The Doors, Bugsy [Media Notes 75e, 76] {narcissistic adolescents doing their thing}

I watched The Doors (1991) the other day and figured that maybe I’d cap off my series on How to Change Your Mind by reviewing The Doors and making some general observations about Change. After all, the Doors, named after Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception, were an important band in the psychedelic 60s, one of those bands where we treated each new album as a potential source of mystical revelation – until, of course, they weren’t. And the movie did have its trippy sequences, its augmented reality sequences.

Except, except, Morrison himself, as presented in the film, was such a disaster. A gifted performer, yes, but as a human being, a disaster. Here’s the opening paragraphs from Roger Ebert’s 1991 review:

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the problem with American lives is that they have no second act. The problem with Jim Morrison’s life was that it had no first and third. His childhood was lost in a mist of denial - he never quite forgave his father for being an admiral - and his maturity was interrupted by an early death, caused by his relentless campaign against his own mind and body. What he left behind was a protracted adolescence, during which he recorded some great rock ‘n’ roll.

If we can trust Oliver Stone’s new biographical film, “The Doors,” life for Jim Morrison was like being trapped for months at a time in the party from hell. He wanders out of the sun’s glare, a curly haired Southern California beach boy with a cute pout and a notebook full of poetry. He picks up a beer, he smokes a joint, and then life goes on fast-forward as he gobbles up drugs and booze with both hands, while betraying his friends and making life miserable for anyone who loves him. By the age of 27 he is dead. Watching the movie is like being stuck in a bar with an obnoxious drunk, when you’re not drinking.

How could I float a reasonable set of more general observations about psychedelics on a film about all that went wrong about the 60s?

So I shelved the idea for a day or two while I thought about it. Meanwhile, I decided to watch Bugsy, 1991 film about the gangster Bugsy Siegel and his development of The Flamingo Hotel & Casino, which became extremely profitable, though Bugsy was killed because his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, stole $2,000,000 from the project before it opened. As I watched the film, I realized that Bugsy and Morrison where the same person, headstrong narcissistic overgrown adolescents. Morrison was an out-of-control front man for the group, and lyricist, Bugsy was in thrall to his vision for The Flamingo. Where Morrison was a compulsive drunk, Bugsy killed people. Both were womanizers.

What have we got? Two films about the same guy, but expressed through a different mise-en-scène. Both 1991, for what it’s worth, the year of Operation Desert Storm, 42 days of aerial bombardment of Iraq.

I’m still looking for a way to come to terms with How to Change Your Mind.

How to Change Your Mind [Media Notes 75d] – What's Next?

I’ve watched the last two episodes of How to Change Your Mind, devoted to MDMA, known colloquially as ecstasy, and Mescaline respectfully.

MDMA

The MDMA episode concentrated on therapeutic uses, particularly in connection with PTSD. Much of the footage covered particular cases. MDMA allows you to talk through your traumatic experiences without negative affect and thus facilitates coming to terms with them. Spotlights pioneering independent researcher Alexander Shulgin, Rick Doblin, and the organization he founded, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which has funded studies conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs. It noted that MDMA was close to FDA approval for therapeutic use.

Mescaline

Mescaline is the psychoactive ingredient in peyote, which has long been used in Native American communities in the United States and in Latin America. The episode goes into this history and has extensive interviews with contemporary Native Americans, particularly in connection with the Native American Church, which has succeeded in gaining access to peyote for ceremonial use. These interviews explore the therapeutic importance of peyote, but also its broader spiritual significance and its importance in maintaining a sense of cultural identity.

The last third of the episode gives a great deal of attention to the Decriminalize Nature movement, which is active throughout the United States in urging legislation to decriminalize entheogens (the term it has popularized for psychedelics). The goal is not so much to legalize the drugs but for law enforcement to give them low priority. The movement is at odds with those Native Americans who advocate for peyote. In part the issue is one of cultural appropriation, but it is also practical. Peyote is in limited supply because the cactus takes a long time to mature and exists only in a few locations. Native Americans don’t want the limited supply to be all but taken over by others. Consequently the decriminalize movement has excluded peyote from consideration. In a final note, Pollan noted that, for this reason, he chose not to try peyote.

The episode also mentioned the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece, which may have been mescaline based, though other psychedelics are possible as well. We also have footage from an interview with Aldous Huxley, who had tried mescaline and, in consequence, wrote The Doors of Perception (1953), which I read in my freshman year in college (but not in connection with any course). It has become a classic in the psychedelic literature.

