Last week I re-posted a From the Archives Friday post to my social media sites. That piece was about James Shelby Downard’s “King Kill 33″ theory about the JFK assassination being a Masonic ritual. Today is the anniversary of the assassination and we’re still making discoveries in the newly-released files about that day in Dallas.

Here’s a cool new episode of one of my favorite podcasts, The Higherside Chats. This ‘cast features host Greg Carlwood speaking with Michael Joseph of the Schism 206 YouTube channel discussing the magickal murder of Camelot’s King…

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I came across a post on the Lashtal site this weekend — BBC 4 is playing a series about the Summer of Love and the first episode featured two mentions of Aleister Crowley. I found the documentary’s trailer online, but couldn’t manage to find the full episode. I’ll keep and eye open for it, but while I was searching I discovered that Crowley has his own channel on YouTube. I’ve seen lots of documentaries and profiles on Crowley, but there’s plenty of fresh content there including this illuminating video featuring Robert Anton Wilson explaining Crowley’s magick…

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This year we commemorate 60 years of Rosaleen Norton’s art and pioneering occultism. Norton was an Australian witch and a visionary painter born on October 2, 1917. We’re jumping the gun by remembering Norton’s contributions to art and magick at the beginning of spring, but maybe we’ll plan multiple posts counting down to Norton’s autumn birthday. Here’s a bit from the Witchcraft and Witches site…

Her paintings and drawings for the most part were depictions of the gods, demons and other entities with whom she claimed to communicate, the god Pan being her personal favourite, full of grotesque detail and writhing, interlocked forms. By 1951, she had become well-known as an artist around Kings Cross, the bohemian centre of Sydney, where her murals adorned cafés and galleries traded briskly in her popular and provocative works.

However, in August 1951, four of her pictures were seized by the police and Norton was prosecuted on the allegation that her works could “deprave and corrupt the morals of those who saw them”, and that they were inspired by works of medieval demonology. The next year, a book of her pictures and poems by her young boyfriend Gavin Greenlees, published by Walter Glover, was banned as an obscene publication, and was only re-published in the more liberal atmosphere of 1982.

Due to her notoriety, she soon became a favourite with the tabloid press, which began referring to her as the “Witch of King’s Cross”, and dark stories of witchcraft, black masses, sexual magical rites and Satanism began to appear regularly in Australian newspapers and magazines, and Roie Norton became a household name. Throughout the 1960s, she was notorious as the supposed head an active coven of witches in King’s Cross, although the coven never really amounted to much more than a few masked friends gathering in her small flat for occult talk and the occasional friendly ritual.

Here’s a super informative video about Norton despite the robot voice…

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Austin Osman Spare was a British artist and chaos magician whose work was all but forgotten before author and occultist Kenneth Grant published Spare’s books like: Zos Speaks! Encounters with Austin Osman Spare, Fulgur Limited, 1998; Images and Oracles of Austin Osman Spare, Fulgur Limited, 2003; Borough Satyr, The Life and Art of Austin Osman Spare, Fulgur Limited, 2005.

Spare’s work ranged from religion, to the occult, sex, magic, atavisms, and ghosts, and his visual art is truly, well, visionary.

We’ll be celebrating Spare’s 130th birthday on December 30. Newbies can get caught up with this great primer on the magician and his wondrous workings. Here’s Austin Osman Spare: The Bones Go Last…

Stay Awake!

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Today we remember the death of the late, great Orson Welles who exited this stage on October 10, 1985. The date of Welles’ death makes October a great time for looking back at the genius, but an even better reason is his War of the Worlds broadcast from October 30, 1938 — probably the greatest Halloween trick of all time. Remembering that unprecedented, and unequaled public prank here’s a bit from the War of the Worlds site about a 1957 television movie that recreated the panic surrounding Welles’ radio show…

Like the later 1975 telefilm The Night That Panicked America, this is a dramatisation of the events of October 30th 1938, when Orson Welles scared a nation witless with his adaptation of The War of the Worlds. However, this is a virtually unknown gem of a production dating back to 1957. Made for the renowned weekly anthology series “Studio One”, it is a really extraordinary 50 minutes of live television, featuring an incredible cast of soon to be major movie and television stars and a very accurate re-enactment of the broadcast…

Confusing or not, the actual script is extremely faithful to the original broadcast, right down to the use of the original orchestral arrangements. You get the impression that someone on this production had some first hand experience either of the actual War of the Worlds broadcast, or at the very least, of this period in broadcasting history. It’s a great piece of work, and captures the infectious air of mischief that is said to have permeated the studio that night. Alas, we do only get the first half of the broadcast re-enacted, and much of the material that would have been read by Welles is missing or only hinted at, but this does not really detract from the performances and the authentic feeling of realism…

Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for appearances by James Coburn, Edward R. Murrow, Warren Oates and even a young Warren Beatty as a college student playing a card game. Here’s The Night America Trembled…

Stay Awake!

