Hi folks,

Been so busy with the project I haven't wanted to interrupt myself to edit a snippet...  since I'm dealing at this moment in bulk.  Lots of interviews; lots of me telling my story verbally for transcription.  

The cool thing is that I've been able to integrate my day job at Acceler8or.com  to some degree with my Mondo History work.  Plus, much of a piece recently for Boing Boing will work it's way into the narrative.

Here then, in case you haven't been seeing this stuff...

Remote Control: The Interactivity Myth  (Managing Editor Andrew Hultkrans on YouTube representing)  http://www.acceler8or.com/2012/01/remote-control-the-interactivity-myth/

Pariahs Made Me Do It: The Leary-Wilson-Warhol-Dali Influence  http://www.acceler8or.com/2012/01/pariahs-made-me-do-it-the-leary-wilson-warhol-dali-influence-mondo-2000-history-project-entry-3/

Robert Anton Wilson Talks To Reality Hackers Forum (1988) http://www.acceler8or.com/2012/01/robert-anton-wilson-recordings/

"Hello, Fellow Tripper"   http://boingboing.net/2012/01/13/raw-week-hello-fellow-trip.html

In other news, does anybody from the SF Bay Area want to "volunteer" to help digitize print, audio and a little bit of video.  Since I'll be using some of the material for Acceler8or, I can offer a (very) nominal fee.

I'll be back sooner!

thanx

R.U.

Hey all.  I'll be back in about a week for an update on all the great work that's been getting done over the last month or so... but in the meantime, I wanted to let you know about this interview with Marc Franklin aka Lord Nose, who designed the spectacular Big Pink edition of High Frontiers.   Part of it is material done for this here project and part of the interview is about his photo exhibit in L.A.

Marc Franklin: I remember driving down to Manhattan Beach to meet Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw. There was a heavy, low fog. Looking up, one could see the arcs running between the insulator and the wires as we passed Los Angeles Power and Light’s generation plant.  Just like in Blade Runner. It looked like we were entering Hell. Arriving in their neighborhood, in the street, there was Sandy screaming into a two-way radio… announcing our arrival. Apparently she’s deaf.

RU: Wasn’t she dressed in…

MF:  Black leather.

RU: I remember they were in army fatigues… camouflage. Sandy screams into a walkie-talkie: “They’re here!”

Psychedelic Transpersonal Photography, High Frontiers & MONDO 2000: an Interview with Marc Franklin

The Mondo 2000 History Project continues to roll, albeit slowly. Yours truly is typing this in – count them – two ace bandages – having been assaulted by carpal tunnel in both wrists at the same time… I think it’s actually been almost three months that my main organ of communication has been of limited use. A brief experiment with speech recognition software turned out not so good… but a move towards simply recording spoken content has started to loosen my tongue, as well as those of others.

The private website provided for former MONDOids to banter and share memories and observations had a flurry of activity from mid-October through early November with Severe Tire Damage generously sharing memories and observations, SteveAnanda and Morgan Russell bantering about the extremities of hallucinogenic experimentation observed and participated in, and Mark Frost revived his Somerset Mau Mau persona to the amusement of many:

>>>>> smaumau October 18, 2010 at 10:06 pm
I didn’t realize that Ken was a woman trapped in a man’s body until later. His boyfriend told me all about it. Then there was that night in Alameda when he put his filthy hands on my …

Flashback:
As you may know, I had penis reduction surgery in 79, so that the darn thing would fit in my pants. The downside? They don’t tell you who gets your extra penis material. Some unknown man or woman is walking around with my penis. It makes me feel sad to think about it. Another deficit? I have to carry a tape measure with me at all times to measure anything under a yard.
PRS – (hotlink) Penis Reduction Surgery: The shaft is separated from the tip and the groiny thing and replaced with a lifelike replica of the penis, only much, much shorter. It’s filled with a spongy gelatin substance that comes in a lime, lemon, or kiwi flavor. (Not the fruit, the weird little animal) If you experience an erection that lasts longer than four hours, please call the manufacturer for instructions on how to deflate your pee pee.

RUSirius October 18, 2010 at 11:13 pm
As usual, Mau Mau is exaggerating what happened that blissful night among the sailors of Alameda. I mean, just because I was wearing 6″ stiletto heels, assless chaps and some very fashionable fushcia lip gloss, he assumed so much. I had to slap his hands away so many times… but then finally giving in, I was shocked not by the size of it but by its shape. It’s then I realized he was not of this world or even of this dimension. Still, he became insanely jealous because the sailors of Alameda were more interested in me then him. It all went on… how long? it must have been 17 hours nonstop, with him getting upset and driving away in that van, crying and throwing copies of issue #1 out the window. No problem. A buff diesel mechanic dressed in gym shorts and a Norma Kamali top gave me a lonnng ride home..

>>>>
This was all in response to my straight forward posting that I hadn’t realized that Mau Mau had a problem with alcoholism when I went and bought a six pack for us to share for our second meet up. As amusing and brilliant as the post was, somewhere beneath the clowning, I found myself wondering how willing ex-Mondoids will be to dig in and lay some real blood on the tracks or whether we will mostly remain on the surface and deflect any deeper investigation into who are what we were.

But I remain committed to telling the real story – as well as the surreal story – and to interrogating myself as deeply as possible, even if I have to write most of the damn book myself.

One of the last posts before everybody clammed up completely involved a rumor – said to have come from the late Terence McKenna — that our esteemed publisher – and I daren’t speak her name right now in this context -- gave head to everybody in the hot tubs at a psychedelics conference at Esalen in late 1984.

Knowing the lady involved, I find this dubious… or certainly exaggerated… but it can’t help but sell books so perhaps I should let it stand without comment.

Anyway, my friends, I’m about to rattle the cages of all those who are signed onto the Mondo History Project and I suspect there will be another flurry of content… followed again by a deadly silence… followed again by another kick in the shins.

Such is the life of a voluntary project director.

ps: Please send me any spare wrists and… any volunteer transcribers out there?

best
R.U. Sirius

Edit
Link

Finally, at least a month behind where I’d hoped to be, the Mondo 2000 History Project Private Web Space is opening up to people who have participated in the MONDO (High Frontiers, Reality Hackers) experience. Seventeen of us have signed up since yesterday… but so far only Morgan Russell and I have posted anything… other than one person commenting that the site “makes me feel old.”

