White Album Art - Rutherford Chang

Please Google this cat whose art is to buy as many copies of White Album as possible and finally do a multi track digital master of the lot.

 

It is all about the "story" behind each and every copy, and when I look back to my own situation it is rather fascinating how I got to get the music itself into my head without ever buying the record itself.

For me the art also involves the technical journey [and affordability of enjoyment] over those decades, so here is my tilt.

1968 - drafted into army for Vietnam and my girlfriend's father was replacing the turntable in his gramophone so he gave me the old one which [being an engineer and being bored in army waiting discharge] I fixed and then made up a "box" with speakers, my National Tranny as Amp and turntable up top with hinged lid, my first step to becoming an Audiophile, but on a very limited budget.

1969 - got discharged in January and set myself up in a flat, with my record player of course which by now had a National 4 inch open reel [el cheapo] tape player also plugged in to my "system".  English guys in another flat had a bunch of original UK Albums including White Album, so I got to record it onto my tape.

1970 - did the "big trip" to Europe, backpacking for 6 months and on return to Oz via Singapore ordered [so as to declare at customs and avoid 100% duty at that time] my dream HiFi state of the art system, which took me 6 months to pay off.

1971 - married in January and HiFi arrived in March so I started buying records and the sound was mind boggling and window shattering [for 1812 Overture].  But did not buy White Album as a record as I already had it on tape [but complete with hiss/crackle and ceramic pickup garble], but rarely listened to it.

1974 - HiFi had gone back into packing boxes as we were totally renovating a terrace house and for 2 years we lived in dust and rubble, but now was time to set it up again with a room purpose designed for the HiFi experience.  So while renovating in 1972 it was back to my old system and while we got burgled and tape player was taken, the tape remained.

1975 - with house complete it was time to do lots of skiing and I bought a Sony cassette player that would plug in to a HiFi system for our MGB which I made up, so we had cassette format music for those 8 hour trips to Perisher Valley and the snow.  So old tape from White Album morphed again, now from a Sony Tape Deck [same as used by Kilgore in Apocalypse Now] to the further inferior rendition of cassette [without Dolby at that stage so lots of hiss with S/N ratio of only about 45].  But in a car it matters not with such finer specs as you simply do as Kilgore did "Big Duke Six to Eagle Thrust - put on PschWar Ops, make it loud to a Romeo Foxtrot, shall we dance?"

1975 to 2005 - cassette survived [but probably never played] through having kids, living overseas, divorce and separation from kids by Family Law Family Extermination Court, but after 10 years of no communication with kids my elder son emails me to say happy 60th birthday.  He had just recently at age 28 started his "Beatles Era" and by some miracle of ESP our top 7 Beatles favourites were basically the same, even though we had never spoken of The Beatles previously.

2006 - possibly spurred on by our email conversations, I wanted to add a White Album playlist to my IPod so I found the cassette from 30 years before and somehow "ripped it" to IPod.  But even listening in my car, the sound had been so degraded by all the morphing that I ebayed the CD [in today's dollar about 20% of the cost of the record in 1968] and ripped that to IPod.

So that is the Betty Davis "bumpy ride" for my own White Album Experience, enhanced once again by this movie.

Prudence as Napalm Girl

Even 40 years after HAL conned the world with Napalm Girl, blaming Vietnam on the "Universal Soldier" and getting out with tail between legs, Taymor has been careful in dealing with that issue.

Here for the record is my own Michael Moore "doco" style proof of the FRAUD.

You can take this as you wish and it seems all 12,000 viewers of it on Utube simply did as the German people did in WWII, ie just put head in sand and watched Ellen Degenerate [sic] comin outa her closet.  Here is German version from Nuremberg Testimony of Justice Janning:

"My counsel says we were not aware of the extermination of the millions. He would give you the excuse we were only aware of the extermination of the hundreds. Does that make us any the less guilty? Maybe we didn't know the details. But if we didn't know, it was because we didn't want to know."

Whatever, HAL herself seems to have agreed with me as Utube was required to "Terminate With Extreme Prejudice" my account of all 130 movies uploaded.

But I am still foggy on some of the analogies here and will return after watching Lady in the Water, as I feel there might be a connection, knowing how deep is M Night S.

EDIT

OK, have just watched Lady in the Water and although that Myth is also of Vietnamese origin [in Night's imagination] it does not specifically address the issue here, BUT a bit of Googling did in fact reveal an ancient NORTH Vietnamese Art [still practiced today]  of Water Puppets [please look it up on UTube to see some examples].

So in this movie the girls are shown doing a normal Water Dance but their clothes have been "ripped off" [including panties as in Napalm Girl to get attention from J Doe] to signify that Napalm Girl was in fact a Hollywood style gig using an American born Vietnamese girl, the reason Prudence in this story is "from the Midwest", to make connection to Dylan's God on Our Side.

I will think further on this but it seems Taymor is referring to the fact that the puppet masters [behind the curtain] are simply the normal farmers etc and when they complete a dance the puppets simply fall into the water, SO she seems to be simply making the point that by the American soldiers killing the parents of the kids, then the kids can't survive, hence we see the puppets [the nude girls] fall down and die in the water.

This interpretation of course explains Max in the water, as he too is just a puppet [or in fact the Buffy Sainte Marie Universal Soldier] of HAL "with God on HAL's side", hence Max lying in water as a crucifix and the Huey making another crucifix as it flies over him.

Hold Me Tight

As already mentioned, the Hold Me Tight segment cleverly flashes back and forward "Across the Universe", ie the Atlantic to reveal the totally different cultures, at least for Jude and Lucy.

Lucy lives in Massachusetts in an upper class "manicured" neighborhood which could well be that of the Burnhams in American Beauty and attends an expensive school where the dancing is as organised as we are about to see for the cheerleaders with Prudence [or for Angela and Janie in American Beauty] and all the kids, band included, are of the REM "happy shining people holding hands" variety.  Feminism is already starting to raise its ugly head as depicted via the girl dragging the guy onto the dance floor, but that is done as a very quick flash to say this movie is BEFORE the official feminist takeover in 1970.

For Jude the song is performed at its birthplace at the Cavern [or look alike as original was demolished] where the Beatles started their amazing careers, the band is of the Rock and Roll type and the dancing is of the "grope" variety, and is totally UNorganized.  And the clips show the poverty of Liverpool as a "working class" city for "stiffs" [as Jude refers to himself] who remain as such even "when they are 64".

The fantastic comparison continues with "All My Loving", then a clever little bit once Jude gets to America where he starts to get into the left side of the car that stops to give him a lift, then checks himself and gets into the right hand side.

All of that sets the scene brilliantly for Jude's American Experience, and then lo and behold he meets Max who is a kindred spirit [if not a problem to his parents].

Where is the GIRL?

I did not know what to expect when I bought this DVD - like would it be some mindless "Anthology" to bring the young folk up to speed in Beatles Twitter?  The cover description looked OK so I nervously inserted it into my machine.

A desolate Liverpool beach scene next to those depressing docks at the mouth of the Mersey that only Gerry Marsden could possible "love", sees Jude sitting there and I thought OK, so he will be off to USA, but then he starts to sing Girl, in a haunting slowed down slightly de-scoused John Lennon voice and I said "this is gonna be great", BUT what is he going to do when he gets to the "Secret Wimmuns Business" parts of Girl?  Well the answer was he stopped right there [Meatloaf] and we went into a brilliant comparison of the two cultures via Hold Me Tight, after first doing the equally brilliant Helter Skelter segment.

Please note the iconic Willard's head rises from water from Apocalypse Now, here for Lucy being "injected" into the present and repeated later for Max being "injected" into Vietnam.  Totally brilliant by Taymor.

The start, in my view, was in fact a tribute to American Beauty in several ways.  For starters the scene is an up front flash forward [as in American Beauty] to a situation towards the end of the movie.  In the case of Across the Universe it seems to be when he first gets back to Liverpool, totally devastated, and "wanders lonely as a cloud" [but not quite "along the Sands of Dee", and without the unfortunate Mary and the cattle, all of that having been 10 miles South, but with equal depression], before he gets back to work at the depressing docks.

So younguns can follow, here are the words of Girl.

Is there anybody going to listen to my story
All about the girl who came to stay?
She's the kind of girl you want so much
It makes you sorry
Still you don't regret a single day.
Ah girl
Girl

When I think of all the times I've tried so hard to leave her
She will turn to me and start to cry;
And she promises the earth to me
And I believe her
After all this time I don't know why
Ah girl
Girl

She's the kind of girl who puts you down
When friends are there, you feel a fool.
When you say she's looking good
She acts as if it's understood.
She's cool, ooh, ooh, ooh,
Girl
Girl

Was she told when she was young that pain
Would lead to pleasure?
Did she understand it when they said
That a man must break his back to earn
His day of leisure?
Will she still believe it when he's dead?
Ah girl
Girl

As you can see these words show amazing knowledge of Secret Wimmuns Business [aka Eve Syndrome] only attempted by such as Bob Dylan in Gates of Eden [where Eve hangs out] but in deep code, whereas Girl is in yer face, and sure sent chills down my spine at the time as I observed what Jude calls "shaggers", ie bees to the honeypot, just waiting to grab my own gorgeous teenage model girlfriend, once I had to board the "Blue Bus" for Vietnam.

