“Intriguilingly, Kantner once discussed with writer Kurt Vonnegutthe prospect of making a science fiction movie based on his 1970 album  Blows Against the Empire?”

Blows Against the Empire was a plan we Hippies conceived to take over the world. Vonnegut was a part of this plot. It was much more than a movie. Kurt cloaked his collaboration. It worked! We now control all Illusion Making on Earth. We are much more than science fiction. This is why I gave away so much information – FOR FREE! We knew it would be plagiarized. If we remove the hallucinating, the world will end. Hollywood would go blank! The internet, would dry up. Never put your eggs in one basket.

Thirty years ago we dug a huge tunnel on Skellig Michael. We built our base with monies channeled into a Swiss account by famous musicians. We own the Michael Jackson estate, and the estate of his good friend, Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor. Skellig is the number one destination in the world! We have space seeds!

So, kick back and watch the show. We have made a hologram of Lucia Joyce, dancing with Artaud who employed Gamelan music in his ‘Theater of the Absurd’. We employed Gamelan dance and music. How clever we are! The suggestion Artaud was a space alien, was not off base. We, are on a planet, in space! The Balinese theater celebrates this.

Jon ‘The Sky Pilot’ Presco

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/paul-kantner-co-founder-of-jefferson-airplane-dies/

http://www.npr.org/2011/11/19/142350679/kurt-vonnegut-was-not-a-happy-man-so-it-goes

Just before Christmas I had some discussions with the author Charles J. Shields about who will write the story of the love affair between Samuel Beckett, and Lucia Joyce, the daughter of James Joyce who wrote Finnegan’s Wake.

A Flower Given to My Daughter
Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time’s wan wave.

Rosefrail and fair — yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blueveined child.

Greg Presco Charles, I hope I am not stepping on any toes, here. Were you thinking of authoring Lucia Joyce’s biography. I just googled her and her father and his work. My grandfather, whom I never met, was a poet, and when I began authoring poetry (while in a trance) at twelve, my mother and aunts became alarmed because they were bid to loathe their father. I wrote this poem a year ago to a young woman who worked at Starbucks. I read it with an Irish brogue.

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/…/05/lauras-glance-2/

Greg Presco: Charles has lobbed some balls across my plate with his steam motorcycle and Joyce. In my un-finished novel ‘The Gideon Computer’ the last hippie of the future channels a Nazi whose love for wood-burning cars allows him to get near the hard-water German is making, and helps sabotage the plants. These A-bombs would be delivered with V2 rockets. My ex had shown my Pynchon’s books, but, I found them a hard read.

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

How this man would eventually be recruited to brainstorm with the Jefferson Airplane and be hipper than his own children are among the mysteries on which Mr. Shields casts light.

Blows Against the Empire is a concept album by Paul Kantner, released under the name Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship, the first album to use the “Starship” name, although the personnel line-up was not the same as would appear on the first actual Jefferson Starship album. It was released in 1970 as RCA Victor LSP-4448. It peaked at #20 on the Billboard 200

In 1970, the Airplane released only one single, and Kantner took advantage of the hiatus to work on a solo album. Blows Against the Empire is his concept album recorded and released in 1970, credited to Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship. This marks the debut of the Jefferson Starship moniker, though not of the band of that name itself, since Blows predates the actual formation of the band Jefferson Starship by four years.[5]

The album was recorded at Pacific High Recording Studios and Wally Heider Recording Studios in San Francisco by Kantner and Slick with a collection of musician friends that included members of Jefferson Airplane (Jack Casady and Joey Covington), The Grateful Dead (Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart), Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (David Crosby and Graham Nash), David Freiberg of Quicksilver Messenger Service and Harvey Brooks of Electric Flag. Also appearing was Jorma Kaukonen‘s brother Peter Kaukonen, and Phill Sawyer,[6] the engineer at Pacific High Recording studios

The album is a narrative concept album that tells the story of a counter-culture revolution against the oppressions of “Uncle Samuel” and a plan to steal a starship from orbit and journey into space in search of a new home. The original vinyl release is divided into two album sides. “Mau Mau (Amerikon)” launched Side One, a counter-culture manifesto and call to arms. In the context of the narrative, this is the free music being performed in the park, drawing everyone together.

