Lifestyle: Damian Marley "Frees Up" a former prison as a Pot Farm

Damian Marley has announced that he, in partnership with Ocean Grown Extracts, is converting a former 77,000 square foot California State prison into a cannabis grow space that will cultivate medical marijuana for state dispensaries.
"Many people sacrificed so much for the herb over the years who got locked up," says Marley, 38, noting the poetic justice of turning a prison that once housed non-violent drug offenders into a cannabis cultivation facility. "If this [venture] helps people and it's used for medicinal purposes and inspires people, it's a success."

Damian Marley Opening Colorado Weed Dispensary

By that measure, the prison-to-pot farm initiative is already a triumph. With their purchase of the Claremont Custody Center in Coalinga, CA for $4.1 million, Marley and his partners instantly relieved the economically-challenged Central Valley town of its roughly $3.3 million debt. The venture will also generate 100 jobs -- in an economically stagnant region plagued by an ongoing, historic drought and descending oil prices, both of which have damaged the region's traditional farming and oil industries -- and will generate an estimated million dollars in annual tax revenues for Coalinga.

The new business began "in a very organic way," says Dan Dalton, Marley's longtime manager. "Cannabis is something that's around Damian every day with friends, family and with his Rastafarian faith. We've watched people who have sacrificed their lives for it. That injustice has motivated us to be advocates as well as knowing that there are healing properties in cannabis."

Marley today also announced the introduction of Speak Life, a proprietary strain of cannabis he created with Ocean Grown. The strain is based on the company's lauded OG Kush, but altered genetically with the help of a Ph.D trained chemist at who helped cultivate the unique breed.
"The OG has always been my favorite," says Marley, who met with the chemist while making Speak Life. "When they introduced this strain of OG I really loved it and loved its consistency." The bud is a hybrid made of 70 percent indica and 30 percent sativa, and is hand-watered and trimmed.
Marley and his partners are prepared for the "green rush" should California's Proposition 64 -- which would legalize cannabis for adult recreational use -- passes in November, as the polls seem to indicate. And California isn't alone in reconsidering marijuana's legality, either. Voters in seven other states will choose whether to legalize recreational and/or medical marijuana -- Arizona, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada could approve the use of recreational pot; Arkansas, Florida, and North Dakota will decide on legalizing medical marijuana, which a status the plant has been assigned in 25 states and the District of Columbia.

Music: Ganja trumps Jazz (for now) t legendary California record store

Founded in Berkeley, California, Amoeba Music has established itself as one of America's most iconic music store chains. With three locations across the state, co-founder David Prinz says its Los Angeles store alone brings in $20 million in annual revenue.
It's original location on Telegraph Avenue, however, has seen revenues plummet by 50 percent over the past decade. Thanks to the initial rise of pirating services like Napster and LimeWire, and then legal streaming services like Spotify, students in the local area stopped buying records and CDs.
But financial trouble is not unique to Amoeba; Telegraph Avenue is blighted and its local economy has been in decline for years. Since the 1990s, sales at stores along Telegraph have dropped over 40 percent, Dave Fogarty, Berkeley economic development project coordinator, told San Francisco Chronicle in 2013. Prinz, who started Amoeba with Marc Weinstein in 1990, said they needed to create a new revenue stream to prevent the Berkeley shop from closing. It's rescuer? Medical marijuana.

Four and a half years ago, as the medical marijuana business started to show its muscles in California, Prinz and Weinstein decided to convert its once-popular 3,000 square foot jazz room into a marijuana dispensary. After submitting an application last fall, the founders finally received approval last week from the city of Berkeley for a license to sell medical marijuana. Prinz says the dispensary, which will be a totally separate space with its own entrance, will open by May 2017. "Marijuana will save Amoeba Music in Berkeley," says Prinz.
This isn't Amoeba's first foray in marijuana. Since April 2014, its San Francisco location has been running a medical marijuana recommendation clinic with Dr. Samuel Dismond. The clinic, which does not sell marijuana, sees about 50 patients a day who consult with the doctor and leave with a recommendation to use cannabis.
"The clinic helps us continue to pay the rent and helps us pay our employees," Prinz said. "But the dispensary is going to be more lucrative."

