The Society of the Spectacle

 

Spectacle is capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image, and in societies where modern production prevail all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation spectacle.

Spectacle can take on many forms before it reaches its absolute realization. Image as a blissful social unification through consumption. Disillusionment with life is the life-source for the spectacle carrying on. Whether its is a lifestyle, military, capitalistic, or image spectacle. 

Its a mix of a treadmill dynamic and the economic foundation of capitalism created the ideology of the spectacle. Through philosophical speculation and a Marxist politics approach the spectacle has now become a boring dystopia. Philosophically it shows that we lead a boring in-authentic life, just passive phony spectators. From a philosophical stand point it is our alienation, merely observers in a world of objects, to the point that we have become objects. An army of consumers who have become what they have consumed,  similar to the movie Terminal Man.

The French radical theorist Guy Debord wrote about boredom in the 20th century during a pseudo-cyclical time and how time is a marketable commodity, pointing at tourism, theme parks and subscriptions to what he called cultural consumption as examples. How life is kept at a distance as if behind glass, without intimacy and awareness. People congregating with strangers in order to experience the world as a series of mere images. Condemned to a pseudo & hyper reality. The feeling of endless repetition is contradicted by the linear time that defines capitalism production. These constant innovations are not echoed in consumption, which presents nothing but an expanded repetition of the past. Because dead labour continues to dominate living labour in spectacular time, the past continues to dominate the present. Stuck in an eternal present, stuck in an unchanging world. For Debord the material aspects of capitalism is a material realm, but the real of exploitation and production is real and really does move. Innovation occurs in the factory and in studios, in a way that it never occurs in our personal lives. 

Situationist Techniques  

*Dérives -  ''It is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and "let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there"  

*Détournement - The cut up, collage, montage, juxtaposition, the refusal of original creation, everything has already been created just put it into new creations 

*Unitari-Urbanism - integrated city creations, games played on urban sites *psycho-geography - play as free and creative activity

Lettrism or ‘letters’ in French was an art movement founded in the 1940’s by Isidore Isou in Paris, influenced by the theories of Dada and Surrealism, Isidore Isou’s aim was to rewrite all of human knowledge. In order to accomplish this rewriting of all human knowledge he believed that transforming the letter and creating a new language to abolish all others would complete this. His idea of a language consisted of letters and symbols, creating a visual art. He aimed his work at all fields of knowledge including theatre, art, cinema, economics and law. His paintings including his self-portrait were covered in a layer of symbols and letters. 

The movement soon expanded by attracting numerous creative people, such as Gabriel Pomerand, Maurice Lemaître and Gil J Wolman.  Isou is argued to have had a connection with ideals of Futurism within his ideas. One of his main areas to deconstruct was poetry. He saw that many aspects of society including poetry, music and painting had been created with a blue print. In the case of poetry, he saw that Homer had created the blue print of poetry and that poets had simply built upon this blue print instead of creating original work. Isou wanted to be the man who radically changed the blue prints of society and become the original. He believed that deconstructing this idea through re-writing poems using symbols and letters would destroy the idea of the poem and therefore create a new Lettrism poem. 

He further tried to deconstruct film and cinema by making his own film ‘Le Traité de bave et d’éternté / Treatise on Venom and Eternity (1951) where Isou destroys the concept of the classical image by using scraps of film found in trash bins, scratching graffiti on these images to make them unrecognizable. He goes even further in radically disassociating the sound and the image, viewed as two totally independent channels.  The Lettrist ideals carried on into the 1990’s until Isou died in 2000. His friend Lemaitre continues to pursue the theories of Lettrism, however these techniques are on a much smaller scale than they were in the 1940’s and 1950’s. 

Hurlements en faveur de Sade (English: Howlings for Sade) is a 1952 French avant-garde film directed by Guy Debord. Devoid of any images, the film was an early work of Lettrist cinema. The image track of Hurlements en faveur de Sade contains no actual images, only solid white or solid black frames. It follows the sound track such that when there is speech the screen is white, and when there is silence the screen is black. The sound track uses text détourned from Isidore Isou's book Esthétique du cinéma, John Ford's film Rio Grande, work by James Joyce, and the French Civil Code. The time between speeches becomes increasingly long throughout the film, and it ends with a 24-minute sequence of silence and darkness. 

Debord wrote the original script for Hurlements en faveur de Sade during the winter of 1951–1952. His notes outlined a combination of original scenes and found footage. Debord planned to use newsreel footage, images of himself and other Lettrists, painted film stock, and sequences of solid black. For the film's soundtrack, his notes included Lettrist poetry, text by Guillaume Apollinaire, and music by Antonio Vivaldi. In April 1952 Debord published his original scenario in Ion magazine along with a preface titled "Prolégomènes à tout cinéma futur" (English: "Prolegomena to Any Future Cinema"). Debord abandoned most of his original plan for the film and instead used no images at all. He used speeches delivered by himself, Gil J. Wolman, Isidore Isou, Serge Berna [fr], and Barbara Rosenthal. Hurlements en faveur de Sade premiered 30 June 1952 at the Ciné-Club Avant-Garde 52 in the Musée de l'Homme. The audience became unruly, and the screening was stopped after twenty minutes. The film had its UK premiere in 1957 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

Orson Welles once remarked that “everything that’s been called directing is one big bluff. Editing is the only time when you can be in complete control of a film.” 

Critique of Separation (1961), as should be most obvious, takes this mark as its point of critical departure, and, in more ways that one, Society of the Spectacle picks up where the former had left off, further dissecting “the official language of universal separation”, voiced here (and consequently détourned) by appearances of French government ministers and union bureaucrats integral to the restoration of spectacular order following May ’68. Here, the political leaders of spectacular society attain an unprecedented star status, and their citizenry consequently becomes reduced to passive spectatorship; images of rulers institute a one-way, top-down communicative model wherein the constituent has no autonomous voice, no means of talking back.

The spectacle, Debord argues, thrives on the repetition of commodity form, reinvesting the structure with seemingly new products and images. By compiling image after image of the commodification of life by consumer capitalism (female bodies, political figures, product advertisements, popular films, and so on), his films expose this oppressive repetition and artificial sense of the new, and, as if to help along one of the most problematic concepts in Marx’s work, Society of the Spectacle (1973) ponders the commodity’s “metaphysical subtleties” while sequentially imaging automobile showrooms and naked cover girls.

In 1951, Isou released his first movie, the experimental film Traité de bave et d'éternité (Treatise on Venom And Eternity), whose premiere took place at the Cannes Film Festival. Although the film was not officially entered in the festival, it was widely publicized in the press and its screening constituted one of the festival's fringe events. While threatening to form his own jury to judge the film, Isou went door to door, harassing the administrators of the festival until they agreed to grant him a small, peripheral exhibition. The film consisted of "four and a half hours of 'discordant' images, enhanced with scratches, shaky footage running upside down or in reverse, blank frames, stock shots and a soundtrack consisting of monologues and onomatopoeic poetry". In addition, the celluloid on which the film was recorded was attacked with destructive techniques such as scratches and bleaching.

