Kenneth Anger

*

INTERVIEW
IN
“SPIDER”

SPIDER: Talk about your next film, Kustom. What’s it about? When will be it be done?

ANGER: Well, right now it’s hung up because I’ve run out of money. When I got the Ford Foundation grant, I was completely breadless, and I conscientiously paid off lab bills and things like that. So by the time I’d taken care of my debts there was a piece missing of the $10,000, and then I got a used station wagon, and some extra equipment I needed. And so a friend and I set off across the country from here to New York to film. The material I’m filming is teen-agers in relationship to machines. And one of the machines that across the country they’re hung up on in a popular sense, I mean like aside from the transistor, is the car. And so my film is ostensibly about teen-agers and drag racing and kustom cars.

SPIDER: Then that’s what the name is for.

ANGER: Actually, the complete title is “KKK,” which stands for Kustom Kar Kommandos. You can publish that as the real title because that is the real title. Kustom is spelled with a “k” because that’s the way the teen-agers spell it to show that it’s a teen-age word and adults keep out. They’ve invented their own little things like that, and they’ve invented a lot of other things too. The Kommandos being spelled with a “k” turns out to be German, but the kids don’t realize it.

SPIDER : Well, what do you do? How do you go about filming a picture like that?

ANGER: In the first place, I subscribe to a thing called Drag News, which has nothing to do with Finocchio’s or drag queens. It’s about drag races. It gives scheduled events for the next six months, and it also gives the addresses of various car clubs which meet usually once a week. I’ve gone to plenty of their meetings and all they talk about are motors and cars. It’s just incredible. It becomes very abstract, like some sort of theological discussion.

SPIDER: Why do you think that teen-agers are universally hung on the automobile? Do you think it’s symbolic?

ANGER: Well, I suppose my films can be said to have symbolism in them, but I don’t see a difference between a symbol and a thing: it’s the same. And so, you can say that the cars, particularly the drag racers—what they call the rail jobs—not only are obviously power symbols, terribly phallic and all this, but they’re also an involvement in a controlled ordeal, in a controlled deathtempting ritual. The kids I’m interested in are the ones who create the cars themselves, not the ones who have the money to hire one of these super-duper kustomizers to make their dreamboat project.

SPIDER: What would you say to these kids when you wanted to do some filming?

ANGER : Well, I say the same thing that I said with the motorcycle group in Scorpio Rising, which is, “I’m making a film,” as I said in Scorpio, “about bikes,” or I say, “about kustom cars.” And the only similarity of the two groups is that they’re terribly touched by anyone that shows any interest in the thing they dig. I’ve had to do quite a bit of homework, memorizing things that are really quite foreign to me, so that I could talk on their level enough to be accepted.

SPIDER: Why are there so many prints of your films? We have seen at least three different Scorpios and copies of Fireworks with and without color.

ANGER: Actually, you’ve only seen two different versions of Scorpio. One is what I call the first state, which I had to finish for a festival when I didn’t have enough money to do a mixed track. A year later with some of the Ford money I did make a mixed track with sound effects blended with the music, and recut it slightly at that time. It’s only two states, and I don’t think that there’ll be a third. But I don’t think there is anything wrong with the idea of maybe making a few more changes. Someone like Griffith (with Intolerance) never had two prints that were the same. Every print he’d be juxtaposing and recutting it. Eventually, because I am interested in new projects, I will abandon it. It’s easier for a musician or a writer. He can revise just by crossing out or writing in between the lines, but the thing that makes it difficult to revise a film is that it is so fucking expensive. Every print of Scorpio costs two hundred dollars. Incidentally, I’ve withdrawn the earlier version. I only had about three prints, and they are all worn out. So there is only one finished version that is left. And in the case of Fireworks there is only one version but there is one print which I hand-tinted just for the hell of it. It was an old worn print and I needed something to do to keep me from flipping, once, because I was so hung up on nothing working out. The print was there, and I had some dye and I began a countermadness which was to hand-color a black and white film, frame by frame.

SPIDER: We’ve been curious about the rock ‘n’ roll songs in Scorpio. Why did you decide on a rock ‘n’ roll score?

