Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of Ecstasy - Hardcover

Christensen, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1936182009 ISBN 13: 9781936182008

Verlag: Schaffner Pr Inc, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

From the literary wonder boy to the countercultural guru whose cross-country bus trip inspired The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, this candid biography chronicles the life and times of cultural icon Ken Kesey from the 1960s through the 1980s. Presenting an incisive analysis of the author who described himself as "too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie," this account conducts a mesmerizing journey from the perspective of Mark Christensen, an eventual member of the Kesey "flock." Featuring interviews with those within his inner circle, this exploration reveals the bestselling author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in his many forms, placing him within the framework of his time, his generation, and the zeitgeist of the psychedelic era.

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Mark Christensen is the author of The So-Cal Speed Shop, Super Car: The Story of the Xeno, and The Sweeps: Behind the Scenes in Network TV. He is the former editor of Oregon Magazine and a media columnist for Rolling Stone. He has contributed articles to American Film, Connoisseur, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Playboy, TV Guide, and Wired. He lives in Laguna Beach, California.

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Acid Christ

Ken Kesey, LSD and the Politics of Ecstasy

By Mark Christensen

Schaffner Press

Copyright © 2010 Mark Christensen
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-936182-00-8

Contents

PROLOGUE: NEON RENAISSANCE MAN, 
PART ONE: THE SHEPHERDS, 
Chapter One: Requiem for a Heavyweight, 
Chapter Two: Natural Man, 
Chapter Three: Adams and Eves, 
Chapter Four: BMOC, 
Chapter Five: The Good Book, 
Chapter Six: Unholy Grail, 
Chapter Seven: Big Mother and the Whores, 
PART TWO: THE SHEEP, 
Chapter Eight: Holy Land, 
Chapter Nine: Notion, 
Chapter Ten: Theater of Sheep, 
Chapter Eleven: I am A Camera, 
Chapter Twelve: Auteur, 
Chapter Thirteen: Blows Against the Empire, 
Chapter Fourteen: Days of Heaven, 
PART THREE: THE SAVANT, 
Chapter Fifteen: Krassner Agonistes, 
Chapter Sixteen: Utopian Thought in the Western World, 
Chapter Seventeen: Holy Mayhem, Inc, 
Chapter Eighteen: The Jail Interviews, 
Chapter Nineteen: Sea Change, 
Chapter Twenty: The Rise and Fall and Rise Again, Maybe, of the High Ideal, 
Chapter Twenty-One: Fantasy Island, 
Chapter Twenty-Two: High Crimes, 
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Abuses of Enchantment, 
Chapter Twenty-Four: .000001 and Much, Much More, 
Chapter Twenty-Five: Man Child in the Promised Land, 
Chapter Twenty-Six: Heaven on Earth, 
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Burbank Babylon, 
PART FOUR: SHEEP, THE SEQUEL, 
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Working on My Fantasy, 
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Revolution Has Happened, 
Chapter Thirty: The Dream Museum, 
Chapter Thirty-One: California Girls, 
Chapter Thirty-Two: Scepter of Democracy, 
PART FIVE: THE SAVED, 
Chapter Thirty-Three: The District Sleeps Alone Tonight, 
Chapter Thirty-Four: Venusians, 
Chapter Thirty-Five: Last Supper, 
Chapter Thirty-Six: Dying in the Provinces, 
Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Story of H, 
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Last Go Round, 
Chapter Thirty-Nine: A Long Time Gone, 
Chapter Forty: Drowning in the Wishing Well, 
Chapter Forty-One: Kiss No Ass, 
Chapter Forty-Two: End Game, 
Chapter Forty-Three: Stairway to Heaven, 
Chapter Forty-Four: Last Rites, 
EPILOGUE: FLASHBACKS, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
PUBLISHER'S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
ENDNOTES, 
PHOTO CREDITS, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT

"Once upon a time a young man of American background thought he had discovered the great Secret, the Skeleton Key to the Cosmos, the Absolute Answer to the Age-Old Question asked by every Wizard and Alchemist and Mystic that ever peered curiously into the Perplexity heavens, by every Doctor and Scientist and Explorer that ever wondered about the Winding Ways of the world, by every Philosopher and Holy man and Politician that ever listened for the Mysterious Song beneath the beat of the Human Heart ... the answer to 'What Makes It All Go?'"

