Eden Ahbez, Jack Parsons, and other LA kooks...

Good grief! Where to start?

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG00/robertson/asm/aimeeimages/as2.JPG

Aimee Semple McPherson. One time atheist-turned-Pentacostal who put together the basic blueprint of modern media-savvy evangelism.

Manly Hall. One of the later Theosophists and general know-it-all about occult mysticism and Masonic influence on history. He founds the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz whose library is the closest reality equivalent to the holdings of Miskontonic U.'s Department of Medieval Metaphysics. Like all ultra-successful conspiratorial wack-jobs, knowledge of Hidden Truths leads to complacency so instead of teaching Evil Genius Fundamentals their course catalog looks more like the b-pages of The Learning Annex.

LAFD made McPherson an honorary batallion chief. Also, it's a great picture.

Eden Ahbez Early proto-hippie who lived underneath the Hollywood Sign in the 40s and wrote the song "Nature Boy" who was covered by everyone. Expounded often about being naturally sane in an technically insane world, however technology wins when Ahbez is fatally TKO'ed by a passing car.

Edwin Dingle. English journalist with a China fixation arrives in Tibet and goes native. After Enlightenment, "Ding Le Mei" arrives in LA in the 1920s and establishes the "Institute Of Mentalphysics." Teaching the "Super Yoga of the Western World" proves profitable as Dingle gets Frank Lloyd Wright to design his house and institute out by Joshua Tree.

Jack Parsons Current It guy who has more connections than a switchboard. Co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab, key person in the US rocket program in the 1940s, roommate of L. Ron Hubbard, and personally chosen representative of Aleister Crowley to lead the California OTO. Interesting guy... I recommend this book

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0922915970.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Mainly because of the publication of The Visionary State which documents everyone that found California to be their nexus for some sort of transcendental exploration. Great book - CLUI meets metaphysics.

http://www.geocities.com/los_angeles_coast/Simon_Rodia1983.jpg

The Neal Hefti thread got me wondering if I had included Synanon in the LA kook thread. Apparently not!

http://www.ralphmag.org/BH/synanon-rev329x317.gif

Synanon. Early drug rehab organization that soon devolved into an aggressive hippie cult of by the 1970s. Kinda noteworthy for attacking critics with live rattlesnakes. Philip K. Dick apparently modeled A Scanner Darkly's New-Path drug group on Synanon. Time magazine in 1977 says...

A once respected drug program turns into a kooky cult

In a cavernous California mountain lodge, some 40 smiling people, their shiny, shaved heads reflecting the dancing flames of a roaring fire, oohed, ahed and applauded. A lawyer had just pledged to file ten divorces for the ten highest bidders at a fund-raising auction on New Year's Eve. At a wooden table a grizzled, gruff man who wears a cap emblazoned with the message I'M THE MEANEST S.O.B. IN THE VALLEY nodded his approval. Charles (Chuck) Dederich, 64, was adding another ritual to his famed commune Synanon: wife swapping.

That is quite a reach for a 19-year-old organization that was once widely admired and imitated as a seemingly successful program for rehabilitating alcoholics and drug addicts. Dederich established a nononsense, self-help program that included the "game," a rugged encounter session in which participants acted out their inmost hostilities. Learning the truth about themselves supposedly helped them stay off drugs or booze. But in recent years, Dederich has had more grandiose ambitions and transformed Synanon into a religious cult with himself as high priest and prophet. It now attracts fewer addicts and more middle-class eccentrics in search of new adventures in living.

Since its shoestring beginning in an Ocean Park, Calif., garage, Synanon has done very well by itself. The taxexempt, nonprofit organization has 883 adults and 300 children living in luxury on two ranches in the Sierra foothills, beach-front property in Santa Monica and Tomales Bay and in a converted San Francisco paint factory. Most members pay a minimum $400 a month for room, board and uplift, but some contribute much more. One woman has donated more than $1 million. Synanon's assets, including ten aircraft and 400 cars, trucks and motorcycles, total almost $30 million. Its advertising and specialty-gifts business netted $2.4 million last year; donations and other income amounted to another $5.5 million. Dederich draws an annual salary of $100,000 and pays his top corporate officers from $30,000 to $50,000. "A lot of guys could do this thing from an old Ford roadster and sit on an orange crate," he says, while munching on powdered lettuce from a silver bowl. "They're holy men; I'm not. I need a $17,000 Cadillac. We are in the people business just exactly as if we were building Chevrolet axles."

Indeed, the people at Synanon are treated much as if they were interchangeable automobile parts, and Dederich is certainly in the driver's seat. He makes the rules as he goes along, and the members never know what is coming next. "Chuck is marvelous," says Terri Haberman, 30, who has lived at Synanon for nine years. "He has this amazing quality of being able to articulate what we want to do before we even know what it is we want."

In 1970 Dederich decided that because he was giving up smoking, everybody else would too. In 1975 the women at Synanon began shaving their heads. Any that refused were ostracized. When Dederich's wife Betty went on a diet in 1976, all the other members had to cut down on the vittles. That same year Dederich concluded that Synanon had too many kids. So all the men were pressured into having vasectomies, except Dederich. "I am not bound by the rules," he says. "I make them."

I love this thread.

AWESOME thread, i'm gonna check out the visionary state asap. x-post

Eden Ahbez only wrote the lyrics for Nature Boy. The tune's an old Yiddish folksong. Nothing else he did was very good, that I could dig up.

I'm gonna check out the visionary state asap

Terrific book. I generally keep an eye out for any of Erik Davis' writings. I liked his 33 1/3 book on Led Zeppelin IV quite a bit and his stuff in Arthur is always worth reading.

I think Aleister Crowley swung through L.A. in the twenties... and even HE thought everybody there was nuts.

I think Aleister Crowley swung through L.A. in the twenties... and even HE thought everybody there was nuts.

See the Jack Parsons entry above. Crowley picked Parsons to lead the OTO lodge in LA.

altman got almost all the background people in california split from synanon

http://www.timboucher.com/journal/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/technocracy-flag.jpg

Technocracy, Incorporated. (initially founded in New York, but quickly moved to California where they had half a million members in the 1930s. Up until a mid-90s, surviving Technocrats were still meeting in Long Beach)

Several loose groups of concerned scientists and engineers confronted the post-WWI/Great Depression era head on and concluded that social, economic and governmental structures could not adapt quickly and efficiently enough to adequately manage the world. Solution:
1. Chuck capitalism and socialism into the trash along with money and the entire market system.
2. Build an automated centralized system based on the exchange of energy rather than money. Put all the scientists and engineers in charge.
3. No more poverty, fuel shortages, pollution, 40 hour work weeks, politicians, price system
4. Kick back with a beer and enjoy the New Frontier.

Near-infinite abundance sounded good, but people got kinda weirded out by Technocracy's fleet of all-gray cars, their gray suit uniforms, and their insistence of addressing themselves by numbers instead of names. (A speaker at a California rally was introduced as 1×1809x56). Similarities to totalitarian fascism were not unnoticed.

Conspiracy alert: M. King Hubbert of the infamous Hubbert's Peak Oil theory was an early Technocracy, Inc. mover and shaker.

They're still around too! There's a ton of archive material at: http://www.technocracy.org/

Apparently they're still into having a North American "Technate" state and have gone so far to make up their own ID cards
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/technate-id-card.jpg

More info here:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006/07/27/welcome-to-the-technate
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,744852-1,00.html (1932 Time Magazine article)
http://www.kevinbaker.info/c_tes.html
http://www.hatch23.com/2009/02/12/real-life-dharma-initiative-6-technocracy-incorporated/

Heads up to everyone in LA who's into this. LA Conservancy is running a tour

"CITY OF THE SEEKERS: L.A.'S UNIQUE SPIRITUAL LEGACY"
Self-Driving Tour
Saturday, March 14, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.
$30 ($25 L.A. Conservancy members, $10 children 12 and under)

A truly unique event! Discover five historic sites related to spiritual organizations that took root in Los Angeles in the early part of the twentieth century.

Los Angeles is home to a number of religious sites and organizations, many of which are deeply woven into the city’s history. “City of the Seekers” will celebrate this unique identity and the architecture that embodies it.

This special one-time-only tour offers a rare chance to explore historic religious sites not typically open to the general public. Here's a preview of tour locations; check back for updates.

Angelus Temple (1923) in Echo Park

One of the most recognizable religious sites in Los Angeles is the distinctive Angelus Temple, home of Aimee Semple McPherson's Foursquare Gospel church. Sister Aimee was a major force in the spiritual life of the city with her charismatic personality serving as a beacon for her ministry. This remarkable building is one of only seven sites in Los Angeles designated as a National Historic Landmark, the highest form of historic designation in the U.S.

