Marie Laurençin: Pot Party Painter

UPDATE 10/15: Laurençin is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.
 

Les Invités (The Guests) 1908

"Everybody called Gertrude Stein Gertrude, everybody called Picasso Pablo and Fernande Fernande and everybody called Guillame Apollinaire Guillame and Max Jacob Max, but everybody called Marie Laurençin Marie Laurençin," wrote Gertrude Stein.

Stein purchased Laurençin's Les Invités, the painter's first sale. The painting is a record of an infamous 1908 dinner party where hashish pills were taken at Azon's restaurant in Paris. Laurençin's self portrait is upper left, with knowing eyes, flanked by Picasso and Apollinaire. Fernande Oliver, Picasso's mistress, is bottom right.

The following year, Laurençin painted Un Réunion a la Campagne (A Reunion in the Country), where she is depicted reclining as a hostess would, along with the three from Les Invités and others. Thus Laurençin is possibly the first person to paint a pot party (or two). In the first portrait she is the most fully realized image, and is bringing a flower: was she the instigator for the hashish taking? She may have been a lover of Princess Violette Murat, who could have supplied her.

Marie Laurencin, Diana a la Chasse (Diana of the Hunt) 1908

An illegitimate child, Marie Laurençin was born in Paris in 1883 to a Creole mother who worked as a seamstress. She began her career as a porcelain painter at the Sèvres factory, studied with the flower painter Madeleine Lemaire, and attended the Académie Humbert where she met George Braque. Through Braque, she soon became part of the avant garde artist set in Paris. Source.

The paintings reproduced in Elizabeth Louise Kahn's excellent 2003 biography of Laurençin demonstrate amply her unique and prodigious talent.  In 1907 Laurençin exhibited her paintings at the Salon des Indépendants and was introduced to Apollinaire. The two artists began an affair that lasted until 1913, and she has also been linked with Picasso and with other women. Rodin said called her "a woman who is neither futurist nor cubist. She knows what gracefulness is; it is serpentine." Picasso purchased her painting La Songeuse (1911) and had it all his life.

Max Ernst painted her portrait, as did Cocteau and Rousseau. She kept company with Mary Cassatt and Susanne Valadon. In 1912, Laurençin and two other women (Charlotte Mare and Gaby Villon) fought off angry viewers of the controversial Cubist House with their umbrellas.

Les Chansons de Bilitis 1904 (print)

In Stella Gibbons's wonderful 1932 book Cold Comfort Farm, the heroine advises a protegée not to share her poetry with society people. "Nor must you talk about Marie Laurençin to people who hunt. They will merely think she is your new mare."

Laurençin was named chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1937 and in 1983, the Marie Laurençin Museum in Nagano-Ken, Japan was inaugurated to celebrate the centenary of her birth. A Japanese influence can be seen in this print (left). Marie Laurençin's 130th birthday is October 31st of this year.

Perhaps Laurençin was also familiar with Alice B. Toklas-style brownies: she was a regular at Gertrude Stein's salon on rue de Fleurus, and remained in contact with Toklas for the rest of her life. "I see Marie Laurençin quite often," Toklas wrote in a 1949 letter. "She wants me to translate for her some of the poems of Emily Dickinson so that she may do some illustrations—most certainly her dish of tea." Sadly, Toklas never did the translations.

In a letter Toklas wrote in 1950 discussing the Cone collection, which had just opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art, she suggests her correspondent look for "a very early Marie Laurençin" and describes Les Invités. Apparently the painting had been sold to the Cone sisters; Claribel Cone met Stein when the two attended Johns Hopkins medical school and the Steins introduced the Cones to the Parisian art scene. 

Natalie Takes the Maines Stage

Natalie Maines headlining the Star Stage at the 13th
annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco

Faced with the daunting decision of which headliner to watch at this year's Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, I decided against Robert Earle Keen, Steve Earle and Los Lobos and went for Natalie Maines, since I'd just re-read that she signed an open letter to President Obama calling for an end to the injustice of the war on drugs in April.

