Totally gratuitous Pop Culture reference to the Squid Game which has such a great colour pallet and kind feels relevant if you read the whole newsletter.
Yesterday I woke up to find a load of glistening purple semi toxic berries in a brown cardboard box waiting on my doorstep. It was a gift of pokeberry from my friend Don. Don Kerr can make the armature of a rooftop garden out of sidewalk-abandoned Ikea futon frames and develop a band out sounds he makes by drumming on a thing he finds on his desk with just his fingers in the same spirit that he jumps in as drummer for Ron Sexsmith or The Rheostatics or Bahamas or basically name any experimental Canadian band that happens to be going to Tokyo and needs someone to help out and he is there drumming like he has always been part of the band. Did I mention that he has also been recording and producing quietly and generously for decades the best of the indie musical culture in Canada. Generous doesn’t cover it.
Don once rigged up a triple-sized paintbrush for me and another time urged me to try raw echinacea flower seeds which are so zingy that why would you bother buying them in pill form as an antidepressant. One year he sprouted his own burdock burrs because he wondered what they would taste like, and because making bitters out of burdock weeds wasn’t yet the full use this versatile weed. He is a musician, a producer, an inventor, a father, a ping pong player, a children’s book author, and my chosen family older brother. Also he turned 58 the other day and I forgot to wish him happy birthday so this is a bit of a thank you and happy birthday. The pokeberry gift reminded me of an earlier pokeberry gift from another chosen family brother named Thomas Little. That cardboard box arrived for me at the reception of D.C.’s Phoenix Park Hotel dripping with hot pink blood.
A couple of years back I was invited by NPR’s Ari Shapiro to talk about natural inkmaking. The interview would involve foraging with Ari in Washington DC and I was a little bit worried that I didn’t know the landscape well enough to share with a national audience about how to make ink from anywhere. I contacted Christina Young a natural chocolate maker connected to the foraging community, and Thomas Little known as A Rural Pen on Instagram. Christina and her network got me to a black walnut tree growing in the front yard of the Josephine Butler Center and Thomas sent deep woods pokeberries delivered in a cardboard box. For the interview we mostly ended up talking about the ink-making supplies we found in an alley just across the street from the NPR offices and I didn’t need black walnuts or pokeberries to make my point. I think Thomas was back in his laboratory deep in rural America listening to the interview and I still regret that I didn’t get to mention him. He makes magic from plants and rocks and blow torches and puppets and is not afraid to buy a gun and dissolve it in acid and once gave a peacock a ritualistic ochre burial. Thomas, who I have never met, feels like an older brother, not as a teacher or a mentor, but as a kind of model for living. If there is an opposite of toxic masculinity it might involve a kind of undoing of structures of patriarchy, racism, capitalism, the chemical industrial complex, all the old structures of normal life. But this opposite of toxic masculinity would be both an undoing and a remaking. A kind of tinkered utopia of rooftop gardens, magnetic slimemolds, synaesthetic music, and a more grounded life coloured by all of the senses.
If I had to give it a colour it would come from a humble source and overlooked weed that has been creeping north with global warming. It would be both old and futuristic, poisonous and healing. A plant that civil war soldiers collected in the forests to write love letters back home before succumbing to bullet wounds. Pokeberries are the future. Their colour is shocking pink.
