william_kent

Well-known member
Scorpian Rising - A Seaside Noir
Anthony Frewin

Sidney Blattner is probably the most successful organised crime figure in London, but things are coming unstuck. Who would dare to execute his innocent brother down in Margate? And Why?

'Symphony' Sid sends a succession of his minders down to investigate, but they keep turning up dead. Someone's taking fucking liberties. Now it's the turn of hard man Vince to find out who is behind the killings. Bent coppers, alcoholic hacks, third rate massage parlours, whores with a heart of stone, and a knife wielding leatherman all feature in this fast paced crime thriller. I read this yesterday in one sitting. Proper UK pulp action.
 
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william_kent

Well-known member
Divine Rascal - On the Trail of LSD's Cosmic Courier, Michael Hollingshead
Andy Roberts

Interesting "warts and all" biography of a misogynistic sociopathic narcissist who got around. Michael Hollingshead would have wanted to be remembered for being the man who "turned on" Timothy Leary to LSD, although in reality he bullied Leary into taking it by continually taking the piss out of him for only doing psilocybin. The author attempts to put to rights the history of acid, a history which Hollingshead has been largely written out of. A difficult task because he was an inveterate liar, prone to self aggrandisement - this is a guy who according to one account was:

the only person I knew who travelled with a theme song. He had a small cassette player, and at the slightest provocation, he would play a tape of this theme song which had the refrain 'He was the man who turned on the world'


The Friends of St Francis - The Man Who Turned On The World


So much for acid destroying the ego... the song title is also that of Hollingshead's "unreliable" memoir, which fails to mention the countless times he would befriend someone of influence and then rip them off for large sums of cash, some of which would then go into his arms ( at one point taking seven shots of methedrine a day, along with coke, smack, and whatever else was to hand ), with the remainder being used to relocate to another country where he would scam someone else before moving on.

Another page turner.
 
Divine Rascal - On the Trail of LSD's Cosmic Courier, Michael Hollingshead
Andy Roberts

Interesting "warts and all" biography of a misogynistic sociopathic narcissist who got around. Michael Hollingshead would have wanted to be remembered for being the man who "turned on" Timothy Leary to LSD, although in reality he bullied Leary into taking it by continually taking the piss out of him for only doing psilocybin. The author attempts to put to rights the history of acid, a history which Hollingshead has been largely written out of. A difficult task because he was an inveterate liar, prone to self aggrandisement - this is a guy who according to one account was:

the only person I knew who travelled with a theme song. He had a small cassette player, and at the slightest provocation, he would play a tape of this theme song which had the refrain 'He was the man who turned on the world'


The Friends of St Francis - The Man Who Turned On The World


So much for acid destroying the ego... the song title is also that of Hollingshead's "unreliable" memoir, which fails to mention the countless times he would befriend someone of influence and then rip them off for large sums of cash, some of which would then go into his arms ( at one point taking seven shots of methedrine a day, along with coke, smack, and whatever else was to hand ), with the remainder being used to relocate to another country where he would scam someone else before moving on.

Another page turner.
Did he ever encounter Owsley Stanley?
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Did he ever encounter Owsley Stanley?

Hollingshead claims in his autobiography that Owsley Stanley accompanied Richard Alpert when Alpert visited him in Wormwood Scrubs, but Stanley denied this ever happened:

Stanley acknowledges he was in England with Alpert at the time but denies having visited Hollingshead or having even heard of him until years later. ( Divine Rascal, p 140 )

Hollingshead was an acid snob and was vocal about "street acid" being rubbish quality when compared to Sandoz or SPOFA (Czech government issue ) LSD, so it would have been an interesting meeting if it ever happened

edit: Hollingshead did meet Jerry Garcia in 1970, but that was when Owsley was in prison himself, so didn't encounter him then. Hollingshead was getting his acid from The Brotherhood of Eternal Love at that point, which was cooked up by Tim Scully and Nick Sand using supplies provided by Owsley, so there is a vague connection
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.

Here at a small field's ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
And the shingle scrambles after the suck-
-ing surf, And a gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.

Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands,
And this full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Psychedelic Tricksters - A True Secret History of L.S.D.
David Black

I was reading this last night and I was thinking that those guys were the crypto-bros of their time.You had the evangelists proclaiming "if only everyone took acid the world would be a better place", nowadays it is"the blockchain will cure all ills", "if only people adopted web3 we'll have world peace", and then you have the "we'll be millionaires tomorrow" crew with their scams, rip-offs, rug-pulls, flashy sports cars, and money laundering ( both then and now )...plus the environmental damage with chemical waste and excessive energy consumption...
 

luka

Well-known member
Psychedelic Tricksters - A True Secret History of L.S.D.
David Black

I was reading this last night and I was thinking that those guys were the crypto-bros of their time.You had the evangelists proclaiming "if only everyone took acid the world would be a better place", nowadays it is"the blockchain will cure all ills", "if only people adopted web3 we'll have world peace", and then you have the "we'll be millionaires tomorrow" crew with their scams, rip-offs, rug-pulls, flashy sports cars, and money laundering ( both then and now )...plus the environmental damage with chemical waste and excessive energy consumption...
i know david black
 

jenks

thread death
I’ve just started a whole bunch of new stuff
The Europeans - an early Henry James. I finished Washington Sq recently. Like Forster I think he’s like an anthropologist trying to understand the rites and rituals of a soon to be extinct tribe.
The Raft by Tom de Freston - ostensibly about Geticault’s Raft of the Medusa by weaves in a memoir strand. Enjoying it very much - there’s been a few of these recently, Philip Hoare’s Durer, de Waal’s two and Sight of Death by T J Clarke
Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes - not expecting any Barnes love here, I’ve read all of his stuff and think he’s underrated and certainly not some cuddly middle brow writer as he’s often depicted. Anyway, this one is apparently based on Anita Brookner who I consider to be beyond compare - just finished a massive project which involved reading all 24 novels and various non fiction things mainly on 19th C French art.
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers - on the back of Wade’s Square Haunting about five famous women who lived in Mecklenburgh Sq during the 20s and 30s I thought I’d try her. Really fascinating view of the new class of Oxford educated women and the struggle to make their space in the strict confines of the world.
Fiona Benson’s Ephemeron- I really liked her previous collection Vertigo and Ghost, this based on things which are short lived and transitory. She also does a re-telling of the Minatour myth from Pasiphaë’s point of view.
and I’ve got Gwendoline Brooks’ Maud Martha which I’ve not started - it looked good in Foyles’ window.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
LSD Underground - Operation Julie, the Microdot Gang and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love
David Black

Deja Vu? Or am I experiencing a flashback? I started reading this and it seemed awfully familiar. What the author has done here is copy and paste wholesale from his previous book, Psychedelic Tricksters. He's just taken the parts dealing with the UK, word for word, typos and all ("dug squad" indeed ) and passed it off as new work. Oh, he did increase the font size and doubled spaced it as well so it ends up the same thickness of the book this is lifted from. Although, I have to admit I was relieved that he didn't include all the boring stuff about Italian politics and the interminable explanations of Maoist doctrine from the previous book. Maoism is only interesting when it's about the taoist sex rituals he performed on his specially built slanting bed with selected girls from the Song & Dance troupe... It seems as though his research into shady drug deals has rubbed off on him, as this is what would be termed a "burn", and I can only mutter "bummer maaan"... It's only on page 129 when there is any new material that appears, all three pages of it, unless you also count the "extra" bit at the end which is just an article about possible IRA involvement that you can read for free on the Lobster website. Hmmph.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood Of Eternal Love And Its Quest To Spread Peace, Love, And Acid to The World
Nicholas Schou

A bunch of juvenile delinquent "street fighters" and surfer dudes do acid, see "god", and embark on a mission to supply acid for all. This is very readable, but really lacking on information about the acid production and distribution side of things. I don't know how someone can write a book about the Brotherhood without mentioning Ron Stark, international man of mystery and supplier of precursor chemicals, but this guy has. This is really a book about smuggling weed, full of ripping yarns about being lost at sea in a yacht packed with tonnes of Mexican grass, close encounters with customs while wearing waistcoats dripping with hash oil, etc.,

Heads: A Biography Of Psychedelic America
Jesse Jarnow

Awful. I only read this to the end so I could hate on it. "Psychedelic America" seems to consist of a parking lot full of Grateful Dead fans. The guy must have read "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", as the prose is various shades of purple, full of nonsense like this:

By 1979, with the ritualization of "drumz/space", the Dead's whole performance structure - both the music and the breaks - is now an acid trip condensed into a sequence of creative moves. It is both exquisitely conceptual and plain useful for those on psychedelics.
The dancing has grown only more tribal over the years, swirling, spastic and jumping, communicative and sympathetic, and more often, spinning. [...] It looks absolutely nothing like boogie-oogey-ing as it is understood in the minidiscos and malls and roller rinks [...]. The twirling, whirling dance of Deadheads is another way to mark the territory. If they're there, you're here.


Or, unbelievably:

The post-Garcia Dead world resembles early Christianity, splintering into dozens and then hundreds and then infinite interpretations

When he tries to write about "electronic dance music", its psytrance. It's that bad.
 
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