In the first part of this dopey Q&A, Wonkette’s Ken Layne asked Everybody Must Get Stoned author and cyberpunk prankster R.U. Sirius about the glorious excess of rock-art past, and where the William S. Burroughs of the 2010s might be hiding out today. In the final installment, they cover Kesey, R.A. Wilson, Lou Reed, French Bohemia and psychedelics in modern medical trials.

Q: Robert Anton Wilson and Ken Kesey are two of the crucial counterculture writers, and you got to work with both of them. They haven’t been gone very long, but it feels like forever. This is basically the same question again, but where are the philosophical/spiritual leaders a druggy counterculture needs to keep it from descending into, say, the scene around where I live in the Mojave Desert, where illiterate high-school-dropout OHV idiots are cooking meth in double-wides and spending the meager profits on neck tattoos promoting terrible white-rap bands and Aryan gangs? Is the intellectual/arty drug era over?

A:  You know, I don’t see how people can take meth and want to ride around on their “hogs” all day. Doesn’t it make you want to re-read Gravity’s Rainbow… backwards… and then diagram the relationship between it and the Kabbalah? continue »

R.U. Sirius has long written about dope in his cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 and his many books, and he has long played punk and machine-rock music. His new book, Everybody Must Get Stoned, is about rock stars on drugs. Ken Layne interviewed R.U. Sirius through the magical medium of email — about Barack Obama getting high and whatever happened to the secret handshakes of the counterculture.

Q: We now have a president who grew up taking whatever drugs were around, never denied inhaling, and who has better than usual taste in music, at least for a politician. Is there any such thing as a counterculture when the president is a mixed-race former dope fiend who went to college hanging out with the punks and radicals at Occidental in east LA, and now has goddamned poetry slams and funk concerts in the White House?

A: Well, if Barack was really hip, One Nation Under A Groove would have been his theme song and P-Funk would have headlined the inaugural. But… you say he took whatever drugs were around?! When Olbermann sees this, his head will explode. (”Where is your proof sir!”) It seems nobody ever popped the psychedelic question to a presidential candidate. Did Barack trip? I’ll tell you a story. After Clinton was elected president, someone who claimed to be one of his former classmates from Oxford posted on The Well — a conferencing system that I was also on — that Clinton was known to be fond of psychedelics while he was in school there… particularly mescaline, and that it was true he didn’t inhale because of his throat problems, but he liked to eat hash. continue »

A very scary and terrible winter-style storm is headed for the Pacific Northwest. There will be snow as low as 2,500 feet! Also: wind, rain, sleet, fierce winds, and glum people moving about, their expressions invisible beneath the rain gear — all but the eyes, which will be both visible and vacant.

You might be saying, “Oh come on now for god’s sake what is it, almost Memorial Day?” But really, is it that big a deal to have a winteresque storm in mid-May?

Last week I spent a few days at Cannon Beach, on the Oregon Coast, in a battered little cabin on the shore. There was a winter storm that week, too — with 75mph gusts and violent downpours and etc. But we had sunny days, too, which is almost illegal on the Pacific Northwest coast, most of the time. And I visited some tragic seals at a low-rent Marine Aquarium in a nearby honky-tonk shore town. They clapped and fought and snarled over the bits of fish supplied to my group. It was like watching cable news with the sound off.

In this Great Recession Pandemic Horror of 2009, there are only four commodities in demand: Tamiflu, surgical masks, hand sanitizer and any form of booze to numb the fear and pain of daily life.

Having only Tamiflu in sufficient supply, thanks to previous freakouts about Avian Flu or SARS or Night AIDS or whatever it was that prompted me to shake down the various medical professionals in my family for a supply of this mysterious antiviral drug, I needed to stock up on wine, disposable face coverings and huge plastic buckets of squirt-top anti-bacterial gel. continue »

Yeah we’ll get right on it:

JERUSALEM – The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, according to an Israeli health official.

via Israeli official urges name change for ’swine flu’ — MSNBC.