I’m on the mountain. I came down for a day to tie up some last loose ends and I may not have internet for the next month save a few trips. But I tried to make it fruitful. I wrote a bunch of reviews for the Bloglin, I made that video, and I did a bunch of other stuff such as laundry that’s not worth mentioning. I’m posting it in Standard Deviance for obvious reasons. The other one which is my raps over the “N***as in Paris” beat is perhaps less obvious. The title though, if you’ve paid attention to the column over the last year, should bare some significance.
Arcata is basically the mecca of the Emerald Triangle. It’s where people congregate, and drifters drift. At this time of year there are tons of trimmers in Arcata. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s been like that for a long time. Children have grown up there and turned out alright. In fact they seem more level-headed than a lot of other Americans I’ve known. It’s all just puns in the end.
This is a lil’ different for us, but it’s awesome nonetheless. We made a short film along with the good folks from NoPromo. We hope you like it cause we sure do.
Brooklyn streets are weird enough as is without the aid of certain sticky green enhancers. Fortunately, its all in a days work for the kid, who’s more than just his routine, who he serves and what he’s pitching. This cycle is far from ordinary. With a few special customers, and some chance encounters, this one day snapshot of a Brooklyn delivery guy takes a few unusual detours and gets into the mental of “The Green Monster.”
Cannabis is heating the fuck up right now. And, from what homies back East, and down South have been telling me, there is not a lot of news coverage exposing what Obama’s “non-interfering” federal government has been up to (please fill me in in the comments if you have any links or leads on existing stories). Over the course of roughly 2 weeks a group of meddling individuals in a number of government branches have managed to launch a coordinated effort to disrupt California’s medical cannabis industry, and the supply chain of safe and affordable medicine for those with a very real medical need.
The motives are still unclear, but two things are certain: this is a reminder/wake up call of how real this business is, and Obama has lost the support of California’s cannabis industry and has instead garnered its disdain. For those of us abiding by the state’s laws, creating jobs, paying taxes, strengthening communities, and opting out of a corrupt system of labor this rash of recent federal actions is a slap in the face. Remember Obama’s claim that his administration wouldn’t interfere? Well, here’s a summary of a few of the recent events that have taken place under his administration, and which have not garnered even a peep from Barack Obama the nation’s first black president, and an admitted cannabis smoker:
IRS says cannabis businesses can’t deduct business expenses because they are illegal businesses. Thus people owe back-taxes, and they’re claiming that Harborside owes $2 million.
ATF says cannabis patients can’t buy new firearms and have to hand over existing firearms because cannabis patients are addicts.
California DAs are grasping for straws and threatening bystanders. Northern California DA Melinda Haag is going after land owners who rent to dispensaries, and sent letters threatening to seize properties if landlords don’t evict cannabis tenants.
Federal officials claim that they are “cleaning up” but this is a total farse. In their 30 year war on drugs the black market has grown. In the 15 years of California’s medical cannabis program we have succeeded in creating the only solution to the black market; a legal market that is safe; a legal market that provides jobs; a legal market that doesn’t foster the growth of illicit drug cartels; a legal market that supports the values of those who founded this nation in opposition to a tyrannical and exploitative ruling class.
My main employer of late was one of those shut down in recent DEA raids. The federal government took my job away. But they’re still calling for me to pay my credit card bills, and pay my student loans. I’m on the streets if it wasn’t for the grace of friends. What am I supposed to do? I know what I feel like doing, but I’d never be foolish enough to document it anywhere. I don’t know how you’re feeling but I hope it involves outrage. The folks out here in California fighting for their rights are fighting for the rights of everyone in this nation.
Don’t get mad, don’t get even, don’t get fed up. Start strategizing, and start organizing, and wait for the call. I refuse to abide this, and I intend to do something. In fact, I’ve already begun. Head over to HR2306 and read up, because that bill is going to be a major part of organizing people across the country. Legit though, this is some real life Star Wars type of shit. There is an evil oppressor at work, and there is a group of rebels who have been maintaining a resistance for decades. This is real as fuck, this is about freedom, this is life or death, this really is the future of our people. I know you can’t see it from the outside, but the cannabis/hemp industry is going to play a large role in the re-casting of our nation. It’s putting power and money back into the hands of the working class, and it’s putting sustenance back into communities. If you ever bought or sold weed then you are part of the resistance. Get ready to rise the fuck up.
