So evocative of a better time! And how I wish I'd seen Hendrix. We lost a lot when he died. And I don't think it was just music. Excellent as his music was, I always sensed there was more to him than music. Had he lived, I don't know what we would have gotten along with the music, but I always knew he had a mind, and when I finally read …
So evocative of a better time! And how I wish I'd seen Hendrix. We lost a lot when he died. And I don't think it was just music. Excellent as his music was, I always sensed there was more to him than music. Had he lived, I don't know what we would have gotten along with the music, but I always knew he had a mind, and when I finally read two bios of him, I found I was right.
The bios, by Charles Cross and Sharon Lawrence, and that's the order I recommend reading them in--Cross does the big picture, journalism style; Lawrence was Hendrix' confidante, a role someone else had chosen for her, because that person felt he needed one, and she was an excellent choice. (There are parts of Lawrence's book you can skip--the latter parts, because those aren't about him, but about the step sister who used his legacy and a lot of falsehoods about her relationship to him to make money.)
As for Ken Kesey, I lived on Perry Lane the summer of '57, a highly googleable two blocks in Menlo Park, a year before Kesey arrived there. I was 4 years old and highly impressed by the big live oak in the middle of the street. It was a magical place, but the magic is gone because Perry Lane was too close to Sand Hill Road, which became Venture Capital Boulevard. I realized I was never going back in the '00s when, looking up houses I'd lived in on Zillow, I found that #2 Perry Lane, which had been a charming 800 sq foot cottage, was now worth 1.2 million, and then, when I looked a little further, it said #2 Perry Lane had been built in 2002.
Ken Kesey retired back to Oregon and lived on a farm/ranch outside of Pleasant Hill. He lost his son Jed in a vehicle crash when the van carrying the U of O wrestling team crashed after sliding on an icy road. He bought the wrestling team their own van the following year.
There’s a bench downtown where Olive and Broadway intersect where there’s a small (30’by 50’) brick patio for food carts and a small performance venue. It depicts Kesey reading a book to small children.
I HATE when that happens. and I betcha the new place is a shithole with walls about as durable as matzoh.
it seems like every day in NYC you hear about another super-luxury building in Long Island City that's starting to fall apart before it's even occupied. and LIC had amazing potential to become a genuine mixed-income COMMUNITY (the paradigm being Sunnyside Gardens, which is actually also in LIC).
So evocative of a better time! And how I wish I'd seen Hendrix. We lost a lot when he died. And I don't think it was just music. Excellent as his music was, I always sensed there was more to him than music. Had he lived, I don't know what we would have gotten along with the music, but I always knew he had a mind, and when I finally read two bios of him, I found I was right.
The bios, by Charles Cross and Sharon Lawrence, and that's the order I recommend reading them in--Cross does the big picture, journalism style; Lawrence was Hendrix' confidante, a role someone else had chosen for her, because that person felt he needed one, and she was an excellent choice. (There are parts of Lawrence's book you can skip--the latter parts, because those aren't about him, but about the step sister who used his legacy and a lot of falsehoods about her relationship to him to make money.)
As for Ken Kesey, I lived on Perry Lane the summer of '57, a highly googleable two blocks in Menlo Park, a year before Kesey arrived there. I was 4 years old and highly impressed by the big live oak in the middle of the street. It was a magical place, but the magic is gone because Perry Lane was too close to Sand Hill Road, which became Venture Capital Boulevard. I realized I was never going back in the '00s when, looking up houses I'd lived in on Zillow, I found that #2 Perry Lane, which had been a charming 800 sq foot cottage, was now worth 1.2 million, and then, when I looked a little further, it said #2 Perry Lane had been built in 2002.
Ken Kesey retired back to Oregon and lived on a farm/ranch outside of Pleasant Hill. He lost his son Jed in a vehicle crash when the van carrying the U of O wrestling team crashed after sliding on an icy road. He bought the wrestling team their own van the following year.
There’s a bench downtown where Olive and Broadway intersect where there’s a small (30’by 50’) brick patio for food carts and a small performance venue. It depicts Kesey reading a book to small children.
What a wonderful thing to have done after losing his kid--to buy the team their own van!
He was a good man and a great community member.
That's really nice to hear!
I HATE when that happens. and I betcha the new place is a shithole with walls about as durable as matzoh.
it seems like every day in NYC you hear about another super-luxury building in Long Island City that's starting to fall apart before it's even occupied. and LIC had amazing potential to become a genuine mixed-income COMMUNITY (the paradigm being Sunnyside Gardens, which is actually also in LIC).
grift, grift Horatio...