So once the Femo War was done and dusted in 1970 after the release of The Female Eunuch, Girl was seen as a song that "revealed battle tactics" and got "locked in that closet" [but not the one Prudence was in].

So in both movies the male lead is "telling us his story" about "the girl" and for Lester much further down the road he does one final attempt in his "where is the girl?" Hamlet bit, speaking of the pre 1970 version of Ms B, but it is of no avail.

Ms. B has been inflicting the PAIN for her own PLEASURE for years, and although she does not kill him it is only because the fag next door jumped out of his closet and beat her to it and Ms B is finally starting to THINK about the consequences as she slumps into her own [laundry] closet "when he's dead", so hearing Jude sing "she's the kind of girl you want so much it makes you sorry, still you don't regret a single day", and knowing the rest of the song is really spooky and makes you really fear for what trouble this likely lad from Liverpool might have inflicted on him down the line, across the "Universe" of the Atlantic.

As I say, totally brilliant. Now read on!

Henry the Horse [Heroin]

We are all aware of the stories, some true some not, about drugs in Vietnam as well as places like The Village and of course The Beatles themselves.  Generally we hear of LSD but all of that is about "drugs by choice" or recreational drugs.

The far more disastrous drug however was Heroin, used for pain relief for many hundreds of thousands of soldiers wounded in Vietnam, and of course that has always been kept as secret as possible by HAL, because as J Doe watches a war on TV he does not want to be bored by facts or nasties as he is entertained.  HAL perfected all that for Iraq by "embedding" the media into the "frontline" so as to be in full LAUNDER mode, as HAL learned from the Napalm Girl Fraud.

Across the Universe does deal with this issue, but of course Taymor has once again called in Prudence with her closets and masks to allow the issue to be codified.

In Australia I was born 6 Jan 1945, just 6 days too late to have avoided the whole draft scheme.  Then with 1 in 9 chance of my birth date being drawn in the "Lottery of Death", it WAS drawn, so like Max I was the only one in my circle of friends called up.  On the lucky side, after 2 years exemption to complete my engineering degree, as an engineer I was allocated to a base workshop facility, essentially making sure the front line troops had Hueys etc that were in good mechanical order, so I was spared the agony and even the knowledge of Heroin addiction.

Fast forward 45 years and in my retirement in 2011 I was formatting books to Kindle for numerous authors, one of whom was Ron Shepherd who was enlisted at the same time as me, but from America.  So we became sort of long distance "brothers-in-arms".  Now when I did his third book he said it is called "To Waltz with a White Horse" so I found a Shadowfax like horse as below and emailed the cover for his approval.

Ron said lovely horse but the book is about the heroin white horse, so I added a syringe, per:

And Ron said fine, let's go with that, but as with all the books I format, I did not read the story in any detail as I did the formatting.  I wished I had as Ron told me that this was the book closest to his own story.  Then after doing his last two books it seems he died [Aug 2011], apparently FROM the effects of the Heroin as detailed in the story.

I was not able to contact his wife or access his Amazon account so I sadly just forgot about Ron, until watching Across the Universe when I decided I needed to be educated on Henry, so I read the whole story and it blew my mind, especially read in conjunction with Taymor's movie and the Happiness is a Warm Gun segment.  That is to say, while Taymor had to step lightly on this Politically Correct matter where HAL is saving millions by closing down vet hospitals and letting the vets die, Ron tells it as it is - and it is not pretty.

So if you too want to read the book here is the page on Kindle.  In fact here is the combined  Home Page I did for his 5 books.  If too mean to buy the book you can click on the book thumbnail and read the flippage for the Prologue and Chapter 1, and you will get the picture.

So whatever John may have denied about Happiness is a Warm Gun [as he always did for his own amusement], in my view Taymor has got it totally spot on with her depiction of the vet hospital.  I am thinking she made it round to signify that this aspect of the war was "just part of the whole circus", or simply "Because the World is Round it turns me on".

I took the Mother Superior bit to infer that this was simply the Stairway to Hell where there were "2 ways you could go by but in the long run, you still ended up in Hell", that is to say you died from your injury or from the Horse, and HAL did not really care, because J Doe did not really care [as shown by Lucy on phone to mum].  So Mother Superior jumps the gun in pronouncing a bloke dead [and exits stage left] when in fact he still had a few more rides on the Horse.