This brings up a split in psychedelic community between populist and elitist theme. The populists, exemplified by Tim Leary advocate giving the drugs to everyone and thereby change the culture. Huxley was more elitist, advocating that use should be confined to “the best and brightest” (a phrase used in the episode) and the benefits would somehow filter down to the rest.

There is a final plea that the use of psychedelics can change our relationship to the natural world, something sorely needed in this time of climate crisis.

Overall?

The series does a good job of presenting the history of psychedelics over the last seven decades. Its strongest case is for therapeutic use. The spiritual and metaphysical case is (much) weaker. The problem, I fear, is with the larger culture. That of course is what the spiritual/metaphysical argument is about. We don’t seem to have the concepts and terms needed to frame a strong argument. Yes, psychedelics and psychedelic research were suppressed. More than that, a whole ‘zone’ of cultural development was impoverished, leaving us with New Age this and that. But that, I fear, is just a middle-class veneer over consumer culture.

It's not clear to me how Pollan could have addressed this.

I have this vague feeling that, when the Metaverse isn’t mostly hype and a way to sell more technology, it represents a desire for something that psychedelic culture was seeking, even promising, but couldn’t deliver – and not because the drugs were suppressed.

Intimations of a Fourth Arena?

I need to think more about this.

How to Change Your Mind [Media Notes 75c] – On the visual style.

Chris Vognar, With ‘How to Change Your Mind,’ Taking a Trip With Michael Pollan, NYTimes, July 25, 2022. I suspected that something like this might be going on:

Tall and bald with the build of a swimmer, Pollan is no Timothy Leary — he isn’t asking anyone to drop out — and the medical trials described and shown in “How to Change Your Mind” shouldn’t be confused with Ken Kesey’s freewheeling acid tests of the ’60s. Back then, when psychedelics left the laboratory and entered the counterculture, the power structure freaked out.

“Kids were going to communes, and American boys were refusing to go to war,” Pollan said. “President Nixon certainly believed that LSD was responsible for a lot of this, and he may well have been right. It was a very disruptive force in society, and that is why I think the media after 1965 turns against it after being incredibly enthusiastic before 1965.”

Junk science spread nonsense about LSD scrambling chromosomes. The drug was made illegal in California in 1967, and then nationally in 1970. Researchers weren’t forbidden from continuing their work with psychedelics, but the stigma made such work very rare until it re-emerged in the 2000s. Today, clinical trials are approved by the F.D.A. and D.E.A.

“From the early ’70s to the early ’90s, there was no approved psychedelic research in human subjects,” said Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at U.C.L.A., who has written widely about psychedelic therapy. “Since then, research development has re-emerged and slowly evolved, until the last few years when professional and public interest in the topic appears to have exploded.”

Given evolving attitudes, one challenge facing the filmmakers, including the directors Alison Ellwood and Lucy Walker, was how to depict the psychedelic experience in a sophisticated way, without stumbling into the territory of a ’60s exploitation movie.

“We didn’t want to fall into the trap of using psychedelic visual tropes — wild colors, rainbow streaks, morphing images,” Ellwood wrote in an email. “We wanted to keep the visual style more personal, intimate and experiential. We wanted people watching the series who have not had their own psychedelic experiences to be able to relate to the visuals.”

One imaginative scene recreates the famous bicycle ride taken by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized LSD in 1936 but didn’t discover its psychedelic effects until 1943 (accidentally). Feeling strange after ingesting 250 micrograms, Hofmann rode his bike during the peak of his trip. In “How to Change Your Mind,” we see the buildings around him bend and waver as he rides. The road beneath him blurs. The tombstones in a graveyard sway.

There’s more at the link.

The Times seems to going all-out on this. Here’s an opinion piece, Dana G. Smith, Taking the Magic Out of Magic Mushrooms. The piece isn’t quite the downer the title suggests. It’s about attempts to engineer drugs that have the therapeutic effects of psychedelics without the consciousness altering sensory effects.

How to Change Your Mind [Media Notes 75b] – Psilocybin brings depth to the series.

As I’ve already indicated, I found the first episode in Michael Pollan’s series, about LSD, to be disappointing. The second one, about psilocybin, is much better. Or at least I found it so.

It was natural to begin the series with LSD, for that’s the drug that brought psychedelics to public consciousness. The story’s simple: 1) Swiss chemist accidentally discovers it, 2) Timothy Leary turns on, tunes in, and urges the world to drop out, and 3) HIPPIES! I more or less lived through this story – I’m a bit older than Michael Pollan, who missed it – so the history wasn’t new to me, and this episode was mostly the history.

