I went to a preview screening of the new A Wrinkle in Time film last night. I first found out about Madeleine L’Engle’s book when I was about 8 or 9 and reading stuff like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit. Honestly, Wrinkle didn’t really stick with me — it’s sort of more of a cosmic sci-fi book than a swords and sorcery yarn and it didn’t really grab me like the other books I was reading. I read it and I mostly forgot it so I don’t really have any thoughts to offer regarding the inevitable BOOK VS FILM arguments these adaptations of beloved tomes always inspire.

That said, I wanted to include my review in this ongoing collection of counter-culture posts because it’s a very psychedelic story about using one’s mind to slip through alternate dimensions. The book was published at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius back in 1962 and it became an immediate hit with the generation that would grow up to challenge the Vietnam War. A Wrinkle in Time‘s occult themes find the book regularly challenged in school curricula. It’s also a sci-fi story that features esoteric physics and quotes from a bevvy of philosophers and artists, but also pins it’s plot to a little girl protagonist.

A Wrinkle in Time tells us that the future is female. Also, you should learn to tesser. Here’s my review…

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The name John Lilly might conjure many images: scientist; physician; the inspiration behind William Hurt’s character in the psychedelic cinema classic Altered States; don’t forget dolphin whisperer. John Lilly contained multitudes and I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon this look back at the man and his work from the Stuff To Blow Your Mind podcast at the How Stuff Works site…

The figure of John C. Lilly as psychedelic dolphin communicator burns in the collective memory as a counterculture avatar, yet his legacy embodies far more than the mythologized and/or vilified figure that most of us know. Join Robert and Christian as they examine the life, career and ideas of Lilly the scientist, Lilly the counterespionage researcher and Lilly the psychonaut. Welcome to the province of the mind.

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On Tuesday the second season of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia premiered on VICE. This show is one of the best series going and I’ve been anxiously awaiting this season since first hearing that new installments were imminent. The “Hamilton” of the title is Hamilton Morris — he’s the son of renowned documentary director Errol Morris and a kind of professional stoner. This show captures Hamilton’s world travels as he makes his way to drug dens, shaman circles, scientific laboratories, and hippie hideaways around the globe in search of the highest highs that plants, compounds and pharmaceuticals have to offer. In the first episode of this new season Hamilton heads to the Sonoran desert in Arizona to search for a psychedelic frog that literally oozes DMT. Along the way he also plays detective as he searches for Albert Most, the author of the mysterious pamphlet Bufo Alvarius: the Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert…

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Syd Barrett, the visionary co-founder of Pink Floyd, was the groundbreaking band’s original singer, guitar player and main songwriter. Pink Floyd should be admired for their evolution and innovation over five decades, but for some the band was never the same after they lost Syd in 1968. Even after he left the band Barrett wasn’t done with music and he released two solo records in 1970: Madcap Laughs and Barrett which included the song “Effervescing Elephant.” Here’s Laughing Squid with the word on the tune and a video that was created to celebrate the song and the artist…

After departing from Pink Floyd in 1968, the troubled but talented Syd Barrett released “Barrett“, his eponymous 1970 album, which was also to be his last. The album included the wonderfully alliterative, but somewhat grim song entitled “Effervescing Elephant“, for which an amusing animated music video was made in that same year.

Here’s the video…

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Last night I hit the Nashville Film Festival for their 8 P.M. screening of the Frayed Shorts program. Every year the Frayed Shorts selections celebrate abbreviated gross-outs, small scares, small sized celebrations of sex, and tiny terrors. After a go for broke introduction by Jason Shawhan — is anyone better? — we were off and running into a wide variety of films that elicited very different responses from the audience.

“The Call of Charlie” is a “fish” out of water tale that re-imagines H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu as a mid-level office drone who needs to get set up on blind dates. The makeup effects are pretty good in this one and the mix of ridiculous humor and bloody gore is pretty perfect. Lovecraft has proven to be challenging to translate to screen, but this rom-com works much better than most adaptations precisely because of its irreverent take on Lovecraft’s mythos.

“Pearlies” turns the Tooth Fairy story into a horror tale about an evil little tooth-collecting German rat. The effects here are really well done, and there’s even a Poltergeist reference for the keen-eyed. If you like monster movies and scary fairy tales this one really delivered.

“Summer’s Puke is Winter’s Delight” by Sawako Kabuki is a crudely rendered pornographic cartoon set to a soundtrack of the sound of people throwing up. It made me so queasy I had to plug my ears as best I could. I wouldn’t want to watch this one again, but I have to believe this was exactly the effect the director was hoping for. Bravo.

