There exists in Melbourne an elusive community of artists, musicians, poets, flaneurs, fringe-dwellers, and radicals who have created a complex and dynamic social network which revolves around numerous converted-warehouse-come- arts-spaces, live-in-studios and grass-roots arts venues.

This is the rumbling in the underground. This book dares to capture the depth and charge of one of the most thriving creative hubs in the world, and thrusts its underground scene upon a national and global stage.

It reveals unseen aspects of Melbourne, and why it continues to be a haven for Australia’s independent arts and radicalism whose philosophy and lifestyles find expression in the city’s warehouse movements, its festivals, and in the enclaves of the rag-tag theatrical, musical and circus communities.

What has evolved is a significant social and artistic movement; an independent micro-society that organizes itself in accord with anarchistic principles and is without dogma or guiding manifesto. This unofficial community is bound together by the numerous, diverse, and ever changing arts-events which emerge from, and are usually held within, the communities venues. The result is colourful, energetic, vital, expressive, and rich, with events spanning decadent artist banquets, masked-balls, cabaret, theatre, visual art, and performance, which in retrospect, may be considered a signifificant contribution to Melbourne’s historical culture-scape, and could call forth a new generation of un-institutionalised artists capable of revitalizing and re-humanizing Melbourne’s Arts and Culture.

 http://thiscityspeakstome.com/

THE CUMBIA COSMONAUTS hail from a parallel dimension to ours, where Earth is more commonly known as La Terra. This world is similar to our own in many ways, except that the world's leading superpower is the United States of Mexico, a powerful socialist democracy that led the world into the space age back in 1969.

When Moses Estevez, the first man in space travelled on his maiden flight to the moon, this was the mixtape he made to fill the silence... We can only guess what happened as that tiny solar powered shuttle orbited La Terra, but upon returning he famously formed the CUMBIA COSMONAUTS with his fellow space crew, Carlos (Barons of Tang) and Soup (Editor).

Now, thanks to the interdimensional podcasting technology developed by SCATTERMUSIC Cooperatistas we on Planet Earth can hear the tunes that have kept that proud planet dancing into the next revolution.

Viva La Cumbia! Viva La Revolutione!

DOWNLOAD OR LISTEN HERE

Check more COSMONAUT launches through here

TUNE IN to real documentary footage from the CUMBIA COSMONAUTS first space mission here:

Recording from live VJ set of track 'Cumbia Incoming' by the Cumbia Cosmonauts. http://www.myspace.com/cumbiacosmonauts

2012: Time For Change screening PANEL DISCUSSION - Melbourne, March 2011 from Rak Razam on Vimeo.

 Undergrowth presents a fascinating discussion of new paradigms in environmental consciousness held after the Melbourne premiere screening of 2012:Time For Change in March 2011. Camera by Sam Hoffmann

Featuring guest speakers:

Neil Faragher – Green Technology Engineer at Centre of Education and Research into Environmental Strategies (CERES).

Matthew Wright, Director, Beyond Zero Emissions.  Matthew Wright is the lead author of the award-winning Zero Carbon Australia Plan, and 2010's Young Environmentalist of the Year. As Founder and Executive Director of not-for-profit organisation Beyond Zero Emissions, Matthew heads the fastest growing climate change research and development group in Australia. While previous environmental advocates have encouraged Australians to take action by changing their light globes, Matthew represents the next wave of leaders who show how we can change from the 19th century technology that runs our economy to 21st century solutions.   beyondzeroemissions.org/​


Nicholas Jouin – In 2009 Jouin went to California for a year and half to complete a long-term apprenticeship at Californian Institute of Earth Art and Architecture, learning new sustainable earth building techniques. He has since started a new project called Earth Kulture focusing on teaching and consulting in alternative practices for sustainable living. calearth.org/​

Doron Francis   is the Enterprise Manager  and co-creator of Fair Food, part of CERES, the thriving not-for-profit environmental education centre in the heart of Melbourne. Fair Food is an organic box  scheme that is leading the way as an alternative to the 'Supermarket way of doing business'  - Fair Food actively supports local farmers, encourages the use of regenerative farming and pays farmers a fair price for their efforts. Their distribution system seriously reduces food miles and being a non profit they are able to supply safe, spray free food for our community at reasonable prices.  From Seed to Plate, Fair Food is creating a ethical and resilient supply chain in these times of Food (in) Security.   ceresfairfood.org.au

Even Dawn is an accomplished singer, visual designer and artist, who's work is featured throughout the range of Mind-Heart Media products and Second Creation magazines promoting consciousness raising, new-paradigm media. She works with the Mayan-inspired "dreamspell" calendar and has produced a 'natural time navigator' almanac of mayan calendrics.
mindheartmedia.com/​kinship/​evendawn


Rak Razam is the cofounder of Undergrowth.org, and author of AYA: A Shamanic Odyssey, exploring the global culture of Ayahuasca shamanism.

