First set of photos is from my trip back home last winter for Christmas. Wasilla, Alaska. Matanuska-Susitna Valley. About 1 hour north of Anchorage.
The Mat-Su Valley
Let’s start out with the best. This is from last winter. This is the lake next to the house I grew up in.
The above is the same lake scenery, but I moved about 20 feet to the right, closer to the shore. This was probably 8 a.m. in the morning in December.
View of the mountains in the Mat-Su Valley from Wasilla on the way to the Anchorage airport. Notice how blessedly free of traffic the highway is at 7 a.m.
This photo of the moose outside our front door makes me think of Monte the Wonder Dog getting kicked by a moose. A brief diversion here. Monte was a Min-Pin. I did not see this event I am about to share, but I heard about it.
Mom and Dad left for Texas, as they do for about 4-5 months out of every year. The dude who watches the house while they are away told my parents this tale about Monte and The Moose.
Monte went outside to do his business and saw a moose in the driveway. Monte began barking incessantly at the moose. The housesitter watched out the window, unable to do anything. Monte wasn’t responding to calls to come inside, and you don’t go outside when there is a moose around.
The moose stood there, the dog kept barking. The moose became annoyed and layed its ears back flat. Never a good sign.
The moose walked toward the little dog, and the dog continued to bark. The moose came rightup to the dog, within a foot….and the moose then kicked that little dog!
According to the house sitter, the dog immediately passed out upon being kicked. The moose, satisfied with his work and apparently happy with the fact that the barking ceased, walked away into the woods.
The dog was knocked out cold by the violent kick, and the housesitter feared, as anyone would, that the dog was dead. The house sitter chilled inside, hoping for the best, but fearing the worst as he watched TV.
About an hour later, he heard the little dog barking loudly and scratching at the door. He let the little dog inside.
Monte ran inside with a passionate fury, headed toward the kitchen and began slurping up water and eating chow like the dog had not received water or food in 3 days.
Afterword, now satisfied, the little dog ran over to his bed and slept for 10 hours straight. The next day he popped up like nothing… and he was absolutely fine. The housesitter reported that Monte was barking loudly and begging for food in the morning hours as usual… just like his usual overbearing self.
Monte was a survivor and a free spirit. He had deep talon scars on his butt where an eagle, or some othervery large bird, had obviously tried to take off with him, and he somehow wriggled free and ran away to reclaim his liberty. We noticed these scars upon adopting him.
In fact, his previous owners gave him awaybecause he was too much of a pain in the ass for them to deal with. He would constantly escape and run off. They were very forthcoming about that fact. Apparently my parents decided to take Monty on as a challenge.
At another point in time, we watched Monte nearly succumb to an opening in the ice covered lake. He wandered out in spring when the lake was melting and there were many soft spots.
Monte hit a soft spot and fell in. We were alerted by the barking of our other dog, a large Mastiff/Rotty mix, standing on the shore, looking out at the lake and barking frantically. We looked outside and saw Monte bobbing up and down, gripping the ice on the sides and trying to get out.
We couldn’t do anything except hope for the best. We shared in this terrible experience of thinking we were about to watch little Monte succumb to the water. But… somehow… little wonder dog… Monte got a firm grip on the surrounding ice, and finally, he pulled himself out.
He got up onto the ice, ran back onto solid land, and then he bolted his little ass straight up the hill and went bursting toward the sliding glass door of the kitchen at lightning speed, barking like a little insane devil.
We covered him in blankets, fed him all the food he wanted for the rest of the night and cooed at him.
And again, the next day it was like nothing had happened. Back to same old Monte. Being obnoxious. Getting his big brother in trouble. Acting the fool. Eating like a pig. Barking. Business as usual.
And after all these dangerous adventures… he simply died of old age. 17 or 18 years. Just passed away in his sleep like any other senior dog. But Monte lived a full life. He lived it better than most canines, and arguably better than a lot of humans.
Juneau
I spent 7 years living in Juneau, and yet I have very few personal photographs to show for it. How is it I lived somewhere for so long, and don’t have any pictures? I probably do have some on my thumb drive… but I’m too lazy to go find them right now. So, I am going to steal some from the internet.
I talked to a few people raised in Juneau who believe that the Mat-Su valley is “ugly” in comparison. This is understandable. I don’t agree, necessarily, but I do see their point. Juneau is much further south, and the land surrounding Juneau is a combination of the beauty of Washington State, mixed with the beauty of the Wasilla/Anchorage area. Juneau, and Southeast Alaska as a whole – it’s a unique area.
All the rugged mountains are there, except they are much closer to you, and you get these wild-ass temperature fluctuations and rain in the winter. The foilage looks a little more like Washington.
Juneau is where I learned the word “Snain” – Snow mixed with rain. It’s a frequent occurrence in winter time Juneau, and yet before moving there I had never heard the term. Look at these summer shots of Juneau that I found.
Juneau in the summer. No matter here you are at, you are at the base of a mountain.
Day jobs are a problem for night owls. The problem with working is the way it cuts into your passion when you finally rediscover your groove.
There’s the need to sleep for work the next day on those moonlit nights; the need to be functional the next day when you’d love to stay up all night.
There’s a giant park 15 minutes away from where I live, featuring 2 miles of paved walking trails that circle around soccer and baseball fields.
Lots of greenspace, expansive rolling hills, trees line the perimeter and giant lamps cast florescent light down over the sports fields at night. Smaller streetlamps hover above the paved walking path.
It’s glorious in the setting sun and even better at night under the electric lights in the evening.
Tonight I rushed along this path, feet hitting the ground – pat pat pat – staring down at the glittering pavement while listening to my circus of music.
It’s autumn and the yellow moon emerged, framed by wispy clouds right as the sun sank below the horizon. I listened and wrote in my head, trying to catch those thoughts and cement them for later usage, but of course it’s a lost cause.
Smart people keep notebooks in their car.
I rushed along for three miles and what a glorious night for a concert. The delicious cocktail of exercise endorphins and good music. Here comes the madness of divine inspiration.
First, we wade through the swamp lands and tidal waves of Tool, the dark spiritual psychedelia of Reflection, perfect under the streetlamp shadows that pass my feet as I rush along.
Now here’s late period Hendrix. I adore his late-period purple funk, and I could stay inside those songs forever.
Fantastic songs for Autumn somehow; those elusive guitar tones, the general feel of having one foot standing in the Christian church and one nostril snorting up cocaine in a lavish whore house.
But, couldn’t that describe much of the blues? Perhaps, but there’s something extra here, that holy ingredient dropping down from those beautiful long fingers.
Nothing compares to the pink ocean swirl of “Drifting” – Jimi’s angel woman he was always singing about. Waiting in the sky, waiting on the other side of the ocean, always there in his music and in the secret heart of many.
Next we have my beloved Pumpkins, here’s “Thru the Eyes of Ruby” and how could I fucking forget how perfect this song is in darkness under a full moon? Holy shit, it’s a surprise all over again, I had completely forgotten.
Oh, here comes the Bending Mirrors of Perception! The bending mirrors in the intro. That first BLAST of indescribable tone and guitar pedal glory still gets me on nights like this. Like it’s the first time I’m hearing it.
The swirling mirrors in the clouds, the gothic vampire sound, the epic movements, the layers and layers building, the drums crashing as the tension builds, the controlled screaming refrain, the laser guitars shooting everywhere, now they crash down into the ground.
Finally, the storm clouds part at the end and here comes that yellow moon over water just like the album art. That acoustic moon rises as the electric storm falls away and that shit never gets old.
Here comes Jefferson Airplane. This is a live, screaming electric version of “You, Me, and Pooneil” featuring Jack Cassidy’s wild bass solo.
