Rapid Eye 2: The Plague Yard

By Simon Dwyer

RAPID EYE was the seminal British counter-culture journal founded in 1979 by journalist Simon Dwyer. Dwyer's classic RAPID EYE articles are now issued in three special ebook editions. Volume 2 contains "The Plague Yard", an epic trip through the altered states-of America which ruthlessly dissects American art and culture. Followed by Dwyer's poignant and transcendental valediction "A Dark Eye Closes", written shortly before his untimely death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elektron Ebooks
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781909923225

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RAPID EYE 2

BY SIMON DWYER

AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-1-909923-22-5

PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

COPYRIGHT 2013 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

www.elektron-ebooks.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution

THE PLAGUE YARD

Altered States Of America

In the shadow of Death Valley, confused, confusing, drunk and disorientated, Simon Dwyer travels and rants through the home of the unholy trinity, the virtually real land of Art, Commerce, Religion – the Altered States of America. Not so much Apocalypse Now, as apocalypse from now on...

HOT WAX AND HOLY WOOD

Dreams, Visions, And Statements Of The Obvious

YOU ARE ABOUT TO HAVE ONE OF THE MOST THRILLING EXPERIENCES OF YOUR LIFE says the sign in the cluttered foyer of the Hollywood Wax Museum. I repress a small shiver. Not another one. I am about to have one of the most thrilling experiences of my life, I think. In Travels In Hyper-Reality the Italian Doctor of Semiotics, Umberto Eco, had visited this spot and called the place one of America’s many Fortresses of Solitude, where the Superman (of D.C., rather than Nietzsche) retreated for meditation. At present, though, it’s full of frightened children and Japanese tourists.

The tour of the building takes about twenty-five minutes as the customer peers at celebrities and historical figures that are, in the main, recognisable only by their nameplate. Iron Mike Tyson, Crockett and Tubbs, the two English Davids – Niven and Bowie – the four breasts, Marilyn Monroe and `Vampira’, Maila Nurmi.

The junkie Frankenstein Bela Lugosi, unaware that he featured in Bauhaus’s only good song and posthumously in Edward D Wood’s incredibly bad film, Plan 9 From Outer Space, is the only character who appears to have benefited from the wax treatment, looking more rosy-cheeked here than he did in real life. But the dummies, right up to the nation’s most revered VD-ridden hypocrite, Abraham Lincoln, all share the same glass eyes, shadows, and shiny nylon hair.

Suddenly, the museum seems quite empty. Captain James T. Kirk stares across the gloom at the crew of the ill fated Challenger space shuttle. Faithful Trekkies flock here in droves to worship. The waxwork Leonard Nimoy sits impassively, his silky pyjama top, black ski pants and pointed ears (made of what?) showing him in his Star Trek persona. The fictional Mr Spock being a more famous character than Leonard Nimoy the TV actor, and a much more famous astronaut than the lifeless crew of Challenger, means he gets a better set, one that lights up. Spock, here, is more real than them, there. Even if neither Spock nor the shuttle crew exist, except as tiny images on celluloid and in the still, 3-D form of wax bodies: they are real in the mind and memory of the viewer. More real than `the real thing’, because the real thing doesn’t exist, and anyway, they are here. In the mind.

The dead Shuttle crew, now heroic American icons who gave their life for the exploration of space, as though they died on purpose, are remembered briefly, sharing serious-looking room with American Presidents. The Lost Boys.

Tricky Dicky, the villain who lost his tapes, and J.F.K., the good guy who lost his head and created a 'loss of innocence’ myth which America used to absolve all its previous sins (including Hiroshima). Images, symbols, memories, little triggers. The most thrilling experience of your life.

The overall feeling of this place is – in a word – creepy. It’s not a new analogy to say that the odd wax models are like a surreal predated piece of Pop Art, but, unlike most such pieces, these figures produce a reaction, a recoil, that has not been deliberately provoked.

The closest direct Art-related experience to it is in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where the stoned, drunken British tourist can stumble in and see a piece done (I think) by the L.A. sculptor Edward Kienholz. The Beanery depicts a life size saloon bar. Distorted music plays in the background as figures lean over the dim, yellow lit bar, motionlessly trying to sip their drinks – forever. Their faces are clocks, clocks which don’t move. It’s scary because you look at the figures and at the bar and you know that is where you’ll end up when you die (a Hell where time stands still and you cannot lift up your drink). The Hollywood Wax Museum is scary because these people are, or were, rich and famous, and this is where they have ended up. Even they cannot escape.

All but one of them, anyway.

