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FREE THE WEED 25
A Column by John Sinclair
It was heart-warming to hear of Ben Horner’s unscheduled surprise visit to Amsterdam (reported elsewhere in this issue of MMMReport) and his impromptu meeting at the Hempshopper on the Singel canal with three of my closest friends and co-conspirators. These guys are very important to me and I’d like to tell you a little more about them to go along with Ben’s story.
Sidney Daniels, proprietor of the Hempshopper, operates two emporia providing hemp products in the Centrum of Amsterdam and owns Ceres Seeds, a cannabis seed producer, vendor and distributor to growers around the civilized world. He broke into the marijuana industry as a teenaged employee of Sensi Seeds and became an entrepreneur with a hemp products stall in the Nieuwemarkt called Funky Farmers.
With his former partner Joeri Pfeiffer, Sidney developed a company called Self-Hemployed that created and operated websites and provided other IT services to a variety of off-center clients. They created websites like www.friendsofcannabis.com, published an alternative newspaper called Free Amsterdam, manufactured and distributed hemp products with a company called Hemporium, created a line of seeds called El Clandestino, and won Cannabis Cup awards with Ceres Seeds for their strains called Fruity Thai and White Smurf (now known as White Panther).
As it happens, White Panther Seeds are now marketed by Ceres Seeds as one of four strains named after this writer and packaged as John Sinclair Seeds: Viper (indica), Trans-Love (sativa), Amsterdam (skunk), and White Panther (indica-sativa mixture). Sidney and Joeri created John Sinclair Seeds to try to channel some money (and respect) to me in what would ordinarily be one’s retirement years (but of course I have no intention of retiring or in any way ceasing my work in poetry, journalism, broadcasting, record production and performance).
Bowing to my own wishes, the Sidney an Joeri created a Dutch non-profit organization called Stichting John
Sinclair, or the John Sinclair Foundation, to be the recipient of funds raised from seed sales and other sources to support “the projects of John Sinclair,” starting with my internet radio project called Radio Free Amsterdam (www.radiofreeamsterdam.com), for which they provide my website, bandwidth, and necessary technical services that allow me to create programming and post it daily on my site. They also underwrite my personal website, www.johnsinclair.us, and guide me in all my many internet activities including the YouTube and FaceBook sites they’ve created and maintain for me site.
Sidney helps take care of me in many other little ways while I’m in Amsterdam, and the Hempshopper on the Singel canal is one of my dual bases of operation—along with the nearby 420 Café, where I meet with friends and associates daily and do my writing, record and produce radio programs, and work on my internet radio station and other activities at my table in the back.
Steve “The Fly” Pratt is a remarkable young man from Stourbridge, England, whose livelihood in Amsterdam derives from his work behind the hash counter at the 420 Café and his gigs around town as a drummer and a club deejay. Steve’s followed his muse around the western world, settling at various times in Brooklyn, San Francisco, New Orleans and now Amsterdam for what’s turned out to be a protracted period of time.
Steve is also a novelist, poet, literary and historical researcher, website maker and manager, expert on James Joyce, student of modern poetry from Ezra Pound to Charles Olson, and acolyte of the late American novelist and visionary known as RAW, or Robert Anton Wilson, for whose family the Fly and his pal Chu, the eminent UK street artist, are creating an official website utilizing their revolutionary 360-degree panoramic presentation style at http://rawilson.com.
The Fly looks after me in a myriad of ways, from putting me up when he has an apartment of his own, to making sure my weed and coffee quotient is met at the 420 Café, to creating and managing my web journal called Fattening Blogs For Snakes (found at www.johnsinclair.us), to playing drums and leading my band in Amsterdam and Europe, to producing my forthcoming album of collaborations between me & Fly for Ironman Records in Birmingham, England and backing me up on
my current release called Beatnik Youth from Track Records in London.
Sidney and the Fly are two remarkably unique individuals who represent the cannabis culture in its highest form with insistent integrity and creative vision. They literally make it possible for me to carry on my work today and help it reach an audience on the world wide web.
But even before I knew them I was connected with Rev. Ferre van Beveren, founder of the THCMinistry and to whom I refer as my religious leader. Ferre founded and directed the Legalize! movement in the Netherlands up to the point a few years ago when he started spending much of his time with his companion in suburban London where he continues his work as an internet maven and relentless opponent of the War On Drugs.
Ferre devoted a considerable amount of time and energy to the establishment and growth of Radio Free Amsterdam when it was launched at the beginning of 2005 by Henk Botwinik, Larry Hayden and myself, and he continues to offer inspiration, assistance and guidance to the project now managed by Sidney and myself. Ben was lucky to find Ferre visiting with Sidney in Amsterdam and even more fortunate to be able to spend an evening in heightened conversation with my people. I just wish I could’ve been there to share the fellowship with them!
As my readers know, I do a lot of moving around in my old age, continually presenting a moving target and maintaing contact with my thousands of friends and co-conspirators throughout the free world. Right now I’m posted in New Orleans until late June, helping my friend Dave Brinks of the Trembling Pillow Press develop his concept of the New Orleans Institute for the Imagination. This is the first time in the past 10 years I’ve spent 5 months in the same place, and I’m enjoying the respite from traveling for a change.
Usually I’m on my way to Michigan for the month of April, arriving in time for the annual Hash Bash in Ann Arbor and continuing through what was called the John Sinclair 420 Music & Art Fair in Detroit on April 20th. This year I’m coming north for the Hash Bash weekend, but I won’t be appearing in Ann Arbor on April 6th because I’ve been engaged to perform at the Creole Pig festival in Grand
Rapids that’s designed to raise funds for people in Haiti still suffering from the effects of the mammoth earthquake there a few years ago.
I’ve enjoyed the Hash Bash since its inception, when it was a simple act of civil disobedience committed by a bunch of hippies who decided to gather on the UM Diag on April Fool’s Day in 1972 to protest the return of state punishment for marijuana use after a glorious three-week period in March when there was no marijuana law in Michigan at all. I wrote about the history of this event in my first column for this publication two years ago, so I won’t belabor it again, but that’s when the Hash Bash started and it’s continued in one form or another every year since.
I missed quite a few years of the celebration and returned one year in the 1990s when Adam Brook invited me to participate in what was now a one-hour ceremony on the Diag followed late into the evening by a wide open Monroe Street Art Fair two blocks away and a musical blow-out at the Blind Pig after that, and working with Adam Brook I’ve attended more years than not ever since.
Since 2003 I would come from Amsterdam at my own expense to be part of the gathering, usually offering a poem or a brief speech to the Diag event and often performing with bands like Glowb on Monroe Street and with the Macpodz at the Blind Pig. Once someone offered to pay my plane fare but they never came through.
Well, Adam Brook was sent to prison in October 2011 and his tight but benevolent control of the event was taken over by a group of Ann Arbor medical marijuana activists whose first major change was to pay a wealthy big-time dispensary owner from California to come in as the keynote speaker for last year’s Bash. This cheesed me off and made me rethink my voluntary commitment to the event.
Then the organizers of the Creole Pig benefit festival offered to pay my way to their event, to provide a good band for me to perform with and to pay a small honorarium as well as provide a hotel room for my daughter and granddaughter and me to spend the weekend together. In Ann Arbor I was never even offered a night’s lodging, let alone airfare or payment. So I accepted their offer and hereby offer my apologies to my friends and fellow patients in Ann Arbor for not joining you this year.
Have a great Hash Bash, Happy 4/20 and Free The Weed!
—New Orleans
March 20, 2013
© 2013 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved. |
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