Odds and Ends 009

What are some good songs that describe a modern bourgeois/bobo lifestyle or household environment?

Wash your fingers for typing "bobo" (David Brooks ptui ptui ptui), but I would propose "Goin' Down Slow" by Howlin' Wolf.

Quite a while back, somebody mentioned the Curious Decline of Oliver Sacks and that struck a chord, because I've had an odd parallel development with two writers who first drew me in with sharp insights about psychoactive drugs.

I thought Sacks's Awakenings (1973) was a clarifying jolt -- the most particular and penetrating discussion of drugs and the mind that I had read ... maybe ever. I thought it reset many discussions for the better from then on. I haven't read Leg To Stand On but felt The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was also meaty with lots of perception/personhoo​d insights.

And then ... somehow this cornball element began to creep into his writing, more and more all the time, until when I tired to read Musicophillia he'd become this repellant combination of squishy and involuted to the point I decided this guy needed an awakening himself.

Just a year earlier in 1972, Dr. Andrew Weil's The Natural Mind: An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness had scrambled my neurons but good. What a wild, on-target book. I knew absolutely nothing about Weil, but amidst all the blabber and smoke about psychedelics going around at the time here was ... seriousness and science. Nice. It raised waves, but as usual in this land, the full-blown discussion of psychoactive drugs never emerged.

Then Weil slipped a little toward New Age with Marriage of Sun and Moon, but okay okay, still trying to provoke the discussion. But soon enough Health and Healing came out and the trip was over. I thought Weil's mini-empire of natural med and health and food was honorable and tedious at the same time. (I met the guy at a Ken Kesey conference in 1975 and thought he was charming and enormously smart, though now in my memory he's become more shifty, constantly calculating the effect of his words.) With Weil, I was like the cartoon characters whose eyelids are exactly in the middle of the orbs ... "whatever" ...

Then I speed-read The Harvard Psychedelic Club (you would be amazed how much Cambridge, or at least Harvard Cambridge, keeps parts of its history under wraps -- I lived there for decades and never heard many specifics about these affairs) and my former golden idol was not only tarnished, but partly turned into a turd. Now I can't see a byline by Weil without thinking -- "Wow, more stuff from the Acid Fink."

if that's your field

Japandroids' 2012 album Celebration Rock is much better than Japandroids' 2009 album Post-Nothing insofar as shouting over loud guitar is much better than whining alongside loud guitar.  I recommend it!

So Cam, are you saying your health is not effected by what you eat?