Self-Realization Fellowship Mother Center in the former Mount Washington Hotel (1909)

The Self-Realization Fellowship Mother Center is located in the former Mount Washington Hotel, on the crest of Mount Washington. The Self-Realization Fellowship has used the Mission Revival-inspired building as its headquarters since 1925. For nearly thirty years, Paramahansa Yogananda, founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship and widely considered the father of Yoga in the west, led daily prayer and meditation sessions in the gardens surrounding the hotel and held lectures, seminars, and writing sessions in the main building. The site still serves as the Fellowship's international headquarters.

Chapel of the Jesus Ethic (1966) in Glendale

The Chapel of the Jesus Ethic is a modern gem located on the Glendale campus of the Foundation of Niscience (which means "knowing"). Co-founded in 1953 by Ann Ree Colton and Jonathan Murro, Niscience teachings blend religion, philosophy, science, and the creative arts to inspire its members to live creative and spiritual lives. Considered a prophet to her followers, Colton authored more than seventeen books in her lifetime outlining her unique brand of spiritual philosophy.

Philosophical Research Society (1936) in Los Feliz

The Philosophical Research Society (PRS) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1934 by Manly P. Hall "for the purpose of providing thoughtful persons rare access to the depth and breadth of the world’s wisdom literature." The Mayan Revival complex, designed by architect Robert Stacy Judd, houses a large library of wisdom literature from ancient traditions, as well as an auditorium and teaching spaces. PRS is also home to a university that continues Hall's quest of universal exploration and learning.

Bonnie Brae House (1896) in Historic Filipinotown

The modest facade of this 112-year-old building belies its great significance as the birthplace of the modern Pentecostal movement in North America. In 1906, an African American minister from the south named William J. Seymour came to Los Angeles to preach. Seymour stayed as a guest in a humble vernacular cottage on Bonnie Brae Street. It was here that he experienced an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that led to the Azusa Street Revival and the birth of the modern Pentecostal movement in the twentieth century.

RELATED EVENTS

ART EXHIBIT
Within Heaven's Earshot: Religious Album Covers
Opening: Friday, March 13, 7-10 p.m.
Synchronicity Gallery, 4306 Melrose Ave.
This unique exhibit runs through Easter Sunday, April 12; special events will take place at the gallery through the run of the show. For details and updates, visit http://www.syncspacela.com/.

LECTURE
Visionary State: California’s Spiritual Legacy
Sunday, March 15, 2 p.m.
Philosophical Research Society, Los Feliz
Join us for a talk by Erik Davis, author of The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. Tickets are $5 and available for purchase at the door. Visit http://www.prs.org/ for directions and more information.

SHOW
Mystic Los Angeles
Tuesday, March 17, 7:30 and 10 p.m.
Silent Movie Theater
Join Process Books as Erik Davis and Jodi Wille co-host an evening full of rare, unusual, and never-before-seen short films and video that explore the magical, mystical side of our city. Tickets are $14 and available for purchase at the door and at http://www.silentmovietheatre.com/.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3144/2795616672_e9a700dbf9.jpg

Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven (a.k.a. The Eleven Club or more commonly known: The Blackburn Cult). Forty years before Charlie Manson, the Santa Susanna Mountains were home base to the Great Eleven cult. Taking their name from 11:3 in Revelation "And I will grant my two witnesses power to prophesy for one thousand two hundred and sixty days," the cult was really just May Otis Blackburn and her "girl of many loves" (according to the press) daughter, Ruth Rizzio. Ruth had a small grifting business going for herself when in 1922 her mother was charged by the archangel Gabriel to reveal the mysteries of heaven and earth. Faster than you can solve the equation SEX + RELIGION = COLD CASH, mom and daughter had relocated from Bunker Hill up to 164 acres of donated Santa Susannas and set themselves up with a steady income from believers and a supply of animals to periodically sacrifice. Copy-pasting from the links:

The "two" whose prophetic activities the cult believed were foretold in the verse were a mother and daughter who used sex, religion, greed and animal sacrifices to separate believers from their money. Most of this occurred while the cultists were awaiting the return of the Messiah--an event they believed would coincide with the "resurrection" of a dead 16-year-old "priestess," whose body they kept on ice in a bathtub. Occasionally, the dead "priestess" was taken off the ice for a spin around Los Angeles in the back seat of a touring car.

