ASTROLOGY BOOKS TO GO - AGAIN

I've had no success contacting either of the commenters who showed interest in these books last week, hence the re-posting. Also, we are about to travel to an out of state funeral, will be away for a couple of days, so no further posts until Friday. If anyone is interested in the books, including either of the two who replied last time, please leave a comment and/or e-mail to
aok39uk@yahoo.com
I'll respond as soon as possible.

When I first came to the USA and began delving deeper into astrology, I bought, on E-bay, a box filled with astrology books. These were probably from someone's estate - the name of the previous owner (an astrologer?) is stamped on most of them. Most are in very good condition - a few are a wee bit worn and ragged - mainly the booklets. I've pared down my own needs to very few, the books listed below are now overflow. I'd be willing send them anywhere in the USA, no charge other than the postage. I'd ask the recipient to donate the cost of postage to Elsa via her Paypal link, as a thank you for her work keeping Astro Dispatch updated. Some of these books fit into the biggest UPS box (about $14 to mail) the rest will go into two big padded envelopes, but I can't estimate cost without zip code of receiving address. Media Mail would be the most economical for the envelopes, but they would take a bit longer to arrive.



If nobody is interested, then I guess the books will be headed towards some also very disinterested shoppers at Goodwill.


Hardback:

Planets in Houses - RobertPelletier

Planets in Composite - Robert Hand

Predictive Astrology - Sakoian & Acker

Larousse Encyclopedia of Astrology

Business Success and Astrology - Teri King

Your Personality and the Planets - Michel Gauquelin


Paperback/softcover

Planetary Heredity - Michel Gauquelin

Harmonics in Astrology - John Addey

The Elements of House Division - R.W. Holden

Life Clock - Age Progression in the horoscope Vol 1 - B & L Huber

Compendium of Astrology - Lineman & Popelka

The Sabian Symbols in Astrology - Marc Edmund Jones

Success Signs: a practical astrological guide to career fulfillment - M.M. Rathgeb

Astrology: The classic guide to understanding your horoscope. - R.C. Davison

Tools of Astrology - Houses - Dona Marie Lorenz

Rectification of the Birth Time - Gustav Schwickert

A Short Dictionary of Astrology - Marylee Bytheriver

Aspects Magnified - Mohan Koparkar

Lunar Nodes - Mohan Koparkar

The 360 Degrees of the Zodiac - Adriano Carelli

Astrodynes - Ken Stone

Deliniation with Astrodynes - Ken Stone

Spherical Astronomy for Astrologers - G.C.Noonan


Booklets

Keys to Inter Relations - C.M. Darr

How to Handle your Human Relations - L.H. Sargent

Your Best Place - Relocation Techniques - D. Warren

An Introduction to Locality Astrology - Charles Jayne

Astro Cartography - Source Book of Mundane Maps for 1982

Music Monday ~ Harry Nilsson

Tomorrow would have been the birthday of Harry Nilsson. He died in 1994, aged 52, possibly helped along the road to that big ol' recording studio in the sky by a wild and woolly lifestyle in his youth. Gone too soon. He was both singer and songwriter, he wrote for many pop singers of his day, but his own biggest hits came via songs written by others: Everybody's Talkin' (used in the movie Midnight Cowboy) and Without You. Another of his better known songs I Guess The Lord Must be in New York City was self-penned - I think.

Nilsson was often described as being the nearest thing America had to the Beatles. He counted the Fab 4 as his friends, for sure - especially Lennon, with whom he spent many wild boozy, druggy days and nights. They're together in the photograph below.



I listened to some tracks from a couple of Nilsson LPs from my husband's collection and was struck by the similarity in sound to some early Beatles' songs. They are of a similar age group with similar influences, so that isn't too surprising.


He is described in one biography as something of a maverick with a disregard for commercialism. Now that cannot be bad! They don't make 'em like that anymore - at least not so's you'd notice. A good example of his mavericity (is that a word?) is his album The Point (described by a fan HERE).







A look at his natal chart:
Born on 15 June 1941 in Brooklyn, New York. A 12 noon chart has to suffice, no time of birth is available on-line.



