Building The Timothy Leary Archive
Supporters of the work of Timothy Leary attended a reception February 8, 2009, in San Francisco. The goal was (and still is as far as I know) to find patrons and a place to build a Timothy Leary museum to house about 400 boxes of archives and to digitize the material. John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, and others attended.

link

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History of the Psychedelic Movement

History of the Psychedelic Moment

Cartoon And Coloring Book

The History of the Psychedelic Movement: Cartoon and Coloring Book. Published by the Neo-American Church, which was one of the three LSD groups within the Millbrook Estate. Art Kleps was the Chief Boo Hoo who subscribed to the following principles

Very few copies of this book are in existance. Art Kleps himself didn't have a clean copy. I will also include and email of a correspondence between the cop and Art Kleps in 1996. Kleps also stated that the remainder of the inventory was lost in Vermont.

EXTREMELY RARE BOOK. US $750.00

link | also see the Boo Hoo Bible. (via)

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Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson

Ghosts of Tim Leary and Hunter Thompson
Freedom vs. Authority under the 40-foot pulsating rainbow vagina
by Joe Bageant

Everything Americans think they know, they learned from a televised morality play. It's all theater. You root for some good guy and boo some bad guy. You pick your own, but you dance to the tune of the men running the show. It's mind control, pure and simple, and if there is an American immune to it, then he is probably living in a snow cave somewhere in Alaska.
— Gypsy Joe Hess (1919-1988), prospector, self-educated philosopher and horse trader

In my ragged assed 40 years of writing, I've been lucky enough — or sometimes unlucky enough — to meet and write about many of America's "somebodies," mostly vapid asshole movie and TV stars and rock musicians. When I was young, so-called "media journalism" then was just what it is now, what we called "starfucking", and amounted to writing PR for media corporations in "music journals" of the time. But we covered a few worthwhile iconic figures in the mix as well — the kind that stick around in the background of one's thinking forever. At my age now, I find a lot of them are dying off, the Hunter Thompsons, Susan Sontags, Ken Keseys and Kurt Vonneguts. However, I have a self-imposed policy not to eulogize them because the hundreds of sentimental Internet tributes that flourish upon their deaths somehow seem ghoulish, and because it is a universal truth that we writers will do anything for an audience, and celebrity death is one of the easiest ways to attract one.

"Is this the office of Hunter Thompson Productions?"

"Yeah. You want to murder a horse tonight?"

"Huh?"

This 61-year old bright eyed ex-Harvard psychologist bouncing around in white Nikes and a pinstriped shirt did not strike me as burned out at all. I'd covered Fleetwood Mac a bit earlier, and believe me, compared to Stevie Nix, Leary was not even slightly crispy around the edges.

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Mods and Rockers Festival

Mods and Rockers Festival: Skidoo

Writer Paul Krassner shares his recollections about the 1968 acid-comedy film Skidoo directed by Otto Preminger. The movie has its first 35mm screening in Los Angeles in over 25 years on Saturday July 14 at the Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Hollywood.

Timothy Leary had a certain sense of pride about the prominent people he and his associates had introduced to the psychedelic revolution. He once told me the names of some of the folks whose lives had been changed by taking LSD. Among them: director Otto Preminger, actor Cary Grant, conservative think-tanker Herman Kahn, Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson, Time magazine publishers Henry and Clare Booth Luce.

"But," Leary told me, "I consider Otto Preminger one of our failures."

...(Preminger's) Skidoo was pro-acid propaganda thinly disguised as a comedy adventure. However, LSD was not the reason that the FBI was annoyed with the film. Rather, according to Gleason's FBI files, they objected to one scene in the script where a file cabinet is stolen from an FBI building. Gleason was later approved as a special FBI contact in the entertainment business.

One of the characters in Skidoo was a Mafia chieftain named God. Screenwriter Bill Cannon had suggested Groucho Marx for the part. Preminger said it wasn't a good idea, but since they were already shooting, and that particular character was needed on the set in three days, Groucho got the job. During one scene, Preminger was screaming instructions at him.

Groucho yelled back, "Are you drunk?"

