kilgoretrout

V.A.L.I.S. alien satellite broadcasting its "ultimate truth beam" into a night time United States. For original full-res version go directly to: http://i268.photobucket.com/albums/jj20/bunnyhoover/VALIS-RadioFreeAlbemuth.jpg Or see the nice PDF about the film with this and other pics at http://www.radiofreealbemuth.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/media/Film&Festivals21_RFA_hi.pdf An early "first draft" of the true story about his Dick's Gnostic "psychic vision"/"pink beam brain transmission" , later to be even more stunningly told in his VALIS trilogy, Philip K Dick himself is a character in "Radio Free Albemuth" which is complete (or nearly so) and should soon be in theaters as the most mind-blowing and authentic PKD film adaptation yet. It also features Alison Morriset as rock singer Sylvia, who may well save the world. (You may recall her brief but really brilliant and intense cameo as God in the film"DOGMA" a few years ago, which also featured George Carlin's final film appearance, among other notables. ) Official site.. many great photos... links to other media at sites that are pretty cool in themselves and where you can find alot of other content worth checking out... really nicely beautiful "Dark" & hip web page design.... great example how to do it well: http://www.radiofreealbemuth.com/blog/ Best most in-depth article Ive seen about it, interview with director http://www.dickien.fr/dossiers/johnalansimon/john-alan-simon-2008.html Turns out both the director and star playing main character of the story (the record store clerk, not PKD) have PKD's birthday... a very good omen! Director says there were lots of happy accidents and coincidences, making him feel like the project was being watched over by benificent otherworldly forces. Well I'm not surprised! There is so much PKD stuff around already and also in the works, I wonder if we are in fact all living in some virtual reality or after-death cryonic suspension mind-dream in the distant future from now belonging to someone who wished to be an SF author in our era (see UBIK, another PKD book currently in production). Perhaps we are ALL a part of HIS VR-dream! In UBIK the characters all start noticing weird inexplicable reality modifications referencing the name and life of this guy that is supposed to be dead, kinda like us and PKD now! Also coming soon: The Adjustment Bureau (September 17, starring Mat Damon) Flow My Tears The Policeman Said

Terry Gilliam's latest "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus" Also, "Southland Tales" (from director of Donnie Darko) You MUST see both of these tripping!!!

:clapping: Hey, thanks Afgin! Really really nice! Strongly enhanced my tedious afternoon sitting at the computer writing code. I am going to have to stay late tonight to help the project meet a milestone, and was a little bummed, but this really helped brighten my attitude alot! But too short! I have several hours still to go! Anything else on tap that you can link us to that might help energize things so I can finish and get out and enjoy the beautiful summer evening a bit sooner?

So to highlight this question, added in an edit of the above: Are there any live and/or extended version of When Shall I Be Free or of this record available? Does anyone have any recommendations?

Really? It engages me every time, and then when I get to ...And Nothing Is Lost, leading into When Shall I Be Free and the Stamen Of The Shamen... it puts me into a highly emotional trancelike state... The melancholy piano line at the end of And Nothing Is Lost... totally enrapturing... and When Shall I Be Free is just SO beautiful and moving and deep in my opinion.... Clearly this is the intended centerpiece of the record... I feel it was all composed that way quite deliberately... I think of the whole rest of the album before that as preparing you for this section. The hypnotic slow washes and the repetition of the first line of the lyric over and over, then building and swirling and building and swirling.. the muttered voices... then in a sort of musical orgasm BOOM! the drums and Bass crash in and those glorious circular arabic guitar filligrees! Then there's the couple of terribly sweet bars when the whole background beat and every else drops out at 3:05 except for the vocals in beautiful double-harmony, along with that rolling very Pink Floyd-esque Bass/Guitar unison vamp that then drop-slides down an octave as the lyric is repeated once more, then all the other parts suddenly come back and do their thing till the end. Wow! And Stamen of he Shamen - what a track! That bassline with the Mexican-esque trumpet section floating over top... somehow it all just really clicks together SOOOO perfectly and captures my attention and my heart. And trumpets! Who would have expected trumpets! Highly dramatic as no natural wind instruments have been used up to this point I do not believe, at least not so front-and-center... providing for a great contrast that really tickles our organic neurons after all the electronics. Very surprising to hear no matter how often I listen to it... still totally unexpected, and something about the emotional character of the melodic musical composition here just gives me goosebumps and makes me almost want to cry while at the same time feel very happy. I don't know how to explain it and I don't know how the hell he came up with this, but there it is. It is simultaneously melancholy, fascination-trance, celebratory and so damn FIERCE! all at the same time. Utterly phenomenal and extremely touching. Pure genius. Why these 4 short simple lines of lyric, which is the entire lyric, repeated over and over like a hypnotic mantra (no, not like a mantra, it *IS* a mantra!) giving more proof that some sort of divine inspiration was clearly at work here: When shall I be free? When I shall cease to be. No more I, but we... in perfect harmony What I would give to have been in a big tripping crowd peaking at 2AM at some festival , hearing/seeing this song performed live (hopefully in an extended version? (ARE THERE ANY EXTENDED VERSIONS floating around?)... I bet it would have been a transformative experience like no other!

I am so very sad to see him stop. Right after I just discovered him via the new album so generously given to us free. I think it is brilliant! What a drag! Anyway, fans probably already know about this but it looks like many previous albums, as well as compilations he edited are available to download in multiple formats here: http://www.ektoplazm.com/profiles/jikkenteki/

Did you mean to say THX1138 ??? Yes, you should seek that out, it is quite outstanding.

I disagree. The trips were not just "Oh, wow" visuals that they made then stuck some ad-hoc story around. There WAS meaning and content in them related to the story. I think the plot gave the visuals alot more depth and power. What I wrote above about WHY Blueberry has this "monster" in him... and the appearance of the redemptive, angelic figure near the end, forgiving him... that I thought was so unexpected and absolutely moving, just deeply touching and breathtakingly executed... all of the trip sequences were really preparing you for THAT moment... did no one else notice that? That emotional impact would have been absent if these sequences were just a bunch of wild trippy graphics in a music video. And didn't you notice the SOUND processing and MUSIC during these sequences? It was absolutely stunning, almost as impressive and complex and psychedelic as the visuals. You must not have been paying very close attention... It would have really reduced the impact of the visuals to have heard only some stupid "thump thump thump thump" generic techno track behind these. The connections between the story, the trip visuals, and the soundtrack/music made for one very powerful whole in these sequences. Well, I think the film ended up with a bit of a hybrid. Director Jan Kounen spend a year being given trips by Peruvian shamen before making this, hence the visualizations are like Ayahuasca, which is what the Peruvians use. HOWEVER, that is never explicitly spoken of in the film.... there is brief shot in the film. I think inside a cave where they have perhaps been harvested and stored I guess, of the "Treasure" of the indians.... and in that that shot we CLEARLY see hundreds of PEYOTE cactuses. So explicitly the film is saying it is Peyote... but those who have done them both would say the experiences shown are far more like Ayahuasca than Peyote.

I was wondering about that; well, I'll have to check it out, then. Thanks.

Yea, I watched the DVD at home alone, sound on the stereo turned up.... did a good sized dose of 2C-I, and the whole thing really came together for me... I was blown away to tell the truth... I thought the "bad" parts were just deliberately done that way to be funny as a way of the film poking fun at itself for using the tired out old "Western" genre as a framework. And the trip sequences... OH... MY... GOD... I didn't even know what I was seeing it was so complex. But I could follow the emotional intent of what was happening .I had to watch it again a few days later. But I certainly felt powerfully impacted after it was over. Ignore the German guy (Eddie Izzard) or just see the humor in the character - why do you think they chose a comedian? - ancient Ernest Borgnine's hackneyed overacting - again a deliberate and self-ironical "bad" choice. Straight you just find these elements annoying. Tripping you intuitively understand what the film maker is doing... you feel let "IN" on the joke... and you NOTICE all the little signposts saying "ignore all this Western silliness, this film is really about something much deeper", like how it begins with the Eagle symbolism. The story they are telling is Blueberry's mystery of this horrible dark monster he sees in himself on the first trip, and then his battle with it, through it, to finally see the suppressed truth about what really happened to him those many years ago, which unlocks and releases him, so he is now free of his demon and can be happy at last, all with the aid of the "Treasure" of the Indians, which is not gold (stupid German Banker jerk!) but rather PEYOTE!!!! (although the experiences seem more like what to expect on Ayahuasca). INCIDENTALLY - Jan Kounen, maker of Blueberry in fact has another film: "Other Worlds" that documents Ayahuasca Shamanism... that is the subject of Other Worlds, which also includes some CGI Trip animations. Some info about it and images and I think mabe even clips at Kounen's site: http://jankounen.com Apparently the movie DVD it is hard to find find, you can order from overseas places, it has english subtitles, there is some information here: http://ayahuasca.tribe.net/thread/8965e39d...49-37166584c265 about where you might find it. BONUS: in the middle of the above link there is a LONG writeup from Kounen himself about his experiences with shamen in peru researching for Blueberry, as well as thoughts on the nature of the mind, etc. Pretty interesting.

