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About Renate - Painter, filmmaker, member of the Los Angeles art/occult demimonde with Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington, Christopher Isherwood, & Cameron.

Situated on the fringes of cinema yet as influential as any in the centre, Kenneth Anger’s work is not for the faint-hearted: it’s not some smooth ride in a plush cinema seat, it’s a grab-you-by-the-throat-and-tie-you-to-the-chair affair. But like most domineering experiences, you’re left with an instinctive craving for more.

Writing about Anger’s life is somewhat difficult, blurred by drugs, rumours and Anger’s own bending of the truth, but his story begins in suburban middle-class Santa Monica, California, where he was already rubbing shoulders with the children of Hollywood’s elite: at the age of four he played the prince in Max Reinhardt’s 1935 adaptation of Midsummer Night’s Dream – alongside Mickey Rooney and James Cagney, coincidentally – and a few years later he found himself partnered in a dance class with fading child star Shirley Temple. A fascination with Hollywood quickly evolved, yet Anger – as would become his raison d’etre – twisted it to suit his own devilish palette...

Ten years in the making, Lucifer Rising (1972) is Anger’s masterstroke. Though barely half an hour-long, the work is an all-encompassing visual deep-end dive. Set within a visceral, technicolour vision of ancient Egypt, gods summon the angel Lucifer in order to usher in a new occult age, all the while traversing Icelandic volcanoes, the Pyramids of Giza, the ancient solar temples of Stonehenge and Externsteine in Germany...

While the spectre of occultist Aleister Crowley looms large over Anger’s entire catalogue, Lucifer Rising takes clear reference from the teachings of Crowley’s religion, Thelema: it’s descriptions of Lucifer as the light-bearing god and an analogy of the coming Aeon of Horus directly reflects the Thelemic prophecy described in The Book of the Law.

Dig deeper into the film’s back story and its subcultural weight is clear: it was set to star Mick Jagger as Lucifer, but while the singer eventually backed out following the ’69 Altamont incident, his then-girlfriend Marianne Faithfull did appear in the film as the demon Lilith; while the soundtrack was created by Bobby Beausoleil, a follower of Charles Manson who, having been convicted for murder in 1970, wrote most of the score in prison

..Tex Watson, rarely mentioned in stories, is convicted in a separate trial of all of the murders, he likely killed almost all of the victims....The origins of much of the violence associated with the Manson murders can be traced to Tex trying burn a high level weed dealer known as Lotsapoppa or Bernard Crowe. ..

Drugs also figure heavily throughout the oncoming darkness, and in the tale of the murder of Gary Hinman in late July 1969 that started things off in a really wrong direction. Once a friend of the Family, and roommate of Bobby Beausoleil for a while, he was rumored to have sold bad mescaline to Beausoleil, who sold it to a biker gang who claimed it bunk and wanted their money back. Beausoleil was in a bind, and he was in danger of a beating or worse, and needed to fix it..

Satanic trappings had started to intersect the family early on in late 1967 at the famed Spiral Staircase house in Topanga canyon. A woman named Gina held increasingly frequent and increasingly weird parties there, and Manson and his small troupe of girls parked their ‘Holywood Productions’ black bus there and set up shop until the scene got uneasy. Manson himself had said that dark magical practices started to be commonplace there at a time when celebrities were starting to roll through the house, and it got too weird, even for him. (this is where Bobby Beausoleil enters the tale, and his association with Kenneth Anger and his starring role in Lucifer’s Rising being filmed at the time is perhaps one of the ‘dark practices’ being referred to.) In the mid 1960’s people were getting intrigued by the dark side of spirituality across California. The head of the Church of Satan Anton LaVey had made Satanism fashionable in the Hollywood scene. He was an adviser and played the Devil in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby film. With Jayne Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jr openly preaching Satanism, it was easy to see Hollywood folks getting drawn deeper into weirdness they didn’t really understand. Oh, and Susan Atkins worked with Anton LaVey in a sensationalist Satan showpiece playing a topless blood drinking vampire before she met Manson. Pieces of the puzzle were beginning to draw together in an eerie fashion, and with occult themes as the glue binding them.

They [at the Tate house] had fallen into sadism and masochism and bestiality—and they recorded it all on videotape, too. The L.A. police told me this. I know that three days before they were killed twenty-five people were invited to that house for a mass-whipping of a dealer from Sunset Strip who’d given them bad dope”

–Dennis Hopper
“They were fucking pedophiles, they weren’t innocent.” -Manson about Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski and Jay Sebring.

In an interview with Truman Capote, Bobby Beausoleil said:

“Who says they were innocent? They burned peo­ple on dope deals. Sharon Tate and that gang. They picked up kids on the Strip and took them home and whipped them. Made movies of it. Ask the cops; they found the movies. Not that they’d tell you the truth.”

