50/50 and the normalization of Marijuana

I was up at my my sister and brother-in-law's over the holiday weekend.   Good liberals in a small conservative town and we decided to head to the small art-house cinema see a movie.   The movie, 50/50 , is based on a true story of a young man's brush with an unexpected cancer.  It's funny; the chemistry between the two main characters:  Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Adam) and Seth Rogen (Kyle) was good.   But what struck me and surprisingly didn't strike my brother-in-law, who's a doctor in a medical marijuana state, is how "normalized" they chose to show the pot smoking.  

Adam doesn't drink or smoke and his first dosage of medicinal marijuana is in the macaroons offered by Phillip Baker Hall (Alan) to deal with the nausea caused by chemotherapy.   From there, the filmmakers actually show Adam stoned, smoking with Kyle, and even socializing with Mitch (Matt Frewer) and Alan and smoking again.   It was suddenly normal for cancer patients to sit around smoking pot.  And the only noticeable effects that it seemed to have were the visual tricks it played the first time Adam ingested it. 

Now I liked the movie, and as you know, am an advocate for legalization, but I almost thought that the movie was a tad bit deceptive.   For one thing, it does show that alcohol is bad when it shows Kyle so messed up he can't drive home, yet, it never shows Adam having any sort of detrimental effects from smoking.   You never see Adam stoned at work, or Kyle getting behind the wheel of an auto stoned.   So, from propaganda standpoint, we now see pot as harmless and alcohol as bad; we now see pot as medicine and medicine only.  

Now my argument with the movie is not only that it was deceptive in how it showed pot, but it manipulates the viewer.  If the audience is anything like Adam (who's never smoked before the macaroons (?)), then don't you think he'd be a little bit more cautious?   Or is this generation (mid-20s) so exposed to marijuana that the scare tactics of DARE just didn't have any effect?

John Prine-Popejoy Hall, Albuquerque 11172011

I guess I'm glad I don't let labels tell me what I should like anymore.   Of course, I'd be lying if I tried to hide behind the old cliche, "I like what I like" or "I think there's really only 2 kinds of music:  good music and bad music," cause I do think labels are important.   Not that I use the label to help me decide if I like it or not, but I do use it to try and understand it.   Thus, even though I've known many of his songs, I probably wouldn't have seen John Prine in concert just a few short years ago.

When I went to concerts, I wanted them to do something different than what I might get from listening to their work on the stereo, and most concerts just simply don't do that.   One of my earlier concerts, The Cars during their Heartbeat City tour reinforced that position early on.   Why would I want to pay to basically hear the album?   So, my choice of concerts was carefully screened:   would they do something different than what appears on the albums?  did the concert feel uniquely crafted for that night or are they going through the motions and playing the same set night after night?  

But, now that I'm a performer too, I have a more discriminating eye and frankly, "I like what I like."   So, even though I didn't move around very much or John didn't take particular flights of jam fancy, his show had this real sense of introspection, reflection, a deep and abiding affection for the songs that he's created that made me want to cry at times.   I felt distinctively middle aged and whether it was holding Mindy's hand as he crooned, "There's a hole in daddy's arm where the money goes..." I couldn't help but think that John, frankly, doesn't have much longer to do this.  

He wasn't frail, but I could sort of feel how hard being on the road must be.   And, for me listening to John Prine, who's probably spent the better part of his career being on the road for the last 50 years, live was a real privilege.   I don't think about it often, but at times, I'm downright thankful for what life has conspired to bring me and last night, up on the Mezzanine at Popejoy Hall, I'm not sure if there was any other path I could've taken that would've put me there.  The show felt like mine; the songs written for me; and the night, chilly, but calm, was one I wouldn't be replicating any time soon.  

Thanks John.

Thrive: the Movement

Released via the internet on 11-11-11, I decided I'd sit back and give the movie  a viewing.   Foster Gamble (of the Proctor and Gamble fortune) is the narrator and basically walks you through different types of "discoveries" that he's arrived it in his effort to understand what it would take for human beings to "thrive."  Of course, what the movie does is package all the traditional conspiracies together:

Nikolai Tesla & Free Energy----------------------------------------------------Check
Alien visitation & Crop Circles--------------------------------------------------Check
The Rothchilds, Rockefellers, Morgans and the Illuminati------------------------Check
Federal Reserve ponzi scheme--------------------------------------------------Check.
Control of food production as population control--------------------------------Check
Eye in the Pyramid on the dollar bill----------------------------------------------Check
Real Purpose of the Pyramids----------------------------------------------------Check
And the nice little wrap-up at the end is that we can all live in harmony.  

