The Magic of Castor Oil Packs
‘Palms of Christ’ have healing powers, known to the Pharaohs
Cultivating castor oil consciousness, with the help of medical mystic Edgar Cayce
The real doctor is you
In the bleak end-of-winter days of March 2013, I found myself reporting a story from a barge on the Mississippi River. The barge was parked near President’s Island, a forlorn peninsula in southwest Memphis blighted by chemical plants and agribusiness operations, where great drifts of garbage accumulate after heavy rains. As we bumped along over the filthy water in a speedboat, my guide pointed out an oil refinery here, a cement factory there, a Cargill corn processing facility on that bank, a coal-fired power plant on another. I noticed that my lungs had begun to burn. The air, which smelled of acrid chemicals and fermented cereal grains, was a toxic soup the likes of which I had never encountered or inhaled.
But I wasn’t going to be a baby, so I ignored the searing sensation in my chest. And then, adding insult to injury, a passenger with a respiratory flu joined our group. Armed with my personal travel …
Critic's Corner
Sparklehorse Sparkles on Posthumous Tracks
Wednesday’s shoe-gazing Grunge
Too much Elliott
Sparklehorse, Bird Machine
Indie rock band Sparklehorse released Bird Machine, their newest and final album, on September 8th. It’s the first album the band has put out since the lead singer Mark Linkous died by suicide in 2010. The album itself was recorded in 2009 and was set to drop that year, but then disappeared. Mark’s younger brother Matt was sifting through his late-brother’s boxes of tapes when Matt found the name and track listing for the record.
I've known about Sparklehorse for a while and there were a few songs of theirs that I loved, but I never really went so deep into their discography. When I heard Bird Machine I was definitely pleasantly surprised. Posthumous albums always worry me because it's really hard to understand somebody else's art. But the final product here doesn’t seem to stray at all from what Mark had in mind. His brother …
Mule Days
Humble pack-animals risk everything they have, move at astonishing speeds
Fiddlin’ Pete Plays ’King of the Gypsies’
The drama of mule-packing rests in the psychology of the mule
The discovery of gold in Aurora, Nevada in 1862 brought a flood of miners and adventurers, including a young Mark Twain, to the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Anticipating a demand for beef, cattlemen followed shortly on their heels. Some of these cattlemen made it to Aurora. Others, passing through the adjacent Owens Valley and attracted by its open ranges, decided to settle there instead.
This was just as well, for by 1865 most of the gold in Aurora was gone, and pretty soon the town was in irreversible decline. The population fell from 10,000 to a couple hundred within only a few years. Some people broke down the empty houses and sold the worn bricks to contractors on the coast. Others moved into the Owens Valley, where the cattlemen had established a string of towns running southwards down the corridor between the Sierra and White Mountains. The first of these townships was Bishop, …
