Ken Kesey once said that America co-opts its revolutionaries by showering them with money and honors. I doubt at the time he was thinking of his own co-Non-Navigator of the Merry Pranksters, Captain Skypilot Ken Babbs the Intrepid Traveler. I don't know about money, but lately Babbs has been collecting the honors. First he was invited to address the English Department at the Air Force Academy. Babbs is a decorated U.S. Marine pilot, but crossed military lines to speak to the Air Force instructors on how to teach the novels of Ken Kesey. He did arrive decked out in Marine regalia.
It was a challenging audience for the Captain, not exactly beatniks and Deadheads.
However, he said his talk went over well with the military types: When I got up to speak I shed the blazer to reveal my flourescent orange loggers suspenders to great laughs and cheers. I started the talk with the question, "Is anybody here ready to have a psychedelic experience?" whereupon two cadets raised their hands and cried, "We are."
They were promptly expelled, just kidding, everybody got a good laugh....
Babbs was also honored recently by the Beat Museum. Here he is posing by the official Merry Prankster shirt worn by Neal Cassady.
This is a picture of Neal Cassady when he was a baby.
Just kidding. Here's the real Neal with Allen Ginsberg, no doubt at the time never suspecting that his clothing would be displayed in museums.
The Captain also attended a Dead reunion show (what he calls the "Leftover Dead") and took this picture of a giant turtle appearing on stage.
I'm surprised by how commercialized and mainstream the legacy of the Grateful Dead has become. I can't help but wonder, what would Jerry Garcia have thought of it all?
Style Over Substance
I am saddened to hear of the death of Massachusetts writer John Updike. Despite living in Massachusetts since 1959, Updike was considered the best example of a certain kind of urbane New Yorker style writer. He was indeed a brilliant stylist, although in my opinion Updike's writing often had more style than substance. The subjects of his books always seemed too small for the size of his talent. The Rabbit Runs series for which he was best known, was a mean spirited trivialization of the American middle-class male, which made him well loved by leftist literary critics. But for all the praise he received, most of his books were more praised than read. His death was treated as the passage of a literary giant, but I predict Updike's reputation will fade with the passage of time.
Bad Call
Stephen King is not half the stylist Updike was, but I predict that King's books will still be read for generations to come. This 2006 novel was recommended to me because it is the first King book to have a homosexual as a lead character. Frankly I had stopped reading King. Ever since his near fatal accident King's books have become too dark to be fun.
The queer angle is minor in this book that has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with technology. Cell shows King returning to form with a story that is a good mix of funny and scary. Something awful starts happening to people who use their cell phones, which King himself makes known he has never owned. If you're sick of seeing everyone walking around talking on cell phones, then this book is your vengeance.
Endless Winter
More snow last night, so walking downtown at dawn today my woodland way was turned into a snow lined corridor.
Some canines conspired to trick their humans into taking them out so that they could meet and tell dog secrets.
Once downtown, Northampton sidewalks were clogged with snow.
Oh my, not a day for bike riding!
Hey Spring, we're getting more than a little impatient.
Dinosaur Jr. is the most successful band ever to rise out of Amherst. I saw their lead guitarist, J. Mascis, wandering around the Farmer's Market last summer and asked him if I could take his picture. He responded with sign language, putting a finger to his lips and nodding yes. I quickly took the following photo without alerting anyone around us to the world famous rock star in their midst.
Northampton's Jim Neill is shown here with former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. Sheesh, Byrne is almost unrecognizable. Good thing I haven't gotten any older.
Can you imagine what kinds of pressure you must be under if you're a son of Hugh Hefner? Then again, can you imagine what advantages there must be to being a son of Hugh Hefner. The Playboy mogul's son's gave a rare interview recently as reported in FoxNews.
Despite having grown-up with a father who has always had bundles of busty blonde babes floating around, Hugh Hefner’s son Marston has no desire to follow in his footsteps.
"I’m not going to have multiple girlfriends— not at the same time. I can’t imagine doing that," the 18-year-old told the 55th Anniversary edition of Playboy Magazine.
