RIP Frank Gehry, Whose Architecture Soared High (and So Did He)

I can't believe I am so soon writing another RIP post for a Very Important Pothead, this time architect Frank Gehry who has died at the age of 96. 

Gehry re-made architecture in Los Angeles and beyond with mind- and form-bending buildings crafted from materials like plywood and chain-link fence. Among his many worldwide accomplishments, he won the coveted commission to design the Walt Disney Concert House in downtown LA (pictured). Among his many awards was the including the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

In 2014, Tommy Chong said on the cable TV show "Getting Doug with High" that he smoked pot with Gehry. Others have claimed that Gehry was a stoner over the years. 

A 2015 biography of Gehry by Paul Goldberger, former architecture critic for The New Yorker, confirms that Gehry can be counted amount the many Successful Stoners that populate the arts and other fields. According to Goldberger’s book Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, in 1967 Gehry visited Paris with his office manager Babs Altoon, when "high on some marijuana they had brought along, they went to the Eiffel Tower, took the elevator to the top, and ran all the way down the stairs." 

Later, before fellow architect Philip Johnson came by to see a house in Malibu that Gehry had designed for artist Ron Davis, Gehry and Davis got stoned and were "somewhat giddy" by the time Johnson arrived. [I interviewed Gehry for a story I wrote for the LA Reader about the Malibu house; he was very personable, humble and kind, like most potheads.] 

David Whitney, Johnson's partner, "regularly provided Frank with marijuana, and he invariably brought some to share on the water" in the 1990s when Gehry co-owned a sailboat with colleagues Jim Glymph and Randy Jefferson. According to Goldberger, "Not the least of the pleasures of their sails was that it gave him and Glymph, who smoked a great deal of marijuana, a pleasant place to get stoned." Glymph recalls in the book that he and several others smoked weed in Gehry's hotel suite before the opening of Seattle's Experience Music Project in 2001, but that Frank, "worried that word would get out that he was hosting a pot party, shooed them out." 

In 2008, Gehry's daughter Leslie used cannabis during her battle with uterine cancer, and she and her brother Alejo "had the happiest time they have ever had together when Leslie invited her brother to share some of the medical marijuana she had been given." The actor Lawrence Fishburne is also quoted in the book saying he worried a bit when he took Frank on motorcycle rides because "sometimes I'd, you know, smoke a bit of marijuana." 

Gehry's career was championed by Progressive Insurance mogul Peter Lewis, who contributed to marijuana-reform measures including California's Proposition 215, the nation's first medical marijuana law. 

In Hillary Clinton’s farewell speech as secretary of state, she said, “We need a new architecture for this new world, more Frank Gehry than formal Greek.” California Governor Gavin Newsom and First Partner partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom released a statement upon Gehry's death, saying, "His work encouraged imagination and freedom of thought, and recognized the value and the beauty of working people and neighborhoods, seeking to make room for everyone in this world – especially the misfits like himself. Frank will be missed, but his legacy – in California and beyond – stands as tall as his finest creations.”

 

UPDATE: Nice obituary from the Associated Press on Gehry, also from the New York Times, who called him a "titan" of architecture.  

RIP Todd Snider, the "Alright Guy" who left us "High, Lonesome and Thensome"

Sadly, singer songwriter Todd Snider has died at age 59 following an incident in Utah where he was assaulted and then arrested for a creating a disturbance when the hospital where he was being treated insisted on releasing him. 

Snider titled his last album and tour "High, Lonesome and Thensome." In the video for the title track (my new favorite song), he enjoys a sesh before the session. The tour was cancelled on November 3 following his attack. 

Snider was known to fans of John "Illegal Smile" Prine, for whom he often opened. The two had similar song-writing styles: simple and straight to the point, yet beautifully poetic and universal. And always amusing, if not downright hilarious. NPR reports he modeled himself on — and at times met and was mentored by — artists like Prine, Kris Kristofferson and Guy Clark. Jimmy Buffett was a fan who produced his first two albums. 

Looking online for Snider's hit "Alright Guy," I could only find a video version with the word "dope" censored from the line, "Now maybe that I'm dirty, and maybe I smoke a little dope / It ain't like I'm going on TV and tearing up pictures of the pope" [a reference to Sinead O'Connor calling out the Catholic church's child-abusive ways long before anyone else did]. 

In his popular singalong song "Beer Run" he sings;

A couple of frat guys from Abilene 

Drove out all night to see Robert Earl Keen ...

