Seth Lorinczi Blog on Punk, Psychedelics, and More

Many years ago, in Washington D.C., there was a bar and nightclub called d.c. space. A grotty little place at the corner of 7th and E, stuffed into the first two floors of an ancient brick building. Everyone just called it “space.” But it hosted some of the most incendiary shows the nation’s capital has ever seen. Like that one night in 1989: The night Fugazi ripped through the songs that would become their first album, Repeater, on space’s tiny wooden stage only a few feet in front of me.

I want to share a (sadly) timely story with you. one I chanced upon while researching Fatherland. While it ended up not making the cut, recent events in Ukraine suggested it needed to find a home. The piece—first published in Moment Magazine—offers both an eerie perspective both on the current war and the role of bystander-shot footage.

It’s funny how you sneak up on yourself sometimes.

As many of you know, I’ve spent the last months helping plan Judaism and the Psychedelic Renaissance: A Portland Gathering, a one-day conference here in Portland on July 10. In the process, I’ve been doing all the “right” things: Crossing the T’s, dotting the I’s, making sure it’s being organized and promoted in a sober way to convey its gravity and its authority.

In other words, I’ve been trying hard to prove I’m a normal person, someone who follows the rules and knows how to fit in. But it turns out you just can’t keep the punk out.

As a co-organizer of the upcoming "Psychedelic Jewish event" in Portland, I’m often asked exactly what that means. What’s a psychedelic Jew? Journalist and author Michael Pollan? Pioneering (but near-forgotten) researcher Gertrude Paltin? Late Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia?

Jerry wasn’t actually Jewish, to the disappointment of the Dead’s many Jewish fans. But that shouldn’t dissuade you from attending this event.

The photo’s blurry, but so was I: Age 18, deep into punk and getting high and not going to school. I had moved out of my parents’ house the year before and I was in free fall. But if you fall long enough, a strange thing happens. You lose perspective: Are you hurtling downwards or soaring upwards? Lost as I was, I was also homing towards something bigger than myself: My chosen family, the D.C. punk scene.

A couple of years ago, a friend asked me about Fatherland, my then-unfinished manuscript. “What stage is the book at?” she asked. “What’s next?”

“I have to be honest,” I told her. “It feels like writing it’s the easy part. What I’m worried about is how to get it published. I know it’s a unique book, but it’s gonna be really hard to find an agent.”

“What about self-publishing?” she asked. “What would that feel like?”

My response came so quickly it surprised even myself: “Suicide,” I said.

Writing a book about the Holocaust and psychedelics will lead you to some interesting places. Some of them are scary, even incomprehensible. But others—thankfully!—can transmute the weight of ancestral trauma with new connection and growth. That’s why I’m so pleased to share news of this upcoming event, slated for Sunday, July 10th, 2022, right here in Portland, OR.

I’ve been in conversation with an acquisitions editor the past few weeks. (For those of you outside the literary world, that’s a person who evaluates potential manuscripts for publishers to buy.) And I was surprised by what it stirred. Beneath the kindling of a long-dormant thrill—finally, nearly 6 years after starting my book, I was starting to get traction!—was another feeling. It felt, of all things, like a threat.

Why did the prospect of succeeding feel so dangerous? What did I have to lose by showing myself? Nothing, and also everything.

Found on a walk at the Oregon coast. Tule elk, maybe? I’m a city boy, and I don’t know these things.

I’m heading back to the coast for a writing retreat tomorrow. I’m feeling the usual mix of feels: Thrill; expansiveness; a little dose of fear (will I squander my time? will I fail to get it right?).

I recently turned in my manuscript to a trusted guide for an edit, and I’m grateful: It was a real gift to receive an unvarnished, clear-eyed read on the project I’ve now spent five years on. It’s the bird’s-eye view; what I’m asking for now is the god’s/goddess’-eye view.

Though we spoke regularly in the last years of her life, I never spent much time with my Aunt Csupi. Like many of my family's stories, hers was shrouded in mystery. But sometimes, those memories have the strangest way of breaking through into the present. And once they do, you never know what they'll reveal.

I was pretty sure I’d be the last person to give a damn about “Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s recent Beatles documentary. Eight hours watching the band trapped in the studio making “Let It Be,” an album which never really spoke to me? No thanks.

I’m glad I did: The film touched me in ways I couldn’t have predicted, filling me with an unexpected surge of wistfulness. More than the songs the band were working up in their final chapter, “Get Back” depicts John, Paul, George and Ringo in a new light: as human beings, ones I felt I’d known my entire life but never actually met. With this comes a soft reckoning: I see how much their music shaped me, even as the era of starry-eyed optimism it invoked quietly ends.

I’m not sure what drew me to the @marcmaron interview with @kristinhersh . But something told me to listen, and I’m glad I did. Hersh, who suffers from PTSD, talks about how a friend clued her into a behavior she was unknowingly exhibiting: "Switching.” It’s a dissociative and self-protective persona.

What clicked it into place for me—ha ha, pun intended—was a mental image: An imaginary structure that operates as a gate between modes. I know it because I wrote about it years ago, on the very first page of Fatherland: