Zane approached the gate and was given a spot in the venue. He went back out to get the bus and drive it in and we were positioned to help him back it into this spot on a hill. It was all a very precarious series of maneuvers. Just as it’s about to be in place, a very angry aggressive production guy pulls in in a golf cart and parks right behind the bus so that Zane can’t park it.

We try to explain that this is the bus that the festival is named after. (It’s actually the sequel, but, y’know, still a fitting mascot.) This angry guy’s henchman walks up and says “well, anyone can paint Furthur on the front of their bus.”

I don’t know who these two guys were but the henchman proceeded to make a handful of really stupid statements. First he said “This isn’t the ’60s where you guys can just pull in and do your own thing.” Then he said the Merry Pranksters were “not that pivotal.” My jaw was on the ground. Not that pivotal to WHAT?!? The band named itself after the bus, the event was named after the bus, the band wrote a song about the bus (“The Other One”) with the lyrics “the bus came by and I got on, that’s when it all began.” How much more “pivotal” did the Pranksters need to be?

I asked this guy if he read the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He said he had but was dismissive about the book and it’s importance to the Dead scene. This guy kept putting his foot in his mouth. He said that Zane didn’t “create” the Bus, so Zane replies “No, but I inherited it.” And then Zane backs the vehicle up and is gone and this guy turns to me, “Was that Ken Kesey’s son?”

I got a very big grin on my face when I said “Yes.” This guy had stood there acting important to us for twenty minutes and just now figured out how stupid his “anybody can paint Furthur on the front of their bus” comment came out sounding.

There was plenty of comedy and irony to go around.

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After the Furthur Festival in Mountain Aire, we’re going Furthur with the Furthur Bus…

The afterparty, which I rather uninventively dubbed Furthurmore, is going to be at Tuolumne, California, about 35 miles up the road from the Mountain Aire Furthur Festival site.

Here’s the image for the event flier:

I recently updated the Furthurmore web page to include site directions, too.

Hope to see you at the jubilee!

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On Monday I was back in the city and working with Alex and Allyson Grey at a Bicycle Day party. I wound up staying there until 5am and had a blast. Saw many friends, heard some decent music, and just felt great about everything.

This week will be a bit of a blur. I’m going to pack up, try to tie up as many loose ends as possible, and point my compass towards New Orleans for the Jazz and Heritage Festival. I haven’t been back there since 2006, the year after Katrina, but I look forward to it.

I am looking to pick up a bit of work with 7 Walkers, but mostly will be flying by the seat of my pants. I look forward to it.

When I get back, it’s full steam ahead for our Furthurmore Prankster Afterparty.

Onward and upward!

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Well, I liked the name Shady. The name Backflash just sort of occurred to me. I was always a fan of Ziggy Stardust, so I figured it was a mutation of that. It had never occurred to me how close Shady Backflash was to Snidely Whiplash, the nemesis of Dudley Do-Right.

In honor of Easter, I’d like to tell the tale of “How I Became Pope.”

My first year at Antioch I was heading to Dark Star Comics in Yellow Springs and buying and reading a lot of very strange books, many of them published by Falcon Press. Prior to my first year of college I’d never heard of Falcon Press. My first Falcon Press book was Neuropolitique, a Timothy Leary book on the Evolution of Consciousness. Leary examined the themes that became central to his scientific outlook, namely whether it was possible to “wash” brains and, if so, whether psychedelics could assist in the program. Much of the book was written while Tim Leary was in a maximum security prison, having been imprisoned for possession of two joints and labeled by Richard Nixon “the most dangerous man in America.” At one point Leary is introduced to Charles Manson, serving life in prison for orchestrating numerous very high profile “Helter Skelter” Manson Family murders.

In the course of the book Leary examines whether the Manson Family was brainwashed and whether he, himself, after all of his experiences with psychedelics had learned to “wash his own brain”… He arrives at something he calls “imprinting” and sets out to “map” the mind with an 8-circuit model. At each stage of development, he says, the mind is most vulnerable to receiving imprints. As the mind develops, new circuits are impressionable. At a later stage it is difficult to go back and re-imprint the mind, but that the use of psychedelics open up opportunities to do so. He also examines the ability of trauma and related events to make one more susceptible to new imprints. He examines the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the SLA as an example of traumatic re-imprinting.

