was originally THIS:
There's a story here waiting to be told...
Listen to the hummingbird
Whose wings you cannot see
Listen to the hummingbird
Don’t listen to me.
Listen to the butterfly
Whose days but number three
Listen to the butterfly
Don’t listen to me.
Listen to the mind of God
Which doesn’t need to be
Listen to the mind of God
Don’t listen to me.
( Leonard Cohen )
Adam Cohen's message on the death of his father, Leonard
November 12 at 10:44pm
· My sister and I just buried my father in Montreal. With only immediate family and a few lifelong friends present, he was lowered into the ground in an unadorned pine box, next to his mother and father. Exactly as he’d asked. As I write this I’m thinking of my father’s unique blend of self-deprecation and dignity, his approachable elegance, his charisma without audacity, his old-world gentlemanliness and the hand-forged tower of his work. There’s so much I wish I could thank him for, just one last time. I’d thank him for the comfort he always provided, for the wisdom he dispensed, for the marathon conversations, for his dazzling wit and humor. I’d thank him for giving me, and teaching me to love Montreal and Greece. And I’d thank him for music; first for his music which seduced me as a boy, then for his encouragement of my own music, and finally for the privilege of being able to make music with him. Thank you for your kind messages, for the outpouring of sympathy and for your love of my father.
Message from the blogger known as Ann Diamond
Although I knew it had to happen someday, I wasn't prepared to hear the news last Thursday night, as I sat reading about Donald Trump's victory in the US elections. First it arrived as a text from a friend but I didn't believe it. A minute later another text arrived, and another, and then there were links to Leonard's Facebook site and Rolling Stone. That's when I started thinking it might not be a hoax after all. Finally, CBC's Peter Mansbridge made the announcement and nothing could be more final for a Canadian. In my shock I received an email Inviting me to talk about him early the following morning on CTV Toronto. I was grateful for the chance to say goodbye. Over the next 24 hours, I got two more requests to talk about Leonard from the perspective of someone who had known him.
I knew parts of him. Death seemed to unify the parts and bring them closer. It was like being back at Zero, where birth and death are one. Or like the shock of our first meeting.
Later I learned he had died on Monday, November 7. I need to check my journal but I believe we met on that day, 39 years ago, 11/7/1977. If accurate, that would be eerie. Thirty-nine is three times thirteen, the number of years I lived next door to him. When I was 39, he took my photo and said "Now you look very much like yourself." That was 26 years ago, or 2 x 13. And I was 26 when I met him so that's lots of thirteens.
In fact I owe my life to Leonard Cohen. That is a fact he never mentioned, as it would have been too traumatic, but it ran in the background of our friendship even through the years when we were no longer on speaking terms. Like many things that are true, it can probably never be proven, but it seems appropriate to mention it here.
That plus the fact that I will miss him, although these days he's hard to miss, being everywhere. He was like no one else, and now that he's gone, there is even less chance that he can be replaced. Let alone captured.
So now we can go on missing him, forever.
*****
I've been shooting phone videos of the crowd at Leonard's house opposite the park. I used to live around the corner, for 13 years, so it seemed like the normal thing to do. It was my old neighbourhood too.
On Wednesday I ended up at the fresh grave on Mount Royal -- I hadnt intended to go there but all my appointments were mysteriously cancelled and I had nothing better to do than climb to the cemetery, a half hour walk in mist and drizzle. At the grave site, three people were standing looking down at a fresh patch of sod, two plastic-wrapped bunches of wilting flowers and a drooping white rose -- forbidden in Judaism and probably left there the day before by unsuspecting Catholics. The three visitors all spoke French. One said "This empty space is really in the image of Leonard."
Someone had pinned a poem to the sod with a rock, in what looked like Leonard's handwriting, describing a wonderful conversation they had and how he 'understood'. There were about two dozen small rocks on the headstone, which was blank, not yet inscribed with his name. I said I had known him personally. The taller man left, and the remaining couple started taking photos of each other beside the modest plot. They offered to take mine. I forgot to look sad -- in fact I look deliriously happy -- this is how farewells affect me. After the couple left I hung around in the fog for about an hour. Leonard's barely noticeable grave directly faces another belonging to someone named "FRAID." I sat on the base of FRAID's tombstone but couldn't think of much to say except "Sorry."