The alleged angels allegedly told the alleged prophets to close their doors on the world for more than three years and to write a book about the "sixth sense" called the "Great Sixth Seal," explaining the mysteries of life and health, heaven and earth. The angels also promised to reveal the "lost measurements" that would lead them to all the hidden gold and oil deposits in the world.

Upon hearing this revelation, Clifford Dabney, the nephew of local oil magnate Joseph Dabney, joined the cult and offered Blackburn $40,000 in cash and property, including 164 rolling acres that sprawled across a canyon in the community of Santa Susana Knolls in Simi Valley.

All she had to do was share the "lost measurements."

It was in the canyon that the cult built a dozen cabins and a temple filled with furniture, including a massive gilded wood throne weighing 800 pounds, sitting upon four hand-carved paws and adorned with a lion's head. The temple was sealed off, waiting for Christ's return.

Cult members were said to gather there at night in the woods, as high priestesses in long robes sacrificed mules in a ceremony called the “Jaws of Death.” Following these rites, the cultists danced about in the nude around ceremonial bonfires. On this same site, the leader of the Great Eleven Club, Mrs. May Otis Blackburn, later baked a disciple in a brick oven to cure a “blood malady.” Two days later, the disciple predictably died. Soon after, the Great Eleven Club became the subject of a police investigation when it was discovered that four other members had mysteriously disappeared. One of the more gruesome discoveries was the corpse of a 16-year old girl, Willa Rhoads, who was stored in a pickled state for three years while the cult awaited her resurrection. Rhoads’ body was later exhumed from a crypt beneath a house in Venice, California. Afterwards, the cult reportedly relocated to the Lake Tahoe area, and was never heard from again.

Selected links:
http://www.onbunkerhill.org/greateleven
http://articles.latimes.com/1999/may/23/local/me-40217
http://gorightly.wordpress.com/2009/01/03/the-great-eleven-club/

On this same site, the leader of the Great Eleven Club, Mrs. May Otis Blackburn, later baked a disciple in a brick oven to cure a “blood malady.” Two days later, the disciple predictably died.

!!

http://www.borderlands.com/archives/meade.jpg

Borderland Sciences Research Foundation. Golden Dawn/Society Of The Inner Light member Meade Layne founded BSRF in Vista, CA to further investigate the metaphysical aspects of the Swedish "ghost rocket" wave of 1946 and their similarities to some elements of the Shaver Mysteries - a series of stories that (sort of) details the existence of parallel civilization on Earth. Maybe.

Vague as that is, Layne finds himself writing about UFOs just as the 1947 saucer wave crashes which gives him plenty of ears for his weird mix of off-the-shelf occultism, Ascended Masters, flying saucers, Tibetan Brotherhoods, and Little Green Men. Unlike much of the tin can/spaceship UFOs theories of the time, Layne looked at UFOs as an anti-materialistic, paranormal phenomonon. Besides, Layne and his Inner Light friends had been chatting with the Space People since the beginning so they knew They were already on the way.

Layne passes/ascends/whatever in 1961, but Borderland Sciences continues today (they're based in Eureka, CA now) - mostly as a publishing house now. Trevor Constable is probably his closest disciple, but Constable deserves his own entry (plus I'm not sure if he's SoCal based)

Jan 4, 1920 - Police raid Temple Of The Sun cult headquarters

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef0128769a5e32970c-pi

awesome thread

Any other book recommendations, Elvis Telecom? I'm already looking into the ones mentioned upthread.

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/cameron.jpg

Marjorie Cameron There's so much WTF in her life that I can't really condense it down so I'll resort to copy/paste

When she was 17, the Great Depression was underway and Cameron moved with her family to Davenport, Iowa, a considerably larger town than Belle Plain. Having trouble adjusting and after the suicide of a close friend, Cameron several times tried unsuccessfully to take her own life using sleeping pills. She claims that these near brushes with death had further enhanced her psychic abilities, reportedly giving her a glimpse into the realm of the dead.

