Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road present

An Evening with MICHAEL MOORCOCK
in conversation with ALAN MOORE

Wednesday 18th January at 7pm.

Tickets £6, concessions £4, from the shop during opening hours (9.30 Р8.00 Mon-Sat, 12.00 Р6.00 Sun) or 0845 456 9876 (Mon-Fri, 9.30 Р6.00)

info courtesy John Coulthart

Interview with Allen Ginsberg by Paul Carroll, in Chicago, 1968. Published in Playboy, April 1969. Complete text available in Allen Ginsberg: spontaneous mind – Selected Interviews, 1958-1996,, edited by David Carter.

AG: … Progress requires abolition of race ego, national ego, boundaries; it requires planet-citizen consciousness.

Although a minority is aware what that next step is, what about the majority who are plunged in darkness, flood, apocalypse and destruction? How to redeem these ‘ignorant armies’ who clash by night from their own bad karma? Violent confrontation? Violence begets violence. Revolutionary violence begets fascist tyranny. So, though noble impetuosity of confrontation by some New Leftists may seem appropriate to a situation in which long-haired angels are surrounded by pigs. The problem remains: how to cast the Devil from the hearts of swine?

Playboy: We’ll bite. How do you?

AG: Since we’re in an apocalyptic situation, old historical dialectics no longer apply. I prophesy that the only way to reverse the apocalypse is white magic, because the apocalypse itself is incarnate black magic. What would be the effect of total sacramental harmonious shamanistic ritual prayer magic massively performed in the American or Russian political theater?

Playboy: We’re beginning to feel like a straight man. What would be the effect?

AG: Exorcism. We need a million children saints adept at high unhexings, technological vaudeville, rhythmic behaviors, hypnotic acrobatics, street trapeze artistries, naked circus vibrations–magic politics to exorcise the police state. Is there a kind of poetry and theater sublime enough to change the national will and to open up consciousness in the populace? If the direction of the will can be changed and consciousness widened, then we may be able to solve the practical problems outlined: ecological reconstruction and the achievement of clear ecstasy as a social condition. And once that is achieved, people could relax and start looking for the highest, perfect wisdom.

Psychiatrist calls for end to 30-year taboo over use of LSD as a medical treatment

Sarah Boseley, health editor
Wednesday January 11, 2006
The Guardian

British psychiatrists are beginning to debate the highly sensitive issue of using LSD for therapeutic purposes to unlock secrets buried in the unconscious which may underlie the anxious or obsessional behaviour of some of their patients.
The UK pioneered this use of LSD in the 1950s. But psychiatrists found their research proposals rejected and their work dismissed once “acid” hit the streets in the mid-60s and uncontrolled use of the hallucinogenic drug became a social phenomenon.

Today, on the 100th birthday of Albert Hofmann, the scientist who discovered the mind-expanding properties of lysergic acid diethylamide in Switzerland, one consultant psychiatrist is openly risking controversy to urge that the debate on the therapeutic potential of LSD be reopened. Ben Sessa has been invited to give a presentation on psychedelic drugs to the Royal College of Psychiatrists in March – the first time the subject will have been discussed by the institution in 30 years.

“I really want to present a dispassionate medical, scientific evidence-based argument,” says Dr Sessa. “I do not condone recreational drug use. None of this is tinged by any personal experience.

“Scientists, psychiatrists and psychologists were forced to give up their studies for socio-political reasons. That’s what really drives me.”

LSD was brought to the UK in 1952 by psychiatrist Ronnie Sandison who had visited the labs of the drug company Sandoz, where Dr Hofmann worked. He came home with 100 ampoules in his bag and began to use them at Powick hospital, near Malvern in Worcestershire, on selected patients with conditions such as obsessional hand-washing or anxiety who did not respond to psychoanalysis.

Dr Sessa has looked back on the papers published by Dr Sandison and others from the heyday of psychedelic psychiatry, and thinks they may have modern relevance. They claim positive results in patients who were given LSD in psychotherapy to get to the deep-seated roots of anxiety disorders and neuroses. It took them, as the title of Aldous Huxley’s book has it, from the poem of William Blake, through “the doors of perception”. Yet when he was a student, says 33-year-old Dr Sessa, all his textbooks stated categorically that LSD had no medical use.

