It’s Monday morning after a pretty fun weekend. I stayed in on Saturday night to watch the Deontay Wilder fight and to get a good night’s sleep before my show at Mad Donna’s last night. I had a ball at the East Nashville Songwriter’s club, sharing the stage with Rich Mahan and Lauren Farrah. Jean Paul Lilliston and I started the night off with a seven song set including newish additions like “The Wicked” and “Faraway Sound,” and throughout the show everybody kept track of the Blood Moon eclipse which was happening right outside of Mad Donna’s loft’s east side windows. During the day yesterday I was mostly taking it easy, reading lots of articles through Flipboard when I came a across this Beat treasure trove at Open Culture…

Plenty of us get tuned in to the Beats through print — maybe a yellowed copy of Howl, a mass-market Naked Lunch, a fifth- or sixth-hand On the Road — but sometimes the verse or prose that so thrills us on those pages fairly demands to be spoken aloud, preferably by the Beat in question. That may have proven a tricky desire to fulfill in decades past, but now Spotify has made it nearly effortless to hear the Beats whenever we like: you can find over eighteen hours of material on a playlist called, straightforwardly enough, The Beats.

These 249 tracks include not just figures like the previously alluded to Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, but other beloved Beats such as Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky — and Charles Bukowski…

Click the Open Culture link above to access the audio cache. In the meantime, here’s Ginsberg reading an LSD-inspired poem to television host William F. Buckley…

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This year we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the psycho/thriller, war flick Jacob’s Ladder. With great acting by Tim Robbins and Danny Aiello and its Francis Bacon-inspired visual effects, Jacob’s Ladder is one of those movies that takes a seemingly impossible premise and makes it feel very real.

Jacob’s Ladder is a film with lots of layers and twists and it’s not always easy to tell the difference between Jacob’s reality, hallucinations, memories and dreams. On the surface Jacob is a Vietnam veteran who is back home but suffering from exposure to a chemical that was designed to make him and his comrades into frenzied killers.

Of course, Jacob’s Ladder is just a movie. But the U.S. armed forces have a bad record for experimenting on their own soldiers with chemicals and chemical weapons. Here’s a little bit about the real Jacob’s Ladder from the The New Yorker…

In France, the team abandoned the decision to test only foreigners, and surreptitiously gave LSD to Private James Thornwell, a soldier from South Carolina who worked as a clerk at an American military-communications station in Orléans. Thornwell, the only African-American soldier at the station, had a contentious relationship with his superior and had recently been demoted; for these reasons, it appears, he was suspected of stealing a hundred and seventy-two classified documents that had gone missing. For ninety-nine days, members of the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps had interrogated Thornwell continuously. Thornwell later recalled being confined to a small room, where he was kept awake for long stretches and forbidden access to food, water, or a toilet; interrogators told him, “If you talk, you get your physical needs taken care of.” He was beaten, and attacked with racial epithets; but he was also told that his interrogators were there to protect him from white soldiers trying to hunt him down, or from assassins working for French intelligence. Thornwell was convinced that he was fighting a war for his own mind. When he could not hold himself any longer, he defecated on an interrogator’s desk. To withstand the isolation, he played imaginary chess on a wall, and dictated an improvised novel, just to hear a human voice. But as the days went by he was pulled deeper into a psychological void. According to a report drafted by a psychiatrist Thornwell saw years later, “He became unsure of who he was, where he was, and why all of this was happening.”

At some point, Thornwell admitted to taking some of the classified documents—an admission that he later said he made up in order to end his suffering. But what he said did not add up: once, he claimed to have burned some of the classified documents; another time, he said that he tossed them all into the Loire. (More than fifty of the documents had been discovered on the riverbank.) He agreed to be questioned under sodium pentothal, saying that he had nothing to hide; the officers found the results inconclusive. He agreed to hypnosis, and was told that if he lied he would feel pinpricks across his body. When he withheld some information about his life, he felt millions of pins tearing into his skin and in his brain, and screamed in agony. But he said nothing more conclusive about the documents.

At last, after three months of trauma, Thornwell was released, but the Army wasn’t done with him. An evaluation by a military psychiatrist found—unsurprisingly, after his ordeal—that Thornwell exhibited an “antisocial personality” with “paranoid trends.” Yet, even though the psychiatrist didn’t believe that Thornwell had “voluntarily compromised government secret information,” he recommended that the experimental interrogations continue. Hypnosis would not work on such a man, he wrote, but “the tension method,” in combination with “tension-producing drugs,” would be successful. This is where the Special Purpose Team came in.

