to a young Pete Townshend doing a series of his trademark windmills.
The couple circus acts are entertaining enough; the fire eater is pretty spectacular.
John Lennon performing separately from the Beatles was probably the musical highlight of the show for me. While obviously in the throes of a serious depression personally, as a performer once on stage Lennon is charisma spilling out all over the place. The depression does show up in the name he chose for his ad hoc group- The Dirty Mac. The name characterizes the general depression and malaise of the whole show. Lennon's group brought together some stellar lights of the time. Besides himself he had Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience on drums, Eric Clapton on lead guitar and Keith on rhythm. They are joined a by fiddler, I presume Ivry Gitlis, and the irrepressible Yoko Ono.
The Dirty Mac
Yoko was in her Bagism phase. While the movie is loosely shot during Lennon's gig, if you watch the lower right corner of the film you can see a black object sort of pulsing. That's the bag Yoko is in. I suppose as she was a performance artist the bag was Yoko's joke- that's the bag I'm in, get it?
After a noisy rendition of Yer Blues Yoko wiggles out of the bag bouncing up with her arms outstretched as in Here I am, aren't I wonderful? Well, she certainly shocked Ivry when she began to squeal. Yoko is very tiny so Ivry kind of looks down at Yoko with raised eyebrows, looks over at John, backs up a couple steps, stops playing momentarily and has this incredulous am I believing what I'm seeing and hearing look on his face. One might say Yoko stole the show. Really, I had to start laughing.
Marianne: I have since learned that Marianne's performance was deleted. Jody Klein substituted this picture from a French performance. It has nothing to do with the Circus.
The real show stopper comes next when the camera shifts to Marianne Faithfull. She was decorously posed in a stunning black designer gown. At her most beautiful with a fine folky voice that entrancingly recalled her As Tears Go By but strong and more focused. I missed the words but caught the mood of this enchanting chanteuse. Marianne definitely trumped Yoko as a showstopper.
Taj Mahal was a special case. Believe it or not Taj is still out there challenging the Interminable Tourist Dylan himself. Taj works, or did, about 170 days a year, every year. While he is not well known he began as a duo with Ry Cooder called the Rising Sons then added a string of records on his own. The guitarist is Jesse Ed Davis, a failed guitar god, who had a couple solo Lps of his own. Taj's first two records are superb blues Lps, two of my favorites of the period. The third LP, a two record set is also quite good but begins his political period that obviated his musical career. He goes rapidly down hill after that.
For some reason he chose a rather lame piece from his repertoire. If he was making an appeal for a girl or girls to join him backstage his salacious version of Hey, Little School Girl might have served him better.
The Stones rounded out the show at the end. While the Who were supposed to have buried the Stones I didn't find it so. The tension had been well maintained throughout the show with the comic interlude of Yoko and the Stones maintained it through to the end with a climax of sorts.
It was obvious that Mick, Keith and Marianne were in a world of hurt….and Brian Jones. That tragedy would play out over the next year when Brian drowned and Marianne almost drowned in her own tears and Mick spawned a real live Satan at Altamont.
The movie ended in hurt and Satanism- homage to the Devil.
Mick and Marianne had gone to see Jimi Hendrix a few months earlier. After performing Hendrix had sat at Marianne and Mick's table where he put the make on Marianne telling her to dump the White dude and go with him. Marianne hesitated a moment too long giving Mick offense so that he commemorated the evening in his song, You Can't Always Get What You Want. Suddenly I realized the meaning of the line, you and your friend Jimi as Mick shouted it to someone off stage to the right. OK, not my problem.
So Jagger was still wearing his hair as he did in the movie Performance. That soul corrupting film was obviously still influencing him. As Marianne said, it changed his personality.
The show closed with Sympathy For The Devil. There was a little stage extension on which Mick prostrated himself as though doing obeisance as the song played. It looked like he was groveling, then he looked up making a couple goofy grimaces at the camera beginning to pull off his shirt. Not necessary, Mick, not necessary. Then with the shirt off he straightened to a kneeling position to reveal Satanic tattoos a la Kenneth Anger.
Anger had a large LUCIFER tattooed across his chest. Here Mick seemed to be imitating him apparently trying to tell us that the Great Satan had arrived. I hope they were transfers. Interesting, especially as the movie Rosemary's Baby appeared in 1968 in which Rosemary gives birth to the Son of Satan. Even more interestingly in the 1990's book sequel Son Of Rosemary Satan's little lad was named Andy. After Andy Warhol, I presume.
I suppose then that Mick conceived the film as a coming out party for himself as The Great Beast. Apparently he took his Satanism very seriously. It make one wonder, was Altamont a projection of the Great Satan?
Posted in Civilization, Folk Music, R.E. Prindle, Rock And Roll, Writing | Tagged Beatles, Cinema, Essays, Films, John Lennon, Keith Richards, Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger, Movies, Rolling Stones | Leave a Comment »
Part 3a: The Sixties And The Negro Revolution: Terraplaning Through The Ozone
The Sixties And The Negro Revolution
Part 3a
Terraplaning Through The Ozone
Always keep in mind 1954's Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. The Board Of Education of Topeka as the basis of our interpretation of the Negro revolution. There are other things to consider. In that era before the internet, indeed, even as television networks were only developing, magazines were a key element in forming public opinion. Liberalism, even Communism, was the lens through which events were viewed. This was usually disguised as tongue in cheek conservative criticism.
The most important purveyors of this sort of public opinion were Time, Newsweek and Life. The first and last formed the Time-Life group of magazines all of which were very influential while disguising their Liberal bias very well. Life was the first to bite the dust probably being replaced by T-L's People Magazine that more or less covered the same ground in a more contemporary fashion. Far back but vying with these was the William F. Buckley fronted National Review. Buckley was the most pernicious of all posing as the consummate Conservative while guarding the Liberal agenda from Conservative inroads.
These were New York based magazines so that it is not surprising perhaps that they were staffed mainly by Jews, including the National Review, hence Left Wing although disguised as right wing or objective, and heavily pro-Israel, Negro and definitely Jewish. It might seem odd that all pushed a Jewish agenda but then as New York City was 25% Jewish let's just say they had a foot in the door.
Until Time-Life was absorbed by the Jews in the TL-Warner Bros. merger the Luces, Henry and Claire Booth who founded the empire ran a fairly useful organization. I read Time religiously and believed in the veracity of the magazine until I learned in their account of Howard Hughes departure from Las Vegas that they fabricated the story completely. Pure fiction and that this was done routinely.
Nevertheless as publishers of outstanding illustrated history books in extended series and phonograph record collections of very high quality they did their best to educate Americans of their past.
I finally chucked Time Life in after buying their mail order library, The Time-Life Reading Program. This was a series of 108 titles sent four volumes bi-monthly. They became progressively Red oriented, that is propagandistic. I read the first eighty or so titles then stopped although I have the full set of 108 less the replacement title of one volume.
As they were located in New York City they were enablers of the various revolutions giving national prominence to what were local situations. Andy Warhol would have remained a relative unknown except for Time while a relative nobody like Edie Sedgwick went nationwide with Life's picture essay of her. Even Ed Sanders of the Fugs made the cover of Life as T-L constantly hyped the Greenwich Village Bohemian culture, enabling that culture to conquer America.
Newsweek was a Time wannabe that didn't have what it took. One picked it up when Time wasn't around which was rarely. Newsweek has gone defunct while pursuing a far left Jewish agenda. The signs are that Time sabotaged by the Jews through their merger will probably soon follow under Jewish editorship.
As commentary magazines there were Harpers, Atlantic, The Reporter and a host of others but they were minor in distribution compared to the giants Time, Life and Newsweek.
Time is of the essence of the period.
Just as one's dreams form a parallel reality alongside one's waking life so movies and TV play a key role in the formation of one's public life somewhere between dreams and waking reality. Contrary to claims made by the industry movies were not about entertainment but were purely propaganda disguised as entertainment. No serious history or study of movies exists to my knowledge although specific movies are being injected into articles as alternate reality. While movies may not be actually real they nevertheless create real memories and very influential memories that do affect your actions. And memory is the basis of consciousness. The memories are so powerful that one may adjust one's personality to reflect what is on the screen. Thus when M.A.S.H. was on TV any number of Hawkeyes stalked the land assuming that persona. The Hawkeyes then cast the people around them in the various roles behaving as if those roles were real in fact. What a curse that was.
There was a changing of the guard that occurred in 1962. Within a few days of each other two movies were released the one being The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and the other Ian Fleming' Dr. No. The former was the swan song of the old American mores while the latter established the new Freudian/Reichian pornographic image of the New America.
Liberty Valance featured the two aging stars of the thirties and forties John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart while being directed by the old warhorse, John Ford. Dr. No introduced Wayne's successor Sean Connery. It was like Zeus replacing Cronus in the Age change from Taurus to Aries.
The two female leads also heralded the change. Vera Miles as the beautiful Hallie Stoddard Aryan model of Chivalry of virgin sensibilities exited stage right while like Aphrodite of old the new model woman Ursula Andress rose nearly nude from the sea as the pornographer's delight. Indeed, soon an area legal for pornography would be created within a twenty mile radius of the Hollywood studios ensuring that pornography would triumph in America's theatres.
Thus violence was personated in the form of James Bond (Sean Connery) and pornography in various forms of Bond heroines who might all have been named Pussy Galore were united. The future was cast. Out with the chaste and demure Vera Miles and in with the lusty, busty, big-assed Bond heroines chasing the Big Dick. I knew something had happened but I was left scratching my head.
Nineteen sixty-two also produced the morally relativist masterpiece Mondo Cane. The movie had tremendous impact as it demonstrated that nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. Sixty years later its images flash through my mind
Thus the Jews through Freudian/Reichian psychoanalysis triumphed over and displaced Aryan European Chivalric mores.
Now, Freud and Reich were motivated by Freud's total misunderstanding of the Unconscious. Freud looked inside himself and extrapolated his malaise as the normal for mankind irrespective of race or religion. If Freud was the Jesus of psychoanalysis then his disciple Wilhelm Reich was its St. Paul. While Freud was rejected by Aryans Reich was able to translate sex and violence into something palatable for them.
While most people know Freud, at least by name, many fewer have heard of Wilhelm Reich. Reich was a disciple of Freud. While Freud dressed his discovery of the psycho-analytic method in a lot of mumbo-jumbo he essentially deified his own subconscious desires for sex and violence and passed them off as universal. He didn't take those desires to their logical conclusion however while Reich did. Reich's vision was pure sado-masochistic sex and violence and by sex I mean merely fucking.
While this had been what Freud meant, when Reich held up his mirror for Freud to see Freud was revolted by himself and cast Reich from his organization. At that time his group was all Jewish as it was realized that psycho-analysis was a Jewish affair.
Reich continued on and wed Communist violence to his psycho-sexual political creation. Where he would have gone from there having been discredited by the psycho-analysts isn't clear but that scourge who destroyed America without lifting a finger, Adolf Hitler, came to power in Germany. The German States were the center of the psycho-sexual scum.
As Hitler was antagonistic to Jews in general, when he came to power in 1933 all this intellectual treyfe with the exception of Freud, and he was to plague England, fled to the United States settling in its two culture forming centers, New York City and Los Angeles. Reich, the King of Scurf, was one of these figures. Hitler's revenge on the United States. He remained on the East Coast peddling his sex and violence.
If Freud had rejected Reich US authorities followed suit in spades. They were so repelled by Reichian theories that, this is truly remarkable, they not only arrested him as a criminal lunatic throwing him into prison but actually collected his books and burned them. This was in anything goes America too.
The only thing other than Reich that the US was intolerant of was Jewish comic books that were also banned. The Jewish Horror comics such as William Gaines Tales From The Crypt were sado-masochistic, violent and pornographic while possible inspired by Reich's approach to psycho-analysis.
I was an avid reader from eight to twelve of all the Gaines comics which I considered outre and even as I read them thought to myself that they shouldn't allow them for little kids like myself. But, I read them eagerly. Still I didn't know that what I was reading was sado-pornographic stuff. Didn't know either term at the time. Apparently our parents did. These were vivid, vivid stories. Great pictures. Many of the images linger on. Perhaps I was revolted because I have always rejected pornography as a mental malaise. Not that that does me or anyone else any good because every Hollywood movie has a pornographic base while many for general distribution are worse than anything Gaines published. His line was named, humorously I hope, EC- Educational Comics. Believe it or not.
At any rate not all Reich's books were burned as they were revived in the Sixties forming the basis of Bohemian sex and politics notions. So a new synthesis began to form, began to jell in the Sixties. The adoption of a new set of mores. It was realized that movies were an unrivalled propagandistic tool.
Dusan Makajevic, a Yugoslavian film maker made a perfect visualization of Freudian/Reichian sexual politics in his movie of 1971: WR: Mysteries Of The Organism. The modern world in a nut shell, no pun intended I don't recommend it as without proper education its sexual presentation will certainly be misunderstood as pure pornography. Of course it is, but only as a visualization of the Freudian/Reichian unconscious and its consequences. E. Michael Jones gives an extended literary version in his Libido Dominandi that I do recommend. Perhaps read it first.
So, now, we have the perfect propagandistic tool that functions through both the conscious and unconscious minds in hands of Jews indoctrinated in Freudian/Reichian psychology. After WWII and the discovery of Hitler's death camps the Jews became absolutely hysterical. Even though American Jews had never been in any danger, not even remotely, they now saw White Americans as potential if not actual Fascists intent on destroying them. This was serious.
William Paley of CBS, himself a Jew, believed American death camps were so imminent that he capitalized the careers of prominent Jewish performers- actors, comedians and such- and sold shares in their future incomes to gentiles. By this ploy he believed that when the round up came these few Jews would be spared for economic reasons. This is serious, indeed.
In any event the path to survival in their mental state was to divide and discombobulate. The Negro as a tool was at hand. While the Judaeo-Communists of the twenties and thirties had always used the Negro to sow discord and confusion, in the post-war US their effort was stepped up. The movies were the perfect vehicle to divide and control America. Hence we had all those horrid Sidney Poitier movies shaming Whites and glorifying Negroes. By 1960 this was nearly in full spate. Miscegenation was a popular device so there were numerous Negro male/White female pairings. Remember the movies are a third reality somewhere between waking and dreaming providing both conscious and unconscious very real memories from faked reality. What was seen wasn't true but was accepted as such by suggestion. This is serious business while presented as entertainment, it was actually behavior changing propaganda. New mores for the masses.
The dialogue, then, was controlled and directed through films, the third reality.
And then there was Brown vs the BOE. The greatest divisive decision ever made and taken full advantage of by the Jews. Here was a way to protect themselves from a nation, they thought, of Hitlers thirsting for Jewish blood. After the great preliminary battles of the Fifties came the Sixties and the wedge that split the nation- the Civil Rights Battle.
Posted in Aphrodite, Civilization, Dreams, Freud, Greek Mythology, Jews, Liberals, Psychology, R.E. Prindle, Religion, Religious Consciousness, Reviews, Sigmund Freud, Writing | Tagged Adolf Hitler, America, Aphrodite, Brown vs. Board Of Education, Cinema, Essays, Film, James Bond, M.A.S.H., Movies, Sean Connery, Supreme Court, Time-Life, Wilhelm Reich, William F. Buckley | Leave a Comment »
Chap. VIII: Marianne Faithfull: The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties
Marianne Faithfull:
The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties
Would anybody like to try the changes I'm going through?
–Donovan.
In Her Glory
Life at best is difficult. Change after difficult change presents itself. Of necessity life is lived on the fly. One must always deal with fixtures and forces one cannot comprehend on first confrontation. In a way then we can hardly be responsible for the decisions we make unless we have enough experience to interpret that with which we are confronted correctly. At any point a controlling psychological fixation through misinterpretation may cause to act against our best interests. All further experience then will be interpreted through and disturbed by one or more fixations in our subconscious of which we probably are not aware.
Sexually Marianne was probably confused by the sexual scenes she observed at her father's Braziers Institute contrasted with her subsequent teaching of abstinence at St. Joseph's Convent School. The confusions conflicted her sexual attitudes in later life, attitudes she was unaware of and never resolved.
Young Marianne
Once she left her father's governance passing into that of her mother's she lived not in poverty but in relative hardship; luxuries if experienced at all were few and far between yet she did received an upper class education and outlook at St. Joseph's.
Her mother was apparently strongly Bohemian having been involved with the stage pre-WWII. She encouraged Marianne in the Bohemian direction which Marianne found congenial, sought and never abandoned. The girl was interested in the stage while becoming a Joan Baez style folk singer after leaving convent school in Reading at seventeen.
While not beautiful in any classic sense she was yet attractive with a great figure making her a desirable sexual object. The sixties was the decade of wide open sex making all women mere sexual objects. Her first reaction was to seek a stable married life choosing John Dunbar as an appropriate husband. Dunbar was Bohemian in outlook while apparently headed for an academic career.
At this point fate intervened. At a party with Dunbar she met the record producer Andrew Loog Oldham who perceived her persona as a marketable commodity in the pop music world. As an added bonus Marianne could actually sing, having performed as a folk singer.
She was still an impressionable girl of just seventeen just after the Pill had been introduced with little ability to successfully traverse the changes she would be called upon to go through. These would be formidable and rapid calling for huge energy reserves on a day to day basis. Not an enviable situation.
While most musicians go through a relatively long learning process and struggle to succeed Marianne struck gold the first time out without even trying. Her first minimal three minute effort, if it was an effort, established her as the pop princess or queen of the generation. Her innocent convent school persona was perfect in a vulgar world. But it was a persona at odds with the one Marianne would seek and embrace- she became the devil with a blue dress on.
While the music or, really, record business seems very attractive from a distance it is literally vile from the inside. Everything connected with it is dishonest, the record companies, musicians, lackeys, the whole number. Nobody remains unstained.
It is truly a man's world, even a gay man's world, in which the men have no respect for womankind. Women are expected to merely service the sexual desires of the male performers. They have no use beyond that. Thus one has the phenomenally debauched groupie scene that amazed the world during the sixties. After that there was no longer anything amazing.
Having witnessed sex acts at Braziers of numerous descriptions the pop music world satisfied this side of Marianne's psyche. At the same time a desire for a chaste life pushed her in the direction of marriage with Dunbar which desire she consummated, however Dunbar proved to be not the ideal choice.
While Marianne thought she would be leading a sedate intellectual academic life with him as a professor he turned out to be as much or more a Bohemian as she was. Quite frankly he failed her.
Having acquired a wife he did not act responsibly toward her. He was blindsided by her recording success and perhaps belittled by her financial success. In effect he was supported by his wife which is always a difficult situation. The changes he faced were in themselves formidable and he didn't have the character to meet them. Still, a man doesn't fill his house with dopers and heroin addicts. Marianne can hardly be faulted for resenting it after getting up in the morning to find a house full of conked out junkies in rooms littered with used needles. The transition from Braziers to St. Joseph's to high degeneration must have been changes hard to adapt to. Sent her head spinning.
Marianne Searching
The change from the straitened circumstances of her childhood and youth still actually in progress to one of affluence in which she could indulge her wildest fancies in buying clothes and more clothes. Her lack of maturity hurt her badly. In this case her hero William Blake's notion that the road of excess leads to wisdom was not quite true, it led to penury.
Not clearly seen by many at the time the pop world split into two streams, the British pop stream of the fifties soon to be extinct and the Rock world of pop princes and princesses of the future. The Beatles straddled both worlds while curiously Marianne may have been the first to emerge as a star of the Rock world soon to be followed by the Rolling Stones.
As such even though having only one hit single to her name she was on a par with the Beatles and the Stones while being superior to the lesser groups following in the train of the Beatles and Stones. Thus in the salon formed around the pop art dealer Robert Fraser she held a place of primacy that she never realized. Her tragedy was that she was too young and inexperienced to grasp her opportunity making a series of inept decisions while being seen only as so much poontang by the Rockers and of transitory fame by a series of inept managers.
Thus, unable to find someone capable of carefully building her career she did become transitory, or her career going into hiatus, she did lose her place while gravitating to the dominance of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. Gradually her royalties diminished so that she was financially dependent on Jagger while still married to John Dunbar. Deep in a milieu of drug users she found their allure irresistible.
However conscious she was that she had been and still was to some extent a celebrity she thought to regain that identity. Feeling unable to compete with Jagger as a recording star she chose to follow her mother's wishes and take up acting. In her enthusiasm to and need to show Jagger that she was somebody too, that she was his equal, as a performing artist she aroused Jagger's interest in also being a movie star. He, being a more marketable commodity soon gave evidence of eclipsing her as an actor rather than staying in recording as she assumed he would.
Her own space having been preempted she developed an affinity for Brian Jones of the Stones who was essentially in her situation in his relation to the group. He too was being forced out thereby losing his identity.
When Brian died she then in sympathy decided to follow him overdosing with pills that would have killed her had not Jagger been alert enough to rush her to the hospital. As much as anything her suicide attempt was meant to get away from Jagger's dominance. That move now being thwarted she had no choice but to walk out which she did in 1970. Thus began the rest of her life.
Marianne The Wild Thing
The Rock and Art scene was a drug scene. Bob Fraser's salon centered around Rock musicians was also a drug center. Fraser introduced members of his salon to all drugs including heroin. Marianne had a favored position in Fraser's salon early learning of heroin to which Fraser himself was addicted. By the time she walked out on Jagger in 1970 she had been addicted for some time. Heroin was to remain her central fixation throughout her life.
Jagger disapproved of her addiction so she was forced to conceal it from him. When her royalties decreased she no longer had her own money becoming dependent on Jagger. Not wishing to plead for large sums of money from Jagger in order to obtain her heroin she prostituted herself to Keith Richard's factotum Spanish Tony Sanchez.
Sanchez was an aspiring criminal who came to Richards through Groovy Bob Fraser. Sanchez had met Fraser in a bar after which the friendship blossomed. Fraser had contracted gambling debts to the notorious Kray Brothers, the criminal kingpins of London. The Krays were threatening Fraser with grievous bodily harm if they didn't get their money. According to Sanchez in his autos Up And Down With The Rollings Stones and I was Keith Richard's Drug Dealer he volunteered to negotiate the debt with the Krays which he did.
At that time, following their US Mafia model, the Krays were attempting to lift the Beatles from Brian Epstein who also had large gambling debts to them so there is no reason to disbelieve Sanchez. Following the episode with Fraser Sanchez was employed by Richards as drug/procurer-factotum at the fabulous salary of two hundred fifty pounds a week. This leads me to believe that the Krays were using Sanchez to infiltrate the Stones possibly with the intent of taking them over.
