Does Francis Ford Coppola Consume Weed

Most people think of it as fun, but it has medical benefits – so can microdosing marijuana help you?

The post Does Francis Ford Coppola Consume Weed appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

Does Francis Ford Coppola Consume Weed

Most people think of it as fun, but it has medical benefits – so can microdosing marijuana help you?

The post Does Francis Ford Coppola Consume Weed appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

Does Francis Ford Coppola Consume Weed

Most people think of it as fun, but it has medical benefits – so can microdosing marijuana help you?

The post Does Francis Ford Coppola Consume Weed appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

Does Francis Ford Coppola Consume Weed

Most people think of it as fun, but it has medical benefits – so can microdosing marijuana help you?

The post Does Francis Ford Coppola Consume Weed appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

Does Francis Ford Coppola Consume Weed

Most people think of it as fun, but it has medical benefits – so can microdosing marijuana help you?

The post Does Francis Ford Coppola Consume Weed appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

Does Francis Ford Coppola Consume Weed

Most people think of it as fun, but it has medical benefits – so can microdosing marijuana help you?

The post Does Francis Ford Coppola Consume Weed appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

The adults who don’t feel the pain of Palestinians today are the same as the adults who did not feel the pain of Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War.

by Charles Mudede

I want to open with an observation concerning America’s reception of Israel’s current war in the Gaza Strip (which, by the way, has a length that’s a little longer than the distance between Seattle and Everett, and, for the most part, a width that almost matches the one between downtown and Lake Washington). After the observation, I will attempt to make sense of it inductively—meaning, from experience or facts up to a generalization or theory.

Let’s start with a confrontation that occurred at the University of Washington on Sunday, May 12. The encampment of students who support Palestinians was countered by a march organized by the pro-Israel church group Pursuit NW. The appearance of this confrontation? One side, young students; on the other, older churchgoers. This age disparity, which an I eyewitness (Hannah Krieg) confirmed, wasn’t confined to Friday’s showdown. It’s also found in how mainstream politicians in both parties have negatively responded to the new anti-war movement and further observed in a section of a comprehensive study posted by Pew Research Center on March 21, “Majority in U.S. Say Israel Has Valid Reasons for Fighting; Fewer Say the Same About Hamas,” titled “Views of how, why the war is being fought, by age.”  

I like this guy 😂 pic.twitter.com/NmjkRTt85d

— Nader (@BonsaiSky) May 11, 2024

Pew Research Center found that…

Younger adults are significantly more critical of how Israel is fighting in the war than are older people: 21% of Americans ages 18 to 29 say the way Israel is carrying out its response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack is acceptable; 46% describe it as unacceptable.

Another Pew Research Center study that focused on Jewish Americans repeated the age disparity, particularly in views of the Israeli government:

[T]here are age differences among Jewish Americans, as there are among American overall. For example, 45% of Jews under 35 have a favorable view of the Israeli government, while 53% have an unfavorable view. Jews ages 50 to 64 are the only age group in which a majority express a favorable opinion of the Israeli government (64%).

What are we to make of all this? One might go down a well-trodden path that leads to this common conclusion: Young people do not have any real responsibilities (paying bills, raising a family, keeping a job), and so they have the freedom to hold and express unconventional or critical opinions. But when they grow up, they will cool down and finally become adults. But what if we don’t take a path at all and instead attempt to make a new one? What would be its point of departure? I have a suggestion. It comes from a concept that posits the communicability of pain.  

I first came across this concept in a recent e-Flux Notes obituary for Marina Vishmidt. The post’s author, Andreas Petrossiants, described Vishmidt’s devotion—as a professor, critic, and theorist—to deprivatization. Pain, the seemingly “most isolating thing,” wasn’t left out of this program, a fact made clear in Vishmidt’s brief review of Anne Boyer’s book The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness.  

Petrossiants writes that “Marina… worked to dispel the dominant logics and abstractions that individuate and separate, pain included, putting the whole world in there, in all her endeavors.” The key line here is “putting the whole world in there.” It means we live in a world that is out there. But outside of what? The fiction of the individual. What is real, however, is our sociality, or ultrasociality. We are the most social large animal in the kingdom. Without this biological feature, we could not build bridges, collect trash, fly in the sky, and so on. These achievements, and more, require a level of cooperation that’s exceptional and not found in even our closest and far less social relatives, the great apes.

Such an understanding (the priority of human individualism) makes it very hard to see pain as not only social but communicable. In truth, however, we transmit what we feel, good or bad, on scales that far transcend the local. In this way, we can break with Darwinian evolution (genes as isolated) and enter that of Lamarck, an 18th/19th-century French naturalist whose star is rising in the age of epigenetics. Lamarck insisted that seemingly personal experiences can be transmitted to one’s offspring, a fact revealed by the Dutch Hunger Winter of World War 2. If life has been hard for you, this hardness is communicated directly to your children and even their children. The speed of Lamarckian evolution is closer to culture than natural selection. 

But what does this have to do with the American students protesting the war in Gaza? If pain is socially (“the whole world in there”) transmittable then we can arrive at this conclusion: Young people, in general, are more attuned to human animality than adults. The former can feel the pain of a war that has killed more civilians than combatants. And a large number of those civilians have been children. This kind of suffering should be imaginable to all. (Our mode of social communication is the imagination.)