You can see young Grace Slick on stage in your mind dancing around near the bass amp. The most beautiful woman, in her youth, who ever walked planet earth. Jet black hair, crazy blue eyes cast down in concentration, staring at the floor near Jack’s bass amp, her wicked stage presence and dark beauty.
Now the drums pick up speed, the bass solo crests and BOOM – here’s Jorma Kaukonen’s lead guitar taking over like a lightning bolt.
That mean-ass guitar drops down and says, “I’m the fucking boss now”. The singers harmonize in a groove, then suddenly they all soar up and bellow out a high note together and the lead guitar comes back and twists around, that evil fucking snake twisting around on the stage! Oh my god! It goes on forever and all the instruments go in different directions and I’m walking.
My mind tries to follow all the musical ideas, but I can’t decide which way to go. Colors flash; fireworks, an intellectual orgasm in my mind and it always conjures wooden floorboards in my imagination, a little blues shack in the woods, jazz and blues central, walls vibrating, organic things mixed with neon flowers.
Finally, we have my other beloved, Radiohead, and here is “Motion Picture Soundtrack”, crazy mashup of “Everything in it’s right Place”. This particular version of this song is a perfect reflection of what happens in the brain of someone messed up on anxiety or other mental illness; reverse kaleidoscopes melting into each other, refracted light, two colors in your head, I see grey and yellow. Now we’re in the netherworlds with the gremlins and the strobe light sound machines.
*
I don’t allow myself to listen to this kind of music in my living room at night, because if I catch the inspiration, I’ll stay up all night, speakers blasting, walking around in circles when I get excited about guitar solos and various things.
I listen to ambient electronica instead.
*
So, I walked and wrote in my head, knowing I wouldn’t get it all down. Glittering pavement, ideas flying around. I had an idea to write a post every night featuring one song. 500-700 words max. I had an idea to type up a passage from my favorite books and other writings every weekend. I opened up my skull beneath the harvest moon and the universe flew inside. When passion is underway for me, it’s all consuming.
Master the energies.
Smart people would designate a half hour to get it all out every day, then move on to something else in their routine. But for some of us, it’s not that simple. If it’s there, it wants to flow.
You can’t put a harness on that wild horse.
So, if I want to sleep I can’t ride that horse the way I want. As it is, I should have gone to bed and read some George Eliot tonight. But, here I am.
“I see this as a realistic film about an unreality. The gestures, the sound, the human expressions all seem real, but reality is re-interpreted artistically. It becomes a kind of moving painting.” -Richard Linklater, Wired magazine
We sat in a dark room. The kitchen light flickered as everyone waited in silence to watch some movie Jake and his girlfriend were raving about.
Jake stood before us; a young crowd of punks, miscreants and arty types seated on couches and the floor. He bent down and carefully placed the disc in the player, stood back up, reached for his lighter… and inhaled a huge bong hit. Jake exhaled a long plume of smoke as he spoke to us:
“Ahem. {cough} I just want to warn you guys that this shit is heavy. The content is kind of hard to follow the first time you watch it. But it’s awesome.”
Jake pressed play and the film began.
We watched in rapt silence, awestruck from beginning to end. We all wondered what the hell just happened. Jake sent us on the craziest trip of our lives, but none of us had eaten LSD.
Inside the mindscape
Waking Life is about a dream experience that weaves science, history, and philosophy into a mesmerizing parade of sensory input. The film combines existentialism and other themes with visually stunning animation.
Director Richard Linklater shot the entire movie using a handheld camera. After completing the live-action footage, he hired a team of artists to paint over each frame using a technique called rotoscoping. The result is realistic animation – an effect Linklater describes as a “mindscape”.
The main character (Wiley Wiggins) doesn’t know his own name or identity, but viewers watch him float through various scenes where he encounters dream characters. The characters eventually begin to talk about lucid dreams and he realizes what’s happening. He discovers he’s trapped in a dream and fears he’ll never wake up.
Linklater’s handheld camera magic enhances the surrealism; the camera often pans into scenes at weird angles – zooming into rooms, zipping across an orchestra scene, floating over rooftops. Linklater and his crew shot footage from a hot air balloon to capture scenes where the main character floats through the sky over suburban neighborhoods.
As a viewer, you become absorbed in the wild visual flow while attempting to follow complex verbal insight with your ears. Classical music and tango heighten the beauty during scene transitions.
The major theme is awareness; accepting the moment and making the best of a situation within our limited toolbox. The film showcases activists, teachers, and thinkers of all ages. People in different phases of life may take different lessons away from this film.
You are the main character
Waking Life boasts many achievements, but the most impressive is the way Linklater pulls you into the film. The main character doesn’t remember his own name or identity; he could be anyone. He could be you.
One character tells our young protagonist that the image of himself that he views inside the dream is only a “mental model”.
The dream characters directly address your thoughts and feelings about the movie as you watch. It’s part of the film’s spooky genius. In one scene, a blonde lady (Kim Krizan) speaks about the history of communication and the difficulty of expressing abstract emotion:
“So much of our experience is intangible, so much of what we perceive cannot be expressed – it’s unspeakable. And yet when we communicate with each other and we feel that we have connected, I think we have a feeling of almost spiritual communion… and that feeling might be transient, but I think it’s what we live for.”
As you watch and listen, you experience what she’s talking about. The visual and thematic elements coming at you in this film are unspeakable.
She relates directly to your experience as a viewer, and she simultaneously provides insight into something important in your life. She addresses all those clusters of emotion in the past; times of trauma or perhaps elation when your personal experience escalated beyond what you could express in words.
She also delivers you into the “spiritual communion” aspect of her speech. You feel an uplift because she’s communicating a new insight into your mind. Here’s a human being expressing something either forgotten or never known by me… but now I know… or… maybe I remember. Collective conscsiousness.
Your brain lights up, electrical impulses dancing around as this stream of information enters the “conduit” she discusses. The animator illustrates your experience on-screen by drawing a crude visual conduit.
This is your dream.
This is also the brilliance inside the mind of Richard Linklater.
I read the script (found here) and realized the script is amazing on its own. Watching the film, however, is an additional layer of experiences and emotions that words on a page cannot replicate. Again, this exact issue is addressed in a scene called the “Holy Moment”.
Later on, the main character discusses his dream experiences with a new dream character. He describes feeling engaged in an active process. This confuses him because he’s been silent and passive during the dream. She responds that listening is not necessarily a passive act. Once again, this is also about your viewing experience.
Moving paintings – the dream comes to life
“This film uses dreams as a kind of operating system for the narrative, the hitch for most of the ideas. The realism of live-action film would have canceled out the ideas… This style of animation allows you to see a different state of reality.” –Rick Linklater, Wired Magazine
“It’s different from traditional animation; it’s on the computer, but it still involves a lot of hand drawing…it’s pleasing for people to recognize real motion and real expression but have this added layer of an artist’s sensibility. I wanted a very painterly look. With rotoscoping, you’re not required to come up with any original motions. You have to draw people’s facial expressions, have a good sense of color balance and design; all the skills that painters have.” – Bob Sabiston, Rotoshop creator and Waking Life Art Director
Animators have used rotoscoping since 1915, but Waking Life’s animators used proprietary rotoscoping software created by Linklater’s friend and collaborator, Bob Sabiston. While working on a different project, Sabiston demonstrated his Rotoshop software to Linklater and “something clicked”.
The animation conveys a coffee shop style of art; shades of brown and red mixed with yellow and blue. Sabiston limited the color range available to the artists to keep the appearance of the film consistent. Each artist showcases a different art style throughout the film, but the colors stay within an earthy palette.
Sabiston’s Rotoshop software is notable because the program features important advantages over traditional rotoscope. The first upgrade is interpolation.
