Else Lasker-Schüler: Orientalist Poet

Lasker-Schüler in 1875

Once called “a bohemian princess who lived in the belief that she was the prince of Thebes [Egypt],” the German-Jewish author Else Lasker-Schüler was dubbed “The Black Swan of Israel,” by the poet Hille, who nurtured her career. Widely regarded as one of the most important German lyric poets, one rhapsodic fan proclaimed, “To know Else Lasker-Schüler was the nearest to God that a mortal can hope to reach” (quoted in Else Lasker-Schüler: Inside this Deathly Solitude, by Ruth Schwertfeger).

As a child Else was diagnosed with either epilepsy or St. Vitus dance, “for which there is no factual record, but which played a central role in the feeling life and imagination of the poet—one that was undiminished over the years" (Else Lasker-Schüler: A Life by Betty Falkenberg).*

Believing that she was “a misunderstood, mystical visionary,” (Jewish-German Identity in the Orientalist Literature of Else Lasker-Schüler, Friedrich Wolf, and Franz Werfel, by Donna K. Heizer), she left her first husband, a bourgeois doctor, and had a child out of wedlock to an unknown father.

In 1903, at the age of 34, she took up with 25-year-old George Levin, who she renamed Herwarth Walden. In 1910 the pair, already foundering as a couple but remaining devoted to each others’ work, co-founded the influential literary magazine Der Sturn (The Storm) in Berlin. Lasker-Schuler meanwhile was having success as a poetess, both in ink and in performance.

One of her expressive poems reads:


BUT YOUR EYEBROWS ARE STORMS 

At night I hover restlessly in the sky, 
undarkened by sleep. 

Around my heart dreams buzz, 
searching for sweetness. 

But my edges are spiked— 
only you drink gold unharmed. 

I am a star 
in the blue cloud of your face. 

When my rays shine in your eyes 
we are one world. 

And would fall blissfully asleep— 
but your eyebrows are storms. 

Readers of this blog know I've connected Europeans' fascination with the Orient in the 1800s with their discovery and use of cannabis, and that I've reported that some think the incense of biblical times, caneh bosom, was cannabis.

In 1906, Ruth St. Denis, who had not yet been to India, created her famous solo dance “The Incense.” Coaching a dancer for this role, Martha Graham told her, “Your arms become the smoke, which is your prayer.”

Else too was an Orientalist, traveling east and penning The Nights of Tino of Baghdad, (1907) and The Prince of Thebes (1912) in the style of the Arabian Nights.  Even her style of dress was avant garde for the time: she chose Oriental-style trousers over dresses. "Lasker-Schüler was fascinated with what she saw as the exotic, the mythical and the mystical in Oriental culture," wrote Heizer. "It was a culture filled, she thought, with visionary artists like herself.

Heizer argues that for Jewish-Germans, whom Germans often saw as Orientals, "writing about what they considered to be Oriental culture enabled them to examine not only the exotic Other but also themselves. Through their Orientalist works they could thus explore their own cultural identities. Coming to terms with their own identities became a pressing concern for Jewish-Germans at this time because of the rise of volkisch ideology, which, with its stress on national uniqueness, asserted that they did not belong in German society."

Lasker-Schüler in Oriental garb

I haven’t yet found a reference to Lasker-Schüler taking hashish, only opium once during an illness. But it's recorded that her crowd indulged. One friend, Hanns Heinz Ewers, took haschich starting in 1895, adding opium and mescaline by 1903.

In 1914, a young Walter Benjamin was drawn over to Lasker-Schüler’s table at Berlin’s Café des Westens, which he called “the headquarters of Bohemia.” Benjamin called Else's poem “David and Jonathan” one of his all-time favorites. He wrote, “the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson.” (quoted in Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism by David Pan).

Modigliani (a hasheesh user) was one artist who was shown at Der Sturm Gallery, owned by Walden, who is credited with introducing the term "Expressionism." One of Walden’s “circle of expressionists” was Harald Kreutzberg, who in 1920, while attending art school in Dresden, performed a "hashish dance" at a student carnival party. The dance was so well-received that Kreutzberg enrolled in a dance class and later paired with the exotic-looking dancer Yvonne Georgi for and act that “enjoyed enormous and unprecedented international appeal” from 1928 to 1930. (Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935, Karl Toepfer).

