from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (August 3, 2000):

Years before MTV, an Atlanta TV show created its own music videos. It was psychedelic. It was far out. It was the ... 'Now Explosion'

By Miriam Longino
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

Music video channel VH1 says Aug. 1, 1981, is a landmark date in rock history. Airing "The 100 Greatest Rock and Roll Moments on TV" this week, the self-appointed rock historians noted that it was the day when MTV launched the nation's first music video television show.
    (Sound of needle being ripped across a vinyl 45.)
    Well, not exactly.
    (Scratch, pop, hiss. Turn up the spacey, distorted guitar intro of the 1970 Norman Greenbaum hit, "Spirit in the Sky.")
    Let's set the record straight. The nation's first music video show didn't start in New York in 1981, and it wasn't MTV. An early chapter in the video revolution happened right here in Atlanta, over a fleeting, nine-month period in 1970, when a group of young disc jockeys and film producers (eventually with the help of Ted Turner) launched a 28-hour weekend block of music videos called "Now Explosion."
    Now Explosion (echo: explosion, explosion, explosion, explosion...).
    Imagine the psychedelia of Austin Powers blended with the trippy light shows of Filmore West with a little "Laugh-In" bikini dancing sprinkled into the mix: Hippies frolicking in Piedmont Park to the Plastic Ono Band's "Instant Karma." Traffic speeding past the Varsity to the sounds of "Vehicle" by the Ides of March. Bikini clad young girls -- surrounded by floating blobs of paisley -- dancing to Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Lookin' Out My Back Door" at the Channel 36 studios.
    "I was 16 and thought it was the closest thing to rock 'n' roll heaven that I would ever get," says 47-year-old Alice Walker of Gay, Ga. "I can still hear my mother saying, 'Are you watching that rock music show? Turn it down!' I envied the dancers."
    One was 48-year-old advertising executive Lori Krinsky, who hopped in the car with a fringed-vested friend one night in 1970, wound up at the Channel 36 studios and danced on-air to "Spirit in the Sky."
    "I don't remember much," she says with a laugh. "It was kind of cool. We waited for hours, then they said, 'Come on in and dance.' They did that weird photography that shows just your shadow and outline in psychedelic colors. What a riot."
    The mere mention of the words "Now Explosion'' send Dan Turner, a 47-year-old jazz pianist from Conyers, into a retro stream of consciousness: "The fog lifts. ... Lazy days sitting around watching TV. ... My friend in knee-high moccasin boots. ... Staring at the background stuff on the screen all day in between runs to the Krystal. ... It was way ahead of MTV."
    Sam Judd, 47, of Douglasville says, "When MTV came along, I tried to explain that this type of programming had already been tried in Atlanta, and no one remembered it but me."
    Just how did one of the nation's first music video experiments wind up in a then-sleepy Southern town? The story, which stretches from March to November of 1970, goes something like this:
    "Now Explosion'' was the brainchild of a flamboyant Philadelphia businessman named Bob Whitney. With a background in radio (reportedly as a producer for Dick Clark), Whitney came up with the idea of broadcasting Top 40 radio on television -- TV you could not just hear but watch. Or as the promotional brochure said at the time, "TV so turned on you can't turn it off."
    After supposedly bankrolling $25,000 to launch his concept, Whitney tapped two Atlanta DJs, "Skinny" Bobby Harper and Bob "Todd" Thurgaland, to host the show and introduce records. The two had been top jocks on WQXI-AM ("Quixie in Dixie"), Atlanta's only rock 'n' roll station throughout the '60s, and were primed for the job.
    "We were the first video deejays," says Harper, 61, a communications consultant for the Georgia Student Finance Commission (HOPE scholarship program). "We didn't have videos handed to us; there was no such thing back then. We had to make them all."
    Thurgaland, 54, who lives in Ocala, Fla., recalls the days when UHF stations (these were the high-band channels long before cable) were desperate for programming to fill their air time, especially on weekends. "We used the studios at Channel 36 during the middle of the night when the station was dark. It was a nonunion facility, so we could play with all the equipment."
    Getting the music was no problem. "Now Explosion" simply used records of the day (without notifying any of the licensing agencies, such as BMI. It was the era of love and peace, after all). But getting visuals to air over the songs was a challenge.
    The job of creating the look of "Now Explosion" was handed to a 28-year-old television producer named R.T. Williams. The brash young broadcaster had begun his career on a more traditional route, as a producer for Atlanta's Channel 11. But when Whitney laid out his new concept of a music video program, Williams took the bait.
    "It was so incredibly simple, but so different," he says today, peering over a pair of glasses under a head of graying hair. "You never know that history is being made when it's being made. We were really the first to do that kind of interpretive video to music."
    Williams quit his mainstream job, grabbed a Norelco PCP 90 portable camera and starting filming. His job: to produce five original videos for each song aired on the program.
    "When you look at music videos today, keep in mind that MTV doesn't produce any of this stuff. We had to hatch and fry the eggs that we made."
    Williams and crew turned to the psychedelic images of the day, and their own imaginations, to churn out what amounts to an estimated 1,700 hours of primitive music videos. Many were filmed on location in Atlanta: street scenes of girls in jeans and gingham dresses from the "hippie" district between 10th and 14th streets; shots of students in big Afros coming and going at area high schools; politically themed segments, such as "Bridge Over Troubled Water," played over film of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech; dancers gyrating in front of a blue screen filled with special effects -- girls that Todd says he and Harper "picked up down on Peachtree."
    "We would carry an empty, two-inch videotape canister with an ABC-TV sticker on it, and ask pretty young girls if they wanted to come down to Channel 36 at midnight and put on skimpy outfits and dance," Thurgaland says with a laugh. "And they did."
    Occasionally, Top 40 acts would drop by the studio to lip sync their hits, such as Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, who interpreted "Just Dropped In (to See What Condition My Condition Was In)" for "Now Explosion." "Oh, yeah, I remember it," Rogers says. "I had this long hair, a big bushy beard, rose-colored glasses and an earring. I actually thought I looked good."
    But this was no "American Bandstand."
    With no blueprint to go by, the crew literally made up the groovy look of "Now Explosion" with a series of special effects that Williams still gets excited about today.
    "There was the 'rhythm zoom,' where the camera would zoom in and out real fast," he recalls. "Then we did the 'quad split,' where we'd show the same image in all four corners of the screen. The 'reverse chroma key' was like they do now with weathermen in front of the weather map, where we would have a negative outline of a dancer."
    "Now Explosion" was on the air only a few weeks when trouble erupted. According to the then-staffers, the company that owned Channel 36 was threatening to take over the show. Williams remembers that Whitney called a secret meeting in a room at the Emory Sheraton Hotel on Clifton Road.
    "It was a raid-planning party," he says. "We rented some trucks, and went over to the station [Channel 36] about 3 a.m. It was a driving rainstorm, and there were still two people working in master control. We went in and started hauling out all our tapes and loading them into the trucks. Finally, a guy got wise to us and picked up the phone. Next thing, we saw the lights and heard the sirens."
    But the "Now Explosion" crew somehow avoided the law, and smuggled the tapes to Florida.
    Days later, the program premiered on Channel 17, a new UHF station owned by an entrepreneur named Ted Turner. Turner quickly signed on to air "Now Explosion" all weekend, and also agreed to dub the videos in his studio on West Peachtree Street for syndication across the country.
    Eventually, "Now Explosion" wound up on 111 UHF stations, including stations in Philadelphia and New York. But like the Woodstock era that spawned it, its life was short. Mounting bills and an incredible demand for video footage caused Whitney and crew to throw in the towel in November 1970.
    Williams went on to manage production for the Channel 17 superstation, WTBS. Harper worked as a spokesperson for Delta Air Lines for many years, while Thurgaland and his son started a video production company in Florida. No one knows what happened to Whitney, who was last seen in San Francisco around 1974.
    As for the "Now Explosion" tapes, they wound up in a garage in Coral Gables, Fla., where they were reportedly destroyed in a flood around 1972. It's not likely any of the dubs exists either. Williams says they were shot on expensive two-inch, quad video tape.
    "A 10-hour reel cost $20,000," he says, noting that television stations were likely to tape over the footage as soon as it was obsolete.
    Thurgaland still owns a one-hour tape of the show, which he dug out of a box in the attic to share a snippet with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Williams once had two reels, but left them in his office at WTBS when he departed in 1984. "Who knows what happened to them," he says today.
    Though just a blip on the pop culture meter, "Now Explosion" left lasting impressions. In the early '80s, a funky, kitschy local band, led by Clare Butler, adopted the name and toured the East Coast. Others who watched the show say it had lasting effects on them, too.
    "I was in the seventh grade, and can still see some of the videos," recalls Leza Young, 42, of Chamblee. "Bobby Sherman dancing in front of four large studio panels to 'Easy Come, Easy Go.' The clip for 'Little Green Bag.' The woman dancing to Freda Payne's 'Band of Gold.' The poor hitchhiker standing in the rain in 'Kentucky Rain.' So much of my taste in music developed as a result of that show -- I now have a degree in rock radio and was a deejay for several years."
    "I think one reason I got so interested in music and do what I do today came from sitting around all weekend watching that thing," says Atlanta concert promoter Peter Conlon. "They played songs that you couldn't hear on the radio here, like 'Little Green Bag' and 'Fire' by Arthur Brown. It was kind of like FM before everybody had FM radio."

