Fireworks and Inaugurations

"Fireworks" and "Inauguraton of the Pleasure Dome"

On July 4, NASA's probe "Deep Impact" is expected to slam into Comet Tempel 1, carving out a "crater the size of a football field and between 7 and 14 stories deep." It seems apt that the dimensions match those of a football field, America's standard unit of measurement, and on Independence Day, no less. And like Independence Day, "Deep Impact" was once a movie, too.

America speaks the language of film. Often, seemingly without knowing what it's saying.

A Bloomberg headline reads "NASA's Deep Impact Fireworks to Light Up Space on 4th of July." So, is it a fireworks display? Comet Tempel - occasionally misspelled "Temple" - is 82 million miles away, and the probe was launched January 12 with a one-second window. Of course it's a display - full spectrum pyrotechnics in the rockets' red glare - though it's supposed purpose is to "analyze the gases and dust thrown up by the impact with a series of four instruments and relay the information back to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory."

And that reminds me: "Fireworks" is also the title of a film; a short film released in 1947, the first of significance by OTO adept Kenneth Anger, shot by the then 17-year old over three days at his family's house while his parents were away attending the funeral of a relative. Anger cast himself as the transfigured victim/sacrifice of ritualized sexual violence delivered by the homoerotic archetype of a US sailor. It's harrowing, and moving, and funnier than it sounds. (Who can't help but laugh at the roman candle sequence?) Anger's an important filmmaker, whose sexual pyrotechnics makes manifest the latency of America's red rocket.

About the same time Anger was making "Fireworks," Jack Parsons, of both the OTO and the Jet Propulsions Laboratory (JPL is said, half-jokingly, to stand also for "Jack Parsons' lab") was engaged in his "Babalon Working, " which only sounds like a movie. (It's intent was a real blockbuster, too: open a rift in space-time to introduce transdimensional entitities to our reality and so hasten its end.) His partners were first L Ron Hubbard and later, his "Elemental," Marjorie Cameron.

In 1954, Anger filmed "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome," which starred Parson's Elemental, Cameron, as the "Scarlet Woman."

Also appearing in "Inauguration" was Anger's fellow filmmaker and ceremonial magician Renate Druks. After Parsons' 1952 death when his garage-laboratory blew up, Druks took in Cameron. Druks told Nat Freedland for 1972's Occult Explosion that Cameron "stayed with me at my Malibu Beach home for six months, pulling herself together after Jack died. I have every reason to believe that Jack Parson was working on some very strange experiments, trying to create what the old alchemists called a homunculus, a tiny artificial man with magic powers. I think that's what he was working on when the accident happened."

I'm not suggesting everything from "Fireworks" and Parsons to "Deep Impact" and the military-occult complex are related, other than to say, it's all America. If it's not an unbroken thread, it's all of the same cloth. And I've had the sense in recent weeks that something is being inaugurated. If you looked behind, or perhaps through, Bush last Tuesday evening, and could see the spectral smiley faces and chopped flags which evoked the dimensions of the twin towers, maybe you had the same sense, too.

The news, which isn't news at all, that Karl Rove was the source of the Plame leak, feels like the beginning of the end. But what's ending, and what may be beginning, I don't know.