I can't understand why there was no actual funeral. When his friends Pierre Trudeau and Irving Layton died, Leonard became pallbearer. I think people were expecting a procession or motorcade, and a huge crowd at Paperman's funeral home. Instead, nothing happened. They say he wanted it that way. He died suddenly in his sleep after a fall before dawn on Tuesday morning (of the election). They shipped the body to Montreal. There was a report that he was already buried before his death was announced on Thursday evening, but his son Adam issued a statement the following Saturday in which he said they had just come from the cemetery. The Globe and Mail wrote that only 15 close friends and relatives attended.
If this all sounds a bit strange, it's because it is.
In lieu of any public ceremony or state funeral, Leonard's house has become an outdoor shrine with hundreds of flowers and candles filling the sidewalk opposite the little park where there was an impromptu concert last Saturday.
Death is not what it used to be. Death is exactly like birth and triggers a simultaneous expansion and contraction that erases conscious thought. We are back at the moment before anything has begun to be spoiled.
Followers of the way, don't be fooled. As Leonard once said, "Nothing is always happening."
~ Rumi
As we all know, Beatle John Lennon was shot in December 1980, at the entrance to the Dakota Apartments in Manhattan. So the man in the above photo, taken in 2008, cannot possibly be John Lennon. Can he? Officially, the Lennon lookalike is said to be a professional impersonator, Mark Staycer, of Travers City, Michigan. Above we see him performing on the set of Let Him Be -- a low budget Canadian mockumentary that went nowhere when it was released, back in 2009.
You can watch the full movie here, and I recommend you do. It opens awkwardly with a scene narrated by Tim Bennett, a young documentary filmmaker who just happens to stumble on a home video that his dad bought at a garage sale somewhere. The video was shot at a house party somewhere in rural Ontario, and features a short segment of a guitar-playing guest who -- to Tim's astonishment -- is a dead ringer for the late John Lennon. Of course, he has aged about twenty-five years since the last time we saw him, back in 1980 prior to getting shot.
If you can get past this opening premise -- or blatant narrative device -- Let Him Be is a watchable little movie that starts out as a quest to track down the lookalike glimpsed in the video. In fact, I'm surprised it seems to have been taken out of circulation soon after it premiered in Hamilton, Ontario and later at a film festival in Vancouver. Oh, and it also played in Liverpool, England - birthplace of John Lennon. Very little was written about it at the time, although the few reviews I've found were positive. Peter McNamee, the first-time director, set up a Facebook page for it, but otherwise seems to have done almost no promotion or distribution. And then wham, it disappeared.
Under normal circumstances, a film like this would have got more mileage, especially as books and movies about John Lennon's life and death tend to do quite well. Let Him Be had all the makings of low-key Canadian success. So why was it pulled from distribution before anyone got to see it, and not even available on YouTube until recently?
I got interested in the possibility that Lennon was still alive back in 2014 when someone alerted me to an article by the brilliant researcher and writer Miles Mathis. You can download it here and read all about how Mathis, with typical zeal and sarcastic flair, decoded the forensics and arrived at the conclusion that Lennon had faked his death, mostly based on his investigation of Mark Staycer, a Lennon impersonator, who plays "Noel Snow" in the movie. Snow, we are led to believe, has been hiding out on a rundown farm with his buddy Stanley Fields, played by the late Graham Wignall. In a memorable pub conversation, Stanley lists all the reasons Noel Snow cannot be John Lennon. Of course this only persuades young Tim that he is closing in on the fugitive rock star -- who only wants to be left alone to impersonate himself in peace.
The last thing Noel Snow needs is exposure -- if he's really John Lennon, that is. The film teases the audience with brief glimpses, culminating in another performance where Noel plays songs that really sound like Lennon could have written them. Mark Staycer just happens to look and sound like you might expect a 67-year-old Lennon to sound and look. What right does the nosy filmmaker have to reveal Noel's whereabouts, thus alerting the Powers That Be who may want Lennon to stay dead?
Let It Be plays with these possibilities, never really showing enough of Staycer to answer the obvious question: is this really John Lennon playing himself playing an impersonator? Seems like the kind of story only Lennon himself could have come up with. And obviously some people take this quite seriously.
Having watched it all the way through just once, so do I. Here is a list of all the reasons Let Him Be does not make sense as what it claims to be -- a quirky fiction. Like Miles Mathis, I think it was made by an undead John Lennon to send a message to his fans and play them his new songs. Several things about its pre-and post-production history are suspicious.
