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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This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967. During that auspicious season about 100,000 young Americans traveled west to the Fog City to twist in the gyre of a countercultural hurricane while similar youth movements blossomed in Canada an across Europe. Suspicious of government oppression, aligned against the Vietnam War and consumerist values, the hippies seeking out the Summer of Love embraced sex, art, music, meditation, and the expanded consciousness that could be accessed through drugs and meditation. From this scene a radical value system based on communal values, community care, cultural transformation, and freedom from bourgeois hypocrisy and political tyranny came to light. They were weird, wild, wacked-out, and their impact on the culture has been permanent and lasting despite their many critics and naysayers. Here’s the story of the Summer of Love from PBS’s “American Experience…”

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Over the weekend we lost a giant of cinema when Michael Cimino passed away on July 2 at the age of 77. Some might wince at the word “giant” to describe Cimino’s work as a writer and director, but he made two masterpieces, and his decade-ish long run between Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and The Year of the Dragon (1985) make Cimino one of the best directors to emerge from New Hollywood — the American films that span from the late 1960′s to the early 1980′s which represent cinema’s high-water mark.

For me The Deer Hunter (1978) is a masterpiece, and so is the version of Heaven’s Gate (1980) that re-emerged in 1982. However, in the end, The Deer Hunter made Cimino one of the most important directors of his generation and his follow-up, Heaven’s Gate, made him a legendary failure. Here’s Variety‘s word on the documentary Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate…

Vet documentarian Michael Epstein (“The Battle Over ‘Citizen Kane,’”) draws heavily from well-received 1985 book by Steven Bach, senior v.p. and head of worldwide production for United Artists when UA green-lit “Heaven’s Gate.” Taking its cue from Bach’s tome, pic renders production of ill-fated pic — originally budgeted at $7.5 million, but completed for $36 million — as a slow-motion train wreck.

Ultimately, however, Epstein comes off as appreciably more forgiving of Cimino’s fanatical perfectionism and “epic mismanagement,” even to the point of suggesting the original 3-hour, 45-minute version of “Heaven’s Gate” is, for all its many flaws, “a beautiful, ambitious film” that deserves critical re-evaluation.

Artfully entwining outtakes, production stills, film clips and newly filmed interviews with executives, actors and crew, Epstein methodically charts stormy progress of the initially promising project.

Fresh from his triumph with “The Deer Hunter” (1978), his Oscar-winning Vietnam War drama, Cimino was actively courted by UA and other studios eager to release the hot director’s follow-up opus. Bach recalls that, upon seeing “The Deer Hunter,” he was equivocal: “This is a potentially great filmmaker.” Right from the start, however, the former UA exec (who frequently appears on camera through “Final Cut”) had minor misgivings.

During pre-production, for example, Cimino insisted on casting French actress Isabelle Huppert as his female lead. When Bach (among others) complained that Huppert couldn’t speak English well enough for the part, Cimino steamrolled over all objections. After that, Bach claims, production went downhill, then off a cliff.

Here’s Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate…

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Today as Americans turn-out to vote in both state and federal midterm elections, very few voters are aware that we’re also celebrating the 62nd birthday of the N.S.A. which was founded in 1952, 3 years after George Orwell published 1984.

The N.S.A.’s purview is signal intelligence — they monitor information and data from around the world with an eye toward counterintelligence while also protecting the data and information of the U.S. government from being hacked or gathered in a similar manner — it’s all a bit of the Spy V.S. Spy set-up, but more data versus data, code versus code.

Of course, that’s the definition on paper. In real life the N.S.A. has demonstrated it understanding of its mission to be much more far-reaching than this simple description might seem to imply. Here’s a bit o’ the Wiki…

NSA surveillance has been a matter of political controversy on several occasions, such as its spying on prominent anti-Vietnam war leaders or economic espionage. In 2013, the extent of the NSA’s secret surveillance programs was revealed to the public by Edward Snowden. According to the leaked documents, the NSA intercepts the communications of over a billion people worldwide and tracks the movement of hundreds of millions of people using cellphones. It has also created or maintained security vulnerabilities in most software and encryption, leaving the majority of the Internet susceptible to cyber attacks from the NSA and other parties. Domestically, it contributes to mass surveillance in the United States by collecting and storing all phone records of all American citizens. Internationally, in addition to the various data sharing concerns that persist, research has pointed to the NSA’s ability to surveil the domestic internet traffic of foreign countries through “boomerang routing”.