In one of the film's voiceovers, Isou states his opinion on the medium:  "I believe firstly that the cinema is too rich. It is obese. It has reached its limits, its maximum. With the first movement of widening which it will outline, the cinema will burst! Under the blow of a congestion, this greased pig will tear into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, of rupture, of this corpulent and bloated organization which calls itself film."

Following its screening, the work was deemed revolting by many critics present at the premiere. The film was booed and hissed from the start, but after the first section was completed and the screen went completely blank with the audio still going, the audience was furious and the screening had to be stopped. It was, nonetheless, celebrated by Cannes jury member Jean Cocteau, who called it “the most beautiful scandal of the entire festival”and handed Isou a hastily concocted “Prix de spectateurs d’avant-garde”. Including a reflexive discourse on the making of a new cinema, Isou's film became a virtual Lettriste manifesto. Following the scandal after the film's showing at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival, it was later imported into the United States, where it influenced avant-garde film makers such as Stan Brakhage, who corresponded with Isou directly afterward and let it change his approach to the medium and to narrative entirely.  In the early 1950s, one segment of Orson Welles' film journal, which was entitled Le Letrrisme est la Poesie en Vogue, included an interview with Isou and Maurice Lemaître.

Elvis & Colonel Tom Parker: Conman or Genius

 

According to last year's "The Inner Elvis," written by psychologist Peter Whitmer, Presley's problems with Parker were rooted in his desperate mama's-boy relationship with Gladys Presley. According to Whitmer, Parker was "a perfect psychological amalgam of an idealized mother. . . . After Gladys' death in 1958, Tom Parker became Gladys Presley," with whom he shared such physical attributes as a rotund body and a round face with double chin. Whitmer also writes that Gladys and the Colonel were both "masters of passive-aggressive manipulation {who} used subtle set-pieces of controlling behaviour with which they could coax and entice, rather than shout or push, to make their point. . . . Forever supplicant before those he perceived as authoritarian, in this regard Elvis was like a weather vane in a strong wind." My Boy Elvis: The Colonel Tom Parker Story is another great book on Parker.

And Tom Parker was a hurricane, one who first touched down on American shores in Hoboken, N.J., in 1927, after having stowed away on a ship. Soon after, Andres Cornelius van Kuijk became Thomas Parker and joined the Army ("Colonel" was an honorary title bestowed many years later by Louisiana Gov. Jimmie Davis, writer and first singer of "You Are My Sunshine").  After the Army, Parker gravitated to Florida, America's circus capital, and began honing the skills that would serve him so well with Presley. For a while he was an advance man for a traveling circus, slipping into a town to slap up posters, goad the local media and generally stir things up. It was a process he never abandoned, and sometimes you could find traces of that, as when Parker hired a troupe of midgets to parade around Los Angeles, provoking boat loads of copy about the Elvis Presley Midget Fan Club. Even at the height of Presley's fame, Parker himself would sometimes hawk programs, photos and buttons to fans waiting to get into a venue.  That aggressive attitude was a metaphor for the Colonel's stance after Aug. 15, 1955, when Presley signed a usurious contract naming Parker his "sole and exclusive adviser, personal representative and manager." The standard manager's fee then (as now) was 10 to 15 percent, but Parker started at 25 percent. In 1966, he jacked it up to an unheard-of 50 percent.

When Col. Tom Parker passed away Tuesday at the age of 87, it marked the death of a super-salesman whose one and only product -- Elvis Presley -- became the catalyst for a worldwide cultural revolution. Parker, a onetime carnival barker, never had a clue about Presley's sociological impact, didn't particularly care for rock-and-roll, and certainly didn't care for the fans. They were just marks. He couldn't have cared much for Presley, either. When the singer died in August 1977, the first thing Parker told an associate was: "This won't change anything." And even as Presley was undergoing an autopsy in Memphis, Parker was putting the finishing touches on a souvenir merchandise deal, the final chapter in his client's transformation from cultural oddity to commercial commodity. Parker and Presley represent the convergence of two characters from carnival culture: the poor country boy who grabs the brass ring and the mysterious stranger who fleeces the innocent. The Colonel was often described as a cross between P.T. Barnum and W.C. Fields; in the King's court, he was combination court jester, Svengali and Robin Hood. For Parker, success was never measured by creative achievement, only by financial payoff, understandable since the bigger the pot, the bigger his portion. When million-dollar offers would come in for a concert or some other project, Parker would smile and say, "That's plenty for me, but what about my boy?" And he wasn't joking. 

Everything had its price, including Parker, who offered himself for interviews at $25,000 for small talk, $100,000 for long conversation. Neither situation promised anything resembling truth, of course. Admittedly, the Colonel was a character -- fat, oblivious to fashion, possessed of a strange, unexplained accent. But he was a cipher, as well. It wasn't until Albert Goldman's 1981 Presley biography that the world learned Col. Tom Parker was really Andres van Kuijk of the Netherlands. By that time, he'd been an illegal alien here for half a century, as well as an inadvertent cultural revolutionary by proxy. And just as Presley's greatest fear was that everything would suddenly disappear, fear of discovery and deportation kept Parker from ever fully enjoying the fruits of his client's labors. Parker was the world's highest-paid manager. And since he demanded additional payments as adviser, consultant, technical director and so on, he actually made more in commissions and consultancies on some films than Presley did.

About the same time as the RCA deal, Parker formed Boxcar Enterprises to handle Elvis merchandising, with Presley getting only 15 percent.  Eventually, of course, the dancing chickens came home to roost. During an estate hearing in 1980, an alert Memphis judge questioned Parker's 50-percent commission as well as other elements of his contract and appointed a lawyer to represent and defend the interests of Lisa Marie Presley, then 13. The court subsequently declared Parker "guilty of self-dealing and overreaching" and said he had "handled affairs not in Elvis's but his own interest." Calling Elvis "naive, shy and unassertive" and Parker "aggressive, shrewd and tough," it closed the book on any further dealings between him and the estate.  After being exposed in Goldman's Presley book and sued by the Presley estate, the Colonel proved wily as ever. He filed legal papers suggesting that since he'd served in the U.S. Army without permission from the Dutch government, he had automatically forfeited his citizenship there. Since he had never applied for U.S. citizenship, he was essentially a man without a country and no one had jurisdiction over him. Such tactics delayed resolution so long that the Presley estate finally settled with Parker, and he received a $2 million settlement from RCA Records. That was the last money he made from Elvis. 

