* (restored)
—-

 

‘Albert Hofmann (11 January 1906 – 29 April 2008) was a Swiss scientist who was the first person to synthesize, ingest, and learn of the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), a drug that came to be synonymous with the 50s and 60s beatnik and hippy generations in The USA and worldwide. LSD was legal in the beginning including in The USA until it became illegal in California on October 6, 1966, and other states and countries soon followed.

‘While it was legal LSD was distributed mostly in liquid form and as pills, capsules, or sometimes dropped onto sugar cubes. It was available for purchase from Sandoz laboratories in Switzerland, where Hofmann worked and many medical applications were under research.

 

Albert Hofmann holding a Timothy Leary Blotter Art Sheet

 

‘After the US government made LSD illegal people continued to use LSD, but it was manufactured and distributed through underground illegal channels. A popular way of distributing LSD was called “blotter”. It involved saturating absorbent blotting paper with liquid LSD. Later the papers were perforated along the lines of a grid so that doses could be torn apart easily, and small symbolic pictures were added to the paper to provide clues as to the origin of the LSD that paper contained. Not surprisingly, considering the substance it was used to distribute, the symbolic pictures gradually became creative and amazing designs, later gaining independent existence any many designs have never been used to actually distribute LSD.

‘The guy who originally gave space to blotter art and identified it as an art form was Mark McCloud, a San Francisco based artist and former art professor. His collection – part of which you can find on his website, Blotter Barn – started in the 70s and today he has over 400 framed prints and tens of thousands (!!!) of unframed sheets, constituting the largest collection of blotter art in the world.

 

Original Perforating machine

 

‘In the early days blotter art could only be obtained with LSD already on it. McCloud bought these sheets, matted and framed them, and hung them like fine art. It was initially quite difficult for McCloud to collect the undipped (and hence legal) sheets of art, so he’d have to venture out into the underground and ask dealers if they could get him the same image on an undipped sheet, but over time he won people’s trust and managed to get hold of undipped sheets. Later on he also began to produce his own images and his collection has shifted to a completely legal blotter art archive.

‘That did not prevent him from experiencing troubles with law enforcements agencies and he was prosecuted in 2003. After a two-week-long trial in federal court in Kansas City, Mo., McCloud was acquitted by a local jury of felony charges of conspiracy to distribute LSD. A guilty verdict could have carried a penalty of life in prison. Federal drug authorities spent millions in their effort to nail McCloud, 47, conducting phone taps, monitoring his mail and conducting surveillance from neighboring apartments before the SWAT-style raid by an FBI-DEA task force in early 2000. Police seized his collection of almost 400 framed LSD blotters, which range from a print of Peter Rabbit from the early 1970s to a recent example from Europe showing two lesbian aliens. Authorities also seized 33,000 sheets of McCloud’s own blotter art printed on rag paper. None of the material had any traces of the drug.

 

Mark McCloud in the late ’60s

 

‘During the trial, assistant U.S. attorney Mike Oliver argued that McCloud used his role as an artist to distribute LSD through the country. McCloud’s attorney, Doron Weinberg of San Francisco, contended that McCloud wasn’t responsible for the use of his prints by others as a vehicle for illegal drugs. The case was tried in Kansas City because blotter paper linked to McCloud and impregnated with LSD was seized in a 1999 raid there. Among McCloud’s defense witnesses were New York art critic Carlo McCormick, who told the court that McCloud’s work is part of an American folk-art tradition. McCloud’s blotter art has been exhibited at Psychedelic Solution in New York and at the San Francisco Art Institute.

‘Another person that took blotter art to a new dimension was Thomas Lyttle, who after a meeting with Mark McCloud, started my his own collection of undipped blotter art. After collecting for a while, he started to approach people central to psychedelic culture, such as Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and many others, and asked them to sign limited edition, hand-numbered blotter art prints. These then were matted and framed per museum display specs, and sold. This was the beginning of what has been termed “vanity” blotter art. That is, blotter art which has been produced solely for art’s sake as a collectible, and which was never intended to be dipped with any drugs. Some autographed vanity blotter art has been advertised for sale for thousands of Dollars.’ — trancentral.tv

 

Timothy Leary & Mark McCloud, 1994

 

 

 

 

 

Interview
from SFAQ & VICE

 

 

So Mark, you collect tabs of acid as artwork. Why?
Mark McCloud: This happened because I have an interest from my childhood in small, well-made things. When I was growing up in Argentina they put out these little books and the one I remember most clearly was called “Weaponry of the Second World War.” You would buy a stick of gum and inside would be all these little images to collect. We tried filling the books with them to entertain ourselves.

How old were you when you arrived in California?
Well, I was raised in Buenos Aires until I was 12 and then sent to a boarding school in Claremont. Two weeks after I got here, Frank Zappa’s Freak Out came out, just to place the time [meaning it was 1966]. So I became an American eighth grader reading The Doors of Perception and doing pot, then mescaline when that came on.

