In 1985 I visited my friend, Nancy Hamren, at the Kesey family creamery here in Springfield where I now reside. We had gone to lunch and talked about living at the ‘Idle Hands’ commune in San Francisco that was funded by Betty Zorthian the heir of William’s Shave. Nancy suggested I author the history of the Hippies because I could recall so much. A year later I began my first novel ‘The Gideon Computer’. It is about the ‘Last Hippie of the Future’. Thanks to the computer and the World Wide Web, that future has come to pass. You could say I have found God, and God is Me. We are one, and we are on the Internet.

In beginning my critique of my ex-wife’s art work, I discovered that the Loading Zone was there in the beginning, at the Open Theatre on College where Stewart Brand lurked, the publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogue that historians claim is the written Biblenet. Stewart was the compatriot of Lloyd Khan who published ‘Shelter’ and George Brook-Kothlow, who built the house Clint Eastwood lived in and the house my sister stayed in just before she left the planet. Christine signed her images of beautiful women ‘Rosamond’. The Rose of the World.

Like her brother, Christine Rosamond Benton became a Bohemian. Not only did my sister love me, she was in love with me. I was her ideal. She followed in my footsteps. I had an Eye for Beauty that I put aside when I headed back to Oakland with all my paintings strapped to the top of my 1957 Ford Fairlane my aunt June gave me. This Eye would reemerge and lead some to believe I was God, the Acid Messiah, a title laid on Ken Kesey, who died of alcoholism according to Mark Christensen. Is this why Ken let me on the bus just after I graduated from the New Hope program at Serenity Lane?

I made eye-contact with Ken in front of Autzen Stadium where we entered to hear the Grateful Dead. Ken had stopped writing, and I had stopped painting. I got sober so I could live long enough to finish the two science fiction novels I began. I would go with Nancy to hear the reading of Ken’s book he co-wrote for his class. I think Nancy told her friend about my sobriety, and perhaps suggested I had something he wanted. No one has written Ken’s biography.

I discussed with my friend and neighbor as to why Allan Fox sold his Bohemian House at Rocky Point where Christine was going to celebrate her first sober birthday. Her art had suffered with her disease. If Allan was fond of my sister, then it would be hard for him to look out his big glass window at the sea and behold her fifty minute struggle as she clung to the rocks trying to pull herself out of what she feared the most in her life, the sea with large waves. Gone is the beauty, replaced by ‘The Nightmare’.

When I was twelve I struggled with a major decision whether to be an architect, or be an artist. I had talent for both. Art became my major, and I did architecture on the side. I made a model of a house on the edge of the sea when I was sixteen. For the last 20 years I render floor-plans of homes while watching television. Above is my latest, a 340 square foot apartment above a garage.

Folks are asking why a 80 year old Eastwood is building a 80 million dollar house he might not live in – for long. Allan invested 58 million in Writer’s Square in Denver there talk about building a glass pyramid like the one we see at the entrance of the Louvre. These men are God-like wanna-be Bohemians. Now add Pynchon’s movie to the mix starring Reese Withersppon who is kin to Sam Farr, who Clint helped get reelected. Sam is kin to William Sharon the partner of William Ralston ‘The Man who built San Francisco’.

When Christine married into the Benton family she we became kin to the foremost Family Tree in America, where evangelicals worship Ayn Rand and her fictional architect, Howard Roarke, who is God-like, in a safe, fictional, way. If I wasn’t God, I would anoint that other dude from Oakland seen coming out of his Bohemian Home at Big Sur.

What is truly astounding, is, my ugly ungifted sister, Vicki Presco, did a child-like drawing of the Bohemian House, she playing God when she lied and told me our niece, Drew Benton, did this drawing. Indeed, Vicki played God quite a lot after she dropped out as the named Executor. You can say Vicki wrote Tom Snyder’s biography. This led me to suspect there was a hidden person behind Vicki, a ‘Puppet Master’ pulling the strings.
But, what is truly frightening, is, Vicki is ‘The God of the Nobodies’ that dull-minded collective, that drags the Co-Creators back down to Earth, and feeds on them like vultures.

Vicki started taking LSD when she was thirteen. She was the youngest of the four, and always felt she shared an equal portion. My brother, Mark Presco, designed computer systems at Hugh’s Aircraft. Today, anyone with access to a computer, can be God-like. Murderers play God. Consider Jesus dying on the cross.