Interpolation is a difficult concept to understand until you watch an animator demonstrate the technique. In a featurette, Sabiston demonstrates interpolation; he traces a line in one frame that will show up off to the side in the following frame. Doing so allows him to approximate the exact line or shape again on the following frame for consistency. The result is consistent lines in important places – such as chins and necks – and the animation flows more smoothly.
Another advantage this software has over traditional rotoscoping is “layering”. Sometimes a specific house or nature scene is required across many frames. The animator colors over the house once and places it inside one layer within the program, and that same layer can be used across multiple frames.
The result, like interpolation, saves animators time so they don’t have to redraw the entire scene in each frame. Despite these upgrades, rotoscoping still requires a tremendous effort. According to Wired Magazine, each minute of Waking Life’s footage took up to 250 hours to animate.
The featurette also provides an eye-opening glimpse into some of the film’s mysterious non-animation effects. The crew achieved a scene in which the main character floats above a car by suspending actor Wiley Wiggins with cables attached to his body.
Traverse the light and shadows
“I didn’t start out with such a set idea about what it was going to be like. The film is so much about its own process. It unfolds, and you kind of accept it the way your own life unfolds. Things come at you, and you either incorporate them or you don’t”. -Linklater, AV Club
The film’s content is optimistic at times, neutral and questioning at other times, and occasionally the subject matter is dark and pessimistic. It’s a mirror of our thought cycles as we pass through our days.
The optimistic characters shine with luminescence; light pours through their eyes and they emit an aura. They speak with their hands, palms up, gesturing with openness and freedom. The animators absorbed Linklater’s vision and did a phenomenal job using their talents to breathe life into this film.
I enjoy the film’s ambiguous spirituality. At one point the main character questions where all this new information is coming from. Is it being transmitted to him from an outside force? Christian viewers might see the information as sourced from God and the other dream characters as angels and demons, or perhaps ghosts.
Alternately, a science fiction enthusiast might interpret this dream as alien abduction. Maybe he’s been abducted by aliens and they’re tinkering with his brain while he’s asleep, using tools to activate specific memories from his readings of D.H. Lawrence, Sartre, science class, and the bible.
Maybe when he floats up to the sky he’s about to wake up, or maybe he’s about to die. Maybe the aliens are bringing him out of the dream.
By working with a team of artists and animators to manifest his vision, Linklater created a film that is also a learning tool. The themes would be fascinating enough as a collection of quotes or classroom talking points, but Waking Life stretches beyond the man-made, elitist borders of the literary and academic worlds.
Like an actual dream, it bursts through the confines of academia to reach a universal audience. The vehicle is art, but the driving forces are curiosity and fear of the unknown. The film entertains, but it also delivers viewers into introspection.
According to a commonly accepted plot interpretation, the dreamer is either dead or he’s about to die. A cruel irony unfolds as dream characters deliver useful insights; it’s too late for the main character to apply this insight to his life. This is frustrating to watch, until you realize it’s not about him.
“I think one of the reasons the audience came in such large numbers was out of curiosity. They didn’t want to take LSD, but the reviews said the film came close to an LSD experience.” -Roger Corman, Director
In 1967, American International Pictures released The Trip starring Peter Fonda to the curious masses. Crowds flocked to cinemas during the Summer of Love to experience a new motion picture featuring the hot topic of the year.
Written by actor Jack Nicholson and directed by horror film veteran Roger Corman, the film broke new ground in the world of independent cinema and paved the way for 1969’s Easy Rider.
Viewed today, The Trip is campy and hilarious, featuring a simple plot – a protagonist who takes LSD for the first time. The highlight of the film is dazzling set design and special effects produced using analog methods that are primitive today, but were ahead of their time in 1967.
Peter Fonda Visits Wonderland
In the first scene, we are introduced to Fonda’s character, Paul Groves, a fashionable TV director filming a commercial on the beach. His estranged wife (Susan Strasberg) shows up to tell Paul he missed a divorce meeting.
It’s clear that Paul is having a crisis, but it’s unclear exactly which one of the two initiated the divorce. The conversation is civil and bursting with the innocence and bad acting of 60’s era films.
In the next scene, Paul descends stairs into a club called “Bead Game” to meet his trip guide, John (Bruce Dern). Paul and John meet up with mutual acquaintance Max (Dennis Hopper) to pick up the goods. Paul retreats with John to swallow the acid capsules.
Like most first-timers, Paul is giddy and nervous. John tells him to relax and gives him an eye mask. Paul lays back on a futon, places the mask over his eyes, and the circus begins.
Music kicks in and the screen fades from blue into pink. Kaleidoscope shapes parade before our eyes. Some look like moving paper snowflakes, others look like cave paintings shifting around.
Behind the Scenes – Special Effects
“Right after [taking LSD at] Big Sur, I knew I could never reproduce this on film. The images, the feelings, the emotion were so overwhelming that there was no way to translate that from your mind to the screen. You could get some of it, which I think I did, but you could never get it all.” -Roger Corman, featurette documentary
Attempting to recreate the effects of LSD was an ambitious undertaking, so Roger Corman turned to Peter Gardiner of Charlatan Productions, a professional who produced psychedelic effects for TV.
Gardiner referred Bob Beck, known for creating rock band light shows, and award-winning cinematographer Allen Daviau, who later directed cinematography for E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. The three teamed up with Gardiner overseeing the operation, and they began creating effects for the film.
A post-film documentary film, and a 1968 edition of American Cinematographer provide fascinating insight into the amount of work behind creating special effects for The Trip.
The effects team used mixed media in the truest sense of the phrase; they used multiple analog sources combined to create one overall show.
They used different camera lenses, light sources, and they copied symbols and designs on film strips. Next, they re-photographed the film strips through color gels to create a “master strip” which they used with colored lighting. During the featurette, Corman discussed how the success of the film involved a combination of set design and special effects:
“I worked with Bob and Allen in one way, primarily post-production, but some of the other work was done during production… body paint on people and at the same time I was using very strange lenses; a couple of lenses broke up the image into sections. A lot of it was done on the set, in the camera, and then a great deal was done by Bob Beck and Allen post-production in which they took our images and treated them with multiple layers of images they created, which sometimes weren’t even images, just light and liquid flowing across the frame.”
The budget for special effects was limited to a flat $10,000, so the effects crew had to utilize various resources and hone a creative approach to honor Jack Nicholson’s script. They were also limited by a three-week time constraint, so they had to move fast.
“For the love scene we had liquid projectors, we had carousel projectors at odd angles, strobe lights… waves of color and various types of symbols and psychedelic visuals that Bob came up with… we were there to show up and bring whatever we had. By throwing (symbols) out of focus and overlapping, you’ll see one source panning on and another source panning off as the cameras move. We were able to get an interesting texture over the scene. It was very abstract… we were doing everything we could to keep it happening.” -Allen Daviau
Combining the analog effects was a complex process. In the article Beck wrote for American Cinematographer, he discusses the equipment problems he overcame and the many resources involved, including the design and construction of equipment from scratch.
Beck used existing equipment, such as liquid projectors, but he also had to design and build several machines to achieve the film’s effects.
Beck constructed 6 modified strobe lights for the nightclub scene because nothing powerful enough existed on the market to use in film production. He also constructed huge lamps to project psychedelic images on nude bodies in the dark.
Perhaps most fascinating of all, the effects team used a “color organ”. His description of the color organ is, in and of itself, psychedelic. A color organ is a piano-like device used to “play” colors:
“The tunes, frequencies, and intensities of musical notes served to modulate lamps that were mounted behind red, green, and blue filters which were then reflected from broken mirror segments onto a screen… and produced a weaving, ever-changing cloud-like effect of color and shifting forms floating across the screen”.
“Optical Bench” constructed by Beck to create effects for The Trip
Synchronizing the strobes with the cameras was also an intricate task. Among other considerations, Beck had to determine the right amount of flashes per second to reach the desired effect while filming the dance scene.
