Nothing Is Real: Crowley, Manson, Polanski, and the Beatles boxsets

First, friends, a mystery (or two). Who is the anonymous entity behind the Rotten Apple Series? Have you seen it? If you haven’t, I’d say it’s worth surrendering a couple hours of your life to this addictive and somewhat unsettling cycle of video collages built around the old Paul is Dead myth. Or ‘Apaul Corps Ltd’, as it’s cleverly put by ‘iamaphoney’, the person or persons responsible for The Rotten Apple. Whatever would possess iamaphoney to construct upwards of 80 clips on the topic, ranging from one to six minutes each, we must at least salute the sheer obsessive depth of the project, along with a certain primitive gift for audio and visual montage that makes for a genuinely creepy experience once you get to episode #20 or so (if you spook easily, don’t watch alone late at night).

The crux, as far as I can tell, is this: the Cute One died in a car accident on November 11, 1966, was replaced by an equally cute and talented fella named Bill (some reconstructive surgery might have ensued), and the Beatles thereafter retired to the studio for its remaining time as a unit. All of which is covered ad nauseum in the first few episodes of The Rotten Apple, via all the dodgy backmasking, extremely broad visual clues, out-of-context statements, and otherwise freestyle fact-mangling that we’re already familiar with, assuming one has the patience and necessary sense of humour for it. The Rotten Apple becomes more intriguing, however, when it starts to examine the tissue of occult references surrounding the Beatles, positing Fake Paul as a disciple of the Great Beast Aleister Crowley and then folding Manson, the Zodiac Killer, Lennon’s assassination, and a lot more weirdness still into its Beatle-centric grand unified Aquarian conspiracy theory.

Not that iamaphoney’s collagist approach is all that unified. But it’s definitely grand, and at the very least has its basis in reality. There’s no ignoring that Crowley’s baleful and magnetic gaze provides one of the strongest visual cues on the Sgt. Pepper cover, or that the fashionable occult ferment of the ’60s -- which demonstrably infiltrated the Beatles’ world -- resulted in an ongoing, alternative cultural-historical narrative that has yet to be grasped properly by the mainstream. Which is where things get really strange. We all know how to connect the dots between the Beatles and the Tate-LaBianca killings, but The Rotten Apple delves artfully (though not exclusively) into the subterrain of ’60s witchery. Crowley’s inadvertant influence on a chain of events ending with Charlie Manson tends to be glossed over in the official history of Helter Skelter, but authors Ed Sanders, Maury Terry, and Peter Levenda have all examined Charlie’s probable schooling in Scientology and its offshoot, the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Both of which have their origins in Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis, via a bizarre episode in the life of Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard that would beggar belief if it weren’t true.

Another conspicuous Crowleyite and darling of London’s ’60s beau-monde was filmmaker Kenneth Anger, author of Hollywood Babylon, and auteur behind Scorpio Rising. Appearing in Anger’s 1972 film Lucifer Rising were filmmaker Donald (Performance) Cammell, Marianne Faithful, Chris Jagger (Mick’s brother), Jimmy Page, and Manson-acolyte and convicted killer Bobby Beausoleil, who also scored the film from his prison cell. According to the biography, Anger, the filmmaker had an unusual encounter in Hawaii in the late ’70s when John Lennon’s killer Mark Chapman approached him after a screening and handed Anger two .38 calibre bullets, remarking, “These are for John Lennon.” Chapman would then slay Lennon on the steps of the Dakota Building—which is where Roman Polanksi shot Rosemary’s Baby, the year before his wife and child were killed by the Manson Family. Mia Farrow, meanwhile, hung with the Beatles in Rishikesh while her sister was immortalized in the song “Dear Prudence”, which eventually made it onto Charlie Manson’s favourite Beatles record. And so on.

At a certain point—for me, anyway—there’s an unbearable humidity to all these evil synchronicities, and this is only one subset of events in a much larger picture. The Rotten Apple deals with more in grand and spooky style, further touching on such fine points as the significance of Crowley’s book The Winged Beetle (ahem), the implications of the word ‘Lily’, the symbolism in Fake Paul’s mustache, and at least one very startling fact that I didn’t know about Help. And perhaps it’s all just coincidence piled on top of genuine coincidence, galvanized by iamaphoney’s considerable talent for hypnotic mindfuckery. None of which answers my initial question about who might be behind The Rotten Apple, although it’s probably worth bringing up that the registration info for iamaphoney.com lists the same building address as Ringo Starr’s fanmail address but a different suite. The cherry on top is that iamaphoney’s suite number is revealed to be 666 (Thanks to ‘whipstitch’ at the Rigorous Intuitionmessage board for that).

Which is a little provocative, no? Perhaps The Rotten Apple is a viral marketing or Alternate Reality Game project, initiated somewhere inside Apple itself. But let’s throw one more probably random detail into the picture. The much-vaunted and very long-awaited remastered Beatles boxsets that prompted me to write this piece in the first place were finally released on September 9, 2009.

Or, to put it another way, on 9/9/09.

Or, to put it upside down, 6/6/6.

And just in time for a flurry of old signifiers to reappear with such unlikely speed and timing that it forces one to wonder if there’s a twilight order to things that goes beyond marketing, gaming, hoaxing, and even coincidence itself. Like the release of Manson girl Squeaky Fromme in August, the death of Manson killer Susan Atkins last week, and the arrival of Roman Polanski on our front pages again two days later. I’m sure my imagination has gotten the better of me again, but it sure feels like something is coming down fast.

The Tyee, October 2009