Jon Presco

Copyright 2014

“A principal author of the Bohemian Modern [my term for it] design
vocabulary, an idiom that found its energy source first in the Beat
scene and then in the 1960s/70s back-to-the-land movement and its
ad-hoc handmade house phenomenon, Brook-Kothlow was a major figure of
first-wave environmental architecture in the American West. He
specialized in conceiving houses that have that aura—an overwhelming
feeling that gets you in the solar plexus the moment you sit down in
front of the fireplace.

The next revolution was digital. Formerly industrial processes like printing were democratized with desktop publishing. The “cognitive surplus” of formely passive consumers was released into an endless variety of personal creativity. Then distribution was democratized by the Web, which is “scale agnostic and credentials agnostic.” Anyone can potentially reach 7 billion people.

Lloyd Kahn (born 1935) is the founding editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, Inc., and is the former Shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He is also an author, photographer, and pioneer of the green building and green architecture movements.

http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2010/10/nonfiction_review_acid_christ.html

http://www.richardolsen.org/blog/2012/09/19/in-memory-of-george-brook-kothlow-architect/

In Memory of George Brook-Kothlow, Architect. 1934 – 2012

On September 5, 2012, Carmel Valley, California-based architect George
Brook-Kothlow died. He was 77. He’d been battling cancer, all the
while working with unflinching dedication on several new ambitious
building projects. When I saw him last spring, he had a sparkling new
bicycle propped against a wall in his living room. That weekend, we
hiked a nearby park together. A marathon runner for many years, he was
even setting his sights on road time again. More than once during this
period, his once-masterful tennis game came up in conversation. Give
in, or at least slow down? Not George, and certainly not with his wife
of 50 years, artist Jennifer Brook-Kothlow, at his side as a
collaborator and a constant source of inspiration and support. He was
one of the kindest, coolest, and most talented men I’ve known. I was
honored to be able to count him as a good friend. His body of work—in
particular the house he and Jennifer built for themselves and
daughters Marit and Ingrid—is essential to the story of Handmade
Houses.

A principal author of the Bohemian Modern [my term for it] design
vocabulary, an idiom that found its energy source first in the Beat
scene and then in the 1960s/70s back-to-the-land movement and its
ad-hoc handmade house phenomenon, Brook-Kothlow was a major figure of
first-wave environmental architecture in the American West. He
specialized in conceiving houses that have that aura—an overwhelming
feeling that gets you in the solar plexus the moment you sit down in
front of the fireplace. Brook-Kothlow designed homes that manage to
stand monklike amid the most intimidating of idyllic scenarios. How do
you insert a building into glorious perfection? Really, how do you
place a house in a scene involving wildflower-blanketed mountains,
wind-contorted Monterey cypress trees on a white-sand beach, and
long-interval azure swells unloading with abandon on sea
lion-inhabited protruding shards of granite? George knew.

He’d come up through Frank Lloyd Wright’s Organic Architecture
tradition, however indirectly. When pressed, he’d classify himself as
a Modernist, although I could never imagine him waving that flag, or
any other for that matter. Unlike so many in his profession, this
architect could never be called an ideologue. Hero worship of Modern’s
forefathers, a common practice in architecture, and the business of
“marketecture” just weren’t in him. He was his own man. Understated in
his personal style, he simply stood for thoughtful, details-obsessed
design that respected its natural surroundings. He considered the
needs of the client, of course, but his own vision came first.
Sometimes clients felt they weren’t being heard. When you hired
George, you were hiring an artist who was going to go off and come up
with an original idea, and you’d better be prepared—both for the
extraordinary rewards and the inherent challenges.

Brook-Kothlow seldom marketed himself to the magazines. In 2006, when
I began working at Architectural Digest as senior editor overseeing
architecture, one of the first things I did was crack open the “B”
section of the alphabetized project-submissions files. I was excited
to find him there, but in all his years of practice he’d submitted
only a single project to the magazine, the Fox House, which
tragically, due to “furniture issues,” didn’t get the green light from
the editor in chief. [We won’t go into that bit of politics here…]
In the extensive paperwork that he was required to fill out for the
submission, dated 1991, I found this, his eloquent description of his
work for the client.

