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Why Are Earth People So Parochial (The Dominators)

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You know, looking at them, I can’t think of any witty jokes
to make that the picture doesn’t do for me.

It’s August 10, 1968. Tommy James and the Shondells are at number one with “Mony Mony,” but if we really want to capture the spirit of this one we need to look at number two, or just jump a week ahead to where it hits number one and look at Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s “Fire,” which dethrones Mr. James for a single week. From there on out, it’s just the Beach Boys and the Bee Gees. So let’s go back to Arthur Brown. Personally, I advocate taking three minutes out of your day and just watching Mr. Brown perform this song on Top of the Pops. But if you cannot spare the time to watch a man with a hat whose most visible feature is the fact that it is a pair of horns that are constantly on fire scream “I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE” on BBC One, well, I pity you. It’s basically the greatest thing ever, and should really be recognized as the anthem of uniquely British psychedelic culture as discussed last Friday.
Speaking of last Friday, a fair chunk of the events of that post happen in the course of this story – all the DNC and Prague Spring stuff, for instance. So just read that post for the news section.
While on television we get our second entry into the ignoble rankings of the ten worst ever Doctor Who stories according to the most recent Doctor Who Magazine poll. The Dominators comes in 191st. The thing about the bottom ten in a poll like this is that they’re not the ten worst stories. They’re the ten most hated stories. To come at the bottom of a list like this, you can’t just be lousy. You have to be so lousy that there are people who hate you and will make that special effort to give you a zero out of ten.
For most of the ten, there are clear reasons why they’re hated. Of the three 1960s stories in the bottom ten, two are ones that have single surviving episodes. Those episodes are watched only by particularly dedicated fans, and if they’re dodgy, they are remembered for the constant mocking they elicited. So, for instance, The Underwater Menace is basically down there entirely on the basis of Joseph Furst shouting “Nothing in ze world can stop me now!” Further, there are five stories from John Nathan-Turner’s tenure that are slammed as part of a well-rehearsed (and largely, though not entirely, correct) critique of his tenure. Similarly, there’s one Graham Williams episode that is slammed because it’s the worst story of another era with a ton of detractors. But then you have two episodes that are down there despite having no obvious reason for the hatred – a lone turkey from the new series, and The Dominators. The Dominators, in other words, is one of the two most hated episodes of Doctor Who that has no credible explanation for the hatred other than being truly terrible.
…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 8 (’68)

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And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. – Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas


The 60s ended.

This may seem like a very obvious thing to point out to anybody with a remote skill in calendar-reading. But when you’re immersing yourself in the raging heat of psychedelia and social justice, it’s as easy in 2011 to forget that its sense of inevitability was a fragile illusion as it was in ’68. As ever, reality stands ready to intrude.

However badly the Summer of Love ended, it was still a utopian moment, beautiful in its naiveté. Even in its most crassly commercial version, its iconography holds a strange power. I mentioned a few entries ago the cover of the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s single “Simon Says,” which you can gaze upon here (which also gives me the opportunity to hat-tip the fabulously good Chart Stats website, from which the first paragraph of almost every entry on this blog derives). What is most interesting about this cover is that despite the fact that it is the cover of an appallingly banal piece of bubblegum pop, the cover is still arrestingly psychedelic. Its b-side – “Reflections From the Looking Glass” – is unapologetically and unambiguously a piece of psychedelic utopianism. Even corporate commercialism proved unable to completely repress psychedelia.

Stunning, then, that less than a year later, on the other side of California, youth culture’s best hope for the future, Robert Francis Kennedy, was gunned down following his victory in the California Democratic Primary. Two months later the Democratic National Convention in Chicago turned into a festival of ugly riots as various left-wing groups such as the Yippies prepared to make a bold stand and deliver the psychedelic street theater of the Diggers (see the Summer of Love entry, linked above) to the masses, albeit without the utopian community building of the Diggers (which turns out, perhaps, to have been the more important part). From the perspective of anyone with an aesthetic appreciation of guerilla theater politics, this should have been a high water mark, with the threatened plan to dump LSD in the city’s water supply being a particular highlight.