The effects team received help from the film crew for the dancing sequence. Showing true teamwork and dedication to craft, the assistant director gave the dancers amyl nitrate “poppers” to heighten the atmosphere of frenzy:
“The Bead Game sequence was shot in an actual L.A. club, with minor modification by the film crew. Assistant director Paul Rapp remembered shooting the Bead Game sequence, ‘I bought hundreds of boxes of amyl nitrate, which was then sold over the counter. I was working with dozens of extras in the scene and I needed to get their energy up to a pitch…when I was ready to shoot, I got everybody higher and higher and brought out the poppers.’ ” (Bret Wood, Turner Classic Movies)
Roger Corman’s Trip
Corman researched LSD before production, and he decided to take LSD to accurately reflect the experience he wanted to portray on film.
Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson helped influence this decision; both men were experienced psychonauts and they encouraged Corman to ingest acid before filming. Corman corralled a group of friends and headed to Big Sur, California for his trip. In the documentary featurette, Corman shares his experience:
“I was floating in the sky and the atmosphere seemed to be a golden orange, like a sunset, but the whole sky was a sunset. A ship started to sail through the sky toward me. The sails turned to jewels as it came closer, and I noticed it was a ship, but it was also a woman and her body was made from jewels… the sails of the jewels were moving in the wind.I remember seeing all the way to the center of the earth and thinking that I had just invented a new art form. The creator would lay spread eagled on the earth, looking face down. His creation, whether it was music or a painting or a motion picture, would transmit through the earth and anybody else who was lying face down on the earth would receive the piece of art uninterrupted.”
In 60’s parlance, Bruce Dern was “straight”. Dern had no interest in trying LSD, so he asked Nicholson and Corman for guidance about LSD in order to perfect his own role as a trip guide.
“[Roger] said to me that he took a trip, laid on the ground face down and looked into the earth and studied what was under the grass for about 7 hours. I said, ‘well, there’s nothing under the grass’ and he said, ‘oh yeahhh… oh yeahhh, I saw alllll the way to the center of the earth.’” -Bruce Dern
Roger Corman
American International transforms The Trip into Reefer Madness II
American International Pictures viewed the final product and determined that The Trip was cheerleading for LSD.
Since the film was already laced with plenty of “bad trip” sequences (inspired by Corman’s desire to be neutral) it’s evident that paranoia over industry reputation drove American International to take the bad trip imagery one step further.
After production (and without the knowledge or approval of Corman) American International overlaid a cracked image on Paul’s face in the final scene, an apparent sign of a victim cracked permanently. They also inserted a “Reefer Madness” style cautionary scroll at the beginning of the film.
Interestingly, an important member of the effects team was also concerned about associating too closely with psychedelia. In his article for American Cinematographer, Bob Beck arrives a peculiar conclusion for a man who wrote a feature article about building machines from scratch to create psych effects:
“Despite the fact that many of the unique lighting effects that have developed in recent years were first used in connection with the psychedelic scene, and in spite of the fact that I was involved in the production of several films about the experience, I feel very strongly that all of these “light show” techniques and optical effects should remain separated from the psychedelic label. I would greatly regret having such techniques saddled with the label and stigmatized”.
According to Wikipedia, the film grossed 6 million dollars. It’s clear that people were curious about the psychedelic phenomenon. Business moguls in the music and film industries were divided between a desire to capitalize on the craze, versus fear of rocking the boat to the point of derailing their careers.
Despite American International’s cheesy efforts and the film’s own campiness, The Trip is a masterpiece of its time. The crew and team embarked on an ambitious project together within a limited budget and timeframe, and the result was a stunning exercise in creativity and efficient use of resources.
The film deserves a place in history as a breakthrough feature, right next to A Trip to the Moon by Georges Melies.
You should visit it. 😁 However, be warned that her general tone and content are wildly different than mine (if you like my blog stuff). I like reading her blog.
After lamenting my difficulties in creating art in this space yesterday, the universe proved this was nothing more than a self-limiting belief. I had a lot of work to do, but I couldn’t shake the desire to draw. In the time before my journey… that other life which I am seeking a concise name for… […]
The pictures did not adequately capture the amazing magic of this thing. Then I remembered all about YouTube… and videos and stuff.
I was also just talking about SP, and I have the lamp sitting next to the SP flag. Which makes it even cooler because the flag features the same color palette as the lamp.
Therefore, it made perfect sense to me that I should also include the weirdest SP song in their entire catalog. This is a folky little weird-ass number called “Meladori Magpie”.
I recommend making it full screen to see the full magic. We have come a long way since people put oil drops on slides in the 1960’s and people manually moved the slides.
I’ve been wanting to write about my past psychedelic experiences for a long time. Last night I discovered a great resource for researching psychedelics & experiences that I will plug at the bottom of this post, along with a few other links.
Before we get into my experiences, I gotta plug a few hilarious quotes I found.
My original intention was to do two separate posts.
One of them was going to be chock-full of funny quotes like those below, plus some quotes that were simply interesting or beautiful. The other post was going to be my personal experiences.
Well, as I continued to read about people’s experiences, I found that most of them just were not as funny as the ones below.
And I don’t have patience to make a big research project out of this whole thing.
But let’s get into the good stuff.
Quotes
“Moments later I progressed ever deeper into the ego death and lost my sense of self momentarily. I then started to feel that I was the universe searching for itself within itself but had entirely forgotten that it was itself. At this point a brief moment of realization hit me, I realized that I had found myself and that it had been right in front of me all along.”
“I was asking questions aloud to my friends/guardian spirits, like “When did you get here?” (by which I meant, ‘When did you beings come into existence?’), and my friend replied, “We’ve been here the whole time, dude” (this proved to me that they were divine).”
And later, in the same entry:
“One friend stayed behind to keep me company through all this while the other two went exploring, and I asked stuff from time to time (still thinking he was divine); “Where did you come from?” I asked, and he replied by touching my heart and whispering, “We came from inside.” Looking back on it he was simply trolling me, but my mind was blown, again.”
Haha, lmao! =) That entry above is my absolute favorite.
(The quote below is for Rob in particular)
“I decided it was finally time for me to try to play Mario cart, and as I tried to navigate through the menu with my friend I realized that I could actually still play really well. I chose a map called “rainbow road” for obvious reasons, and the neon rainbow of colors engulfed the entire room as we played. I had never felt this before, but a great peace of everything being connected to me overcame me and I started bawling my eyes out! I kept telling my friends that I was experiencing “pure love” and that the universe loved me!”
(He then goes on to explain that his friends were shitty trip sitters, and it seems like they were just ignoring him while he was having this majestic insight about the universe – how sad).
My experiences
Before we get into my experiences, I should tack a disclaimer on here.
I have never had a bad trip on any psychedelic drug. However. This was during a very social time of my life. I was young and I was surrounded by friends I trusted who I spent time hanging out with nearly every day.
The “set and setting” was continually good because this friend group had such a profoundly positive effect on my life. Thus, even when I tripped alone I never had a bad trip.
I had not yet developed anxiety or a stressful career. I had zero self-awareness. In other words, I was not yet an adult. I was an adult in age (early 20’s) but not mentally. If I took any of these substances now (besides MDMA), there’s a good chance I’d have a nightmare trip unless something in my life changed to where I could establish general emotional safety, plus a very good set and setting.
LSD
I remember the beginning of my first LSD trip like it was yesterday. It makes me smile.
Being incredibly dumb as a young person, I took that first dose alone. My girlfriend must have been at work. I have no memory of her being there. I was alone in my first apartment.
I took a low dose and waited for the effects to kick in.