They wanted cigarettes, so to save a little money 

They got one from this hippie that smelled kinda funny 

And the next thing they knew they were both really hungry 

And pretty thirsty too

According to CelebStoner, in 2014 Snider formed the supergroup Hard Working Americans with Dave Schools, Neal Casal, Chad Staehly and Duane Trucks; in the video for "Blackland Farmer" from their self-titled album, a struggling farmer switches to marijuana. 

The Acid Queen: Rosemary Leary

A new biography titled The Acid Queen sheds light on Rosemary Woodruff Leary, who was arrested with her husband Timothy Leary for carrying marijuana over the Mexican border, and during the infamous G. Gordon Liddy Millbrook raid, both in 1966.

The book's author Susannah Cahalan became interested in "mind opening" and psychedelics after her brain disorder autoimmune encephalitis was misdiagnosed as mental illness, spawning her bestselling book, Brain on Fire. 

Cahalan appeared by Zoom at a recent event in Berkeley, CA sponsored by the Women's Visionary Congress, a group that highlights psychedelic women who "often disappeared behind there more famous and florid male partners." She drew on Rosemary’s autobiography Psychedelic Refugee and her archives at the New York public library (where there are 400 boxes in Timothy's archives and only 25 for Rosemary, largely redacted FBI files).

Rosemary Woodruff, Cahalan writes, had her first mystical experience in 1943, the summer after her eighth birthday. Walking alone near her home, "she felt a tingling sensation rise up from her spine. The trees crackled with energy. She had plugged herself into the electrical grid, and the whole world flickered in confirmation of her sudden second sight: everyone and everything were connected. It happened for a second, a nanosecond, but that shining moment of divine union would stay with her....Other realms called. She longed to return to that blissful state."

The statuesque beauty worked as a model and a stewardess, professions in which "uppers" were regularly handed out to young women to keep them slim and active. In 1959, she had a small role in the film "Operation Petticoat" starring Tony Curtis and Cary Grant. During publicity for for the film, Grant went public for the first time about his use of LSD, telling a reporter that it saved his marriage to Betsy Drake (who lead him to try it). 

Living a Bohemian life in New York City, Rosemary dated jazz musicians and downed diet pills by day and marijuana at night. She "learned to find pleasure in the sensation of her heart beating in her ears when she smoked cannabis in jazz clubs. And how to portion out correct dosing of the hash fudge she baked from Alice B. Toklas’s famous 1954 cookbook. Like a growing number of Americans, Rosemary was joining an emerging drug subculture, not for medical or spiritual use, but for pleasure, identification, and belonging," Cahalan writes. A peyote experience made he realize she needed to leave her junkie boyfriend, packing her bags and leaving him the next day. 

Trumpty Dumpty Dumps on Us All

Humpty Trumpty by Barbara Kelley

Apart from watching our country's comedians (when they are permitted to air), about the only solace I have in these dark authoritarian days is attending peaceful protests like the huge No Kings Marches that happened on Saturday all over the nation. The camaraderie, the clever signs, and the knowledge that the resistance is alive, bolstered my spirits for another day of living in the USA. 

But nothing quite prepared me for the uber-infantile, incredibly nasty and undemocratic AI video that Trumpty Dumpty posted on his social media after an estimated seven million Americans marched in protest of his administration's autocratic actions. 

In the video, he sports a crown and flies a plane named King Trump that dumps massive shit bombs on protesters, including young left-wing influencer Harry Sisson (just after giving Charlie Kirk the Medal of Freedom). As the Turkish proverb goes, "When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace becomes a circus." 

It was bad enough that the day before the rallies, Trump freed from prison and released from paying restitution the convicted fraudster George Santos, perhaps pandering to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has surprisingly become a critic of the Trump administration and is ready to vote to release the Epstein files. 

RIP Diane Keaton, Who Played Charming Potheads on Film

UPDATE: CA Governor Gavin Newsom issued a statement, saying: “Diane Keaton was a true Californian. She was a self-described oddball, uniquely stylish, deeply creative, funny, and an acting legend who could steal the screen in comic and dramatic roles alike. She was in a class all her own, an icon."

Art: Alejandro Mogollo

The sad news hit today that Diane Keaton, who won an Oscar in 1977 for playing a charmingly ditzy pothead in Annie Hall (1977),  has died at age 79. 

Keaton, whose last name at birth was Hall, was doubtlessly an inspiration for her character in the film, which also picked up Oscars for Best Director (Woody Allen), Best Writing and Best Picture. 

The original title was Anhedonia, meaning the inability to experience pleasure. Allen's character suffers from the condition until he meets Annie, who with all of her fumbling and self-consciousness is a beautiful vessel of pleasure.

