I DID IT MYSELF

Throughout my adult life, I’d occasionally overhear people suggest that Charles Manson was a puppet, his strings pulled by figures within America’s sinister intelligence apparatus. According to this theory, members of the Manson Family were test subjects in the CIA’s infamous MK-Ultra program, programmed to commit the Tate-LaBianca murders as part of a psyop designed to discredit the hippie counterculture and the student antiwar movement. It didn’t strike me as implausible, but it did seem unprovable.

Then, in 2019, Tom O’Neill published CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, a book that strongly suggests — without offering irrefutable proof — that those people I’d overheard might have been right. One of O’Neill’s many claims is that the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic — which the sexually unhealthy Manson Family visited often — was staffed in part by people connected to the CIA. After fifty-two years in operation, the clinic mysteriously shuttered its doors one month after CHAOS was published.

Then, in October of last year, John Kiriakou appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Kiriakou was a CIA case officer who spent twenty-three months in prison after publicly revealing the United States’ use of torture during the so-called War on Terror. When the CIA, mind control, and the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic came up in conversation, Kiriakou casually remarked that, “Manson was a part of it as well!”

So how is one to read David McGowan’s 2014 book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream, which is full of outlandish claims? Could it really be that the same American intelligence apparatus long associated with psychological warfare also played an active role in shaping a counterculture that steered young people away from organized political resistance and toward drug use and solipsistic self-exploration? Was it a coincidence that key members of the Laurel Canyon scene who became household names suspiciously quickly also had parents working in the military, or politics, including Jim Morrison, whose father was involved in the Gulf of Tonkin false flag accident — an event that helped justify a dramatic escalation of the war — and profiteering — in Vietnam? Was Yoko Ono — whose father was part of Japan’s financial aristocracy — really an intelligence plant focused on controlling John Lennon?

None of it matters, not really. For the conspiratorial minded, Chaos and Weird Scenes confirm an instinctive belief: that beneath the surface of all things shiny lies a poisoned substratum, governmental and militaristic. If you’re not conspiratorial, there’s another take: the dream wasn’t poisoned, it just failed on its own, and McGowan is searching for a reason that isn’t boring, and painfully ordinary. The result is the same. Nothing good lasts forever, and dreams slip through our fingers like sand. This is the Deep Hollywood story, the old California mythos.

This exhibition takes place in the former Laurel Canyon home of Albert Wohlstetter — the RAND Corporation strategist who helped inspire the title character of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove — whose theories of nuclear deterrence helped formalize an American policy framework defined by permanent threat, preemptive violence, and invisible escalation. Wohlstetter helped design the logic of nuclear war while living a mundane domestic life in the same hills that, at that very moment, were occupied by countercultural figures dedicated to dismantling the American military-industrial complex. Joni Mitchell with a guitar and a dream, smoking weed, singing about love. Wohlstetter with a calculator, a theory about the survivability of nuclear war, a double bourbon, no music, no smiling. The psychic effect of these two realities occupying the same space becomes visible in the works on display.

In his series The Park, Kohei Yoshiyuki (1946–2022) depicts couples having sex in Tokyo’s Shinjuku and Yoyogi parks, often while being secretly observed by strangers. The postwar dream of hard work leading to personal freedom and home ownership was increasingly unattainable in 1970s Tokyo. Young people lived with their parents, who had traditional ideas about sex and courtship, leaving public space as one of the few sites available for intimacy. Like Yoshiyuki’s lovers, who believed themselves alone even as unseen voyeurs gathered in the darkness around them, musicians in Laurel Canyon inhabited a dream whose true perimeter they could not see.

Kenneth Anger’s (1927–2023) films reveal about Hollywood what Kiriakou revealed about America: that beneath the dream factory lies a system governed by secrecy and control. Faces appear doubled, possessed, overtaken by forces beyond their control. Long before David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Anger was illustrating what exists beneath the glitz and glamour — the broken dreams, the private bargains, the souls sold to the devil in the hopes of a few speaking lines in a made-for-TV movie.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be so tragic. Nobody lives in California, not really — it’s a place people visit in their dreams, sometimes for decades. This exhibition will come down, the doors of the Wohlstetter house will close, and the works on display will return to their homes. The Laurel Canyon of the past is a fantasy, made real only because so many people agreed to believe in it. Once the veil lifts, this stretch of land near the Pacific reveals itself for what it is: a waystation on the journey from hope to reality.