Hi, Monday. Here we go, yo.
Pretty chill weekend thank the Lord...got to catch up on some TV and film, which was lovely. I got to check out the story of Ken Kesey's manic panic of a road trip with his pranksters in "Magic Trip". I've always been a Kesey fan, and my obsession with Neal Cassady dates back to my moody high school years. Admittedly, watching this acid and speed fueled road trip now makes me feel anxious (trapped on a bus with Cassady talking a mile a minute and everyone else flying on LSD is almost hard to watch at times), but this mythic journey to get to the World's Fair in NY in 1964 held a lot of weight for me as a young girl in Philadelphia, who was always in search of her own brand of freaks to hang out with and learn about life and perhaps even open the mind (yea, I read the Doors of Perception. What's your point?).
So as I watched this documentary, I recognized something about the American spirit that is sorely lacking these days. And that is, the exploration, the wide eyed pioneer spirit that we have all but abandoned. True the digital domain has us plundering online for the new and the next, but is it really that big of an adventure as the open road? I'm going with no on that one. Here was this beautiful bunch of kids, all incredibly fucked up, sure, but wow. As Kesey says in the film they were "too old to be Beatniks, and too young to be hippies". So smack dab in the middle of the 60s, but all with dog eared copies of "On The Road" and a sense of change and wonder in tow.
What made this trip so gorgeous was they had that uniquely American brand of DNA that I wish we as a nation still had. Yes, the road's been traveled, it's been a thousand years (or so it seems) since Kerouac and Dean Moriarty, but I'm looking to rediscover that part of America, that aching to see something new and vast and wide and perhaps even a little maddening sense of freedom and spirt that we as a nation have lost, not to mention our much remarked on optimism. Though other countries hate that about us, it's one of the things I love most.
Cassady was maddening but unreal, Kesey was an instigator of the highest order, and all of those chicks and dudes on the bus were up for it, whatever it was. And it's no coincidence that they were trekking to the world's fair, the world of tomorrow, where "better living through chemistry" was one of the taglines. Ha (Leary wanted nothing to do with them, PS. He was more of a clinician while these kids were alpha spirits). 1964 was a time when the world and the country was massively changing- post Kennedy and four years before the summer of love. It was an abandoment of the 50s and an embrace of something altogether different- a new sort of red, white, and blue movement that involved great music, art, and writing. So what happened after that? Where has our persona gone, where are those pioneers and frontier folk that are going to do some real discovering? Who are the new Lewis and Clark? I refuse to believe we have already found everything. That's why we need to keep looking. Our collective culture of fear is strangling us...that's my take. We need to embrace the more fearless, disruptive model of who we are.
And now that the space shuttle has permanently landed (here on Earth), what now becomes the final frontier? What caves can we enter and find out more about who we are? I'm not sure I know the answer, and no I'm not on LSD right now, just a cup of coffee or two and thinking how I can continue to explore, when things often seem very finite. I'm in favor of finding some new pranksters, plunderers, and wild Indians to take us there, together. Just a thought, and a big, deep, bebop infused one for a Monday. Heady stuff, but on my mind... That's all there is, until there ain't no more. Snap, snap, snap.
Cause that's what's up this howl of a Monday in the MIA. Go further. XO