"Just You" by The Milk and Honey Band

"Just You" is a mesmerizing song by the Milk and Honey Band. The band is essentially made up of Robert White, a guitarist/keyboard player formerly with the frazzled psychedelic band Levitation from 1989 to 1993. Robert's latest CD is "Dog Eared Moonlight" (Ape Records) that includes the "Just You" track. "Perhaps it's a scary thought that we're all floating about the cosmos in a random fashion with absolutely no-one looking after us," writes Robert. "Perhaps that's why we need to look after each other a little more and not simply leave it in the hands of a being that may or may not exist." He shot the video during a 2005 road trip he took with his wife, Jan, through California, Nevada and Arizona. "The yellow flowers were filmed in Death Vaelly and it was the first time they'd bloomed in forty years. There were carpets of them everywhere… Very beautiful…



For more information on The Milk and Honey Band visit http://www.myspace.com/themilkandhoneyband.

SPACED OUT CONVERSATION - Ramon Sender

Ramon Sender improvises on an open-tuned autoharp struck with a chopstick, and then talks about his early career as an experimental composer at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, how he helped to organize the Trips Festival in 1966 and went, soon after, into the desert with his dog Lucy to trip, thereby finding his cosmic self and choosing a path of humble country living, lyrical lightness, planetary synergy and voluntary primitivism, co-founding the Morning Star commune with Lou Gottlieb and experimenting with sun yoga and solar strobes.

SPACED OUT IN MIAMI - By AG

"Spaced Out" provides thematic glue for Lunar Lounge, this year's P.S.1 installation at Art Basel/Miami (December 2-7, 2008) on the beach at Collins Park and 21st Street in Miami Beach, at once a public plaza, art installation, free zone, open-air movie theater, radio station, experimental media lab, performance platform, corral of independent galleries and architectural conundrum made of stacked shipping containers painted ghostly white.

Crowds of people, exhausted from looking at art in the convention centers and satellite fairs--running from event to event, trying to keep up with art-world politics, gossip, exclusive parties, pseudo-celebrity stalking, vernissages, press briefings, velvet-rope intrigue, VIP areas, or All-Weiwei-All-the-Time, Chinese artist who's hulking presence--this year's Koons--is felt in galleries, island developments, and hotel lobbies. Collectors, dealers, critics, advisors, enthusiasts, busy hustling, positioning, brown-nosing, or broken-heartedly resigning to this season's operative narrative of fiddling while Rome burns. Small planes fly overhead, pulling banners with banal and obfuscated statements like "No Angst for Art," "Intellectual Revolution=Retinal Submission," but people are tired of the fragmented art orgy, tired of art as lubricant for international exchange, as validation for real estate speculation and outdated museology.

Many of these jaded souls drift in and find unexpected solace in Lunar Lounge, soothed by immersive sounds, white noise and glowing lights. Lunar Lounge! Pale garden of floating thought patterns where nothing is being marketed, promoted or commodified except the suggestion of new paradigmologies. ULTRA, a site-specific environment that transforms the Lunar Lounge area, was created by Czech/Argentine artist Federico Díaz and the Prague-based collaborative known as "E Area". ULTRA is a deformed topography of polyethylene layers cut into various mounds and islands by CNC robotic technology. The mounds glow with preternatural light and vibrate, ever so seductively, with throbbing sounds that come from hidden speakers. (A disorienting, out-of-body audio mix of psychedelia, trance and experimental sounds was curated by David Weinsten, E Area, Iain Gordon and AG.) Some read it as moonscape or autobiographical brainscape. Others see white-matter mappings, topographies, radiology/MRI scans, radiating sound waves, ripples in a rock pool, furrows and folds of ocean depths, eruptions, splayed vortices, fluctuating space/time warps, cumulus clouds, concentric circles, fingerprint whorls, happiness vectors, arcane nomenclature, oscilloscopic signals, genome loops, flow charts, global weather models, high-pressure areas, occluded fronts, or, even, alien plottings of humanoid moods and tipping points. Adults sit, lean and slump against the undulating mounds. Children crawl in and around the peaks and valleys while at the very center of the plaza, an amorphous blob either rises up, depending on how one sees it, or oozes down from the PS1 radio station as if to dominate, smother or possibly surrender to the utopian thought workers who vigilantly man the booth.

The neutral white walls, mounds and floor of ULTRA/Lunar Lounge make a perfect trippy setting for "Spaced Out: Psychedelic Projections and Expanded Cinema," curated by Alastair Gordon and M.M. Serra (Film-Makers' Cooperative), projected onto a large screen across from the two-story radio/projection booth. There are light shows by Tony Martin, USCO, and Joshua Light Show; vintage mind-blow films by Michael Kuchar, Stan VanDerBeek, Jud Yalkut, Bill Etra; and new experimental films by Magdalena Jitrick, Federico Díaz, Martin Kaftan, Eric Christensen, Charles Light, Mike Inglesh, The Poool, Joan Grossman, and Tom McCourt.

All of these immersive environments, light shows, psychedelic films, sounds, music, meals, parties, "book-offs", and six days of continuous radio programming are orchestrated, somehow, under the luminescent leadership of Allana Heiss, high priestess of all things alternative and founder/director of the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City. Allana understands the vagaries of the collaborative process and actively promotes the notion of "lounge" as an all-inclusive, non-linear matrix of art, anarchy and leisure--not unlike the squishy time chambers of Leary's day--in which overlapping and often contradictory elements cross-pollinate and flourish. With uncanny presience, she pulls together unlikely participants--random factions, attitudes, trips, mood swings, coming from different locations and time periods--as if tossing so many cards in the air and letting them fall where they may. Yet all of it fits together in copasetic synergy. The uterine softness of E-Area's ULTRA, for instance, echoes the sculpted womb rooms and participatory sensoriums of the Spaced Out 60s (USCO, Electric Circus, Cerebrum, Haus-Rucker Co., Ant Farm) but points to a very different future.

Radio programming (both live and pre-recorded) is moderated by Alanna herself, David Weinstein, Tony Guerrero, Jeannie Hopper, Beatrice Johnson and includes a series of Spaced Out interviews by Alastair Gordon with psychedelic trailblazers like Gerd Stern, Tony Martin, Ramon Sender, Lloyd Kahn, Jay Baldwin, Joshua White, Isaac Abrams, Alicia Bay Laurel, Clark Richert and others. Most of these interviews will be featured as pod casts on "Spaced Out, The On-Line Commune." (*See www.wps1.org for radio schedule.)

The astonishing week of events is capped by the Spaced Out-Come Trip With Us party at the Shore Club (1901 Collins Avenue) on Saturday night, December 6, starting at 10PM and going into the wee hours with open bar, DJs, naked splashing in the pool. But the focal point of the evening is light-show legend Tony Martin performing live liquid projections, with wife and co-conspirator Margot, on a rear-projection screen and the back wall of the Shore Club, working with slide and overhead projectors, manipulating glass bowls (clock faces) filled with water, oil, vegetable dies, etc.

The Joshua Light Show - Liquid Loops (1969)

Live projection performance on an overhead projector using oil, water and glycerin. Light artist: Cecily Hoyt. Originally recorded on 35mm film.

RAMON SENDER, Inner-Space Magellan -AG

Ramón Sender playing accordian. Lou Gottlieb sitting lower left, Bill Wheeler sitting lower right.

