Fascinating article about legal psychedelic Salvia Divinorum from Dangerous Minds pal David Jay Brown at Reality Sandwich:

While under the influence of salvia, people often report radical shifts in perception, seeing visions with their eyes closed and visual changes with eyes open. Sometimes people find themselves laughing uncontrollably, even though they don’t find anything to be particularly funny. Time and space can become distorted in strange ways. The sensation of being pushed, pulled, twisted, or taken into alternative dimensions and other realities is common, as is the feeling of other presences, other people, and nonhuman entity contact. The plant itself is often perceived by the user as a female spirit.

Higher doses can cause people to completely dissociate from their body, and people who ingest strong doses need to be watched carefully so that they don’t accidentally harm themselves. With higher doses, sometimes people get up and walk around, completely oblivious to their physical surroundings, and start bumping into furniture and walls. Experienced salvia users insist that a sober sitter always be present when one is experimenting with the plant. With strong doses of salvinorin A, all thinking in the brain shuts down, although a very lucid awareness remains, and people become completely immersed in another world. Often people completely forget that they are under the influence of a psychoactive substance. After the experience ends, many people describe feeling an “afterglow,” an upbeat, life-affirming antidepressant effect that lasts for around a day or more.

Adventures with Mazatec Mint: Exploring the Mind-Bending World of Salvia Divinorum by David Jay Brown

The Nation excerpts Max Blumenthal’s new book Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party. (Blumenthal is the journalist that uncovered the video of Sarah Palin being anointed by Kenyan “witch hunters.”)

The jacket copy makes it sound like a pure winner. Might have to order this one:

Republican Gomorrah is a bestiary of dysfunction, scandal and sordidmess from the dark heart of the forces that now have a leash on the party. It shows how those forces are the ones that establishment Republicans-like John McCain-have to bow to if they have any hope of running for President. It shows that Sarah Palin was the logical choice of a party in the control of theocrats. But more that just an expose, Republican Gomorrah shows that many of the movement’s leading figures have more in common than just the power they command within conservative ranks. Their personal lives have been stained by crisis and scandal: depression, mental illness, extra-marital affairs, struggles with homosexual urges, heavy medication, addiction to pornography, serial domestic abuse, and even murder. Inspired by the work of psychologists Erich Fromm, who asserted that the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings, Blumenthal explains in a compelling narrative how a culture of personal crisis has defined the radical right, transforming the nature of the Republican Party for the next generation and setting the stage for the future of American politics.

The Nation’s excerpt focuses on the damage done to developing minds by batshit insane Republican home-school programs, focusing on school shooter (and Crowley/OTO enthusiast) Matthew Murray.

A few miles down the road from Colorado Springs [a home to James Dobson’s Focus on the Family], in the quiet bedroom community of Eldredge, a deeply disturbed young man named Matthew Murray followed the unfolding debacle at New Life Church [once under the stewardship of Pastor Ted Haggard] with an interest that bordered on obsession. Murray, a sallow-faced, bespectacled 24-year-old, had been indelibly scarred by a lifetime of psychological abuse at the hands of his charismatic Pentecostal parents. Murray’s mind became crowded with thoughts of death, destruction, and the killings he would soon carry out in the name of avenging what he called his “nightmare of Christianity”...

Murray lurched to the polar opposite edge of his parents’ fanatical faith, replacing their Bible as his inspiration with the writings of Aleister Crowley, a flamboyant, self-proclaimed Satanist. The fin de si?ɬ

Excellent essay from Cabinet Magazine, by Aaron Schuster.

What happens to levitation, one of the great imaginative figures of art and literature, in the transition from a religious culture to the disenchanted universe of modern science? What becomes of ecstasy, rapture, ascension, transcendence, grace wh?Ǭ?e?Ǭ?n these give way to “space oddity”: man enclosed in a tin can floating far above the world? Is the cosmonaut a prophet of the erotic future, avatar of man?

 
Along with Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn belongs to that select group known, for better or worse, as The Young British Artists (YBAs).  While Hirst has his formaldehyde-dipped sharks, and Emin has her unmade beds, Quinn is perhaps best known for Siren, his solid-gold, wildly contorted statue of Kate Moss, of whom the artist calls, charmingly, a “cultural hallucination.” 

You can watch below as Quinn explains how, in creating Siren, he drew inspiration from a ‘70s museum trip to see Tutankhamun.  Okay, a Goldfingered Kate Moss is nice, but I’m more intrigued by the Quinn piece unveiled yesterday at London’s National Portrait Gallery:

Quinn has been making casts of his own head and creating models using his own frozen blood since 1991.  He has made a new one every five years to document how he is aging, but the first three are all overseas.  The gallery said the acquisition of the latest edition, made in 2006 and entitled “Self,” was a major addition to its contemporary collection.

“Quinn’s ‘Self’ is an outstanding acquisition—a major icon of contemporary British art, both startling and revealing,” said Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery.  The gallery paid 300,000 pounds for what it describes as an “unconventional, innovative and challenging” piece of art, bought using a grant from the Art Fund charity and other donations.

Quinn used about nine or 10 pints of blood for the artwork, which he said was all about pushing the boundaries.  “To me this sculpture came from wanting to push portraiture to an extreme, a representation which not only has the form of the sitter, but is actually made from the sitter’s flesh,” he said. “It only exists in certain conditions, in this case being frozen, analogous to me, with a person being alive.

 
London Gallery Acquires Blood Head

More on Self @ Factual TV

 
If you missed Rep. Joe Wilson‘s (R-S.C.) heckling of President Obama during last night’s Congressional address, you can catch—or hear—his loutish behavior below.  Since then, of course, the pro-wiretapping, anti-health care Republican has “apologized” directly to President Obama but, amusingly, the fallout keeps floating his way.  As The Nation‘s Ari Mebler posts:

Beyond criticism and a swift apology, the incident has already provided a fundraising bonanza for Wilson’s opponent, Rob Miller, a Democrat and Marine Corps veteran.  Miller raised over $50,000 in just a few hours after Wilson’s outburst, after activists and small donors flooded his page on ActBlue.  Bloggers and readers at Daily Kos, a popular liberal blog, also used the site to instantly create a dedicated fundraising page highlighting the incident.  The portal, titled “Defeating the man who yelled ‘liar’ at Obama: Goodbye Rep Joe Wilson,” has already raised $35,000 for Wilson from over 1,050 individual donors.

Adrian Arroyo, an official with ActBlue, noted that Rep. Wilson’s antics struck such a strong chord, references to “you lie” on Twitter even surpassed Jay-Z, the popular musician who has led chatter on the site in anticipation of his new album debuting this week.

UPDATE: By Thursday afternoon, Miller’s haul topped $300,000 from over 8,000 donors.

 
Rob Miller For Congress

Stunning monotone photographs of wildlife in Africa by photographer Nick Brandt.

The Beatles remasters have finally hit the street and all across the world, music fans are gorging themselves on the most fabled and revered repertoire in pop music history. This may well prove to be the last hurrah of the CD age and certainly the marketing gurus at Capital have been working overtime to make sure we’ve all very aware of the Beatles as we approach this holiday season. It’s highly likely that the Fab Four will prove to be the best selling artists of this decade, an incredible feat for a group that disbanded nearly 40 years ago. So the question—the only question, for the Beatles are hardly an unknown quantity—is simply are these new versions worth it? Are they that much different? Should people who’ve already bought these albums umpteen times buy them again? I’ll try to answer that question here for those of you who still might be on the fence.

Next Nature has a great post about artist