Despite some of the film’s amateurish attributes—a talking plastic skeleton is used as a stand-in complete with Kesey commentary during several sections, and high hippies aren’t always the most articulate guest speakers on film, or otherwise—there is quite a bit of historical and latter-day footage featuring Leary, his books, psychedelic work, and subsequent scorn by society, and Kesey’s own countercultural contributions. The soundtrack is filled with cool snippets of Grateful Dead music, who along with Kesey and the Pranksters, helped turn on the San Francisco hippies, and later, the world to psychedelics, both sonically and in its narcotic form, in the mid-to-late 60s.
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In the end, the film does a pretty good job of showing Leary defiantly refusing to bend his mind-tripping principles, even at death’s doorway, as he courageously prepares for his trip into the Great Beyond. In a nutshell, Leary said he was proud to live through four revolutions: jazz, LSD, punk and cyberspace. And to his controversial and questionable credit, he helped pioneer at least two of those four scene-changers.
Specimens of Beauty is also far from perfect. Imagine Phish playing a one-set 30-minute show like they were just your average band. Nonetheless, the film created and directed by Danny Clinch also does a fine job of capturing a unique concluding moment in time. No one outside of Trey Anastasio, and perhaps a few close associates, friends or relatives, knew that the Phish frontman was about to pull the plug on this two-decade-plus band.
And that bleak aura of dark mystery surrounds the film as we see Phish float through numerous scenes, and quick edits, while Clinch does a great job of focusing on the weird, isolated and beautifully strange world of Phish for less than a half hour. The film features some sublime outdoor winter shots (hey, it’s Clinch, he KNOWS his shit), hilarious drummer Jon Fishman sequences, Trey “yaknowwhatimean?” repetition, and, of course, gloriously wonderful and rare studio footage of Phish recording their final album, Undermind, before their second hiatus at The Barn, Trey Anastasio’s multi-storied, monolithic wood studio that had been used for several solo and band projects.
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As of this date, however, The Barn is non-existent in the collective Phish realm, and that leads to melancholia as the site almost appeared to have been a stealth persuader, much like Kesey and his sometimes invisible Merry Pranksters, on that creative Phish-y muse. But the philosophical and deep-rooted frivolity continues, as does Leary’s vision of a truly psychedelic cyberspace which unites all the Heads on Earth. The Barn is now being used by Anastasio’s Seven Below Arts Initiative which encourages artistic development and supports art education in Vermont. The site features an artist-in-residence program “designed to provide a quiet, inspiring and supportive environment where visual artists can work uninterrupted for 8-week periods. Artists are provided a stipend, a private room and studio, and access to many communal amenities” at the 200-year-old property in the hills of Vermont, and the old studio home of that Pranksteresque thing we call PHISH.
- Previously on Hidden Flick: Mothership 2057,
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