There’s no need to review this lovely, holistic collection. We’ll let this clip speak for itself:
What is there beyond knowing that keeps calling to me? I can’t turn in any direction but it’s there. I don’t mean the leaves’ grip and shine or even the thrush’s silk song, but the far-off fires, for example, of the stars, heaven’s slowly turning theater of light, or the wind playful with its breath; or time that’s always rushing forward, or standing still in the same—what shall I say—moment.
What I know I could put into a pack as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it on one shoulder, important and honorable, but so small! While everything else continues, unexplained and unexplainable. How wonderful it is to follow a thought quietly to its logical end. I have done this a few times. But mostly I just stand in the dark field,in the middle of the world, breathing in and out. Life so far doesn’t have any other name but breath and light, wind and rain. If there’s a temple, I haven’t found it yet. I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass and the weeds.
“All that I want is keeping it easy.”
You may know Röyksopp from that caveman commercial, but their music is consistently awesome and the lyrics to this song are particularly relevant.
From the archives:
Inception
Perfect for: Enhancement Stoners
To Be Used: After you’ve exhausted all other awesome dream movies
Okay. Okay. Okay. Fine. I’ll write the INCEPTION REVIEW. Everyone just calm down. Jesus. I’ve probably gotten a dozen emails this week about it.
The reason why I’ve been resisting a WHOLE 10 DAYS to write the thing, is because it seems like all the reviews on this site go a little something like this:
Ohhhh, man, so-and-so movie was sooo fucking cool. I was baked out of my gourd, man, and the graphics were sweet as hell, dude..
But. Dude. I was totally confused at some parts…
Sound familiar?
Yeah, not that interesting, is it?
Now you know why I waited.
You know when you’re high with your friends and you start coming up with the craziest ideas? Like, maybe you have an idea for an awesome new way to design a car or a sweet-ass amusement park, you know where the roller coaster bends in such a way that the participants lose gravity or something….
That’s kind of how it was for the protagonist of this movie I caught the other day. This guy followed around Banksy and other street artists with a video camera for many years until he finally decided that he himself was going to make art.
But it was more than that.
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You no doubt saw Honey I Shrunk the Kids when you were a wee lad and didn’t give it a second thought. Maybe you were obsessed with it like I was. Maybe no matter how much you pretended, you just couldn’t will yourself to be tiny enough to transform your dad’s tiny plot of backyard into the huge jungle scape that they enjoyed.
When you’re a kid, the movie feels huge and expansive. But watching it again, there are really only a few scenes where they are actually tiny and in the back yard, but these scenes are huge in my memory. Nothing like the nerdy kid having to face his allergies by getting launched into a massive dandelion. Or battling a scorpion. All in excellent super 80’s claymation.
Honey is worth a watch again. It’s only an hour and a half, but if you smoke enough weed, you can be right up there with them, zipping down the blades of grass and feasting on massive discarded cream puffs.
Books are hard for me.
It isn’t that reading is hard, what’s hard is finding a book that holds my interest enough to finish it. Maybe there’s just too much weed-induced ADD happening in my life these days. Rule of the Bone, however, was not hard to read at alll. In fact, it was fantastic. A modern-day Catcher in the Rye about a fucked up middle school kid who gets kicked out of his house and spends the next two years trying to survive first in upstate New York and ultimately Jamaica.
The New York part of the story is an excercise in squallor. A lot of sleeping on old matresses and hanging out with meth addicts, but the Jamaica stuff is where things really start to get cool. He meets a Rastafarian who shows him the intrinsically spiritual connection between ganja and the universe. Listening to the wise old I-man for half the book was one of many treats to reading it. So was this awesome scene where the kid hallucinates himself back to the days of slavery.
The amount of drug use that happens over a beautiful tropical Jamaican setting is enough to read a book (especially in the winter). You can almost feel the Caribbean sun on your face and definitely makes you want to spark a joint right along with them. But this is a book that isn’t really about drugs.
It’s about how shitty it is to barely still be a kid. And it has an ending that quite literally gave me the chills.
AVATAR
Perfect for: Geeking Out
To Be Used: Anytime. Literally. Any time.
Okay. First of all, you are an idiot. Why, you ask, are you an idiot? Well, you’re settling in to read a review of a movie that you’ve no doubt already seen. You don’t need to know whether or not I liked it, all you have to do is fire up some of those brain cells and remember whether you liked it…
You were high when you saw it, weren’t you?
Of course your were.
If, however, by some infinitesimal, incalculable odds you (a) read this blog, but (b) have not seen Avatar, then you, my friend, are the greatest idiot of them all.
Or maybe you’re poor.