Well, the work makes me feel old… and it’s been hard to squeeze this project in amidst full time job and this and that… but progress is being made. Somerset Mau Mau has been interviewed and Lord Nose has been briefly caught on tape.. two heroic members of the early High Frontiers crew. And Morgan Russell is running down some awesome memory fragments… one of which is included below.

So that’s it for now. Now that the site is up, I’ll be delivering on the promised updates and enotes variously owed to people in the rewards… gimmie a couple of weeks.

& contact me if you are a MONDO participant and think you should be admitted to the private part of these festivities. Email me at Sirioso@Yahoo.com

And now, for your entertainment... Morgan's Penis-oriented Tale of Days at the Mondo House... starring St. Jude

********
How St. Jude Operated on my Penis

Jude was a friend of Alison’s. Jude offered me Tango lessons. She rolled up the carpet and gave me very flimsy bottomwear and top and brought a boombox with Tango music. I made so many mistakes that I rubbed up against her and couldn’t hide my hard on. We retired to the velvet cushions that Alison had had made for the window seats. Jude and I never danced again.

She positively seduced me and we became lovers. Jude gave me Methaqualone i.e. Quaaludes and Nitrous Oxide and a nasal spray of Vasopressin and we got along in her velvet-draped (curtains from a cinema) room.

She did poke her finger in my body, near my groin, to the fullest extent. She described medically, as a certified Physician’s Assistant, what organs she was bypassing.

Once upon a time, when Queen Mu was on the East Coast, Ken gave a number of houseguests two hits of acid and two doses of Ecstasy and we went into the garden to relax. Soon, one woman took her clothes off and curled into a ball. One man took his clothes off and disappeared into the house, to emerge with one of Alison’s shawls wrapped round himself and announced he would hunt food for us. Jude and I leant against one another and were fully absorbed. I was hoping not to take my clothes off since I had something on the end of my penis. Ken became anxious since there was nudity easily observable and no one was straight enough to go to the door. We felt for him and comforted him as well as we were able.

I did show Jude, my lover, the end of my prick. Not just then, but later. She said I had a wart and asked me if I had insurance. Not. She took me to her bedroom and shackled me with a blue chain. She next excited me and told me that the more excited I was, the less flesh she would have to remove from the end of my penis. She had surgical instruments in front of us. She picked the scissors. This was not erotic. “The less hard you are, the more I have to cut,” she said.

Jude had practiced medicine without a license before. It was in the days when she was a Maoist and met up with Jim Jones before a protest. They made their plans. The National Guard injured people and Jude came to their rescue. When she became certified as a Physician’s Assistant, she walked into the waves of the Mediterranean to kill herself. Her partner saved her. [more here]

So, Jude excited me though I was in bondage and though she was wielding stainless steel tools. [Alison has approved this part in a conversation today. She was afraid that I was making everything too dry. p.s. Jude believed that morning light would burn out one’s third eye….

UPDATE:

16 days to go to raise more funds for the MONDO 2000 History Project. Please buy a reward. And please spread the word.

I have located the esteemed Mark Frost aka Somerset Mau Mau, on Facebook. Had to fight my way past many other talented Mark Frosts. “Mau Mau” was really the person who co-created the first edition of anything to do with all this … the first issue of High Frontiers… with me. He says he’s ready to try to remember something/anything from that period… which will be a heroic effort indeed. I’ve also friended many other old friends on Facebook and on LinkedIn, so I’ve got ‘em right where I want ‘em. Or else I’ve located email addresses.

I’m in the hunter-gatherer stage of the project right now – gathering names and contacts for later deployment.

And I’ve been writing a few entries in conversational style… pretending I’m talking to someone… most of the entries start at the beginning. It seems like I’ll have to trudge through my part of the story in a linear fashion, beginning to end. Because if I try to describe something that happened, say, in 1992, I have to explain who everybody is and all kinds of circumstances – stuff that will probably already have been ‘splained in the final book.

This piece below is an exception to the rule… and is rather long. It’s the story of Mondo Vanilli and Timothy Leary going to a housewarming party thrown by Nine Inch Nail mainman Trent Reznor after he moved into Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate’s old place… yes, that place.

So, ok… it’s very name-droppy (Drop names, not acid!), but that’s the way it was. And yes, I’m throwing this up because I think it may gain some last minute attention before the end of our Kickstarter period on July 4.

btw, all entries are experimental at this point, and I welcome suggestions...

Hey! We do need more money. This is a two year project with bells and whistles and site management and video and writing and interviewing. Let’s just say we would love to get this at least up above 12k during this final push.

16 days to go to raise more funds for the MONDO 2000 History Project. Please buy a reward. And please spread the word.

I hope you enjoy this entry.

R.U.

****************************

November 1992

R.U. Sirius

It was about three months after I’d quit MONDO 2000. We (Mondo Vanilli) headed down to L.A. with a demo tape and this very fun and very silly little Xeroxed package offering music industry behemoths the opportunity to get in on the cutting edge of cyber-absurdism.

Actually, the day before, I’d discovered that issue #8 of MONDO 2000 had come out in my absence. It was the first one without me. I was down at Tower Records off of Telegraph Ave (in Berkeley) and I saw it on the stands. And I actually bought it. I could have gone up to the MONDO house and grabbed a dozen for free, but pride etcetera… you know. And it looked great. The Negativland v. The Edge confrontation (as mentioned earlier, I had walked out of MONDO in an argument with Alison over whether to run it at all) was in it, but it was a much shorter version and it wasn’t mentioned on the cover. I read the issue all the way through that night and it was the best issue ever – it was the most flawless and sophisticated issue yet, which was a bit upsetting, actually. I kind of wanted it to totally fall apart in my absence. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that it was good since St. Jude and Andrew Hultkrans were still guiding the editorial content.

We were going to stay with Leary in Beverly Hills and we had a whole lot of really amazing music industry connections to look up. I had connections because of MONDO 2000. And we were going to meet this girl Yvonne, from Chicago, who had gone to art school with (Mondo Vanilli musical force) Scrappi. And she knew all kinds of people in the industry. She was sort of… well… let’s just say that Al Jourgenson called her a groupie. I certainly wouldn’t pin that tag on her… because she wouldn’t accept it and secondly, because she’s a great, multidimensional, real human being -- but she did hang out with a lot of musicians, let’s put it that way. She has been a babysitter for Anita Pallenberg, which to me, was the height of hipster cred. And she knew a lot of people. I also had heard from Billy Idol, who was just starting work on his infamous cyberpunk thing. So I had his phone number to plan a visit.