Sun and Jupiter in Gemini reflect his songwriting and communication skills, and partly why he and John Lennon got on so well (Gemini and Libra Suns - both Airy same wavelength signs). In addition both had the trine between Uranus and Neptune shared by their age group. In Nilsson's case it was linked in to his personal planets via a semi-sextile to Sun from Uranus.

Stand-out configuration in the chart is a challenging T-square between Sun/Neptune/Mars, which possibly connected to his health and/or financial problems. His financial advisor embezzled most of Harry's his earnings/savings. The T-square configuration is softened somewhat by what astrologers call a working wedge or T-wedge, by the helpful trine between Neptune/Uranus and a sextile between Mars and Uranus. (See right).




Below is a trailer for a film about him. Who Is Harry Nilsson (& Why Is Everbody Talkin' About Him?) It had very limited release and so far hasn't been issued as DVD, in spite of promises.


Who Is Harry Nilsson?

Harry Nilsson MySpace Video

And his 1969 recording of I Guess the Lord Must Be in New York City

SPLICING

We saw Splice the other evening. In case a passing reader hasn't heard, it's a movie about a couple of scientists who create a creature from a mix of animal/bird/fish/human DNA. Suspense of disbelief, suspended to a very great height, is required as well as a distinct lack of delicate sensitivities when it comes to sexual shenanigans - of which there are one or two. The movie was made in France. Sensitivities are somewhat rougher hewn there than in the USA.

I found the movie engaging - I wasn't bored - always a good sign. I found parts of it to be darkly funny. Movies these days seem to need "a message" - in this case there were several, pick and mix 'em rather like the DNA they used. The message I took from it is that life force, whether human, animal, bird, fish, whatever, is not a warm cuddly entity. It has an inbuilt ferocity which became necessary aeons ago out of necessity, for it to to develop, and continue to survive, against all odds. Hence, astrologically, our Mars traits and the Fire element, characterised long ago by the ancients.






Splice was written and directed by Vincenzo Natali, born in the US but grew up in Canada. His only other well-known film is Cube. I didn't see that one, but it sounds like another strangely intriguing story. I took a peek at Natali's natal chart, expecting to see Uranus (planet of all that's futuristic) well placed.




Here it is:



Uranus in Libra is in close trine (harmonious aspect) to his natal Mercury in Aquarius (rulership of Uranus). Uranus is also semi-sextile Mars, at home in mysterious and darkly erotic Scorpio.







The movie ended on a note ripe for continuation via sequel.....
"How bad could it be?" the scientist asks the CEO. I'd hazard a guess: Pretty darn bad!

Arty Farty Friday ~ Weegee, photographer.

Back in the day - the long-gone day before the internet, cellphones, TV, and before access to images of world events - even neighbouring events, photographs were the only link people had with the world outside of their own small sphere. Back then photographers were key to keeping the information loom weaving. One such was Weegee, nickname of Arthur Fellig. He earned the nickname, derived from "ouija" (as in board) because he had a mystical magical way of always being in the right place at the right time ....for photographs of an accident, crime, event of note. Weegee didn't become arty-farty in its full sense until late in his career - see last few images in the string below.

Born in the area of Eastern Europe now called Ukraine (then part of Austria) he arrived in the USA with his parents in 1909. He spent his life in New York. From the 1930s to 1950s he photographed life and death in stark and striking photographs for tabloid newspapers.

Holland Cotter's excellent 2006 New York Times review of an exhibition of his photographs, "Unknown Weegee", gives a good sense of who Weegee was, the times and the place. An extract:

His story is the story of a Jewish kid, son of a rabbi, who came with his family from Europe to New York City. Independent-minded, he noodled around, did the odd job, hit the flophouses. Then he discovered photography, and he became a man with a mission. Make that obsession. Scratch that: addiction.

A freelancer by temperament, he had long-term gigs with The Daily News, The Daily Mirror and the left-leaning daily PM. His beat was the inner city, and everything was raw material: the good and the bad, but mostly the bad. He liked nights because he had the photographic turf to himself but also because the best bad things happen at night, under the cover of darkness. Vandals make their mark; hit men practice their trade; people get crazy.