*breathes out cloud of smoke* Even though most of the stuff we smoke today is a hybridized version, we’re takin’ it to the origins on dat ass. You know we’re not your average pot-smokers here behind the giant eyeballs and snake-tongued bears. No, we are connoisseurs! And we are implying that you are too, so don’t…whatever bro, pass me those peanut butter Newman O’s. What if only one could exist? Choice is Yours…
Oofa!!! Now this is a fuckin’ PSA if I’ve ever seen one!!! It’s about 30 minutes long but well worth sitting through the whole thing. SPIN actually has a great minute by minute breakdown of the whole thing for those of you who’ll need Cliff Notes on the time signatures to skip to.
Remember the last time you were going out to a rave, and you decided that you wanted to have an especially great time, greater than any other time previous to that time, so you decided you would take six ecstasy pills instead of the usual five? But then, remember also, that your stupid, caring, concerned friend said it would be a bad idea? Yeah, that person was wrong.
New studies have shown that Ecstasy, along with Prozac and other anti-depressants have the potential to stop cancerous growth. It seems the altered forms of MDMA (ecstasy) could potentially be used to treat leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma, where in a test one variant form was 100 times more effective at killing the cancer cells than not doing anything, which is not at all effective. What this means, is that ecstasy could potentially cure cancer. Call your drug dealer now, because you’re gonna want to stock up.
But not so fast, because an actual treatment is still a decade away, reports the BBC. So don’t go feeding your grandmother ecstasy, or adding the drug into your daily vitamin regiment, because that, apparently, is still unsafe. The prospect of such a treatment does beg the question, however, as to what effect prior, or current recreational ingestion of the drug will have in regard to cancerous growth. Now, I’m not a scientist, but it does seem to make sense that if you take ecstasy for recreational purposes, perhaps you are preventing future complications with cancer.
Since its American debut as a recreational drug in 1970, ecstasy has become increasingly more popular, today, being a hallmark of various parts of popular and youth culture. Though because it is still a relatively young drug, it’s too soon to tell what sort of effects regular use may have in terms of cancer. Now, it would seem just through following a simple path of what I think is logic, that based on these new studies, today’s youth who subscribe to the frequent use of ecstasy should not worry about cancerous growth in the future. Severe brain damage, on the other hand, that’s another story. But really, how bad could a little ecstasy now and then be if it could prevent cancer? It’s cancer we’re talking about! The number four killer in America! Like I said, I’m not a scientist, so I have no idea how to answer that last question.
You ever smoked crack? I haven’t. I freebased once by accident. In my freshman year of college a friend and I were smoking joints of weed laced with coke. We probably had some stupid name for them too, but anyways, one night we were out of rolling papers, and I had the bright idea to use a bowl. Now, in addition to that bright idea we also decided to just pour the coke directly on top of the weed. Being inexperienced drug users my friend and I didn’t realize that the coke was gonna burn up way faster. Thankfully it wasn’t too much cocaine, but it was enough to get me pretty wired. Weed on the other hand, doesn’t get me wired, so I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to disassociate freebasing from dabbing.
Dabbing, if you’re unfamiliar, is just a shorthand colloquialism for smoking hash oil. The whole freebasing association is because of how you smoke it: with indirect heat. The first time i saw hash oil smoked it was out of a glass pipe, heated witha glass wand, and it looked like dudes were freebasing out of a lightbulb. You can’t heat the hash oil itself with a flame, the hash oil has to come into contact with something hot, at which point it completely vaporizes leaving behind no ash and no trace. The smoke is incredibly smooth, and the Carbon Dioxide extracted oil I smoked this past weekend tasted a lot like a crayon.
