Tantra-Induced Delusional Syndrome ("TIDS")

[American Dream]

NOVEMBER 9, 2015
Dancing at the End of History: The Fall of the Berlin Wall and Ecstasy in Berlin


Image: “Angel in ecstasy” Photo credit: Eke Miedaner, Feb 10, 2007.


By Ben Gook, CHE Associate Investigator at The University of Melbourne

Around the fall of the Berlin Wall, electronic music took on a new role in the lives of many eastern and western Germans. Over the following decade, rave and club music’s ecstatic form in Berlin attracted mass audiences from across Europe. Berlin’s annual Love Parade, which had begun in July 1989, saw a million people dancing in the city’s Tiergarten in 1997, with this number swelling to about one and a half million by the end of the decade. Although the Love Parade has since moved on, electronic music still contributes considerably to Berlin’s tourist industry and the city’s self-image as a place of ecstatic weekend encounters. A growing number of documentaries and books capture this cultural moment, as visitors and locals explore its particular history and bring it into cultural memory.

Although I think the electronic music scene’s durability in Berlin is a fascinating topic, it hasn’t been the focus of my research. I instead look at the first few years of German re-unification as a time of ecstasy and melancholy. Still, non-musical cultural production has helped to cement Berlin’s place as the ‘techno capital’ of the world, as reflected in feature films such as Run Lola Run (1998), Berlin Calling (2008) and this year’s Victoria.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QzAA4qEGqs

Its mantle as techno capital has seen Berlin called the electronic dance music equivalent of Nashville’s country music industry: ‘a hub for production, distribution, networking and performance’. All this sits at the end of the period I describe in my research on ecstasy, but it’s important to keep it in mind as the present circumstances – the outcome, if you like – of the earlier period.

Ecstatic encounters

What captures my attention is the way that ‘ecstasy’ functions as a signifier to describe the experience of the Berlin Wall falling and what was simultaneously happening in music. So these are the triple senses of ecstasy I mean with my title: an ecstatic response to the geographical and political reorganisation around 1989; an ecstatic cultural enactment and reimagining of that reorganisation on dancefloors; and the popular take up of the drug that takes its name from an emotional experience already accounted for by the ancients (e.g. Euripides’ Bacchae). The blurb for SubBerlin (2008) illustrates what I mean by this – namely, the release from cultural and social stasis, rediscovered in artistic forms over the years after 1989:

The Fall of the Berlin Wall was something no one had ever expected to happen so quick and with such intensity, leaving Germany in a state of euphoria, upheaval and confusion … The years that followed were marked by new-found freedom, chaos, change and a rush of collective ecstasy.


Renowned techno club, ‘Tresor’.

This documentary film is about Tresor, a renowned techno club that was at first set up in an abandoned department store vault in the former no-man’s-land border strip of Berlin. The blurb clearly associates the club with its historical context.

This is hardly surprising. The years 1989 and 1990 mark a world historical event – to say this is at once a banality and a claim that could be substantively argued through philosophical and political-theoretical understandings of an event and its consequences, its prolongation and its development. What followed for many Germans, however, was a decline of early openness, a move towards rigidity, a loss of autonomy, suspicion of westerners, a trashing of eastern German hopes, and so on.

What I want to trace can be put in a slightly different, and potentially universal, register: it concerns the openness of ecstatic experience versus the loss of that openness in melancholia, or a shift from plenitude to lack. The latter would not exist without the former; the regret would not persist without the taste of something joyful, the absence without the memory of something once present. If an event occurs then vanishes, it leaves traces and calls upon subjects to retain fidelity. Such an event struggles to be expressed in available language. The musical subculture becomes a cultural echo of that experience, perhaps an attempt to take up the event in a different language, as it ripples out, ecstatic and melancholic, a double tonality of history and experience, a tone and its counter-tone. An ambivalent switching occurs as the event is traced and lost (see Gibson on Françoise Proust, whose work remains untranslated in English).

To be more historically specific: 1989 and 1990, of course, formed an incredibly optimistic period for many people. This moment, particularly for East Germans, heralded the end of various deadlocks. The revolution saw the spilling of people on to the streets, a rush to overturn and renew what stood in their path – this kernel of disaffection and the promise or hope of something better created a moment that broke through the institutional blockages and banal routines of damaged and compromised lives (for more on this, see my recently published book on this period. The electronic music scene, among many other contemporaneous expressions, retained a token of that lived experience, and this carried within it an openness towards others and a promise of futurity and change that travelled beyond Europe.

Drugs and divided subjects

If music and geopolitical rearrangement produced a call of freedom in clubs after 1989, the other part of the equation is drugs. Specifically, ecstasy: its properties helped to set the period’s tenor. Indeed, as Joshua Clover writes, ‘rarely has a subculture’s self-identification been so thoroughly indexed to a single drug’.

A pure dose of ecstasy – which pharmacological and public health research indicates is difficult to find on the black market – is an empathogen-entactogen. Its entactogen properties signify a ‘touching within’, a shift that can put pill takers in contact with others and oneself. MDMA’s legislated use in the second half of the twentieth century was as a tool for therapeutic sessions, particularly romantic counselling. For some time, it was legal in the United States for this purpose. Its empathogen properties make it a feeling enhancer, disinhibiting subjects and affording them access to a potentially broader range of experiences. The term indicates too that it aids in producing empathy, so these experiences are typically shared experiences.

Ecstasy can hence open barriers and remove borders for individual subjects – and for spontaneous communities. Such crowds, as on the dancefloor, can catalyse what music critic Simon Reynolds calls ‘a strange and wondrous atmosphere of collective intimacy, an electric sense of connection between complete strangers’. Again, this urge-to-merge recalls those spontaneous embraces at the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Excerpted from: https://historiesofemotion.com/2015/11/ ... in-berlin/

[American Dream]

And... angels in America?





MAY BE TRIGGERING

The Agony Of Ecstasy: The Fall Of Sammy Gravano And Peter Gatien

By James Ridgway de Szigethy

http://www.americanmafia.com/Feature_Articles_237.html


Fall, 2002. New York City. Salvatore Gravano, also known as Sammy
"The Bull", former Underboss of the Gambino Mafia Family, is
languishing in a Federal prison cell. Peter Gatien, the impresario of
several successful New York nightclubs, is also languishing in a
Federal prison cell.

Both men came from very different upbringings; Sal Gravano grew
up in Brooklyn, where his parents operated a profitable business that
sold women's dresses. Peter Gatien grew up in a poor family in Canada,
where he excelled in the national obsession of hockey. Sammy Gravano
put in a stint with the United States Army, after which he returned to
his native Brooklyn where he enrolled in a local school, intent on
becoming a hairdresser. Peter Gatien's ambitions were narrowed by an
accident in a hockey game, during which a hockey puck destroyed one of
his eyes. Gatien utilized the insurance settlement from this accident
to bankroll a succession of nightclubs; first in Canada, later in the
South, and later, most successfully, in New York City.

Both men were on a course that would make them millionaires at a
young age. Then came their fall, as both would become the targets of
Prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn and the New York
office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The ammunition that
brought both men down was a tiny little pill called Ecstasy.

A HAIR-DRESSER NAMED SAL

The city that Salvatore Gravano returned to after his Army tour
in the 1960s was a metropolis becoming increasingly violent. In an
event that stunned the world, young Kitty Genovese was slowly stabbed
to death on the streets of New York while scores of witnesses ignored
her cries for help. Such conditions of resignation and indifference
provided fertile ground for the Mafia, which had long held sway in New
York, to dramatically expand it's operations and influence. The Mafia
even moved into a new line of money making – the kidnapping for ransom
of members of rival Mafia Families.

Such was the lawlessness in New York City that spurred on two men
who needed little encouragement in breaking the law; young John Gotti
and the man who would later become his Underboss, Sammy Gravano. By
the early 70s a series of incarcerations and murders had elevated
Gotti to a position of power within his crew which brought him into
direct contact with Carlo Gambino, Godfather of the Family. In 1973
Gotti was indicted for the murder of Jimmy McBratney, who allegedly
was involved in the botched kidnapping of Carlo Gambino's nephew.
Gotti hired to represent him criminal attorney Roy Cohn, arguably one
of the most corrupt lawyers in U. S. history. Cohn had achieved fame
as a Prosecutor in the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were
convicted in the 1950s of espionage and later executed. Cohn then
became a household name as an aide, along with Bobby Kennedy, to
Senator Joseph McCarthy during his televised hearings exposing
Communist infiltration of the U. S. government. Cohn later became an
attorney for the Mob, representing a succession of America's most
notorious and violent criminals. The relationship between Cohn and the
Mafia was a marriage of convenience that would last until Cohn's death
in 1986 due to AIDS; Cohn provide the Mafia with some of the best
legal – and illegal – assistance available, and the Mob in return
provided Cohn with the drugs and male prostitutes he used on a daily
basis.

Cohn's power as a criminal attorney stemmed from his association
with criminals, not just those who belonged to organized crime
families, but those corrupted by such families, including cops,
prosecutors, and Judges. With such contacts and, some would say,
"leverage," Cohn was able to cop pleas and procure reduced sentences
as few others in his field could. In Gotti's case Cohn was able to
convince the authorities to allow Gotti to plead guilty to the lesser
charge of attempted manslaughter. Gotti received a sentence of only 4
years in prison, of which he served less than half.

Although Gotti had only been away from New York a short time,
much had changed during his absence. A new culture had erupted upon
the scene in New York which would quickly spread across America. The
phenomenon was called "Disco." Nightclubs began to spring up across
New York City as venues for this new dance music and the mob saw in
such clubs new potential for money-making ventures; one as a
'legitimate' business and another as an opportunity to launder money
from illegal activities, including the burgeoning drug business. Drug
abuse, notably the new 'in' drug cocaine, was a commodity demanded by
many of those who sought escape in the Discos. Young toughs in the
Mafia families began to ignore the Mafia's traditional edict that
prohibited drug dealing, among them associates of John Gotti,
including his brother Gene, who developed a lucrative drug trafficking
operation.

During those years Sammy Gravano had turned himself from a
hairdresser to an up-and-coming wannabe gangster aligned with the
Colombo Mafia Family. As a child, Gravano had received ridicule from
his classmates because of his dyslexia condition, which made him a
'slow learner.' His diminutive size also prompted bullies to taunt
him, and once Gravano enrolled in a Beauticians School, it seemed to
many that Gravano would suffer the ridicule heaped upon those
considered by some elements of society as 'sissies.' At some point,
Gravano began to fight back, determined to 'prove his manhood' to the
petty hoods that ruled the streets of his native Bensonhurst. Gravano
soon discovered an ally in his fight to be treated with respect;
anabolic steroids, drugs that, combined with a special diet and
vigorous weight training program, can turn small 'sissies' into
hulking 'macho' men. As in all drugs, however, steroids produce side
effects, including an increased blood pressure and heart beat and the
eruption of violent fits of anger, the so-called 'roid rages.' As to
how many of the 19 murders Gravano has admitted to were fueled by his
steroids use, the number cannot ever be known but nevertheless will be
the subject of debate of criminologists and mental health
professionals for many years to come.

One of the more popular New York clubs of the era was Max's
Kansas City, which was presided over by the 'Andy Warhol' crowd.
Warhol had years earlier invented a new art form, 'Pop Art,' which
relied on everyday, commonplace subjects, such as his famous painting
of a Campbell's Soup can. Max's Kansas City was a place where stars
and wannabes of the art, fashion, and music world gathered to interact
off each other's creativity. Unknown musicians such as Billy Joel,
Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, and Patty Smith first plied their craft
inside the walls of the infamous club. Patty Smith's boyfriend, artist
Robert Mapplethorpe, also got his start at Max's Kansas City.

Within a few years Smith was a star of the new 'punk rock' genre
and Mapplethorpe was a rising star in Manhattan's hot art scene. Along
the way, Mappelthorpe descended into a subculture of New York
nightlife which dealt with drugs, sado-masochistic sex rituals, and
involvement in the Occult. Already a denizen of this scene was an art
dealer named Andrew Crispo, who found a lucrative business in
procuring art objects for rich and/or famous clients worldwide.

DEATH OF A GODFATHER

With the dawn of the 1980s new opportunities arose for members of
organized crime, most notably the arrival on the scene of an
inexpensive, highly addictive form of cocaine known as 'crack.' The
crack cocaine epidemic that swept America in a relatively short period
of time was in part the result of events that occurred in the final
months of the Administration of U. S. President Jimmy Carter. In 1979
the Soviet Union invaded neighboring Afghanistan. The response of
President Carter was his threat that if the Communists did not
withdraw from Afghanistan, the United States would not send it's
athletes to compete in the 1980 Olympic games to be held in Moscow.
Also during this time, Islamic militants seized the U. S. Embassy in
Tehran, Iran, holding hostage 52 U. S. citizens. Also, exploiting
President Carter's weakness, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro dumped onto
the shores of the United States thousands of his convicted criminals,
mentally ill, and drug addicts in the infamous 'Mariel boat lift.' The
Mariellitos were a nightmare for law enforcement nationwide, bringing
with them the practice of cocaine trafficking.

Carter's weakness prompted both the Soviet Union and it's ally
Cuba to sponsor Communist revolutions in several countries in Central
and South America. Most of the Communist insurgents were poor peasants
eaking out a living in the remote rain forests of their country, but
one commodity, which could be locally grown, was readily available as
a means of achieving arms to further the Communist cause; that
commodity was the coca plant, which produced a substance that could be
refined into cocaine, and, more deadly for the youth of America,
'crack.' As the Western World and the Communists fought it out over
the control of the hearts and minds of those in Central and South
America, tons of crack made it's way into the communities of America.

Members of John Gotti's crew in the Gambino Family were among
those to capitalize on the new flood of drugs into America. There were
several obstacles standing in their way; one was the Feds, who were
struggling to respond to the new tide of drug trafficking. The other
was the Godfather of the Gambino Family, Paul Castellano, part of the
old school of Mafia leaders who prohibited the dealing of drugs.
Something had to go; either the millions of dollars in drug profits
being earned by associates of John Gotti, or Godfather Castellano.

In December 1985, John Gotti and his associates awaited Paul
Castellano's planned visit to Spark's Steak House in mid-Manhattan.
The murder gang, which included drug addicts Sammy Gravano and Eddie
Lino, pulled off one of the great assassinations in Mafia history. The
murder of a Godfather was not permitted under Mafia rules, but this
was just one of many of the old rules that John Gotti would break
during his lifetime of crime.

THE KING OF CLUBS

In late 1983 Peter Gatien opened The Limelight in New York City.
This was actually the third incarnation of Gatien's club by this name,
the prior two having been hits in Florida and Georgia. The setting for
the nightclub was an abandoned Episcopal Church in the heart of
Chelsea, home to many of Manhattans artists, models, gays, and drug
dealers. The theme of the club was 'post-Disco' decadence, with a
deliberate sacrilegious scorn and disdain for the religious symbols
that flanked the walls and stained glass windows of the former house
of worship.

Everything from celebrities to the scum of the earth were
attracted to the Limelight, which in many ways recalled the glory
years of Studio 54, which had been at its peak just a few years
earlier. So many celebrities, in fact, came to the Limelight that
Peter Gatien hired a person whose sole function was to entertain them.
Performing this duty was a young man named Fred Rothbell-Mista. Young
Fred was one of several Gatien employees who would go on to bigger and
better things; in Fred's case, he would, years later, become "Rocco
Primavera," a character that satirized the 'lounge lizards' that
entertain in small venues nationwide, whose repertoire always include
the song "I Did it My Way!" Limelight Doorman Chazz Palminteri would
become a star after Gatien put up the money to produce Palminteri's
anti-Mafia motion picture "A Bronx Tale," starring Robert DeNiro.
Another Gatien employee to hit it big was Mark Vincent, a bouncer at
the Tunnel who would later become action star Vin Diesel.

Before Rothbell-Mista became a celebrity on MTV and other TV
programs, he made certain that those Celebes who popped into the
Limelight had a full glass of the drink of their choice (compliments
of the house), and that the gossip columnists got their daily fix of
'who was doing what and with whom.' On February 22, 1985, Fred
welcomed celebrity art dealer Andrew Crispo and two of his associates
into the VIP room at the Limelight. Crispo and his associates
repeatedly tried to convince Fred to join them in a 'party' some
distance away. Rothbell-Mista politely refused, as there were several
other VIPs on hand at the Limelight that night.

Crispo's young employee Bernard LeGeros would later claim that
Crispo was trying to lure Fred to a house upstate where he was to be
murdered. Failing that, Crispo and LeGeros left the Limelight and
headed downtown, where they hooked up with a young model from Sweden,
Eigel Vesti. The three then drove to Rockland County, where Vesti had
his face covered with a leather S&M mask. Vesti was tortued and
sexually assaulted for a lengthy period of time and then shot to death
with a rifle. The body was then thrown into a ditch and set on fire
with gasoline. By the time authorities found the body, all that was
left was the flesh on Vesti's face, protected by the leather 'Death
Mask.'

LeGeros was charged with the murder and convicted. Crispo,
however, was never charged in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of
the young model. Crispo had hired as his criminal attorney Roy Cohn.

The Limelight received a lot of negative publicity as the
investigation into the murder of Eigel Vesti revealed the earlier plot
at Peter Gatien's club. Partly as a result of this event, the
nightclub began to lose its popularity. As the decade was coming to an
end, Peter Gatien knew personnel changes were in order if his clubs
the Limelight and the Tunnel were going to regain their former
stature. Gatien decided to hire two young men as party promoters, the
'two Michaels;' 'Lord Michael' Caruso, a pathological criminal and con
artist who hailed from Brooklyn, and Michael Alig, a slight,
effeminate kid from the Midwest.

JOHN GOTTI SUPERSTAR

Pop icon Andy Warhol's most famous quip was "In the near future,
everyone will be famous for 15 minutes!" By the 1980s many Americans
had taken the quote to heart, believing it was their birthright as U.
S. citizens to become famous, if only temporarily. From the moment he
took over as Godfather of the Gambino Family, John Gotti appeared to
fit into this category. Most Godfathers of Mafia Families maintain a
low profile so as not to unnecessarily attract the attention of law
enforcement. Genovese Family Godfather Vinny "The Chin" Gigante had
taken this to another level, wandering the streets of Little Italy in
Manhattan wearing his bathrobe, mumbling incoherently to himself.

John Gotti decided not to hide from the Media nor law
enforcement. The new Godfather quickly became a conspicuous figure in
New York, walking the streets openly with his entourage while decked
out in $2,000 suits. First the tabloids, then the 'mainstream Media'
took the bait, turning Gotti into one of the most recognizable
'celebrities' in the city. Gotti even began to host a block party
outside his headquarters in the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Ozone
Park. The event was held each Fourth of July, with plenty of rides for
the kids and hot, free meals for whoever chose to attend. Enough
members of non-Italian ethnic groups were on hand to advertise that
the 'new' Mafia was an equal opportunity employer. Capping the event
was a huge – and illegal – fireworks display. Standing guard each year
at the event were dozens of impotent cops, on hand to ensure that no
one tried to interfere with the Godfather's right to violate the law.
The rank-and-file cops fumed silently, their anger directed more
towards the Mayor than at the Godfather.

Perhaps more angry and embarrassed were agents of the FBI;
Gotti's flaunting of his position as Godfather was nothing less than a
slap in the face of every FBI agent in New York. The Administration of
President Ronald Reagan decided to take action. The number three
person in the Reagan Justice Department was an aggressive attorney
from New York named Rudolph Giuliani, who was in charge of all of the
U. S. Attorneys thoughout the country. Giuliani grew up in New York
and hated the Mafia; many years later his anger would be revealed to
have familial roots.

Giuliani then resigned his high-ranking position in the Justice
Department to take the subordinate position as U. S. Attorney for the
Southern District of New York. From that office Giuliani launched an
unprecedented attack on the five Mafia families that had an iron grip
on the labor Unions, the garment industry, the waste management
industry, the Fulton Fish Market, and other viable moneymaking
industries. One of Giuliani's best achievements was his successful
prosecution of the "Commission case," in which the leaders of all five
families were indicted. One of those indicted, Paul Castellano, would
not live to face trial.

Rudolph Giuliani, however, would not get a crack at putting John
Gotti away. In 1986 Gotti was placed on federal racketeering and
murder charges by the U. S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District
of New York, the location of Gotti's headquarters. One of the jurors
selected, George Pape, was a friend of a man with alleged ties to
organized crime, Bosko Radonjich. Sammy the Bull was thus allegedly
able to bribe the juror and guarantee at least a hung jury. Gotti also
beat two other trials, neither of which involved extensive use of the
resources of the FBI.

That changed in December 1990 when the FBI arrested John Gotti
and Sammy Gravano on charges including gambling, tax evasion, and
murder. The indictments were the result of secretly taped recordings
made in a building in lower Manhattan where Gotti and his associates
frequently gathered to conduct business. Gotti and Gravano were each
held without bail while awaiting trial. Gravano hired as his lawyer
criminal attorney Benjamin Brafman, a career Mafia defender. Before
going to trial, Sammy the Bull made the stunning decision to plead
guilty and testify against Gotti in exchange for a reduced sentence.
Also sealing Gotti's fate was the decision by the Judge in the case
barring Gotti's use of his attorneys Bruce Cutler and Gerald Shargel,
citing their being mentioned by Gotti on secret tapes.

During Sammy's testimony at trial, Gotti at one point made a
motion with his right hand as if he was injecting a drug into his left
arm. The point of this gesture was to allude to Sammy's expensive
anabolic steroids habit. The anonymous, sequestered jury found Gotti
guilty on all charges and he was sentenced to life in prison without
parole. Outside the Courthouse, hundreds of what Gotti referred to as
"my public" rioted, chanting "Free John Gotti!"

The Gambino Godfather was sent to the Federal Penitentiary in
Marion, Illinois, where he was kept in solitary confinement. Sammy The
Bull, however, would soon be a free man, receiving a prison sentence
of only 5 years for the life of crime he confessed to, which included
19 murders. Conventional wisdom held that the Mafia would track
Gravano down wherever he was living in the world and assassinate him.

THE CLUB KIDS

In March, 1998 the 'Club Kids' were born at a now-legendary party
at Peter Gatien's The Tunnel nightclub. Among the founding members
were performance artist Joey Arias, the Lady Bunny, Phoebe Legere,
Lypsinka, RuPaul, Michael Alig, Keoki, Allison Wonderland, and Larry
Tee. The invitation to the party, entitled "Changing of the Guard,"
even listed Andy Warhol as a sponsor of the party, although Warhol had
died the year before.

Perhaps prophetically, the event was a huge success, and each of
the participants did in fact soon attain their '15 minutes' – and then
some. Keoki and Larry Tee would become famous DJ's, with Tee producing
a hit record, 'Supermodel' with transvestite model RuPaul. The Lady
Bunny and Lypsinka would also attain fame in the world of men dressed
as beautiful women. Pulling this all together as the "King of the Club
Kids" was Michael Alig, a young gay from the Heartland of America who
was attaining the ultimate revenge against those schoolyard bullies
who had taunted him in his youth for being 'different;' Michael Alig
had turned his 'difference' into fame, becoming within just a few
years of his move to the New York one of the most successful party
promoters in America.

The Club Kids wanted everything 'new' and they got it; their
costumes were futuristic, as were many of their names, they danced to
futuristic music, notably Techno, a computer-driven version of House
Music, and to get high, they turned to a new 'designer drug' named
Ecstasy. On one segment of the Geraldo Show Michael Alig had actually
bragged of having turned his own mother on to the new 'feel good' drug
of the 1990s.

"House Music," which would become identified with the Club Kid
scene, was invented in the mid 1980s in Chicago by music pioneers
Frankie Knuckles, pop duo Clivelles and Cole, Liz Torres, and the
"Queen of House Music," 'Screaming Rachel.' House music soon became
popular worldwide on the nightclub scene and the hit records recorded
by Screaming Rachel soon took her to the clubs of New York City. Just
years before the Internet explosion would provide everyone with their
own website, Screaming Rachel was among those in the early 1990s who
communicated their agenda through their own Public Access Cable TV
show. These programs, mostly of poor quality and with a narcissistic
tone, were a national trend at the time, satirized memorably in the
Saturday Night Live skit 'Wayne's World.'

By 1993 Screaming Rachel and the Club Kids were at the height of
their popularity; Michael Alig ruled as King every Wednesday night at
his popular Limelight event 'Disco 2000.' Screaming Rachel packed them
in during her Monday Night Live performances at the nightclub Tatou,
then run by former owners of Studio 54. Emcee of the Monday night
performances was Rocco Primavera.

The fall of the Club Kids scene began in 1994, when former
Prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani took over as Mayor of New York City. By
this time New York City had experienced unprecedented crime levels and
the residents demanded change. The previous Mayor, David Dinkins, had
not set a good example for New York City residents, having 'forgotten'
to pay his income taxes for 5 years. Openly hostile to the police,
Dinkins had raised taxes to unprecedented levels during the midst of a
Recession. Soon 100,000 jobs quickly vanished from the New York
economy, one of many disturbing facts TIME Magazine reported in it's
cover story 'The Rotting of the Big Apple.'

Giuliani was determined to clean up New York and his
Administration began a crackdown on crime, taking on everything from
the Mafia's control of the Fulton Fish Market to the "crime" of
jaywalking, considered by many New Yorkers a birthright. Even the sex
shops in Times Square, which provided a backdrop for the movie
'Midnight Cowboy,' filmed a generation earlier, were shut down. The
Giuliani Administration refused to issue the permit the Gambino's
needed to hold their annual block party, and scores of cops were sent
in to prevent so much as a sparkler from being ignited. Such
aggressive law enforcement tactics by the Giuliani Administration
would soon produce results most residents believed unattainable;
within a few years, New York City had become the "safest large city in
America!"

It was only a matter of time before law enforcement turned its
attention to the nightclub scene in Manhattan, which, since the days
of Studio 54, had operated under little scrutiny. One tragic event
that helped frame the problems in ClubLand was the death in the Summer
of 1995 of a New Jersey youth, Nicholas Marinella, who died from an
overdose of drugs obtained at The Limelight. The distraught family of
the 18-year-old turned to Mayor Giuliani for help. New York City clubs
came under increased surveillance, and the atmosphere in the clubs
began to chill. Screaming Rachel saw the writing on the wall, and,
sensing the impending death of the 'scene' of which she had been such
an intrical part of, the House Music Queen packed her bags and
returned to her native Chicago.

Also during this time, another member of the New York Club scene,
Michael Papa, decided to relocate to hopefully greener pastures. In
November of 1994, Papa and a friend were arrested for assaulting a
doorman at the Trump Tower on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue. Papa then
decided to move out West, and he brought to his new home in Phoenix,
Arizona first-hand knowledge of the New York Club scene and an
affinity for its drug of choice, Ecstasy.

Another New York City family headed out to Phoenix during this
time, the wife, daughter, and son of Sammy the Bull. Before they left
New York, they denounced Sammy in the Media as a 'rat,' claiming they
never wished to associate with him again. It is now known that this
was all a sham, that the Gravano family left town to set down new
roots in another city, a place where Sammy would join them after his
release from prison. Using the alias "Jimmy Moran," Sammy the Bull
started a new life for himself in the Arizona desert. Soon, his son
Gerard hooked up with Michael Papa, and the two longed for the good
times they had had in the Clubs of New York.

MURDER AND COVER-UP

Even though, by mid 1996, Screaming Rachel had been out of the
New York nightlife scene for 2 years, Geraldo Rivera did not hesitate
to invite her onto his program about the Club Kid scene. On May 8th,
the program flew the House Music star into New York, where she joined
the other nightcrawlers on the panel that continued the chronicling of
this social phenomenon.

Rachel and I had become acquainted years earlier when I covered
the nightlife scene as a columnist for a local magazine. Thus, once
Rachel was back in town, the two of us got together, along with a
mutual friend, to catch up with each other over a few drinks. That
night Rachel drank more than usual, and soon she was opening up to
something that was bothering her. Just a few days earlier, her friend
Michael Alig had visited her in Chicago, en route to a drug
rehabilitation facility in Colorado where Michael was being sent to
attempt to beat his addiction to heroin and Ecstasy. Alig had brought
with him videotapes of his favorite movies, which he and Rachel
watched during his visit. One was 'Rosemary's Baby,' the 1968 film
about a group of Devil worshippers in New York City. Also in Alig's
possession were his favorites "Seven," about a psycho who dismembers a
drug dealer, and "Angel Heart," the Mickey Rourke thriller about the
Occult and murder in New York and New Orleans.

At some point while watching these movies, Rachel claimed,
Michael confessed that he and his room mate "Freeze" had murdered a
drug dealer named "Angel," dismembered him, and thrown his body parts
into the Hudson River. Rachel then noted that her friend Michael was a
practical joker and that she wasn't convinced he was telling the
truth. The speed with which Rachel downed her next drink, and then
another, convinced me that she believed Michael had in fact murdered
Angel.

The next day I phoned Al Guart at the New York Post and the two
of us set out to investigate the alleged murder of Angel. First, we
met with Angel's brother and father outside the apartment building
where Angel was believed to have been murdered. The serious tone the
two exhibited towards the missing Angel convinced us that Angel was
probably dead.

Something curious then happened; friends of Michael Alig, aware
Al and I were investigating the disappearance of Angel, began a smear
campaign against me, claiming the story was a hoax I had concocted.
Rachel suddenly developed amnesia over the entire event. Then, on May
15th, Peter Gatien and 23 of his employees were arrested by the Feds
on charges they trafficked the drug Ecstasy in Gatien's nightclubs the
Limelight and the Tunnel. Brooklyn U. S. Attorney Zachary Carter
displayed uncharacteristic humor in noting that some of the DEA agents
in the investigation had to dress "like Dennis Rodman" in order to
gain access to Gatien's drug underworld inside the Clubs.

On May 17th Al Guart ran a story in the Post that gave a chilling
look inside Peter Gatien's empire; the previous September, authorities
had shown up one night at the Limelight to arrest 30 people for drug
trafficking, but only 4 were in residence. The Feds became convinced
that a crooked cop had obtained the list of those expected to be
arrested and that the list was circulated at the Limelight the night
before. Guart noted that because of the information compromise agents
of the Drug Enforcement Administration later refused to co-operate
with the Manhattan District Attorney's office and the NYPD. This
would, in fact, be the beginning of bad blood between the agencies
that would haunt the investigations for many months to come.

The Post also noted that the Ecstasy pills sold in Gatien's clubs
originated in Europe and were smuggled into the United States by a
group of Israeli citizens. Bail for Peter Gatien was set at $1
million. Gatien was represented in Court by criminal attorney Benjamin
Brafman, Sammy Gravano's former criminal lawyer.

Meanwhile, the investigation into the missing Angel Cruz
continued. Angel's real name, it turned out, was Andre Melendez, but
his name, like many in Clubland, had been changed. In this case, Andre
was rechristened "Angel" by none other than Michael Alig, the
inspiration being Alig's favorite movie "Angel Heart." Melendez took
the moniker literally, wearing two giant feathered wings on his back
as he plowed through the back rooms of the Limelight, selling drugs.
To the parents of kids who would die of the drugs peddled in Peter
Gatien's clubs, "Angel" the drug dealer was nothing more than the
'Angel of Death!'

As the weeks went by and no trace of Angel showed up, reports in
the Media suggested that the drug dealer was in fact dead. By
mid-July, the Federal Prosecutors in Brooklyn who had indicted Peter
Gatien and his employees on drug trafficking charges were reported to
have been investigating the disappearance of Angel. Speculation spread
through the city that the Feds could charge those involved in the
cover-up of the murder of Angel as crimes furthering the interests of
a racketeering enterprise, in this case, the alleged Gatien drug
trafficking ring. In other words, the Feds could use the RICO statutes
normally reserved for Mafia prosecutions to add racketeering charges
against Gatien and his employees that would significantly increase the
jail time such alleged criminals would receive if they were convicted.
While the actions that several Gatien associates had taken were
unmistakable evidence of an attempt to cover-up the murder of Angel,
the Feds were left with one minor little problem; they had yet to come
up with a body – or body part – that would prove Angel had been
murdered.

A few months later, the Feds thought they got a break in the case
when a body part wrapped in duct tape was pulled from the East River
by a hapless angler. The body turned out not to be the missing Angel.
However, two NYPD Detectives who read the story in the New York Post
decided to take a second look at a body part they had found months
earlier washed up on Staten Island. That body part turned out to be
the torso of Angel Cruz, proving at last that the drug dealer had in
fact been murdered.

However, the body showed evidence of more than just murder; the
corpse had been sexually mutilated, suggesting that what happened in
Michael Alig's apartment involved more than just a drug deal gone bad.

BLOODFEAST

In 1995 Michael Alig's friends threw a birthday party for
Michael, which Michael produced, called the BLOODFEAST and the
invitation to the event was a huge poster done up to present the party
as if it were a gruesome horror movie. The poster featured Michael
lying on the floor, his brains bashed out by a hammer that lay in
front of him. A Club Kid known as Jenny Talia was depicted eating
Michael's brains with a fork. The poster mentioned "Freeze's" name,
and carried the terms 'buckets of blood' and 'legs cut off.' This was,
of course, exactly what Michael and Freeze would do months later to
Angel Cruz; bash him on the head with a hammer and cut off his legs.
As all the elements of the eventual murder were there in the poster,
the evidence suggested that Angel's murder was in fact pre-meditated.

I decided to investigate further the elements that were used to
put the Bloodfeast poster together. My investigation revealed that the
fonts used in the wording of the invitation were purchased over the
Internet from a business called Brain Eaters Font Company. The fonts
used in Michael's poster were called Blood Feast, taken from a 1960s
horror flick. As Michael had already been revealed to be a pedophile
Ecstasy and heroin addict who drank his own urine at parties, a new
question had to be posed; 'had Michael and/or Freeze cannibalized
Angel's body?'

If the Feds knew the answer to this question, they certainly were
keeping it secret, as it appeared they intended to use Alig as a
Prosecution Witness against Peter Gatien. The Manhattan District
Attorney's office surely knew also, but they have a long history of
hiding from the public information about crimes involving the Occult.
Further investigation proved that Michael Alig and Freeze were
involved with the Occult; Michael being a 'dabbler' whereas Freeze was
heavily involved.

During this time, and continuing to this day, there existed a
sub-culture within the Club Kid scene of people involved in the
Occult. Some were into the 'Goth' scene, in which adherents dress in
Gothic clothing, their skin lightened with cosmetics. Associated with
this culture is the 'Vampire scene,' in which adherents drink each
other's blood. Scores of websites have sprung up over the last decade
devoted to these and related Occult practices, which would seem
humorous were it not for the fact that many of these practitioners
have been involved in murders throughout the country.

One person in this world, who was intimate with both Freeze and
art gallery owner Andrew Crispo was a young man named Ricardo Wiley.
For months, reporters tried to get an interview with Wiley, but the
Clubber indicated he feared for his personal safety if he spoke of
what he knew about his associates. On a warm August night in 1998, the
31-year-old suddenly died. Heart failure was ruled the cause of death.
Gregory Kraemer, a fixture on the Club scene for many years also fell
silent as to his extensive knowledge of crime in Clubland; just days
before Peter Gatien's arrest, Kraemer was found hanging at the end of
a rope secured to a ceiling fan in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel.
His death was ruled a suicide. The deaths of these two men, like that
of scores of others, were extremely convenient to many.

As to the murder of Angel Melendez, Detectives from the Manhattan
District Attorney's office eventually obtained a Warrant to pick up
Freeze, who immediately gave a hand-written confession. Michael Alig
later pleaded guilty as well, hoping to receive leniency in exchange
for offering testimony against Peter Gatien and others. Alig in fact
claimed what seemed evident all along to those following the case;
that there was a concerted effort to cover-up the murder of Angel the
drug dealer. However, by the time Peter Gatien's drug trafficking case
came to trial in the Federal Courthouse in Brooklyn, Alig had changed
his tune, instead making outrageous allegations against the DEA agents
involved in the investigation. By then, Federal Prosecutors had filed
additional charges against Gatien, including, as expected, a RICO
count. This charge, however, did not pertain to the cover-up of the
murder of Angel, but rather the use of sex and drug parties hosted by
Gatien at the Four Seasons Hotel which the Prosecutors argued were
'company bonuses' to reward those in the drug trafficking ring.

At Gatien's trial the Club Kid known as Jenny Talia suddenly
developed amnesia on the witness stand in regards to what she had
testified about before the Grand Jury. Jenny Talia had extensive
knowledge of Gatien's nightclub empire, as she had had an affair with
Peter Gatien, whom she met through her high school friend, Gatien's
daughter. Once on the Witness stand, Jenny Talia stated: "These
(parties at the Four Seasons Hotel) had nothing to do with the Clubs!"
This declaration echoed the mantra argued repeatedly by criminal
attorney Brafman throughout the trial. The Prosecutors in the case,
who had offered the Club Kid immunity from prosecution in exchange for
her testimony, were clearly fuming over having been 'screwed by Jenny
Talia' on the Witness Stand. "Are you afraid to testify against Peter
Gatien?" Prosecutor Michele Adelman barked. Once Jenny Talia was
excused from further testimony, her criminal attorney, Gerald
Lefcourt, left the Courtroom sporting the same smile he had at the
beginning of the session when he embraced Gatien's attorney Brafman.

When the trial was at last over, none of the reporters seemed
surprised when the jury returned a 'Not Guilty' verdict on all charges
facing Peter Gatien. The one juror who chose to speak to the Media
outside the Courthouse indicated that the jury was so shocked by the
crimes committed by the Prosecution Witnesses that they could not
believe a word that they said against Gatien. Particularly stunning
had been the testimony of "Lord Michael" Caruso, who confessed to
brazen rip-offs of drug dealers, drug trafficking, robberies, and
other crimes and whom attorney Brafman suggested had been involved in
a least one murder.

Peter Gatien mentioned under his breath to the reporters
surrounding him that he was going to "Church," although it was not
clear if the nightclub King had suddenly found religion during his
ordeal or if he was in fact referring to the Limelight, the old Church
that had been temporarily closed by the authorities. For Gatien and
his nightclub empire, however, more troubles lay ahead. Among other
problems, there were still charges of income tax evasion against him
filed by the Manhattan District Attorneys office. Citizens groups fed
up with the crime his clubs brought to the neighborhoods were fighting
to get his liquor license revoked. The issue of the crooked cop on
Gatien's payroll had yet to be resolved, and a Limelight-related
murder and a murder at the Tunnel were yet to unfold.

Also, the Federal trial against Gatien had brought into scrutiny
an unresolved murder with roots in Clubland; the violent death of a
drug dealer named Billy Balanca, an associate of both Lord Michael and
another ClubLand figure who was best known for being a lover of pop
star Madonna. His name was Chris Paciello, and his world – and that of
Sammy Gravano – would soon unravel as the world celebrated the
approach of the New Millenium.

SAMMY'S FALL

On New Year's Eve, 1999 a jet airliner was bound from Cancun
Mexico for the Bahamas, carrying onboard Serbian freedom fighter Bosko
Radonjich. The flight landed for a brief stopover in Miami on New
Year's Day and while awaiting the plane's departure, a restless
Radonjich accidentally wandered into an area that was a U. S. Customs
checkpoint. Bosko Radonjich had worked with the CIA for many years in
the fight against Communism in his homeland, but the computer the
Customs agents had access to at the airport had something very
different to say about Bosko; he was, in fact, a wanted fugitive,
having been indicted in 1992 for giving a $60,000 bribe to a juror in
the 1987 racketeering murder trial of John Gotti. The Customs agents
promptly placed Bosko under arrest. Upon learning of this, the Feds in
Brooklyn were ecstatic, knowing that the star witness in Bosko's trial
would be Sammy The Bull Gravano. By that time Sammy had been revealed
to be living a new life in Arizona, no longer hiding in the Witness
Protection Program. Gravano's plea agreement required that he testify
at any future trials in which he had information; Bosko's case fell
under this agreement.

However, a thousand miles away in Cleveland, Ohio, events were
unfolding that would impact on Bosko's trial. A Drug Enforcement
Administration agent and a Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department
Detective spent New Year's Eve intercepting a package sent via Federal
Express from Phoenix, Arizona. Inside the package were over 2,000
Ecstasy pills bound for four Youngstown area residents who were part
of a drug trafficking ring.

Meanwhile, back in Miami, pop star Madonna and her friend Ingrid
Casares were just a few miles away from Bosko's drama, spending New
Year's Eve at a Miami disco. Ingrid, the daughter of a Cuban Freedom
Fighter, had become a regular in the ClubLand scene, along with
Madonna and her circle of friends. It was in this world that Casares
would meet a New Yorker, Chris Paciello, who would become her lover
and business partner in three Miami nightlife hangouts. However, just
weeks earlier, the Feds had arrested Paciello on racketeering and
murder charges, claiming he was a member of the crew of Anthony Spero
of the Bonnano Mafia Family.

Paciello's rise from an obscure upbringing on Staten Island was
due to his talent for partnering with others. In 1992 Paciello and
'Lord Michael,' along with a few silent partners from the Gambino
Family took over a Florida bar owned by actor Mickey Rourke and turned
it into the nightclub RISK. It was indeed a 'risky business,' as the
club soon burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances.
Paciello then took the insurance money and opened a new nightclub,
LIQUID, which became a huge success, with the help of celebrities he
met along the way, including Madonna, Casares, Daisy Fuentes, Jennifer
Lopez, Naomi Campbell, Liza Minelli, and Nikki Taylor.

When Chris Paciello was hit with his multiple Federal charges, he
first hired as his attorney Roy Black, perhaps best known for his
successful defense of accused rapist William Kennedy Smith. Later,
Paciello switched to Benjamin Brafman. On January 7, 2000 Paciello was
arraigned in Brooklyn Federal Court on various charges, the most
serious being his role in a botched robbery attempt that ended in the
murder of Staten Island housewife Judy Shemtov. Among other
allegations against Paciello was the claim that he had given refuge to
Gambino Family associate Vincent Rizzuto while on the lam for
murdering a Colombo Family associate, and that Paciello had a meeting
with "Allie Boy" Persico, acting head of the Colombo Family.

Federal authorities would later add additional charges, claiming
Paciello torched his club RISK for the insurance money and also tried
to bribe a cop who had information about drug trafficking inside his
club LIQUID. Also, Prosecutors would claim that Paciello conspired
with Colombo Family Underboss "Wild Bill" Cutolo to run a nightclub in
Manhattan that would be a front for the Colombo Family. Cutolo, who
led a rival faction against the Persico faction during the bloody
Colombo Family war and was involved in the DC 37 Union scandal,
disappeared in the Spring of 1999 and is presumed to have been
murdered.

Also among the large volume of evidence the Feds had against
Paciello was a secretly recorded tape on which Paciello conspired with
a member of law enforcement to have a rival nightclub owner framed on
fabricated drug charges. The tapes also reveal Paciello stating that
if he ever got taken down, he wouldn't turn 'rat' as had Sammy the
Bull. However, as Paciello and criminal attorney Benjamin Brafman
weighed all of the evidence against him, Paciello began to think of
the unthinkable: turn government's witness and rat out all of his
associates in the Colombo, Gambino, and Bonnano Families.

In February, 2000 authorities in Arizona indicted Sammy "The
Bull" Gravano, his wife, daughter, son, and several associates on
charges they ran an extensive drug trafficking ring in Arizona, New
Mexico, and Ohio. When arrested, Sammy was found to be in possession
of a handgun and anabolic steroids. Federal Prosecutors in Brooklyn
then had to drop the bribery charges against Bosko Radonjich as their
star Prosecution Witness was now revealed to be someone who used his
own children to peddle drugs to kids.

Cynics publicly hoped that Sammy's son and daughter would pull a
"Sammy the Bull" and testify against their own father in exchange for
leniency. Instead, it was Gerard Gravano's friend Michael Papa who
agreed to testify against the Gravano family in exchange for leniency.

In July 2000 the Feds in Brooklyn indicted several people
involved in the trafficking of Ecstasy into the United States,
including an Israeli named Ilan Zarger. This 'Israeli connection'
turned out to be the same people behind the Ecstasy trafficking that
flourished inside Peter Gatien's nightclubs.

EPILOGUE

In May, 2001 Sammy Gravano pleaded guilty to drug trafficking
charges. He was to be sentenced by the Feds in Brooklyn on September
11, 2001, but the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center that day
postponed the sentencing hearing. Then, Sammy's attorney Lynne Stewart
was arrested on charges she illegally aided her client Sheik Omar
Abdel-Rachman, who is in prison for plotting terrorist attacks on New
York City landmarks. In September 2002 Gravano was finally sentenced
at the Federal Courthouse in Brooklyn to 20 years in prison. Although
Peter Gatien faced up to 25 years in prison for income tax evasion,
his criminal attorney Benjamin Brafman was able to secure a plea
bargain that put Gatien in jail for just a few weeks. Under attack by
community leaders and the outraged parents of kids who died because of
the drugs sold in his nightclubs, Gatien sold the Limelight and the
Tunnel nightclubs. In September 2002 agents of the INS threw Gatien
into solitary confinement in a Pennsylvania prison while processing
deportation proceedings. Despite having lived in the United States for
over three decades, Gatien, because of his negative opinion regarding
the U. S. military, had never applied for citizenship.