When Skidoo was released in 1968, Tim Leary saw it, and he cheerfully admitted, "I was fooled by Otto Preminger. He's much hipper than me."

Krassner's just got tons of good stories, doesn't he?

link

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Human Be-In 40 Years Today

Sunday January the 14th is the 40th anniversary of Golden Gate Park's Human Be-In.

"Close your eyes, man, and think of this: ten thousand people, most of them young, half of them stoned, in Golden Gate Park listening to music, to poetry, celebrating life, celebrating being human. Sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll. A Human Be-In."

"A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In," announced on the cover of the new issue of the San Francisco Oracle, would feature Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Richard (Ram Dass) Alpert, Dick Gregory, Lenore Kandel, Jerry Ruben, and All SF Rock Bands January 14, 1967, 1 to 5 pm in Golden Gate Park 30,000 people showed up. The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and others called the tune. Leary, in his first San Francisco appearance, uttered the sound bite of the decade: "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out."

Photo credit: Larry Keenan

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Nena Von Schlebrugge

Uma? No. It certainly looks like Uma Thurman. It's Nena Von Schlebrugge, Uma's mother, as she gets ready to wed Timothy Leary. (She later divorced Leary and married Tibetan scholar, Dr. Robert Thurman.)

Nena was 28 when she met Leary, who was then 45, at his annual Fourth of July party upstate in Millbrook. According to Robert Greenfield (who recently wrote a bio of Leary), she told the mind-altering Harvard professor that she "wanted to go to India to seek ultimate wisdom, not to mention the secret sexual practices of the Orient."

"They took LSD and three days later they decided to get married," recalls Leary's ex-girlfriend Peggy Hitchcock.

Their Millbrook nuptials were a "phantasmagoric, magical mystery tour, the first real big coming-out party for all the A-list, jet-set, high-fashion beautiful people from New York who had recently discovered LSD," writes Greenfield. "Guests lined up to present the newlyweds with hash, grass and psychedelic mushrooms, as well as snuffboxes filled with LSD and cocaine." The wedding cake was crowned with the Hindu deities Shakti and Siva having sex.

You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You
By D A Pennebaker
1964, 12 minutes, Black & White

Watch Video (Quick Time)

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MUSIC | STUFF

* I have Leary surrounded. Interview with John Higgs. link

* Former Mega City Four singer Darren "Wiz" Brown died from a blood clot on the brain on December 6, 2006. Condolences are being received here.

* These swinging dicks have the 'I Got The No Pussy' blues.

* Bob Dylan Live on WBAI. mp3

* You are MOG-ing, aren't you? link

* Dealhack Holiday Shipping Deadlines at Popular Online Stores

* Garrett County Press asked favorite artists to "color in" pages from Kevin Stone's latest project, The Pat Robertson and Friends Coloring Book.

* Hack This: Decorate a glass block from House Hacker. [via]

* How many blue and red people live in your zipcode? Following The Dollars, a Google Maps mashup that points out election donations in your zipcode.

whew! goodnight...

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Web Trail - Tom Robbins, Social Suicide, Acid Reduxe, Sedaris, Unhoused, Black Panthers, Juneteenth

* Not Just Another Roadside Attraction - Tom Robbins reflects on his 44-year romance with the Blue Moon bar in Seattle. link

* Social Suicide - Tailored in Savile Row and styled for a civil row, this isn't your average shit. link

* ACID REDUX - The life and high times of Timothy Leary link

* WHAT I LEARNED - And what I said at Princeton by DAVID SEDARIS (his recent commencement speech) link

* Street blogging - Filmmaker Daniel Cross goes online to tell the stories of Canada’s street populace with Homelessnation.org. Here the "unhoused" maintain their blogs and podcasts and more. link

* Newsreel Film DVD on Black Panthers being compiled with appeal for donations. link

* At the annual Juneteenth festival comedian/activist Dick Gregory blasted the major television networks for hiding the truth in reporting a bloody and ugly war in Iraq. link

Carpe Scrotum - Grab life by the balls

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Yippie Museum Approved

A man named "Kenny the coke freak" once lived in the basement of the three-story brick building at 9 Bleecker St., just off the Bowery. In the early 1970s, when Kenny no longer could pay the rent, the Yippies moved in.

