Thursday, January 31, 2008

Mark Turner Is Desperate












Mark Turner has a big announcement for January 31- Today!


Wait for it.

Hear it comes.

There have been rumors of dead bodies buried at Barker Ranch. And so for most of 2007 some fools, I mean people, have been out there with dogs looking. And they let little Markie come along.

Excuse me I am going to vomit.

Bleeechhh. Thank you.

Okay. So here is where he explains his big announcement.

A first year philosophy student can explain his logical syllogisms. The other team of dogs failed to find any bodies not because of the damn humidity but because there aren't any. He also blames that asshole Melton for the lack of funding. But then these are people that listened to the asshole in the first damn place. They are not smart. Debra Tate was at the ranch with the dogs- either she thought she might get to eat one or she was snorkeling for truffles. What a crock of shit!

And he loves that MOST EVIL show wherein the senile psychologist believes the lies of Gypsy Share.

Bleeech! Excuse me.

Here is an interview with a cop with too much time of his hands. He cites Ed Sanders, the same unreliable hippie loon who used asshole Melton as a source for his books. THAT'S good cop work!

Then he goes on to explain why a dog with the name BUSTER might have smelled a 500 year old Indian grave. Public Funds being wasted as I type.

Here he says " I spoke to a source who interviewed Manson around year 2000. Manson had a handler who is another inmate, who is a "jailhouse lawyer."" - and a friend of a friend of mine can fly without a plane.

There is no way to tell without digging if they are Native Americans, old prospectors, Manson Family Victims, or if the dogs made a mistake. Or just wishful lunacy.

BUT The BUG is very supportive. And he loves Latin Music Cds.

Debra Tate would like funding for the dogs. And a dozen large pizzas.

Cyber Detective Mark Turner has helped.???

BLECCH.... excuse me.

What did Mark do again? Ask Barbara Hoyt to make up more fucking bullshit lies?

Grave Sites? or maybe just a nice place to piss?

Somebody else
talks about toilet paper and mob hits.

So what is the big news? Mark spent most of 2007 feeding Babs Hoyt and Debra Tate truffles and took fifteen cars and dogs out to Barker Ranch and found nothing.? White Rabbitt Mach 2.

To repeat the big announcement using their own useless words as they wonder about bullshit funding...
There is no way to tell without digging if they are Native Americans, old prospectors, Manson Family Victims, or if the dogs made a mistake.

My big announcement? I chew gum sometimes!

PS- that noise you hear is Bill Nelson rolling in his grave.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Other Groups and The Col


The Col doesn't play well with others. I admit that. All my report cards always would say that. Why? Well that should be obvious. Most people aren't worth playing with. They are willfully ignorant, lazy, or just biologically stupid.

When I started on my quest for the truth of TLB eleven years ago, it was a different world. The only site was Nellie's unless you counted ATWA which I didn't. ATWA spent pages telling me Charlie was not five feet two. And he is. Soon after Nellie spewed his puke into the ether the Ronson board appeared. FULL of pretenders to being in "The Family." The only "real" person was Karen Mccoy Montecillo who claimed to be a girlfriend of Steven Parent. She was a girl who was his friend, but him being gay, not his girlfriend. And she is now dead. Ronson eventually was revealed as phony with a Neve Campbell obsession. Nellie was outed by ATWA as a multiple count child molester. As was Larry Melton, the asshole known as White Rabbitt. Charlie made Blue shut ATWA down and I think that was the beginning of the end of her obsessions with him.

After that implosion around the turn of the century, the only place left was the YAHOO Group Killed the Sixties. On several occasions the Col saw that there were people there that knew what they were doing. The Col would join up there and get chased out because he had no time for small talk. He wanted to know what they knew. The Col must have been chucked out AT LEAST 25 times. Finally, he arranged to stay and mostly watch. Mostly.

Mark Turner had had his site, and occasionally updated it. No real firsthand research. Not often enough. It was a good site to have. Then he started a message board and banned people who told him he was delusional. This made him evil. He then started defending and promoting Dennis Rice, even trying to sell a (fraudulent) vest for the guy who left his children behind to be molested by Clem and others.

Somewhere in there I saw the Candygramma group and found something interesting in there. This has led to the biggest time suck of the last two years as the Col fought with stupid trailer park housewives who look like shit and know shit. I would get sidetracked by Jim, the delusional obsessed fan from, Staten Island who used to post here as "Savage". Then delete every post for no reason at all. What a mess. But he does understand much of the case, even if he believes a hardened, remorseless old lady should be freed. And Aaron over there always got it, but chose to stay with the biddies anyway. I left last week, and despite some illiterate, retarded emails from Candyass and Cuntyl who got their own bad selves moderated at KTS, I am done with it.