http://www.rakrazam.com

MC –  Hugo  (Rap NEWS)   Hailing from Branksome in the UK, Hugo is a prolific rhymer and orator, MC and spoken-word poet who regularly graces the stages and festivals of Melbourne. Having spent six years rhyming and rapping, he now co-writes ~TheJuiceMedia: Rap News.   thejuicemedia.com/​

 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1862402066/the-brotherhood-of-the-screaming-abyss/

About this project

Summary

Terence McKenna is a legend in the psychedelic community:  He is remembered as a radical philosopher, futurist, raconteur, and cultural commentator.  He was and is one of the most articulate spokesmen for the post-psychedelic zeitgeist. He is one of the prime originators of the 2012 mythos with all its attendent apocalyptarian anxiety. I am the younger brother of Terence McKenna. I want to write a memoir telling the real story of our intertwined life together over the last 60 years, and of the ideas, adventures, and explorations (both inner and outer) that we shared. I am Terence’s only brother; I am the only one who can tell this tale, from this unique perspective. Terence died in 2000, but his ideas live on the Net and in his books (e.g. True Hallucinations, Food of the Gods, The Archaic Revival, The Invisible Landscape and others). The time has come to tell his story; in reality, it is our story.

Full Project Description

For those who lived through what is sometimes called the Psychedelic Revolution, Terence McKenna is a legend. Once characterized as ‘the intellectual’s Timothy Leary’ Terence attained iconic status as a radical philosopher, futurist, raconteur, and cultural commentator. His unorthodox ideas about the cultural, societal, and evolutionary impact of psychedelic drugs shocked many, and resonated with many others.  Our fateful expedition to the Amazon in 1971 together with a small coterie of fellow seekers bent on uncovering the real mystery behind the psychedelic experience has become contemporary myth, chronicled in his book, True Hallucinations. Terence’s unorthodox ideas about time and the nature of history that were triggered by those adventures provided fertile ground for the emergence of the current apocalyptarian mythos surrounding 2012, the eagerly anticipated (and/or dreaded) end of the world as we know it. Sadly, Terence died in 2000 from terminal brain cancer; he will never know if his ideas about 2012 and the end of time are true. But Terence has achieved a kind of virtual immortality.  Ghost-like, he haunts the Net; a talking head in Youtube space, the articulate prophet of an end-time that he did not live to see. His books are still read, (e.g. True Hallucinations, Food of the Gods, The Archaic Revival, The Evolutionary Mind, The Invisible Landscape and others), his voice and image is as close as the click of a mouse, his ideas, as fresh and timely as though they were uttered yesterday. He lives on as the beloved pater familias of a younger generation of psychedelic seekers; most of them were still in diapers when Terence was at the peak of his public career.

I am the younger brother of Terence McKenna. We grew up together in a small town in Western Colorado during the 50’s and 60’s; we traveled to the Amazon together in 1971, as brothers and friends, as fellow seekers. We called ourselves, self-mockingly, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (even on the cusp of uncovering the mysteries of existence we managed to keep a sense of humor; it helped to be Irish). We went in search of we knew not what; only that it was a profound insight, unspeakable, beyond comprehension, and that it would change us, and everything, forever.  We were right on both counts, though not in the ways we imagined.

Our trip to the Amazon in 1971 is chronicled in The Invisible Landscape, the book we co-authored and published in 1975 in an attempt to construct a rational explanation for the things that we experienced. Terence described the adventure again in True Hallucinations (HarperOne, 1994), more honestly, and with less technobabble, still with important elements elided, or deliberately omitted.  That expedition, and what has been memorialized in the annals of psychedelia as the Experiment at La Chorrera, was the pivotal event in both of our lives.  We were both young when it happened; Terence was a young man of 24; I was a mere lad of 20.  We have been haunted ever since by the memory of those curious events that overtook us in that primeval rainforest.

Terence McKenna only had one brother. I am that brother. I shared the entire span of his lifetime, collaborated with him in the creation and evolution of many of ‘his’ ideas.  Together we traveled to the ends of the earth, together we explored the outer limits of psychedelic experience seeking answers to the astonishing mysteries of time, mind, and the improbable reality of existence on earth.  During the decades that followed La Chorrera, we went on with our lives, at times together, at times separately. Terence became the spokesman for the alien dimensions accessed through psychedelics, the philosopher of the unspeakable, a beloved and sometimes reviled bard of the outer limits of human experience. By choice and inclination, I remained in the background, pursuing a career in science, disciplines that ranged from ethnopharmacology to neuroscience. 

Ever cognizant of the limitations of science, knowing that what had happened to us was unlikely to yield to rational investigation, nevertheless I continued to chip away around the edges of the mysteries that had so preoccupied us at La Chorrera.  Terence departed this corporeal plane in April 2000 while I remained behind to witness the opening decade of the third millennium, a millennium that, by all early indications, will be far stranger, far more disturbing, and far more full of both hope and despair than any that humanity has endured so far.

