R.U. Sirius, also known as Ken Goffman, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Mondo 2000 magazine, has a new blog called Acceler8or. The blog will curate links from around the Internet relating to technological acceleration and transhumanist/Singularitarian culture.

The round of content included an interview with Genesis Breyer P. Orridge, and an interesting essay about the new Adam Curtis documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace.

In other R.U. Sirius news, Vice Magazine interviewed him over I.M. recently about the history of Mondo 2000 and he gives DM a nice compliment:

Where are all the cyberpunks that read Mondo 2000 back in the day? Was someone like Mark Zuckerberg a reader?
Mark was too young. Maybe Sean Parker. I hear from people in the computer industry all the time that they were inspired by Mondo 2000. Also, people working in biotechnology, nanotechnology… I think the Mondoids are all over the map, most of them still have many of the same enthusiasms, tempered with experience and a healthy skepticism.

You’ve used the term “gonzo anthropology,” the means of studying the more esoteric and under-researched aspects of human culture—what does that mean, exactly?
Alison Kennedy aka Queen Mu, the Mondo 2000 publisher, practices gonzo anthropology. She was the one who uncovered toad venom containing 5-meo DMT in the West. She also explores very odd and arcane anthropological theories about the uses of plants and animals as aphrodisiacs, the use of Calumas as a sort of natural MDMA-like substance. Her magnum opus appeared in Mondo 2000. It was an article about how Jim Morrison used tarantula venom and got penis cancer, based on an entire gonzo anthropological exploration of implications of tarantula venom use (as an inspirational but self-destructive intoxicant) throughout human experience. The Doors producer, whose name I can’t remember, took it very seriously and got very upset about it. Ray Manzarek, I think, was not happy either. It was a wildly brilliant and hilarious and beautifully written piece.

Do you feel that in some ways you guys were too left field for some people?
I think we were too anarchic, playful, and incomprehensible for a mainstream magazine about the uprising of the digital technoculture. One of the first things that I noticed about Wired was that they had letters to the editor from people expressing ordinary Republican or Democratic political views, whereas we would get letters about the green aliens on acid who wrote the letter writer’s new software program and how many different drugs Hitler used. I mean, off the wall stuff. But I think Republicans are on a wall that I can’t relate to. So yeah, there was a limited relationship between us and a mainstream audience. The mainstream media people liked us because we seemed colorful and novel. And as a result of the attention, the people who would read the magazine found out about it. Wired does some great stuff online now, though. It’s an OK institution. I have to say though, they send me the magazine and it usually winds up in recycling, unread.

What do you see as your legacy? Who is continuing what you guys started?
Well, Boing Boing have been their own thing from the start. They were the small magazine when we were the big one, but they’re a relative. Maybe Dangerous Minds, Richard Metzger’s new site, in spirit. But I think Mondo was unique. It was an art project really using journalism and technoculture as a context. It was just a few unusual individuals following instincts. The mistakes were obvious but the energy of it was so much fun that as Richard Kadrey once said, “You have to have a mighty big stick up your ass not to love it.”

Mondo 2000 and gonzo anthropology (Viceland Today)

 
So begins R.U. Sirius’s history of Mondo 2000 magazine and its circle of fellow travelers. I approve of how it starts with this wonderful personal anecdote about his first exposure to the underground press as a teen, in the form of the San Francisco Oracle. Many people will tell you of an “Oh wow! This exists! And there must be more of it!” epiphany like this—I had a similar experience discovering David Bowie and reading Lester Bangs in Creem magazine eight years later—and it’s a highly enjoyable essay. Worth pointing out that kids today and forevermore will be unable to have an experience like this due to the always on mediascape we inhabit today. Discovering something rare used to require luck, a knack for ferreting out weird stuff or a hip relative. Not saying it would be preferable to go back to this earlier era, of course, I’m just saying that back then it took work:

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!

How great is that last sentence?

Read the entire essay—and support the project—here.

 
Ken Goffman, R.U. Sirius, also know as Ken Goffman was the editor/co-founder of Mondo 2000, one of the most visionary and influential publications of late 1980s and ’90s. He’s looking to use Kickstarter to finance a “collective memory project” about the magazine and its history, for posterity. It’s certainly a worthy subject to my mind. Goffman’s project would take the form of a physical book and possibly become a documentary, too. Kickstarter has a podcast interview about the project and the history of Mondo 2000.

This project stemmed from your original desire to do a memoir, but seems to have become something much more.

Originally, I had the idea that I could work with the idea of memory and perception in the context of writing a memoir. I probably didn’t remember my life that accurately, and perhaps not that interestingly, but if I made my memoir open-source and brought people who had their own memories of interacting with me in their own lives — during the late ’60s/’70s and the period when I was doing Mondo 2000 and earlier magazines — then something really interesting would come of that. It’d be a literary experiment and an exploration of memory and psychology.  That’s where it started.

On one level it seemed really self-indulgent; in another way, it seemed like a fairly original project.  There’ve been a lot of books where it’s “as told to,” starting with a book called Edie by George Plympton, where they go around and talk to a whole lot of different people and quote them verbatim about some person’s life and what they witnessed.

My feeling was this would dig a little bit deeper, more interactive and more probing. Eventually, largely as a result of thinking about raising capital to get started on Kickstarter, trying to get the equivalent of the small amount book companies give for an advance, I decided I needed to narrow my focus.  People would be interested in doing this just with Mondo 2000 and the magazines that preceded it.  So it was narrowed down to a period from 1984-1997, starting with a magazine called High Frontiers that mutated into Reality Hackers and then Mondo 2000.

Mondo 1995: Up and Down With the Next Millennium’s First Magazine by Jack Boulware (SF Weekly)

Here’s a blast from Counterculture Past… it’s Dr. Fiorella Terenzi, the super hot Italian astrophysicist musician who used to appear in Mondo 2000. Dr. Terenzi played cosmic symphonies using the sounds of the universe channeled through a synth while lecturing on astrophysics.

(Her Wikipedia entry lists her as being “known as an Apple Computer AppleMaster.” Holy shit, that sounds intimidating.)

Dr. Fiorella Terenzi is an Italian astrophysicist, author and musician who is best known for taking recordings of radio waves from galaxies and turning them into music. She received her doctorate from the University of Milan but is currently based in the United States.

Terenzi is known for her CD-ROM Invisible Universe, which combined music and poetry with astronomy lessons, and for a sexually charged 1998 book about science titled Heavenly Knowledge. She also released albums of her music. She is known as an Apple Computer AppleMaster, and has collaborated with the likes of Thomas Dolby, Timothy Leary, Herbie Hancock, and Ornette Coleman. She is currently teaching astronomy at Brevard Community College in Cocoa, FL.

(Fiorella Terenzi)

(Dr. Fiorella Terenzi: Music from the Galaxies)