Californica

Plus News and Notes

Burning Shore readers may be oblivious of the fact, but this publication is at heart a California affair. That’s what the burning shore refers to, anyway, at least in the classic Weir-Barlow Dead tune “Estimated Prophet”: the edgezone of a sometimes incendiary, sometimes kooky, and sometimes apocalyptic land. But my fixations (and decisions) often lose their clarity over time, dissolving into more open fields of ambiguous possibility. I decide to watch all the BBC Shakespeare plays and hit the wall after a boring history or two, or to concentrate on Japanese art cinema until…I don’t. For the Burning Shore, I inevitably started writing essays about, well, whatever I wanted, though West Coast augurs could usually perceive a Cali undertow to the affair. But while the freedom to range widely is liberating, it also grows hazy and rudderless (now there’s a California theme). And it’s not a smart way to run a Substack, which thrives on consistency.

So here is a Tiki raft of Californica for you, starting with some obits.

• Brian Wilson (1942-2025) and Sly Stone (1943-2025): Two giants have passed, almost together, two great wounded California behemoth musical prodigy fools who finally crashed to an earth that had already knocked them around many a time. We are a Sly-loving household, but I don’t have much to say other than to point you to Margaret Wertheim’s charming tale of almost furnishing a come-back Sly with a hyperbolic crocheted hat. That weird math makes sense to me in light of my favorite Sly tune, 1973’s “In Time,” whose rhythm cannot be charted by man, and whose hyperbolic beat scheme, I like to think, gave him a momentary place to hide from the historical and personal forces thrusting him toward the wasteland.

Brian Wilson’s own voyage through drugs and mental illness seemed to close with some love and mercy, which the poor dude very much deserved. But I’d still count his life a California tragedy, or a tragi-comedy really, which means there’s money and girls and excellent session players, but also, like, brutal exploitation and evil shrinks and way too many pills lost in the arroyo folds of the waterbed. Indeed, part of being a Brian fan is feeling protective towards the guy, not unlike the way that PKD freaks nurse a soft spot for the author’s terrible mental struggles and sometimes pathetic life decisions. This inverts the usual heroic mode of worshiping a pop “genius”, suggesting something more like the Christo-Gnostic notion of the Salvator salvatus — the (aesthetic) savior who himself needs to be saved after being wounded by the world they have come to illumine.

I remember getting turned on the real Beach Boys in the early 1990s. I was hanging around Dinosaur Jr. for a Spin profile, and bassist Lou Barlow took it upon himself to enlighten me as to the weird wonders of the catalog, especially taken in toto. And lo and behold, around that time Columbia released pretty much the whole run in two-fer CDs, which I played over and over and over for months. A meaty LA Weekly piece came out of this obsession, and I continue to ponder and enjoy the Beach Boys mysterium. “Til I Die,” whose lyrics Brian actually wrote for once, is a sacred text in my book, an existential Zen pagan ballad of poignant flow. And I still well up, as if on cue, when Brian reaches the “children’s song” close of “Surf’s Up” — the salvational prize held up at the end of that song’s cryptic apocalypse, when dominos fall, laughs come hard, and the stumble down to the beach finds us aboard a tidal wave (or an earthquake, or a burning shore).

“Surf’s Up” plays a central role in my favorite media reverb of Wilson’s death: three episodes (so far) of Michael S. Judge’s singular podcast Death is Just Around the Corner. “Columnated Ruins Domino,” sides A, B, and C, are devoted to Wilson, SMiLE, and, because this is Judge we are talking about, Gravity’s Rainbow, La Strada, Tarot, Van Dyke Parks, David Lynch, T.S. Eliot, and the archetypes of fools and bicycle riders. If you are not familiar with Death is Just Around the Corner, you really owe yourself a plunge. A voracious, biting, and singular take on high culture, low politics, and the moral reckonings of the age, the podcast is smart, and dark, as fuck. Judge, who also writes super-gnarly experimental novels, weaves together dense and feverish tapestries of ideas, histories, dreams, texts, myths, and machines, and with nary a stitch of elbow-patch academia. He is a deep reader of Pynchon and the Rainbow, and therefore particularly close to my heart. I recommend starting with his Crying of Lot 49 series, or anything he says about JFK.

I’ve met a couple dudes kinda like Judge in my life — brilliant and sardonic freelance intellectuals whose grim worldviews, based on knowing far too much about the down-and-dirty twentieth century, hang like sepulchral Spanish moss from their sensitive poet souls. Unsurprisingly, he is also a music fan, deeply knowledgeable about both popular song and the star-making machinery behind it. Be warned: we don’t even get to Brian Wilson until an hour into the first episode. But readers of Gravity’s Rainbow, a text written in the same Manhattan Beach hood where PT Anderson placed Inherent Vice’s “Gordita Beach”, will not be surprised.