I read and reread Neuropolitique. Then I went back in the bookstore and the woman running the store said “You must also be interested in Robert Anton Wilson.” I told her I’d never heard of Robert Anton Wilson. She pointed to a stack of books by this unknown author. I picked out one titled The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science.

A friend down the hall was studying psychology and bong hits. He majored in bong hits and minored in psychology. And even though he only stayed on campus for a year before dropping out to hang around Strawberry Fields in NYC, I learned a tremendous amount from late night conversations with him. One night we got to talking about a guy on our campus who was calling himself Tao Jaffee who wrote a long winded piece for the campus paper called “Who Is John Galt?” We were first year students and not terribly familiar with the “tempest-in-a-teapot-controversy-of-the-week” nature of LIfe At Antioch, but we were plenty curious about this whole scenario. Turns out, not much of this was as unique as we’d thought. John Galt was from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and the question “Who Is John Galt?” was lifted directly from there. There is even a website called whoisjohngalt.com. But the rumors swirling around Tao Jaffee were that he’d started a cult.

That’s when I decided I wanted to start a cult of my own. My friend was railing against my book The New Inquisition, so I started The Counter-Revolution Against The New Inquisition and declared “we’re starting a cult! Give me your lunch money!”

Another friend was working on launching an “alternative campus paper” and agreed to run my first article as Shady Backflash.

The cult never got off the ground in spite of numerous attempts on my part to keep restarting it. In the end, I didn’t have much to offer. Even my philosophy was half-baked, warmed over reworkings of R.A. Wilson and Leary, sprinkled with esoteric Deadheadisms.

The following year I returned to campus, but had a rather traumatic and abrupt departure for brain surgery on September 23, 1989. (Readers of R.A. Wilson will note this significance of The Number 23.)

When I returned in the spring, I returned to Dark Star Comics for my fix of Falcon Press books. I picked up another Robert Anton Wilson book, this one titled Coincidance.

At the time that I was reading Coincidance, I was also writing a term paper on “Acausal Coincidental Principle and Ceremonial Magick”. Acausal Coincidental Principle is one of those long-winded bullshit terms that seems to say a lot and nothing at the same time. I was hoping that Coincidance could help me understand What It All Meant. Essentially what I was trying to get at was the idea of seemingly unrelated things coming up at the same time in the form of “meaningful coincidence”. I read books on empiricism by A.J. Ayer. And I read all the prominent writings of the time on Synchronicity. I read about Jung and Pauli. I read about seriality. I read Koestler’s investigations. No one really knew how to explain the occurrence of causally unrelated events happening at the same time. Today I see that there is a prominent sentence in the scientific world to deal with this strangeness: “correlation does not imply causation.”

Casauity is something we all understand. Baseball is the perfect example of causality. Someone throws a ball. Someone swings a bat. The bat either hits or misses the ball, and the outcome begins to dictate the movements of the play. If the bat connects with the ball, the ball flies through the air and the batter runs. If it misses, well, there are a few variations, but in the vast majority of them, the batter doesn’t run for a base. Most scientific models are based upon the causal model of the world. Or at least they were until Einstein, who introduced the idea of relativity and when he began to delve into quantum mechanics, even he did not even accept many of the results of his own findings, going so far as to proclaim “God does not play dice with the universe.” Stephen Hawking retorted “God not only plays dice, but sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.” (As has been stated elsewhere, God does so in the dark and the dice are loaded.)

The gist of what I was trying to understand in college was whether or not there was a way to increase the frequency of the occurrence of meaningful coincidences. It seemed like a lofty ambition, but I was doing a lot of acid at the time and seeing meaningful coincidences everywhere.

In the course of writing this paper, I hoped that Robert Anton Wilson would provide some insights. So I began reading Coincidance. And in case that book did not provide enough insight, I picked up a giant doorstop of a book titled The Illuminatus Trilogy. Coincidance, as the name implies, was a look at meaningful coincidences. The doorstop was a trilogy that wove historical data about The Illuminati in with very strange humor and sci-fi elements. I came to learn, in the course of reading R.A. Wilson, that he lived in Yellow Springs, Ohio when he was writing the books and that portions of the Illuminatus Trilogy were set on my college campus and the adjacent nature preserve, The Glen Helen.