Lasker-Schüler’s lover Ernest Junger, a prolific German novelist and essayist who is “considered among the forerunners of Magic Realism,” used ether, cocaine, and hashish in the early 1920s; thirty years later he turned to mescaline, ololuqui, and LSD. His experiments were recorded comprehensively in Annaherungen (1970)

Else was reportedly abused by the right-wing press and beaten unconscious by Nazi thugs when she won the German Kleist Prize for her body of work in 1932. She fled to Switzerland and then Israel. "She often gave money to people in need, leaving herself in poverty, and she spent her last years that way, dying in Jerusalem." (Notable Women in World History, Lydia G. Adamson.)

*St. Vitus dance, or chorea is an involuntary movement disorder that can have several causes, including drug intoxication (commonly levodopa, anti-convulsants and anti-psychotics). Sources of L-DOPA include Mucuna pruriens (velvet bean), and Vicia faba (broad bean or fava bean). “Like all priests of the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries who were forbidden from ever touching, mentioning, or looking at Fava beans, Pythagoras forbade his followers from doing the same and some claimed that it was due to his belief that fava beans contained the souls of the dead. …Initiates of the Eleusinian mysteries where studies were done on a ritual that transmogrified participants were said to have a deathlike experience after ingesting the kykeon and would then pass by the home of Kyamites, the Greek demigod of Fava beans." (Wikipedia)

Janis Ian and the Summer of Love

"I was born into the crack that split America."

So begins Society's Child, the autobiography of singer/songwriter Janis Ian. Writing about her side of the generation gap, Ian goes on to say, "We marched, wrote polemics, started magazines, took over universities. And in between, we smoked a little pot, made a little love, and changed the world forever."

Ian published her first song at the age of 14 in the magazine Broadside and earned two standing ovations from the likes of Judy Collins and music industry execs when she first performed them. By 15, she had a hit on her hands with "Society's Child," despite the fact that many radio stations banned the song about an interracial relationship, and she met with hostility when she performed it. One station in Atlanta that played the song was burned down, and people would spit in her food in restaurants. She writes:

I was having a hit record.
I was singing for people who wanted me dead.
I was fifteen years old. 

Ian was no stranger to controversy, or hostility. Her father, a farmer, attended a meeting about the price of eggs and was thereafter followed by the FBI as a suspected communist. The family lost the farm and moved every two years when her father was unable to get tenure at the schools where he was a respected teacher, after the FBI would pay a visit to school administrators. Added to that was abuse Janis suffered from her family's dentist and the early realization that she was attracted to women at a time when homosexuality was not well accepted.

She found her salvation in music, with the help of teachers and counselors who recognized her intelligence and potential. After she hit the charts, she traveled West and played the Berkeley Folk Festival, where she befriended Janis Joplin, eight years her senior. "We went to a party at Peter Tork's house one night, where everyone was wearing bright silk Indian clothing and crashing on a floor filled with pillows and hashish pipes," she wrote. At the next party, where a heroin dealer went around the room shooting people up, Joplin turned to her and said, "Kid, time for you to go home."

Jimi Hendrix used to call her, "that girl who wrote that song, man, you know." He let her try some of his cocaine, but her reaction was so extreme that she never tried it again. "Lucky for me, because cocaine could easily have come my drug of choice," she wrote. "I'd have loved the extra energy, the sense of power, and I'd have ended up like so many of my friends, strung out or even dead."

When Ian taped the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (below), Bill Cosby saw her sleeping with her head in her chaperone's lap during a break, and proceeded to tell several industry people that she was a lesbian and shouldn't be on national TV. Now that we know about what Cosby's been accused of, one wonders if he was really upset that Ian wouldn't be drinking wine with him.



Ian herself became an object of government surveillance, through the CIA's "Operation CHAOS" program, whose goals were to target war protestors, civil rights activists, and public figures, and:

Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions, explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges. Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them. Send articles to the newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt. Get records of their bank accounts. Obtain specimens of handwriting. Provoke target groups into rivalries that may result in death. 

"For us, it was impossible to separate protesting against the war from the civil rights movement, using drugs, and living on music," Ian wrote. "The rest of the country had managed to ignore most of it, until San Francisco's 'Summer of Love' [50 years ago in 1967] got national attention from the press, and large portions of America that still yearned for the simplicity and rigidity of the fifties had their minds blown."

Ian enjoyed smoking pot and listening to a roommate recite Russian poetry and Dostoyevsky. "We confined ourselves to marijuana and hash, although once in a while something else snuck past," she wrote. She and a boyfriend declined an invitation from Stanley Owsley to try his LSD, but did accept some THC pills from him, which they liked to take while flying (on planes), with Ian hiding it in an empty makeup tube.

