Ideology meets reality and collides with the powers that be as articulated through the inner voices and external lives of a millennial anarchist collective near downtown L.A.

The Shipibo Shop is on a ruddy sand road about a half hour’s walk from Espiritu De Anaconda near Iquitos, Peru. Bastian is from Belgium. He and and his wife Vanessa, the daughter of Kestenbetsa, are the proprietors. They buy the stuff from Shipibas in...

I met Tigrane and Michka in Paris a couple of months ago…. Tigrane and Michka went out for dinner. They were going to stop at the tobacco museum first. The restaurant was lovely, but the museum was long gone… disappeared to a pile of ruble. Vanished in the vapours, but not to worry… everything worked out for the best… as these things go. From the ashes of disaster, a plume if insperation and subsequent birth of le musee du fumeur in Paris. That was around 2001. The museum features a permenant exhibit and subsequent temporary instilations a gift store and libraby. It’s free, has one of the best bathrooms I’ve seen to date with a collections of photogrpahs iconic smokers, but words can’t really articulate the experience. From the native Americans who gave us tobacco to the pious saddhus of India who sacramentally puff on ganja, smoke is holly. It connects mankind to the divine element, inviting the gods to descend among mortals, it inspires human beings. “Before answering a question, one ought to light a pipe” commented Einstein. Having now become an industrial product, tobacco has lost all sacredness. Condemned as harmful and addictive, cigarettes have fallen into disrepute, whereas cigars and a whole new range of smoking paraphernalia, are gaining popularity. All in all, smoke has retained its mystery. The Smoking Museum presents a practice as ancient as mankind ; it also provides a vantage point for the observation of changing...

HOME is a short form documentary about Daybi. I met Daybi in New York at a party for RCA records circa ’97. Young, wild and exceptionally gifted, the Aboriginal rapper / musician from Canada was working gold fronts and functional defiance. We hung with ODB from Wu-Tang. At some point I might have seen the president of the label kiss him on the cheek. He had a lot of magnitism fueled by the omnipotence of youth. These days, the wild child rapper from Vancouver has found transcendence in fatherhood emerging as a prolific performer/producer/filmmaker not far from where the journey started. Now residing in Kahnawà:ke, a Mohawk reserve on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, Canada, a stones throw from Montreal, Daybi is clearly just getting started now that he’s found Home. I’m always expecting big things from him. He’s had a few films at Sundance and toured extensively with his hip hop collective, Slangblossem, so who knows what’s coming next. Here’s a mini documentary by filmaker Mathieu Favreau about Daybi that gets to the heart of the matter. HOME Home from Mathieu Favreau on...

Here’s my Huff Po blog on South American Cholo. It’s a documentary by Vietnamese/American Phuong-Cac Nguyen Journalist that looks at lowrider culture in Brazil. The premier is Thursday at the LINE Hotel in K-Town....

I’m not really one to anticipate film releases but there are some exceptions. Truth be told, I waited with bated breath for Michael Douglass to reveal himself as Liberace in Behind the Candelabra, and I was not disappointed. In other cinematic realms,  AWAKE -The Life of Yogananda is a release I’d been waiting lifetimes for and didn’t even know it. You can find out more at: http://www.awaketheyoganandamovie.com (excerpted from awaketheyoganandamovie.com) Filmed over three years with the participation of 30 countries around the world, the documentary examines the world of yoga, modern and ancient, east and west and explores why millions today have turned their attention inwards, bucking the limitations of the material world in pursuit of self-realization. Archival material from the life of Yogananda (who died in 1952) creates a spine for the narrative, but the film stretches the dimensions of a standard biography. The footage includes stylized interviews, metaphoric imagery and recreations, taking us from holy pilgrimages in India to Harvard’s Divinity School and its cutting-edge physics labs, from the Center for Science and Spirituality at the University of Pennsylvania to the Chopra Center in Carlsbad, California. By evoking the journey of the soul as it pushes its way through the oppression of the human ego and delusion of the material world, the film creates an experiential immersion into the unseen realms. AWAKE is ultimately the story of humanity itself: the universal struggle of all beings to free themselves from suffering and to seek lasting happiness.  ...