With illustrations by Janjetov and brain-melting color by Beltran, The Technopriests is an eye-popping visual feast. Jodorowsky has been quoted as saying, “I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs”. The same would seem to be true of his work in comics. Indeed, in collaboration with Janjetov and Beltran, he brings worlds to life that would be impossible to film, even with today’s CGI wizardry. [ read more ]

By the 1975 publication of Realms of the Human Unconscious, Stanislav Grof was prepared to assert the existence of “a vastly extended cartography of the human psyche” including two new realms whose non-existence were central to the (even now) prevailing scientific worldview: the perinatal––relating to the experience of embryogenesis and birth––and the transpersonal––relating to experiences of the synchronistic, telepathic, karmic, or otherwise out-of-body variety. [ read more ]

[...] author David David Katzman has taken the plunge and produced an exuberantly psychedelic narrative. [ read more ]

Sylvan’s aim is to posit the power of rave culture as being globally transformative; however, he seems to think that the mere experience of universal connection is sufficient so far as positive political action goes. Missing also is the critique of rave culture as merely being part of what Herbert Marcuse called repressive desublimation: the blowing off of steam that serves in the long run to cement social norms. In the end, anyone in contemporary culture believing that the best way to enrich your soul is to lose your mind, and that the best means for doing that is through the exuberance of the body, is going to be fighting an uphill battle for legitimacy. In the struggle to honor and dignify this style of worship, Trance Formation is a solid resource. [ read more ]

If the aim of Moore’s book is to “cover both sides of the debate over amphetamine prescription and use” then her work is, to put it mildly, an embarrassing failure. The book is unabashedly in favor of stimulant drug use, going so far as to dismiss the better part of those problems associated with said stimulants as being largely the result of insufficient legal access to speed, owing to pesky government restrictions. [...] If, however, the goal of The Amphetamine Debate is to provide aid, comfort, and what is essentially a resource guide for anyone wishing for greater legal access to stimulant medications––a resource guide camouflaged in a stupefyingly shallow way as a seriously researched impartial exploration of a difficult issue––than, for what’s it’s worth, I suppose the book is probably a success. However, woe betide anyone looking for a genuine engagement with the debate alluded to on the book’s cover. [ read more ]

The stories and relationships in which Rasmussen seems to be most invested, and which he teases out in the greatest detail, concern the subtle (and not so subtle) ways that speed itself seemed to direct the evolution of culture in the United States—the culture of the American medical community, if nothing else. For a well crafted history and critique of the ongoing evolution of that “speed” with which we are plunging forward, and the chemicals that fuel and are fueled by it, we have Rasmussen to thank for his educational, entertaining, and ultimately troubling book. [ read more ]

One of the most interesting features of this book is the fact that joining Ram Dass and Metzner—whose conversations with Bravo form the bulk of the text—are a rich assortment of shorter but no less personal statements by a wide selection of surviving individuals who were involved with psychedelics in the 1960s. If Leary, Ram Dass, and Metzner were the “fathers” of the movement, then these other folks were the mothers, foster-parents, midwives, baby-sitters, mischievous aunts and uncles, fellow travelers, and simple eyewitnesses to the growth of the culture that was birthed during that time. [ read more ]