I wrote a poem and I am so goddamn proud of it that I want to share it with everyone. But I don’t like Facebook’s layout, so I am going to publish it here instead.
Dude
I
know
dude
like,
I
know.
– By Simone Loxton
what the internet told me about trimmigrants
It’s my latest phase.
Cute, hey?
One evening, the three of us settled on the same idea: let’s head to the States for trimming season. We decided on a date, but realised five minutes later it wasn’t feasible.
Since then, we have each dedicated some time to researching when, how, and everything else about becoming a trimmigrant on USA soil.
Today was my turn to get stuck into what the Internet has to offer and I did so by heading to three searches platforms I thought fit: Google, Instagram, Reddit.
The first gives you news, trends, images and all the really shitty advice, like how not to speak, or five ways to get a job. Sure, those articles, mainly in the form of lists, like this one, are useful, but the more you read them the more they help cut out the bullshit aggregations of what the journey entails. Rehashed information, if you will, is a tad bit boring after a while.
Google shows you what everyone thinks, but you need to dig deeper for what people know.
Following that hour-long wormhole, one that took me to the depths of obscure blog posts, YouTube videos of strain hunters and every meme relating to the subject, I ended up realising that enriching information is the only thing that would calm my mind.
So I headed to Reddit.
Sure, some subreddits are average, but then you find golden nuggets a plenty.
And we like them golden nuggets.
Reddit has the tendency to enrich your life in one way or another. People are poetic and funny and serious and extremely punny, but they are also dead serious and rules are strictly adhered to.
While searching for “trimming” I came across people who had misused groups by suggesting illegal activity in their posts (working without the appropriate visa). They were scolded.
I have never been a trimmigrant – let alone travelled to the States, so please be aware that whatever you find below is a mere collection of things I found on the Internet and wanted to share with the two other people I am planning to go with. There was too much, however, so I decided to put all that information in a blog post, a listicle if you will.
Please, take it in, one budding strain at a time:
Redditor PleaseCallMeTall
Seriously, Reddit is delicious.
I quickly came across Tall Sam Jones’ post as its title got it placed at the top of the results of my first search.
“So you want to be a trimmigrant?” is an insightful, personal account of what it’s like to trim weed in the States. It’s clean, factual and effortlessly connected to other posts by the same author, which are all tales about his life travelling the USA.
Here’s one of the last paragraphs, for those of you who suck at reading long-form anything:
My time trimming in Northern California was meaningful and difficult and exciting. All-in-all, the time spent living on the river with our little tribe of beautiful, flawed travelers was the most enjoyable part of the whole thing. We hiked several miles over rough terrain every day. We swam naked in the river and shared coffee and spliffs and music and stories and food. We met people from all over the world, amazing, inspiring people with resilient spirits and big hearts. I was vetted by career criminals, doing small, simple jobs like driving them around or helping them move innocent packages as they watched and tested to see how well I followed directions. We eventually peaced out of there with a few thousand dollars in-hand. We could have made a lot more, but we started with no connections, nothing but our wits, our car, and the name of a town. I’m hesitant to give out the name of the place here, but these are stories that have relevance in any trimming or seasonal labour scene.
Bear in mind that is one personal account of millions, so onwards and high-wards.
The hippies are a’spreading
I’m from Cape Town, South Africa. Fish Hoek, to be precise. Much of my young life was spent behind the “lentin curtain”, the southern part of the peninsula so called because it’s a protected valley of suburbia where all the vegan and flexitarian hippies can be found. Psychedelic trance slowly infiltrated my playlist and took me on a short and colourful journey filled with mushrooms, repetitive doofs and tie-dye everything.
You see, we don’t get a lot of travellers down south, other than the annual influx of Europeans and the occasional American who either attempt to save the Africans or claim the role of surf-instructor-cum-party-animal. They are far from the dirty hippies who make it their mission to visit “rural” parts of the world.
During my search I hit Instagram.
I noticed some sites call them trimigants or trimmigrants, but it was #trimigrants that was the most popular hashtag on Instagram.
