Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by American Dream » Wed Oct 16, 2013 1:25 pm
by American Dream » Thu Oct 17, 2013 12:55 pm
Indians, Beats, and Hippies
Even as Brand was participating in the technocentric rituals of USCO, he was continuing to search for new, flexible modes of living in other realms as well. Soon after Brand left the army, an old family friend, Dick Raymond, commissioned him to take photographs of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon for a brochure. Over the next three years, when he was not working with USCO, Brand visited the Warm Springs Reservation and Blackfoot, Navajo, Hopi, and Papago reservations as well. When he began this project, he saw Native Americans in terms long set by Anglo-American myth. They were the custodians of the American landscape and, as such, guides to the preservation of the American wilderness. Over time, however, Brand began to reimagine Native Americans in light of his readings of McLuhan and Fuller. In his journals of 1964, he wrote that a new era was dawning. The old era had been dominated by a "Protestant consciousness" ; under it, "mystery subsided into number, uniform and linear. Specialization gradually pervaded Western society, became malignant, and then suddenly, with the acceleration of electricity and computer automation, it passed its own breakpoint into an era of tribal endeavor and cosmic consciousness still un-named. Americans dwelling in the wilderness of changing eras are re-learning to be natives from the most native Americans, The Indians, studying with the new clarity the ancient harmony of a shared land-heritage." For Brand, as for many counterculturalists in the decade to follow, Native Americans became symbolic figures of authenticity and alternative community. If the white-collar man of the 1950s had become detached from the land and from his own emotions, the Native American could show him how to be at home again, physically and psychologically. If the large corporations and governments of the twentieth century were organized in psychologically and socially divisive hierarchies, the world of the Native American was organized into tribes. Polis, family, community: within Brand's heavily idealized vision of Native Americans, all three exist harmoniously as elements of a single unity, the tribe. And if technology had finally begun to draw Americans toward a "cosmic consciousness," well, the Indians had been there all along.
Stewart Brand with Navaho peyote roadman Hola Tso and obligatory Volkswagon van.
Not long after he started working with the Warm Springs Indians, Brand read a book that seemed to confirm his inkling that Indians might hold the key to a nonhierarchical world, Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. There Kesey told the story of McMurphy, an individualistic con man imprisoned in a mental hospital, and his struggle against his rigid, unfeeling floor manager, Nurse Ratched (also known as "Big Nurse" ). His narrator was another patient, the Native American Chief Bromden. McMurphy's struggle with Ratched and Chief Bromden's ultimate escape from the ward served, in Brand's view, as emblems of his own struggle to establish an independent identity. The novel, he wrote in his journal, gave him "the answer to my dilemma between revolution against the Combine and preservation of things like old Indian ways. No dilemma. They're identical. As Kesey writes it, the battle of McMurphy versus Big Nurse is identical with [Warm Springs] Indians versus Dalles Dam [on Oregon's Columbia River] or me versus the Army." For Brand, the hierarchical institutions of the hospital in Kesey's book and the government on the reservation mirrored each other. McMurphy's struggle for independence was Brand's own, and Chief Bromden's escape from the hospital at novel's end neatly described Brand's own desire for de-institutionalized freedom. As he read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and as he traveled from reservation to reservation, Brand, like Kesey, began to link his own struggle against hierarchy and his generation's struggle against technocracy to a mythic American past.
Brand in his desert period, with fellow hippies Jack and Jean Loeffler.
As he did so, however, he found a way to bring a countercultural version of that past to life. In 1963 Brand wrote a low-key letter introducing himself to Ken Kesey and soon after met him face-to-face. By that time, Kesey was not only an increasingly famous author, but the host of a burgeoning psychedelic scene on the San Francisco peninsula as well. In 1958 Kesey had come to Palo Alto as a graduate student in Stanford's creative writing program. Over the next few years, the program admitted a stellar roster, including future novelists Larry McMurtry, Ed McClanahan, Robert Stone, and Gurney Norman. While there, Kesey wrote much of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He also began to develop an affection for psychedelic drugs. In 1959 Kesey became a subject in a series of experimental protocols at the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, sponsored by the CIA's MK-ULTRA program. Doctors in these experiments gave volunteer subjects various psychedelic drugs and observed their behavior. In return they offered the subjects small amounts of cash. Between 1959 and 1960, Kesey tried LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline, and the amphetamine IT-290. The CIA believed that these drugs had the potential to become weapons in the cold war, breaking down the psyches of spies, for instance, and making them more amenable to questioning. Kesey saw quite a different effect:
The first drug trips were, for most of us, shell-shattering ordeals that left us blinking knee deep in the cracked crusts of our pie-in-sky personalities. Suddenly people were stripped before one another and behold! As we looked, and were looked on, we all made a great discovery: we were beautiful. Naked and helpless and sensitive as a snake after skinning, but far more human than that shining knightmare that had stood creaking in previous parade rest. We were alive and life was us. We joined hands and danced barefoot amongst the rubble. We had been cleansed, liberated! We would never don the old armors again.
For Kesey, LSD served as a weapon in the same generational struggle that occupied Stewart Brand. Symbolically, Kesey's "knightmare" echoes Brand's undergraduate fear of growing up to don psychic armor on behalf of a militarized corporate state. In this context, LSD was a benevolent wake-up call, one that allowed Kesey to step out of the regimented ranks of adulthood and become childlike, flexible, barefoot and dancing. Stewart Brand's first experience taught him a somewhat different lesson. Brand was first given LSD in December of 1962 at the International Federation for Advanced Study (IFAS), an organization founded a year earlier by Myron Stolaroff, an engineer from the Ampex Corporation, and Willis Harman, a professor of engineering at Stanford and later a futurist at the Stanford Research Institute. Stolaroff and Harman had built the institute in order to explore the psychological effects of LSD; by 1962 they were charging subjects like Brand five hundred dollars for a daylong trip guided by one of several local psychologists. The man in charge of Brand's procedure was Jim Fadiman, who later served for several months at Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center—the division that in 1963 sponsored Douglas Engelbart's research on networked computing. According to Brand's journals, he received two doses of LSD, one in a "goblet" and the other, an hour later, by injection. Fadiman and others then had Brand look at a mural, a yin-yang mandala, and a series of other images, including pictures of his family. They played classical music. They asked Brand how he felt ("very thing" he replied). Eventually, the session ended and Brand wandered off to dinner at Fadiman's house, still high.
Brand was put off by the highly structured, pseudoscientific trappings of the IFAS procedure, but the notion that psychedelic drugs could alter one's perceptions took. Brand soon began to hang out with a group devoted to "tripping" in every sense: the Merry Pranksters. The Pranksters had first come together around Kesey's house on Perry Lane on the edge of the Stanford campus. Not long after he began visiting the Veterans Hospital in Menlo Park, Kesey began bringing drugs home. A scene began to emerge: some of the writers from Stanford, the artist Roy Seburn, psychologist Richard Alpert (later known as Baba Ram Dass), guitarist Jerry Garcia, Page Browning—all had begun to appear for various parties. Within a year, Kesey had put together a new scene, with Page Browning and Gurney Norman remaining from the original Perry Lane crew, and in the fall of 1964 he and the Pranksters painted up an old school bus and drove east on the first leg of the legendary tour chronicled in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Brand did not go with them. As Wolfe put it, Brand represented "the restrained, reflective wing of the Merry Pranksters.
Even so, to Brand the Pranksters were a West Coast version of USCO's techno-tribalism. If USCO had emerged out of an East Coast engagement with cold war avant-garde art, the Pranksters drew on the bohemian energy of San Francisco's Beatnik scene. Since the mid-1940s, the Beats had built a small, highly influential social world, and with it a literature and a way of being that had an extraordinary impact on the counterculture, especially on its West Coast contingent. The origins of the Beat movement can probably best be dated to 1944, when novelists William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac met poet Allen Ginsberg in Manhattan. Over the next fifteen years, these three writers traveled to Europe, North Africa, New York, and San Francisco; together with writers and artists in each of those locations, they built a vision within which, as Ginsberg put it, "existence itself was God." For the Beats, cold war society was plagued by mechanical ways of living and thinking. In the years after World War II, Ginsberg later recalled, "there was a definitive shrinkage of sensation, of sensory experience, and a definite mechanical disorder of mentality that led to the cold war. . . . The desensitization had begun, the compartmentalization of the mind and heart, the cutting off of the head from the rest of the body, the robotization of mentality." In response to this mechanistic world, Ginsberg and company launched a celebration of individual, embodied experience. Drawing on influences ranging from German historian and mystic Oswald Spengler and nineteenth-century American Romantics such as Walt Whitman to psychologist Wilhelm Reich and semanticist Alfred Korzybski, they imagined that both the material world and the social world were imbued with meaning. That meaning could be experienced as an ecstatic state of enlightenment that was itself in tune with the deeper, mystical laws of experience: satori.