Like a boy scout, he was always prepared. He prowled the streets in a car equipped with a police radio, a typewriter, developing equipment, a supply of cigars and a change of underwear. He was a one-man photo factory: he drove to a crime site; took pictures; developed the film, using the trunk as a darkroom; and delivered the prints.

He often finished a job before the cops had cleared the scene, in some cases before they even arrived. About certain things he was clairvoyant. (Weegee = Ouija, as in board. Get it?) He caught catastrophes in the making and filmed them unfolding. An opportunist? A sensationalist? A voyeur? You could call him all that. He wouldn't mind. "Just get the name right. Weegee the Famous."

He was in the right place at the right time. New York from the Depression through World War II was a rude, crude town. No heat in winter, way too much in the summer. Immigrants poured in; there was barely enough room to hold them. Native-born workers felt the competition for jobs and space, resented it. The melting pot was on a constant boil.

Weegee was aware of social problems. This is one of the points the show makes. A congenital, unradical leftist, he gave his work a deliberate political slant. He documented segregation and racial-bias attacks. In one 1951 photo, he shows a black woman holding aloft a piece of paper with a picture of a gun. The paper was actually a coupon to win free admission to a new Randolph Scott movie called "Colt 45." But at some point Weegee pinned a "Black Power" button to the print to give it a pointed meaning.

The politics that really made him tick, though, were populist. He knew what Americans wanted, because he wanted it too. Sentimentality: cops holding kittens, lost kids crying. Zaniness: people dressed up as Martians, things like that. He was drawn to glamour, though not the social register stuff. That he despised. He loved to embarrass the rich, make them look like freaks.

(Weegee's 1945 book, "Naked City," was the basis for a Hollywood movie; he himself, quintessential New Yorker, appeared as an extra in films.)

12 noon chart shown below in the absence of a known birth time.



Oh, "I love it when a plan comes together!" (Apologies to The A-Team) Neptune rules (among other things) photography, and what do we have here? Sun conjunct Neptune.....also conjunct Mercury and Pluto. Mercury = communication, Pluto connects to all that is dark, death included. Weegee's photographs often depicted death and dark events and communicated them to the world.

Venus at 25 Taurus - the degree of Fixed Star Algol, the star known to astrologers as most unfortunate of all stars. Venus represents art - again we have a symbolic connection with art and unfortunate happenings.

Saturn in Sagittarius opposes his natal Sun and planet cluster in Gemini indicating a dynamic between business, expansion, publication (Saturn in Sagittarius) and Gemini's curiosity and restlessness.

Moon would be in Leo whatever time Weegee was born, and more than likely would be in harmonious trine to Uranus which could be translated as his rather rebellious attitude towards the status quo, and his concern about social problems of the day.




Arrested for bribing basketball players



On the fire escape







Coney Island










Summer 1937, Lower East Side







DISTORTIONS

ASTROLOGY BOOKS TO GO

When I first came to the USA and began delving deeper into astrology, I bought, on E-bay, a box filled with astrology books. These were probably from someone's estate - the name of the previous owner (an astrologer?) is stamped on most of them. Most are in very good condition - a few are a wee bit worn and ragged - mainly the booklets. I've pared down my own needs to very few, the books listed below are now overflow. I'd be willing send them anywhere in the USA, no charge other than the postage. I'd ask the recipient to donate the cost of postage to Elsa via her Paypal link, as a thank you for her work keeping Astro Dispatch updated. I'm not sure how many of these books would fit into the biggest UPS box (about $14). I have fitted them all into a box from the liquor store (12x10x14"). The biggest UPS box is only 12x12x5 and half, so quite a bit smaller. I could use a large box and a medium box from UPS, I guess. That would add $10 to cost though. Or I could use a box similar to the one they're in now, but have no idea what the cost would be, certainly $20+ I'm not overly keen to split the lot .... any suggestions welcome.




If anyone is interested, do let me know via the comments and I'll give you an e-mail address. If not, then I guess they'll be headed towards some very disinterested shoppers at Goodwill.


