“Messages from beyond” are forms of information, and information is a trickster

Fooled you! Dancing with the Dead, a new documentary by the filmmaker Ward Serrill, is not actually about the wharf rats, spinners, and syncopated Deadheads who shook their bones to Jerry and the band over the years. Instead, it’s about Bill Porter, aka Red Pine, an American translator of traditional Chinese poetry and dharma, as well as a sometimes travel writer. The doc title describes the almost shamanic character of translation, as Porter explains it, a kind of haunted tango...

There is a difference between psychedelic experiences and psychedelic people

Fooled you! Dancing with the Dead, a new documentary by the filmmaker Ward Serrill, is not actually about the wharf rats, spinners, and syncopated Deadheads who shook their bones to Jerry and the band over the years. Instead, it’s about Bill Porter, aka Red Pine, an American translator of traditional Chinese poetry and dharma, as well as a sometimes travel writer. The doc title describes the almost shamanic character of translation, as Porter explains it, a kind of haunted tango...

It is too close, too far-out, its sacred transmissions too muddled with the scandalous grit of its concrete historical unfoldment

Fooled you! Dancing with the Dead, a new documentary by the filmmaker Ward Serrill, is not actually about the wharf rats, spinners, and syncopated Deadheads who shook their bones to Jerry and the band over the years. Instead, it’s about Bill Porter, aka Red Pine, an American translator of traditional Chinese poetry and dharma, as well as a sometimes travel writer. The doc title describes the almost shamanic character of translation, as Porter explains it, a kind of haunted tango...

Terminal. What other journey, you might ask, begins at the end?

Fooled you! Dancing with the Dead, a new documentary by the filmmaker Ward Serrill, is not actually about the wharf rats, spinners, and syncopated Deadheads who shook their bones to Jerry and the band over the years. Instead, it’s about Bill Porter, aka Red Pine, an American translator of traditional Chinese poetry and dharma, as well as a sometimes travel writer. The doc title describes the almost shamanic character of translation, as Porter explains it, a kind of haunted tango...

But what if the medium is the message?

Fooled you! Dancing with the Dead, a new documentary by the filmmaker Ward Serrill, is not actually about the wharf rats, spinners, and syncopated Deadheads who shook their bones to Jerry and the band over the years. Instead, it’s about Bill Porter, aka Red Pine, an American translator of traditional Chinese poetry and dharma, as well as a sometimes travel writer. The doc title describes the almost shamanic character of translation, as Porter explains it, a kind of haunted tango...