“It is as if a whole generation of psychiatrists have had this systematically erased from their education,” he says. “But for the generation who trained in the 50s and 60s, this really was going to be the next big thing. Thousands of books and papers were written, but then it all went silent. My generation has never heard of it. It’s almost as if there has been an active demonisation.”

He says he understands why. LSD became a huge social issue. But he argues that nobody would ask anaesthetists to forgo morphine use because heroin is a social evil, and cannabis is now being formulated as a therapeutic drug.

Since the 1960s, when research was stopped on LSD, “depression and anxiety disorders have risen to almost epidemic proportions and are now the greatest single burden on today’s health services. Therefore, today’s political climate may be just right for the medical profession to reconsider the use of psychedelic drugs”, writes Dr Sessa in an as-yet unpublished paper with Amanda Feilding of the Beckley Foundation which promotes research into the nature of consciousness.

A major conference is being held in Basel, Switzerland, this weekend in honour of Dr Hofmann’s birthday. Scientists in the burgeoning psychedelic psychiatry movement will be there, alongside artists, musicians and those who look to hallucinatory drugs for spiritual experience.

In the past five years, the international climate has been changing, albeit very slowly. In the US, Israel, Switzerland and Spain, a few research projects have been permitted into the effects of LSD, MDMA (ecstasy) and psilocybin – the active ingredient in magic mushrooms – on the brain. They look at the use of the drugs in conditions such as post-traumatic stress, obsessive compulsive disorder and the alleviation of distress in the dying.

But Dr Sessa knows it will be an uphill struggle to get research proposals approved and funded in the UK. He believes the drugs are safe in medical use – given in a pure form in tiny doses and in controlled and supervised surroundings. But LSD is associated with flashbacks, and brain scans of clubbers using ecstasy have shown damage. Some psychiatrists are likely to be appalled at the idea. Former patients of Dr Sandison claimed his use of LSD had caused them long-term problems and attempted to bring a court action for compensation.

Dr Sandison says his early experimentation with LSD in the 50s produced results in difficult cases. “I recall one young woman. She had a near-drowning experience. She developed a severe anxiety state. It coloured everything.

“We didn’t get anywhere with ordinary psychotherapy, so we went on to LSD. She recalled an extraordinary memory of how, when she was eight, she had gone into a store with her mother and become separated from her. She went to a counter to ask an assistant and felt a man behind her trying to feel her up. She felt very confused by this and said she thought it was an odd way of stealing her purse.” he said.

“It was pretty alarming. She had suppressed all this. We began to get somewhere and we discovered why she had sexual difficulties with her husband and felt angry towards men.”

In 1954 he wrote his first paper, for the Journal of Mental Sciences, on LSD use in 36 patients. It concluded: “We consider that the drug will find a significant place in the treatment of the psychoneuroses and allied mental illnesses.” But by the mid-60s, Dr Sandison had had enough. The drug had become a street problem. He gave evidence in a couple of Old Bailey cases where arson and a murder were committed under the influence of LSD.

“I don’t see either ethically or professionally or technically why it shouldn’t be used in the future,” he says. “But anything done now has to be very different from what we did. All the expertise developed in those years by a large number of people has been lost so we have to start again.”

“Amazonia Ambient Project”

Based on the experiences of an anthropologist and three electronic musicians, this project deals with Amazonian reality and its current implications, including ecology, shamanism and the encounter of cultures.

For the occasion, The Young Gods will be in small-scale electronic formation (computer, sampler and percussion), and will blend a presentation of their new ambient album “Music for Artificial Clouds” (2004) with soundtracks recorded in the Amazon and reworked by computer: a live work of electronic improvisation.

Jeremy Narby is a doctor in anthropology from the University of Stanford. He has worked with indigenous people in the Western Amazon for two decades on questions of territorial rights and bilingual, intercultural education. He has written several books, including “The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge” (1998, Penguin Putnam, New York), which breaks new ground in showing connections between indigenous knowledge and science. He also co-edited with Francis Huxley the first-ever anthology showing the evolution of Western attitudes towards shamanism on a worldwide scale, called “Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge” (2001, Penguin Putnam, New York).

He works as coordinator of Amazonian projects for Nouvelle Planete, a Swiss NGO.
The “show” should last about 90 minutes and should include several phases, including music only, anthropological tales only, and others in which music and story combine.

2006 Venues

Amazonia Ambient Project at Les Docks, Lausanne Switzerland on March the 5th 2006.

Nouvelle PlanÔø?te is celebrating their 20th anniversary with Amazonia Ambient Project, Jeremy Narby & The Young Gods
A sonic conference about amazonian reality and its current involvement for ecology. A lively narration combined with an electronic improvisation.
Doors : 18:00
Show : 19:00

Subdelegado Zero’s Trip Resumes
| January 8, 2006 |

Originally published in Spanish by the EZLN
***********************************
Translated by irlandesa

CommuniquÔø? from the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Campaign – General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation

Mexico

January 8, 2006

To the Supporters of the Sexta and the Other Campaign
To the People of Mexico:

CompaÔø?eros and CompaÔø?eras:
Brothers and Sisters:

As you already know, our compaÔø?era Comandanta Ramona, a member of our political organizational leadership, died on January 6.

Comandanta Ramona, in addition to being our leader, had become a symbol of the struggle, of the struggle built from below and to the left. Her loss has meant great pain for us, and it is very difficult to talk about it. That is why we are unable to say anything else about our Comandanta and about what her absence means, and will mean, to us.

On that very day, January 6, the EZLNÔø?s Sixth Committee (as part of the first stage of our participation in the Ôø?Other CampaignÔø?) was in the city of TonalÔø?, Chiapas when we learned of the great sorrow which came into our hearts. Given the magnitude of the loss, activities were then suspended, and the EZLNÔø?s Sixth Committee delegate returned to the city of San CristÔø?bal de Las Casas in order to wait there for directions from the CCRI-CG of the EZLN.

While still sorrowing over the death of Comandanta Ramona, the Comandantes and Comandantas met in their respective regions to review, discuss and decide on the Sixth CommitteeÔø?s national trip. They decided on the following:

They ordered the EZLNÔø?s Sixth Committee, following our Comandanta RamonaÔø?s internment, to resume their trip throughout all the states of the Mexican Republic and to carry out their mission of listening to our compaÔø?eros and compaÔø?eras of the Ôø?Other CampaignÔø? throughout Mexico and the United States, of calling on the people of Mexico to join in with the Sixth Declaration and of uniting those struggles which are by themselves. To this end, some adjustments were made in the tripÔø?s program so that the activities which were suspended in the Coast and Sierra of Chiapas can be carried out.

We respectfully ask supporters in Mexico and the American Union to excuse us for the problems that these changes may cause them. Regarding Chiapas, Quintana Roo and YucatÔø?n, we have already been in contact with their respective committees, and they have, nobly and generously, agreed to make the necessary changes so that, respecting the number of days which had been established for each state, the calendar can be modified.

The new calendar is as follows (program details for each location will be released, in due course, by the committees of each state):

January 9 and 10 – Coast of Chiapas. Base: TonalÔø?
January 11 – Sierra and Coast of Chiapas. Base: Huixtla
January 12 – Travel from Huixtla – San CristÔø?bal de Las Casas
January 13 – Travel from San CristÔø?bal – Palenque
January 14 – Travel to Quintana Roo
January 15, 16 and 17 – Quintana Roo
January 18, 19 and 20 – YucatÔø?n

January 21 – Traveling to Campeche-Tabasco
January 22, 23 and 24 – Campeche
January 25, 26 and 27 – Tabasco

January 28 – Travel to Veracruz
January 29, 30 and 31 and February 1, 2 and 3 – Veracruz

February 4 – Travel to Oaxaca
February 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 – Oaxaca

February 11 – Travel to Puebla
February 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 – Puebla
February 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 and 23 – Tlaxcala

February 24 – Travel to Hidalgo
February 25, 26, 27 and 28 and March 1 and 2 – Hidalgo and part of Veracruz

March 3 – Travel to QuerÔø?taro
March 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 – QuerÔø?taro

March 10 – Travel to Guanajuato-Aguascalientes
March 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 – Guanajuato-Aguascalientes

March 17 – Travel to Jalisco
March 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 and 23 – Jalisco

March 24 – Travel to Colima or Nayarit
March 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 – Colima-Nayarit

March 31 – Travel to MichoacÔø?n
April 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 – MichoacÔø?n

April 7 – Travel to Morelos
April 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 – Morelos

April 14 – Travel to Guerrero
April 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 – Guerrero

April 21 – Travel to the State of Mexico – Federal District
April 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 and 30 and May 1, 2 and 3 – DF – EDOMEX

May 5 – Travel to San Luis PotosÔø?
May 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 – San Luis PotosÔø?