(1) If it's just whimsical fan fiction, why include the very serious assertion that Mark Chapman could not have shot Lennon, only to drop it, without either proving or disproving it?
(2) Why did it receive so little publicity when it came out? Although not a great film, its subject matter made it a likely candidate for interviews and journalistic articles, yet very little was written about it at the time, and almost no reviews.
(3) Why was it pulled from theatres and festivals soon after its release, even disappearing from the internet?
(4) Why do the professional actors involved not include it on their IMDb pages?
(5) How did the director Peter McNamee and lead actor Graham Wignall think up the concept that John Lennon was still alive, based on the 'conspiracy theory" (shown in the film) that Chapman was not the real shooter? That's quite a leap, when you think about it -- and raises questions like "So who really killed Lennon?" that never get answered. In writing and marketing such a far-fetched scenario you would need to present some rationale. Unless you just happen to KNOW Lennon is alive, because you are part of a network of cronies going back to Liverpool -- and you were handed this story on a platter, with instructions to go ahead and shoot it.
(6) What made the neophyte director choose this small town Ontario locale when he is from Liverpool, and practically grew up with the Beatles and Lennon.You would think if two Liverpudlians were making a fiction film about Lennon, their first thought would be to set the action back in their birthplace. "Write what you know."
(7) If Peter McNamee had no previous track record as a filmmaker, and Graham Wignall had never acted before, how did this project get Telefilm funding? Telefilm only works with established director/producers.
Everything seems to point to John Lennon having played a role in initiating this project. No easy feat to pull off from beyond the grave.
I just dropped into Live Journal yesterday, in search of the journal of a friend who died last week. I wanted to find out what my departed friend shared with his online community over the years. I found this entry -- it's about me, dated a year ago.
http://saintgeorge.livejournal.com/522255.html
Ann is sleeping on the carpet of the meditation room. Before going to sleep tonight she insisted that she was going to sleep on the balcony again. It was because she claimed the air in my apartment was stagnant and suffocating. I told her that all the windows were wide-open and you can't get more air in here unless we move outside. Anyway she said she needed to breath fresh air all the time or she would die. So Ann set up the cot on the balcony. However there was rain during the night and she got wet and now she has decided that suffocating is better than being cold and wet.
Yesterday was our first full day together. First in the morning Ann decided I needed to more air in my apartment. I am okay with the air circulation here as it is, certainly the air circulation is superior to the situation I endured in the basement, but having screens on the windows impedes the flow of air. I know that already and I accept that the screens block the breezes but I prefer the air being hotter in exchange for keeping out with local flying insects. But Ann is accustomed to living the free life in Greece and she wants to continue living the free life here.
So Ann has taken to opening the kitchen door and leaving it open to catch any passing breezes. She doesn't mind flies buzzing in and not finding their way out. I object to sharing my apartment with flies so I keep the kitchen door shut, and I pursue an aggressive no-fly zone indoors. Ann claims that in Greece she can snatch the flies out of the air in mid-flight and release them safely outdoors. I am not so adept. Also, because I am a nudist and because my kitchen faces a busy bus stop and because the open kitchen door allows anyone waiting for their bus to see into the kitchen and because I want avoid being arrested for indecent exposure and because in consequence I have to wear clothes when I go into the kitchen when the door is open and because this is my apartment and because Ann is the guest, I feel Ann is imposing on me even though I am providing her with a free bed and free food and free beer and free wi-fi. You can imagine that I feel annoyed with her. And yesterday was the first day of a visit of unknown duration.
Patrick died a few days ago on August 31. We were friends for about 45 years. If he's reading this, maybe he already knows what I am about to say, even if I don't.
When my brother died in October, 2012, Patrick came to the gathering for him but stayed outside in the street for most of it. He was a very private and shy person, with a deep sense of irony and humour. He was also a great listener who spent hours just letting me talk about my problems when few others would.
