Undergrowth Featured Blogs

A robust round table discussion first broadcast on the Munt Warning drug harm reduction show, River FM in Lismore, Northern NSW, Australia in Jan 2010. Featuring hosts Paul and Jackie Onassid, with guests experiential journalist Rak Razam, Aussie plant specialist Mulga, and youth culture representative Dylan Heller. What is the difference between entheogens and drugs and what role does DMT or Dimethyltryptamine straddle between the two as this archaic knowledge crests in the Western consciousness? Is DMT in danger of becoming a recreational street drug, as with the leaf extract known as "Changa"? What about the religious spiritual usage as with ayahuasca churches like Santo Daime? Can modern culture reclaim the sacred, and is DMT the vehicle for it? Does DMT take us to the realm we go to when we die? Is it a portal to God? Are there alien entities in the hyperspace it takes one to? And what good is the knowledge of the DMT experience when we come back? This debate covers the pros and cons, the dangers and the ineffable mysteries of DMT from a street level and a divine perspective and is invaluable listening for those psychonauts about to ingress, or those who are wondering about the merits of tryptamines themselves...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

In conversation with Mark McCloud, acid blotter art historian and 60s archivist in his home in the Mission district of San Francisco, August, 2009. In which experiential podcaster Rak Razam learns from the master about the colorful and mind-expanding history of blotter art, from the early acid chemist oufits like the "Ghost" and the underground crews that ran the business of enlightenment. Discover who first put artwork on blotter and how the process of dipping the chemical on artwork was evolved. Acid was originally dipped on string, sugar cubes–even underwear, in the case of Michael Hollingshead (who wrote the book The Man Who Turned On the World) before blotter paper was hit on as a mode of transportation. And then the artform really took off, originally with the chemists themselves choosing the art that would grace the minds of a generation of trippers. But how does the art influence the trip? Did trips like the "Gorbies" with Mikail Gorbachov heads help tumble the Berlin Wall? Why did the infamous Mickey Mouse Sorceror's Apprentice tabs terrify the Disney corp? Like the host in the Catholic mass, is blotter art a holy artform? An illuminating interview into the world's first edible art... This talk was transcribed and printed in part in Juxtapose magazine online.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

A Skype interview conducted in mid-2007, from which a feature article was printed in Australian Penthouse. Here experiential journalist Rak Razam interviews the prophet Raël, who may or may not be the messiah, or just a very naughty boy, to paraphrase Monty Python. Raël claims to have had a UFO encounter in 1973 where the Elohim (the original name in the Hebrew bible for the "sky people", later converted to "God" in Western translations) gave him the mission to be their last prophet on earth. Raël's mission is to build a space embassy in Israel (the third temple) to welcome the Elohim (and to provide sexy "Raël's Angel's" brides for our alien masters). Raël claims the Elohim created all life on earth through their super science and cloning, and that they hold the secret to eternal life. Far off in space with clones of Jesus, Mohammed and other luminaries, the Elohim watch us like a clip of "Cosmic YouTube", waiting for us to reach maturity. As whacked out as all this may sound, there are definite seeds of anthropological and mythological truth in what Raël says, and the lighthearted interview approach is a unique bro chat with perhaps the world's most controversial religious figure, head of the global free love and alien worshipping Raëlians... Beam us up, Raël!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

On December 30, 2009, Gus Dur (Indonesia's 4th President Abdurrahman Wahid), passed away in Jakarta. Mourners of all faiths and background gathered at his house in Ciganjur, Jakarta. The video shows the emotions of those who came to the house, and preparations for the following day's burial. There are also remarks from Gus Dur's friends and fans. Farewell, Gus!

Can ordinary people help save our planet under siege from environmental crises? What does it take to change attitudes and lifestyles to consume and waste less? In this Asian series, we profile six successful initiatives that combine knowledge, skills and passion to create cleaner and healthier environment through local action. The stories were identified from a regional competition in 2007, and produced in partnership with Asia Pacific Cultural Centre for UNESCO (ACCU)

EngageMedia went to Malaysia to join the festivity and spirit of the Freedom Film Festival in Kuala Lumpur where cross generation filmmakers, artists, activists and journalists gathered to express their ideas and concerns.

A programme that links schools with their local community helps Thai children learn about Nature through exposure and experience.

Displaced from traditional homelands by a natural calamity, an indigenous group is preserving their culture through theatre.

By inspiring discussion and debate, a community radio station helps Nepali communities to find the best solutions or compromises.

A small group is trying to transform learning in Laos by introducing play-and-learn activities in schools.

Timorese artist and actor (Balibo Five) Osme Gonsalves raps and combines the songs "Le'ule" & "Tupukur" about the harvest seasons. The Fataluku (Los Palos language) songs were usually sang by rice and corn farmers from ancestral periods and they did it while stomping on rice paddies to separate the seeds. "Le'ule" is like the Timorese "tebe-tebe" war song, and "Tupuku" means owl.