The Merry Pranksters thought the Beats offered a model of how to step outside mainstream American culture, build an alternative community, and pursue psychic wholeness even within the bowels of a militarized state. Yet the Pranksters extended the Beat vision as well. Like the Beats, they sought to experience a condition of harmonious flow, and they turned to drugs to do it. Also like the Beats, they saw the whole world as their stage and their own lives as roles that could be played for pleasure. Like USCO, however, the Pranksters appropriated technologies developed in industrial and sometimes military contexts (including LSD) and put them to work as tools for the transformation of self and community. Although Brand later recalled that Kesey and the Pranksters were unfamiliar with Buckminster Fuller's writings and with cybernetic theory when he first met them, their technological performances suggest a deep sympathy with both. For Kesey and company, body and landscape, community and state, and sometimes even biological and electronic systems were mirrors of one another. Metaphorically, when they drove their school bus into the heart of the United States, its sheet-metal skin coated with Day-Glo paint, its insides and often outsides wired with speakers and microphones, its inhabitants hairy, costumed, nicknamed, and alert, Kesey and the Pranksters dropped a tab of LSD into the belly of America. They wanted to turn the country on, to do for the nation what LSD had done for them as individuals and as a community. They wanted to show cold war America an alternative and apparently a much more adventurous, harmonious, and fun way to live. The bus was both the vehicle by which to make this new lifestyle visible and a prototype of that lifestyle itself. Are you "on the bus" ? asked the Pranksters. Or not?
Both on and off the bus, the Pranksters played with the boundaries between self, community, and technology. As they drove across America, they kept a movie camera rolling. If all the world was a stage, they were living here and now, in the real, material space of everyday life, and at the same time inside a movie, in media space. They were both themselves and characters in a scene—a pattern of self-understanding that they saw as congruent with the experience of self on LSD. In part, they were self-consciously seeking to make history, and of course they did. Yet they were also working out a new relationship to technologies of communication and transportation. At one party, for instance, Tom Wolfe recalls seeing Kesey and a half dozen Pranksters sprawled out across the floor, high on LSD, ululating. They were pretending to be a "Humanoid Radio." This was partly a party joke, a prank. "The idea was to try to hit that beam and that mode that would enable you to communicate with beings on other planets, other galaxies. . . . They were all high as hell," wrote Wolfe. But it also marked a weird attempt to appropriate the radio's ability to transcend distance and reach faraway minds with a single, disembodied signal. In the Pranksters" world, LSD and radio were harbingers of New Communalist possibilities. They were communication technologies through which humans could not only exchange information, but, at least imaginatively, merge with one another in a spiritually harmonious state.
Whereas USCO took up technology to make art, the Merry Pranksters deployed technology expressly to create a new consciousness and a new form of social organization. In this sense, the Pranksters represent a key origin point not only for the psychedelic side of the counterculture, but for the New Communalist movement. By 1965 the San Francisco Bay area had seen the Free Speech Movement emerge at Berkeley and had witnessed its first antiwar protests as well. In this increasingly politicized atmosphere, Kesey and the Pranksters turned away from the politics of struggle and embraced the politics of consciousness. On October 15, 1965, Kesey was invited to speak at a rally against the Vietnam War in Berkeley. Organizers expected a fiery speech and a joining of the New Left and the growing counterculture. But rather than orate, Kesey simply stood up and announced to the audience, "You know, you're not gonna stop this war with this rally, by marching. . . . That's what they do." He then pulled out his harmonica and played "Home on the Range." In keeping with psychedelic visions of transpersonal harmony (and with cybernetic and Romantic visions of a world linked by invisible currents of energy and information), Kesey rejected as fundamentally false the dynamics of confrontation called for by the moment and by the logic of the cold war more generally. He simply stood up and demanded that the audience not confront their enemies, but instead turn away from them and come together elsewhere.
After some confusion, the audience ignored him and continued their march. But in retrospect, Kesey's action marked a key moment in the public emergence of a New Communalist style of social action. For the Free Speech and antiwar movements, to attempt to change society meant to pursue claims on the existing political structure. In both cases, demonstrators asked for changes in policies—the policies of a university in the first case and of a nation in the second. Kesey sought nothing from established politicians, other than to be left alone. Having rejected agonistic politics, he asked demonstrators to turn away from the centers of established political power and look inward, toward each other. In place of politics, he offered the experience of togetherness; in place of a rigid, violent society, he presented the possibility of a leveled, playful community.
At the same time, he exhibited a style of leadership that would soon characterize Stewart Brand's work at the Whole Earth Catalog and that, over the next three decades, would migrate into debates around the social impact of digital technologies. At the Vietnam Day rally, Kesey simultaneously denied his role as a leader and assumed it, albeit in a new way, by playing his harmonica. Like the members of USCO, the Pranksters worked to step outside traditional political arrangements and celebrated a tribal togetherness. But unlike USCO, they also had a single, de facto leader: Kesey, called "the Chief " by the Pranksters. It was Kesey's earnings from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that had paid for the bus trip in 1964, and it was Kesey who was paying most if not all of the group's expenses (which Wolfe estimated at a hefty twenty thousand dollars per year). But neither Kesey nor anyone else would acknowledge this power explicitly. Wolfe put it this way: "Kesey took great pains not to make his role explicit. He wasn't the authority, someone else was: 'Babbs says . . ." 'Page says . . ." He wasn't the leader, he was the 'non-navigator." He was also the non-teacher. . . . Kesey's explicit teachings were all cryptic, metaphorical; parables, aphorisms." Within the Pranksters, Wolfe argued, Kesey's leadership and the group's direction were "The Unspoken Thing.'
Rather than identify the power to lead with Kesey himself, Kesey and the Pranksters turned to various devices to distribute and, ostensibly, level that power. One of the devices was a simple spinner. The Pranksters regularly played a game in which a number of them would sit in a circle. Someone would spin the spinner, and whoever it pointed to would then have full power over the group for the next thirty minutes. Another tool they used was the I Ching. When important decisions loomed, Kesey and others—like hippies everywhere in the coming years—would throw a set of coins, find a correlated bit of text in the book, and use it as the basis for taking action.
The spinner and the I Ching did serve to take power out of the hands of designated leaders. If the former turned group members into followers, it did so only temporarily, and only with the members" consent. If the latter threw up an obscure ancient fortune, it also demanded that one work out its meaning on one's own. In both cases, the individual remained empowered. But within the context of the Pranksters, these devices also served an ideological function. That is, they not only distributed some power among group members and decision-making devices, but they also diverted attention from the very real and centralized leadership Kesey was exerting. Having walked away from what they believed were the excesses of the traditional party politics practiced by the American government and its cold war allies and enemies, Kesey and the Pranksters did everything they could to deny the fact of concentrated power in their midst. In a pattern that would become familiar around the digital technologies of the 1990s, they reassigned it, at least temporarily and at least symbolically, to devices.
For Stewart Brand, Kesey became a role model and a collaborator. In January of 1966, Brand and Kesey mingled the Pranksters" vision of power with USCO's high-tech tool kit to create the single event that, more than any other, would take the San Francisco psychedelic scene public: the Trips Festival. Over the preceding year, Kesey and the Pranksters had staged about a dozen "Acid Tests." According to Tom Wolfe, Kesey had originally dreamed up the notion of an acid test as a multimedia LSD fest to be staged within one of Fuller's geodesic domes with psychedelic lighting by Gerd Stern of USCO. In the end, the tests tended to be more modest—they included long-hair gatherings featuring LSD in various venues in Palo Alto, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and even Mexico. The Grateful Dead supplied much of the music. Toward the end of 1965, Brand and Ramón Sender Barayón, a composer of electronic music and a friend of USCO's Michael Callahan, thought up the Trips Festival as a way to bring the burgeoning scene together. Together, they found promoter Bill Graham (then a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe) and hired the Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco for three nights: Friday, January 21, through Sunday, January 23. By this time, the federal government had outlawed LSD, so posters promised an Acid Test—a full-blown psychedelic experience—without LSD.
Ken Kesey introduced Da-glo as a color for art, along with op-art moirŽ references and a high-tech oscilloscope sine wave for this handout advertising the 1966 "Trips Festival." Designed by soon-to-be-famous cartoonist Wes Wilson.
