For better or worse, I’m a millennial, which means I wasn’t yet born when Venkman, Stantz, and Spengler were busting ghosts and cracking wise all over the movies, TV, and lunchboxes. For me Ghostbusters was just another monolithic VHS tape on the walls of Dave’s Video, and for a long time I thought I had missed out on that particular pop-culture phenomenon, but it occurs to me now that, while I wasn’t around for all that, I got basically the same experience in 1997 with Men in Black. Keep the New York setting, but change the overalls to black suits and the wacky paranormal ghosts to zany extraterrestrial aliens—somehow find the perfect young-upstart meets cranky old-timer chemistry in Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones—and voila: another summer blockbuster appears.

Men in Black worked well for many reasons. The tone it struck (basically Ghostbusters meets The Blues Brothers) was aimed at two distinct audiences, kids and adults. The kids (that was me, Alex) could go see it and laugh at the aliens and effects and Will Smith saying “aw dayum,” while the adults (my dad, who didn’t enjoy movies, generally, or maybe just not the movies my Mom and I wanted to see) can go see it and laugh at all the grown-up jokes, most of them uttered by Jones or Rip Torn—and then those kids can grow up and watch again to finally understand what old dad was laughing about—and the loop repeats. I only dimly remember the theatrical experience, but I spent the subsequent years watching the tape over and over.

My experience up to this point is likely not unique. This movie was an enormous hit. It launched Will Smith to superstardom, and stamped itself on my generation as one of a handful of hugely popular media in the 1990s that primed our later taste for the supernatural. And yet at the time we were all watching with eyes wide shut. When Alice tells her husband in the opening moments of Kubrick’s final puzzle piece, “you’re not even looking,” this was Kubrick talking to us, the audience—not just of his films, but of cinema (and perhaps reality) as a whole. In 1997 we were simply not looking at what was being put in front of us. We thought it was entertainment.

I can prove it, but before I do, a little context on how I got here. I didn’t just wake up one day and realize this. Nor did I even happen upon it by sheer chance or accident while watching the film again one day. And I certainly didn’t get it from some video on TikTok. The fact is I was directed to this information about a year ago – specifically I was directed to it by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Gordon Cole, practically yelling into my ear. Yes, it was David Lynch who put me onto this.

How did he do this you ask? By dying. When David Lynch died on 1/16/2025 I did the same thing I do when anyone expires: measure the lifespan, find the mid-point. I was amazed to discover that, having passed away only 4 days before his 79th birthday, Lynch had lived for 4 blocks of 237 months (99.9% exact). Naturally I went ahead and divided his life into quarters to examine each node for synchronistic residue, and guess what dividing a life into quarters creates?

It’s cosmic! It’s cosmic! A full explication of this marvelous Lynch-span structure will be published here in the future. Here we only need to traverse the first “peak” to understand what led me to Men in Black. One search for 10/19/1965 turned up the fact that this is the canon birthday of Agent J, the character played by Will Smith in all three films.

So the fictional “Agent J” was born when the actual David Lynch was 237 months old. It got me thinking. Lynch essentially made his own take on the Men in Black when he made Twin Peaks. Agent Cooper (Agent C?) famously sports the “black suit, black tie,” as do Gordon Cole and Albert Rosenfield. The show is about a group of well-dressed occult cops chasing down “alien funny business,” just like Men in Black.

That was enough for me. It was time to put away the nostalgia, and take a serious look at Men in Black through the Crypto-K electron-microscope, specifically mining it for resonance with Twin Peaks and Lynch, and of course Stanley Kubrick. What I found was a shockingly precise internal architecture. It’s not just in the images or sound; 9/11 is edited into the very geographic and temporal fabric of the film. Either the writer, director, editor, production designer, cinematographer, etc. were all in on this together, or they were all being puppeteered by an otherworldly force (PKD called it Ubik; Crypto-K calls it Kubrick). There is no in-between.

“Today we’re going to concentrate on the J’s.” – Agent Cooper

In Men in Black, Will Smith plays a spirited New York cop named James Edwards who is recruited into the world’s secret alien police-force by the older Agent K (played by Tommy Lee Jones) after coming to their attention by running down and cornering an alien on foot. Before striking a Christ pose and falling backwards off a roof to his death, the alien reveals himself to James when he appears to “blink with two sets of eyelids.” After reading the report, the Police chief asks James, “You mean he blinked with both eyes?” “No, sir, he blinked one set, then blinked an entirely different set.”

Just for the record, couldn’t we call those, twin peeks?

The Men in Black film franchise officially derives from a 1990-1991 comic book, itself based on the real-life lore about strange men clad in black suits appearing out of nowhere to intimidate UFO witnesses into silence. Stories of this ilk have been circulating for about as long as UFO encounters have been a thing, but for some reason in the 1990s the archetype pushed its way to the forefront of the collective consciousness. Except in the 1960s and before they were generally seen as devils, villains—seemingly non-human in origin—but by the 1990s, the MIBs had become the good guys (“Jose Chungs From Outer Space” notwithstanding).

Remember that the Men in Black comic book wasn’t the only story released in 1990-1991 that involved a secretive department of paranormal agents wearing black: that was the same year as the original run of Twin Peaks. The 1997 film traded Agent Cooper’s trench-coat and tape recorder for hip sunglasses (lifted from The Blues Brothers, also based on the MIB lore) and the phallic red-eyed Neuralyzer, but the basic idea remained: occult cops dealing with alien funny business and looking low-key fire while doing so.

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to Shawn Mar 11, 2016, 9:44 PM

There’s so much going on right now, it’s overwhelming. That Civil War seems to be starting in Chicago. Captain America: Civil War premieres 48 days from today.

Civil War... and we’re back to Lincoln already.

At work I listen to podcasts all day... today I listened to talks by Terence McKenna and Timothy Leary. Of particular interest was Timothy Leary’s famous lecture about LSD and psychedelics at Cooper Union, which occurred on November 29, 1964. It’s said to be the “opening salvo” of the 60s counter-culture.

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Stepping out of my grief though, I began to realize that this is not a dusty archive, but a glittering vault full of hoarded treasure, and my feeling is that there is no better content to share exclusively to the honorable paying subscribers of this website, honorary Cryptokubrologists all of you, than a curated glimpse into it, the endlessly fascinating raw material that makes up the Vault of Crypto-K.

Enjoy—and more where that came from…

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Today a video connecting the 1998 film Snake Eyes to the Kirk assassination went viral. Immediately on seeing it my mind went to this essay, because Snake Eyes was also directed by Brian De Palma. According to Mark, there are artists and then there are Artists—or maybe there are Artists and then there are Programmers—and De Palma falls into the latter camp. This might go some of the ways towards explaining why aspects of his film from 30 years ago are showing up in the details of a present-day psychological operation. This stuff (predictive programming) is just what happens when the whole of creation is repeatedly, expertly condensed into a simulacrum of itself, a faint but still highly-potent echo or repetition of the original creative (ie, destructive) act.

Brian De Palma was born on September 11, 1940. Charlie Kirk was killed on September 10, 2025. A few days ago I tweeted that one of Kirk’s political nemeses Nick Fuentes was exactly 237,237 hours old on the day of Kirk’s murder, having been born on August 18, 1998, the day Roman Polanski turned 65, or 23742 days old. This turns out to have been only and exactly 19 days after the premiere of Snake Eyes on July 30, 1998, and 11 days after its country-wide release. This adds up to the fact that Kirk’s murder and the following 9/11 ended 237,732 hours after the premiere of Snake Eyes, a film shown to contain programming predictive (or synchronistically foretelling) of the Kirk assassination. On September 11, 2001, Brian De Palma turned 61, or exactly 732 months old (and 61 is 19 flipped around).

Though this essay concerns an entirely different film, I invite you to consider the parallels between Mark’s analysis of it and the death-ritual of Charlie Kirk, particularly the attention paid to violence to the neck as a trope (or piece of code). In this respect I also invite you to consider the fact that Mark originally posted this essay on October 14, 2012, which was, amazingly enough, **Charlie Kirk’s 19th birthday. * Remember that 19 years constitutes a Metonic cycle, or the amount of time it takes for the Sun and Moon together to make a complete cycle through the sky—if that’s what they are doing at all!!

Also, you might want to watch the movie before you read—this is a shot-for-shot breakdown, he spoils everything that happens—but it’s not entirely necessary, as he also provided screenshots of everything he analyzes, which were miraculously all saved by the wayback machine. There are a LOT of pictures.

Now here we go.

Originally posted Sunday, October 14, 2012

Suicide Switch

There is a lot of debate over the question: what is Art? I have an absolute answer to that question. A work of Art must cause at least one suicide, or a serious suicide attempt, and if it fails to do so it is not Art. The type of suicide I am talking about is not metaphorical, but literal. Furthermore, it is not an anecdotal suicide, the type carried out for a personal reason—like suffering or the notion of romantic transfiguration. I refer to a sudden programmed act of suicide—one might say a Manchurian Suicide.

This article is the study of a work of Art, Brian De Palma’s 1974 masterwork called Phantom of the Paradise, with music and lyrics by Paul Williams—one of many works of drama that is a suicide switch. To be clear, I have no doubt that this work and many others have caused as an act of will by their creator the suicide of unsuspecting consumers. I will make this difficult case as carefully as I can. To begin, a small bit of explanation why a proper work of Art will inevitably trigger the suicide of a selected sub-set of its audience.

First we must define carefully the term of Art—Art as an act of design, by a human being—an act that successfully simulates or models the mystery of All Creation. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard declares reality to be a simulation of a simulation. He is almost right. Reality is the simultaneous existence of a variety of successful simulations of original creation. Furthermore these simulations are not, as described by Baudrillard, weaker, less potent versions of an original artifact. They are in fact distillations, greatly more potent than the original occurrence of creation.

To follow this reasoning, we need a quick outline of the Gnostic Creation Myth, which begins as Pure Undivided Consciousness. As an image, this consciousness can be perceived as Pure White Light flooding the eye and White Noise flooding the ear canal, which produces the simultaneous effect of blindness and vision, and the simultaneous effect of deafness and hearing. When the light waves of all colors are mixed, Pure White Light is produced, just as the mixture of all sound is White Noise. As such, this Undivided Consciousness is called The Perfect One. In the Gnostic Myth, this image is the combination of invisible forces called The Cosmic Christ and the Elder Sophia. The first of act of Material Creation is the moment when this Perfect One, as an act of inner will, divides itself first into Two—the Young Sophia and the Crucified Christ—and then further divides into the rainbow of colors and seven toned music that is the foundation of Material Reality. In a recent article called Moon in the Middle, I have outlined the nature of this mechanism in pretty fantastic detail.

Moon in the Middle appears in The Sync Book II (available now). I don’t make a penny off of this publication, and its noble publisher, Alan Green, along with his many helpers, don’t get much cash return on their investment. Check out The Sync Book and The Sync Book II. Read Sync in Print.

What must be understood is that this First Act of Will which separates The Perfect One into the Lovers called Sophia and Crucified Christ, has three distinct qualities. They are, Love, Murder and Suicide. The Act of Love is realized when the dual aspects of the Perfect One separate, to allow for each of these faces to gaze upon the other. The thing that is One can not see Itself, so it divides into Two. It is also a murder-suicide pact, as each aspect of the unseen duality realizes it will kill both the Other and Itself through the Act of Primordial Division. This act creates a wound which in turn produces the division of the sexes, the human sex organs, the tide of menstruation, and the death of the previously immortal Adam and Eve and the race to which they give birth—a bunch of soon to be dead people.

The recreation of this act by a human being is called Art or Artifice. It is the Great Work of the Satanic Alchemist who proposes by his work a mirror of creation—to regain his immortality, which has been broken into pieces by the Creation of Nature—Nature which brings Death. In this way it reverses the three qualities of the First Act of Will. Human Art is an act of hatred, suicide and murder. It gazes at creation in anger. It reverses the Murder-Suicide pact into a suicide-murder, a murder carried out by hypnotizing the victim, a certain class of hapless consumer of the Art, into a programmed act self-destruction against their will. This is an exact mirror of the act of Breathing Life into Dust, as it instead coaxes life out of that which appears to have free will or a mind of its own.

This mirror, this simulation, does not weaken the substance of reality, make things less real, as imagined by Baudrillard. Art is an imitation of Reality the way that whiskey is a simulation of wheat—it distills reality by increasing it into spirit. The potency of the First Act of Will, which separates the Perfect One into the Material Construct is weak because it is foretold—agreed upon by its dual constituents. It does not come as a surprise. It is not potent. The Black Act of Human Art does the opposite—by the force of will against nature. Art is strong. It surprises its victim with the threat of a sudden reunion to the spiritual. It is the attempt by human beings to scorn the original Act of Love, because as the broken pieces of that Love we are the victims of its pains, but not the recipients of its joys. Every man fails to live up to the Love of Christ on the Cross and every woman fails to live up to the Love of Magdalene for Her Christ and of Mary for Her Child. Our failure is raised as the Awful Cry of Art and Human Design and it is most potent in the form of Drama. Drama, for which great buildings are erected, great painting and image is produced, great music is composed and great performance is rehearsed. In its more modest aspect as a song, a dance or a picture; or as a Great Work of Drama with many elements combined on stage or on the screen, the completed Work of Art has such spiritual potency that it can drive a person into a suicidal attempt to rejoin the cosmos. This happens all the time—read some Goethe for starters, he lays it all out quite nicely. But this expresses only the sentimental respect of small “a” art. For the big “A” Artist, this reaction is a programmatic response. The real Artist is not so unless he also kills.

I think De Palma is just such an Artist—and I will try to prove it here. I hope you enjoy the discovery, but remember, this investigation isn’t Art—so don’t do anything drastic.

Suicide Switch: An In Depth Study Of Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise.

Intro: Narration

In the set of images which open the film, we see a dead bird (dead girl). It is the logo of Death Records, owned by an impresario, music producer and composer called Swan, one of the two heroes of Phantom of the Paradise (POTP). The term death records is a verb. Death records a life. When one dies, one’s life is a recorded event, that can be played back.

The colors of the rainbow appear in the order ROY-G-BIV. G for Green is separated to emphasize its position as the central principle of Creation. Keep this in mind as we continue. In the Gnostic creation allegory, the first principle, the principle that separates the Perfect One from Pure White Light into lesser colors is symbolized by the color red, the firsr color expression of the rainbow. Red is the first color and therefore the first principle, as it symbolizes Love and the Bloody Wound that the separation of the Lovers creates. In natural creation, further principles emerge in the same order as these seven colors, and create in combination Pure White Light. This idea will be expanded as we continue.

The bird logo of Death Records begins as red, then becomes purple, blue and green, before it becomes pure white. Thus it is a reversal of the first principle and the original manifestation order of the rainbow colors. This human act of Artifice which seeks to imitate All Creation must begin at the beginning, where all material things begin, with the color red, but immediately reverses itself by tracing backwards through the circular link of rainbow colors from red to purple, the blues and finally green. At this point, the bird goes white, because green is as far on the rainbow as the Satanic Art can go. This is symbolized by man’s effort to stand upon The Moon, which is made of symbolic Green Cheese. The Moon, in occult studies, has already been identified as the limit of human striving and even as a lock to keep human kind on the limits of Earth. This modulation from red, backward through the blues and into green is the exact symbol of man’s reach for The Moon, and because of the absence of the remaining colors that are necessary to create white light, it is also a clue that man has never stood upon the exterior surface of The Moon. Again, all of this philosophy will be clarified in detail by the text and image of POTP.

Added to this color analysis is the fact that the image of the logo rotates. It appears to be falling as it does so.

The narration for this scene, delivered by Rod Serling, contains a neat trick. It implies that Swan, who owns Death Records, will be the victim of a thief. This idea passes quite subtlety, as the actual identity of the thief is not given. It could be Swan who is the thief. We will learn right away that Swan is a thief, but, by way of his condition as a human under the yoke of death, he is also the victim of a theft. This duality is also discovered as the unfair weight of suffering of creation carried by the life of the human being. When the Perfect One separates to “love itself,” the side effects are nasty for the resulting creation. Swan’s theft, from a man who turns out to be a shambling Christ in disguise, is attempt to steal back from creation what it stole from him, his naturally immortal life.

The image (above) that follows the white Death Records logo is the first moment of action in the film. It introduces Swan’s current front-line act, The Juicy Fruits as they appear live on-stage at a club owned by Swan. Note the colors behind the lead singer, in stripes on the downstage wall. They are red, purple/blue, and green, the same colors of the Death Records dead-bird logo on its half-way backward journey through the colors of the rainbow. Swan has directed the design of the set upon which his players play--he is The Artist inside POTP. The human being attempting to build a paradise of his own design, even if he has to be a mean cheating bastard to do it. Yet, in spite of his fearsome talent, Swan is just a man, a short-timer. In the effort to build his paradise, he will lock horns with a shambling and dissipated God, and find out that the weakest of Gods remains a dangerous opponent.

The Songs I: Goodbye Eddie, Goodbye

Hear “Goodbye, Eddie Goodbye”

POTP is a musical. The lyrics of each song tell a good deal of the story. Here are the lyrics of Goodbye Eddie, Goodbye. Quoted in full, in bold italics for specific reference.

We’ll remember you forever Eddie
Through the sacrifice you made we can’t believe the price you paid
For love
Little Eddie Mitty born in Jersey City
Started singin’ when he was five
Never knew his father mother didn’t bother
To catch his last name fast as he came
He was off and flying
Times were really trying
Eddie and his mother alone
Soon another mister soon a baby sister
Mama kept swingin’ and Eddie kept singin’
Ah ya ya ya ya ya
Ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya
Ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya
Ya ya ya ya for love for love
And now the tragic story
Eddie’s sister, Mary Louise, needed an operation
To get the money he would have to become an overnight sensation
Eddie believed the American people
Had wonderful, lovegiving hearts
His well publicized end he considered would send
His memorial album to the top of the charts...and it did
Ah ya ya ya ya ya
Ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya
Ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya ya
Ya ya ya ya for love for love
When a young singer dies to our shock and surprise
In a plane crash or flashy sports car
He becomes quite well known
And the kindness he’s shown has made more than one post mortem star
Well you did it Eddie and though it’s hard to applaud suicide
You gave all you could give so your sister could live
All America’s choked up inside
We’ll remember you forever Eddie
Thru’ the sacrifice you made we can’t believe the price you paid
For love

Goodbye Eddie, Goodbye sounds like a song about a young pop-singer who commits suicide to achieve fame and make the money necessary to save his ailing sister. It is in fact a strong description, an artistic rendering of the first act of Primordial Creation, when the Perfect One divides into its masculine and feminine halves, as an act of love, or as the song repeats in its chorus “for love“—and in so doing creates the lower material world. Swan, as the producer of this song, identifies himself as a creator too. He tells carefully the story of creation to imitate the act itself--to establish himself as an indivisible and immortal One, because he can not live up to the measure of true creation, which is fearless sacrifice in the face of love. The fame that Swan most certainly achieves is no different than that of the great human artist of history, say Beethoven, Da Vinci, or Shakespeare—or even Paul McCartney. The Art created insures the immortality of its creator as an imitation of a divine love he can not enjoy.

It is also a model of The Lunar Matrix. The exterior of The Moon is the mirror in which the Sophia, the Supreme Lady, can see her image for the first time. The inside of The Moon is the Crucified Christ, who out of love is the nail upon which hangs the mirror and all subsequent manifestations of rainbow creation. That’s right, all of visible, audible and feel-able reality, the seven-colored seven-toned world in which we dwell, exist inside The Moon. The exterior universe is real, but also imaginary. Real because it exists, imaginary because it is perceived to be an exterior and unbound phenomena, when in fact it is merely the false projection of an unbound phenomena that is in fact bound in a chamber. This notion of The Moon as a Central Unifying Matrix, detailed extensively in my upcoming Sync Book II article Moon in the Middle, is not unique to my research--and it will turn out to be well known to De Palma.

The image of The Moon as a Rainbow Trap is seen in the stage-floor design of Swan’s nightclub (seen partially in the image below), which is a series of circles that imitates nicely the Moon Phases, and also imitates the image of the Supreme Triple Moon Goddess elucidated by Robert Graves in his academic work The White Goddess, and by Frazer in The Golden Bough. In Swan’s club, it is imagined as two small circles (the third smaller circle is completely covered by the back-up band) and a larger circle as the center stage--lines of rainbow flashes extend from the center of each circle.

The name of the hero of the song is called Eddie Mitty. This produces the pun admit e, or admit the fifth element. Eddie (Ed-E) is Adam, Da Vinci’s five-pointed Vitruvian Man, the first human man, which explains why he “never knew his father“, because he is separated from the Perfect One, in which He is His Own Father, the Creator of All Things. This character, as he descends, becomes the Crucified Christ. It is generally perceived that the Christian Cross has four points, like a compass, but it actually has five. The center point of the cross is the fifth wound of Christ, which pierces His Heart. We also discover that Eddie is from Jersey City, which provides his divine initials of J.C., and also his identity as a sacrifice, a Jersey Cow, a Side of Beef. More on this later.

When the lead singer for The Juicy Fruits flashes the number five as a rebus of his lyric, we can see a blue-green piece of gum in his mouth (click on image to enlarge). This gum appears only once, at the exact moment the five-finger symbol is flashed. Blue is the fifth color on the rainbow, and is a symbol of the first fully material consciousness in the form of a human being. In the Book of Revelation we are told that God forms the body of the fallen man by chewing him up and spitting him out in a single piece, as one spits out a piece of gum. The blood that nourishes the body of a fallen man of flesh is blue in the vein, and is also the Blood of Christ as it gushes from His Heart. Blue Blood is the Blood of the King. His baby sister is the Magdalene, the sacred whore. We also identify her as Isis after the death of her brother husband Osiris, as she searches for and eventually fashions for herself the severed penis of her murdered brother (q.v.).

We learn that Eddie’s sister is called Mary Louise, another Magdalene clue. The singer explains that she “...needed an operation.” The term operation, in the greater sense, is the first principle of creation, the operation that severs the Perfect One. This operation is also the recovery of the phallus of Osiris by Isis, and is also expressed in the Freudian theory called penis-envy, which is the desire of the woman to have a naturally and permanently affixed member of power of her own. The theory of penis envy was effectively squashed by the popular feminist and behaviorist movements, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Freud is completely correct and his theory is borne out by the ancient myths of creation that he studied and new so well. De Palma knows it too, and at the precise moment the lead singer of The Juicy Fruits says the lyric “...Mary Louise needed an operation,“ he grabs reflexively at his crotch.

The next lyric proclaims “...to get the money (for the operation) he (Eddie) would have to become an *overnight sensation*.” The *overnight sensation* is The Moon and its influence on the waters. These waters are first la mer (Eng: The Sea) and also Mars, the Marine, the Seaman, who is the fifth planet and therefore the color blue being chewed by The Juicy Fruit front-man. Mars is mythologized as red, but as the fifth principle it is linked directly to the fifth color of the rainbow: blue. Blue is also the traditional color of the human man in clothing and the favorite color of most men of youth. Men are from Mars. Eddie’s music, his work, is his blue collar tradition. The subsequent lyric “...to the top of the charts,” is also a symbol of The Moon as the top, the upper limit of human striving. The combination in POTP of music, work and the principle of Mars, the War God, will be discussed in just a bit.

