Pescadero Memories

John Vonderlin tracks down Ken Kesey’s “missing film”  Atlantis Rising, shot at Ano Nuevo, featuring Russell Towle’s remote cabin.

Email John Vonderlin (benloudman@sbcglobal. net)

Email Russell Towle (russelltowle@gmail.com)

John Vonderlin (JV):   I was surprised to read that “Atlantis Rising” was from a children’s play Jo Lysowsky, a friend of Kesey, wrote.  He wrote an article at gatelessgate.newsvine.com about the play and his other life experiences.I’ve posted an email to him on Newsvine and hope to find out a little more. Haven’t located the film at the UCLA Archives yet, as the site is new to me and a little confusing.. Enjoy. John

Russell Towle (RT): Of course this is the same Joe Lysowski I knew at Año Nuevo, who gave me Ron Boise’s old Honda Dream motorcycle, bored out from 300cc to 350cc, with fenders chopped, and who gave me two old round-topped windows from a house in Santa Cruz, windows which are in my hexagonal cabin right now. And whose son’s penciled childhood scribblings are on the weathered boards which make my ceiling as I sit here at my computer. For those boards came from Big Creek Lumber Company, via Año Nuevo.

Joe was quite interesting, knew the Beatles and so on, as I have written for June, and only now do I recall that, yes, the film made at Año Nuevo was titled “Atlantis Rising,” and that it derived from Joe
Lysowski’s play of that title, produced with the help of the Beatles in London a few years earlier.

I am quite excited that you have succeeded in tracking down the film! UCLA!

So now all is needed is a ton of money, to convert to HD video. Hmmm. I have some background in video editing and film conversion.There are easy cheap methods and harder more costly methods. For instance, one could scan each frame of the film, and export directly to QuickTime, as an uncompressed “image sequence,” of, say, 1600X1200 resolution, or even higher, and from there export to any video file type, any type of HD, for instance.

Or one could screen the film and record to video camera.

Wow. Amazing. You found it!

R

Email Russell Towle (russelltowle@gmail.com)

This body of material forms, as it were, the film companion to “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” It is quite an important aspect of our history.

I find I am only echoing Tom Wolfe himself, who wrote in EKAT [Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test] in the first paragraph of Chapter Four,

“… Kesey stands in the gloom of the Control Central, over to the side amid the tapes, and cans of movie film marked with adhesive strips, and notebooks and microphones and wires and coils, speakers, amplifiers. The Prankster Archives … .”

I dug out EKAT for my seventeen-year-old son, Greg. Surely Greg should know of his own father’s youth. Where better to learn than EKAT? Alas, Greg has a new video game on his PlayStation (PS) portable gaming
thingamajig. He can’t be bothered with ancient history.

R

Email John Vonderlin (benloudman@sbcglobal.net)

Hi Zane,
I exchanged emails with you, George Walker, and Cap’n Skypilot last year about the W.W. II Observation Post tunnel in a cliffside that the Pranksters were allegedly trapped in by the tsunami from the 1964 Good Friday Quake and the “Graffitti Grotto,” where you scratched your initials into the side of a sea cave on an isolated beach decades ago.

This email was prompted by author Russell Towle contacting PescaderoMemories.com, one of the blogs about the San Mateo coast and its history that author June Morrall maintains. Russell had lived in a driftwood structure on the beach in front of artist Merrill Pickford’s ( aka Stuart Harwood) commune at Ano Nuevo. Russell was looking for a copy of a movie your father made at the commune and surrounding dunes. Russell, his friends and their driftwood structure were in the movie. Are you familiar with the film? Are there copies for sale? Anything you can tell us to point us in the right direction to help solve this mystery would be appreciated. Enjoy. John Vonderlin

P.S. I read in the newspaper about your successful efforts to raise money for the wrestling team with the new “Further,” Congratulations. Your Dad would have been proud of you.

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Hi John

The movie was called Atlantis Rising, never was edited. I just gave the film to the UCLA archives…they should give me high def video someday…that I might be able to edit….maybe? someday?

z

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To: Everybody

From Leah Lubin (email Leah: <leah_lubin@att.net

In the art world, sometimes it takes a long time for the right door to open. Last Saturday, I finally got to meet the owner and curator of the Beat Museum, click here , Jerry Cimino, in San Francisco, where my photo collage of Ken Kesey’s 1999 visit to La Honda has lived since April, 2007. Happily, I can tell you that he is open, knowledgeable, and interested in the two DVDs filmed at the Menlo Park Library events celebrating Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia in 2005 and 2006.

I am working on an idea for an event at the Beat Museum called “Celebrating Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia”. It would include a screening of the DVDs, and hopefully an encore performance of the spoken word and music of our local literary talent (Terry Adams) and musicians (Gary Gates & Friends, Mystic Cowboy), that performed at the library event.

I’m hoping that the event could be scheduled in the Spring, but of course this would need to be approved by Jerry Cimino before plans can be firmed up. I think that it will bring out the fans, and it will rock the big city.

Best wishes,

Leah

PS: The Beat Museum is having a party to celebrate Neal Cassady’s birthday on February 9 & 10, from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM. I plan to be there. All are welcome to attend.

When I was writing a historical column for the San Mateo County Times in 1997, “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” author Ken Kesey put a “for sale” sign in front of his famous log cabin nestled in the redwoods of La Honda.

I never met Kesey but, like many others my age, he made a big change in my life by writing “Cuckoo’s Nest.” Of course, it was a great book that fit in with the theme of the times, a great and ageless message: that it was okay to be you.

I never met Kesey but I wrote about him and even to him, receiving a wonderfully creative response in return.

I also drove past Kesey’s cabin many times on my way to Loma Mar or to the more secluded Coastside beaches. The home had it’s own “sense of place,” with a small, funky wooden bridge that allowed the person on foot easier access across the, what? The big gully? I can’t remember.

In his “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” book, Tom Wolfe described the scene as worthy of a Christmas card and when I think of Kesey’s house, that’s what I see.

In May, 1997, the San Mateo County Times’ Carolyn Jones broke the news: “The rustic log cabin that served as the lively epicenter for a generation of hippies, beatniks, Hell’s Angels and artists is being sold.”

Kesey’s home, where the colorful Merry Pranksters hung out (and who were not afraid of being themselves) was going for $239,000. Rumor was Kesey didn’t want to leave but he might have been encouraged due to an unfortunate accident involving a county sheriff who fell and injured himself on the property.

I haven’t met the Terry Adams family, the new owners , but they understood they were purchasing a precious piece of 20th century San Mateo County History. What greater homage to Ken Kesey, than this beautiful website, including “Prankster House, Hippie Empire, Psychedelic Mecca, Dragons, Wynchwood”…and more… click here.

(Note: Photo of Kesey’s house courtesy of Terry Adams.)

In August, 1995 I mailed a letter to Ken Kesey–the famous novelist, counterculture hero and former controversial La Honda resident–asking him to contribute a story, even “a fragment,” to an issue of “La Peninsula,” the San Mateo County History Museum’s journal. I was a member of the museum’s board of directors and I knew an article by Mr. Kesey would shake things up in the sometimes staid publication.

Hey, I didn’t really expect a response from the author of the highly acclaimed “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)–yet, what’s the harm in keeping my fingers crossed?

Turned out fingers crossed helped because a few months later my original, letter typed on a white sheet of paper was returned to me, forever altered.

Ken Kesey, the real life central character in Tom Wolfe’s, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968), responded with a double blast of psychedelic energy. Kesey, who led his band of Merry Pranksters on a continuing adventure “tripping out” in the redwoods of La Honda, couldn’t resist the opportunity to play a prank. What he did was magically turn an ordinary sheet of white typing paper into an extraordinary work of art. At least I think so. You be the judge.

With Kesey’s creative contribution (in lieu of a story) I still needed one, a story, I mean.

I searched the Internet in quest of “Keseyana,” downloading articles by then San Jose Mercury News columnist Lee Quarnstrom. I tracked him down and we talked: Lee had been a “Merry Prankster.” [I think once you've been a "MP," you're one forever.]

In 1964, Lee, then a San Mateo Times reporter, interviewed Ken Kesey, whose latest book, “Sometimes A Great Notion” had been published. Kesey was already nationally renown for “Cuckoo’s Nest,” a smash Broadway play destined to become an Academy Award-winning film starring the irrepressible Jack Nicholson in 1975.

“Cukoo’s Nest” was based on Kesey’s personal experiences while working in a Menlo Park psychiatric ward–where experimental drugs were administered to the patients.

Reporter Lee Quarnstrom was a great admirer of Kesey whom he interviewed in the author’s neck of the La Honda redwoods. Some years later, Tom Wolfe, the great observer of contemporary culture, made the same trek, resulting in “Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Wolfe described Kesey’s home as a log cabin surrounded on three sides by Sam McDonald Park, with a creek flowing nearby, all as photogenic as a Merry Christmas card. Highway 84 slinked by in front of the cabin, reached by crossing a wooden bridge. Kesey had the perfect location with no neighbors.

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