Scott Walker: Climate of Hunter

In the early 70s, Scott Walker the artist disappeared, replaced by Scott Walker the singing check-casher. He went through the same paces when reuniting with his original group, The Walker Brothers, until 1978, when the group released Nite Flights. It contained Scott’s first original songs since Til the Band Comes In and they were unlike anything he’d written before. His four tracks on that album were critically praised.

Then Walker disappeared from the music world completely.

As I’ve said before, Walker’s artistic progression couldn’t have been more ripe for legend if he had planned it. Stardom as a unique, dark and tortured figure. Challenging and out-of-fashion solo work. Commercial failure and retreat into puerile work-for-hire. A tiny flash of genius and then silence.

It was the right formula to kindle interest in his work. In 1981, one of Britain’s many eccentric pop geniuses, Julian Cope, released a compilation of Walker originals. The album was titled Fire Escape in the Sky:  The Godlike Genius of Scott Walker and focused on original songs from his first five albums. Two more compilations quickly followed and Walker was signed with Virgin Records.

The album he produced was Climate of Hunter, released in 1984.

It’s probably best to consider it a transitional album. A few of the melodies have traces of his earlier, more somber ballads but none of the incredible bombast. One may hear an echo or two of his tracks on Nite Flights, but very little. At the same time, there are just as few hints of the style he would develop on the next three albums.

This article from The Quietus does a good job of appraising it in the context of his other work and gives us a label to hang on the album:  art pop, that sideways little genre that could only have emerged from the 70s.

No discussion of the album is complete without quoting the first line from the opening track, “Rawhide:”  “This is how you disappear.” It’s taken autobiographically, of course, but the song really is remarkable, with its rising tension leading to a frenzied gallop followed by a slow release:

This was 1984, so of course Virgin produced a music video, for “Track 3" (Starts at 5:18):

This is the most obviously pop track, even with lyrics about washing “the murder away” and a messianic tilt. A catchy melody, too.

“Sleepwalker’s Woman” is the track most similar to his earlier work, a languorous ballad. The difference is in the indirectness of his lyrics; as with Nite Flights, Walker is no longer straining to describe things exactly. He’s content with expressionistic abstractions.

“Track Five” gives us the best picture of the production style Walker practiced on the album. He kept the vocal melody a secret from his session musicians and nowhere is the contrast more obvious than here. The live backing band sounds almost like an instrumental bed for a  Miami Vice chase. When Walker’s vocals come in, it throws the band and his voice against one another.
“Track Six” is the clearest bridge between his older work and his future albums, even if it is the oddest sounding track on the album. A little crooning in combination with frightening tones. Walker would leave behind the former and explore the power of the latter as he progressed.

An album like this is almost critic-proof and it’s a shrewd move for Walker, even if that wasn’t his intention. To attempt to remake Scott 4 would only invite comparisons and Walker had gone through a lot in those fifteen years. It’s surprising that he didn’t follow through with the sound he created on Nite Flights, but it’s also evidence that Walker had returned to following his muse and doing so with even less compromise than before.

Assorted Thoughts on Monarchy (and a Goodbye to NRx)

A few weeks ago, I was considering coming to some kind of final reckoning with the ideas of neoreaction. The movement seemed to have stalled and spun its wheels with navel-gazing and back-slapping. And all without having come up with a definable perspective at its center.

I planned on digging through the fundamental texts listed in the Neoreactionary Canon and trying to figure out what exactly were the premises on which everyone was operating.

Then Trannygate happened and I became disgusted with the whole mess of them. It suddenly became clear--these guys think they invented reactionary thought and are too self-aggrandizing to understand that "inventing reaction" is a contradiction in terms.

The ideas they discuss--hierarchy, HBD, the dangers of mob rule--disappeared from the Western conversation only sixty or seventy years ago. For the most part, neoreactionaries don't say, "These old ideas are more true than modern assumptions." They say, "I have true and radical ideas. Me--I have them."

More social posturing, in other words, and that means it's doomed to obscurity, but not before a short-lived sweep through the alternative right because it assembles a lot of loose opinions under a cool-sounding name.

Consider pre-power Italian Fascism. Mussolini and his cohorts wrote millions of words describing how great and revolutionary Fascism was and how different it was from every other political theory. What it failed to describe was what exactly Fascism was.

The Reaction will put you in the driver's seat. The Reaction will be no rerun, brother. The Reaction will be live.

Neoreaction is the same way, all marketing puffery surrounding a few old ideas with no central perspective. So, I'm no longer interested, though I plan on checking in a year from now to see its state.

However, I realized that I'd never written out my thoughts on monarchy, which the mainstream media has erroneously attached to neoreaction but was once a lively topic of discussion. With no more ado, the advantages and lessons of having a final authority:

Monarchy has a human reach  Perhaps the triumph of democracy is really the triumph of bureaucracy, with the idea that good governance is too complex for one man to sit at the head of it.

In absolute monarchy, the government does what the monarch feels is important. If a bureau has outlived its usefulness, the monarch can single-handedly dissolve it. Consider how a strong monarch could have handled the civil rights movement, had he been persuaded that blacks were unduly disadvantaged. He may have instituted the exact same affirmative action programs that were placed but at some point he would have discontinued them as having done as much as they can.

In our current system, programs are easy to start and almost impossible to end. A final authority examines the efficacy of the programs and adjusts accordingly. The quality of the programs, of course, rests on the quality of the one ultimately responsible.

Most importantly, the fact that the monarch cannot control everything means that he’s more likely to control what’s important. Even though final authority rests in a single person, monarchy is naturally decentralized. He’s just one man, after all.

A bureaucracy without an ultimate authority, however, believes that everything can be controlled and never hesitates to try.

Monarchy is the ultimate arbiter of the law  Progressivism has a bad trait of wanting the tail to wag the dog. The existence of exceptions means that the whole of the law has to change. Gay marriage and transgender rights are the current hot buttons, but the best example is euthanasia.

Everyone can conceive of a situation in which it appears that snuffing out the life of another is an act of mercy and not of violence. Our laws are generally geared toward allowing someone to die--removing medical assistance--but progressive thought says that this is oppressive--the law should allow for situations in which it’s advisable to actively kill someone.

By providing a final authority from which the law springs--as opposed to our conception that the law itself is the authority--, monarchy provides an escape valve for especially difficult cases. The man who is charged with murder for putting a pillow over the face of his father who was in the final stages of Alzheimer’s can have his punishment reduced or rescinded by order of the monarch. The monarch has the power to say “This is a special case,” without establishing a precedent for euthanasia. The law applies to most situations but cannot apply to all--monarchy solves this through the final authority of a single person.

Monarchy comes with a set of inherited obligations  Perhaps the reason why dictatorships usually devolve into tyranny is because the dictators themselves were not morally prepared for true leadership.

Aristocrats and monarchs were raised in the culture of noblesse oblige--their blessings of rank required them to care for those lower in status. A future king was raised to respect his role and to understand the needs of his kingdom.

It’s always a gamble to rely on the moral compass of a leader (but hasn’t America consistently done this?), but the truth is that cruel leaders like Ivan the Terrible and prolifigates like Louis XIV were rare. The majority of bad rulers were mediocre and a surprising number were paralyzed by the enormity of their responsibilities, rather than abusing their stations.

The training of life-long leaders is the primary reason why a return to monarchy isn’t feasible today. The descendants of royalty have been separated from real power for so long that they will rule no better than your average ambitious colonel.

Monarchy provides a framework  One of the most eye-opening writers I discovered in my early days of conservatism was Justus Moser. In this conservative collection, he has a piece from the 1770s named “No Promotion According to Merit.”

I was amazed that something so fundamental had a period of debate. But Moser had some good points. His central argument was that a stable arrangement allows actors to work around the framework to accomplish their goals. A shifting arrangement--one that is always changing in order to “improve” it--is like building a house during an earthquake.

Likewise, in one of his books, Theodore Dalrymple marveled at the quality of life somewhere in Italy, which he ascribed to the complete ineffectiveness of the government. Because the people could not rely on the state to regulate their economy properly, they developed a black market for quality goods whose prices were not inflated by taxes and other regulatory costs.

I don’t know that I’d go quite as far as those two, but one should know that monarchy provided a stable arrangement. The character of the reign was dictated by the character of the monarch, whose time on the throne may well last decades. Whether the most capable leader in history, a so-so ruler or a total incompetent, the subjects had time to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of their monarch. If the king was good, they prospered. If he was bad, they worked around him.

Monarchy is not driven by change  Modern democracy is built on the cry, “We can do it better!” Rare is the politician who runs on the platform that nothing needs to be done.