Hardback:

Planets in Houses - RobertPelletier

Planets in Composite - Robert Hand

Predictive Astrology - Sakoian & Acker

Larousse Encyclopedia of Astrology

Business Success and Astrology - Teri King

Your Personality and the Planets - Michel Gauquelin


Paperback/softcover

Planetary Heredity - Michel Gauquelin

Harmonics in Astrology - John Addey

The Elements of House Division - R.W. Holden

Life Clock - Age Progression in the horoscope Vol 1 - B & L Huber

Compendium of Astrology - Lineman & Popelka

The Sabian Symbols in Astrology - Marc Edmund Jones

Success Signs: a practical astrological guide to career fulfillment - M.M. Rathgeb

Astrology: The classic guide to understanding your horoscope. - R.C. Davison

Tools of Astrology - Houses - Dona Marie Lorenz

Rectification of the Birth Time - Gustav Schwickert

A Short Dictionary of Astrology - Marylee Bytheriver

Aspects Magnified - Mohan Koparkar

Lunar Nodes - Mohan Koparkar

The 360 Degrees of the Zodiac - Adriano Carelli

Astrodynes - Ken Stone

Deliniation with Astrodynes - Ken Stone

Spherical Astronomy for Astrologers - G.C.Noonan


Booklets

Keys to Inter Relations - C.M. Darr

How to Handle your Human Relations - L.H. Sargent

Your Best Place - Relocation Techniques - D. Warren

An Introduction to Locality Astrology - Charles Jayne

Astro Cartography - Source Book of Mundane Maps for 1982

Wednesday Woo-Woo ~ Uri Geller

Probably the best-known name of all in the area of Woo is
Uri Geller, spoon-bender extraordinaire, purveyor of the paranormal, including (from his website HERE): telepathy (extrasensory perception - the ability to receive someone's thought pattern and transmit images in a similar manner.) Dowsing: finding the location of precious minerals. Bending, breaking and softening metal and other solids with the power of the mind, e.g. spoons, keys etc. Fixing broken watches and appliances, and using collective power, influencing the Big Ben to stop. Moving compasses with the power of thought. Erasing computer tapes and disks. Sprouting: causing tiny seeds (mainly red radish) to grow a few centimetres in seconds.

I've never been able to make up my mind about him. One thing is clear - he's a consummate showman. Showmanship and paranormal abilities are not easy bedfellows if a person wishes to be taken seriously. Perhaps Mr. Geller has never wanted to be taken seriously, but has been happy to use any gift he possesses to entertain the public and make a living for himself. Nothing wrong with that. I seriously doubt that he is the charlatan skeptics declare him to be. I'd rather think that he does have some kind of skill or gift - though perhaps a fairly minor one which is inconsistent, and has been exaggerated, embroidered and expanded for the delight of an audience.

I wonder if his natal chart will throw any light on the matter.
Born 20 December 1946 in Tel Aviv, now Israel, then Palestine. Astrodatabank has his time of birth as 2:30 AM.




Although his natal Sun is in Sagittarius, his Scorpio side is far more visible to the public. This isn't surprising as Scorpio was rising as he was born, Moon/Venus/Jupiter in Scorpio were closely conjoined in his First House of self. Scorpio is known for its magnetic, hypnotic, darkly magical characteristics, which Mr. Geller loves to emphasise on stage. At midheaven (the career area of the chart) is Leo - the show-biz sign, with Saturn right on the angle - so strong, and very important in this guy's personality. Saturn connects to science, and to business and the status quo, which don't fit too well - apart from the fact that Mr. Geller obviously has an acute business sense, which is linked to his life in the spotlight (midheaven). There's an echo of this from Mars in early Capricorn (the businessman's sign) conjunct his late-Sagittarius Sun. I see Sagittarius here as almost over-ridden by Scorpio and Capricorn/Saturn.

Uranus (the futuristic), one of the planets I expect to see prominent in these Woo charts, is in Gemini and opposite Geller's Sun and Mercury in Sagittarius, though not particularly closely hooked in. Neptune (illusion) the other planet closely connected with Woo is in Libra and helpfully sextiled to both Mercury (communication) and Saturn(business/career). Neptune is closely and helpfully linked in to his personal planets and career angle, which fits the picture of a creative showman/businessman, well able to communicate his illusions to an audience.

