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Entries tagged with 'LSD'
Posted Apr. 30, 2008,
Trip Movies in Honor of Albert Hoffman
By Dennis Dermody
More grieving over the father of LSD -- Albert Hoffman, who died at age 102. But what I'll especially miss are those fabulous campy movies made about tripping. From serious efforts like The Trip to Psych-Out, The Hallucination Generation, Riot on Sunset Strip, The Hooked Generation, Free Grass, Wild in the Streets, The Big Cube, where Lana Turner was dosed, and of course, Jeff Lieberman's classic Blue Sunshine, in which LSD that you took 10 years ago causes you to lose your hair and become homicidal. Now that's what I call a good trip!
Posted Nov. 1, 2007,
Elephant on LSD is #1!
By David Hershkovits
The foibles of man knows no bounds. The figure of the mad scientist looms large in fact and fiction for a simple reason. They're for real! If you need further proof, New Scientist has put together a listing of the top ten wackiest experiments of all time. And the # 1 is Elephant on Acid:
When Warren Thomas, the director of Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City, approached Tusko the elephant with a syringe full of LSD in 1962, he thought that he was about to make a major contribution to science.Within a few moments of being injected, Tusko began trumpeting furiously, before keeling over as if he had been shot. An hour later, he was dead. “It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD,” Thomas and his colleagues concluded.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. via timesonline
Posted Oct. 23, 2007,
Skidoo on Turner Classic Movies!
By Dennis Dermody
A friend alerted me to the rumor that Turner Classic Movies is going to air Otto Preminger's mondo-bizarro 1968 film Skidoo. It's a wild hippie-dippy counterculture movie with older stars like Jackie Gleason, George Raft, Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, Mickey Rooney, Carol Channing (in eye-popping Rudy Gernreich gowns) and Groucho Marx as "God." Watching this movie is mind-blowing -- here's a scene with Jackie Gleason in prison on LSD. Never released on video, this drug-addled insanity has a finale with the credits sung entirely by Harry Nilsson that will unhinge your jaw! Supposedly it will air on Jan. 5th on TCM. Cannot wait!
Posted Sep. 28, 2007,
Busby Berkeley Does Acid So You Don't Have To
By Ann Magnuson
Getting back to what Hollywood does best (no, not getting away with murder) we leave you with another Busby Berkeley freak-out to usher in the weekend. I was watching a special on Technicolor last night and was reminded of some of the gems that came out of the Hollywood Dream Factory in those years when color was still a novelty (and child labor laws probably pretty darn lax -- those kids doing the polka-waltzing are kinda... creepy, no?). Noone utilized the new color process more Suessically than wildman choreographer Busby Berkeley. This one comes from YouTube user "Picklepuss" who says...
Hold on to your hats. Here it comes. The most realistic depiction of what a brain on acid feels like. This wicked awesome tribute to one of the world's most overlooked entities, the polka dot, takes us on a journey to a star that we may never come back from. After the freak out look for Alice Faye, Carmen Miranda, Phil Baker, Benny Goodman, Eugene Pallette, Charlotte Greenwood, Edward Everett Horton, James Ellison and Sheila Ryan in the "Attack of the 50 Foot Polka Dots" right at the end.
Posted Sep. 14, 2007,
The Sunset Strip Takes a Trip to Hollywood Blvd. in Freak-Out Film Fest This Weekend
By Ann Magnuson
There's a bitchin' film fest this weekend at the fabulous Egyptian Theater (home to the American Cinematheque) featuring the historic happenings on the Sunset Strip and other hippie freak outs! My favorite of the flicks offered up is the 1967 classicThe Trip (see trailer above), directed by schlock-meister Roger Corman, written by Jack Nicholson (!!!) and starring a very dreamy and very young Peter Fonda. Co-starring Bruce Dern and, of course, Dennis Hopper. What fun these guys must've had making this! (How high do you think they were? Six miles and beyond I'd say.) I would be there but Granny is taking a trip herself -- to the naturally psychedelic desert instead. Have a great weekend ya'll!
Posted May. 22, 2007,
Summer of Love: Believe the Hype
By David Hershkovits
There's much ado being made about the Summer of Love, that glorious time in 1967 when anyone on the East Coast who smoked pot, opposed the Vietnam War, believed in free speech and free love, let their hair grow long, listened to rock music, believed in black liberation and wanted to have a good time looked west to San Francisco where the hippies of Haight Ashbury had created a youth culture utopia on the wings of LSD. As the media looks back on the 40th anniversary of that miracle moment, it's quick to remind us that it was not all love all the time that summer, as the meth-using street people came in to kill the buzz.
But for kids like myself living in New York and reading about it in the Village Voice and Time, it didn't much matter. It was still the experience of a lifetime, a defining moment that launched me into a world of possibility and magic. Sure there were bad trips, bad drugs and bad people but the vibes, man, the vibes. You had to be there! The San Francisco Chronicle is running a series of articles interviewing some of the people who were around then including Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, one-time digger now actor Peter Coyote, writer Paul Krassner, Steve Wozniak and many, many others. So don't believe the anti-hype.