We see the "sudden kick of the Horse" [as Ron graphically describes] once Max gets his fix, but I would love to have been able to ask Ron about the Blue color as Henry kicks, as we saw with Max, as well as the "warm guns" being Blue.

There is a lot in the movie displaying the classic Psychedelic effect of LSD, with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds [in the Credits] said to stand for LSD, as Taymor seems to agree, but the Blue aspect reminds me that [Spoiler Alert!!] the nurse attending Ron is described as having vivid blue eyes.

Back to Henry, John changed the name of the horse in the poster to Henry, of course saying it was not about drugs, but the BBC banned Mr Kite.  So we see Henry the [White] Horse come Waltzing in on roller skates past Jude, Lucy and friends and Max notices Prudence is in fact riding him, with a white mask.  I guess Taymor is just continuing her analogy with closet=secret=mask so she calls on Prudence once again, while Mr K is saying don't worry kiddies, this is all a bit complicated etc.

Prudence demounts and joins the gang while introducing her new girlfriend as being a contortionist, which is "8 miles high" over my head right now, but I am thinking it is an in-joke [of a sexual nature if you get my drift - think Greer and her 1970 Article for the Times] once again about Ellen Degenerate [sic] etc "coming out" to help their ratings.

From then on we see a totally different "personality" for Max, or rather the removal of his personality as he just sits and contemplates.  At the end he has recovered enough to drive a cab and he explains to Jude "that is I think it's not too bad [to paraphrase Strawberry Fields], I'm fine from the neck down.  The "feelgood" part of all that HORROR is that [as in Ron's book] it is the mateship with Jude that not only helps Jude out of his depression [by appearing as a "ghost" at the Shipperies Pub singing Hey Jude] but also helps himself to regain some of his old vitality, but movie remains silent as to longer term effects [both for Max and the loving couple].

Strawberry Fields

There is not a lot more to say about the Strawberry Fields segment as it is quite self-explanatory.

In  Rumsfeld HAL's speak we have several Known Knowns here concerning John composing the song while filming How I Won the War.  We know the film could have been an episode of the Goon Show or Monty Python as it was done in the same manner, with John being a great fan of such satire, meaning the film was a general rant on the circus that is the American Forces, a la Bungalow Bill, but using English Army, a la Dad's Army or Goon Show as the brunt of all the jokes.

And knowing John likes to make a statement by saying the opposite [eg The Fat Growth on Eric Hearble], I think we can assume that in Day in the life:

I saw a film today oh, boy
The English army had just won the war
A crowd of people turned away

is to be read as

I saw a film today oh, boy
The American army had just lost the war
A crowd of people came to spit

that is, forecasting the Napalm Girl Fraud, to which I will return with Prudence in deep cover.  This verse is brilliant in my view

Always, no sometimes, think it's me  
But you know I know when it's a dream  
I think I know I mean a yes  
But it's all wrong  
That is I think I disagree

Taybor interprets this as "think it's me" means "my turn to die" so shows bloke in front of Max get zapped while Max keeps expecting what actually happens to John in his movie, with his little monologue into the camera, so that works perfectly by way of juxtapositioning.

But I think we all know John is saying he sometimes thinks it is he [as the odd man out] who is out of his tree for actually thinking and not taking the easy way out of "living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see [on purpose]", ie the basic reason HAL can do Vietnam etc [forever] being that J Doe WILL never think, as Hitler HAL worked out some years before and USA HAL copied.

He had already decided "no one I think is in my tree" but keeps having doubts about why nobody can "you know, tune in" to his level in the tree, ie until Yoko everyone was either high or low, inter alia explaining why he kept getting further away from Paul, who is a far more "simple soul", as evidenced by his own song on flip side [or was it A Side?] Penny Lane.

So in Across the Universe, Jude ends up with the same "communication breakdown" with Lucy, who is trying to think but still tripping over her own feet, so at that point "She's Leaving Home", instead of "a Love that Should have Lasted Years", to add 2 more Beatles songs.

But in closing there are far too many words pronounced as "know" in the verse above, from where I sit, to be a coincidence.  The famous rant of Rumsfeld/Bush HAL to start Iraq War was:

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that, we now know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.

