Gibson / Leary / MONDO2000
February 20, 2022 6:09 AM Subscribe
Back in the distant past of cyberspace, there was MONDO 2000 magazine and for their first issue they wanted to interview William Gibson, the premiere cyberpunk author at the time. Unfortunately his agent wouldn't setup a meeting, so Timothy Leary offered an audio recording of his conversation with Gibson about a Neuromancer game that was going to accompany the movie release. Gibson claimed it was a drunken business meeting, but MONDO published it anyway: High Tech High Life: William Gibson & Timothy Leary in Conversation (1989).
This is a non-overlapping Double's Jubilee with A history of Mondo 2000 from 2004 and Before Snowcrash, before Ghost in the Shell from 2016. Extra bonus content: scans of all of MONDO2000 issues at archive.org so that you can relive the optimistic era when we hoped that a connected world (and smart-drugs) would bring us together in a cyber-utopia.
This is a non-overlapping Double's Jubilee with A history of Mondo 2000 from 2004 and Before Snowcrash, before Ghost in the Shell from 2016. Extra bonus content: scans of all of MONDO2000 issues at archive.org so that you can relive the optimistic era when we hoped that a connected world (and smart-drugs) would bring us together in a cyber-utopia.
Certainly not the first time Leary had betrayed someone's trust. Makes you wonder just why he was recording a private conversation.
posted by Catblack at 7:49 AM on February 20, 2022
posted by Catblack at 7:49 AM on February 20, 2022
In his letters, Burroughs makes it very clear that he found Leary to be pretty full of shit. "I hope never to set eyes on that horse's ass again. A real wrong number."
posted by heteronym at 8:00 AM on February 20, 2022 [10 favorites]
posted by heteronym at 8:00 AM on February 20, 2022 [10 favorites]
Regarding burroughs and Leary, I like this quote from Leary himself (from the interview):
I started telling him about these new Drugs and, of course, he knew many times more about drugs than anyone in the world! I was just this childish Harvard Professor doing my big research project on drugs. And Burroughs is saying “Oh shit. Here they come. Boy Scouts. And they’re gonna save the world with drugs. Yeah, sure.”
posted by beesbees at 9:16 AM on February 20, 2022 [6 favorites]
I started telling him about these new Drugs and, of course, he knew many times more about drugs than anyone in the world! I was just this childish Harvard Professor doing my big research project on drugs. And Burroughs is saying “Oh shit. Here they come. Boy Scouts. And they’re gonna save the world with drugs. Yeah, sure.”
posted by beesbees at 9:16 AM on February 20, 2022 [6 favorites]
The Neuromancer movie was never made, but Interplay did publish a video game adaptation in 1987. In my opinion, it's a surprisingly great adaptation and a lot of the game mechanics and storytelling were well ahead of their time.
posted by mmcg at 9:24 AM on February 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by mmcg at 9:24 AM on February 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
If the Neuromancer screenplay that was making its way around the internet in the early 2000s is authentic, it's best that the movie never got made. That screenplay is hot trash. And I say that at someone who'd liked just about everything Gibson has written, including the unfilmed Alien sequel.
posted by tclark at 9:41 AM on February 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by tclark at 9:41 AM on February 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
The link above to mondo scans is wrong, that's related material but not actual issues. Some issue scans show up here though not all.
posted by ead at 10:54 AM on February 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by ead at 10:54 AM on February 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
Even more (possibly all) under a more general search.
posted by ead at 11:01 AM on February 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by ead at 11:01 AM on February 20, 2022 [1 favorite]
Loved MONDO 2000. So many memories of reading that, 2600, and FringeWare Review.
posted by ryoshu at 12:46 PM on February 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by ryoshu at 12:46 PM on February 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
Burroughs makes it very clear that he found Leary to be pretty full of shit.
I'm trying (with limited success) to get out of the habit of speaking ill of others but let's just say I felt much as Burroughs did when I met Tim at a party in the late 80s.
posted by majick at 12:53 PM on February 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
I'm trying (with limited success) to get out of the habit of speaking ill of others but let's just say I felt much as Burroughs did when I met Tim at a party in the late 80s.
posted by majick at 12:53 PM on February 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
it's a good interview. Leary, love or hate him, never really stopped pushing whatever envelopes he encountered, and Gibson seems right there with him ...
