The Swedish Mountains and the Men who Ride Them

Kebnekajse - Leksands Skänklåt (Live Nyhetsmorgon 2009)


Fläsket Brinner - Gånglåten
Swedish radio recordings 1970-75 Just The Music!


Träd Gräs och Stenar - Sanningens Silverflod


Pärson Sound - "Milano" (1969)


Archimedes Badkar - Wago Goreze (Edit)
From"Badrock For Barn I Alla Aldar"(1st / 1975) "Archimedes Badkar" was formed in Stockholm in 1972.

Robert Gardner: Forest of Bliss

Forest of Bliss from Documentary Educational Resource on Vimeo.

Robert Gardner's masterly film about Varanasi in India, Forest of Bliss (1986), does not need to be improved in any way, but with no commentary or score, it can be augmented without permanently affecting the pristine original. Gardner may have been an outsider, a visitor to Varanasi, but Forest of Bliss shares the same meditative, low-key style of Sleep Furiously. He can afford to be low-key because Varanasi is one of the most intense, visually intoxicating, delirium-inducing places on Earth. While sparing us none of the city's routine unpleasantness – a bloated corpse floating in the river, shit everywhere – the film is full of spellbinding images of the Ganges bathed in mist and of the burning ghat at Manikarnika. Baraka and Powaqqatsi both drop by or zoom in on Varanasi; Gardner offers a lingering, almost homely view of the day-to-day sacred divinity as resident landlord and (sometimes noisy) neighbour. The tacit message, in Hindi (rather than Hopi) might be "Way of life that never changes."


Robert Gardner in Mexico.


"Forest Of Bliss" Ecovillage Varanasi India

Jefferson Airplane - The Rock Scene (1967)

Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit (The Rock Scene, 14 Sept 1967)


Jefferson Airplane - Two Heads (The Rock Scene, 14 Sept 1967)


Jefferson Airplane - Ballad Of You And Me And Pooneil (The Rock Scene, 14 Sept 1967)

Incapacitants - Live In Tajima, Fukushima, 25. AUG, 1991

Classic Japanese noise. Beautiful.

Rock Arena: John Cale 1986

Interview with John Cale by Suzanne Dowling, Ep 63. Broadcast 16th September 1986.

Burning Man: Art in the Desert

A. Leo Nash in an artist and photographer. Burning Man: Art in the Desert is a photographic document of the Burning Man Festival assembled by Nash over the course of more than a decade.

Nostalia 101: What Happened in 1989?

I just discovered Rembrandt Pussyhorse by the Butthole Surfers on Spotify. Listening to it now takes me back in a big way. While it was Hairway to Steven (1988) that got me into the Surfers, anything before the somewhat lackluster PIOUHGD from 1991 is gold, even today as I age and wither.


The Butthole Surfers, before the whole Nirvana, Lollapalooza and the its-so-cool-to-be-aphasic thing was launched on the world, were the real deal. They did not make sense. The music was offensive and the lyrics worse. I still have a T-shirt from their 1991 tour and it makes my son embarrassed just to look at it (Mr Pee Pee the sailor and the sick clown in the raincoat). To like the Surfers was to be the kid that was avoided on the bus. University was made up of those that spoke to teachers, those that did work, those that walked tall and proud and us few Surfers fans (like about 12 people on a campus of thousands in 1989 in rural Australia). We felt different on the inside.

Butthole Surfers - Florida

We knew little about the Surfers in 1989. We made up stories, like they toured Mexico in a bus for a year. The dancer really had scales:





Double Live was a revelation. A housemate had it and played it non-stop for weeks. At the beginning of 1989 I was so disturbed by the record I banged on the wall begging him to stop. By the end of 1989 I owned a copy of it myself. A lot changed in 1989 for me.


The Butthole Surfers-Hey

Hosted by eSnips

Cheerub. Driving an allnighter (bullfighter, lamplighter moonlighter highlighter) to Sydney from Toowoomba. A thousand ks in the dull rain. Cups and wrappers and butts litter the dash. Windscreen wipers chug over cracked glass. Towns with unpronounceable names slide by our frosted glass and the Surfers cough out the sounds of what we wanted when we arrived in the metropolis at sunrise. Coming in over the bridge as Newtown breakfasts beckon.