As for the air in his apartment, and the question of flies, and the life of a solitary nudist living on the third floor of a building overlooking a train station and bus terminal -- it was often noisy on the balcony, but I had the best sleeps of my life during that week plus a view of the moon and stars, rare in Montreal --
I remember opening the balcony door and failing to close it, and that once a fly flew in, and Patrick became very upset. He said that people across the street could see into his place, although they couldn't -- the kitchen door was behind a large maple tree blocking anyone's view of the kitchen, and even a person standing on the balcony was basically invisible to passersby or peeping toms -- therefore I didn't fully grasp Patrick's fear of exposure and arrest for being nude in his own apartment, especially as every window was sealed and covered with opaque paper, blocking any view either in or out. And even then, his nearest neighbours were across the street, well out of peeping range --
I had just come back from Greece and was concerned about Patrick, that he so rarely went out, and that he seemed to be living in seclusion. The only phone calls he ever received were around suppertime, from telemarketers. He sat for hours at his computer -- I remember that rainy night when I slept on the carpet in the living room. Several times a night, from the next room, he would shout in his sleep: "No! Don't!" I asked him why did did that, nearly every night, often waking me from a deep sleep. He said it was Nothing. He said it was Entities. He didn't know what it was that was attacking him .It got too cool to sleep outside. Then I found work and left him alone for about a month.
I was concerned because opening a kitchen door on a hot August day did not seem like such a serious infraction to me -- and the fly also left of its own accord, leaving no trace of itself, bothering no one. I remember cooking Greek food and bringing wine for dinner, and conversations -- I had not seen Patrick in several months and there were always things to talk about. He made the best dahl, which he ate every day, so my cooking had to be a novelty. After he complained (bitterly, repeatedly) about the fly, I got a bit worried. I remember going out with a friend who knew Pätrick and describing these strange dynamics to him to make sure I wasnt crazy. Patrick was alone, most of the time, for those last years of his life and my being there for a few days, with all its annoyances and unwanted air-circulation, seemed like the best thing I could offer him. He needed company. Alone, he became depressed and somewhat obsessive. His behaviour in the kitchen, when I cooked, was sometimes unnerving -- he would seize things from my hands, e.g. a pot or a wooden spoon, as if he couldn't bear anyone handling his things.
In return for my being there, I bought him a new frying pan, a hand mixer, a coffee thermos, and a few other things that he said he appreciated. The last time, I brought him an espresso maker. He liked espresso in the morning. And rhubarb scones. And Spanakopita.
Now he's gone, and I can't quite believe it yet. I keep expecting him to message me on Facebook. I keep waiting for his next sardonic remark -- and in a few days I'll be arriving in Montreal to get a few things I left behind at his place. I was expecting to see him in September --
People, don't let your friends spend too much time alone. It can ruin and distort a life, and a friendship. Remember the good stuff, along with the irritating stuff -- the ways friends can challenge and bring out the best in one another.
And never stop loving them. Friends are so precious.
We know -- or at least some of us know -- that children are being "sexualized" early on. We haven't been told that this programming has been going on for decades, and was something the scientists who ran the MKULTRA program were interested in. The purpose: fragmenting the human personality in early childhood to create alters -- unconscious parts -- that can be programmed in useful ways. For girls: prostitution was always a primary option. We're seeing the results of this in fashion and media.
As for me, I didn't end up acting on my programming -- as far as I know. But I believe it's in there, somewhere, and has influenced my life at times. It's a subject too strange and personal, maybe, to delve into here. But I hope to, elsewhere.
Meanwhile, I notice there are TED TALKS on "transgenderism" but none on MKULTRA. That's something that needs to be addressed. It is now okay, in fact fashionable, to come out as a transgendered person. But it remains taboo to talk about secret experiments on children that happened right here, in our lifetime, that continue to change our world in mainly unconscious ways.
I met the man in this mug shot twice in Montreal in the summer of 1969 or 1970 on a downtown street where he sometimes stood in a black cape, hawking copies of the glossy Process Church magazine, with its feature article on the recently arrested serial killer Charles Manson. In fact, both times I saw John Roland Stahl that summer, I stopped to chat. I was 18 or 19, he was 22 or 23 — flamboyant, androgynous, charming, handsome, articulate — as he spoke of the unity of God and the Devil. I had the sense he was recruiting young people who stopped to talk to him, with inspired revolutionary zeal and Luciferian appeal. In those days he had rock star looks -- his dark shoulder length hair pulled back in a pony tail, his smile wide and generous. Still, I knew to stay away from people like 'King John' which was what he called himself back then. 