Here we see the first of image of the suicide switch as the singer, acting as Eddie, simulates his suicide with a switch blade.

In the image that follows, we see the most common type of this suicide trigger as it appears in popular media. It is a choking symbol. The singer intones the word “shock“ as a thickly enunciated “chock“, which sounds like choke. At this moment, another member of the band chokes an audience member, seen in the lower left of the screen image. This motif is recapitulated in the lyric “all America’s *choked-up inside*.” In this case “choked-up“ means hanged, and “inside“ means inside The Moon, and is a symbol of Christ Crucified, hung-up, at the center of the The Moon’s inner limit. The term America is used as a rough anagram of in camera, which describes The Moon as both the negative chamber and projector of the images which create the illusory rainbow Matrix. The Juicy Fruits perform here at a cabaret. Cabaret is a term that means a chamber. The movie and play called Cabaret is based upon a memoir called I Am A Camera.

Why a hanging code? Well, hanging is one of the most readily available and effective methods of killing one’s self. Anyone who wants to can probably find a way to pull it off within a minute or two and it is much less daunting than a visceral cutting or handgun suicide—leaves less of a fuss afterward, too. The depth of this code is one of the main motifs of this article, there will be many other examples given in the fullness of our investigation, and some deeper hints to the philosophy of the code.

This choking of an audience member is the first clue that the film, Phantom of the Paradise, is itself reaching out to attack its audience—in particular young male viewers. This vicious trigger is used in a variety of films by Stanley Kubrick. In Eyes Wide Shut, Dr. Bill chokes a boy and asks “does this hurt?” In Full Metal Jacket, Sgt. Hartman demands that Pyle choke himself. Frank Poole is suffocated by HAL. Danny is choked in The Shining, maybe, as his father Jack suggests, by himself. Dr. Strangelove strangles himself. The list goes on. This same strangulation code is also discovered in a massive number of films, images, comic books and songs from across the international and historical spectrum. A good example from the popular record is the song The Green, Green Grass of Home. In a few moments, when discussing how to deal with the problem of Winslow, Philbin chokes himself. More on Philbin coming up.

The song ends with The Juicy Fruits, their back-up band and a downstage sound tech forming into three successively larger pyramids. The connection of a triple-pyramid to the Act of Creation is too well documented for further description at this time.

While The Juicy Fruits sing, we cut briefly to the exterior of Swan’s club. Winslow Leach, the other hero of POTP, is plastering his own name over top the playbill for The Juicy Fruits. The name Winslow Leach is a pun upon the leech who wins slowly. It is no accident that De Palma identifies Winslow as a leech, because Winslow turns out to be a God, albeit in a very rough disguise. This slow winner is also verified as the tortoise of the fable The Tortoise and the Hare, who simply plods along to victory behind the more innovative and gifted hare. The symbol of a tortoise is the hexagon of his shell. The term shell derives from the same root as shield. The Star of David, which is correctly called The Shield of David, also produces a hexagon at its center, and gives us our first clue to one of the main identities of Winslow Leach. He is King David, the Musician and Warrior. In POPT, Winslow, like King David, fulfills both of these roles, God of Music and God of War. Winslow’s hair is yellow, the symbolic color of The Sun, who is Apollo, The God of Music. His t-shirt is the blue color of the Shield of David, who is the warrior Mars. His eyes are Mooney green, the combination of yellow and blue. It is interesting to note that the special blue color of The Shield of David, called tekhelet and sacred to the Jews, is made from a dye that can be fabricated only by exposure to The Sun.

Winslow’s homemade playbill is striped like the colors of The Israeli Flag and also like a scarf-like vestment worn by orthodox male Jews. We get another clue, that Winslow is also the Eddie of which The Juicy Fruits sing, whom we have identified as The Crucified Christ. It is no secret that the mythical Christ of the New Testament is called the Seed of David, King of the Jews.

The lead singer, still in his role as Eddie, imitates the Hebraic tradition of the yod tefillin, using his microphone cord. The image of this act of wrapping the arm as the act of a heroin user will also be clarified.

In the next section of our investigation, we learn more about Winslow’s identity, but for now, we meet Philbin, Swan’s concert promoter, and get our first glance at Swan himself.

Here, we see The Juicy Fruits and a few lucky fans as they gaze for approval toward an upper-deck at Swan’s club. Their gaze is reflected by a mirror that hides Swan from view. Please note the reflected array of the back-stage lighting scheme already identified as Swan’s colors of false creation, and the mirror ball and two other spheroids, one of them red, which symbolize the Triple Moon as the first principle of Primordial Creation that Swan wishes to stand above.

The hands of Swan also illustrate the yod of yod tefillin. Yod is the Hebrew word for hand as a symbol of The Hand of God who fashions creation. De Palma edifies that this legendary Hand of God is in fact the hand of a man. In the Gnostic myth the first principle is the feminine red, the cosmic menstrual blood from which the material realm is formed. The paternal concept of godhead is misappropriated from this source, as an act of Satanic defiance. As he applauds, Swan holds his hands to block out the subject of his creation, The Juicy Fruits, indicating his complete lordship over their performance. This is the hand of the paternal godhead, which is a man-made creation, to administer the construction of a man-made paradise. Swan obscures his viewpoint of creation because it does not satisfy him, another attitude he shares with the unsatisfied god of traditional Genesis.

To Swan’s left is Philbin, who is complaining about an act that he manages, a young singer, a girl named Annette, who has taken to the straight and narrow and abandoned the seedy world of Rock and Roll. The description Philbin gives, that she was “...more than just a piece to me, she was the light of my life...” is remarkably similar to that given by movie producer Jack Woltz in The Godfather, just before he wakes-up next to the severed head of his prize stallion. This proves an interesting connection as we continue and identify Philbin as Goliath, the planet Jupiter, whom King David will slay with a stone to the forehead.

The Songs II: Faust (Winslow)

Hear Faust (Winslow)

I was not myself last night couldn’t set things right with apologies or flowers
Out of place as a cryin’ clown who could only frown and the play went on for hours
And as I lived my role I swore I’d sell my soul for one love
Who would stand by me and give me back the gift of laughter
One love who would stand by me and after making love we’d...
Dream a bit of style
We’d dream a bunch of friends
Dream each others smile
And dream it never ends

I was not myself last night in the morning light I could see the change was showing
Like a child who was always poor reaching out for more I could feel the hunger growing
And as I lost control I swore I’d sell my soul for one love
Who would sing my song and fill this emptiness inside me
One love who would sing my song and lay beside me while we’d
Dream a bit of style
We’d dream a bunch of friends
Dream each others smile
And dream it never ends

All my dreams are lost and I can’t sleep
And sleep alone could ease my mind
All my tears have dried and I can’t weep
Old emotions may they rest in peace and dream, dream a bunch of friends
Rest in peace, and dream, dream it never ends

The song Faust is performed three times in POTP, first by its composer Winslow Leach and then by Swan’s band The Juicy Fruits and finally by Swan himself.

The highlighted text of the lyrics are a model of The Moon as the central unifying feature of the Matrix. Winslow, singing as Faust, declares that he “...was not (himself) last night.…” This indicates the memory of the first principle, the Perfect One, as it is recalled by its male sub-self as He looks back at his previously Perfect Union with his female counterpart. It is this separation that creates the human longing for romantic love, and all of the love songs that come with it.

Faust explains first that he can not “...set things right...” which laments his inability to restore the Perfect One. Next, he states that”...in the morning light, (he can) see the change was showing...” This sentiment does not celebrate the appearance of the Sun as a positive change, but instead isolates the conundrum of Faust as the fallen man, descended from the cool heavenly realm and into the heated world of solar consciousness. It signifies the moment when a child becomes a man, and begins his work. The “...emptiness inside me...” also illustrates the suffering created by the first principle of material creation, when the Perfect One separates.

On stage Winslow is immediately identified with the completed central principle of green and the first principle of red. During his performance, his stage flashes at once first solid green and then solid red. Later a red and a green orb appear over his head. The stage also flashes a solid tekhelet blue, at the moment the soundtrack balances switches to Winslow’s song. This is another clue that Winslow is King David, master musician.

The image on Winslow’s t-shirt identifies him as both the central Lunar principle and also the principle of Music that Swan wishes to pirate. A similar image, a line drawing of a face, is seen on both the bass drum (Moon) and piano (Music) played by The Juicy Fruits during their set (click image to enlarge).

Phibin’s t-shirt also sports a face, this time of a woman. Her name, Annette, can be seen at the bottom of her image on the shirt. This image appears to be leaping forth from Philbin’s chest, but this is a compromise, because she ought to be emerging from his head. Philbin is Jupiter or Jove, from whose head leaps the Moon Goddess Athena (Annette can pronounced by reading Athena backwards). It is important to remember that this principle of the Moon Goddess, which is the exterior image of the Moon, may emerge from the brow of Jove, but remains a causal reaction to the first principle of the separation of the Perfect One. Jove, like Philbin, considers himself to be the origin of certain principles, but he is just another cog in the wheel—the largest cog, as we will see.

The Roman Emperor Caligula, who was infamous for staging forced public orgies, believed himself to be Jove. Actor John Hurt, like Philbin, is also known for a female demon leaping from his chest and he is also the most enduring performer of Caligula, in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius.

Jupiter, who is Jove, is also the jovial Great Party Man of Kubrick’s The Shining. Great Party Man, his head split to release the Moon Goddess Athena, his head part-ing, his head party-ing, toasts Wendy and declares “great party!” and thereby expresses the identical sentiment of Philbin’s green button which reads “Orgy Organizer.” Of course, like the goliath shape of Jupiter, Philbin and Great Party Man merely carry forward an already ancient and distant first principle. The first principle belongs to Uranus, not to Jupiter. Jupiter is a long way from Uranus. The final image in this sequence is Philbin, as a thread of blood gushes from a head wound directed by Winslow. Winslow—as David—has hit him in the forehead with a stone. Jupiter is Goliath, the largest planet in the Solar System.

Winslow’s lowly digs, his modest accommodations, are a clue to his ultimate identity as the male principle of the Perfect One. Uranus is the Greek word meaning sky. The supreme and undivided One is the unseen, unmanifest balance between the Male Sky and the Female Earth that exist prior to the formation of the material realm. Winslow’s apartment is interesting. All the natural light is blocked-out. He has a ceramic horse’s-head on his wall. The red and blue color of Winslow’s horse’s head are a complex clue. The horse is in fact Philbin (more q.v.). Jupiter is the phallus of Uranus, prior to when it is cut-off by Saturn (Satan, Swan). Inside POTP, Winslow’s original possession is now just a copy.

In Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, we meet Berg, whom Jodorowsky openly identifies as the human embodiment of the principle of Uranus. Like Winslow, Berg lives with a horse, and has all of his windows blocked, indicating that his essence is invisible, that he can not be seen. Berg lives with a woman who is both his mother and his wife, which is the description of the undivided Perfect One as Cosmic Christ and Elder Sophia, His Mother Bride. In the first image we see Berg on a bed of green, a bed of green upon which we will later see Winslow in POTP. In the second image Berg covers an open window that has allowed in some exterior light. His Mother Bride on the toilet is not merely a profanity. As the Earth, she is directly connected to soil, dust, ash, and excrement—the foundation of all that grows, and in the larger cosmic model, all that appears, is heard or sensed. Also note the blue and yellow checkerboard tiles on the bathroom floor. We have linked Winslow to this same color scheme.

Winslow roughs up Philbin, revealing great physical strength and a very quick temper.

We again see the green and red color combination, which encode Winslow’s ultimate identity as the male half of the first principle. The green color of the button reveals that it is Winslow, who is seen on the green Moon stage who is the organizer, the green principle at the center of the rainbow, at the center of white light, and therefore at the center of The Moon. Winslow appears to be gripping the button in his hand.

This first scene between Philbin and Winslow is also the first big clue to a series of reversals, of mirror images that the movie represents. In the opening narration, we learn that Swan will be the victim of a theft. In this scene between Philbin and Winslow, we learn that it is Swan who is the thief, the theif of Winslow’s original musical creation--or is he? In the background noise at Winslow’s home, playing on his radio as he writes his cantata, is the music of The Juicy Fruits, music that Winslow acts as if he hates. So why is it on his radio? Just who is the thief here--Winslow or Swan? Could it be that the Gods feed upon humanity just as we feed upon the Gods? One of the most important themes of POTP is this symbiotic relationship between the Supreme Gods who are the Cosmic Christ and the Elder Sophia, and the lesser gods, who are ordinary men and women, subject to mortality.

Here we see the placard reading One Month Later, in red and yellow. This color combination signifies danger.

In many, many films and works of literary and dramatic art, the combination of red and yellow is used to indicate an upcoming disaster. As this placard appears within the story of POTP, Winslow is about to approach his terrible fate. The red is the red of menstrual blood and the yellow is the yellow of urine. This combination is a signal that something is about to be flushed out, to be destroyed. In terms of sexual activity, the color red is paired in three ways: with yellow, indicating that it flushes away waste; with white, which is the union of the virgin bride and her first lover; and with black, which reveals the Elder Mother in one aspect and the Elder Magician, the Cosmic Christ, in the dual aspect.

When Winslow tries to reach Swan, who has not returned any calls since the initial contact with Philbin, he is rebuffed. This scene also introduces the first color-scheme after the One Month Later placard, and it illustrates the two aspects of sexual union described above. Red and White and Red and Black. On the secretary’s rolodex, Winslow’s name is sandwiched between the names Jerry Moss (Green Seed, where jerry is a pun upon German and therefore germinate) and Peter Fonda (which provides a pun for fondling the penis). Thus De Palma has placed Winslow at the center of the Green principle. In Lolita, Nabokov uses the same trick, by putting the name of his heroine, who is an allegory of the Magdalene, in between two girls named Rose on a list of students. Nabokov claimed that this was his favorite part of the novel. The third of these images reads “NEVER TO BE SEEN”. Yet another clue that Winslow is a part of the first principle of creation, the ineffable and invisible Uranus, one half of the Perfect One before it divides itself into material creation.

Added here is another image from Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain--to reinforce the occult symbol of the green penis.

Winslow makes his way to Swan’s estate, to ask why Swan isn’t returning his calls. He hails a taxi while standing in the center of two concentric circles. As stated, in his ultimate guise, Winslow is the Crucified Christ who is fixed at the center of the Sphere of White Light, The Moon. As he hails, he points upward with his right hand as one would point at an object up in the sky, in the same gesture used by the lead singer of Goodbye Eddie Goodbye as he points upward to sing the lyric “...overnight sensation...” which we have already identified as a Moon clue. Remember that the fictional Eddie of the song is a simulation of Winslow himself.

As Winslow gets into his cab, we see the advertisement for Sun Dew, which indicates Winslow’s dignity as the God of Music, Apollo, and of David, who is a master musician.

Finally, as Winslow’s taxi arrives outside Swanage, Swan’s love palace, we are again treated to a harbinger of the danger that Winslow faces, in the red-yellow combination of the taxi and the fire hydrant. The hydrant, and its sharp shadow on the side of the taxi, foreshadow Winslow’s doom, a sort of death by fire, and also clue the counterpart of his identity associated with The Sun, which is a Ball of Fire.

The Songs III: Never Thought I’d Get To Meet The Devil

Hear “Never Thought I’d Get To Meet The Devil”

Never thought I’d get to meet the Devil
Never thought I’d meet him face to face
Heard he always worked alone
That he seldom wrote or used the phone
So I walked right up to meet him at his place

The highlighted lyric “...that he seldom wrote or used the phone...” is another key to Swan’s identity as a false creator, a Satan. He does not write means he does not inscribe The Word (Swan doesn’t sign his name. He uses a rubber stamp instead). He does not use the phone means he does not Speak the Word.

On the gateway of Swan’s personal pleasure palace there are many prominent orbs, which again indicate Swan’s desire to capture the principle of The Moon and The Supreme Sphere for his own use. These are spheres of stone and give off no light, indicating that they are a false creation: Art.

Here seems like a good place to compare Winslow Leach with both Dr. Bill Harford and piano-man Nick Nightingale of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Apollo, with whom we have connected Winslow, is God of Music and Medicine.

In his September 11th, 1991 speech, George Bush declares the institution of a kinder, gentler nation. Bush is being quite wicked here, because he by no means intends to give up one inch of power to the multitude of the ignorant and disinherited masses. He means that the methods of social coercion will be improved, less violent at first blush, and therefore more difficult to challenge—all which serve to cement the process of Law that so clearly separates an elite class of oligarchs from the rest of us little people. In the course of POTP Winslow will traverse much of the same terrain as both Bill and Nick of EWS. Like these two luckier men, Winslow will be thrown out on his ear as he tries to approach the gates of Satanic Majesty at Swan’s masonic pleasure dome. Unlike Nick and Bill, Winslow’s fate is much more immediate, visceral and painful. As an improvement upon POTP, EWS is a kinder, gentler form of suicide trigger than its earlier counterpart—kinder and gentler, but by no means less sophisticated.

Swan’s Mansion and Somerton Estates of EWS are the same place. Gateway Orbs.

Red Curtains and Checked Floors.

Birds of Prey.

Lots of girls, only One Mysterious Woman.

In EWS, The Mysterious Woman wears a mask with a headdress of plumage. The mysterious woman in POTP is called Phoenix, and just as Bill chases his bird into darkness, so will Winslow chase after the love of Phoenix. De Palma reveals more about this woman than Kubrick seems to do. When we meet Phoenix, the heroine of POTP, De Palma gives a fantastic clue. The girl behind Phoenix, dressed in all red and white, is brushing her upper lip while she looks into a circular hand mirror. Now, take a look at Phoenix’s upper lip, upon which is visible an obvious girl mustache (click on image to enlarge). This identifies Phoenix as the other half of the undivided Perfect One. The thing that is One can not see itself without a mirror. A make up artist could have easily covered the mustache sported by actress Jessica Harper, the choice not to do so is deliberate. And as for as the fictional girl Phoenix: a modern girl with a mirror would probably take care of that mustache—especially if she was into show-biz. But Phoenix isn’t just any girl, she is, in a sense, a hermaphrodite, a dual sexuality—until she meets the love of her life, Winslow Leach, who is the mirror in which she can see her reflection for the first time—although the competed gaze is not expressed in this first meeting, but by the complete arc of their story. It is worth noting that Winslow is also a hermaphrodite of sorts. When he is kicked out of Swan’s estate, he tries to sneak back in disguised as a woman. His dress is red, green and white, connecting to the first rainbow principle of red, the central rainbow principle of green, and the unified White Moon as the framework of the Matrix that is the essence of the material illusion.

The image of the dual hermaphroditic nature of both Phoenix and Winslow is confirmed with great emphasis when Winslow, still in drag, is discovered and kicked out for the second time. Winslow turns out to be carrying a red and white purse that could very well be part of the ensemble of the lady in all red and white from the stairwell behind Phoenix. From within Winslow’s purse, the policeman draws a bag of heroin. Heroin is heroine. In Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson outlines The Eight Circuits of Consciousness and compares the first circuit to the feeling produced by opium or heroin. R.A. Wilson’s first circuit is thus the first principle of the Gnostic Mother Bride and Cosmic Christ—the Womb of Creation. Heroin is also know as horse, which connects back to Winslow’s identity as Uranus the Sky God.

Now Winslow’s real fall begins, and he is processed into a Golem. The hammer comes down on his head. He declares “Swan framed me!” This is true, but it is also true that he has framed himself. The frame in this sense is the frame that closes the image. Winslow got nailed. He is the nail that hangs the image of creation, the exterior splendor of The Moon. As one half of this undivided Perfect One, he is personally responsible for his predicament, a predicament that demands his inevitable crucifixion.

Winslow ends up in Sing-Sing, where he learns a couple of important facts right away. In prison, everyone is innocent. This isn’t just a normal use of this old saw about prisoners because it marks for Winslow the terrible moment he becomes aware of the condition of original sin. It is a side-effect of Creation that no one is innocent—an awful truth, but true nevertheless. Winslow is told that all of his teeth will be pulled in an experiment run by The Swan Foundation. In the Freudian interpretation of dreams, to lose one’s teeth is to become mature. Winslow is an adult at last, not merely in the flesh, but an adult who knows the hard truth that most people manage to deny for their whole life long—that we live in a very ugly world and how that ugliness touches all of us.

Winslow’s First Escape

Winslow in his first stage as a Golem. His teeth have been pulled and his golden hair, like that of King David, has been shorn. The stylistic font of The Swan Foundation written on his cap is similar to others that use English letters to approximate Hebrew letter forms. A golem is initiated by writing a Hebrew spell upon his forehead, and once it is initiated, the golem can not be stopped, except by a revision of the spell. In the story line of POTP (ignoring certain supernatural elements), there are two scenes that appear to require a great suspension of disbelief. Both of these scenes involve a seemingly impossible act of strength by Winslow. The human Winslow was strong, but the fallen Winslow is Superman—a Golem. When he decides to do something, he simply does it. The first of these two improbable acts is Winslow’s escape from Sing-Sing.

After Winslow escapes, he makes way to Swan’s record factory, to make some mayhem. He slips and falls face first into a hot-wax record press. Here he receives his final instruction as a Golem, the stamp of Death Records emblazoned on one side of his face. He also becomes a split-person and begins to fulfill his natural destiny as one half of the first principle. He has some way to go yet.

In the creation of this Golem, Swan has at last proven himself the equal of the Great First Principle, The Ineffable and Undivided Uranus and Earth. He has made himself a god, and thus, the gates of paradise are opened.

As Winslow’s suffering continues, we are again to treated to the red-yellow danger combination. Winslow is about to be flushed out. He stumbles to be baptized in the East River. Christ is resurrected on Easter, which is a contraction of East Star. This is confirmed in The Book of Revelation, when Christ declares himself Star of Morning, the rising Eastern Sun (not to be confused with the morning star Venus, which is used in symbol as an inverted imitation of the Eastern Sun). Winslow’s terrible fate doesn’t rate a headline, but a short column explains that is he and not Swan who is at the gates of paradise.

Emerging from his baptism, Winslow makes tracks for The Paradise Theater Complex, where The Juicy Fruits are rehearsing their doomed performance of Winslow’s Faust. On the way, his fearsome visage proves too much, even for some pretty tough looking people. He will need a disguise. In the wardrobe store room, he finds a black suit, black cape and a mask—the same clothing procured by Dr. Bill in Eyes Wide Shut. Unlike Dr. Bill, Winslow won’t be shooed away—he has vengeance in mind.

Also noted: in the right frame of the image of Winslow’s Mask, we see a green wig, hanging on some type of a hook and balled into a spherical shape, and below it a spherical white light. The light is the image of the exterior Moon and the green wig represents the unifying principle, the central green principle of the Lunar Matrix, which like the Earth illusion, appears to be bigger than The Moon when it is in fact inside The Moon. This image will be reinforced repeatedly by De Palma.

The Songs IV: Faust (The Juicy Fruits)

Hear Upholstery

Faust, as performed by The Juicy Fruits in their new guise as The Beach Bums, is called Upholstery and has some major lyrical innovations to the same melody by Winslow.

Carburetors man, that’s what life is all about.

I was not myself last night
Lost a fight, my woody barely running
By a dude I should have beat
And on the street a blow like that is stunning
I finally lost control
And tore my tuck-n-roll
Upholstery - Where my baby sits up close to me
That’s supposed to be what our life is all about
Upholstery where my baby sits up close to me
That’s supposed to be what our life is all about

Of all life’s mysteries the greatest one I’ve seen
My short runs better when it’s clean

I was not myself last night
Ran a light without my registration
Where the cops were bound to see
And you know me already on probation
I wound up on parole
I tore my tuck-n-roll
Upholstery - Where my baby sits up close to me
That’s supposed to be what our life is all about
Upholstery where my baby sits up close to me
That’s supposed to be what our life is all about

The newly imagined lyrics of Winslow’s Faust celebrate the male teenage conundrum of sexual frustration. The highlighted lyrics provide the good fun, as they both describe a function of a young man’s penis, and/or how a young man should care for his equipment. However, our main interest is in the theme of tuck-and-roll Upholstery as it relates to the principle of sewing as a function of Time. Quality tuck-and-roll jobs require hand stitching. In Norse myth The Norns are three sisters (a manifestation of the Triple Moon Principle). The Norns unravel, measure and cut the thread of a human life, to mark its time on Earth. We will meet the Norns a little later in POTP, adding support to this initial reference to time and sewing. As The Beach Bums rehearse this number about sewing, we are given the first look at a clock in the movie. The clock on Winslow’s homemade time-bomb. Film buffs will recognize this scene as the same continuous shot seen at the beginning of Orson Welles legendary Touch of Evil. De Palma’s homage to Welles includes the use of a favorite De Palma technique--the split screen image. The cinematic orchestration of this scene is damned impressive. Watch it again and consider that it is two continuous shots, no cuts, filmed simultaneously and spliced together into a single image. De Palma’s use of the swish-pan in this scene is just one indicator of the level of virtuosity required to pull off this extraordinary vision.

We are again treated to the red-yellow danger combination, seen here as the surfboard at center stage. The dominant color is yellow this time, because this particular combination indicates the reversal of the flushing of menstrual blood, namely, male masturbation. The surf board (which the singer calls “my short“) is an erect phallus at the point of ejaculation. De Palma is warning, or programming, that masturbation is dangerous and wasteful, which should be no surprise as he is one of a tight group of prominent and powerful American director/producers of the 1970’s, all of whom were openly Roman Catholic.

Harold, one of The Juicy Fruits, is seen looking a lot like young Winslow, with a yellow wig and a pale blue t-shirt, while Philbin chokes him.

Again, we see Swan as he attempts to usurp the Supreme Power of Creation through Black Magic. Swan has a hideaway, a secret world. To access this chamber, he manipulates a double phallus—a two pronged candelabra. The double phallus is a standard symbol of ceremonial magick—indicated by the number 11 and Crowley’s 11-lettered Abrahadabra—where the first 1 in 11 symbolizes the upright human and the second 1 symbolizes the wand/phallus. The same image can be seen as The World of Tarot, in which Isis, the Sophia of Gnostic allegory, holds the dual wand of power that only a woman can hold, creating The World, or the feminine half of the unseen principle of Uranus called The Earth.

Winslow is The Phantom in his black suit, black cloak and a mask.

Swan wears the garb of the dark magician, illuminated by a false moon of his own design. His hands are in the as above so below position of the Tarot Magician and he has a little wand in his right hand.

Swan meets with Winslow and charms him. He invites Winslow to the auditions to star in Winslow’s own vision of Faust. Of course, Winslow wants Phoenix to star. Here, we see a reversal of the earlier image of Phiblin and Swan as they hear Winslow for the first time. This time, it is Winslow who appears to be in control, but Swan has fooled him. He has reversed the position of the David and Goliath myth. Next to the Phantom, Swan is the diminutive David. Swan continues to cling to the creative power of King David that he wishes his own.

The Songs V: Special To Me

Hear Special To Me

Caught up in your wheelin’ dealin’
You’ve got no time left for simple feelin’
I thought I knew you but I didn’t know you at all
Trapped inside your world of worry
You miss so much when you always hurry
Well slow down baby
You’ll only get hurt if you fall

Well you told me one time that you’d be somebody
That you weren’t workin’ just to survive
But you’re workin’ so hard
That you don’t even know you’re alive
Workin’ so hard to be somebody special
Not working just to survive
Well you’re special to me babe
But what I don’t see babe
Is where you go once you arrive?
Where we go once we arrive

Damn all evil that takes possession
Until your pipe dreams become obsessions
They scare me baby
And we should have nothing to fear
I’m no child
But I can’t help wonder
It seems like some kind of spell you’re under
You’re listenin’ baby
But somehow you don’t really hear

Well you told me one time that you’d be somebody
That you weren’t workin’ just to survive
But you’re workin’ so hard
That you don’t even know you’re alive
Workin’ so hard to be somebody special
Not working just to survive
Well you’re special to me babe
But what I don’t see babe is
Where you go once you arrive
Where we go once we arrive

Phoenix is a virgin. In this song she sings about an ethic she shares with Winslow, which expresses how the fear of the sexual act is often channeled into working or Artistic energies. How many homely young men, for example, have become rock-stars so that they could get laid? For the socially awkward, the desire and opportunity for sex are not enough. Such individuals seek an office, a position of power or status great enough for them to believe that their sexual longings are safe enough to practice. When Winslow meets Phoenix for the first time, he says “I would never let my personal desires influence my aesthetic judgment”—to a pretty girl who obviously likes him! Both Winslow and Phoenix are virgins, and their desire to succeed without admitting the presence of social pressure or even desire indicates their over-arching fear of social contact and fear of sex. In the deepest way, POTP and other works that use similar coding are in fact programming tools, designed to literally frighten this class of awkward people into socially productive lives. The consequences for Winslow and Phoenix aren’t nice, and social programmers want the wayward slackers and dreamers of the world to see this fact and shape up their act and become proper consumers and workers. The suicide code is the fail-safe, for those to whom these lesser threats of program are not sufficient. If certain people can not be made to follow rules then they are murdered. The great goal of Great Art is to cast this murderous and nearly invisible net upon the unsuspecting targets at large—all of us.

At the audition, other girls show skin and wear form fitting clothes while Phoenix dresses a bit like a hippy grandma. Here, before she sings, Swan asks if she would “give... (her) voice” in exchange for the chance to sing and find fame. As Swan makes this statement, Philbin, sitting at the table on stage, blows a puff of cigarette smoke directly into her face. This is another albeit subtle example of the choke code.

As she sings of spells and possession, the horns of her would be master hover over her head. The dusty pink molding beneath the horns and paler pink of the surrounding walls is the same color-combo as Swan’s suit and shirt while he watches this audition.

The stagehand is one of Philbin’s roadies. He has had his way with hundreds if not thousands of willing sluts, and he shows no interest in any of the girls on stage—except Phoenix. He can smell her virginity and wants to plunder her. As she dances off stage, he scratches reflexively at his crotch.

The Songs VI: Faust (Swan)

Hear “Faust (Swan)”

This is Winslow’s original composition and lyric heard in act one, with Winslow’s damaged voice processed through filters to sound like the voice of Swan. The theft of the first principle continues.

We have already seen Winslow on a bed of grass, after he is beat up and thrown out of Swan’s mansion for good. We have also seen his counterpart Uranus in the same repose, on a bed of green.

Here we see Winslow The Phantom in his ultimate image at the center of the green principle, the center of the rainbow, the interior of The Moon. The curvature of the music studio is that of an inner sphere. In my Sync Book II article Moon in the Middle, I detail the mechanism of sound as the basis for feel-able sensation. Atomic and Molecular vibration, which are the building blocks of the feel-able material world, is a frequency. A vibration is always a frequency and a frequency always creates a sound. Thus, sound proves to be the basis of all that is felt, and even tasted and smelled. Like the seven colored rainbow, which represents a near infinity of tones and hues, the seven toned musical-scale blends to create the physical construct. Here, at the Middle of the Matrix Moon, Winslow conducts the Music of the Spheres, the sound matrix of the physical reality.

Swan’s studio, on the other hand, reveals him as the Satanic Mason—a businessman, not a creator. The studio is all square and straight edges.

Here is a better view of Winslow’s Moon Studio, with its shaggy green-grass carpet.

Earlier, back at Swan’s mansion, we get a look at Philbin in his underwear. Red and blue in combination are the colors of a Masonic Novice. Philbin is such a Mason. He appears to be big and powerful but lurking behind him is the Satanic Swan who is the planet Saturn. A stated, Philbin is Jupiter. The Roman Jupiter is the Greek Zeus which is pronounced by the Greek as Zay-oos. When one chants USA, USA, USA... one also repeats, by the offset of the sibilant, the chant of Zay-oos, Zay-oos, Zay-oos... The red, white and blue of the Stars and Stripes are the red and blue of Philbin’s underwear and his lily white flesh. Back in the studio, Swan, in his attempts to make Winslow’s damaged voice sound like his own, presses a button on his console and intones the term “filters” with a strong emphasis on the ph of filters. As he does so, the image cuts to a graphic audio equalizer in the strong red and blue of Philbin’s undies. Philbin is the Philter. The porch mason, the street mason, whose massive corpus stands between the profane the Satanic Set of Inner Masonry—filtering the secrets of the oligarchs into something more suited to the bourgeois palate. Also noted, the square framing of both red-blue combinations.

The Songs VII: Phantom’s Theme

Hear “Phantom`s Theme”

Half asleep I hear a voice
Is it only in my mind?
Or is it someone calling me
Someone I failed and left behind?

To work it out I let them in
All the good guys and the bad guys that I’ve been
All the devils that disturbed me
And the angels that defeated them somehow
Come together in me now

Face to face I greet the cast
Set in silence we begin
Companions in an empty room
I taste their victory and sin

To work it out I let them in
All the good guys and the bad guys that I’ve been
All the devils that disturbed me
And the angels that defeated them somehow
Come together in me now

A tale of beauty and the beast
I defend my soul from those who would accuse me
I share the famine and the feast
I have been the world and felt it turning
Seen the jester yearning to amuse me

Like a circus on parade
Seldom close enough to see
I wander through an angry crowd
And wonder what became of me

To work it out I let them in
All the good guys and the bad guys that I’ve been
All the devils that disturbed me
And the angels that defeated them somehow
Come together in me now

Phantom’s Theme is a montage sequence right at the middle of the film. Here, in a split screen, we see Phoenix as Winslow imagines her and in the same plumage as the mysterious woman of Kubrick’s EWS.

Swan has lied to Winslow yet again. He will not feature Phoenix as the star of his vision of Faust as promised. He tells Philbin “...she is too good, and you know how I abhor perfection in anyone but myself.” Here, Swan and Philbin audition some prospects to star in the cantata. Swan, inside the circle of power, keeps his hand on the switch.

Of the acts he will reject, Swan doesn’t like any of them—except one, a country singer with thick curly locks of dark brown hair, similar to Phoenix. Of him Swan says “pretty”—and he is correct, of the performances he sees at this audition, the performance of the pretty cowboy is the best, the most compelling of the auditioneers. The pretty cowboy is the hermaphroditic Phoenix.

When Swan gets the final pages of the cantata from the imprisoned Winslow, he declares them “tasty... very tasty.” This foreshadows his selection of performer to premier Faust. Beef is tasty. When Swan hears Beef, he lifts his hand from the switch for the first time.

Beef is brought before the press—introduced by The Juicy Fruits in their final incarnation as The Undead. The three are all sporting bandages over the injuries they received from Winslow’s time bomb during their rehearsal of Faust as The Beach Bums. Harold, who we have paired as a mirror of Winslow, is seen again with a choker on his neck. The three injured Juicy Fruits are De Palma’s masonic semaphore for Jubelo, Jubela and Jubelum, the three heroes of masonic allegory who were executed for the assassination of master architect Hiram Abiff.

Beef Cheeks

As the story of Beef progresses, he sports a series of small pictures drawn on his right cheek (click on any image to enlarge). They tell a story. His first cheek is seen during his audition with Swan. It is hard to see what it depicts, but it is blood red and almost certainly a Valentine Heart. This signifies Beef as the Living Cow, before he is sacrificed.

Next, at a private press conference staged by Swan, Beef emerges from the cold casket. His cheek is stamped with a skull and cross bones. This is the slaughtered and refrigerated Beef, being brought before the wholesale vendor, before he is processed and cut into choice selections.

Here, Beef is tattooed with a dark blue star, indicating the choice Grade A cut of meat at the commercial market.

Before his live performance, Beef wears the astrological symbol for Saturn on his cheek. In the moment of his preparation, he remains the property of Satanic Swan.

Winslow warns Beef not to sing his music. He kisses Beef’s cheek with a plunger—providing a pun upon Winslow as Ur-anus. Beef makes a retreat, and we see that his choice is a wise choice, for he is kissed by a green four-leafed clover, a fitting symbol of Winslow’s mercy. Sadly for Beef, Philbin intervenes.

Beef’s last cheek is the combined astrological symbols of Mars and Venus, man and woman. The cross of Venus and the arrow of Mars are not overlapped, as they would be to indicate a sexual union between male and female. Instead the circles are overlapped—yet another clue to the hermaphroditic, non-sexual union that is the Supreme One. Winslow will not tolerate Beef’s use of such a symbol. Beef should have gone home to his mother’s place.

Winslow’s Second Escape

When Winslow has completed his musical score, Swan entombs him in the Moon Studio. In the second of the suspension of disbelief scenes, Winslow’s unlimited Golem strength is exhibited. He escapes with no trouble at all. Swan has underestimated a God whom he believed to be a man.

The Songs VIII: Somebody Super Like You

Hear “Somebody Super Like You”

We need a man that is simple perfection
There’s nothing that’s harder to find
Someone to lead us protect us and feed us
And help us to make up our minds
We need a man that’s sophisticated
Quiet and strong and well educated
Where to go what to do
Could it be somebody super like you?

We need a man that can stand as a symbol
And symbols have got to be tall
Someone with taste and the tiniest waist
With his help would not life be a ball
If we had fun he would not restrain us
If we got caught he would just explain us
Where to go what to do
Could it be somebody super like you?

We pledge allegiance to his gracefulness
And charming manners
With a voice that’s both sides choice
He’ll bring us to our knees in admiration
He is king of all who see and hear
His perfect pitch and more surprises
When his time is come a stallion rises

We need a man with a head on his shoulders
A nose that is simply divine
Hollywood smile and a perfect profile
And with eyes that would sparkle and shine
Long flowing hair for a crowning glory
There’d be a man who could tell our story
Where to go what to do
Could it be somebody super like you?

We pledge allegiance to his gracefulness
And charming manners
With a voice that’s both sides choice
He’ll bring us to our knees in admiration
He is king of all who see and hear
His perfect pitch and more surprises
When his time is come a stallion rises
Rises...rises...rises

Somebody Super Like You describes quite nicely the attribute of a Divine Savior—but it is used to introduce the monstrous Beef, a creature cobbled together from corpses and raised from the dead as if by Dr. Frankenstein. This dual image of Christ as a savior and as an insane and vengeful Golem is equally present in more traditional interpretations of the Biblical Christ, who promises both the salvation of the innocent and the punishment of the wicked. By the subtlety of De Palma’s hand, Beef becomes both of these characters just as his audience at the premier of Faust fill simultaneously the roles of innocent, ignorant victims and slavering demons on the edge of damnation.

Here is our first look at Swan’s Faust, his supreme recreation of All Creation. The Great Work in its most potent form as Dramatic Art. De Palma, of course, is the real Artist behind this Satanic imitation, and it is a pretty fucking spectacular vision.

Naturally, the stage in The Paradise has been fashioned into a crucifix. Every good Western post-modern sacrificial simulation needs a crucifix.

Here, in their final work under the employ of Swan, The Juicy Fruits are The Undead. The original Zombie was not a flesh eating corpse, but a person under the total control of a Master Magician. Please note that under this control, all of The Undead are wearing chokers.

We return to the motif of sewing as a function of time. The last time Winslow intervened on stage, it was during the rehearsal of “Upholstery,” an image we have already connected to the motif of sewing as a function of time. Here, at the next point of Winslow’s intervention, and again while The Juicy Fruits/Beach Bums/Undead are on stage, we are again treated to the motif of sewing. Here three zombie nurses stand in as the mythical Three Norns, who unspool, measure and cut the thread that marks the time of a human life. As Beef’s creator, Swan wants us to believe that this same power is in his own control.

On a small side track, the motif of Time as it relates to The Moon Matrix is fundamental to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. So we ought to also find a connection in Kubrick to The Moon and to Sewing. Given the already stated connection between POTP and Eyes Wide Shut, we look into Dr. Bill’s weird and loopy like a needle pulling thread travels through the streets of Manhattan and find our proof. In the early morning Bill passes beneath a large dark blue and white painted advertisement reads “thread mills” and “sewing thread”. Later that same morning Bill passes another painted advertisement. The content of this second clue, in dark blue and white at the far right edge of the image, needs no description (click to enlarge). Also noted, the same color-combo seen on yet another painter advert nearer the center of the image. The white-diamond logo almost certainly indicates the seven diamonds seen during the stargate sequence of 2001:ASO.

In the next image we focus on Beef at screen right, hovering over the trio on stage below, in his surgical table. A tiny noose appears to screen left. The lighting effect that produces this noose is both subtle and technically demanding—there is no way it is an accident.

As the lighting effect changes we see that this noose is a stage support rope. As The Undead chant the lyric “...rises, rises, rises...,” Beef, the character about whom they sing, in fact descends, while The Phantom, using a stage counter-weight, rises suddenly and dramatically. Beef will serve as a temporary sacrifice, but Winslow is the real Beef.

The Songs IX: Life At Last

Hear “Life At Last”

Life at last!
Salutations from the other side
I can see that you’re the devil’s pride
Do you realize that all of you donated
Something horrible you hated that is part of you
I’m your nightmare comin’ true
I am your crime!

Life at last!
Sit and listen while the fun begins
Hearts are broken and the bad guys win
Sit and listen all the cutting up is easy
And this isn’t for the queasy or the weak of heart
You had better start for home
While there’s still time!

I’m the evil that you created
Gettin’ horny and damned frustrated
Bored stiff and I want me a woman now

I’m the evil that you created
Gettin’ horny and damned frustrated
Each of you must stop and try me
All of you might satisfy me

“Life at Last” is Beef’s rearrangement of Winslow’s song called “Old Souls.” Swan encourages Beef to make “Old Souls” his own—and given the startling “Life At Last,” and the live sacrifice that its one time performance produces, Beef is on the money. He truly has made the predicament of The Original Creative Act into his own, and we may infer from his lyrics that he knows he is in great danger from doing so.

The first verse of the song describes the Crucifixion of Christ, which is the concentration of all human acts of crime into a single act of murder. The second verse suggests that the listener may be in for more than they bargained for, and ought to “start for home while there’s still time“. When Beef is kissed by The Phantom and given a chance to get out of his predicament, he considers going home to his mother in Cincinnati.

The difficulty of “cutting-up“ is also expressed. Believe it or not, this term of cutting-up refers to the act of creating Art. In the Beat Generation, novelist William Burroughs and his painter friend Brion Gysin popularized cut-up, the re-organization of previous material into new works of Art. Swan and De Palma are doing the same thing. As stated, Art must be a simulation of Original Creation and as such, all of its elements are cut-up and reordered according to the vision of a particular human Artist. In his musical Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim has his hero, George Seurat, express the identical sentiment in boiled down to its skeleton: “Art is difficult”. Sondheim is polite and even coy. De Palma hangs it out on the edge. Art is dangerous, to its creators and even more so to its unsuspecting and unsophisticated audience.

The resurrected Beef has a scars where he has been sewn together from multiple corpses. Although it is true that these scars are as represented in the surface narrative as surgical scars, the scar around Beef’s neck looks exactly like that of a hanging victim. Hanging wounds bleed.

The bow around Beef’s waist appears to be black but is actually a very dark green. In his choice of costume design, red and green, Swan dresses Beef in the same colors that flashed upon Winslow’s stage in the first act of the film. Beef also passes in front of the backstage set features under a spotlight. Under the full lighting effect, these walls appear grey in tone. Under Beef’s spot they are green. As already explained, in the model of the Lunar Matrix, Christ is crucified at Rainbow Central Green. Here, in the light of a Green Moon, Beef is crucified to fulfill the destiny of both Swan and Winslow.

Keeping his promise, The Phantom kills Beef for singing the music he wrote for Phoenix. Beef is first electrocuted and then burned. The second image is one of the most astonishing in the movie (click to enlarge). De Palma does not squander a single opportunity to encode the larger myth of Horrible Original Creation. A sliver of green cord with just a touch of red is delicately lighted above the raving Phantom (upper right of image).

The Songs X: Old Souls

Hear “Old Souls”

Our love is an old love baby
It’s older than all our years
I have seen in strange young eyes
Familiar tears
We’re old souls in a new life baby
They gave us a new life to live and learn
Some time to touch old friends
And still return
Our paths have crossed and parted
This love affair was started long long ago
This love survives the ages
In its story lives are pages
Fill them up
May ours turn slow
Our love is a strong love baby
We give it all and still receive
And so with empty arms we must still believe
All souls last forever
So we need never fear goodbye
A kiss when I must go...
No tears...
In time...
We kiss hello

Immediately after Beef’s gruesome demise, Philbin orders that Phoenix take to the stage. He tells her she must do so because “someone” killed Beef so that Phoenix could sing. Philbin knows that Winslow has killed Beef, but Phoenix doesn’t know it, because she believes Winslow to be dead. This detail is important.

The scene begins with an act that seems wildly out of character for Winslow, the murder of an innocent lighting technician. Up until now, Winslow has directed his anger only at those who stand between him and the realization of his vision. The murder of the tech is gratuitous. It is true that this murder elongates the dramatic tension of the scene, but given the previously revealed fearsomeness of Winslow’s Golem face, he could just as easily have frightened the lighting guy off to provide a reasonable dramatic entrance to his position at the light. But Winslow must murder the lighting guy because, by a form of infinite regression, Winslow is the lighting guy. We have just seen him kill Beef with a bolt of light-ing, sorry, lightning. When Winslow strangles the tech and takes his place, he is strangling himself, hanging himself like a light in the night to shine upon his beautiful Phoenix. It is also worth noting that in this single image of Winslow we get the first and only decent look at the green color of his eyes, or eye. Except for the red of his cloak, the other colors in this image are neutral. Red and green shine forth. Of course, the spotlight is The Moon, and its light is there for Phoenix alone—she who is the separated female half of the Perfect One. In her first moment in the light, we see the symbol of her fate in a shadow on the floor—a double crucifix, one for her and the other her unseen lover. At the end of the sequence The Moon motif is reinforced as De Palma does an iris-in on Phoenix, isolating her image. She is happy for the first time in her life, because Winslow and the audience have validated the potential of her beauty. This is the office that she has sought, which will allow her to enter into the social contract. In the very next scene she gives up her virginity—but not to Winslow. Whoops!