I know this makes me seem a bit cynical, but the movie wraps way too many "mysteries" in this nice glossy package.

I'm left with a couple of nagging doubts.  I'll only touch on a couple of them because I'm not sure I want to sit through the movie again to address all the problems I have with it.

If the Tesla Coil is so efficient and can basically create energy out of the air, then why hasn't anybody created a marketable version?  

Now, it may make sense that the oil/gas/coal industry is in collusion with the power companies to suppress this technology, but the level of sophistication and coordination involved seems flat-out staggering.  Solar Power and Wind are also a direct threat but I see windmills and solar panels on a small scale.   Yet, the Tesla Coil powering someone's house?   Haven't seen it.  I was unable to find anything on the net on how to actually make one that works.   Bring it on.  I'd like to power my house with one.

Why does he hint at the Truther Conspiracy and 9-11 as a False Flag Operation by showing the collapse of Tower #7 without acknowledging that the view that is always shown neglects the actual damage to the building on the other side that basically destroyed the building?


My ultimate criticism is why is it easier to believe in some sort of conspiracy than it is to believe that we are culpable in a really dysfunctional system?  If indeed we are on the verge of a great transformation, a great awakening, what is that going to look like?   Am I going to lose my job, my house, actually have to go through a few years of horrifying existence as the system transforms from a "fractional banking" system to something less speculative?   I hope not.

I guess if I want to dream about a better world, I prefer these approaches:

Empathic Civilisation
The Future of Energy

I don't want to live in a world where I'm dependent upon some benevolent E.T. to show us how to live together.   If we've been visited by aliens, then where are they?   How come they don't come and land on the Whitehouse lawn, strike up a position above every major capital until the powers that be have no choice but to acknowledge their existence?   I don't want to live in a world where I have to believe that our elected leaders are stooges, there's a ruling family that is hellbent on keeping its power and resources at the expense of way too many other humans.   It may make for great Hollywood, but it doesn't jive with the people I know.  

We, and we alone, have created this mess and its about time we took some concrete steps to reform the system to make it better for all because if we don't we're going to find ourselves living in a world that with every year becomes increasingly less livable and no amount of money, power, or control is going to change the fact that we've screwed this place up bad and we don't have any other places we can go.

He Wrote About Us

To call Norman Spinrad's He Walked Among Us Science Fiction is really stretching the genre.  True, Spinrad is one of the elder statesmen of SciFi, but this work is more important than sadly the genre would allow.

At times a critique on our media obsessed culture, the book deftly follows the trajectory of a comic (Ralf), claiming to be from the future 500 years from now as he rises to become a small time cable television star modified and cultivated by his agent, "Texas Jimmy" Balaban, science fiction author, Dexter Lampkin, and new age networker, Amanda Robin.   The book also acts as a critique of the SciFi/Comic Con convention business where hoards of loyal fans dress up as their favorite character from StarTrek, World of Warcraft, etc. and parade in hotel conference rooms hooking up, drinking, and talking all the while thinking that this is all somehow making a difference when they are really only being manipulated by the publishing industry for financial gain.

In many ways the book is not fun to read and Spinrad's humor quite often is not funny at all, but he's not crafting this as a sort of audition for writing for late night.  No, he's more appropriately labelled a satirist in the same vein as Jonathan Swift.   Is this really the culture we've created?  And is it any wonder we seem to be heading for a collision with a bleak, almost unlivable future?

Being a Science Fiction writer, Spinrad deftly wields the technical jargon into the story effortlessly and perhaps adds more fuel to a debate that resonates when looking out on the various Occupy protests even as I write this.  Under the guise of Ralf's closing monologue, Spinrad writes, "We are the crown of creation!  We are the Giant Turnip God of the Double Helix!....I have seen the Light and it is us, oh yeah!  It's time to hijack this crappy old airplane that's auguring in to the toilet bowl and tell the guys in the cockpit to fly us to Tomorrowland!" (343).

Outside of the guise of a Science Fiction novel, the idea that we control our own destiny; the future isn't written and no one is going to come from the future to help us avert a cataclysm or no savior is going to beam down from a cloud to take the reins and create a heaven on Earth would be cause for celebration and discussion.   Sadly, this book, along with too many, gets the same sort of promotion and publicity as typical genre fiction and languishes on a bookshelf when it should be read by people, a lot more people.