Recently I heard he also ran a bar called The Image, on Park Avenue, around the corner from where I lived as a student. So we were neighbours and probably knew people in common. He oozed counter-cultural refinement that set him apart, and I had a soft spot for that kind of fallen angel. Later I wondered what became of him and who he really was -- Now I know.
Among other things, he became an artisanal paper maker in Mendocino County, California, and a known sexual predator. The hippie movement had plenty of charlatans like him and he played the part with flair. In the early 2000s, he moved to southeast Asia and when arrested in 2013, he was running another hip cafe, the Cafe Noir, on the beach in Sihanoukville, known as a hangout for foreigners and a place where young local boys came to play chess. Stahl was teaching some of these kids -- many of whom lived from collecting trash at the dump -- the art of papermaking. On his blog he sometimes expounded on "intergenerational relationships" -- making no secret of his pedophilia. Eventually the authorities caught up with him and he was deported back to California in 2013 for failure to register as a sex offender. In January 2016, he was reincarcerated for violating his parole conditions and remains in prison.
Married twice and the father of two children(his second wife died of cancer), he worked with youth, spreading his ‘gospel.’ Back in the sixties in Montreal he was a draft dodger, one of hundreds who crossed into Canada so they would not have to go to Vietnam. So it makes sense, maybe, that he would end up in Cambodia where another veteran of Montreal's downtown scene, Oscar Sanchez, turned up later. Sanchez died recently of "swollen feet" and was found by police keeled over on the toilet at his rented house in Sihanoukville, a seaside town known as a magnet for men looking for child sex. In the 1990s, Sanchez had worked with youth in Vancouver's Portage program,, and friends describe in stellar terms as 'an unforgettable man' and 'a comet in my life.' A photo shows several boys seated outside a lit-up front door at Sanchez' cement residence.
I didn't know Sanchez, but I knew some of his friends, e.g. painter Stephen Lack and filmmaker Alan Moyle, who acted in the 1974 movie Montreal Main, about drugs and pedophilia. It's a lifestyle that has been introduced since the 1950s, by intelligence cults like the Process Church. The trend is obvious when you look at how the counterculture was not just infiltrated, but set up and promoted, by mainstream media including the CBC and National Film Board of Canada.
John Stahl is also hard to forget. Young boys, his victims of choice, and their clueless parents, had a way of getting lured into his charmed circle and he was seen by some as 'a great guy'. It feels eerie to find him again after all these years. He stands out in my memory like a street corner mime, or possibly an unwitting front man for something sinister that keeps expanding. The photo below, which I can't get to stand upright for some reason, appears to have been taken years ago in his cafe on the beach, with a young boy seated behind him.
Viewing it on my phone, I mistook the foot resting yogically on his thigh for an erect penis. I think this is intentional: a way to insinuate sex and rise above it at the same time. So it was, back in 1969, when we flirted on Ste Catherine Street. Maybe I felt sorry for the black-cloaked elf hawking a glossy Satanic magazine that nobody wanted. That could be why I stopped to talk to him: to demonstrate my nonchalance, or sympathy for the devil. I inquired about the Baphomet symbol, combined with a cross, dangling from his neck and he delivered an inspired and enthusiastic response, suggesting I read Hermann Hesse's novel Demian to find out more about the God, Abraxas. We bantered back and forth for several minutes. I flirted with a 22 year old future child molester dressed up in a devil costume in broad daylight on a busy street corner and never saw him again. -- And here he is, 45 years older, sending emails from prison.
I first discovered that Margaret Atwood and George Eliot are identical twins while visiting UCLA'S William F. Clark Library, in Los Angeles. Headed by an old acquaintance from Montreal, Bruce Whiteman, who used to be curator of Rare Books at McGill University, the Clark Library houses the world's largest private collection of Oscar Wilde manuscripts. While taking me on a tour of the building, Bruce showed me a room filled with portraits of Wilde's contemporaries and predecessors, including Dryden, Pope and Milton. Dwarfed by these likenesses of male literary giants hangs a tiny pen and ink sketch of Mary Ann Evans, known to the world as George Eliot. To my astonishment, I saw that it was the face of Margaret Atwood.
I motioned Bruce over to have a look. He said, "My God -- you're right!" Apart from the hairstyle (Eliot wore her dark unruly curls in the Puritan style, pulled back from a centre part to cover her ears), the resemblance was staggering. The same wide- apart, slightly crossed eyes, the aquiline nose, the full lipped Mona Lisa smile, the cheekbones, the rounded chin... Young George Eliot was Atwood in Victorian dress.