The Berkeley location will sell marijuana and THC-infused products. Because Prinz and Weinstein have never sold marijuana before, they partnered with longtime advocate and marijuana entrepreneur Debby Goldsberry. She's also a founder of Berkeley Patients Group, a respected cannabis supplier and dispensary operating since 1999. (BPG is seen as a model for the industry--it pays millions in taxes, follows rules and regulations, and donates to the poor.)
"I don't think we could've kept Amoeba Berkeley going without this. Our store in Berkeley took the biggest hit; college kids are the first to find out how to get music for free," says Prinz. "I think we'll see the college kids come back again once the dispensary opens."

Prinz says they invested about $500,000 in total for the license, and to keep the store open. The dispensary will not grow its own marijuana, but instead purchase the cannabis from farmers in Northern California. He says he's been flooded by interest from growers who want to help stock Amoeba's shelves with weed.
Twenty years ago, Rolling Stone said we built the best record store," says Prinz. "We think we'll be able to do that for this industry--my goal is to build the best dispensary in the world." He hopes to bring the "Amoeba experience" to the dispensary, which will be called the Berkeley Compassionate Care Center. (If the shop ever becomes recreational, Prinz says they will call it "AmoeBuds.")

The impetus for the dispensary was to save the business, but Prinz and Weinstein say there was another motivating factor: Rasputin Music has been on Telegraph Avenue since 1971, decades before Amoeba Music moved in across the street. Founded by Ken Sarachan, Rasputin watched record store after record store bite the dust.
To honor the fallen record shops, the store made a tote bag with a cemetery illustration, featuring tombstones with the names of every record stores that went out of business in the area: Tower Records, Sam Goody, Odyssey Record, Music Land, Peach's, Moby Disc, Rough Trade, Rainbow "Twenty years ago, Rolling Stone said we built the best record store," says Prinz. "We think we'll be able to do that for this industry--my goal is to build the best dispensary in the world." He hopes to bring the "Amoeba experience" to the dispensary, which will be called the Berkeley Compassionate Care Center. (If the shop ever becomes recreational, Prinz says they will call it "AmoeBuds.")
The impetus for the dispensary was to save the business, but Prinz and Weinstein say there was another motivating factor: Rasputin Music has been on Telegraph Avenue since 1971, decades before Amoeba Music moved in across the street. Founded by Ken Sarachan, Rasputin watched record store after record store bite the dust.
To honor the fallen record shops, the store made a tote bag with a cemetery illustration, featuring tombstones with the names of every record stores that went out of business in the area: Tower Records, Sam Goody, Odyssey Record, Music Land, Peach's, Moby Disc, Rough Trade, Rainbow tombstones with the names of every record stores that went out of business in the area: Tower Records, Sam Goody, Odyssey Record, Music Land, Peach's, Moby Disc, Rough Trade, Rainbow Records, Star Records, Aron's, and more.
"I care about Berkeley, I care about Telegraph, I care about the kids, the patients, but we will not end up on that bag," said Prinz, half joking. "I paid over half a million dollars so we don't end up on that bag."
Rasputin and Amoeba have been locked in an epic feud for 26 years--ever since Weinstein quit working at Rasputin and opened up shop across the street. "We are fighting to keep our store open, we are fighting to keep our employees' jobs," says Prinz. "We think marijuana will help us continue the fight."

Music: Herb (Alpert) and His horn Save the Day in L.A.

This week, Herb Alpert is in Hollywood's Capitol Studios with an orchestra, cutting his first Christmas album in 48 years. But it's really Christmas in August for the school where his foundation has just promised $10.1 million — Los Angeles City College, which says it will be able to provide free tuition as well as private lessons to all its music majors for years to come as a result of the Herb Alpert Foundation's gift.

LACC is not one of Southern California's "glamor schools" when it comes to star gift-giving, but the trumpeter is hoping to start a "tag, you're it" chain reaction among his fellow philanthropists, retraining some of their financial attention on the community college system.

"Some kids are in situations where it's a bit of a struggle just to get their mojo working," says Alpert. "I was just thinking about how expensive it is for kids to go to UCLA or 'SC or one of the major colleges, and I love the idea that we can open the door to help students who are financially challenged to study at LACC, which is a beautiful college. I mean, it's a gem. If you haven't been there lately, the campus is alive and kicking, and there are a lot of great teachers and a lot of great energy there."lpert's donation sets a record, or comes close, in several regards. The $10.1 million he has promised more than quintuples the previous high-water mark for a gift to an arts-related program in California's community college system, set last year when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association gave $2 million to LACC's cinema department. It's also the most anyone has ever given to a community college in Southern California for any purpose, and the second-highest amount ever handed over to any two-year school in the entire state, according to Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Los Angeles City College Foundation.

"I think once this gift is announced, we're going to see an even greater influx of talented kids coming in from around the city," says Schwartz. LACC currently has about 175 students majoring in music, but the level of funding — with an endowment set at about $400,000 a year in perpetuity — is designed to accommodate an expected 250 music majors getting a free education at the school. Also benefiting in some way will be the rest of the 2,000 students per semester who enroll in at least one LACC music class.How rare is this kind of gift? "I'll give you this statistic," says Schwartz. "Last year in the United States, there was approximately 40 billion dollars given to higher education in gifts, and of that, less than 2 percent was given to community colleges. Juxtaposed with that is the fact that in the United States, about 80 percent of the workforce has been educated at a community college. Again, of that 40 billion, about a third of that number went to about 20 schools, so it's very concentrated."

John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Charlie Mingus and Chet Baker are among the past students at the school who could have benefited from this largess. Schwartz likes to point out that LACC — which has offered music courses since opening in 1929 — was the first college in the country to offer a jazz major, starting in the 1940s.

Alpert never attended LACC himself, but his brother, David, did. When he considers the roots of his interest in funding music education, he inevitably thinks back well beyond college days."When I was 8 years old in my grammar school here at Melrose Elementary, there was a music appreciation class," Alpert says. "And luckily for me there was a table filled with instruments, and I happened to pick up the trumpet. And when I finally made a sound out of it — because I thought you just blow hot air into the horn — it was talking for me. I was super shy; I was an introvert, and this horn was speaking for me. … I like the idea of world music — that kids can experience their own creativity and appreciate their own uniqueness. And if they can do that, then hopefully they'll appreciate the uniqueness in others, which is a win-win, because I think we're in kind of a bind today with the world situation."

Some of the younger students who'll benefit from Alpert's generosity may be surprised to learn that their benefactor is bigger than Taylor Swift — at least according to one ranking: Alpert currently sits at No. 7 on the list of the top Billboard 200 album artists of all time, just ahead of Swift and just behind Mariah Carey. Twenty-five of the albums that put him on that list are being reissued on CD in September, concurrent with the release of a brand-new album,Human Nature, which features a cover of the Michael Jackson hit of that name as its title trac

Brands: Skip Marley covers The Gap

Next generation Marley family member and musician, Skip Marley has been included in the GAP clothing company’s new online social media promotion campaign promoting their ‘1969 DENIM’ clothing line with people that “live the spirit” of those known for the style they wear, Jamaicans.com reports.  “The Gap asked me what makes me feel most alive,” Skip explains about the video ad while shooting in the sunshine of California.

“Music Is Life” cited the young artist and that his grandfather Bob Marley and his uncles have preferred to be outfitted in denim spanning the generations.  Skip has had a impressive start to 2016 with stellar performances in Jamaica at the One Love Fest and Marley71 Celebration, the GAP’s 1969 Denim campaign and now he is prepping to shoot a video for his updated version of his grandfather’s classic “Three Little Birds” used in Sandals’ “No Worry” global ad campaign.

Music: Andrew Tosh extends the Mystic

"I've been singing away my heart since basic school," recalls
Andrew Tosh, the tall, slender third son of reggae legend Peter
Tosh.

Born on June 19, 1967 in Kingston, Jamaica, Andrew seemed
preordained for a life in music. Among his earliest memories are
trips to the countryside of Westmoreland on the rural western end
of the island. There, along the lush banks of a swiftly running
river, he and his father would sing songs together - not just
Peter's militant compositions, but also pop classics by the likes
of Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Kenny Rogers. Andrew notes that
"Peter always knew I would do something in the music business, so
he encouraged me to study piano, 'cause he knew I loved it. From
the start it was inside me to sing and play instruments." The first
song he learned was Peter's composition "You Can't Blame the
Youth," and from that point forward, he says, "I knew that my
heartbeat was music and one day it would just be music out of my
mouth, and writing and singing my own songs."

Throughout his elementary and high school days in Duhaney Park
on the outskirts of Kingston, Andrew was constantly pulled to the
forefront of the class and made to sing lead. At 14, in emulation
of his father, Andrew began to ride a unicycle too. Although Peter
was often on the road, performing tours that remain to this day
reggae's most lengthy and successful ones, Andrew spent much of his
childhood living in Peter's house, especially between the critical
ages of 12 and 15.

His first recording came in 1985, when he cut a song he wrote
called "Vanity Lover" for Neville Lee's Gorgon label. A keen
observer of the vibrant music scene in Kingston, Andrew was
checking out some of the new talent at that city's famous Skateland
dancehall on the evening his father was murdered - Friday,
September 11, 1987. "I felt my father's spirit come right there at
Skateland where I was," he says, "and the spirit said leave that
place right now." The impact of the elder Tosh's passing made an
immediate and life-changing impression. "I tell myself that Peter
Tosh is gone and it's my need to carry on. Not for want, and not
for the lust of fame and the glamor and want to be rich. No, for
the love of my art and the love of my people, because love carry no
color. Love is love and that's what Jah say, make a joyful noise
unto Me."

Ironically, the first glimpse the public got of Andrew's
nascent talent came when he sang at his father's funeral in the
National Arena in Kingston. His version of Peter's "Jah Guide"
stunned the mourners. "I was astonished myself on stage," he
recalls. "The other song I did was 'Equal Rights,' because everyone
is crying out for peace but none is crying out for justice. When I
came down off the stage, I couldn't stop crying."

Late the following year, he tested the international waters
with a pair of memorable performances in Southern California,
including a show-stopping turn on the stage of Burbank's Starlight
Amphitheater, the site of the final appearance together of Bob
Marley and Peter Tosh. Was he nervous? "I felt elevension," he
laughs, engaging in some of the crafty wordplay for which his
father was notorious. "It was way beyond tension."

From that point, Andrew began working under the guidance of
keyboardist Keith Sterling and his bandmates, Fully Fullwood and
Santa Davis, the bass and drum team from Peter's most ferocious
backing group, Word Sound and Power. Andrew began to tour, wowing
audiences in Europe as well as North and South America. He has been
especially successful in Brazil, where he has appeared several
times in Sao Paulo, Rio, and Curitiba. His first album, Original
Man, was a mixture of his tracks and those of his father. The
follow-up, Make Place for the Youth, indicated a new maturity to
his song-writing, and was well received, earning him a Grammy
nomination.

Currently, he has some new tracks as he seeks to fully assert his own identity and legacy, even while preserving the indelible mark left by his illustrious Dad.

Next Stop on the "Weed Legal Train": Cali 2016?

localjoe.myorganogold.com

Business: Fifty for Pan-Jam, One for the "Top"

 A banner day for business - with local conglomerate Pan-Jamaican marking the half-century, and, coming out of California, a slightly younger business bringing its offerings into the hyper-competitive auto/commercial lubricants market

www.localjoe.myorganogold.com

Book review: The erotic memoir returns, from the East

A touchstone of the 1970s "Me Decade"(and in fact a holdover from the 1920s/1930s heyday of Henry Miller, Anais Nin et al), the erotic memoir  essentially disappeared from popular consciousness and discourse from the early 80s onward.

Who better than a Jamaican to revive the genre and with a near unexpected twist?

Stefhen Bryan initially escapes his mother's repressive parental style, or so he thinks, when he lands,at age 15, at his father's place in New York City. When it becomes clear however, that his father is totally uninterested in nay kind of relationship with him, he begins a westward odyssey that takes him first to Denver Colorado, and eventually to California. the substance of Bryan's parental relationships are detailed in the one-man play "Doodu Boy", which forms an important corollary to this book.

After gaining his first degree, and with brief detours in the UK as well as back in his native Jamaica, Bryan - financially down and dogged by his own familial obligations, accepts, in 2001, an offer to teach English in Japan, where he is suddenly able to fulfill his long-held predilection for Oriental women - an appetite first stoked in Jamaica, where the girls of Chinese and mixed ancestry offered a picture of  financial substance relative tothe grinding poverty of his own formative years.

Thus given free rein, Bryan indulges in a sexual spree that would likely defeat many men and may well have made Miller himself proud. Wives, students, professionals (including the co-ordinator of his teaching course) all make up what he describes as a "revolving army of sexual partners, all Japanese. 

The memoir describes Bryan's carnal adventures through a cultural lens that touches on interracial relationships, promiscuity, patriarchy and abortion. Included is sex research that one reviewer asserts "would make Kinsey proud." 

This ethnic exclusivity does impart to the author some insights as to a national psyche of the Japanese woman (aided by Bryan's own extensive bouts of therapy), but for the reader, it largely comes off as a little black book opened for public viewing; one sexual conquest essentially following another, with much the same descriptives used. Bryan's dynamism (coupled with a distinctly amoral persona) is palpable, but the prose itself is never spectacular enough to transcend the subject matter. 


 The author's outsider-insider observations of mores and relationships in Japan are fascinating. They are also the kind of blunt talk you won't get elsewhere. Black Passenger, Yellow Cabs is a ride you may take willingly - but perhaps only once.

Performing Arts: The Journey of "Doodu-san" from Pit to Peace

At no age or stage in life would most human beings contemplate or envisage the consequences of falling chest deep into a pit latrine (think faeces, toilet paper and giant cockroaches and rats).

Little wonder then that Stefhen (no longer Stephen, he remade himself even a his father worked on a "replacement" ) Bryan has a certain skew on life: he lived through just such a nightmarish ordeal while still in what we refer to as "short pants,"

That rude entry into life's potential for adversity became the opener and theme for his excellent and mostly compelling one-man show, "Doodu Boy" (doodu of course being slang for feces) which had a special one-night only preview performance at New Kingston's Theatre Place.

In that well-executed piece we meet young Steve, the typically curious, hyper-imaginative young Jamaican kid mired in poverty and at the mercy of an overbearing, Scripture-quoting mother with a more than free hand when it comes to dishing out beatings to her son.

The situation is of course so dire that Steve has violent fantasies of killing his mother and moving to "'Merica" to live with his absentee Dad. that latter dream eventually comes true at age 15, but the underside of Steve's American Dream and "life in Paradise" comes up all too quickly as he discovers that his father, a mercurial, materialistic yet somehow successful engineer, was even more disdainful of him than his mother.

Faced with this greatest rejection, Bryan heads west, first to family in Denver Colorado and then on to California, where a latent predilection for Oriental women is given  free rein and expression - much of which ends up in his book "Black Passenger, Yellow Cabs" (check back in a couple days for our review of the book).

When an attempt to visit his father for a reconciliation goes awry - his father calls the cops and reveals that he has in fact, fathered another son - to whom he has also given the name "Stephen" - the crushed Bryan responds to a call to teach English....in Japan.

There, he furthers his own education in Oriental delights, but also learns the language and  - as is often the way of such things - falls in love. Even this is an occasion for Jamaican-style bawdiness, as the love of his life is revealed to him as the first girl with whom sex is - for a lengthy initial period anyway -impossible, owing to what he describes as her "monster hymen."

In the wake of losing his mother to cancer (after an intervening heart to heart of sorts while on a home spell), Steve, with his new wife, attempts one last bid to reconcile with his Dad. The latter proves taciturn to the end, but two strokes, and the travails of loneliness (the younger "Steve" has since grown and moved out) have softened him to the point where even an awkward conversation is possible.

Bryan's stage presence and visual communication skills are highly evolved and his total lack of self-consciousness while sharing details which might floor lesser mortals make the play a very engaging experience, one which even Jmaaicans, accustomed tothe ensemble presentation, will be held rapt by

One rough Chop: The Grind (2009)

If the first fifteen minutes of a film are the film in microrcosm, then you might just be able to spare yourself excessive torture in the case of this free-wheeling but ultimately tedious thriller, set in the moral wasteland that is suburban Southern California.

In he opener, a man (C Thomas Howell) has had his hand run through a kitchen sink disposal; another man has been stabbed to death by a young woman with whom he has just had sex, and  the previous man - who also doubles as a kind of infrequent narrator - has had himself set up in the Internet reality soft-porn business (hotgirlzoncamera.com), courtesy of a teenage apprentice and his black associate, both of whom have various degrees from the proverbial school of hard knocks.

The rest of the film maintains this lurid trajectory, even as the "protagonist" struggles to get enough returns from the business to make good on his outstanding obligations to the men who tried to grind his hand up. Those guys are led by a fearsome figure, none other than Danny Trejo - who following this release would go on to such glorious roles as "Machete". Another well-known Hollywood miscreant, Tom Sizemore, rounds out the rogues' gallery.

Of all the tarnished stars, Howell appears to have come closest to getting his act together. He appears to have clawed his way out of the child-star abyss that he fell into after the classic, "E.T." and has roles in several big-budget action features, including the forthcoming summer blockbuster, "The Amazing Spider-Man".

In the meantime though, bills have to be paid, so there'll be modern-day B-movies like this one, with its soft-core girl-on-girl scenes, views of seedy Cali, and hardcore violence. it adds credits all around and provides minimal employment threaded by the thrill of near illegality, not unlike the venture undertaken in this story.


tom Sizemore

C Thomas Howell

Danny trejo