Hash oil comes in a variety of resinous states from highly viscous liquid, to putty and wax-like compounds. The final state of the matter depends on preparation methods. Like hash, hash oil is created through an artisanal process that removes plant matter and other inactive compounds, or perhaps even active but unwanted compounds. The process is unique to the individual, and there are different methods and gases that can be used, all of which have different affects on the final outcome. But in all cases the end product is a highly refined substance with very high potency, and incredibly smooth vapors to inhale. It’s quickly becoming the method of choice for industry folks when it comes to medicating. And if that’s the case, then it’s only a matter fo time before it moves to the public.
***Late Bonus***
I just got this photo of some rather professionally rendered hash oil via a Facebook group.
So, funny story about the weed in that picture up above. It’s from 1973, and the picture is out of a High Times magazine. And the weed in the picture is currently at Steep Hill Laboratory in Oakland, California. In my strangely enigmatic travels I came across the gentleman whose hand is in this picture, and he took a liking to me. It turns out he was a distributor/rep for one of the earliest publishing companies handling cannabis cultivation.
He was responsible for the delivery of thousands of copies of, as he told me, “The book that taught everyone how to grow sinsemilla. It was a strategy for growers to get more for what they were growing because if there was less seeds, it meant it was more flowers to the weight. But, I feel like there is something very different about weed that’s been able to go through the full life cycle. I don’t know that un-seeded weed is necessarily better.”
Toby (that’s not his real name because I’m not gonna blow up dude’s spot and use his real name) is an older guy, in his late fifties or early sixties. He’s about 5’10″ with a mustache, and glasses. He paints, and drives an old school Volvo wagon. He’s a cool laid back guy. He would fit right into a poster of iconic middle-aged California dudes. If it were a calendar of said fellows he’d probably be June, or September. Anyways, I certainly trust him, and he has no reason to lie to me. So, when he told me that he had cannabis samples from 1973 I immediately thought of Steep Hill. And when I told Steep Hill they took interest immediately. “We’d love to be able to run some tests on something like that.” When I proposed the idea to Toby he was into it.
I didn’t see Toby around for a few months after that and when I finally did catch him again he told that he’d be moving. I was bummed that I wouldn’t be running into him anymore, as we’d had some enjoyable conversations in the past. But, he made sure to get me some of his untouched stash from long ago. When he handed it over he explained that the stuff he was giving me had also appeared in a photo in one of the books he had distributed. He then gave me a copy of the book, and pointed out the page where it appeared. There in 70′s dot matrix color was the same flower almost 40 years ago. He then handed me a copy of High Times magazine and pointed out another more-accurately colored version of the image.
When I took the sample to the lab we joked that if you smoked it you wouldn’t get high, you would just enter into some kind of wormhole through time and have a crazy weed sensei shaman experience. They ran it through a brand new testing technology that I’m not allowed to talk about with any degree of specificity (I signed a non-disclosure agreement to be able to see this thing), but it’s gonna have a serious affect on how testing takes place. Which brings me to what is perhaps the most exciting part of this post: the giveaway.
Of course the whole reason for taking this ancient sample to Steep Hill was to try and get an idea of what cannabis was like at an earlier stage in its genetic development. That development has, of course, been thoroughly affected by the last 40 years of human-helmed breeding. What are the more ancient genetic lines like? And more specifically what does the cannabinoid profile look like? We want you to guess. You don’t have to be exact, and you don’t really have to know shit about anything. With a little bit of basic research I’m sure you can find some accurate estimates, but it’s not gonna be that easy. We need you to guess the THC percentage down to the second decimal. So, for example that would be: “9.99″. Whoever gets the closest–whether you’re over or under–will win a High Times Cannabis Cup 2011 T-Shirt, Tote Bag, and an Incredibowl, the award-winning pipe that took Best Product at this year’s Cannabis Cup.
Send your guesses to: weedzach{ at }g__maildotcom. We’ll announce the winner next week. Contest is over stoners.
