History of manufactured consumerism

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Consumerism: an Historical Perspective PDF Print E-mail
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by Sharon Beder
21 February 2009
Image The Pacific Ecologist, whence this article came, provided this editorial note: Sharon Beder explores the history of consumer societies from the 1920s when over-production of goods exceeded demand. Instead of stabilising the economy, reducing working hours, and sharing work around, which would have brought more leisure time for all, industrialists decided to expand markets by promoting consumerism to the working classes. The social decision to produce unlimited quantities of goods rather than leisure, nurtured wastefulness, obsolescence, and inefficiency and created the foundation for our modern consumer culture. People were trained to be both workers and consumers in a culture of work and spend.

Consumption was promoted through advertising as a "democracy of goods" and used to pacify political unrest among workers. With the help of marketers and advertisers exploiting the idea of consumer goods as status symbols, workers were manipulated into being avaricious consumers who could be trusted "to spend more rather than work less." But if we admired wisdom above wealth, and compassion and cooperation above competition, we could undermine the motivation to consume.

The development of consumer societies meant the erosion of traditional values and attitudes of thrift and prudence. Expanding consumption was necessary to create markets for the fruits of rising production. Ironically this "required the nurture of qualities like wastefulness, self-indulgence, and artificial obsolescence, which directly negated or undermined the values of efficiency" and the Protestant Ethic that had originally nurtured capitalism.1 Advertisers sought to redefine people's needs, encourage their wants and offer solutions to them via goods produced by corporations rather than allowing people to identify and solve their own problems, or to look to each other for solutions. 2

Consumerism also played a major role in legitimising a social system which rewards businessmen and top corporate executives with incomes many times those of ordinary workers. The consumer society gives ordinary workers some access to the good life. Surrounded by the bounty of their work-the television set, stereo, car, computer, white goods-they are less likely to question conditions of their work, the way it dominates their life, and the lack of power they have as workers. Advertisers constantly tell them these are the fruits of success, that this is what life is all about. To question a system that delivers such plenty would seem perverse.

Over-production and the shorter working week

The growth in production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries required growing markets. This meant expanding the consuming class beyond the middle and upper classes to include the working classes. Production between 1860 and 1920 increased by 12 to 14 times in the US while the population only increased three times.3 Supply outstripped demand and problems of scarcity were replaced by problems of how to create more demand.

By the early 1920s, when American markets were reaching saturation, "over-production" and lack of consumer demand were blamed for recession. More goods were being produced than a population with "set habits and means" could consume.4 There were two schools of thought about how this problem should be solved. One was that work hours should be decreased and the economy stabilised so production met current needs and work was shared around. This view was held by intellectuals, labour leaders, reformers, educators and religious leaders. In America and in Europe, it was commonly believed consumer desires had limits that could be reached and production beyond those limits would result in increased leisure time for all. 5

The opposing view, mainly held by business people and economists, was over-production could and should be solved by increasing consumption so economic growth could continue. Manufacturers needed to continually expand production so as to increase their profits. Employers were also afraid of such a future because of its potential to undermine the work ethic and encourage degeneracy amongst workers who were unable to make proper use of their time. Increasing production and consumption guaranteed the ongoing centrality of work. 6

Keen to maintain the importance of work in the face of the push for more leisure, businessmen extolled the virtues and pleasures of work and its necessity in building character, providing dignity and inspiring greatness. Economists too argued that the creation of work was the goal of production. John M. Clark, in a review of economic developments, stated: "Consumption is no longer the sole end nor production solely the means to that end. Work is an end in itself..." Creating work, and the right to work, he argued, had a higher moral imperative than meeting basic needs. 7

Manufacturer, H. C. Atkins, along with president of the National Association of Manufacturers, John E. Edgerton, warned a five-day week would undermine the work ethic by giving more time for leisure.8 If work took up less of the day it would be less important in people's lives. Edgerton, observed: "I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance.... the emphasis should be put on work - more work and better work, instead of upon leisure." 9

Most businessmen believed shorter hours meant less production, which would limit the growth of America's business enterprise. They argued they could not afford shorter work weeks, that they would become uncompetitive and go bankrupt. They also feared that given extra free time, people would spend it in unsociable ways, turning to crime, vice, corruption and degeneracy and perhaps even radicalism. "The common people had to be kept at their desks and machines, lest they rise up against their betters." 10 And Edgerton, argued "nothing breeds radicalism more quickly than unhappiness unless it is leisure. As long as the people are kept profitably and happily employed there is little danger from radicalism." 11 In the US consumption rates were increasing in the mid-1920s and the "new economic gospel of consumption" gained many adherents. 12 The idea there were limits on consumer wants began to be eclipsed by the idea such wants could be endlessly created. In 1929 the President's Committee on Recent Economic Changes stated: "wants are almost insatiable; one want satisfied makes way for another... by advertising and other promotional devices, by scientific fact- finding, and by carefully pre-developed consumption, a measurable pull on production... has been created." 13

The public was urged by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) to "end the buyers' strike." 14 However the desire to consume did not come naturally, it had to be learned: "People had to move away from habits of strict thrift toward habits of ready spending."15 From the 1920s corporations began advertising to the working classes in an effort to break down these old habits of thrift and encourage new consumerist desires. At the same time they sought to counter anti-corporate feelings generated by the conditions of work in their factories. 16

Hooking work and leisure to consumption

Higher wages helped in this shift from the Protestant ethic of asceticism to one of consumerism that fitted with the required markets for mass production.17 In boom times, workers were given increased wages rather than increased leisure. Between 1910 and 1929 the average purchasing power of workers in the US increased by 40%. 18 With these rising wages they bought more and the upward spiral of production and consumption was maintained. In earlier times higher wages might have encouraged workers to work shorter hours, but once workers had been coached into becoming consumers there was little danger of this. With the help of marketers and advertisers, workers could be trusted "to spend more rather than work less." 19

In this context it was important leisure was not an alternative to work and an opportunity to reflect on life but rather a time for consumption. In this way the forty-hour week, rather than threatening economic growth would foster it. Leisure goods such as radios, phonographs, movies, clothes, books and recreational facilities all benefited from increased leisure time.20 At the same time leisure had to be subordinate to work and importantly, a reason to work.

Business people still wanted to limit the reduction of work hours and believed that by 'educating' workers to become consumers, the demand from workers for reduced working hours would also be limited. 21 Manufacturers expanded markets by expanding the range of goods they produced, moving from the basic requirements of living such as food, clothing and building materials to items such as cars and radios that provided entertainment and recreation. 22 US unions fell in with the consumption solution to overproduction in the late 1920s and concentrated on fighting for higher wages. Union leaders promoted increased production and economic growth as a way of increasing wages. It was not till the Great Depression of the 1930s that they again fought for a shorter working week as a solution to unemployment. 23

After the Second World War the idea of solving unemployment by reducing working hours disappeared from mainstream thinking. During the war a demand for consumer goods built up and following it workers tended to prefer wage rises to shorter hours.24 Unions no longer pressed for shorter working hours and workers themselves became wedded to a consumer lifestyle that required long hours to support. Many unions in fact gave up their fight for control of production in favour of a share of the fruits of production and "ever-increasing levels of material well-being for their workers."25

The promise of full-employment assuaged fears that long work hours might create unemployment. Leisure became consumer-oriented, revolving round the home with its entertaining and convenience goods and the vacation where workers could enjoy living in luxury for a short time. 26 As Cross noted: "The identification of leisure with consumption won many to hard and steady work in disagreeable jobs." 27

Juliet Schor noted in her book, The Overworked American that by 1991 productivity in the US had increased steadily from the 1940s: "we could now produce our 1948 standard of living (measured in terms of marketed goods and services) in less than half the time it took in that year. We could actually have chosen the four-hour day, or a working year of six months...." Instead, workers work more hours now than in 1948 and consume more than twice as much. 28 It was the "social decision to direct industrial innovation toward producing unlimited quantities of goods rather than leisure" that created the foundation for our modern consumer culture, "a culture of work and spend." The movement for more free time for workers and leisure time free of market forces, was defeated by the middle of the 20th century when mass consumer culture took off. 29 The consumer culture, rather than eroding the work ethic, tied people even more closely to working long hours in order to earn the money for their consumer desires.

Consumerism as opiate of the masses

Stuart Ewen in his book Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture showed that advertising for mass consumerism was not only aimed at increasing markets for goods but also at shifting the locus of discontent from people's work to arenas that advertisers could promise would be satisfied by consumption. Their frustrations and unhappiness could then be directed towards buying rather than political protest against working conditions or other elements of industrial society.30

Ewen claims that consumerism: "the mass participation in the values of the mass-induced market," was not a natural historical development but an aggressive device of corporate survival." Discontent in the workplace could lead to a challenge to corporate authority but discontent in the consumer sphere provided an incentive to work harder and reflected an acceptance of the values of the capitalist enterprise. 31 Similarly Robert Lane claims in his book on Political Ideology that: "The more emphasis a society places upon consumption-through advertising, development of new products, and easy installment buying-the more will social dissatisfaction be channeled into intraclass consumption rivalry instead of interclass resentment and conflict... the more will labor unions focus upon the 'bread and butter' aspects of unionism, as contrasted to its ideological elements." 32

If people were dependent on the products of the factories they were less likely to be critical of the appalling working conditions within them. The good life attained through this consumption was also compensation for the unpleasantness of work and distracted attention from it. Advertisements were careful not to depict people working in factories. A leading copywriter in the 1920s, Helen Woodward, advised consumption could help sublimate and redirect urges that might otherwise be expressed politically or aggressively. "To those who cannot change their whole lives or occupations," she argued, "even a new line in a dress is often a relief." 33

Department store merchant Edward Filene, a spokesperson for industrialists in the 1920s and 30s, spoke frankly about the need for social planning in order to create a consumer culture where industry could "sell to the masses all that it employs the masses to create" and the need for education to train the masses to be consumers in a world of mass production. He argued that consumer culture could unify the nation and, through education, social change could be limited to changes in the commodities that industry produced.34

