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A Mycological Foray: A new look at John Cage and his mushroom obsession (2020)

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Re: A Mycological Foray: A new look at John Cage and his mushroom obsession (2020)

#21

Post by deertick1 »

graphtradr wrote: post #9
LA-resident wrote: post #8

So far no comments upon the artist/composer J.Cage interesting and intellectual, perhaps soon to be lost to time. Is he the American analog to Joseph Beuys or maybe the American zeitgeist makes them incomparable?

Honestly, I think he is kind of a fraud musically.

Really? I mean he has got compositional chops, but not nearly enough to be considered a great composer. Where I find Cage to be a genius is his mastery of generating unique sonic elements. Like his prepared piano peices, as a peice of music, aren't great : but the individual sounds he coaxes out of the piano are awesome. His works are incredibly fertile grounds for sampling, and I draw a lot of inspiration from his use of texture as a compositional theme.

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.

Re: A Mycological Foray: A new look at John Cage and his mushroom obsession (2020)

#22

Post by memetomancer »

graphtradr wrote: post #9
LA-resident wrote: post #8

So far no comments upon the artist/composer J.Cage interesting and intellectual, perhaps soon to be lost to time. Is he the American analog to Joseph Beuys or maybe the American zeitgeist makes them incomparable?

Honestly, I think he is kind of a fraud musically.

Honestly, can you support that nasty claim without revealing that you have only a vague understanding that he did some wacky thing called 4'33"?

Frankly, your lack of citation and supportive reasoning does more to validate the Dunning-Kreuger effect than it does to criticize Cage.

Re: A Mycological Foray: A new look at John Cage and his mushroom obsession (2020)

#23

Post by fit2rule »

aleks224 wrote: post #14
Alex3917 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Speaking of unhinged mushroom hunting behavior, it's interesting to look at the New York Mycological Society (NYMS) Newsletter from 2017: https://www.newyorkmyc.org/newsletters/NYMS_17_2E.pdf >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 i…

>rocket fuel

Why aren't we just growing these in fuel pods?

Re: A Mycological Foray: A new look at John Cage and his mushroom obsession (2020)

#24

Post by highiqman »

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #20
tomrod wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like you're one of today's lucky 10,000 about today's lucky 10,000 https://xkcd.com/1053/

[flagged]

You mean a forum populated by people who act like they think they are on the high end of the IQ range

Re: A Mycological Foray: A new look at John Cage and his mushroom obsession (2020)

#25

Post by Turing_Machine »

Alex3917 wrote: post #15
aleks224 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of unhinged mushroom hunting behavior, it's interesting to look at the New York Mycological Society (NYMS) Newsletter from 2017: https://www.newyorkmyc.org/newsletters/NYMS_17_2E.pdf >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 i…

Yeah there are a lot of mushrooms that are listed as deadly poisonous in field guides, but that lots of people eat anyway. And there are other mushrooms that are listed as edible, but that kill some of the people who eat them. 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 definitel…

Right. Even within a species, your mileage may vary. Sweet and bitter almonds are the same species, but the bitter variety contains cyanide (as do the pits of their close relatives, the peach and apricot). As few as 5-10 bitter almonds can be fatal to a child.

Re: A Mycological Foray: A new look at John Cage and his mushroom obsession (2020)

#26

Post by moistbar »

Alex3917 wrote: post #12
aleks224 wrote: post #11

It's fascinating how these articles create drama without any justification. 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!

> 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.

>Poisoning yourself with false hellebore suggests he might have been a little unhinged.

I would have thought his music alone was plenty of evidence that he was more than a little unhinged.

Re: A Mycological Foray: A new look at John Cage and his mushroom obsession (2020)

#27

Post by dang »

memetomancer wrote: post #22
graphtradr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I think he is kind of a fraud musically.

Honestly, can you support that nasty claim without revealing that you have only a vague understanding that he did some wacky thing called 4'33"? Frankly, your lack of citation and supportive reasoning does more to validate the Dunning-Kreuger effect than it does to criticize Cage.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself, and certainly not by crossing into personal attack.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: A Mycological Foray: A new look at John Cage and his mushroom obsession (2020)

#28

Post by dang »

graphtradr wrote: post #9
LA-resident wrote: post #8

So far no comments upon the artist/composer J.Cage interesting and intellectual, perhaps soon to be lost to time. Is he the American analog to Joseph Beuys or maybe the American zeitgeist makes them incomparable?

Honestly, I think he is kind of a fraud musically.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: A Mycological Foray: A new look at John Cage and his mushroom obsession (2020)

#29

Post by dang »

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #13
rantwasp wrote: post #2

Mushrooms are fascinating. Can't blame this guy for digging them. Did you know that mushrooms (fungi to be precise) are not a plant and are not an animal? They are so special that they have their own biological kingdom. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungus )

That’s like… elementary school knowledge.

Please don't be an asshole on HN. That poisons the culture and is the leading thing we want to avoid here.

If you know more than someone else, please share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. If you don't want to do that, that's fine, but then please don't post. Supercilious putdowns don't help and aren't nice.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: we've had to ask you many times not to break the site guidelines like this. If you keep it up we're going to have to ban you again, so please review the guidelines and please fix this.

Re: A Mycological Foray: A new look at John Cage and his mushroom obsession (2020)

#30

Post by dang »

durpkingOP wrote: post #3
rantwasp wrote: post #2

Mushrooms are fascinating. Can't blame this guy for digging them. Did you know that mushrooms (fungi to be precise) are not a plant and are not an animal? They are so special that they have their own biological kingdom. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungus )

did you know water is wet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water

Please don't be an asshole in HN comments. Posts like this are extremely damaging. If you know more than someone else, that's a great chance to share some of what you know, so we all can learn. If you don't want to do that, that's fine, but then please don't post. Damaging the commons, as you did here, is not a good choice.

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.

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