Prepare yourself – and make sure to read the comments:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BeD8JzUFhAK/?tagged=trimigrants
https://www.instagram.com/p/BamcnD2FK1n/?tagged=trimigrants
https://www.instagram.com/p/BYWlLJ4h2Yp/?tagged=trimigrants
It’s like, you have to be ready for anything, with a pair of scissors in hand.
Back to the subreddits
Threads on Reddit are pots of gold. People use Reddit to voice opinions and share knowledge, so it’s naturally filled with, yup, golden nuggets.
While searching, don’t just fall for the highest rated comments. Those nuggets can turn into a fucking delicious meal, you just have to skim through them all. Where’re not here for humour, we’re here for knowledge.
Where’da come from? Where’da go?
There’s nothing like a little bit of history and context, so here are some class articles I discovered:
- The Hardscrabble Origins of California’s Fabled “Emerald Triangle”
- Season in the Life of a Trimmigrant
- IamA “Trimmigrant” — someone who trims cannabis for cash. AMA!
- The Life of “Trimmigrants” During Harvest Season in the Emerald Triangle
It feels like gold
The final discovery I am going to mention is the bitches tits. It’s a document, listing farms and dispensaries that have been given licenses by the state of Oregon to grow and sell weed. I am not going to share it, but I can tell you it’s on Reddit and didn’t take me long to find at all.
As it stands, one of the people I am planning to go just found a job via Instagram. What do you know, perhaps this time next year I’ll write about my own experience.
Or not 😉
caleon fox
I subscribe to Caleon Fox’s YouTube channel and have watched this a million times since I got the email notification it had been uploaded.
You have to watch, though, not just listen to the music; caleon fox is a performer:
He also does sketches:
check it
marti lund – the nomad of the burham commune
When you speak to Marti, the biggest advocators of chats, you soon realise talking to him isn’t just about words, but rather an experience that adopts immense gees in every syllable, gesture, and facial expression.
The massive, frothing grin that greets you is one that can only be taken lightly and, with the accompaniment of satisfying laughs and long-ass hugs, sometimes it’s all you need.
Meet him once, and Marti is bonded to you, popping up along the rollercoaster we call life to have his say, make his mark and, many times, leave you in a trail of well-ridden dust.
Marti has a tendency to pop into my room for a little chat every now and then, whether it’s about house matters or marketing issues or just general pieces of magical advice and encouragement.
You see, we live together in The Burham Commune and it’s entering our third year as digsmates. We met back at Rhodes and, as with everyone else who knows him, has weaved in and out of my life like the surfer he is.
Since living with him, I have gained much insight into his work and never-ending mission(s), so I asked him some questions and he obligingly answered:
1) Tell me what it is about writing on walls:
Hello.
[I told you he was all about the chats.]
I caught a couple tags in high school. The trains in Cape Town were a big part of my high school years and I got into a little graffiti but it didn’t amount to much.
It really started when I was living in a utility room (a Canadian expression for a broom cupboard for all your shit). I had hitchhiked from Toronto to the Rockies in Canada and it was the only place I could afford. It had no window so I started painting the wall alongside a futon and my proudest possession, a Hannah Montana Boombox.
Shortly after that, I almost hit a guy, my boss, at a sushi restaurant when I was living in Golden, BC. I went to the local backpackers and asked if they could pay me to paint their wall. I ended up living there for a little while, eating their food, drinking their coffee and meeting some fascinating humans.
I ended up doing that in Mexico a couple months later. At that stage I realized I had something potentially sustainable to explore and a means to support my travels, if not anything else.
2 – On your website you talk about creating “participatory style murals”. What is your modus operandi and how, do you feel, the subject of your murals inspire empathy in people once you have left the location?
The modus operandi of the participatory murals is inclusivity. In most instances, I run a workshop around a topic at hand, dreams, environment, humanitarian superhumans to state a couple, that guides the students through a practical and reflective drawing process. In the end we come out with a few resolved, usable drawings which I, along with the kids, transform into a composition.
If we look at artists like ARYZ, his work is done in pastel tones simply because he had to scavenge house paint from his neighbours. That was all he had. Now he’s one of the most well known wall artists of our time and he STILL borrows paint from his Aunty.