As it turned out, the Trips Festival featured plenty of LSD. But more importantly, it represented a coming together of the Beatnik-derived San Francisco psychedelic scene and the multimedia technophilia of art troupes such as USCO. On the first night, Brand and some friends performed his multimedia piece America Needs Indians. When he developed it during his time with USCO, America Needs Indians consisted of sound tracks, three slide projection systems, and four Native American dancers. Brand thought of it as an immersive experience, a "peyote meeting without peyote." In the open, industrial space of the Longshoremen's Hall however, the piece looked tiny, like "a teepee and some slide projectors," according to one visitor. That evening, visitors wandered throughout the hall, sometimes dancing, talking and playing with bits of electronic gear scattered around the floor.
The second night brought the scene into focus. Kesey had called for the audience "to wear ecstatic dress and to bring their own gadgets (A.C. outlets will be provided)," and they did. Audience members painted in Day-Glo colors danced and watched their dancing rebroadcast live on a series of closed-circuit televisions. The hosts had arranged for live microphones and sound gear for anyone to play with. Five slide projectors splashed images on the wall; light machines scanned the room. Two bands played: the Grateful Dead and Big Brother & the Holding Company. Above it all hovered Kesey. Stationed on a balcony and wearing a space suit, he wrote messages on acetate slides and projected them onto a wall below. Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist with the Dead, recalled the feeling that characterized the early Acid Tests and the Trips Festival: "Thousands of people, man, all helplessly stoned, all finding themselves in a room of thousands of people, none of whom any of them were afraid of. It was magic, far-out beautiful magic.'
Stewart Brand designed this poster for the 1966 Trips Festival with graphic artist Peter Bailey.
According to Tom Wolfe, it was also the start of the Haight-Ashbury era. The festival grossed $12,500 within three days and had spent very little in the way of overhead. Two weeks later, Bill Graham could be found staging a trips festival every weekend at the Fillmore. Within a year, teenagers from across America would be streaming into Haight-Ashbury, looking for the sort of bohemian utopia Graham was marketing. Reporters for Time and Life were not far behind. Almost immediately, San Francisco became Oz to a generation that had feared it would grow up into a black-and-white Kansas of a world—if it lived long enough in the face of nuclear weapons and the draft to grow up at all. In myth, if not always in fact, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters became San Francisco's wizards, and as they did, they made visible to mainstream Americans the possibility of living a mobile, tribal life, a world in which the role-playing and psychological fragmentation common to the institutions of technocracy dissolved in a whirlwind of drugs, music, and travel and left standing only a more authentic, and seemingly childlike, self. For the teenagers then beginning to think of heading west, and for the reporters packing their bags to follow suit, the Trips Festival and the San Francisco scene heralded the birth of a new and open world.
The Trips Festival marked Stewart Brand's emergence as a countercultural entrepreneur—but in a deeply technocratic mold. Ten years earlier, Brand had feared that he would grow up into a world where he would have to partition his psyche and wield what power he had from within a hierarchical organization. He would have to become a soldier, cut off from both the world around him and the world within him by his uniform and his place in the ranks. At the Trips Festival, in contrast, Brand acted as a Comprehensive Designer. He built a world in which he and the dancers on the floor were part of a single, leveled social system. At one level, that system responded to the norms of the countercultural critique of technocracy. It shunned hierarchy in favor of anarchic togetherness; it turned away from emotionally removed, objective consciousness and toward a delicious, embodied, experiential magic. Like the happenings of Allan Kaprow and the music of John Cage, the Trips Festival transformed every moment into an all-encompassing now—itself a version of Beatnik satori.
The command module at the Trips Festival, January 1966. Lower row, left to right: Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey, Ken Babbs.
At another level, though, the swirling scene at the Trips Festival, and Brand's role in it, represented a coming together of the New Communalist social ideals then emerging and the ideological and technological products of cold war technocracy. The festival itself was a techno-social hybrid. The Longshoreman's Hall surrounded dancers with the lights, images, and music of electronic media. The bodies of many dancers were infused with LSD. To the extent that they felt a sense of communion with one another, the sensation was brought about by their integration into a single techno-biological system within which, as Buckminster Fuller put it, echoing Norbert Wiener, the individual human being was simply another "pattern-complex." Brand himself had organized the event in keeping with the systems principles he had encountered at Stanford and afterward. Far from asserting direct control over events, he had built an environment, a happening, a laboratory. He had set forth the conditions under which a system might evolve and flower, and he had stocked the biological and social worlds of those who entered that system with technologies that allowed them to feel as though the boundaries between the social and the biological, between their minds and their bodies, and between themselves and their friends, were highly permeable. He had helped found a new tribe of technology-loving Indians, artistic engineers of the self. Very soon these new Comprehensive Designers would set out from San Francisco to found their own communities in the wilderness.
When they got there, thought Brand, what they would need most would be tools and information.
~~
by American Dream » Thu Oct 17, 2013 10:51 pm
by American Dream » Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:28 am
by American Dream » Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:54 pm
by American Dream » Fri Oct 18, 2013 10:11 pm
by American Dream » Mon Oct 21, 2013 10:02 pm
by American Dream » Tue Oct 22, 2013 2:57 pm
by American Dream » Wed Oct 23, 2013 10:43 am
MK-ULTRA subproject x: sexual blackmail
Mind Control research is interesting, of course. The same goes for some of the immoral chemical and radiation experiments. But of particular interest here is an MKULTRA subproject ran by George White, a former lieutenant colonel in the OSS who after the war had become active again in the narcotics squad.
White had been approached by Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA's TSS department and the MKULTRA project, in 1953. He was given a lavish apartment in New York City and was asked to invite all kinds of people - a lot of them preselected - so he could slip them a variety of drugs. The media has generally presented White's apartments as an operation to test all the different drugs Gottlieb's CIA lab was producing, and although this may be true, the more important purpose here appears to have been to find ways to make people give up their secrets. White started out with drugging criminals and mafia figures, but whether this was the intent from the beginning or not, the project soon evolved into one continuous entrapment operation (and apparently involving more than just KGB officers). John Marks in his 1978 book 'The Search for the Manchurian Candidate' wrote in remarkable detail about this operation:
"In CIA jargon, White became MKULTRA subproject #3. Under this arrangement, White rented two adjacent Greenwich Village apartments, posing as the sometime artist and seaman "Morgan Hall." White agreed to lure guinea pigs to the "safehouse"—as the Agency men called the apartments—slip them drugs, and report the results to Gottlieb and the others in TSS. For its part, the CIA let the Narcotics Bureau use the place for undercover activities (and often for personal pleasure) whenever no Agency work was scheduled, and the CIA paid all the bills, including the cost of keeping a well-stocked liquor cabinet—a substantial bonus for White. Gottlieb personally handed over the first $4,000 in cash, to cover the initial costs of furnishing the safehouse in the lavish style that White felt befitted him.
"Gottlieb did not limit his interest to drugs. He and other TSS officials wanted to try out surveillance equipment. CIA technicians quickly installed see-through mirrors and microphones through which eavesdroppers could film, photograph, and record the action. "Things go wrong with listening devices and two-way mirrors, so you build these things to find out what works and what doesn't," says a TSS source. "If you are going to entrap, you've got to give the guy pictures [flagrante delicto] and voice recordings. Once you learn how to do it so that the whole thing looks comfortable, cozy, and safe, then you can transport the technology overseas and use it." This TSS man notes that the Agency put to work in the bedrooms of Europe some of the techniques developed in the George White safehouse operation."
In 1955, White moved his operation to an apartment in San Francisco. He turned it into another playboy-style mansion and again had several prostitutes working for him. He soon became regional head of the Bureau of Narcotics and could largely do whatever he pleased. Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Dr. John Gittinger and Dr. James Hamilton were among those who regularly spent time at the apartment of White to observe the operations (and seemingly also for a lot of pleasure). Next to the drug experiments, it was especially Hamilton who had a specific focus on "deviant sexual practices". We now extensively quote from Marks's book again:
"To supplement the furniture he brought from the New York safehouse, he went out and bought items that gave the place the air of the brothel it was to become: Toulouse Lautrec posters, a picture of a French cancan dancer, and photos of manacled women in black stockings. ...
"TSS officials wanted to find out everything they could about how to apply sex to spying, and the prostitute project became a general learning and then training ground for CIA carnal operations. After all, states one TSS official, "We did quite a study of prostitutes and their behavior.... At first nobody really knew how to use them. How do you train them? How do you work them? How do you take a woman who is willing to use her body to get money out of a guy to get things which are much more important, like state secrets. I don't care how beautiful she is—educating the ordinary prostitute up to that level is not a simple task."
