I've always taken a hard line stance that idiots (and minors, of course) shouldn't use drugs. 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 hanging out with metalhead Central Jersey burn-outs. I ditched them soon as I got to college. But then 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 that crowd too and found some beautiful acidheads, and there I found myself, for a spell. 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. Seeing Jason Banker's 2012 film Toad Road recently reminded me that the blithe openness about psychedelics on this blog might do more harm than good and 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, who get way into psychedelics far too fast, too deep; some truth is always about to be revealed, like a slot machine jackpot just a few more coins away, for decades. 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?" (her answer, "oui"). Spiritual seekers never listen to advice from anyone who's already chased that rainbow and maybe they shouldn't (the "I did them and they changed my life but you shouldn't because I already did so I saved your brain cells blah blah"). My advice, first practice meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, and only trip with qualified shamanic guides, and/or cool and beautiful people, and mostly, for the cause of art, for opening one's doors of perception, to paint or write or play in ways far outside your norm, good or bad. Otherwise you're just wasting the alien intelligence's time.
The doomed truth-seeker in Toad is Sarah (Sarah Anne Jones), a young wastrel home from college (or about to leave), she's way cute and so has two suitors amidst the Kids-meets-Jackass crowd she rolls with. One of them is James (James Davidson), who starts the show a wastrel but gets tough love counseling and 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, lecturing that she doesn't have to do drugs to have a good time every step of the way: he has to 'protect' her. Sarah will have none of it. She wants to the Fulci distance by tripping her way through the seven gates of hell via the legendary PA haunted mile, Toad Road, a path into the woods where one might, as they say in The Beyond, "face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored."
Sadly, Sarah Anne Jones died in real life shortly after the film's premiere, though one gets the sense she was MIA for a lot of the shoot --leading to a kind of ghoulish 'coming true' of the storyline; even if she died after the film was completed it still feels unfinished. Did she disappear from the set at odd times like Marilyn Monroe with her last film, the premonition-titled Something's Got to Give (1962)? Maybe this was just exactly as Banker envisioned or maybe I missed something. Like so many trips, Toad Road feels like it had a chance to do something wild and missed it. Drugs, man.
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. 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 version of the title character in Valerie's Week of Wonders. Her damaged sweetness and her unrelenting drive to explore the void are a haunting combination. If you know the druggie scene you know this girl and probably fell in love with her at some point, 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." I still feel that first night, and the pang of missing girls like Holly and being powerless to stop them going over the side. I would have enjoyed the Toad more if they had maybe gone a little meta about it, shooting-wise, as the Picnic at Hanging Rock element never really gels with the muted realism. 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 musch more psychedelic recall-shiver-inducing film, in gorgeous black and white, which draws from old woodcuts and psychedelic concert posters from mid-60s Britain, correctly mixing them - recognizing the common psilocybe cubensis root between the cosmic alchemists of old and the Zen hipsters tripping at outdoor music fests today.
The film follows Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), a wussy servant of a noted alchemist, who begins the film cowering from a furious offscreen battle. Ere long the skirmish moves away and he finds himself in the company of three other fellas: 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 search of an ale house, across one of the huge rolling hedgerow-crossed fields of England. Set sometime during the 17th century English Civil War, it does right what most costume films do wrong -- that is, the clothes look like they fit the actors and that they've been wearing them for about twenty years without a bath --as nature intended, and the pistols and muskets all need to be patiently reloaded with powder and ball after every shot, resulting in some hilarious gunfights as opposing sides shoot, then duck down in the grass to reload From there it would be a crime to reveal anything, suffice it to say that digging for treasure is involved, as is a shady Irish bastard of an alchemist, O'Neil (Michael Smiley), his assistant Cutler (Ryan Pope), a mushroom circle, a black sun, and some of the best use of wind since 1925's The Wind. The acting is uniformly stunning, and the dialogue naturalistic while still witty as Withnail. Rich in period slang, robust expletives, forgotten alchemical science, and sly illustrations of the way men befriend one another on a casual basis, and lastly the way a mouthful of the right mushroom can turn a meek scholar into a lion!