Meanwhile, the increasingly fierce Vietnam protests, spurred on by moral obscenities like the Mai Lai massacre, descended on the convention as well in an effort to derail the candidacy of Hubert Humphrey, seen as too close to Lyndon Johnson’s war position.…

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That’s Just Wizard (The Wheel in Space)

9

In a scene not actually in the episode, the Cybermen
menace Zoe as she fiddles with the sexual air supply.
(The sexual air supply, I should note, is in the
episode.)

It’s April 27, 1968. Louis Armstrong is declaring how wonderful the world is, and is at #1 doing it. He continues proclaiming this for four weeks, before being unseated by one of the great anthems of pedophilia, Union Gap’s “Young Girl.” What a wonderful world indeed. So wonderful that nothing too terrible happens during these six weeks – just your usual nuclear tests, Vietnam war protests, deadly tornadoes, nuclear submarine sinkings, and Manchester United winning the European Cup. This last one I actually quite like, as a Manchester United fan, but I’d be lying if I said it was a hugely relevant point. Oh, and the May 1968 events in Paris. But those are for Friday.

While on television…. Hooboy. This may be the most misunderstood story by Doctor Who fandom I’ve yet covered. I commented to the endlessly brilliant Anna of the lovely blog A Random String of Bits last night that The Wheel in Space has what are possibly the two least likely cowriters in Doctor Who: Kit Pedler and David Whitaker. Long time readers of this blog probably have some sense of how weird this is, but if you don’t, imagine Alan Moore rewriting Arthur C. Clarke and you’re at least in the general ballpark.

See, Kit Pedler is… OK, let’s be honest. He’s not much of a writer. I mean, this surely isn’t a huge revelation. Every writing credit he has on Doctor Who (and, so far as I can tell, every fiction writing credit he has period) is co-authored, which, while not an immediate sign of anything, is suggestive. (He does have solo credit on the first two episodes of The Tenth Planet, but from there on out it’s co-authoring flat out, so let’s face it, I bet Gerry Davis did a fair amount of work on those two as well.) One imagines that Pedler’s involvement in his scripts amounts, in most cases, to declaring a location where the Cybermen will show up (The moon! A tomb! Panama!) and… possibly nothing else, actually. I mean, we should give the man credit – the Cybermen were a brilliant idea, and apparently The War Machines was his as well, which… OK, well, The Cybermen were a brilliant idea.

But at the end of the day, Pedler is an optometrist with a flair for creating “hard SF” premises. Previously he was, seemingly, brought into the program mostly because Gerry Davis liked working with him. Since Gerry Davis walked away from the series for seven years after leaving as script editor, this left Pedler without a co-author for Cybermen stories. So clearly they had to find someone else to do it. Thankfully, the show has a lot of candidates – one can readily imagine Ian Stuart Black, Victor Pemberton, or Brian Hayles getting tapped for this role, for instance, or current story editor Derek Sherwin.…

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When You’re Living Your Life One Day After Another (Fury From the Deep)

17

OH MY GOD! I SAW UNDER JAMIE’S KILT!

Hi! So, how was A Good Man Goes to War? I hope it was good. I wrote this post a full week ago, and since I suspect that there are going to be things that it would make sense to point to in A Good Man Goes to War here, I figured I should remind you of that fact. 

It’s March 16, 1968, and Israeli novelty blues are still at the top of the charts. It is replaced by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich with “The Legend of Xanadu,” which sits oddly on the line between novelty and love song. In week three The Beatles ride in to save us with Lady Madonna, and in week five it’s Cliff Richard. Honestly, I’m at a loss – this is not music I’m terribly familiar with. Cliff Richard appears to veer in his career from young rock guy to evangelical Christian. I see lower in the charts things like 1910 Fruitgum Company, which I have never heard of. I look at the cover and think “Ooh, that looks like a nice bit of psychedelia.” And it turns out to be bubblegum pop. Let’s call that the defining image of these weeks.

