Syndication
Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2024 12:43 am
Douglas Mercer
December 17 2024
Somehow the wires got crossed
Communication lost
It’s a real place
John Lennon was killed in front of the Dakota building in December 1980. At the crime scene the murder possessed a copy of JD Salinger’s novel The Catcher In The Rye and at the time he gave to police two motives for what he had done: to promote the reading of the novel and to protect the world from phonies. The killer was also enraged by the lyrics to Lennon’s song God wherein he sates that he no longer believes in the dream of his songs but is just John.
During the 1970s and 1980s J.D. Salinger, the nation's most famous reclusive writer, was seriously thought by many romantic or conspiracy-minded readers to be secretly writing the books of the nation's second-most famous reclusive writer, Thomas Pynchon. This notion was postulated due to the somewhat slangy and casual style that both authors possess but from an aerial view what the two have in common is a shared commitment to writing on religious themes and psychotic breaks.
In the late 1960s the literary Smart Set declared Salinger finished; that the characters in his novels were amoebas which split off into others but were the same narcissistic character. And his last (so far) story published Hapworth (1965) was said to be one rambling set of incoherent ideas and was “too much theology.”
In 1971 a young man named Curt Claudio showed up at John Lennon’s mansion in Tittenhurst. Claudio was a Vietnam Veteran and had been a ward at a psychiatric institution in California. Nominally Claudio was suffering from what psychiatrists term paranoia, that is he possessed ideas and delusions of reference. This is when the paranoiac believes that a television show is about him, or that people in the next room are talking about him. Fundamentally it is the belief that one is the center of the world and everything else is processed only in view of one’s own self. Claudio believed that he was John (as did Chapman) and just as John believed he was Jesus Christ for several weeks in 1968, all classic symptoms of Paranoia. Lennon took the time to talk to Claudio and tried to talk him down from his high.
Don’t confuse the songs with your own life Lennon told him, averring that he was just a guy who writes songs. Claudio told Lennon that if he met him he would know and Lennon asked know what? Claudio said that “it all fits.” Anything fits Lennon responded, anything fits if you are tripping off on some trip—anything fits you know. Claudio then homes in on the song I Dig A Pony and mentions the lyrics you can radiate anything you like, you can penetrate anything you like, you can syndicate anything you like. Lennon calls that song literally a nonsense song, that he was just having fun with words. You take words and you stick them together.
He said that song was when he was coming out of his own dream, you can last your whole life on that dream if you want hallucinating and then it’s all over. This is lucid Lennon, the Lennon of God, no longer the dream weaver but just John. What Lennon lacks is the conceptual apparatus of psychiatry to understand that what Claudio is experiencing is paranoia, that he himself was and remained a classic paranoiac; and what he neglects is Burroughs saying that language is a virus; and the words do not belong to him and have a meaning and an intent which are independent of him. That is he is certainly not “just” John and he is not the dream weaver but the woven, that is the conduit by which the virus speaks its words, he was at the very center of a dense network of signs which was in the process of mobilizing itself for a yet unspecified purpose.
***
Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying Of Lot 49 was published in 1965, and is set in the summer of 1964. The Beatles became a worldwide sensation in February 1964. In the novel the Beatles form a recurrent theme, a song is referenced which is I Wanna Kiss Your Feet, Ringo Starr is mentioned, and the husband (Mucho Mass) of the protagonist says the following:
When those kids sing about She Loves You yeah yeah yeah well, you know, she does, she’s any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different sizes, shapes, ages, distance from death, but she loves. And the you is everybody. And herself. And the human voice, you know, it’s a flipping miracle.
This is quite close to the position of Claudio, that the words manifest something impersonal and that everyone who hears the words are the same person.
This is reflected later on when the same speaker limns the process of his own paranoia, his own psychotic break:
It’s like I have a separate channel for each voice. And the more I need I just expand and my bandwidth becomes infinite. I don’t know how I do it but lately it just flows seamlessly on all the channels. It’s like what Funch said that when I arrive I come in as a roomful of people. That’s what I am. That’s what everyone is, they just don’t know it.
I am he and you are me and we are all together—John Lennon
In the novel an erstwhile National Socialist says that at Buchenwald they had been experimenting in mind control and hypnotism on “catatonic Jews” but the Allied victory meant they did not have enough time to perfect their studies. He then says that from his own postwar research he finds that with LSD-25 we are beginning to find that the distinctions and the edges blur between egos, but he avers that he chose to remain in only relative paranoia so he knew who he was and who the others were.