"The TSS men continually tried to refine their knowledge. They realized that prostitutes often wheedled extra money out of a customer by suggesting some additional service as male orgasm neared. They wondered if this might not also be a good time to seek sensitive information. "But no," says the source, "we found the guy was focused solely on hormonal needs. He was not thinking of his career or anything else at that point." The TSS experts discovered that the postsexual, light-up-acigarette period was much better suited to their ulterior motives. Says the source:
"Most men who go to prostitutes are prepared for the fact that [after the act] she's beginning to work to get herself out of there, so she can get back on the street to make some more money. . . . To find a prostitute who is willing to stay is a hell of a shock to anyone used to prostitutes. It has a tremendous effect on the guy. It's a boost to his ego if she's telling him he was really neat, and she wants to stay for a few more hours.... Most of the time, he gets pretty vulnerable. What the hell's he going to talk about? Not the sex, so he starts talking about his business. It's at this time she can lead him gently. But you have to train prostitutes to do that. Their natural inclination is to do exactly the opposite.
"The men from MKULTRA learned a great deal about varying sexual preferences. One of them says: We didn't know in those days about hidden sadism and all that sort of stuff. We learned a lot about human nature in the bedroom. We began to understand that when people wanted sex, it wasn't just what we had thought of—you know, the missionary position.... We started to pick up knowledge that could be used in operations, but with a lot of it we never figured out any way to use it operationally. We just learned.... All these ideas did not come to us at once. But evolving over three or four years in which these studies were going on, things emerged which we tried. Our knowledge of prostitutes' behavior became pretty damn good. . . . This comes across now that somehow we were just playing around and we just found all these exotic ways to waste the taxpayers' money on satisfying our hidden urges. I'm not saying that watching prostitutes was not exciting or something like that. But what I am saying was there was a purpose to the whole business.
"In the best tradition of Mata Hari, the CIA did use sex as a clandestine weapon, although apparently not so frequently as the Russians. While many in the Agency believed that it simply did not work very well, others like CIA operators in Berlin during the mid-1960s felt prostitutes could be a prime source of intelligence. Agency men in that city used a network of hookers to good advantage—or so they told visitors from headquarters. Yet, with its high proportion of Catholics and Mormons— not to mention the Protestant ethic of many of its top leaders—the Agency definitely had limits beyond which prudery took over. For instance, a TSS veteran says that a good number of case officers wanted no part of homosexual entrapment operations. And to go a step further, he recalls one senior KGB man who told too many sexual jokes about young boys. "It didn't take too long to recognize that he was more than a little fascinated by youths," says the source. "I took the trouble to point out he was probably too good, too well-trained, to be either entrapped or to give away secrets. But he would have been tempted toward a compromising position by a preteen. I mentioned this, and they said, 'As a psychological observer, you're probably quite right. But what the hell are we going to do about it? Where are we going to get a twelve-year-old boy?' " The source believes that if the Russian had had a taste for older men, U.S. intelligence might have mounted an operation, "but the idea of a twelve-year-old boy was just more than anybody could stomach.""
This all happened in the years after the San Francisco apartment had been furnished in 1955. Judging from John Marks's book, it clearly was realized that videotaping a person having sex with an underaged child is one of the most effective ways of entrapment. However, it is also obvious that the vast majority of people in and outside the CIA would never get themselves involved in such criminal and immoral operations. But does this also go for the CIA leadership?
by American Dream » Thu Oct 24, 2013 9:30 am
I’m dreaming of a white riot
Just like the one October 8th
When the pigs took a beating
And things started leading
To armed struggle against the state
I’m dreaming of a mass movement
That has the highest consciousness
That the Third World’s winning
And we’re beginning
To join their fire in SDS
We’re leading now toward armed struggle
With every cadre line we write
May you learn to struggle and fight
Or the World will off you
‘Cuz you’re white
When you’re a red you’re a red all the way
From your first party cell till your class takes the state
When you’re a red you will fight till you die
With a gun in your hand and an armed struggle line
You’re often alone, you’re often unprotected
The pigs tap your phone, your mailbox is inspected
And you’re rejected
But if you’re a red you take this with a grin
You go straight to the mass and you know they will win
When you’re a red you are just out of sight
You attack the pig class and you fight cause you’re right
Your home is your class, and all oppressed nations
You kick the pigs’ ass, form mass organizations
Lead demonstrations
So if you’re a red take your gun and its lead
Get the people behind you, the pigs out of bed
The struggle’s begun, don’t let fear hold us back
There’s a world to be won, onward comrades attack!
When you’re a red you stay a red.
Dig it: first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the pig Tate’s stomach! Wild!
by American Dream » Thu Oct 24, 2013 11:08 am
(photo of a photocopy of a microfilm of a newspaper photo plus a drawing made with pen on paper plus a drawing made with color pencils on paper plus a photo of a laptop screen plus a photo of flowers I made with an iPhone. All of the images were combined using an iPhone and "Layers" app. Pictured is a law enforcement official [Dan Addario] in a 1970 article about a large LSD bust in Berkeley, California. ["The press weighed more than a ton, can make 16 sizes of tablets, and is capable of putting out more than 1,000,000 pills a week."] Addario went on to become a high-ranking DEA agent and many years later was Chief Investigator for San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan. "...Addario is expected to undergo alcohol rehab..." [quote from a November 3, 2003 article by Phillip Matier, SFGate.com])
by American Dream » Thu Oct 24, 2013 1:14 pm
by American Dream » Thu Oct 24, 2013 6:03 pm
I have seen people get high on five micrograms of LSD...usually very receptive people who were in an optimum Set and Setting...
I have on multiple occasions personally observed LSD manufacturers making mega-quantities of doses that contained approximately 10 micrograms of LSD per dose. Admittedly, many of the persons who bought the doses thought they were a bit weak. Sometimes I wonder if some of these manufacturers were clandestinely working for the government. I observed one of them as he made into tablets and blotters approximately twenty kilograms (!!!!) of crystalline LSD over the course of more than 2 decades. And he was never arrested...!!!!
(Perhaps he was a "dry-snitch" and that was why he was never arrested. A "dry-snitch" is someone who is not consciously aware that they are being allowed by law enforcement and/or intelligence officers to engage in illegal activities. These authorities do not arrest the "dry-snitch" because they have decided that in the long run the strategy of waiting and then carefully orchestrating the arrests of the associates of the associates of the "dry-snitch" is much more effective than arresting the "dry-snitch" himself).
(Likewise, one can surmise that there might be such a thing as a "dry double operative", that is, someone who is consciously an informant but unconsciously is attempting to subvert the efforts of their law enforcement and/or intelligence handlers.
"[Richard Aoki was a revered San Francisco Bay Area radical political activist (and an FBI informant) who gave the Black Panthers some of their first guns and firearms training in late 1966 and early 1967. In a 2007 interview he said "People change. It is complex. Layer upon layer."
---the quote is from a letter by author and investigative journalist Seth Rosenfeld that was published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, 9.26. 2012. Rosenfeld discovered that Aoki was an informant after studying more than 300,000 pages of FBI records that were released to him as a result of five lawsuits he brought under the Freedom of Information Act.]
"The most serious danger in clandestine operations comes not from spies or infiltrators but from the inadequacy of the human beings who compose the underground. One of the most critical areas of underground work is the teaching of members to maintain silence. Normal curiosity leads members to find out more information than they should know."
---A.R. Molnar, J.M. Tinker, and J.D. LeNoir, in HUMAN FACTORS CONSIDERATIONS OF UNDERGROUNDS IN INSURGENCIES, a 1966 Department of the U.S. Army pamphlet.)
The DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), a Federal agency, conducts "buy/bust" operations, where its agents buy illicit drugs from a dealer and then immediately arrest the dealer. Sometimes the agents do a "sell/bust" operation where they sell drugs to a person and then immediately arrest the person. Occasionally the agents will conduct a "buy/let go" operation and at a later date arrest the dealer. What is not commonly known to the public, however, is that the DEA (and other law enforcement groups) also do "sell/let go" operations where, to establish the "credibility" of their undercover agents to a group of drug dealers, they sell a dealer drugs and do not attempt to arrest the dealer until some future date, frequently after the dealer has re-sold to the community the drugs the police provided him...
("As the U.S. Supreme Court said in Russell, supra:
"The illicit manufacture of drugs is not a sporadic, isolated criminal incident, but a continuing, though illegal, business enterprise. In order to obtain convictions for illegally manufacturing drugs, the gathering of evidence of past unlawful conduct frequently proves to be an all but impossible task. Thus in drug-related offenses law enforcement personnel have turned to one of the only practicable means of detection: the infiltration of drug rings and a limited participation in their unlawful present practices. Such infiltration is a recognized and permissible means of investigation; if that be so, then the supply of some item of value that the drug ring requires must, as a general rule, also be permissible. For an agent will not be taken into the confidence of the illegal entrepreneurs unless he has something of value to offer them. Law enforcement tactics such as this can hardly be said to violate "fundamental fairness" or be " shocking to the universal sense of justice" . . . .'"