I had also gotten a gig writing for The Antioch Record, the campus paper. The Record editors humored me by letting me write a column as Shady Backflash alongside my more mundane campus coverage. I’d been influenced by the R.A. Wilson writings enough at this point that I began to expand on the idea of a campus cult to a religion and wrote a quick article called “Shady For Pope.” I wrote that I was expanding from politics to religion and sought to attract converts.

The following week, a friend, John Wells, was convinced to render a cartoon of me as the Heirophant Tarot card, wearing a propellar hat and holding an ankh. Above the Heirophant were the words Shady For Pope. As a last second addition one of the editors found a Weekly World News Headline that read “As If She Didn’t Suffer Enough With Brain Surgery” and blacked out the S and made the “h” into a capital letter. It was perfect! The cartoon appeared on the back of the school paper.

Then a series of very strange things happened. Someone gave me a card that read “The Bearer of this card is an official and authorized Pope” (you can create your own here.) Then someone else gave me a photocopied stack of papers titled The Principia Discordia. But that was only the beginning of the weirdness. In the course of reading Coincidance, I saw the Pope card replicated in the back of the book under a caption “You Too Can Be A Pope.” And I learned that the entire Illuminatus Trilogy that I was reading was based upon this “book” called The Principia Discordia that I’d been handed in a stack of photocopied pages.

So there I was back on campus staring at a term paper on Acausal Coincidental Principle analyzing whether I could “invoke” coincidence. I didn’t do it by ritual, but, rather, I’d inadvertantly opened a portal for Eris Discordia, the Greek Goddess of Chaos and Discord to wander into my life and introduce herself.

And so even though I believed I was starting my own religion, The Born Again Pagan, Christian Mystic, Zen Gypsy Warlock, Psychedelic Mind-Fucked Church, unseen forces were conspiring to draft me into theirs. I kept my religion, but expanded my cult portfolio to be poly-denominational and omnidirectional. I’ve been a proud Discordian Pope ever since. The Discordians, I’ve come to learn, define a Pope as “someone not under the authority of the authorities.” What is it they say? When the student is ready, the teacher will arrive? I guess The Secret MisChiefs decided I was ready to be Pope.

Technorati, not to be confused with Blotterati, actually gets heavy web traffic as the premiere clearinghouse for the so-called blogosphere. It will track blogs and chart endless statistics on which topics are trending and which are not. It will also tell you if your obscure little blog out on the hinterlands of cyberspace has gotten any recognition whatsoever, but Google Analytics is really a better way to track that info.

Anyway, in the midst of roaming around Technorati I saw that “Jesse James” was among the trending topics. “Jesse James?!? Ya mean like the outlaw bandit from Missouri who, depending on your perspective, was either a post-Civil War anti-hero or a murderous racist scalliwag?” Well, no, as it turns out, not THAT Jesse James. And what a shame, because I would have had some interest in learning why he was suddenly trending on Technorati.

Turns out there’s a custom chopper celebrity Jesse James who went to an Arizona sex rehab, had an orgy and posed as a Nazi. Or something like that. Who can be certain of the details? Or be bothered to care? How disappointly typical of these modern times!

I have more than a passing interest in the outlaw Jesse James though. As a child my maternal grandmother told my family that we were related to Daniel Boone. The family went out to the Daniel Boone home and signed into the guest book and was, apparently, able to trace the actual lineage. Not to be outdone, my maternal grandfather began propagating the story that we were also related to Jesse James, on his side of the family. He had no proof to bolster his claim, of course, but lack of evidence made his claim no less attractive.

In the more than thirty years that have passed since I first heard him tell this tale, I’ve had to wonder if there was any factual basis to the claim or if he just disliked the idea that his wife had ties to Daniel Boone and that he needed a wild claim of his own. If memory serves me right, his mother’s maiden name was James and we lived in Missouri, where the James Gang was known to hide out in the caves, but beyond that, I don’t have a clue if he was just pulling our leg.

One strange serendipity that I encountered a few years ago is that there was a book called The Life, Times and Treacherous Death of Jesse James edited by a Joseph Snell of the Kansas State Historical Society. And a quick Google of Jesse James and Snell informs me that the screenplay for Roy Rogers’ The Days of Jesse James had a screenplay written by an Earle Snell. Snell was my grandfather’s last name.

