Tag: LSD

Underground history

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Poster by Arik Roper.

Radical Living Papers
A history of the free, alternative, counter-culture and underground press, 1965–75

Gavin Brown’s enterprise at PASSERBY
436 W. 15th Street,
New York, NY 10011
February 2–March 7, 2007

Opening reception: Friday, February 2, 2007, 6pm.

The Council for the Fortieth Anniversary of The Summer of Love with Gavin Brown’s enterprise opens and invites you to an exhibition of the world’s most radical living papers from a time when the press took risks and voiced opinions.

Celebrating the heyday of alternative magazine publishing in Europe and America, Gavin Brown’s enterprise at Passerby opens an exhibition of more than two hundred original copies, as well as reproductions of these seminal and obscure publications, whose influence reverberates through culture, politics, and society.

Covering politics, revolutions, evolutions of the planets, freak-outs, love-ins, support of green politics, gay liberation, power to the people, the peace parties, protests, the Panthers, peyote, LSD, pot, fiction, music, poetry, prose, prayers and more. Publications include: Actuel, Avatar, Berkeley Barb, Berkeley Tribe, Black Panther Papers, Digger Papers, Door, East Village Other [EVO], The Fifth Estate, Freep, Grabuge, Hobo-Québec, International Times [it], Los Angeles Free Press, The Oracle, The Organ, Other Scenes, OZ, Rat, The Realist, Re Nudo, Rolling Stone, The Seed, Ann Arbor Sun and more.

Please note: A press conference to the unified, positive forces actively involved in the community will be held at 6pm on Friday, February 2, 2007, with active members of today’s free press.

Curated by Eva Prinz, Dan Donahue, and Thurston Moore.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Wallace Burman and Semina
• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer
• 100 Years of Magazine Covers
• Oz magazine, 1967-73

Arthur #22

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America’s most vital cultural bulletin. Free PDF download.

How nature droners GROWING found their flow. By Peter Relic. Photography by Eden Batki.

Swiss anthropologist-author JEREMY NARBY talks with Jay Babcock about what hallucinogens like LSD and the Amazonian drink ayahuasca have to teach us in the 21st century. Introduction by author Erik Davis, with a full-color illustration by Arik Moonhawk Roper.

How columnist DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF learned to stop worrying about current events.

Why power duo Al Cisneros and Chris Haikus reunited to make the meditation-suitable
heavy metal sound of OM.

‘Do the Math’ columnist David Reeves on the main reason why the USA should seal its border with Mexico.

The life, work and astounding impact of North Indian vocalist PANDIT PRAN NATH, guru
to Western minimalists La Monte Young and Terry Riley. By Peter Lavezzoli.

‘New Herbalist’ columnist Molly Frances on Lord Byron’s secret elixir and the Prophet Muhammed’s top condiment: VINEGAR.

How to recognize—and use—OCCULT FORCES, by the Center for Tactical Magic.

Notes from Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 2006 by the intrepid Gabe Soria.

Comics by Vanessa Davis, Chris Wright and PShaw.

Scenes from ArthurBall 2006, featuring Joanna Newsom, The 5:15ers (Joshua Homme & Chris Goss) and Moris Tepper and Polly Harvey.

Bull Tongue columnists BYRON COLEY & THURSTON MOORE review Richard Youngs, Pink Mountaintops, Parts & Labor, Oneida/Plastic Crimewave, Ex Models, Mouthus, The Bummer Road, Idea Fire Company, Taurpis Tula, Spykes, Ong Ong, Carson Cistulli, Starbird, 2673, Ladderwoe, Tovah Olson, Pan Dolphinic Dawn, Gastric Female Reflex, ANP Quarterly, Matt Chambers, The Colonial, Mineshaft, Little Claw, Black Lips, Zaat, Mystical Footprints of Asia, Whysp, The Story, Skarerkauradio, Jerusalem & the Starbaskets, Noise Nomads, The Nightjar Review, Shannon Ketch, Jeremy Rendina, Carousel, Quantum Noise, Lambsbread, Carlos Batts, Trenton Doyle Hancock, S.M.S.R., Tchernoblyad, Narrowmind, Sudanstrain, Blod, Sharon’s Last Part, Mnem, Edwidge, The Rita, Mania, Ashtray Navigations, Evenings, Septic Sores, Bottom Dweller, Paul Metzger, Tombi and Glass organ.

C & D riff into the dawn on Marvin Gaye’s The Real Thing: In Performance, 1964-1981 dvd plus new albums from Gnarls Barkley, Rufus Harley, The Black Keys, The Raconteurs, Eagles of Death Metal, The Cuts, Future Pigeon, The Aggrolites, The Fiery Furnaces, Espers, Josephine Foster, Scott Walker, Fred Neil, Belong, Boris and Howlin Rain. Plus: Peter Relic’s Book Corner spotlights new poetry collections by Alex Mitchell and John Tottenham.

And more…

Impressions de la Haute Mongolie

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Metamorphosis of Hitler’s Face into a Moonlit Landscape with Accompaniment (1958).

Impressions de la Haute Mongolie (1976/Salvador Dali/José Montes-Baquer/Germany)

In any list of films I’d currently most like to see but can’t due to lack of availability, this bizarre “documentary” collaboration between Salvador Dalí and José Montes-Baquer would be near the top of the list. I saw it once, probably shortly after it had been made, when the BBC screened it as part of their Omnibus arts series in the late seventies. By this time I was already very familiar with the Surrealists, Dalí, Magritte and Max Ernst especially, so it was great to see Dalí himself declaring a supposed mission to explore Upper Mongolia in a search for giant hallucinogenic mushrooms. This premise aside, I remember few other details, the whole film was as delightfully confusing as might be expected. The most distinct memory was of the painting above being shown, then the camera pulling back some distance to reveal the full extent of Hitler’s face which is only hinted at in the original. Happily, a web review now provides us with some more details:

Homage to Impressions d’Afrique (1909), is a free-associative poem written by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), even though he never visited Africa. The film is dedicated to this French author, forefather of the Surrealists, who developed a formal constraint system to generate inspiration from dislocative puns.

Dalí does the very same thing with this chimerical pseudocumentary leading us to the mysterious realm of High Mongolia where a gigantic white soft mushroom grows, many times more hallucinogenic than LSD! From his studio-museum in Cadacès (Spain), he proceeds to report on the alleged scientific expedition sent out by himself to retrieve this precious treasure, with newspaper clips and newsreel. Childhood memories (like the picture above) are the opportunity to explain more thoroughly the source of his inspiration. This bucolic landscape is in fact a close up of Hitler’s portrait (his nose and moustache) turned to the side!

Wholly Dalíesque, this film experiment pieces together astonishing combinations of superimposed images, fading in and out, switching scale with odd perspectives. Dalí invents a filmmaking process and applies his very language to cinematic purposes, bending the rules to serve his desperate need for originality. Travelling through a microscopic close up of paintings or rough surfaces, his voiceover commentary gives sense to the landscapes taking form under his eyes.

Impressions of Africa was also the title of a Dalí painting from 1938, of course:

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It’s probably too much to hope that this will turn up on TV again, so for now I suppose I’ll have to look forward to it appearing on DVD at some point in the future. How about it José?

Update: Ubuweb has a copy!