• Bill Atkinson (1951-2025). Bill Atkinson, who grew up in Los Gatos, was one of the designer visionary freaks that worked on Apple computers early on. He was responsible for a number of Apple’s most creative features — the early GUI on Alice, the pioneering drawing and painting programs, the lasso and menu bar, and especially Hypercard and its revolutionary language of the hyperlink. Last year I also learned that Bill played an important role in streamlining the “user interface” experience of vaporized 5-MeO-DMT, and, using a pseudonym, broadcasting the LightWand tech. I talked about this extraordinary (and by no means rare) convergence of Bay Area tech and psychedelic culture at Breaking Convention in the spring. Then Bill died of pancreatic cancer in June, and wanted the full story spread, which some friends have done over at the Pattern Project. One marvelous story they don’t mention concerns Atkinson’s hyperlink Eureka. While high on LSD, Bill claimed, he looked outside and his eyes hopped between the bright moon and a bright street lamp. One thing literally (or psychedelically) led to another…

• Jonathan Ott (1949-2025). Jonathan Ott, one of the mightiest literary psychonauts of all time, was not particularly associated with California, although his latest publishing project — a deluxe reissue of many of his out-of-print books and unpublished manuscripts, now temporarily put on hold — calls Sonoma County home (I helped back the project). I only hung out with Jonathan a few times, and exchanged some emails with him (he was notorious for cranking out prolix and multi-colored bombers). These were lovely and memorable experiences, as were my encounters with his extraordinary and singular and sometimes decidedly over-the-top texts: Pharmacophilia, Ayahuasca Analogues, The Age of Entheogens, and especially The Chocolate Addict (my favorite), now renamed The Cacáhuatl-Eater. So many. Jonathan was a polymath, brilliant and productive and unapologetically single-minded. He was one of those rare birds who can just stand up, open their mouths, and have brilliant, stimulating, and cited discourse pour out. But he was also exceptionally kind and fun, as well as freeing, as if a lifetime of scholarship, DIY living and thinking, and regular drug use (including baddies like heroin and cocaine) actually delivered the secret to happiness. He will be missed.

• Wayne Thiebaud and the California Sublime. The Ruth Asawa exhibit at the SFMOMA is still the show to beat this San Francisco season. But when I had an afternoon in the city free the other week I turned my trusty two-wheeled steed toward the avenues to make my way to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor museum and its Wayne Thiebaud show, “Art Comes from Art,” which lasts until August 17. It’s one of those shows driven by a curative concept — Thiebaud as a “thief” (his words) of art history, whose pieces derive from sometimes rather brazen riffs on specific historical paintings. Rather than trumpeting the usual “rupture” that Pop or Pop-adjacent artists like Thiebaud are supposed to have made with high modernism, the show exudes his love of tradition, an appreciation that not only infused his formal compositions but animated the luscious applications of oils that Thiebaud famously used to bring his milkshakes, pies, lipstick tubes, and bathing suits to exuberant life. These are, or were, Pop images, but Thiebaud was coming at them from a very different angle than the cool irony of Warhol or Lichtenstein — something closer to love and mercy.

Thiebaud grew up in Long Beach and lived most of his life in Sacramento, teaching for decades at UC Davis. The wry American Graffiti images he is most famous for, and the unapologetic pleasure they radiate, owe more than a little to his commercial experience at Walt Disney Studios, his work as a military cartoonist, and involvement with advertising, illustration, and design. His New York encounter with Willem de Kooning in the late 1950s was also important, and some manner of abstraction is always pushing his representations towards the picture plane. But equally important are the masters of old he came to study and love when he started really teaching art. Thiebaud was clearly a wonderful teacher, and his sprightly comments on art enliven the wall texts at the Legion of Honor. Indeed, by the end of the show it becomes perfectly apparent how much one of his gumball machines owes to the bravura brushwork of Velázquez and El Greco.

But none of this brought me across town. I was there for the vertigo. Already in the 1960s, and increasingly towards the end of his career, Thiebaud also painted landscapes, which was super uncoolio for a postmodern sorta Pop artist to do. Landscapes were fuddy-duddy, sentimental, vaguely imperialist. But Thiebaud’s images of San Francisco, the Sacramento Delta, and mountains (mostly the Sierra) break with both the realism and the comforts of traditional landscape painting. Inspired in part by his friend Richard Diebenkorn, another ace California painter who probed the liminal zone between abstraction and landscape representation, Thiebaud’s canvases are direct explorations of color, line, and shape that warp established rules of perspective. More audaciously, many of them — especially the San Francisco and Sierra images — exaggerate the vertical dimension to the point of absurdity.

Wayne Thiebaud, Ripley Ridge (1977)

Some folks might see this as more wacky pop surrealism — or, being San Francisco skaters, might grab their decks and prepare to hill bomb. Not me. These diagonals plunging out of the frame scare the shit out of me. You know the way that some David Lynch shots hit too close to home, as if he scraped them from the walls of your own personal hypnogogic cave? These Thiebaud streets and cliffsides get me that way, stirring up a primal environmental anxiety, not unrelated in some ways to Brian Wilson’s tidal waves. The colors and composition are still rather cheery, of course, and Thiebaud has referred to these canvases as “pictorial tall tales,” which stresses the fantasy of them. But he also acknowledges the kinesthetic vertigo they trigger, a “precipitousness . . . you . . . feel in the pit of your stomach.”

Yes these angles are absurd, but their absurdity is not really about pictorial exaggeration. It’s about the cold hard reality of our civilized human condition, clinging to fragile and contingent architectures as we ride the bucking bronco of the biosphere. In an article about Thiebaud’s landscapes, Margaretta M. Lovell suggests this core tension is particularly visible in San Francisco, where a handful of large grids characterize the bulk of the city’s streets, despite the lurching and squirrelly topography they stridently try to overwrite. As I discuss in Blotter, the grid is arguably the central design archetype of the top-down control logic of modernity. “And yet the grid is sometimes irrational,” writes Lovell, “as when it trumps topographic logic.” (And, I want to add, when it is used to streamline the distribution of LSD.) Lovell argues that, while Thiebaud’s images highlight the shapes of San Francisco’s landmass, the painter also points “to what we cannot see, to what he encourages us to feel, namely to the power of gravity to chasten us and remind us of the array of superhuman natural forces that underlie our buildings and our assumptions.”

The one painting I was not prepared for at the Legion of Honor show was “Road Through”, which totally knocked my socks off. Thiebaud based the image partly on his admiration for the Grapevine, the fantastically engineered six-mile plunge that Interstate 5 takes from Fort Tejon down to the town of Grapevine and, for so many travelers, the start of the San Joaquin Valley haul. In the piece, whose powerful brush strokes and sense of vertigo are totally lost in digital reproduction, a near vertical stretch of highway bisects a steep crevice between hulking landmasses whose extraordinary range of color suggests a leaking Cézanne landscape.

I got the shivers when I saw this thing in part because of something I wrote in one of the best rock reviews I ever cranked out: the lead review in Spin of the Stockton band Pavement’s 1992 debut, appropriately entitled Slanted and Enchanted. The review was one of those rare jewels that emerges almost effortlessly, over a couple of hours, and includes the line that some songs on the record are “beautiful the way freeways through the mountains can be beautiful.” And here is that beautiful freeway and those beautiful mountains, only now that beauty is also nerve-racking, plunging down the slanted and enchanted earth towards the abyssal California sublime.

Thiebaud himself invoked the aesthetic category in a comment about Barnett Newman, who partly inspired the painting: “If you’re dealing with the sublime, you’re making a caricature of some thing.” This is a reformulation of the classic hi-brow/low-brow tension that Thiebaud’s own confectionary work plays with, and that remains a core Cali polarity. California can be sublime, in both the cosmic and sybaritic senses, but it endlessly caricatures itself as well, and the difference between the categories melts like sandcastles or burger cheese. If OpenAI’s machines can now engineer “culture,” its a culture that depends on caricature.

Upcoming Events

• Jamie Wheal and I Shake our Bones. On July 31, the night before Dead & Co.’s three-day Golden Gate Park run, I meet up with the intrepid writer and ecstasy engineer Jamie Wheal for a discussion of the Grateful Dead. In contrast to today’s psychedelic scene, with its Instashamans and obsession with individual trauma, the Dead offer a much-needed example of collective psychedelic integration and ecstatic mythopoetic play. In addition to parsing the esoteric wisdom animating the Grateful Dead songbook, we will also address the revival circuit of Dead tour, that burnt-over snake-oil spirit-dance mystery cult of cowboy tunes and cosmic jam. Our chat, Steal Your Face Right Off Your Head, will go down at the Portal in Mill Valley, which I have been meaning to visit for some time. (Look for details at the Portal website.)

• August Chalice. For the August Chalice, which will take place at the Berkeley Alembic at 7pm on Wednesday, August 6, I am stoked to announce that we will be hosting Michelle Lhooq — for my money the best younger drug writer we have these days. She writes for DoubleBlind, the Guardian, and other rags, and also pens the Rave New World newsletter. Full deets.

In one of her recent posts, Lhooq offered an account of a Sasha and Ann Shulgin celebration at last month’s Psychedelic Science conference. Along the way, she put forward some of the key ideas behind the Chalice. One is that certain substances, especially LSD and MDMA, are “indigenous” to the modern West, a point made in her article by Zach Leary. That’s why it’s extra important that we keep the wisdom of our elder freaks and hippies warm and bubbling as their bodies bone-dance into oblivion. “This church of elder psychonauts represent a dying breed whose renegade spirits and altruistic attitudes…are getting eclipsed by the logic of psychedelics under today’s late-capitalist and increasingly militarized landscape. [Zach] Leary is right: in order to prevent psychedelics from becoming de-radicalized, investor-driven mental health ‘products,’ the spirits and stories of the old guard must be kept alive.”

• Dead Zen. On August 9th, on the 30th anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s demise, I will be joining the Zen teacher Kokyo Henkel for another Dead chat: the online San Francisco Zen Center workshop Dharma and the Dead: A Lyrical Discussion of the Grateful Dead. After discovering our deep mutual affinity for the Dead’s music and songcraft, Kokyo and I decided to explore the band’s “Dharma songs,” and particularly the striking lyrics of Robert Hunter. “Together we’ll listen to selected tracks and hear Zen commentaries on lyrics that open the heart to a realm beyond our habitual fixed views of the world.” This particular nightfall of diamonds will actually stream in the afternoon, 3pm - 6pm PST.

• Practice Circle. On Saturday, August 16, at the Berkeley Alembic, from 2 to 4 pm, I will once again host a conversational workshop about practice with my squeeze Jennifer Dumpert. The basic assumption here is that we humans are at root “practicing beings” who to some degree make ourselves what we are through what we do. The Practice Circle offers room for us to individually and collaboratively discuss the sometimes difficult issues that arise around practice — issues like commitment, guilt, obsession, intuition, experimentation, trust, rejection. We will also talk about ways to craft practices on one’s own. Suggested donation, $20-50, no one turned away. Registration here.

• The Way of the Bear. In my previous Burning Shore post, “The Wild Awake”, I wrote about the animist backpack adventure I had with Wildtender, an outfit out of Big Sur. I’ve been hanging around these folks for a while now, trying to impress them, and this September I will be serving as a support guide for a new Yosemite trek they are offering focused called “The Way of the Bear: Pan-cultural Bear Mythopoetics, Tracking & Ecology.” Some words from Wildtender’s poet guide Fletcher Tucker: “Across the Northern Hemisphere, from the cave art of Ice Age Europe to the healing ceremonies of Siberian shamans and the stories of North America’s first peoples, Bear has stood as a keeper of thresholds — guardian of sleep and waking, of death and renewal, of body and spirit. As we move through bear habitat, we will listen for these deep archetypal echoes, shadowing the Bear not only through physical track and sign, but through story, memory, and our own bodies.” One nice feature of the trip is that we will only move camp twice, so we will have some time hiking without our full packs. An even more fun feature is that, in addition to Fletcher, we will be joined by the amazing Meghan Walla-Murphy, who is a world-class animal tracker and ecological educator. I interviewed Fletcher and Meghan separately for Expanding Mind years ago, and I am chuffed that I get to support their work now by offering contemplative and sensory awareness practices to complement our engagement with the Sierra.

Appearances

• Team Human. I have known and respected Doug Rushkoff forever, or at least since the 1990s, and I was pleased as Kesey punch when he invited me onto his blockbuster Team Human podcast to gab. It’s a well-run operation, which suggests to me that Doug is getting the support he needs to keep doing the amazing work he does asking questions, calling bullshit, sharing vulnerability, and being willing to change his mind in public. Doug and I share a particularly deep and nuanced sense of generational identity, and one of my favorite things about our conversation is how we riffed on certain shared features of Gen X sensibility, especially the double-edged sword of Don’t Know mind.

• Blotter: The Medium is the Art that Melts in your Mind. OK, normally I wouldn’t serve up any more interviews about Blotter, now grown rather tepid in the memories of the book buying public. (Maybe I should have gone to Denver to shill the puppy after all.) But rarely have I had as much fun as I did with this conversation with Mark McCloud and the indefatigable RU Sirius, whose recent record release party-cum-90s cyberpunk reunion at San Francisco’s Gray Area was truly mindblowing — goofy, sweet, and poignant in equal measure.

I hope you enjoyed this flicker of Burning Shore. More than anything, I want to find resonant readers out there. So if you want to show support, the best thing is to forward posts to friends or colleagues. You are also welcome to consider a paid subscription, though for now everything here is free. And you can always drop an appreciation in my Tip Jar.