This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: They made John check his jingle stick, referring to John going to a Miley Cyrus concert in a rain coat and a dad hat with a walking stick with bells on it that he had to check at the door.

The show title refers to the amount of spinach John had to put into his juicer to get a 2 ounce cup of spinach juice.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

John being on a juice fast, not drinking any coffee (RL98)

It is so early! John is feeling sick because he is on his 3rd day of caffeine withdrawal. He woke up at 7am with shivers and felt like he had rolled a car. Every muscle and joint in his body is really protesting. But John likes to get into the center of the pain and explore all of it, he is the 7 blind men describing an elephant of pain. Merlin has tried to cut down on coffee, but it has been a while since he did not have any caffeine at all. It is really hard and a little crazy. As a result of his withdrawal John is very irritated. Merlin has noticed that the effects of too much coffee can be similar to having no coffee, minus the energy.

John is a caffeine ranger and uses it to explore all the universes. He has quit it a few times over the years and he knows what is in store. He is looking forward to a solid three days of gutting it out and each day has its phases and you would think that by the third day it would be tapering off, but the third day is really the toughest one and on day four you walk out into the clear. This morning John woke up in a title match with his nerve endings.

The caffeine withdrawal is a component of a larger 3-day project: John is on a juice fast (Merlin can’t hold his laughter), a thing he finds ridiculous on its face. He has no idea of why he is doing it and what the point of it is, but it was suggested to him and he said: ”Sure, I can do a 3-day juice fast. I love juice!” He was reading in Martha Stewart’s Living about all the healthy juices you can make from your orchards.

He owns a juicer because at one point The Long Winters did some extensive touring with the band Keane and they always had a juicer in their backstage area and as they got off of long brutal drives across Europe, they would roll into stadium shows and there would be a juicer waiting for them and they would make complex juices with ginger and lemon and you felt like superstars. After that tour John got a juicer because that is a how a man lives.

Now John is making juices out of spinach, kale, carrots, ginger, garlic, basil and beet greens, and he is watching all the actual food get shunted off into the garbage bag and what is left is a concentrated purple sugar water. He put the equivalent of a Mastiff of spinach into the juicer and it produces 2 ounces (60 ml) of wheat grass juice. It is probably 600 calories a day of juice and part of why it works is that it is so fucking complicated to make the juice and clean the juicer that you don’t want to do it more than a couple of times a day. You are basically just starving yourself, taking some sugar water in the interim.

Merlin’s family also made some juice this morning, which is really loud, and Merlin’s daughter offered him a small glass of caramel-colored liquid to drink, but he rejected it because he had heard the noice. It was so gross! There was some spinach and some carrots, but it really tasted like celery. John has read that celery ruins any juice by making it taste like celery. It is like cilantro. He said: ”Eleonor, that is terrible! It is an awful thing to put in my mouth while I am still laying in bed, and don’t spill it on the bed because it is brown!”

John is just doing this for fun. Back when he decided to stop eating wheat and sugar (see RL80 about 6 months earlier) he could not remember what was motivating him even a day later, although he usually does. It is the same with this juice fast: He doesn’t remember how this idea got lodged in his brain, he probably read something on an airplane, and that is how so many terrible projects start.

To Merlin it sounds like something they would do in the HM Prison Maze in Ireland when they give you the punishment load and put you on a juice diet. He would find it hard to look forward to anything in life if he knew it was going to be a day filled with juice. When you stop eating food you realize how many of the projects and how many of the pylons that demarcate the obstacle course of your day are just about food and already you are the most boring person.

The other night, two days into John’s juice fast, The Presidents of the United States of America played their annual presidents’ day concert in Seattle. John sings a song on their new record with them (Crown Victoria on the album Kudos to You!) and he got up and sang a song and then they launched into New Girl and encouraged John to join in and it was super-fun to do that in front of their sold-out crowd.

As they got off the stage John said he was tweaking a little bit because he was on a juice fast and Chris Ballew, who has a very complicated theory about food, said that actually juice is garbage food because most of those foods were developed by human intervention and we robbed all of our foods of their nutrients over the course of millennia. He is extremely knowledgable, but he also goes on intellectual journeys where he discovers a new thing that then becomes central to his way of thinking for the time.