But while flocks of females isn’t Marston's fantasy, becoming men’s magazine moguls is definitely in the dreams of both he and brother Cooper.
"I definitely want to be involved with the company— if I were to take over the company or have a say in what’s going on, I’d want the girls to be presented more as they were in the pictorials back in the 1950s and 1960s—kind of artsy, classy. I would like to bring back that retro-class feel," 17-year-old Cooper said, adding that having the Hefner name has been both a blessing and a burden in life.
"It’s not that I’m not a social person, because I enjoy spending time with people. But when I walk into a room, I feel that if they know who I am or they hear the last name, I’m going to be judged negatively as well as positively," he explained.
I imagine the worst pressure would be to be some kind of superstud like your old man. Can you imagine if you were Hef's son and realized you were gay? Personally I never told my Dad I was queer and he never asked. It was the only way we could have a relationship.
Van Dog shows that apathy is enthusiastically practiced at Holyoke public meetings.
Mike Henry won a t-shirt recently, one I could wear everyday.
In Springfield in the 1990's there used to be a great coffee shop/art gallery called SEE. Here is an old card from the joint I came upon recently.
I had some fun there, and its closing was a great cultural loss.
Here's an update on my National Public Radio interview with Hwei-Ling Greeney (above) and when you might be able to hear some of it, as reported in the WFCR Winter Newsletter:
Starting January 14, 2009, WFCR and WNNZ will be broadcasting edited versions of StoryCorps interviews conducted in Springfield, Greenfield, Lenox, Northampton and Amherst.
"We are thrilled that these stories will be on the air," said Program Director Helen Barrington, "the interviews people did with those they care about are so moving and now they will become a more permanent part of the history of our region."
Storycorps is a national oral history project that has conducted over 21,000 interviews in more than 100 locations in 48 states. StoryCorps stories are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
The stories will be heard on 88.5 FM WFCR and 640 AM WNNZ Wednesdays during Morning Edition at 6:33 amd 8:33 AM.
They got a lot of ice last week upstate, but most of our Valley was spared. However, things got pretty icy way up on Mt. Tom, as Jim Ingram reports via video. Dig the sound of the wind through the icy trees.
Out in Oregon Captain Skypilot Ken Babbs the Intrepid Traveler reports hail stones as big as eggs.
On the bike path near my house a Led Zeppelin fan has let his presence be known.
I promised that I would tell you more about the videos Ken Babbs sent me, and what better day to finally get around to it than 420, the International Stoner's Holiday of High Pride?
Ken Babbs you may recall (or not) is one of the co-stars of the popular book by Tom Wolfe The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He is soon to become more famous because a film is in the works based on the book directed by the renowned film maker Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting) shown below on the left with Babbs.
The subject of the book, and now the film, is the infamous bus trip taken by Babbs and his best friend Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) a trip where legend has it they helped to popularize the use of psycheldelic drugs, in particular LSD, which was legal back in the mid-1960's when the cross country bus trip occurred.
That legend is somewhat exaggerated and simplistic. The real purpose of the trip was to arrive in New York City for the official release of Kesey's second book, Sometimes a Great Notion, a lesser known novel but one which many literary critics consider better than Cuckoo's Nest, at least in terms of style and creativity. While there was drugs of psychedelic types onboard the bus, and many madcap adventures occurred, it was never specifically the desire of Kesey, Babbs and crew to turn on America, at least not by bus.
If the bus ride eventually had a pro-drug influence on society, that is largely the result of Wolfe's book, which had a romanticizing effect on the trip. Ironically not everyone associated with drug culture has praised it, with some complaining that Wolfe sometimes adopts a snarky tone in the book. In any case, forever after Kesey, Babbs and their friends, who sometimes called themselves the Merry Pranksters, were locked forever in the public's conciousness with that bus ride.
