Happy 70th, LSD!

Heute vor 70 Jahren schmiss sich Albert Hofmann 250 Mikrogramm LSD, setzte sich auf sein Fahrrad und fuhr nach Hause – deshalb ist heute auch Bicycle Day. Auf seinem Fahrrad-Trip nach Hause begann das Acid zu knallen, er dachte wahlweise, seine Nachbarin wäre eine Hexe, er würde wahnsinnig oder das LSD hätte ihn vergiftet. Nach und nach hat er sich dann an die Hallus gewöhnt und konnte den Trip einigermaßen genießen und schrieb später:
„…little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux…“ (Wikipedia)
Ich hab’ selber selbstverständlich niemals nicht LSD zu mir genommen, hatte nicht ein paar Jahre lang den Spitznamen Acidwalta, habe nicht einen Club vor meinem Auge zu einer seltsamen roten Masse verschwimmen sehen, bin nicht auf dem Rücken einer Riesin nach Hause gesurft, hatte niemals einen Horrortrip auf Erdbeeren im Omen-Parkhaus, hab’ mir nie Splatterfilme aus Hofmännern angesehen und hab’ niemals mit einer lila Lennon-Brille im Gras gelegen und hab niemals eine halbe Stunde lang nur „Hast Du auch dieses ganz grelle Licht gesehen?“ gerufen. Never.
Ich war auch nie der Meinung, dass ein LSD-Trip für jeden Menschen eine Pflicht sein sollte und mein Lieblings-Acid war nicht der Silver Surfer, nicht dicht gefolgt von Miraculix. Und dieses Blog ist selbstverständlich auch ohne LSD so geworden, wie es nunmal ist – ganz abgesehen von mir selber. Und dafür möchte ich mich auch gar nicht herzlichst bei Herrn Hofmann bedanken. Turn on, tune in, drop out.
Hier noch eine Galerie voller Blotter-Art, gefolgt von einer Tonne Links:
Deutschlandradio: Auf dem falschen Trip – Vor 70 Jahren entdeckte der Schweizer Chemiker Albert Hofmann die halluzinogene Wirkung von LSD
Podcast: BBC Witness: The discovery of LSD
TAZ: 70 JAHRE LSD – Teleskop in den Weltraum der Seele
Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Electric Kool-Aid Acid-Pinball
Enterprise LSD-Blotter and the Internet Explorer-Trip
Brad does Acid on the Twitters
Dock Ellis’ LSD-Baseball HTML5′d
Underground LSD-Lab in a Missile-Silo. And a Goth-Stripper.
Dock Ellis LSD No-Hitter recreated on the Xbox
Simpsons LSD-Artwork
Doku-Trailer: Magic Trip
The Plot to Turn On the World: The Leary/Ginsberg Acid Conspiracy
Radiohead Acid-Tabs
Doku: Inside LSD – Vom Trip zur Therapie
LSD-Doku: The Beyond Within
LSD-Freakout at a 2001-Screening: Space Odyssey gone bad!
Timothy Leary über Aleister Crowley, LSD und Geister
Unicorn LSD
LSD-Ticket-Artworks
Cary in the Sky with Diamonds
Lennons verlorenes LSD gefunden
National Geographics Inside LSD
Obama Acid
Dock Ellis’ LSD-Baseball animated
Der Brief von LSD-Erfinder Albert Hofmann an Steve Jobs
R.I.P. Albert Hofmann, LSD-Entdecker
Electric Kool-Aid Acid-Pinball

Ein LSD-themed DIY-Pinball von Tilt Warning: „Evil Mansion is a hand painted LSD themed custom pinball machine by Pittsburgh based graffiti artist and sign painter Soviet NSF.“ (via Laughing Squid)
Enterprise LSD-Blotter and the Internet Explorer-Trip

spOnlines EinesTages hat einen netten Artikel über Blotter-Art (Danke Yannik!), die Illus auf LSD-Trips, und die Sammlung von Marc McCloud. Leider zerstört der Autor das Posting mit der furchtbarst möglichen Headline, die man sich zum Thema ausdenken kann.
