The Colbert Report has picked up on Fox News's absurd praise of Downton Abbey and its job-creating serf system.
But that system was prettied up mightily for TV. The 2001 movie from which the series is based, Gosford Park, also written by Julian Fellowes and, unlike the sanitized TV version, directed by VIP Robert Altman, paints quite a different picture of the aristocracy.
An upstairs/downstairs story set in the same time period as Downton, Gosford Park also stars Maggie Smith as the blunt and bossy matriarch and also has three daughters--two beautiful, one not--plus a shy, stringy haired and obsequious servant intrigued by a nasty blue-eyed valet; a slim and stately blonde servant who knows her place; and a comely, earnest daughter with brunette bob involved in an inappropriate clandestine affair. Even the sets are nearly identical, down to the candlesticks.
In Gosford, the Lord is a monster who so mistreats his help that he gets his comeuppance at their hands, doubly so. The Lady is not, in any sense of the word, a lady. Smith's character enjoys dishing with the servants, and uses them for spies. The help truly dislikes their overlords, and knows full well that they are the unfairly treated workers.
Gosford Park won nearly every Best Director award worldwide and Fellowes picked up an Oscar for Best Screenplay. Co-producer was Bob Balaban, who plays the American movie director in the film, and also did a cute guest spot as a medical marijuana doctor on HBO's Entourage. But gone is the insight that the holy herb gives the masses in the PBS uber-fundraising version.
Americans have a warped view that all of us will be rich someday: boys want to be Michael Douglas in Wall Street and girls still believe in Prince Charming (hell, they're all dressing like slutty princesses now). Even during the Great Depression, the favorite board game was Monopoly, in which the winner takes all, to hell with the rest of the players. As I learned on Netflix recently, Monopoly was first invented by Lizzie Phillips in 1923 as The Landlord's Game, to illustrate the downside of concentrating land in private monopolies. If you doubt the inequities of our system, you can also see the 2006 documentary The One Percent on Netflix.
The truth is out there, we just have to dig a little deeper than Fox News or PBS to get to it.
Celebrating famous female cannabis connoisseurs throughout herstory to the present day. All contents copyrighted. "Bright Leaf" artwork by Jean Hanamoto http://www.camomoto.com
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Remembering Janis
In a gentler world, Janis Joplin would have turned 70 today.
I just came across a Dick Cavett episode filmed just two months before her brightly burning candle burned out. Janis gives an astonishing performance of "Half Moon," showing she's in full control of her tight-as-a-drum band, the aptly named Full Tilt Boogie.
Afterwards, she stands up for pot to fellow guest Gloria Swanson, talking about repression in the 1920s when Swanson was making movies. "Back then you couldn't drink because they didn't like it. Now you can't smoke grass," Janis said. "Back then you couldn't be a flapper because they didn't like it, and now you can't play rock and roll ...It seems to me that people who went through all that prohibition and flapper times should realize that young people are always crazy, and to leave us alone." The audience applauded their agreement.
Just afterwards, Cavett promises his audience a lift from the following Pepsi commercial. Nowadays Beyonce, whose daughter with Jay-Z was honored with a medical marijuana strain named for her days after she was born, has taken criticism for pushing Pepsi at the upcoming Superbowl. Too bad she can't promote something actually uplifting.
I saw this picture of Janis at a Mill Valley record store once years ago, in front of which was planted a little girl demanding to know who she was.
At the 2005 Grammy Awards Joplin was honored by VIPs Joss Stone (who looked the part) and Melissa Etheridge (who sounded it). There will never be anyone, anywhere, like Janis, but her torch has been passed to a new generation.
UPDATE 2017: Hot Auction Going For Janis Joplin Pic With Michelle Williams
Labels:
Dick Cavett,
Gloria Swanson,
Janis Joplin,
marijuana
Monday, January 14, 2013
Did Richard Nixon Finger Lucille Armstrong for a Pot Bust?
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Lucille Armstrong in 1983 |
"Mr. Glaser, you must see to it that I have special
permission to smoke all the reefers that I want to when I want or I will just
have to put this horn down, that's all," the letter says, addressing
Armstrong’s manager. "I can gladly vouch for a nice, fat stick of gage,
which relaxes my nerves, if I have any...I can't afford to be ...tense, fearing
that any minute I'm going to be arrested, brought to jail for a silly little
minor thing like marijuana."
The incident that prompted Louis to write about his
well-known love for marijuana was the arrest of his wife Lucille on marijuana
charges in Hawaii on New Year’s Day, 1954. Lucille was nabbed by federal
narcotics agents at her hotel in Waikiki Beach where a US Customs inspector
found one cigarette and two stubs, totaling 14.8 grams of marijuana, in her
eyeglass case.