The day after Martin Luther King was shot, Janis was assaulted on the streets of New York and given a Coke to drink that was laced with too-strong acid; she was prescribed Stelazine to come down from it but still experienced flashbacks later.

After Robert Kennedy was also shot, "Every hero I had was dead," Ian wrote. "The war on drugs dried up the border, and there was next to no marijuana in the five boroughs. The Mafia moved in with heroin, and normal people my age, not in the music business, not on the fringes, started dying. It seemed death was all around me."

Around this time Ian's agent David Geffen arranged for her meet to fellow songwriter Laura Nyro. On their evening out, "We spent most of it in his limousine, riding around downtown and smoking pot." On another occasion, Nyro took a TV to Ian's apartment to watch the premiere of "The Mod Squad" with her friend Peggy Lipton; "So we watched TV through dinner, smoked some dope, and made our good-byes."

Nyro, Ian wrote, would constantly sip Cheracol, a cough syrup with codeine, "her eyes getting duller by the hour." Once during a recording session Nyro pointed to a purple chair and said, "I want it to sound like that." Ian was able to translate that she wanted it legato.

Somewhat abandoned by her now-divorced parents, unhappy with the state of the world, and stressed from the pressures of her career,  the young singer took refuge in marijuana. "Since the world refused to change, I stayed stoned," she wrote, though she never smoked while working. Then a book called The Day on Fire, a fictionalized account of the life of VIP Arthur Rimbaud "turned my world upside down," she wrote. "Overnight, I became steeped in the mysteries of being an artist....Just being a person wasn't enough after reading Rimbaud, not by a long shot."

She started seeing a therapist who told her, "You don't trust anyone. You're scared of everyone." Not surprising, considering she was surveilled since she was a child, and overdosed with a drug by a stranger. She overdosed on Seconal, and then stopped eating, her weight dropping to 82 pounds just as she turned 18. Once more music brought her back, and she wrote her hit "Stars" after being inspired by Don MacLean's "Starry, Starry Night."

Ian's songs have been covered by Joan Baez, Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, Bette Midler, Amy Grant, Shirley Bassey, Cher, and Mel Tormé, among others. In 1993, she released the album Breaking Silence and came out as a lesbian; she was interviewed by Tokin' Woman Melissa Etheridge for The Advocate.  

Ian, who will turn 66 on April 7, is now writing for the Huffington Post. Her latest article, Women Under Trumpcare—A Proposal, is well worth a read. Keep up with Janis at JanisIan.com

Maha Shivaratri and Parvati

A poster advertising an Indian smoke shop
depicting Shiva and Parvati, circa 1992.

My friend Jeannie Herer reminds me that this is Maha Shivarati, the holiday when Nepal relaxes its laws to allow the partaking of the holy ganga, generally in the form of bhang, an edible mixture of cannabis often mixed into milk that is also consumed on other holidays, like the spring festival Holi.

In some parts of India, rather than just worshipping the Lord Shiva, Maha Shivarati celebrates the day Shiva married the goddess Parvati ("She of the Mountain"). By some legends Parvati was as devout as Shiva, but when she saw him she had to marry him, and diligently brought him out of contemplation into the world.

I was told this legend straight from the Himalayas at an Albert Hofmann Foundation talk in Santa Monica around 1990: Shiva was busy frolicking on the mountaintops with various nymphs when Parvati, left alone at home, discovered a cannabis plant growing in her garden. When Shiva returned to her, Parvati put some of the plant into a pipe for him to smoke. He did, and thereafter the two invented tantric yoga and saved their marriage.

Rather like the Adam and Eve story, here it is the woman who discovers the magical plant (which is “forbidden” in the Bible, what Timothy Leary called “the first controlled substance”).

Shiva with the goddess Parvati,

approx. 600-700 A.D.  India; Bihar state 

Another legend told on the podcast "Great Moments in Weed History" is that Parvati soothed Shiva's throat with bhang after he drank poison to save mankind, turning him blue like the blue-throated cubensis mushroom. The event is another from Shiva and Parvati's life that is celebrated on Maha Shivarati (which looks to me like a combination of the words Shiva and Parvati).

