Category: Flotsam

Hey, Les.

I heard a new song on the radio this morning. It had special resonance for me; I was just about to sit down and apply for last week’s unemployment compensation. The song by Rufus Wainwright is called “Going to a Town”; the lyrics go like this:

I’m going to a town that has already been burnt down
I’m going to a place that has already been disgraced
I’m gonna see some folks who have already been let down
I’m so tired of America

I’m gonna make it up for all of The Sunday Times
I’m gonna make it up for all of the nursery rhymes
They never really seem to want to tell the truth
I’m so tired of you, America

Making my own way home, ain’t gonna be alone
I’ve got a life to lead, America
I’ve got a life to lead

Tell me, do you really think you go to hell for having loved?
Tell me, enough of thinking everything that you’ve done is good
I really need to know, after soaking the body of Jesus Christ in blood
I’m so tired of America

I really need to know
I may just never see you again, or might as well
You took advantage of a world that loved you well
I’m going to a town that has already been burnt down
I’m so tired of you, America

Making my own way home, ain’t gonna be alone
I’ve got a life to lead, America
I’ve got a life to lead
I got a soul to feed
I got a dream to heed
And that’s all I need

Making my own way home, ain’t gonna be alone
I’m going to a town
That has already been burnt down.

I have to say, by word and wan voice Rufus nailed me this morning. My applications were online, for three different positions at Wells Fargo banks; I was imagining myself a teller, a personal banker, and even an agricultural controversial claims analyst. Anything to get me out of the cave, you know. But so bloodless—no meeting with an interviewer, no soul to the exchange, which felt like filling out a marketing survey.

Am I tired of America? Yes and no. I’ve been riding the wave of economic stimulus and unemployment assistance through the duration of the jobless recovery, so I’m grateful to the America that supports its displaced members. But I’m pissed to be one of the members of a society that gives rise to arrogant megalomaniacs like Madoff and Petters, pissed to have been found guilty of my own ambitions, pissed to have been found wanting in the midst of entrepreneurial capitalism run amok. Tired of feeling at war with my world, tired of my country using war as a means of public relations. Tired of feeling alone (sorry, Rufus, that arrow missed its mark).

You?

Yrs,

Today our mushroom table arrived from fantabulous furniture wizard Thomas Wold. The Little Brown Mushroom Showroom is coming to life!

Buy yours here. And visit Thomas Wold’s blog here.

This little brown mushroom enterprise is meant to be my escape chute from the gas-leaking, ready-to-blow, art biz. As such, I want to refrain from using this space to talk about spreadsheets and art politics. But after a couple days at the NYC fairs and the Whitney Biennial, I need to vent. Or maybe vomit. I’ve overindulged at the buffet.

As Peter Plagens wrote in the current issue of Art in America:

“Not only are the aural and visual dins almost deafening and blinding, and not only is the speed at which they’re conveyed approaching simultaneity, but the analysis, punditry and attendant bloviating are delivered just as fast. And quicker than you can say “Jaron Lanier,” the second round of analysis, punditry and bloviating attendant to the first arrives, and so forth, practically ad infinitum. As a result, it’s extremely difficult for an artist today to take any sort of stand, except a stand against taking a stand, or a stand that mocks all stands, or a stand that blankets all stands.”

Plagens is right. What’s the point? It’s like living in Minnesota and taking a stand against the Mall of America. Speaking of which, there is a video about our beloved Mall in the Whitney Biennial. Mall of America, 2009, by Josephine Meckseper uses red and blue filters and an apocalyptic soundtrack to try and get at the menacing undercurrent of the culture of consumption.

But after a couple of days at the art trough, the Mall of America almost feels like the serene farmland it used to be. (God, I’m happy to be home). So enough about the art market, let’s get back to mushrooms and caves. Earlier today someone emailed me this video. We might be onto something here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI5frPV58tY]

Hey, Les.

For your global itinerary:

• Les Hautes Roches, Rochecorbon (“From $252 for a double.”)
• Alexander’s Boutique Hotel of Oia, Santorini (“180-degree views of the Aegean Sea.”)
• The Laleh Kandovan, International Rocky Hotel, Kandovan (“Rooms once hid residents from invading Mongols.”)
• The Caves, Negril (“All-inclusive rates start at $798 for double rooms during high season.”)
• Cuevas Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Guadix (“Once sheltered those fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. Now they house half the town’s population.”)
• Kelebek Hotel, Göreme (“Views of—and rooms carved out of—the rock formations known as ‘fairy chimneys’.”)

What are self-respecting, miserly, monadic troglodytes like you and I supposed to do when word like this from Afar* starts getting out?

Somehow, though, I think the panoramic views place isn’t doing the cave thing quite right. Caves that “make you feel like you’ve taken a vow of chicness”? No, thanks.

Yrs,

* “Sleep Like a Rock in a Cave.” Afar 2, no. 1 (March/April 2010), p. 47. Thanks a lot, Amy Cortese. You can keep the Italian place for yourself.

For those of you who tried to order a LBM T-shirt or Lost Boy Mountain zine before 3 p.m. today, we were having issues with our orders. Your order most likely did not go through. Please check your pay-pal and re-order these items you will not be double charged, but please check your pay-pal account to be sure. sorry for the problems and inconvenience!

