For MK Ultrasound & I, it was already a significant weekend in light of the 45th anniversary (1969) of the Abbey Road photo and the Manson murders. But, as sync would have it, we were all in for a ride.
The first night of the event involved the filming of Andy Shmushkin's sync show Radio8Ball.
The premise of the show involves a guest asking a personal question to the universe about their life, and the question is then answered via a song randomly chosen from the "pop music oracle", which is most often the discography of each particular guest's favorite band; or sometimes, as in this case, the catalogue of the live guest band. Which, this night was Peter David Connelly.
http://radio8ball.com/
For a preface to the show, musicologist & syncronaut Ezra Sandzer-Bell (red shirt) delivered a monologue on science-fiction author Philip K. Dick's Valis Zebra, the Abbey Road photo, the "Paul McCartney is dead" rumor, and Brian Eno's definition of coincidence and it's use in his music. Then it was on to the show.
For this particular show, eight different guests were randomly chosen from the audience, the majority of which was us syncronauts. At one point, a great sync filmmaker & blogger who goes by Violator Hellspawn was chosen to partake of the Radio8Ball pop oracle.
What is crazy is that he was wearing a Charles Manson shirt.
I assumed he'd chosen it purposefully to commemorate the anniversary, but I later found out that he was not aware of the dates and it was merely one of three shirts he grabbed for the trip.
"Charlie don't surf" being a reference to Apocalypse Now.
Manson's Helter Skelter being his interpretation of the coming Apocalypse.
Violator's question was "What do I have to do before I die?"
Read his post on the Sync Summit here.
The next guest chosen was a 6.5 month pregnant woman and her question was "Is it a boy or a girl?"
The song chosen was I Need A Manager, and through all of the aspects of the song, the general consensus was that it would be a boy.
What was chilling was that at one point in the song, there is a lyric that says, "dead at birth".
At it's mention, there was a certain charge that could be felt in the room. Andy addressed it masterfully; explaining how sync is a mirror, which shows us not only our hopes but our fears.
At the show's end, Andy did a rapid-fire reading of all of the questions that didn't get picked. The very last one being, "Why is the Zebra such a dick?"
I will add for those that don't know, Sharon Tate was killed next to a zebra rug, and The Beatles are crossing a zebra crosswalk on the Abbey Road cover.
Not only was Philip K. Dick a central topic of the intro to the show, but Andy Dick was also discussed during the show.
Plus, the running inside joke about the sync community is that it is a sausage-fest, which was also addressed by Andy during his intro for the show.
The next night we all went out to eat at a restaurant called Dillinger's. Not only did the room we ate in have a zebra rug on the floor, but in 1969 there was a film released called Dillinger Is Dead.
There are only a few characters in the film, the main two being a man & his wife. At the end of the film, the man kills his wife - who was played by Anita Pallenberg, the girlfriend of Rolling Stone guitarist Keith Richards.
Sync-illy, Pallenberg previously dated Rolling Stone guitarist Brian Jones who died in 1969.
Anyways, after the man kills his wife, we see the first outside shot of the entire film, as he walks out to his car, which is parked next to a VW Beetle.
Of course, on the Abbey Road cover, we see a VW Beetle parked along the street, which syncs with Lennon and Rosemary's Baby for days.
The Olympia Sync Summit was coordinated by Andras Jones and creator of Sync Book Press Alan Abadessa-Green. Alan has been working on a book for over 2 years now titled Suicide Kings.
The subject matter centralizes on JFK and 9/11.
Alan debuted the first installment of his video series based on his book at the Summit.
In the video there is a clip of Robin Williams from the Terry Gilliam film Fisher King, which co-starrs Jeff Bridges, who seems to resonate as a 9/11 poster-child. And as we all know, on August 11th, the day after the Sync Summit ended, Robin committed suicide.
And as is often the case in the sync community, Alan found himself saying, "My post/video makes sense now the he/she's dead."
(Notice the zebra on his pillow).
The other long-anticipated sync film debut was that of Joe Alexander, who has previously put together a stunning presentation on the works of Christopher Lloyd, particularly the Back To The Future trilogy.
Joe's Youtube channel
As we all know, the time machine engages when the Delorean reaches a speed of 88 MPH.
Robin Williams died on 8/11.
8 x 11 + 88.
August 8th = 8/8.
It turns out Robin Williams was also suffering from Parkinson's; the most famous Parkinson's sufferer being Michael J. Fox.
The recurring theme in Ezra's work is the number 88; such as the keys on a piano, Mercury's solar year, etc. He also emphasizes how zebra stripes resemble piano keys.
(Ezra's Zebra which was the mascot of his musical interpretations of the Sephiroth on the Olympia Tree of Life).
Sync Book Radio also features a weekly show titled 42 Minutes, which is co-hosted by Will Morgan, whose presentation just happened to be about horses and how they represent the libido, or phallus - tying back into Dick (etymology), sausage-fest, zebra, etc.
The house the presentations were held at has zebra stripes across the sliding glass door.
Sunday morning as the Summit was winding down, I overheard the pregnant woman and her husband telling Andras about how the two of them read through the Sync Books together, how it changed her husband's perspective on life, essentially saved their marriage and, from what I understand, inspired them to have a child.
That baby is the Sync Book Starrchild.
The Sync Summit felt a lot like a Woodstock of sorts to me.
Where all of us sync-heads came together and we could physically see that we were a community. And of course, Woodstock also took place in August if 1969.
The events of the weekend were truly an initiation or baptism for me into the deep, interactive, personal levels of sync and the summer of '69.
Experiencing it breaking through into the summer of 2014. Not too unlike the 70 A.D. experienced by Philip K. Dick in his book Valis.
On the 10th, I returned home around 8:00 pm. Around 8:45 pm, a car crashed into a telephone pole near my house and knocked out the electricity for the whole neighborhood for about 6 hours.
The Sync Summit event for Saturday morning was a tour of the Olympia Tree of Life, guided by Andras Jones who wrote a book on the subject. Interesting that the Tree of Life is animated by a lightening flash, and there were a number of electricity-related buildings on the tour.
That same night that the telephone pole went down in my part of town, on the other side of town, also around 8:45 pm, Ezra and Alan were talkinag about how the "Paul is dead" myth states that McCartney crashed his car into a telephone pole.
Violator returned home to find two books sent to him by his parents. One on synchronicity, with lighting bugs on the cover. The other on the Twilight Zone with a bold lightning flash on the cover.
And as the week developed further, the August 9th shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO lead to the kind of racial tension anticipated by Manson with his Helter Skelter philosophies.
Ebony & Ivory
Paul McCartney & Stevie Wonder
The week of the 10th-17th I also happened to be working my way through Futurama season 3.
The first episode I watched featured the Patch Adams robot. (Which is episode 42)
The second one I saw featured Harlem Globetrotter 'Bubblegum' Tate.
Then there's the classic episode "Roswell That Ends Well", which goes right along with Joe Alexander's work.
Here you can see my work on the life & career of Sharon Tate:
Part One
Part Two
A brief preview of the Sync Summit video coming from Sync Book Press.
Olympia Sync Summit (Intro) from SyncBookPress on Vimeo.
Andras guiding the Olympia Tree of Life tour.
This is at Gevurah.
Photo by me
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