The Politics Of Ecstasy - Timothy Leary

 THE POLITICS OF ECSTASY - TIMOTHY LEARY

"My advice to people in America today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out."

So advised Dr Timothy Leary and so ensued a social earthquake the like of which America had never quite seen or experienced before. Turn on, tune in, drop out. A slogan as good if not better than any advertising logo ever devised. The problem being, however, that any successful advertising slogan is immediately cast in stone and deprived of any nuance or subtlety and so subsequently becomes a monolith to a depiction of a black and white kind without any shade of grey let alone any other colour.

The term 'turn on' in the Dr Leary sense is self-explanatory as in 'get in touch', the term 'tune in' means to harness, whilst the term 'drop out' means - what exactly? Therein lay a problem. At face value, to 'drop out' means to stop what you're doing whatever that might be and if that means or includes living and participating in society then it means stopping your involvement with that society on whatever level you're engaged with it.

There's no real way of knowing how many people took Leary at his word and followed his advice to the letter but it's a substantial amount. 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,' as Allen Ginsberg put it and there's an argument that says this is applicable to Leary's slogan where the best minds were destroyed by his advice leaving the paths to positions of social influence and power wide open to those of a more conservative bent. Meaning this explains how someone like George W Bush ended up as being the President of the United States rather than someone like Jerry Garcia.

That's not to say, however, that 'dropping out' is all bad. It may put a halt to any dreams of becoming President but it can also lead to a job in Silicon Valley and to the invention of the i-Phone or to living in a cave in the Mojave Desert. So it's swings and roundabouts. It's the American dream. It's the reason why the advice to 'drop out' was the hardest pill to swallow and caused the most alarm because it could potentially ruin the careers of a good many students or middle class men with mortgage payments.

And there's the nub. Dr Leary whilst addressing anyone who would listen was being picked up on by a largely middle class demographic and this little fact was never being acknowledged. There was never any class analysis or class politics in any of Leary's words of advice. Does it matter, you might ask? Well yes it does, particularly when considering the social impact Leary had upon a generation.

The immediately striking thing on reading The Politics Of Ecstasy is how Timothy Leary is such an eloquent writer. He's like a cosmologist poet - or a poet cosmologist. He's like a cut-and-dried case for when sending an astronaut into space to send one with at least a grasp of poetry rather than some of the meatheads NASA sends up and on being asked what the view is like they reply "Great!" or "Neat!".

Leary was, of course, a sort of astronaut himself but of innerspace rather than outer. A clinical psychologist, a personality astrologist, a scientific messiah of sorts whose arguments many of which were irrefutable.

'Your body is the universe.' he declared 'The ancient wisdom of Gnostics, Hermetics, Sufis, Tantric gurus, yogis, occult healers. What is without is within. Your body is the mirror of the macrocosm. The kingdom of heaven is within you.' And who could argue with that? Buzz Aldrin?

Likewise with his condoning and advocacy of psychochemicals: 'Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides, telescopes are unnatural.' And who could argue with that? Isaac Newton? 

The Politics Of Ecstasy is a collection of articles, transcribed lectures and interviews presented as a testament to Leary's psychedelic/ecstatic vision. Unlike his 'turn on, tune in, drop out' slogan, however, it's not a vision cast in stone but more an ongoing, organic one. It's a vision buffeted both forwards and backwards by ongoing drug experimentation along with reaction and retaliation from what Leary calls the 'middle-aged menopausal mind system'. Authority, in other words. The Establishment and the protectors of it. The defenders of the status quo. The Ronald Reagans and the J Edgar Hoovers of this world.

Leary understands but tends not to forgive: 'One of the terrible things about the menopausal society is that the older you get, the more brain damaged you are, but in our society, the older you get, the more power you get. So we now have this paradoxical, suicidal situation in the United States, all of the wealth being in the hands of the menopausal people, who are naturally only concerned with protecting this, and that's why we have a very unhappy, violent country.'

And Leary's solution? Turn them on, baby. Offer them the sacrament. Turn on your parents and even your grandparents. With consent, ideally, though Leary doesn't stop short at seeing it as a wholly bad thing if the Viet Cong were to drop LSD into the water supply. As a cherry on the cake he also thinks there should be laws that allow people to vote at puberty and that voting be taken away at menopause - that no one over the age of fifty should be allowed to vote.