Besser und ergiebiger: Die LSD-Datenbank auf Erowid mit Tonnen von Links und Fakten zum Thema. Die Website ist von der Nutzerführung her bestenfalls… verstrahlt ist hier wohl der richtige Ausdruck. Aber man findet dort unter anderem diesen LSD Blotter-Index der DEA (PDF) aus dem Jahr 1987 mit Star Trek-Trips und in den Galerien auf Erowid findet man neben der Alice in Wonderland auch den Internet Explorer-Blotter.
Brad does Acid on the Twitters
are you aware of the tremendous amount of reflective surfaces visible in the day to day world. there’s so many
— Gary Debussy (@hella_brad) September 8, 2012
Gary Debussy hat sich vor zwei Tagen zum ersten mal LSD eingeworfen und den Trip live getwittert und das halluzinogene Getweete hat dann jemand auf Storify zusammengeklickt: Brad does Acid. Die eingebetteten Storify-Dinger sehen im Feedreader ziemlich scheiße aus, deshalb hier vorher der Bonustrack: Fledermausland!
aside from the ghost bats this is remarkably amazing this was a really fun choice
— Gary Debussy (@hella_brad) September 11, 2012
Nach dem Klick das komplette Ding:
Dock Ellis’ LSD-Baseball HTML5′d

ESPN hat eine schöne HTML5-Story über Dock Ellis, dem ersten und einzigen Pitcher in der amerikansichen Baseball-Liga, der einen No-Hitter auf LSD warf. Die Story hatte ich schon ein paar mal hier, einmal als die Animation unten und dann eine Aktion, in der sie ein Baseball-XBox-Game auf LSD gespielt hatten.
It was a Friday. That much is certain. June 12, 1970. Three years after psychedelic Pied Piper Timothy Leary invited America to “Turn on, tune in and drop out.” Four years before Richard Nixon’s resignation marked an inglorious denouement to the counterculture era. The middle of things. A purple haze. The perfect moment for the first and only known no-hitter in major league history pitched under the influence of lysergic acid diethylamide, thrown by the first and only player in major league history to inspire both a biography penned by a future American poet laureate and a seminal article in High Times.
Six hours earlier, Ellis had been in Los Angeles, nursing a hangover, dazed and confused, enjoying what he thought was his day off. […] Ellis rented a car. Dropped a tab of acid. Drove north to his hometown, Los Angeles. He showed up at the home of Mitzi, the girlfriend of an old childhood buddy, Al Rambo.
The two drank screwdrivers. Smoked marijuana. Talked through the night. Eventually, Ellis fell asleep. Possibly for an hour. Probably less. Around noon — maybe earlier — he took another dose of LSD. Meanwhile, Mitzi flipped through a newspaper. “Dock, you better get up,” she said. “You gotta go pitch!” “What are you talking about?” he said. “I pitch tomorrow.”
Mitzi gave him the sports page. Ellis scanned the newsprint. Padres-Pirates. Doubleheader. Friday. Today. Game time: 6:05 p.m. Game 1 starter: Ellis, D.
“Oh, wow,” he said. “What happened to yesterday?”
The long, strange Trip of Dock Ellis – Meet the Man behind Baseballs most psychedelic Myth (via Reddit)
Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Dock Ellis LSD No-Hitter recreated on the Xbox
Dock Ellis’ LSD-Baseball animated
Magic Mushroom House
Youtube Direktshrooms, via Laughing Squid
CNN über ein Haus in Aspen, das der Legende nach auf Acid und Pilzen gebaut wurde. Ich glaub’ davon kein Wort, aber das Ding ist schick und die Story ist toll, auch wenn sie Bullshit ist. Aus einem NYTimes-Artikel von 2009 (hier die dazugehörige Galerie mit Bildern aus dem Haus):
Built over several years beginning in 1973, the circular house coils around itself, with rooms and railing-less balconies that Ms. Findlay refers to as “go-go platforms” constituting 12 levels. Ladders and narrow stairways lead to other platforms, and small loftlike spaces, making sure footing essential.
At the house’s very center is a round, sunken area the Findlays refer to as the “love pit” but that could more aptly be termed the creation room. A built-in sofa encircles much of the white-shag-carpeted space, while an unmistakably phallic canopy built of moss rock protrudes from part of the wall, extending toward the fireplace opening in the large hearth opposite. Look closely at some of the rock in the chimney, and you can pick out more sexual imagery. A mural behind the couch, painted by Mr. Ulrych, depicts a somewhat abstract rendering of the reproductive process.