The Colonel had a bag of tricks that went all the way back to his carny days such as:

• Selling Elvis to Hollywood ''I dont want to read the script cose I cant read and write but how much are you going to pay me? We'll give you $25k. -That is exactly what I wanted, but how much are you going to pay Elvis?
• Never letting Elvis play to venues that aren't overflowing with people out onto the street.
• Telling promoters that they can have Elvis for $12k when other promoters are paying $10k for him.
• In the circus the Colonel had a dancing chicken act. The chicken danced because it was standing on a hot plate.
• Only released a limited number of records per year not to saturate the market.
• Invented an exclusive club called the Snowmens League Of America to keep people loyal. It was free to join but $1k to leave. The club celebrated the art of the con trick. ''We've never lost a member yet.''
•  He would get his watch out and hypnotise members of the Memphis Mafia and make them pretend to be a dog.
• He would solicit donations for dogs, and also charge people to bury their dogs, charge grieving people if they wanted flowers, and also providing mini tombstones.
• To check if Elvis wasnt too fat for his next movie he would have girls hug his waist to see if he'd put in extra weight.
• Made Elvis pretend to be single so women would think he was available.
• Used TV commercials with the only word being ELVIS!
• Threatened the Presley family after Elvis died, that he was gonna build an Elvis museum, complete with a massive parking lot. The Presley family settled in buying the whole of the Colonels memorabilia museum for $1million. The biggest snow job he did.
• Sold advertising space in his unpublished/unwritten autobiography book 'How Much Does It Cost If It's Free.' 
• While working at a hotdog booth in Florida, to make extra money he would cut out the middle bit on the foot long hot dog, fill the middle with sauerkraut and just have the meat sticking out at both ends. If someone complained he would say that they must have dropped it. 
• He made ends meet by painting sparrows yellow and selling them as canaries.
• If Elvis wore his own clothes in a movie he was entitled to an extra $10k, even if he was only wearing a watch.
• In 1973 he organized a live world satellite telecast. He got the idea after watching Nixon's live broadcast from China.
• Sold 'I Hate Elvis' badges.
• He considered his artists his main passion, ''you're my hobby''.
• He invented the patent medicine Hadacol drink which included alcohol.
• Sensing a marketing opportunity that no music manager had every considered before, Colonel Parker signed a deal with a Beverly Hills  movie merchandiser for $40,000. 
• In just a few months, over 50 different Elvis-themed products were produced, from charm bracelets and necklaces, to scarves, teddy bear perfume, Topps bubble gum cards, and sneakers... to record players, hats, and lipsticks in "Heartbreak Pink" and "Hound Dog Orange" - sold with the slogan, "Keep Me Always On Your Lips."
•  When asked about the deal between him and Elvis, the Colonel responded: “That’s not true at all. He takes 50 per cent of everything I earn.”
• He'd say ''this is probably gonna be Elvis' last film so we should double the price.''
• Even after his death, Parker continued business as usual: 'Elvis didn't die,' he said, 'The body did.' 
• The Snowmen's League Of America booklet only had two written pages then all the other pages were blank. ''A real Snowman reads between the lines.''
• He liked to rub peoples curly hair and say ''now you can tell people the Colonel rubbed your head, you're gonna be a star!''
• Gradually, Parker eased out competition to become the gyrating teen's 'sole and exclusive adviser, personal representative and manager.' So read their ironclad contract. 
• He used to say, 'You don't have to be nice to people on the way up if you're not coming back down.'
• He sold 500 spare penmamt sticks as ''Elvis special Pearl Harbour Day special: Teddy Bear Toothpicks'' to the Vegas hotel's Japanese tourists.  
• One of his fav saying was ''I'll be very happy if you buy something.''
• To build credit with Las Vegas casino managers he would send someone to borrow $500, he'd than put it in an evelope in his desk, not touch it, and at the end of the Las Vegas residency give it back.
• He would send his assistant Kenny Wynn on a 4 hour flight from Vegas to Palm Springs to pick up some catfish in his fridge and then fly back to Vegas.
• He had a very unusual mind. Most people have one voice of inner dialogue. It's our inner thought. We think all the time, words are formulated in our minds. That's our thinking process. Colonel had multi levels of inner dialogue.
• Parker had total recall. Colonel never made notes. He carried everything in his mind. And when someone would ask him a question about something that occurred maybe six months ago, or 20 years ago, his replay invariably was, 'Let me run my tapes'. And he would sit for a minute, and then he would bring the answer out.
• He bought 900 pairs of binoculars from Army surplus for 90 cents a pair and sold them at a dollar each (10 cent profit) at the back of the auditorium. 'They had just plain glass in them, but they looked good' he admitted.
• During his carnival days he gypped rube carnival goers with a quarter glued to the side of his ring.
• When he was a dog catcher in order to give the dogs new homes he would hild contests for people to win a dog.
• He also had a Flower Contract and people would pay him to put fresh flowers on peoples graves. Only he would go at night to different florists and get the old flowers for free. When people complained that the flowers didnt look good he would say '' well you should have been here yesteday they looked wonderful.''
• 
  

The Weirdest Record Ever Made: The Sounds of American Doomsday Cults

Isn’t it weird? How do they do that with their voices [ululates manically]? There’s a really good documentary called Death Cults or something, and it shows you them digging this enormous bunker, and [Elizabeth Clare Prophet] says: “The world is going to end on this date with a nuclear war”. The bunker’s not finished on time, but they go down anyway, come back out about a week later and the world hasn’t changed [laughs]. She says the master’s order wasn’t right, and that the world will actually be in four or five months. So they all go back down, and it doesn’t happen. It turns out she has brain tumours, which probably explains the entire cult, and then she dies. But it’s still going! They interviewed them a few years later. The women all look like Elizabeth Clare, with their suburban haircuts and clothes, and big smiles! There’s one piece on the album where they’re cursing pop music, and it’s just stunning. Hilarious. We play them at the beginning when we DJ!

“Together,” a man's voice intones. And then an onslaught of voices. Two are in front, a man and a woman; if they’re actually saying words, they're impossible to decipher. It's just syllables rolling together, the sound of lips flapping and tongues rolling over a single note. There’s something insectine about it, its nasality and its density, like a fog of cicadas descending. Occasionally—every few minutes or so—both of the leads stop to take a breath. You can really hear the congregation then: hundreds, maybe thousands of voices droning in a cavernous room, every tone and pitch in the musical spectrum. It is a great, heaving cloud of voices.

I’ve heard mantras and chants before but this sounds different. It’s insistent, for one thing. The energy is turned outward, instead of inward. And the intensity jacks upward every five minutes or so, the voices all become louder together and raise pitch a half-step, like a phalanx of semi trucks shifting up at the same time. After 27 minutes of these intensifications, the chanting is fast, high-pitched, the kind of thing that makes your eyeballs want to jump out of their sockets. The image in the mind is a congregation in the thousands, knelt down, eyes rolled back, filling their lungs with their intentions. What are they asking for? Then, abruptly, it stops. “Please be seated,” says the woman.