A monarch is more likely to accept that a system is generally working and leave it unchanged. Progressive thought is always looking for the exceptions and overhauling the system to correct them. When the overhaul creates further exceptions, more overhauling follows. It’s a cycle that produces instability and can never be judged for its effectiveness because it’s always about to be improved.

The days of powerful monarchs probably will not be seen again for a long time. The kings and queens of the past came from warriors who won their position through battle and cunning. Their descendants held their thrones by outsmarting and outfighting their rivals while earning the love of their subjects. The genes may still be there (though probably not) but the historical environment has been destroyed. There is no one to take their place.

Even though we can’t return to those days, we can see the failures of our current system by comparison. Absolute monarchy may be extinct but it is not obsolete.

Your Guide to Monarch Mind Control - Chapter Ten

The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave
By Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler

Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five

Chapter Six
Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine

CHAPTER 10 USING SPIRITUAL THINGS TO CONTROL A PERSON

S&W consider this chapter to be their most important. As usual, the more significant they feel their message is, the more incoherent it becomes.

In a nutshell, allowing demonic forces into the system of alternate personalities is the glue that holds the system together. Without the demons to maintain the system’s integrity, the victim is naturally drawn to heal herself, through therapy and becoming born again.

Too much of the chapter is about proving that demons exist and manifest in humans. Evidence of voodoo possession is drawn out; the lack of Multiple Personality Disorder and prevalence of spiritual possession in India is discussed. Just as with the chapter on hypnosis, S&W should have simply stated that demons possess people instead of trying to convince us that they do. Their purpose is to explain the mind control uses of demonology; proving the veracity of demonology is another book entirely.

Illuminati bloodline members will be attached to generational demons, spirits which have been attached to the same family for years. S&W tell us that others have less esteemed demons attached to them which allow entities such as the “Spirit of Lust” to enter them.

[A note:  the common knock against those who claim Dissociative Identity Disorder is that they had been troubled their whole lives, needlessly rebellious and susceptible to drugs and impulsive behavior. With the help of credulous therapists, they “recover” memories of extreme abuse and now have a key to all their problems. Not only do they have one single reason why they have struggled in life, they also have someone to blame. Even further, they have a justification for continuing to struggle--they are recovering from brutal trauma. The idea that they stole because a demon allowed them to be consumed by a Spirit of Larceny sounds like the ultimate “Not my fault” defense.]

Demonology is also vital to one of the other far-out concepts we’ve discussed:  the programming of psychic powers. Understanding the world of evil spirits is a great help when programming victims to travel on the astral plane.

It’s the beginning of the chapter that is the simplest. Forcing the slaves to perform in satanic worship makes them feel too guilty to seek help. Equally simple is that the programmers so traumatize their victims that the victims are willing to turn to demons for relief and are thus ensnared.

It’s always been a temptation to write about the way this book is written but this is easily the most difficult chapter to get through. The entire book is close to a first draft--actually, more like S&W sat down to write what the book was going to be about and got carried away but this is the worst example of it so far.

A lot of it is the indulgent nature of writing. S&W set out to explain something but then get stuck on one facet of their point, drawing out detail after detail. Which is great for understanding your own point but needs to be condensed when one considers the readers.

I’ll say it again:  It’s unbelievable that this book is used as a reference by so many Illuminati theorists. Not because of its assertions--it’s difficult to believe that anyone read it all the way through.

Chapter 11 deals with the methods by which slaves are controlled internally.

Quick Review: Maleficent

A few weeks back, I wrote about the shift in perspective our culture has taken; that is, that our narrative point-of-view is with the outcasts and the "others." The Atlantic article I cited flew to absurd heights when the writer lamented The Terminator's lack of sympathy for Skynet, the computer determined to wipe out all humans.

Maleficent--Disney's reworking of Sleeping Beauty--has the same attitude; the first three minutes makes a clear distinction between the wonderful, magical kingdom of the "Moors" (not moor-like in the least, or is there a hint of pre-Reconquista nostalgia?) and that of the horrible, all-male world of the humans. Make no mistake, they are called "humans," rather than by the name of their kingdom or whatever, and, like all humans, they wish to conquer the Moors for no good reason. The usual human bloodlust, I guess.

Adding to the outsider sympathy, Maleficent herself, when in her powerful glory, looks awfully Luciferian with her horns and enormous wings topped with claws. I suppose they had to square the circle to make a villain into a hero, but it left me saying, "Look, I don't want to become an Illuminati conspiracy theorist but you're making it really hard not to."

Aside from the asinine perspective, it really is a bad movie. It's one of those Hollywood products that was obviously chopped down to the bare minimum; things happen with no explanation, no doubt left on the cutting room floor.

Even the bad reviews praise Angelina Jolie's performance but I just don't see it.  All she did was stand around, sometimes with a small smile, sometimes with with a frown, and talk in that irritating British accent she used in Tomb Raider. She barely interacts with any other characters and it looks like she could have filmed her scenes in three days. In my opinion, she's one of the most overrated actresses around and her beauty has dried into freakishness--the Lady Gaga-style faux cheekbones don't help.

It's all too stupid to talk about. Every change to the Sleeping Beauty story is made arbitrarily just to be different or anti-human. The effects are ugly and unimpressive. The climax is the most hackneyed action-movie trope:  Maleficent is in a position to kill the evil king but she releases him. She turns her back and, like all humans, he attacks her from behind. She defends herself and he falls off the tower.

My girlfriend, who is no critic and loves the story of Sleeping Beauty, kept saying, "Why?" and concluded, "Who is this movie for?"

Starting From Scratch, Again and Again

Bruce Charlton makes a good point:

One of the strangest traits on the Left is the one when people behave as if pacifism, secularism, egalitarianism, feminism, racism, the sexual revolution etc. are new ideas - fresh, exciting, untried, untested - give them a shot why not? Don't write-off idealism! They might work!
---
The point is that we actually know, in so far as anything can be known, how these ideas turn out - and they they turn out very differently from how idealism paints them.

In the Brian Eno article I quoted yesterday, he also said this:

So, just as we might come to accept that "coriander" is a name for a fuzzy, not very clearly defined space in the whole of our smell experience, we also start to think about other words in the same way. Big Ideas (Freedom, Truth, Beauty, Love, Reality, Art, God, America, Socialism) start to lose their capital letters, cease being so absolute and reliable, and become names for spaces in our psyches. We find ourselves having to frequently reassess or even reconstruct them completely. We are, in short, increasingly uncentered, unmoored, lost, living day to day, engaged in and ongoing attempt to cobble together a credible, at least workable, set of values, ready to shed it and work out another when the situation demands. 

And I love it: I love watching us all become dilettante perfume blenders, poking inquisitive fingers through a great library of ingredients and seeing which combinations make sense for us, gathering experience - the possibility of better guesses - without certainty.

 The thing is, I agree with Eno that so many of the things we argue about are "fuzzy, not very clearly defined spaces." Where we differ is that I don't think we started feeling out their borders in 1965.

Civilization has been a millennium-long project of pushing and pulling against the concepts and mores of human life in order to provide more order, more stability and more happiness to the individual.

Tradition provided that, creating the best possible outcome for the largest number of people--restraining their worst impulses and, at its best, coaxing out the saint within. "Progress!" is the cry of the person desperate to indulge their vices but too cowardly to defy society. When vice fails as it always does, the progressive never blames vice itself.

Wealthy and lauded people like Eno think that being "uncentered" and "unmoored" is a great freedom. Perhaps for them it is, but their pronouncements ignore the addict, the narcissist and the child of divorce and all the people who crash on the rocks for lack of guidance.

LA Weekly Tries to Convince Us that Tom Cruise was Railroaded

If there's someone in your life who can't understand how the media misleads, LA Weekly has offered the bunny slope of media skepticism: "How YouTube and Internet Journalism Destroyed Tom Cruise, Our Last Real Movie Star."

Writer Amy Nicholson should really have written this and then locked it in a vault for fifteen years. You see, she's writing revisionist history about events we just recently lived through and it's a ham-handed class in selective fact-picking and obsequiousness to the subject.

Her thesis is that Tom Cruise's public meltdown in 2005 was entirely fabricated, a combination of his inexperienced and less-powerful new publicist (his sister) and the rise of Internet celebrity gossip. The recurring motif is her contention that Cruise never jumped on a couch during his interview with Oprah Winfrey.

The comments on the article are excellent--immediately catching on to all the tricks Nicholson is pulling to make her meaningless point. Most importantly, he did jump on the couch, twice, but the writer would like us to believe that "jumping" means "jumping up and down." Since he only hopped onto the couch, and didn't act like a child on his parents' bed, she wants us to accept her contention that he didn't jump at all, as if he had stood on a couch in dignified, mature manner.

