I don’t really care that much about LEGOs, but this “Legolize It!” weed-themed exhibition showing at the Known Gallery in Los Angeles May 26 - June 9, looks like a can’t miss art show.
In the wake of increasing raids on Medical Marijuana dispensaries by local, state and federal drug enforcement agencies, the LAgo brand’s brand-new, flagship storefront is set to open on May 26, 2012 at Known Gallery located at 441 North Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles. The LAgo brand, as a perpetual “harvest” of healing power, has been especially commodified to meet the addictions of anyone who has ever wanted to experience the transaction of purchasing medical marijuana – or fine art – at a legal business organization. Synthetic starter-plants, seedlings, clones and a totally huge selection of intoxicating, fake plastic buds- all built with LEGO bricks to resemble some of the finest strains of medicinal marijuana ever grown- will be on display and available for limited purchase.
The LEGO grow room is the best. Genius!
Known Gallery
441 North Fairfax Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90036
info@knowngallery.com
Happy birthday Dennis Hopper. You were one of the great mad geniuses of American pop culture.
During the Sixties Taos was a rural hippie Mecca. Communes like New Buffalo, Reality Construction Company and The Hog Farm popped up around this Northern New Mexican town like ‘shrooms in a field of cow pies. In 1969 I spent a few weeks at the Lama Foundation, a commune 20 miles outside Taos, where I lived in a small A-frame and spent most my time reading books and staring off into the endless New Mexico sky. This quiet mountain area was propelled into the national consciousness when Dennis Hopper shot footage in the vicinity of Taos for Easy Rider. It kind of changed things forever. Taos went from being a low key destination to a center for hippie tourism. The locals hated it.
I moved back to Taos in 2002 and lived there for seven years. The legacy of Dennis Hopper and Easy Rider still color the town and what was once seen as an intrusion by a bunch of Hollywood hipsters has now become an honorable part of the town’s history.
Hopper ended up living in Taos for a short time. He bought the historic Mabel Dodge Lujan house and the El Cortez movie theater in 1970. Throughout his life, Hopper would return to Taos. He was made honorary Mayor of the town and is buried in Jesus Nazareno Cemetery, Ranchos de Taos.
It was in Taos that Hopper struggled with his follow-up film to Easy Rider, the misunderstood, flawed, masterpiece The Last Movie. Hopper practically lost his mind (some say he did lose it) while trying to edit the film into a commercially viable product. He spent a year doing so and the end result was both a critical and commercial disaster.
I saw The Last Movie when it was released in 1971. I found it an amazing head film that rivaled Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo for sheer mind-blowing brilliance. But my first viewing was enhanced by some Nepalese finger hash and subsequent small screen viewings of the movie haven’t been quite as psychedelically satisfying.
While Hopper was madly trying to edit The Last Movie, he called upon the help of Jodorowsky and the Chilean brujo went to Taos to offer his insight.
In a 2008 interview with Damien Love, Jodorowsky discussed the Taos experience:
I had showed El Topo privately around the studios, I showed it to Metro Golden Mayer, Universal. And, all the time, the people at the screenings were enthusiastic, but then, when the salesmen came along, they would say, “We don’t know to sell this picture.” And Dennis Hopper was at one of these private shows, and he liked El Topo a lot. And so he invited me to come to Taos. And in Taos, he had four or six editing machines and twelve editors working. At that time, he didn’t know what to with The Last Movie. And I saw the material, I thought it was a fantastic story. And I said, “I can help.” I was there for two days, and in two days I edited the picture. I think I made it very good. I liked it. But when he went to show it to Hollywood, they didn’t want it, because by then he was in conflict with them. Later, I think that Dennis Hopper decided that he couldn’t use my edit, because he needed to do it himself. And so he destroyed what I did, and I don’t know what he did with it later. I never told that to anybody through the years, but I am sure that if, one day, they found my edit, it was fantastic. Because the material was fantastic. I took out everything that was too much like a love story or too much Marxist politics. For me it was one of the greatest pictures I have ever seen. It was so beautiful, so different. I don’t know what it is like now, how it has been edited, the final thing, I don’t know if he conserved anything of mine. But it was a fantastic film. One thing I do remember from back then, though, was how strong the smell of Dennis Hopper’s underarm perspiration was. It was so strong, and one day — he had I think ten women there — and I put everyone in a line in order for them to smell the perfume of Dennis Hopper. Because he never changed his shirt, for days upon days. He smelled very strong. That I remember.