I recalled an interview I'd read a year or two before, in which Atwood confided that the only novelist she would claim as a major influence (apart from Dickens) is George Eliot.
Could Atwood be a continuation of George Eliot who -- after death -- chose Toronto as the best environment to continue her career? Canadian poet and novelist Robert Kroetsch once pointed out that Canadian Literature went from its Victorian stage into post- modernism with no intervening period of modernism. Atwood's career is emblematic. She attended the University of Toronto's Victoria College and got her first teaching job in Montreal in 1967, teaching Victorian and American Literature. In the 70's she rose to fame as Canada's premier woman writer.
Hot on the heels of discovering that Margaret Atwood was George Eliot in a past life, I stumbled across a portrait of Eliot's friend and mentor, John Chapman, in Frederick R. Karl's biography of George Eliot, Voice of a Century.
Bearded, handsome, sexy in a patrician kind of way, Chapman ran a lodging house cum publishing operation on the Strand in central London. Chapman was editor of the Westminster Review and a dead ringer for the late Robertson Davies.
Like Davies in his varied career as a journalist, playwright, editor and university man, Chapman was known for his egotistical manner and way with the ladies. Separated by an ocean and a century, he and Robertson Davies look as much alike as Eliot and Atwood.
Chapman introduced the young Eliot to British intellectual life in the early 1850s. In Toronto during the 1980's and '90s, Davies and Atwood teamed up in public, sometimes appearing as a neo-Victorian literary duo, and even going so far as to sing a duet of "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" at a PEN gala in 1992.
Flipping through Karl's biography, I found an 1859 photo of Eliot's long time companion, George Henry Lewes, whose reputation as a novelist has been overshadowed by that of his famous life partner. There's no mistaking his resemblance to Graeme Gibson, Atwood's husband in this lifetime, whose most recent novel was err, ah...
Eliot and Lewes socialized with Robert Browning, and frequently dropped in at Dante Gabriel Rossetti's studio on fashionable Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. After Lewes' death, Eliot married James Walter Cross and the couple moved in to number 4 Cheyne Walk, almost next door to Rossetti -- which made them, in a way, neighbours of Henry VIII (whose 16th century manor house stood at the corner).
If, during the 1970s, Atwood and Gibson had decided to love back to their former Thames-side digs, they would have had to put up with the new kid on the block, Mick Jagger.
Jagger bears a haunting likeness to a second-millennium BC pharaoh, Amenhotep IV -- but that's another story.
parts of this work have appeared in Geist and Matrix magazines
A very strange year, 1969. I'm surprised I can even remember back that far, but the release of Ninth Floor - which I still haven't seen - by the NFB has triggered memories that I'm now sorting through. See, I was there when it all happened. When the Computer Centre Crisis began with the occupation of the ninth floor of Sir George Williams University, I was 17 and also the "news editor" of the student newspaper, the georgian.
The georgian office was on the sixth floor at the south-east corner of the downtown cube some people called the "air conditioned nightmare." When I wasn't going to classes, I spent most of my time there -- a short escalator ride down from the seventh-floor cafeteria and all the action. In a way, I grew up in the georgian office, during the crisis and afterwards. I even lost my virginity there -- in more ways than one.
Of all the events I have witnessed in my life, this was one of the most traumatic. After it was over, punishment came down on all the participants. Names were blackened, lives wrecked, and some fine journalists never worked again in journalism. In the aftermath, everyone tried hard to forget and put it behind us.
The following year, drugs flooded the campus and the georgian office -- and even more memories were swept away. It was 1969, and our minds were being blown, almost daily, in overt and hidden ways.
Ninth Floor by Mina Shum, National Film Board of Canada
But seeing that Ninth Floor trailer brings it all back, and once again I'm in that classroom auditorium (room H-110) listening to the speeches and grievances of black students demanding justice. I'm with Alan Zweig, the advertising editor, taking notes. We are waiting for something to happen. We know something will. After two hours, it comes in the form of a call to occupy the Ninth Floor. From my seat in the middle row, I watch as students, mostly black, with some whites joining them, fist raised, file up the aisle and out the exit. Four hundred of them. The occupation begins. It will last for two weeks, and end in a mysterious fire and a lot of wreckage, including of the two state-of-the-art computers.Then Alan and I go upstairs to write up the story for tomorrow's georgian. It's a cold night in late January. Tomorrow will be the beginning of a long, slow siege.