Sanchez was always resented by Richards and the Stones but he managed to stick with them until the mid seventies when Richards was able to shake him. In his vanity Sanchez considered himself an essential member of the Stones' entourage, if not an actual member of the Stones.
Marianne's misfortune was that everyone wanted to sleep with her, a further misfortune was that she obliged. Thus she and Tony had a sexual liaison for several years. This raises the question then whether Tony was also pimping for her. Certainly as his criminal associates knew he was sleeping with her they would want to also. Not being a fool Tony may have named a price and received it. Whether he or she could have successfully resisted is open to question. The US Mafia certainly used their female artists to gratify their desires.
In the mid sixties additionally, once again, through Fraser Marianne had become part of the Satanic crowd. Through Fraser she was introduced to the arch US Satanist, Kenneth Anger. Through them she was introduced to the writing of Great Satanist of the twentieth century, Aleister Crowley and also the writing of the nineteenth century French arch Satanist, Eliphas Levi, not Jewish despite the name. And then the modern Satanist classic the Russian Bulgakov's The Master And Margarita published in 1968.
Also in this period she became involved with the Satanist Process Church Of The Final Judgment. Marianne downplays her involvement with Satanism but it was much more serious than she is willing to admit.
Playing against this background Marianne renewed an acquaintance with the Irishman Lord Patrick Rossmore. He was 43 to her 24. I merely mention this, it makes me no never mind what the ages are so long as the couple is comfortable with each other. In this case they weren't comfortable. The two, in a sort of a farce became engaged but never married parting as they met in a friendly sort of way within several months.
While Mick was aggressively dominating, Marianne seems to have chosen Lord Rossmore because shy and retiring as he was she could dominate him. According to Hodkinson the couple rarely saw each other, he being in Ireland while Marianne remained in London closer to her dope supply.
True to her interpretation of William S. Burroughs degenerate novel, Naked Lunch, she led a totally debased and degraded life as a street junkie or, at least, her version of it. Remember it was her movie of Marianne and she was pretending to be a sociologist. She cultivated the friendship of total degenerates such as the artists Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. She also became friends with the total junkie, writer Alexander Trocchi. Also at this time becoming fast friends with another lowlife, Henrietta Moraes who she says was a close friend until she died. Marianne was able to sink to lower levels than any of these people and gloried in it.
It was during this period of 1970-71 that she says she sat on the wall in Soho staring into the bomb crater. In his first biography Hodkinson scoffed at this. According to him this wall was a waiting station lined with junkies alert for their supply.
By 1971 the Stones had become tax exiles in the South of France so that Spanish Tony was with Keith no longer able to supply Marianne with her drugs, thus, we suppose, the wall. As Marianne had no regular income during this period, although adequate royalty checks still arrived irregularly, there does arise the question of how she paid for her dope. As a junkie Marianne had no qualms about running up tabs she couldn't pay and apparently didn't. At one point she boasts she left New York owing several dealers 20K each while flippantly adding she had no intention of ever paying. Whether she succeeded or not is not known.
Marianne vehemently denies that she resorted to prostitution although there is a fair amount of circumstantial evidence she did. A careful reading of her second auto, Memories, Dreams And Reflections, gives some hints. At one point she retorts to an admirer that she is not a two-bit prostitute, that it would take 200 pounds to be with her. Perhaps a joke but the price sounds right, her retort has the ring of authenticity.
In the same auto she claims first hand acquaintance with all the working girls of the area. There is only one way such first hand knowledge could be obtained. There is or was a video on the internet in which a camera had been placed within a building between two half open doors. Marianne dressed in some pretty snappy expensive looking working girl gear walks in front of the camera, notices it, shows alarm, then quickly turns a corner then flattening herself against the wall to peer back at the camera. It seems evident that she was going to or returning from a job.
She seems to have worked from 1970-71 through at least 1974 through her association with Madeleine D'Arcy. In 1971- during the recording of Exile On Main Street when Tony Sanchez accompanied Keith to the South of France Tony met Madeleine with whom he fell deeply in love and had a relationship with her in France.
Upon returning to England he apparently resumed some sort of relationship with Marianne as well as Madeleine. Marianne in her turn began a lesbian relationship with Madeleine, perhaps to spite Tony, who she despised personally, or so she says. Tony was angry at the relationship.
It then appears that Marianne and Madeleine functioned as high price prostitutes or perhaps call girls between '72 to '74. In '74 Madeleine as Marianne recalls had gone back to turning fifteen pound tricks in Brighton. 'Going back' implies that formerly she received higher payouts, perhaps 200+ as Marianne received.
As she hadn't heard from Madeleine for a little while she called at her apartment. When no one answered she called a couple bravos to break down the door. One was a Maltese pimp and drug dealer. At that time in London the Maltese are said to have controlled crime in the West End. That Marianne could call on them to supply help implies a certain degree of familiarity with the underworld. The other person's identity Marianne doesn't indicate so there is the possibility it could have been Tony. When no one answered the door the two men broke it down.
Entering the apartment Madeleine was found dead on her bed. She had apparently been beaten to death although not molested as she was artfully laid out in a beautiful full gown. Thus whoever killed her loved her. This points to Tony although the crime was never solved.
So, if Marianne says she never turned to prostitution perhaps not, but there is sufficient evidence to indicate she did. The whole period from 1970-1974 is very hazy in her memoirs.
While she was supposedly incognito on the streets of Soho, as if Marianne could ever be incognito, lost to view of the music world, Michael Leander, who had been her producer suddenly got the idea to make an LP with her so he beat the bushes, scoured the walls so to speak, like any good detective, tracking her down in Soho supposedly sitting on her wall staring into the bomb pit. He induced her back into the studio where they recorded the LP Rich Kid Blues, a return to Marianne's folk roots.
For some reason the record was shelved not being released until decades later. After this she took up with Oliver Musker who she was associated with for the two years from '72 to '74.
The Myth Of Marianne
Down And Out In Soho
For all her emotional problems Marianne was a bright girl. She read. Among her readings were those of the psychologist C.G. Jung. Among Jung's ideas was that of the personal myth. By that he means everyone must have a personal myth to survive, to make sense of what one is doing or what is happening to you. This was more or less the same notion of Andy Warhol's that if you don't like the way your life is going pretend it's a movie. That's a sort of displacement so what's happening is just a script that was written for you. Your own personal myth. Lots of people were living in their own movie.
It seems probable, in observing Marianne's life, that she came across Jung's observation and set about creating her myth. For proper understanding I quote Jung: p. 197 of the Red Book as quoted in the introduction by Sonu Shamdesani:
I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: "what is the myth you are living?" I found no answer to the question and had to admit that I was not living with a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust…
So in the most natural way, I took on myself to know "my" myth– so I told myself– how could I, when treating my patients, make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person, if I was unconscious of it."
During the period of 1970 '72 Marianne had fallen on the hardest times, the lack of a model for her life. It seems obvious that the wall bit is perhaps a metaphor for her mental state while sunk into her heroin addiction which perhaps had led to other unsavory activities.
If she really thought she was incognito amongst the street people and shopkeepers who she tells us were wonderful to her, what would have been just another junkie earning money by any means necessary, she is either misremembering or was oblivious to the truth. Marianne was a nationally recognized figure on TV and records who had won the hearts of the people. If anything, one can only think that they wondered how she could have fallen so low but in a manner they still revered the image she had been. On the other hand she says guys drove by and yelled 'you dirty slag' out the window. Marianne was in denial.
Without a myth of herself that was all she could do. I don't know when after her fall from grace in 1967 she had read Jung to conceive of creating her myth but the period after 1970 has certainly been mythologized. Remember she titled her second auto Memories Dream And Reflections which just happens to be the title of Jung's own auto without the And.
As it was necessary for Marianne to form a new persona after the Redlands bust it appears that the persona began taking shape during this period of extreme depression from '70 to '72. When she met Musker and perhaps even Leander recorded Rich Kid Blues with her, she began to form the myth and regain an identity and perhaps sanity.
Musker led to Ben Brierly which was a key recovery period and then later she grabbed hold of the supreme works of despair and depression, the works of Brecht and Weil. God, that's hurting.
All her associates in the mid seventies were Creatures From The Black Lagoon. Black Lagoon was one of the great psychological sci-fi parodies of the fifties. Freud's vision of the unconscious dominated the period so in Lagoon some 'scientists', always portrayed as evil themselves, discover a black lagoon in the Brazilian jungles. The circular pool, of course, represents Freud's vision of the unconscious in which demons and monsters lurk so the Creature, stirred up by the scientists, perhaps it may be read as psycho-analysts, emerges in all his horror dripping with weeds from the black lagoon. Coulda been me I thought as I sat watching.
So, Burroughs, Gysin, Ginsburg, Corso, Bacon, Lucien Freud,, Moraes, all the people a reasonable person would run from. No matter how attractive they may appear on the printed page they were much less so in person. I've met a few of them and, shall we say, I knew I would never fit in.
Marianne did fit in. She was beginning to reconcile her Braziers Park sexual education with her high Catholic teaching. Andy Warhol said if your life is not going as you like it, pretend it's a movie. Marianne was in the unique position where she could live her myth in movies, on the stage and on phonograph records as well as in real life. In her mind she could make it work but real life upsets things once in a while. Plus Marianne in her reading read William Blake whose line 'the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom' was the mantra of the whole junkie crowd as well as Marianne's. Who would be seduced by bull shit like that? Beaudelaire, Rambeau and the French Symbolists also provided such like justification for the path she was on. Thus Marianne was able to justify her myth by such philosophy.
Marianne could thus justify sexual excesses, perhaps even prostitution, as drinking the cup to the dregs on the path to wisdom. At the same time she was able to split her personality in a Braziers/St. Joseph' contrast so that she could remain 'pure' while sympathizing with the plight of all those unfortunate prostitutes she knew so well. That actually was a sort of Rich Kid Blues so Leander was perhaps more prescient than Marianne thought.
Marianne who had many acting offers during these years and at least one serious role with Roman Polanski all of which she blew ostensibly because of her heroin addiction but also possibly because as she felt so degraded she didn't think she deserved success because of Redlands. At any rate she was the darling of the counter culture and remains so down and out or not.
Oliver Musker an old Etonian met her through Christopher Gibbs who paled with Bob Fraser at a party in 1972 so she wasn't so incognito that she wasn't attending parties. Still her addiction was obvious enough that Musker wanted to save her. Therefore he took control and put her in rehab. But what's rehab to an addict? Perhaps a time out. Of course Marianne says Musker saved her life. Well, romance, romance, romance.
Musker was an apparent stable interlude in Marianne's self-destructive course. He kept her on a more or less even keel for these two years. No less destitute than she had ever been Marianne accepted a role filmed in India titled Ghost Story. Not quite the hardship Marianne attests, indeed, very glamorous to anyone in her fan base and elsewhere.
She and Musker traveled to India and from there to Hong Kong. So she was leading a life many could envy. Not too much is available about Musker but he apparently found India congenial as a business opportunity. He currently runs a furniture factory out of Delhi.
But he was an overbearing, dominant sort enforcing his will with violence. He knocked out Marianne's upper two front teeth. When he tried to manage Marianne's career he became too much for her and they parted company. Or, perhaps, Musker was just a crutch to get her over a very rough patch. By 1974 perhaps she thought she no longer needed him.
And then as part of the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom Musker was a type of male and as part of her identity she was to experiment with different types. That would lead to her future second husband Ben Brierly. The music scene about to transit the very destructive Punk era so, perhaps Marianne saw it as chance to revive her recording career.
As I see it Marianne went into shock after Redlands. The shame of the Mars bar bit was too much for her psyche to handle. The court's denial of the chance to defend herself and possibly explain was an egregious insult that she could find no way to handle. This kind of shock takes time to digest and find some way to regain one's composure. Thus Marianne's life from that point to her suicide attempt in 1969 can be explained in that context.
Her rejection of Mick can largely be explained as the aftermath of Redlands.
Marianne had been used as sex object once she entered the record industry. It was a role she didn't reject apparently being a hot mama. But as one matures one finds ways to use as well as be used. Thus after 1969 Marianne turned predator using her sexual desirability to turn predator herself.
She stayed with Lord Rossmore after leaving Mick while she used Musker to regain some balance although kicking heroin is just a mirage junkies pursue. One grows weary of their stories of becoming 'clean.' At best after Musker she discovered her limits although she really tested them.
While I don't think it's true, Marianne felt that Mick was a superior musician to herself. Marianne let the notion destroy her self-confidence. Jagger is no singer, has no voice, is a mediocre lyricist, can't dance but is a great showman with a burning desire to corrupt society.
Marianne's problem was that she couldn't find the proper agent or musical guide. Issuing four albums in 1965 was a crass error for which she was apparently responsible. She took no time to enter the spirit of the songs while many of the backing arrangements are revolting. Nevertheless she was Marianne.
Having felt herself overshadowed by Mick she now picked the poor shlub Ben to musically dominate and overshadow in revenge on Mick. As she left Musker she was emerging from the horrible reaction to Redlands while finding a musical persona to allow her to go on living the pop life she had learned to appreciate.
In keeping with her newly found myth combined with the Blake/Symbolist fantasy of plumbing the depths in search of the pearl of great price she embraced Brierly's punk life style living in squalor in desperate squats. During this period she was forming the persona that would emerge with her 1979 release of Broken English. That record reestablished her musical credentials while providing her with a substantial cash windfall. She might as well have worked for nothing as she took a 90K check and promptly blew it on clothes and drugs. In some ways Marianne was a real slow learner.
She was able to disburse her cash faster than Edie Sedgwick threw away her 80K inheritance. Edie had no hopes for another windfall although Marianne did.
Broken English was a boundary line between the middle Marianne and what came after.
Marianne Soldiers On, A Real Trooper
Chapter IX will follow but I have other projects first.
Posted in Folk Music, Psychology, R.E. Prindle, Rock And Roll, Writing | Tagged Cinema, Essays, Film, John Dunbar, Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger, Movies, Music, R.E. Prindle, Rolling Stones | 7 Comments »
Looking For A Miracle: The Sixties And Its Religion
Looking For A Miracle
The Sixties And Its Religion
The deliberate pursuit of whatever type of sex is considered deviant by one's own culture is part of the program of spiritual seekers as far removed from each other in time and space as Tantric Hindu, California Satanists, Daoist sorcerers, Siberian shamans, and paunchy English "witches", with their scourges and "sky-clad" retreats in the New Forest. To break tabu is a necessary stage in vama marg tantric ceremonies, for instance, in which dietary and sexual tabus are deliberately broken one after another. It is recognized by these technologists of the spirit that deviation from socially accepted mores is a powerful tool for awakening the sleeping powers within us, provided that this deviation takes place within the occult engines they have designed.
Peter Levenda- Sinister Forces, Book III, pp. 211-12
The key to the Sixties is Sigmund Freud. The Sixties was when Freud's schemes came to fruition. He turned Aryan civilization on its head.
As unpleasant as it may be to recognize Freud was Jewish and his activities were based on his Jewishness and the age old prophecies that govern Jewish activities. Freud's father came from the Galicia that was a stronghold of Hasidic magical Judaism. Freud himself was a student of the magical Zohar and Kabbalah.
Along with them he acquired the Jewish hatred of the Other, specifically Europeans or Aryans. He identified his psyche with the Semite Hannibal who attacked Rome- Freud's symbol for Europe. In actuality Hannibal defeated Rome in the field. The Romans retreated within their walls refusing to come out and fight. Unable to sustain his army Hannibal was forced to vacate Italy. Thus, although he had won all the battles he couldn't win the war. This was a real dilemma Freud had to solve and he did.
Freud began his career as a biologic researcher looking for eel gonads. Seeing no route to universal fame from that research he became interested in psychology. Here was some room to move.
Freud was born in 1856 in the midst of the great unfolding of the Aryan mind. He became associated with a fellow Jewish doctor, Joseph Breuer, who had become involved in researches into hysteria. This led Freud to the center of research in hysteria at the Salpetriere hospital run by Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris when Freud was about thirty years old. He could only afford Paris for a few months but they were eye opening months. He learned the nature of hypnotism and its control element- suggestion. This would be the stratum on which he built psychoanalysis.
Following Charcot Freud's first book is an analysis of hysteria. The book caused no stir. Turning to associate Breuer and his proto-psychoanalysis Freud studied the nature of dreams. He characterized dreams as the 'royal road to the unconscious.' Following Sherlock's advice Freud carefully studied the literature on dreams which was fairly extensive. His dream book flopped failing to make Freud a household word.
While issuing a steady stream of articles he contributed his greatest work in the form of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1901. In 1905 he contributed the useful Jokes And Their Relation to the Unconscious and another significant work that gave a clear indication of Freud's direction Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality. This small volume finally created the fire storm he had been trying for. At the time the book was considered close to or actual pornography. At any rate it attacked prevailing European or Aryan morality breaking all sexual tabus.
While one may argue that Freud's was a scholarly approach there is undeniable smut to it. Freud in general reveled in smuttiness. He always leaves you with a slightly sickened feeling. There was controversy then as well as now as to his intent.
D.H. Lawrence who was no stranger to sexual theory and controversy denounced Freud in The Plumed Serpent for wishing to destroy prevailing European morality let alone reforming it. In this opinion he was correct. Both Sexual Theory and his Theory of the Unconscious and mass hypnosis would be his primary weapons.
Freud, contrary to popular opinion was not the originator or the discoverer of the unconscious nor even an early investigator. The unconscious had been a hot topic in European thought ever since Anton Mesmer arrived in Paris in mid-eighteenth century. There were many different ideas concerning the nature of the unconscious but by 1915 Freud had swept them off the board so that by the end of The Great War his perverted version stood alone. The question was how to use this tool he designed to destroy the conscious mind and manipulate the unconscious to attain his and Jewish ends.
In the nineteenth century the only mass media that could be used to manipulate public opinion, the unconscious, was the newspaper, but the newspaper requires consciousness making access to the unconscious difficult. It was only in the twentieth century that the great media capable of manipulating the unconscious directed arrived. Perhaps the most important of these was modern advertising that arose alongside the movies to be followed by radio, talkies and television. Color photo magazines are not to be overlooked either. Photographic images go directly into the unconscious.
Of these media the most overlooked is the power of advertising to quickly change mores, for it was mores that Freud had to alter or modify, the way of looking at and thinking about things.
Freud had a nephew in the US by the name of Edward Bernays. Bernays being Freud's wife's maiden name. Eddie Bernays became a publicist with George Creel and the Committee on Public Information during WWI turning to publicity as a vocation after the war. Thus he became a premier advertising consultant. His influence today is greatly overlooked.
The CPI was a tremendous propaganda, indoctrination and conditioning machine. The Wilson administration bludgeoned the American public into its party line. Bernay's would use those techniques to change the mores of the American people post-war following Freud's ideas. First he visited his Uncle Sigmund in Vienna where they had long summer walks and quiet talks. What was said isn't known but can be inferred from Bernay's subsequent career.
According to Wikipedia quoting his daughter Anne Bernays felt that the public's democratic judgment was 'not to be relied upon,' and he feared that [the American public] could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had 'to be guided from above.'
Of course, who is to judge who is the wrong man and on what basis as well as the wrong or right thing. Who is the infallible 'above' who is going to force his candidate on the erring people?
In other words, Bernays wanted a dictatorship of virtue. Unable to disturb the political system in one fell swoop it would to be don incrementally. Using techniques imbibed from his uncle's political agenda Bernays did just that experimenting first through the commercial field.
Old fashioned advertising in print, as radio and TV hadn't come into existence as yet, consisted of long prose pleas trying to persuade the conscious mind. When color printing came into common use an attractive image coupled with product ID and snappy slogan, or propaganda, would prove to be more effective. Thus to promote Lucky Strike cigarettes there was an incredibly attractive slender woman smoking a Lucky with the slogan 'Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.' The ad then carried a number of subliminal messages as well as the plea.
When Bernays began his work the Aryan female ideal was the Arthurian conception portrayed most notably in the Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Virginal and desirable as a wife. Freud's sexual goal was to invert that image to turn Aryan women into sluts. Smoking in women was considered sluttish at the time just as cosmetics were symbolic of the prostitute or painted woman. Good girls didn't wear lipstick. Bernays through his advertising techniques was to change all this.
Meanwhile back in Vienna, Freud was developing techniques to change the mind. As always an avid student of literature Freud latched onto a small book by the Frenchman Gustav Le Bon titled: The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Freud incorporated Le Bon's studies into his own Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. By ego he meant group ego not the individual ego.
The analysis of Le Bon meshed with the advertising propagandistic ideas of his nephew. Freud then combined their work with his understanding of sexuality, drugs and his version of the unconscious to undermine Aryan civilization. Remember he was successful in imposing his vision of the unconscious as the only version of the unconscious on the entire psychological and psychiatric discipline, hence society as a whole.
Aiding the effort was the triumph of Adolf Hitler in 1933 in Germany. Hitler's anti-Jewish stance drove the whole horde of Freud's disciples out of Europe to the United States. While Freud knew what he knew the other members of his psychoanalytic order didn't. I don't mean to be unkind to Freud's personal lumpenproletariat but they just didn't grasp what he was talking about. Nevertheless they were accepted at face value becoming not only influential but directors of US culture during the fifties and sixties after which their prestige began to wane.
Most of them settled in the two culture capitols of the US, NYC and LA so that the media took their lead from them. While few, if any, understood Freud his vision of the unconscious as a discrete entity extraneous to the mind and actually the body while controlling one's actions to the exclusion of the conscious mind was readily accepted and adopted as was his notion of repression in a completely distorted form.
The reality of Freud's vision of the unconscious was quickly picked up by sci-fi writers who turned out a stream of such novels as Jack Schaefer's I Am Legend, Jack Finney's Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and Heinlein's The Puppet Masters. Not that we consciously understood at the time.
The State of Israel had come into existence in 1948 setting the Middle East ablaze in a series of wars. The 1956 war was a turning point for the Jews. They had been shamed by their non-resistance to the death camps so the '56 war allowed them to assert their manhood and become fierce warriors driving US tanks and jet fighters. The war also had intellectual consequences.