My good friend Bill Whaley, who has been a seminal part of Taos’s art culture since the 1960’s, wrote about his encounters with Hopper around this time in local paper The Horsefly, of which Whaley was the publisher. Here’s Bill’s account of first seeing The Last Movie at a private screening in Taos and a rumination on what Hopper was going through while editing the movie.
If I’m not mistaken, El Topo was first shown at El Cortez Theatre in Rachos de Taos, Dec. 13, 1970. At the time, I managed the theater for Dennis Hopper. Then he was still editing The Last Movie at the Mabel Dodge House. The latter was about four to six hours in length. David or Dennis or perhaps Diana Schwab, David’s secretary phoned me and asked me to arrange for a special screening of a film on Sunday afternoon, which turned out to be El Topo. After watching El Topo, which blew everyone’s mind, we watched the rough version of The Last Movie. That evening, we showed the regularly scheduled feature: Fellini’s Satyricon. My mind was deluged by too many images. I never recovered. Due to its complex themes and brilliant cinematography, I remember thinking that Dennis might turn out to be the next American Fellini if he could edit The Last Movie with some sense of its mimetic qualities. That promise remained unrealized.
In Taos, the real Dennis Hopper appeared to get all mixed up with the artistic conceit or character represented up there on the screen of The Last Movie. Whether due to the demons or stimulants that dominated his psyche, he had committed himself to a course of action that ultimately undermined his project. As Dennis edited The Last Movie he appeared to call on the same techniques of personal emotion that a method actor uses as inspiration, but this time employed to cut the film. Somewhere in the cross over between film and life, Dennis appeared to lose access to the rational faculties and objective reality that are also a necessary part of life and the artistic process–at least in terms of the conventions of story telling and a semblance of acceptable behavior.”
Hopper stories in Taos are legend. He could be a loud-mouthed, gun-toting drunk - he showed up hammered at a city council meeting toting a shotgun - who tried to fuck every flower child that moved (foreshadowing Frank Booth). He could also be a gentle, stoned philosopher who appreciated the deep spiritual aura radiating from the magnificent Sangre de Cristo mountain range that towered over Taos like great stone gods. He hung out with artists and hippies and did his damnedest to support the local culture. But in a small town where locals have trouble accepting outsiders, Hopper may have been too much of shit stirrer, too big of a presence and too batshit crazy, even for the open-air madhouse that is Taos.
Locals claim that Taos Mountain will steal a piece of your soul so that you must stay in order to feel whole or the mountain will ultimately reject you, sending you on your way. With Hopper, the mountain did a little of both. Ultimately, it accepted him…or else one day he’s gonna crawl out of his grave and come raging into town with shotgun barrel blazing.
In L.M. (Kit) Carson’s 1971 documentary The American Dreamer we follow Hopper as he struggles with the film making process, hot tubs with groupies, rambles, pontificates, mindfucks, and gradually goes gloriously mad while wrestling with celluloid and the visions in his ever-expanding brain.
For more of Bill Whaley’s tales of Dennis Hopper in Taos, visit The Horsefly archives.
Here’s a wonderful bit of darkly lysergic quick-cut photo collage for “Scum of the Moon,” the new single by Berlin-based Montreal trash-punker King Khan’s side project The Black Jaspers.
Posted by the charmingly named YouTuber LSD210SCUM, this rather incredible vid captures the extreme spirit of Khan & Co.’s ditty, and is pretty fun to just watch and randomly pause. As one commenter noted, “If you watch this video three times, you’ll be declared legally insane.”
Unfortunately, there are no shots of our King’s Cannes nightclub dalliances with a certain constantly rehabbing and self-reinventing starlet, but hey, can’t have it all…
Sixties short film Vertige by Jean Beaudin mixed a time-stretched version of The Beatles “I Am The Walrus” results in a spooky ambient experience that has a decidedly lysergic feel to it.
Thanks to AngelMusification for the The Beatles’ time-stretch.
In this episode of Sanford and Son, “Fred’s Treasure Garden,” which aired on Nov 29, 1974, Grady finds some pot growing in the junkyard, mistakes it for wild parsley, makes a nice big salad out of it and hilarity ensues.
Even without Redd Foxx , this is some high grade shit. The roots of stoner humor.
Wired goes behind-the-scenes of movies and popular drug-themed TV shows and gives you the skinny on what actors “actually toke—or snort or shoot or huff—on camera.”