I looked it up right after the first time I heard it—on a late night show on WFMU, New York’s venerable free-form radio station—and located it online right away. It’s an old recording of the Church Universal and Triumphant, from an album entitled Sounds of American Doomsday Cults, Vol 14, released by a mysterious imprint called Faithways International. The cover, which had been copied and posted online along with mp3 files, is austere, an obvious homage to the old Smithsonian Folkways releases—a picture of a lighthouse, lime green and pink background. As far as anyone on the internet knew, there were no Sounds of American Doomsday Cults Volumes 1 through 13. The label, according to the internet, had only one other release to its name: a collection of original tunes by Aum Shinrikyo, the cult that killed 12 Japanese subway commuters in a terrorist attack in 1995. History and half-researched mythology blend together in the internet’s accounting of the Church Universal and Triumphant recording’s origins. CUT was a group in rural Montana that was at one time centered around Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who believed herself a reincarnation of Marie Antoinette and Guinevere who could channel a pantheon of saints that included Jesus, Hercules, and Shiva. Pictures show a woman with a perm and a dead-eyed grin—perhaps the most homespun-looking doomsday cult leader of all time. It was Prophet's voice I’d heard leading the chant. The recording originated sometime in the mid-80s. No one knew who had made the recording. No one knew who Faithways International was. No one knew where Sounds of American Doomsday Cults, Vol. 14 had come from. I reached out to the DJ who’d played it on his show—they were just some mp3s he’d found online a few years ago, he said.

I downloaded them. The entire recording is plainly amazing. Sitting through the entire 27-minute chant is a rush, consuming and burying, like being swallowed up by human voices. It has a touch of the supernatural; it exists somewhere beyond music. It’s thoroughly of its own making, science fictional. The rest of the recording is maybe even more fascinating: an entire Church Universal and Triumphant service dedicated to “the tackling of the beast and the dragon—the momentum of rock ‘n’ roll.” Mostly, it’s Prophet’s voice, preaching about the sexual perversion of rock music, saying outrageous things that are both hilarious and truly inspired. Chanting alone, she prays for those “subverted by the syncopated rhythm of the fallen ones and the misuse of the 4/4 time.” She “calls on the electronic solar rings of the great central sun.” She plays the music video for Tina Turner’s “Better Be Good to Me." The man, when it’s his turn, "calls forth the sacred fire” in nasally solemnity on a list of 71 contemporary rock and roll celebrities including Michael Jackson, Kenny Loggins, the Alan Parsons Project, “Cyndi Looper,” and “Scooby Dooby Doo." I felt like I’d found a buried amulet. There was something slightly morbid and voyeuristic about my interest—these are, after all, real people’s prayers. I wanted to know what I was hearing; what the room looked like; what they were saying. And who was this shady Faithways International label that put the album out? With slightly nosy intentions—like flipping through the pages of someone else’s family bible—I tried to find where it had come from.

I was joining a group of curious listeners, sound artists, and avant garde music obsessives who have been fascinated by the recordings for decades. The spoken parts of the album—the parts about Tina Turner and Cyndi Looper—had been a hit for years with underground DJs and experimental composers. Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle once said they brought it with them every time they DJed. Negativland, dissident sound collagists and copyright crusaders who’d once thrown down with U2, sampled the “sacred fire” rock ‘n’ roll-call on a piece called “Michael Jackson” way back in 1987. Fatboy Slim sampled it in 1996 and also called his piece “Michael Jackson.” Negativland's Mark Hosler said they found the original tape of the Church Universal and Triumphant service back in the mid-80s. It was titled “Rock ’n’ Roll Exposé #1,” copyright Church Universal and Triumphant, Inc. This wasn’t the Sounds of American Doomsday Cults CD, but the source material.

"It sure wowed us back then,” Hosler told me. “[It] cried out to be used.” But it wasn’t Hosler who found the tape—he said it was either band members Ian Allen or Don Joyce. Could either of them have been behind Faithways International? We might never know—they both sadly passed away earlier this year—though it doesn’t seem likely. A hard copy of Sounds of American Doomsday Cults, Vol. 14, which was issued by Faithways in 2000, is not easy to find. It’s out of print; every once in awhile, someone puts a CD or vinyl copy of it on sale for $100 (outside my writerly budget). I called Aquarius Records, the oldest record store in San Francisco, the city where everyone who discovered the recording seemed to have found it. But since the CD is out of print, the store doesn’t carry it anymore. And none of the people I talked to there knew where it came from (though one clerk said he still subscribes to new recordings from the church—they still put them out on CD-R and ship through the US Postal Service—because “they’re awesome”).

I eventually found a copy on the internet’s back pages—a guy named Earl Kuck was selling them on his website, Tedium House. He told me he bought a box of the CDs at a record fair in San Francisco ten years ago. He sent it to me in a package along with a wooden snake, the last page of an angry hand-written note, and a copy of Le Carillon by the Autumns. The packaging of the CD is simple—a pink booklet with two reprint news articles about the cult and nothing in the way of credits. Kuck said he didn’t know where the CDs he bought had come from, but he thought someone in Australia had made them. He connected me with another San Francisco friend, a guy named “Seymour Glass” who’d reviewed the “Rock ’n’ Roll Exposé” version of the tape for his underground zine Bananafish. “Glass" had an experience similar to mine when he heard it. “The first time I listened to the tape, I sat staring at my stereo with mouth agape for the duration,” he wrote. “I returned to the bookstore and bought every copy they had. I’ve made more recordings of this tape than any other.” I managed to get a hold of “Glass” (the name on his email was “Maria Estevez”) who confirmed he found the tape at a since-shuttered bookshop in San Francisco, which led him to lament "the plague of start-ups and luxury condos” in the city. "I have a long history of exploiting (I guess you could say) these recordings I love,” he wrote me, "and have been told numerous times that I am suspected as, if not assumed to be, the disc's midwife. It's nice to be remembered."

Now, I had it on background that “Glass" and Kuck are the same person and that neither name (surprise!) is real. It would make sense that they/he were the one/s who put together the Doomsday Cults CD from the original tape. Both claimed they didn’t know its origins, which was, of course, in keeping with the tone and tenor of this whole affair. I became convinced—and still am— these merry pranksters were, in fact, the “midwives” of the CD; that they'd taken the old tape and cleverly repackaging it. But they’d never tell me if they did, so I kept poking around for good measure. (I told Kuck I had heard him and "Glass" had never been seen together in the same room. He replied: "He and I are in the same room together frequently. People just aren't observant enough to notice.") Brian Turner was, as far as I could tell, the first WFMU DJ to spin Doomsday Cults 15 years ago, when it was first released by Faithways. He’s also the music director. I was sure he would have some insight. He didn’t know where it came from, but he said that when it first came out in 2000, he’d gotten his own copy in the mail. That’s not that weird for him—he’s the music director at a radio station, after all—but when he opened the package, he was startled to find he was thanked by name in the credits. He ventured a couple guesses about who put it out. "Elizabeth Clare Prophet has been touted by weird sound connoisseurs like [Gregg] Turkington, [Germs and Ariel Pink drummer] Don Bolles, and the ilk,” Turner told me. Otherwise, he had no clue.

Gregg Turkington is famous in the comedy world for creating the Neil Hamburger anti-comedian character. He’s also Australian. I felt like I might have been on the right track. I reached out to him right away, but got only a brief message in reply: "I had nothing to do with that record,” he wrote. “I have no idea who actually was behind it… though if I recall correctly, I'm thanked in the liner notes.” I got a reply back from Don Bolles right after. “No,” he wrote. “But my name was on it.” Elizabeth Clare Prophet laughed at us from beyond the grave.

