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Stay Gold - Caught Up in the Moment EP (2001)

2010-01-04 - extension: rar - size: 17 MB

Stay Gold - Caught Up in the Moment EP (2001)

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| Source: http://www.taringa.net/posts/4299631/

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Stay Gold - Caught Up in the Moment

2009-10-20 - extension: rar - size: 17 MB

Stay Gold - Caught Up in the Moment

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| Source: http://westhxc.blogspot.com/2009/10/stay-gold.html

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The Order of Skull & Bones, Nazi & Bohemian Grove
When Saddam Hussein talked of 'the devil Bush' he may not have been so far from the truth. (More) When Saddam Hussein talked of 'the devil Bush' he may not have been so far from the truth. U.S. president George W. Bush, his father and grandfather are proven initiates of this multi-generational occult lodge. George W. was tapped (initiated) in 1968 at the group's Yale University HQ, a mausoleum known as 'the tomb'. When undergraduates broke in they found that the 'holy of holies' inner sanctum has red velvet walls and carpet, with a large pentagram emblazoned on the wall.Adolf Hitler was obsessed with the occult, in his case the Thule Society, closely inter-connected with German Theosophists. The jolly roger, skull and cross bones, "der Totenkopf" was an emblem worn by Hitler's SS soldiers and was emblazoned on SS armoured cars and tanks (see images on this page). The SS was a religious cult of sworn Hitler/German ancestor worship. If the Nazis' occult lodges had been exposed then shut down, not treated as a taboo, millions of lives could have been saved. A small price to pay for insane racism and the blood of millions of people. The second world war need never have happened. Unless you want the occult fuelling a totalitarian West's Third World War 'on terror' and their 'New World Order' - please - do your bit to expose George W. Bush, the bonesmen and other interconnected lodges round the world. Heinrich Himmler, whose arrest as a traitor Hitler had ordered on 28 April 1945 for negotiating with the Allies, was captured by a British patrol on 23 May. A few hours later he killed himself with cyanide, and, dying as Reichsführer-S.S., set his final seal upon the destruction of the world's most sinister order, which the Third Reich's military defeat had already inflicted. Hitler had sown seeds of the deepest hatred between Nazis and Communists in his teaching and in the cruelty and mass murder he had launched in Russia. Now it was the turn of the Soviets. Nazism reached its end in a Berlin turned into a battleground of unparalleled violence, fire and brutality as the Soviet forces dealt blows of destruc-tion and revenge. It was as if the Satanic essence of Nazism shone through the flames and the ruins.George W Bush was/is a member of the "skull and bones" society. There's even a movie about it. And no, this isn't just another harmless Greek fraternity. It's a secretive, satanic cult for the jaded and self-appointed elites at Yale University. The upper crust of the upper crust -- with only 15 new initiates selected from each graduating class. Bush wrote in his autobiography it was, "so secret, I can't say anything more." But I can: We know that initiates undergo torture, kiss a scull, press a human femur bone to the initiates backside, act out a throat slashing ritual murder, and they pledge allegiance to a figure dressed up as Satan. They are also compelled to relate their entire sexual history while masturbating in a coffin. Bush had the name "Magog" , because he had the most extensive illicit sexual background of all the new initiates. And of course, Gog and "Magog" are names directly connected with Satan and the Antichrist in Revelation (20:8). The following is a short clip from a video taken by investigative journalist Ron Rosenbaum on April 14, 2001: Scull&Bones Clip The words and imagery of the cult are heavily centered on death, as they repeat the same mantra over and over, till it is burned into their conciseness: THE HANGMAN EQUALS DEATH! THE DEVIL EQUALS DEATH! DEATH EQUALS DEATH!' Initiates are instructed to "die to the barbarian world" so that they can be reborn in the "The Order," a brotherhood of Satan. In a new and more recent twist, in addition to being cross examined by Satan, initiates are also being cross-examined by a member dressed up as George W Bush, aka "Magog", who hurls vulgar profanities and says thing like "I'm gonna kill you like I killed Al Gore." Some may want to dismiss all this as somewhere on the extremely poor-taste edge of college hijinks, but it's much more serious than that. Such a darkly obscene and prolonged ritual cannot help but have a lasting impact on the souls of young initiates. Oaths to the devil taken in jest are nevertheless taken in fact. It's also important to point out that scull and bones cult members do not resign after graduation - like born again Christians they consider themselves to be born again into "the order" forever- only they're reborn in Satan, and not the Holy Spirit. They even have their own hideout called Deer Island, where former Bones members bring their families for summer reunions. A secluded hideaway is located in the St. Lawrence River, and owned by the Deer Island Club Corporation, a shell company operated by Skull and Bones members. The Scull and Bones Satanist Elites maintain their cultic relationships their entire lives - mostly by helping each other gain positions of influence and world power, in order to make more money. A satanic mafia for the super-well-connected. Though Bush kept going bust in the oil business, his comrades from scull and bones helped bail him out, and it was they who would later give him his start in politics. Bush was also involved in torture at Delta Kappa Epsilon, at a time when he was President of the fraternity. One pledge recalled how this "compassionate conservative" took great pleasure in branding him with a red hot iron, leaving him with scars which he carries to this day. When the hazing scandal broke in the campus newspaper in the late '60s, Bush tried to defend the illegal torture as a "harmless prank", but the fraternity was fined and the branding practice halted. It's little wonder that he still considers illegal torture a 'harmless prank': When he was a boy he also used to sadistically insert firecrackers into frogs and blow them up for kicks. Little wonder that under his leadership, for the first time Americans are engaging in the shameful and counter-productive practice of torturing prisoners in places like Abu Ghraib Prision.Then there's the Bush family alliance with the greatest evil in history - Adolph Hitler. Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush, also a 'scull and bones' man, got rich first by helping the Nazis come to power, then helping Hitler build the war machine that would decimate the world, and then even benefiting from Nazi slave labor and the extermination of millions of Jews. Auschwitz was built near coal deposits so that slave labor could be used in one of Prescott Bush's holdings, the Silesian American Corporation. Even after the US declared war on Germany, Prescott Bush continued violating the Trading With the Enemy Act, until the government finally shut him down late in 1942 - but not before making him rich, and establishing the Bush family as a power in American politics.Sometime in the early 1830s, a Yale student named William H. Russell—the future valedictorian of the class of 1833- traveled to Germany to study for a year. Russell came from an inordinately wealthy family that ran one of America's most despicable business organizations of the nineteenth century: Russell and Company, an opium empire. Russell would later become a member of the Connecticut state legislature, a general in the Connecticut National Guard, and the founder of the Collegiate and Commercial Institute in New Haven. While in Germany, Russell befriended the leader of an insidious German secret society that hailed the death's head as its logo. Russell soon became caught up in this group, itself a sinister outgrowth of the notorious eighteenth-century society the Illuminati. When Russell returned to the United States, he found an atmosphere so Anti-Masonic that even his beloved Phi