If It Feels Good, Do It

What a long, strange trip it was.

The James River Film Festival kicked off today with the hippie-dippy screening of the documentary "Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place" at the Grace Street Theater.

Appropriately, waiting for the film to start, the music was of the era. "Only the Strong Survive," "Reflections," "Whiter Shade of Pale" and "Wild Thing" got us in the mood to visit the sixties.

The footage that made up the documentary had been shot by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters back in 1964 when they set out to make a road movie, driving a psychedelic school bus from California to the New York World's Fair.

Their goal was to experience the American landscape and heartscape (I know, very groovy, right?).

With lots of drug taking along the way.

None of the motley crew on the bus knew anything about movie-making, not that it stopped them from trying.

I have to say, it's pretty compelling to watch people tripping on acid, becoming one with the slimy algae in a pond or dancing through meadows with horses.

The filmmakers who were given all this footage by the Kesey family a few years back must have had a hell of a job assembling it into a cohesive format because none of the audio and video synced up.

It was as if all the drug taking affected the cameras' ability to shoot properly.

Driving the bus was seminal Beat member Neal Cassady (the model for Dean Moriarity in Kerouac's "On the Road"), always talking or singing.

"Cassady was like a radio," one girl recalled. "He never shut up. I guess it had a lot to do with the speed he was taking."

You think?

One especially compelling part of the film was the documentation of the early LSD experiments being done by Stanford and in which Kesey was a test participant.

Seeing Mom-looking nurses ask test participants what they were seeing and feeling as they tripped in the small, sterile hospital rooms could have only made the experience more surreal.

Like an acid trip needs more surreality.

Along the way across the country, participants dropped out (one girl because her brain got so scrambled after a bad trip) and people were hooking up left and right ("It was like Soap Opera 101").

Joints were endlessly passed back and forth on the bus and instruments were pulled out at every opportunity, whether people could play them or not.

Once they made it to NYC and to the futuristic fair, one Prankster noted, "The fair was trippy and great...if you were high."

Trippy or not, the consensus on the bus was that the trip had become more important than the destination.

Actually, that theory is the basis of an entire generation's model for how to live life.

Some of us still subscribe to it.

After the fair, they went to visit LSD guru Timothy Leary at his If If spread in upstate New York where, "West coast acid-heads met East coast acid-heads."

Turns out the two groups were incompatible. To each coast its own acid head type apparently.

The bus trip became a metaphor the the change that was happening in 1964 as the country lost innocence and began moving away from the Eisenhower country of the fifties.

An old commercial for LBJ for President began with a wide-eyed, freckled-face little girl and morphed into a bomb going off.

Under that unpleasant segue, the candidate was heard saying "We must all love each other or we all will die. The stakes are too high."

I feel certain no political candidate will ever again exhort the U.S. people to love each other.

Not surprisingly, the Grateful Dead and their music had great appeal to the band of acid heads.

An impossibly young Jerry Garcia was filmed saying, "The Pranksters were the first to get off on our music."

The whole film was like that, full of cultural touchstones of another era.

When Kesey is later arrested for possession of marijuana and serves jail time, he is asked by a reporter on his release, "Do you see yourself becoming square now, like one of us?"

"God, I hope not," he answers to the amazement of the press present.

Clearly you can take the marijuana away from the acid head, but you can't take the desire to experience something different away from a child of the sixties.

Thanks, James River Film Fest; the film was trippy and great...even if you weren't high.

Now can we all just love each other?