Miley Tokes, Gaga Chokes : All in 24 Hours!

How can a girl get attention these days in the media meatgrinder Penthouse once depicted on its cover? When a young woman has to resort to licking and riding construction equipment in the nude so that we'll listen to her song, it's our society that's really reached a new low.

You can't blame Miley Cyrus for needing to compete with the hired nude girls in Robin Thicke's idiotic "Blurred Lines" video, and you gotta admit she came in like a wrecking, twerking ball to take Thicke out, even casting a female dwarf as him in her performance last night at the European MTV awards in Amsterdam.

To cap it off, after winning "Best Video" for "Wrecking Ball," Cyrus pulled a joint out of a Chanel bag and lit it onstage -- and no one was talking about anything else. (TMZ has the unedited and edited-for-the-US nonsmoking version.)

Cyrus's blunt move out doobed Lady Gaga, who smoked onstage last fall at her concert in Amsterdam, saying, "It has totally changed my life and I've really cut down on drinking. It has been a totally spiritual experience for me with my music.”

But just when we were celebrating the reality that women could come out of the cannabis closet without repurcussions to their careers or personal lives, Gaga labeled herself as addicted to pot, grabbing back headlines she hasn't enjoyed exiting her egg.

How to get attention, ladies? Like Joni Mitchell did, or Grace Slick, or Chrissie Hynde: With talent and hard work. Let's stop watching our music on YouTube and open our ears and hearts to the sound again. We've got a lot more to fix than the pot laws.

UPDATE 12/7/2013 - Gaga's views on marijuana are getting as hard to keep up with as her fashion statements. She now says smoking pot makes her feel 17 again. What could be wrong with that? 

Gossip Girls Having Sex in the City (sans Pot, for the most part)

Oh, what I do for research.

I've just watched nearly every episode of Gossip Girl looking for marijuana and have come up nearly empty. I got hooked by the first episode where bad boy Chuck shares a joint with his buddy Nate. (The girls are apparently off gossiping, missing out on the fun.) The plot sickens when Chuck nearly date rapes an underage girl at a party, but his character is later redeemed when he finds his love for the scheming, goody-two-shoes Blair (who would truly benefit from chilling out with a phatty).

In a later episode, Serena (Blake Lively) is seen coming out of a Venice pot club, bag in hand, also with Nate (pictured). But rather than smoking it herself, turns out she's been tricked into procuring it for someone on the movie set she's working on, almost leading to the project's demise. Although all the Gossip Girl characters drink, Lively's been quoted saying she neither drinks nor does drugs, and her character is always trying to clean up her act.

Nate (played by Chace Crawford, who's been popped for pot) is joked about throughout as the stoner of the group, and in Season Four he turns on Raina Thorpe (played by Tika Sumpter, left), the only black Gossip Girl (I guess pot is deemed OK for ethnic groups).

In the Season Four crescendo, Serena's mother Lily is heading to prison (or what turns out to be an ankle bracelet worn in her penthouse) for sending an innocent man to the big house. Her sister Carol, offering support, promises to visit her inside and bring her some pot brownies.

In another episode, Blair's mother hosts an Arabian-themed party, complete with hookahs, to which her daughter turns up her pretty little nose. Blair is played by the multitalented Leighton Meester, who was born in prison while her mother was serving a 10-year sentence for smuggling marijuana from Jamaica.

It makes me think that writers and producers take seriously Hollywood's requirement that marijuana must have negative consequences to be included in the plot. The standard was revealed when the Meryl Streep movie "It's Complicated" got slapped with an "R" rating in 2009 because her character smokes pot and nothing terrible happens to her. Reportedly Streep also smoked medicinal pot in One True Thing, a film in which she plays a cancer patient who takes her own life with an overdose of morphine (I guess that consequence was bad enough for the censors).

Marijuana showed up in a couple of episodes in Sex in the City (1998-2004), notably one called "The Post-It Note Always Sticks Twice" (Season 6, Episode 7) wherein Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is broken up with by her boyfriend via a post-it note. To cheer her up, Samantha procures a joint and the two smoke it on the street.

Soon a cop comes by and begins arresting Carrie, but her friends talk him out of it when the post-it is offered as evidence of the bad day she's had. Giggling and jokes about bogarting that (banana) split ensue (pictured), and Parker actually does a good job acting like a stoner. In the following episode she decides "it was time to leave fear behind and have some fun," so she tries the trapeze.