[From Docket Number 79-1362
United States of America, Plaintiff-
Apellee, v. Peter Wylie, Defendent-
Apellant. United States of America, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Sheldon Perluss, Defendent-Appellant.
United States of America, Plaintiff-
Appellee, v. David Bachrach,
Defendent-Appellant., 625 F.2d
1371 (9th Cir. 1980)])
by American Dream » Fri Oct 25, 2013 11:41 am
("jdyf333 is an outsider artist / poet / acid tester in California with a wicked sick drawing hand. His brilliant textures are secretly encoded alien circuits from the future, embedded with autonomous holy LSD patterns."
---Danny Glix [acidskull.com, 2.18. 2010].)
I am a male who was born at a U.S. military base in Japan in 1951. I grew up in North Carolina, South Carolina, France, and New Mexico. One of my grandmothers was said to have been one of Andy Griffith's Sunday school teachers.
After graduating high school in 1969, I hitchhiked from North Carolina to Berkeley, where I was jailed and convicted of the crime of "Malicious Mischief" for the act of drawing a 2-inch line in a patch of wet cement. I TOOK LSD APPROXIMATELY 5,000 TIMES BETWEEN 1969 AND 1992. I became a federal fugitive in 1972 after being brutally beat and threatened with death by federal agents who were angry because I declined to cooperate with them following my arrest for alleged involvement in an MDA deal.
The drug charges were dismissed following my arrest 13 years later, but I was forced to serve 15 months in prison after being convicted of the crime of "Failure To Appear in Court", a felony.
("Often it is not possible to dissipate the compulsive need for an addiction. In such cases the destructive craving can be rechanneled into a positive beneficial addiction..."
---Michael Lesser, M.D., in his book NUTRITION AND VITAMIN THERAPY, 1980.)
Dr. Lesser, a doctor in Berkeley, treated me for chronic kidney stones in the 1980s. Before I was scheduled to appear in 1986 before federal Judge Samuel Conti to face the 1972 charge of "Failure to Appear in Court", I wrote the judge a letter containing the above quote by Dr. Lesser. I knew the judge had probably read a transcript of a telephone conversation DEA agents had recorded in which I said to a heroin addict that perhaps he should take LSD instead of heroin. I explained to Judge Conti that many people I had known died from using heroin, but I did not know of any instance where someone had died from using LSD. Judge Conti was well-known to be VERY harsh when sentencing people in drug-related cases. My attorney had made an agreement with the prosecutor stating that I would accept a sentence of five years in prison for "Failure to Appear in Court", but when it came time for sentencing, Judge Conti surprised my attorney by refusing to accept the agreement, and he sentenced me to two years in prison instead.
I was not issued a Social Security number until I was 35 years old (1986).
Capitalism tends to encourage greed, although on a well-regulated and very small scale capitalism might sometimes be beneficial to a community. I am vehemently opposed to large-scale capitalism.
I strongly believe in harm reduction. For two decades I earned my keep by doing nonprofit quality-control work for psychedelic drug distributors.
(Necessitas non habet legem ["necessity knows no law"]: When I learned about the quite vast quantity of LSD being clandestinely manufactured, I realized that attempting to influence the flow of the inevitable flood was a far better strategy than trying to stick my finger in the dike.)
("...belief in the beneficient properties of LSD has been, over the years, as strong a motivating factor in the production and distribution of the drug as the profits to be made from its sale.."
---from the DEA document "LSD in the United States".)
("John talked me into investing the $150...in the...LSD business so that we could get motorcycles for Christmas, but I gave away all the acid the same night I got it."
---Pam Tent, describing late summer 1968 in San Francisco, in the 2004 book MIDNIGHT AT THE PALACE--My Life As a Fabulous Cockette.)
An avid reader, I eventually amassed a 10,000+ item drug research library.
My entire lifetime "earnings": $2,143.
After I officially became homeless in January 1993, I applied for (and continue to receive) disability payments. I have lived "on the street" for more than 16 years...
THE WORLD IS MY STUDIO!
("'Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?'
He just grinned and shook my hand and, 'No' was all he said"
---from the song "The Weight", which was written by Robbie Robertson and was recorded by The Band in 1968.)
(Every time I have been detained or arrested or in any kind of legal trouble, I have refused to give any information or assistance to law enforcement officers or prosecutors, because I strongly believe it is morally wrong in such circumstances for a person to cooperate with the authorities in order to save their own skin. And I have always believed that it is my responsibility to accept whatever sentence the court imposes if I am lawfully convicted.)
In my life, any minimization of complicity has been more the result of luck than will.
(And I doubt the amazing and precious luxury of walking deserted city streets, speaking to no one for many months at a time, of being seriously able, every waking minute of every day, "To see a world in a grain of sand" while standing thunderstruck in the middle of the sidewalk in front of some utterly random address would have been afforded me if I had not been a quietly polite clean-shaven Older White Male in Berkeley...)
My current online "bibliography" consists of 4,482 scans of the covers of some of the books, etc. that I have attempted to study.
("No one who is lacking legal authorization should attempt the synthesis of any of the compounds described in these files, with the intent to give them to man. To do so is to risk legal action which might lead to the tragic ruination of a life. It should also be noted that any person anywhere who experiments on himself, or on another human being, with any of the drugs described herein, without being familiar with that drug's action and aware of the physical and/or mental disturbance or harm it might cause, is acting irresponsibly and immorally, whether or not he is doing so within the bounds of the law."
---from a book by Sasha Shulgin.)
I have always seen patterns, both superimposed on things when my eyes are open, and in the dark. The patterns changed after I started taking LSD, becoming more sharply geometric, and the colors have changed as the years have passed. Except when I am on high doses of LSD, I usually have quite a bit of control over the patterns and I can make them disappear if necessary. Although the patterns I draw are based on what I see, I find it impossible to accurately draw the multi-dimensional patterns and shapes that I perceive! My father was in the U.S. military and I was I was raised on military bases until 13 years old. It turns out that many of the places we lived were, at the times we lived there, places where the U.S. government conducted secret experiments on soldiers and others, without the subjects permission or knowledge, using LSD and other hallucinogenic substances. At "The Church Committee Hearings" in the U.S. Congress in 1976, the CIA said that they had done such things, but not to American children. Both of my parents were American-born United States citizens at the time of my birth in 1951 at a military base in Japan. (Around the time the CIA was apparently conducting some of its first experiments with LSD, also in Japan, Projects BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE...) Interestingly, and for reasons unknown, I did not become a U.S. citizen until I was 9 years old. I had to go to Washington, D.C. and answer questions posed by a judge before I received a Naturalization and Immigration certificate. My parents, with myself present as an infant, had contact with a CIA agent while we were in Japan. The agent was an uninvited guest at their first wedding anniversary party, which they recall as being quite a memorable affair. Only years later did they discover that the guest at the party was a CIA agent. They attributed his presence to the fact that my mother was a librarian at the base and she had refused to divulge to military intelligence officers the names of soldiers who read certain communist publications which they had planted there. Only years after forming this theory did they realize that the father of my Japanese nursemaids was a doctor who had served in the Japanese military in the infamous "Unit 731" that had done horrific experiments on Chinese prisoners, and that perhaps the U.S. authorities, who had secretly given amnesty to these doctors because they felt it was important to American security to know what the doctors had learned, were concerned that my parents would leak information about this top-secret amnesty program...
When I was a youth, I spent time every summer with my grandmother and grandfather in Greensboro, North Carolina. I attended Vacation Bible School there each year, and frequently walked over to the nearby Woolworth's store to have a snack at the lunch counter. (I was not consciously aware at the time that African Americans were not allowed to sit there.) In early 1960, there were "sit-in" protests by African American college students at this "whites only" Woolworth's lunch counter, which soon spread to other southern cities. The protests received significant media attention and the President of the United States expressed his support. Eventually the Woolworth's stores were forced to abandon their extremely wrongful policy of racial segregation. A section of the lunch counter is now preserved in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History.
When I was 12 years old and living in France, my parents took me to visit the Douaumont ossuary. Inside the building I viewed the remains of 130,000 of the approximately 230,000 soldiers who died nearby during in the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Piles of skulls and bones stacked to the ceiling. In front of the building lies a cemetery with 25,000 graves. I was monumentally shocked, and have been very, very deeply opposed to war ever since.
