Sam C. phones around 12:30 today, a talk we’d scheduled for the Adam P. bio. We really didn’t accomplish anything. After Adam died in 2018 Sam got in touch with me and I gave him extensive data-dumps in notes and memoirs and possible contacts and even a phone chat or two. My Adam-mine is pretty exhausted.
The central topic this time concerned a fellow named James Downer (?) who bylined one of the conspiratological essays in Apocalypse Culture. As I recall, this posited a Freemasonic angle to the JFK assassination. 33º North Latitude, thirty-three degrees of Masonry, whatever else. Sam suspects that the author was actually Adam himself. This is because he can’t find any information on Downer anywhere.
This prompts me now to i-srsch him, and I find the name is actually James Shelby Downard, and he’s all over the conspiro-net, linked in a Wiki article to Bill Grimstad. Part of the Apocalypse Culture article, now long out of print because it was dropped from the second edition of the book, is here.
So I was not very helpful to Sam in this. The one thing that occurred to me was that Whatsisname in Colorado might know. “You know, the one who that the album, Martinis and Misanthropy and whatever…?” I was groggy from Trazodone and vodka, and the old memory not up to its steel-spring traditions. But we came up with the name, Boyd Rice. I forget whether Sam said he’d asked him.
Otherwise, Sam talked about how the bio project is in a logjam right now, because Adam’s sister Jessica has taken over the publishing house and is making it very PC, and doesn’t want to be reminded that Adam built his career on consorting with neo-nazis, satanists, and other mongers of the outré and occult. Bit of a surprise here: I didn’t know Adam had a sister (two, actually) though I once met his brother on a trip to the desert. Anyway I told Sam to just plow ahead, because Adam was at least a semi-public figure, and his story needs to be told, warts and all.
I wonder if he has a publisher or agent at all? Possibly not. This book began as Adam’s own memoir, then turned into an oral history.
