merry pranksters: Joke on who?

The hippie culture will never die. It seems like we have to keep immortalizing it, reinventing it in some way in order to make a buck off it. Whatever its almost Durkheim inspired alturistic origins and optimism for a kinder, gentler society, the hippie generation was brought for the most part down to earth, seemingly by forces beyond control. There is a new movie out documenting what may have been the beginning of the end when wealthy author Ken Kesey organized his magic bus tour from California to the New York World’s Fair in 1964.

Obviously, the counterculture movement was a complex process coming from a variety of west coast alternative lifestyles such as hot rods, bikers, utopians etc as well as the perceived menace of imported European cultural Marxism from Frankfurt School thinkers like Horkheimer and Adorno which were interpreted to undermine traditional values and institutions and could serve as a coded pretext for racism and anti-semitism. Also, their analysis of corporate domination of “culture industries” was perceived as undermining the basis of the entertainment complex.

Mr. Gibney, who won an Academy Award for “Taxi to the Dark Side,” his 2007 documentary about American uses of torture during interrogation, and Ms. Ellwood, a film editor who has worked with him on several projects, including “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” first learned of the Kesey footage from a 2004 article in The New Yorker by Robert Stone, who was for a while one of the Pranksters. “That much footage — I thought, wow, what we could do with that,” Mr. Gibney said recently at the Chelsea office of his company, Jigsaw Productions.

On the other hand Mr. Gibney also found in Kesey’s barn some audiotape recorded about 10 years after the bus trip, in which various Pranksters comment on what’s happening on screen, and this made possible what is probably the most interesting feature of “Magic Trip”: its way of eliminating the talking heads so common in documentaries. There are a few moments of exposition, narrated in mock newsreel style by Stanley Tucci, but for the most part the viewer hears from the participants back when they were still Pranksters more or less and not nostalgic senior citizens. Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/movies/magic-trip-reconstructs-footage-from-ken-keseys-bus-trip.htmla

The surprising thing about “Magic Trip” is how sweetly innocent it all seems. The Pranksters are not longhairs. They’re cleanshaven, wear red-white-and-blue outfits and could almost be a patriotic revival group. Most of them too young to be beatniks and too old to be hippies, they have one foot in the ’50s and one in the ’60s.

Kesey, a former college athlete, is blond and muscular and movie-star handsome. He could be Paul Newman’s stand-in. But it’s Cassady, the real-life model for Jack Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty in “On the Road,” who steals the film. He too is buff and magnetically good looking, and while driving he keeps up a nonstop, amphetamine-fueled monologue. Listening to him is so exhausting that the Pranksters have to take turns sitting next to him. Read More:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/movies/magic-trip-reconstructs-footage-from-ken-keseys-bus-trip.html?pagewanted=2

The default position of American society has always been to turn any unwanted or unplanned social change into some form of conspicuous waste similar to what Veblen described. Hippies would develop their own hierarchy  of status that would generate a collective self-defeating pattern of consumption, and, which in turn would make the social institutions maladaptive with respect to the fall out. As Veblen would remark the structure of the class system which is the foundation for consumption would remain. In he case of the hippies and the counter-culture, it just forced most of them to find some new way of demarcating themselves from their social inferiors.All these generational movements create the need for a system of distinctions that can serve this function without being too obviously intended to serve this function and in the case of the new Kesey film he is simply asserting his desire to be on the top of the pecking order:

The arriviste or the nouveau riche are often accused of vulgarity. Yet often the problem is not that they are doing anything wrong, it’s that they are doing it all too consciously. This

ves more entrenched members of the class feeling exposed, because it reveals the artifice underlying what they prefer to regard as a purely natural form of behavior. (What Bourdieu calls “the ideology of natural taste” has correlates within all of these hierarchies: from “the ideology of good breeding” to “the ideology of natural cool.”)Read More:http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~jheath/veblen.pdf

ADDENDUM:

Aldous Huxley – of the British Elite – was important in creating the LSD or drug movement in both California and in the Boston area through his protegees Gregory Bateson, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Huxley promoted his LSD project in California by making use of Alan Watts and Gregory Bateson. Watts was the “guru” of a Zen Buddhist cult. Bateson, who had been with the OSS, became the director of a hallucinogenic drug experimental clinic at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital. Bateson was one of the first to experiment with giving LSD to mental patients and others. The OSS to which Bateson had belonged, was the Office of Strategic Services, the American intelligence agency during World War II which was the forerunner of the CIA.