In 1875, a Russian immigrant in New York City named Helena Blavatsky formed the Theosophical Society with her friends. Blavatsky claimed to communicate with a host of spirits, including Jesus. The society sought to unite world religions into a single belief system, and by the time she died in 1891—of influenza, at the top of a growing organization, besieged with accusations of fraud—she’d launched Theosophical Society enclaves in India, Europe, and Russia. Forty years later, Theosophy had made headway in America—including to Chicago, where Guy Ballard, a Blavatsky acolyte, founded the I AM movement in the early 30s with his wife Edna. Ballard, like Blavatsky, believed he could communicate with a spiritual dream team, whom he referred to as the Ascended Masters and expanded to include Buddha, Confucius, and the Virgin Mary. (He believed himself to be the reincarnation of George Washington.) The Ballards led their growing membership through marathon “decrees”—composed prayers shouted out loud by the entire congregation during services. In 1939, Ballard died suddenly, and immediately afterward, Edna and their son Don were both indicted by the federal government for mail fraud (which they fought and won before the Supreme Court in 1946). The I AM movement, like the Theosophy Society, had sprouted many groups of followers.

One of those followers, Mark L. Prophet (his honest-to-God birth name) founded the Summit Lighthouse in 1958. Like Ballard, Prophet claimed to communicate with venerable ghosts (he adds Hercules and Shakespeare and many more to the list). Like Ballard, claimed to have been reincarnated (in his case, Sir Lancelot and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow); and, like Ballard, Prophet's wife Elizabeth Clare could chat with Ascended Masters, too. The New Age movement of the 70s provided a glut of washed out and disenchanted hippies that swelled the Summit Lighthouse's membership rolls. Like the Ballards before them, the Prophets wrote decrees for the congregation to chant, but with less shouting and more of a controlled drone. During services, the Prophets would specify an intention—for example, the judgment and destruction of rock music—and the congregation believed their decrees, if they were forceful enough, could make the intentions come true. They could turn the tides of history without going outside the walls of their sanctuary. (In other words, what I’d heard as music, church members considered serious prayer.) Sometimes, while the congregation decreed, Elizabeth would swing an actual steel sword over her head, sometimes for hours. The faithful called her “Guru Ma." When Mark Prophet died in 1973, Elizabeth moved the church to Los Angeles and renamed it Church Universal and Triumphant. In 1986, as she amassed members and money, she moved again, to a 30,000 acre ranch just north of Yellowstone National Park she bought from Malcolm Forbes.

In these days, Elizabeth Clare Prophet is on fire. She’s built the Church Universal and Triumphant into a religion with something like 30,000 adherents. She’s leading marathon services to 2,000-or-so believers who live with her in Montana. And she’s starting to get messages from the Ascended Masters about doomsday. She shifts the church into full-on prepper mode. The church commenced building underground fallout shelters big enough to house 750 people, started stocking weapons, and stored thousands of gallons of gas in giant tanks. In the early 1990s, she told followers that Soviet nuclear missiles would fall on the United States at midnight on March 15. Local pharmacies reported being sold out of medicine, Band-Aids, bottles of water; banks said customers were lining up to close their savings accounts. "It's bizarre,” a bank official told the Los Angeles Times in March. "They don't want to wait, they want it now, and they want it in cash."

One night near the apocalypse, one of the church’s members, packing up his things, had his own kind of religious epiphany. It centered on the band Rush. 25-year-old Sean Prophet, only son of Elizabeth and Mark, often helped his mother spread her anti-rock and roll propaganda, but he nursed a secret: He loved prog rock. That night, Sean impulsively put on his headphones and listened to Power Windows—for research, he told himself—and was surprised to find himself moved to tears. He listened to at least five more Rush albums that night. Later, he wrote, "the idea that such talented musicians could be 'fallen ones' as the church taught just didn’t add up. They felt like brothers to me.” The experience changed him. He decided he’d stick around to see if the world did in fact end (never hurts to hedge your bets) and if it didn’t, he was out.

On the night of March 15, hundreds of adherents crouched in the cult’s homemade shelters, amid fetid buckets of human waste (the plumbing wasn’t finished yet). The sun set on the compound that night and (surprise!) rose again the next morning. Devotees started to pack up and go home. Sean and his family cut their final ties with the cult in 1993. (Incidentally, one of Sean's sons, Chris, grew up to play drums in Horse the Band.) In 1999, Elizabeth stepped down from the church—she’d developed Alzheimer’s—and died in 2009. The Church Universal and Triumphant does still exist, albeit diminished both in its scale and mission. I like Sean. He’s affable, doesn’t mind digging into the details of the church, and seems as inspired now, as a radical free-thinker, as he ever could have been the child of a cult leader. We talk about growing up in the cult. I couldn’t wait to ask him about the decrees. “I haven’t talked to anyone about this in years,” he told me. It turns out, Sean is the one who recorded the “Rock ’n’ Roll Exposé #1” tape—the one that Seymour Glass and Ian and Don from Negativland found at local junk stores. The one that someone out there had released as Sounds of American Doomsday Cults, Vol 14. In the 80s, Sean had headed a 25-person team that made audio and video tapes to mail to devotees scattered around the world. The team cranked out tapes like “Rock ’n’ Roll Exposé" on a weekly basis.

these old tapes—it’s tapping into a world I know nothing about, extracting a 27-minute sample, and burying myself in it like it’s any old experimental recording. There’s a world beyond the recording I'll never grasp; a web of believers who were (and perhaps still are) enraptured, mislead, and manipulated. I feel in some way that it’s unfair to dig into the recording without fully appreciating its origins. It’s a door I’m not ready to open. But I can’t just stop my fascination with the tape, either.

I think back on the conversation I had with Mark Hosler of Negativland—a pioneer of this tape, in a weird way as much an expert as anyone. Hosler and other artists are able to appreciate these sounds as wholly independent—as much a product of the geeks who’ve dubbed it thousands of times as it is of a secluded doomsday cult in Montana. “We have a true love and tender appreciation for all the weird things we have collaged in our work over the last 35 years, this tape included,” Hosler told me. "It's never a patronizing or sneering or hateful thing, though perhaps some listeners mistakenly guess otherwise. It's more like amazement and stunned admiration that humans being can be so incredibly odd and unusual."

Ian Curtis & his disturbing 'Epileptic Dance'

 

Ian Curtis the demonic ring master, a man passessed, electrified by his own scowling intense music, lost in his own world, as he marches back and forth like a crazed Wehrmacht sentry, rhythmically clutching at imaginary ghosts. Peer closer, and his eyes are glazed and haunted. It's as if he's seeing something we cant. Maybe he was.

After watching all the video's of his performances cult filmmaker Fabrizio Federico noticed that ''the audiences loved him because he made them gape with astonishment with his unique cataclysmic choreographic style. His brooding haunting vocal delivery was the icying on the cake. Ian was a crooner from a black hole from the underworld, the voice of a dark lord from a terrifying void from centuries past. The phenomenal vacancy and desolation in his eyes as he loses himself to the music is astounding. You can feel the power of the music going through him, but he's not excited, he's terrified. His dancing showed us what the music looked like. There was desperation, anger, honesty and fear in his dancing, with the weight of the world on his shoulders as he danced like a lost marionette. He was mesmerizing and trying to escape from his body, like a helpless puppet on some strings. This style of dancing can be traced back to David Bowie performing Stay on the Dinah Shore TV show. His impulsive, choppy dancing is a strange counter-balance to his lifless eyes.'' 

Ian was possessed by some very strong powers onstage, while his band created emotional, icy magic, his soul-searching performances made him vulnerable and immolated, like he was in another world, appearing both very powerful and very fragile. He'd come onstage looking very shy and quiet, and then he would go inside and take command, as if he was pluged into a huge electrical voltage, twitching and jerking. This tranced out symbol of a human being. When he shook himself into a frenzy you didnt know where it was gonna take you, like a performance artist who sacrificed a part of them selves. He treated each show as a laboratory experiment, performing each show as if it were his last. With his dancing Ian had tapped into unknown dark forces that lurked beneath the surface of everyday life. 

Ian Curtis had the room and the support to take centre stage, to calibrate to the room, and then launch himself into the void. At the 1979 Plan K gig, by the second song "Wilderness", from the album Unknown Pleasures, Curtis begins with his characteristic "dead fly" dance partially derived from northern soul moves. Although he is loose-limbed, he holds himself erect and stiff. The effect, whether intentional or not, is paradoxical: he is seeking escape, if not transcendence, yet his whole body language indicates that this is impossible. Transported by amplified electricity, he enacts his visionary words with lightning fast, jack-knife movements. As the camera closes in, he shows an open face, with watery eyes, that is all emotion.

Through his lyrics he had powerful psychic abilities, he was a channel for the Gestalt. A lightning conductor. Haunted by the spirits of the past like in the song Dead Souls. Here Ian cast a spell that felt more like an invocation as he spelled it out: ''Someone take these dreams away, that point me to another day.'' It went beyond aesthetics into something undeniable, making the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. There were forces that lurked beneath the surface of everyday life, and Ian had tapped into them.

Someone take these dreams away
That point me to another day
A duel of personalities
That stretch all true realities

That keep calling me
They keep calling me
Keep on calling me
They keep calling me

Where figures from the past stand tall
And mocking voices ring the halls
Imperialistic house of prayer
Conquistadors who took their share

Or when he alluded to having been reincarnated through many different times, like in the song Wilderness. Other topics featured: guilt, fear, rage, claustrophobia, disgust, self-hatred, and fatalism. Darkside immersion also included: mass murders, summary violence, radical right wing politics, and Nazism inspired by J.G Ballard, Burroughs, Kafka etc... ''A lot of people think he was on drugs. He wasn’t on any drugs at all. That was just him losing himself in the music.” So said Ian Curtis’ former Joy Division bandmate, Stephen Morris, of his extraordinary dancing. On May 18th 1980, Ian Curtis lost his battle with depression at the age of just 23. 

Ian's expressive, confused vocals croon over recurring musical patterms which themselves mock any idea of escape. Possessed by demons as he danced spastically and with lightning speed, winding and unwinding as the rigid metal music folds and unfolds over him. In his short life, he released two seminal albums, and cultivated one of the most captivating live performance styles of all time. Dubbed, perhaps a little insensitively, his “epilepsy dance” (Curtis suffered from epilepsy, as did the subject of his song ‘She's Lost Control’), Curtis’ twitchy, possessed dance moves are inimitable. 

“When we rehearsed he used to literally just sit in the corner mumbling into a microphone,” said Morris, "and then you’d do a gig with him and he’d turn into this… dervish thing.”

Curtis had held a keen interest in music since the age of 12, and this interest developed greatly in his teenage years, with artists such as Jim Morrison and David Bowie being particular favourites of his, and thus influencing his poetry and art. Curtis could seldom afford to purchase records, leading him to frequently steal them from local shops. By his mid-teens, Curtis had also developed a reputation among his peers as a strong-willed individual, with a keen interest in fashion. Despite gaining nine O-levels at King’s School, and briefly studying A-Levels in History and Divinity at St. John’s College, Curtis soon became disenchanted with academic life, and abandoned his studies to commit himself to finding employment. Despite abandoning his studies at St. John’s College, Curtis continued to focus on the pursuit of art, literature and music, and would gradually draw lyrical and conceptual inspiration from ever more insidious subjects.

Joy Division a name that will live in infamy. This moniker was derived from the 1955 novel The House of Dolls, writen by Ka-Tsetnik 135633, born Yehiel Feiner, which featured a Nazi concentration camp with a sexual slavery wing called the “Joy Division”. The cover of the band’s first EP depicted a drawing of a Hitler Youth beating a drum and the A-side contained a song, “Warsaw”, which was a musical retelling of the life of Nazi leader Rudolf Hess.

While performing with Joy Division, Curtis became known for his quiet and awkward demeanour, and a unique dancing style often reminiscent of the epileptic seizures he began experiencing in late 1978. If you watch the Apollo performance the opener Dead Souls, with its progressive, intense build up, it allowes Ian to position himself and read the audiences atmosphere as the band lock in behind him, so he can calibrate himself to see how far he wants to travel in his trance.

Throughout Joy Division’s live performances in 1979 & 1980, Curtis collapsed several times while performing and had to be carried off stage. To minimise any possibility of Curtis having epileptic seizures, flashing lights were prohibited at Joy Division gigs; despite these measures, Bernard Sumner later stated that certain percussion effects would cause Curtis to suffer a seizure. In April 1980, Terry Mason was appointed as a minder to ensure Curtis took his prescribed medications, avoided alcohol consumption, and got sufficient sleep. Regarding the choreography of Curtis’s stage performances, Greil Marcus in The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs quotes Jon Savage from Melody Maker: “Ian’s mesmeric style mirrored the ever more frequent epileptic spasms that Deborah Curtis had to cope with at home.” Marcus remarked that Curtis’s performance “might also have been a matter of intentionally replicating fits, re-enacting them, using them as a form of energy and a form of music.” Curtis’s final live performance with Joy Division was on 2 May 1980. This performance was at the High Hall of Birmingham University, and included Joy Division’s first and only performance of “Ceremony”, later recorded by New Order and released as their debut single. The final song Curtis performed on stage with Joy Division prior to his death was “Digital”.

In West Hampstead to honour their commitment to perform a second gig in one evening at this location, although some 25 minutes into this second gig, Curtis’s “dancing started to lose its rhythmic sense and change into something else entirely” before he collapsed to the floor and experienced the most violent seizure he had endured to date.

According to Tony Wilson, prior to his suicide, Curtis had watched Werner Herzog’s 1977 film Stroszek and listened to Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot. His wife recollected that he had taken photographs of their wedding and their baby daughter off the walls, apparently to view as he composed his suicide note.

It was the band’s performances that got the press going, particularly due to the transparent movements of frontman Ian Curtis. He was like a pale phantom. A dark cloud of sweat starting out small and then moving south along his button-down shirts. His movements on stage were chaotic and unpredictable: a moment of stillness followed by a windmill of rapid arm movements, or his body, twisting and turning into a brief and uncontrolled tornado before settling into abrupt calm again. There are videos online – compilations of these moments that people can watch and marvel at. Through the grainy black and white footage, the small fists of Curtis cut through the darknesses, like he’s fighting some invisible demon, circling the stage. The sight of Ian trembling and alone onstage singing ''dance, dance, dance to the radio...'' is one of the truly iconic sights of the post-punk era. If you watch the Facrory video Here Are The Young Men you can see how Ian could physically wind the music to new levels of intensity. When Ian danced Joy Division became a better band. Flicking his wrists, violent swaying, nodding his head, a backwards shimmy, standing on his tip-toes. No dance instructor would recognize his ferocious movements.

Joy Division’s Ian Curtis’ favourite 32 books:

• Adrian Henri, Environments And Happenings
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
• Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
• Antonin Artaud, The Theatre And Its Double
• Arthur Rimbaud, A Season In Hell
• Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations
• Dawn Ades, Dada And Surrealism
• Franz Kafka, In The Penal Colony
• Franz Kafka, The Castle
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight Of The Idols
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Great Short Works Of Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
• Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
• Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
• J.G. Ballard, High–rise
• J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
• Jean–paul Sartre, Nausea
• John Heartfield, Photomontages Of The Nazi Period
• John Wilcock, The Autobiography And Sex Life Of Andy Warhol
• Ka–tzetnik 135633 [Yehiel De–nur], The House Of Dolls
• Michael Green, The Art Of Coarse Acting
• New Worlds [British Science Fiction Magazine] Nik Cohn, Rock Dreams: Under The Boardwalk
• Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
• Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works Of Oscar Wilde
• Selected Poems By Thom Gunn & Ted Hughes
• Various, A Century Of Thrillers: From Poe To Arlen
• William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
• William S. Burroughs, The Third Mind
• William S. Burroughs, The Wild Boys

Charles Manson's infamous interview with Tuesdays Child magazine

Shortly after this interview, Manson’s telephone privileges were suspended by the court.

CHARLES MANSON: When you look at things in a positive manner, everything can work out perfect. You know, like as fast as man can go, he is destroying everything he can destroy. The pace that he’s picked up in sawing the trees down, killing the animals and shooting everything. You know, I go live out in the desert and I see a lot of madness. I see big fat people coming around with guns, shooting lizards, spiders, birds, anything they can get their hands on. Just killing and killing. They’re all programmed to kill.

 

You know, there’s one thing I flashed on the other day. A policeman took me over and on his helmet, you know, right on his forehead, there’s a beast, a bear, a bear beast on his forehead. And I say, “Well, can’t the people see the mark of the beast?” You know, it’s not… it’s not hard to see. 
           

Is there anything you want to know? That I could tell you?

 

Q: What’s your birthsign?

A: Scorpio

 

Q: Do you know your rising sign?

 

A: You know you wake up every morning and there’s another rising sign.

 

You know, maybe I can tell you where I’m from Everybody is always telling me where I’m from and where I developed my philosophy and what I think and all this and none of this is the things I’ve always said.  I’m from Juvenile Hall. I’m from the line of people nobody wants. I’m from the street. I’m from the alley. Mainly I’m from solitary confinement. You spend twenty years in institutions and you forget what the free world is. You don’t know how the free world works. And then you come out and you live in it and you say, “Wow, I’ve been locked up for twenty years but my mind has been free.” And I come outside and I see everybody’s got their minds locked up and their bodies are free. You know?

I’ll give it to you just like this. All my life I felt all the bad people were in jail and all the good people were on the outside. Then I would get out of jail and I would find out that that the people on the outside smiled and pretended like they were good, but there wasn’t too many of ‘em, you know? And then I’d go back to jail. I think my longest time out in the last 22 years have been maybe 6 or 8 months. And I was out two – let’s see, three different times – one time for 6 months, one time for 8 months and then the last time I’ve been out for three years.

 

Well, when I got out the last time, I didn’t want out. I told the Man, I sez, “I can’t adjust to society and I’m content to walk around the yard playing my guitar, doing the things you do in a penitentiary,” So when I got out I met a 16 year old boy. I was living in Berkley, and I ask him where he lived. And he said, “Weill I live out in my sleeping bag.” I said, “Well don’t you work?” and he told me, “Hell no. Nobody works, you don’t have to work.” I said, “Well how do you eat?” He said, “Well I eat at the Diggers.” And I said, “Well how can you live that way?” He said, “Come on.” He put his arm around me and like I was his brother and he showed me love.

 

He took me to Haight-Ashbury and we slept in the park in sleeping bags and we lived on the streets and my hair got a little longer and I started playing music and people liked my music and people smiled at me and put their arms around me and hugged me – I didn’t know how to act. It just took me away, it grabbed me up, man, that there was people that are real.

 

You know, I just didn’t think there were such real people. There were people with beards and we smoked grass. And like I never had been involved with dope – with what you call dope – except when I got out I took some LSD, which enlightened my awareness. But mainly it was the people. It was the young people walking up and down the street trading shirts with each other and throwing flowers and being happy and I just fell in love. I love everything.

 

But the worst thing is, I have seen how the Haight was going, because being in jail for so long has left my awareness pretty well open. So I’ve seen the bad things that were coming into Haight, the wild problems and the people getting harassed in the doorways and the policemen coming with the sticks and they were running them up and down the street. So I got a school bus and I asked anybody, “Anybody wants to go can go in the school bus. The school bus is not mine, it doesn’t belong to anyone. We’ll put the pink slip in the glove compartment and the school bus belongs to itself.” And we all turned our minds off and we just went around looking for a place to get away from the Man.

 

We went to Seattle, Washington – the Man was there, every we went. We went to Texas – the Man was there. We went to New Mexico – the Man was there, everywhere we went. And like it was just a trip, we were going nowhere, coming from nowhere and just grooving on the road because the road seemed to be the only place where you can be free when you’re moving from one spot to another. You seem to have the freedom to take a breath. To take a breath from the city. To take a breath form oppression, from the madness of the city.

 

And then we went out and got out in the desert. We found a whole world out in the desert. Then I got to see that the animals were smarter than the people. You know, like I’ve never been around many animals. In jail there are hardly any animals around. Then I got to looking at coyotes, and I got to looking at dogs and snakes and rabbits and cats and goats and mules. And we walked around for weeks, following the animals and just see what they do. And there is a lot of love there. That’s where most of the love is, in the young people and in the animals. And that’s where my love is.

 

You know, I don’t have any philosophy. My philosophy is “don’t think.” You know, you just don’t think. If you think, you are divided in your mind. You know, one and one is one in two parts. Like I don’t have any thought in my mind, hardly any at all, it is all love.

 

If you love everything, you don’t have to think about things – you just love it. Whatever circumstances had to you, whatever dealer deals you, whatever hand you get handed, you just love the hand you got, you know, and make it the best you can. And that’s what I’ve always thought. I’ve never had much schooling. No mother, no father. In and out of orphanages and foster homes. And then to boy’s school and reform schools. Like it’s always been like… my head is empty.