I am NOT a Christian. But I do very strongly believe in following the Christian commandment that "THOU SHALL NOT KILL". Obviously the commandment also means that one should never in any way support killing. To follow the commandment "THOU SHALL NOT KILL" means that one absolutely cannot give money or support to the military, and that one cannot give money or support to (or vote for) any member of any political party that supports the military or capital punishment. There are many ways to stop people who are doing great harm. Killing may sometimes seem cost-effective, but there are far better solutions.
("...man is bound to the first and most fundamental command of the Bible, not to kill..."
---Erich Fromm, in his book PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELIGION.)
("I will...never do harm to anyone."
---from the Hippocratic Oath, which is an oath historically taken by by doctors and other healthcare professionals. [Translated from the Greek original by Michael North.]
"Primum non nocere" is one of the principle precepts of modern medical ethics.
[It is a Latin phrase that means "First, do no harm."])
(Brutal communist dictator Joseph Stalin ordered the deaths of between 10 and 20 million of his fellow Russians. During World War II, the United States allied itself with Stalin in the war against Germany and the Axis. American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt justified the alliance by saying "It is permitted in times of grave danger to walk with the devil until you have crossed the bridge."
My father was a decorated bombardier in the American Army Air Forces in World War II. He killed thousands of German civilians. He told me that the first time he and and the other crew members were ordered to bomb non-military sites they became quite enraged, because they felt they should be attacking German soldiers, not killing women and children. After the war, my father was very upset and he spent time recuperating in a psychiatric hospital.)
One afternoon in 1965, I was folding newspapers for my newspaper route when suddenly I heard my voice on the television. I looked up and was amazed to view, on an education news special, about 20 minutes of myself (holding a plastic model of a human brain) speaking about my theories of how ESP might possibly be explained...
When I went back to North Carolina in 1991 to visit my parents for the first time in 22 years (in fact the only time I have been able to afford to visit them in more than 40 years), they picked me up at the airport. Instead of taking me directly to their house, they took me to the site of an abandoned research facility first, asking me if I remembered what happened there. They said that when I went there I was one person, and that when I came out, I was an entirely different person, and that they suspected that the government had in some way "programmed " me while I was there. When we went to my parents house, they gave me letters (that they had saved for 26 years) from the research facility that rather vaguely explained what the researchers planned to involve me in. One of the letters said they would need to take me to several other places to conduct research experiments, but that they would not do anything that would harm me. (I remember that one of the places that the researchers took me was Wake Forest college and that I was placed under hypnosis there...) Another of the letters sent to my parents was to inform them that I and others from the facility had been on national television on the Mike Douglas show.
(Former LOOK magazine editor George Leonard, author of WALKING ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: A Memoir of the Sixties and Beyond, visited the facility while I was there as part of his research for an article on education.)
What happened was that when I was in the eighth grade, my parents were told that I was going to fail that year and have to do the eighth grade again unless I was allowed to go for several months to Winston-Salem, North Carolina and participate in a residential "education experiment" called the "North Carolina Advancement School" (NCAS) where experiments were being conducted on "underachievers".
("While I was onstage doing my act to churchlike silence, a guy said to his date, loud enough that we all heard it, 'I don't understand any of this.'"
---Steve Martin, in his autobiography BORN STANDING UP--A COMIC'S LIFE, 2007. Martin was describing performing in Winston-Salem ["This town smells like a cigarette"] in June, 1975.)
When I arrived at the school, I asked why I had been selected and I was told that I had the lowest grades of anyone in the eighth grade class at my school, but that when I had been given an IQ test I had made a "perfect" score, answering all questions correctly. I told the NCAS people that I doubted the IQ test results were accurate, since, because my dad had been in the military, I had attended many schools and had thus taken the same IQ test many times. I told them that in the instance they were referring to, knowing already that I was plenty smart (because of the previous test results) I only answered every fifth question and then penciled in the answers to all of the other multiple-choice questions in an utterly random fashion.
After extensive testing I was told that I was to be part of an experiment in self-education. It was called "Group O". I was given an office, unlimited funding, and absolutely no adult supervision, free to come and go from the campus and the dorms as I saw fit. My parents were not allowed to visit. All the school advisors said was that they wanted was a written report at the end about my research. I really had FUN! My research project was a study on the subject of extrasensory perception. I was already well-read on the subject and I contacted the parapsychology lab at Duke and J.B. Rhine and associates at the Foundation For Research On The Nature Of Man gave me valuable assistance in my work. I had already become skilled at hypnosis (I suspect my frequent hypnosis of my classmates before I was selected for NCAS may have been one of the reasons why I was selected) so I designed and did tests for telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, etc. using other students that I had hypnotized as subjects. When I read a report of experiments using LSD, etc. in ESP tests, I was fascinated. Having no access to LSD, I designed tests where I had my subjects (some hypnotized and some not) sniff glue. In other tests I administered electric shocks, sometimes in addition to hypnosis and glue-sniffing...
("The intake of drugs in connection with divinatory practices is probably as old as mankind."
---Cavanna, Roberto and Servadio, Emilio in ESP EXPERIMENTS WITH LSD-25 AND PSILOCYBIN: A Methodological Approach, 1964.)
("The results indicated accurate comparisons in approximately 1 in 3 of the targets for LSD, with a rate of only 1 in 10 for the no-drug control condition."
---David P. Luke, commenting on the research by Cavanna and Servadio, in "Psychedelic Substances and Paranormal Phenomena: A Review of the Research", the Rhine Research Center, in the Journal of Parapsychology, Durham, North Carolina, 2008.)
Two things I learned: One was that one of my subjects appeared to be able to influence the flight patterns of model rockets (Estes Industries brand solid fuel). The other thing, which I am still pondering, was that when doing the standard ESP card test (where I kept a written record of each trial), one of my subjects twice guessed the EXACT order of the Zener test cards before the deck had been shufffled, even though in the real time tests his scores were never any better than chance!!!
I was forced to conclude that "time" is not what it seems to be...
("...the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one."
---Albert Einstein)
("Independent theoretical physicist Julian Barbour goes so far as to suggest that time does not exist..."
---Marcus Chown, NewScientist, 10.1. 2011.)
("...the present is the only thing that has no end."
---Erwin Schrödinger, in his book MY VIEW OF THE WORLD.)
("...hauntology---the notion of how the present is haunted by both past and future..."
---BAM/PFA [University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive] ["Art Notes"] Sept/Oct 2010.)
("Could today be tomorrow?"
---Surrealist Dorothea Tanning, in a poem published at age 101.)
("The past is never dead. It's not even past."
---William Faulkner, in REQUIEM FOR A NUN.)
("China has recently sought to suppress time travel as a creative device for some artists..."
---Douglas Coupland, The New York Times Book Review, 3.11. 2012)
(At the time of my research, I did not consciously realize how intensely interested the government might be in such matters. I now suspect the person who appeared to alter the flight path of the model rockets, and the person who guessed the exact order of the cards before they were shuffled may well have ended up being removed from their homes and placed in government custody for further study...Yikes!!)
In 1992, I told my NCAS story to a person who had been one of my large-quantity crystal LSD suppliers. He amazed me by showing me that he had been involved with ESP research at Duke at the same time that I had contact with the researchers there... and then had come to Berkeley where he became an associate of Jackie Leary, et al.
In 1993 I finally recalled filing many reports to my ex-advisor at NCAS, esperanto advocate Dr. Hazel Naugle, about LSD and the Berkeley counterculture in 1969, using a payphone in the Student Union building on the UC Berkeley campus to call her in North Carolina.
I did a google search of NCAS and it turned out one of my dorm advisors (many of them, recruited to work at the school from east coast ivy-league schools, had very long hair and were obvious hippie-types) at NCAS, Damon Rarey, had died. In Memorium to him the following was written:
"Damon Franz Rarey "created the first nationally broadcast computer animations" and "...co-founded Aurora Systems, the first company devoted to the design and manufacture of computer videographic systems..."
---Howard E. Daniel, Yale Class of 1966.
"Rarey's co-counselors at NCAS included Sandy Blount, Greg Teague, Robert L. (Reebee) Garofalo"
"Damon deserves to be remembered in the history books as the first graphic artist to use computer graphics on a regular basis in television."
---Dick Shoup, co-founder of Aurora Systems.