Beta Kappa, the honor society, had been unceremoniously stripped of its secrecy. Incensed, Russell rounded up a group of the most promising students in his class-including Alphonso Taft, the future secretary of war, attorney general, minister to Austria, ambassador to Russia, and father of future president William Howard Taft-and out of vengeance constructed the most powerful secret society the United States has ever known.The men called their organization the Brotherhood of Death, or, more informally, the Order of Skull and Bones. They adopted the numerological symbol 322 because their group was the second chapter of the German organization and founded in 1832. They worshiped the goddess Eulogia, celebrated pirates, and plotted an underground conspiracy to dominate the world. Fast-forward 170 years. Skull and Bones has curled its tentacles into every corner of American society. This tiny club has set up networks that have thrust three members into the most powerful political position in the world. And the group's influence is only increasing-the 2004 presidential election might showcase the first time each ticket has been led by a Bonesman. The secret society is now, as one historian admonishes, " 'an international mafia'. . . unregulated and all but unknown." In its quest to create a New World Order that restricts individual freedoms and places ultimate power solely in the hands of a small cult of wealthy, prominent families, Skull and Bones has already succeeded in infiltrating nearly every major research, policy, financial, media, and government institution in the country. Skull and Bones, in fact, has been running the United States for years.Skull and Bones cultivates its talent by selecting members from the junior class at Yale University, a school known for its strange, Gothic elitism and its rigid devotion to the past. The society screens its candidates carefully, favoring Protestants and, now, white Catholics, with special affection for the children of wealthy East Coast Skull and Bones members. Skull and Bones has been dominated by about two dozen of the country's most prominent families—Bush, Bundy, Harriman, Lord, Phelps, Rockefeller, Taft, and Whitney among them—who are encouraged by the society to intermarry so that its power is consolidated. In fact, Skull and Bones forces members to confess their entire sexual histories so that the club, as a eugenics overlord, can determine whether a new Bonesman will be fit to mingle with the bloodlines of the powerful Skull and Bones dynasties. A rebel will not make Skull and Bones; nor will anyone whose background in any way indicates that he will not sacrifice for the greater good of the larger organization.As soon as initiates are allowed into the "tomb," a dark, windowless crypt in New Haven with a roof that serves as a landing pad for the society's private helicopter, they are sworn to silence and told they must forever deny that they are members of this organization. During initiation, which involves ritualistic psychological conditioning, the juniors wrestle in mud and are physically beaten—this stage of the ceremony represents their "death" to the world as they have known it. They then lie naked in coffins, masturbate, and reveal to the society their innermost sexual secrets. After this cleansing, the Bonesmen give the initiates robes to represent their new identities as individuals with a higher purpose. The society anoints the initiate with a new name, symbolizing his rebirth and rechristening as Knight X, a member of the Order. It is during this initiation that the new members are introduced to the artifacts in the tomb, among them Nazi memorabilia—including a set of Hitler's silverware-dozens of skulls, and an assortment of decorative tchotchkes: coffins, skeletons, and innards. They are also introduced to "the Bones whore," the tomb's only full-time resident, who helps to ensure that the Bonesmen leave the tomb more mature than when they entered. Members of Skull and Bones must make some sacrifices to the society—and they are threatened with blackmail so that they remain loyal—but they are remunerated with honors and rewards, including a graduation gift of $15,000 and a wedding gift of a tall grandfather clock. Though they must tithe their estates to the society, each member is guaranteed financial security for life; in this way, Bones can ensure that no member will feel the need to sell the secrets of the society in order to make a living. And it works: No one has publicly breathed a word about his Skull and Bones membership, ever. Bonesmen are automatically offered jobs at the many investment banks and law firms dominated by their secret society brothers. They are also given exclusive access to the Skull and Bones island, a lush retreat built for millionaires, with a lavish mansion and a bevy of women at the members' disposal. The influence of the cabal begins at Yale, where Skull and Bones has appropriated university funds for its own use, leaving the school virtually impoverished. Skull and Bones' corporate shell, the Russell Trust Association, owns nearly all of the university's real estate, as well as most of the land in Connecticut. Skull and Bones has controlled Yale's faculty and campus publications so that students cannot speak openly about it. "Year by year," the campus's only anti-society publication stated during its brief tenure in 1873, "the deadly evil is growing."The year in the tomb at Yale instills within members an unwavering loyalty to Skull and Bones. Members have been known to stab their Skull and Bones pins into their skin to keep them in place during swimming or bathing. The knights (as the student members are called) learn quickly that their allegiance to the society must supersede all else: family, friendships, country, God. They are taught that once they get out into the world, they are expected to reach positions of prominence so that they can further elevate the society's status and help promote the standing of their fellow Bonesmen. This purpose has driven Bonesmen to ascend to the top levels of so many fields that, as one historian observes, "at any one time The Order can call on members in any area of American society to do what has to be done." Several Bonesmen have been senators, congressmen, Supreme Court justices, and Cabinet officials. There is a Bones cell in the CIA, which uses the society as a recruiting ground because the members are so obviously adept at keeping secrets. Society members dominate financial institutions such as J. P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Brown Brothers Harriman, where at one time more than a third of the partners were Bonesmen. Through these companies, Skull and Bones provided financial backing to Adolf Hitler because the society then followed a Nazi-and now follows a neo-Nazi—doctrine. At least a dozen Bonesmen have been linked to the Federal Reserve, including the first chairman of the New York Federal Reserve. Skull and Bones members control the wealth of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford families.Skull and Bones has also taken steps to control the American media.Two of its members founded the law firm that represents the New York Times. Plans for both Time and Newsweek magazines were hatched in the Skull and Bones tomb. The society has controlled publishing houses such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In the 1880s, Skull and Bones created the American Historical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Economic Association so that the society could ensure that history would be written under its terms and promote its objectives. The society then installed its own members as the presidents of these associations. Under the society's direction, Bonesmen developed and dropped the nuclear bomb and choreographed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Skull and Bones members had ties to Watergate and the Kennedy assassination. They control the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission so that they can push their own political agenda. Skull and Bones government officials have used the number 322 as codes for highly classified diplomatic assignments. The society discriminates against minorities and fought for slavery; indeed eight out of twelve of Yale's residential colleges are named for slave owners while none are named for abolitionists. The society encourages misogyny: it did not admit women until the 1990s because members did not believe women were capable of handling the Skull and Bones experience and because they said they feared incidents of date rape. This society also encourages grave robbing: deep within the bowels of the tomb are the stolen skulls of the Apache chief Geronimo, Pancho Villa, and former president Martin Van Buren.Finally, the society has taken measures to ensure that the secrets of Skull and Bones slip ungraspable like sand through open fingers. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote a long but not probing article about the society in the 1970s, claimed that a source warned him not to get too close."What bank do you have your checking account at?" this party asked me in the middle of a discussion of the Mithraic aspects of the Bones ritual.I named the bank. "Aha," said the party. "There are three Bonesmen on the board. You'll never have a line of credit again. They'll tap your phone. They'll. . . ". . .The source continued: "The alumni still care. Don't laugh. They don't like people tampering and prying. The power of Bones is incredible. They've got their hands on every lever of power in the country. You'll see—it's like trying to look into the Mafia."In the 1980s, a man known only as Steve had contracts to write two books on the society, using documents and photographs he had acquired from the Bones crypt. But Skull and Bones found out about Steve. Society members broke into his apartment, stole the documents, harassed the would-be author, and scared him into hiding, where he has remained ever since. The books were never completed. In Universal Pictures' thriller The Skulls (2000), an aspiring journalist is writing a profile of the society for the New York Times. When he sneaks into the tomb, the Skulls murder him. The real Skull and Bones tomb displays a bloody knife in a glass case. It is said that when a Bonesman stole documents and threatened to publish society secrets if the members did not pay him a determined amount of money, they used that knife to kill him. This, then, is the legend of Skull and Bones.It is astonishing that so many people continue to believe, even in twenty-first-century America, that a tiny college club wields such an enormous amount of influence on the world's only superpower. The breadth of clout ascribed to this organization is practically as wide-ranging as the leverage of the satirical secret society the Stonecutters introduced in an episode of The Simpsons. The Stonecutters theme song included the lyrics:Who controls the British crown? Who keeps the metric system down? We do! We do. . .Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star? We do! We do.Certainly, Skull and Bones does cross boundaries in order to attempt to stay out of the public spotlight. When I wrote an article about the society for the Atlantic Monthly in May 2000, an older Bonesman said to me, "If it's not portrayed positively, I'm sending a couple of my friends after you." After the article was published, I received a telephone call at my office from a fellow journalist, who is a member of Skull and Bones.He scolded me for writing the article—"writing that article was not an ethical or honorable way to make a decent living in journalism," he condescended —and then asked me how much I had been paid for the story. When I refused to answer, he hung up. Fifteen minutes later, he called back."I have just gotten off the phone with our people." "Your people?" I snickered."Yes. Our people." He told me that the society demanded to know where I got my information."I've never been in the tomb and I did nothing illegal in the process of reporting this article," I replied."Then you must have gotten something from one of us. Tell me whom you spoke to. We just want to talk to them," he wheedled. "I don't reveal my sources."Then he got angry. He screamed at me for a while about how dishonorable I was for writing the article. "A lot of people are very despondent over this!" he yelled. "Fifteen Yale juniors are very, very upset!" I thanked him for telling me his concerns."There are a lot of us at newspapers and at political journalism institutions," he coldly hissed. "Good luck with your career"—and he slammed down the phone.Skull and Bones, particularly in recent years, has managed to pervade both popular and political culture. In the 1992 race for the Republican presidential nomination, Pat Buchanan accused President George Bush of running "a Skull and Bones presidency." In 1993, during Jeb Bush's Florida gubernatorial campaign, one of his constituents asked him, "You're familiar with the Skull and Crossbones Society?" When Bush responded, "Yeah, I've heard about it," the constituent persisted, "Well, can you tell the people here what your family membership in that is? Isn't your aim to take control of the United States?" In January 2001, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd used Skull and Bones in a simile: "When W. met the press with his choice for attorney general, John Ashcroft, before Christmas, he vividly showed how important it is to him that his White House be as leak-proof as the Skull & Bones 'tomb.'"That was less than a year after the Universal Pictures film introduced the secret society to a new demographic perhaps uninitiated into the doctrines of modern-day conspiracy theory. Not long before the movie was previewed in theaters—and perhaps in anticipation of the election of George W. Bush—a letter was distributed to members from Skull and Bones headquarters. "In view of the political happenings in the barbarian world," the memo read, "I feel compelled to remind all of the tradition of privacy and confidentiality essential to the well-being of our Order and strongly urge stout resistance to the seductions and blandishments of the Fourth Estate." This vow of silence remains the society's most important rule. Bonesmen have been exceedingly careful not to break this code of secrecy, and have kept specific details about the organization out of the press. Indeed, given the unusual, strict written reminder to stay silent, members of Skull and Bones may well refuse to speak to any member of the media ever again.But they have already spoken to me. When? Over the past three years. Why? Perhaps because I am a member of one of Skull and Bones' kindred Yale secret societies. Perhaps because some of them are tired of the Skull and Bones legend, of the claims of conspiracy theorists and some of their fellow Bonesmen. What follows, then, is the truth about Skull and Bones. And if this truth does not contain all of the conspiratorial elements that the Skull and Bones legend projects, it is perhaps all the more interesting for that fact. The story of Skull and Bones is not just the story of a remarkable secret society, but a remarkable society of secrets, some with basis in truth, some nothing but fog. Much of the way we understand the world of power involves myriad assumptions of connection and control, of cause and effect, and of coincidence that surely cannot be coincidence.Most of the speculative lore about the Skull and Bones ritual has centered on its death fixation. Beyond the obvious skull-and-crossbones insignia, of course, the most persistent story is that initiates spend their senior year in the basement crypt of the Bones Tomb taking turns lying in a coffin and, in two long, intense, psycho-drama autobiographical sessions in said coffins, recount their personal and sexual history to the other 14 chosen ones. The better to bond for life with those they know best and prepare for their destiny as stewards of the ruling class. The death-centered imagery, the injunction to initiates that they must "die to the barbarian world" and be reborn in the Elysian company of the elect of "The Order," as they call it, is what makes Skull and Bones as radically different from a college fraternity as the Gambino family is from the "hunting and fishing club" that was their nominal headquarters. The hangman equals death. The devil equals death. Death equals death .... What the hell is going on there? Is it a puzzle in logic, like "All men are mortal. Socrates is mortal ..."