This leaves Bret's site. I don't know where the hell he came from, but some dude in Iceland has put me, AesNihil, Scramblhed, Turner, and any researcher in to the case to shame. He doesn't show his opinion often and when he does I tend to disagree. But his site is THE site out there now.

THIS place is a site of my opinions, thoughts and references as I look for the truth. People who are not wankers are welcome to post THEIR thoughts and opinions. This is not an intramural baseball game. If people want to attack and mock us, good. We have been here for years and yo can find more truth here than anywhere but Bret's. By discussing the idiocy of CG we give her power when she deserves none because, well she is an idiot.

If it isn't a reliable, primary source it doesn't deserve our attention. I mean, weeks spent dealing with Melton, who is a sad excuse for a human? No more.

Forward for the truth. It is out there.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Polanski SOLD


HBO inks U.S. rights to 'Polanski' doc
By Gregg Goldstein and Steven Zeitchik

After an extended and mutating round of dealmaking, HBO picked up all U.S. rights for Marina Zenovich's documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired." The network's docu division will handle the Sundance title's cable bow, with a theatrical release still to be determined. The feature tracks the iconic director's statutory rape trial and urges a second look at the particulars of the case. TWC bought all rights excluding North America and U.K. TV on Saturday. The deal closed after 2 a.m. Sunday morning. In the final round, bidding came down to HBO, ThinkFilm and Roadside Attractions, with Netflix, A+E and the History Channel attempting various partnerships with theatrical distributors. Since its debut Friday night, "Polanski" was one of the only films to attain universal praise at this year's festival. The other was Nanette Burstein's docu "American Teen," which had top bidders awake until around 4 a.m. Sunday. The sellers and buyers decided to sleep on it and resume talks after sunrise. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Lila Yacoub produced "Polanski." Cinetic Media and Josh Braun at Submarine Entertainment repped the filmmakers in the deal.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Larry Melton, Asshole


Larry Melton.
I am sick of talking about this prick.

In his incoherent, unpublished book, he boasts about having sex with underage girls well into the seventies.
He is a registered sex offender for dealing in KIDDIE PORN.

He was never a member of the Manson Family. NEVER. At best he met Squeaky somewhere thinking she was a small child. And that is a maybe.

He has lied to the police.

He is an ugly shit who lives under a bridge and lets goats pass.

Because there is no honor in a group that allows people like him, I am officially leaving CandyGramma's Yahoo Group. I will miss Jim's rants and Aaron's knowledge. But CG and Gloria and the Biddies Cheryl spend more time making up rules and not following them than finding the truth.

THIS blog I realize is for advanced scholars of TLB. That group is a playpen for pre-schoolers who believe Ruth Ann Moorehouse posts among them.

Enough of all this. I hear Tom O'Neill got a book deal for later this year on his book that will "blow open the case". I can only wish that it is true.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Roman and the Rape


Getting to the bottom of the Polanski case
Why did Roman Polanski flee the country? A dogged filmmaker attempts to find out.
By Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 17, 2008

IT all came together for Marina Zenovich, director of "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," during one of numerous conversations with Polanski's agent Jeff Berg about the filmmaker's possible participation in her documentary. "Berg said, 'Why are you making this film, everyone knows this story.' And I said, 'No, you know this story, but everyone doesn't know it.' "

Polanski ended up not participating, but Zenovich turned out to be right. Her compelling, smartly told film, debuting Friday night in Sundance's documentary competition, takes the seemingly familiar story of the circumstances surrounding Polanski's fleeing the country after pleading guilty to having sex with a minor and tells it with such intelligence, dispassion and detail that it's like we've never heard it before. Which is exactly the point.

"Everyone thinks Polanski fled because he was afraid of going to jail, but people don't know the real story," the engaging, articulate Zenovich says. "That can only be told by the people who experienced it." She quotes David Dalton, Polanski's attorney, who says, "Only three people know the story and one of them is dead."

The dead man is the judge in the case, Laurence J. Rittenband, who died in 1993. As described by both Dalton, who has never before spoken publicly about this, and his opposite number, prosecutor Roger Gunson, Rittenband engaged in actions that would have turned Perry Mason's hair gray. "I remain astounded," is how Dalton puts it. "This case will never leave me."

Astounded or not, Dalton was quite reluctant to participate in Zenovich's film, as was almost everyone else. "This was a very long process, nobody wanted to talk about this," Zenovich says wearily of the literal years of importuning it took to get everyone on camera. Not only were people like Dalton and close Polanski friend Andrew Braunsberg difficult to convince, they refused to sign releases for their interview footage until they saw the finished film.

