AYA: Awakenings begins as independent journalist Rak Razam sets out for South America to explore the burgeoning business of shamanistic tourism, replete with a Shaman convention. The film quickly detours, however, and documents Razam’s own experience with ayahuasca, a psychedelic brew made out of the jungle vine Banisteriopsis caapi, which contains an MAOI (monoamine oxidase inhibitor).

Most of the film consists of either still photographs from Razam’s journey or psychedelic graphics inspired by his experience, as he reads from his book of the same title. The most interesting part comes about halfway through when Razam smokes DMT. With the help of a western scientist called Dr. Juan, whose specialty is QEEG (Quantitative Electroencephalography), Razam has a skullcap attached to his head with gel and electrodes, and a computer reads his brainwaves during the experience.

Rakam tributes the title Awakenings to the inspiration of Terrence McKenna, who wrote in 1989:

Psychedelic shamans now constitute a worldwide and growing subculture of hyperdimensional explorers, many of whom are scientifically sophisticated. A landscape is coming into focus, a region still glimpsed only dimly, but emerging, claiming the attention of rational discourse–and possibly threatening to confound it. We may yet remember how to behave, how to take our correct place in the connecting pattern, the seamless web of all things.

Ultimately Awakenings is less an analytical documentary and more of a personal interior travelogue, and a celebration of this neo shamanistic movement. “You might think that ayahuasca is a niche subject,” he says, “but it is rapidly becoming a mainstream one that is peaking in global media. Ayahuasca could be the new global sacrament.”

It takes a while to settle into watching A Survey of Open Space, the documentary by Austin visual artist Peat Duggins. Anyone looking for the filmmaker to impose dramatic narrative devices on this film about a cross-country bike trek will be sorely disappointed. There is no pumped up character conflict, no artificial suspense or second act reversals. Those willing to invest the time to watch it, however, will find a closely observed and very thought provoking film about the relationship of three people to what’s left of the once vast American wilderness as they encounter it.

Duggins makes a three month bike trek with his sister Michaela and his friend Zach Hall that begins in Brownsville Texas and concludes in the Alaskan wilderness. The film that documents this trip is no misty-eyed, sanctimonious environmental paean to the vanishing wilderness. Rather, it’s a very naturalistic travelogue in the tradition of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley — and thanks to the presence of Duggins’ extremely colorful friend Zach, with a little of Kerouac’s On the Road thrown in for good measure.

Along the way the trio encounter Mormons, bears, mosquitoes, wild horses, snow and the righteous drive to consume enough food to bike between 50 an 80 miles per day. The filmmaker never shows himself, but his meditations on the trip provide a voiceover narrative to the action. And while like Steinbeck he worries about the choices being made with regard to nature, he doesn’t see man’s incursion into it as a necessary evil — but rather, sees a much more complex and animated relationship. “Who can argue with a well-placed bench?”  he muses at one point in the film (or something to that effect).

Duggins displays his skill as a filmmaker by setting up the parameters of the journey, and then having the courage to just let it play out. And probably his best and most important choice was having the aforementioned Zach along for the ride. From the movie’s opening scene of Zach singing Queen’s “Bicycle” wearing a white spandex sailor suit that leaves nothing to the imagination, you realize you’re in the presence of a unique American character who provides both the perfect lens for the filmmaker and counterpoint to the landscape. Duggins admits that without Zach, there would be no movie, and he’s probably right.

On a purely personal note, I would LOVE to see Duggins’ sketchbook which he made of the journey printed as a book. It’s absolutely gorgeous and I’d buy it in a heartbeat.

In Southern California, it feels as if summer is a sun-proof vampire, immortal, a never-ending gothic summer of drought and car chases, punctuated by shootings, stabbings and beatings, heartbreak and horror.  In his blog The Westsider, author, journalist and Los Angeles native Rodrigo Ribera D’Ebre recalls:

People would hear more gun shots at night and gang members walked around their neighborhoods in the daytime wearing brown-colored gardening gloves to avoid fingerprints on their guns. The visual is so stark in my mind—bald heads, white t-shirts, shrink-to-fit Levis, white sneakers, and the ever-famous “brownies” on people’s hands.

My neighborhood had one (reported) shooting this summer. There have been nights of gunfire with no sirens ever heard, nights when cars race up our block and the neighbors call the next morning to warn me that unfamiliar vehicles are circling the block. Cops eat regularly at the red sauce joint just down the street and movie stars stroll the Sunday farmers market within walking distance of my house, within walking distance of thirteen houses of worship. A mile away, last weekend, a local guy was stabbed during a music festival.

The darkness of Los Angeles, of Southern California, cannot be chased away by sunlight. It is in our history–the missionary conquest first of the natives, then the conquest of the conquerors by “Americans.” It is in the history of the enslavement, land grants and curses on Griffith J. Griffith (who gave his name to Griffith Park) and the Doheny family, the Chicken Coop murders, the stretch of Sunset Blvd known as Deadman’s Curve, the Manson Family, the SLA shootout, the Hillside Strangler and the Nightstalker, Rodney King and OJ.

Raymond Chandler, Ross McDonald, Joan Didion, James Ellroy captured our darkness in prose; film noir held it to the projector’s light. But in art–well, the Light and Space movement and Cool School avoided it. Low Brow and Pop Surrealism toyed with it, dancing around with cartoons and big eyed girls in antlers. It wasn’t until Rodrigo Ribera d’Ebre that a specific nativist genre, Dark Progressivism, was recognized and defined.

This year, my own gothic summer officially began with Bats’ Day in Fun Park (aka Goth Day at Disneyland) and has moved through the release of Prayers‘ EP and video “Gothic Summer,” into San Diego tattoo parlors and restaurants with altars to the dead placed discreetly by the front door, culminating with “Devils’ Town,” a month-long art show in L.A.’s Chinatown, which I co-curated with d’Ebre, and artist Edwin Quiroz.

The choice of Chinatown was not an accident. Los Angeles first rose to international infamy not because of our film stars or orange groves. Known as “Los Diablos” the wickedest city west of the Mississippi, Los Angeles made worldwide news in 1871 with the lynching of 17 Chinese men by a mob of whites on the street known as Negro Alley. The Chinese Massacre remains to this day the largest urban lynching in U.S. history.

This was the jumping off point for our artists in “Devils’ Town” — the devils of our city’s past, the devils in our region’s present. And these artists brought it hard and strong and brave and bold; in black and gray, in glowing nighttime neon tones, in the reds of blood fresh and dried. “Devils’ Town” is a fundraiser for d’Ebre’s documentary, Dark Progressivism: On Rupture and Rebellion; while the artists are paid for the sales of their work, we are donating our curatorial fees to complete the film’s production. “Devils’ Town” closes this weekend with a party featuring a performance by Prayers.

I am proud of this show, proud of the artists, proud of living in this city in endless gothic summers And I am proud of myself for casting off societal expectation, stepping outside the stereotypes of where I was born, where I went to school, of how and who I am expected to be; proud to be able to move through many worlds with grace. That is my dark progress.

And gothic is the summer. Eternally

Top: Germs, Concrete Jungle.

Detail: Krush.

Top: Juan Carlos Muñoz Hernandez. Bottom, Jose Lopes.

L to r: Jose Lopes, Pablo Cristi, Ed Gutter.

Left, Ed Gutter. Top right, Tyson Pedrosa. Bottom, Jason Hernandez.