If you have any problems or questions, please feel free to contact LBM at:

contact@littlebrownmushroom.com

Hey, Les.

You up on your Transcendentalism? This is from Emerson, and I found it moving, today:

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him.

I feel like so many are caught in the bind of admiring, and seeking to emulate, what someone else has created. Seeing success, and thinking it takes only a set of procedures to accomplish it. A sequence, set and named, more than a bravely, unwittingly followed interior agenda, something moving you forward that can hardly be identified, quantified, or labeled.

What do we learn from teachers, except to ignore their lessons? Or, rather, to ignore the model they set, for it worked for them in the unique circumstances of a life’s evolution and is unlikely to yield similar results if tried in another context.

Oh, where have I been today, to be thinking these thoughts…mucking about in the hills of suburbia, where so many lives seem to emulate each other.

Yrs,

In a recent post on 5b4, Mr. Whiskets mentioned that my book is packaged with ‘floor sweepings.’ These are in fact perfectly safe agaric fungal fragments, (not dried troll-smor). If Mr. Whiskets has a Valentine sweetie like Alec Soth, I’d recommend she give him Mushrooms, Russia and History by Valentina Pavlovna and R. Gordon Wasson. The two volume set was printed in 1975 in an edition of 517 and now costs about $3000 (but I downloaded it for free here … you book collectors are stupid).

Chapter 5: Mucus, Mushrooms and Love is especially good Valentines Day reading:

We have seen on an earlier page that ‘spunk’ in English is a name for the seminal flow of the human male, that the ordinary mushroom stipe sunk in the pileus is the symbol of the sexual act, and that the Greek P.UXYJC; means not only ‘mushroom’ (or ‘morel’) but the membrum virile. Perhaps the same idea lies enfolded in the Indo-European root of the Russian smorchok. There is a Norwegian word, troll-smor, or the demon’s butter, for the yellowish slimemoulds that are often found spilling over rotten stumps and that scientists call ‘myxomycetes’. It is our suggestion that ‘butter’ in such fungal words scarce conceals the erotic meaning, corresponding to the erotic vulgarism frontage in the French langue verte, and the special meaning of ‘spunk’ in England. In low English ‘cheese’ is the designation for smegma…

We now call to the reader’s attention certain further semantic associations with fire that link together the two Greek words. The word for mushroom also meant the half-carbonized end of a wick, which in English is called the snuff- a word with nasal ties. This half charred end of a wick is of course tinder. The Greek word for mucus also meant the nozzle of a lamp. This same Greek word for mucus crops out in Latin as myxa, and in Latin it meant ‘wick’, and we discover that in Latin fungus was the snuff of a wick. The Latin word for ‘wick’ in turn gave to the French their meche, and from the French the English acquired ‘match’. Why should the match that we strike come down to us from Greek words for mucus and mushroom? Why this persistent association between fire on the one hand, and mucus and mushrooms on the other, with the membrum virile also playing a role in the same affair? In low English ‘wick’ is still potent with erotic meaning, as the English soldierlets us know when he ‘dips his wick’ or complains that someone ‘gets on his wick’. The cap of a morel suggests a burnt clump of tinder, and what is a nozzle but a ‘cock’? Both ‘nozzle’ and ‘schnozzle’ are variants of’nose’…

Here then is a persistent association of ideas, triangular in design, between mucus, mushrooms, and candles or lamps. Like the candle-wick itself, the ideas are plaited together, weaving in and out in a slow measure down the centuries. It is easy to see why the mycophobic Greeks regarded mushrooms as globs of mucus. But why the lamp nozzle? Why the burnt end of the wicke? Why the candle? Perhaps the reader has already discovered the common denominator that underlies these disparate ideas. Relying on certain straws of evidence, we have conjectured a deep-seated semantic association between nasal mucus and seminal fluid. The primary use of the fungi among the primitive Europeans was for the making of fire, a rite instinct with sexual associations. In the burning candle guttering with heat, in the dripping nozzle of the hot antique lamp, we discover the supreme figure of dynamic sexual metaphor, wherein the discordant ideas of mucus and fire are suddenly and boldly reconciled.

Happy Valentines Day,

Hey Osage, did you see this recent profile on J.D. Salinger in the New Yorker? I always knew he had LBM qualities, but get a load of this:

“I spent a wonderful afternoon with him going around San Francisco’s Chinatown, looking at exotic mushrooms, roots, and herbs. Jerry had an encyclopedic knowledge of mushrooms, and often travelled under the alias Mr. Boletus, which was one of his favorite varieties.”

See Little Brown Mushroom’s new acquisitions on Tumblr (and Facebook).

With much reaction to the iPad this week here is an interesting BOOK to add to your collection.

“Introducing a new case based on an old idea. BOOK is a hand made hard cover book jacket on the outside, with a sleeve tailored to the iPad on the inside. Protect your digital device safely and then shelve it, carry it, put it in a book-bag, or leave it on the coffee table. BOOK is made with the highest grade of sustainable, durable, and natural materials to insulate your iPad in an enduring style”

Check out the BOOK here