Alvy tells Annie that her whole body is an erogenous zone, and soon it is revealed that she insists on smoking pot before they make love. When Alvy objects, comparing it to a comic getting a laugh too easily, Annie tells him if he'd only smoke with her, he wouldn't have to see a therapist. Cinemablend ranked her at #6 as only woman on their list of top 10 movie potheads on the strength of her performance.  

Kamala Harris Address Cannabis, and Joe Rogan, in Her Book "107 Days"

Kamala Harris's new book "107 Days" about her presidential campaign says of her time as District Attorney of San Francisco:

"I was one of the first elected progressive district attorneys, looking for ways to keep nonviolent offenders out of jail rather than put them in it. I didn’t seek jail time for simple marijuana offenses. My Back on Track initiative, connecting offenders with services and jobs, and also taking care of their mental health by doing things like hooking them up with counseling and gym memberships, worked so well it became a model for other jurisdictions. It is true that prosecution rates for violent crime increased on my watch. If you rape a woman, molest a child, or take a life, consequences should be serious and swift. I don’t apologize for that."

Cannabis comes up only one other time in her book, discussing negotiations to be interviewed by Joe Rogan on his podcast. "I wanted to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast on October 25. He chose Trump instead," she recounts.

"I wasn’t in the weeds on any of it. I left that up to my staff," Harris writes. "They’d suggested topics that might interest Rogan’s audience, such as cannabis, social media censorship, and crypto. Rogan’s team said they just wanted to discuss the economy, immigration, and abortion. Again, I was fine with that."

Trump and the UK's Cannabis Connections: Shakespeare, Kipling and Orwell, plus King Charles and Princess Kate

In what must have reminded the Brits of Billy Bob Thornton's portrayal of the US President in "Love, Actually," Donald Trump made his second state visit to the UK, where he embarrassingly read a speech that praised British authors Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, Lewis, Orwell, and Kipling. "Incredible people," he ad-libbed after reading the list. 

At least three of those authors have possible cannabis connections, as do King Charles and Princess Kate. 

Clay pipe fragments excavated from Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon home were found in 2001 to contain small amounts of cocaine and myristic acid - a hallucinogenic derived from plants, including nutmeg. In Sonnet #76, he wrote that a "noted weed" inspired his creativity. His father dealt in contraband sheep's wool. 

Rudyard Kipling was given "a stiff dose of chlorodyne" to treat a bout of dysentary in 1884 at the age of 18. This mixture of opium, tincture of cannabis, and chloroform "hit him with the force of a revelation. In modern parlance, it 'blew his mind,'" writes a biographer. A character in Kipling's novel Kim, says, "News is not meant to be thrown about like dung-cakes, but used sparingly - like bhang." 

High-lights of the Smithsonian "Entertainment Nation" Exhibit and Report from DC and Mt. Vernon

The “Entertainment Nation” exhibit at the Smithsonian American History Museum in Washington, DC, highlights several Tokin' Women and men, and other sheroes and heroes. It opens with a pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland as Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," and the guide told us the exhibit was years in the making. (Garland was 13 years old when she sang "La Cucaracha" in a film short.)

The first Tokin' Woman I caught was Bessie Smith, with copy that said, "Pioneering African American blues women such as Bessie Smith sang about the virtues of economic and sexual independence from men...in 'Any Woman's Blues' she laments her affections for a man who continues to let her down." Smith also sang about reefer in "Gimme a Pigfoot" (1933). 

Included in the exhibit are Billie Holiday's 1939 recording of "Strange Fruit" and the Aretha Franklin album cover, "Young Gifted and Black" (a Nina Simone song), in front of the dress worn by Billie Jean King when she defeated Bobby Riggs in the 1973 "Battle of the Sexes." 

The Day Georgio Armani Died and All the Dominoes Fell (for Me)

When fashion designer Georgio Armani died on September 4, commentators noted how influential the Armani suits were as worn by Richard Gere in the 1980 film "American Gigolo." The plot had Gere's character, a male prostitute, framed for a murder after he begins an affair with the wife of a California senator and his handler sends him on a kinky sexual assignment. 

Sexual blackmail is the undercurrent of much of our politics these days, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal comes close enough to Trump for him to pull out every possible distraction he can.  It made me think of the handmade sign I saw held by a Russian man at the "pussy power" march I attended after our Groper- and Grifter-in-Chief was first elected: "Trump is Kompromat," with a hammer-and-sickle image. 

Women Get Short Shrift in Hank Williams and Leo Tolstoy Biopics

So, finally women's stories (aka herstories) are being told, but often through the lens of men. Two biopics I tuned into of late tell the story of women married to famous men, and the miserable lives they lead trying to steer their husbands away from their demons, and have their own ambitions squashed. 

First I watched I Saw the Light, the 2015 biopic of Hank Williams, who penned an astonishing number of great country songs in his short life.  Bob Dylan has named Williams as a key influence in his work (just after Woody Guthrie). Nora Jones and Dylan are among the many artists who have covered Williams songs. 

Tom Huddleston as Williams is sufficiently lanky, and does a fine job singing and moving like Hank did onstage, even on "Lovesick Blues," with the characteristic yodeling that earned Williams the moniker "Lovesick Blues Boy." The song's performance at his 1949 Grand Ole Opry debut is depicted, without showing the six encores he earned that day. 

We see precious little of Williams's performances in the film, which instead focuses on his turbulent relationship with his first wife, Audrey Sheppard—well played by Elisabeth Olsen—and his mother, played by the always-excellent Cherry Jones. As depicted, Sheppard, a singer/songwriter herself, did much to advance Williams's career, and wanted to share the spotlight with Hank, but she wasn't considered an asset to his career by the (male) musical hierarchy. Hank's alcoholism and womanizing, along with the usual life-on-the-road challenges, helped to tear their marriage apart just before his tragic and untimely death in a car accident in 1953, at the age of 29. 

Using her married name Audrey Williams, Sheppard did have a recording career, starting with "Leave Us Women Alone," where she seems to have had her say at last. 

Next I watched "The Last Station," depicting the last days of Russian author Leo Tolstoy, in an Academy Award-nominated performance by Christopher Plummer. Playing his wife Sofia "Sonya" Tolstoy is the also-Oscar-nominated Helen Mirren, depicted largely as a money-grubbing shrew objecting vehemently to the machinations of his acolytes, who encourage him to give away his personal property and the copyrights to his books, instead of leaving them to his wife and children, (The couple had 13 children, 8 or 9 of whom survived into adulthood.)

Pitcher Tug McGraw on Smoking Grass (not Astroturf)

I did some investigation after spying a meme purporting that pitcher Tug McGraw once said, when asked if he preferred grass or Astroturf, "I don't know, I never smoked Astroturf." Turns out, it's true, and there's more to the story. 

Sly's Stony Name and Brian Wilson's "Good Vibrations"

It's a sad week when we lose two musical luminaries: Sly Stone and Brian Wilson. 

Sly & the Family Stone's Greatest Hits was one of the first albums I selected from the Columbia Record Club my family belonged to just after my 13th birthday. It opened with, "I Want to Take You Higher" and was full of positive, uplifting messages like, "You Can Make It If You Try" and "Everybody Is a Star." 

"Everyday People," the band's first #1 hit, was a perfect transition for me from nursery rhymes to rock and roll,  in the rhythm of a jump-rope rhyme with a funky twist: 

There is a blue one 

who can't accept the green one 

For living with a fat one, 

trying to be a skinny one 

Different strokes for different folks 

And so on and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby 

Ooh, sha-sha 

We got to live together 

 

The man who became known as Sly Stone was born as Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, and raised in the Bay Area city of Vallejo in Northern California, where he performed gospel music starting at the age of 4 or 5 with his siblings (and future bandmates) Freddie and Rose. Already a successful songwriter and music producer by the age of 19, he produced Grace Slick's song "Somebody to Love" for her original band The Great Society. He soon became a popular D.J. at the San Francisco radio station KSOL.

In his memoir "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," he writes of that time:

That was when I completed my name. Back then, when they added a new on-air voice, they usually made up a DJ name. I was already using the Sly from the blackboard, but I didn't know the rest yet. "Sly Stewart" didn't sound quite right. Someone at the station, maybe Tom Johnson, tried to pin "Sly Sloan" on me. That didn't work at all-you couldn't even get it out of your mouth right. "Give me a few days to think of something better," I said. It didn't take that long. 

I went on the air and introduced myself as Sly Stone. I was cooking with a bunch of ingredients. It sounded right. I was already smoking marijuana. And there was a tension in the name. Sly was strategic, slick. Stone was solid. (Ray Charles would even have a song called "Let's Go Get Stoned," too, but that wouldn't come out for a few years yet.) Once I had my name, I started making up little rhymes around it and putting them on-air. I'm Sly Stone of KSOL, goodness for your mind, body, and your soul. 

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

UPDATE 8/25: In honor of its 40th anniversary, "The Breakfast Club" will be shown in cinemas nationwide on Sept. 7 and again on Sept. 10.

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.

Sidney Bechet and the Steppenwolf

In 1926, novelist Herman Hesse attended performances of the Revue Nègre featuring Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet. Steven C. Tracy, professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, writes that the character of Pablo in Hesse's novel Steppenwolf was "inspired by Bechet's playing."