I made the right choice. Maines blew the crowd away with incendiary vocals and songs, belting out a strong set backed by her five-piece band. She's broken away from her country roots and is rocking out, hard, with a voice and a sensibility that are made for it.

The Dixie Chicks, fronted by Maines, were the Pussy Riot of their day: nearly blacklisted, they received death threats after announcing they were ashamed that George W. Bush was also from Texas when he ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The mother of two boys, Maines's first solo album Mother was released in May to critical acclaim (only one review I saw lamented the loss of the Chicks' harmony vocals). At the New York Daily News, Jim Farber called it "a flat-out masterpiece, an ideal match of singer and songs that moves Maines from being a skilled and decorative singer into one of the most emotive vocalists of our time." On the disc, she covers Roger Waters' song "Mother" for the title track and selects material by Eddy Vedder and Jeff Buckley. She also co-wrote two songs with Ben Harper, including "Take It On Faith," with which she ended her show tonight.

Take it on faith
That I’ll be there
When the pain comes
And I’ll take it all on faith
That you will try, try not to run
When it’s hard, so hard

We can take it on faith that Maines is not one to run away from a fight. She will perform in Napa tomorrow (Oct. 6) and in LA on October 8. Catch her if you can.

Postscript: I just uncovered that Maines appeared on a historic Politically Incorrect episode in 1998 with Woody Harrelson and medical marijuana activist Todd McCormick. It seems perhaps her opinions have "evolved" since then.

Susan Molinari in MPP Video of Republican Pot Smokers

Molinari with fellow youthful pot experimenter Newt Gingrich.

MPP is back on the celebrity beat, this time with a video of Republicans who smoked pot in their youth, to the tune of VIP Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were."

The two women in the video are Sarah Palin and former New York Congressperson Susan Molinari, now in DC again lobbying for Google.

Molinari was caught falsely denying her collegiate pot use in a 1992 interview, but in 1996 admitted she tried it "less than a handful of times," adding, "It was the wrong thing to do." Asked why she lied, she said, "It was an initial panic to a question I believe every person in America dreads." Yeah, like anyone today applying for jobs or food stamps.

Another prominent Republican woman who might have made the list, though her admissions are vague, is former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. Also, Texan Republican precinct chair Ann Lee, who is ramping up the debate with her group RAMP (Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition).

In a poll just released, a slim majority of California Republicans (53%) remain against marijuana legalization while Independents and Democrats support it at 60-64%. Maybe John McCain's jumping on the legalization train because of his wife's Cindy's past problems with prescription drugs (she'd have been better off on pot). If this upward trend continues, Bill Hicks' bit about why God made Republicans may soon no longer apply.

Too bad more female politicians don't feel safe admitting to their marijuana use, maybe then we wouldn't have policies that mean an undocumented immigrant convicted of possessing pot may be more likely to face detention than one who’s been convicted of rape.

Molinari appears in the terrific documentary Miss Representation, which also interviews everyone from Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein and Condoleeza Rice to Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow, Jane Fonda and many more. A must see!

Carolyn Cassady Steps Off the Road, Leaves Her Record

It's been reported that author Carolyn Cassady has died at the age of 90. She was the "unwilling den mother" to the Beat generation while married to Neal Cassady, the real-life inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the 1957 novel that set the Beats in motion. 

Carolyn Elizabeth Robinson was born in Lansing, Michigan on April 28, 1923. Her father was a college biochemistry professor  and her mother was an English teacher. Carolyn developed an interest in the arts at an early age and won a scholarship to Bennington College, where she studied art and drama. In 1946, she moved to Denver to work on a master's degree in fine arts and theater arts at the University of Denver. 

It was in Denver that she met Neal, Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. Shocked by their free-wheeling lifestyle, she left to look for costume design work in California. Neal followed her to San Francisco and they were married on April 1, 1948 while she was pregnant with the first of their three children. 

