Apparently cop farts ruin everything. This happened in Leicestershire sometime in June 2013.

Via Arbroath:

The officer in the back enjoyed a high protein diet, and suffering with flatulence. The officers in the front seats of the car were forced to wind down the windows.

On doing so the officers smelled what they thought was cannabis. They asked their colleague in the back what he had been eating, and after fits of giggles and denials, they realised that the cannabis smell was in the air in the street outside.

All three officers’ suspicions were now raised, and they left the car to get some fresh air and find the cause of the cannabis smell. 200 metres further along the road the officers, following their noses, found a cannabis factory with a crop worth £12,000.

Seven individuals were arrested. Damn you, cop farts!

Via Arbroath and Nerdcore

 
West Coast and East Coast hip hop artists achieved international notoriety in the ‘90s and early 2000’s, thanks to well publicized rivalries and deaths. At the same time that Tupac, Notorious B.I.G., Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg were blaring from headlines and thumping from heavily customized car stereos, a thriving hip hop underground was taking place in Houston, Texas under the aegis of Robert Earl Davis, Jr., the legendary DJ Screw. Sadly it was a peculiar local drink that led to early deaths of DJ Screw and other young southern rappers.

Nicknamed “The Originator,” DJ Screw was a gifted musician and wily entrepreneur and marketer. His slowed-down, mellower style of “chopped and screwed” hip hop differed from the predominant, faster form of the time. His effects included skipping beats, stop-time, using the same record on dual turntables, and scratching. He released his mixtapes, called “Screwtapes,” selling them out of his house to friends and fans and later out of his independent record store, Screwed Up Records and Tapes, on the southeast side of Houston. The growth of his popularity through the mixtape network is exactly how Metallica first disseminated their music as a new band.

It’s been claimed that the infamous cocktail called “lean” or “Purple Drank” was a source of inspiration for DJ Screw’s chopped and screwed subgenre because of its trippy, slowing effect on the brain. He was a consumer and popularizer of the infamous “lean” concoction of cough syrup (prescription-only brands containing the antihistamine promethazine and codeine), soda and—for color—Jolly Rancher hard candy. This mixture was also called “sizzurp,” “Dirty Sprite” and “Texas tea.” Lean dates back to late 1960s/early 1970s Houston and experienced a surge in demand among rappers in the area in the 1990s.

 
DJ Screw, “Drank Up in My Cup”

Cough syrups containing codeine only are available over the counter in some states, but cough syrups with promethazine alone or with codeine have almost always been prescription-only all over the country. The abuse potential of promethazine has made it more of a concern than codeine. The popularity of the strongest promethazine-codeine cough syrups led to their widespread theft from pharmacies and the subsequent restriction of their sales. Over the counter brands containing dextromethorphan are also abused.

 
Indo G, “Purple Drank”
 

 
Three 6 Mafia, “Sippin’ On Some Syrup”

The health consequences from drinking lean, including obesity, heart problems, and dental issues, quickly damaged the lives of its users. Sadly DJ Screw overdosed in 2000 on a combination of lean made with prescription-strength codeine cough syrup, alcohol, PCP, and Valium. DJ Screw protégé Big Moe, who was addicted to lean and used it as the subject of many of his songs, overdosed in 2007. (Both Lil Wayne and Justin Bieber have been associated with sizzurp.)

It wasn’t until 2004-05 that the scene and artists associated with and inspired by DJ Screw, the so-called Screwed Up Click, gained national attention. DJ Screw’s 2005 album 3 ‘n the Mornin’ (Part Two) was named #13 on alternative newsweekly The Houston Press’s list of best Houston rap albums of all time.

Republican Texas governor Rick Perry has officially named DJ Screw a Texas Music Pioneer. In 2007 Vice produced a five-part documentary about the Houston hip-hop scene (and the use of purple drank), Screwed in Houston.
 

 
It’s an hallucinatory, almost trance-inducing experience, said underground film-maker, photographer and poet, Ira Cohen about his film The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda (1968).

It’s like going on an ecstatic journey to another planet, full of magical beings, animals and plants.

It’s certainly all that and more, and also has a soundtrack by The Velvet Underground’s original drummer Angus MacLise. 

Cohen filmed this phantasmagorical short at his apartment in New York’s Lower East Side. Cohen called his home “The Mylar Chamber,” as its walls were covered with Mylar, and he used its distorted and reflective quality to photograph various artists, writers and musicians. It was also a key component to The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, where its wonderful ripple effect is like one long trip. But to Ira Cohen back in the 1960s, it was “just reality.”
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

Shaman of the Lower East Side: Ira Cohen R.I.P.

 
Bonus: rarely screened interview with Ira Cohen, after the jump…
 

 
And here’s the proof!!!

From a New York Times article published in 1927.

Via The World’s Best Ever

 
I have a bevy of hats from my great grandmother, quilts from my mamaw, and scarves from my girlfriends who have embraced the textile arts. But a bong cozy? I could totally use that! As a gift… you know, for a friend.

Don’t you hate that harsh sound your glass piece makes when it hits the tabletop? And isn’t it annoying when you’re passed the bong but not a lighter? Well, I have the solution! My bong cozy and lighter holder set will protect your waterpipe and keep your lighter close. A necessity for any bong owner, especially if you have a glass table!

It is a harsh sound! And one does tend to misplace those lighters! And the best part? Machine-washable! Which is so convenient… for my friend.

 
According to the Hail Mary Jane website, this handmade glass guitar bong (or is it a bowl?) is fully-functional as a musical instrument.

It sure looks like a bitch to clean. Wouldn’t you get resin all over the fret board? And a glass guitar? My husband once broke two regular glass bongs in a 24 hour period. How long would this puppy last in the hands of someone who is stoned enough to actually want one of these?

“A” for effort, “F” for practicality.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Wake ‘N Bake: Coffee cup weed pipe

Via KMFW

 
The Burning Ghat is a strange, yet revealing short film that explores the relationship between original Beat Herbert Huncke, and his long-time companion and room-mate, Louis Cartwright.

Huncke was a petty crook and junkie, who hustled around Times Square in the 1940s, where he met William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. It was Huncke who originally introduced these three young writers to the “Beat Life”—a major inspiration on their writing.

Not long after their meeting, Ginsberg wrote in his journal:

Who is Herbert Huncke? When I first knew him I saw him in what I considered the ‘glamorous’ light of a petty criminal and Times Square hustler who was experienced in the ways, thoughts, and activities of an underground culture which is enormously extensive. The attempt to dismiss him because of his social irresponsibility is something that I was never able to conceive as truthful or productive. I saw him as a self-damned soul—but a soul nonetheless, aware of itself and others in a strangely perceptive and essentially human way. He has great charm. I see that he suffers, more than myself, more than anyone I know of perhaps; suffers like a saint of old in the making; and also has cosmic or supersensory perceptions of an extraordinary depth and openness.

Louis Cartwright was a photographer (he took the portrait of Huncke above), drug addict and alleged pimp. According to Huncke, he was also someone not to be trusted. In 1994, Cartwright was stabbed to death, and his murder still remains unsolved.

The Burning Ghat was directed by James Rasin (Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Andy Warhol Superstar) and Jerome Poynton, and was filmed in Huncke’s apartment on Henry Street, New York.

Allen Ginsberg wrote of the film, “O Rare Herbert Huncke, live on film! The Burning Ghat features late-in-lifetime old partners Huncke & Louis playing characters beyond themselves with restrained solid self-awareness, their brief masquerade of soul climaxing in an inspired moment’s paradox bittersweet as an O’Henry’s tale’s last twist”.

Harry Smith said of the film, “It should have been longer”.

The Burning Ghat was featured at the 53rd Venice Biennial, and included in the Whitney Museum’s “Beat Culture and the New America” show of 1996. It won the Gold Plaque Award for Best Short Film at the 1990 Chicago International Film Festival.

Made the same year Huncke published his autobiography Guilty of Everything, this was to be his only on-screen, acting performance.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

‘Original Beats’: A film on Herbert Hunke and Gregory Corso

 
Out-takes from ‘Original Beats’ featuring Herbert Huncke, after the jump…
 

 
As someone who was born and raised in Wheeling, WV, I saw a bustling steel and coal town, where good jobs were once plentiful, turn into a pretty fucking bleak place in under a decade. Downtown Wheeling had several movie theaters, upscale department stores, one of the best international magazine stores that I’ve ever been in, and even some pretty good record stores. It was always difficult to find a parking space and I have memories of my parents driving around forever looking for a spot.

By the time I left—at the age of 17 in 1983—many residents were abandoning the town for better jobs elsewhere. The population today, I think, is about exactly half of what it was thirty years ago. The folks who stayed saw their $30 an hour plus benefits union-secured livelihoods disappear to be replaced by minimum wage positions as Wal-Mart associates and in fast food chains. Within a very short time most of the stores in Downtown Wheeling were closing and their windows were boarded up.

One Christmas I returned to my hometown to visit my family and a friend drove me around to show me just how much things had changed for the worse since I’d been gone (about five years at that point). He took me to (literally) Main Street and imagine if you will, a scene of happy middle-class families, busy stores, tinsel Christmas decorations on streetlights and a general small town America holiday shopping hubbub.

Well, that’s the way it used to be. That’s what I remembered. Now transpose that over some empty sidewalks, 2x4s nailed across broken windows and a guy we both went to high school with working as a prostitute in front of what was once the store were the rich people in the town shopped.

That’s a nasty picture, isn’t it? But Wheeling had it lucky compared to most of the state where clear-cutting, fracking and mountaintop removal mining have turned parts of West Virginia into lunar surfaces, polluted the drinking water and probably accomplished much worse. Who can blame the often dirt poor rural people who sold their land to the coal and gas barons to become instant Jed Clampetts, but seriously, this is like The Lorax in real life. When they’re done depleting the state of its precious natural resources, what’s left behind ain’t gonna be pretty.

Who knows how long it will take to extract every last penny of energy out of Appalachia, but one thing is quite certain: Once this has occurred, as it inevitably will, there will be virtually nothing left. No jobs, no mountains, no communities, no clean water, fuck all. When the capitalists have finished raping West Virginia, there’s going to be a big gaping hole there, plenty of devastation, and not a lot more.

Chances are you don’t know this and probably wouldn’t care much if you did. MTV’s Buckwild aside, light is virtually never shed on what is going on in West Virginia. That’s why Sean Dunne’s new documentary Oxyana, about the state’s so-called “Hillbilly Heroin” epidemic is so important.

Oceana, West Virginia, sits squarely in one of God’s blind spots. It’s one of the old coal mining communities that feeds the nation’s insatiable appetite for energy. Set in the middle of unbelievable natural beauty, a beauty that in the last number of years has been marred by the Appalachian scourge of Oxycontin. Life persists, but it’s a living that few Americans could explain or even believe - closer in kind to the world of a medieval plague. Men and women die epidemically. The addicts — who are the vast majority and all nice enough people — sell, scramble, and steal in an economy of nigh-endtimes desperation. Worn down and out by the pills, the mines or the indignity of both, everyone looks twice their own age and is unable to imagine an existence outside of coal, subsidies and prescription narcotics. Things could hardly get darker than in this place called Oceana. Nevertheless, there it is. A little village in the valley of Death, where children are born, groceries are still purchased and festivity is expressed through firearms and poor decision-making. But is this enough to live for? Is it enough to provide anyone with any hope or deliverance? OXYANA is an unflinchingly close focus on the anguish and horrors of a community that the rest of the country would just as soon forget, a nearly Biblical narrative of American forsakenness.

That last phrase there says it all, if you ask me, “a nearly Biblical narrative of American forsakenness.” Fuck.

In 2009, interviewing Julien Nitzberg, director of the (AMAZING, must-see) documentary The Wild Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (on Netflix), I asked him about a scene in his film where one of the protagonists is seen in a hospital—only moments after delivering a baby—grinding up an Oxycontin pill and snorting it with her friend while her newborn sleeps but a few feet away! I wondered if he felt, you know, bad or exploitative to have been there shooting that and he said no because that pill would have been crushed up and snorted regardless of whether or not his camera had been recording the deed. (During the film a young redneck guy looks into the camera and asks “Ever hear a Boone Country mating call?” and then he shakes a bottle of Oxycontin pills and laughs).

Oxyana received a Special Jury Mention at the recent 2013 Tribeca Film Festival. Sean Dunne is also the director of the exellent American Juggalo short, which we featured on DM back in 2011.
 

 
In celebration of the great Bea Arthur’s birthday (the “Golden Girl” would have been 91 years old today) here she is demanding “some marijuana” by YouTuber DewFuzz.

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
WTF? Bea Arthur and Rock Hudson sing about coke, meth and weed

 
Despite what the title might imply, there’s nothing sexist or Stepford Wives-ish here, rather it’s the frantic, rubber-faced hubby who is badly in need of a chill pill. Or an entire bottle of them.

If you’ve ever seen the Dr. Seuss-scripted kids film The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, this weird little 1957 industrial film puts me immediately in mind of that.

With all sorts of amazing WTF flourishes, like a desk that hands you a newspaper!
 

 
Thank you Binky Prod! (if that is, in fact, your real name)