Brice Taylor - Thanks For The Memories

Okay, so we've read Dave McGowan, we've read Walter Bowart, and we've been following Aangirfan's schoolgirl gaze. Now it's time to step right through the looking glass into complete bonzo zonko territory - Brice Taylor's Thanks For The Memories. (Purchasable directly from Brice Taylor here).


This book is over the top. It's such a test of one's incredulity that it seems the choice one's faced with is to accept it all, or to dismiss it utterly. As appealing as the latter is, it's the wrong choice. The hurdle here is the scale of it all. Even for a fellow like yours truly, who's declared any number of times that the paedophocracy is 'fucking huge', it's still a brain bender. The size of the enterprise is orders of magnitude larger than I imagined.

In searching for a metaphor I wonder if it isn't like that fellow in high school, who knew all about banks and interest, discovering the insane reality of the private ownership of international reserve banking, and the con of money from nothing. Hmm... the scale works there, but it's not quite visceral enough. Perhaps we'd be closer to the mark with someone who has a vague idea that a bus crash is bad (what with having seen The Fugitive, ha ha), and then meets an ambulance officer who attended one, and describes how they had to put the arms and legs in one pile, the heads in another, and the unidentified bits in a third. Is that too gory? I actually had a fellow tell me that once.

Never mind the metaphors, the main thing is that there's nothing in the scale or the relentlessness of Ford's book that's at odds with either McGowan or Bowart. Nothing - all of it meshes. If anything, given the hints and inferences that both of the aforementioned make as to the heights that this shit reaches (as in The Finders and the CIA in chapter six of the Pedophocracy), what Ford tells us of would seem almost inevitable. And vice versa, this book makes everything in both McGowan and Bowart look like the bleeding obvious. Bowart by the way, writes one of the book's forewords. In fact all of these forewords are excellent, worth the price of admission alone.

Perhaps, the most striking, and maddest, aspect of this book is the absurd amount of sex that goes on. Given the scale of the programme that went into turning Susan Ford into a variety of super-human, why was she so relentlessly sent hither and yon to deliver blow-jobs? What's the big deal about sex? Funnily enough, what with yours truly having spent so many years in film production, I thought about it and ended up answering my own question.

The key is the producer. In the small production companies I worked for, the producer would have two roles. One is scoring the job to begin with, and the other is running it, ie. schedules, budgets, meetings, staff, deadlines etc. etc. But to be honest, it's only the first part that's important. The latter nuts-and-bolts stuff, depending on how good your team is, will often look after itself, or failing that merely be handed off to a line-producer - peanuts for a clever monkey. The biggie, the only thing that counts, is scoring the deal to begin with.

Initially, I had it arse-about. One particular producer that I did a lot of work for as an animator was perfectly incompetent at running a job - hell, if I hadn't perpetually taken the reins we'd have crashed and burned. At the time, I wondered how he kept his job: my running gag being that he was a professional drunk. His only skills seemed to consist of drinking copious amounts and hooking people up with drugs and women. Et voilà - there you have it. Sure enough, of all the producers I ever met, this guy hit the most stellar heights and is now a very big deal, easily a multi-millionaire. In spite of the fact that he couldn't organise a job to save his life, over and over again the clients with the big budgets would give their money to him.

It's a simple fact (okay, for men) that a fellow who can get you laid is the guy you want to hang with. Whether it's a couple of armchair salesmen, or a couple of arms merchants, it doesn't make any difference - they all want the same thing. Hands up everyone who has a friend who could be described as a 'party captain'? We probably all know someone like that. They have a brilliant knack for organising a good time - they have a ton of friends, their parties go off, and sure enough if you hang with them you get laid. (That ain't me by the way, you hang with me and I can guarantee a very dull evening, ha ha).

And so it goes right to the very top. You get a fellow laid and he's your man. But being at the top has its own problems - between lardy Jewish girls in blue dresses, and note-taking Debra Jean Palfreys, things start getting tricky, which is to say, fraught. But the brute imperative remains the same - what works with scoring the $100,000 TV commercial, works with scoring the new world order. The only thing that changes is the difficulty involved in getting whomever-it-is laid so that it doesn't bite them in the arse afterwards (think Prince Philip). Sure enough, whatever shift in scale that takes place from the small production to the global one, will likewise be replicated in terms of scoring pussy. As if: banking, drugs, and war; with billions, even trillions, at stake; that have been decades, even centuries, in the making, wouldn't warrant pussy of a similar magnitude. Honestly, the whole thing stands to reason. Of course it's that way.

And yeah, some of the people in on the gag are famous - like the otherwise unlikely pair of Bob Hope and Henry Kissinger. Bob Hope we can quickly dismiss. Anyone who's read McGowan's Laurel Canyon should already have their head around what went into making the hippy scene. Okay, so why would we imagine that that's a one-off taking place in isolation? We already know that the media is a bloc-media that tolerates no dissenting voices. Only a fool would view the Laurel Canyon hippy scene as anything other than a single part in a much bigger picture. Sure enough, read Ford's book and know that Laurel Canyon was/is nothing special - everything in the entertainment industry is as manufactured and contrived as Laurel Canyon. Everything. And yep, in amongst this, Bob Hope was a big wheel. Oh, and in much the same way that those who've read Laurel Canyon can never view Frank Zappa, the Doors, and CSNY in quite the same way again, read this book and see how you view Bob Hope's schtick. It ain't pretty.*

Bob Hope is one thing, Henry Kissinger is another. Susan Ford has Kissinger as a variety of consigliere/strategist working for 'the council'. For mine, Kissinger now makes sense. I never quite got him before, but read this book and see if your otherwise nebulous image of him doesn't sharpen. And then there's 'the council' - the identity of which comprises the book's ultimate question. For mine, Ford fails to answer it. But since this piece is long enough, I'll deal with that in the next one. Yoroshiku.





*And then there's Disney...