As our troubled planet spirals toward the singularity point of December 21st, 2012, I feel compelled to tell our story.  It is a story that only I can tell, and the time has come.  Whether or not 12/21/2012 will mark the collapse of the continuum, global catastrophe, a new era of enlightened consciousness, or merely a small tremor in the psychic evolution of the human species, I do not know; nor, I venture to say, does anyone.

This story needs to be told, and I need your help to tell it. This is my reason for posting this project on Kickstarter.com. Through the unique funding mechanism of Kickstarter.com, I am seeking help from friends and fans of "Terry & Denny" and members of the psychedelic community to enable me to write this story. The unfortunate reality in these days is that time is money. Many of us spend so much time just trying to get by that we don’t have time for the creative projects that we would all rather be doing. I'm caught in this trap, as are a lot of people.  But with your support, I’m seeking a temporary escape; I’m seeking to buy the time to tell the tale that I know I have to tell.  I’m betting that it’s one that many people will want to hear, whether they lived through the psychedelic revolution of the sixties or are younger members of the new psychedelic renaissance, or are simply curious about one of the stranger tales of the latter 20th century.  If you think this is a tale worth telling, if you would like to read it, then help me ‘clear the decks’ by pledging your support in exchange for one or more of the incentives listed on the project website. 

As I sit here in April 2011, thinking about the time line for the project, my goal is to have the book completed and available to the world by the end of September 2012.  How will these funds be used?  My goal is to raise $80,000, which may sound like a lot, and it is.  Approximately half of it (35 to 45 thousand) will be used to self-publish 10,000 hard cover copies of the book, and also to pay for editing, layout, publicity, and order fulfillment.  I have identified a reputable self-publisher who will work closely with me through all stages of this process.  The remainder of the funds (35 to 40 thousand) will be used to buy time, to partially defray expenses over the 9 to 12 months that I estimate it will take to research and write the book in a way that does justice to the story. If you want to contribute to the realization of this creative project, and receive something very special in return, then I respectfully request your support.  I promise you a ripping good read!

Project location: Marine On St Croix, M

I.

staring into a big fire makes me remember things.  there's a lot of music in all the snap-crack and popping.  you never see the same shapes twice, that's for sure.

the heat from this fire is fantastic.  i'm way up the other side of the valley now, and i can still feel it.  i can still see it. it is, as i’ve said, fantastic.

0 0 0

my parents met at the aquarius festival and fell in love and eventually bought this land that i am standing on now.

my parents gave themselves new names when they bought this place.  invented a ceremony, with candles and bush flowers.  there’s photos somewhere.

they decided to call me tractor.  my parents just liked the sound of it.  if i was born a girl i would have been called petrol.  my mother reckoned if you repeated it enough it sounded like a flower.

0 0 0   

they educated me here in the valley, raised me on rabbits and wheat grass and chick peas, let me paint on the walls and express myself verbally.  my mother would tell me all the bird's names and my father would tell me which trees they ate from and we would go and inspect the trees and bushes that grew out of the various squirts of bird shit. my father was fascinated by that.  we had trees and mushrooms and birds that we loved individually each day as a family.

my father taught me a great respect for plants, trees especially.  'each one is as important as you or me.' 

we would have a nightly bathing ritual in the dam and dry ourselves around the fire and make up stories and sing and my mother would tell us our future.

0 0 0

i remember one night sunbeam was wearing this little mini skirt she had made out of rabbit skins and moondoggy said, 'i should make myself a fox suit.  then you could dress up like a rabbit and hide in the blackberries and i could come and search you out,' as he rips off her rabbitskin and spreads her on the table, 'skin-a-bunny,' he says.

'ah, skin-a-bunny!' she shrieks.

'yeah,' i say from behind the telescope, 'skin-a-bunny.'

there were no doors in our house, they just didn't build them.

0 0 0

my mother predicted many things, but she did not foresee the big iron bark tree that grew tall and straight for two hundred years only to fall on them while we were out for our nightly stroll.

it was a stormy night alright and the wind was blowing cold and bloody fury and we were walking up to the other side of the hill to get a better look at the lightning. 

one moment they were walking beside me and the next they were not and the tree was there instead.  i didn't even have to bury them.  and the spooky thing is, the tree didn't die.  it was only half uprooted. it's grown even bigger since it swallowed my parents.  i pretend to believe that the tree fell on them for a reason.

mum and dad always said that they wanted to be buried under trees and now they are.  my parents death was not as great a shock as you might expect because my father said that we will all die someday, somehow.  that it was best to meet death in good spirits, with a good sense of humour.

i think people have forgotten that we live here.  nobody visits.  nobody seems to miss my parents except me.

                    II

i've got this big telescope i use for looking at birds but right now i can see people camped out in tepees, babies shitting into the dirt, dogs licking sleeping faces.  the bush around here is full of these strange new creatures.

one day there was just a hill there and then the next day there were all these panel vans and kombi vans and tepees and i had heard my parents talk about the circus and i thought that maybe the circus had come to my little valley. 

and they made this huge fire and all joined hands and everyone was juggling and breathing fire and walking backwards over hot coals and whatever.

and it was a good show, i enjoyed it at the time.  but they have stayed.  maybe a year.  more maybe.  they have half built shacks, they have doubled their tepee circle.  they have cooked and danced and reproduced and bashed each other up and stolen from each other and whatever.  i've been watching it all through my telescope from this side of the hill.  i can see everything. 

they all look so small from where i'm standing.  i can fit the birdman’s head between my thumb and forefinger.  i can squash his head in my fingers like a pea.  that's something my father used to do, squash my head between two fingers through one eye.  ‘i'm squashing your head like a pea,’ he would say.

0  0  0

all the people that live over on the other side of the hill are crazy.  they bought this huge shipment of acid.  it was so cheap.  sunbeam always said that most things are cheaper when you buy a lot of them but this was ridiculously cheap.

my parents made sure i knew all about lsd and marijuana and heroin and whatever.  they wanted me to be prepared for every situation.

so when the birdman came down and asked me if i wanted to buy some acid i told him what moondoggy told me.  i told him what i will tell you.  lsd is just a government experiment abandoned in the late 60's.  the lsd all came from one person.  he was paid by the cia to grow his hair long and go out into the streets with sheets and sheets of free lsd. 

the cia is a curious organisation.  the cia wanted to see what happened and then they changed their minds.  that's the way my father told it.  they didn’t know what to do.  they were tripping.

0 0 0

my parents told me that each batch of acid has a different design or logo, like a dancing test tube, or strawberries or a smiling budha.  like when they first met each other, moondoggy was on a very sophisticated gelatine clear light, while sunbeam was under the influence of some kind of bogus brown paper acid, the type the government warns you about.  she thought she was an insect, my father took her under his wing.  found her a cup of orange juice.  danced a slow dance that lasted until breakfast.

there were no doors, no secrets in the house my parents built.  my father had sex with many women and even another man, who my mother also had sex with.

'moondoggy isn't your real father', she told me one night around the fire.  she told me about bj the big fat biker that wiggled and jiggled and came inside her.  she was too jazzed by all the bogus brown acid, she can't remember much about it.  she remembers that bj was giving away the acid for free.

0 0 0

so when the birdman told me that the acid came from a big fat biker, i instantly thought of moondoggy and that big iron bark tree.

0 0 0

when buying the acid, the birdman had asked the biker what kind of trips they were.  he wanted to know if they were strawberries or microdots or purple ohms or whatever.

it wasn't even acid.  it was a completely different set of chemicals altogether, juggled in the bath by the big fat biker.   he just threw it all in there and stirred.

and the birdman said 'well i never heard of a big fuzzy smoo.  what do they do?'

0 0 0

the bfb didn't care what happened to the birdman or his friends.  he had no interest in his experiment once he had their money in his fat little fist.

so perhaps that is why i am recording this information.  i am taking over the bfb's abandoned experiment.

0 0 0

i can hear them up there on the hill doing the war dance.  big fuzzy smoos have fried their brains but they're still taking them.  they are out in the rain beating on their bongo drums.

they have a dam over on the other side of the hill but i have never seen one of them take a bath in it.

i can't understand why they don't wash.  i mean, moondoggy had dred-locks but he managed to keep them clean.  but this one guy i am observing today, his hair has a life of its own.  i can see the individual insects jumping around in there and i am nearly a mile away.

the birdman actually wears parts of dead animals, i mean sunbeam used to make jewellery out of bones and teeth and whatever but she let the ants eat the flesh off first.  the birdman has these goat horns embedded in two of his biggest dreds, he has a dried out cow's tail attached to the bum of his jeans.  he has a waistcoat made out of a dog.  it's like he's the prince of flies, i can see them individually through the telescope.

the feral kids have been chasing him around the tepees.  pulling his tail off again. 

0 0 0

he has come to visit me, i see him walking down the track a mile away.  i pull a blanket over the telescope and walk outside.

he wants to know something, or wants to trade something, i don't know.  he wants to sell me a big fuzzy smoo.  yeah, he wants ten dollars for it and that's pretty cheap, he says. 

i am looking at the birdman’s dried up cows' tail.  it is all muddy and tattered, it is hanging off his bum on one, maybe two threads.  he sees me looking and stiffens up and takes a breath. 