ANGER: Well, I always knew that I wanted a popular music score. Actually, some of the songs are ballads; some are different things. Rock ‘n’ roll is sort of a generic thing you can fit them all under. What Scorpio represents is me cluing in to popular American culture after having been away for eight years, because I had been living in France for that long. When I came back, I spent the first part of the summer of 1962 at Coney Island on the beach under the boardwalk. The kids had their little transistors, and had them on. It’s one of the things that I call a magical happening, the way it worked out, because every single song that I used in Scorpio came out at the time that I made the film. For instance, “Blue Velvet,” which I use for the “dressing adagio” in Scorpio. I was in the final week, where I had to get the track re-recorded and I wanted something slower for this part. Bang, there it was out just on time. And it was just like it was made for the picture, or the picture was made for it—a perfect marriage, because it has the blue of blue jeans. The whole three-minute sequence was just made for it.

SPIDER: What are European film-makers doing right now?

ANGER: Right now Europe is having a very bad time film-wise. The worst is Italy. In fact, the whole country is very fucked up. They don’t know what they want any more. Something has to push out the Catholic Church that just sits on the country like a big, fat toad. It really is a weight, there is nothing like it—quite—in this country. I had a book which came out in Italian, and Cardinal Ottiavani in Milan saw to it that this book was banned throughout Italy. One man!

And in France, the New Wave has sort of washed itself out. The first enthusiasms of the young kids, whom I knew (I knew Truffaut when he was just sweeping out the office of Cahiers du Cinéma) is gone, but I’m still looking forward to some of them producing great things. By the way, there’s a big difference between, say, the American group and the French because the French are exceedingly clever in finding quite a bit of capital. Mostly it is putting the squeeze on the old man. And I’d hate to tell you how many New Wave films depended on marrying the producer’s daughter! Truffaut was one.

SPIDER: What about America?

ANGER: I think Hollywood should be dismantled. In other words, no more films should be made there. The name should be changed. For one thing, the air has become so poisoned that there’s no clear sunlight. Like Chaplin said, when he first went there, “there was sparkling weather.” Now the whole valley is just under this yellow shroud. There’s a lot of things I regret not being made in Hollywood any more that they used to do well. One of the things which I adored and I miss most are serials. I have my favorite serials which I’ve seen over and over: Flash Gordon, Daredevils of the Red Circle, Chandu. Luckily, in Europe they have copies of the American serials, and I got to see them again over there. That, and the kind of little В film that they used to make at Warner’s and Columbia. There were good things: the idea of having a movie studio is terrific; it was a magic factory. But what did they do with it? Aside from a few musicals that are really very far out, they just didn’t do much. Hollywood has had it as far as I’m concerned.

Did you see the Beatles’ film? I liked it. It was quite extraordinary. In a sense I—if it were possible—I’d like to work in a more popular movie medium. I would like to because the things that are supposedly made for the teen-agers are a pile of shit; they’re literally no good. And the kids know it. Yet they have nothing else, so they take this. But they know that they are being taken. And I think I could make a good teen-age film, that would still be for them, and that wouldn’t get the parents upset about their kiddies seeing it. Maybe I’m fooling myself, but I think I could get away with it. For instance, I don’t think there are any good horror films being made nowadays; they have such contempt for the audiences. They are sold on the title or something like that. The horror film is a great form: it’s a kind of nightmare wonderland. It is the equivalent of the fairy story, because most of the fairy stories are horror tales.

SPIDER: What about Stanley Kubrick?

ANGER: Well, Strangelove is pretty good. But I very much regret the unnecessary complete sacrifice of Lolita. Even if Nabokov agreed on the idea, it doesn’t make it right. Upping Lolita’s age just tosses the whole idea away. So just forget it. But that’s why Kubrick can work in the industry, because he does make those adjustments which I couldn’t make.

SPIDER: What do you think is the most important thing about the film as art?

ANGER : I like the idea that an experience can be put in a can and somebody can re-create it. My films are being shown tonight in New York for the first time since the censorship law fell. I can’t go myself, but I put them in a can and send them. It’s strange because what I do in my films is very much wrapped up in me. I really dig the idea of audiences. I dig people seeing my films. But when I work on a film I don’t think I could ever worry about whether they will like it or understand it. When I get involved in creation, that just disappears. It’s only afterwards that I feel it. When I really get into that creative thing of making a movie, it’s just me, and the camera, and whatever else happens to be there.

SPIDER: Why is rock ‘n’ roll important to you?

ANGER: I find it a good way to read young America’s mind.

SPIDER: Well, what do you see going on in young America’s mind?

