Timor mortis conturbat me

Dale Pendell has been, next to my wife, one of the most influential people in my life, for better and worse. I never met him.

He died of cancer back in January, after a long illness, but I was working with Katie on getting our business on firmer footing, and didn't find out until today, when a quote came up on my social media that I had posted back in 2013. It's from his book Pharmako/Dynamis:

"There is a spring. It comes out of the rocks on a high ridge dividing two great watersheds. The water is very cold and is pure beyond any other. It may be the only thing in the world that is not poison. It is surely the only thing in the world that can save your life. I'm not going to tell you where it is, but you know how to find it."

I quoted this because, at the time, I was just coming out of a period of severe depression that had been precipitated by what I believe to have been Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome. You can read about that here. I spent most of 2012 depressed out of my mind, watching anime and MMA to get the periodic shots of dopamine I so desperately needed. For those who didn’t click, I used a plant called kratom pretty heavily from 2004-2009, by the end using it almost three times a week. 2013 was when I started getting my head back together with yoga and meditation.

My depression wasn’t Pendell’s fault, of course. He was a writer and an ethnobotanist. Ethnobotany is the study of how plants and people interact. Specifically, he was super into the plants that people used to alter their consciousness. He wrote a series of books, the Pharmko series, that were a combination epic poem, scientific journal, trip report, sociological treatise, meditation guide, and occult grimoire. There is nothing like them in literature, that I know of.

In 1999 or so I stole one of his books from the sister of a friend of mine (Hi Lark! Hi Chad! I know you’ll never read this - sorry about everything) because I had fallen in love with it and couldn’t stop reading when we had to go back to New York from New Hampshire. At the time I was very interested in the chapter on Salvia Divinorum, which is a plant with hallucinogenic properties that, while useful to the seeker after wisdom, are unpleasant enough to make the stuff unpalatable to the casual, recreational user. This kept it from being scheduled by the DEA, since they mostly legislate against pleasure. Wisdom, being altogether more difficult to quantify, and perennially unpopular with the masses, they mostly leave alone.

Finding Salvia in the early days of the internet wasn’t super easy, but it wasn’t hard, and once you found somebody who could get you that, they often had other things for sale. That’s how I found out about kratom, which is a plant with opiate-like properties that, at the time, people believed to be non-addictive. Turned out that wasn’t true, but we live and learn.

One of the things that set Pendell apart from a lot of ethnobotanists was that, like Terrance McKenna or Timothy Leary, he made no bones about having tried all of the substances he wrote about. He was an alchemist in the truest sense, in that he was both the experimenter and the experimented upon, all with an eye toward enhancing and opening up his experience of the world.

It should be no surprise, then, that the guy who tried any number of different plants to alter and enhance his consciousness would, at some point, get liver cancer. This may be my protestant upbringing speaking, of course. There’s no way of knowing how or why a person gets cancer, and there may be any number of contributing factors. The idea that a person deserves to die for having pleasure and joy in the world and in the body is a pernicious myth propagated by puritanical busybodies, and I hate it.

But still he got cancer. He was recovering from it right around the time I was dealing with cancer, too. Which made today particularly hard. I made it. He didn’t. We’re all on a march to the grave.

I’ll likely edit out most of this.

He wrote beautifully. He wrote with cleverness and wisdom, like Terrance McKenna meets Alan Watts, with a dash of Gary Snyder. Because of him, I altered my consciousness, both with and without plants. I probably would have done that anyway, though. I’m still doing it to this day (yoga, Wim Hof). I loved him and his writing, and I’m sad he’s dead. I wish that we all lived a lot longer, and without the suffering that comes with living in a fallen world.

You Didn't Miss It If Everything Is Happening At Once

One of the things I hated most about coming up in the music scene in early-90's Tucson (and there were a lot of things to hate about the scene, even if the music was quite good), was the near-past nostalgia. This is, of course, a symptom of the hipsterism that, even then, permeated the town. Nothing defines a small-potatoes backwater with big-city ambitions better than vicious backbiting about matters of taste. Of course, Tucson didn't invent sneering hipsterism, but when I moved to New York in 1996 and went around the music venues, the cynical affect of a lot of the folks I met was not entirely unfamiliar to me, even if I still had no idea how to respond to their lack of enthusiasm for anything.

But near-past nostalgia was particularly prevalent. If a band put out a new album, it was nowhere as good as their early effort, and even I got caught up in it, going so far as to come up with a rule with my then-songwriting partner: first album was best, and everything after that could only be in the running for second place, at the highest. Part of this was in response to a lot of metal and punk bands already being in their "difficult middle" years in the early 90's.