Brook-Kothlow had earned his architecture degree at the University of
Colorado and while in school worked under Elizabeth Wright-Ingraham
(Frank Lloyd Wright’s granddaughter) in Colorado Springs. From
Colorado, he leapt to Mill Valley and, from 1962 to ’66, worked for
Callister & Hillmer, a boutique Bay Area design firm known for its
high-end work and Japanese Organic leanings. In ’58, Callister had
designed a house for Surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, one of
many Callister buildings regarded as influential.

In terms of organic-architecture history in the Monterey Peninsula
region, Brook-Kothlow’s ’66 arrival in Big Sur and subsequent output
situates him in-between the late Taliesin alum Mark Mills and the
great Bruce Goff protege and Post Ranch Inn architect Mickey Muennig.
For decades, these three transplants operated as friendly
contemporaries in the region, and for all high-art design intents and
purposes they were without peer. With Frank Lloyd Wright’s Walker
House on the beach in Carmel looming in the background as an early
benchmark, these three architects, each in his own unique way, showed
us how Modern could also be rustic, idiosyncratic, and warm. (Nepenthe
Restaurant architect Rowan Maiden, also a Taliesin apprentice, has to
be mentioned here. A tragic story, Maiden died very young.) But even
in this rarefied company, Brook-Kothlow stands out. He was the
region’s first Modern architect to build “from the ground up”
principally with architectural salvage. Keep in mind that, even
through the 1960s, most Modern architects who dabbled in “woodsy” did
so with easy-to-handle, machine-cut veneers. Brook-Kothlow worked with
solid redwood—giant used first-growth redwood timbers that had been
saw-sized to be able to support train and automobile traffic over
great spans. Between the 1960s and ’80s, in house after house, he made
an art form out of re-using these large-scale natural materials that
might’ve otherwise ended up in landfills or the incinerator. In the
process, he gave his clients showpiece ecofriendly homes that have
skyrocketed in value and are regularly sought out by Hollywood
location scouts.

Brook-Kothlow’s pioneering work with reclaimed wood wasn’t plotted,
however, and its beginning was hardly the path of least resistance.
The client behind his 1966 break into independent practice, artist
Claire Chappellet, was the one who’d nudged him in that then-unpopular
direction, asking for a big family house and a studio made of bridge
timbers for her oceanfront ranch in the Ventana Wilderness. Earlier,
the architect had observed both Daniel Liebermann and Lloyd Kahn build
successfully in Mill Valley using mostly scraps. But by comparison
these were small-scale endeavors, not fair points of reference.
Really, in the case of the Chappellet project Brook-Kothlow would be
on his own.

With many of the state’s old wood bridges then being decommissioned
and replaced with steel-reinforced concrete structures as part of a
major infrastructure overhaul, the timing was perfect; a suitable
candidate for his new client, a bridge that had served Sonoma County’s
Duncans Mills, was found quickly and trucked south. The structure was
all gorgeous first-growth redwood, with a patina that read like an
epic novel.

When you design with the intention of using salvaged materials, you’re
in effect working in reverse of conventional practice. The material,
in this case 8? x 22? x 30? rough-sawn redwood, establishes certain
guidelines. And you must know every inch, every nuance, of what you’ve
got on hand. Brook-Kothlow’s “materials first” post-and-beam design
was as ambitious—and some might say unproven—as himself. Chappellet
gave it a name that poet Robinson Jeffers would have appreciated: Hill
of the Hawk.

Part of that ambitiousness can be attributed to the circumstances of
the build. It seems that for everyone involved (note: the Chappellet’s
small crew of builder friends included Lloyd Kahn), completing this
unconventional, incredibly heavy building—all by hand—on a remote
mountaintop ranch susceptible to 100-mph-plus winds gave a new
definition to “taxing.” Typical of Big Sur in the sixties (hell, even
now), in about ten minutes you could find your way into a bar seat
with a bottomless beer or a killer bottle of wine, but the nearest
building-supply store (not to mention a hospital or drug store or
legitimate grocery store) was almost an hour away. This was not your
ordinary construction site, and in Big Sur, where Brook-Kothlow did so
much of his early work, it never is.