Parvati is the Hindu mother goddess of love, fertility and devotion. Along with Lakshmi (goddess of wealth and prosperity) and Saraswati (goddess of knowledge and learning) she forms a trinity of Hindu goddesses called a Tridevi. In the Navaratri ("nine nights") festival, the Goddess is worshiped in three forms, starting with Parvati for the first three nights. In Hindu temples dedicated to Parvati and Shiva, she is symbolically represented as the argha or yoni. She is found extensively in ancient Indian literature, and her statues and iconography grace Hindu temples all over South Asia and Southeast Asia. [Wikipedia]

Premiere edition of Ms. magazine with
artwork by Miriam Wosk

Shiva is also a god of destruction, and Parvati has come down to us as Durga, her warrior form, or as Kali, the destructor goddess. The cover of the original Ms. magazine in 1972 featured Kali as a modern woman trying to juggle work and motherhood.

Robert Bly wrote in Iron John, "Women in the 1970s needed to develop what is known in the Indian tradition as Kali energy—the ability really to say what they want, to dance with skulls around their neck, to cut relationships when they need to. Men need to make a parallel connection with the harsh Dionysus energy that the Hindus call Kala."  

I am told by a colleague that Shiva's female counterpart is also the divine feminine spirit Shakti, and that the two are seen in hermaphroditic iconography, called (by men, it seems) Ardhanarishvara, which "represents the synthesis of masculine and feminine energies of the universe (Purusha and Prakriti) and illustrates how Shakti, the female principle of God, is inseparable from Shiva, the male principle of God, and vice versa."  

Shakti is also called Mahadevi, the Great Goddess. David Kinsley writes, "Texts or contexts exalting the Mahadevi however, usually affirm sakti to be a power, or the power, underlying ultimate reality, or to be ultimate reality itself. Instead of being understood as one of two poles or as one dimension of a bipolar conception of the divine, sakti as it applies to the Mahadevi is often identified with the essence of reality." In the Hindu calendar, the 13th day of every lunar month (the New Moon) is known as Shivratri. Mahashivratri is on the new moon that occurs in February-March in the month of Magha.

Mural by Katherine Arion at India Sweets
and Spices groceries in Glendale, CA

Parvati is the mother or creator of Ganesh (she molded him from clay, and Shiva gave him his elephant's head). She is often celebrated for her motherhood instead of her own divinity; I searched recently all over an import store for an image of Parvati, but could find her only minimized by Shiva and Ganesh, or replaced entirely with her son. 

She is believed to be sister to the Goddess Ganga, the personification of the sacred river Ganges and the term for cannabis leaves and flowers that are smoked. Another interpretation of these ancient myths is that the cannabis plant is another form of Parvati. She is also called "Uma" and it's where modern screen goddess Uma Thurman got her name, meaning Light, which comes down as Helen (she of the nepenthe) in Western myth. 

Bhang and Ganga are said to reside side by side on Shiva’s head, while s/he dances on the body of a dwarf who embodies indifference, ignorance and laziness. May we all dance on that dwarf tonight.

Opiate of the Masses Now Officially Opiates (and Booze)

UPDATE: Maher's second show had Eva Longoria bringing up voter suppression, and Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan chiming in that 2 million voters had been purged from the rolls in his state. This prompted Grover Norquist to bring up exactly what Greg Palast has been saying: that Pew found 2.8 million people are registered to vote in more than one state (thus the Crosscheck list). This is the real voter fraud we need to look at, people. Read more. 

Bill Maher's season opener on HBO's Real Time started with Tokin' Woman Jane Fonda, included his observation that Toby Keith ought to be head of ATF because he writes so often about booze, and ended with startling statistics about the states and counties that voted for Trump and their pain pill or heroin habits.

Maher put up maps demonstrating that the 14 states with the highest number of painkiller prescriptions per person all went for Trump, who won 80% of the states that have the biggest heroin problem.West Virginia, Trump's best state, downs 433 pain pills yearly for every citizen of the state. In Wisconsin, heroin deaths nearly quadrupled between 2008-2014. Even Muskogie, Oklahoma about which Meryl Haggard penned "Oakie from Muskogie" has nine drug treatment centers, Maher noted.

The stats stemmed from the findings of several observers, including journalist Chris Arnade, who has spent the past four years traveling the US to document the opioid crisis, according to Business Insider. "Wherever I saw strong addiction and strong drug use," Arnade said, he saw support for Trump.

Maher also noted that most of the counties in Pennsylvania and Ohio that flipped Republican had higher overdose rates than average. That  correlation was made by Shannon Monnat, a rural sociologist and demographer at Pennsylvania State University. She found that counties that voted more heavily for Trump than expected were closely correlated with counties that experienced high rates of death caused by drugs, alcohol, and suicide.