Jason Finn was sitting on the couch and jumped in by saying he had done a 7-day master cleanse, which is 7 days of lemon, molasses, and cayenne peppar in lukewarm water. By the 4th day you are really seeing dragons! John was certainly impressed that his 3-day juice fast got 1-upped so hard the first time he got out in public with it. He went home with his tail between his legs, but he stuck to it.

John has a glass with juice in front of it that is bright red like cow’s blood. Merlin thinks that the thing with a nutty system is that sometimes you just have to stick with the nutty system and make it routine.

Usually when John quits caffeine it is because he is super-sick, that is how he quit drinking, drugs, and smoking cigarettes, that is how he ends most of his relationships, and he goes off into a corner to die and when he comes back he is phoenix rising from the ashes. His current caffeine withdrawal is just a byproduct of it. The first thing John thought about when somebody mentioned ”3-day juice fast” was ”That would be a tough caffeine burn!”, but when it is over he would have accomplished a pretty daunting task and he was going to try to stay off of the coffee, which is a better way to live, at least for a while, because he doesn’t like dependence.

The overarching theme of John’s life is that he cannot abide dependence and he is dependent on caffeine, which makes him uncomfortable.

The thought alone that you can’t have the thing you are used to is a profound anxiety and it is the number one mind game of quitting all drugs: It isn’t really the physical addiction that defeats you, but it is the anxiousness that says: ”I can never have another French Frie? I can’t live like this!”

John visiting a Miley Cyrus concert (RL98)

Last night John went to see a Miley Cyrus concert at the Tacoma Dome (part of the Bangerz Tour) because he got an email from a friend who is working at a high level in her production and he was telling John about what he was doing there and asked him if he wanted to come. John agreed mainly because every little post-it note in his head about her was negative. He instinctively didn’t like Hannah Montana judging by the little plastic guitars with Hannah Montana stickers on them he saw in thrift stores despite not knowing how it sounds.

He also thought he liked Billy Ray Cyrus (her father) although he didn’t even know how that sounds like either. John didn’t like that the Disney girl was reinventing herself as a bad girl and he also didn’t like that performance where she twerked with the Blurred Lines guy (Robin Thicke, at the MTV Video Music Awards 2013, see here). He didn’t even see it, he just saw it talked about. Merlin thinks it was very uncomfortable to watch. But now his friend got two passes for him and John spent all afternoon trying to find somebody to go to the concert with him.

He asked a handful of friends who are usually game when he wants to see Michael Schenker (from Scorpions) or if he wants to see a monster truck rally or a motor cross race, but all of his go-to show buddies were: ”What? No way! Absolutely not!” It was a different kind of pushback, they drew the line there and there was nothing funny about it, almost like going to a klan rally. It increased John’s perception of the knee-jerk negativ feeling about her, this take on her that everybody has that increased John’s desire to go.

It was a stormy night, it was 45 miles (70 km) to Tacoma, a lot of reasons why he normally would not do it, but he decided to go anyway because he was suspicious of his own bias against this person. He was seeing it reflected in other people, but he didn’t know anything about her and why did he feel so strongly about this girl that sticks her tongue out? As John walked into the show it was sheets of rain and all around him on the streets are girls dressed very provocatively. He was expecting a bunch of Hannah Montana type 10-year olds and some pre-teens, but they were all 20 years old, dressed pretty sexy.

It was a cold rain storm, so there was a lot of shrieking and high-heeled running to get to the venue, everybody covering their hair with plastic bags, and John was well-protected in his rain coat and dad hat and he noticed that he was really wrong here and this was going to be weird and wrong. Still, he made no attempt to look cool. He was by himself, carrying a walking-stick with some bells on it. He walked into the venue just as he took the stage and there was a giant 10-story tall picture of her and the jaw opened in almost a Monty Python way and a giant tongue unfurled out of the mouth and revealed itself to be a slide and Miley Cyrus appeared in her own mouth, waved to the crowd and slid down her own giant tongue to the stage.

