I came across a post on the Lashtal site this weekend — BBC 4 is playing a series about the Summer of Love and the first episode featured two mentions of Aleister Crowley. I found the documentary’s trailer online, but couldn’t manage to find the full episode. I’ll keep and eye open for it, but while I was searching I discovered that Crowley has his own channel on YouTube. I’ve seen lots of documentaries and profiles on Crowley, but there’s plenty of fresh content there including this illuminating video featuring Robert Anton Wilson explaining Crowley’s magick…

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.

I just watched the The Sunshine Makers documentary. The 2015 flick tells the story of two idealistic young men in the 1960′s. The pair couldn’t be more different, but they both shared a common goal: to manufacture and distribute a massive amount of LSD, thoroughly convinced that the insights provided by the drug would create a kind of mass enlightenment that would change the world. You might not have heard of Nicholas Sand and Tim Scully, but The Sunshine Makers takes viewers on a tour of the 1960′s acid underground to meet the psychedelic pioneers at Timothy Leary’s East Coast Millbrook retreat, clear to California where the Grateful Dead, the Hells Angels and legendary acid manufacturer Owsley Stanley make San Francisco the acid capital of the world. Here’s a bit from VICE…

Acid made me want to devote myself to my life, but when chemists Nick Sand and Tim Scully first took it it made them want to devote their lives to the drug. For them, it wasn’t dissolution—it was a mission. “We thought LSD was going to change the world,” explains Sand in the new film The Sunshine Makers, which premieres at the DOC NYC festival this Wednesday. “By opening people’s minds, everyone would experience such a sense of love as to bring about world peace.”

Sand’s first LSD experience bordered on the biblical. As he recounts on camera: “I was with friends at a lakeside retreat in [upstate] New York. I sat in front of a fire, nude, in the lotus position. I just wanted to be naked. I didn’t want to be encumbered by clothing. And then I went much further than that and disappeared. I was floating in this immense, vast space, and a voice shot through me. It said, ‘Your job on this planet is to make psychedelics and turn on the world.’”

Three thousand miles away in San Francisco, and sans the voice of God, Scully was struck by a similar thought: “As we were coming down I felt fresh and new. The smells of flowers and trees were intense. I thought: [I] could make this stuff and give it away to anyone who wanted to be turned on .”

The flick just started streaming on Netflix and I’ll be publishing a review in The Contributor next week. If you don’t have Netflix the movie is also showing on YouTube.

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.

For some reason the fall always seems like the most poetic season — the best season for writing and reading verse. I think it has something to do with darkness. I think it has something to do with the cold and the damp that begins to creep into the coming Southern winter. I think it has something to do with the academic calendar and that sense of something that might begin as the natural cycle begins to end. It has something to do with harvest and holidays and a sense of summing up the year gone by.

Here’s a quadrilogy of Charles Bukowski poems curated by Open Culture. Find credits through their link. Here’s a bit from their recent post…

The poetry of Charles Bukowski deeply inspires many of its readers. Sometimes it just inspires them to lead the dissolute lifestyle they think they see glorified in it, but other times it leads them to create something compelling of their own. The quality and variety of the Bukowski-inspired animation now available on the internet, for instance, has certainly surprised me.

I made a playlist of the videos that I’m hosting on my YouTube channel…

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more book posts.

Yesterday’s post celebrated the David Lynch film Blue Velvet‘s 30th anniversary, but today I wanted to take a second to note that 2016 also marks the 45th anniversary of Fists of Fury — the Bruce Lee action film originally titled The Big Boss when it was released overseas in 1971. The movie was the first great martial arts film of the kind that Lee became known for, and The Big Boss made the martial artist a superstar across Asia. Of course, Lee didn’t become a household name in the United States until the posthumous release of Enter the Dragon in 1973, but by then his legacy had already passed into legend. I posted about Fists/Boss a few months back, but I was reminded about the film again after finding my favorite Bruce Lee documentary on YouTube this weekend.

Here’s How Bruce Lee Changed the World…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts

Sam Weber’s paintings supply the gorgeous illustrations in the Folio Society’s new edition of Dune. Go to http://sampaints.com/2015/02/02/dune/

This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the novel Dune. I’ve been following the remembrances the book is getting in the form of online articles and new releases, and I wanted to share a couple of recent favorite discoveries connected to Dune‘s half-century birthday.

The Folio Society has released a gorgeous version of Dune complete with a slipcase and gorgeous illustrations. This post’s title image is from the book. Click the link above to go to the Folio Society’s page and check out all the details of this wonderful celebration of the book’s first half-century.

Of course, talk of the Dune book automatically reminds me of the Dune movie/movies and I’ve been trolling YouTube watching lots of docs/interviews/retrospectives about the David Lynch film of the story. Here’s a cool remembrance featuring movie critics that gave the movie positive reviews despite the general skewering Lynch and his movie received upon its initial release.

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.

I tried to find a nifty, timely reason for posting this sweet YouTube discovery, but I’m coming up blank. Fact is, I was just screwing around online when I came across this playlist of Terence McKenna reading Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s “The Hash Eater.”

“Reading” doesn’t really capture what McKenna does here: fans of the man know that he’s a yarn-spinner of the highest order and his take on this tome is more of a performance than a simple recital.

Here’s some Wiki words on the text…

The Hasheesh Eater is an autobiographical book by Fitz Hugh Ludlow describing the author’s altered states of consciousness and philosophical flights of fancy while he was using a cannabis extract.

