Abandoned Planet bookstore
1 rating since posting on Thursday, February 22, 2007
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in Mission District
(submitted by
gigi
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Overall Rating based on 1 rating |
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In memory of John Bryan - legendary prankster, king of the underground press, counterculture pioneer Wed, February 21, 2007 - 5:11 PM I just learned yesterday that John Bryan died. Most of us in the Mission knew him as the crochety guy who worked behind the counter at Abandoned Planet bookstore on Valencia Street. The Planet is a San Francisco legend -- a tweedy used bookstore with that leathery, dusty, slightly mildewy old book smell, a patchwork of Persian carpets on the floor, a patina of history, a cat snoozing on the counter. It always felt like home to me, and for the ten years I lived in the Mission district, I passed in and out of the store without paying much attention to the white haired man behind the counter, who usually seemed to be in a bad mood. One day I stopped inside to find a copy of Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test," and his blue eyes lit up. "Nobody's asked for that book in a long time," he said. I learned that his name was John Bryan, and he was one of the original guys who rode on the legendary bus, Further, with Ken Keesey and Wavy Gravy . We spent hours talking about the Summer of Love, as John showed me rare books by Alan Ginsberg and other legends of the beat era. I bought a rare book by Timothy Leary called "The Psychedelic Experience" just because the trippy end paper and cover art caught my eye -- though John warned me it wasn't one of Leary's better books and it wasn't even a first edition, either. "What was it like riding the bus?" I asked. His eyes lit up...he regaled me for hours with stories about those days, where one day blended into the next in a psychedelic purple haze, where everything was utterly in the moment, the perfect moment of now. "Was it dangerous. Did anyone get lost?" He laughed. "Well, some people lost themselves in it, I sure did. There's only one problem with riding the bus," he mused. "Once you get on the bus, you never want to get off." We laughed for a long time about that. And even though I never rode a magic bus, I'd experienced glimpses of that life a few times, and I knew what he meant. Perfect moments, perfect timeless moments of absolute happiness in the now. If one had the luxury of riding, day after day, for one long, endless perfect summer of perfect moments, why not? I told John that the scene was back -- and described the festival scene -- Burning Man, Raindance, Earthdance, Synergenesis... he was spellbound, disbelieving. "I had no idea this was going on," he said. I urged him to go to Burning Man, to see it with his own eyes. "It's the acid test all over again, with hundreds of Furthers -- they call them art cars now. Dinosaurs, golden dragons, furry cats, pink cupcakes, Victorian houses...thumping, pulsing nightclubs on wheels, casting a light of video onto the paper white desert floor while people in glittering costumes dance and bicycles shaped like neon lit fish weave back and forth, laser beams overhead, fireworks..." It was like running into Rip Van Winkle and describing the future. It was incredible to me that I was the person who finally delivered this message to him--that nobody had made the connection between then and now. John had never heard of this magical new technoshamanistic, psychedelic world, the logical evolution of a movement he and people like Leary and Keesey helped start 40 years ago. John didn't even realize that the underground press he started still lives on, in hundreds of thousands of blogs, on virtual communities like the Well, and now, social networks like Tribe. That there were now hundreds of magic buses, many powered with vegetable oil, and that the scene was global now, it was everywhere, everywhere all at once. I said he should go this summer, that I'd help find an RV or someone who could give him a ride. "No, no. I'm too old," he said. I told him that the chemist and author Alexander Shulgin, in his 70s, was rumored to be heading there in September. John paused for a moment. "No, I'm just too sick now." He was 72, frail, walking with a limp, weak heart, his teeth were falling out, he shot up insulin to stay alive. Maybe he wouldn't be able to handle the rigors of the dustbowl, the extremes of heat and cold, that even a day out there might do him in. John did himself in, not long after, on February 1. The pain of his long illness was overwhelming, life was overwhelming, and he left this world and broke on through to the other side. That era did a lot of people in -- Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison -- many of them never lived past 40. Bill Graham died. Timothy Leary died. Jerry Garcia died. Wavy Gravy is ailing but still hanging in there. Now we're losing our tribal elders. The oral history, the legacy of their perspective, passes away when they leave us. And all we have is the books, most of them out of print, sold in dusty used bookstores on Valencia Street like this one. The San Francisco Chronicle honored him with a long obiturary two weeks ago, and I learned about his death last night from a friend who was very close to him in his last year of life. He was a pioneer of the underground press, the first editor to publish the work of poet Charles Bukowski, editor of the LA Free Press, contributor to the San Francisco Oracle and writer of one of the more interesting and revealing biographies of Timothy Leary. It was not until reading his obituary today that I realized how much of a legacy John left us -- and how much our community owes pioneers like him today. www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi I'd like to ask you this: consider sponsoring a tribal elder this summer. Let's create a comfortable camp for the seniors and bring these people to the desert, show them that their legacy lives on. Let them know that the children are continuing their work. - gigi , posted 02/22/07 |
Abandoned Planet bookstore was recommended for:
- Tribe: Rainbow Family
- Tribe: Psytrance / Goa
- Tribe: Burning Man
- Tribe: The Culture of Burning Man
- Tribe: Clean Hippie-Bohemians
- Tribe: OPEL
- Tribe: SFBay Burners
- Tribe: The Rainbow Family Tribe
- Tribe: Digital Be-In
- Tribe: the post-hippie movement
- Tribe: El Circo
- Tribe: Earthdance Internationalists
- Tribe: tie-dye-diaper babies
