Passing Current 33: Mushroom dogsup
(Hello again, just before midsummer. This is the 33rd of these letters, and will be the last until fall. Parts of these letters so far have been notes and sketches towards a book, which now has a deadline on the first of September, and many miles and pages to cover between now and then.
In the meantime, a special summer edition about the pleasure of doing and being, inspiration for long twilit evenings, and three songs for southern winters and northern noons.
There are so many more things I can’t wait to tell you. Until next time.)
mushroom dogsup
Mushroom Dogsup
Mushrooms
Salt
Ginger root
Mace
Bay leaf
Cayenne
Black pepper
Allspice
Brandy
Break mushroom caps into small bits, slice stems. Place in earthenware jar with 1.5 oz. salt for each quart of mushrooms. Stand in a cool place 3 days, stirring/mashing several times a day. Put over a low fire in enamel pan till juices flow freely (about 1/2 hour). Mash. Simmer for 20 more minutes. For each halfpint of mash, add 1 oz ginger root, grated/chopped, a blade of mace, a bay leaf, crumbled, a pinch of cayenne, 1 oz of black pepper and of allspice. Boil down to half the quantity. For each remaining halfpint, add tsp. best brandy. Bottle, cork, seal. Must be kept at least one year. 20 qts mushrooms = 4–5 qts dogsup
John Cage loved mushrooms, Merce Cunningham, cigarettes, rain, Xenia Kashevaroff Cage, sesame seeds, Grete Sultan, the Ramapo Mountains, pianos, cacti, cooking for friends, chess, D.T. Suzuki, telephones, thunder, Erik Satie, and paying attention. Walking through the wet woods, he noticed “spring sponges, fall stumpies and quirines, pinkies,” and countless morels. Later in life he seemed to have rendered himself utterly immune to boredom. Even grays are differentiated, he wrote; “traffic’s never twice the same.” (Of his friend and teacher and inspiration Marcel Duchamp’s work, he said “I don’t understand any of it. Nor do I understand the night sky with stars and moon in it.”) When he and Cunningham moved to an apartment on one of the noisiest corners of New York City – where Eighteenth Street meets Sixth Avenue – after years of silence in the woods, how did he sleep? “The traffic never stops, night or day. Every now and then a siren. Horns, screeching brakes. Extremely interesting; always unpredictable. At first I thought I couldn’t sleep through it. Then I found a way of transposing the sounds into images so that they entered into my dreams without waking me up. A burglar alarm that lasted several hours resembled a Brancusi.”
Prepare Cage’s dogsup recipe now, and it’ll be ready by mid-June of next year. His next recipe needs two tablespoons of it.
Mushroom Salad Dressing
Juice of 1 lime
2 Tbsps mushroom dogsup
Black pepper, ground
Kosher salt
Pinch cayenne
3/4 cup heavy cream
Serve with salad (peppergrass, watercress, chopped horseradish leaves, catbrier, bitter cress)
Cage sought to live and work in a way that would lead to a future where “what you see, framed or unframed, is art, where what you hear on or off the record is music.” He called himself an anarchist but his politics, such as they were, were direct expressions of his music, the dream of a system within which everything and everyone mattered, harmonized, and contributed: “Society as an impersonal place understood and made useful so that no matter what each individual does her or his actions enliven the total picture.” A born tinkerer who mic’ed cacti and ice and reworked pianos with nuts and screws, pie plates, springs, and wires – hanging out under the lid like a shade-tree mechanic under the hood of a hotrod – he looked to new technologies to teach new kinds of listening, new openness to serendipity and chance, new kinds of conviviality and “sound, silence, time, activity.” In the late 1960s he compared computers to the invention of harmony in medieval European music: “Sub-routines are like chords. No one would think of keeping a chord to himself. You’d give’t to anybody who wanted it. You’d welcome alterations of it.” Subroutines would be another kind of music, made by everyone at the punchcard console, shared and refined. Unexpected output of algorithms delighted him, seeming to mirror weather, cities, and lives. “The mind,” he wrote, “like a computer, produces a print-out. It’s on the palms of our hands.”
(“Add video screen to telephone,” he proposed in 1968. “Give each subscriber a thousand sheets of recordable erasable material so anytime, anywhere, anyone’d have access to a thousand sheets of something (drawings, books, music, whatever). You’d just dial. If you dialed the wrong number, instead of uselessly disturbing another subscriber, you’d get surprising information, something unexpected.”)
Cage knew Ray and Charles Eames (they had a mutual friend in Sister Mary Corita Kent). They were likewise playful – they loved superballs, shadow puppets, boardgames, puzzles, seeing in toys and games “preludes” to big ideas – and resourceful: “innovate as a last resort,” Ray would say, knowing that there’s probably a great solution to your problem out there already, hidden in the shape of a pushpin, the optics of a soap bubble, the geometry of an embrace, an obscure scientific paper or a popular song, waiting to be found. And like Cage they were superb hosts: cooks and storytellers. Though they were iconic industrial designers, they advocated a new kind of desirable good that could replace the manufactured appetites and throwaways of consumer culture. “New Covetables,” they proposed, would be only available for attention, focus, and time, not money, and individual ownership would not be the point. “The point is that these things will not diminish as they’re divided. They’re endless.” Charles made a list of his ideas for New Covetables: learning how to read a map, speak a new language, ride a unicycle, graph math functions, getting to know a city or a story, and learning to make music.
Mushrooms and John Cage suited each other: he spent forty years of weekends and afternoons getting to know them better. In 1958, he went on Lascia o Raddoppia, “Double or Nothing,” an Italian quiz show, to compete on his mycological knowledge; challenged to recall the 24 names of a mushroom species (from Atkinson’s landmark 1900 Studies in American Fungi), he cheerfully listed them in alphabetical order. The five million lire he won after five episodes bought a piano for him and a VW bus for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to go on tour. (In the 1960s, whenever the experimental-music work dried up, he kept restaurants like the Four Seasons supplied with rare mushrooms to bring in some extra income.) Few mushrooms can be cultivated, meaning you have to go looking, alert to your situation, taking it all in, learning to read the landscape, and seeing what turns up. “Ideas are to be found in the same way that you find wild mushrooms in the forest,” he said: “by just looking.” When Woody Guthrie heard one of Cage’s “prepared piano” solos from 1947, he felt wind blowing from the open space of “a whole forest and desert mountain full of these fine things.” It’s all out there, waiting to be heard. Go foraging.
With the salad, prepare:
Morels à la John Cage
For every 1 lb. morels,
1/3 c. sweet butter
1/2 c champagne
1/2 c heavy cream
Salt and pepper
Morels and butter in baking dish, at 350–375 F, 20 mins. Add champagne, cook another 15 mins. Season, cover with cream, return to oven until the cream is bubbling. Serves four.
“only sick music makes money these days”
John Cage, “Hymns and Variations,” performed by Ars Nova and Tamás Vetö, from The Complete John Cage Edition, Vol. 18: The Choral Works 1, composed using early American choral pieces by the hymnodist William Billings and subtracting notes from them with chance operations until you can see the world through the gaps. Gloaming music for deep azure twilight; music for moonrise and the first visible stars.
Women, “Black Rice,” from the self-titled 2008 first album. Everything in this song is sun-dazzled in a gorgeous, shimmering daze.
Camera Obscura, “Razzle Dazzle Rose,” off Let’s Get Out of This Country: trumpets smeared across the sky, a railroad track of a drumbeat heading for the horizon, and Tracyanne Campbell opening her great melancholy voice up to all outdoors.
and finally
Breaking Glass in Infinite Dimensions (plus the original paper)
A charming guide to radio from 1912 for watchmakers who needed to set their timepieces accurately
Taekwondo’s Dosan pattern is a series of 24 moves which tell the life story of turn-of-the-century educational reformer and Korean independence activist Ahn Changho (video)
An untold story of the mechanization of carpentry and human bodies in the exquisite Victorian patent furniture of George Jakob Hunzinger
Observation of rogue wave holes
“Bodybuilder Kicking a Bunch of Plastic Flamingos” (video)
The dreamlike chess universe of V.R. Parton
The Multiocular O may be the most beautiful glyph ever created – and the rarest: the eyes of seraphim
(Thanks for reading, as ever. Have a great summer.)