In America you’ll get food to eat
Won’t have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You’ll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It’s great to be an American…( Randy Newman, Sail Away)
- Dustin Hicks:I’ll be the first to admit that his story is compelling. He’s a six foot five inch ghost, running barefoot through the woods avoiding every attempt at capture, has driven a car into a fuel tank to distract police with a massive explosion while making his escape like he’s living in a freakin’ episode of The A Team, and learned how to fly planes simply by reading flight manuals. This kid is insanely intelligent, and all sorts of detached from reality. …and we help fuel his exploits.
He was the Dixie Flyer.An anti- teen hero of the social media age. Teen fugitive Colton Harris- Moore had eluded the grasp of the law so frequently that Houdini would likely commend his seeming ability to dematerialize, and hisapparent understanding of rudimentary techniques of illusion and subterfuge. The thrill of living by wits has netted Harris-Moore a folk hero legend status based on his two year hiatus from conventional life in which five airplanes have been swiped and flown, but not landed with any degree of success. The ” Barefoot Bandit”:At six foot five inch and no footwear, he should not have been that hard to find ;the halfway-house escapee caught the public imagination with a certain flair reminiscent of a bygone era when criminal perpetrators left calling cards and ”signatures” after their deeds.However, he is an icon for something bigger, and the mystique of danger and mystery is the tip of a broader phenomenon.
- Salvador Dali
…Ain’t no lions or tigers ain’t no mamba snake
Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake
Ev’rybody is as happy as a man can be
Climb aboard little wog sail away with me…
Being a successful thief or a successful scholar or magician all require the same things. Intellect, wit, quickness of mind, and often quickness of hand. Adaptability, flexibility and a certain impartiality. Even a distancing from the emotions, periodically, to be able to evaluate a result or an activity without emotion clouding judgement. Colton Harris-Moore has this in abundance. Nonetheless, his eccentricities and aggressive-exalted nature has steered his actions away from expression through more productive means and into thievery. Theft, and his ingeniousness, is specifically what he is known for.
…In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family
You’ll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree
You’re all gonna be an American
- Dematerialization. Japanese Securities Exchange
Those who are fans of Harris-Moore, are representative of a sense of ambivalence against a social system of immobility and stagnancy.Inevitably, he was captured. The drama surrounded the idea of a loner cheating the system and mocking it had a certain appeal. And the fact that he robs rich and poor alike is something many overlook, so deep is their revulsion to what the police in this situation appear to represent. In the end, the cultural ramifications from this escapade are derived more from many peoples’ loosely shared fantasy than it is from the actual events on the ground. The forces of attraction and repulsion are in sharp conflict; his fans cheer for the social anarchy as long as it is contextual and controlled, but heaven forbid if thousands of Harris-Moore’s were on the lamb ”scrounging for their next meal like a rolling stone”.
- ” “The Escape Artist”, and is part of a new series of whimsical pieces that explore the notion of dreams, both lost and found, and how as we go through life, we are often compromise or change our dreams, instead of following them fully.”
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you’re gonna have to get used to it
You said you’d never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He’s not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And say do you want to make a deal?
How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone ?
You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain’t no good
You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you ( Bob Dylan )
- Pam Kohler, mother of Colton Harris-Moore:Colton Harris-Moore’s mother Pam Kohler in a news media interview she stated, “I hope to hell he stole those airplanes, I’d would be so proud, I want him to wear a parachute next time.” Pam Kohler has hired a Seattle attorney to handle her “entertainment” interests. She said a book is in the works detailing the life and times of her 19-year-old son.
”His story is a funnel—a focusing instrument that has collected and blended disparate thoughts and feelings, congealing them into an impassioning elixir. He is up against the best of the best local, state, and federal law enforcement; men and women caricatured as the most systematic people you could ask for. Where the law has tried to be calculating he escapes them with creativity. Where they have been humorless and determined he has been ebullient and whimsical. And where they have spent thousands of dollars in awareness campaigns and manhunts with high tech equipment, he has taken off his shoes and bounded into the woods to escape them. Colton’s story is an image many are measuring themselves against. While they want to be seen as good people, his supporters—and detractors—seem to be loathe to let their unpredictable, determined id break through years of stale submissiveness. His fans view the choices in their lives as choice between being wild and being wonderful. Colton is both. Colton is their savior—someone who, like Aslan the Lion, can be both good and terrible.”