“Put your old ladies back into bed,

Put your old men into their graves,

Cover their ears so they can’t hear us sing,

Cover their eyes so they can’t see us play.”

“Get out of the way, let the people play,

We gotta get down on you,

Come alive all over you,

Dancing down, into your town.”

It celebrates late-sixties counter-culture, depicting people celebrating mind expansion and free love, “We’ll ball in your parks, insane with the flash of living…calling for acid, cocaine and grass.” They’ve had enough of the military, domestic and abroad, and make one of the earliest references to Ronald Reagan in popular music in the line, “You unleash the dogs of a grade-B movie star Governor’s war…so drop your fuckin’ bombs, burn your demon babies, I will live again!” They condemn the divisive strictures of conservative society, and dream of finding a Utopia.

“The Baby Tree”, written by Rosalie Sorrels, is about an imaginary island where babies grow on trees and are collected by happy couples when they fall. The scene develops over the remaining album side, in “Let’s Go Together” and “A Child Is Coming,” that a couple is among the gathering in a park outside Chicago the night before the hijacking, tripping on acid as dawn approaches. She reveals that she’s pregnant, and predictably they resolve to free their child from the government’s “files and their numbers game” by joining the hijackers. In this setting, “The Baby Tree” can be seen as their acid-induced daydream about pregnancy, and so fits neatly into the narrative.[citation needed] The allegory of “Let’s Go Together” and “A Child Is Coming” symbolizes Paul Kantner and Grace Slick’s romantic relationship and Slick’s pregnancy by Kantner, which would result in the birth of their daughter, China Kantner, the following year.

By Kantner’s admission, the underlying premise of the narrative was derived in part from the works of science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, particularly the novel Methuselah’s Children. Kantner went so far as to write to Heinlein to obtain permission to use his ideas. Heinlein wrote back that over the years, many people had used his ideas but Paul was the first one to ask for permission, which he granted.[7] Blows was the first rock album to ever be nominated for a Hugo Award, in 1971 in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation.[8] In voting, the album garnered the second most votes for the award, losing to “No Award”, which received the most votes.[9]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/books/charles-j-shieldss-and-so-it-goes-on-vonnegut-review.html

It sounds to me like the author wasn’t around for/doesn’t have the imagination to see Vonnegut’s connection to baby boomers against the draft and the undeclared war in VietNam and evidently doesn’t see what PTSD does to people – I used to live near Kurt Vonnegut in the East 50s (NYC)and see him with Lilly on his shoulders mornings for coffee in a little Rockefeller Park – he was a friendly fellow who I doubt gave a hoot about his perceived “hipness” – this is a silly interview. I also doubt Jefferson Airplane gave a hoot about what Kurt Vonnegut wore to their meeting – they had read his books and recognized something valuable there!

Charles J. Shields is also author of the highly acclaimed, best-selling biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee.
Michael Bailey/Henry Holt and Company
Shields persuaded Vonnegut to let him write the book, and he spent hours talking to the Slaughterhouse-Five author during the last year of his life. He says he was surprised during their very first conversation when Vonnegut began by complaining about his parents.
“For all the world, I thought I was talking to a much younger person who still had a real beef with the way he had been raised,” Shields says. But that oddly youthful outlook was what endeared Vonnegut to generations of disaffected kids.

But, you know, the irony, when you really study Kurt’s novels and when you look at the things that he said and also my interviews with him, Kurt was not really so much a radical as a reactionary. What Kurt wanted was an earlier America. He wanted an America that he remembered before World War II, an America of aunts and uncles and swimming holes and things like that. That was the world he wanted to return to. I think a seminal moment that shows the contrast between what people thought of Kurt and what he was actually like was this: Jefferson Airplane asked him if he’d like to brainstorm with them for their next album. So he went to the meeting with Jefferson Airplane wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and wingtip shoes.