Atop The Paradise, Winslow and Phoenix look down as the charred corpse of Beef is trucked away. The image is another carefully composed example of the red-yellow flush out code. The bright colors of red and yellow jump out of the image. Two other colors, much more muted, are also visible, midnight blue and green (the green car in the lower right of the image). The addition to the palate of these colors should be fairly clear as the night-blue sky and the green interior Moon as an underlying principle.

Winslow reveals his identity to Phoenix. Looking at both sides of his disfigured face, she does not recognize him and refuses to believe he is who he says he is. He warns her that Swan is evil and that he will destroy her. To fully appreciate this critical scene, we need a bit more background on the Gnostic allegory of Creation. When the Sophia separates from the Cosmic Christ and plunges into Primordial chaos, she becomes impregnated with Samael, who is the Gnostic model of the Biblical Satan. In this scene, The Phantom wears a red cape—red on the outside. He wears this cape in this scene alone. The strong combination of red and black is one of the three red pairings discussed earlier (red/yellow, red/white and red/black). The red and black pairing indicates the non-sexual union of the inner aspects of the Perfect One, before they separate into the material realm. Here, Winslow represents the masculine half of this complete equation, just after the Sophia separates, which is depicted in the movie as the sexual awakening of Phoenix at the end of her live performance of “Old Souls.” Like the Gnostic Cosmic Christ realizes at the moment the Perfect One separates to see itself—to achieve fame—Winslow recognizes that this act will mean a painful disaster for Phoenix, who is seen here in her first plumage.

Swan seduces Phoenix and takes her to his pleasure dome to plunder. The two lay on a black moon. This is very important in terms of Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. In Rosemary’s Baby, actor John Cassavetes (JC) plays an actor whose sudden success is granted by the Devil. This boss then appropriates the actor’s wife, to seed her sacred womb with the Anti-Christ. The next image from POTP gives the same cypher. Winslow is a performer who works for Swan. Winslow loves Phoenix, but he has made a deal with Swan to make music. Laying on an evil Moon, Swan calls forth the forces of Black Magic to impregnate Phoenix with a Moon Child. Also in this image: Winslow flashes the number-five hand. The strong color in this image is blue, like the nearly subliminal gum seen in the mouth of The Juicy Fruits lead singer as he flashes the five-hand. The normal silver of The Phantom’s mask is also rendered this same shade of blue by lighting design. As stated, this blue represents the human body in the material realm—the five-pointed Vitruvian Man. When she engages in a sexual act with the lower cosmos (symbolized by the mythical Swan, who is Samael the Satan), Phoenix draws down into the material realm the formerly spiritual bodies of herself as Sophia and Winslow as Cosmic Christ Uranus. In this image, both of them are awash in blue lightning.

Here Winslow appears to be gripping a crucifix, in the form of window struts. Is he trying to repel the evil that he witnesses? Hell yeah! The same split image decapitates Swan and makes his head one half of a tape reel. The magnetic reader of an analog tape player is called a head. This image also contains a deeper layer of meaning to the verb death records.

Looking up at Winslow, Swan has crucified him in the manner of Vlad the Impaler: through the sphincter on a single stake. Winslow’s has his five-hand at the crux, the center point of this impaled man.

When Winslow kills Beef, he sends lightning down from the upper right corner of the image. Now, Winslow is under that lightning. As it flashes, Swan’s surveillance camera is illuminated. The motif of capturing death as an eternal photographic image is all over POTP, the works of Kubrick, and is also the crux of my “Moon in the Middle” model. Panning down from the CCTV camera, we see another bird of prey, behind Winslow, watching over Swan’s estate. Thus CCTV is paired as the Eagle Eye of the Law. Under the camera’s gaze, Winslow stabs himself in the side. Thus his suicide is an uncanny doubling of his own murder of Beef. Those with a bit of Kabbalah background can understand the completed image as From Keter to Malkut, which means from crown to foundation. The Phantom (the never to be seen Uranus) draws down from Heaven the lightning. His under-self Winslow is then struck by the same blow, which crucifies him. This act of nailing, of pinning, stabilizes the material realm—keeps it from spinning away like an unbound flash of light.

Winslow doesn’t die from his wound. In fact he is not hurt at all. Swan explains that Winslow terminates with Swan and that Swan does not terminate until his contract terminates. Winslow goes looking for this contract and finds it on an archive of tapes in Swan’s hideaway at the Paradise. The room in which Swan keeps his records is the same room as on Kurbick’s Discovery, where HAL’s memory center is stored.

Both Winslow and David Bowman learn a secret in the records room. We’ll get to Winslow in a minute. First look at the Mooney white circle behind the head of Heywood Floyd, Bowman’s boss, as his secret message is played. Then look at the two images from POTP that take place just as Winslow unravels Swan’s record to learn his secret. An older woman reveals that Swan has not aged in twenty years. It is not enough that she is in a green dress of the same tone as Bowman’s helmet from the memory center scene. On the wall of the room in the downstage image, there is a massive and detailed mural of The Moon that is on screen for just a few moments. A costly effect, barely liminal.

Swan’s secret is that he has sold his soul to the Devil. The Devil appears as Swan’s mirror image in a video from Swan’s archive. This video serves as the contract and when Winslow destroys it, both he and Swan will be destroyed with it. Swan’s Devil Twin appears just as he is about to kill himself. The hookah is actually the Genie’s Bottle from which Swan releases his own spirit. Swan has in fact already done himself in, killed himself, released his essence from the bottle that is the Earthly body. His twin appears after this act, to resurrect him—for a price. It is possible to see the entirety of POTP as Swan’s dream after death, in which he meets his Saviors (Winslow and Phoenix who combined are the supreme creative principle in all human beings) whom he rejects in favor of his own paths of glory.

Winslow sees that Phoenix is now also under contract. When Phoenix signs in blood, she speak-spells the first three letters of her name—P-H-O—right before De Palma cuts the scene.

Winslow discovers that Swan plans to assassinate Phoenix to continue the blood frenzy of Beef’s death so popular with his audience. Swan will “marry” Phoenix on stage, with Philbin officiating. When Philbin says the last “’til death”, Swan’s main henchman, a silent black panther, will shoot her in the head. On Swan’s surveillance, Winslow sees the sniper preparing his nest. Can he intervene and save Phoenix? Before he rushes out to do so, Winslow sets fire to Swan’s record storage.

With Phoenix in the cross hairs, Winslow redirects the bullet into Philbin’s head. David, the musician has slain Goliath.

What follows is the Orgy Philbin wishes he could have lived to see. The crowd, thinking it is all part of the show, goes ape-shit. Swan is burning to death in front of them, burning with the record of his life and his deal with the Devil.

At last the image of Winslow is restored to Phoenix and in a moment the Perfect One will be reunited. Please note that Winslow is green here. As he lay dying, the orgy that neither Philbin nor Swan could have dreamed rages around him.

And here the film ends, but not the story. Winslow has not saved Phoenix, he has killed her. She too is under contract with Swan. Furthermore he has also killed the remainder of humanity as symbolized by the lustful and oblivious audience of the Paradise. It all burns down. In this way, De Palma hones in on the human condition exactly as it is, and foreshadows the inevitable doom of consumer civilization in the flames of its fleshy passions. This terrible and unseen fate is telegraphed by De Palma in this image.

It could be that this clue of a coming apocalypse is commentary. But is serves just as well as a threat that to mess with the forces of the Earthly power structure and the Social Contract of Law is to bring destruction on everyone and everything. For me, it is the Artful and impossibly subtle methodology of this message that marks it not as commentary, but as a threat--a propaganda of social order.

The Songs XI: The Hell Of It

Hear “The Hell Of It”

Roll on thunder, shine on lightning
The days are long and the nights are frightenin’
Nothing matters anyway,
And that’s the hell of it.
Winter comes and the winds blew colder
While some grew wiser, you just grew older
And you never listened anyway,
And that’s the hell of it.
Good for nothing, bad in bed
Nobody likes you and you’re better off dead
Goodbye, we’ve all come to say goodbye (goodbye)
Goodbye (goodbye)
Born defeated, died in vain
Super-destructive, you were hooked on pain
Though your music lingers on
All of us are glad you’re gone
If I could live my life half as worthlessly as you
I’m convinced that I’d wind up burning too.
Love yourself as you loved no other
Be no man’s fool and be no man’s brother
We’re all born to die alone, you know, that’s the hell of it.
Life’s a game where they’re bound to beat you
And time’s a trick it can turn to cheat you
And we only waste it anyway,
And that’s the hell of it.
Good for nothing, bad in bed
Nobody liked you and you’re better off dead
Goodbye, we’ve all come to say goodbye (goodbye)
Goodbye (goodbye)
Born defeated, died in vain
Super-destructive, you were hooked on pain
And though your music lingers on
All of us are glad you’re gone

Phantom of the Paradise is a scintillating and sophisticated work of Art. Every time I see it, I am electrified. And yet, like nature itself, it is cruel. It is darkly mysterious and way outside the immediate apprehension of its widest audience. But just because these messages are well hidden does not mean that they are not perceived. The lessons of this work of Art, and many others like it, aren’t that hard to understand when they are presented without backhanded guile. Why then are they concealed in such a deliberate and sinister technique? I was just 11 when I saw this movie for the first time. To say that it fucked with my life is an understatement.

By golly it is a beautiful thing, Phantom of the Paradise, and it is fair to say that without this kind of instruction, I would have no idea the shape of our reality and the amazing hidden truths of history that it reveals so carefully. For this I am grateful. But the Buddhist in me can not merely shrug away the horrors of the process. Is any beauty worth so much pain?

The lyrics of the final song are yet another use of uncanny doubling. About whom does the song sing? Is it Winslow? Is it Swan? Maybe it is about both of them. Maybe it is about all of us. But for me, when I hear this song, and feel the intensity of this movie and its message coming at me so fiercely ... I can’t help but wonder... is it only me?

***

You may not feel I have made my case as promised, but this investigation is not over. I will continue to look at films or other media devices in the same way as I have with this article—as both a revelation of Supreme Nature and the Manchurian Suicide Code. I am thinking of Barry Lyndon for my next effort, a big change of pace. However, if readers are interested in an investigation of their favorite media, I am up to the challenge.

Peace

Da WWWiz

Alex sits down across space and time with McLuhan scholar and doppelgänger theorist Linus Minimax—his X profile has him down as “ANAGRAMMATIST & MCLUHANATIC PERPLEXIONIST & 'PATAMUGICKIAN”—for a casual chat about 1947, the year and number, and how it fits into each others respective Cryptokubrological and conspiratorial journeys. It’s a year that somehow remains relevant to Hoagland acolytes, UFOlogists, Crowleyites, intelligence cultists, ancient and modern gnostics alike, and of course Cryptokubrologists. Conversation recorded in April 2025.

Shawn Montgomery <shawnfella@hotmail[dot]com>

Jan 16, 2018, 10:45 PM

The tropes come in ever more fragmented forms as one steps deeper into the maze.

A-maze-ing apparitions. Broken bits of magic spells. Dark incantations thrust forth from somewhere, jumbled and rearranged, then sprinkled down onto the timeline of a Century, or a piece of Cinema, or the life of an Individual, or a moment in the life of an Individual, Century, or Celluloid. Sifting through these "broken bits of magic spells" is like living in a place where the language is foreign. After time and repeated exposure, one begins to slowly come to understand, and even speak, the foreign language. So it is with Crypto-Surfing. The cut-up girl, the fragmented female, the REDRUM, can be seen as expressions of a deeply occult language emanating from an even more deeply occult agency. Something made the person or people chop up and destroy the girl. That same something made the girl be there to be killed and chopped up.

It could very well be that the something that is behind the creation and distribution of countless tropes—delineated and performed by human activity, the results sprinkled out onto the timeline macro-table—could be a function of our genetic coding. DNA as Puppetmaster, not just for shape, form and physical essence, but for what one will do with that body, and when it will do it. Fate. Destiny. A running program. A dna macro-sequence.

"History" is human dna, broken up into billions of individual cells (people) all working in concert while dancing to an omnipresent, silent beat. Effectively, we "act out" our entire, pre-programmed lives. DNA does not just set the body, but everything one will ever do with that body for the entire course of a pre-programmed existence. "Free will" is the "veil," a concept ingrained by the Bible. We think we have it, and this (our thinking) is how the dna clock ticks undetected, Puppet Strings invisible. We are only the vessels, the "mouthpieces" for "ideas" that we only "think" are our own. Our thoughts are hatched from the same place our bodies are hatched, the dna oven.

Astrology is the science of dna programming/imprinting. The position in space the Earth occupies for the nine months of gestation (when our lives are programmed in the womb, our bodies imprinted with all the activities and thoughts to come) are determinative, like magnetic tape heads cutting a track into a tape reel. We are "who we are" (the recorded "tracks") because of our spatial positions (the spinning curved track the Earth cuts through space for the gestation period) relative to the surrounding star systems and moon(s) (the magnetic tape heads) that define, then activate, the programming sequence. If celestial bodies influence humans (and the tides tell us they do), then this Puppet-String Theory is "a thing" (I'll warrant).

Maybe Planet Earth and everything that has ever happened on it is a form of Art.

Or, the ultimate Science Project. Maybe, instead of making movies, the Creator(s) make historical timelines that dna modules act-out (on seeded worlds). It is not just the animal forms that the Creator creates (with the dna paintbrush), but everything that happens to the dna superstructure after it has been collectively born. "History" is a "tone poem," a super-hyper-omni-advanced emoji. We may have an "audience" (other than the Creator). We may be "interactive." Maybe the Creator-class-of-Being can insert itself into the creation.

Maybe we're a Game.

Read a post from Noah about the natal chart of David Lynch here:

https://facingnorthastro.blogspot.com/2025/01/the-passing-of-master-and-how-his-natal.html

Noah’s breakdown of the Houses through the films of PTA:

Facing North Patreon (launched May 2025)

Facing North Youtube Channel

Facing North Astrology (blog)

Facing North Facebook group

Song: “Searchin’” by Alvarius B.

Support Cryptokubrology:

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Subscribe now

Znore has blogged on the Joycean Occult for nearly 15 years at Groupname for Grapejuice: https://groupnameforgrapejuice.blogspot.com

Znore’s book Death Sweat of the Cluster published by Sync Book Press is essential for any reader interested in works on synchronicity and countercultural thought, or just beautiful, independently produced books in general. You can purchase a copy here.

Alex’s Bitcoin Magazine article: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/print/give-me-time

Support Crypto-K by upgrading your subscription, or even becoming a founding member here for full access to all I have published so far. You can also make a one time donation.

Or don’t, whatever!

Song: “Wrecking Man” by The Imposters

Like with the discovery of a strange radio signal from space, Cryptokubrologists and sync-heads working their telescopes independently across the continent all found themselves improbably focused on the very same period of time: March 9-11, 1977.

Why? It’s a long story. You’ll just have to listen and see.

An epic, rapid-fire discussion recorded over two nights.

David Charles Plate—inarguably “the world’s leading pioneer in album-film syzygy”—and his extensive work in the synchro-mystic arts can be viewed collectively and conveniently at TheSyncBook.com.

You can interact with David on X @mkultrasound.

Sorry Cassandra I Misunderstood: Everything Predicts 9/11 by David Charles Plate

A Perfect Date With Roman Polanski by Shawn Montgomery

Stanley is a Bear by Alex Fulton

Song: “Mars” by Mark LeClair

Support Cryptokubrology:

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After a few years coming down from the experience, and inspired by the likes of Goro Adachi and Jake Kotze, Mark began blogging about his own synchromystic insights derived from his experience, describing it as akin to what Philip K. Dick went through in 2-3-74. His blog The Wrong Way Wizard (subtitled Bringing Up the Rear on the Left Hand Path - Where Nothing is Impossible and So is Everything Else) was highly influential in that “scene” at the time, heavily impacting just about everyone who happened to stumble upon it (like the Velvet Underground of sync)—especially for those looking for a slightly more cynical take on the phenomenon than most other synchronauts. He became known best for his essays and theories on Stanley Kubrick: full theoretical Gnostic break-downs of 2001, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut, providing many highly original insights into these films—not to mention other massive decodes of Brian de Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise and the Coens’ Burn After Reading, as well as sync commentary on various then-current events (like the Aurora Batman shootings in the summer of 2012).

The essay that follows was the first of Mark’s I ever read (it was linked to me randomly by someone completely outside the sphere of sync), and the rest is history. A few years later I reached out and we became friends, and even started a short-lived podcast together. Unfortunately his mental state remained ever fragile, and after some inevitable drama, he decided to pull the plug, deleting his entire internet presence and history. Aside from a stray e-mail or two, I did not speak to Mark for 8 years, but then one day we managed to get back in touch—just in time for him to have contracted a terminal case of pancreatitis (brought on by years of frankly irresponsible drinking—he often bragged that he would watch The Ninth Gate and match Johnny Depp for every drink and smoke). We had one last long conversation a few days before Christmas 2022, and then a few weeks later I learned from his Mother that he died on January 23, 2023—1/23/23—a fact I’m sure he would have appreciated as a student of RAW and the “23 Enigma.”

Of course, nothing is ever gone on the Internet, as I told him, and that of course I had gone and saved what I could from the Wayback Machine, preserving almost all of his work, and even that I considered myself something of a Max Brod to his Franz Kafka. He seemed flattered that anyone would care about his work. Well, I know a lot of people cared, and hell, a lot more people might care to read this essay now in 2024 (and 2025 and beyond), than would ever have in 2008. He was genuinely ahead of his time in many ways.

So here it is, exactly as it appeared 16 years ago. (And it will always be free to read here.)

Merry Christmas.

Does this hurt?

The Emperor’s New Clothes: A Study of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut

by Mark LeClair

Originally Posted Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Preface

Here and now, on shelves for the Xmas season, the complete solution to Stanley Kubrick’s riddle Eyes Wide Shut. As a gesture of good faith, I'll let you in on the final prognosis: the world actually ended on Sept, 11th, 2001, and we are all dead. I shit you not. My proof is not oblique. The bravest of theorists have fumbled, but your bud Da WWWiz has made a sweet recovery. Dragging the ball beyond Uranus and into the end zone.

Happy Holidays.

You can skip this next part and go straight to the body of 'The Emperor's New Clothes' or look at the following Eyes Wide Shut refresher - it comes highly recommended.

Dramatis Personae, Plot Synopsis and Table of Contents of The Emperor's New Clothes

Players

The Wrong Way Wizard: Author of The Emperor's New Clothes and your narrator. 40-ish. Still lives with his mom.

From Eyes Wide Shut:

Alice and Bill Harford: a highly leveraged Manhattan physician and his bored and brilliant wife.

Helena: the Harford's daughter. A perfect little angel.

Roz: a babysitter.

Victor and Ilona Ziegler: a captain of industry and his long suffering wife. Patients of Dr. Harford.

Nick Nightingale: he's with the band. Dr. Bill's old med-school buddy.

Gayle and Nuala: twin serpents of desire.

Szandor Szavost: a Hungarian Count. He is starving for love.

Amanda Curran: One in a stable of perfect love slaves kept by the evil Ziegler.

Marion Nathanson: Grieving for her lost father. She loves Dr. Bill.

Carl: Marion's gold-digging fiancee. He is like Dr. Bill, but on the cheap.

The Yalies: a gang of roving rugby players. Homophobic jerk-offs.

Domino: street-walker, or is she?

Mr. Millich: proprietor of Rainbow Fashions.

Miss Millich: a daughter and a perfect doll.

Two Japanese Businessmen: Miss Millich's love monkeys.

A Cabbie: probably from Hackensack.

The Hierophant: A Red Man. Master of Ceremonies at Somerton.

Tricorn and Teardrop: could they be the Zieglers?

The Mysterious Woman: who is she, really? A lifesaver, for sure!

A Waitress: She knows Nick Nightingale, in the Biblical sense.

The Kinky Desk Clerk: Night Porter at the Hotel Jason, home of Nick Nightingale.

Sally: Domino's good-girl roomie, or Domino reborn?

The Stalker: maybe even death himself. Needs a haircut.

Also appearing, our special guests:

Alex de Large

Wendy and Danny Torrance

Private Joker

The Monolith

The Scientologists

Pink Floyd

Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Edward Bernays

Truffaut

P.K. Dick

Santa Clause

Jesus

Satan

Idi Amin

Mel Gibson

Maverick and Goose

...and host of your favorite stars.

And of course the one and only, the inimitable, the immortal--Stanley Kubrick.

The Action of Eyes Wide Shut

Dr. and Mrs. Harford are off to Victor Ziegler’s annual Christmas gala. They say goodnight to little Helena and twirl away to the ball.

At the Ziegler's lush and luminous Manhattan stately home, Bill and Alice will quickly separate. Bill will talk to Nick Nightingale, who is playing piano at the affair. Then he'll wheel about with supermodels Gayle and Nuala, before being whisked up to Ziegler's private bathroom for a con-fab, where Mandy, Victor's love toy, has OD'd on heroin and coke. She is sprawled naked. The doctor's expertise and cool reassurance are needed to smooth things over. Ziegler states in no uncertain terms: Bill, this is just between us.

Alice has a pee and shares a long and sensuous dance with Count Szandor Szavost. The Count wants to lure Alice to the sculpture gallery and taste her milky white flesh. He is pretty smooth but Alice won't have it. She is married, after all.

At home after the party Bill and Alice make love in front of the mirror but Alice has other things on her mind.

The next day we follow Alice and Bill through their daily routine. Bill at the office seeing to his upper-middle class clientele and Alice at home with Helena. That night they will smoke marijuana and argue. Alice has a secret that drives Bill into jealous and depressive anxiety.

There is a phone call. A patient of Bill's, one Lou Nathanson, has died. It is late night, but Bill must make a condolence call.

Marion Nathanson, Lou's middle-aged daughter, is distraught, but not so much at the death of dear old dad. She's moving away with her boyfriend Carl, to Michigan, but doesn't want to go. She loves Dr. Bill you see. With all her heart. Bill, gobsmacked, but still kindly, suggests "...we barely know each other." Embarrassed, he escapes.

On the streets of Greenwich Village, Bill is accosted by an ornery gang of college boys looking to rumble. Still dizzy from this encounter he is pursued by the sweet, persistent Domino, who offers Bill to come inside her suite and get warm. Bill enters, but withdraws from Domino when Alice calls his cell to ask when he'll be home. Late, says he, don't wait up. Feeling guilty and angry, he leaves Domino's cozy flat to walk the streets of the Village alone.

Land ho! The Sonata Cafe is just ahead. Bill goes in to find Nick Nightingale at the piano. After Nick's set the two will share a chat over drinks. Nick will hint that he has another gig that night. A late night gig. Exclusive. Nick admits that he plays blindfolded. Bill is hooked. He has to go to this mystery-party. Begrudgingly, Nick gives Bill the password for admittance. But Bill will need a costume.

