Are You Hallucinating in DayGlo Pink?
... Then you must be looking at High Frontiers #2
In the 1990s, the irreverent, independently run cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 was responsible for forming one of the first conceptions of digital culture. They were messy and a whole damn scene, created by a bunch of counterculture freaks out of a mini-mansion in Berkeley Hills, run by editor-in-chief R.U. Sirius (Ken Goffman) and publisher/domineditrix Queen Mu (Alison Bailey Kennedy).
Here is one of their stories.
It was 1985.
It was the dawn of the second Reagan administration and we were neck deep in Nancy Reagan’s ineffective and hollow “just say no to drugs” campaign. The hypocrisy of the moment was not yet clear to the general public, not until 1992 when Reagan daughter Patti Davis would write that her mother abused sleeping pills and sedatives on the regular. And that is to say nothing of the eventual accusations of Iran-Contra adjacent cocaine trafficking under Ronnie’s CIA. But most of the counterculture strongly suspected the false sanctimony of the slogan, even in the 80s.
It was in this moment, and within this context, that the most peculiar magazine was created.
If you recall from previous posts, High Frontiers was the original magazine that eventually transitioned into Mondo 2000. While my bigger project is about Mondo—and this story pre-dates that by roughly four years—it was this weird High Frontiers issue that paved the zeitgeist that constructed the on-ramp to a brand of cyberpunk futurism that would eventually evolve into 90s tech.
This was because HF#2 became an on-boarding document, of sorts. Countless people—many of whom later became part of the Silicon Valley tech boom—have told me that it was this magazine issue that first put the Mondo scene on their radar. It was with its production that the fringes of the counterculture became hyperaware that something wild was happening in Berkeley.
In fact, it was also my on-boarding document; when I first agreed to this project, Ken (R.U. Sirius) mailed me a giant package with issue #2, commonly referred to as “The Big Pink Thing.” And, just like those before me, I was hooked.
And so, here and now, I’m going to on-board you, too: explain why The Big Pink Thing was important, tell you its story, and describe its content.
This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?
Let’s get the uncomfortable thing out of the way. Let’s talk about the drugs.
I am not advocating that readers experiment with illegal substances. At the same time, I do want to briefly advocate for the psychonauts. While some psychonauts experiment purely for kicks, others do it attempting psychological or spiritual enlightenment (or some combo of the two).
Gracie, half of the husband-and-wife financier-by-day, psychonaut-by-night pair “Gracie & Zarkov” explained this best to me. She notes that her and her co-author husband saw themselves as “adventurers” of sorts. “Instead of SCUBA and ice-climbing, winter camping, and dog-sledding” they could “stay home and trip to inner spaces.”
Think of it as extreme sports, but for the brain. Is it for everyone? Absolutely not. But nor is extreme sports. It is a thing that some people do, and (like ice-climbing) doing it safely means sharing information. To wit: Grace and Zarkov’s most famous publication was a pamphlet series called Notes from the Underground which included trip reports: mixing, matching, changing conditions, and documenting.
All of this to say, despite Nancy’s best efforts to get everyone to just say no, The Big Pink Thing was very pro-substance, particularly those of the hallucinogenic or disassociative varieties.
Many have documented the cozy relationship between psychedelics and computing, most notably John Markoff in his detailed history, What the Dormouse Said. Famed psychologist-turned-psychonaut Timothy Leary himself argued that the coming tech would negate the need for using drugs to trip. And, of course, William Gibson famously begins his 1984 cyberpunk classic Neuromancer by describing cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination.” So, even if this seems like a side-trip, the drugs are actually important to the broader story of how we got here.
Lord Nose knows what’s up
Let me set the scene a bit for you.
At this point in the story, Alison Bailey Kennedy had not yet found The House. In fact, Ken (R.U. Sirius) and Alison had only barely found one another, and Alison—who would later be “publisher” of the whole shebang—is listed on the masthead of #2 as one of several “associate editors.”1
The real player in this story is a man named Marc Franklin, who goes by the nom de guerre “Lord Nose.”
High Frontiers #1 was created mostly by R.U. Sirius, who found a staff of random psychonauts via local newspaper classifieds. He (alongside his colleagues, Somerset MauMau and Severe Tire Damage) published it on old-school newsprint. It was ugly and full of so many typos that on first read I thought they were an intentional dig at mainstream journalism. The typos were not intentional.2
Marc Franklin is a long story, but I’ll give you the tl;dr. He came from the east coast, studied at Pratt Institute, served in the military, and had worked quite successfully in both design and photography. After a particularly soul-sucking corporate epiphany he moved to the West Coast, became a vegetarian and decided to use his talents for Capital-A Art.
One day, Marc was in a head shop and saw “this ugly little thing”: High Frontiers #1. While he told me that he could never have possibly made something quite that ugly, he dug the content. Marc found R.U. and MauMau and agreed to help design the second issue. Marc and Ken moved in to a small Berkeley duplex, right beneath the BART. They held meetings in the nearby pocket park and paid rent partially in blotter.
Marc chose the name “Lord Nose” after the Aztec god of travelers, Yacatucuhtli, which means “Lord of the Nose.” The honorific is intended to imply leadership—the nose leads before the rest of the body.3
Lord Nose was persnickety in his design. He wanted everything just-so, and often dragged the group on long Shamanic hiking quests (while tripping) for inspiration. Lord Nose told me that the “universe showed him” things on those hikes, which he would later build into his design. All told, this created friction with some of the original crew who interpreted Lord Nose’s ambitions towards Art as a kind of snobbery that bristled against the street style of the first issue.
It’s true, the two issues aren’t anything alike.
High Frontiers Issue #2 is a perfect specimen of insurrectionist, pro-psychedelic photocopy art that feels like a combination of MAD magazine, Artforum, and a random zine you would find at a punk show. It is an exquisite articulation of a scene, a moment, a culture that thrived on its own physicality.
You can, of course, read the entire issue on the Internet Archive. But in what follows, I’m going to walk you through the highlights.
The Cover
The first thing you need to know about the second issue of High Frontiers is that it is enormous and very bright. It is 11x17 and DayGlo Pink, a color which acts as a highlight on the front, back, and the centerfold. The magazine was so big that it was mailed to subscribers in poster tubes. It’s printed on heavy weight matte paper, far from the flimsy newsprint of issue #1.
Here is the cover:
A few things about this cover. The face is two different superimposed half-tones of Art Linkletter, the famous mid-20th century television personality who hosted Kids Say the Darnedest Things.4 The half-tones create a fuzzy effect, that looks, well, hallucinogenic. His slogan, of course, has been changed to “Kids do the darnedest drugs!” The use of Linkletter was intentional here because he was outspoken against LSD, which he blamed for the death of his daughter in 1969. Legendary director John Waters even turned the Denise Linkletter story into a satirical short, though publicly stated in 2015 that it was his worst film.
Dancing on the top of Linkletter’s forehead is a 3-earred Mutant Mickey Mouse, holding an acid tab with the CIA logo on it. No need for liner notes there. Rabbit ear fingers in the top right corner signify “2”—the second issue.
The Content
The visual style was both carefully rendered and pure chaos. The issue has no traditional form of page numbering, but some articles still suggest jumps to future pages. I once asked Lord Nose about the logic of not including the page numbers. “What… even is the logic of page numbers???” he sputtered back in frustration. Fair enough.
Later, I realized that I had been incorrect. There were page numbers on a few random pages, but they were embedded in alien ways, like this random “24” that appears in the middle of a page, coupling as the planetary symbol for Jupiter.
Regardless of the numbering, the issue is 32 pages, including the cover. The content is entirely in lowercase.
The Big Pink Thing opens with the masthead and some letters-to-the-editor (which somehow they had acquired from the meager issue #1). Lord Nose told me that the image accompanying it is actually his favorite in the issue. “I made something out of nothing with that one,” he explains. It’s actually a jarring image when you get wrapped into its inherent visual contradictions.
The opening story of the issue gets right to the point, a parable-like tale about Ram Dass, the 20th century white spiritual guru (real name: Richard Alpert) who is best known for the book Be Here Now.
For the accompanying art, Lord Nose mirrored the left and right sides, imposing Ram Dass’ head on Ram Dass’ forehead. The effect was trippy, which tracks because the story itself involves copious amounts of LSD.
On first read of the story I actually became low-key convinced that it was not real and was just some kind of elaborate Ram Dass fanfic. In part, this was because the article was authored by Peter Stafford (author of the Psychedelics Encyclopedia) and involved a main character named “Pete” who dies midway through the story.5 Reading it, I was positive that this was a tale of ego death. I was wrong. Ken assured me that it was a real story, coming straight from Richard Alpert, himself.
Meanwhile, (and not to be outdone) R.U. Sirius was up to his usual shenanigans.
In full Yippie form, my eventual co-author had ended HF #1 by announcing his presidential bid, as part of the “Neo-Psychedelic Pop Party.” Shockingly, that didn’t pan out.
In the Big Pink Thing, R.U. proposed a new movement: the Yummies (or “Young Upwardly-Mobile Mutants.”)6 Yummie identity was in response to Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin’s ongoing Yuppie vs. Yippie debates of the mid-80s. Sadly, Yummie didn’t catch on any better than the Neo-Psychedelic Pop Party.
Feel free to take his Mutation 101 quiz and decide if you are a Yummie. I’ll wait here.
Meanwhile, Lord Nose offered a hypnotic photo retrospective spread of the modern dancer Lucas Hoving. Somehow, the motionless pages articulate movement perfectly.
I imagine some of you are wondering how Lord Nose got the weird effect in the photocopy art on the right-hand page, and honestly it was pretty slick. In the 1980s, at the height of the dot-matrix printer, mall-type shops used the tech to create print-on-demand t-shirts. Lord Nose ran his images through those dot-matrix machines to create an eerie, pixelated effect and then added it to his xerox piles.7
The photocopy artwork was primarily done at Krishna Copy in Berkeley which was open 24 hours and chill about these kinds of things.
