Mildly irrelevant aside
Funny this should come up now, I’m painting a thirty-two foot high mural of the view down the valley I was living in in ’74 when Mick Farren visited and memorably said on looking down the burnt sienna and Umber scene of buccolic perfection, “It needs some Vegas neon.”

I think of this as I paint, thinking to subvert the sylvan Vedic vistas before me with a crass blaze of Nickelodeon brash. The valley is one over from the Zen Buddhist monastery, and has its own connections with zen through the library of Allen Watts, which is one of two rain-barrel houses designed by Roger Sommers. Set in a one time ‘deliberate community’ of about six main buildings with various outhouses and built to fool the building inspectors who never discovered the full extent of the habitats grouped in the euk’ knoll on what is now state park. When I was there in ’74 it was a mature 1950′s hippie scene, called ‘Druid Heights’, with Watts, the beat generations’ favorite buddhist Church of England priest wandering around in a robe with a bottle; Roger Sommers, a jazz playing visionary builder, who has in retrospect has become the founder of the Tiny Homes Movement – he studied under Frank Lloyd Wright; Margo St. James the Whore organizer with whom I went on to found the Hookers Ball; The King of Carpenters, a stylish craftsman and his potter wife; and the poet Elsa Gidlow in whose goat house I stayed. In one of two wood shops, lived the landlords son, Tagore, a chippie who went on to be an engineer at Enron, and his girlfriend with whom I got very well, Julie, the classical flautist whom I married. Julie went on to the South Bronx in ’82 and was influential in early Rap.

When I read Mick’s book back then I told him that I had thought of a sequel and would write it. It was from that forgotten story that the Street Lightnin’ Gang (The Graffiti Artists Union, with President for Life, Molly Rodriguez Bode) evolved, leading to the glorious discoveries of World Teleport, that so changed the diesel emissions standards of the world, and leading to cleaner skies everywhere.

My cover art for Mick and Ed's book

Walls: Some of the book. Video: Yippie invasion of the David Frost show 1970, with Mick in full flight heckle.

Exhibition signing-in book

Hi David
Here's Barney Bubbles' own letterpaper when he worked under the name
of Teenburger Designs (the early 1970s). The back of the letterpaper
features an oozing burger; the front of the letterpaper just has the
address printed on it. It's actually printed on square-shaped thin
tissue paper, the kind that burgers get wrapped in.
We had this item up in the Barney Bubbles exhibition we did a few
years ago; you can just about see it in one of the photos of the
exhibition that lie a few kilometers below in your blog!
Best wishes,
Rebecca and Mike

David writes: I think this was the first thing that Barney designed when
he moved into 307 Portobello Road.

1967. Mod meets freak. Here we see the late 20th century at that moment in time when Barney Bubbles first ingested LSD. This touching family scene shows the gang preparing in front of the mirror in my room at Leigh Court, West Kensington, London W14, for the Alexandra Palace all-weekend bash. Barney’s hair is being combed back down, mod style, by Lorry One-day-to-be-Sartorio, to give it that fluff-it-up bouffant, Rod Stewart look. Barney’s dopamine receptor induced glassy eyes stare from a mask painted on his face, on which another mask is to be affixed. He looks to be drying his nail polish. John Muggeridge to the left. I photographed the occasion thinking it to be historic, I was right.

Above the cosy scene is a lamp shade I bought at Conran’s store, Habitat. (Which I seem to remember was in Heal’s, could that be possible?) Barney, at this time, was working at Conran’s design studio and was friendly with a manager there, whom he advised on some purchases for the store. One of his recommendations was this lampshade, because it reminded him of the Perkinje Pattern based Dreammachine we had once considered making. This spinning optical illusion device, the Dreamachine, was invented by Brion Gysin, a writer and performance artist (and associate of William Burroughs), with scientist Ian Sommerville. The Dreammachine was a  stroboscopic flicker device designed to be viewed with the eyes closed and produce visual stimuli.

I had bought the lampshade forgetting about the Dreammachine association, although it seemed familiar, so when Barney asked me, “Y’ going to use the Lampshade then?” I didn’t know what he was talking about. I figured it out and explained that it didn’t spin and the geometry was wrong so it wouldn’t work.

Reproduced here below for new readers who have not investigated the back story, is the post I previously posted explaining the workings of the Dreammachine and the Perkinje Pattern effects.

Perkinje Patterns: Great Flickering Fingers – it’s the Dreammachine

Here’s something for the Hawkwind crowd – how Barney amused himself. Gysin was the guy who taught Burroughs to do cut-ups. Here Gysin describes the lowdown heads-up on one of Barney the Entertainer’s (p)arty tricks. You probably all know that Barney got his cut-up text ideas for that Hawkwind booklet off Bill Burroughs, who in turn worked with and was influenced by poet Brion Gysin. But did you know that one of Barney entertainments used Gysin’s discovery of the Dreamachine? Read all about it here.