On our first full day in L.A., we saw a bunch of people. I think the first person we met was Cara Burns, an old friend of Yvonne’s. She was part of a very powerful law firm, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. They represented lots of high-powered people in the entertainment industry. And she agreed to take us on, which I think was ultimately our undoing, actually. And we met with this guy who was like one of the top agents representing bands… as I recall, he mostly signed people to Warner Brothers. Our connections were actually too good.

At some point during that day, I called Casey Cannon, a MONDO friend from LA who knew everybody in Hollywood. At that time, she was making most of those short two minute previews you see in movie theaters… and her husband Van Ling was with Lightstorm and was Cameron’s go-to guy on the new technology. I must have called her from a phone booth since, like most people at that time, I didn’t have a cell phone. And she told me that we had to go to Trent Reznor’s party that night.

As she informed me, Reznor had just rented the ol’ Tate mansion. That is, he’d rented the house that had been occupied by Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate… the place where Sharon and all those other people were slaughtered by the Mansonoids. And this was to be his housewarming party.

I didn’t have a pen, so I promised to call her back when we got back to Tim’s house and get Reznor’s phone number. And almost as soon as I got there, she called me. “You’ve really got to go meet Trent Reznor!” Plus, she noted that Leary’s house was right around the corner from Reznor’s new place. So I got the phone number and called it right away.

I always have anxiety about calling famous people – a fear of rejection. Particularly then, sort of at the height of MONDO’s media hype… when some famous person said, “Who the fuck are you?” it bruised my ego. (Now, it feels like there’s less at stake.) But I called, and fortunately, I got an answering machine. And I was able to leave the message that I was staying at Timothy Leary’s house. Howdy, neighbor! The Leary name was a first-rate calling card.

The phone rang almost constantly at Tim’s house, but at some point a couple of hours later, he came out of his office with his phone in hand and announced that he was talking to Peter Christopherson (Coil, Throbbing Gristle) -- who identified himself to Tim as Pighead Christopherson -- and we were invited to Trent Reznor’s housewarming party. It was all a bit of a synchronicity too, because – at that time -- this underground theater group was putting on a play based on a conversation Leary had with Charlie Manson when he was in prison and there were posters and flyers for it around the house. Leary was pretty excited about the play.

Just before we were about to head to the party, Tim came out with a mint dish filled with pink ecstasy tabs, offering them around. Simone (Third Arm – the other member of Mondo Vanilli) took one and I think Yvonne may have taken one. Scrappi and I refused.

But something about the historical resonances nagged at me. What would the small town freak who I had been back in the ‘70s think about refusing a hit from Timothy Leary before heading up to the infamous Manson horror house to a rock star party. After a few minutes, as we worked on our beers before heading out, I snuck over and pocketed two hits. I went in the bathroom, broke one of them in half and took it. (I guess it seemed more shameful to be a lightweight and take half-a-hit than it was to just refuse it all together, thus the subterfuge.)

I must have had an empty stomach because it came on quick and rather strong for a low dose. Reznor’s new home was only a few blocks from Leary’s, but it was on some windy roads and getting there became interesting when a red Ferrari started tailgating and some guy began gesticulating wildly out the window. He cut in front of us and made us stop. Out popped Gibby Haynes, shouting. He wanted to know if we knew “the way.” He didn’t even have to say the way to what. Yes. He let us get in front again and we made our way to the Reznor party.

On arrival, an enthusiastic Gibby jumped out of the car to meet Tim and bragging that the red Ferrari was on loan from Johnny Depp. With the ecstasy coming on, the entire L.A. media world started to seem like a serene and glittery playground filled with happy children playing grownup and I settled into a comfort zone. The world was a friendly place. Relatively speaking, of course.

There were two buildings on the Reznor grounds. One relatively small looking house and another building that looked like a warehouse space. The lights were all out in the house and a sign said to go to the other building.

The scene inside was grunge boy meets Barbie doll. Very odd. The guys – who all looked to be in their thirties -- were all in jeans and t’s and leather jackets, with long hair and puffy beer faces. (OK… me too… except I had the lambskin, fur collar, floor length overcoat.) And the girls -- who looked like they were just about past high school -- were all perfect mostly blonde babes with inflated boobs and noses pointed to the sky wearing impossibly short skirts and generally dressed and made up for sex. And for the most part, the guys and girls weren’t together.

Gloomy Kraut techno blared too loudly for conversation, and the general mood seemed dour. Everyone carried plastic cups filled with beer. No one was talking to each other. The girls all looked disappointed. No rock stars in sight. This was nothing more than a college kegger with a bit of hipster edge. Where the hell was Trent?

Leary looked lost and confused. Nevertheless he asserted his tribal leadership and brought us all to safety -- a place to sit –- some benches around an unlit fireplace. Once settled, Tim and Simone found comfort locked in each other’s eyes, while Scrappi, Yvonne and I continued to scan the room in search of a glimmer of glamour.

After awhile, I realized I had to move. If I sat there any longer, I was going to trance out for the entire evening into the rather boring pink spongecake that the inside of my head was turning into. Yvonne must have been feeling the same thing. By this point, too bored for paranoia, she suggested we “creepy crawly” around the grounds, which made me laugh.

As we were exiting the building, Reznor appeared and greeted us with a sly grin. He followed us out, and around the corner was Anthony Kiedas. Reznor introduced me. Kiedas asked: “Your name is Are You Serious?” Somehow my ecstasy displaced ego mustered a response. I looked up at the towering pop star whose face had been on my TV screen a thousand times over the previous decade and smiled and said, “Yes. And who are you?” Kiedas deflated. “I’m Anthony,” he muttered, humbly, and we shook hands.

And so, Yvonne and I soldiered on to check the perimeters of the ol’ Tate mansion, wondering what walls a creepy crawler would crawl over; what bushes would a Squeaky Fromme creep through (Fromme actually wasn’t involved in the Tate-LaBianca episodes). It was all just a funny game and Squeaky was just a famous name… like Reznor or Kiedas or Leary. Somehow the horrible reality of that day some 25 years earlier didn’t feel any closer at hand on the grounds of the ol’ Tate mansion than it had from any other spot on the planet. If there are ghosts, maybe ecstasy chases them away.

