Douglas Mercer
March 7 2025
Continued from Dakota (Part One)
Hinckley had an empty, schizoid inner life which started to fill up with fictions. One class on German History sparked his interest and he wrote a paper on Mein Kampf. Two years later he joined the National Socialist Party Of America and he marched in a parade with them in St. Louis. He urged his comrades in the party to begin to shoot people to further their aims. He published a newsletter of his own design called American Front in which he said would be a viable alternative to the minority kissing Democrats and Republicans; it was to be a Party for the proud White conservative who would rather wear a suit and tie than waves swastikas banner or wear White sheets. The movie that fascinated Hinckley (Taxi Driver) is part of the genre known as Pulp Fascism, in which a psychopathic anti-hero begin to loath the scum of Manhattan and shoots a pimp, just as Holden fantasizes of riddling a pimp with bullets. The psychiatrist who examined Hinckley concluded that he had adopted the persona of various alter egos, including Travis Bickle and John Lennon. And once he was underway with his plan it was no longer make-believe. The movie strip broke.
The hysterical reaction to Lennon’s death was immediate, it was an immediate main event. The participants at the memorial saw themselves as participants in an “event” as if this were a theatrical spectacle rather than a memorial. This event was reviewed by the New York Time’s theater critic, Frank Rich. How did this admirer of Ronald Reagan and devotee of John Lennon arrive at the Hilton, fingering his revolver, and waiting for the limousine? Without a doubt he arrived there armed not only with a pistol but with a core set of fictive identifications which led him to believe he was on stage at a magnificent theatrical spectacle.
The oracle has spoken: it’s clean up time.
The term cat’s cradle eventually became associated with other things beyond the game itself. It began to be used metaphorically to describe situations where someone is caught up in something complicated or confusing. This usage dates back at least several hundred years. Today, the idiom cat’s cradle continues to be widely recognized and used in everyday language. Its historical context serves as a reminder of how games and activities can evolve over time, taking on new meanings and associations along the way.
Now somewhere out in the black mining hills of Dakota---
The Dakota Building did not exist in 1882, the year in which the novel Time and Again is set. The Dakota building was built in 1884, it was built in the high German Renaissance style, a gabled and turreted structure like a castle keep, a sand-colored gem. It was initially described as being so far uptown that it might as well be in the Dakotas, hence the name. Uniquely it has four feet of sand between the walls of the apartments so dead silence can be enjoyed in its confines. In the 1980s an architectural firm called Glass and Glass did a remodel; it was once a Co-Op but no longer; they say that it used to house the bohemian, the odd, the offbeat, the artistic, and the unconventional and the famous of the arts but of late has become home to the titans of the world of finance.
John Lennon was murdered in front of the Dakota building on December 8 1980, one day after the commemorative day of Pearl Harbor. Both the murderer and the murdered were married to females of Japanese descent. Pearl Harbor comes down to us as the prototype of a sneak attack and the Japanese have a worldwide reputation for inscrutability. A kabuki dance being one of masks and dissimulation, of a sort of going through the motions with an ulterior motive in mind. That is it a ritual dance or play or waltz meant to adhere to certain preordained points in a heavily stylized manner. The term kabuki originates from a verb that was used to describe young samurai patrons, meaning being weird or offbeat. Pictures of Jap girls in synthesis, saw the details are away.
According to Farrow actor Sidney Blackmer (who played coven leader Roman Castevet) once said he was disturbed by all of the dark motifs of the movie and apparently he wasn’t the only one who thought so. William Castle later became convinced the film was cursed. Shortly after production he suffered gallstones to such a severe extent that he required surgery. As he recovered from that illness, Rosemary’s Baby composer Krzysztof Komeda suffered an accidental fall that led to a coma and, eventually, his death. Then, in the summer of 1969, actress Sharon Tate—Polanski’s wife—was infamously murdered by the Manson Family. For Castle, it all added up. He had a cameo, playing the grey-haired man standing outside the phone booth where Rosemary, played by Mia Farrow, is attempting to get in touch with the obstetrician.
Sidney Blackmer was an American actor who was in such films as Kismet, It’s A Wise Child, House Of Secrets, A Covenant With Death, Rosemary’s Baby, and Revenge Is My Destiny. Allegedly he was given the creeps and was quite uneasy at the contents of Polanski’s film saying at one point that nothing good will come from this hail Satan business.