Lucas Yonderboy was my reaction to the spookier and more interesting side of punk. Kind of young and enigmatic. Cool to the point of inexplicability. And he’s a member of the Panther Moderns. They’re sorta like Marshall McLuhan’s Revenge. Media monsters. It’s as though the worst street gang you ever ran into were, at the same time, intense conceptual artists. You never know what they’re going to do.
Lupus Yonderboy was a real person on the Vancouver punk/whatever scene of the late 70s, which is where Gibson was while writing Neuromancer. He (Lupus) was known for showing up at gigs in full Nazi regalia and zeig-heiling the stage.
I got to know him a few years later (the late 80s into the early 90s). He was an American, claimed to have seen serious action in Vietnam and was just crazy enough that you believed him. He was also rather brilliant in his historical and political insights. He's the guy that said to me (during the first Gulf War) that he had it on authority (family connections to the Pentagon) -- that the prime reason for America charging into that war was that the entirety of the military-industrial complex was in peril. It had been too long since they'd had a proper war to justify it. Even conservatives were wondering (in 1990, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall etc) if maybe it was time to start winding things down. But then along came a "desperate windbag in the desert" (Saddam Hussein) who was just stupid and bull-headed enough to not see what he was inviting ...
posted by philip-random at 12:56 PM on February 20, 2022 [6 favorites]
Lucas Yonderboy was my reaction to the spookier and more interesting side of punk. Kind of young and enigmatic. Cool to the point of inexplicability. And he’s a member of the Panther Moderns. They’re sorta like Marshall McLuhan’s Revenge. Media monsters. It’s as though the worst street gang you ever ran into were, at the same time, intense conceptual artists. You never know what they’re going to do.
Lupus Yonderboy was a real person on the Vancouver punk/whatever scene of the late 70s, which is where Gibson was while writing Neuromancer. He (Lupus) was known for showing up at gigs in full Nazi regalia and zeig-heiling the stage.
I got to know him a few years later (the late 80s into the early 90s). He was an American, claimed to have seen serious action in Vietnam and was just crazy enough that you believed him. He was also rather brilliant in his historical and political insights. He's the guy that said to me (during the first Gulf War) that he had it on authority (family connections to the Pentagon) -- that the prime reason for America charging into that war was that the entirety of the military-industrial complex was in peril. It had been too long since they'd had a proper war to justify it. Even conservatives were wondering (in 1990, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall etc) if maybe it was time to start winding things down. But then along came a "desperate windbag in the desert" (Saddam Hussein) who was just stupid and bull-headed enough to not see what he was inviting ...
posted by philip-random at 12:56 PM on February 20, 2022 [6 favorites]
It may lead to elevated risk of digideroo ownership, but I'll take the Mondo 2000 Internet over the centralized Big Tech social media Internet, any time.
posted by thelonius at 1:59 PM on February 20, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 1:59 PM on February 20, 2022 [8 favorites]
Lupus Yonderboy was a real person on the Vancouver punk/whatever scene of the late 70s, which is where Gibson was while writing Neuromancer. He (Lupus) was known for showing up at gigs in full Nazi regalia and zeig-heiling the stage.
Ugh, that's distressing, but also seems to be well aligned with the fictional Gibson character to have no compunctions about using whatever shock and outrage they can think of just for the shock and outrage factors.
This sort of shock and outrage was something I witnessed personally in punk, experimental and noise music circles, and sometimes it had a point or a purpose - and I'm not even talking about the actual, openly neo Nazis who went out to start bloody fights at ska shows with SHARPs and Two Tones, which is a whole different category of messed up.
There were a couple of experimental/noise bands from the 80s and 90s that had some really shitty and neo-Fascist views hidden in their Nordic neo-paganism that were barely hidden below the surface, and I definitely remember seeing and hearing about peace punks and late stage hippies showing up at those shows to throw salutes and disrupt their shows.
In hindsight from 2022 none of that shit on either side or for any purpose looks cool, funny or in any way punk and it's all a hot mess of unintended or intended consequences and it makes me wish I had a time machine and a rolled up newspaper to use to thwack a lot of the parties involved.
To tangent away from all that - as for Leary and early cyberpunk culture - I regret drinking his Kool-Aid, and that of some of his cohort like Brion Gysin (Notable for his Dream Machine contraption) and even Rudy Rucker and others along the general Mondo 2000 areas and axis.