John was standing there in a wet rain coat, thinking: ”Okay, what the fuck is this?” It was almost a bad trip. If this were 20 years ago and John took his usual regimen of pre-concert hallucinogens he would have really freaked out over this heavy image, a lot for the mind to take in. John was looking for his seat and he realized that both the average age and the mean age was 20. There was no variation, no-one that was 30, no-one that was 15, and he couldn’t think of a time he had ever been in a room with 8000-10.000 20-year old girls who were digging the show.

It turned out that John had a front-row seat. He has a beard right now and wet uncut hair, wearing his Kim Jong Il North Korean functionary glasses and every other aspect of his attire was Stern Dad. They had made him check his jingle stick. John watched the entire show in utter amazement and his first instinct with every new set piece that came out, every new thing she was pushing his first instinct was: ”Oh my God! No!” and in the course of the tune it was revealed that in fact Miley Cyrus is completely in control of every aspect of her presentation and career, she is overwhelmingly positive, everybody in the place had a positive time, and the take-away from the show was that this was the most culturally interesting and empowering show of its type that John has ever seen. There was not ever a Madonna concert that was that casually empowering (see concert DVD).

John came out of there not just with a whole new impression what Miley Cyrus is and represents, but with a real push-back on his own cultural instincts. The entire culture is lined up to dismiss her and as a result she has real credibility with 20-year old girls. As a 20-year old girl she had a direct line to them and was talking to them directly and they were responding to her directly and no-one else was allowed in. Her show is too dirty for teens. The Katy Perry show makes sure not to be too scary because she is trying to get all the 10-year olds, but the Miley Cyrus show was an absolute spectacle with way more vaginas than you are going to see in a normal presentation.

When the Beastie Boys come out with a giant set of inflatable boobs or Mick Jagger is bouncing around on a huge blow-up microphone and she had a lot of blow-up animals in her show and some of the visuals were fully into the realm of: ”This is trippy, trippy shit!” and John kept coming back to the fact that if he had taken some mushrooms before the show he would be weeping. It was a cultural mash of Japanese Anime, Punk Rock, Metal, Rap, Country, and YouTube culture, Photoshop culture, total pole dancing all the time. Every physical gesture was derived either from pole dancing, twerking, and a 21-year old’s sense of what sex is.

If there had been a reporter waving a microphone at John when he was walking in: ”You there, with the jingle stick, come here, what are you going into the Miley Cyrus show? Do you think she is sexy?” - ”A 21 year old girl is not sexy. She is skinny and she doesn’t know how to have sex, she is a child!”, but coming out of that show he realized that 21-year olds know how to have sex. What was he thinking? Maybe they aren’t all experts on it, but she is not a child, she is 21, she is a lot older than Mia Farrow was when she married Frank Sinatra (actually, she was also 21).

John’s mind was trying to process a torrent of images with everything the culture has produced: African drumming, Snuff videos, Wendy O. Williams, and it was all happening in quick succession. Not everybody in the audience knew all the references, but maybe in a way they do and they are much more attuned to this torrent of micro image and they are very comfortable with it and are not sitting there borderline Grand Mal Seizure like John was, but they are also not trying to parse every image, which is part of what made it overwhelming because every image was igniting a part of his brain that had a cultural association with it. They were just taking it in from a place of pure sensation.

The cultural differences between the Miley Cyrus concert and when John went to concerts at her age (RL98)

The whole event was completely un-ironic and there was no cynicism to it with a net-result of total positivity. The 8000-10.000 20-year olds were not all dressing like sex workers for the male gaze because there were no men there. They were dressing like this for one another, for their own pleasure and in homage to Miley and she is dressing like that for them. Not a single person ever looked at John like he was a creep. Every single girl who made eye-contact with him, which was hundreds of them, all smiled and were like: ”Hi!”, or ”Excuse me!” Everyone was polite and John never for a moment had a feeling of: ”Oh my God, what are you doing here?”

