I really loved The Grateful Dead documentary “Long Strange Trip” (streaming on Amazon in six parts) If you’ve never cared for The Dead don’t let that stop you. I grew up in a very Grateful Dead-loving community and I was always secretly ashamed that I basically only liked “Ripple” and “Friend of The Devil.” But there’s so much beauty in their story and the doc also serves as a kind of elegy for an era that’s often misunderstood.
The whole thing is excellent and deeply watchable but I found the last episode to be particularly sad and affecting, watching Jerry Garcia slide deeper and deeper into isolation and addiction. This beautiful thing he’d made kind of turned on him. He simply needed to stop and rest but felt he couldn't. He knew how much people needed the live shows, how they’d yoked their whole lives to them. He’d envisioned The Grateful Dead as this beautifully anarchic amorphous living thing and he very much didn’t want to be the hero, idol and god he became.
There’s a devastating line about how Jerry used to say he lived in a world without The Grateful Dead. The very thing he provided to all those people – the container of community for worship and ecstasy and release – no one was able to provide that for him. But it was also amazing to witness all the love that surrounded that band, how many connections were forged and hearts were opened. It’s a great 20th century story and phenomenon and Amir Bar Lev, the director, did a beautiful job with it.
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If you’ve spent any time with me on Twitter you probably know of my love of Cloud Cult. I made a really gorgeous film with them (directed by Jeff Johnson) called The Seeker which you can watch here: theseekerfilm.com/watch. It’s essentially a silent film which is scored by their album “The Seeker,” and it hits on a lot of the classic Cloud Cult themes: Loss, grief, healing, and transcendence. Or as they put it: "Who are we, why are we here, where did we come from, where do we go."
Here are some of my favorite CC lyrics from a great tune called “Journey of The Featherless,” which I think are kind of emblematic of the band’s whole ethos:
I’m not the kind of man
Who’s into looking downwards
I’ve drank my share of pity
From the bartender’s cup
So many people wonderin
“What’s the right direction?”
As far as I’m concerned
There’s only one way up
And my fingers they are blisters
My eyes they are bullet holes
But my heart’s still beating
Guess I’m pretty lucky
Pretty lucky
Pretty lucky
I saw them play in Brooklyn this summer (They played live along with the movie of 'The Seeker' followed by a live set) and I was reminded anew of how thrilling and life-affirming I find them to be. I was asked to contribute to a book about CC a few years ago and I concluded with this:
Cloud Cult’s music is aspirational, in the best sense of the word, without ever being moralizing, fussy, or finger-pointing. Each song, in its own way, functions as a kind of optimist’s anthem.... They’re a carbon-neutral band in a carbon-saturated world. They’re a heart-centered band in a heartbroken world. I love them dearly and I’m intensely grateful they exist.
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The best albums can make you feel as if the artist somehow plundered the raw material of your own life, your most intensely private thoughts and yearnings and fears, and spun ten perfect songs out of them. That was how I felt about Joni Mitchell’s Blue, an album I loved so ardently my senior year of college I had to hear it every few hours. I even began carrying it with me wherever I went and annoyingly insisting it be played on the nearest stereo. (I wrote a piece a few years ago about Damien Rice’s album “O,” which in 2003 was basically all I was constitutionally capable of listening to....)
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Another album that’s been giving me an inordinate amount of joy is the new Gang of Youths record “ Go Farther in Lightness.” It’s like a gorgeous howl into the abyss, the lead singer David Le'aupepe doing all he can to triumph over his resistance to love and possible heartbreak. By the end of the record he seems to conclude that he's going to keep going and risk again. You can't help but share in some of his courage.
I’ve been trying to zero in on why I feel so strongly about Cloud Cult and the new Gang of Youths record and I’ve landed on this: It’s music for dinged-up optimists. There’s a pulse of grief underneath the songs, but also a yearning ache to transcend it. It’s not toe-tapping Pollyanna-ish music which averts its eyes from darkness. It’s fierce and honest and clear-eyed about how hard life is, how deeply we can be wounded and wound each other, while at the same time holding out the possibility for transformation and transcendence.
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I had lunch with my friend Joshua Wolf Shenk before I left Los Angeles. (Josh’s books are amazing, btw) and he told me about a therapist named D.W. Winnicott who coined the term “good enough parent,” which posits that perfection in relationship is unattainable so that the best we can hope for is the “good enough mother” and the “good enough father.” I feel this extends into the realm of all relationships.
I’ve long battled with the demon of perfection, this force in me that tells me I have to look, act, or speak in some kind of arbitrarily ‘perfect’ (i.e. impressive, non-humiliating) way, that love is earned rather than freely given. So hearing this from my friend really landed on me. What if we just had to be good enough? I felt some new kind of freedom at just hearing the term, that I’m not here applying for sainthood. I can release myself from these unrealistic expectations and release others from them as well. And acquaint myself with the messy, impatient, moody, complicated person I more than occasionally am.
Carl Jung said whatever isn’t claimed (as our own) is projected. We’re seeing this everywhere these days. Anyone who’s compiled a vast enemies list, who’s engaged in massive amounts of finger-pointing, is someone who is actively - if unconsciously - refusing to acknowledge their own personal darkness. Thus they see darkness everywhere but always outside of them (Ring any bells?) Any true healing work will involve a deep dive into the ugly aspects of one’s psyche. This is not fun, in any traditional sense of them term. But it seems to me to be essential to growth.
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Years ago I went on a weekend retreat led by the meditation teacher I was studying with at the time. The theme of the weekend was “addiction.” I was excited for the retreat, but as the weekend wore on I found myself feeling less and less connected to his words. This man began meditating when he was sixteen and had never touched a drug or a drop of alcohol. So his words felt merely theoretical and slightly detached. They might have been ‘true,’ but they weren’t tempered by the force of experience. Better, I think, to learn about the perils of addiction from an alcoholic with years of sobriety or a recovered heroin addict, someone who has stared into the abyss and through some kind of grace returned to health and wholeness.
I no longer have any use for or interest in spiritual piety or perfection. The perfect, as they say, is the enemy of the good. The voices I trust on these matters are the ones who say “These are my wounds, this is my confusion, these are my defects and failings, and this is how I’m walking in spite of all of them.” An optimist who has tasted real suffering and emerged wiser and more resilient really has something to say and share. We could use some more of these voices on the cultural landscape, I think.
We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that pain and suffering are aberrant and to be run from. But suffering is on the menu. A bummer but true. It’s the dark wood of every fairy tale. Without pain there’s no transformation and only the cheapest kinds of joys are available to us. The trick, I think, is to meet our suffering with some grace, to be alert to its lessons, to lean upon the wisdom and guidance of elders, and to trust in unseen forces that have our best interests at heart. I really do believe the universe is for us.
And when we forget, sometimes we can be reminded through a song.
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This cartoon delights me:
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Some other things I've been loving recently....
Two great Jackson Browne tunes: From Silver Lake and For A Dancer
This amazing interview with Jerry Garcia. The poem Ram Dass wrote for Jerry when he died is also really gorgeous.
Garrison Keillor: We Will Survive This
The letter that Hillary Clinton’s pastor wrote her after the election:
Emily Esfahani Smith: You’ll Never Be Famous – And That’s Ok
Pink’s speech at the VMAs. Glorious.
My dear friend Judith Light wrote this beautiful piece in The NYTimes: The First Time I Quit A Big Job
Here’s Brain Pickings on Great Writers on The Power of Music
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