Jesus Christ needs no nameplate, no introduction. He has a beard, and, after all, none of the other exhibits in the building are nailed to a cross. But that comes later. First, there is The Last Supper. Timing here is of the essence, as at the point of Man’s Salvation, bright lights and taped choirs envelop the crucifix, leaving the Last Supper in the dark. So if one enters God’s Room when Jesus is being killed, you can miss the Last Supper entirely. So the chronology of history is rather dependant, as always, on the viewer. Not surprisingly the Last Supper in question is an attempt at an exact three dimensional copy of that depicted in oils by Leonardo da Vinci. The long dead Italian, an imaginative genius and no mean sculptor himself, could not have imagined anything like this. The painting is replicated everywhere. Sleeping throughout the culture and waking up and looking back at you at the oddest, most unexpected moments. You remember seeing it appear in the arranged actors of Steven Berkoff’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salome – a clever theatrical hint at the beheading to come – and also, inexplicably, painted on a pinhead exhibited under a microscope in Mijas’ Smallest Things Museum, among the sunburn and San Miguel of Spain’s Costa Del Sol.

God, like Leonardo, gets everywhere, and is available in all shapes and sizes, working in mysterious ways. Here in Hollywood, He is larger than life.

But one wonders – is this supposed to be a reproduction of Christ’s last supper, or a replica of Leonardo’s Last Supper?

A reminder of a historical event, a mythical event, or a duplicated image. One wonders if any difference should be perceived here, in the mind of the viewer, between the Passion and what is now almost a photographically accurate picture from the shared unconscious of Italian Catholicism.

Then a voice, as deep and reverential as something out of Cecil B De Mille’s Ten Commandments, prompts the punter to observe the scene not in terms of a viewer looking at a cheap waxwork representation of a Renaissance painting, but almost as if you were a ghostly uninvited guest at dinner the night before Christ was executed. You could almost point at Judas and reveal all to the disciples as they munch their way through the dusty wax bread and fruit, and save the life of the young Nazarene revolutionary. (Indeed, in Henry Lincoln’s book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, that Christ did survive his supposed execution is seriously, and quite convincingly, postulated.) One wonders if, in some time slip as experienced by the likes of Mr Spock, a customer from the Wax Museum did just that and changed history. Or Henry Lincoln, perhaps. But no, Judas triumphs as a flash of lightning streaks across the blackened set, and Christ is, in a clever scene change, bumped-off. The faces on Berkoff’s actors, or Oscar Wilde’s characters, or Leonardo’s painting, all look in the same direction as they, the viewer, and the world, are plunged into darkness.

But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came blood and water... and the scripture sayeth `They shall look on Him whom they have pierced.’

—St. John 19, 34 & 37

A Roman Soldier, Loginus, holds the weapon that will in future become the so-called Spear of Destiny, an occult relic – like the skull of Lazarus – that in itself will inspire still more madness and death and belief, passing from the hands of Loginus through to Charlemagne and, via a circuitous route, to Adolf Hitler. A weapon used to pierce the side of one Jew, used as a Lost Ark symbol with which to kill six million. The disembodied voice of the narrator doesn’t mention it, or its own legend, so for now, it’s just a spear, and for now, the tape tells the customers, they are having one of the most thrilling experiences of their lives. Christ is born, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

In the book, The Hidden Art, there is some speculation as to the true significance of The Last Supper painting, and suggestions that the picture is, in fact, somewhat heretical.

The problem seems to lie with the figure that sits second from the left. He looks like Christ’s döppelganger, and there is speculation that the image may be significant – fuelling the rumours that survived through to the Renaissance and beyond, which said that Christ had brothers and, later, a family of his own. Hidden Art author Gettings himself seems unaware of the 'Christ family’ story, saying that ...the source of the tradition in Renaissance thought is so far unknown. And, Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci was himself an initiate, a secret adept... Curious. Thanks to documents since unearthed by numerous journalists in Paris’ Bibliothèque Nationale, we now know that he probably was.

Leonardo is listed as Grand Master of the Prieuré de Sion between 1510 and 1519. Also on the list are such notables as Nicolas Flamel, Boticelli, Robert Fludd, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo and Jean Cocteau. The list ends with Cocteau, who is said to have taken over leadership of the secret society in 1918 from Claude Debussy. It is said that Cocteau handed over leadership in 1956, four years before his death, to none other than Pope John XXIII.

