Kindle. Notionally about underground/experimental/avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger's short Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) but more on the California/San Francisco counterculture that Kobek mined a few years previous. Brand new you're retro! — as someone once said. This one is Haight/Ashbury, LSD, occult, the end of the Summer of Love, Manson-adjacent, like Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019). I guess Ken Kesey never did fit that frame.
The book has three parts, a structure that imitates the film as explained towards the end. The focus is on Bobby Beausoleil who Kobek interviewed recently. There are also snippets of an interview with Anger. The thesis is that this movie, or at least a falling-out between these two men, had a major causal role in the Manson Family murders. The first part Therefore is a ramble through the SF and LA scenes and was a bit of a slog. The second [Filmic Material] is an analysis of the film in Kobek's signature style. That was fun and worth the entry price. Finally Because lays out the causal argument. It leans too heavily on some counterfactuals. The whole show is heavily footnoted and referenced, mostly to web resources of dubious veracity. So much tat, ecumenical between DC and Marvel, like the MCU four decades early. Kobek mentions but does not dwell on the Thelema, Aleister Crowley, etc. aspects which link Anger to, for instance, Jimmy Page.
After reading the book I watched the film itself (YouTube). It runs about 11 minutes and is visually more interesting (overloading) than I expected. I would have been totally mystified without Kobek's close analysis of it; the Batmen, for instance, are hilarious while Anger's theatricality in his "The Equinox of the Gods" ceremony was quite boring, as were the cremation of the dead black cat, the Rolling Stones concert footage, Marines exiting helicopters in Việt Nam, the Orkustra. I had expected to see more of Anton LaVey who represented the more commercial end of Thelema. Some of the visual compositions are great but it's all too much too quickly. The music is quite good; it's a Moog synth loop with authorship ascribed to Mick Jagger but Kobek claims it was actually just a demo loop set up by the salesman. Whoever heard of Jagger working for free?
Goodreads. Someone suggested that this is Kobek's masterwork; before watching the movie itself I would've insisted on Atta (2011) but afterwards I can't disagree.
