Michael Myers: CIA Agent

by **Gouda** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 6:12 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>Not to be condescending, but I've actually read Bob Dylan's first autobiographical installment in its entirety, and the self-portrait that emerges is a lot more complex than a few out-of-context excerpts might indicate to those who peruse them.<hr></blockquote> mr. reed, i am not quite sure what you mean there or who you are referring to. If you are referring to my excerpt from Chronicles as being pulled out of context without my having even read the book, then that is the second time you have assumed I engage material without having read it (first was regarding Invisible Man). Not sure if that's what you mean.

by **Gouda** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 6:39 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>I think ART tends towards synchronicity, so MOST of this "side" of CT is probably "coincidence", despite its apparent symbolic meaning.<hr></blockquote> There's a point there. So it is what these artists choose to do when they find themselves at the symbolic crossroads of power - if they understand, or not, what they have encountered. "Synchronicity" - Reminds me, Stewart Copeland is Miles Copeland's son. Ha!

by **robertdreed** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 9:28 pm

Gouda, since you've read the book in full also, I wasn't referring to you. (And fwiw, I don't recall ever implying that you hadn't read Invisible Man, although I do recollect the particular exchange to which you were referring, contained within another page hereabouts. ) Dylan's exchange with Archibald MacLeish was indeed intriguing. I think Dylan included the anecdote to give his readers a feel for what the "one degree of separation" referred to by HH in the case of famous artists can actually feel like, up close. I don't find it particularly damning. On another topic, I seem to recall Gordon Sumner (aka Sting) tearing a new orifice in Miles Copeland about some political issue or another back in the late 80s, in the letters column of some music mag- either Rolling Stone, Musician, or the short-lived RS publication Record. Not sure of this, but I think it was Miles Copeland, Jr., Stewart's brother, who founded the original record company of the Police and some other "new wave" artists, IRS Records- the company with the logo of the spook with fedora and upturned collared overcoat. Cheeky... A few there for the RI playlist- "Murder By Numbers", "Many Miles Away", "Synchronicity"... Sting is one of my main artistic heroes of the 90s, 12 Summoner's Tales is up there with Bruce Cockburn's Charity Of Night as nailing my personal spirit-space in that era. I don't know if he's with the Craft, but to this cowan, Summoners has a really mystical lyric bent, in a Speculative Masonic sort of way. Which I don't find to be a bad thing, at all... Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 11/17/05 8:57 pm

by **Dreams End** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 11:52 pm

So I guess Chapman was just a lone crazed gunman, then. Hmmm...I thought maybe there was something else...but I guess if the PTB leave the music world alone.....

by **robertdreed** » Fri Nov 18, 2005 12:14 am

The Lennon case is interesting, and I keep the file open. That wasn't the specific case being discussed, however. Incidentally, being as I'm watching a lot of teevee lately, I noticed that one of the networks has an interview with Mark David Chapman scheduled for Friday night. Incidentally, if you want a really chilling and provocative glimpse into that case, and the wider phenomenon of "programmed assassins", I suggest you hunt up a copy of the novel The Fifth Estate, by Robin Moore, and skip to one of the chapters at the back of the book, around page 200 or so. There's a full chapter referring to one of the characters views on creating a programmed assassin. The character is a spook/psychologist type named "Dr. Wormser", or something like that. The book reads like a real roman a clef with overtones of disinfo, the biggest false note being that it characterizes American organized crime as an Italian plot. I read it just a few months ago...the biggest alarm bell for me comes with the fact that it was published in 1973 0r 1974, well in advance of any public revelations about MK-ULTRA or other allied programs dealing with psyops research, RA/MC, etc. Robin Moore of course also wrote The Green Berets, The Country Team, and several other books on espionage/covert ops topics. In some ways, his 50+ year career as a journalist and "historical novelist" includes a degree of "insider access" that's even better than Bob Woodward's insider connections. He recently wrote a book on the Secial Forces in Afghanistan, in fact. According to the bio on his book jacket, Moore's career also included doing things like setting up the first closed-circuit TV network ever, for Sheraton Hotels in the 1950s. Which means he probably was tight with people like Bernie Spindel, and the other shady characters documented in books like Jim Hougan's Spooks (OOP, a fact that won't surprise anyone who manages to find a copy of it and read it. )

by **hanshan** » Fri Nov 18, 2005 12:28 am

robert - as the subject has yet again popped outta d'hat hunt up a copy of this: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312931972/102-9987378-7749763?v=glance&n=283155&s=books&v=glance" target="top">www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312931972/102-9987378-7749763?v=glance&n=283155&s=books&v=glance</a> Hinckley & Chapman appear to be cut from the same cloth. Proving it is a fish w/out a tuning fork ...

