Wow, this is cool. Everyone who’s read Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Testor just knows a little bit about the origins of the 1960s counterculture knows that Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, while on their legendary LSD-fueled road trip from San Francisco to New York, taped the whole thing. In fact, filming it was sorta essential to the experience -- just like rigging the Furthur bus with all kinds of sound equipment was.
Now unfortunately, afterwards nothing was ever done with the film material. Until now. I’m pretty excited about this, because apparently, some people have gotten together and created a documentary about the 1964 Magic Trip based on loads of original raw material never seen before. This means that all those characters -- Kesey himself, Neal Cassady (the driver in On the Road and (!) the bus driver), Babbs, Mountain Girl, Ed McClanahan, Sandy Lehman, etc. -- are in there. And it’s in color too.
Wow. I wonder if the Merry Pranksters’ encounter with the other psychedelic pioneers of that time -- the East Coast based Harvard professor Timothy Leary and his followers -- is in it as well. Apparently, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg are in it too.
Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s MAGIC TRIP is a freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankster’s fabled road trip across America in the legendary Magic Bus. In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, shooting footage on 16MM, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen. With MAGIC TRIP, Gibney and Ellwood were given unprecedented access to this raw footage by the Kesey family. They worked with the Film Foundation, HISTORY and the UCLA Film Archives to restore over 100 hours of film and audiotape, and have shaped an invaluable document of this extraordinary piece of American history.
Check out this enthralling short documentary about the hippie love-in in Los Angeles on Easter Sunday, 1967, entitled ‘God respects us when we work, but He loves us when we dance’. Full of flowers, children, hippie girls, dances and psychedelic folk!
Hippies and flower children dance and create rituals at the historic Los Angeles “Love-In” of Easter Sunday, 1967. This ‘60s classic documents a once-in a lifetime phenomenon, preserving all the fashions, energy and idealism of the first “alternative lifestyles.” Psychedelic special effects!
If there’s one book ever that’s suited to be made into a movie, yet failed to see the light of day, it’s On the Road. Although some have tried, it never worked out.
This fall, however, finally an On the Road movie will hit theatres. And it looks promising. Not only is it directed by Walter Salles and Jose Rivera, known from The Motorcycle Diaries; the lead role of Sal Paradise (the autobiographical character of Jack Kerouac) is played by Sam Riley – the guy who played Joy Division’s Ian Curtis in Control! Garrett Hedlund will portray Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady. Also featuring are Viggo Mortensen and (hm) Kirsten Dunst.
Of course, turning a classic with lots of fans like On the Road into a movie holds the potential for disaster – especially when the style and language in which it is written plays such a crucial role in a book. It must be possible, though, to adequately translate Kerouac’s free-flow stream of consciousness writing into cinematography.
It’s not the first recent movie about the Beat era, by the way – a while ago, Allen Ginsberg’s Howlwas made into a biographical movie too, which I still have to see. Prior to shooting, cast and crew of On the Road went on a three-week Beat boot camp to immerse themselves in the time period. Looking forward to this one!
Now, somewhat quietly, “On the Road” has finally been made into a movie. The $25 million production, shot in San Francisco, Montreal and other locales, is scheduled for release this fall.The movie is expected to be of keen interest in San Francisco where the Beats and their old hangouts are a cottage industry. Each year, thousands of people flock to North Beach to visit the City Lights bookstore and the bar Vesuvio or to gawk at Kerouac artifacts in The Beat Museum.
But with so much interest comes anxiety.
Adapting any beloved book for film is perilous and apt to irk fans, especially when it’s a literary classic where the language itself played a starring role — something not easily translated onto the screen. “On the Road” is particularly daunting since the provocative ideas that defined the novel — casual sex and drug use and a rejection of materialism — are unlikely to raise eyebrows with today’s multiplex audience.
The creative team from another counterculture road movie is leading the project: the director Walter Salles and the screenwriter Jose Rivera from the award-winning Che Guevara biopic “The Motorcycle Diaries.”
The cast is peppered with actors with box-office appeal, including Kristen Stewart of “Twilight” fame, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen. The two male leads, characters based on Kerouac and his fellow flâneur Neal Cassady, are played by lesser-known actors, Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund.
In July, before filming began near the primary sets in Montreal, the cast and crew went through Beat boot camp — three weeks of immersion with Kerouac experts.
One “drill instructor” was Gerald Nicosia, author of “Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac,” considered by many (including William S. Burroughs) to be the definitive Kerouac account.
None of the cast and crew were old enough to remember the Beat era, so Nicosia, of Corte Madera, approached the sessions as if he were teaching ancient history, “like I was bringing them the Holy Grail.”
He said the actors were especially intense, knowing they would upset a lot of people if they didn’t portray the characters accurately.
At the camp, Nicosia played an audio interview that he recorded in 1978 with Lu Anne Henderson, Neal Cassady’s young wife, on whom the book’s character Marylou is based. That conversation is also the basis of “One and Only: The Untold Story of ‘On The Road,’” a new book by Nicosia out this fall.
(…)
Concerns remain. Joanna McClure, a Beat poet who was immortalized as a character in Kerouac’s novel “Big Sur,” is curious about the new film, but said: “It was the writing that was so exciting. How do you make that into a movie?”
McClure also wondered whether today’s young movie audience, which she described as obsessed with “trying to get into corporations,” could grasp a story about shunning worldly possessions.
Damn, it pains me to hear this. The counterculture is, of course, what made Berlin what it is: a cultural free haven full of creativity. It has been like that since before the fall of the Wall, and has continued to be so in the twenty-first century.
But the forces of gentrification and corporatization are on the march. Let’s turn Berlin into every other European city; let’s make it a sort of Paris. A neat, clean, tourist-friendly city, full of shopping malls. No more squatting, no more turning post-industrial areas into something cool and original, no more ventures into the underground.
Bar25‘s closed to make room for ’urban development’; now one the last communal housing projects, Liebig 14, that has been there since 1990. Sigh.
Around 2,500 police officers were deployed in Berlin today to evict inhabitants of one of the capital city’s last former squats.
The 25 residents of the Liebig 14 tenement block have refused to leave after losing a lengthy legal battle which has become a touchstone for the city’s anti-gentrification movement.
The local Green MP, Hans-Christian Ströbele, said alternative housing projects such as Liebig 14 were one of Berlin’s trademarks and should be protected rather than destroyed.
More than 1,000 protesters gathered outside the building in the former east Berlin district of Friedrichshain. They waved banners, banged wooden spoons on saucepans and shouted at officers from the German Special Forces who had managed to climb onto the roof during the night. On the street, police in full riot gear blocked all access routes.
By 11.45am local time (10.45 GMT) 23 protesters had been arrested, but police had not managed to gain full access.
Demonstrations and publicity stunts are planned across Berlin throughout the day. Already, protesters claim to have paintballed the famous department store KaDeWe, Berlin’s answer to Harrod’s, along with the town hall in the district of Schöneberg, where John F Kennedy gave his”Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963.
The building, which has 25 bedrooms, four kitchens and five bathrooms, was first squatted in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. After Berlin’s housing board took ownership of the house in 1992, the squatters signed a lease making them the legal residents.
After it was sold to private developers, the lease was passed on to the current occupiers, who range from 19 to 40 years old and hail from around the world. One British resident, a 24-year-old PhD student, gave her name as Sarah.
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“People with not much money are being forced out of Berlin city centre. This is not just about 25 people losing their home, it’s a protest against the gentrification of the city and ordinary people all over being priced out of their local housing market.”
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The district mayor, Franz Schulz, criticised the eviction. “It is not a good day. We’re losing an important alternative project,” he told Inforadio.
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Berlin police said 2,500 officers were engaged in the operation, “but not all are stationed here; they are spread out all over the city to deal with the planned demonstrations”.
The interview ranges from the meaning of the word ‘hipster’, how it evolved from the early 2000s Vice archetype to the eco-minded, liberal arts educated type of today, to how hipsters are not really a genuine counterculture. Tortorici also has sympathy for the hipster though, self-identifying to some extent with them. The hallmark of the hipster, nonetheless, is its shallowness: it’s a subculture that’s defined entirely by its aesthetics.
At the end of the interview the question is asked: ‘Is the hipster over?’ You may wanna ponder that question yourself. A very interesting piece though, which I recommend to read in its entirety.
HIPSTERS are everywhere and nowhere in the culture of the last decade. On the one hand, a quick hop on the L-Train to Williamsburg (and now Bushwick) in New York City suggests that the burgeoning population of bestubbled waifs with chunky eyewear is, if anything, expanding its hold on the contemporary imagination. On the other, this prevalence seems to have precluded any real conversation about the hipster’s meaning in our culture at large. “What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation“, the latest addition to a small-book series published by n+1, a Brooklyn-based magazine, turns an inquisitive eye to a subject that would seem to defy such discussion. After all, nobody likes hipsters, hipsters least of all.(…)
Dayna Tortorici co-edited “What Was the Hipster?”. Her essay “You Know It When You See It” tackles the subject of hipster photography and the place it carves out for women in a male-dominated subculture. She spoke toMore Intelligent Life via Google-chat about late capitalism, the death of the poser and why it’s a cop-out to refuse to understand hipsters. We’ve condensed the conversation here.
One of the running themes of the book, and of hipsterdom in general, is the way the term eludes definition. What do you see as the essence of the hipster?
Well, one of the arguments that the book tries to make in confronting this question is that the hipster is a sort of a “boogeyman” in popular culture—a blank screen one can project a lot of one’s own prejudices and anxieties onto. It seems like a cop-out—a refusal to talk about the hipster in a way that’s personal. So to answer more personally, I’d say that the essence of the hipster is his or her (but mostly his) fascination with, or curation of, subculture arcana. There are many ‘types’ of hipster that tend to get lumped together when people talk about hipsters—and one of the challenges of the book was knowing when to generalise, when to taxonomise. But one of the things they all have in common is the desire for a special kind of cultural knowledge, and a fierce protection of this knowledge once it’s obtained.
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What’s striking to me about your definition is that it’s ultimately an aesthetic categorisation; it’s about self-presentation and curation. Whereas when we think of subcultures or countercultures historically, we usually tend to think of politics or even religion. Can hipsters make a genuine claim to being a counterculture?
I think this is where the “taxonomise” v “generalise” problem comes in—because while I’d say “No, hipsters can’t make a genuine claim to being a counterculture” (as Mark and several others in the book argue, hipsters are the dominant culture nowadays, despite their “interest” in aspects of subculture, past and present), there are several groups of people who I think often unfairly get lumped into the category “Hipster” who are in fact representatives of more genuine countercultures. Freegans, DIY-kids, radical queers, feminists, crust punks…all kinds of punks. And so on. I wouldn’t call such people “hipsters,” but I can think of more than a few people who would.
Do you see the hipster as inherently negative? The book, in particular, Mark Greif’s opening paper, suggests that hipsters are in some way “poisonous.” Is this giving them too much credit?
It might be. “Poisonous to whom?” one wants to ask. Of course, the other complication of talking about the hipster generally is that the distinctions between mutations get lost. I’d argue that the conservative, white-pride-inflected, Vice-magazine hipster of 1999-2003 Mark Greif talks about in his contributions is far more “poisonous” to culture than the eco-minded, bicycle-riding, liberal arts-educated hipster one thinks of today. The hipsters of today seem pretty benign. But what I think a lot of people see as truly negative about the hipster (apathy, refusal to engage in politics, participation in gentrification, mindless consumerism paraded as “uniqueness”) isn’t actually unique to the hipster. Hipsters today are often regarded (from what I can tell, anyway) more as a nuisance than a poison. They’re not doing much of anything bad—often, they’re not doing much of anything at all. But they’re people that make you feel something about yourself, or about culture, that you don’t like.
Right. Part of the frustration with hipsters seems to be that they say something very complicated about privilege, in particular about the privilege of the early “millennials” who came of age in the boom years. I mean, in most instances, aren’t we dealing with the white upper-middle-class?
I think so—or if not strictly white, mostly white. In his piece for the panel discussion Jace Clayton asks what we’re not talking about when we talk about hipsters, and the role of race and socioeconomic status in this phenomenon is undoubtedly the biggest elephant in the room. But while I think a lot of the ill-feeling toward privileged white twenty-somethings who have the luxury to try out “being an artist” in a city like New York is warranted—hipsters, especially disaffected hipsters (a redundancy?), seem to lack perspective when griping about their problems, claiming to be ‘poor’ because they have bedbugs in their renovated three-bedroom apartment in Bushwick—I also sympathise with the hipster. Being a hipster looks like it really sucks: I would hate to be living in an overcrowded city, sublimating my artistic impulses into tacky freelance graphic-design work, going to the same bars every weekend with the exact same white people who look just like me, posing for the Cobrasnake. But it’s a pattern that’s been established, so I think a lot of young people reach for that lifestyle when they don’t know what to do with themselves. Part of it, apolitical as it may be, seems to be a resignation to living in the socio-economically stratified, over-commercialised world of late-capitalist America.
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Your essay deals with the role of internet instantaneity in the proliferation of hipster tastes. Do you think there would be hipsters, in the 21st-century sense, without the internet?