The novel's narrator Harry (Hesse) is older than more staid than the free-wheeling Pablo, who plays music ecstatically. (Hesse was 20 years older than the Creole musician Bechet.) Harry is introduced to Pablo by a character named Hermine, an androgynous creature named it seems for Hess and perhaps Hermes, the god who transports souls to the underworld. With a face "like a magic mirror to me," Hermine seemed to know all about Harry, though he muses, "Perhaps she might not understand everything of my spiritual life, might not perhaps follow me in my relation to music, to Goethe, to Novalis or Baudelaire."  

Harry tries conversing with Pablo about classical music, but their conversations lead nowhere. Hesse writes: 

His business was with the saxophone in the jazz-band and to this calling he appeared to devote himself with love and passion.... Apart from this, however, he confined himself to being beautiful, to pleasing women, to wearing collars and ties of the latest fashion and a great number of rings on his fingers. His manner of entertaining us consisted in sitting beside us, in smiling upon us, in looking at his wrist watch and in rolling cigarettes—at which he was an expert. His dark and beautiful Creole eyes and his black locks hid no romance, no problems, no thoughts.....

Once when I showed a certain irritation, and even ill-humor, over one of the fruitless attempts at conversation he looked in my face with a troubled and sorrowful air and, taking my left hand and stroking it, he offered me a pinch from his little gold snuff-box. It would do me good. I looked inquiringly at Hermine. She nodded and I took a pinch. The almost immediate effect was that I became clearer in the head and more cheerful. No doubt there was cocaine in the powder. 

Hermine told me that Pablo had many such drugs, and that he procured them through secret channels. He offered them to his friends now and then and was a master in the mixing and prescribing of them. He had drugs for stilling pain, for inducing sleep, for begetting beautiful dreams, lively spirits and the passion of love...."

Sidney Bechet: Viper Mad

Watching "Finian's Rainbow" for St. Patrick's Day, I was reminded that Don Francks, who played Woody in that movie, was a Canadian Native American who gave up alcohol at the age of 21 and liked to sing a medley of "Smokin' Reefers" and "Viper Mad." 

From what I've been able to uncover, "Viper Mad" is a Sidney Bechet composition that was first recorded as "Pleasure Mad" by the likes of Blossom Seeley, Whitey Kaufman, and Ethel Waters starting in 1924. Bechet's co-author was composer and lyricist Rousseau Simmons. But in 1938, just as the Marijuana Tax Act took effect, Bechet recorded the tune as "Viper Mad" with lyrics like: 

Wrap your chops
'round this stick of tea
Blow this gage
And get high with me
Good tea is my weakness
I know it's bad
It sends me gate and I can't wait
I'm viper mad

Jasmine Crockett and Cannabis

While most Democrats are wringing their hands over the Trump/Musk takeover of our democracy, Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas has been telling it like it is. PBS's Evan Smith introduced her as someone who has "emerged as the raised voice and clenched fist" against Trump/Musk in an "Overhead" interview a few days ago.  Asked by Smith about her fellow Democrats' response to Trump, she said, "Resistance means different things to different members of the caucus. For me, it's to get a little rowdy."

The NRCC has homed in on Crockett, after she spoke at the Democratic National Convention last August, when she praised Kamala Harris for holding police to account over the death of Brianna Taylor in a botched drug raid. 

Now I see under the headline, "How a marijuana case fuelled Jasmine Crockett's rise to presidential critic" that during her time as a public defender, "a black juvenile caught with a brownie laced with marijuana in small towns was granted a mandatory felony conviction." Reportedly, Crockett refused to accept a plea bargain for a 17-year-old black client being tried as an adult as an accomplice to murder. Facing 47 years in prison, he was offered 10 years instead for pleading guilty to a drug possession charge. Crockett maintained there was no evidence for her client's crime and got the case dismissed. 

In 2021, Crockett filed House Bill 1233, to make it easier to prescribe low-THC cannabis under the Texas Compassionate Use Program. “What’s a medical refugee? One of the countless folks leaving Texas for a state with medical marijuana so they can receive the lifesaving treatments they need. We can not let stigma and politics interfere with medicine and evidence-based treatments. That’s why I filed HB 1233,” Crockett wrote in a series of tweets on 4/20. “Doctors know what’s best for their patients — not the government. HB 1233 gives physicians full discretion over medical cannabis treatments including the dosage, potency and route of administration. Medical marijuana isn’t just used to treat uncomfortable conditions — physicians rely on this to treat deadly ailments and see great results not achieved through traditional pharmaceuticals.”