ANGER: Well, you can’t do like the Christian Crusaders do, which is to be hung up on one idea, so all they see is their idea. Like they’re hung up on anti-Communism, so anything they don’t like has to be Communist. Otherwise it would destroy their whole structure.

SPIDER: Speaking of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, what did you think of Billie James Hargis’s contention that the Beatles are a Communist front—a menace to American youth?

ANGER: Bullshit. But that’s not really a good answer. It’s like this—I think they have a point.

SPIDER: What’s the point?

ANGER: Well, the main menace they’re reacting to is sex, and that’s the thing they always come back to. They have a big pile of clippings from different papers on the Beatles and whenever the excited reporter gets to saying, “It was just like an orgy!”—well, you can see everyone just bug out their eyes and get very upset. So I think that’s the thing that upsets them.

SPIDER: Well, why do they call it Communist, instead of just good old-fashioned sin?

ANGER: Because it works exactly like the devil worked for the Church in the Middle Ages. The reaction that these bags get from the word “Communist” is exactly the reaction that the word “devil” had in medieval times. Like in medieval times you were accused of fucking with the devil, or the Church burned and tortured you until you admitted it and all that. Now the nuts say anything, you know, like that these songs for nursery school are pinko or something like that. The kids’ songs say “love everybody” instead of saying just “God Bless America.”

SPIDER: Why do you think they chose the Beatles and not various other rock ‘n’ roll groups?

ANGER: Well, they claim that the thing that upsets them is the beat of the music. They say that the beat blocks the brain, and then all the kids’ inhibitions get loose. Because they’ve all been taught to be good, you know, and not to tear off their clothes in public, and not to kick holes in doors, and not to do a whole lot of things. And they described this one concert in Seattle, where a twelve-year-old girl tore her blouse off, as if that’s really going to shake everybody up. I talked to Barney Rossett, the publisher of Grove Press, when he was here last week. He said, “Don’t underestimate these kookie groups like the Citizens for Decent Literature; when they get on to something they will bug and bug their Congressmen, or they’ll telephone. One old bag will notify another, and like there’s a thousand notified in five minutes via the telephone. They jam the phone, either to the fuzz or whoever they’re bugging, or the public library if they want a book removed, or a theatre if they want a picture taken off. I’m talking about small towns, not big cities. You know, it’s the Ku Klux Klan, it’s sheer provincial terrorism. And it’s not just small towns, because a Catholic pressure group is behind the current cleanup campaign for North Beach. A hell of a lot of the time, people give in to them and think they’re basically, you know, like good people. But they ain’t.

SPIDER: Well, getting back to our original question: what things are in young America’s mind?

ANGER: When I was in high school, popular music was like Glenn Miller. But what you have now, and I’m speaking about American music and I’m not even bringing up the Beatles, is content in these records. I find not only a smoldering rebellion against the whole order of the adult world, but a desire to escape into the romanticism (and it’s always romantic) of the death wish. It isn’t even disguised. In a song that came out about three months ago called “The Last Kiss,” something happens on the freeway and a guy’s girl friend goes through the windshield, so he pulls her back for the last, bloody kiss. There’s also a new attitude towards death : a sense of black humor. The kids dig these songs on one level, but on another level they’re not taking them seriously.

SPIDER: What are the bike-riders in Scorpio like? Were they a typical motorcycle gang?

ANGER: This group was from Brooklyn. There are some superficial similarities to other groups like dress and attitudes, but some go a lot farther. Like, the Hell’s Angels go farther than most other groups. My group doesn’t have a name. They just hang around together. Most of them are married, have a couple of kids already, are in their early twenties. They got married just after high school. Most of them have jobs, either as truck-drivers, mechanics, or unloading fish down at Fulton’s Fish Market. Most of them have an Italian background. I see the bike boys as the last romantics of this particular culture. They’re the last equivalents of the riders of the range, the cowboys. The horse has become a mechanical thing, but it has the appeal that horseback riding has—it’s out in the open air and you’re really in contact with the elements and danger. Also, skill is required to ride one and not flip, not go down. There used to be large areas where they could ride without being bugged by cars or bugging cars in return, but now the cars have taken over everything.

Groups like the Hell’s Angels have so completely got this image going. For instance, I was out with three of them here in North Beach and they didn’t even have a bike—they came in a car. But just because they wore their colors, little sleeveless levi jackets with “Hell’s Angels” on them, suddenly we had two patrol wagons with riot dogs surrounding us. Just for three guys! It’s like the fuzz were going to put down an insurrection. We managed to split. But now whenever the Angels are recognized they are going to be bugged by the fuzz, and this brings out all the worst in them.

