(NP) "Any time the music on the radio starts to sound like rubbish, it's time to take some LSD" - Owsley

[Joseph Tracy]

Great story.  I fear he is wasting greater talents by doing the art.   
I liked his relevant little essay on TV
Children's Television




The programming on so called "children's television" is the single  
most societally destructive activity ever developed. Programs such as  
Sesame Street are a passive, non-interactive activity. This is most  
dangerous to young children under the age of 8 years. The human child  
has no time to waste during these formative years. The only way  
children learn is while engaged in ACTIVE interaction with adults and  
other children. We are observing the rapid breakdown of the society  
around us. Many people recognize that it is somehow related to TV,  
but usually blame content. Content isn't the determining factor, it  
is the passive nature of the medium. Look at kids in front of the  
tube. Glassy eyes fixed on the images. PASSIVE. Children have been  
tested and it has been shown they don't learn from Sesame Street.  
Except, of course, they learn to engage in TV-watching...

All children's television falls into this category, not just Sesame  
St. The cartoons, which many adults object to, aren't directly  
destructive to the kids because of the violence, but because during  
the time they are engaged in TV-watching they don't learn the things  
required to be a fully developed human. Later, when the kids are  
older, the violence might be looked on as acceptable behaviour. This  
would be due to the lack of socialisation from the earlier TV  
watching, normal kids wouldn't accept it. If you remember, there were  
cases of so-called"feral children" discovered from time to time who  
were thought to have been nurtured by animals. These children were  
found to be unable to learn to talk and to interact with others in a  
normal human fashion.

There are "windows" of time in which certain skills must be learned  
by children, and if these windows close, then the child will never  
learn those skills. So it is that we have all those kids out there  
who behave as though they were incapable of understanding how to  
live. They don't, and the scary thing is, it may not be possible now  
for them to learn. Most people don't understand this. The nearest  
thing to a description of the effect would be found amongst Marshall  
MacLuhan's works. So most think I am some sort of ratbag for being  
against children's TV. They have become dependent upon it to support  
their lifestyle, like an addictive drug. I have given the whole  
matter a great deal of thought.

I was a TV broadcast engineer for many years, and still hold the  
highest class of license the US gov't issues. I am old enough so that  
I first had a TV in my home when I was 13. NO kids in those days had  
what is now referred to as "dyslexia". Everybody could read. Of  
course some were much faster and better readers than others, But...  
EVERYONE could read. Nowadays they claim up to 40% of kids in the US  
and 50+% in Australia are extremely deficient in reading skills and a  
significant number can't read at all.

The Countess Montessori, who developed a complete structure for  
teaching based on careful observations of babies and small children,  
first noted the time slots, or windows, for learning different  
skills, and incorporated them into her system of schooling. The whole  
picture is sort of MacLuhanesque, in that it is the activity (or lack  
thereof), rather than the content which is at the core of the  
problem. Most people are too taken in by content and so don't  
understand the effect of the media itself, which as MacLuhan pointed  
out, is totally independent of content (cf. "Gutenberg Galaxy" and  
"The Medium is the Message").

Phil Lesh has a few words to share on this subject on his page at  
Dead Net.

On Mar 12, 2009, at 12:50 AM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> http://hightimes.com/news/ht_admin/3520
>
> The small, barefoot man in black T-shirt and blue jeans barely rates a
> second glance from the other Starbucks patrons in downtown San Rafael,
> although he is one of the men who virtually made the '60s. Because
> Augustus Owsley Stanley III has spent his life avoiding photographs,
> few people would know what he looks like.
>
> The name Owsley became a noun that appears in the Oxford dictionary as
> English street slang for good acid. It is the most famous brand name
> in LSD history. Probably the first private individual to manufacture
> the psychedelic, "Owsley" is a folk hero of the counterculture,
> celebrated in songs by the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan.
>
> For more than 20 years, Stanley -- at 72, still known as the Bear --
> has been living with his wife, Sheila, off the grid, in the outback of
> Queensland, Australia, where he makes small gold and enamel sculptures
> and keeps in touch with the world through the Internet.
>