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John Lennon
Happy 50th John by Rand Marsh October 9, 1940 John Lennon was born in Oxford Street Maternity Hospital Liverpool, England. His mother Julia was a dreamy, ethereal woman, and his father was a rounder who shipped himself off to sea. And he, John Winston Lennon, later known as John Ono Lennon, was for many of us who grew up in the 60's our Star, our Sun, and our Moon. Fifty years ago this month, on the night John was born, the moon was full, high in the sky and in the Tenth House of his birth chart. This usually means fame, fortune and an enormous influence over masses of people. In the summer of 1966 John said in an interview for the London Evening Standard, "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that. I'm right and I will be roved right. We are more popular than Jesus now. I don't know which will go first; rock and roll or Christianity." and this remark taken out of context as "We are more popular than Jesus." caused protest along with the Beatle's first popularity backlash. It was true that in the year 1966 more Beatles records were sold than Bibles. The enormous influence of John Lennon and the Beatles is legendary. Just as others of their generation can remember where they were when they heard the news that the Archduke Ferdinand had been shot, or the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, or the news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, we Beatle-maniacs (reformed or otherwise) can still remember our first attack of Beatlemania. I can, as if it were yesterday. Everyone had their favorite Beatle, but I had them all. At first it was Ringo, then Paul, and then it was John. He held sway until the mid 70's when he dropped out to beocme a house husband and I was entering my meditative state and tuned into George. No matter what Beatle I was "maintaining" at any given moment, it was always John that I felt was the heart and soul of the Beatles. We all knew that it was he and Paul that did all the writing. I felt of the two it was John who was the true force in the duo. When on December 31st, 1970 Paul McCartney initiated legal proceedings to end the business partnership of the Beatles the glue came apart, but I was still stuck on John. I know that a great many Beatle-maniacs held Yoko Ono responsible for the breakup. John's Sun Sign was Libra and he had Aries rising, which made him passionate, and probably more romantic than he may have cared to admit. But, because Venus was in Virgo he was also extremely critical of the women in his life. And then there was Yoko Ono; we saw them come together, we saw them in bed for trying to give peace a chance, we saw them nude on an album cover, we heard them singing together, we saw them split up, we saw them come together again and we saw them exchange roles. Who was this avant-garde artist named Yoko Ono.. Some said that beneath that Mona Lisa veneer, that inscrutable smile, that flawless skin, that whisper-shy voice, she is about as frail as Darth Vader. John said of her, "It wasn't that she inspired the songs. She inspired me." When at the age of forty, in an attempt to explain why he had written at the age of twenty-three that "Women should be obscene and not heard", he said "I was a working class macho guy that didn't know any better. I was used to being served (by women). I used to be cruel to my women. Yoko taught me about women. From the day I met her, she demanded equal time, equal space, equal rights. An I'm thankful to her for the education." In 1980 after five years of silence, restraint and privacy that was spent raising his son Sean, who was born on the same day as his father in 1975. John emerged pale and whipper-thin on his macrobiotic diet. He had finally lost the beatle baby fat and also gone was the melancholia expressed in a poem to Stu Sutcliffe; "I can't remember anything without a sadness so deep that it hardly becomes known to me." Now there was buoyancy, candor, sheer happiness, optimism and their album "Double Fantasy" was selling well. Then suddenly it was December 8, 1980 and the dream was over. I got all my old Beatles and Plastic Ono Band records and tapes and remembered, cried and wondered why it had to end this way. John had once said "The King is always killed by his courtiers not by his enemies." It wasn't until the summer of 1985 that I could finally let him go. The old Beatle synchronicity was at work. As I was speeding down Sunset Blvd. toward the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine the radio played Beatles songs the entire way. I was late for the wedding of Gary "Dream Weaver" Wright. As I rushed down the walk into the chapel I took little notice of another late arrival that entered with me and took a seat beside me. After we left the chapel I noticed that it was George Harrison. We were both on our own and so we struck up a conversation that lasted through the reception and into the evening. He said something to me as we talked of the death of John Lennon that I'll always remember, "We must always have faith in the future." And how true that is, but I'll never forget how John Lennon made me feel.  