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Far Out Company Countercultural rarity visual overload Keeping it cosmic.

09/06/2026

From the BBC Man Alive series, 1970, about the “hippie trail” which generally ran from London → Amsterdam → Istanbul → Tehran → Kabul → India → Kathmandu.

The final stop on the hippie trail was Freak Street, officially known as Jhochhen Tole in Kathmandu. It was a legal cannabis hub until 1973, when the Nepali government banned cannabis and o***m under pressure from the U.S. government and revoked the visas of long-term “freaks.”

09/05/2026

Pathé footage from the office of underground newspaper Frendz circa 1971, featuring Baroness Rosie Boycott, who’s now a member of the House of Lords in the UK Parliament.

Boycott founded the groundbreaking feminist magazine Spare Rib in the year following this footage. Then in 1973, she was jailed in Thailand for 18 days for smuggling cannabis, an experience she wrote a book about in 1984. In the ‘90s she was editor of the UK edition of Esquire, and in 2018 she was nominated for a life peerage (as opposed to hereditary peerage) in the House of Lords.

08/29/2026

From ‘Getting It Straight in Notting Hill Gate’ (1970) by Joe Gannon, featuring pop/op-art artist Larry Smart and footage of the famous Portobello Road street market. The title comes from the Quintessence song ‘Notting Hill Gate’ (“We’re getting it straight in Notting Hill Gate / We all sit around and meditate..”).

Smart is best known for his psychedelic portraits of music legends like Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon. He was influenced by Islamic geometry from his childhood in Baghdad. In the period shown here he was trading his mandala paintings for food at a local Indian vegetarian restaurant.

Soon after this he spent spent a year living at George Harrison’s 120-room Friar Park mansion, painting murals and a trompe l’oeil (art technique that uses realistic imagery to create the illusion of three-dimensional depth). Later in the mid ‘70s he designed the Atomhenge set for Hawkwind, and in the ‘90s he designed packaging for Whole Earth Foods.

08/23/2026

Lynn Darnton and the Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom, 1968 vs 1978, from the BBC's Everyman series.

In 1967, Lynn Darnton was living in North London with members of The Exploding Galaxy, an experimental dance/performance collective organized by Filipino kinetic artist David Medalla. But he was allegedly kicked out for cannabis use, which was strictly forbidden.

He then established The Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom, whose name came from Andrija Puharich's 1959 psychedelic classic 'The Sacred Mushroom: Key to the Door of Eternity.' In '68 the Tribe established a rural commune in Suffolk, which International Times called "the first rural hippy commune."

I'm pretty sure the beginning footage here is from a ritual performance at London's Middle Earth psychedelic club. Another performance of theirs there was raided by police. And later a group of Covent Garden market porters stormed the place with axes and box hooks because they heard a (false) rumor that the group was about to sacrifice a child.

Darnton wrote an article in Oz #31 called "Magick Mushroom," and he appears to have been one of the first people in England to investigate and experiment with indigenous psilocybin mushrooms. He dried them by a fire and ate them with jam.

In more recent years, Darnton has been a meditation teacher in the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT).

08/09/2026

From ‘Everybody Rides the Carousel’ (1976) by Faith and John Hubley, featuring the voice of Meryl Streep.

The Hubleys are often considered the most important figures in American independent animation. John Hubley started his career at Disney, art directing ‘Fantasia’ among others, and then quit and created Mr. Magoo at UPA. In the ‘50s he was forced to leave UPA after refusing to denounce communism, and he opened an independent studio with his wife Faith. Together they created dozens of award-winning films while also making iconic early-‘70s shorts for Sesame Street.

Their films often used unscripted, improvised dialogue, and an unusual technique where drawings on paper were illuminated from below (rather than a camera taking pictures of paintings on celluloid). They often collaborated with jazz musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Quincy Jones, and liked to explore complex psychological theories. They also taught a class at Yale called “The Visualization of Abstract Themes.”

‘Everybody Rides the Carousel’ follows the eight stages of human development according to psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (who coined the phrase “identity crisis”). It was broadcast on CBS on September 10, 1976.

Candid shots from the streets of Cambridge, MA circa 1971, by Nick DeWolf. DeWolf went to MIT and co-founded Teradyne (N...
08/07/2026

Candid shots from the streets of Cambridge, MA circa 1971, by Nick DeWolf.

DeWolf went to MIT and co-founded Teradyne (Nasdaq: TER), a maker of automatic test equipment with customers like Samsung, Intel and Qualcomm. He left Teradyne in 1971 after it went public and moved to Aspen, where he collaborated with artist Travis Fulton to make the world’s first computerized “dancing fountain” which will not repeat the same 20-minute pattern for 75,000 years. He also designed a computer system without hard disks or fans which booted up in seconds.

Throughout all this he was a compulsive photographer who carried a camera constantly and took remarkable photographs. There are over 145,000 of them uploaded to his archive on Flickr.

[Soundtrack by Boston’s Eden’s Children]

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