After a good half hour of wandering around, and Yvonne videotaping the arriving party guests (she kept her video camera with her at all times), we noticed a little bit of light now peaking out from behind the curtains of the smaller house. We slinked up to the door. There was a handwritten sign that read: “COME IN HERE TO BE KILLED.”

While Yvonne laughed it off, I actually thought it through. Let’s see. Reznor is a major rock star with money and ambition. He doesn’t want to die right now from a lethal injection, particularly one that doesn’t get you off first. Now, maybe if he had spent the last year of his life sucking up to Terry Melcher and Dennis Wilson only to have his song lyrics ripped… achhh! Don’t go there. Thankfully, my little reverie was interrupted before it turned into full blown empathy for the devil. Yvonne did the only sensible thing. She opened the door and walked in, camera first.

There they were. Seventeen Illuminati figures, including Marilyn Monroe, George H.W. Bush, David Bowie and The Penguin, all in black robes, huddled over Britney Spears, laying in the center of a Pentagram while Reznor raised his blade.

OK. I just made that up. Actually, it was terribly normal inside. Kiedas and Gibby and Trent were there, and some music industry types, and the hottest of the young girls, clearly selected with care from the warehouse space. Within minutes, Tim and Simone wandered in. Record industry guys came over wanting to ask me about virtual reality. Here I was, in this world historic cosmically weird Manson horror house with Timothy Leary and rock stars sorta situation and I was getting into the same conversations that I would have had back in San Francisco.

There was one moments of vintage verbal violence. Gibby started screaming at some way porno looking girl because she wouldn’t believe that this greasy looking longhaired dude with a southern accent was the driver of the red hot Ferrari and that he’d borrowed it from his good friend, Johnny Depp.

“CUNT!” he screamed. “Stupid fucking L.A. cunt!” But it wasn’t to be taken seriously. She laughed at him, extended her middle finger and walked out and he immediately turned his attention elsewhere.

And that’s basically the whole story. I did see a laughing Reznor waving around a baggie of mushrooms and heading into a room with one of the girls. Maybe that’s why he liked the Mondo Vanilli tape so much that he called the next day to offer us a recording contract.

Later that night, Gibby came up to Leary’s house and started asking if he’d ever seen any of that real acid… “like the stuff you guys used to take in the ‘60s.” Tim got annoyed. “LSD is LSD. It’s just that they make the doses smaller.” Then, Gibby started ranting about how nobody tries to change the world by hijacking planes anymore, and Tim got even more annoyed and denounced terrorism in a couple of brief sentences. Gibby paced the entire house in long rapid steps for a few minutes and then flew out the door. I believe they eventually became friends.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
16 days to go to raise more funds for the MONDO 2000 History Project. Please buy a reward. And please spread the word.

Hi folks. What with complications with my regular job and so on, I've been a bit remiss on keeping you all informed that

TOMORROW... I will be giving a 20 minute presentation at DorkbotSF on the MONDO 2000 Open Source Project. I'm just figuring out what to say now... and I thought of YOU. If you're in the SF Bay area please join me!

http://www.dorkbot.org/dorkbotsf/

time:
7:30pm Wednesday
9 Jun 2010

place:
Parisoma
1436 Howard @ 10th
San Francisco, CA

FREE ADMISSION but $5-$15 donations to our hosts much appreciated. No one turned away for lack of funds

The following is a possible introduction … or possibly one of several introductions or possibly an opening chapter to the Mondo 2000 History Project book. It’s my story of particular points in my life that I now see as the run up toward starting High Frontiers magazine which became Reality Hackers and then MONDO 2000. Since I was the sole possessor of the idea to start the initial magazine, I believe there is some justification for this personal narrative being the opening salvo, however I’m not stuck on it and I’m happy to hear all feedback.

Morgan Russell, who is co-editing the book with me, said this text works as an introduction to the book and is “naïve” (in a good sense). I think that’s correct. Hopefully, a somewhat more worldly perspective is implicit in my current writing of these memories.

If you like the writing here, please let that be a motivation for continuing to spread the word about this Kickstarter page. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1502076070/mondo-2000-an-open-source-history We would love to be able to dole out a few dollars beyond the money needed for management of the open source site to pay us and any other super-contributors a little bit for our time; to pay for some transcription of recorded interviews; and to get rights to reuse some already published materials. So keep it coming, please. (And if you don’t like the writing here, then you can buy us the time to improve it!)

Besides linking to it, the text below is available to reuse/post elsewhere. I ask only that you give attribution to R.U. Sirius as the author and then link to http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1502076070/mondo-2000-an-open-source-history.

The MONDO 2000 History Project: An (Possible) Introduction

Let the story beginning in the Spring of 1967. I am 14 years old and in 9th grade. It’s early evening and the doorbell rings at the suburban house in Binghamton, New York where I live with my mom and dad. It’s a group of my friends and they’re each carrying a plastic bag and looking mighty pleased. They come in, we shuffle into the guest room (where the record player is kept) and they show off their gatherings — buttons (“Frodo Lives!” “Mary Poppins is a Junkie” “Flower Power”), beads, posters (hallucinatory), incense with a Buddha incense burner, and kazoos. A lonely looking newspaper lays at the bottom of the pile, as though shameful, the only item unremarked.

Without realizing the implications, I happen to throw side one of Between The Buttons on the player. Eventually, the song “Cool Calm and Collected” plays and a kazoo sounds through the speakers. In an instant, newly purchased kazoos are wielded and The Rolling Stones only-ever kazoo solo is joined by three wailing teenagers, bringing sudden shouts of objection from my famously liberal and tolerant Dad in the living room. It’s quickly determined that it’s late, Dad’s tired, and it’s time to send all kazoo-wielding teens packing. As each of the friends moves to retrieve his items, I grab the newspaper to see what it is. There are, I now see, two of them — two editions of something called “The Oracle.” It has hallucinatory visuals on the cover and boasts an interview with a member of The Byrds (David Crosby). Vinnie, who had bought it — but who, despite writing poetry — avoids any signifiers of intellectual curiosity as the teen status crushers that they are, feigns disinterest and gives the copies to me.

And that’s where it begins, this strange love affair with the periodical, particularly the periodical that has flair and style… where you can almost feel the energy and fun emanating off the pages.

I remember only one thing from the content inside those two Oracles and that’s David Crosby denying that he was “some kind of weird freak who fucks ten chicks a day.” That stuck in my mind. I didn’t know it was possible even to think that, much less print it, much less be in a position to find it necessary to deny being it!