It must have been one sugar cube, because I can’t remember any geometric wave patterns from this first trip. But then, I only remember the first part of the trip. I do remember a pufferfish on the ceiling. But we’ll get to that later.
The first thing I remember is a gentle and heady shift in my consciousness. I remember having a little feeling of excitement. “Wow, it’s happening!”
Some time passed, and I looked down at the carpet. The carpet was one of those low carpets like you’d find in a doctor’s waiting room office. It was normally dark blue with green specks in it.
As the effects of the acid kicked in, the floor started turning green. A neon-colored green. I was ecstatic.
I grabbed the cordless phone and dialed my friend Nick. He answered.
“Nick!” I shouted, “Nick, the floor is turning GREEN!”
Nick chuckled.
“It sounds like you took that acid.”
“Yes!!!”
I don’t remember what he said after that. I’m sure that I continued talking about how amazing everything was and he continued chuckling for some time.
I was a big marijuana stoner during this time, and I had recently discovered The 13th Floor Elevators. I grabbed a 13th Floor Elevators album, placed it in the CD deck of my stereo and cranked the music up.
The song “(I’ve Got) Levitation” came on and I was overtaken with musical ecstasy.
The lyrics talked about the ocean rolling below you. I jumped up on my couch and looked down at the floor. I wasn’t hallucinating at this point, but I had a general feeling like the room was more expansive and I imagined my floor as the ocean. A blue-green ocean of neon.
I jumped from the couch cushions up to the very top of the couch, and then back down to the couch cushions again. I just remember being ecstatic over the music.
At one point, I looked up at the ceiling. I couldn’t believe my eyes!
I saw a flashing pufferfish on my ceiling. There wasn’t any color or anything, it was just the outline of the pufferfish. It was in the ceiling texture – those paint bumps you see in apartments.
But it was clearly a pufferfish. Spikes and everything. And it was flashing and moving around.
I sat for a while looking up and admiring the pufferfish.
This is an amazing thing about LSD. Where did this come from? I didn’t have any particular interest in pufferfish. But one just appeared randomly. Created by my fucking brain. Just… out of nowhere.
*
Apparently, Nick decided that I shouldn’t be alone. Because at some point there was a knock on the door. I wasn’t scared because I somehow knew that it was my friends.
I opened the door, and they all piled in. About 7 or 8 of them.
I didn’t have much furniture so most of them sat cross legged on the floor.
They suddenly looked like cabbage patch kids to me. You know, the doll from the 80’s. They didn’t literally look like the dolls, but I had a general feeling that they were cabbage patch kids because of the particular way they sat cross legged on the floor. Their crossed legs were like cabbages and they were cabbage patch kids.
Most of them were a few years younger than me. I was totally the immature 21-year-old befriending and buying beer for the 17- and 18-year-olds. And yet… I was the most childlike among the whole crowd. It was a thing they liked about me and they were special.
There’s a whole Jack Kerouac-style backstory about how I met these kids that I should tell some other time. We all remained friends for several years until a primary member of the group committed suicide and shattered each of our lives.
But, at this very moment on LSD they looked like cabbage patch kids to me, and I remember telling them so. They were always amused by “crazy Melissa” and my weird-ass antics while drunk or stoned. And they all came over to my apartment because they couldn’t miss the chance to see me on LSD. Heh.
One of the girls sat next to me on the couch and I handed her my journal with sketches and writings. She sat there reading it and looked amazed by what she was reading. I continued tripping but I don’t remember anything else.
This is something I drew with colored pencils during my acid days. I think I was just stoned, but obviously influenced by LSD. I cannot normally draw or even conceive of something like this. I have no idea what the fuck this is. Welcome to your brain on LSD.Even when you are not actively tripping on LSD – it changes your whole perspective and increases creativity for about a week. Do you see theupsidedown bong?
Other trips
I did quite a bit of LSD tripping after that. There was a great deal of listening to music and staring at the geometric swirls in the fireplace.
During the most intense experience, I remember I ate a little too much acid. Probably like 3 or 4 sugar cubes. Too much for me. I tried listening to some wild song by Jimi Hendrix.
The whole room smiled at me in mockery. The edges of everything in the room, and indeed the room itself – it was all bent sharply upward in a mocking smile. The stereo smiled at me. It wasn’t a bad trip; it was just a little too intense. I shut the radio off and waited it out. This intense moment passed pretty quickly.
One time me and the boys went to Kincaid Park and it was the most amazing trip of my life. People should trip outdoors under the moonlight. We climbed this huge hill and looked out over Anchorage’s Cook Inlet. I can’t remember much of that one, beyond the sheer beauty of Kincaid Park under the moon in early spring. Which, honestly – I’m sure is amazing while perfectly sober.
Generally speaking – low to moderate doses of LSD bring a vast amount of geometric form pattern hallucinations.
You don’t actually have the kind of hallucinations where you see things that are not really there – you just hallucinate moving geometric patterns – at times often quite intricate – in the forms of reality. Walls, carpets, desktops. And maybe – as in my case – the occasional form of some kind of animal in the wall or ceiling.
Most of the experience is spiritual in nature. It changes how you feel. There’s a spiritual transcendence.
I cannot speak for high doses. I was never brave enough to take a high dose, except the aforementioned “mocking smile” experience. That was a bit uncomfortable for a while. My male friends would take much higher doses than I did.
One time Nick told me that he had a trip after 9 sugar cubes where he thought he swallowed his tongue. I laughed my ass off and told him that’s why I stuck to lower doses.
One time I drove to Kincaid Park and ate a couple of sugar cubes in the bathroom. Alone. I hung out for a while and went and sat in the grass. Then I went to the bathroom to pee.
At some point, the walls began turning orange and the geometric hallucinations began. The walls started breathing. I had a moment of clarity where I decided it was probably not smart to hang out in the woods alone on LSD.
I drove home. High on acid. So – it was not safe enough to be alone in the woods, but driving was apparently fine. I wrote in more detail about this experience in my post about Soundgarden.
Because I listened to Soundgarden on the drive home, see. On full blast. It was the greatest driving experience of my life.
But… it was incredibly, incredibly dumb. I cannot believe I was ever that stupid. I don’t understand how I made it out of my early 20’s alive.
I paid close attention to red and green lights. I drove as carefully as I could and stayed between the highway lines while everything swirled around me. This was my Hunter S. Thompson moment.
I could have called my girlfriend to come get me. I realized this half-way through the drive. But it was too late.
But when I got home, my girlfriend was zoned out on LSD herself. She was laying on the couch watching Pink Panther cartoons.
Heh. So much for that idea.
Mushrooms
Then came magic mushrooms. Ooooh, I was arrogant about mushrooms at first. I thought I could handle a whole bag of mushrooms because I had done so much LSD.
Newsflash: They’re two different drugs. You don’t eat a whole fucking bag of mushrooms the first time you try them. It doesn’t matter how often you’ve been taking LSD.
I was laying on the couch while tripping. At some point, I completely lost my sense of self. I had no form. I had no body.
I could not perceive where the couch ended, and I began. All of this happened with my eyes closed.
I closed my eyes and the most incredible visuals with great huge beams of blue light in a shape I can only describe as hourglass-like – they moved in constant patterns like a modern screensaver.
I was too fucked up to be scared. I do not remember any fear. Whatsoever. I remember being fascinated. To the extent possible, given that I was no longer a human and I had no human form.
After a while, I came down some and opened my eyes. I took a drink of my water and it tasted like strawberries. I was astonished. I kept drinking more. How can this be? I took more sips, it kept tasting like strawberries.
The best mushroom trip happened with my friend Nick.
We ate the mushrooms (a reasonable dose this time!) and walked the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail. As we entered the trail, some type of machine that cleans paved paths was driving toward us. I was starting to come up. I was absolutely fascinated.
“Nick, look at this crazy shit!”