Pope John was a Rosicrucian since his days as Papal Nuncio in Turkey in 1935, and many of his judgements as Pope lend some credence to the idea of him having some connections with the masonic stream of thought, not least his strange letter to all Diocese in 1960, when he wrote of Christ’s physical spilling of blood being important, and also ruled that Catholics could join the Freemasons. Given the recent revelations unearthed by investigators into the death of Roberto Calvi – found hanging beneath London‘s Blackfriars bridge – which indicated connections between the Vatican Bank, Chicago mobsters and the Mafia-like Italian masonic lodge P2, the theory of Pope John 23rd’s masonic involvement does not seem as far-fetched as it may once have done.

As the brief, three minute God Slot section of the show finishes and the loop tapes roll for another instant repeat (Christ dies and resurrects a few dozen times a day here), I wonder what it is that is glinting on the wooden floor and on the table of the Last Supper set, and I see coins. Hundreds of dimes, pennies and quarters, all have been thrown by faithful previous visitors at the feet of Christ. As if this wax `museum’ were a real – that is, consecrated – shrine. To many of the tourists from the Mid West, and the Hispanic cities to the south (the hidden people of `real’ America), it is.

This is Hollywood, the mecca of visions and dreamers and myths. As they should say in the Pepsi ads, it’s the Unreal Thing. So, Christ takes his rightful place alongside James T. Kirk and Mr Spock. At once both real and imaginary, he has an even more impressive set, because, like the shuttle crew, he gave his life for someone, or something or other. And like Mr Spock, he can travel through space – and time – through art and imagination. And here he is, more real than the real thing, because he exists there, in wax, and here, in the mind of the viewer. Belief constructs the virtual reality. More concrete than the myth, more tangible than the Word.

And he is just as one remembered. Just as hairy and white and hippyish and kind and sacrificial as had been taught at school. People come in here to worship not only filmstars, but God, no less. Worship God and give money to the Hollywood Wax Museum.

Christ’s story, one of the all-powerful magician prophet being misunderstood, persecuted, and allowing himself to be butchered by the oppressors of the Nazarene sect, is the most powerful magickal act in the history of the planet. From omnipotence to omnipresence in one day. From the hill of Golgotha to the hills of Rome, Rio and, holy of holies, Hollywood. The show is on. One hadn’t realised.

A POLAROID NEGATIVE (OF DORIAN GRAY)

The usual reaction to such a thrilling experience is to seek out a few large, strong drinks, so I stumble into the white sunlight of Hollywood and proceed to get blisters and sunstroke in my search for a bar, the nearest of which seems some 30 miles away (L.A. has never heard of tube trains and has precious few cabs). The first bar I go into is about the size of someone’s front room and is as dark as pitch, lit only by a buzzing Budweiser advert and a portable TV. In the gloom I realise that there are only two other customers, both Hells Angels the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger who stare at me as I stumble blindly towards the bar and rapidly try to think of a drink that they definitely won’t stock here. Sure enough, to my great disappointment, they’re right out of Newcastle Brown, so I leave. Quickly.

When finally ensconced with a 'pint’ of weak lager that is, as is the fashion here, smaller than a pint in Britain (16 fluid ounces instead of 20), fifty percent froth and far too cold to taste, I discover that the second bar I have chosen is gay. I realise this because the man sitting next to me, a slim Italian calling himself George, leans over and beckons me with a snaking index finger that dances uninvitingly on a hairy little fist. I move my head within hearing distance. George smiles, looks at me and says that I must be European because I’m so beautiful and... can he kiss me?

George won’t leave me alone, and it is one of those humbling occasions when as a man, you realise just how awful it must be to be a woman in such situations.

Despite my protestations in my deepest, most macho voice, my ego rather enjoys having this person repeat yuwere sooo bootifowl, but I extricate myself and sit nearer the women at the bar. Naturally, they are all so phenomenally good looking they cannot, in Hollywood, be the real thing. And indeed, their foot sizes prove that they’re all TV’s or TS’s, with shoes the size of HMS Ark Royal. Watching them dance to Jim Morrison aptly singing L.A. Woman on the jukebox is like seeing the NATO Fleet manoeuvre. They’re fun, and happy and relaxed, but the love that once dared not speak its name has long since been overcast by something that few would wish to speak of, and the shadows in this bar are getting longer, darker, crossing tables and laying-on peoples’ shoulders like hands.

But my secret is hidden within me. No one shall discover my name! Oh no, I will reveal it only on your lips when the daylight shines forth and my lips shall break the silence.

Nobody will discover his name... and we shall have to die. Alas. Die.

—Puccini, Turandot

Secrets, secrets, never seen... In the days when homosexuality was outlawed, homosexual men made the best spies – used to keeping secret lives. Their lives were so secret that even their spy masters were often unaware of their private sexuality. Ironically such sexual tastes were considered to be a weakness in a spy but were, in fact, his strength. A guarded sub text, perfect practice. In the days when occult practices and beliefs were genuinely that – secret – writers and painters made the best communicators of the hidden truths.

