Mark Sutton
speaker
695 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2018
last heard Jul 2020
Mark Sutton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
There's a great scene in the book where later on they start allowing rich New Yorkers to come to their commune for the weekend, take some LSD for the cost of $80 and experience commune living and then go back because they're out of money.
So it kind of becomes immediately outside the highfalutin aims of what it was all about.
And the not allowed to talk thing is interesting because there's a scene where this man shows up and because of, you know, they're all interested in this experiment and common way of living, the main character, Joanie, hands the man a card that says, you're not allowed to speak.
And he says, okay, fine, but where do I park?
I thought it was a great summation of the kind of way that the whole thing had been turned from at least initially an idealistic experiment to something that kind of had lost its meaning.
There is a critique.
And ultimately for me, I found that, and also from what I know about it historically, and I don't know that much, I'm no expert in Timothy Leary, but I think it's fair to say that leaps and bounds in terms of the benefits of taking LSD for psychological health were not made.
So therefore, as they go down the path, begin taking higher and higher doses, the further and further they get away from any kind of real research element to what they're doing.
Yes, it's a very hard one.
One element I noticed where it seemed to depart from the history in a strange way was we spoke earlier about the merry prankster.
So this is Ken Kesey, the author of One Float the Cuckoo's Nest.
He hired a bus and they travelled across the country taking LSD and it's kind of the birth of the hippie movement.
That was written up in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the book, and the driver of the bus is Neil Cassidy, who is the inspiration for Dean Moriarty, the protagonist of On the Road.
And earlier in the book, our main character here, Fitz, had mentioned that he loves on the road and he quotes on the road.
And yet I thought it was really strange that when the Merry Pranksters showed up at the commune, there was no reference to the fact that Dean Moriarty would have been there and that Fitz presumably would have recognised him.
And I just thought this was a very odd choice by the author.
If he's trying to create...
a history that is worth telling.
That was a scene for me where it all came together, this kind of 50s beatnik jazz thing coming up against the hippie, you know, new counterculture of the West Coast.
And yet T.C.
Showing 401–420 of 695 · page 21 of 35
← Previous
Next →