But it’s not. Why? Because we live in a society that works hard and long to repress and then invert our species being. Meaning, the older we get the more our sociality is, by cultural engineering, converted into its opposite, individualism. And so, for the most part, adults in a market order are left with little to no imagination when it comes to being with others. The more years we add to our experience, the less responsible we become. Only the generalization of this inverted condition explains the existence of billionaires (who have no pain) and homelessness (who do feel pain every day, every hour). We see both classes as composed of individuals.

The adults who don’t feel the pain of Palestinians today are the same as the adults who did not feel the pain of Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War.

Kent State. Fearful people don’t change much pic.twitter.com/QMqolIjIdX

— mass ave curmudgeon 🏁 (@mass_ave) May 9, 2024

The Stranger

THC test subjects with limonene aboard reported a smoother flight.

The post Can lemon-smelling weed cause less anxiety than others? appeared first on Leafly.

Leafly

Cannabis Can Help Painful Menstrual Cramps

While more research needs to be done, cannabis can help painful menstrual cramps – which is good news!

The post Cannabis Can Help Painful Menstrual Cramps appeared first on The Fresh Toast.

The Fresh Toast

The best new music to hit Dave Segal’s inbox this week.

by Dave Segal

The Bug Club, “Quality Pints” (Sub Pop)

Sub Pop continues to be a safe space for unsafe non-American rock bands. For a label of its considerable size, that’s admirable. The Seattle company’s new signing, Wales’ the Bug Club, joins other notable foreigners to its roster such as SLIFT, Deaf Wish, Vanishing Twin, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, and, going back a bit, Jennifer Gentle, and feedtime. 

The Bug Club consist of bassist/vocalist Tilly Harris and guitarist/vocalist Sam Willmett. They’ve been around since 2016, winning over BBC DJ and former Fall and Creepers guitarist Marc Riley with their 2021 debut single, “We Don’t Need Room for Lovin’.” The EP whence that single comes, Launching Moondream One, announces the Bug Club’s appealing m.o.: brief, lo-fi rock songs that hook you from their first seconds and never let go. Catchy melodies seem to ooze out of this duo like sweat. A wry, Welsh Guided by Voices, but with more estrogenic energy? The Pooh Sticks (also Welsh! Also hyper-self-aware-rock!), but with a less gross name? Only a crass bugger would make those comparisons, so let’s go with them.

“Quality Pints” vigorously extols the anticipatory pleasures of searching for good alcohol, but even a teetotaler like your blogger can get inebriated on its speed-demon rock. This is faster, punkier, and more immediately catchy than anything else in the Bug Club’s discography, with manic guitar solos that’ll make you spit out your lager in admiration. One senses that, if he were alive, another BBC DJ, John Peel, would love the Bug Club as much as he did the Fall. Let’s hope an album’s in the works. 

<a href=”https://thebugclub.bandcamp.com/track/quality-pints”>Quality Pints by The Bug Club</a>

Kevin Richard Martin, “One Hundred Deaths” (Intercranial Recordings) 

Black has to be one of the most unlikely tribute albums imaginable. I’ve been following Kevin Richard Martin‘s musical exploits since 1990, through many projects that favor stylistic mutations, radically extreme textures, and earth-shaking bass and beats. So, if you listen to KRM’s music as the Bug, and in groups such as Techno Animal, Ice, God, etc., you’d never suspect he was an Amy Winehouse fan. But a random viewing of Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary Amy opened his mind to her artistic depth and the tragedy of her premature death. Here Martin—who’s collaborated with Earth and remixed them, too—has laid down 11 tracks that respectfully distill Winehouse’s 2006 album Back to Black to coal-hued ambience that’s more somber than a dozen state funerals. 

In his moving liner notes, Martin calls Black “a musical eulogy…, a heartfelt memorial to a sorrowful demise… possessed by the ghost of ‘Back to black’. Fragmented moods and hypnotic drones melt together, as its circular beauty is set adrift, floating away into an endless void.. where the original only remains in spirit alone…” That last phrase totally rings true. It’s safe to say that Winehouse aficionados won’t at all recognize the originals’ R&B/soul stylings. But they ought to feel the melancholy that drifts through these pieces like rueful sighs over lost potential. 

Black is not all funereal ambience, though. “Camden Crawling” boasts snappy trip-hop beats over an ominous bass line, oceanic oscillations, and static. “Love You Much, Love Too Much” might be the ultimate slow-motion hip-hop track, as lugubrious as Bohren & Der Club of Gore messing with the “Funky Drummer” break. “To Disappear” is a vortex of mesmerizing needle-on-vinyl surface noise and a slothful bass riff of gentle doom. The album’s peak, “One Hundred Deaths,” sounds like a terminal procession, a gradual slide into self-destruction rendered in minimalist sound. It’s the piece that most agonizingly captures the gist of Winehouse’s tormented life. 

Black was initially issued digitally in late 2023, but it’s receiving a vinyl release on May 17. Good timing, as the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black opens in theaters on that date. 

<a href=”https://kevinrichardmartin.bandcamp.com/album/black”>Black by Kevin Richard Martin</a>

The Stranger