— United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

Now before you say that I am out of my tree to suggest John was that brilliant in forecasting HAL's dribble, it was not HAL that wrote it, but rather a 13th Century poet and the Copywrong had perspired [if I may attempt some Lennon writty].  It went:

* One who knows and knows that he knows... His horse of wisdom will reach the skies.
* One who knows, but doesn't know that he knows... He is fast asleep, so you should wake him up!
* One who doesn't know, but knows that he doesn't know... His limping mule will eventually get him home.
* One who doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know... He will be eternally lost in his hopeless oblivion!

So John could easily have known that, in which case he and Henry the Horse are off for the skies while Donald and George are heading to get eternally lost in hopeless oblivion, though most non Americans would say that is nothing new.

Ah, one more.  Taymor shows the TRUE version in strawberry red of how the millions of kiddies are incinerated under HAL's orders by high level Hail Bombs, then we see her brilliant transition from swirling red bits of kiddies to a swirling WHITE sheet being carefully LAUNDERED to wash all the blood off HAL's hands, and the fact poor Lucy is still too green to notice, and is taken in by Megaphone Diplomacy.

We will soon see how this lie causes Max to be "fucked in the head" as Lucy is telling her mum, as she starts to see her own folly in joining the Tweedle Dee-Tweedle Dumb mob with Paco.

And yeah - I have added Strawberry Fields as #22 on my Kilgore Jukebox, but here it is as a single:

 

Bungle-O Bill

If you research the normal Politically Correct [castrated by HAL] sources such as Wiki you will find that the interpretation of "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" is simply the EXTANT instance of a single American at the Yogi Bear camp in India going on a tiger hunt with his mum, an elephant and a gun, killing an unfortunate tiger and prancing around like The Great White Hunter, to which John remarked "But wouldn't you call that slightly life-destructive?".

Obviously there is far more to the ditty by any means of investigation, starting with the fact John had just completed the movie "How I Won the War".  This was an English satirical movie which I saw just before taking the Blue Bus to Boot Camp in 1967 and the full title as anyone outside of USA will know is: "Those fuckin' Yanks come into the war at the 11th hour and shower their money on our girls, telling them How I Won the War".

Certainly Taymor knew as she constructs that scenario for Jude's dad even though John's dad was far more honorable, even if not a pillar of virtue.

It is almost 50 years ago but I remember laughing with my own Lucy type girlfriend back then about John's punch line in this Pythonic/Goons style movie where he gets zapped and comes up to the camera to say to us "Now we all knew that was going to happen" [or similar words].

So let me slot the song into an appropriate part of the movie, per:

There is a lot going on here but I will leave it at that for now, but as an aside see the clever CROSS Max makes in the water and the Huey shadow then duplicates it to show the "soldiers die for our sins, Sacrificial Lamb" aspect of Nam, and was that the inspiration for Eastwood at the end of Gran Torino in 2008?

However I had already done my own Napalm in the Morning Juke Box some years ago to explore FF Coppola's BILL, who is Bill Kilgore [ie kill with blood and guts - and the smell of Napalm and sounds of Wagner to "scare the shit out of the Slopes"] and you will see Bungalow Bill is #20 Variation, or you can see it below, which should buffer/stream faster:

But even without considering any of the above insinuations regarding American Forces acting as Buffalo Bill but bungling it, what Wiki etc are ignoring is the words IN the song, per "He's the all-American bullet-headed Saxon mother's son" and "So Captain Marvel zapped him right between the eyes" and John asking via the children "The children asked him if to kill was not a sin".

Even for those not having read "In My Own Write" [ie "No one I think is in my tree"] should know of John's quick and vindictive satirical wit, and this is no exception.  There ARE no children at the actual tiger event so John simply creates them so as to rub salt into the wound regarding HAL's incineration of millions of kids via Hail Bombs and then blaming it on the soldiers by Napalm Girl fraud, and accentuate his disdain for the whole American love of war and guns, which ironically was to kill him in 1980, almost as "prophesied" in his movie role.

Obviously the name Bungalow Bill [ie mimicking Buffalo Bill] is not as Wiki says, ie just a reference to the fact this mother and son were staying in a bungalow, but rather is to be read as Bungle-O.  Like get real folks, this is John Lennon and not Ricky Nelson at his Garden Party.

But in my view Taymor picks up on all those aspects of the song, starting with Lucy's boyfriend as the Saxon style mother's son, doing something "brave" [but the inference is stupid] and getting himself killed.  Then we see the induction center Sargents are all made as if Captain Marvel, per:

But where is the tiger? well at Mr K's circus [which is a "tribute" to the bunnies gig in Apocalypse Now and Willard's comment regarding the whole war being a circus by the Grocery Clerks in Washington - aka HAL] there are no tigers on the "menu" but Taymor arranges some "paper tigers, disguised as zebras" to walk in unchallenged, and later we see 2 of them raise their front legs in mock attack.

