Ted Nelson & John Perry Barlow For MONDO 2000 (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #17)

May 22 2012

Ted Nelson & John Perry Barlow For MONDO 2000 (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #17)

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“I went to a party on Nelsonâ€™s Sausalito houseboat and wound up in a house in San Rafael in a scenario that involved some folks I’d met at Nelson’s party â€” three beautiful hookers, John Gilmore and a chimpanzee wearing bondage gear and assless chapsâ€¦”

John Perry Barlow and Ted Nelson blew into Mondo space around the same timeâ€¦Â probably mid-1990, as the magazine was just taking off. At the time, Barlow was fresh off the farmâ€¦ that is to say, itâ€™s my impression that heâ€™d been laying low as a gentleman rancher in Pinedale, Wyoming for many years and was just starting to get into the wind. (Heâ€™s been running around at a fair pace in the wider world ever since.)

Morgan Russell had met him at some public event and was bringing him around to meet us.Â I remember that there was some fair warning that Barlow was coming aroundâ€¦ and that he was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which I knew nothing about.Â At the time, I thought Robert Hunter wrote all the words for the group.Â I was not, obviously, a deadhead, but was nevertheless excited to meet someone connected to their scene.

The actual meeting is a blur, although I do remember we gathered around the fireplace and talked agreeably for a long time.Â Did he give us $1,000 right then and there to help with the project, or was that later?Â Â How the money happened for those transitional Mondo moments is a curiosity to meâ€¦ one that will be explored in more depth in the History Project book.

Iâ€™m pretty sure that Ted Nelson smoked his first DMT on his first visit to the Mondo house and that he found it impressive.Â Some time very soon thereafter, I went to a party on Nelsonâ€™s Sausalito houseboat and wound up in a house in San Rafael in a scenario that involved some folks I’d met at Nelson’s party â€” three beautiful hookers, John Gilmore and a chimpanzee wearing bondage gear and assless chapsâ€¦Â but that story I will hold for the book itself.Â (And Iâ€™m only lying about the chimp.)

In this unpublished segment from an hours-long chat between the two â€” really organized as an interview with Ted â€” Nelson goes into his rap about â€œbiostatus.â€Â He had explained his biostatus concept to myself and Russell one time, sitting in his office at Autodesk and, to be honest, I couldnâ€™t quite grasp the novelty of it as it sounded like basic sociobiology (Nelson seemed surprised that I knew of such things.).Â Maybe itâ€™s a behaviorally-specific exfoliation of sociobiologyâ€¦ a few years before people started talking about evolutionary psychology?

This was during a brief period where the hacker genius John Walker â€” cofounder of Autodesk,Â the famously successful Sausalito, California-based producers of AutoCAD, let the experimental freaks in.

At some point around 1988, Walker, as head of Autodesk decided to use the companyâ€™s wealth to experiment. There was the Virtual Reality project, worked on by Eric GullichsenÂ among others. “Cyberpunk” SF writer and math genius Rudy RuckerÂ was hired to create a Cellular Automata program called CelLab,Â and James Gliek’s CHAOS. Â

And perhaps most interestingly,Â our man Ted was gifted with the opportunity to try to achieve the Xanadu vision â€”I always understood it as a hypertextual project linking everything to everything in an ever-evolving and highly intelligent way (and with much more intentionally thanâ€¦ sayâ€¦Â Google).

Owen Rowley was also there in some capacity, and those of you who know Owen Rowley (rhymes with Crowley) know just how coolÂ thatÂ is.

A monthly speakerâ€™s program featured Timothy Leary and Todd Rundgren, among others.

As you can guess, it was an interesting (and casual) place to spend an afternoon. Iâ€™m not sure exactly what happened, but at some point, fiscal responsibility (some might say sanity) returned, John Walker moved on, and Autodesk returned to its core task.Â Carol Bartz became CEO.Â Youâ€™ve heard of her.

The conversation between Nelson and Barlow took place in a restaurant in Sausalito and was published in 1990 in MONDO 2000 Issue #4 under the title â€œCaverns Measureless To Man: An Interview with Xanadu Founder Ted Nelson by John Perry Barlow.â€

Listen to Nelson tell Barlow about â€œbiostatusâ€

Listen to the audio now:

Previous MONDO History Entries

Did The CIA Kill JFK Over LSD?, Reproduced Authentic, & Two Heads Talking: David Byrne In Conversation With Timothy Leary (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #10)

Memory & Identity In Relentlessly Fast Forward & Memetically Crowded Times (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #11)

The First Virtual War & Other Smart Bombshells (MONDO 2000 History Project Entry #12)

Swashbuckling Around The World With Marvin Minsky In How To Mutate & Take Over The World (MONDO 2000 History Project #13)

Tags: assless chaps, Autodesk, Carol Bartz, DMT, Eric Gullichsen, hookers, James Gliek, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John Walker, Project Xanadu, Robert Hunter, Rudy Rucker, Ted Nelson, Timothy Leary, Todd Rundgren, virtual reality, William Gibson

Uncategorized | 22 May 2012 |

By Morgan Russell, May 23, 2012 @ 3:28 pm

Well, I first met Barlow in a hallway at Autodesk in the Virtual Reality Sector while I was hanging around doing research to get the first Virtual Reality (by that name) book out. It was 1989 and I soon was to be employed by Autodesk as one of Ted’s five assistants. He told me that he was paying me the same as a comely assistant with a Master’s Degree was earning. My official title was “Consultant to the Stars.”

Barlow already knew High Frontiers and/or Reality Hackers and sort of glommed onto me. I guess I did offer a capsule bio to (what was to become) MONDO Central. Barlow, who is a gentleman and a rancher, inherited his ranch along with a million dollar debt. Friends, such as Phil deGuerre (sp?), producer of “Starsky and Hutch” did indeed help him out for example by putting him in a small space accessible by a ladder to write a script and paid $30 thousand only to throw it in the waste bin at his home in the Hollywood Hills (more on this later). Barlow was not loaded (in the usual sense) and did indeed plunk down a grand by cutting us a check for one thousand. He got his money’s worth. He was a front row spectator and participant at any events at Quail House.

He had access to all areas. He once called me to tell me it was his birthday and he had no place to go (right). So we customized a party for him. I gave him a human skull wrapped in a bandanna (which he typically wore) and he gazed at it and declared that the person must have suffered. This was not what I expected. It is true that I had two human skulls from the 14th Century in Austria (since the date was known when a cemetery was converted to an ossuary) and that both were unusual. One had an occipital bun and the other, though adult, did not have its fissures fused. He has since avoided telling me what the fuck he actually did with the skull. They were smuggled from Austria to Germany by our housemate and anthropologist Bill and flown by military transport to the US of A.

One will have to read the book for further elaboration.