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Consumption allows people at the bottom of the social hierarchy to feel they have some measure of access to the good life for all their troubles. The escape from real life provided by leisure activities allows people to continue what might otherwise be a dreary and downtrodden existence. Lisa Macdonald and Allen Myers from Green Left Weekly, claim workers attempt to gain ownership of what they produce and overcome their alienation through consumption: "it is only as purchasers, 'shoppers', that we are treated with the courtesy worthy of a human being."35 Employers encouraged workers to think of consumerism as the rationale for their work but measures of success were moved from the realm of production and work to the realm of consumption. Advertising messages affected people's aspirations. They portrayed a bounty of consumer goods as the fruits of the American Dream. Rather than aspiring for their children to become leading businessmen or top executives or political leaders, advertisements offered messages such as "Some Day your Boy will own a Buick."36

Advertisers also undermined the nineteenth century "culture of character" which was the basis of the myth of the self-made man, someone who succeeded as a result of hard work, morality and discipline. In its place a "culture of personality" evolved which promoted the importance of presentation and appearance, things that advertisers were so helpfully offering to assist with. What mattered in getting ahead and influencing people was the impression a person made on others. Things like their clothes, their home furnishings, their personal cleanliness were all used by others to judge their character.37 Also advertising and consumerism played a major role in the acceptance of the capitalist vision and its associated inequalities. Roland Marchand in his book Advertising the American Dream argued advertisers repeatedly used "the parable of the democracy of goods" to sell their products to the middle classes. In this parable, although there was a social hierarchy with wealth concentrated at the top, ordinary people could enjoy the same products and goods that the people at the top did. Joe Blo could drink the same brand of coffee as the wealthiest capitalist. Mary Jane could buy the same soap as the lady with the maid in waiting. The most humble of citizens (although not the poor who were not the targets of these advertisements) could afford to purchase the same quality products as a millionaire. 38

The social message of the parable of the Democracy of Goods was clear. Antagonistic envy of the rich was unseemly; programs to redistribute wealth were unnecessary. The best things in life were already available to all at reasonable prices. Incessantly and enticingly repeated, advertising visions of fellowship in a Democracy of Goods encouraged Americans to look to similarities in consumption styles rather than to political power or control of wealth for evidence of significant equality. 39

According to Filene, the process of buying goods was a means by which people were supporting industry and thereby electing the manufacturers, who made the goods, to a government which would satisfy their needs. They were voting industry leaders into positions of leadership in society. In this way "the masses have elected Henry Ford. They have elected General Motors. They have elected the General Electric Company, and Woolworth's and all the other great industrial and business leaders of the day."40 Not only was the desire for social change displaced by a desire for changes in commodities, but political freedom was equated with consumer choice and political citizenship with participation in the market through consumption. Consumption was promoted as democratising at the very time it was being used to pacify the political unrest of workers.41 According to well-known sociologist Daniel Bell: "If the American worker has been 'tamed' it has not been through the discipline of the machine, but by the 'consumption society,' by the possibility of a better living which his wage, the second income from his working wife, and easy credit all allow."42

Production, consumption and status

Vance Packard, in his book The Status Seekers argued the use of consumer goods as status symbols was a deliberate strategy of advertisers, or "merchants of discontent," who took advantage of the "upgrading urge" people felt. The message that workers could improve their status through consumption was particularly aimed at people who had little chance of raising their status through their work because opportunities for promotion were slim.43 employers sought to divert the dissatisfaction of workers with the nature of their work into a more personal dissatisfaction that could be fed with consumer goods: "offering mass produced visions of individualism by which people could extricate themselves from the mass."44

The advertiser offered workers the possibility of gaining social status through buying goods that were better than their neighbours. With the help of installment plans and credit, they could purchase the signifiers of success even if they weren't achieving success in their workplace. This was not something that came naturally to working people who were, for the main part, resigned to their position in life. According to Packard "they need prodding and 'educating' to desire many of the traditionally higher-class products the mass merchandisers want to move in such vast numbers, such as the electric rotating spits or gourmet foods."45

Car manufacturers, particularly, exploited people's desire for status, spending "small fortunes exploring the status meaning of their product." They found, for example that people in housing developments where all the houses looked similar, were most likely to leave their large new cars parked on the street in front of the house rather than in the garage where no-one would see them. Plymouth advertisements pictured a family in front of their car saying "We're not wealthy... we just look it!" Dodge advertisements featured a man saying to a Dodge car owner "Boy, you must be rich to own a car as big as this!" And Ford advertisements showed the back of one of their cars and stated "let the people behind you know you are ahead of them!"46

Such advertising was so successful people began diverting funds from other purchases into the purchase of a car to enhance their status, and by the end of the 1950s Americans "were spending more of their total income on the family chariot than they were in financing their homestead, which housed the family and its car or cars."47 Not to be outdone home builders and sellers ensured the home became a status symbol that rivalled the motor car.

Chinoy observed consumption provided automobile workers in the 1950s with a way of rationalising their failure to advance in their work: "Advancement has come to mean the progressive accumulation of things as well as the increasing capacity to consume... If one manages to buy a new car, if each year sees a major addition to the household-a washing machine, a refrigerator, a new living-room suite, now probably a television set-then one is also getting ahead."48 Rather than question the American Dream, workers would either blame themselves for their failure to live up to it, or find other ways to interpret it.

Such trends were not confined to the US. The consumerism that proliferated in the US in the 1920s and 1930s, spread to other industrialised nations after the Second World War, particularly in the 1950s. 49 In his book on the rise of a consumer society in Australia, Greg Whitwell said: "The ownership of certain sorts of consumer goods, each ranked according to brand names, came to be seen as guides to an individual's income which in turn, so it is believed, said something about his or her inner worth. Consumer goods became external signs, used to give a sense of hierarchy by members of a society characterized by an emphasis on change and on social and geographical mobility."50

More pay needed to buy "goods"

In a British study of the working class in the 1950s Ferdynand Zweig found: "a steep rise in acquisitive tendencies and pre-occupation with money in work attitudes." There was far less difference between middle class and working class purchase of consumer durables (cars, white goods, electrical appliances) than previously and class self-identification had come to depend more on factors such as house ownership than type of work. In fact Zweig found workers impatient with questions about class. They were more interested in status as a way of organising the social spectrum.51

Increased consumerism led to an increased emphasis on the importance of pay. Many people work so as to earn the money to buy consumer goods and some measure of status that accompanies them. A European study by the Henley Centre in 1991 found "better pay" was the priority for new jobs for 70 percent of those surveyed, compared with enjoyable work, which was a priority for 58 percent.52

A U.S. study found those who believed "having lots of money" was "extremely important" had gone up to almost two thirds in 1986 from less than half in 1977. It ranked higher than any other of goal in life.53 Americans born since 1963, those referred to as generation X, are more likely to agree that: "The only really meaningful measure of success is money" than any previous generation. They spend more money on stereos, mobile phones, beepers and cars than older people and are more likely to take a less interesting job if it pays well.54

Jimmy Carter, as President of the US noted: "Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns."55 Consumption has become a more important source of self-identity and status than work for many people. Compton Advertising undertook a survey of public attitudes to the economic system in 1974 and found two thirds of those surveyed identified their role in the economic system as that of "consumers and spenders of money" rather than workers or producers. This included one half of those in the labour force. 56

More recent opinion surveys show that in countries like the US and Japan, "people increasingly measure success by the amount they consume."57 In a society where people don't know each other very well, appearances are important and social status, though more securely attained through occupation, can be attained with strangers through consumption. When people are uprooted and move to the cities they are strangers to each other. Previously everyone knew one another's business and the status that should be accorded to each person. In an anonymous city a person can adopt a certain lifestyle, clothes, car that is higher up the status ladder than their occupation would indicate, particularly if they are willing to go into debt to do it. Consumption then becomes an indicator of achievement.58

The desire to consume is often portrayed as a natural human characteristic that cannot be changed. However it is clear populations have been manipulated into being avaricious consumers. What people really want, more than the multitude of goods on offer, is status. History has shown the determinants of status can change. If we want to live in an ecologically sustainable society, then we need to award status to those who are happy with a basic level of comfort rather than those who accumulate possessions. If, as a community, we admired wisdom above wealth and compassion and cooperation above competition, we would be well on the way to undermining the motivation to consume.

This article was first adapted for publication in Pacific Ecologist from chapter 12 of the book Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR, by Sharon Beder, Publisher Scribe, Melbourne 2000. Professor Sharon Beder is head of the Science, Technology and Society Programme at the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia. She writes a regular column for Engineers Australia and has written several books including Power Play Toxic Fish and Sewer Surfing; The Nature of Sustainable Development. Professor Beder was awarded the 2001 World Technology Award in Ethics.

References

[1] Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making way for modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p, 158.

[2] Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), pp. 70, 108.

[3] David J. Cherrington, The Work Ethic: Working Values and Values that Work (New York: AMACON, 1980), p. 37.

[4] Gary Cross, Time and Money (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 38; Rodney Clapp, 'Why the Devil Takes Visa', Christianity Today, Vol. 40, No. 11 (1996).

[5] Cross, note 7, pp. 7-8, 28.

[6] Ibid., pp. 7,9,39; Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 42, 67.

[7] Ibid., pp. 62-3.

[8] Paul Bernstein, American Work Values: Their Origin and Development (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 157.

[9] Cross, note 7, p. 16.

[10] Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline in Leisure (USA: BasicBooks, 1991), p. 74.

[11] Quoted in Hunnicutt, note 9, p. 41.

[12] Hunnicutt, note 9, p.; 42.

[13] Quoted in Cross, note 7, p. 41.

[14] Quoted in Ibid., p. 38.

[15] Clapp, note 7.

[16] Ewen, note 5, p. 19.

[17] Ibid., p. 29.

[18] Cross, note 7, p. 7.

[19] Hunnicutt, note 9, p. 43.

[20] Ibid., p. 45.

[21] Ibid., pp. 46-7.

[22] Robert Eisenberger, Blue Monday: The Loss of the Work Ethic in America (New York: Paragon House, 1989), p. 11.

[23] Hunnicutt, note 9, p. 79.

[24] Cross, note 7, p. 85.

