This is the Vedanta Temple in San Francisco as pictured in The Visionary State: A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape by Erik Davis and photographer Michael Rauner. It was my birthday last week and Tom Matrullo kindly gave me this amazing book as a present. It includes many forms of high weirdness as practiced on the left coast, and will be an invaluable aid to my ongoing research. While Davis is far more reverential than myself -- at least toward certain spectra of the rainbow of mystical mythemes and cultural aberrations he covers -- some of his chapter headings do sound especially intriguing: Theosophy and its Discontents, The Rosy Cross Parade, OC Superstar, Space Brothers, Sci-Fi Gnosis, and so on. But the whole is much more than the sum of the parts. Visionary State is the ultimate coffee-table book of hyper-syncretistic spiritual seekery.

We get a good look at the conventional stuff, such as the California missions, the Hare Krishnas, Theosophists and their forebears, and the beat/Zen/hippie/nature devotees who have helped give California its much-deserved reputation as a place well-suited for and hospitable to spiritual experimentation of all kinds.

Davis also presents the darker side of spiritualism ... including Charles Manson, Jim Jones and the Heaven's Gate suicide cult. And he gives ample attention to the psychedelic movement, ranging from the early mescaline experiments of Aldous Huxley in the 1940s to the invention of recreational drugs such as STP and Ecstasy that he attributes to research pharmacologist Alexander Shulgin, who, he says, still experiments in a cluttered lab in the hills above Lafayette.

from: Exploring California's spiritual scenery
source: Contra Costa Times, 27 August 2006
via: HighBeam™ Research

• PreScript: Oh yeah, I meant to say (but first wanted to make sure I could get this working again), the old archives will be linked into the sidebar soon. They're all still "there" in some wonderfully virtual way. Here: see for yourself.

Meanwhile, The New York Times has a story on Allen Ginsberg that will be coming out in next Sunday's Book Review section (I get their Wednesday previews as a "TimesSelect" subscriber). I haven't read the piece yet, as I was stopped by the photo that precedes it. Now, is it just me, or is there more than a passing resemblance here?

Ginsberg	Goldblum

Of course, we all know that Jeff howled a lot in Jurassic Park, and Allen was great in altered states. As HOWL just turned 50, there's lots of news about the Beats floating around these days. And there was much leading up to this signal anniversary in American letters.

Yada yada... Actually, I'm using this post as a practice run to get my Chief Blogging Officer chops back. Let's see if I can remember how this quoting business works.

Fifty years after co-founding City Lights as the first paperback bookstore in the country, only to revolutionize poetry in 1956 by publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," Ferlinghetti remains a leading light in San Francisco's cultural community. He is still organizing and giving readings, still painting and holding art exhibits, still publishing his work and still putting in time in the cramped offices of the City Lights press, on the bookstore's second floor.

from: Ferlinghetti's City Lights, Still A Beacon at 50 source: The Washington Post, 9 June 2003 via: HighBeam™ Research

Oh yeah, it's all coming back to me now.

Reading this uneven new biography by Bill Morgan, you come to realize what hard work it was being "beat." For one thing, you had to have an absolute aversion to the 'straight' world of basic workaday life. Morgan, for example, quotes from a 1952 journal entry by the 26-year-old and still not famous Ginsberg: "I never ride the subway toward an interview for a new job without dreaming of suicide." Not surprisingly, Ginsberg's employment record was a bit spotty in those early years.

from: Bio marks 'Howl' 50th source: Rocky Mountain News, 3 November 2006 via: HighBeam™ Research

What I want to know, though, is precisely why Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac were all reading Oswald Spengler in the late '40s. And precisely how they were influenced by Der Untergang des Abendlandes (click for instant translation). After I finish reading the 40 or so books I've collected on the beat scene, I should have a pretty good handle on these questions. Wish me luck.