Methamphetamine
The speed cooked up by Walter White (Bryan Cranston) on Breaking Bad won’t give you meth mouth, but it might cause cavities—rock candy is the stand-in for Heisenberg’s product.
Marijuana
Throughout Pineapple Express, characters smoke a nontobacco herb from online head shop International Oddities. It looks like pot, it blazes like pot, but no word on if it “smells like God’s vagina.”
Cocaine
Legend has it that Al Pacino plowed through real coke on the set of Scarface. When it was time for the cast of 2001′s Blow to go skiing, though, the actors snorted inositol—powdered vitamin B.
Crack
Ryan Gosling’s rock in the indie film Half Nelson was actually a piece of a broken drinking mug that prop artists had dyed with coffee. A bit of tobacco provided the smoke, and voilà: Pookie status.
“Madwoman of the Sacred Heart.” Graphic novel by by Moebius and Jodorowsky.
On the heels of sharing The Holy Mountain with DM readers, I thought an Alejandro Jodorowsky documentary might be timely and this is a good one.
In 1994 French film maker Louis Mouchet interviewed Jodorowsky and a bunch of his friends and collaborators, including director Fernando Arrabal, Peter Gabriel, Marcel Marcea and artist Moebius.
Jodorowsky is witty and wise as he discusses his masterpieces El Topo and The Holy Mountain, his failed Dune project, the Tarot, his role as a teacher and reluctant new age guru. He’s kind of like Freud on psychotropics.
I hope you enjoy this fascinating look into the mind of a modern magician and trickster who is constantly evolving and adapting to new technologies and formulating new philosophies.
“As soon as I define myself I’m dead.” ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo and The Holy Mountain truly define the meaning of the words “head movie.” Both films have the capacity to alter your consciousness while you’re watching them and long thereafter. Like the afterglow of a deeply profound dream, El Topo has been a part of me, shifting the gears in the soft machine of my brain, since I first saw it in 1971 at a midnight screening in Denver, Colorado when I was 19 years old. It was in every respect a spiritual experience.
Years later, when I saw The Holy Mountain the impact was less transformative than seeing El Topo, but I was still thoroughly blown away by Jodorowsky’s Technicolor alchemy. His celluloid transmission was light years ahead of its time. Made in 1973, the film’s look and attitude seem totally of the moment. Yes, it has its hippy dippy moments and goes soft in places, but overall it’s an amazing piece of film making that in its visual design - sets, costumes, symbols, color palette - is as cutting edge as anything made by contemporary directors like David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Chan Wook-park or Gaspar Noé. The movie is breathtaking. And it looks like it cost 20 times its $750,000 budget. Amazing.
If you’ve never seen The Holy Mountain, I suggest you see it on the big screen. Its visual wonders should be allowed to overwhelm and engulf you.
For home viewing, THM has been released in a beautiful Blu-ray transfer that is vast improvement over the fifth-generation bootlegged VHS copies that used to circulate among hardcore fans way back in the days before Jodorowsky’s praises were being sung by Marilyn Manson and Daniel Pinchbeck.
Normally I wouldn’t steer Dangerous Minds’ readers to a YouTube upload of something as visually sumptous as The Holy Mountain, but this happens to be really nice looking. Watch it and you’ll probably want to own it in remastered form, either on DVD or Blu-ray. Consider this as a kind of introduction, a full-length teaser, a first date with someone you’ll eventually marry.
Watch in 720p for a nice hi def image. This version has English dubbing, which is unfortunate but it doesn’t really diminish the overall experience.
If you watch the show, you know Breaking Bad is as addicting as meth, but a lot more fun and better for your health. The fourth season is finished and the big question among fans is where is the show gonna go next in its twisty turny road to its fifth season conclusion. Well, those nutzoid Taiwanese animators over at Next Media Animation have come up with what they think is going to happen and it’s batshit crazy.
Danish band Baby Woodrose explores psychedelia with a sure sense of what makes it sound and feel right. This particular track, “Down To The Bottom,” from their sixth studio album Third Eye Surgery, could be a lost track from Love’s first album. Yes, it’s that good. Vocalist and band mastermind Lorenzo Woodrose delivers a vocal that has the the big, beautiful, sardonic snarl of Arthur Lee.
Fans of The Seeds, Music Machine, Thirteen Floor Elevators and good old fashion head music, should find this track sonically fulfilling. And the video gives you something trippy to look at.
If you like what you hear, do what I did and download Third Eye Surgeryhere.
