It’s like watching an episode of The Twilight Zone.

(via Nerdcore)

 
(via Boing Boing )

 
There was a time not that long ago when New York City was overrun with marijuana. In the 1940s and early 50s, pot plants were flourishing in vacant lots throughout the five boroughs. In 1951 over 41,000 pounds of marijuana were uprooted and destroyed by the sanitation department’s weed wacking “White Wing Squad,” so described because of their white uniforms. Queens alone yielded 17,000 pounds for the grim reapers.

“Though the bust in the above article occurred in Greenwich Village, the leader of this group of “strikingly pretty girls” and musicians copped to finding his marijuana “somewhere in Brooklyn.” As to what they were doing “sitting hobo style around a man preparing marijuana in a frying pan” is, however, anyone’s guess.”

Read about the amazing history of New York City’s marijuana jungles at the Brooklyn Public Library’s website.  Lots of jaw-dropping photographs.

In the photo below, 100 pounds of ganja uprooted in Brooklyn is being hauled off for incinerators in Woodside, Queens.
 

 

It looks like someone got to the crops before the cops did:
 

 
Thanks to Mark Kamins for the turn-on.

via KFMW

So I watched this 45 second time-lapse video (above) of a cigarette burning in reverse called “Chasing Smoke.” After watching this, I got curious and wondered if it was actually possible to smoke an entire cigarette in less than 45 seconds? Well, it is. The gentlemen in the video below demonstrates how to finish off a smoky treat in just 40 seconds! Quite a… uh… talent!  Must’ve taken years of practice and years off his life…
 

 
(via KFMW)

 
Robert Downey Sr.‘s stoned apocalypse Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight got its start in 1975 and then wandered all over the physical and psychic landscape tripping on counterculture mindgames, jazzbo attitudes and post hippie hipsterisms. This is Dada, surrealism and soap opera all mixed up in the salad bowl of your your brain.

The key to digging Downey is to understand that he was fucking with filmgoers expectations. People went to the movies to relax and enjoy the myths that solidified their world views, Downey’s movies are like explosions in some kind of postmodern nickelodeon, disrupting the linear flow at 24 fps. Approaching his films and expecting some soothing reality that reflects the real world is an exercise in frustration and possible nervous breakdown. What Jackson Pollack had done with painting, allowing the paint to paint itself, is what Downey does with film and narrative…he gives it the space to find itself. The result can be a series of happy accidents, genius or the ridiculous.

Behind it all, the music of David Sanborn, Jack Nitzche, and someone credited as Arica.
 

 
Hippies,beatniks, go go dancers and acidheads let it all hang out in a psychedelic group grope set to the now sounds of the new generation. Mature audiences only.

“What Goes On” (live) - The Velvet Underground
“Cellophane Woman” - Sopwith Camel
“Help You Ann’ - The Lyres
“Time Machine” - Satori
“Roller Girl” - Anna Karina
“She Has Funny Cars” - The Jefferson Airplane
“I Haven’t Got The Nerve” - The Left Banke
“Sally I Do” - Abdullah’s Regime
“Hold Me Now” - The Rumors
“Mona” - The Pleasures

Break out the Kama Sutra oil, the Nepalese Temple Balls and the Nag Champa incense and get ready to freak out!
 

 
In this episode of Miami Vice called “Payback” which aired on March 14, 1986, Frank Zappa plays Mario Fuente, the head of a drug ring dealing “weasel dust.”

I spent 13 years snorting weasel dust and the best part of the experience was the anticipation prior to snorting the first line. It was straight downhill after that.
 

 
Via Exile On Moan Street

 
Journey In Time is some wacky anti-drug propaganda from 1971. Chock full of unintentional humor and bogus facts about drugs, this sucker is a classic. The narration by director Alan Hodd sounds like it was written by a precocious, glue sniffing 12 year teenybopper.

What makes the film particularly groovy is the footage of hippies shot on location in San Francisco and Dallas and the soundtrack featuring The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Texas psyche-rockers Kenny And The Kasuals singing “Journey To Time.” Reputedly, the Kasuals disavowed the film and claim the song was used without their permission. As fas as I know, The Beatles and Bob Dylan have no comment.

I hope you enjoy every sordid minute of this hippie/rock’n’roll/drug scarefest.

 
Born in Glasgow in 1925 and reborn in the land of Morpheus sometime in the 1950s, Alexander Trocchi was the beatest of the beat, a self-described “cosmonaut of inner space” who Allen Ginsberg called “a major figure in cosmopolitan new-consciousness fifties’ and sixties’ literature.” Trocchi was a junkie, poet, writer of porn and author of one of the landmark books about being a rebel, drifter and drug addict, Cain’s Book. He wrote it while living in New York and even though it’s billed as a novel, Cain’s Book is based on Trocchi’s own life story. Though banned in the United Kingdom as pornography, it wasn’t the sex that upset the status quo as much as it was Trocchi’s unabashedly anarchic spirit and overall fuck you attitude.

Trocchi’s belief was that a writer should be a pioneer, venturing into areas that ordinary people either were too sane or too afraid to go. His explorations included heroin. Like DeQuincey, Crowley, Baudelaire and Burroughs, Trocchi found a muse in drugs. He was relentless in his pursuit of the next high. And while he might be accused of wearing his junkie status as a badge of honor, he never romanticized the life of the addict. He also never apologized for who he was and what he did, which included turning Marianne Faithfull onto heroin and letting his wife Lyn prostitute herself on the streets of the Lower East Side.

Cain’s Book is the classic late-1950s account of heroin addiction. . . . An un-self-forgiving existentialism, rendered with writerly exactness and muscularity, set this novel apart from all others of the genre.” –– William S. Burroughs

Along with Naked Lunch and Hubert Selby’s Requiem For A Dream, Cain’s Book is a classic of dope-inspired writing. It was Trocchi’s last novel. He spent the rest of his life occasionally writing short stories, prose and poetry. He died of pneumonia in 1984.

I discovered Cain’s Book right around the time I was reading Burroughs, Bukowski and Kerouac. It was another big black splotch on my teenage Catholic soul. Literature was ruining me for the “straight” world but splendidly preparing for a life of sexual adventuring, drug experimentation and the pursuit of my own muses. Trocchi was an imperfect muse himself. But I have discovered that it is the troubled souls that stir up the most heat and though their light is often hidden in the murk of their disheveled lives when it does shine it does so more intensely.

Here’s a clip from the documentary Cain’s Film followed by a short video on Trocchi featuring William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Leonard Cohen.