Giants of Cinema

I sense the giants of cinema encountering a soundscape problem.
A carrier bag of fresh prawns from my man sustains me for two days.
Returning now to forage more case material.
Recent theories posted were truly noteworthy, unfortunately I can't remember anything about them.
There was something about a simultaneous transmission; a meeting of waves in the mid atlantic.
Yes, that's it. I will get my falafel contact to dig up the gossip behind scenes.

Open university beards on aged hippies, wearing cotton. It is 3 am.
BBC 2 is transmitting early whiteboard flipchart scenes.
Venn Graphs and Vanderrgraffs and vandeloos and vent gaffs.
Gotta do a pratfall when they've vanned all the graffs.
I wonder which continent Ellena Costa is in now.

Perhaps when all this is done we can go travel in a van over the plains, maybe grow some beens.
jump in a pool under a waterfall or something.
I feel that at least one of the michigan cotton pickers may be with us in the U of K.
My eyes are open. There is a girl wwoofing nearby who looks a little like melody nelson but I don't think for a minute it is her.

It's a while since I was last on the protest or festival circuit.
there are channels of communication there - easy to pick up scents.
falafels are on the menu. and veggie-meat burgers.

A consignment of out of date ginger beer, and canada dry, note, has just reached me by car boot.
It kicks like it is fermenting or something.
Sam Ting says that the centre point of a magna-ring is a potential for strangeness.
He points out the example of the inside of a racing track.
How easy it would be, he says, to hide out in there...

Turbulence

Your last missive gives me the impression that things are beginning to unravel. Are you working from a new base now? A change in situation often allows things to be seen viewpoints hitherto unviewed. Maybe your move will provide you with a different view of the case.Thunder and lightning is filling the sky as I type. Low pressure. Electricity. Turbulence. eight young tomato plants are currently being rained on.

So, the beards are coming to town. It seems our guitar-slinging cowboys are will be active in the UK at a similar time to Costa's Broken Social Scene hitting the Candian road. Is this coincidence? Not if Bob Palindrome's maxim is anything to go by; 'there's no such thing as coincidences; there's only incidences, and they all go in the casefile'. He also used to say 'a casefile is like a good stew; you chuck everything in there, keep a low heat on it and see what rises to the surface'. I always took this as a good metaphor but once I got to know the man I realised that he also meant it literally.

Once I had visted his apartment I soon realised that he would destroy old closed casfiles by boiling them up in a pan of water in his kitchen. This explained the scald marks on his hands I'd previously wondered about. The man, resourceful as ever, used this method of data erasion as it provided him with the raw material for his hobby of making lifesize paper mache sculptures of his favourite birds of prey. The man had these things, hand painted, all over his house. A bald eagle hung above the main doorway, neck craned down and beak out so as to almost peck your left eye out while you waited for the door to open. A pereguin falcon, wings hunched back in a dive pose sat on his bureau acting as a mail holder, envelopes stuffed between the two raised wings. I digress...

Although the dates of BSS and the beard troupe's performance are not the same, they are only a couple of weeks apart. There is the possibility of using winds, possibly the trade winds one of our investigators mentioned earlier, to allow the sound to travel over large distances. This obviously takes time. I am consulting Dr. Epstein on this and am waiting for confirmation, but rough calculations show that it is fairly likely the soundwaves from both touring circuits will collide and interact at some point around the start of august. Perhaps there is some underlying plan for the two soundwaves to mesh in a certain area, interfering with one another in a way similiar to that you tried to achieve with the dual spin sources.

This could be another Black Cat style experiment, done in reverse fashion to the dual particle example. This time, they are starting with two sources, which are intended to meet up in one location. causing some kind of effect or outcome.Due to the butterfly effect, turbulence, it is hard to predict with certainty the when and where or even if of what may happen, but Epstein did say 'it could be possible'. Of course, I may be looking in the wrong direction and this could just be nothing. If, on the other hand, it is the case, then we are dealing with some advanced Obfuscation techniques.

In Reply

Neil Young, CSN and Bruce Springsteen will all be in the same area of the UK over the same weekend, in about a fortnight’s time. I don’t have a ticket. It should be a good focal point for various forces, with an ancient Somerset tor and a pyramid-shaped stage increasing the transmission potential of energies from the locality. Meanwhile, today for me is a day of great strangeness and great liability for changes. I met and lingered with my old Australian soulmate last night, and the air seems ripe for a thunderstorm of sorts. I hope this will not be my last transmission, although it may be my last from this station. In the wee wee hours my mind gets hazy, radio relay towers lead me to my baby, the radio’s jammed up with talk show stations, it’s just talk talk talk talk till I lose my patience.