[American Dream]

What kind of drugs does one need to take to turn these people into emissaries of peace n love?

Sunday, April 01, 2001
Sammy Gravano and the Devil Dogs

Mob rat Sammy Gravano had a new name, a new home, and a lock on Arizona’s Ecstasy market. Then a gang of skinheads brought him down.

When 18-year-old Jordan Jarvis took off out of the keg party at 2658 East Gemini Street around 11:30 p.m. Memorial Day weekend in 1999, he was shaking. Streaming out of the house behind him in a blind rage were about 15 steroiders from Highland High in the Phoenix suburb of Gilbert. These guys called themselves the Devil Dogs, and they were enormous. As they came after Jarvis, a couple of them stripped off their T-shirts.

“Emergency!” someone yelled. “Get that motherfucker!”

Jarvis ran to the street and almost cried with relief when he saw his friend Charles “Bubba” Cairns, 19, in his black open-top ’76 International Harvester Scout truck, the engine running. “Go, dude, go!” Jarvis yelled to Bubba, jumping into the front seat and buckling himself in. But then Bubba’s friend Alisha Larson, 17, lost her shoe as she was climbing into the backseat. She bent to pick it up.

The Dogs were upon them, screaming like lunatics. “You’re the motherfucker who beat up Riley Gilbert!”

“No, man,” Jarvis said. “I don’t even know who that—”

A fist slammed in out of the darkness and shattered Jarvis’s cheekbone. The Devil Dogs swarmed around the truck. They grabbed at Jarvis. His seat belt held him in. So one of them, a kid named Kevin Papa, climbed into the Scout, straddled Jarvis and began smashing his face, over and over. “Stop it! Stop it!” screamed 17-year-old Beth from the backseat. She tried covering him with her body, but the Dogs pulled her away and then took turns hammering his face. To Beth the flat smack of fists pummeling Jordan Jarvis “sounded like machine-gun shots.”

The attackers howled like a pack of mongrels. As they kicked and clawed and punched, they spit out expletives: “Faggot!” “Piece of shit!” “You fucking niggers!” It didn’t seem to make much difference that Jarvis and Bubba were both white.

Even though he was in a choke hold, Bubba managed to get the truck into gear. “White power!” someone yelled as they peeled away down Gemini Street. Beth looked down—her legs were spattered with blood. When she checked on Jarvis, she almost fainted. His face was unrecognizable, a red and purple mass. Jarvis’s nose was crushed, pushed flat into a mangled left cheek. Blood soaked his shirt, the seats, the windshield. As Jarvis fought to stay conscious, he thought, I’m going to die.

As they raced away, Jarvis dimly heard a sound fading behind them—the strange sound of human children barking like dogs.

Twenty miles to the west, a short, stocky 54-year-old man with graying hair relaxed with his family in Tempe, quietly enjoying the holiday. A few of his neighbors still knew him as Jimmy Moran, owner of a local construction firm. Close friends and family knew him by another name: Salvatore Gravano. The Bull.

Few would question his status as the most notorious Mob turncoat in history. After a 20-year career as an enforcer, hitman, and eventually underboss of New York’s Gambino family, Sammy Gravano turned informer in 1991. He nailed 39 mobsters and landed Gambino boss John J. Gotti in Federal prison for life. Despite admitting to 19 murders, his searing insider testimony earned him a sweetheart deal with the government. Then, in the kind of second act that Americans—especially mobsters—aren’t supposed to have, Gravano relocated to Arizona and quickly returned to the work he knew best.

In rebuilding a crime network from the ground up, Sammy the Bull didn’t reach out to the old-world Mafia. Instead, authorities say, he joined together with a new breed of vicious young suburban white-boy gangsters led by Michael Papa, 23, a brilliant and charismatic Arizona State University premed student, and Gravano’s own son, Gerard, 23. With Sammy as godfather and venture capitalist, and muscle provided by the violent white supremacist gang the Devil Dogs, the group sought to dominate the Phoenix market for a drug that burst like a supernova in the 1990s: Ecstasy. At its height the Gravano-Papa cartel was pulling in about $1 million profit per month.

Sammy and the Dogs. Together they rose, and together they fell. Gravano couldn’t have known it on that quiet Memorial Day weekend, but the Gemini Street attack would eventually set forces in motion that even the most powerful former Mob man in America would be unable to control.

Continues at: http://www.thechicagosyndicate.com/2001 ... -dogs.html

[American Dream]

Long lost Robert Anton Wilson book, Starseed Signals, to be published

RAW and Discordianism scholar Adam Gorightly rediscovered the book and wrote a forward for it. And although the book was never published, it formed the basis for later work, Gorightly writes in his forward: "Starseed Signals laid the foundation for RAW’s landmark work Cosmic Trigger, The Final Secret of the Illuminati, so don’t be surprised if some of the passages in this book seem familiar, to be later lifted and inserted into the Cosmic Trigger narrative."

https://boingboing.net/2016/12/05/long- ... ilson.html

I can't say much about the newer Starseed work, but I do have a few thoughts about the earlier Tim Leary stuff. I smell the hand of very sophisticated psy-ops in that.

I believe they were "channeled" when Leary was housed at Folsom Prison, before he was moved to Vacaviille Prison, a notorious MKULTRA site. I also believe that at least one of the four-person "telepathic team" was a likely CIA operative and confidence artist. That would be Joanna Harcourt-Smith, Tim's "wife", and somewhat of a junkie too.I can't say if the other members of the team were compromised, but certainly they were prisoners, and thus very vulnerable.

Interesting that Leary got into boosting space travel during and after these sessions, a place where arguably his line coincided with elite agenda. Interesting that his later friend Carol Rosin ("Mata Hari Von Brownie") was an intimate, even a disciple, of notorious space Nazi Werner Von Braun. Interesting also that Leary after the Starseed sessions became a big booster of the L5 Society which actively tried to turn on psychedelic people to a pro-space exploration agenda. Also interesting that L5 actively promoted space launches by a German company called OTRAG which featured Von Braun as scientific adviser and another big Nazi war criminal Kurt Debus (also of NASA) as Chairman of the Board.

For whatever it is worth, around this same time Marshall Applewhite, of later infamy with the Heaven's Gate suicide cult, was recruiting an earlier iteration of his mind control cult. He and another woman ("Bo" and "Peep") were recruiting people to give up all their earthly belongings to go underground with them so they could be taken by alleged "space brothers" to the stars. I don't know what ever happened to these people, but a lot disappeared.

So, anyway, my personal understanding is that Tim Leary was a CIA-affiliated psychologist who "spun out" into loose-cannon status but was then taken into CIA-linked mind control prisons through extraordinary rendition with the active collusion of his paramour Joanna Harcourt-Smith.

[American Dream]

TW: Not such a pretty picture...

Ready to Die: Three Days of Drugs and Disintegration with The Grateful Dead



Day Two: Taking Acid Alone


I smuggle the acid inside a Gary Snyder anthology. Airplane security can’t scan every page of a portable library, and any short-lived alliance with ancient forces helps. The last time I came home from Chicago, the psychedelics stashed themselves inside an Aldous Huxley book. They call the shots, pick the page, assign the author.

These two tabs came at high recommendation, acquired from a stranger on the balcony of a party at New Year’s Eve. He seemed trustworthy, so I pocketed them for the right moment, risking commercial incident in case homeland security got too savvy. Judging from the hieroglyphics and Greek letters inscribed on each fleck of doused paper, I could wind up enlightened or wind up like a conscious rap casualty bleeding from my third eye.

I don’t even want to do this. After waking up multiple times in the night, riddled by a nascent cold and gnawing numbness, I briefly consider leaving the tabs at home, but I’m a professional. This is the Fourth of July, the 50th Anniversary of the band that soundtracked the acid tests, and why not add fireworks to fireworks. Besides, VICE paid for these tickets and I feel some sort of journalistic courtesy.

So I let the paper dissolve under my tongue and slowly float down Shakedown Street. The song said that this used to be the heart of town, a traveling drug bazaar, Samsara for the stoned, a Mobius strip where even infants could score high-octane Owsley LSD.

But the carnival has contracted. Chemicals have gotten more complicated and lethal. Tolerance has lessened for allowing an open-air black market in the Soldier Field parking lot. Yet here we are, 5:22 PM on the last Saturday night, spinning the wheel, buying the chillum, petting the dogs and babies in Terrapin Station t-shirts, eating the BBQ, idling by semi-sane casualties costumed as Uncle Sam, walking past policemen gliding on Segways, flashing meat hook squints and slate eyes.

I buy a lighter from a dreaded woman with a gentle voice who asks if I want any “Shud, ganja, or wax.” I pat my pockets, smile, and amble off past a man with feathers on his wheelchair, motoring through the crowd as his friend cries out, “Watch Out! Let him pass! You don’t want bloody shins.”


No blood spilled, but skeletons and bears are everywhere. Buttons, flags, shirts, posters, bumper stickers emblazoned with the trademark insignias—the original embodiment of “brands will make you dance.” Wu Tang before Wu Tang. But the Clan could never keep it together for this long. Despite occasional strife, the greater Dead diaspora staunchly fought the corrosion. A molten reckless comet threatening to hurtle into the soil, but somehow afloat via the power of crystal skulls and guitar solos.



Everyone is in on the act. Young black dudes who look more Gangsta Disciple than Grateful Dead wear skeleton shirts, whispering pleas to buy coke and mushrooms. With bulging belly, a woman holds up a cardboard sign reading, “Baby in the oven wants to hear Dead play live.” December 2 is the due date, I overhear. In 16 years, they’ll tell their kid that he heard the last gasp in utero. Maybe he’ll consider it when he smokes loud for the first time. Or maybe they won’t land a ticket.

Short beardos, fat beardos, tall beardos, decrepit old beardos, baby-faced aspiring beardos. 17 types of Bro hand shakes. Lavender tinctures for sale and five dollar vegetarian struggle burritos hastily cooked and wrapped in the baked asphalt wards of Soldier Field. Sad old lonely men hawk “Jerry is My Co-Pilot” stickers, Beavis & Butthead Dead shirts, Dead vinyl slipmats, and used Phil Lesh autobiographies. Fair condition.

Ganja caramels are furtively passed. Reeking cobweb clouds of chronic and cigar smoke blend with the dank rot of garbage and backwash-filled beer bottles. A wastrel glued to his lounge chair rocks a “Mountain Dew” shirt—except it actually says “Morning Dew,” a song that he plays on loop from a boombox. My hair stretches past my shoulders, I’m unshaven for a month, and yet I’ve never felt more clean-cut.

“LAST NIGHT WAS WAY BETTAH THAN SAN FRAHN. ONE OF DA BEST SHOWS I EVAH SAW,” brays a tank topped-mook with a Fenway accent and beak face.

Shambling Egon Spenglers carry “Grateful Dead Theology Project” notebooks, approaching ad men in jester hats. Opiated Broman legions idle, bloated with beer, removing cans one by one from their coolers. The coolers look like caskets and they’re wide open.