Let the story continue some time in early 1969, I’m 16 and in my junior year at Binghamton Central High School. The student/youth protest movement has fired my imagination — and the more radical the better. The Columbia University takeover with obscenity screaming Mark Rudd! The French Revolution of May ’68! The armed black student takeover of the Cornell administration building, just 45 miles away in Ithaca! WoWeeee!

I wanted a piece of it. So I started a high school “underground newspaper” — The Lower Left Corner. Wanting to spring it on the school as a total surprise, I brought in only one co-conspirator (memory fails me, but he was more a collegian liberal type while I hung with the freaks.) Anyway, what we came up with was, I am sure, a completely lame and absurd piece of adolescent indignation. While college students revolted against the war, racism, and authoritarianism in school, we boiled it down to authoritarianism at school. The one thing I remember is that we had a cartoon of a teacher wearing a swastika armband busting a student for smoking in the boys’ room. (Eat your hearts out, Brownsville Station!) It was that stupid.

To this day, I consider The Lower Left Corner a great success. Eight pages, Xeroxed front and back and stapled together… we entered the school each armed with a boxful… probably about 80 copies each total, and started handing them out selectively, avoiding the jocks and straights (by the way, straight used to mean “not hip.”)

We got to homeroom — official start of the school day. The principle came over the loudspeaker. “Anyone caught with a copy of the paper called The Lower Left Corner will be immediately suspended from school.” All eyes on me. Homeroom ends and as the door to the hallway swings open, I step out into my first taste of celebrity. All the jocks that usually threaten to beat me up or cut my hair off are jostling for a copy of the forbidden paper… even thanking me upon receiving. Laughing, I thrust the pieces ‘o’ crap into the grasping hands, happy also to get rid of them so that I wouldn’t be caught with any copies… and then I waited for the administrative consequences.

None were forthcoming. I had beaten the system… and in two ways. I’d gotten the administration to act out the very authoritarian impulse that we were lamely dithering about in print; and I learned something that served me well through the rest of my career as a high school “sixties radical. “ If the authorities think you’re political enough to run to the ACLU, they’ll leave you alone and bust your intended audience instead!

We created and “printed” one more issue of The Lower Left Corner. As I recall, it was on an antiwar theme and we paid more attention to the quality of the text and design the second time out. This time, we handed them out without any attempted interference. Teachers even used it as a source for classroom discussions. And of course… no one cared.

Let the story continue in Fall of 1971. I’m 19. I meet Tommy Hannifin at a rally against the killings at Attica State. He’s shouting the not-so-secret codeword… YIPPIE! We converge and excitedly share our mutual love of the Yippies funny and fun acid-infused, prankster, wild-in-the-streets take on The Movement as a Youth Culture Revolution. I tell him that I want to create a Binghamton Chapter of the Yippies and start an underground newspaper. And so we did.

I should be clear. I had never thought… even for a moment, about journalism as a craft and/or a career. It didn’t even occur to me that I should think about it in those terms. Indeed, to the constant worry of Mom and Dad, I never thought about career at all. I assumed that The Revolution would render those issues moot. I simply reached for the print medium because it seemed like a tool that was accessible. (It was… relatively speaking.) I seem to recall that Tommy, at least, knew something about layout — that you had to get these boards, type out the text, get visuals and paste it all up. And so, we pasted together Lost In Space, Binghamton’s little underground newspaper, ripping off a few frames from an underground cartoon titled Nancy Kotex: High School Nurse for the front page. This thievery was utterly naïve. The idea of copyright and intellectual property was unfamiliar to me — like so many things in life that seemed obvious to so many, it hadn’t occurred to me. The cartoon just struck us as funny, and when we imagined people getting all upset and offended by it, it became twice as funny. And so I learned about the double scoop of pleasure you get from prankster humor that confounds or freaks people out. You get to laugh at the joke… and then you get to laugh at the over-reaction to the joke.

Like The Lower Left Corner, Lost In Space (changed by issue #2 to Space because movement types told us Lost In Space sent a negative message) was a piece of crap. And unlike the underground papers of the bigger urban centers and hip college towns like Madison Wisconsin and Ann Arbor Michigan, we had no tributes to George Jackson and Ho Chi Minh; we had no quasi-sophisticated neo-Marxian analyses of the movement; no major statements from Robin Morgan about the rise of militant feminism; and probably not much news. Like The Lower Left Corner, Space was locally focused, reflexively against all authority, and juvenile. But it was probably a bit more stylishly written… and it certainly had a puckish sense of humor.

Let the story continue in 1980. I’m 27 years old and a Junior at the State University College at Brockport, New York, near Rochester. (The Revolution having left me stranded.) My friend Brian Cotnoir wants to start an avant-garde art newspaper. He calls it Black Veins — which comes from an interpretation of a line from Lautreamont’s epic proto-surrealist misanthropic horror poem Maldoror (Les Chantes de Maldoror) — and he signs me on as co-editor. The paper features dark, perversely angled bits of poetry and fiction, but I bring something else in. Since the mid-1970s, I have been nursing a growing obsession with the neuro-futurisms of Dr. Timothy Leary and Illuminatus author/philosopher Robert Anton Wilson.

For the first issue, I have a written exchange with Wilson, performed by the soon to be archaic means of letters sent by mail. (As best I recall) the exchange essentially involves me wringing my hands that the world is a terrible place and that his optimistic weltanschauung may actually be a dangerous diversion. (I would later get letters like that myself at MONDO 2000 and, generally, respond with dismissive quips intended to communicate my lack of commitment to an optimistic — or any — point of view.) My letter includes a pretentious, portentous quote from a Village Voice review of Hans-Hurgen Syderberg’s 6 hour film, Our Hitler.

And then word comes that Dr. Leary himself is coming to Rochester on his “stand up philosophy” tour. Brian, his girlfriend Ellen, myself, and our ex-girlfriend Liz pile in Ellen’s car for the 30-minute drive to Rochester for the Sunday afternoon performance. Our goal is to interview the Dr. after the show for the second issue of Black Veins and then to film him. I plan to try and incorporate him into an 8mm movie called Armed Camp I’m making for a film class. (Incidentally, that’s camp in the Susan Sontag sense.) The film involves, among other things, some 20-somethings playing poker in pajamas using the Aleister Crowley Thoth Tarot deck and then dancing to The Archies “Sugar Sugar” 45 rpm played at 33 (makes the vocals sound sort of like Jim Morrison). There is a vague narrative structure to this odd little attempt and I have reworked it so that it required Timothy Leary to say a few lines.