[25] Schor, note 15, p. 78; Daniel Yankelovich and John Immerwahr, 'Putting the Work Ethic to Work', Society, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1984), p. 59.

[26] Cross, note 7, p. 155.

[27] Ibid., p. 153.

[28] Schor, note 15, p. 2.

[29] Cross, note 7, pp. 5, 9.

[30] Ewen, note 5, pp. 43-5.

[31] Ibid., pp. 54, 109.

[32] Robert E. Lane, Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What he Does (New York: The Free Press, 1962), p. 80.

[33] Ewen, note 5, pp. 77-8, 85-6.

[34] Ibid., p. 54.

[35] L. Macdonald and A. Myers, 'Malign Design', New Internationalist (November 1998), p. 21.

[36] Marchand, note 4, pp. 162, 222.

[37] Ibid., pp. 209-10.

[38] Ibid., p. 218.

[39] Ibid., pp. 220, 222.

[40] Quoted in Ewen, note 5, p. 92.

[41] Ibid., pp. 89, 91.

[42] Daniel Bell, 'Work and Its Discontents (1956)', in A. R. Gini and T. J. Sullivan (eds), It Comes with the Territory: An Inquiry Concerning Work and the Person (New York: Random House, 1989), pp. 122-123.

[43] Vance Packard, The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behaviour in America (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), pp. 269-70.

[44] Andrew Hornery, 'Family Pack aims for the children', Sydney Morning Herald, 24 September 1998, p. 45.

[45] Packard, note 84, p. 271.

[46] Ibid., pp. 273-4.

[47] Ibid., p. 274.

[48] Ely Chinoy, Automobile Workers and the American Dream, 2nd ed (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinios Press, 1992), p. 126.

[49] Stewart Lansley, After the Gold Rush: The Trouble with Affluence: 'Consumer Capitalism' and the Way Forward (London: Century Business Books, 1994), p. 85.

[50] Greg Whitwell, Making the Market: The Rise of Consumer Society (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble Publishers, 1989), p. 7.

[51] Ferdynand Zweig, The New Acquisitive Society (Chichester: Barry Rose, 1976), pp. 15, 21-2, 26-7.

[52] Cited in Lansley, note 90, p. 136.

[53] Alan Thein Durning, How Much is Enough: The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth, ed. Linda Starke, Worldwatch Environmental Alert Series (London: Earthscan, 1992), p. 34.

[54] Dan Zevin and Carolyn Edy, 'Boom Time for Gen X', US News and World Report (20 October 1997)

[55] Quoted in Thomas H. Naylor, William H. Willimon and Rolf Osterberg, The Search for Meaning in the Workplace (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), p. 69.

[56] Compton Advertising, 'National Survey on the American Economic System', (New York: The Advertising Council, 1974), p. 17

[57] Durning, note 94, p. 22.

[58] Bell, note 71, p. 68.

Io's "Is Earth Becoming a Dune Planet" Drops April 1 in Paranoia - no kidding

paranoiamagazine.com/currentissue.html
"Is Earth Becoming a Dune Planet?" Iona Miller

ISSUE #50 CONTENTS
Gloucester Sorcery: Strange Swamp Tales of Cotton Mather :: Steve Ahlquist
Black Sun Rising: Satanism and Exorcism in the Americas :: Scott Corrales
Demystifying the Myth Called “Roswell” :: Kathy Kasten
When the Truth is Found to be Lies :: Frank Berube
Yes, We’re Matricidal: Murdering Mother Earth One Forest, One Species and One Atom at a Time :: Jason Miller
The Code Killers: An Exposé of the Nuclear Industry :: Ace Hoffman
Is Earth Becoming a Dune Planet? :: Iona Miller
A Monetary Reformer’s Interpretation of The Lord of the Rings :: Richard C. Cook
Obama-Neptune Trance Formation in America :: Francis D. Grabau
Inside Job: Everything you were never allowed to ask about 9/11 :: An Interview with David Ray Griffin Joan d’Arc
Sleepwalkers, Awake! Steps to Creating a New Paradigm :: Paul Tice
Paranotes :: Al Hidell

SpiraStar

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Glow Globe Io

I invite all my Tribe friends to join me on Facebook.com which is where I'm mostly hanging out now.
Still, Tribe is still my favorite network because, well - all you good people are here. ;~)

Happy VD -
io

Glow Globes

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Mondo Wormhole Reality Tunnel

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Mondo Iona

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Mondo flashbacks

With the Leary gallery show and party last week, here's a clue if you weren't on the cyber bus...
also see Allan Lundell's facebook.com gallery for party photos, if you can crack the code.
io

www.suck.com/daily/95/11...ndo1995.html

Mondo 1995: Up and Down With the Next Millennium's First Magazine

By Jack Boulware

Copyright 1995 SF Weekly. All rights reserved. No reproduction without written authorization.

The night air swooshes through a 20-foot door into Bart Nagel's Emeryville warehouse/studio space, where almost a dozen people are busy shooting a promotional video for a new book - Cyberpunk Handbook: The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook - that takes the cyberhip cliché to task with an ironic smirk.

It's only fitting that the book's authors - St. Jude, R.U. Sirius, and Nagel - are sending up the concept, seeing as they were the ones who foisted cyberpunk mania upon the world with the slick quarterly Mondo 2000. Begun six years ago as a shared hallucination in the Berkeley hills, Mondo melded computers, psychedelic drugs, sex, and art into an organic whole.

Published and financed by minor heiress Queen Mu, Mondo found a nationwide audience in the hip computer culture and titillated the talk show bookers with stories about virtual sex, smart drugs, cryptology, and nanocyborgs. By 1993, Mondo was on the cover of Time magazine, promoting the editors' best-selling book from HarperCollins.

But in 1995, with cyberpunk now reduced to trite Hollywood formula, this trio from the Mondo brain trust are happy to record the movement's obituary with the snide video. As Nagel puts his "star," former Mondo writer Chris Hudak, through his paces, R.U. Sirius and St. Jude offer directorial suggestions. Hudak, decked out in black leather - his bullet belt bristling with a Taser, laser pointer, and Star Trek communicator - re-creates his tongue-in-cheek role from the Mondo spoof "R U a Cyberpunk?" in issue No. 10.

Nagel's Fisher-Price video camera pans across Hudak's gear as he recites, perhaps a tad earnestly, from a color PowerBook:

"The term 'cyberpunk' has been used to describe music, lifestyles, and artistic sensibilities, but it really describes one narrow school of science-fiction writers," Hudak says. "God, it was a good word ... poetic, efficient, and romantic. Distance and passion. Machine and man. Technology and attitude. Cyberpunk. Great fuckin' word. And what the hell; we stole it."

After several takes a break is called and the crew sips brew and chatters. Slouched against the refrigerator, R.U. compliments Hudak's performance and adds, "Boy, am I working hard!"

When did cyberpunk die? I ask.

"1993," smirks somebody. "The release of the Billy Idol record."

Although the crew continues to gab, they avoid discussing the magazine that brought them together in the first place. It's no secret they've all fallen out with Queen Mu, and haven't worked on the publication as a group for several issues. I understand their reticence, having survived a few San Francisco magazine wars myself. Since the newsstand hasn't seen a new issue of Mondo in seven months, many readers assume that it is as dead as the cyberpunk concept, so I volunteer what appears to be the obvious:

"Isn't it a shame about Mondo?" I say.

The silence that falls on the room informs me immediately that I've broached a horribly touchy topic. The seasoned smartasses avoid my gaze to stare at the floor. An uncomfortable dramatic pause says I might as well have mentioned the name of somebody's family member who died in a violent accident. After a couple of vague, sad remarks, the subject is changed and chatter picks up again. Without further comment, we return to the video shoot.

As it turns out, Mondo isn't dead: In late September, Queen Mu produced Issue 14 and placed it on newsstands. What did expire some time ago was Mondo's bragging rights, its role as the undisputed arbiter of technohip. Having nailed the new Zeitgeist with the very first issue in 1989, the Mondo crew isn't keen on acknowledging that a South of Market competitor fat with consumer ads, subscribers, a commercial Web division, and an infusion of cash from Condé Nast has displaced it as the magazine of the 90s digital mind-meld.

Examined at close range, Mondo's history reads as if fabricated on another planet, spewed forth by a sweaty cyberpunk novelist tripping on nasal-ingested DMT. Yet the story is true. In its absurd journey from Marin to San Francisco to Berkeley, Mondo changed its name three times to avoid detection. Its staff consumed vast quantities of designer psychedelics; was plagued by vehicular accidents, some of them fatal; experienced office break-ins; suffered publicity-starved celebrities; indulged in media pranks; watched the skies during suspicious helicopter flyovers; engaged in cross-dressing; enjoyed the temporary rush of depleting inheritances; and generated conspiracy theories about the Mormons taking over the world.

And it all began at a 1984 equinox birthday party for an archdruid named Stephan Abbott in Berkeley. Ken Goffman (by this time already adopting the Dadaist persona of "R.U. Sirius") arrived with newsprint copies of the premiere issue of High Frontiers under his arm. Subtitled "Psychedelics, Science, Human Potential, Irreverence & Modern Art" and published by a dubious organization called the Marin Mutants, High Frontiers consisted primarily of long, unedited interviews with acid veterans like Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, and Terence McKenna, the margins filled in with weird jokes and short items.

That night, Sirius met a woman named Alison Kennedy.

"She was talking about how she had been irradiated over in Germany, because she was living right next door to the Russian Embassy," says Sirius, who turned 43 this year. "She'd been irradiated and poisoned, she was sick and dying, and she was smiling from ear to ear. I immediately fell in love with her because she was so strange. She was also the prettiest woman at the party. I said, 'Let's go take some drugs,' and it went from there."

The long-haired, gap-toothed Sirius was a self-described "street rat" and ex-yippie musician from New York. Kennedy was the faculty wife of an Eastern religion professor at UC Berkeley, and the daughter of a wealthy Palo Alto family that claimed Noah Webster in its lineage. Her friends included the late Aldous Huxley and Ken Kesey.

