Announcement from R.U. Sirius: "R.U. Sirius & Shira Chess are pleased (and a little frightened) to announce that we have contracted with Strange Attractor Press to publish Freaks in the Machine: Mondo 2000 in Late 20th Century Tech Culture. With a forward by Grant Morrison."
Richard Kaczynski, meanwhile, has a new book out: Friendship in Doubt: Aleister Crowley, J.F.C. Fuller, Victor B. Neuburg and British Agnosticism. Watch a YouTube interview by Maevius Lynn.
Via the Mindplex podcast, a video of covers, articles and covers from Mondo 2000, "including Deborah Harry, Reese Witherspoon, Todd Rundgren, David Byrne, Timothy Leary, Neil Young and William Gibson." I missed Reese, but isn't that David Byrne, and wasn't one of the articles by Robert Anton Wilson? Music by Mondo Vanilli. More information here.
Full podcast with R.U. Sirius.
If this video makes the magazine seem interesting, see the archive at the Internet Archive. See also the Mondo 2000 History Project. And here is an archive of bOING bOING magazine.
Well, this looks interesting! The Hilaritas Press podcast released today features R.U. Sirius.
Official blurb: "In this episode, Mike Gathers chats with writer, editor, & vocalist/lyricist Ken Goffman (aka R. U. Sirius) about Psychedelic Transhumanism, Singularity, and more.
• • •
"Ken recorded this podcast about two weeks before the passing of his longtime partner Eve Berni. All of us at Hilaritas Press and the RAW Trust give our love and deepest condolences to Ken and all who knew Eve."
The official site has related links, although per usual this podcast should be widely available at the usual apps.
Art by Eve Berni, posted on X by Ted Hand
We are sorry to have to pass on bad news, but Eve Berni, the longtime partner of R.U. Sirius/Ken Goffman, has died.
Posting on Twitter/X late Monday night from @StealThisSingul: "I am sad beyond words to report that my partner of 26 years (Jacqueline) Eve Berni has left us. She died at around 1230 pm today in Marin General after many years of poor health and about a week of extremely poor health. I'll share some details soon. I'm in a state of total shock, deep sadness and some relief that the extreme suffering of the past week or so has ended.
"I love her so much."
From Ted Hand: "RIP Eve Berni, the amazing partner of @StealThisSingul and an accomplished visionary artist. I will have to dig for the photos I took of her work. Here is a sample from her Facebook page. I will treasure my time hearing her stories about Jacques Vallee and Uri Geller."
Cover of issue 14 of Mondo 2000.
Mondo 2000, the cyberculture magazine co-founded and edited by R.U. Sirius, featured contributions from the likes of Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary and Rudy Rucker. It came out in the 1980s and 1990s.
Every issue of the magazine is now available for download. Find all of the issues here.
I downloaded the first issue, and it includes a piece by Robert Anton Wilson, "Cyber Evolution: Montage."
The Mozilla Festival, a virtual festival, has been announced March 20 through 24. "MozFest is a unique hybrid: part art, tech and society convening, part maker festival, and the premiere gathering for activists in diverse global movements fighting for a better internet – and you’re invited!" the website says.
I bring it up here because R.U. Sirius will be the leader for two sessions. One will be The R.U. Cyber? :// Mondo 2000 History Project Salon. It will explore the origins of the Mondo 2000 magazine and cultural movement, with Sirius (aka Ken Goffman), Eleanor Dare, James Edward Marks and Marius Mateson.
Timothy Leary (Creative Commons photo by Philip H. Bailey.)
Timothy Leary, born on Oct. 22, 1920, was 75 when he died in Los Angeles in 1996.
He would have been 102 on Saturday, and to mark the occasion, author, publisher, musician etc. R.U. Sirius penned a tribute, "I Channeled Timothy Leary for his 102 Birthday (Happy birthday Tim)." Sirius knew Leary well, completed Leary's book Design for Dying and penned a biography of Leary, Timothy Leary's Trip Through Time.
Excerpt from the new piece:
“So what’s hell like, Timmy?”
“It’s not so much hot as boring. I mean, Lawrence Welk is in hell and Brian Jones is in heaven. Got that? It’s like one giant Church of the Subgenius prank just to mindfuck little Timmy. And all those French philosophers are in hell. Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard. Droning on and on. ‘Tim can I read you my essay about the post-dialectical dialectics of the isness of not being and gendered demonologies in hell?” Fuck no! Get out of here! I’d rather listen to Eldridge go on and on about how cool Kim il Sung is.”
Cover art by Jay Cornell (please see this art project)
R.U. Sirius -- Mondo 2000 co-founder and editor, writer, musician, presidential candidate, etc. -- will turn 70 on Friday, August 12.
To celebrate, he is releasing his new song, "I'm Against NFTs," as a free download. It is available free from today to Sunday morning, August 14. "This song will disappear from this site prior to becoming... yes... an NFT!" the Bandcamp page says.
The song, credited to Mondo Vanilli and Blag Dahlia, is part of an ongoing music recording project, Infinite Gesture, based on Sirius' lyrics and featuring collaborations with various musicians, including Steve Fly Agaric 23, Phr!endz with R.U. Sirius and Party Dogs.
See my 2015 interview and search this website for other items about R.U. Sirius. Follow him on Twitter.
1. In the Hilaritas Press newsletter announcing the publication of Wilhelm Reich In Hell, Rasa wrote, "we think the timing could not be more appropriate. We live in strange and challenging days."
This could refer to any number of things, of course, but one of the main concerns of RAW's play is the amount of violence humans do to each other, and there has certainly been a raft of mass shootings lately in the U.S.
