Happy Hempenly 80th Birthday to "Mama" Cass Elliot

"Mama" Cass Elliot would, and should, have turned 80 today. 

Cass was by all accounts an exceptionally intelligent, talented and giving individual. She always loved singing and performing, and started her career in summer stock productions while still a teen. Witty and captivating, with perfect pitch and impeccable timing, Cass was eventually paid court to by David Crosby, Graham Nash, the Beatles, Dave Mason, Graham Parsons, Donovan, Eric Clapton, and many others. She introduced Crosby to Nash and Nash to LSD. Contemporary artists from Boy George, kd lang, and Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers cite Cass as an influence.

As overweight teenager, Ellen Cohen's family physician prescribed her increasing doses of Dexadrine, and she was also sent to a psychologist. Finding it impossible to sit still in her classes, Ellen dropped out of high school and went to night school to earn her final credits for graduation. It was then that she discovered Baltimore's downtown, with its beatnik society. She began to explore poetry readings, bookshops, and cafes of the neighborhood, smoking hash and grass at her friends' apartments afterwards.

 She soon changed her name and headed to New York, landing a job as a hat check girl at The Showplace in the West Village, where she sang around the piano at informal after hours shows. After her father died she went back to the DC area, and briefly enrolled at American University where she hosted a nightly jazz program, impressing all with her knowledge of musical history. 

 

Folk music soon hit, and Cass shifted to that genre, forming the folk trio The Big 3 with Tim Rose and Jim Hendricks. While performing at New York City's The Bitter End on Bleeker Street, Cass, whose comic patter was as popular as her singing, once improvised a tale about Irving Banjo, the inventor of the banjo, who was an unemployed marijuana picker. While recording The Big 3's first, self-titled album, the band's manager Roy Silver, Cass and bassist Bob Bowers met in the control booth. "This really isn't happening" Silver said, and Bowers agreed. "Well, here, maybe this'll help," said Silver, bringing out a piece of hash. Cass "proceeded to magically create a pipe—complete with bowl and stem, out of the foil lining from a pack of cigarettes."

Survey: Young Women Surpass Men in Lifetime Marijuana Use

Articles on the annual Monitoring the Future survey of drug and alcohol use in young adults in 2020 picked up on the findings that college students reported using more cannabis and psychedelics, and less alcohol, than in previous years. 

Forty-four percent of college-age adults surveyed reported using cannabis in 2020, up from 38 percent in 2015. Eight percent of respondents reported using marijuana “on a daily or near daily basis in 2020,” up from five percent in 2015. And while the use of other illicit drugs is declining among young adults,  annual prevalence of use of any hallucinogens, of LSD in particular, showed significant one-year increases in 2020 for college students (to 8.6% and 7.3%).

"Across the board, men tended to report more substance use than women," researchers and articles have tended to report. However, the findings show that while women were somewhat less likely to use marijuana or any illicit drug annually, monthly, or daily in 2020, their reported lifetime use of marijuana or any illicit drug was greater than men's.

Among the full young adult sample ages 19 to 30 in 2020, 64.2% of women reported lifetime marijuana use, versus 63.4% of men. (Table 4-2). This is the first time women have surpassed men in the report, but the gap has been narrowing: in 2019, 65% of men and 63% of women reported lifetime marijuana use; in 2018 it was 62% to 61%, and in 2017 it was 63% to 59%.

Give Us More Michael Moore

I just watched Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" which he has made available for free on his Facebook and Substack pages leading up to the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks today. 

Drawing connections between the Bush family and the Saudis, including the possible funding of Shrub's oil company by the Osama bin Laden family, the film ponders why when all US flights were grounded after the attacks, bin Laden family members were flown out of the country. Footage of Iraqis killed or maimed by US bombs, servicemen who refused to be sent back to Iraq, and a mother who lost her son in the war are juxtaposed against Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld justifying the war and a conference where Cheney's company Halliburton and others lined up to reap huge profits from the war. 