Also that February, David Bowie would begin recording Space Oddity months ahead of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing on July 20. Also that summer, Brian Jones would drown in his own swimming pool. It was the summer of Charles Manson and the Sharon Tate murders. And would be followed by the winter of the Altamont Festival and the Stones' deadly performance of Sympathy for the Devil.
1969 The year we were told everything was about to change for the worse. What we're finding out, all these years later, is that some of these "mind-blowing" events were outright hoaxes. Not one was what it seemed at the time.
********************
One of the people 'blackened' by his involvement in the computer centre affair, and by the stand he took at the time, was the georgian's Editor-in-Chief David Bowman. Interestingly, he has the same name as the astronaut in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was the inspiration for David Bowie's 1969 song.
David Bowman, a thin wiry ultra-white 23-year-old whose British accent and pale blond Afro set him apart from the rest of the georgian crew, was a clear-thinking, principled guy. As editor, he came out strongly and never wavered in his support of the black students in their demands for an investigation into charges of racism against their Biology professor.
He and other journalists at the georgian were aware that Principal John O'Brien's administration had mishandled the case, and were not being straight with the students. These suspicions came to a head in a controversial letter allegedly written by someone in the Dean's office, suggesting that the occupation could be ended by "breaking a few windows" and calling in the cops to eject the occupiers. That is, by faking a riot.
In the days leading up to the final explosion of February 11, Bowman and others, including former georgian editor Frank Brayton and some journalists from the McGill Daily, attempted to leak this damning letter which exposed the administration as planning what today we might call a 'false flag.' But before the story could get out and embarrass the Dean and the university, Bowman and Brayton were accused of having fabricated the letter as a 'hoax' -- and soon after, the 'riot' exploded.
The following day, February 12, the entire staff of the georgian were fired by the administration, with support from the student council. Dave Bowman disappeared -- I'm not sure I ever saw him again. In the summer of 1975, I ran into Frank Brayton while I was visiting Vancouver. Recognizing me after six years, he said "We all come here to lick our wounds." I don't know what became of him afterwards. Though gifted and charismatic, he always struck me as too sensitive for a profession where sociopathic personalities rise to the top.
So in mid-February 1969 I ended my short (three-month) career as News Editor of the georgian, Canada's most radical student paper at the time, or at least a close second to the McGill Daily, then headed by the team of Marc Starowicz and Mark Wilson. Actually, as I recall, I was more of a proofreader/intern, and Alan Zweig was the real news editor. He showed me the ropes, giving me taxi chits so I could travel back and forth from the printers, late at night, where he and others sometimes came to do layout. In those days, the georgian came out twice a week -- although it increased to four times a week during the height of the crisis and occupation.
I couldn't join the occupation since I was still living in the suburbs with my parents. All I saw of the riot was what everyone else saw who was standing on the street on Bishop Street that morning. Helmeted cops herded us onto the sidewalk, as computer cards rained down from the windows that, earlier, had been belching smoke from the mysterious fire that, to this day, remains a mystery. Why would occupying students set fire to their own barricade? For that matter, why would a group of them have invaded the cafeteria at 4:30 am on that fateful morning, overturning food machines and destroying furniture, as they blocked the stairwells in their ultimate takeover of several floors? Up to then, it had been a peaceful sit-in. What was the point of all that violence, while most of the 97 occupiers were upstairs sleeping?
I haven't seen Ninth Floor -- maybe it has answers to these questions. But even people who were there don't really know what happened, or who did it. How could the people on the ninth floor know what was going on down in the seventh-floor cafeteria? Or on the other side of their own barricade, for that matter? Nevertheless, all were arrested -- "white revolutionaries, Negroes, and ladies" as they were quaintly labeled -- and instantly branded as guilty criminals. "Why should we not throw the book at them?" the administration asked, with amazing confidence and self-righteousness, the very next day in the special issue evening students' newspaper. Awfully fast, when you come to think of it -- almost as if they had the presses ready to roll in the aftermath. Along with condemnation of the destruction came the blurred photos of the smashed computers, piled-up furniture and the famous lineup of arrested students with their hands up against the cinderblock wall.
