The Wide and Wild World of Nancy Kwan

Upon the publication of her memoir, "The World of Nancy Kwan," acting legend Nancy Kwan was interviewed, partly in Cantonese, by Ronny Chieng on The Daily Show. Noting that she worked with and hung out with some of the top Hollywood icons of the 1960s, Chieng asked her, "What kinds of drugs were they doing back then?"

The 85-year-old actress cleverly turned the tables on Chieng, asking him, "What drugs do you do?" When he said he didn't do drugs, she assented, "Well, I don't do drugs either." Chieng joked that she could tell him the answer later in Cantonese, and she laughed.  

Kwan Tells the Opium War Tale

Born into a prosperous Hong Kong family with a British actress and model as her mother, Kwan begins her book by describing the Opium Wars, by which Britain gained control of Hong Kong and forced the importation of opium to balance trade. 

"The island's natural harbor made it a convenient stopping place or British trading ships (the ones from other Western countries) sailing to and from Southeast Asia," she writes. "These merchants were unhappy about their commercial dealings with China because they were at the wrong end of a trade imbalance. There was a high demand for Chinese imports such as tea, silk, and porcelain in European countries, but the Chinese were less interested in Western goods. The British East India Company solved the problem by licensing private traders to operate a market guaranteed to become a booming business: the opium trade."

"Opium was used for medicinal purposes in China but not for recreation until these foreign merchant ships provided a steady supply—and collected hefty payments in gold and silver. Predictably and as planned, a large percentage of the Chinese population became addicted to the drug. When the emperor saw the negative effect that opium addiction had on his country, he tried to ban it and destroyed a large shipment, causing British merchants to lose a fortune. They cried foul, and and the first of two 'Opium Wars' ensued in 1839. England was a stronger military power than China and easily won the war, then demanded more favorable trade terms."

As a child escaping the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during WWII, Kwan writes that she contracted an unspecified illness and, lacking access to a doctor, was treated by her aunt with traditional, medicinal herbs, and recovered. 

At Its 40th Anniversary, "The Breakfast Club" Cast Says Pot-Smoking Scene Was Improvised

The reunion of all five "The Breakfast Club" cast members on the 40th anniversary of the film is kind of hilarious, because they were still the characters they played.

In the iconic 1985 film that was said to define Generation X, Molly Ringwald played Claire The Good Girl against Judd Nelson as Bender The Rebel. Ally Sheedy played The Freak, Emilio Estevez The Jock and Anthony Michael Hall The Brain. Forced to serve high school detention together, the disparate characters bond after they smoke a joint together. 

Speaking of the film's writer/director John Hughes, Nelson said, "He was the first writer who could ever write someone who was young, without them being less," Nelson said. "Except less old." 

Telling the story of watching Hall perform his hilarious, stoned, "chicks can't hold deir smoke" routine, Nelson said that, "In the middle of close-camera coverage of the routine, the camera runs out of film but Hughes doesn't say, 'Cut.'... It's something I've never seen since. It's a reflection of his affection for the characters that he created."   

When the interviewer asked Hall how he managed to play being stoned because, "Surely, you'd never been stoned at 16 years old," the actor was quick to quip, "If I may, don't call me Shirley," an Airplane reference the crowd appreciated. Then in true Brainy fashion, looking down, he said, "Uh, was I stoned at 16, yeah maybe." Bender chimed in, "Some people start late." 

Easter/Ishtar Falls on 4/20 Once More

Once again, as in 2014, Easter Sunday falls on 4/20. This time, cannabis retailers seem to be co-celebrating the dual holiday, with Easter-themed decorations and events. 

Easter, the celebration of Jesus's resurrection, is the most sacred day of the Christian year. In ancient Babylon, around the spring equinox, people celebrated the resurrection of their god Tammuz, who was brought back from the underworld by his mother the fertility goddess Innana, known in Akkadia as Ishtar, pronounced “Easter” in most Semitic dialects. Flowers, eggs, goats and rabbits, among other agricultural products and animals, were the symbols of the holiday then, as now.

Ostara (1884) by Johannes Gehrts

Ishtar/Ostara and Her Connection to Easter

"In ancient Sumeria, Ishtar was held in high esteem as a heavenly monarch," writes Jeanne Achterberg in Woman as Healer. "Her temples have been found at virtually every level of excavation." The Ishtar Gate to the inner city of Babylon was considered one of the ancient wonders of the world.

Also called the Queen of Heaven, Ishtar was a compassionate, healing deity. Her medicine kit likely included plant allies, and one of them, known as the "aromatic of the Goddess Ishtar," was likely cannabis. 

As the land of Sumer became a perpetual battlefield, Ishtar
became the goddess of war and destiny, and became more
sexualized, even as women were restricted from education
and the healing arts.

