My Psychedelic Love Story (2020)

 

Directed by Errol Morris

Written by Joanna Harcourt-Smith

In this documentary an old woman tells a rambling, not altogether coherent story of her time as Timothy Leary's hot young rich babe during his rapid decline to eventually becoming a FBI stool pigeon. 

Along the way there are still images from back in the day with standard “psychedelic” filters over them.

There are some sound film clips of Joanna Harcourt-Smith speaking back then. Oddly her Euro speech accent seems noticeably less than it was last year whenever the interviews for this movie were shot.

She tells how she becomes aware of who Leary is rather late in his celebrity career. She says she was pregnant in the bathtub and heard the song Legend of a Mind, one of the less good songs by Moody Blues, the one that goes “Timothy Leary’s dead, No No No No he’s outside, looking in”. It’s about all the swell stuff that Timothy Leary can do for “you”. It is idiotic celebrity deification, something Leary exploited to his own glory. In the song LSD is not mentioned at all but there are descriptions of its effects, all attributed to what Timothy Leary, what he can do for “you”. The song might as well say that the local acid dealer down the street can do these things for “you”.  
At any rate she says in the movie that at that moment she knew it was her destiny to be with Timothy Leary. Since she was a rich young attractive “socialite” she was in the position to make this happen.

In her story she name-drops her way to Timothy Leary. She tells us of hanging out with Keith Richards in some European rich people sun spot and helping to arrange an idea in which the Rolling Stones were going to tour the USA in support of George McGovern in his 1972 presidential campaign. Then they go to DC but the campaign was so defeatist that they couldn’t take up the offer, or something like that. It’s kind of a murky story as are all the rest of her stories of her drugged out life 50 years ago.

So she meets Leary who is then on the lam in Switzerland zooming around in a canary yellow Porsche. She seems quite impressed with this cool daddy sports car.
Being at the idiotic height of his career he decides almost instantly, according to her, that they are in fact destined to be together. He flashes tarot cards which verify this.
They run around Europe eventually coming back to the USA. Leary goes back to prison and she wants to help him to get out. Enter here a guy who is one of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, despite this lofty name, they are the amoral LA surfer drug dealer gangster sector of the LSD distribution scene. (More of their story is in the more lucid documentary Orange Sunshine. By the way there is another documentary on the more wholesome and helpful characters involved with LSD, The Sunshine Makers <2015> about Tim Scully and Nickolas Sand, good guys who made damn good LSD for us.)

Anyway there are more murky stories about ripping off some guy for $10,000 in a phoney(?) drug deal in order to get money to spring Leary. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love guy also arranges for Joanna to help get out of jail by becoming an FBI informant which eventually happens.

The documentary is a reminder of what a narcissistic jerk Leary was or became in the course of acquiring celebrity power, interrupted by USA extreme drugs laws which were partly as result of Leary’s lust for attention and grandstanding. 
All this is recounted through Joanna Harcourt-Smith’s rambling storytelling in this messy documentary.

The Sunshine Makers is a much better movie about more intelligent people on a more wholesome mission to bring the general public the wondrous gift of LSD and the psychedelic experience. They actually helped rather them screwing up the whole thing like celebrity Leary did.   

   

Outside Looking In by T C Boyle

Reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric KoolAid Acid Test and Boyle’s own Drop City, Outside Looking In, is set a few years earlier than Drop City, and concurrent with Acid Test, except it is set in Leary’s East Coast scene instead of the West Coast Kesey Pranksters.

It is not about Leary, he appears, it’s his world at Harvard and mostly Millbrook, but the novel follows a psychology grad student, Fritz, and his wife, Joanie, an upwardly mobile high school psychologist teacher. They have a young son. Fritz enters Harvard for and graduate degree to advance his career. They are a rather straight laced couple in 1963, a rather straight laced time. He is studying under Leary and they get all involved with the scene that evolves from that.

So there is LSD and surprisingly, alcohol, and a lot of it. I say surprisingly because it had not occurred to me that drinking would be a part of that scene. How naive! This is the early 1960s, everybody drank. Yet as the story goes, it has negative effects in some cases, and maybe lead to reckless things that went on needlessly in the scene. (I’m set up for being negative about alcohol because I don’t like it and hardly ever use it.) Of course all this is fiction, but now I assume Millbrook had a lot of alcohol consumption as well as some lovely Czech made LSD. Fiction, movies/books, alters facts to fit it’s needs.

Dick is in it too, the rich boy and the one booted from Harvard with Tim. He flies to Canada to get the Czech acid, pilots the small plane. This is Richard Alpert, later Ram Dass, of Be Here Now fame (he’s still here now, like Hawaii, on Netflix).
 

I had read something in passing before reading this book; that Boyle said he had never had a positive LSD trip, so I was concerned how LSD would be treated in the novel. Happy to say that I feel that the descriptions of the experiences, the trips themselves, are conceivable and close enough to my own experience with it to say, well written and true to psychedelic life. There is really not a lot of big scary LSD situations in it. I’m happy with this. 

LSD itself is a neutral, sort of passive, character in the novel. It has enormous effects but it varies of course with “set and setting” and can be very joyous and just as challenging, and all in the same trip. This is clear in the novel. LSD is mostly good in this.

The point of view in the novel shifts from a third person describing what Fritz is going through to being with Joanie and her thoughts, then back to Fritz, who is really the main focus of the novel.