'those little snot munchkins,' he says, 'little buggers.' 

i go inside and get a needle and some thread and he stitches his tail back on.  he asks me again if i want any of that acid and i tell him again that i don't.

and i've only just found out what a tractor is, i've never seen one.  the birdman tells me: a tractor is a mechanical pig: they dig up fields, knock down trees, they are horrible, destructive things.  i am really beginning to wonder what my parents were thinking when they gave me this name.

i give the birdman ten dollars anyway and he says that i had better take a big fuzzy smoo then.  and i tell him again that i don't want one, that the money is a gift.  i don't know why, but he seems so disappointed.  it's like i've insulted him.

i make a pot of tea and we talk for an hour or so.  the birdman keeps pointing behind my shoulder and when i look there is nothing there.  then i notice, some sort of fuzzy energy coming out of his fingertips, shooting out at me in all these colourful streamers.   

then it hits me.  the awkwardness creeps up from my feet.  my feet are so far away.  i'm shrinking in my chair as if i am on the edge of a great cliff.  a terrible vertigo.  the birdman dancing to the bongo drums in slow motion, throwing back his head and laughing.        

i turn all jaded and mean and i mean business.  i grab the axe and turn to the birdman, but he flies away giggling, shedding feathers.  i follow him up to the iron bark tree, but lose him in the branches.  he breaks apart into crows, crumbles.  i don't know which one is which.  he must have slipped a big fuzzy smoo into my tea when i wasn't looking.

so i just start hacking away at the tree and the birds all scatter, i hack away and hack away.  i cut the tree for killing my parents and i cut my leg, i split the axe handle, bleeding all my blood into the wound in the trunk, bleeding all these bloody sweaty stinking tears, getting all these sparks and flashes in tunnel vision, through the wrong end of the telescope; trapping feral cats with my father, collecting blackberries with my mother and sleeping in the same bed and telling stories and massaging each others brains and the sun bounces off the creek beats my egg shell brain and i dry out and crack open and cry out for sunbeam and scream out blue and solid for moondoggy. 

slowly, all those birds come back peeping, poking through leaves.  hanging around me in the iron bark branches like i'm not even there.  i am not myself.  not a plant or animal.   just some sort of fungus or lichen growing out of the bark, i hear water in the creek, a dragon fly grinds its chasse against my ear.

0 0 0

my parents money and property has always been in my name, they decided on my name before i was even born.  tractor hamilton-burn, there was great debate about burn-hamilton and in the end it was up to the fate of two bob, that's what my father called a twenty cent piece.  two bob.  they had worked out my whole life for me.  they knew that if something happened to them; if they became insane with jealousy, or were divorced, or murdered, then i could live here in security until i was grown.  i could sell the property, cash in the last crop and have enough money for adventures and meeting people.

i've sold it to the real estate agents in the next valley. 

my parents were very clever for giving me such an unusual name.  i mean, it's the first time i lay eyes on my namesakes, the top of the hill is humming with tractors and bulldozers, swarming with workmen in utes.  the birdman was correct, tractors are horrible destructive things, tearing down the trees with chains and hammers, stacking them against the fallen iron bark.  my parents could have called me 'real estate agent', or 'chainsaw', or 'drunken yobbo bastard'.

they hired private detectives to eliminate the birdman.  they sewed him up in a drug sting, hauled the women and crying babies away in police cars.

the tractors and bulldozers cut up the valley like a quilt. each square is worth more individually than as a whole.  sunbeam always said, most things are cheaper if you buy them in bulk, but this is ridiculous.  i ask the real estate agent to pay me in lobsters.  i tell him, 'that's what my dad used to call twenty dollar notes, lobsters.'  the agent gives me a suitcase of them.

all the workmen knock off around dusk, knock the ears off their stubbies,  spread out their bluey jackets, sit perched on eskies, listening to radios.  the pile of trees becomes a fiery monster with all this hooting and hollering and screaming.  the noise is fantastic.  the sky churns with smoke and screaming birds.  i can feel the blaze on my face and i am nearly a mile away.   

Eric Yoshiaki Dando (ericdando.com) was born in Tokyo in 1970 but now lives in Melbourne. He is the author of the novels Snail (Penguin, 1996) and Oink, Oink, Oink (2008). His short fiction has been published in Sleepers Almanac, The Age, Vice Magazine and Australian Goat World.

For more see ericdando.com and also ebooks of poetry and short stories: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ericdando

Anti-authoritiarian, insightful, controversial, conscious and beautiful, HUNGRY BEAST is by far the best thing on Australian television. Streets ahead of any other yoof oriented programming, this group of clever kids are single handedly carving out a new form of cultural creativity on the box.

Hard to compare it to anything else around because the truth is, there isn't anything else like it on television. Think John Safran meets The Chaser in a Monty Python Flying Circus reality TV show and maybe we're getting close.

Blurring the lines between culture jamming, current affairs, documentary, satire and framed in slick motion graphics by the wunderkind Patrick Clair - HUNGRY BEAST is pioneering some kind of new gonzo TV that everyone should see and support.

If there was more of this kind of thing on our televisions, then maybe we might actually watch them again.