There were a few of these machines and they were like crazy giant bugs – some kind of ant that sprayed water. He laughed because he saw the same thing. “Yeah, that’s some weird shit, I know…”
We walked the trail all night long. Gorgeous. I had to stop several times to puke. Mushrooms always had this effect on me.
Until my friend Crystal informed me that you can cut the nausea by squeezing the good shit out of the mushrooms with a strainer into a cup of double-bagged chamomile tea and steep it for 15 minutes.
It works. That’s how powerful chamomile tea is. I never puked or had nausea after making “mushroom tea”.
Here comes the best part:
We entered a park area with picnic tables. I saw a statue sitting at a picnic table. I was absolutely fascinated. I began walking quickly toward the statue. I heard Nick yell behind me, “Melissa, what you are you doing!?” He sounded alarmed, but I thought he was just being dramatic.
“I’m going to look at this statue!”
I slowed my pace as I neared the statue. The statue had its chin resting on its hand – like that whole “To be, or not to be” statue of classical whatever.
Suddenly, the statue moved! I gasped and started running away as fast as I could.
At some point, I stopped and looked back, still alarmed. I’m not sure why I did this, but I kicked dirt up into the air with my foot. Like a dog. And then continued running back toward Nick.
Nick was laughing his ass off. He was laughing so hard he was in tears.
“I thought it was a statue!” I explained.
So, let’s consider the perspective of this poor dude. He’s sitting around thinking about something. Suddenly, a young woman runs up to him at full speed, slows down, and peers closely at him with wildly dilated eyes. Ha. It’s too great.
Welcome to Anchorage, Alaska. Stranger things happen in this town.
*
As we walked, seagulls dived at Nick and it scared the shit out of him. We had walked beneath a nest. He was trying to punch them in the air. I laughed at him and he was annoyed at my laughing. And I laughed even more at his annoyance.
I wish I had a better description of walking on the Knowles Trail in summertime on mushrooms. Especially with a trusted friend. Let me just say this: This trail in Anchorage is amazing enough on its own. The lush plants, the summer light.
Nick was planning on leaving for California for winter, and toward the end of the trip we sat in a field with flowers. Suddenly Nick became Mr. Planning. Which I thought was hilarious.
He talked a great deal about things he needed to do for his cats. Nick always had cats around. He was very serious about taking care of his pet cats. Which was sweet because he was a young stoner boy. He named one of his cats “Spliff”.
He talked about his plane leaving at “Nine o’clock in the afternoon”.
We were still fairly high. I lost it. I started laughing my ass off.
“Nine o’clock is nighttime, Nick, not afternoon!” He was like, “Oh yeah, I guess you’re right.”
Heh. Shit like that. You had to be there.
MDMA
Ah, then there was MDMA. Colloquially known as “Ecstasy”. This was a few years after the LSD and mushrooms.
Far and away – the CRAZIEST hallucinations I have ever seen happened on MDMA. This is due to one of two things – either the massive doses I took, or there was something else in those pills. We’ll get into the hallucinations later.
This was during a very irresponsible time of my life. I was out of my mind, and I was reckless.
My good friend had killed himself.
Only a few months after that incident, I walked in on my best friend and my girlfriend having sex.
I remember my MDMA trips, but I do not remember much else from this period. It was the darkest period of my life.
Looking back, I used the MDMA as self-therapy. I had no one. My friend group had splintered apart after our mutual friend’s suicide. The whole group isolated and stopped seeing each other for a while.
I lived with this best friend of mine. The Betrayer. So, I had to continue living with this wench for a while until I decided to move back in with my parents. You can imagine how that went.
Well, unless I was high on MDMA, which I often was. Then I was okay with the two of them. But when I came down? Not so much. I should have moved out sooner, but you see – I couldn’t sit around doing MDMA all night long at my parent’s house.
I did ecstasy alone and it was my therapy. I forgave them both. I saw their perspective. I had intense empathy for myself, for both of them, and for everyone in the whole world. My friend would walk by and I was like, “Okay, I understand, and I forgive you” and she would be confused because hours earlier I was screaming at her and throwing shit.
I took massive doses. 5 pills at once, and then I took more once the high wore off. Nick told me I was out of my mind. He was concerned, but there was nothing he could do about it.
The craziest hallucination was The Parrot. I worked for a guitar store at the time. We were allowed to take home awesome promotional posters sent to the store for gear.
I had this poster of Jimi Hendrix with a huge Marshall stack behind him. It was a Marshall advertisement. I was high and staring at this poster intensely.
Suddenly, something started GROWING on this poster. On Jimi’s shoulder. It was a bright green color, almost a neon green. The green thing started as just a little round ball, but the ball kept growing.
The ball continued to slowly grow into a branch! From the branch, talons formed, and from the talons, legs grew up, and from the legs a torso, wings, and a head!
I sat up and squinted. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I knew that I was experiencing a hallucination, I didn’t believe it was real. But – I had never seen ANYTHING like this on LSD or mushrooms. The detail was amazing.
Best yet, this was all 3D. The branch grew out halfway into my living room and the parrot WALKED out onto the branch and stared at me. It turned its head this way and that, checking me out.
I got up and grabbed the air. People are funny like that when high – you know full and well that it’s a hallucination from your mind, but you’re going to try and grab it anyway. You know. It just seems so real that you have to make sure.
I also remember seeing a lot of spiders coming down from the ceiling on webs during this time. That was unsettling because spiders are a thing that actually exist. I was always swatting at them just to make sure. But these hallucinations were so frequent that soon enough I learned to ignore them and listen to my music.
I was constantly listening to The Meat Puppets. That music is made for MDMA. There’s no way I can explain this. The only way you could understand how The Meat Puppets are the perfect MDMA band is to take the drug and listen to the band.
It was so good that I rarely listened to anything else.
I just listened to this and it took me back. I have not heard this album in a long-ass time. This album was cemented to the point where I can almost feel like I am on MDMA while listening to this.
One morning I had a hallucination that a rat was giving birth in my bathroom heater vent. I thought it might be a hallucination, but it seemed so real that I couldn’t stop watching and trying to figure it out. It was disgusting. These little hairless rodents swirmed around like maggots and the mom rat just kept popping them out. She had like 10 babies and finally it disappeared.
Then I went to work while still high. I told one of my co-workers about how a rat may have given birth in my heater vent. I relayed this information while still obviously very high, I’m sure.
I was fired that day, of course.
Heh. And then four years later I became an HR worker. I never judged people with drug charges on those background checks, let me tell you.
*
And so ends the history of my psychedelic drug use. I had many fun times. I did many stupid things.
I have no interest in MDMA but would happily do LSD and mushrooms again under the right circumstances. But first I would need either a group of close and trusted friends, or a licensed therapist who enjoys supervising these adventures. I can’t see ever doing any of that shit again on a willy-nilly basis like I did back in the day. And I would certainly never trip alone. In general, I’m more of an actual adult now and would be very cautious about the whole affair.
“I think society is moving a little bit, but I think it isn’t moving near that fast. There’s always gonna be a large, huge bulk of straight people that aren’t going for it.”
“Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, they are so subtle. They can milk you with two notes. They could go no further than from an A to a B, and they could make you feel like they told you the whole universe… but I don’t know that yet. All I have now is strength. Maybe if I keep singing I’ll get it.”
“I always felt that way about the blues, even when I didn’t know anything about it. When I listened to it, I always felt there was something there – an honesty that Peggy Lee was lacking. And now the kids are open enough to say, ‘Now, wait a minute, let me listen for myself’, and those kids are getting into Indian music, getting into black music, getting into any kind of music they think is telling the truth to them.”
