PAGE FOUR; FEATURE

The milling crowds, the people jams, the queues for the cafeteria -- hey, it’s Cup time again! But playing argy bargy with people you don’t know is never fun, never elevating, never a celestial experience.
....There were, however, celestial experiences to be had by the non-Goddesses attending the Cup.
....At the end of a busy day smoking grass and falling in and out of coffeeshops, Cup delegates congregate for more festivities within the multi-halled Melkweg complex. But it is not all jostle and push. For the laminate carrying judges there is a souk-like lounge where the vaporisers belch in a clamorous atmosphere of intense dopiness. Elsewhere the crowds mill between the large hall and the cafeteria in a tireless confused procession that flows back and forth and eventually congeals around the cloakroom desk.
....Most people would pay hard cash for somewhere to sit quietly, put their aching feet up and roll a nice long spliff. But that is not the nature of the Cannabis Cup. Fortunate, then, the delegates with the initiative to find the quiet haven of the Melkweg Tea Room on the first floor. For the rest it was queue for a table in the cafeteria or flop out in the judges room. But rest and relaxation are always in short supply at the Cup and at the Melkweg the pressure is really on.
....With the serious busi-ness of the day behind them, the evenings at the Melkweg offer delegates a feast of entertainment. From top(ish) bands to Amy the Sword Swallower, there is allegedly something for everyone. As if the Cup itself were not comical enough, there is always a comedy troupe or two but that is another ‘allegedly’. This year it was Comedy Central’s ‘hilarious award winning Upright Citizens Brigade’ and sassy comedienne, MC Watermelon. It was interesting that for the latter’s vaginal infection jokes most of the ‘upright citizens’ seemed to be in the audience. What a way to treat a Goddess.
....So, as always at the Cup, it was in the audience that the best comedy took place.
....Never taken seriously at the Cup, the comedy performers know that they are there to fill out what is essentially a music programme. Music, as Jim Morrison once observed, ‘is our special friend.’ More and more, music has become our chronometer, our time stick, the soundtrack that runs through all our memories. But, for dope smokers, it is something more. Where, after all, would music be without the sacred herb. Would Dylan have written Desolation Row or Mr Tambourine Man, would Doors have taken their extended Romanesque vacations on the other side, would anyone have been in the queue at the Chelsea Drugstore with Mr Jimi, if it had not been for the GanjaMa? We think not. If anything was responsible for the development of rock, it was the substance that the Cannabis Cup glorifies. And that makes the music VERY MUCH our special friend.
....The music at the Cup is always of a high standard even if we have not heard of all the bands. In 1999, one of the high points was the popular Jai Levi and his extremely smooth, highly original songs about spirituality. But there was much more that we were too stoned to remember now. There seemed to be some good reggae and there are some vague memories of dancing with the shade of the man who shot the sherriff but . . . Sorry. All we can say in our defence is that the absence of memories must indicate that we had a good time.
....If anything it was the music of the previous year that made a greater impression. Well, not just the music, actually. The 1998 Cup was Coffeehouse Culture’s first. It was our first year of living in Amsterdam and we had had a gruesome summer putting together the paper edition of issue one of Coffeehouse Culture, which actually appeared a week or two before the Cup started. It could not have come at a worse time, this major event of the cannabis year that we simply had to attend. On the edge of a nervous breakdown, we were to say the least tired and emotional. And, although we didn’t know it at the time, the Cup is always a tremendously tiring experience full of hardcore conversations that sail so hard against the wind of stonedness that they have to be anchored by the tightest focus. So, weary and worn, on our feet still only through the grace of the GanjaMa, we ‘did’ the Cup.
....We could not know that against such a backdrop of exhaustion, depletion and depression, we would have one of the most elevating and beautiful experiences of our lives. But we cannot speak for the whole Coffeehouse Culture team. Truth be told, it was just the eternally tired and emotional editor who had the mindblowing experiences.
