Stuff

Stuff is a short documentary of John Frusciante's house. It was made in 1993 by Johnny Depp and the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers, Gibby Haynes. Dr. Timothy Leary is also present in the video. The film's main purpose was to depict the chaos of Frusciante's life. It was once aired in a Dutch TV show called Lola Da Musica, and was released in the '90s as a rare promo VHS. "Untitled #2" from Frusciante's Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt is featured on this film with a poem read over it. Also featured in the film is an otherwise unreleased Frusciante song.

Video: http://vimeo.com/8992318

furry furnace

you were young
a thin black cat
feeling fire between
his eyes
a giddy mutant
smelling of smoke
and orchids
a mangy dancer in
moon dust
they threw bottles
at your head
threw spears of light
at the dark side of
man you never see
the face of man
on forest's floor
leaves of grass
bought by the ounce

then
through the sand
castles in their mouths
from the angelic
whispers of jesters
you heard the king's demands
you owed them guts
and fur
the fur your ancestors
wrapped around silent machines
in the night
and you gave up a thousand dream
bodies to gentle laughing lions
shaped your unbridled
entropy and
sniffed out alien mischief
in scorched fields
read horoscopes to particles
read sutras to lizards
but you couldn't shape
the world of squares

it busted up
the stars in your eyes
reeling in moebius ten strips
in a rollercoaster blooming
strange flowers all
the way down
no one really saw it
the distant planet
all it had was motion
and time
beauty blew through you
and swirled crackling
around the others
but you couldn't shape
the world of squares
the corpse of the Illuminati
still dancing on
strings held by
scared children

woe is the freakyheaded
child who loveslovesloves
even the boot heel pressed
into his heart
wild is the burst of light
the inflation
of smooth starry blowoffs
the byzantine puppets
of stardust grokking
how stars died for their
sinlessness
long gone lights of
true benevolence
asking for no penance
for they gave what
they came to give
and yet they called
to you
to pledge fealty
to beauty

you couldn't shape
what has no shape
you know it now
why you couldn't change
what is only change with
a face
you couldn't see it
until the faces all changed
giving generations
to the earth
life to the tomb
the mask dissolved in
its own energy
and you saw the true face
the face of nobody
the cool water that
a long year's desert
concealed in transparency
it was zen
and the bald-faced
love of a woman
of nobody
you are nobody's fool

now
you are young
a thin black cat
feeling fire between
his shoulders
nowhere to go today
but something's always
happening

Wikiquotes: Timothy Leary

•  We always have urged people: Don't take LSD unless you are very well prepared, unless you are specifically prepared to go out of your mind. Don't take it unless you have someone that's very experienced with you to guide you through it. And don't take it unless you are ready to have your perspective on yourself and your life radically changed, because you're gonna be a different person, and you should be ready to face this possibility.
  • Documentary CBC: "How To Go Out of Your Mind: The LSD Crisis" (1966)

• People use the word "natural" ... What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the sunday school teachings.
  • LSD: Methods of Control (1966)

• Art's certainly made a lot of money, and got on a lot of shows — he got himself into the Nixon White House riding on the death of his daughter. And I think that's ghoulish! That's ghoulish.
  • In a Stanley Siegel interview (c. 1977), with phone commentary by Art Linkletter who blamed his daughter's death on her involvement with LSD.

• I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.
  • As quoted in Shout! (1981) by Philip Norman, p. 365; and in An Encyclopedia of Quotations about Music (1981) by Nat Shapiro, p. 303

• If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.
  • Changing My Mind, Among Others (1982)

• "Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interact harmoniously with the world around you — externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity."
  • Flashbacks (1983)

• Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
  • As quoted in Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1987) by Robert Byrne, #40

• We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.
  • Interview by David Sheff in Rolling Stone Twentieth Anniversary Issue (1987)

• Think for yourself and question authority.
  • Timothy Leary's track on Sound Bites from the Counter Culture (1989)

• That’s the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA.
  • Discussing CNN’s Crossfire as quoted in Rolling Stone (14 December 1989)

• I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan.
  • At the Neo-Pagan Starwood Festival (July 1991), recorded on Timothy Leary Live at Starwood (2001) by the Association for Consciousness Exploration ISBN 1-59157-002-6

• The universe is an intelligence test.
  • As quoted in Cosmic Trigger : Final Secret of the Illuminati (1993) by Robert Anton Wilson, p. 170

Our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos...

• Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political, the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing — forming in our minds — their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.
  • How to Operate Your Brain (1994), a guided meditation spoken by Timothy Leary and set to music.

• I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life.
  • Chaos and Cyber Culture (1994)

The drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

• A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.
  • The Psychedelic Experience (1995)

• Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.
  • The Intelligence Agents (1996)

You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.

• Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim. The Christians say "you are a sinner", and you better just zip up your trousers and give the money to the pope and we'll give you a room up in the hotel in the sky.
  • Timothy Leary's Last Trip (1997)

• We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.
  • On the Castalia Institute in Millbrook, New York; quoted in Storming Heaven : LSD and the American Dream (1998) by Jay Stevens, p. 208

• You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind.
  • As quoted in Office Yoga : Simple Stretches for Busy People (2000) by Darrin Zeer, p. 52

• In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.
  • As quoted in The Best Advice Ever for Teachers (2001) by Charles McGuire and Diana Abitz, p. 57

• Why not?
  • Said repeatedly, with various inflections, these were among his last words before his death (31 May 1996), as quoted in "Timothy Leary's Last Moments" by Carol Rosin. Some have stated his final intelligible word was "Beautiful".

• At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.
  • As quoted in Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia : How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings (2005), by Rob Brezsny, p. 8

• Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.
  • As quoted in Still Casting Shadows : A Shared Mosaic of U.S. History (2006) by B. Clay Shannon, p. 376

• I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration.
  • On being brought back to life, during the period in which he considered putting his body into cyronic suspension, as quoted in The Nastiest Things Ever Said About Republicans (2006) by Martin Higgins, p. 130

• Seven million people I turned on, and only one hundred thousand have come by to thank me.
  • Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club (2010), p. 202

The DEA Took My Future Drugs Away

In the cyberpunk comic book Transmetropolitan it is many years in the future and the DEA is forbidden from banning drugs that don't yet exist, but new substances are being created and distributed constantly by machines called Makers that intelligently reorganize matter. Though it takes the DEA only 20 minutes to ban a drug after its creation, there are always new drugs on the market. Anything that is more than a few hours old is considered archaic and inferior.

Though this comic was written in the 90s, it does seem to have predicted our current drug trends. I just hope that the DEA never has the ability to outlaw non-existent chemicals based on molecular association. Perhaps the worst thing would be for them make it illegal to merely develop a compound based on its similarity in chemical structure to something that was already needlessly banned. At that point, the mere intention to bring various arrangements of atoms into being becomes a thought crime and they have far, far too much power.

Now that we've fully committed the crime of outlawing nature as we know it, the next step is to outlaw all these alien forms of gnosis before they even have a name. Not only are we at war with known elements of the world that bring us to terms with the unknown, we are now at war with the unknown itself. This is a logical, albeit twisted and very unfortunate, progression for those in power of collective fear. Because anything in the realm of the unmanifest can be a catalyst for the kind of social upheaval that could usurp those in power, they are trying to build their walls closer and closer to the source of all possibility, to isolate and eventually eradicate chaos.

When will we learn that the goddess can not be chained? Our laws are merely creating a ritual, and not a particularly enjoyable one at that, by which we sacrifice ourselves to chaos.

Documentary: Know Your Mushrooms

 

KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS follows uber myco visionaries Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans (two of the more expert and unforgettably mercurial characters in the community) as they lead us on a hunt for the wild mushroom and the deeper cultural experiences attached to the mysterious fungi.

Combining material filmed at the Telluride Mushroom Fest with animation and archival footage along with a neo-psychedelic soundtrack by the Flaming Lips, KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS opens the doors to perception, takes the audience on a longer, stranger trip and delivers them to a brave new world where the fungi might well guide humanity to a saner, safer place… with extra cheese…

CONSUMER WARNING: Don’t Go Into The Forest Without This Movie!

http://sphinxproductions.com/films/mushrooms/ 

If you know your mycology, this movie might not be the most informative piece of media for you, but I recommend it nonetheless because it is entertaining, sometimes even cute. It starts out quite normal, maybe to rope in the squares, and eventually gets very McKenna-esque. Though the movie is brief, they do try to cover every possibility in the relationship between humans and mushrooms. The characters are enigmatic old hippie wanderers in a sense and yet know their stuff very well. I learned from one of them that reishi mushrooms can be very effective in treating psoriasis.

One should be able to find a torrent of the DVD rip online, just as I did. You probably won't regret it.