In Pynchon’s novel there is band who wear English sartorial fashion, affect English accents and who use English slang (blokes). The band is named The Paranoids.
***
There is no conceivable way that Thomas Pynchon could have known in 1965 that the Beatles had, or were to have, their own unique relationship with the word paranoia.
A reasonable historical question is had the Beatles ever heard of or read Thomas Pynchon. They were certainly totally plugged into the counter-cultural literary scene of the time, befriending the likes of William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg. So it is certainly possible though, if it is true, it has so far left no trace in the visible historical record.
The Beatles ad-libbed the song Los Paranoias during a recording session for the White Album, following an impromptu version of Paul McCartney’s Step Inside Love. Although Los Paranoias is credited to all four members of The Beatles, George Harrison did not attend the session or otherwise contribute. The phrase Los Paranoias was a running joke within The Beatles, and was nearly used in the lyrics of Sun King on the following year’s Abbey Road. Los Paranoias was an inside joke for the Beatles as an alternate band whom the were, much like Sgt Peppers Lonely Heart's Club band was to be.
When we came to sing it, to make them different we started joking, saying cuando para mucho. We just made it up. Paul knew a few Spanish words from school, so we just strung any Spanish words that sounded vaguely like something. And of course we got chicka ferdi – that’s a Liverpool expression; it doesn’t mean anything, just like ha ha ha. One we missed: we could have had para noia, but we forgot all about it. We used to call ourselves Los Para Noias. Lennon eventually used the phrase on his 1973 solo album Mind Games. In the credits for the Plastic U.F.Ono Band the clavinet was credited to Dr Winston O’Boogie & Los Paranoias.
Los Paranoias was recorded on 16 September 1968, during a session for I Will. After the song, McCartney can be heard mockingly announced the fictional group Joe Prairies and the Prairie Wallflowers. John Lennon follows up the comment by saying Los Paranoias, perhaps in reference to Trio Los Paraguyas, who often appeared on BBC television shows in the 1950s and 60s.
With Lennon and Starr on percussion, McCartney then improvised Los Paranoias. The song lasted 3’48, but was faded out to last less than one minute when it appeared on Anthology 3. The full version was released in 2018 on the 50th anniversary box set reissue of the White Album.
The name Los Paranoias suggests a group or collective, perhaps referring to a fictitious band within the Beatles themselves.
***
The Greek word noia means thought or mind, intellect, the reason or simply common sense.
You can radiate anything you like
You can imitate anyone you know
You can syndicate anything you like
Syndicate: a group of individuals or organizations combined to promote some common interest. Broadcast syndication is the practice of content owners leasing the right to broadcast their content to other television stations or radio stations, without having an official broadcast network to air it on. It is common in the United States where broadcast programming is scheduled by television networks with local independent affiliates.
***
The beauty lies in our extended capacity for convolution. A lawyer in a courtroom becomes an actor, right. Raymond Burr is an actor who is impersonating a lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor. Me, I’m a former actor who became a lawyer. And they have done the pilot for a television series about me starring Mann DiPresso, a onetime lawyer who quit to become an actor. Who in the pilot plays me, an actor reverting to being a lawyer who from time-to-time acts. The film is in an air-conditioned vault in Hollywood, light cannot fatigue it and it can be repeated endlessly (from The Crying Of Lot 49).
In Pynchon’s novel Perry Mason figures prominently, he wrote a book called Mason and Dixon, there are multiple Masonic themes in The Catcher In The Rye (Albert Pike) and the person who the title is taken from was a Mason, Robert Burns (Raymond Burr). In the 1970s and 1980s the line demarcating Southern California from Northern California was jokingly referred to as the Manson-Nixon line. Frames are blurring and rotating around one another, bleeding into one another, and the dense network of signs becomes crowded, heading headlong to some as yet unspecified purpose. Our wonder lies in our extended capacity for convolution and that it can be repeated endlessly.
***
Notes:
In Pynchon’s novel Bleeding Edge there are multiple uses of the phrase borrowed time which was a song on Lennon’s posthumous album Milk And Honey. In the novel is a scene where Japanese tourists are looking at the Dakota Building. Both Lennon and his murderer were married to women of Japanese descent.
Bleeding Edge: cutting edge, avant garde, vanguard, frontier thinking.
