Hammer of Los wrote:Now excuse me, I have to go start a new thread entitled "Materialism-Induced Delusional Syndrome."
Materialism is a delusion, you know. A useful one, perhaps.
Fabulous!
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by American Dream » Mon Nov 07, 2011 11:18 pm
Hammer of Los wrote:Now excuse me, I have to go start a new thread entitled "Materialism-Induced Delusional Syndrome."
Materialism is a delusion, you know. A useful one, perhaps.
by American Dream » Mon Nov 07, 2011 11:48 pm
Hammer of Los wrote:That article you posted there undead really made my hackles rise for any number of reasons. You probably know that already.
by Hammer of Los » Tue Nov 08, 2011 12:05 am
American Dream wrote:Continues at: http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/zweig.htmlIlluminating the Shadow:
An Interview with Connie Zweig
By Scott London
In psychology, the dark side of human nature is often described as the alter ego, the id, or the lower self. The great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called it the "shadow." By shadow, he meant the negative side of the personality, the sum total of all those unpleasant qualities that we would prefer to hide.
Connie Zweig
While Carl Jung coined the term "the shadow," the idea of a dark side of human nature dates back to antiquity and has figured in some of our most famous stories and myths, from the dark brother in the Bible to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
For psychotherapist Connie Zweig, the shadow represents one of the most important yet least understood aspects of human nature. We all have a shadow, she says. The challenge is to meet it face-to-face. Unless we come to terms with our own dark side, she says, we're condemned to be its victim.
Connie Zweig is the author of Romancing the Shadow. She has also edited a bestselling anthology on the subject called Meeting the Shadow. Zweig is the founder of the Institute for Shadow-Work and Spiritual Psychotherapy in Los Angeles.
Scott London: Of all the metaphors that have been used to illustrate the shadow in recent years, my favorite is Robert Bly's image of the big bag we drag behind us.
Connie Zweig: Yes, he said that we spend the first half of our lives putting everything into the bag and the second half pulling it out.
London: What did Carl Jung have in mind when he formulated this idea?
Zweig: He believed that everything that is in our conscious awareness is in the light. But everything of substance which stands in the light — whether it's a tree or an idea — also casts a shadow. And that which stands in the darkness is outside of our awareness.
As Jung saw it, the shadow operated at several levels. First, there is the part of the mind that is outside of our awareness. He called this the personal unconscious or personal shadow. That is the conditioned part of us that we acquire from our experiences in our childhood when that which is unacceptable, as determined by the adults around us, is cast into shadow. It may be sadness or sexual curiosity. Or it may be our creative dreams and desires. That's personal shadow. But there is another level as well. Jung also talked about the "collective unconscious" or the "archetypal shadow."
London: What are some of the most common manifestations of the personal shadow?
Zweig: The personal shadow is that part of us that erupts spontaneously and unexpectedly when we do something self-destructive, or something that is hurtful to someone else. Afterwards, we know it's been around because we feel humiliated, ashamed, and guilty.
For example, one of my patients — a young woman in her 20s — has had a series of brief relationships in which she very quickly has unprotected sex with men she does not know. She feels so devastated afterwards, filled with shock and self-hatred. She says, "How could I? I thought I saw this the last time. I thought I'd never do it again. I thought I really understood why I was doing it, and that it would never happen again. And here I am. I can't believe it." This is her shadow — her sexual shadow is acting out in ways that are bringing her terrible pain and grief.
I would say the personal shadow is that part of us that feels like it can't be tamed, can't be controlled. For instance, many parents who struggle with their children with impulses of rage that rise up, and they yell, or maybe even hit the child. Then, afterwards, they say to themselves, "Oh, my God, I can't believe I did that. Who am I?" That's the shadow.
London: There have been a spate of books and conferences about the shadow in recent years. Why do you think this subject has become so popular now?
Zweig: In some ways our collective denial has broken down. I think that has been happening gradually since the 1960s. We've lost faith in politicians. We watch them enact their own shadows in the headlines everyday. And we have lost faith, to some extent, in celebrity heroes because we read about their failings and double-lives everyday in the news. I also think that a lot of people in the New Age or counter-culture — people who have been really involved in spirituality and Eastern philosophy — have had experiences in which either their teachers or their communities broke their hearts in some way.
And on a larger scale, there are so many topics that were in the cultural shadow which are now out in the light. For example, domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse, alcoholism in epidemic proportions. These are topics that would not have been commonly spoken about 20 years ago and are now understood by everyone.
by Hammer of Los » Tue Nov 08, 2011 12:20 am
American Dream wrote:Hammer of Los wrote:That article you posted there undead really made my hackles rise for any number of reasons. You probably know that already.
The article didn't raise my hackles but it did help me remember some things:
That little UFO cult in Arizona, led by the guy who wrote so many books on his out of body experiences with aliens- most of which seemed to involve having sex with beautiful cosmonauts from afar. His wife was delighted with our visit before their meditation, saying, "I just know I'm going to have an OB tonight!" Their teenage son who just wanted so desperately to be a normal kid but never would be....
Looking for UFO's in the Southern California desert, dizzy from all the mushrooms. convinced that the stars were moving due to alien intelligence. When the police helicopter almost landed, I was nearly apoplectic but no alien visitation that night- the cops were jus having fun with us, I guess...
Those weird Aleister Crowley people, including the one who kept trying to hypnotize me....
Reading Benjamin Creme almost 30 years ago and being convinced that it was all true- Maitreya would reveal himself so soon! ( and the Masters of Wisdom).
The neighbors in the commune who I now think tortured dogs alive- at the time I thought the bodies were half bone, half mummified flesh due to pyramid power or something...
The people who did try to fuck with my mind when I was tripping- they represented an organized group...
The Japanese monk who said he wanted to walk on my back but really wanted to get in my pants...
The psychic bookstore where they pushed A Course in Miracles on me, till that person left and moved to Alamogordo to open another store...
How weird it was that I ran into those staff people from Jonestown, a month after the massacre. The woman I met later that day who seemed like a puppet and her "friend" was pulling the strings...
Taking so seriously the claims about "walk-ins" and psychokinesis for all...
The guy from the New Age "cult" who wanted to marry me off to his sister and seal me in to their group.
My classmate in high school who told me about the weird cult he met on Halloween that used sex to manipulate him, got him strung out on weird drug combinations, convinced him to burn down a church etc. (He wound up in a mental hospital).He alternated between them and a Jesus cult which uses private planes to run orphans around the Caribbean...
You know- that sort of thing...
(These are only a few of the stories which I feel like sharing)
by American Dream » Tue Nov 08, 2011 12:30 am
Hammer of Los wrote:That was a great article, but some of the articles you post are extremely prejudiced hitpieces, usually against some largely imaginary "foe" the capitalist corporate new ager who preaches quietism in the face of appalling social, economic, legal injustices, war and so on. I don't recognise at all this figure that is attacked, although I did almost start reading "Golf for Enlightenment" last week by Deepak Chopra. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. It only fell in my lap by chance.
