This weekend we observed the 40th anniversary of the mass murder/suicide tragedy at Jonestown in Guyana. The utopian cult lead by the the charismatic Jim Jones had its heyday as the People’s Temple, a Christian church in San Francisco known for its outreach to homeless neighbors. In the end it became a madhouse deep in the South American jungle as Jones became increasingly unhinged, and the would-be paradise disintegrated into a living hell. 909 men, women and children died at Jonestown and this weekend I found a great article that focuses on how pop culture shapes what we talk about when we talk about cults…

Originally, the word “cult” simply meant “to worship”. Deriving from the same root as “culture” and “cultivation”, it described rituals and offerings intended to cultivate the favour of gods, saints and other holy figures. The term later took on negative connotations, and by the mid-20th century was mostly associated with charlatans and violent or otherwise bizarre fringe groups.

Today, a cult might loosely be defined as any group exhibiting a combination of qualities including (but not limited to): a charismatic leader, mind-altering practices, sexual and economic control and exploitation of members, us-versus-them attitudes towards outsiders, and an ends-justify-the-means philosophy.

By this definition, it’s difficult to argue that Peoples Temple wasn’t a cult. After all, they had a leader who was notoriously charismatic and who exerted a disproportionate level of control over his congregation. Members were often overworked and overtired, their finances and sex lives regulated by leadership. Relationships with outsiders were generally discouraged, and Jones was known to sexually abuse both male and female followers. Meanwhile, an ends-justify-the-means line of thinking was employed to justify everything from faked healings to the ultimate massacre of more than 900 individuals.

Read more at the link above. Here’s a Real Stories documentary about the tragedy, Jonestown: Paradise Lost…

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I’ve been reading a new book on abstract expressionism that I’m planning to review in an upcoming post. That and a second viewing of a television program episode about Mark Rothko’s last paintings has me thinking a lot about that great painter and his suicide. In 1983 the PBS series American Playhouse dramatized Rothko’s bloody end, and the sordid art world shenanigans that slithered through its aftermath. Here’s a bit from a contemporaneous New York Times review of The Rothko Conspiracy:

WOULDN’T it make a marvelous script? Beset by paranoia and depression in the last years of his life, and estranged from his wife and children, a celebrated painter is found dead in his studio, presumably a suicide, his arms slashed in the crooks of the elbows.

His will names three friends as executors of his estate. But less than two years later, his daughter files a suit, charging the three with attempting to ”defraud” the estate and ”waste its assets.” They had conspired with a prestigious gallery, the suit holds, selling and consigning to the gallery many hundreds of paintings on terms hugely disadvantageous to the estate. In the end, justice triumphs, with a judgment of millions levied against the offenders, and the dauntless daughter named as the estate’s sole administrator.

The story is true, of course: the painter was Mark Rothko, the three executors the late Bernard Reis, accountant to star artists; the late Morton Levine, an anthropology professor, and Theodoros Stamos, a painter. The gallery was Marlborough, headed by Frank Lloyd. And the suit, filed by Rothko’s daughter, Kate, in 1971, became a cause celebre, taking six years of litigation, dividing the art world into partisan camps and providing a field day for those inclined to see the art market as a vast conspiracy in which the innocent artist’s creativity is exploited for the profit of others.

As evidence of the heat the Rothko case still generates, nearly 13 years after the artist’s death and seven years after the original trial ended, we now have ”The Rothko Conspiracy,” a 90-minute film to be shown tonight at 9 o’clock on Channel 13′s American Playhouse series. Written by Michael Baker and directed by Paul Watson, it is a co-production of the British Broadcasting Corporation and Lionheart Television. The film is heavily based on Lee Seldes’s 1978 book, ”The Legacy of Mark Rothko,” and also on trial transcripts and interviews with Gustave Harrow, then Assistant Attorney General for New York State, who prosecuted the case on behalf of the public.

The review goes on to deride the production as lurid and sensationalizing, and that’s true, and that’s also one of the things that makes this flick worth watching. The 30-year-old production aesthetics and VHS presentation are charming here and the sweaty-faced acting and art world cliche’s push this piece right up and over the top in a manner that I find thoroughly entertaining in 2015.

Here’s The Rothko Conspiracy…

As a bonus for those interested in more about how Rothko became Rothko, check out The Case for Mark Rothko from PBS Digital Studios…

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Been having some trouble sleeping lately. Actually, I’ve been falling right to sleep, but I keep waking up in the middle of the night for an hour or so with some minor nightmare that seems connected to the anxiousness I feel upon fully waking. Of course, the only thing to do is to make myself comfortable, relax and be confident that sleep will come.

That would be the smartest option, and it’s ultimately what happens once my eyes get tired again and I’m sure that I can get my ticket to dreamland punched. However, before that, I’ve been spending my early morning hours adding stories to the Flipboard magazine I’ve been curating with Joseph Matheny and David Metcalfe.