No liquid storage in Detroit, no gasoline in Minnesota, no fleece in Duluth. Just a big hole in a ground floor window of a Minneapolis cold water flat, and a three storey sub-ground parking lot empty of cars.

My man in Somerset may have more to report in 10 days time. My insider is doing the falafel scene on the festival circuit. He may recognise other regular faces from show to show – loitering by the jester hat stand; lingering on the edge of the jazz tent; hiding in bushes when famous people walk by…

Festival Circuitry

This investigator took the weekend off the case to indulge in some much overdue sunshine of impressive intensity and only now has he picked up the impending development in the case, ie. the immediacy with which BSS are 'touring' from Canada to California.

This strikes me as pertinent for the following reasons - we have already established that festivals and musical touring circuits are ideal ways to move people and goods around the continent in a fairly undetected way. We also know Costa is either in BSS or has close links with them. This suggests to me that Costa may use a BSS tour as a means to achieve her own ends, with or without the band's complicity (she is a known Obfuscationist, remember, and as such would have no problem hiding her true intentions while being close to the band).

The band may even be a front to hide less universally accepted operations, such as the promotion of wool-based lifestyles or products of closed-loop synthesis, with promotional methods possibly adapted from those used by the Minnesota thinktank (I recall Costa being quoted in a marketing journal from years ago, which suggests she either worked in marketing or pretended to work in marketing to gain knowledge of their obfuscatory techniques [i strongly suspect the latter]).

It seems to me that the BSS tour is likely a smokescreen to transport a portion of the Michigan operation (people or products) down to California for some purpose, or perhaps to collect something from the southern state to bring back north. The California connection cannot be ignored - Searly's act of philanthropy at the Reno Steak-n-Cake suggests the California route has been active for sometime, and Melinda Packett is registered to a Bay Area address.

The California connection could well be a base or stop-off point for managing the South American connections - this investigator for one is definitely aware that products made from llama wool are readily available in the fields designated for corporate-sponsored rock festivals, though how popular such things prove to be in the california heat, this northerly located investigator cannot confirm.

Addendum to case notes

Why do you think De Leon and Vandeloo headed South straight after their research trip to Nova Scotia? It is obvious now. After investigating the flotilla project in the Nova Scotia boating scene they made straight for the ‘long float’ material source – Mexican chinchilla.

Nota bene, coming tour dates for BSS:
3 Jul 2009 / Rothbury Festival / Rothbury, Michigan
4 Jul 2009 / 80/35 Festival / Des Moines, Iowa
11 Jul 2009 / Harbourfront Centre / Toronto, Ontario
26 Jul 2009 / Wanderlust Festival / Lake Tahoe, California

This is no coincidence. Within a month they travel from Michigan to Toronto to Lake Tahoe itself, California. The roadsters are returning home…We must act fast.

Old Laughing Lady

Our Boston man’s dispatches fit perfectly – road trips either cease or go more underground in 2005. The theory of Costa’s low key festival circuitry is 99.7% likely, I feel. Slipping back into the fog when the band ‘make it’. Chinchilla fabric – a ‘hold-all’ term capable of containing the natural and the synthetic without revealing whether one or the other or else ‘wool mix’ combination.

The speed adjuster controls of a good mixer double turntable set up are indeed a potential means of achieving a variety of beat frequencies from waveform interference.
In the city squat this investigator abandoned overnight recently, such a two turntable set-up was included among the original paraphernalia present. The investigator recalls the fullsome sound of such interference some years previous. I have recently been researching non-electric wind-up turntables (originally called grammaphones, due to their frequent presence in the upper year social rooms of grammar schools, where 15 year olds would listen to swing, ragtime and early jazz). Standard grammaphones would have an analogue variable speed control. Later machines would have an analogue 3 way control between 78, 45 and 33. What I could do with is something capable of going lower – say 22. That way I could do the ’45 played at 33 speed’ trick on 33s, and listen to a whole album at ‘mong-out’ speed. I know of no modern manufacturer of wind-up, non-electric grammaphones. There may be one.

Approx 40 min ago, this investigator was on a bumpy old-tarmac / dirt track road, a regular tourist walker route towards the base camp of a large mound of highland mountain, when rounding a puddled corner there was an elderly lady, of short height, blocking said road, arms waving in air. I came to an easy halt among the puddles. She held a walking stick – Walking stick in one hand, wrinkled healthy-looking complexion, vibrant face, wavy white hair, with a look of eccentricity and foreignness to her. I walk over to her, sidestepping between puddles on this barmy hot day. In what I think is the broken English of an northern/eastern European accent, she asks for a lift, in upfront, confident terms. I reverse to give her a puddle free access route to passenger side of the vehicle, though she heads towards driver’s side at first – a giveaway of one used to left-hand drive cars. I run her towards a village restaurant – she has been up in the foothills, and is parched and hungry – overheating. I half understand her side of the sparse but friendly conversation. Just before reaching destination, she reveals that she is a tourist from Oregon.