And how old were you when you discovered acid?
I was 13. It was in Santa Barbara at a very nice hotel on the beach. Me and a friend had our own cabin and we ordered some cubes from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which was Owsley [Stanley’s] outlet. The experience was very full-bodied even though I was nervous, and I just liked acid for its humility and educational effects. I was blind, but then I could see.

When did you start collecting it?
Oh, that was when the first imagery came out. See, when acid first came out it was just drops on paper. This was in 1968, and it was the first commercially available acid. It came out of New York City, and it was done by this great underground chemist called Ghost-may he rest in peace-and they were called five-by-twenties. They were five drops by 20 on a little card that was the same size as autochrome film, and it came out wrapped in Kodak packaging.

And when did the first illustrated tabs appear?
In the 70s. There’s a whole vignette of imagery that appears throughout that era, and it’s usually on sheets of paper the same size as an LP so they could ship it dressed as a record. The first sheets would have a single image that would be divided up into the tabs, usually in a single color. They quickly became individual pictures, though, with great detail.

And how did you come to start framing them?
Well that’s another question about my rebirth. See, I was a very difficult 17-year-old. Hendrix had just died, so I took 300 mikes of orangesSunshine, and basically the fabric I existed on changed. I vibrated myself out of this world and into a different thing, and that’s when I really started collecting. At first I was keeping them in the freezer, which was a problem because I kept eating them, but then the Albert Hofmann acid came out, and then I thought, Fuck, I’m framing this. That’s when I realized, Hey, if I try to swallow this I’ll choke on the frame.

So how did a guy with a freezer full of acid become an acid historian?
Well I was on the board of the San Francisco Art Institute, and to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love I proposed that we do a show on the San Francisco acid guys. So we set up a big art show, and I exhibited the whole collection. And 1987 was still loose enough to have a huge acid party with everyone afterwards.

Your so-called mentors …
Fewer and fewer are alive. Sky dying and then Arthur Lee. All I’ve got left is Vale and Roky.

Very funny. You mean Sky Saxon? I thought you were his patron.
I was his patron and hugest fan, for sure.

I thought you let him live at your house.
Yes, of course. Just such a great artist, incredible person. But also the type of artist who wouldn’t really see himself as an artist, but truly is an exceptional artist and an outstanding person. I still go see Roky . . . huge fan still.

Roky Erickson. And Arthur Lee you were a fan of.
Just tremendous, tremendous fan of Arthur’s, and so sad to see him die the way he did, but I always was interested in what Arthur was writing and performing. The psychedelics have truly caused a renaissance, something we won’t be able to measure properly until we’re much farther away from it.

I’m trying to think of other artists that were associated with that, like Peter Max.
Yeah, and Isaac Abrams is still with us, and Peter is still alive, who put the vision on the Slurpee cup. That’s what Peter did—he put the psychedelic vision on the 7-11 cup. He’s the guy that brought it down to the street level.

So you collected this art; you didn’t make it.
No—François Truffaut and the other art critic who worked for Cahiers du Cinéma for André Bazin: Godard, yeah, and they were both art critics who after a few years, he said to them, “You know, the good art critics make movies.” And he forced them to make movies. And so then that’s what happened to me: after collecting avidly for fifteen years, I decided to learn more by making some. And then one thing led to another.

And you got some notoriety, fame, whatever the word is, and that brought the attention of the flics [French slang for policemen].
Les gendarmes.
But no, the first blotter show at the Art Institute was also attended by the FBI. They showed up and they said, “Can we photograph this?” And I said, “Sure, this is for you guys, more so than anyone else,” I told them. Because they were the last whores who came to the party!

Whores?
Yeah, the acid party; they’re still trying to arrest us. So I told them, when they showed up in ‘87 at the Art Institute, I said, “Yeah, of course you can photograph it. You’re the guys that don’t understand it yet.” And really, that’s what’s going on. The fliic is tormented by his own demented fears.

Yeah, I suppose so.
That’s why they’re so against it, they think—yeah, and it’s still not over yet. It’s incredible to me: the persistence of erroneous information.

They didn’t understand art; you had to educate the jury and everybody on art.
It’s not an easy one. My poor attorney, you know? My poor, poor attorney.

You said that one of your attorneys demonstrated to the jury that a lot of money had been made, and that impressed people: “Oh, it must be art if it makes money.”
Yeah, they had followed $24,000 into the house. There’s no illegality of receiving money in the mail, and someone had sent me $24,000 cash. They taped it into a magazine and mailed it here. So the DA had opened the packet before it got to me, and they recorded the money, and then sent it in. They couldn’t keep it because it was legal. When they got here the next morning they wanted to know where the $24,000 was. Of course, it wasn’t here; I had already given it to Timmy’s leg operation—from Uncle Scrooge. You know, Uncle Scrooge is mean to the workers and one of them is a father who has a little paraplegic boy and he’s trying to save enough money to get Timmy’s leg operated on. So the money always goes to Timmy’s leg operation, I say! Like when people worry about the future, I always say, “Can we save Weena from the Morlock menu?” Because in The Time Machine Weena is served up to the Morlocks as dinner—Dante’s fascination of the future. That’s her name, the Eloi girl that the Time Machine driver falls in love with.

