Jon Beinart - "How would you describe your comics Tim?"
Tim Molloy - "I would describe my comics as an ever expanding and interconnected web of dreamlike and nightmarish storylines soaked heavily in delusion, confusion and a general sense of unease. I draw heavily on surrealist techniques, symbolist ideas, synchronicity and dreams to construct my stories. Recurring themes include (but are not exclusive to) death, rebirth, the nature and expansion of consciousness, self-destruction and discovery… There is a kind of pre- apocalyptic tension throughout, balanced (i hope) with a sense of humor that stops it all from getting too serious…"
Jon Beinart - "That's some very heavy content. I'm glad you include humor to make it digestible. How important is satire to you? Do you get a warm fuzzy feeling when you see someone in hysterics over your work, or would you prefer them to walk away with a contemplative expression on their face?"
Tim Molloy - "Satire is very important to me. I think that as the years go by my work is becoming more 'political' and concerned with the issues that we have to face collectively in 'mundane' consensus reality. By shining a light on the beasts of ignorance, greed and prejudice you expose them as the shriveled sniveling things they really are… I read somewhere that If you can make someone laugh whilst making them think than you really start to change the way they view an issue or idea, and I think that is very true…"
Jon Beinart - "I have related to the social commentary in your comics in general, but my favorite series is 'Mr Unpronounceable'. I relate to this character on many levels, but mostly to his paranoia and depravity. Although I have found parallels between his paranoid dystopia and our own sick society, most of this series appeals to me on a basic level. I love the claustrophobic absurdity of his world. Its like a bad acid trip with no foreseeable recovery. Have I missed the point? Is 'Mr Unpronounceable' a vehicle for your political and social views, or is he just an outlet for your sick sense of humor?"
Tim Molloy - "Mr Unpronounceable has been a lot of things to me and to my art over the years… He can be a useful template to channel certain ideas through, or he can simply be a whirlwind force of his own… For instance, the Mr Unpronounceable strip 'The Burning Wheel' is (amongst other things) a pretty pointed statement about the role of art and creativity in the world as opposed to other more destructive forces… Mr U finds an overgrown, quiet park, with a fountain that has run dry. He ingests a hallucinogenic statue that tastes of battery acid, and immediately begins to levitate out of his environment into outer space. After millions of years he comes into contact with a vast burning wheel that seems to be at the centre of things, and he realises that the Wheel must never stop turning at all costs. When he returns to the City and the park, the fountain has started flowing again with a thick, sluggish fluid that tastes like ''oil and blood." This strip in particular is very political for Mr U, but for the most part he as been a vehicle for my own more destructive tendencies. In fact the latest series of comics that I produced I've come to view as a visual diary of some awful stuff I was going through. The thing I've found with Mr U is that it isn’t enough to 'get out those bad feeling on the page' and have done with them. There is no catharsis with him, and I mean that in the way that writing Mr Unpronounceable actually seems to perpetuate those kind of emotions… which is why I decided to stop hanging around with him for a while! He's a bad influence on me!"
Jon Beinart - "I have mixed feelings about your resolve Tim. I'm glad to hear that you have had this realization and will be protecting yourself from Mr Unpronounceable's bad influence, but I have to say. I will miss him dearly. Have psychedelics played a large role in your creative life Tim?"
Tim Molloy - "Haha! well, they’ve played a role that’s for sure (sorry mum!) Like most kids growing up in Auckland city I had a chance to experiment with magic mushrooms. I had my first experience when I was about 18 or 19. I had just read all this literature, Huxley’s 'Doors Of Perception', Leary’s 'Book of the Dead', 'The Electric Koolaid Acid Test'', some books by Terence Mckenna, and of course I was getting into Robert Crumb and all he associated material of the era…Just all the usual stuff i suppose. Some friends invited me along and I thought 'why not?' I'm lucky I was in the right headspace at the time because it was a pretty spur of the moment decision. In any case, it was an incredible experience, and I feel like my life would have taken a different route had I not indulged. As well as all the various localized hallucinatory and delusional effects, that initial 'flicking of the switch' provided me with the initial payload for the artistic trajectory I'm still on… I also felt a very deep connection (here it comes) to the universe as a whole and for a while there actually understood my place in it! I also randomly met up with some other kids on the top of a mountain who went on to be some of my best friends… In any case, i felt that an experience like that wasn’t to be taken lightly so I didn’t 'keep experimenting.' In the Acid Test, Wolf recounts how Ken Kesey was trying to get all the Merry Pranksters to stop taking acid. He said there was no point continuing to 'open the door', and I think he was right. I haven’t done anything like that in years, nor felt the need to…I guess we all have to move through different phases in our lives to really achieve a true understanding of ourselves and what we are doing here, and whilst altering ones consciousness is an incredible thing, it does devalue the really amazing thing, the fact that we have a consciousness at all."
