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JFK, James Bond and the Movies

I have a friend who has become in his late years a real conspiracy theory believer. He doubts that people were ever on the Moon and subscribes to many theories about politics and culture. He gets a lot of his information from what I consider spurious sources - and he laughs at me because I believe in the big, established media news sources. 

He doesn't believe most of the popular theories about the JFK assassination a,nd the Warren Commission Report is total fiction. He does believe he was assassinated.  A recent podcast on who killed JFK has made me more of a believer in the JFK assassination conspiracy.

John F. Kennedy was quite a reader. Part of that came from his many long hospital stays in his youth because of colitis, and Addison’s disease and with his back issue during his Presidency. Doctors doubted that he would make it into his 30s. One of his favorites was Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. Do a search on JFK + James Bond and you'll find many articles connecting the two.  

Did Kennedy use Bond to fight the Cold War?  You can imagine why something like From Russia, With Love would appeal to him.   

Kennedy proclaimed his love for James Bond in a 1961 LIFE magazine feature at the height of his political popularity. At that time Bond was not popular in America but JFK's endorsement led to Fleming’s first significant sales in the U.S. Then United Artists secured the film adaptation rights. They rushed Dr. No. United Artists’ movie adaptations did not follow the order of the novels. It went from Dr. No to From Russia with Love perhaps based on JFK's reading list. 

Fleming even had Bond say “We need more Kennedys’ in the next book, The Spy Who Loved Me in 1962. 

There were three books that Lee Harvey Oswald had at the time of his arrest: 2 Bond novels, The Spy Who Loved Me and Live and Let Die and a non-fiction book about the USSR and Communism. Legend has it that Lee Harvey Oswald and Kennedy were both reading Ian Fleming the night before the assassination.

Trivia: The film The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) was the last movie watched by Elvis Presley. 

President Kennedy watched 81 films at the White House cinema. The first was The Misfits, starring Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. They watched 13 foreign-language films (probably Jackie;s choices). JFK liked Fellini’s La Dolce Vita but walked out after 20 minutes on Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, which I totally understand.  They keep track of these things at the White House. President Dwight Eisenhower's favorite movie was High Noon

Before becoming a senator, papa Joseph Kennedy had been a successful Hollywood producer who was said to have had an affair with Gloria Swanson. She is best remembered for Sunset Boulevard, which is one of Trump’s favorite films and was the most repeatedly screened film during his time in the White House. The first film he watched? The animated Finding Dory.  

Before JFK knew Marilyn, he had a poster of her upside down (so her legs were akimbo) on the rear of his hospital door as he recovered from back surgery in 1954. Jackie complained about the poster. The poster image was from Niagara. That was the film that really made her a star. Warhol stole the image for his Marilyn silkscreens from that film. In From Russia, with Love, there is a chapter called “The Mouth of Marilyn Monroe.” While in the hospital, Jackie gave him a copy of Fleming’s first book, Casino Royale

Tom Jones may have been the last film JFK saw, though on November 20 he was briefly back in DC for brother Robert’s birthday party and they had a copy of From Russia with Love then. The film differed from the book with SMERSH, the Red Army’s real-life counter-intelligence unit, replaced with a Russian crime syndicate. We didn't want to stir up the Russians. Kennedy had already seen it, getting an advance copy back in October. He watched it with his brother and Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post who reported later that “Kennedy seemed to enjoy the cool and the sex and the brutality. He seldom sat through an entire film, but he watched this one to the end.” 

United Artists released the film on a double-bill with War is Hell. That was the film that Lee Harvey Oswald saw part of as he hid at Dallas’ Texas Theatre, where he was apprehended shortly after the shooting of the President. 

According to The Washington Post, Kennedy’s admiration of Bond was also political. “Kennedy deliberately used Bond to project an image as a heroic leader who could meet any challenge in the most perilous years of the Cold War.”

JFK didn't get to read all 14 Bond novels which were published through 1966. 

The Immortal Jellyfish

 

Jellyfish have been working their way through the Earth’s waters for 600 million years. That is before the dinosaurs, before flowers or fungi. They have survived five mass extinctions.

They don’t have a brain or heart, just a nervous system. Is that part of the way they have survived? I am so hung up on the idea that our nervous system is intimately connected to our heart and brain, I cannot grasp their separation.

They exist in every ocean, from cold Arctic waters to the tropics and in freshwater ponds and lakes. Very adaptable. 

Have you heard about the immortal jellyfish? Not truly immortal but when something bad happens to it it reverts to an earlier stage. (For a moment, I thought about rolling back your operating system to an earlier version because the current one is broken in some way. But that is a crude comparison.) The jellyfish is hurt, has an illness, or becomes too old, it can revert to an earlier stage of development.