Hard to say if I’ll ever definitively know if I’m related to Jesse James, but, in the immortal words of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, “it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”

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Hail Eris!! All Hail Discordia!!!

I’ve been increasingly uncertain about the role of this blog and yesterday I wrote a long tirade about how microblogging via Facebook status updates and Twitter have seemingly supplanted a lot of the blogging activity that I used to participate in and how that seems a lot more like microwavable meals on wheels than actual interaction, but by the end of the long winded tirade, I’d bored myself with how tedious it sounded and I didn’t post it.

Then this morning I clicked over to Technorati.com, the site that tracks all of the thousands of blogs online, and saw that it lifted my ranking from 1 to 103 and listed the following tags as descriptive of what this blog is all about: “blotter art, blotter, merry pranksters, ken kesey, lsd, acid, psychedelic art, art, jerry garcia, grateful dead, deadheads, burning man,”

Granted, I probably put those tags in there. In fact, I’m nearly certain I did when I submitted the blog for inclusion on their site, but what I’m noticing this morning is nowhere in there did I include “curmudgeonly rants about how facebook and twitter and microblogging are superficial and deteriorating discourse in the modern world,” so I decided this morning that I need to get over my grumpy old man tendency and get back to the meat of the matter, which is cheerleading this weird little art world that I’ve found myself in and that I’m spending my time trying to promote as an alternative to venturing out into the cold scary world of employment to earn my rent and groceries.

Kesey once used the term The Intrepid Trips Society for Artistic Revolutionary Training (ITSART) as the umbrella under which he threw parties. I’d like to see the ITSART faction of the Grateful Dead scene have a second life. In that vein, I should say it does look like our afterparty is going to happen. At least that still seems to be the hope… Furthurmore is still the working name… Two days, May 31st & June 1st, a continuation of the Memorial weekend event at Mountain Aire…

I’ll post more here and to ATFurthur.com when some contracts get signed and announcements are ready to be made.

And in the meantime, I’m creating some new blotter art designs, tweaking some old ones into new variations, working on scanning images to the Shakedown Gallery website, and still plodding along with Google Page Ranking.

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Asshat or Fucktard? Definitely both!!!

I’m definitely looking forward to it, but also a bit bummed that it seems to me a clear indicator that I won’t be going South for the Do Lab’s more Burner-centric Lightning In A Bottle event. I guess I can’t be everywhere doing everything at once, though I do my best

Furthur The Band gets its name from Furthur The Bus, as the Grateful Dead lyrics to the song “That’s It For The Other One” clearly indicate:

“The Bus came by
and I got on
That’s when it all began.
There was Cowboy Neal
at the Wheel
of a bus to Never Never Land.”

In high school I did a term paper on Ken Kesey for an English class. That expanded to a Master’s Thesis, a sold interview with Ken Kesey, a writing class with Ken Kesey, an opportunity to be Ken’s Faculty Assistant, and eventually a slot selling Kesey’s stuff on the Furthur Festival tours back in ‘98 and ‘00.

By 2000, the Furthur Booth evolved into the Merlin’s Wheel Gallery, which I’ve since mutated into the Shakedown Gallery, a traveling festival gallery selling blotter art, signed ephemera and weird psychedelic artifacts.

In 2005, Zane offered me the opportunity to organize the Acid Test 40th Anniversary Party. The result was A.T. 40, a sprawling psychedelic smorgasboard of talent from the Deadhead, Burning Man and twisted cabaret tribes of all flavors on Halloween Night in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The follow-up event was A.T. Furthur: Daze Between, hosted between the two Dead dates at the Shoreline Ampitheater back in May of 2009. A.T. Furthur could be viewed as both taking the Acid Test model Furthur and as the Always Traveling Furthur Circus…

Well, the bus rolled out for the Portland Furthur show and I was able to spend a little time with Zane Kesey. It remains to be seen if the bus is going to make it to Angels Camp for the Furthur Festival, but if it does, expect the Shakedown Gallery and the Key-Z Productions booth to merge. And, who knows, maybe Zane and I will get another A.T. afterparty together. If you’re booking travel and reading these words, planning on staying West an extra day or two just in case. Afterparties can be fun!

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