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."