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Although Kingston only began to write in the mid-1970s, the spirit and aesthetic lessons of the counterculture and its specific and sacramental use of hallucinogens permeate her work like no other American writer of this period. Neither a wide-eyed promoter nor an uninformed skeptic, Kingston helps us see the complexity and richness of psychedelic experience in the 1960s counterculture. As the Liddel-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon has it, the word pharmakon can mean, in addition to “remedy,” “poison,” and “scapegoat,” also “a means of producing something.” In the 1960s, a whole generation undertook to produce something new through a deliberate course of dismantling the assumptions and perceptions they saw as rooted in their social conditioning. In their place, 1960s psychedelic experimenters sought to found a new, more gentle and more just society, one based on the boundary-blurring insights of LSD experience. A major landmark in the cultural history of the pharmakon, the counterculture built its philosophical, political and aesthetic practice around the ultimate psycheledic principle that “all is related to all.”
The proliferation of psychedelic drug use in the 1960s would have major cultural ramifications, significantly contributing to the development of countercultural ideals. The profound impact of the psychedelic experience cannot be understated. Whether willing to act upon it or not, these drugs provide individuals the opportunity to revaluate their beliefs, values, life patterns, and ultimately understanding of reality. For many middleclass youth at this time, conditioned to accept a lifestyle based on materialism and conformity, experiencing a reality that extended beyond perceived notions of truth was genuinely transformative. In an increasingly unstable context at home in the Unites States and abroad in Vietnam, many decided to utilise these insights, rejecting mainstream dogmas as illusionary and immoral, and convening in their own counterculture communities. As these communities grew, it began to seem that society could be transformed for the better. Mass consciousness expansion could lead to the creation of an alternative parallel society in which the values and beliefs perpetuating society’s ills would be absent. However, such a revolution never occurred. Ultimately this type of thinking encouraged political disengagement rather than directly challenging institutionalised problems such as racism and sexism. As such the counterculture did nothing to stop these problems continuing within mainstream society and even within the counterculture itself. This essay explores the transformative role that psychedelics played in the 1960s, arguing that although it certainly transformed individuals and significantly aided the development of countercultural ideals, this transformation could not be extended to society at large like many had hoped. It begins with a discussion of the differing perspectives regarding the role of psychedelic drugs, exploring first the historical debates on the subject, and then the contemporary ideas of key figures in the counterculture movement Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey. It then proceeds to an analysis of psychedelic rock and countercultural musicians’ attitudes found in their lyrics and performances, due to the centrality of music to the counterculture, to demonstrate how psychedelic drugs as a tool for societal change was ultimately limited.
With the advent of psychedelic rock the medium of choice of musicians is not strictly sonic anymore; musicians of the Sixties begin to show a vibrant vocation towards a wider, more complex and ductile interaction with art forms and the very concept of Art. In this brief era visual artists become interested in rock music, they start to produce art inspired by music and, viceversa, musicians become more and more involved in the visual aspect of their work. The mid and late Sixties then represent a period of seminal renaissance for Album Cover Art and Poster Art: LP covers strive to translate the message of the music they wrap in visual terms. Conversely, psychedelic rock tries to put the amazing visions triggered by psychedelic drugs into music. Focusing on posters, album covers and the innovative experimentations of light shows, this article brings to light an often unsung, but definitely essential, trait of psychedelic culture: its holistic and synesthetic disposition - a sort of mission: to bring art forms back together, to put Art in everyday life and in the lives of everyone. Psychedelic rock and psychedelic visual arts then become ideal platforms for an innovated and innovative language that does not indulge with art’s artificial categorizations, but embraces the synergetic possibilities of all its different forms.
A review of Jon Savage's "1966: The Year the Decade Exploded" (Los Angeles Review of Books). It examines the remarkable convergence of psychedelics and pop music at the time when LSD was still legal.
2023 •
Intersex, Asexual, plus) people come to psychedelics in much the same ways we come to other "illicit" drug use _ by way of trauma, that is, as a means to deflect, calm, assuage, and forget the way in which family, community, and religious institutions have both neglected and condemned many of us. In short, to get high and get a time-out from pain. Many come to drugs and alcohol as well as a way of accessing permission within the self, via the lowering of conscious defences, to enjoy the sex we desire.1 This paper continues a journey I look forward to exploring even further in the future. I hope it will contribute to queer and psychedelic studies by providing some literature and analyses to the profusion of knowledge as well as addressing the chasm within the discipline so that people may engage with issues of ecology, race, class, sexuality and gender as they think through these issues and tackle them for themselves. It will focus on psychedelics, or queer plants, as I also call them, as a site of ecology, politics, cultural and racial struggle. Therefore, the intersections of illegality, oppression, cultural appropriation, commodification, and global 1
This is the syllabus for a series of public lectures I gave in Denver during the summer of 2014.
2014 •
LSD shaped the American counterculture in its own image. The powerful drug strongly influenced countercultural ideas, symbols, fashions, and music. ‘Dropping acid’ was a rite of passage into the counterculture that helped to separate it from mainstream society. Psychedelic experiences also encouraged users to question and rethink social mores and fostered a sense of community within the movement. Some historians contend that acid and other drugs killed the counterculture, but I argue that LSD played only a minor role in the movement’s decline.
2012 •
The psychedelic dimension of religious experience occupies a marginal position in the scholarship of American culture. For the last seven decades, scholars have viewed the psychedelicist church movement as, variously, an excuse for taking illegal drugs, an inauthentic mode of religious fellowship, and a purely oppositional “counter-culture.” More recent scholarship challenges these interpretations by emphasizing the legitimacy of the experiences occasioned by psychedelics. Psychedelicism in the 1980s took shape as the “zine scene,” a vast information network composed of approximately ten thousand self-publishers. The convergence of underground networks that coalesced into this expansive literary microcosm can be traced back to the SubGenius Church. This fellowship of psychedelicist hipsters organized its members into an epistolary network. This intra-church postal exchange was the seed out of which the zine scene bloomed. However, the SubGenius Church would not retain its position a...
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