Saturday, July 25, 2015

If I Could Love You Forever 1975 - Roy C - Moon Traveller Blog Post 600



Roy C's If I Could Love You Forever starts with a classic CYO dance song chord (think Pacabel) progression. CLICK ABOVE AND IT SHOULD JUST START PLAYING. This is a slow one, it's clear pretty soon - some Memphis horns come in, underpinning  flighty oddly mechanical violins, and electrical clavier thing, and then comes a strange falsetto, an odd voice - it's Roy C. Hamond - something like I've Been Lonely Too Long. Like that song, too this was a flashback of 60s soul, that just managed to slip into the R&B charts of 1975. Music was getting more and more rote. But If I Could Love You Forever breaks through. Roy does an overdub - two voices - the falsetto.. He is not too well known but he forever can intone...

If I ...
oh I ....
Could Love You Forever ...

besies the falsetto, he appars in a more regular singing voice. Dubbed. It is just haunting thrilling and captivating. Like when someone else might have heard Heartbreak Hotel in the deep winter of Mitch Miller's tundra.  Roy drops into the soul rap style of the 60s too...

I often think about the way she kisses me .. I think about the way she loves me ... I think about the way she hugs me... it makes me want to scream...(high shrill falsetto dick stuck in a car door scream is heard)

About this time you may be saying.. this song seems to have some special meaning to Jack. well you could listen hard, but Al Green was not going to sing like they did at Stax - those days were gone. But I was looking for them. High hoping on Syl Johnson to succeed, or Johnnie Taylor to make a non-disco comeback. This song came over the radio like a dove from the Ark.

At that time, I dont think too many people were actually falling in love forever. The time horizon was a lot shorter. I'd been writing poetry like mad, just met a girl, J., and we got together - she was my college girl friend - but there was an obvious expiration date from the start - and the song evinced a lot for me. The song doesnt profess there was going to be some love forever ...it brings up the notion... asks 'if' -If I ...oh I ....Could Love You Forever ...

You didnt hear it that much on the radio. We're talking Boogie Nights, right? Here comes a story. I called up the MIT college station, late night DJ,(J.C.?) to request the song. He says ok..hold on.. I will put you on air.. and you say "J.C. is back and that's a fact." he puts me on hold for quite a while, and I start to think of this as an opportunity. And I pen a quick poem. I hear the chords of the song fading up, and say..


J.C. is back/ and that's a fact / tonight as I drive / past the laundromat. 


And without saying the word J.C. audibly goes 'oh shit.' After its brief charting, it faded away. I never saw it for sale. Heard it on the radio about 1988 - then there was static... and I almost drove the car into the wall in the Pru tunnel speeding to get out of the tunnel to hear the song. Then I found it on You Tube last week.

(I dont blame those White Sox fans for rioting on disco night. It started out so good, but then it became a goose step of Kapital overbearing. (Funny, but this song is a lot like Daddy Your a Fool to Cry by the Rolling Stones (falsetto, electric piano, big chords, talking part) released the following year of 1976 (though said to have been recorded in late 1974.)

This is 600 post on Moon Traveller Herald Dispatch with Report! -Jack Vaughan

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Saturday, July 11, 2015

Criterion Satyricon



Gordon Thomas writes: While Criterion’s catalog of Fellini films is very deep, their recent Blu-ray edition of Fellini Satyricon is a latecomer. But no matter; it’s here, and it’s wonderful. The film is not the Fellini favorite for many – nor is it for this writer – but I’m very grateful for its arrival. There are plenty of reasons to appreciate now what was considered, at its release, the director’s folly, and just as many reasons these days to ask questions of it.....Read the whole story.....on Bright Lights site.

Related
Satyricon Trailer Revisited - MoonTravellerHerald - I recently saw the Criterion Satyricon Gordon discusses, and it all came back to me..that is the nausea I felt during the first 20 or so minutes.

Pynchon Promo for Inherent Vice





Recently found a trove of Pynchonian trivia. It all started when I realized it was him talking on this promo

If you're driving south from LA International it should take no more than a hit or two off of your favorite brand of cigarette before you're right here, in Gordita Beach, California. Well, no, actually, this used to be the beach. Later on, all this is gonna go highrise, high-rent, high intensity. But right now, back in 1970, what it is is just HIGH. An ounce of Mexican Commercial should run you no more than ten dollars - that's with the seeds and stems, of course.....
For a trove of YouTube Pynchon, dial
The bong goodbye - Brightlightsfilm

Rumination
Funny but - People lay the Manson Family's vicious Tate-LaBianca murders to drugs, delinquency and diaspora – in that Charles Manson could arise from a bereft underworld, use LSD as a salve, and manipulate young girls casting about in the late 1960s in California. Funny but there are parallels between LSD and the Internet, at least as drawn by author Thomas Pynchon in Inherent Vice, for example. The Internet predecessor, ARPAnet, is described as "like acid, a whole 'nother strange world –time, space, all that shit," by Fritz, Doc's lawyer in the book, soon to was a major motion picture. Bunny fut, the newspaper today covers the investigation into Charleston killings of five black churchgoers and a minister. And one could ask: Could this be part of a plot? Could a supremacist podcaster be directing like a Manson the action? What is the nature of conspiracy in the age of Internet? How does it change the historical shadow game? - Jack Vaughan

