Symposium on the Devil.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Mmmm, I see the bit you meant now, but I better stop posting on top of my own posts. It explains the earlier call from the other guy, saying there's someone shooting at the stage. Meredith was possibly in his "combat stance" before the camera ever reached him, and was approached, and fought, then rolled out of the turmoil just as we first see him here....

The unusually long barrel on the gun, apart from being numerous types of long-barelled pistols, could've been an average .22 or .44 with a silencer. Hence the guy shouting about someone firing at the stage, though no shots were audible.

Hunter did seem to roll out of a hell of a situation, all of a sudden, apparently producing the gun at the same time, on a closer watch...

I'm going to stick with my original vote, though.

I dunno.

[justdrew]

well, what I think is the angels already knew he had a gun from earlier observations, he had drawn their attention before and had been around with the gun all day at least. one of them might well have felt it while bumping up against him or something. at any rate I believe they knew and decided to kill this kid. the method is actually a standard bike gang trick that I swear I've read described elsewhere, maybe in hst's book.
Anyway: Angel A located toward the stage pushes him hard back away and to the left probably having said something racist to provoke. MH falls back but gets up and pulls the gun on angel A. angel B jumps and knifes MH from behind. it's a simple team strategy to allow you to stab a gun wielder to death and call it 'self defense' - really, if he hadn't pulled the gun, he might be alive today, but he thought he "had-to"/"could" in order to scare the guy who'd just attacked him. so you see what a dirty trick this is to pull. I suspect biker gang types had been pulling this gutless stunt for over a decade by the time of 69. easy way for one to earn his 'colors'. if they'd just left him alone the gun wouldn't have been pulled.

[Et in Arcadia ego]

He had already been stabbed once before he returned into the camera's field of view at the end. What you see here is the end of the assault against him, not the beginning.

The initial contact is not present on this footage.

Wait. What? I believe you, but what is your source for this?

Oh man, its in here somewhere. I ate this thread alive for about 6 hours on one of my days off this week and read as much as I could get my hands on..

My source is here somewhere tho.

[compared2what?]

Okey-doke. I will bow to consensus.

It doesn't invalidate any argument. However, just for sake of precision:

I don't think the sequence showing Jagger noticing something in the crowd, then MH w/gun being tackled is really evidence that you can take to the bank as proof that it happened that way in real time.
.
The picture cuts to that, but it's a different camera, so it might have been filming exactly what Jagger's looking at while he's looking at it. That wouldn't affect the sound continuity. And it might have seemed like the best they could do with what they had. .

And I doubt they had enough coverage for reaction-shot style editing. Which really didn't get as rapid as that would have had to be, stylistically speaking, until the '80s, anyway, I don't think. Definitely, we're all used to a much quicker visual beat now than anyone would have imagined using for anything other than special purposes then.

But my point is: that's a reasonable doubt issue, wrt timing.

[justdrew]

while I doubt MH was a programed assassin, the whole event seems setup to be sold as a bad trip. 300,000 people, in that venue for over 24 hours most of them, the truth is for the most part it was peaceful and wasn't the extent of bad trip that it's been made out to be. the authorities wanted an end to this sort of gathering and used marketing/public relations/psi-war/propaganda techniques to make sure it was sold as the "end of the sixties" and a horrible experience from day one.

personally, no way would I ever go to a mass gathering like that. 10 gatherings of 30,000 people would have been much better.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

[quote="American Dream"]
Despite the fact that he fancied himself a high adept of the Psychedelic Illuminati, runnining off to the Isle of Man to bring back more magickal texts for his friends in San Francisco, and believed in a kind of Nitzchean/psychedelic eugenics, Hank Harrison sounds like a miserable fuck to me...[quote]

Despite? I see those things as being mutually inclusive, if not inseparable.
Every "high adept" ends up a bitter and miserable and vindictive old fuck, or a bitter old grinning fool and dupe. And then they die. Just like the rest of us.

Surely the pattern has been noted by now. Magick just isn't working, any more than the global free market or renewable energy or immortalisation is.

The self-help industry as pioneered (very originally and beautifully) by Crowley is just an endlessly prolonged intelectual dry wank, aimed at discovering what every child already knows - Do what feels best for yourself, so long as you don't hurt anyone (and if you do, too bad for them) but be careful not to get caught.

It's the philosophy of the borstal.

He barely had the discipline, or the lack of humanity, to obey his own teachings. He must've been stunned whenever someone took him seriously.

That goes for every other guru and mufti and bishop too. No wonder they're always laughing.

I fear I am in the wrong thread. Or just rambling generally.

Bedtime, I think. G'night all.

[IanEye]

anyone know who this guy is? one of the SF based organizers talking early in the film.

that is Rock Scully.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Scully

[American Dream]

I must say, the Wikipedia article doesn't tell the whole story. Rock Scully procured lotsa heroin (and other drugs) for Jerry Garcia, from what I understand, and slinked off with Mr. Garcia for many "lost weekends", too. He was considered a "bad influence".

It should be pointed out that at the same time many, many fans were being systematically entrapped into drug felonies, and incurring heavy sentences at early ages. The band knew what was going on (DEA "Operation Dead End"), but never warned the Deadheads how much danger they were in. Oh well I guess Phil Lesh visited some people in jail, and I think they gave ten thousand dollars to Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Ahh, the wonders of drug abuse...

[IanEye]

I must say, the Wikipedia article doesn't tell the whole story. Rock Scully procured lotsa heroin (and other drugs) for Jerry Garcia, from what I understand, and slinked off with Mr. Garcia for many "lost weekends", too. He was considered a "bad influence".

hi A_D - oh yes, i always consider wiki just a 'starting off' point to doing research, not the end all and be all.

i just wanted to ID the man for 'justdrew'....

[American Dream]

IanEye wrote:

i always consider wiki just a 'starting off' point to doing research, not the end all and be all.

i just wanted to ID the man for 'justdrew'....

No problem IanEye- that is awesome that you I.D.'d him. I just wanted to add the other side of the story about these so-called leaders of the psychedelic underground. It's a crazy story that needs to be told!

[justdrew]

i just wanted to ID the man for 'justdrew'....

and thanks for that. didn't know the dead's manager was involved, very interesting. I wonder if he was just there booking the band or doing more to get the concert to happen. I'm still not exactly clear who's idea it was in the first place. (Say, do you think Rock might be still alive and not rich?)

I like just about all other music from the 60's except the dead. granted a song or two are great (truckin), but the rest I can't stand. like fingernails on chalkboard can't stand. I do wonder why, no other music has that effect on me.

[Joe Hillshoist]

BLIMP

[compared2what?]

Sure. Here you go:



That SLA thread sure did remind me of this one, though. What with Hunter's race, air of dissociation, and -- especially -- the key role played by Mel Belli wrt sticking them in that particular location with those amenities at the last minute. Which I don't think got much of an airing when the thread was fresh, unless my memory's even worse than I know.

Hmm. Maybe I'll go look at the Melvin Mouron Belli FBI file, the existence of which online I've noticed before, but never read, just to see what J. Edgar Hoover might have turned up. Or made up, as the case may be. But you know. Six of one.

[JackRiddler]

.

I'm a stepchild of the 60s. I did my best to catch up, being years too young to have caught any of it while it happened. (My first relevant memory might have been the cheers among the Greek day-camp counselers at the headline, "NIXON RESIGNS.")

But while I always understood the Altamont-killed-the-60s story as purest Grade-Z methane-reeking establishment spin, I never had an idea it might have involved anything other than the Hell's Angels just killing some guy, until now. I obviously sinned in never seeing this movie before.

Wow. Thank you c2w?. You've not blown my nose, but you've blown my mind.

.

[compared2what?]

Hey! It's not like I was there myself, you know, I'm not that old. Come to think of it, I can't specifically recall hearing about that concert at all when it happened. Which I'm pretty sure must mean I didn't hear about it until some time after 1971. Because I do very vividly remember every single detail related to buying both "Jumping Jack Flash" b/w "Child of the Moon" (which was before Altamont) and Sticky Fingers (which was after) when they came out. So it's not like it wasn't the kind of news that wouldn't have stuck in my mind had I known of it at any point roughly contemporaneous to its occurrence.

I highly recommend seeing the movie, anyway, simply because it's superb beyond all reckoning and comprehension, and would be even if Altamont had been uneventful. And....Why, look here! The entire thing is on Google video!

It's only ninety minutes, and feels like much less. But if you wish to just cut to the chase: Sorry. First you must watch from the press conference that starts at approximately 16:24 through to the special moment Keith spends with a spot on his shirt somewhere around 29:42. You won't regret it, I promise. It's cinema heaven!

Or I guess you could just go straight to the "Sympathy for the Devil"/"Under My Thumb" sequence, which starts at about 1:08:24, if you really want to. It's pretty amazing movie-making as well, quite apart from its forensic interest.

Also, I really don't think I've ever seen anyone in real life look as frightening as Sonny Barger transiently does during -- I think -- the first of those two songs. He looks like the devil himself, practically And I mean Evil Incarnate Whatever You Call It, for reals, not just some projective we-have-met-the-banality-of-evil-and-it-is-us version, like the one Mick's singing about. It sends a chill down my spine every time I see it.

on edit: fixed link that was the entire reason for the whole post....