Who were the Informants? The Hidden Power Brokers? Did the government really know what was going on?

Yes, there were stand down orders from ‘someone above’ documented. How did Manson get arrested and let go so many times when he was out on bail unless he had a guardian angel somewhere fairly high up in the system watching over him? Charlie had meetings in Terminal Island with a lawyer before he got out. But for a career low level hoodlum, it was a very odd choice for a lawyer that wanted to meet with him. George Shibley. According to Mae Brassell– A prominent attorney by the name of George Shibley who works with groups in the Middle East (and Sirhan Sirhan)—in Beverly Hills he has powerful connections—met with Charles Manson just before he got out of jail in (Terminal) Island. No one will know what conversation transpired between Mr. Shibley [and Manson], or why he was up there. If this is accurate, why would Shibley have gone to see him? Did Manson have need for legal representation at that time? Was this a sign of some master plan for Charlie once he was out?..

Charlie’s original probation officer Roger Smith was connected to the Family early on and also to Abigail Folger through the Free Clinic. Dr. Roger Smith, was a research criminologist who had launched the drug treatment program at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. Dr. David Smith had founded the Free Clinic, and in 1969 clinic administrator Al Rose spent months living/infiltrating the Manson Family before things grew dark. He brought his data back and with Smith, and together published a fairly famous paper on the Family: “The Group Marriage Commune: A Case Study,”. Their probation officer and his wife were somehow allowed to be foster parents to Manson family toddlers whenever they were busted, often, then give the kids back. That seems a bit ill advised for a hippie group with so many lingering negative associations. Manson being his only client makes this something quite anomalous.

..The immediate disappearance of Winifred Chapman, Sharon and Roman’s trusted housekeeper–the first one to find the murder scene is generally unreported. Chapman is well known to most researchers, but few are aware of her oddly timed disappearance. She was a long term employee of the Polanskis, and privy to many of their secrets. So it is troubling that one never reads that she was reported missing on October 13th of 1969 by her landlord, and that she was last seen on October 10th. She left her purse and wallet with her ID in her room. Two weeks later she was still missing. The fact that she disappeared on the exact day the Manson family was arrested for good at the Barker ranch should make any investigator wonder if she was spirited away by officials or parties unknown for reasons unknown. The Family were not yet suspects at this point, yet this is an odd coincidence.

..One final note: I bought the original library bound edition of Rolling Stone magazine from summer 1970 which contained not just the massive Manson article issue, but a dozen subsequent issues. Now anyone familiar with Rolling Stone of that era knows that the letters section of the following issue is chock full of comments about the previous issue. Hell, if the news was big enough, letters sometimes were in the same issue as the news broke in. So I scanned the next issue for any mention in the letters of the Manson article. There were none. Odd. I checked the following issue. Still nothing. I kept searching the next five issues and not one single mention of the Manson article. Clearly this was intentional, but the big question is ‘why’? Obviously the magazine had been flooded with letters, but not a single one was published. This had to be an editorial decision by the publisher and editors at the highest levels. Who ordered this: law enforcement? Not likely they’d listen to that. Death threats from the Manson Family still at large? Far more likely. No one has ever mentioned this ‘non-event’-obviously it was never intended to be ever mentioned, and they must have just hoped nobody would notice. Definitely one of the strangest little tidbits of hidden information I’ve ever encountered in this case.

Alfred Kinsey had an interest in the occult.. Dr Alfred Kinsey and Kenneth Anger unearth Aleister Crowley’s Satanic frescoes in Thelema Abbey, Sicily.

The purpose of Anger’s ALAC show is in part to shift $300 bomber jackets with “Lucifer” emblazoned across the back, a replica of one worn by Leslie Huggins in his classic Lucifer Rising. It’s also to introduce art fair perusers to the work of two women, Rosaleen Miriam “Roie” Norton, an Australian pantheist known as “the Witch of Kings Cross” and the better-known Marjorie Cameron, a flame-haired woman once married to Jet Propulsion Lab scientist Jack Parsons, the man whose occultist LA-based group, The Gnostic Mass at the Church of Thelema, briefly included Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard in its congregation.

..“She was extraordinary – a genuine witch,” Anger says matter-of-factly. “She had powers. Unusual powers. Extra powers. She kind-of knew things before they happened. She loved a full moon.”

In classic gadabout form, Renate Druks is remembered as an ephemeral creature. Like Wallace Berman, she attracted a circle of remarkable people and forged connections between them. On her own, she was a painter, but even more acted as muse for so many others’ work.

The capsule biographies always start, “studied painting in Vienna,” and skip to, “lived in Malibu” with little in between. She was born in Vienna on January 2, 1921 (if you are interested in her horoscope). We know nothing of her mother. Her father was a doctor, perhaps a psychiatrist. Her past is murky, like a smeared charcoal drawing, erased on purpose.

