Encore Film Screening of The Truffle Hunters & LAPL Free Book Giveaway
Memorial Day Potluck and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind discussions!
Dear Fellow Myconauts,
What a delight it was to host Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez last month! We will have more to share later, but it’s a busy end to a long mushroom season, so let’s cut to event announcements!
Expedition LA: Fungi Talk with Aaron Tupac at Valley Plaza Branch Library
Thursday, May 16th, 4pm @ Valley Plaza Public Library, Los Angeles, CA – Free!!!
Come to the last of this incredible LA Public Library series of Expedition LA where we will be giving out free hand lenses and copies of the two books that inspired me to become a conservation mycologist Braiding Sweetgrass and Entangled Life. Working with LAPL has been a dream so please come out and show support so we can continue doing incredible events like these!
Film Screenings of The Truffle Hunters & The Mycorians
Monday, May 13th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation
Back by popular demand, we will be screening for the second time one of our favorite fungi documentaries, The Truffle Hunters. Heralded as one of the best documentaries on dogs as well, this charming documentary brings us into the subterranean depths on interspecies relationships.
We will open festivities with a surprise generative SF documentary of the fabled Mycorians...
Before our screening, we invite you to:
Bring your favorite mushroom story from this past mushroom season! As the end of the mushroom season is upon us, it's an opportune time to reflect on the season and the abundance of mushrooms the record setting rains brought us this year. Before the screenings we will have time to share and hear each other's stories!
Potluck + Thinking with the Wood Wide Web
Monday, May 27th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation
Take note! The potluck starts at 6p and the discussion starts at 7p.
Join us for a unique potluck experience that celebrates our shared fascination with fungi. While bringing food and drinks to share is not mandatory, it's a wonderful way to contribute to the event. We encourage you to prepare fungi-themed dishes, as many of us are fungivores.
After the fungal feast, we will discuss two articles that have stirred controversy in the fungi world. As the world of fungi grows, so do the concepts we think with fungi. So, too, do our critical thinking abilities to think with fungi. How does anthropomorphism fit into our understanding of fungi? How are our values reflected in our understanding of science? How do the press, public, and science all influence each other? Is it good? Is it bad?
Before our discussion, we invite you to:
Read the article – Mother trees and socialist forests: is the ‘wood-wide web’ a fantasy? (The Guardian, 2024)
Read the article – Are Trees Talking Underground? For Scientists, It’s in Dispute. (The New York Times, 2022)
Discussion: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
Monday, June 10th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free
Start reading the incredible manga of this mycoremedation SF epic adventure now! And if you haven’t watched it yet, Nausicaa will be screening on May 19th & 21st in theaters.
Join us in discussing one of the most popular Japanese mangas ever. We will focus on how fungi (plus slime molds) inspired the central plot of remediating a damaged planet after an apocalypse. A cautionary tale of what appears at first to be monstrous and other turns out to be in fact our best ally. An insightful commentary from the 1980’s on mycophobia and the fear of the natural world.
It tells the story of Nausicaä, a princess of a small kingdom on a post-apocalyptic Earth with a toxic ecosystem, who becomes involved in a war between kingdoms while an environmental disaster threatens humankind. Pushed by her love for others and for life itself, Nausicaä studies the ecology of her world to understand the Sea of Corruption, a system of monstrous flora, fauna, funga that came into being after the Seven Days of Fire..
Before our discussion, we invite you to:
Watch the film adaptation (it's based loosely on the first two of the five books but gives you a sense of the incredible world-building)
Read the manga! Don't let the size intimidate you. It's a beautifully illustrated thriller. The manga provides a richly detailed story of the world's ecology, including the myxo-myco relationships, as well as what actually happens – whereas the film can only give a convenient ending to a much more complex story.
Welcome to the Fermentation Station [Save the Date!]
Monday, June 24th, 7pm @ Arlington Garden, Pasadena, CA – Free by donation
The Mycoverse is about to get yeasty! More TBA soon…
Links in the Myconautical Almanac
Spread the spores,
Aaron