John Perry Barlow stopped by our event, and had a few words to say.
(Video: Enric Teller)
Complete transcription:
Ya know, I met Joi Ito in Tim’s livingroom, when Joi actually was as young as he usually looks. And, for a while we had this idea that we wanted to start this project called the Rashomon project, based on the Kurasawa film Rashomon. With this crowd I would assume that most people have heard of that movie, and know what it’s about, but it’s about a very complex matter told from a lot of different points of view.
And, this archive, is one of the great Rashomon’s ever, because it will attempt to encapsulate Timothy Leary, who was truly the most paradoxical and vexing and inspiring and maddening of human beings. He probably had more to do with introducing people to the spiritual matter than practically anybody who wasn’t born in the desert someplace, and yet he was, for much of his life, a profoundly anti-spiritual man.
He was a very loving man, who introduced a lot of people to a greater depth of love, and his own family was kind of a ruin. (Sorry, audio drops out there.)
I think it’s really important to decode this guy. He was one of my friends. I knew him from ’65 until he died, pretty continuously, and I loved him dearly.
But it’s important to take him apart, and figure out who he really was, ’cause you can learn a lot about America, from learning a lot about Timothy Leary.
