Timothy Leary, classic or dud

Also: Eldridge Cleaver was a major, major creep too.

NOPE

http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/5095/561kg6.jpg

this sounds like the premise for a "my two dads" type sitcom or a wizened elder / young + wacky cop buddy movie.

And people tend to forget that he was imprisoned for many years for a crime which at the maximum should have earned him only 6 months.

People forget this stuff.

Like every convert, his faith was strong. He had no fear. He was equally loony and inspired, principled and wild-eyed, dangerous and laughable. He was a victim of pure love, which is why his life also looks so much like horribly, blindly, irremediably bad judgement. It was.

That makes him interesting in exactly the same way as all other apostles are interesting - so, I say classic, but not in a way anyone ought to emulate.

In the photos of him around 66/67 you can see the faith in him. He must have felt he was riding the zeitgeist.

Timothy Leary R.I.P.

It may be said
Tim Leary's dead.
So let us mourn his blazing head.

He came. He saw.
He raised his paw,
And flapped his flabbergasting jaw.

"Shut your yap trap.
"Toss the claptrap.
"Shake and wake up from your daft nap."

Said the fellow,
Of smiles mellow,
Of Harvard sheepskin and lime jello.

He turned his back
On off-the-rack
Grey flannel suits and ties that lacked

When he embraced
The mien of grace
And moments gone without a trace.

ha. also see 75% of UK prison inmates...

If anything, Leary was extremely aware of his public persona and was pretty good at playing up to it. In the late 80s I'd see him a lot at the old Amok Books on Hyperion. He'd come in to chat with the manager, drop off some new books (this was when he was in his computer software phase) and talk about going to the grocery store, visiting the grandkids, etc. - all the normal day-to-day stuff that you wouldn't expect from The Most Dangerous Man In America, well, except he was complaining about all the phone calls from G. Gordon Liddy who wanted to do another lecture tour.

If anything, Leary was an extremely optimistic guy. Admiriably so, especially in a subculture filled with paranoids, depressives, and cynical hucksters who just want cash. Not that Leary wasn't a huckster himself, but I think that he honestly believed and dove in full bore into whatever crackpot theory that caught his attention.

Ultimately though, classic for his optimism about dying and death.

Fave Leary moment: watching Sonic Boom explain the functions of synthesizers and Vox guitars to a very intent Leary.

I'm not sure why you think I was trying to make one.

Speaking of feeling giggly, it's funny to me that the first Google result for "cocksure" turns up thefreedictionary.com which gives the following examples: "an arrogant and cocksure materialist"; "the less he knows the more positive he gets."

came across this nice interview with his son Zach yesterday

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5AKVbx2M38

"a futurist, spiritualist, digital branding specialist and self proclaimed social theorist"

almost poll-worthy

How many lives were ruined by dropping out of school because of Timothy Leary's stupid "Turn on, tune in, drop out" slogan? DUD.

if they dropped out because some guy told them to their ceiling probably wasn't too high to begin with.

OTM

how many lives were ruined by the promise of staying in school = good job = material success gives life meaning

idgaf about school but the clip of leary in the new adam curtis movie telling his boomer zombies that "politics and power" are "old men's games" sealed this one for me

not that the epitaph hadn't already been written of course

He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too.

from HST's paris review interview:

I knew the bastard quite well. I ran into him a lot in those days. As a matter of fact I got a postcard invitation from something called the Futique Trust in Aptos, California, inviting me to attend the fourth annual Timothy Leary Memorial Celebration and Potluck Picnic. The invitation was printed in happy letters, with a peace symbol in the background, and I felt a burst of hate in my heart when I saw it. Every time I think about Tim Leary I get angry. He was a liar and a quack and a worse human being than Richard Nixon. For the last twenty-six years of his life he worked as an informant for the FBI and turned his friends into the police and betrayed the peace symbol he hid behind.

For a few minutes I've been reading this thread thinking of Denis Leary and going "can't believe he did all this stuff!"

Had to put down Greenfield's bio before the good parts (jail escape etc) because TL's neglect of his children was so appalling.

how many lives were ruined by the promise of staying in school = good job = material success gives life meaning

All of that you can walk away from?
You don't get to "drop back in" quite so easy

Re: Elvis Telecom post up there - Why do we think grifters and hucksters deserve a pass for "sincerely believing" in the shit they spout?

Boomers and early Gen Xers kind of did get to drop back in fairly easily.

But people like this aren't really talking to masses of people who won't have an easy time recovering from their year of following the Dead or slacker heroin-dabbling in Seattle anyway.

Now they're just gurus telling you how to run an e-commerce site while following your bliss in Thailand, so the contemporary version is obviously more evil.

Or really, pied pipers have always been with us, this ass clown just happened to come along in time for a new drug. Johnny Appleseed was also a terrible human being IIRC

(I am centuries old you see)

there's a popular conspiracy theory that Leary, Castaneda, et al, were actually gov't agents used to divert subversive tendencies into go-nowhere schemes like drugs/spirituality. there's a particularly damning audio recording somewhere of a group of them sitting together joking about being CIA operatives.

from what I've read Leary was just an eccentric Harvard professor, one of many doing legit experiments with psychotropics in the early 60s. once the war on drugs hit, legit experimentation ceased and folks like Leary were out of a job. so in a large way we have the War on Drugs to thank for Leary.

It is true that every asshole is a product of the state

the WOD effectively eliminated any legit research and education on the topic. it only offered disinformation and propaganda, forcing a naturally curious public to entertain said grifters and hucksters.

this is going to come across like I'm patting you on the head but that's a much better way of coming at the argument. that I can get behind.

the timeline's a little off i think, the war on drugs started under nixon in the early 70s, leary was already a big deal in 66/67

Leary lost his job in '63, I think. LSD was criminalized before the major Nixon WOD, state by state then federal by the late '60s.

I enjoy the list of drugs he was taking on his deathbed: Between April 14 and April 21, according to Timothy Leary's home page on the World Wide Web, his "average daily input of neuro-active drugs" included 50 cigarettes, a joint of marijuana, two lines of cocaine, 12 balloons of nitrous oxide, 0.45 of a cubic centimeter of ketamine and assorted other intoxicants.

Helluva party.

Those are not even psychedelics

Weed is a mild psychedelic.

That much ketamine, I guess you'd feel like you were prolonging your life with a daily k-hole?