Bezos, Musk and Branson Get High in More Ways Than One

Brothers in Space, and Green

Bezos with McCormick in 2005

Ian Rassman of LA NORML has informed me that activist/
author/filmmaker/
breeder Todd McCormick revealed on his Instagram account that Jeff Bezos indicated he was a pot smoker when the two met in 2005 at an Amazon 10th Anniversary event featuring Norah Jones and Bill Maher. 

This would mean that the three billionaires who shot themselves or others into space of late—Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson—are all potheads. So much for marijuana smokers not achieving their highest goals. 

Amazon announced in June that it would cease drug-testing its employees for marijuana and would work towards pot legalization in a message to US Amazon employees from CEO Dave Clark that began, "In April, Jeff shared our vision to become Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work." Bezos famously thanked Amazon's poorly paid employees after his costly space shot, something that rankled employees who have been thwarted from unionizing.

Did Frida Kahlo Use Marijuana?

Itzcuintli Dog with Me (detail)

“They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men."

    –Kate Braverman, The Incantation of Frida K. has Kahlo saying, 

I have been for years trying to track down any reference to Frida Kahlo using marijuana. The closest I have is a reference (via Errol Flynn) that Kahlo's husband Diego Rivera used it, and shared it with others.

Judy Chicago in her book Frida Kahlo: Face to Face says that the cigarette Kahlo holds in a holder in her 1938 painting Itzcuintli Dog with Me is a marijuana one.*

Elsewhere it’s assumed it’s a tobacco cigarette Kahlo holds in her paintings (e.g. Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States, 1932; Me and My Parrots, 1941). She was often photographed holding a cigarette, even in her wedding portrait. 

Dr. Susan Blackmore: 70 Years Conscious

Today is the 70th birthday of psychologist and meme queen Dr. Susan Blackmore, author of the bestselling book The Meme Machine, who has over 900,000 views on her TedTalk on "Memes and Temes."

Blackmore appeared at the 2005 Cheltenham Science Festival to discuss whether drugs can teach us anything about ourselves. A version of her talk was published in the Daily Telegraph on May 21 of that year. In it, she says,

"Some people may smoke dope just to relax or have fun, but for me the reason goes deeper. In fact, I can honestly say that without cannabis, most of my scientific research would never have been done and most of my books on psychology and evolution would not have been written. . . . 

Judy Chicago's "The Flowering"

Feminist artist Judy Chicago has been in the news lately, having published the latest installment of her autobiography, The Flowering at the age of 82. 

Chicago's 1979 work The Dinner Party turned the male-dominated art world upside down, setting the table for 39 prominent and mythical women with vulva-inspired ceramic plates and elaborately embroidered place settings. “Women had embedded in houses for centuries and had quilted, sewed, baked, cooked, decorated and nested their creative energies away,” Chicago wrote in her 2006 book Through the Flower. “What would happen, we wondered, if women took those same homemaking activities and carried them to fantasy proportions?” 

Chicago "reclaimed the feminine in the midst of our male-dominated art world" and "paved the way for subsequent generations of female artists," wrote Lucy Koto Olive in The Brooklyn Rail, adding, "The Dinner Party brought psychedelia and feminist ideas together in a bizarre, monumental manner. The many detailed settings, the symbolic triangular shape of the table, and the use of the vagina aim to grasp and elevate the universal feminine experience. In its totality and repeated attention to patterns and shapes, the psychedelic is strongly present in this work," Olive wrote. 

When The Dinner Party opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "no one had ever seen anything like it," wrote Sasha Weiss in the New York Times.  "It was theatrical, audacious and definitively feminist: a work of stark symbolism and detailed scholarship, of elaborate ceramics and needlework that also nodded to the traditional amateurism of those forms, a communal project that was the realization of one woman’s uncompromisingly grand vision, inviting both awe and identification. It caused an immediate sensation."

Weiss interviewed Chicago for her 2018 article, describing here like this: "Her lipstick was purple, her curly hair dyed a reddish-pink, with tinted glasses to match, giving her a dreamy, psychedelic look."