In addition to being a smashing songwriter, singer and memoirist, Julian Cope has spent the past 20 years exploring and documenting Britain’s megalithic heritage: monuments, stone circles, hill forts and barrows. In this documentary made for the BBC, we follow Cope on his journey into the geography of the mystic, a place of ceremony and magic.

The documentary is a companion piece to Cope’s splendid, sadly out-of-print, 1998 book ‘The Modern Antiquarian’. Fortunately, for those of us interested in sacred places he curates a website and you can find it here.

Since launching in March 2000ce, the site has grown to be a massive resource for news, information, images, folklore & weblinks on the ancient sites across the UK, Ireland and Europe.

 
Watch parts 2-6 after the jump…

 
Peter Blegvad is an all around swell songwriter/ poet/visual artist that I’ve long admired. Here are some great cartoons of his that are posted at the Radio Free Song Club which also hosts some songs by Blegvad as well.
 

 
More after the jump…

 
Self-described futurist and entrepreneur Ross Dawson projects that newspapers will become extinct starting with the USA in 2017. While this isn’t groundbreaking news, Dawson’s charts and graphs are fascinating in their specificity on when and where newspapers will become obsolete.

I have created a Newspaper Extinction Timeline that maps out the wide diversity in how quickly we can expect newspapers to remain significant around the world. First out is USA in 2017, followed by UK and Iceland in 2019 and Canada and Norway in 2020. In many countries newspapers will survive the year 2040.

Reasons that Dawson presents for the rapid decline of newspapers are:

Increased cost performance of mobile phones
Increased cost performance of tablets/ e-readers
Development of high performance digital paper
Changes in newsprint and print production costs
Uptake of digital news monetization mechanisms
Trends in advertising spend and allocation
Development of open platforms

Checkout Dawson’s graphs and charts on the endtimes for news print media at

rossdawsonblog.com

 
Bill Hicks on Austin cable television. The show aired on October, 1993, five months before Hicks died.

Bill knows his days are numbered and seems more intent on speaking truth to power than being funny. He’s getting his last licks in, discussing the Waco Branch Davidian masscres and censorship, including Letterman’s chickenshit decision not to air his appearance on The Late Show.
 

 
Waco is 102 miles from Austin and the Branch Davidian confrontation was taking place at the time of this interview. Hicks had visited the site of the compound during the siege. His thoughts on the matter swung wildly from being dismissive of Koresh to outrage at the government over the outcome. Here’s a couple of videos of Hicks talking about the Waco disaster.
 

 
More from Hicks on Waco after the jump…

 
Grandpa Woodstock hosts his show ‘The Flower Power Hour’ from wherever he might be at any given time, whether it’s a box or a cave in Arizona. I like him. This old flower child is a perennial. An American sadhu.

He has a Facebook page. You can check it out here.
 
“I will continue to spread peace and love for the rest of my life.”
Even if peace comes I still won’t stop.”

I like the way Grandpa schools that young fuckin’ punk hippie.

“Now you wanna lay on Grandpa’s bed and smoke the bowl all day.”
 

 
No comment. You can decide.

(via Cynical-C)

 
Turn on, tune in, happy birthday! Dr. Timothy Francis Leary, the revolutionary philosopher, “most dangerous man in America” (as per Richard Nixon) and High Priest of LSD was born on this day, October 22, in 1920.

More Timothy Leary on Dangerous Minds

 
Henry Miller, Asleep And Awake is a charming visit with the Buddha of Brooklyn.

Tom Schiller’s 1975 documentary follows Miller from the microcosmos of his very own shit-hole to a mock-up 1890s New York of his childhood—or “that old shit-hole, New York’” (in fact the set for Hello Dolly, with Barbra Streisand & Walter Matthau, 1969). Schiller describes his documentary this way: ‘A guided tour of the pictures and artifacts of his bathroom’ ... though it feels to be very much more than that.

 
British TV personality Jonathan Ross interviews Alejandro Jodorowsky on the BBC in 1991. Jodowsky had released Sante Sangre a year earlier and had just completed The Rainbow Thief when this show was filmed.

“Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.”

“I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs.”
 

 
Sun Ra’s Rocket Number Nine is an exuberant, joyfully child-like expression of excitement at the notion of space travel. It is one amongst many catchy anthems the man created during his time on Earth. This version from a 1968 self-released 7” single and compiled on the wonderful 1996 double CD Sun Ra: The Singles is probably my favorite. Slowed down to a New Orleans swagger, I could listen to that glorious Monk-esque riff all day long.
 

 
Hear a few more versions of Rocket Number Nine by Sun Ra after the jump…