Mushrooms & Bananas

[Becky Lindroos]

"Electrical banana -  gonna be a southern craze.”  -  way before GR - while he was writing maybe.
 (Southern = London town/Kensington).  Donavon - 1966/67.    About a 14-year old girl named Saffron,  fwiw) 

(“I’m just mad about 14 and she’s just mad about me - they call me mellow yellow - quite rightly.”) 

(So mellow, he's so yellow)
Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze
Electrical banana
Is bound to be the very next phase
They call it mellow yellow
(Quite rightly)
Lyrics from <a href="http://www.elyrics.net">eLyrics.net</a>

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Tambien: -   The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), was officially produced by Warhol, though critics agree that his most important contribution, besides providing the now iconic banana image for the front cover.  https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/excess-under-control-the-new-sensibility-in-midcentury-art
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Velvet_Underground_%26_Nico   (also '67)

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http://www.amazon.com/Electrical-Banana-Masters-Psychedelic-Art/dp/8862082045

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The song was rumoured to be about smoking dried banana skins, which was believed to be a hallucinogenic drug in the 1960s, though this aspect of bananas has since been debunked.[7] According to Donovan's notes accompanying the album Donovan's Greatest Hits, the rumour that one could get high from smoking dried banana skins was started by Country Joe McDonald in 1966, and Donovan heard the rumour three weeks before "Mellow Yellow" was released as a single. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellow_Yellow

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Inherent Vice - page 140: 

a hippie belief of the moment
I don't know about the magazine articles, but this rumor was making the rounds at just about this time. It is odd, however, that Bigfoot's addiction to, and supply of, chocolate-covered frozen bananas is described in such detail here, and then is never mentioned again in the novel.
My immediate thought was that this was a reference to Arrested Development.

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Becky 



> On Mar 30, 2016, at 2:14 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> On the question whether the banana breakfast - in general: the farming on the roof - is a good counter-cultural "Fuck Death!", or in itself just an artificial and synthetic strategy of death-orientated survival.
> 
> On pp. 92-93, Katje  just entered the scene, it says: "She's alone in the house, except for the secret cameraman and Osbie Feel, who's out in the kitchen doing something mysterious with a harvest of mushrooms from up on the roof. They have shiny red-orange cups with raised patches of whitish-gray veil. Now and then the geometry of her restlessness brings her to glance in a doorway at his boyish fussing with the Amanita muscaria (for it is this peculiar relative of poisonous Destroying Angel that claims Osbie's attention, or what passes with him for attention)---flash him a smile she means to be friendly, but which to Osbie seems terribly worldly, sophisticated, wicked."
> 
> Thing just is that in the case of Amanita muscaria (dt. "Fliegenpilz"), in contrary to the magic mushrooms of the psilocybin type, it's not possible to cultivate it in artificial surroundings. According to my knowledge, you cannot grow these mushrooms in greenhouses or boxes! They can only grow in conjunction with a living tree. "Amanita cultivation in a lab environment has always been a frustrating prospect due to the symbiotic relationship of this mushroom to its host trees, most of which are Birch trees that occur naturally in the wild. But if one has the right host trees in their area, and resides in the proper temperate zone or elevation, one can try and simply take a few dried or fresh caps that are in sporination (fully flattened or upturning with longitudinal tears along the striations), crush them up thoroughly, and mix the crushed pieces into the top soil. See if it will take. If one doesn’t want to make the initial investment of the caps simply chop up the stems from sporinating specimens, which will naturally have collected some of the falling spores, and mix with the soil" (amanita-shop.com/amanita-cultivation). So what you need is a garden, a greenhouse on the roof won't do it.  
> 
> I'm not sure what to make of this.  Did Pynchon know about the impossibility to grow Amanita muscaria the way he describes it and thought "Hey, a little magic realism cannot do any harm". If so, the whole  farming on the roof motif, including the initial banana breakfast, could indeed be read as basically positive. It's so very counter-cultural and "Fuck Death!" that it even makes Amanita muscaria grow without any birch or pine tree around ... But if Pynchon actually knew about the impossibility, a reading along the lines of Laura's skepticism regarding the motif of good nature in Pynchon would also make sense. Then the cultivation appears be another example of war ridden science going beyond the zero by practicing something which appeared (and still appears) to be impossible. What fits this reading is the fact that the effects of Amanita muscaria are actually not so much psychedelic yet deliriant, dissociative and sedative-hypnotic. Via the early use by Siberian shamans the mushroom is associated with the north. Not exactly the direction of the sky Pynchon favors in terms of his cultural cosmology.
> 
> Does Osbie Feel - "He leads her to a back room fitted out with telephones, a cork board with notes pinned all over, desks littered with maps, schedules, An Introduction to Modern Herero, corporate histories, spools of recording wire"  (p. 536) - somehow represent Pynchon himself? 
> 
> 

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