Hetty MacLise 1931-2011

Hetty MacLise (pictured right with her late husband Angus) speaks about ironing and 'those ghastly catalogues' in this video from 2007.

Hetty had a much greater story to tell. She was literally at the centre of the American avant gárde in the late 1960s and early 1970s as an artist, musician, poet and muse. She inscribed a brief memoir of the time on a blog that was updated in 2008 and 2009; http://www.phantomlyoracula.com/ -  from living with The Grateful Dead, performing in the underground art music scene of the time, early work with tape recorders, as a staff artist on The San Francisco Oracle (as Hetty McGee), traveling to India, Nepal, London and all over the USA and Canada, to the communes, city collective, working with the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol and as a mother to a recognized incarnate tulku lama. You can download a PDF of the full 73 pages of writing by Hetty about her life. There is music featuring Hetty here (along with her husband Angus (1938-1979). Hetty died in London on the 10th June 2011, aged 80.

Hetty played organ, tampura, and other instruments in the Universal Mutant Repertory Company, which played psychedelic drone trance music with an Indian flavor. One track by the Universal Mutant Repertory Company, "Heavenly Blue Pt. 4 & 5," appears in The Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda, a collection of musical endeavors in which Angus MacLise participated between 1968 and 1972. The 39-minute title piece, a live improvisation while Ira Cohen's Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda film played at St. Mark's Church in New York. It is not explicitly credited to the Universal Mutant Repertory Company, but the five musicians listed, including the MacLises, are the ones that comprised that group. The MacLise's work has made them bona fide legends among vintage psychedelia enthusiasts! Hetty and Angus produced a magickal child, a son by the name of Ossian. The couple moved to Kathmandu, Nepal where Ossian was later 100% recognized as a Tulku (an incarnation of Sang gyes Nienpa Trulku Rinpoche) at the Swayambu Buddhist Monestary by His Holiness, The Gyalwa Karmapa! A Tulku "literally means, an emanation body; a term used for the incarnations of Buddhas, Arya Bodhisattvas and Bodhisattvas, as well as for the reincarnations of spiritually achieved practitioners or Lamas"


Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda
Film by Ira Cohen. (1935-2011)