Steve Jobs, Counterculture, LSD and Multiculturalism

Juan Cole hat einen Nachruf zu Steve Jobs geschrieben und das werdet ihr heute in den Mainstream-Medien garantiert nicht lesen:
Jobs was the biological son of Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah Jandali (a Syrian Muslim then graduate student in political science from Homs, which is now in revolt against the Baathist regime).
That is, like Barack Obama, Jobs was the son of a Muslim.
Simpson young and unmarried, gave Jobs up for adoption, but she and Jandali later wed and gave Jobs a half-sister. He never appears to have met his father a political scientist who later went into the casino business, but he did get to know his half-sister Mona. That is, Jobs’s childhood was wrought up with a) Muslim immigration to the United States and b) the sexual revolution, both phenomena of the 1950s that accelerated in subsequent decades. Of course, these two parts of his heritage had only an indirect impact on him.
His adoptive parents were Paul Jobs and Clara Hagopian Jobs (his adoptive mother would therefore be of Armenian heritage.)
Jobs dropped out of college, gathered Coca-Cola bottles to turn them in for money, got free meals from the Krishna Consciousness Society (“Hare Krishnas”), and later made a trip to India, where he converted to Buddhism.
I’d be interested to know how that happened. There is very little Buddhism in India. Tibetan Buddhists have centers in places like Varanasi (Banares) in North India, because these monks are political or cultural exiles from Communist China. The Dalits or ‘untouchables’ of western Indian have had a conversion movement to Buddhism. Jobs is said to have gone with a college buddy to see a Hindu guru devoted to the monkey-god, Hanuman. I really wonder whether the Buddhism was not encountered in the US rather than in India, though the trip to India may have influenced his decision.
In the same period, he was doing psychedelic drugs like LSD, which he later said were very important to his creative vision.
So the whole world made Jobs, and he remade the world.
Steve Jobs: Arab-American, Buddhist, Psychedelic Drug User, and Capitalist World-Changer (via Reddit, Bild via Ronny, This isn’t happiness)
Underground LSD-Lab in a Missile-Silo. And a Goth-Stripper.
(Vice Direktlsd, via Reddit)

Vice hat die ziemlich weirde Story von Leonard Pickard, Gordon Todd Skinner, der ehemaligen Stripperin Krystle Cole und ihrer Zeit in einem Underground-LSD-Labor in einem ehemaligen Raketensilo. Und ich bin mir supersicher, dass ich die Story hier schonmal hatte, aber ich glaube, das Video dazu ist neu. Naja, und solche Geschichten bringe ich aus ein paar Gründen natürlich gerne nochmal.
What is known is that in 1997, a virtuosic organic chemist named Leonard Pickard joined forces with Gordon Todd Skinner, the heir to a spring-manufacturing fortune, to organize what would later become the world’s most productive LSD laboratory. A laboratory that, according to some sources, produced 90 percent of the LSD in circulation, in addition to unknown quantities of MDMA, ALD-52, ergot wine, and quite possibly LSZ… but I’ll get to that later.
Leonard Pickard is an anomaly among clandestine chemists—one of very few who was able to achieve great success in academia. He studied at Harvard, Purdue, and UCLA while producing kilos of MDA and LSD in secret laboratories under the auspices of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. He was charismatic and gentlemanly, with excellent posture (he would advise slouchers to let their vertebrae fall vertically, like “a beautiful string of pearls”). A notable photo depicts Leonard at a scientific conference in Sussex, gently appreciating the scent of a long-stemmed rose. He was like that.
Gordon Todd Skinner (known by friends as Todd) is an autodidact chemist of uncertain ability; indeed, whether he is a chemist at all is subject to debate. He allegedly performed his first mescaline extraction from L. williamsii at the age of 19. By 25, he was incarcerated and facing life in a New Jersey prison for trafficking 42 pounds of marijuana. In order to beat the charges, he began a long and fruitful career as a government informant. In 1996, he purchased a decommissioned Atlas E nuclear-missile silo in Wamego, Kansas, and transformed it into a subterranean psychedelic palace. Three years later, he purchased a second silo to house an LSD superlab. The laboratory, however, only operated for a short time, and by October 2000 Todd was providing DEA agents with a guided tour of the premises. Simply dismissing Todd as a snitch would ignore the fact that he seemed to possess a deep and honest commitment to the distribution of psychedelic drugs for the betterment of mankind, which makes what he did all the more complex.
