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The Wound as Diploma

A transcript arrived this week: five signs of “traumatic intelligence,” clipped from a video and passed along as science. The research record tells a different story, and the difference matters. A reader sent me that transcript. It came without a link, without a channel name, without an author, the way most things travel now, and it ended in the middle of a sentence: “Sign five. Consider this for a moment. Everything you’ve heard so far, the perceptiveness, the empathy, the analytical mind, these are not weaknesses dressed up as strengths.” Then nothing. The clipboard closed before the payoff arrived. That dead cut turns out to be the most honest moment in the whole document, and I want to show you why. The reader’s question was whether the thing could run here as an article. It can, on the table, under the lights.

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The Lemurians of Mount Shasta: A Visit to the Hidden Country

California’s mystic volcano has tenants no census has ever counted. An inquiry into where they live, how they live, why they live, and what happened when I went up to ask. Drive north out of Redding on Interstate 5 and the land begins rehearsing for something. The pines close ranks, the grade climbs, and then the forest opens and the mountain is simply there: fourteen thousand feet of snow and andesite standing alone above the valley floor, keeping no company on that horizon, rising nearly ten thousand feet above everything around it. Joaquin Miller saw it in the 1850s and gave it the sentence it has never escaped: “Lonely as God, and white as a winter moon.” A mountain that looks like that collects tenants, and for a hundred years the most famous tenants of Mount Shasta have been a hidden people.

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Charles Manson Still Interviewed

Forty-two years ago, Charles Manson orchestrated the murders of eight people, possibly more that have never been discovered. In my best estimate, the thing that should have been done once it was determined that he should spend the rest of his life in prison is that he should not have gotten anything in terms of media attention, interviews, record releases, or anything of the sort. Rather, he should have been put in prison and let to stay there with not so much as any form of contact with the media, let alone a series of interviews that seems to happen every so often.

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Did Gibson.com Get Punked by the Onion?

Did Gibson.com just get punked by the Onion?  Or are Gibson punking us with misleading rumors they are positing as the truth?  Here’s a screenshot of the Gibson.com Lifestyle page where they tell us today that Led Zeppelin are getting ready to reunite — according to a Robert Plant interview in The Onion.

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Interview with Blöödhag

I met up with Jake Stratton, the lead singer and songwriter from the band Blöödhag, to discuss the band, the state of music in general, and of course, singing “Rhinestone Cowboy”.

Kids Today Don’t Know What A 7″ Is
Gordon Davidescu: So, how are you doing?

Jake Stratton: I’m doing alright. I don’t often come out to West Seattle… so yeah, I missed the bus. I ended up taking a cab out here. Blöödhag’s in a weird spot right now because Jeff (the guitar player) is having surgery coming up so we’re having to rig our schedule around him and fortunately, he’s actually a little more mobile than we thought but that’s only because he’s doped up and shot up on Cortizone. It’s going to be a serious deal and I think once he has the back surgery, I don’t know if he’s going to be – I’m worried that the recovery is going to be worse than he thinks it’s going to be.

GD: Well, you know, if Jerry Garcia can endure – what was it, a heart attack? Diabetes, and all that? He played right up until he died, didn’t he?

JS: Well, Jeff’s the driver of the band – rather, he likes to drive… I don’t know if he can switch to passenger that well. We’ll see.

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