I'm still working on podcast #21... stay tuned... listen in to the other 20 anytime here. Meanwhile, over on my other blog, Madam Mayo, a new post:
PEYOTE AND THE PERFECT YOU: NOTES
Far West Texas, an area approximately the size of West Virginia, includes a goodly patch of the territory that stretches deep into Mexico where peyote, or lophophora williamsii grows... oh so very... very... very... v-e-r-y... slowly.
A runty, dull-gray spineless cactus with wispy white hairs, when found, peyote-- an Anglicization of the original Nahautl name, peyotl-- is usually growing in clusters. What certain indigenous peoples have done for an eon is slice off the tops-- the "buttons"-- and eat them. Calories and dietary fiber are not the point; apparently the taste is puckerlips nasty. But adepts claim that this humble-looking plant is no less than "the divine cactus," and eaten as a sacrament, as "holy medicine," it can bring one's mind into a mystical realm where psychedelic visions can help one see across time and space and heal one's thoughts about oneself and the cosmos. As one participant in a peyote ritual reported, echoing so many others, he found "profound gratitude for his life" as it was. [>>CONTINUE READING]
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Over on my main blog, Madam Mayo:
Extra-Astral Texiness: Definitions
First, what do I mean by "astral"? I don't mean "of the stars," but the old-fashioned esoteric concept of the imaginal realm. Yes, I am a mite old-fashioned, and apropos of my most recent book, about the secret book by the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution, I plowed through a sizable library of antique books on various aspects of the astral. So that's a word I like to sling around! Whether you, dear reader, believe in the astral or not, I think you will agree that (1) everyone has an imagination and (2) the imaginal realm, aka the astral-- or whatever you have a notion to call it-- includes works of fiction and movies. Imagine those works, if you will, floating like little bubbles through the ether. (Well, porquoi pas?)
Speaking of Texas-sized astral bubblies, apropos of my book in-progress about Far West Texas, of course my horse (as they say in Mexico) I have a long list of "to dos" that includes grokking Giant, that Rock Hudson-Elizabeth Taylor-James Dean mashup filmed in Marfa and parts thereabouts-- I have watched it and read the Edna Ferber novel it was based on, too. And now I've finished reading Don Graham's Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas, in which I first came across the term "Texiness." [CONTINUE READING]
P.S. I am still working on podcast #21. Listen in anytime to the other 20 posted so far here.
Podcast 21 is (ayyyy) still in-progress. Meanwhile, a note from my other blog, Madam Mayo:
Notes on Xavier González (1989-1993), "Moonlight Over the Chisos" and My Visit to Mexico City's Antigua Academia de San Carlos, the Oldest Art School in the Americas
It was in 2012, when I first started on my still in-progress book about Far West Texas, that I first encountered the paintings of Xavier González in the Museum of the Big Bend on the Sul Ross University Campus in Alpine, Texas. I was there to see "The Lost Colony," an exhibition of works by painters associated with the summer Art Colony of the Sul Ross College (now Sul Ross State University). The works were from 1921-1950; the Art Colony, formally so-called, spanned the years 1932-1950. >>>CONTINUE READING