In their youth the Glass Children all appeared on a radio quiz show called It’s A Wise Child. In The Glass Onion the Beatles tease that here's another clue for us all.
The Deseret makes The Dakota look like the Holiday Inn—Thomas Pynchon (2014). In Bleeding Edge the heroine gets off the subway near the Dakota building and sees a group of Japanese tourists taking pictures at the Lennon assassination site. In Pynchon’s novel there is a computer program called Deep Archer and the Dakota has an interior court out of which communication comes through the arch.
The struggle is in the mind.
On November 7 1966 John Lennon met Yoko Ono (of high caste Japanese ancestry) for the first time at the Indica Art Gallery in London, England. Two hours after Lennon left the building Roman Polanski showed up to the Indica Art Gallery and met Ono for the first time. As the art that Ono had made had apples and needles Polanski said: this is the most beautiful apple I have ever seen. This is the essence of a needle. Because 9 was Lennon's lucky number and the meeting between him and his future wife had taken on proportions so mythological Lennon always said the event had occurred on November 9, a date which is replicated in most all subsequent accounts. But it happened on November 7, not November 9.
Everyone who knew him agreed that John Lennon had a horror of cremation, in fact so strongly did he feel about cremation that he wrote a song about it. Eighteen hours after he was pronounced dead John was cremated, which is very quick, neither Julian nor Mimi was consulted. The only person who saw Lennon’s body being burned was an ex-FBI agent. One theory is that Yoko Ono (of high caste Japanese ancestry) was selected by the FBI to keep Lennon in check due to the fact that he was such a loose cannon.
Lennon was shot five times in front of the Dakota Building in New York City where Polanski's Rosemary's Baby was filmed. During the making of this film the man who portrayed the Crowley figure was very uneasy about the demonic content of the film as if they might be inadvertently summoning dark forces. The movie follows a proto yuppie couple who live at the Dakota, the husband (John Cassavetes) becomes involved with a couple who live in the building who are devoted to Satanism. The husband is an actor and he sells his soul to the devil and a man who got a part he wanted is killed as a result and he gets the part in his stead. He then agrees to let Satan rape his wife in a surreal dream sequence and ultimately she gives birth to Satan’s child. The husband in the Satanic couple is more or less based on Alistair Crowley, an English Aristocrat who dedicated his life to the Dark Arts by means of such things as back masking and speaking and writing backwards. Crowley appeared on the cover of Sgt. Peppers. The band Paul subsequently formed was called Wings as an homage to Crowley’s book The Winged Beetle.
You can do anything you want if you put your mind to it. The human mind is an incredible thing. Once it is made up nothing can stop it from doing what it wants to do. So said Mark David Chapman two days before the murder; it is the same theory of how to travel in time in Time And Again.
Chapman was thinking about Don Quixote on the eve of the murder, that he as a cyborg who was entering into another dimension. The psychiatrist who saw Chapman just after the murder said she was wary of giving him a diagnoses but she did say that he was very quixotic and very mercurial, but that mercurial is not a psychiatric diagnoses. Neither is the Catcher In The Rye Syndrome. There is, however, an Alice In Wonderland Syndrome (aka Todd’s Syndrome) in which the sufferer, usually an child in latency, experiences a wide variety of perceptual distortions.
The last words spoken to John Lennon were when he was bleeding out in the back of a police car. They were spoken by a police officer: do you know who you are? The police officer (Spiro) who was driving Lennon to the hospital proclaimed loudly to his partner (Cullen): I told you I felt it! I told you something big was going to happen. Cullen confirmed that he had indeed said that earlier in the day. Spiro said: This is history. This is history, man.
History and Time. History and time and synchronicity. They were all coming together. Something was bound to happen.
Chapman learned that the original mop top Beatles haircuts were called Pudding Basin, just like they wore in Ancient England. He fantasized about music festivals in ancient England attended by the Little People. Chapman had a host of little people as imaginary friends, there were whole cities and kingdoms, and from time to time the little people would come out of their homes to be reviewed by and salute their king. But Chapman as King was whimsical and mercurial and if he was displeased he would slaughter a whole host of the little people and they would be afraid---but he wanted to teach them that they needed to obey.
When he became a Christian Chapman came to despise the Beatles and Lennon’s statement that he was bigger than Jesus. When he was younger, however, he adored them and it was them which led him to become a hippie or, as his mother said, an alien creature (late summer 1969). He particularly liked to sing the ballad of John and Yoko which has the line the way things are going they are going to crucify me. Later he sang Imagine John Lennon is dead to the tune of Imagine—Imagine John Lennon is dead, it’s easy if you try. Oh boy when you’re dead you don’t take nothing with you but your soul—think!