My posse — myself excluded — is negative about mind-altering drugs and cynical about Leary, and this makes me anxious. As we take our seats, the end of the Pink Floyd album The Wall blasts out of the loudspeakers and the cover of Leary’s book The Intelligence Agents — which shows multiple copies of the same baby attempting to climb over a brick wall which appears to have no end — is projected onto a screen on stage. Then comes Side 2 (The “1984” side) of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. Given his recent byzantine adventures with prison, exile, revolution, and compromise with the powers of state, it seems as if Leary is trying to tell us something. To the final echoes of Bowie singing “We want you, big brother,” Dr. Leary walks on stage. Liz mutters a bit too loudly, “Ohmygod, it’s Johnny Carson!”

The performance is not particularly impressive or funny, but Leary agrees to be interviewed. He unleashes that famous laser beam smile on each of us, one at a time, and the vibe immediately changes. Instant intimacy. Timothy Leary is now our special pal and we’re his co-conspirators. We move into the restaurant attached to the club, order drinks and peruse the menu. Liz, a slightly moralistic vegetarian, asks Leary if he eats meat. “I’ll eat anything!” he says directly to her, smiling. It’s something that has been said a million times before by both jackasses and geniuses, but it comes out like a blast of freedom. Everybody feels this.

We all have a roaring great time interviewing Leary about life, drugs; his hatred of followers, his futurist theories, and the 1980 Democratic primaries (“If I’d done a better job, you wouldn’t have all these pasty-faced white guys running around New Hampshire.”) We’re all dazzled, feeling like the host of Planet Earth’s party had lifted the velvet rope and let us in. As we finish the conversation, Ellen urges me to ask Tim about appearing in Armed Camp. I’m feeling shy, but I share the script — such as it is — with him and point him at his two-sentence part. “What’s it about?” he asks. A bit flustered, I blurt out, “Nothing really.” He laughs and looks at my friends. “Thaaat’s wonderfullll, isn’t it? Nothing. Isn’t thaaat wonderful?” Everybody laughs, including me. He won’t read the lines but he will let me ask him a question and film his response… which turns out to be useless for my movie, but a treasure (that I will soon lose) nonetheless.

As we wrap up, Tim asks for a ride back to his hotel. He shrewdly picks Brian to dismantle and pack up the photo projector he’d uses to backdrop his talk. As we head to the car, night has fallen. Liz is pawing Dr. Leary, while they both gaze up at the stars. He points and describes a constellation or two. In the car, Liz continues to stroke and flirt, offering to come up to his hotel. Leary tells her she is very beautiful and wonderful, but he’s married. As “Sympathy For the Devil” pops up on the mainstream rock radio station, we pull up to a raggedy-ass little hotel that’s near the Rochester Airport and the good Dr. takes his leave of us.

Let the story continue in early November 1983. I am 31 years old and have just recently moved into a weirdly straight (see above) shared household in Mill Valley, California, a ‘burb of San Francisco. The house is made up mostly of sedate 50-something recent converts to new age philosophies — an oddly pale white man who emanates a bland but likeable passivity seems to be the eminence grise of the household scene. And then there’s a Hindu Hippie couple around my age that lives in the back room. They smoke pot (I can smell it) and they pretty much keep to themselves.

I have moved from Brockport, New York to the San Francisco Bay Area (starting off in Berkeley) with a “note to self” in my pocket — the only thing I could write during several months of writer’s block, after a briefly successful academic and small town rock and roll career as a writer of fiction… and writer and singer of song lyrics. The note contains my California to-do list: “Start the Neopsychedelic Wave. Start a Neopsychedelic band. Start a Neopsychedelic magazine.”

In late 1980, having written two darkly comic short stories to great local academic approval, and even winning a scholastic award (best fiction) for one of them (titled “Glib Little Holocausts”); having written darkly comic lyrics for a punk-tinged rock band (called “Party Dogs”) and performed to some approval in both Brockport and Rochester; and looking ahead vaguely to either trying to make a run at a career as a rock and roll eccentric or hiding in obscurity as a writing professor; I came in for an odd reckoning — an interruption, really. It was a really good LSD trip.

Two days after the murder of John Lennon, laying in a room in a small apartment in which the heat pipes played oddly angelic music that had gone heretofore unnoticed, my girlfriend Lisa and I laid face to face, took the clean 250 microgram doses of liquid LSD-25 we had gotten from the colleges’ hippyest Deadhead and made off for the cosmos.

Up until then, even my best trips had been fraught with ambiguity. My friends and lovers were weird. My hometown was relatively small… and contained parents who worried, and hostile lawmen and jocks who knew who I was. There was always at least the hint of trouble or shame — the feeling that my neurological nakedness was something to hide and someone lurked around the bend ready to give me a bad — or, at least, a strange time.

Now, there I was, safe and high and with a girlfriend who I actually liked and felt comfortable with, primed by my readings of Leary and Wilson to tap into an elegant symmetry, a generosity, even a sense of frivolity in the heart of all-that-is.

At first, the acid hit strong. It jolted up and down my spine like kundalini lightening, then shooting out the top of my head in a glorious explosive overabundance — an excess of multicolor wow! and then it smoothed over into an endless and sumptuous multidimensional layer cake of pastels filled to the brim with warm congratulations at having arrived. Later, it took me into deep space, and the heat pipes, which had been playing a pleasant kind of Tuvan throat music drone started, instead, to play John Lennon’s hit song, “Starting Over” and, well… the message seemed clear. What the Lizard King had said was true: “Everything must be this way.”

The aftermath of the trip found me disastrously happy, playful, optimistic, frivolous and energized… and writing about the coming of a Neopsychedelic Wave in lyrics and fiction. In the real (small) world of Brockport, New York, I’d shifted into a master’s course in Fiction Writing, and attempts to give expression to my new head in that context weren’t working. What came out was the sort of gibberish that has been produced before and aft by so many in the throes of psychedelic wonder — shards of flashy words that tried to convey – no, make that impart the energy of being aliver than thou to the recipient with FLASHY CAPITALIZED WORDS. Finally, after a couple of floundering semesters, I heard the siren call: “California is the place you oughta be!” There was really, after all, only one state from which to start a Neopsychedelic Wave.

