Two Films About The 60s

2 Upcoming Films With Links To The 60s

Neal Cassady - From the bars of Denver to the Steel Mills of Utah to the avant-garde parties of Manhattan, across a nation whose heart is calling for a role-model, a leader, a hero... Neal Cassady's on the road again, and all his old pals are there with him--Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, The Merry Pranksters. They're searching for Neal's long-lost father, who holds the key to the great unwritten American novel. But in the end it's Neal alone, and in the rear-view fast-approaching are cops, groupies and the dark chimera of his own vanity.

Release Date: To Be Announced
link


Across The Universe - A love story set against the backdrop of the 1960s amid the turbulent years of anti-war protest, mind exploration and rock 'n roll, the film moves from the dockyards of Liverpool to the creative psychedelia of Greenwich Village, from the riot-torn streets of Detroit to the killing fields of Vietnam. The star-crossed lovers, Jude (Jim Sturgess) and Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), along with a small group of friends and musicians, are swept up into the emerging anti-war and counterculture movements, with "Dr. Robert" (Bono) and "Mr. Kite" (Eddie Izzard) as their guides. Tumultuous forces outside their control ultimately tear the young lovers apart, forcing Jude and Lucy – against all odds – to find their own way back to each other.

I don't know if I would like this one or not. I've read that it's more like a series of punctuated scenes and characters each represented by a Beatles song - 32 in all. Too much of a musical for me...maybe it has more of a story.

Now the Neal Cassady film sounds promising because the people are interesting. Cassady, Kesey, Kerouac, the the Pranksters, of whom I thought were the end-all and be-all of the universe when I was growing up.

Release Date: September 28, 2007.
View trailer
Link

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Stew Albert 1939 - 2006

Berkley 1968 - Portland 2002
Stew Albert a prominent anti-Vietnam war activist, an early supporter of the Black Panthers and a founder of the Yippie radical protest group, died Monday at age 66 in Portland, Oregon.

Initially diagnosed with Hepatitis C, he spent a whole year enduring grueling chemotherapy. He spoke openly about it on his website, documenting each day and each weekly shot. He was finally declared free of the disease only to be diagnosed with liver cancer this past December. The ultimate Fuck You. (My sister passed away this past Thanksgiving also from liver cancer from Hep C.) We spoke thru email about Hep C, how it sucked and how the treatment felt worse than the disease. I was always inspired by his spirit. From 1968 in Chicago throughout his life. People with true 60s ideals are a rare breed. Tom Robbins said, Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business. Stew certainly believed in magic.

On his website...from Judy
"Stew will be buried tomorrow (Wednesday) in Jones Pioneer Cemetery in Portland. He will be wrapped in a tallis (Jewish prayer shaw), holding a stuffed flower from the Haight and wearing his kick-ass Frye boots and our wedding ring."

There are beautiful sentiments expressed on his website, Bay Area Indymedia, Infoshop News, SFGate, and on Counterpunch.


More On Hepatitis C
Allen Ginsberg died from complications of it. Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, and David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, & Nash, both had liver transplants and still suffer from it. Ken Kesey, author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, suffered from it and died of liver cancer in 2001. Penny Arcade, the 55-year-old performance artist for the East Village avant-garde art scene since Andy Warhol roamed the city, also suffers from it.

Miles Keaton Andrew, a 52-year-old author who contracted it when he experimented with intravenous drugs as a teenager, has kept a blog, www.mkandrew.com, since 2001 about his experiences battling H.C.V. His blog has received a million hits in the past year. “I understand the whole stigma thing,” he told The Villager. "There are a lot of people like me who might have experimented with drugs. Some of us got sick from it and it isn’t anything to be ashamed about."

Hep C Life After Interferon is another blogger who documents his experience with it.

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The Rare Vinyl Network specializes in 'hard-to-find' vinyl. But I also reading enjoy the back story on the albums about the band members or what was happening at the time it was made.

In 1967 the Beatles were in Abbey Road Studios putting the finishing touches on their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. At one point Paul McCartney wandered down the corridor and heard what was then a new young band called Pink Floyd working on their hypnotic debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He listened for a moment, then came rushing back. "Hey guys" he reputedly said, "There's a new band in there and they're gonna steal our thunder". With their mix of blues, music hall influences, Lewis Carroll references, and dissonant experimentation, Pink Floyd was one of the key bands of the 1960s psychedelic revolution, a pop culture movement that emerged with American and British rock, before sweeping through film, literature, and the visual arts. The music was largely inspired by hallucinogens, or so-called 'mind-expanding' drugs such as marijuana and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), and attempted to recreate drug-induced states through the use of overdriven guitar, amplified feedback, and droning guitar motifs influenced by Eastern music.

This psychedelic consciousness was seeded, in the United States, by countercultural gurus such as Timothy Leary, a Harvard University professor who began researching LSD as a tool of self-discovery from 1960, and writer Ken Kesey who with his Merry Pranksters staged Acid Tests - multimedia 'happenings' set to the music of the Warlocks (later the Grateful Dead) and documented by novelist Tom Wolfe in the literary classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) - and traversed the country during the mid-1960s on a kaleidoscope-colored school bus. Suzy Hopkins, formerly *Suzy Creamcheese, a dancer and inspirational figure on the underground scene in Los Angeles and London, remembers the visceral way psychedelic culture affected the senses. 'There's a difference between a drug and a psychedelic. Drugs make you drugged and psychedelics enhance your ability to see the truth or reality' she says. For her, LSD and music created a kind of alchemy. Many psychedelic bands explored this sense of abandonment in their music, moving away from standard rock rhythms and instrumentation.

* She's ONE of the Suzy Creamcheesees.

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Bliss On Board

From Mongolian overtone chanting to Peruvian nose flutes to Catholic masses and Indian ragas, "music is part of every spiritual tradition," Ananda Marga monk Dada Nabhaniilananda recently reminded us.

There's also a long tradition of getting on the bus as a means of raising – or altering – consciousness. In the '60s, there were Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. During 1970-71, Steven Gaskin, head of the Farm, led a caravan of 50 school buses on a speaking tour across the U.S. Fans followed the Grateful Dead and Phish, and continue to trail Widespread Panic, in livable vans. Budget travelers, looking for a change of scenery, hop aboard the Green Tortoise. Thousands of people each year caravan to the ever-changing Rainbow Gathering destinations.

The Kundalini Express, then, is an efficient way to disseminate a complex network of spiritual-music traditions – "a way to celebrate the anniversary with the different centers of Ananda Marga across the continent," explains tour coordinator Nirmal Kronenberg by phone. "We're conducting parties, sort of ... visiting [Ananda Marga] centers to inspire these people." The Kundalini Express stops off in Asheville on Friday, June 24 for a 6-8 p.m. concert. [more »]

Ananda Marga in Asheville

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Wednesday's Interactive Post X 3

1. You can watch Moveon's "Elephant's Rampaging Ad". It's pretty funny.

2. What will YOU look like in 40 years? Select a .jpg picture from your computer and transform it into what you'll look like in 10 - 40 years on Age Transformer. Can you say Cryptkeeper? Damn frightening.

3. And, check out this website which enables one to "measure" the readability of one's blog just by plugging in its URL. Looks like I'm not a total trogladyte as I'm scoring in the normal range. (via: Stu Savory)

{Today's Quote}
"Since we don't know where we're going we have to stick together in case someone gets there." -- Ken Kesey

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saturday morning me//
a quick run/a quick trip to atlanta bread co/
for coffee & muffin reward/
listening: local radio - WNCW/
riding the lethargy xpress/
so how about you?/

Today's Quote
"Since we don't know where we're going we have to stick together in case someone gets there." -- Ken Kesey

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The Spitfurther Tour left Nov 13, with a Bus full of Pranksters, merry or otherwise, and Skypilotclub members that will go from Eugene to Portland to Ashland, to San Francisco, Mountain View, Sebastapol and to Berkeley leaving a wake of confused citizens, startled sheep, mooing cows, billy goats, rocky raccoons and Oregon Beavers.

Ken Kesey passed in Nov 2001, and left unfinished works that are now completed and up for sale. Two new books will debut: Kesey's Jail Journal is an oversized, richly illustrated work that Kesey began in the late 1960's while serving time in the San Mateo County Jail. Also just out is Spit in the Ocean #7, a special tribute issue with contributions from Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Larry McMurtry, Gus Van Sant and others.

I really love living in Asheville, NC, now, but it does seem like California gets all the good tours, entertainments, etc. And Portland and Seattle... the grass is always greener... and don't even get me started on how cool Canada is.

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