How do you spell that?
W-e-e-n-a. They only have one name in the future. Like a great artist. When an artist signs his work with one name, like “Rene”—I think: he must be a great artist to go by one name! But a lot of people here, you know—we’re dead guys. We’re what’s happening now so we must already be over.

So how many shows of blotter acid art were you involved in?
As many as possible.

So the powers that be budgeted a surveillance of you from two apartments for a year and a half. Then they swooped in for the kill after they thought they had enough evidence.
They didn’t understand that the C&H sugar cube guy had had the same problem for years before me! And at my first trial I was wondering where the C&H guy was, because it was a chicken-and-egg kind of defense I had. My defense was, “Hey, I raise eggs, okay, some of them grow up to be bad chickens, you know? But I’m just dealing eggs!” And it was really that: I just made the paper. And I didn’t use Albert Speer’s slave labor in making the paper. No LSD zombies were used in making the paper! And so then my argument was that: “Hey listen, I’m just the art, you know, art is not LSD, LSD is added later to the art!” And so that’s what the good jury of Kansas City, Missouri understood. If they were trying to prove I did the acid they hadn’t done that. That wasn’t enough of a defense to really satisfy my attorney, but that’s all I gave him. You have to give your attorney your defense. I told him it’s really a chicken-and-egg problem.

 

 

From: ´MarkMcClure (Sat Jun 10 18:39:11 2006)
Probably the best known blotter of all time. Allegedly dosed with Sandoz. Originally issued circa 1977. The ultimate psychedelic artifact.

 

From: Manager (Tue Feb 15 03:53:24 2005)
A four-way hit that was originally issued circa 1977. These pre-perfed beauties may be the first sigil on blotter. Magical!

 

From: Clown (Thu Jul 14 22:02:40 2005)
this photographic print depicts 1000 hits that were originally issued circa 2008.

 

From: Bunny (Tue Aug 12 15:56:33 2006)
This print depicts 44 hits that were originally issued circa 1976. One of the very first full color print, perfed pieces. This issue was cutting edge in its time.

 

From: pimpdaz (Tue Oct 26 15:56:33 2004)
remember these very well, loved the stripey paper. we used to get these on a regular basis, the talk was they were supposedly double dipped etc. good trips though

From: gabbachris666 (Wed Nov 2 14:49:35 2005)

These were great in their day but they started to get weaker and more scummy. I remember hearing the double dip thing as well. They were lush though. The colours you saw were unique among acids I have taken. I wish the people would make some more.

From: sunnyaura (Thu Dec 1 16:35:05 2005)
Yeah , wish the chemist would treat us all again but sadly if he is as wise financially as chemically s/he will be long gone. i kept these for ages, wouldn’t sell one even for £25.One of the cleanest nicest trips ever..

 

From: stc (Sat Jun 18 05:22:53 2005)
i have take one of this and i had blaste my mind for many many hours!!!

From: pano (Thu Jul 28 11:44:49 2005)
They are very strong. about 500 mig!!! isn’t it???
good stuff but not very clean.
They are as strong as Fat Freedy or Tomato soup.
i had a full picture (25 blotters) in 2000

From: ´pauchislooo (Sat Jun 10 18:39:11 2006)
my best trip was one of this one, and the things i saw that day change my life completely, everyone should try them some time, uwuwuuwuwu i guarantee a lot of fun and smiles and trip for al least 12 hours.

 

From: monk (Fri Jul 21 22:35:39 2006)
well, i´m gonna try one of this tonight, lets see what happens!

 

From: order? (Wed Mar 30 08:41:38 2005)
can someone help get those?robabra@hotmail.com

From: snitziel (Mon Jun 26 20:55:15 2006)
very strong had dinner with girl freinds family on it they just thought i was a happy person

 

From: oz (Mon Sep 5 09:27:50 2005)
these were the worst trips i ever took. felt like adulterated, low quality. on really thin paper. not very strong. i didn’t get very high, but my jaw was still clenching.

 

From: Jason Emberson (Tue Feb 15 03:53:24 2005)
Simular to the fractles

From: HOLY SHIT! (Sat Dec 3 16:25:43 2005)
Alright so i ate 3 of these a few months ago and DAMN!!! I only got 20 so i didn’t have to many to save. I strongly suggest everyone go out and try a few of these…

 

From: nick (Sun May 4 15:16:49 2003)
this is a 900 or 1000 sheet, had about 14 of these that partly makes up one Twin moderate 75 mcg year 1990

From: nick (Mon May 5 03:00:19 2003)
thick card paper

 

From: AstreaL (Sat Jul 23 06:09:14 2005)
This was not so good acid !! It was very light, you should take up to 1 and even then, you ‘dnt be happy … 🙁

 

From: Jason Emberson (Tue Feb 15 03:56:16 2005)
don’t know. however this most definetly came from the makers of pink elephants and alice through the looking glass.

