Salvador Dalí and filmmaker José Montes-Baquer, in honor of underappreciated Surrealist Poet Raymond Roussel, shot a fake documentary of an non-expedition to Mongolia in search of gigantic mythic hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Tag: 1970s
The CIA and Psychedelics: From Timothy Leary to the Unabomber
Jeffery St. Clair and the late Alexander Cockburn wrote about the history of CIA-associated psychologists such as 1960s psychedelic pitchman Timothy Leary using LSD and psilocybin, and their effects on subjects, like the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.
Throbbing Gristle’s Industrial Emotions Broke Noisy Ground
The first band ever to be called “industrial,” Throbbing Gristle’s confrontational live performances and use of disturbing imagery, mixed with pre-recorded tape samples and special effects, created a distorted sound performance, quite ground-breaking in its time. Spinoff bands Psychic TV and Chris and Cosey continued to shock and beautify into the 1980s.
Delia Derbyshire: ’60s Science Fiction Sound Art
Watch “The Delian Mode” a documentary on the innovative electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire, who worked from 1960 to 1973 at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. She utilized both real-life and ‘artificial’ electronic sounds in her compositions using a musical style known as Musique Concrète.
Lucifer Rising: God of Light and Color in Experimental Film
Lucifer Rising is Kenneth Anger’s portrait of the love generation, the dawning of a new age and morality. Inspired by the ancient solar religions and conceived with occultist Aleister Crowley’s vision of the Age of Aquarius.
J. G. Ballard: Atrocity Exhibition and the Modernist Motorcar Dystopia
“The Atrocity Exhibition” is J.G. Ballard’s instruction manual in how to disrupt mass media and recontextualize technology in a dystopian landscape overrun with industrial waste and technological white noise. Watch the piece on Ballard and the Motorcar, that careens across the landscape of his controversial novel, “Crash.”
Communal Utopia: The Farm in Rural Tennessee
Once the largest hippie commune in the US, the Farm persists as an intentional community in rural Tennessee, based on principles of nonviolence and respect for the Earth. It now advocates permaculture, sustainable and renewable energy, a vegetarian diet, and midwifery.