The second episode has history as well, the story of how Gordon Wasson, a J.P. Morgan banker and amateur mycologist, traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, to meet María Sabina, a curandera, and thereby brought knowledge of psilocybin to the 20th century Western world. This brings a new dimension to the story. The story of LSD is a story of 20th century pharmaceuticals. But psilocybin is a naturally occurring substance that has been used by humans for centuries and centuries around the world to take these journeys, these trips, these investigations, making them a facet of humanity that has been sidelined by Western culture.

But that’s not how the episode opened. It opened with the story of an older woman who had been diagnosed with cancer. She took psilocybin (in a clinical setting) to help her overcome her fear of death, which it did. Here we see special effect used to present us with her trip, convincingly but not flamboyantly. This is done, I believe, three more times in the series. Once with Paul Stamets, a mycologist, once with a man suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and finally with Pollan himself. I thought this was quite effective. We also learned about the work done on psychedelics at the Spring Grove Clinic in Baltimore – I was aware of it at the time.

Taken in conjunction with the first episode, on LSD, we now have a much more rounded and fully realized picture of psychedelics. In particular, the first episode makes a connection between psychedelics and computer culture through the figure of Steward Brand, best-known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue. Brand had settled in San Francisco, which was an important center of counter-cultural activity (Haight Ashbury was legendary), but the surrounding area, Silicon Valley to the southeast, was important in computer culture as well. Thus these two pivotal movements matured in close proximity.

In one sense they are very different. Computers are highly complex technology used to facilitate things in the external world. Whatever the chemical complexity of psychedelic drugs, anyone can ingest them, and take an inward journey. Both, however, are mind technologies, one a set of devices for externalizing mental activities, the other a group of drugs for re-ordering one’s own mind. Their physical conjunction is thus important. If we are to understand the course of cultural growth and change since the middle of the 20th century, we need to track the parallel evolution of these two movements.

Here's a brief chronology indicating some of the conjunctions of these two movements. It is derived from a book proposal I’d created, but failed to sell, about the interaction of these developments.

Mind Hacks R Us – Computing & Tripping to the Millennium’s End

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue so it can accompany my ongoing posts on artificial intelligence and my recent post on How to Change Your Mind. Perhaps I'll do another one or two on the series. I'm most of the way through the second episode, on psilocybin, and I like it better than the first. Perhaps the third will be even better. Addendum: It was different.

* * * * *

A bit earlier in this millennium I thought it would be interesting to write a book on the parallel evolution of computer culture and psychedelic culture in the United States from mid-century to the end of the millennium. I wrote up a proposal, called it Dreams of Perfection, and it went nowhere. Subsequently John Markoff and Fred Turner each published parts of the story. Now I’m publishing a slightly revised portion of that old book proposal as an independent document. I’ve cut the marketing portions of the proposal, leaving only the conceptual overview and the chapter summaries. I’d envisioned five longish chapters, one for each decade, each chapter keyed to a different film: Fantasia, Forbidden Planet, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tron, and The Matrix. I’ve retained that structure in this précis and concluded it with a consolidated chronology is significant dates.

Downloadt Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/37206924/Mind_Hacks_R_Us_Computing_and_Tripping_to_the_Millenniums_End

Here's the consolidated chronology:

1936: Alan Turing publishes “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” This paper established that some computations were, in principle, impossible to perform.

1936: Avant-garde playwright Antonin Artaud travels to Mexico to try mescaline. Artaud’s writings were very influential among the people who created the “happenings” of the 1960s and 1970s.

1938: LSD was first synthesized at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland, though its mind altering properties were not discovered until 1943. LSD, of course, was the major “drug” of the psychedelic 60s.

1945: Vannevar Bush published “As We May Think,” in the Atlantic Monthly. This article, written by a government research administrator, is often regarded as a harbinger of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s.

1945: Hungarian emigrant and polymath John von Neumann wrote “First Report on the Development of EDVAC,” the document that defined the basic scheme used to implement software in digital computers.

1953: Watson and Crick publish the double helix structure of DNA and thus initiate the age of microbiology, initiating biology into the information paradigm.

1954: J. R. R. Tolkein publishes The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers.

1954: Thorazine, the first major tranquilizer, is marketed.

1956: The Bathroom of Tomorrow attraction opens at Disneyland.

1959: John McCarthy proposes time-sharing to MIT’s director of computing; time-sharing would make computers much more accessible.

1960: Robert Heinlein publishes Stranger in a Strange Land, which would become a major point of literary reference in the drug and mystical counter-culture of the 1960s.

1966: LSD and other psychedelics are outlawed, making it illegal for people to take trips.

1966: Original Star Trek series debuts on television, starting an entertainment franchise that would produce offspring for the rest of the century.

1967: The Beatles release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a triumph of high-tech electronics and the psychedelic imagination.

1968: President Nixon declares war on drugs.

1969: Herbert Simon publishes The Sciences of the Artificial, a collection of essays that makes fundamental insights of the artificial intelligentsia accessible to a larger audience.

1969: Man lands on the moon, the first time we have traveled to another world from ours – in physical reality.

1969: The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) establishes a nationwide network linking computer researchers to one another. This is the original seed of the internet.

1977: Star Wars became a motion-picture blockbuster, wedding martial arts mysticism with a space opera story and high tech special effects.

1981: William Bennett appointed to head the National Endowment of Humanities, his first government post. This positioned him to declare and lead a culture war. Later he would become “Drug Czar” under President Bush.

1981: Ted Nelson publishes Computer Liberation, in which he describes an elaborate hypertext system he called Project Xanadu (after the kingdom described in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”).

1984: Apple Computer advertised their new Macintosh in a Super Bowl advertisement that pitched IBM in the role of Big Brother and the Mac as humankind’s liberator.

1984: William Gibson combines video game imagery with reggae music and mythology and sets it in the future, thus placing psychedelia and computing on equal terms in the cyberpunk world of Neuromancer.

1985: Steve Jobs purchases Pixar, from George Lucas, and establishes it as an independent computer graphics company. Pixar would go on to produce the first completely computer-generated motion pictures.

1990: The world-wide-web was proposed by Swiss researchers.

1991: Desert Storm, the first war televised live and in real-time. Now real war is at our fingertips, just like a video game.

1994: Netscape was founded, with its IPO in 1995. This is the first company created by the world-wide-web, and it started the dotcom bubble that was to burst in 2001.

1999: Inventor and businessman turned futurist guru Raymond Kurzweil publishes The Age of Spiritual Machines, a manifesto about a future in which machines will surpass the accomplishments of their human creators.

2000: Detroit Electronic Free Music Festive draws 1.5 million people in its first year and is dedicated to genres of music which cultivate trance states.

2003: Anti-war organizers used the world-wide-web to organize world-wide protests against the American-led war against Iraq.

2003: Two major books about psychedelic drugs and mysticism are published, Rational Mysticism, and Breaking Open the Head.

How to Change Your Mind [Media Notes 75a] – LSD for serious people: Mind-changing is asserted, not shown.

How to Change Your Mind is a four episode miniseries on Netflix based on Michael Pollan’s book of the same name. It has four episodes, each named after a different psychedelic drug: LSD, Psilocybin, MDMA, Mescaline. I’ve watched the first episode. Color me underwhelmed.

Pollan serves as an on-screen guide and narrator, and is appropriately serious. He’s very clear that LSD is a potentially mind-changing and therefore very important drug. But, to be honest, he’s also a bit boring.

Before I get going, however, let me quote from a review of the episode published by James Hallifax in Psychedelic Spotlight News:

Episode 1 of Netflix’s How to Change Your Mind is a great introduction to the topic of LSD for those who don’t already know a lot about the subject. Narrated by Michael Pollan, the show takes us on a journey through the history of the powerful compound, from its discovery and its early medical use, to secret CIA mind-control studies, the counterculture and its banning, and finally to our current renaissance.

From amazing clips of LSD’s inventor Albert Hofmann describing his “Problem Child,” to powerful personal testimonies of individuals who have healed their suffering through LSD, episode 1 is a fun and entertaining refresher on the topic of LSD for even experts in the field.

In short, How to Change Your Mind’s first episode is definitely worth the watch.

My favorite segment came when psychedelic researcher James Fadiman was discussing an early LSD study on its effects on creativity, held at Stanford University in 1960. They recruited 48 senior scientists from various fields, all of whom had been working on a scientific problem to no avail for at least three months. In the study, each scientist was dosed with 100 micrograms of LSD, which can be considered a medium-sized dose.

As Fadiman describes it, “out of the people who came, we had 48 problems and 48 satisfactory solutions.” In other words, the LSD study was a stunning success. The fact that all 48 scientists —who had all been working on their problem for at least 3 months!!!— credited their LSD experience with solving their problem is nothing short of a miracle. True, perhaps this study would not meet the rigid rules of today’s clinical trials, but the results speak for themselves. According to Fadiman, “We had patents, we had publications, and because most of these people worked in industry, we also had products. And eventually the computer world emerged here.”

Despite this amazing story — and many more held within the one-hour premiere — the debut episode was not without its faults. Primary among them is its over-reliance on anecdotal stories, weaving a narrative that is not necessarily always backed up by current scientific study. The best example of this comes towards the end of the episode when Michael Pollan turns towards the subject of microdosing LSD.