"Damon and I and our friends were never big druggies. We mostly only got stoned on special occasions, like it being Tuesday or something like that. I only remember one truly memorable stone. I guess that's something of an oxymoron, isn't it? In his senior year at Yale, Damon was living with Reebee and another roommate in an apartment in New Haven. Sometime during that year Connie moved in with him. At some point, some of us who were the North Carolina wing of our group came up to visit. It was just when "Sgt. Pepper" came out. None of us had heard it, except maybe Reebee. Reebee had made a light machine. It was a work of art and a work of love. It was a 4 x 8' plexiglass sheet stamped so as to refract light, the kind you could put in the window of a bathroom. The little refracting surfaces broke up any image behind it. Out of a second sheet of the same stuff, Reebee had cut four large circles. He had mounted them at the corners on the back of the main sheet, each one on a spindle so it could turn. Each was connected to a large makeshift belt that was connected to a small electric motor. When the motor turned, all the wheels turned very slowly. The light going through the two layers of Plexiglas constantly changed refractions like in a kaleidoscope. Behind the center of the sheet and behind each of the circles, he had mounted different colored Christmas lights in various arrangements. The lights were wired to a keyboard so that each key lit a different color and/or a different part of the board. So . . . there we were, having gotten stoned, sitting on the couch, all leaning back listening to Sgt. Pepper for the first time in the dark watching the light machine that took up much of the opposite wall being played by a professional percussionist who was totally in tune with the music. When the first guitar intro started for the first cut of Sgt. Pepper and the lights came on, in time with the music and changing color and pattern to fit the mood and story of the music, our little minds melted and ran out our little ears. We all knew it was a special day in the history of the species."
---Sandy Blount
"We were working at a brand new residential school for 'underachieving' eighth grade boys from all over the state of North Carolina. We were in an old hospital building in Winston-Salem, my hometown. The school was Capital 'I' Important, funded by Ford and Carnegie and the Office of Education. It was the first integrated residential school in the South..."
---Sandy Blount (Blount later became a prominent psychologist at the University of Massachusetts.)
Hypnotic facts:
("In addition to the sensory effects, hallucinogens create mental states in which patients become unusually open to suggestion."
---Charles S. Grob, UCLA psychiatrist, quoted by Denise Gellene, the Los Angeles Times, 11.19. 2006, in an article about legal medical research conducted by Grob using psilocybin, the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms". [The psilocybin was produced in small quantities under special Drug Enforcement Administration permits.])
("...well-known studies of hypnosis demonstrate that inflammatory responses on the skin of subjects in trance can be induced or prevented by suggestion, and these effects are immediate. A hypnotist can touch a subject in deep trance with a finger, representing it as a piece of hot metal, and a blister will appear at the site of contact. Conversely, suggestion can prevent blistering in response to contact with a real piece of hot metal."
---Andrew Weil, M.D., in his book 8 WEEKS TO OPTIMUM HEALTH, 1998.)
("Hypnodelic Therapy":
"Fogel and Hoffer reported that they were able to counteract the effects of LSD by hypnotic suggestion and, conversely, at a later date evoke typical LSD phenomena in a subject who had not ingested the drug that day."
---Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D., in his book LSD PSYCHOTHERAPY.)
(Psychologist Charles Tart once stated that all states of consciousness are trances, and that what we call "normal" waking consciousness is just "consensus trance".)
(While I was in prison in Arizona in 1986, I continued my ongoing study of "covert hypnosis" [also known as "indirect hypnosis"]. Through an inter-library loan from the University of Arizona, I was able to obtain unpublished papers written by psychiatrist Milton H. Erickson, who was a founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis. I was a member of a group of prisoners who were secretly engaged in learning about hypnosis. [We were able to experience the necessary privacy while hypnotizing people because we used a classroom that we had rigged so that it could be locked from the inside.])
In 1969 when I was 17 years old, I was very acutely "mainstream". So much so that I had been given the "God and Country Award" by the Boy Scouts of America and was a card-carrying member of a "Police-Specialty" Explorer Scout post sponsored by the Fayetteville Police Department and the U.S. Army Special Forces ("Green Berets") in Fayetteville, North Carolina. After I ran away, arrived in Berkeley, and first got high on marijuana (I was told it was from Vietnam), I went with my friends to the roof of the Berkeley Inn, a hotel on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. It was late at night and I had a paranoid hallucination: I briefly perceived the capped vent pipes on the roof as being Vietnamese soldiers squatting.
The 1969 Woodstock music festival occurred the weekend that I became 18 years old in Berkeley.
("The fabric of American society...seemed to be coming apart at the seams."
---description of what life was like in 1969 at the time of the Woodstock music festival, USA TODAY, 8.14. 2009.)
("A pivotal event in 20th century popular culture and a signature moment in a generation's legend of itself."
---Mick LaSalle, describing Woodstock, the San Francisco Chronicle, 6.12. 2009.)
(In 1972, when I was a federal fugitive, I hid out in southern Mexico and took Psilocybe Aztecorum mushrooms that I obtained from an old woman who was a curandera in a small village near the base of the volcano Popocatépetl. Triple-WOW! Later my friends took me to see the absolutely amazing art at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, which also influenced me greatly...[Please see book THE MEXICAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY by Ignacio Bernal, Román Piña-Chán, and Fernando Cámara-Barbachano, revised edition copyright 1970 by Thames and Hudson, London, England. Illustrated with many photographs of the beautiful art displayed in the museum, including the famous statue of Xochipilli.])
("...hadn't he once been offered a cartload of green bananas plus a full can of potoguaya for her and turned the whole deal down?
But before letting that offer go he had taken a look at the tea, that had been of a light greenish cast. 'If it had been the real boge,' he admitted later, 'I couldn't have answered for my actions.'
Meaning, by boge, the deep-purple plant that only grows on Mount Popocatepetl."
---Nelson Algren, in his 1956 novel A WALK ON THE WILD SIDE, quoting a pimp in New Orleans. This is the earliest published mention of purple marijuana that I have been able to find. The marijuana that I smoked in 1972 that was grown on Popocatépetl was not purple, but it was Quite Excellently Psychedelic...)
When I visited my parents they took me on a tour of places where we had lived. As we approached the house where I had lived just prior to running away to California and becoming a "counterculture" person, I was looking at the sky and my mom said "Do you remember what happened here?" I suddenly had a vision of a door opening in the clouds, and then suddenly closing. I replied to my mom "No! What happened here!" It turned out that when I was a teenager, I had been home alone, when suddenly a naked woman ran up onto the front porch outside my bedroom window and pounded on the front door. Before I could answer, her psychotically-enraged husband, a uniformed police officer who had just caught her in bed with another man, ran up to the porch and started to choke her. The woman's father ran up behind the officer, took his gun and saved his daughter's life by shooting the officer in the head, which killed him instantly. I was found inside our house, speechlessly curled into a fetal position... Until my parents told me the story, I had absolutely no conscious recall of the incident! I had repressed it completely. After they told me, I slowly started to remember...(Learning about the incident helped to explain to me why my entire adult life I had such a powerful fear and dislike of policemen, guns, and women who cheat. They were all issues which threatened to dredge-up a terrifying memory...)
My parents later showed me my base I.D. card from when I was 12 years old and we lived at Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico. (Alamogordo is near where the first atomic bomb was detonated and was at one time the home of spy Edward Lee Howard, born the same year I was. His father was a U.S. Air Force Sergeant, same as my dad was. Howard was a fellow Boy Scout, and later a drug user. In 1985 he became the first CIA officer to defect to the Soviet Union. Holloman Air Force Base was the site of the Air Force's Missile Test Center, where ex-nazi missile scientists, who had been given amnesty after World War II because of their scientific expertise, helped the U.S. develop America's space programs.) My I.D. card was marked "TOP SECRET". When I questioned my parents about why my card had those words written on it, they told me that it was so that I could go visit my dad where he worked, a classified area on the base. (On my frequent rock-collecting hikes to an isolated area of the base [my favorite specimen in my rock collection was a piece of Trinitite, a pale green glassy material that was formed from melted sand during the first atomic explosion] I sometimes found typewritten carbon paper that the wind had blown against the surrounding fence. When I held the carbon paper up to the sun I could read what was on each page. Often they were "SECRET" documents. Not wanting to cause any trouble, I kept what I learned to myself and destroyed the pages...) For years, I had carried with me the memory of visiting the home of one of my schoolmates when we lived at Holloman Air Force Base. The classmate's parents were from Germany. At the classmates house he showed me the new issue of SUPERBOY comics. Superboy had changed his "secret identity" from Clark Kent to someone with MY first and last name!!! It seriously amazed me! Such a strangely empowering coincidence! After I became an adult, I spent many hours in comicbook stores trying to find a copy of that comicbook, but I never could. I finally decided that perhaps my memory, though very vivid, had been false, although, as far as I could tell, I had never experienced any false memories.