THANKS TO A. PIERCE!

From the July 23, 2002 NEW YORK TIMES:

Why We're So Nice: We're Wired to Cooperate
By NATALIE ANGIER
 

What feels as good as chocolate on the tongue or money in the bank but won't make you fat or risk a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission?
    Hard as it may be to believe in these days of infectious greed and sabers unsheathed, scientists have discovered that the small, brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.
    Studying neural activity in young women who were playing a classic laboratory game called the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which participants can select from a number of greedy or cooperative strategies as they pursue financial gain, researchers found that when the women chose mutualism over "me-ism," the mental circuitry normally associated with reward-seeking behavior swelled to life.
    And the longer the women engaged in a cooperative strategy, the more strongly flowed the blood to the pathways of pleasure.
    The researchers, performing their work at Emory University in Atlanta, used magnetic resonance imaging to take what might be called portraits of the brain on hugs.
    "The results were really surprising to us," said Dr. Gregory S. Berns, a psychiatrist and an author on the new report, which appears in the current issue of the journal Neuron. "We went in expecting the opposite."
    The researchers had thought that the biggest response would occur in cases where one person cooperated and the other defected, when the cooperator might feel that she was being treated unjustly.
    Instead, the brightest signals arose in cooperative alliances and in those neighborhoods of the brain already known to respond to desserts, pictures of pretty faces, money, cocaine and any number of licit or illicit delights.
    "It's reassuring," Dr. Berns said. "In some ways, it says that we're wired to cooperate with each other."
    The study is among the first to use M.R.I. technology to examine social interactions in real time, as opposed to taking brain images while subjects stared at static pictures or thought-prescribed thoughts.
    It is also a novel approach to exploring an ancient conundrum, why are humans so, well, nice? Why are they willing to cooperate with people whom they barely know and to do good deeds and to play fair a surprisingly high percentage of the time?
    Scientists have no trouble explaining the evolution of competitive behavior. But the depth and breadth of human altruism, the willingness to forgo immediate personal gain for the long-term common good, far exceeds behaviors seen even in other large-brained highly social species like chimpanzees and dolphins, and it has as such been difficult to understand.
    "I've pointed out to my students how impressive it is that you can take a group of young men and women of prime reproductive age, have them come into a classroom, sit down and be perfectly comfortable and civil to each other," said Dr. Peter J. Richerson, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California at Davis and an influential theorist in the field of cultural evolution. "If you put 50 male and 50 female chimpanzees that don't know each other into a lecture hall, it would be a social explosion."
    Dr. Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich and colleagues recently presented findings on the importance of punishment in maintaining cooperative behavior among humans and the willingness of people to punish those who commit crimes or violate norms, even when the chastisers take risks and gain nothing themselves while serving as ad hoc police.
    In her survey of the management of so-called commons in small-scale communities where villagers have the right, for example, to graze livestock on commonly held land, Dr. Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University found that all communities have some form of monitoring to gird against cheating or using more than a fair share of the resource.
    In laboratory games that mimic small-scale commons, Dr. Richerson said, 20 to 30 percent have to be coerced by a threat of punishment to cooperate.
    Fear alone is not highly likely to inspire cooperative behavior to the degree observed among humans. If research like Dr. Fehr's shows the stick side of the equation, the newest findings present the neural carrot — people cooperate because it feels good to do it.
    In the new findings, the researchers studied 36 women from 20 to 60 years old, many of them students at Emory and inspired to participate by the promise of monetary rewards. The scientists chose an all-female sample because so few brain-imaging studies have looked at only women. Most have been limited to men or to a mixture of men and women.
    But there is a vast body of non- imaging data that rely on using the Prisoner's Dilemma.
    "It's a simple and elegant model for reciprocity," said Dr. James K. Rilling, an author on the Neuron paper who is at Princeton. "It's been referred to as the E. coli of social psychology."
    From past results, the researchers said, one can assume that neuro- imaging studies of men playing the game would be similar to their new findings with women.
    The basic structure of the trial had two women meet each other briefly ahead of time. One was placed in the scanner while the other remained outside the scanning room. The two interacted by computer, playing about 20 rounds of the game. In every round, each player pressed a button to indicate whether she would "cooperate" or "defect." Her answer would be shown on-screen to the other player.
    The monetary awards were apportioned after each round. If one player defected and the other cooperated, the defector earned $3 and the cooperator nothing. If both chose to cooperate, each earned $2. If both opted to defect, each earned $1.
    Hence, mutual cooperation from start to finish was a far more profitable strategy, at $40 a woman, than complete mutual defection, which gave each $20.
    The risk that a woman took each time she became greedy for a little bit more was that the cooperative strategy would fall apart and that both would emerge the poorer.
    In some cases, both women were allowed to pursue any strategy that they chose. In other cases, the non- scanned woman would be a "confederate" with the researchers, instructed, unbeknown to the scanned subject, to defect after three consecutive rounds of cooperation, the better to keep things less rarefied and pretty and more lifelike and gritty.
    In still other experiments, the woman in the scanner played a computer and knew that her partner was a machine. In other tests, women played a computer but thought that it was a human.
    The researchers found that as a rule the freely strategizing women cooperated. Even occasional episodes of defection, whether from free strategizers or confederates, were not necessarily fatal to an alliance.
    "The social bond could be reattained easily if the defector chose to cooperate in the next couple of rounds," another author of the report, Dr. Clinton D. Kilts, said, "although the one who had originally been `betrayed' might be wary from then on."
    As a result of the episodic defections, the average per-experiment take for the participants was in the $30's. "Some pairs, though, got locked into mutual defection," Dr. Rilling said.
    Analyzing the scans, the researchers found that in rounds of cooperation, two broad areas of the brain were activated, both rich in neurons able to respond to dopamine, the brain chemical famed for its role in addictive behaviors.
    One is the anteroventral striatum in the middle of the brain right above the spinal cord. Experiments with rats have shown that when electrodes are placed in the striatum, the animals will repeatedly press a bar to stimulate the electrodes, apparently receiving such pleasurable feedback that they will starve to death rather than stop pressing the bar.
    Another region activated during cooperation was the orbitofrontal cortex in the region right above the eyes. In addition to being part of the reward-processing system, Dr. Rilling said, it is also involved in impulse control.
    "Every round, you're confronted with the possibility of getting an extra dollar by defecting," he said. "The choice to cooperate requires impulse control."
    Significantly, the reward circuitry of the women was considerably less responsive when they knew that they were playing against a computer. The thought of a human bond, but not mere monetary gain, was the source of contentment on display.
    In concert with the imaging results, the women, when asked afterward for summaries of how they felt during the games, often described feeling good when they cooperated and expressed positive feelings of camaraderie toward their playing partners.
    Assuming that the urge to cooperate is to some extent innate among humans and reinforced by the brain's feel-good circuitry, the question of why it arose remains unclear. Anthropologists have speculated that it took teamwork for humanity's ancestors to hunt large game or gather difficult plant foods or rear difficult children. So the capacity to cooperate conferred a survival advantage on our forebears.
    Yet as with any other trait, the willingness to abide by the golden rule and to be a good citizen and not cheat and steal from one's neighbors is not uniformly distributed.
    "If we put some C.E.O.'s in here, I'd like to see how they respond," Dr. Kilts said. "Maybe they wouldn't find a positive social interaction rewarding at all."
    A Prisoner's Dilemma indeed.

From the Sunday, July 28, 2002 LATImes Sunday Book Review:

Hipster, Flipster and Finger-Poppin' Daddy

DIG INFINITY!: The Life and Art of Lord Buckley
By Oliver Trager
Welcome Rain
406 pp.
$30 (including CD)

By GROVER SALES

     The welcome full-scale biography of Lord Buckley may signal the long-overdue revival of this avant-garde stand-up, nonstop jazz-talking ecstatic visionary preacher with a three-octave range and febrile surrealist imagination who loomed decades ahead of his time. His death in 1960 was largely overlooked by the standard obits, except as an opportunity to dismiss him as a "cult comic."
     Those obits neglected to add that the ever-growing "cult" quoted at length in Oliver Trager's exhaustive tribute, "Dig Infinity!," included Steve Allen, Ed Sullivan, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Robin Williams, Ken Kesey, Henry Miller, the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Studs Terkel, Jonathan Winters, Frank Sinatra, Laurence Olivier, Frank Zappa, Dick Gregory and the Nicholas Brothers. Not to forget an early employer, Al Capone, reputed to have called Buckley "the only man that ever made me laugh."
     Those familiar with Lord Richard Buckley only on recordings tended to assume he was black and were aghast to discover that, in the flesh, he embodied the Hollywood stereotype of a crusty British Lord, what Eric Hobsbawm, who writes as a jazz critic under the name of Francis Newton, described as "a Colonel cashiered from the Indian army in 1930." His Lordship, a title self-conferred and lived to the hilt, offstage as much as on, was noted for recasting Shakespeare, the Bible and the lives of Jesus and Gandhi into the jazz argot of a black hipster. At 6 feet, 3 inches tall and weighing 185 pounds, his barrel-chested gymnastic physique reflected an early stint as lumberjack in the environs of Tuolumne, Calif., in the High Sierra, where he was born in 1906.
     Teaming up with Red Skelton as emcee in the walkathons, those grueling marathons of the Great Depression, Buckley reinvented his persona even more radically than Jay Gatsby did. A charismatic con man and bunco artist, he lived the flamboyant epicurean lifestyle of an oil-rich potentate, conferring honorific titles on his "royal court" of idolaters ("Lady Doris, Prince Valentine") eager to lavish him with free rent, motorcars and unlimited credit. Tubby Boots, who joined the Buckley Royal Court at the age of 12, said, "Buckley should have been born with money because he thought he had money. He'd go out and tell the butcher, 'My God, I'm having a party in your honor. Every Hollywood star is going to be there. I know you're going to want to put the meat in the party.' And before you knew it, Buckley had all the trimmings for a party. He was always in debt, but people loved him because he only took advantage of his friends. If he liked you, he'd con you. If he didn't like you, he avoided you."
     His road manager, Charles Tacot, recalled: "Buckley led sixteen nude people through the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian where [Frank] Sinatra was performing. Sinatra had got him the job. When he learned of this caper he phoned Buckley. 'It's the funniest thing I ever heard. Just don't ask me for any more favors.' "
     Trager also quotes the late comic Adam Keefe: "Buckley was working in a Chicago club, the Suzy Q. He hired an open-backed hearse and was lying in an open coffin in the back of the hearse. There was a big sign that said, 'The Body Comes Alive at the Suzy Q' and he's lying there in the coffin smoking a joint riding around Chicago."
     Buckley carefully tailored his act to fit the audience. His frequent gigs on "The Ed Sullivan Show" stuck to safer material, including his audience participation Amos 'n Andy ventriloquist routine and the phantasmagoric sounds of a Fourth of July picnic replete with brass band and double-talk political speechifying. Working a hipper crowd, like the one at the Coffee Gallery in San Francisco's North Beach during the heyday of the beatnik invasion of the 1950s, Buckley openly smoked pot on stage while he regaled the societal dropouts with "The Nazz," shorthand for "The Nazarene": "So The Nazz and his buddies was goofin' off down the boulevard one day and they run into a little cat with a bent frame. So The Nazz say, 'What's de mattawid you baby?' And the little cat say, 'My frame is bent, Nazz--it's been bent from in front.'
     "So The Nazz put the golden eyes of love on this little kitty and he looked right down into the window of the little cat's soul! And he say, STRAIGHT-EN!!! Ka-zoom! Up went the cat like an arrow and ever-body jumpin' up and down say, 'Would you look what The Nazz put on that boy! You dug Him before--re-dig Him now!' "
     Half a century ago, you might have had only a hazy notion of what he was talking about, unless you were a new wave comic, actor, writer or a jazz musician like his protege, Anita O' Day, who considered him "the forefather of Professor Irwin Corey, Lenny Bruce, Mike Nichols and Elaine May."
     Actor-comic Larry Storch "never saw him write anything down. He was able to pick four people out of an audience and do a routine with them, but it would take him fifteen minutes--it was absolutely hypnotic: 'You! Up on stage immediately! You don't want to make me angry!' And by God, they would go right up on stage. I saw old people with canes hobble up on stage. And he'd sit them on stools in front of him, and tap each one on the back and tell them to move their lips and suddenly here 'vas un olt Chewish man' and Buckley would tap someone else and they'd move their lips and out would come Louis Armstrong's voice, and it was absolutely hysterical."
     The public notoriety that evaded Buckley in life surfaced immediately after his death in 1960 at 54, when the Manhattan media led by the Village Voice discovered that he was another victim of the New York Police's notorious "cabaret card" law, which prevented anyone convicted of a felony, no matter how remote or trivial, from being employed in a venue that served alcohol. (Buckley had been charged with a minor misdemeanor 15 years earlier.) His death set loose a firestorm of organized protest among theatrical unions, show people and journalists, including Nat Hentoff, that resulted in the abolition of the "cabaret card" insanity.
     Comic and political activist Dick Gregory provides a clue to the possible reasons behind a revival of interest today in Buckley's recordings and appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and Groucho Marx's "You Bet Your Life": "His use of the African American idiom was brilliant. It wouldn't take nothing to do that now, but imagine the guts and integrity it took for him to do that in his time. Political Correctness notwithstanding, I think his material would go over big now because America, despite its many problems, is more mature than it was then."
     Trager's obvious labor of obsessive passion covers Buckley's obscure origins, with expansive interviews with nearly everyone who had contact with His Lordship, including his beauteous, supportive and infinitely patient wife, "Lady" Elizabeth Buckley. The CD included with Trager's book contains some of his most memorable live routines to suggest why Buckley was embraced with messianic fervor by leading writers, comics, actors and opinion makers of our time, many of whom can still recite "The Nazz," "The Bad-Rapping of the Marquis De Sade" and "Willie the Shake" from memory. Perhaps His Lordship's time has finally come.