In 1943, in the midst of World War II, the 21 year-old Cameron joined the Navy-turning down several scholarships. She was sent along with 3000 other women to boot camp in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Soon she was selected for a high-level job in Washington, DC, where she applied her artistic skills by drawing maps for the war efforts. She was then sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff where she once met Winston Churchill. She had a drafting table at the head of their conference room. Later, she felt that many men died in the South Pacific as a result of her drawings, Cameron considered all of her drawings to be magical talismans that had a very real effect on the world, she always felt a karmic connection to these men and believed that later tragic events in her life were the result of her participation in their deaths.

By the late 1950s, Cameron was living in Malibu and hanging out with a crowd of artists that included the likes of Dennis Hopper, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, and others. Wallace Berman's show at the Ferus Gallery was closed in 1957 after displaying one of Cameron's drawings which depicted a woman, possibly Cameron, being taken from behind by an alien creature.

When rocket propulsion researcher and occultist Jack Parsons met Marjorie Cameron, he regarded her as the fulfilment of magical rituals he had been performing as the beginning of the Babalon Working, roughly, an attempt to incarnate in a physical body a divine entity that would bring about great change for the Aeon of Horus.
Parsons wrote of Cameron in a letter to his mentor Aleister Crowley in 1946:

"The feeling of tension and unease continued for four days. Then on January 18 1946 at sunset, whilst the Scribe and I were on the Mojave Desert, the feeling of tension suddenly stopped. I turned to him and said 'it is done', in absolute certainty that the Operation was accomplished. I returned home, and found a young woman (Marjorie Cameron) answering the requirements waiting for me. She is describable as an air of fire type with bronze red hair, fiery and subtle, determined and obstinate, sincere and perverse, with extraordinary personality, talent and intelligence. During the period of January 19 to February 27 I invoked the Goddess BABALON (a particular aspect of the Egyptian goddess Nuit) with the aid of magical partner (Ron Hubbard), as was proper to one of my grade."

They termed this incarnation the Moonchild. Writes Aleister Crowley on the subject:

"The Aeon of Horus is of the nature of a child. To perceive this, we must conceive of the nature of a child without the veil of sentimentality - beyond good and evil, perfectly gentle, perfectly ruthless, containing all possibilities within the limits of heredity, and highly susceptible to training and environment. But the nature of Horus is also the nature of force - blind, terrible, unlimited force."

The Babalon Working was allegedly successful.

After her husband Jack Parsons' death, she starred in Kenneth Anger's 1965 cult-film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Both Cameron and Kenneth believed that this film was proof to the world that she had manifested the force of Babalon on Earth. Anger later said of her that "She was doing art for the sake of magick and her soul. She never sold her paintings." Cameron later burned most of her paintings in the late 1950s in a symbolic suicide performed with her second husband Sherif Kimmil after they had been up for several days on speed and had formed what Cameron called a "suicide club". Kimmil slit his wrists in the bathroom at the same time as the burning. Cameron's two brothers, her sister and also her father worked JPL, the company co-founded by her husband, Jack Parsons. She was a protege of mythologist Joseph Campbell.

Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel died of cancer on the 24th of July, 1995

Any other book recommendations, Elvis Telecom? I'm already looking into the ones mentioned upthread.

Visionary State is still the one to start with, but really you can just pick anything out of the occult section of the Amok Books/Koma Books catalog and keep checking the footnotes/references. I'm just starting in on L.A. Despair: A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times which is a compendium of bottom-of-barrel true crime sordidness that's catnip for the Ellroy set.

When I saw Craig Baldwin introduce Mock Up On Mu, an unfortunately terrible film about Parsons, Cameron, Hubbard et al, he really talked up John Carter's Sex and Rockets.

Upon hearing this revelation, Clifford Dabney, the nephew of local oil magnate Joseph Dabney, joined the cult and offered Blackburn $40,000 in cash and property, including 164 rolling acres that sprawled across a canyon in the community of Santa Susana Knolls in Simi Valley.

I wonder if Ross MacDonald was thinking of this with The Moving Target?

There's a book out on Marjorie Cameron now.

Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron

Oh cool! I had no idea...

Emperor Norton wuz robbed. Oh wait, this is an LA thread.

I was going to say.

http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/5240_1200084928019_1405412996_557342_6187673_n.jpg

This book just popped up on my radar...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51qLjirH1KL._SL500_AA278_PIkin4,BottomRight,-40,22_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

Seems to be hyper-bullshitic, but this isn't the first time I've heard of high weirdness going on in the early Inland Empire. Only it doesn't just tie in the Zodiac Killer, but throws in Crowley, Harry Houdini and the occult geography that connects them all together.

