Travel Movie Watch: 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'
Eva Holland
04.28.09
Move over, Fear and Loathing. There's a new drug-addled, road
tripping book-turned-movie in town. A film adaptation of Tom Wolfe's
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Testwhich follows Ken Kesey and the Merry
Pranksters cross-country in a school bus named "Further"is due out
in 2010. Production details are still thin on the ground, but the New
York Times notes that Gus van Sant will direct, while Dustin Lance
Black, who recently won an Oscar for writing van Sant's "Milk," will
provide the screenplay.
That still leaves one crucial question: who will play Kesey himself?
Rolling Stone reports that van Sant had been eyeing Heath Ledger for
the role before his death last year. Now, it looks as though Jack
Black and Woody Harrelson are the front-runners.
Whenever a cult favorite like this one gets the adaptation treatment,
every decision is scrutinized and skepticism runs high. Who do you
think should play Ken Kesey? And do you like the look of the project
so far? Or, as one commenter on the Rolling Stone article put it, is
this a book that should have been left alone?
--------
Then and Now
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6198103.ece
Forty years on, Then and Now looks back to Harold Beaver's review of
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
April 30, 2009
Harold Beaver's review of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom
Wolfe was published in the TLS of May 1, 1969.
--
Here beginneth the second gospel according to Tom Wolfe of a
real-life, kandy-kolored, streamline baby, the psychedelic Messiah, Ken Kesey.
CAN YOU PASS THE ACID TEST? D'ye ken Ken Kesey Captain Marvel from
Oregon, the Stanford guinea-pig of psycho-mimetic drugs, author of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1963), founder and instigator of the
Acid Tests, first and aboriginal Prankster? It was Kesey, in 1964,
who opened Aldous Huxley's "Doors of Perception" (by LSD) to walk out
of the old Lit. into the new "Life"; who created a fluorescent,
orgasmic haven round his redwood cabin at La Honda (that Day-Glo
Walden Pond of the West); who with his fellow Pranksters on a bus
marked "Furthur" set off on that ultimate "trip", or mission,
throughout the length and breadth of the United States like piping
clowns or legendary Zen archers, not playing at people but inside them:
"They play inside them, oh merciless flow. And many things are clear
in the flow. They are above the multitudes, looking down from the
Furthur heights of the bus, and the billion eves of America glisten
at them like electric kernels, and yet the Pranksters are grooving
with this whole wide-screen America and going with its flow with
American flags flying from the bus and taking energy, as in solar
heat, from its horsepower and its neon and there is no limit to the
American trip."
By the end of 1965 Intrepid Trips Inc. had spent $103,000 on various
enterprises, suffered two mental breakdowns, explored the miracle of
the "synch" (synchronization, viz., cosmic control), ceaselessly
recording with mikes and movie cameras its own "Big Movie". In April
the Merry Pranksters welcomed the Hell's Angels (outlaws both of the
motorbike and LSD); and an epoch opened. With swirls of
electro-pastels (jabs and vibrations of LSD), to the sound of Acid
Rock (by courtesy of The Grateful Dead), among multiple projectors,
strobe lights, rock'n'roll, the psychedelic era was born. Later that
year the Trips Festival first convention of the Underground
grossed $12,500 in three days. COLOURED (Day-Glo) POWER openly took
to the streets. Then Show Biz intervened. Sergeant Pepper stole away
with the band. The rest is history, with tourist buses cruising
through Haight-Ashbury.
Out was the hip life, the bohemian oldspeak of jazz, coffee houses,
civil rights, a spade for dinner, Vietnam: "nothing but intellectual
products, ideas, concoctions, brain candy, shadows of life, as a
substitute for living". Out was Europe, gadget-free fatherland of the
mind, and Mexico, land of the earth. Out was the whole "eternal
charade of the middle-class intellectuals". New-speak was sheared to
finest simplicity. of "Thing", "Freak", "Heads", "the Life"; its
capital was transferred from Cancer Gulch to Edge City, Civitas Dei,
a place of living ecstasy Ekstasis, the ultimate expansion or bust.
Here all were "out front", spontaneous, wholly free, without secrets
or guilt. Fantasy was in; games, that so riddle our culture, out. All
vibrations were significant.
"Oh, the cult of living in India, brothers . . . ." Have we slipped
into some time warp with Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, and Ouspensky?
What is this Dada East of sympathetic vibrations, of allegorical
living, of Unity (the All-One) and Group Therapy (wired for sight and
sound)? Who are these fluorescent Day-Glo Pranksters of the "contact
high", with their audio-systems, tapes, projectors, mikes,
amplifiers, variable lags, and strobe lights? This is the generation
of the Total Breakthrough, beyond catastrophe, and Tom Wolfe is its
Dante and our guide:
"suddenly all sorts of . . . well, beautiful people blossomed forth
from out of the polyglot, people who really had a lot to them, only
it had been smothered by all the eternal social games that had been
set up. Suddenly they found each other."
Found Allen Ginsberg too and the late Neal Cassady, the Denver Kid of
On the Road. But the scene long ago had shifted, moved to the koans
of the Prophet Kesey:
" 'You're either on the bus or off the bus.'
'Feed the hungry bee.'
'What did the mirror say? It's done with people.with your ears and
hear with your eyes.' "
He created the aura and through the Pranksters many not only
"observed but experienced mystic brotherhood, albeit ever so
bizarre." Kesey steps onthe all-American, electronic, Day-Glo
Jesusdisclaiming his role:
"We're not on the Christ Trip. That's been done, and it doesn't work.
You prove your point, and then you have 2,000 years of wars. We know
where that trip goes."
His trip was to have gone "beyond acid", to the Garden of Eden and
Innocence, when be was nabbed by the FBI.
In a style as neon-lit, as lithe and swinging, as the japes of his
Merry Pranksters, Tom Wolfe follows the Kesey trip to the finish. "Go
with the flow!" Like his hero, Wolfe rolls with the punches and go s
with the flow. He does not merely describe emotions, but rouses them.
In his own words:
"I have tried not only to tell what the Pranksters did but to
re-create the mental atmosphere or subjective reality of it. I don't
think their adventure can be understood without that. All the events,
details and dialogue I have recorded are either what I saw and heard
myself or were told to me by people who were there themselves or were
recorded on tapes or film or in writing . . . . The Pranksters
recorded much of their own history in the Prankster Archives in the
form of tapes, diaries, letters, photographs and the 40-hour movie of
the bus trip."
But the movie alone, from internal evidence, conveys little; the
Pranksters are, by turn, rapturous, weird, psychic, and always deadly
serious. The merriest prankster, by far, proves their evangelist,
this dandy historian of the generation gap, this New Yorker pursuing
his amused, absorbing love-affair with California (ForniaForniaFornia).
.
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