God is Photographing Me Upside Down
This article first appeared in the Psychedelic Press journal. You can subscribe to our final three print issues here, and check out all our publications here.
“O.k. imps, snot-freaks, pill elves
Hi-fi fury flipsters and intelligences,
It’s out, all out now onto the rooftops –
Your only chance left now
Is to come out here into the naked star-fright
And freak it out alone.
Yes, out until it’s scared the living
Fainlights out of you”
Harry Fainlight, from ‘Trans – “The D.J. Speaks”’[i]
Contrary to some popular beliefs, the psychedelic sixties occupy a liminal margin in the history of mid-twentieth century culture. In Britain, an emergent ‘permissive society’ centred on changing attitudes to sexuality, gambling, marriage, and censorship. This liberalization took aim at a moral hangover bequeathed by earlier ages. It lay the foundations for today’s prevalent questions about identity—central to which are notions of sexuality, gender, and expression. Drugs, and particularly psychedelics, epitomised a paradox that lay at its heart.
Psychedelics seeped out of laboratories and into wider social consciousness in the 1950s and ’60s. They began deeply affecting attitudes and came to represent the struggle between old and new moralities in media and minds. For the counterculture, they were a badge of honour; while for the old, they became the scapegoat, a ritual sacrifice. In the UK, a year prior to homosexuality being decriminalised in 1967, the unlicensed use of LSD was criminalised. By 1971, there was a global prohibition. The war on drugs is perhaps another moral hangover, but also a sacrifice never properly re-integrated.
As above, so below. It is possible to see something of this macrocosmic narrative in the microcosmic being of the Anglo-American poet Harry Fainlight (1935–1982). Fainlight wrote ‘Trans – “The D.J. Speaks”’ (see above) in 1965. The poem plays with a paradox that being high on LSD is simultaneously interconnecting and isolating. Not only is this a theme in Harry’s life and poetics, but it’s concurrently the role LSD began to play in a wider milieu that year. Yes, it established spontaneous community within the permissive society; a cultural marginality that contributed to wider change. Yet, criminalised, the psychedelic aficionado was an isolated figure, pushed back into cultural interstices.
It is perhaps a truism of literature generally, but reading Fainlight’s poetry is particularly prescient in conveying both the deeply personal aspects of the poet and the deeply historical context in which it was written. And for the psychedelic sixties, like LSD, he is a liminal being par excellence. Indeed, the transitory nature of a rite of passage is mirrored in an early life spent in a constant state of national transition, which became an important aspect of his life and work.
Born in New York to a Jewish family comprised of an American mother, English father, and his older sister Ruth (who also became a poet), they soon after moved to England. Due to the outbreak of WW2, however, and having spent a year in Wales as evacuees in 1940, they returned to America via liner, amidst the horror of warships and torpedo alerts. The family flipped back to England in 1946 and were finally reunited with their RAF father.[ii] Quite what effect this had on the 6-year-old Harry is difficult to tell, but this transnational identity and its unfixity certainly became defining features in his work.
Back in England during his teenage years, Fainlight became settled for a time, attending Brighton and Hove Grammar school where he enjoyed playing cricket, chess, and the clarinet. It was there he started writing poetry. Academically on point, he won a county scholarship, and attended Pembroke College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a second-class degree. During his first year at university, however, signs of mental instability began to emerge, which his mother later described as a ‘nervous crisis’. As his life progressed, this crisis continually reasserted itself as old morality clawed back the tide of change.
Ruth Fainlight describes herself as being the more rebellious of the two in their youth. Visiting him after he left Cambridge, with Harry dressed in the garb of his job as an advertising agency executive, she felt it was he who was taking his older bohemian sister and her lover (Alan Sillitoe) out to lunch. She later noted, however, that he ‘must already have felt the impossibility of conforming to the expectations and limitations of that image […].’[iii] Indeed, he soon left that job, and decided to return to New York—a decision that would bring him into contact with American Beat culture and psychedelic substances.
At that stage, Harry had already begun publishing his poetry, most notably with the Encounter literary journal; founded in 1953 by the poet Stephen Spender and the journalist Erving Crystal. Tempered by an Anglo-American cultural theme, it was associated with the anti-Stalinist Left. As is so often the case when looking into anything which is even very remotely connected to psychedelic substances and politics in the 1950s, this was funded by the CIA—they and MI5 wanted a publication to counter cold-war neutralism.[iv] Fainlight, of course, like so many LSD subjects across the pond, was unaware of this at that time.
Fainlight’s earlier poetry is steeped in a tendency to personify human emotion through a physical absence. For instance: ‘A warm evening; from windows open / on air-shafts and streets, television screens / flicker like faint summer sheet lightning.’[v] Yet, between 1959 and 1964, a notable change occurs in which Harry, and his own emotional states, begin to take centre stage, which coincides with his American return. In ‘Morning’ (1962), he writes: ‘Hollow-feeling, empty of sleep and as yet unbreakfasted / from an already forgotten stranger’s bed / I stumble out into an unfamiliar part of town.’[vi] His ‘I’ begins to be cast about, and sexuality starts to creep into the frame. As Fainlight, so the permissive society.
In New York, he began embracing a Bohemian lifestyle, but one existing on a further margin than his sister had inhabited. Partly driven to America by his wish to explore Beat poetry, he befriended such luminaries as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, and found himself engrossed in the East Coast pop-art and counterculture movements. He also spent time with Andy Warhol in The Factory, and even lent his voice to Warhol’s film Harlot (1964). As an off-screen presence, his involvement illuminates a certain tragic theme in his life, in which he maintained both a presence and an absence.
For a time in the early sixties, two poetical sides of Harry Fainlight co-existed on each side of the Atlantic—the English poet and the American Beat—and they rarely sat comfortably together. He began exploring the Beat’s predilection for communicating lived experience, which explains the emergence, although sometimes unsettlingly so, of his ‘I’. Greatly respected by his fellow poets, his work began appearing in important, small publications such as Ted Berrigan’s C: A Journal of Poetry and Ed Sanders’ infamous Fuck You. Unsurprisingly, the American Beat was sometimes wont to muse on the prior life of the English poet.
‘O London’ is a 2 part, 12 sectioned, poem that first appeared in Fuck You, and which describes a homosexual encounter.[vii] Interestingly, Part 8 is in fact the previously mentioned poem ‘Morning’ that was published in Encounter—shorn of its sexually explicit context. Bearing in mind Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti’s obscenity trial (1957) in America, and the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial (1960) in Britain, the early rumblings of the permissive society were already sounding. Homosexuality, as already noted, was however still firmly illegal at the time. A liberalization in the legal rights of artistic expression presaged those of human rights in the emergence of permissiveness.
This begs the question as to whether he culled the more ambiguous morning after section especially for the British audience, or whether he expanded on it when in America for an audience more accepting of such language and themes. It’s tempting to believe the latter, so far as New York gave him the opportunity to shed the cultivated identity of a trained English poet, in favour of a newly found liberal expression of self in America. In some respects, he was achieving a form of nostos or homecoming, literally in terms of returning to the place of his birth, but also in terms of embracing his sexual identity—one facet of ‘I’.
The ‘I’ of his poetry was a useful problematic, but of course more deleterious as an experience of life. This is nowhere clearer than when read through his personal and poetic encounters with psychedelic substances; particularly those described in ‘Mescaline Notes’ and ‘The Spider’—dealing with mescaline and LSD respectively.
Poetry has been no stranger to the alluring effects of psychoactive substances. From Coleridge’s famous opium-inspired domes to the private nitrous oxide experiments of Sir Humphry Davy, drugs were a byway into the sublime. And in the age of psychedelics, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg took up this mantle, publishing his trio of poems on LSD, mescaline, and nitrous oxide in Kaddish and Other Poems 1958–1960 (1961). While other Beats were more concerned with amphetamines and opiates, Ginsberg’s Blakean fascination with the mystical self was drawn to the otherworldliness of psychedelics.[viii] Fainlight also tried to find that space, but was ultimately unable to reach it, stuck somehow in the liminal passage.
He wrote ‘Mescaline Notes’ whilst tripping on 20th June 1963, and it was published in Fuck You during Spring the following year.[ix] In many respects it bears a close relationship with Ginsberg’s mescaline poem so far as both were, in a Beat tradition, experiential records. Their prose-poetry lyricism centres on coming to an extraordinary conception of themselves in amongst, for the most part, quite ordinary backgrounds—coming to terms with a new rhythmic relationship. The central axis of this was of course the self. Fainlight wrote:
Everything is happening to fast for my brain to reverse it / GOD IS PHOTOGRAPHING ME UPSIDE DOWN / Geoffrey can you hear me? / Heroic space adrift… / the beauty of my particles.