Lastly, there is Krystle Cole, a former goth stripper from Kansas, who fell in love with Todd and was ushered into his private circle of chemists and dealers. Krystle met Todd in February 2000, and they shared six months of lysergic bliss in the silo before things began to catabolize into chaos. By August 2000, Todd was afraid the LSD laboratory was under government surveillance and decided to preempt any criminal charges he might face by turning in Leonard. He furtively began recording conversations and compiling evidence. This led to Leonard’s arrest, and a nationwide (and possibly global) LSD drought that lasted throughout the early 2000s.
Bookmarks for August 3rd: NYC Garbage Art, Hofmanns Potion, Spaceflight Psychology
Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared on Vimeo
Retro Future: Space Art Update
Spaceflight Psychology and the New ‘Right Stuff’ | Wired Science | Wired.com
AFP: Icelanders hand in draft of world’s first ‘web’ constitution
Princess Leia Costume Made of Duct Tape
Heather Holliday, Sword Swallower on Vimeo
LEGO Dragon Breathes Actual Fire | Geekosystem
“Space Night – Earth Views” 4-10 komplett online
NYC Garbage, Trashy Art In A Cube From New York City
Hacker stock art – Boing Boing
Mac ‘n’ Cheese on Vimeo: Mac 'n' Cheese is an animated short directed and created by four students at the Utrecht School of Arts in the Netherlands. This roughly two minute animation took about five months to make, and about a bajillion peanut butter sandwiches.Synopsis: When you find yourself running scared and running out of energy, there's only a few options left to outrun your opponent through the southern desert. Stopping at nothing, watch these two guys wear each other out and rip through boundaries hitherto unbroken.
Mona Lisa – 6,239 dot to dot drawing on the Behance Network: I created an A0 poster with dots numbered from 1 to 6,329 and took a time lapse video of myself linking them all up over 9 hours. Here's how it turned out.
The Mission to Get Osama Bin Laden : The New Yorker: What happened that night in Abbottabad.
Essential Mix by Paul Kalkbrenner (30.7.2011) [Mix,Download] | Dressed Like Machines: This Essential Mix is a live set of Kalkbrenner’s own productions and remixes, including tracks from his new album ‘Icke Wieder’.
Hofmann’s Potion (LSD documentary) – YouTube: The documentary delves into the little known early history of the world's most notorious psychedelic.Long before Timothy Leary urged a generation to "turn on, tune in and drop out," lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, was being used by researchers trying to understand the human mind. This documentary is a fascinating look at the story of "acid" before it hit the streets.Featuring interviews with many LSD pioneers, Hofmann's Potion is much more than a simple chronicle of the drug's early days. <br />
With thoughtful interviews, beautiful music and stunning cinematography, it is an invitation to look at LSD, and our world, with a more open, compassionate mind.
The Bible of Western War, Now Featuring Cartoon Animals | Danger Room | Wired.com: On War is Clausewitz’s attempt to distill warfare down to its enduring essentials. Its only equal is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. If you’ve heard the phrase, “war is politics by other means,” you know the nickel version. If you want to go for the jackpot, stroll over to one of the war colleges or onto any military listserv to hear people debate Clausewitz’s relevance to their pet issue or dispute what he really said like he was Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall.But if you’d like something in between, Fitzgerald’s Clausewitz for Kids blog is slowly recasting On War, section by section, into a lecture series in the Prussian forest, conducted by Hare Clausewitz (get it?), the intense-looking rabbit officer pictured above in Napoleonic-era regalia.
CINEMETRICS: cinemetrics is about measuring and visualizing movie data, in order to reveal the characteristics of films and to create a visual “fingerprint” for them. Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side.
Christian Groß — SMS to Paper Airplanes: The text messages were filtered and analyzed using PROCESSING. The sender was encoded by the direction of the paper airplane, the length of the message with its size and the amount of positive emotional words with the amounts of folds. Additionally the paper airplanes were divided in two types depending on the length of their text. Finally, the paper airplanes resulting from this construction plan were placed in the room depending on the time when they were sent, as well as their emotional value.