Anais Nin was a longtime friend, and Druks was a muse for two peculiar little books written by Nin later in her career, Portrait in Three Dimensions, and Collages.

In Portrait she writes:
“Renate’s father treated her like a confidante, a friend. . . He discussed her mother with her as if Renate was a woman, and explained that it was her mother’s constant depression which drove him away from home.”

Nin also writes that Renate’s father told her, “No man will love you as much as I do.” Handicapping her psyche for life....

..In the book The Occult Explosion (Nat Freedland, 1972), Renate is quoted, “Cameron stayed with me at my Malibu beach house for six months, pulling herself together after Jack [Parsons] died.” That is, the Jack Parsons of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who blew himself or was blown up by evil spirits, or the government, or anti-Zionists. Take your pick.

Furthermore, Renate says of her occult study, “I was never really a witch, but I did study magic for a while . . . I took it up mostly in self-defense; there were some scary things going on at Malibu Beach in the late fifties.”..

During these years she was embroiled in a relationship with Paul Mathison, a gay artist whose only traces today are the titles he designed for two Kenneth Anger films, and some futuristic furniture. They lived together at her Malibu place where they threw infamous and complicated theme parties.

Around 1954 one of these parties proffered the theme, “Come as Your Madness,” in which the bit was to dress as an alter ego of oneself. Kenneth Anger was sparked by the concept, and took the frame to build his Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Guests at the party and their costumes became the cast of the film: Curtis Harrington as Cesare from Cabinet of Caligari, Cameron as the Scarlet Woman, Paul Mathison as Pan, Anais Nin as Astarte, and gadabout incarnate, Samson De Brier, as everyone else.

Druks designed the make-up and was “Lillith.” She is the woman with the red hair and broad laughing face turned skeleton face after ingesting the magic potion. She is the most graceful presence in the film, the only one to truly look as if she is in a heightened state.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAPn_r0vYPQ

Dr. Krishna Ella is the Chairman & Managing Director of Bharat Biotech International Limited, which he incorporated in 1996. A gold medallist at university, Dr. Ella worked as a research faculty at the Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston after earning his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison...

Dr. Ella is also involved in shaping India’s science education and policy through his association with several committees such as:

Scientific Advisory Committee to the Union Cabinet
CSIR Governing Council.
CCMB Governing Council.
Research Council for CSIR National Laboratories.
Board of Visitors – Global Health Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The UW-Madison Global Health Institute is an idea born in Wisconsin—and it is a global manifestation of the Wisconsin Idea.

Jonathan Patz is a professor and John P. Holton Chair of Health [1] and the Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also serves as Director of the Global Health Institute.[2] Patz also holds appointments in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin. ..

He was invited on two occasions to brief the Dalai Lama on the inequities posed by climate change,[13] following a widely cited peer-reviewed quantitative assessment led by Patz in 2007, comparing carbon dioxide-emitting countries with countries burdened most by climate-sensitive diseases. Also in 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, of which Jonathan Patz was a member alongside Al Gore, though Patz name is not on the medal

The "Wisconsin Idea"is a public philosophy that has influenced policy and ideals in the U.S. state of Wisconsin's education system and politics. In education, emphasis is often placed on how the Idea articulates education's role for Wisconsin's government and inhabitants. In politics, the Idea is most associated with the historic political upheaval and subsequent reformation during the Progressive Era in the United States...

First articulated in the educational sense in 1904 when University of Wisconsin-Madison President Charles Van Hise declared he would "never be content until the beneficent influence of the university reaches every family in the state", the Wisconsin Idea has been used to frame and foster the public universities contributions to the state of Wisconsin's government and citizens: "to the government in the forms of serving in office, offering advice about public policy, providing information and exercising technical skill, and to the citizens in the forms of doing research directed at solving problems that are important to the state and conducting outreach activities".[2]

In the strictly political sense, the Idea came about during the Progressive Era when proponents of the Wisconsin Idea took inspiration from traditions and customs bought to the state by German Americans. These progressives saw U.S. states as "laboratories for democracy" ready for experimentation. This resulted in a genetive legislative environment that implemented numerous significant reforms including to primary elections, workers' compensation, state and federal transportation, U.S. Senate elections, and progressive taxation that served as a model for other states and the federal government.[4] The modern political facet of the philosophy is the effort "to ensure well-constructed legislation aimed at benefiting the greatest number of people".