In real news, the British Foreign Secretary resigned seemingly over a drunken row with the Prime Minister, the Mai Lai massacre took place, 91 people are injured in a London protest against the Vietnam War, 200 more are arrested. Aer Lingus flight 172 crashes, killing 61. Lyndon Johnson declares he will not seek re-election, which was probably a good idea on paper, though as it turns out, this upcoming US Presidential Election is going to go somewhat badly for the planet. (I am rather more a hippie than an archeologist). Martin Luther King is murdered. Political assassinations in Germany. And, just to wrap off these uneventful six weeks, on the day the final episode of Fury From the Deep is transmitted, Enoch Powell makes the famous Rivers of Blood speech in which he rails against excessive immigration into Great Britain, complains that the British way of life is being destroyed, and warns:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

In other words, this is the bit of history that we’re talking about when we talk about the turbulence of the 1960s.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 6: The Dark Path (David McIntee, Virgin Books, March 1997)

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It’s March of 1997. Depending on the week, either No Doubt is at number one with “Don’t Speak,” or the Spice Girls are with “Mama.” Other options in the top ten include the Backstreet Boys, Boyzone, R Kelly, Ant and Dec, Bush, and the Bee Gees. If you think one of those things is not like the others, I certainly don’t disagree.

You’re hopefully, by this point, getting enough of a sense of the general shape of the 1989-2005 period of Doctor Who that “March of 1997” already gives you some clues. If not, what we’ve got here is the second to last month of Virgin Books before they lost the license to BBC Books. In this period, Virgin, facing their own end and with little to gain or lose, basically proceeded to cut loose with some of the best and most challenging books of their line, but all of this was frankly dampened by the kind of funereal atmosphere. Not everyone had loved the Virgin line, but it had some strong admirers who were crushed to see it go. The prospect of the BBC starting up an in-house line based on the TV Movie was hardly inspiring, especially given the murmurs that the line was to be the anti-Virgin – an explicit reaction against the Virgin era’s excesses and a return to simpler, less challenging prose. In practice the BBC Books line would be weirder and more interesting than that, but it looked bad from the outset.

Meanwhile, Virgin was releasing its last books in a sort of maudlin celebration of the line’s potential. In the second to last month, they released two books. One, Marc Platt’s Lungbarrow, was an ambitious retconning of the history of Gallifrey and the apparent culmination of the last plot strands left lingering from when the series was on television. The other – The Dark Path – was a long awaited attempt to tackle a massive continuity point and deliver what is one of the most wanted untold tales in Doctor Who.

As a result, there’s something almost actively insane about reviewing it within the Troughton era. The supposed conceit of the Missing and Past Doctor Adventures is that the stories they tell could be inserted into their assumed eras. As we’ve seen that’s always been a bit of a myth – even the most faithful recreation we’ve looked at, Gareth Roberts’s The Plotters, takes liberties that could not have been taken in the era whose television the book imitates the tone of. Other times it’s nearly shattered – The Man in the Velvet Mask is flagrantly and deliberately a vision of the Hartnell era distinct from what we see on the screen. But both of those were still fundamentally comments on the Hartnell era. One attempts to work within the format of the Hartnell era to tell a story that wouldn’t have made it to screen with the actors in question or in the year it would have aired. The other attempts to show a counter-narrative to the Hartnell era.…

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Help, Brigadier, Help! (The Web of Fear)

9

The funniest thing about one of these sitting on a toilet
is actually that their roars are the sound of a toilet flushing
slowed down. Maybe that’s why they go to Tooting Bec.
So they can get the sound clips for their roars…

It’s February 3, 1968. The Love Affair are at number one with “Everlasting Love,” a piece of production line pop given a reasonably psychedelic spin in album art. It’s unseated by Manfred Mann covering Dylan, who are in turn unseated by Esther and Abi Ofarim’s “Cinderella Rockafella” a novelty blues song by an Israeli double act. (Look, you have to get used to these things. Eventually I’m going to have to talk about how “Do the Bartman” hits number one in between KLF and The Clash, and I’m going to have to do it with a straight face, so if you can’t deal with Israeli novelty blues, we’re in trouble.)

