Tomorrowland

Hallucinations, Inc.

Album cover for the self-titled 1968 release by UFO club psych-rockers Tomorrow.

“No one I think is in my tree
I mean it must be high or low
That is you know you can’t tune in but it’s alright
That is I think it’s not too bad” 

- Strawberry Fields Forever, Lennon/McCartney 

The family and I boarded the marshmallow hovercraft (a.k.a. the 6 train) and floated uptown this weekend to see “Summer of Love,” the Whitney Museum's epic psychedelic art show.

Incredibly, the show wasn’t too cheesy, narrowly avoiding the full-bore “Hard Rock Café on acid” boomerfest I anticipated. The curators certainly aimed to please, so the abundance of Janis and Stones memorabilia was to be expected. And yeah, too many Fillmore West posters. But! The oozy, primordial lightshows and Soft Machine soundtracks redeemed the exhibit’s worst transgressions.  

Successful historical reenactments from the show included: Verner Panton’s incredible “fantasy landscape” environment, which the kids and I crawled around in for awhile; the go-go techno-futurist designs from the Archigram collective; promo posters from Joe Boyd’s UFO club (AMM and Pink Floyd once played there on the SAME NIGHT, people!); and the Mati Klarwein lightbox room – literally a walk-in cube of lightboxes showcasing Klarwein’s work (he of Bitches Brew and Abraxas album cover fame).

Lots to see and touch, plus a decent audio guide that my daughter Kyra Leaf seemed to enjoy more than anyone else. (Apparently she’s a huge fan of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which she listened to on a loop for at least half an hour. As she said, “I would eat the tangerine trees, Daddy.”)

The visit to the Whitney effortlessly coincided with my reading of Joe Boyd's music biz memoir, White Bicycles. If you’ve ever blissed out to Nick Drake’s “River Man” or surrendered to the folk spirits of Incredible String Band’s “Mercy I Cry City,” then you know the guy’s work. That said, the book is beyond amazing, not just as a historical document but as memoir… his personal recollections are alternately hilarious and stupefying and erudite and bizarre. He gave us Nick. He gave us Fairport. And he gave us the Deliverance theme song. (Yes. The banjos.) A proper review is forthcoming; until then, just buy the book. You won’t be disappointed.

UFOs over New York! UFOs over Tomorrowland!

The Peculiar Etymology of "Quaalude"

Because nothing is too inconsequential to blog about, I share the origin of one of the pharmaceutical industry's more, ahem, popular releases: the Quaalude. From the entry at Answers.com:

"The trademark Quaalude for the sedative and hypnotic agent methaqualone is an example of how a product name is carefully chosen for a positive public response. Methaqualone was developed in the 1960s by William H. Rorer, Inc. At that time, the company's best-known product was Maalox, a digestive aid that derived its name from its ingredients, magnesium and aluminum hydroxides.

To enhance the product recognition of their new sedative drug, the company incorporated the aa of Maalox into the name Quaalude. The other elements of the name are presumed to be a contraction of the phrase quiet interlude, a soothing, even poetic description of the drug's effect."

Estados Alterados

Flickr user ex-novo has uploaded a brilliant collection of Spanish pharmaceutical ads from the 1950s-70s. The supersaturated designs remind me of vintage sci-fi book covers, all twisty shapes and sans serifed type. Themes of connectivity, transformation and revitalization abound.

Fungal Solutions

A new study reported by the BBC reveals that psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms, may have a therapeutic effect on sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder.   

The last time a study was published on the medical benefits of psilocybin was 30 years ago. Maybe this is stating the obvious, but isn't 30 years a bit long to wait for research on the healing effects of a naturally-occuring compound with no known fatal dose?

Unlike Prozac, Tylenol, table salt or potatoes, one cannot OD on this fungi. The anecdotal evidence for their healing properties is overwhelming, and yet, and yet... they're classified by the FDA as a Schedule 1 drug, with no medical value whatsoever.

Perhaps the fungi's lack of addictive properties makes it of little use to the pharmaceutical industry. No addiction means no repeat customers, and that's certainly a businessman's worst nightmare.

[via Mind Hacks]

Mindfulness

I Want A New Drug

Ospolot® and Serenace® ads from Psychiatria et Neurologia Japonica, 1970

Fascinating gallery of Japanese psychiatric advertising from vintage medical journals. Mostly pharmaceutical-related, the ads demonstrate a bleak, haunted aesthetic that flirts with the surreal in several ways. Madness, nightmare, hallucination and paranoia inform the entire gallery. It's the absolute antithesis of today's cuddly Zoloft blob anti-anxiety advertising. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, anyone?

A Rainbow in Curved Hair

.Net magazine cover by Saiman Chow

Great article in the new Print magazine about contemporary psychedelic design.

Author James Gaddy might be the first to successfully articulate this new wave "aggressive sensory overload" aesthetic. It's a look embodied by Black Dice album covers, Stardust advertising, and the work of Saiman Chow (look up!). The parallels to 60s design are legion, from the "rebellion" against sober forebears to the supersaturated colorburst palette. From the article:

"Like the prism on the album cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, this [new] lens fractures both the colors and undulating rhythms of throwback psychedelia into a new style, one that incorporates ’80s pop-culture references, underground comics, anime, science-fiction archetypes, street art, kaleidoscopic filters, and tongue-in-cheek clip art: multicolored rainbows, stars, and geometric shapes set to Atari video-game sound effects."

It's a candy-coated universe, for sure. It goes down easy, leaves you dizzy and maybe a little sick afterwards. It's more than slightly juvenile. But the kiddie-cool aspect is offset by a hyperdimensional buzz that taps into deeper cultural rhythms: it's a free-associative slang that connects the dots, then blasts them further into a million little pieces. Glass shards on the beach, washed over by wave after bubbly wave. I'll take a 30-second Nike ad by one of these guys over half the crap found in any given SoHo gallery.

Notes From Underground

Tunnels? Check!

Secret hydraulic doors? Check!

Camouflaged escape hatch? Check!

Super-ambitious, devilishly-illegal subterranean grow lab? Dubble check!

[via craplinks]

Fungi Bewilderscapes

Researchers with the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions have just published a report stating that a substance in certain mushrooms induced powerful, mind-altering experiences among a group of well-educated, middle-age men and women.

So what, right? Shrooms have been used as a spiritual technology for thousands of years by many a village shaman and intrepid mindsurfer. What differentiates this study is that it's one of the only academic studies to systematically assess the effects of naturally-occuring, hallucinogenic substances in 40 years. The science community pretty much was forced to abandon research into psychoactive agents since 1970. That was when the US government classified them as Schedule 1 drugs, having "no currently accepted medical use in the United States." Perhaps this study, conducted by one of the top research institutes in the world, will help to overcome the government's disinformation campaign waged for much of the 20th century.

From the Wall Street Journal article:

[Johns Hopkins researchers] said that the episodes generally led to positive changes in attitude and behavior among the 36 volunteer participants and that the changes appeared to last at least two months. Participants cited feelings of intense joy, "distance from ordinary reality," and feelings of peace and harmony after taking the drug. Two-thirds described the effects of the drug, called psilocybin, as among the five most meaningful experiences of their lives.

[Also: 3DChem features a great interactive 3D model of the psilocybin molecule.]