The story she constructs is that Cruise was placed before a thrilled audience and fed on the energy as a performer does, matching it with his own. A few of his for-the-crowd mannerisms were distilled into a video that made it look as though he were attacking her. This video, she says, is the source for the meme that he had gone crazy, which was amplified by the entirely new world of in-the-moment Internet gossip.

An example of her strain to spin the facts is in her off-hand mention of another appearance:

For two decades, Cruise had tried to keep the spotlight on his work. Now, it was fixated on him. Even the old guard — after years of chafing under his publicity restrictions, and finally freed from the need to appease the powerful [former publicist] Pat Kingsley — happily spun everything to fit the new narrative: Cruise was crazy. 

Guided by his sister's inexperienced hand, Cruise could only oblige, proposing to Katie Holmes and then debating the use of antidepressants (which Scientology opposes), specifically by a postpartum Brooke Shields, on The Today Show with Matt Lauer. 

Kingsley never would have let the Today footage air. But, of course, Kingsley wasn't there. "Afterward, I remember the PR people coming in and saying, 'Well, none of that stuff on Scientology and Brooke Shields, that's not going to be on the air,' " says Jim Bell, then executive producer of Today. "I started laughing and I said, 'That's probably going to be on a promo in about 30 minutes. It's going to be airing in a loop to get people to watch tomorrow morning.'"

Here's an alternative thesis, one that most people have already accepted:   Cruise has always been a nutball and Kingsley's tight control over his image prevented the public from seeing it. Let out of his cage, he showed the world that the intense characters he's played (and they're always intense) were a mirror of his own personality. But rather than being angered by lawerly misconduct or driven to succeed as a sports agent, his passion was for the tenets of Scientology.

Scientology was the third prong of his weird year. The Tom Cruise that appeared on the leaked internal Scientology video was exactly the same as his more public appearances, overly intense when serious, manic when happy and, as he called Matt Lauer, glib--he could speak paragraphs to any question he was asked.

What Cruise's "breakdown" indicated was not that the media was out to get him but that the real and unfiltered Tom Cruise is strange. Nicholson would have us believe that the previous lock-down on his private life was because he wanted the press to focus on his work. And while the media is ravenous when a weakness appears, the truth is that Cruise needed to be hidden away, lest his eccentricity sour the public.

Nice try, Nicholson, but you gave the whole game away.

Scott Walker - Nite Flights

By the time the Walker Brothers started recording their third album since reuniting, the momentum was gone. “No Regrets,” the first single of the reunion, had kindled some nostalgia and interest but the subsequent albums left critics and the public unimpressed. Scott’s work on those albums was at least more consistent with his musical persona and he sounded marginally more engaged without being the least bit inspired. It seemed that the reunion would simply peter out.

Instead, Scott put out a dazzling set of songs completely in line with the most cutting edge rock of the era and, in fact, ahead of them. And after releasing them to the world, he disappeared for six years.

Nite Flights was a contractual obligation for both the band and the record label. GTO Records was falling apart and facing bankruptcy. Scott realized that the group would receive almost no attention from the executives and certainly very little publicity--why not record whatever they wanted? They decided to record their own songs, each member alotted a portion of the release.

Surely, there must have been a few Walker Brothers fans--what few of them remained--who had enjoyed the previous two albums of country-flavored MOR and vanilla-fied rock. I like to imagine their surprise when they dropped the needle on this:

What the hell is this? Driving drums and bass with a guitar solo? Then:

What are these weird sounds? What is Scott singing about?

That’s the creepiest Solid Gold number I’ve ever heard.

But it’s not as creepy as that.

Obviously, Scott’s wheels were turning while lost in his “wilderness years.” The tracks here are so different from his previous work that, had someone else sung them, one wouldn’t suspect that Scott had made them.

One difference is that they are clearly rock tracks, founded on high-in-the-mix drums and layered with guitar. Scott had never been a rock artist, at least since his Sunset Strip and session days.

The lyrics are, at best, cousins to Scott’s earlier compositions. One of the charms of Scott’s solo years is the lyrical tension between matter-of-fact descriptions and self-consciously “poetic” figures. Like Hemingway’s prose, the immediate effect is of eccentricity, which eventually feels consistently unique. Here, he’s abandoned that direction; these lyrics are abstract, with “glass traps” opening and closing and “sunfighters” and “bloodlites.”

