It was fifty years ago today, or whenever it was, that this landmark album first came out, and the world is celebrating. I wish I remembered my first reaction to it. Since we lived in a small town, I am sure we didn't get around to buying it 'til maybe 1968. But there it was, and it was as if it had been part of our lives always.
Though it was indescribably weird, at the same time, there was something familiar about Sgt. Pepper, and it fast became a friend, an album you'd go back to again and again, maybe for the next. . . fifty years. I've started dipping into it again, though I find the Beatles so "dense" (no, not stupid, just musically thick and layered and emotionally laden, not to mention dizzyingly brilliant technically) that I have to take it a few songs at a time.
When I listen to Pepper now, I hear George Martin. His musicality and influence permeates every song. Along with the less-brilliant Magical Mystery Tour, Pepper is one of the Beatles' most highly-produced (some would say overproduced) albums, meaning that it is just thick with the bells and whistles that spawned the stoned, psychedelic, signature '60s sound. They could not have done this on their own. They were a gear group, man, and as they matured as songwriters, they could tear off a masterwork like Blackbird backed by a single guitar. But right there they were in an uncharted musical wilderness, breaking ground like crazy, and badly needed a guide.
I love finding snippets of interviews with George Martin. His love for the group is palpable, as is their trust of him and openhearted willingness to apply his complex arrangements to songs that, let's face it, were still pretty scouse around the edges. Though Ringo retained more skiffle than the rest of them, the fact that they remained working class lads probably kept them from flying off the edge of the world from the insane pressures of fame.
Please forgive these strange animations. I got making them today, and couldn't stop. What happened is, I decided to see if I could animate (if you can call it that) the legendary Sgt. Pepper album cover. Of course I could not go near the front. That would be plain foolish. So I tackled the back instead, though in its own way it is no less complex. All the song lyrics are superimposed on top of the four lads, creating an eerie 3D effect. (By the way, I used to be on the front cover myself: I clipped out my face from one of those godawful class photos - I was wearing a pink velvet dress with a ruffle down the front - and scotch-taped it next to Laurel and Hardy. Or was it Marilyn Monroe.)
As I poked around in all this 50th anniversary stuff, noticing the approximately ten billion YouTube videos on the subject, I inevitably ran into the stupidest conspiracy theory in human history: "Paul Is Dead" (as of 1966, when he was replaced by a double). I was amazed to see that the rumor, poisonous lie, or whatever it is, is still around and has so many viciously enthusiastic proponents. There are comparisons of eyes, noses, lips, even teeth, insisting that the Paul of today (indeed, the Paul of 1966 - God, I can't believe I just wrote "indeed") is a mere stand-in. Some even call him, inexplicably, Faul.
Apparently, the Beatles' music is rife with clues as to Paul's demise/replacement. Since he died in a car crash, John wrote, "He blew his mind out in a car/He didn't notice that the lights had changed." Never mind that John specifically stated that the song was about the death of Guinness heir Tara Browne.
I could go on. "Dying to take you away." "Turn me on, dead man." "I buried Paul." Bare feet, black carnations, "the walrus was Paul" (and by the way, conspiracy people see all sorts of omens and portents where there aren't any. Walruses are NOT a sign of death, people. They are large marine mammals. John's use of them was pure surrealism.)
This album has been analyzed and written about to death. Each song has brought forth PhD theses and books and more albums and all manner of things. My favorite Pepper story - and this may even be true - is about Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!, the circus poster come to life. George Martin wanted something special to illustrate the surrealism of Henry the Horse dancing the waltz, so he had a technician find an old tape of calliope music, cut it up into one-second pieces, throw them up in the air, then splice them back together as they landed. This led to a lot of snippets of backwards music that was, like, weird, man, it was just incredible. I don't know for sure if the Beatles invented backwards music/messages, but I do remember that in 1965 the end of Rain sounded a lot like "nair".
I always assumed Paul was alive, but then it hit me, as I was mucking around trying to make these silly animations: hey, why is he facing backwards? This was 1967, and though the conspiracy theory didn't really come out until two years later, the Paul-is-dead zealots would claim that he had died already and they were trying to cover up the fact that his "double" (Billy Shears? William Campbell? - whatever) looked nothing like him.
I was determined to get Paul (Faul?) to turn around here, and found an image of a guy in a blue Pepper uniform. I don't know who he is, nor do I care. He was the right size and shape for my purposes, Beatlish in a generic sort of way. I keep thinking he looks a bit like Dave Thomas of SCTV wearing a Sonny Bono wig.
I don't know. It is odd as hell, when you think about it. I am not sure if all the people on the cover were dead, or just most of them. I can't remember, and I don't want to look it up because I am getting bloody sick of the topic. If they were all dead, then Paul was "facing" them by looking backwards like that.
But wait, wait, no, JOHN is dead - we know that much. We know George is dead. Good old scouse working-class Ringo is still around, and he is SO COOL and hip now, it's a real transformation. It's really just stupid, because it means Paul never did Blackbird, and - screw it, it's all a load of crap! Who else could have done Blackbird? No other human being, living or dead.
This is my attempt to record that deathly sound I was writing about, you know, that doomy night noise that no one believes. It's there, but did not record very well, and I talked too much, perhaps out of nervousness. Bentley appears in this one, as he does in so many of my videos. He is my guide and my familiar.