Despite its small print run of 1,500, High Frontiers No. 1 was well-received. The back room of Mill Valley's Flashback Pizza became the unofficial hangout of Sirius and other characters who worked on the magazine: "Somerset Mau Mau," "Amalgam X," and new Art Director "Lord Nose." There, Sirius began plotting the second issue of this party-on-paper. Timeliness was not an issue. "The staff was always blasted!" laughs pseudonymous investment banker/psychedelic drug expert "Zarkov" of the pizza parlor era. Zarkov often contributed, together with his companion Gracie, to this Mondo family tree of publications. "Selling pizzas and drugs on the side - it took forever to get your pizza." High Frontiers No. 2 equally focused on drugs, but expanded to include interviews with yippies and physicists, reviews of art and literature, and an essay by Kennedy about datura, the common North American plant whose psychoactive qualities were rediscovered by British soldiers who accidentally ingested it in Virginia in the 1800s. (According to an 1883 citation, the limeys became extremely disoriented, blowing feathers in the air, grinning like monkeys, and "pawing and fondling their companions.")

In its pages, Sirius and Mau Mau advertised little pamphlets touting the "Neopsychedelic Pop Party" and "cunnilinguistic programming." Now published by Sacred Cow Mutilators, High Frontiers was right on schedule - producing a whopping one issue per year.

"My original idea was to make it a confluence between psychedelics and science and tech, but once we blasted out the first issue, which was all about psychedelics, we sort of got deep into it," laughs Sirius. "That's the most fun I've ever had in my life, actually. It was pretty fucking carefree."

But not very profitable. David Latimer came on board for High Frontiers No. 3 in 1987, which was subtitled "The Latest in Science and Fun." He had worked on Sunset and Scientific American, and was co-publishing both Soma and a magazine for Asian-Americans called Rice. With Latimer (also hiding behind a pseudonym), Sirius and company opened an office in San Francisco's Financial District, launched a companion newsletter called Reality Hackers, and began sponsoring seminars and discussion forums at the Julia Morgan Theater.

"We had Terence McKenna and [physicist] Nick Herbert together talking about time travel," remembers Sirius. "It was pretty fucking obscure stuff."

Equally obscure were the new designer drugs, many of which were not yet outlawed.

"We tried every drug there was," says Latimer, who today publishes the cafe magazine Cups. "Peyote, ketamine, DMT, MMDA ..."

"... 2CB, 2CE, dozens of little alphabet soups," smiles Sirius. "We were tripping pretty heavily. It was very magical, actually."

High Frontiers No. 3 plunged still further into new technologies with strange articles on psychoactive software, nutritional memory enhancers, quantum physics, fractal geometry, and interstellar carbon clusters. And, of course, heaping quantities of drugs, and an essay on tarantula venom from Alison Kennedy, who had been rechristened Queen Mu, Domineditrix.

High Frontiers/Reality Hackers attracted not only the psychedelicized, but computer types from Silicon Valley. As detailed in Douglas Rushkoff's book Cyberia, the acid/high-tech computer geek connection extends back to the days when Jobs and Wozniak were still constructing blue boxes from which free long-distance phone calls could be made.

Sirius says that a revelation occurred to the staff "that if, for instance, we were able to change ourselves biologically, that would be a more interesting change than a million people dropping acid. ... I started to become aware that the ability to manipulate information - and the huge carrying capacity of information, all that stuff that is related to silicon and digital stuff - was also going to be related to any other kind of technical change."

In other words, getting high wouldn't change the world. But computers could. The '80s had been years of great imagination with science-fiction novelists like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and John Shirley stretching the form so far that one East Coast newspaper wag coined the term "cyberpunk" to describe this new genre. Silicon Valley nerds were hunched over tool benches, furiously whipping more, more, more out of their fledgling appliances - the 512 begat the Mac Plus, which begat the SE, etc. Desktop publishing bureaus opened around the bay. Ex-hippies like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly started the WELL computer network as an offshoot of the post-hippie Whole Earth Review. Anarchist programmers like Jude Milhon hovered around the Bay Area, inciting nerds to plot the overthrow. In Amsterdam, Louis Rosetto and Jane Metcalfe, later to found Wired, published a magazine called Language Technology. Theorists like Timothy Leary pondered the consequences of a digital future about which nobody knew anything - except that its reach seemed infinite.

And then tragedy struck High Frontiers. One night Sirius and Deborah Smith, the magazine's office manager and fiancee of David Latimer, drove down the peninsula to Cupertino for a radio interview. Smith got bored and decided to take a drive over to Santa Cruz; on winding Highway 17, she got in a horrible head-on collision.

Smith was paralyzed. Latimer says that he and Sirius and Queen Mu attempted a peyote healing ritual in Smith's hospital room to lift her out of her coma.

"We brought a Native American Indian in," Latimer remembers, "and brought Smitty in on a bed. We did a prayer ceremony, did channeling things - they brought witchcraft and crystals."

To this day Smith remains brain-damaged and bedridden, cared for by her family in Texas. When Queen Mu offered to buy Latimer's shares, he reluctantly accepted and left the magazine. (Some months later, he would begin working with me on the concept of a rude little magazine called The Nose.)

Not long after, new Art Director Adam Zakin celebrated the completion of High Frontiers No. 4 by traveling to Tibet with his wife, where both died in a freak accident when their bus went over a cliff. Meanwhile, back in the States, the High Frontiers office was broken into twice under mysterious circumstances. In 1988, Sirius and Queen Mu renamed the magazine Reality Hackers to reflect the drugs-and-computers fusion they had been writing about and moved the operation to the Berkeley hills, where Mu rented a big wooden Maybeck house and stocked it full of Victorian furniture.

Vowing to make the magazine a moneymaker, the pair wrote a business plan, but their meetings with potential investors ended in frustration.

"There was definitely no advertising," says Sirius. "Acid dealers don't advertise."

"It's just that if your lead story is 'How to Party on Ecstasy,' it's really hard to go to IBM or Macintosh and say, 'Hey, would you like to take out a full-page ad?' " echoes Latimer.

Although Reality Hackers appeared more frequently than High Frontiers, Sirius and Mu could only afford to publish biannually. Sirius says he made the sacrifice of cutting back on psychedelic use to get more work done. Unix champ Jude Milhon signed on after meeting Sirius at a party, mutating into the sharp-tongued St. Jude. The staff bumped into Michael Synergy, who was working for AutoDesk down in Silicon Valley, and he agreed to write up some subversive articles about cyberpunks overthrowing the government. After a serious bicycle accident left Synergy temporarily laid up, Mu and St. Jude rescued him from the hospital and moved him into the house in the hills.

Reality Hackers offered the most diverse and interesting mix yet, with articles on computer viruses, virtual reality, psychoactive designer foods, high-tech paganism, alleged AIDS biological warfare experiments, Brian Eno, chaos theory, Hakim Bey, and a lengthy exploration by banker acidheads Gracie and Zarkov on Blue àyster Cult. In addition to Leary, Herbert, and McKenna, new contributors included isolation tank expert Michael Hutchison, drug authors Peter Stafford and Bruce Eisner, drug architect Alexander Shulgin, smart-drug pioneers Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, and computer whiz Eric Gullichsen, one of the original VR developers. To corral the whole concept, a new subhead was composed: "Information Technologies & Entertainment for Those on the Brink."

But the name Reality Hackers remained a problem. Reports came in from national distributors: Retailers don't know whether to stock it next to Guns and Ammo or D-Cup Beauties.

"One distributor told them that everybody east of the Rockies thought it was about hacking people up, and that it was a Mansonite cult magazine," cackles Sirius.

Kevin Kelly, then editor of Whole Earth Review, wanted to hire Sirius as a writer to help him produce a new magazine called Signal, which would cover digital technology and the cultural impact of computers. Sirius said no, that he had an idea of his own.

With the next issue containing a big scoop on the heretofore ignored subject of cyberpunk, R.U. Sirius and Queen Mu wanted to change the magazine's image and make a big splash. Sirius flicked on the television.

"There were all these commercials for this-2000 and that-2000. Furnishings 2000. All this really banal stuff with the name 2000 after it. Finally this show came on, which was like Future 2000. It was like an Omni magazine kind of pop-science show. I stumbled into Alison's room and said, 'We've got to come up with a name with the name 2000 on it, because everybody's using it to sell shit.' "

"Mondo," replied Queen Mu, explaining that the lettering would look great on the masthead, and that it had a delightfully fashionable yet decadent sound. The name was changed.

Mondo 2000 reached newsstands in 1989 with a unique new logo designed by German graphic artist Brummb'r, each letter of "Mondo" containing its own separate personality. Todd Rundgren was the cover boy, the only male to grace its cover in masculine clothing (drag queen Jade made an appearance years later). Readers were treated to articles by Gibson, Shirley, and Sterling, as well as several pieces on hackers and crackers, Internet viruses, conspiracy theories, cyberspace, and cutting-edge technology nobody had heard of.

The inclusion of Gibson in particular struck a chord with readers. In many circles his seminal 1984 book Neuromancer was referred to in hushed tones, like a sacred scripture containing secrets of the future. "He was writing about us," says St. Jude. "Drug-taking, intellectual scum." At the bottom of the masthead was this somber warning: "Mondo 2000 has monthly bonfires at the full moon of all unsolicited manuscripts."

"It had arrived at a particular moment where there was at least a subculture of people in the computer community that were ready for it," remembers Sirius. And after some money from Kennedy's family became available, it was full steam ahead. "At the time there was no competition at all. There was absolutely nothing to compare it to. It talked about how technology was important in our lives at a time when people were in denial about it."

There was no denial about the importance of technology from the publishing industry. This same time saw the launch of several local magazines, taking advantage of the burgeoning desktop opportunities, including Frisko, SF, SF Moda, FAD, The Nose, Harpoon, and Just Go!. But Mondo 2000 took the technology to the outer limits, thanks to Bart Nagel's art direction.

A photographer and custom guitar maker in Phoenix, Nagel had followed his friend Fred Dodsworth to San Francisco. Dodsworth, who had started a new publication called The City, introduced Nagel to Queen Mu, who was in the market for a magazine redesign and in an interview asked Nagel his astrological sign.

