Call it vanity, but every six months or so I Google The X-Spot, just to
see the new links to this page. On very rare occasion (rarer than I
would have thought, actually), they’re cussing me up and down for
butchering a sacred cow. Usually though, it’s because someone has cited
something on the page as a reference.
Back in January 2011, I came upon a very unusual link: a footnote to a 46,000 word online novel. It read:
Most of the novel’s characters aren’t fictional, but rather real-life flesh-and-bone people, most of them famous Hollywood actors, directors and producers. The remaining characters consist of historical figures, many of them not famous but connected to the underground scene of 1960s Los Angeles. The few fictional characters populating this work are thinly disguised versions of actual people. Some of the characters’ actions accurately reflect what their meatspace counterparts actually did. Other actions are purely fictional. The footnotes became the forum’s way of sussing out fact from fancy.
A group calling itself Margaras Media posted the novel sometime in 2010.* Its title: The Last Statue Its author: V. Cinco, or as I like to call him, Five Five.
The plot: Dick Privette (a private investigator for those of you who are incredibly thick), on behalf of a client named Wheeler, hires a hack screenwriter to infiltrate the shoot of O’Blivion’s Water. The movie’s director, former 1960s wunderkind Rex Learner, has gone into bunker mode, hiring tight security and letting no outsiders onto the set. Wheeler suspects Learner’s life is in danger because of the movie, and has hired Privette to get to the bottom of the things. Because the project has a need of a script doctor, the screenwriter, who had worked for Learner before, seems a natural choice of spy.
At least that’s how the plot starts. The novel sorta rambles, first to the screenwriter’s past, and then to the party scene of 1960s Hollywood. From there, it goes into the history of what Mae Brussell called “the California violences” (Zodiac, Tate-LaBianca, and so forth). The story then catches up with Lerner and his exploits in Latin America during the 1970s. The last chapter has the screenwriter, back in his native Westchester County, New York, shooting the breeze with old friends, talking about the strange history of their hometown.
Upon casual inspection, The Last Statue comes across as, well, a mess. With so many references to so many things--the bulk of which I knew about, but a number of them that I had to look up--and with so many changes in direction, it’s damn near impossible to comprehend. But since it touched on a boatload of conspiracy subjects, I thought I’d give it a college try.
When I want to read something that’s disorganized, I often find it helpful to edit the damn thing. That forces me to engage the text in an active way, making me less likely to be dismissive of subtle themes, connections or other things that seem trivial at first glance. I better see the work's internal logic. In the case of The Last Statue, some things began to dawn on me:
1. The novel had multiple authors. I realized this because of subtle changes from chapter to chapter in such things as punctuation style, syntax, time/date presentation and so on. My best guess: five (possibly six) people wrote it.
2. Actor Dennis Hopper appears in two separate contexts within this story. The first is as himself, the actor Dennis Hopper. But he is also Rex Learner. We know this because the fictional director’s biographical information highlights unique events in Hopper’s life. For instance, the novel has Learner attacking his girlfriend, Caterine Milinaire, subsequently putting marks on her face. The following morning, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe visits and, horrified by the previous night’s violence, documents Milinaire’s injuries by taking pictures of them. In real life, Milinaire was Hopper’s beau. Mapplethorpe came over the morning after a night of violence, and photographed her injuries.
Another example: there’s a reference in the novel about Learner’s attempt to blow himself up in a chair. Hopper really did this.in a 1983 publicity stunt.
3. The Last Statue, as originally posted by Margaras, has a sidebar (if you click the above link to the novel, you might have to scroll down a bit to see it), which consists of various names and titles. Many of the links (e.g. Harry Dean Stanton) belong to characters in the novel. Some of the items listed do not (e.g. Giulio Camilo and Thomas Pynchon), but one can quickly see their relevance to the text.
One of the most important links leads to a Wikipedia article on “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a 1940 short story penned by Jorge Luis Borges. Here, a bunch of cultural elites conspire to create a bogus history of a fictional country, Uqbar, by publishing phony references to it’s existence in a region of Asia Minor. Their plan is to have Uqbarian culture dominate the globe in order to transform the Earth into the mythical kingdom of Tlön.