Scorpio Men on Prozac The title is just the beginning. This is a comically satirical story of a group of Scorpio boys and men, ages sixteen to thirty. These men for various; emotional, sexual and romantic problems are taking the anti-depressant Prozac or 'zac' as they call it. Our main character Josh Eversmen has just turned thirty. His wife a LAPD officer, has left him. He has just lost the job he loved more than life-its-self, to his boss's lesbian lover. And he has moved back home into his childhood bedroom which is now his mother's sewing room. His mother, who is concerned about his depression and mood swings gives him as a birthday present an appointment to see a therapist. The story follows Josh in one-side of the Prozac-world and out the other. While the door is open Josh makes new friends and meets an old friend among the men in a 'group' he joins. One member of the 'group', who is a successful male model has the eating disorder "activity anorexia", one member has Tourette Syndrome, another has a "underwear fetish", one is an "obsessive compulsive" and other members suffer from the "craziness of apparently normal people". By the luck of the draw they are all Scorpios and when they are not stinging each other, or any and everyone they meet... they're stinging themselves. 'Scorpio Men On Prozac' for the most part is howls of laughs, sexy with a grin or a smirk, sometimes dark, but never dull. AVAILABLE ON AMAZON BOOKS  ERIC STOLTZ
The Water Dance by Rand Marsh Eric Stoltz whom we all loved to laugh at as one of the dudes in Fast Time at Ridgemont High and who we all had a good cry with as the deformed son of Cher in Mask, and who made us all scream with fright in The Fly II, is back. Eric has never been typecast and he has never been afraid to accept a challenging role. His latest film, The Waterdance is no exception; he plays a character in a wheelchair who is half Mexican (he dyed his hair black to look the part). At this years Sundance Film Festival The Waterdance was the winner of the screenplay award and the film was voted the audience's favorite. Written by River's Edge author, Neal Jimenez (who also co-directed with Michael Steinberg), it tells the author's autobiographical story while avoiding the snares of self-indulgence. A script with the potential to be full of despair, it is laced throughout with humor. The cast is uniformly impressive. Eric Stoltz plays the filmmaker's alter ego, a young novelist who is paralyzed after a hiking accident, and Wesley Snipes and William Forsythe play his hospital-ward mates. "When most people hear about a film dealing with people in wheelchairs they go 'Oh no, not another one of those,' but this film will surprise you. It is a brilliantly written black comedy and you forget the fact that the characters are in wheelchairs ten minutes into the film. The title comes from a dream the Wesley Snipes' character has. He dreams that he can walk on water as long as he can keep dancing, but if he stops dancing he will be drowned. It's like the story in the New Testament where Christ is walking on water and one of his disciples wants to walk to him on the water. As long as he has faith in Christ he can keep walking on the water, but if he loses faith in the power of Christ, he slips into the water." Eric views this film as some of his best work as well as a great growth experience. "Before making this film I had really known only one person who was disabled. I was sixteen and a friend was injured in a car accident and I'm afraid I may have reacted poorly to his new condition. I was not emotionally mature. But, after meeting many of the patients at the hospital where we filmed the movie, and of course after playing the part, I feel no discomfort about approaching and talking with a person in a wheelchair. I think that our uneasiness about the disabled is the fear that it could happen to us or sort of a strange guilt about feeling the fear. the human body is such a fragile thing. I met this patient at the hospital who had stepped on a rake and fell backwards and broke his neck, paralyzing him from the neck down. In three seconds his life was changed forever. I think that it is great that our country is finally taking a serious interest in the everyday plight of the disabled and the public access law just passed by the U.S. Congress is a step in the right direction." Many moviegoers have grown up with Stoltz, watching him become a very peaceful, mature man who has not been spoiled by his Hollywood movie-star-status. "I started acting at the age of ten in school plays and by the time I came to L.A. from Santa Barbara to study acting, first at USC and then at the Lot Studio, I had done at least 30 plays. Theater is still my first love. there is no money in theater, you have to love it to do it. I've been fairly successful with my movie career and it has allowed me to do theater. I do about one movie a year. When I first started acting I never though about making a living at it; I've been making a living for the past eight years. Because I don't have a lot of big payments or a family, I don't feel the pressure to do a lot of films that I don't