What wasn't always appreciated was that most everyone involved with the bus ride lived for decades afterward, indeed, a good many are still alive today. Kesey is not one of them, having died of liver disease in 2001. But much of what is so celebrated in Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test continued on through the years, even if no writers were hanging around to write books about it. Much of the psychic and cultural experimentation was recorded in one form or other and stored in the Prankster's legendary archives. Most of it has never been seen by the public, but that may change if the acid test movie is a success.
The most valuable archival material, that owned by Kesey himself, is under the control of his son Zane, who makes some material available on the website Key-Z.com, formerly known as Intrepid Trips, which was originally run by his father as one of the pioneering websites of the cyberspace revolution. The Pranksters were online as one of the earliest colonizers of cyberspace, and among the first to present their daily lives online in the manner that would later be called blogging. Whatever their cultural significance, Kesey, Babbs and the Pranksters were technological innovators as well. Not in the sense that they created new technology, but because they pioneered new uses and forms of self expression that the technology could be used for.
Today we consider it commonplace for people to make videos and other forms of recordings of private lives and then share them with the public through mass distribution online or by other means. But in 1965, when the Pranksters filmed their bus trip, the idea that private lives recorded by regular people could have a wider significance was by no means widespread. Yet the purpose of the film was to show a subculture, hidden from the view of the larger culture at the time, and to express the consciousness that subculture was experiencing. The fact that they were using drugs was almost beside the point.
For the Pranksters, and the musical group most associated with them, the Grateful Dead, it was considered essential to preserve everything one did that was of any significance, either by writing about it, filming or sound recording it, or all three! The Grateful Dead's credo of preserving everything has paid off handsomely in a string of endless live releases. But for the Pranksters, their archives have been less of a mother lode, at least commercially.
Part of the problem is the archives are in desperate need of editing. Kesey reportedly left behind mountains of manuscripts, miles of film and reels of recording from which no one has really attempted to sift the wheat from the chaff. What Zane Kesey has mostly made available is stuff that was already pretty much edited and ready for release around the time Kesey died. Much of this material is excellent, such as the original films shot on the bus trip, some priceless footage of a shirtless and stoned Neal Cassady tripping at Kesey's farm, and a 1970's poetry festival the Pranksters put on featuring some of the most important literary figures of the era. There is a grab bag of later material available, which is not as good but still interesting, such as videos about a trip the Pranksters took to England and the delightful but hopelessly spacey labor of love of Kesey's later years, the play called Twister. All these and more can be obtained here.
Timothy Leary and Neal Cassady.
However, if Zane is the keeper of the vaults, then Ken Babbs has emerged as the definer of the Prankster message in the present. Actually the term Merry Pranksters has been mostly retired since the death of Kesey, in much the same way as the term Grateful Dead was retired after the death of Jerry Garcia. While the spirit lives on, the terms in both cases was too closely identified with a single individual to keep the same name. While the Merry Pranksters were always bigger than Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead were always more than just Jerry Garcia, neither entity could really be called the same thing in their absence.
So for the future evolutions of the Prankster concept, Babbs came up with the Skypilot Club, a loose kind of spoof of the old cereal and comic book clubs of the 1940's and 50's. There are membership cards and other silly knockoffs of kid culture, all presented with a wink and a nod to drug culture sensibilities. And there are videos of what Babbs and his cohorts are up to now. What those videos suggest is that the more things change, the more things stay the same in that wondrously odd world of those formerly known as the Merry Pranksters.
Two excellent examples are some videos Babbs sent me recently. The first is one that is about the United States military base Guantanamo in Cuba. Or at least that's sort of what it's about.
What the video is about as much as anything is wordplay. The Pranksters have always been fascinated by language and sound, whether it be puns and rhymes or just noise and the way it undulates through space. Babbs (and Kesey of course when he was alive) love to play language the way a jazz musician plays sound, arranging it in new and unusual ways that sometimes have only a tangental relationship with the normal usage of the words. The result is a kind of sonic intoxicant that is almost hypnotic in its effect, phasing back and forth between message and medium in a way resulting in fresh understandings. Babbs, a proud veteran, is obviously sincere in denouncing the alleged cruelties committed at Guantanamo, but as this video unfolds the constantly repeated script becomes more musical than political. In the end, it's all about the wordplay.