In her book Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg (William Morris, 1990), Carolyn recounts how Neal turned her on to marijuana, telling her: "Now darling, listen to me. You must have no fear, hear me? It is completely harmless, I promise you. All the tales you're doubtless heard are entirely false, perpetrated by Anslinger and his boys to keep up employment in the narcotic squads. All this does is heighten your sensory perception, awaken your own true awareness and speed up your thought processes while giving the impression that time has immeasurably slowed. You'll see more and see better…colors…patterns…you'll hear every note of every instrument, simultaneously. You'll be amazed at how much you usually miss…You think you've heard music? You've never heard it until you hear it on tea….Then, after a while, we'll dig into that delicious pie you've made and which we were too full to eat, and you'll taste as you never have before…pure ambrosia, you'll see."

He put her on a program of smoking "Tea" every night for a week, so that she could see get accustomed to the effects and wouldn't have to worry about getting paranoid. He taught her how to inhale it and to stop after a few "respectable puffs." Carolyn writes, "Everything he had described proved true, my favorite being the sense of extended time. After savoring the pie, we lay flat on our backs by the phonograph, the music vibrating every cell. . . .I enjoyed the time extension and the second-by-second awareness, as well as the physical feeling of well-being, but I never got over the fear of being caught in an illegal act." After getting too "stoned" (feeling immobilized) at an event, she gave it up, saying she resented "control of my mind by an outside agent."

Neal worked for 10 years as a brakeman on Southern Pacific Railroad to support Carolyn and their children, but he never tamed his wild ways, cheating on her with other women and men (namely Ginsberg), and taking off to Mexico and elsewhere to score weed. She had an understandable and sanctioned affair with the more gentle Jack Kerouac while he lived with them in San Francisco, and the three shared many nights of Tea [marijuana] and conversation. She chronicled the time in her book Heart Beat: My Life with Jack and Neal (1976) which was made into a movie in 1980 starring Sissy Spacek as Carolyn and Nick Nolte as Neal. Kerouac cast her as Camille in On the Road (played by Kirsten Dunst in the 2012 film adaptation); Carolyn is also the inspiration for Evelyn in Big Sur.

Months after On the Road was published, Neal was arrested for giving away a few joints at a North Beach party and sent to prison for two years. After Neal was arrested, Carolyn said in an interview, “The very next morning the Mercury-News printed this story. This eager-beaver reporter talked to some police chief--and none of them knew nothing yet--so they make up this wonderful story about how Neal was part of a gang that was importing marijuana from Los Angeles and Mexico on the Southern Pacific trains. That’s why he could never get his job on the Southern Pacific again. Even though they retracted it, they said it didn’t matter--it was in the paper. So they never took him back, and that’s what killed him.”

After prison, Neal took a job at a tire factory and Carolyn chronicled how he escaped more frequently into smoking pot and taking benzedrine and morphine as well as "anything else available....In the next four short years I saw him pursue death with every breath of life." He joined the Merry Pranksters on some of their LSD escapades, and it's interesting to read the account of that self indulgence from the point of view of the wife left behind. On his way to getting his old job back at the railroad, he was re-arrested and ended up back with the Pranksters instead.

On February 4, 1968 Neal was found collapsed beside a railroad track in Mexico, after he had reportedly taken a barbituate and alcohol at a wedding. He died there four days before his 42nd birthday. Kerouac, who told Carolyn he would be joining Neal soon, died the following year, after drinking himself to death.

An interview with Carolyn late in her life reveals that she was instrumental in advancing parapsychology and making acupuncture legal in California. 

Here's to Carolyn Cassidy, who survived and held her family together in the face of drug-war repression, and left us her story.

(Just found: A 1950s housewife takes LSD)

Cue The Stubbly-Bearded, Reprobate Pothead Brother

"What's up with Anna?" Philippe and Paquin Puffing in Straight A's

Ryan Philippe started his career playing the first gay teenager on a soap opera and broke through in teen hits like I Know What You Did Last Summer. He was very good in Gosford Park, and in Anti-Trust (2001), a prescient edge-of-your seat thriller about computer spying with Tim Robbins as a Gates-esque character. I also liked Philippe in Homegrown, with Billy Bob Thornton as a pot grower in Northern California. (It got crazy violent by the end but had some good acting and scripting.)