So I’m sitting in the living room here in Mill Valley in 1983 just sort of gazing out the window when something bordering on an apparition appears. The Hindu Hippies plus their friend, a tall thin man in white robes — a visitor who occasionally slinks in and out of their room to use the bathroom — are opening a side door, and walking with them into the very back yard that I am gazing upon is a tall, thin, curly haired man, speaking something not quite audible in a familiar, nasally voice.

I recognize the man. I had attended a lecture he gave at a place in Berkeley a few months earlier. It was something about magic mushrooms and UFOs. In a nasally voice that reminded me of Jello Biafra, the man — Terence McKenna — had woven an astounding linguistic spell, rich with references ranging from Learyesque projections of future space architectures and superhuman amplifications to McLuhanistic media meanderings and, to top it all off, erudite descriptions (damn, why couldn’t I do that?) of psychedelic experiences… including one that involved something along the lines of forty days and forty nights on mushrooms in the Amazonian Rain Forest during which he “channeled” a message from the logos that was calling us forward through time and using the acceleration of technology and consciousness and social crisis to bring us to some kind of psychedelic singularity in which exteriority and interiority would trade places!

Well… far out! But what the fuck is he doing at my house with the Hindu Hippies!? Here am I, on cosmic assignment from something or other to start the Neopsychedelic Movement and feeling meek and quiet and ill prepared and there’s this McKenna guy at my house. They quickly retreat into the back room. It takes me a good half hour to work up my nerve and tap on the door.

What happens next is (like an alien probe) wiped from my memory. Let it be said — and many will attest to this — that Mr. McKenna always brought the powerful fucking weed with him when he came. All I know is that, somehow, at the end of the visit, which probably lasted all of an hour, Mr. McKenna is handing me a baggie with 6 grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms and a joint of his way-too-strong pot and telling me (McKenna familiars… hear the nasel): “Eat these on an empty stomach. An hour later, go into a darkened room and smoke this joint. That will get you where you want to go.”

So it’s about a week later, and it’s Monday, the start of a Thanksgiving weeklong break in my job selling season ticket subscriptions by phone for various Bay Area arts organizations. I have decided that tonight’s the night. I will take the 6 grams of mushrooms late that night and lie in the dark in silence in my room and I will make contact with The Others — the alien intelligences that Mr. McKenna says are available on the Psilocybin frequency (when you take enough) — or I won’t… and either way, it will be a groovy trip.

I have decided to try a borderline fast — nothing but toast and water (and my morning cup of coffee) all day. It’s a big mistake. It’s around 5 pm and I’m heading home after strolling into town and I start to pass the McDonalds on the corner when the hunger overwhelms me and the biological robot commandeers my brain. By the time my brain returns to ordinary consciousness, I have downed a bag of Chicken McNuggets and a small bag of fries. Now I’m unhappy with myself and I’m deciding that I’ve blown the opportunity. No trip tonight.

I get back to the house and, oddly, it’s empty. It’s a large household, yet no one is home. A thought grips me. If they all stay away for an hour, I have a chance to get off on the mushrooms alone, having the run of the house during those energetic, intensely physical early moments that occur when you first come on to psychedelics. Then, I can hide out in my room with the lights out for the remainder of the trip. The time is nigh. I chew down the biggest batch of ‘shrooms in my life by far and I find myself pacing the house, nervously. Suddenly, after about 20 minutes, it slices through me like a shard of angry glass. A shattering angry splintery energy thing is outside me lacerating me and I am in everything’s sights and all-that-is is pissed at me. The house cats start scurrying around yowling, running furiously, scratching at and trying to climb the walls. The suburban Mill Valley street suddenly looms very small and enclosed and conservative, and me… Mistra Inappropriate… not in control of my basic social signals and I’m now being lacerated by demons from a peculiar occult/Rolling Stones mirrorworld for abandoning them back in Binghamton, New York. Multiple car engine noises scrape the insides of my gut (In reality, it’s around 6 pm, the time when people in the suburbs get home from working in San Francisco) — each one of them very likely carrying narcotics cops or agents of some hostile control system and, worst of all, I see it like it is now… They’re the good guys and I am cast out, having done wrong; having eaten magic mushrooms on a corporate McDonald’s stomach… heedlessly. I stare out the front window expecting incoming — hoping merely that the inevitable death is not too tortuous. And then it happens. A car actually stops right in front of the house. This is it. It’s over! But wait. The doors open and several clearly preoccupied corporeal and painfully ordinary humans emerge — all my housemates. They are opening doors and the trunk and picking up grocery bags. In an instant, things shift. The immediate danger lessens but does not disappear. I still may be attacked by angry beings, but right now I have another challenge. I have to act normal. I shuffle to the front door and open it, thinking that the best strategy is to wander out and offer to carry grocery bags. I take one step outside. Can’t handle it. I go back inside and close the screen door. Now I’ve given myself away. But the roomies walk in the house, preoccupied with their normal activities and blandly saying hello, to which I manage a normal sounding reply. All, that is, except for the Hindu Hippie guy. He makes a beeline for me and looks me right in the eyes. Quietly, he says, “Oh boy. Come with me” and, with his girlfriend, leads me by the hand into their back room. I start to tell him what I’ve done but he already knows. “You’ve taken Terence’s mushrooms.” The thin man in the white robes is lying on his side on a cot looking calm. He has been sitting in there all along. They say very little at first. They bring me a cup of warm tea; have me lie down on a cot, and the Hindu Hippie girl gives me a shoulder rub. I mutter something about demons from a Rolling Stones mirrorworld and start to explain about the friendship I had with a strange and charismatic guitar player who was fanatically and uncannily tapped into Keith Richards almost to the point where the evidence suggested a mystical connection and how we spent five months together in borderline isolation learning the entire Rolling Stones catalogue, and how he played it better than anybody alive except maybe Keith (better than Ronnie, by far), and how we talked long into the night about the occult dimensions of The Rolling Stones and the gut level pagan authenticity of the sex and drugs and rock and roll left hand path to enlightenment and how this friendship had all the elements of an intense sexual affair but without the sex and he started talking about Rimbaud & Verlaine and how it made me self-conscious and I couldn’t handle it and then I gave him my song lyrics to start writing originals and he said he lost them and laughed at me and I left town and never spoke to him again.