Carrie smokes cigarettes on the show, tries to quit for a boyfriend, and goes back to the man she can share cancer sticks with. The show has been cited as a reason young women are drinking so much, and Kristin Davis, who played the good girl Charlotte on the series has said she's a recovering alcoholic. Nothing other than an occasional, amusingly presented hangover is ever shown as a negative consequence of alcohol, and I'm guessing the Carrie Gets Lung Cancer From Her Nicotine Habit episode won't be a sequel either. (NORML's Paul Armentano just re-debunked links to cannabis smoking and cancer.)

Samantha (played by Kim Cattrall), the naughtiest girl on the series, is the one who gets breast cancer on the show. In the second Sex in the City movie (2010), Samantha smokes a hookah in Abu Dhabi and encounters some very bad consequences indeed when the girls are all deported after she has sex on the beach. Parker's been making noises about a third installment; let's hope no one will have to get sick in that one to enjoy the safer substance.

A High-Living Princess: Violette Murat

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

Princess Violette Murat, c. 1928-30
Photograph by Berenice Abbott 

In his memoir Chiaroscuro (1952), Welch painter and "King of the Bohemians" Augustus John described a 1920s dinner party at the home of photographer Curtis Moffatt, "a bit of a sybarite" who married poet Iris Tree:

When he lived in Hampstead, Curtis used to give small parties at which sardines and wine were consumed -- and sometimes hashish. I had already tried smoking this celebrated drug without the slightest result. It was Princess Murat who converted me. She contributed several pots of the substance in the form of a compôte or jam. A teaspoonful was taken at intervals. Having helped myself to the first dose I had almost forgotten it when, catching the eye of Iris Tree across the dinner table, we were both simultaneously seized with uncontrollable laughter about nothing at all. 

 ...The crises of laughter continued with some of us till dawn, with further repercussions as I made my way home with Violette Murat, who had only been slightly amused by the night's proceedings. 

Violette Murat, who turned John onto hashish, was a Bonaparte princess who may have been a lover of Marie Laurencin. The book Cote D'Azur - Inventing The French Riviera includes the following insight into the lifestyles of the rich and famous in the 1920s: “Princess Violette Murat, friends say, not only bought her opium in Toulon, but also rented a submarine in order to smoke it in peace."

Murat is described at another famous dinner party in 1922, where VIP Marcel Proust met James Joyce and Stravinsky: "Princesse Violette Murat flounced out of the party, looking daggers at [Proust] as he arrived. Gossip about her meanness was rife, and she was mortally offended by rumours that one of Proust’s particularly parsimonious characters was based on her. With her strange lack of physical proportions, he once said of her 'She looks more like a truffle than a violet.'"

The Napoleonic family is large and convoluted; everyone has five names, with repetitious family names like Eugene. I've uncovered conflicting information about Murat but I think she is Violette (aka Cecile) Ney D'Elchingen, born September 9, 1878. Granddaughter of Napoleon's marshall Michael Ney, she was the wife of (Eugene) Joachim Murat (1875-1906), a descendant of the Joachim Murat (1767-1815) who married Caroline Bonaparte, Napoleon's sister. Violette died in Paris on July 19, 1936.

Along with VIP Tallulah Bankhead, Murat was part of the Harlem renaissance in the 1920s. Berenice Abbott, who photographed (Eugene?) Murat (shown), wrote of her, “A very high liver. Oh, all kinds of wonderful tales are told about her….She…knew how to make an art out of living and that’s something stupendous. Anything she did became a vibrant, extraordinary event. I can remember seeing her go into a ten-cent store and buy the place out and have a fling doing it.”

NOTES: The 100th anniversary of the publication of Swann's Way, Proust's first volume in A la recherche du temps perdu (aka "In Search of Lost Time") November 14, 2013, will be celebrated the world over.

Born on November 13, 1913 in Paris, Princess Laure Louise Napoléone Eugénie Caroline Murat was a cousin of Violette Murat. In 1939, she married Fernand Auberjonois, a journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade as well as NBC and Voice of America. The couple's son, actor Rene Auberjonois, is best known as Father Mulcahy in the movie M*A*S*H.