In 2006, Phillippe played real-life Navy corpsman John Bradley in the war film Flags of Our Fathers, directed by Clint Eastwood, about the journey of the United States Marines who lifted the flag at the battle of Iwo Jima. In a situation akin to Robert Mitchum playing a war hero in The Story of G.I. Joe and then getting caught with pot, Philippe was caught on camera puffing pot outside a Malibu restaurant in a 2007 Us magazine spread.

Philippe didn't go to jail like Mitchum did, but the next thing you know he and Reese split and now he's making movies like Straight A's, out this year and viewable on Netflix. In it he plays Scott, the irresponsible, near crazy pot-smoking brother who literally rides in on a horse to save the day (after the usual twists and turns, heartfelt scenes with kids, and "will he show up this time?" nail-biting moments).

Anna Paquin plays Katherine, the wife who settled for the less challenging brother William (Luke Wilson, in a funny twist since he played the pot dealer in 1997's Bongwater). Katherine is uptight and prone to freaking out, while Wilson is clueless and hot to trot (yes, it's written by a man). But Paquin is good in the scene where Katherine and Scott smoke pot by the pool. Afterwards, she suddenly has the urge to go to the Farmers' Market and cook for her family, and is sweeter and more inclusive with her daughter. (As the Marijuana Moms are now saying on talk shows everywhere, smoking pot can actually make you a better parent.)

The scene  is reminiscent of Owen Wilson getting Sarah Jessica Parker stoned in The Family Stone(d), Paul Rudd in My Idiot Brother, or Bette Midler in The Women. The shaman shows up to set everyone straight, or at least asking the right questions, so now what?

There only two ways movies like this end: everyone goes back to their "responsible," capitalist and mind-numbingly boring ways, or someone dies. Since Straight A's is set in Texas and both a Black and a Latina are depicted as servants to the rich whities that inhabit the film, it's not hard to figure out that this movie isn't headed towards a realistic end. Still, it has some good moments, the kids are terrific, and yeah, Phillippe is as hot as Louisiana asphalt.

He's currently in post-production a film he wrote and directed called Shreveport, based on his experiences filming Straight A's there. According to Wikipedia, he has been attached to a number of possible future film roles, including Chronicle, a film "about two childhood friends who reunite to launch the biggest marijuana dealership in New York City." I'm not that interested in stories about smugglers and dealers, but it sounds at least a bit more interesting.

I can't find any connection between marijuana and Paquin, but interestingly, the Urban Dictionary says:
Derived from the Central Valley in California, Anna Paquin, Anna, or just Paquin basically means pack a bowl (of marijuana). Comes from the actress Anna Paquin, and the words "Pack one". When you want to pack/smoke a bowl you say "Paquin", "Anna", "whats up with Anna?", etc. Any form of the name will work.

OOOOOOOOOOOprah!

UPDATE 5/18: Gayle King, guesting on The Ellen Show, said she wasn't telling tales out of school when she said that Oprah "has smoked a little marijuana." In a separate interview, Oprah  declared Ellen's pot-infused party "the most fun I ever had. I don't even know what happened to me." 

9/18/2013 - Last year's Top 50 Most Influential Marijuana Users from MPP had only five women on their list, and a female didn't show up until position #21.

This year's a little better, with 11 women included and Oprah Winfrey coming in at #2, between Presidents Obama and Clinton.

Winfrey was asked when she last smoked marijuana on Bravo's "Watch What Happens Live" on August 16 and replied "Uh...1982." Host Andy Cohen then said, "Let's hang out after the show" to which she replied, "Okay. I hear it's gotten better."

At age 17, Winfrey won the Miss Black Tennessee beauty pageant and began doing the news part time at radio station WVOL. She was then both the youngest news anchor and the first black female news anchor at Nashville's WLAC-TV. She moved to Baltimore in 1976 to co-anchor the six o'clock news at WJZ-TV where she became co-host of WJZ's local talk show People Are Talking.

By her admission, Winfrey did much of this during the time she smoked pot, until the age of 28. In 1983, she began to host AM Chicago, taking the show from last place in the ratings the highest-rated talk show in Chicago. The rest is herstory.