May 12 – Travel to Zacatecas
May 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 – Zacatecas

May 19 – Travel to Nuevo LeÔø?n – Tamaulipas
May 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25 – Nuevo LeÔø?n -Tamaulipas

May 26 – Travel to Coahuila – Durango
May 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31 and June 1 – Coahuila – Durango

June 2 – Travel to Chihuahua – the Other Side
June 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 – Chihuahua – the Other Side

June 9 – Travel to Sinaloa – Sonora
June 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 – Sinaloa – Sonora

June 16 – Travel to Bajas – the Other Side
June 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22 – Bajas – the Other Side

June 23, 24 and 25 – Return and Informative Plenary in DF
June 26 – 30 – Return to the mountains of the Mexican Southeast

These are our thoughts, compaÔø?eros and compaÔø?eras. Hopefully adjusting your program of activities to this new calendar will not cause you many problems. We await your proposals.

We send you our zapatista greetings and abrazos from compas of this Ôø?otherÔø? struggle we are moving forward.

Democracy!
Liberty!
Justice!

By the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee – General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the Sixth Committee of the EZLN

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

Mexico, January of 2006

CNN.com – Jan 11, 2006

LONDON, England (Reuters) — British researchers said on Wednesday they had uncovered the first proof of teaching in non-human animals — ants showing each other the way to food.

The ants studied over two years by scientists from Bristol University used a technique known as tandem running — one ant led another ant from the nest to a food source.

It was a genuine case of teaching as ant leaders observed by Professor Nigel Franks and Tom Richardson slowed down if the follower got too far behind. If the gap got smaller, they then speeded up.

Tandem leaders also paid a penalty, because they would have reached the food four times faster if they had gone alone. But teaching had its advantages — the follower ant then learnt much more quickly where the food source was.

Information then flows through the ant colony when followers are promoted to leaders and the teaching process starts all over again.

“Teaching isn’t merely mimicry. It involves the teacher modifying its behavior in the presence of a naive observer at some initial cost to itself,” said Franks, who reported the findings in the journal Nature.

“We think real teaching involves a lot of feedback. This is to our knowledge the first example of formal teaching in non-human animals,” he told Reuters.

“What’s nice about this demonstration is that the ant is an animal with a small brain. The human brain is a million times larger and yet the ant is very good at teaching and learning.”

Syd Barrett, the swinging 60

Pink Floyd’s guiding genius walked away as stardom beckoned. On his 60th birthday, John Robb analyses his iconic status and speaks to those who remember him best

Published: 07 January 2006
THE INDEPENDENT

One of the key figures of the Sixties – and the original acid casualty – was 60 years old yesterday. How he celebrated, no one can be too sure, for Syd Barrett has been seen by virtually no one except his mother for many of those years.

With the handful of songs he wrote while fronting Pink Floyd in 1966 and 1967, Barrett was at the forefront of British psychedelia. He changed the way pop music was listened to and played, fusing childlike, whimsical songs with wild freak-outs, forging a vibrant whole that set the template for the late 60s and beyond.

His unique style – off-the-wall slide guitar shoved through an echo unit – took the guitar away from plain riffing. It was like listening to the colour of sound even before Jimi Hendrix arrived in London. The post-Barrett Floyd operated in his shadow, while a host of contemporary musicians are still in awe of his plaintive and original songs. It has been 35 years since his last interview and more than 30 years since he released an album, but the legend continues to grow, though the man himself disappeared into a reclusive life in Cambridge.

Barrett had it all – he was innovative, artistic and surrounded by beautiful women. But he imploded months after the band’s breakthrough, a victim of the hectic touring, the pressure to come up with new songs and his drug experimentation that put intolerable pressure on an already fragile psyche. In autumn 1967 he started behaving oddly on TV shows in America, and at gigs would stand onstage stock still and not playing a note.