(I had read about Jean Piaget, the great child psychologist, who had claimed that his earliest memory was of nearly being kidnapped at the age of 2. He remembered details such as sitting in his baby carriage, watching the nurse defend herself against the kidnapper, scratches on the nurse's face, and a police officer with a short cloak and a white baton chasing the kidnapper away. The story was reinforced by the nurse and the family and others who had heard the story. Piaget was convinced that he remembered the event. However, it never happened. Thirteen years after the alleged kidnapping attempt, Piaget's former nurse wrote to his parents to confess that she had made up the entire story. Piaget later wrote: "I therefore must have heard, as a child, the account of this story...and projected it into the past in the form of a visual memory, which was a memory of a memory, but false". I had also read the story, recently covered [in 2009] by CBS news, about Ronald Cotton, who spent 11 years in prison after he was wrongly convicted of raping Jennifer Thompson. Cotton and Thompson are now friends and give joint lectures about how memory and eyewitness testimony can be wrong. In front of the camera, using a series of photographs and questions, they implanted a false memory in the mind of the CBS interviewer to demonstrate how easily such a thing can be done. The interviewer was utterly flabbergasted, and more than a little embarrassed...)
WHEN I WENT ON THE INTERNET AND DID A GOOGLE-SEARCH, I IMMEDIATELY FOUND THE SUPERBOY COMICBOOK WHERE SUPERBOY CHANGED HIS SECRET IDENTITY TO SOMEONE WITH THE SAME NAME AS MINE! MY MEMORY WAS ACCURATE, NOT FALSE.
("Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill-provider..."
---Ralph Waldo Emerson)
I have not been able to obtain much in the way of gainful employment. The job I had for the longest time was as an agricultural worker, hand-harvesting tobacco in rural Johnston County, North Carolina, near where actress Ava Gardner was born. (The County Seat is Smithfield. When I lived there as a teenager in the late 1960s with my parents and family, there were large racist billboards beside the road as you entered and exited the town. These billboards showed a man on a horse wearing a hooded robe brandishing a flaming cross and had the words "Help Fight Communism and Integration--Join and Support the United Klans of America--Welcome to Smithfield"...)
I also worked briefly at a Post Office, a popcorn factory, a bookstore, a restaurant, and a service station...
("I had never handled money. Not even a penny. Money was the key to everything that was wrong with the world..."
"Rain and I weren't sports fans, what with the obsession over winning and losing."
"Her sigh cut me off. 'Maybe you're better off at Camp Purple Haze. I hate to think of what would happen to you in the real world.'"
---students, in Gordon Corman's 2007 novel SCHOOLED. A hippie, raised in isolation by his grandma named Rain in the remnants of a rural commune, is suddenly thrust into 8th grade classes in a public school. In the end, the hippie kid becomes the school hero. The book was written for young people. "Cap had never watched television." [Back cover blurb.])
One of my cellmates in the federal section of the jail in Oakland, California where I was incarcerated in 1985 (before being convicted of "Failure To Appear in Court" 13 years previously) was the spy Jerry Alfred Whitworth, a former Senior Chief Radioman in the U.S. Navy. He was part of the Walker spy ring which operated for 18 years. Whitworth was a rather stupid and acutely selfish person who sincerely believed he was quite smart. (He very much reminded me of a stereotypical Republican.) He used to toss cheese toast to me in the dining hall like the toast was a frisbee. So surreal!
Whitworth was found guilty and sentenced to 365 years in prison.
("The government justified the severity of Whitworth's punishment by contending that he was the 'principal agent of collection' for the secrets relayed to the KGB."
"'Jerry Whitworth is a zero at the bone' who betrayed his country because 'he believes in nothing.'"
--Sentencing Judge John Vukasin.
"'...the KGB regarded the Walker-Whitworth operation to be the most important...in the KGB's history.'"
--Vitaly Yurchenko, KGB officer.
---George J. Church and Bruce Van Voorst, TIME, 9.08. 1986.
"It is estimated that at least one million classified messages from U.S. military services and U.S. intelligence agencies were compromised through information
John Anthony Walker, Jr. provided to the Soviets.
Billions of...dollars were expended to repair leaks created by Walker and his network..."
--Fredric L. Rice)
Paul Sjeklocha, a.k.a. Paul Cutter, is someone I knew quite well. Paul was a fellow prisoner (and a fellow member of TOASTMASTERS) at Safford Federal Correctional Institute, the prison camp in Arizona where I was sentenced to serve 2 years after being convicted of Failure To Appear In Court. (Safford FCI is also where Watergate conspirator John Ehrlichman [former Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs in Nixon's White House] served his time...) Paul had been convicted in 1985 of unlawfully selling missiles to Iran. Paul steadfastly maintained that he was working hand-in-hand with the CIA at the time he made the sale, and that he had their permission to do so. Shortly after I was released from Safford FCI, the "Iran-Contra Scandal" came to light. (High-ranking members of the Reagan administration secretly orchestrated the the sale of weapons to Iran. The U.S. Congress had forbidden what the Reagan administration officials considered to be important funding to support a war that, with the assistance of the CIA, was being waged by the "Contra" rebels against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The Reagan administration officials secretly diverted some of the money from the sale of weapons to Iran and used it to help fund the "Contra" rebels. Eventually 11 of the officials, including the U.S. Secretary of Defense, were indicted for committing crimes related to the "Iran-Contra Scandal".) In the wake of "Iran-Contra Scandal" revelations, Paul was released from Safford FCI on Appeal. Paul then failed to appear in court and became a fugitive. He was later arrested in March 1996 after waving a gun around at an airport in Arkansas and was eventually re-sentenced to "time served"...
Gary Webb, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News newspaper in San Jose, California, wrote the "Dark Alliance" series of articles in 1996, which detailed how cocaine-dealing Nicaraguans (such as "Norwin Meneses", whose family was close to deposed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza) were linked to the CIA-backed "Contra" rebels. Webb accurately showed that the CIA deliberately ignored cocaine smuggling by its "Contra" rebel-linked associates. I was close friends with 2 Meneses brothers, fellow prisoners when I was at Safford FCI. One of them was a prison librarian, and both of them were members of the TOASTMASTERS group. Many years before the "Dark Alliance" articles by Webb, they very, very succinctly told me that the CIA had cleared the way for their large-scale cocaine-smuggling activities. Webb spoke to me on the telephone from his home in Sacramento, California not long before he committed suicide in 2004, still quite upset that the San Jose Mercury News and the Los Angeles Times had falsely stated that he had recanted the facts of his investigation...
I was asked by someone in the "BERKELEY" group on Flickr: "I don't understand what your images have to do with Berkeley?" Here is my reply:
Myron J. Stolaroff, the former Ampex executive, noted in 1999 that LSD was the most important invention of the last 1,000 years. No intelligent well-informed person would disagree. Berkeley was world headquarters for LSD, a substance which the government conservatively estimates more than 90 million people have taken. (In 1993 a ranking DEA official, Gene Haislip, stated that the entire global supply was controlled by a group of approximately 100 people in the San Francisco Bay Area.) I was present when much LSD was delivered to the very tiny Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley. A manager of the Buttercup was Kary Mullis, the inventor of the ultra-important polymerase chain reaction DNA test. Mullis famously attributes his invention to the fact that he took LSD in Berkeley. A waitress at the Buttercup was Suze Orman, who went on to become the bestselling financial author. She was frequently annoyed at the 2 customers, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who were poor and tried to get free coffee. When asked how Apple got the jump on IBM, Jobs famously said "Maybe they didn't take enough acid." (Or check out the cover story in FORTUNE magazine, "The Edison of the Internet", about long-hair Bill Joy and the U.C. Berkeley computer group.) A google search I just did shows 26,200 results for the quote "There are 2 major products that come out of Berkeley--LSD and UNIX." There was a reason the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, labeled former Berkeley resident Timothy Leary "the most dangerous man in America". The reason, of course, was Leary's advocacy of LSD. (I think Leary had an amazing brain. Some of what he wrote was utterly brilliant. His life, however, was apparently such an intense game-playing ego-circus that we may never truly know if he worked for [or cared about] anybody other than "TIM LEARY". Did Leary associate with persons linked to the CIA and other intelligence agencies? Yes, of course! So did I. There were more than a few spooks in the Berkeley LSD scene, and since you never knew who they were, the possibility of association with them was absolutely unavoidable. I did my best to have NO contact with Tim. I did not want to get arrested or murdered. I was friends with his son, Jack, who supplied quantities of crystalline LSD. [It was the only kind I have ever taken that caused me to hallucinate actual paisley patterns!] More than once, Jack said to me, with a great deal of emotion, "My father is a liar!") In the words of a popular song from that time ("San Francisco [be sure to wear some flowers in your hair]" by Scott Mckenzie, 1967): "ALL ACROSS THE NATION, SUCH A STRANGE VIBRATION"...
by American Dream » Fri Oct 25, 2013 1:51 pm
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