As U.S. Schoolteacher Marc Fogel Is Released from Russian Prison for Pot, Injustices Continue

After spending 3 1/2 years in a Russian prison for bringing a small amount of medical marijuana into Russia, Pennsylvania-born international schoolteacher Marc Fogel landed on US soil this week and was greeted by President Trump and a group of government officials and lawmakers at the White House. 

Standing next to the president in the Oval Office, Fogel—a history teacher—invoked Winston Churchill's famous phrase, "Never was so much owed by so many to so few," saying that in his case, "Never has one owed so much to so many." He spoke of "the superorganism of people that came to my support," mentioning his fellow Pennsylvanians, and his family & friends.

Indeed, Fogel's release is a testament to the power of activism, starting with his 95-year-old mother Malphine, who met with Trump when he spoke in Butler, PA last July, just before he was shot in the ear by a gunman before he could say Marc's name onstage. Fogel's sisters, other family members, friends and former students mounted a sustained campaign to have Marc designated as "wrongfully detained" in the way that WNBA star Brittney Griner was before the Biden administration secured her release for the same "crime" that Fogel committed in exchange for arms dealer Victor Bout.

Also contributing to the effort were PA lawmakers, who passed a Senate resolution calling for Fogel's release and kept up the pressure, including questioning presumptive Secretary of State Marco Rubio at his confirmation hearing. On their side was the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, which published a series of articles and opeds calling for Marc's release, as did the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as well as local papers in the Butler area and the school paper from Marc's alma mater, Indiana University of PA. 

Some think the turning point came via the "Make A Marc" art exhibit that I got to attend in my hometown of Pittsburgh in April 2023. Pittsburgh-based artist Tom Moesser, reading about Marc in a local paper, noticed that his attorney was Sasha Phillips, a painter he knew from local art circles. He reached out and together he and Phillips planned the show, at which over 100 local artists contributed portraits of Marc to put a face on him and his plight. 

RIP Tom Robbins: Our Boomer Petway

Robbins in 1981

I'm not ashamed to say I was pretty much in love with Tom Robbins, who died yesterday at the age of 92. The only personal ad I ever wrote said, "Ellen Cherry Charles seeks Boomer Petway," naming two characters from his novel Skinny Legs and All. (The paper refused to run the ad because I wouldn't say how old I was, or was looking for. They missed the point.)

The author of nine wild and wonderful novels like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Robbins also penned a memoir titled Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life, which describes in a series of stories his “lifelong quest to personally interface with the Great Mystery (which may or may not be God) or, at the very least, to further expose myself to wonder.”

Born and raised in the South, Robbins worked as a copy editor for The Richmond Times-Dispatch, a job he continued after graduating with a degree in journalism in 1959. But, according to the New York Times, "he chafed under the restrictions of Jim Crow-era Richmond, including a prohibition at the newspaper against printing photographs of Black people — a transgression he nevertheless committed several times."

He moved to Seattle and worked at the Seattle Times, where he wrote art reviews and unusual headlines for Dear Abby columns during what he calls “that nondescript period between the end of the beige '50s and the beginning of the Day-Glo '60s.” He read about Gordon Wasson’s sacred mushroom experiments in Life magazine and—having explored Zen, Tantric Hinduism, Sufism and the Tao—he sought Wasson’s experience, but was lead to LSD instead.

Describing his first LSD trip in Tibetan Peach Pie, Robbins wrote that the session ended with his consciousness entering a daisy’s, described “like a cathedral made of mathematics and honey.” He credits this life-changing experience with enabling him to lose his “terror of the eternal,” and finding the connection between modern painting and the psychedelic sacraments:

Each…offered humanity a new way of seeing, an enlarged and deepened definition of reality, a freshened and intensely sensual awareness of what it means to be a cognitive mammal on a tiny planet spinning precariously in the backwash of an infinite universe…

He wrote of visiting Amsterdam “to take the waters,” and recounts his participation in the historic 1963 LeMar (Legalize Marijuana) event organized by Allen Ginsberg at the Women’s Detention Center in Greenwich Village, “to protest that the prison was crowded with females of all ages whose sole criminal act was the private, orderly, nonviolent inhalation of tiny plumes of smoke given off by a smoldering weed.”

Bob Dylan Biopic "No Direction Home" Misses the Politics -- And the Pot

For a moment, I loved it. 

Watching Timothée Chalamet step off a bus in Greenwich Village on a quest to find Woody Guthrie, wearing that classic Dutch boy cap and looking for all the world like a young Bob Dylan, I almost felt like I was there. In "A Complete Unknown," Chalamet does an amazing job capturing Dylan's voice while performing some of his greatest songs. 

But in the end, the film ends in a muddle of mixed non-reasons Dylan abandons his folkie roots, mistreats his women, and questions his own talent and importance. 

It wasn't just sudden, huge fame that changed Dylan. His fame was such that people almost thought he was the second coming, our society's savior. More than anyone, his lyrics nailed his times, when the civil rights, environmental, and anti-war movements coalesced, all fueled by music—and marijuana. 

Yet, not only is there no pot smoking at all in "A Complete Unknown," there's practically no discussion or presentation whatsoever about the politics of the time in the film. In one scene, Dylan watches the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold on TV and is sought out by Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) while playing his masterful song "Masters of War" in a coffeeshop, after which they (rather inexplicably) make out in the stairwell and sleep together. But despite Baez's strong political beliefs and activism, and the fact that she and Dylan performed together at the 1963 March on Washington, the two never talk politics in the film. Yeah, right. Instead, he's shown acting out on stage when the two tour because he's tired of performing "Blowin' in the Wind." 