Grover Sales Is the Author of "Jazz: America's Classical Music" and Teaches Jazz Studies at Stanford University. In the early 1960s he handled Publicity for Lord Buckley in the San Francisco Bay Area.

From The New York Times:
 

I.R.S. Loophole Allows Wealthy to Avoid Taxes
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

In recent months some of the wealthiest older Americans have been buying huge life insurance policies on themselves. Curiously, these people have shopped not for the cheapest rates but for the highest rates they can find. In some cases, they delightedly pay 10 times the lowest rates for that insurance.
    Why would anyone willingly pay so much?
    Taxes.
    Through a technique invented by a lawyer in New York and a chemical engineer in California, each dollar spent on this insurance can typically eliminate $9 in taxes. Spend $10 million on this insurance, avoid $90 million or more in income, gift, generation-skipping and estate taxes.
    "I'm not saying this is the best thing since sliced bread, but it's really good for pushing wealth forward tax free," said Jonathan G. Blattmachr, the New York lawyer who heads the estate tax department at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and who explained the plan in a half-dozen interviews.
    The technique is legal, blessed by the I.R.S. in 1996. But some leading estate tax lawyers, as well as some accountants and insurance agents, say it shouldn't be. They say it effectively disguises a gift to one's heirs that should be taxed like any other gift involving millions in wealth. They also say it is but one example of how a tax exemption on life insurance that was approved by Congress in 1913 to help widows and orphans has been stretched to benefit the very richest Americans.
    Several thousand of these jumbo policies have been sold, according to agents who sell them, all under confidentiality agreements with the buyers and their advisors. One member of the Rockefeller family took out a policy, according to people who have seen documents in the deal.
    The several billion dollars of this insurance already sold, much of it in the last 18 months, means that tens of billions of taxes will not flow into federal and state government coffers in the coming decade or so.
    In recent months, policies with first-year premiums alone of $4.4 million, $10 million, $15 million, $25 million, $32 million and $40 million have been sold by New York Life Insurance, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance and other underwriters, according to insurance agents, accountants and tax lawyers who have worked on these deals.
    The agents selling the policies find them hard to resist — they can earn millions of dollars for selling just one such policy. One of them said that his small firm's commissions this year have already reached $20 million.
    The technique works this way. An older person — typically someone who does not expect to live long and who has at least $10 million and usually much more — wants to avoid estate taxes, which are 50 percent with such fortunes.
    Under tax law, money from a life insurance policy goes at death to heirs tax free.
    The premium paid on that life insurance is considered a gift to those heirs. Any annual premium that exceeds $11,000 is therefore subject to the gift tax of 50 percent. Only the wealthiest Americans pay such large premiums and are subject to this tax.
    The new technique sidesteps the gift tax in a two-step process. First, the person who is buying the policy reports on his tax return only a small portion of what he really paid in premiums.
    Wouldn't the I.R.S. say that is cheating? No. It's perfectly legal. The reason is that insurance companies offer many different rates for the same policy. And the buyer is allowed to declare on his tax return the insurance company's lowest premium for that amount of insurance, even if that person could never qualify for that rate because of his age and health, and even if no one has actually ever been sold a policy at that rate.
    A low premium means a low gift tax. But in fact the buyer has really paid the very highest premium offered by that insurer for that amount of insurance. The insurer then invests the difference between the highest premium and the lowest premium. That investment grows tax free, paying for future premiums on the policy. At death, the entire face value of the policy is paid tax free to heirs.
    In an example cited by one agent, a customer paid a $550,000 premium for the first year alone, the highest price offered by the insurance company, for a policy that was also offered at $50,000, the lowest price. So $550,000 can be passed on to heirs tax free. Yet the gift tax is only $25,000 — 50 percent of the lowest premium, instead of $275,000, which is 50 percent of the highest premium.
    The I.R.S. would not comment officially. But an I.R.S. official who specializes in insurance matters said he had not heard that so many people were exploiting this loophole. He could not say whether the issue would be re-examined.
    The deal gets better because of a second step. Under this technique, even that $25,000 tax can be avoided by shifting the gift-tax obligation to the spouse through a trust. In 1982, Congress made transfers between spouses tax free, so the gift tax disappears.
    If the policy holder continues to pay huge premiums year after year, he can pass along much or all of his fortune tax free if he lives long enough. In fact, Michael D. Brown of Spectrum Consulting in Irvine, Calif., said, many clients in their 50's and 60's, working with other agents, are now trying to do just that.
    By far the biggest insurance deals have been made by two insurance agents who work together, Mr. Brown, a former chemical engineer, and Louis P. Kreisberg of the Executive Compensation Group in Manhattan.
    The technique was devised in 1995 by Mr. Blattmachr and Mr. Brown. Mr. Blattmachr has since expanded his idea and other estate tax lawyers have copied his methods.
    "In 1995 I was told that this was the stupidest idea ever by a guy who is now collecting millions in commissions from selling" such insurance, Mr. Blattmachr said.
    Among his peers Mr. Blattmachr is renowned for his creativity in finding ways to pass down fortunes without paying taxes and without breaking the law.
    He is a busy man. Recently he set off to counsel clients in eight cities over three days — a trip made possible by a client who provided him with a private jet. Afterward he spent the weekend fishing with his brother, Douglas, whose company, Alaska Trust, helps wealthy Americans set up perpetual trusts, some of them using Mr. Blattmachr's insurance plan.
    One buyer of an insurance plan like Mr. Blattmachr's paid $32 million in the first year for a policy that will pay $127 million tax free to the grandchildren, according to a lawyer who worked on the deal and spoke on condition of not being identified. No gift taxes were paid.
    Sales of such insurance soared after the Internal Revenue Service announced 18 months ago that it was considering restrictions on similar techniques, which are known as equity split-dollar plans.