Among Bateson’s Palo Alto recruits was the writer Ken Kesey. In 1959, Bateson administered the first dose of “LSD to Ken Kesey. Kesey soon organized a group of of LSD users called “The Merry Pranksters.” They toured the country in a bus giving out LSD and helping to develop the then very small counterculture. During the fall of 1960, Aldous Huxley became visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. While in the Boston area Huxley recruited Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert to help him promote the use of LSD. Leary and Alpert were assistant professors in the Harvard psychology department.Read More:http://northwye.blog.co.uk/2011/07/11/example-of-nihilism-in-american-social-interaction-sixty-one-years-after-cultural-marxism-came-in-the-door-ii-timothy-3-1-11466063/
—————————————————-

…In this sense, the centre-peripheral model of ‘culture industry’ suggested by Adorno and Horkheimer fails to capture autonomy amongst individuals, denying agency on part of the individuals. Their idea of ‘popular music’ as creating docile uncritical individuals can be proved
to be wrong in some cases, and the proposal that ‘popular music’ lacks ‘seriousness’, and are standardized, repetitive, and simplistic is an over-generalization.

Neverthess, Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of ‘culture industry’ is indispensable. They offer a trans-disciplinary approach, emphasizing the interconnections between technology, economy, culture, in capitalist societies. It does provide us a framework that aids us to understand
contemporary culture. However an update is desperately needed. We must consider how the term ‘popular music’ was used by Adorno and Horkheimer when they wrote about ‘culture industry’. The term appears to label all music genres outside the ‘classical’ domain. A redefinition of ‘popular music’ is required – perhaps we can extract the music genres which apply to their idea of ‘popular music’, which would probably include music such as ‘pop’, dance/trance/house music, hip hop, R&B, and any ‘easy listening’ music etc.

While Adorno and Horkheimer saw the ‘culture industry’ as a threat, there were writers who praised the mass produced goods and services. Benjamin Walter and Paul Du Gay are two of them. Benjamin recognised that mass production of art ruined the potential of ‘serious’ culture
(to borrow the term Adorno used) but he also saw these cultural commodities as liberating creativity from art and allowed multiplicity of mass produced everyday objects. Barry Smart explains his stance as follows:

“For Benjamin the new forces of artistic production and reproduction hold out the prospect … of the creation of new social relations between artists and audiences, writers and readers, producers and consumers of text. Technical means of reproduction raise the prospect of art ceasing to be the privilege of a few.” Read More:http://www.angelfire.com/falcon/sociology/Culture_Industry.pdf
——————————————-
Kesey and the Pranksters remark that they “were too young to be beatniks and too old to be hippies.” They also weren’t eloquent enough to be beatniks and not politically conscious enough to be hippies. Ultimately, the group comes away looking like a gang that was conscious of their image, but never to its meaning. Despite the turbulence of the times, they weren’t activists. The Pranksters were eye-catching, but not noteworthy because they didn’t affect any change or even attempt to. While they want to claim they were responsible for rise in LSD use in America, there’s no conclusive evidence that they were founders of any real movement that wouldn’t have come about naturally on its own during a time when use of many different drugs were becoming prevalent. Why should Kesey get more attention than any other group of acid-trippers of the 1960s? Because he was a literary star and had a sweet ride. Read More:http://collider.com/magic-trip-review/71983/