But where are you from originally, I ask. I expect her to be German, for example. She says she is originally from Canada – that is the accent, she explains. West Coast? I ask. Yes, the west.The strange appearance in the road of this elk convinces me I have something to learn from the encounter relevant to the case. A Canadian, with an accent I could have sworn was European, who lives now in Oregon. I suspect that she is the Old Laughing Lady, who can be seen in many mythic sources including the cover of Neil Young’s After the Goldrush album. This album is about the exodus of the hip culture from the US west, or the passing of that culture into hiding.

On the cover image, the red Indian laughing lady is moving in the opposite direction to Neil, however the overlapping alignment between them on the ‘great shot’ makes it appear that she is actually riding in Neil’s backpack (and so actually going in the same direction as Neil, but facing backwards – like a rear gunner). With every movement I feel an opposite flow probably occurs, as per Newton’s third law. So, if this Canadian woman went from Canada to the US, she is the reverse of the movin’ up country hippies who went to Vancouver to avoid nam. Just like Neil, in fact, who travelled from his roots in Canada to the US west.

Long Floats

The reference material sent on Closed Loop fibres revealed a detail which may be of note regarding the fibrous aspects of the case. See mention of a special fabric as follows...

Cinchilla: A cotton, wool, and even synthetic fabric of sateen or twill construction with extra fillings for long floats.

This is a fabric which can be made from natural and synthesised sources and bears a cutely disguising name. Note the talk of 'long floats'. Combining this with the name of the fibre suggests to me a Flotilla, something highly pertinent to this case. Perhaps the Michigan crew were looking at shipping/manufacturing such a fibre for use in their various operations. Perhaps your novel simultaneous spinning experiments are something akin to this manufacturing process, though may need some kind of modification or change of variables to get the desired results.

Are you aware that certain models of turntable favoured by audiophiles and disc jockeys have a pitch adjustment facility which allows, by means of a slider, many (14) speeds of rotation. It enables music to be played between the notes of conventional key structure, similar to the effect of de-tuning an instrument, but on a song-wide scale. I hypothesize that perhaps an unorthodox rotational speed could create some kind of resonance between the two spin sources, allowing for a qualitative change in results. This could operate as some kind of vibrational/resonant cipher - find the right combination of rotational speeds in the two sources and information may be gleaned from the beat notes of the resulting cross-rhythm like some kind of low frequency morse code.

With regard to working out some kind of timeline of 'disappearances', Perhaps Costa's mid-90's 'disappearance' was her dropping out of the state education system to form a band (possibly an early guise of Broken Social Scene), with the interim years spent touring the low-level festival circuit until the band's profile was raised enough to force her to return to the overground. As previously noted, the festival circuit can be a great way to fall of the radar should one wish to do so. Though, as a known Obfuscationist, she could easily disappear and yet be active at the same time, most likely under a pseudonym. Happy said the mixtape couple stopped visiting circa 2005. He doesn't recall when they first began appearing on campus, but says he became aware of them a couple of years into his studies, around summer 1995. I do not know how this fits with your theories.

Rain Curtain

Absolutely.

The ‘west-side’ style W-sign as taught by Evan/Ethan (the guy to the left of frame I assume) is inherently important to the case. The northern states have that looming proximity to ‘otherness’ lacked by the more central localities. While the southern states; texas, NM, Ca, have a sunny Mexican other pervading their psyche, the boundary fringe to the north is saturated by something altogether more mysterious – the encroaching rain-curtain of the North – the mist, the winter darkness, the blue-grey sky over the wheatfields that comes along in September like something out of Van Gogh – You can read it in the faces of those northern border-watchers. Like they can hear the static of the rain and know that if they wanted to they could tune right into it…

Why Croatia? Was Evan/Ethan just travelling through, or there for some reason? Was he an important figure, or just a neutral carrier of Wisconsin information for you? The festival circuit would be a good place to recruit strangers for some cause. Just as the circus scene was (/is?) a haven for runaways, fugitives, and those seeking cheap travel and adventure, so the festival circuit is a means for the same old longhaired guys you might see loitering on the dodgem boards to travel discretely and undetected from town to town, country to country, selling falafels and day-glo jester’s hats to teenagers, or screwing together highhats and setting up mic stands. Was Ethan part of this scene? Why was he alone?