The Beat Generation

Their writings haven't resonated with me at all. This feels wrong somehow. I have Sun in Aquarius, I'm supposed to be a rebel, they were rebels, of a sort. The Beats are often described as the forerunners of hippies - just because both rebelled against the status quo. I could relate to the hippies, even though, back in Yorkshire, hippiedom didn't really catch on, it was an American phenomenon. We sang along... "If you're going to San Francisco wear some flowers in you hair...." and felt fuzzy warm inside - but that's as far as it went.

I could never relate to the Beats. If I look to relate easily to anti-establishmentarianism it means going back as far as Friederich Engels and, shock horror....Karl Marx, those are men I can admire.

Perhaps astrology can throw some light on The Beat Generation. Before looking into that, a bit of Googling threw up something that made sense to me, something that explained what I had sensed without being able to define it. From a piece by Frank Pulaski (HERE)

I didn’t realize then but what was being dramatized was a Beat Generation mentality, a very negative, dystopian frame of mind, a mentality at complete odds with anything that ever came out of the Woodstock generation. Comparing utopian hippies with dystopian Beats is a cultural distortion, a media lie. Beats were basically disenfranchised working-class guys, World War ll and Korean War veterans, guys who enjoyed smacking hippies upside the head. In fact, Beat Generation icons Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac are on record for holding hippies in contempt. Media distorted what Beats were about through caricature, casting them as beatniks, linking them, again, to hippies, real “cool man” hipster types rather than guys that were into the cult of down, down like in “I’m beat, man, beat,” a phrase I heard my father and his friends repeat many times. The New Yorker writer Louis Menand, in an article, “Drive, He Wrote: What the Beats Were About,” likened them more to Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack than to any hippie culture. Most interpretations of the Beat Generation miss the mark; nothing ever written has ever captured its malcontent and illogical soul. But what it meant to be Beat was best captured in the words of a Peggy Lee song: “Is That All There Is?”

However strange, a Beat Generation mentality could never move beyond, what was for them, one very sad fact: That all the world ever had to offer them, could ever offer them, “was a stinking fucking job.” The idea that mankind had marched through six thousand years of civilization and yet could not advance beyond the concept of Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief really beat them down. Thus the song: “Is That All There Is?”
(Lyrics to that song HERE).

Most, though not all, of those at the heart of the Beat brigade were born when Uranus transited Pisces in the 1920s. That is an astrological common factor, along with Pluto in Cancer and Neptune in Leo. These people were not old enough to make make themselves heard until the 1950s, and at that time we find Uranus in Cancer - in Watery harmony with their natal Uranus.

Uranus is always the rebel against the status quo. Uranus in Water signs, Pisces and Cancer, mutable and cardinal respectively, translates as rebelling emotionally rather than in a physically "man the barricades" revolutionary fashion. There's a definite whine factor among the Beats, a feeling of being badly done to. That's astrologically Watery. Instead of getting out there and fighting the establishment they wrote books, spawned a cult of similarly whine-prone individuals. I think this what I despise about the Beat Generation. They didn't DO anything to help change things for people. They were passive, they wallowed - Watery!



I've been hard on the Beats. Too hard? Some would think so. For balance, I admit to liking some of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poetry. He was "one of them". Born 24 March 1919, just before Uranus moved into Pisces from Aquarius. His natal Uranus is at 29 Aquarius - maybe this is why I (Sun in Aquarius) can relate to his writing more easily.

The poem below was written some 10 years ago, I think - though even more apt now. Some of his more recent poems can be read at the City Lights website. City Lights is the bookseller/publishing company of which he is co-founder.

