I didn't realize the City of San Francisco canceled its 4/20 celebration this year due to lack of funding (its budget blown on free booze and needles for the homeless, I suppose) and a lack of corporate sponsorships.
Corporate sponsorships? In the heart of the Haight?
Nonetheless, the Church of Ambrosia rescued the celebration. Ambrosia is inevitably nondenominational and promotes “all entheogenic plants, with a focus on Cannabis and Magic Mushrooms."
That's from the introduction to this delightful piece in the June edition of Spectator World that focuses on the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and psychedelic art.
Here's one excerpt, which tells me pretty much everything I've ever cared to know about psychedelic art.
[M]ost psychedelic artists didn’t seek to profit from their creations. The major poster artists of the period — Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse and Wes Wilson, known colloquially as the “Big Five” — created their elaborate visuals predominantly for events: concerts, sit-ins and parties where one might be subject to an electric-Kool-Aid-acid test (which is a fun way of saying LSD spiking). People would rip the posters off the wall and take them home with them simply because they looked cool, with Wes Wilson popularizing the hallucinogenic font which gave the appearance of melting in real time.
Was the psychedelic art movement worth it?
Why not leave psychedelic art in its naive and slightly unsophisticated aesthetic cocoon? Its goofiness and ephemerality are what made it
Amelia Butler-Gallie