The men never leave the field and there's almost no one in the cast but these few men (no women), but it never feels dull or Jarmusch-style idle. Credit Jim White's score for slowly building up from a single, sturdy military drum beat, and gradually expanding in scope, with a pause on the way for one of the characters to sing a little ditty, and eventually into full blown sonic mind-melting reminiscent of Bobby Beausoleil's score for Lucifer Rising. And it was written by Amy Jump, a woman! Aye, and lensed by a woman (Laurie Rose) and produced by two women (Anna Higgs, Claire Jones) and a man, aye, but there be not a woman in the cast, as nature intended! It may be the best film about masculine identity since Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker!
Great as the existential Sartre-Godot-Leviathan-style robust gallows humor is, and the weird mystical angle with coughing up runes, ropes into the alternate realities, psychedelic shrooms growing wild and free (as they did in those days and still do in the soggy fields of England), the song and the strange slow motion and woodcut-style tableaux, the music, acting, and costumes, it's also a great document of perhaps the single best freak out on too much psilocybin since maybe ever: as the music gets truly monumental, buzzing and soaring in and around its droning center, a series of overlapping strobes and mirror splitting occurs, and you might say yeah yeah, that mirror FCP effect hasn't been fresh since Led Zeppelin's Song Remains the Same, (I even used it in Queen of Disks) and the strobe cutting is so seizure-inducing it comes with a warning about it at film's start to ward off epileptics, but Wheatley and Jump, who co-edited the film, clearly put in some real time to get this all perfect, alternating split second imagery until it comes together in the mind in new shapes that breathe and pulse. One one hand it's nothing too different than what one might shoot with their friends on mushrooms in a field as I did (and Syd Barrett before me) in the early fall of 1987 - there's no unusual sight or diegetic sound (I was thinking for sure they'd switch film stock to color for the tripping parts) but the strobing overlapping images really do work to create a feeling of stopping time and space, the two or more images cohering into one overlapping collage image that is so astounding if you really surrender to it that it reveals the unknowable buzzing throbbing molecular Now waiting for us all just outside the veil, exposing and eradicating the fine fiber optic line between waking life and the collective archetypal unconscious, illustrating the black hole sun overlap between waking and dreaming, the union of birth and death, past and future, real and unreal; this trippy sequence speeds our perceptions up fast enough they slow way down, that dying is very slow but ghosts move faster than the eye can see, so the ground zero time distillation strobe moments are the mirror of death, the gaze from the opposite side of the river, the psychedelic peak when mundane linear time is completely sidestepped, and when one returns to it, they are renewed, like Popeye coming back from the dead and now completely made of atomic spinach.
In short, A Field in England shows us the reverberating core that tripping outdoors should unveil, it all but illuminates Titania and Oberon watching gamely from their transdimensional bower. Even though Wheatley's film leaves plenty of room to doubt the reality of these visions it also shows we've dismissed the ancient arts of magick and alchemy at our peril. Maybe one day we'll learn knocking on wood grounds your body's accumulated current, dissipating any negative energy your positive affirmation may generate in order to preserve stasis, or that salt tossed over the shoulder dissipates negative spiritual magnetism in the air. The ancient science behind such superstitions having died out, we may presume our ancestors' superstitions are all groundless, but the originators of these wives' tales made Stonehenge, the Pyramid of Giza, Machu Picchu. Western science denies the existence of things beyond its ability to measure, and then one day it measures them.
Alas, this is also why it falls to the brave to sometimes have to party with the burn-outs and jackasses just to get high enough to see outside their mind. Psychedelics deserve a more hallowed place in society; they would have immense benefits to the human race if used in rites of passage both into adulthood and out of life (for the dying). Just the briefest voyage beyond the Self 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 transform the mental fabric of all those for miles around. Alas, Toad Road shows the downside of all that, that such transformations can rip that fabric clean in half, especially with some lovestruck buzzkill mooning around. So fuck off, James. The depths of the Beyond accommodate no kibbitzers. Just point your camera down into the dark sea if you want to know our destination, one your sad life raft won't let you follow. Down, down, downriver to the beautiful swamps of black socket blankness, the toad-secretive road, the beautiful empty, the big sleep that will not come without first hours of almost-sex, whatever alcohol is still left hidden, and hours of buzzing in the ears and black and white inside-of-the-eyelids, tattooing glowing banded imagery, first roses, then skulls, then finally... mourning.
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