There was no booze, no Satan-worship, unless it is very complex and subtle that everybody read a pamphlet before they went in, explaining that this was all in service of Satan, but John didn’t see those, he just saw Miley Cyrus’ joy of being 21 years old and rich and being able to do whatever she wants. It was a great experience for John and he is still chewing on it. He did not live-tweet it, although when he was walking in he was planning on doing it because it was going to be hilarious on Twitter, but this was so over his head that it would have been a disservice. He was just going to be rooted in this experience and trying to figure out where it was coming from.

When John was her age he was at Scorpions concerts and Punk Rock shows and they were all dressed for one another in Denim and Leather, but there was no average age at a Scorpions concert. It was almost entirely dudes through they whole age range. What the Scorpions represented and what their message was? John has forced to ask himself yesterday. They basically just wanted to know if you were ready to Rock’n’Roll, and John was ready. He was going to shows all the time then and they were profoundly important to him, but there was a lot less sensory experience than there was last night at the Miley Cyrus concert.

John’s daughter is not even a member of this generation at all. Miley Cyrus is going to be a mature and legendary artist by the time his daughter is going to her first concerts, and she will be 25 years into her career. John did not get a toehold on understanding what the culture is going to be like and the degree to which he is going to need to be capable of experiencing and understanding the culture 15 years from now.

Merlin mentions the authenticity problem that goes back to Dylan. A lot of this stuff is so confusing and weird to Merlin and John is that this is one of the first major generational changes in Pop music for quite a while, even up through Indie Rock, which is still heavily rooted in the singer/songwriter tradition. The way Merlin’s generation has looked at that doesn’t matter to people today. Her team is brilliantly leveraging how things have changed in music or culture. John talked on Myke Hurley’s show (see CS77) how you put all this money into making an album and put it out and it used to be that you could ride on that for a year or two, and today people want a constant dribble of culture that is not facilitated by putting $100.000 into an album, putting it out, and waiting for the checks to arrive.

Authenticity is maybe the singular criteria of Hip Hop. The whole trip there is: ”Is it real? Are you real?” John doesn’t know enough about that culture for him to deeply critique it, but that scene has been caught up in authenticity for almost its entire life. Original Hip Hop was merry, fun party music and it was only Run-D.M.C.’s tougher than leather vibe that started the Eric B. & Rakim direction where it was: ”No, this is righteous!” and for a long time there were two sides of Hip Hop: De La Soul over here, intellectual but also fun, and on the other side N.W.A. and Public Enemy pushed it in another direction. There were articles about the feud between Kool Moe Dee and MC Hammer: Who is more real?

At the Miley Cyrus show there was a middle section where she goes out to a little stage way at the back of the arena, playing for the people in the cheap seats. It was little pop-up stage that wasn’t evident to anyone who was there. She was putting on an enormous spectacle and multiple times she all of a sudden disappeared in an elevator beneath the stage to change costumes and in the meantime there is a big video show that could be the craziest part of the show.

She popped up on this mini stage, dressed in a glitz B-Boy outfit with glitter baseball hat turned to the side and a giant Justin Bieber T-shirt except for his face it was Miley’s face, a costume that The Fly Girls would wear on In Living Colour and John’s frist instinct was that he didn’t like it because it was appropriated from something that he didn’t like initially and he also doesn’t like the appropriation of it.

On this little stage she did two covers: An acoustic downtempo cover of Hey Ya! (by OutKast) that was for the most part a very cool Indie Rook cover. If John had heard Tegan And Sara or St. Vincent (of Polyphonic Spree) do it, he would have found it great, and watching Miley Cyrus do it he also found it great. She was singing this song and it was making him sad, which is tremendous. She was doing it in an arena with a picture of herself on her shirt and John was genuinely moved. Her second cover was a full-throated straight-ahead honest cover of Jolene (by Dolly Parton) at the top of her lungs and it was fucking incredible.

There was no reference made and no wink, but it was sad country version of Hey Ya!, full-throated version of Jolene and then back to the stripper show. At no point did anyone stop for a milliseconds and go: ”See what we did there?” because that element of it is gone and the ”See what we did there?” impulse is still tied to the authenticity problem that Merlin just talked about. The authenticity argument is: ”I know I am a white kid playing the Blues, but my recognition that I am doing it makes it forgivable and you should admire me not just because of what I am making, but also because of my intention and my self-knowledge and my purpose!”

