Word: kesey
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...Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, adapted from Ken Kesey's novel, a woman is used as the symbolic agent of a vindictively oppressive social system. The autocratic nurse who orders the rebel hero of the asylum lobotomized is intellectually presented as conformity's tool in crushing individualists. The emotional line of the play, however, suggests that the hero's real crime is machismo. He is, in effect, being castrated by a neurotic, sex-starved spinster in an acute fit of penis envy...
They played with the frenzied amphetamine energy of post-Savio Berkeley. The Dead, along with the Airplane and Quicksilver, beat the rhythms for Kesey, Brautigan and Co., those self-conscious saviors of the Western mind. Yet the music was always theirs alone, and through it all they maintained a musical identity distinct from the political stamp which eventually blotted out any trace of individuality among the so-called Volunteers of America...
...work is little short of a 20th Century Odyssey, with every conceivable metaphoric cultural transformation. The most striking of which is perhaps from the Homeric balladeer to an eclectic, electric band of gypsies. Listen to the story of Casady, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on their transcontinental trip--set into a musical creation of elegant turbulence. Most important, the music, Listen. They don't just play it. They create it. Give birth. And the musical communication involved is ineffably complex...
Missing Vigor. Readers of the Ken Kesey novel from which John Gay's diffuse screenplay is derived will miss Kesey's vigor and his bigger-than-life characterizations. The book roared, the film sputters. But the actors do it more than justice. Sarrazin, whose past performances have been consistent only in their boredom, is at ease and quite effective as a maverick Stamper home from the big city. Jaeckel is perfect as an inveterate joker who takes only his fundamentalist religion seriously, and Newman is better than he has been in years as the favorite son who idolizes...
...taught himself the finer points of brainwashing, although there he had used it only to stir up support for the prison baseball team. Now, in the Summer of Love, with thousands of rabbits to hunt, coyote-man was ecstatic. As Sanders explains it, "Manson carried this (Ken Kesey's initial acid experimentation) onward, making it evil, slowly changing the colors, the red tempura becoming dog blood, the acid test turning to psychedelic satanism, the filming of happiness turning to the filming of hapless murder of female Caucasians on the beaches of Southern California...