UPDATE 3/15 - Just discovered: Tucked in the corner of La Grand Odalisque by Ingres (1814)—a painting commissioned by Violette's grandmother and Napoleon's sister Caroline Bonaparte Murat—is what looks like a hash or opium pipe, along with what looks like an incense burner (complete with smoke). The fan the girl holds looks rather like a hookah mouthpiece.

The painting was “widely criticized” when it appeared, supposedly for the elongation of the girl’s figure (which almost looks like a grand pipe itself, with a big-ass bowl).  

Sinead's Wild Ride Looking for Marijuana

Sinead O'Connor has been in the news after penning an open letter to Miley Cyrus, after hearing that Cyrus cited O'Connor's video for "Nothing Compares 2U" (pictured left) as an influence for her wrecking ball video.

The Irish songstress warned the younger singer that the music industry "will prostitute you for all you are worth, and cleverly make you think its what YOU wanted.. and when you end up in rehab as a result of being prostituted, ‘they’ will be sunning themselves on their yachts in Antigua, which they bought by selling your body and you will find yourself very alone."

Cyrus, BTW, was spotted smoking a blunt at a Halloween party, where presumably she was the only young woman not wearing a Miley Cyrus twerking get up.

O'Connor once said that dealing marijuana was one of the most honest professions a person can have. Now it seems the lack of a legitimate dealer has lead to the quick break up of her latest marriage, to drug counselor Barry Herridge, after only 16 days.

On her blog, she blamed the late-2011 split on taking her husband on what she described as "a bit of a wild ride" looking for marijuana on her wedding night, as she does not drink. After the street dealer she found handed her a bag of crack instead, her hubby freaked out.

O'Connor recently said she hides her pot smoking from her younger children by smoking it in the garden, and that she worried her older child would get arrested for pot, "which is what happened."

Travels with Maggie, Tooley, Squiggy and Micky

I finally viewed the 1972 adaptation of the Graham Greene novel Travels with My Aunt, starring Maggie Smith, now known as the dowager duchess from Downton Abbey.

The story begins with a young paramour of the mysterious Aunt Augusta (Smith) hiding his pot stash in an urn of ashes following a cremation. A madcap voyage ensues, during which Augusta and her nephew, the staid bank manager Henry, encounter a young woman named Tooley on the Orient Express.

Tooley is played by Cindy Williams, the year before she appeared in American Graffiti. Tooley offers Henry some cigarettes that turn out to be pot, and the experience opens his mind and heart.

Williams is super in the role, from a time when, like in Graffiti, a new realism was seen in cinema. She went on to be paired with Penny Marshall as a writing partner, leading to a guest shot on "Happy Days" and their spin-off "Laverne and Shirley" (1976-1983). The show has a 1981 "lost episode" titled "I Do, I Do" in which the girls get stoned on pot brownies.

David Lander, who played Squiggy on "Laverne and Shirley," was an MS sufferer and advocate for medical marijuana who said he and his partner Michael McKean (Lenny) created their characters for the show while high. Lander told producer Garry Marshall that instead of patrolling the halls during the show he ought to put marijuana in the budget.

The sitcom lives: "Today Show" co-anchors Savannah Guthrie and Natalie Morales dressed as Laverne and Shirley on Halloween (way classier than "Good Morning America's" Lara Spencer as Miley Cyrus on a wrecking ball).

Sixties TV icons The Monkees were also pot fans. A "Behind the Music" episode reveals that Peter Tork, considered the best musician in the band, was busted for $3 worth of hash he had on him when crossing the US/Mexican border and did three months in jail for the "crime" in 1972.  Meanwhile drummer Micky Dolenz was admittedly partying hearty, talking about being stoned and demonstrating what he meant by that (see left). 

The Day That Hollyweed Happened

Douglas Finegood thought the Hollywood sign should say "Hollyween" for Halloween, but that project was never realized. The man who first altered the iconic sign to say "Hollyweed" on January 1, 1976 died of multiple melonoma at the age of 52 in 2007.

An art student at CalState Northridge, Finegood conceived of the worthy, weedy project as part of an assignment about working with scale. He got an "A".

"For a long time, he had this idea that if you just changed the two O's you could change the whole meaning of the sign," his wife Bonnie told the LA Times. He chose to make the alteration to celebrate California's law decriminalizing marijuana, which took effect on the morning Algelinos awoke to the altered reality.

Finegood made a scale model, enlisted three friends to help and spent about $50 on materials. Using only stones and rope, they hung sheets as if they were hoisting sails. The image was seen around the world and clinched Finegood's relationship with his future wife when she appreciated his effort.

Objecting to being called "vandals" in a 1983 letter to the Times, Finegood and his comrades wrote, "An artist's role throughout history has been to create representations of the culture he exists in. By hanging four relatively small pieces of fabric on the landmark, we were able to change people's perception of the Hollywood Sign."

According to the Times, Finegood obscured consonants to coin "Holywood" for Easter later in 1976 and "Ollywood" to protest the hero worship of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987. In his final round of wordplay, Finegood made a political statement against the Persian Gulf War by draping plastic sheeting over the 50-foot-high letters to form "Oil War" in 1990. But park rangers and police yanked down the plastic before sunrise, and almost no one saw Finegood's final work.

After the sign had been altered by others several more times, city officials beefed up security with a fence, alarms and eventually installed a closed-circuit surveillance system. As superagent Sue Mengers said of Hollywood in the '70s versus today, "We used to have fun."

Finegood's other concept, camouflaging the sign for April Fool's Day to make it seem as if it had vanished, also never happened.

Read more about Hollywood and marijuana.

UPDATE 2017: Another "vandal" brought back the Hollyweed sign on 1/1/2017 to celebrate the passage of Prop. 64 in California, legalizing marijuana for adult recreational use. 

Parkinsons Quiets Linda Ronstadt's Voice, Not Her Spirit

UPDATE 10/19 - A wonderful documentary, "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice" is currently in theaters.

Linda Ronstadt has been making the talk show rounds talking about her new "musical memoir" Simple Dreams and revealing that she can no longer sing due to Parkinson's disease.

To Diane Sawyer's insipid question about her illness, "Do you ever get angry?" Ronstadt, who has always had a social consciousness and dated the once-and-future Governor Jerry Brown, answered, "Yes, especially when I think about our immigration policy."

Uncomfortable with her Queen of Rock status, Ronstadt sang country harmonies with Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton, appeared in Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance, and recorded an album of jazz standards and another of Mexican music she learned as a child. Her biography is mostly about the music, but some cultural references slip in.

On drugs, she writes that alcohol made her ill, and cocaine caused a bloody nose and was said to interfere with hearing: she eschews both. She admits to trying marijuana "several times" and not objecting to others using it, but adds in the words of a friend, "When I smoke pot, it makes me want to hide under the bed with a box of graham crackers and not share."

Ronstadt seems to have sanitized her own drug history, according to New York Daily News and compared against her 1975 interview with Ben Fong-Torres of Rolling Stone. After all, she did record Lowell George's "Willin'"

As uncovered by CelebStoner, Ronstadt told the Daily News in 2013, "People who smoke pot are generally peaceful. I think it should be legal. I think all drugs should be legal, just like alcohol. You take the money out of it, and suddenly there's not going to be a big drug trade because all of a sudden the drugs will be cheap. The whole idea of the drug cartels and the violence surrounding them will be gone. We can tax it and it will be a huge tax revenue, and I think it will be easier to educate people. There will be less HIV from infected needles, less hepatitis C; all that stuff could be controlled for the better."

On dating Brown, she writes, "Jerry Brown and I had a lot of fun for a number of years. He was smart and funny, not interested in drinking or drugs, and lived his life carefully, with a great deal of discipline...Also, he considered professionally many issues that I considered passionately: issues like the safety of nuclear power plants, agricultural soil erosion, water politics, and farm workers' rights."

Perhaps it's time to add medical marijuana rights to her list, because studies have shown that cannabinoids can aid Parkinson's. Massachusetts' new medical marijuana law, for one, specifically allows the use of cannabis for Parkinson's.

After a long, hectic and fruitful career, it might be time for Linda to stay home and heal with some graham crackers and cannabis.

UPDATE 7/14 - Ronstadt has been awarded the National Medal of the Arts by President Obama, who admitted he had a crush on her back in the day. She entered in a wheelchair but rose to accept her award.

UPDATE 12/16 - A star-studded tribute and benefit was held in LA.

7/19 - Ronstadt has been named a 2019 Kennedy Center Honoree. It ought to be a great show, December 15 on CBS.

Michael J. Fox Parkinson’s Foundation Urges Congress To Pass Three Marijuana Research Bills