Instead the message of her show was that there is no difference between people or between things and African drumming and Japanese imagery belong together because everything is possible all the time. John can’t find fault with that.

Merlin makes a point equating it to watching Dr. Who or Star Wars and who we want to be in those shows. Dr. Who often has a companion, often a woman, some character where you are supposed to see yourself on this journey, which is true of Lord of the Rings and in Star Wars it might be Luke Skywalker in Episode IV. John calls Merlin out for calling it Episode IV because it is simply called Star Wars. In Pop music you also want to be them or be with them and it is difficult to want to be Klaus Meine (of Scorpions) if we feel he is is not authentic. Miley Cyrus is pretty unabashed in saying: ”You want to be me and I want to be you and we are doing this for each other!”

Selfie culture, being comfortable with images of yourself (RL98)

John had a conversation with someone on the phone the other day and they had never taken a selfie because they were an old person. John said: ”You really need to get past the barrier here!” and they were like: ”It is really nice to see a picture of you!”, but they had psychological barrier to taking a selfie that were all related to shame about self-aggrandizement. Now we have crossed the Rubicon and selfies are a form of art and they are part of the awareness of ourselves. John knew people who would get a roll of film back from the drug store and throw away the pictures of themselves just because even owning a picture of themselves taken by somebody else was too much vanity.

Now the culture has completely embraced the idea that taking thousands of pictures of yourself is a way of exploring your identity and understanding your ego. The shame that John used to feel about is missing. Watching this panoply of images unfold with a lot of pictures of Miley Cyrus in her own show including on her own T-Shirt including at the beginning when she literally slides out of her own mouth. Maybe her show-runner and choreographer are both Art PhD’s, there is that much intention behind some of this stuff that just couldn’t be an accident.

This cascade of images is received by an audience who are so much more comfortable with images of themselves. One of the best bit was when she was out on the runway, grabbing people’s phones and videotaping herself for a second and handing the phone back to them, which is like an autograph and an amazing gift to give to somebody. Everyone in the audience is putting themselves in her shape because they all can make videos of themselves, they are making videos of themselves right now.

How the Internet has brought all the cultures together to a mashup (RL98)

We always thought at the dawn of the Internet that here was the potential for all of human knowledge to come to one central clearinghouse and finally we could compare and contrast. You didn’t have to get lost in the stacks with 7 books open, trying to figure out where the Koran and Bible…, but we finally had a consensus place. This is the Liberal mentality: If we just get all the information in one place, then the truth will be known and strive will disappear because truth is available and the only reason we have war and that there is so much anger in the world is that we are confused and we don’t know the truth.

The Internet had this enormous possibility, but we are now in a post-Internet time where all the information is available if you want to look for it, and it has created not an intellectual consensus, but the culture has gone the other direction and all things are equal and there is no consensus, and it has produced an art culture where every single thing that has ever been made is cut up and pasted back together and there isn’t a differentiation between anime and tribal drumming and Punk Rock. Those things all just sit comfortably beside one another as if they had always been together. In a sense it is the achievement of the sum total of human knowledge all brought together, but it is happening in this mash-up of music and image, rather than in a bookish, theoretical place, which is not what John has expected, but it seems to bode well.

Somebody from Western China comes into the world now and says: ”I play the one-string violin, it is the instrument of my people!” Until very recently the response to that would have been to give this guy a show at Carnegie Hall or his record would be the new NPR favorite, it would be: ”Look at this!”, but this new Miley Cyrus culture would just instantly assimilate that: ”Cool! one-string violin guy!” and his sound would be automatically appropriated and he would get up and do a song with her, but it wouldn’t have the reverence that we used to accord with: ”Here he is now going to play his traditional music!”, but it would be: ”That is a cool sound! That guy is cool-looking!” and in a way that seems like true globalism and more in line that all of humanity is on one course together. Her message, if there is one, is almost: ”One planet, one people!”