Douglas Mercer
October 5 2024
Nothing is real—John Lennon
So now we have yet another diorama or set piece or tableaux (puppet show) wherein the god foreshadows destiny as in a cartoon or spoof; as always there are destinies hidden within destinies as the moving parts have not been locked into place; which will happen later when everything clicks. Thus we look for false leads and their ultimate reversal.
Heartland is the heart of small town America, not the Babbitt small town America but the heartland: wholesome, hale and whole, the decent folk, salt of the earth people who love their sweet and wholesome music played by the band. It’s a jukebox musical comedy or rock opera which were so much in fashion in the late 1970s, an over the top valentine to the schmaltzy and camp and the burlesque. The impresarios of the town are The Lonely Hearts Club Band, a name cribbed from West’s book (Miss Lonely Hearts) in which the narrator has a “Christ Complex”; fresh off playing God Almighty in another schmaltzy and campy film the very Jewish George Burns (Good Night Gracie!) is the Stage Manager narrator a la Our Town but is now presented as Mr. Kite (Mr. Kite will challenge the world!) presiding over the goings on and occasional derring do.
Mr. Kite, elderly mayor of the small, wholesome town of Heartland, recounts the history of Heartland's celebrated marching band.
It is a marching band (from here on out just “the band”), the one that in the end will refuse to yield when the players try to take the field. The back story is that the band’s music brings “love and joy” and that in both of the World Wars this “love and joy” was the Allies most potent secret weapon in defeating the Germans, this being a quintessential hallmark film of the ostensible Penultimate Time which precedes our Ultimate Time, that is the main values are in the reverse; whereas eventually free love gives way to Divine Love (you know sometimes words have two meanings, but with a word you can get what you came for, say the word, the word is love, say the word and you shall be free, runic spells).
In August 1958, Sgt. Pepper is given a Golden Eagle (Divine Bird) but quickly dies of a heart attack in the middle of a performance, at the unveiling of a new weathervane in his likeness. Sgt. Pepper left the band's musical and magical instruments to the town; so long as they remain in Heartland, its people will live happily ever after as in lullaby or fable or fairy tale. Heartland City Hall, which doubles as a Sgt. Pepper museum, contains the instruments.
So we have a fable or fairy tale, a play within the play, an emblem meant to instruct, like driving around in a van and solving mysteries.
The museum contains the instruments which like the Rhine Gold must be hoarded. The instruments are that on which music is played, the music which spreads the love like sweet psychic waves of energy. The weather vane is said to be in his “likeness” thus it is a diorama or a simulacra itself, conjuring up the cluster of the complex of wax works (dolls, dummies, statues, mechanical animals, automata in secret grottos). The weather vane is the key, usually being in the form of a rooster or cock which crows and spins around will nilly like the fates at the whim of the wind until it speaks or crows and foretells which way the wind is blowing. In the end it will be the weather vane which proves to be the saving power when the danger grows. In Holderlin’s late poem In Lovely Blue, written deep within the heart of his Divine Madness, it is said that high in the wind (fate, time) the weathervane creaks (the cock crows three times, Socrates owed someone something, it’s the crowing of the cock that sends the ghost in Hamlet reeling hellward at the witchy hour of night, so hallowed is the time when the savior was born: red mantled time). Creaking things are creeping or creepy things, the intruder knows how to creep quietly along creaky wooden floors. That is it comes out of the woodworks to put an end to the reign of the wax works.
The inheritor to the military title of sergeant is Billy Shears (the pure or cutting will, goat). Billy forms a new Lonely Hearts Club Band with his three best friends: Mark, Dave, and Bob Henderson (the Hendersons will all be there: hen female, ur: primal, son).
Heartland loves the new band and soon Big Deal Records invites them to Hollywood with the promise of a recording contract. Billy says goodbye to this hometown sweetheart (Strawberry Fields) and soon the band is enmeshed in the Whorish World Of Babylon where the Desolating Abomination is said to sit; and the magic charms and spells are broken in decay, decomposition and destruction. Billy forgets about Strawberry as he falls for the Lovely Lucy (the girl with kaleidoscope eyes, rocking horse people with marshmallow eyes, they being the wax works or dummies of the horror laced uncanny). Worldly success ensues after which always come surcease in an evil world of emphatic eyeless inauthenticity.
Villainous Mr. Mustard and his henchman the Brute drive to Heartland in their computer and robot equipped van. Mustard receives orders from the mysterious FVB to steal the magical instruments from City Hall and distribute them among FVB and its affiliates.
Once again we have the cybernetic and the robotic performing the role of arch villain, the synthetic eyeless dummies created by man who come to wreak unholy vengeance, mechanical marionettes sprung loose against their creators.