"I'm a Pisces," said Nagel.

"Well, I think this will work out very well," answered Mu, and though Nagel had never designed a magazine before and had lived in California for just a month, he was appointed Mondo's art director.

"Being in Mondo is like being in a rock band," explains R.U. Sirius. "You have to bring your own equipment."

"I didn't think this was going to go anywhere," Nagel says, remembering that he would arrive each week at the Mondo House to pick up editorial copy - and learn that none was finished.

Besides a lack of copy, the photographer-turned-graphic designer faced an intimidating work environment - an editorial staff of the brightest, most eclectic bunch of misfits in the Bay Area. Queen Mu, the mad miscellaneous-trivia bank; Jas. Morgan, the subscriber from Georgia who came to visit and ended up as music editor; St. Jude the computer anarchist, a self-described polygamist and ex-physician's assistant with legitimate hacker connections; and R.U. Sirius, a walking Bonneville Salt Flats of pharmacology. Loitering around the perimeter were Michael Synergy, Queen Mu's former boyfriend Morgan Russell, and Gracie and Zarkov, the investment bankers who enjoyed drugs, heavy metal, and polyfidelity, and who took credit for starting the first sex club in Chicago.

As many news hacks would later trumpet, it was Revenge of the Nerds.

"We were all freaks in our high schools," says St. Jude. "They all hated us."

Nagel felt like he was trapped in another universe.

"In my circle of friends back in Phoenix, I always felt fairly bright. I had bright friends. And then I come into this world, and I'm starting to feel like an idiot. They just know too much about too many things. The editorial was beyond me. What the hell is an Extropian? Tell me what DMT was again?"

Nagel set about redesigning the book from top to bottom. He commissioned unknown artists like Eric White to do full-page illustrations for cheap, and discovered that collage artist John Borruso's sensibility would fit perfectly on the spine. And photographs were no problem - Nagel took most of them himself.

One such photo caught the eye of Andrew Hultkrans at a Berkeley newsstand - the cover of 1990's Mondo No. 3, portraying a sweaty Deborah Harry against a background shot of deep-space nebulae.

"What the fuck is this?" thought the 24-year-old Harvard graduate, fresh from a year as managing editor of the Zyzzyva literary journal. He thumbed through the issue, which boasted peculiar articles on producing your own growth hormones, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, cybernetic fashion, and psychotic illustrations by Butthole Surfer Gibby Haynes.

"They were intelligent, obviously," says Hultkrans. "Part of the thing that seemed intelligent about it was that I couldn't understand half of it. A little bit might have been that I was just baffled, and therefore assumed it was deep."

Sheer curiosity drove him to send in a résumé, which earned him an interview at the Mondo House - scheduled on a Saturday morning.

Hultkrans showed up looking professional - pulled-back ponytail, blazer and button-down vest - and knocked on the door for several minutes before a nonplussed Morgan let him in without introduction, ushered him into the kitchen of this antique-crammed home, and left him to wait. Queen Mu eventually entered, but instead of asking questions, she kept a steady stream of words going all by herself.

"Five minutes later [R.U.] appears in a bathrobe, looking totally awful and pale and fucked up," says Hultkrans. "R.U., in the morning after a big night, is pretty much of a sight. Alfred E. Neuman with long hair. He mumbled something and then left." To his astonishment, Hultkrans was hired, first in ad sales, but he quickly was moved to working with text, and Nagel christened him "The Tall Editor" on the masthead.

One month after he joined up, the Mondo House threw a party for staff and friends. Somebody put on a belly-dancing record, and Gracie the investment banker came out in costume and did an exotic dance routine in the living room. "This is so fucked up," thought the New York transplant. What had he gotten into? Mondo was nothing if not playful. Nagel peppered the book with eye-scorching graphics and puns and wordplay. St. Jude composed witty subheads and penned a column called "Irresponsible Journalism." Hultkrans steered the ship further into the rapids of pop culture, assigning articles on hip hop bands and writing a column about slacker culture. Morgan was essential for dense interviews with mathematicians and physicists. In addition to her interests in toxic plants and conspiracies, Queen Mu edited stories and brought a strong gender balance that attracted female readers, a subtext that said your sex wasn't as relevant as your brain. Sirius floated around as figurehead, writing and assigning articles. And new pseudonyms appeared: Mondo Connie, Lady Ada Lovelace, Nan C. Druid, Marshall McLaren, G. Gordon MIDI, and the wild conspiracy ranter, Xandor Korzybski.

Although Mondo gained enthusiastic readers, it received its share of negative notices from the press. Rather than sulk about it, Mondo wore them as badges of honor, reproducing them on the magazine's subscription solicitations. "Slightly unfathomable - The Washington Post," read one tear-out card. Another: "Unfortunately, the hacker lingo makes this relatively new magazine indecipherable for any but the most seasoned of computer aficionados. - The Utne Reader." Below this was the Mondo pitch: "Have this indecipherable rag delivered to your own doorstep. Stump your mailman. Confound your neighbors. Master the secret argot of the cyber underground."

The Village Voice declaration that Mondo was an art director's nightmare and completely unreadable prompted Nagel's joke of putting "Guaranteed Read-Proof!" on a cover-in-progress. The gag was such a hit with the staff that they let it stand, and it was printed in issue No. 5.

Some jokes weren't planned. Also in issue No. 5, in 1992, Nagel accidentally transposed the names of avant-garde musicians Glenn Branca and Elliott Sharp on the cover, rendering them Glenn Sharp and Elliott Branca. Since Sharp and Branca weren't household names, few readers noticed, but Mondo obviously owed them - and the author of the piece, Mark Dery - an explanation.

Rather than apologize, Mondo proclaimed the snafu intentional. Gracie and Zarkov composed an essay about post-postmodernism and deliberate art damage. Or rather, they scribbled notes on a napkin while out having drinks. The outline was passed around to the staff, and the concept ended up as a collaborative two-page manifesto on Art Damage called "What Do You Say After Po-PoMo?"

"Half the time we were trying to baffle people into thinking we were deep," says Hultkrans, "and having it be a pop fluff rag at the same time. It was paradise."

"You picked up Mondo and it became aflame in your hands," remembers high-tech publisher Randy Stickrod, who acted as business consultant for the early Mondo. "It was like computers as drugs. This very cool but somehow almost impenetrable intellectual content underneath it, and yet with this edge of New Wave paranoia. It was outrageous! It was like discovering sex for the first time!"

There was little division between Mondo House living, Mondo House parties, and Mondo the magazine. Mondo partied with the people it wanted to write about and have write for the magazine: the cyberpunk novelists (of course), Spalding Gray, Timothy Leary, and John Perry Barlow, to name a few.

"Ideas for articles appeared at parties, parties happened as a result of articles, parties happened as a result of interviews, interviews happened as a result of parties," recalls Zarkov. "It was a very integral part of how Mondo proceeded. Ken and Alison knew a lot of people that they wanted to have over, to build the scene. The scene built the magazine, and the magazine built the scene."

A Mondo party might find a time-travel expert being interviewed in one room, people playing word-association games in another, others experimenting with weird mental mind-stimulation glasses, groups quietly chatting in conspiratorial whispers, or Bart Nagel and virtual reality theorist Brenda Laurel leaping in the air to see if they could do a complete 360-degree turn without falling down. Rude pornography or Japanese animation videos flickered on monitors, figures performed frottage on antique sofas. A journalist from GQ might have been taking a piss on the front lawn. One creature would trap people for entire evenings in conversations about how Sir Francis Bacon was actually William Shakespeare.

"It's very strategically positioned," says Timothy Leary of Mondo House, speaking between bites of crackers. "You're almost in the country, and yet you're three minutes away from the country's top university. Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone - you can't go over to Jann's pad in the penthouse on Park Avenue and hang out."

Mondo also partied with people whose money it coveted, throwing one affair for Joichi Ito, its Tokyo correspondent whose parents had been targeted as potential investors because they came from a wealthy big-business family in Japan. During the course of conversation, the topic turned to the Japanese language.

"You know, there are 12 ways of saying 'thank you' in Japanese," said Ito.

"And every one of them insincere," replied novelist John Shirley.

I recall one evening drinking and arguing in the Mondo House kitchen with an accordion player named Miss Murgatroid, and thinking that not only our conversation was passé, but our substance of abuse. Beer was a quaint, retro, Bill-Haley-and-the-Comets vice compared to the choline cooler smart drinks people were sipping or the experimental mail-order neural inhibitors whose molecular structure was still a mystery to the FDA. Having defined the nascent cybersexcomputerdrug culture, Mondo assumed the role of oracle for the rest of the media struggling to comprehend the trend. Sirius appeared on Donahue and Ron Reagan's show. Reporters descended upon the Mondo House from all parts of the globe - Newsweek, Details, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and bureaus from Europe - as well as all the local dailies.

What is cyberpunk? they begged. Tell us why cyberpunks wear mirror shades and drink Jolt cola. What is virtual sex like?

Mondo obliged with catchy slogans for the journalistic pack. "We're a pirate mind station," Queen Mu told them. "The New Edge ... the alpha and omega of cyberzines." Rudy Rucker supplied the accusatory, "How fast are you? How dense?"

" 'The convergence of technology and culture' would be the straight rap," says Sirius. "But it got mistaken for total advocacy. These magazine people would come around, writing an article about VR. I'd be really cynical for a half-hour. I'd say maybe one positive statement, and that's what they'd put in the article, because that's what they were looking for."

The magazine found itself described as "Berkeley-based and cyber-spaced." R.U. Sirius became everything from "Gomez Addams" to a "balding entrepreneur" to a "long-haired leprechaun who sports some truly humongous brain banks." Queen Mu was described as "hyper-cerebral," "techno-yogic," and "not a witch but may be a pixie." Together they were "digital Druids," working against a "pre-Raphaelite backdrop" out of a "techno-Gothic citadel."

Mondo staffers were articulate and erudite in interviews - so articulate and erudite that reporters were too intimidated to ask for clarifications and instead ran the staff's soundbites in their goofy entirety.

"We talk a lot about the 'rupture before the rapture,' " Sirius once told an Examiner reporter. "It's going to be interesting to see how the really advanced super-high-tekkies are going to function and evolve amidst this coming economic chaos. It just might be the garage-tech cyberpunk brigade that can carry the ball through it."

Queen Mu added, "We're no longer knuckling under to a priest-physician class that demands belief in a model that has totally failed - a highly puritanical society where both pleasure and intelligence are suspect."

When the Washington Post asked Sirius what he looked forward to most in the future, he responded gleefully: "The cure of venereal diseases and the free passage of RU 486 and the orgiastic end of the 20th century!"

Eventually, being covered by the media became as intoxicating as making media. One day, Hultkrans entered the Wednesday editorial meeting to announce that Mondo was the subject of the lead editorial in the new issue of Artforum. The staff cheered, then somebody asked:

"Is it positive or negative?"

"It's hard to tell." Hultkrans scanned the text. "I think it's negative."

The room broke into applause.

During 1992, Mondo finally lived up to its promise that it was a quarterly by producing four issues, to the surprise of all. In three years, circulation rose from 15,000 to nearly 100,000. Quality writers and artists flocked to the magazine - certainly not for the grandiose late payment of 5 cents a word or 100 bucks per full-page image, but for the joy of partaking in the magic.

"There was something really wonderful about the dangerous mind behind Mondo," says Gareth Branwyn, author of the Beyond Cyberpunk hypercard stack, and a frequent contributor. "As a young writer, this to me was a real breakout platform. It had a similar feeling to the whole notion of punk music. There was that sense that we had thrown out all of the rules. So when I would go to interview a rock band or a multimedia producer, you could do just whatever you damn well please. The Red Hot Chili Peppers - they actually did a Rorschach on their dental records. Really bizarre shit."

Branwyn continues: "You could be belligerent and combative, or be just conversational. If you thought what they were saying was bullshit, you could just start arguing with them. It was really this kind of Interzone, where anything was allowed. That was a real liberating feeling for me as a writer. It celebrated that you were being irresponsible."

The success of 1992 also included a book - Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge - a 317-page compilation of previous articles and artwork, with new additions and resource listings. It was an immediate success, going into reprint and eventually selling over 40,000 copies.

In 1993, Bart Nagel rattled his peers with an editorial inspired by artist Jeffrey Koons' theory of image appropriation. Either steal it and manipulate it, wrote Nagel, or use it blatantly under the fair-use doctrine. Nagel practiced what his editorial preached with the cover of issue No. 10, in which he superimposed a photo against a background stolen from the cover of another magazine.

Nagel was immediately savaged in trade journals as the Antichrist of art directors. He retaliated with an editorial in issue No. 11 about a new technology that works on the DNA level to detect microscopic, recognizable patterns in images. He asserted that the technology encoded patterns that were invisible to the naked eye but detectable no matter how much the image was scanned or used. He further claimed that in one year hence, all scanners and copy machines would contain a built-in chip to detect these codes and notify a national computer image bank of every duplication by modem. The computer would then automatically debit your Visa account.

"I tried to make it more and more absurd, by saying these scanners would be hooked up to a neural net computer, which could actually detect if you were scanning someone's style, and that a lot of photographers were already excited about this, and that Richard Avedon and Annie Liebovitz were already offering to donate their proceeds from their style theft to a photo assistance group called We're Creative, Too."

It was a joke, of course, yet an assistant who worked for both Avedon and Liebovitz called Nagel, asking if his bosses were actually doing it. The magazine of the Library of Congress called expressing interest in an interview with Nagel. The corporate offices of Kinko's requested permission to reprint the article and distribute it to managers. When the Australian Broadcast Company also requested an interview, Nagel couldn't stop laughing, and admitted the hoax.

"Well, just consider it a feather in your cap that you put one over on the Australian Broadcast Company!" snapped the indignant Aussies. As Mondo was cresting, the founders of a failed magazine named Electric Word, Louis Rosetto and Jane Metcalfe, were returning to the States from Amsterdam. They were eager to start a magazine about computer culture and had already picked out a name: Wired. A mutual friend introduced them to Mondo adviser Randy Stickrod, and after a small meeting at Stickrod's home, he showed the group a portion of his office space at South Park, a corner eventually nicknamed "The Charmed Corner" for its list of successful publishing tenants - Wired, Might, Cups, Boing Boing, and Just Go!.

Rosetto and Metcalfe liked the space, moved in, and spent the next 15 months hosting a conference on the WELL, schmoozing contributors, and working on a business plan package for investors. Stickrod even introduced them to Queen Mu at the Mondo House.

"They were kind of chummy," Stickrod remembers. "They were swapping tips. That was the level of incestuousness we had going on there. Alison would come over to my office and bring a box of Mondos for me to hand out. She'd go sit and talk to Louis and Jane for half an hour. There was no overt tension at all."

Throughout 1992, Mondo 2000 could do no wrong and could afford to be gracious to the young upstarts, who obviously were dull, boring computer people while Mondo was ultrahip counterculture. (Electric Word telegraphed how boring it was with the slogan "The world's least boring computer magazine.")

Still, Wired's basic concept - the consequences of technology on lifestyle and popular culture - was very similar to Mondo. Didn't everyone know?

"Oh, of course I did," says Stickrod. "They knew that, too. What we all tried to do was politely underplay the similarities and really play up the differences. At the time, we all put a spin on it that they were not competitors. Including Alison."

"The only thing that was remotely connected [to Wired] was Mondo 2000," says Wired Executive Editor Kevin Kelly, who wrote for the early Mondo. "It was coming along in parallel with it. We were very careful not to refer to Mondo. We didn't want to be compared to them. But they also were aware of this same niche."

In January 1993, Wired magazine debuted as a bimonthly, its billboard campaign announcing, "At last. A magazine for the Digital Age," its promotional literature adopting the phrase "Rolling Stone of the 90s," a soundbite used previously by Mondo 2000.

The Mondo folks had no reason to flinch: A week later they were featured on the cover of Time magazine's "Cyberpunk" story in what could have passed for a paid advertisement. The cover was designed by Bart Nagel, and the layout, which mimicked the Mondo book's design, was illustrated by Mondo artists and photographers. Paragraph after paragraph was devoted to descriptions of Mondo articles and topics. Wired rated only a passing mention.

Accompanying the article was a photo of Nagel, R.U. Sirius, and Queen Mu standing in a field, the royal trio of cyberpunk prankster publishers. But unknown to Time readers was that Sirius and Mu were barely on speaking terms. He had already left the magazine. Most staffers say it was over the U2-Negativland story.

As the magazine's popularity rose, its staff was solicited by celebrities hoping to get into the pages. Neil Young, Italian astrophysicist Fiorelli Torenzi, Dan Aykroyd, Michael Penn, Billy Idol's "people," even Buffy Sainte-Marie approached the magazine asking for press. So when U2 guitarist The Edge asked to be interviewed, R.U. Sirius summoned his friends from Negativland, a Bay Area band that had been sued for copyright infringement by U2's management for sampling the Irish band's music on its release U2.

When The Edge phoned on schedule for the interview, members of Negativland were there to conduct it - unbeknownst to The Edge. Negativland skillfully drew the guitarist into a philosophical discussion in which he described the artistic liberties U2 had taken in appropriating video images and music onstage during its "Zooropa" tour.

The shocker came when R.U. Sirius told The Edge that he was, in fact, talking to the band his management company nearly sued out of existence. Brilliantly revealing U2 as hypocrites, the article caused a huge rift at Mondo when Queen Mu balked at running it. She was tired of Negativland, and since she was paying the bills, she could make the calls.

"This was the centerpiece of the issue," remembers Hultkrans. "It was a huge fight."

"I just blew up," says Sirius. "It was probably a confluence of a lot of other shit leading up to that." He quit, walked out of the meeting and out of the house, and later faxed in a formal resignation.

Hultkrans rewrote an introduction to the story and Queen Mu graciously ran it in 1993's issue No. 8 as scheduled, but Mondo 2000 had faced its future.

"If [R.U.] is not here," thought Nagel, "it's not going to be fun anymore."

Sirius left the magazine and started looking for work at mainstream magazines like Details and Spin. His approach was not the most tactful employment solicitation. "Let's face it, I had an attitude: 'Hey, I'm gone from Mondo 2000! I can fucking come in and remake your goddamn magazine until it means something!' That didn't go over too well," he says.

He eventually slinked back to the Mondo House, and traded his ownership shares for a steady salary and financial security. Nobody said anything.

"It was like Long Day's Journey Into Night," says Hultkrans, "where everybody sort of dances around the problem."

Queen Mu's idiosyncrasies also ran through other departments, recalls Stickrod, who, in addition to advising the magazine for a time, also shared responsibility for advertising sales.

"Alison personally alienated more advertisers than you can imagine. She developed this theory that the reason she couldn't get big-name advertisers is that the agencies didn't respect her because her rates weren't high enough. So one day she arbitrarily tripled the rates."

"She was always frustrated because she couldn't understand why we weren't selling more [advertisements]," says Miles Hurwitz, an independent media rep who hustled ads for several issues. "And one of the reasons is because the rates were ridiculously high."

"This is a place I'd done a lot of footwork, and had opened the door up to them," says Stickrod of Apple Computer's ad agency. "There are people I can't talk to now because Alison came in and raised so much hell."

Queen Mu may not have been the greatest leader of a sales force, but the magazine did attract ads from the likes of Xaos Tools, Geffen, New Line Cinema, Logitech, and other big-ticket concerns.

But the magazine's erratic publishing schedule also made it difficult to develop a solid advertising base. "Had they just come out quarterly as they had promised," says Hurwitz, "that would have been helpful."

Mondo's pro-drug association continued to haunt advertisers, a bargaining chip often used by Wired ad reps, so Queen Mu began orchestrating the tone to appear more mainstream.

"I think that was a big mistake," says Stickrod. "That was the place that made them interesting and hip. She was losing touch with her constituency - the thing that made them outrageous and interesting."