believe in. When I read the script for The Waterdance, which is a low budge film, I knew I wanted to do it. And I had the freedom to do it." When Eric speaks of acting, in films or on stage, there is a gleam in his eyes. "I love being a part of making movies. It's like being part of an old big top, three-ring circus that sweeps through a town, creates this fabulous entertainment, and then leaves behind an audience wanting more. I like to try every part of the movie business. As a matter of fact, I'm going to be producing a film which we'll be shooting in July and August. Producing is like taking a graduate course in filmmaking. It's very strange being in a room with the other producers and talking about actors. It certainly will give me a more balanced approach when I'm rejected for a part I feel that I'm perfect for. Rejection is the most stressful part of this business. You have to adapt a Zen attitude to remain sane. Directing is one job I'm really not ready for; it's like giving birth to a child, and even though I'm 30 I'm not ready to be a parent, someday maybe, but not now.  ERIC STOLTZ
The Water Dance Venice Magazine by Rand Marsh Eric STOLTZ, WHOM WE ALL LOVED to laugh at as one of the dudes in Fast Time at Ridgemont High and who we all had a good cry with as the deformed son of Cher in Mask, and who made us all scream with fright in The Fly II, is back. Eric has never been typecast and he has never been afraid to accept a challenging role. His latest film, The Waterdance is no exception; he plays a character in a wheelchair who is half Mexican (he dyed his hair black to look the part). At this years Sundance Film Festival The Waterdance was the winner of the screenplay award and the film was voted the audience's favorite. Written by River's Edge author, Neal Jimenez (who also co-directed with Michael Steinbert), it tells the author's autobiographical story while avoiding the snares of self-indulgence. A script with the potential to be full of despair, it is laced throughout with humor. PORN AGAIN?
Tracy Lords By Rand Marsh Nora Kuzma was a sweet little girl just like so many other young girls-well, maybe not just like the girl next door. But what's a girl to do? You're being abused nightly at home in your canopied bed among your stuffed animals so you look for an escape route. The pretty young thing runs and runs not to grandma's house, but into the open arms of the hard-porn business. Sweet young Nora Kuzma is then disrobed as Traci Lords. Traci took her new-found occupation like a sexy-duckling to water, starring in such memorable classics as New Wave Hookers, Beverly Hills Copulator, and Lust in the Fast Lane. Shortly after her 18th birthday it was disclosed that she had made most of her 100-plus lusty skin flicks while a minor, some even before she turned 16. The legal repercussions of that scandal reverberated for years even reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, which last November upheld a child pornography law used to convict a distributor caught peddling tapes from Traci's early days. "A victory for children everywhere," says Traci. "You know, I'm always really wary of doing interviews. I hate it, because it just seems like journalists are fucking stupid, and they write things that aren't even true. I've always said that I don't even understand why I have to give interviews, when the journalists have already written them before they've even seen me." Traci was born Nora Louise Kuzma in Stubenville, Ohio. Her adopted name comes from, Hawaii-Five O's Jack Lord. "Yeah book'em Dan-o!...He's the first man I ever masturbated to. It's true. I was 10. I didn't know what I was doing but it felt good. I had a poster of him above my bed." Lords and her three sisters were brought out west to Redondo Beach when she was 12 by her mother. "My life has been a really wired trip. When I was 14, I was a runaway; 15, I was a drug addict and a centerfold; 16 and 17, I was a porn star; 18 I was in a rehab; and at 19, I became an actress. When I was in high school-which didn't last long-the thing to do seemed to be, take speed and go to the gym. Hey! Wow! look how fast I can run! I didn't realize I could keel over at any minute. When I was 18, I almost OD''d. For me, it was a spiritual experience. I had a total breakdown and came out the other side. I realized how stupid I was being. It made me mature really young, but I think pain does that." Lately, Traci's been dabbling in music and has just released her first album, 1000 Fires. Her first full-length CD is a collection of dance music produced by Mike Edwards of Jesus Jones, Tom Bailey and Allanah Curry of the Tompson Twins, and Ben Watkins of KIF and Juno Reactor fame. Though few have heard the album, the media has already started on Traci. Reports came in that she was working on a rock-and-roll album. Hits magazine wrote that Radioactive would be handing out latex gloves and Vaseline with each purchase. "They'll take cheap shots because they don't really know anything else yet. They just automatically dismiss me as a slut trying to capitalize on my fame. I wrote or co-wrote virtually all of the songs on the album, which