With some liturgical precision, YouTube pushed my way the following video featuring musician Murray Head, hosted by David Frost on November 15, 1969.1 Head had taken the role of Judas Iscariot on the concept album of Jesus Christ Superstar, written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, who already had gotten their pop cantata-turned-musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat under their belt. On Frost’s show Head saunters in sporting a svelte swimmer’s physique not quite concealed beneath a sheer chiffon chemise. There’s an unsettling tension between surface and substance in this presentation: muted tones in living color, crosses replaced by jagged Y’s forming an ebony crown of thorns.
In Superstar, Judas famously takes lead billing over Jesus (in order of appearance) in a retelling of the Passion, casting Christ as man and superman. In the opera Judas begins and ends—here, beyond the grave—as the conscience of the incautious up-and-comer Jesus.
Five years ago this month I posted a lengthy review of Martin Aston’s encyclopedic Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out.2 Last week one of Aston’s subjects came to life as it was pushed my way courtesy of YouTube: 1964’s “Have I the Right?” by the Honeycombs. Lyrically it’s reminiscent of Sixties songs that became gay and lesbian bar hymns. Think Sinatra’s “Strangers In the Night” (1966), Bobby Darin’s version of “My Buddy” (1962), Connie Francis’s “Where the Boys Are” (1961). Such songs were appropriated by this social set, but its membership included a few of the hymnists as well.
I couldn’t recall why I knew the Honeycombs’ music until I found that these clips come from Top Gear (1965) aka Go Go Mania (US), which I taped from cable years ago. It’s available for viewing, gratis, via Kanopy.Continue reading “A Taste of Honeycombs”
Pardon merci, je suis le grand zombie I’m just not human tonight
— Mekons, “Big Zombie”
I haven’t thought about anthropologist Wade Davis much since his 1985 nonfiction book The Serpent and the Rainbow was turned into what I thought was an icky film by Wes Craven in 1988.3
In L.A. I had a habit of picking up review copies and other first editions at Cosmopolitan Book Shop, where I got Davis’s book. I always had good luck there.
In his book Davis recounts his attempt to see if zombification in Haitian Vodou had a pharmacological component. I remember his tale being akin to Terence McKenna’s Food of the Gods, published seven years later, taking the reader on a similar, esoteric journey regarding psychedelics.4
So, on my birthday, last Monday, Wade Davis shows up on of all things, Christiane Amanpour’s PBS show. And he ain’t talking zombies. But perhaps he is. He was tapped because of an August 6 Rolling Stone article that went viral:
The Unraveling of America
Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era
A sampling from that article…
In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism.
More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom.
In truth, at least in economic terms, the country of the 1950s resembled Denmark as much as the America of today. Marginal tax rates for the wealthy were 90 percent.
(Hmm… Maybe there is something to that MAGA hashtag.)
And then there is this:
The United States, virtually a demilitarized nation on the eve of the Second World War, never stood down in the wake of victory. To this day, American troops are deployed in 150 countries. Since the 1970s, China has not once gone to war; the U.S. has not spent a day at peace.
In essence, the U.S. has kept alive its corpse—once decimated by Depression, animated by WWII animus—only to be eviscerated by a military-industrial-congressional complex that planted “defense” plants in every district to insure an economic survival more akin to aspartame than, say, agave.
On July 23, two weeks before Davis published his article, Prof. Richard D. Wolff posted “Why a Cold War Against China?” in which he explains how the U.S. needs enemies to justify an insatiable military.
Predictably Wolff invokes Eisenhower, who warned us about the “conjunction” of arms manufacturers and arms consumers in his farewell address of January 17, 1961. What’s less remembered is that Eisenhower also said, “Those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibility,” which left open the United States’ exceptional place in the world. That responsibility, despite Eisenhower’s caveats, meant—and means—arming ourselves and our allies to the teeth rather than cultivating endeavors involved with life rather than death: education, health care, the arts—not to mention sustenance itself.
Three days later Wolff said “our economic system is on life support.”
And then last Friday Wolff published an article in which he discusses the Chinese economic model.
Rising labour productivity yielded rising average real wages (also rising far faster than in the West). Across these years, no Chinese troops fought in any foreign wars. Housing, education, health care, and transportation received massive investments; their supplies often grew ahead of Chinese demand for them.5
Richard D. Wolff – Socialist or Capitalist—What Is China’s Model, Exactly? | Brave New Europe
An interesting take not only on China, but the USSR and Europe as well.
All of this is Economics 101.
Then on Sunday David Cay Johnston’s DCReport posted the following appeal:
Vote! For God’s Sake, Dear America, Vote! | DCReport.org
Vote! For God’s Sake, Dear America, Vote! The Choice In The November Election Comes Down to the choice between Freedom or Tyranny
But what about the tyranny of the military and its stranglehold over whichever choice you choose?
Vote? That’s something the walking, living dead do.
This past summer in Cheyenne my uncle Richard Hughes told me of his hallucinations. That a man going blind might also view visions seems an insult to injury. Yet his condition has a name—Charles Bonnet syndrome—after an eighteenth-century Swiss naturalist and philosopher. As profiled in ACNR (Vol. 8, No. 5, 19) Bonnet first listed his grandfather’s
silent visions of men, women, birds, carriages, and buildings, which he fully realised were ‘fictions’ of his brain. Bonnet himself later underwent visual deterioration and experienced hallucinations typical of the syndrome named after him […].
(Compare with “Blinky” Watts, the sound effects technician character from David Lynch’s short-lived TV series On the Air, who suffers from Bozeman’s Simplex, which causes him to see “25.62 times as much as we do.”)
Six months prior I came across a song by Richard Dawson, which I wanted to write about tonight only to find that he too sees things (due to a genetic defect), but through a glass darkly, as Dawson toldThe Guardian‘s Michael Hann, who remarked, “There’s an almost hallucinatory clarity to his writing.”