Find out more about the show and check out old episodes here:
http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au

A beautiful visionary video art animation by Venezuelan/Australian filmmaker and painter Victor Holder. The REBIRTH OF RESONANCE depicts the soul's journey between two distant lands and the interior journey through the resonance of other dimensions, such as the dreaming.

"I believes everything in the universe, our mind, body, feelings, and soul resonate with all that exists. Nothing is separated. All is one soup of energy and sounds. Our soul can not be contained by geographical frontiers or by man made oppressive and rigid systems." - Victor Holder

 http://www.victorholder.com.au/

THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS

is the bastard love child of yin and yang,   

is an audiovisual smorgasbord full of multi-sensual fingerfood,

is an instrumental chaos theory funnelled through the troppo order

is the aesthetics of escapees from the illusion of pigeonholes,

is a dionysian bacchanal channeled through beethoven's broken hearing aid,

is the pulsing psychedelic tinted gramophone of a heartbeat's manifesto,

is the sound of digital battling analogue in a second life pagan corroboree,

is the impromptu live jazz experimental jamming of evolution's ad libido,

is an orgiastic ritual conducted by the random number generator inside the pineal gland,

is the primitive technology born from the nascent heartbeats of futuristic savages

is a multidimensional surround sound and vision installation performance art piece that you are living right now, right here, always,

is a mystery within a riddle within a rubiks cube,

is beyond categories,

...it just is….

DEBUT PERFORMANCE @ HAPPY YESS, Darwin City 

Friday the 6th of May 2011

Doors open 9pm

Live taoist audiovisual laboratory commences from 10pm

 {NOTHING IS FORBIDDEN - EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED}

:::Contents:::

1/ cover/ Steven Mann 6/ open sourcery / tim parish 12/ an interview with shelly innocence/ undergrowth editorial 20/ under the skin/ rak razam 28/ nodes of conflict/ andrew lowenthal 38/ survival of the prettiest/ tom doig 46/ telefuck/ rak razam 52/ media jacking/ hugh mcginlay 57/ milky chewy bars/ sonicboy + james riches 66/ eat this information/ tim parish 77/ father joe/ joseph gelfer 80/ telestreets/ luther blisset 88/ escape from toxcity / floyd davis 96/ mantra for an open universe/ rak razam 102/ we were in the bubble/ tim parish

To download the PDF issue simply click on the attachment below. To browse sample jpegs of the issue click on the jpegs in the box below.

From:     Bear <the-bear@thebear.org>
Subject:     Re: STOP THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT MAKING PLANTS ILLEGAL
Date:     21 January 2011 5:45:38 PM AEDT
To:     Rak Razam <shazaman@netspace.net.au>

Utter nonsense!

ALL DRUGS MUST BE LEGALISED (I do NOT mean 'decriminalised) AT ONCE. Leave aside the absolutely ludicrous idea that ANY plant can be made illegal, the drug prohibition has spread the use of all kinds of drugs to nearly everyone on the planet.  In 1937 .03% of the US population used pot, today it is around 80-90%.

And why not? Literally millions deal drugs, the highest paying enterprise on earth, even open to kids.

But most importantly drug prohibition is the SINGLE cause of the present financial meltdown!  What do you think the 'Mafia' do/did with those trillions/year?  Well you can't keep all that in cash, so it had to be used to buy things, BIG things, like multinational corps.  Over 80% of teh ownership of all the biggest corps (banks, loan companies, Transamerica, Halliburton, etc) are owned by a mere handful of (the same) people.  So it is not surprising that they all were acting like street hoods- that is the Mafia way.  Every cent in 'stimulus buys more drugs, and of course drugs cost nearly nothing, they are PLANTS and plant products- the 'price' is a DELIVERY FEE, very like gambling- it drains the life out of teh community and spawns wars and so on.

Any and all commodities that are in trade, MUST be in legal, normal trade.  NO BLACK MARKETS can exist in today's world.

The original and ONLY reason for this prohibition is/was to REPLACE the alcohol prohibition with one which targeted USERS, so the corrupt cops did not have to bust those who were paying them (embarrassing to say the least!).

Those who think that it is acceptable to ENLARGE this stupidity need a good talking to.

I suggest you make a print-out of my essay "Win the War..." (I need to update the title to 'A Practical Solution'- please use this title).

Cheers.

Bear

A Practical Solution to Prohibition

In the effort to "control" drug use, the approach taken on an international scale has been to prohibit even the use and possession of many materials. This model is the "American" one. That this approach is a failure has been widely noted by many prominent and even conservative commentators. The use of substances which alter in various ways the conciousness of man, is an extremely ancient and established practice, in spite of the belief of those who feel their moral views are the ones which should be imposed on all humanity. The use of draconian legal laws as deterrents, to attempt to eliminate ("control") drug use has already led to the widespread development of a powerful and dangerous black market, and in fact, any further movement in this direction will have the following inevitable results:




1. The use and distribution of drugs of all kinds will increase in direct relation to the increase in penalties. The penalties represent the "degree of risk" to the supplier.