Podcast interview with the authors here: http://radiomisterioso.com/2011/08/01/walter-bosley-and-richard-spence-occult-murder-from-1915/ (follow iTunes link on the right)

slept-on post by jaxon above!

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2735/4051980281_4259952d81.jpg

Krotona (a.k.a. Krotona Institute Of Theosophy) Founded in 1919, Krotona was envisioned as a utopian Theosophist colony, a "modern Athens" where residents would "suffer neither fog nor dust nor frost." When it was finally completed in Beachwood Canyon, the colony was an oddball architectural mashup best described as Walt Disney Moorish complete with onion domes, keyhole windows, and Rosicrucian carvings everywhere. Most of the colony was funded by a Hawaiian sugar cane heiress and during it's heyday from 1919 to 1924, attracted assorted mystics, New Atlantis searchers, requisite celebrities (Mary Astor and Charlie Chaplin were active there), and anyone questing for the California Dream.

LA's growth eventually suburbanized the Hollywood Hills and in the late 1920s Krotona split for Ojai where it remains. Parts of the Krotona complex remain today and like a lot of buildings from that era - it's been subdivided into apartments. One of Krotona's lodges is still used for theosophist lectures.

So that's where Pynchon got the idea.

http://www.cinefamily.org/films/special-events-november-2011/#process-media-presents-aliens-from-spaceship-earth-director-in-person-2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jg5RXSZiU8

Now that looks prime.

already got tickets.

yay! i love when you bump this thread, Elvis! <3

If I want founding of LA, Chinatown, and occult weirdness to read on vacation, which book to I want?

Just got around to Dharmaland the other day it and dug it. I liked how they took it seriously with the arrangements - not kitschy or goofy at all

This is cool, thanks!

At least one of these tunes sounds a lot like a Hair outtake.

http://shadowboxstudio.com/edenahbez.htm Joe Romersa's website is my favorite Eden Ahbez thing. The best part is the section called "phone messages from ahbe" which consists of 4 long, rambling voicemails he'd left on Romersa's answering machine. In message #3, he performs an original song called "Gone Yogi".

I liked Erik Davis's blog post more than the embedded track from Dharmalands.

Speaking of Erick Davis, this one is on my short list... I heard a couple interviews with him when it was released:

High Weirdness -
Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/high-weirdness

RIP Skylaire Alfvegren. I knew her back when she was writing for Ben Is Dead and she went on to be a great writer and source for a lot of what I've been posting here. Kinda shocked here...
http://www.cryptozoonews.com/alfvegren-obi/

i'm here for jack parsons

but you know what, i'm open to other kooks as well

Have you read Strange Angel?

nope! currently trying to find somewhere i can stream the tv version though

yeah i want to watch the tv series too

The Dollop comedy podcast did a surprisingly great episode on Parsons

cant find the ep in their feed but it’s on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgTT0Om5rJw

yeah i want to watch the tv series too

The TV series' pacing isn't great. Season two (and by extension, the entire series) ends when L Ron Hubbard shows up - so you're missing a good 75% of the story. Also because it's CBS, everything has been cleaned up for broadcast television. Sex And Rockets is still the book to read first before tracking down the show.

good to know, thx Elvis

One a somewhat related note... twilight for the back-to-the-land movement:

https://www.gq.com/story/californias-vanishing-hippie-utopias?utm_source=pocket-newtab

parsons and l. ron are fuckin dorks its all about marjorie cameron

marjorie cameron: also fuckin dorks iirc

https://arcana-media.s3.amazonaws.com/thumbcache/5e/6f/5e6f87d242071503607bc932fb5f47f6.jpg

Found a used copy of this recently... really cool little book (the font is quite large), very well put together with tons of interesting illustrations. Gordon Kennedy's Children of the Sun already covered a lot of the fruit & nut germanic proto-hippies, but I found the stuff about California TB sanitoriums to be especially interesting - and how this architecture had a profound influence on the modernist look (Neutra to Eames, etc.).
I knew TB was a scourge but I don't think I was aware of just how bad it was... and SO many people came to California & the Southwest to heal themselves of it.

I went to a closing sale at a sanatorium in Altadena, not much left when I was there. It's now a bunch of expensive single family houses (called La Vina, as was the sanatorium).

Zorthian Ranch in Altadena has a commune vibe (and is still around), though it really isn't one.

