Reader David wanted us to know about this psychedelic Seattle band, and an upcoming event:

Of interest to Seattle-based psychedelic music heads, here's a video Seattle psychedelic design group Dumb Eyes made for Seattle band Midday Veil. Lots of maximalist trippy imagery. The song is off Midday Veil's debut studio album, Eyes All Around.

Midday Veil plays the 2nd annual Portable Shrines Escalator Fest, Oct. 22-23 at the Lo-Fi Performance Gallery, along with other psych/experimental bands such as Climax Golden Twins, Moon Duo (members of Wooden Shjips), Curious Mystery, This Blinding Light, Night Beats, Edibles (members of Eternal Tapestry), Dahga Bloom, and Jeffertitti's Nile. Eye-popping projections through the night as well as DJs in the lounge.

French-American mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot has died of cancer at the age of 85 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Mandelbrot was most famously known for his work in exploring the mathematical shapes known as "fractals." Fractals are shapes that reproduce themselves infinitely--each offshoot of the shape is an approximate miniature of the original shape (including the offshoots). This property (each part being a miniature of the original shape) is called "self-similarity."

"Fractals are easy to explain, it's like a romanesco cauliflower, which is to say that each small part of it is exactly the same as the entire cauliflower itself," Catherine Hill, a statistician at the Gustave Roussy Institute, told the AFP, "It's a curve that reproduces itself to infinity. Every time you zoom in further, you find the same curve."

Amongst the hash-head community in Britain, Howard Marks is a bone fide legend. Belonging to the same generation as the Rolling Stones, with similar looks, hairstyle and attitude, he has become a paterfamilias of the pro-cannabis movement, a figure whose former criminal activities have given him a Robin Hood or Butch Cassidy status--a freedom fighter with a smile on his face, as his famous moniker suggests.

As 'careers' in cannabis go, his has no equal, starting with his introduction to the drug as an Oxford undergraduate in the 1960s, moving quickly through the ranks of smuggling to become a major player through the '70s and '80s, whilst having spectacular run-ins with international policing and attaining media celebrity in the process. Later, he became a best-selling author with his autobiography, 'Mr. Nice', and other books, and also carved out a niche as a stage performer, a DJ and raconteur, pontificating at length about his favourite subject. He could have been a Richard Branson-type alternative entrepreneur, apart from the mere detail that his trade was highly illegal.

'Mr. Nice' the movie encapsulates this picaresque life, using Marks' own choice of actor to play him, Rhys Ifans, a fellow Welshman and like-minded friend. The evident chemistry between the two works well, with Ifans in dark wigs slipping easily into another louche Welsh charmer role, assuredly inhabiting the character of 'Howard Marks' and making him very sympathetic.

Originally published in 2002 ‘The Road of Excess -- A History of Writers on Drugs’ by Marcus Boon explores what he describes as the age-old relationship between literature and drugs. As a comprehensive survey of drug literature, the text is both an entertaining read and an invaluable well of source information, which crafts modern, scholarly technique with a hitherto poorly explored area of writing.

Boon employs an interdisciplinary, cultural approach to the historical connections between drugs and literature, borrowing much from a Deleuzian model and in doing so he creates an effective ethnography. This postmodern approach, free of any rigid conceptual framework, lends itself to a lucid exploration and an engaging narrative: "What interested me was to reveal more subtle, micropolitical histories of everyday interactions between human beings and particular psychoactive substances and to find out whether these histories had left their traces in literature" (Boon 9). As such, he deals with both authors and drugs as mechanisms for socio-historical and cultural forces, which has the effect of drawing out many interesting ideas.

[Thanks JRoast]

Is that Toonces?

[Thanks Sam Hell!]

Originally published in 2010 'Ayahuasca, Ritual and Religion in Brazil' is a collection of essays and articles, edited by Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Edward MacRae, on the emergence of ayahuasca-using religious movements in Brazil. Many of the articles are available for the first time in English and as a collection it represents a wide range of approaches on the topic, generally derived from the human sciences.

The story of the Brazilian ayahuasca-using religions finds its roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when migrant workers, on the rubber plantations in the Acre area of Brazil, came into contact with the indigenous, Amazonian peoples. A combination of the local shamanic practice of ayahuasca use, elements of Catholicism and the emerging Afro-Brazilian religions, helped create a hotbed of spiritual movement in Brazil, which continues to evolve and expand to this day. This collection of anthropological writings seeks to help fill the gap of English-language research in the area, which to date is relatively sparse. And as these movements begin to make inroads into North America and Europe, these articles are timely in helping to develop the groundwork for a more global understanding.

To the rites of middle-age passage, some families are adding another: buying marijuana for aging parents.

Bryan, 46, a writer who lives in Illinois, began supplying his parents about five years ago, after he told them about his own marijuana use. When he was growing up, he said, his parents were very strict about illegal drugs.

"We would have grounded him," said his mother, who is 72.

But with age and the growing acceptance of medical marijuana, his parents were curious. His father had a heart ailment, his mother had dizzy spells and nausea, and both were worried about Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. They looked at some research and decided marijuana was worth a try.

Bryan, who like others interviewed for this article declined to use his full name for legal reasons, began making them brownies and ginger snaps laced with the drug. Illinois does not allow medical use of marijuana, though 14 states and the District of Columbia do. At their age, his mother said, they were not concerned about it leading to harder drugs, which had been one of their worries with Bryan.

"We have concerns about the law, but I would not go back to not taking the cookie and going through what I went through," she said, adding that her dizzy spells and nausea had receded. "Of course, if they catch me, I’ll have to quit taking it."

This family’s story is still a rare one. Less than 1 percent of people 65 and over said they had smoked marijuana in the last year, according to a 2009 survey by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. But as the generation that embraced marijuana as teenagers passes into middle age, doctors expect to see more marijuana use by their elderly patients.

[Thanks Tom!]

With researchers and therapists from a wide variety of academic disciplines, this event will be dedicated to the exploration of a broad range of subjects. From addiction treatment to psychotherapy with the aid of psychedelics, from the neurobiology of ayahuasca to the social, ritual and legal implications of its use, and from human psychopharmacology research and the exploration of exceptional mindstates to new views on the legalisation of psychedelic substances.

The conference lasts two full days; the conference will start at 9 am each day and end around 6 pm. In between lectures attendees will have ample time to discuss with speakers, to buy books, to acquire more information on psychedelic research and associated organisations and more. The whole conference will be held in English.

Speakers:

Torsten Passie MD (DE)
R. Andrew Sewell MD (US)
Peter Oehen MD (CH)
Bia Labate (BR)
Jordi Riba MD (ES)
Jose Carlos Bouso MD (ES)
Adele van der Plas LLM (NL)
Katharina Kirchner MSc (CH)
Stephen Snelders PhD (NL)
David Luke PhD (UK)
Dr. Anwar Jeewa (SA)
Daniel Waterman (NL)
Konstantin Kuteykin-Teplyakov PhD (RU)