Don't hate on the New Age. Don't hate on anything. Don't be fooled by the labels that are applied. New Age is a label, a tag that can be used to solicit approval or disapproval depending on your emotional response to that. Rise above prejudice and preconception.
You can make the New Age whatever you want it to be.
Me, I'm working on making it a glorious New Era of Integrative Thought.
Hammer of Los wrote:But yes, I do know what you mean AD. I know you are of good intent. I know good intent, if I hear enough of your own words, I can discern a little.
But if there are fakers, it is because there is a real thing also.
God be with you my friend.
by Hammer of Los » Tue Nov 08, 2011 7:37 am
AD wrote:Perhaps you understand those articles I post through your own filter.
AD wrote:My point isn't to say "New Age- bad"- more like "Don't step in the poo".
by American Dream » Tue Nov 08, 2011 9:46 am
The world of the subject is the night: that changeable, infinitely suspect night which, in the sleep of reason, produces monsters. I submit that madness itself gives a rarefied idea of the free 'subject,' unsubordinated to the 'real' order and occupied only with the present.
by American Dream » Tue Nov 08, 2011 12:21 pm
Hammer of Los wrote:AD wrote:My point isn't to say "New Age- bad"- more like "Don't step in the poo".
I do know that AD. Your caveats are certainly well taken by me. However I will say some of the writers you quote in articles do seem to have a real bee in their bonnet about "New Agers," who they seem to simply despise. It's very silly and ignorant.
by American Dream » Tue Nov 08, 2011 10:47 pm
by American Dream » Wed Nov 09, 2011 8:52 am
Cults
Some abductees I have spoken to have been directed to join certain religious/philosophical sects. These cults often bear close examination.
The leaders of these groups tend to be "ex"-CIA operatives, or Special Forces veterans. They are often linked through personal relations, even though they espouse widely varying traditions. I have heard unsettling reports that the leaders of some of these groups have used hypnosis, drugs, or "mind machines" on their charges. Members of these cults have reported periods of missing time during ceremonies or "study periods."
I strongly urge abduction researchers to examine closely any small "occult" groups an abductee might join. For example, one familiar leader of the UFO fringe - a man well-known for his espousal of the doctrine of "love and light" - is Virgil Armstrong, a close personal friend of General John Singlaub, the notorious Iran-Contra player, who recently headed the neo-fascist World Anti-Communist League. Armstrong, who also happens to be an ex-Green Beret and former CIA operative, figured into my inquiry in an interesting fashion: An abductee of my acquaintance was told - by her "entities," naturally - to seek out this UFO spokesman and join his "sky-watch" activities, which, my source alleges, included a mass channelling session intended to send debilitating "negative" vibrations to Constantine Chernenko, then the leader of the Soviet Union. Of course, intracerebral voices may have a purely psychological origin, so Armstrong can hardly be held to task for the abductee's original "directive." Still, his past associations with military intelligence inevitably bring disturbing possibilities to mind.
Even more ominous than possible ties between UFO cults and the intelligence community are the cults' links with the shadowy I AM group, founded by Guy Ballard in the 1930s.According to researcher David Stupple, "If you look at the contactee groups today, you'll see that most of the stable, larger ones are actually neo-I AM groups, with some sort of tie to Ballard's organization." This cult, therefore, bears investigation.
Guy Ballard's "Mighty I AM Religious Activity," grew, in large part, out of William Dudley Pelly's Silver Shirts, an American Nazi organization. Although Ballard himself never openly proclaimed Nazi affiliation, his movement was tinged with an extremely right-wing political philosophy, and in secret meetings he "decreed" the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. The I AM philosophy derived from Theosophy, and in this author's estimation bears a more-than-cursory resemblance to the Theosophically-based teachings that informed the proto-Nazi German occult lodges.
After the war, Pelley (who had been imprisoned for sedition during the hostilities) headed an occult-oriented organization call Soulcraft, based in Noblesville, Indiana. Another Soulcraft employee was the controversial contactee George Hunt Williamson (real name: Michel d'Obrenovic), who co-authored UFOs CONFIDENTIAL with John McCoy, a proponent of the theory that a Jewish banking conspiracy was preventing disclosure of the solution to the UFO mystery. Later, Williamson founded the I AM-oriented Brotherhood of the Seven Rays in Peru. Another famed contactee, George Van Tassel, was associated with Pelley and with the notoriously anti-Semitic Reverend Wesley Swift (founder of the group which metamorphosed into the Aryan Nations).
The most visible offspring of I AM is Elizabeth Clare Prophet's Church Universal and Triumphant, a group best-known for its massive arms caches in underground bunkers. CUT was recently exposed in COVERT ACTION INFORMATION BULLETIN as a conduit of CIA funds, and according to researcher John Judge, has ties to organizations allied to the World Anti-Communist League. Prophet is becoming involved in abduction research and has sponsored presentations by Budd Hopkins and other prominent investigators. In his book THE ARMSTRONG REPORT: ETs AND UFOs: THEY NEED US, WE DON'T NEED THEM[sic], Virgil Armstrong directs troubled abductees toward Prophet's group. (Perhaps not insignificantly, he also suggests that abductees plagued by implants alleviate their problem by turning to "the I AM force" within.)
Another UFO channeller, Frederick Von Mierers, has promulgated both a cult with a strong I AM orientation and an apparent con-game involving over-appraised gemstones. Mierers is an anti-Semite who contends that the Holocaust never happened and that the Jews control the world's wealth.
UFORUM is a flying saucer organization popular with Los Angeles-area abductees; its founder is Penny Harper, a member of a radical Scientology breakaway group which connects the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard with pronouncements against "The Illuminati" (a mythical secret society) and other betes noir familiar from right-wing conspiracy literature. Harper directs members of her group to read THE SPOTLIGHT, an extremist tabloid (published by Willis Carto's Liberty Lobby) which denies the reality of the Holocaust and posits a "Zionist" scheme to control the world.
More than one unwary abductee has fallen in with groups such as those listed above. It isn't difficult to imagine how some of these questionable groups might mold an abductee's recollection of his experience - and perhaps help direct his future actions.
Some modern abductees, with otherwise-strong claims, claim encounters with blond, "Nordic" aliens reminiscent of the early contactee era. Surely, the "Nordic" appearance of these aliens sprang from the dubious spiritual tradition of Van Tassell, Ballard, Pelley, McCoy, etc. Why, then, are some modern abductees seeing these very same other-worldly Uebermenschen?
One abductee of my acquaintance claims to have had beneficial experiences with these "blond" aliens - who, he believes, came originally from the Pleiades. Interestingly, in the late 1960s, the psychopathically anti-Semitic Rev. Wesley Swift predicted this odd twist in the abduction tale. In a broadcast "sermon," he spoke at length about UFOs, claiming that there were "good" aliens and "bad" aliens. The good ones, he insisted, were tall, blond Aryans - who hailed from the Pleiades. He made this pronouncement long before the current trends in abduction lore.