The secrets carried by Last Supper painter Da Vinci were, perhaps, numerous. A giant scientist, artist and philosopher – it was not really until I happened to visit an exhibition of his drawings and reconstructed models at the Hayward Gallery in London that I realised quite how substantial this man’s genius was. The first man to understand inertia, sound and light waves and, a hundred years before England’s William Harvey, the circulation of the blood. He was also an astounding mathematician, engineer and architect, having worked as such for Ludovco Sforza – `the Moor’ – and in Egypt. (Both the Moors and Egyptians were of course steeped in magickal thought, and this influence may have been relevant to his later life). In 1506 he moved from Florence to Milan, which was at the time under the rule of France.

Four years later, he became Grand Master of the French-based Prieuré de Sion, and in 1517 moved to Amboise, between Tours and Orleans, an area steeped in the traditions of the Cathars.

SONGS OF LOVE AND DEATH

While rich Americans think of themselves as sophisticated, well brought-up Europeans such as my gay Italian barfly George like to think of themselves as Cultured. At the Dorothy Chandler Opera House, a slick concrete mausoleum dotted with the proud civic fountains with which big cities like to festoon themselves, the cultures collide.

The culture of Old Europe, predominantly white, meets the citizens of the New Europe, which is also predominantly white. America’s highest social strata retain their links with the old countries, while all around them, America transmogrifies into a South American and Asian culture. On the streets of L.A., you can see one black or Hispanic face for every white one. In the air conditioned, perfumed palace of the Opera House, non-white faces are rare.

The place is studded with famous and soon to be famous nose-jobs, gleaming capped teeth, expensive wigs, clicking Gucci heels and wrists dripping with gold; and that’s just the men. The women, straight off a Lorimar set, have shoulders the width of a small Japanese car and the stretched, leathery brown skin from the twelve month summers of the wealthy.

Having said that, although there is probably far more money on show here, there is less of the chinless snobbery of similar events in Little England. The last time I went to the Royal Opera House in London I felt almost physically ill. Media types and minor middle-aged celebrities are everywhere; Jeremy Isaacs, Whatsisname, the Editor of the Observer, That bloke, the famous actor, Ken Russell slouching around in one of those ill-fitting tracksuits that pass for being èccentric’ in such situations, and numerous fat ugly MPs and their fatter, uglier wives with their noses in the air. No wonder nobody goes there.

Here in L.A. I sit, trespassing on the first night of Tosca, like – as they would say in London – a snotty opera bore. The building epitomises the meaning of that old word, swanky.

In direct confrontation with the words of Ruskin, that architecture should be designed forever, Marinetti and the Italian Futurists, with all their nonsensical pretension, said that as we needed a complete break with the past then all architecture should be temporary, and that each generation should destroy the buildings erected by the last. What a stupid fucking idea. If you look at La Scala in Milan, then at this place, you know they didn’t really mean it. Even if they tried not to be, they were, after all, Artists.

The world famous head of Placido Domingo peeks up from the orchestra pit where tonight he is conducting. He looks like a nervous Pilsbury Dough Boy. At least here at the Opera they know something that the world of popular music does not admit. Namely, that watching musicians perform is as boring as watching paint dry. Here they use the Orchestra Pit for its obvious purpose, as a place in which to drop musicians.

The hidden orchestra tunes up from the bowels of the theatre, angrily scratching catgut and making the sound of a thousand fingernails on glass. Then, all is silent.

Rome, June, 1800. In the church of Sant’Andrea, our hero Mario is putting the finishing touches to his canvas depicting Mary Magdalene. As the Sacristan moans about his profanity, the artist muses (`Recondita armonia’) on the contrast between his subject and the woman he loves, the singer Tosca: one blonde, the other dark, both beautiful.

Although a little Nutrasweet, Puccini’s music melts the most cynical of hearts. From a male perspective his heroine, the headstrong Floria Tosca, represents more about the feminine condition than any text from Andrea Dworkin ever could. Consumed and weakened by the worst and most common sin – jealously – she is made vulnerable to the ruthlessness of a sex-obsessed, conniving politico – the nasty Scarpia.

Yet, forced by him into a trap, she proves herself strong enough to commit murder, yet still too trusting and innocent of mens’ cold-blooded sense of duty to be able to save either herself or her lover.

