Rose of the World Movie Company

The title of this morning’s blog was going to be ‘Taking Back the Franchise’. Instead, I decided to found The Rose of he World Movie Company.

What I had come to realize is that there was a East Coast invasion of the West Coast Bohemian Scene by the Cornell Crew. This invasion was led by Thomas Pynchon who went to Cornell where he became good friends of Richard Farina, who married into the Baez family, a established California family from where two famous singers emerged, Joan and Mimi Baez. Then came Mary Ann Tharaldsen who was married to Tom and lived with him in Mexico and Manhatten Beach. From Mexico crept Pynchonianism, a fake hippyism that would challenge and undermine the work of author Ken Kesey by establishing Fake Tripping for Squares, Eggheads, and East Coast Elitist Authors, such as Boris Kachka. Then we have the book ‘Lineland’ by Jules Siegel who also went to Cornell. Christine Siegel left Jules to have an affair with Pynchon. This is a Love Be-in Nest from New York State.

Yesterday I talked to Marilyn about the movie ‘Magic Trip’ that gets a terrible review from the New York Times. How did the treat Pynchon’s movie. The producers of this movie threw Acid Parties here in Eugene Oregon. A mutual friend considered introducing me to the makers of this film because I was full of hippy history. I could have been a consultant, but, this ex-friend had ambitions of his own, he wanting to be the next Walt Disney.

Above is a photo of the 13th. Street Four crossing a bridge in Venice California. From left to right is: Keith Pruvis, Tim O’Connor, Peter Shapiro, and, Jon Greg Presco. In the foreground in Tim’s girlfriend whose father was a famous Hollywood agent and good friend of Lee Marvin and Marlon Brando who were at her home quite alot. Tim’s father was a famous actor of the same name.

All four of these Real Hippies were at my wedding reception after I married Mary Ann Tharaldsen in Topanga Canyon. We lived in a Victorian on Miles Avenue in Oakland. Mary Ann went to Cornell where she met Pynchon and Richard Farina. In this union, the invasion by the Cornell Crew, is complete. From this bond would spring the worst hippy ever movie made, and the worst straight movie ever made. It’s a disgrace! Our reputation has been sullied. Inherent Vice – is a Hippy Exploitation Movie! It’s time to expose the New York Slicks!

A couple of months ago I found this letter two days ago on the Rosamond photo file. I could not make out the signature, and googled Sulphur Mountain and Santa Paula. This is a letter from the famous director, Gaston Melies, the brother of the even more famous director, Georges Méliès. It is upon this letter that I found ‘The Rose of of the World Movie Company. I am offering my expertise in Bohemian History to anyone who considering making a hippie movie. I will read the script, and be brutal. I will do my best to shoot down your idea before you fork over money you will never recover.

Above is a photo of me with my lover Dottie Witherspoon. We lived in Boston and a Victorian in Alameda. She too is the same family tree as Thomas and Mary Ann. She is a cousin of the actress, Reese Witherspoon.

Jon Presco

Presdient: Rose of the World Movie Company

braskewitz@yahoo.com

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/swinging-seventies-3

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/movies/paul-thomas-anderson-films-inherent-vice.html?_r=0

In 1968, The Four lived in a large Victorian house on 13th. street near downtown Oakland. James Taylor, Keith and I, moved into this incredible house two weeks after my fall at McClure’s Beach. James invited the rock band ‘The Loading Zone’ to come live with us. As ‘The Marbles’ they played at the first Trips Festival at Longshoremen’s Hall in 1966.

I was given a bedroom next to the sound room. It had a beautiful carved mantel. I was the artist in residence. When the Zone came home from a gig at the Filmore they would bring home members of famous bands who wanted to see the quintessential hippie scene that had made the San Francisco bay area famous all over the world. I would get a knock on my door and some band member wanted to come in and take a peek. One young man asked if he could watch me paint. There was a fire in the hearth. I worked late at night on large canvases provided by my patron and benefactor, Bob H. who grew up with Tim Scully, and was a good friend of Owsley, he helping him build the sound system for the Grateful Dead. Bob’s brother, Tim H. was a member of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and sold LSD in Europe. Bob had worked at the Livermore Lab when he was sixteen. He was a young genius who bid me to paint again after my fall.

One day Larry Sidel came into my room in the attic, and was surprised to find me there. Larry is the father of Shannon Rosamond who inherited her famous mother’s artistic legacy that was destroyed by un-creative members of my family who wanted to go forward without my history that was symbiotic with Christine’s history, that is the subject of a show coming to the Oakland Museum, titled 1968. This show is touring America.

Bill Arnold and I used to got to the original Oakland Art Museum that was located in a small room in the Oakland Auditorium. had a Bohemian scene going on with our thirteen year old peers down by Lake Merrit. Nancy Hamren was Bill’s lover off and on for a couple of years. Nancy was the first girl I every kissed. We ended up living in a famous commune in San Francisco. Christine moved in, and went on a double date with Nick Sands, Nacny, and Owsely. Denny Dent was a part of the Oakland Scene that in many respect was mor dynamic then what was going on in SF. Two of our close friends in Oakland were members of SLA and were questioned by the FBI about the Patty Hurst kidnapping.

In 1968 my father-in-law, Robert Miles, was in Vietnam. Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers helped find Marilyn’s lost sister in France. I was general manger of the upstairs Art Association that was located in Victorian offices on Broadway in Old Oakland. The President, Rosalie Ritz, did illustrations for Panther trials. A mutual friend, Bruce Perlowin, is coming out with a movie about his life, he the ‘King of Pot’.

My friend Michael introduced me to his good friend Michael McClure who taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. They were good friend of Jim Morrison. I just found a book of Jim’s poems.

I am still in touch with Tim and Peter, and Chris Wandel, who was a lover to three of the four. She lives in the Grenwhich Village and was close with Buzzy Lindhart who moved to Oakland where my ancestors had a farm in Fruit Vale. Add to all this the East Coast scene of my kindred Mel Lyman and Jessie Benton, then you could say we got it covered.

In the Victorian on 13th. was a room we could not enter that was reserved for the elderly owner who was back east being taken care of by her sister. She lived in the Victorian by herself, in a all black neighborhood. This room was part of the tour, it suspended in time, there little old lady things set out, waiting for her return, that never happened. Great expectations!

The Zone played with The Who at the Filmore. The Who sang’My Generation’ at Woodstock.

Jon Presco

If you have ever agreed to baby-sit for a friend who needed a sympathetic watchdog while experimenting with psychedelics, you know how boring it can be to observe someone else in the throes of an acid trip. Unless, heaven forbid, the friend freaks out and has to be carted off to a psych ward, there is nothing interesting about it, not even the addled oh-wow remarks of the person under the influence. Meaningful communication is possible only if you’ve also ingested hallucinogens and are flying side by side. Then you might share the clammy fantasy of crawling around inside each other’s heads.

More About This Movie

Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place

Ken Kesey in the documentary “Magic Trip.”

That unbridgeable distance between the stoned and the sober is the problem with Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s documentary “Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place.” This distillation of home movies shot by the author Ken Kesey and his friends, known as the Merry Pranksters, chronicles their acid-fueled cross-country bus trip in 1964 from California to New York to visit the World’s Fair. Thanks partly to Tom Wolfe’s raised-eyebrow account, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” that bohemian lark has been retrospectively hailed as the flash point of the emerging hippie counterculture.

Compiled from more than 40 hours of 16-millimeter footage shot during the journey and stored in a barn near Eugene, Ore., “Magic Trip” is the cinematic equivalent of a yellowed scrapbook whose pictures are accompanied by sketchy captions created after the fact.

Because the Pranksters were too careless to synch the images with the sound, many of the movie’s voice-over reminiscences come from audiotapes recorded 10 years later, with the speakers haphazardly identified. Their accounts are supplemented with sparse narration by Stanley Tucci. None of the storytellers could be described as transfixing yarn spinners. Any philosophical afterthoughts are resoundingly banal.

With nicknames like Stark Naked, Intrepid Traveler, Mal Function, Gretchen Fetchin, Generally Famished and Zonker, the Pranksters suggest nothing so much as a group of attractive, preppy-looking partygoers, outfitted in red, white and blue, whose traveling bacchanal zigzags across the country, with each stop identified by a postcard.

In those more relaxed times, the Pranksters encountered only sporadic harassment. Their psychedelically painted vehicle, a 1939 International Harvester school bus that they christened Further, was an object more of curiosity than of hostility. In downtown Phoenix they mocked the presidential aspirations of Senator Barry Goldwater by driving the bus backward. Outside New Orleans they accidentally visited a beach for black people and fled in fear and embarrassment.

There is a minor uproar in Houston, where they visited the author Larry McMurtry in his staid, middle-class neighborhood, and the mentally unstable Stark Naked went missing. The Pranksters are also shown dancing around in a circle and playing instruments (badly) while imagining that they sound like John Coltrane, as well as splashing around in an Arizona pond while spontaneously inventing tie-dye (or so the movie suggests).

The World’s Fair proves to be a disappointment, as does a visit to the Millbrook, N.Y., estate where Timothy Leary reigned as the East Coast acid guru. This was not the euphoric, proto-hippie summit meeting they had anticipated, and Leary’s West Coast counterparts found themselves looked down on as frivolous.

The film begins with a biography of Kesey, a glamorous, blondish roughneck writer known for his novels “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion.” His college dreams of being an Olympic wrestler ended with a serious shoulder injury. The documentary includes a history of LSD and a re-creation of Kesey’s participation in a 1959 government study in which his moment-by-moment remarks after taking LSD were tape-recorded. (We hear his voice over a faked re-enactment.) The cheesy visual effects accompanying the sequence are meager compared with the full-blown psychedelia in Julie Taymor’s movie “Across the Universe.”

One can say our family Muse has taken us down the red brick road in Montana and introduced us to neo-Nazi supremacists who are hell-bent on destroying the political party our kindred worked so hard to found. What did we ever do to them? We have our children and grandchildren to protect. As the head of my family, now that my brother has advocated and disappeared, I intend to do just that. Any questions?

We all like to think we are individualist entitled to our unique opinions, but, when a family is under attack by organized forces bent on our destruction, one has to gather as a unit, and hope a courageous leader step forth.

Here is the name on my late sister’s death certificate.

CHRISTINE ROSAMOND BENTON

We have real important American history to protect, and real family values to preserve and promote for generations to come. If members of the NPI are arming themselves getting ready to fight for what they don’t own, and what they can’t promote, then don’t you think we should show some unity here.

I call Rena our family Muse because the Presco and Benton family are still doing creative things. Drew Benton is rendering her art at aunt Vicki’s house, and, I can’t wait to stretch a tall canvas and do a full body portrait of Rena. And, then there is Garth, Thomas, and Jessie Benton, who married Mel Lyman who founded a racist leftist cult from outer space, that led to making of Zabriskie Point, a movie about left-leaning radicals.

So, let us stop our quibbling. There is enough crazy-ass white culture to go around for those who belong. Just like Phil Roberston of Duck Dynasty I am the head of my families creative dynasty. Since Rowdy Rosemary Rosamond died, we have not elected a head of the family. Rosemary was our fearless leader. There was nothing she wouldn’t try, or do, not like Ms. East, the scardy-cat.

We were sailing along in a favorable breeze, when Ms. Easton had a major freak-out right after she agreed to be instated in our Muses Hall of Fame. We have spent way too much time on Rena. It is traditional that the women of the Rosamond Cult freak out. It’s be a tag-team freak out since I can remember.

Kara Bromily was Rosamond’s Tarot Card Reader. Her husband conducted the services at Rosamond’s funeral. Kara wrote the screenplay for the Rowdy Girls starring Julie Lynch who was the Muse for famous artists. Julie and Rean could have passed for sisters when Rena was young. Here is Khara Bromily telling Tom Snyder the Death card came up in Rosamond’s Tarot card reading a week before she drowned.

“Was there any indication to Khara in her vision, or the cards themselves, of
death or impending doom? Did Christine have any concerns in that regard?
My work is about health and forgiveness and self-worth. A death pronouncement
can work against all that. But, if you are asking if a Death card came up, then
the answer is yes?”

Now, as soon as I post this I am going to call a Detective in Montana in order to see if I can find out why Rena Easton freaked out when she read my letter. I think I know what spooked her, our rowdy redneck muse. I forgot she is not from the West Coast where we native get Tarot Card and Psychic Readings. Red-neck women feel safe at bull-riding events, big truck demolitions, wild kegger parties where young women go round peeing their pants while bubba’s fight over them. So, here is the culprit – I guess!

“Over a year ago I began a painting of you. One night after I lie down to go to sleep, you lie down next to me. You were seventeen again. I jumped out of bed. For a month you appear by my side as I walked. When I went to a movie, I was not quite alone. I told my friends I have a very friendly – and beautiful ghost.

“Do you think she is dead?” a friend dare ask.

I began a psychic search for you, to feel where you were. What had become of you? I wondered if you were held a prisoner of a abusive and crazy man who had to have you all to himself. I saw that you were in a very dark dungeon. I wanted to free you. I was heart broken when I could not. I have never known such emotions. I don’t know if anyone ever has. I had to stop working on your portrait.

I told my childhood sweetheart about your visits. We concluded you had a very abusive childhood, and were a prisoner of that abuse. Marilyn was abused by her father and we have helped each other break the bars to our cells.

To read that you were abused and scarred for life is a hand and a voice that comes across the chasm, and I embrace these dark truths with all my heart and soul.”

C’mon! Look at the scary crap Rena Easton is surrounded with in Montana! You got Meth-heads shooting themselves in the neck with a needle. You got Nazi Supermen in armed camps preparing for Doomsday! C’mon! This is great material for a reality show. I got tons of material in this blog. Any producer of a reality show is going to thank me for doing all the work.

We can’t allow Rena the Muse to hold up production. She’s freaked out long enough in her little trailer on the hill. Someone go slap a star on that trailer, because……….

“It’s show time!”

Yeeeeeeeeeeehhhaaaaaaaaaawww!

Jon Presco

http://www.magpictures.com/magictrip/

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/05/movies/magic-trip-alex-gibney-revisits-ken-kesey-review.html?_r=0

http://preservationpark.com/home/

https://rosamondpress.com/2012/04/10/oakland-1968/

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzbN3kn2Ti8

http://www.alamedainfo.com/Oakland_CA.htm

http://teczno.com/old-oakland/

http://www.city-data.com/forum/san-francisco-oakland/830406-historical-photographs-oakland.html