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When America first dropped acid
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Re: When America first dropped acid
#82Recently read a description of 1960's ideology. The claim being that its all propaganda, and what we know as 60s ideology (peace love etc) actually never really happened for a real duration of time. What did happen was that those that prescribed to that line of thinking either moved to communes, or they dropped so much acid they were societally irrelevant. There werent many people actually out and about that were pus…
I disagree, but ignoring this somewhat, I offer this:
One remarkable thing is how the hippie stuff often induced by chemical manipulation of serotonin receptors mirrors a lot of religious messages. You can take slogans like "peace on earth, love your neighbor, love is all you need" and say, is that hippie stuff? Or is it, say... The message attributed to Jesus? In that sense, you don't really need the drugs or counterculture to come up with that. It's been an authentic part of history before. Nor can it totally be dismissed as only coming from drug culture, or a brief source for a small moment in time. We've had similar movements and ideas become popular before. I'd go one step further and call it objectively a good thing.
Re: When America first dropped acid
#83Recently read a description of 1960's ideology. The claim being that its all propaganda, and what we know as 60s ideology (peace love etc) actually never really happened for a real duration of time. What did happen was that those that prescribed to that line of thinking either moved to communes, or they dropped so much acid they were societally irrelevant. There werent many people actually out and about that were pus…
This is such an absurd overgeneralization of the cultural lives of millions of people
Re: When America first dropped acid
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless we are defining that “ideology” very narrowly, the sheer volume of cultural output (fashion, music, cinema, etc) would be a clear counterpoint.
Cultural output pushed by media, continuously and inarguably well after the movement ended? If there's one thing that's clear beyond all else involved in the topic of popular culture, it's that the media chooses what culture to push and what to ignore.
I think that the "Mondo" films played a part.
For those not in the know, Mondo films (that's usually the start of the title, like Mondo Freudo) gathered together very disparate samples of different slices of life, with a heavy emphasis on the titillating, the criminal, the bizarre, not to mention almost anything that might be numbered among the counterculture, and presented them in a vaguely documentary-like format. How much was staged, how much wasn't? Still, aside from the almost obligatory nudity, you got a very strong feeling of "look at the strange stuff these people get up to!"
My guess is that they had kind of an outsized impact for what seemed like half "nudie cuties" of the 50s married to a casual National Geographic feel of different cities in Europe, the United States, and associated territories.
Re: When America first dropped acid
#85Author of the book under review here. AMA!
One thing I thought would be helpful is to link to the YouTube video described in the opening paragraph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMF-cyHAaSs
It's from a 1957 CBS documentary series called "Focus on Sanity" that featured interviews with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, among others. I found it fascinating and my questions about it were actually one of the motive forces for why I wrote the book.
I believe the recording was first brought to public attention by Don Lattin, whose books The Harvard Psychedelic Club (2010) and Distilled Spirits (2012) are both great.
Re: When America first dropped acid
#86Recently read a description of 1960's ideology. The claim being that its all propaganda, and what we know as 60s ideology (peace love etc) actually never really happened for a real duration of time. What did happen was that those that prescribed to that line of thinking either moved to communes, or they dropped so much acid they were societally irrelevant. There werent many people actually out and about that were pus…
The French Revolution was also 4 years btw and nearly anybody involved in it that did matter was killed. Still it has a profound effect on society to that time
And maybe to today.
My opinion is also that it is more amplified then justified part of the 60s. The more important part was the social revolution and not the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was more the pill. People did fuck before.
Re: When America first dropped acid
#87Author of the book under review here. AMA! One thing I thought would be helpful is to link to the YouTube video described in the opening paragraph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMF-cyHAaSs It's from a 1957 CBS documentary series called "Focus on Sanity" that featured interviews with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, among others. I found it fascinating and my questions about it were actually one of the motive forces…
What does your writing process look like when you set out to write an entire book? I know a lot of HN users have blogs, but the idea of writing a whole book seems daunting. Would love to hear the details of your experience and what it looked like particularly for Tripping on Utopia
Re: When America first dropped acid
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing which immediately reveals the lie in this is that it pretends the counterculture was the only thing going on in the 60s and ignores the New Left, Civil Rights movements, various arts movements, the cementing of the MIC, the rise of the PMC, etc etc. The 60s were a massive rupture and while it’s true the counterculture wasn’t the only influence its bizarre to say it didn’t really exist to any extent.
And beginnings of the labor market having its back broken of course.
IMO that’s concomitant with the PMC since it’s the concrete moment workers stop thinking of themselves as workers and a big paycheck is sufficient to make people class-dumb, but I know that’s a contentious view.
Re: When America first dropped acid
#89Author of the book under review here. AMA! One thing I thought would be helpful is to link to the YouTube video described in the opening paragraph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMF-cyHAaSs It's from a 1957 CBS documentary series called "Focus on Sanity" that featured interviews with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, among others. I found it fascinating and my questions about it were actually one of the motive forces…
From reading Michael Pollan, I recall that there was a lot of work being done on psychedelics up here in Canada.
Did you look into that at all? Especially considering the current stance on psychedelics in Canada (essentially decriminalized), and the state of serious research, do you see Canada being a pioneer going forward like it was in the past?
Re: When America first dropped acid
#90Author of the book under review here. AMA! One thing I thought would be helpful is to link to the YouTube video described in the opening paragraph: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMF-cyHAaSs It's from a 1957 CBS documentary series called "Focus on Sanity" that featured interviews with Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, among others. I found it fascinating and my questions about it were actually one of the motive forces…
What does your writing process look like when you set out to write an entire book? I know a lot of HN users have blogs, but the idea of writing a whole book seems daunting. Would love to hear the details of your experience and what it looked like particularly for Tripping on Utopia
I wouldn't recommend my process to anyone, to be honest! I probably wrote a total of around 200k words over a four year period, of which I ended up cutting around 110k. I find it to be very true that you don't know what you actually want to say until you start writing things that aren't what you want to say. Then it's an iterative process of critiquing, rethinking, and starting over. I'm sure some people are able to start with a clear outline and then just plow through to the end, but I'm not one of them.
In terms of research, I used to keep all my photographs of archival documents, PDFs of sources, etc in DEVONThink, but I switched over to using the standard Photos app on Macs. It has automatic OCR now so I'm able to search text that appears in photographs quite easily. I did a lot of oral history interviews to supplement the archival research. This book wouldn't have been possible up until recently because it's only in the past decade that so many historical archives have been digitizing their collections. I was able to visit the key archives in person, but with others, archivists were nice enough to send me scans of key documents. Super grateful to them.