Summer of my Netflix Streaming I: A Psychedelic Odyssey

Go Rick Strassman go-ooo--ohm! In case you were born in some inane, counterintuitive dimension where all they keys to enlightenment through brain chemistry have been made into felonies, you should know Dr. Rick Strassman actually got clearance to do DMT studies by the government. The results? Mind-blowing of course, but inconclusive, equally of course. See this and answer the question: is there a difference between hallucination and reality? If what you experience in the DMT-verse feels a hundred times more real than our waking, consensual reality, then doesn't that mean, as quantum physics and bioverse theorists suggest, it's realer?

The only answer is.

Even so, enough bad trips happened under Strassman's experiments that he now feels a little guilty for messing in all those minds. So is he a Pandora's box cutter, a modern messiah, or an apex predator Albert Hoffman?  Only the machine elves know for sure, and they only tell the silver spiders that spin together crystal cities out of our universal thought matrix. Heads talking include my boy Daniel Pinchbeck and the 'other'-other McKenna... Dennis; there's lots of groovy Alex Grey art and deep hallucinogen-ready kaleidoscope eyefuls, their labels tampered with by Joe Rogan narrating while standing in front of a blackboard for extra validity. (more from Tripumentaries)

See also: Ayuhuasca Vine of the Soul

(2009) Dir. Gasper Noe

"Drifting around Tokyo's pinku parlors, orbiting the copulations and floating into light bulbs like Hitchcock's camera might have if it didn't find its way out of the black tunnel connecting the drain with Janet Leigh's pupil in PSYCHO, we never know what the late Oscar's free-floating POV is thinking. We just see what he (or rather his third eye) sees. Drawn to the gravity of the flaming sexual heat bardo, where reincarnation can occur and he can get back in the game again, he drifts towards any old giant sun egg in which to be reborn, looking for the white light to absorb him, and finding only the respite of 60 watt bulb lamps left on by the couch, then winding up on the float again, the way we used to walk around outside the Dead shows when we didn't have that miracle ticket, looking for that unlocked fence, that lax security guard... that one shot, the ripped condom, the missed pill. Doses... doses. (from: Die Like an Eagle) 

(1940) Skip ahead to 7:32 mark (and avoid the 2000 version)

Fantasia did not make a profit until its 1969 re-release. By then, Fantasia had become immensely popular among teenagers and college students, some of whom would reportedly take drugs such as marijuana and LSD to "better experience" the film. Disney promoted the film using a psychedelic-styled poster. The re-release was a major success, especially with the psychedelic young adult crowd, many of whom would come lie down in the front row of the theater and experience the film from there.  

 METROPOLIS 
(1927) Dir. Fritz Lang (Giorgio Moroder version - 1984)

The History Channel is laden with ancient alien-related programming today, and Erich von Däniken is there, but so is repetitive narration and whiplash editing and catheter commercials to give you mad panic attacks. But this is the original, the groundbreaker. True or not is irrelevant - one merely looks at the facts - and these wild locations, long since traveled over and over for Ancient Aliens and seekers; here there are still the original inhabitants, by which I mean wildlife, overgrown with jungle and sand: shot on film with that earthy vibe of the day. There are almost no talking heads, those that are are translated / dubbed (from German and Russian), but there is a lot of travelogue style footage of pyramids, etc. And valuable footage of cargo cults in the Pacific that help us understand the root of all of our religious thought. These natives keep watching the skies, praying for the return of the white brothers and their cans of delicious peaches.



At one point does a divinely inspired lysergic-macrobiotic sage either remember that way down deep he's a lusty huckster? I tell you one thing, I'd follow Yaweh-O or whatever Papa Bear's name is here way sooner than I'd ever be swayed by Phillip Seymor Hoffman as a faux L. Ron Hubbard in The Master. Apparently he was a near Gilgamesh mountain man messiah in and of himself, like the greatest of modern gurus, able to waken people's kundalini with just a touch or a glance from across a crowded room, but he was deluding even himself if he thought he could hang glide. That's why my own spirituality will always stop short of wearing long flowing robes and divesting my worldly possessions to my new family. But that's just me, it's a curse as well as a blessing. Watching this crazy documentary and hearing these crazy beautiful starry-eyed people, it's a solid trip that can tingle your kundalini right there in the room, sparking off your third eye like an Olympic torch - as Master Wong once said, "Take what you want, and leave the rest, like your salad bar." I'm quoting directly from one of my holiest of texts also on Netflix, from der unheimlich Vater J.C., Big Trouble in Little China! (see also CinemArchetype Senex: The Sage)

"This Side of Paradise" (season 1, ep. 25) finds Kirk the only member of the crew not bewitched by space poppies. Everyone who beams down on this certain Edenic planet becomes too happy and content to do anything but loll around in the sun and love one another. Kirk tries to convince them they need goals and challenges to evolve as people, but they're too busy digging the flowers; it's not until he stirs their more violent emotions that they snap out of it.

And though you can argue both sides, which is to the script's credit, it's one of the earliest examples of Kirk seeming a killjoy, especially when Spock gets the closing line: "For the first time in my life, I was happy."

"The Way to Eden" (season 3, ep. 20) wherein a group of space hippies work various angles to convince the Enterprise crew to take them through forbidden space to an allegedly pristine planet named Eden. The hippies include Charles Napier on space guitar inviting Spock to sit in and jam with the flower people! ("He is not Herbert! We reach!") Dig that Vulcans consider the goal of these groovy brothers to be the highest form of sanity. But just as the Source Family found disaster following Father Yod to Hawaii in the last film, so this Eden planet carries its own tricky backhand bitch slap for their bucolic naiveté. (Sex, Drugs and Quantum Existentialism: The Acidemic STAR TREK Short Guide)

With aliens dancing and the dangerous space microbes and cosmic mind-altering spores on your mind, let's, as Steve says, get small. This weird movie tells its own story in insect language and movement, without any music or narration, allowing the intricate weave of nature the space and 'close reading' it's been waiting for all this time, to really show just how bizarre insect interactions are...ants milking droplets of water from clingy flea-style bugs and kicking ladybugs off their leaf home. That's kind of what head trips are, the utterly strange aliveness of our world, what our mind usually screens out. Only as small kids ourselves were we more open and attuned to the crazy scariness and odd joys of a fluent insect community. Well, when you tune into the 'other' realms, you get all that kid's eye view back, so let the bug show begin. On the other hand if this gets too boring or gives you a minor dose of delirium tremens, you're excused.


What if those weird bugs from Microcosmos were also hallucinogens that let their user see through time and space and transmute dimensions? And other bugs were constantly taking over human hosts and killing them while preparing for an sixth-dimensional Lovecraftian tentacle crossover? What? Slow down, man. Think about it. Then plunge into the coolness. Unlike Gilliam's Loathing, this is truly a film where the weird turn pro.

If the walls start closing in, switch to this televisual equivalent of a Wavy Gravy chill-out tent immediately. This is way better than Bruce Dern handing you thorazine or Jack Nicholson and Adam Roarke melting into zombie monsters while trying to stop you from cutting off your own hand with a circular saw. Not that you ever would, because you're not a lightweight like Warren!