4. The plot serves as a platform to discuss the Los-Angeles based Four-Pi Movement (or Chingons), a cult formed in 1968 by fifty-five former members of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, an offshoot of Scientology.** (Remember V. Cinco?) Gannett reporter Maury Terry, with help from the Queens County (NY) District Attorney’s office, and law enforcement agencies in Westchester (NY), Minot (ND), Los Angeles, and Palo Alto (CA), linked the cult to numerous crimes, including possible involvement in the Zodiac, Son of Sam and Cotton Club murders.
The Last Statue features suspected Four-Pi members (e.g., movie mogul Robert Evans, convicted hitman William Mentzer, and military intelligence officer Ron Stark), actions the group allegedly undertook (e.g., ousting Mellon family scion Billy Hitchcock as the dominant supplier of LSD in the 1960s), possible victims (e.g., director Roman Polanski and producer Roy Radin), and rumored settings (e.g., Hollywood, and Yonkers, NY’s Untermeyer Park, where an East Coast branch of the cult supposedly operated). These references and many more serve as the unifying theme of an otherwise incoherent narrative.***
5. Most important, The Last Statue isn’t really about Hollywood, the 1960s or Four-Pi. The true protagonists are never mentioned, nor do they participate in the story as either themselves or fictional characters, although their names appear in the sidebar. Permeating the tale are massive references to their story, which had become a juicy source of gossip in New York during the fall of 2007, with considerable press coverage in the local dailies, and eventually the national press.
In 2007, a few of my meatspace friends--academics who are highly amused by the fact that I maintain this blog, but who nevertheless promise to keep my identity secret--pressed me for my thoughts about the matter. They wanted my perspective for several reasons. (1) They knew that because of my relationship to Dr. R., I had spent considerable time in and around St. Marks, the primary setting of this story. (2) A number of rumors had begun to circulate that involved, let’s say, X-Spot material.
(3) The gossip centered on the fate of a fellow conspiracy blogger.
Footnotes
Back in January 2011, I came upon a very unusual link: a footnote to a 46,000 word online novel. It read:
Joe Dorgan, a member of the Straight Satans motorcycle club, was present at the LaBianca residence when the bodies of Rosemary and Leno LaBianca were found. Dorgan was the fiance of Rosemary's daughter Susan Struthers. See http://xdell.blogspot.com/2008/10/ devils-in-slide-love-locs-and-rosemarys.html.Of course, novels usually don’t have footnotes, unless they’re republished editions from some bygone century. As it turns out, this was not the original version of the book, but rather a recreation of it by a forum dedicated to dissecting it for meaning. The original had no footnotes. The netizens on this particular page had discovered an abundance of clues--kinda similar to the Paul-Is-Dead Hoax--that in themselves presented a mystery. It was dense with arcane, esoteric, and occult allusions, with copious references to the lyrics of Steely Dan and the Doors. The forum’s founders established the page to parse out everything. The posters wondered if there were some sort of profound secret meaning behind this story.
Most of the novel’s characters aren’t fictional, but rather real-life flesh-and-bone people, most of them famous Hollywood actors, directors and producers. The remaining characters consist of historical figures, many of them not famous but connected to the underground scene of 1960s Los Angeles. The few fictional characters populating this work are thinly disguised versions of actual people. Some of the characters’ actions accurately reflect what their meatspace counterparts actually did. Other actions are purely fictional. The footnotes became the forum’s way of sussing out fact from fancy.
A group calling itself Margaras Media posted the novel sometime in 2010.* Its title: The Last Statue Its author: V. Cinco, or as I like to call him, Five Five.
The plot: Dick Privette (a private investigator for those of you who are incredibly thick), on behalf of a client named Wheeler, hires a hack screenwriter to infiltrate the shoot of O’Blivion’s Water. The movie’s director, former 1960s wunderkind Rex Learner, has gone into bunker mode, hiring tight security and letting no outsiders onto the set. Wheeler suspects Learner’s life is in danger because of the movie, and has hired Privette to get to the bottom of the things. Because the project has a need of a script doctor, the screenwriter, who had worked for Learner before, seems a natural choice of spy.
