Vimeo is Youtube with integrity, and their evolving playlist Eye Candy is worth saving to your bookmarks for those moments when you need to let your brain wander into beauty and weirdness.
Here you’ll find the sorbet of Vimeo v
ideos, cleansing your eyes with state-of-the-art, top quality visuals.
eye candy homepage
Enjoy this Vice interview with author Mike Jay, whose book Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic was recently released:
Mescaline is an alkaloid that occurs in nature in two families of cacti: the San Pedro in the Andes and the peyote in Mexico, and a bit of what’s now Texas. It’s a phenethylamine, biosynthesised by the cacti from the amino acid phenylalanine, which is also present in foods such as eggs, milk and soybeans, in breast milk and in trace amounts in the human brain.
Mike jay
This makes it different from other psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin and DMT, which are tryptamines, derived from a different amino acid, tryptophan. Other mind-altering phenethylamines include amphetamine and MDMA. Mescaline has some effects that are similar to these, though it’s also intensely visual and trippy. Compared to other psychedelics it’s more physical, with an intense body load [a tactile sensation] that can be experienced as euphoria, or nausea, or both. It’s slower to cross the blood-brain barrier, so onset time is longer – up to two hours – and it also lasts longer, around 12 hours.
Come prepared to smoke, paint, chat, indulge, and probably laugh harder than you ever had before.
puff, pass and paint website
The advent of legal recreational weed has seen a refreshing sidecar of accompanying experiential business models, from marijuana tours to professional ThC infused dinner parties to weed-oil massage therapy. In my quick search for what’s out there I discovered Puff, Pass and Paint which describes itself as “Canvas and Cocktails with a Cannabis Twist”. The painting events aren’t “about making the perfect piece of art. It’s about being part of an atmosphere that is relaxed, comfortable, open-minded, and allowing yourself to freely create your own original masterpiece.” They offer classes like X-Rated Los Angeles (nudes), abstract fluid painting, and Puff, Pass & POTtery. Currently there are class offering in big cities: DC, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Vegas, Detroit, SF. It is HQ’d in Denver.
Podcasts are perhaps the most accessible intimate artform, gaining your full attention. There are podcasts on most topics — no matter how obscure or ridiculous — I am currently listening to a podcast where each episode explores in-depth one minute of the movie My Dinner with Andre, called My Minute with Andre. I recommend that you probably don’t listen to that, unless that also happens to be your favorite movie.
Anyways, you probably should listen to some of Vulture’s recommendations of the 10 best Podcasts from last year. Their #10 choice is also one of my favorites, The Nod’s “Saving Grace”. Vulture describes it:
A woman, Autumn, recalls her childhood efforts to preserve her grandmother’s memory through The Sims, a video game. “Saving Grace” illustrates a distinctly modern iteration on the universal act of grieving, and though this isn’t a particularly new topic, this episode does successfully capture both the surreality and the earnest power of the process. Much of this has to do with the episode being presented as an act of remembering. As Autumn tells her story to producer Wallace Mack, we hear her hesitate, qualify, and oscillate between fleeting embarrassment and, unquestionably, burning pride.
Nicholas Quah on the podcast episode “Saving Grace”
Mr. Ye and Ms. Xue met and began a relationship in the Chinese mega-city of Chengdue in 2011. They are now married with children.
While going through a box of his in-law’s old family photographs, Mr. Ye discovered a 2001 picture of Ms. Xue posing for in May Fourth Square in Qingdao, another sizable city 1100 miles away from Chengdue. “When I saw the photo, I was taken by surprised and I got goosebumps all over my body… that was my pose for taking photos,” Mr. Ye tells Sina News. “I also took a photo, it was the same posture (as captured in Ms Xue’s photo), just from a different angle.” He still had his photo and knew exactly where it was.
For context, Ms. Xue was on vacation in Qingdao for some r&r after her mother’s surgery. Mr. Ye was visiting Qingdao as part of a tour group. They posed near to each other and the photos were snapped around the same micro-second. This was before the ubiquity of cell-phone cameras.
Regardless if this was meant to be, or if “meant to be” exists, the couple endowed the location as significant to their family and plans to vacation there in the future.
I’m obsessed with biographies about the influencers and shakers of the 60s counterculture, the people who actively challenged American culture’s stifling status quo and aimed towards a reality completely different. Primary goals were to live free, to protest war and injustice and to focus on self and community love in a more aware, intentional way. The long-term effects can be observed around us today, including some of the origins of: vegetarianism, yoga, environmentalism, anti-racism, meditation, rave music, ethnic studies and LGBTQ scholastic departments, music festivals, Burning Man, feminism, liberated sexuality, and even the internet.
As for the living out loud piece, Augustus Owsley — also known as “Bear” — did this to a superlative and moshed to his own drum beat. In many ways he was a DaVinci of the movement, a self-learned garage chemist synthesizing (with the help of skillful lovers and friends) millions of hits of high quality LSD, he created the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound revolutionary speaker arrangement, he helped design the dancing bear logo, he was responsible for soundboard recordings of the Dead and other Bay-area musicians of the time, he ate only meat for most of his life, he became a jeweler towards the end, he was arrested over and over. His over-confident alpha-style personality frustrated many and caused many conflicts, but he kept moving forward. He eventually met the love of his life and the two retired to Australia on a large tract of rural land.
