Ken Kesey, R.I.P.

From: "Ellis Dee" <fxtrt22@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: alt.slack
Date: Sat, Nov 10, 2001 4:49 PM

A true genius, and an honorary SubGenius.

from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/11/obituaries/11KESE.html

Ken Kesey, best known as the author of the novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest," died yesterday in Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, Ore., said
his wife, Faye. He was 66 and lived in Pleasant Hill, Ore.

The cause was complications after surgery for cancer of the liver late last
month, said his friend and business associate, Ken Babbs.

Mr. Kesey was also well known as the hero of Tom Wolfe's famous nonfiction
book about psychedelic drugs, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (1968). In
describing Mr. Kesey's role as the Pied Piper of psychedelia, Mr. Wolfe's
book, an early flowering of the author's typographically innovative
new-journalism style, somewhat mockingly compares Mr. Kesey to the leaders
of the world's great religions, dispensing to his followers not spiritual
balm but quantities of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, to enhance their
search for the universe within themselves.

The book's narrative focuses on a series of quests undertaken by Mr. Kesey
in the 1960's. First, there was the transcontinental trip with a band of
friends he named the Merry Pranksters, aboard a 1939 International Harvester
bus called Further that was wired for sound and painted riotously in Day-Glo
colors. Neal Cassady, the Dean Moriarty of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," was
recruited to drive. The journey, which took the Pranksters from La Honda,
Calif., to New York City and back, was timed to coincide with the 1964 New
York World's Fair. Its purposes were to film and tape an extended movie, to
experience roadway America while high on acid and to practice "tootling the
multitudes," as Mr. Wolfe put it, referring to the way a Prankster would
stand with a flute on the bus's roof and play sounds to imitate people's
various reactions to the bus.

"The sense of communication in this country has damn near atrophied," Mr.
Kesey told an interviewer from Publishers Weekly after the bus had arrived
in New York City. "But we found as we went along it got easier to make
contact with people. If people could just understand it is possible to be
different without being a threat."

Then, back in California, there were the so-called Acid Tests that Mr. Kesey
organized - parties with music and strobe lights where he and his friends
served LSD-laced Kool-Aid to members of the public and challenged them to
avoid "freaking out," as Mr. Wolfe put it. They were interrupted by Mr.
Kesey's flight to Mexico in January 1966, after he had been arrested twice,
to avoid going on trial on charges of possession of marijuana. And finally,
after he returned to the United States in October, and was arrested again
and waiting to stand trial, there was the final Acid Test, the graduation
ceremony designed ostensibly to persuade people to go beyond drugs and
achieve a mind-altered state without LSD.

This was the public Ken Kesey, the magnetic leader who built a bridge from
beatniks on the road to hippies in the Haight- Ashbury; who brewed the
cultural mix that fermented everything from psychedelic art to acid-rock
groups like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, to the Trips Festival
dance concerts in the Fillmore auditorium in San Francisco; and who in the
process of his pilgrimage blew an entire generation's mind.

Yet Mr. Wolfe also narrates the adventures of a more private Ken Kesey, one
who in addition to his quests took the inner trips that gave him his best
fiction. It is true that by 1959, when he had his first experience with
drugs, he had already produced a novel, "End of Autumn," about college
athletics, although it would never be published. But after he had
volunteered at a hospital to be a paid subject of experiments with little-
known psychomimetic drugs - drugs that bring on temporary states resembling
psychoses - his imagination underwent a startling change.

To earn extra money and to work on a novel called "Zoo," about the beatniks
of the North Beach community in San Francisco, Mr. Kesey also took a job as
a night attendant on the psychiatric ward of the hospital. Watching the
patients there convinced him that they were locked into a system that was
the very opposite of therapeutic, and provided the raw material for "One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." One night on the ward, high on peyote, he
suddenly envisioned what Mr. Wolfe describes as "a full-blown Indian - Chief
Broom - the solution, the whole mothering key, to the novel."

As Mr. Kesey explained, his discovery of Chief Broom, despite not knowing
anything about American Indians, gave him a character from whose point of
view he could depict a schizophrenic state of mind and at the same time
describe objectively the battle of wills between two other key characters,
the new inmate Randle Patrick McMurphy, who undertakes to fight the system,
and the tyrannical Big Nurse, Miss Ratched, who ends up lobotomizing
McMurphy. Chief Broom's unstable mental state and Mr. Kesey's imagining of
it, presumably with the help of hallucinogenic drugs, also allowed the
author to elevate the hospital into what he saw as a metaphor of repressive
America, which Chief Broom calls the Combine.

Mr. Kesey would "write like mad under the drugs," as Mr. Wolfe put it, and
then cut what he saw was "junk" after he came down.

"Cuckoo's Nest" was published by Viking Press in early 1962 to enthusiastic
reviews. Time magazine call it "a roar of protest against middlebrow
society's Rules and the invisible Rulers who enforce them." Stage and screen
rights were acquired by the actor Kirk Douglas, who the following year
returned to Broadway after a long absence to play McMurphy in an adaptation
by Dale Wasserman that ran for 82 performances at the Cort Theater during
the 1963-64 season. The play was revived professionally in slightly
different form in 1970 and 2001, with William Devane and Gary Sinise taking
turns playing the part of McMurphy.

Even more successful was the film version, which was released in 1975 and
the following year won five Oscars, for best picture; best director, Milos
Forman; best actor, Jack Nicholson as McMurphy; best actress, Louise
Fletcher as Nurse Ratched; and best screen adaptation, Lawrence Hauben and
Bo Goldman - the first time since "It Happened One Night" in 1934 that a
single movie enjoyed such a sweep.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: Ken Kesey, R.I.P.
From: Unit 4 <UnitIV@Sputum.COM>
Newsgroups: alt.slack

On Sat, 10 Nov 2001 21:49:37 GMT, in alt.slack Ellis Dee wrote:

}A true genius, and an honorary SubGenius.
}
}http://www.key-z.com
}
}from:
}http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/11/obituaries/11KESE.html
}
}Ken Kesey, best known as the author of the novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
}Nest," died yesterday in Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, Ore., said
}his wife, Faye. He was 66 and lived in Pleasant Hill, Ore.

Honorary my ass. He was carded.

Rev. Ken Kesey hereby receives the traditional SPUTUM farewell:

"Fuck." -- Afterburner

He met the saucers before we did, that's all.

"Would you join a slow marching band,
and take pleasure in your leaving?
As the ferry sails and the tears are dried,
and the cows come home in evening.

Could you get behind a slow marching band?
Join together in the passing,
of all we shared through yesterdays,
in sorrows everlasting.

Dream of me as the nights draw cold,
still marking time through winter.
You paid the piper and called the tune,
and you marched the band away.

Take a hand and take a bow,
you played for me and that's all for now.
Oh, and never mind the words,
just hum along and keep on going.
Walk on slowly.
Don't look behind you.
Don't say goodbye, love.
I won't remind you.
Walk on slowly.
Don't look behind you.
Don't say goodbye, love.
I won't remind you.
I won't remind you." -- Jethro Tull, "Slow Marching Band", on 'The
Broadsword and The Beastie'

We are all On The Bus, thanks to Rev. Kesey.

See www.intrepidtrips.com to inherit your hertiage.

Furthur on!

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