At the centre of psychedelic discourse—then and now—are psychotherapeutic notions of self; when tripping, the ego-identity is, at times, warped and changed, and in others seemingly blown apart. When psychedelic therapy itself was developed, the intention was often to reach a non-ego state. For Fainlight, as a poet who had begun tentatively exploring the notion of ‘I’ in his work, whilst also being in a new geographical and cultural context, psychedelics seemingly plugged straight into this personal narrative—only, if you’re not sure of yourself already, what foundation is shaken? Fainlight’s ‘Mescaline Notes’ is less the hero’s journey of poet George Andrews, and to an extent Ginsberg, and more Jean-Paul Sartre. An unmistakable loss of meaning:
Then nothing. Void, emptiness as far as my finger will reach down. But then, ah! The other side, Wire…hair… and again soft wadding. I am home. / Alas, home. The sad smallness of revisiting scenes of childhood (the child shrunken to a mummy, the mummy to a mattress even?). The same states of headache and nausea I started with again are with me.
Fainlight returns to himself, as he was, unable to pass through the transition of his mescaline experience. Of course, some people familiar with mescaline may also recognise the dodgy stomach—but one person’s unease, is another’s traumatic re-entry into the body. The sense of being trapped is also evident in his most infamous psychedelically-inspired poem ‘The Spider’. It records an LSD experience in a house, in the presence of others such as Allen Ginsberg. At turns nightmarish, comical, orgiastic and lonely, it centres around the looming presence of a spider, and is without doubt one of the finest LSD poems ever written. It is also, however, deeply reminiscent of the very worst excesses and trials of a wild, uninhibited trip—one with no guiding presence.
Ginsberg later claimed that Fainlight had wanted the old Beat’s ‘power,’ and that he had indeed given it up to him. Ginsberg said: ‘Maybe more cursed than blessing for years afterwards he blamed me for laying a prophetic trip on him complaining of conspiracies to watch him and blockade his creation and fame in Albion.’[x] While it is difficult to fully assess Fainlight’s relationship with Ginsberg, it often seems that Ginsberg’s hyperbole about their relationship, along with other praising comments about his poetry, masks an ambivalence on his behalf. It would appear he was a guru or teacher figure, but one more interested in the advantages he could have in excess, rather than being a friend. Friendship is certainly wholly missing from ‘The Spider’.
Aside from the personal aspects, ‘The Spider’ also demonstrates how a master poet can take the closed and controlled observations of science, and communicate them with subtle nuance and meaning. And in other words, how culture begins to repackage science. Dr Peter Witts conducted a series of famous experiments in which spiders were given a range of drugs, and their webs were photographed. His research was widely reported in the mainstream press, and was one of the influencing elements in Fainlight’s poem. The spiders, a control(led) subject, were given various psychoactive substances then studied in their performance. Is this how Fainlight felt in the presence of Ginsberg? Regardless of its role as personal metaphor, however, it was a prism through which to explore other aspects of the LSD experience. For instance:
‘When tested on spiders, the drug tends to distort the symmetry of the webs they are spinning.’
When chested in spiders, the dugs bend to Detroit the cemeteries of wives they are spawning.
When testicles of spiders in drag blend into the delirium of simpering dicks they are spraining . . .
The famous mantra of ‘set and setting’ had also begun to filter out into the psychedelic underground along with the substances. Above is a perfect poetic illustration of this. While the rhythm and rhyming scheme control the poet’s expression, the content itself becomes wonky, veering off into unknown areas and nonsense-relationships. It is possible to find long papers and chapters explaining ‘set and setting’, but Fainlight manages it superbly in three simple lines. Moreover, he is literally illustrating the movement from science to culture, by beginning with a quote—something official—and then diverting off into the excesses of the mind. Yet, it remains controlled by poetic schema. ‘The Spider’ gives the impression that while Harry had difficult, potentially detrimental, experiences, his was a poetic voice that could, at the very least, skilfully and touchingly communicate them.
After three years in the US, Fainlight arrived back in England. Without doubt, LSD, Allen Ginsberg, and the counterculture scene had had a tremendous effect on him—whether or not this was ultimately positive however is debatable. Ruth described him, during a brief visit to her place on the outskirts of Tangiers, as spending his days sleeping, draping carpets across his window, and being restless throughout the night. She wrote: ‘It was obvious that a lot had happened to him in New York. He was thinner and much more nervous.’[xi] His experiences had thrust him to the extreme margins of the permissive society, and yet he clearly struggled to integrate those years of his life. And in his absence, London had also changed—its Underground scene had emerged.
Better Books, on Charing Cross Road, was run by Barry Miles and his wife Sue, and was one of the hubs of the progressive culture in London during the mid-sixties—a meeting place of prominent members of the Underground scene. When Allen Ginsberg arrived in London in 1965 on his enforced tour of Europe, he ended up staying there and giving a triumphal poetry reading. Also present were Fainlight’s New York compatriots, the Fuck You magazine crew and Andy Warhol.[xii] Whether or not Fainlight was there, however, is unclear. The momentum of this event—Ginsberg’s seemingly never-ending cultural momentum—led to the organisation of the International Poetry Incarnation (IPI) at the Royal Albert Hall, which took place on the 11th June 1965.
In one sense, it was a hugely successful event—it’s not very often 7,000 people gather to listen to poetry—and it’s often cited as the first gathering of the Underground. Indeed, many of those present found themselves in the middle of a culture much larger than they had imagined existing in London. The IPI’s spontaneity was a step in the cultural normalisation of the permissive society. In another sense, however, it was a shambles. Its compere, author Alexander Trocchi, had politely let dozens of unknown and (very) below par English poets do readings. Psychiatrist RD Laing brought along his psychiatric patients from Kingsley Hall, adding to the commotion. Dutch poet Simon Vinkenoog, high on either mescaline or LSD, depending on accounts, kept grabbing the microphone, and Ginsberg became uproariously drunk by the time he came on to read.
Not that all of this was captured by Peter Whitehead’s IPI film, Wholly Communion. What is evident in his narrative, however, was a clash between American and English poets—typified by Ginsberg’s unimpressed face at the poet Adrian Mitchell’s anti-war poetry. In his analysis of the film, scholar Daniel Kane argues that the presentation of the event evokes a tension of literary nationalism between the British and American representatives. Interestingly, it is this very tension that Fainlight appears to capture, not only in his life, but also in his own reading of ‘The Spider’.
According to Bomb Culture author Jeff Nuttall: ‘Fainlight was the star by default. He got pilloried. He was going to read his poem ‘Spider’ and he started to talk about ‘Spider’ and it was clear he couldn’t stop talking about it. He was delaying reading it by talking about it—which was something he frequently did. He was out of his bonce on amphetamines.’[xiii] Half way through, Vinkenoog, loved up and high, and obviously trying to counter the negative portrayal of Harry’s experience, begins to shout ‘Love, Love, Love!’ at the top his voice. He eventually soldiered on, but as the poet Michael Horovitz has said, ‘for Fainlight himself it was not only dramatic but traumatic and it haunted him for the rest of his life.’[xiv] Daniel Kane said the following of the scene in Whitehead’s film:
Perhaps no other sequence in the film illustrates the paradox at the core of the psychedelic underground— the very drugs and communal events that were designed to bring people together were equally likely to coax out basic narcissism and self-centeredness. Vinkenoog was alone in his “Elysian field.” Fainlight was alone, enraged, and embarrassed in response to what he believed was an unbearably public humiliation.[xv]
For Fainlight, however, this evocation of narcissus was of course quite the reverse. This moment, in which he achieved perhaps the widest audience of his life, he was left isolated on a stage. He strangely overshadowed the brilliance of his own poetry. His publishing career illustrates this. His one small, pamphlet collection was entitled Sussicran (1965)—Narcissus spelt backwards. The poetry, while excellent, is for the most part a return to his more measured efforts, without the profane explorations of his American period—yet the legacy of a troubled ‘I’ remained. The title poem begins: ‘Alone in my room, I set up the magical apparatus; the arrangement of mirrors placed to conjure up that other self.’ He gazed at himself just as Narcissus did, only just like the magical apparatus of his ‘Mescaline Notes’, God was photographing him upside down.
He claimed to friends there were conspiracies contriving against him as a poet in Britain, however his unrecognised self appears to have often been the culprit. In 1966, Bomb Culture author Jeff Nuttall and a colleague at Penguin—Tony Richardson—were putting together the Penguin Modern Poets 12 collection. According to Nuttall, Fainlight, who was going to be included, ‘backed out at the last moment, characteristically, because he was paranoic’.[xvi] This difficult relationship with mainstay publishers is also evident in the story of Ted Hughes persuading Faber to publish a collection of his poetry: apparently aghast, Fainlight responded by lighting a rag doused in petrol and pushing it through their letterbox.[xvii]
After the IPI, the London Underground began formalising, as free schools, universities, and a burgeoning countercultural press took root, the most famous of which was International Times (IT). IT carried a mixture of avant-garde art and literature, drug information, and interviews. It was anti-establishment, and when the authorities noticed it, they did not take kindly to it. The first bust of their offices occurred on the 9th March 1967, shortly after Issue 8. The police removed all their paperwork, which left the publication with no knowledge of its subscribers, its phone contacts, and its uncashed cheques. This disregard for the freedom of the press went all but unnoticed by the mainstream papers. Fainlight was incensed by what had happened, and no doubt fed his sense of paranoia about establishment authority. As a result, he helped co-organise a piece of street theatre by way of protest which was known as ‘The Death of IT’ two days later.[xviii]
The street theatre involved a march down Whitehall to the Cenotaph carrying a scarlet coffin adorned with flowers—the coffin contained Fainlight, representing IT. The police quickly moved the group of thirty-something people on, but they went down to Westminster Underground and spent 4 hours travelling the Circle Line chanting and playing music. They eventually emerged, coffin still in hands and Fainlight still in place, at Notting Hill and marched down Portobello Road, before dissipating.[xix] Just what went through his head as he was carried around, both the centre of attention and simultaneously hidden away, is difficult to know. In some sense, a buried architect, he perhaps found the balance of performance that had eluded him—his body contained and unable to disrupt the theatre.
Ted Hughes wrote the poem ‘To be Harry’ after Fainlight’s death, and one stanza deals specifically with ‘The Death of IT,’ although Hughes also unwittingly revealed his own distance from the Underground scene by mistakenly naming the paper as Oz. Nevertheless, the poignancy of the occasion was not lost on him; the ever-present Sussicran of life and death.
One thing has changed. Though it tries not to change,
The space inside our heads – the theatre
Where for a whole day you were surely happy
As the corpse of Oz,
Under flowers, sunk in a coffin, alive,
Round and round on the Circle Line, to music –
This has changed.
Fainlight remained, for the most part, in a difficult state of mind. He was hospitalized several times over the last 15 years of his life, and his sister noted he was always short of money, and having tangles with the police. ‘But there was always his poetry, the final point of reference, the clear centre. He kept writing.’[xx] Sadly, however, his work was only intermittently published thereafter in literary magazines. In a letter, written by Ted Hughes, he mentions Harry confessing to having ‘morbid paranoia,’ and described how he had become a ‘mysterious element’ in Hughes’ life, appearing and disappearing at random times.[xxi] By 1973, he was living alone in a Soho studio. Ginsberg visited him and later wrote:
His temperament seemed to be permanently altered by amphetamine paranoia, he still worked his lips back and forth, protruding then drawing them in, halting of speech silent long seconds at a time on the verge of pronouncing a phrase suspicious of me and the electric surveillance of the British establishment over his consciousness.[xxii]
In 1976, perhaps by way of escape, he moved back to the area of Wales he and his family were evacuated to, near Llanelli. That same year his parents died, and although he spent some time living at their house in Hove, he found it disturbing, and was briefly hospitalized again before returning to Wales. There his cottage was in a small valley, with a stream and thick vegetation, and was just a short walk from beautiful vistas of rolling hills. He lived a hermit’s lifestyle, which his sister believed suited him and had a calming effect. Unfortunately it was below a flight path used for RAF training, and Ruth writes a sombre and brief but revealing comment: ‘In this case, Harry’s convictions of persecution had an objective correlation.’[xxiii] Harry later died of bronchial pneumonia sometime between the 28 August and 11 September, 1982, when he was found outside near his remote cottage.[xxiv] Shortly before his death, Harry wrote to his sister Ruth:
Your particular duty now is to help preserve the poetry that I wrote before I went to America (& since) & which belongs to your own literary area but which has been cut off & isolated from it by those three intervening years. Politically, it is only the work of those three years which they wish to exploit. And the formulae of exploitation are very profitable & so they keep on repeating them. But they have become more & more irrelevant to the whole of my work; those years exist in it only as a body of water, a lake in a far greater surrounding land mass.[xxv]
It is uncanny the extent to which Fainlight’s feelings about his psychedelic beat poetry, mirror the overall state of society’s engagement with drugs in that permissive era. Not only did they both remain a contained lake, part of a landscape trapped in time, but also, as such, exploitable. The essence of liminality is anti-structure, and if those beings—be they drugs or people—are unable to pass through that state and return matured, then they become a scapegoat. Yet, the great paradox of Harry’s ‘I’ was in-built in psychedelics and himself before they ever met. With hindsight, it is possible to see that while God may have been photographing him upside down, he captured psychedelics in a manner most-befitting of their effects and that time.