Bear’s story and impact is mythical, bigger than life and worth reading. Greenfield’s book Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III is worth your while; I listened to the audio and enjoyed the well-told narration of Bear’s wild adventures and foibles.
Owsley’s high octane rocket fuel enabled Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters to put on the Acid Tests. It also powered much of what happened on stage at Monterey Pop. Owsley turned on Pete Townshend of The Who and Jimi Hendrix. The shipment of LSD that Owsley sent John Lennon resulted in The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour album and film.
robert greenfield
Ben Zank is a NYC-based photographer who captures mostly-faceless subjects buried, disappearing, laying surreal in isolated nature. I hoped the artist had a shop with prints, but no such luck that I’ve found.
About the facelessness, Zank says, “Some people are really good at getting a certain emotion of people when photographing them. I’ve found that I can create the same effect without showing someone’s face. The image itself is the emotion. I have nothing against showing my face, I’ve done it before. I just don’t want it to take away from the important bit. I’ve got a pretty distracting face, you know.
A stimulating Reddit question posted five years ago by user Fuuuuunke. The entire reddit stream is here. A few of my favorite responses:
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
My bio prof recently pointed out to us that every person existed (as an egg) inside their mother while she was still developing inside her own mother’s uterus. Your first cell was created inside your grandmother, and is as old as your own mom.
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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.
Theres_A_Moth_Here
If you’re currently a virgin, you’re the only virgin in long, long line of ancestors over thousands upon thousands of years. They’re all just waiting for you to continue the chain.
its_a_punderful_life
if you didn’t know a language how would you think?
NLunny
Eating is pretty weird when you think about it. You grind up various materials to suck energy out of them and then poop them out. I think it’s weird that we eat together socially, but at the same time it’s not like we are getting together as a family to take a poop. It’s just the other side of the same process.
georgeclooneynecktat
Roads. I can get in my car right now and go pretty much anywhere. There is an unbroken route from where my car is parked to virtually every location on this continent. And if I can’t get there by car, there are often specific places to park my car that make it as convenient as possible to get to where I want to go. We take it for granted, but it’s kind of crazy to me sometimes.
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How words are spelled/look. If you look at words long enough, you begin to question why words were chosen to have that certain spelling. Or how the shapes were even formed. Or why a different letter wasn’t chosen. Or how in the hell is that word pronounced the way it is.
newfoundhope
People stick other people’s genitals in their mouths as a sign of affection.
rorynoodles
“Imagine that the collapse of civilization didn’t happen everywhere at the same time. Instead, it’s happening in waves. Every day, more people fall out of the society intact. We queers were always living in the margins of that society, finding solidarity, love, and meaning in the strangest of places. Apocalypse didn’t come for us first, but it did come for us.”
Successfully Kickstarted last year, this book (either PDF or printed) uses a no-dice and no-dungeon master format to explore players’ imaginations as they become characters from oppressed communities in otherworldly but familiar settings. The two campaigns in the book are about: “a queer enclave enduring the collapse of civilization” and “a Jewish shtetl in a fantastical-historical Eastern Europe.”Dream Askew uses the system to create campaigns in “a queer enclave enduring the collapse of civilization” and Dream Apart is set in “a Jewish shtetl in a fantastical-historical Eastern Europe.”
[Both of the campaigns put] community at the center of the story. Players collaboratively fill out a community worksheet as part of setup. Dream Askew has players choosing apocalyptic visuals and ideological conflicts, while Dream Apart has them choosing blessings and curses. A map gets drawn, relationships get established, and play emerges.
Rather than telling stories of rugged individuals on epic adventures, both dreams keep the focus closer to home. They tell stories of interpersonal relationships, community drama, and tension with the outside world.
Each player takes on a character role, one of six archetypal figures in their community. These are pages divided into three columns: on the left, everything that gets read aloud when introducing the role; down the middle, all the choices you make during character creation; and finally, on the right, everything you need to play the character.
These games are diceless, leaving nothing to chance. Play is driven by the choices that get made at the table, with scenes unfolding as players make moves: picking simple narrative prompts off their sheet and working them into their description of what happens next. Weak Moves grant a token while Strong Moves require one, creating a balanced tempo for each character – moments of petty drama and tragic failure set the stage for ones of resourcefulness and skill later on.
There’s no Game Master to defer to; authority is divided equally around the table. The dreams achieve this by giving each player a setting element to customize and play.
In Seattle we have several supremely psychedelicly dark black-light-glowing strobe-blinking bar backrooms chock full of obnoxiously-loud pinball machines (most impressively: Shorty’s). The addictive scene reeks of chaos, but pinball wizard Roger Sharpe tells how the game isn’t as random as it seems.