I've always taken a hard line stance that idiots (and minors, of course) shouldn't use drugs. Drugs should only be taken by artists, truth-seekers, visionaries and never for dumb burn-out kicks... Seeing all the great drugs wasted on the snickering young in the 2012 indie Toad Road made me remember back to the young age when I could only get high, or even get hold of a beer, by driving around with metalhead Central Jersey burn-outs. Cool as some of them were I could have done without the snickering idiot who lit us up a joint, first I'd seen in weeks, and only when it was too late announce it was laced with PCP. Driving the 20 miles home from that encounter took approximately three years of amok time trapped in a blue-light and white fog prism (or prison), wherein, among other things, I could dim or brighten street lights with my mind. And I hated the music. I'd bring Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" thinking they'd dig it but for them it was Maiden, Dio, and Ozzy. End of discussion.
I ditched them senior year when I discovered the Clash and punk rock - which was all about cocaine, whiskey, and slam-dancing at the Trenton club City Gardens' all-ages punk shows: The Ramones, Iggy Pop, X, the Replacements, and Husker Du. But still I wasn't satisfied. My freshman year punk contingent were scared of acid, tried to warn me off it, but I felt the calling of a higher power, a spirit was beckoning, so I ditched the punks as abruptly as I'd ditched the metalheads, and became a hippie, and there, enduring endless Dead concert tapes, the LSD and shrooms ran wild and free. I was cured, all right.
But what a burnout-and-lightweight-strewn path I left behind --so many people who never should have tried drugs at all or at least not until college but they never went; they were just too damn stoned. Seeing Jason Banker's 2012 film Toad Road recently reminded me that the blithe openness about psychedelics on this site might do more harm than good in the short term and worse, expose a truth hidden even from myself, that my whole holy enlightenment shortcut-seeking trip masks just another garden variety waste case burn-out, because you see, I'm one of those idiots.
But all through my travels I've seen people, especially the very young and Piscean, get way into psychedelics far too fast, too deep, chasing some white rabbit truth through twisting trails right into rehab, jail, or the slab. It reminds me of that question posed to Anne Wiazemski in Godard's Sympathy for the Devil (1967) "Do you consider drugs a form of spiritual gambling?" ("oui"). Spiritual seekers never listen to advice from anyone who's already chased that rainbow and maybe they shouldn't (the "I did acid and it changed my life but you shouldn't because I already did so you're welcome"). One such doomed truth-seeker, in Toad Road, is Sarah (Sarah Anne Jones), a young wastrel way cute to be wasting time with the scruffy band of marauders she's chosen. An older member, James (James Davidson) meanwhile is getting counseling and shortly turns into a preachy buzzkill, which is too bad, as Davidson isn't the usual mumblecore anemic smarm merchant. He could go do something grand, but he's too in love with Sarah, he thinks, and that's his excuse.. to follow her down that hole, lecturing that she doesn't have to do drugs to have a good time, but he'll still hang out because he has to 'protect' her.
Sarah will have none of it. She wants to go the Fulci distance, tripping her way through the seven gates of Hell via the legendary PA haunted mile, Toad Road, where one might, as they say in The Beyond, "face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored."
Sadly, the real Sarah Anne Jones died in real life shortly after the film's premiere, though I got the sense of a fractured kind of ghoulish 'coming true' of the storyline that hints-- even if she died after the film was completed---that she was MIA on set a lot, ala Marilyn Monroe during the never-completed Something's Got to Give (1962). Maybe this was just exactly as Banker envisioned or maybe I missed something. Like so many trips I got talked into taking by the Village Voice, Toad Road feels like it had a chance to do something wild and blew it. Maybe that's her fault, or his, or mine. Maybe it's just my whole idea of something wild is warped.
But the music is good, the photography tight and clever, and when it all hinges on the frail Sarah, her insanely tiny legs hugged by tight hipster pants, things are good, if sad. She has a great way with throwing her shoulders around, and her thick long hair coupled to her waif thinness makes her seem like a willowy older sister to the title character in Valerie's Week of Wonders. If you know the druggie scene you know this type of girl and probably fell in love with her at some point. Her damaged sweetness and her unrelenting drive to explore the void were a haunting combination. and wrote a poetry book, or album about her, like that girl Holly for Craig Finn (of the Hold Steady): "Holly's inconsolable / unhinged and uncontrollable / cuz we can't get as high as we got / on that first night." If you know the type you shiver when you hear that song, shiver with her memory and the chill of never getting that first night glow back, the torture of being in love with someone you are powerless to save, and all the more in love with them for it. I would have enjoyed the Toad more if they had maybe gone a little meta about that kind of memory, shooting-wise, as without it the Picnic at Hanging Rock element never really gels with the muted realism (imagine if the girls really did disappear during filming but they didn't want to admit it so they changed the film to hide their absence). Still it's a promising feature film start for former documentarian of the youth music and 'culture' scene, Jason Banker, and I love the dark and beguiling poster series:
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I also like the art and posters for Ben Wheatley's A Field in England (2013), a much more psychedelic recall-shiver-inducing film, in gorgeous black and white, which draws from old woodcuts and psychedelic posters from mid-60s Britain, correctly recognizing their common psilocybe cubensis roots, the mushroom common to cosmic alchemists of the 17th century and Zen hipsters tripping at outdoor music fests in this one, possibly in the very same field, merging with each other's future and past ghosts.
