(PS: There’s a fun book about this. I recently touched on this stuff at the end of this article, and touched on it very briefly here.)
Take, as a mere appetizer, the possibility that the Beatles may have stayed (and dropped acid) at 10050 Cielo Drive in the mid-sixties, something (apparently unwittingly) implied by John Lennon during a 1974 Rolling Stone interview. (…)
[T]he Beatles probably had sat turning their minds inside-out within the very walls that would—a few years later—have their as-yet unwritten song-titles scrawled upon them in blood…
***
BONUS: “Live freaky, die freaky”:
In the fictional universe of Levin’s novels, then, whatever rough beast it was that crawled its way through a maddening collage of song-lyrics and movies and Indian sages and desert psychopaths and Hollywood orgies never made it as far as the fictional Bramford of 1966 to be born, to say nothing of the real Dakota and Hollywood of 1968 to be born again in a swelter of assassinations and paranoia and weird scenes which were about to look very strange in the glare of the morning, and the scrutiny of a thousand flashbulbs.
Perhaps Levin realized on some level that art, as the great mediator between the worlds within and the world without, was no idle make-believe, as we have seen countless times in this narrative, be it in Seconds frying Brian Wilson’s brain, or The White Album and The Catcher in the Rye crystalizing and giving shape to the fraying psyches of Charles Manson and David Mark Chapman, or in the peculiar sense that The Manchurian Candidate and Rosemary’s Baby acted as reverse mirrors to events which followed after them.
Despite many theories to the contrary, it seems most likely that the tangled web of intentions underlying the Tate/LaBianca murders was primarily motivated not by the people who were killed, but by the locations where they happened to be on those nights. The killings traced a psycho-geography of Los Angeles which was rooted in Manson’s experience of the city, and in so doing created a pattern, a web of connections, which have baffled and fascinated ever since, owing to that mixture, so beloved of conspiranoids, of the appearance of randomness and the suggestion of occulted order.
The foregoing essays have attempted to trace the rich, disjointed map of postwar culture which emerges in this pattern; by routes alternatively eerie and tenuous, it has pointed us to some strange places.