Making their pixelated return to the computer monitor, Brooklyn’s own BLISSED OUT, or BL§§D ØU† if you’re feeling fancy, has revamped and reworked a version of their dark, nebulous track “Drones”, this time with the help of Mexican spellcaster Ritualz, or †‡† if you so prefer. Reviving the cheesy euphoria of 1990s trance and house, with Alex Winter setting off another color and light show using animated gifs, morphing polygons, and neon backgrounds, the collaboration ups the beats per minute and puts it on for the ravers still rocking LED pacifiers, JNCOs, and ‘Mad Hatter’ hats at the club.
As a kid born in the 80s and raised in the 90s, the symbols that orbit and float around within the video ring a bell or two in my head. The generic alien face with black almond-shaped eyes, the yin-yang, and the peace sign are all relics of a period gone, and fads that over a decade and a half ago could be found attached to black cord necklaces as pendants or stitched onto oversized tees and baggy jeans. If you look closely enough you can see the dock for a Macbook, a modern convention, peek it’s head up from below the cheap effects in addition to a blurry Facebook chat bar stretched across the screen. This is Winters’ way of synchronously making a distinction between now and then while also blurring the cultural dividing lines that separate them.
The whole “trippy” aesthetic is flawlessly executed by the team of BLISSED OUT and Ritualz as part of, what will become, an ongoing series of trance remixes from the pair. What’s next? We’ll just have to wait and see. And if you haven’t hit your quota of BLISSED OUT or breakneck dance muzik, go over to Santos Party House tomorrow night where they’re holding their bi-weekly extravaganza of the highest order called S!CK. With a lineup of straight crowd-movers including household names like AraabMuzik, DJ Assault, and the Chicago Juke-box, DJ Rashad. Details about the happenings can be found here.
Not to worry, It’s not what you think. I just needed something attention-grabbing to, well, grab your attention and direct it toward Adult Swim’s fairly new, consciousness expanding show Off The Air. After some covert research, which really means a good couple hours website surfing and message board scouring, I found that not many people have seen, or even know about, this radical program, a disjointed collage of video clips transmitted from your cable box to your third eye.
I first stumbled upon the absurdist presentation on the official Adult Swim website on that little marquee thing they have that enables visitors to watch episodes they might’ve missed during regular programming, online at their leisure. Used to seeing King of The Hill and Metalocalypse premieres in that area, naturally my interest was peaked when I saw something I couldn’t identify. Off The Air was nestled there, waiting patiently for someone to pick it up, open the floodgates and unleash it’s chaotic power upon the universe, a Pandora’s Box kind of situation. “Animals” was the name of the episode, coincidentally, the show’s debut, the start of a sequence of themed, 10-minute chapters that would get progressively more disturbing as it went on.
“Animals” flanked my senses from the get-go with a missile of color, sound, and allegory that made my psyche recoil in defense. Actual footage of an eagle and a mountain goat, starts the party with a bang, as the bird’s gigantic talons grab the goat and fly away with it, smashing its skull on the rocks below and dropping it into a valley, watching as the helpless billy falls hundreds of feet to its death. Pressing ahead toward insanity, clips of ostriches skiing, cats meowing and multiplying to a beat (Meow Mix), and music videos from Flying Lotus and Blockhead, kept shit groovy and in accordance with the zoological motif.
Airing originally on New Year’s Day sometime in the early moring, I’m talking 3 or 4 am, the show drew contradicting reactions from audiences, with some commending it for it’s “trippiness”, some tearing it down for it’s “stoner-crowd appeasement”, and others too bewildered to comment. Still it wasn’t until the release of the second episode, “Food”, that viewers saw the show, as a show, and not just a one-off holiday special or an elongated bump. “Food” dropped on May 25th of this year, again at some obscenely late hour, giving those die-hard enough to disregard their bedtime a sweet treat that their neurons would savor forever.
Overwhelming and frightening at times, this show continues to haunt those who lays eyes on it, dishing up brain-munchies for the late-night, couch-sitting, burnouts. Only two episodes of the series have been released thus far but word on the street is that Adult Swim has got plenty more rounds of Off The Air psychedelia locked, loaded, and ready to blow, your mind that is. The show airs pretty infrequently with no set schedule, keep your eyes peeled in your ears open for any developments. Now heed my word and find a comfortable place to lounge, spark up a bowl, and see for yourself what all the fuss is about.