But even more obscure is where are the elephants?  Firstly I think most folk will accept a connection between Huey the Elephant and Huey the Chopper, and I will deal with all that under a separate post, but in this movie [as in Apocalypse Now] we always see "Captain Marvel" arrive in a Huey with what Kurtz explained to HAL as "long, loud, clumsy and costly [especially loss of life wise for Marvel]".

Well now the question raises another issue of why Prudence is portrayed as that horrible Pronk of "gay" along with associated Pronks from HAL via Hollywood of "homophobe, closet and straight".  We see in American Beauty that if you are to make it via Hollywood you MUST include all those Pronks in your offering.

So my take is Taymor totally rejects that crap but has taken the time to have a dig at such as Ellen Degenerate [sic] that come out of their closet to increase their ratings.  Certainly back in the 1960s as a high class music magazine put it "nobody cares who Bowie fucks, man or woman", so when John wrote Dear Prudence at Yogi Bear gig it was about Prudence Farrow taking her "trancendentals" too seriously and John and company were simply asking her to "de-escalate" to use the then Pronk from HAL.

So we have the amusing bit I will get back to with the gang singing to Prudence in a perfect closet.  But it is even better here as we see behind Mr K there are 2 small "closets" [tents] and each one has an elephant that refuses to "come out" but just throws out a phallic trunk and trumpets.

What Taymor had in mind there is anyone's guess but in my view she is trying, AND succeeding in matching John's wit from his book, in fact John actually DID one such "writty".  And good luck following if you are American.
 

ON SAFAIRY WITH WHIDE HUNTER

In the jumble...the mighty jumble... Whide Hunter sleeps

tonight.

At the foot of the bed, Otumba kept wogs for poisonous

snacks such as the deadly cobbler and apply python.

Little did he nose that the next day in the early owls of

the morecombe, a true story would actually happen.

Otumba awoke him with a cup of teeth, and they lit up to-

ward the jumble.

'Aint dat Elepoon Pill?' said Wipe Hudnose, 'wearing his

new Basuti?'

'Could be the Flying Docker on a case.'

'No, he's walking,' said Otumbad in Swahily which is not

arf from here as the crow barks. All too soon they reached a

cleaner in the jumble and set up cramp.

Jumble Jim, whom shall remain nameless, was slowly but

slowly asking his way through the underpants, (underware he was

being washed by Whide Hungry.)

'Beat the bus, Otumba,' commanded Wheat Hoover.

'No! but mable next week it will be my turn to beat the

bus now standing at platforbe nine.'

Jumping Gym, who shall remain norman, spotted Whit Monday

and the Barking Doctorine shooting some rhinostrils and

hippoposthumous and Otumbark.

'Stop shouting those animoles.' Bud it hab no inflience

upod them. They carried on shotting alligarters, wild boats,

garriffes, lepers and Uncle Tom Cobra and all... Old Buncle Ron

Gobble and all... Bold Rumple, Bom Dobby and all... Bad

Runcorn, Sad Toddy and all.

Finally explanation of "The continuing Story of ..." is not even attempted by the Politically Correct agencies of HAL, eg Wiki, but I simply see it as a tongue in cheek copy of Dylan's "if God is on our side He'll stop the next war", or as Jude simply says when Lucy wants to lie in front of a tank, "it won't".  That is to say John added it to his song to say Ladies and Gentlemen, HAL via Capt Marvel as the Universal Soldier will never stop this genocide [but I will keep trying via Give Peace a Chance, and Jude will continue his "doodling" while the shaggers blow themselves up].

So all in all my thinking is 2007 was still too close to Iraq genocide by HAL so Captain Bill Marvel had to be "hidden" ...... and I am suddenly hit like a Kurtz diamond bullet - yes, there it is, Bill [and Prudence as Napalm Girl] is still HIDING in the closet until "he looks much better and smells much better".

So "How does it smell to YOU soldier?"

Of course Taymor also makes extensive use of masks to "hide secrets", and I will return to that also.

The Continuing Story of [ . . . ] Forever

It does not take a genius to work out that The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill and Strawberry Fields Forever both have a prophetic message that, as long as God is on Our Side, HAL will not stop in Vietnam, especially after such a horrible loss.

Taymor uses an interpretation for Strawberry Field [of blood] that I am sure John would agree with totally, even if he did not specifically "intend" that message, for indeed John LOVED to have people go into mortal battle over the meaning of his songs, and sit on the sidelines "Watching the Wheels Go By".