2. The price on the street will also increase, removing ever larger amounts of money from the legitimate economy.



3. The number of dealers on the street will increase, especially those targeting the most vulnerable of our society- in particular, children. 



4. Dangerous infectious diseases such as AIDS and hepatitis will increase, perhaps to epidemic proportions. At the same time, many more users will die of overdoses and blood infections due to the unknown purity and concentration of the drugs as furnished.



5. Crimes will increase, especially property crimes like burglary and armed robbery.



6. The increased flow of money into the criminal element will increase the likelihood of police corruption to the point where it will become the norm.



7. All political systems will be placed under great corrupting influence as the elements profiting from the money-for--nothing drug trade use their funds to buy influence to maintain the level of prohibition.



8. Our systems of taxation, already stretched to the limit to provide services will be threatened with collapse in the attempt to imprison all the people who will be convicted and require incarceration.



9. The lure of "easy money" will entice many perfectly ordinary citizens to become criminal cultivators in order to make ends meet (interested persons are urged to examine the American Broadcast Company News Special "Pot of Gold", Peter Jennings, reporter, on marijuana cultivation in the USA. Aired on 13 March 1997. and available on video from the ABC).




10. The money paid for drugs is not based on the real value of the drugs themselves, but is based on the risk of delivery, which in turn is the result only of the law. This presents us with an economic crisis of enormous impact, wherein a person with no skills, experience or education can have an income (tax-exempt), greater than the highest paid individual in the entire industrial world. Such a situation destroys the mutually agreed upon basis of modern society, which is the assumption that a person is rewarded, or remunerated in direct relation to their contribution to the economic whole.



There are other important factors which figure into the wider picture in a negative way, such as the outflow of money to pay for the illegal importation of many of the drugs in use, which affects the balance of trade in a way that is impossible for even the experts to compensate for. Consider also the hazards to agriculture to farmers everywhere of the smuggler's importation of large amounts of plant material such as marijuana without quarantine inspection, which could conceivably lead to the local introduction of serious pests and diseases, possibly damaging agriculture, livestock, and wildlife. Some proposals suggest that a person who is cultivating a certain amount of marijuana plants be sentenced to life in prison. This is for an activity no more difficult nor unusual than growing a field of tomatoes. This seems hardly the sort of action worthy of any democratic nation.



All of the drugs which are used in a recreational way by people are either plant materials, or are derived from plants. These plants have been a part of the life on this planet as long as man has, perhaps even before we became recognizably human. All of these drugs have had traditional, sometimes ritual use among humans for uncountable ages. Until the first decades of this century there were no prohibitions against the use of any of them. During this long period there seem to have been few problems associated with drug use. Almost all of the problems relating to drug use seem to have been the result of only two factors, advertising and prohibition. Opium was employed in the 19th century by Great Britain to subjugate China. The use of opioids in India is of ancient origin, and like the cannabis, caused no harm in the traditional setting, but transplanted to China under a form of prohibition, the effects were devastating. In the US, the sales of "patent medicines" containing paregoric and other opium extracts as cure-alls, which were heavily advertised as a feel-good cure for anything that ailed you, led to widespread addiction, and resulted in the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914, which required that all narcotic containing medicines be subject to a doctor's prescription.



The Volstead Act and the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution, passed in 1919, showed the Mafia how valuable prohibition was as a tool for making cheap things yield vast profits. With the end to prohibition, marijuana was made a model to prohibit all possession and use of any substance as well as production and distribution, (which were the only proscribed acts in the Volstead law). These laws all originated in the United States and were then exported to the rest of the world through the coercive powers the US wields through its economic threat of withholding foreign aid. In this way all the members of the United Nations were induced to sign the Single Convention on Drugs, thereby creating a world-wide black market for the drug trade. No one has had the temerity to oppose this "law", even the Dutch still officially honour the treaty, although they don't enforce its provisions. Of course, in order to implement the removal of drug prohibition, some brave country must stand up as an adult in the world community and repudiate this unreasonable treaty. Perhaps the origin of this prohibition movement was the Puritan tradition of forbidding "sin", but it has since been pre-empted and maintained by the drug traders themselves. Without the laws there would be no lucrative trade.



The problems with alcohol and tobacco, as well as addictive gambling, are the direct result of advertising, which may be looked upon as a coercive behaviour, and is often laced with misinformation and the suppression of information about the consequences of usage. We generally have a habit of confusing the "speech" of advertising with the "speech" meant in the phrase "freedom of speech", which refers to the right to freely express one's opinion in the political sense. Advertising is not the act of expressing an opinion, but is used in facilitating the acquisition of money, and needs to be controlled, so that coercion is not used to encourage practices which may be harmful in their consequences.