In mankind’s first written story The Epic of Gilgamesh
(circa 2000 BC), the cruel king Gilgamesh calls Ishtar
a predatory and promiscuous woman, and rebukes her
advances, just before taking off with his buddy Enki-
du to chop down the great cedar forest. Gilgamesh’s
repudiation of Ishtar, some scholars say, signifies a rejection
of goddess worship in favor of patriarchy in ancient times.

One of the interpreters of the Epic of Gilgamesh, discovered in tablets at the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh in the 1850s, was Leonidas Hamilton, who published a translation in 1884 that gives Ishtar top billing over Izdubar (Gigamesh), subtitled "The Babylonian Goddess of Love and the Hero and Warrior King." Hamilton writes, "Ishtar... may be identified with Eostre of the Germans, or Easter. To this goddess our Saxon or German ancestors sacrificed in April...from thence arose our word Easter, which the Saxons retained after their conversion to Christianity, so that our Easter-day is nothing more nor less than Ishtar's day." Hamilton cites the Hebrew and English lexicon from John Parkhurst. 

Some have tried to debunk the Ishtar/Easter connection, saying the holiday is named only after the German goddess Ostara (pictured), "the divinity of the radiant dawn" (Grimm), doubtlessly a reincarnation of Ishtar, who the Babylonians called "the morning star" and "the perfect light." 

Art Show Kicks off San Francisco's 4/20 Week "Space Walk"

The “Higher Visions: Art of the Plant” and “Keep Glowing” blacklight poster exhibition at the Haight Street Art Center in San Francisco served as a fine and fitting opening party for this year's SF Space Walk today. 

A High-light is the brilliant “Stoned Wars” poster series from Emek, who I am told designed the poster for the concurrent Coachella Music Festival this year. Emek’s work includes take-offs on Star Wars characters and the Peter Tosh “Legalize It” album cover. I also liked the clever, feminist-minded digital collages from Alexe Reyes.

Female-run Moon Made Farms and Sonoma Hills Farm were collaborators on the exhibit. Plants grown by Moon Made are presented as in a herbarium, beautifully pressed and framed. In the blacklight poster exhibit, my favorite was the irreverent “Pink Jesus” poster designed for Sonoma Hills, featuring a female figure and the banner, “SHE HAS RESIN.”

Outdoors on the patio, stunning portraits of female growers from the Emerald Triangle are presented as part of “The Farm and Feminine” project from GrupoGreenlit. 

Inside, the wonderful documentary Tending the Garden was shown. It interviews couples practicing regenerative agriculture to grow cannabis and other crops in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, bucking the trend of corporatization that is squeezing out craft cultivators in California and elsewhere.

The exhibit, I am told, will be up through mid-May. The Center is open Thursday–Sunday, 12-6 PM.

The party kicked off a week's worth of daily events in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area. On Wednesday 4/16 Snowtill will drop their living soil indoor "Mirage" strain drop at 7 Stars in Richmond. And on Thursday 4/17 is a hand-picked sun-grown flower showcase at Solful in Irving St. in SF.  

The event will culminate in a 4/20 (Easter Sunday) reception at Mirus Gallery in SOMA featuring 10 brands. While you're in the city, you might want to check out the annual "Hunky Jesus" contest from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.  

The Great Gatsby at 100

Let's raise a glass--and a J--to the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, the jazz-age classic from F. Scott Fitzgerald that may be the first novel about a drug dealer. 

Fitzgerald had a distant cousin, Mary Surratt, who was hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. But he was named for his ancestor Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to “The Star Spangled Banner.” 

Raised in a middle-class family with an alcoholic father in Rochester, NY and St. Paul, MN, he excelled in the Catholic schools he attended and became one of the first Catholics to attend Princeton University.

Apparently, he was a bit of a rebel. The protagonist of his second novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) has this exchange with a friend:

“Did they ban cigarettes? I see the hand of my holy grandfather.”
“He’s a reformer or something, isn’t he?”
“I blush for him.”

Anthony Patch, who stands in for Fitzgerald in the story, is the grandson of Adam J. Patch, a reformer in the mold of Anthony Comstock (for whom Patch is named). In 1873 Comstock created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an institution dedicated to supervising the morality of the public Patch speaks disdainfully of the “shocked and alarmful eyes” of “chroniclers of the mad pace of America.” 

Fitzgerald wrote his third novel,  The Great Gatsby, published on April 10, 1925, while living in Europe and friendly with fellow Lost Generation authors Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and others.  Known to be a serious drinker, in 1929, he contributed to the New Yorker an autobiography of a life spent drinking. Since while he was partying and writing marijuana "reefers" will still legal and available, I wonder if he did more than drink, and if The Great Gatsby reflects this.