According to his Tarot Reader Mark Green in 1977 John Lennon gave him the book The Spear Of Destiny which was terribly dog eared and marked up with copious notes. The erstwhile Beatle seriously wanted to embark on a search for the Spear Of Destiny. We could find it you know. It would not be so very very hard. We’ve got the advantages and who’s looked for it before? Armies? The Church? We’ll be adventurers but we’ll be adventurers with money and time. The Spear has tremendous power. There have been regular reports about it as a relic. What I want out of this is power. I want to change the world. I’ve always had the plan but I never had the power. I thought I did. Big star, big deal. No one listens when they don’t have to. At this point Green said so you’ll make them listen. That’s why Hitler wanted the Spear isn’t it? Well I’m no Hitler and don’t give me that absolute power corrupts absolutely shit either.
These young people have become intoxicated by The Cather’s ink and have emerged in the twisted guise of their hero. Chapman prophetically squared the circle by signing the maroon covered book that he dropped at the murder scene by writing: To Holden Caulfield by Holden Caulfield. Other less well-known persons have written I am Holden Caulfield’s alter ego. Or I am Holden and Holden is me. Martin speculates that it is the way that Holden possesses an instinctual and true sense of reality and his direct and uninhibited and uncensorious willingness to express this reality in unbridled and flamboyant language which lures in those who are obsessed with life’s falsehoods. This coupled with an underdeveloped and weak sense of identity leads to what Martin calls flooding episodes where the voice of the book becomes so all powerful that the reader in this instance simply succumbs to the stronger and Svengali like nature of the words in a kind of brainwashing or triggering process.
On theory is that acquaintances of Chapman used Salinger’s book as a trigger book to brainwash him a la the Manchurian Candidate. Salinger was ex OSS which was a precursor to the CIA, and the old saying is once CIA always CIA. Whether Lennon was shot in the back or the front has always been a point of confusion. Timothy Leary said that the Beatles were mutants sent by an agent of God for the evolutionary purpose of creating a new genus of Homo Sapiens, a la the Superman. Leary worked for the FBI.
One theory of his assassination was that Lennon seemed to be emerging from his cocoon and the “right wingers” did not want the notoriously loud mouthed Lennon attacking America from the view point of a citizen. In 1986 Ken Kesey lamented that Lennon had not survived to attack all the “greed heads.” But Lennon was a man who would go into a department store and with his American Express Gold Card and think nothing of dropping 50,000 dollars and then have his servants dump what he bought into one of the many rooms he had at the Dakota and never look at it again. In one of his final songs he advocated that one should serve oneself, that no one is going to do for you. He believed that greed was good, was a devotee of conspicuous consumption. Money for him equaled identity.
Rosemary's Baby is one of the most famous horror films ever made — and also one of the most infamous. The story itself is grim enough: Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) is drugged by her husband, raped by the devil, falls pregnant, and eventually learns that she's been incubating the Antichrist. But the film also has a reputation for being cursed due to the web of horror surrounding it. From tragic accidents to shocking murders to creepy coincidences, Rosemary's Baby has a dark real-life aura.
Based on the novel of the same name by Ira Levin, Rosemary's Baby was released in 1968, a year that marked a radical shift in the mores of Hollywood movies. For the past few decades they'd been governed by the Hays Code, a set of moral guidelines so strict that even suggestive dancing and superfluous use of liquor were prohibited — so scenes of Satanic rituals were definitely out of the question. However, after the Hays Code was replaced with the MPAA's ratings system, there was an explosion of extremity in horror, especially when it came to previously taboo topics like religion and the occult. Paul McCartney said that with Helter Skelter the band really made the meters peak and kicked over all that old romantic stuff. You know the Pillow Talk, the Doris Day stuff.
The Manson Family murders aren't the only thread linking the Beatles to Rosemary's Baby. The exterior shots of the gorgeous building that plays the role of the Bramford, Rosemary's new home in the film, used a real New York City landmark. The building, located on the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West, is actually called the Dakota. The building is called the Dakota because when it was built it was so far North in the city and nothing else was there so people said that it might as well be up in the Dakotas.
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. 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 yet, but they will.