The best part of writing Spaced Out was getting to know some of the truly original shapers of sixties subculture. (I missed Ken Kesey but had a fruitful conversation with Tim Leary before his earthly remains got shot into space in 1996.) One name that kept popping up was Ramón Sender, experimental composer, proto-hippie and inner-space Magellan, who positioned himself on a certain vibratory wavelength, surfing the zeitgeist, a madly curious free spirit who invented sun yoga and various consciousness-twanging devices like the sunstrobe and the "thwizzler". (http://www.raysender.com) "Looking back, I realize I've always been interested in 'hallucinate your own melody'," said Ramón. As a 14-yr-old in New York City, he discovered that he could tune the Magnavox radio in the living room between stations to a place where he seemed to be hearing all the stations at the same time. "It was a very rich texture out of which I could 'pull' whatever sounds I wanted. It seems that the rest of my composing career was more or less searching to re-evoke this experiences, this 'lost chord', so to speak, especially in the richly textured drone pieces "WorldFood III" and "Worldfood XII," now out via Locust Music.

"Mousehouse," Ramón's self-built house at Wheeler's Ranch, c. 1970. Photo: Bill Wheeler

In the early sixties, Ramón helped to found the San Francisco Tape Music Center. "Working with tape recorders was a very liberating experience for a young, over-trained composer," said Ramón. "I felt it gave me the same freedom that a painter enjoys of putting a stroke of color on a canvas and then stepping back to decide whether to keep it or not. Up until then, it had been just putting black dots on music paper and then trying to convince somewhat staid instrumentalists to interpret them as sounds. Tape made for more direct feedback, and I loved it. Of course the medium has limitations, and I/we searched hard for ways to expand the palette, leading ultimately to the invention for us of the Buchla synthesizer." (Ramón was co-inventor of the synthisizer (west-coast version) along with Don Buchla and Mort Subotnick.) . The University of California just published an excellent history of this experimental outpost: "The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and The Avant-Garde." (see: http://www.amazon.com/Francisco-Tape-Music-Center-Counterculture/dp/0520256174/ref=ed_oe_p)

Everything changed in 1964 when Ramón had his first out-of-body, psychedelic experience:" "One day, in 1964, Steve Reich came over to my house with a paper bag full of these odd-looking little green dried-up buttons. He asked, 'Where's your Waring blender?' I said, 'Why?' We each downed the peyote and I went through a little bit of the nausea thing, but then I was having a great time noodling around at the piano, but finally he said he thought it was time for him to go home. I said, 'You're going to go home? But why? We're having a wonderful time!' He left and I lay down, and began an absolutely Jungian, back-to-the-womb recap of my life, finally through the moment of conception. It was fantastic. This whole new universe opened up."

"Being of the Sun" by Ramón Sender and Alicia Bay Laurel

Ramón and Stewart Brand (publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogue) organized the Trips Festival at the Longshoreman’s Auditorium in January 1966. Somehting like an expanded version of Ken Kesey's Acid Tests, the three-day event included performances by avant-garde artists as well as newly emerging SF bands like the Grateful Dead. Ramón became the first to ever play a synthesizer with a rock band--Big Brother and the Holding Company--at this seminal pyschedelic moment.

A few weeks after the Trips Festival, Ramón went out and bought fifty tabs of LSD and drove into the Mojave Desert to cool out and think about things. "We all scattered in different directions," he said. "The energy was centrifugal." He found an isolated little cave and camped out for two weeks. Then he visited a psychedelic church in Socorro, New Mexico, where an old couple gave him psilocybin mushrooms. He also went to visit Drop City, one of the first hippie communes, with its multi-colored domes made from recycled automobile metal. When he came home to San Francisco, he was a changed man. "After the desert time, I just couldn't live in the city any longer. I had to be out in nature. It wasn't so much a drop out of the mainstream as a drop back into The Tao."

Along with Lou Gottlieb (former Limliter), he helped found Morning Star commune in Sonoma County and brought his open-minded spirit and infectious curiosity into that pioneering communal scene, teaching other communards how to play open-tuned instruments -- guitars, autoharps, bells, flutes, gongs -- forming great pentatonic drone circles of musicians and non-musicians alike. "At Morning Star I found myself in an ideal position for a composer: a group of people who were spontaneously retribalizing with the help of mind-merging chemistry and needed the chants and rituals that usually are created by living together for thousands of years." He began to compose chants that could be learned in a few minutes around a campfire, using open-tuned instruments that anyone could play and sound good. "Sonic harmony. I'd tune the instruments to the sound of the wind in the redwoods, which oddly enough was in G - like good old country music! Needless to say I spent a lot of time tuning (smile.)"