Colonel Mustard is the stock character of a great white hunter and colonial imperialist. He is usually a military man both dignified and dangerous. He is the Buffalo Bill figure of the Wild West whom the children ask if to kill is not a sin (looks can kill and it will be them instead of us). In the game you can usually find him in the parlor with a blood spattered knife, as if it is a clue. Or someone will take him out to look at the Queen where he has always been and often shouts out something obscene.
Colonel Mustard now has the instruments in tow.
Without the instruments, Heartland—now under Mustard's control—quickly degenerates into a hotbed of vice and urban decay. Strawberry takes an early morning bus to Hollywood to warn the band. Mustard, who has a crush on Strawberry, follows. In Hollywood, the band and Strawberry steal Mustard's van and use its computer to locate the stolen instruments. They recover the cornet from the deranged, money-driven anti-aging specialist Dr. Maxwell Edison, and the tuba from mind-controlling cult leader Father Sun.
Maxwell Edison (James Clerk Maxwell, Thomas Edison) kills the pataphyscial Joan who stays up all night with her test tubes and amateur science (“science in the home”). In the play within the play of the created diorama (dramarama) it is Edison himself who takes on the mantle of the mad scientist whose occupation is human reconstruction or creating fake or plastic or synthetic humans via technology, a surgeon who stitches up dummies with grafts (people of shreds and patches); he hits or zaps them on the head with lightening (god figure of false creation). It is said that the technology for plastic surgery was created in the camps alongside other monstrous experiments and Hitler said he could do without generals of poet but not without doctors. Father Sun leads us into the world of the defunct god Jesus Christ and plays on Sol Invictus. Mind control became prevalent after the Korean War with the hostage videos of American soldiers, and soon led out of the Macy Lab to concerns of brainwashing and Manchurian Candidates and psy ops and triggers and LSD. The famous false clinic in San Francisco of MK Ultra taught Charles Mason how to perform the trick and he proved an apt pupil, creating another 1970s dramatic set piece later termed Charlie’s Angels one of whose dolls was married (in real life!) to the synthetic human the six-million-dollar man (six million being the sacred number).
A personae is a mask, a destining within destining, the drama or dream is never quite what it appears to us until the masks are torn off. Who’s there and who is who being questions such as who is kidding who here.
Billy is knocked out in each battle, with nothing except Strawberry's love keeping him going. The group easily finds the bass drum, which Mr. Mustard kept for himself in the van. However, the computer and robots malfunction and self-destruct before they can locate the final missing instrument–the saxophone–which remains in the hands of FVB.
The drama is a long one with many twists and turns and reversals of fortune until it is finally stabilized in the truth.
As Heartland continues to deteriorate, Billy and the Hendersons conceive of a “benefit” concert to save the town. This is where Mr. Kite flies (files) through the ring and Henry the Horse dances the waltz (the waltz being the ominous stately and measured dance of the god—slow time, see Salinger on the Waltz). Ballroom dance or ballroom blitz.
Benefit
Meanwhile Dougie and Lucy, who have bonded over their shared love of money, plot to run off with the show's proceeds. They hide bags of money in Mustard's van while Billy, Strawberry, and the Hendersons are watching as they perform at the benefit . Mustard and the Brute suddenly arrive and take back the van, which also contains the recovered instruments and the benefit money. They also kidnap Strawberry. Mustard drives off with Dougie, Lucy, Strawberry, and the money hidden on board. Billy and the Hendersons see the van leave and pursue it in the town's hot air balloon.
Here we have the reversal (the toing and froing motion of fate, two steps forward and one back, but always in stately onrushing time.) Mustard drives to FVB's headquarters, where the Future Villain Band plans to take over the world. This Orwellian hard-rock group contrasts the wholesomeness and optimism of Sgt. Pepper's band. To turn Strawberry into a mindless groupie, FVB chains her up onstage while the band plays. Billy and the Hendersons arrive and engage FVB in hand-to-hand combat. The singer is thrown off the stage to his death, but unfortunately, so is Strawberry.
After the Knight like battle Strawberry dies. Straw bury / Straw men: red herring arguments meant to throw one off course, straw man as scarecrow who is a wax dummy whose mortal fear is fire. When you bury the straw man life occurs. Strawberry Field is designated as a cybernetic field in the book How The Beatles Knew. Where nothing is real and there is nothing to get hung about. Eliot’s stuffed men, straw men, synthetic beings which cause such horror in Hoffman’s The Sandman. Leaning together our heads filled with straw—but not learning together. Dummies are like the brainwashed humanity—mindless. They will all be buried many fathoms deep where no sound plummets.