has been two years in the making. I worked really, really hard. I turned down acting roles to work on it. I spent six months living above a coffee shop in fucking Hampstead, all this just to record tracks in old basements across London. But I enjoyed being in London, the best part of it is that the rave scene is part of the culture there...it's all about the future. The past is really fucked and the present is rather mediocre. I either run really hot or really cold. I hate being warm, warm is a comfort zone, and I don't want to be comfortable. I want to be either really excited and crazy and out of my mind or really depressed and find something inspiring in that. That's the way it works for me. That's what I think techno is all about. It's a total extreme." The album features a wide variety of dance music; techno, house, rock, ambient tracks. One of the ambient tracks is about rape. "I haven't always been a big fan of ambient music, though I've always been interested in it. One ambient track was written from personal experience, rape, that was really powerful and which I feel has had a great deal to do with who I am today...it really fucked me up. This is the first time that I've ever told that story. The track is Father's Field and I think it's one of the heaviest tracks. It's about an experience I had when really young...about being raped when I was eleven. The lyrics describe just what happened to me. I didn't tell anyone. The scary thing is, I haven't told my mother yet. She knows there were reasons why I had so much trouble as a teenager, but she doesn't know what they were specifically. I guess I haven't told her because I don't want to hurt her. She'll think it's somehow her fault. I was one of those after school specials: the little Ohio farm girl who ended up in the big citgy wanting to be a movie star, a singer. I was built like I was eighteen when I was fourteen, I had people around me who were very manipulative, I did a lot of very stupid things." "I hate the phrase former porn star. That part of my life was a long time ago. I wish people would think of something else to call me." At 26, Traci has been battling to free herself of her X-rated boudoir fame trying to cross over to legit films. First Traci starred in B flicks, Roger Corman's Not of This Earth, Shock 'Em Dead and Raw Nerve. She took bit parts on episodic TV (Wiseguy MacGyver). She also had a supporting role in campy John Waters movie Cry Baby. She finally hit the prime time with a strong part in 1993's Stephen King mini-series Tommy Knockers. Come 1995 and Traci has just joined the cast of Melrose Place. "I'm successful in spite of my past, not because of it. I have talent. the character of Rikki, the name of my new Melrose Place character, is a sexy but scary cult member who becomes Sidney's roommate. It's a cool part. I start off being nice, but you can see something lurking behind my eyes. I turn into a monster. The role is scheduled to run for five weeks. Nobody turns on Melrose Place for the acting but if I couldn't act I'd stand out like a sore thumb." So much for her career. What about her thoughts and beliefs? "I don't believe in censorship. I think everybody should have the right to choose, because where do you draw the line? Something that's offensive to one person might not be to another. But I never rent porn and I never would, because it will always be there in the back of my mind, and having it there is plenty. I try to help in my own way. I still work with Children of the Night for runaways in Hollywood, because this is the place where kids go. They see pictures of Marilyn Monroe and a pink cadilac, and they think, 'Wow I could be a star too. I could actually be somebody'. I thought that I should have stayed home and married dear Billy Baker next door." Lords feels that the American woman is still getting a raw deal. "Abortion? God I think it's ridiculous to even argue over a woman's right to choose. Teach the girls a little self-respect and the boys a little responsibility, then maybe you wouldn't have as many pregnant teenagers. Likewise I think the concept of judging a person based on sexual orientation goes with this obsession to control other people's bodies and minds. It's ridiculous. I don't judge people on their sexuality or sexual history. Maybe that's because I've always been judged on mine and I know that's total crap." Although marriage is not on the immediate agenda, she confesses, "I love men. I'm in love with one of the sexiest men in the world. He's a prop master. When I first saw him, he was carrying all this heavy equipment-but he was wearing red lipstick, fake eyelashes and a feather boa. He was just goofing around, but I thought, cool." "No matter what happens to me as an actress or as a performer, no matter what anybody says about me, they can't say I sold out-because I didn't. These are my thoughts. These are my ideas and my feelings. So whatever people say or whichever way things go, I know that I haven't lost. I've just been me all along." WW