? Does it solve out to "The hangman equals the devil?" Could one detect a capital-punishment theme here--the hangman as executioner presaging George W.'s prolific execution rate as Texas governor? "George W. equals death," you might say. And what about the devil? (Well, the figure dressed like the devil.) Is that the secret they've been covering up ever since the society was founded in 1832, the offshoot of a German secret society: devil worship? A fulfillment of the paranoid fantasies of the fundamentalist right, who believe the Eastern establishment is a front for Satanic conspiracy. Probably not, but it made me more eager to participate in this year's caper: the attempt to see as well as hear it, to capture it all on video--for educational, historical and journalistic purposes to document a defining rite of passage of the American ruling class. Oh, yes--before we get to the night-vision videotape, there was one more thing, the embarrassing part of the audiotape, the OOGA-BOOGA part. Part of the ceremony on the tape involved an initiation master ordering the neophytes to fetch bones and uttering the (I guess) fake Tarzan-movie "native" chant "OOGA BOOGA." It left me feeling embarrassed for Skull and Bones. Hard to ever take seriously again anyone whose defining life-mission moment includes an OOGA BOOGA. But as it turned out, "OOGA BOOGA" was not evident in this year's ceremony, as far as we were able to tell. Perhaps it was an improvisation, like this year's impersonation of George W. ("I'll ream you like I reamed Al Gore") was. The Observer Mission Impossible Force met to plot strategy an hour before sunset on initiation night, Saturday, April 12. It is not widely known, but Tap Night, which occurs on Thursday, is not generally the same as initiation night. The good stuff happens on Saturday night, and already limos are cruising the quiet streets that crisscross the Yale campus, conveying initiates of other secret societies to their rituals. Bones initiates come on foot, knock on the massive triple-locked wooden door of the Tomb and are conveyed to the first stage of the ritual. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let me just mention how much I admired the intrepid Yale members of the Observer Bones Task Force for displaying the kind of curiosity, initiative and heretical, skeptical impulse apparently absent on most Ivy campuses, if you believe David Brooks' recent Atlantic Monthly cover story on get-along-go-along premature careerists. The guys on my team will make more of a real contribution than any of the smug secret-society types. First on the agenda was a quick examination of the Bones income-tax filings, which an outside consultant to the team had obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. He and Peggy Adler pointed out to me a couple of dubious assertions on the Form 990's (Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax), which called into question certain of the grounds for charitable exemption. In particular, there was the assertion in the 1997 RTA Incorporated filing (Part VI, line 80b) that the organization was not "related ... through common membership, governing bodies, trustees, officers etc. to any other exempt or non-exempt organization." Contradicting that assertion is information on the filing of the Deer Island Club Corporation. Deer Island is the private island of the Skull and Bones Society, located in the St. Lawrence River. It is the place where Bones members bring their families for summer get-togethers. It is wholly owned and run by Skull and Bones members, apparently contradicting Bones' claim of "no relationship" to another exempt organization, and appearing to contradict the strictly educational and charitable mission for which RTA gets its exemption for Skull and Bones. The consultant argues in a memo that the purpose of the 80b question on the Bones deduction claim form "is to prevent tax exempt charities from undertaking non-charitable activities by hiding them in another corporation. This is of course precisely what RTA Inc. is accomplishing through the Deer Island Club Corporation. In order to conceal this arrangement however RTA Inc. denies its connection to the DICC." In fact, he goes on, "RTA and the DICC are so closely linked that for all intents and purposes RTA Inc. does own Deer Island despite its claims to the contrary." I'm not going to go into the whole tax issue here. Perhaps the Bones shell corporation has a good and valid reason for claiming that it has no connection to the Bones private-island country club.** Perhaps this sort of thing goes on all the time among the private charities of the privileged. I don't think Deer Island will become George W. Bush's Whitewater. But one might think that a scrupulous White House counsel would want to look at the kind of tax information George W.'s secret society is filing on his behalf. Particularly since he's promising enormous windfalls for the privileged, the tax breaks his secret society takes should be utterly beyond suspicion. Does the President, I'd like to know, claim his Skull and Bones dues as a charitable deduction, when the only charity seems to be providing a club house and country house for the privileged? The RTA filing claims Skull and Bones exists "for the benefit of Yale University." But Yale--which celebrates three centuries of luminous atainments this weekend--ought to question what "benefit" it gets from chants of "lick my bumhole" and the mockery of Abner Louima. Anyway, as night came falling and we choreographed the evening's caper, I felt that we were carrying on an old-fashioned, longstanding tradition: the natural reaction of the democratic (small D) tradition to elitist power that conceals itself within the cloak of privilege and secrecy. And for me, it was a culmination of my own quarter-century quest, one that had become personalized lately by the fact that our Skull and Bones President had been a classmate of mine at Yale. 'Run, Neophyte, Run!' At last, zero hour approached. For two centuries, the outside world had wondered and fantasized about what was about to happen, what actually went on in the fabled Skull and Bones initiation. There's a long tradition of Yale secret societies (including Bones) raiding other secret societies to capture their ritual artifacts. In the 1970's, an all-woman break-in team published photographs of the Bone's Tomb's interior. But tonight, for the first time ever, we would attempt to capture the actual secret initiation ritual and bring it to light for anthropological study. Our team's equipment included three night-vision-capable digital-video cameras, one tape recorder, a stepladder and two walkie-talkies. (I could never get mine to work.) Because of a recent injury which limits my mobility, I was stationed at a listening post with my tape recorder while the video-cam team proceeded to their more perilous perch at the forward base (as those of us in special ops call it). We planned to rendezvous afterward for me to view the tape. We split up just as the whoops and groans, the screams and moans began to emanate from inside the Tomb and the masters of the Skull and Bones initiation began establishing the posts they'd man for the occult psycho-drama to come. From my post, I could see through an open window shadowy figures walking very close above my head. Later I'll put my audio impressions together with the video-cam record the other team obtained for a more complete picture, but first let me transcribe some of the notes I made from listening in. Fragmentary as they are, they capture some of the strangeness, and perhaps the kind of disorientation the initiates themselves experienced there in the courtyard of Skull and Bones. First, there was the guy posing as George W. He seemed to be a bit disgruntled at being given this role--a feeling he expressed by calling out in his George W. drawl to another "Patriarch" (as they're called): "I got the power to bomb the crap out of China and they give me this station." Then someone--one of the initiates?