’60s – Cubilone's Dimension

Review: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

You ask me what I think. Think. Neurons flashing up, millions, billions, zeros, on an array of pixels my primitive mind is not fully equipped to understand. The bright lights! “Yes! Follow them”, and they did just that, his super-ergo, his ego, the animus, the shadow self and all of the other assorted invisible, conscious, subconscious, unconscious and extended entities, tied together by the zeitgeist of the universal… Now. Nobody was better fit to understand it but him -or is that them– in that room, with that assortment of pages and memories and experiences and images, in that city that they in the South – but it wasn’t just the South – had no idea about, but who does really? And the assortment of pages, which we borrowed from the city library in Sofia, that city known for the cold but living the heat, “great day today, record highs!“- it took some time, some bits of now, of one-ness and possibilities and pages and memories and experiences and all of that, to decode and understand. But how much of it stuck? Does it even matter? And it’s not like I haven’t dipped my toes in this stuff, mind you. Beginning to understand and creating the dots on the screen this 01010010010100010 111011101010101010 in vast, immense, unfathomable bzzzzzzzz, only harnessed by the computer, the ultimate being, the judge, the jury, the executioner, the Wikileaks activist, the troll and the Spyder – it’s a superbeing unleashed by the lowly beings, that’s it. The Computer -it has to be with a capital C now, don’t you see?- will take my decoded neural flashes and make them into this text that, if people watch carefully, will see that it’s not more than it is. Which part exactly? Hah! So many interesting questions. Tell me more about how much you want to learn about the world.

This was my subjective experience of reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and beginning to write a review for it. What? You didn’t get it? Tsk. First of all: I didn’t ask you for your opinion, and much less did I write it to suit your needs; what part of “self-expression” do you find so difficult to understand? Figures: you’re one of those square types that can’t appreciate a description of an indescribable experience for what it is, aren’t you? For chrissakes, why do you have to push meaning into everything? Look how much good your meaning has done us!

OK, enough with this. Because I do value meaning, I’ll stop here. I hope, however, that this was enough for you to get the picture. You see, Tom Wolfe did something remarkable, though quite representative of his time (that’s 1968 we’re talking about here): he tried to document and tell a story without caring too much about whether the readers would understand it or whether it would make sense at all, but insisting on a specific style to prove a point. The magic of what really happened, which we’ll get to in a second, apparently gave him the impression that having his story mirror what its main actors must have experienced while actually living it, would make for a breath-taking read…

…no-no-no. Let’s put it this way. Suppose the people you wanted to document the life of, their life as seen through their eyes, were tripping on LSD for most of the duration. Bad idea, right? Well, let’s just say that this is the book that had to be written for people to learn why it’s not a good idea.

Actually, the story itself that The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test sets out to tell is super-interesting: it’s the documentation of the events that made LSD hit the mainstream, the story of the Merry Pranksters, the absolutely bonkers mix of gang, pilgrims, troupe, nomad tribe and religion led by Ken Kesey and how they took over the US underground in the ’60s. Obnoxious and inspiring in equal measure -okay, maybe slightly more obnoxious- they travelled all over the US in that painted old school bus that turned magic and ended up becoming a symbol of their later activity, the Acid Test parties, underground events that in their own right founded a big part of what we understand today as the recreational drug, clubbing and hippie scenes.

Reading about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the crazy things they did filled me with wonder and amazement: so that’s what happened; that’s what living in those times and following this ground-breaking movement must have felt like, being an acid-head cyberpunk 20 year before anyone had even thought of the word. They thought then, whenever they weren’t “zonked out” of their brains, that they would change the world, only they didn’t, and maybe you can understand why -and where things might have gone different- by reading this story.

It’s not Tom Wolfe’s “subjective” style that gives this effect, though. Reading something that felt like it was written while everyone involved was tripping did not make me have a clearer picture of what really took place. On the contrary: the segments of the book more akin to real journalism, the parts where Wolfe decided he could give us readers a break, were the most interesting by far for me to read. However, I can see what he was trying to do: using this kind of language he only wanted to convey the indescribable that is the altered state, the psychedelic experience. Back then it must have felt like a revolution to put it in this way, the culmination of a million different things guiding your hand and voicing the feelings and memories of an entire generation (it says so in the description of the book anyway: “They say if you remember the ’60s, you weren’t there.”) But now, one or two generations later, it all comes across as rather bad writing. He might as well have invented a new language to try to describe the inexplicable, the “you must live it!” factor. Maybe the new language would have been easier to read through, even.

This is a significant book documenting important and interesting events that distill the countercultural mythology, don’t get me wrong. If you’d like to get a feeling of the psychedelic indescribable by reading it, though, maybe it would be a better idea to watch a recently released cut of The Movie known as Magic Trip – the 16mm film Ken Kesey and the rest of the Merry Pranksters shot during their journeys with Further. I know I will.