It’s a blast working with such an interesting team as everybody is always turning up some great little nugget of avant garde, countercultural import, and today was no exception. Joseph Matheny posted a couple of stories about French philosopher, writer, filmmaker, activist and revolutionary, Guy Debord who shot himself in the heart 20 years ago in 1994. Here’s a remembrance from Verso…

He is now something of a canonical figure in literature, cinema and the art world. It has become commonplace to refer to the media sphere as a spectacle, and the cut and mix practices of today’s aesthetics appeals to the apparently similar Situationist practice of détournement for legitimation. He has been, as he might say, recuperated back in to spectacular commodity production. Such is the fate of all avant-gardes…

Debord’s work is quite deservedly canonized. His writing has an austerity and beauty all its own. His short autobiographical text Panegyric is a masterpiece. His last work on film, In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni is a highpoint in avant-garde cinema. The movement he co-founded, the Situationist International, endured for some fifteen years and involved some remarkable collaborators, such as Michèle Bernstein, Asger Jorn, Constant and Raoul Vanegeim, whose work is also celebrated and studied…

It was apparent to Debord that the capitalism of postwar France was a new and strange kind of commodity economy, one in which even the parties and trade unions of the working class had become mere images of themselves. If there was a challenge to the spectacle it might come from boredom with the paltry pleasures of commodified life. And come it did, most famously as ‘May 1968’. Usually thought of as a student revolt, it was also one of the biggest general strikes in history.

The revolution against the spectacle did not come to pass. By 1972 Debord had wound up the Situationist International and gone into a kind of internal exile. His later work has a tone of revolutionary nostalgia, intended not to mythologize past struggles but more to give courage to those to come to look to their own situation and find what might be possible.

Debord’s first film was an experimental adaptation of Society of the Spectacle made from found footage. Here’s the movie…

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Michael C. Ruppert’s From the Wilderness website was a go-to source for me when I was more than a little bit obsessed with conspiracy theories. Ruppert’s research uncovered lots of connections between the C.I.A. and the crack cocaine epidemic and his film Collapse and its companion book, Confronting Collapse, both offered a chilling summing-up of the end of the age of oil.

Ruppert’s Lifeboat Hour talk show was his most recent project. After his April 13th show, Ruppert shot himself, making this episode a kind of accidental eulogy that finds Ruppert speaking with his guests, Carloyn Baker and Mimi German, about coping with the stress of fighting to make the world a better place.

Here’s the show…

It’s true that big industry, big government, big medicine and big business give us all plenty of reasons to question their veracity. That said, speaking truth to power and uncovering the lies in high places can be treacherous work and it’s important to remember that the biggest conspiracy theory of all is the one that finds you questioning every lie but your own. Ruppert wrote himself into a story where the hero had to die in the end. I wish he hadn’t believed that one.

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There’s a fine line between the truth and a good story when it comes to celebrities. And when it comes to the death of a celebrity like Kurt Cobain, there is a fine line between the findings of the police investigation that ruled his demise a suicide and the conspiracy theories that insist the singer was the victim of a murder.

This week that line got even thinner as stories about police in Seattle re-opening their investigation into Cobain’s death began to appear and new, never-before-seen photographs of the scene where the singer’s body was discovered hit the internet. Here’s the story via COS…

Now, 20 years later, Seattle police have found new evidence, prompting them to re-open the case. Reportedly, four rolls of 35 mm film had been sitting for years in the department’s evidence vault. Last month, the film was processed by King County Sheriff’s Office photo lab “under high security”. Police told KIRO that the film more clearly shows Cobain’s death scene than earlier photos taken by investigators. Why the photographs are only being developed now is unclear.

KIRO has reportedly obtained one of these photographs, which it will show during its broadcast tonight. Additional details regarding the investigation are also expected to be shared during the telecast.

Police plan to release the photographs and will answer questions on the anniversary of Cobain’s death next month.

Technically speaking, the new photos constitute a re-examining of the case, but not an official re-opening. Here are two of the newly-discovered photos…

Kurt Cobain’s heroin kit

Cobain’s belongings at the scene of his death

It’s unlikely that questions about Cobain’s death will really ever abate, after all, folks are still claiming that Elvis is alive and well. For me, the circumstances of the singer’s death aren’t as interesting as the culture surrounding those who continue to question the findings of police and coroners. Conspiracy theories aren’t necessarily as interesting in and of themselves as they are as part of a storytelling, myth-making culture that insists that things simply aren’t as they may so plainly seem.

When it comes to Cobain’s death, the queen mother conspiracy theory is supplied by Nick Broomfield’s documentary Kurt and Courtney. Watch it for yourself and see what all the fuss is about.

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While America marks the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, right wing politicos and lovers of literature in Japan mourn the loss of their most famous — and infamous — post-war writer every November 25. But who was Yukio Mishima and how did he die? The Guardian provides a primer:

After a failed coup attempt at Japan’s military headquarters on November 25, 1970 Mishima, the homosexual author of Forbidden Colours, sliced open his belly with a sword and then ordered his followers to decapitate him.

According to the media and politicians of the time, the suicide was also pointless: at best, an artistic performance by a showman and, at worst, a futile gesture by a deranged extremist.

The last day of Mishima’s life was a fitting end for a man who was attracted to contradictory extremes: Mishima was a poet/playwright/novelist/actor/filmmaker obsessed with masculinity, the military and Japan’s samurai culture. His work was a radical mix of both modern and traditional aesthetics. He was an intellectual who wrote an entire book on bodybuilding and suntanning. He was a married man and a father who also had gay lovers.

There are a number of good biographies about Mishima available and I’d recommend Confessions of a Mask as a great introduction to the author’s writing. Another way into the man’s life and work is the stunning, intense, gorgeous film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters which was co-written and directed by Paul Schrader in 1985.

Here is the film in its entirety:

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