Erik Davis: the beatification of blotter art

Spotlight On

What can be scarier than Halloween ghouls? How about a trip through the LSD underground?

Today, the Spotlight shines On Erik Davis, and this trip is no bummer. Erik is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher in San Francisco. He is the author, most recently, of Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium_, a study of LSD blotter art. And that’s what he’s joined us to talk about.

Erik also wrote one of my favorite books, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. His scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in many books, magazines, and journals. He is also one of the founders of Alembic, a center in Berkeley, California, devoted to meditation, movement, and visionary arts and culture.

Enjoy our talk about the hysteria surrounding LSD, the cultural significance and risks of the LSD blotter art trade, as well as the intersection between that art and the illicit drug market.

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Dig Deeper

• Visit Erik Davis at techgnosis.com
• Subscribe to Erik Davis’s newsletter Burning Shore at burningshore.com
• Purchase Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium and other books by Erik Davis from MIT Press, Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powell’s
• Eight LSD Blotters That Defined Psychedelic Culture
• Inside the LSD Museum That the DEA Somehow Hasn’t Torn to the Ground
• ‘I’m high as a Georgia pine’: Dock Ellis’s no-hitter on LSD, 50 years on
• Dig into this episode’s complete show notes at spotlightonpodcast.com

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