Nagel also winced at the changes. "The rest of us thought, 'We've already gotten mainstream coverage here - why don't we just continue doing what we're doing?' It's not like we were going to lose any ads." Wired scrupulously avoided mentioning Mondo, but its contents page revealed that it had looked long and hard at Mondo's back issues.

The cover story in its premiere issue was written by Bruce Sterling, a frequent Mondo contributor. Also on the masthead were R.U. Sirius as contributing writer and Randy Stickrod, who was thanked under "tea and sympathy." The second Wired detailed the Crypto Rebels, "cypherpunks" battling for the right to encrypt, a subject first covered by Mondo. Posing on the cover, among others, was St. Jude herself, who had coined the word "cypherpunks." Wired's third cover featured Brian Eno, previously written up in Mondo; the fourth cover story was written by Mondo alumnus (and Mondo House guest) William Gibson.

Paying writers 20 times as much as Mondo, and paying on time, the more commercial Wired quickly skimmed the best of the rest of the Mondo talent pool: St. Jude, Branwyn, Rucker, Barlow, Ito, and Jaron Lanier.

To this day, Wired still smells strongly of Mondo. The October issue contains articles by former Mondoids Andrew Hultkrans, Chris Hudak, Allan Lundell, Mark Fraunfelder, and Gareth Branwyn; Wired's on-line subsidiary, HotWired, includes on its staff former Mondo contributors Gary Wolf, Richard Kadrey, and John Alderman; the magazine's new Scenarios special edition contains essays by Barlow and Sterling.

"Mondo did the market research for a cyberculture magazine," says Branwyn, author of an upcoming book called Jamming the Media. "Wired manifested on a much larger playing field, with sane people running it, with intelligent management. Mondo could have been much, much more than it was, and could really have been a contender for Wired."

Initial reaction to Wired's debut at the Mondo House was skeptical. They now had a competitor - their first competitor - but nobody seemed impressed by the first issues. It was corporate and straightforward, even journalistic. Timothy Leary called it the CIA's answer to Mondo 2000. The staff compared it to the Monkees.

"I thought it was a rip-off," remembers Hultkrans. He then pauses. "It was really like seeing yourself cloned in a way. It seemed like they were on a campaign to eat up our entire back catalog - people we've interviewed, issues we've covered."

Even the distinctive spine design of Wired was blatantly copied from the clever John Borruso-designed spines of Mondo, according to an insider who attended the Wired design meeting.

"I don't think they make any bones about [the similarities]," allows R.U. Sirius. "Kevin Kelly pointed out in a discussion on the WELL, 'Well, you're always advocating appropriation, so fuck you.' I gotta hand it to him."

"Wired was uptown and Mondo was downtown," says Stickrod. "Mondo was really for the hairy and unwashed, and Wired was able to comfortably cross that threshold."

Queen Mu and her chief assistant, Wes Thomas, acted indifferent to the arrival of Wired, yet each issue was immediately scoured for ad leads. Once Sirius severed full-time ties to the magazine, Thomas assumed more editorial control. Originally the Mondo publicist based in New York, Thomas wrote technology articles for many issues, and had a brilliant intelligence for conspiracy theory.

"He went to work creating this little wedge in between there, and wound up with this really weird period that I like to refer to as Hogan's Heroes," says Sirius. "He was acting like Colonel Klink. On some cosmic level, his job was to come in and tear the place apart." "He was the potentiator of Alison's worst qualities," claims Hultkrans. "I personally hold him partially responsible for what happened at the magazine."

"Wes would come to the door around 11 a.m. in a Buddhist monk robe, and get upset that his morning Chronicle was sitting under a car in the driveway," says then-staffer John Alderman. "Make one of the staff go get it for him. 'I'm the editor of the most important magazine in the world, and I need my newspaper every day!' "

The fun and games had ended.

"They had this beautiful house up in the Berkeley hills, trying to be the center of culture, but really it's this siege mentality," Alderman says. "The mail all has to be pored through like it's messages from the CIA/Wired/Mormon/Illuminati axis. That was a fully described theory one day."

In the early days, paranoia and conspiracy theories were just jokes from which outrageous scenarios and rants could be spun, but by 1994 the mood was strangely sober. The guys working on the phone box down the street - what were they really up to? And who was that guy visible from the kitchen window, pretending to draw sketches of the building? And who were those kids who came to the door of the house, one of them claiming his dad worked for the CIA?

But maybe the paranoia was justified.

"Some of the shit they wrote about," says former illustrator Eric White, "I wouldn't be surprised if I'm on some list somewhere, just for being associated with it."

When a package arrived one day, the usually levelheaded Bart Nagel remembers gingerly opening it with an X-Acto knife taped to a broom handle. Gracie and Zarkov remember coming to visit once and finding everyone hiding under a bed, convinced the feds were circling with a helicopter.

And one of the staffers started to develop a serious cross-dressing persona - at the office.

"He was like, 'Oh, I'm sorry. We haven't met. My name is Amara,' " remembers Alderman. "He looked more like a British pop star. He had on all these flowing things, and a red wig. It was sort of par for the course. In fact, it was much more pleasant to work with Amara, because [he] was this cranky old man, and Amara's at least kind of perky."

Alderman and fellow staffer Kenneth Newby were in similar positions - young latecomers surrounded by incomprehensible tension, working on a magazine that was appearing less and less frequently on the newsstand. The two wondered if this was what publishing was really like.

"We'd go out to lunch every day and just laugh and laugh and laugh," says Alderman. "Everything seemed so important, dead serious while you were there, and then you'd get out for a minute, take a breath. You're like, 'I just spent my whole day arguing about Masons and the CIA stealing the data base, when it's right there under yesterday's Chronicle.' It was like a Fassbinder film." Many Mondo principals interviewed for this story doubted that Alison "Queen Mu" Kennedy would talk on the record about the magazine. After years of skilled media manipulation herself, they said, she was now distrustful of the press, and refused all requests.

But talk she does. To me for about five hours and to the editor of SF Weekly for maybe 30 minutes. She is puzzled about why this piece is being written, but once it becomes evident the story will be told anyway, she loosens up, relaxes, and expresses herself. Still, she insists on not being quoted.

No complete history of Mondo can be written until she talks because, as she has repeated to anyone who will listen, "I am Mondo 2000!"

Rudy Rucker agrees.

"It wouldn't be Mondo without Alison," says Rucker. Since its inception six years ago, Queen Mu has published 14 issues and co-authored a book, all without drawing any salary, instead pouring a personal small fortune into the coffers to produce the best magazine possible. The inheritance is now spent, by some accounts tallying close to a half-million dollars, but at the time of this writing, a fresh infusion of cash into Mondo is said to be on the horizon.

Given the sheer number of off-record anecdotes about her, the level of unresolved frustration among many former staffers and contributors, it is surprising to find her extremely charming, in a timeless, Old World sense. Verbal exchange for her is an art form - you imagine receiving an engraved invitation for lunch, delivered by a butler on a silver tray. It's a truly odd juxtaposition, the publisher of a high-tech computer lifestyle magazine preferring to discuss arcane academic disciplines instead of electronic gadgetry. For years she even refused to use a computer. But then, Mondo has always been about juxtaposition, as perpetually confounding as a conversation with its matriarch.

Topics bounce around with lightning speed in conversation with Queen Mu, a stream of thoughts often mutating, unresolved, from one to another, as we circle around a set of questions faxed at her request. Our discourse is luxurious, seductive, and frustrating simultaneously, as a sudden Latin or French expression is casually dropped, requiring me to ask for explanation. It is a position of authority she has been in many times before.

One can empathize with Queen Mu's reluctance to talk on the record. Everybody on a publication wants to reap the rewards, but nobody wants to pay the bills. The person who does handle the checkbook has the least fun and becomes the most vilified.

In that context, the animosity toward Queen Mu among former employees seems confusing and unjustified. In her mind she professes great love and admiration for the talents of those who have passed through Mondo House portals. She is also frighteningly quick to judge, however, and starts zeroing in on certain Mondoids' personality flaws, giving each a verbal slap with antique velvet-gloved condescension, until I point out that the situation isn't that black and white. Many of the people I interviewed also have nice things to say about her, and admit they owe her for the opportunity. This produces a tranquilizing effect, and we arrange to have tea later in the week.

The day after our conversation, a flurry of panicked phone calls bounces among Queen Mu, myself, and SF Weekly. The story - the cover art by Bart Nagel! - infuriates her.

Staff members - past and present - say that no Mondo article was ever sent to press without her pencil going over it. It is becoming obvious to Mu that this Mondo story is one of the few the Domineditrix will not be able to edit. Referring to powers that will not be pleased by this article, she cancels our date for tea.

More than seven months after the appearance of Mondo No. 13, Mondo No. 14 is now on the newsstands. Its look is still sleek, still printed on heavy coated stock, and even more saturated with photography, courtesy of new Art Directors Thomas Pitts and Heidi Foley (Foley paid her dues for years as an assistant in the Mondo art department). Getting this edition out was obviously a chore - one ad announces a new CD available in January 1995, another promotes a Macintosh music festival that ended in July, indicating the issue's tardiness.

Some of the names on the masthead of No. 14 have since left. There are some interesting articles on Bruce Sterling, cryogenics, Bob Guccione Jr., and the future of audio, and a fun essay on video games, but it is a different magazine now. And yet, thumbing through its glossy pages, Mondo is still, as O.J. might say, absolutely, completely, 100 percent Queen Mu.

