Tripumentaries: MAGIC TRIP, DMT: THE SPIRIT MOLECULE, 2012: Mayan Prophecy and Shift of the Ages, and ROBERT THURMAN ON BUDDHISM

As the age of Pisces ends, and June munches through its seed pod servings, and apocalypse-- according to nearly every ancient culture--approaches, now more than ever we must ask: Are we going to go out in style, like Slim Pickens riding his H-Bomb stallion. or like that old married couple who can't stop fighting about which way to turn even as their car goes roaring off a cliff? Pick Pickens, America, and then buckle up for these awesome flashback-inducing documentaries that explore the area where psychedelia, psychopharmacology, quantum entanglement, God and literature all mix.

I've rated them at the end of each description for saliva-thickening aspects, i.e. that aftershock, pre-trip flashback tingle when your mouth feels electric and your saliva slows to an aching crawl and your teeth start to clench, your pupils dilate and the hairs on your neck rise. That flashback saliva thing is sometimes annoying, it brings a lot of emotional baggage (remembering the lost highs and peaks in a deep, painful imprint way it took me decades to get over) which is why I sometimes avoid these sorts of films, even though they are the very foundation of this blog's raison d'etre! 

Today, for example, being back at work, I feel hungover and sad, just from the flashbacks induced by this first film:

Magic Trip

(2011) Dir. Alison Ellwood
***

In 1964, three years before the summer of love, an era when, as Jimi Hendrix lamented, there was only surf music on the radio, Ken Kesey, famous for his acclaimed Cuckoo's Nest, went on a magic bus trip with an orange juice bottle spiked with LSD, a group of friends and lovers, and speed freak Neal Cassady at the wheel. Did beauty and truth ensue? Perhaps later, but in the beginning their magic bus looks more like it's embarking on one of those early 1960s surfer journeys, as in The Endless Summer, with everyone's all buzz-cut and folkie and wearing big unflattering red and blue striped shirts. He comes across mythic in Kerouac stories but in person, beat relic Neal Cassady seems to be like just some twisted methed-up townie ("he would never shut up" someone notes) and the bus keeps breaking down, and there's endless goofing instead of fixing, and the usual sexism, so the smarter girls, get out at the first train station and head back to their 9-5 jobs. Smart move, ladies! I've often wished I could do that when our band tours would start out badly, but if you do bail, then you're left out of the myth, presuming there is a myth, but how would you know back at the pupae stage? It takes years and you never know who amongst the horde of idiots gibbering in the back is going to turn out to to be the Thomas Wolfe or Kerouac or whomever will immortalize you in decades to come. Anyway, pass that damn orange juice!

Yes, the good acid is finally dispensed at an Arizona watering hole, the color 16mm film is loosed from its can and finally myth takes wing. Highlights include: epiphanies at Yellowstone because of a sign that says "Beware of the Bear" ("it used to be about being aware of the bear, but now it's just beware," Kesey laments); nervous "We're the only white people here" moments at a colored beach in Louisiana; a cold welcome at the Ivy League estate of Tim Leary (office-mate Albert-about-to-be-Ram-Dass is nicer, thankfully); a world's fair that imagines America as an all-white Jetsons tail-fin miracle that's already outdated by the time the pranksters pull in; the growing disenchantment with speed freak Cassady and his friend, the morose drunkard Jack Kerouac (Allen Ginsberg comes off as nicer, thankfully), and so forth. Kesey explains that the drugs were "part of our American personality -- you try go down deeper in the ocean and higher in the sky - these drugs were opening us up to new landscapes." No shit, Sherlock!

I guess you had to be there, and twisted yourself. But that's the deal --you need to be twisted to appreciate the beauty of the Magic Trip, but you'll never be as twisted, apparently, as they were. Because--as they so clearly like to think--they broke the mold. They were doing it to discover America, and then America did it to emulate them, and now we all want to glom onto their speedy Zen kicks because we read Dharma Bums and it moved our assemblage point and opened our third eye. But dig, man, our eye will never be as open as theirs (they think). They took it as far as anyone could, so now you better sober up and just read Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

That's the sour note being struck here, because--after a trumped-up pot bust got him jailed--Kesey cut a deal to renounce the acid. He was bid play his pipe and lead the rats out of town. He decreed this all had been a test, "the acid test" and he and his pranksters 'graduated' and the hordes of thrill-seekers and runaway dirtbags that descended on the Haight like a plague of locusts did not, the test was over, they failed because they were absent during test time. And now the allotted times is over. Turn in your pencils and go home, o errant wanderers, go back to your parent's Christian basements.

Zane Passes!

But is it really that simple? I'd vote we need to start recognizing the historical importance of today's dirty hedonists as legends in progress! Instead of putting Kesey's magic bus into a museum let's teach the kids to paint their own and go easing down the road. Why should the rantings of Kesey and company be gospel and the rantings of today be 'just' ranting? When Kesey notes "this wasn't literature anymore, this had jumped off the pages... and onto the streets," we can snicker at his cliche'd idealism and believe it at the same time, because the truth often comes caked in soapy crap. "Something is happening that is so new," Kesey says about the establishment's knee-jerk demonization, "they're scared beyond any power of reasoning." Asked whether he regretted taking acid for that Stanhope experiment that started it all, Kesey notes, "I think it's a good experience, every time you see more." Hey man, it's your trip.

Saliva thickening: 6.666

DMT: The Spirit Molecule

2012 -****

Go Rick Strassman go-ooo--ohm! In case you were born in some insane dimension where all the keys to chemically-enhanced enlightenment have been made into felonies for no real sane logical reason you should know Dr. Rick actually got legal clearance to do DMT studies by the big Health Overlords. He recruited dozens of subjects and gave them massive doses of DMT in a safe space, and then recorded their impressions once they cam back to reality. The results? Mind-blowing but inconclusive, raising more questions than offering answers. Luckily this documentary helps us realize the only answer to whether hallucinations are real or vice versa is that real itself is a meaningless phrase. If what you experience in the DMT-verse feels a hundred times more real than your waking, consensual reality, then--as quantum physics and bioverse theorists suggest--it is.

Even so, enough bad trips happened under Strassman's experiments that he now feels a little guilty. Is he a Pandora's box cutter, a modern messiah or an apex predator Albert Hoffman? Other heads talking include Daniel Pinchbeck and the 'other' McKenna...Dennis, and there's lots of groovy Alex Grey art and deep hallucinogen-ready kaleidoscope eyefuls.

Joe Rogan narrates, in black and white to give the illusion you're watching this in fourth grade science class, which you should be. I donated money to help get this film finished!

Saliva thickening content: 10

2012: Mayan Prophecy 

and the Shift of the Ages

 2009 - ***

Dude! I remember this as being good, but man they do show a lot of the same stock footage of natural disasters over and over again, especially some shots of a fire bravely eating away the side of a building. I dig the use of the Terence McKenna timewave study, though, and the idea that 'inner time travel' will one day be the new back, if you get my weird meaning. Because it's made in 2009, they're a little more confident in their doomsaying than some of the more recent Mayan docs, and even so they realize that the future lies within, not without. It may take light years to get to the next galaxy but that's only if you need to lug your body. If you can go with just your mind it takes less than no time at all. In fact, time itself reverses so you get there before you left!

Salvia thickening content - 3.9

Robert Thurman - Buddhism.

2-Part Series - ***1/2

There's big arguments between trippers and 'hardcore' Buddhists about which path is 'correct' -with hardcore Buddhists insisting that drug epiphanies, meditation 'shortcuts,' don't 'count.' But to me that's absurd. Even if, as they say, LSD is the helicopter ride to the roof of the mountain (i.e. we get to look but can't stay long enough to legally change our address), so what? In our ADD age, no one wants to waste their time meditating if it's not going to pay off. So let them go see the mountain and be sure there actually is a destination to work towards. That's what happened with Ram Dass, after all, and his documentary, Fierce Grace, is also on Netflix, if you want to go in that direction. And there's a Wavy Gravy documentary too if you want to go in the other.  I'm still at the crossroads, hanging by my left foot.

Because ultimately if we dabble in psychedelics in search of the truth, and that truth leads us to an ashram, but then we don't go in because we don't want to join a cult and the cult doesn't think we came there honestly anyway, then were we ever really truth-seekers or were we just bored and young and psychedelics and meditation offered a way out of our depression in the time before SSRIs? And are the cult members really humbler than thou or just pissed they didn't dare use your quicker method to get to the same place? And if we shun the ashram with its commitments and robes and many-armed deities, might we instead become addicted to the sound of helicopters, always hoping this next ride up to the top of mountain will be the one where we can get out and stay, skipping in the process all the chapters about self-discipline and humility?