Truly, I don’t think there would, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think it’s the internet’s ability to rapidly circulate taste markers (clothes, music, movies, even poses) that facilitates the making of the hipster, insofar as the hipster is defined purely by the expression of his or her taste (how s/he looks, what obscure movies s/he knows about, etc). Significantly, you don’t have to have any ideas to be a hipster, or any ideas in common with other hipsters to recognise them as your hipster brethren. While it’s possible that this ‘subculture’ of people that was all taste and no ethos could have existed before the internet, the internet certainly facilitated the spread of the hipster by making the how-to of hipsterism available to almost everybody online.
(…)
Is the hipster moment over? The title of the book implies as much.
I think most people would acknowledge that the hipster moment isn’t over. The inflammatory, online-comment reactions to the book suggest as much: people are still preoccupied with hipsters, whether they’re sick of hearing about them or not. While certain iterations of the hipster are definitely over—you don’t see trucker hats anymore, really—new iterations are still taking shape all the time. But I’d argue that the hipster as I think of it is certainly phasing out, bleeding into mainstream taste. The figure of the hipster as an elitist, subcultural icon is becoming obsolete. But as for hipsters in general? I think that unless something radically changes in youth culture in the next few years—or in American politics, or in the economy—we’ll be seeing hipsters for a while.
The Beyond Withinis a two-part BBC documentary from 1986 about the history of lsd. It’s pretty even-handed and impartial, and features such luminaries as Albert Hoffmann – the Swiss inventor of lsd -, Aldous Huxley -, writer of The Doors of Perception -, Ken Kesey – author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and founder of the Merry Pranksters, the original West Coast hippies – and a British politician named Christopher Mayhew.
The main question the documentary asks is whether the experiences of lsd users can make claim to being spiritual in nature, or whether this is ‘just’ psychedelic delusion. It then documents the history of lsd, from the CIA experiments in the 1950s, to the psychedelic experiments by Timothy Leary at Harvard University and its experimentalist use by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the early 1960s, to its more widespread use as a recreational drug in the age of the hippie counterculture.
Very interesting is the footage of Christopher Mayhew, a British upper class aristocrat politician, who in the early 1960s took mescaline as an experiment to be documented by the BBC:
The footage of his experience is extraordinary, as this eloquent upper-class Mr. Cholmondley-Warner-style aristocrat describes what he is experiencing under the influence of the drug, his eyes wide as saucers. Indeed, the footage proved too controversial for the BBC at the time, and was not shown until this Everyman documentary broadcast it in the 1980′s. Interestingly, Mayhew, who in 1986 was a member of the House of Lords, watches the footage, 30 years later, and stands by his description of the experience. “I had an experience in time” he says, and his conviction is apparent.
But, the documentary also explores bad trips. Albert Hoffmann has the last words, ending on the note that while he didn’t believe his lsd experiences to be spiritual, he did believe that they represented ‘another dimension to reality’.
So here it is. Enjoy!
- Edit: If you’re interested in this stuff and want to read more about it, we can recommend you a couple of titles. Jay Steven’s Storming Heaven. LSD and the American Dream(1998) is a good one. Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, about Kesey and the Pranksters, is one of Adriejan’s favorite books. For the Netherlands’ story of lsd, Maartenp recommends Peter ten Hoopen’s underrated King Acid- which is very hard to come by in paper, but is now available on Kindle.
Today it’s thirty years ago that John Lennon was shot in New York City. I’m not that much of a Beatles fan (I like their songs, like everyone, and then especially the psychedelic work on Sgt. Pepper and the White Album), but they have to be recognized as harbingers – well, early adapters – of the 1960s counterculture, and of course the psychedelic explorations of that era. Let alone their huge innovation and influence on popular music.
Also, I once made a list of my favorite Beatles songs and then checked by whom they were written, and it turned out John Lennon (along with the Lennon-McCartney cooperations) had the most ones.
NME has a print article on the dark side of John Lennon: “John was the original Punk Rocker, his appetite for sex, drugs and rebellion matched only by his hunger for self-exploration.” And then Nerdcore has a scan of some great Lennon citations accompanying this article:
Man, I love the BBC. The documentary Hotel California: LA from The Byrds to The Eagles traces the evolution of the Southern California psychedelic folk/rock scene through the ’60s and ’70s. Great stuff!
Featuring Crosby, Stills and Nash, Neil Young, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell, The Eagles, and many more.
This is part 1, the other 6 parts are attached to it.
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