Basement/Lake

In reference to recent basement work regarding the monk and the band:

The basement has long been a stronghold of the underculture… As one investigator suggests, one place the ‘underground’ will naturally hide is in the actual underground. The underground stream, a below-ground flow of water, has long been a symbol of secret cultures, knowledge or traditions. The esoteric strands of crypto-religious and crypto-anthropologic study such as the nasorean / templar / celtic Christian traditions are one example. This example also, as with our case, supposedly utilised the literal underground, taking cover in catacombs under the temple of herod, for example, and leaving fish symbols on the walls. Our crossed knitting needles and 4 lakes found by ‘Epps’ in catacombs in South America, are comparable to this.

The basement, however, is no river, it is a lake. It is no tunnel, it is a cave. An enclave - a slab of crumbling concrete rather than a tarmac road. It leads nowhere geographically, but it persists. (On a four dimensional drawing of course, it would be a tunnel, a road, a river – spanning along the time axis as long as it persists to exist.)

If the basement is the cave / lake / cracking carpark, then the tunnel / river / road must be highway 61.

I have long been associated with an individual, a filmmaker of some avant-garde standing, working on a film treatment for a literal translation film version of the song Desolation Row. The film, as yet unfilmed I believe, is to be a veritable nighttime circus of characters. Einstein will have his electric violin; Ophelia will have her sad red light. The blind commissioner will be on the tightrope with a hand in his pants… The main dilemma of the film will be who is in and who is out of Desolation row. Who peeks into the place, and who mails postcards out of it?

As a row, ie. a street of dwelling houses, it is part cave, part tunnel. A basement that can be reached by tunnels - populated with the same characters as fill the covers of Monk’s and the Band’s 68 subterranean works. The circus is in town…

See also, the laughing lady – perhaps she ventured into the basement in Neil Young’s backpack, as he lay there with the full moon in his eyes, dreaming of replacement after the gold rush, and hoping what his friend said had been a lie. His friend could be Dean Stockwell, the spirit guide of Sam Beckett. The thing he said could be: ‘the gold rush is over; the gold is all gone’. Dean lived on the neighbouring ranch in the same canyon as Neil, and wrote the film screenplay of After the Goldrush, for which Neil wrote the soundtrack. The ‘band fair blowing’ in Neil’s head could be the Band, playing in Neil’s basement.

All just thoughts… Perhaps irrelevant to this particular case.