    In Alaska, premiums for such insurance totaled just $1.1 million in 1999, but ballooned to more than $80 million last year, state tax records show.
    This month, when the I.R.S. issued its proposed restrictions, it did nothing to stop Mr. Blattmachr's plan.
    Indeed, the proposed I.R.S. regulations can be read as strengthening the validity of his plan, Mr. Blattmachr and some other estate tax lawyers say.
    Mr. Brown said that in some cases, when the policy holder dies quickly, both the government and the heirs come out winners, at the expense of the insurance company.
    "This is a good deal because both the government and the heirs get 90 percent of what they could have gotten," he said.
    He added: "We think it is good policy to allow this because it discourages games like renouncing your citizenship or investing offshore."
    But many estate tax lawyers and insurance experts think that because Mr. Blattmachr's plan is similar to the plans the I.R.S. moved to stop on July 3, it should be ended as well.
    While the I.R.S. in 1996 approved the outlines of the Blattmachr plan, these opponents argue that the plan as sold by agents like Mr. Brown and Mr. Kreisberg stretches that ruling so far that it no longer provides protection in an I.R.S. audit.
    Some of them say it is the huge fees for everyone involved that are blinding their competitors to aspects of the Blattmachr plan that make it vulnerable to being banned as an abusive tax shelter.
    Commissions for the insurance agents run between 70 percent and 200 percent of the first-year premium when it is $1 million or so, while on the jumbo policies commissions are typically 9 percent to 11 percent, or up to $4.4 million on a policy with a $40 million first-year premium, Mr. Kreisberg said.
    He acknowledged that many peers in the estate tax world say that he earned $100 million in gross commissions last year, but said, "I wish it were half that." Mr. Kreisberg did not dispute a statement by someone with knowledge of payment records that his small firm's commissions this year have already reached $20 million.
    Lawyers who opine on the validity of the deals can also earn big fees. Mr. Blattmachr gets $100,000 for his basic opinion letter and reportedly has charged as much as $250,000.
    Sanford J. Schlesinger of the law firm Kaye Scholer said he passed up a chance to collect a six-figure fee for advising on one of these deals because he thinks the deals should not pass muster with the I.R.S. "My mother taught me that if something seems too good to be true, it isn't true," he said.
    Other leading estate tax lawyers, as well as some accountants and insurance agents, say Mr. Blattmachr's insurance technique should fail because it is wholly outside the intent of Congress in giving tax breaks for life insurance, the I.R.S. ruling on the plan notwithstanding.
    "If the I.R.S. understood this they would say that it relies on a disguised gift — and if you have to pay gift taxes, then Jonathan's insurance deal does not work," said an estate partner at a tax firm in New York, who like others, said they could not be identified because they have signed confidentiality agreements that are part of all such insurance deals.
    Another legal expert said paying 10 times too much for insurance in a plan like this reminds him of a matriarch selling the family business to her granddaughter for $10 million when it was actually worth 10 times that amount. "The I.R.S. wouldn't let a family get away with selling the business for a dime on the dollar," this lawyer said, "and they should not allow it to work in reverse through insurance."

From The Crossing Project:

"The city of Banaras, like Jerusalem and Mecca, is one of the world's most celebrated pilgrimage sites, and has been acknowledged as a center of learning for over 2000 years. As a physical place, Banaras lies on the banks of the river Ganges. As a psychical place, the city derives its sacredness from the intimate association with Lord Shiva(one of the main deities of the Hindu trinity). It is believed
that Shiva lives in Banaras through his invisible form to liberate humankind from ignorance.
    Banaras has over 2000 temples, big and small, dedicated to Lord Shiva and to other deities. The skyline along the riverbank is market by high spires of temples. According to a myth, Lord Shiva performed severe austerities to sanctify Banaras, and considers Banaras his earthly home.
    In the imagination of the people of Banaras, Shiva is visualised as an ash-smeared yogi who is meditating in the cremation grounds and eternally bestowing grace and liberation on his devotees.
    The interface between the city and the river are the long flights of stone steps called Ghats. There are over a hundred ghats in the city, and the ghats hum with ritual and festive activity all year round.
    From dawn to dusk, thousands of worshippers come down to the river to perform ablutions, and through ritual and prayer, invoke the healing powers of the Ganges. The rituals invoke all the sense perceptions -sight, sound, touch, smell and taste - and invoke all the elements. People propitiate the Ganges river, the river of healing, by floating lamps and offerings.
    Some of the most important rituals to the dying ad the dead. The ghats provide the places of cremation. The burning embers of the cremation pyers alongside the riverbank provide people with a powerful symbol of the integral relation between life and death. Death in the Indian imagination is considered as a crossing over from one state into another; and the fear of death is considered to be an irrational fear. Once the body disintegrates, the ashes are immersed into the Ganges. The final immersion into the womb of the Ganges symbolises a new creation out of the waters of life.
    For 2000 years, Banaras flourished as a living center for learning. The Buddha, Adi Sankara, (founder of the philosophy of Neo-dulaism), and Mahavira(founer of Jainism), pondered life's fundamental questions.
    Atop the ghats, in the pavilions, gurus continue to transmit to students the living experience of self-realization. Besides the religious significance, Banaras is the home of classical music, dance and textile traditions. Banaras artists have developed distinctive genres of artistic expression. The sounds of the drummers and dancer's bells provide an aural backdrop to Banaras.
    The ghats present an incredible "multimedia" theater of activity. Together, the river Ganges, the temple spire-lined the skyline,
the pavilions of learning, pilgrims performing rituals, and the fires of the cremation provide a multimedia, living stage in which the pilgrim experiences transformation. These elements make the ghats an excellent domain for multimedia applications in learning.
    The pilgrim is he center of the transformation, and the ghats ad its activities provide the " periphery". Banaras's ghats and its activities provide the spatial periphery; the myths and metaphysics of Shiva provide the psychical periphery.
    Together, the spatial and the psychical settings allow the pilgrim to "cross-over" into the space of transformation.

