While I was attending my last two years of high school in New York City from 1971 to 1973 at a small school called Elisabeth Irwin High School, I wrote something for a creative writing assignment. It was a make-believe newspaper editorial, addressing a future world where superstition/paganism had taken over. In this world, technology was as sophisticated as could be imagined, but most people called it magic. The editorial defended the unpopular idea that, though some called it magic, those new things everyone was talking about, Mind Helmets, might actually be a product of science.
Over time I have accumulated good reason to believe that, contrary to the official version of how it came about, this story of mine had a lot to do with the creation of “Mind Games,” the title song of the John Lennon album that followed “Imagine”. Both this story and “Steinhoff’s Monster”, a 16mm film I started on at CalArts in 1973. There were people at my very small (25 boys, 25 girls in my grade) high school who would go to Lennon's secret Bank Street home after school, having met Lennon through a mutual friend of Lennon's, David Peel (in 1974 I would work for Howard Smith, the person who introduced Lennon to Peel). I was actually told that this story of mine would appear in the 1973 school yearbook, though it was pulled at the last minute.
Two things happened during the afternoon of March 16th prior to the Daily Show videoclip included here:
- I received an emailed Facebook communication from someone I hadn’t heard from since the early ‘70s, a person I knew at Elisabeth Irwin
- The Mind of Natasha Richardson, whose husband, Liam Neeson, is working with Steven Spielberg on a movie about Lincoln, was damaged, presumably because she skied without a Helmet.
What might have been prevented, what can still be prevented, what exactly is at stake, I feel very much in the dark here. What is it that someone wants us to see, what guilt would they wish to assign, that may be more apparent. Oh, if only I hadn't printed the words, "Zig Ski". And oh, do no such thing again. Perhaps this is like some poker game, where a player would seek to bluff us into believing that "Zig Ski" is/remains a great clue, when it is in fact an easy opportunity to mislead. The driver of the "Zig Ski" car may have innocently done nothing more than drive from Point A to Point B on cue, expecting he was enroute to seeing the Martians land or Ringo Starr dancing the cha-cha-cha. But who cued him? Can it lead back to a more genuine clue?
Could this be an effort to guilt Spielberg for the death of Richardson, because I had to divulge the clue in a blog instead of being able to provide it directly to someone who would follow-up? Someone who would follow-up, because they would accept that I am secretly important and would thusly be more likely to receive such a clue "on my doorstep"? Could dumping guilt on people like Spielberg and McCartney be the kind of thing an enemy of the Western world would endeavor to accomplish, with me as their pawn? As for me, I recognize how complex issues might surround matters of this kind in ways beyond that which I presently know of, thus justifying a decision by Spielberg and McCartney to avoid publicizing my importance. As I lead a far more reclusive existence than most, it could seem to people like Spielberg and McCartney that I am far more vulnerable.
I do not let the kind of sick people who would kill Princess Diana and Natasha Richardson direct my mind in how to look at these things. I read the news today, but I did not see the same thing as everyone else in so doing.
And finally, I've written another sketch comedy idea, "Timeout", available at archive.org. I hope you see something good in it.
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