I’m approached by gentle mendicants hopping out of double decker buses clutching copies of the magazines that they made with their “communal family” in San Diego. He tells me that they worship “The Messiah…or Jesus, as some people call him…He’s a man who started something radical and lived communally until the evil powers subverted it and took it for their own use….But this re-emergence of this manifestation of the heavenly commonwealth dates back to the year, 1974. ”

One of his friends asks if I have gotten on the bus yet. He says, “you must, you must.” I look for the aforementioned bus in the Adler Parking Lot, but can’t find it and don’t get saved. Story of my life.

A plane flies a banner reading, “Chicago, we’re grateful.” A soused heathen walks past me in a shirt that says, “Don’t Give Bobby Bronco acid.” When someone asks who Bobby Bronco is, he chortles and replies, “the guy you don’t to give acid to.” A woman bovinely waves a “Be Kind, Jerry’s Watching” sign. The first iridian flushes rush through my head, but the chemicals have yet to fully kick. Is Jerry is watching? No, he’s not. But I still double check the sky to vainly detect his corpulent outline in the clouds.



A DirectTV blimp levitates, touting “Sammy Hagar’s Rock and Roll Tours.” An errant firework decapitates the blimp and turns it into a rock and roll auto-da-fe before the horrified but intrigued crowd. Maybe I’m feeling something.

With rip tide pull, the crowd yanks me towards the entrance, past a desiccated old-timer forlornly offering, “I Miss Jerry” stickers. An overheard voice says, “If someone in Phish dies, I hope they never play as Phish again.” As I approach the concrete stadium façade, a 44-year-old bearded tie die tells me, “all those fingers that people are holding up? In Santa Clara, those were tickets.”

We talk briefly. He didn’t get into “cool music” until ’95, when he was a senior in college. Prefers Panic to Phish. The Dead above all. “But you have to admit, Trey is a God.”


Before I enter, a psychedelic Uncle Sam to the left of me smuggles a Strawberita in his socks.

* * *

Bill Walton waves from the stage at us. He’s galumphing in a skull and bones shirt, posing for photos with an E-Z Bake smile. No tie-die, as if to preserve a shred of self-respect. Or maybe he just wore that shirt yesterday. A dark golem next to me severs my concentration by creeping on everyone with a “Hugs for Free” sign. Therein lies the paradox: one minute, you’re gawking at one of the deftest passing big men in NBA history, the next you’re trying to avoid a touchy-feely angel of death.

I eavesdrop on a denim pantsuit (54th show) speaking with a man with flecks of grey in his four-day stubble (62nd show). His name is Jeff. She tells him that she also has a Deadhead friend named Jeff. Not me, I hope. All around, conversations loop about “energy,” “vibes,” and “waves.” I’m going to reconsider all the life decisions that led me to this moment during “Space/Drums.”

For now, “Shakedown Street,” ignites the last day of disco. You’re supposed to ease into it, but only 48 hours left before the coke wears off and the soul train grinds to a halt. Phil is gaunt but still giddy, a kindly seer-coach with a thick shag of hair, Sesame Street goofy, doing floppy bowlegged rooster dances. Mickey Hart wears dark shades looking pure aged hipster. Weir is all gruff scowls and business. Bruce Hornsby crushes white line grooves with psychedelic piano vamps. A banner flies above us: all the years combine, they melt in a dream.

So here I stand, several months from my 34th year, nearly half of life elapsed, trying to remember every vanished Fourth of July, acid asphyxiating the oxygen in my brain, memories unable to adhere, wearing flannel in the heat. My chin tilts up, hypnotized by a sky tinted with ectoplasmic white light, considering the salutary benefits of freedom, disco, and survival. The band bumps “Liberty.” No subtlety allowed on Independence Day.



The dancers codify themselves. There’s the “Frat Boy Boat Float,” the “Nevada City Whirling Dervish,” “The Fairy Princess Flutter,” the “Fat Man Belly Flop,” the “Runaway Nymph,” and the “Little Red Rooster” (recommended for blues aficionados).” The Dead offer the ability to disregard the beat. You can sync with any drum gong, bass riff, piano slither, or guitar flight—or none of the above. The drugs start saber rattling during “Me and My Uncle.” In my brain, air balloons ascend and familiar spirits rifle through the cabinets, the colors mutate and contort, liquefying with their own rhythm and cadence. The acid was essential because this is a last chance to connect the eternal chords to the chaos of the present. My cold nags, but I’m trying to ignore it. This is my personal Michael Jordan flu game. I don’t need to drop 38, but I’m going to throw up jumpers and elbows until the last whistle.

How did this happen? How did something as ostensibly trivial as a rock and roll band neurologically re-route hundreds of thousands of lives? Was it the music? The culture? The drugs? The Jerry? The obvious answer is all four. Respect due to anyone who can achieve the same feverish rush by organic means, but I’ve always required illicit fuel and other welcome distortions. I once asked Ray Manzarek of The Doors, “The 60s happened because of acid, right?” “Oh yes.” He repeated it several times. “Without a doubt.” A completely biased observer, but I’ll accept it as confirmation.

Without acid, the Dead might wind up an obscure Palo Alto bluegrass jug band. Kesey never writes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Tom Wolfe never shambles after the bus in the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. The tie die is never cast for these parishioners.

Instead, Weir morphs into a peyote shaman lingering on the periphery of a New Mexico Indian reservation. He sings about West Texas, the historic drug and oil wasteland, not far across the border from Juarez. The last time I drove through that lost elbow, I got stopped at a checkpoint off Interstate 10 by DEA officials and a drug-sniffing dog, who found less than a gram of weed within 14 seconds.

It had been buried at the bottom of a laundry bag in the trunk. No matter. The human pork rinds removed me from the car, interrogated me about every facet of existence, and threatened me with 56 nights in a federal penitentiary. Finally, they let me go, smirking and laughing as I threw away the weed in a metal cylinder. It might as well have been a Dead song. At the time of the almost arrest, I’d been listening to “Me and My Uncle” and “El Paso.” That’s what you do when you’re driving through tumbleweed country. Texas, Colorado, Arizona, Mexico, and California shroud Dead songs, a character of their own, territories with endless imagined unbroken road, the frontier chartered by those on the permanent fringe.

“I’m as honest as a gambling man can be.” Weir sings a line originally written by John Phillips in a black out Tequila fugue state, but it could easily be an original. The Dead recruit every cheater, gambler, and degenerate into their rogue cosmos. Threnodies obsessed with dubious religion, drugs, and dissolution. Songs for the flawed and immoral—American ballads. Happy birthday.



It’s 8:02 PM and I write down the note that the painted roses on the transom of the stage are leaking black ambrosia onto the band’s head. Give all props to the drugs for making these hideous color schemes and laser shows seem copacetic. A beach ball lands at my feet. I pick it up and thwack it into the audience, which elicits an impressed stare from the man next to me.

“If the beach ball comes to you, you hit it,” I tell him, raising my eyebrows.

A potential life credo, but only if you aren’t the zesty bro bringing the beach ball to the party. As it orbits the audience, the band rips into a ragged muffled “Tennessee Jed” then “Cumberland Blues,” then the sawdust mud strut of “Red Rooster.” The latter cut torn from the Pigpen bestiary.

Pigpen is the mustache that time forgot. History reveres Jerry as the brains, guitar, voice, and soul, but that’s a simplistic interpretation. It’s Pigpen who sold Garcia on the vision of electricity. Before that, they’d been jugging folk-blues at Stanford coffee shop kickbacks. He was the original frontman, de facto manager, and one of the few Caucasians to competently wear a bandana. After the “27 Club” inducts Pigpen in the spring of 1973, it’s a different band. The drugs only get more intense, but something’s still cleaner. He was their Jacques Cousteau or Ol’ Dirty Bastard: without him, the Dead could never get that low. He wore all leather and stressed Southern Comfort over psychedelics, a vote that led him to the earliest grave of the bunch.

There’s something permanently displaced in Pigpen songs. They’re a broken sewage pipe. Filthy revenants lingering in unbaptized purgatory. Liver-ravaged swamp rat blues sung by a man who sensed he’d never see 30. His live performances throughout the late 60s and early 70s could be the best white blues of the era, only really rivaled by Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, Eric Burdon, and Jim Morrison on LA Woman. A dirtbag of the best kind.

When Pigpen went haint, Weir wrapped himself up in those gross rags. He absorbed the dirt well enough, but the world can’t produce another Pigpen. And this battle has long been lost. The bros next to me aren’t celebrating the merits of bones buried for 42 years, they’re offering air guitar testament to “Trey’s fingers, maaan.”

“Friend of the Devil” slurs. The DirecTV blimp responds with anodyne slogan: “Thank You For a Real Good Time.” Followed by the #Dead50 hashtag and a cascade of dancing bears. In spite of it, the song stays sacred, each note its own nostalgia thirst trap. They slide into “Deal,” but everyone knows that before it happens. The big screens come alive with sepia and psychedelic videos of teens dancing in every decade. Soul era to selfie. All the generations crash one LED floor with different dance moves. I take a look around and everyone sings every word, enraptured and chemically bright. High as hell. Drowning in a giant bowl of Trix.

* * *

“Do you want to hear the most fucked up story you’ve ever heard?”

There’s only one way to answer that question. It comes from a flirtatious brunette in her mid-40s, who just used me as a shield from security, so that that she and her friend could blow lines from a compact mirror on the floor of Soldier Field.

It’s intermission and I debate a beer or bathroom run, but the lines for everything are 20 minutes each. The stadium is dangerously overcrowded, sweating, foaming and heavily drugged. It’s not territory worth navigating on a head full of hallucinations. Half these people are ghosts and half are cartoons.



I lean against a metal railing and let it hit me. A salt and pepper Gen X “cool dad” with black hipster glasses facetimes “Wifie.” A 17-year old adjusts her sunflower diadem. People pass out hand sanitizer and sit down on blankets. It’s all chill until a Dead-themed episode of Sex and the City breaks out. Within eight seconds of eavesdropping, one tells the other, “If I was a Lesbian, I’d totally fuck you.” Arms around each other, silver bracelets dangling. Fast-twitch coked up hand gestures, exaggerated amphetamine movements, loud babble.

The brunette laments, “I had a love and I lost it.” She’s clearly the “Carrie” of the crew: wavy-haired, wrinkles forming at the creases, an over-tanned olive skin Jewish American Princess. Summers in the Hamptons or Cape Cod. Soul Cycle slim and Sauvignon Blanc drunk. Married to a doctor, lawyer, or hedge fund acrobat, but no more. Maybe it imploded from adultery or just regular life stresses. Either way, something’s awry. The cocaine confirms it.

After a bump or three, she stands and thanks me for blocking the security guards, none of whom would’ve cared had they seen it go down. We briefly make dull conversation. She introduces herself as Lisa. The bomb drops.

“How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow and life as you knew it was no more?”

“That’s very Final Destination of you.”

Trying to be funny because I don’t want to hear what’s coming.

“One morning in March, I woke up and my husband of 25 years was dead.”

“Was he sick?”

She shakes her head and repeats a story told too many times. About the shattering late night phone call from police. The commuter train car crash that incinerated a half-dozen near their home in Philadelphia’s Main Line. Waking up her children in the morning to tell them that they’d never see daddy again. The subsequent unraveling.