ENDNOTES:
[i] It was first published as ‘Trans’ in the Paris Review, Issue 39, Fall 1966.
[ii] Fainlight, Harry (1986). Selected Poems. London: Turret Bookshop: 1
[iii] Fainlight, Harry (1986). Selected Poems. London: Turret Bookshop: 2
[iv] Saunders, Francis Stonor “How the CIA plotted against us.” New Statesman, 12 July 1999: https://web.archive.org/web/20141010045414/http://www.newstatesman.com/node/135185
[v] “July 1959” in Encounters, December 1959: 43
[vi] “Morning” in Encounters, December 1962: 71
[vii] “O London” in Fuck You: a magazine of the arts, Vol.5, No.5, December 1963: 1-4
[viii] For more information on psychedelics poetry see: Dickins, Robert (2017) ‘A Song of Insurrection and Madness: The Poetry of LSD Culture’ in Sessa, Ben et a. Breaking Convention: Psychedelic Pharmacology for the 21st Century. London: Strange Attractor Press. 119-130
[ix] “Mescaline Notes” in Fuck You: a magazine of the arts, Vol.5, No.6, April/May 1964: Unpaginated
[x] Fainlight, Harry (1986). Selected Poems. London: Turret Bookshop: 7
[xi] Fainlight, Harry (1986). Selected Poems. London: Turret Bookshop: 2-3
[xii] Green, Jonathon (1998) All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture. London. Pimlico: 137-143
[xiii] Green, Jonathon (1998). Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961-1971. London. Pimlico. [1988]: 69
[xiv] Green, Jonathon (1998). Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961-1971. London. Pimlico. [1988]: 72
[xv] Kane, Daniel (2011) “Wholly communion, literary nationalism, and the sorrows of the Counterculture” Framework, 52 (1): 118
[xvi] Green, Jonathon (1998). Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961-1971. London. Pimlico. [1988]: 271
[xvii] “Review: From the Notebooks of Harry Fainlight”: https://web.archive.org/web/20090427050823/http://www.wolfmagazine.co.uk/15_review.php
[xviii] Farren, Mick (2001) Give the Anarchist a Cigarette. London. Random House: 112-113
[xix] Green, Jonathon (1998) All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture. London. Pimlico: 350-351
[xx] Fainlight, Harry (1986). Selected Poems. London: Turret Bookshop: 3
[xxi] Hughes, Ted (2011). Letters of Ted Hughes. London. Faber & Faber: 267-269
[xxii] Fainlight, Harry (1986). Selected Poems. London: Turret Bookshop: 7
[xxiii] Fainlight, Harry (1986). Selected Poems. London: Turret Bookshop: 4
[xxiv] Fainlight, Harry (1986). Selected Poems. London: Turret Bookshop: 1
Rob, you are turning me on to Fainlight.
I like your saying "Yet, criminalised, the psychedelic aficionado was an isolated figure, pushed back into cultural interstices." That is how indeed I felt before discovering Psychedelic Press and Breaking Convention. So many thanks to pass around.