by **FourthBase** » Fri Nov 18, 2005 12:43 am

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>I think I've already provided a partial answer, above. But I need to clarify the fact that I don't buy very far into the idea that musicians have any "power" over anyone that isn't granted by the individual audience members in the first place. Responsible musicians are wary of such power, and they don't much care for its connotations. Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, and the rest of the Grateful Dead are all on the record as disdaining that power. But there's next to nothing they can do about the moth-to-flame true believer factions in their audience, doing thingsa like going through their garbage, or "scrying" from every stray comment they offer, on-stage or off.<hr></blockquote> So...TV has no power unless people grant it - same for movies, video games, myths, propaganda, and just about every cultural artifact that has power, eh? Regardless, pop music has power over people, people follow musicians like herds, quote them, frame their emotional lives by songs, and take up political causes shared by the musician. Not just true believers, either, the masses. <blockquote>Quote:<hr>Perhaps the most effective way to subvert the mind-opening influence of artistic revolutionaries is to own the media outlets that program their music (or not); that frame their output with corporate sponsorships that have become a prerequisite to mount large-scale tours; and to own the venues and promote concerts that adhere to rigid formats that keep the audience in line as if they were overly chaperoned teenagers.<hr></blockquote> And uh, didn't they own the venues, stations, labels, magazines back then, too? Of course, it's escalated to a ludicrous degree of control today, but there were never any "good ol' days" when the PTB couldn't have directed the course of pop music by championing certain artists and suppressing others. <blockquote>Quote:<hr>Killing the artists? I won't rule it out, although it leads me to wonder why they haven't snuffed the most overtly political artists currently around- like Ani DiFranco, Bruce Cockburn, Fugazi, Willie Nelson, Steve Earle- all of whom have had careers stretching over decades without running afoul of suspiciously life-threatening events.<hr></blockquote> None of them have a mega-audience or following? Are they also not subversive enough, I guess? Maybe they're just lucky...so far. Or maybe people have been apathized to the point where the PTB doesn't have to worry about musicians revealing truths and inspiring a revolution? OTOH, Mary Hansen, daughter of an Australian MP, member of Stereolab, one of the most subversive groups in the world, was killed while riding a bike in London. I'm sure there are some other recent examples, too.

by **banned** » Fri Nov 18, 2005 1:07 am

...before deciding it's bullshit. As for Macleish, Christ, who doesn't know he was CIA? Do some reading on the "Congress for Cultural Freedom" which pushed many writers through various magazines it supported including Encounter, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Partisan Review, Paris Review, and Daedalus. Do you seriously believe that though the CIA was involving itself in shaping the postwar development of other art forms, literary, visual and musical, it had no interest in rock music, the power of which had been amply demonstrated by one Elvis Aron Presley and his swiveling hips? DO YOU? Aw, come on.

by **FourthBase** » Fri Nov 18, 2005 1:42 am

<a href="http://www.bilderberg.org/ccf.htm">www.bilderberg.org/ccf.htm</a> The above link is also informative. "Who Paid the Piper?", indeed.

by **proldic** » Fri Nov 18, 2005 9:24 am

"History is like a badly-constructed concert hall, [with] dead spots where the music can't be heard." - Archibald MacLeish [We] attempt to record those dead spots. [We] seek a different acoustic, a tune other than that played by the official virtuosi of the period. It is a secret history, insofar as it believes in the relevance of the power of personal relationships, of "soft" linkages and collusions, and the significance of salon diplomacy and boudoir politicking. It challenges..."those official fictions that have been agreed upon by all together too many too interested parties, each with his own thousand days in which to set up his own misleading pyramids and obelisks that purport to tell sun time". Any history that sets out to interrogate these "agreed upon facts" must, in Tzvetan Todorov's words, "become an act of profanity. "It is not about contributing to the cult of heros and saints. It's about coming as close as possible to the truth. It anticipates what Max Weber called the "disenchantment of the world"; it exists at the other end of the spectrum from idolatry. It is about redeeming the truth for truth's sake, not retrieving images that are deemed useful for the present... - Frances Stonor Saunders

by **Dreams End** » Fri Nov 18, 2005 10:56 am

proldic, I think you were the one who posted the stuff about how the CIA funded abstract art merely to keep art with political content off the main stage. I think that shows that they try to anticipate and keep their hand in anything and everything cultural to keep us in the dark. That said, empty corporate culture can surely account for much of the crap that "graces" our tv's and radios.