....The Cup was such a good experience. There were so many beautiful people shining their light and being their thing, so many saints and seers and shamen, so many people reflecting the increased consciousness that comes from the smoking of cannabis that it not only reaffirmed our belief in the ethos and rationale of Coffeehouse Culture but brought to it new aspects of confirmation of which we had only dreamed. This gathering of the tribe, this meeting of friends, this counterculture cavalcade of gypsies and travellers, flower children and freaks, criminals and corruptors, mystics and mystery men, this motley procession of jesters and anarchists, represented such a singular spiritual (yes, spiritual) event that it could almost have been a Kumbla Mala. But of dope smokers. Of dope smokers.
....So what, do we hear you say?
....In this world where spirituality is the lost treasure that could make life the deeply fulfilling, glorious and wonderful experience it really should be, the communion of individuals into one mind focused through a collective peak experience of bliss, or devotion, or holiness, or just simple shared pleasure (you can call it what you like) is an extremely rare occurrence. It is this experience that is -- or should be -- the core of all religions in which collective worship is practised. The church service exists to focus the mind, to generate the impulse of devotion in the congregation and to feed from and to the collective consciousness that results.
....What made the 1998 Cannabis Cup such a singular spiritual event is that it was not a church service, it had no spiritual content and it was to do with a herb. No one was there to worship. They were there to party, get stoned and have a good time. Religion? Gi’us a break. This was compulsive-obsessive over consumption. Isn’t that number 12 of the ten commandants or one of the eleven deadly sins? Or an abomination in Leviticus (where everything is forbidden?)
....Just on the first day at the Cup we met so many beautiful people. It was just great to find so many who felt just the same way as we did -- about life, about living, about the sacred herb. Indeed, it was an eye-opening, mind-opening, tear duct-opening revelation to find the rationalisations we had formulated over ten years as an isolated recluse locked in the theoretical and practical study of consciousness in a carpeted cave in south London being bounced back to us. Often, in almost the very same words.
....And the love. Sorry but I must mention that much maligned cliché that makes up the best half of the much maligned phrase: ‘Love generation.’ There was so much love around at the Pax Party Centre, so much warmth, so many good vibes and such an elegant and finely developed sense of bonhommé, that -- for the editor, who much like Laurence Cherniak, has been everything and done everywhere, and was a proud member of the aforementioned ‘love generation' -- it was just like being back in the 60s.
....That, however, is not the story. It is a nice story, perhaps, for the aging hippies who were there when the worlds collided, when the spirit of truth rose again from the shallow grave in which it had been buried, when the doors of global consciousness started to swing open, and can associate with the powerful, heart-warming, evolutionary impulse of consciousness that fuelled the whole thing. But it is not the story.
....The story is much more significant than that. Yes, more significant than the initial impulses that started this whole culture thingy off. Of course, it is just the same story 35 years on. But the cast have matured and the plot has become more clearly defined. This is a story of a maturing of all of the best things we gained through the 60s and what it seems to have created. And, in its own way, it is a tale as worthy of a Cecil B DeMille epic as the First Coming.
....And it all happened at the Melkweg. To appreciate the full power of what is to follow, dear reader, you need to understand just what a revelation, what a surprise, what a gob-smackingly unexpected event the Cannabis Cup -- in its aspects -- was for our poor, naive, painfully insular editor. In the small hall at the Melkweg, the one that these days houses the judges lounge, away from the bouncing crowds in the main hall, there was a small dance floor and some good music. To this day I cannot remember which band it was but I think that maybe it was the Cannabis Cup Band. They were up there on the stage doing their reggae(ish) thing, singing their songs dedicated to the GanjaMa, praising the plant and glorifying its existence and down below on the dance floor were some lonely dancers. Too stoned and tired to dance myself I stood towards the back and just took in the good music and the fine vibes and watched the dancers. There was one guy who caught my eye. He looked like he might have stepped out of a biblical epic, a misguided eremite, a desert father, who had wandered out of the wilderness and into the Melkweg. Like a dervish he spun and twirled as the music carried him away and his arms and his many scarves and shawls swirled around him like shoals of fishes following the currents he cut through the viscid but empty air of the dance floor. He flowed to the music like it ran through his veins and his body responded to its every nuance. His grace was extraordinary but his dance was strange -- abandoned, ecstatic and unconstrained.