Bird With Two Right Wings

And now our government
a bird with two right wings
flies on from zone to zone
while we go on having our little fun & games
at each election
as if it really mattered who the pilot is
of Air Force One
(They're interchangeable, stupid!)
While this bird with two right wings
flies right on with its corporate flight crew
And this year its the Great Movie Cowboy in the cockpit
And next year its the great Bush pilot
And now its the Chameleon Kid
and he keeps changing the logo on his captains cap
and now its a donkey and now an elephant
and now some kind of donkephant
And now we recognize two of the crew
who took out a contract on America
and one is a certain gringo wretch
who's busy monkeywrenching
crucial parts of the engine
and its life-support systems
and they got a big fat hose
to siphon off the fuel to privatized tanks
And all the while we just sit there
in the passenger seats
without parachutes
listening to all the news that's fit to air
over the one-way PA system
about how the contract on America
is really good for us etcetera
As all the while the plane lumbers on
into its postmodern
manifest destiny

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Music Monday ~ Boz Scaggs

Boz (William Royce) Scaggs, has Sun in Gemini and a birthday this week. When I started researching for this post I knew next to nothing about him. The name was familiar from way back, but I couldn't have named a single hit of his. I had a vague image of some heavy metal-type dude. Wrong! By the end of my searches I'd ordered two of his most recent cds!

Many pop/rock/soul/rhythm and blues stars before him have daringly taken on the challenge of recording songs from the wonderful "American Songbook" of standards. It's filled with some of the best lyrics and melodies known to man, by such luminaries as Duke Ellington and Johnnie Mercer. Many have tried, few have succeeded with much style - for example: Robbie Williams and Rod Stewart.




Boz Scaggs seems to have just the right "vibe" and an innate understanding of this genre. His take, on two cds But Beautiful and Speak Low is the best by far, so far, in my opinion. With backing from a super jazz combo, Scaggs' smooth vocals don't overdo jazziness to the point of affectation, but stay mostly true to the haunting melodies, while still not singing the songs exactly "straight". For me, this is what "cool" means!

Boz (derived from a school nickname "Bosley") started his musical career as guitarist and vocalist with Steve Miller (of the Steve Miller Band), back in high school, later he travelled in England, Scandinavia and India, during the musically surging late 1960s. He had no spectacular musical success, he played for food and money enough to get by, looking on music as a meditation and escape rather than as a career. He returned to the US, California, during the psychedelic era, wasn't much impressed, by all accounts:

"I was coming from a different place," he explains. "I'd just come from Nepal and India. I picked up a Time magazine, and I saw people dressed up in costumes. They looked like cowboys and Indians. It was very American, and I was not feeling very American."
"Boz wasn't a hippie", remembers Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, who then lived across the street from Boz in San Francisco. "He was smooth, sophisticated and elegant."

(July 1988 Interview, Dallas Morning News HERE)


However, by the mid-1970s Boz Scaggs had achieved solid recognition, many hits and a Grammy, with rock/soul/blues inspired material, such as Lowdown and Lido Shuffle. By 1980 though the pressure of the music business, a rapidly shattering marriage and bitter custody battle over his two sons must have contributed greatly to his decision to abandon his music career for a while - for 8 years as it turned out. He concentrated on spending time with his young sons, and running the Blue Light Café and a nightclub called Slim’s in San Francisco, as well as running a vineyard and developing his own line of wine. His musical career re-surfaced in 1988, when he resumed recording and touring. The two jazz-inspired albums, already mentioned, were recorded in 2003 and 2008.


In the July 1988 interview linked above, Scaggs had opened up quite a lot, about himself:

The most important thing in his life, he says, is nirvana. Music can be a source, he says. Love can't. Nirvana, he says, "is a time and a place. You walk around a corner and see a little red wagon, and it's a perfect photo and it's a perfect smell and it's a perfect day."
This state of "mental ease" just comes in fleeting moments, he admits. But there is hope for more.

"I think you can achieve it in a lifetime, and I think there is such a thing as learning to live gracefully. Grace is a state -- a deified state. It's sought for in every religion and every discipline. One time I was talking to a friend of mine . . . He asked me what my nature is, and I said that my nature was stealth. This is a rather odd thing to come up with, but it was the first thing off of my tongue.

"I go carefully and very slowly. In other ways, my life is completely haphazard and random. Anything can happen. But in another sense, I take it slowly and watch carefully. I'm always moving from one environment to another. I've always felt that my life's been transitional, from one small town and one small world into a slightly larger world. And that's what I do. I'm always moving carefully to the next stage. Once I'm there, I see my way around and move to the next one."