The town of Heartland, now cleaned up and the instruments returned, holds an elaborate funeral for Strawberry. The depressed Billy attempts to get Strawberry off his mind; when he cannot, the Hendersons worry for him. Unable to take it anymore after a couple weeks, Billy attempts suicide by jumping from a rooftop. Before he can hit the ground, in a form of Deus Ex Machina, the Sgt. Pepper weather vane atop City Hall comes to life wielding magical lightning bolts, the Sgt. Pepper Weather vane catches Billy and reverses his suicide attempt. The Sgt. Pepper weather vane dances through the town square, transforming Mustard and the Brute into a bishop and a monk. Mustard's van is transformed into a Volkswagen Beetle. Dougie and Lucy are transformed into a priest and a nun. Strawberry is restored to life, and happily embraces Billy. The Sgt. Pepper weather vane also transforms the Hendersons' mourning suits into shiny new uniforms.
A coda
As Strawberry is to be buried (grim double irony) the effects of mind control and brainwashing lead to the denouement of the Identity Fracture project: suicide. As the danger becomes greatest the trigger is in place for the Weather Vane, the uncanny double of Sgt Pepper and it is suitably described as a god from machine as the saving power predicted and dead life is reanimated as is the Weather Vane. The Deus Ex Machina (god from a machine) parodies the machine as fake but its springing to life make it real, it is the trigger for reversing time. Dummies or cybernetic creatures without eyes are not alive but become real in the moment of transition. A god from a machine was how the Greeks would end the play in an arbitrary way cleaning up the mess that humans had made with high handedness. Clustered around this is the lightening, the signature sine qua non of the god; the upside down world of death is reversed in a trice as if by magic levitation; the evil are made holy and the van (plain car or the foremost part of a company of people moving or preparing to move forward, especially the foremost division of an advancing military force) is turned into a Beetle (Beatles). With the Beetle we are at the knife point of entwined fate. Admired by the counterculture (indeed a counter culture favorite was Herbie The Love Bug which has a sentient car and claimant to Buddhist Enlightenment). The Beetle was conceived in the early 1930s. The leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, decided there was a need for a people's car—an inexpensive, simple, mass-produced car—to serve Germany's new road network, the Reichsautobahn. The car was originally called the Volkswagen Type 1 and marketed simply as the Volkswagen, but it was not until 1968 that it was officially named the Beetle. According to John Lennon the fact that the Beatles got their name was all thanks to a simple pun. The band was considering naming themselves after another insect-themed band at the time, the Crickets. However, they decided to change the spelling to beat as a pun on musical beats (beatniks, beatitudes). And thus, one of the most iconic band names in history was born. Interestingly enough, there was another band called the Beatals who were active in Germany at around the same time as the Beatles. This led to some confusion early on, with both bands being mislabeled as imitators of each other (the synthetic imitation game or doppelganger phenomena). However, the Beatals disbanded in 1962 while the Beatles’ career was just beginning to take off. As a result, any confusion between the two groups quickly faded into memory. In Ancient Egypt, the dung beetle now known as Scarabaeus sacer (formerly Ateuchus sacer) was revered as sacred. Egyptian amulets representing the sacred scarab beetles were traded throughout the Mediterranean world. In ancient Egypt the beetle was deeply interwoven with their rituals, their means of reproduction was seen as a metaphor for the Sun God (Father Sun) traversing the sky, linking the life cycle of the beetle to the universe’s celestial rhythms. Before the pharaohs, before the gods, there was the scarab. The significance of the scarab beetle in Egypt dates back over eight thousand years. Mummified scarabs and scarab-shaped amulets have been found in tombs dating back to the beginning of the Predynastic period. It came to be the face of one of their most important gods. To the ancient Egyptians, this sacred beetle symbolized everlasting life. As a result of all of these transmutations the Hendersons cease to mourn but are given the splendid radiant garments of eternal life.
Sit back and let the evening (leveling) grow: I know you will enjoy the show (ten to six).
***
Notes:
It’s the trigger for the strangest Beatles song thus far, halfway between ritual incantation and high art. The dreadful descent down to Strawberry Fields is accomplished by a huge lunge and a sickening instrumental glissando then to a flattened dominant seventh; succeeded on nothing is real to a cavernous dominant ninth of B minor which, after a dreamlike and hazy vacillation, resolves, or fails to resolve, into the proper tonic. A major is in a very irregular 6/8 rhythm which suddenly drops like a false floor to a drooping appoggiatura. The hallucinatory atmosphere is maintained throughout the vague shifts of rhythm (crochet triplets, quavers, semi-quavers) with sinister distortions of registers and sonorities. This is a dark call at the end of a long night and, as such, is no longer discussable in terms of previous Pop History.
And I saw a man on a flaming pie, and he said, You are the Beatles with an A. And so we are. The quote was from John Lennon answering the already well-worn question of the origin of the Beatles name as part of a Capitol Records promotional interview for the Jan. 20, 1964 American release of Meet the Beatles!
Seargeant Peppers possesses a military title, hence the marching cadences of which McCartney is so inordinately fond.
Heartland
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10961
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10961
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10961
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10961
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