HOLLYWOOD POP NOVEL: A TRUTH STRANGER THAN FICTION (Scorpio Men on Prozac & Their Oil Changes) LA WEEKLY - REVIEWED BY JOEY ALKES On first picking up a novel called 'SCORPIO MEN ON PROZAC,' an XLIBRIS paperback, this very Cancer male and skeptic is presented with a reasonable 'Why should I read a novel about Scorpio men or Prozac, for that matter. Especially since, I reserve talk of the anti-depressant Prozac to 12-step dumps and astrology to pick -up lines. Being married it has been years since I've entertained a study of the science to any useful purpose. So, Why is it that I put down my thoroughly unreadable ancient copy of Albert Schweitzer's prose in his "Out of My Life and Thought" to read Scorpio Men you ask? Curiosity my friends, a sometimes very dangerous curiosity. As fate would have it, the author of Scorpio Men, Rand Marsh, was one of this columnist's editorial charges in the early days of Venice Magazine, and in those last days of the quirky Hollywood Gazette. Fortunately for me, and definitely for him, writer and critic Marsh's debut novel (or novelette) has enough moments in it that are hilarious and inspired to ignore those parts of the book that one wouldn't insert into a typical Hollywood Oscar contending movie, no less a literary work. Trust me folks, as his old editor, Marsh's publisher couldn't have unearthed a tougher critic to review this work. Marsh, who is a regular contributor to such pulp fiction culture rags as Spin Magazine and URB, who has had a number of plays produced, and presently has full-length feature film in development, has a knack (And yes just like that bubble-gum pop band of the Eighties) for good hooks. In 'Scorpio Men On Prozac' he has chanced upon the double barrels of both; the popularity of astrology as a distraction from personal responsibility, and the obvious dependence on pharmacology in place of any evidence of a comprehensible higher-power in the universe. Structuring the book through a series of short tales, divided by tips for Scorpions based on their moon sign conjunctions; basic Scorpion life-advice ("Scorpio remember, to fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already dead."); visits to the "shrink" who writes the "zac" prescriptions entitled, "Doctor Please Some More of These" (creating a form of insider shorthand like "being zacked"); and various facts and anecdotes about Prozac itself, he and his dysfunctional "crew" of Scorpio men sometimes on Prozac, and sometimes trying to kick it as if it were some form of dope, manage to mismanage their lives into a painful degree of comedy and pathos. The publisher describes the novel as "a darkly comic adventure into the psyches of a group of Scorpio men and boys who are taking or should be taking Prozac AND the people they love or who have been twice stung" and makes the claim that, "Scorpio men may make you laugh or cry, they may piss you off but they will never bore you." For the most part this is true. Often the characters piss me off more than they make me laugh, but laughter is definitely a part of the experience of reading Scorpio Men... Josh, or Rand Marsh himself, suggests that added to the trials and tribulations of being a "man" on this planet at this time, being a Scorpio, creates an almost impossible mission in life. Various characters choose different responses, and in one case a highly unlikely suicide in my opinion, with the information the reader has available (The author himself tells me that this is a true story. Go figure??). All the men (or boys)in the novel 'act out' with some form of self-destructive behavior in response to the dual pressures of testosterone and a Scorpio Sun (Oct. 22 - Nov. 21). Overeating or deprivation, drugs, obsessive career rituals and for a couple of these young men just being musicians, qualifies as some of the manifestations of dealing with such an overwhelming burden. The only escape hatch outside of insanity (jails, institutions and death), even at the supposed price of losing one's soul, is the pharmacology of Prozac; yet needing to make some sort of macho sense out of it all, Marsh feels compelled to escape the "zac" in the book's conclusion. "Shy? Forgetful? Anxious? Fearful? Obsessed? Overweight?" asks the author. "Now science will let you change your personality with a pill," ridicules Marsh. Debut novelist Rand Marsh displays a sense of humor, and engaging sense of self-deprecation, a dreamy narrative language of originality and a feel for the ultimate absurdity that being human suggests. In the context of his own identity (Writers writing about what they know best, themselves), Marsh succeeds in exposing his own confusion and angst at what being a man alive in today's gender-confused society, a West Hollywood crowd full of vacuous pre-occupation, his view of what he, and many men for that matter, interpret as an evolving feminine insensitivity (His LAPD wife's. His suicidal best friend’s wife's. His mother and sister's) to this male dilemma; and the hypocrisy of modern medical solution in the form of pharmacology. Whether one agrees or not with what Marsh suggests about the issues, Scorpio Men on Prozac makes thought- provoking reading. More importantly, it is a downright enjoyable read. Tim Leary
The Return of the Space Cowboy by Rand Marsh William S. Burroughs called him a "true visionary of the potential of the human mind and spirit." Allen Ginsberg says he is "a hero of American consciousness." But is Timothy Leary self-confessed cyber-punk, at 72 really the last American hero? Not everyone who knows who Tmothy Leary is would agree his contribution to the collective consciousness of this country and the world has been entirely positive. Some of his critics see his 'turn on, tune in and drop out' as the opening salvo hearlading the beginning of the drug generation. A generation that won't go away. If the drugged out generation of hippies and flower children spawned a generation marked 'X'. And if this 'X'ed out generation lost its way in tattoos and track marks, was it his fault? It took two visits to get Tim to sit down. The first time he ducks in and out of conversation with his secretary, friends and a young graphic artist, ever returning to his computer to spill out his latest thought. Time doesn't like being interviewed. He said, "This is what we'll do, I'll interview you, then you can interview me. Do you have anything that I can read that you've written." He began to devour the pages the moment they were in his hands, reacting to passages and asking question. He got out a copy of his latest book Chaos & Cyber Culture (published by Ronin Publishing, Inc. Box 1035, Berkeley, Ca 94701.) "You read this and I'll read your materials and we'll get together next week and we'll talk-you'll do your interview, I'll do mine." When we met again, the visit was nothing short of a mind-altering experience. When Tim turns his attention on you, with his riveting blue eyes, you feel as if you are being pulled into another dimension. I start off by asking him the standard CV-type question: how many books and autobiographis has he written? We progress on to the use of mind-altering substanes and his theories on the popularity of LSD. Was it a good or an evil thing, was it part of counter-culture or simply a new direction? We skip subjects; his studies and subsequent rebellion at West Point, his early days of LSD research at Harvard, the dawn of a counter-culture, imprisonment in the 70s, the effect of computers on language and literature...I'll let him speak for himself. "I've written at least thirty books...yes, it's in the high thirties. Each and every one of my books is an experiment in change, sabotaging the established 'Lion of Letters.' There is a total control of literature by a literary elite who produce, promulgate works that are read by only one per cent of the population who can undertstand or care to understand them. "In my first book that I wrote back in the 60's, it was two columns that ran side by side on a page it was the most I could get away back then. It was before graphics but now my books are like magazines. Magazines are designed to use as few words as possible, to hit you in the 'eye-ball'." And what of 'Leary's Law'? "If you write straight, you edit stoned...if you write stoned, for god's sake edit straight. I've gotten up in the morning and read what I've written stoned the night before and boy what a mess. I've had to rush back to my stoned mind to get what I was trying to say, the words and thoughts are usually very dramatic. I use the word on the paper as a guide to what I was thinking. I can usually get back in the mind of the night before and write down the ideas as clearly as I want them to be. "In 1973 the federal drug agency established that more than seven million Americans had used LSD. When this number of young or influential people engage in an activity passionately denounced by every respectable organ of society as dangerous, chaotic, immoral, illegal, we have a social phenomenon that is worthy of study. Here is a fascinating development, a new sin! A new counter-culture. A new evil crime. "It was just one of those times...this has happened before. At a similar moment in history, when cultures reached similar states of national security, economic prosperity, and imperial confidence, the inevitable next step was to look within. "The postwar, baby-boom generation that reached adolescence during the 1960's was probably the most affluent, confident, indulged crop in human history. Man social forces conspired so this group expected and demanded more from life. "The accumulation of psychedelic drugs by Americans in the sixties provides a powerful endorsement of religious rituals from tropical latitudes. Psychedelic drugs are all derived from the tropics. They produce states of possession trance, delightful chaoticness, expanded consciousness, spiritual illumination...powerful, mystical, empathizing with natural forces. "The so-called sixties drug culture was not a campus fad but a world-wide renaissance of the oldest relgions: paganism-nature. the hippies intuitively sensed this as they wandered around barefoot playing flutes. Paganislm 101 suddenly became the most popular campus elective. "Is it entirely accidental that our own space program, booming out to the stars, occurred exactly when our LSD-inspired inner-trip was at its height? When the sense of national pride and confidence diminished during the Nixon