December 17 2024
Somehow the wires got crossed
Communication lost
It’s a real place
John Lennon was killed in front of the Dakota building in December 1980. At the crime scene the murder possessed a copy of JD Salinger’s novel The Catcher In The Rye and at the time he gave to police two motives for what he had done: to promote the reading of the novel and to protect the world from phonies. The killer was also enraged by the lyrics to Lennon’s song God wherein he sates that he no longer believes in the dream of his songs but is just John.
During the 1970s and 1980s J.D. Salinger, the nation's most famous reclusive writer, was seriously thought by many romantic or conspiracy-minded readers to be secretly writing the books of the nation's second-most famous reclusive writer, Thomas Pynchon. This notion was postulated due to the somewhat slangy and casual style that both authors possess but from an aerial view what the two have in common is a shared commitment to writing on religious themes and psychotic breaks.
In the late 1960s the literary Smart Set declared Salinger finished; that the characters in his novels were amoebas which split off into others but were the same narcissistic character. And his last (so far) story published Hapworth (1965) was said to be one rambling set of incoherent ideas and was “too much theology.”
In 1971 a young man named Curt Claudio showed up at John Lennon’s mansion in Tittenhurst. Claudio was a Vietnam Veteran and had been a ward at a psychiatric institution in California. Nominally Claudio was suffering from what psychiatrists term paranoia, that is he possessed ideas and delusions of reference. This is when the paranoiac believes that a television show is about him, or that people in the next room are talking about him. Fundamentally it is the belief that one is the center of the world and everything else is processed only in view of one’s own self. Claudio believed that he was John (as did Chapman) and just as John believed he was Jesus Christ for several weeks in 1968, all classic symptoms of Paranoia. Lennon took the time to talk to Claudio and tried to talk him down from his high.
Don’t confuse the songs with your own life Lennon told him, averring that he was just a guy who writes songs. Claudio told Lennon that if he met him he would know and Lennon asked know what? Claudio said that “it all fits.” Anything fits Lennon responded, anything fits if you are tripping off on some trip—anything fits you know. Claudio then homes in on the song I Dig A Pony and mentions the lyrics you can radiate anything you like, you can penetrate anything you like, you can syndicate anything you like. Lennon calls that song literally a nonsense song, that he was just having fun with words. You take words and you stick them together.
He said that song was when he was coming out of his own dream, you can last your whole life on that dream if you want hallucinating and then it’s all over. This is lucid Lennon, the Lennon of God, no longer the dream weaver but just John. What Lennon lacks is the conceptual apparatus of psychiatry to understand that what Claudio is experiencing is paranoia, that he himself was and remained a classic paranoiac; and what he neglects is Burroughs saying that language is a virus; and the words do not belong to him and have a meaning and an intent which are independent of him. That is he is certainly not “just” John and he is not the dream weaver but the woven, that is the conduit by which the virus speaks its words, he was at the very center of a dense network of signs which was in the process of mobilizing itself for a yet unspecified purpose.
***
Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying Of Lot 49 was published in 1965, and is set in the summer of 1964. The Beatles became a worldwide sensation in February 1964. In the novel the Beatles form a recurrent theme, a song is referenced which is I Wanna Kiss Your Feet, Ringo Starr is mentioned, and the husband (Mucho Mass) of the protagonist says the following:
When those kids sing about She Loves You yeah yeah yeah well, you know, she does, she’s any number of people, all over the world, back through time, different sizes, shapes, ages, distance from death, but she loves. And the you is everybody. And herself. And the human voice, you know, it’s a flipping miracle.
This is quite close to the position of Claudio, that the words manifest something impersonal and that everyone who hears the words are the same person.
This is reflected later on when the same speaker limns the process of his own paranoia, his own psychotic break:
It’s like I have a separate channel for each voice. And the more I need I just expand and my bandwidth becomes infinite. I don’t know how I do it but lately it just flows seamlessly on all the channels. It’s like what Funch said that when I arrive I come in as a roomful of people. That’s what I am. That’s what everyone is, they just don’t know it.
I am he and you are me and we are all together—John Lennon
In the novel an erstwhile National Socialist says that at Buchenwald they had been experimenting in mind control and hypnotism on “catatonic Jews” but the Allied victory meant they did not have enough time to perfect their studies. He then says that from his own postwar research he finds that with LSD-25 we are beginning to find that the distinctions and the edges blur between egos, but he avers that he chose to remain in only relative paranoia so he knew who he was and who the others were.