My eyes are cameras. My mind is tuned to more television channels than exist in your world. And it suffers no censorship. Through it, I have a world and the universe as my own.
Because Lennon was so expert in receiving psychic waves of energy he and Yoko became convinced that it he practiced hard he could control the universe. Nothing in the nutty history of the human race approaches this in fascination. We need to know how you react when the impossible is happening. You have to see it before you can understand it.
The story was that John Lennon was shot, which we couldn’t believe. Lennon shot? Where? What Happened? When I heard the Dakota you can imagine how I felt. I was there. Just an hour before. Alan Weiss who was our producer was at the hospital. What an amazing thing for him to be there. To witness history. Incredible that those events would be taking place all at the same time. So as the pieces are coming together everyone was trying to figure out how to structure it. How are we going to put it on the air? And we finally came up with a format. That was the moment the light went on. And we made the announcement. This is eerie. This is surreal. Especially since I experienced being there a couple of hours before. We didn’t know what would happen next. We had no idea what the next piece of this story would be or what would unfold.
I know we make our own reality and we have a choice but how much is preordained? Is there always a fork in the road or are there two paths which are equally preordained? There could be hundreds of paths where one could go this way or that, there’s a choice, it’s very strange.
James Taylor, who has intermittently been confined to psychiatric hospitals, was one of the first artists produced by Apple. He says he encountered Chapman the day before the murder. Others say the person he saw was a double, meant to be a red herring or a ruse to throw people of the scent of the trail. Taylor said on the next day (December 8 1980): I was talking to Peter Asher’s wife on the phone and she was saying, I think it was at the time of the Manson trials, or some kind of reiteration of the Manson thing, and she said man things are wild out here, they’re crazy, and I was sitting by an open window on the sixth floor and opposite was this ventilation arch which came through the courtyard of the Dakota it’s blocked off from the second floor from the street level but then there’s this arch which gives communication from the interior court of the Dakota and I hear out on the street I hear five shots ring out and I said I think the cops shot someone you think it’s crazy out there. They were so popular you are going to fit into somebody’s crazy fantasy.
In the book How The Beatles Knew the author posits that by living at the Asher’s Paul McCartney was exposed to cutting edge psychological and psychiatric literature which enabled him to embark on what she calls an Identity Fracture Project. The father of Paul’s girlfriend Jane Asher, Richard Asher, was the physician responsible for the mental observation ward at the Central Middlesex Hospital; and in 1951 he named the mental disorder Munchausen Syndrome.
In the interior court of the Dakota there is a communication system which you can hear if you listen really hard.
That is to say that Paul, through his contact with the Ashers learned about cutting edge psychological and psychiatric research and this, combined with exposure to the research on creativity that was being done at Stanford (via his contact with various figures of the Beats) was able to translate a theory of the mind and personality and consciousness into what seemed to be whimsical and harmless, if at time ominous, lyrics.
On December 7 1980 Ronald Reagan appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, the caption was: A Fresh Start. The word well is said 20 times on Double Fantasy. The Swastika is an ancient symbol which means be well, or simply good luck. Just like starting over.
The Dakota, also known as the Dakota Apartments, is a cooperative apartment building at 1 West 72nd Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. The Dakota was constructed between 1880 and 1884 in the German Renaissance style and was designed by Henry Janeway Hardenbergh for businessman Edward Cabot Clark.
William T. Carpenter, who diagnosed Hinckley with schizophrenia, testified for three days, opining that Hinckley had amalgamated various personalities from fiction and real life—including Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver and John Lennon.
Hinky: Back to Random House: A later variant (spelled variously “hincty,” “hinkty,” “hankty,” and finally “hinky”), is described as an underground or police term for suspicious, wary, paranoid, nervous, jumpy, or even arousing suspicion (as in something hinky is going on). Urbandictionary describes hinky as meaning, among other things, something as yet indefinable is wrong, out of place; not quite right. Awry or out of joint, or off.
The façade is largely composed of yellow brick with sandstone trim and terracotta detailing. The main entrance is a double-height archway on 72nd Street, which leads to the courtyard. The building's design includes deep roofs with dormers, terracotta spandrels and panels, niches, balconies, and balustrades. Each apartment at the Dakota had a unique layout with four to twenty rooms. The building is divided into quadrants, each of which has a stair and an elevator for tenants, as well as another stair and another elevator for servants.
The word Dakota means ally or friend in the Dakota language.
Continued at Dakota (Part Three)