Could some of the abductions be conducted by an extreme right-wing element within the national security establishment? Disagreeable as the possibility seems, we should note that the "lunatic right" is represented in all other walks of life; certainly hard-rightists have taken positions within the military-intelligence complex as well.
by Hammer of Los » Wed Nov 09, 2011 9:03 am
by American Dream » Wed Nov 09, 2011 9:40 am
by American Dream » Wed Nov 09, 2011 3:28 pm
American Dream wrote:http://hqinfo.blogspot.com/2008/10/inside-dope-lsd-in-britain.html
INSIDE DOPE: LSD IN BRITAIN
Wish you were here
Mojo, September 1996
He was Pink Floyd's astral voyager who went too far, the star-child of psychedelia who never returned from his journey to inner space.
Nearly 30 years after his brief creative shining, the cult of Syd Barrett continues to fascinate new generations. Cliff Jones investigates the truth behind the myth of the original Crazy Diamond.
In a private ward at the Adenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, where a Barrett Room is named in honour of his late father, the respected pathologist, Syd Barrett lies resting. He is now almost totally blind, following complications arising from diabetes. The prognosis isn't good if he does not routinely take the prescribed insulin, and Barrett seems either incapable or unwilling to do so by himself. Since the death of his mother Winifred in 1991, Syd has often lapsed into diabetic coma, apparently unconcerned about his helth. However, he is watched over by a tight network of understanding relatives and neighbours.
When he's healthy, Syd lives a peaceful, comfortable life in one of a secluded row of semi-detached houses on the outskirts of Cambridge. His earnigns from his recordings are substantial and he wants for very little, though he chooses a modest existence. Nevertheless, he is still in an emotionally precatious state; talk of his illustrious past can trigger bouts of depression, sometimes stretching to weeks. For this reason, none of his former colleagues in Pink Floyd have direct contact with him anymore.
Barrett's mental illness has provided the rock world with some of its most enduring anecdotes. What should be remembered, though, is that behind these acts of inspired eccentricity lay a creative but profoundly confused mind and an unhappy individual. Though Syd's moment was only briefly bright, his wild worldview continues to delight listeners and his life still influences the work of Pink Floyd. The word "genius" is often attached to his memory as fans wax fondly about his child-like, trippy songs that came to define British psychedelia. Former friends have been known to refer to him as "almost too talanted". But was he a visionary or simply a regular middle-class kid with a fixation on his idyllic childhood who blew his mind for eternity on too much high-grade acid?
...Meanwhile, other Cambridge friends, Ian 'Imo' Moore, Dave Gale, Storm Thorgerson and Nigel Gordon, had been experimenting with a phial of pure liquid LSD-25. Gordon had married and moved to London to become a filmmaker and made a connection with Michael Hollingshead, the Englishman who'd turned Timothy Leary on to the yet-to-be-criminalised hallucinogenic. "Hollingshead was passionate. Once he arrived everyone was spiked," recalls journalist Miles. "He turned Leary on and he wanted to turn the rest of the world on too."
Moore and Gordon were anxious to initiate Syd into the ways of the new wonder drug. Moore set up a psychedelic garden party at Gale's home while his parents were away on holiday. The friends laced sugarcubes with generous doses of liquid LSD, and, having absorbed the drug through their skin, were tripping by the time Syd arrived. Barrett took his cube with little idea of what to expect and spent the next 12 hours, according to Storm Thorgerson, "lost in space". Syd seized an orange and a plum from the household fruit bowl and carried them everywhere during his trip. In his altered state the fruits came to represent the planets Jupiter and Venus. Syd imagined himself suspended in place between the two planets for hours until someone ate his plum (Venus) and his universe collapsed."We were all seeking higher elevation and wanted everyone to experience this incredible drug," says Gordon. "Syd was very self-obsessed and uptight in many ways so we thought it was a good idea. In retrospect I don't think he was equipped to deal with the experience because he was unstable to begin with. Syd was a very simple person who was having very profound experiences that he found it hard to deal with."
Stage Five: Breakdown
David Gilmour: I remember I really started to get worried when I went along to the session for 'See Emily Play'. Syd was still functioning, but he definitely wasn't the person I knew. He looked through you. He wasn't quite there. He was strange even t hen. That stare, you know?
June Bolan: I went through all of Syd's acid breakdowns. He used to go to the Youth Hostel in Holland Park, climb up on the roof and get wrecked and get spaced and he'd walk all the way to Shepherd's Bush where I was living. He used to come round to my house at five in the morning covered in mud from Holland Park when he'd freaked out and the police chased him. I meant money, meant wages, meant security to him.
Peter Jenner: Even at that point, Syd actually knew what was happening to him. 'Jugband Blues' is a really sad song, the portrait of a nervous breakdown. 'Jugband Blues' is the ultimate self-diagnosis on a state of schizophrenia.
JUGBAND BLUES (from 'Saucerful of Secrets')
It's awfully considerate of you to think of me here
And I'm much obliged to you for making it clear
That I'm not here.
And what exactly is a dream?
And what exactly is a joke?
Storm Thorgerson: (When Syd stayed with Storm in Kensington) Syd was well into his 'orbiting' phrase by then. He was traveling very fast in his own private sphere and I thought I could be a mediator of some sort. Y'see, I think you're going to have to ma ke the point that Syd's madness was not caused by any linear progression of events, but more a circular haze of situations that meshed together on top of themselves and Syd. Me, I couldn't handle those stares though!
June Bolan: Syd Barrett had this quality like a candle that was about to be snuffed out at any minute. Really all illumination. An extraordinary, wonderful man. He took lots of LSD. Lots of people can take some LSD and cope with it in their lives, but if you take three or four trips every day....and then, because it was the done drug, you'd go round somebody's house for a cup of tea and they'd spike it. People did this to Syd.
Peter Jenner: 101 Cromwell Road was the catastrophic flat where Syd got acided out. Acid in the coffee every morning, that's what we were told. He had one of our cats and they gave the cat acid. Then he got taken up by Storm and Po from Hipgnosis who put him up in their flat on Brompton Road just by South Kensington tube station. They knew him very well an they suffered with him going down: they were very supportive and tried to keep him with us. We rescued him from Cromwell Road, which was run by he avy, loony messianic acid freaks.
Mick Rock: (Syd's flat was) a burnt-out place, the biggest hovel, the biggest shit-heap; a total acid-shell, the craziest flat in the world. There were so many people, it was like a railway station. Two cats Syd had, one called Pink and one called Floyd, were still living in the flat after he left. He just left them there. Those were the cats they used to give acid to. You know what heavy dope scenes were like.
John Marsh: Syd was one of the earliest acid casualties. He lived in a flat in the Cromwell Road with various characters, among whom was a psychotic kind of character called Scotty. He was one of the original acid-in-the-reservoir, change-the-face-of-the-world missionaries. He was also a desperately twisted freak and really malovelent crazy. Everyone knew that if you went round to see Syd never have a cup of tea, never take a glass of water unless you got it yourself from the tap and even then be des perately worried, because Scotty's thing was spiking everything. By this time, Syd was living on a diet that must have been comprised of 80% acid. Poor old Syd was really in the poo.