Zenovich, whose previous docs include "Independent's Day" and "Who Is Bernard Tapie?," succeeded because "you can see that I'm disarming, genuine and I have good intentions. It can be endearing that you're trying so hard. I never give up."

Zenovich's interest in Polanski was piqued by a 2003 Los Angeles Times piece that talked about "the 30 years of limbo" the case had caused for the director. Then she saw Lawrence Silver, who represented the girl in the case, say on TV that " 'the day Polanski fled the country was a sad day for the American judicial system.' That didn't make sense to me, I wanted to understand why he said it."

Gradually, Zenovich became consumed by the lives of the story's characters, including 54-year-old Judge Rittenband, who loved celebrity cases and turned out to have a 20-year-old mistress. But she was especially struck by Polanski, just a few years past the murder of his wife Sharon Tate, and the girl in question, Samantha Geimer, who is interviewed on camera about the case. "They've been prisoners of this story," she says, "but the facts are wrong."

What is most interesting about "Wanted and Desired" is that prosecutor Gunson and defense attorney Dalton, as well as Geimer's attorney Silver, all agree that Judge Rittenband acted improperly, attempting to stage-manage events in a way that was out of legal bounds.

"Despite what he did, Polanski was screwed over by the judge, he fled because the judge pulled the rug out from under him," Zenovich says. "It was like Polanski was caught in one of his movies, this kind of stuff isn't supposed to happen, everyone was shocked that a judge would behave like this." As Polanski himself puts it in an archival clip, "I was a mouse made sport of by an abominable cat."

With its spotlight clearly on the judicial aftermath, "Wanted and Desired" does not focus on what happened between Polanski and the girl past putting both their statements to the police on the screen as type. That sex took place is not in dispute, and Zenovich, who says "if it was a violent rape I wouldn't have made this film," calls it "a tragedy for all involved. It's not for me to judge."

After literally years of trying, Zenovich did finally meet Polanski for an off-camera lunch in Paris near the end of filming. "He said it would look like self-promotion to be in the film," the director says, but the event was hardly a waste. "After having someone in your head and in archival footage for over three years, that meeting was satisfying, to say the least."

Thursday, January 17, 2008

You Made a Fool of Everyone


Following up on MOTIVE we move slightly off of Tex and we move on to SADIE.

Here are my current thoughts and ramblings about this bitch.

1- WHY in the name of God did Bugliosi use her in any capacity when the woman is clearly legally insane? He succeeded perhaps in permanently muddying the waters but seriously, did he have no ethics at all to repeatedly put a crazy person on the stand?

2- She thinks it actually matters who stabbed Sharon Tate. It doesn't- every one of those pukes that were there that day deserves to fry, including Linda. But she has changed her story so much it actually hurts my head. My instinct? I believe her grand jury testimony- it holds together the most.

3- Her motive- well she wanted to fit it. She liked the speed she was getting from Tex. Oh and she is fucking insane.

4- The Motive? To be honest, I don't think she knows. She was useful to Charlie because she was bugfuck nutso. But she was so wild and wooley that Tex didn't even take her the next day. She might have second hand information about motive, but I don't think she really knows why she threw her life away.

Thoughts? Disagree?

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Sway


'Sway' by Zachary Lazar

A novel conjures a powerful prism in which to view the potent, still-rippling contradictions of the late '60s.

By Mark Rozzo LA TIMES

January 6, 2008

Sway

A Novel

Zachary Lazar

Little, Brown: 260 pp., $23.99

"HE was a pain in the arse, quite honestly," Keith Richards said not long ago of his late bandmate Brian Jones, with whom he, along with Mick Jagger, founded the Rolling Stones in the early 1960s. Amazingly, Jones -- the troubled blond waif who played a Vox Phantom Teardrop guitar as well as an untold number of exotic instruments on a slew of Stones records -- still has the power to rile people up: By name alone, the prolific indie band Brian Jonestown Massacre (a subject of the surprisingly resonant 2004 documentary "Dig!") suggests an enduring cultish fascination with the doomed musician, who was found dead in his swimming pool on July 3, 1969.

"Sway," Zachary Lazar's second novel (after 1998's "Aaron, Approximately"), places a fictionalized Jones in the midst of a triumvirate even more uneasy than the one completed by Richards and Jagger. By highlighting the little-known links among Jones; Kenneth Anger, the notorious filmmaker behind such oddball, darkly camp creations as "Kustom Kar Kommandos" and "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome" (he is also the author of "Hollywood Babylon"); and Bobby Beausoleil, the would-be California rock star who became Charles Manson's murderous yes-man, Lazar has created a powerful, infernal prism through which to view the potent, still-rippling contradictions of the late '60s. It's no mean feat. Despite the era's nearly impossible richness, fresh insights are hard to come by. (Witness, if you must, Tom Brokaw's recent prime-time retread, "1968.")