The film chronicles the manly transformation of a wussy assistant alchemist, Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) from his cowering point during a furious offscreen battle to his ultimate triumphant return from the land beyond. During the time between he pals with a savvy deserter Trower (Julian Barrett), a dimwitted wanderer (Richard Glover), a fourth man (Peter Fernando) with a mysterious agenda, and this quartet set off in a series of fascinating tableaux across one of the huge rolling hedgerow-crossed fields of England. Set sometime during the English Civil War of the late 1600s, Wheatley does right what most historical dramatists do wrong: the clothes look like they fit the actors and that they've been wearing them for about twenty years without a bath --as was the fashion-- and the pistols and muskets all need to be patiently reloaded with powder and ball after every shot, which is how it was, but here it seems to be an actual reality they're used to rather than a constant surprise as it is in most films set in the era. This results in some hilarious shouted exchanges as warring men hide in the grass to reload during lengthy gunfights. Digging for treasure is involved, and a shady Irish bastard of an alchemist, O'Neil (Michael Smiley), his assistant Cutler (Ryan Pope), a psilocybe mushroom circle, a black sun, and some of the best use of sudden wind gusts since, um, 1925's The Wind, or ever. The acting is uniformly pointed, Amy Smart's dialogue rich in period slang, robust expletives, hilarious asides and tangents, forgotten alchemical science, sly deadpan joke illustrations of the way men befriend one another in times of trouble, and lastly the way a mouthful of the right mushroom can turn a meek scholar into a lion!
The men never leave the field, are never seen indoors, and there's almost no one in the cast but these five men (no women), but Field in England never feels dull or Jarmusch idle. And there's H=Jim White's slowly building score moving from a single, sturdy military drum beat into a full blown sonic mind-melting reminiscent of Bobby Beausoleil's score for Lucifer Rising. There's an invigorating kind of mortality-sneering masculinity vibe ala Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. Interesting than that Field was written by a woman! Aye, and lensed by a woman (Laurie Rose) and produced by two women (Anna Higgs, Claire Jones) and a man...
In short, A Field in England shows us the reverberating core that tripping outdoors should unveil. It all but illuminates Oberon and Titania watching gamely from their transdimensional bower, laughing with at the flower-eyed revelry. Even though Wheatley's film leaves plenty of room to doubt the reality of these visions, Field also shows what we've missed by denigrating the ancient arts. Maybe one day we'll learn knocking on wood grounds the body's accumulated current, or that salt tossed over the shoulder dissipates negative ions and that disembodied intelligences might be dispelled through these tactics. One day western science will seem vain in its denial of the existence of things beyond its ability to measure. If we want to wait for the modern science to catch up to our ancient past version we'll be sitting in the waiting room 'til we're cobwebbed skeletons. Any science not up to the task must be left behind in completion of that task. There are many sciences for many realities.
Alas, this is also why it falls to the psychedelic warrior braves to sometimes party with the burn-outs just to get high enough to learn how to escape them. Psychedelics would have immense benefits to the human race if used in rites of passage both into adulthood and out of life. Just the briefest voyage beyond the ego is sometimes enough to help one's whole outlook and life transform. A Field in England shows that before the ridiculous illegality of certain kinds of mushrooms, their presence in a field was enough to make reality's fabric at least partially transparent to even the simplest of metalheads.
Alas, Toad Road shows the downside of all that, that such threading can rip weaker fabric long before it endows them with zippers, especially with some lovestruck moths chewing away its once stout fibre. So fuck off, James, you make bad trips happen by hanging around talking about how drugs are bad mmmkay. The depths of the Beyond accommodates no kibbitzers. Just point your camera down into the dark sea if you want to know our destination, but don't expect to see the disappearing Sarah, the one life your sad raft won't let you follow save: so let the lens flare as she falls down to the beautiful swamps of black socket blankness, down the toad-secretive road, through the bottleneck beautiful empty, the big sleep that will not come without first hours of almost-sex, cottonmouth kissing, rummaging through drawers and under couches for any dropped pills, scraping resins from bongs and Nyquil dried on a baking sheet and snorted (a trick told me by the PCP joint guy), guzzling mom's vanilla extract to stop the shakes after all else was gone, and hours of lying in bed trying to sleep with buzzing in the ears, hallucinating mom's scolding voice in the sound of running water, and black and white patterns inside-of-the-eyelids: roses, skulls, hearts, then finally...
We wake ever presuming we're the same person as the night before but with Oberon's flower nectar off our eyes we're just toast crumbling beneath the spread bullshit butter of sanity, threaded through god's breakfast mandible sprockets in a 35mm scream.
Alas, Toad Road shows the downside of all that, that such threading can rip weaker fabric long before it endows them with zippers, especially with some lovestruck moths chewing away its once stout fibre. So fuck off, James, you make bad trips happen by hanging around talking about how drugs are bad mmmkay. The depths of the Beyond accommodates no kibbitzers. Just point your camera down into the dark sea if you want to know our destination, but don't expect to see the disappearing Sarah, the one life your sad raft won't let you follow save: so let the lens flare as she falls down to the beautiful swamps of black socket blankness, down the toad-secretive road, through the bottleneck beautiful empty, the big sleep that will not come without first hours of almost-sex, cottonmouth kissing, rummaging through drawers and under couches for any dropped pills, scraping resins from bongs and Nyquil dried on a baking sheet and snorted (a trick told me by the PCP joint guy), guzzling mom's vanilla extract to stop the shakes after all else was gone, and hours of lying in bed trying to sleep with buzzing in the ears, hallucinating mom's scolding voice in the sound of running water, and black and white patterns inside-of-the-eyelids: roses, skulls, hearts, then finally...
We wake ever presuming we're the same person as the night before but with Oberon's flower nectar off our eyes we're just toast crumbling beneath the spread bullshit butter of sanity, threaded through god's breakfast mandible sprockets in a 35mm scream.
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