The bust was a big deal: Louis almost lost a charity gig for
the March of Dimes and was nearly barred from performing in Hawaii. Lucille
posted $300 bail and appeared at a day-long hearing on January 5 with Louis
sitting in the spectators’ section.
She pleaded guilty for expediency, she said, but protested her
innocence. It was widely speculated that it was Louis's stash.
The judge reduced Lucille’s fine to $200 owing to her
husband's good works. "At the start of 1954, he was at the peak of his
popularity and was already being touted as an ‘Ambassador of Goodwill’ due to
his tremendous popularity overseas," wrote Ricky Riccardi, who details the
incident in his book What a Wonderful World.
An often-told story relates that Armstrong once prevailed on
Richard Nixon to carry his valise containing pot through an airport for him. A
trumpeter in LA told me that that Satchmo laughed heartily every time he told
the story, pinpointing the locale as Japan. Both Armstrong and then-VP Nixon toured
Japan in late 1953, just before Lucille’s arrest. The timing begs the question: Did Nixon figure out he’d been used for a drug courier and fail to see the
humor in it?
Louis hadn’t been in trouble with the law since 1930, when
he was arrested outside the Cotton Club in LA while smoking a joint. That
incident and his subsequent jailing ultimately lead to Joe Glaser, an Al Capone
acolyte, taking over Armstrong’s career, and later suppressing his writings
about marijuana.
Riccardi, who is the archivist at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, credits Lucille with preserving Armstrong's letter and his taped audio version. A former dancer at the Cotton Club, Lucille Armstrong went on to become a community activist after Louis's death, drafted by Gov. Rockefeller.
"Can you imagine anyone giving Lucille all of those
headaches and grief over a mere small pittance such as gage, something that
grows out in the backyard among the chickens and so forth,” Louis emoted in his
letter to Glaser. “I just won't carry on with such fear over nothing and I don't
intend to ever stop smoking it, not as long as it grows. And there is no one on
this earth that can ever stop it all from growing. No one but Jesus--and he
wouldn't dare. Because he feels the same way that I do about it."
Gage “ain't nothin' but medicine," Louis concluded,
words that will resonate with medical marijuana advocates here in the city
where he wrote them.
The medical marijuana movement began in San Francisco, where
activist Dennis Peron rallied the HIV/AIDS community to fight for their rights
in the early 1990s. The state Proposition 215 followed in 1996, making
California the first state to legalize marijuana for medicine.
Those events and others will be marked by a conference happening January 26 & 27 at Ft. Mason Conference Center in San Francisco, sponsored by
California NORML. The conference will take place at the 100th anniversary of cannabis prohibition in California.
It’s high time to
end the 100 Year War that has harassed and imprisoned so many of our citizens,
including some of our best and brightest.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
How Paulette Goddard Turned on Fred Astaire?
I just learned that Petula Clark "outed" herself and co-star Fred Astaire as smoking marijuana during the filming of 1968's Finian's Rainbow. "There was a lot of Flower Power going on," she told the BBC.
The movie, directed by pot-puffing Francis Ford Coppola, is set on an agricultural cooperative where Al Freeman Jr. attempts to develop a pre-mentholated tobacco. The plot has co-star Don Francks trying hard to get a hand-rolled cigarette to produce smoke, and ends with the whole cast blissfully doused in smoke.
The Canadian-born Franks—a jazz singer, poet and Native American—used to perform a song called Smokin’ Reefers. "A smoker of weed in his younger years, he was a fan of the plant. He gave up drinking when he was 21, using the First Nations term 'firewater' when referring to alcohol." Source.
I can't find any other reference to Astaire and marijuana, but the choreographer most closely associated with him, Hermes Pan, is described in a biography as offering both tobacco and marijuana cigarettes to guests at a 1949 dinner party at his home in Coldwater Canyon.
Astaire called Pan his "ideas man" and the two began their collaboration on "The Carioca" number for "Flying Down to Rio" (1933) (probably the most humorous dance duet ever). Pan also suggested Astaire dance with a hat rack in "Royal Wedding," and advised him how to do it. He continued to collaborate with Astaire right up until his last musical picture, Finian's Rainbow.

Shortly afterwards, Pan visited Rivera at his home in San Angel near Mexico City where Rivera asked Pan to pose for him dancing, so that he could work out techniques for depicting motion in his paintings.
Errol Flynn wrote in his autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways that he visited Rivera in 1935, introduced by another actress, Dolores Del Rio (who also appeared in "Flying Down to Rio"). Rivera offered Flynn marijuana, which he smoked, and afterwards he could hear the paintings singing.
"Pan found life in Hollywood even more superficial and insignificant after his return from San Angel," wrote his biographer John Franceschina. Maybe the two-week posing process included puffing something mind expanding and if so, he shared some with his friend Fred.
See a little clip of Goddard and Astaire dancing.
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