Penned by Neo-Beat poet-author of The Magick Papers, actor-rocker Antonio Pineda
Dedicated to the memory of Paul Gaylon Ennis, psychedelic activist and revolutionary who passed away in SF on February 18, 2022 at 7:25pm. You live forevermore in our thoughts and love.
Once upon a misty morning in the merry month of May, I wandered starry-eyed and laughing through the Spanish-speaking streets of the Mission district. As I strode on 20th Street, I saw in the distance an apparition enshrouded in fog. The 3-story Victorian edifice possessed an air of magic and mystery. I had arrived at the site of the Institute of illegal Images.
I climbed the stairs to the front door and knocked. The door swung open. I was greeted by the curator of this most extraordinary museum, Mark McCloud. He sported shoulder length salt and pepper hair, a trim beard, and a psychedelic shirt of many hues.
Mark hit San Francisco in 1965 as a student and decided he would move here. The Psychedelic Experience was instrumental to his foundation as an artist chronicling the historical importance of the counterculture. Framed images of blotter art festooned the walls. Literally millions of inactive doses of LSD are captured in all their glory. Mark walked me to the front windows, and pointed at an innocuous room that looked down opposite his house.
“The Police set up shop there. They filmed and photographed everybody who came and went. Law enforcement had construed a tree that charted all my friends as co-conspirators, and assigned them positions like consigliere, distributors, associates, etc. I was the kingpin of a massive criminal conspiracy that trafficked in LSD.
“Art is not a crime. The cops thought that this was a reshoot of The Godfather or something. They tapped my phone and rooted through my garbage. Eventually they tried to stitch me up for life imprisonment. I was brought to trial on trumped-up charges. My lawyer Dorn Weinberg asserted my work was art, and not crime. The gods smiled on me, and I went free.”
Mark drew my attention to a most popular print, Alice Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland based on the children’s fantasy fiction by Lewis Carroll. “Alice was a response to my struggles with law enforcement.”
Mark contemplated a celebrated artwork, the bicycle ride, that commemorated his friend and mentor Dr. Albert Hoffman’s mythic bicycle ride after accidentally ingesting a minute quantity of LSD during his laboratory experiments in 1943. He had discovered this chemical compound in 1938, and Sandoz produced and sold the first tablets in 1947 as an antidote to alcoholism, and other psychological disorders.
Mark had the privilege of attending the 100 year birthday of Dr. Hoffman. On January 13-15 2006: LSD Problem Child and Wonder Drug International Symposium was celebrated in Basel, Switzerland. Swiss President Moritz Leuenberger congratulated the scientist on his centenary, hailing him as a great researcher of human consciousness.
Acid tablets leaked out to the art underground. Aldous Huxley extolled it’s wonders, and ingested it on his deathbed in order to pass on into eternity. Jasper John and Andy Warhol were influenced by it in their paintings. Tom Wolfe would write about it in his book , The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.
Acid became the recreational drug of choice among the hippies of the counterculture. It was prolific in it’s influence on music, poetry, prose, and politics. Love is the drug.
Flashback: Mark had previously offered to introduce me to the writer Joel Selvin. I had followed Selvin’s career as a music-entertainment- arts critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. Joel was also the author of; Summer of Love, LSD, and the Wild Wild West, one of the most revealing and important books about the counterculture.
Joel also wrote the screenplay for Born in Chicago, and Nick Gravenites famously composed the eponymous paean to the Chicago blues scene. Produced and co-directed by Bob Sarles and John Anderson, the film follows the adventures of young white bluesmen Mike Bloomfield, Barry Goldberg, Paul Butterfield and others who explored the Chicago blues milieu. They learned to live the blues from Little Walter, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Buddy Guy and a star cast of bluesmen. They absorbed a black musical genre, and brought it back to California reintroducing a great American tradition to a young white audience.
Many of the hard drinking, hard living bluesmen were introduced to LSD by the aspiring white bluesmen, ushering in a period of psychedelic blues. Sarles also produced : Sweet Blues, a Film About Mike Bloomfield, and has a reputation as being a premiere film documentarian of the blues.
Mark invited Joel and I to dinner at Bruno’s, a hip venue in the Mission where between drinks and good cheer, Joel regaled us with stories about the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and his contemporaries at the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle and Ralph J. Gleason.
It was a glorious era for journalism. A new style was being forged, bringing jazz, rock, and the San Francisco Sound to the attention of a new audience, mixed with a dash of civil rights and lysergic liberalism.
McCloud and Tim Tyler are currently working on a film with the working title, The Secret History of the LSD Drug Trade. Mark is also developing two books for publication. One to be published by MIT Press is a comprehensive history of the development of the Blotteratti, and the relevance of blotter acid art. The other is a coffee table style book with images of the most important pieces of blotter art prized by collectors.
As we emerge from the underground kingdom of Chez McCloud, evening stars are coursing through the skies, and we strike out through the streets of the Mission district where I grew up. The demographics have changed, the influx of the new gold rush of Silicon Valley has transformed the neighborhood. Latinos and African Americans have been displaced by the artificially high real estate values where the average house Is worth a million dollars and change. McCloud The Godfather of the Mission makes me an offer I can’t refuse. Mark and I stride toward his favorite taqueria, populated by the coolest of the cool, where the Mexican beer is blond with a slice of lemon, the tacos al pastor succulent, and the diners speak Spanish.
[NOTE: HSV edited the first 6 paragraphs for space and quotation accuracy].
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