Grand unified books thread

[Savonarola]

I read "Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga" by Hunter S. Thompson and, while Hunter will always be my favorite Doonesbury character, I'm not so sold on Gonzo Journalism.  There's some journalism there, but it reads a lot more like autobiography.  It is still a fascinating account of the outlaw motorcycle gangs in California at the time; he covers both the outlaws themselves (who were indeed menacing, and would eventually curb stomp Hunter) and the exaggerated public fear of them.

Tonitrus posted in the Trump thread:

A younger Christopher Hitchens kinda foresaw it 30 years ago...

...these rebels as they call themselves, these anti-establishment figures are nothing of the kind; they say they're against the government, they're lone pioneers and frontiersmen...but if the time should come when push came to shove these are the people who would be the freikorps, these are the people who would take orders, these are the people who would be the disciplined and docile forces of a government that would of course always regard them as deniable, and we have been warned.

Which fits in this book, the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels attacked at Berkely anti-Vietnam War march during the course of the book.  Despite being self-proclaimed outlaws they respected strength and authority much like the stereotype of a MAGA supporter.

The book is set about three years before Altamont.  Mick Jagger really should have read this beforehand, it's obvious they were a terrible choice for security.  (The Grateful Dead had used the San Francisco chapter as security, but that was for block parties near Haight-Asbury, not for 250,000 people in the middle of nowhere.)  One of the principle angels in the book Sonny Barger, leader of the Oakland chapter, is also in the movie (he's the one who calls in at the end of the film - and the one who looks like he's considering kicking Mick Jagger's ass as he walks onstage during the concert.)

The book also features Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.  At the time it was the fashionable thing to have a Hells Angel at your party for upper middle class Bohemians in the Bay Area - which usually went poorly.  Kesey was actually able to get along with them; for one thing Kesey was a large man, he had been a wrestler; and for a second he introduced them to LSD.  (Allen Ginsburg is also in it.)

The original article that this was in The Nation, and I thought it was strange that someone like Hunter, who would routinely get drunk and shoot out his apartment window would have articles in The Nation.  But, the last time I tried to read The Nation I think they had hired a bunch of people from Vice after it folded and I kept thinking it sounded like "This time around the revolution will be IN YO' FACE!" so maybe it's not so strange.

[Syt]

I read the book some years ago. It was thoroughly entertaining and an interesting ground level view into the subculture, but I agree it doesn't have much professional distance to the subject matter (even though he does point out that he was always an outsider within their group).

[Josquius]

I got a book from the library for the first time in years.
Now I need to figure out how to get time to read it.

[mongers]

I got a book from the library for the first time in years.
Now I need to figure out how to get time to read it.

I've got several books out of the local library in recent months, as with you first time in ages.

But I've not figured out the second bit yet, either. :-)

[Grey Fox]

I got this book from the city library. : https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646154/on-savage-shores-by-caroline-dodds-pennock/

It wasn't great.

[Sheilbh]

So I slightly mentioned it in the other thread but just finished The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing - and it's one of the most extraordinary, fascinating books I've read in years.

It's kind of tough to describe but it's a book about the matsutake mushroom which is a delicacy in Japan and the most expensive mushroom in the world. No-one has ever been able to cultivate it despite a lot of research. It grows specifically in human disrupted forests - either the "ruins" of industrial woodland (like Oregon), or peasant managed farms - and is picked by various groups from Yunnanese peasants (largely into ethnic economic structures), to Japanese pickers celebrating their heritage and traditions, to South-East Asian (Mien, Hmong, Lao and Cambodian) pickers in the Pacific North-West both picking and also, for a season, creating a sort of re-creation of South-East Asian life in the Pacific North-West to white woodsmen. Then incorporated into global supply chains before becoming a heavily graded delicacy in Japan that is largely given as a gift. It's incredible - considering the ecological damage and economic precarity of much of this "supply chain", but also thinking "with" mushrooms which are multi-species dependent organisms in these landscapes which are both ruins of modernisation and industrial capitalism. but also sites of new growth opportunity and life plus community making.

Very well written and beautifully produced as well.

I hadn't realised when I started but Tsing was the wife of James C Scott and there are similarities in outset and intellectual project in a really interesting way.

[Savonarola]

Following up on Hell's Angles, I read Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."  The books compliment one another, and Wolfe describes a party which the Angels attended at Ken Kesey's house from the Prankster perspective, which Thomson had described from the Hells Angel's perspective.

Ken Kesey was living in a Bohemian neighborhood in San Francisco and had volunteered for psychiatric drug tests (financed by the CIA); so he knew all the best drugs.  He also worked as a night aide, and in his down time he wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest.  The book's success allowed him to finance what was more or less a cult of fellow acid-heads.

One of the high points of the book is the Merry Pranksters attending a Unitarian-Universalist weekend retreat (as invited guests.)  Unitarian-Universalism is a progressive and activist religious group, and most of the middle aged or older members were shocked and despondent at what they had inspired.  (Sort of like the time Kurt Cobain heard the band Bush on the radio and realized what he had done.  Fortunately the Unitarian-Universalists didn't take it as hard as Kurt did and blow their own heads off.   

)

Anyhow the book begins as a wonderful psychedelic carnival, but things start to fall apart as some of the Pranksters (metaphorically) get off the bus (and, in some cases, into psych wards).  Then Kesey's legal troubles increase and he flees to Mexico.  The Pranksters meet him there, but things just grow more pathetic and Kesey seems less like a messianic figure and more just a regular fugitive.

Kesey, in the end, was sentenced to six months on a work farm (the very same punishment that his protagonist in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" received) and would then move back to Oregon.  It might be for the best that he did; the hard drugs would come into Haight-Asbury shortly after he returned home and the groups that stayed to go even further (such as the Levelers) would just end up as junkies.

One of the things that struck me, as they were discussing the Prankster's return from Mexico around 1966 is that the hip scene in San Francisco had changed during their stay.  Previously if you were a member of the Congress of Racial Equality or had been a Freedom Rider or something like that you had status among hipsters.  When they returned dropping out and taking a lot of drugs gave you status.  Prior to Kesey's flight, the Pranksters had attended an anti-Vietnam rally, where Kesey, who had been invited to speak, played "Home on the Range" on a harmonica and told the attendees that protests were simply "Playing their game," the only way to make a difference was to say "Fuck it."

In any event it is well written.  Wolfe didn't meet Kesey until he had returned from Mexico, so some of the accounts of the Prankster's early activities may have been romanticized.  He gives a vivid portrait of a number of the pranksters, especially Mountain Girl (whom he obviously had a crush on) and Neil Cassady (though not the first to do so.  )