Mervyn Peake’s Caterpillar from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland finds itself used to promote High Society, an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection devoted to the long history of human drug-taking. There’s more about the exhibition here and also an accompanying book by Mike Jay from Thames & Hudson. Related: The Most Dangerous Drug:
A group of British drug experts gathered by the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) rated alcohol higher than most or all of the other drugs for health damage, mortality, impairment of mental functioning, accidental injury, economic cost, loss of relationships, and negative impact on community.
• Unless the magazine Man, Myth & Magic was advertised on TV in 1970 (and I suspect it would have been) Austin Osman Spare’s work has never been seen on British television, certainly not in any detail or with a credit to the artist. This week the BBC finally paid him some attention with a brief spot on The Culture Show as a result of the Fallen Visionary exhibition which is still running (until November 14) in London. Alan Moore, Fulgur‘s Robert Ansell and others attempt to summarise Spare’s career in seven minutes.
Neil Fujita designs: Mingus Ah Um (1959) and The Godfather (1969).
• RIP graphic designer Neil Fujita. Related:
“By taking the “G” and extending it to the “D,” I created a house for “God.” The way the word was designed was part of the logo and so was the type design. So when Paramount Pictures does a film version or Random House, which bought out the book from Putnam, does another Godfather book, I still get a design credit. In fact, before the first Godfather film opened in New York I saw a huge billboard going up in Times Square with my design on it. I actually got them to stop work on it until we were able to come to an agreement.” Waxing Chromatic: An Interview with S. Neil Fujita
• French SF illustration. Related: Where did science fiction come from? A primer on the pulps, a feature by Jess Nevins with some of the craziest covers you’ll see this month.
• Gay-bashers in 1970s San Francisco had to beware the wrath of the Lavender Panthers.
• More Marian Bantjes as she discusses her work in an audio interview.
• Music from Saharan cellphones.
• Better Git It In Your Soul (1959) by Charles Mingus.
In reference to ‘The Most Dangerous Drug’- I am amazed at how very little anti-marijuana activists actually say to back up their fanatical, childish, intellectually lethargic claims, at how very little they actually say period. They repeat the old statement with different words- pots a dangerous, addictive drug, blah, blah, blah. When the ‘facts’ don’t support them, they simply raise their voices to menacing heights. Well believe me, I can do that better than any of them, but I am ‘not’ the one trying to throw ordinary kids in jail with child-molesters and arsonists, so how am I being violent when I raise my voice in defiance?
Pot-heads don’t commit date rape and piss on the rugs of religious minorities, those are alcoholics’ duties. Just how much green could be saved doesn’t really matter. The fact is, it simply ‘would’ save some amount of money to tax hemp and ‘not’ throw skinny non-violent kids in prison for smoking it. People who talk about the ‘backwardness’ of countries where pot is not as wastefully persecuted have obviously never left their houses in their lives. The Netherlands and Portugal are both in the first world, neither are perfect by any means, but neither experience crime of the same sort as in Colombia for instance, as pundits like to say, not even as much as in some areas of America!
For instance, all you nay-sayers need to read the damn books, and ‘not’ those written by politicians of any kind. Neither of those countries have the same ‘hard’ drug problems as many others, because when you de-criminalize relatively tame drugs like marijuana, you remove them from the company of actually more dangerous drugs sold by cartels. This would hurt the criminal aspect, as is proved by the countries mentioned because most people who actually have lives of their own prefer smoking weed to blowing snow. I’ll repeat, far less hard drugs are used by people living places with less stringent pot-regulation, than in countries like mine. Its a wasteful prospect to think you’ll actually get rid of it anyway!
Any addictive qualities of pot are minimized by simple facts that anti-marijuana advocates will never understand, because they simply never seem to go outside. People who smoke pot don’t smoke it like tobacco, no one is going to smoke two twelve-packs of joints a day, it doesn’t work like that. In addition to this, more and more people bake cannabis into brownies and the like, and believe me, I went to college and none of those guys ever went out driving after doing so.
Hell, if thats so dangerous, then why don’t all these moral agenda pushing, born-again christians stop being such hypocrits and outlaw truly dangerous food distributors, like McDonalds- the holiest of holies for all obese Americans who bring shame to those others like me, as well as being the second holy rest-stop for depressed born-again christians who harbor irrational hatreds, like that of cannabis.
They’re always going on and on about, ‘the founding-Fathers this’ and ‘the founding-Fathers that’ as if the rest of us don’t know who the founding Fathers were. Hey, hypocrits, wake up! Pot wasn’t illegal back then and many of the documents signed during and after the Revolution were written on hemp paper! You idiots honestly think Glenn Beck knows better than Benjamin Franklin?!
Hell, I don’t even smoke pot anymore, in fact its been years. I know this though, nearly all the people I know who smoke pot, only smoke pot. The ones that only smoke pot are much less violent than say, people like me. They are unsung American hereos in that they are a chief preventative of vehicular homicide. Why, because none of them are on the road when they’re high, and out of the way of impatient speed demons like myself whose unmatchably superior driving skills are nullified when he’s surrounded by an ocean of buffoons who aren’t paying attention because they’re either tipsy, texting their girlfriends, or putting on make-up. In other words, people like those watch ‘The Sinister Urge’ as if they were watching a documentary, and not something shot by a misguided idealist who’d probably seen ‘Triumph of the Will’ 200 times over.
Perhaps I am being too literate, I am comparing all you anti-pot legislators to people who get behind the wheel drunk, texting, and putting on make-up, and that goes for all you horse-faced, balding, 50-something homophobes as well. Since all of you are in the business of making claims based on heresay and innacurate propaganda, then go to your phoney anti-pot statistic books and just try to prove me wrong.
How about this, quit wasting money on stupid shit and just ease up a ‘bit’ on marijuana. No, matter how you reactionaries piss and moan and cry, your hysteria would not cover up the plain facts when controlled decriminalization of pot solves ‘far’ more problems than it creates. It’ll do so in California, when it eventually gets voted across.
You can talk all you want, but it eventually will. If people less neurotic about themselves than you, whats the word, oh yeah- queers, can still get legally married in ‘Iowa’, despite all the noise local idiot pundits are making over here, then pot will eventually cry ‘free at last, free at last’ in California. Why, because more people in America smoke pot than take it up the ass. Oh, but I’ve forgotten, all you anti-marijuana activists never learned to count either did you?
Sorry for the lengthy rant John. I just figured one of the hecklers who occasionally show up here might see this and have a slightly harder time facing themselves in the mirror afterwards, despite however they may retort in letters after crying in the corner for a good long while like a delusional child. No, I no longer smoke pot. Yes, I strongly support peoples’ right to use cannabis, because I am an observant and insightful person, and to the best of my knowledge, none of the cons would even begin to stack up against the weight of the benefits.
Heh, no need to apologise. William Burroughs says everything I’d want to on the matter in his Just Say No to Drug Hysteria!
If you ever have to argue about cannabis with a Christian, remind them that they believe that god created all the plants.