It’s an interesting time now, 2019, with psychedelics experiencing another wave of more popular interest. This time more positive. It could be said and maybe suggested in the events of the novel that, Leary was really too reckless and ultimately damaged to reputation of LSD with his need to advance his own ego with it. The novel cast it all as rather cultish with the great leader who had gone further and therefore knows better and followers gathered around him and more of less adhering to the structure and games that Leary designed.

So in a way it is a novel about regular people who are involved with a personality and substance cult. In that way some of the events are easily transferable to any other cult. LSD doesn't make people become cult members, but there is a suggestion in the book, that one is susceptible to “imprinting” a feeling of deep connection to the person who has the LSD, controls it, gives it to a person for the first time and trips with them.
This might be so but I cannot say directly, because that is not the way I went into it. When I was 18 in 1970 I was at a tiny southern Ohio college visiting a friend. Someone, I don’t know who, had LSD that I had been hearing about for years and was eager to try. It was a good experience and I have gone back repeatedly through the years and continue to do so when I can get some LSD which is rare because I’m not socially connected to any scene where I can get it. I’m shy. (But if I can't connect to people maybe I ought not to be doing it anyway. I’m old so I know I’m going back to the pool seen enough, the ultimate transcendence.)

The people in Leary’s scene in the book are trying to do something with it, get someplace, achieve something. I think psychedelics maybe ought to be approached with more neutrality. Yes they are somehow connected to some kind of transcendence which is also associated with types of spiritual/religious experiences, mysticism. I don’t believe in loading up on anticipation of something like that prior to taking the substance. That stuff can also open one up to some of the cultish social set up and grow around these things.  
I suggest that is one is a newbie, forget about all that stuff and just take it and see what happens. I don’t think most people really need leaders and guide as much as people need to put themselves in leader roles. Ignore them. 


The novel has a terrific final scene and it made me laugh out loud.

Ram Dass, Fierce Grace (2001)

Ram Dass, Fierce Grace (2001)
Director:

Mickey Lemle

This is a documentary film about Richard Alpert who became Ram Dass and focuses on a life changing stroke that occurred in his mid 60s.

It goes through his story. He was a child the Boston elite, his father a wealthy industrialist. The film has clips from home movies shot in the 1930s and 40s on their 300 acre estate in New Hanpshire, complete with 3 hole golf course. He was the youngest and darling of a family of three boys.
He becomes a Harvard professor. At Harvard he meets up with Timothy Leary, gets into LSD research with him and gets fired from Harvard with him. They land for a time in Millbrook, NY at the Hitchcock Estate and continue the LSD work in a much freer way than they could at Harvard. Ram Dass revisits Millbrook in the movie and marvels at the enormous house it has, with 50 or 60 rooms. This becomes a counter culture scene that went on for about 5 years 1963-68. It eventually falls apart, Alpert describes it getting excessive with him and others obviously overindulging. Alpert breaks from this Leary dominated situation.

Then he goes to India, meets guru Neem Karoli Baba and is amazed by his powers in mind reading. Neem Karoli Baba asks to try some LSD and takes a massive dose afterwhich he exhibits no effect.
I remember reading about this in the old Ram Dass book Be Here Now. Frankly I have trouble buying into it. Neem Karoli Baba might have been a sort of great teacher, but could have also been a bit of a trickster magician. He could have very easily been given the tiny LSD tablets and not actually consumed them. At any rate this is profoundly impressive to Alpert and he goes Indian and returns to the USA as Ram Dass spiritual teacher in Indian like dress and manor, himself transforming into a guru for the new age, the hippie generation. The film shows lovely footage of him in early stages of this at the family's estate where young people have come to be with him and receive his teachings. They chant, sing Hari Krishna on the golf course, young westerners, seekers, embracing this very exotic Indian religious stuff.

This is the background information of a film that is about the aftermath of this stroke. We see him in the year 2000, now reverting to western clothing going through physical and speech therapy, and struggling to get around with the right side of his body not cooperating as it had before.
He speaks of being “stroked” and taking it as a new lesson that he needed even though he did not particularly welcome it.

Ram Dass comes off in this movie as a very nice man. His teaching, not very clear in the movie, appears to be benign at least, a type of self-help therapist. He is clearly a child of wealthy elite and exhibits no hesitation at talking on a leadership role. It is something he feel entitled to. There are a lot of people like him. I have not read any of his books, Just pieces of Be Here Now, but as a popular cultural figure he doesn’t appear to be harmful. I am convinced that many people have found things in his work that help them through life.

The film shows this and depicts him as a caring, compassionate, person.
Yet as I followed the story I saw a man lucky wealthy by birth. A situation that makes even the stroke aftermath, with so many people working to serve and help him, a great deal easier than it might be for so many of us who are less privileged. This does not discount what he has to share but I think it is best listened to in privileged context.

It is not unusual for the psychedelic experience to reset people into “spiritual”. I know people personally who are more or less transformed in this way, some embracing surprisingly exotic modalities. This didn’t happen to me. LSD instantly gave me a new view of life, the planet, and my place within it. But I didn’t feel the need to name it, remediate it, and turn this profound direct experience into something as codified as religion, or “spiritual”, as many others apparently are drawn to do. The attaching of this experience to symbols of religion is an interesting phenomenon for sure.