In Lazar's telling, Jones, Beausoleil and Anger turn out to be strange mirrors of one another: compelling, sometimes annoying personalities driven by the times, making the most of its catch-as-catch-can hipster opportunism; spirited dabblers whose ambitions are thwarted or dwarfed by their cohorts in a period of zooming possibility; dreamers whose divergent fates -- death, prison, survival -- illustrate how the decade's long and winding road forked into many paths, not all of them leading to happiness or enlightenment or money-minting commemorative world tours. The connections that Lazar forges are not entirely whimsical, either: The Stones were apparently introduced to Anger's work through the London gallery owner Robert Fraser, a.k.a. Groovy Bob. And Anger did, in fact, cast an unknown Beausoleil as the Lucifer figure in his short film "Invocation of My Demon Brother." (Jagger would score the film.)

Told in appropriately kaleidoscopic episodes that veer from Los Angeles to London and beyond, "Sway" opens with a lazy afternoon at what seems to be the Spahn Ranch above Chatsworth, the Manson family's preferred hide-out, circa 1969. The ragged collection of hippies and Brentwood runaways holed up there doesn't make much of an impression on the wayward Beausoleil, a good-looking kid who briefly played with Arthur Lee before that Angeleno legend went on to form Love.

"It was like a lot of other places he'd been in the past two years," Lazar's narrator observes, in the first of many evocative passages that sum up the times. "[E]verywhere along the coast now there were groups of young people with nowhere to go and no money to spend. It was as if they were living in a fort or a tree house." But as with any fort or treehouse, there needs to be a bully. Here, it is Manson himself, who has an eerie way of getting inside Beausoleil's head: "Not bad," Manson tells his skittish sidekick when they take a drive to break into a house in Benedict Canyon. "Just driving around on a Thursday, getting high. Why don't you just cool off and relax?"

There's nothing relaxing, of course, about those words, which echo throughout "Sway." Lazar ingeniously elevates this innocuous catchphrase of the era to the level of creepy mantra. Similar words are tossed at an increasingly unstable Jones in 1967, after the famous drug raid on Richards' country house and during the Stones' subsequent journey to Marrakech. Anger uses them when coaxing his straight subjects -- including Beausoleil -- to appear in his homoerotic films. And, most famously, they're uttered by Jagger at Altamont on Dec. 6, 1969, as Manson and his followers faced murder indictments: "Everybody just cool out," the caped singer pleads, while nearby a member of the local Hells Angels kills a pistol-wielding black teenager in the crowd.

Meanwhile, we follow Anger's course from an L.A. childhood in which he gravitates toward an Aleister Crowley-esque text called "The Sephiroth" and experiences terror at any thought of the future. A sensitive boy growing up in a not particularly gay-sensitive time, he realizes that "people like him ended up living in residence hotels. They worked as floorwalkers in department stores, cooked their meals on a hot plate." As Anger embarks on his singular career -- cobbling together films that win the attention of Jean Cocteau (and eventually inspire the likes of David Lynch and John Waters) -- we find that he shares with Jones and Beausoleil an outcast quality that will become emblematic of the 1960s: "Everyone under thirty has decided that they're an exception -- a musician, a runaway, an artist, a star." (Variations on this riff turn up throughout.)

Perhaps the most compelling of Lazar's three intertwining story lines is that of Jones and his bandmates. We first find them in 1962, huddling in their squalid Edith Grove flat with their filthy socks drying on a radiator and struggling to work their way through the simplest of Chuck Berry songs. Jones is the glue that bonds the creative partnership of Richards and Jagger. As he teaches Jagger harmonica and steers the nascent Stones through their paces, we come to understand that this young man -- already a father -- will never again have so much power in the band. Jones is there at the crucial moment of inception: "They're trying to be serious and sarcastic at the same time." It's a duality -- adroitly pinpointed by Lazar -- that expresses so much of the '60s, which were as much about the idea of the put-on as they were about the celebration of innocence.

Lazar's vision of the Stones at their genesis is echoed in another haunting guitar-strumming scene in which Beausoleil attempts to accompany Manson's musical ramblings. Like the Stones, particularly Jagger, Lazar's Manson has a "way of miming his emotions, acting them out so that they came across as artificial and sincere at that same time." Connections like this abound in "Sway." If they sometimes feel forced, they are almost always pleasantly jarring: In the murdered Sharon Tate, we find a doppelgänger for Anita Pallenberg, Jones' imperious German girlfriend, who endures his beatings until finally leaving him for Richards, a blow that may have led to his death. In their brazen invasiveness, the Manson break-ins resemble the various police roustings of the Stones. And the bikers of Anger's cinematic and erotic fascinations resurface, in decidedly hellish form, at Altamont.