Fortunately, though, your misdeeds can be forgiven BECAUSE HOLY SHIT AVATAR IS COMING BACK TO THE THEATER, which is fucking awesome, because unless your a 15 year-old girl who likes vampires, the summer movie season this year has sucked. A fatty.
I remember last Thanksgiving, my brother and I were kicking it in our garage, and he started telling me about this movie that was “basically a combination of Fern Gully and The Smurfs.”
I’d never heard of it. And it sounded pretty stupid.
“Nah, man,” he replied, taking another hit off the spliff (oh, yeah, we were wolfing down a spliff), “I’m not explaining it right. It’s going to be awesome.”
For Christmas, he got passes to Avatar.
Not just Avatar—
Not just Avatar 3D—
BUT AVATAR MOTHERFUCKING IMAX 3D.
So we roll to the show and ya know, it’s really easy on a blog like this to say that everything is the best thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, when you’re stoned everything is pretty fucking cool. But. Avatar is easily the best movie-going experience I have ever had. Ever. I’m not kidding you.*
It’s the only movie I’ve ever seen in the theaters three times. Ever. It’s that good.
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Okay. This book was really fucking crazy. It begins with this weird precocious kid who’s playing in the forest when all of a sudden this black tar pit thing spits out a girl. At first the girl insists that one day she and the boy will be married and then just as they’re about to hook up—child molester alert—the girl disappears. Ho, hum!
Or something.
Then the boy spends the rest of the book sort of wondering among the land of the living, doubting that there really is anything to it. It’s an inverted Truman Show type thing where he’s the only one who seems to have the sense that life’s just a big joke. Armed with this unique ability to stand back and just kind of watch things, he ends up getting really good at stuff. Good at sports. Good at school. Wunderkind.
Eventually he joins the military, trains, and because this book takes place in the not-too-distant future gets shipped off to a war that looks a lot like Iraq, but takes place in Africa instead— which apparently is not in Africa.
There are other adventures.
A beautiful English girl in the desert. A time when he’s a POW. Another time when a well-dressed man who in a very Ben-Linus-from-Lost way seems both to be evil and have all the answers approaches him. Some other thing about rape and an ice cream truck…
I know it sounds confusing, but this book is really easy to read and kind of a fun mind-fuckery. Despite its confusing content, it’s written in really simple, easy to follow language. There are only a few characters to keep track of and everything moves really quickly.
I read this book in two days. I was stoned for both of them. Thus the fogginess. You know how it is. Read it yourself if you want to know more about it, asshole.
I am only just getting into to Tarot, but this so far has been an excellent deck to work with. It combines all the things you might expect from a tarot deck, but perfect for the beginner.
Osho is one of those Eastern philosopher guys who have totally taken off in the West. One thing I really like about his philosophy, is that it tends to be secular and holistic, instead of drilling down from the point of view of a particular religion. This comes across in his tarot deck as well. Instead of using overtly religious imagery, the illustrations are much more about tapping into the subconscious.
Here we have a nice, although distorted sample of what the cards look like. What’s nice about this deck, is that it labels the cards at the bottom things like “Trust” and “The Muse”. This is an awesome feature, because it’s not always easy to keep track of every single damn card in the deck.
It takes a long time to learn Tarot, but this is a nice, holistic, transcendental approach and there’s a lot to enjoy here when you’re sitting around getting high with friends.
I try to shy away from getting political here at Stoners. I usually save that for my other blog, but sometimes pot and politics intersect and, in the case of Tommy Chong, can turn a stand-up comedian into a drug lord. I’ll admit, I had no idea what I was getting into when I started reading his book. I was never a fan of Cheech and Chong. In fact, I don’t really like stoner movies at all. I find it’s a lot more fun to be high than it is to watch other (usually retarded) people get high. You probably heard he’d gone to jail, which seemed kind of inevitable and not all that surprising… but once I read his account of what the fuck went down, I felt outraged by the media shit-storm and scapegoating the DEA put him and his family through. They basically said that if he didn’t plead guilty to shipping bongs over state lines, then they would bring his son and his wife up on distribution charges as well. They even held the trial on the anniversary of 9/11 just to make the threat of drugs seem that much scarier. His book is poorly written to be sure, and a little heavy on the Holy Spirit, but it’s a really easy read. I would have liked him to compare his plight to the Nazi occupation a little less often. All things being equal, going to jail for 9 months is not the same as the slaughtering of an entire people. Moreover, sometimes his anecdotes felt like nothing other than page-filler, but overall, it’s a really fascinating look at what an all-powerful government can do with unlimited time and money.
