15 Comments
Mar 28, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes

No idea about any connection in Herrmann's work, but maybe Herrmann was inadvertently channeling someone else's music which he may have heard. I listened to the theme and was immediately reminded of Harvey Brook's "Harvey's Tune", a sax 'solo' from the album SuperSession, by Al Kooper Mike Bloomfield and Steve Stills, from ..... 1968.

It is on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMlOY4vnQ7Y

That album has an 11 minute version of Season of the Witch! Also on youtube.

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Mar 28, 2023·edited Mar 28, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes

To my untrained ear, the tunes are variations on a theme.

The bigger question in my mind is whether that was Michael Caine coming out of the phone booth to ask for change. Sure sounded like him, but he'd have been much younger then.

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Love the musical sleuthing! I recognized the name Penrose - so I did some digging of my own. As a philosophy undergrad I read Roger Penrose, and googling confirmed he is the son of Lionel Penrose. What I read was about consciousness/quantum mechanics/AI. Interesting to follow the thread from Lionel's to Roger's thoughts, and fun to revisit on the heels of watching "Everything Everywhere All At Once" :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_interpretation

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F---, that trailer's creepy!!!

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Mar 30, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes

Eugenics is the application onto humans of techniques to modify animals and plants. Plant and animal breeding have proved fruitful. The problem of eugenics is not going away. I’m sure everyone has mentioned the Star Trek: TOS episode on how eugenics made cruel tyrants, leading the federation to ban human modification. (This has a sequel in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s episode ‘Dr Bashir, I presume.’) I do not believe human modification will be banned everywhere.

The belief that plants and animals can be modified led to Lysenkoist delusions that if the objective conditions were changed, then the plants would change—there were even claims wheat had changed into corn (or rye, after all these years my memory for this nonsense is fuzzy) and back again. And that it grew in snow.

I’ll peg the hate meter here with noting the similarity to certain gender theories today: changing objective conditions, whether Mengele adding a third arm or a doctor creating a vagina does not change wheat into rye (or the human equivalent). [Feel free to remove this statement, if it violates your terms, but leave the next.]

Contemporaneously with ‘Twisted Nerve’ is a movie in which Lysenkoist nonsense is the McGuffin for an assassination (of Mao) plot: “The Chairman.”

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Mar 30, 2023Liked by Robert F. Graboyes

For the corrupt state medical officials file, add George Hodel. He was head of Los Angeles’ Social Hygiene Bureau (which did contact tracing for venereal disease), child prodigy (entered CalTech at 15), what now would be called a sex addict, and almost certainly a blackmailer and serial killer. Check out his Wikipedia page for tepid rundown of his life.

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