Book borrowed from the American Corner of Sofia City Library

View all my reviews

Review: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’m quite amazed that these guys managed to stay alive after all these drugs! Seriously, with a book like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which you can’t tell what’s true, what’s not and what true event inspired what slight exaggeration, one of the key facts is that, knowing at the very least my own sensitivity to mind- and mood-altering substances, the duos adventure (especially their eating mescaline as if it was Tic-Tac), lookd completely surreal; I wouldn’t have lasted half as much, not by a longshot! What also disappointed me was that a lot of the little background details won’t make sense to anyone who: 1) didn’t live through the ’60s and ’70s, 2) isn’t from the US and 3) both 1) & 2). Of course, you could say that about any work that acts a reflection and representation of its zeitgeist.

fear_and_loathing_ink_blot — Looking at that ink blot while reading the book made me question my own sanity. Well played.

Still, Fear and Loathing was a fun read. I could listen to the protagonist’s internal dialogue, something which wasn’t as pronounced as in the film. On the other hand, the film was also decent if only because of the visual aspect of it, which was good food for flighty and trippy thought on its own.

All in all, I’d suggest watching the film first and then, maybe, trying the book, if only just to see the different perspective.

Have a look: would you believe that is Johnny Depp? Holy shiat.

View all my reviews

Review: The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed

The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed by Joseph Heath

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This one is a toughy. Few other times have I been this undecided on a book before reviewing it.

While reading The Rebel Sell, I was nodding in agreement with many of the arguments Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter posed, such as the proposition that mass consumerism is unavoidable because it is recognition, distinction and status that people find when they consume, and while on the whole if theoretically no-one bought anything all would be well and good, everyone has to keep consuming just because everyone else keeps doing so. It is an instance of the prisoner’s dilemma, a central part of their point, used many times in the book and presented convincingly. It’s an interesting concept applicable to politics, sociology and other topics.

Furthermore, their analysis of taste in art and culture and how it is another form of projecting one’s own social class was also profound, as well as their take on what it means to be cool and how, in their view, that is the very thing that drives consumerism: someone has to be the Joneses, after all, and it is the cool people who become the Joneses, whether they realise/like it or not. There are many other such bits and pieces I found agreeable and fun to read, such as the distinction between dissent and deviance, something with which I can completely relate. If you wouldn’t like a society in which everyone acts a certain way and not just you, it’s probably deviance and not dissent, like the stupid graffiti tags, not paying taxes or avoiding standing in queue. It’s a healthy observation.

But. As convincing as I found the points above, as well as many others which did, at times, make the book a bit chaotic in its argumentation, I couldn’t help but feel the smugness of Mr. Heath and Mr. Potter seep through the pages. They ridicule the counterculture, often repeating themselves and failing to spot the benefits society has gained from it in the 50 years since it first emerged, at least in the form they describe. They cannot find any merit in any kind of fringe social movement. It’s like they’re trying to “get over” their own countercultural past by dissecting it, as if they’re trying to prove how wrong and misled their own mocking peers had been -as my friend who lent me the book accurately commented. It’s like they’re saying “look how grown up and rational we are now! Just try and grow up like we did, you pathetic self-important tree huggers/hipsters/anarchists/punks/Naomi Klein.”

Nevertheless, I realise that the implications of what is presented within the book are vast and indeed might be playing an important political role in the fragmentation of the left and its members trying to “out-radicalise” oneanother. The sad result is that it is a weaker force which is left to oppose the all-consuming capitalist market. When all has to do with individuality and how different everyone can and should be in order to “stick it to The Man”, there can of course be very little emphasis on how people can cooperate and find the similarities and common goals between them. The problem is that the same market which the writers are defending -at least in principle- and its state today, 10 years after the writing of the book, has only made itself horrifyingly stronger against legislative and institutional reform. The writers greatly underestimate the current relationship between corporations and governments and how difficult it is to change from within. The world is practically ruled by corporations and to question that rivals the counterculture in its supposed naiveté.

Comfortably, the above declaration would be enough for the writers to smirk at me and include me in the already-accounted-for group of wannabe radical counterculturals who can’t face reality. The whole point of the book is putting cases such as me, if just a hint less self-conscious, in their rightful place; just another individualistic rebel who lazily rejects all small reforms in favour of a total paradigm shift which will most probably never come, at least not in the form anybody expects. Maybe I am such a naive, sentimental being as to fall right into this argumentative trap, but I feel, like so many others ridiculed in the book, that there just is something wrong at a much deeper level with the world than what can be merely altered through laws and regulations.

Enough. I could go on. As someone whose rough ideology is directly challenged by the book, I feel I have to excuse myself and prove how “they don’t get it” in quite a thorough and wordy manner. I’m not sure I like this reacion of mine but I acknowledge it. Suffice it to say that this shows that the book is at least worth reading. For good or bad, it has intensified my great ideological confusion and has made me think and question myself – a favourite hobby of mine, that last part. I recognise its value and its propositions even if -I suppose I should say ‘thankfully’- at a sentimental level I just can’t agree. I suggest that you read it and see what impact it has on you too.

View all my reviews