Morning everyone,

Here are some links about fascinating and inspiring women from or related to the 1960s.

Last week I went to see Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass at the Royal Festival Hall. It was excellent and I’m not going to link a review because the only review I can find liked it less than I did. Anyway, Laurie Anderson told a story about her interactions with JFK. It was delightful, and here is a video of her telling the story so you can enjoy it as well. It’s really lovely and you can just listen, the visuals are not necessary:

Acclaimed musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson was “just a young twerp” running for student council when she was advised by Senator Kennedy to “find out what the people want and promise it.” In this video she discusses her relationship to the late president, his politics and views on poetry and art: that poetry is the soul of the country and art is what makes us who we are. Neither before nor since, says Anderson, has an American president recognized poetry or art as the engine of society.

https://vimeo.com/168601078

Of course, this exchange of letters would have happened in the 1960s, and by way of a segue, what could be more 1960s than psychedelics. I’ve long (I mean, since Feb 2015) been fascinated by this New Yorker article, and did not realise the Beckley Foundation, mentioned in this article as funding psychedelic research, was set up by woman and English peer, Amanda Feilding:

She got serious about activism, founding the Beckley Foundation in 1998, raising support for increasingly ambitious studies. In 2016, after years of regulatory hurdles, The Beckley/Imperial Research Programme published two groundbreaking studies. One was the first UK government-funded research into psilocybin as a treatment for depression. Three months in, 42 per cent of patients remained depression-free. Then, the world’s first LSD imaging study charted how the drug affects the brain, validating Amanda’s early hypotheses about a system now known as the Default Mode Network.

http://www.huckmagazine.com/art-and-culture/amanda-feilding-acid-psychedelic-research-drugs-pioneer/

By the way – I’m aware that I’ve been very video heavy on Fem Friday lately. Have you been enjoying that? I don’t watch a ton of videos (although obviously I watch the ones I send to you!) so feel like a bit of a hypocrite for recommending that you watch so many. Let me know what you think, anyway.

A xx.