--called out "Uncle Toby!" (Many Bone ritual personae are taken from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy-- you gotta give them credit there for good taste.) "Uncle Toby!" the cry repeated. "Shut up, neophyte." "Take that plunger out of my ass, Uncle Toby." Presumably, this mocking Louima reference was a ploy to scare initiates into thinking Uncle Toby was going to give them the plunger treatment. That cheerful rectal theme was followed up by: "I'm gonna ream you like I reamed Al Gore!" from the George W. imitator. Followed by "Help me! It's the devil!" And then "George W." really getting into it: "I'm gonna kill you like I killed Al Gore." Silence. Then a door opened. Voices--half of them, it seemed, women--were screaming: "Run! Neophyte! Run, neophyte!" (The neophytes are, of course, the new initiates.) From my post, I could only see hooded figures racing about in the darkness above my head, accompanied by cries of: "Run, neophyte!" "Find the femur!" And (again): "Take that plunger out of my ass, Uncle Toby!" Then silence for awhile. The neophyte seemed to have gone back inside the Tomb. After which one of the Patriarchs complained, "We ought to get better blood than this fuckin' syrup, man." It was only later that I learned what the blood was for: the whole throat-slitting "barbarian" tableau after the skull-kissing."Find the femur, neophyte!" Along with the occasional "Lick my bumhole!" "Remove the plunger!"—type outcries. The devil figure pulled them into a white tent in the courtyard where, we think, they found their femurs and emerged with what looked like a thigh bone, although it was impossible to tell whether it once belonged to a human or not. When they reemerged from the tent, they were led to the centerpiece of this part of the ritual. They were forced face-to-face with a shocking tableau: a guy holding what seemed like a butcher knife, wearing a kind of animal-skin "barbarian" look, stood over what seemed to be a woman covered in fake blood and not much else. The neophyte then approached a skull a few feet away from the knife-wielder-and-victim tableau. The neophyte knelt and kissed the skull, at which point the guy with the knife knelt and cut the throat of the prone figure. (Well, pretended to cut the throat.) I'm not sure what it all means. I've yet to decode the mystical significance of this, although I do love to think of former President George Bush kissing the skull. Obviously, it has something to do with subservience. Kiss the skull of power. Bow down to The Order. But what about the "barbarian" cutting the throat of his victim? Does it mean "One dies to the barbarian world"? Does it mean "Death to the barbarians"? Does it endorse cutthroat tactics? Is that how they enforce silence and secrecy? I plan to continue my relentless study of the hermeneutics of the Bones rituals, myths and symbolism based on these new revelations, and perhaps with the help of a Bones graduate who feels the time has come to lift the veil on the silly (and no longer even secret) symbolism of their society. (Contact me privately c/o The Edgy Alliance, 577 Second Avenue, Box 105, N.Y., N.Y. 10016.) All that death imagery, though: Maybe it's meant to be a first ritualistic confrontation with Mortality, the skull as a memento mori designed to instill in the "neophyte" a sense of the gravity of one's mission in life. In that regard, consider the direct relevance of at least one aspect of the ritual to George W. That recurrent phrase: "Run, neophyte, run!" Think about it. When George W. was first considering the fairly serious shift from baseball-team owner (whose major achievement was trading away Sammy Sosa) to governor of Texas, or when he was considering the shift from one-term governor of Texas to President of the United States, what decided him--what made him think he could pull it off, despite years as a semi-permanent neophyte? Could it be that what he heard, echoing in his brain, down the corridors of the years, was the injunction from that long-ago April night when he was a Skull and Bones initiate? When he bent down to kiss the skull and heard, resounding in his ears, the command: "Run, neophyte, run!"Those on the inside know it as The Order. Others have known it for more than 150 years as Chapter 322 of a German secret society. More formally, for legal purposes, The Order was incorporated as The Russell Trust in 1856. It was also once known as the "Brotherhood of Death". In America it is called the 'Skull & Bones' club, The American chapter of this German order was founded in 1833 at Yale University by General William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft who, in 1876, became Secretary of War in the Grant ministration. Alphonso Taft was the father of William Howard Taft, the only man to be both President and Chief Justice of the United States. It is a senior year society which exists only at Yale. Members are chosen in their junior year and spend only one year on campus, the senior year, with Skull & Bones. In other words, the organization is oriented to the graduate outside world. The Order meets annually - patriarchies only - on Deer Island in the St. Lawrence River. Senior societies are unique to Yale. There are two other senior societies at Yale, but none elsewhere. Scroll & Key and Wolf's Head are supposedly competitive societies founded in the mid-19th century. We believe these to be part of the same network. Rosenbaum commented in his "Esquire" article, very accurately, that anyone in the Eastern Liberal Establishment who is not a member of Skull & Bones group is almost certainly a member of either the Scroll and Key or the Wolf's Head . The selection procedure for new members of The Order has not changed since 1832. Each year 15, and only 15, never fewer, are selected. In the past 150 years about 2500 Yale graduates have been initiated into The Order. At any time about 500-600 are alive and active. Roughly about one- quarter of these take an active role in furthering the objectives of The Order. The others either lose interest or just change their minds. The most likely potential member is from a Bones family, who is energetic, resourceful, political and probably an amoral team player. ... Honours and financial rewards are guaranteed by the power of The Order,but the price of these honours and rewards is sacrifice to the common goal of The Order.Some have not been willing to pay this price. The Old Line American families and their descendants involved in the Skull & Bones are names such as the following:Whitney,Perkins, Stimson, Harriman, Rockefeller, Lord, Brown, Bundy, Bush and Phelps. The order is not just another Greek letter fraternal society with passwords and handgrips common to most campuses. Chapter 322 is a secret society whose members are sworn to silence. It has rules and ceremonial rites. It is not at all happy with prying, probing citizens - known among initiates as 'outsiders' or 'vandals'. Its members always deny membership. An interesting point is whether the many members in various Administrations or who hold government positions have declared their members in the biographical data supplied for FBI 'background checks'. We doult this fact as test cases along with freemason membership often goes unrecorded.Pressure is now being placed to correct this.Between 1983-1986, the British-born conspiracy theorist Antony Sutton wrote a series of pamphlets about the Order of Skull & Bones. According to informed sources, Sutton was one of several historians who were provided with a large file of the Order's internal documents, including minutes of some meetings, descriptions of rituals, and what would appear to be a rather complete list of its members from its founding through to the early 1980s. The short pamphlets were compiled into one volume and published as a book in 1986.For someone closely following the just-concluded Persian Gulf War and attempting to gain some insight into George Bush's performance during that largely orchestrated affair, one recurring theme in the Sutton volume stands out like a sore thumb: the New World Order.According to the Skull & Bones documents used by Sutton in his somewhat flawed profile of the Order, the creation of a New World Order is a primary goal of the Bonesmen and has been for decades. For the initiates into the Order, the term New World Order has a very specific meaning.It is a world dominated by American military power and American control over all strategic raw materials. Just as the Greek city-state of Sparta provided the Skull & Bones with the image of a WASP warrior caste, the Persian Empire, with its system of coalitions of satrap armies, provides the model for the Bonesmen's New World Order. The image of Secretary of State James A. Baker III traveling from foreign capital to foreign capital demanding military legions or chests of gold to finance the war for a New World Order is an image straight out of the chronicles of the Persian Empire.According to the recent biography of Henry Stimson, the man who inspired President Bush was firmly convinced that it was essential for America to go to war once every generation or so. It was, for Stimson, a spiritually cleansing process which enables the nation to rally behind a cause and overcome its weaknesses and shortcomings in one grand burst of military fervor. The romantic mystique of the purgative powers of combat is key to understanding the political philosophy of Skull & Bones.Although America's Vietnam debacle remains a bitter memory of the Bonesmen's failure in war, the recent Persian Gulf conflict, with its massive overkill and the use of highly advanced weapons and technologies, is now the new glorious symbol of the WASP warrior caste's reincarnation. When President Bush vowed that the Gulf War would not be another Vietnam, he was speaking first and foremost to his fellow Bonesmen -- not to the American people. If such thinking smacks of dangerous fantasy on the part of a major world power in the modern era, it is indeed.On a more practical political level, the Gulf War was a gambit to save the Bush presidency from a mounting pile of domestic financial woes, not the least of which was the savings and loan (S&L) crisis and a pending series of failures of major commercial banks. In the months preceding the Gulf showdown, the president's own son, Neil Bush, came under intense media scrutiny for his role in the failure of a large S&L in Colorado. Neil's photograph, testifying under oath before a congressional committee probing fraud among top S & L managers, became a familiar front-page feature in every major newspaper in America, threatening dangerous popular disillusion with the Yale Bonesman in the White House. With a U.S. federal government deficit projected at nearly a half a trillion dollars for Fiscal Year 1991, in large part because of the S&L crisis and a shrinking business tax base, the Democratic Party majority in the U.S. Congress was pressing for deep cutbacks in defense spending now that the Cold War had ended.On the international stage, the reunification of Germany, clearly the most dramatic event of 1990, posed new challenges to the Bush team. Germany was about to emerge as the dominant power in continental Europe by virtue of its advanced industrial infrastructure and its long tradition of independent political dealings with Moscow. Just months before the outbreak of the Gulf crisis, Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl had met with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and signed a long term economic assistance pact. As a result, Gorbachev dropped all remaining objections to the immediate reunification of Germany.At that point, the Bush administration changed its tactics. Previously, in sharp contrast to the Thatcher government in Great Britain, it had been nominally in favor of German reunification. But at the Houston economic summit of the Group of Seven Industrialized Countries in the summer of 1990, the United States blocked (with Britain) Germany's plan of unconditional economic aid to the Soviet Union. President Bush took the position that the Soviet Union must submit to International Monetary Fund requisites as a precondition for any substantive economic assistance.In the Far East, Japan's continuing growth in manufacturing also posed a threat to Washington's desire to retain superpower status. If President Bush and his Bonesmen coterie were unaware of a stunning historical analogy, their British "cousins" were quick to pick up on the parallels between the global strategic situation in July 1990 and the identical international situation that existed 100 years earlier.In the 1890s, France, under the brilliant political leadership of Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanataux, was attempting to forge a Eurasian alliance with Germany, Russia and Meiji Japan. The idea was to link continental Europe with Japan and China through a series of large overland infrastructure projects, beginning with the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Through treaties covering key areas of economic and security matters, Hanataux hoped to create a zone of prosperity, built on a foundation of rapid economic growth and extensive trade.Such a political-economic common interest alliance threatened the imperial hegemony of Great Britain. At the turn of the 20th century, Britain looked to the United States (as its English-speaking ally) to join in sabotaging the Hanataux plan. Through the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Britain and her American junior partner (by then led by Henry Stimson's old mentor Teddy Roosevelt) managed to disrupt the French-German-Russian-Japanese economic axis. Two world wars and the Great Depression were the consequences of that interference.THE PERSIAN GULF WARIt was against this historical backdrop that President Bush, invoking the World War II imagery of his Skull & Bones idol Henry Stimson, went to war against Iraq. There is even speculation that President Bush was personally instrumental in luring Saddam Hussein into invading Kuwait, thereby provoking the American-led military response. Many news accounts have emphasized that a two-hour private meeting between the president and Margaret Thatcher in the Aspen, Colorado vacation chalet of U.S. Ambassador Henry Catto on August 2, 1990 helped finalize Bush's decision to immediately deploy military force.Recently, an astute Japanese analyst drew a disturbing parallel between Bush and FDR, who was greatly influenced by Stimson. According to the writer, FDR lured Japan into World War II through an intricate series of economic warfare maneuvers which left Japan with little choice but to strike-back. In much the same way, said the analyst, Bush had lured Saddam Hussein into Kuwait in order to launch a new Gulf War that would have consequences reaching far beyond Iraq and the Middle East.As a result of the military victory over Iraq, the United States is in the process of establishing a string of permanent military bases throughout the Persian Gulf and Near East. The oil sheikdoms of the region, led by Saudi Arabia, are now thoroughly dependent on the American military presence to ensure the survival of their regimes. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is effectively captured by Washington. American bankers aided by U.S. gunboats now are setting world oil prices. Thus, one consequence of the Persian Gulf War is that the United States now has an oil weapon -- pointed principally at Germany and Japan. Ironically, America's two chief economic rivals have paid out a total of $27 billion to date to help finance a Bush administration military adventure which put the oil weapon in Washington's hand.Another telling example of how the Order's man in the Oval Office intends to administer a crumbling U.S. domestic economy while imposing the New World Order on the rest of the world is to be found in the recent buyout of the majority of stock in Citicorp, the largest U.S. commercial bank, by Saudi Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz. Citicorp is one of the major American commercial banks on the verge of collapse, but which is considered by the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve System to be "too big to fall." The stock purchase amounted to a Saudi Royal Family bail-out of Citicorp, using the increased profits being enjoyed by the House of Saud as a result of the massive jump in Saudi oil production since the beginning of the Gulf crisis in August 1990.There points up a striking difference between the role of the United States in World War II and the Bush administration's handling to date of the Middle East crisis. During World War II, the United States went through a genuine economic revival. Skull & Bones historian Samuel Huntington described it as a "neo Hamiltonian" policy, a reference to the first United States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. (Less)

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Brazil by Portinari - 1