At Rainbow Fashions, Bill coaxes the irascible but world-wise Mr. Millich into opening up for business. It's after 1 am, but Millich gives in at Bill's promise of a couple of Benjamins. Inside, Millich discovers his teen-age daughter at play with two much older Japanese men. He chases her to bed and locks the men away to attend the police, but they'll have to wait while he fits Dr. Bill into his costume. A Tux, a Black Cloak and a Mask.

Bill is off to Somerton Castle to witness a weird circus of lust he'd have ne'er imagined but hours before. Nick Nightingale is at the piano, blindfolded. What is the meaning of this Ritual in the Dark? Before he can find out just what is going on, Bill will be unmasked as an outsider, an interloper who just does not belong. The Mysterious Woman, whose identity is a intriguing to Bill, will save him from an uncertain fate. He escapes with a dire warning.

Bill goes home and hides away his costume, the evidence of his night’s wilding. It is after 4am. In bed, Alice is in the throes of a nightmare. She will wake and tell her dream to Bill, adding injury to his unhinged jealousy.

The next morning, Dr. Bill will go to Gillespie's Cafe and then The Hotel Jason in search of Nick Nightingale. He'll learn, from the night porter, that Nick has been spirited away against his will by a pair of professional thugs.

Back at Rainbow Fashions to return his costume, Bill finds that he has lost the mask. That's OK. Just a $25 surcharge. And should the good doctor like a romp with the nubile Miss Millich, her proprietor father assures that too can be arranged, for a price.

Next Bill drives out to Somerton and stands before its imposing gates, staring into the security camera. And inside, they are ready for him. Bill is handed an envelope. Inside is another warning, which promises to be the last. Stay away and say nothing of what you have seen. Lost in a thick fog of fear and desire, Bill wanders the streets of the Village once more. He buys a cake and makes for Domino's pad. She is not home. Her roomie Sally answers. Domino, Sally will tell Bill, has been found HIV positive. Bill is shocked. Sally offers Bill a coffee and maybe more, but Bill makes tracks.

Wandering aimlessly, Bill discovers he is being followed. He buys a paper and ducks into Sharkey's Cafe. Inside he reads that Amanda Curran, ex beauty queen, has OD'd on drugs. Bill wonders: Is she the Mysterious Woman that saved me from my fate at Somerton? He must find out.

At the hospital, Bill learns that Miss Curran has died. He sees her body in the morgue.

Bill's pesky cell rings. It is a representative of his patient Victor Ziegler. Can Bill make an urgent house call?

Bill meets Ziegler in his ample billiard room. Ziegler explains the need for this visit. He is aware of Bill's odyssey. He was there at Somerton and saw everything. He warns Bill that he is in over his head. And yes, the dead Amanda Curran is indeed one in the same as the Mysterious Woman who saved Bill the night before. Bill demands an accounting but Ziegler only reinforces his threats.

At home Alice is sleeping. Next to her, on Bill's pillow, is the missing mask. How did it get here?

Bill falls into frantic spasms of grief as he tells Alice the horror he has survived. Later, Christmas shopping with Helena, the Harfords will agree they are lucky to be alive and there is nothing to do but go on living.

Boom-shaka-laka!

The Emperor's New Clothes

Domino Falls

On my 15th birthday, a wide-eyed fool in the dead of winter, I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time. It was a midnight show. Sold Out at the Paramount, Domino Falls' grand old cinema house, right downtown. The screen was colossal.

When the show let out onto the wild and windy streets of my little prairie megalopolis, I walked home for five miles, colder than Pluto, with my head lost in the cosmos. I thought I was going north. My life, my world, my universe, yes, the universe had changed for good. Here's the thing, I wondered, after this what!? How will I be the hero of my own life? Fuckin' Kubrick - just some recluse who I hadn't even heard of but 3 hours gone, some insane sonofabitch genius, had turned my whole world Danube Blue. So not only had Stan become my first real hero, but at once the ultimate nemesis, for he shewed a world so majestic and transcendent and full of hope, yet a world that I might never altogether reach or even comprehend.

A world full of stars.

I wanted that world. Regardless of consequence. I want it still.

I found myself, at 15, destined to be away like today's Tom Sawyer, to unravel an enigma. And I'll be a monkey's uncle if it weren't that after 20 years of searching the vast expanse of unbridled, frozen space of mind and soul, my quarry turned out to be a pun. A clever pun. A masterful play on words. 'Deus Ex Machina,’ Stan? Yeah, I get it. Ha, ha, ha.

I report this moribund little tidbit not for naught. You see, after learning as much of literary theory and the dramatic and cinematic language as one could for a lumpy prole and specifically for the purpose of revealing 2001 to myself, well... I just didn't think there was another curve ball in the works from the old Q-Brick. Then I watched Eyes Wide Shut and knew I was very wrong. And curses if the bastard didn't up and die without a word to explain his twisted yuletide horrorshow.

This story is a chronicle of my solution to Stan's final riddle. Eyes Wide Shut is my own private Everest, my K2, and I will have it, or go on living endlessly in the attempt. I have to. Why? Because it is there - blocking the light like a spot on the sun.

Note: There is a commentary to the audience of Eyes Wide Shut: 'Give up your inquiries which are totally useless.’ Dire consequences are threatened. Is Eyes Wide Shut this hostile to its audience?. At a safe distance it is a cruel albeit very funny joke.

Closer it could be dangerous. In his 2004 metaphilm exclusive Ears Wide Shut, Leon Weber proposes that Eyes Wide Shut may be a 'best of breed' movie about a conspiracy. The conspiracy intimated by Weber is that of an eastward moving cabal of one world oligarchs who have settled at a crucial time in the history of NYC. As per form, The Wrong Way Wizard will drag this notion into the daylight.

Herein we shall expose:

1) the conspiracy in question

2) the complete meaning of 2001: the year and the movie.

3) the cryptic monologue that closes Clarke's 2010 re: the people of the two suns.

4) the transcendental and absolute value of the events of Sept 11, 2001 as a conspiracy to be sure, but oh so much more so, as a function of pi.

And, of course...

5) the fantastic secret of Eyes Wide Shut: that the action of this nearly incomprehensible dreamplay unfolds just following the very real and terrific events of Sept. 11, 2001. An interesting feat for a movie released in 1999.

Please, gentle reader, remember the warning to Dr. Bill. What you learn here will be all too easy to understand and hard to shake. You might not sleep so well. Proceed at your own risk. The password is Fidelio.

Where the Rainbow Ends is Where it Begins

OK... The term EYES WIDE SHUT is a sly reference to Kubrick's personal life. Upon seeing 2001 for the first time, filmmaker Franco Zefferelli sent Kubrick a telegram. It read: 'You have made me dream with eyes wide open.’ Kubrick, notorious for imitating his own mythos, had a delicate sense of humor.

The acronym EWS is a big give away to the topography of the film. The missing letter from the set of E, W and S is 'N' where it stands for North. Well, North isn't exactly missing on the streets of Kubrick's Manhattan., Rather, the absence of North, as a symbolic compass, is firmly implied by the vicious re-cycle of infinite regression detailed in Bill's travels around NYC and environs. Being lost is a way of life on the loopy streets of EWS. In this way, EWS is a scathing criticism of the universal framework heralded by the Cartesian/Newtonian model and a document to end of this same delusion. Within the quadratic model, Kubrick says, it's all about being LOST. As long as we are deluded by the notion that we live on the exterior of a spheroid that is but one such body in a rapidly disintegrating and unbounded cloud of gas, we are always impossibly lost.

When teachers tell our kids kiddies that the polynomial equation is muchos importanto they aren't lying... well not exactly. The quadratic model for thought, artificially modulated to flummox the middle class comprehension of natural science, is imposed through mass education onto each and every human value system. Sex. Money. Love. Family and Politics. All of it a shell game. A 4D Rubik's Cube. A Devil's Quadrille. The specific value of the geography of Kubrick's exteriors and the applied force of the North in EWS will be explored a bit further along, but for now, stuff this in your Christmas stocking: someone is rearranging our world while we sleep. He's been mean to children and his methods are down right Catholic. So you'd damn well better watch out, kiddies.

Now then, the title and the end credit sequences of EWS are white lettering on a black background - like dominoes. The film that glitters in between these loose ends is a veritable kaleidescope of shimmering light. This runs a parallel to the marvelous and hateful The Wizard of Oz. In TWOZ, Dorothy's 'real' world, seen at the beginning and end of the film, is a flat sepia Black&White, where the troublesome middle world of OZ is dripping with florid and ominous color. Kubrick's homage to OZ, EWS is therefore first and lastmost delivered as a two-dimensional and strictly linear representation of all visible color phenomena. And just as Dorothy's journey through OZ is a dream (or nightmare) - so is the action of EWS. The deeper message is that life itself is a but a Techni-color dream. All of it.

The movie-going experience provides a simile to the film as revealed by its credits. The lights drop: it is dark/black. There is a flash of white light as the leader is spooled and then: seven colors spill out of the white and into the dark. In EWS Kubrick will use each of these seven colors to a level of subtlety that is wizardry. The process is reversed as the movie ends, credits roll and then the theater goes dark again. In this way Kubrick sees EWS and movies in general as a cypher for the life cycle: an orgiastic tightrope of tonality held at the ends by a single moment of clarity (birth/death). And beyond, utter emptiness. All exits are final.

Model Citizens

The casting of Cruise and Kid-man in EWS is analog to the oven-roasting of Hansel and Gretel by the Mean Old Witch. Kubrick is a crypto-alchemist and his two big stars are the base metals he wants to marry up. As a couple, Tom and Nick are the epitome of middle-class virtue at the end of the Consumer Century. They are realized individuals. They are goods to market and Kubrick will pimp them out for an IPO. Now, I am not saying, nor would I, that Tom's and Nicole's work in EWS contributed to the dissolution of their marriage. By all accounts the Cruises enjoyed a warm relationship with Stan. Kid-man was distraught when he died. Nevertheless the portrayal of middle-class matrimony as a Lacanian power struggle ending in hopeless abandon is not friendly.

Next: Tom's life as a Scientologist and as a rumored homosexual play a critical counterpoint to the character of Dr. Harford, especially if you accept Cruise's claim that he is not gay.

First: regarding Scientology. Mother Hubbard's little mood-cult is a direct rip-off of Freudian theory as it has been applied to sociology, especially by Dr. Edward Bernays, whose techniques are used by everyone from corporate advertisers through to MKUltra to achieve what Bernays calls the engineering of consent. The heart of this motif is played out in the conundrum of the masked ball of EWS. Dr. Harford is totally unaware of the practices of his mind-fucking Occult Overlords (about the dead Amanda Curran, Ziegler will say: "she got her brains fucked out!") In fact, Dr. Bill thinks he is one of the chosen. This image forms a reflection of Cruise and his earnest and fanatical belief in Scientology. Cruise's beliefs are a hallmark of social conformity. Does he know that the provenance of his beloved religion is based on the practices of an Occult madman making a well planned bid for world domination? Stan must've been sure that Cruise was mostly in the dark on the history of behavioral mind control and darker tenets of Scientology, or he wanted it to seem that way, because he overlays Dr. Harford onto our Tom as smooth as gold leaf upon gold.

About the gay thing. Freud, whose work is a character within EWS, thought everyone was a little gay, but did not approve of homosexual behavior. EWS obliquely agrees. Homosexuality is a key pivot to the much touted human right to free expression - an expression that Freud feared as savage. As I will try to show, EWS, on one level, threatens that conformity is the only safe pursuit. Forget happiness. We must see our hero Dr. Harford as we see ourselves - just a little gay and that's OK, but....

In a second act street scene, where the good doctor is accosted by a gang of preppy gay-bashers, he is shaken and stirred but not embarrassed by their characterization. We all know that homo-phobia conceals the desire for the extreme homosexual encounter. It is the anally obsessed Yahoos from Yale that are gay, not Dr. Bill. In this minor and shocking scene, Kubrick forwards the idea that male homosexuality is ofttimes a violent manifestation of the desire for power and holds that Cruise himself, the uber-conformist, is straight as a bowman's arrow.

The Yale vs. Harford confrontation may also be seen as a candid-snap of the practices of the Yale based Skull and Bones Society.

Da WWWiz promises to come round this corner again, a little later on.

Introit: Waltz

The film begins and ends to the strains of Dmitri Shostakovich's Jazz Suite. As jazzy as Dmitri tried to be with this piece he surely created a perfect waltz in the Viennese fashion; maybe he was being ironic. Anyhoo, Vienna is important because it is the fin de siècle birth place of psychoanalysis and the setting for the inspiration to EWS: Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle. Traum-novelle means dreambook. Schnitzler was an ardent Freudian.

Also, the term Vienna is a nice homophone to Veniza: Venice. Venice, as proposed by Mr. Weber in metaphilm's Ears Wide Shut, was for a time a strategic stronghold in the oligarchic mega-conspiracy made flesh in EWS. Kubrick has scratched a rose-line from Venice through Vienna and probably Paris and London straight into the heart of of OZ central: NYC. Please remember that it's just exactly at that moment of phony linear time when Freud's theories spring to life in Zoo York that ol' Ziggy Joy dies in London. It is beginning to seem that ghost of Freud decided to make westward ho with the oligarchs we pursue. Could we trace the Jewish Freud back to the Catholic Dante? How far eastward will we go in search of God's simple truth. Freud, going back in our footsteps like Danny Torrance, turns out to be Moses.

The connection to Freud, psychoanalysis, and the conspiracy of our infatuation can not be over-stressed. EWS is itself an attempt, through incomparable artifice, to carry out a mass analysis and re-program. The program in question initiates the Age of Horus, which reads in some plain words as an attempt to socialize and market individualism and de-construct the western nuclear family - among other delights. Kubrick delivers both a scathing comment on 20th century values and a psychoanalytic trigger for the New World Values that will replace them. This will be elucidated at length, but to begin, readers can watch the excellent Century of the Self, a four hour documentary by Adam Curtis, now on Google video. To wit, the theories of Freud and his followers are the origin of technology used in the mass manipulation of the middle-class.

More striking is the use of the Jazz Suite waltz as a motif for TIME. As it opens and closes the film, this clockwork waltz insinuates an important Occult teaching. TIME, too, is a mechanism bound by iso-perimetric curvature. Stan is telling us that TIME, like the black and white credits of EWS, is the binary pulse that binds our reality - but only tempo-rarily. Kubrick uses Strauss' Blue Danube in 2001 to the same ideal. The waltz is used to bridge the enormous gap of ages implied by the famous monkey-bone/spaceship cut. Time, we are told, is wrapped within itself, an illusion of itself. But what an illusion!

Isis Unveiled

The opening image is a pretty quick peek at a dorsal Alice Harford as she disrobes. It is worth a note that this single moment is the only in the film that is interlaced with the black and white credits. A mere clip on the Movieola, it stands as a movie within itself. As it compares to the tale told in the strange drama to unfold, this shot may be the most revealing in cinematic history. It is meaningful in multiple context. First, it's a pun upon the title of the film. And myriad Occult revelations burn into the mind's eye...

As a pun upon the phrase 'Eyes Wide Shut,’ Alice's pose works in two ways. As she disrobes we see her but do not see her, because she is turned away from the camera. This is a visual term equal to the expression 'you see but do not see'. Also, the clip is about as long as the interstice of the normal blink reflex. Stan says - If you blink you will miss it! Eyes Wide Shut indeed.

As she stands between twin pillars, Alice is the perfect picture of the High Priestess of Tarot. The pillars are key. Again, the onlookers 'rear view' reinforces the idea of Isis as visible yet invisible, as the mythic Isis as Priestess of Tarot is described as unseen. We see Her in the many faces of maya, but this is not the complete vignette: the true face of Isis is not revealed, as yet: or is it? No false promises, good reader mine. We will see.

The light source, the illumination for Alice's strip-tease, comes from a lamp in the corner of the room and is reflected by closetdoor mirrors. In 2d relief the lampshade forms a pyramid with no capstone - the Great-Grand-Goggle of Occult symbology. The eye of illumination traditionally pictured above the pyramid is implied by the lamp-light. It is the light of secret initiation. This simple prop - a plain lamp - gives off a lovely and modulating light. By using this hidden glyph - this eye of illumination - Kubrick has winked his own eye as it peers at us, his audience, through the lens of the camera. We are in the middle, between this gleaming eye and the finished work up on the screen. And it is no ordinary work, for it exposes the fact that in EWS as in life, true comprehension of whazz goin' on is only found behind the scene, out of the picture, lurking overhead like an eye in the sky.

It can not be explicated, but discovered only through the correct use of metaphor.

Next is the window at the back of the shot. Alice faces it. The window square is an important Occult signal that I will go into in a later part of our story, but as a teaser here's a wee pip: the Hebrew letter Dalet meaning Doorway also forms the main structure of the letter He, which means Window (a window to another world, as Dr. Harford will find on his odyssey). Secretly, He also means Seed. The combination of a Window and a Seed will grow into a mighty oak during Alice's first and cataclysmic monologue. And a bit more: the idea of a seed entering doorway forming a window to another plane of existence should prick up the ears of any would be psycho-naut and/or fans of Kubrick's 2001:ASO.

The final Occult volley of this first scene comes from a game of love, namely: tennis. Games are doubtless afoot in EWS, but much more than serving up a historical Ace on the courtly game of Kings and Queens (all the good people play, you know) the criss-crossed rackets that sit on the floor at the base of the pyramid lamp are are a masterful trump of occult messaging. Pink Floyd fans will recall the use of tennis (table tennis, in this particular case) as an image from the video for The Division Bell's “High Hopes.” Like EWS, The Division Bell is a self-acknowledging critique of the cybernetic model of Norbert Wiener. Stanley Kubrick instructs that the binary exchange of information must be appreciated from a subjective, metaphoric standpoint.

Thusly, EWS will reveal that the game of l'oeuf is much more than just knockin' some balls across the net - it is the nihilistic initiative to crack the Cosmic Egg and con the game. To hoodwink evolution and end the objective exchange of information with subjective union: a guilt free booty-call. It's the weird hieros-gamos at the center of the Masked Ball. The act of Sexual Magick that these high-falootin' fuck-ohs believe might produce Rosemary's Baby or some other freaky shit.

Ya gotta love it.

Looking for Dr. Goodbill

Two dominant themes are introduced in the first line of dialog, delivered by Tom Cruise's priggish alter ego Dr. Bill: Honey, have you seen my wallet? The Act of Seeing (or Looking) and Money (Bills, both as credit and debit).

Stanley Kubrick got started as a photographer for a magazine called Look. The repeated references to the Act of Looking dovetails EWS with Kubrick's early work as a shutterbug. The same device also connects the action to the title of the film. I will leave the reader to scavenge for these many references so rich with nuance when looking for themselves. Have fun. Wear dark glasses.

As for the theme of Money, well, it's a specific Occult emphasis. And it is no accident that we are talking about American Money. At Ziegler's party, when Alice introduces herself to Szandor Szavost, she states: ...I'm American. She may as well open with: I am Money. This exchange pays toll to the opening image of Alice as Isis. The now well known sigil for Isis is that of the Dollar Sign: $$. One doesn't need to be an economist to see it spells Is-is. There is square and solid foundation to this claim. The common depiction is of Isis seated or standing upon a Cube. This Cube represents Saturn, her father, from whose brow she issues forth. Now, Isis is often tied to the number 7. This is because she is the seven veils of the maya, beyond which lie the pure light of the Supernals. This image is recreated as the cabbalistic Tree of Life, with its Ten Sephirot. The lower 7 of 10 houses represent the forces that act upon and form the material world, the false Matrix. Above and distant are the 3 Supernal Houses, separated from the lower 7 by the veil of Isis, shown in this rendering as the abyss. Old school images of Isis, rendered in 2d, show Isis upon a simple four-sided Square. This counts, for it gives us the fraction 7/4. On Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon the track called Money is measured in 7/4 time. The shattering meaning of the fraction 7/4 and the esoteric secrets of money will follow. Be a good patient.

For now, the undertow of the Money motif is the objectification of women as a fundamental denial of reality. Throughout his dark night, Dr. Bill treats Money like he does Women. He doesn't look at it. He doesn't understand it. dHe doesn't love it. He just uses it. The ignorance of this objectification is refracted into an array of metaphoria. EWS is an exhaustive and gross anatomy on the Cartesian corpus of objectivity. Under the knife, Dr. Bill is a dunce beyond compare. Through obedience to the fallacious model of universal objectivity, Harford is become a false ego and blind to the simplest processes of the world he inhabits.

I want to take a quick look at the probable background of our good-buddy Dr. Harford. He likely comes from the home of on overbearing and overprotective Mother. The traditional Oedipal Mom. Cruise's Doctor Bill is the grown up Danny Torrance (from The Shining), whose nickname was Doc. Bill turns out to be quite brave, caring, and not too stupid, but he is stupendously ignorant of the world he's living in. He just doesn't see. A perfect bourgeois fool. Monty Python's Upper Class Twit. The refined product of a Western education system built to turn out an obedient class of consumers seduced by the promise of meaningless pseudo-wealth. Dr. Bill is a poor numb skull and he doesn't even know it. He might just as well be penniless.

And about the name Harford: reversed it spells Dr. of Rah. Rah could be a homonym for the Egyptian Sun god Ra. Ra is analog to Apollo, the Greek Sun god, to whom doctors give an oath of service. Also, the meaning of the British slang term Rah has a revealing similarity to the person of Dr. Harford.

Black Christmas in July

EWS was released on July 16th, 1999. Out on a limb, I think that if Stan could've secured a July the Fourth release he would've done so. Perhaps there is a secret in the simple fact that sixteen is four-squared. It happens that July the Fourth is the date of the Ball in the Gold Room, pictured in a still photo at the end of Kubrick's The Shining. There is a neat connexion between this portrait of a ghostly party that happens every day and a sequence from the Python film The Meaning of Life that can help us unwrap the riddle of releasing a Christmas Movie in the summertime. In TMOL, a group of diners die from food poisoning and are whisked-off to Heaven where it happens to be Christmas all the time. In EWS, Kubrick super-impresses July the Fourth onto Christmas. America is the acme of Consumer Culture and the feast of Christ is a feast (like most feasts) of consumption. I'm talking about cannibalism here folks. Transubstantiation. Soylent Green is Jesus, man! By acting out our desire for individualism as consumers of goods and service we partake of the meta-body and blood of Christ. The big pig-out is maxxed for the yuletide season, but it really never stops.

The 20th century addiction to this metaphysical consumption of Christ permeates every level of western culture. This is most certainly engineered by Dr. Bernays (mentioned above) and other social programmers that use the same methodology. The way it is handled in the American and European media would have Marshall McCluhan cry for mercy. Conditioned by TV, Movies, Music, Popular Books and News from infancy, the middle-class now identifies a comfortable life of powerless wealth with the act of glorifying Christ through conspicuous market consumption. Whether you are Christian or not what matters most is the installation of the value system. Money sharp evangelists like Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar are but a few among pawns moved by the Invisible Hand to nudge humanity into the belief that Christ died for our right to be individuals capable of objective feelings. We are then gently, deftly directed to express these feelings in the open marketplace, as users. It is thus that our base animal instinct, so feared by the sociological masters, is funneled into harmless and meaningless consumer behavior. Even knowledge and spirituality have been inexorably fettered to material concerns. Everything is a commodity. The entire so-called free-market is but an engine that drives us to the next Black Christmas.