by **robertdreed** » Fri Nov 18, 2005 7:17 pm

"And uh, didn't they own the venues, stations, labels, magazines back then, too?" No, they didn't. Not "THEM", anyway. Your self-assured cynicism is showing, along with your lack of erudition on the subject- and, last but not least, your evident absence of having experienced the Zeitgeist of those days at first hand. Before I jump in with the dispute, I need to note that the paragraph from which you pulled that quoted sentence represented an attempt to agree with you. The original rock concert promoters of the 1960s era were a bunch of loopy kids, for the most part. Often, the bands put on their own tours. Even someone like Bill Graham, who had the ambition and foresight to realize that promoting rock shows could be done professionally as a career rather than as a hit-or-miss effort by youthful dilettantes, pursued the Middle Path, between the cant-get-it-together amateurism of the day and Vegas Mob entertainment values. He saw the rock scene as more than just a cash register. ( In my experience, Bill Graham features as a huge villain to many Leftists. Come on then, bring it. This Winterland alumnus will defend him until I can't lift a hand to the keyboard. ) Ever see the movie Woodstock? Not exactly Clear Channel Productions, was it? Remember Hunter Thompson's comments on the "stone-broke freaks" who put on the Sky River Rock Festival? As for the radio stations- the "free-form radio" boom of the 1960s began when a few savvy folk stumbled upon the fact that radio stations on the FM band were going for a song in the 1960s. AM radio was the core bandwidth of pop music stations, and FM was considered the poor stepchild. So people like Tom Donahue at KMPX, and later KSAN, bought up those stations for bargain prices, and allowed the DJs to do their thing. Cut down WBCN all you want from a stance of 35 years after. All I know is that in terms of content, it was great radio in the early 1970s. ( I don't feel like repeating myself more on the radio thing. There's another discussion where I laid out the history fairly comprehensively. I'll find it after I this AOL connection gets ditched for something with wheels and an engine. ) As for the record labels- they were often run by people who had a legitimate interest in music and culture, not just profits. John Hammond, Jr. at Columbia; Jerry Wexler at Atlantic; the Ertegun brothers; the guys at labels like Folkways and Vanguard. There are still labels like that- before everything merged into Bertlesmann. I think even Sony/Columbia is Bertlesmann now. (Apologies for the lack of detail in this post- this AOL connection doesn't allow me to launch windows or do searches worth a damn. This situation WILL be rectified within the month. In the meantime, I work from my memory, which falls a few percentage points short of 100% reliability, especially on the fine details. ) As for the magazines- I forgot who loaned the money to Jann Wenner to start Rolling Stone. It's on-line somewhere, I think in connection with some anti-Jewish conspiracy theory...( of course, paranoid Leftists often make the exact same sorts of arguments, minus the anti-Jewish angle.) Beyond RS, there wasn't much to read in terms of national publications, in the late 60s and early 70s. There was the splendidly insightful Crawdaddy, the arch-snarky Creem, and the faux-hip superficiality of Harold Bloom's Circus magazine (of course, that isn't the way Harold tells it...is there anyone more overrated as an intellectual than him? ) But beyond RS, the press wan't that important to the rock scene. Look back to issues of Time and Newsweek from the era, and it's plain that what you're getting is mostly grown-ups reviewing the culture of their children, i.e., a whole lot of head-scratching. Anyone who think's that the Corporate Right had a hand in fostering the American Youth Culture by exploiting the rock music scene is waay off-base. They have no recollection of the era. But it's a common fault of the dogmatic Left to assume a stance of Eternal Pre-Revolutionary Powerlessness, and to attribute that status to the omnsiceint capabilities of super-agencies like the CIA. Personally, I'm so glad that American Youth didn't mount a Revolutionary Takeover in the 1960s. In my judgement, the outcome would have more resembled the Maoist Cultural Revolution than Global Utopia. But make no mistake, the promise of authentic cultural revolution has been bound, tied, knee-capped, poisoned, etc. by reactionaries, corporatist overlords, and their proteges, once they began playing catch-up ball, around 1975. And, although I think that anyone who ridicules "lone-nut" theories of assassination simply because they're "lone-nut" theories has problems with empirical assessment- I do think it possible that there was more to the Lennon assassination than the self-motivation of Mark David Chapman. But Fenton Bresler's book offers only the faintest hints for presuming conspiracy. It boils down to about 90%+ discussion of "motive" (including a lot of repetition and outright page-padding), with the rest consisting of a few scattered data points that I admittedly find somewhat mysterious. But if there was one rock musician important enough to get rid of as part of the coronation of the Reagan-Bush counter-revolution, it was John Lennon. As for the Mae Brussell article, I don't find it to be her strongest work. The Jim Hendrix kidnapping episode is authentically sinister. Hendrix's business manager Mike Jeffery was an authentically sinister character with connections to British Intel. But, you know, with some people it's all or nothing...they feel compelled to fit everything into one over-arching pattern. In my opinion, the demise and diminishment of rock musicians- all too many of them- was, and is, largely due to their own personal decisions. Many of them have been very reckless and unwary. That's too bad. "So...TV has no power unless people grant it - same for movies, video games, myths, propaganda, and just about every cultural artifact that has power, eh? Regardless, pop music has power over people, people follow musicians like herds, quote them, frame their emotional lives by songs, and take up political causes shared by the musician. Not just true believers, either, the masses." That's a somewhat confusingly phrased viewpoint, but I think I get the gist of it. The underlying sentiment that it represents is one with which I'm in near-complete disagreement. It's one of the reasons that I can't bring myself to be a Marxist, because you have to sign off on nonsense like that. It implies as a corollary that if only the right cultural diet is prescribed for "the masses", that they'll achieve Raised Consciousness- enlightenment, grace, beneficient altruism, etc. Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 11/18/05 4:25 pm

