complete, tiny, adrift

"It was February 1966 and I was twenty–eight and was sitting on a gravelly roof in San Francisco's North Beach. I had taken a mild dose of LSD on an otherwise boring afternoon and sat, wrapped in a blanket, gazing at the San Francisco skyline. As I stared at the city’s high–rises, I realized they were not really parallel, but diverged slightly at the top because of the curve of the earth. I started thinking that the curve of the earth must be more dramatic the higher one went. I could see that it was curved, think it, and finally feel it. I imagined going farther and farther into orbit and soon realized that the sight of the entire planet, seen at once, would be quite dramatic and would make a point that Buckminster Fuller was always ranting about: that people act as if the earth is flat, when in reality it is spherical and extremely finite, and until we learn to treat it as a finite thing, we will never get civilization right. I herded my trembling thoughts together as the winds blew and time passed. And I figured a photograph—a color photograph—would help make that happen. There it would be for all to see, the earth complete, tiny, adrift, and no one would ever perceive things the same way."  - Stewart Brand, designer of the Whole Earth Catalog.

The Apollo program was going full-bore by then and as NASA prepared to launch the Lunar Orbiter series of lunar-surveying spacecraft, Brand launched the "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" button campaign - with buttons sent scientists, senators, thinkers, the media, and getting some press out of it. Finally realizing that the photo would be a good PR move, NASA instructed Lunar Orbiter 1 to take a single black and white picture of the Earth on August 23, 1966.

Love to Say Dada

miserable psychedelia

Mick Jagger: "That was the time of lots of acid. It has sitars on it. It's like the beginnings of miserable psychedelia."

my name is russel harwick
i began this diary
as a record of my experiences
while suffering from alcoholism
i began drinking
when i was 14 moderately
at first on vacation
from school among friends.
by 15 i was suffering
from delerium tremens.
at 19 I found marijuana, hashish,
cocaine or heroin kept me off alcohol
for a limited time.
my pattern became a night marish
maze of shifting
addiction alcohol then drugs,
finally i was
introduced to hallucinogenics peyote,
psilocybin and l.s.d. 25
under the influence of peyote
i had a vision
i tried to forget it returning to drink.
but the memory haunted me

chappaqua (1966) conrad rooks

suddenly, their trip was over.

(first test of a Saturn S-II-T booster rocket, Mississippi Test Facility, 1966)

"LSD was, in the Grateful Dead world, a catalyst. For Lesh the highest he would ever get was during the Dead's 1966 sojourn in Los Angeles, when he and his love, Florence, Garcia and his lover, Diane Zellman, and a friend called "Heddie the Witch" went to a canyon on Mount Wilson and experience telepathy. Information came in extraordinarily fast bursts, ten minutes of material exploding into each brain in a few moments. It would be the closest Lesh would ever feel to Garcia off the stage, and it staggered him. They were well and truly connected. And then a test rocket at the nearby Rocketdyne facility exploded through the sky, severing their gestalt. It was, Garcia said, 'a reality butt splice.' Suddenly their trip was over. 'Sorry, kids. Go home.'"

- Dennis McNally, "A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead"

Newsweek_LSD1966.jpg

ten trip ticket book

"10. Ten Trip Ticket Book. Resembling a book of tickets, excerpts from fourteen papers presented at the Berkeley Conference on LSD. Contents: Users and Abusers of LSD: Richard Blum; We Are All One: USCO; Adverse Reactions to LSD: William Frosch; A Descriptive Approach to the Psychedelic Experience: Rolf von Eckartsberg; Stability and Change in Human Intelligence and Consciousness: Frank Barron; LSD: Implications for Law Enforcement: Joseph D. Lohman; The Role of Psychedelics in Shamanism, Witchcraft, and the Vision Quest: Michael Harner; LSD and the Art of Conscious Living: Richard Alpert; LSD and the Dying Patient: Eric Kast; LSD Therapy of Alcoholism: Abram Hoffer; The Significance of Artificially Induced Religious Experience: Huston Smith; Therapeutic Uses of Ibogaine: Claudio Naranjo; The Myth About Psychedelic Drugs: Paul Lee; The Molecular Revolution: Timothy Leary." - From Aspen Magazine No. 3, The Pop Art issue, designed by Andy Warhol and David Dalston

LSD Partners

"Wait. Listen. There are seventeen violins on that cut, and one of them—I can't tell where he was because it's monaural here, damn." It dawned on her that he was talking about the Muzak. It has been seeping in, in its subliminal, unidentifiable way since they'd entered the place, all strings, reeds, muted brass.

"What is it," she said, feeling anxious.

"His E string," Mucho said, "it's a few cycles sharp."

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49, 1966

My direction in life was permanently altered by taking LSD. In a way, the rides at Disneyland kind of prepared me for my LSD experiences. But almost every time I took it, at some point I'd find myself on my hands and knees, puking my guts out and asking, "What the hell does it all mean?" I took some bad acid in November of 1965, and the after-effect left me crazy and helpless for six months. My mind would drift into a place that was very electrical and crackly, filled with harsh, abrasive, low-grade, tawdry, carnival visions. There was a nightmarish, mechanical aspect to everyday life. My ego was so shattered that it didn't get in the way during what was the most unselfconscious period of my life. I was kind of on an automatic pilot and was still constantly drawing. Most of my popular characters - Mr Natural, Angelfood McSpade, the Snoid, Shuman the Human, Devil Girl - all suddenly appeared in the drawings in my sketchbook in this period, early 1966. LSD put me someplace else. I wasn't sure where. All I know is, it was a strange place. Psychedelic drugs broke me out of my social programming. It was a good thing for me, traumatic though, and I may have been permanently damaged by the whole thing. I see LSD as a positive, important life experience for me, but I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anybody else. (R. Crumb)

regeneration

"The metaphysical change ... is a horrifying experience — an experience in which he relives some of the most unendurable moments of his long life, including the galactic war. It is as if he has had the LSD drug and instead of experiencing the kicks, he has the hell and dank horror which can be its effect."

Chappaqua

trip to Australia

Conservative British politician Jonathan Aitken's mother was constantly at his side. When he took LSD to write up the experiment for the Evening Standard, she was there to record his hallucinations: "He had the most vivid and terrible dreams... he thought he was in Australia, he could see the future and there were just seas of blood. Black men fighting brown men, fighting yellow men." she recalled.

"This drug needs police, the Home Office and a dictator to stamp it out,' he asserted, while wondering aloud: 'Where is my mother, the only symbol of sanity I know in this diseased world..."

The controlled-experiment people felt that public LSD orgies would lead to disaster for their own research. There was little optimism about what might happen when the Angels—worshipping violence, rape and swastikas—found themselves in a crowd of intellectual hipsters, Marxist radicals and pacifist peace marchers. (Hunter S. Thompson)

Dropping acid with the Angels was an adventure; they were too ignorant to know what to expect, and too wild to care. They just swallowed the stuff and hung on... (Hunter S. Thompson)

innocence and divine beauty

Turmoil in a Capsule