Yes Virginia, there is a Satan Claus

As we make our first reach into the frozen space of EWS's special use of Christmas symbolism, I begin with some thoughts about Superman, particularly the late 70's flick starring Christ-opher Reeves as The Soup. The child Kal-el escapes Krypton in a starship incubator. A falling star. Later, the young Clark Kent makes for the North Pole to find his long lost father in a palace of ice. The motifs of a Falling Star, of Ice, and the North Pole are a cool note. Ice is a symbol for the planet Saturn - as it is a frozen ball of gases. The falling star is Lucifer, errant son of Satan/Saturn/Santa. Blavatsky, in The Secret Doctrine tells us that Satan is the true name of Jehovah - architect of our Matrix - the eye on the pyramid. And it doesn't matter if it's true and Satan really exists, or instead serves as a programming tool. Santa sees us when were sleeping and knows if we're awake and knows if we've been bad or good, so...

The mere notion alone that there is a mean and chilly old bastard keeping the nightwatch, looking in from on high, is more than enough to keep all of His lost children working happily to further the betterment of humanity through social conditioning, paying with our lives ever upwards into the pyramid of usury. Funny part is, like Dr. Bill, we hardly know it! We are brainwashed to brainwash ourselves. Christ/Superman (and his multiple simulacra) is the infamous policeman in the brain - a programming technology of Satan used to promote the civil behavior of the denizens of Hell. The same cop that anti-consumer groups of the 60's - like the Weatherman - wanted purged from the collective soul - so that humanity could express it's long repressed natural libido and return to the equivalence of form left behind in the Garden of Eden.

Holy Hex-a-gram, Batman!

Now it just so happens that the planet Saturn is in the position North for the ceremonial Ritual of the Hexagram, an act of Magick designed to attune the Magus to the frequency of the Solar System. The Satanic link to the direction of North should not be lost to those with even a touch of Occult awareness. As discussed, the missing term of the acronym EWS is 'N' for North. Because North is only implied but not present in the world of Stanley Kubrick's millennial Manhattan we can then identify Dr. Harford's world, and our own too, as PERDITION. Wherever you are you are lost. Cast out of Eden for eternity. It is a world ruled at super-cosmic arms length from the unreachable arc of Saturn, a god somewhat disappointed by his own creation. The best he could do was send a kid to bring us the good news. We're all immortal. Big Whoop. The bad news: we ain't going nowhere. Nowhere but into a timeless dream. But hey, it's better than Hoboken. To clarify this somewhat elusive point, we must have a hard look at a ceremony called the Ritual of Hexagram, seen through the lens of Stan's 2001 and straight into Clarke's 2010.

Take another look at the cabalistic tree of life. There are Ten Houses, numbered one through ten, and One Forbidden House, numbered eleven. In the Ritual of the Hexagram, house number three (the planet Saturn) is brought down and superimposed over the eleventh house (the planet Uranus). In this way the accepted planetary attribution of Saturn is substituted for the forbidden Uranus to form a perimetric hexagon of houses numbered three, four, five, seven, eight and nine. In the center of the hexagon is house number six (the Sun). The performance of this ceremony now fixes the student at the center of the solar orrery as witness to the movement of the planets as far away as Saturn. The status of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto can be appreciated with a correct understanding of the term forbidden, which in this special sense does not mean disallowed but rather impossible. That Saturn is the extreme limit of this working is symptomatic of TIME itself. Saturn must be known as Father Time to all the good children and is now revealed as an actual entity, the placental wall of which forms the barrier to all temporal phenomena. The official position of Saturn on the tree, which is beyond the veil of the forbidden, is a profound lesson that inside the curvature of TIME we remain completely ignorant of its higher functions. Beyond TIME, we are told is the forbidden, an impossible manifold metaphor. By our association to the impossible unknown realm outside of time, reality within TIME is actually unmanifest. None of it has even happened, at least not in the way we like to assure ourselves. History, both social and natural, is an illusion suspended beyond geometry.

Film buffs don't need to be reminded that Kubrick's first plan for 2001, to culminate around the rings of Saturn, was derailed by the failure to create a convincing mock-up of the mighty Father of Time. The title of Odyssey's final section was called Jupiter and Beyond... as an attempt to compensate for the short-comings of the special effects team. The implication is that, by metaphor, 2001 takes the viewer outside of time. Such discovery is bolstered by the appearance of a second sun as the denoument to Clarke's follow-up, 2010. The gravitronic effect upon planetary motion of the appearance of a solar body in the orbit of Saturn could very well sequence the end of linear time. This one time novelty (2010 was published in the early 1980's) has today become a fully fledged internet conspiracy theory under the name of The Lucifer Project.

We can now easily transpose a distinct class of metaphoric types:

• North, both as an occult orientation and as the magnetic earth-pole of lore.

• Santa Claus

• Satan as a personality and as the planetary body of Saturn

• The alchemical attempt to 'stall' or slow down time (as in the denouement to Superman wherein Superman reverses time)

• The hexagonal shape that has formed at the pole of Saturn

• The Magical Ritual of the Hexagram

For Thomases who doubt the technological basis for ceremonial magick, here are two good leads: Jack Parsons and the distinguished A.C. Clarke. Parsons was Aleister Crowley's hand picked and milk-fed successor. Parsons was also a literal rocket-scientist. A madman and a genius and self styled Anti-Christ. He worked for NASA at the JPL. A.C. Clarke, whose attitude is summed up quite neatly from his own pen -
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” - is also a high mucky-muck at NASA.

Helena's Big Adventure

There is a common device, a page right out of many Fairy Tales, much loved by modern story-tellers and filmmakers. Through this device the enormity of reality is cryptically linked to the dream of girl or young woman. Not to mention the obvious example of The Wizard of Oz, a fine filmic version of this motif can be found in Cronenberg's A History of Violence. In the opening sequence of AHOV, just as a little girl is murdered by a monstrous sociopath, another little girl wakes up from a nightmare, screaming. The viewer is sub-consciously directed to wonder if the killer from the opening scene might've emerged from the girls nightmare. Later, her father, Tom, will be challenged by this same cold killer, and the resulting madness will put him through a grim struggle for the survival of his fragile reality. Violence's Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is in just the same boat as our Dr. Bill.

The transmogrification of a child's dream into a test of her parent's strength-quotient is transparent. To socially proper humans children are of the highest value. The child will test boundaries to ensure the safety of the material world and the cohesiveness of the family unit. The malevolence of reality is scary and a child must re-examine their level of security every time they go to sleep. They use their parents to gauge the limits of the social game. This is the role of the parent - as servant to the child. Foot soldier on the front-line, beating back the inevitable and inexhaustible evil of childish imagination. Most parents I know are horrified of the unblocked potential of their kids, and the child inside themselves.

EWS uses the device of a little girl’s dream to this same effect. In the first act, Helena, the Harford's se7en year old daughter, asks if she can stay up to watch The Nutcracker while mom and dad are gone to Ziegler's Christmas party. This scene, in the commonly pointless Kubrickian fashion, establishes the classical relationship of the master to his audience. The main action of The Nutcracker is the dream of a young girl. Jeffrey Scott Bernstein, in his excellent shot by shot analysis of the first act of EWS, suggests that the reference to 'The Nut-Cracker' is a codeword that EWS is a kind of puzzle - something that one must crack one's nut to understand. The Wrong Way Wizard very much concurs, and will go further. This two word quip, 'The Nutcracker', is vital to the paradox of EWS. Think of the close up eyeballs of A Clockwork Orange: Stan is telling us that, through the medium of the eye, his hero and the audience are about to be peeled wide open. Dr. Bill will be conditioned likewise to Alex de Large. But, instead of a mere 2d movie horrorshow, Bill will stumblebum through the paces of his daughter's wild fantasy world in glorious 3d and straight into the heart of Hades: a gauntlet that will prove or disprove his very genetic viability. Good thing it's only a dream.

Again we consult the tree of life for insight. Please note that the tenth house hangs like a pendulum alone beneath the ninth. When Helena asks to stay up past '...nine o'clock' she provides a diagram of the clockwork pendulum at ten. The Nutcracker Suite is about one hour long. Helena will be up until ten, in the world until ten, but Alice and Bill will stay out past eleven. This key is corollary to the forbidden nature of that which lurks outside of time, beyond the exterior curvature of the orbit of Saturn - no small distance from the world of our perpetual infancy. Uranus is a long way from Saturn. A long fucking way.

Here we go!

The Division Ball

The Christmas party at the Ziegler's is the first operation in the Alchemical Wedding of Bill and Alice Harford. Just as in a prosaic wedding ceremony, the bride and her groom must be separated for a time before being eternally joined in unholy matrimony. After meeting their host and hostess, the Harford's each go their own way. Bill will talk to his long-lost buddy Nick Nightingale and play snakes and ladders with Gayle and Nuala, before being called away to see Victor Ziegler in his private ice-palace: the upstairs bathroom. Alice will make away for a pee and later get drunk and dance with sensual Szandor Szavost, Grandmaster of the 'Order of the Blue Lotus.’ A death worshiper.

To begin, let's follow Doctor Bill. The conversation with his ol' bud Nightingale seems superficial. The two men size each other up, in a friendly way. It's been ten years. They share a drink and a few words before Nick is demanded elsewhere. Not much to see it seems, but it is soil that nurtures a progeny: the casting of individual men, both in EWS and at large, as lone spermatozoa. We learn that Nick hasn't managed to swim quite as near the Cosmic Egg as his med-school pal Bill. This is reinforced by the snippy way that Nick is called off to service by Ziegler's man, a stark contrast to how, only moments later, Dr. Harford is smoothly urged upstairs to meet Ziegler. All of this is added up to show that our Billy is just better stock than the itinerant minstrel Nightingale. More likely to produce. Higher on the food chain.

In no small way, the audience is meant to see Nick and Bill not as individual men but as versions of the same experiment (remember that Apollo is the god of Music as well as Medicine). These frat boys were tuned-up and turned-out to perform by the same fish-factory, but like spawning salmon, only one or two will get far. Dr. Bill, with all his flaws, will make it. Out to the brink of chaos and back, because he is a good man, a good father and a good husband. Nick, so cavalier about his social short-comings, will make it pretty far out to sea but he won't make it home any time soon.

Next is Bill's stroll with Gayle and Nuala. After an awkward introduction, Bill walks a serpentine through a grand concourse with Gayle on his right arm and Nuala his left. The girls want him to come and play where the rainbow ends - a place that Stan has told us, through the stark credit sequences, is total nothingness (or as close as you can get). The enduring image of the trio as they slink along is that of the caduceus, universal shield of the Medical Arts. Physicians, who swear by Apollo, are used as literary and dramatic simulacrum for Christ the Healer. In The Shining, Kubrick dresses Danny Torrance in an Apollo 11 sweater; and of course, Danny's nickname is 'Doc.’ The little doctor Danny is also urged to come away and play, and by a pair of girls no less. Danny and Bill are the Christ at different ages but in the same world: the maze of Satan.

Escorted to Ziegler's bathroom Bill is treated a peek in on the real Victor Ziegler: rapist. Bill may tell himself that ol' Ziggy is just an aging poon-hound get'n'some, but nothing could be further from the truth. The beautiful model with the 'great tits' is a mind controlled sex slave, and not merely, as Ziegler will later scoff: a hooker. There are three features of this scene that merit special attention:

1. The large shower stall in the center of the room.

2. The towels that hang on the towel-rack.

3. Ziegler's quip: “...ah, a snowball, a speedball, something like that. Heroin and Coke.”

Numbers (1) and (2) can be taken at once, just like you do at home. The big glass shower stall and the blue on pale blue towels both inscribe the shape of a cube. The towels in particular form a clear 2d example of a cube, seen with one edge closest to the beholder. The letter 'M' implies this same perspective of a cube. There is little doubt that these cubes stand for (a) the Matrix (b) Free Masonry and (c) the Merovingian Bloodline and muchos more. My own point is of baser stuff: the towels and shower reveal the identity of Victor Ziegler. He is Mephistopholes. The connexion of Santa, Ice, the Cube or Brick and the planet Saturn (who is Satan) has been established. Mephisto is just one more ice-cube in the glass. One more brick in the wall.

It is intriguing that the name Ziegler is Yiddish for bricklayer. Could it be that Ku-brick is telling us the he himself is Ziegler? Perhaps not. But you can bet your bottom dollar that Ziegler has as much power (more!) over the world of EWS as Kubrick over his film version of that world. Stan wanted us to know this.

Victor's account of Mandy's overdose is another cheer (or razz-berry!) at The Wizard of Oz. In OZ, Dorothy and her clique are led into a field of poppies (heroin) where they fall to sleep. But Good Glinda sends snow (cocaine) to wake them up. This bitchin' cocktail is the speedball that Victor says Mandy has taken. Kevin Smith, in his comely little film Clerks, reminds us that a snowball is performed when lovers share, in a kiss, the semen produced by fellatio. You may notice that although Ziegler maintains that it has been five or more minutes since Mandy went over the rainbow, he is just pulling up his pants as Dr. Bill comes to the door. And take special note of the framing of Ziegler's mouth as it overlays the large Klimt-esque portrait of a nude that hangs on the wall behind him. Was Ziegler sharing a snowball with Mandy just before the doctor came to the rescue? There is specific Occult text that supports such an idea. We will learn more as we go looking for Alice.

The Red Queen

Alice has twirled away to the loo. She peed just a short while before leaving home and for some reason worth noting, has to go again. Was she into the hooch before leaving for the party? Maybe, but I think it might be something a touch more sensitive. Alice is in or approaching menstruation. When sly Szandor Szavost chooses Alice to woo, he can smell blood. He drinks her champagne as a bold prelude to his desire to engage in the reversed version of Ziegler's bathroom snowball. He wants to consume her. Period.

Szavost to Alice: Have you seen Victor's collection of renaissance bronzes...do you like the period? Mmmmm...replies Alice with the sound of lips bathed in milk and honey. Renaissance Bronze is the tangy metallic taste of Alice's period; it renews, maybe immortalizes, if you can get at it. Szavost will try. The Occult ritual revealed is related, in poetic code, by Crowley in The Book of Lies. The Stanza in question, called The Way to Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs, is also numbered 69. Go figure.

It is at this point that we draw precariously nigh onto the more dizzying heights of EWS. Da WWWiz proffers a second warning: I have mummy truths to tell. Mock me at your peril.

I never liked a Vampire I didn't meet

OK. Szandor Szavost is a Vampire. There I said it. Szavost, like the best story tellers, sticks to his own story. He is Ovid himself, not a reincarnation, mind you, but Ovid in person. Understand this: I am talking about a real Vampire here, and not merely within what readers may presume to be the imaginary world of EWS. Da WWWiz's Vampire hypothesis strikes right at the heart of the conspiracy hinted by Mr. Leon Weber in his Ears Wide Shut. Recall that said conspiracy moves across the globe from east to west - quite literally fleeing the daylight.

A cursory exam of mainstream Vampire mythos is helpful. The problem with being a Vampire is well known. You must take care to avoid creating new vampires or conspicuous corpses. There is a mob of stake and torch wielding villagers around every corner and man are they pissed. The Vampire community poses the only viable alternative to extinction - the socialization of Vampirism. This is affected through the twin mechanics of education and fashion, symbolized by Nuala and Gayle. Fashion (Gayle) is used to disguise the pantheon of bloodsuckers down through the ages by subtle changes in appearance. Education (Nuala) is straight-up hypnotism: the self-satisfied Cartesian Quadratic framework and its malformed progeny, Objectivism, and no more than a storefront magic trick. All done with mirrors.

Nowadays, Vamps hardly sleep at all, they just change into bats a few hours before dawn and make flaps for the next party westward, where horny housewives, out for a night in society, linger, a little tipsy, just dripping with red red groovy. Yum-yum. And for lady Vamps, a salty seaman is just as tasty and some say twice as nutritious. Come, come, little children - love one another. And so it is that no Vampire who cares for his good name has bothered to kill anyone in aeons - to bite you not. Nowadaze they just wanna eat you out. As for Da WWWiz, count me in.

By comparing the progressive curve of concentric circles, we can extrapolate that the nature of Vampirism is exactly that of One World Judeo/Christo-ethical politic economics and the B.S. objective spiritualism perpetrated every morning from somewhere over Tibet. Every solar day the charming cult of Vamps circle the globe through a chain of what becomes an endless party at the edge of night. This is made possible only by the slower cycloid movement, along the same curve and to the same point, of the parasitic cartel of international banks and churches that serve the necessary social framework to support the champagne life of jet-setting Vampire glitterati.

Baby Love

At home after the party the naked Bill and Alice make out in front of a mirror. The music is Chris Isaak's throbbing “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing.” The pivotal term is baby. As Dr. Bill staggers blindly through the streets of Greenwich Village later on in the movie, he passes the same mailbox (male) over and again. On the side, in graffiti, reads the word baby. The baby in question is the good doctor himself, as the Christ Child. The lost seed looking for a land to find his purchase. And the bad bad thing? Well fucking of course. To Freud, whose theory is at the seat of EWS, every hetero-lay was a session of incest. The only fuck ever is between Oedipus and Jocasta: the Rejects of Eden, whose bloodline flows into the veins of Christ.

The same frame work is played out in the miserable novel and even more miserable film Cold Mountain, a cheeze-ball version of Homer's Odyssey. Cold Mountain is the story of a poor schlub who makes his way across a civil-war zone just to give his seed the proper home and then get killed for nothing. But that's OK cuz he sired a little squirt: a girl. Cold comfort. The sum total of this equation is that men are little else but sperm donors. Kubrick delivers the same mail. Men are lost children. A one in a million shot. Is anyone surprised?

More beautiful is the mirror motif as a tool of MKUltra. Many readers of Da WWWiz are already informed of the meaning of the mirror in programming language. Some extreme theorists may even argue that, in programming sessions, victims are forced to gaze into a mirror, sometimes a broken mirror, to reinforce the shattered persona desired by the programmer. But such vulgarities are hardly necessary and rarely, if ever employed. Faced with the truth of it, conspiracy theorists needs must be disappointed. There is no working MKUltra outside of the already ancient and perfectly codified media deluge that goes back to Noah. You, you trans-finite thumbsucker, paid to see Eyes Wide Shut, didn't you? If you think about it, you are paying still. The price of freedom is your very memory.

We follow the piper for our lives.

Intermezzo: Valses Noble et Sentimental

The graceful gymnopedie that opens the 2nd act is a deft ballet of Middle American Life with a malevolent subtext. Dr. Harford, at the office, softly asserts his blind male chauvinism. He doesn't give even a glance to the women who work for him. He walks on by. Meanwhile, back at home, Alice has a simple and intimate day with her daughter . She is an involved, caring and patient mother. But an evil lurks beneath. This innocent little montage shows a culture careening out of control in the act of soulless consumption and conformity.

I hone in on two special examples. The doctor's exam of a young lad and the scene of Alice and Helena wrapping Christmas gifts. There is a dark bond between these scenes from a marriage.

To start us off we need some shading from master wit Oscar Wilde. In his intro to Dorian Grey, Wilde offers a very tidy commentary on the oceanic subject of ART. The summation of his thesis: All art is useless. As usual, Wilde his having his way with us. The value given art by the unwashed mushrooms of the middle-class is fatuous, a fantasy of good taste. The real worth of art is that it is used by an elite class to manipulate mankind at large. Art in this sense is a Cartesian lattice framework. All of its relationships are presumed unbounded, which is to say, on the exterior of a sphere, as is the phony Cartesian/Newtonian universe. Wilde's art is useless is analog to the MGM motto: Ars Gratia Artis. Wilde prefers wit to Latin. Art, Wilde seems to say, is useless because it is entirely self referential, but not without use. It is the chief tool of the Great Social Cluster Fuck, disseminated through church and corporation as one, to promote the illusion of an unhinged algebraic house of cards that threatens to collapse at any and every moment.

The particular work of art at play in EWS is the 'Passion of the Christ.’ No, not Mel's version. This passion is planted like a land-mine hidden in a school yard. So that you have a chance to see it coming, here is how it trips off...

Dr. Bill examines a wee-feller while a concerned mom looks on. For this instant, the doctor has been cast in the role of Joseph at the nativity scene. A chilly virgin hovers over her angel-boy. The doctor asks of the boy-child two questions one right after the other: Are you looking forward to Christmas? and Does this hurt? (as he touches the boys throat!). These questions are meant to be taken as one. Does it hurt? Christmas, that is? The answer is a killer. Damn right it does, Doc. It is after all, the cannibalism of my eternally resurrected flesh, dude. Touching the boys throat as he does, Dr. Harford recalls that many pre-Gutenberg myths of Christ have him meet his fate upon the gibbet. And of course, Judas, the unmasked Christ, hanged himself.

The melody at Dr. Harford's office plays a canon to the domestic bliss at home. Alice is wrapping an expensive Van Gogh art book. This simple image conveys the role of art in the life of the bourgeois. Middle class values are wrapped-up, packaged, and otherwise starkly meaningless. As culturally Christian consumers the Harfords, like the Americans they stand in for, are rashly unaware of the dark Satanic mill that feeds their breezy, shallow life of consumption. Meta-Christ is crucified every time a credit card is authorized for a pair of Manolo Blahniks or a big screen TV or a donation to the United Way or a trip to Yosemite 'to find myself.’ We have rigorously programmed ourselves to trade in our presumably natural and quite pedestrian desire for hot, man on woman, man on man, woman on woman, sister on brother action, for the chance to self-identify with Christ by going shopping. Sit on Santa's lap. Don't pay a cent until 2012.

And, at least according to EWS, it's better that we don't give in to these carnal urges so easily controlled by our hidden masters. We might accidentally have some fun: forget who we think we are and do as we really want to.

Johnny Appleseed

I have a peculiar idea about the use of weed as a symbol for a space-seed. Could it be that marijuana is actually a seed or virus that carries a message from outside the reach of the orbit of Earth? Compare the well publicized 'secret code' for weed, 420, with the final message (42) delivered by Douglas Adam's Deep Thought, from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Add to this the occult flashcard glyph for the planet and influence of Jupiter, as seen on the tree of life in house number four. Deep Thought is a computer that bears remarkable similarity to another Incredible Machine, a certain HAL, that can now be telegraphed from orbit around Jupiter and right onto the fascination of cuddly Kubrick. If you meditate on it the next time yazz all get hizzy, perhaps a bell will ring. But for now peep in as Bill and Alice smoke some herb in their bedroom and da shizzle hits the fizzle, nizzle.

The main theme of Alice's withering monologue hinges upon a Window. He, the fifth letter of the Hebrew Alpha-Bet and analog to the English letter E, means both Window and Seed. This is a germinal touchstone. Alice delivers her monologue, on the floor with her legs folded, right beneath a big window. The eyes are drawn to the window because Kubrick has rearranged the props on display in the window sill. Where before sat a Christmas card reading 'Peace' and other sundry paraphernalia, now there is a stack of Video Tapes (screen right) and a stack of CDs (screen left) perched in each corner of the window like pillars with Alice's head centered between them. Does she recall her memory of illicit love from the twin media of Philip K. Dick's Valis or the like? Yeah, in a big way. But that is not all. The empty window is Alice's head, or more pointedly, her mind, so the first message of this scene is that the nature of reality is entirely subjective. The window, and by metaphor, Alice's mind, is divinely empty, the so called tabula rasa. A bona fide holy grail to philosophers. Now, with the window at the position of 'north' we can trace the lightning path by spelling out the acronym EWS. North, as the first media, is the empty window/mind and is paired with the topmost house of the tree of life. What resides herein is permanently ineffable and entirely pure. Imagination. Next, at the East, is the second media, which is produced, like video-tape, by the application of magnetic feedback. In the third media, at the Western gate, are the CDs: binary language as the first manifestation of the Logos. At South is Alice's vulva, which as media, acts as the extreme barrier between the material and spiritual realm.

Listen closely to Alice's stress of the English word He as she drops her A-bomb. The He of which she speaks is the young naval officer of her Cape Cod fantasy-fuck. A naval officer is a seaman. A Seaman is semen. Semen carries the seed. The seed is He. Now I am well aware that the proper articulation of the Hebrew letter He is as Hay, but poetic license is at work here folks. Alice's He is the semen of all men, all potential breeding stock. The shell-shocked Bill is learning, for the first time, that a woman's love of a man begins and ends not in the heart but in the loins that will nurture his seed. Alice has unwittingly unleashed the daemon.

It is neat that Kubrick blocks his actors to mirror the deathbed scene in 2001 with Bill as Bowman and Alice, with the window looming over her, as the Monolith. Poor Bill is nowt but a dribble of dust that must enter the living as a seed among millions in the vast and fickle space of Woman-hood. It's no wonder that he doesn't feel so special anymore. Just watch, under Kubrick's tender lighting, as he turns quite yellow.

For pop culture buffs: there is a funky link between this idea of a seed: He, 2001, and the kids TV show The Electric Company. In an oft-run cartoon sketch from TEC, an old man is observed reaching towards a monolithic stone to the music of Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra. As the stone crumbles it reveals a lower case e. The music rises as the old man cries: Eee! Eee! Eee!

The Harfords live in apartment 5a. Ea! Ea! Ea!

What, gentle friend, do you make of that?

Late last night, while we were all in bed...

The phone rings in the marital boudoir, interrupting Alice's revelations. The doctor is needed for a late night house call - a patient has died.

Bill's condolence call to one Marion Nathanson, old maid, is both a mirror to Alice's monologue and is crossed over with Oedipal vertices. As his cab races into the Village, Bill is driven through a fire lane. In The Shining there is a curiously elliptical scene (warning: this scene has been cut from older American prints). In it, Danny and Wendy Torrance sit watching Summer of '42 on TV. So42 is a tale of the love affair of a teen boy and much older woman. Stretched out on the spacious floor of The Shining's Overlook Hotel, a squirrelly Danny Torrance will ask his mother if he can go get his toy fire truck. His clinging mom doesn't want to let him go - but Danny smells smoke. It's the Oedipal fire.

Bill too is about to be scorched by Oedipal determinism. Lou Nathanson lay dead in his bed, where Marion is holding a lonely wake. And in apparent grief this beautiful and older woman will offer herself to the good doctor, heart and soul, just as Alice might to her Seaman if given half a chance. Marion's confession to Harford: I love you, I love you...! is cold hard proof that Alice is on da money. The entirety of Alice's argument is cemented for good. A woman will give everything away for one chance at primal life-giving communion. And just as Dr. Bill died on the inside at Alice's unravelment, so will he end up dead like hopeless Marion's poor dad. His own powers can not save him. The physician heals nothing. His once realized ego is a total shambles.

And Dr. William Harford's journey through Hell is just beginning.

Wandering Dude

As we descend onto the streets of the Village, I would like to overlook the much loved idea that Bill's outlands d'amour on his widening erotomaniacal gyre are the manifestation of the good doctor's own psycho-sexual mentations. Kubrick wanted his audience to come to this very view-point, but it is a false-witness to conceal a fact that few movie-goers can confront head-on: that each and every social transaction in the western-hemisphere and probably the whole-world-wide is enfolded-entire by the mystery of sex. All of them. Havelock Ellis quipped: Sex is the central problem of life. Kubrick divides Ellis' black and white one-off into a spectrum of correspondences and Dr. Bill's every encounter will carry it home. Power (especially in the exchange of money or service) is the basis of social structure, and sex is not only the ultimate expression of this of power, it is its most critical component - just ask algebraic psychoanalyst Lacan (not at all co-incidentally a faithful Freudian).

The basic human need to express ourselves sexually has been decoded and then retooled as the the instrument of mass social-control. I won't speculate that Freud himself, or his inner circle, intended the theory of the psycho-sexual human to be used in such a way as I have edified. But there can be no doubt that Bernays and other 20th century social engineers intended exactly the full range of sensual response to be channeled into the maintenance of the class-based structure of so-called civilization - and they were successful.

Rough Trade

Let's examine Harford's confrontation with the Yalies.

The term homosexual is an oxymoron. One can't have sex with someone of the same sex as oneself. Sex is the act of coupling that may bear progeny. William Jefferson Clinton exploited this semantic distinction to his everlasting infamy. Whatever you are doing, suggests Clinton, it ain't sex unless it might make a baby. Homosexuality could be better termed homoeros. Homoeroticism is one behavior of the children of Pan, but is not sex. Homoeros is a sociological by-product, engendered by the bizarre quarantine of the sexes as they mature through adolescence. One need only attend a gay-pride parade to see how closely the civilized gay community holds the right to freely express their sexual selves with the freedom of being children. There is no western-type homosexuality to be found in isolated tribal cultures and it goes without saying that children in such cultures usually achieve adult sexual expression at a much younger age than in the civilized world. Yes, of course there are homosexuals in these tribal cultures, but this is found mostly connected with the shamanic proclivity to explore the extremes of experience. The shaman is often trans-genderal and is generally regarded with fear and respect - the opposite of how western-homosexuals are treated by the culture they struggle with and within.

Dr. Bill's troubling encounter with the Yalies can now be solved. As a group of the same sex the young men are completely safe to express their normal and childlike homosexual urges in an attack on Bill. A curious proof for this contention from Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451. The firemaster is reaming out two subalterns in his glass-walled office. He is very angry at the two young fireman, who seem a smidge chagrined by it all. In the next moment the firemaster will ask Montag, hero of F451, to organize some sports for the morale of the firemen. Games, sports and everyone's fav, global thermonuclear war, are the well known and well worn bi-roads of male homosexual sublimation. Back in EWS, the Yalies are just a team of pre-pubescent boys in the shower after gym-class, yearning to be touched and to reach out and touch, and the only ones in sight are other little boys.

Within this twenty seconds of EWS lies the answer to the persistently annoying question: why is being gay such a problem, anyway? Well, because the unleashed freedom of sensual expression will cause the complete breakdown of society, that's why.

Economy, Class, Government, Elite Power, all of it will be lost for good as we revert to Eden.

Tiajuana Taxi

The reported homoerotic initiations of Yale's Skull and Bones society give another clue to this scene as a specifically post 9/11/2001 event.

Who remembers David Fincher's dog-daze thriller The Game: where hero Michael Douglas is drugged and dumped in Mexico, literally nailed into a coffin. Of course it's for his own good and the same can be assumed true of Bill's run-in with the gay bashers: the Yahoo-Yalie's are bragging about their recent shenanigans in Mexico and as they meet Bill, one can spy a taco shop across the street. The link here is Mexico. Mexico (and sometimes Spain) is a cinematic shop-code for death or the near death experience. Think, if you like, of the recent simulacra of Q's 2001: Aronofsky's The Fountain. The Fountain is set in Spain and like it's Grandpa 2001, is obsessed with the mystery of death (2001 just hides it much better). Any major-meta-movie whizz will surely tell you the the motif of Mexico/Spain = Death is used over and again, and especially by American filmmakers.

Conspiracy theorists hop around ground-zero, NYC, like jumping beans. Ask and most can give startling details of the myriad web that links the Skull and Bones Society to the protracted events leading up to 9/11. Many a robust young researcher has been exhausted chasing leads to back before the second world war and yonder still. There are some sharp points to be made, no doubt, for those with a nose for finery, but Da WWWiz wishes to show the big rainbow connexion. 9/11 = Death. We have blinked, missed the rapture, and hopskotched the kingdom of Malkuth straight into Hell. 9(10)11. It is just that simple and just that awesome. The overarching mystery of 9/11 is no commonplace conspiracy, but the full-scale initiation of humanity into death culture. EWS is both a document and keystone to these events: on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, all the lost souls were dragged, kicking and screaming, beyond the surly bonds of Time toward Uranus and the depths of Hades. O shit!

As we follow Harford through the streets what must be post 9/11 Manhattan, we dare to broach our most intricate of design.

Her Name is Mystery

Domino, meet Bill. Bill, meet Domino. Domino is not a prostitute. One: she actively pursues Dr. Bill. Two: she is uneasy about discussing both sex and money. Three, and this is proof positive: she kisses like nobody's bid-ness. Pros don't kiss.

The trouble with Domino is not who she so clearly is not but rather: who is she?

Domino unmasked is the Whore of Babalon. She is Sex as Plague but she will spare the doctor. He may be faithful after all. Good luck, as he pulls out of his embrace with Domino, he is away with just a bit of a cough. And as we find out later, she'd have infected him without mercy if he'd failed this little test. She was ready to mark him with her very blood. Domino's apology to Bill: ...it's the maid's day off... is a clue that she may be nearing menstruation and the scrambled eggs in her frying pan tell the same tale. Bill gets out alive... just. As said whore of undeserved infamy, Domino chances Bill a slower journey where Gayle and Nuala wanted to lead him but quick. And just where is where the rainbow ends? Death. Paradise. The flat face of a rectangular domino is just that of the upward faces of a pair of dice. Through Kubrick's crafty punnery we identify Domino, as we have Alice in the rear-view mirror, as Isis, and particularly as her Seventh Manifestation, which is the final barrier between the world of the living and the dead.

Isis, we see, has many faces. Seven, the highest prime from one thru ten, is an occult expression for transfinite complexity. Simply, one can understand that seven is always just one less than INFINITY. Fractions with a denominator of seven repeat a decimal array of seven digits, endlessly.

Money Shot

Here is a rough pitch of our ascent. We must establish, once and for all, the bond between Time and Money and the fraction 7/4. Note that 7/4 is a rebus for July the Fourth. Our 4d Matrix is measured as if within a cube and by four axes: Forward and Back. Up and Down. Left and Right. Before and After (O, Tempora!).

Occult keeners will note that the cube is a prominent symbol of the planet and planetary influence of Saturn. Saturn, our Father Time, is the father/sole generator of Isis, who, as Manly P. Hall tells us, issues fully formed from her father's brow. Isis is seated or standing upon the cube. In 3d there are three faces to this cube. This is famous triple manifestation of the Supreme Goddess taught by J.G. Frazer, Robert Graves and other pagan/occult researchers. Fun cube factoid: When looking at a cube in 3d one can see only 7 corners of the cube. Ancient 2d images of Isis show her upon the square. Placement of 3d/2d gives the integral fraction of... 7/4.

Stoned co-eds of every place and name glow a rich green when they tell you that if you overlay The Wizard of Oz with Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon the color sequence of TWOZ begins precisely at the moment the track “Money” rolls out its first cha-ching. In cinema jargon this is called a money shot. A money shot is any shot that is extra-especially aimed to impress the audience. Please recall that Floyd's “Money” is metered out in the very rare 7/4 time signature.

Deeper investigations will note that a little earlier in TWOZ, the Wicked Witch of the West appears in her guise original (as mean old School Marm Elmira Gulch) at the precise moment of the wake-up chimes that begin Floyd's Time: track #3 of DSOTM. As we go deeper still, keep in mind the slate black gown worn by The Wicked Witch. The Black Robe is a standard symbol of Saturn. Now it just so happens that when you overlay DSOTM with Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey Floyd’s “Time” peals out at the precise moment that the Slate Black Monolith first appears to the proto-human tribe. Later on, when Money begins, the viewer of 2001 will see, for the one and only time in the movie, the IBM logo. It is right there, readable above an on board navigation monitor as the Pan Am Jet docks with the International Space Station. Watch for it!

The connexion of Floyd’s Time to the Black Monolith ought to be straight away clear: Saturn = Time. It happens we prefer that an acronym of International Space Station spells ISIS. IBM is the industry standard for cash registers. And, as stated, I-S-I-S overlain is $$.

ISIS, by now, must = 7. So, it thusly follows that seated upon a square she becomes 7/4. This explains Floyd’s use of the unusual 7/4 Time signature for the track Money.

$$ = ISIS = Money.

The legitimacy of the 2001/DSOTM/Wizard of Oz super-synch-up must be seen to be believed. Here are your instructions.

1. Syncing OZ and DSOTM is simple enough: just start the movie from the MGM Logo at the same time as the first track DSOTM. Put your CD player on replay and watch the whole movie to the strains of Floyd.

2. The 2001/DSOTM sync is a bit trickier, but completely justified. After considerable experimentation Da WWWiz has determined that the album DSOTM is, in fact, actually designed for play over the opening of 2001. Please carry out this protocol yourself. Begin playing DSTOM at the attack of the last note of the Title Overture Also Sprach Zarathustra. If you wonder, gentle friend, why wait!? for the end of Sprach to start up the Floyd sync, consider the following: the theme of Sprach is a cryptologic spelling of the name ISIS. Strauss called his theme, which is inscribed musically as 1-5-1-5-1, the Nature Theme. Nature is of course the Matrix of Illusion and ISIS is understood as the Master of that very same illusion. It should fascinate that by reading the numbers of the Nature Theme as letters we are given ISIS-I.

3. Enjoy the multitude of synchro-niceties. Be the first kid on your block to collect all INFINITY of them!

Now we can extrapolate that annoying little nugget of 9/11 symbol-synch, the precise occult meaning of the number 175. The potential meaning of flight numbers 11, 77, and 93 proved an easy tumble for 9/11 researchers with a bit of occult background. 11 has been clarified. 77 is the Hebraic numeric that means 'OZ', which oughta satisfy on 77 for our purposes. 93 is a bit tougher, but research unearths that 93 is a numeric for Aleister Crowley's word 'Thelema', which means 'The Law'. We will read for this degree just ahead when we face at last, the nature of natural law, but for now, what of the flight numbered 175. As yet, no link is clear, unless...

Well, I’ll bet my bottom dollar that 7/4 = 1.75. So at long last and not to put to fine a point on it: Flight 175 struck the South Tower. It was the second tower to be struck. The attack that most everyone awake saw as it happened. The big moment of 9/11. To coin a phrase: Flight 175 was the Money Shot. Dr. Bill offers Domino One-Fifty for her services, hinting both the nature of Bill's full desires (crudely: $50 per hole), and that he is too shy-shy for the pot-o-gold at the end. Bill's wanderlust circles gingerly toward nowhere, through the maze of the post 9/11 Village of OZ.

Let's join him and go dig some tunes...

Maverick and Goose

Down in the Sonata Cafe, pianist Nick Nightingale is just finishing his last set with a pick-up quartet. His fortune-telling session with his ol' pal Bill is gonna turn out to be the last mistake he'll ever make. Soon he'll be with the fishes in the East River. The sad part is that in this melancholy world of ours, poor Nick can't help but spill the beans to his friend. The explanation for this is found again in the sexual power struggle modeled by Lacan. Nick's and Bill's chat is a magnification of their previous meet at Ziegler's Christmas party; a standard boys club oneupsmanship. The message here is that such exchanges are critical to the programming language of social communication. Men must test their sexual worth as a matter of self-preservation. As Kubrick has already taken home in 2001, only one of us is going to make it big. A guy's gotta take every chance, no matter the caution. It's survival, man.

Through this innocent tete-a-tete Bill will learn that he's not as far up the totem as he has always believed. Nightingale, it seems, knows of a world Bill himself has yet to imagine. Because this is an affront to his sexual ego, Bill cannot let Nick's squawking show him up. He must follow where Nightingale has gone, and go farther still. In this way we understand that both Nick and Bill are victims of an evil mechanism fabricated quite literally for the purpose of upgrading humanity to Supermen. Bill will make it to the red red heart of the Magic Circle, but only to face at last that he is nothing more than a slave to the rhythm. A flash in the pan. Easy to replace. One spermatozoa and about to get flushed... but he don't know it, yet.

And there is greater Gnosis. Bill's and Nick's con-fab is a perfectly woven recapitulation of the betrayal of Christ by Judas, sealed with a kiss. Because this betrayal is the direct action of Judas's free will, we must confront that in EWS, Nick knows that Bill is headed for serious trouble, and probably for death, of a sort. Nick's skittish and amused tone throughout this encounter instruct that it is all a set up. A set up so sophisticated that it operates on the level of reality. Given his personal exposure it is a sad but nevertheless amusing irony that Nick doesn't fully acknowledge he too faces jeopardy. Later, we shall explore the possibility that Nick's future is really quite bright, but for now, before crossing the street to Rainbow Fashions, just a caw about Kubrick's choice of Nightingale as the name for Bill's navigator into the underworld. Of course, a bird sings, and Nick is a perfect pigeon. But: harken to the sly parallel to Cruise's Maverick and Anthony Edward's Goose, from Top Gun. Both Nightingale and Goose are avians who will act as a guide to Cruises' doppelgängers. And like Goose, Nick is soon destined to kiss the sky.

The Costumer is Always Right

Bill buzzes Rainbow Fashions hoping to find proprietor and one-time patient, a Mr. Peter Grenning. He is greeted by the irascible Mr. Millich, who explains that Grenning has moved to Chicago “...over a year ago.” The metaphor is at least two-fold. Peter Grenning is the severed penis of eternal greenman Osiris, object x of Occult worship. But one flap westward along the Vampire Great Circle, known to 'the in crowd' as the 20th Century Unlimited, is Chicago: the American Mecca of Freemasonry for 100 years. Bill is way behind the curve, for even following the convolutions of 9/11, he hasn't figured in the necessity of moving the money out before the fire. Dr. Bill is the last Manhattan Man. Dazed and bankrupt.

The interior layout of Mr. Millich's quaint olde shoppe, Rainbow Fashions, has an interesting ability. It rearranges itself every night. Fans of the marvelous Alex Proyas flick Dark City ought to twig to this right away. Dark City is a comicbook boiler-plate for the Manipulation of Mankind by an Invisible Elite. And so it goes...

In Rainbow Fashions Kubrick interlaces image and text from three of his early works: 2001, A Clockwork Orange and Lolita.

The long black carpet of the display room is Kubrick's Monolith. Kubrick uses the same trick in The Shining when Danny reaches to touch the door of Rm. 237. Bill's nightmare-ride is initiated by a likewise touchstone - the black carpet upon which he stands. And the same promenade of ghouls is traced straight from the closing scene of ACO. In it, Alex de Large, hero of Orange, is number-one with a bullet. His trials would make Bill's seem like a trip to the Bronx Zoo. But he is of a wee-bit tougher stuff. In the final shot of ACO we see Alex at the old in-out-in-out with a quite malenky young devotchka who would obviously rather be elswhere. Flanking the lovers are two rows of applauding gentry, dressed in Edwardian Sunday-best, urging them onward in their abandon. Bill, on Millich's carpet, between the rows of costumed mannequins, is at the same party. Unlike de Large, he will be put out on his ear. I think it is fair to say that droog Alex is the reincarnation of Bill, the capitulation of Bill's failure to break the chains of Oedipal determinism. As Alex, Bill is stripped once and for all of his misgivings and neurosis. Alex is a pure living machine and will hear the cheers of Valhalla as easily as falling out of a window. Dr. Bill, on the other hand, will have to be patient.

And what of Lolita, so dolorous and hazy. The sitting area, where Lee-lee is caught inflagrante delicto by Mr. Millich, playing house with her Japanese boy-toys, is a cozy Reichian Orgone room that everyone wishes they had in the back-yard or basement. Inside it everyone is a child and it's perfectly OK if that childish magic turns into sexual exploration. The Organism demands it. Making her escape from daddy's put-on rage, Little Miss Millich, just as Lolita to Humbert Humbert, will whisper a sweet nothing into Dr. Bill's ear: You can love me. It is the featherlight touch of a genius. The pure sexual energy of children can not be suppressed, says Stan. Willy-nilly - for as we will be assured when we return our costume to the ruthless old Mr. Millich, young desire can be diverted into a commercial concern.

Swing Low Sweet Chariot

In his taxi outside Somerton, Dr. Bill tears in two a one hundred dollar bill, to persuade his driver to wait for him. First: the position of Dr. Bill in relation to the cabbie. It is a mirror to just before, at Rainbow Fashions, when Miss Millich stands behind the brave doctor to hide from her father's raging. Connoted herein is the framework of a psycho-sexual power structure. Miss Millich takes a position of control, she has Doctor Bill wrapped around her finger. In the back seat of the chariot, Bill holds the same current of sexuality over his driver. This image repeated later as Ziegler delivers his veiled threat on the lives of Bill and his family, in his billiard room. The stress is that power is wielded from above and behind. Roughly the position of a movie-goer unto the lens of the projection room. This is way, way more than a blithe academic statement about power of the filmmaker over his audience - it's the working of a master programmer on the collective soul.

The torn hundred is the rending of the Mother. The essence is that of Isis, the eternal woman. We are being treated to another variation of the inexorable link between Money, in particular American Money, and the Goddess. A cursory look at part of the Gnostic Myth: the immortal human, Christ/Lucifer, the Wandering Jew, pulled himself away from his Father's perfection as an act of self-discovery. The best analog is that of the Buddha, who left his father's walled palm-garden to achieve enlightenment. Enlightenment and Illumination are one mechanism. Anyway, in Gnostic terms, so that the eternal child would not fade away and die at last, the Great Mother will rend her own body and use a piece of herself to surround him as he tumbles endlessly across the cosmos in search of a home he will never find. This womb and its stillbirth are the twins of PKD's Valis, Isis and Osiris, designated mourners one to another. When Bill tears money he is re-enacting the really-big-shoo of the Gnostic Cosmic Magic Trick, he is tearing a woman in half.

Also present here in the cab is the idea of re-deem-shun. Just as Bill, in just a few wild and weird minutes forward, will be re-deemed by the Mysterious Woman, he will redeem the torn bill for his ride home to the safety of his true-love's arms.

Semper Fi

It is time to decode the password to the ball: FIDELIO. There are many intriguing facets to this term. It is the name of a Beethoven Opera with a thematic motif similar to EWS. It is the name of magazine, published by the Schiller Institute: baby of American political marginalist Lyndon H. LaRouche. Schiller, who penned the poem that inspired Beethoven's 9th, wrote, often controversially, on politics and economy. The Schillerian doctrine is the foundation to LaRouche's core philosophy. Kubrick, as Leon Weber tells us in his Ears Wide Shut, subscribed to Fidelio Magazine. I can't help but wonder how he might've read and chuckled as LaRouche strains to marry a utopian socio-economic plan with the principles of transfinite math. LaRouche is a really smart guy who falls into a old trap. He seems bitter at the triumph of the oligarchic Il Nuovi faction that has the world in the cruel grip of a talon, while at the same he celebrates the unutterable perfection of Nature. By his own carefully weighted arguments, we must expect LaRouche to hate the beaver building a dam as much as he does the economic and political factions that have built his own world. The mature response to such a discovery, Da WWWiz thinks, is one of awe and not of rage, however politely expressed.

FIDELIO is a seven letter word that means faithful. We speak not of the faith shown by one person or committee of persons to another, nor of the faith in a speculative god or gods. Instead, this is the faith of complete abandon, which one must show before being permitted to enter the circle and cross the abyss of chaos. By pronouncing his right to entrance, Bill trips in behind the seventh curtain and into...

The Houses of the Holy

The winding drive up to Somerton is a look back at both The Shining and Full Metal Jacket. I am thinking of the Sidewinder, the road leading to the Overlook Hotel, and of the crooked-creeks of the Nam seen from the helicopter ride on Joker's trip to Hotel Company. Kubrick superimposes the plan of the Overlook Hotel onto the Ten Rooms of Somerton and by including a similar snap-shot from on high in FMJ, implies the whole stage of human geography is a vast maze of laundry chutes-and-ladders.

The ritual underway is, as discussed, sexual magick against the forward progress of linear time. Horny euro-trash and nouveau rich? Not at all. Satanic Cultists? Now yer talkin’. The music to Bill’s entrance is called Backward Priests. Inside the circle Red Cloak swings his censer, a circle within a circle, and dispatches pairs for the hieros-gamos so carefully calculated, across oceans of time, to forestall the Apocalypse.

And what of the head-scratcher: how is Bill recognized so quickly once inside Somerton? In his lecture series Occult Signs and Symbols, Rudolph Steiner describes the visual faculties of the Atlanteans, our genetic masters. Where the ordinary naked man sees a Vitruvian frame-up, Atlanteans instead see a signature aura. Consider the way in which Dr. Bill is framed with the spotted colored lights of EWS's many Christmas trees. This is how the supreme Occultists and their minions at Somerton discover his identity so easily. He is literally naked to them. The costume conceals nothing. Dr. Harford is swathed in the Emperor's New Clothes.

As Bill enters the ritual red room, please pay special notice to the light from the lamp against the wall. Above the lamp you will find an inverted triangle of light. This is the same eye over the pyramid implied by the lamp in the opening shot of Alice slipping from her dress - but this time the triangle is inverted. Why is this? Well it so happens that the commonly depicted eye over the triangle, the eye of illumination itself, is a trump l'oeuil. As one ascends the pyramid of illumination, it turns out that this eye is actually inverted! One must picture an hourglass. The entire of creation pours from the top and onto the chaotic pyramid below. It is not until near the top of the wood pile that one can behold that the eye of creation is inverted to the world. The hourglass is the tool of Father-Time. Kubrick cements this keystone with the slow zoom in on Ziegler, the brick-layer, looking down and then nodding at Bill from the upper-deck of the red ritual room. His mask wears a tricorn hat with one point frontmost. We can now assure ourselves that Ziegler is the highest present emissary of Satan, perhaps Satan himself.

Next, note the woodwork that adorns the chair of the Hierophant Red Cloak. It is the same as this masonic emblem, and surprise, an inverted black triangle gleams above it all. The good times at Somerton are the wellspring of chaos from which our pyramidic reality is formed. This is why these strange goings on seem somehow outside of time -they are right at the bottleneck of an hourglass. The natural result of unbridled chaos is a stable pyramid. Somerton is, for tonite, the pin-point location from which that chaos spills into the world below. And above it all at the 33rd degree: the dark prince of the many cults of Saturn. The Old Lamplighter. Mr. Mephistopheles.

The formal structure of the kabbalistic Tree of Life yields the same fruit. The supernal triangle is separated from the lower world by our now familiar chasm of chaos. As discussed, in the Magickal Ritual of the Hexagram, to this nexus of chaos is brought the planetary body of Saturn. The Earthly aim of this ritual is the combination of the upper inverted triangle of light with that of the lower triangle of the material world. Such is the art that drives the doings at Somerton. The two triangles, which also form a Star of David are not only the tongue/genital combination of lovers in 69, they are also the deltas of the pubis coupling in the act of commonplace man on woman intercourse.

Sexual abandon is the ultimate act of chaotic magick and it is the basis for universal order. Ordo ab Chao.

A Bat Out of Hell

The Mysterious Woman and her sacrifice on behalf of Dr. Bill is as I have described: the act of giving birth into the cosmos. There is only one woman and she must give her blood to the survival of her eternal child. This passion is necessary to the development of Bill into a real adult, passed through the refiner's fire and updated to the brutal necessities of maintaining reality at a cosmic level. Amanda Curran may die, just as the American Century of Liberty must also die, but thanks to this sacrifice Dr. Bill will live on, upgraded into a new metal. A 21st century man. A New World Man. A man who has earned his lumps and knows the painful truths that scurry in the shadows of the heart and mind.

Imagine, try to empathize, with the amalgam of Bill's emotions at this moment. He is probably still buzzed from his weed-sesh with the wife. Combine this with events of his circumambulations: Bill must be glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife. Supremely paranoid. The events of 9/11 are quite fresh, no more than 3 months gone. Still an open wound. By squirming like a camel through the proverbial eye and into Somerton, looking for a chance to forget his nearly unbearable suffering, Bill has come crashing into the truth he sought to avoid.

Any open-minded meditation upon Sept. 11, 2001, floods the mind with at first incomprehensible riddles. The brave seek answers and begin to connect the dots. A shape begins to appear. The seeker can stop with a complete hypothesis: evil men, shadow men, bankers and oilmen, a secret one-world power. Some seekers go deeper into the woods: Satanic Goofball Cultists and their midnight rituals. Nazi connections. The Fourth Reich steps out from behind the American Flag. Not satisfied, a few scrabble onward: an at least rudimentary knowledge of Occult Technology is a must have. Occult science is that of metaphor and the big truth of 9/11 is that it is a Hierophantic event, planned for two-thousand years by the priests of On and Tibet and altogether inevitable. Beyond this third degree, aspirants court the Abyss itself, gaze into the yawning yaw of Yah-weh and cry out: More Light! The result is self-evident. For Doctor William Harford, the journey was a lightspeed leap from ignorance to Gnosis. He just growed up. Fast.

Mystery lovers: spoiler alert! What would have happened to Dr. Bill if the grateful Amanda Curran had not stopped the proceedings and redeemed him. He would have been invited, noblisse oblige, into the Vampire circle. These folks, vamps, I mean, aren't total assholes. Every now and again they want a little fresh blood at court, to keep things fun. And we have our answer to Alice's act one query: Why does Ziegler invite us to this thing every year? The Harfords are being screened for their potential contribution. Tasteful, discreet, good-looking, not too stupid, etc. Da WWWiz, it seems, doesn't have a chance in hell.

For now we follow him home in the wee hours, hide the costume, and find Alice in the throws of a terrible dream.

The dream is a schoolbook allegory of the fall from Eden. The sin of shame. Now, Alice's handsome able seaman stands in for the seed of knowledge partaken by Eve. As she describes her dream and how she laughs at Dr. Bill, we must know he has hit rock bottom. His carefully managed image of upstanding citizen, healer, and pocketful of Grade A Jizz has been decimated. He may not confront it just yet, but he knows at last that he is one of the fallen children of Cain, born from the stain of Eve's immortal sin and cursed to roam perdition until the end of time. He knows where he is for the very first time, and it's the only game in town.

Nothing Could Be Finer

It's morning and Bill has yet to sleep.

We'll tag along with Dr. Bill as he retraces his steps through reveries gone by. At Gillepsie's, next door to the Sonata Cafe, Dr. Bill will learn that the pretty waitress did a little ballin' the jack with carefree Nick Nightingale. As she coyly states: ...he comes in here. It seems that everyone on planet-flesh has been getting freaky but our hero Bill. He is totally sexually inept. He projects himself onto his objective world and adores the image, but can not love the other. A fully prepared product of western consumer culture, he directs his sexual urges into his phony social-identity. Die cast action figure of the Grand Oedipal Narrative, this guy is a lay only a mother could love, for even within the tortured angst that is unrequited lust, he will turn away every chance at get'n'some strange. Marion, Domino, Miss Millich, all of them brushed-off. Even the ready-willing-free-and-beautiful Sally. Sally, whom we'll suss is Domino healed of her HIV by Bill's very touch and transformed into a dreamgirl who just wants to say thanks! Any sane person would fuck 'em all. Even the kinky desk clerk at the Hotel Jason, Nick's old digs, is worth a tumble. What I mean here by sane is of specific gravity. Sanity is a virtue defined by a sole component: the conscious awareness that we are a living in a mad house - out of our minds. Welcome to the Hotel California. As balladeers The Eagles inform, it can be a lovely place, if you are on the proper medication. According to Wilhelm Reich, who was imprisoned and his work destroyed as a threat to society, the right medicine is the freedom of the organism. Unbounded sexual expression. Our Occult Masters reserve this practice for themselves alone. The coherence of social order demands it.

For Dr. Harford, it will be necessary to pull away the mask of his Mystery Self before being able to be sexually free and without guilt. Moreover, as he will read in the funny papers, his social impotence has cost someone their life. This visceral shock carries with it a sub-textual cue. Is EWS a form of Reichian or Gestalt therapy upon its audience? Therapy to ease the transition into a New Age, which dares to promise that we can once and evermore be children? I guess we'll see.

Next stop, the Hotel Jason, where Bill learns that Nick might be in too deep and we are treated to another page from the Gnostic Mythos. From the Evangelion of Judas comes the heretical account that Jesus demanded that Judas betray him to the Romans. Jesus consoles Judas, who wishes not to obey, that although his trials for this deed will be most difficult, he will be rewarded. Jesus tells Judas that his star will shine more brilliantly that any of the other apostles. This model gives a metaphoric definition of the reward, to Judas the betrayer, of thirty pieces of silver.

Silver is second only to gold. And so we see that Judas is second only to the glory of Christ. This secret teaching is lain over EWS. During most of their meeting at The Sonata Cafe, the letters S-o-n, from the Sonata Jazz neon sign, glow a silvery blue next to Nick's head. Contrast the amber gold of Bill's brewski to Nick's gunmetal Vodka Tonic. And Nick carries a silver pen in his suit jacket pocket. Kubrick validates the Gnostic myth. Jesus made a sacrifice for mankind. Judas made the same sacrifice for Jesus. There is a second son. There will be a Second Sun.

But for now, Bill returns the costume to Rainbow Fashions. And the mask is missing. Hmmm...

Vincent and Theo

The return visit to Millich completes another clew to the technology of the EWS conspiracy. Every morning, it is the Japanese who are first to work, up with the sun and gettin' to business. Their business: the art game that Szavost spoke of to Alice at the Ziegler's Christman Ball. Compare the blocking from the act two scene where Alice and Helena wrap gifts, to that same night, at Rainbow Fashions, where Millich pulls a velvet cape from a wall hook to expose Japanese businessman #1 shivering in his BVDs. Millich has unwrapped the same Van Gogh wrapped-up athome by Alice. This pair of scenes edify the voodoo process of pricing. The Japanese are very fond of art and pay any price to own it. Thus, with the rising sun, we can trace both the slower progress of snivilization at large right along with the practice of east-to-west usury denounced in essays by LaRouche and his believers at Fidelio Magazine. Art, in EWS, is the metaphoric archetype for the desire of consumer culture. The asians get it first and pay the most.

Moving westward, both value and quality decrease. And so it is that by nightfall, Bill will see the vestal beauty of the alabaster Miss Millich debased into the corpse of Amanda Curran.

If I Knew You Were Coming...

After his useless return to the gates of Somerton, Dr. Bill will visit with Domino's friend Sally and be stalked as he roams the streets of Greenwich Village. He'll grab a newspaper and duck into Sharkey's Cafe. The paper has a grim report.

But first, about Sally: Sally is Domino. Kubrick is trying to tell us that there is quite literally only one woman, with many faces. Mother, Sister, Daughter, Wife. All as One. We might infer that if Bill was ready to open himself Sally would have made healing love with him. The New Age carries the promise of free sensual expression. An expression free not only of social or moral complication but also of the slightest guilt. The good Doc still isn't ready. He needs a first hand look at the death of the 20th Century Value System on a slab before him. Too bad, Sally is kinda cute and probably a monster in bed. Instead, Bill wanders out into the Village where he flees a scary lookin' stalker. When is this numbnuts gonna get the message? Soon enough.

I want to take this opportunity, as we visit the morgue to see the body of the late Mandy Curran, for a look at an interesting synchronicity that lends itself to the notion that the world we inhabit is but a the ripple of a dream. EWS is identical in thematic structure to the recent The Last King of Scotland, with Forrest Whittaker. TLKOS tells the story of a callow young doctor who fancies himself an idealist. This doctor will befriend a shirtless Idi Amin early on in the movie. Later, he will work for Amin. And we will follow him into a morgue to find his dead lover, murdered by Amin's ruthless machine. Dr. Bill will be put through the same paces by Victor Ziegler. When he meets Amanda Curran in Ziegler's luxurious john, Victor is shirtless. Now, at the morgue, Dr. Bill finds that someone who he loved has died, and at the behest of Bill's own employer. It is up to the reader to decide themselves the significance of this dual occurrence. Is our world a dream where such co-incidences spring forth from the imagination, or are we being manipulated by an inscrutable class of invisible puppet-masters? Da WWWiz prefers that it's a dream. Safer that way.

Get Thee Behind Me, Victor!

In his opulent billiard room Ziegler will sum up for Bill the final account of his misadventures. Victor doesn't have to spell it out, and as anyone knows who has ever talked to someone really powerful, these people NEVER spell it out.

Instead Ziegler will sketch an outline for Bill to color in on his own.

One look at Victor holding his cue-stick looming next to his red-felted pool table, the position of the green lamps in a tricorn configuration over his head, tells the whole story. He is the great force behind the proceedings at Somerton. Master of Masons. His glib and sinister account of events is a ghastly game of blind mans bluff. It's like this Bill. These are the things we do. We fuck our stable of slaves as we enslave the masses. We perform black rituals and in so we control everything. The only reason you get out alive is 'cuz I kinda like ya kid, you've got chutzpa. But you have been warned. This is the way of things. Grow up and get used to it. It's a New Age.

Here, for the enjoyment of all, is the summation of the Law of that Age, from The Book of the Law.

Liber Oz:

The law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Thou hast no right but to do thy will. Do that and no other shall say nay.

Every man and woman is a star.

There is no god but man.

Man has the right to live by his own law --

To live in the way that he wills to do:

To work as he will:

To play as he will to rest as he will:

To die when and how he will.

Man has the right to eat what he will:

To drink what he will:

To dwell where he will:

To move as he will on the face of the earth.

Man has the right to think what he will:

To speak what he will:

To write what he will:

To draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will:

To dress as he will.

Man has the right to love as he will:--

'Take your fill and will of love as ye will,

when, where, and with whom ye will.

Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights.

'The slaves shall serve'.

Love is the law, love under will.

Given the mastery of Kubrick, no one should be at all bothered that the opaque density of Ziegler's primer on the facts of life actually lends more weight to the film as a picture of the real world. In my research I have found everything from the contention that EWS is an Illuminati mind control tool to the fanciful idea that Kubrick was trying to reveal the secrets of the elite, and was murdered for doing so. These seductive notions may indeed be true, but I am not so sure. To me, EWS is a picture of the world as we all know it to be, in our own dark and wounded hearts and I think that it is designed to help mitigate that world, to help everyone see what is right before their eyes.

It is here in the Billiard Room, we propose our final combination, to debunk the elusive hypothesis of Weber's Ears Wide Shut. First, regarding that EWS is an attempt to realize a best of breed movie about a conspiracy. Well, maybe so, but Da WWWiz would have to rebuff that every Kubrick film is about the very selfsame conspiracy. Thereby, EWS is a best of breed Kubrick movie and by extension a best of breed Movie movie. The correct category for Eyes Wide Shut, as it compares to other movies is this: it is not a movie, it is a Total 20th Century Codex. The whole she-bang of life on Earth in the good ol' 1900's can be extracted from the metaphor of EWS.

This is a large claim so I will stand on it. The key is the number of the Harford's apartment, numbered 5A. This motif is used throughout the film. Kubrick is numbering the age that he depicts as the Fifth Age, the Piscean Age, which is grinding to a halt as you read. The magnetic power of Kubrick's metaphor is that it clings to the external world from which it is manifested and somehow carries it's audience across into impossible abyss of the unleashed imagination foretold as the Age of Aquarius. EWS is an Ark. By the method of housing reality for posterity EWS is the one and only cinematic equal to the impossible Quintuple Axel, and likewise it defies gravity. Events not made in any way explicit are implied to the level of absolute certainty. Earth culture has been shaped, for 2000 years, by western values, and the World of EWS is tied on every level to the mutli-colored arc of that civilization. It's all inside.

The second hypothesis I'll tackle is that of the conspiracy in and of itself. Let's start with what it isn't.

It isn't...

• the conspiracy of a one-world banking oligarchy once based in Venice.

• a cabal of cabala: Rosicrucian scum-bags who've nowt better to do than play at black magic by night while by day they pick the pockets of the John Q. Public straight down to the third-world lint ball at the bottom.

• Nazi Vampire Jet-Setters.

...but wait, you cry, and you are right, the conspiracy of our concentrations is all of those things but so much more, my long-suffering peruse-ers. It the conspiracy of TIME. Somewhere, hovering over Tibet, Satan and his A-Team tinker with Solomon's clocks, and once, every two-thousand years or so, at the end of an age, they solve for Pi. The events of Sept 11, 2001 are both predicted and depicted by EWS. When Alice drops her dress we can pinpoint the undoings of EWS as just after 9/11. Compare these images of the Thoth Priestess, the Waite Priestess and the nude Alice Harford with the words attributed to ISIS by M.P. Hall in The Secret Teachings of All Ages: I, Isis, am all that has been, is, or will be, and no mortal man has ever me unveiled. Kubrick shows ISIS stripped bare. The Twin Pillars of Boaz and Joachim have tumbled down and we have entered the land of the dead. Eyes Wide Shut is the chronicle of the secret conspiracy behind those events. The greatest conspiracy the universe has known. And we're all in on it.

Masque of the Red Death

The game has ended and the players have mostly gone home, but there are one or two loose ends to tie.

There is a phenomenon observed by the Science of Sleep Study. In a marital bed, one partner alone will move to the side of the bed their lover uses. Kubrick uses this fact to expound his mystery of the missing mask. Disturbed by her dream at the end of Act Two, Alice is on Bill's side of the bed (you'll remember him finding his wallet on the bedside table in Act One). But now, next to the mask on Bill's pillow, Alice sleeps on her own side of the bed. We are meant to infer that the mask is Bill. When you watched the Jim Carrey vehicle The Mask, I am sure you were goodly amused that he just couldn't get rid of that mask, however he might try. We may understand that Dr. Bill Harford has the same problem. He owns this mask. It is his real face, a composite of social and cultural co-ordinates that until moments ago, Bill thought was an authentic personality. It is all there is to him. There is nothing underneath. It is here that Dr. Bill, as he breaks down to the soul, has completed the Saturnine processes of the Alchemical Wedding. He is purified. He is awake. His confession to Alice is the easy part. But what will he do with the rest of his life?

Business As Usual

At the toy store with Helena, Bill and Alice take a second honeymoon. They have been shattered and put back together, better than before. And, as the sign for the tinker-toy K'nex tells from the wall of the store, their wedding is built to last. It's a marvel and a pity that the effect didn't rub off onto the real life marriage of the Cruise's, for the good of the kidz'n'all. Even so, I, for one, am happy for them, the lot of them and their collective serial spouses. They seem to be gettin'-on just fine in life. But here, at the end of my journey through Eyes Wide Shut, I worry what it all means to me, livin' in a trailer park with my mother. Me and the faceless millions like me. No chance at all of getting laid.

What I do know, as the Jazz Suite Waltz rises for the third and final time, is that the conspiracy theories are right, but oh so wrong. Sure, we the masses are but slaves to the consumer middle class who are in turn the dice in a global and probably universal game of social and genetic Yahtzee, played by some eldritch race of 4th dimensional pain-sucking lizards. I know it. But I also know that there is nothing anyone can do about it short of steam-rolling Earth to good-old flat again. Our reality is in the shape a pyramid: the most enduring structure imaginable. That's that.

Life is a pyramid scheme and it ain't gonna tumble. And if'n you're at the very bottom of that tower or at the very top doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this town. My town - Domino Falls. 'Cuz here, all of us are scrambling for a toehold as the sands of the ages thunder in from chaos above.

Fuck.

Roll Credits.

The End?

“The number one threat… is bears.”

- Stephen Colbert

I. Crypto-K Genesis

After decades of hype and speculation, December 21, 2012 ultimately came and went without much fanfare. Much like when our compu…

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Topics include: teaching in the modern world, expanding grey matter, the occult significance of the taxi, Crypto-K as LAMinate, Joachim of Fiore, Philip K Dick, Paul Thomas Anderson, the secret of Phantom Thread, Boogie Nights as a Laminate of The Shining, visual space vs literate space, sync as practice not theory, syncing Deadpool and Wolverine, Megalopolis, and Twin Peaks: The Return.

They are accompanied by a song from their mutual friend, the late Mark LeClair, a founding synchromystic who blogged about Stanley Kubrick and synchronicity as the Wrong Way Wizard in the halcyon days of 2007 to 2014.

Follow Bill Klaus on X.

Two of Bill’s blogposts referenced in the discussion:

https://iahuasca.blogspot.com/2024/11/december-1979.html

https://iahuasca.blogspot.com/2024/11/arithmetic-in-chokmah.html

Here’s what Elon’s slop-machine made of the first episode of We Don’t Talk About Crypto-K (after a little training and encouragement):

In the conversation with Bill Klaus on 12/7/2024, topics range from modern education to the esoteric symbolism of taxis, contrasting tech algorithms with human intelligence. "Crypto-K" is explored as a metaphor for cognitive expansion, drawing connections to mystics like Joachim of Fiore. Philip K. Dick's VALIS theory is discussed, suggesting media as a conduit for hidden messages. The dialogue then shifts to synchromysticism, analyzing film syncing with music for deeper interpretations, particularly Kubrick's films through numerology. It ends by promoting synchromysticism as a healing practice, encouraging personal exploration in finding esoteric connections across media.

Sounds like a good time, right? So press play and enjoy!

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