Create Your Own Roadshow Dept. - Terence McKenna

Here's Big Mac posing with a bunch of crap, basically. Credit: ©High Times

 “Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.”

Terence McKenna died at the turn of the century, as the fingers were tightening on the trigger. At least he didn't have to be embarrassed by the failure of his prediction that 2012 would see a global evolution of human consciousness. It's always a mistake to hold the calendar - any calendar, no matter how deeply etched in stone - to ransom in this way, because it has no meaning or application outside its own artificial parameters. Zappa told part of the curly tale in Greggary Peccary, and it's a disappointment that McKenna, who believed in the redemptive and transformational power of chaos, should also believe in such a weaponised piece of bureaucratic control magic as the calendar. But don't follow leaders, as the best of our leaders say. 

Literate/articulate proponents of the psychedelic are pretty rare. Timothy Leary with his blarney-stoned gift of the gab, Richard Alpert with his academic helix twist, Ralph Metzner (the Quiet One) and Curiosity McKenna were in the Thinking White Guy tradition (nothing inherently wrong with that) of Aldous Huxley in trying to attractively package the experience in language. Where the whole deal comes apart is, of course, we have to eat. For a lot of people, this means buying food. Which means having money. Which may involve working for it. And floating with the Eternals above Nazca isn't an attractive skill-set on your resumé. Embracing chaos isn't compatible with punching the clock except in the sense of shattering time, and your employer isn't likely to accept experiencing the ineffable void as an excuse for not turning up at the sausage factory. Caveat emptor - any celebrity telling you to drop out is either making money in some way from that message, so he can eat, or living off his parents.

Which is not to say - heavens to Betsy! - that the psychedelic experience is to be avoided, or is invalid or irrelevant. It's necessary, dammit. Here's Terry again, on the glitterball, behind the eight ball, having a ball:

“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”

A convenient approach to the man and his life, should you be desirous of making it, is in today's loaddown, detailed in the comments. Thinking about the psychedelic is the next best thing to being it, and in some ways more useful. Let's eat!

The Road Less Travelled Dept. - Two Lane Blacktop

He blew his mind out in a car.

The late sixties, early seventies were weird scenes inside the Hollywood goldmine. The unexpected cash-cow yield of Easy Rider sent the studios' eyes spinning in jackpot dollar signs. The suits shrugged, said we don't know what's happening here but if you young people can make us some money, you go right ahead. Peter Biskin's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls brilliantly documents the brief era when Art and Commerce jumped into a vibrating motel bed together and fucked each other's brains out.

The arthouse bastards born of this unlikely coupling did no better than Easy Rider at the box office, and the suits turned away to spill their seed on the pale underbelly of frathouse fatboy George Lucas, who treated the public like dumb little kids and made everybody feel good about it, infantilising cinema to the point where, today, adults don't feel shortchanged anteing up for a superhero movie.

Nothing childish or feelgood about Easy Rider, Two Lane Blacktop. Nor Five Easy Pieces, or Vanishing Point. These were movies about men incapable of relationships, in crisis, and going nowhere. Not date movies, not popcorn movies. Movies for men incapable of relationships, in crisis, and going nowhere after the sixties dream shredded into bloody tatters. You can imagine how women felt watching them in cinemas. Fucking assholes. Movies about men's issues before men knew they had issues, or even knew what issues were.

Two Lane Blacktop is the genre in its purest form, so stripped-down that only meaning is left. Although the publicity invariably focusses on James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, and Laurie Bird, the third point in the triangle is Warren Oates. Laurie Bird, like all the women in these road movies, is a landmark rather than a destination. Charlotte Rampling's similar role in Vanishing Point was cut right out of the movie.

James Taylor is The Driver. That's what he does. He drives the car. He's focussed, in the moment, as humorless as any two year-old - and driven. His only off-topic conversation is an embarrassing and inept attempt at engaging The Girl (Laurie Bird) in small talk about the bizarre and bleak life of cicadas. "You're boring," she says, moving off.

Dennis Wilson is The Mechanic. He's either under the hood or thinking about what's happening under the hood. His dialog is mechanical. He gets to fuck The Girl, but that's mechanical, too, working under the hood.

Warren Oates is G.T.O. - he doesn't even get the dignity of a role, reduced to the name of his car. Unlike our other two holy assholes, he's a liar and a dreamer for whom the past and the future are nothing but fantasies to suit the moment. He's also desperately unhip, and desperate. He yearns for a destination, he wants to go home, and his own company makes him antsy.

But in American Zen, you can't go home again. And you can't get there from here. That's the story of the movie. Recognise it?

We never discover anything about these three, their backgrounds. They're principles, isolated aspects of male behavior, not fully rounded characters on individual arcs. Nobody learns anything, thank God. There's no message here. No satisfying linear development and resolution. Just the road, and you either come to terms with that - and its direct relevance to you - or you're lost. Be here now. There is nowhere else.

A note on the ending - spoiler alert: sometimes viewed as a cop-out because they couldn't think of an ending, it's poetically inevitable. This is a movie - a story - with no beginning and no middle, either. No traditional Three Act structure. Just what's happening. Look at James Taylor concentrating on the lights up there. He did notice when they changed. Monte Hellman's burnt-out film stock is misunderstood as some kind of nihilist Vanishing Point ending, but he's saying - this is what happens when you stop. When you stop moving, you burn up. Keep moving.

Hidden In Plain Sight Dept. - Santana (Again)

No apologies. I farqing love Santana, me. They were hip and cool back there for a few short years, but "the brand" - which it is, as opposed to a band - devalued over decades of declining interest and zero relevance, stinking up the marketplace with some of the most wretched product ever released by a major act. I don't care - the best is still the best, and provides a seemingly non-depletable source of energy and good vibes, qualities weirdly not much in demand today.

Thus, this.

Flor D'Luna is the album created from hermetically contiguating the studio tracks from Moonflower, the underplayed double album from '77. It's liked well enough, but the consensus seems to be the mix of studio and live tracks makes for less rather than more. The consensus is right - the hidden studio album is a beauty - mostly instrumental, with a butterfly-light jazz-inflected feel reminiscent of Borboletta. And there's a terrific cover of The Zombies' She's Not There, echoing Black Magic Woman. Carlos' playing throughout is inspired - fiery-ferocious or gentle as a summer breeze.

From their first in '69 up to this the man they're calling Santana barely put a foot wrong or missed a beat. Flor D'Luna represents, in some ways, the culmination of what you could call his Golden Era, if you were not that great with words [like he's not - Ed.]. From here on in, it was never quite the same again. But what is? Looked in the mirror recently?

I've mind-melded a couple of shorter tracks - you won't feel the seam - and edited and sequenced with my signature due diligence so you don't have to get your hands dirty grubbing up a playlist, ya lazy slob. Provided AT NO COST TO YOU, MR. CONSUMER, is this here swell new cover design using DALL-E©. 

Included in the loaddown is the remaining live album which I've left under the original (and beautiful) cover [left - Ed.].

That Random Post Doohickey Is The One Thing You Can Rely Upon In This Crazy Old World

Foam-O-Graph© - Braille for the deaf!

 

Hit the "Random Post" button like there's no tomorrow! It's that red thing OVER THERE ▶️. Keep hammering the sucker until you find something that appeals to you. The associated link is almost certain to be dead, but you can find the music easily enough on a handy internet, which is where I got it in the first place, duh.

There are thousands of mirth-inducing and informative posts here; good taste, piercing wit, and sagelike wisdom never go out of date! Spend the rest of your life reading them all - what else you gonna do? Let the world go to hell while you put your feet up at th' Isle O' Foam©!

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