Friday, July 03, 2015

Lie Detector Woman Man


William Moulton Marston was a unique somewhat New Englandish character. Born in the 1890s in Saugus Mass. – educated at Harvard – he is renowned in comic book circles as creator of Wonder Woman at the outset of World War II. A recent book by Jill Lepore, The Secret Life of Wonder Woman, looks at his life. In his time he was a bit of a social revolutionary and polygamist. He studied psychology at Harvard, and did a thesis which tested World War I German prisoners on their truthfulness by measuring their blood pressure. With this and later promotions he became an individual that was a  part of the campaign of history known as feedback -  but as a  pseudo scientist rather as a great innovator. He actually was not the inventor of the lie detector – that mantle goes per Wikipedia to John August Larson of UCal Berkeley. This is worth noting as the history of feedbacks and cybernetics are both racked by misteps…and some outright shamanism. The lie detector or polygraph machine is still marked as a object of pseudo science. It takes two - technology and wistful thinking - to tango. Wonder Woman had a golden lasso that forced truth telling. This and other notions of Marston do stand in the history of feeback. Today, the quest to discern lies through technology continues.

Bin Laden's books

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (who remembers there is such an office?) in May listed some of Osama Bin Landen's last assets - his books. Below is the list of the books in English. There is also an interesting list of Think Tank white papers he possessed.

Looking at anyone's - well almost anyone's - book collection is interesting. (Once on this site I riffed on a collection of Thomas Pynchon as I took it to be.) It is hard to tell if someone read the books at all, sometimes. But let's assume for purposes of rhetorical argument that Bin Laden read a good part of these. Many of them show a pretty strategic bent. To me, Bin Laden always seemed like a chess player. He seemed to know that the US would attack Afghanistan after the 2001 assaults. I also feel that he expected the Iraq incursion, and that, while he was prescient enough not to think he could totally foresee the exact number on the dice he threw, that he expected something along the lines of what we see now in the Middle East and Africa, which is trouble brewing of such proportions that it is not extreme to imagine a world war bubbling. "Know Your Enemy" - it works both ways. - Marcus Tullius Jr.

Bin Laden's books


The 2030 Spike by Colin Mason ■ A Brief Guide to Understanding Islam by I. A. Ibrahim ■ America’s Strategic Blunders by Willard Matthias ■ America’s “War on Terrorism” by Michel Chossudovsky ■ Al-Qaeda’s Online Media Strategies: From Abu Reuter to Irhabi 007 by Hanna Rogan ■ The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast ■ The Best Enemy Money Can Buy by Anthony Sutton ■ Black Box Voting, Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century by Bev Harris ■ Bloodlines of the Illuminati by Fritz Springmeier ■ Bounding the Global War on Terror by Jeffrey Record ■ Checking Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions by Henry Sokolski and Patrick Clawson ■ Christianity and Islam in Spain 756-1031 A.D. by C. R. Haines ■ Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies by Cheryl Benard ■ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins ■ Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Committee of 300 by John Coleman ■ Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert ■ Fortifying Pakistan: The Role of U.S. Internal Security Assistance (only the book’s introduction) by C. Christine Fair and Peter Chalk ■ Guerilla Air Defense: Antiaircraft Weapons and Techniques for Guerilla Forces by James Crabtree ■ Handbook of International Law by Anthony Aust ■ Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky ■ Imperial Hubris by Michael Scheuer ■ In Pursuit of Allah’s Pleasure by Asim Abdul Maajid, Esaam-ud-Deen and Dr. Naahah Ibrahim ■ International Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific by John Ikenberry and Michael Mastandano ■ Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II by William Blum ■ Military Intelligence Blunders by John Hughes-Wilson ■ Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s program of research in behavioral modification. Joint hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, Ninety-fifth Congress, first session, August 3, 1977. United States. Congress. Senate. Select Committee on Intelligence. ■ Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies by Noam Chomsky ■ New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 by David Ray Griffin ■ New Political Religions, or Analysis of Modern Terrorism by Barry Cooper ■ Obama’s Wars by Bob Woodward ■ Oxford History of Modern War by Charles Townsend ■ The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy ■ Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower by William Blum ■ The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly Hall (1928) ■ Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins ■ The Taking of America 1-2-3 by Richard Sprague ■ Unfinished Business, U.S. Overseas Military Presence in the 21st Century by Michael O’Hanlon ■ The U.S. and Vietnam 1787-1941 by Robert Hopkins Miller ■ “Website Claims Steve Jackson Games Foretold 9/11,” article posted on ICV2.com (this file contained only a single saved web page)
Releated
http://www.dni.gov/index.php/resources/bin-laden-bookshelf