....And his face. His face was blinding. His eyes were closed and he was smiling a smile of the deep ecstasy he was obviously experiencing. As I watched, his movements and the music became more and more aligned. As the man and the music merged into a tightly balletic symbiosis of energy it seemed that the dancer was consumed by the music and the music flowed out through his limbs as trails of colour and light. It was a beautiful sight. As the band praised the Green Goddess in what seemed like a devotional chant from the deep recesses of all our minds, the dancer performed the ritual steps, the sacred movements, that gave sanctity to worship that was clearly taking place. The dancer’s vibes lit up the whole of the dance floor and were powerful to behold.
....As I looked around me I saw that there were other dancers on the fringes of the small dance floor doing their thing in the same way. They had the same radiance, the same blissful smiles, the same joyful vibe. Suddenly I understood what was happening. As I looked further I could see many non-dancers like myself, standing watching the amazing events take place on the dance floor. I noted that like me they were all smiling broadly and swaying like beds of kelp in the warm water currents of the Gulf Stream.
....It was as if we were one. One mind, one heart. One. All sharing in the devotions of the dancers, the worshippers, lost so deeply in their spiritual ecstasies, in the physical expressions of their intense love of the substance we were all there to celebrate. It was a religious exper-ience. Truly a religious experience.
....At such times the heart expands. The muscles and fibres that pump the lifeforce around the frame take on a new mystical fluidity as the heart lotus opens and flowers. And the light shines forth from the vision of bliss that is revealed within the waves of deep love that flow over and through the heart and the mind.
....As William James would tell us (and, indeed, does tell us in his seminal volume, ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’ published in 1902), this is what religious experiences are all about. And many of the Sandoz acid hippies who were experienced in the hitherto unplumbed heights of chemically induced consciousness will recognise it as such.
....Experiences like that are rare. They can happen spontaneously -- if you have the karma -- but usually they need some kind of precipitant. And a dramatic one at that. Acid, in the early days, was just about dramatic enough. If the Cannabis Cup was anything to go by, it had burnt away the sores and pustules of self deceit and left only the Clearasil clean skin of a saint. But, of course, it wasn’t just the acid; it was the 30 years or more of smoking the Green Goddess that had really wrought the changes.
....I am aware that at the 1998 Cannabis Cup I was witness to something special. It is, however, as you will have gathered, hard to define and put colours to but it was clearly there. That unity of consciousness, that oneness of heart and mind, that collective mood of bliss, that communion of souls in common devotional love, that sharing of consciousness, that holy, holy feeling. It was too big to rationalise or review. It was just something to be relished and respected.
....That experience of the truly fervent worship of cannabis was something I experienced several times at the Melkweg in that week in 1998. It could, of course, have been because as a publisher I had been following the path of the flagellante and had pushed my body and mind to the extremities beyond which lies the Great Abyss. It could have been just a glitch in my usual energy patterns. It could have been just a bit of imagination, a fabrication of a desperate mind seeking solace in the arms of the peace that surpasseth all understanding. It could have been just a dream I had. I wasn’t really sure.
....So, it was with some interest that I approached the Cup as November 1999 rolled around. I was, however, disappointed. Sure, a good -- verging on great -- time was had by all. And, indeed, there was plenty of magic around. But that special magic seemed to be missing. For the first time that year the judges lounge was done out as a souk and had reserved tables for the coffeeshop entrants. And it was on the De Kuil table (as ever our sponsors at the Cup) that we did duty. Jai Levi sang his songs of Cosmic love and chanted the names of God and everyone was mellowed out and softened by the vibe and the belching vaporisers. But, although the collective consciousness tumbled and rolled, that special level of communion, of blissed out holiness, of Divine Grace, was absent.