 

From: as i.d (Wed Jan 19 13:16:44 2005)
my first one.. belgium 1991..
great to see them again here !!

From: Jason Emberson (Tue Feb 15 03:58:09 2005)
Disturbingly interesting.

From: Aaron F (Fri Apr 28 10:55:40 2006)
There were loadz of these floatin around a sleepy dorset(u.k)village in early 90’s–blindin visuals, *&^^ing amazing…ppppick up a pppenguin!!

From: Swede (Sat May 6 08:49:50 2006)
Yea, we had some of them in Sweden around 95, and they were good ones, not that good as the Miraculix or Hoffmans that where here the same time, but better then the Buddhas, and alot of others.

 

From: oz (Mon Sep 5 09:31:28 2005)
these were pretty good. very dependable. medium-strength. i did have one terrible trip on them though, but that was my fault, not the acid’s.

From: Magic Mad Hatter (Thu Jan 19 14:02:11 2006)
Those were my first hits in 1996!! I would say they were around 50 mics. Not that strong, but very clean und nice.

From: Panoramix… (Fri Jan 20 17:50:32 2006)
Had them in 1996 & again in 1998… Not bad… I’d say abt 100 mics…

 

From: tom noxx (Tue Nov 29 07:54:02 2005)
les meilleurs que j’ai connu avec les dragons verts.Oulalalahh , pousse toi de devant, man, ceux là ils déménagent.

From: Stagueve (Sun Mar 19 23:30:28 2006)
Jsuis d’accord rouge ou vert, une bonne claque en perspective !!! C’était du bon matos ;p

From: Digital Citizen (Wed Jun 21 09:09:21 2006)
Monkey Temple-Kathmandu-full-power-Momentous.

 

From: Canopus-49 (Mon Dec 19 16:07:42 2005)
Reaaaaaalllyyyyy psytrancer!!! Within a board like this we gonna through the interdimensional walls!!!

 

From: Ringer\’s Friend (Sun Nov 20 05:13:45 2005)
Purple with gold ink. HELL yeah this was some good stuff. Clean, visual, prolly upwards of 150 mics? Saw a lot of it in the early 90s

 

From: penis dancers (Tue May 16 22:32:28 2006)
yo dude … we are tight like a fat kid in spandex

 

From: Soma (Sat Feb 12 05:47:24 2005)
Manufactured in Houston, TX between 1991-1993. Actually called Blue Hawaiian, and it also came in green sheets. Lab busted, 3 Vietnamese guys found with 5 million hits. $2 hit, $5 for 3, sheets $90 and books were $650

 

From: vcw (Wed Mar 15 13:02:31 2006)
ate plenty of these about 100mcg

 

From: Jason Emberson (Tue Feb 15 04:25:54 2005)
strong strong strong stuff.

From: pano (Thu Jul 28 11:38:12 2005)
this blotters are very strong. Not so clean. i took that in 2000. A friend took 2 blotters in 2 hours at a festival and wanted to pay some beers with marijuana. Then he lost his keys and all his things

From: Panoramix… (Thu Sep 1 09:22:56 2005)
Good stuff from Belgium…

From: oz (Mon Sep 5 09:41:30 2005)
yep, very strong, but good quality, i thought. that was back in 1997-1999. don’t know about since then. the paper was really thick.

 

From: nick (Sun May 4 15:19:41 2003)
these smilies were popular in 1989 rave culture had a few

From: riX (Thu Jul 14 22:02:40 2005)
Yep, known as “super smilies”.
Am*dam ZOO 1985.

From: gabbachris666 (Wed Nov 2 14:38:37 2005)
Yes, They are “super smileys” They were not very strong