A student of Eastern philosophy, Boz believes he can get "very close to that state' of nirvana.
"I feel confident,' he smiles. "It's a real goal of mine to develop an inner grace and learn how to hold on to it."

On New Year's Eve 1988 Scaggs' son Oscar died from an accidental overdose of heroin (from Newsweek Magazine)

And my world is blown to smithereens. My son – this fine, beautiful, sweet young man – my Oscar is gone from this world. Twenty-one years old. Hooked on the high, the release, that place of no worry about pressures from family or school, or jobs not yet found. And I am trying to put together the pieces of my own life and of his. There are so many unanswered questions when one so young dies suddenly. So many parts of his life were in transition and unresolved. I hardly know how to begin.

Scagg's re-married around 1994. His remaining son, Austin is a music critic and a senior editor for Rolling Stone magazine

Born 8 June 1944 in Canton, Ohio, at 5:12 AM (Astrotheme)



He's very Gemini: Sun/Venus/Uranus/Saturn and Gemini rising! With a heavy dash of Leo and - surprise surprise, a Capricorn Moon....or maybe not so surprising after reading a little about his life and career. Versatility of style: rock, blues, pop, soul, jazz connects to Gemini's restless and ever curious mind, as does his songwriting. Leo clearly connects to his show-biz life in the spotlight. Mercury is the lone planet in Taurus, and on the degree of Fixed Star Algol, thought by ancient astrologers to be the most unfortunate of stars. If there is a connection, I see it here as probably being his son's death at age 21 - a devastating experience for the father.

Moon in serious, steady, sensible, business oriented Capricorn has been Boz Scaggs' astrological "rock" or anchor I'd guess. He had the good sense to withdraw from the spotlight when other matters needed his attention. He put his business sense to work to provide an alternative outlet for his skills in his restaurant, club and winery.

He describes himself as always moving slowly, stealthily from one stage of his life to another - this is Capricorn over-riding Gemini. All that Gemini of his would otherwise run around hell-for-leather, scattering valuable energies, but achieving little. There's a Yod (Finger of Fate) which beautifully describes this over-riding. It's formed by the sextile between Gemini and Leo planets respectively in quincunx (150*) aspect to Moon. Capricorn Moon is at the apex, drawing the best from the rather heady and showy sextiled planets and processing them through the steadiness of Capricorn.




One of his latest jazzy tracks

SATURDAY/SUNDAY SUNDRIES

I'm a regular visitor and infrequent commenter at Common Dreams, and a few weeks ago was surprised to find one comment referencing astrology, in the midst of a seriously political thread. It came from one "Sioux Rose", a regular commenter there, politically well-informed and eloquent. I complimented her on her bravery in referencing astrology in such an environment - soon thereafter she had to deal with a skeptic attack. I've recently stumbled across one of Sioux Rose's astrological pieces and in case it hasn't been spotted before by astro-oriented readers, here's a link:
Do Astrological Portents Lend Credence to the Mayan Prophecy?







Tomorrow, 6 June, is the birthday of the wonderful actor Paul Giamatti. There's an archived post about him HERE. We watched him this week in a DVD movie, Cold Souls - a silly story about having one's soul removed, or replaced. Only Paul could make such a plot entertaining. Gotta love him!







I got me a used copy of British cartoonist Ronald Searle's slim volume "Searle's Zodiac". He's a national treasure in Britain. One of these days I'll get around to drafting a post on Mr. Searle - 'til then, a taste from the fly-leaf:

Click to enlarge







And....tomorrow, 6 June, is of course the anniversary of D-Day when, in 1944, an armada of allied forces crossed the narrow strip of sea between England and Normandy, France, to break the Nazi grip on western Europe. I can't ever forget this, if it wasn't for the events of that day, I might not be here to record the anniversary.

I've oft wondered what the "D" means.

