Pubdate: Mon, 23 Oct 2006
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2006 San Jose Mercury News
Contact:  http://www.mercurynews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/390
Author: Julia Scott, MediaNews

KESEY HOME MEMORIALIZES MOVEMENT FROM '60S

The Redwood Trees Surrounding Ken Kesey's Old House Seem Strangely 
Peaceful for All They've Been Through.

Few signs remain of the Merry Pranksters' camp in the woods in La 
Honda, their 1960s' LSD parties and sound experiments immortalized by 
Tom Wolfe in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

A blue splash of paint on a tree trunk is the last vestige of the 
Pranksters' forest-wide paint job, once a Day-Glo cathedral of pink, 
blue and green.

A long wire disappearing into the branches of another redwood marks 
the Pranksters' habit of setting microphones on the forest floor to 
pick up the sounds of scurrying woodland creatures -- and the 
occasional snooping cop.

Together with Pescadero's Venture Retreat Center and the Esalen 
Institute in Big Sur, the Kesey home is one of the last symbols of 
the human potential movement, a psychotherapy-based branch of the 
counterculture born in the Bay Area.

Local poet Terry Adams was aware of the history of Kesey's house, 
known as "The Nest," when he bought it in 1997. He preserved 
everything except the floors and wall paneling. The living room still 
has a Day-Glo piano decorated with a bright collage of photographs 
and magazine clippings -- images from the Kama Sutra, pictures of 
Kesey in drag, and photos of counterculture icons Allen Ginsburg and 
Timothy Leary.

Adams studied Kesey's first book, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," 
in graduate school in the 1960s. In 1977, he led a writers' group at 
Prometheus, a Palo-Alto based offshoot of the human potential 
movement. There he met Vic Lovell, the founder of Prometheus and a 
friend of Kesey's, who helped Adams buy the house in 1997.

On a sunny afternoon in 1999, Kesey held a ceremony in a circle of 
redwoods with Adams, his wife, and several of the original Merry 
Pranksters to bless the house. Kesey died two years later.

Sitting by the fire, Adams reflected on how much had changed since 
the years when Kesey's drug experiments seized the public imagination.

"One thought is how incredibly dramatic it was. The Kesey part of the 
human potential movement was doomed to burn itself out pretty 
quickly. But I think there's a slower, more enduring impulse, 
particularly out here in California, to keep the human potential 
movement alive," said Adams.

Lovell, a resident of Menlo Park, has a different opinion about 
Kesey's influence.

"I don't think Ken was interested in the human potential movement, or 
the peace movement, or the New Left. Ken was a movement unto himself," he said.

Lovell, Kesey and many of their friends were early subjects of 
government-run LSD, peyote and psilocybin mushroom tests conducted by 
the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital in the late 1950s; eventually, those 
drugs found their way into the Bay Area hippie scene.

Those tests, which were also conducted at the Stanford University 
Medical School, formed the basis for "Cuckoo's Nest," which Kesey 
dedicated to Lovell.

"I thought he was a little too overly persuaded by his vision and the 
world the way he saw it. I tried to be a rationalist in relation to 
him," Lovell said.

Prometheus, which Lovell founded in a Palo Alto commune in the 1960s, 
used psychodrama, or spontaneous theater role playing, to address 
personal trauma and interpersonal conflicts. Many of the groups that 
met at Prometheus held retreat weekends at the Venture Retreat Center 
in Pescadero.

One men's group founded in those days, to which Adams belongs, still 
meets at Venture.

Adams tries to honor Kesey's legacy with one wild house party a year 
with music and poetry, which always lasts until the police come by to 
break it up.

"As far as I know, no one has dropped acid at our parties -- except 
maybe once," Adams joked.
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MAP posted-by: Elaine