How amazing that it can transform its own cells so that it goes from its fully grown, sexually mature state back into its fetal form (which is a colony of polyps). And then, it starts over again. It is some wild version of time travel, except it is still in the same time. 

Theoretically, the jellyfish can do this forever, so scientists consider it biologically immortal.

Agrippa's Cabinet of Curiosities

Reading Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s encyclopedic study of magic is like stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, where toad bones boil water, witches transmit misery through optical darts, and numbers, arranged correctly, can harness the planets’ powers. 

Agrippa was a Renaissance polymath, His occult insights into the structure of the universe, discovering a path that leads both upward and downward: up toward complete knowledge of God, and down into every order of being on earth.

When I was reading an article on publicdomainreview.org by Anthony Grafton who is the author of Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to AgrippaThe FootnoteDefenders of the Text, and Inky Fingers, in order to write another essay about a different Agrippa, I was intrigued by this man. I encountered him many years ago as an undergraduate and had a very superficial understanding of his ideas. 

Below are some excerpts from the Grafton text.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s manual of learned magic, De occulta philosophia (1533), explicated the ways in which magicians understood and manipulated the cosmos more systematically than any of his predecessors. 

He attempted to map the entire network of forces that passed from angels and demons, stars and planets, downward into the world of matter. Agrippa laid his work out in three books, on the elementary, astrological, and celestial worlds. But he saw all of them as connected.

It includes a massive taxonomy of magical animals, plants, and stones, with ample instructions for their preparation and use. 

Though I read them once thinking I would uncover some ancient secrets, most of the information means nothing to us today, other than being curiosities.

Would you want to cure a sore throat by touching your neck to the hand of someone who had died prematurely? I have an early winter cough this week, but I don't think I will be putting my spit in the mouths of green frogs and then letting them escape.

A natural history cabinet or “cabinet of curiosities”.

Grafton says "Any reader could find something of interest in this paroxysm of parataxis, a good bit of it taken directly from Pliny and none of it explicitly verified by anything resembling a test." Agrippa gave his readers anecdotes and practices.

He also thought knowledge of mathematics was required to do magic. For example, the Pythagorean number patterns that gave the universe structure. 


Magical seals, characters, and numerical grids from
a 1651 English translation of Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia 

The therapies in Agrippa’s book often required the invocation of celestial or angelic powers, either to awake the slumbering, hidden forces of the magical things he wished to manipulate or to protect magus and clients against the more frightening sorts of supernatural powers. 

Magic squares originated in the Arabic world, long before Agrippa’s time. Often they had their top row of cells filled with the letters of a divine name or with the first letters of a verse from the Koran, and the lower rows with permutations on them. Since Arabic letters, like Hebrew, have numerical values, each magic square automatically forms a mathematical figure, and it was in this form that they became most popular in the West.

All the stars have their own natures, properties, and conditions, and through their rays, they also produce signs and characters in inferior beings as well, in the elements, in stones, in plants, in animals and their members. Agrippa’s book not only became the manual of magical practice, but it also made the formal claim that magic was a kind of philosophy in its own right. 

Planned Impermanence and a Book of the Dead

Image constructed for this work by a graphic artist. It shows a decayed book-shaped object delicately wrapped in mesh cloth.
Agrippa book    via Wikipedia

Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) was published in 1992. It was a book designed to decay from its very first use. It was an unusual conceit and played into our fears about malfunctioning technology ahead of the dawning millennium.

The source of the image shown above is the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. This is the museum's copy of the book, first shown in an exhibition entitled The Book and Beyond in 1995. 

Made on demand for a cost of  $500-1500 The book was created by publisher Kevin Begos Jr, artist Dennis Ashbaugh, and writer William Gibson. Is it a book at all?

The writing is a 302-line poem that Gibson wrote after looking at an old family photo album filled with images of people who were dead. The poem is stored on an Apple floppy disc within the "book." The disk would lock after play, meaning the user could experience the work only once. Dennis Ashbaugh’s artwork was similarly motivated. His images would distort if touched and naturally disintegrate as any paper book would - but at a much more rapid rate.

We don't like things that disintegrate. We like to preserve things.

There is a clear allusion to The Egyptian Book of the Dead 

Agrippa’s dominant theme in Gibson’s poem is centered on the loss of his father. The name Agrippa referred to the photo album in his family home. The album was produced by Kodak, and the particular volume was called Agrippa. Inside the album, there were visual reminders of all those who’d gone before. So, it is a book of the dead. They provided memories, of sorts, for Gibson, and his autobiographical poem centers on those images. 

Of course, memories fade, erode, crumble, and disintegrate almost immediately after the event occurs. How often do you forget a dream - even a vivid one - minutes after you wake up?