The opera is set within a forest of symbols, in the darkest of Establishments. A church, a government office, and a prison. Places where love and whispered plots take place beneath the stony ornaments of power. In this set – crucifixes, coats of arms, and guns. Since Puccini composed the piece in the early part of the century, these symbols remain unchanged, immovable. Unmoving. Or, do they?

Love and music, these I have lived for.

Nell’ora del dolore, perche, perche, Signor, perche me ne rimuneri cosi?

I’ve laid flowers on the altar. In this, my hour of sorrow and bitter tribulation oh! Heavenly Father why have you forsaken me?

You’re reminded of the flowers in the dustbin. The threads and desperate, accusing questions showing up in the later, angry electric cultures of London and New York. Bustling cultural wind-tunnels of broken dreams. Towns of scattered flowers.

Oh, Heavenly Father, I know I have sinned, but what she’s done to me, is making me crazy...

—Lou Reed

As Maria Ewing pauses for dramatic effect, I hold my breath. Not because of the tension, but because if I don’t I will cough loudly, and probably spray Ms Ewing and the front three rows with luminescent globules of sputum.

Eventually, Ewing starts once more to sing, allowing me to cough-up something that looks like it came out of John Hurt in Alien. Asthmatics have a bad time here, nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons reacting in the sunlight to form photochemical smog.

It’s worse in L.A. not – as most locals think – because there is more traffic here than in other places, but because the ozone levels are higher in suburban areas that are distanced from really heavy traffic, and Los Angeles is one huge suburb set down in a still, breathless bowl. Like Milton Keynes with palm trees.

Back in London, Friends of the Earth are hanging up posters printed on blue litmus paper (memories of bunsen burners and controlled explosions). With the acid rain falling on England, the paper takes only a few minutes to turn red.

Affects the commuters as they drive to work, one to a car.

Aq. Dist. Fol. Laur. Te Verid. Enough stuff here to chloroform you... bad cough. Clogs the pores or the phlegm.

Poison the only cure... And white wax also, he said. Brings out the darkness of her eyes. Flowers, incense, candles, innocence, melting... Sweet lemony wax.

In the more urban, grubby environment of Britain, where the word `smog’ was invented (in Glasgow), the pollutants are altogether more homely. Sulphur dioxide from power stations; particulates from diesel engines; nitrogen dioxide from rush hour cars and heavy industry; and my favourite, carbon monoxide which peaks inside of cars during traffic jams. Whatever, I’m just not used to this kind of smog and my throat is itching like sandpaper. I need a cigarette.

Of course, had this been inside the 100 Club or Marquee or Music Machine back in ‘77 or ‘78, it would have been considered by some quite de rigueur if I had sprayed the stage with large quantities of dubious coloured solids from the aching walls of my lungs. Punk stars were often petulant moving targets who courted a youth culture that took them at spotty face value. I was one of the best gob-shots at my school, using a hand flick technique that could hit someone at twenty paces. When, as a star-struck 18 year old, I met Joe Strummer atop a Number Eleven bus to The Swan in Hammersmith in 1978, he complained of getting illnesses due to the amount of spittle he had to swallow at each gig from people who tried too hard to be street credible. I liked Joe, I liked The Clash. But I had little sympathy then.

Here and now, 5,000 miles and an aeon away, I have no desire to disrupt proceedings with so much as a murmur into my man-sized Scotties. Even though I feel somewhat out of place. This feeling is my problem, as, like most people, I always feel somewhat out of place.

That was why I loved the first Clash album, and hated all the rest. The limp, Americanised white trash of Bernie’s boys.

The stuff that was adored by people who found it easy, the people who just didn’t understand. Then, it was considered cool not to cope. Now, in these suits and colognes and thirtynothing glasses, being able to cope, and get on, is what it’s all about. Sit in silence in the secular world of `Culture’.

(Sit/stand/kneel, dressed in these clothes, listening to the language which nobody understands...)

From the flashbulbs and film crews outside it becomes clear that this evening is an Event, something to see and be seen at. Forget culture. People exchange Events with each other in theatrical whispers across the aisles, and one realises that to many people here, Puccini is to the Opera what Shakespeare is to the Theatre. Both are more popular and more misunderstood than even The Clash at their height.

Puccini is of course adored by opera bores the world over, just as Shakespeare is adored by supposedly literate theatre bores. Of course, if the rumours that Sylvester Stallone is due to play the part of Puccini in a forthcoming bio-pic are true, Puccini’s popularity among the middle classes will take a huge nose-dive, as such hype will put the composer on a par with Batman and make him a part of popular culture. A sort of dead Andrew Lloyd Webber. (Since writing, we have of course witnessed Gascoigne’s World Cup weeping and the popularisation of Puccini by the BBC,