by **robertdreed** » Sat Nov 19, 2005 9:33 pm

"As for Macleish, Christ, who doesn't know he was CIA?" Almost nobody...even these days. Even less so in the 1960s, a period of time that predated the revelations of "Project Mockingbird" by several years, I think it's also worth mentioning the fact that, by the decade's end, Bob Dylan still had yet to reach the tender age of 29. As for myself- this is a tough admission to make, being as it alludes to a state of personal ignorance- I still don't know who Archibald MacLeish is, much less how he figured as a person of eminence in 20th centruy American history; any CIA connections he might have had; or the nature and scope of any role he might have taken (or not) in attempting to steer the youth culture of the 1960s. If MacLeish was a household name, I must have missed the memo. I do recall that most anyone his age was written off as "corny" by people in their teens and 20s, in the Sixties and Seventies. Although I suppose that it's possible to hold something or other over Bob Dylan's head, for- by his own admission- almost having collaborated with such a person on a theatre project. I'm not sure, what, though...I've been told that "agency" assumes many guises, but specifics were lacking. Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=robertdreed>robertdreed</A> at: 11/19/05 6:57 pm

by **banned** » Sun Nov 20, 2005 1:00 am

It's always been HIGHLY controlled whether it was keeping black artists out or DJ "payola" or 'stokin' the starmaker machinery' or 'look what they done to my song, ma". I was friends with several musicians in Cleveland in very different areas, one was a punk/art rock artist who is more famous now than when he was alive, another a 'folky.' They both had lurid stories about the barracudas in the music biz, how artists were selected to suddenly 'make it big', how 'cover stories' were constructed about them to facilitate this, how they were pushed and shoved in various directions as far as their creative output. The whole happy go lucky buncha hippy dippies is one of those covers. I wouldn't go so far as to say that EVERYONE who has ever made it in music has signed on the dotted line with the Lucifer & Associates Agency...but to listen to some musicians you'd believe that was so.

by **dragon feathers Jack** » Mon Dec 19, 2005 3:58 pm

oh come on it's not that deep, i'll start you off - 1. Michael Myers in Hallowe'en mask is a modified Captain Kirk mask / "there's a man! on the wing of the plane!" / the famed Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds recording 2. the Leprecaun! ( WW2 ) think torches, flamed and also shone, such as being shone in the boots of expensive lovely cars by London policemen / 9-11 emergency cord pull 3. that's me in the corner ( WW MTV special ) 4. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind 5. So I Married an Axe Murderer 6. The Master of Disguise 7. other two-guys-that-are-metal-fans films and TV - Bill & Ted, Beavis & Butthead....... <img src="http://www.smartgroups.com/vault/eightyeight/ScotFree.jpg" style="border:0;"/>

Michael Myers: CIA Agent

Re: Chronicles

Re: Chronicles

Re: Chronicles

Re: Chronicles

Lennon's murder

re: oops/spooks

Re: Lennon's murder

You might read the Mae Brussell article...

Word, banned

time bandits

Re: time bandits

shoe-horning didacticism

Re: shoe-horning didacticism

rdr, I don't think you know much about the music biz.

Re: AUSTIN Powers

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