Renata Gasiorowska’s “Pussy” is a simple animated story about a single girl at home trying to masturbate. She experiences a few funny fails before the titular part detaches from her body and begins running around her apartment building. After a bit of slapstick chaos the two come to an agreement: the girl writhes on the floor while her pussy runs all over the house rubbing up against candle sticks, rolling around in the soft bristles of a brush, and running beneath the tassels hanging from the edge of some furniture upholstery. The best part of the film is its chromatic, psychedelic climax. Of course, this is one Frayed Short with a happy ending.

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I’m not fanatical about comic books, but I’ve always enjoyed graphic stories of all kinds, and I’ve been impressed by much of Marvel’s screen universe especially the brooding Captain America: Winter Soldier, and Daredevil‘s first season on Netflix. I recently attended a preview for Doctor Strange and it’s got much to recommend to readers of a blog like this one: it’s a psychedelic tale about an arrogant surgeon who must let go of his own ego to realize his true vocation as the Sorcerer Supreme of the Marvel Comics Universe. He does this by training with an ancient shaman to master occult powers that reveal new levels of consciousness and access to a multiverse of parallel dimensions. Sounds pretty cool, right? Also, there’s demons.

I flipped a story about the artist who created Dr. Strange with Stan Lee into Remnants the other day. Here’s a bit about Steve Ditko…

“Steve Ditko was almost primarily responsible for bringing the alter-ego into the comic book narrative.”

“Here’s the co-creator of Spiderman at the top of his game — Spiderman’s the most popular character by now at the end of the sixties — and he’s giving away ten-page stories on his superhero ‘Mr. A.’,” says Bell.

Here’s a fascinating BBC doc about Ditko, the role he played in creating Marvel cornerstones like Spiderman and Doctor Strange, and his mysterious, reclusive retreat from the characters he brought to life, and the audiences and readers that love them…

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Keeping with my recent posts on all things eschatological here is a charming-as-hell, cyberific video of Terence McKenna explaining his Timewave Zero theory. Listen closely with your third eye and draw your yarrow sticks with care…

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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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Today marks the anniversary of the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, first held on this day in 1970 on Michael Eavis’s family farm in Pilton, Somerset.

Along with the utopian idealism of the time came an invention of the “free” music festival, a social movement based on collaboration and responsibility for one’s own expectations. Admission to these festivals was free with the idea that concert-goers would be concert-participants, helping out in some way by working, bringing equipment and/or amenities, and contributing to any number of big chores made smaller by a collective.

Eavis, a former naval officer and dairy farmer, was inspired by hippie sightings around the town (an area that has historically attracted bohemians with its “mystical vibes” since the medieval construction of a monk’s hermitage at Glastonbury Tor), his own personal Methodist ideologies, and a particularly impressive Led Zeppelin outdoor performance.

Eavis got together with friends to invest in the stage and managed to bill The Kinks as headliner, who ended up being replaced at the last minute by Tyrannosaurus Rex—both Insomnia favorites. Tickets were a nominal £1, and it was such a success that they tried a free festival the next year. Official attendance jumped from 1,500 to 12,000—an apparently less manageable volume. Prices and sales have been climbing ever since. While it’s no longer free or cheap, it’s still organized by the Eavis family who divide the profits for local and worldwide charities, and it’s still held at their aptly named Worthy Farm.

Here’s Eavis himself talking about the beginnings of the fest and his mindset at the time, along with some great (possibly NSFW at times) footage:

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This year we celebrate the 45th birthday of the U.S. release of The Beatles’ psychedelic, experimental film, Magical Mystery Tour. The band’s third movie, Tour was released in theaters in America, but it was actually a made-for-television project when it debuted on sets across Britain on Boxing Day, December 26, 1967.

The best Beatles flicks are A Hard Day’s Night and Yellow Submarine, but despite the fact that Tour was mostly unscripted and panned by critics, it’s not without its patchouli-and-paisley charms four-and-a-half decades on.

Here’s the Wiki from The Beatles’ filmography page:

The Magical Mystery Tour film was essentially McCartney’s idea, which was thought up as he returned from a trip to the U.S. in the late spring of 1967, and was loosely inspired by press coverage McCartney had read about Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters’ LSD-fuelled American bus odyssey.[3] McCartney felt inspired to take this idea and blend it with the peculiarly English working class tradition of charabanc mystery tours, in which children took chaperoned bus rides through the English countryside, destination unknown. The film was critically dismissed when it was aired on the BBC’s premier television network, BBC-1, on Boxing Day — a day primarily for traditional “cosy, family entertainment”.[citation needed] While the film has historical importance as an early advance into the music video age, at the time many viewers found it plotless and confusing. Compounding this culture clash was the fact that the film was made in colour and made use of colour filters for some of the scenes – particularly in a sequence for “Blue Jay Way” – but in December 1967 practically no-one in the UK owned a colour receiver, the service only having started a few months earlier.

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