In early 1968, the band drafted in Dave Gilmour to cover. The plan was for Barrett to be a Brian Wilson figure, writing the songs but not playing live. But after five weeks, in the face of increasingly erratic and unreliable behaviour, they decided, reluctantly, to on without him.

Barrett returned to the studio to cut two solo albums of sad, lilting off-the-wall songs, fragments of genius that have become precursors to modern day lo-fi indie rock – highly personal music poured on to tape. But he was now starting to withdraw from the world, and for the next few years he lived in virtual seclusion in his London flat, then, at the end of the 1970 went back to the family home in Cambridge.

Syd Barrett could have been one of the pantheon of rock legends, alongside Bob Dylan, John Lennon or the Rolling Stones. Instead he bailed out early, leaving those who knew him still touched by his genius four decades later.

Dave Gilmour, Pink Floyd guitarist

He was a truly magnetic personality. When he was very young, he was a figure in his home town. People would look at him in the street and say, “There’s Syd Barrett,” and he would be only 14 years old.

In my opinion, [his breakdown] would have happened anyway. It was a deep-rooted thing. But I’ll say the psychedelic experience might well have acted as a catalyst. Still, I just don’t think he could deal with the vision of success and all the things that went with it.

[On working with Barrett later]: Roger [Waters, Pink Floyd’s bassist] and I sat down with him after listening to all his songs and said: “Syd, play this one. Syd, play that one.” We sat him on a chair with a couple of mics in front of him and got him to sing. The potential of some of those songs… they could have really been fantastic. But trying to find a technique of working with Syd was so difficult. You had to pre-record tracks without him, working from one version of the song he had done, and then sit Syd down afterwards and try to get him to play and sing along. Or you could get him to do a performance of it on his own and then try to dub everything else on top. The concept of him performing with another bunch of musicians was clearly impossible because he’d change the song every time. He’d never do a song the same twice, I think quite deliberately.

Pete Jenner, Pink Floyd co-manager 1966-68

My first contact with Pink Floyd was at the Marquee in June 1966. I had this label and we were looking for a band that could sell records. I was not really into pop, but I did like the way the band improvised. I remember walking round the stage at the Marquee because the stage stuck out, trying to work out where the noise came from.

All the stuff on Floyd’s first album he wrote in autumn, 1966. In fact, nearly all the songs he ever wrote were in that six months, and a lot of the songs cropped up on his solo albums.

The autumn after the first US tour, there were problems. He’d been wobbling out all sorts of weird shit, and from there on in it was a real struggle keeping it together – keeping him together. We were all saying: “We need more songs” – everyone was putting pressure on him. In the end, it became obvious that it couldn’t go on working, and that’s when Dave Gilmour came in as the fifth man. Did Syd know what was happening? I don’t know… I think in a way he had removed himself from the band.

Andrew King, Pink Floyd co-manager 1966-68

Syd told me it took him weeks to perfect the lyrics for “Arnold Layne” [Pink Floyd’s debut single]. There was a lot of intellectual effort involved. I miss him every day off my life, really. He had everything. He was a songwriter, painter, actor, charmer. I don’t want to talk about him in the past. I just want to say, “Happy birthday, Syd”.

Duggie Fields, musician And Barrett’s former flatmate

I went to their early gigs. They also used to rehearse in the flat – I remember it was the twists in their music more than the blues they played that made them interesting. Syd was certainly the major creator in the band – he was the one everyone would look to at gigs. Then he obviously became dysfunctional, but the person I saw was not dysfunctional by a long shot. I looked at their touring schedule a few years ago and was shocked by it – such a crazy schedule. Throw in a bit of drug abuse, and it would be enough to freak anyone out.

Eventually, he withdrew more and more. There would be curtains permanently on the windows, no fresh air… it seems like in retrospect he was withdrawing, though it didn’t seem like that at the time. I have very fond memories of Syd.

Jeff Dexter, deejay at London’s legendary psychedelic club, UFO

In the summer of ’66, I went to one of these Sunday spontaneous underground things at the Marquee. I didn’t get Pink Floyd at that time. I was into more straight rock ‘n’ roll. The International Times party at the Roundhouse [15 October 1966] was a key event. I was more enamoured by the event than by any particular band, but I did speak to Syd. I was intrigued by all the birds round him. At the time, everyone was spaced out, and Syd was no different.