 

I have no opinion. I know the truth – the truth is in no word form. It just is. And everything is the way it is because that’s the way love says so. And when you tune in with love, you tune in with yourself. You know, that’s not really a philosophy, that’s a feel and everybody who’s got love in their hearts knows that. Okay?

 

            Q: If you’ve got anything else to say, just keep talking.

 

            A: Yeah, okay, if anybody wants to listen. I realize everybody’s got their own message, dig? But I can’t tell anybody nothing that they don’t already know. But I can sing for them and I got some music that says what I like to say if I ever had anything to say.

 

Steve Alexander for Tuesday’s Child

Local occult publication Tuesday’s Child was born on Nov. 11, 1969 — three weeks after the Manson murders and a month and a half before the new decade. The newspaper — if it can even be called a newspaper; avant-garde magazine or cultural zinelet seems more appropriate — was assembled and curated by a bunch of angry beat poets and old L.A. Free Press writers, producing an “ecumenical, educational newspaper for the Los Angeles occult & underground.” They circulated the paper all over the city, selling it for 25 cents a copy. 

At the helm of Tuesday’s Child were founder Art Kunkin and editor Chester Anderson. Kunkin was a broke occult-and-labor-union-obsessed retired journalist. Anderson was a Haight-Ashbury zine-maker and musician who slept on a cot inside of the Tuesday’s Child offices in Hollywood. Together, their paper took shape: nonsense, “useful” witchcraft, political satire, riddles, socialist poetry, comics, countercultural sentiment and whatever else came into Kunkin’s head while he trolled the Sunset Strip.

• 

• 

Left: Tuesday’s Child inaugural issue published on Nov. 11, 1969. Right: A graphic comic from within the pages of the occult publication.

Charles Manson on the cover of Tuesday’s Child as the “Man of the Year.”

Unsurprisingly,   Tuesday’s Child’s favorite subject was Charles Manson, as he was the perfect intersection of crime, occultism, celebrity, class warfare and local news. One issue featured a crucified Manson on the cover, while another proclaimed he was “Man of the Year.” The timely coverage of the Manson murders through the absurdist lens of Tuesday’s Child was not only chilling, but it also predicted the rise of Manson’s notoriety and a cultish cynicism that would overtake the softer free-love ideologies of the 1960s. 

Tuesday’s Child inexplicably ceased publication in the mid-1970s. Though the reason it shut down remains unclear, the publication probably didn’t make many friends publishing essays like “The Universe as an Electric Train” or “Sympathy for the Devil.”

Still — and like the time it reflected — reading Tuesday’s Child, which can be found deep in the Los Angeles Public Library archives, is enjoyable in its confusion. It is darkly playful and politically provocative with prose that captures our lesser-known California magic.

To hear more about Tuesday’s Child and the hijinks that surrounded the publication, tune into Rebecca Leib and Jason Horton’s Ghost Town podcast

Life: What was the Manson Family? Manson: The D.A. put the word “family” on it to make me a leader and bring me into the conspiracy. They’ve never really been my family or my followers. We were together in a dream, man. Life: You stay in touch? Charles Manson: I know everything they’re thinking. They won’t think nothing in the next 20 years that I don’t know. I answer their letters before they write them. If you got all those people, and you put them in this room, everything would be all just like it once was. We’d sit around and sing. The family circle can never be broken. We’re still together. There’s no taking us apart. Life: How did this group get started? Manson: I get out of the penitentiary— a man can understand this— and I haven’t been with a broad in a long time. So I meet a broad on the street corner. She’s real young. So I ask to stay with this other broad [Mary Brunner]. So we meet another chick [that] didn’t have no place to stay. That was Squeaky [Fromme]. Then we meet Patty [Krenwinkel]— and Patty’s got a credit card! So we’re just going to have a little vacation trip, so we get a bus. We’re just tripping. And Susie [Atkins] wants to freeload, see? So I look up and I’m sitting on the beach with 12 girls. They’re lighting my cigarettes, spoiling me, and actually it’s a pretty nice little trip I’ve got going. Life: Why did it go bad? Manson: The troubles came when the guys came. Every guy that came had troubles. And everybody that comes in that circle, I gotta go through all their changes. Life: The troubles weren’t your fault? Manson: I’m not saying I didn’t influence— I did influence. But no more than I’ve been influenced. It’s hard to explain 20 years of a running psychotic episode. It had no logic, no good, no evil; it all runs in insanity. You put 30 people in a circle, and you’ve got a vortex of everybody’s thought and will, and it reflects off onto one head, and that head goes off into madness. I was stuck in that psychotic episode. Life: Are you psychotic? Manson: We can go in and out. Life: Do you every hear from these people now, like Squeaky? Manson: She’s in the joint doing life. Life: Do you write to her? Manson: Back and forth. She’s me. Life: Do you hear from Sandra Good, who was jailed for writing death threats to corporate executives? Manson: yeah. She’s out now. Life: She’s the one in Vermont? Manson: She’s your blue socks. Life: How about Mary Brunner? Manson: Mary Snitch? Life: Is she still in jail? Manson: No. she snitched. When she had [my] baby, I held the baby up and I held a knife to it and said, “If the cops come and say, ‘Tell or we’ll kill this baby, what are you going to do?’ She said, “I won’t tell. I won’t tell.” Life: Is Susan Atkins, who boasted of the killings, still in jail? Manson: If they let her out tomorrow, she’s still going to be in jail. She’s imprisoned herself. She’s playing Jesus for parole. They say, “If you accept Jesus as your savior, we’ll let you out.” So she says, “O.K.” But I got nothing against Susie. I love her. You know. But I wouldn’t want her around me. Life: Do you regret that those people are not free and happy today? Manson: Don’t you realize what those kids have done for you people? What do you think would have happened if the Manson family hadn’t did what they did? You seen the Vietnam war stopped, didn’t you? Life: Because of what you did? Manson: No. because of what these kids did. You forgot? It was the peak of the revolution. [Sings] “You say you want a revolution…” Life: Are you saying the murders were political acts? Manson: Why was people killed? There was $250,000 worth of gold coins laying by the dead body, by LaBianca. Why didn’t they pick it up? You think we weren’t in the peace movement? Life: Are you at peace with yourself? Manson: Sure. How do you think I’ve survived all this madness? By not having a mother and father. Life: You think your suffering absolved you from later deeds? Manson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Later deeds? I’ve done nothing I’m ashamed of. Nothing I couldn’t face God with. I wouldn’t kill a bug. Life: But you’d kill a person? Manson: I’d probably kill all of them if I could— is that what you’ve been waiting to hear? Hey, time and circumstance made me into this Manson guy, Satan. Society wanted to buy this evil, mass-murdering-devil-fiend. I’m nobody. I’m the hobo in line. Give me a bottle of wine and put me on a train. Life: You said you lived in darkness. Manson: I do. It’s away from the light. I don’t fit into the world you guys live in, so I live over there in the shadows of it.