"It's a really remarkable institution," says Timothy Leary. "There was a style, in the best aristocratic sense, and an attitude of [being] very bouncy, self-confident. A beautiful merger of the psychedelic, the cybernetic, the cultural, the literary, and artistic. It shouldn't last a long time."
***************
2004 - The Wallen Maybeck House

2751_buenavistalivrm320

Bernard Maybeck's Wallen house, at 2751 Buena Vista Way in Berkeley, California, is for sale. Agent Norah Brower (with Berkeley Hills Realty) has the 1,700 square foot house on a 7,900 square foot hillside lot listed for $1,050,000 (3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, a potting studio, plus basement and garage). As with most Maybeck homes, this particular house is full of beautiful hand-hewn and lovingly-assembled detail. From the flyer:

After Maybeck's large family house on Buena Vista burnt down in 1923, it was never rebuilt, nor did he build another large house for his family. Instead, over the following years, he and his family built several cottages all in the same neighborhood, some on the site of his original house. Maybeck had purchased large parcels of land in the North Berkeley hills and 2751 Buena Vista was one of two houses, essentially the same design but rearranged to fit the site, that he designed and built during the depression to keep his staff and craftsmen working. Over the years, various family members moved in and out of their 8 different houses, all cotages except for "Hilltop" in Kensington. 2751, however, seemed to be the heart of the extended family, where Ben and Annie lived for several years and to which Wallen, Jacomena and the twins eventually returned. It embodies many of Maybeck's notions about what an ideal home should be; modest, free of adornment, well-integrated into its site, amidst the lush foliage and with views of the bay. The many decks extend the interior outside, the height of the living room, the arched beams and the floor-to-ceiling metal sash windows add drama, atmosphere and light.

In more recent years, it has had a new foundation, drainage and retaining wall added (1998), a new furnace, electrical upgrades and a new roof and roof deck off the kitchen (2005). Jacomena wrote in her book, Maybeck, A Family View, that a workman told Maybeck "I believe you have put the house partly on the next lot," to which Maybeck replied, "Oh, well, move the lot line." This was finally done in 2004.

Maybeck’s designs were as varied as the number of artisan bread bakeries in Berkeley. On La Loma, a home resembling a Roman villa, distinctive in muted hues, with arched windows and small colored tiles inset to create diamond-patterned motifs. On Buena Vista, the “Sack House,” Maybeck’s answer to the 1923 fire that destroyed nearly 600 homes. The distinct outlines of burlap sacks dipped in concrete and hung like rough shingles, contrast with the graceful roof and overhanging eaves of the nearby Prairie-Style Matheson House.

Another Maybeck, designed as a Bavarian cottage, hides behind its own forest of trees. On the door of the garage I saw the often photographed painted motifs. The old Volvo nearly buried beneath branches and fallen leaves added to the “Enchanted Forest” feel.

1940, Berkeley, Charles Aikin house
2750 Buena Vista Way, Berkeley
Bernard Maybeck.

nm (Cardwell 1977: 246).

Maybeck's last house, built in 1940, was more a neighborly act than a commission. Charles Aikin, a professor of political science, and his wife, Audrey, an artist, bought property from the Maybecks on Buena Vista Way. (According to family accounts, Mrs. Aikin pestered Maybeck to help her design their house, but declined to pay him any commission after it was built.) Now nearly eighty, Maybeck seems to have retained his delight in creating, and Audrey Aikin recorded his statements about the work in her diary. Of the living room (plate 216) he said: "It is a grand and quiet room. What I want you to do is this: look around for a poet or a musician. Invite him in and let him just sit in hre. Some spaces are disquieting, but this is all right. Give him something to drink--ah, but nothing with whiskey in it--or he'll stay all night.!"5

This last of Maybeck's living halls is a rerun of those we have seen before, but with new variations in materials. The ceiling has pecky cypress, the "poor man's carving," between the beams; the main feature of the room is a culptural concrete fireplace (plate 219) that is baronial in scale--Maybeck said that he wanted Charles Aikin to be able to impress his students. As usual, the hall is approached indirectly from both the uphill and the downhill entrance. The two entrances occur almost opposite each other, on line with the stone steps that ascend the hill. Thus the house is also a "hillside house" very similar to the one in the undated drawing (see plate 127) that Maybeck had made years earlier. The stucco-and-wood exterior of the Aikins' house is modest in charactaer, like the 1933 family houses and a few other houses on Buena Vista Way whose owners Maybeck advised. According to Jacomena Maybeck, he persisted in this habit of giving advice as long as he was able, and whenever construction was going on in the neighborhood he could be found sitting in a chair near the workmen, chatting with them and offering suggestions.6 (Woodbridge and Barnes 1992: 210-14, 236).

(DMT) Is an Endogenous Sigma-1 Receptor Regulator

Science 13 February 2009:
Vol. 323. no. 5916, pp. 934 - 937
DOI: 10.1126/science.1166127

Prev | Table of Contents | Next
Reports
The Hallucinogen N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) Is an Endogenous Sigma-1 Receptor Regulator
Dominique Fontanilla,1 Molly Johannessen,2 Abdol R. Hajipour,3 Nicholas V. Cozzi,1 Meyer B. Jackson,2 Arnold E. Ruoho1*

The sigma-1 receptor is widely distributed in the central nervous system and periphery. Originally mischaracterized as an opioid receptor, the sigma-1 receptor binds a vast number of synthetic compounds but does not bind opioid peptides; it is currently considered an orphan receptor. The sigma-1 receptor pharmacophore includes an alkylamine core, also found in the endogenous compound N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT). DMT acts as a hallucinogen, but its receptor target has been unclear. DMT bound to sigma-1 receptors and inhibited voltage-gated sodium ion (Na+) channels in both native cardiac myocytes and heterologous cells that express sigma-1 receptors. DMT induced hypermobility in wild-type mice but not in sigma-1 receptor knockout mice. These biochemical, physiological, and behavioral experiments indicate that DMT is an endogenous agonist for the sigma-1 receptor.

1 Department of Pharmacology, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
2 Department of Physiology, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
3 Pharmaceutical Research Laboratory, Department of Chemistry, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan 84156, IR Iran.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: aeruoho@wisc.edu

The binding, biochemical, physiological, and behavioral studies reported here all support the hypothesis that DMT acts as a ligand for the sigma-1 receptor. On the basis of our binding results and the sigma-1 receptor pharmacophore, endogenous trace amines and their N-methyl and N,N-dimethyl derivatives are likely to serve as endogenous sigma receptor regulators. Moreover, DMT, the only known mammalian N,N-dimethylated trace amine, can activate the sigma-1 receptor to modulate Na+ channels. The recent discovery that the sigma-1 receptor functions as a molecular chaperone (30) may be relevant, because sigma-1 receptors, which are observed in the endoplasmic reticulum, associate with plasma membrane Kv 1.4 channels (22) and may serve as a molecular chaperone for ion channels. Furthermore, the behavioral effect of DMT may be due to activation or inhibition of sigma-1 receptor chaperone activity instead of, or in addition to, DMT/sigma-1 receptor modulation of ion channels. These studies thus suggest that this natural hallucinogen could exert its action by binding to sigma-1 receptors, which are abundant in the brain (1, 27). This discovery may also extend to N,N-dimethylated neurotransmitters such as the psychoactive serotonin derivative N,N-dimethylserotonin (bufotenine), which has been found at elevated concentrations in the urine of schizophrenic patients (10). The finding that DMT and sigma-1 receptors act as a ligand-receptor pair provides a long-awaited connection that will enable researchers to elucidate the biological functions of both of these molecules.

DMT Psychoactive Compound Activates Mysterious Receptor

Psychoactive Compound Activates Mysterious Receptor

Thursday, February 12, 2009

A hallucinogenic compound found in a plant indigenous to South
America and used in shamanic rituals regulates a mysterious protein
that is abundant throughout the body, University of Wisconsin-
Madison researchers have discovered.

The finding, reported in the Feb. 13 issue of Science, may
ultimately have implications for treating drug abuse and/or
depression. Many more experiments will be needed, the researchers
say.

Scientists have been searching for years for naturally occurring
compounds that trigger activity in the protein, the sigma-1
receptor. In addition, a unique receptor for the hallucinogen,
called dimethyltryptamine (DMT), has never been identified.

The UW-Madison researchers made the unusual pairing by doing their
initial work the "old-fashioned," yet still effective, way. They
diagrammed the chemical structure of several drugs that bind to the
sigma-1 receptor, reduced them to their simplest forms and then
searched for possible natural molecules with the same features.
Biochemical, physiological and behavioral experiments proved that
DMT does, in fact, activate the sigma-1 receptor.

"We have no idea at present if or how the sigma-1 receptor may be
connected to hallucinogenic activity," says senior author Arnold
Ruoho, chair of pharmacology at the UW-Madison School of Medicine
and Public Health. "But we believe that the National Institute on
Drug Abuse (NIDA) may be interested in biological mechanisms
underlying psychoactive and addictive drug action."

In addition to being a component of psychoactive snuffs and
sacramental teas used in native religious practices in Latin
America, DMT is known to be present in some mammalian tissues, and
it has also been identified in mammalian blood and spinal fluid.
Elevated levels of DMT and a related molecule have been found in
the urine of schizophrenics.

Ruoho speculates that the hallucinogen's involvement may mean that
the sigma-1 receptor is connected in some fashion to psychoactive
behavior. When his team injected DMT into mice known to have the
receptor, the animals became hyperactive; mice in which the
receptor had been genetically removed did not.

"Hyperactive behavior is often associated with drug use or
psychiatric problems," says Ruoho. "It's possible that new, highly
selective drugs could be developed to inhibit the receptor and
prevent this behavior."

The study revealed an additional neurologic link by confirming that
the sigma-1 receptor and some compounds that bind to it inhibit ion
channels, which are important for nerve activity. Work by many
researchers - including some from UW-Madison - initially showed
this relationship in earlier studies.

Some studies have also linked the receptor to the action of
antidepressant drugs, and National Institutes of Health (NIH)
scientists recently found that it appears to serve as a "chaperon,"
helping proteins to fold properly.

The Wisconsin researchers found that DMT is derived from the
naturally occurring amino acid tryptophan and is structurally
related to the neurotransmitter serotonin. This finding, Ruoho
says, illustrates the mantra often used in the biological
processing of natural molecules: Nothing goes to waste.

"Our findings support the idea that biochemical alterations of
molecules such as tryptophan can produce simple compounds such as
DMT that may target other regulatory pathways served by sigma-1
receptors," he says.

DMT may also reflect the presence of an even larger family of
natural compounds that arise from other structurally related amino
acids that may further regulate the receptor, Ruoho adds.

"It may well be that these different, naturally derived chemical
forms regulate the sigma-1 receptor in tissue and organ-specific
ways," he says.