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Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

Milk Into Milk

In the old days, I would've held on to an idea like this for a while: polished it, come up with some extra riffs on it, built a whole GILT or two around it. But now I think I'll just toss it out there while it's amusing me. Remember Harry Smith, the eccentric artist/alchemist/derelict who assembled the Anthology of American Folk Music? And do you remember the anecdote I shared the very first time we mentioned Harry Smith in these pages?

Smith's parents were Theosophists, Smith's grandfather was a leading Mason, and his great-grandfather was one of many nineteenth-century mystics to refound the Knights Templar. Smith's mother sometimes claimed to be Anastasia, last of the Romanovs, and she told Smith that his true father was Aleister Crowley. On his twelfth birthday, Harry's father (or his step-father, if Harry's mother was telling the truth) presented him a complete blacksmith's shop and commanded that he turn lead into gold.

Twelfth birthday? Mysterious parentage? Lead into gold? I can't believe it took me four years to come up with the mash-up: Harry Smith and the Sorcerer's Stone.


Photo & caption by Allen Ginsberg: "Harry Smith, painter, archivist, anthropologist, film-maker & hermetic alchemist, his last week at Breslin Hotel Manhattan January 12, 1985, transforming milk into milk."