About that last paragraph, I’m neither here nor there.

My problem with the episode is a bit different. It’s serious and, on the whole, dull. There’s some nifty special effects used to recreate the legendary bicycle ride taken by Albert Hoffman after he’d taken a substantial dose of LSD, 250 micrograms. There are some special effects scenes as well, and footage from some of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests from the 1960s. But there was nothing like this:

That’s a mural painted by Bob Hieronimus in Levering Hall on the campus of Johns Hopkins University in 1968-1969. I was a student at Johns Hopkins at the time; I saw that mural being painted. I listened to music played in that room, which functioned as a coffee house on the weekends. I rehearsed with a rock and roll band in a room next to that. That’s what I think of when I think about when I think about LSD.

Mind you, I am not now nor have I ever been an acid head. I’ve only taken LSD twice – which I’ll get to in a minute – but I was there and, if not exactly immersed in the culture, I spent a lot of time at its edges. I read a lot of the scientific literature on LSD and other psychedelics, not to mention a wide variety of material on mystical experience, I listed to the music, wore the clothes. And whatever THAT is, it’s missing from this episode.

The problem is one of technique, of aesthetics. How do you convey THAT while at the same time making it clear that you are not stoned out of your freaking mind? It’s clear that Pollan thinks psychedelics are important, that it’s important that we investigate them, and learn how to use them. He’s also aware that The Establishment, if you will, freaked out and made LSD illegal in 1968, shutting down all research on it. I mean, Pollan writes for The New York Times, fercrissakes, he IS the establishment (almost). He wants to steer clear of all that crazy stuff that freaks people out while at the same time knowing that, considered appropriately, the craziness is the point. It's not crazy, but rather reflects a different order in the universe.

As for my two acid trips, one was in January of 1972 and lasted approximately two weeks and the other was, I believe, in the Spring of 1974 and only lasted several hours. In neither case did I experience the visions and other sensory effects typical of LSD trips. Why, I don’t know. But that first one, that was a trip. Here’s a couple of paragraphs from an article I published in 1975:

What happens on an LSD trip is intimately bound up with one's expectations. I had lots of them. I expected to receive an insight (at least one!) into my study of language which would make it possible to write my masterwork. I had also expected to experience all kinds of nifty sensory effects. None of my expectations were met.

The sensory world remained the same and I spent two weeks living the life of a character in a Thomas Pynchon novel. I was on a quest and every event I faced was a test of my herohood. Nothing was what it appeared to be; everything had a hidden meaning. If I succeeded in my tasks the world would be saved and I would be inducted into the Secret Society of Master Creators (I didn't call it that at the time, but that is what it was) and spend the rest of my life as a Master of Improvisational Musics.

Winter in Baltimore is a dreary rainy affair. But those days in January were like the first days of spring–proof that I had succeeded and the world was being reborn. I received a letter from a friend which was misdated; the year read “1973” rather than “1972.” But I didn't think it was misdated; I merely assumed that self-sacrifice (as in Christ and Oedipus–sometimes I lay in bed at night pressing my palms into my eye sockets wondering if I would be called on to blind myself) had eliminated a year from time and that it was in fact 1973. (I didn't bother checking calendars.)

The account continues in that vein for a half-dozen more paragraphs and concludes:

Many of the people around me surely thought I was going mad. But none of this seemed in the least bit incoherent or confusing to me. And, as my cryptic messages went unanswered, as events refused to follow the course indicated by the signs, I realized that I had been acting out fantasies but that I had not broken free of them. My ego had been inflated, but not transcended. The dance had been exhilarating, but it lacked grace.

During that period I had signed up for trumpet lessons at the Peabody Institute and, as a result, brought my technique up a notch and have continued with the trumpet ever since. As important, perhaps more so, I completed my Master’s Thesis on “Kubla Khan,” and have been pursuing that work ever since. Would I have done those things if I hadn’t taken LSD? I don’t know. The fact is that before that trip I hadn’t played my trumpet in over a year and I was blocked on my thesis.

Pollan surely knows of that. It’s why he wrote the book and undertook this miniseries. I’ve not read the book, though I’ve read a review or two, but something is missing in this first episode. It tends to be strong on the facts, even if only anecdotally, and seems pitched at people who don’t know those facts. If you’ve lived through them, then there’s not much here for you. It jogs your memory, but leaves your imagination untouched.

I’m reminded of some lines from Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode”:

Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!

Where’s the feeling? Maybe things will improve in the other episodes. We’ll see.