—-

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Cool, thank you. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Ah, I see. My uni was this kind of late-hippie place that was all about fostering free thought and all of that. It was different time, for sure, and it was in California where that sort of approach still exists, but only here and there now. ‘Us’ had the same problem. I haven’t seem ‘Nope’ yet. Ha, good question about gif/meme-related fame. I think I remember reading about people who became celebrities from having had their visages used in very viral memes. I can’t think of any gif performers who got any traction. Love didn’t save me from the heat precisely, but it wasn’t as horrid as it will be today, so maybe love was just saving his energy for these 24 hours, let’s hope. Oh, wow, that magical youtube storage area would be so, so helpful to me in my blog construction! Love making reality a thing and place that we can all agree exists, G. ** Misanthrope, As long as the cake was the greatest part, it qualifies as a birthday. So, good. I’ve seen promos for that series. Sounds sweet. And I just read that it’s Steve Martin’s swan song as an actor, which seems kind of sad. Avoid the weirdo rebound, not that I guess you can do much to avert it. Anti-eek. ** _Black_Acrylic, Great, thanks for checking it out, Ben. Enjoy the spaciousness. Spaciousness is no small thing. And thank you for angling towards the guest-post. Super greatly appreciated, maestro. ** Brian, Hi, Brian. Really good to see you, pal. Totally understood about the absence. I like to think of this as a place where people can come and go as they like and where they can feel just as big a part of the place where they’re eyeballing it as when they’re typing into it. Thank you so much about ‘My Loose Thread’. That’s so kind and nice. That’s one of my favorite novels of mine, and it’s one that seems to often get kind of forgotten about, so yay. Thank you, man. It is a fun couple with ‘The Tunnel’. Ha ha, Luhrmann to Bresson. Gosh, I’m happy I wound up on the latter side of that equation, let’s just say. I read ‘The Tunnel’ when it was published. As I’m sure you know, it was a long, long awaited, legendary tome long before he finished it. Honestly, I don’t think I ended up reading the whole thing. I think it was one of those novels where I read far enough to get the pleasure of what he was doing and to the point where I felt like I figured out what he was doing, and then I think I was ready to read something else. I like that kind of writing, in theory. If it’s brilliantly done. I love reading prose that’s masterful and yet charged with a spirit of adventure. But, again, sometimes I just want to good taste of that kind of writing, and I don’t feel a big inclination to read something of that sort from cover to cover. I like Gass. I think ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’ was his best fiction. I think his writing about writing can be really extraordinary. I don’t know ‘In Order Not to Be Here’. I’ll look it up. Cool, like I said, it’s always a great pleasure to get to talk with you, and I’m always interested to know that you’re doing and thinking, so anytime that feels right on your end, seeing you will be a boon on my end. I hope everything proceeds extremely apace for you and yours. xo. ** Steve Erickson, Wow. Sorry for your panic. Of course, being the amusement park loving dude I am, my imagination immediately went to how fun that ride sounds, ha ha. Big hope that you get the ears thing sorted as straight away as possible. Everyone, Steve Erickson alert: ‘Here’s my Gay City News review of LE TEMPS PERDU. I kinda like the fact that although my review’s intended to be negative, it’s stirred up interest in the film on Facebook.’ A friend of a friend of mine in LA apparently tried lying about his sex life to get the monkeypox vax, but they wanted proof of his sluttiness. I don’t know what proof they wanted. ** RANGUSWAZE, Hi, man! Whoa, nine days, holy shit! Exciting time, and you sound suitably revved and ready for action. Thanks for the sneak peeks! Keep on far more than keeping on! As you are and will be doing no doubt whatsoever. xo. ** Robert, Hi. Oh, cool, I’m happy my way of thinking about that made sense. I’m such a prose-first kind of reader, and if I think of that dense, often stiff, brain maxing out writing as just writing with a non-fictional purpose, it seems to help draw me in, and then of course the contents and points come through too because they and the writing and the writing’s reason for being are inextricable and all of that. Happy Friday. ** Bill, Ha ha. That is a nice poster, yeah. And the film itself follows suit? I’ll put it on my list. Thanks! ** Right. I always quite liked this very old post, and my memory is that wasn’t all that wildly popular the first time I launched it, but I like it, and time has passed and, hey, you never know, so please give it your initial consideration and let the consequences be what they may be. See you tomorrow.

 

‘Standish Lawder is an underground filmmaker. In a sense this is an inside joke—he first made films in the basement of his home in New Haven; now he works in his basement film studio at Yale where he also teaches. Furthermore, he seldom shoots films outdoors, but works within restricted spaces, enclosed by walls, by the camera’s immobility, or perhaps by the preexisting limits imposed by his choosing to make new films from old films. Lawder is better described as an experimental underground filmmaker because of the way in which his films lead the viewer to a particular consciousness of their speculative nature.

‘Necrology, 1969–70, is, paradoxically, both a film containing no camera movement and an important one in the history of camera movement. The first image appears to be produced by a crane-mounted camera moving down a row of people standing on an inclined surface, such as a football stadium. People move into the frame from the bottom, then move across the frame to exit at the top. As this process continues, a viewer might begin to see the film as part of a tradition of long camera movements. Orson Welles’ 1958 Touch of Evil opens with an extraordinarily complex camera movement over three minutes long. Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 Weekend contains what appears to be a 15-minute tracking shot of a line of cars caught in a traffic jam, as well as a continuous six-minute movement circling the inside of a farmyard in both directions. Long camera movements range from early ones, such as those astonishing shots made from a downward moving elevator in the Babylon section of Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance, to the three hours of movements in Snow’s 1970–71 La Région Centrale. Necrology is a part of this tradition, but not for the reason a viewer might initially assume.

‘The camera moves without a pause down an apparently endless row of people. At first, the viewer may think that something equivalent to my football stadium/huge crane situation is the source of the images; next the viewer may be awed by the length of the camera movement; then doubt about the football stadium/ crane explanation may begin because no crane is that big; finally the viewer may realize that something else is happening. The explanation that there could be a camera movement producing the effect seen in Necrology gradually ceases to be plausible. At this point, an observant viewer may begin to look beyond the procession of people and see the metal steps of an escalator behind them. This seems to be an explanation: the people are moving on an escalator, and the camera is stationary. It only looked like it was going to be the longest camera movement in the history of film—there was no camera movement at all.