From http://www.kaosbabalon.btinternet.co.uk/

KAOS is an occult magazine, first published in London in the 1980s. It was the underground zine that introduced the writings of Hakim Bey to Europe, and published new work by Lionel Snell, Stephen Sennitt, Mouse (ex Psychic TV), and others. KAOS influenced the comic-book writer Alan Moore, who now writes in the latest edition, a 200 page large format book that appears after a 13 year absence.
    In 1988, in London, Joel Biroco performed a magical operation with Babalon that has subsequently become known as the "KAOS-BABALON Working". The object of the operation was to initiate the "156 current", essentially the Cult of "Chaos conjoined with Babalon", to advance and supersede the now defunct 93 current of Thelema and transform the Chaos current. Initial details were published in the last KAOS in 1989, just before Biroco disappeared from the occult scene altogether. The latest KAOS contains further information about this Working and explores the significance of the KAOS-BABALON 156 current, the impetus of which arose out the skrying of the Enochian Æthyrs by Aleister Crowley and Victor Neuburg in Algeria in 1909, and prior to that from the receipt of the Angelic language by Dr John Dee and Edward Kelly in Cracow, Poland, in 1584. In the aftermath of the KAOS-BABALON Working in 1989 it seemed that this magick, despite its intensity, had failed to achieve its objective, but in 2001 it became apparent that all along it had been a dormant seed awaiting the right conditions for its growth. There has been a great need to make available all that is known about the 156 current to provide a background for those seeking initiation into its mysteries.
    In addition to this main theme, KAOS continues the documentation of recent underground occult history that proved immensely popular in the 80s, which gained the magazine a reputation for being remarkably well-informed about the magick and personalities of contemporary occultism. KAOS also analyses in depth Kenneth Grant's contribution to the occult and discusses the ultimate aim of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Other topics range from the seven-headed dragon and the demon Choronzon to Austin Osman Spare, Jack Parsons' relationship with Babalon, and "The Black Room, the Chamber of Death, and the Red Room". The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, long rumoured to be an actual occult order set up by the magus Alan Moore, comes out of silence in this issue. Published as a signed limited edition of 156 copies in April 2002, KAOS is now available for free download as a PDF. Plus a supplement, "The Black Lodge of Santa Cruz", a personal memoir by an Enochian magician who was at the heart of a chaotic magical working in the States in the early 90s that also appears to have been a party to the birth of the 156 current.

About Joel Biroco
After studying chemistry at University in London, Biroco secluded himself away to write. KAOS began in 1985 when Joel decided to publish his "attic writings", typified by The Exorcist of Revolution (1986) and other juvenilia, interspersed with comment on the then burgeoning "Chaos current" and "Chaos magick". But in 1989 after the KAOS-BABALON Working, a slightly infernal magical operation with a female erotic entertainer from the Church of Satan in Amsterdam, Biroco put together what was to be his last KAOS for 13 years and promptly disappeared from the occult scene.
    In the 90s he still continued to bash out writings on an old typewriter under various pseudonyms (including Coleman Healy) and to paint pictures. Some of these writings were published in limited editions at his own Herculaneum Press. He also attained recognition for his major scholarly work on the Chinese I Ching oracle. When some of his more political writings were published in Russian and Romanian translation, he enjoyed notoriety in the anarchist poetry scene of the Black Sea area. KAOS was a thing of the past.
    Unexpectedly, in early 2001 Babalon revisited Biroco and told him it was time to go back on the black pilgrimage. At first Biroco rejected the challenge, wishing only for the comforts of his "miaunici" in Bucharest. But on a return to London his presence was demanded at an important meeting of The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, at which the Exquisite Basilisk himself would be present, otherwise known as the supreme magus Alan Moore. After an evening of excellently skinned "Camberwell carrots", Moore managed to persuade Biroco to bring back KAOS, and promised him an article or two, but little did Biroco realise that KAOS would swell to 200 pages and take over a year to complete.

From the  July 23, 2002  New York Times:

 (right) Dr. Alison Elgart-Berry digs at the site of a canal excavated by the Ortona.