Ramón Sender playing synthesizer at the Trips Festival, January, 1966

While at Morning Star, Ramón learned to work with his hands, building simple shelters from free and recycled materials and helping others to learn the Tao of intuitive building. "Building codes and other bureaucratic encroachments on our nest-building instincts are just another straitjacket to our basic freedoms," wrote Ramón in a recent e-mail.  "Best damn therapy that ever came along was allowing folks to build their own structures. A guy would stumble onto Wheeler's Ranch all weirded-out from street living to the point where he just wanted to be left alone. First night he'd roll up in his blanket under a small pine to wake up cold from the morning fog. So he went looking for something warmer, stumbled onto a piece of unused construction plastic, and hung it over a branch to keep off the fog drips. A few days later, he found an old window and propped it to the windward. By then he'd discovered the wood-burning stove in O.B's meadow where a pot of oatmeal occasionally sat - or where he could cook his own with grains from the free store. By then he was feeling relaxed enough to trade some conversation and accept a few tokes. By the end of the week, he had built himself a cute little hovel out of redwood deadfalls and some surplus slab, and was asking if there was anything that needed doing he could help with. I'd point him to the community garden, which always could use weeding. And so we leave our newly revived human happily ensconced, grounded to the soil, living as nature intended. Sigh…"

Later, when the bulldozers came to destroy the funky shelters at Morning Star, Ramón, along with others moved to nearby Weeler's Ranch, another open-land commune. He moved into a hand-made hut called the "Mousehouse" that someone else had already started, but he worked with what was there and built a humble addition. "At Wheeler's Ranch, we used to get the redwood 'slab'- the first cut on a log to strip the bark - very  very cheap scrap - and then used them for exterior siding of a hut. Lots of gaps, of course, that would have to be chinked with mud or whatever. But keep in mind we were in a very temperate zone - perhaps only two days of frost a year, but you did need a tight roof for the 28-or-so annual inches of rain, and a wood-burning stove (I used sawdust burners - three of them - that provided three years worth of heating out of one enormous vanload of sawdust (free except for the trucking charge). I'd dry it over the summer and then bag it up in 30-gallon bags. Only thing I missed was the visual pleasure of watching the flames (these were home-made sealed stoves made out of barrels of various sizes. I got the plans from the Pennsylvania Dept of Forestry.)"

"I helped a friend build his home from one fifty-dollar two-ton-truckload of used lumber.  We pulled the old nails, straightened them and pounded them back in. For the total cost, I would have to add a used door, some recycled windows, and a custom tarp 'roof' (probably biggest expense) so that on sunny days he'd just roll it back, standing in his loft… Dirt floors are easy to keep clean, by the way! And construction plastic makes great picture windows. Speaking of the latter, one of the most imaginative houses on the ranch was put up by a friend in a redwood grove: one large sheet of plastic (30 by 30 feet?) sandwiched between quarter-inch by four-inch redwood 'bender-board' strips 24-feet long.  We then raised it by pushing in and  up on the bender board ends, which created a 'Quonset hut' tunnel structure. Shade from the grove supplied less sunlight so it didn't become too much of a greenhouse. The ends of the structure were sealed with more plastic sheeting, and the 'floor' covered with carpet scraps. Just gorgeous, and perhaps cost all of $100."