More and more I notice another kind of sound during the day, whatever the hell it is. Am I imagining this? At first I fervently hoped it was the refrigerator going on and off, since it did seem to stop once in a while. But I checked when it was loudest, and the fridge was off.
It's always on one pitch, very low, very doomy. I hate it. I can't wear a headset or earplugs because they seem to concentrate it. I can't have music on all the time. If I'm totally absorbed in something else, it seems to go away, but it doesn't. If I focus on it, it becomes almost unbelievably loud.
The noise on the video, however, is definitely an aircraft. We've had some weird violence in our neighborhood lately, the kind of things we never used to hear of when we moved here. Recently there was a murder behind the recreation centre. Maybe the cops DO fly over, or the military, or someone else. Bill said he saw a police helicopter circling in the air above our local Walmart, where someone had threatened a clerk in the Customer Service department. For God's sake, people! If you have an item to return, bring your receipt. Don't wear the socks before you bring them back.
That sound MUST be coming from somewhere. It doesn't even seem to be outside. When I'm outside, there's too much ambient noise to pick this up. I swear, every so often it completely stops.
A noise machine?
I just had this weird memory. In Chatham, when I was growing up, the environment was very strange. I see now that we weren't a normal family. We used to get static on the TV all the time, for no reason that was apparent. There was an old lady named Mrs. Clackett, and for some reason my mother used to say, "Mrs. Clackett is running the static machine again."
Does someone around here have a static machine? A doom machine? A what?
Now I remember something else. In Chatham, there was a local whore. She had a lot of children, rumored to be by different men. One of her children was red-haired. A nice lady asked her, "Does his father have red hair?"
In the past few years, the internet has gone from "the gift that keeps on giving" to a cacaphonous bedlam of screaming-each-other-down-so-we-can-go-viral, wildly competing voices. The worst aspect of this is the mad competition to post a video of your kid having a meltdown and screaming in terror and grief, so that it can appear on the TV news and make the kid's parents vaguely famous for a day (until someone else comes along with a cuter, more traumatized kid). Never mind the one-year-old strapped to water skis that I recently saw: it was "his idea", of course, just like Jon-Benet begging and begging her mother to put her in beauty pageants when she was two. And just as safe . And never mind what the KID thinks when he/she is a little bit older, and the humiliating, shitty-pants, howling video shows up on her Instagram page, mocked and jeered at by her "friends". It's quite ironic that while internet fame is ridiculously fleeting, these videos are forever. There is really no such thing as "delete". (And with kids, there is no such thing as "choice"). The aptly-named viral video is truly a sick phenomenon, but who notices it? Who even says anything any more? Once more, we're frogs in hot water, chuckling away at the casual violation of a child's emotional wholeness for the sake of popularity and "fame".
Which leads me to something KIND OF related to this. Every time I look on YouTube, there are approximately one billion more videos on the subjects I am interested in: meaning that it is much HARDER for me to find anything I want. With no sort of filter on the quality/quantity of content, YouTube is simply drowning in its own material. I found a playlist with 1,697 videos in it just of old TV signoffs. You know: those things they used to have at the end of the broadcasting day before everyone went to 24 hours. (Too long ago for YOU to remember, of course.) I seldom saw them as a kid because I just wasn't up that late, except for the few times I was allowed (as a rare treat) to sleep on the pullout sofa in the den and watch Hoolihan and Big Chuck. But since they continued well into the '80s, I do remember signoffs and the strange things that happened in them, especially the religious messages - why on earth do we need a religious message before we turn off the TV? Is it like that awful prayer, "If I should die before I wake" - ? But even in the '80s, there were sermonettes and reflections and Thoughts for the Day, generally sappy and pretty excruciating. They usually rotated Christian and Jewish (but likely not Muslim) clergy for these, just to show they were Not Prejudiced and Jewish people maybe had something to say too, before the test pattern and the "booooooooooooooop" came on for the next six hours.
Sleeping in the den, if I was watching Canadian TV, which was not too bloody likely, there would be a nice version of O Canada with pictures of moose and squirrels and stuff, and Mounties doing the Musical Ride. But usually I'd have U. S. channels on. So I'd have to sit through the plodding, martial, heavy-handed American national anthem (which I now see has so many question marks in it that it should be called The Star-Spangled Banner?), in which the tune is almost as bad as the militaristic, violent, battle-inspired words. Sorry, American friends (especially YOU, and you know who you are), it's the anthem I hate and not you. In my present frame of mind, I despise ALL anthems, in fact. The very idea of one makes me squeeee-yuke.
So in clicking around amongst all these hundreds and hundreds of signoffs - most of them too recent to really please me very much - I once again ran into the above National Anthem Conspiracy Theory video. There are tons of them on YouTube. Like most conspiracy theories, it's stupid: people rabidly WANT to believe them because their lives are dismal and they feel like flops and failures as human beings. Or else they're just bored. Real life isn't spicy enough, they don't yet realize they're going to die, perhaps horribly - so they have to jack up their adrenaline by climbing the sides of buildings and stuff, and believing this shit.