The more I write about this, the more I realize I might not really have a thesis. The truth is, I just hated the idea that, whenever I first discovered a band or an album, there was always somebody there to tell me, "Well, that's kind of their sell-out album. You should have heard them when they first started out." This always led me to believe that, whatever was going on, whatever scene was happening, I had arrived too late. I had always just missed it, whatever "it" was. When I got to New York, by the time I was hearing about Williamsburg in 1999, it was, per all the truly "in-the-know" kids, already over. Bushwick is the same now, as anyone who has been paying attention would be happy to tell you that it's been over since 2010 (or earlier).

I discovered Sonic Youth because of "Goo." I was told that was the "sell-out" album. Maybe they were right, all those hipster kids with their indie-cred gatekeeping. It was pretty pop. Even had a video on MTV.

But because of that album, I went out and found "Daydream Nation". And that's the money, right there. "Daydream Nation" made everything else possible: noise, melody, snark and sincerity rubbing shoulders and butting heads. It was more than a dialectic of rock, punk and art. It kicked ass, and it allowed all the bits and pieces of those things to co-exist and create something more than the sum of the parts.

Everybody told me that "Daydream Nation" was also a sell-out, and that the real shit was "Evol" or "Sister". Then some other people were like, no, even those were too poppy, and what you really wanted was "Bad Moon Rising" and the truly evil stuff they recorded with Lydia Lunch. Nope, said others, it's "Confusion is Sex" and "Kill Yr Idols" or nothing.

Fuck it. The noisy early stuff is fine. Not my thing, though. For my money, "Daydream Nation" is the perfect prescription. They had some good stuff later, too, but this is where it all came together. Art and pop. My favorite.

There's a larger point here, though. "Daydream Nation" put together a lot of disparate elements and allowed them to co-exist. Similarly, on the internet, everything is simultaneous. When the sum total (or damn close enough) of human expression is available at any given moment, suddenly which came first becomes less relevant. The new Anderson .Paak album isn't competing with just the last AP album, it's also possible to compare it with Sudanese dance music from five years ago, Australian pop from the late-80's, and whatever the hell is happening in some small town like Tucson. And not only that, but you can compare it (and cross-fertilize it) with the latest movie by Spike Lee, an essay on metamodernism, or a GIF of Steven Universe with superimposed text written by a kid in Oslo.

There will always be asshole gatekeepers, and there will always be those who hang on to their scenes with a death grip to prop up an insecure sense of self-worth and identity. Regardless, thank you, internet, for making the argument over "artistic progression" vs. "selling out" completely irrelevant, in fact if not in discourse.

This is America, So Lose My Number

Donald Glover (as Childish Gambino) put out a song and a video that blew up the internet, called "This is America". You've probably heard of it.

It details visually, musically, and lyrically, the way that America destroys black lives and then covers up the damage with entertainment.

A few days later, a mash-up video put the first few minutes of the video together with an earworm from the early oughts called "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen. And then THAT blew up the internet.

I'm not linking to that video, because it's radioactive as fuck. If you haven't seen it, you're probably an adult, you can find it.

That being said, I do have some thoughts on it. 

It seems like there are several different reactions one could have to this video, only some of which are legit.

1. "This is hilarious." Full stop. These people are likely missing the point of the original video.
2. "This is awful. The people who think this is funny are missing the point of the original video." As we can already see, reaction 2 has a basis in truth, see reaction 1.
3. “This is hilarious BECAUSE it is awful.” Another way of phrasing this is: "This is hilarious, because it makes me incredibly uncomfortable.” This reaction is responding to the way this video simultaneously seems to undercut the message of the original video and then reinforces it by the juxtaposition of the banal and the serious. Note that this reaction is very difficult for others to distinguish from reaction 1, because it’s both difficult to explain (and remember that any joke you have to explain is explicitly NOT going to be funny to the person you explain it to), and difficult for others to accept in good faith if they are already are in pain from feeling trivialized by reaction 1. It’s also difficult to express because people having reaction 3 are VERY leery of being lumped in with people having reaction 1, and so they’re already starting out from a position of defense. Understandably so.

Reaction 1, while understandable, because this is cleverly and skillfully done, doesn’t fly. I doubt anybody here just thinks the mash-up is straight up funny in its own right. 

Reaction 2 is completely valid: there’s a lot of pain being expressed in the original video, and anything seen as trivializing that is like a slap in the face.

Reaction 3 is also valid, but difficult (and somewhat dangerous) to express, and harder to justify. Laughter that comes, not at the expense of others, but at the existential horror of suffering, is a tough sell to those who are in the midst of suffering.

The laughter that comes from watching somebody fall down an open manhole and die is qualitatively different from the laughter of reaction 3, but that’s not going to make somebody having reaction 2 feel any better.