‘Is it as simple as that? The image in Necrology could be made by a camera moving down and in front of a vertical row of people in a stadium. In order to produce this direction of movement by filming an escalator with a stationary camera, the people should be riding an up escalator. People riding an up escalator face the steps, but the people in Necrology are facing the camera. The viewer is bewildered and increasingly conscious of the mysterious quality of the images. The images, which initially seemed so simple, now appear enigmatic. The organization of Necrology leads the viewer to gradual consciousness of an initially unimagined complexity behind the creation of the images. Thus, the structure of the film directs the viewer toward an awareness of the filmmaking process. A tricky special-effects shot in a Hollywood film and particular shots in other films produce this awareness: in both Murnau’s 1927 Sunrise and Welles’ 1942 The Magnificent Ambersons, shots show the metal tracks guiding the camera’s movement. Lawder is more subtle: the form of his film extends a growing awareness of the film medium over the entire length of the work.

‘Dangling Participle, 1970, is Lawder’s most complex found footage film. It is so carefully put together from a number of prints of six ’50s classroom films and a sex education record that the viewer might think it is authentic. A more typical reaction during the first viewing is not to think about it at all—it is just seen as a funny film. A viewer seeing the film a second time can begin to ask the questions that Lawder films usually raise about the process of their creation. This can lead to a consciousness of the repetition of some of the images—Fernand Léger’s 1924 Ballet Mécanique can repeat images, but not a ’50s educational film—and of the improbability of a teacher making the comments found in the narration. As this questioning continues, the film begins to look different, to look like a film made from other films with the narration built up by joining pieces of a tape recording. It is the best example of Lawder’s interest in reversing the viewer’s anticipated reaction to a film: cartoons are funny; sex-education films are serious. Lawder uses cartoons in ways that are not funny (Runaway, Roadfilm) and has made a hilarious sex education film.

‘Corridors are enclosures for moving people. They are spaces that are moved through, not looked at. Corridor, 1968–70, starts with an extended camera movement down the entire length of the corridor outside Lawder’s film history classroom. On first viewing, this can be taken as a conventional camera movement showing the size of the space relative to a person moving through it with a hand-held camera. But like many other beginnings of Lawder films, it is more complex than it first seems. The opening shot actually extends the corridor in both space and time. The shot combines the effects that would be seen by a human eye which had sharply focused peripheral vision and was simultaneously looking through the wrong end of a telescope. This is the appearance of a shot made with a wide-angle lens—in this case a 5.7 mm on a 16 mm camera. The time is extended through the use of slow motion—54 frames per second. These are not likely to be sensed during a first viewing: if the viewer had ever been in the corridor then the peripheral vision effect or the extended length would be obvious camera produced distortions. Or, if a person were seen walking in the corridor, the degree of slow motion would be apparent. As it is, the corridor only looks like an extremely long space being moved through very slowly. When the camera reaches the end of this two-and-one-half-minute exploration, there is a cut back to a shot from the starting position and a change in the electronic music sound track. At this point the film begins again, but this time the space is shown in an extremely complex series of images.

‘The opening shot of Corridor contains both the subject matter and the method of the film. However, the viewer only gradually becomes conscious of this, and in a similar way to other Lawder films. In this film, space is examined in ways which emphasize the differences between film image and vision. In less carefully worded phrases, the film concentrates on distorted images. After the first subtly distorted shot, the film becomes a flashing, rhythmical, pulsating series of images. The black-and-white images seem to be showing every detail of the space in as many ways as are possible in a 21-minute film: wobbly movements down the corridor; positive and negative images; images produced by a camera whirling around a bar placed in the center of the corridor; a nude woman standing with her limbs spread as if to give a human measurement of scale to the space; and superimpositions of five images. These images are accompanied by an electronic music sound track of comparable complexity and intensity. It is in part a Terry Riley composition and in part Lawder’s own work. The images and music combine to produce a sense of constant movement—nothing is static in Corridor. This is absolutely appropriate in a film based on a camera moving through a space designed for moving people.’ — John W. Locke, Artforum

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Standish Lawder @ Wikipedia
Standish Lawder @ The Film-makers Coop
Standish Lawder @ Artforum
Standish Lawder@ MUBI
Book: Standish Lawder ‘The Cubist Cinema’
Standish Lawder @ Letterboxd
Standish Lawder / ANOTHER YEAR IN LA
Letter from Gerland O’Grady to Standish Lawder
Standish Lawder: My Teacher & Role Model Returns to Yale
Taking A Long Walk Down Standish Lawder’s “The Corridor”

 

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Extras

Lecture and Screening with Standish Lawder at Carnegie Museum of Art (4/9/1975)

Trailer: Screening Room Standish Lawder & Stanley Cavell

 

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Restoring Runaway (1969) by Standish Lawder
by Mark Toscano

 

Standish passed away in June of this year. I hadn’t been much in touch with him over the past couple of years, during which time he had departed from his Denver Darkroom and moved to the Bay Area, though I would occasionally receive news. We’ve been able to restore a few of his films, including Necrology (1970), Raindance (1972), and the little-known but quite lovely Catfilm for Katy & Cynnie (1973). Many others are in the works. Some present quite unusual challenges, and may someday be the subject of another post here.