Hill of the Hawk’s owners required hands-on involvement in the
construction, and I’ve gathered there was no small amount of tinkering
with the details. There were also architect-builder disagreements,
particularly over the engineering of all the heavy elements.
Complicating matters further, as part of the deal the entire team,
including their wives, lived on-site, ending up squeezed into a warren
of old chicken coops. Inevitably during the multi-year construction,
relationships between the collaborators broke down. Knowing the
history, I’m amazed the house was finished as it was. In the end,
however, the Chappellet’s persevered. But it was Brook-Kothlow’s
design, his artistic vision, that emerged as the winner in the
disputes. Today, Hill of the Hawk remains a beloved residence, and if
you’ve been there I think you’d have to agree that it ought to be
formally recognized as the one of the 20th century’s great California
houses.

Even before its completion, within Big Sur’s extended community of
accomplished creatives (the Westons, Emile Norman, Ansel Adams, Morley
Baer, Gordon Newell, Louisa Jenkins, etc., etc.) Hill of the Hawk’s
emerging dramatic aura was causing a stir. After the house’s May 25,
1969 heralding in the Los Angeles Times‘s Home magazine, with photos
by Baer, Brook-Kothlow knew things were going to change for him. As
unlikely as it may sound, among progressives statewide interest in
houses made of old weather-beaten rough-sawn redwood was spreading. In
fact, thanks to Brook-Kothlow and to similarly important creative
input from artist-carpenters in the Bay Area enclave of Canyon, in
just a few years the California bridgetimber house was on its way
toward becoming an actual building trend.

And so with his first project, Brook-Kothlow had made a name for
himself. For the better part of the next 15 or so years, the architect
was in high demand, all the while repeatedly drawing from that Duncans
Mills timber stash and outdoing himself, it must be said, with each
new project. In ’69, it was the Staude House, his first radial design
and the first project to come directly from the Hill of the Hawk work.
In ’71, there was Coker Studio. In ’74, he did the Kemnitz House. In
’78, he was building his own house and studio. In the ’80s, there were
houses for Michael Trotter and Allen Fox. A few of these are visible
from Highway One, and they would have caught your attention. The
zenith, though, is the house you’ll never see during a drive and won’t
find on the Internet: The Clint and Maggie Eastwood residence, ’75, in
Pebble Beach. Clint, too, had seen the LA Times’s Home magazine piece
on Hill of the Hawk.

Obviously, the “woodsy” aesthetic so closely associated with the
1970s, the earth-tones era—the decade that made the environmental
movement, we must remember—was very much Brook-Kothlow’s stock in
trade. With the bridgetimber structures, he’d carved out his very own
high-end niche in the Monterey Peninsula region—true “handmade
Modern.” Certainly by the time he completed the Clint Eastwood house,
it was looking like the decade was his. As the ’80s broke, he was
carrying a lot of momentum.

Starting in the 1980s, though, popular tastes shifted. A more flashy,
if not more feminine, look was the direction. Increasingly among the
affluent, it was common to hire an interior decorator and an
architect. Surface treatments were now the vogue. Within the world of
the shelter magazines, every element of an interior was being
scrutinized. Moreover, out in the real world, every element of one’s
home could now be “freshened up!” (Interior decorators don’t make
money from calling for just a few changes.) One could go broke
covering a decorator’s specifications for, well, let’s say, drapery
shear or how about pillow piping?! By the ’90s, among the new design
tastemakers, the genre of all-natural exposed-structure redwood
interiors, what characterized Brook-Kothlow’s greatest houses, was
being filed under a new category: “Granola,” the East Coast’s new
derogatory term for practically any interest or endeavor deemed to be
rooted in the “loose” New Age-friendly California lifestyle. Every
once in a while, fortunately, there were exceptions, such as a July
’97 House & Garden feature absurdly titled “Carefee Living” that
included the Staude House in Big Sur. (I’m a New Yorker living in
California, and often I have to remind my NYC colleagues that just
because you live in Big Sur, not New York City, doesn’t mean you live
without a care in the world.) Brook-Kothlow, like so many other West
Coast architects, saw the writing on the wall early and did what he
had to do in order to stay in business. Embracing stucco was on that
to-do list, and so would have been “getting along with the decorator.”

Through the late ’80s, the ’90s, and the 2000s, the architect kept
busy, having reinvented himself to some extent. Of course, the
Eastwood commission helped. In Carmel and Pebble Beach and beyond, he
completed dozens of houses during this period. [In case you haven’t
noticed, this is not a period that really interests me…or that fits
the focus of this forum, so I won’t really go into it here.] There
were commercial projects too, including a renovation of Eastwood’s
Hog’s Breath Inn restaurant in Carmel. In the late 90s, the beginning
of renewed popular interest in architectural salvage in interiors, raw
barn wood in particular, suggested that tastes might be coming back
around to the Brook-Kothlow approach of old.

In 2006, when I first contacted him, he seemed to have a lot going—all
of it before him via word of mouth, as always. At the time, I remember
thinking that some of that influx should have been a result of the new
fire under the environmental movement, the new “green.” But because
all through his career he never made a point of having his work
professionally photographed and pitched to magazines, Brook-Kothlow
had never formally been presented to the public for appreciation, much
less have his work placed in historical context. I couldn’t believe
it. Here was a pioneer of environmental design who’d created all these
incredible houses but was virtually unknown outside of his own
community.

In 2010, I was working on Handmade Houses: A Century of Earth-Friendly
Home Design, and it was very clear to me that in order to have a
chance of presenting even a halfway persuasive argument, a real look
at back-to-the-land architecture and design, I would have to show
Brook-Kothlow’s houses. One day, I got in his Volvo station wagon with
him and drove from Carmel to Big Sur for a visit to several of his
projects from the ’60s and ’70s. Getting this reserved 70-something
architect to open up about his work was always a challenge. It just
wasn’t his way, and after spending several years publishing the work
of architects who have their sound bites ready at a moment’s notice I
could really appreciate his humility. But on this day, as we passed
Nepenthe and Deetjens Big Sur Inn, I had to press him. I needed to
know if these iconic buildings entered his thinking when he was
designing Hill of the Hawk in ’66 or any of the later houses. “I guess
Nepenthe might have been an influence, you know, Rowan Maiden,” he
said. “Not really consciously thinking about it, but more looking at
what would be appropriate for Big Sur in terms of structure—expressing
it. These were structures that kind of reflected the environment,” he
said of Deetjens and Nepenthe.

It was a typical low-key George kind of response, insightful in an
off-handed way but without any real zingers. But that last comment, I
realized upon reviewing the tape later on, was actually a little gem.
It was this very quality, what he saw as the highest complement you
could bestow, that so perfectly summed up how I’d always felt about
his structures.

Thanks for reading…. —R.O.

A memorial gathering for George will be held on Sunday, October 21,
at Hidden Valley, in Carmel Valley, at 2pm. All are welcome. A
schedule of tours of George’s buildings will be posted at a later
date. For questions and to express interest in a tour, email:
maritbk@gmail.com.remove

http://www.richardolsen.org/blog/2012/09/19/in-memory-of-george-brook-kothlow-architect/

http://lloydkahn-ongoing.blogspot.com/2012/07/musician-finds-out-on-night-of-concert.html

Stewart Brand’s Summary of Chris Anderson’s Talk on “The Makers’ Revolution”

We’re now entering the third industrial revolution, Anderson said.  The first one, which began with the spinning jenny in 1776, doubled the human life span and set population soaring.  From the demographic perspective, “it’s as if nothing happened before the Industrial Revolution.”

   The next revolution was digital.  Formerly industrial processes like printing were democratized with desktop publishing.  The “cognitive surplus” of formely passive consumers was released into an endless variety of personal creativity.  Then distribution was democratized by the Web, which is “scale agnostic and credentials agnostic.”  Anyone can potentially reach 7 billion people.

   The third revolution is digital manufacturing, which combines the gains of the first two revolutions.  Factory robots, which anyone can hire, have become general purpose and extremely fast.  They allow “lights-out manufacturing,” that goes all night and all weekend.
 “This will reverse the arrow of globalization,” Anderson said.  “The centuries of quest for cheaper labor is over.  Labor arbitrage no longer drives trade.”  The advantages of speed and flexibility give the advantage to “locavore” manufacturing because “Closer is faster.”  Innovation is released from the dead weight of large-batch commitments. Designers now can sit next to the robots building their designs and make adjustments in real time.

   Thus the Makers Movement.  Since 2006, Maker Faires, Hackerspaces, and TechShops (equipped with laser cutters, 3D printers, and CAD design software) have proliferated in the US and around the world.  Anderson said he got chills when, with the free CAD program Autodesk 123D, he finished designing an object and moused up to click the button that used to say “Print.”  This one said “Make.”  A 3D printer commenced building his design.

   Playing with Minecraft, “kids are becoming fluent in polygons.” With programs like 123D Catch you can take a series of photos with your iPhone of any object, and the software will create a computer model of it.  “There is no copyright on physical stuff,” Anderson pointed out.  The slogan that liberated music was “Rip. Mix. Burn.”  The new slogan is “Rip. Mod. Make.”

   I asked Anderson, “But isn’t this Makers thing kind of trivial, just trailing-edge innovation?”  “That’s why it’s so powerful,” Anderson said.  “Remember how trivial the first personal computers seemed?“

  –Stewart Brand
http://longnow.org/seminars/02013/feb/19/makers-revolution/

“It changed the world, says Turner, in much the same way that Google changed the world: it made people visible to each other. And while the computer industry was building systems to link communities of scientists, the Catalog was a ‘vernacular technology” that was doing the same thing.…

“John Markoff, who wrote What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, says, simply: ‘Stewart was the first one to get it. He was the first person to understand cyberspace. He was the one who coined the term personal computer. And he influenced an entire generation, including an entire generation of technologists’.…
 
“Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, tells me how he first came across the Catalog when he was still in high school ‘and it changed my life. But then it changed everybody’s life. It inspired me not to go to college but to go and try and live out my own life. It was like being given permission to invent your own life. That was what the Catalog did. It was called “access to tools” and it gave you tools to create your own education, your own business, your own life’.…”
Sent us by Vic Long

The reason Clint entered the political arena in the first place was that he believed he was being disrespectfully treated by the little city’s administration, and he was upset about it. Hassled with rules, regulations, and taxes regarding building permits and zoning laws, and tired of getting the runaround and going through endless miles of red tape with the city, Clint decided to fight back.

The breaking point was when the preservationist-dominated town council automatically rejected Clint’s plans to build a small building in downtown Carmel that would have improved the surrounding area. Clint promptly sued the city winning an out-of-court settlement that permitted him to proceed with his building.

He remodeled The Mission Ranch and preserved the precious landscape it was on which was supposed to be demolished in favor of 80 condominiums. He also opened the library annex which is dedicated for children’s use, and it is said to be the accomplishment of which he is most proud.

Though he enjoyed his experience, he opted not to run for a second term. He began to reach this conclusion one day standing in a chilly garage, surrounded by staff and council members trying to decide if a prominent Carmel citizen, a doctor, would be permitted to change the slope of his garage roof. Life was too short for this kind of pettiness. Late in 1987 he announced that he would not stand for a second term. And although he made two films while in office (Heartbreak Ridge and Bird), in early 1988, Clint was back to devote a full time effort to his career in film.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/category/arts-culture/clint-eastwood-was-this-towns-mayor/

Carmel visitors often want to visit “Clint Eastwood’s restaurant” in Carmel, but information about it is often out of date or just plain wrong. Here’s the straight story: Clint Eastwood and his partners once owned the Hog’s Breath Inn at San Carlos and Fifth Avenue in downtown Carmel, but they sold it many years ago.
Today, Eastwood owns the Mission Ranch, a former dairy farm saved from becoming a housing development when he purchased it.
Besides a charming lodging complex, there’s also a restaurant at Mission Ranch. Even if no one famous owned it, we would like this place. Inside, it’s comfortable and the food is great, especially the prime rib, but it’s the outside that’s Mission ranch’s strongest point.

http://denverinfill.com/blog/

Lloyd Kahn (born 1935) is the founding editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, Inc., and is the former Shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He is also an author, photographer, and pioneer of the green building and green architecture movements.

In Kesey’s case, not many could take what he could. Owsley Stanley, the infamous LSD maker, was quoted in Rolling Stone as saying that for most people 150-200 micrograms is a proper dose. “When you get to 400, you just totally lose it,” Stanley said. “I don’t care who you are. Kesey liked 400. He wanted to lose it.” Wolfe reported that Kesey sometimes took as much as 1,500 micrograms. “But what may have braked (Kesey’s) literary output and ascent was the cumulative sledgehammer effect of 400 to 1,500 mg. doses,” Christensen writes.

The notion that Kesey fried his brain makes some sense but is incomplete. Throughout his life, he offered all sorts of explanations for why he quit writing novels for almost 30 years. A popular one was that his life became his art and that, as he said in 1965, “to continue writing would mean that I couldn’t continue my work.” Christensen is at his sharpest when he points out how much time and effort Kesey put into filming his life, an enterprise that anticipated reality TV by decades. Kesey spent $100,000, most of the profits from “Cuckoo’s Nest,” and shot countless hours of footage, on the bus and everywhere else. There were problems with sound and film speed that were never solved, and bigger problems. As Christensen put it:

“a) Just because you are a genius of the very words you are abandoning, doesn’t mean you’ll be a genius at film — no more than Babe Ruth could have been a great quarterback in the NFL.

“b) As Kesey was about to discover: Making a great movie about the wonders of acid while on acid is tough.”

Bobby Miller, Arthur Miller’s son and a friend of Kesey’s, told Christensen that “Kesey felt that writing no longer spoke to the audience he wanted to reach. He’d be writing for the old folks and they already had enough writers … He was trying to speak to his followers, and writing wasn’t going to do it.”

Writing was boring. It was hard. It wasn’t in the moment. It’s difficult for most writers to match their early success. Kesey said as much many times. That doesn’t mean he didn’t write. “Last Go Round,” a novel written with Ken Babbs and set at the 1911 Pendleton Round-Up, is overlooked by many, including Christensen, who has a long chapter on its origins as a screenplay and nothing much on the novel. “Sailor Song” is an ambitious failure of a novel. “The Sea Lion” and “Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear” are two delightful children’s books. There were essays and journalism for Esquire and Rolling Stone, including a brilliant meditation after the Kip Kinkel school shooting in Springfield. None of it is “Sometimes a Great Notion,” not even close, but it’s not nothing.

After Kesey settled into a quieter life in Pleasant Hill, he involved himself in the community and led a respectable life built around his family and friends. He also drank heavily, something that isn’t widely known. Jeff Forrester, who took Kesey’s creative writing class at the University of Oregon, told Christensen, “Ken drank himself to death. Even after he found out he had hepatitis C, he kept drinking. He had diabetes. But he kept drinking, and he just wasn’t gonna stop.”

http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2010/10/nonfiction_review_acid_christ.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Tests

The sound of Jerry Garcia’s guitar grabbed hold of Owsley, and he freaked out on acid for the first time….[In the book] Tom Wolfe described how Owsley completely lost control of himself, dissolving into “gaseous nothingness” until he became nothing more than a single cell. “If he lost control of that one cell, there would be nothing left,” Wolfe wrote. “The world would be, like, over.” “I lost control of that cell as well,” Owsley says. “They were all gone. That was the initiation. The price I had to pay to get through the gate. Ego death. I thought I was going to die, and I said, ‘Fuck it.’ And that was good.” Running out a side door during his freakout, Owsley leaped into his car, gunned the engine and promptly ran into a ditch. When he finally returned to his physical body and found it mostly intact, Owsley was horrified by the way Kesey and the Pranksters were messing with people’s minds.

Technological Innovation

Stanley played a role in pioneering various sound systems that helped create the big stereo sound that fueled the generation’s live

Kahn next worked for Stewart Brand as Shelter editor for the Whole Earth Catalog. In 1970 Kahn published his first book, Domebook One, followed the next year with Domebook 2, which sold 165,000 copies. In 1971, he bought a half-acre lot in Bolinas, California, and built a shake-covered geodesic dome (later featured in Life magazine).

Also in 2008, Kahn authored Builders of the Pacific Coast. Kahn authored a photo book about tiny houses, titled Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter published January, 2012.[3] Kahn’s newest book is “Tiny Homes on the Move” published in April, 2014.[4]

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/turner06/turner06_index.html

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/turner06/turner06_index.html

As they came of age, Stewart Brand and others of his generation faced two questions: How could they keep the world from being destroyed by nuclear weapons or by the large-scale, hierarchical governmental and industrial bureaucracies that had built and used them? And how could they assert and preserve their own holistic individuality in the face of such a world?

As he sought to answer those questions, Brand turned first to the study of ecology and a systems-oriented view of the natural world. Later, after graduating from Stanford and serving several years as a draftee in the army, he found his way into a series of art worlds centered in Manhattan and San Francisco. For the artists of those communities, as for Brand’s professors at Stanford, cybernetics offered a new way to model the world. Even at the height of the cold war, many of the most important artists of this period, figures such as John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, embraced the systems orientation and even the engineers of the military-industrial research establishment.

And so with his first project, Brook-Kothlow had made a name for himself. For the better part of the next 15 or so years, the architect was in high demand, all the while repeatedly drawing from that Duncans Mills timber stash and outdoing himself, it must be said, with each new project. In ’69, it was the Staude House, his first radial design and the first project to come directly from the Hill of the Hawk work. In ’71, there was Coker Studio. In ’74, he did the Kemnitz House. In ’78, he was building his own house and studio. In the ’80s, there were houses for Michael Trotter and Allen Fox. A few of these are visible from Highway One, and they would have caught your attention. The zenith, though, is the house you’ll never see during a drive and won’t find on the Internet: The Clint Eastwood residence, ’75, in Pebble Beach. Clint, too, had seen the LA Times’s Home magazine piece on Hill of the Hawk.

http://www.richardolsen.org/blog/2012/09/19/in-memory-of-george-brook-kothlow-architect/

http://www.fcfox.org/

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/wrongful-death-claims-overview-30141.html

https://rosamondpress.com/2014/02/18/a-bowl-full-of-lies/

https://rosamondpress.com/2014/02/18/the-suede-coat-lie/

That year, Stewart’s Point Foundation received a publishing advance of $1.3 million for The Whole Earth Software Catalog, a record deal for a paperback original to this day. As a spin-off, he and Kevin Kelly organized the first Hacker’s Conference at Fort Cronkite, the old army barracks north of the Golden Gate bridge. It was in his talk at the conference that Stewart spoke his prophetic words, “information wants to be free”, before a hacker audience that included Steve Wozniak, Ted Nelson, Captain Crunch (Ted Draper), and Richard Stallman, among others. I was also there. Stewart had convinced Doug Carlston, the founder of Broderbund, and myself, to put up the money to finance the event. Stewart’s talk was later published in a May 1985 article in Whole Earth Review entitled “‘Keep designing’: How the information economy is being created and shaped by the hacker ethic.”

Clearly, some of the interesting thinking about the Internet has its origins in ideas formulated by the artists of the ’60s, which, wittingly or unwittingly, were carried forward by the enthusiastic young Lieutenant Brand.

She moved to England and they had two sons, Frederick and Thomas.
Flora remained in England and died at her London home on September 25, 1924. The two sons
were:
Frederick Fermor-Hesketh
When Frederick was only twenty-six years old and in the service, he took a one week leave to
visit Ireland and simply disappeared from the face of the earth. A little foul play it would seem.
Thomas Fermor-Hesketh
Thomas married Florence Breckenridge, a daughter of Louise Tevis Breckenridge Sharon.
Louise was the widow of John Witherspoon Breckenridge prior to marrying Frederick W.
Sharon. This was a marriage of step cousins of sorts.
Thomas was made the first Baron Hesketh in 1935. He died in 1935.
They had five children:
THOMAS FERMOR HESKETH
LOUISE FERMER HESKETH who married Sir Edmond Stockdale.
FREDERICK FERMER HESKETH the next Lord Hesketh. He married Christine
McEwen. They had three sons:
Alexander Hesketh the next Lord at age 19 in 1970.
Robert Hesketh
John Hesketh
FLORA FERMER HESKETH who first married Lord Revelstoke and then later married
Derick Lawson.
JOHN FERMER HESKETH twice married. First to a Patricia and then to a Lorelei. Don’t
have any last names.
Frederick W. Sharon
Frederick Sharon was born in 1862 in San Francisco and in 1884 he married a widow, Louise
Tevis Breckenridge in San Francisco.
Louise was the daughter of Lloyd Tevis and Susan Saunders. She had been married to John
Witherspoon Breckenridge. There were three children in her first marriage.
They had one child, Henry William Tevis Sharon.