Ian Moore: (friend of Syd) We got hold of some liquid LSD bottles, laid out hundreds of sugarcubes in rows and put two drops on each. But the stuff was so strong we were absorbing it through our fingers, or more likely by licking it off them. As it took effect we had no idea which cubes we had done, so many of them probably got double doses while the rest did not have any. Syd had his plum, orange and matchbox and was sitting staring at them during his trip. Whatever he was into was his whole world - to him the plum was the planet Venus and the orange was Jupiter. Syd was floating in space between them.
Syd Barrett: (on whether he had taken too much acid) Well, I don't know, it doesn't seem to have much to do with the job. I only know the thing of playing, of being a musician, was very exciting. Obviously, one was better off with a silver guitar with mirrors and things all over it than people who ended up on the floor or anywhere else in London. The general concept, I didn't feel so conscious of it as perhaps I should. I mean, one's position as a member of London's young people's (I don't know what you'd call it, underground wasn't it?) wasn't necessarily realised and felt, I don't think, especially from the point of view of groups. I remember at UFO, one week one group, then another week another group, going in and out, making that set-up, and I didn't think it was as active as it could've been. I was really surprised that UFO finished. Joe Boyd did all the work on it and I was really amazed when he left. What we were doing was a microcosm of the whole sort of philosophy and it tended to be a little bit cheap. The fact that the show had to be put together; the fact that we weren't living in luxurious places with luxurious things around us. I think I would always advocate that sort of thing, the luxurious life. It's probably because I don't do much work. It was all, I suppose, related to living in London. I was lucky enough...I've always thought of going back to a place where you can drink tea and sit on the carpet. I've been fortunate enough to do that. All that time...you've just reminded me of it. I thought it was good fun.
Peter Jenner: It was all getting too much with Syd, just getting too spacey. The American trip, which Syd went on, was quite extraordinary.
Nick Mason: Syd went mad on that first American tour in the autumn of 1967. He didn't know where he was most of the time. I remember he detuned his guitar onstage in Venice, LA, and he just stood there rattling the strings which was a bit weird, even fo r us.
Glen Buxton: Syd Barrett I remember, (though) I don't remember him ever saying two words. It wasn't because he was a snob; he was a very strange person. He never talked, but we'd be sitting at dinner (at our house in Venice, LA) and all of a sudden I'd pick up the sugar and pass it to him, and he'd shake his head like 'Yeah, thanks,' It was like I heard him say 'Pass the sugar' - it's like telepathy; it really was. It was very weird. You would find yourself right in the middle of doing something, as you were passing the sugar or whatever, and you'd think, 'Well, damn! I didn't hear anybody say anything!' That was the first time in my life I'd ever met anybody that could actually do that freely. And this guy did it all the time.
John Marsh: On their first American tour the Floyd were being taken by some A&R man around Hollywood. They were taken for the classic tour of the stars' homes and so on. And they ended up on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. The band are looking around : 'Hey, made it, Hollywood,' and the A&R man's saying, 'Yes, here we are, the centre of it all, Hollywood and Vine,' and Syd's wandering around the place, wide-eyed, reckless and legged. 'Gee,' he says, 'it's great to be in Las Vegas.'
Peter Jenner: (on the Pink Floyd's lip-synched appearance on 'Dick Clark's Bandstand') Syd wasn't into moving his lips that day.
Andrew King: (tour manager on 1967 American Tour) Eventually we cancelled out on (appearing on) 'Beach Party'
Buxton: The crew used to say he was impossible on the road. They'd fly a thousand miles, get to the gig, he'd get up onstage and wouldn't have a guitar. He would do things like leave all his money in his clothes in the hotel room, or on the plane. Som etimes, they'd have to fly back and pick up his guitar. I didn't pick up that he was a drug casualty, although there were lots at the time who would do those exact things because they were drugged out. But Syd was definitely from Mars or something.
Lindsay Korner: (During the fall of 1967) it got a bit crazed. (By Christmas) Syd had started to act a little bonkers, schizophrenia had set in.
Duggie Fields: Oh, he went more than slightly bonkers, it must have been very difficult for him. I think the pressures on Syd before that time must have upset him very much, the kind of pressure where it takes off very fast, which Pink Floyd did - certai nly in terms of the way people behaved towards them. I used to be speechless at the number of people who would invade our flat, and how they would behave towards anyone who was in the group; especially girls. I'd never seen anything like it. Some of th e girls were stunning, and they would literally throw themselves at Syd. He was the most attractive one; Syd was a very physically attractive person - I think he had problems with that.
Peter Jenner: (When Lindsay Korner turned up on his doorstep after being beaten up by Syd) I couldn't believe it at the time. I had this firm picture of Syd as this really gentle guy, which is what he was, basically.
Sam Hutt: I went to UFO quite a lot. Saw the bands, the very loud music, the oil lights. I remember near the end with Syd, him coming up and somebody had given him a bottle of mandies. Mandies were the big-bouncing around drug, very dodgy indeed, and p robably a very good idea that they took them off the market. Syd appeared on stage with this jar of Brylcreem, having crushed the mandies into little pieces, mixing them up with the Brylcreem and putting this mixture of Brylcreem and broken mandy tablets all over his hair, so that when he went out on stage the heat of the lights melted the Brylcreem and it all started to drip down his face with these bits of Mandrax.
Peter Jenner: He was extraordinarily creative and what happened was catastrophic: a total burnt-out case. All his talent just came out in a flood in two years and then it was burnt out. Syd got burnt out from acid in the coffee every morning.
John Marsh: He was going further and further down the tubes because nobody wished to be thought uncool and take him away from these circumstances. So Syd went down the mine because of the inertia of those around him.
Jenny Fabian: Syd was so beautiful with his violet eyes. I only sort of lay beside him, nothing more could be accomplished. Then he had a breakdown and was gone. He hardly spoke. He would just tolerate me because I was so overpowered, so in awe that I didn't really speak either. I only hung around him for two or three weeks just before he flipped and was virtually removed from the group. I knew Syd was wonderful because he wrote such wonderful songs. He didn't have to speak because the fact that he couldn't speak made him who he was: this prson who wrote they mysterious songs. I just liked looking at him: he was very pretty. A lot of the time with pop stars, when they opne their mouths, it was all completely ruined anyway. So it was perfect that he was like that. My first pop star and it was just wonderful that he didn't speak.
Peter Jenner: It was really stressful waiting for Syd to come up with the songs for the second album. Everybody was looking at him and he couldn't do it. The last Floyd song Syd wrote, 'Vegetable Man', was done for those sessions, though it never came o ut. Syd was around at my house just before he had to go to record and, because a song was needed, he just wrote a description of what he was wearing at the time and threw in a chorus that went 'Vegetable man - where are you?' It's very disturbing. Roge r took it off the album because it was too dark, and it is. It's like psychological flashing.
VEGETABLE MAN (unreleased)
Vegetable man! Where are you?