Strange News: Key to Hallucinations Found

By Jen Palmares Meadows, Scientific Blogging

Almost fifty years ago, the beat poet Brion Gysin (1916 – 1986), described a visual hallucination that he experienced while riding a bus:

…Had a transcendental storm of colour visions today in the bus going to Marseille. We ran through a long avenue of trees and I closed my eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. I was swept out of time. I was in a world of infinite number. The vision stopped abruptly as we left the trees. Was that a vision? What happened to me? (Brion Gysin, 21 December 1958)

Gysin, a writer and performance artist, though known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, which inspired writers like William S. Burroughs, was also the co-inventor (along with scientist Ian Sommerville) of the Dreamachine, a stroboscopic flicker device designed to be viewed with the eyes closed and produces visual stimuli.

At the end of his documentation, Gysin asks, “Was that a vision? What happened to me?”

PURKINJE PATTERNS

According to Dominic ffytche of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and author of ‘The Hodology of Hallucinations,’ a study recently published in an issue of Cortex, “Fifty years on we are able to answer Gysin’s question.” Gysin’s hallucinations were quite similar to what Jan Purkinje (1787-1869), the father of contemporary neuroscience, experienced as a child.

“I stand in the bright sunlight with closed eyes and face the sun. Then I move my outstretched, somewhat separated, fingers up and down in front of the eyes, so that they are alternately illuminated and shaded. In addition to the uniform yellow-red that one expects with closed eyes, there appear beautiful regular figures that are initially difficult to define but slowly become clearer. When we continue to move the fingers, the figure becomes more complex and fills the whole visual field. (Purkinje, 1819)

When Purkinje moved his fingers, he simulated an effect similar to that of Gysin’s Dreamachine.

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/081123-hallucinations.html

And check this, out.

http://pendu.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/william-s-burroughs-brion-gysin-the-cut-ups/#comment-13

• Rebeca and Mike say: The Dreamachine eh? Looking at stuff with your eyes closed eh?Okay then, there was a poster Barney did for the fictitious band ‘The Image’ (members of the band were Roger, Pete, Colin, Roy and Wöll). The poster featured a silhouette of a guitar-weilding guy, and was printed in two strong colours (there are different colour variations of this poster). You have to stare for a while at a star-shaped badge the guitar guy is wearing and then shut your eyes. Low and behold, due to the magic of after-imagery, ‘The Image’ of a pop star you’ve just been looking at appears, as if on the back of your eyelids!

  Before we’d come across this poster, we’d used a slightly similar after-image technique for a fashion shoot we did for Tank magazine in London. You stared at green tights (for example) and when you’d charged your eyeballs up enough you looked over to the photograph of the girl, and all of a sudden she was wearing pink tights!

• The Wöll, in RandM’s comment above is my pseudonym of the time. This ‘Image’ poster is another in the co-operative pieces Fulcher and I worked on together and which are only half credited in gorman’s ‘Reasons.’ In the absence of any obliging personnel to fulfill our grand ideas of impresariodom, we were inventing the band, The Image, in reverse, graphics first then the band.

hi David. well, we plunged into the Barney Bubbles tombola and pulled out this item for you. hopefully your readers will enjoy seeing this.

okay… so… this is an advert Barney designed for Elvis Costello’s LP ‘This Years Model’ 1978. this is one of a series of adverts that Barney designed for the LP, all were on different themes. this one (as you can see) is themed ‘Drugs’. the pic is big enough for you folks to be able to read the labels and have a go at decoding it; we can argue between ourselves in the comments department over who is who and what means what, and warm Siberia up a bit.

of immediate interest to Hawkwind readers might be that Nik Turner and Lemmy both make an appearance in this Elvis Costello advert (that’s Nik in the top middle picture, and Lemmy is name-checked under the top right picture).

David W writes: Down in the comments dungeon it is explained that the top right picture is of Little Tony, not Hawkwind’s Lemmy although that is what the caption implies.

I would expect that this was designed as a center spread with no split, and got shoved elsewhere by Jarvis in production, I don’t think Barney would have designed an everything-centred layout if he had known it was going to be split. Factis, if I recall aright, it was a bit unusual for the Ol’boy to center anything if he could help it. So prove me wrong. I remember having some circles with type in them, I asked “Flush left or centred?” and he answered quick as a spark, “Flush left!” with the implied “Of course, you idiot.”

*Who may, in due course, resend another shot of this ad, perhaps with a sheet of glass on top for extra flatness, with the full-frontal of Nik showing in the across-the-back split at the fold so that our Nik T fans can admire his charm.

Outraged Barnophiles gibe: there’s a lot of centred barney texts, like there’s a lot of ranged left (or right) texts.

there’s also a lot of barney design that is willfully designed to not fit the format…

DW: And so it is that wise things are said that refute my mumblings and wise me up – especially when used with the word ‘wilfully’ to describe The B. Wilfull is of the essence.

RM: glass?

DW: Ok, no glass then, how ’bout showing all the ink that is currently hid by overlapping pages?

RM: words split by a fold?

boy, you is gettin old and cranky

DW: Got that right. I called myself ‘Eric Stodge’ for a reason.

RM: but, we are still friends okay! LOL!