....Maybe my perceptions of the previous year had been just a trick of the light. Maybe I had simply been cracking up (but, hey, it was nicely) and kinda lost it. Maybe I had just been too stoned. If it had happened at all, maybe it had been a one-off experience, a unique glimpse of the divinity that is accessible within all of us through the grace of the Green Goddess. Who knows? I certainly didn’t.
....Winter. Spring. Summer. Autumn. And here we are again. Coffeehouse Culture’s third Cannabis Cup. Time to Honour the Goddess. Truly.
....By day we . . . . Well, if you want to know what we did by day, maybe you should read the other main Cannabis Cup story in this issue. This article is about something else and it is with that ‘something else’ that we should stay. Goddesses, remember? Join us, therefore, as we fly you -- care of Trans-Love Airways -- again to the Milky Way where the stars are about to twinkle very, very brightly.
....Although we should have been in the judges lounge vaporising its occupants with our sponsor’s fine grass, we had heat blisters on our brains through the heavy-duty vaporising we’d been doing all day at the Pax Party Centre and were, therefore, absolved (before we dissolved) of evening duties. It was great just to hang out pretending to be a brain dead stoner; or were we merely pretending?
....It was a good result for us. It had only been a few days previously that we had actually got a look at the Cup programme. Same old, same old. But . . . . wait . . . . hang on . . . . what’s this . . . .and . . . ooohhh. Patti Smith and Jefferson Starship. At the Cup! Wow! Good bands, man.
....No one said a word but Amsterdam was quietly impressed that the Cannabis Cup could attract such top-line performers. Both legends in their own lunch times (for ‘lunch’ read ‘lurch’), Patti Smith was the streetwise Rabelaisian poet of freedom and the Starship were -- in their previous incarnation as a mere airplane -- among the people who helped to create this culture. It was an exciting line-up.
....Monday night. The Grand Zaal at the Melkweg . And it is Patti Smith strutting her stuff as the midnight hour rolls around. Before her set the talk is all of her last gig in Amsterdam, some five years ago, at which she is said to have levitated the Paradiso. Such is the stuff (and nonsense) of rock legend. Her band is tight and peppy and she is bopping and hopping to the rhythm section. Twirling and swinging her arms above her head in the ecstasy of the performer’s moment, she is clearly at home in the Land of the Truly Free. But this, of course, is her audience. A rabble of rebels with a cause, street people one and all, the children of the revolution.
....There is some dancing but mostly they are listening. For this is art. No empty words here. The poetry is rich with references drawn from the culture of which we are all a part and resonates with the decadent spirit of Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire. They were, of course, among the first of the free thinking, far seeing, re-definers of reality as we know it. And, indeed, as members of the Club des Hashishin, among the founding fathers of the culture to which we belong. It is only right and proper that their shades should be there, in the Melkweg, while their distant descendents give them honour. It is the words that carry the visions and the visionaries. The oblique perceptions of material reality filtered, refined and redefined through the music of poetic vision weave rich tapestries of sound and image that few within the Melkweg can resist. Not always pleasant on the inner eye the words reach out towards a hard cold reality and seek to transmute it into something with a softer heart.
....As she works through some of her greatest hits and a few new things, the audience stands mesmerised by the dervish presence on stage. Eyes glazed they still do not dance but bounce, sway and swirl as the visions carry them away. But the artist has no mercy (and nor would the audience wish for any.) As she pulls the crowd into the extrapolations of her personal landscape, the rainbow colours of the shared vision light up the hall.
....It seemed to happen in colours until all the colours were overwhelmed by a simple white light. As the band cranked up the music, the exchanges of energy between performer and audience became almost palpable. In flashes of purples, reds and greens the audience hurled back the good vibes coming off the stage and charged the performance with an electrical resonance that bounced off the walls in showers of sparkles. Within the hall the atmosphere was vibrant and electric, crackling with communication and association. They were hers, the audience. Moving to her mind and rhythms, within her world, lost to the joys of Amsterdam, lost in the music.
