Joe Nolan's Insomnia » Ken Kesey

Hells History

Joe Nolan — Mon, 29 Aug 2016 04:12:45 +0000

The Hells Angels Motorcycle Club were the wild and wooly Zeligs of the American counterculture of the Vietnam Era: The Angels partied with Ken Keasey and his Merry Pranksters; they saw their reflections on the big screen in Easy Rider, and in the pages of Hunter S. Thompson’s first book; and they effectively ended the hippie dream at Altamant. But the group’s roots dig deep, back to an earlier generation of soldiers returning home to California after World War II, and naming their motorcycle club in the same bold, fierce nomenclature brandished by fighting squadrons in the war.

Here’s a great documentary from 1983 that tells the story of the rise and fall of Hells Angels. Here’s Hells Angels Forever…

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The Man in White

Joe Nolan — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 04:07:51 +0000

Today we celebrate the 1931 birthday of author Tom Wolfe who became a hero of the counterculture with the 1968 publication of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test — an experimental report on the drug culture surrounding Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Wolfe is a New Journalism pioneer whose use of fictional devices in his non-fiction reporting represented a literary breakthrough that found Wolfe aligned with lions like Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Terry Southern and Norman Mailer.

Here’s The Word According to Tom Wolfe…

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Quoting the Counterculture

Joe Nolan — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 04:32:42 +0000

Milicent Cranor of the Who What Why blog is currently curating a collection of quotes from notable counterculture luminaries including Abbey Hoffman, Ken Kesey, William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. It’s a fun smart series and one worth catching up and keeping up with.

Here’s an excerpt from the Kesey post:

Truth doesn’t run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow blending together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface.

It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world… by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.

The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer—they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.

Plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom.

We can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed.

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Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive most of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Counterculture posts.