When Leary's saying these things it's like he's riffing on a theme but one that hasn't been clearly thought out. LSD in the water supply would be a major acting of 'spiking' without any precision behind it so would be pretty irresponsible if not reprehensible. Not allowing voting for the over-fifties opens the door wide open to all kinds of other things to be disallowed, leading ultimately down the path to Logan's Run territory. Opening up voting upon hitting puberty leads on to standing for election at the same age and whilst being governed by old duffers with their fingers up their arse and their eye on their stocks and shares is no joy, being governed by a twelve-year old spotty brat could be even less so.

'American culture,' Leary tells us 'is an insane asylum. The Western world has been on a bad trip, a 400-year old bummer. War heroics. Guilt. Puritan ethics, grim, serious, selfish, striving.' LSD in the meantime is 'the spiritual equivalent of the hydrogen bomb'. It's not a narcotic, it's not a medical drug and it doesn't cure any illness. It is instead a new form of energy that will sweep the user 'over the edge of a sensory Niagara into a maelstrom of transcendental visions and hallucinations'. And where's the problem with that? It's almost the kind of thing you might want to have available for free on the National Health.

'There's no such thing as an overdose of LSD,' Leary continues 'There's no known lethal quantity.' So why the big moral panic over it? Why the prohibition? Why has the possession of it, the use of it, the manufacturing of it etc, etc been made illegal? Fear, says Leary. The fear of everything the Established Order stands for becoming obsolete and crashing down, or at least fading away into insignificance. But why then has this not yet happened? Why is there still a constipated Established Order governing a mutually constipated populace? Patently, LSD doesn't lead to psychomania but neither does it lead to a Jesus Christ complex and the creation of heaven on earth. So what does it lead to? Well, that's the beauty of it. LSD leads only to you, the imbiber. It leads to the mirror, to your own reflection. LSD takes you home.

'Write your own life,' Leary advises as a final parting shot. 'Start your own religion. Write your own bible. Write your own ten commandments. Start your own political system.

Reader, write your own Politics of Ecstasy.'

John Serpico

Sic - Chumbawamba

 SIC - CHUMBAWAMBA

Produced in 2002 by members of Chumbawamba when they were flush with money from the success of Tubthumping, Sic is subtitled as being a 'magazine of no value' and described on the back cover as 'an irony-free zone where artists, activists and sex and drugs and rock'n'roll meet up'. Design-wise it's more like a Reader's Digest than a typical kind of magazine you'd pick up at your newsagent and content-wise it's neither 'a pop magazine with politics or a political magazine with pop'. To be a bit more precise, it's probably better described by the mock caption on the cover: 'Adventures In Anti-Capitalism' - but without the exclamation mark.

So what do you get for your cover price of £4.95? A bargain that's what and a pretty good one at that. An interesting and easily readable compilation of interviews, articles and graphic design that whiffs of social change and do-gooding without the typically associated embarrassment. It's a roll call of participating names that if put together in the same room would erupt into arguments but on paper sit very well together. Jake Black of Alabama 3, Mick Farren, Jeremy Hardy, Seething Wells - and that's just the ones who have since passed away. Caroline Coon, Bill Drummond, Rob Newman, Jon Savage, Mark Thomas - and that's just some of the better known ones.

Twenty years after it first being published and it's interesting how 'soft' some of the politics and points of views expressed within Sic's pages now seem. Even though the kind of world being aimed at by all the contributors might appear even further away than ever, everything being expressed sounds so very reasonable and easily achievable with just a bit of good will and fortitude. So after twenty years it now begs the question that Marc Bolan first posed back in the early 1970s as Glam Rock wobbled on its stack heels: Whatever happened to the teenage dream?

In Italy that dream was represented for a moment by the Tute Bianche, otherwise known as the white overall movement on whom there is a very good article written I presume by one of Chumbawamba? Dressed in white overalls with home-made foam and cardboard body armour beneath and sporting crash helmets and home-made shields, the Tute Bianche would make their way to the front of demonstrations and advance towards lines of riot police with a chant of 'Here we come, bastards'. Significantly and importantly the only weapons they held were soft cuddly toys and bendy balloons whilst the foam padding meant they could only push and use weight of numbers. In effect, this meant that any violence could only come from the police. 

During the anti-globalization mass demos of the late 90s and early 2000s the Tute Bianche were a sight to behold and they easily stole headlines. Come the anti-G8 demo of 2001 in Genoa, however, these tactics came to a head when the Italian State responded in the way they knew could be most effective: by massive indiscriminate violence. To witness Italian police armed with tear gas, batons, guns and armoured cars attacking people armed with teddy bears, balloons and water pistols might well reveal the true face of the State but it doesn't bring that State down, though it does leave a lot of people injured and jailed. Clearly, post-Genoa 2001 it was time for a re-think.

Meanwhile in an interview with Sri Lanka-born writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan, migration is cited as a way of looking at what capitalism does to people's lives. 'Globalisation displaces people, I call it economic genocide by stealth. There's no such thing as an illegal migrant, there's only an illegal government,' he says. 'The cultural demonisation of asylum seekers takes place before the law comes into place. Capitalism moves in mysterious ways, its miracles to perform. There's a collective subconscious about capitalism which allows it to use the cultural feeling, the cultural instance, the cultural dynamics of a people in order to soften them up for the economic exploitation to come. In an old democracy like Britain it's a blotting paper society that absorbs and negates opposition.'

And then there's artist, writer and veteran of both the hippy movement and punk, Caroline Coon, who says 'The most heroic thing you can do is smuggle refugees into this country. I always feel that I should do it. The poor lorry drivers who are getting fined, it's a very heroic thing to do.' And remember, this was twenty years ago she was saying this.

More closer to home and in what is the best interview/article in Sic, the late Reverend D Wayne Love (aka Jake Black) of Alabama 3 expounds upon his interactions with Crass and whilst acknowledging their influence sees them now as having been extremely conservative in their politics. As for the One Little Indian label Alabama 3 were on at that time, according to the late Reverend all that label boss Derek Birkett was doing was accumulating and writing off groups as tax losses or viewing them as grist to the mill, just in the same way that any boss would do in terms of surplus value. The interesting thing about this is that One Little Indian was the label Chumbawamba were on prior to them signing to EMI and the release of Tubthumping - leading to the financial success without which Sic would never have been produced or published. There's some kind of lesson there.

As is there also a lesson in the fact that copies of Sic are currently for sale on Amazon and AbeBooks for £75...

John Serpico

Bright Lights, Big City - Jay McInerney

 BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY - JAY MCINERNEY

Whenever Dillinger had cocaine running around in his brain and he would tell Jim that a knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork was the way you spelt New York I used to think: No it isn't. When I actually first went to New York I thought I might hate it there, this powerhouse of capitalism where money is God and where its inhabitants are loud and crass as a matter of course. But I was wrong. I was impressed. I stood looking out at Manhattan from on top of the Empire State Building and the noise from down below was like some colossal machine. A never-ending roar like that of a gigantic waterfall. Down there below me was one of the pinnacles of human creation. Looking up from the street from down on Fifth Avenue the buildings stretched up into the sky and were indeed like canyons. And then with the hustle and the bustle and the extremities of all human life I though yes, I could live here.

Whenever Peter York or some such similar talking head was on television defining the 1980s solely as a time of extravagance, Sloane Rangers, yuppies, and wealth creation on the Stock Exchange I always used to think: No it wasn't. On picking up a copy of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City I thought I might hate everything about it, this tale of a young urban professional carousing the streets of Manhattan in a blaze of cocaine and first world problems. But I was wrong. In fact I'm almost impressed.

According to the blurb on the cover from Tony Parsons, Bright Lights, Big City is 'probably the best book ever written about being young, about doing drugs and about music'. It isn't and Tony Parsons is wrong but then when is he ever right? Were it not for its wry humour and weird attention to weird detail then it would be a tale of self absorption and self pity kept afloat by a druggy white line fever but it is instead a sort of immorality tale of a fall from grace and a gradual redemption. It's well composed, finely executed and not too serious which makes for the final redemption to come across as quite touching that in itself is an achievement because let's face it, no-one likes a yuppie.

Its drug angle is of interest as well because the whole book seems to be not so much about drugs but drug-fuelled: 'The sweet nasal burn hits like a swallow of cold beer on a hot August day and by the time you all troop out of the bathroom you are feeling omnipotent. You are upwardly mobile. Certainly something excellent is bound to happen.'

Would it come as any surprise to know that the whole Thatcher/Reagan economic free-for-all, the whole shoulder pads and Armani fashion sense, the whole selfishness and greed is good mantra of the 1980s was ridden on the crest of a cocaine wave? Of course not. Why else would all those brash city slickers of that period appear so confident? How else would the musical emptiness and the lyrical shallowness of someone like Phil Collins gain such traction and provide the soundtrack to anyone's life? Why else would a place like Studio 54 become so popular? Why else would anyone want to go to the Groucho Club?

Not that I would ever condemn cocaine use, however. In fact more power to it, I say. Whatever gets you through the night, etc. It's just that Bolivian Marching Powder does not make for witty or erudite conversation nor does it make for great art which is why Bright Lights, Big City impresses because it is witty, it is somewhat erudite and it is rather great.

John Serpico