"I spent perhaps my happiest summer at our ranch, living on $5 a week. My hens were laying, the two cows giving milk, the community garden a cornucopia of veggies, and the free store had brown rice, oats and wheat berries. All I needed to buy basically was white gas for my Coleman lantern (night reading), an occasional can of Top tobacco, coffee and cooking oil. Yeeha! When the USA shortly becomes a bankrupt third world economy, I'm ready!  And believe me, we'll all be happier and healthier for it. Of the 14 births we had in the two years I was there, I can only think of two that required a run to the local hospital. Just the daily walking required to gather supplies, chop wood, carry water, etc., kept future mom's' bodies in good shape."

"We met the revolution, and it was we! Of course the county bulldozed us out of existence in 1972, but today Sonoma County probably has the greenest local government south of Mendocino. However the developers, like sharks, are always circling..."

Ramón was one of the guiding spirits behind Spaced Out. In the process he became a friend and mentor and has been kind enough to share his experiences, ideas, inventions, memories and photographs. (By the way, his unpublished work "Home Free Home: A History of Two Open-Door California Communes" is one of the best sources for anyone doing work on 60s alternative lifestyles: http://www.diggers.org/home_free.htm"http://www.diggers.org/home_free.htm)

Solar salutations to Ramón!

Clockwise from left: pattern effects created by strobe; Ramón Sender lying in field, trying out his Sunstrobe device (Wheeler's Ranch), "Antropos," painting by Ramón.

LANDING MAN ON EARTH - (AG)

I took my daughters on a pilgrimage to the new Woodstock museum in Bethel, New York and recommend doing the same to anyone who attended the actual event or for those who couldn't attend, like myself, or for those who weren't even born yet but wish they'd been there. (The 40th anniversary of Woodstock Nation will be celebrated next August.) The museum's floor plan is a spiral, like a giant Ying Yang button, with interactive displays and 165 original artifacts including Wavy Gravy's hand-embroidered jumpsuit and the original travel manifest for the Hog Farm who came to Woodstock all the way from New Mexico. There's a flowery painted VW bug and Sha Na Na's Wurlitzer electric piano and ticket stubs and a psychedelic school bus and alarmist reports published in local newspapers, and correspondence back and forth between organizers and community officials.

But the displays are oddly shorn of the radical politics, sex, and drugs that made the event such a tipping point in popular culture. "I took a trip to the future," wrote Abbie Hoffman in 1969, a few days after the festival. "Functional anarchy, primitive tribalism, gathering of the tribes. Right on! What did it all mean?... If I had to sum up the totality of the Woodstock experience I would say it was the first attempt to land a man on the earth."



The most poignant reminders of pre-digital body culture (sadly missing today) are the museum's collection of hand-scrawled messages written on scraps of paper and tacked to the Woodstock message board: "To Cindy (with black hair and sister) I'm sorry I was too untogether to remember to ask your address, please call… Dan." And that's also been forgotten, the way that information got circulated without the Internet, through some subtle kind of morphic resonance, word of mouth, Dylan lyrics, cross-country trekking, "grokking" and head-shop bulletin boards. Everyone just seemed to know what was going to happen next.

The most jarring note, along with the retro architecture of the museum's outer shell--just imagine what Steve Baer or Ant Farm might have done--is the final gallery that has video testimonials from Pat Buchanan, Nancy Reagan ("The 60s was the worst time in history…") and Ed Meese ("It was the age of self indulgence…"), voices that sound like fingernails scratching across the psychic blackboard. Haven't we heard enough "fair and balanced" propaganda over the past eight years of Fox News and Cheney/Bush? Isn't it time to reclaim counterculture mythology from the powers of darkness and forgetting?

In the end, the best thing you come away with is not inside the museum, but outside on the great green bowl itself, Max Yasgur's former alfalfa field that slopes away from the arts center and possesses it's own effervescent vortex of energy. You can see where the stage was set up at the bottom of the slope, near West Shore Road. There's a little monument to one side and a split-rail fence surrounding the site. Festival organizers spotted it from a plane buzzing over the Catskills in search of an alternate site (after being thrown out of Wallkill, NY) and it turned into an alternative zone of 500,000 souls, something like a nation.