“This success thing hasn’t yet compromised the position I took a long time ago in Texas; to be true to myself and not play games. To be the person inside me, not bullshit anybody, be righteous, be real. So far, I’m not wearing cardboard eyelashes and girdles and playing in Las Vegas. I’m still being Janis. It just happens to be on a slightly different level.”
“It’s slightly inhibiting, but it doesn’t force a game on me. Because I don’t let it force a game on me.” (The interviewer asks if the camera is inhibiting, and this is her response).
-Janis Joplin
Hunter S. Thompson
“There was madness in any direction, at any hour… you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, we were winning. That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.”
“’You found the American Dream, in this town?’ [he asked]. I nodded. ‘We’re sitting on the main nerve right now’, I said. ‘You remember that story the manager told us about the owner of this place? How he always wanted to run away and join the circus?’ Bruce ordered 2 more beers. He looked over the casino for a moment and shrugged. ‘Yeah, I see what you mean,’ He said. ‘Now the bastard has his own circus, and a license to steal, too’. He nodded. ‘You’re right, he’s the model.’”
“The room looked like the site of some disastrous zoological experiment involving whisky and gorillas.”
“The rear windows leapt up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond.”
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008) Documentary
Directed by Alex Gibney
Shown: Hunter S. Thompson
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
“She was not only singing; she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song, she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks – not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sings the notes on her face.”
“The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher… the groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wandering confident girls who weave here and there and become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices under the constantly changing light. Suddenly, one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage, and moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform.”
“The wind has blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.”
“Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it if he climbed alone, and once there he could gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. He waited, listening a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.”
Grace Slick
“A startling presence, both visually and vocally. An Oscar Wilde in drag who combined insight and sarcasm that was sometimes light, sometimes dark. A provocateur.” – Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane
Somebody to Love? 1998 Grace Slick Biography
“There’ll always be people who are afraid of living and afraid of dying. And there will always be more of them than there are risk-takers, the people who bring innovation into every area, with our without drugs.”
“Since all changes, no matter how small, are absorbed into and add impetus to the ongoing paradigm shift, nothing ever really slips away. The old themes and styles persisted as stitches in the unfurling tapestry, but they were hard to see. What caught the eye was all the newness.”
“As we lay on our backs in the tall grass on the mountain, each person made a brief awestruck remark about the diversity and synchronicity of the clouds, the air, the trees, and the animals. It was on that mountaintop where I first understood that you and I are only separated by one channel of a limited thought process. If I looked long enough, colors on the same object would slowly change in accordance with my ability to take in the transformation. My usual focused perspective was expanded. Instead of viewing certain things or people as passing scenery, as something inconsequential, the peyote made everything, and everyone seem equally important. Suddenly I could see no isolation, no overabundance. It was just energy exhibiting itself in infinite dimensions.”
“Four gigantic Altec speakers were set up so we could literally feel the playback, the technology could squeeze or explode a sound… there were countless knobs and dials and wires to mold a song into an aural vision, and I was fascinated by all of it.”
“When a band is in sync and everybody is playing well and feeling good, there’s nothing like it. You, both the audience and performers, become the power of the music. It’s a biological as well as spiritual phenomenon and it still happens to me when I’m riding around in a car or sitting at home listening to 130 decibels of speaker-cracking music. An almost tangible shift in feeling happens as I go from thick to weightless.”
“Imagine it’s a Saturday night, and there’s a line of what looks like a bunch of young multi-colored circus freaks waiting to go into the Fillmore Auditorium. The crowd is animated, everybody is talking to each other even though they may have just met for the first time. The only visible sign of color on the outside of the building is a poster drawn in Day-Glo swirls. It reads ‘Jefferson Airplane, The Charlatans, Moby Grape and The Great Society.’ When the door to the building opens, the last of the grey vanishes. At the top of the steps that lead to Fillmore’s main hall there is a wall of bright, intensely colored posters. They’re so numerous that the wall itself is invisible. As you walk onto the dance floor, you have the feeling you’ve just entered seven different centuries all thrown together in one room. The interior of the building is turn-of-the century rococo, and a man in red briefs and silver body paint is handing out east Indian incense. A girl in full renaissance drag is spinning around by herself listening to some baroque music in her head while several people in jeans and American Indian headbands are sitting in a circle on the floor smoking weed. Close by, a good-looking man in a three-musketeer costume is placing ashtrays on the cheap fifties Formica tables that circle the edge of the room. In the corner, people are stripping off their clothes while the acid is taking effect. This is The American Dream (for a few hours) with no color barriers, dress code, moral imperatives, and only one keeper – the show’s intense but smiling dark haired promoter – Bill Graham.”
Jack Kerouac
“But there was a wisdom in it all, as you’ll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street, each with the lamplight of the living room shining golden, and inside the little blue square television, each family riveting it’s attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards, dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels… I seem him in future years stalking along with full rucksack in suburban streets, passing the blue tv windows of homes, alone, his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified to the master switch… the millions of the One Eye.” -The Dharma Bums
“It was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenor man to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor. Everybody was rocking and roaring… boom, kick, that drummer was kicking his drums down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattley-boom! The pianist was only pounding the keys with spread eagled fingers, chords at intervals when the great tenor man was drawing breath for another blast… The tenor man jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around, his hat was over his eyes… he just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high, wide and screaming in the air.” -On the Road
“See, the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, dharma bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming all that crap they didn’t need anyway. All of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work. I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks going up to the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad.” -The Dharma Bums
Wayne Coyne
Some interview. Original Source not recorded in the notebook these are typed from.
“’The good times, it’s hard to make them last.’ – I think what people are hearing somewhere along the way is that the good times don’t just come at you. You almost have to create them. You have to make sure that you’re searching out some sort of meaning and some sort of happiness throughout.”
“It just makes you stop in your tracks and go, ‘What’s it all worth?’ We’re all just hurtling through space. At any moment the whole thing could just run into some asteroid out there and we’re all gonna blow up and how insignificant and meaningless and what a speck of existence our life is, and I think I sing about that a lot. When I sing utterly with fear about how insignificant I am, that’s the only time we sound significant. Isn’t that funny?”
This is the second installment where I have typed up something delicious by a famous author for your reading pleasure. As a reminder, we play this game: You don’t know who wrote it until the end. Rule: Don’t cheat by scrolling all the way down first (unless you’re a douchebag who likes to ruin good & wholesome fun!)
“WHY had they pretended to kill him when he was born? Keeping him awake for days, banging his head against a closed cervix; twisting the cord around his throat and throttling him; chomping through his mother’s abdomen with cold shears; clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side; dragging him out of his home and hitting him; shining lights in his eyes and doing experiments; taking him away from his mother while she lay on the table, half-dead.
Maybe the idea was to destroy his nostalgia for the old world. First the confinement to make him hungry for space, then pretending to kill him so that he would be grateful for the space when he got it, even this loud desert, with only the bandages of his mother’s arms to wrap around him, never the whole thing again, the whole warm thing all around him, being everything.
The curtains were breathing light into their hospital room. Swelling from the hot afternoon, and then flopping back against the French windows, easing the glare outside.
Someone opened the door and the curtains leapt up and rippled their edges; loose paper rustled, the room whitened, and the shudder of the roadworks grew a little louder. Then the door clunked and the curtains sighed and the room dimmed.
‘Oh, no, not more flowers,’ said his mother. He could see everything through the transparent walls of his fish-tank cot. He was looked over by the sticky eye of a splayed lily. Sometimes the breeze blew the peppery smell of freesias over him and he wanted to sneeze it away. On his mother’s nightgown spots of blood mingled with streaks of dark orange pollen.
‘It’s so nice of people…’ She was laughing from weakness and frustration. ‘I mean, is there any room in the bath?’
‘Not really, you’ve got the roses in there already and the other things.’