This film, presented in 7 parts, shows Brazil as seen by the late Brazilian painter Candido (More) This film, presented in 7 parts, shows Brazil as seen by the late Brazilian painter Candido Portinari (1903-1962). PORTINARI (by his biographer Antonio Callado) At the end of his life, when he was very ill and full of financial worries, Gauguin wrote from Hiva-Oa, in the Marquesas Islands, to his faithful friend Daniel de Monfreid, to announce he was thinking of going home, going back to France. In words seemingly brutal in their frankness but dictated by a long, lucid friendship, Monfreid told him not to come back: “... you enjoy the immunity of the great Dead... you have become part of the history of Art.” A few days later, in May 1903, Gauguin was dead. Only Tioka, his old Maori friend, was there to close his eyes. However, as Monfreid had anticipated, Gauguin was, from that day on, among the great European dead. He might have ended his days in a remote Pacific Island, but he was born in France, he had made his name in France, he had been the friend of Van Gogh, of Mallarmé, of Strindberg. In that same year 1903, Portinari was born in Brazil and when he died in 1962, his name was well-known in the United States, in France, in Italy. To this day one can see Portinari’s mural paintings in the Library of Congress, in Washington. And, in the great entrance hall of the United Nations, in New York, one can see his two impressive, gigantic oils named respectively Guerra [War] and Paz [Peace], installed there in 1957. At about the same time, Portinari was showing his paintings in Europe and in Israel, and was illustrating, for Gallimard, novels of André Maurois and Graham Greene. But it seems that the passing of time does not help sustain the works of artists born away from the first world of Western Europe and the United States. The great museums, the great galleries, the great art magazines, the stock exchanges of art are located in New York, in Paris, and in very few other cities. Either an artist belongs to that magic circle where “l’histoire de l’Art” is always alive and rich or he has to have his name brought to life again from time to time, recalled, remembered. The intrinsic value of Portinari’s paintings is shining as brightly as ever. But the memory of his name became blurred. Let us have a look, in this book, at the many-sided, majestic world of Portinari. Born into a family of poor Italian immigrants who toiled in the coffee plantations in the State of São Paulo, Candido Portinari in 1928 won a scholarship in painting that took him to Paris. During his stay in Europe, Portinari had his painter’s block, like a writer’s block: he visited studios and exhibitions; he compared techniques of painting; he spent hours and days in churches and museums; but he painted nothing. Literally, as he used to say, he painted “only a few pictures, small ones.” The truth is that in Europe Portinari felt like a sponge, like blotting-paper, like an open camera, just absorbing impressions, sucking, registering. Upon coming back to Brazil, on the other hand, he started painting as if he might die if he stopped. In a few years, he became the most important painter in Brazil. In 1935, his name reached the United States, through his painting Café [Coffee]. In 1940, The University of Chicago Press published a study of his work under the title Portinari, His Life and Art. This book contains many black-and-white and full-color reproductions, including paintings on social and religious themes and some magnificent portraits that show that he reached the height of his powers at an early age. It also reveals that by this time, Portinari was already acclaimed by no less a person than Rockwell Kent, the American painter, illustrator, and writer. Kent (1882-1971) wrote the introduction to the book, and it is still a pleasure to note the enthusiasm with which he welcomed his young colleague from the south. This is how he describes the vision central to Portinari’s art: The world of Portinari: as, compelled by it, in thought, we move about in it, with wonder — fear, perhaps — but with the same acceptance of its elements as our unconscious selves accord the most fantastic dreams that trouble us in sleep, we come gradually to the realization that this is no world of pure imagination but an intensified, fantastic re-creation of the world that Portinari knows, his native land, Brazil. Of this, his other paintings are the evidence. In them, we see the landscape, we tread the soil; we see its workers and their poverty — not agonized about, just recounted. And recounted with love. Not love for poverty and unremitted toil, but love for woman, man, and child — who, rich or poor, to him are lovable. He paints them trustfully. “Blessed are the meek” would seem to be the utterance from his heart. And if the conditions of their life on their Brazilian earth would seem to us to be no great inheritance, they by their goodness make life seem worthwhile. They work; they marry and rear families; their children play. And of their happiness, of the happiness of carefree children at their play, there are no paintings in the treasury of art more eloquent. Thus wrote Rockwell Kent about the great Brazilian painter in 1940. I have just been looking in the Encyclopedia Britannica for the entry on Portinari. There is none, and the entry on Brazil contains only two lines about him. On the other hand, Rockwell Kent is the subject of an excellent article, running to more than twenty lines and accompanied by a reproduction of one of his pictures. Yet, if Kent has a certain position in the art and culture of the United States, it is in no way comparable to that occupied by Portinari in the painting and culture of Brazil and Latin America. The tribute that Kent paid him in 1940 was prophetic. Portinari’s art continued to develop until the end of his life. No painter of comparable stature has appeared in Brazil since his death in 1962. During the first half of the present century, two Brazilian artists, each working in a different art form, enriched their country’s culture and enhanced its international standing. They were Portinari and — in music — Villa-Lobos. To add the name of Oscar Niemeyer, the architect of Brasilia, is to define the area in which the Brazilian cultural sensibility has spread and influenced the sensibilities of other peoples. But there is no doubt that Portinari best and most directly illustrates the Brazilian phenomenon. For reasons of personal taste, some people may think that other Brazilian painters are more important than Portinari. No one, however, would deny his absolute primacy as the painter of Brazil as a whole. The Portinari Project is gradually recording, photographing, and cataloging the monumental heritage of Portinari’s work. The Project gives an idea of the artist’s impressive output of more than 5,100works: migrants from the poverty-stricken Northeast, cowhands, laborers, popular musicians — as well as religious and historical paintings, and portraits. In 1956, I published the book Retrato de Portinari [Portrait of Portinari] edited by the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art: a biographical study of he who was, in my opinion, Brazil’s greatest painter. The series of interviews for the book served to establish the basis of my longlasting, strong friendship with Portinari. I took to calling him Candinho, as his family and closest friends knew him. I paid frequent calls to the painter’s apartment in the district of Leme in Rio de Janeiro; I enjoyed lunch with him, his wife Maria — my friend to date — and son João Candido, a young man at the time, and today a teacher of Mathematics and a prominent leader of the Portinari Project. In 1979, I published a second edition of Retrato [Portrait] (Editora Paz e Terra), in which the painter’s biography is extended until his death in 1962. [A longer, reviewed third edition was published in 2003 by Jorge Zahar Editor.] I always recall Portinari wearing yellow rubber gloves while painting in an attempt to fight the lead poisoning caused by the paints he could not avoid using. And how he loved to wear Italian-style vests, some of them quite elaborate! Holding his palette in gloved hands, Candinho looked just like an artist of earlier times. That is how I picture him now, in perspective; in the background of an extensive art collection. However, on the easel, the picture I recall is always one of those last on which I saw him working. At that time Candinho painted motifs of the Carajás Indians although frequently returning to the theme of the Rio de Janeiro hillsides; except that the hillsides of his last canvasses were