I've been looking all over the place
for a place for me
But it ain't anywhere
It just ain't anywhere.
He's the kind of fella you just gotta see if you can,
Vegetable man.
Jerry Shirley: When he plays a song, it's very rare that he plays it the same way each time - any song. And some songs are more off-the-wall than others. When he was with the Floyd, towards the very end, Syd came in once and started playing this tune, a nd played it completely different. Every chord change just kept going somewhere else and he'd keep yelling (the title), 'Have you got it yet?' I guess then it was Roger (who kept yelling back, 'No!') who kind of realized, 'Oh, dear.' It was getting abs olutely impossible for the band. They couldn't record because he'd come in and do one of those 'Have you got it yet' numbers, and then onstage he would either not play or he'd hit his guitar and just turn it out of tune, or do nothing.
Jonathan Meades: I had a friend called Harry Dodson who was at that time very friendly with a guy called Po, who was part of Hipgnosis. They were two guys - Po and Storm. They were friendly with the Pink Floyd because they all came from Cambridge. In l ate 1967 Harry, Po, Syd Barrett and other people lived in Egerton Court, a mansion block right opposite South Kensignton tube station. Syd certainly was the crazy of the party and one also got the ipression that he was rather disliked. I went there at t he time when Syd had either just left the band or was ready for the final heave-ho, and by this time he was a total casualty. Syd was this rather weird, exotic and mildly famous creature, who happened to be living in this flat with these people who were pimping off him both professionally and privately. I went there and there was this horrible noise. It sounded like heating pipes shaking. I said, 'What's that?' and they sort of giggled and said, 'That's Syd having a bad trip, we put him in the line cupboard.' And that seemed a terrible thing to do.
by American Dream » Wed Nov 09, 2011 4:01 pm
...In 1964 Taylor introduced my mother Julia Callan-Thompson to Detta Whybrow, the woman Dolphin describes as Taylor's 'call-girl friend', and with others they formed a magic group in west London. Fuelled by grass alone the attempts of this coven to materialise thought forms appear to have borne some strange results but when they came to be powered by LSD their activities immediately took off into another stratosphere. At that time Detta Whybrow had a john who was a chemist and I've been told that through a combination of her charms and various weird rituals, this boffin was persuaded make acid. There may be some mythologising going on here, while Detta does seem to have suggested to the john he manufacture acid for her friends to deal, the lure of easy money was probably enough to convince him it was a good idea. That said, when the cops raided the two acid laboratories set up by Victor James Kapur, they also recovered a huge stash of photographic negatives showing him having sex with Whybrow and various other women; agreeing to pose for these shots could have been the means by which Whybrow's circle got the chemist to commit to manufacturing LSD for them. Terry Taylor informed me recently that at first he thought Detta had gone crazy when she told him she had a john who'd make acid for her. Street sources say the acid was extremely pure and potent; the English equivalent of the legendary Orange Sunshine.
In November 1967, after a series of police raids across north and west London aimed at smashing an LSD manufacturing and distribution operation, Detta Whybrow then aged 39 was one of ultimately nine individuals hauled up before the beak at Bow Street Magistrates’s Court over drug offences. Hauled in alongside Detta was her 29 year-old boyfriend of the time, John Sherwood Pendry. Their chemist Victor James Kapur, who was just a year younger than Detta, was given a nine year stretch at the Central Criminal Court at the end of May 1968 for manufacturing LSD. Amazingly, Whybrow got off with two years probation. A 54 year-old antique dealer Harry Nathan of Chelsea copped the main blame for overseeing the distribution of the acid and was jailed for seven years; my view is that Nathan was a very minor player and Detta was the only individual who played a key role in the acid distribution to be arrested. A 31 year-old dispenser Mohammed Hassan Ally who assisted Kapur got 21 months. The authorities claimed the LSD involved had a black market value of a quarter of a million pounds.
For my mother, Detta and most of the others involved in Taylor's London magic group, these visionary sessions with LSD proved to be extremely intense and so they started to damp things down between their occult experiments by smoking a bit of heroin. In a number of instances this chasing of the dragon eventually escalated into intravenous drug use. My mother made her first attempt at coming off heroin in 1967, and although there were periods when she didn’t use smack, she suffered relapses into addiction until she died in 1979. Detta, I understand, succeeded in getting off and staying off heroin some time before her death in the 1990s. Terry Taylor, who disapproved of heroin and didn't use it, moved to north Wales in the early 1970s. He dropped from public view and raised a family; according to rumour he was also perfecting his use of magic in secret. When I asked Terry about this, he told me he didn't talk about magic, but offered do some with me if I was up for it!
Considerably more visible as an acid proselytiser than Terry Taylor was Michael Hollingshead. That said, within the context of a purely London psychedelic-magic scene Hollingshead proved ultimately less enduring and influential than Taylor. Hollingshead's claim to fame is chiefly that he was the man who introduced Timothy Leary to LSD. While working in New York in 1961, Hollingshead had acquired a stock of acid. He took a trip and the experience blew him away. In his autobiography Hollingshead claimed he then telephoned that well known fan of psychedelics Aldus Huxley, to find out what the blissedout writer thought he should do with the stash of acid he’d acquired. Huxley allegedly told Hollingshead to go and see Timothy Leary. Other observers believe Hollingshead was told about Timothy Leary by a doctor he knew called John Beresford. At this point Leary was experimenting with milder psychedelics and imagined LSD wouldn’t be much different to the stuff he had been tinkering with. When Leary took his first trip he was an instant convert to the wonders of acid and for a while treated Hollingshead as his guru. However, remaining true to his former self, Leary soon inverted the relationship.
In 1965 Hollingshead was sent to London as Leary's emissary and he set up the World Psychedelic Centre in Belgravia. The people drawn to Hollingshead's Psychedelic Centre included Alex Trocchi, Feliks Topolski, William Burroughs and Joseph Berke. Despite heavy duty establishment backing in the form of some old Etonians and a swanky location on Pont Street, the World Psychedelic Centre did not survive for long. As well as dropping acid which was still legal at the time, Hollingshead was also jacking up speed and smoking pot. Hollingshead's flat, which doubled up as his base of operations, became squalid and he was busted for possession of cannabis. (16) It is worth noting that Hollingshead also used heroin to damp down his LSD visions when he felt they were becoming excessive. After getting out of jail and working on his autobiography in Nepal, Hollingshead gathered together a group of followers in London who named themselves the Pure Land Ashram and then relocated to the island of Cumbrae in Scotland where they treated LSD as a sacrament. Before being forced to leave the island due to authority figures taking exception to their amalgam of religion and drug use, the group renamed itself The Free High Church of Cumbrae. Hollingshead and his coven then drifted to Edinburgh where they organized an I Ching and fortune-telling exhibition called Changes 72 at the Richard De Marco Gallery. The group reconvened yet again in London but fell apart when Hollingshead took off around the world.
