"He's not making this up. It's from the Tibetan Book of the Damned."
Meanwhile, at roughly the same time, in a mansion at Millbrook, New York, in the more or less real world...
"The long telephone wire of history, which goes back 2 billion years, and which is buried somewhere inside your brain and mine...."
Lurking outside the Millbrook estate hoping to bust Leary was an FBI agent called G Gordan Liddy, who would later supervise the break-in and wiretapping of the Democratic National Commitee headquarters in the Watergate Complex, and make guest acting appearances in various TV shows, including Airwolf, Perry Mason, and Miami Vice.
"It is primo, radical, bitchin' trip.."
"The long telephone wire of history, which goes back 2 billion years, and which is buried somewhere inside your brain and mine...."
Lurking outside the Millbrook estate hoping to bust Leary was an FBI agent called G Gordan Liddy, who would later supervise the break-in and wiretapping of the Democratic National Commitee headquarters in the Watergate Complex, and make guest acting appearances in various TV shows, including Airwolf, Perry Mason, and Miami Vice.
"It is primo, radical, bitchin' trip.."
I strongly disagreed with Dr Tim on a variety of issues. Perhaps the most distasteful to me was his suggestion that everyone should drop “acid”. I am not opposed to the psychedelic experience nor am I on a “high on life” crusade, but I think any reasonable person might agree that LSD is in fact, not for everyone. As a result of Tim’s popularization of “taking a trip”, I’m afraid many people learned more than they ever wanted to know about the term, bummer. That being said, there is no doubt that Tim Leary was and is a cultural icon of my era, for better or worse. “You can be anyone you want this time around”.
ReplyDeleteHey Mike. My attitude towards Leary is a little complicated. On the one hand, I agree with you completely: Leary's assertion that everybody should take acid was wrong-headed and disastrous, both in the sense that you refer to, and for the sake of serious research into LSD, in so far as it fast-tracked negative public awareness and criminalization of the drug. And, no doubt about it, a large part of what drove Leary was his tremendous vanity and love of the limelight.
ReplyDeleteBut....at the same time, I find the guy irresistible. I think it was Lester Bangs who said that he tended to admire his heroes for all the wrong reasons,for all their flaws and less savory qualities more than their noble ones.....I'm like with a lot of my heroes, I guess! I love Leary as a larger than life symbol of incorrigible hedonism and rebellion against authority - but I do recognize the considerable havoc he caused along the way.
If you haven't read Art Kleps account of Millbrook you might find it a real hoot. Here's the link:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.okneoac.org/millbrook/