The term "D Day" indicates the beginning of an attack or other military operation when the specific date has yet to be selected or secrecy is required. "H Hour" is similarly used to designate the time of the attack.
The "D" and "H" are derived from the first letters of "day" and "hour." There is one D Day and H Hour for all units participating in an operation. Plus and minus signs are used to indicate the number of days or hours that precede or follow the specific operation. (HERE)

Astrology Found Lurking In Arty-Farty Movie

Among the booty brought back from our last trip was a DVD ($1) - the slim jacket attracted me: photograph of a young Tommy Lee Jones, long-time favourite of mine, and an astrological glyph. The title Eliza's Horoscope. I'd thought I knew of all Tommy's movies but had never heard of this one, from the early 1970s. I've since discovered that it was the only film made by Canadian writer/director Gordon Sheppard. It won several awards on release, then disappeared without trace until some pirated copies hit DVD status after Tommy Lee Jones was Oscared for The Fugitive. An interesting article by Sheppard about the film's history is HERE.


Back in the New Mexico junk shop, a glance at the blurb on the jacket had indicated to me an early example of a chick flick. With astrology as part of the storyline, this one was for me!

Boy! Chick flick? Was I wrong! This was another in the same genre as The Holy Mountain , mentioned in a previous post. An "art" film. There's the faintest imprint of a chick flick there, but a mass (or mess) of would-be Fellini-esque arty-fartyness, possibly meant to be symbolic, heavily overlays it. We watched in quiet astonishment, unable to switch off for fear of missing the point of this 2 hour stint in front of the TV.

A quick run-down of the storyline: Eliza is a naive country lass, with Sun in Pisces, come to the big city, Montreal, to have her horoscope done and, she hopes, find the love of her life, and have a child. She visits an old Chinese astrologer (Rose Quong) in a run-down lodging house. The astrologer undertakes to calculate her horoscope/natal chart and have it ready in a couple of days. This, of course, was well before the advent of astrology software.

Eliza (Elizabeth Moorman) stays in the lodging/flop-house with a middle-aged off-the-wall religious theatrical woman, who encourages Eliza to abandon her astrological quest and turn to Catholicism. She soon meets another of the manic residents, Tommy Lee Jones who plays Tom, Aries, a Native American construction worker with plans to blow up a city bridge in protest against the government. Tom falls for Eliza, but Eliza has other plans. He takes Eliza to meet his grandmother, a lovely Native American lady who tells Eliza how life has changed since settlers industrialised the city and the area.

On returning to the astrologer, Eliza is told, with the aid of two hand-drawn charts, that she will meet, during the next 10 days, the love of her life, a handsome man "full of riches" who will be either Sagittarius or Aries - but there will be danger.

Now, as all good astrology buffs know, no astrologer could possibly divine that much detail with any degree of accuracy....but the movie uses artistic licence I guess. Anyway, the prediction sets Eliza on track to find her wealthy man, leading to several encounters which grow weirder and weirder. There's a guy who has a larger than lifesize model of a centaur in his house, upon which he loves to ride, with assistance from a pretty assistant (Eliza). Then there's a wealthy composer, played by Richard Manuel of The Band, who feigns interest in astrology and lures Eliza to a peculiar quazi-religious orgy peopled by hippie-like cultists.

Behind all this are entwined flashes from Eliza's earlier life, the death of her young brother, and other, indecipherable mysteries. There's a feeling of nightmare or drug-induced vision throughout.


Tom blows up his bridge and gets himself shot in the ensuing chase.

Eliza realises, too late, that Tom was "the one", his "riches" being spiritual, stemming, I guess from his desire to fight oppression.

This is a movie - bad as it is - which can be interpreted in several ways. I've outlined a straightforward version above, but have since read reviews by some who see the film as having a religious and anti-astrology, or spiritual, or even political significance. One reviewer wrote :

Eliza's Horoscope, can even be seen, I should think (knowing nothing of the film-maker's politics), as a kind of Marxist parable populated by those whom the world of commerce has cast aside, ruined (the boarders in the lodging house, the American Indians), or whom the world has rewarded with ill-deserved riches and the ability to indulge their rottenness.

Yes - now I can see that! Maybe I'll need to watch it again......or perhaps not, at least not without several large measures of Scotch.