Is LSD Good for You? Oh the possibilities! I was just finishing up Tom Wolfe's trippy "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" when I ran into this article on the renewed interest in the therapeutic potential of LSD. Fun stuff. Sure Lysergic Acid Diethylamide started out in the 1940s as a drug under investigation for specific psychiatric uses, but it quickly took on a psychedelic life of its own...good for you in the mind expanding, horizon broadening sense. Oh to be on the bus! If medical marijuana is controversial, I don't really see this going over well. But if it treats really bad cluster headaches better than anything else, how can you deny someone? On an ophthalmology related note... marijuana can lower intraocular pressure and therefore be used to help treat glaucoma. Plus, cocaine has long been used (though I don't think anymore) as a topical anesthetic for eye surgeries. Who says recreational drugs aren't useful?!?
Last night I saw a dance performance that absolutely blew my mind (and I wasn't on any drugs). It was amazing....like laugh out loud, speechless, crazy amazing. The work was called "Caught", by the Parsons Dance Company, and it featured a male dancer who essentially seemed to levitate due to extraordinary skill and the use of strobe lights. Strobe lights! Just like they used with the Grateful Dead at Ken Kesey's Acid Tests with his Merry Pranksters. Awesome! There was some other really great dancing, but nothing else quite as innovative (of course the dance was first choreographed in 1982, so I'm a little late to the party). Sadly the youtube video just doesn't do it justice at all. I mean, that's what it looks like, but you've gotta see it live. It reminded me of this equally jaw dropping exhibit I saw at the Guggenheim, "I Want to Believe" by Cai Guo-Qiang. The main work "Inopportune: Stage One" depicted a car bomb explosion created by nine cars somersaulting up the atrium with lights radiating out in every direction. Insane. Images suspended in time...just as if they were viewed under a strobe light...or maybe on an acid trip. Turn on, tune in, heal?
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