In hindsight there's not a lot of real humanity there and it's all very technocratic, technofetishist and even technofascist or cryptofascist as we call it today. The nerds did eventually take over, and what they mainly did with it was increase all of the problems of hyperconsumerism and technology fetishism and happily ushered in the panopticon.
It wasn't the psychedelic drugs that were really ever the problem, it was, I don't know, the general concept that psychedelics would make anything better all by themselves and if enough people tuned in, turned on and dropped out that it would be its own good thing that would magically lead to more humanism, and, well, this just hasn't been true. The technology culture space has been utterly dominated by cis white dude-bros that aren't technocratic cipherpunks at all, but even more of the status quo that they claimed to be rebelling against.
For fuck's sake, today we have technocratic movers and shakers that microdose acid basically every day and use it as a tool to be super efficient about making even more disruptive and fucked up, oppressing bullshit like this is all fine and good to the point that it's like something out of a Phillp K Dick novel like VANGELIS or a John Brunner book.
The same tools and toolchains that people were espousing back then as liberating just seemed to help make stronger metaphorical and non-figurative locks.
Instead of making stronger lock picks and locks, I really wish these figureheads of the cyberpunk era decided to discuss and explore the concepts of trust and genuinism and how trust is the only real currency. Not gold, not money, not information as a currency or weapon but the concepts and strengths of trust itself as a valuable commodity and structural building material of humanity.
Instead of technocratic solutions it seems like it would have been a lot more productive to embrace more humanism instead of fleeing from it through mediated technology. Less cryptopunks or cipherpunks LARPing being black hat Operators, more direct action and mutual aid at food banks or getting involved in civics and rolling up one's sleeves to do real work instead of trying to solve everything and anything with an algorithm.
The vast diversity of thought and human experience will never, ever be able to be codified in an algorithm. This is one of the basic precepts of theoretical number theory and informational systems - it will always be an inaccurate and non-inclusive, incomplete model of an idealized state. Perfectly spherical cows don't exist.
To believe otherwise would be to believe that with enough pure math and logic you could grow a plant to eat without doing some real work, or pull down the moon from its orbit and bend or break physics with Boolean logic alone.
As I've matured I've had a lot of strong feelings about all of this period of time, and few of them are positive thoughts or feelings.
Back in the early 2000s I was living in an arts village and often hanging out with an older classically schooled trained artist and we must have spent hundreds of hours hanging out in his sprawling, ramshackle Arts and Crafts style home he designed and built himself, where we spent most of those hundreds of hours talking about technology and art, and technocracy and really dived into this area of philosophy and thought and we tread that ground so hard and for so long it became like dust under our cognitive feet.
He was from another era, like a living Da Vinci and true polymath. An accomplished architect, a designer, a painter, a sculptor and so much more. He was no saint, either, and definitely had some very common and human flaws, sexism and misogyny probably being chief among them, but alas...
He was no luddite, either. He did own a computer and he used it. As an architect, he knew his way around CAD software, too, and other salient points that were rather advanced for his background and chronological age. But he could also sit down at his drafting table and design a small city with little more than a sharp pencil, some good vellum and a set of triangles and T-square all the way down to the nuts and bolts. Like one of his last major professional projects was an entire planned community suburb from the ground itself on up to the rooftops of individual home plans, watersheds, architectural landscape design, geologic engineering and everything this would entail. (Supported, of course, by experts in each field, but the overall designs were all his and under his direction.)
At the time I barely understood the concepts or problems of a technocracy or what the word even meant. I knew I was holding my own as a humanist-focused fan of technology because otherwise we wouldn't have had so many debates and talks about it and he would have dismissed me and not invited me back or given me the time of day.
On his side of the debate table he argued emphatically, skillfully and knowledgeably for craft and classic skills in all things, in relationships and art and design having a deep obligation and need to include humanism, to discard mediation and mediated experiences as an essential human need.
On my side I tended to argue for technology and mediation as tools to do those same things, but better, that it lowered the barrier of entry by skipping past the bothersome real world work of craft to liberate human expression and connections, but more importantly that the technology itself - not unlike psychedelics - would open doors and be a liberator of humanity and expressionism and much more.
Some of those things I do still believe in as true, and evidence of this can be seen in how much more affordable it is today to learn how to become a photographer, or a film maker, or to make music with lower barriers of entry. Or even simple things like being able to instantly look up how to cook something, bake a pie, fix a bicycle or plant a garden.
But in hindsight? He was right about so much of the things that have come to be in the nearly twenty years since those talks we had, that on balance things have gotten much worse about the problems we both agreed were problems facing humanity. That on balance things have become even more mediated, restricted and manipulated in ways we never would have dreamed could even happen with things like disinformation through technology and weaponized algorithms just making things generally even more terrible and more of the same bullshit.
I don't wish I had my copies of Mondo 2000. I wish I had recordings and transcripts of those talks to review and share.
posted by loquacious at 2:46 PM on February 20, 2022 [17 favorites]
Ugh, that's distressing, but also seems to be well aligned with the fictional Gibson character to have no compunctions about using whatever shock and outrage they can think of just for the shock and outrage factors.
This sort of shock and outrage was something I witnessed personally in punk, experimental and noise music circles, and sometimes it had a point or a purpose - and I'm not even talking about the actual, openly neo Nazis who went out to start bloody fights at ska shows with SHARPs and Two Tones, which is a whole different category of messed up.
There were a couple of experimental/noise bands from the 80s and 90s that had some really shitty and neo-Fascist views hidden in their Nordic neo-paganism that were barely hidden below the surface, and I definitely remember seeing and hearing about peace punks and late stage hippies showing up at those shows to throw salutes and disrupt their shows.
In hindsight from 2022 none of that shit on either side or for any purpose looks cool, funny or in any way punk and it's all a hot mess of unintended or intended consequences and it makes me wish I had a time machine and a rolled up newspaper to use to thwack a lot of the parties involved.
To tangent away from all that - as for Leary and early cyberpunk culture - I regret drinking his Kool-Aid, and that of some of his cohort like Brion Gysin (Notable for his Dream Machine contraption) and even Rudy Rucker and others along the general Mondo 2000 areas and axis.
In hindsight there's not a lot of real humanity there and it's all very technocratic, technofetishist and even technofascist or cryptofascist as we call it today. The nerds did eventually take over, and what they mainly did with it was increase all of the problems of hyperconsumerism and technology fetishism and happily ushered in the panopticon.
It wasn't the psychedelic drugs that were really ever the problem, it was, I don't know, the general concept that psychedelics would make anything better all by themselves and if enough people tuned in, turned on and dropped out that it would be its own good thing that would magically lead to more humanism, and, well, this just hasn't been true. The technology culture space has been utterly dominated by cis white dude-bros that aren't technocratic cipherpunks at all, but even more of the status quo that they claimed to be rebelling against.
For fuck's sake, today we have technocratic movers and shakers that microdose acid basically every day and use it as a tool to be super efficient about making even more disruptive and fucked up, oppressing bullshit like this is all fine and good to the point that it's like something out of a Phillp K Dick novel like VANGELIS or a John Brunner book.
The same tools and toolchains that people were espousing back then as liberating just seemed to help make stronger metaphorical and non-figurative locks.
Instead of making stronger lock picks and locks, I really wish these figureheads of the cyberpunk era decided to discuss and explore the concepts of trust and genuinism and how trust is the only real currency. Not gold, not money, not information as a currency or weapon but the concepts and strengths of trust itself as a valuable commodity and structural building material of humanity.
Instead of technocratic solutions it seems like it would have been a lot more productive to embrace more humanism instead of fleeing from it through mediated technology. Less cryptopunks or cipherpunks LARPing being black hat Operators, more direct action and mutual aid at food banks or getting involved in civics and rolling up one's sleeves to do real work instead of trying to solve everything and anything with an algorithm.
The vast diversity of thought and human experience will never, ever be able to be codified in an algorithm. This is one of the basic precepts of theoretical number theory and informational systems - it will always be an inaccurate and non-inclusive, incomplete model of an idealized state. Perfectly spherical cows don't exist.
To believe otherwise would be to believe that with enough pure math and logic you could grow a plant to eat without doing some real work, or pull down the moon from its orbit and bend or break physics with Boolean logic alone.
As I've matured I've had a lot of strong feelings about all of this period of time, and few of them are positive thoughts or feelings.
Back in the early 2000s I was living in an arts village and often hanging out with an older classically schooled trained artist and we must have spent hundreds of hours hanging out in his sprawling, ramshackle Arts and Crafts style home he designed and built himself, where we spent most of those hundreds of hours talking about technology and art, and technocracy and really dived into this area of philosophy and thought and we tread that ground so hard and for so long it became like dust under our cognitive feet.
He was from another era, like a living Da Vinci and true polymath. An accomplished architect, a designer, a painter, a sculptor and so much more. He was no saint, either, and definitely had some very common and human flaws, sexism and misogyny probably being chief among them, but alas...
He was no luddite, either. He did own a computer and he used it. As an architect, he knew his way around CAD software, too, and other salient points that were rather advanced for his background and chronological age. But he could also sit down at his drafting table and design a small city with little more than a sharp pencil, some good vellum and a set of triangles and T-square all the way down to the nuts and bolts. Like one of his last major professional projects was an entire planned community suburb from the ground itself on up to the rooftops of individual home plans, watersheds, architectural landscape design, geologic engineering and everything this would entail. (Supported, of course, by experts in each field, but the overall designs were all his and under his direction.)
At the time I barely understood the concepts or problems of a technocracy or what the word even meant. I knew I was holding my own as a humanist-focused fan of technology because otherwise we wouldn't have had so many debates and talks about it and he would have dismissed me and not invited me back or given me the time of day.
On his side of the debate table he argued emphatically, skillfully and knowledgeably for craft and classic skills in all things, in relationships and art and design having a deep obligation and need to include humanism, to discard mediation and mediated experiences as an essential human need.
On my side I tended to argue for technology and mediation as tools to do those same things, but better, that it lowered the barrier of entry by skipping past the bothersome real world work of craft to liberate human expression and connections, but more importantly that the technology itself - not unlike psychedelics - would open doors and be a liberator of humanity and expressionism and much more.
Some of those things I do still believe in as true, and evidence of this can be seen in how much more affordable it is today to learn how to become a photographer, or a film maker, or to make music with lower barriers of entry. Or even simple things like being able to instantly look up how to cook something, bake a pie, fix a bicycle or plant a garden.
But in hindsight? He was right about so much of the things that have come to be in the nearly twenty years since those talks we had, that on balance things have gotten much worse about the problems we both agreed were problems facing humanity. That on balance things have become even more mediated, restricted and manipulated in ways we never would have dreamed could even happen with things like disinformation through technology and weaponized algorithms just making things generally even more terrible and more of the same bullshit.
I don't wish I had my copies of Mondo 2000. I wish I had recordings and transcripts of those talks to review and share.
posted by loquacious at 2:46 PM on February 20, 2022 [17 favorites]
It may lead to elevated risk of digideroo ownership, but I'll take the Mondo 2000 Internet over the centralized Big Tech social media Internet, any time.
Not to abuse my edit window, but my last comment is effectively arguing that the Mondo 2000 internet is the natural result of what we have today where venture capitalists and many tech founders have tuned in and turned on, a world where owners or founders of billion dollar companies go to "transformative" events like Burning Man and take heroic doses of psychedelics and they may even own, have owned or played a didgeridoo.
They just seemed to conveniently forget the "drop out" part of Leary's axiom.
For better or worse these are the exact same people that invented Big Tech social media internet.
posted by loquacious at 2:57 PM on February 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
Not to abuse my edit window, but my last comment is effectively arguing that the Mondo 2000 internet is the natural result of what we have today where venture capitalists and many tech founders have tuned in and turned on, a world where owners or founders of billion dollar companies go to "transformative" events like Burning Man and take heroic doses of psychedelics and they may even own, have owned or played a didgeridoo.
They just seemed to conveniently forget the "drop out" part of Leary's axiom.
For better or worse these are the exact same people that invented Big Tech social media internet.
posted by loquacious at 2:57 PM on February 20, 2022 [4 favorites]
I don't wish I had my copies of Mondo 2000
I mostly agree with your assessment of the trajectory, but it's also fairly interesting to read (or at least browse) those back-issues, because they show .. multiple different parties involved in the conversation about technology-mediated cultural changes at the time. Many of whom were later (especially in WIRED) drowned out by the John Perry Barlow techno-libertarian fetishism.
There's a certain amount of nuanced humanities-talk in those pages. A bunch of non-bullshit anarchist, queer, feminist, critical theory talk. Race, class, gender and not-just-libertarian politics talk. A lot of skepticism about the future unfolding.
Adjacent to a lot of "nootropics + photoshop + the WELL / internet + sex parties + burning man = liberation" Timothy Leary Fan Club nonsense (which I agree mostly just facilitated and got absorbed-into the Barlow-world trajectory we now live in).
Like a couple previously and subsequently not-entirely-aligned cultures are surprisingly juxtaposed in those issues, which makes them a somewhat unique snapshot.
posted by ead at 3:26 PM on February 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
I mostly agree with your assessment of the trajectory, but it's also fairly interesting to read (or at least browse) those back-issues, because they show .. multiple different parties involved in the conversation about technology-mediated cultural changes at the time. Many of whom were later (especially in WIRED) drowned out by the John Perry Barlow techno-libertarian fetishism.
There's a certain amount of nuanced humanities-talk in those pages. A bunch of non-bullshit anarchist, queer, feminist, critical theory talk. Race, class, gender and not-just-libertarian politics talk. A lot of skepticism about the future unfolding.
Adjacent to a lot of "nootropics + photoshop + the WELL / internet + sex parties + burning man = liberation" Timothy Leary Fan Club nonsense (which I agree mostly just facilitated and got absorbed-into the Barlow-world trajectory we now live in).
Like a couple previously and subsequently not-entirely-aligned cultures are surprisingly juxtaposed in those issues, which makes them a somewhat unique snapshot.
posted by ead at 3:26 PM on February 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
I mostly agree with your assessment of the trajectory, but it's also fairly interesting to read (or at least browse) those back-issues, because they show .. multiple different parties involved in the conversation about technology-mediated cultural changes at the time.
Yeah, you're right and I'm not being entirely fair in my retroactive analysis about those parts. Mondo 2000 definitely went places that weren't just technocratic or techno-fetishistic.
I do miss the optimism of that era that was often well balanced with caution and cynicism.
posted by loquacious at 3:45 PM on February 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
Yeah, you're right and I'm not being entirely fair in my retroactive analysis about those parts. Mondo 2000 definitely went places that weren't just technocratic or techno-fetishistic.
I do miss the optimism of that era that was often well balanced with caution and cynicism.
posted by loquacious at 3:45 PM on February 20, 2022 [2 favorites]
Talk of Mondo 2000 puts me back to something I've often wondered about ... where we'd be if the ruling alternative scene in the late 80s/early 90s had been tech instead of punk and anarchy. So much energy devoted to ephemeral music and dead-end political arguments (and, even worse, to their respective aesthetics and arguing about their respective aesthetics) that ended up with half the folks burned out or marginalized, and the half the folks going to law school, leaving the geeks and bros the only intellectual factions ready to rule tech when it broke out in the mid-90s to become the dominant economic force of the next 30 years (and soon to be counting).
posted by MattD at 5:30 PM on February 20, 2022
posted by MattD at 5:30 PM on February 20, 2022
Punk was a big speedbump put there to confuse junk party druggism, with psychedelic change potential. It was a clever, clever braking action, a distraction, a major dose of give 'em enough rope. The power that is wasn't ready to solar, pastoral, conservation, yadda,yadda, women's rights, women as full humans, and also close down the culture of fear which drives the military / industrial juggernaut.
This article takes down some people I found inspiring, entertaining, the lassez faire parents I didn't have. I am glad I never met THEM, because I was a pretty hippie girl. There were plenty of other agents, provacateurs, artists, posing as friends. The zeitgeist was something else. The deconstruction of a generation's ideals...see, ellipses and romanticism.
posted by Oyéah at 6:22 PM on February 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
This article takes down some people I found inspiring, entertaining, the lassez faire parents I didn't have. I am glad I never met THEM, because I was a pretty hippie girl. There were plenty of other agents, provacateurs, artists, posing as friends. The zeitgeist was something else. The deconstruction of a generation's ideals...see, ellipses and romanticism.
posted by Oyéah at 6:22 PM on February 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
I knew a guy who was a friend of both Burroughs and Leary. He told me that Leary was the man Burroughs always wanted to be and Burroughs was the woman Leary always wanted to be.
posted by goalyeehah at 10:06 PM on February 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by goalyeehah at 10:06 PM on February 20, 2022 [3 favorites]
« Older Saving rescue dogs - by moving them cross-country | The Black Falconer Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Time to go read those old Mondo 2000 issues! This rules.
posted by heteronym at 6:50 AM on February 20, 2022