Wonderful short essay from Christopher Hitchens, writing about British novelist J.G. Ballard on the occasion of the publication of The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard.

From The Atlantic:

For all that, Ballard is arguably best-known to a wide audience because of his relatively ?

 
“I do not have a single constructive proposal.”

This is hilarious. It’s poetry, too. This man is a genius. Give him his own TV show!

Here’s what it says about him on WIkipedia:

Koichi Toyama (?

Second installment of a two-part, in-depth conversation with cultural engineer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on the occasion of the publication of THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE: A New Testameant, a compendium of Gen’s writing on magick, the occult and sexuality. Part one is here.

 
Tantalizing short excerpt from The Harvard Psychedelic Club over at The Daily Beast.  Don Lattin’s new book looks at the moment in time when Dr. TImothy Leary, Dr. Richard Alpert (AKA Ram Dass), Huston Smith, and lifestyle guru Andrew Weil (then a student) crossed paths at Harvard in the early 1960s setting off a revolution in consciousness that is still felt today. It’s fascinating to see Leary’s influence on culture beginning to become rehabilitated a decade after his passing. His legacy is difficult to ascertain, to be sure, but the man had a huge, huge effect on so many people’s lives—whether directly or indirectly via the fact that LSD use became widespread, you cannot untangle Leary from that fact. He certainly had a huge influence on me. I can’t wait to get my hands on this!

From the book:

Weil and Winston had both read The Doors of Perception, Huxley?

 
Remember “The Big Guy”? Mike from Brooklyn (AKA The Kid from Brooklyn and The Big Guy) is an outspoken senior citizen with a penchant for the “F” word who makes his home-pundit videos in his bathrobe (or shirtless) and puts them up on YouTube. Not saying I’m endorsing, necessarily, everything that Mike has to say (he likes Sarah Palin and is vociferously anti-Muslim), but very often he’s bust-a-gut funny and he’s more liberal than you might think at first glance. Here are a few better examples of Mike’s zany, boisterous and LOUD home-punditry.
 

 
Thank you Jesse Merlin!

Happy 2010! We’re starting off the new decade right with the first installment of a two-part, in-depth conversation with cultural engineer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on the occasion of the publication of THEE PSYCHICK BIBLE: A New Testameant, a compendium of Gen’s writing on magick, the occult and sexuality. Part two will be posted next week.

 
An open letter in the underground press that accused the Beatles of going soft and selling out to the establishment, comparing John Lennon’s call for pacifism in “Revolution” to a BBC radio soap opera, and conferring superior revolutionary credentials on the Rolling Stones, so incensed the Beatle that he spent six hours 40 years ago giving an interview to a couple of college students offering a rebuttal that was finally published today in the pages of the New Statesman magazine.

In 1968, Maurice Hindle and a friend hitch-hiked to Surrey to meet Lennon, who picked them up personally at the train station in his Mini Cooper. Yoko Ono fed them homemade macrobiotic bread and jam. Lennon spoke nearly continuously for six hours.

He says “Revolution” was no more revolutionary than Mrs Dale’s Diary. So it mightn’t have been. But the point is to change your head - it’s no good knocking down a few old bloody Tories! What does he think he’s gonna change? The system’s what he says it is: a load of crap. But just smashing it up isn’t gonna do it.

Hindle writes “Lennon demanded Black Dwarf publish his response, which took [writer John] Hoyland to task for his “patronizing” tone, and ended with the defiant challenge: “You smash it—and I’ll build around it.”
 

 
The full interview is only available in the print edition of New Statesman magazine.

 
Sister Wendy, the art lovin’ nun and a clearly flummoxed Bill Moyers discuss Andres Serrano’s controversial photograph “Piss Christ”. There’s something delightful about the way in which she calmly damns Seranno with faint praise and generally defends her appreciation for erotic imagery in this clip. Go Sister Wendy, go !

 
Who knew Jean-Paul Sartre suffered from a mescaline-induced crustacean complex?  What follows is a snippet of conversation the French existentialist had with political science professor, John Gerassi.  In it, Sartre recalls an “experiment” with drugs in 1929, the same year, not so incidentally, he met Simone De Beauvoir, aka “Castor.”

Sartre: ... I ended up having a nervous breakdown.

Gerassi: You mean the crabs?

Sartre: Yeah, after I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time.  They followed me in the streets, into class.  I got used to them.  I would wake up in the morning and say, ?