A dazed housewife had made the mistake of driving across the train tracks against a red light. The “Do Not Cross” bar slammed down on top of her SUV. Getting out of the vehicle, she inspected the damage, hopped back in, and fatally opted to keep crossing.

One underestimation and the victims could only be identified through dental records. Six corpses in a car carrying over 600. A 99 percent survival rate doesn’t matter when you’re in the wrong seat. One second you’re looking at your iPhone inside an iron horse, the next your entire life is a quarter-page obituary. They hit the third rail. A gruesome odor of bones and singed flesh seeps through my nostrils. It sounds overwrought until you’re eyeball-to-eyeball with the widow. And the acid isn’t helping.

“What would you do?” She repeats the rhetorical, as though I have any answers. As though my life to date hasn’t been a series of lucky curves and narrowly avoided catastrophes.

I murmur awkward platitudes about survival and trying to make the most of a fucked-up existence. But as soon as the words come out my mouth, they sound suspect.

“Sometimes, I think he’s playing pranks on me from the grave,” she drags me deeper into The Twilight Zone.

Where do we go from here? How can I possibly convey the intensity of consoling a bereaved dowager with a head beaming with warped light? This is the platonic bad trip, swallowed by dark energy. I’m not the right man and this is the wrong time, but she’s sweating profusely and in muted agony, so I do the best I can and just listen. Like everyone else in the stadium, The Dead was their band. First date, sushi. Second date, one of the final shows in ‘95. When Jerry shuffled off, her future husband was woebegone. He always morbidly claimed that he’d die at 53 too. The prophecy came true. But before it did, everything conformed to yuppie phantasy: two healthy kids, multi-million dollar suburban home, disposable income to tape jam bands around the globe. Then one night...



“Look at him,” she waves to her brother, slightly dopey and short, bespectacled and sweet. He stands just out of earshot, tie-died.

“He’s 45-years-old with a girl barely 30,” she adds contemptuously. Smirks.

The girlfriend seems nice enough, mouth slightly asymmetrical, plain-Jane enough to star as Pam in a small-town community theatre reproduction of The Office.

“I gave her an edible last night. Half as much as me. I was fine. She went to first aid.”

My brain feels like it’s been slimed. Everything looks like R. Crumb grotesquerie. I ask about her kids.

“Do you know how many thousands of dollars I’ve had to spend on autographed sports collectibles?”

A few Philadelphia Eagles offered condolences to her son. One even followed him on Instagram. “I’ve had to be mother and father. I’ve had to handle all the business”

Flashback to being 13 again. Picturing her child sitting in a sad tomb of sports memorabilia, missing his dad and being filled with infinite rage.

“Are you happy?” she asks me.

I’ve never really understood the meaning of happiness. Appreciative and fortunate, sure. But happiness feels like a phantom idea only accessible to the religious, rich, or naturally serene. Achievement always mattered more because it’s measurable.

“Mostly.”

“What do you mean mostly? This nightmare has taught me that the only thing that matters is happiness. I’m here, and I’m going to have fun because none of this matters. You might not wake up tomorrow.”

We’re one platitude away from re-enacting the acid scene in Easy Rider. All I need is a few raised New Orleans vaults, some voodoo candles, and her whispering, “I know what it’s like to be dead.”

I can joke all I want but it feels smug to make to jokes. I’d rather run as far as away as possible, but feel starched to the ground. And I’m supposed to stay here and watch and tell you if a bunch of senior citizens are good or bad at playing songs, 40 years after their prime. What was I thinking? Why did I do this to myself? I need to go home and check into a Zen monastery without Wi-Fi. Meditate all day and snort bok choy at night for eternal life.

But there’s no escape route. The bowl overflows. Ramparts of people wall me in every direction. Lisa and her crew pass out glow sticks in advance of the second set.

“Do you want a glow stick?”

No, I don’t want a glow stick.

She’s with mostly middle-aged men, resolved to bi-yearly benders but determined to make them count. A bald bro next to me wears preposterously narrow cat-eye glasses and a red, white, and blue Hawaiian lei, because right—it’s the Fourth of July.

“What do you want? Drugs? To dance? To make out?” Lisa says, inching closer, forcing my most awkward grin.

All around me, the men do fraternal “Let’s drink more,” chest-beating. But it feels oafish and forced. A U.S. Blues of buttery chins, gelatinous smiles, and puffy sourdough loaf bellies erupt from Bahama shirts. All avenues led here, somehow.

* * *

The next set starts slow, but by the second song, “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion),” the jams turn into maple syrup and liquid quartz. The drug screams are muffled, replaced by thoughts of the universal. This is really the root of all acid revelation: Everything is inter-connected and the only thing that matters is love. Let me save you the trouble.


I stare at a woman to the right of me, lost in reverie, closing her eyes to disappear into the decades, experiencing cosmic baptism for the 33rd time, healed through music and spastic flailing. I consider all life on this dumb planet, not just the ones crammed in here, but all those who couldn’t make it—permanently silenced by freak accidents or exotic disease. I light another spliff as a votive.



Enter the axis mundi. 10:17 PM on the final Saturday, America’s 239th birthday, the Dead’s 50th. Future and past divined from arabesque patterns; my eyes inflated and red as a playground handball. On the LED screens, raw cherry, cream soda amber, neon emerald, amethyst and ocean blue waves crisscross—instantiating the organized chaos of guitar, organ, and drums.

The Dead is where all compass directions meet. A songbook as column of smoke— compromised of acid rock, country, bluegrass, rockabilly, jazz, the blues, jug band folk, and Appalachian murder ballads. Every form of American outlaw music, synthesized and electrified. They inspired a million carbon copies and a half-dozen true originals. You can see their influence in Dungen and Tame Impala, Wilco and My Morning Jacket, Pavement and Real Estate, and anything ascribed as psychedelic. Clichés can be correct. This is the most quintessentially American band.

Another jam so long that you could learn Ancient Greek. Lesh still killing it out here, close to his ninth decade. Weir on rhythm guitar, whiskers filliwipping, and everyone dreaming of Jerry, the haintly saintly specter who held it all together before turning into a Half Baked myth and ice cream flavor. His ashes strewn at sea while Trey handles his leads, staring at his guitar with “whoa” face like he just pulled Excalibur out of Medieval stone.

“Are you happy now? Lisa asks me.

Yes, I am happy. At least for a few fleeting exhales, where it all seems so ordained and absurd. I use drugs for this, so that the mundane seems important, and the vaguely important becomes epic. So I can step outside of my prison for a second and attempt to interpret anything significant from this runic madness.

Staring at myself from outside my frame. Situated in the heart of the circle, amidst 70 thousand pilgrims, a weird pillaging vortex of energy smack in the middle of Downtown Chicago, plagued by its own poisons and temporary cures. This is mine for a minute.

We cruise into “West LA Fadeaway.” The rare Dead song about Southern California. Glassy-eyed sinner-man synth-pop about meeting an old mistake next to the Chateau Marmont. Cold-blooded music that feels heart-warming, especially for me, who has shot and conducted enough West LA fadeaways to fill an almanac. Memories of seedy drug exchanges in parking lots off Pico, jittery all-nighters in apartments off the Sunset strip. Good times. Bad people.

Lisa tries to get me to dance, but I shake my head and stare at the floor. It’s stained with glow sticks and toy earrings, cigarette butts and empty molly and cocaine packets. My own doomed odometer is ticking. I’m still leaning against the metal rail, head still spinning, colors still outrageous, fear mounting about what will happen when this all ends.

She asks me to dance one more time or nah. Nah. As soon as her back turns, I opt to take the Dead’s advice, dipping into the dark amoeba mass. Sometimes it’s better to fade away than to burn out. So I perform yet another West LA Fadeaway 1700 miles from home.

https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/t ... -well-2015

[American Dream]

JOHN WILCOCK: The History of East Coast Academic Acid

[American Dream]

4 Elements to Strengthen Us

http://www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/ ... ngthen-us/

[American Dream]

“But how does shamanism work?” Julie asked.

Seeing a puzzled look on Julie’s face, I searched for an analogy.

“Imagine yourself,” I replied, “as a Koryak reindeer herder living a nomadic existence in the endless boreal forest belt of Siberia. You live in a world without maps, compasses, or clocks and certainly without GPS. Season upon season you travel with your clan and reindeer herd through a seamless landscape of green and brown forests sometimes interrupted by the blues and grays of lakes and rivers. Then one day you watch your favorite reindeer nibble on a bright red-and-white mushroom that popped up out of the moist ground overnight. Suddenly, the reindeer begins to cavort about in a very un-reindeer-like fashion. You try the mushroom and soon find yourself transported through magical landscapes filled with talking spirits who instruct you how to live well and prosper.”

Julie was listening intently as I asked her, “So what would you think about this world?”

“That it was showing me a spirit world that could help me thrive in the natural world,” Julie replied.

“Precisely,” I agreed, “and that’s the point. For tribal peoples, these supernatural realms were accessed through the shamanic flight of the soul. It’s only within the context of shamanism that we can understand the true origins of Santa Claus.”

Mushroom Rock Art of the Chukchi

Often overlooked and certainly overshadowed by Wasson’s cracking of the Soma code in the Rigveda is his equally surprising discovery of an ancient “Siberian fly-agaric complex” among the ancient indigenous peoples of the Arctic Circle. Peering deep into the wellsprings of time long before the Aryan invasion on the Indus Valley,* Wasson traced the roots of Aryan worship of the Soma mushroom back some six thousand years to the semi-nomadic reindeer herders of Eurasia known to anthropologists as the fathers of shamanism. Today there remain some three hundred thousand reindeer herders divided into thirty ethnolinguistic groups.†

*According to the widely accepted Aryan invasion theory, between the fourth and second centuries BCE, several migrations occurred involving different Proto-Indo-Aryan groups from the steppes of central Asia toward the alluvial plains and valleys of northwest India. However, academics continue to debate whether the Indo-Aryans invaded and assimilated the less sophisticated Indus Valley cultures, or whether the Indo-Aryans moved in as the superior Indus Valley civilization was in a state of decline, adopting their mythologies and technologies. †They inhabit three far-flung, forest-belt regions of Russia and Scandinavia. Among them are the Lapps and Nenets in the Far West; the Ostyak, Samoyed, and Vogul of the central tundra and taiga zones; and the Chukchi, Koryak, and Kamchadal who live in the extreme Far East of Russia.

When Wasson published Soma in 1968, he had to rely on secondhand data derived from folk tales and linguistic analysis and on the firsthand accounts of “explorers, travelers, and anthropologists” who visited these remote regions as far back as the late eighteenth century.4 At that time he was unaware of recent Russian archaeological expeditions that had found iconic evidence—dramatic images etched in stone—of the use of psychoactive mushrooms among the ancient Chukchi.

During field expeditions in 1967 and 1968, Russian archaeologist N. N. Dikov discovered numerous mushroom and reindeer petroglyphs (rock carvings dating from 1000 BCE) on the banks of the Pegtymel River in the Far Eastern Chukotka region, located across the Bering Sea from Alaska. These rock drawings graphically reflect the worldview of nomadic herders and their traditional shamanic practice of ingesting Amanita muscaria. Since that initial discovery, Russian researchers have identified more than two hundred similar compositions at rock art centers in northern Russian, mainly in areas inhabited by reindeer herders.

