The Beat Generation

Denis Berry, Trustee of Timothy Leary’s estate, is seeking donations to help with the digitalization of his archives, which could turn out to be great for the future.

We need a significant amount of money to digitize the entire archive. This includes paying for the digitization of the photos, videos, audio, and documents, and also paying staff to research and add the proper metadata to the collection, so it can be searched and accessed for research purposes. (This is a huge task. Remember there are 500,000 documents alone.) 

If you would like to help preserve one of the most controversial periods in recent history and make it available to the public, please donate now!

Send donations by mail to:

The Futique Trust

PO Box 3561

Santa Cruz, CA 95063

For further information on how you may participate or to do an e-bank check, or money transfer contact Denis Berry at 831-566-0325 or by e-mail at denis@timothyleary.org.

Donate to the Timothy Leary Archives [Timothy Leary Estate]

Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder recently posted about a newly discovered cache of Timothy Leary-related videos up on Archive.org.

I like seeing technology (Twitter, in this example) implemented with the goal of disseminating actual, useful information rather than pure garbage, which is most of what people seem to use it for.

Lisa Rein twittered about Archive.org’s new Timothy Leary video archive. It currently has over 80 videos.

The above screenshot is from a documentary called Growing Up In America: Breathing Together, Revolution of the Electric Family, from 1986, which has interviews with Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Fred Hampton, Deborah Johnson, John Sinclair, and Timothy Leary.

Timothy Leary videos at Archive.org [Boing Boing]

Earlier in the week Boing Boing linked to this interview between Jayden Devereux and the editor of Leary on Drugs, Hassan I Sirius, and I thought it was worth a mention. Very cool stuff.

JD: What were Leary’s favorite drugs? 

HIS: I guess they all had their place. He was a social drinker and he was a social guy… so that amounted to a fair amount of drinking. It’s sort of funny – he’s always celebrating great moments in the psychedelic revolution with a glass of champagne or something along those lines. Mind you, I don’t see anything wrong with it. And he always thought LSD was an extraordinarily marvelous invention. In a 1988 article included in the book, he writes about “good old LSD” and marvels that it’s still the best. There’s a segment on heroin. He wasn’t crazy about heroin, even though he found it pleasant when he tried it… and he makes it clear that he wasn’t happy about the dominance of coke and crack in the drug culture during the 1980s. 

Timothy Leary’s New Book On Drugs [10 Zen Monkeys]

(photo by jaycobs)

In what may be one of the most amazing things I’ve stumbled upon all week, Think for Yourself; Question Authority is a collection of essays by Arno Ruthofer that deal with all sorts of psychedelia—from ancient conceptions of psychoactivity to Timothy Leary, the Beats and Cyperpunk.

Leary argues that the millions of Americans who experienced the awesome potentialities of the brain via LSD certainly paved the way for the computer society we now live in. According to Leary, many of the people who were involved in the development of the personal computer got their inspiration from psychedelic drug experiences. He suggests that without the psychedelic revolution in the 60s, the personal computer would have been unthinkable.

[4.2. Countercultures (the Beat Generation, the hippies, the cyberpunks/ the New Breed)]

From the early 60s on into the 70s, Larry Keegan photographed the who’s who of the American counterculture, from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Bookstore to Bob Dylan and Timothy Leary. Most phenomenal (and what sets his work apart from other online repositories) are the photos’ accompanying blurbs, little pieces that succeed in bringing us closer to the history he was trying to capture.

Beat Generation Gallery