Twin Peaks - The Definitive Gold Box Edition Anytime a show gets canceled, its fans declare it was simply “ahead of its time”, as if some other, future, more literate audience could understand it better. In the case of Twin Peaks, a show set in a mysterious, Lost-like Northwestern town, the other, future people I’m referring to are… us. Shot entirely on film before the days of digital, the series gives off a saturated pallet such that when Laura rolls up onto the shore, famously “wrapped in plastic” at the beginning of the series, her water-logged body gives off a chilling sky-blue color. Blood, later, comes vividly in crimson. It’s beautiful. …And it’s scary too. I cannot tell you how unsettling it is when people look, marble-eyed off-screen and acknowledge that “the owls are not what they seem”. It’s even worse when the grimacing Bob turns his unblinking eyes toward you and starts to laugh. *It is a good thing, however, that the show did air a decade ago, because David Lynch has since gone off his rocker, and any attempt to make the series today would have resulted in him writer/director ejaculating crazily onto the screen and not giving a fuck what any of it meant or who seemed to enjoy it. Twin Peaks - The Definitive Gold Box Edition
Perfect for: Geeking Out
To be Used: Over a Long Summer
Airing in the early 90’s, this show was ahead of its time*, but only by a decade, because now that series like The Sopranos and Weeds arch over the course of a season, audiences today are much more inclined to settle in and watch the residents of Twin Peaks
Perfect for: Geeking Out
To be Used: Over a Long Summer
Yellow Submarine DVD by The Beatles
Perfect for: Nostalgic Stoners
To be Used: Just as a Hangover Sets In
My friend, who easily smokes a quarter a week, approached me with the following riddle: “Imagine if a bunch of super-wealthy, experimental stoners sat down right in the middle of the acid revolution and pieced together a psychedelic cartoon bit by bit without a script or even, really, a plan. Think that’d be something you’d be interested in?”
I looked at him. Of course that would be something I’d be interested in! “I’m talking about Yellow Submarine, man… By the Beatles!”
Though there are a lot of my friends who have fond memories of watching this when they were kids, I somehow missed the boat (no pun intended!), so when I caught it a couple weeks ago, it was my first time. Let me promise you, this cartoon is a trippy mess. It - though rambling and, in some parts unclear - basically tells the story of the Fantastic Four on their crazy adventures in Pepperland and on the Yellow Submarine. (Fun fact: The Blue Meanies are what people used to call the police). There is much you can gather about the style and sweetness of this movie from the following clip:
See. It’s the fucking shit, and it seems perfectly designed for one of those hung-over days where everyone is unable to move from the couch, and all you want to do is pack another bowl and put on a movie that’s light and easy and will help you forget about how close you are to throwing up.
Yellow Submarine DVD by The Beatles
Perfect for: Nostalgic Stoners
To be Used: Just as a Hangover Sets In
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Season 3
Perfect for: Geeking Out
To be Used: In Conjunction with the 1st and 2nd Season
If you haven’t taken my advice and looked into It’s Always Sunny, I dare say you have been smoking too much weed. Here’s a good primer on all things Always Sunny.
For those of the rest of us who aren’t positively retarded, and know, in fact, what I’m talking about: Season 3 of this series is a real gem. It features my favorite episode thus far - The Gang Solves the North Korean Crisis - in which they black mail the owner of a Korean Barbecue into closing on the day of the all-important pub crawl.
Here’s a little preview in transcription form. The scene takes place in the barbecue joint with Dennis and Charlie doing a little reconnaissance:
Charlie: Look at the door. You see that door marked ‘pirate’? You think they got a pirate living in there?
Dennis: I see a door marked “private”. Is that the door you were talking about? Charlie: Nah, I was talking about the—
Dennis: Yep. Charlie: I didn’t say - what did you hear?
Dennis: I heard you say you saw a door marked ‘pirate’. You said is there a pirate living in there? Why would there be a pirate living in there?
Charlie: Well, look are we going to talk about pirates all day or are we going to find out who lives in here?
See. Pure genius. There are, of course, tons of other great episodes in this collection. My second favorite (and original first favorite until I got bored of it) is Sweet-Dee’s Dating a Retarded Person, in which, well, I’m sure you can imagine, but the part you might not be able to imagine, is while Dee is off, well, dating a retarded person, the rest of the gang are starting a band:
And because it is a phenomenon, I leave this review, with a few It’s Always Sunny spin-offs: The Acoustic, The Rager, and The Animator. I would strongly recommend the middle one…
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia:
Season 3 $24.99
Perfect for: Geeking Out
To be Used: In Conjunction with the 1st and 2nd Season
Volta by Bjork
Perfect For: Art House Stoners
To Be Used: In Conjunction With Acid
Bjork’s a classy lady and she sure likes her music videos. These are the videos released thus far from Volta,
Volta by Bjork
Price: $16.99
Perfect For: Art House Stoners
To Be Used: In Conjunction with Acid
