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Pleasantly surprised to discover Indoctrinaire, the first novel by Christopher Priest, a tale of strange foreboding and paranoia, wrapped up in altered states of consciousness and alternate realities.   The protagonist, Dr. Wentik, finds himself forcibly recruited from his scientific research post beneath the South Pole, and whisked away to the Planalto District of Mato Grosso in Brazil.  Both of these places are so far off the beaten track and outside of the ordinary world of human affairs that the novel begins with an eerie sense of dislocation, which is only accelerated into total disorientation as soon as Wentik begins to trek into the strangely deforested zone of Planalto.  His guide, a tight-lipped man named Musgrove, shows signs of mental illness as the story progresses and Wentik finds himself an occupant of “the jail,” under interrogation by an equally opaque antagonist named Astourde.
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Given the opportunity, I just couldn’t resist sending a little micro-chipped token of my affection to my favorite sub-miniaturized phantasm on Mars.  Aloha,  Perky Pat!  How’s the water at Lake Shalbatana?  Thanks to NASA, you too can send a Can-D gram to the red planet!   Don’t be Chew-Z, sign up today!

http://mars9.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname/index.cfm

Ran over to Mass Art Paine Gallery (how apropos!) to see the R. Crumb Underground exhibit, which was written up recently in the Phoenix and the Globe.   This exhibit kicked off two years ago at the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, and has been making the rounds from city to city, and finally seems to have drifted into Boston on a Greyhound bus, clutching an old leather bag of 78s and sinsemilla buds.

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As the Boston Phoenix explores the possibility that Harvard will once again be involved with research on the affects of LSD, we do pause to wonder: haven’t the yard and the square been pretty trippy places all along? After all, when you think of the fact that Harvard is, in fact, a private corporation that engages in research on every topic under the sun, you sometimes get the feeling that mind-expanding drugs have been laced into the coffee urns. On the other hand, when you face facts, the University often resembles a revolving door for the generals, military contractors, and policy wonks that cook up projects like the current fiasco in Iraq… which is a major bad trip! From my perspective, Tim Leary wasn’t wrong when he took microdots out of the hands of the scientists and “put them into the hands of dirty hippies everywhere.” Let us hope that when the new Veritas blotter is brewed that its a “sunshine” batch, and not some sort of evil “Cheney war forever” dose. We’ve had too much of that already!

Do you remember those trails following your arms around as you glided down the grassy slope in the park? And those sounds that seemed to flow around you when the traffic light changed color? Well, you can trace it all back to Albert Hoffman’s accidental ingestion of 250 mics of pure LSD-25, as recorded in this Chick Tract.

Haven’t you sometimes said to yourself, I’ll bet other people can see me! And you’re puzzled as to what to do about this serious, baffling problem of being conspicuous…

At once overly self-conscious, and at the same time paranoid and internalized, it is no wonder that the previous statement was written by our favorite paranoid schizo SF writer, Philip K. Dick. However, it is worth taking a closer look at the tendency for humans to worry about their own self-consciousness and appearance, since it is obvious that our right to privacy is under serious attack. Although the government is wrestling with the issue, it is by no means certain that the harsh surveillance tactics brought to us in recent years are coming to an end.

Indeed, the inquisitorial big-brother milieu extends beyond the concept of mere observation…as Dick implies, there is an active attempt to instigate our own self-doubts and keep us trapped in a spiral of confusion. Everywhere we go, we are bombarded now by advertisements for drugs. These often take the form of overt manipulation. For those who are having a bad day, or have low self-esteem, these could trigger a whole chain of thoughts, a sort of self-reinforcing trap for which, SURPRISE! Drug companies have an ANSWER! And with the relaxation of restrictions on Direct to Consumer Drug advertising, this predatory form of brainwashing is reaching epidemic proportions.

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