Well yea, there were some sucky elements to it... some bad acting... some stupid dialogue. Actually there were a couple of other shorter hallucinatory sequences in addition to the main ones, I think... havent seen it for a while... one involving smoking something I think? I like how it starts with the emblem of the spirit journey - the Eagle - flying right in your face then going on an extended flight over some really trippy & spectacular landscapes. Did you get.. SPOILER ALERT! ... how the dead girl's spirit makes an appearance and forgives Blueberry? I thought that was quite unexpected and absolutely beautifully handled, didn't you think? That was really the core of the film... Blueberry has this darkness in him he cannot understand or explain that seems to keep attracting trouble. But his psychedelic experiences finally succeed in unlocking the memories, at which point the above happens, and he is emotionally healed. And at the same time... within that trip somehow his enemy who has vowed to kill him, dies due to whatever happened to him during his trip I guess. THAT is the arc of the story. And it sure seems to me that such an arc is in fact "about" the power of psychedelics to heal one's mind and spirit (or in the case of the bad guy, give him what he deserves). But yea, there was also a bunch of B-grade western stuff in it too.

Nice thread.. if I had more time I would post a few of my own. But given the thread title, I just had to turn folks on to these places... you MUST check out some of the videos (see the sites' store links) that have been made by artists working in "Music Visualization"... some of them look utterly phenomenal http://www.centerforvisualmusic.org/ http://www.iotacenter.org/ http://www.soundingvisual.com/visualmusic/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Belson http://www.siggraph.org/artdesign/profile/...ey/whitney.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_music

You are absolutely correct. I just had on my "Professional Film Reviewers" hat, and was acting like big-ass know-it-all who hates everything. Actually I love Altered States, you are right about it being a work of Surrealism, not an attempt to communicate realistic trips. More a poetical allegory of tripping, if that is the right expression. And yes, the trips visualizations really are rather brilliant works of art, made as you point out with only photographic techniques. But I guess it is too "fringe" to ever be released in Blu-Ray, unfortunately.

I have watched many films tripping... usually a moderate dose so I can still follow the story line, more or less, and especially if it is at a theatre so I can deal with all the "normals" easier. But it is not a waste at all. ( I can always trip at home with just music whenever I want) Especially movies with some psychedelic or highly intense aspect to the story, you can really become far more focused and emotionally involved, and it seems more like an experience you had yourself rather than something you just watched remotely on a screen. And you can also better perceive some of the normally hidden details or implications that the director or writer or visual artists put in that would normally go right past you... while tripping these things for some reason seem to highlight themselves to you. But mushrooms are far to reality bending, usually not a good idea... LSD in as I said in only moderate doses. Best thing for this I have found is 2C-I... enhances visual and emotional intensity, without all the side-branching thought processes of other substances. The best is when you can get a ride to an actual theatre with a huge screen and sound system and nice comfy seats you can just sink into... and go at a time when there is likely to be only a few other people in the theatre. Then on a psychedelic a really intense or visual film can be amazing. SIT CLOSE! so that you are totally enveloped in the movie. And you always have the rest of the trip to do other stuff...

Closest thing I could find was in the shop at Jan Kounen's own website (jankounen.com CHECK IT OUT! LOTS OF COOL STUFF!)... a pointer to a 2-disc collectors edition apparently only sold by the French Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000...iteofficielj-21 but it is not Blueray or HD. And unfortunately Altered States is also NOT available Blueray... that would be really nice... some of the trips DO have a phenomenal and hypnotic level of visual detail... like the "Turning Into Sand And Being Blown Away" sequence.... whoa! Bet that would look just stunning on a 60" HD screen in your living room!