In Pynchon’s novel there is band who wear English sartorial fashion, affect English accents and who use English slang (blokes). The band is named The Paranoids.
***
There is no conceivable way that Thomas Pynchon could have known in 1965 that the Beatles had, or were to have, their own unique relationship with the word paranoia.
A reasonable historical question is had the Beatles ever heard of or read Thomas Pynchon. They were certainly totally plugged into the counter-cultural literary scene of the time, befriending the likes of William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg. So it is certainly possible though, if it is true, it has so far left no trace in the visible historical record.
The Beatles ad-libbed the song Los Paranoias during a recording session for the White Album, following an impromptu version of Paul McCartney’s Step Inside Love. Although Los Paranoias is credited to all four members of The Beatles, George Harrison did not attend the session or otherwise contribute. The phrase Los Paranoias was a running joke within The Beatles, and was nearly used in the lyrics of Sun King on the following year’s Abbey Road. Los Paranoias was an inside joke for the Beatles as an alternate band whom the were, much like Sgt Peppers Lonely Heart's Club band was to be.
When we came to sing it, to make them different we started joking, saying cuando para mucho. We just made it up. Paul knew a few Spanish words from school, so we just strung any Spanish words that sounded vaguely like something. And of course we got chicka ferdi – that’s a Liverpool expression; it doesn’t mean anything, just like ha ha ha. One we missed: we could have had para noia, but we forgot all about it. We used to call ourselves Los Para Noias. Lennon eventually used the phrase on his 1973 solo album Mind Games. In the credits for the Plastic U.F.Ono Band the clavinet was credited to Dr Winston O’Boogie & Los Paranoias.
Los Paranoias was recorded on 16 September 1968, during a session for I Will. After the song, McCartney can be heard mockingly announced the fictional group Joe Prairies and the Prairie Wallflowers. John Lennon follows up the comment by saying Los Paranoias, perhaps in reference to Trio Los Paraguyas, who often appeared on BBC television shows in the 1950s and 60s.
With Lennon and Starr on percussion, McCartney then improvised Los Paranoias. The song lasted 3’48, but was faded out to last less than one minute when it appeared on Anthology 3. The full version was released in 2018 on the 50th anniversary box set reissue of the White Album.
The name Los Paranoias suggests a group or collective, perhaps referring to a fictitious band within the Beatles themselves.
***
The Greek word noia means thought or mind, intellect, the reason or simply common sense.
You can radiate anything you like
You can imitate anyone you know
You can syndicate anything you like
Syndicate: a group of individuals or organizations combined to promote some common interest. Broadcast syndication is the practice of content owners leasing the right to broadcast their content to other television stations or radio stations, without having an official broadcast network to air it on. It is common in the United States where broadcast programming is scheduled by television networks with local independent affiliates.
***
The beauty lies in our extended capacity for convolution. A lawyer in a courtroom becomes an actor, right. Raymond Burr is an actor who is impersonating a lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor. Me, I’m a former actor who became a lawyer. And they have done the pilot for a television series about me starring Mann DiPresso, a onetime lawyer who quit to become an actor. Who in the pilot plays me, an actor reverting to being a lawyer who from time-to-time acts. The film is in an air-conditioned vault in Hollywood, light cannot fatigue it and it can be repeated endlessly (from The Crying Of Lot 49).
In Pynchon’s novel Perry Mason figures prominently, he wrote a book called Mason and Dixon, there are multiple Masonic themes in The Catcher In The Rye (Albert Pike) and the person who the title is taken from was a Mason, Robert Burns (Raymond Burr). In the 1970s and 1980s the line demarcating Southern California from Northern California was jokingly referred to as the Manson-Nixon line. Frames are blurring and rotating around one another, bleeding into one another, and the dense network of signs becomes crowded, heading headlong to some as yet unspecified purpose. Our wonder lies in our extended capacity for convolution and that it can be repeated endlessly.
***
Notes:
In Pynchon’s novel Bleeding Edge there are multiple uses of the phrase borrowed time which was a song on Lennon’s posthumous album Milk And Honey. In the novel is a scene where Japanese tourists are looking at the Dakota Building. Both Lennon and his murderer were married to women of Japanese descent.
Bleeding Edge: cutting edge, avant garde, vanguard, frontier thinking.