At least that’s how the plot starts. The novel sorta rambles, first to the screenwriter’s past, and then to the party scene of 1960s Hollywood. From there, it goes into the history of what Mae Brussell called “the California violences” (Zodiac, Tate-LaBianca, and so forth). The story then catches up with Lerner and his exploits in Latin America during the 1970s. The last chapter has the screenwriter, back in his native Westchester County, New York, shooting the breeze with old friends, talking about the strange history of their hometown.
Upon casual inspection, The Last Statue comes across as, well, a mess. With so many references to so many things--the bulk of which I knew about, but a number of them that I had to look up--and with so many changes in direction, it’s damn near impossible to comprehend. But since it touched on a boatload of conspiracy subjects, I thought I’d give it a college try.
When I want to read something that’s disorganized, I often find it helpful to edit the damn thing. That forces me to engage the text in an active way, making me less likely to be dismissive of subtle themes, connections or other things that seem trivial at first glance. I better see the work's internal logic. In the case of The Last Statue, some things began to dawn on me:
1. The novel had multiple authors. I realized this because of subtle changes from chapter to chapter in such things as punctuation style, syntax, time/date presentation and so on. My best guess: five (possibly six) people wrote it.
2. Actor Dennis Hopper appears in two separate contexts within this story. The first is as himself, the actor Dennis Hopper. But he is also Rex Learner. We know this because the fictional director’s biographical information highlights unique events in Hopper’s life. For instance, the novel has Learner attacking his girlfriend, Caterine Milinaire, subsequently putting marks on her face. The following morning, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe visits and, horrified by the previous night’s violence, documents Milinaire’s injuries by taking pictures of them. In real life, Milinaire was Hopper’s beau. Mapplethorpe came over the morning after a night of violence, and photographed her injuries.
Another example: there’s a reference in the novel about Learner’s attempt to blow himself up in a chair. Hopper really did this.in a 1983 publicity stunt.
3. The Last Statue, as originally posted by Margaras, has a sidebar (if you click the above link to the novel, you might have to scroll down a bit to see it), which consists of various names and titles. Many of the links (e.g. Harry Dean Stanton) belong to characters in the novel. Some of the items listed do not (e.g. Giulio Camilo and Thomas Pynchon), but one can quickly see their relevance to the text.
One of the most important links leads to a Wikipedia article on “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” a 1940 short story penned by Jorge Luis Borges. Here, a bunch of cultural elites conspire to create a bogus history of a fictional country, Uqbar, by publishing phony references to it’s existence in a region of Asia Minor. Their plan is to have Uqbarian culture dominate the globe in order to transform the Earth into the mythical kingdom of Tlön.
4. The plot serves as a platform to discuss the Los-Angeles based Four-Pi Movement (or Chingons), a cult formed in 1968 by fifty-five former members of the Process Church of the Final Judgment, an offshoot of Scientology.** (Remember V. Cinco?) Gannett reporter Maury Terry, with help from the Queens County (NY) District Attorney’s office, and law enforcement agencies in Westchester (NY), Minot (ND), Los Angeles, and Palo Alto (CA), linked the cult to numerous crimes, including possible involvement in the Zodiac, Son of Sam and Cotton Club murders.
The Last Statue features suspected Four-Pi members (e.g., movie mogul Robert Evans, convicted hitman William Mentzer, and military intelligence officer Ron Stark), actions the group allegedly undertook (e.g., ousting Mellon family scion Billy Hitchcock as the dominant supplier of LSD in the 1960s), possible victims (e.g., director Roman Polanski and producer Roy Radin), and rumored settings (e.g., Hollywood, and Yonkers, NY’s Untermeyer Park, where an East Coast branch of the cult supposedly operated). These references and many more serve as the unifying theme of an otherwise incoherent narrative.***
5. Most important, The Last Statue isn’t really about Hollywood, the 1960s or Four-Pi. The true protagonists are never mentioned, nor do they participate in the story as either themselves or fictional characters, although their names appear in the sidebar. Permeating the tale are massive references to their story, which had become a juicy source of gossip in New York during the fall of 2007, with considerable press coverage in the local dailies, and eventually the national press.