Historian Kathleen Frydl found that six of the nine Ohio counties that flipped from Democrat to Republican in 2016 had overdose death rates far above the national rate, and 29 of 33 Pennsylvania counties with overdose death rates above 20 per 100,000 conformed to the same pattern and/or flipped from Democrat to Republican entirely. (You can see Frydl's comparison of county vote totals and overdose death rates here.)

Noting the irony of hippies long being called unpatriotic for their drug use, Maher joked, "Kids, don't do heroin. It's the gateway to becoming a Republican," and added, "You're doing the wrong drugs. Stick with the stuff that comes out of the ground. Ninety percent of you are farmers!"


The full quote from Karl Marx translates as: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."

"I expected to see [the correlation] because when you think about the underlying factors that lead to overdose or suicide, it's depression, despair, distress, and anxiety," Monnat told Business Insider. "That was the message that Trump was appealing to."

In the 2002 Dutch film Twin Sisters, two young girls are separated from their twin, and grow up in very different ways. One has loving, enlightened parents and is educated and happy; the other is abused and kept ignorant, and ends up marrying a Nazi who promises her something better than her desperate life.

And so the fix is to address the factors that are causing so many Americans to reach for opiates, actual or trumped up.

UPDATE 2/9/2017 - Professor Irwin Corey, the World's Foremost Authority who has died at the age of 102, used to joke about Moses and the burning marijuana bush, and once said, “Marx, Groucho Marx, once said that religion is the opiate of the  people. I say that when religion outlives its usefulness, then opium will be the opiate.” A head ahead of his time.

Good Girls Revolt (with Ganja)

UPDATE 10/17: Roy Price, the Amazon chief executive who cancelled the show, has resigned amid sexual misconduct allegations. 

Just as I discovered the excellent series Good Girls Revolt on Amazon Prime, it was announced that it won't be picked up for another season.

The series is based on the 2012 book by former Newsweek staffer Lynn Povich about the 1970 lawsuit filed with the EEOC by 46 women who were denied the chance to write under their own bylines at the magazine as part of a company-wide policy.

The suit was filed by none other than Eleanor Holmes Norton, the former ACLU lawyer who currently serves as the Congressional representative from DC. Eleanor Clift, who rose from "Gal Friday" at the Atlanta bureau to Newsweek's White House correspondent, writes, "I owe my career to the women who put themselves on the line to right wrongs embedded in our collective psyches about the roles of women and men."

Making an appearance as Nora Ephron is Grace Gummer, which is fitting because her mother Meryl Streep was pregnant with her when she filmed Ephron's movie Heartburn. Nora left Newsweek before the suit happened, and went on to a writing career. Also appearing is actor Hunter Parrish, who played Nancy Botwin's older son on "Weeds." Katherine Graham, the publisher of Newsweek at the time, is fictionalized in the series but her line, "Which side am I supposed to be on?" remains.

There isn't any marijuana in the book, apart from a single scene where researcher Kate Coleman, a "proud member of the Berkeley Free Speech movement" who worked on a 1967 cover story about the rise of marijuana use, hosted a male editor and his wife at a pot party. But the lead character Patti Robinson, who's hip to the hippie scene and leaves a joint in her boss's desk for him to try, seems to be based in part on Coleman. Patti admits to turning on to watch the nightly news and is depicted in one scene doing so (shown above). Even the goody two-shoes lead researcher Jane Hollander, played by Anna Camp of The Help, tries pot (shown), declaring it did nothing for her (but letting it change her life anyway, after she encounters sexual harassment and discrimination on the job).

Two months after the Newsweek complaint was filed, 96 women from Time Inc. filed a similar suit, and in the next few years, women at Reader's Digest, Newsday, the Washington Post, the Detroit News, the Baltimore Sun and the Associated Press did the same, Povich reports. In 1974 six women at the New York Times filed sexual discrimination charges on behalf of 550 women there, and in 1975, sixteen women at NBC initiated a class action lawsuit covering 2600 past and present employees.

Lest we think this kind of thing is ancient history, Povich's book starts with the story of Jessica Bennett, who "grew up in the era of girl power" in the 1980s, and yet found similar obstacles when she started working at Newsweek as an intern in 2006. She watched male interns get hired before her, and when she was finally hired a year later, she had to fight for assignments. Her best friend at the magazine, Jesse Ellinson, experienced similar difficulties, discovering that the man who was hired for her former job made more money than she did, and being told by her boss to take advantage of her looks.

Like the women in the consciousness-raising era of the 60s, Jessica and Jesse eventually realized their problems stemmed from sexism, instead of personal failings. Like most of us, they were unaware of the Good Girls lawsuit until they were given a copy of Susan Brownmiller's book In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution which has a chapter on the suit.

