Harvest moon (Zero tolerance)
OKLAHOMA CITY – Walking this morning I searched for
the Moon. I did not see it, but I did see it last night and was thinking about
it. The Moon has been on my mind quite a bit lately. After all, efforts are
being made in recent days to send NASA’s Artemis 1 to the Moon, complete with a
mannequin named “Moonikin.” Sounds ritualistic to me, particularly when there
have been a number of false starts.
Which got me to thinking (after reading Christopher
Knowles’ revelatory new post at The Secret Sun) as I walked around the
early morning dawn thinking about the synchromystic clues in yesterday’s
reported death of Queen Elizabeth II at the age of 96 on the eve of the Harvest
Moon.
I am not going to delve into my personal feelings
about Her Majesty (a short song about, well, you know, written by *cough* “Paul
McCartney” for the Abbey Road tombstone. But we do know her husband,
Price Phillip, repeatedly and gleefully said he would love to be reincarnated
as a deadly virus and take out most of humanity.
Oh, and what music was I listening to as I drove between Oklahoma City and Enid yesterday (observing a literal dust devil in a farm field in NOBLE County (the same county where Timothy McVeigh was pulled over and arrested on April 19, 1995). Well, the Cocteau Twins, of course, Blue Öyster Cult and their Agents of Fortune album. And the Spectres album. More interestingly, I felt compelled to play The Stone Roses.
I recall back in the frigid late fall of 1989, my
friend FLETCHER, picked me up in his customized 1955 Chevy BelAir (in Wichita, Kansas
– where John Cusack’s The Ice HARVEST is set – “As Wichita Falls, So Falls
Wichita Falls”) he was playing a cassette tape by a new band out of Britain –
The Stone Roses.
I IMMEDIATELY fell in love with this band. They had a
muscular-yet-delicate quality. Like a band Brian Jones’s son (had he had one –
Rolling Stone begats Stone Rose) would have started.
And The Stone Roses album art, with its colorful, lemon-slice, Jackson Pollock-like paint drippings, really made an impression on me at the time.
Oddly, on Sept. 8, 2017. I wrote a review of An Unlikely Prophet: A Metaphysical Memoir by the Legendary Writer of Superman and Batman by Alvin Schwartz.
The comic-book writer, Alvin Schwartz (who unwittingly creates a tulpa), talks about Jackson Pollock's creative process, since, at the time, he lived next to Pollock:
"In any event, from here we get to know more about Schwartz’s early years as a novelist and living near famous artist Jackson Pollock and his wife and when the Schwartz’s and Pollocks were discussing the artistic method of creation, Pollock admitted that he doesn’t overthink his methods, he just “lets it happen” and, amazingly, what appears on the canvas is what is supposed to appear. Pollock offers a demonstration to Schwartz and his wife in his barn studio …
“I began to realize that the paint did not seem to obey the law of gravity,” writes an astounded Schwartz. “It poured in impossible directions, never just straight down but splaying outward or sideways as though some other force were directing it.”
Pollock, like Schwartz, seemed to be creative vessels for some other unseen power that found energy in the creative process. I will admit, myself, to going back and re-reading some of my own articles and not remembering writing them, although I know I wrote them."
Many, many artists, musicians and other creative types have shared stories about how they don't understand how they created certain works of art. It's as though something was working through them, being channeled through them.
(As a side note: Taking the kids to school and
listening to 60s Gold station on Sirius XM, deejay Phlash Phelps remembers Liz
by playing “Her Majesty” by The Beatles, followed by the 1962 song “Her Royal
Majesty” by James Darren. As that song is playing, I tell my son the Rolling
Stones were established as a band in 1962. When “Her Royal Majesty” ends, the next
song is “Paint It Black” by The Rolling Stones!! Of course, it was featured on
the US version of their 1966 album Aftermath. Indeed! I then switch to another
station and its Paul McCartney & Wings’ “With A Little Luck.” I then click
over to The Beatles Channel and it’s John Lennon’s “How Do You Sleep?” This all
seems so … orchestrated.)
Oh, and the most shocking song on 1989’s The Stone
Roses? “Elizabeth My Dear.” A very short, English folk song in the style of
“Scarborough Faire,” singer Ian Brown offers this – along with a cough, or
gunshot –
Tear me apart and boil my
bones
I'll not rest 'til she's lost her throne
My aim is true, my message is clear
It's curtains for you, Elizabeth my dear
Many rockers hated the Royals. Morrissey comes to
mind. Johnny Rotten. But this was pretty dark. And here we are, 33 years later. Like
the inverse of “Her Majesty.” No bellies full of wine here …
But, I digress …
MOONAGE DAYDREAM
I go to YouTube to play some David Bowie videos and
the advertisement preceding the videos is for the new Apple iPhone 14
pro. It begins in Kubrickian fashion, with the new iPhone in front of a
projection screen showing the crescent Moon and the iPhone in front of it looking like the monolith in 2001:
A Space Odyssey.
Of course, that film inspired a relatively obscure
English singer/songwriter named David Bowie (born David Jones – not to be
confused with the Monkee – who first appeared on American television as “Davy
Jones” on The Monkees on Sept. 12, 1966, the day after the alleged car-crash-related
death of James Paul McCartney of The Beatles) to record a song called “Space
Oddity.”
That was in 1969. A little less than two years later,
in February 1971, Bowie records “Moonage Daydream.” This was just a couple of
weeks after Apollo 14 returned to Earth from the Moon (if you believe such
tales). Apple 14 - Apollo 14.
The song, which would later be re-recorded for 1972’s The
Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars, the album that
introduced the world to Bowie’s first major stage persona – “Ziggy Stardust, a
bisexual, alien rock superstar who will save Earth from the impending disaster
described in the opening track “Five Years.”