Leashes are employed to make dogs behave, and Society has the responsibility to limit coercive behavior to ensure the public is protected from the unscrupulous. This is made very clear by the behavior of the big tobacco companies with regard to the hazards of smoking. In the following sections it is to be understood that none of the items in either Category "A" or Category "B" may be advertised by anyone in any way, either directly or indirectly. This applies to the government owned lotteries as well. The principle here is to not encourage behavior while not prohibiting it.



The laws of the last 60 years prohibiting drugs have led to very widespread drug use, and almost total disregard for the genuine and useful laws of society. In the days while I attended high school, 1949 to 1952, I never heard the word "marijuana" nor, as delinquent as I was at times, did I even know anyone who used any sort of drug. It was at least ten years before there was any visibility to marijuana and other drugs in the general public arena of the USA.




Having said this, I wish to put forward the following proposal as a solution which I hope will be seriously considered. This is based on the Dutch approach, but is far more complete and coherent. I believe that we are now presented with a unique opportunity for some brave country to lead the world in eliminating this disastrous prohibition, which may very well be threatening the survival of all of humanity's social fabric. The operant principle here is harm minimization. The best laws are always the simplest.




An outline for the reform of present laws on drugs and their use.



First, the entire designation until now called "illegal drugs" needs to be divided into two classes, much as the drugs used in legitimate medicine are divided, into those which are freely available to any adult person, as are the over-the-counter products, and those which require medical advice and/or supervision, such as the prescription drugs.

Category A



This category includes all plants and crude plant derivatives including tobacco, opium and hashish, alcohol and (although not a drug per se) gambling. Including, but not limited to all plants containing the substances psilocybin, ergoline alkaloids, mescaline, cannabinoids, opioids, nicotine, caffeine, ecgonines (coca alkaloids) and ethanol. Although it is not a "drug", I believe the costly, socially disruptive and frequently addictive practice of gambling should also be grouped in this category, since "problem gamblers" often require counselling and rehabilitation, which is similar to that needed by people with problems controlling their use of drugs. Here too, advertising never mentions the odds against winning.




Category B



This includes all the chemical and highly purified products, whether derived from natural materials, or synthetic. Whether currently used in medicine, or not.

These two categories would then be dealt with in the following fashion.




Those in Category A:

 The plants and materials in this category would be permitted freely to be grown, processed, possessed, and used by an individual for the personal use of that person and immediate family, but cannot be sold. A small fee must be paid on a yearly basis by those exercising this right.



Individuals may, however apply and be granted a license to produce these materials for sale to others, provided they are of good character, and pay a licensing fee. All the sales made under this provision will have a small fee attached at the point of sale. These fees are not tax, and cannot be transferred to general revenue. All such revenue derived from this fee must be used in the following manner by government: A portion of all fees collected under this rule will be set aside for education, detoxification and rehabilitation, and the remainder will be passed on to the health service to help with defraying the costs of treatment of the increased number of ailments which are the result of such drug use. In this way the system is prepared to deal with any problems, by making it "pay its own way".



Those in Category B:

 The material in this category may only be bought and used under the supervision and/or authority (prescription) of a medical practitioner, but otherwise are not restricted. The same licensing and fees for producers and sales as in Cat. A will apply.



Educational, detox and rehabilitation facilities must be well funded, staffed and available to anyone who needs them. A drug-user's equivalent of "driving licenses" could be required for the Cat. B (and perhaps also for Cat. A users). This license would take the form of a required course in the effects, dosage, hazards and health risks, followed by a test and the issuance of an ID card similar to that issued to road vehicle operators. The user is then informed of all the pertinent facts. Both categories would require that the user be an adult.



A requirement might also be made that a person who wishes to use the psychedelics be a member of a support group which should have a trained psychological worker associated with it. 

An important principle is that the fees are kept reasonable and do not represent a "sin tax" mentality, so as not to raise the price too high and re-establish the black market. Drugs and gambling are not of benefit to society and governments must not derive revenue from them, otherwise there is little motivation for the powers to discourage the practice.



Other drugs under consideration for prohibition, like anabolic steroids, must be returned to the medical community so as to destroy the growing international black market in these substances.



It is important to realize that ALL black markets are dangerous to the public health, damaging to the economy, corrupting to officials, and create a basis for crime. Honest democratic governments must never knowingly act to create situations which will allow black markets to develop, no matter how reasonable the impulse to do so seems at the time. It is also important to understand that legalizing the use of drugs will not encourage more people to use drugs, nor will it, as many have proclaimed, "send a message" to youth that drug use of any kind is approved of by society.

Legendary acid chemist and sound engineer Bear Owsley Stanley died after an automobile accident in Australia on March 13, 2011. A statement released on behalf of Stanley's family said the car crash occurred near his home in Queensland. He is survived by his wife Sheila, four children, eight grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. John Perry Barlow, former Grateful Dead lyricist  described Stanley as an "Acid King, Annealer of the Grateful Dead, and Master Crank" who "died with his boots on." His legacy changed the world, and he will be sorely missed...