Far Out Company

Far Out Company Countercultural rarity visual overload Keeping it cosmic.

08/29/2026

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

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

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

08/23/2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

08/09/2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Soundtrack by Boston’s Eden’s Children]

08/01/2026

Cult Time, featuring the role of hand embroidery in the Manson Family 🧵🪡

Footage from ‘Manson’ (1973) by Robert Hendrickson and Laurence Merrick. Music by former Manson Family members Paul Watkins and Brooks Poston.

Hendrickson shot most of the remarkable observational footage in ‘Manson’ and had basically unlimited direct access to the Manson Family for years. His collaborator, Laurence Merrick, with whom Hendrickson got into legal battles, was later murdered at the acting studio he owned by a troubled man who contended Merrick cast a black magic spell upon him during an audition.

A few years after this film’s initial release, Manson Family member Squeaky Fromme (seen speaking in this clip) was arrested for an attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Her motive, she said, was to draw attention to the destruction of California’s giant sequoia forests. The ‘Manson’ film was then banned in the Eastern District of California by United States District Court Judge Thomas MacBride in order to preserve Fromme’s constitutional right to a fair and speedy trial. Hendrickson got the ACLU involved to fight this ban, and they filed motions against it. ‘BANNED IN CALIFORNIA’ became a marketing angle for the movie.

Fromme was sentenced to life and imprisoned, and she later escaped from a West Virginia prison in an attempt to travel to see Charlie, when she heard reports that he was suffering from cancer. She was captured two days later and ended up serving a total of 34 years before she was released on parole in 2009.

07/31/2026

Gene Wilder and Ellen Burstyn pick up their son at a very ‘70s California est (Erhard Seminars Training)-inspired summer camp in ‘Thursday’s Game’ (made in 1971 but broadcast in 1974). It was a made-for-TV movie written by James L. Brooks, who created The Mary Tyler Moore Show and helped develop The Simpsons.

As Google says, “In the est (Erhard Seminars Training) philosophy, expressing feelings is viewed not as something to be controlled, but as an experience to be fully lived and taken responsibility for. The core idea is to experience your emotions without trying to analyze, justify, or change them. The goal is to directly connect with the sensation of the emotion itself.”

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