Shortly after Thornwell was let go—maybe even that same day—he met a man who called himself Fusfield. After introducing himself as a lawyer, Fusfield told Thornwell that he was in grave danger, and that he could help. Thornwell could never recall precisely what happened after his lengthy confinement, but he remembered that the two men had lunch, and then Fusfield drove him to a remote mill house in the wooded French countryside. Along the way, a car began to pursue them. Fusfield told Thornwell that assassins working for the French government had tracked them down. By the time they reached the house—a lone rustic structure by a river—Thornwell’s sense of reality had begun to warp. The house’s interior appeared to be covered with spiderwebs, and he found himself seated at a desk, facing a small man with pallid green skin. The man, keeping his hands under the table, explained that he and Fusfield had taken tremendous risks to help him, but, before they could take any more, they needed to be able to trust him—they needed to know what had happened to the documents.

Thornwell, weakened by his relentless isolation, knew that he was not himself. “My head was full of the universe,” he later told his psychiatrist. “Meteorites were burning inside my head, stars shooting off.” He started feeling intense pain and confusion. Time and space tore apart. One moment, it seemed, he was seated at the desk; at another moment, his body had been thrown across the room, and he was being violently crushed against a wall. Suddenly again, he was back in his chair, facing the ashen, alien-like man across the desk, as if he had never left. Thornwell didn’t understand LSD, or even that he had been drugged; he had no framework for comprehending what was happening to him. His nerves felt as though electric current were coursing through them, and he became convinced that a magnet was keeping him locked in the chair—that he was being electrocuted through it. He struggled to get up, but the man at the desk told him to sit, and he found that he could not disobey: he had lost any sense that the chair was separate from his body. Thornwell passed out. When he awoke, the following morning, he was in Fusfield’s car again, heading back to Orléans. He looked at Fusfield, and he saw the same ghoulish skin that the man behind the desk had. Fusfield handed him a piece of fruit. Then he let him go.

Throughout Thornwell’s interrogation, the members of the Special Purpose Team drew his attention to the changes in his perception, and indicated that they had the power to make him permanently insane. After he was let go, he forever had to question whether he had been fundamentally altered. “I felt like my mind was being erased,” he said later. Back in the United States, Thornwell could not speak of his experience without descending into hysterical fits of tears—and, even if he could, who would believe him? He drifted in and out of jobs and relationships. Depressed, and deeply suspicious of the people around him, he went for long periods without speaking—until he feared that he would lose the ability altogether—and once refused to see anyone but his doctor for nearly six months. “The irony is that the Army interrogation techniques forced upon him a tortuous state of isolation,” his psychiatrist noted. “And the legacy of this is that he now imposes this upon himself.” In 1980, two senators from South Carolina, moved by Thornwell’s story, succeeded in obtaining a private congressional bill for him. Thornwell was awarded six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. “But he still struggled,” his lawyer, Harvey Kletz, told me. “His behavior was still aberrant, and I don’t think the money in any way changed what burdened him.” Four years later, Thornwell’s body was found in a swimming pool. His wife speculated that he had died of a seizure, although he had never had one before. He was forty-six years old.

A strange tale of LSD, torture and racism that’s scarier than any Hollywood film, here’s a 60 minutes profile of James Thornwell that tells the story of the real Jacob’s Ladder…

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Happy Bicycle Day!

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I’ve blogged about Leonard Cohen’s use of LSD on this illuminated scroll before. Today as I was sorting stories for the Remnants Flipboard when I came across this bizarre report from Abel Danger about Leonard Cohen’s involvement with early CIA LSD experiments in the 1950′s. Here’s the word…

The man in the photo, taken at McGill University in 1951, is 17-year-old Leonard Cohen. He’s wearing a blindfold, and his ears, fingers and hands are encased in padded restraints which prevent movement and cut off all sensory stimulation. This is one of Dr. Donald Hebb’s famous/notorious sensory isolation experiments, for which student volunteers were paid the then-princely sum of $20 a day. Some of the volunteers were unable to stand this torture for more than a few hours. Some tore off the bandages and banged on the door of the isolation chamber, screaming and crying to be released.

Back in the 1980s, when I lived next door to him, Leonard Cohen once told me he enjoyed these experiments. He said he learned to dissociate, leave his body, and go on long voyages through the universe. The experience was so pleasant that later he volunteered to be placed in a flotation tank while on LSD. He enjoyed that, too.

We now know that D.O. Hebb’s sensory isolation experiments became the foundation for torture techniques used by the CIA etc. in its secret prisons around the planet. Hebb, a neurologist, had CIA clearance, and also allegedly experimented on small children, mainly orphans and aboriginal children who arrived in his laboratory courtesy of McGill and the RCMP. Having access to human guinea pigs made Hebb’s research that much more impressive. He also, of course, worked with rats and monkeys. It seems quite likely that his famous “rat” study on the effects of sensory isolation on IQ, would have been based on his experiments with children. McGill, at the time, was controlled by a network that included many British-trained, mind-controlled pedophiles with an interest in eugenics – and probably still is today.