The issue included a smattering of poetry:
A spread of fake tabloid-style headlines:
And, of course, there was a trip report on combining LSD and MDA by Gracie & Zarkov:
A conversation between noted physicist Nick Herbert and counterculture icon Elizabeth Gips unpacking Bell’s Theorem of nonlocality:
The issue included the first contribution by Alison (before taking on her nom de plume of “Queen Mu” and co-authoring with German anthropologist Christian Rätsch). The piece is about the nightshade plant Datura, and its use as an aphrodisiac:
There was also an interview with counterculture icon Robert Anton Wilson:
And, of course, the requisite beatification of ‘shroom aficionado Terence McKenna.
Collectively, these articles seem to scream a message at the audience: the Reagan years may be weird, but we are weirder. And something even more uncanny is coming next. As R.U. Sirius writes in his opening editorial gambit, “We’re not talking about new age Pollyannaism. We’re accelerating to the point where speciocide or ex-stasis occur in wink-of-the-eye choice,” a statement which certainly reads even more ominous in 2026. It’s a good reminder that things have previously felt dire and it’s also a good reminder of the value of Art and physical community in these dire moments.
The Centerfold
I’ve saved the centerfold for last, because everything else is really just set up for what is arguably some of the most wild photocopy art imaginable. I’d like to briefly prepare you before you scroll down and see it:
Nancy Reagan is the focus of the image, her head on the body of Yab-yum, a Tibetan god. God-Nancy dances atop a golden calf, which is sexually ravaging a woman of color while biting the head off of one of many identical dolls, all positioned obliviously in conformity. Around Nancy’s neck is a neck-less chain of Mr. Ts, a not-subtle reference to a famous photo op where Nancy sat on Mr. T’s lap. The Mr. T chain is connected by the logo for Ma Bell, a corporate monolith before the phone monopoly was unwoven in the 90s. She raises a scepter bearing the face of televangelist Jerry Falwell. God-Nancy has a visually apparent vagina.
Behind Nancy is what appears to be a nuclear mushroom cloud, once again using the dot-matrix effect.
OK, now you’re ready. Here it is:
When I first asked Lord Nose what it all meant he responded with all of the dismissive incredulity of an art history professor. “What does it say to you?” I panicked—slightly unprepared for the pop quiz—and stuttered out something about the ruling class (something something) being in league with corporations (something something) while women were being devoured. The Nose grunted lightly in approval and didn’t disagree with this read, so I suppose it stands.
I asked him again, more recently, and he told me how he was looking to show anything that pointed out Nancy’s hypocrisy. Pushing a little further, I asked about the bottom half of the image, and he giggled. “La de da…” he pivoted, “La de da…”
But what does it all mean?
There was no mention of the coming digital technologies in the Big Pink Thing. Layout was done by hand-and-xerox, and it seems distant from its eventual mutation into the magazine Mondo 2000. Why, then, did I just spend a solid 2K words describing the issue in detail?
In the 1980s and 1990s, Timothy Leary often declared that the purpose of those in the counterculture was “finding the others.” That, in a nutshell, was what the Big Pink Thing did. It sent a beacon signal that catalyzed all of the others who were still aching for a return to a culture that felt authentic and subversive. While HF#2 was printed well before Mondo was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, it was at this moment that the futuristic magazine of the future became an inevitability.
Our future culture didn’t begin with a singular technology it began with a sense of corporate and political resistance.
We are at a strange moment in our digitality where we are trapped in our cosmic doomscrolls, wondering when the code might eat us all. But by taking a step back and remembering these inflection points, we can begin to wrap our heads around when and how that cosmic doomscroll began.
Ken and Alison met at a party thrown by an archdruid (Stephen Abbott) in October of the previous year.
Most of the party end of the scene, at this point, was happening at a place called Flashbacks Pizza in Marin, which was run by a speed freak named Harvey. Gracie recalls that pizza was remarkably good, all things considered, though notes that it might have just been because they were all stoned.
I don’t have any pictures of Lord Nose but I have it on good authority from a trusted source that back in those days he was an absolute snack.
In the late 90s, that show would be reprised with Bill Cosby as host. <insert emoji signfying awkward discomfort here>
I actually have only one picture of Peter Stafford. He’s full-frontal naked, high on something and is yelling something at the normal-looking clothed people surrounding him. I decided against posting it.
As readers will note, there are two other versions of what “Yummie” might stand for. I went with the first one because R.U. Sirius is a whole lot of nonsense and I’m over it.
Lord Nose is vaguely unhappy that I’m sharing his methodologies.
“Don’t you want the future generations to be inspired and try these kinds of things?” I asked. “Let them figure it out for themselves!” he growled.
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The three-eared Mickey Mouse had a strange echo in a recent Michelle Obama hairstyle: https://www.facebook.com/TheOldblackChurch/posts/maga-dr-carol-m-swain-expressed-an-opinion-about-michelle-obamas-hair-in-a-podca/1075464117954409/