Supposedly, way back in 1966 or whenever, The Government had someone doctor up the words on the screen to say all kinds of subliminal, authoritarian things (but only if you looked real fast). It's hard for me to wrap my head around the concept of displaying the lyrics of your own national anthem, to begin with. Unless English is your second or third language, you're going to know them already. You sing them at every sporting event, You would know them from childhood, along with putting your hand on your heart and reciting, "I pledge allegiance to Big Brother" (etc. etc.) I think you HAVE to know them to become an American citizen, don't you? So the whole idea of flashing the words across the screen, especially in such an ugly font, is pretty ludicrous, and may well be a hoax in itself.
Maybe if your brain works either really quickly or really slowly, you'd be able to somehow perceive all those Orwellian messages about God and the government and obedience and, most menacing of all, Naomi. (I am reminded of - oh, I've GOT to do a palindrome post soon, they'll get me out of this vile mood! - "I moan, Naomi", or even "'Naomi, sex at noon taxes', I moan".) But this probably isn't THAT Naomi. This is a Naomi meant to read backwards only.
If all this had worked, how do you account for the unprecedented upheaval in the social order in the late 1960s? Couldn't people read? Weren't they paying any attention to the subliminal messages? Reading them - actually reading words they had been singing since they were two? Several videos have debunked the subliminal messages as mere video doctoring, which of course never happens! How can you change a film? A film! Think of the Hanging Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. There are STILL people who believe that sucker was there in the original film, and that the studio somehow blotted it out by superimposing a bird. Thus Judy Garland and her merry companions danced down the Yellow Brick Road with a dead human body just hanging there in the woods, in full view of the camera, the cast, the director and the technicians. Though it could very well be that the munchkin blotted out the bird. These things happen in the merry old land of paranoid mistrust.
The Star Spangled Banner Lyrics By Francis Scott Key 1814 Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight, O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming? And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep, Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam, In full glory reflected now shines in the stream: ‘Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave! And where is that band who so vauntingly swore That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion, A home and a country should leave us no more! Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave: And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand Between their loved home and the war’s desolation! Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation. Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.” And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
Now, there are aspects of this that I find strange. Of course Americans don't go on and on singing EVERY verse of their national anthem. They make the first verse look like a walk in the park, and even speak of slavery in an ambiguous way (not to mention justifying conquest "when our cause is just").. But putting that aside, I find it strange that there are three question marks in the first verse, the one they DO sing at sporting events. I noticed this in the subliminal messages video, and thought it couldn't be right. I don't expect Americans to question things like this - oh, maybe they do, I'm just in a bad mood about Trump, and no doubt you are, too. HIM I question, and how he ever got so far.
Just for the sake of fairness, and because I don't really know the other verses, here's the Canadian one. We've been squabbling over the sexism of "in all thy sons command" for years now, wanting to substitute "in all of us" - which I wouldn't mind so much, if it didn't clang so badly in a lyrical sense. But it will probably happen anyway. At least it's better than the original suggestion: "in all of thy command", which demonstrates a jaw-dropping ignorance of the grammar of that line. In that version, Canada is somehow the one with (noun) "command". The actual meaning is in the imperative: "please, please, wonderful Canada, command true patriot love in all your sons (which includes sons with no wee-wee)!" It's the upside-down sentence structure that has people confused. But there are still people who argue bitterly with me about this. "All of thy command", indeed.
In the following version, there was an attempt at a literal/word-for-word translation of the French original, which came out about as well as these things usually do:
O Canada! Our fathers' land of old Thy brow is crown'd with leaves of red and gold. Beneath the shade of the Holy Cross Thy children own their birth No stains thy glorious annals gloss Since valour shield thy hearth. Almighty God! On thee we call Defend our rights, forfend this nation's thrall, Defend our rights, forfend this nation's thrall.
Now, HEY, this one reminds me so much of America the Beautiful that it just isn't funny. Amber waves of grain, and stuff. (I still haven't figured out what a "fruited plain" is.) O Canada! In praise of thee we sing; From echoing hills our anthems proudly ring. With fertile plains and mountains grand With lakes and rivers clear, Eternal beauty, thos dost stand Throughout the changing year. Lord God of Hosts! We now implore Bless our dear land this day and evermore, Bless our dear land this day and evermore.
And here you see our staunch ties with Britain, which existed until they weren't there any more. Which they aren't. But I do remember having to draw a Union Jack in school, and singing God Save the Queen.
O Canada, our heritage, our love Thy worth we praise all other lands above. From sea to see throughout their length From Pole to borderland, At Britain's side, whate'er betide Unflinchingly we'll stand With hearts we sing, ‘God save the King.’ Guide then one Empire wide, do we implore, And prosper Canada from shore to shore.
THIS one is getting closer to the final version, but it just goes on too long. O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love thou dost in us command. We see thee rising fair, dear land, The True North, strong and free; And stand on guard, O Canada, We stand on guard for thee. (Refrain) O Canada! O Canada! O Canada! We stand on guard for thee. O Canada! We stand on guard for thee. O Canada! Where pines and maples grow, Great prairies spread and lordly rivers flow, How dear to us thy broad domain, From East to Western Sea; Thou land of hope for all who toil! Thou True North, strong and free!
(Refrain) O Canada! Beneath thy shining skies May stalwart sons and gentle maidens rise, To keep thee steadfast through the years, From East to Western Sea. Our own beloved native land, Our True North, strong and free!