The Wormwood Star is leaving Criterion at the end of this month - of course you can catch it on YouTube, but the Criterion's copy is far better looking. (check out Curtis Harrington's other stuff while you're there)

Can't believe I literally learnt about eden ahbez last night and this is the second time today I come across him mentioned in my daily trawl through the internet

Almost wanted to revive this thread recently to mention that cult leader Mel something who had something to do with Zabriskie Point but I think he was more East Coast, Boston-based.

Mel Lyman.

Ryan Walsh's book Astral Weeks talks about Lyman and the entire Fort Hill community in Boston. Worth checking out

Yeah. Love the quote here from Jonathan Richman and then the rest is something I only just recently heard about:

If the Velvets were busy, Richman would wander through Cambridge and sometimes pick up an issue of Avatar. (“I wasn’t sure I understood all of it but could seethey admired this Mel fellow,” he says.) Meanwhile, another young Velvet Underground fanatic was also reading Avatar, and he felt he understood everything it published, especially the Mel-centric pages. Wayne McGuire had been arrested and convicted for selling the paper in November 1967. For his loyalty, Lyman invited him and other salesmen to Fort Hill for a celebratory dinner, and McGuire dedicated himself to turning the population of Boston on to his guru’s brilliance. Once the Velvets started frequenting the Tea Party, the band got rolled onto McGuire’s hero roster, leading to his Crawdaddy essay “The Boston Sound,” easily the most intense endorsement of the Velvets to be published during their career. “NOW IS THE TIME FOR DISTORTIONS TO BURN,” McGuire screams via typewriter, “with flaming sword in hand I will clear away those ugly growths which parade as insightful musical criticism. . . . This is a review of the Velvet Underground, this is a review of the end of the world.”

Walsh, Ryan H.. Astral Weeks (pp. 120-121). Penguin Publishing Group.

Mel Lyman seems like a real prick

Yeah, Rolling Stone did an expose of him pretty early on: among many other things, he saw Jim Kweskin coming, got into the Kweskin Band as harmonica player (in the witty, lively, multiple POV music doc Festival, he condescends to drop us some pearls ov wisdomb), may have had something to do with Kweskin disbanding them at peak, then moving into Lyman Family house, butt of jokes, called "Jimmy the Jew" by Mel, back on stage later ranting about end of the world, did at least one album about that, some better stuff later, at least he's outlived Mel, I think.
probably in the Rolling Stone anthology Mindfuckers, published by their Straight Arrow Press, long OOP< but some other stuff in there I wish I could forget. (Nah if I could find an affordable copy, would prob re-read)

There’s an old clip from The Dick Cavett Show online where he’s interviewing those two kids from Zabriskie Point and they’re talking about that whole Mel Lyman business and it’s just really creepy to watch.

Yeah, read about that but didn’t watch.

I did watch John Simon vs. Mort Sahl though, which was also kind of unpleasant.

Seem to recall Antonioni visiting Sammy Davis, Jr.’s poolhouse to talk to The Band while they were recording the s/t about possibly doing the soundtrack for Zabriskie Point but can’t find a reference right now.

Some discussion here: The Band.

There’s an old clip from The Dick Cavett Show online where he’s interviewing those two kids from Zabriskie Point and they’re talking about that whole Mel Lyman business and it’s just really creepy to watch.

Kliph Nesteroff wrote a great article about Lyman for the WFMU blog - it leads with this messed up Cavett interview.

Yeah, keep coming back to that article, but it’s so dense I haven’t gotten all the way through it.

Every time I see the name Geoff Muldaur I think of his ex-wife Maria and her song “Midnight at the Oasis,” written by big time soap opera composer and meditation maven David Nichtern.

To further detail, here is an article by Nichtern’s son: https://lithub.com/how-loving-the-princess-bride-led-me-to-buddhism/

To further derail

(inevitable)

The surprising afterlife of a ’70s L.A. cult - How the Source Family became hot IP in 2023

Though the Source Family disbanded in 1978, fascination with the group and its practices has surged in the new millennium. Since the mid-aughts, there have been documentary films, books and multiple CD and vinyl record reissues of the group’s music. Bootleg T-shirts, hoodies, mugs and stickers appear in Google search results. All of these may be traced to a vast collection of images, video and audio recordings, recipes and manifestos that has survived the march of time.