For comparison, consider another great alt/art-rock artist, John Cale. Biographies inevitably mention that his first language was Welsh and that he often uses English words as sounds and not for their meanings. Scott appears to be describing things using only expressionistic details--the words mean something but we’re never given the complete picture.

I love these tracks but I was curious why critics and Scott mythologists thought they were so important. The answer lies in David Bowie and Brian Eno’s collaborative work for the so-called “Berlin Trilogy,” the three albums Low, “Heroes” and Lodger.

This article by Chris O’Leary is an excellent thumbnail of Walker’s career and an even better report of the artistic dynamic between Walker and Bowie.

In late 1978, Eno brought Nite Flights to Montreux, where he and Bowie had started recording Lodger. Bowie was stunned. One can’t blame him. Imagine if a great stone face to whom you’ve been making offerings for years suddenly rumbles up a response, in an approximation of your voice.

But what was Walker doing on these tracks to respond to Bowie that was so important? For that, we have to look at the modus operandi of rock genius Brian Eno.

Here’s an excerpt from an article he wrote for Details Magazine over 20 years ago (emphasis mine):

What [music theorists] failed to notice, or at least attach any importance to, was that their language, the language of classical written composition, simply didn't have any terms to describe Jimi Hendrix's guitar sound on "Voodoo Chile" or Phil Spector's production of "Da Doo Ron Ron" - arguably the most interesting features of those works. Rock music, I kept saying, was a music of timbre and texture, of the physical experience of sound, in a way that no other music had ever been or could have ever been. It dealt with a potentially infinite sonic pallette, a palette whose gradations and combinations would never adequately be described, and where the attempt at description must always lag behind the infinites of permutation.

Nite Flights came in between "Heroes” and Lodger (the latter has a song called “African Night Flights,” which in production style is clearly influenced by Walker). The Walker Brothers’ engineer said that ”Heroes” was the reference album for the recording. The three artists are in dialogue.

Bowie’s legend for this era is that he was rebuilding himself professionally and personally. His glam-rock period starting with Ziggy Stardust put him on a trajectory of self-destruction through excess. The nadir was the time around Station to Station (my favorite Bowie album), when he was heavily into drugs and made a spectacle of himself by flirting with fascism. He retreated to Berlin to work on Low, not expecting the songs to be commercial enough to be released. Eno joined him later in the project and their collaboration continued through the next two albums. Low is the rock-nerd favorite, as it’s the most experimental.

“Experimental” is the right word because that was Eno’s method at the time (and still is to some extent). Using his “Oblique Strategies,” playing cards with methods of breaking old habits, Eno’s technique was to create chaos with the work in order to make creative discoveries. For example, at one point during the recording of Lodger, he had Bowie sing to a track playing in reverse. In addition, Bowie himself has long been a fan of William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique, creating lyrics by pulling random word combinations from a hat.

Combining their interest in finding inspiration in chaos and Eno’s particular interest in timbre and texture, we can see what was so “stunning” about Nite Flights. From Low to Lodger, we can hear the sonic chaos approaching order. In Scott’s contributions to Nite Flights, we hear timbre and texture completely and assuredly integrated with the song. That is, the interesting production elements in Bowie and Eno’s work sound accidental while it sounds as though Walker knew exactly what he was doing. It’s like working on a Rubik’s Cube and someone who’s never seen one before takes it out of your hands and solves it. “Is this what you were trying to do?”

Take another listen to any of these tracks, but especially “Nite Flights”--they sound somehow fuller. Even the background accents are either in harmony or in the almost-harmonic style that Walker favored. When Eno listened to the tracks again for the filming of the documentary, he got exasperated, asking why no one has gone beyond Walker’s work here and why young groups were content to mimic Bowie and Roxy Music.

The album was another flop, although critics liked Scott’s songs a great deal. But, after years as a failing interpreter of mediocre songs, Walker had reminded people of his unique vision and shown that, rather than being left behind, he was way ahead of pop music. Then he disappeared for six years.