aRTAUD & tHE bALiNESE tHEATRE

by Bettina L. Knapp
What so impressed Artaud about the Oriental and especially the Balinese theatre was the importance accorded to gesture and facial expressions and the relatively unimportant role delegated to the spoken word. He described the impact of the physical action on stage and its effect upon man’s conscious; the emergence of the latter not only by means of the spoken word, but also by means of gestures, which should be looked upon as a kind of hieroglyphic or symbol. Gestures would thus act as transforming agents; communicating the mysterious and hitherto unrevealed contents of the author’s, director’s, and actor’s unconscious and conscious intentions, making them visible on stage in the form of an elevated arm, a lowered finger, etc. Dance, lighting and music, considered from this point of view are laden with a certain magical force, empowering them to transform the amorphous into the concrete.

The fact that words are not the essential features in Balinese theatre appealed strongly to Artaud; he who had always had such difficulties formulating ideas by means of them and who described his struggles in this domain so pathetically. Artaud was absolutely convinced that words are just incapable of expressing certain attitudes and feelings, and that these can be revealed only through gestures or sounds, symbolically felt.

“All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it.”

Therefore, objects, music, chanting, costumes, gestures and words, used together are much more effective in bringing about powerful reactions in the spectator than are words used either alone or as primal factors in a spectacle. Imitative harmonies, such as the hissing of serpents or the buzzing of insects, lend a metaphysical and awesome quality to a production.

“It happens that this mannerism, this excessively hieratic style, with its rolling alphabet, its shrieks of splitting stones, noises of branches, noises of the cutting and rolling of wood, compose a sort of animated material murmur in the air, in space, a visual as well as audible whispering. And after an instant the magic identification is made: We know it is we who are speaking.”

The impact consequently, of such a group of elements on the viewer is tremendous.

Artaud went still further in formulating his views. All the operative elements in Balinese theatre (music, costumes, objects, words, gestures, etc.), he reasoned, leave no space unutilized. A concretesculptural quality is, therefore, created on stage which fills up the void about the actor. Not only does such theatrical architecture add to the visual enjoyment of the spectacle, as Artaud saw it, but it captures the theatre’s essential qualities: its metaphysical and spiritual aspects.

“There is an absolute in these constructed perspectives, a real physical absolute which the Orientals are capable of envisioning – it is in the loftiness and thoughtful boldness of their goals that these conceptions differ from our European conceptions of theatre, even more than in the sTRANGE perfection of their performances.”

By means of a harmonious use of stage elements (gestures, voice, words, etc.) a Balinese theatrical spectacle succeeds in injecting a feeling of metaphysical terror into the heart of the spectator. When a spectator (a “blasphemer”) sees a sTRANGE and horrifying wooden form appear before him on stage, he feels he is viewing a manifestation from beyond, when he is actually seeing the image of his own blasphemy (in projection). When Dragons or other inhuman manifestations come on stage, dread has been aroused within the audience by something concrete, not by language which is in itself an abstraction. The theatre, in this way, has become, symbolically speaking, the manifestation of something “inhuman” or “divine”.

Artaud sought to create an Occidental drama that would take on these solemn and frightening aspects present in Oriental theatre: where the “inner eye” would become operative. He looked upon everything on stage as symbolic, as a sign behind which lies a mysterious, fabulous, and dangerous reality. Reality, for the Westerner, resides in “appearances, “show”, “facade”; for the Oriental and Artaud, true reality resides in the world “within” -which resembles the Westerner’s dream world. It was the Oriental’s reality, corresponding to the Westerner’s unconscious world, that Artaud wished to represent on stage.

In addition to reflecting man’s inner world, the theatre, because of its metaphysical and religious nature, must be, a manifestation of cosmic reality. Consequently, author, actor, composer, dancer, musician, director, spectator, objects, color, sound, gesture, movements, rhythms and word in the theatre arena, must be looked upon as differentiations or parts of the cosmic whole. Space, therefore, is seen as, something alive full — active — as part of the cosmic flow and not distinct from it.

Furthermore, since the theatre, Artaud felt, should be looked upon as a religious ritual and the prima materia of religions are: he advocated a theatre based on myths.