At UFO, they were on every other week with their light show. It wasn’t like watching an average rock band – there were people lying on the floor, people dancing round or just waving their arms about.

John Leckie, record producer

I saw Pink Floyd at All Saints Church Hall in Powys Terrace [30 September 1966]. They were fantastic. The hall was minute – it was a nursery school with little chairs. Everyone sat on the chairs, and now and then people would get up and idiot-dance. And musically it was great – Syd’s guitar was really loud, with lots of improvisation.

In 1974, they’d released his solo albums, Barrett and The Madcap Laughs, as a double album in America and they had done well. So EMI wanted him in the studio. Pete Jenner said: “Syd’s going to come in, he’s not in very good shape, and we’re just going to see what we can get.” So Syd came in with new guitars. He had six Stratocasters – his flat must have looked like a music shop. He still looked like Syd – long hair, bit unkempt but still looking good. He seemed bit vacant, a bit shell-shocked. Still, every day he would turn up with a different girl. But there were no lyrics, nothing at all. I’m not sure if he even had any songs.

Every day if he walked out of the studio and turned left he would come back again, and if he turned right he would disappear. On the last day he left and turned right, and that was the last we ever saw of him.

Mick Rock, photographer

I was studying modern languages at Cambridge. It was New Year’s Eve 1966, and I had mutual friends saying: “You’ve got to come and see Syd with his band.” I went along and yes, indeed, it was one of those unprecedented things! Completely out of stage left! There was nothing else quite like them. I wonder if it had something to do with the chemicals… After, there was a party at Syd’s mother’s house, where I first met Syd. He had a very attractive girlfriend. I thought “Wow! he has got everything!”

Syd was very friendly. I always remember him laughing a lot – if you look at pictures I took later in 1971, in the garden in Cambridge, there was a lot of laughing in them as well. We had a good rapport. The chemicals help initially with creative people but then the hindrance sets in. The impression I got when I interviewed him in 1971 was that he didn’t want to be a pop star anymore.

Daevid Allen, guitarist, The Soft Machine

I first saw them at the IT festival. I was obviously influenced by what he was doing, sliding things up and down the neck of guitar. He was pretty – I met him at [the club] UFO and he would stare right at you. His naive, childlike songs were for people who wanted to reject the old ways – the generation which hadn’t grown up with the war. It was a glorification of the innocence of childhood. In the end, Syd ran out of freshness. It got boring, it wasn’t fun any more, so he stopped.

John Robb’s “Punk Rock: The Oral History”, will be published shortly by Ebury

Jan 7, 2006 New York Times

The Saturday Profile

Nearly 100, LSD’s Father Ponders His ‘Problem Child’

By CRAIG SMITH
BURG, Switzerland

ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the windowpane.

Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr. Hofmann’s conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man’s oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that fact.

“It’s very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature,” he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. “In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans,” he said. “The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature.” And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his “problem child,” could help reconnect people to the universe.

Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more than 90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The experience left him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls “a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality.”

“I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature,” he said, laying a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist. “Outside is pure energy and colorless substance,” he said. “All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.”

He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which plants turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies. “Everything comes from the sun via the plant kingdom,” he said.

MR. HOFMANN studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally, chemists in the United States identified the active component as lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.

His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the body’s circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it became famous. “Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a child,” he said. “I didn’t know what caused it, but I knew that it was important.”

When he returned to his lab the next Monday, he tried to identify the source of his experience, believing first that it had come from the fumes of a chloroform-like solvent he had been using. Inhaling the fumes produced no effect, though, and he realized he must have somehow ingested a trace of LSD. “LSD spoke to me,” Mr. Hofmann said with an amused, animated smile. “He came to me and said, ‘You must find me.’ He told me, ‘Don’t give me to the pharmacologist, he won’t find anything.’ ”

HE experimented with the drug, taking a dose so small that even the most active toxin known at that time would have had little or no effect. The result with LSD, however, was a powerful experience, during which he rode his bicycle home, accompanied by an assistant. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as “bicycle day.”

Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used only under carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline, and proposed that they take LSD together. They each took 0.05 milligrams of pure LSD at Mr. Hofmann’s home accompanied by roses, music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense. “That was the first planned psychedelic test,” Mr. Hofmann said.

He took the drug dozens of times after that, he said, and once experienced what he called a “horror trip” when he was tired and Mr. Junger gave him amphetamines first. But his hallucinogenic days are long behind him.

“I know LSD; I don’t need to take it anymore,” Mr. Hofmann said. “Maybe when I die, like Aldous Huxley,” who asked his wife for an injection of LSD to help him through the final painful throes of his fatal throat cancer.

But Mr. Hofmann calls LSD “medicine for the soul” and is frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. “It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis,” he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960’s and then demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He said LSD could be dangerous and called its distribution by Timothy Leary and others “a crime.”

“It should be a controlled substance with the same status as morphine,” he said.

Mr. Hofmann lives with his wife in the house they built 38 years ago. He raised four children and watched one son struggle with alcoholism before dying at 53. He has eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. As far as he knows, no one in his family besides his wife has tried LSD.

Mr. Hofmann rose, slightly stooped and now barely reaching five feet, and walked through his house with his arm-support cane. When asked if the drug had deepened his understanding of death, he appeared mildly startled and said no. “I go back to where I came from, to where I was before I was born, that’s all,” he said.

Friday Nights @ Not A Cornfield

‘What Comes Next?’ Discussion Series: Healing Gardens
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Film Screening: The Shaman’s Apprentice

Friday, January 6, 2006 @ 7:30pm

This is the first in a planned series of discussions and presentations about issues that relate to the follow-up of the Not A Cornfield project on the grounds of the Los Angeles State Historic Park in downtown Los Angeles.

Not A Cornfield
South gate:
1201 N. Spring St.
North gate:
1799 Baker St.
(323) 226-1158

– All events and activities are FREE.
– Handicapped Accessible
– Refreshments served during special events

This first discussion is an invitation to discuss healing gardens. An end goal is to define what to plant in the spiral “Eye” near the southern end of the 32-acre site.

Anyone interested in influencing this dialog is welcome to attend and encouraged to participate in the evening’s discussion. To expand the brainstorming, Echo Park Film Center will bes hoing the film, “The Shaman’s Apprentice.”

NOTE
Friday Nights@Not A Cornfield programs are held rain or shine in the heated and covered Yurt, near the Not A Cornfield North Gate entrance. These events are free of charge and open to the public.

FILM PROGRAM
The Shaman’s Apprentice (Miranda Smith, 2001, 54 minutes)
Curated by Sarah McCabe and Jaime Lopez in association with Echo Park Film Center.

ABOUT THE FILM
The Shaman’s Apprentice, an award-winning documentary directed by Miranda Smith with narration by Susan Sarandon, examines Ethonobotanist Mark Plotkin’s quest to preserve the ancient wisdom of Amazonian shamans.

‚ÄúFor more than twenty years Dr. Mark Plotkin has searched the Amazon for plants that heal. He is an ethnobotanist, a scientist who studies the relationship between indigenous people and plants. He set out on a mission to find a cure for diabetes, a disease that killed both of his grandmothers. The Shaman‚Äôs Apprentice charts the story of Mark’s discoveries, and looks at the astonishing ability of native people to manage their environment.

People of the forest have become sophisticated chemists by necessity, utilizing plants for every aspect of their lives. Often, the entire knowledge of a tribe resides in the mind of the shaman – the tribe’s doctor and spiritual leader. But the shamans are also the most endangered species in the Amazon. Marooned in time by the loss of traditional ways, many of the native healers have no apprentices. Most are old, and each shaman’s death is a kind of extinction. It is these shamans that Mark seeks out, hoping to save their precious knowledge, for it may be vital to the world’s future.

The Shaman‚Äôs Apprentice is a story of survival against the odds. It interweaves the luminous rain forest world of phenomena and legends with western science and the grim realities of extinction. In the story of one man’s quest to preserve the ancient wisdom of our species, we find intelligence, cooperation and hope that could save one of the most glorious places on Earth. ‚Äú
–Text from Bullfrog Films