Your Guide to Monarch Mind Control - Chapter Nine

The Illuminati Formula Used to Create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave
By Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler

Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five

Chapter Six
Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

CHAPTER 9 THE SCIENCE OF MIND MANIPULATION BY PSYCHOLOGICAL PROGRAMMING METHODS

S&W bring us one of the more straightforward chapters detailing a few (unconnected) aspects of programming outside of the sex-drugs-and-Wizard-of-Oz system they’ve previously discussed.

They describe witnessing a young Satanic family in action. They were at a restaurant early in the afternoon having what the father called “breakfast.” S&W listened in as the mother and father quizzed their pre-school aged son on various trivia in rapid-fire fashion. The boy responded correctly and emotionlessly. The little girls with them dissociated, sang programming cues and behaved exactly as their parent told them. They were denied food, even when the staff was so impressed with their model behavior that they offered the children free ice cream.

Speaking as a satanic-conspiracy skeptic, their description is fascinating. What could they have really seen? How much of what they tell us is real?

Second, I asked the father what the age of his children were and he didn’t know, or acted like he didn’t know. Then he blurted out, they are 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 years old. His wife knew that that answer must have looked bogus to us, and she reprimanded him, “You don’t even know the age of your children.”
To which he replied, “Yes, they are 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.” He second answer was equally implausible, but his wife didn’t protest, and the poor mind controlled children were experiencing just one more element of Satanic mind control.
They are not even allowed to realize how old they are. Dates, and times, and ages are kept very confused in the children’s minds for secrecy and control.
Not only that, but by giving a hypnotic induction “1, 2, 3 ...” the father had lowered each of the alters which were holding the bodies of his children into a deeper trance.

Whatever really happened, they use the interaction to explain that much of the programming is training the victim to respond exactly as the programmer wishes. In order to achieve this they are subjected to extreme inconsistencies. They learn that their confusion will never lift and their survival depends on submission. 

When leniency is alternated with kindness, the effect is devastating and disconcerting because the person loses the ability to predict what is going to happen.

S&W draw out the parallels between mind-control programming and the practices of non-Illuminati cults which are generally known. The individual submits his entire being to the leadership, even giving up the ability to think for himself. 

The duo discuss the use of isolation to reinforce programming and then Springmeier begins a tangent about graphology, or handwriting analysis. This is interesting for two reasons. The first is that it represents the appearance of a technique sorely missing from this book, the segue. The second is because it rings a bell our discussion rang earlier.

Apparently, Springmeier is a bit of an expert in neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, which we discussed in Chapter 5. 

A summary for the, er, uninitiated. NLP is a therapeutic perspective derived from Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics, Milton Erickson’s method of hypnosis and the experience of highly effective therapists. Though it has a great deal of interpretive and curative insights, its focus on quick-fix techniques lends itself to quackery--an online search filtering through a lot of scams.

The basic idea behind NLP is that we operate in the world according to the “map” we’ve developed through our sensory experience. In this model, the difference between mind and body, between thought, emotion and sensory experience, is illusory. They are inseparable parts of a whole. For example, when one feels happy, one's physical demeanor changes, from expression to voice to posture and beyond.

As I mentioned previously, much of the thinking is most easily explained by the term, “Fake it till you make it.” Rather than waiting for one's feelings to drive one's actions, it’s just as easy to adjust one’s external expressions to alter one’s internal state. Act in the manner of one who is happy and confident and eventually one will feel happy and confident. (This is an extremely limited description of NLP.)

Springmeier, who tells us he is a certified graphologist, discusses handwriting as an example of this principle. The hundreds of tiny movements one’s hand muscles make while writing are a reflection of the writer’s internal state. Programmers use handwriting to analyze the stresses that an alter personality is hiding. They then train the alter to write in the manner of one who isn’t experiencing those stresses. In other words, they teach the alter to fake it until they make it.

Did I say that S&W had employed a segue? Well, they didn’t but they could have. There are a couple of entries between the handwriting analysis and the section on NLP. These are about using behavioral psychology to modify a victim’s behavior and how programmers convince slaves that the ultimate cause of their misery is the programmers’ enemy rather than the programmers themselves.

We’re given a crash course in NLP which really should have come much earlier in the book. Instead of trying to divine how S&W were describing the mind, they could have laid out this framework and built upon it. The hypnotic cues described earlier are better explained as “anchors,” which connect sensory experience to desired states. Internal-world programming is “reframing as metaphor.” S&W’s book is influential despite itself--what would the conspiracy world look like if they had written it well?

Chapter 10 discusses spiritual methods of control.