‘Oh, God, I can’t bear it. Hundreds of flowers have been cut down and squeezed into these white vases, just to make us happy’. She couldn’t stop laughing. There were tears running down her face. ‘They should have been left where they were, in a garden somewhere.’
The nurse looked at the chart.
‘It’s time for you to take your Voltarol,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to control the pain before it takes over.’
Then the nurse looked at Robert and he locked on to her blue eyes in the heaving dimness.
‘He’s very alert. He’s really checking me out.’
‘He is going to be all right, isn’t he?’ said his mother, suddenly terrified.
Suddenly Robert was terrified too. They were not together in the way they used to be, but they still had their helplessness in common.
They had been washed up on a wild shore. Too tired to crawl up the beach, they could only loll in the roar and the dazzle of being there. He had to face facts, though: they had been separated. He understood now that his mother had already been on the outside. For her this wild shore was a new role, for him it was a new world.
The strange thing was that he felt as if he had been there before. He had known there was an outside all along. He used to think it was a muffled watery world out there and that he lived at the heart of things. Now the walls had tumbled down and he could see what a muddle he had been in. How could he avoid getting in a new muddle in this hammeringly bright place? How could he kick and spin like he used to in this heavy atmosphere where the air stung his skin?
Yesterday he had thought he was dying. Perhaps he was right and this was what happened. Everything was open to question, except the fact that he was separated from his mother.
Now that he realized there was a difference between them, he loved his mother with a new sharpness. He used to be close to her. Now he longed to be close to her. The first taste of longing was the saddest thing in the world.
‘Oh, dear, what’s wrong?’ said the nurse. ‘Are we hungry, or do we just want a cuddle?’
The nurse lifted him out of the fish-tank cot, over the crevasse that separated it from the bed and delivered him into his mother’s bruised arms.
‘Try giving him a little time on the breast and then try to get some rest. You’ve both been through a lot in the last couple of days.’
He was an inconsolable wreck. He couldn’t live with so much doubt and so much intensity. He vomited colostrum over his mother and then in the hazy moment of emptiness that followed, he caught sight of the curtains bulging with light. They held his attention. That’s how it worked here. They fascinated you with things to make you forget about the separation.
Still, he didn’t want to exaggerate his decline. Things had been getting cramped in the old world. Towards the end he was desperate to get out, but he had imagined himself expanding back into the boundless ocean of his youth, not exiled in this harsh land. Perhaps he could revisit the ocean in his dreams, if it weren’t for the veil of violence that hung between him and the past.
He was drifting into the syrupy borders of sleep, not knowing whether it would take him into the floating world or back to the butchery of the birth room.
‘Poor Baba, he was probably having a bad dream,’ said his mother, stroking him. His crying started to break up and fade. She kissed him on the forehead and he realized that although they didn’t share a body any more, they still had the same thoughts and feelings. He shuddered with relief and stared at the curtains, watching the light flow.”
*
This would be from The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St Aubyn. This passage is from Mother’s Milk, a later book within the novel. St Aubyn’s ability to imagine the perspective of a newborn infant, and to articulate that perspective using adult language and insight is nothing less than stunning.
I haven’t seen the HBO series yet, but I feel like this passage is a great example of why books rule over TV and film. How could you possibly capture something like this on film without losing the essence of it? It doesn’t seem possible.
My favorite line from the above is:
Perhaps he could revisit the ocean in his dreams, if it weren’t for the veil of violence that hung between him and the past.
I also wanted to include the entire book from Patrick’s drug addled youth, but I cannot handle typing that much.
As a bonus, I’m including a passage from the same guy from episode 1 up there. But you have to check out episode 1 to find out who the hell it is.
I was going to do a separate blog entry. But I should probably put this where the people who like reading books are likely to hang out. Plus I don’t want to plug the same guy in a third post.
The passage below – damn – you all wish you could write this well. And so do I.
“At nine o’clock in the morning of every working day, Mr. Jack was hurled downtown to his office in a shining projectile of machinery, driven by a chauffeur who was a literal embodiment of New York in one of its most familiar aspects.
As the driver prowled above his wheel, his dark and sallow face twisted bitterly by the sneer of his thin mouth, his dark eyes shining with an unnatural luster like those of a man who is under the stimulation of a power drug, he seemed to be – and was – a creature which this furious city had created for its special uses. His tallowy flesh seemed to have been compacted, like that of millions of other men who wore grey hats and had faces of the same lifeless hue, out of a common city-substance – the universal grey stuff of pavements, buildings, towers, tunnels, and bridges.
In his veins there seemed to flow and throb, instead of blood, the crackling electric current by which the whole city moved. It was legible in every act and gesture the man made. As his sinister figure prowled above the wheel, his eyes darting left and right, his hands guiding the powerful machine with skill and precision, grazing, cutting, flanking, shifting, insinuating, sneaking, and shooting the great car through all but impossible channels with murderous recklessness, it was evident that the unwholesome chemistry that raced in him was consonant with the great energy that was pulsing through all the arteries of the city.
The unnatural and unwholesome energy of his driver evoked in his master’s mind an image of the world he lived in that was theatrical and phantasmal.
Instead of seeing himself as one man going to his work like countless others in the practical and homely light of day, he saw himself and his driver as two cunning and powerful men pitted triumphantly against the world; and the monstrous architecture of the city, the phantasmagoric chaos of its traffic, the web of the streets swarming with people, became for him nothing more than a tremendous backdrop for his own activities.
All of this – the sense of menace, conflict, cunning, power, stealth, and victory, and above all else, the sense of privilege – added to Mr. Jack’s pleasure, and even gave him a heady joy as he rode downtown to work.”
HOT DAMN! I love that whole thing about the chauffer and his everything being made of the grey city stuffs of buildings. This is my favorite passage ever. If someone wants to find where this is at, go look at episode 1 and then go order all the books by this author and just read it all.
Now I have to stop typing on a screen that emits blue light and read the kindle paperwhite that doesn’t emit blue light so that I have some chance of falling asleep by midnight.
As you can see, I have delightful shit to read for several hours.
Linklater’s handheld camera magic enhances the surrealism; the camera often pans into scenes at weird angles – zooming into rooms, zipping across an orchestra scene, floating over rooftops. Linklater and his crew shot footage from a hot air balloon to capture scenes where the main character floats through the sky over suburban neighborhoods.
As you watch and listen, you experience what she’s talking about. The visual and thematic elements coming at you in this film are unspeakable. 
Later on, the main character discusses his dream experiences with a new dream character. He describes feeling engaged in an active process. This confuses him because he’s been silent and passive during the dream. She responds that listening is not necessarily a passive act. Once again, this is also about your viewing experience.
Another advantage this software has over traditional rotoscoping is “layering”. Sometimes a specific house or nature scene is required across many frames. The animator colors over the house once and places it inside one layer within the program, and that same layer can be used across multiple frames.
The featurette also provides an eye-opening glimpse into some of the film’s mysterious non-animation effects. The crew achieved a scene in which the main character floats above a car by suspending actor Wiley Wiggins with cables attached to his body.
I enjoy the film’s ambiguous spirituality. At one point the main character questions where all this new information is coming from. Is it being transmitted to him from an outside force? Christian viewers might see the information as sourced from God and the other dream characters as angels and demons, or perhaps ghosts.
By working with a team of artists and animators to manifest his vision, Linklater created a film that is also a learning tool. The themes would be fascinating enough as a collection of quotes or classroom talking points, but Waking Life stretches beyond the man-made, elitist borders of the literary and academic worlds. 
In the next scene, Paul descends stairs into a club called “Bead Game” to meet his trip guide, John (Bruce Dern). Paul and John meet up with mutual acquaintance Max (Dennis Hopper) to pick up the goods. Paul retreats with John to swallow the acid capsules.
ZeroSpace 