Network of Waterways Traced to Ancient Florida Culture
By MARK DERR

ORTONA, Fla. — The casual visitor to this small rural community about 15 miles west of Lake Okeechobee might barely notice the broad indentations that run for seven miles from a cluster of oak-shaded mounds through scrub pine and palmetto to the Caloosahatchee River.
    But to archaeologists they are monuments to prodigious engineering skill and hard work — canals that enabled Indians to travel between Lake Okeechobee and the Gulf of Mexico.
    Around A.D. 250, Indians inhabiting this area began digging the canals by hand, using wooden and shell tools to create waterways 20 feet wide and 3 to 4 feet deep, said Robert Carr, the Florida archaeologist who directs excavations at the site.
    Their goal was not to drain or irrigate land, Mr. Carr said, but to create a waterway to bring dugout canoes to their village, a mile north of the Caloosahatchee. The canals also allowed paddlers to bypass rapids roiling the river.
    The two-square-mile village at the center of this watery network was a planner's dream, with sculptured earthworks (one of them resembling a crescent moon holding a star) and mounds, ponds and geometric causeways. Eventually, the people, known today as the Ortona, added a 450-foot-long pond, shaped like a ceremonial baton and surrounded by a beach they made with white sand.
    "In adapting to their wetland world, the people of South Florida achieved a level of cultural sophistication and social organization much earlier than previously believed," said Mr. Carr, executive director of Archaeological and Historical Conservancy in Davie, Fla.
    And the dates place the Ortona people squarely within an American Indian tradition, that of the Hopewell people, whose center was far to the north, in the Ohio River Valley. Archaeologists have long theorized such a connection, primarily because of the design of mounds and artifacts. But they lacked hard evidence.
    "Now, with these dates, Bob Carr has provided the smoking gun for placing peninsular Florida within the Hopewell culture," said Dr. James A. Brown, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, who was not involved in Mr. Carr's excavations.
    Humans apparently occupied Ortona around 700 B.C. and lived there at least 1,500 years, Mr. Carr said. But the Ortona people's greatest cultural achievements occurred from A.D. 200 to 700, radiocarbon dates from recent excavations indicate. Similar bursts of construction appeared about the same time in other parts of South Florida. On one site, at the mouth of the Miami River, Indians carved a circle 38 feet in diameter into limestone, said Mr. Carr, co-discoverer of that site in 1998.
    With a population of 200 to 300, the Ortona village was a major center for the exchange of goods and religious and cultural ideas from other parts of the country, Mr. Carr said.
    In their dugout canoes, traders plied the rivers flowing to and from Lake Okeechobee like spokes on a wheel. They also paddled up and down the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts of Florida, and even beyond.
    Archaeologists have long reasoned that a major trade route ran from Lake Okeechobee down the Caloosahatchee to the Gulf of Mexico and up the Gulf Coast to the Apalachicola River in the Florida Panhandle. From there it followed the Chatahoochee River north and ultimately crossed the Allegheny Mountains at Cumberland Gap to reach the Ohio River Valley.
    Alligator and shark teeth and skins, feathers from Everglades birds and shells were carried north, Dr. Brown said; flint, copper, beads and possibly effigy pipes moved south. And travelers carried a host of ideas about the cosmos, marriage and burial rituals and shamanistic rites.
    These ideas and many of the goods were related to the Hopewell culture, which originated in the Ohio Valley around 100 B.C. At its height, from A.D. 200 to 400, the Hopewell people built mounds, enclosures and causeways in the Midwest and much of the Mississippi River Valley, and even more extensive trade routes, Dr. Brown said.
    But in a significant departure from the Hopewell tradition, Mr. Carr said, the Ortona people and their neighbors in South Florida built mounds for their homes, as well as for burials and ceremonies. "Placing structures on mounds was a special South Florida adaptation to the wet environment," he added.
    The Indians of South Florida traveled chiefly by dugout canoe, going deep into reaches of the Everglades that many white settlers later considered impenetrable. It is not surprising, then, Mr. Carr said, that the Ortona people built canals to speed their travel. "The Ortona canals are the earliest we have found devoted to transportation," he said.
    The Ortona canals formed a triangle, with the Caloosahatchee River as the base and the village as the apex. A western canal ran about four miles; an eastern canal, about three.
    Mr. Carr's team established the age of the canals with carbon 14 dating. The researchers — Mr. Carr, Jorge Zamanillo of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida and Jim Pepe of Janus Research — published their report in the March issue of Florida Anthropologist.
    The Ortona canals appear to be part of a more extensive network of canals and dugout canoe trails that crisscrossed the Everglades and ran along the coasts, said Dr. Ryan J. Wheeler, senior archaeologist with Panamerican Consultants, who has studied the waterways.
    Little is known about the Ortona people, but Mr. Carr speculated that they might have built some or all of the 20 other groups of mounds and circles around Lake Okeechobee. He added that they were probably ancestors of the powerful Calusa, who occupied southwest Florida and controlled tribes around Lake Okeechobee, and the Mayami, who lived south of the big lake. Those tribes flourished from around 1200 until Spanish settlement in the early 16th century.
    By the time Spain ceded Florida to England in 1763, virtually all of Florida's indigenous people had vanished, victims of warfare and disease, particularly smallpox. Their cultures and histories were lost with them. When American surveyors discovered the Ortona earthworks in the early 19th century, they thought they were Spanish fortifications, Mr. Carr said.
    Seminole and Miccosukee Indians were driven into the Everglades region during the Seminole Wars of the 19th century.
    The landscape and earthworks of the earlier Floridians have changed drastically as well. Hamilton Disston, a toolmaker from Philadelphia, destroyed the rapids of the Caloosahatchee River in the early 1880's, during the first concentrated effort to drain the Everglades.
    A century of drainage and development have further altered the environment and carved up the Ortona earthworks. The vegetation-covered dry indentations that were the canals, best seen now from the air, lie mostly on private land, their preservation dependent on the owners.
    The Baton Pond, built before 700, according to a recent, unpublished analysis, is also mostly obscured, although the owners of the site are working with Mr. Carr to preserve it.
    Some of the 25 Ortona earthworks are protected in Ortona State Park, but others, including a 60-foot causeway, are unprotected. Sand mining and development have taken a toll on many, including a 20-foot-high burial mound — the highest point in Glades County. The burial mound was largely destroyed by road building in the 1940's and 50's, Mr. Carr said.
    Over the years countless Florida archaeological sites have suffered the same fate, usually before anyone could investigate them, he added.
    "The prehistoric settlement pattern across South Florida is still largely unknown," Mr. Carr said. "Lake Okeechobee was the hub, and it is one of the least protected areas in the state. We have to help preserve what's left, or it will be gone in the next 20 years."

From The Independent on Sunday, 30th August, 1998

Film-maker Peter Whitehead was the coolest dude in Sixties London. Then he dropped out and
went strange. Now Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit have made a film about him -- and Whitehead
hates it. Chris Darke reports.
 

