Kingsley Ben-Adir as Bob Marley and Lashana Lynch as Rita in "One Love" |
The biopic "Bob Marley: One Love," co-produced by several members of Marley's family, tells his and his wife Rita's story in a moving way seldom seen on film.
Celebrating famous female cannabis connoisseurs throughout herstory to the present day. All contents copyrighted. "Bright Leaf" artwork by Jean Hanamoto http://www.camomoto.com
Kingsley Ben-Adir as Bob Marley and Lashana Lynch as Rita in "One Love" |
“[The Last Supper] is not my inspiration and that should be pretty obvious," production designer Thomas Jolly said, [in translation]. "There’s Dionysus arriving on a table. Why is he there? First and foremost because he is the god of celebration in Greek mythology and the tableau is called ‘Festivity.’”
The Last Supper and the Catholic Mass are likely re-enactments of the Mysteries, with participants munching mushrooms (per Joseph Allegro) and nowadays partaking of communion hosts in which the rye was not permitted to go moldy and psychoactive. Dionysus took the sacred out of the Mysteries when debauchery took hold, with wine containing only alcohol and not the more interesting and holy potions the ancients drank.
"The foundations of the Catholic Church are literally built upon Dionysus," writes Brian Murarescu in his book The Immortality Key. Harkening to The Dionysian Gospel by Dennis McDonald, he relates how Jesus's first miracle as recorded by John, turning water into wine at the Wedding of Cana, equated Jesus with Dionysus as the new God of Ecstasy.
Ancient wines and beers often contained other psychoactive substances. Picking up on scholar Dorothy Irving's interpretation of the Fractio Panis fresco in the Roman Catacomb of Priscilla as depicting female figures breaking bread together ceremonially (shown), Murarescu concludes, "Before Jesus generations of women brewed the graveyard beers and mixed the graveyard wines in the Indo-European ritual that spread east and west of Stone Age Anatolia, the 'ritual act of communion' that was 'by women for women.' After Jesus there were many women who dominated the house churches and catacombs that defined the faith, offering a safe haven for the old Greek sacrament that needed shelter from the wilderness."Once men got hold of the sacraments, war and hedonism took hold over from spiritualism and communion, and humankind has never recovered. The Eleusinian Mysteries were systematically targeted by the Roman senate starting in 186 BC. "The idea of the God of Ecstasy obliterating all loyalty to family and country was not welcome in a Roman Empire in the thick of nation building. Similarly the idea of making visionary wine available to the poor folks and women of the 99 percent was just as offensive to the 1 percent of the religious establishment," Muraresku writes.
In The Power of Myth, Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell had this exchange:
MOYERS:
Do you ever think that it is this absence of the religious experience
of ecstasy, of joy, this denial of transcendence in our society, that
has turned so many young people to the use of drugs?
CAMPBELL: Absolutely, that is the way in.
MOYERS: The way in?
CAMPBELL: To an experience.
MOYERS: And religion can do that for you, or art can’t do it?
CAMPBELL:
It could, but it is not doing it now. Religions are addressing social
problems and ethics instead of the mystical experience.
Modern
society demonizes what was once a religious experience: the partaking of
psychedelic plants. Communion has now denigrated
into a hollow ceremony performed by a cult, the Catholic church, that has a problem with pedophilia.
And laws against marijuana and other drugs have sent teenagers trying untested
and unregulated substances for the experience they naturally seek. No wonder
they’re confused.
It’s time we came to grips with the fact that
adolescents will forever demand the kind of rite-of-passage experience
that entheogens provide. Instead of offering information and guidance to
our youth, we instead try to shelter them from their own history, and natural inclinations, to their own detriment and that of society.
J.D. and Usha Vance at their Hindu wedding. |
Harris (top left) wearing a sari. |
In his usual Teflonic and ironic fashion, The Donald managed to skirt the issue of the long list of performance-and-other drugs given out like candy at his White House, and the persistent accusations that he's the one on drugs. That he offered to take such a test himself means nothing, considering that he has no compunction about cheating on elections, his wives, and almost everything else. The fact that his plan was backed by former White House doctor Ronny (as in Reagan) Jackson (whose name Trump got wrong while bragging about passing the cognitive tests he administered), makes me wonder if his dastardly plan was to have Dr. Johnson-Jackson administer the tests, duly bribed to provide a negative result for Trump.
Leading up to the debate, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow laughed heartily at Chis Hayes's pronouncement that, "If performance drugs make you a better debater and president, I'm all for them." My twitter feed ruminated a bit on that, pointing out that it's "too bad the performance enhancers Trump is on make him even more delusional, narcissistic and evil."
Then Jon Stewart, who appeared live post-debate, nailed the thought as only he can (because, Great Heads Think Alike):
After stints performing with Count Basie and Artie Shaw, Holiday opened the Café Society, the first non-segregated nightclub in New York City, and did the two-year residency there that shot her to fame. The surveillance of Holiday by the FBI and the BNE (Bureau of Narcotics) started not long after she began her residency there. It intensified after she began singing "Strange Fruit," a song about a lynching. Barney and Leon Josephson, who owned the club, were considered shills for the Communist Party and were later prosecuted.
Holiday's political views, as well as her drug use, made her a target for surveillance. Talking about "Strange Fruit" and "the Jim Crow–sanctioned racism that motivated her to sing it," she publicly said, "That's what made me a communist. Everybody should be a communist—not like the communists you meet at benefits and rallies, though. Not that stuff, at all. But we should all believe in treating each other as human beings. Everybody should have the chance to eat and sleep in peace." Like others in the African-American community at the time, it was the Communist Party's stance on racial equality that won her support, writes Alexander.
Bitter Crop recounts that Holiday "had smoked marijuana since she was a teenager" and that "she particularly enjoyed sneaking off from Café Society between sets to smoke a reefer while driving around the city in a taxi." It was mostly men who took her down into heroin, starting by smoking opium with her husband Jimmy Monroe, whom she married in 1941. When Truman Capote saw her perform at the time, he wrote of "my most beloved American singer—then, now, forever....Billie, an orchid in her hair, her drug-dimmed eyes shifting in the cheap lavender light, her mouth twitching out the words."
The opening chapter contains one blockbuster revelation after another. It starts with a group of interdisciplinary scientists connected over a span of two decades to study human consciousness by anthropologist Margaret Mead and her third husband and fellow anthropologist, Gregory Bateson.
Aldous Huxley "read Mead carefully as he wrote The Doors of Perception following his mescaline experiments in the 1950s," Breen writes. Leary's earliest published work as a scientist was inspired by Bateson, and in one of his first speeches about psychedelics, he quoted Mead, while behind the scenes he tried to convince her to take psilocybin with him. Bateson was directly responsible for Allen Ginsberg's first LSD trip and played a key role in the birth of psychedelic psychiatry in the 1950s Silicon Valley, CA.
Every chapter continues to amaze with eye-popping enlightenments both delightful and diabolical, and each ends with a cliffhanger that draws the reader to dive into the next fascinating tale, making Tripping on Utopia almost impossible to put down.