Aryan Europe and America had astounded the world by its astonishing scientific discoveries and intellectual development unshared by the rest of the world including the Jews. Emboldened by their military success they set out to reassert their pre-scientific religious dominance they felt they had enjoyed throughout history until the nineteenth century. Indeed a Jewish woman named Barbara Spectre has established the Paideia Foundation in Europe to claim a parity between what she calls Jewish Knowledge and Aryan Knowledge. She specifically says that the future will not be like the nineteenth century when science wrested the crown from the Jews.
This is apparently not the first such crisis of the Jewish mind. A site called Jewniverse published a short piece credited to Daniel M. Bronstein on 7/19/13. I reproduce it here in full:
Talmudic lore offers many episodes of rabbinic sages intellectually defeating the luminaries of the Hellenistic world. Far less common are instances of rabbis dismembering their pagan nemeses. So 2nd-century Rabbi Joshua Ben Hananiah really stands apart.
Acting on Roman Emperor Hadrian's dare to abduct Athens' top philosophers, Ben Hananiah traveled all the way to the celebrated city-state and coerced a local into revealing the secret location of the philosophical academy.
Upon reaching the heavily defended abode, the esteemed rabbi tricked the academy's elders into killing the guards.
In a match of wits, Ben Hananiah demonstrated his intellectual superiority while exposing the vapidity of Greek wisdom. After kidnapping 60 of Athen's best, he brought the scholars before Hadrian, who placed their fate in the sage's hands.
Using what can only be called magic, Ben Hananiah caused the philosophers' shoulders to be violently wrenched from their bodies. All of them were killed. Other sages, like Hillel the Elder, have been praised for almost superhuman patience. But Ben Hananiah's actions present another view of the sages: as people who were extraordinary, but flawed.
Unquote.
Of course Plato's academy had neither a secret location nor was it heavily guarded but it makes a good story that flatters Jewish sensibilities, apparently of a highly bloodthirsty order. Thank god he didn't pull Moses, trick and send ten plagues on the poor nitwit, stupid Platonic academicians. How Barbara Spectre is going to replicate Rabbi Hananiah remains to be seen. Let's hope she doesn't operate in the same realm of fantasy as the good rabbi.
Just as Moses through Yahweh destroyed Pharaoh, as Rabbi Hananiah demolished the hated Platonic Academy so Freud had calculated the destruction of nineteenth century Aryan science.
Nineteen-sixty was the critical year. Western American society reached its apex in that year, but the demands of the scientific attitude exceeded the ability of the body politic to rise to it. The people slipped back to a pre-scientific mentality. Whether we saw it or not the crash of Western society that resulted in the Manson murders and the Rolling Stones at Altamont began in 1960. Actually the much celebrated Woodstock concert of '69 was evidence of the intellectual retreat also, a premonition of Altamont.
By 1960 TV had reached a certain level of maturity. During the fifties when programming was developing most locales had only one or two networks while there was some concern TV wouldn't make it commercially. By 1960 the three networks and independent system was in place. The sitcom and drama setup was well organized. Hollywood had learned the Freudian formula of using the medium for indoctrination and conditioning.
The fifties had been the great creative period for science fiction both in literature and movies. This whole body of outstanding material was now mined by TV. Rod Serling's Twilight Zone successfully invaded the minds of millions while the gold standard was probably Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. Both producers were Jewish.
It is impossible now to recount the propaganda, indoctrination and conditioning of the many, many series and thousands of episodes representing tens of thousands of hours of viewing that made war on established beliefs gradually weaning the multitudes from old mores to new. Mostly the old mores with different content much as new religions build their religious edifices on the old religion's sites.
The new religion was Saturnic or in another word, Satanic and the hallmark of Satanism is violence. Few people now remember the TV series, Bus Stop, but that show was a direct assault on established beliefs and attitudes toward violence. Incredible gratuitous mindless violence for the time far surpassed today when sadistic pornographic violence with nudity or nakedness perhaps a better word, thrown in.
One of the Twilight Zone episodes was a depiction of Charles Beaumont's short story The Howling Man, the script also written by him, in which Monks somewhere in Ruritania had captured Satan and had him safely locked in a cell where he howled incessantly all night long. A passing traveler asks for a night's lodging. Against their own strict rules forbidding it the Monks weakened and allowed him in carefully explaining to him to pay no attention to the howling man in the cell. No good deed shall go unpunished. The traveler naturally listens to the Howling Man's pleas releasing him. Satan laughing maniacally shouts Fool and rushes out the door.
Beaumont had divined the situation and put it into symbolic story form. In the TV episode the sorry Fool spends his life searching for Satan to put him back in his cell.
It is prescient that Beaumont wrote the story in 1959. By 1966 Ira Levin would develop the theme further when he wrote Rosemary's Baby about the birth of the son of Satan who replaced Jesus that was made into a very influential movie a year later by that evil presence Roman Polanski. We'll get to that.
As is well known Sigmund Freud was a cokehead, a drug addict. He well knew the deleterious effect of drugs on the mind and morality. Dreams may be the royal road to the unconscious but drugs are the destroyer of morality. The Unconscious corrupted by drugs is the end of all law and order.
As Freud, the old cokehead, said there are no coincidences so it follows that the drug explosion of the Sixties is the effect of a premeditated cause. After all, Arnold Rothstein, a Jew, did organize the drug distribution network of the US in the 1920s. It can also be no coincidence then that Dr. Feelgood, Max Jacobson, latched onto amphetamines as the great corrupter of society. Jacobson also claims to have conferred with Freud in Vienna. Getting underway in the US in post-war NYC in the forties, by 1960 Max was dispensing amphetamines by the gallon. Imitators sprang up who poured their own gallons of amphetamine into the veins of New Yorkers. This is fact, now it should come as no surprise then that by 1966 NYC was overrun by criminal behavior, that seemed to explode in that year. Or shall we say lack of morality caused by drugs. In essence New Yorkers could no longer tell right from wrong. Satanism ruled. It should be needless to add that Dr. Feelgood was a Jew. There were many factors causing the erosion of morality in the Sixties not all pertaining to religious developments that are our interest here.
The rise of science caused the intellectual disenfranchisement of all religions but more particularly within the Aryan ranks in which science developed, hence Aryan's became disenchanted with Christianity while Jews and Moslems reinforced their belief systems against science.
Aided and abetted by Einstein's Theory of Relativity the notion of moral equivalence took hold. This was, one might say, cemented by the movie Mondo Cane of 1962. While moral equivalence should have applied to all religions or moral systems it was turned exclusively against Aryan belief systems. Movies and advertising reflected the animus against Christianity, Aryans and what Negroes called White Supremacy, that is, White rule and knowledge- science or in Negro terms, Acting White.
With all systems supposedly equal or morally equivalent while consciousness, that is objectivity was suppressed in favor of complete subjectivity or the Unconscious was endorsed, it became an easy matter to inject voodoo, witch craft and Satanism into Aryan belief systems. Now, the transition to a satanic sensitivity was fully supported by movies and advertising as well as print media. In 1966 the cover of Time Magazine proclaimed the message 'God IS Dead' in black. To the informed that was not a revelation as old gods do die while history is littered with the remains of old gods as epitomized by Shelley's Ode to Ozymandias. To the religious Time's announcement was a huge blasphemy but then, the jury was still out concerning on which side the Luce's were.
As if in celebration of the Luce's announcement the Jew Ira Levin published his novel Rosemary's Baby that concerns the birth of the Son of Satan although definitely by maculate means. The novel was a commercial success bringing the little Satan Roman Polanski on the scene who turned the novel into his equally successful movie in the year of revolution, 1968.
The impact of Polanski's movie was quite extraordinary. Certainly in the aftermath of the movie Satanism had been, one might say, popularized. Of course Levin and Polanski didn't create modern Satanism but they contributed to its manifestation. The voo doo Saturnian cult had taken root on the East Coast being prominent in NYC. Santeria as well all the Negro voodoo cults in the New World, of course, derived from Yoruba practices in Nigeria. The Yoruba people combined aspects of Christianity with their own Yoruba beliefs themselves derived from Greco-Roman religious practices to create a very hybrid religion based completely in magic which through slavery passed into the New World.
Scientology, created by Ron Hubbard, one of those called UFO religions, in the forties somehow gets mixed up in this. Certain disaffected members established their own church in England in '63 called the Process Church of the Final Judgment. This outfit tried to combine Satan, Lucifer and Jesus into one religion. No science involved here. Charles Manson at the end of the decade would be influenced by both Scientology and the Process.
The idea was that Jesus said, Love your enemy. Satan was the enemy of Jesus so Jesus was compelled to love Satan. So the two along with Lucifer combined to share humanity so that virtue and evil were morally equal bringing in relativism, so right and wrong are irrelevant because what one calls right another calls wrong and vice versa. So the law was that 'it's all good.' Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Everything is permitted. A recipe for disaster no doubt. A state of social confusion had been created, almost a state of sustained hysteria.
After 1966 LSD became significant reifying whatever beliefs one had into stone. The fact is that nothing can be gotten out of a mind other than what is in it. Education is everything. To really expand one's consciousness one has to develop it. With drugs learning stops, especially with LSD. If anything one only reifies one's existing opinions. One may think one is talking to God but notice that God isn't saying anything back. You're only having a dialogue with yourself. You don't need LSD to do that.
A biker by the name of John Griggs dropped a tab, saw God, changed his ways and began his own religion based on LSD called The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Begun in the LA coastal town of Laguna Beach the cult, or more aptly perhaps, commercial enterprise expanded up and down California and into Oregon where it was especially prominent in Josephine County of Southern Oregon. It is said the BEL dominated or controlled the marijuana, hash and LSD supply of the West Coast but rather strangely none of the authors concerning themselves with the Process Church or Manson's Family have heard of it. These authors seem to think that the Process had a monopoly on that drug trade although dealing with biker groups. Perhaps the role of the biker BEL wasn't apparent to them. All three 'religious' groups mentioned above were seriously involved in drugs and hence lead a Freudian unconscious life.
The Process Church founded by Robert and Maryanne DeGrimston in London in 1963 as an offshoot of Scientology soon moved to the sinister sounding site of Xtul on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. There its Satanic, Luciferian and Jesusite form took shape. As one can see, under the influence of Freudian psychology and the rejection of the conscious mind science had been discarded while consciousness has regressed some thousand years more or in some cases less. Magic and superstition have once again taken center stage. Behind the magic cults lay the teaching of one Aleister Crowley of the Golden Dawn and the infamous OTO (Ordo Templi Orientis) with its emphasis on sex magic(k). The K Crowley added to distinguish his magick from stage magic. May not look like much of a distinction but it is significant.
So, in 1967 we have Charles Manson being released from prison just as the Hippie thing with its legions of underage runaway girls took shape in the Haight-Ashbury district of the city of San Francisco. The Haight was a hustler's paradise and Manson was the man to mine that particular mountain.
More than anything the Hippie phenomenon was a symptom of the rejection of science, or objectivity and the conscious mind in favor of superstition, subjectivity and the unconscious mind of Freud. In connection with Freud it should be remembered that the motto of his 1900 book The Interpretation Of Dreams in his Latin quotation from Dante's Inferno was Flectere si nequeo Superos, Acheronta movebo which translated means: If I cannot move heaven, I will stir up the underworld.
Freud had failed at the conscious level of science, which he attributed to anti-Semitism, so when he became aware of the unconscious through Breuer and Charcot he had found his underworld. But that hell was part and parcel of his upbringing as Judaism is pure subjectivity hence rampant egoism capable only of creating a hell on Earth- hence Hollywood.
The Unconscious in Freud's vision was the source of Satanic magic. Hence it can be little wondered that at the very least per the Process Church the world was shared by Jesus and Satan with the Jesusites compelled to love their enemies and presumably turn the other cheek which is to say that Satan Rules. In his own way the great Satanist Aleister Crowley had won the battle sharing the triumph with Freud.
By the way, the Process Trinity mirrors Greek mythology in which Zeus is the god of Heaven, Poseidon the God of the waters and Hades the god of the underworld. Earth was the common property of all three. So the Process reflects old age beliefs.
Because of the horrific nature of his Satanic practices all the attention has been focused on Charles Manson who identified himself as both Jesus and Satan. Half or better of the biker groups derived their identity from Satan- Hell's Angels, Straight Satans, Satan's Disciples, etc.
In point of fact Manson was not doing anything his betters , i.e. Roman Polanski et al., weren't. The whole of Hollywood film was involved in Satanic practices. Nor were Satanic practices new to the LA basin. All of this cult stuff, snuffings and all was common knowledge in the fifties when I was there in the Navy. I have no doubt it dated back through the forties and thirties. Read Raymond Chandler and let your imagination go. Watch the movies closely.
Manson said the reasons for the Tate-La Bianca killings were not what was thought but that he was no snitch. It also means likely that these unknown forces were doing their best to help him once arrested as evidence disappeared, police bungled the process so that Manson and the Family might have beaten the rap except for the persistence of Bugliosi.
Manson appears to have been associated with the Polanski clique involving a large selection of A-list Hollywood. They were involved in drug related Sado-masochistic practices and filmed themselves doing them. Not surprisingly Manson was doing the same with his group. Perhaps under the influence of hallucinogenics the significance of a filmic trail didn't seem so important. In any event the police confiscated hours of Sado-masochistic films from the Polanski residence. Not unusually these have disappeared although they were offered for sale by the police.
In addition there were huge dope deals on the table that if Polanski wasn't involved in he was well aware of. His close friend Frykowski, a Pole from Red Poland, was involved in a scheme to distribute the amphetamine MDA and that would have been through the Polanski residence. Shortly before the murders a dealer accused of burning them in a dope deal was brought to the residence where in the course of a large party he was strung up and tortured.
A few days later when Polanski was out of town Manson instructed his devotees to strike. The result was horrific. While it is said that the dope dealer Frykowski was the actual target it was the horrific death of Polanski's pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, that garnered the headlines.
We have an interesting thing happening here that seems to have gone unnoticed. It was a transition of consciousness that affected every member of society though few actively participated. As an example to illustrate what was happening from 1967 through 1969 I quote from an online publication by an anonymous author concerning the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Nazi Government of Germany. ( hppt://thespawnofthesphinx.com ) chap.17, p. 4:
In his book, "In The Garden Of The Beast", Erik Larson relates first hand accounts of what it was like to be an outsider (in particular the American Ambassador and his daughter) observing Hitler's rise from Chancellor to tyrant in 1933. It was during that year that Germany became absolutely transformed. "It was like watching a dear friend go insane." as one outside observer put it. After the great transition and assimilation, German's collective mind was "coordinated."
Larson quoted:
"Beneath the surface, however, Germany had undergone a rapid and sweeping revolution that reached deep into the fabric of daily life. It had occurred quietly and largely out of easy view. At the core was a government campaign called Gleichshaltung- meaning 'Coordination'- to bring citizens, government ministries, universities, and cultural and social institutions in line with National Socialist beliefs and attitudes.
'Coordination' occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbstgleichschaltung, or 'self-coordination.' Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern. Gerda Laufer, a socialist wrote that she felt 'deeply shaken that people whom one regarded as friends, who were known for a long time, from one hour to the next transformed themselves."
Unquote, unquote.
The same thing happened in the US in the fifties as Jack Finney recorded in his Body Snatchers, is happening again here at the end of the sixties and is happening now as Obama/Hitler transforms the Aryan mind. We now have a call for a 'meaningful dialogue' on race which means 'accept our views or be punished.' There is no dialogue just an order from headquarters.
On a longer wave than Germany one entered the fun house in 1960 and through a bizarre series of dioramas one exited into an entirely different world in 1970. On the shorter wave the rapid transition took place from 1968's Rosemary's Baby to the Rolling Stones fiasco at Altamont in December 1969 which had been scheduled for December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, but was delayed by a day to December 8th.
As Dylan sang, there was something happening here but few if any knew what it was. There was no way for anyone to gain sufficient facts to interpret the whole but those with certain roles observing specific parts knew what to do.
Thus the public had no idea what Manson was doing before or after the Tate-La Bianca killings. The killings themselves obscured everything. Manson based his attitudes on Robert Heinlein's novel of 1961 Stranger In A Strange Land. Stranger was one of the formative novels of the 60s fitting right in with the psychedelic revolution even though Heinlein had a forties-fifties mentality while adding numerous terms to the vocabulary such as 'grokking' and 'water brother'.
One can imagine Manson reading it in his cell. Then when he was released actually being a stranger in the very strange land of Haight-Ashbury. At the same time he realized it was a parallel universe designed with him in mind. He combined aspects of the two lead characters, the human Valentine Michael Smith raised on Mars and his terrestrial guru Jubal Harshaw. Jubal means father of all, a role Manson assumed. He also named his son Valentine Michael. Smith transformed terrestrial culture as so in his way did Manson.
While on Mars Smith learned the Martian method of mind and body control which Manson adopted and extended to his disciples. After the killings Manson began living out some desert fantasy in Death Valley. It was there he really overstepped the bounds bringing the Park Department down on his head which then led to his charge of the murders, but it's the desert adventure that interests us here. While the vast majority was unaware of the Death Valley escapade detailed in Ed Sanders, The Family, (make sure you read the first edition) Mansonites saw and learned. In the desert Manson nearly created his own country living by his own laws. Unfortunately his prison mentality kept him from grasping his full opportunity . He was too much the outlaw.
While I didn't realize it at the time his influence spread up the coast to Eugene, Oregon where I was living at the time. Those were rough and rowdy times. There were many crimes, frequently using shotguns. An especially outlaw area was called Fall Creek. At one time a truck with a light rack pulled up before a camp site turning the light rack on the campers from the road. They stood like deer staring into the lights. The occupants turned rifles on the campers man, woman and children and mowed them down.
As far as I know the police chose not to apprehend them. It would have been easy. A brown pick up with a light rack in a small town? I knew the truck while finding a brown pick up with a light rack should have been easy. Couldn't have been more than one in the county.
I was lured out to the area once with my wife by a couple posing as friends. All of a sudden at eleven o'clock at night they shooed us out of their house. As one neared the highway a narrow stone bridge crossed Fall Creek, almost a ditch at that point. As we approached a guy came up from under the bridge, stood in the middle of the roadway waving his arms. I wasn't going to stop and there was room to drive around him. No sooner had I crossed the bridge than another guy came up from under it bearing an automatic with what looked like a silencer on it. Both began calling me names. So, I at least, would have been murdered on the spot.
As a footnote Diane Downs of the famous murder case in the same area said she was stopped by a guy waving his arms in the middle of the road. She was disbelieved subsequently spending her life in prison. I know she was stopped and I believe her story. What the DA's problem with her was I don't know but she was sure railroaded.
The revolutionaries flooded into the hills above Fall Creek building concrete bunkers a la Manson that they stocked with food and weapons in preparation for the Day. Strange robberies and shootings happened fairly frequently. There were Manson cultists around for several years. They may still be there, or here, actually, but I no longer have reason to be in contact with them.
Of course, Manson combined Heinlein with the various Satanic cults, the writer of the Spawn Of The Sphinx calls them UFO cults, to create his unique mixture.
Manson has taken the rap for what was going on but as I have indicated Polanski and a large part of Hollywood were as deeply connected to Satanism as he was. Remember actually billions of tablets of prescription amphetamines and barbiturates were being sold annually in addition to the hundreds of millions of hits of illegal LSD, marijuana and God only knows what. Frykowski was negotiating to become a large distributor of the amphetamine MDA.
Drugs were not solely a Hippie phenomenon; drugs were endemic.
Polanski, who can possibly be seen as a successful Manson, continued his nefarious career being arrested in 1977 on charges of child porn or statutory rape. While it is said that the girl's mother rented her out for the purpose the charge was still statutory rape. Remember Manson said that the Tate-La Bianca victims were into kiddie porn. Polanski believing he would be sentenced to hard time, possibly even being in the same prison as Manson, who knows, took it on the lam. Today he is a fugitive from justice living in Europe where he has powerful protection. Still makes movies though.
The Manson trial was docked in December being very much in the news at the time of Altamont, as was the Zodiac killer, so there was a certain atmosphere surrounding the concert.
The last half of '69 was in some ways the apex of Aryan consciousness while at the same time its nadir. Even as powerful rockets were propelling a manned vehicle to land on the moon carrying an astronaut to leave a footprint three inches deep in the lunar dust the unconscious was burying the conscious mind on Earth. A giant step forward for mankind on the moon while a two thousand year regression on Earth.
Almost simultaneously as the lunar module blasted down on the moon a half million of what used to be the hope for America's future gathered in a muddy field in New York to show a level of culture not seen since the Anabaptists four hundred years ago.
While my generation celebrates Woodstock as the high point of Sixties culture I can see it only as an embarrassment. Not wishing to go into detail I will only mention one thing. Columbia Records released an album call Beautiful People, an ironic insult to the Woodstock Nation as Hippies called themselves in mockery of the Jetset beautiful people. But, if you look at the album cover closely, in the upper lower quadrant you will see some guy standing up haveing sexual intercourse with a sheep. Beastiality as well as NAMBLA maybe endorsed by some but damned if I'll join in.
I know I'd never be forgiven for saying so but I consider Woodstock to be the penultimate nadir of the Sixties. The nadir was, of course, Altamont, Satan's triumph.
While the Rolling Stones, under whose auspices the event occurred refused to take responsibility for it, the Stones were as responsible as Levin, Polanski, the Process Church and Manson for the rise of Satanism.
The Manson trial was about to commence. Manson to a large extent incorporated Rock into his philosophy although basing his notions more on the Beatles Double Album than the Stones. Also bear in mind that Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land was his bedrock. One could only hope that he had been captivated by the bible of evildoers, The Catcher In The Rye.
The character of society changed greatly after 1968 almost like Nazi Germany. Sixty-eight was the year of Mao's Cultural Revolution, the horrors of which in China are still unlearnt in Europe and the US. The Cultural Revolution was global. Sixty-eight was the year of Mao's Little Red Book and his red and gold portrait pins. Sixty-eight was the year SDS exploded and the formation of the idiot Bomber Billy Ayers' Weathermen organization as well as the Jewish Defense League, its offshoot The Jewish Defense Organization and the criminal activities of Rabbi Meyer Kahane. Over the period of a couple years there were thousands of bombings in US cities. So many that very few were ever publicized.
While the Tate-La Bianca killings dominated the headlines organizations like the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Black Panthers and numerous cults such as The Process Church were stirring up the folk. One was practically dizzy. In action at the same time as Manson the Zodiac killingts of the Bay Area where Altamont would be held were going on. There was just way way too much for people to absorb or begin to understand. As most people were busy trying to live their lives all this crazy activity had remarkably little effect. It was just 'news.'
Apropos of Altamont the Stones were relatively heavily involved in Sastanic matters, that, if I am right came to a head at Altamont.
Marianne Faithfull and Jagger had been familiar with Satanism before the Redlands bust. Anita Pallenberg, formerly with Brian Jones and then Keith Richards, was deep into Satanism. At one time she had Brian and herself dress in Nazi uniforms. The Nazis were a fascination of the Process Church so rather than being an innocent lark she may have been showing the Church she was in a position to influence the Stones. Indeed, they were in awe of her.
Through the art dealer and man about Hippiedom, Robert Fraser, Marianne and Jagger had met the arch American free lance Satanist Kenneth Anger, with whom they were deeply involved, and who was associated with the arech US Satanist, Anton La Vey. La Vey would play Satan in Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. That would imply that Polanski was involved in Satanism leading back to the Tate-La Bianca killings.
Post Redlands, Mick was thrown into a frenzy of hatred of society probably having thought he was a notch or two above the law immune to arrest. Indeed he thought the enforcement of the law against him was a violation of his 'freedom.' Marianne had been a bit of an innocent, too naïve for her own good. Mick now enraged turned to Satanism posing as Satan himself in his song Sympathy For The Devil of 1968. He allowed the Stones to be featured in Jean Luc Godard's bizarre revolutionary movie titled One+One subsequently changed to the title of Jagger's song. Marianne would let herself be exploited in a couple of French films while becoming involved with the Process Church itself while starring in a Satanic film of Anger's.
It is said now that Satanism was a minor flirtation on their parts but the indications are that the involvement was much deeper and more serious, especially on the part of Marianne that was reflected in her persona and activities in the first two years of her parting with Jagger.
It was perhaps the Process that alerted Marianne to the publication of a Soviet Satanic novel The Master And Margarita published in early 1968. The novel has since attained a high cult status in the US and GB while becoming an industry in the former USSR. A number of films of the novel have been produced in Europe. A much overrated literary effort, in my opinion but a key Satanic document.
Marianne pressed Jagger to read the novel as he was about to begin production of Donald Cammel's movie Performance, also a Satanic film, shot in the summer of '68, that revolutionary year. The movie would not be released until 1971 so has no effect on the period.
Whether or not Jagger or Marianne took their Satanism as more than a hallucinogenic lark the effect of their Satanism on their fan base was intense. Jagger was viewed as the Great Satan or, at least, a wannabe.
So the aura surrounding Altamont was imbued with Satanism. Haight-Ashbury was Satanic. Satanic was.
The Altamont was an almost perfect Satanic location. The Altamont is a pass over the hills surrounding the East side of the San Francisco Bay, the East Bay. To the North of the pass lies Contra Costa County; to the East is Stockton, Sacramento, Modesto, and the Central Valley. To the South are barren hillsides, desert for miles all the way to San Jose and beyond.
The pass is only a thousand feet but very windy while when the pacific fog comes in at night cold and dewy. Today, they've covered the area with wind turbines, must be more spooky than ever at night.
When I was in the Navy in the late fifties I used to hitchhike back and forth from San Diego and Oakland every weekend. I would have a friend drop me off at the thousand foot level to begin the return trip. Gloomy place but a quick place to pick up perhaps a very decent ride. The demolition derby grounds were off on the right side going down, maybe at 900 feet. Real desert.
So, through a series of misadventures, given only a couple days to set up this site straight out of hell, cold enough to freeze a witch's tit the Stones held a free concert. There was no parking, cars strung out along the side of Highway 40 for miles.
Everything was jerry built. The stage was so low and surrounded by so many Hell's Angels that few could even see the stage in the dark. The sound was terrible. Out into the darkness stretched a couple hundred thousand drugged shivering people. I mean it gets cold and damp there any time of the year and this was December.
So, picture the symbolism. The chief Droog, the Great Satan himself is going to take the stage surrounded by Hell's Angels and begin shouting out 'Let me introduce myself…' OK. Hello, Satan.
Well, now. Jagger and the Stones had been positioned as the bad boys of rock n' roll by their first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham back in '64. Their reputation kept getting worse and now they have improved this rep to being the house band of Hell, Satan's own rock n' rollers. Huzzah! 'I'm a man of wealth and taste…'
There's a Negro in a green suit who has pushed himself stage side, right behind the not so straight Satans, the Hell's Angels. I mean, these guys had a worse reputation in the Bay Area than Satan himself. They used to have their club house just down the street from me. We will never know the Negro's motives but he does have something on his mind and he has a pistol in his pocket. Are we looking for trouble, do you think? He's apparently been waiting for the moment Jagger opens his mouth to introduce himself. Jagger begins belting it out and at that moment Meredith Hunter, for that is the Negro's name, whips out his pistol. Waving it in the air he begins a charge through the Hell's Angels for the stage. There's a few Angels between himself and Mick who cut short Meredith's pilgrim's progress.
No one can say for certain that he didn't want to put a bullet between the Great Satan's eyes but I am positive his intent was not to take out six Hell's Angels and then run like hell. I'm not a gambling man but I would wager on that.
The Angels were cranked out on drugs, pot, LSD, crank or something while getting high on being tapped for the very important function of furnishing security for The Greatest Rock And Roll Band On The Entire Planet and, perhaps.- the Universe.
Wham! Bang! Oh God! Meredith today rests for all eternity on the Altamont or for however long it takes Time to wear down those hills to sea level. If not Meredith, then his shade.
As Jagger made a dash for the helicopter somewhat reminiscent of the last evacuees from Saigon he was heard to mutter, 'Something weird always happens when we play that song. Could have a clue, Mick. A Clockwork Orange wasn't released for another couple years but that was the popular impression of you up on the screen, Mick. Bad boy, bad boy, the bad boy of rock n' roll.
Nor did Jagger abandon the persona after that disastrous experience. He developed his ambi-sexual persona further appearing on stage as a sadistic agitator lashing the stage with his studded belt. The Chief Droog.
Thus by the end of the sixties the suppression of the conscious rational mind had been accomplished in favor of the vision of the unconscious as a satanic separate being whose external control of the individual was irresistible. Sex and drugs were used to place a generation beyond redemption.
In support of sex and drugs, TV and movies pounded out the message that rage and violence were the proper responses to one's inability to realize one's fantasies.
While some may pooh pooh the advancing Satanism of the Sixties and on to the present time TV and movies did advance the agenda into the present. As incredible as it would have been to a person of the fifties when the mention of leg for lower limb was still frowned upon, copulation, not simulated even, but actual, is shown commonly on TV and in movies. Murder as an occupation or even pastime has openly been promoted on TV shows such as Dexter that celebrates a serial killer and portrays him sympathetically, even as a hero to emulate.
In the series Breaking Bad a mild mannered high school chemistry teacher gets into manufacturing meth and slowly turn into a Death Dealer not unlike Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The Dexter TV series is a very special case as it seem to have been designed around the philosophy of the Process Church and that of Manson.
Dexter develops around the career of serial killer, a Death Dealer in the Process term. It is nothing less than a series of snuff films recording many, many ritual killings. The ritual theme is highly developed. The ritualistic aspects are quite startling while many of the settings are quite Satanic.
The question of incest is raised as Dexter and his sister are quite close and as the series develops they become romantically in love. Then Dexter involves Deb, the sister, in his ritual killings. This cause a moral conflict in her character against her love for her brother. After an attempt to resolve the conflict by an attempted suicide and killing of Dexter by driving the car they are riding in off the road into a lake. She is rescued by a convenient observer then goes back to save her brother.
Both are under the care of a female psychologist who his fully aware of Dexter's career because she analyzed Dexter's father who had trained his son but then committed suicide when Dexter's avidity for the kill disappointed him. The series is really astonishing. The psychologist is then converted into an accomplice of Dexter.
In a touching scene reminiscent of the Egyptian statue of Isis beholding her son as the father stands behind her throne, one watches as the sister/wife psychologically accepts the role of serial killer, justifying it in her mind, very well acted, now Dexter's full accomplice. The psychologists nods her assent as Deb wonderingly says: The family that kills together stays together.
Thus the whole philosophy for which Manson has spent his life in prison is legitimized for public emulation. Charles Manson told his Family: You can't kill kill. And there on your television screen in an incredible reversal of morality in the short space of 60 years from 1960 to the present you have the rejection of God for Satan. If in the Sixties only 2% of the population according to Scientology could be cold blooded killers the entire population of the United States, potentially, has been indoctrinated and conditioned to kill. It only remains for Dexter, his sister and their psychologist to become cannibals.
Thus, through the efforts of Time Magazine, Ira Levin, Roman Polanski, The Process Church and numerous other Satanic cults aided by the Sado-masochists of Hollywood Satanism has slowly displaced Godliness. Satan has murdered Jesus. The unconscious of Freud has displaced the conscious mind of the Aryan past.
The road to chaos has been paved. Can the momentum be stopped?
Posted in Christ, Christians, Consciousness, Jesus, Jews, Psychology, R.E. Prindle, Religion, Religious Consciousness, Reviews, Rock And Roll, Rod Serling, Science, Scientific Consciousness, Semites, Sigmund Freud, Structural Psychology, Subconscious, The Howling Man, Twilight Zone, Unconsciousness, Writing | Tagged Breaking Bad, Charles Manson, Cinema, Dexter, Film, Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger, Movies, Process Church, Roman Polanski, Satan, Satanism, Sharon Tate, Sixties, WP Longform | Leave a Comment »
The Sixties: A Comic Book Heaven
Look Out Sixties, Here I Come
Of course, everyone is, and always has been, slightly mad. Still, repressing the unreasonable side of his nature man in the Western world has, since the eighteenth century, built a civilization based on scientific reason and classic Aristotelian logic- the heritage of the Enlightenment. And the result, especially in this country [US] during the past fifty years [article dated 1970], has been a rational society that has made one technological break through after another, from the invention of the pop-up toaster to the ability to land men on the moon. Here, until recently, two plus two had inevitably equaled four, not five, as Eastern mystics suggest, and no one other than J.D. Salinger had been able to imagine the sound of one hand clapping.
–Thomas Meehan- Horizon Magazine, Spring 1970.
Comic books were first sold in 1933-34. Thus the first two comic book generations coincide with those too young to serve in WWII while many of the first generation was obliged to serve in the Korean war while the second generation missed both.
How deeply the mind of the first generation of comic book readers was formed is problematical. Comic books didn't take their classic form until 1938 when the character of Superman was formed. The number of comic characters proliferated during WWII but as these, i.e. Capt. America, were war specific they fell out of favor after WWII.
The first generation of potential comic book readers, those born from 1933-34 formed the substratum for the sixties when they created rock and roll and the base for 60s pop culture during the 50s. That was Presley, Sanford Clark, Cash, Vincent, Nelson et al.
Following the war those born in 1937-38 and subsequently through about 1943-44 had their minds formed by comic books although not all to the same degree. A significant percentage of them were forbidden to read comics by their parents, perhaps wisely. There were some who indulged themselves indiscriminately. I was one of those. I read them all, avidly. The question is how were we affected?
There was a terrific reaction against comic books. Angry parents fought to have them banned. In perhaps the only, certainly of a very few, successful efforts of censorship, comics were banned in 1954. The survivor, of course, was Mad Magazine published by the worst offender, William C. Gaines. All of the comic book readers plus many of those formerly excluded shifted to Mad thus further polluting our brains. While I never gave up reading the comic books till their banning I did abandon Mad for political reasons after a year or so.
Now, with the exception of Capt. Marvel, and that may only be partial, the comics were exclusively of Jewish origins. Thus we in the US, Britain was excluded, were shown the Jewish point of view without our knowing.
One of the key themes was the all male group of do-gooders. These were some of my favorites. The tops, perhaps, was the very influential Blackhawks comics. The Blackhawks were a group of five ex-WWII pilots who each owned his P-38 fighter and flew around the world, Third World mainly, if I remember correctly, righting wrongs they recognized more quickly and efficiently, that is vigilante style, than organized government could or would. I remember the Blackhawks as terrific, I loved them. The fellowship of the pilots, each with a different character, each loyal to the others was something that I and I suppose every reader wished to emulate, especially the notion of a bonded group of five like minded guys.
Another was called the Daredevil. He had a red and blue set of body tights upper right and lower left red and vice versa for the blue. Weird but that's the way he was. Daredevil was a surrogate father figure to five orphan boys, same character makeup as the Blackhawks, who righted wrongs in their neighborhood and lived in the same clubhouse. The later musical group The Monkees was probably based on them. The Monkees were short one, being four, which lessened their impact. If they'd had that fifth member I would have been an avid fan although older by then.
The Blackhawks- Vigilante Justice At Its Best
Thus in 1954 the origins of Top 40 began on radio. Twenty four hours round the clock seven days a week full time music. An innovation created by the arrival of television. The first generation of rockers were solo artists. Some came attached with a band such as Bill Haley And The Comets or Gene Vincent And The Blue Caps who were proto-Blackhawk type groups but mainly they were solo artists with a band not a group. Presley, Sanford Clark and that curious mixture of both, Ricky Nelson.
The societal maturation process was continuing and then in the mid-sixties the Charlatans came down from the hills of Virginia City dressed in movie style cowboy outfits to home base San Francisco and the first group of costumed crusaders a la the Blackhawks burst forth in full flower.
In Britain the situation was somewhat different although coeval with the US. While the US escaped devastation in WWII the South of England was bombarded mercilessly destroying millions of buildings. A good representation of the situation may be found in John Boorman's I suppose accurate, I wasn't there, movie, The Hope And The Glory. As Boorman, who was there, portrays it, acres and acres of rubble stretched in every direction. The kids who scavenged and roamed the area are portrayed as little savages. An interesting education for the age cohort that came of age in the fifties.
Those born in the early forties, the core of the second generation of rockers, themselves played in this same although shrinking devastation. But rations were short in hard hit Britain, restrictions were not lifted until 1954. How their psychology was impaired isn't so clear, although in the mid-sixties a wild party time called Swinging London appeared. Gay abandon one might say.
The group situation there may have been the result of the generation's discovery of American slave music- Rhythm And Blues. R&B as a new entry to the British music scene met with resistance so that the devotees were possibly forced to form small groups who recognized each other, many wanting to play the music so they naturally formed groups, two guitars, drums, bass and a singer.
At any rate the British invasion of the US consisted of these four and five man groups coinciding with the comic book groups of the US.
Other formative influences other than comics and radio were films and TV. Those all involved a specific point of view repeated ad nauseum or lessons from a know-it-all crusader cum super hero.
Of course we all grew up with Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry among others during the forties but with the fifties came the fantastic science fiction movies. One of the most important was The Day The Earth Stood Still with its famous characters Klaatu and Gort. The premise was preposterous but no one got it. Klaatu is an alien landing a saucer in the US. He is here to vet Earthlings to see if the they are ready to enter the intergalactic community in which peace reigns. Alas, Earthlings, you and me, are hopelessly primitively addicted to violence. Klaatu boards his saucer with a sign of benediction delivering a long sermon about shaping up and saying he'll be back if we ever sort things out. Alright.
Movie after movie repeated the same message until today people actually believe that extra-terrestrials are all peaceful and Earth is the only rogue planet in the universe. Ask anyone. Flying Saucers were portrayed as hovering out there where the communications satellites would soon be. There they carefully studied mankind for any sign of the diminution of violence. Boy, I bet they think they've been wasting their time. Imagine circling Earth for seventy years waiting for indications of peacefulness. Obviously they've been sadly disappointed while being joined by the Negro Mother Wheel that appeared some time in the seventies to keep them company Hello, Earth calling Mother Wheel.
These movies established the idea that the whole universe except for Earth is highly developed and pacific along with the idea that Earthlings are worthless, hence most people accepted as fact we were being watched by superior beings and found wanting. We were inferior.
The movies established the notion that there were millions of inhabited worlds out there inhabited by superior beings who could travel billions of light years and get to home base in time for dinner. 'Honey, I'm home.'
Now, at the same time, pulp magazines existed. Monthly editions of Amazing Stories, Astounding Tales and others poured out endless reams of the most astonishing stuff imaginable. Thus, all three, comics, pulps and movies, sci-fi and movies were rushing through our minds, forming expectations. Of course, the number of us who read sci-fi, almost as despised by parents as the comics, was small, but then as TV developed, Rod Serling's Twilight Zone and Star Trek came along both of which mined the sci-fi stories of the fifties while spreading the notions throughout the entire population. This reduced the intellectual discrimination of the people whose minds were prepared to accept anything.
The Bunny Himself
These years of the fifties were very crowded with the most exciting new developments. TV was perhaps at the top of the list. Bear in mind that cable didn't exist. There weren't even three channels in most places including a major market like the San Francisco Bay Area. People didn't think TV would be profitable. The channels didn't even broadcast until noon and shut down at ten o'clock prime time. There was no 24/7 TV.
There wasn't even enough original programming to fill a ten hour day so they ran old movies and almost anything anyone could think up. Arthur Godfrey's show ran for hours every day.
One of those odd things they chose to fill time was a character called Crusader Rabbit. I don't know how well remembered the Rabbit is today but he had a profound effect in forming the minds of the 60s generation. Crusader Rabbit was a distant relative of the Blackhawks. While they flew around the world able to determine who were the good guys and who the bad, Crusader Rabbit was a self-righteous little bastard of a vigilante squad who instilled certain little minds with his self-righteousness and made them think they should impose their vision of reality on the world by mounting 'crusades.' Hawkeye of the later TV series Mash combined Crusader Rabbit with the Blackhawks.
Now, all this was happening in a short six years from 1950 to 1956. In many ways this was a major intellectual/psychological revolution preceding those revolutions of the sixties.
Equally, if not more important, was what was happening in the classrooms of our schools.
If an astonishing variety of educations was going on outside the classrooms what was going on inside was no less astonishing. I don't know if everyone saw it the way I did but I had a tough time assimilating what I heard. Of course American superiority and the inferiority of Europeans was standard staple. At the same time we were warned to be humble as bearers of these great gifts and to share them with our inferiors who after all couldn't help it that they weren't born Americans. True enough I suppose.
And, because of the success of our own American revolution, barring any negative thoughts caused by the French and Bolshevik revolutions, we were taught, indeed, indoctrinated and conditioned to believe that revolution per se was good, indeed, a blessing. Ignoring whatever may have been going on in the world we were taught to revere the South American George Washington, Simon Bolivar, who flitted from country to country on the whole continent until he came to end of it in Venezuela tossing the Spanish aside like so much chaff. Viva Bolivar, hey? Well, Viva Zapata next.
Well, I came from the orphanage and I had a different idea of right and wrong. Heroes were much scarcer for me than for the kids from normal homes.
By the time we got to high school, 1953-56, teachers were preaching revolution, revolution, revolution full bore. Revolution was everywhere. Minute changes in processed breakfast cereals were described as revolutions. Crusader Rabbit was a revo. Who wasn't?
The reverence for revolution continued in college too. Another four years of revo, rah, rah, rah followed in college which ended for my class in 1960. Portentous year, what? That was the year our limp President, John F. Kennedy created the Peace Corps. We were eager to share our wonderful achievement so recent college graduates with absolutely no knowledge of the world and inadequate educations sallied forth to tell the world how to do it right. OK? How's that for arrogance?
Now, there were plenty of revolutions in progress in 1960 and all those graduates from say, 1954 to 1959, were primed for revo. Lived for it, breathed it. They didn't even have to be recruited; they went searching for it. Give us revolution, they screamed.
These were years of the magnificent march of progress too. Years of change and hope, revolutions one might say, in all areas of endeavor. The people born from 1938 to 1945 leaped in with both feet and arms flailing. The sixties belonged to us, it was a world that we would make ourselves.
The next age cohort born from '46-'53 would be instrumental in forming the seventies, the eighties going to the next age cohort. Of course these cohorts created nothing merely extending the ethic of the 60s' cohort. The interesting thing is that there was a fairly complete break between us and The Greatest Generation as our fathers have been styled.
Those revolutionary minded teachers of ours were mostly born c. 1890 so they were at the tail end of the post-Civil War corps, lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. Our fathers born somewhere around 1918 caught the Depression and WWII while witnessing the Korean War. We younger ones, in the US, avoided that while TV, Top 40 and other assorted wonders made us rather distinct, nothing alike in outlook. Our fathers didn't really like, couldn't trust us, and certainly were not going to accord us the dignity of adulthood and the authority that goes with it. So we grew distant from them not really thinking an awful lot of them or giving them our trust. Fuck, they couldn't even deal with the Mafia.
Politically they kept control during the sixties while culturally and socially we managed affairs. As it was a new beginning of sorts the succeeding age cohorts respected us and what may be called our achievements, sex, drugs and rock and roll, but still maintaining that sense of breakfast cereal revo.
To make the break even sharper, in 1960 the real old guard headed by Eisenhower checked out and an Irish upstart son of a bootlegger, Jack Kennedy, leader of the Celtish Camelot and a guy who could twist the night away even with a bad back, attempted to lead the way.
His best wasn't very good and he caught a piece of flying lead allowing that pale Texan reincarnation of FDR to see how badly he could muff it. He did a good job of muffing it too.
So, there we were on the brink of 1960 raring to show the world what we could do. Really revo the whole machine? We'll see.
Charlie Whitman
Richard Speck
The psychological background of the sixties as exhibited by the second rock generation from 1938 to 1945 is a major manifestation of an effort begun back in the WWII days. It is the realization of the theologico-metaphysical notion of what Sigmund Freud dubbed the Unconscious. As the quote opening this essay indicates the sixties was the undoing of the several hundred year effort to realize the conscious. We thought we'd seen enough of the unconscious to last much more than a millennium. As the effort was begun before the awareness of the nature of the Un or subconscious the effort was achieved as Mr. Meehan states by the repression of sub-conscious motives not their elimination.
Freud quickly discerned this and he understood the function of dreams that he called the 'royal road to the unconscious.' Thus the motto he appended to his volume The Interpretation Of Dreams published appropriately in 1900 is 'Flectare si nequeo, Superos, Acheronta movebo." which translated means 'If I cannot deflect the will of heaven I shall move hell.'
Freud interpreting the conscious mind as heaven chose to deemphasize consciousness in favor of his vision of the unconscious that he interpreted as Hell. Thus, you will find almost nothing in Freudian psychology referring to the conscious mind while he enthrones his Unconscious as the moderator of the human mind. He actually believed that the Unconscious was an agency separate from the body. In theological terms it had a supernatural existence. Thus, he has negated consciousness, or Science, in favor of Religion. As he has rejected God or Heaven then it follows that he embraced Satan and Hell.