The readiness of many sixties hipsters to experiment with drugs and magic stemmed in part from the visual and literary culture they had imbibed as they grew up in the fifties and early sixties. A key figure for my mother and her immediate circle of drug culture friends was Henri Michaux. This Belgian was a maverick who operated in the slipstream of surrealism and is reasonably well known for his prose poetry, travel writing about South America and Asia, books on drug taking, and interest in the occult and Hinduism. To reuse a phrase of Alexander Trocchi's, Michaux was a 'cosmonaut of inner space', but one who unfortunately never enjoyed the international acclaim and influence of Timothy Leary or Baba Ram Dass AKA Richard Alpert. As well as writing, Michaux also produced visual works, sometimes under the influence of psychedelics. (17) However, unlike Colin Wilson who in England was briefly an overnight sensation, Michaux has to date remained a somewhat rarified taste.
At the time of its publication in 1956, Colin Wilson's The Outsider probably appeared to be an unlikely bestseller, although in retrospect it is easy enough to see its success as symptomatic of the backwardness of English literary culture. (18) At the age of twenty-four, Wilson was young and hip enough to pick up on many of the themes and writers who already fascinated a burgeoning youth culture. Blake, Nietzsche, Hesse, Kierkegaard, Camus and Dostoevsky were among the authors he admired, and while it is glaringly obvious from the breezy dismissal of Hegel and Marx in The Outsider that Wilson wasn't actually familiar with their work, no one from the British literary establishment at the time seemed to either notice or care. Wilson's elitism and disdain for the masses (who are invoked through phrases such as 'the average plumber or stockbroker') appealed both to the literary intelligentsia and the massed ranks of teenage individualists who were sufficiently guileless to take Wilson's assertion that salvation 'lies in extremes' at face value. It should go without saying that 'extremism' is necessarily relational and not rational, and while Wilson possibly understood that self-styled extremists always end up reproducing what they oppose (albeit in inverted form), through sophistries of this type he inadvertently transformed the more naive of his admirers (and here I'm thinking in particular of those critics, including Edith Sitwell and Cyril Connolly, who praised The Outsider in the press) into accidental post-modernists. Similarly, Wilson's interest in gurus and mystics as Nietzschean supermen – and in this his tastes range from George Gurdjieff to the Hindu mystic Sri Ramakrishna – demonstrates that some of the more reactionary elements of late sixties youth culture were circulating in pre-digested form from at least the mid-fifties onwards...
...Marianne Faithfull, who in the latter part of the sixties was the highly visible live-in lover of Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger, has written that Alexander Trocchi acted as her 'great drug guru' and introduced her to his doctor at Bexley Hospital who registered her as a heroin addict. (20) Despite this, Brian Barritt in his memoir The Road To Excess writes that he accompanied Faithfull to the clinic. (21) These two accounts are not necessarily contradictory since Barritt says he met Faithfull at Trocchi's flat and it is possible all three of them went to Bexley together, or else Barritt went with Faithfull at Trocchi's behest. Barritt worked for a time as Trocchi's assistant. Like Terry Taylor, Barritt was a fixture of the tight knit London drug scene of the sixties and seventies but is not particularly well known outside it.
Barritt is a psychedelic evangelist who advocates dropping acid as a consciousness-raising act that deconditions people by taking them beyond the known world. He first turned on in 1962 and is said to have been involved in the distribution of acid before it was criminalized, although in the sixties he also did time in Maidstone prison for cannabis smuggling. Barritt wants to see LSD freely available so that anybody who wishes to 'investigate their own mind' can trip. When Barritt is mentioned in print, it is often as a British foil to American acid guru Timothy Leary. After Leary was jailed in the US for possessing a couple of joints, and had broken out of the jug with the help of the Weather Underground, Barritt met him on the run in Algeria and Switzerland. Indeed Barritt was initially credited with co-writing Leary's Confessions of a Hope Fiend, although whether Barritt had a hand in the actual production of the book has been a matter of much dispute. Nonetheless Barritt believes that LSD is one of the few drugs that can take the user through the seven levels of human consciousness that he says he discovered independently of Leary. Prior to their first meeting, both Barritt and Leary had apparently come to the conclusion that acid was a 'psychedelic elevator'. Supposedly there are only two ways in which to reach the higher levels of human consciousness, either by devoting years of one's life to arduous spiritual practice or almost instantly with psychedelics. The first four levels of consciousness can be reached in ordinary everyday life. Level five requires either chemical assistance or long hours of meditation, and when you hit this level sexual activity is said to be vastly enhanced. Barritt has even claimed that:
If a man keeps an image in his head at the point of ejaculation on acid, you project that image, firing it into the subconscious of your partner. The female at that altitude is the 'all woman', she is the every living thing, the DNA, the goddess. If the goddess hears you, she will ask everything in nature to conspire to grant you your request. (22)
When tripping together for the first time in the Algerian desert, Barritt and Leary discovered that by pure chance they were doing so in the same place at which fifty years earlier the magus Aleister Crowley and his sidekick Victor Neuburg had conducted a rite based on John Dee’s Enochian magick. Barritt claims: 'We felt we were representative of the same force, but whether we were incarnations of these people or not I don’t know, it didn’t seem to matter.' That said, in the interview in which Barritt made this claim, he insists Leary was never a mere reincarnation of these dead occultists: 'When Tim lost his ego on a trip, he was an amalgamation of all the people on acid who were thinking of him at that time. Leary was gone, he was an astral image – no one took a trip without Leary coming into it.' (23)
Sadly it appears there is little homo-eroticism involved in Barritt and Leary's appropriation of all this, despite anal sex being a key element of Crowley's magical practices, since Barritt is adamant that once you go above level five consciousness you don't necessarily need coitus. Indeed, at level six you are telepathic and sexually combined with your fellow trippers, and this integration is even greater at level seven. As for Leary, he is now an archetype and obviously you can't shag someone who is no longer corporeal. Like Hollingshead and many others involved in psychedelic occultism, Barritt used heroin to damp down the magical visions brought forth in LSD rituals.
