Bay-area Artist Pixel-Pusha went on a variety-drug binge, trying 19 different intoxicants in 19 days. He drew an illustration while under each influence, attempting to capture the essence of each. His drugs ranged from nitrous to GHB , and he added a 20th-day influence of “love”, which also happens to be intoxicating. You can learn about Pixel-Pusha and purchase posters of his 20-day binge here.
Melting: Bruce Riley paints
“You can’t have any other intent but moving. You can’t worry about it, you can’t stop, you can’t choke. It’s obvious when it works. It’s obvious when it fails. The paintings aren’t about specific things, they’re all about kind of the same thing. And I’m not really trying to define any ideas, I just let it flow.”
Bruce riley
Chicago-based artist Bruce Riley is suspends layers of paints and resins to create organic, vibrant, hypnotizing paintings.
Visualization: Subtle environmental control
Casually play god with this “visual journey”, growing mountains in an ocean inside a sunset, and more. Works on phone but better on desktop.
Discover: Acid Rap
I enjoy psychedelia. I mostly enjoy hip hop. It occured to me that the two are likely married outside my awareness. The internet helped me out.
Flatbush Zombie: This paragraph from Wikipedia — “Friends since grade school, all three members were born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York City. Erick and Meechy Darko are of Jamaican descent. One of the first things Dimitri Simms (Meechy Darko), Antonio Lewis (Zombie Juice) and Erick Elliott (The Architect) bonded over was the Japanese anime Dragon Ball Z and wrestling. During their teenage years, they began experimenting with psychedelic drugs, such as psilocybin mushrooms and LSD. Zombie Juice, along with fellow Flatbush native Issa Gold of the Underachievers (Erick did not participate), specifically started looking into the indigo lifestyle. Meechy Darko said the first time doing mushrooms his ego died and had a sort of rebirth of conscience.”
Noja Cat: Her rap style is funky and unique and this video is snapping a light stick and slinging the liquid at a wall while biting into a blow pop to get to the gum.
Ab-Soul: Herbert Anthony Stevens IV grew up in Carson, California at his grandmother’s. He developed his rapping chops in part by keystyling, which is like freestyle rap battles, but with typed text online. He’s been around as a professional music artists since 2002.
Kid Cudi: Originally from Cleveland, Kid Cudi began his rapping career in NYC. His creativity and emotionally-charged style have propelled him to stardom.
Trippz: I couldn’t find much about him, but I dig it.
LEIKELI47: “I only smoke girl blunts. What’s that mean? I don’t know.” This is flowing jazz rap fusion, spinning around the roller skating rink.
For the People: Mail order psilocybin microdoses
Medicinal marijuana was a stepping stone towards legalization. Next step — at least according to drug activist Dana Larsen — medicinal microdoses of psilocybin.
In 2008, Larsen opened a medical marijuana dispensary in Vancouver as an act of civil disobedience. While he was arrested (with charges eventually dropped), his dispensary proved a model for many others. He gave thousands of tours and encouraged people to start their own. Now that pot is legal, Larsen is on to his next project, the Medicinal Mushroom Dispensary. This is a mail order business and serves all of Canada (but only Canadians), with a Vancouver storefront in the works. You do need a doctor’s recommendation to become a member. The microdoses of encapsulated psilocybin are available in a few different strengths, with a suggestion of dosing twice per week.
The MMD website lists ailments that qualify for treatment (editor’s note: most people would qualify):
ADHD
Anxiety Disorder
Substance Addiction/Withdrawal
Cluster Headaches
Depression
Migraines
PTSD
Sleep Disorders
AIDS/HIV
Cancer
Fibromyalgia
Multiple Sclerosis
Pain – Chronic
Paraplegia/Quadriplegia
Severe or terminal illness
Although MMD only serves Canadians, will Oakland and Denver — both of whom recently decriminalized medicinal mushrooms — offer something along this model in the future?
Book: Review of the “first textbook on psychedelic research”
David Wilder of Think Wilder reviews an advance copy of the self-published research textbook Medical Psychedelics by Dr. Oliver Rimle Hovmand. Wilder’s video review is posted below and is ~9 minutes long, and his written review is here. If you haven’t heard of David Wilder, he is a sharp and intellectual blogger focusing on psychedelics and self-exploration and he releases a “weekly psychoactive recap” called “This Week in Psychedelics.”
Hypnotized: Cactus flower timelapse
Cactus flowers blooming contrast with the spiky cactus textures. Vibrant otherworldly colors palettes embody impermanence. These cactuses are known as “Echinopsis”, their flowers bloom overnight and last one day. The time for each timelapses captured in this montage average 8 hours/bloom.
Here is the photographer’s website, chock full of more more timelapses and stills. The video’s background music is “Chin Swee Sunset” by O$P$.
Thinking: Too much
Reddit’s folks explore “What gets really weird if you think about it too much?” Authors of each thought are in [colons].
- for me, it’s gotta be calling people “baby” romantically or sexually…ew. [fuuuunke]
- Do caterpillars know they they are going to become butterflies? Or do they just get in a cocoon thinking, what the fuck am I doing? [mr3inches]
- Ripping the skin off a creature and wearing it around. Sure it’s dried and treated with chemicals, but look closely and you can still see pores and where the skin folded. [neefvii]
- Literally everything. For example, right now I’m pushing some buttons with abstract symbols on them on something called a keyboard, and am instantly able to transmit my own thoughts through a machine that takes them, breaks them apart into other abstract symbols, and then reassembles and transmits them in some ethereal non-physically existing thing called the internet, where anyone, anywhere, at any time can look at that same exact pattern of lines and dots and instantly understand exactly what I was thinking. [DepartmentStoreSpook]
- Airplanes. You’re sitting in a chair, miles up in the sky, going 500mph on a gust of wind. And people complain about the food. [grumpypotato]
- Trying to imagine if nothing ever existed. [TheresAMothHere]
Flicks: Canon of film psychedelia
The Taste of Cinema blog describes 25 psychedelic films “worth your time”, with classics like Zabriskie Point, Altered States and Easy Rider, and more obscure or unexpected films like the Czech New Wave movie Daisies, feature length trippy porn Behind the Green Door and genre-defying British film The Wicker Man.
Whether the film is depicting drug-induced madness or creating an atmosphere of existential confusion, these films somehow experiment with the audience’s sensory perceptions in order to uproot the viewer from reality. These films welcome (or in some cases, force) the audience to interact with a plethora of psychedelic imagery, sounds, and/or narration.
Esther Zeilig, taste of cinema blog
Mixed: Pearl Jam meets Footloose
DJ Cummerbund seamlessly cut together “Jeremy” and Footloose, with a dash of Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary”. An absurdist bouncy take on school shootings.