As the sixties progressed the generation abandoned consciousness embracing unconsciousness. Time Magazine proclaimed in 1966 'God Is Dead' while Satanism came alive, indeed according to Ira Levin in his novel, Rosemary's Baby, Satan's son, Andy, was born in 1966 just as God died. Levin continued his story in 1999's Son Of Rosemary. Interesting.
It is no coincidence that Freud was both a druggie and a homosexual. Now, the royal road to free the mind of consciousness or Heaven is an obsession with sex and the free indulgence of drugs especially Freud's favorite, cocaine backed with a pounding jungle beat. Eh voila- the sixties.
Sex, drugs and the hypnotic jungle beat of Rock and Roll. The sex was facilitated by the introduction of the birth control pill and anti-biotics; the amusing Shel Silverstein sang of Penicillin Penny who always had VD. If the girls took the pill both they and their boys were freed from the fear of pregnancies while the ga-ga types had no fear of Venereal disease because the cure was quick and easy by a regimen of anti-biotic pills. Almost paradise here and now and on Earth. For less than a buck you could get a nice big piece of pie too.
Freud had achieved his goal; he had overturned Aryan society.
Freud essentially by fraud allowed us to indulge forbidden appetites and responsibility from forbidden acts, for after all as the conscious mind had no authority and the will of the unconscious was unresistible we had no responsibility for our acts- If it felt good, we did it, as the mantra was. Hence by 1966 we had Richard Speck killing all those nurses in Chicago and Charlie Whitman up his clock tower at UT blowing away his fellow students. Guns aren't the problem; Freud is the problem.
Hell, Dick and Charlie just wanted to be free. Indeed, freedom in the freest of all societies became a problem to the generation.
Sally Banks in her Greenwich Village 1963, Chapter 5, appropriately titled, Dreaming Freedom, explains her views on what being free actually meant to her and a very large part of the age cohort. She is writing from New York City.
In 1963 freedom was a vital political issue charged with artistic consequences for both the mainstream and avant-garde. Part of the avant-garde's utopian vision was that liberty could be found within community. But, in fact, the very concept of freedom sets autonomy and the notion of individualism in conflict with the bondedness of community. For social life is a potent source of restraint [suppression of freedom], yet, paradoxically, total freedom would mean the humanly unrealizable (and unbearable) state of complete isolation. Thus there is a deep ambivalence in Western culture toward freedom and social life. The dream of community, itself, may be incompatible with the dream of freedom, a contradiction the avant-garde sought to discover.
The Sixties artists constructed an art that re-imagined daily life in terms of achieving both liberation and community. If such a situation proved illusory, in 1963 it seemed necessary- and it still seemed possible given the booming economic infrastructure- to find a model that would make these imaginings concrete.
Yes, people wanted total freedom- that is a disconnect from the reality of having to deal with unpleasant facts- free from all restraints including gravity and mostly free from themselves. The drugs seemed to serve as those releases. Under the influence people could imagine themselves as someone else who 'really had their shit together', miracle men and women able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, move mountains with the wave of a hand, fly through the air like a host of angels but they inevitably came back down where if they were anywhere near a mirror they could watch their bodies disintegrate.
Freedom from reality has its price.
So, the sixties that began with such 'High Hopes' to realize 'The Impossible Dream' of Camelot began to crash in 1966 just as like a flash of lightning in the sky the realization of those dreams seemed to dawn. As Lewis Carroll said, be careful that your Snark is not a boojum, for you see….
The Truth Is No Defense
The sixties, then, was when the impasse between the Scientific Method came into its latter day conflict with the Theologico-Metaphysical mindset. The T-M system is merely a mental state that not only does not require objective validation but positively rejects it in favor of subjectiveness; what Freud called inner wishful thinking.
While the sciences of sociology and anthropology and biology produced irrefutable, by logical methods, results that ran counter to the inner wishful T-M thinking, as there were no means to refute the scientific results the T-M people merely denied them and forced scientists to suppress their accurate but uncongenial truths.
To ensure that the truths were suppressed and remained suppressed the T-M partisans passed laws making it criminal to express these truths. These laws called 'hate' laws were then applied to any who spoke these truths. As the truths were undeniable T-M partisans corrupted the law, common sense, and, one might say, the will of God to declare in a court of law by the judges that 'the truth is not a defense.'
The truth is not a defense! Think about it. Such a rule of law is the triumph of absolute criminality and ignorance. And this happened during the watch of an age cohort that claimed to love freedom and revolution. Well, it was a revolution, one that enslaves the mind.
Now, in a position to punish those who disagreed with them the beneficiaries of the T-M mentality were able to enshrine their will as the law of the land. As the law was no longer concerned with the judgment of facts as evidence but the religious beliefs of the T-Ms the US at that point turned into a theocracy. The religious left became an established religion running counter to the old dispensation of the Constitution in favor of something not yet codified and something not approved by the former electorate that now became passive and an ineffective annoyance to the new slave masters.
The ruling social ethos in the US when the sixties dawned was the theory of the Melting Pot formulated by the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill c. 1900. According to that theory that had nearly the effect of a law all the disparate social elements forming the population of the US would fuse into one people of uniform American belief.
In 1960 or thereabouts the new theory of multi-culturalism was introduced which stated that each culture should have an autonomous existence. This was the dream, wishful thinking, of the wannabe Jewish Autonomous people. Nothing new, it was their age old dream. Thus the body politic of the US as a matter of principle was fractured into many warring cultures.
While the Melting Pot had always been a fantasy having no real existence in fact multi-culturalism was alive and real and exacerbated in 1965 when the immigration act was reformed allowing unlimited immigration to all the peoples of the world. And if they didn't come willingly members of the T-M mentality went into the actual jungles of Africa, dragged the natives out, put them on a plane, free fare, and flew them to the US.
What can one say to such zaniness.
The whole notion of freedom advocated by the age cohort was thus negated. Dozens of laws were passed giving these 'immigrants' precedence over the rights of the native population, depriving the natives of equal rights. This is a true story. Incredible but true.
And lastly, for this essay we come to the complete overturn of reason in favor of a comic book utopia and the installation of an age of inner wishful thinking caused by the introduction of drugs as a mass phenomenon.
Drugs in the sixties were nothing new. Drugs begin to show up in literature during the nineteenth century Romantic period. Thomas de Quincey's Confessions Of An English Opium Eater is the first famous confession or novel on the topic. Opium was much used in Victorian England as an ingredient in Laudanum which was given to infants to make them stop crying.
Opium was further reduced to morphine and then heroin. Freud is famous as the promoter of the joys of cocaine, synthesized from the coca plant. As chemistry developed, synthetic chemical drugs such as amphetamine began making their appearance at the end of the century.
Drug labs were busy and soon creating drugs that attacked any area of the brain. LSD was discovered in 1938 and popularized after 1943. Drugs like Miltown and other tranquilizers began filling women's purses after 1950. Pot and hash had been simmering below the Hot 100 for some time but moved up the charts after 1960. So the whole pharmacopeia was available as the decade began. New formulas would be discovered in the following decades as drugs became part of the entertainment industry.
Drugs of course suppress the conscious mind exposing the raw wiring of the user. They also lower resistance to hypnotic influence. Hypnosis is merely a heightened sensitivity to suggestion. A drugged out population can be swayed by propaganda as no other, which is merely suggestion by another name, in any direction. They can be swayed but you mist control the means to do so. The mass media was the means, namely TV, Movies and records, and it was in the control of Jews with their special agenda.
Thus Movies, TV and Records propagandized a pro Jewish revolution agenda along with its subordinate Negro revolution agenda.
It is strange how all trends worked to favor the Negro/Jewish agenda. Of course, Jews had been instrumental in breaking down Aryan resistance to Negro music. Jewish DJs such as Alan Freed and Cousin Brucie along with Jewish song writers such as the hugely influential Leiber and Stoller and Goffin-King led the assault.
The songs they wrote were performed by Negro artists. While the Jewish song writers were not so familiar with Aryan culture as is supposed it was enough to bridge the Aryan-Negro gap making the Negro performances potable while paving the way for Barry Gordy's Motown label.
As of 1960 there was virtually no one who listened to or was familiar with Negro Blues. The Blues was
brought forward by the British Invasion who apparently listened to that crap. I am always astonished by White Blues artists citing Robert Johnson as a source. There was nothing available by Robert Johnson until 1960 when CBS released its first collection that virtually no one bought. The second collection was released in '62 with the same result.
I first heard of Robert Johnson in 1968 when I owned a record store. Many people talked about the Blues but when I started a first rate Blues section the records remained untouched and unsold. I doubt that I ever had a Robert Johnson sale.
I was in a university town and when such Blues artists as Lightning Hopkins were brought to town the 'séances' were held in someone's living room with maybe fifteen people attending, ten of which were girls worshipping blackness. Nevertheless White Blues was popularized by the British, spreading to American performers.
I should point out that White performers of the forties and early fifties such as the Singing Cowboy Gene Autry sang many Blues based songs. Autry's song The Yellow Rose Of Texas is of course about a Negro woman, high yellow.
By decades end the cohort's fascination with exaggerated notions of freedom and revolution had turned into drug addiction and violence. By the late sixties looney tunes like Bomber Billy Ayers and his female side kick Bernardine Dohrn with their Weatherman organization and the Jewish Defense League and its offshoot the Jewish Defense Organization were killing and bombing at will and furthermore they would get away with it. 'Free as a bird and guilty as Hell.' as Bomber Billy Ayers would put it.
So by the end of decade ending with the Caped Crusader, Mick Jagger, at Altamont a comic book vision of reality had triumphed over the real thing. Who can forget Mick Jagger mounted on a giant inflatable cock on stage before sixty thousand people. Now, there was a comic book fantasy. Two and two added up to any number you wanted.
Ride 'em High Mick
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Chap. 6: Marianne Faithfull, Faerie Queene Of The Sixties
Chap. 6, Marianne Faithfull: Faerie Queene Of The Sixties
Orders From Headquarters
This chapter will center around the Global Communist Cultural Revolution phase kicked off in 1968 while being managed by Mao Tse Tung who replaced the Russians as managing director.
The purpose of the CR was to destroy the Bourgeois past replacing it with itself. Hence Ira Levin who wrote Rosemary's Baby in which Satan's child is named Andy posited 1966 as the Year One much as the failed new dating of the French Revolution of 1789. '89 was the Year One of that Revolutionary calendar. Perhaps in preparation for the CR in 1965 in the US new immigration reform was pushed through Congress that opened the gates of the US to the world, especially Africa, Mexico and the East. By 1968 West and East Asians were flooding into the country. As seems obvious now this was with the intent to subvert and destroy the Aryan hold on the US.
In his song Bob Dylan would sing: In the museums infinity goes up on trial, in an opening blast on destroying past culture as displayed in museums. In China Mao was less timorous as huge gangs of the Red Guards coursed through museums smashing irreplaceable cultural artefacts. They even invaded peoples homes ransacking the houses destroying anything of value. Culture bearers such as college professors or any educated persons were rounded up and sent out to reeducation camps to work at manual labor; tens of millions were murdered outright. Regular people were called before neighborhood re-education cells to confess their bourgeois faults and pledge to Communists faults.
Outside of China local agents were recruited from Communist ranks; college campuses suddenly sprouted Chinese Communist stores selling Mao's Little Red Book and those pretty little pins sporting a
Chairman Mao Ze Dong
gold Mao against a red enameled background. Nice work and cheap too. Any campus that hadn't been disrupted by 'Free Speech Movements' now came under attack by the Cultural Revolution. The end result would be Kent State.
As no one knew what was going on the Cultural Revolutionists seized the institutions beginning to establish the tone, the matrix with which opinions would be considered. This was established in subtle ways that few noticed and even they hadn't a clue as to who or why. The Revolutionists had seized the cultural venues of movies, TV, newspapers, magazines and music, or, recordings. One of the key units in recorded music was the Rolling Stones. Mick was a Communist, at least since his London School of Economics days.
Even before the Redlands Bust he had been bleating that victory was his side's because 'they had the kids' in the palm of their hands. The bust had been a cold douche that rankled Mick to his core. The revolutionists were of the mind set that they were going to fight and win and never lose. Thus the mild reprimand of the bust struck Mick as foul play, an unforgivable insult and injury.
Many people in the US were brought up short when their outrages were tried and sentences passed. I know people who went to prison for their outrageous criminal acts. They were considered martyrs. They couldn't comprehend what they had done wrong anyway. Of course, by their own revolutionary lights what they had done was right; unfortunately the law, the authorities and the people, who Nixon called the Silent Majority were not of the same mind.
Mick found this out to his chagrin although he vowed revenge. Like Sigmund Freud and many another if he couldn't move the higher powers he would enlist the aid of the lower. Thus after escaping his prison sentence the Stones metamorphosed into Satanic sorcerers for the cover of their Dec. 1968 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request.
Mick After A Lifetime Walking Down The Long And Winding Road
The title itself was a play on the Queen's request on British passports for the visited countries to allow the visitor to pass. Thus in the Freudian sense Mick elevated himself to a competing royal status with the crown as their Satanic enemy. One presumes that being a Stones' fan was the entre into Satanic circles.
Mick was not new to Satanic ideas. He ran with Bob Fraser and Chris Gibbs while having at least met the US Satanist Kenneth Anger who was associated with the West Coast big daddy of Satanists, Anton La Vey. In addition he was probably already known to Donald Cammell who would star Mick in his film Performance and Marianne in his Lucifer Rising.
In June of '68 Mick would be recording his song Sympathy For The Devil in studio while being filmed by Jean Luc Godard for his revolutionary film One+One, retitled Sympathy For The Devil. Sympathy was inspired by Satanic Russian novel titled: The Master And Margarita. The novel had been given to him to read by Marianne.
The Master And Margarita
For the promoters of The Master And Margarita the novel is an astounding mind blower. Maybe if you're Russian and haven't been exposed to the stunning variety of truly astonishing unending mind blowing fiction and movies of the US. The cultural scene in Russia was primitive compared to the unbroken line of development in the West where very few limitations, none actually, were placed on expression. Bulgakov has his Satanic girls running around without clothes as though that were something not routine in the West. I mean, beginning in the sixties there was a pornographic explosion. Movies were made that would have made the Marquis de Sade blush. That poor guy was egregiously defamed according to current standards. De Sade's puerile novels were thrown into the shade. By 1972 a movie like Deep Throat was being shown in legitimate theaters to the general public. How's that for a cultural revolution?
Before the wars we had Edgar Rice Burroughs whose female characters on both Earth and Mars ran around robust except for a few ornaments. Woo woo Bulkagov.
My god, we had the Shadow and Doc Savage and then in the thirties comic books were invented. Superman was born the same year I was in 1938 but he grew up faster and already had a job by 1948 while I was sitting in the orphanage as a kid. Superman, Batman, Capt. America came in a flood of characters that was unceasing. There were marvels presented every month that exceeded anything Bulgakov can come up with. And then…and then…William C. Gaines at EC Comics (Educational Comics, and what an education it was) came out with Tales From The Crypt with its copycats. You want to talk about mind blowing!!! There I was a ten year old kid permeated with terrific pornographic images, sadistic violence and mayhem that even I said, reading on, they shouldn't let ten year old kids see this. I don't know what kind of brain damage they did but I feel OK. But they did and I read every single story. Now that was mind expanding.
Of course the parents of America did catch up with Gaines forcing him to withdraw the comics. Then as if to thumb his nose at the United Parents of America he created the aptly named Mad Magazine. Boy oh boy, those were the days. Never see those again.
And then the science fiction through the fifties. My god. There was school and there was school and the best school was the sci-fi. Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, John Wyndham's Midwich Cuckoos and its two movies The Village Of The Damned and the sequel Children Of The Damned. I mean, Jack Schaefer and William Tenn. Try to top those two. The movie Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. Christ! And for God's sake the stunning James Bond movies. I could go on an on. The clearly Satanic Bus Stop TV series. Jesus Christ! All the scripts could have been written by Charlie Starkweather. All that and more. Much, much more before 1967 when M&M was published. Since then, I mean, have you seen the TV shows Dexter or Breaking Bad? Hell on wheels, guys, hell on wheels. All men to their battle stations. It's not that M&M isn't decent sci-fi/fantasy/horror, but that's all it is. Doesn't even compare with Bram Stoker's Dracula. But, then, maybe I'm over educated. Still, I think of myself as an average All American Boy.
Hey, have you seen A Giant Crab Come Forth? I have. Have you seen a single octopus tentacle demolish the city of San Francisco? I have. Have you seen the eggplant that ate Chicago…I could go on.
I don't know how deeply or extensively the Russian author Mikhail Bugakov's novel has penetrated the Western mind. It was certainly unknown in the sixties except to the initiated. Definitely not a best seller. I can't remember ever hearing of it until the turn of the century when references to it as a literary marvel began popping up in my reading. In 2010 the book was published as a selection of the Folio Society of which I have been a long time member and so I acquired a copy. I have read it twice and while I recognize its purpose I am unimpressed with it as a novel.
Essentially a manual of social deconstruction the book is being heavily promoted in Communist circles. In Russia the book has been turned into a TV series, at least a couple movies and several stage plays for Western consumption.
In addition to the book I have acquired a three disc set of Vladimir Bercko's film version and the TV series. The blurb on the back cover gives some idea of what the book means to its promoters:
…An imagined world where one's consciousness actually perceives and experiences sorcery. The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, the novel on which this film is based, is a rare, mind-expanding pleasure, a journey whenever one takes and reads. The book is about the great, burning, perennial areas of the human predicament, story of the Christ, seen by Matthew, Judas and Pilate; the tale of Faust's pact with the devil; the confrontation between individual genius and the demands of an ideologically driven State; the meaning of entertainment in society; and the love of man and woman. Bulgakov is an early precursor of the literary genre of magic realism exemplified by the South American writers Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The above seems somewhat overblown to me; about the only thing I would agree to unequivocally is that it is of the sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre. Its actual purpose is as a manual for disrupting society, of cultural upending; in other words, of furthering the Cultural Revolution.
After the novel was finished , in a long post-climax, this passage is inserted into the novel.
…the two blackguards marched down the asphalt path under the lindens straight to the veranda of the unsuspecting restaurant.
A pale and bored citizeness in white socks and a white beret with a nib sat on a Viennese chair at the corner entrance to the veranda, where amid the greenery of the trellis an opening for the entrance had been made. In front of her on simple kitchen table lay a fat book of the ledger variety, in which the citizeness for unknown reasons wrote down all those who entered the restaurant. It was precisely this citizeness who stopped Koroviev and Behemoth.
'Your identification cards?' She was gazing in amazement at Koroviev's pince nez, and also at Behemoth's primus and Behemoth's torn elbow.
'A thousand pardons, but what identification cards?' asked Koroviev in surprise.
'You're writers?' The citizeness asked in her turn.
'Unquestionably,' Koroviev answered with dignity.
'My sweetie…' Koroviev began tenderly.
'I'm no sweetie,' interrupted the citizeness.
'More's the pity,' Koroviev said disappointedly and went on: 'Well, so, if you don't want to be a sweetie, which would be quite pleasant, you don't have to be. So, then, to convince yourself that Dostoevsky was a writer, do you have to ask for his identification card? Just take any five pages from any one of novels and you'll be convinced, without any identification card that you're dealing with a writer? And I don't think he even had an identification card, what do you think?'
'…You're not Dostoevsky,' said the citizeness who was getting muddled by Koroviev.
'Well, who knows, who knows,' he replied.
'Dostoevsky's dead.' Said the citizeness…
'I protest!' Behemoth exclaimed hotly. 'Dostoevsky is immortal!'
'Your identification cards, citizens,' said the citizeness.
This passage served as a blueprint for obstructionists. Passing into common use by the late seventies Village Fucks of this variety harassed innocent clerks to distraction. As an instruction manual how then did the book fit into the continuum of the proto-Cultural Revolution from the end of WWI to the present, for there is a question of authorship found here.
The passage concerning Koroviev and Behemoth might well have been written by the Dadaists of the Café Voltaire in Zurich. Their efforts were meant to disorient European culture, knock it off center. Themselves Jewish they were followed by the establishment of the Jewish Critical Theory school in Germany. Critical Theory meant that European customs, ideas and politics were to be denigrated whether virtues or vices as though by superior beings viewing from above and apart. This led to the debunking school of the twenties in the US by which all American heroes were attacked turning their virtues into vices and vices as evidence of ghastly criminality. Eventually the Critical Theorists would leave Germany migrating to the US en masse along with the entire Freudian psycho-analytic establishment. How this must have cheered Hitler.
One then begins to see the similarities between The Master And Margarita and this Jewish continuum. The protagonist of the novel was Satan going by the name of Woland (Woe to the Land) who was a master hypnotist dealing in counterfeiting.
Woland is almost a duplicate of Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse who was also a counterfeiter and a master hypnotist. He also was out to destroy European society. Lang's first effort was the silent flick Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler of 1922 which it is possible Bulgakov might seen but the events of the Russian Civil War make that improbable. There is no chance that Bulgakov could have seen Lang's talkie sequel of 1933 The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse in which Dr. Mabuse having been placed in an insane asylum in 1922 has hypnotized his analyst, Dr. Baum, through his writing, into carrying out his subversive schemes. While Bulgakov couldn't have been influenced by Lang the similarities are so close one may posit a central organization directing the publication of books and movies of this sort. This becomes more evident when one looks for similarities in the US.
In the US a coordinating agency had been founded in 1906 called the American Jewish Committee, the AJC, under the direction of Jacob Schiff and Louis Marshall. Those are two names that don't mean much outside of Jewish circles but they should. Louis Marshall's collected correspondence is very interesting.
Now, the Great War of 1914-18 devastated Europe to be following by the greater devastation of WWII from approximately 1938 to 1945. At the same time in the Far East Japan opened hostilities that engulfed and unsettled that area beginning in the 1930s also through 1945. Hostilities continued in China through 1950 between the Communists and the Nationalists aided and abetted by massive shipments of US arms which even though granted to the Nationalists passed directly into Communist hands and then the Korean conflict began that ran through 1953.
In contrast the US and North America were not directly affected by these wars allowing permitting a unique uninterrupted culture to develop.