In 2007, a few of my meatspace friends--academics who are highly amused by the fact that I maintain this blog, but who nevertheless promise to keep my identity secret--pressed me for my thoughts about the matter. They wanted my perspective for several reasons. (1) They knew that because of my relationship to Dr. R., I had spent considerable time in and around St. Marks, the primary setting of this story. (2) A number of rumors had begun to circulate that involved, let’s say, X-Spot material.
(3) The gossip centered on the fate of a fellow conspiracy blogger.
Footnotes
1. Click here to see the recreation and footnotes.
2. 'Chingon’ apparently comes from a Mexican Spanish slang term roughly translating as ‘bad ass.’
3. Indeed, The Last Statue would be impossible to comprehend without extensive knowledge of Four-Pi. Terry’s The Ultimate Evil is an excellent primer on the subject.
Terry briefly examined the relationship between Charles Manson and Mentzer, who were close enough for the latter to acquire the nickname Manson II. Ostensibly a consultant for Crest Security, whose clients included Evans, Larry Flynt, and other glitteratti, Mentzer gunned down Radin in 1984, and actress June Mack (right) in 1983. A jury, believing that he had killed “for profit,” found Mentzer guilty of first-degree murder in Radin’s case in 1991. He subsequently confessed to Mack’s slaying later that year after forensic evidence proved he used the same .22 to slay both her and the producer.
David Berkowitz told Terry and authorities that he assisted Mentzer in the killing of Christine Freund and Stacy Moskowitz, two victims generally attributed to the Son of Sam. Berkowitz also accused Mentzer of the 1974 murder of Arlis Perry, the wife of a Stanford University undergraduate. Police found her severely brutalized corpse in the campus chapel.
Berkowitz stated that he had joined the Four-Pi Movement shortly after his discharge from the US Army. He identified former USAF Airman John Carr (father: Sam Carr) as another member of the cult, and a fellow Son of Sam perpetrator.
2. 'Chingon’ apparently comes from a Mexican Spanish slang term roughly translating as ‘bad ass.’
3. Indeed, The Last Statue would be impossible to comprehend without extensive knowledge of Four-Pi. Terry’s The Ultimate Evil is an excellent primer on the subject.
Terry briefly examined the relationship between Charles Manson and Mentzer, who were close enough for the latter to acquire the nickname Manson II. Ostensibly a consultant for Crest Security, whose clients included Evans, Larry Flynt, and other glitteratti, Mentzer gunned down Radin in 1984, and actress June Mack (right) in 1983. A jury, believing that he had killed “for profit,” found Mentzer guilty of first-degree murder in Radin’s case in 1991. He subsequently confessed to Mack’s slaying later that year after forensic evidence proved he used the same .22 to slay both her and the producer.
David Berkowitz told Terry and authorities that he assisted Mentzer in the killing of Christine Freund and Stacy Moskowitz, two victims generally attributed to the Son of Sam. Berkowitz also accused Mentzer of the 1974 murder of Arlis Perry, the wife of a Stanford University undergraduate. Police found her severely brutalized corpse in the campus chapel.
Berkowitz stated that he had joined the Four-Pi Movement shortly after his discharge from the US Army. He identified former USAF Airman John Carr (father: Sam Carr) as another member of the cult, and a fellow Son of Sam perpetrator.
"The plot serves as a platform to discuss the Los-Angeles based Four-Pi Movement (or Chingons), a cult formed in 1968 by fifty-five former members of the Process Church of the Final Judgment..."
ReplyDeleteThat must be the fictional part of the story, I assume.
"...a cult formed in 1968 by fifty-five former members of the Process Church of the Final Judgment..." is a pretty humorous, albeit black-comedic, statement - being completely false & fanciful. There never was a "4-Pi movement" at all, excepting as a fantasy in the minds of two drug-addled and mentally ill murderers.