transparent, translucent, much more disquieting than those he did twenty years back, where the crude misery appeared together with the liveliness of biscateiros [those who live off odd jobs] and women carrying water cans on their heads. I believe this way of remembering my friend and the painter is deeply rooted in his personality and in his art: it comes from the conflict that always existed between Portinari’s intense Brazilianism and his Italianism. While a young scholarship student in Paris, Portinari wrote to a friend in Brazil a letter that was to become famous in the story of his life, in which he said: Despite my blood of the people from Florence, a city described by Romain Rolland as feverish, proud, where one was free and one was a tyrant, where it was splendid to live and where life was pure hell, I feel like a “hick.” The hicks Dominga and Baptista, Italian peasants originally from Vicenza in Veneto and from Florence, immigrated to the Brazilian land of coffee in the late 1800s where they conceived their son Candido. The conflict installed in Portinari’s spirit between Florence and Brodowski, his hometown, between the Arno River and the region of the Alta Mogiana railway, would have caused, according to one or two critics, a certain inconsistency in his style. Thus, in their opinion, there was a lack of consonance and conviction between, let us say, Portinari the portraitist and painter of religious and historic themes, and Portinari the painter of retirantes (migrants from drought areas), of favelados (shantytown dwellers), of popular musicians. The first of these two Portinaris was viewed as a conservative and the second, an innovator; the first, classical, the second, modern. Such criticism seems superficial and unfounded, considering that even in Portinari’s most hieratic and grave works such as A Primeira Missa no Brasil [The First Mass in Brazil] or A chegada de D. João VI à Bahia [The arrival of D. João VI in Bahia], the modernity of style is overwhelming, as indeed the classic monumentality is present in Portinari’s Cangaceiros [Bandits] and in the Meninos de Brodowski [Children of Brodowski]. One always finds tension, a powerful balance in his work: the bow in one world, the bow string in another. Any survey of the amazing Portinarian labor assures us that, besides his painting of “social” inspiration, at least in three other painting categories Portinari revealed himself as the most complete of Brazilian plastic artists: religious, historic, and portrait. Take portrait painting, for instance. The depth and variety of the gallery of portraits Portinari left us make me often think of the keen, peasant-like cunning with which he observed and summed up people around him. His blue eyes used to flash behind his gold-rimmed glasses and people would be instantly defined with respect or dismissed with a boutade. Portinari’s portraits are as “painterly” as Kokoschka’s and at the same time intensely psychological. Suffice to mention here the four portraits Portinari painted of the Rubinstein family, pianist Arthur, his wife and their children Eva and Paul. Arthur Rubinstein’s portrait belongs to an extensive group of portraits Portinari painted of artists and poets, the fine faces, the peace, the inner glow. Mrs. Rubinstein’s picture belongs to another extensive wall in Portinari’s collection: the wall of elegant women, of hostesses. Finally, we have, with Eva and Paul, two perfect early instances of the passion with which he painted children. He loved them and painted them as if he were dipping his brush in golden, sparkling wine. His series of children’s portraits are a permanent delight to the eye, from the portraits of the Rubinstein’s children to those of his own granddaughter Denise. In his last years of life, Portinari painted Denise repeatedly. It was his self-portrait of the painter as a doting grandfather. Portinari used to say he did not like portrait painting. He stuck to doing them during his life because a few portraits of very rich people would bring him enough money to buy lots of time in which he could paint only and exactly what he felt like painting. And he in fact reduced his portrait painting in proportion to the rising level of his bank account in his mature years. But he fortunately never stopped painting portraits for nothing, portraits of his friends. He did mine, thank God. The experience of having your portrait painted by Portinari was not only an honor and a special emotion, but for those dealing in any kind of art, a learning process, a lesson in effort and integrity. A master of all the resources of his art, Portinari painted and repainted an ear, or the cloth of a shirt, for as long as it was necessary — hours, days — awaiting that moment when the artist suddenly feels the thrill of arrival, of having achieved what he sought. Portinari did not have a work routine, so to speak: he worked all the time, the whole day. However, he never established dates to finish anything. The canvasses he diligently worked on seemed to know the time to consider themselves finished, to finish themselves. Portinari resembled a gardener or a hand at a coffee plantation, just like his parents. He toiled his ground of paintings from sunrise to sunset, and after that left them to thrive by themselves. And let me now recall one more aspect of Portinari’s creative genius, actually the last one he revealed: that of a poet. His posthumous book Poems was published in 1964. He caught his poetry fever in 1958, on board the Conte Grande. He feared it might be his last trip to his beloved Europe. He seemed to know that his longstanding disease — that fatal incompatibility of his with oil paints — was lately gaining firm ground in his body. And the painter felt almost professionally inquisitive. He wrote: I wonder whether there is color in death? Which color shall I find on the other side? Then, the following day, he wrote: How much I would be able to tell If only words came to me as colors do. The truth is, however, that taking for granted that he didn’t know how to handle a pen as well as he handled his brushes, Portinari not only left us sweet and at times deeply moving poetry, but also yet another instance of his artistic integrity. When Portinari had quite a sheaf of good poems — mostly impressions from his humble but inspiring childhood, peopled by ghosts and angels — his publisher José Olympio, who happened to come from the same backcountry as Portinari, asked him for illustrations for his verses. Portinari was adamant in saying no. He did not intend to use the painter to promote the poet! People, he argued, would only buy the book because of the illustrations. I, personally, tried to make him reconsider his decision by saying that William Blake, the great English poet, had illuminated his poems with his own etchings. Portinari replied that Blake would have been famous through just his etchings, whether he had written poetry or not. No. His case was different and he refused to draw or paint anything for his Poems. Some day he might produce a very limited edition of Poems with illustrations: “for intimate friends, only.” Portinari’s obsequies in Rio, on February 6, 1962, were at par with those French funeral processions — of Valéry and Sartre— during which the heart of Paris seems to stop beating. And the crowds who looked on — black people and mulattos, Indian-looking people and white people — were the very crowds Portinari painted in a thousand pictures: his Northeastern cangaceiros, his farmhands, his popular musicians, his shantytown mestizos, his 16th century Portuguese discoverers, his saints. A lifetime of titanic artistic effort was somehow alive around the dead painter now. And I suddenly remembered Portinari telling me once he had managed to bear with fortitude many a day of physical and spiritual suffering because the one unbearable suffering he feared he had been spared: he never had to stop painting. However hard he worked, he added, he would never say he had earned his living with the sweat of his brow. He had always been thrilled and fulfilled by his painting. I kept thinking while I followed the funeral procession that lovers would never say either that they had reached pleasure by the sweat of their bodies; to a certain extent it would be true, but it would be a meaningless truth. (Less)

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