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Long-Secret James Dean Files Offer Some Shocking Surprises

5/10/2023

Note: This article is cross-posted from my Substack because Twitter is limiting links to Substack. I think you'll find the historical content interesting.

Nearly seven decades after James Dean died, I would have thought that everything that could be known about him was known. All but a small handful of people who knew him in life are now dead, and those left alive have had nothing new to say in decades. The magazine and newspaper articles have been raked through many times, and the scraps of archival materials picked clean. Then, to my amazement, Nate D. Sanders Auctions announced the sale later this month of more than 500 pages of James Dean’s business, legal, and personal correspondence and papers from the estate of his New York talent agent, Jane Deacy, who died in 2008. These papers, never before seen, are, frankly, astounding in what they reveal.

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James Dean Biographer Donald Spoto Dies at 81

2/18/2023

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Last this week, we learned that Donald Spoto, the celebrity biographer, died at the age of 81. Spoto produced many well-regarded biographies, including Rebel, about James Dean. I found that book particularly useful in writing my own manuscript for my James Dean book. Spoto was kind enough to read an early draft of my book before his death and offered both useful critical notes and a blurb as endorsement: “His new book The Rebel and the Fear is sure to evoke spirited debate, not least when he addresses the lure and lore still attached to that hapless young actor, James Dean (1931-1955).” Spoto will be missed.

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This Was the Year That Was: 2022 in Review

12/26/2022

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This year wasn’t quite as bad as 2021, so I can’t be too upset at a year that, if nothing else, did not get appreciably worse. On the other hand, nothing really improved either. Between inflation and further work cuts in my failing industry, it’s been hard. When a prominent astrologer said this year would be the best of my life, I wasn’t sure whether that was a promise or a threat. It’s a good thing astrology is bunk, or else I would be painfully depressed to think this was the best things will ever get.

In a more general sense, this was a year devoted mostly to UFOs, which dominated the paranoid paranormal discourse for the first ten months, until Atlantis made a late run for the crown.

Here, then, is the year that was, edited and condensed from my blog posts and newsletter.

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Review of "Adoration and Pilgrimage" by James F. Hopgood

10/25/2022

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Adoration and Pilgrimage: James Dean and Fairmount
James F. Hopgood | Luminare Press | 2022 | 282 pages | 979-8886790108 | $18.95

Note: This review is cross-posted in my Substack newsletter,

The current issue of Mojo, a music magazine, features an illustration of James Dean driving toward the reader in the Porsche Spyder in which he died. The singer Weyes Blood sits beside him as he speeds away from a flying saucer, its tractor beam chasing them toward Dean’s inevitable death. The striking image illustrates a line from Blood’s new song “Grapevine,” but the unusual portrait also suggests a longing to follow Dean into death, as though his demise were an act of transcendence, an event of cosmic importance. It’s not the kind of image you find associated with most celebrities. You don’t see much fan art of political junkies depicting themselves riding through Dealey Plaza alongside JFK, nor are there many beatific images of Marilyn Monroe as a psychopomp guiding fans to heaven.

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Weekly Roundup: A House UFO Hearing, Prehistoric Phallic "Civilization," and More!

5/10/2022

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This week, Rep. André Carson announced that his subcommittee of the House Intelligence Committee would hold a hearing next week on the Pentagon’s lack of transparency on UFOs. It is the first UFO hearing in Congress since 1966. Naturally, the New York Times brought back its biased reporters Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean, both with conflicts of interest, to cover the story. Both reporters are longtime members of the UFO community. Blumenthal has openly spoken of his “transcendent” belief in the paranormal power of UFOs, and Kean spent much of the last year working for Bob Bigelow, a key figure in the government UFO story. She was also the longtime romantic partner of the late Budd Hopkins, an alien abduction researcher funded by Bigelow.

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Queer Numbers: Tracing the Origins of a Misleading Statistic

5/2/2022

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As part of the research for the new book I am crafting out of parts of the one that didn’t garner much interest, I have been researching government persecution of queer people in the postwar era. In so doing, I came across a rather dramatic fact that led me down a statistical rabbit-hole as I hunted the source of a seemingly dramatic fact that turned out not be what it seemed.

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Demi Lovato Joins Gaia TV, Begins Promoting Noxious Reptilian Conspiracies

11/9/2021

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A few months ago, NBC's Peacock streaming service gave Demi Lovato a UFO series in which the streamer presented Lovato as a goofy, cuddly conspiracy theorist gawking in wonder at lights in the sky. Gaia TV saw the publicity that Lovato gained and appointed them a brand ambassador, and Lovato began telling their 118 million social media followers to watch hand-picked promoting extreme fringe history ideas, including lizard people conspiracies.

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The Ghost in the Machine

6/5/2021

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Note: This article first appeared earlier this week in my Substack newsletter.

Not long ago, I wrote an essay about the supposed “curse” of James Dean’s Porsche 550 Spyder, inspired by the recent announcement of the rediscovery of one of the few original parts of the car to have survived since the crash that killed Dean and totaled the car in 1955. The transaxle assembly went up for auction at the end of May, and the auction ended in the most predictable and disappointing way possible—with all of my various intellectual interests colliding into a flaming mass of stupidity. Paranormal cable TV star Zak Bagans purchased the part for $382,000 in order to install it in his Las Vegas museum dedicated to horror and the paranormal, where he will present the “cursed” car part in an exhibit room dedicated to James Dean and the occult.

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The Immoralists: André Gide, Michel Foucault, and the Philosophy of Abuse

4/1/2021

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Note: This piece first ran earlier this week in my Substack newsletter. I am cross-posting it here.

A firestorm erupted this weekend in intellectual circles when economic philosopher Guy Sorman told the Sunday Times that the famed—and long dead—French intellectual Michel Foucault was a pedophile who sexually exploited young boys in Tunisia in the late 1960s. Sorman said that he witnessed boys eager to trade sexual favors for Foucault’s money. “They were eight, nine, ten years old, he was throwing money at them and would say ‘let’s meet at 10pm at the usual place’,” a nearby cemetery, Sorman told the Times. “He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys. The question of consent wasn’t even raised.”

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French Fashion Magazine Repeats Fake Claims about a Dean-Brando Relationship

2/19/2021

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Last week, the U.S. edition of the French fashion magazine L’Officiel ran a digital spread about James Dean’s clothes to mark the actor’s ninetieth birthday. The spread, written by the magazine’s digital editor, Italian journalist Simone Vertua, fell victim to fake history, spreading very strange lies from a trashy recent faux-biography and deploying a digitally altered photograph to support untrue claims. Granted, we don’t usually hold fashion magazines to exceptional standards of excellence, but it’s still disturbing to find the plague of fake history infecting yet another medium.

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