More than three decades later, the counterculture group founded by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin is looking to turn its Bleecker Street headquarters into a museum. The state Office of Cultural Education is recommending that the Board of Regents grant a five-year provisional charter to the Youth International Party - which spearheads an annual march calling for the legalization of marijuana - at its March meeting next week. The Regents are likely to follow the recommendation.

"It's sort of going to be like the Hard Rock Cafe of radical culture," a longtime member of the Yippies, Dana Beal, a co-curator of the museum, said during a tour through the building yesterday. Mr. Beal, (of Cures Not Wars) who has a shock of white hair and a moustache like Mark Twain's, has inhabited 9 Bleecker St. since 1973.

The items to be on display will include some of the cremated ashes of acid guru Timothy Leary and an American flag blazer donated by Hoffman's son, Andrew, who lives in Indonesia. [More...]

Yippie Museum Approved

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The Rare Vinyl Network specializes in 'hard-to-find' vinyl. But I also reading enjoy the back story on the albums about the band members or what was happening at the time it was made.

In 1967 the Beatles were in Abbey Road Studios putting the finishing touches on their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. At one point Paul McCartney wandered down the corridor and heard what was then a new young band called Pink Floyd working on their hypnotic debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He listened for a moment, then came rushing back. "Hey guys" he reputedly said, "There's a new band in there and they're gonna steal our thunder". With their mix of blues, music hall influences, Lewis Carroll references, and dissonant experimentation, Pink Floyd was one of the key bands of the 1960s psychedelic revolution, a pop culture movement that emerged with American and British rock, before sweeping through film, literature, and the visual arts. The music was largely inspired by hallucinogens, or so-called 'mind-expanding' drugs such as marijuana and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), and attempted to recreate drug-induced states through the use of overdriven guitar, amplified feedback, and droning guitar motifs influenced by Eastern music.

This psychedelic consciousness was seeded, in the United States, by countercultural gurus such as Timothy Leary, a Harvard University professor who began researching LSD as a tool of self-discovery from 1960, and writer Ken Kesey who with his Merry Pranksters staged Acid Tests - multimedia 'happenings' set to the music of the Warlocks (later the Grateful Dead) and documented by novelist Tom Wolfe in the literary classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) - and traversed the country during the mid-1960s on a kaleidoscope-colored school bus. Suzy Hopkins, formerly *Suzy Creamcheese, a dancer and inspirational figure on the underground scene in Los Angeles and London, remembers the visceral way psychedelic culture affected the senses. 'There's a difference between a drug and a psychedelic. Drugs make you drugged and psychedelics enhance your ability to see the truth or reality' she says. For her, LSD and music created a kind of alchemy. Many psychedelic bands explored this sense of abandonment in their music, moving away from standard rock rhythms and instrumentation.

* She's ONE of the Suzy Creamcheesees.

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Web Trails

Aleister Crowley, British occultist born on October 12, 1875. He was an occultist, mystic, sexual revolutionary, and drug addict (especially heroin).

Other interests and accomplishments were wide-ranging (he was a chess master, mountain climber, poet, writer, painter, astrologer and social critic).

We place no reliance
On virgin or pigeon;
Our Method is Science,
Our Aim is Religion.
~Aleister Crowley

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
~Aleister Crowley

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Psychedelic Sunday - Berbati’s Church of Psychedelia is a free event organized by Point Line Plane’s Josh Blanchard. It has been going strong every last Sunday of the month since its inception last January.
Link

Exciting material relating to rock greats Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones to lead Christie's annual sale of Pop and Rock Memorabilia at Christie's Rockefeller Center, 21 November 2005.
Link

Psychedelic Books for Independent Minds
Leary Library, Lilly Library, Fringe Series, Entheo-Spirituality, Psychedelic Library and more. Part of The Psychedelic Ring which has 29 sites, which may or not be surf-worthy.
Link

Faster Firefox - Speed up your Firefox browser by tweaking settings. Installs into Firefox Options if you can’t find it. Anybody tried this yet? Mitch? It's different from the tweaking we did last year on Firefox; it's a download. Thanks, Devon.