As it may fairly be said that war is the father of technological invention, it is also true
that in the liberal democracies of the Western world, politics fathers public relations. The
rhetorical arms race of political PR vitalizes the entire spectrum of persuasive
communication. My presentation takes account of the political philosophy of the first modern
theorist, Abraham Lincoln, which he succinctly expressed in his statement, "He who moulds
public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes
statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed." The new birth of freedom he
prophesized at Gettysburg depended in no small part upon the role of the media as an
indispensable fourth estate -- a conviction that resonated with the role of a free press foreseen
by the Founders.
It did not, however, anticipate the collateral consequences of mass audiences for mass
media over the following decades. The opposite end of Abraham's arc bends toward the
"manufactured consent" that Walter Lippmann warned of in Liberty and the News (1920):
"[M]en are conscious that somehow they must deal with questions more intricate than any
that church or school had prepared them to understand. Increasingly they know that they
cannot understand them if the facts are not quickly and steadily available. Increasingly they
are baffled because the facts are not available; and they are wondering whether government
by consent can survive in a time when the manufacture of consent is an unregulated private
enterprise."
Traveling along that arc (looking for a wrong turn?) we find the Progressive reformer,
Governor Bob La Follette of Wisconsin, who recognized at the turn of the century that the
challenge of reforming the financial, industrial and commercial realms required an informed
citizenry who could trust the experts to provide meaningful options for democratic
deliberation. La Follette's "Wisconsin idea" deployed the state university system in the
training of a generation of what he called "publicists," who could translate the complexities
of banking, land speculation, railroads, oil and steel -- the entire repertoire of the robber
barons -- into manageable, voteable political choices in which all (men) could participate.

As the historian Katherine H. Adams has written, "The vision of a Progressive society
posited a more powerful and active citizenry who would need information to pursue reform.
To chart the future wisely, the populace would need guidance from trained communicators....
By 1910, Progressive universities would be providing these mind-molders, taste-formers, and
idea-suggesters through specialized courses and majors in journalism, public relations,
advertising, public speaking, creative writing, film, and business and technical writing."
The original “publicists” -- the muckrakers -- came first. Lee and Bernays were the
response, and Lippmann’s concerns were ultimately justified. Adams cites Eric Goldman:
"The muckrakers used publicity as an anti-business weapon ... industry, in direct reply to the
muckrakers, began to feel that if publicity could be used against them, it could be used for
them. Hence the birth of the whole public relations industry."
This genealogy of public relations provides a fresh perspective that bridges the evolution
of “public sentiment” in an industrial democracy, and helps to illuminate current dilemmas of
an ill-informed body politic.

The cornerstone of Lause’s contention that spiritualism and Republicanism formed part of the same intellectual current is his treatment of Abraham Lincoln. His chapter on Lincoln demonstrates beyond doubt that the president was more than a dabbler in the spiritual arts; he made multiple personal connections with those in the spiritualist community. ..

One does not have to buy the story of Lincoln being levitated on a grand piano to grasp why spiritualists saw in the president a kindred spirit. “Lincoln actually retained a vast residue of folk beliefs,” Lause concludes, “sharing many of the fundamental assumptions of spiritualism”
(146). Spiritualists viewed Lincoln himself as a mediator—a medium in
the political sphere—positioned between the founders of the nation and
the struggle of the Civil War. When Lincoln invoked “the mystic chords
of memory” in his First Inaugural Address, spiritualists perceived a
friend. ..

As the flame of Radical Republicanism flickered out, spirit voices became whispers. Still, in
his final chapter Lause traces the subterranean survival of elements of
the spiritualist impulse in the organization of the “Order of Eternal Progress,” in the Theosophical Society, in Victoria Woodhull’s following, and even in Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward, 2000–1887.

Readers accustomed to conceiving of the New Deal in Iowa entirely in terms of thoughtful technocrats,
beleaguered farmers, and empowered workers will be in for a surprise.
Harrington’s study shows that the politics of alcohol did not disappear
with the repeal of Prohibition. As a work of journalism history, the book
also serves as a case study of the perils of checkbook journalism..

Wisconsin on the Air: 100 Years of Public Broadcasting in the State That Invented It, by Jack Mitchell. Madison: Wisconsin State Historical Society Press, 2016. xi, 226 pp.

..Jack Mitchell, the first producer for National Public Radio’s (NPR) All Things Considered, has compiled an informative and entertaining chronology of Wisconsin Public Broadcasting, an institution he helped shape as director of Wisconsin Public Radio for more than two decades from 1976 to 1997..The book is divided into two sections. The first half treats the first
50 years of what the author labels educational broadcasting. The second part covers the era of public broadcasting made possible with the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and financial support for noncommercial stations. ..The tale begins with a nearly inaudible piano melody flowing from
a receiver speaker in the living room of University of Wisconsin physicist Earle Terry in 1917. By all accounts, the guests listening in Terry’s home were not impressed. Certainly they had no reason to believe they
had witnessed the historic origin of what would become one of the nation’s foremost public broadcasting operations.
The University of Wisconsin saw the new medium as a vehicle for spreading the institution’s Wisconsin Idea, a commitment to its educational mission to extend progressive ideas from the campus to homes across the state. Mitchell argues that the academic origin of radio continues to influence contemporary public broadcasting.