According to Kitty Kelley's unauthorized biography, drug use was so prevalent at the Nashville station when Oprah worked there that management removed a vending machine "after they discovered it had been rigged to dispense marijuana." On a special pre-taped show in January 1995, Winfrey tearfully admitted she did cocaine in her past, according to Kelley to stave off a lawsuit by a former boyfriend who alleged she addicted him to coke. Oprah's book club endorsement of former heroin addict James Frey's A Million Little Pieces blew up when it was uncovered Frey fabricated most of the book.

Like Obama, Winfrey is lucky she never got arrested for a youthful pot offense, or she might have had a much lesser career, like 2008's Miss Teen Louisiana Lindsey Evans.

Showing up next on MPP's list is Lady Gaga at position #20. Last year, Gaga missed the cut, coming in at #52 (even though she was probably more influential last year). Jennifer Aniston (last year's #38) follows at #25, and Angelina Jolie dropped from #24 to #28 (maybe because she says she doesn't like pot). Sarah Palin dropped the furthest, from #14 on last year's list to #39 this year.

Martha Stewart is new to the list, coming in at #29 after she also joked with Cohen about knowing how to roll a joint. The venerable Susan Sarandon joins the list at #33, with an early admission uncovered by VeryImportantPotheads.com

Also newly added are Madonna (#42), Miley Cyrus (#45) and Rhianna (#47). Maya Angelou, who was the top woman on the MPP list last year at #21, dropped down to #37, and Whoopi Goldberg, who made last year's list at #44, has dropped off entirely.

Some obvious omissions to the list are: Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Jennifer Lawrence, Anne Hathaway, Melissa Etheridge, Joan Rivers and Roseanne Barr. I sure hope someone asks Hillary Clinton soon if she smoked.

Why Nancy Reagan Was The True Traitor to America (Not Jane Fonda)

Fonda as Reagan. (We like her look better as a hippie.)

Jane Fonda is playing Nancy Reagan in a new movie, "The Butler" and the right [sic] wing is predictably apoplectic about "Hanoi Jane" playing the wife of their sainted spokesmodel. One theater in Kentucky even refused to show the movie in protest.

But who is the real American traitor?

When Ronald Wilson Reagan* beat Jimmy Carter for president in 1979, the Iranian hostages that ruined Carter's re-election chances were released within 24 hours. Only later did we find out it was because Reagan had made a secret deal to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for their release on his watch. After his election, Reagan subverted Congress by exchanging arms for cocaine in Nicaragua, and dumping it in Los Angeles's American-American neighborhoods, leading to our crack epidemic.

And all the while Nancy Reagan was the face of the Just Say No to drugs campaign in the US. "So that while Nancy Reagan was saying 'Just Say No,' the CIA was saying 'Just Fly Low,'" joked Paul Krassner.

Adding to the hypocrisy, according to Kitty Kelley's book Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography (Simon and Schuster, 1991), the Reagans smoked a joint proffered by Nancy’s chum Albert Bloomingdale at a dinner party with Jack Benny and George Burns around 1968. (Bloomingdale reportedly got the joint from a hooker; he was later accused by his longtime mistress Vicki Morgan of riding her piggyback and whipping her.)

Kelley wrote that Nancy siphoned off $3.8 million from her antidrug charities into her own foundation, and an unnamed senior White House staffer speculates in the book that she was on amphetamines to curb her appetite because she was so energetic. But apparently when Kelley's book came out, it was the charge of smoking marijuana that the Reagans found most insulting, because that was the incident they answered publicly.

In 2008 Nancy endorsed John McCain for president. Now that the tide is turning, and polls are showing a majority of Americans are for marijuana legalization, McCain has said, “Maybe we should legalize.”

Will Nancy follow? She’s been a champion for Alzheimer's awareness and in 2009 she praised President Obama for reversing the ban on federally funded embryonic stem cell research. There's still time for her to figure out, as the song says, "Them Hippies Was Right."

*Each of those names has six letters

Also see: The Disastrous Legacy of Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" Campaign.