Is anyone watching Lost? I'm trying to watch it, especially after I heard someone talking backwards, reminiscent of Twin Peaks, which brilliantly stands alone in tv series innovation. 4 8 15 16 23 42 is keeping the secret.

British Library Online Gallery - Turning The Pages.
Leaf through 14 great books and magnify the details. Very nice. Thanks, Carol.
Link

I noticed Salon has a new design and read this piece: Thousands of men are shelling out $6,500 for hyper-realistic dolls that answer all their needs -- and don't talk back. Ask Davecat about Sidore. How fucked up ARE these guys anyway? Let me count the ways.
Link

Go get 'em, BDM. Big Daddy Malcontent takes the banks and christians to task.
Link

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LORDS OF ACID
How the Brotherhood of Eternal Love Became OC’s Hippie Mafia

Leary’s mantra—Tune in, turn on, drop out—had already led countless disaffected middle-class kids to quit their jobs or classes, head to California and drop acid. The Brotherhood’s bible was Leary’s Psychedelic Prayers, his idiosyncratic translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Mystic Arts sold copies of Leary’s book, along with incense, candles and imported countercultral paraphernalia. Behind a bamboo-covered wall, church members gathered in a secret meditation room decorated with a massive Taxonomic Mandala, a technicolor spiral depicting the evolution of life, from primal ooze to Homo sapiens.

But Mystic Arts was more than a head shop or meditation center. And although it didn’t start out that way, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love wasn’t just a church. It was also Orange County’s first major international drug smuggling network. [more »]

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From the conservative AOL:

Should Tom DeLay step down as the leader of the House Republicans?

Yes...89%
No.....11%

Total Votes: 20,955

Besides being such a nefarious ass, I've always been leary of anyone with a shellacked head. And face.

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In "Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000," by Martin Torgoff, he refers to his own drug use and abuse throughout the book. Besides using his own story, he fuels the book with a polyphonic spree of supporting characters, among them storied beats Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac; psychedelic superheroes Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna; fallen jazz greats Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie; tragic rock stars Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison; cult figures Ram Dass and Wavy Gravy. The result is a sweeping epic that bounces between orgiastic nostalgia trip and cautionary tale -- and, at times, like the drugs themselves, can assault the senses.

Mixing oral history, autobiography and a large dose of firsthand sources from High Times to Foreign Policy, the book moves across time and culture, starring one drug after another, from marijuana to MDMA.
Salon Link; Amazon Link
War stories that are worth a look...

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John Malkovich is thumbing a ride on "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," a Disney adaptation of the Douglas Adams novel. Malkovich will play a religious cult leader called Humma Kavula, created by the late author especially for the long-gestating film.

April 27 - The Weather Underground
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, several hundred young women and men tried to spark a socialist revolution. The Weathermen waged a low-level war against the U.S. government: bombing the Capitol building, breaking Timothy Leary out of prison and evading one of the largest FBI manhunts in history. The Weathermen were a surviving faction of the SDS. (Where are the Weathermen now?) [link]

{Past Re-visited}
I recall Cliff Potts came by the university in his converted old bread truck and parked in front of the Student Center where all us 'ne'er do wells' were lounging. He set up a table with SDS pamphlets and we all signed up and discussed Nixon's pending visit to the campus and talked to us about the ROTC program and how to take over that building in protest of Vietnam. Within a year I was onboard with NOW, SDS, and for fun, Montrose, a performance troupe of drama and art majors and assorted strays named for the historic Montrose building that now housed many university students (read: freaks). I was eighteen and felt electrically plugged in, challenged and scared.

saturday morning me//
black tank top/aqua low waisted sweats/
barefoot/green tea #2/rye toast/oj/
good hair day/i'm wearing a hat/
good husband day/he's off running errands/
listening: shoutcast radio/
so how about you?/

Just a molotov cocktail missing a match.

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Ah, Thursday....one of my seven favorites days of the week.

Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, by Douglas Rushkoff
Rushkoff, a New York-based journalist, goes west to Berkeley for a look inside Cyberia-the emerging countercultural terrain of computer hackers, "smart" drugs, house music, and a range of alternate "cyberpunk" lifestyles and anarchic philosophies. This largely sympathetic report from the latest frontier will undoubtedly strike many older readers as outrageous, but others (especially those with clear memories of the 60's) may find much of the rhetoric familiar, even nostalgic. In fact, many of the ingredients hark back to the Berkeley scene of nearly three decades ago: the text is full of references to acid trips, pagan rituals, and Grateful Dead concerts, and even Timothy Leary puts in an appearance at a virtual reality demonstration. Go here to read it all online. Very informative. [via (ripping off): the most excellent stare]

::Black Table's Primer on Collegiate Preparedness
A whole summer went by and now it's time to head back to the wonderful fairyland called college, where responsibility is kept to a minimum and partying is a club sport. New shoes, new haircuts, and new book bags -- why leave your penis out on all the fun? Back-to-school time not only means there is massive amounts of homework and studying to do, but also massive amounts of casual, consensual sex. So, dress your little feller up into something nice and comfortable before he goes trolling through the bushes.


100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time - According to Rolling Stone magazine. Not hard to figure out who's number one. I was so fortunate to see him once. And I'll never forget a moment of it.

::MTV VMA tonight. You can still vote for Viewer's Choice award. Nominated are: Eminem, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, Kelly Clarkson, 50 Cent, & Good Charlotte. Christina Aguilera threatens to wear a Nun outfit. The Sun reports Courtney Love has pulled out of presenting tonight because of a disaster over hair extensions. ("Squauwk! Yeooowww! You Royally Fucked Up My Fucking Hair, You Stinking Cunt--now you must die," Courtney didn't say.)

::Bummer Chinese Fortune Cookies

::Splut Photos - Very nice.

I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.

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Good morning. I still wish for peace.....

Singer Perry Farrell (Jane's Addiction) is 44 today.

Camp Freddy made their national TV debut on ABC's the Jimmy Kimmel Live show on Friday March 28th. I missed it, damnit. Camp Freddy is made up of: Dave Navarro, guitar; Billy Morrison, guitar; Scot Ford, bass; Matt Sorum, drums, Donovan Leitch, lead vocals.

Pics of Gwen and Gavin in London with their dog, Winston.

Anyone seen BlogShares? Not had the time to really look into it, but it says it's a fantasy stock market for weblogs. I'm still leary of stock markets. I've been out for sometime now. And ouch, what a penalty.

Democrat Gary Hart has joined the Blogging community as part of his strategy for Democratic contender in 2004. There's fodder for the right wing masses, if I ever saw it. That loud buzzing sound you hear is the sound of bandwidth humming as the fanatic right zooms in to check him for accuracy and spelling errors. I give him a week before he's forced to pull his comments. But hope he doesn't cave.

Quote For Today
What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.
~Albert Pike

saturday morning me/
grapes/angel food cake/coffee-cream, equal/
marlboro-1" ash protruding/npr radiosound/
baby powder smell/hair: stringing down/
jeans/yoga slippers/navy Duke t-shirt/
a duck font with me look on my face/
hows about you?/

Refusing to buy a $7 bottle of French wine is a piss-ass, penny ante protest. Hell, I'm refusing to buy a $70,000 German Mercedes-Benz.

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Tooling Around Blogworld

Well, Ms Diva Maggie sure gets her rant on today about Bush. Everyone is more than a little concerned about the latest decisions regarding us and Iraq. And Shirl has a fun link on her site today that's a little rare, but funny, about plaster casts. Yes, it IS what you think it is. Kim is curious about a blocked address coming in on her stats referrer page that said, "Field blocked by Outpost". That's a new one on me. Ilana's gotten a new award for her great site....The always entertaining Skippy has a post about the Oldest Known Penis, which belongs to a crab, and other goodies. Sara is a little leary about it being Friday the 13th and the detainees in Florida. I think everyone is a little leary nowadays, not just because it's Friday the 13th. Kymberstorm hasn't had a day off in forever and could certainly use one real soon.

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