— Ken Kesey

Portland, Oregon 2003.

Death's door. Here's what can happen if, after a breakfast beer or two or three, you're not careful at a cross walk: multiple concussions, two broken shoulders, a broken neck, several broken ribs, both legs shattered below the knees. This was just days after my ex-cousin, poet Marty Christensen, had taken part in a eulogy to Ken Kesey. Marty — small, handsome, grizzled, quick — evoking the riches to rags élan of a broke blueblood down on his luck — as author of the following tribute to the man he referred to simply as the Commander.

THE SHAMAN

There is a strange boom
when he explodes

we go up
& remain aloft

he gestures from below

we feel calm
& flap our arms

But do not dare to bend over.

Marty and his beloved, tall, pretty, sad-eyed Lorna, lived in East Portland in a little house that featured plants cut to animal shapes in front, all Marty's stuff inside — dunes of tapes and books all over the livingroom floor — and the "Hole to Nowhere" out back, a hole the blackest of black which appeared totally bottomless. You could drop a beer bottle down there, send it on its way straight to hell or China, and never hear it hit bottom. Marty was the kind of off-center voice Oregon grows or hosts best: in-through-the-out-door talents including Ursula K. Le Guin, Raymond Carver, Katherine Dunn, Kent Anderson, Mikal Gilmore, Susan Orlean, Gus Van Sant, Larry Colton, John Shirley, Pierre Ouellette, Todd Grimson, Charles D'Ambrosio, Rick Steber and Chuck Palahniuk, whose novel Fight Club made him — for Gen X, Y or Z — the kind of New Normal Noir freak beacon Kesey had been for Flower Children.

The state has played home or host to bohemian writers going back to John Reed, "the father of modern journalism," who was born in Portland before writing the story of the Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, and dying of typhus at 31. A pioneer Marxist all about free love and anarchy, Reed, not Kesey, was arguably the true First Hippie. Oregon also abides more linear types. Bill Keller, current Executive Editor of The New York Times, was a reporter here for years. Low on oligarchs and movie stars (a young Clark Gable lived in Portland, did dinner theater, and moved south), killers and writers have long found Oregon a comfy windowed womb, and Ken Kesey, blessed with brilliant parents, was very much a product of this environment.

A man of the West —"homeland of the rootless" as Kesey's editor Malcolm Cowley called it — a still somewhat unsettled land recalling wilderness and fantasy, both the wild and the imaginary, from Paul Bunyan to Bigfoot, home to free spirits like DB Cooper, Gary Gilmore, Tonya Harding, Courtney Love and maybe the most successfully subversive modern American of all, Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons." As perhaps the most culturally complex of the northwestern states (though whitebread whack Norman Rockwell Nazi Idaho certainly gives it a run for its money and the Tom McGuane borough of Montana is not chopped liver either), Oregon is a fractured fairy tale, not one state, but several, home to cops who drive Volvos, liberals who hate blacks and bikers who vote Republican. Where put enough lead in the air and you're bound to come home happy, any man could shoot a duck for dinner, and where local Ishmaels fish for thirty pound steelhead on ten-pound test.

Marty had first met Kesey at a poetry reading across town at "Fool's Paradise" in Portland in 1972. Kesey came into the tavern with Prankster second-in-command Ken Babbs. They set up an applause-o-meter in the back of the gloomy beer mill as Marty was reading from a portfolio of poems including:

LASTING HATE

When I was a lad I'd roam
sewers in search of animals
which I would kill then try
to sell for money.
I hated them then and I still
feel nothing but complete contempt.

Of all the poets performing that night, Marty got the highest score on the Prankster applause-o-meter. Kesey was so impressed he named Marty head of the Portland delegation to "Bend in the River," Kesey's national symposium designed to determine the hippie/utopian/Keseyian future of the Republic.

"Auxiliary" Prankster Marty was one of Kesey's favorites perhaps because nuthouse alum Marty had lived the zero gravity life Kesey had only dreamt about, and because Marty gave Kesey shit. Claiming, for example,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Schaffner Pr Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1936182009
• ISBN 13: 9781936182008
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 449
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar