wild horses

"When Marianne Faithfull slipped into the coma that almost killed her-- the result of taking 150 Tuinals in a hotel room in Australia-- she had a vision that Brian Jones, just six days in the ground, was beckoning her over a cliff. He leapt; at the last minute she decided to stay. When she opened her eyes in a hospital room six days later, Mick said, 'Marianne, we thought we'd lost you.' In that milky voice that was already starting to curdle, the first thing she said to him was, 'Wild horses couldn't drag me away.'"

The cocaine problem in the United States is really because of me. There was no cocaine before Easy Rider on the street. After Easy Rider, it was everywhere. - Dennis Hopper

Brian Aldiss, Barefoot in the Head, 1969

drug song

turning on

MCLUHAN: The upsurge in drug taking is intimately related to the impact of the electric media. Look at the metaphor for getting high: turning on. One turns on his consciousness through drugs just as he opens up all his senses to a total depth involvement by turning on the TV dial. Drug taking is stimulated by today's pervasive environment of instant information, with its feedback mechanism of the inner trip. The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers. LSD is a way of miming the invisible electronic world; it releases a person from acquired verbal and visual habits and reactions, and gives the potential of instant and total involvement, both all-at-onceness and all-at-oneness, which are the basic needs of people translated by electric extensions of their central nervous systems out of the old rational, sequential value system. The attraction to hallucinogenic drugs is a means of achieving empathy with our penetrating electric environment, an environment that in itself is a drugless inner trip.

Drug taking is also a means of expressing rejection of the obsolescent mechanical world and values. And drugs often stimulate a fresh interest in artistic expression, which is primarily of the audile-tactile world. The hallucinogenic drugs, as chemical simulations of our electric environment, thus revive senses long atrophied by the overwhelmingly visual orientation of the mechanical culture. LSD and related hallucinogenic drugs, furthermore, breed a highly tribal and communally oriented subculture, so it's understandable why the retribalized young take to drugs like a duck to water.

PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. "LSD doesn't mean anything until you consume it," she said. "Likewise McLuhan." Do you see any similarities?

MCLUHAN: I'm flattered to hear my work described as hallucinogenic, but I suspect that some of my academic critics find me a bad trip.

PLAYBOY: Have you ever taken LSD yourself?

MCLUHAN: No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant. I had an operation last year to remove a tumor that was expanding my brain in a less pleasant manner, and during my prolonged convalescence I'm not allowed any stimulant stronger than coffee. Alas! A few months ago, however, I was almost "busted" on a drug charge. On a plane returning from Vancouver, where a university had awarded me an honorary degree, I ran into a colleague who asked me where I'd been. "To Vancouver to pick up my LL. D.," I told him. I noticed a fellow passenger looking at me with a strange expression, and when I got off the plane at Toronto Airport, two customs guards pulled me into a little room and started going over my luggage. "Do you know Timothy Leary?" one asked. I replied I did and that seemed to wrap it up for him. "All right," he said. "Where's the stuff? We know you told somebody you'd gone to Vancouver to pick up some LL. D." After a laborious dialog, I persuaded him that an LL. D. has nothing to do with consciousness expansion--just the opposite, in fact--and I was released. Of course, in light of the present educational crisis, I'm not sure there isn't something to be said for making possession of an LL. D. a felony.

»No Grass Piece«, 1969 by Lee Lozano

GO WITHOUT GRASS FOR THE SAME AMOUNT OF TIME AS »GRASS PIECE«, WHICH TURNS OUT TO BE 35 DAYS, START IMMEDIATELY AFTER »GRASS PIECE«. (MAY 4, 69) (PIECE ENDS JUNE 6, 69). PARANOIA STARTS, (MAY 4, 69) OTHER PRE-GRASS SYMPTOMS. NOTICE SUCH AN INTENSE FLOW OF ADRENALINE THAT I GET HIGH ON IT. (MAY 5, 69) GET HIGH ON A SMALL GLASS OF WINE (MAY 5, 69). SLEEPLES NIGHT LAST NIGHT, ANOTHER PRE-GRASS SYMPTOM. EXCESSIVE DREAMING (MAY 7, 69). HALF-AWAKE DREAMS. EVERYTHING SEEMS FUNNIER (MAY 9, 69). UNCONTROLLABLE SADNESS. (MAY 10, 69) DEATHNESS. DROP MESCALINE BUT ITS A DUD SO FRIENDS TURN ME ON WITH HASH & GRASS TO GET ME OF MY BAD NO-TRIP. (MAY 11, 69) SLEEPLESSNESS CONTINUES. (MAY 12, 69). A FRIEND WHO VISITS BRINGS ME A JOINT. HOW CAN I REFUSE? (MAY 12, 69) SLEEP WELL FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE MAY 5.


http://www.hauserwirth.com/

the eyes of a pig

Alfred Hrdlicka, an Austrian etcher whose fantasy even without drugs is pretty grotesque, began drawing a pig. "Don't you think that the eyes of a pig have a particularly devout look?" he asked. Suddenly Hrdlicka began drawing symmetrically with both hands at once, something he had never done before. "The simultaneous depiction with both hands may be new to Hrdlicka," says Hartmann, "but it is a well-known archetypal phenomenon that occurs in the art of schizophrenics."

acid international

The Acid Head War

“About the present state of England he imagined he had no illusions. When the Acid Head War broke out, undeclared, Kuwait had struck at all the prosperous countries. Britain had been the first to suffer the PCA bomb - Psycho-Chemical Aerosols that propagated psychomimetic states, twilight ruptured its dark cities. As a nunsacs official, he could guess the disorder he would find there." (Brian Aldiss, Barefoot in the Head)

Drugs Won't Get It, People Will

like an electric snake

I was praying to god to keep me in time. (Carlos Santana)

Speculative proposal for a pill to induce architecture in the mind

Look at Venice. This city appears like a vision contrived under drug influence. Yet had its builders been drug eaters, they would have never managed the energy to build it. They would have merely dreamed about the city, and would have remained idle on their mud flats. (Friedrich Hundertwasser)