After joining the Family in 1972, Isis Aquarian, who was born Charlene Peters, the daughter of an archivist for the Air Force and NASA, served as the group’s documentarian, creating the artful material that has been drawn from for various archival projects over the last 15 or so years. After the group fell apart, she made it her mission to preserve the Family’s legacy.

Most recently, in November, Isis, curator Charlie Kitchings and filmmaker and publisher Jodi Wille, who has previously worked with Isis on a book and a feature documentary, released “Family: The Source Family Scrapbook” in conjunction with the independent record label Sacred Bones. The book includes previously unpublished photographs and ephemera from Isis’ archive and detailed captions that contextualize the images. Isis also moved her archive, around 50 boxes of materials, to the American Religions Collection at the UC Santa Barbara library. In conjunction with the book’s release, a series of Source Family events took place in Santa Barbara, Los Feliz, Malibu and Culver City in late March.

And now, Hollywood is getting involved.

At a private dinner in Malibu on March 25 sponsored by the media company Atlas Obscura, guests including actors Patricia Arquette and Mark Ruffalo, music producer Rick Rubin, actor and producer Ben Sinclair, original Source Family members and other curious parties were invited on “a journey into the cult roots of health food.” The menu, inspired by dishes at the original Source restaurant, featured seven courses including “psychedelic toast,” “multidimensional soup” and a re-creation of the restaurant’s “aware salad,” served by staff engaged in Source Family cosplay, dressed in flowing white frocks and wigs. Isis and fellow Source Family members Venus, Zerathustra and Galaxy Aquarian blessed the meal with a ritual they performed in the Family. “As above, so below, and around, we go, YaHoWah,” they chanted with corresponding hand gestures, as if guiding energy around the 40-person table decorated with poppies, dill flowers, wheat and cut papaya, a flower child’s rendering of a medieval banquet.

Arquette, who spent her childhood in a Subud commune in Virginia, said she’s always been fascinated by various religious philosophies and spiritual seekers. “It’s been nice to talk to these elders who are here, about their radical experiences as young people,” she said. “Especially when they talked about how Father Yod went down his own ego path. That they acknowledged it made me feel like there’s not an absolute revisionist history.”

The Malibu event doubled as a hub of in-progress Hollywood spiritual ventures. According to Wille, Ruffalo, his manager Margaret Riley and the producer Stacey Sher are working on a Source Family limited series in which Ruffalo will play Father Yod. Sinclair is developing a series about the spiritual leader Ram Dass while Rubin is producing a docuseries about Yogi Bhajan. Two days after the event in Malibu, Rubin sent a limo for Isis and interviewed her for three hours with a full camera crew because, he said by email, that he’s “excited by … Isis Aquarian’s bird’s-eye view of Jim Baker’s evolution from successful man of the world to spiritual leader, whose ever-curious hunger for deeper spiritual connection was shared by 150 like-minded souls.”

Rubin said he learned about the Family after he moved to California in the late ’80s and began dining at the Source Restaurant. “Something about the space held an energy even though the Source Family had already moved on.” During Father Yod’s lifetime, wrote Rubin, “The Source story was a local story. Now it’s global.”

...

A Q&A at the Philosophical Research Society on March 23, which followed a screening of Wille’s 2013 documentary “The Source Family,” made with Maria Demopoulos, turned into one of the more heated discussions that Wille and the Family have participated in since they began working together. Some audience members implied that the film’s narrative arc, and the family member’s answers that night, were selective, omitting Father Yod’s use of alcohol and cocaine. One questioner politely asked if the three female Family members on stage — Isis, Galaxy and Venus — if they were aware, at the time, of the negative perspectives presented in the film, or if they feel negatively about the Family today. Another asked about patriarchy and power structures.

About right.

feel like this ties in to the May Pang interview that Ned also linked to, in that the eventual answer/explanation/context is "it was the 70s, man"

it's unclear how that Q&A resolved? would love to hear more context.

Great LAT article on the current state of the Philosophical Research Society (live in LA? check it out!)
https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2023-09-11/philosophical-research-society-los-angeles-arts-culture-events-for-mystics-esoterica

Thanks for that, cool article... this detail stood out: The organization purchased the Los Feliz property in 1935 for just $10 and soon began construction on the arched Mayan-inspired building in what was then a wild mustard field.

at the intersection of Los Feliz and Griffith Park boulevards, that's crazy