But with Bungalow Bill I figure she stepped lightly and wrote-in Bill in code, so as not to get her movie banned, which was what FF Coppola ran into with Apocalypse Now where he had to wait 10 years after 1969 to release it and another 22 years to include the "how does it smell to you soldier" bit in the Detox version.

But back to 1968, Dylan was already public enemy #1 with HAL for suggesting God might STOP wars, per:

So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.”

Taymor had already made two very clever references to God On Our Side, starting with Lucy's explanation of how we thank God at Thanksgiving for helping us kill the Injuns, per:

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

Then we see Lucy's parents are off to Europe to have a vacation with their new friends while LBJ HAL takes over Hitler HAL's BBQ duties in Nam, per:

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And then we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

With all that preliminary stuff squared away I will turn to Bungle-O Bill.

Cranberry Sauce

Taymor steps very lightly around issues that are "too political" just as FF Coppola had to do with Apocalypse Now, so we have to dig deep to find the Cranberry Sauce issue that Lucy's aunt alludes to when she says "the Cranberry sauce was not as spicy this year".

Lucy provides the next clue when she exits the Laundry in a huff saying "maybe you'll do something when bombs start going off around here".  Then later, a sader but wiser Lucy peeks in on her shagger friend making a bomb and says "I thought the other side made bombs".

Of course the type of bomb we are looking at here has nothing to do with either side in Vietnam but is all about the IRA bombing in England - mainly London but Liverpool is the port connecting England to Belfast.  So even if not a "cause" for Jude, it certainly was an issue for anyone living in England, as I was, back in 1970 when you were constantly on alert on the Tube or in a pub for any parcel at all that might have been an IRA bomb, ticking away and ready to kill you.

Another cleverness of the Laundry scene is none of the J Does there saw any fear from Lucy's outburst, thus showing the absolute need for a 9/11 if USA HAL wanted to control J Doe into the future.

The hook to Jude and cranberries [or strawberries if you will] is that while USA HAL tried for years to deport John for his anti-war stance, UK HAL has had the same problem post 1994 after The Cranberries made a video that even surpassed anything John ever did in bringing a cease-fire to Northern Ireland, or Paul was to do in 1972 with Give Ireland Back to the Irish.

The video is of course Zombie and here is the 70 million plus viewed UTube:

If it does not raise the hairs on the back of your neck and bring tears to your eyes then Across the Universe is not your type of movie.

Alas, the comment about Cranberries not as spicy this year is a jibe to identify just how worried HAL has always been about any anti-war initiatives, and in this case Hollywood was called in to create zombie movies to divert the kiddies' little minds away from the "deadshit" meaning of this video that had the effect of shaming the IRA into a cease-fire.

So if you Google for information on that victory by the Cranberries, all those so called information sources such as Wiki have had their balls cut off, which has been totally easy since HAL did his 9/11 gig.

Taymor has Mr K comment on this dumbing down as Henry the Horse waltzes past our friends [and I will return to Henry later] where he says "His name is Henry and it's a lot of explanation but don't worry about it kids, just tune in, tune out, drop out, switch on, switch off and explode".

The earlier example of an anti Vietnam initiative is the song Universal Soldier, written by Buffy Saint Marie and made famous by John's mate Donovan, who was with the Beatles in India with Yogi Bear.  Buffy explains it in full before singing it, and please look at the scenes from 1968 in the Village which could have been straight from Across the Universe.

Hollywood was called in again by HAL and [apart from Buffy the Vampire Slayer] they morphed the Universal Soldier into a Terminator style thing with lights sticking out of his head.

But the biggest Hollywood task was to create Napalm Girl to blame the war on the soldiers and we see later how Prudence is "masked up" to fill that role.

But before we part from the Cranberries' victory, take a look at how the video mocks Napalm Girl fraud by having the "gold-boys" open their mouths as if screaming to match Napalm Girl and brother in the Pulitzer Prize winning fraud.

Oh yeah, here is my own "fraud-buster" video:

This video was uploaded to UTube in 2010 and lasted a year with 10,000 or so views, in which time not one J Doe made comment either way, but after that time HAL terminated my whole account of 130 videos.

So what we are looking at here [as in Across the Universe, Apocalypse Now etc] is HAL's mantra, unchanged since HIS time as Hitler, "It is most fortunate for governments that the people do not think".