In March 1991 I and my then-girlfriend and two friends hatched a fiendish plan in Brisbane. We borrowed a friend's car, a Datsun 120Y, saying we needed it for the weekend to move furniture (in a 120Y??). We fueled it up and split for Sydney. It is 1000kms. the car was painted orange but our friend had painted huge multicolored flowers and butterflies all over it. In Tamworth we stopped for fuel and the people at the garage said in a thick drawl "Yous aint from round here are ya?" "Nah we aint." We arrived in Sydney and spent a week around the dives and pubs of Newtown. We went to a party above shops on King Street. Hung out at the Sandringham Hotel. And on my 22nd birthday I saw the Surfers play.



While we were having fun in the big city the owner of the car and her boyfriend had become a bit concerned. They tried to find us and failed. Working out what we had done hey reported the car stolen. We drove the now-hot-car back to Brisbane and left it in their yard at 4am. Running from the scene of our crime.


Yup, we weren't allowed to say their name on the air back then! Aired 12-23-85.

My dog was named Gibby after the singer of the Surfers. Best dog a man could ask for. On our way to see the Surfers play at St George's Hall in Newtown, some of our company, not having tickets, tried to sneak in the back way to get in. At the door was none other than Gibby, singer with the Surfers. From a distance I saw him push the intruders out the door, saying the words savagely "I win. You lose."

(Spelling mistakes are intentional in reference to the fanzines that sustained so much street and minority culture in the 1980s and 90s)

Leary at Millbrook Under the Influence of McLuhan 1968

Tim Leary at Millbrook - Interview (Part 1) by Bodhisattva1956


Tim Leary at Millbrook - Interview (Part 2) by Bodhisattva1956


Tim Leary at Millbrook - Interview (Part 3) by Bodhisattva1956


Tim Leary at Millbrook - Interview (Part 4) by Bodhisattva1956

I think two things are particularly interesting about Dr Leary giving his spiel in 1968. First he continually returns to metaphors of visual technology, especially the microscope in various forms is evoked as a metaphor for the LSD experience. The second point that struck me is his references to media more generally. Old people "who drink whiskey and read books" are somehow contra to young people who take "psychedelic drugs and watch TV". The background supplied by Marshall McLuhan at this time plays into many of Leary's assumptions about the media landscape of the time.

Marshall McLuhan Interviewed by Playboy Magazine 1969
PLAYBOY: What's natural about drugs?

MCLUHAN: They're natural means of smoothing cultural transitions, and also a short cut into the electric vortex. The upsurge in drug taking is intimately related to the impact of the electric media. Look at the metaphor for getting high: turning on. One turns on his consciousness through drugs just as he opens up all his senses to a total depth involvement by turning on the TV dial. Drug taking is stimulated by today's pervasive environment of instant information, with its feedback mechanism of the inner trip. The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers. LSD is a way of miming the invisible electronic world; it releases a person from acquired verbal and visual habits and reactions, and gives the potential of instant and total involvement, both all-at-onceness and all-at-oneness, which are the basic needs of people translated by electric extensions of their central nervous systems out of the old rational, sequential value system. The attraction to hallucinogenic drugs is a means of achieving empathy with our penetrating electric environment, an environment that in itself is a drugless inner trip.

Drug taking is also a means of expressing rejection of the obsolescent mechanical world and values. And drugs often stimulate a fresh interest in artistic expression, which is primarily of the audile-tactile world. The hallucinogenic drugs, as chemical simulations of our electric environment, thus revive senses long atrophied by the overwhelmingly visual orientation of the mechanical culture. LSD and related hallucinogenic drugs, furthermore, breed a highly tribal and communally oriented subculture, so it's understandable why the retribalized young take to drugs like a duck to water.

PLAYBOY: A Columbia coed was recently quoted in Newsweek as equating you and LSD. "LSD doesn't mean anything until you consume it," she said. "Likewise McLuhan." Do you see any similarities?

MCLUHAN: I'm flattered to hear my work described as hallucinogenic, but I suspect that some of my academic critics find me a bad trip.

PLAYBOY: Have you ever taken LSD yourself?

MCLUHAN: No, I never have. I'm an observer in these matters, not a participant.

Armistice Day

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
By Wilfred Owen

Pandoras Box (2008) - Michael Flückiger

Details Pandoras Box