Thursday, July 8, 2010

TNS#71: Terence McKenna Retrospective

TheNextStep show #71 was taped 4/14/10, close to the tenth anniversary of the passing of Terence McKenna. The show was supposed to feature guests David Jay Brown and Robert Forte, however due to the upcoming maps.org Psychedelic Science Conference that weekend, both had to cancel on short notice. Very short notice... the producer's nightmare! Fortunately Marty Wasserman who was slated to direct the show filled in as an ad hoc interviewer, and fortunately I'd done my homework and had made film clips from The Alchemist's Dream (featuring Terence) and had pages of notes from his various books. So, Marty interviewed ME about Terence's life and work, and the show went on - not what I had in mind but I'd like to think we pulled it off reasonably well. I really enjoyed reading through his books Food of the Gods, Archaic Revival and Invisible Landscape in preparing for the show... all classics! I'd read through Invisible Landscape in the early 80's but had forgotten the great diagrams he included depicting the chemical make-up of various neuro-transmitters,. and showing how close they are to various entheogens... like serotonin and psilocybin for instance.
From Wikipedia:
Terence Kemp McKenna (11/16/46 – 4/3/2000) was an American author, public speaker, metaphysician, psychonaut, philosopher, ethnobotanist, art historian, and self-described anarchist, anti-materialist, environmentalist, feminist, Platonist and skeptic. During his lifetime he was noted for his knowledge of psychedelics, metaphysics, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, mysticism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, biology, geology, physics, phenomenology, and his concept of novelty theory.