It's the clinging to the skids of expectation, dragging our Apocalypse Now heads through the palm trees, it's the tired feeling when you see your 300th punter waving a glow stick and saying under his breath "OmanI'mtrippin'sohard" and you feel like you're still wading in a sea of melted kindergarten crayons while ever-younger kids ask you for doses. Better to just jump out the window and hope you fly, like Superman. That's what all the hysteric anti-drug crusaders think LSD makes you do anyway...

No worries about any of that, though, or enduring any dogma, grandiosity, judgment or incoherence when listening to Uma Thurman's dad, the great Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman. You would think an old white guy, with a glass eye and a gorgeous movie star daughter, speaking for an hour and a half via a two camera set-up wouldn't be so riveting, but his tongue speaks much wisdom, and since it's sheathed in scholarly wit and humble perspective it goes down smooth as the pangs of truths you feel you forgot rather than never knew. And if you still don't think Buddhism is trippy, just realize that before she married Thurman, Uma's mom was married to... that's right.... Timothy Leary. Tibetan Book of the Dead, thou art connected!

 Through powers of pronoia I've traced the whole Uma lineage back to benevolent Nordic alien ancestors who helped manipulate our DNA so that there could be gorgeous blonde Swedes, who helped the original Buddha clean the land of reptilian demons so modern day humans could get a toehold, and who then opened up the still-developing human mind with the most potent of angelic wand taps, the doctor's delivery room spank of wisdom. I you dare to believe it! Let the music leaf off the page and finally become aware... of the bear.

Saliva thickening - 11.2

Quilty Makes This World: 12 Tricksters (CinemArchetype #1)

This post commences a series on Jungian archetypes in film and media, wherein we gather an assortment of characters, icons, and public figures who all fit the same functional mold, the better to unravel our iconographical lexicon. The first archetype celebrated here on Acidemic is, naturally, 'The Trickster' for he is the most psychedelic. Just ask Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary, if they weren't dead....Trickster makes this world (by Lewis Hyde).

For sake of polarization of type we've limited this to males, but of course the trickster is by nature beyond gender, beyond personal gain as well. He lives in a state of identity flux, bound to no one persona (though perhaps he can be in service of an abstract cause, like 'the paper') and is seldom on the level as far as sincerity and yet this allows him perhaps greater leeway in his altruistic ambitions, for he need gratify no urge, for him there there is no one persona to 'want' anything. You are most likely to meet him on the road to knowledge, and if a trickster helps you on your way, be grateful but not indebted. And beware: for every two or three favors he gives, one wry screw-over is guaranteed. But you can't just walk away after two favors, what if the third is legit, too? Dude, turns out none of them are favors, they're gin and tonics. He'll confuse the simple and clarify the incoherent, and never justify anything, let alone means or ends. Take Elliot Gould's doctor in MASH for example,who seamlessly incorporates an operation on the child of a prostitute into his Tokyo boondoggle and just as effortlessly employs blackmail of the resident officer to make it happen. He expects no reward from the mom and brooks no condemnation from the Army, he demands neither a freebie nor accepts a guilt trip; he doesn't think ahead or crave validation - he's just a dancer in the Shiva flame. That's a trickster.

1. Peter Sellers as Clair Quilty - Lolita (1962)

"The woman always goes for the trickster, because he cannot be shamed; he is too transparent, always able to drop his 'story' the moment it gains any weight, embodying instead a series of roles each easily discarded for the next. The James Mason types by contrast inevitably resort to violence, for they presume their warped idea of dignity and ownership is an essential right, worth killing over, no matter how abstract. They feel justified in the use of firearms against the trickster who mocks them — and in the 1960s it was because the repressed guy was closeted, or abused, or a mélange of the two like in Bertolucci's The Conformist. The trickster's game involves exposing these straightedge characters for the damaged bullies they are, and so they can't help but leap across the mess hall table and start strangling Donald Sutherland (Burns in MASH) or shooting Quilty, so we realize the whole time said losers have been festering in their self-made prison of masochistic desire. But even here the trickster's power is healing and transforming — his opponent's straightedges have been rounded off against their will. Maybe after some time in the booby hatch, Burns will learn to smoke pot and lift weights in his garage, like American Beauty or get a motorcycle like in Wild Hogs!" (All Tomorrow's Playground Narratives)

2. Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice (1988)

"Instead of accepting 'the fate' as is, Beetlejuice attempts to create his own rules. Beetlejuice's ostracism is the result of his anarchic 'supernatural' politics; his mindless rebellion against any mediocrity (both worldly and underworldly) and, ultimately, his powerful unpredictability."-- Helena Bassil-Morozow, The Trickster in Contemporary Film (Routledge)

3. Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight (2008) 

The meta-textual similarity of Joker's burning money scene to the wasteful expenditure of the film's vast budget and its justification via huge box-office profit -- all for what amounts to a big loud explosion of nothing -- is eerily prescient. Dark Knight pays lip service to how "Gotham needs a hero" but it's just a really a big, loud, leftist version of Death Wish, with our sympathies reversed. When Joker sets fire to his half of the money we can imagine Batman rushing in to save it, cradling it in his arms and screaming to the sky: "Damn you, Damn yoooou!!"In this one scene, Joker proves he's the only truly sane man in Gotham, the only "true" soul in this dark mess, the only one with inner Zen stillness and joie de vivre; the only one not hypnotized by his or her "life story." No matter how harshly he's screamed at (Batman growls and shouts until he's hoarse), the Joker never loses his mellow-gold cool; he's already at peace with himself and his mania. He's in the flow like one of those old drunken masters in the Shaw Brothers films. (see: "Burn your money!")

4. Groucho Marx

"Let me know when you want to be attacked and I'll be there five minutes later to defend you."

5. Bugs Bunny

"Bugs Bunny gets a charge out of driving people crazy. And that may be why he lasts. He doesn't seem like a character of the '40s, but rather a character of today. His wisecracking, gender-bending, anti-authority antics broke ground long before punk rock, or David Bowie, or Jerry Seinfeld. He's impossible to pin down in any specific sense."  --J.J. Sutherland, Trickster, American Style

6. Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow

"Me? I’m dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It’s the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they’re going to do something incredibly, stupid."

7. Eli Wallach as Vacaro - Baby Doll (1956)

Vacaro wins Baby Doll via a constant ebb and flow of masculine aggression, a flow that pushes her boundaries and then moves back a bit to let her catch her breath. He chases her but when she stops running, he stops chasing. When she chases him, he runs. Genuine play is introduced into the mating ritual, letting Baby Doll assume a more pro-active role. Once he has her where he wants her (trapped on an attic beam) instead of demanding sex he forces her to sign the statement against her husband; she's disappointed. Why this film outrages the Catholics may lie more in this area than in the idea of a man obsessed with an "under-developed" woman (Baker doesn't seem the least bit under-developed, merely inexperienced). There's an implicit notion in code-sanctioned romance that the sex must be dealt with quickly - one dissolve between a kiss fade-out and a cigarettes-in-full-dress afterwards-- and then move on with the story. BABY DOLL lives in the twilight realm of that fade-out. The "did they or didn't they" ambiguity is allowed to drive the censor stand-in (Malden) to a point of sweet insanity. --The Tell-Tale Dissolve

8.Robert De Niro as Conrad Brean - Wag the Dog (1997)

Conrad: 

And it's most certainly NOT about the B-3 bomber.
Aide:
There is no B-3 bomber.
Conrad: 

I just said that! There is no B-3 bomber. 

I don't know how these rumors get started!

9. Elliot Gould as Trapper John  - MASH (1970)

Peterson:

You can't even go near a patient until Col. Merrill says its ok
and he's still out to lunch.
Trapper John: 

Look, mother, I want to go to work in one hour.
We are the Pros from Dover and we figure to crack this kid's
chest and get out to the golf course before it gets dark.

10. Cary Grant as Walter Burns - His Girl Friday (1944)

Walter Burns: 

Look, Hildy, I only acted like any husband
that didn't want to see his home broken up.

Hildy Johnson: 

What home?

Walter Burns: 

"What home"? Don't you remember the home I promised you?

11. Roy Scheider as Dr. Benway - Naked Lunch (1991)

 "You'll see how elegantly this works (he mixes black powder into water or juice for Bill to drink). The black will disappear completely. There'll be no smell, no discoloration. It's like an agent, an agent who's come to believe his own cover story. But who's in there, hiding, in a larval state. Just waiting for a time to hatch out."

12. Max Von Sydow - The Magician (1958)

Bergman's film itself refuses to guess whether Sydow's character is a poor beardless blonde actor begging alms for his attempt to entertain and terrify, or the actual mystical creature he appears to be in the beginning and by the end. Even the embittered empiricist for whom most of it all is being performed can't tell which if either are the act, but he's at least wise enough to see that the denuded magician / beggar is just another persona. There is no 'single' true self with him.