There was another one on June 1, the day the book came out, and it had a kind of grim synchronicity for me.
Five people were killed during the Tulsa shooting, including the gunman and two doctors. The shooting took place at the medical campus for St. Francis Hospital, only a short distance, an easy walk, from where both my parents and my sister live. Survivors and their families were reunited at Tulsa Memorial High School, my alma mater.
So certainly I have violence on my mind as we discuss the book.
2. I recently posted about "Infinite Gesture," R.U. Sirius' new collection of song lyrics without music. Steve Fly Agaric 23 has now set one of them, "Not A Bug But A Feature," to music. Listen to the track here.
3. Over at the Jechidah blog, Apuleius Charlton has been leading an online discussion of Sex, Drugs & Magick. He's been busy with his day job, but that's easing up, and he wants everyone to know blogging will resume next week.
R.U. Sirius
R.U. Sirius (Mondo 2000 founder, author, friend of Timothy Leary) always has interesting things to say, so I am passing along a new interview he granted with Spike, a "a contemporary art magazine, online platform, and event space" based in Vienna, Austria.
Here is a bit of the interview with Lydia Sviatoslavsky:
R.U. Sirius: Mondo started as High Frontiers. I was pretty much diverted by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson and their playful, hopeful futurisms, their whole shebang about evolutionary brain circuits being opened up by drugs and technology.
I needed something to get me out of bed at the end of the 1970s. I mean, punk was great – rock and roll was great – but it wasn’t inspiring any action. I remember my friends stole some giant lettering from a sign at a gas station and some of it hung behind the couch in our living room where we took whatever drugs were around and tossed glib nihilisms back and forth. The letters read “ROT”. Tonight’s the Night caught the vibe (some will know what I mean). I couldn’t sink any deeper into that couch, so there was nowhere to go except up into outer space.
Showing my age, but I bought Tonight's the Night, the Neil Young album R.U. references, when it came out. It's a good album, and also a pretty dark take on the drug culture, newly relevant.
My 2015 interview with R.U. Sirius might be of interest, see also this post on his book about Timothy Leary, Timothy Leary's Trip Through Time.
"Fake Album Cover" for Infinite Gesture by Jay Cornell. Please see this amazing art project.
R.U. Sirius -- writer, Mondo 2000 founder and editor, musician, Timothy Leary friend and collaborator, Robert Anton Wilson expert, website founder, etc. -- has just published Infinite Gesture — 21 Lyrics in Search of Music,
It's a nice set. As you might guess from the title, there's plenty of sly wordplay, and a lot of humor (see, for example, "Deleuze Guittari Gnash & Jung") but there are also some grim moments, too. I don't want to harsh my mellow by thinking too much about a new one, "Vertigo & World War 3," which I hope isn't prophetic, so instead here's a favorite of mine:
Ignore
Out of boredom or torpor
The trending thing is so soporific
& your beauty & the moonlight is so terrific
So ignore
Ignore
Every Marie Kondo urging you pep talk
Every ugly rumor about Johnny Depp
Just ignore
& when you’re stuck in traffic
Some MAGA wearing a leather jacket
Some argument that trades logic for static
Ignore
And if everybody else lost the plot
& you ask are they really alive or not
Just lay yourself down on the cot
Have some whiskey & a little pot
& ignore
1. On Twitter, Charles Faris (who has contributed to this blog, and helped copyedit Starseed Signals) spots something interesting: A recent article at Far Out describes the day that Bob Dylan met the Beatles. This encounter involved Dylan turning the Beatles on to marijuana, and after getting stoned, Paul McCartney asked for a pencil and paper to write down his resulting deep thoughts. The next day, Paul read what he wrote: "There are seven levels."
This is amusing, because Starseed Signals in Chapter 3 talks about Leary's "7-dimensional game model" and Chapter Four has a detailed table Leary's "seven levels of energy consciousness."
In addition, Leary's Eight Circuit model was originally seven circuits, and Chapter Six of Starseed Signals does into detail outlining the seven.
2. John Higgs' introduction to Starseed Signals mentions the efforts of Elon Musk to make some of Leary's ideas a reality and says it would be interesting to know if Musk read Leary.
When I interviewed R.U. Sirius back in 2015, I brought up Musk, and he responded with a suggestion I still think is a good idea:
RAWIllumination.net: You mentioned Leary and RAW's interest in space migration and life extension. It seems to me that Peter Thiel and Elon Musk deserve credit for trying to make these things happen, but I wondered what your take was.
SIRIUS: They do deserve credit. It would be wonderful if there was enough wealth flowing through society at all levels so that some of these things could be crowdfunded — owned and controlled by groups of people from all walks of life (SpaceX works with NASA, so in a sense that is happening via taxes). Thiel and Musk are visionaries (Musk, particularly, strikes me as a well-balanced altruistic entrepreneur) and we’re lucky they’re reaching towards these goals. But it’s also worth noting that there are lots of brilliant visionaries and we need to liberate the potentials of greater numbers of people to make this stuff happen faster. Post scarcity could lead to crowdsourcing at an undreamt of scale.
We had recently become aware that Robert Anton Wilson was available to speak. He was touring around, setting up speaking engagements in a really cheap DIY operation — it wasn’t through an agency or anything like that. He was available to speak for $500.— MONDO 2000 (@2000_mondo) January 17, 2020
The oddness of my friends seeing the magazine as complimentary reading material in the first class section of an airplane escalated to learning that candidate Bill Clinton, asked what he had just been doing by an interview on Labor Day, said “I was reading MONDO 2000.”— MONDO 2000 (@2000_mondo) January 22, 2020