A myth, it must be recalled, is a dramatic relating of those experiences or a description of those qualities which are deepest within man. Myths are the outcome of original experiences; not always personal, but rather impersonal or transcendental. In ancient times, for example, people believed that flowers, rocks, water, ice — all of nature’s forces — were inhabited by Gods. Primitive man did not just watch the sun rise and set and accept it as such. He assimilated this external experience which then became an inner one. For instance, he likened the story of the sun’s daily journey through the skies to a hero’s fate. He did likewise with everything in nature: rain, thunder, harvest, drought. The fascinating and terrifying images man’s unconscious produced, as a result of the experiences, took the form of dreams and premonitions and fantasies; they became symbolic expressions of an inner drama which he could only cope with by projecting into nature or the environment These projected dramas or Myths, transcended the individual conscious mind in that they occurred everywhere, in all of mankind. Every culture has its Creation Myth, a God Myth, etc. and these myths, whose origins are in many cases prehistoric, are recorded sooner or later.

 “The theatre must make itself the equal of life — not an individual life, that individual aspect of life in which CHARACTERS triumph, but the sort of liberated life which sweeps away human individuality and in which man is only a reflection. The true purpose of the theatre is to create Myths, to express life in its immense, universal aspects, and from that life to extract images in which we find pleasure in discovering ourselves.”

SULLIVAN: I’m speaking with Charles Shields. His new book is “And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life.” It seems like that there is this disconnect that runs throughout the book about the way Kurt Vonnegut sees himself and the way the people around him saw him.
SHIELDS: Yes. I think one of his nephews said that Kurt seemed a whole lot hipper than he really was.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SHIELDS: I mean, here he is being read by hippies and counterculture types and, you know, he’s still being read. I don’t mean to say that his work is time-specific, either, but it’s true. In the biography, I show a man who was a little bit surly to his kids, who was obsessed with doing his writing, who wanted to make it big and was perceived by his public as somebody who was the ideal avuncular, jocular kind of person, you know, somebody who tells it like it is and somebody who will level with you. Well, Kurt was actually rather flinty, rather irascible. He had something of a temper. But as I also point out in the book, he was a damaged person.
SULLIVAN: How do you reconcile these two people? I mean, the man who wrote “God damn it, babies, you’ve got to be kind” and this other guy who had difficult relationships, sometimes was not so great to even his agents and publishers and was a little bit irascible?
SHIELDS: Kurt was a disenchanted American. He believed in America. He believed in its ideals. And what he wrote in his books was a kind of an outpouring of his disenchantment. He wanted babies to enter a world where they could be treated well, and he wanted to emphasize that people should be kind to one another. So these were his priorities as a human being. But as you know, so often happens in life, he had a sort of a creative professional side and a personal side. One fed into the other. As one reviewer said recently, you know, Vonnegut couldn’t have been the kind of writer that he was unless he was this kind of person. And so I don’t see it as a complete break. I see his pain as, you know, pouring into his works in a kind of a wry, droll, unhappy way.

http://m.npr.org/story/142350679

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

In 1940 Vonnegut started to study biochemistry at Cornell; his father, who funded his education, had recommend that he should study chemistry rather that the humanities. Arts were discouraged in the family. However, Vonnegut also wrote satirical anti-war articles for the student newspaper Cornell Sun. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Vonnegut volunteered in 1943 for military service. “Good! They will teach you to be neat!” his father said.

After the war Vonnegut studied anthropology at Chicago University from 1944 to 1947, but his M.A. thesis ‘Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales’ was rejected. However, in 1971 the anthropological department accepted his novel Cat’s Cradle (1963) in lieu of a thesis and Vonnegut war awarded the degree. In the book Vonnegut explores destructive rationality of Western science and the turn towards mysticism, which was just then beginning to take hold among students in the USA and Europe. In 1945 Vonnegut married a childhood friend. They had two daughters and a son, and also adopted the three children of Vonnegut’s sister, who died of cancer in 1958.