On January 21, using questionable judgment, the georgian had run a front-page interview with a photo of black power leader Eldridge Cleaver, and the headline: STICK EM UP, MOTHERFUCKER - WE WANT WHAT'S OURS.
Who made that decision, I can't remember, but it certainly sent a message of cross-border escalation. This was no longer just about six students and their Biology grades at a second-rate university in a provincial city noted for mainly for its night life. Who was stoking the story, blowing it out of proportion, turning it into a race war in the making?
But now, the little details didn't matter. What mattered were the headlines. Shame, shame. The shock. The glare of international attention and condemnation. In any case, the staff of the only paper with an interest in investigating, had all been fired. We were in disgrace for supporting the 'rioters.'
From that moment on, we all began to dissociate. We were ripe for psychedelic takeover.
Ending with the need for a spiritual perspective.
Topics covered in this interview:
how Ellen and I met over the internet in early 2014 because Ellen's mother was a patient of MKULTRA psychiatrist Dr. Ewen Cameron; Cameron's record in Montreal: 10,000 electroshocked patients a year; a room at McGill filled with old electro-shock machines; Cameron's excellent reputation thanks to media exposure; misdiagnosis of patients who came for treatment for other ailments and ended up depatterned; Ellen's mother's broken life after depatterning and on tranquillizers; what is crazy?; Ann's father was a Cameron patient for 6 weeks in 1962; a high school music teacher who may have become aware of the mind control experiments on children; the project to create Manchurian Candidates using children (Project ARTICHOKE); children as 'blank slates'; children of the military were often used; twins as MK subjects; when you start investigating this subject other survivors gravitate to you; Quebec and the Catholic Church and the surplus of war orphans; less adoptable kids sometimes ended up in experiments at group homes, military bases, hospitals; Canada's reputation as a 'nice' country; Ann's research, Air Force involvement in MKULTRA; marginal "schizophrenics" often turn out to have been in MK experiments; media are heavily controlled and many people working in media are actually survivors of mind control programming; a societal problem; trauma-based mind control and bloodlines; ancient roots of mind control; trauma and special abilities like photographic memories; a non-human culture; sado-masochism and cults; pedophilia and sexual perversion; organized pedophilia and blackmail/control; 3000 missing women in Canada; why did the police let Robert Pickton operate his Pig Farm; snuff films; secretive men's clubs; child trafficking in Canada; systemic and controlled at the highest levels; Pickton and Cameron as fall guys; Canadian 'heroes of medicine' experimented on children who were kept in cages; Wilder Penfield; pedophilia as the Achilles' heel of a corrupt society; Ann's amnesia for being in Cameron's experiments; the illusion of growing up normal in a city filled with broken psychiatric patients; poetry and the arts as a gathering place for MKULTRA survivors; controlled schizophrenia at McGill, the aerospace industry uses children for experiments; artificial intelligence; creating cyborgs; MKULTRA is now entertainment and all-pervasive; comparing early mind control programs with today; the Allan Memorial and Dr. Cameron; Cameron's patron Allen Dulles and Roosevelt's death; the secret treaty with Hitler's SS that ended WW2; Operation Paperclip; the Nazi connection; rumours of Dr. Mengele in Montreal in 1967; possible photo of Mengele in Quebec City hospital in 1949; British and American eugenics inspired Nazi experiments with Rockefeller funding; the Tavistock Institute in London; the Tavistock-funded counter-culture; our Brave New World; chances for self-realization despite our MK'ed culture; believing we are 'special'; negative frequencies; rivers of guilt and shame; negative emotions; electronic bombardment; Ellen realization that she was being controlled by external frequencies; hearing voices; voice-to-skull technology going back to early 1960s; 'you're a bad mother' messages; creating schizophrenia while pretending to cure it; alters and multiples; John Marks exposed Cameron in 1977 otherwise he would have remained Canada's little secret; Wilder Penfield's experiments on children at the Montreal Neurological Institute; Carol Rutz describes Penfield's brain-mapping experiments on her and other children; "the fate of the Western World depends on your silence"; murdered children; Dr Cameron's secret behaviour lab that housed up to 25 children; how disposable children were programmed at the Allan Memorial; candies with LSD; unmarked graves in Montreal; 'A family that betrays its ancestors descends into madness.'
Ellen's story is at her blog