(Refrain) Ruler Supreme, Who hearest humble prayer, Hold our dominion within Thy loving care. Help us to find, O God, in Thee, A lasting, rich reward, As waiting for the Better Day We ever stand on guard. (Refrain)
And now, pant-pant-pant, here we are at the one we actually sing. Pared down immensely. It has been subtly changed through the years, particularly removing three or four "stand on guards" that really didn't need to be there. But I like it. I don't sing it very often because I don't go to sporting events. O Canada! Our home and native land! True patriot love in all thy sons command. With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free! From far and wide, O Canada, We stand on guard for thee. God keep our land glorious and free! O Canada, we stand on guard for thee. O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
TOP-UP. I usually top these things up because I forget something, or else think of something else I want to tack on. My Dad, bless his sometimes-belligerent soul, was born in England and had not much patience with what he called The Americans. He especially did not like their anthem. How often I remember (over and over again, because he didn't seem to remember doing things) he would bellow his own version of the first couple of lines: O say can you see Any bedbugs on me? He generally ended his satirical version with "the land of the free, and the home of the slave." He had something there. I grew up in Chatham, which is in the Windsor-Detroit area and a settlement point for the Underground Railroad, a historic route of refuge for slave families. I didn't even know what it WAS until much later, as it was never once mentioned in school, though we had a high black population in Chatham. Each of my classes had at least 3 or 4 black kids out of 30, and sometimes more like 5 or 6. But nobody stopped to ask how that happened. As with the Royal York Hotel turning away George Gershwin because he was a Jew, Chatham turned away black history and virtually annihilated it - when it should have been a point of pride. So everybody got cheated. One wonders why humanity has such a tight grip on mean-spirited bigotry. It will be the death of us, I am afraid - and sooner than we think.
You know, not every day is a good day. Some days are crap-ass, and this is one of those days. Not that anything bad has happened. It's just that nothing has happened AT ALL.
So I look around for things to post, but mostly they look around for me, because I'm always bumping into stuff. I found a great photo, from the 1940s I think, with a modern-day time traveller in it. No doubt a masterpiece of photoshopping, but I've seen that sort of thing before, even in films, and have posted on it (see Time Traveller on Blackfriars Bridge).
This, well. If you lived through this, and let's hope you didn't, there was a great to-do about "obscene" lyrics in the song (because the words were basically indecipherable). We used to say there was a "dirty" version and a "clean" version of Louie Louie, but I doubt that because no one ever found any evidence. I think the whole thing was a sublime example of the mondegreen, or misheard lyric, which I recently posted about. It's possible to see things, hear things, and probably even taste and touch and smell things that aren't really there: thus Finding Bigfoot and all those ridiculous ghost-hunting TV shows. But for some reason, this seems to be particularly true of hearing things.
The urban myth that the FBI spent years pursuing an investigation of the song is true. They played it forwards and backwards, upside-down and sideways, and couldn't find anything obscene (though the Kingsmen still turned out to be one-hit wonders. Just a coincidence? I. . . DON'T. . . THINK. . . SO!) I was going to post all of the FBI's smudgy, blacked-out typewritten correspondence about this, but it bored the piss out of me, so I didn't. It's even more boring than all that blacked-out shit about Roswell.
BUT! Listen to this again, and at exactly 0:55, the drummer (having fumbled his drumstick) yells "FUCK!"
Well, it might be fuck, or it might be something else. But it's Thursday, the week is dragging ass, and it should be Friday, so here it is at last, proof that Louis Lou-EYE really IS an obscene song.
POST-IT-SCRIPT: In 1972 The Kingsmen were found at the bottom of the Hudson river wearing cement overshoes, right next to Jimmy Hoffa. Just a coincidence?
You decide.
POST-POST. Oh all right. This thing would be incomplete without at least SOME examples of the kind of bullshit that went on with the FBI or the CIA or whatever (because obviously, Louie Louie posed a serious threat to national security). The reproductions of these documents are so plug-ugly that I tried to find a way to dress them up a little, paste flowers on or turn them pink or something, but it just didn't work.
This one is obviously a complaint from a citizen sent to the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover got a lot of fan mail back then, which he enjoyed reading while dressed in women's clothing. (See related post: Was Herman Goering a Transvestite?): was-hermann-goering-a-transvestite-you-decide
Can y'all read this? It makes for some boring reading. But this was the kind of dirty-minded thinking that led to the fracas around Louie Louie. People were hearing whatever they wanted to hear, and whatever they wanted to hear was filthy, I tell you. . . filthy!
This is sort of like, kinda-like, what they thought they heard, or maybe some people thought they heard. I can only imagine the salacious delight of these FBI agents as they listened to the thing 500 times while drinking martinis, carefully deciphering those filthy, dirty lyrics which included such words as "girl" and "park" and "awaiting".
But as usually happens (eventually), sanity prevailed. The FBI had to admit they couldn't make out a damn thing in those lyrics, that it was just one big mush-mouthed jumble.
We could have told them that, right from the beginning! But no, J. Edgar was having a slow day and needed a project. Should've gone out and bought a hat with a veil and a new pair of heels.
This is filed under the category of found, lost and found. I listened to it years ago, back when I was first beginning to take YouTube seriously and use it as a source of information rather than just stupid cartoons and 1950s soup commercials.
And yes, I DO look at alien footage sometimes late at night when I need a thrill before going to bed. Most of it is so ridiculous that I can't even laugh at it. And I know a lot of it is deliberate prank stuff, but there's something about this particular call that doesn't sound prankish to me at all.
This is an archival recording much cherished by the conspiracy theory community. In 1997, someone phoned Art Bell's Dark Matter radio program, sounding as if he was facing the apocalypse single-handedly. Either this guy is the best actor in the world, or something horrific has just happened to him. Or he has experienced a psychotic break and is spinning into an abyss of paranoia (all that illuminati/survivalist/freezedried/freemason/jesus-in-the-cheese-sandwich stuff).
What he seems to be saying is that he worked in the mysterious Area 51, the ideal picnic spot for extraterrestrials around the galaxy, before being forced to take a medical leave. According to the distraught caller, what we call "aliens" aren't just little grey men running around in parking lots, as they so often appear in these YouTube videos, or laid out on slabs being autopsied. They're some sort of evil mind-controlling entity that transcends the physical. The buggers must be beyond evil, or they wouldn't be preparing for some sort of mass destruction of earth's major population centres (why?). I suppose one could conjecture that these entities took over the minds of the pilots of those doomed planes on 9-11, but I'm afraid that lets us off the hook too easily.
When somebody really doesn't want to own something, some evil deed or some horrendous trait they harbour, they can in some cases split it off, shove it away in a dark closet, where it doesn't die but takes on a murky life of its own. Suddenly it's not "me" or "we", but "THEM", Humanity can't be that bad, can it (?), so therefore someone or something else has to take up the slack, to become the witch or the incubus or the - alien. This habit of finger-pointing and demonizing has been around for so long that it seems inseparable from the human condition.
I don't know if it's a reaction to fear, however, so much as a way to get ourselves off the hook. Fear we can deal with, or think we can. It has always struck me as a curious thing how much humankind loves having the giblets scared out of it - look at the whole horror film industry, with people paying perfectly good money to be shocked, squeamed, squicked, even horrified. Those are all extremely uncomfortable feelings, are they not? And don't most people prefer being in a state of comfort? Don't they go out of their way to achieve such a state (alcohol, cigarettes, too much TV)? I'm just askin'.
We obviously evolved with the need to make a quick exit whenever a predator suddenly appeared (the worst predators undoubtedly being other human beings).Was that flash of raw terror necessary for the human race to keep on moving forward (in a manner of speaking - though since Roswell, I think we've been moving backwards)? Is THAT where we first developed our addiction to having the jeezly Jesus scared out of us? It must have come from somewhere.
It was weird to find this thing again, because it had no identifying marks on it that I remembered. I didn't recall the name Art Bell, the content of the call, or the fact that the transmission suddenly went dead. I just remembered a very strange video with a black screen, no picture, and someone in a lot of distress. Maybe a radio show or something like that? Things are amazingly easy to find on the internet, however, so with a few almost random search terms, the thing popped up again.
Not true, however, of psychic bridging, another mystery I want to deal with once I figure out what to say about it. Back in about 2009, while researching The Glass Character, I came across a very strange web site and an even stranger video - both of which have vanished without a trace - which purported to explain a very bizarre form of time travel sanctioned by the government during the Cold War. Moreover, Harold Lloyd was directly involved and suffered disastrous consequences. If there's any grain of truth in it at all, I could sell it to the conspiracy theorists and retire in eternal comfort.
POST-BLOG. As so often happens, I have a few more things to say. That psychic bridging web site/video was one of the strangest things I've ever seen. In almost every case, no matter how weird the subject matter, you can google a topic and find SOMETHING on it. Not so in this case. I realize now I should have cut and pasted and printed out the content, which I probably could have done, but it was just so freaky that I kept avoiding it. The video was long and strange and, frankly, boring. It starred a dull young Englishman from an industrial town (the accent) called Paul Simon - not "that" Paul Simon. (Can't find that, either.) He went on and on about experiences he had with psychic bridging. I don't know how this relates to remote viewing because I really don't have much familiarity with it. All that tin-foil-hatted/Jiffy Pop-headed stuff does kind of make me disgusted, or at least extremely skeptical, because there are lots of nuts and fanatics out there who seem to WANT the world to come to an end. Maybe they crave excitement, like that Wallenda guy who seems to want to go on and on until he's half an inch deep on the pavement like his ill-fated granddad on that YouTube video.
So if there was or is such a thing as psychic bridging, and if it really is a form of armchair time travel (i. e. you don't exactly physically GO to these eras, but envision or view them from the present), what happened to it? Was it an experiment that failed? The Jiffy Pop-head league might seem so absurd as to be completely dismissable, until you look into the LSD experiments of the Cold War. Some of these were methods of keeping soldiers awake for days and days, but some of it was an elaborate form of spying. So imagine the possibilities of going back in time and spying on them Russkies before they even dropped the fat one on us! Maybe we could even do something about it, to make them stop. Better yet, look into the future to see what they WILL be up to. Sounds good, doesn't it?
But there are problems.
What would be the freak-out margin of someone going back in time from the comfort of their armchair and seeing THEMSELVES scurrying around, doing all the things they did in the past? What if you discovered you had the power to "bend" those actions somehow, to change the past - and here we run smack up against the time travel paradox that always makes me go "oh for Christ's sake" when I read science fiction novels.
It's a riddle trapped within an enigma inside a pickle jar. My husband is a certified Big Bang Theory-type scientist who knows all this stuff to a degree that is a little bit spooky. Over the years, he has evolved into a sort of science Yoda, folding philosophy into pure science through long reflection and experience. I sometimes ask him science questions, though one time he made me cry just by talking about Einstein's theories. I just couldn't help it, it was so beautiful and terrifying. Not long ago, I asked him in a come-on-it-can't-really-be-true way if you could really be in two places at the same time, and he said, "Oh, yes, of course you can. Theoretically, it's quite possible." In quantum physics, a particle can actually exist in two places simultaneously. Then I envisioned the alarming possibility of meeting yourself and wondering (as in Star Trek and so many other sci-fi dramas ) "which is the real Captain Kirk".
I didn't want to spend much more time on that subject, but I had to ask him about that related subject: time travel. "Yes, it's quite possible," he said, and if my hair could stand on end like Harold's, it would have. Time and space, he explained to me, are not etched in straight lines but infinitely curved. The folds can touch each other and double back like switchbacks in a road or river. And then there are wormholes! Like black holes, they really do exist. I knew it was true that an astronaut comes back from a space voyage younger than when he left, and if this went on for long enough we might see a fetus in a jar rather than a grown man. Time, like all the other immutable "laws" of physics, might not be the straight-ahead boring thing we assume.
I am reminded of Wiggs Dannyboy, the Timothy Leary-like "immortalist" of Tom Robbins' masterpiece Jitterbug Perfume, who claimed that the universe doesn't have laws: "It has habits. And habits," he went on to explain, "can be broken."
So I don't know if Harold Lloyd went nuts over Cold War experiments, but I do know that he had a fervent desire to serve his country which up to then had been thwarted by the severe injury to his right hand. (And that whole accident/bomb thing was murky, too. A plot by Charlie Chaplin to blow up his rival? After all, he turned out to be a flaming Communist, not to mention a statutory rapist.) As a magician and the highest muck-a-muck in the Shriners (Imperial Potentate - could there be a more Freemasony/Illuminati-ish name than that??), he may well have been open to alternate realities and the expansion of human consciousness. Or not - maybe it was just an accident.
Some nut, some Paul Simon wanna-be may have made up psychic bridging, or hallucinated it, or specifically cited Harold Lloyd for obscure reasons of his own. But he did mention that the breakdown occurred while HL was "filming" in the 1940s. Yes, he did make his last film in the 1940s, and it was a disaster, taken over by the increasingly weird machinations of its producer, Howard Hughes. (Do you hear the theme from The Twilight Zone? That strange popping sound on the stove?). The way he described it was: "Actor Harold Lloyd became self-detached during filming in the 1940s and was hospitalized." That's all.
So did his brethren in the Freemason/Shriner community help him out there? What happened exactly, or did any of it happen at all? Probably not, but it's an odd one. The fact it all vanished is also odd. I do remember bits and pieces of the rest of it, something about spirit entities getting trapped in cell phones. Not a common belief in anyone except major psychotics. I remember when email was new, everyone seemed to think there was something mystical and a little intimidating about it. Someone wrote a popular novel, an absurd thing about a woman who began to receive emails from a mystic in the 17th century.
Oh no!
The movie version didn't fly, though for a while it looked like it might. Reminds me of the bristling paranoia in the old Twilight Zone series, with computers taking up a whole room, rattling and whirring in a menacing manner and sometimes even talking, not in the slightly fey and sinister manner of HAL in Kubrick's 2001, but sounding more like Mr. Ed or My Mother the Car. Reams of paper would spew out like vomit, covered with earth-shattering messages of doom. Technology was coming, and it was the end of the world as we knew it.
And, as a matter of fact, it was.
POST-POST BLOG. Maybe it's the pale light of reason the next day - I don't know. But when you play the Art Bell Area 51 call again, it sounds phony. It sounds like bad acting. There WAS someone who called in later to say "I'm the Area 51 caller", but the voice didn't sound the same at all, leading the Jiffy Pop crowd to cry "Coverup! Conspiracy!" So now I don't know what to think. I don't know much about Art Bell's program except that it was extremely hokey. And they went through a suspiciously large among of Reynold's Wrap.
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(and this is the kicker): Lord forgive me for adding to this, but it has been a while since I've written at length. My blog does not live by gifs alone, though you'd never know it sometimes. I found some interesting stuff on Wikipedia about the influence on pop culture of the infamous Area 51 call:
This incident formed the basis of the song "Faaip de Oiad" by the rock band Tool which features said interview (with Art Bell's part cut out) dubbed in over frantic drumming and buzzing static.
The interview was also sampled in Konkhra's track "Religion is a Whore", The Faceless's "Planetary Duality", experimental Texas quartetThe Paper Chase's "It's Out There and It's Gonna Get You", MC Lars' "Lars Attacks!" and Sweet Valley's "So Serene" (around the 22:40 mark).
Anyway, this is what I found in WIkipedia. I've listened to them all, and yes, they do exploit this poor gasping sobbing man (or actor - I swear it sounds actorish to me now) in all SIX recordings. Most of them aren't listenable to me, so I won't bother posting them.
Just ONE more eekie fact, which I found out on the Wiki entry for Art Bell: the mysterious Area 51 call was made in 1997. . . onSeptember 11.
(From YouTube notes about Lost Cosmonaut video, posted above):
This is a supposed recording of a Soviet space flight in 1961. In it, a Russian woman can be heard complaining about the increasing temperature inside the craft before it is destroyed attempting re-entry. This was recorded by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers in 1961. It is reportedly one of many transmissions intercepted by the two brothers that prove the existence of the lost cosmonauts.
The following is a translation of what the woman is saying: five...four...three ...two...one...one two...three...four...five... come in... come in... come in... LISTEN...LISTEN! ...COME IN! COME IN... COME IN... TALK TO ME! TALK TO ME!... I AM HOT!... I AM HOT! WHAT?... FORTYFIVE?... WHAT?... FORTYFIVE?... FIFTY?... YES...YES...YES... BREATHING... BREATHING... OXYGEN... OXYGEN... I AM HOT... (THIS) ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL... ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL... YES...YES...YES... HOW IS THIS? WHAT?... TALK TO ME!... HOW SHOULD I TRANSMIT? YES...YES...YES... WHAT? OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW... FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW... FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW... FORTYONE... YES... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... IT'S ALL... IT'S HOT... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... ... I CAN SEE A FLAME!... WHAT?... I CAN SEE A FLAME!... I CAN SEE A FLAME!... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... THIRTYTWO... THIRTYTWO... FORTYONE... FORTYONE AM I GOING TO CRASH?... YES...YES... I FEEL HOT!... I FEEL HOT!... I WILL REENTER!... I WILL REENTER... I AM LISTENING!... I FEEL HOT!...
OK, gentle readers. So what's my take on all this? I found this eerie recording on a Top 10 List of Eerie Recordings (from a site called Top 10 Lists of. . .), and haven't been able to stop listening to it. I couldn't even get to sleep last night, it creeped me out so much.
Way leads on to way, and I found much more information about these notorious Judica Brothers, along with a million mostly-amateurish-and-absurd conspiracy-theory videos claiming the moon landing of 1969 was a complete hoax. The best of these is a clever satire (taken seriously by many, which was the whole point: to show how naive and idiotic these theories are) called Dark Side of the Moon. Watch it if you are at all interested in this subject, as it will show you how "convincing" these arguments can be (until they collapse in a heap of incoherence, or perhaps sardonic laughter).
So how valid is this claim that two young Italian guys, obviously smart and innovative, were able to pull down signals and even voices from remote space using cobbled-together, Heathkit-like amateur equipment? The documentary I watched, Space Hackers, makes a convincing case. There is no doubt that these guys were brilliant, and since two heads are better than one, they joined forces in an odd sort of fused-together, codependent manner. Suffice it to say they didn't get out much, and would have fit in nicely on The Big Bang Theory.
All this started with the commonly-heard beeps of Sputnik, the first Soviet satellite launched in 1957 (which I remember, though I was only 3 years old at the time: my brother Walt, a science junkie, dragged us all up on the roof of my father's store with a powerful telescope to try to see Sputnkik, which we didn't. Then we all went out and had a Spudnut, so that I forever confused the satellite with a doughnut hurtling through space.)
OK. . . confusing stuff, but some of it is compelling. Sputnik was just a start: the Judica brothers then supposedly picked up the heartbeat of Laika, the doomed dog the Russians shot into space. Then morse code SOS signals that read like howls of agony in the inferno. Mumblings from cosmonauts, full of suppressed panic, most of them in hopeless peril. The gasps, rapid heartbeat and what sounded like the death-rattle of another cosmonaut. And on it goes.
It's all Caught On Tape, folks, and last night, recovering from the worst migraine I've had in years, I was in an Oliver Sacks-ish state that can only be described as altered consciousness, my neural wiring sticking out all over my head and audibly sizzling. (As a means of enlightenment, I don't recommend this, because it hurts like hell and makes you throw up). So I watched all kinds of things, including something that totally debunked the Judica brothers' recordings - or most of them - as fakes.
It's true that the female cosmonaut in the video I posted doesn't sound like she's speaking in the terse, formal military language of space - but was it in place back in 1961? And was it common to send women into space back then? Well, they sent a dog. The Americans sent a chimpanzee. Maybe she was the next logical step before they risked sending a man. (The photos, by the way, depict the official "first woman in space", Valentina Tereshkova, launched a few years later after they had got the major bugs out of the system: i.e. re-entry without hurtling back to earth in a blob of molten metal.)
The Judicas had an enigmatic, playful quality about them (but then, doesn't Howard Wolowitz with his dickies and his brisket and his Billie-Burke-ish girl friend also strike you as a bit dippy?). Nevertheless, as the brothers' notoriety grew in the Italian press, NASA invited them for a "friendly" visit to headquarters so that they could pose a few "friendly" questions.
Their answers are nowhere on the record, nor do we know of any attempts to harness their amateur brilliance in the service of spying on the Soviets. It could be they were dismissed as chippers with a vivid imagination and a love of publicity. Maybe they were just attempting to score some chicks.
But if these guys really did even a fraction of what they claimed, it's astonishing. At one point they were supposedly able to compress a long series of secret signals broadcast from Russia - a code no one could crack - and found that it was, in fact, a few phrases of music taken from the opera Boris Gudenov. (No relation to Boris Badenov of Rocky and His Friends. Come to think of it, that IS a weird coincidence.) Another time they were able (supposedly) to crack a band of frequency by calculating the exact length of an antenna they saw in a photograph.
Or. . . are they having us on, after all?
There are those who believe we went to the moon. There are those who believe we went there, but didn't land and come back because it was technically impossible. There are those who believe we had to fill that visual gap somehow (with footage shot by Stanley Kubrick?). There are those who debunk, and those who debunk the debunkers. It becomes very convoluted, to the point that an obvious satire like Dark Side of the Moon (a sendup of the "I want to believe" earnestness of those conspiracy nuts) is taken at face value.
In some cases, it just makes people angry. "Those people (the filmmakers) were lying to us! Henry Kissinger did NOT say those things!" This speaks volumes about the IQ level of the average citizen. Like Brontosaurus, maybe their brains are in their butts.
So what do I think? Oh, I don't know. I watched the "moon shot" from a cottage on Lake of Bays, at Bondi Resort, a heavenly sort of place that nevertheless didn't have TVs, so we had to borrow one from somewhere. We had a wine-and-cheese party to celebrate the event, and suffice it to say I didn't pay much attention to the cheese.
My parents had allowed me to have wine with dinner since age 13, and after a gruelling Oxfam walk my Dad brought a glass up to my room containing a couple of ounces of Scotch mixed with orange juice. But this time I was drunk, really drunk, though I was only 15 years old. My parents kept filling up my wine glass over and over again, and when they cut me off, my much-older siblings kept right on pouring until I was stupefied. They must have thought that seeing me drunk was kind of cute, like watching a monkey that had got hold of a bottle of beer. After all that one-small-step-for-man business by Neil Armstrong (which should have been "a man," not that anyone cared), I remember lying on a hillside staring up at white-hot stars, disturbingly close, that wheeled and whirled like something out of Van Gogh.
Back then we all took this moon shot stuff at face value, of course. But one reason all these theories (most of them loony) are popping up now is that we're starting to realize how incredibly primitive the equipment was that launched these guys, got them to the moon and (even more incredibly) brought them back. The average SmartPhone has a thousand times more computer juice, a quantum leap (if you'll pardon the expression) beyond that dinosaur technology with its hair-raising risks.
Really, shouldn't all of them have blown up? Weird, isn't it. Just a coincidence? Sheer luck? Why did two Challenger missions end in flaming disaster, when the only Gemini/Apollo fatalities took place on the ground? (And just what did Gus Grissom have to hide? Jesus, I've got to get off this subject.)
Think of it now. What if those men had landed, made their historic moon walk and dramatic pronouncements, then couldn't get back? (My husband the science wiz, who seems to have inside information about some of this stuff, tells me that each astronaut was given a cyanide capsule before they launched.) I think even Walter Cronkite would have been at a loss for words.
The deeper you delve into all this shit, the crazier you feel. I am certain that NASA, not to mention the Soviets, did some spin on this stuff, maybe hid some things, minimized them or downplayed them. It's more likely the Soviets did coverups, just because of the nature of the Iron Curtain culture (which, by the way, I thought was a literal iron curtain, kind of like the Great Wall of China. Well, I was five.) There are those people who seem to think everything to do with government and/or the military is a conspiracy: it fills the endless hours while they wait for a girl friend (someone ditzy enough to tolerate all this shit). Oh, bring back the X Files, please.
Meanwhile we have this haunting, almost pleading voice, repetitious, so blurry it could mean almost anything. We hear what we want to hear. My own brother had Heathkits and telescopes and bunsen burners (which we used to melt lead, I am not kidding, I did it at age eight). It was trendy then to be an amateur scientist, a space geek. I married one, after all.
The documentary I saw was very strange because the brothers, now old men, still have all their dusty, creaking old equipment with the dials and chugging reel-to-reel tape recorders. The men seem like relics who haven't kept up, their one encapsulated moment of fame now stowed in a museum of obsolescence.
And yet, and yet. At one point there was some film footage of their "antenna", or at least one of them. I expected a rod with a little bulb on it. You know, an antenna. But this was a massive structure that spread out to cover the roof of their subversive little lab. It looked like a space station up there. How had they figured that out? You couldn't get that shit from a hardware store, now could you?
To hear these old men speak, which they did in Italian with subtitles, was sheer poetry. They described how the American press dismissively thought of them as "just pizza and mandolins". Einstein (whose theory of relativity was obviously a load of conspiracy-driven bullshit) would have appreciated this. Enigmatic, rumpled, otherworldly as E.T., he had that same dreamy, subversive quality, the uncanny power of men who have stared into space, reached out in childish curiosity and pulled down the stars.
(Note. This is a summer repeat of one of my, well, don't I have the right to think so?, best pieces. It isn't really summer, but this sure is a repeat. But it's my birthday, and I can do anything I want. And if *I* didn't remember it, YOU sure as shit won't.)