SPIDER: What do they do when they grow up?

ANGER: There comes a day when they get married and when their wife gets pregnant and when it’s impractical to ride around, and so they sell the bike and get a car. That’s the big break for a motorcyclist—when they sell out for a car.

SPIDER: What don’t you like about left-wing politics? ANGER: Well. I’m removed from it, you know—I don’t move in it. But one thing that does bug me, and which is sort of a tradition, is a kind of solemn self-righteousness. In one way they’re as bad as the Christian Crusaders. They have the idea that society is perfectable, and that man is perfectable. I think that life and man both will always be a mess, that the life instinct is messy, and that people who want to clean it up ultimately get into a position like Hitler, who, through his logic, had to send the gypsies to the gas chambers along with the Poles and Jews, just because they were messy and didn’t fit into his scheme of things. The idea of gypsy bands traveling around on their own in caravans, and not saying “Heil” to any social order, was just too bugging for words, and that’s how the gypsy nation in Europe was slaughtered along with the rest.

SPIDER: Do you think that in modern times society is moving closer to a clean world, or do you think that modern society is becoming more tolerant of messiness?

ANGER: The positions are hardening. While I was in Europe, friends wrote me that there were girls in San Francisco—up on Grant Street—who were arrested for going barefoot. They even found a law against that, against like indecent exposure of your toes or something, I don’t know what. But they did. But something that’s happened in the last ten years in California, particularly Southern California, is the way the surfers dress and the way the surfers wear their hair. Quite often they’ll never wear any shoes all summer long, and this is when they go to a movie or when they go in the streets, and quite often you’ll see a couple of dozen guys in the beach towns, the business district, topless. And when you think that in the thirties they were arresting men in New York and in California for not wearing a top on their bathing suits. . . .

SPIDER: Why do you think that the so-called civil libertarians refuse to support actively the people who spoke at the “obscenity” rallies at Cal and were arrested? More personally, why did you give a benefit showing of your films for the Fuck Defense Fund?

ANGER: I’ve always felt that most civil libertarians have a bugging streak of puritanism in them. They’ve always had, since the thirties. They used to have something that is worse: no sense of humor whatsoever. This mentality is hanging over some countries—such as England—like a pall. They tend to condemn everything that isn’t “serious” and good for everybody—and they have a very limited idea of what is good for people.

SPIDER: Aside from defending those who were arrested, what do you think was the significance of the issue in the first place?

ANGER: I think it was a very good thing to have things like the taboo word and the taboo spiders come out of the woodwork. I prefer to see it in a poetic sense as part of the Aquarian Age, which began in 1962.

SPIDER: What do you mean?

ANGER: AS an artist I use astrology like colors. I use it in a poetic sense. The Aquarian Age is actually the precession of the constellations.

SPIDER: How long does it last?

ANGER: Two thousand years. The one that ended in 1962 was the Piscean Age, the Age of the Fish, which was the age of Jesus Christ. Where the Piscean Age was ruled by Neptune, planet of mysticism, the Aquarian Age is ruled by the planet Uranus—the most erratic planet of all. It’s the sign of the unexpected, revolution, for one thing. And that doesn’t mean revolution necessarily taking place in the streets, though it’s that too. But it’s also a revolution of inner space—Man discovering himself. But, you know, everything’s happening on schedule. That’s what’s so groovy. There was a Stellium in 1962. When all these stars get together once every two thousand years, when all these planets, the way we look at it from Earth, are all grouped together real tight, this is called a Stellium. The Indian astrologers, you know, predicted in 1962 finis—the end of the world. And mobs of Indians were so disappointed when the day passed and it wasn’t the end that they lynched some of the astrologers.

SPIDER: And what you’re saying is that it wasn’t the end of the world, it was just the end of an era.