Chicago: The Ferris Bueller high school – YouTube: You can make a strong case for The Blues Brothers as the definitive Chicago film, but Ferris Bueller's Day Off almost seems like a 103-minute commercial from the Chicago Office Of Tourism. That was no accident. Director (and Chicagoan) John Hughes described the film as his "love letter" to the city. He wanted to capture "not just the architecture, but the spirit."
In Test Tube, Hint of Chemicals Coming Alive – NYTimes.com: SAN DIEGO — Here in a laboratory perched on the edge of the continent, researchers are trying to construct Life As We Don’t Know It in a thimbleful of liquid.
Dock Ellis LSD No-Hitter recreated on the Xbox
(Vimeo Direktlsd, via Jason Kottke)
In den 70ern warf Baseball-Pitcher Dock Ellis auf LSD einen No-Hitter, dazu hatte ich schonmal eine Animation hier vor ein paar Jahren.
Jetzt hat Deadspins A.J. Daulerio versucht, das ganze in im Baseball-Game MLB 2K11 auf der Xbox nachzumachen, inklusive LSD-Trip natürlich. Die Kombination macht Sport sogar für mich interessant, weil für Sport interessieren sich ja normalerweise nur aber ich hör’ an dieser Stelle besser auf.
Hier nochmal die Animation von James Blagden: No Mas Presents: Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No.
I had a perfectly pleasant first LSD experience, one made only slightly less pleasant by my attempts to recreate Dock Ellis’s acid-addled June 12, 1970, no-hitter on the Xbox version of MLB2K11.
I took my first strip of the stuff (pictured below) at approximately 12:30 in the afternoon and it took about 30 minutes for the first burst of spastic wooziness to arrive. The games began, with an MLB2K11 custom-generated Dock Ellis leading the 2011 Pirates against the 2011 San Diego Padres, a considerably less fearsome offensive bunch than the woeful ’70 Pads, who at least had homer-thumping Nate Colbert in the cleanup spot. It should be noted that I’m not a very good player.
The Electric Dock Ellis Acid Test: An Attempt To Recreate His Drug-Addled No-Hitter, On Xbox
Doku-Trailer: Magic Trip

Schöner Trailer zur Doku „Magic Trip“ über die Hippie-Tour von Autor Ken Kesey („One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest“) und Neal Cassady (Wikipedia: „Teil der Beatniks, reiste viel zusammen mit Jack Kerouac durch die Vereinigten Staaten, und stand in den nächsten zwei Jahrzehnten auch mit Allen Ginsberg und William S. Burroughs in näherem Kontakt“) in ihrem LSD-Bus einmal quer durch die USA.
In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, shooting footage on 16MM, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen.
With MAGIC TRIP, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) and co-director Alison Ellwood were given unprecedented access to this raw footage by the Kesey family. They worked with the Film Foundation, HISTORY and the UCLA Film Archives to restore over 100 hours of film and audiotape, and have shaped an invaluable document of this extraordinary piece of American history.
(Dailymotion Direkttrip, via Ronny)
The Plot to Turn On the World: The Leary/Ginsberg Acid Conspiracy
Und wo wir grade bei LSD waren: Steve Silberman, ein alter Bekannter von Allen Ginsberg, hat ein superinteressantes Interview mit Peter Conners geführt, der grade ein Buch darüber geschrieben hat, wie der Beatnik-Poet Timothy Leary auf seinen Weg brachte: The Plot to Turn On the World: The Leary/Ginsberg Acid Conspiracy. (via Dose Nation)
Silberman: Until I read your book, I never realized how much of an influence Allen had on Leary.
Conners: It was massive. That’s really the heart of this book: How Allen Ginsberg enabled Timothy Leary to become Timothy Leary. It goes back to Allen being asked to give a presentation to all these psychiatrists coming in for an annual conference in Boston. Allen gets up there and reads a poem called “Lysergic Acid” and another called “Laughing Gas.” After the conference, Allen hears about Leary’s work and Leary — who was involved in testing psychedelics as “psychotomimetics,” substances that mimic psychosis — hears about Allen. Before then, there wasn’t really any artistic component to Leary’s research.
So in comes Allen, this great networker, this expert at forging connections between people in a very pure and organic way, and he turns Leary onto this idea of getting great artists and intellectuals to take these drugs. They thought that by the time the government caught on to what they were doing, they would have a foundation of prominent intellectuals who supported their work. Leary would later come right out and say, “From the time that Ginsberg showed up on my doorstep, everything changed. After that, the project was different, my life was different, and I was on a different path.”
Amazon-Partnerlink: White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg
Radiohead Acid-Tabs

Creative Review hat ein erstes Preview auf die am 9. Mai erscheinende Special-Edition des King of Limbs-Albums von Radiohead. Neben einer (weiteren) Zeitung und typischen Stanley Donwood-Artworks gibt’s dazu obige LSD-freien Radiohead-Acid-Tabs. Er erzählt Creative Review, dass er denkt, man habe Acid-Tabs noch nie als Marketing Gag benutzt. Natürlich gab es das bereits, und zwar spätestens mit Plasticmans „One Sheet“-Album, mit dem man diese Blättchen bekam.
The 60s link continues in the blotting-paper artwork Donwood has created, which could be seen as a large sheet of LCD tabs. “I wouldn’t like to push any of those associations,” Donwood says coyly, before going on to muse on the idea of someone turning the innocent sheet into the drug. “In theory, not that I would propose such an illegal thing, but somebody could…,” he says. “And I don’t think that’s been done as a marketing thing before.”
Doku: Inside LSD – Vom Trip zur Therapie
Vor rund einem Jahr hatte ich über die National Geographic-Doku „Inside LSD“ gebloggt, die wurde mittlerweile von Arte unter anderem Namen ausgestrahlt (ich habe sie an dem LSD Candy-Clip erkannt) und ein sehr psycheledischer Mensch hat sie bei Youtube hochgeladen.
LSDs inventor Albert Hofmann called it “medicine for the soul.” The Beatles wrote songs about it. Secret military mind control experiments exploited its hallucinogenic powers. Outlawed in 1966, LSD became a street drug and developed a reputation as the dangerous toy of the counterculture, capable of inspiring either moments of genius, or a descent into madness. Now science is taking a fresh look at LSD, including the first human trials in over 35 years.
Using enhanced brain imaging, non-hallucinogenic versions of the drug and information from an underground network of test subjects who suffer from an agonizing condition for which there is no cure, researchers are finding that this “trippy” drug could become the pharmaceutical of the future. Can it enhance our brain power, expand our creativity and cure disease? To find out, Explorer puts LSD under the microscope.
Die Doku hatte ich aus den Related Videos der anscheinend ebenfalls sehr sehenswerten Solar-Doku „Mit der Sonne um die Welt“ gefischt: „Die Nutzung von Sonnenenergie ist eine der großen Herausforderungen dieser Zeit. Vor zehn Jahren beschlossen die beiden Schweizer Bertrand Piccard und André Borschberg, der Welt gemeinsam zu beweisen, dass Photovoltaik auch zum Fliegen taugt. Sie entwickelten das Flugzeug “Solar Impulse”, mit dem es ihnen gelang, 24 Stunden lang nur mittels Sonnenenergie zu fliegen.“ (via Swen)
„…little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux…“ (








It was a Friday. That much is certain. June 12, 1970. Three years after psychedelic Pied Piper Timothy Leary invited America to “Turn on, tune in and drop out.” Four years before Richard Nixon’s resignation marked an inglorious denouement to the counterculture era. The middle of things. A purple haze. The perfect moment for the first and only known no-hitter in major league history pitched under the influence of lysergic acid diethylamide, thrown by the first and only player in major league history to inspire both a biography penned by a future American poet laureate and a seminal article in High Times.
What is known is that in 1997, a virtuosic organic chemist named Leonard Pickard joined forces with Gordon Todd Skinner, the heir to a spring-manufacturing fortune, to organize what would later become the world’s most productive LSD laboratory. A laboratory that, according to some sources, produced 90 percent of the LSD in circulation, in addition to unknown quantities of MDMA, ALD-52, ergot wine, and quite possibly LSZ… but I’ll get to that later. 
Silberman: Until I read your book, I never realized how much of an influence Allen had on Leary.