Then, of course, there's the spirit of Lucifer, who binds it all together: For Anger, he is the Satan of Blake, "a god of light, a child god, the fallen angel . . . finally coming back." But as the decade slouches toward its bummer of a conclusion, Lucifer reverts from red-hot symbol of Eros to grim avatar of Thanatos: Lazar's crowning irony is to reveal how the revolutionary '60s unraveled under the heel of a retrograde Satan. "That was how the Lucifer role had played itself out," Anger notes with a shudder when he hears that Beausoleil has turned cold-blooded killer. And he looks on with amazement while the Stones struggle, much as they did back in their cold flat, to lay down "Sympathy for the Devil," the ultimate invocation of the demon. "They spoke of evils wrought by humanity in the sway of a sly, sophisticated con man who in the end was just a bewildering reflection of themselves." In "Sway," the fun-house '60s are nothing so much as a hell of mirrors. *

Their Satanic Majesties

SWAY

255 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $23.99.

By Zachary Lazar.

With its motifs of homosexuality, Satan worship, drug addiction, promiscuity, nihilism and general decadence, Zachary Lazar’s superb second novel, “Sway,” reads like your parents’ nightmare idea of what would happen to you if you fell under the spell of rock ’n’ roll.

That’s not to say Lazar has produced a cautionary tale. He sees the novelist’s job as understanding and conveying experience before judging it. And yet “Sway,” a study in amorality, is itself the work of a clear- and sometimes cold-eyed moralist. Lazar has taken territory, the 60s, where the individual blades of grass have long been trampled into the mud by legions of literary, sociological and critical boots, and found something new. What he evokes is unlikely to please either those who condemn the decade as a body blow to decency and authority, or those who celebrate it as a trippy carnival of raised consciousness and experimentation. Lazar’s is a book that has no time for preconceived ideas, that tells the reader exactly the things likely to disturb any cozy notions. He’s a bad-news bear and thus the most valuable kind of cultural commentator.

“Sway” is an elegant and intricate novel that switches between three stories whose players eventually intersect. The stories are that of the Rolling Stones, from their inception as a group of scruffy English R & B enthusiasts to Altamont; the repressed, closeted upbringing of the director Kenneth Anger, whose tamped-down obsession with devil worship and the homoerotic side of rebel glamour burst forth in underground films like “Fireworks” and “Scorpio Rising”; and Bobby Beausoleil, a sometime dealer and aspiring musician, one of the pretty, not especially talented young people who descended on Los Angeles in time to catch the implosion of the ’60s counterculture. Beausoleil lived on the fringes of the Manson family and, at 22, received a death sentence (later commuted to life) for the murder of Gary Hinman, another associate of the group.

It’s not the intersections that matter so much here — the Stones being filmed for Anger’s “Invocation of My Demon Brother”; Beausoleil becoming one of Anger’s lovers and starring in the filmmaker’s “Lucifer Rising” — as the way the three stories echo one another. “Sway” is the tale of people separated by miles or class or intellect or possibilities of escape, all mining the same dark vein.

Too many novelists and critics and not-too-bright pundits have used the Manson murders and Altamont as convenient symbols for the collapse of the ’60s. What differentiates “Sway” from that ready-made sound-bite pessimism is that in Lazar’s view, those events are something like the decade’s fulfillment.

This is a novel about the ’60s in which the great political upheavals, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, civil rights, Vietnam and the assassinations are barely mentioned. The Beatles, who stood for the greatest sustained explosion of the utopian ideal in all of pop, are dismissed by one character as a group “from Liverpool of all places.” In contrast to the love-and-peace ethos the decade is remembered for, every early Stones gig here ends with a fight. Crowds seem to pack Midlands blues clubs for the sheer pleasure of trying to beat up the band. In “Sway” the freedom that is often vaunted as the cri de coeur of the ’60s is entirely stripped of its communal ideal. It is, instead, a way for people who have always felt themselves on the outside not to feel they have to fit in. It’s a freedom that can result in “Street Fighting Man” or “Scorpio Rising,” or in a group of murderous hippies invading two homes and slaughtering the inhabitants on the orders of a petty thief and failed rock star. Freedom, Lazar is saying, does not inevitably result in noble aspirations.

Lazar has taken a decade spoken of as being about movements and groups and tribes, and given sway to the isolate and the solitary. Brian Jones watches as the group he began is usurped by Keith Richards, the guitarist who barely speaks to anyone, and the singer, Mick Jagger, a student at the London School of Economics who seems a middle-class poseur. For all Anger’s acclaim he might still be the lonely boy in California trolling the docks. Beausoleil holds himself suspiciously apart from the Manson clan.

Lazar’s view of the Stones echoes the English music critic Simon Frith’s 1979 essay on the band in the collection “Stranded,” in which he identifies them as “petit bourgeois jesters, who’ve taken delight in standing morality on its head but retained a touchy egotism, a contempt for the masses that they share with any respectable small shopkeeper. Their rebellion has been a grand gesture, an aesthetic style without a social core.” Or, to put it another way, they will be helicoptered out of Altamont, leaving the terrified masses below on their own.

And yet, Lazar is not unconscious of a touch of heroism in the Stones’ adventure. You don’t compose “Gimme Shelter,” a living elegy for the decade that made you, possessed of both grandeur and dread, if your gaze is entirely inward. The song’s “every man for himself” ethos is not a rejection of compassion but the hardest realism possible, a blunt assessment of everyone’s chances in the aftermath of an era striking an iceberg. But Lazar is conscious of the price for abandoning adventurousness. The absent presence in the novel’s coda — a 2002 encounter between two people who inexplicably survived the era, Anger and Anita Pallenberg — is the Stones themselves, moneyed irrelevancies shortly to appear on another of their rumored final tours.

If there is a literary antecedent to “Sway” it’s Gordon Burn’s 1991 novel “Alma,” a masterpiece that provides another view of the era and is the greatest novel ever about pop culture. Its real kin, in ambience if not method, is Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s 1970 film “Performance,” in which Jagger starred. Like that picture, this brilliant novel is about what’s to be found in the shadows, the most terrifying crannies of twisted souls, the darkest gleaming gems.


Review: '60s icons of Lazar's 'Sway' embody the energy of the era

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Sway

By Zachary Lazar

LITTLE, BROWN; 255 PAGES; $23.99

Energy is eternal delight," wrote William Blake in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell." This declaration serves as an epigraph to "Sway," Zachary Lazar's compelling second novel. Plunging his readers into '60s counterculture, Lazar merges episodes from the lives of the Rolling Stones, the Manson family and experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger. But the novel's central character is that era's strange energy. Lazar's real-life figures are emblematic of a fascinating cultural shift: Something was being born, yet no one could say quite what it was or where it was headed. The energy Lazar evokes was far more powerful than any individual. Impersonal, indefinable, thrilling and dangerous, it seized people and brought them just to the brink - if they were lucky - of chaos.

Anger was already pushing 40 by this time. His 1947 film, "Fireworks" - a dark and hilarious fever dream of sadomasochism and maybe the first great moment of gay cinema - won the admiration of Jean Cocteau. In 1964, Anger caused a sensation in the underground circuit. "Scorpio Rising," an anti-narrative stream of images involving biker gangs, drugs, gay and straight sexuality, Christianity and fascism, revealed Anger as an unparalleled chronicler of countercultures (Martin Scorsese and countless others have since imitated the film's combination of pop soundtrack and sheer kineticism). Steeped in the occult and obsessed with a private system of mythology to rival Blake's, Anger wanted to show "how the world was changing" with his next film, "Lucifer Rising." Anger's Lucifer, Lazar writes, "was a god of light, a child god, the fallen angel who after two thousand years of repression was finally coming back. He was the god of desire, illicit desire, the liberator, the revelator."

Initially cast as Lucifer, Bobby Beausoleil was a charming, beautiful musician with whom the director soon became infatuated. When the young man departed for Los Angeles in the early stages of filming, Anger waited in vain for him to return. In "Sway," Anger tries to persuade Mick Jagger, fresh from recording "Sympathy for the Devil," to take the role; Anger eventually made the film with someone else altogether. Ever resourceful, Anger saved his footage of Beausoleil and used it in his disturbing 1969 reflection of America in turmoil, "Invocation of My Demon Brother," which was scored by Jagger and includes brief footage of the Rolling Stones performing. In July 1969, Brian Jones - who had recently been fired from the Stones - died in his swimming pool. Beausoleil, meanwhile, had drifted into the Manson clan; he was arrested for murder in August. The Stones' disastrous free concert at Altamont, at which the Hells Angels killed a concertgoer, took place in December of that year.

Lazar offers several convincing sketches of the band in its early years. At first, Jagger's "chief talent ... is a lack of embarrassment"; onstage, "[t]he noises he makes have nothing to do with singing. But his sheer persistence is a provocation because it's clear that he isn't joking." Eventually, the band elicits enthusiasm that it neither anticipates nor understands: "The sound the girls make is the strangest they've ever heard, not the high screech of adulation but an eerily sexual keen, a thickening moan. ... Every gesture they make now is magnified, triggering panic and exaltation. ... They don't realize they're even making a gesture until the screams get louder, and then they have to just accept it: they're performing, they're putting on a show."