ANGER: The end of an era. The Era of the Jesus Hang-Up. And the new thing is happening right now. The last two thousand years were based on renunciation, sacrifice, and guilt. The fight for the next generation, the next twenty-five years, fifty years, just the beginning of the fight really, is skinning off the shell that’s left over from the last era : the idea of guilt associated with sexuality and also associated with social responsibility. To begin with, this era has to be—it’ll make plenty of mistakes—but Man has to become like a child again, and, well, I see it happening. I see it all over the world, in practically every field. In the arts I’d say that something which will prove to be a very temporary phenomenon but which nevertheless reflects it is Pop Art. But I also see it in machine forms. I see it in the kustom cars that these kids make that are really some sort of Buck Rogers rocket ships. In other words, what they’re really doing is inventing a power machine—they want to go way out. Right now and for the next seven years, something is happening. Neptune, the planet of mysticism and idealism, is in the sign of Scorpio, which is its most inimical sign, because Scorpio is the sign of sexuality and is very materialistic. It’s something you grab hold of, whereas Neptune is way out there—that’s mysticism. It’s the weird situation of a mystic planet in a magical sign : Scorpio. Magic is something that’s dynamic and active, whereas mysticism is contemplative. That’s the difference between the two.

The scorpion is a magnificent bug. It’s actually an arachnid. It’s armed, you know, like a battleship. I had one. Someone brought me one, and I kept it for a couple of weeks. But then I put it up on Telegraph Hill in the park because I thought it would die. There weren’t any flies to feed it. But for two weeks it didn’t eat, yet you’d stick a little toothpick at it and Wham! And the spider is the same way. I see the spider not only spinning webs but being capable of biting. In other words, they’re related. The sign of Scorpio, which is death and resurrection, is like the poisonous bite that makes the fever that makes you well. A spider, if you really want to analyze it, I mean, let me just make as an aside a very interesting thing. It was one of the two taboo animals, or beasties, in ancient Egyptian art. They had plenty of spiders, they’ve always had plenty of spiders, in Egypt. But they chose certain bugs like the beetle or the scorpion to deify, and they left out two things that were always plentiful in Egypt: the spider and the bat. And it isn’t that they even relegated these to some kind of inferno or hell, like horror films do when they associate spiders and cobwebs and bats with freaky things. They simply did not exist in Egyptian art. And one of the reasons I finally got from an Egyptologist is that they considered the spider a vampire, and because it’s a vampire, they had to take it out of their solar religion. And the bat also is something associated with night, so it was taboo. But the spider is cunning—it makes its web, which is a design of the universe, it waits for the fly, and then it moves. And it moves fast.

SPIDER : Let me tell you how we got the name “Spider” for our magazine. We were trying to think of a name for the magazine, and what things we wanted to pay most attention to. And so we finally decided that it was sex, politics, international Communism, drugs, extremism, and rock ‘n’ roll. . . .

ANGER: Well, you see, I didn’t get around to talking about drugs, but the way Neptune operates in Scorpio right now is that you want to break out. In other words, you need a release even beyond the bodily release of sex. It’s to get high. The ecstasy of the saints or of the voodoo worshipers is the same thing. But Scorpio is unscrupulous—it’s shortcuts and drugs. In other words, any means to the end. The push from the unconscious to get free, to get high or to get beyond, is so great that it will seize on drugs as a means of breaking through this god-awful inhibition. On college campuses of the squarest kind they are now smoking pot. Something probably happens even to the squarest kind of person when he gets stoned. Once you’ve seen through even that much of this husk or veil of the universe, I don’t care how you pierce it, it’s like a shock. Some people get a shock by seeing some sort of accident in the street. I have seen a five-year-old get smashed like that, and that’s one kind of shock, you know, it’s a visceral shock. The whole idea of a little being dancing and alive and then out—it’s gone. Another kind of shock is—I’ve been in an Arab riot in Cairo, when the native mob was having a grand old time going around burning everything that my civilization stands for. Burning typewriters, burning automobiles, even burning money, you know; I could not believe it. They broke into these European restaurants, took out the cash registers, and burned the money as though it were evil. This was in the huge anti-English riot of 1952. I saw this mob action as a dark ecstasy; this terrible thing that was going on, I mean, was a beautiful and awesome thing. It’s terrible that they murdered, but when you realize how many aeons the Arabs had been crushed, then you can understand this kind of insane explosion. And that’s why I think that the drug thing is as important as sex for our time.

SPIDER: Well, we were thinking of the letters that began those words, and wrote them out in different combinations. When we wrote S, P, D, R, we thought “Spider.” That’s how we picked the name.

ANGER : That’s terrific. I think that if you don’t get put off by the word you can see that what is happening is what I call Magick. Magick is when you put two and two together and you get five. This doesn’t mean like mixing up something and—BANG! It means ideas and things happening—action. And I think there will emerge an entirely different way of looking at the world.