And this makes perfect sense to my Hindu Hippie friends. I mean, christ… they were California hippies. They were probably at Altamont as teenagers! Demons sent from a Rolling Stones mirrorworld made perfect sense. And then, as I settled into a state of calm, the thin man in the white robes told me his story. Vijaya was a former leader of the American Hare Krishna cult. He had left the group because they had started to behave — as do pretty much all cults — like gangsters, with all the corruption and violence that implies. He still believed in Hare Krishna’s brand of Hinduism, but he was part of a renegade group of psychedelic Hare Krishnas. And the Hare Krishna cultists had tried to kill him… and he was hiding out. So here we were, me hiding out from mirrorworld Stones demons and him hiding out, ostensibly, from Hare Krishna assassins, both of us in the back room of a very bland Mill Valley shared household.

While the LSD trip that had sent me to California was a “good trip” and the trip on McKenna’s shrooms was a “bad trip,” they both propelled me on. A couple of days after the psilocybin trip, the resolve to go forward with the creation of a psychedelic magazine took hold of me. I contacted Will Nofke, a new age radio host who had done a series of interviews about psychedelics with Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna and Andrew Weil on Berkeley’s Pacifica station KPFA, and asked him for the tapes to transcribe and publish the content. He sent me the tapes and granted me the permission. On New Years Eve — as 1983 was becoming 1984 — I stayed home alone. I finished transcribing the last of the tapes — the Leary interview — while watching the avant-garde video artist Nam June Paik host a very special New Years Eve 1984 show titled Good Morning, Mr. Orwell on PBS’ Alive From Off Center, featuring many of my culture heroes: Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, and Paik himself. Later I would have my first date with my wife Eve at a Nam June Paik exhibit in San Jose, California and I would co-create a TV show proposal and sample titled “The R.U. Sirius Show” for the consideration of PBS with John Sanborn, the Producer of Alive From Off Center. When the show ended, I channel surfed and found Timothy Leary on a silly, long forgotten entertainment talk show (I have mercifully forgotten the host). It was lame, but still, it was Timmy on network TV. A great signifier for the beginning of a new life. As 1984 dawned, I started reaching out to find compatriots to be part of a magazine that would be called High Frontiers and later Reality Hackers and then finally MONDO 2000.

Well, this is the second time I thought I'd posted an update and came back to find it not there... so it's a bit anti-climactic but

wOOt!
We made it!

have made our minimal goal. Now, onward toward realistic funding for the project. I'll be back soon with more words.

Hi folks! Thanks again to all our supporters. We're almost within $1,000 of making our minimum, and let's not stop there because Bart Nagel demands pretzels and beer... at least once. And I'm thinking a six pack of Guinness.

Anyway, Andy Baio interviewed me for the Kickstarter podcast http://blog.kickstarter.com/post/592816921/podcast-an-open-source-history-of-mondo-2000 and I'm pretty happy with how it came out. You can read the transcript, but it makes more sense if you hear the vocal inflections. If you haven't already, check it out.

R.U.

There are two streams merging here to generate the Mondo 2000 History Project. In one stream, Morgan Russell… who was editor and publisher during the transition from High Frontiers and through Reality Hackers… has been expressing interest in doing something exactly of this sort for a year or two. And Alison Kennedy (Queen Mu) has evinced some interest in seeing it happen.

In an eddy off of this stream -- (do eddy’s run off streams? No time to research, just accept the metaphor) – a conversation with David Latimer led to the idea of a Mondo 2000 film project. Latimer was briefly a High Frontiers (pre Mondo 2000 edition) Publisher and also an important muckity muck in Res Fest and Res Magazine back in the day when digital filmmaking was avant garde… and he’s a long time pal. We’ve done various projects together.

But undergirding all this for me was an idea to write a memoir of my entire life as a stranger among the strangers from the point of view of a stranger. In other words, what if I approached my life like an outside journalist. Thinking about this raised all kinds of issues and thoughts…

about memory in a frantic, crowded, forward-focused lifetime. And, of course about the whole Roshomon Effect (a bit tired as a metaphor but could be dynamic in context). And then there are the colorful/pranksterish opportunities. Many of my friends are -- or have been -- great exaggerators. Shouldn’t they be encouraged?!! Or should they?
…..

about identity and the continuity or discontinuity of a person. To what extent are we made of other people… infected, occupied by their ways of seeing… and by how they see us? What is the emotional and narrative quality of taking in the perceptions other people have of you or have had of you at some point in the past? (How does it feel? What do I think? And the really big question when asking people to dig up your own past, or their past in the context of you… do they remember much and why should they bother?)

.....

about the things one is willing to say or report about oneself and about what one is willing to have said about oneself in public. And perhaps more to the point… about what one would prefer someone else say, so that you don’t have to.

Anyway, as you now know, I’ve narrowed my ambition from an entire misspent lifetime to the history of Mondo 2000 and its progenitors circa 1984-1997, although I must say that the people from my earlier life largely among the “freaks” of the late ‘60s and the ‘70s mostly in Binghamton, N.Y. were every bit as hip, intellectual/demented, and a whole lot weirder than the Mondo scene, which was plenty weird itself by most lights. (My friend, Steve Greitzer, has taken up the task of doing a movie about the Binghamton scene. If you were a Bingie (University included), I’ll put you in touch.)

Of course, the first thought here is that this would all be seen as an enormous ego trip. I suppose it is, although my sense is that this is likely to end up an exercise in self-deprecation (not just for me, but for at least some other MONDOids as well). I certainly see it as an exercise in self-exploration that could turn reasonably severe. In fact, I encourage all participants to explore as deeply as they are willing to, while also being playful and telling ripping yarns… each in turn or all at once.

OK, WAIT… this is what I really want to say. I’ve never done a book, collaboratively or on my own, that I’m entirely satisfied with… that I can point at as a sort of literary achievement. Some of them were pretty good, but they’ve all been pitches to book companies, followed by deadline-stressed realizations.

I think this is the one. So it’s going to have to be deep -- poignant, surprising, evocative, and reflective while at the same time being MONDO -- surreal, funny, provocative, playful, and colorful. It should have all the great stories but also lots of real gut checks, genuine adult insights as well as the usual heckling from the eternal adolescent id. It should be the reality about the Mondo 2000 experience, with enough lies thrown in to bring out the truth. And finally, it must bring everybody on earth to perfect enlightenment or make an awesome movie on late night cable. All this must be so.