As 1968 progresses, it becomes increasingly hard to read events outside of a larger narrative. When we see three college students killed when police break up a civil rights rally at an all-white bowling alley in South Carolina, or the the Tet Offensive ends, it’s very hard not to read these as part of the ongoing progression towards the collapse of the idealism of the 1960s. Music echoes this with an increasing number of songs that are not quite the unambitious conservative pop of Engelbert Humperdinck, but are also not exactly The Beatles, The Who, or Jimi Hendrix.

While on television, we get The Web of Fear. Once again, we’re stuck with a story where the history of it is frustratingly and maddeningly layered. Basically, the core issue is this – the story was tremendously popular and influential, and ended up having a much larger impact than anyone making it anticipated or intended, and as a result watching it there’s tons of stuff that works oddly because you know how it turns out. Really, this is true of both of the Yeti stories. Even though the Yeti never appear again except in cameo, these two stories remain important because they introduce someone who goes on to have a large role in the series. I am talking, of course, about John Levene, who is inside one of the Yeti costumes in each story and goes on to play Sergeant Benton through Jon Pertwee’s tenure as the Doctor.

Sorry, that probably whizzed over some people’s heads. Let’s back up. Starting in season seven, about two years after this story aired, Doctor Who gets a complete revamp in which it is set entirely on Earth with the Doctor teaming up with UNIT, an international military force, to fight aliens in modern day Britain. We’ll be spending a lot of time talking about that. But as it turns out, one of the major characters in UNIT is Brigadier General Aleister Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, better known as The Brigadier.

The Brigadier appears in the season six story The Invasion, which was in part an effort to test out the UNIT concept before they committed to it for the whole series.…

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Look at How Cool This Stuff Is (The Enemy of the World)

25

People do not remark on the fact that Salamander
dresses like Jon Pertwee enough. This is sad, as there
are some great jokes about Pertwee as an evil version
of the Doctor to be made here.


It’s December 23, 1967. The Beatles are at number one with “Hello Goodbye.” Also at number three with the Magical Mystery Tour EP. They’ll hold it for five weeks, which is good, because the rest of the top ten for those weeks leaves more than a little to be desired. At week six, the bottom falls out and Georgie Fame takes over with the Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.

In terms of news, we have the origin of the term “black hole,” which will be a term with surprisingly large impact on the series. Prime Minister Wilson endorses the “I’m Backing Britain” campaign asking people to work an extra half hour without pay, which ends up being a complete turkey. The Prague Spring gets underway, which is a bit unusual given that it’s January. And the Vietnam War keeps it up.

But look, the real news is this. Doctor Who airs The Enemy of the World. And I am here to tell you that it is the best Doctor Who story up to this point. It is, in fact, one of the all time greats of the series. It is a criminal offense that there are people who think of this as the red-headed stepchild of season five and prefer the monster stories. This story is absolutely incredible, light years ahead of its time, and still fantastic to this day. I’m honestly at a loss for why this does not have the wild and ecstatic praise reserved for it that Marco Polo or The Massacre, both of which it runs rings around. I’ll take it as a given that it’s never going to attain the luster of The Tomb of the Cybermen or something by virtue of it being mostly missing, but there’s really no excuse for it not being recognized by those who have seen it as an absolute triumph. Because it is. This story belongs on the list with things like City of Death, Caves of Androzani, Doomsday, and Blink. It’s that good.

(For the sake of completists, since I have declared this the best story to date, I will say that previously I consider An Unearthly Child/100,000 BC, The Aztecs, The Rescue, and Power of the Daleks to be the best stories to date.)