The central images of these carvings are reindeer and an increasing number of “incomparable” anthropomorphic images of people, mainly women, wearing huge mushroom-shaped hats or, in another interpretation, dancing women with mushrooms hovering over or emanating from the crowns of their heads.

The northern region where these figures are found is one where fly agaric thrive. In a later work, observing that these “doubtless” Amanita muscaria “mushrooms were much larger in scale than normal,” certainly when compared to the humanlike figures, Wasson concurs that this suggests “mushroom possession.” A common theme in these visions is the personification of the spirit (wapaq) of the mushroom as “little men or women.” The Koryak believe that the spirits residing in the fly agaric appear in the form of tiny mushroom folk who give instructions to the be-mushroomed person. One observer reports that among the Ob-Ungrians, “the mushroom eater enters the realm of the little people, talks with them, learns from them what he wishes to know—the future, the outlook for a sick person, etc.”

Santa, the Reindeer Shaman

“So are you saying that the story of Santa Claus originated with the reindeer herders?” Julie asked.

“Not at all,” I replied, “simply this: while most people think of Christmas in terms of the classic Christian holiday, the truth is that most of the symbols associated with Santa Claus are based on the religious traditions of pre-Christian Europe. In fact, every major meme of our modern myth of Santa Claus can be found in Wasson’s pioneering description of a Siberian fly agaric–reindeer culture.

“Convince me,” Julie insisted.

“Okay, I will,” I replied.

Flying Reindeer

In Soma, Wasson notes that “reindeer have a passion for mushrooms and especially for the fly-agaric, on which they inebriate themselves. Reindeer have a passion for urine and especially human urine. (When the human urine is impregnated with fly-agaric, what regal cate is there, to be served to a favored reindeer!)”9 In fact, some herders carry sealskins filled with their own urine to lure stray reindeer back to the herd.

Reindeer have a seminal place in the lives of these semi-nomadic herders as the primary source of useful everyday articles and of spiritual significance. Practically, the reindeer provide transporation by sleigh, food and milk, clothing, shelter in the form of skins for yurts, tools, and many other necessities. Spiritually, flying reindeer serve as guides for shamans, transporting them through the spirit world. The hundreds of flying reindeer megaliths found in Siberia and Mongolia offer graphic representations of myths and legends about winged reindeer who transport their ecstatic riders up into the highest branches of the Cosmic Tree, universally revered by ancient peoples as the Tree of Life.

Christmas Tree as Cosmic Tree

In addition to the nearly universal flood myth similar to the story of Noah in the Bible, many tribal cultures have a deep belief in a sacred Cosmic Tree. In the context of shamanism, this tree provides a cosmic axis around which the three planes of the universe revolve. Its roots run deep into the Underworld, its trunk holds Middle Earth, and its branches reach skyward into the Upperworld.

The birch, pine, cedar, and fir trees play a conspicuous role among Siberian cultures and serve as the nodal points for shamanism. But it was Wasson who first pointed out that birches and evergreens play an essential role in the life cycle of the fly agaric. This is because fly agaric has a symbiotic relationship with these trees in that its invisible spores colonize the host trees’ roots prior to the mushroom bursting into view aboveground as an early stage Amanita muscaria, wrapped in a pure white veil. As a result, tribespeople were amazed to witness how these mushrooms apparently sprang from the earth without any visible seeds in what appears to be a virgin birth.

Like the Cosmic Tree, the center point between heaven and earth, the North Star is also considered sacred. Among reindeer herders, it is also known as the “Immobile Star” or the “Pole Star,” because all the stars in the heavens revolve around it. Thus today we symbolically place a star at the tippy-top of the Christmas tree, and for this reason Santa makes his home in the North Pole.

Santa, the Archetypal Shaman

Our contemporary image of Santa Claus as a rotund, jolly, white-bearded fellow in a red suit (or robe) with white fir trim is a modern version of the archetypal Siberian mushroom shaman. In fact, even today some Siberian male shamans and female mushroom gatherers still dress in ceremonial red-and-white trimmed jackets when they go to gather the sacred mushrooms. The biochemical effects of Soma are most pleasant and transformative when the mushrooms are dried before consumption. For this reason, the shaman initially hangs the fresh fungi to dry in the branches of pine trees (like the colorful ornaments that decorate the Christmas tree).

After the mushroom harvest is complete, the shaman collects his gifts in a sack and places them on his sleigh, which a team of reindeer pulls back to his yurt (Santa’s sleigh full of toys, pulled by flying reindeer). A yurt is the nomad’s teepee-like dwelling typically made out of birch branches and reindeer hides. In winter, snow drifts can cover the yurt’s main entrance, so the shaman enters through the smoke hole at the top (Santa coming down the chimney) to deliver his gifts to appreciative clan members. To further dry the mushrooms, they string them up around the fireplace, and in the morning they awaken to a ritual feast of dried magic mushrooms (Christmas gifts placed in stockings over the fireplace). Once they ingest the mushrooms, the celebrants leave the physical plane and are transported to the mystical realms of the Cosmic Tree, guided by spirits that live within the mushrooms (Santa’s helpers, elves that live in the North Pole).

All of these Christmas themes include the image of Santa Claus: the Christmas tree, the flying reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh, Santa coming down the chimney, the exchange of gifts—even the elves who live in Santa’s workshop at the North Pole.

Excerpted from The Psychedelic Gospels by Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D. and Julie M. Brown, M.A., published by Inner Traditions.

[American Dream]

We Talked to LSD Guru Michael Randall

[American Dream]

The Value of Psychedelic Information

Psychedelic information is generated within the domain of the personal; yet many people who take psychedelics perceive the information as having species-level importance. There are a few reasons for this phenomena. The first, and easiest, is that psychedelics create states of mania and delusions of grandeur in which the subject feels that he or she is the most brilliant person on the planet, or that they are receiving supernatural prophecy. Secondly, the subject may experience archetypal visions or sensations of transcendence that are perceived to be of high religious or mystical importance. Thirdly, the subject may experience a deconstruction of consciousness associated with animal consciousness, reptilian consciousness, plant consciousness, the Gaian mind, genetic-level intelligence, or deep species memory; information perceived to be of value to all humans or all living creatures. Because psychedelics produce all of these experiences they are routinely perceived as being of high value to the entire species.

Psychedelics are obviously useful in the domain of the personal; shamanism and psychedelic therapy rely on the information function of psychedelics to diagnose and heal. In the cultural domain psychedelics can be employed in ritual to build strong religious or tribal groups; they can be used in healing or sorcery; or they can be a catalyst for innovation and creative expression. Beyond this their value is ambiguous. There are some debates to be made in this area, such as pointing out that Francis Crick envisioned the spiral structure of DNA after he ingested LSD,6 or that LSD helped Kary Mullis think up the PCR process that earned him a Nobel Prize in genetics.7,8 To counter these arguments, both Crick and Mullis had been studying molecular biology for years trying to crack those very problems; LSD cannot take credit for anything more than helping Crick and Mullis organize their thoughts in a new way. We can point to great discoveries as examples of psychedelic information, but only a tiny fraction of all psychedelic information can claim this level of importance. Worse than this, erroneous psychedelic information claiming species-level importance has negative cultural value and dilutes the overall information marketplace, making psychedelic information almost statistically worthless.9

Probability dictates that most psychedelic information will have little or moderate value, and that the rare piece of psychedelic information will have extreme negative or positive value. It also follows logically that the more times a subject takes psychedelics the more likely they will generate information of high positive or negative value. Similarly, the more often a subject takes psychedelics the more likely they are to latch onto and subsequently reinforce information of high perceived value, either positive or negative. In this case the psychedelic becomes an information imprinting tool. In psychedelic imprinting the information is always subjectively perceived to be of high value, even if it is of low or negative cultural value.10

Negative and Positive Information Value

It is easy to demonstrate that psychedelic information has value; cultures that use psychedelics as sacraments place high value on the information they receive; people will trade hard-earned cash for a psychedelic experience. But because the quality of psychedelic information has such a wide range it is easy to perceive psychedelics as having no value or, in the argument of prohibition, negative value. Psychedelic information with negative value can be described as that which is delusional, paranoid, false, or subverts the health of the individual or society. Negative psychedelic experiences, or bummers, are a commonly reported element of the psychedelic experience, but this does not necessarily make the information negative. Some users claim that negative experiences have value because they provide emotional insight; others report that negative psychedelic experiences cause permanent psychological damage, which is extremely negative. In rare cases people act out and harm themselves or commit suicide on psychedelics. Obviously these are extreme examples of negative value, and these extreme examples are usually linked to mixing drugs, drug binging, or overdosing. There is an optimal dose range for any psychedelic substance; reports of negative effects go up once the optimal dose range is surpassed.11

Conversely, there is a range of psychedelic experience that is just as extreme but positive in value; the spiritual or therapeutic or entheogenic experience that adds value to the user and their culture. Having an extremely positive psychedelic experience does not happen by accident; there is nuance involved in getting the proper dose, finding the right setting, and so on. By contrast, having a negative psychedelic experience is almost always an accident due to improper dose or setting. Therefore, the positive value of a psychedelic experience can be predicted and controlled up to a certain dose range, but beyond that the potential positive value drops and potential negative value increases.

Shamanism, or the practice of using psychedelics in ritual, employs specialized techniques to guide psychedelic information along desired pathways. Influencing and imprinting psychedelic information along positive pathways is perceived as spiritual, enlightening, and therapeutic; influencing or imprinting psychedelic information along negative pathways is perceived as mind control, black magic, or sorcery. Although the value of psychedelic information generated in any single episode is ambiguous, the practice of shamanism is a durable technology with species-wide application. Thus, shamanism is a technological subset of psychedelic information with high value to the entire species, even though the practice of shamanism can be employed to both positive or negative effect.

http://psychedelic-information-theory.c ... nformation

[American Dream]

Alice Notley's poetry is deeply influenced by trance states and the psychedelic experience


Benediction

[liminalOyster]

The Value of Psychedelic Information ...

I'm curious what thoughts you have on this move to apply an information framework to "psychedelic" experience and the direction of causality in the comparison between the web and psychedelics (ie "Jungle TV"). IOW which came first? Obviously the cross-fertilization and dabbling in both worlds by Leary and Crick and McKenna and Hoffman and, well, all of them makes it somewhat murky. But it seems a bit problematic to rely too heavily on information as a way to understand the experiences of shamanic/entheogenic realities. For me at least it seems to suggest a receiver that is receptive but not mutable by the experience itself.

[American Dream]

I very much see your point, liminalOyster and I would say it all depends on where you're coming from. For a person who was squarely square all their life, there may well be a place for living on the beach and cavorting with fairies on a daily basis. For James Kent, it is understandable that he was looking for ways to ground himself a bit more in the material, in logic, and in the scientific method. After all, he- like many- had problems with:

Messianic Ideation & Delusions of Grandeur

http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?smlid=486

[liminalOyster]

Yeah - don't get me wrong. I think it adds something of value as the Crick / Narby stories artfully reveal. But I suppose my question is, at base, about the notion of "jungle tools." IOW whether or not the user can benefit from fairies on the beach, what do the fairies want, need, desire? I would hate to think that understanding them as tools (IOW disproportionately factoring their human value into their ontology) means almost enslaving (or, maybe just indenturing) those discarnate entities who are finally allowed a human interlocutor.

[liminalOyster]

Psychiatric Power and Taboo in Modern Psychedelia
http://realitysandwich.com/159327/psych ... ychedelia/