Shortly after the release of Ziggy Stardust, by
the time Bowie had moved on from that androgynous persona, synchromystic James
Shelby Downard was interviewed in the 1974-75 period, the same time period
Bowie had recorded and released Diamond Dogs, where the album cover
features Bowie as a half-man, half-dog.
Siriusly?
Oh yes.
We've got five years, what a surprise
We've got five years, stuck on my eyes
We've got five years, my brain hurts a lot
Five years, that's all we've got
In that recording, called Sirius Rising, Downard – sounding like a grizzled old prospector - talks about the 33-degree-line-of-latitude, menacing Freemasons, Saturn’s mystic rays, the alchemical connections between the destruction of primordial matter at the Trinity Site in July 1945 (and the creation of a Crowleyan "mannikin" in the Jumbo "bottle") and the later “Killing of the King” – President John F. Kennedy – and later Robert Kennedy and, in Memphis, Tennessee, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Oh, and there’s much more on this recording, that is rather
hard to find. Downard does talk about the advent of the “androgyne.” Those with
the non-binary gender identity. Something that seems all the rage, in 2022, 50
years after the world was introduced to Ziggy Stardust.
After Bowie’s ascension in 2016 and thereafter, I
wrote about something I referred to as “The Blackstar Event.” It was set into motion once The Man Who Fell To Earth returned from whence he came. Looking back more than six years, it seems that many current problems began manifesting around that time in early 2016, although things were percolating before.
And now, we can look forward to Moonage Daydream, a new documentary on Bowie.
QUEEN ... IN RED
Two years after the Diamond Dogs scene, occult-inspired rock n' roll marched onward. Blue Öyster Cult released Agents of Fortune, featuring "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" and all that cowbell.
First of
all, this band has a certain occult power about it. The band had
manager/producer/lyricist/guru Sandy Pearlman to thank for that, considering
his penchant for conspiracies and the whole Imaginos storyline
that were first crafted in the mid-1960’s and took on a life of its own over
the years, before becoming Imaginos
The first song on Agents of Fortune is
the menacing “This Ain’t The Summer of Love.”
“This ain’t the garden of Eden / There ain’t no angels above / And
things aren’t what they used to be / And this ain’t the summer of love.”
Nearly
a decade later the blowback was in full force. The Aquarian dream was dead.
But it’s the third track, “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” that
everyone knows. And while it played on classic rock stations for years after it
got as high as number 12 on the pop charts in 1976, the same year Rolling
Stone magazine named it the song of the year. It also makes a
notable appearance in the horror film Halloween and a source of inspiration for
Stephen King to write The Stand.
It was in 2000 that the song really got its due thanks to a
sketch titled “More cowbell” where Christopher Walken plays record
producer Bruce Dickinson (based on occultist Sandy Pearlman) who is trying to
get percussionist Gene Frenkle (Will Ferrell) to “really explore the studio
space” with his wild cowbell playing on “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” a song that
he feels will be such a huge hit that the band will soon be wearing
“gold-plated diapers.”
Writes
Knowles: "Speaking of Christopher Walken (who portrayed Whitley Streiber in Communion), one of
Pearlman's best-known lyrics for the Oysters was "E.T.I.
(Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)", a personal favorite of mine in junior
high school:
I hear the music, daylight disc
Three men in black said, "Don't report this"
"Ascension," and that's all they said
Sickness now, the hour's dread
All praise
He's found the awful truth, Balthazar
He's found the saucer news
I'm in fairy rings and tower beds
"Don't report this," three men said
Books by the blameless and by the dead
King in Yellow,
queen in red
From daylight discs to fairy rings to The
King in Yellow. Are you
still wondering why I'm writing about this guy?"
--END--
Knowles and Recluse are plugged in, man! And so was Pearlman. King in yellow? QUEEN IN RED?
Blue Öyster Cult, interestingly enough, will be performing at the Oklahoma State Fair on Sept. 24 and it is being sponsored by Louie's Bar & Grill. I mention it, because in my Sept. 9, 2016 Dust Devil Dreams post (exactly six years ago today) "The red flower (JUNGle BOOK)," I talk about Christopher Walken, who was in the 2000 Saturday Night Live Blue Öyster Cult "More cowbell" sketch. It was Walken who played King Louie in the recent Jungle Book film, a film where Mowgli picks up and plays a cowbell!
ZERO TOLERANCE
Coincidentally (or not), I worked on a story about a new coffee house on Britton Road here in Oklahoma City. It's on a spur of historic Route 66, which was founded in 1926, the same year Queen Elizabeth II was born.
The coffee house is called Zero
Tolerance Coffee & Chocolate, owned and operated by Maura Baker.
My boss, for the magazine I write for, wanted me to
profile Zero Tolerance. I was confused by the name of the business. Well, Maura
pointed out a reprint of a 1675 poster of a Royal Proclamation King Charles II
had tacked to the walls around England which called “FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF
COFFEE-HOUSES.” King Charles II had “zero tolerance” for coffeehouses in
his Empire, as they were establishments where caffeinated customers could begin
discussing why Englishmen no longer needed a monarch. That was considered treasonous. American-colonists-turned-patriots had had enough of British tea and their taxes. Coffee was the way to go!
One thing I will mention is that yesterday, when the news broke about the Queen’s death, I was working. I happened to be wearing a T-shirt for the defunct band Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians. It features a drawing for art linked to the song “Madonna Of The Wasps.” Now what that song actually means, I am not sure if Robyn Hitchcock himself could explain it. But there is an interesting verse that goes: “Gone Madonna of the swans / She waves a magic wand / And then she settles on me.” Oh, and the drummer on the song? Morris Windsor.
It was on this date, 246 years ago – September 9, 1776
– that the name of this country, the United States of America – was established.
More to follow.
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