SPIDER: What do you mean? How will we be looking at the world two or three generations from now?

ANGER : I think that there will be a sense of beauty where there was once revulsion and horror. I know of the existence of a beautiful Mexican child who is being held captive by scientists in Los Angeles. This child is now two years old. It is very intelligent. It has one beautiful perfect eye in the middle of its forehead and that is all. And the scientists—the doctors—they’ve got this child in an isolated clinic room and there are no mirrors and it has never seen another child. And the mother, of course, when she learned she had some kind of freak, looked at it for maybe a split second and screamed for the saints. They took the baby away and she’s never seen it since. It’s like the child has just about been born out of a seashell. This cyclops child could lead the world. I see something different emerging; something even biologically different. There’s a marvelous picture of the Beatles in which they are standing, one behind the other, and it looks like Ringo has eight arms. The Beatles are a group thing. It’s no longer just an identification with one figure, like a single leader. That’s another possibility.

But the one thing to remember about the Aquarian Age that we’re in is that Uranus is the planet of surprises. It rules us right now—I don’t think that the period we’re living in is going to be just a big drag. Things are going to happen. It’s a battle absolutely of generations; it’s Shakespeare—he says,

Crabbed age and youth cannot live together:

Age is full of grief, youth is full of pleasure.

You can be eighty and not be crabbed age—this isn’t the question. But unfortunately, most of the senior citizens are totally crabbed. Their minds are shrunken like crab apples. That’s why there is a kind of war going on between the students and the Regents and Administration. That generation has proven that no dialogue is possible. They and the young cool just aren’t the same race.

SPIDER: We get that feeling sometimes.

ANGER: But don’t you see? They’re ... Do you know what colleges were like in the twenties, when they were doing Rah Rah and Boom Boom and all that? Well, Wilson called Yale the nicest country club around. And that’s what the older generation is falling back on. College used to be a big social scene: it was the fraternities, the dances, the football team, getting your diploma, a whole kind of scene that doesn’t mean a fuck anymore. It’s so dead and gone that even such things as caps and gowns should just be tossed out completely. But then I copped out of college. I couldn’t make that scene. And the reason the Regents are now so upset is that the only thing the big wheels—the business wheels—want from a college graduate is a replacement part. They want minds that can think about all these electronic problems or run computers, but that’s to replace parts, because they always need new ones. And they don’t want to be bugged by anyone else.

SPIDER : What kind of world are we getting ourselves involved in? What will things be like twenty years from now?

ANGER: Well, I don’t know if twenty years will see us even begin to solve some of the things which have to be worked out, but the central problem for this generation—and it’s really so enormous a problem that we haven’t begun to scratch it—the central problem is the racial one. It has to be faced and gotten through. And just behind that, there’s the sexual problem. But I don’t work in politics. I feel that I’m involved in what is going on, but there is no kind of party that exists right now under any banner that I could go along with. As far as the future goes, I think that the biggest difference between now and the time when I was in high school is that there are more people in the world. It’s getting crowded everywhere. But something different and new is even going to come out of all this pushing together. There’ll be conflict. It won’t all be rosy, but I’m sure something very exciting is going to happen. I really think there’s a subterranean state of war, and the crucial moment will be when the big boys begin to put two and two together.

SPIDER: Specifically, what do you mean?

ANGER: Well, suppose instead of the Regents, the federal government were reacting this way. That’s exactly what I mean. Because you have a situation where no dialogue is possible. And that’s why I say in my commandments that if somebody bugs me, then it’s him or me. Regents (I’m speaking symbolically) are stronger than you are, but they’ve got to go. That’s what the word “kill” means. You know, just—out. Drop dead, literally drop dead. I see some very beautiful things happening, but I also see some things that will seem like flipping out, like a St. Vitus Dance epidemic. I have another film up my sleeve which will express some of these things. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to get it out. What I wonder is, can a group, like a group of young people, sustain a relationship with each other as a group—sustain something that must be love, call it whatever you want. It’s a kind of communication. You see, I consider myself and just about every young group I meet, like you, as part of something that I call Magickal that is going on. There is something Magick in the air right now. Like the old saying goes, when the time arrives for an idea, nothing can stop it.

From Spider I, no. 3, April 15, 1965, pp. 5-7, 9-11, 14-16.