years, both inner and outer exploration decreased. No surprise to any student of cultural evolution. Granted, a lot of mentally disturbed persons took acid and then blamed the drug for their genetic instability, but there was never any comparative census count. Now the smoke has cleared, we see that far from inducing window-jumping and self-destruction, the suicide rate for young people actually dropped during the LSD boom. Suicide is caused by boredom and hopelessness. There are more alcoholic-induced episodes of violence in one weekend these days than in the twenty years of psychedelic drug-taking. Acid is probably the healthiest recreational pursuit ever devised by humans. Jogging, tennis and skiing are far more dangerous. If you disagree, show me statistics. Now, more than every before, we need to gear our brains to multiplicity, complexity, reletivety, change. Those who can handle acid will be able to deal more comfortably with what is to come. The PC is the acid of the 1990s." "When we were at Harvard we were fortunate to have wonderful coaches, people like Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts. There was a wonderful Englishman named Michael Hollingshead who had a very mischievous sense of humour. His brain was so addled with mystical experiences he saw everything as a prank. He was my assisstant at the time. We were trying to test the ability of psychedelic drugs to change people's behaviour. So we went to a prison, the obvious place to measure change; do they go back and commit more crimes or do they stay out of prison? "So we were taking LSD and similar drugs with maximum-security prisoners who were all volunteers. We weren't doing it to them; we were doing it with them, taking LSD with them in prison. The first time we did it, it seemed like the most scary, reckless, insane thing we could do; to be going our of our minds in a maximum-security prison with the most dangerous, evil, homicidal people in the world! We psychologists were afraid of the prisoners because obviously they were dangerous maniacs. They were afraid of us because we were crazy scientists. Suddenly we're looking at each other, saying, 'What's happening?' I said 'Well, I'm afraid of you,' and they all laughed, 'Well, we're afraid of you.' then we just broke up in laughter. "For the next two years the entire prison experiment continued (very scientific; personality tests, control,s the usual procedures), but basically everyone who was involved knew it was a big escape plot. We were trying to help them get out of prison. We would get them paroles, and in general help them get going in life. The whole thing was a big joke. It seemed too simple to rehabilitate prisoners and make it into a prank, rather than a crime and punishment saga of grand-opera criminality. It was an experience which did in fact cut down the prisoners' recidivism rate in Concord, Massachusetts, about 75 percent. "Another prank we performed at Harvard was for the Divinity School. We worked with thirty students and several professors; famous ministers, and the dean of the Boston University Chapel was involved. It was Good Friday and we involved. It was Good Friday and we gave the Divinity students psylocibin mushrooms (the other half didn't take them) to see if they had mystical experiences. It developed into an incredibly wonderful, warm, funny mystical experience, in which, in the most lighthearted way we were helping people get beyond the confines of the church and the ritual. When we would come back to our homes after working in prison,we were exultat. What a wild prank! Here we were, taking these drugs inside a prison, while the criminal-justice officials cheered us on. "The same thing was true after the Divinity School project. It started out so solemn and serious with the hymn singing and the dean of the chapel giving sermons. It ended with a tremendously life-affirming sense of joyous laughter. It all turned out to be a human coming-together! "Everyone's lives were changed by these trips in one way or another, but as for their behavior, well, some would leave their wives, and some would get married. Having a revelatory or deep mystical experience is one thing. What you do depends on an enormous number of factors. We had three ministers quit the church, for example, go out and make an honest living. "I was born in West Point, New York. My father was a military offer there. It was a foregone conclusion I would go to West Point. After my first year I realized it was the ultimate brain-washing Institution. Their main objective is to smash everyone into conformity, so they'll obey orders. This is to smash everyone into conformity, so they'll obey orders. This is the system that created men, women and children at My Lai, Vietnam. The military's main objective is to produce the kind of persons who will do their killing. (More bombs were dropped on Vietnam than in two hundred years of warfare. Not to mention a sea of Agent Orange.) The war machine not only kills, it produces killers. Just like the Vietnam vets and other ex-military nuts, we see in the Oklahoma City Fed., building bombing and the like, who preach hate, anti-Semitism