This is even more apparent in the second video Babbs sent me Dreamin.
Essentially a skit performed as part of a concert by the newly reformed Grateful Dead offshoot band New Riders of the Purple Sage, this short (35 minutes) performance is essentially a New Riders jam session set to a poem by Babbs. The performance, where Babbs and the New Riders are accompanied by a spirited cast of Pranksters and friends, again relies heavily on the juxtaposition of words so that they convey fresh meanings. The tone of the piece is very upbeat, and Dreamin is one of Babbs best poetic compositions.
Alas, if you are looking for a New Riders concert, this is much too freeform for a fair sampling of the current state of the band, which from all reports I've heard is as good on the road as it's ever been. This video is all about Babbs and friends, with the New Riders providing only tasteful noodling among the verses.
However, if you are looking for good videos to put on after midnight at your next party, then these are two certain to surprise and intrigue your guests. Or better still, watch them yourself when you can really get into the words and the rhythm of the literary beat. You'll be surprised by what these videos unveil with repeated viewings.
How can you get your mitts on these viddies? Well, Babbs is currently hard at work completing a novel with a strict deadline, and is officially discouraging any correspondence that makes demands on his time. But maybe if you were to send him a portrait of Andrew Jackson on greenish paper and a polite request to the address here, then perhaps he may be enticed to send you a surprise.
Continuing in a 420 vain, I spotted another one of those hula hoop defaced signs on King Street.
Don't understand what I'm talking about? Then click here
Finally, closing out our 420 post, here is Springfield native and Classical High graduate Timothy Leary, goofing with Cheech and Chong and ending with a worthwhile public service message by PeeWee Herman that I wish I had heeded.
Greetings and salutations upon the Feast of Fools.
Here's something that really pisses me off. I was over by the Academy of Music in Northampton when I noticed this commemorative stone and decided to check it out. It turns out that beneath the stone is a time capsule planted on the bicentennial in 1976 and due to be opened in 2076. I'll be sure to mark my calendar. The stone also commemorates something else, but I can't tell what it is because someone has swiped the other plaque!
Who took it? Most likely a crack addict or some kind of junkie looking to sell the plaque for scrap metal. I don't know who to have more contempt for, the druggie that stole it or the dealer who bought it and who must have known full well what it was. This kind of crime is sadly common. In Springfield, a compelling rumor persists that a lot of the copper from the old Tech High was stolen by a politically connected person. In Amherst, someone stole half of the two plaques commemorating the old Elm Grove that had to be cut down to make the Fine Arts Center and Herter Hall at UMass.
It's so hard to come up with the money and the will to preserve the past. On the rare occasions when we do, it is an unforgivable outrage to have the displays vandalized. However, sometimes things that vanish reappear. For example, last month I wondered what became of the bus shelter that used to be in front of the Amherst Post Office.
I never did find out what caused it to go away, but I noticed the other day that it's back.
I will be happy to make use of it on my frequent trips to downtown Amherst. Meanwhile, on this street in Northampton, I noticed an odd form of vandalism done to a street sign. Someone had drawn a hoola hoop on the image located on a safety sign.
I saw another such image over on West Street.
What on Earth? Suddenly it occurred to me what it was. The images are part of a campaign by the fans of the psychedelic jazz-rock fusion band The String Cheese Incident. One of their promotional icons is the hula hoop.
Captain Skypilot Ken Babbs the Intrepid Traveler (below left) was second in command to Ken Kesey in the Merry Pranksters and is a fan of the band.
Here is Captain Babbs with the String Cheese Incident.
Yesterday I got a package in the mail from Captain Ken. Photo by Shane.
In the package was two discs and this note.
I will watch these discs and then report to you what was on them.
Meanwhile, let's listen to The String Cheese Incident in concert.