Billy lives on Earth and on the distant planet Tralfamadore, responding to events with the resignated slogan “So it goes”. Paul Kantner and Grace Slick, members of the rock band Jefferson Airplane, were great fans of the book. They invited Vonnegut in 1971 to San Francisco, but cooperation plans were dropped. “The vibrations were just awful, I wanted out as fast as possible,” Vonnegut said later.

Greg Presco I do not do drugs and spoke out against the use of LSD since 1967. I have been compared to Campbell and have studied The White Goddess by Robert Graves for years. Even though it is flawed scholarship, I love the play on symbols and words. As a theologian, I discovered what Jesus wrote in the sand, a mystery that has baffled scholars for 2 thousand years. I subscribe to the idea that words can be mind altering.

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

http://www.usachristianministries.com/us-history-quotes-about-god-and-the-bible/

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/vladimir-nabokov-pynchon-connection/

https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/muse-of-the-love-dance/

Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[2] He is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the “Theatre of the Absurd”. His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.

Finnegan’s Wake a Broadway Musical

Finding herself stuck between two droll and dusty bookends, two avant guard writers who expect at least one avant absurd poem form her, Lucia finds her breakout moment when she meets Antonin Artaud at the Moulin Rouge. Back at his garret they do mescaline together, in the form of Peyote buds Antonin has brought back from his trip to the States where he witnessed the Ghost Dance. Teaching her some of the moves, Lucia goes into a trance and into the future. In her vision quest she finds herself on the dance floor of the Filmore West gyrating to the Grateful Dead. The first Dead Head is born!

Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[2] He is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the “Theatre of the Absurd”. His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.

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

In 1931, Artaud saw Balinese dance performed at the Paris Colonial Exposition. Although he did not fully understand the intentions and ideas behind traditional Balinese performance, it influenced many of his ideas for Theatre. Also during this year, the ‘First Manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty’ was published in La Nouvelle Revue Française which would later appear as a chapter in The Theatre and Its Double. In 1935, Artaud’s production of his adaptation of Shelley’s The Cenci premiered. The Cenci was a commercial failure, although it employed innovative sound effects—including the first theatrical use of the electronic instrument the Ondes Martenot—and had a set designed by Balthus.

Balinese dances are a very ancient dance tradition that is a part of the religious and artistic expression among the Balinese people, native to Bali island, Indonesia. Balinese dance is dynamic, angular and intensely expressive.[1] The Balinese dancers express the story of dance-drama through the whole bodily gestures; fingers, hands and body gestures to head and eyes movements.

By about 1963, Vito, Szou, and their friend Carl Franzoni (b. 1934 in Cincinnati, Ohio), also known at the time as “Captain Fuck”, had begun going to clubs with a growing group of self-styled “freaks”, who reputedly “lived a semi-communal life and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they could”. According to writer Johnny Rogan, Paulekas’ “free thinking lifestyle and artistic passion inspired beatniks, aspiring existentialists and Valley girls in need of rebellion.” In 1964, Paulekas offered rehearsal space to the Byrds, and the following year the troupe of free-form dancers, with Paulekas and Franzoni, accompanied the group on their nationwide tour. Later, Arthur Lee and Love also used his premises for rehearsals.[1][2][3][4]
In some clubs, Paulekas and the dancers became as big an attraction as the onstage entertainment. The troupe – including several of the young women later to become known as The GTOs, and members of the Fraternity of Man – occupied the Log Cabin in Laurel Canyon formerly occupied by Tom Mix and later by Frank Zappa. Credited as “Vito and the Hands”, Paulekas recorded a single, “Where It’s At,” which featured some of the Mothers of Invention, with producer Kim Fowley in 1966. He has been credited with first using the terms “freak” and “freak-out” to describe the scene, and with Franzoni and other members of the troupe contributed to the first album by Zappa and the Mothers, Freak Out!. He appeared in several documentaries of the period, including Mondo Hollywood (1967) and You Are What You Eat
Bonhoeffer’s life as a pastor and theologian of great intellect and spirituality who lived as he preached — and his martyrdom in opposition to Nazism — exerted great influence and inspiration for Christians across broad denominations and ideologies, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, in the United States, the anti-communist democratic movement in Eastern Europe during the Cold War and the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa.