Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney sits with King Charles III and Queen Camilla as they attend the State Opening of the Parliament of Canada, in Ottawa, Canada, on 27th May, 2025. PICTURE: Victoria
I want to found a Psychedelic Film School in Harvard Nebraska that is ninety miles out from Lincoln. Crazed Oakland Jonny will take you to Harvard in his 1939 Ford panel truck giving lessons to his students. Don’t look now, there’s new British Invasion. King Charles just reclaimed Canada – from Donald Chump who is hogging all the American Psychedelia.
My students will live in Harvard. They will be members of the Harvard Yardbirds motorcycle cub. There is a real chance they will blown off their choppers. “Live and Learn” is the motto of Harvard Hollow, affectionately called ‘Hippy Hollow’. In 1970 I visited Rena Easton and she took me to see
‘YELLOW SUBMARINE
Crazed Johnny Braskewits
President of….The Harvard High Rider’s A newspaper for the Psychedelic Arts’
“This institution, however, was of short duration, and, after running about seven months, suspended issue, and the editor and proprietor, whose sense of manhood and honor seems not to have been the highest order among the citizens of the community, quietly “fled the country.”
Dennis Hopper, left, and Terry Southern in Manhattan in 1971. (Pic: NY Times)
Don’t look round, but the chances are that Terry Southern is lurking somewhere in your house right now. He’ll be there on the cover of Sgt Pepper, sandwiched inbetween Dylan Thomas, Dion, Lenny Bruce and Stockhausen. Of all the 61 people featured on it, he’s the only one cool enough to be wearing shades. This year, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the ubiquity of Sgt Pepper, its cover image and Southern thereupon have never been greater. So who exactly was he? How did he come to be on that cover in such esteemed company, and what happened to him afterwards?
The two countries may share a border, a common language, and a love of hockey and Neil Young, but ever since Donald Trump set his sights on turning Canada into the 51st state, the northerners have discovered a newfound sense of identity.
So repulsed were Canadians by the idea of joining Trump’s United States that they elected an outsider liberal anti-Trump candidate as prime minister, boycotted American products en masse, and even started warming to the monarchy again as a way of distinguishing themselves from their southern neighbor.
That was why King Charles III, the reigning monarch of Canada, was invited to open the Canadian parliament on Tuesday for the first time in nearly 50 years, and read a speech written by the government.
Terry Southern, a well-known screenwriter and author, was involved with the James Bond production of “The Marriage Game”. He was considered for a screen adaptation of the Iris Murdoch novel “A Severed Head” and worked on the “Marriage Game” project, which was to be directed by Peter Yates and produced by the James Bond team of Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli. Southern also worked as a “script doctor” on the film adaptation of John Fowles’ novel “The Collector”.
1,391 views Premiered Jul 15, 2022
Terry Southern was one of the minds behind Dr. Strangelove, Casino Royale, Barbarella, The Magic Christian, and Easy Rider. He is one of the favorite writers of Peter Sellers, Stanley Kubrick, and Fran Lebowitz. This video will explore his unique brand of trippy science fiction.
This 5-bedroom, 2-bathroom home, featuring multiple updates, is waiting for you on a corner lot in Harvard, Nebraska. The main floor includes a bedroom, office, living room, dining room, kitchen, laundry hookups, and a newly updated full bathroom. Upstairs, you’ll find a spacious landing that leads to a master bedroom with an en-suite bathroom, as well as three additional bedrooms. Outside, enjoy a large fenced yard and a paved patio next to a fire pit. The standout feature of this property is the oversized two-car garage, which also has access to an additional room on the south side. This room has been used as a workout area but offers endless possibilities for other uses!
Prince Edward VIII bedded the married Pinna Nesbit Cruger while living it up on Long Island.Getty Images
Years before he met Wallis Simpson, King Edward VIII had fallen in love with America. As a young Prince of Wales he was captivated by the energy, confidence and power of the USA as it strode onto the world stage at the end of the First World War. “I’m liking the Americans more than ever,” he wrote excitedly after visiting American troops who had just helped to win the war. “I’m just longing to go to the States.”
Edward’s tours of North America only reinforced that enthusiasm. On his first visit in 1919 he enjoyed a sensational ticker-tape welcome in New York and partied every night with society debutantes. He became an enthusiast for all things American — American slang, American jazz and dancing, American chewing gum, American cars and above all American women.
The Central Plains is the portion of the Great Plains which lies south of the South Dakota-Nebraska border and north of the Arkansas River. It includes Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, southeastern Wyoming, and western Colorado. After migrating from the Ohio River valley, the Siouan-speaking Omaha settled in what is now Nebraska. The name Omaha is generally said to mean “upstream, against the flow.”
James sat down on a wooden bench in front of the train station in Lincoln Nebraska and watched The Old Red Ones waddle by, they sticking close because this may be their last Corn Huskers game. This was the last game of the season, and the Huskers were playing The Sooners of Oklahoma. It was all coming back to Mr. Bond, the wild frenzy of it all, the smell of battle and another coming victory. Looking down the tracks he could see where the city ends and the vast flat nothingness continues. After his mental break-down he thought about moving to Lincoln so he could be near her. But she insisted;
“There’s nothing here, here. You will get bored!”
“But, you’re here!”
“I’m late for my class.”
And off she flew in her long green cape, the love of his life. He had to have her, his nineteen year old Lolita, his Prairie Temptress who stole his heart, and knew it. She was completely irresistible.
Bond stopped off at the library to get some books to take back to his Love Dive, his Sick Oasis of Culture where they slicked it up between classes. She would not let him know where she lived with her lover, a sculptor majoring in art.
“There’s no art – here!” James insisted. Then she took him to the art building and unveiled the lifesize statue he was rendering of – himself!
“Why isn’t he capturing your perfection?”
“You don’t understand. This is America, the Mecca of the Self-made Man!”
Bond was grateful for this clue. Up in his room her put his books on the bedside table. He looked at the cover of ‘Bound In This Clay’ by Royal Rosamond, then got into ‘West Of The Water Tower’ by Homer Croy. The theme of this book reminded Jim of the relationship the King of England had with Miss Wallace. They would meet at the old water tower and seduce each other in that strange forbidden American Way. Bond had been fascinated with The Affair of the Century that had King Edward dressing like an Indian Chief and twirling a lasso, he taught how to do this by Will Rogers. When Irene did not stop by for another session, James, full of the Middle America Malaise, jumped off his hotel bed;
“Fuck this shit! I got to live!”
He had just watched a news item about a gorgeous hitchhiker who got arrested for having a joint behind her ear. Handcuffed from behind, her lovely breasts were thrust out as if they were a sacrificial offering. Her top was made from a red cowboy scarf. Her long legs began at the frayed blue-jean cut-offs she wore as an Art Form. This was the New Lady Liberty.
Bond could not get to the Chevrolet dealership fast enough and buy himself a brand new Corvette Stingray (what else?) and, a suede jacket with tassels. He burned rubber as he left the showroom. At thirty-eitht years of age….007 was reborn! Having read Al Capp’s cartoons each morning, James got it. The young beauty on the news was arrested on a red-bricked road called the Lincoln Highway. James could not get there fast enough. When Irene showed up at the desk the next the clerk told gave her a note.
“Gone on a road trip! Don’t wait up for me!
James Bond ‘King of America’”
The corner of 13th and L has been home to The Cornhusker hotel for almost a century. In 1978 the original Cornhusker hotel closed, and four years later it had been demolished and replaced by a 10-story, 304-room Cornhusker hotel.
However, there is a short stretch of brick-paved road between Omaha and Elkhorn that has somehow survived nearly 100 years, and you can still drive on it today. These bricks were laid in 1920 on a bed of concrete, a technique which has no doubt contributed to the road’s staying power.
If you ever plan to motor west, Travel my way, take the highway, that’s the best. Get your kicks on Route 66. It winds from Chicago to L. A. More than 2000 miles all the way, Get your kicks on Route 66. Now you go through Saint Louie, Joplin, Missouri, And Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty, you’ll see… Amarillo… Gallup, New Mexico, Flagstaff, Arizona, Don’t forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino. Won’t you get hip to this timely tip When you make that California trip? Get your kicks on Route 66. Won’t you get hip to this timely tip When you make that California trip? Get your kicks on Route 66… Get your kicks on Route 66… Get your kicks on Route 66!
The Bohemian, Beat, Hippie Scene did not exist in order to make a few authors rich and famous. I can not be dismissed for owning such ambitions. It occurs to me I am the only one left. Mary Ann Tharaldsen is still alive, and I will be sad if she leaves the planet. My ex was a technical writer employed by Boing in Washington. Writers like Charles Shields and Boris Kachka will not be on the front lines protecting old Oakland Bohemian against the Fascist State of Donald Trump. Nope, they will be waiting down the line a year of so to see what they can glean from the author who wrote the book
THE BATTLE OF OAKLAND
My ex and I lived in Oakland. Mary Ann went to Cornell with Richard and Mimi Farina, as well as Thomas Pynchon. Only I saw Black Lives Matter coming, and a new Revolution that Charles and Boris sit on, like on the lid of a old trunk in the attic, they feathering their nest in those Leisure Times before the pandemic came along. This is bigger than Woodstock. Much bigger.
Mayors of several major U.S. cities, including Oakland and San Jose, co-signed a letter condemning President Trump’s decision to deploy federal agents in Portland, Oregon, deeming it an “abuse of power” for political gain.
Last week, the Trump administration sent federal law-enforcement agents into Portland to quell protests that have been ongoing since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police on May 25. Those agents reportedly fired projectiles into crowds and whisked demonstrators into unmarked vehicles, which “escalated events and increased the risk of violence.”
On Monday, the city’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, sent a letter co-signed by Oakland’s Libby Schaaf and San Jose’s Sam Liccardo as well as the mayors of Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago, Washington DC, Kansas City, Boston, Philadelphia, Denver, Los Angeles, Tuscon, Sacramento and Phoenix to U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf demanding “immediate action to withdraw your forces.”
The mayors condemned Trump, who is campaigning on the premise of law-and-order as he seeks reelection this fall, for exploiting the civil rights movement for political gain.
On December 29, 2013, I posted this on the Facebook of Charles J. Shield who wrote ‘And so it goes’ the biography of Kurk Vonnegut, my idol…..
“If Lucia had her way, she would go with a Dance Drama, a tale of how a classic Anglo-Saxon novel is assimilated into the Hippie Dance Music Culture. The Grateful Dead will do Finnagan’s Wake, and, here come the Lucettes! Turn down volume on India dance and leave Love song.”
On Christmas Day, my Muse, Rena, wrote me a four page letter that she mailed on January 3rd. I opened this letter on January 9th. and wept tears of joy. I feared she might be dead. Tomorrow, the four page letter I wrote will be opened by the woman who had a profound influence on my life, and the life of my late sister, for after Christine saw a photo of the painting I did of my Muse, she took up art.
Rena studied classical ballet, jazz, modern dance, and tap. She attended the Academy of Washington Ballet, the London School of Contemporary Dance, and studied and apprenticed with Susan Alexander, former principal dancer with the Royal Ballet. If Rena would accept I would like her to be the principal choreographer for ‘Love Dance’
‘Love Dance’ was conceived while I was on the train going south to visit my daughter and grandson. I believe this was 2010. I was playing a cassette tape I had ‘The Best of Love’. All of a sudden I am a young man dancing in this musical with Rena Christensen who I learned five years earlier was a dancer and choreographer. I played this tape several times as I visualized what this tribute to Rock and Dance would look like.
This suggestion got some response that appeared to mock me. One of Charles’ friends suggested this ‘far-out’ idea be kept for the archives. When I told Marilyn about the response, and how I later found out Vonnegut met with the Jefferson Starship in 1971 to discuss incorporating Kurt’s ideas into their music project, she told me that Jeff Pasternak had given her a call, and wanted her advice. Jeff was writing a play, and his female character needed a cathartic experience. Jeff could not come up with anything. neither could Marilyn.
This was January 2. We were at the Granary where I read some of my poems, while Marilyn’s husband’s Jazz band accompanied me. The next day, Rena mailed her letter.
Marilyn’s sister co-authored ‘Fela’ that is now a hit in New York. Bryan’s song was inspired by what I said to him when he asked me for advice about the relationship he was having with Christine who had a relationship with my friend from England that resembles the movie ‘Across the Universe’. The last time I saw Rena was when we went and saw ‘Yellow Submarine’ in Lincoln Nebraska.
It appears that Vonnegut was asked to contribute to ‘Blows Against the Empire’. This Broadway Musical is writing itself. I posted the following on the 28 and 29th.
Greg Presco: Charles, I hope I am not stepping on any toes, here. Were you thinking of authoring Lucia Joyce’s biography. I just googled her and her father and his work. My grandfather, whom I never met, was a poet, and when I began authoring poetry (while in a trance) at twelve, my mother and aunts became alarmed because they were bid to loathe their father. I wrote this poem a year ago to a young woman who worked at Starbucks. I read it with an Irish brogue.
Greg Presco” Charles has lobbed some balls across my plate with his steam motorcycle and Joyce. In my un-finished novel ‘The Gideon Computer’ the last hippie of the future channels a Nazi whose love for wood-burning cars allows him to get near the hard-water German is making, and helps sabotage the plants. These A-bombs would be delivered with V2 rockets. My ex had shown my Pynchon’s books, but, I found them a hard read.
Greg Presco: Finding herself stuck between two droll and dusty bookends, two avant guard writers who expect at least one avant absurd poem from her, Lucia finds her breakout moment when she meets Antonin Artaud at the Moulin Rouge. Back at his garret they do mescaline together, in the form of Peyote buds Antonin has brought back from his trip to the States where he witnessed the Ghost Dance. Teaching her some of the moves, Lucia goes into a trance and into the future. In her vision quest she finds herself on the dance floor of the Filmore West gyrating to the Grateful Dead. The first Dead Head is born!
Originally published in France under the title ‘Les Tarahumaras’ (1947), ‘The Peyote Dance’ by Antonin Artaud describes the author’s experiences with Peyote and the Tarahumara in Mexico, in 1936. Written over twelve years and covering Artaud’s stay at a psychiatric hospital in Rodez, the book is an important work of drug literature, so far as it provides an intriguing discourse on a possible essential value in psychedelic drugs.
rtaud’s assertion is so explicit that it can be taken as a veritable declaration of principles, especially when one considers the fact that his text “On the Balinese Theater” was, of all the articles collected in The Theater and Its Double, the first to be written. The last to be written, on the other hand, was the emblematically titled “Oriental and Western Theater,” written in December 1936, shortly before Artaud’s departure for Mexico. All the other texts in The Theater and Its Double fall in between, from “Metaphysics and the Mise-en-Scène” (December 1931) and “The Alchemical Theater” (September 1932) to “The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)” (October 1932) and “Theater and the Plague” (April 1933).
Smoky is somewhat inspired by my late friend, Michael Harkins, a.k.a. Sparky. He was a good friend of Jim Morrison and Michael McClure. He acted as security at our wedding reception. He was trained as a PI by William Linhart who was Cayrl Chessman’s PI. Pynchon was interested in Charlie Manson who some say based his persona on Mel Lyman who married Jessie Benton the cousin of Garth Benton who married Christine Rosamond Benton.
How many of my readers thought I was a cheap rip-off of Pynchon looking to make a fast buck? Mary Ann gave me two of her ex-lover’s books to read; ‘Gravities Rainbow’ and ‘V’. One of them was signed and dedicated to my ex-wife, the artist. I forget which one. I told her I found very little, if no, connection to the Hippie Movement. I surmised I was his only connection.
“Life immitates art!”
John Presco
“Charles Manson lurks behind the pages of Inherent Vice, the latest novel from reclusive mad genius Thomas Pynchon. While the Manson murders don’t factor into the book’s plot, Manson’s name casts a shadow on the world of laid-back freaks habituated by sometime PI and longtime pothead Doc Sportello. Normal folks are always looking for an excuse to put the boot to anyone who doesn’t fit the profit margin, and the straights see Manson’s crazy, spacey cult lurking behind all those friendly stoners pitching true love. After a brief explosion of free expression and chemically enhanced enlightenment, the door is swinging closed on the ’60s, and manic Manson gives the cops all the reason they need to make sure it slams in somebody’s face.”
In 1936, French poet Antonin Artaud landed in the New World with the intention of experiencing the rituals of the Tarahumara and to try peyotl, a ritual narcotic that he called the “plant-beginning,” as he believed it to possess the alchemical virtue of transmuting reality and making the initiate fall into a state in which all was abandoned in favor of a new beginning. He was particularly interested in Amerindians for their ability to enter ritual trances, thus nourishing their close ties to nature and life. It is often told that a couple of decades later, during a trip through the interminable and lonely roads of the Southern United States, the Morrison family was involved in a car accident that tragically affected a family of Indians. On the pavement lay a dying man, whose eyes met little Jim’s at the very instant of his extinction. Morrison was acquainted with the belief that the spirit of an Indian will forever stay with whoever sees them die, and he felt the presence of that man for the rest of his life. In Hidden Poems, Jim Morrison’s poetry collection, some verses express the determining influence of this event on his life:
Bird of prey, Bird of prey flying high, flying high Am I going to die Bird of prey, Bird of prey flying high, flying high Take me on your flight Indian’s scattered on dawn’s Highway bleeding Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile egg-shell mind Underwaterfall, Underwaterfall
We will assume these two experiences to be Jim Morrison and Antonin Artaud’s initiatory turns into the realm of ritual; these would influence them deeply as creators seeking to restore art’s ancient esoteric and ceremonial quality –to enable the renewal of art’s ties to otherness.
In order to relate to Artaud and Morrison’s aesthetic visions, we must leave aside the idea of art as entertainment, cultured leisure-time investment, or untouchable object protected by a glass urn and illuminated by white neon in a Museum. Art will be the revolving door, the language that the soul requires to manifest itself; the means by which we could recover the sense of indissoluble unity between body and spirit, word and object, gesture and reality.
Michael McClure died last week. For three days I have been considering what I have to say about his Death Thing. Haven’t poets – said enough? McClure did the most important thing we can do – after being born. While in our mother’s wombs – we don’t have a clue what is about to happen! BANG!
“Hello world!”
Michael knew he was going to die. Did he wonder what other writers were going to write about him – now that the restraints are removed?
Yesterday I wrote a poem about Michael in the form of a question:
‘Did You Fuck Amber’.
Amber was my Lover. We lived together. I suspect one of her Johns paid her way to go to California College of Arts and Crafts that was founded on the ideas of my hero, William Morris. She was a high-class prostitute in San Francisco. She told me she saved…
Rosamond Press 
Leave a comment