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On November 22, 1963 John F. Kennedy was gunned-down in Dallas. More than 50 years on the event still undermines trust in government authority, and continues to fuel conspiracy theory culture like nothing else except maybe 9/11.

My favorite JFK conspiracy theory is generally referred to as King Kill 33 which claims to unravel the events of that day by interpreting the assassination as a sacrificial rite connected to Masonic magic. The best expression of the theory comes from the writings of James Shelby Downard. William Cooper, conspiracy theorist and cult author of Behold a Pale Horse, illuminates the theory in one of his numerous video lectures. Here’s a description of the film from Cooper’s own Hour of the Time swag shop…

Bill reveals the real story behind the secret government/MJ12, hidden technology, the “real” source of drugs, upcoming one world government JFK assassination, UFOs and much much more.

Here’s JFK: The Sacrificed King…

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I’ve spent a lot of time in the music scene and in the art world, but in my experience there is nothing like a literary crowd for jealousy, resentment, backbiting and general bad sportsmanship. With this in mind it may come as no surprise that there was no love lost between William S. Burroughs and Truman Capote. Capote was generally a target for jealous bashing by all of the Beats, but Burroughs’ resentment of the man and his work may have transcended everyday annoyance, reaching supernatural scale. Did WSB curse Truman Capote? Thom Robinson at Reality Studio think so. Here’s an excerpt from his fascinating article citing Burroughs’ “Open Letter to Truman Capote” which can be found in the Burroughs Archive

Avowing that Capote’s early short stories were “in some respects promising,” Burroughs suggests Capote could have made positive use of his talents, presumably by applying them to the expansion of human consciousness (“You were granted an area for psychic development”). Instead, Burroughs finds that Capote has sold out a talent “that is not yours to sell.” In retribution for having misused “the talent that was granted you by this department”, Burroughs starkly warns “That talent is now officially withdrawn,” signing off with the sinister admonition, “You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished.”

It should be noted that, at the time of writing, Burroughs was a credulous believer in the efficacy of curses (famously believing he had successfully used tape recorders to close down a London restaurant where he had received bad service). Regardless of how seriously Burroughs intended his prediction for Capote’s future, his words proved eerily prescient. After the publication of In Cold Blood, Capote announced work on an epic novel entitled Answered Prayers, intended as a Proustian summation of the high society world to which he had enjoyed privileged access over the previous decades. The slim existing contents were eventually published posthumously while one of the few extracts which saw publication within Capote’s lifetime notoriously employed Capote’s habit of indiscretion to disastrous effect. When “La Côte Basque, 1965″ was published by Esquire in 1975, Capote’s betrayal of the confidences of friends (who recognized the identities lurking beneath the veneer of fictionalized characters) resulted in swift exile from the celebrity world which Capote had courted for much of his career.

Word virus, indeed.

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This week: Gremlins cause havoc with our computers, but Kim saves the day, art is vandalised, art is vandalised by it’s artists, a film that will melt your head with mushrooms and magick, YouTube the censor, American fast-food chains cheat their employees, Mos Def is a cool guy, football goes batshit, Germans get harassed by advertising in their skulls, and isn’t it about time we got a theme tune for sinkholes?

Personnel – Joe Nolan, Kim Monaghan, and Ken Eakins

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Linkypoos:

• Vandalised art exhibitions retrospective – Link

• 5 Famous Artists Who Tried to Destroy Their Own Work – Link Link

• A Field in England – Link

• Do You Trust YouTube to Define Art? – Link

• Why America has a bad reputation with the rest of the world – Link

• Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) Force-Fed Gitmo Style – Link

• It’s just a game, people – Link

• Adverts beamed directly into your head…in Germany! – Link

• Sinkholes : The Revenge – Link

Interludes:

Secret Chiefs 3, Aaron Spectre. and Zombi