What HAL has always understood, eg here as Hitler, is that to GET J Doe to that state of "living is easy with eyes closed" [Strawberry Fields], they must be "Carefully Taught before they are 6 or 7 or 8" [South Pacific 1958] "to hate all the people their relatives hate", and that never changed from McCarthy HAL to GWB HAL.

And the effect [of "none so blind as those that do not want to see"] is "Carefully Explained" in the Nuremberg Testimony of Justice Janning from the titular 1961 movie.

"My counsel would have you believe we were not aware of the concentration camps. Not aware? Where were we? Where were we when Hitler began shrieking his hate in Reichstag? Where were we when our neighbors were being dragged out in the middle of the night to Dachau?! Where were we when every village in Germany has a railroad terminal where cattle cars were filled with children being carried out to their extermination! Where were we when they cried out in the night to us. Were we deaf, dumb, blind?....

My counsel says we were not aware of the extermination of the millions. He would give you the excuse we were only aware of the extermination of the hundreds. Does that make us any the less guilty? Maybe we didn't know the details. But if we didn't know, it was because we didn't want to know..."

Point of Conflict - Revolution

The inevitable issue between Jude and Lucy comes to a head via the Beatles song Revolution, when Jude goes to where Lucy is "working" as a "volunteer for the cause".

Lucy is the [self confessed] naive "pampered suburban chick" to use the Angela expression from American Beauty and is taken in by the "Megaphone Diplomacy/Polarization" methodology of Pablo or some-such, who Jude has correctly assessed as a "shagger".

Ironically John wrote the song after being approached by a similar person for a "protest song" so Revolution is John's refusal to do so.

John's methodology [when he felt inclined to have one] was sort of that of a "pacifist", using his art and music [and simply love] to get J Doe to think [a very hard task as Hitler described via his Mantra "It is most fortunate for governments that the people do not think"].  So Jude represents that methodology, ie he tells Lucy he doesn't have a cause, but see below.

The tiff in the office ends their friendship for the present, but it provides great leads-in for other very clever stuff from Taymor, for example a la Cranberry Sauce.

My Summary

I watched this movie for the first time in January 2013, and again the following day, and will be watching it many more times as it really resonates with me.

The reasons it resonates is it is essentially my own story, growing up in Sydney and a university student as the Beatles became know, drafted for Vietnam in 1965, and living in England after discharge in the "Swinging 60s".

My tilt by way of Summary is that the title is code for Across the Atlantic, as it explores both the similarities and the differences of the UK and American cultures at this time of watershed for several important social issues.

By design or otherwise [but I say design] the content ends abruptly in 1970 [as seen from the benchmark of the music], the exact same time as the start of the Feminist Revolution, which went on to prompt the iconic movie American Beauty that chronicles the total destruction of the Nuclear Family concept and of gender equality.

The other main issue is "patriotism" differences [across the Atlantic] identified here by the so called Vietnam War, albeit America never declared war on anyone at the time.  Of course the UK did not partake in Vietnam [but we DID in Australia] but for the "Return Match of American Genocide" in Iraq, UK DID "sex it up and jump right in".  And of couse we did so again, referred to by the famous Latham expression "like a congaline of suckholes".

So the Director Julie Taymor in 2007 had the advantage of retrospect regarding "The continuing Story of Bungalow Bill", which I will explain below, while Francis Ford Coppola in his similar "tongue in cheek" treatment of the Vietnam madness in Apocalypse Now in 1979 could only speculate about a repeat performance of the madness by the "Grocery Clerks" in Washington.

But Kubrick had already made a long range prophesy that HAL [using the mask of Don Rumsfeld] would strike in 2001 via his 2001: A Space Odyssey, so looks like Coppola simply joined the prophesy queue [which was never very hard to figure] and in 2001 "Reduxed" Apocalypse Now, in preparation for HAL to do his nasties later in September.

Back to this movie, the story is told by inventing a John Lennon facsimile named Jude, coming from Liverpool and with same background circumstances of no father, going to art school, having visa problems etc etc.  Jude is injected directly into Mother America to interface with a few typical Americans, in exactly the same way the Beatles INdirectly interfaced with the whole of America.

The main issue IN America is the War in Vietnam but Taymor very skillfully hints [for those listening] that those back on Jude's side of the Atlantic have their own problems via the long term bloodshed in Ireland.  And even more skillfully she alludes to feminism, essentially by what she leaves out/terminates.

As for Almost Famous [see my blog] the movie can be enjoyed on a superficial level by "young" folk [ie under 60] simply as a "feelgood, coming of age in a former great age" movie, or those who "were there" can delve into the deeper meanings.

Now read on.