First published in 1857, The Hasheesh Eater went through four editions in the late 1850s and early 1860s, each put out by Harper & Brothers. In 1903, another publishing house put a reprint of the original edition — and the last complete edition until 1970. As of 2006, two editions are in print, including an annotated version first published in 2003.

Ludlow said, “The entire truth of Nature cannot be copied,” so “the artist must select between the major and minor facts of the outer world; that, before he executes, he must pronounce whether he will embody the essential effect, that which steals on the soul and possesses it without painful analysis, or the separate details which belong to the geometrician and destroy the effect.”[1] Many of his passages, which may have seemed like fantastic myth-making to his contemporaries, ring true today with more modern knowledge of the psychedelic state.[2] Ludlow writes of one hallucination: “And now, with time, space expanded also… The whole atmosphere seemed ductile, and spun endlessly out into great spaces surrounding me on every side.”[3]

Ludlow describes the marijuana user as one who is reaching for “the soul’s capacity for a broader being, deeper insight, grander views of Beauty, Truth and Good than she now gains through the chinks of her cell.”[4] Conversely, he says of hashish users: “Ho there! pass by; I have tried this way; it leads at last into poisonous wildernesses.”[4]

The popularity of The Hasheesh Eater led to interest in the drug it described. Not long after its publication, the Gunjah Wallah Co. in New York began advertising “Hasheesh Candy”:

The Arabian “Gunjh” of Enchantment confectionized. — A most pleasurable and harmless stimulant. — Cures Nervousness, Weakness, Melancholy, &c. Inspires all classes with new life and energy. A complete mental and physical invigorator.[5]

John Hay, who would become a close confidant of President Lincoln and later U.S. Secretary of State, remembered Brown University as the place “where I used to eat Hasheesh and dream dreams.”[6] And a classmate recalls that after reading Ludlow’s book, Hay “must needs experiment with hasheesh a little, and see if it was such a marvelous stimulant to the imagination as Fitzhugh Ludlow affirmed. ‘The night when Johnny Hay took hasheesh’ marked an epoch for the dwellers in Hope College.”[7]

Within twenty-five years of the publication of The Hasheesh Eater, many cities in the United States had private hashish parlors. And there was already controversy about the legality and morality of cannabis intoxication. In 1876, when tourists could buy hashish at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, the Illustrated Police News would write about “The Secret Dissipation of New York Belles… a Hasheesh Hell on Fifth Avenue.”[8]

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more book posts.

I don’t have cable. Not only does this mean I nearly never watch sports at home, it also means I’m often tuned into the strange wonders that can be found channel surfing over-the-air digital television. My girlfriend calls it a new “Wild West Golden Age of Television for Weirdos Everywhere.” She’s on to something.

Tonight, on Nashville’s digital television channel 6.6 — also known as WRTNLD6 — I caught a fascinating film broadcast with no ads for the price of electricity. The flick was so fascinating, I began to panic a bit when I couldn’t find out its title — screen menus and even the channel’s online listings simply stated “Classic Movie.” Luckily a flick that includes actresses like — one of my all time favorites — Brooke Adams, lends itself to a bit of IMDB cross-referencing for some easy detective work. Here’s the site’s take on James Dean: Portrait of a Friend…

A dramatization of the story of legendary movie actor James Dean. The film’s writer, William Bast, had roomed with Dean in the early ’50s, when both were trying to break into films as actors.

The 1976 made-for-TV movie features great performances a wonderful script and a surprisingly frank exploration of Dean’s bisexuality. Also, it’s on YouTube

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.

For this spooky October post I found a little gem on YouTube. It claims to be the first ever television interview with Stephen King and since I couldn’t find an earlier one on the site, I’m gonna take their word for it.

The interview takes place one decade into King’s career after he’s written horror classics like Carrie, The Shining and The Stand. It’s filmed nearly ten years after King’s graduation from the University of Maine Orono and is produced by the school’s public access channel.

I’m not a big fan of King’s books, but I’m a big fan of King and his spectral success story and his crazy work ethic. However, the scariest thing here might be the ancient computer he was producing those early bestsellers on…shudder…

(2017 Addition) The original, first Stephen King video, was taken down by YouTube. It’s been replaced here by a King interview on the Charlie Rose show from 19993…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Books posts.

Even as the internet and digital technology drag us inexorably into a faster-moving future, the wake of virtual living stirs up artifacts from the past, recontextualizing them in the frantic now.

One of the best places to find the newly-turned-over flotsam and jetsam of yesteryear is on YouTube where you can watch every episode of that cartoon you loved as a kid, the first music video you ever saw, and even news reports both tragic and triumphant that can bring decades-old memories and emotions flooding back.

I particularly enjoy how YouTube has become an archive of cult films like Witchboard — the best Ouija board movie ever made. Here’s the skinny:

Witchboard follows a woman who is introduced to the Ouija board by friends at a party, but when they leave it behind she decides to use it alone and begins to be harassed by an evil spirit whose goal is to possess her so that he may walk the Earth again. Much like a lot of the films of this period this one brings the ultimate fun, cheese and horror front and center to deliver an entertaining film. The film starred White Snake vixen and actress Tawny Kitaen. This film doesn’t sport as many bloody kills as some fans may want, but it is unnecessary for this story. While the look of the film is obviously dated the film still holds up mostly due to the never ending creep factor of the Ouija board.

The movie is not super gory but its genuinely spooky and creepy and does a great job of creating real tension and atmosphere instead of just relying on buckets of blood. Plus, again, as the best Ouija board movie of all time, it’s required viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in the occult.

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more occult posts.