Barber came to the controversy thanks to a girlie magazine. In the summer of 1979 Gallery offered its readers, amongst the nudes, a record of the section of the police Dictabelt that includes the noises said to be gunshots. He played it again and again, and detected something the experts had missed. What had been thought to be unintelligible “Cross-talk” — conversation coming in from another radio channel — Barber’s ear identified as the voice of Sheriff Bill Decker, in the lead car of the motorcade. The sheriff’s voice occurs on the recording at the same point as the impulses that the Committee’s experts said were gunshots. What he is saying is, “Move all men available out of my department back into the railroad yards there… to try to determine just what and where it happened down there. And hold everything secure until the homicide and other investigators can get there.” Clearly Decker did not issue his orders till after the shooting.
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It was Reverend Pettigrew who complained about Floyd Gummer carrying them in his drugstore. Of course I went right down and seized them. Floyd was a good old boy and I knew he wouldn’t go complaining to any American Civil Liberties Union or any of those Illuminatus-controlled eastern troublemakers. I just told him about the complaint and he handed them over gentle as a lamb. He didn’t want to be on the bad side of the Reverend any more than I did. You sure can learn more diplomacy in a small town than you can at the Paris peace talks.
*
All interesting, indeed. And yet all these findings taken together did not slimmest reed of evidence. The case for demonic possession had finally to rest on what was plentifully lacking at Loudun: the reliably witnessed and reported occurrence of so-called paranormal phenomena. Levitating mattresses are very out front.
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I never took it as seriously as some people because of my insatiable curiosity about everything. This is why the moment I finished making a picture, I left California as quickly as I knew how, on a train in those days, and used that time in bed all the way across the continent for reading, because I didn’t have time to do it back there. I would see all the plays in New York, see all my friends and then maybe stay here or go abroad.
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South Avenue northeast of the Village acquired a reputation not long after the Civil War as a competitor to the Bowery. Legend has it that the area was christened by the notoriously corrupt Police Captain Alexander “Clubber” Williams, when, upon being transferred in 1876 from the Oak Street Station in the drably commercial far downtown to West Thirtieth Street, he said, “I’ve been living on chuck steak for a long time, and now I’m going to get a little of the tenderloin.”
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Zukor not only gave Goldstein the money — which was an uncharacteristic gesture for someone as cautious as Zukor — but he visite the arcade and within a short time convinced Kohn they should set up one of their own on Fourteenth Street, which at that time was New York’s tenderloin, crammed with dance halls, saloons, and arcades and teeming with immigrants looking for inexpensive thrills. As he later recounted his inspiration to Michael Korda, “I looked around and said, ‘A Jew could make a lot of money at this.'”
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“Aaron Wassertrum, for instance! He’s a millionaire. Owns a third of the Ghetto. Didn’t you know that, Herr Pernath?”
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Seven extracts from seven page seventeens in seven books, plucked fairly randomly — but I, too, believe in the reality of accidents — from my bookshelves. The books were ~
Not in Your Lifetime, by Anthony Summers; Right Where You Are Sitting Now, by Robert Anton Wilson; William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist, From Novel to Film, by William Peter Blatty; People Will Talk, by John Kobal, interview with Gloria Swanson; Lowlife, by Luc Sante; An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, by Neal Gabler; The Golem, by Gustav Meyrink.
Semi-random illustration: the Kino-Babylon cinema, Berlin, designed by architect Hans Poelzig, also set designer of DER GOLEM.
shadowplay 