This period also coincided with astonishing technological advances that only the US was able to take full advantage. Thus radio became a reality beginning in the twenties although it didn't become commercially effective until the early thirties. Perhaps even more significant was the introduction of sound to movies. The talkies made movies the most effective propaganda tool available until the emergence of television in the fifties.
As is probably not all that well known TV was commercially feasible in the late thirties but WWII postponed its introduction into homes until after the war.
Significantly the first successful talkie was the Jewish themed The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson. Following that would be the series of films featuring the Marx Bros. Their movies would mesh with the Dada attack in art and the emerging Critical Theory school riding over a bed of Freudian psychology. All were direct attacks on Aryan Culture. As Joseph Goebbels told Fritz Lang when he denied a license to show The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse: No government could withstand propaganda if its kind. The truth of Goebbels statement was proven in 2008 with the US election of the Communist Barack Obama. After decades of the most vitriolic criticism and denunciation of US politics and society by the Left, all of a sudden such criticism was denied the opposition who were described as Domestic Terrorists and denied access to the media with the exception of the internet.
So, from 1930 to 1954 the Marx Bros. systematically mocked and vilified as many social institutions and Aryan mores as they could. In Germany before the wars this was called the Kultur kampf or culture wars, an early version of the Cultural Revolution. And of course the same program was carried on in films in general. Naturally it was all denied but now looking at those same films through the new spectacles provided post 9/11 it all seems clear and apparent. One sees with new eyes. Thus there are great similarities between the techniques of the Marx Bros. and The Master And Margarita.
What I consider the greatest of the Marx Bros. movies, although the Marx Bros. didn't appear in it, was the movie of the Year One, 1966, A Funny Think Happened On The Way To The Forum starring the very Jewish Zero Mostel. The movie was the ultimate instruction manual for the demolition of society that The Master And Margarita follows very closely. Forum appeared in 1966 in the US while M&M was discovered in Russia the very same year #1. A succession of similarly themed movies followed of which the most significant perhaps was the movie Cabaret.
The question of the provenance of The Master And Margarita remains. Its similarities to the cultural trend of the previous decades is too strong to be coincidental. It is possible that in old religious terms the book could be called a pious fraud, something along the lines of The Protocols of Zion.
The provenance is certainly somewhat suspect. According to the legend that is impossible to adequately check, the novel was labored over for ten years by Bulgakov at which time he realized that Stalin would take the novel as a personal affront insuring that it would never be published while he would end up in the infamous Lubyanka Prison where in all likelihood he would receive a bullet to the base of his skull. No, better to put it in a drawer and forget about it until a better day should a better day ever come.
So who was Mikhail Bulgakov? He was apparently a novelist and a playwright. As improbable as it may seem, during the Russian civil war between the Communist Reds and the Royalist Whites after the Great War ended he was on the side of the Whites. In Revolutionary terminology white referred to the white cockade of the French royalists and not the color or their skin. Nevertheless according to legend he was a favorite of Stalin who actually favored this enemy of the State. Wouldn't let his stuff be published but still thought him a fine fellow worth preserving. Bulgakov survived all the purges so common to the era.
Time passes, WWII, the rape of the German women, the Atom Bomb, the Korean War, the death of Stalin in 1953 while the precious manuscript sits quietly yellowing in its drawer. I might add that five hundred hand written pages fills a good sized drawer.
Beria and Khruschev follow Stalin followed in turn by Leonid Brezhnev and then this astonishing twist of fate happened. From the Orlando Figes Folio introduction:
After Bulgakov's death in 1940, the manuscript was hidden in a drawer by Elena Sergeevna until 1966, when, by one of the most ironic twists in Russian literary history, unknown until recently, it was prepared for publication by Konstantin Simonov, one of Stalin's henchmen in the Writers' Union who had taken part in the persecution of many writers before the Khruschev thaw. In 1956 Simonov had been made the chairman of the commission in charge of Bulgakov's literary estate by the writer's widow, who was an old acquaintance of Simonov's mother, Alexandra Ivanisheva. (nee Princess Obolenskaya). Simonov then gave the manuscript ..to his ex-wife Evgenia Laskina, who was the working at Moskva (Magazine)…
To make a long story short, Moskva was a failing magazine and as there was great doubt in Simonov's mind as to whether it would pass the censorship of now premier Leonid Brezhnev's stringent rule he, I guess, decided to let his ex-wife take the fall if it didn't pass. Better her than him and a subtle revenge indeed. But, why even take the chance against apparently insuperable odds.
Well, golly, the book did get past some very stupid or traitorous censors and the rest, as they say, is history, although the time line is very tight.
Moskva published Part One in its November 1967 issue doubling its subscriber list Moscow was so bowled over, and Part Two in January 1968. Now, Marianne received a copy of the translation of the American Grove Press imprint, read it, got it to Mick who by the June recording sessions for Sympathy For The Devil had read and digested it. Not much time in there for the Russian publication, translation into English and publication and distribution by the Grove Press, shipment to England and acquisition by Marianne. I mean, what was the big rush for something that might not sell? Therefore I believe something else must have been uppermost in certain minds. As I said earlier this book reeks of a fraud or forgery. Its happened before. The Donation Of Constantine as an egregious example.
The 1997 Hollywood movie Wag The Dog demonstrated exactly how it is done. In Wag The Dog the President of the US asks a Hollywood producer to stage a phony war to shore up his flagging popularity. The producer does this but as Shakespeare wrote: What a tangled web we weave when first we deceive. As the variables unfold in unforeseen manner the producer's ingenuity is strained but equal to the task. He creates a war hero who while on the way to the ceremony dies. Consequently he manufacturers a sentimental story about Schumacher, the dead would be hero, who they dub Old Shoe.
The producer contacts a couple songwriters, explains his needs and they come up with an old timey 20s-30s type country cum folk ditty. The performance is doctored to sound like a scratchy old 78RPM.
Now, here's the key point. It is arranged to place a copy of this forgery in the appropriate thirties archive location in The Library Of Congress. Miracle of miracles the forgery is 'discovered' becoming a hit generating a worshipful attitude for 'Old Shoe.' Old Shoe is buried in Arlington Cemetery, full military honors and mission accomplished.
There you have it- that was a forgery no different than, say, The Donation of Constantine or The Protocols of Zion.
The question then is why did The Master And Margarita surface in Year One in 1966 in time for the Cultural Revolution already begun actually but not announced by Mao until 1968, Year Three.
Quite simply it was necessary to place an instruction manual into the hands of certain key people and agitators. The passage I quoted at the beginning of this chapter is an example of a lesson. Mick received his copy through Marianne and understood. How then did this unknown Russian novel immediately find its way into Marianne's hands upon publication of the English translation of Grove Press?
I mean, how did the Jewish translator, Mirra Ginsburg, receive a copy immediately after the Russian book publication. I imagine she didn't. The window of opportunity between January 1968 and end of May 1968 is too narrow. She must have been involved either immediately after the Moskva publication of Part One or possibly even before. Therefore that indicates a plan by somebody.
We know for a fact that the novel as published was not as written by Bulgakov. We are told that several hands altered the text including various censors. A full sixty pages were deleted in Mirra Ginsburg's translation to be restored thirty years later…to reflect what?
There is plenty of reason then to believe the book was a put up job or, indeed, intended as a disguised instruction manual for easier distribution to interested parties…like Mick.
Mick when he received his copy immediately began to write or conceive the lyrics for Sympathy For The Devil. Satan the key figure in the novel is a master magician and hypnotist. He hypnotizes virtually the entire city of Moscow. As a refresher on continuity lets remember that Dr. Sigmund Freud was a master hypnotist seeking the destruction of European civilization and so was Lang's Dr. Mabuse who was based on Freud.
We know that Bulgakov couldn't have been aware of Lang's Mabuse and I doubt that Bulgakov was much of a Freudian so that leaves forgery as the most probable explanation. As a point of fact the AJC, American Jewish Committee, has employed a stable of writers in the US since at least the thirties to churn out plausibly academic diatribes condemning those they consider anti-Semites. The AJC was global in scope having been active in European politics from its beginning so it would be easy enough to concoct The Master And Margarita either in toto or possibly a revision and claim to have discovered it in a drawer in 1966 The Year One by one Simon-ov in much the same manner that the fictional 'Old Shoe' was discovered in the Library Of Congress.
Jean Luc Godard
In an interview Mick said that the Master and Margarita influenced the writing of Sympathy For The Devil. In the furtherance of the Cultural Revolution Jean Luc Godard of the French Nouvelle Vague school of film makers made his revolutionary movie One+One, reissued as Sympathy For The Devil filming the Stones recording the song. So the Stones are placed in the heart of The Cultural Revolution.
Mick was fully aware of hypnosis as, actually, were a very great many of the rockers, so that he and Keith set the piece to a Samba rhythm. As Mick said in the interview the Samba is a very hypnotic rhythm. Thus, by creating a hypnotic mode everyone would receive the lyrics as suggestion. The suggestion being that the devil is a good fellow and one should have sympathy for him discarding one's prejudices. There was actually a strong effort to rehabilitate Satan in the years following Year One. It will be remembered that both Mick and Marianne were tight with the Satanist Kenneth Anger who had a huge LUCIFER tattooed across his chest. Marianne would later perform in Anger's Lucifer Rising while Mick performed a soundtrack for another of Anger's offerings.
Kenneth Anglemeyer aka Kenneth Anger
Mick beginning shortly after Year Three would turn his act into performance art of a highly suggestive nature accompanied by an intentional hypnotic beat with stun gun volume, flashing lights and the stimulated hysteria of the crowd reaction. A proper atmosphere for hypnotic suggestion.
Mick's vengeance for the drug bust then was to play the Pied Piper to lead the 'kids' to their destruction.
Marianne would be a casualty of his mania as she sank into the deepest of depression.
Chapter 7 follows.
Posted in America, Communists, Edgar Rice Burroughs, ERBzine, Jews, R.E. Prindle, Reviews, Rock And Roll, Sigmund Freud, Writing | Tagged Cinema, Cultural Revolution, Donald Cammell, Films, Mao ze Dong, Marianne Faithfull, Master And Margarita, Mick Jagger, Mikhail Bulgakov, Movies, Wag The Dog | Leave a Comment »
A Review: Pt. III, Tarzan And The Leopard Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#16 TARZAN AND THE LEOPARD MEN
This Silent River Of Mystery And Death
In our hour of darkness,
In our hour of need…
Leopard Men is an exceptionally dark novel. There is nothing about it that isn't horrific, a sort of Gotterdamerung. There are probably more people killed in this novel than any other of Burroughs'. The threat of rape hangs heavy in the air. Old Timer/Burroughs is going through more major changes trying to burst his chrysalis.
Through it all runs the thread of religion; and not just one religion but three religious systems. There is the animistic religion of the Africans; a Semitic style religion of the Leopard Men and an esoteric interpretation concealed in a gorgeous wealth of symbolism. I will consider the last in Part B.
ERB's life was reaching a crisis, he had the MGM contract to worry about, his ongoing war with the Reds and now his sexual crisis that had been roiling beneath the surface for nearly fifty years and was about to bubble over. Hence the novel is filled with murky, rasty sexual symbolism welling up from the subconscious disguised as religion.
For supposedly being an escapist writer without either serious purpose or intellectual content when one parses out any of his stories one is amazed that such serious purpose can be successfully disguised as escapist. ERB shares this ability with Homer of the Iliad. Since no one seems to have penetrated beyhond the surface glitter from one hundred years ago to this day I hope I will be pardoned for making the attempt.
ERB's style of plotting is so diffuse that it is very difficult to grasp the focal point which unites the various strands of his story. In some incredible way he has half a dozen stories running concurrently each with a different point and different conclusion. One has to follow the bouncing ball. In Jewels Of Opar the uniting theme is the story of what happens to the Jewels. In Ant Men one has to follow the trajectory of Tarzan's locket. In this one the key is Kali Bwana. ERB seems to favor this linking approach.
Leopard Men has two main stories, that of Old Timer and Kali Bwana with its subplots as well as the story of Tarzan And The Leopard Men. As the story opens Tarzan is in Leopard Men territory far from home. One wonders what Tarzan is doing in this country? Naturally Burroughs presents his information on a need to know basis. We apparently don't need to know until p. 108 when after Tarzan regains his memory from yet another crushing blow to the skull we are told:
During the long day Tarzan's mind was occupied with many thoughts. He had recalled now why he had come into this country, and he marveled at the coincidence of later events that guided his footsteps along the very paths he had intended on trodding before accident had robbed him of the memory of his purpose. He knew now that depredations by Leopard Men from a far country had caused him to set forth upon a lonely reconnaissance with only the thought of locating their more or less fabled stronghold and temple. That he should be successful in both finding these and reducing one of them was gratifying in the extreme, and he felt thankful now for the accident that had been responsible for those results.
Thus as Tarzan regains his memory he discovers that he had destroyed the stronghold of the Leopard Men. In rescuing Old Timer and Kali Bwana he will also destroy their temple. A good day's work.
With this story of his quest and triumph we have a second examination of religion, a continuation of the exploration begun in Tarzan Triumphant in the first half of 1931. The reference to the accident that led to these results may be a reference to the incident in Toronto in 1899. He and Emma both believed it resulted in his writing career. Perhaps the signing of the contract with MGM in April may also be inferred to as an 'accident.' Much research into his relations with MGM and these critical five or six years of his career is necessary. Certainly by late July and August as he was writing this story the realization of the meaning of the contract he had signed was seeping in. By 1933's Tarzan And The Lion Man he was fully aware. Subsequent to that discovery he formed an ill advised alliance with his new wife's ex, Ashton Dearholt, to film the 'real' Tarzan. That in its place. For now his troubles were not on the laps of the gods but on the desks of Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer.
If negotiations began on April 4 and were completed and signed on April 15 that means that neither ERB nor Rothmund read the contract very thoughtfully. They certainly didn't take it to an attorney. As in Lion Man ERB complains of the duplicity of men; he was finding out what the terms of the contract meant. Perhaps in Leopard Men he was getting glimmers of the shape of things to come.
As in Triumphant the two Midian peoples obviously represent Jews and non-Jews, us meaning the Jews and them meaning the rest of the world as per Rabbi Schneerson's division of mankind into two different species, us and them. I will treat the Utengans as us and the Leopard Men as them which is what ERB intended. The connection of the Leopard Men to the Jews can be established by two references connecting them to Hollywood:
Gato Mgungu had never had the advantages of civilization. (He had never been to Hollywood.)
And on p. 66:
Perhaps his reasons might be obvious to a Hollywood publicity agent.
I'm sure you moved out of the way so ERB's sarcasm didn't splash on you.
His letting his contempt for Hollywood which he had suppressed since 1922's Girl From Hollywood show now and his associating it with Thalberg, Mayer and MGM is evidence of his frustration.
When Van Dyke returned from Africa he brought his gun bearer Riano and the actor who played Renchoro, Mutia, with him for the finishing scenes. It seems likely that ERB would have sought an introduction to these two 'real' Africans. One can only imagine what these two bush Negroes who had never conceived a world larger than their own Jungle thought of the twentieth century in the bizarre world of Tinseltown. How did these minds that had probably never seen a wheel prior to Van Dyke's expedition react to what must have seemed to them a parallel universe straight out of Wells. Place yourself in their position and your head will spin. One wonders, even, having lived naked all their lives, how they reacted to dressing every morning and wearing Western style clothes all day. Did Tarzan's experience in the shower in Tarzan Goes To New York have anything to do with these two noble savages introduction to civilization? Possibly the reference to Gato Mgungu's never having been to Hollywood may refer to ERB's observation of Riano and Mutia.
There is some wonderful stuff going on here. If Hollywood wasn't centered on pornography and its concomitant degraded sadistic violence with a little imagination they might be able to put together a good movie or two from this material. Do I digress? Ah, then I digress. But back to the story.
As with 'them' elsewhere the Utengans are good men going about their business while the 'us' or Leopard Men are a destructive force in society. ERB has displaced the two religious systems to Africa where he presents two rather derogatory versions of Africans. He is uncharacteristically derogatory of the Blacks. Perhaps his concentration on so portraying the Africans was the result of his rage at the Scottsboro Boys. On p. 92 he says of the orgy of the Leopard Men:
He saw that religious and alcoholic drunkenness were rapidly robbing them of what few brains and little self-control Nature had vouchsafed them, and he trembled to think of what excesses they might commit when they passed beyond even the restraint of their leaders; nor did the fact that the chiefs, the priests, and the priestesses were becoming as drunk as their followers tend but to aggravate his fears.
ERB in his evolutionary mode had always considered the African to be less evolved but this is subjective observation and not an objective one. The bold statement 'what few brains and little self-control' may have been his personal opinion but doesn't look well in print. I can't imagine how it got beyond the Ballantine censors. I think it probable that his anger over the Scottsboro affair caused him to lose his customary discretion. In doing so he would be giving fuel to his detractors which it is never wise to do. When it is said that this is his worst novel I believe it is because of passages like this.
One wonders why the delay in the book issuance until 1936 and why then. Among other reasons one may have been that by 1936 the Communist campaign to embarrass the United States over the alleged injustice to the Boys was reaching a peak. Perhaps one intention of ERB was to show by the African example that Negroes were by nature of feeble intelligence and little self-control. If so, risky business for ERB. However throughout the novel a series of Black men is slathering at the mouth to rape Kali Bwana, recalling the train incident of the Scottsboro Boys.
ERB also introduces the concept of religious drunkenness which can exist quite independently of alcohol. Indeed there are many who can maintain a perpetual religious high. The bizarre statements of Rabbis Schneerson and Ginsburg can be attributed to religious drunkenness. In their religious enthusiasm they have certainly set aside reason. So once again a greater depth of thought is revealed than is usually attributed to Burroughs. Just two words- religious drunkenness- reveal a fair amount of thought and study.
During the great storm the Leopard Men catalyze the story by the ritual killing of a Utengan named Nyamwegi. While the storm is raging Tarzan who has taken refuge beside the bole of a great tree has it blown down with one of its great lower branches landing on his head. One admires the tensile strength of the Big Bwana's skull. Apparently a big eighteen wheeler laden with thirty tons could roll over his head, the only possible result being a temporary loss of memory. Burroughs is going through another period of great stress so Tarzan does wake up in a world he doesn't recognize.
A Utengan passing by notices the Big Bwana pinned to the ground on his back by the tree, not on his head, thank goodness, but somewhere over his body. No broken bones, luck is still with the Big Guy. As he had his bow and quiver slung over his back as he was pinned one has to think he's in a fair amount of discomfort. Orando, the Utengan, is about to eliminate Tarzan from the story, which would have left a gap, when he has the suspicion that this might be his Muzimo. Orando had just been praying to his Muzimo to aid him in his hunting, perhaps Muzimo is the hunter after whom this chapter is named, and lo, he now appears. ERB goes to some lengths to demonstrate the superstitious nature of African religion. He really seems to be making an effort to belittle the African in this novel. Orando's suspicion is confirmed a few moments later when by a series of coincidences Tarzan seems to answer when Orando calls him Muzimo. As Tarzan has no memory of another identity he assumes the role of Orando's Muzimo. This is really quite well done.
A Muzimo is a sort of guardian angel, a spirit of an ancestor who looks after you. Tarzan really fills the role performing natural- for him- feats that Orando believes are supernatural. Tarzan, or Muzimo, directs the entire successful attack on the Leopard Men's stronghold.
Tarzan's role of Muzimo is a story within the story within the story which based on Trader Horn. If one keeps diving we might even find another story within the story. The story of Tarzan as Muzimo is quite independent of the story of Old Timer, the Kid and Kali Bwana. As we will learn when his role of Muzimo ends, Tarzan's reason for coming to Utenga was to search out the Leopard Men. The fact that Old Timer, Kali Bwana and the Kid are there is mere coincidence. Their stories only become meshed at the Leopard Men's temple which inadvertantly brings all together. Even then, after regaining his memory, as Burroughs explains, they are of little interest to Tarzan. The connection is only racial which is very weak. Really the devil is in the details; a whole lot of devils.
ERB has established the conflict between the superstition based animistic religion of the majority culture and the horrific satanic religion of his minority culture. He may be 'fictionizing' here the real life situation between the Western dominant culture of Christiantity, which he would still believe superstitious, and its recessive Jewish sub-culture. I'm not clear how closely he intends the comparison. At first sight Orando's mistaking Tarzan for his Muzimo or guardian angel seems ridiculous yet even at this moment seventy percent of Americans believe in guardian angels. The figure would probably have been a few percentage points higher at that time.
Also, the Scopes Monkley Trial in Dayton, Tennessee was as recent as 1925-26, so the conflict between science and superstition in the US was by no means a settled matter. The analogy between African and American culture may be sardonic.
Just as the Utengans probably represent the Christian culture of the West so the Leopard Men may represent the minority Jewish Culture. Just as the Leopard Men had adherents functioning secretly within the majority culture directing affairs so did the Jewish Culture in the West. Just as the Leopard men had organizatonal representatives distributred amongst all the tribes across Africa functioning toward a common goal so Jewish Culture was represented in every culture of the Western world. Just as the witch doctor Sobito manipulated the affairs of the Utengans from within for the benefit of the Leopard Men so the Jewish Culture through the ADL/AJC manipulated Western Culture for its own benefit.
In the twenties and thirties the International Jewish Conspiracy phase of Jewish manipulation was the prevailing fear. The struggle to deny the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion had not yet been effected although well along.
It seems clear to me that Burroughs always has ulterior motives in his novels. He is not simply telling a story for entertainment. Burroughs must have been puzzled by the attitude of the majority culture. While Science was daily discrediting the supernatural yet the majority of the majority clung to, not so much outmoded religious beliefs, as a religious cast of mind. The belief in Christianity was being steadily eroded as based on superstition yet rather than abandoning religion Americans frantically tried to incorporate science into religion. Thus one has the strong religious quality of Liberalism that encourages the defamation of Christianity yet pursues a religious agenda based on wishful thinking.
It is very strange, more than passing strange, that while Westerners reject Christianity they have reverence for Judaism and Moslemism. While Christianity represents an anterior stage in the psychological development of mankind, the former two are even more primitive, magical and superstitious. One has to laugh out loud at Rabbi Schneerson's attempt to incorporate genetics into his religious system while the Moslem clerics are unfathomable by both Scientific and Liberal ideas and notions. Yet Liberals attack Christianity while endorsing Judaism and Moslemism.
Burroughs pits his alter-ego Tarzan and the majority against the minority religion launching an all out attack. Tarzan, whose memory is gone, accepts his role as Orando's Muzimo. Curiously Burroughs describes Tarzan's tan as so deep that he is the same skin color as Orando yet retains his status as 'White.' Possibly Orando was better able to accept Tarzan as his Muzimo because of the skin color. Tarzan becomes Muzimo being in fact Orando's guardian angel until he regains his memory at which point he becomes again his own man pursuing his own interests. While he is Orando's Muzimo he is a spectacular guardian angel directing Orando's quarrel with the Leopard Men to a successful conclusion which as we are told his original intention was the suppression of the Leopard Men.
Tarzan foils the Leopard Men's advantage in Utenga by exposing the witch doctor Sobito as a Leopard Man as well as the spy Lupingu. He is instrument in the deaths of both. His task is made easier because Orando believes implicitly in whatever his Muzimo says. Thus, while there is a natural explanation for what happens the results appear as genuinely supernatural to Orando and his tribesmen.
This is all handled very cleverly by Burroughs as he lets the reader see what is happening as he also shows Orando's superstitious interpretation. It's actually pretty funny.
By following Tarzan/ Muzimo's advice the Utengans catch the Leopard Men coming back from a ritual orgy while hung over and either kill or scatter them, men, women and children. There was no one left alive in their village. Thus the majority expel their troublesome minority or sub-culture from their midst, perhaps as ERB wished the majority culture of the United States might do with its troublesome minority culture. He may have used Africa as a metaphor for the United States. In any event Leopard Men seems to be a continuation of Triumphant on the religious level while being perhaps the most detailed examination of religion that ERB ever did. But you can see why his Liberal detractors would call this his worst novel.
At the time of writing Leopard Men the most recently issued story was Tarzan The Invincible. Tarzan Triumphant had been written and probably submitted to Blue Book but it wouldn't be published until 1932-33 while the book edition was published in 1932 so there couldn't as yet have been a reaction to his portrayal of the two Midian cultures and Abraham son of Abraham and his followers of Paul.
Perhaps ERB found his religious portrayal of Triumphant too clumsy so he refined it in Leopard Men.
The Goddess Kali
Riders On The Storm
If you don't enter as an initiate you won't get the story. The symbolism in this story is so strong and complete that it should be a standard psychological textbook. Burroughs writes as though he had just come from a course in esoteric symbolism. He continues this throughout the story too. I don't know if I can do this justice but I will try.
Burroughs has entered the defining crisis of his life, thus the novel is full of symbols of life, death, sex and regeneration. ERB feels that he is being born again, the butterfly emerging from the cocoon. The very name Kali Bwana is the primary symbol. Kali is the Hindu symbol of life, death and regeneration. Her image is as dark as this story. This story, as it were, emerges from the very bowels of the pit, the viscera of frustrated desires and hopes of their fulfillment. Very frightening actually. I can see how on one level so many people would consider it ERB's worst. It isn't easily understandable.. The story deals with primal needs and desires that would drive a man insane. Indeed, Kali Bwana considers Old Timer insane. He himself says that maybe he is crazy. He makes psychotic statements and is on the verge of criminal sexual behavior throughout the book until the very end when he is reformed. This is an extremely violent but regenerative story. Sort of like Walt Disney on steroids.
Kali Bwana is the joy of man's desiring. A platinum blonde, her beauty apparently disintegrates all men's self control as she inspires dreams of rape rather than courting. Old Timer himself has rape in mind all through the book. No man or animal in the story every thinks of honoring her femininity; their only thoughts are to violate her beauty to gratify their illicit lustful desires or, perhaps, to cannibalize her beauty and make it their own possession. This is serious stuff.
As Kali she is the mate of Shiva. while Shiva is usually depicted as a handsome young man serenely playing the flute while all goes to hell around him Burroughs represents him as the Leopard god of the cannibalistic, criminal animist or nature cult. Thus, Kali Bwana is captured by the Leopard Men to serve as high priestess to their Leopard god thus forming an Anima and Animus. Burroughs does an excellent job of presenting both the barbaric splendor and degradation of the cult or religion.
The story is set by the book's opening, one of attempted rape and violence set amidst a terrific storm in a sort of swamp like atmosphere. One feels this is not an ordinary storm but one fraught with significance and meaning. It is a life changing storm.
The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols which I use here for reference is readily available. It discusses storms on p. 941:
The storm is a symbol of a theophany, the manifestation of the awesome and mighty power of God. While it may herald a revelation, it can also be a manifestation of divine anger and sometimes of punishment.
Creative activity is also unleashed in a storm. In a cosmic upheaval beyond the power of words, life itself was born.
And then Burroughs refers to the storm as a hurricane. The Penguin dictionary says this of that, p. 533:
Hurricanes are almost Dionysiac orgies of cosmic energy. They symbolize the ending of one period of time and the beginning of another as tireless Earth repairs the damage.
So now we have the figure of the eternal female, the symbol of birth, death and regeneration coupled with storm and hurricane symbols also denoting major epochal changes. The impact is increased by the whole being expressed in a half dozen pages, very compressed.
It should be noted that Florence Gilbert represents Kali Bwana and Old Timer is obviously ERB. the changes are happening to him. Florence/Kali is both repelled and passive. Perhaps because of the ripening romance between his wife and ERB Ashton Dearholt had taken her on a motor tour removing her from the scene probably hoping separation would end the affir. According to the ERBzine 30s Bio Timeline the Dearholts returned to LA in May just as ERB was completing Triumphant and before he began Leopard Men. If he had been fighting his feelings for Florence her return was obviously more than he could deal with hence this terrific storm and the overwhelming number of female symbols in the novel.
At the same time as the rape attempt the Leopard Men corner Nyamwegi, a Utgengan returning from a date with his girl friend. Amidst the multiple bolts of lightning which illuminate the entire sky and tremendous crashes of thunder the Leopard Men gruesomely and bloodily murder the boy removing body parts.
ERB accentuates the ferocity of the storm and hurricane by saying that the lightning bolts were numerous and continuous, filling the entire sky. The Penguin dictionary, p. 606:
Lightning symbolizes the spark of life and powers of fertilization. It is fire from Heaven, vastly powerful and terrifyingly swift, which may be either life giving or death dealing.
And on p. 607:
As the weapon of Zeus, forged in FIRE (symbol of the intellect) by the Cyclops, lightning is the symbol of intentive and spiritual enlightenment or the sudden flash of inspiration. However, while it enlightens and stirs the spirit, lightning strikes down the drive of unsatisfied and uncontrolled desire…
So after this storm all will be changed; there will be a new Heaven and a new Earth. Kali Bwana has averted personal disaster while Nyamwegi has met his end. Nearby in another part of the forest Tarzan and Nkima crouch beside a forest giant to wait out the storm. Here the hurricane topples the tree uprooting it. Tarzan tosses Nkima out of the way but is himself struck by a branch, one assumes one of the big ones of the lower terrace. Once again the Big Fella is given a case of amnesia so that he is not aware of his racial affinity to the Whites aligning himself with the Blacks.
In another part of the forest, not too far away, Old Timer and the Kid are discussing their fortunes apparently unaware of this massive storm. As Old Timer sets out on the trail of ivory on the morrow he hears a shot which leads him to Kali Bwana. All the elements of the New Day are in place.
The action takes place not only in the forest but in the Ituri Rain Forest, the forest of forests. In Western symolism the forest is where the lost man wanders in search of his redemption. One has to find one's way out of the forest for personal redemption. Thus Old Timer and Kali lose their way wandering around in the forest hopelessly lost. At one point Old Timer can't see the constellations to navigate at night. At another the forest is so dark he can't see the sun to navigate by it. Both he and Kali have to be rescued by Tarzan after he regains his memory.
As David Adams has pointed out Sheeta the panther is always associated with the Anima or female. Usually Sheeta is described as a panther but in this novel Sheeta is the Leopard. The smell of Sheeta is overwhelming throughout this novel. In this case I think we may be sure that Sheeta represents the fear of the feminine. Tarzan and Nkima are inseparable in this novel. Throughout the entire novel Nkima complains about the small of Sheeta who wishes to devour him, in other words, to emasculate him. So Burroughs is afraid of what is happening to him in regards of Florence. When Tarzan recovers consciousness after the battle with the Leopard Men the first thing he does is call Nkima. The little monkey in his place on Tarzan's shoulder reminds one of the Egypian Ka or double. Tarzan the fearless and Nkima the fearful. Burroughs as a child confronted by John the Bully.
As an aspect of Tarzan's- and Burroughs'- character Nkima probably represents his more chicken livered side. There is no record of Tarzan ever having fear, he doesn't even know the meaning of the word, but Burroughs did hence Nkima who knows nothing but fear. Neither Tarzan nor Burroughs have ever been what one would call ladies men hence if not fear of the feminine at least an apprehension of it. As Burroughs is now reaching a major crisis of his life having now to choose either Emma or Florence it is not to be wondered that the forest reeks of Sheeta. Indeed, the Leopard Men themselves are symbols of the feminine and they intend to sacrifice Old Timer. Thus one has the leopard as Leopard god and Kali Bwana as his Leopard goddess.
The tremendous rainfall, itself a symbol of regeneration and fertility from the male sky god would create a steaming swamplike atmosphere as it fell on Mother Earth while the temple of the Leopard God itself was in a crocodile infested swamp.
First the Crocodile as symbol, Penguin p. 244:
The crocodile which carries the Earth on its back, is a divinity of darkness and the Moon, whose greed is like that of the NIGHT which each evening devours the Sun. From civilization to civilization and from age to age the crododile exhibits a high proportion of the countless links in that basic symbolic chain which belongs to the controlling forces of death and rebirth. The crocodile may be a formidable figure, but this is because like all expression of the power of fate, what he displays is inevitable- darkness falling so that daylight may return, death striking so that life may be reborn.
In other words, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Poor Emma. Obviously for ERB he is killing his past so that his future may be born.
The temple is in the center of a swamp so deep withing the forest that the sun never shines on it. The swamp is the quintessential female symbol. It is in the Lernean swamp where Heracles has to battle with the Hydra. Hydra=the water of the feminine and the irrational. Each time Heracles cuts off one of the seven heads another grows in its place until he cauterizes each severance with fire, that is the power of the male intellect.
Thus, one has crocodiles, leopards, water, swamp, the river and Stygian darkness. if you can't rise above the fear of the feminine, you will be swamped, drowned in her waters. The only entrance and exit is this slow moving river is obscured by the forest. This river of mystery and death, this impenentrable forest. The River is the last of the great symbols we will consider, Penguin p. 808:
The symbolism of rivers and running water is simultaneously that of the 'universal potentiality' and that of the 'fluidity of forms' (Schuan) of fertility, death and revewal. The stream is that of life and death. It may be regarded as flowing down to the sea; as a current against which one swims; or as something to be crossed from one bank to another. Flowing into the sea it is the the gathering of the waters, the return to an undifferentiated state, attaining Nirvana. Swimming against the stream is clearly returning to the divine source, the First Cause. Crossing the river is overcoming an obstacle, separating two realms or conditions, the phenomenal world and the unconditioned state, the world of the senses and the state of non-attachment.
Then this from Burroughs, p. 191:
The sun was sinking behind the western forest, its light playing on the surging current of the great river that rolled past the village of Bobolo. A man and a woman stood looking out across the water that was plunging westward in its long journey to the sea down to the trading posts and the towns and the ships, which are the frail links that connect the dark forest with civilization.
If one looks at this novel from an esoteric symbolic point of view the symbols tell their own story.
As Old Timer says Kali means Woman. At the beginning we have Woman and the Shaggy Man.
I haven't given the symbolism of the Shaggy Man yet so using the Penguin Dictionary of Symbols again under the heading Rags and Tatters, p. 782:
(Rags And Tatters) are the symbol of anxiety and lesions of the psyche as well as that material poverty which, in folktale, is sometimes adopted as a disguise by princes, princesses and wizards. It denotes simultaneously poverty and anxiety or cloaks inner riches under an appearance of wretchedness, thus displaying the superiority of the inner over the outer self.
Thus Kali- the Woman- the symbol of death, birth and regeneration, and The Shaggy Man or the Frog Prince, the Hero in disguise, waiting to be regenerated by the kiss of the ultimate Woman. A classic fairy tale, actually, with a tip of the hat to David Adams for insisting on the fairy tale connection.
The Man, the Woman, the Storm with a tremendous display of Lightning, Thunder, Wind and Rain completely transforming both the physical and psychic landscapes bringing the Man and the Woman together.
The Woman is then captured by the repressed sexual desire of the Leopard Men who wish to install her as their Goddess. The Woman or Kali is stripped Naked and then adorned with various attributes of the Leopard Cult.
As in various myths, fairytale and folklore stories the Man and the Woman (the Anima and Animus) have been separated by Fate and must fight through all obstacles to be reunited.
Kali (Woman) is led through the teeming, steaming forest with a rope around her neck to the big river down which she is canoed to a smaller stream, 'the silent river of mystery and death' in the darkest, swampiest, most crocodile infested part of the darkest of dark forests.
Abandoning all other concerns the Shaggy Man pursues Kali to the village of the Leopard Men where he is taken prisoner, then taken down the silent river (the Styx?) to be sacrificed. By a miracle the two escape only to be separated again while the Shaggy Man is taken back to the temple of the Leopard Men. Kali, Woman, is captured by a Black chief to serve his sexual needs. Rape again. White=Light, Black= Darkness. Thus the ever present threat of rape seems to be about to be fulfilled. But no, the elder wife of the Black chief objects to the White Woman. Out of the pot and into the fire. The Woman is left with Pygmies who are even more vile than the Blacks.
But now a Deus ex-machina, Tarzan, has released the Shaggy Man. Hot in pursuit he follows Woman to the Pygmy camp. He madly attempts rescue which is successful once again because of the Deus ex machina.
It's not over yet folks. ERB can make any 192 page story go on for a near eternity. Together again Kali and the Shaggy Man are once more torn assunder when the Deus ex machina sends an ape who captures the Shaggy Man. Makes you breathless, doesn't it? Deus once again reunites the Woman and Shaggy Man. Now, if you will notice the Shaggy Man forces a kiss on Woman. His act of violence shames him so that he finds redemption in his remorse. Thus the kiss of Woman has returned the Frog Prince to his rightful form.
As the story ends the two are about to leave the dark forest for the light of civilization down river.
Thus one has the classic myths- Psyche and Eros, Perseus and Andromeda and many others, numerous fairy tales -Cinderella, one which ERB has used before, and much folklore. It is done very well, too, if you're following the bouncing ball.
It is noteworthy that the work of another great author is misunderstood too. I refer to the ancient poet Homer. While Homer's reputation is very great no one understands the Iliad. The adventures of the Gods and Goddesses are beyond the comprehension of classical scholars. Thus they prefer the Odyssey which is written in a more comprehensible if pedestrian style. If I remember correctly the Five Foot Shelf excludes the Iliad while containing the Odyssey. While both are attributed to Homer they must have been written by two different mind sets. The psychology of each is too different to have been written by one mind. Besides the Iliad concerns the middle part of the Siege of Troy while the Odyssey skips all the way to the story of only one of the Returns.
There are similarities in the way Burroughs and Homer tell their stories but to avoid argument Homer is incomparably the greater.
Nevertheless Burroughs has masterfully used a set of symbols to supply a very rich subtext to this story and he has done it intentionally. He does know whereof he speaks. I don't think there is any doubt that he has studied Esoterica. Probably the topic was of life long interest both in the old kook capitol Chicago and the new kook capitol of Los Angeles. (Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb.)
There was a lot of esoterica going on in LA. The Golden Dawn of Aleister Crowley was out in the desert at Barstow, Manly Hall was advising the movies on estoteric matters, the Vedantists were established and the Theosophists had a terrific college in LA.
Anybody who thinks ERB wasn't interested in such things doesn't know how to spell Edgar Rice Burroughs.
While ERB wouldn't touch a religious theme unless 'highly fictionized' he managed to highly fictionize all manner of religion in this great novel of his mature period. He was working at break neck pace too.
Love this stuff.
On to Part IV which will deal with the cast of characters. Inevitably there's a certain amount of repitition but I try to cast the stuff in different highlights, crosslights and aspects. This stuff deserves a thorough examination.
Posted in R.E. Prindle, Uncategorized | Tagged Cinema, Film, Irving Thalberg, Leopard Men, Louis B. Mayer, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, MGM, Movies, Tarzan And The Leopard Men, Tarzan Triumphant, W.S. Van Dyke | Leave a Comment »
A Review: Part I,Tarzan And The Leopard Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs.
While Tarzan And The Leopard Men is not well thought of by Bibliophiles being considered the worst of the series, I can't find any reason to believe this. I couldn't place it in the top five but the book is on a general par with the rest of the series, perhaps a little better.
I think the problem arises because it is thought to portray the African in a negative light. As with the Mafia there are those who deny the Leopard cult because it is offensive to their sensibilities. They prefer to see the African as a 'noble savage.' I have no problem with this attitude but I prefer historical accuracy to anything I might wish to believe.
Trader Horn
The existence of the Leopard cult in no way diminishes the character of the African. Secret societies are part of every culture in this multi-cultural world. Many of them are murderous. The Assasins of Hasani Sabah of Persia are a notorious example. The Illuminati who were responsible for the worst atrocities of the French Revolution are another. The Freemasons who while perhaps not so violent function, have functioned and do function as a secret brotherhood who help each other against society. The Mafia and Organized Crime in general are secret societies on a par with Leopard Men. During the thirties Lepke Buchalter ran the infamous Murder, Inc. So I see no reason to lower one's opinion of the book because it may seem to certain sensibilities, by no means shared by all, to disparage the Negro. The events in the Congo after independence and the events in Shonaland happening now are so horrific they make the Leopard Men seem like novices.
The book Tarzan And The Leopard Men was written over July-September of 1931; a trifle of a rush job even for a fast writer like Burroughs. The story was published in Blue Book from Auguast 1932 to January 1933. Book publication was delayed until 1936 so there may have been some editing to reflect personal events over that period.
As the novel shows a rather direct influence from both the book and movie of Trader Horn Burroughs may have received some criticism from the magazine publication hence delaying book publication until time had dimmed the memory.
When Burroughs formed his publishing company he had expected to write a Tarzan novel a year. That schedule would have been adhered to except for this novel that was interjected into the series out of order of its writing.
The cause of the disturbance is very easy to find. In February of 1931 MGM released it great African epic Trader Horn. According to the ERBzine Bio Timeline for the 1930s, on February 23 ERB and Emma drove into Hollywood to catch the show. So we do know exactly when he saw the movie, or, at least, the first half of it. At intermission Emma remembered that they were to babysit for daughter Joan drawing her husband from the theatre. I'm sure ERB steamed over that for more than a day.
At that date he was in the midst of writing Tarzan Triumphant but Trader Horn aroused him so much that he began to plan a rejoinder. After completing Triumphant in May he conceived Leopard Men and rushed it through. Perhaps ERB thought Horn infringed on the Big Bwana's African domain as Leopard Men is a virtual reformulation of Horn using elements from both the book and movie. Of course ERB 'adapted' Horn for his own needs. Trader Horn was to be an influence on the rest of the series.
The African Chief
Trader Horn as a book first appeared in 1927. It was a non-fiction best seller in both '27 and '28, in the top five for both years, a tremendous success. That alone might have aroused ERB's jealousy. Whether he read the book between its issue date and his viewing of the movie isn't known but that he had read it by the time he wrote Leopard Men is clear. The title does not appear in his library although Director W.S. Van Dyke's 1931 story of the African filming, Horning Into Africa, does. ERB undoubtedly used Van Dyke's book as background for his 1933 effort, Tarzan And The Lion Man.
Don't look for a copy of Van Dyke in your library; the book was privately printed and distributed. Copies are available on the internet but at collector prices of from one to several hundreds of dollars. Thus it will readily be seen how large a space Trader Horn formed in ERB's consciousness.
I'm sure that when Emma dragged him from the theatre to babysit, ERB had no idea how influential Trader Horn was going to be in his life. For at least three years his career centered around it. In 1931 he saw the movie, possibly read the book for the first time and wrote Leopard Men. In '31 the contract with MGM surrendering the rights to the portrayal of his Tarzan characters was signed. Then Van Dyke and Hume fashioned Tarzan, The Ape Man after Trader Horn. Tarzan, The Ape Man was a major success changing the public's understanding of the character of Tarzan from a literate cosmopolite to feral child. In answer Burroughs wrote a parody of Van Dyke's African filming of Trader Horn. When the screen Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, gave up the role in the late forties he put on some clothes and became Jungle Jim who might very well have been modeled on Trader Horn. Perhaps an inside joke.
Trader Horn and Ethelreda Lewis
At the time Alfred Aloysius 'Wish' Smith otherwise known as Trader Horn told his story to the woman who wrote it up and got it published, Ethelreda Lewis, he was a seventy year old derelict living in a doss house in Johannesburg, South Africa. Etheldreda Lewis was a well-known South African novelist.
Horn made his meager living by making wire gridirons and selling them door to door. He had developed a sad sack routine meant to induce housewives to buy his gridirons out pity. It worked with Mrs. Lewis.
She engaged him in conversation. As a novelist she realized he had a story to tell, she encouraged him to do so. Horn wrote up a chapter a week bringing it to her on Mondays. As she treated him respectfully offering him tea and cakes and a last chance at self-respect before he peeled off for the other side of the river he managed to prolong his story over twenty-six chapters and one presumes as many weeks of tea and cakes. Trader Horn the book is indicated to be Vol. I. There is a volume two telling of his other adventures. Vol. I is currently in print for 16.95, probably less on Amazon. Highly recommended.
In addition to Horn's story Mrs. Lewis also recorded their weekly conversation which she appends to each chapter. Horn makes some very interesting and timely observations, a little sad but on the knowing side. I'm sure ERB was sympathetic as Horn confirmed his own beliefs. Altogether a very interesting and entertaining book which should have been a best seller not only for two years but more.
Horn's experiences were so wonderful that naturally the question has arisen as to how accurate his recollections may be. I have read a number of vulgar opinions stating that Mr. Horn was a liar. I take offense at such an assertion. The man was relating his life. He may possibly have gotten a few details wrong but, as they say in Hollywood, his life was based on a true story.
I have read the book five times now within the last four years. My opinion as to Horn's veracity is this. He very much wants to please and prolong a pleasant interlude to a rather grim life at the time. He had read a number of books including Burroughs and Du Chaillu. He claims to have known the French explorer De Brazza. He was an educated, intelligent and experienced man. He had apparently always had literary leanings.
Everyone has to be somewhere every moment of their lives and I have no doubt that Horn was on the Ogowe River in Gabon at the time he says he was. As a reader I hope I can perceive the ring of authenticity in a man's reminiscences . Also I have been around myself enough to have seen some things, even seen some repeatedly, for which I get looks of incredulity, so just because I haven't seen some things doesn't mean they aren't true. I reserve the right to question them to myself but stranger things have happened than I've ever seen.
While Horn is telling his own story I think he tries to make a good story better combining fiction with a factual tale. One questions his story of the White Goddess, Nina T. That story just doesn't ring true. It seems like he borrows a little from ERB. Nina T. has been the Egbo goddess since the age of four, five or six being now in her twenties. She was the daughter of an English trader George T. who died when amongst the Blacks. They then appropriated her to groom as their White Goddess.
While Horn is plotting to spirit her away he has to communicate with her in writing, one imagines cursive. He has to explain how she can read, write and understand English. Nina T. and Tarzan should have gotten together. Horn explains that before George T. died he taught the very young Nina how to read and write using a picture alphabet book. Over the intervening twenty years or so Nina never forgot, itself a great feat of memory. Not quite as amazing an accomplishment as Tarzan teaching himself to read and write from possibly the identical picture alphabet book but still very impressive.
The natives also have a giant ruby as a fetish that Horn says he lifted by having a replica made solely from a description he sent to his friend Peru. As he was the first White man to be initiated into Egbo such a betrayal of his oath doesn't speak well for his integrity or trustworthiness.
Thus, while I don't have any trouble believing his trading and hunting adventures I have to conclude that as Burroughs would say, he was 'fictionizing' the rest. Nevertheless it makes a good story and if relating it made him feel good so much the better. No reason to call him a liar and his story lies.
One has conflicting reports on his subsequent life. On one hand there is a story he lived well off the proceeds of the book in England. When he was about to die the story goes that he said: Where's me passport, boys, I'm off to Africa. Famous last words, indeed. On the other hand it is said that he died in 1927 in SA before he received the fruits of his labor. I would like to think he lived long enough to see a version of his story on the silver screen. If he had one imagines he would have been brought to Hollywood for the premier. He wasn't.
So, whichever way he went, a tip of the hat for you Trader Horn.
Filming Trader Horn
Horn, Van Dyke, Hume and Burroughs
Had ERB known of Trader Horn in far off South Africa turning in his weekly installments to Mrs. Lewis I doubt if he would have realized how large a part Horn's story was to play in his own life.
When the book was published and became a bestseller, something which Burroughs must have heard of, there must have been a glimmer of interest but still no recognition of Horn's future impact on his life. When he saw Van Dyke's movie he was duly impressed and was influenced but still probably had no idea of what loomed ahead.
By 1932's MGM movie, Tarzan, The Ape Man, he had begun to realize the significance of Trader Horn to his own life. When he sat down to write Tarzan And The Lion Man the Old Campaigner was aware. While no copy of Trader Horn found its way into his library we know for certain he read it. A book that did find its way into his library was W.S. Van Dyke's account of the filming of Trader Horn, Horning Into Africa of 1931. This book was used as the basis for Tarzan And The Lion Man.
It seems certain that Van Dyke read Trader Horn shortly after issue. By 1929 as the book was moving down the charts Van Dyke, a cast of many and several tens of tons of equipment were moving to Africa to form a safari to end all safaris. Not since Henry Morton Stanley in his quest for Livingstone had Africa seen such a spectacle.
Trader Horn was the first entertainment film shot on location in Africa. All the footage was authentic except those scenes shot on lot in Hollywood. I'm learning to talk Hollywood…all, except. The movie was a mind blower when it hit the theatres being one of the biggest grossers of all time. Burroughs saw it, picked up his pen, dictaphone or whatever, and following the script and book closely dashed off Tarzan And The Leopard Men leaving out the bit about the music box. Let's compare the three versions of Trader Horn.
In the book Horn is the central character. He is a young man of seventeen or eighteen who has run away from school. Peru, his schoolhood chum, does not enter the story until the very end. His faithful Black companion, Renchoro, plays a very secondary auxliary role.
In the movie Horn is a grizzled Old Africa Hand tutoring his young pal, Peru. In the opening scene they are sitting around the campfire before setting out for the interior.
Burroughs follows the movie in having Old Timer teaming up with his young pal, The Kid. Even though the character of Old Timer seems to be based on a man of Burroughs' age it is explained that he is under thirty while the Kid is twenty-two. Maybe ERB looked old but felt young.
In Horn Nina T. is a dark haired beauty the daughter of an Englishman George T. and an octaroon which means Nina is one sixteenth Negro but not so's you could tell. She is literate, after a fashion, being able to read Horn's handwritten notes in English. Horn buys her European clothes which she wears while yet a goddess.
In the movie Nina is a real primitive with the brain of an ape. Burroughs may have been thinking of her when he created Balza of Lion Man. She is astonishingly well played by Edwina Booth who has a mane of blond hair that would have gained her entrance as the queen of the Hippies in the sixties. A very exciting appearance. Just as Van Dyke and Hume made Tarzan an illiterate they show no favors to Nina. She couldn't have begun the the alphabet let alone recite it.
The White Goddess And Her Subjects
In the book her mother died before her father. In the movie Horn and Peru encounter her mother walking through the jungle in search of a daughter lost twenty years previously. I laughed. I wouldn't know if anyone else did as I was watching alone in front of my TV. By the way the VHS I was fortunate enough to buy new for twenty dollars, now out of print, is advertised on Amazon for up to one hundred seventy-five dollars. What a strange world. I hope they issue it on DVD. Maybe this essay will spur enough interest.
Horn coyly refused to give Nina's last name as she is an heiress to the T. fortune which had been claimed long before. The movie boldly proclaims her as Nina Trent.
As Burroughs tells it, the future White Goddess is known as Kali Bwana, a name the natives gave to her. Her real name is Jessie Jerome. Her brother is Jerome Jerome. This is probably a coy reference to the English writer Jerome K. Jerome whose classic Three Men In A Boat was in ERB's library as well as Idle Thoughts Of An Idle Fellow. Three Men is supposed to be one of the most comic books in the English language. If so, it was too subtle or too broad for this reader. I didn't find it amusing. ERB must have liked it. Jerry Jerome covers the Jerome Jerome parts of the name while the K of Kid provides the middle initial. Jerome K. Jerome.
The names are conceald from us until the very end of the book so there must be a haw haw there for the knowing reader. ERB calls Jerome Jerry never calling him Jerome Jerome.
Kali Bwana or Jessie Jerome is 'what is known as a platinum blonde.' So the goddess has gone from dark hair to the blondest. Jean Harlow had starred in Howard Hughes 1930 production of Hell's Angels making her the Blonde Bombshell of Htown so ERB was duly impressed.
In the book Horn was a bright young man, in the movie, an old African hand. In Burroughs although 'not yet thirty' he is an Old Timer, a bum because of what a woman done to him. Since Kali Bwana/Florence redeems his attitude toward women we are free to assume that Emma was the woman what done it to ERB.
Kali Bwana is deserted in the jungle by her safari because she refuses to submit to the embraces of her Negro headman. Old Timer discovers her camp where she tells him she is looking for her brother Jerry Jerome, in yet another parody of Stanley and Livingstone. Old Timer and the Kid have never asked each other's names so Old Timer has never heard of Jerry Jerome, even though he is Old Timer's partner. Thus the rest of the story need never have happened had they known each other's names. ERB likes this sort of thing, using it often.
Old Timer puts Kali Bwana under his protection which proves ineffective against the Leopard Men who seize her and carry her away to their Josh house to be their goddess.
In the book Renchoro is merely an associate of Horn. In the movie Renchoro becomes virtually a romantic interest of Horn. Several scenes are tinged with homosexual overtones, especially Renchoro's death scene while when Peru and Nina T. board the paddle wheeler for the return to civilization and Horn remains behind a big balloon containing a picture of Renchoro appears as a hearthrob for Horn. Horn returns to the jungle presumably to find a substitute for Renchoro. Interesting comment on the Black-White relationship.
In the Burroughs' story the Black-White relationship is removed to one between Tarzan and Orando. Tarzan has a tree fall on his head as the story opens not unsurprisingly giving him another case of amnesia. Orando happens along. He is about to put an arrow through the Big Bwana when Tarzan speaks to him in his own dialect. A handy thing to not only know every dialect in Africa, human and animal, but to know when to employ the appropriate one. Probably has something to do with a refined sense of smell.
Speaking of ape languages, Spain is about to vote on a measure giving apes human status in the country. So not only is the human species to be counted politically in Spain but leaping the Last Hominid Predecessor, an entirely different evolutionary strain is to be accounted human. It will be interesting to see how the Spanish ape population votes.
Orando then mistakes Tarzan for Muzimo or his guardian spirit. Thus for most of the book the relationship between Muzimo and Orando is that of the movie between Horn and Renchoro. And also between God and Human.
Horn traded on the Ogowe River in Gabon. Much of his story concerns his navigation of the Ogowe and its tributaries. Unlike every other African explorer I have read Horn makes Africa seem a wonderland. Every other writer makes Africa dark and forboding with piles of human skulls laying around, walkways lined with skulls. Horn's Africans are laughing back slappers who are merry even as they are shooting and killing each other. The rain forest along the Congo depresses all other explorers but Horn finds the Ogowe otherwise. The skulls are still there but Horn apparently finds them amusing. The river Horn navigates unlike those of Conrad's Heart Of Darkness or Stanley's Through The Dark Continent and In Darkest Africa is a bright cheery place. Maybe it's all a state of mind.
Van Dyke has only one river and that does not play a central role while it is on the dark side, a river of death. It is also the Nile in East Africa. Most of the movie takes place on terra firma.
Burroughs makes the rivers central to his story but they are dark, violent rivers of death. ERB borrows more heavily from Stanley on this score than he does from Horn. Actually, if one is looking for similarities there is some resemblance of Horn's story to the Beasts Of Tarzan, but the latter is based on Edgar Wallace's Sanders Of The River. We don't know what of Burroughs Horn read; it is quite possible that he read a few of the six or seven Tarzans available in his time.
Horn has the Egbo fraternity practicing their rites in a long building quite similar to that employed in Burroughs' Cave Girl of 1913. Horn would have had to have read that in magazine form which is possible but seems a stretch.
Van Dyke has his rites practiced in the open. Horn originates the idea of crucifying the victims upside down so that when the head is cut off the blood drains into a pot for ritual uses. Van Dyke includes an upside down crucifixion but leaves out the more grisly details.
Burroughs dispenses with the crucifixion scene entirely relying on his often used cannibalism. This may be one of the reasons the book is disliked. In the sixties the traditional cannibal cooking pot was derided as a false stereotype of the African. It was denied that cannibalism had ever been practiced in Africa. Black musical groups in the US like Cannibal And The Headhunters ridiculed the facts. Thus imputing cannibalism to Africa became bad taste. Perhaps when Leopard Men was reprinted in 1964 its heavy reliance on such rituals prejudiced a certain mental outlook against it so the story was derided as the worst of Burroughs novels. While very dark and even gruesome the story isn't noticeably inferior to any of the others.
In the book Horn is not only on good terms with the various tribes but he was the first White man initiated into the Egbo society. Egbo is at its most innocent a sort of Freemasonic society and at its worst on a par with the Leopard Men. Horn describes Egbo as a sort of vigilante society who do in anyone any member has a grievance against. Neither Egbo nor Leopard Men figure into Van Dyke's movie. As I understand it , Nina T.'s people merely practice savage primitive rites.
Burroughs who has moved his story from the Ogowe of Gabon to the Aruwimi of the Ituri Rain Forest with which he was familair from Stanley's account in his In Darkest Africa relates the Leopard cult that was notorious at the time. Horn does have a lot of leopards in his story giving a detailed description of how their talons leave cuts looking like they were sliced by knives. His natives wear a lot of leopard skins. There isn't much on Egbo available on the internet except a notice that it originated on the Calabar Coast which, if I'm not mistaken is where the Leopard cult comes from.
Fellow Bibliophile David Adams gives a good short account of the Leopard Men.
Burroughs undoubtedly had sources so that his presentation is based on facts of the Leopard Men but adapted for his own purposes. Thus he makes the Leopard Men the central idea of the story. Tarzan becomes involved with the Leopard Men through his role as the Muzimo of Orando. As an ally of Orando's Utenga people Tarzan engineers the destruction of the Leopard Men's village and cult in that part of his domain.
In Horn's book as a member of Egbo he is familiar with the Negroes, a member of the cult and has full access to the ldge and, in fact, Nina T. He has no difficulty in rescuing her whatever. He had just previously defeated the Egbo chief in battle so that worthy was thoroughly cowed refusing to even give chase.
In Van Dyke's movie Horn and Peru wander into an African Chief's village attempting to trade. The chief is uninterested in trading seizing them as victims for his sacrifical rites.
Horn and and Peru as trade goods offer the chief a music box that the chief scorns. In the book the music box is known as Du Chaillu's Music Box. At some earlier time Du Chaillu while researching gorillas had left a music box and compass behind that enthralled the Africans. Peru shows up with another that they leave behind, presumably in payment for the monster ruby.
Van Dyke apparently thought the music box ridiculous while Burroughs doesn't use it at all although he does follow the movie scene with the African chief closely.
In his version the Old Timer in pursuit of Kali Bwana learns that she was abducted by Gato Mgungu and taken to his village. Gato means cat so perhaps the name has some reference to leopards. Gato Mgungu is chief of the Leopard Men. Old Timer who has traded with Mgungu before barges into his village alone demanding he release Kali Bwana. In the movie the chief is a tall, extremely well built, handsome fellow. Quite astonishing actually, while Burroughs gives Mgungu a huge pot belly. Old Timer is given as short a shrift as the movie Horn. He is seized, dumped in a canoe and taken down river to the Leopard Men's lodge also, as in the movie, destined for the stew pot.
In the book Horn and Nina T. are well acquainted. She trusts him and is eager to be rescued. They easily escape down river in Horn's boat. In the movie Horn and Peru are shown o Nina T. who falls in love with Peru. Somehow an escape plan is concocted that she more or less leads. They are hotly pursued by her people. The band finds its way to the trading post on the river although Renchoro is killed.
Burroughs has Kali Bwana taken to the lodge where with titillating details involving gorgeous nudity she is prepared to serve as chief goddess of the Leopard King who is a real leopard along the lines of the various lion kings of Burrough's stories.
Old Timer is held captive among the crowd of Leopard Men gathered for the rites. As Kali Bwana is led out they both recognize each other and gasp. Unknown to everyone the Big Bwana is up in the rafters observing everything. From then on he becomes the agent of deliverance.
In the book Nina T. having been rescued, Horn provides the happiest of endings. Horn and Peru have only one goddess between them. She must go to one or the other. The happy-go-lucky goddess is willing to take either the one or the other so they flip a coin for her. The outcome is obvious since Horn didn't marry her. Peru wins the toss and gets the goddess. Peru is the son of the owner of one of the richest silver mines in the world in his namesake Peru. He has just come of age so he is one Porfirio Rubirosa. Nina T. has left the jungle to fall into unimaginable wealth. As I see her as nearly a feral child I do not envy Peru.
The two are married aboard ship by the captain then after a pleasant interlude in Madeira Peru and Nina go their way while Trader Horn and his ruby go another. Horn sells his ruby to Tiffany's from whom he does quite well. The stone while large has flaws so he didn't do was well as he might have.
In this volume at least Horn doesn't mention ever hearing from Peru and Nina T. again. He may mention them in volume two but I haven't read it.
In the movie with Nina's tribesmen hot on their trail Nina and Peru go off in one direction while Horn and Renchoro lead the tribesmen on a wild goose chase. Renchoro is killed but Horn makes it back to the trading post. Peru and Nina are now an item. She has either quickly picked up enough English to understand a proposal and say yes or she just likes the color of Peru's eyes. They offer to take Horn with them but that balloon of Renchoro pops up with the implication that Horn can find himself another African 'boy', which he seems to prefer. The paddlewheeler steams down the river with Nina and Peru while Horn turns back toward the jungle presumably in search of another 'boy.'
Burroughs version is much more involved. Suffice it to say that after many tribulations the French army shows up to suppress the remnants of the Leopard Men who were destroyed by Tarzan and the Utengas. Jerome K. Jerome locates Old Timer and the goddess Kali Bwana. The latter two have been reconciled and now are in love with each other. When Old Timer learns that her real name is Jessie Jerome he fears the worst.
In one of Buroughs, name games Kali Bwana had refused to give him her real name insisting he should call her Kali. Old Timer refused to give his last name but confessed to being named Hiram. Perhaps his last name was Walker. Kali could him 'Hi.' Just as there is a joke in the Kid being Jerome K. Jerome there is probably a joke in Old Timer being called Hi.
I refer you to Lewish Carroll's Hunting Of The Snark:
There was one who was famed for the number of things
He forgot when he entered the ship- but the worst of it was
He had wholly forgotten his name.
He would answer to "Hi!" or any loud cry,
Such as "Fry me!" or
Fritter My Wig!"
There is a copy of The Hunting Of The Snark in ERB's library so he must have read and reread the poem, as well as, one might note, The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam, so I think telling Kali Bwana she could call him Hi or any old thing is another of his literary jokes which are sprinkled throughout the novels.
Old Timer is overjoyed when he learns that Jerry and Jessie are brother and sister instead of husband and wife. As they are about to board the old paddle-wheeler, as in the movie, Jessie asks Old Timer to come with her. (Old Timer plays coy.)
The sun was sinking behind the western forest, the light playing on the surging current of the great river that rolled past the village of Bobolo. A man and a woman stood looking out across the water that plunged westward on its long journey to the sea, down to the trading posts and the towns and the ships, which are the frail links that connect the dark forest with civilization.
"Tomorrow you will start," said the man. "In six or eight weeks you will be home. Home!" There was a world of wistfulness inn the simple, homely word. He sighed, "I am so glad for both of you."
She came closer to him and stood directly in front of him, looking straight into his eyes. "You are coming with us," she said.
"What makes you think so?" he asked.
"Because I love you, you will come."
It can be plainly seen how all three versions of this scene are related while being derived from the original of the novel. As Burroughs adapted the movie version of the relationship between Horn and Peru he followed the movie ending.
Thus the novel and movie reoriented his own approach to Tarzan novels. The relationship of the three stories has literary repercussions. While it is plainly seen that Burroughs was, shall we say, highly inspired by Horn's novel and Van Dyke's movie, what might not be so apparent to the untrained eye is the extent to which both Horn and Van Dyke were influenced by the work of Burroughs which preceded theirs by a couple decades.
Horn admits to being familiar with the Tarzan stories. He was a first time writer here, while he had his own story to tell, he needed a format. He has chosen to emphasize many characteristics of the few Tarzan novels he could have read by 1925. While the Ogowe River figures in his life he probably would have been excited by the river scenes in Beasts Of Tarzan. He treats elephants and gorillas that he had actually seen in the wild differently than Burroughs but includes generous doses of both because they have worked for Burroughs.
Viewing from a distance as we are compelled to do one loses the savor of the times. A Burroughs reading Horn carefully might easily have picked up many references that slip by us.
Van Dyke and Hume on the other hand had been exposed to Tarzan movies for a dozen years or so. What they read can't be so obvious. But the very format of the jungle thriller would have derived from previous Tarzan movies. ERB may have felt he was entering a turf war as the Big Bwana's domain was being invaded.
Timber Raft On Ogowe River
He may have believed himself justified in expropriating the expropriators. If Horn died in 1927 his opinion no long mattered. What Ethelreda Lewis may have thought isn't known. She apparently had a hand in writing the movie script for Swiss Family Robinson. Whether she came to Hollywood to do it I am not informed although she was around the movie capitol for a number of years. A meeting between her and ERB would have been interesting.
What Van Dyke and Hume may have thought I am equally uninformed, however between the release of Horn in February 1931 and the release of Tarzan, The Ape Man in March of 1932 was a year during which a contract was negotiated between MGM and Burroughs for the use of his characters but not of any of his material on April 15 of 1932. (Erzine Bio Timeline, 1930s). Within nine months then the movie Tarzan, The Ape Man was in the theatres.
The generally expressed view is that Hume first wrote up a script involving a combination Horn and Tarzan story. This was before they might have seen Leopard Men in print. To quote William Armstrong from ERBzine 0610:
Cyril Hume who had turned the filming of "Trader Horn" in Africa into a suitable story outline, was given the assignment of writing the script for Tarzan The Ape Man, Hume's original script had Trader Horn leading an expedition to Africa to search for a lost tribe. En route, they discover Tarzan, who kidnaps the woman scientist member of the safari. She eventually returns to the safari and they are captured by the tribe they seek (who worship the moon), and are to be human sacrifices to a sacred gorilla. Tarzan leading a pack of elephants, arrives in time to save the safari. The woman scientist decides to stay with Tarzan while Trader Horn and his party return to the trading post.
Map Of Gabon And Ogowe River
This script may give some idea of how conventional Hollywood minds viewed both Horn and Tarzan. Apparently the relationship between th two was very close in their minds. This script leaves little room for the development of the Tarzan yell while it gives the feel of making Tarzan a subordinate character to Horn. Tarzan might or might not have been a part of the next Horn movie. If MGM continued to use Harry Carey in the Horn role he may very likely have had a stronger film presence than Tarzan who, one imagines would still have been portrayed as a feral boy as he essentially was in Tarzan, The Ape Man.
It would be interesting to know when MGM decided to film a Tarzan movie and in what connection to Trader Horn. The success of Horn may have prodded them but one is astonished at the speed at which the project was conceived and executed especially as we are led to believe that they had no actor to play Tarzan in mind when the contract with ERB was signed.
As Leopard Men was probably not even fully conceived in ERB's mind when he signed it could have had no effect on the signing. The release of Tarzan, The Ape Man in 1932 did have an effect on Burroughs. After writing Tarzan And the City Of Gold from November of 1931 to January of 1932 he was stunned by the MGM characterization of his great creation.
That shock resulted in early 1933's novel Tarzan And The Lion Man.
As influential as Horn was for the main frame of the story of Leopard Men ERB had all his usual themes and variations to employ which he lavishly did. This is a very dark story that I do not fully understand. The Trader Horn connection was the easy part. Now to the hard stuff.
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