You know, for that meth-loving snow globe collector in your life. Or maybe just for a completest Breaking Bad fan… I guess. 

Anywho, it’s for sale at Firebox for around $41.09.

 
Some artists, like Picasso and Dali, were discovered when they were young and their talents grew to maturity before the public eye. Sometimes, however it takes… well, dying before the art world sits up and takes notice of you, This was certainly the case with Brion Gysin, the Canadian/British painter and author who long stood in the shadows, figuratively speaking, of William S. Burroughs, his lifelong friend and collaborator. Burroughs once said that Brion Gysin was the only man he ever truly respected.

Gysin is an artist whose work must be seen in person to be truly appreciated. Of course this is said about every artist’s work, but it’s particularly true with Brion Gysin. What might appear to be random chicken scratch calligraphy when reproduced in a book, becomes ALIVE when seen in person. Seemingly careless hash marks become scenes of hundreds of people around a bonfire or a crowded Arab marketplace when you’re staring right at it.

The man was a master. And he left an awful lot of work behind. Although there were various Gysin gallery exhibits in New York while he was still alive—I recall being astonished by some large works on paper in a great 1985 show at the Tower Gallery—there was never a museum-level retrospective of Gysin’s work in the United States until 2010 at the New Museum in Manhattan:

One of the things Gysin is best know for is inventing the Dreamachine—a kinetic light sculpture that utilizes flicker effect to induce visions—a drugless turn-on.

FLicKer is a 2008 Canadian documentary about Gysin’s Dreamachine, directed by Nik Sheehan. Kenneth Anger, Marianne Faithfull, Gysin biographer John Geiger, Iggy Pop, Genesis P-Orridge, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, DJ Spooky and yours truly are interviewed.
 

 
H/T R.U. Sirius

 
Official culture never did figure out how to talk about drug use, did it? This 1980 ABC Afterschool Special stars Scott Baio, who had become a national superstar on Happy Days. It’s the story of an uptight and unpopular high school student who, thanks to moderate drug use, learns to loosen up, make some friends, meet a pretty girl, and save his brother’s life after a potentially deadly boating accident.

Wait, that’s not right. I have my notes mixed up here. No, of course it’s the story of a productive young drone who nearly loses it all because of marijuana. A Reefer Madness for the MTV generation, which means that there’ll be some sprightly saxophone work in it somewhere, and at some point a well-meaning teacher will take a moment to “rap” with his students. Two years later, Nancy Reagan started her “Just Say No” campaign. Oy.

On YouTube the special is broken up into eight videos, and it’s missing the very beginning and the very end. You can still get the gist of it, though.
 

 
Good gawd, there are so many choice quotes from this that I don’t even know where to begin. The LSD-induced poetry just goes… on. “You know what I mean?”

“Nothing really matters. That would mean something’s wrong.”

“I don’t play that game they’re playin’ out there,
runnin around, lookin for bullshit,
whatever they’re trying to sell on TV.
You know that’s a bunch of garbage,
now your head is all fucked up,
every time you look in the mirror, and
you don’t know who to blame.
You think it’s something to do with you.
That’s the saddest part of it all.”

“LSD or just fuckin’ being alive in general, goddammit, I dunno…
it’s fucking awesome.
It’s hard to tell anymore.”

Seriously, maybe this guy is on to something here,—reddit loves him—perhaps even ready to start a whole new religion. I’m ready for this. I’ve been waiting.
 

 
Via reddit

 
When former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was running around before his trial appearing on The Daily Show assuring Jon Stewart that he never, ever did anything wrong, he should have considered adopting the post-arrest media strategy of James Brown, as seen in this incredible interview. Considering that both Blagojevich and Brown ended up going to prison, it couldn’t have hurt! And James Brown is a hell of a lot more popular than Rod Blagojevich.

This interview on CNN’s Sonya Live! in LA occurred in May 1988, after Brown was arrested in Aiken County, South Carolina, on charges of drug possession and fleeing from the police after his wife Adrienne called 911 because he was threatening her safety. Brown was released after paying $24,000 in bail and then went to Atlanta to do this interview.

In the interview, Brown seems only dimly aware of Sonya Friedman’s questions, preferring to shout the lyrics to his songs and talk about how he “smells good ... and makes love good.” (The juxtaposition of Sonya’s “How did all this trouble begin?” and Brown’s non-sequitur answer—“Livin’ in America!”—is resonant in ways that utterly outstrip the meanings Brown may have had in mind.) If you want to see someone on TV being interviewed while high, you can hardly do better than James Brown. As in so many other things. Rod Blagojevich just wouldn’t be in the same league.

Brown’s incredible vitality is such that you’ll be excused for wondering whether this isn’t a concert appearance in addition to an interview. YouTube commenters and the like are given to identifying cocaine as the source of this live-wire act, but it was almost certainly PCP. His arrest was for possession of PCP, a substance Brown was allegedly using a lot at the time.

