Is it LSD o'clock yet? This far out Timothy Leary wristwatch from 1970 is up for auction on eBay. In more than 20 years of looking at Leary memorabilia on eBay, this is only the third time I've seen one of these. I bought the first that came up for myself and only wear it at, er, the right times.
The starting bid is $600, which is hundreds of dollars more than the selling price of previous examples. Read the rest
Our favorite PhD of high weirdness, Dr. Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis, recently gave a compelling cosmic rap at the Morbid Anatomy Museum about Timothy Leary and his appropriation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead! Listen to it here.
"While even most psychedelicists now discount the brazen and now rather dated work he created with Richard Alpert and Ralph Mezner, 1964’s The Psychedelic Experience," Erik writes, "I argue that there was also something deeply canny and even visionary about this mapping, which in some sense just extends possibilities already inherent in the ancient Tibetan concept (which is itself probably as indigenous-shamanic as it is Indian)." Read the rest
In the early 1990s, BB pal Joi Ito (now director of the MIT Media Lab) hosted bOING bOING patron saint Timothy Leary on a trip to Japan. At the time, Tim was energized by the intersection of youth culture and digital technology to empower the individual. Above, video that Joi and friends shot of Tim in fine form. Man, I miss him, and those cyberdelic days. Bonus shout-out at 8:25 to Anarchic Adjustment, Nick Philip's surreal and inspiring clothing line that evolved into today's Imaginary Foundation!
In celebration of the new Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Joel Achenbach wrote a feature for Smithsonian about Carl Sagan's enduring impact on the popularization of science. Achenbach visited the recently-available Sagan archive at the Library of Congress and highlighted some great bits, including details of Sagan and astronomer Frank Drake's 1974 visit with bOING bOING patron saint Timothy Leary while Tim was incarcerated. Sagan had enjoyed Tim's excellent (and now scarce) book Terra II, a philosophical manual for space migration. Read the rest
What a way to spend the spring:
The (New York Public Library) Manuscripts and Archives Division is offering an (unpaid) internship to aid the Digital and Project Archivists for the Timothy Leary Papers for the Spring 2013 term to students from a Master’s program in librarianship, archival studies, or preservation with an interest in the born digital materials in the papers.
The Papers document the life of Timothy Francis Leary (b. 1920, d. 1996), American psychologist and Harvard professor, who, through his studies regarding the use of psilocybin and LSD, went on to become an advocate for mind-altering drugs, eastern philosophy, sexual liberation, cyberspace and the cyberpunk genre. He was a prolific writer, lecturer, and counterculture icon (1960s - 1990s). The Papers contain material from notable figures, such as Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), William S. Burroughs, David Bryne, Larry Flynt, Allen Ginsberg, Keith Haring, Gerald Heard, Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Albert Hofmann, Aldous and Laura Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Art Kleps, and G. Gorden Liddy. The Papers include over a hundred floppy disks created or collected by Leary in a variety of formats.
"Timothy Leary Papers - Digital Archival Processing Internship" (Thanks, Doug Rushkoff!) Read the rest