and race superiority. "The system creates them, then lets them loose on the population. that's Why has no one in the media jumped on that fact. Killers in the name of Christ. The Christian Church and Islam are the two most evil organizations on earth. Now I've said that, I guess I'll have 3 billion people trying to kill me. "I was a bit of a rebel at West Point, they wanted me to resign. but I wouldn't. I wanted to fuck them by staying there in their faces. I got myself silenced, no one could talk to me or fuck with me then. After my second year of hell I resigned. "Before going to West Point I was at a Jesuit University, another brain washing Institution. After 'the Point' I went Berkeley, t to the University of Alabama. Why there? Well because there were women and it was warm. From there I went to the University of Washington, then to Berkeley. I had my Ph.D. and was teaching at Berkeley, when I was invited to come to Harvard. I never expected to stay there. Harvard asked me to leave, feeling my presence (my research into drug use, they were all legal then) was bringing too much attention to the school. I was a well-known and published psychologist who had developed a group approach to therapy. the patients (I don't like that term patient) not only evaluate their own progress but evaluate the both the treatment and the treators. "When I was arrested and thrown in prison during the 70's, I was almost fifty-years old. they wanted to put me away for fifty years for two roaches of marijuana, planted by the police, in a car I was travelling in. the car wasn't even mine. "When in jail I was in a cell next to Charley Manson another product of a corrupt prison system. He was raised in prison, no wonder he turned into what he is." Tim raises his glance to a point on a ridge just above the house where a new grandiose villa is being built. "That's where Sharon Tate and the others were killed. He (Charles Manson) used the mind control used on him in prison - to control them, those kids. All of Charles' so called women are still in jail. I don't know whey they don't let them out. They're middle aged now...they can do no harm to anybody...it's the same type of mind control that was used on Patty Hearst by the SLA. Prison is the ultimate controlling system for the population. When I was in prison I missed the connection with the rest of the world. I couldn't even watch the news on TV. Do you know more inmates are killed in fights about TV than any other reason, except maybe sex? I escaped prison with the help of the Weathermen. 'want to be' Black Panthers and ended up in Algeria with Eldridge Clever. He's another story." On the subject of how computers affect literature and language: "The same aesthetic trends the computer creates in other parts of culture appear in English literature. Next time you boot up your Mac, be grateful to Emerson, Stein, Yeats Pound, Huxley, Beckett, Orwell, Burroughs, gysin. They succeeded in loosening social, political religious insecurities, encouraging subjectivity and the innovative reprogramming of chaotic realities. "Imagine what Joyce could have done with MS Word, a CD-ROM graphic system or modern data base! We don't have to imagine the managed to do it using his own brain-ware. the most influential literary work of this period was produced by James Joyce. In Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, Joyce fissioned and sliced the grammatical structure of language into thought bytes. Joyce was not only a writer he was also a word-processor, a protohacker. He reduced complex ideas to elemental units and endlessly recombined them at will. He assembled and reassembled thoughts into fugal, repetitious and contrapuntal patterns. The fact that he was semi-blind and dyslexic also helped. "Personal computer owners are discovering that the brain is the ultimate organ for pleasure and awareness. An array of one hundred billion microcomputers are waiting to be booted up; to be activated stimulated, and programmed. They wait impatiently for the arrival of software, head-ware and 'thought-ware that pays respect to its awesome potential. This makes possible electronic Internet linkage with other brains. "Human society has now reached a turning point in the operation of the digital programs of evolution, a point at which the next evolutionary step of the species becomes apparent to us, to surf at will. The sanctity of our body images along with the irrational taboo about sex and death, seems to be one of the most persistent anachronisms of thought in the industrial age. The human being of the future may be a bio-computer hybrid of any desired form or an 'electronic entity' in the digital information universe." If these last thoughts of Dr. Timothy Leary are to be seen as an exploration into the future, he very well may not only be the last American Hero but also the last completely Human Hero. No matter how we view Timothy Leary, we can be sure that nothing happens before its time. And if Tim hadn't led the charge into the counter culture the 'times' would have sent someone else to the forefront to do the job. |
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