I don’t have any proof that any of this is true or false, but it’s interesting to note that Cohen may be counted among early countercultural revolutionaries like Ken Kesey who were part of similar LSD experiments and went on to create groundbreaking works of art. Here’s the man himself speaking on the poetic mind…

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Another recent viewing of random programs on Nashville’s over-the-air digital television paid off this past Saturday night when my girlfriend and I discovered this mind-blowing trip of a flick based on Lewis Carroll’s books. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a 1972 British musical that features a great cast in a psychedelic journey that makes Tim Burton’s Alice seem calm, orderly and decidedly un-scary. This version finds Peter Sellers playing the March Hare, Dudley Moore as the humble Dormouse and future Bond Girl Fiona Fullerton in the title role.

Fullerton is especially good in her reading of Alice as a sassy redhead who never seems to do as she’s told. Here’s an entry from George’s Journal discussing the popularity of Alice’s story in the psychedelic age:

And, when you get down to it, it’s really no surprise the young and the hip of the ’60s (whether artists or their followers) found Alice’s adventures so psychedelic, surreal and, well, druggy. I mean, not only do they contain anthropomorphic characters ranging from the seemingly over-stimulated (Hatter) to the seemingly sleepily stoned (The Dormouse) and from the paranoid (The White Rabbit) to the actually visually ambiguous (The Cheshire Cat), one of them is even smoking a hookah-pipe (the always chilled out Caterpillar). Quite frankly, all of them seem to be tripping…

Associations of Alice with drug culture were to be seen everywhere at the time. While the ‘Disneyfied’ image of The Cheshire Cat was a constant on LSD blotters, Alice herself actually tripping was alluded to in a black-and-white, feature-length Alice In Wonderland adaptation, directed by former Beyond The Fringe member Jonathan Miller and broadcast by the BBC on December 28 1966 (see video above). Typical family fare for Christmas this was not, as the ‘Eat me’/ ‘Drink me’ sequence in which Alice grows larger and smaller was treated as if her activities were inducing her into a drugged state. No question, this version is a dark take on Dodgson’s work; Miller decided to film the animal characters as human characters, believing the story to be a cypher for a girl’s fears about the grown-up world around her: “Once you take the animal heads off, you begin to see what it’s all about. A small child, surrounded by hurrying, worried people, thinking ‘Is that what being grown-up is like?”…

Inspiration by, adaptation of and reference to Alice’s adventures didn’t end in the ’60s, though. Like it or not, they’ve been a veritable constant of modern culture. As soon as the early ’70s, Dodgson’s books were once again mined as the source for a major family film in the shape of Alice In Wonderland (1972). British-made, thoroughly charming and fondly recalled, this movie musical boasts future Bond Girl Fiona Fullerton as the heroine…and the cream of British acting talent, such as Ralph Richardson, Robert Helpmann, Michael Hordern and Spike Milligan, among others…

I found the entire film on the Curiouser and Curiouser YouTube channel which is an amazing repository of film and television versions of all things Alice. Here’s the flick…

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I’ll finish up three days of Leonard Cohen posts with this last gem that reminds us that it’s Cohen’s dazzling songs and intensity as a performer that have won him almost five decades of attention from music listeners with ears to hear his erotic prayers and sensual meditations on love, sex, ecstasy, women, death and God.

Bird on A Wire captures Cohen’s triumphant 1972 tour of Europe and Israel with his band, The Army. Capturing candid scenes of Cohen and his musicians off stage and travelling on the road, this flick is also a repository of amazing live performances captured by the acclaimed British director Tony Palmer.

For Cohenphiles, the gem here is the famous, final concert in Jerusalem when Cohen and the band all take acid before taking the stage. A well documented event in Cohen’s biographies, this performance comes to a sudden halt when Cohen quotes the Kabbalah and explains that the band can’t seem to transcend and “get off the ground.” He informs the throng that they will return to the dressing room to meditate and see if they are capable of continuing. After a shave and a cigarette, Cohen and band regroup once the entire audience sings to them, encouraging the ensenble to re-take the stage. The show ends with an intense rendition of “So Long, Marianne” that finds Cohen and the rest of the group breaking into tears before ending the show.

Here is Bird on A Wire…

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They say you can judge a man by the company he keeps, and according to author Tom Robbins’ Wiki page, he’s kept his company very well, indeed…

Robbins was a friend of Terence McKenna,[20] whose influence appears evident in a couple of his books. A main character (Larry Diamond) in Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas advocates a theory similar to those of McKenna, involving the history and cultural influences of psychedelic plants. Robbins also spent time with Timothy Leary and the author has said that one of the protagonists in Jitterbug Perfume (Wiggs Dannyboy) exhibited certain characteristics of Leary’s personality; Robbins has admitted to using LSD with Leary.[21]

He is friends with Gus Van Sant, and performed the voice-over narration in Van Sant’s film adaptation of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. He has been friends with directors Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph, as well, and has had small speaking parts in five feature films.

Celebrating the recent publication of Tom Robbins new memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie, here is a great little video of the counterculture hero’s classic short story “The Purpose of the Moon.”

Buy Robbins’ Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life
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