Of the dozens and dozens of experimental/independent filmmakers I’ve worked with over the past eleven years to store, conserve, and preserve/restore their films, Standish is still, as of this writing, the only one who expressed some undisguised skepticism about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences taking an archival interest in his work. I remember him saying, “I have no idea why the Academy would be interested in my work. I mean, we thought we were underground back then.” I didn’t know if I should say, “Well, to be honest, although the Academy is totally supportive of this work, it’s actually just me and a few other weirdos I work with who actually *know* your films,” because I nevertheless detected a certain pleasure in his tone at the idea of the Academy seeking out his work for saving. Regardless, he was definitely skeptical, and I’m pretty sure it was primarily the fact that I worked with Robert Nelson (an old and trusted friend of his) that he decided to give me a chance. His skepticism waned as he got a better idea of where I was coming from (he said at one point, early on, “I thought you just had an obsession for possession” but then realized I was just trying to save his damn films.)

Since Standish’s passing, I’ve been in touch with his daughter Cynthia, and she was kind enough to assemble all of Standish’s remaining film elements that she could locate, pack them up, and send them to me at the archive. They arrived today. They fit in one big box, a few dozen individual cans of stuff. Some are prints, some may be originals (soon to be determined), some are prints of other people’s work, etc.:

One can in particular promised some very exciting contents:

And just like the labeling says, it contained the original loop Standish used to make Runaway, the film which Jonas Mekas said “achieves the perfection of all his techniques”, with “the visual strength of an old Chinese charcoal drawing.” It felt a bit like finding the missing part of a machine – the coffee can printer – that was required to make it work. A bit worse for wear, but still very readily discernible as a crucial moving part in the dormant apparatus.

 

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9 of Standish Lawder’s 20 films

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Runaway (1969)
‘Lawder achieves the perfection of all his techniques in a small six-minute film called RUNAWAY, in which he uses a few seconds of cartoon dogs chasing a fox. By stop motion, reverse printing, video scanning, and other techniques, by manipulating a few seconds of an old cartoon, he creates a totally new and different visual reality that is no longer a silly, funny cartoon. He elevates the cartoon imagery to the visual strength of an old Chinese charcoal drawing.’ — Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice

Watch the film here

 

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Corridor (1970)
‘CORRIDOR is a marvelous meld of music and cinematic tension that maintains a visual excitement throughout with its constant exploration of horizontal and rectilinear patterns, chiaroscuros and deep grains, pulsating double and negative exposures, and constant tracking shots of a nude figure standing at the end of a long, close corridor. A first-rate piece of work that has to be seen to be appreciated. CORRIDOR is a film of which any filmmaker would be rightly proud.’ — James Childs, New Haven Register

‘An extraordinary exercise in visual polyphony… the pyrotechnic surface is exfoliated with Hegelian relentlessness from an elemental formal core … the many are no less the many for being inescapably the One.’ — Sheldon Nodelman

Excerpt

Watch the entirety here

 

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Dangling Participle (1970)
‘Made entirely from old classroom instructional films, DANGLING PARTICIPLE offers a wealth of practical advice on contemporary sexual hang-ups and where they come from. The funniest underground film I’ve ever seen.’ –- Sheldon Renan

 

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‎Necrology (1970)
‘In NECROLOGY, a 12-minute film, in one continuous shot Lawder films the faces of a 5:00 PM crowd descending via the Pan Am building escalators. In old-fashioned black and white, these faces stare into the empty space, in the 5:00 PM tiredness and mechanical impersonality, like faces from the grave. It’s hard to believe that these faces belong to people today. The film is one of the strongest and grimmest comments upon the contemporary society that cinema has produced.’ — Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice

‘Without doubt, the sickest joke I’ve ever seen on film.’ — Hollis Frampton

the entirety

 

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Colorfilm (1971)
‘Further examining the medium of film itself, Colorfilm is a work Lawder made while trying to make a minimalist, “pure color” film. Using spliced-together strips of colored film leader in white, yellow, blue, red, green, etc., Lawder ran the film through a projector and found the results to be quite boring. While he was running the film, though, he noticed how beautiful the colored strips of film looked as they ran through the projector. So, he turned a camera on the projector and filmed the colored film gorgeously winding its way through the projector’s machinery.’ — Noel Black, Ubuweb

the entirety

 