Marianne Faithfull: She Walked in Beauty

Marianne Faithfull, the honorary Rolling Stone who was central to the drug-fueled rock music scene in 1960s England, has died at age 78. Faithfull had a hit singing the Mick Jagger/Keith Richards composition "As Tears Go By" at age 17, and a few years later, left her husband for a relationship with Jagger that inspired several Stones songs. 

Faithfull spoke candidly to an interviewer about LSD as a Door of Perception (Aldous Huxley's phrase). She went to take the drug with her friends The Stones one weekend and famously covered herself with only a fur rug when police raided the place and arrested Keith and Mick on drug charges. The incident "destroyed me," she later said. "To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorising. A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother." 

In 1969, Faithfull released "Sister Morphine" a song about a man in hospital following an accident that she co-wrote (uncredited) with Jagger and Richard. The song was banned as pro-drug, something that didn't happen when The Stones recorded the same song. 

She struggled with cocaine and heroin addiction, and homelessness, and made a stunning comeback in 1978 with the album Broken English, with a voice that had gained a world of hurt and experience. She sings a heartbreakingly beautiful version of VIP Shel Silverstein's "Ballad of Lucy Jordan," and invites women to a "magic greet" on "Witches' Song." On "Why'd Ya Do It" she sings with authority the Heathcote Williams lyric: 

Why'd ya do it," she said, why'd you let that trash
Get a hold of your cock, get stoned on my hash?

Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas Hallucinates with Mandrax in "Maria"

Angelina Jolie is winning acclaim and award nominations for her portrayal of O.G. opera diva Maria Callas in the movie Maria, which follows Callas through the last seven days of her life, with fuzzy flashbacks to her earlier days. It is the third and final film in a trilogy depicting iconic 20th-century women from Chilean director Pablo Larrain, following Jackie (2016) starring Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy and Spencer (2021) with Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana. 

In Maria, Callas is shown taking Mandrax, a combination of the hypnotic sedative drug methaqualone (Quaaludes) and the anti-histamine/sedative diphenhydramine (Benadryl). Popular in Europe in the 70s, commercial production of Mandrax was halted in the mid-1980s due to its widespread abuse and addictiveness.  

An imaginary young filmmaker whose name is Mandrax appears to interview Callas, setting up a conversation between her and the drug, or her hallucination while taking it. By this strange conceit Maria's life is revisited as she works on recovering her largely lost etherial singing voice just before dying. 

To prepare for her role, Jolie spent seven months training to sing opera. Mostly she lip-synched to Callas's divine recordings, but she did that well. The film premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival where Jolie received a "rapturous" eight-minute standing ovation towards the end of the screening.

Jolie has said she doesn't enjoy marijuana, but that by the age of 20, she'd used "just about every drug possible," including heroin. Episodes of depression and two suicide attempts, plus a nervous breakdown at age 24 lead to her being institutionalized for 72 hours at the UCLA Medical Center psychiatric ward. Her breakthrough role, for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, was as a wild child institutionalized with Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted. She won Golden Globe and SAG awards for playing model Gia Carangi, a heroin addict who died of AIDS in 1986. "Playing the madness and insanity, hearing voices, there's my wheelhouse," Jolie said of her approach to the role as Callas. 

Presidential Medal of Freedom Winner George Soros (and Me)

George Soros

Well, now I can say I've met, and worked for, a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner. 

Among those bestowed last week with this "highest" civilian honor in the land was George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist whose Open Society Foundation funds human rights projects internationally, with $32 billion of his personal wealth. Soros also funded the Drug Policy Alliance, for which I worked in San Francisco around the turn of the millennium. 

I met George only once, briefly, and said something stupid like, "Thank you for my job." By then I'd been a volunteer activist for over a decade, and working at what was then called the Lindesmith Center was my first real paying gig in the field. I'd received a few Soros dollars while petitioning for Prop. 215, California's pioneering medical marijuana law, but ended up turning in most of my signatures as a volunteer to bolster those numbers in the funders' eyes.

"I'll See You in My [Pipe] Dreams"

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS

Rhea Perlman and Blythe Danner in I'll See You in My Dreams

In I'll See You in My Dreams (2015), Blythe Danner plays Carol, a retired schoolteacher whose husband Bill, a lawyer, died in a plane crash 20 years before the film begins. Carol lives a tranquil existence in a comfortable home in Southern California. Her usual activities are watching TV while drinking wine, and playing golf or bridge with her gal pals who live in a nearby retirement home. 

The film begins with Carol putting her dog down, leaving a hole in her life. A rat soon appears in her house, leading to an encounter with her young pool guy Lloyd (Martin Starr), whom she enlists to scout out her unwelcome visitor. The mismatched (age-wise) couple bond over a shared love of music, and he rekindles her interest in singing, taking her out to a karaoke bar where she sings "Cry Me a River" while her young friend looks on adoringly. Meanwhile, another Bill, played by Sam Elliott, appears to sweep her off her feet with fancy wine-filled dinners in a restaurant or on his boat. 

June Squibb takes a toke from a vaporizer

All this seems to cause a re-examination of life by Carol. When her bridge buddy Sally (Rhea Perlman) asks if she wants a refill on her chardonnay, Carol instead asks, "Do you have any more of that medical marijuana?" Sally brings out a vaporizer and the gals indulge, lead by the game-for-anything Georgina (June Squibb), who announces she knows how to use the device, takes a big hit, and remarks, "Oh man, oh jeez, that's great." The brash-yet-timid Rona (Mary Kay Place, who smoked a joint with William Hurt in The Big Chill) also joins in the fun, boogying down to "Groovin" while Carol has a stare-down with an owl-shaped cookie jar in the kitchen, and Sally acts as the down-to-earth shaman/guide. The foursome heads out to the local minimart for a junk food run, and while heading home with a shopping cart, encounter a cute young cop (Reid Scott) who lets them go despite their strange behavior.