This was in 2009, when the scandal about David Letterman sleeping with female staffers hit the news (and it was noticed by another Newsweek staffer Sarah Ball that neither Letterman or any other late night show had a single female writer). Jessica, Jesse and Sarah pitched a story on the lawsuit set in modern times to their editor, and found Povich during their research.

Good Girls Revolt ends with the filing of the lawsuit, but so much more happens after that. Executive producer Dana Calvo reported on Instagram that efforts to shop the series to another network had failed: "Good Girls Revolt won't be airing on another network. We made what felt like a 10-hour play, and I will miss the world and the characters that our cast brought to life. Mostly, I will miss hearing from all of you who said it had an impact. Sending love and thanks today for the privilege of being able to tell stories that bring us closer and make us stronger," she wrote.

Brownmiller, BTW, is one of the interviewees in the Netflix documentary "She's Beautiful When She's Angry" along with Kate Millet, Muriel Fox, Rita Mae Brown, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the Our Bodies Ourselves collective and more. Along with Good Girls Revolt, it's a good watch just before the women's marches on January 21.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (and Pot)

I had expected Private Benjamin Goes to Kabul. But no. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (WTF), has heart, and brains. And courage.

Tina Fey stars in the story of a journalist who travels to Afghanistan to cover the war, based on Kim Barker's The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Fey purchased the rights to Barker’s book and created the adaptation, which is why, unlike Mozart in the Jungle—which was written by a woman but turned into an Amazon series starring a man—WTF remains the story of a woman.

Kim doesn't wait for a man to validate her or tell her what to do, like Diane Keaton did in Reds or Little Drummer Boy. She's able to anthropologically speak to the women of the tribe and get the real story about why the well keeps getting blown up, a little like Sigourney Weaver as Dian Fosse in Gorillas in the Mist.  Kim blackmails rather than using sex to get what she wants, saves her love using all the resources she can muster, and makes all of her own choices.

Fey and Freeman in WTF.

So often when a woman gets a choice role, she's paired with actors who aren't her match, like when Nicole Kidman got to play Tokin' Woman Gertrude Bell and someone cast Robert Pattinson as T. E. Lawrence. But here we are treated to Martin Freeman—who was so endearing as the Shy Guy in the British The Office, Love Actually and Sherlock—in a spot-on performance as a Scottish scamp with surprising depth. He and Fey play one of the funniest love scenes ever, with one of the most honest aftermaths.

WTF even adds Billy Bob Thornton—who's hot even in the Bad Santa movies—as the brassy, brass tacks general Kim needs on her side. Also notable are Alfred Molina (Chocolat) as the clownishly threatening public official she must tango with, and Josh Charles as the man she leaves behind. The cherry on top is the stupendous Cherry Jones in yet another formidable role.

It even has my money shot: Fey puffing a hookah, with no less than Margot Robbie by her side—a 15 in Kabul or anywhere and winner of the 2016 Tokin' Woman Phattest Fashion Award—who portrays a worthy rival to Fey's character.

This is generally how pot should be depicted, as an adjunct to the story. Not that you smoke it and have idiotic Seth Rogan-style misadventurers. That it's just one of your experiences. The scene in WTF where Fey and her Afghan driver (Christopher Abbott) discuss drugs of all types and the high they produce is one of the best written and acted I have ever seen.

Skip the sappy LaLa Land and see Whiskey Tango Foxtrot instead, now on Amazon.

Hollyweed Makes a Comeback

Once again, someone has altered the iconic Hollywood sign to say "Hollyweed," in honor of California reforming its marijuana laws (this time with Prop. 64, which legalized the adult recreational use). Snoop Dogg, Margaret Cho, and Mindy Kaling are some who tweeted their reaction. 

The sign was altered with fabric, in the same manner that Douglas Finegood originally altered the sign on January 1, 1976 to celebrate the decriminalization of marijuana, the same year Bette Midler famously planned to tape a joint under every seat at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion in LA for her New Year's Eve show.

After altering the sign a few more times, according to the LA Times, Finegood died in 2007. City officials beefed up security around the sign with a fence, alarms and eventually installed a closed-circuit surveillance system. This year, they restored the sign by mid-morning, and have tape of the "vandal," who ironically faces a misdemeanor charge if caught. (UPDATE: An artist who goes by "Jesus Hands" and his partner Sarah Fern have taken responsibility for the prank.)

Hempy New Year to all!