A Mycological Foray: A new look at John Cage and his mushroom obsession (2020)
glasstire.com
glasstire.com
There's no "mushroom obsession", JC simply did all the usual stuff that a passionate mushroom hunter would do.
He wrote a book about mushrooms? Obsessed! He accidently poisoned himself? Unheard of for passionate mushroom hunters!
Poisoning yourself with false hellebore suggests he might have been a little unhinged. You’d have to be pretty impulsive to do that.
>On May 15th last year, we took an early trip to our family cabin in the central Adirondacks to see if we could catch the beginning of morel season there.
>We walked down a dirt road for a mile until we came to numerous splits in the road.
>While taking a closer look through a loupe, Riitta, who was a few steps ahead, squealed with delight. She had found something special! But it was not a Morchella americana. She knew it as the choice edible Korvasieni (Finnish for “ear mushroom”). We knew it as the deadly poisonous Gyromitra esculenta, the false morel.
>We knew that these were potentially deadly poisonous, but that some people do eat them when prepared properly.
>However, according to Wikipedia “although it is still commonly parboiled before preparation, evidence suggests that even this procedure may not make Gyromitra escu-lenta entirely safe for consumption, thus raising concerns of risk even when prepared properly. When consumed, the principal active agent, gyromitrin, is hydrolyzed into the toxic compound monomethylhydrazine (MMH - a com-ponent of rocket fuel). The toxin affects the liver, central nervous system, and sometimes the kidneys. Symptoms of poisoning involve vomiting and diarrhea several hours after consumption, followed by dizziness, lethargy and head-ache. Severe cases may lead to delirium, coma and death after 5-7 days.” Yikes!
>Rinse the mushrooms thoroughly in plenty of running cold water. Repeat once more the boiling and rinsing of the mushrooms. Drain the mushrooms and use for cooking like any edible mushroom.After doing this with all the windows open in our kitchen, trying our best to avoid inhaling the poisonous fumes, and cautiously boiling twice for 11 minutes, we cooked up the false morels in lots of butter and onions.
I've never eaten false morels, although if I were at Noma or something I'd probably try the soup. Eating them outside of a geographic region where there is a history of eating them is definitely especially questionable, although I don't know that I'd necessarily consider it unhinged. At least they knew exactly what they were eating and made an informed decision.
I would have thought his music alone was plenty of evidence that he was more than a little unhinged.
If he did consume them, then the music he composed before those dates probably wasn't influenced by them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeking_the_magic_mushroom
Like his pieces about cacti : can't remember what its called - but the whole thing is just like goopy, bubbly, drippy sounds. Very interesting stuff to me.
Frankly, your lack of citation and supportive reasoning does more to validate the Dunning-Kreuger effect than it does to criticize Cage.
I just read it and find this delightful, independently of John Cage. This formulation begs the question about how many of the students of this "immensely popular" class were later accident prone.
Maybe is voluntary humour from the part of the author, but I'd not bet on that.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Also, can you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or snarky comments in general? You've done it repeatedly, unfortunately. We ban such accounts because we're trying for a different sort of culture here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.