An illuminating conversation with experiential podcaster Rak Razam, Dylan Heller and Danny Horvath–the God Club–in which they discuss feeding the noosphere, blossoming divinity and the Western ego, and feeding back to the Source. Should we fear feeding and being fed upon by higher dimensional forces like lambs to the slaughter? Feeding heaven and feeding the earth... Should we shun the Hive mind or embrace the way the individual units make up the whole? How best to be conscious of the web of life we are all part of and feed into? Can we surrender into the larger collective organism? How to cope having the shell of you cracked open on the shores of heaven to reveal your God-nature within... in every moment... A species signal activation peaking in the gene pool... Discover the profound secret in the heart of all humanity in this intense episode of In a Perfect World...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

The end of the year grants us the opportunity to look back and remember which celebrities have died. That’s the truth. We like our death filtered through the spectacle of obscene wealth and fame and obscured by the low resolution of paparazzi images. We hold death at the distance of Myth, in order to comprehend it. And then we have a party and get really messed up.

New Year’s Eve is by definition, a funeral ritual, the means by which we sublimate our fear of death. It is our little Armageddon, where we rehearse the end of time. Even the annual firework display, seems to anticipate some spectacle of devastation, enclosing whole bridges in fire and smoke. Perhaps this is why I am clinically terrified of New Year's Eve, and why I haven’t really enjoyed it since 1991, when I was allowed to stay up and watch Clive James on television talking about which celebrities died during the year. It was the only day, as far as I can remember, on which I was allowed to watch T.V., a novelty that I’m still excited about.

The other day in Portugal, thousands of octopuses enacted their own little Armageddon, by washing up dead along a stretch of beach some 5 miles long. “Authorities have warned the public not to eat them.” A volcano, in other news, is threatening villagers and chimpanzees in the Congo with ash and molten lava. In this slightly morbid mood, such news put me in mind of a strange little Werner Herzog documentary my family and I watched this Christmas Eve, instead of going to midnight mass. “Waiting for an Inevitable Disaster” is Herzog at his most mythic, trespassing through a deserted Caribbean island town in the shadow of a smoldering volcano. Donkeys and dogs have taken over the streets. The traffic lights continue to change, a television plays from an abandoned house, but the rest of the town is eerily empty, silent, like some sort of science fiction set. Every boat has left the harbour, but the water, so we are told, is full of snakes that fled the mountains and threw themselves into the sea, to drown.

In 1902 the same volcano, La Soufriere, emitted identical warning signs before it wiped out the entire population, bar one. The only survivor ironically, so Hertzog tells us, was a criminal, “the badest guy in the Town” who was protected from the blast by the walls of his solitary confinement cell. The lucky man spent the next miserable years of his life as a touring curiosity. Herzog discovers three similar characters in the present tense who have decided, out of poverty or madness or profound spiritual acceptance, to stay behind and face their inevitable death. One such man lies under a tree with a cat, at the base of the Volcano. “God takes us all to him, not just me” he tells Herzog. “Why should I be afraid?”

Profound spiritual acceptance is something I tried practicing this New Years Eve. It’s like when the plane wobbles 33 000 feet above the earth, and your heart skips its beat and you’re able to think, for the longest second, “here it is, my death, welcome.” This year I didn’t get messed up. I stood on a beach in Wilson’s Promontory and watched the sky blacken, watched the pink lightning pulse on the horizon. When it grew dark we drove home through the blackness, slowly enough to avoid wombats, but too fast to avoid the frogs, as the road steamed in the rain. Then we watched channel nine present the Sydney Fireworks, the two onscreen presenters like Emissaries from hell. Afterwards, we lit sparklers and some sort of animal made a noise like a horse breathing heavily in the bush beside us. Then we went to bed and dreamt and woke up in the new decade.

I'm doing a poetry reading on Monday night with some other people. Details here if you're interested.





and a review here and here.

"And yet I am living, I have even discovered that I care about life. The more I have sometimes found reasons for putting an end to it the more I have caught myself admiring some random square of parquet floor: it was really like silk, like the silk that would have been as beautiful as water. I liked this lucid pain, as though the entire universal drama of it had then passed through me and I was suddenly worth the trouble. But I liked it in the light of, how shall I say, of new things that I had never seen glow before."

Andre Breton- from Preface for a Reprint of the Manifesto of Surrealism (1929)

For people in Dindigul in India's Tamil Nadu state, waste isn't really a problem - it's just a resource in the wrong place.

People living on and around Tonlé Sap lake, the largest in Cambodia, discover how to harvest fish and other sources within limits.

Sarawak Gone - the last forest communities of Sarawak struggle to maintain customary rights to land - a micro-docs series. Presented by Andrew Garton in association with SACCESS. Released online, February 2010.

This webisode focuses on the murder of the Balibo five and Jose Ramos-Horta last accounts of the journalists.