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Raindance (1972)
‘RAINDANCE plays directly on the mind through programmatic stimulation of the central nervous system. Individual frames of the film are imprinted on the retina of the eye in a rhythm, sequence, and intensity that corresponds to Alpha-Wave frequencies of the brain. RAINDANCE becomes an experience of meditative liberation beyond the threshold of visual comprehension. Vision turns inward. The film directs our mental processes, controlling how we think as well as what we see. Images fuse with their afterimages, colors arise from retinal release of exhausted nerve endings, forms dance across short-circuited synapses of the mind. RAINDANCE was made entirely from a scrap of found footage taken from an old animated cartoon representing a sheet of falling rain. The cartoon was called, “The History of Cinema.”‘ — The Film-makers Coop

 

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‎Intolerance (​abridged) (1973)
‘Standish Lawder’s four minute abridgement of D.W. Griffith’s 1916 colossus. Processed “entirely automatically” and ‘skip-printed’ on homemade hardware, Intolerance is played at a speed and rhythm “as fast as possible, and yet one can still follow the narrative continuity of the film itself”; According to Lawder, “A kind of classic comic condensation, an encapsulation of this grand monument”.’ — Letterboxd

 

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Catfilm for Katy and Cynnie (1973)
‘In the early 70’s, a New York cat-lover and filmmaker named Pola Chapelle produced a “Cat Film Festival,” which was shown in a large downtown NYC auditorium to an audience of more than a thousand cat-lovers. At the time, I lived with my wife Ursula and our daughters Katy and Cynnie, together with many, too many cats. I loved my family but not the cats.’ — Standish Lawder

 

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Electronical Politics (1988)
‘Made in 1988 at the University of California, San Diego during Standish Lawder’s Experimental Film course.’ — FilmMonkey

the entirety

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, He can be found not so secretly in that novel, yes. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ha ha, I know, that was good, right? I would be thrilled to bits if you want to make that Fungus the Bogeyman Day. I don’t know Briggs’s work, so it would be very instructive for me personally too. Thanks a lot, Ben. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Good, I hope your ears give you good news. Mm, no one here has mentioned to me that they got the monkeypox vax, but since the same restrictions apply in France, I wonder if they would be so open about getting it, ha ha. ** Bill, Hi, B. I’m very sold on the Okonomiyaki. There’s this great Chinese hole in the wall place in the 10th that even serves cold sesame noodle (!), and I bet I can score Okonomiyaki there. Beeline. Cool, trip possible and on. Soon like soon? ** Misanthrope, Lowkey birthdays are very mature. I sure hope your tiredness passes. A bunch of people I know who had the recent version of Co are going through the same thing. No help to you, but … I don’t even want to think about how old I was when I met you. ** Dominik, In my brief time at uni, Foucault wasn’t really in fashion. Academics were still into Sartre, which tells you how long ago I was in uni. Well, if not this Halloween, then the next one! What a brand. I think Jordan Peele’s films are like that too, to be honest with you. Right? That woman’s face was mysteriousness central. I initially thought it was ‘This guy is full of shit’, but after some repetitions, I wasn’t sure. I also wonder if she is/was famous since the gif maker organised the gif to show her. Anyway, … Huge spider like … huge? Eek. I’ve probably mentioned that when I was a little kid and on a family vacation in Texas this big tarantula chased me through a field for literally half a mile, and to this day whenever I see a tarantula, my stomach does serious flip flops. Love creating an invisible chilly passageway that leads to everywhere I need to go outside today, G. ** Billy, Hi, Billy. Yeah, I’ve seen the Foucault bashing stuff. It just seems like a “brainiac” variation on the kind of attention seeking, non-investigative “bright idea” whose propagation gets the media and its self-styled satellites hot and bothered these days. Blah. ** Robert, Hi. Me too. And the sky is already preheating as I type these words this morning. Dude, pumping out the first draft of a book, shoddy or not — you should see my first drafts, Jesus — is no small thing, in my book at least. So enjoy that. De-agonize yourself to that degree. Mm, I read quite a bit of theory/philosophy back in the 80s and 90s. I’ve never read the really huge guys like Kant or Hegel. Blanchot is my guy. He’s my biggie. I don’t read such stuff all that often recently, although I did go on a fairly rampageous Deleuze reading jaunt a couple of years ago after finally getting why he’s so great. I really like reading it when I do. But I do sort of think of it as experimental nonfiction, which may or may not be a good approach. Thanks. I hope your late week is infinitely chiller than mine. ** Russ Healy, Hey, Russ. It’s true, I too think trans identity would have been a serious flummoxer for him. It’s probably best he didn’t live long enough to be wrong about it. Thanks for reading ‘I Wished’. Interesting about your work as a therapist. Huge respect to you! Ultimately, mine, who I saw only for about two years, did help me a lot and pretty much for the reasons you mention. It just took a while. Trivia: she was also Sylvester Stallone’s therapist, and he sometimes had his appointment just before mine, and I’d see him leaving and looking much deeper than I’ve ever seen him look in any film or photo. Best of the best to you! ** Okay. If you don’t know the unique and wonderful films of Standish Lawder, here’s your chance. Recommended, duh. See you tomorrow/