There's a scene in The Falconer in which Peter Whitehead, the man described as the film's "fictive core", is
being interviewed on Swedish TV. "I copulated with falcons," he declares. The female interviewer tries to
keep a straight face while looking like someone who's just had her chat-show stolen from under her nose.
"I did it physically. I built a special hat..." That's how Whitehead describes his method for inseminating the
gyrs; "I was in love with those falcons," he sighs. Behind him, the digitally animated figure of a young
woman strolls into the scene and bends to kiss him. Black leathery wings unfurl from her back.
    During the 1960s, Peter Whitehead made a series of films which have since become documents of the
decade. "I had one foot in the counterculture and one in Swinging London," he says of the period in which
he filmed Wholly Communion, a cinéma vérité account of the legendary 1965 International Poetry
Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall. Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, a glossy trawl through the faces
and places of the "swinging" metropolis, followed in 1967. Over this period, Whitehead was also making
promos for groups as diverse as the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and the Dubliners. The Fall (1969), an
attempt to marry Godard with footage of the American police crushing the counterculture, was Whitehead's
last serious piece of film-making. He now writes self-published novels, and makes his living from selling off
bits of his archive to television.
    After he dropped out of film-making, Whitehead made falconry his life. He trapped the birds and bred them.
By 1982 he was building a falconry centre for a Saudi prince. The Gulf War put an end to this operation but,
by then, Whitehead was convinced that he was living out the ancient Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris. "Isis
copulates with the live body of her dismembered husband Osiris and gives birth to Horns the falcon,"
Whitehead explains to the uninitiated. "I am Horus. I have lived out becoming Horus. It is my myth."
Whitehead seems happily to adopt any number of myths - Horns, Oedipus, Salome - as his own.
    "I kept thinking - there are gaps," runs a commentary in the Falconer film. "How do you get from
film-making to falconry? How do you get from falconry to writing novels?" And it's in these gaps that The
Falconer, made by writer lain Sinclair and writer-director Chris Petit, forges its fictions. The film works on
layers of unreliable memory, flashback-blizzards, origami structures of doubles and doubling, hotel rooms
that metamorphose into a whalebone box which supposedly possesses occult powers.
    Chris Petit, the director, is something of an underground polymath. He was film editor at the London events
magazine Time Out in the mid-1970s, when it still had some countercultural cred. He then moved directly
into film-making with Radio On (1979), a beautiful and austere British road movie, an impressive take on PD
James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1981), and two thrillers, Flight to Berlin (1983) and Chinese Boxes
(1984). He then dropped out of features to make television films and write two novels, Robinson (1993)
and The Psalm Killer (1997). The Falconer has allowed Petit to explore the form of the essay-film, using
video technology. Since finishing it, he has gone on to produce another video essay, Dead TV.
    And his working partner, lain Sinclair - as readers of Lights Out for the Territory will know - is a curio-sifter
at the cultural margins. So, if you watch The Falconer as you'd read one of Sinclair's essays, you'll
understand how it works.
    It's a sort of caricature, produced by a couple of avant-garde satirists. Hogarth worked with pen and ink;
his inheritors take the language of Sixties experimental film, and throw it in with digital editing and
multimedia design. And Whitehead fed himself to the film-makers. As Sinclair has said in an interview, "He's
someone who always has one more story to tell ... He's got a kind of mesmerising, Ancient Mariner quality.
The stories initially were fascinating, you wanted to know the rest. But when he told you them they were
never as interesting as they seemed ..."
    Whitehead now lives in a run-together assembly of cottages in a Northamptonshire village, which he shares
with his wife Dido, the daughter of Teddy Goldsmith and niece of the late James. When I visited, Whitehead's two
daughters were sitting around the kitchen table singing "Brown-Eyed Girl" to a guitar accompaniment. The scene was exactly as I'd
hoped, a high-class Bohemian enclave in the Shires. We spent the afternoon in Whitehead's den. He talked about the 1960s,
and told me about a group of academics at Leicester De Montford University who had invited him to a
conference on 1968 and radical film. "I'm an objet retrouvé" he declared. He then asked Robin, his
14-yearold daughter, to show me around the garden. "But Dad," she protested. "I don't know anything
about your stuff."
    Whitehead's "stuff" consists of a temple that he built himself in his yard, and where he intends to be buried.
The temple was constructed from columns salvaged from a demolished bank, adhering to numerological
principles derived from Egyptian myth. I wondered whether this structure might partly explain why Sinclair is
fascinated with Whitehead. Each in his way is a builder of follies dedicated to his own self-elected
mythology.
    The Whitehead story, as Petit narrates it, is one of "drug culture, high society, weird showbiz liaisons,
dealings with the black economy". But it was the women in Whitehead's life that, further down the line,
would become the sore point in the story of the film. Whitehead has been linked to a number of famous
beauties, among them Nico, Bianca Jagger and Nathalie Delon. Liaisons and working partnerships with
sculptors Penny Slinger and Nikki de St Phalle (he made the film Daddy, an excruciating sexual
psychodrama, with the latter in 1974) and the actress Mia Martin. Sinclair speaks of Whitehead "vampirising"
his female collaborators and Whitehead himself plays with the idea of incest as a mystical metaphor, as his
being haunted by the daughter as the image of his "soul". He tells of how, when he photographs women,
he does so "as a woman". Incest as a metaphor was to prove a source of controversy, to put it mildly. In
one scene in The Falconer, Whitehead relates how he took "a honeymoon" with his daughter, then eight
years old. The father-daughter relationship was a trope that was worked into the film.
    In April this year, Whitehead finally watched the finished film, having previously resisted Sinclair's offers of a
screening. "It really is a masterpiece," he wrote. "I think it will go down in the history of movies (as did
Eliot's The Waste Land for poetry) - establishing a new way of seeing, within film, which really is visionary. It
is a film about me, a very generous one - and I am humbled by it ... I was expecting more gore, blood and
Hammer horror stuff. I also think that I come off quite lightly, considering the truth (But remind me to say
less, next time!)".
    Then, two months later, Whitehead took umbrage. Over the latter part of June, threats of legal action were
arriving daily on the producer's desk. Whitehead claimed that he was the victim of "a deliberate calculated
betrayal, foisted on me by a close friend for whom I had the greatest respect as an artist and a person". It
got worse. Petit was now "a c***", Sinclair "emotionally retarded". More disturbing still, Whitehead claimed
to "have all Sinclair's telephone calls recorded from Christmas. "I have the whole proof of the deliberate
deception." He went on to admit that he was "doing [his] best to screw the thing up".
    In January, Whitehead had produced a signed statement that read "I have willingly contributed to a work
that I understand is not a documentary but a fabulous version of my life and my varied careers ... a fiction
disguised as a documentary, a life explained through its underlying mythology and not through a mere
recitation of chronological facts." So why the savage volte-face?
    One reason may have been the response The Falconer received when it was shown at De Montford
University. Among the panellists was Caroline Coon, radical feminist, former Sixties activist and founder of
Release, the drugs advice organisation. Coon was so incensed by the film that she wrote a vitriolic open
memo to the organisers. "How could you collude with this film?" she demanded. "What is your position on
bestiality and the abuse of children?" Coon went on to describe Whitehead as a "self-confessed
pseudomythologising narcissist" and the film as "a snuff movie ... that is obdurately reactionary, White
Power and orthodox, a film only masquerading as radical and avant-garde." There were rumours that
Whitehead enthusiasts from the US had been bending their erstwhile hero's ear. It seemed that they'd
found the film, well, a little too extreme.
    A friend rings. "I have a definition that might interest you," he tells me. "It's from James Morton's book
Lowspeak: A Dictionary of Criminal and Sexual Slang. Check this out. Under 'falconer' it reads, 'A conman
posing as an aristocrat'."
    But Sinclair knew this all along. Didn't he?

'The Falconer': Renegade TV Channel 4, 24 September.

COURTESY: JOHN C.!!!!

Current Magpie
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Magpie 15:"Yet when she feels his sensitive touch," My Morning Jacket, taxes and justice, The Soledad Brothers, Alan Moore on school, NYC Khanate show poster.
Magpie 14: Dolly covers Zeppelin, real messages in the Queen Mother Book of Condolences, Prisoner convention, Bush and Venezuela coup, The Caterer, Tribes of Neurot and Cairn, Alice Coltrane.
Magpie 13: Military-petrobusiness coup in Venezuela, Jake's in Jamaica, new High on Fire, Chick returns, Dali at 1939 World's Fair, "The Flood," the rainforest as human artifact.
Magpie 12: Michael Giles, new filth from Grant Morrison, The Saragossa Manuscript, corporate rock, Chris Morris bio, new Jodorowsky comic, Lakers' vermicelli recipe, boundary branes & you.
Magpie 11: David Berman on Ecstasy, Roy Wood in New York City, Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker, The Largest Octopus Ever Seen?, Alexandra Kosteniuk - International Woman Grandmaster, Dame Darcy, Ziggurat Theatre, Demos and Cosmopolis
Magpie 10: Sterling Morrison on folksingers, The Soundtrack of Our Lives on the radio, B.O.C. on political activism, giant iceberg boat, Beefheart in new Mojo, "We're all dead Americans now."
Magpie 9: Los Lobos, "Can there be a decent Left?", Greenaway on cinema, Mayan masters at work, Beethoven on what music comprehends, backyard artillery, Rabbis Face Facts.
Magpie 7 and 8: lost to filthy worm
Magpie 6
Magpie 5
Magpie 4
Magpie 3
Magpie 2
Magpie 1

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