If you studied up on the gubernatorial candidates running in your state today, well done. If you’ve weighed both sides of a ballot proposal or considered the opinions of a third-party candidate you get a gold star. But, in the end, what difference can any election possibly make in a country whose constitution has had its legs chopped off by influence, wealth and the false omniscience of self reflexive voyeurs who justify their right to look with the same technology that makes it possible — “We look because we can,” they say. And they do.

Look at this…

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This month we remember the late, great Terence McKenna. The author, lecturer, scientist and philosopher was the heir apparent to Timothy Leary, bringing more lucidity, humor and insight to spreading the gospel of the psychedelic experience than anyone has been able to muster since we lost McKenna to brain cancer in April, 2000.

While it’s always nice to recall our heroes in an online post, I mention McKenna to point to the remembrance created by his daughter. Klea McKenna’s The Butterfly Hunter is a gorgeous photography volume that documents her dad’s butterfly collection as she explains in the introduction of her book:

For four years, beginning in 1969, my father lived out an unlikely fantasy: he became a butterfly collector. (We use the term collector but that is just a euphemism for hunter.) Butterfly hunting is a conflicted activity, a desire for beauty and a small act of violence, both justified by science. Preserving something by taking its life. As a child he had idolized the Victorian era’s explorers and naturalists, in particular Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s forgotten partner in the discovery of Natural Selection. The ship carrying Wallace’s entire collection of Amazonian specimens (four years’ worth) caught fire and sank into the Atlantic before reaching Europe, and in turn history overlooked him. After my father’s death, more than three decades after they were collected, I inherited a large trunk full of butterflies, over 2000 of them. Unopened since they had been captured, each one was still meticulously labeled and wrapped in the papers he had available to him at the time: American magazines, local newspapers, letters and his own notebook pages.

I began to sift, slowly, through his collection, as though it were an archeological treasure or encoded messages from another time. Through the dates and place names I traced his course – Sumatra, Timor, Singapore, Colombia, Amazonas – and began to see how, as our parents’ children, we are each tied to the history of the events that we missed. I see him, each night returning to a small, sweaty, mosquito-netted room, sorting and labeling the day’s boon to the hum of an electric fan. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War was raging, the Nixon administration was self-destructing, student revolts were flaring around the world and he was folding the headlines of these events into hundreds of origami-like envelopes to hold his Lepidoptera specimens.

McKenna’s book is full of thoughtful images that provoke contradictory responses: If we kill something to preserve it, what has actually been preserved? Do images from the past contain the energy of the events they document, and does making images of those images make that energy more immediate or even further removed?

Terence McKenna was educated as an art historian and an ethnobotanist who traveled the world as a young adult seeking art, plants, psychedelic experiences with indigenous shamans, and butterflies. This book invites us to walk in his footsteps by including images of Terrence McKenna’s actual field maps and previously unpublished snapshots of the author on his adventures — a passport photograph from the period is both haunting and hilarious.

The creatures he captured for his collection are exquisite, made even more beautiful and fragile-seeming by the headlines and photographs on the papers they were wrapped in. The book opens with a speckled, golden specimen wrapped in what looks like a Tarzan comic strip from Malaysia — one can imagine McKenna himself getting a chuckle out of the juxtaposition. A handful of butterflies fall out of another piece of paper featuring a photo of Vietnam War protesters in San Francisco carrying a sign that says “Not one more dead.” A gorgeous black and red butterfly is pictured alongside the ghostly stain it left on the plain white paper it was wrapped in and we are treated to yet another symbol of the persistence of memories.

The book is very spare with each butterfly and wrapper shot against a plain white background, but it’s full of complex conversations between cultures from around the world, between the present and the past, and — most importantly — between a daughter and her father. Here are some of Klea’s photographs:

The Butterfly Hunter also includes an unfinished, unpublished short story about butterfly hunting written by Terrence McKenna. The book originally appeared in 2008. Buy the new printing of The Butterfly Hunter directly from Klea McKenna here.

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