On their triumphant second tour of the States - after they've ditched Jones - the band is well aware of its effect. Lazar's depiction of this music's bacchic appeal is as deft and persuasive as any I've encountered:

"It was a series of vibrations amplified through electric circuits, a current of sound the crowd could feel on the skin beneath their hair, in the cavities of their chests, in their rectums and their groins. It registered in their bodies, in the pulse of their blood, but also in their minds, the part that was always changing, as senseless and illogical as a dream. The band was making sounds, the sounds were coming from the stage, but they were no longer themselves, the people in the crowd were no longer themselves, no one was even thinking about it anymore. They might be a nobody from Romford with the wrong kind of accent, or a mechanic's son with ruined teeth, or they might think all the time about what people had and what they were missing out on, but nobody was thinking about any of that while they were in its grasp. It was basic, energy and sound, life intensified for a few moments, its chaos made plain, the self slipping outside the body, joined in sound to other bodies. It was a feeling everyone had always craved, had always been warned about, a connection to something like the deeper self that used to be called the soul."

Lazar's first novel, the semiautobiographical "Aaron, Approximately," was published nearly 10 years ago. It's too early to pronounce "Sway" a departure - it's too early to say who Lazar is, exactly - but the two books share little beyond a taste for nonlinear narrative. One could object that the Maysles brothers have already documented the road to Altamont in "Gimme Shelter," or that Lazar borrows too heavily from the mosaic approach to storytelling favored by postmodern filmmakers such as Alejandro González Iñárritu ("Amores Perros," "Babel"). But such complaints are forgotten as one succumbs to this richly imagined, hauntingly vivid novel, wherein everyone falls under the sway of someone or something, the culture itself appears spellbound and the pursuit of self finds ironic culmination in the loss of identity.

Do You Think They Know....?


Did anyone tell them it was mostly fiction?

If you HAD $118 to waste would you waste it on this?

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

TexASS Tea


I've been getting a lot of feedback as to what really happened. It's kinda fascinating.

The most thought provoking (doesn't mean they are real)

-->Tex was dealing methamphetamines, cocaine, and other forms of "speed". Frykowski was his loyal customer. Leno LaBianca was a supplier. Which would make your DeLorean theory correct. Everyone else was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Frykowski owed money to Tex, who owed money to LaBianca.

--> The "Devil's business" is a reference to the motorcycle club.

--> Next night, Watson gets the bright idea to go kill the drug supplier, steal all the cocaine, and life will be merry and bright.

--> You are looking at the wrong connection- how well did Tex and Manson know ROMAN?

--> Have you considered that Joe Dornan actually WAS dealing with Tex and they expected HIM at the LaBianca house?

These are all thought provoking ideas. Some of them are breathtaking.

Still, riddle me the obvious...

Rather than THIS, Tex prefers a race war motive? Is he afraid STILL of something?

More discussion please.

----------
Angelos criticizes my world view of CM without reading previous posts. We have new members so maybe I need to summarize succinctly.

Charles Manson was a punkass loser. He was not a leader, a guru or the "Most Dangerous Man alive." He certainly did not organize or mesmerize anyone to commit murder. He should be mocked and laughed at for being a short, stupid, fuckwit. Instead he is held up as the embodiment of evil to make a treacherous DA look good. The real BAD guy is Tex Watson who fucking stabbed and killed seven strangers to death. Whatever the motive, HE is the devil, not CM.

Friday, January 04, 2008

Charles Denton Watson


In the comments, Pritash and others ask if I think Charlie Manson was responsible. Not did he get a fair trial and all- if he was responsible.

He was as responsible as Linda Kasabian. They both attended one of the nights of slaughter, both knew about it and did nothing, both didn't kill anyone.

It doesn't interest me to play semantics. Was Charlie responsible? I can state that he is convicted of nine murders and killed no one. Was Charlie responsible? I can say that the key is MOTIVE. Motive here is everything. BUG made up his motive. But what IS the motive? Will we ever know?

You want to know something people. I think the answer is with one man. Tex Watson.

Dig it.

The Charlie Manson who is in prison now is batshit crazy. He isn't the same guy anymore. Like the David Lynch who did ELEPHANT MAN isn't the same guy who did INLAND EMPIRE. So if you could visit Charlie and use a potion to make him tell you the truth about TLB I don't think he even knows it anymore.

But Tex does. He just ain't tellin'.

Here are Ten Questions for Tex Watson to honestly answer- before he even starts talking about TLB.

1- How many drug burns did you do with dealers BEFORE you burned Crowe?
2- How did you know Voytek Frykowski?
3- Were you and Sadie really speeding the Tate night?

I think he had done other burns. I think he knew Voytek. I think there was a burn there. I do not think he was speeding that night. He was a little bit too in control of things to be out of control if you follow me.

4- What did Charlie have on you besides peer pressure?
5- Did you know Leno LaBianca?
6- What was your relationship REALLY with Susan Atkins?

I think Charlie knew something that he could use against Tex, something huge, which made him a useful murderer. I think he knew Leno LaBianca and that Leno might have been trying a John DeLorean move in order to save the Gateway Markets. I think it is weird that Tex and Sadie are never linked in the literature but they are clearly the two most boodthirsty.

7- Tex, whatever happened to your girlfriend Rosina who was held captive by Crowe?
8- How well did you know Gary Hinman?
9- How well did you know Rudi Altobelli?

Rosina was there when Charlie shot Crowe- and then is never mentioned again. She must have been involved with Tex on the drug deals otherwise why capture her? Where did she go? If he's dealing drugs and burning people, well then that makes him the same as Gary Hinman. He definitely knew Gary. But how and why? Altobelli was in the Hollywood scene, and is the connection to Tate.

10- Where did you get that line " I am the Devil here to do the Devil's Business" from?

It is a great line. One for the ages. He is not a creative guy. What was that line supposed to signify?

Yes, the more I research the more this case becomes about drugs. I think cops were in on it. I think the motive is becoming more and more banal and the fairy tale fading away.

Anyway - what would YOU ask Tex?

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Katie Can Waitey


According to Bret's accurate site, Katie is thinking about skipping another parole hearing.

See, this is what LVH should try next time. I mean it.

"Hey guys. It finally hit me. I suck. I killed people. I don't deserve to mingle with free people. You are right. My remorse just hit me. I am staying."

I don't know, but it seems to me that THEN someone might say "Wow, she is seriously remorseful - let her out."

Tuesday, January 01, 2008

New Year's Evil- Ford Assassin Goes Free


NOT SQUEAKY. SHE LIKES IT IN THERE.

One of Ford’s Would-Be Assassins Is Paroled

LOS ANGELES — Sara Jane Moore, a 1970s radical who tried to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford more than 30 years ago, was released Monday on parole from a federal prison in Northern California.

Ms. Moore, 77, who was serving a life sentence for trying to shoot Mr. Ford outside a San Francisco hotel in 1975, left the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Calif., at 5:20 a.m. Monday, said a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Washington.

Officials did not disclose where she might be staying or details on the terms of her parole.

Ms. Moore, who had been involved with several leftist radical groups, including the Symbionese Liberation Army, later told interviewers that she regretted the attempt on Mr. Ford’s life.

“I was functioning, I think, purely on adrenaline and not thinking clearly,” she said a year ago in an interview with KGO-TV in San Francisco. “I have often said that I had put blinders on and I was only listening to what I wanted to hear.”

On Sept. 22, 1975, Ms. Moore stood among a crowd outside the St. Francis Hotel and was about 40 feet away from Mr. Ford as she aimed a .38-caliber pistol at him. But Oliver W. Sipple, a former marine who was standing next to her, knocked her arm upward as she fired, sending the bullet well over Mr. Ford’s head; it ricocheted off a building and slightly injured a person in the crowd.

It came 17 days after Mr. Ford, visiting Sacramento, had survived another attempt on his life, this one by Lynette Fromme, known as Squeaky, a follower of Charles Manson who is now serving a life sentence in a federal prison hospital in Texas.

Although sentenced to a life term and denied parole at least once before in the mid-1980s, Ms. Moore was given another chance at freedom under federal sentencing regulations that call for considering paroling prisoners after serving 30 years if they are not deemed a threat and have conducted themselves well.

Ms. Moore did escape for four hours from a federal prison in 1979, but Tom Hutchison, a spokesman for the United States Parole Commission, said it appeared nothing in her recent record blocked her release. The commission held a hearing in November to clear her release, which coincided with the 30th anniversary of her federal incarceration, he said.

Mr. Ford died on Dec. 26, 2006, at age 93.

Ms. Moore’s motives and background — she reportedly had had five marriages and was known to reveal little even to her lawyers — have remained murky.

A Secret Service study in 1999 of people who had tried or succeeded in assassinating public figures said Ms. Moore had “found herself caught in a swirl of turbulent social forces and causes” in a place and time fraught with tension among the police and left-leaning political radicals.

She had been an informant to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and believed she would ultimately be killed by radicals.

“I was going to go down anyway,” she told The San Jose Mercury News in 1982. “If the government was going to kill me, I was going to make some kind of statement.”

Mr. Sipple died in 1989.