Jon Beinart - "Brilliantly put Tim. If one keeps opening and closing that door (of perception), one could just snap the hinges and either lose access all together or go insane. Have your comics ever really shocked or offended anyone? How do your parents feel about your characters and stories?"
Tim Molloy - "Yes, I think I've definitely shocked and offended a few people in my time… I remember one occasion, back when I was a regular cartoonist for Auckland Universities 'Craccum' magazine, they had a feature which was a survey of readers’ reactions to the content. I went up to the offices and couldn’t resist the urge to go through the surveys and see what people really thought. It's a pretty rare experience for an artist to be able to get that kind of unbiased statistical input into their work… In any case, whilst I can say that more than 50 percent of people 'appreciated my scrawlings,' there were some worrying responses to the question "What drugs do you think Tim Molloy is on?" (haha) such as "Ones that aren’t killing him fast enough." Also some people apparently though that I was some kind of fundamentalist Christian putting subliminal messages in my work to convert people… but yeah, some of those complete strangers seemed to be pretty worked up over what I was doing… the thing is, people weren’t bothered so much by the violence or the grossness or whatever. They were genuinely offended by the lack of obvious meaning in most of the strips I was doing at the time. I mean these people were actually outraged that someone would go to the trouble to produce something that didn’t spell it all out for them. I guess that's what happens when you watch too much TV, or Hollywood blockbusters… As for my parents, I think they're proud of me and what I’m doing for the most part. They both look at my deviantart site regularly as well so they can’t be too bothered. I think they've come to the understanding that it's OK to be puzzled now and then…My mother probably appreciates what i do slightly more, as she has a fairly sick sense of humor (thanks ma!) Both of them have always encouraged my brothers and I to go for our dreams and not settle for anything less so I've been lucky in that respect…"
Jon Beinart - "Gotta love da Mumma's! I am also lucky in that respect. But my father has the sickest sense of humor in our family, followed closely by my Mother (perhaps I am on par with dad). I understand you are not a fundamentalist Christian Tim, but do you have any spiritual beliefs that play a role in your creativity?"
Tim Molloy - "Well I wouldn’t really use the word 'beliefs', perhaps 'notions' is a better word… I also think it would be better phrased if you were to say that my creativity has played a part in my spiritual…notions. The whole process that I embarked on with my art was originally a kind of 'vision quest' kind of thing. A search for ''God'', as it were. My work and my life are pretty tied up together and for the most part I suppose it's all about that search for something greater or least that wonderful headlong rush into mystery… I guess the system that I have molded for myself over the years sounds like any other new-age crackpot hodge-podge, but for me it seems closer to objective 'truth' than materialism or fundamentalism, which seem to rule most peoples paths… I do believe in one thing, and that is Synchronicity. I feel like I have had too many incredible meaningful coincidences in my life to discount this phenomenon. Many of these coincidences have been inextricably tied up with my art as well, and I feel like in 'following the signs' I have for the most part walked the right path up til now. I have been given many gifts and I feel like when we walk the creative path we feed those back into the collective consciousness, and in doing so we create this kind of perpetual motion or flow of energy that begins to sustain itself… am I making sense? i don't know. Basically I think that there is something strange going on behind the scenes, a secret thing behind the curtains… whether this is some kind of super consciousness, or a manifestation of the collective I don’t know… I have more questions than answers! What fascinates me is the hypothetical question of whether consciousness exists elsewhere in the universe. In the instance that we are the only species (although a good case can be made I think for gorillas etc) that has or ever will hold consciousness in the cradle of our brains, then that is one thing. You could call Consciousness a symptom of biology, like our senses, an evolutionary tool that we have developed to interact with the world around us. In the other instance that somewhere, sometime, another species separate from humanity develops what we would call consciousness, and i suppose language to communicate with one another, than consciousness becomes something of a universal constant. A force inherent in the makeup of our universe like matter and energy (same difference right?) So then you might argue that Synchronicity could be to consciousness what gravity is to matter… (my thinking is of course muddled somewhat, not holding any sort of degree in quantum physics!) The boiled down questions here for me are 'Do ideas themselves reach out to each other across time and space? Are we just a way for the universe to ask itself questions about itself?' Of course this kind of heretical thinking will probably land me in the 7th circle of hell…"
Jon Beinart - "If you're going to hell for thinking like this then I believe you will have a lot of company. It should be fun! I'll bring my pillow and some snacks. Thank you
English
Previously there was Nemo's Utopia, an eBay store where all sorts of psychedelic and visionary inspired goodies could be purchased. It has now taken on a new incarnation as the 
Northern California Visionary Art: A Contemporary Legacy 