Let’s just dive right into it. The usual thing everybody knows about this story is that it’s another in an oddly long line of identical duplicate stories that Doctor Who does. The first, of course, is The Massacre. In this one, Patrick Troughton gets to pull double duty as both the Doctor and the villainous Salamander. The second thing that everybody knows about this story is that it’s Doctor Who Does James Bond. This should not be a surprise to us today, when the default mode of Doctor Who is “Doctor Who does X” where X is some other genre – The Curse of the Black Spot being the most recent flagrant example.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 7 (The Prisoner, You Only Live Twice)

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea is a recurring feature in which things that are not Doctor Who are looked at in terms of their relation to Doctor Who. Today we look at two classics of British spy fiction from 1967, the James Bond film You Only Live Twice and the ITV television series The Prisoner.

Well this is certainly a bit of an awkward pairing. I mean, never before has “Well, do both of the espionage things you need to do in one entry” seemed like quite so staggering a task. They may both feature secret agents, be British, and be from 1967, but that’s about where the similarities between James Bond in You Only Live Twice and The Prisoner end.

Let’s start with Bond, since that’s the one that’s kind of long overdue in this blog. The thing to note regarding You Only Live Twice is that it is a movie that expects nothing out of its audience. It would be easy to describe this as having a sort of cynical contempt for its audience, but it’s more complex than that. It is not as though the movie thinks little of its audience and thus concludes that it can be lazy. No, the movie thinks little of its audience and then goes out of its way to please them.

There’s something almost giddily entertaining about the movie’s complete lack of irony. Later James Bond movies would begin to poke fun at the series’ tropes, using things like Bond’s refined tastes for comedic scenes. But this movie is caught in a bizarre midpoint in the franchise. It’s well established enough that everybody knows that Bond likes vodka martinis (though here he seems quite pleased to get one stirred) and is a rakish womanizer. But it’s not well enough established to play Bond complimenting his host on the choice of vodka or describing at some length the proper temperature for sake to be served at for laughs. Instead these scenes are presented with a sort of earnest conviction that the audience really just wants to see Sean Connery explaining the proper presentation of sake. And apparently, given how the movie did, they were right.

But perhaps the most astonishing thing about You Only Live Twice is its structure. When some of the production documents for the first Indiana Jones movie leaked onto the Internet a few years back, one of the things people excitedly pointed at was the fact that Spielberg and Lucas talked explicitly about using the structure of a serial and putting a cliffhanger in at regular intervals. This is indeed a clever trick, but for some reason people seemed to think that Lucas and Spielberg were the first people to think of it, as opposed to the first people to have their discussion about it leaked onto the Internet. Because once you’re past the opening credits sequence of You Only Live Twice, with very few exceptions, the movie is structured as a serial comprised of five minute episodes.…

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I Never Had a Life Like That (The Ice Warriors)

7

Deborah Watling frantically calls for the producer to
point out that doing little green men for black and
white television is a bit naff if you stop to think about it.

Just a quick note that, in preparation for going on vacation for ten days in June, starting now and continuing for a few weeks I’m working on building a backlog of posts and scheduling them to update automatically. This won’t affect the posting schedule at all – new content should be up on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the foreseeable future. However, it means that the sense of the present in the entries is steadily going to drift. Monday’s entry on The Enemy of the World, for instance, is extremely likely to be written before The Almost People airs. So if a post comes along that fails to make a spectacularly obvious point comparing the most recent episode to whatever episode I’m looking at, it’s probably because I wrote it a week before you read it.

It’s November 11, 1967. The Foundations, a British Motown group, are at number one, because these things happen in the UK charts. Two weeks later it gets unseated by Long John Baldry’s “Let The Heartaches Begin.” Knowing nothing about this song, I listened to 90 seconds of it. Look, we all make mistakes in life. But on week two of this rather unfortunate moment in pop history we can already see relief riding triumphantly up the charts, arriving decisively when The Beatles “Hello, Goodbye” shows up. What are the UK charts going to do when they don’t have The Beatles to save them from their own ill-advised taste?

Whereas in real news, the Vietnam War continues to be a massive problem that is seemingly about to bring down Johnson’s Presidency via a Primary challenge, the value of the UK Pound finds itself a cliff and leaps off of it with impressive zeal, and the Concorde makes its debut. Of these, the devaluation of the Pound is of the most interest to us, as it is a part of a larger economic recession hitting the UK in this period, and setting a fair amount of the national mood firmly on “pessimistic.”

Whereas on television we have the Ice Warriors. Regular readers of this blog will note that I have been getting increasingly exasperated with base under siege stories. But I haven’t entirely dealt with why. So since The Ice Warriors is a quite good piece of storytelling with only a few particularly overt flaws (of which the title characters are probably the biggest), it seems like the perfect place to look at the underlying problems here.

The easiest way to see the difference is to fire up The Rebel Flesh (which by the time this posts is hopefully on iTunes) and compare it to this story. Both of them are bases under siege. In fact, as the good folks at Tachyon TV pointed out (and to be fair, so did I, but they had the good sense to do it in public so they’d get credit for it), The Rebel Flesh feels like a Troughton story.…

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My Guru, If You Will (The Abominable Snowmen)

7

There comes a point in Doctor Who where the sheer and
unrelenting absurdity of the show’s premises and visual
iconography simply renders all attempts to mock it
moot.

It’s September 30, 1967. Mr. Humperdinck continues to rule over the musical Landscape untroubled by the psychedelic whippersnappers in the rest of the top ten (of which there are at least three). He continues this for two weeks, at which point he is abruptly unseated by the Bee Gees with “Massachusetts,” with The Move’s “Flowers in the Rain” immediately behind. For the next four weeks, it’s just a question of which bits of psychedelia fail to unseat the Bee Gees, who are currently beautifully exploiting the popularity of psychedelia to provide a safe and fun-seeming alternative with their almost-but-not-quite psychedelic lettering on their single.

“Flowers in the Rain” and “Massachusetts” are also, interestingly, the first two songs played on BBC Radio 1, one of a Collection of four new radio stations that comprised the BBC’s long overdue concession to the existence of rock and pop music on the part of the BBC and the death knell of the pirate radio stations. You also, during this story, have the murder of Jack McVitie by the Kray Twins, a key event in the unraveling of the dominant system of organized crime in London in the 1960s. In other news, it’s mostly Vietnam War I fear, though you have the memorable instance of Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman attempting to levitate the Pentagon during this story. Which is actually probably a decent way into this one.

One of the problems looking back at the 1960s is that for all we romanticize psychedelia and the hippies, for a wide variety of reasons, nobody wants to go back to Old Times and actually do that again. The October 21, 1967 March on the Pentagon is kind of a key event in this phenomenon. For large swaths of the world, the attempt to levitate it while Ginsberg performed Tibetan chants is simply incomprehensible, and is evidence that however nice an album Sergeant Pepper was, perhaps the whole acid thing went just a little further than is useful. I mean, levitating the Pentagon? Really?

In fact what we have here is a case of failing to understand your audience. Anyone who was tuned in to the psychedelic movement at large would have recognized the Pentagon levitation as an act of guerilla theater in the classic psychedelic vein. Did Hoffman and Ginsberg actually expect to levitate the Pentagon? It’s tough to imagine that they did, given that it’s not like they had a lengthy track record of levitations to go on. I mean, even if you decide to just completely embrace the idea that it is possible to levitate objects via meditation and chanting, nobody starts with the Pentagon. I don’t care how many drugs you’ve done, if you’re actually making efforts at psychic levitation, you don’t start with a colossally large building while the cameras are watching. You start alone, quietly, in your Room, or perhaps in the Basement, and establish that you can actually do this.…

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