- ”Although he is now retired, Norm Bigelow performed for years as one of America’s leading escape artists. His unique style was avant garde and revolutionary, breathing fresh life into a field that was worn out from its Vaudeville heyday.”
…Where the Sixties gave young people some meagre hope that institutional reform could save society, students today are under no false illusions about folk songs stopping the military industrial complex. The central identity, is the theme of compromise in order to drag into their garage enough ”things” to give them a sense of empowerment. With the need for vengeance and revenge being so deeply entrenched, maybe repressive social stagnation is the best that can be hoped for. Since the Fifties, each new generation feels a greater need to get “what’s owed” to them. And they find newer, crueler ways to extract it. It is this cycle that we wish we could break but feel, deep down, we cannot. Its almost pop art the way Colton-Harris could use and dispose of unessential luxury goods like yachts and planes the way one would dispose of fast food wrappers. From a hermetic astrologer who has created this profile of the Bandit:
- Chris Buzelli.”Often his images deal with wonderfully grotesque animals and other elements of the natural world, though they appear to be illustrating concepts related to modern industrialized life.”
”All roads lead to Rome, as the saying goes: his afflicted Moon in Gemini means that he is separated from his emotions, and those emotions are conjunct Mars – the planet of violence, anger, war, martial and physical expression. This is a person motivated by intense anger and impulsiveness, the inability to properly express himself (Mercury square Neptune), prone to dishonest activity and extremes of self-exaltation and self-doubt (Jupiter opp. Saturn) and cut off from his emotions, which are inclined to being immature and child-like (Gemini). He’s also quite lucky (Sun, Part of Fortune and Jupiter form a grand trine), but suffers too much from whatever troubles him to use it for things other than crime, which is where Saturn comes into play.”… With Saturn in Aquarius, I would suspect that the crux of Harris-Moore’s conflict is to do with resentment and anger towards society, specifically the law and the subtler restrictions society places on his intellect and his actions, and the way in which it has constrained his expression and opportuniti
as Leo and Aquarius represent the singular ego and the collective ego respectively.
- Elders Scrolls
Mercury square to the North Node, the point through which we act out our purpose in society, shows a person who finds himself unable to communicate through any other means than acting out…his methods of communication, and the nature of his intellect, conflict with the rest of society. Squared to Uranus, it indicates an eccentric, someone who is motivated by a rebellious attitude and approach to the point where it alienates them from the wider community. Considering that this young man has been living in the forests of Camaro Island for some time now, that seems very appropriate. A tertiary testimony is Jupiter contra-parallel to the North Node. Parallels and contra-parallel aspects are effectively a conjunction and opposition, respectively – aspects determined by declination. This effective opposition indicates someone whose social aims conflict and clash with those of the rest of society, and who is denied opportunities at higher education and reconciliation of values with his society. Again, a very appropriate aspect.
- —In each city, Houdini would challenge local police to restrain him with shackles and lock him in their jails. In many of these challenge escapes, Houdini would first be stripped nude and searched. In Moscow, Houdini escaped from a Siberian prison transport van. Houdini publicly stated that, had he been unable to free himself, he would have had to travel to Siberia, where the only key was kept. In Cologne, he sued a police officer, Werner Graff, who claimed he made his escapes via bribery. Houdini won the case when he opened the judge’s safe (he would later say the judge had forgotten to lock it). —
If he survives past his 20th year – a big ‘if’, considering his current progressed chart – it will be interesting to see what this young man becomes. He could be a brutally effective murderer, or a brilliant soldier – whether or not he manifests the potential of his essential planets is up in the air. ( Gwydion Callard )
However, limited the bandit’s artistic merits may be, his spree could be termed ”crime nouveau”, a cult of youth pitted against the established norms of our institutions, beliefs and standards. A reminder that our social problems cannot be painted over with the varnish of modern conservatism and that the established pattern of middle class gentility, is simply seething under a societal imperative to control all forces that could be considered dangerous and irrational. The effort to stuff demons back into the bottle cannot work forever. Demons, like Coltob Harris-Moore are ghosts among us.
- — One of Houdini’s most notable non-escape stage illusions was performed at New York’s Hippodrome Theater when he vanished a full-grown elephant (with its trainer) from a stage, beneath which was a swimming pool. In 1923,…
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