Barritt makes no secret of the fact that he used heroin, and mentions his use of opiates in his autobiography. However, he believes that smack is something that is much easier to overdo than LSD. Barritt worked for a time as Alexander Trocchi's assistant and writes in The Road Of Excess:
When I first knew Alex there was a regular 'French Connection' with artists, musicians and strange unclassifiable characters who bought and sold opium at the same price as hashish and slipped quietly back across the channel in time for tea. But while Alex was trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the largest habit ever known, the world was passing by. By the time he became a vegetable his acquaintances had lost interest in him, as he had in them and by the time he had consumed so much that he was heroin, he was dead and couldn't remember a thing about it... (24)
Actually, Trocchi greatly exaggerated the size of his habit, telling whopping fibs to doctors in order to score large quantities of drugs on prescription, most of which he would sell on. When Trocchi was hospitalized this caused him some problems, since medical staff directly administered him with far greater quantities of drugs than he would normally take. Still, Trocchi survived such ill-advised medical assistance, and the risk of an overdose no doubt palled in comparison to the possibility that the size of his drug script might be reduced. Rather more amusingly, some texts Trocchi concocted with the express intention of conning doctors into providing him with generous drug scripts were published posthumously by a literary editor called Andrew Murray Scott who it appears was sufficiently gullible to accept them at face value. (25)
Often associated with Trocchi because of their shared Glaswegian background and prominence at key counterculture events including 'Wholly Communion' and 'The State of Revolt' is R. D. Laing. Among other things, this 'anti-psychiatrist' used LSD during many of his therapy sessions and in countercultural circles had a reputation for being able to lay his hands on good dope. Laing had been reading French existential writers such as Sartre and Camus in the 1940s when he was at university, and was seriously interested in their precursors such as Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. Laing too had avidly devoured Colin Wilson's The Outsider and from the mid-fifties onwards sought to emulate its phenomenal success. Therefore it will surprise no one that in his early book The Divided Self, Laing announced that his method was existential-phenomenological. Likewise, Laing shared with those more deeply embroiled in the counterculture a taste for writers such as Henry Miller. However, while Laing was considered somewhat wild by his more buttoned-up psychiatric colleagues, he was nevertheless an establishment figure. Indeed, he only resigned from the medical register at the end of his life when he was forced to do so. Unfortunately Laing is still too often judged on his image rather than on what he actually said and wrote; thus both fans and detractors sometimes fail to realize that he emphasized the importance of the family in child development. Despite this Laing did very little for most of his own children and part of his attraction for the more patriarchal members of the counterculture was this conservative irresponsibility. (26)
Completely eclipsing both Trocchi and Laing on the London psychedelic scene of the sixties in terms of accidental high weirdness was an American called Doctor Steve Abrams. He conducted research into the effects of drugs and headed SOMA (Society for Mental Awareness), an organization which was popularly perceived as advocating drug use and the legalization of pot. SOMA was responsible for the advertisement in The Times demanding the abolition of prison sentences and large fines for the possession of cannabis, which is often (mis)recalled as a plea to 'legalize pot'. While Abrams mixed with many of the leading figures of the counterculture, the fact that some of his drug research had been funded by institutions with connections to the American intelligence establishment made many hippies suspicious of him. Timothy Leary could have been criticized on the same grounds, but generally wasn't. Finance of this type was the subject of much controversy in the sixties. For example, in 1967 Stephen Spender resigned as consultant editor of Encounter when it emerged that the Congress for Cultural Freedom which subsidized the publication was a Central Intelligence Agency front organization. (27)
Moving the argument on from what all too often degenerated into paranoid speculation, the way in which Abrams publicized his activities had the potential to arouse hackles too. There are photographs by John 'Hoppy' Hopkins of a psychedelic research session in which Abrams and a volunteer appear to be mimicking the depiction of male doctors and female hysterics in nineteenth-century medical paintings. Since some viewers were inevitably going to make a connection between these publicity japes and the earlier imagery upon which they so strikingly draw, Abrams left himself wide open to criticism for generating negative perceptions of both women and recreational drug users. The aura of paternal authoritarianism so readily visible in these images emerges elsewhere too, leading the International Times news editor Graham Plinston to complain in an interview he conducted with Abrams in 1967 that subscription to SOMA 'seems to involve a totally passive role'. (28)
When Plinston conducted this interview with Abrams, it wouldn't have occurred to him that he was about to take over from the Morland- Wilkinson crew as England's top pot smuggler. Some months after interviewing Abrams and while travelling in the Middle East, Plinston met Salim Hraoui (29) through a third party. Among other things Hraoui wholesaled hash and the two men decided they could do business. The Lebanese connection Plinston established in this casual fashion regularly couriered hash to London on his behalf via ordinary airline flights, arranging for the pot to be concealed in body harnesses strapped to those paid to act as drug mules. It was by such means that Plinston's supply was smuggled until Hraoui introduced him to Mohammed Durrani in 1969. Durrani knew some Pakistani government officials who were prepared to exploit their diplomatic immunity to smuggle hash. By this means Durrani's diplomats were able to get drugs into mainland Europe but not the UK. The biggest hurdle for dope smugglers was getting their gear into Europe; transporting it around the continent was viewed as considerably less risky. Nonetheless Plinston and Geoff Thompson were busted in Lorrach in 1970, as they ferried dope in a car from Switzerland across the West Germany border. This is the famous seizure that gave Howard Marks his break into the major league of the pot trade. After being sent by Mandy Plinston to sort things out in Germany and then reporting back to various Middle Eastern connections about what had and hadn't been compromised, Marks took over portions of Plinston's business while his friends Plinston and Thompson did time in jail.
Bizarrely, John Pearson in his tomes on sixties British gangsters the Kray Twins writes about a man called Alan Bruce Cooper, (30) who it is claimed was working reluctantly and under threat of imprisonment for the American Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Among other things, the American authorities are said to have known that Cooper had been manufacturing LSD and trafficking in this drug. Supposedly, it was decided that Cooper should entice Ronnie and Reggie Kray into committing crimes for which they could be convicted because the authorities in the USA were concerned about their connections to the American Mafia. Regardless of exactly what role various intelligence agencies did or did not have in controlling Cooper, he was a major player in the events that culminated in the conviction of the Kray twins for murder. In The Profession of Violence, Pearson provides the following details about a few of Cooper’s schemes:
Cooper had the big ideas that Ronnie needed and seemed as thrilled as Ronnie by them all. They often talked about narcotics. Cooper had European contacts and clearly knew the market. This was the quickest, safest way for the twins to become millionaires. As a start Cooper suggested setting up a flat in Belgrave Square as a clearing house for wealthy addicts and their pushers. Cooper got as far as renting the flat when Ronnie said he wasn't interested. Other rackets they discussed were large-scale gold-smuggling, further currency deals, a take-over of an existing marijuana racket carried on through the diplomatic immunity of some Pakistani diplomats and the traffic in illegal Asian immigrants from Belgium. And each time it was Reggie’s caution that prevented Ronnie from becoming involved... (31)
If this is to be believed, then it appears that American intelligence may have known in 1967 about the drug pipeline Plinston benefited from two years later. If what Pearson says on this score is reliable, it is possible that having failed to get the Krays to take over the pipeline the American authorities left it up and running for future use, and it is the same drug conduit that Plinston later stumbled upon. That said, despite the paranoia that permeates the drug subculture, I'm unaware of anyone from the circles around Plinston and Thompson who believes they were set up to be busted in Lorrach. It is nonetheless curious that on 18 July 1968 when Alan Bruce Cooper appeared as a Crown witness at Bow Street Magistrates Court against the Kray brothers, he should deny he'd given the police information about Victor James Kapur and Harry Nathan, claiming: "I discovered my father-in-law (Nathan) was a runner for the LSD Kapur was manufacturing when it came out in the papers." Nathan was busted in his son-in-law's car, and the police found Cooper at Nathan's flat when they went to search it immediately after this arrest. (32)
Under oath on the same day of the Kray hearing, Cooper also denied that he'd planned to kidnap the Pope and hold him to ransom, and repeated his claims that he'd had a two year involvement with American intelligence, stating that the Krays' lawyers could check this by applying to the European office of that service. This was reported in The Times of 19 July 1968. Top cop Leonard Read in his autobiography Nipper Read: The Man Who Nicked The Krays provides a more complex take on Cooper's relations with the British police than the one given at Bow Street Magistrates Court. Read does, however, assert that the evidence Cooper gave against the Krays was essentially true, and implies Harry Nathan was wrongly convicted as an LSD runner when he says in his book that it was Cooper - and not Cooper’s father-in-law - who was involved with Kapur's drug factory. Read's account appears to me reasonably consistent with the police file on the Kapur case, and what various street sources have to say on the subject. However, while Nathan may have been completely innocent, it seems to me more likely he was a minor player; but even if this was the case, his role in the drug running was very small in comparison to that of his son-in-law.