Just four months later, Brown was arrested again, this time on Interstate 20 (near the Georgia-South Carolina border) for carrying an unlicensed pistol and assaulting a police officer. He was sentenced to six years in prison and ended up serving three years.

To judge by R.J. Smith’s The One, Brown’s erratic conduct in the 1980s was going to land him in prison one way or another. Between 1984 and his September 1988 arrest, Adrienne Brown had to call 911 to report domestic violence a whopping twelve times.

As the undisputed father of funk, James Brown was one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century, and nobody was more electrifying live. This interview manages to be both highly amusing and a harbinger of the troubles that were just around the corner.
 

 
Recreational cannabis is legal in Denver, Colorado, but folks are still feeling a little bit iffy about its sudden visible, and potentially sniffable, presence. The Denver police are now using an instrument called the “Nasal Ranger” (yes, that’s really what it is called), to measure and track the scent of pot in order to better enforce laws regarding smell complaints. They began using the tool fairly recently, purportedly after pot-related odor complaints more than doubled. Doubling sounds like a lot, right?

Oh wait, except that the numbers were pretty negligible to begin with.

In a city of around 634,000 people, there were 98 smell complaints in 2010, seven involved weed. In 2012, there were 288 complaints, with sixteen having to do with marihuana. While that’s an increase overall, complaints about pot actually decreased by about 1.5%, and this was all prior to the legalization of pot for recreational use. In 2013 (up until September 20th), they recorded 85 complaints, eleven of which were attributed to marijuana, a slight increase since 2010, but the city isn’t exactly being hot-boxed. And let’s be honest, at least some of those complaints were made by anti-pot tattle-tales and buttinskies. I only know a few Denverites, but none I’ve spoken to have complained of a sudden pervasive skunky smog enveloping the Mile-High City.

I looked up the Nasal Ranger, attempting to find a price, but apparently you have to request a quote, which is far too much work for an (cough) groggy young woman like myself. It sounds to me like the police department bought an expensive-ass toy in order to assuage some stuffy reactionaries. In all fairness, the Nasal Ranger actually seems like a pretty tame measure when you learn there are people in Denver attempting to pass laws making the very smell of pot punishable by up to $999 or up to a year in jail.

And at least the Nasal Ranger uses measurable data. That way, they can punish only the truly egregious odor levels—smells most likely produced by a dispensary or farm, not personal use. And at most, it’s a $2,000 fine, nothing completely outrageous. The more potentially unjust part is the provision declaring that five household complaints in a 12 hour period constitutes a violation. That could so easily abused by a few vindictive, lying, busybody neighbors.

On some level, I sympathize with a fear of overpowering smells. I grew up next to a donut factory that ran the ovens at 5 am, right when I was driving to my awful job as a hotel maid. I used love the smell of donuts, but after living in a cloying corn syrup fog for a year, I can now only stand the aroma when the odd donut craving hits me. Of course, now I live in a West Indian neighborhood, so guess what my street smells like in the summer heat? Barbecue, you racists! (Seriously, 95 degrees and a smoker full of jerk chicken in front of every brownstone.)
 

 
Via NPR

 
On Friday bOING bOING featured a YouTube video of a section of Bizet’s Carmen reworked with lyrics pertaining to the trials and tribulations of Toronto’s singular mayor, Rob Ford. Ford has become a magnet of media interest lately, due to the surfacing of videotape proving that he smoked crack, his excuse for doing so (he was in a “drunken stupor”), and so forth. Basically Rob Ford is what would happen if you took your typical NCAA linebacker and made him mayor of one of the largest cities in North America.

The new Rob Ford version of Carmen is funny, but, to give you an idea of how long Torontans have been dealing with the insane Rob Ford phenomenon, there was an actual opera written and staged in Toronto nearly two years ago. Andrew Jaji (pictured above) played the title role.

Rob Ford in costume for a Christmas performance of The Nutcracker last year

On January 22, 2012, the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music put on a one-time-only performance of Rob Ford: The Opera. It was written by four student composers as part of a writing workshop with the considerable assistance of Michael Patrick Albano, resident stage director of the Faculty’s opera division. Albano spoke to The Torontoist while Rob Ford: The Opera was in production:
 

Well, [Ford] is quite bigger than life, which is very interesting. And I don’t mean physically bigger at all. That’s not what I mean. I mean, bigger than life the way operatic characters often are. He really seems to have a spotlight following him no matter where he goes. And what’s interesting about that kind of character—the same as whether you’re talking about Rob Ford, or King Lear, or Richard Nixon, or whoever you’re talking about—is the tremendous catalyst abilities that he has. He has very strong effects on other people around him.

 
According to the Musical Toronto website, “It looks like the opera includes a scene where Ford goes to Heaven, to discover that God looks an awful lot like Margaret Atwood. There is another scene where Ford is judged by a jury made up of Toronto librarians.”

God, I’d love to see this thing. Until then, shaky audience video will have to do.
 

15 minutes in. Before any noticeable effect.

I’m sure by now, a lot of us have seen self-portraits drawn during the course of LSD trips. The majority of examples I could find were all done by men. So, it’s pretty interesting to see a lady’s take on the lysergic experience.
 

45 minutes in.
 

1 hour and 45 minutes in.
 

2 hours and 15 minutes in.
 
More acid induced self-portraits after the jump…
 

 
Next spring Hunter S. Thompson’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky will unveil a public mural banner on a downtown building honoring him as one of their Hometown Heroes, nine years after his death. The banner will feature a portrait of HST by his friend and collaborator, Ralph Steadman, the British artist whose drawings appropriately illustrated Thompson’s work: wild, flowing, surreal, sometimes elegant, other times grotesque, and wildly funny.

Why has it taken so long? The Greater Louisville Pride Foundation’s president admitted that Thompson had “some issues with his life that didn’t really qualify for the banners.” Even so, fans, family, and friends, including Louisville poet Ron Whitehead, have been lobbying for some kind of major memorial for eight years.

Louisville’s list of native heroes is thick with athletes and seriously short on people from the arts. Come on, Louisville, don’t be like those po-dunk small towns who can only be bothered to honor natives who went on to professional sports or marriage to William Shatner. 

Here is a list of all the people, institutions, and entities already declared heroes: boxing legend Muhammad Ali, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, jockey Pat Day, broadcaster Bob Edwards, NBA star Darrell Griffith, sculptor Ed Hamilton, Louisville Slugger inventor Bud Hillerich, Heisman Trophy winner Paul Hornung, musician Patrick Henry Hughes, The Kentucky Derby, surgeons Dr. Harold E. Kleinert and Joseph E. Kutz, New York City Ballet principal dancer Wendy Whelan, whiskey distiller George Garvin Brown, University of Louisville men’s basketball coach Denny Crum, explorer Tori Murden McClure, Olympic swimmer Mary T. Meagher, Hall of Fame baseball player “Pee Wee” Reese, KFC founder Colonel Harland Sanders (I am not kidding), TV journalist Diane Sawyer, New York Giants quarterback and sports commentator Phil Simms, and welterweight boxer Rudell Stitch. It would be nice to see a banner for The Gits’ Mia Zapata someday too.

Steadman wrote to Roger Riddell of Louisville Magazine in 2012:

Who in all of Louisville is blameless that they should throw the first stone? Is there such a person in all the world who can claim such an awesome distinction? C’mon, good folks! Own up and celebrate the life of a man who wasn’t afraid to call a spade a spade… I believe that the citizens of Louisville should feel real proud to call ‘HST,’ one of their favorite sons, a true Kentucky pioneer!

Ron Whitehead produced The Hunter S. Thompson Tribute in Louisville in December 1996, where Mayor Harvey Sloane presented Thompson with the key to the city, and Governor Paul E. Patton bestowed the title of Kentucky Colonel on Thompson, as well as his pals Whitehead, Johnny Depp, and Warren Zevon. The Hometown Hero banner proves that all the upstanding people who held a grudge against him for writing “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” are probably long gone. Res ipsa loquitur.

Below, Hunter S. Thompson is confronted by an angry Hells Angel on Canadian television in the late 1960s:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Double Gonzo: Hunter S. Thompson Interviews Keith Richards

 
Cracked Actor is a 1974 BBC television documentary film about David Bowie that first aired in January of 1975. It was kind of a “Holy Grail” for Bowie nuts and over the years I’ve owned a VHS bootleg that was barely watchable, a DVD that was a slight improvement over that, and then I taped it off the air when BBC America aired it about ten years ago. Earlier this year, what with all the Bowie hoopla going on in the UK, the film was re-transferred to HD and trotted out again by the BBC. Now it’s really easy to find. In fact, it’s just a few inches below this very sentence.

Cracked Actor is a fascinatingly odd film. It was directed by a then 27-year-old Alan Yentob, later the Director of Programmes for all of BBC Television, who was promised extraordinary access to the singer by his manager Tony Defries. We meet a sickly, obviously coked-out David Bowie, being shunted between performances, limousines and hotels. He’s pale, stick thin and clearly mentally fragile. The somewhat uncomfortable manner in which he comports himself in film apparently made a big impression on Nicolas Roeg, who promptly cast him as an alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

In 1987, Bowie said of watching the film again:

“I was so blocked ... so stoned ... It’s quite a casualty case, isn’t it? I’m amazed I came out of that period, honest. When I see that now I cannot believe I survived it. I was so close to really throwing myself away physically, completely.”

Cracked Actor was mostly shot in Los Angeles and the majority of the concert footage was taken from a show at the Universal Amphitheatre on September 2, 1974. It is one of the sole sources of footage from the Burroughsian dystopia via Busby Berkeley vision of the infamous Diamond Dogs tour. Some of the material comes from D.A. Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars film.

Among the numbers performed in the film are “Space Oddity,” “Cracked Actor,” “Sweet Thing/Candidate,” “Moonage Daydream,” “The Width of a Circle,” “Aladdin Sane,” “Time” and “Diamond Dogs.”