....There was a pause between songs. And in it the singer surveyed the conquered and smiled to herself at the satisfaction of the perfection of her art. And then it happened. With the band chunking away, in the distance a chant is heard: ‘Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!’ It seems to come from the stage but far away monks are repeating its sacred sounds. Within the audience the mantra takes a hold and they move to its rhythms. Maybe they are the chanting monks or maybe it is something deeper than mere vocalisations that we can hear. Magic is in the air.
....And then the song starts: ‘The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!’ The last word of each phrase is given increasing emphasis until the final ‘holy’ is rendered as a finely wrought expletive that blasts the windows from the church. The artiste walks to the edge of the stage. ‘Everything is holy!’ She says emphatically. It is a statement not a suggestion. The audience glows energetically. Standing on the very edge of the stage the singer looks out benignly. And with a wide sweep of her arms she addresses them directly. “Every-One is HOLY,’ she shouts. And then adds, her arms still seeking to embrace her listeners: “And YOU’RE all HOLY.’
....Almost visibly the audience expands. The faces are alight. Burning brightly with an ecstasy of reverence for their own divinity, the glow is immense and glorious. Above the crowd the air is radiant and rippling with pulsating balls of energy that rise up and burst in explosions of white light. One mind, one heart, one family joined in the bliss of reverence, lost in the ecstasy of their own holiness, the singer and the crowd. One experience of that divine blessedness that makes our progress on this tiresome earth such a joy. Oh joy. Sweet bliss. Sweet ecstasy. Worship at the Church of the Green Goddess.
....And here we are ag’in. William James watch out. As ever it is impossible to convey the full power and majesty of the experience. As the inclination towards worship, towards the assumption of the holiness of each of us and everything around us, takes over from what is essentially no more than a performance, as the audience becomes a congregation and the performer a pastor who leads them in prayers that come from the heart, the buzz is tremendous. It is a reverent and revelationary experience that has few comparisons.
....That such singular and unusual events happen at the Cannabis Cup is both surprising and to be expected. Is not the Cup a singular event in itself? Sure there are pot rallies in the States and Canada but where else but in Amsterdam can we let it ALL hang out? And is it not this: the true spirit, the spirit of truth, the culture of light, this community of seers and shamen out of which the new religion (the one that lives within, free of rules and regulations) will naturally grow? Are we not the people of the heart? In-touch with our real beings, our real souls, expanding our minds and our vision, developing our compassion and our understanding, growing, growing, growing? Of course, we are.
....As the blissed out Cup delegates shuffled and shambled their way into the cold Amsterdam air empty of clamour and crisp and cutting as a starched collar, it was a trailing procession of saints and the sanctified that left the Melkweg behind. The collective experience they had shared had left them full of the reverent silence in which they now walked. But, boy, they glowed like beacons. Bless ‘em.
....And, as if that were not enough, a few days later the same thing happened again with those pioneers of acid rock, Jefferson Starship. If you closed your eyes you could have been at the Avalon ballroom or the Cheetah or the Fillmore. It was only when you opened your eyes that the decades came bouncing back. Although there was no Grace Slick, her substitute (Diana Mangano) put on a fine performance. And Jorma, Marty and Paul were all there doing it just like they always had. And the music was as good as ever. Perhaps there was a little too much emphasis on new material (for the audience, anyway) but that didn’t matter because the band could always pull such anthems as ‘Somebody to Love,’ ‘My Best Friend’ and ‘The White Rabbit’ out of the hat to get the audience back and into the moment.
....And there were moments. Less of a prayer meeting than the Patti Smith gig, there were hymns to be sung to the glory of the mind. As the audience, one and all, joined in the joyous and joyful chorus to ‘The White Rabbit’ the whole thing became clear. Here was the first of the alternative ten commandments: “Feed your head.’ As the bloated brains of the audience carried them back into the 60s, at the Temple of the Green Goodess worship was, again, in progress.