Cooper confirmed in court during the Kray trial that he'd made a living from gold smuggling, something to which Kapur was also connected. Two months before he was busted for manufacturing LSD, Kapur acted as a crown witness at Bow Street where he testified against former speedway champion Squire Francis 'Split' Waterman and three others who were charged with 'attempted illegal export of gold, receiving gold bars, and possessing firearms and counterfeiting equipment'. This was reported in The Times of 23 September 1967. The case against Waterman ran in part that he'd been cutting and smelting gold from a bullion robbery in Clerkenwell, and that he'd enlisted Kapur's aid in choosing and purchasing a furnace with which to do it. Likewise The Times of 19 July 1968 reported that in court testifying against the Krays, Cooper confirmed he was acquainted with Split Waterman who he knew to be both a gold smuggler and an arms dealer.
Under the headline 'Four-Year Term For Split Waterman', The Times of 20 March 1968 had already reported that the police believed Waterman to be a gun runner as well as a gold smuggler. Reporting on the Kray trial on 20 July 1968, The Times records the claim that Waterman had fitted up an attaché case with a hypodermic syringe loaded with hydrogen cyanide, so that Cooper could furnish it to a third party who was to carry out an assassination for the Kray brothers. At the time this seemed an utterly fantastic escapade, but such methods of assassination were later taken up by eastern bloc security agencies. It is impossible for me to say exactly what Waterman, Cooper and Kapur, were doing; but it is reasonable to conclude that they were known to each other and collaborated on what were either criminal or intelligence enterprises, and possibly both. It is certainly strange that Alan Bruce Cooper, a man claiming to be a willing police informant as well as an American intelligence asset and former gold smuggler, may have had inside knowledge about what on the surface would appear to be two unrelated suppliers of drugs peddled by the group centred on Detta Whybrow, my mother and other individuals such as Mike Burton (who I am naming because I know he is dead, I have other names that I won't include here). It is unclear to me where Whybrow and her circle were sourcing drugs immediately after the Kapur bust, but by the end of 1969 both the acid and the pot they were dealing was supplied by Graham Plinston and his associates.
Drugs and the politics of drugs, much more than psychedelic art, are the counterculture's chief legacy. Indeed, without illicit drugs there would not have been a counterculture, since contraband commodities not only bound those involved together, they also financed many of their activities. Consequently, the political ethos of the counterculture was essentially libertarian, which was why so many of those involved with it were attracted to forms of 'guerrilla capitalism' such as drug dealing and smuggling. Beyond a blatantly hypocritical and often merely rhetorical opposition to free trade in drugs, Thatcherism and Reaganism were very much an outgrowth of the politics of laissez-faire that various hippie entrepreneurs had developed in practice through their dealing and related activities a decade or more earlier. This is not to say that there were not leftist elements within the counterculture but despite, or perhaps even because of its incoherence, the politics that ultimately dominated it in both theory and practice were those of anarcho-capitalism. That said, I feel that the magical drug rituals in which my mother was engaged in the mid-sixties point towards ways in which we will yet regain the modes of consciousness that flourished within classless societies. (33)
Likewise, there were in the sixties a number of agitational groups including Up Against The Wall Mortherfucker and King Mob whose psychedelic cultural politics and use of drugs pointed to a praxis that went beyond the achievements of the historical avantgarde. (34) While recreational drug use has increased rather than decreased since the sixties, this has largely manifested itself in the form of a desire to 'get out of it' rather than as a determination to go beyond the social limits which currently restrict our lives. I do not endorse the escalation theory of drug use, the absurd idea that smoking pot leads to heroin addiction, and in relation to this I see taking drugs simply for recreational purposes as essentially harmless fun. That said, it would still be better if we took more rather than less drugs for whatever reason. However, if we are to use psychedelics to 'fly' beyond the limits of this society then the best way of doing so is in situations of class solidarity. Those who use psychedelics in an attempt to regain shamanic modes of consciousness without simultaneously struggling against our atomized and alienated society run grave risks. Heroin addiction is probably among the least of these, and obviously it is the criminalization of opiates rather than their use which creates a great many of the social problems connected to drugs.
By way of conclusion I'd just like to state explicitly what is implicit in all of the above, that under the influence of psychedelic drugs one can 'hear' colours and 'taste' sounds – but such 'mind manifesting' substances will work to better effect in a post-revolutionary society where the avant-garde desire to integrate art and life will at last be realized. Psychedelic art must become an oxymoron. In a disalienated society the transformative power of our realized human potential will be such that all specialized categories will be dissolved within a greater and more universal creativity. It is the task of revolutionaries not simply to re-establish the social forms of the classless societies of the past, but also to re-appropriate (albeit at a higher level) their modes of consciousness – that is to say shamanic consciousness. The failures of the psychedelic fifties and sixties were a direct result of the endurance of class society. Psychedelics will play a role in the coming total revolution but they do not constitute a revolution on their own.
by American Dream » Wed Nov 09, 2011 5:54 pm
http://www.sydbarrett.net/subpages/articles/wish_you_were_here_mojo.htm
His descent was swift. It began almost as soon as Pink Floyd had achieved international notoriety. On a tour of America, Syd had remained almost catatonic. There were memorable TV appearances on The Pat Boone Show, during which he stoically refused to answer any of the anodyne host's questions, and American Bandstand, where the Floyd were booked to mime to their latest single, Apples And Oranges. Syd, eyes rolling back in his head, didn't even come close to lip-synching the opening lines. The camera hardly returned to him for the rest of the song.
Syd began talking in strange riddles and was becoming increasingly paranoid. On a package tour with Jimi Hendrix and Amen Corner, Davey O'List from The Nice had to deputise because Syd had vanished before the show or would stand playing one note all night. The crunch came at a gig in Brighton when Syd simply couldn't be found. Nigel Gordon called Dave Gilmour, then in Cambridge, and told him the Floyd needed a guitarist for that night's show.
Both band and managers had tried to take Syd to see noted psychiatrist R.D. Laing, an exponent of the idea that madness is in the eye of the beholder. Laing heard a tape of Syd in conversation and pronounced him "incurable". The band resisted going to see more conventional psychiatrists fearing Syd would be placed in an institution never to emerge again.
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