The students are capable of creating powerful and weighed works on their own accord. You don’t need a thousands of bucks worth of equipment to paint a wall or make a drawing or a collage. Whether my intent of teaching sticks, I can’t say I’m too sure at this stage. More sustainable methodologies are in the pipeline.
3 – You’re an avid surfer – and more recently have taken to a daily skate mission. How does this lifestyle lend to your style, your perception of life, and where you see yourself in years to come?
Ja shit hey. Skating and surfing started as a way of escaping rugby and boytjies. These days it’s a lot more inclusive in day-to-day, rather than being something done after everything else. A skate and a surf benefit the process of creation in terms of headspace and finding characteristic ways of seeing the space you’re in. Skaters, generally speaking, see the urban space differently to most people. A stairset and a loading bay are playgrounds. That along with the rebellion of the culture was attractive as kids and helped to mould a way of seeing things that wasn’t boring and ‘take it for what it is’. We used to skate Ndabeni and Maitland at night, getting chased by security guards, coming up with kak tags and causing havoc, it was a good time. Youth well spent I’d say.
In the early high school days, I caught the train with my still closest friend Swain Hooogervorst to surf and we used to check the trackside graffiti and tags in the train. Back then, the trains were proper tagged up, graffiti was alive and well. It was a big influence, now looking in retrospect.
Nowadays, surfing is the best release anyone could ever want. It’s like going on a miniature holiday and gets you to places you would have never known about, gets you hitchhiking, sleeping in half-built buildings, getting sucked out to sea, staying fit, healthy and connected to the earthy flows. The ocean keeps you humble because it will destroy you if it feels like it.
4 – You have a wonderful ability to co-create, so let’s talk CRATEcollective. Since the exhibition last year, what have you guys done and how has been in a collective helpful
CRATE has always had so much potential. The exhibition last year was a solid show and was a good challenge. It helped to create a lot of traction for us all too.
To be honest, I think we could always work more as a unit but we’re good friends and love making things together or at least bringing creativity to a space. I work a lot with MIGO and we’ve built a strong foundation of connection and honest creative investment in each other.
I’ve always got collaborators to call on and that’s great. I love being around those guys, it’s honest and super diverse. They make me stoked to do what I do.
CRATE | THE REASON WHY from Danielle Davenport on Vimeo.
5 – I was around you during your conceptualisation of The Global Island. It was clear such a big commission pushed your boundaries. But you delivered and even got a short film out of it. Tell us about your process and what you learnt:
That was a pretty powerful process, just simply in the scale of the production. I only had a week and a half which forced me to resolve the work rapidly.
Doing graffiti in a corporate building is great, a little like skating the stairsets in your high school and then getting paid for the pictures.
It was in a very sensitive space, occupying a big corporate canteen with a large amount of creative freedom, consideration of the visuals, and how I sought to create critical undercurrents in the work was the biggest challenge, but I managed to resolve it in a way that exceeded my expectations. Doing graffiti in a corporate building is great, a little like skating the stairsets in your high school and then getting paid for the pictures.
I’ve said it all along, I want to treat walls like an oil painting. Allow it to breathe, to become its own organism that talks back at you. I find graffiti to often be such a simplified process of drawing to execution without allowing the wall its ‘independence’. Sometimes you have to watch paint dry. Otherwise it becomes too formulaic. I wanted to concentrate on this ethic throughout this work.
Also, working with Craig was a big shift, again realizing the power of collaboration. He’s very serious about not being too serious, that’s important.
6 – What have been some of your more standout moments of work, whether commissions or personal pieces?
The exhibition last year was a highlight, forcing me to resolve something of a style, a body of work that in the end becomes a self-portrait of experience, critical interest and time. I realized so much about the work I made after I had made it, that it was discursive and so incredibly personal at the same time. I also got held up at gunpoint in my bedroom on the morning of the show. I had to deal with investigators for the first few hours of the day, then hang and open the show in front of over 100 people. That was the most alive I’ve ever felt.
This year has been an all-round highlight. I’ve always aimed to travel for at least half my time and this year I spent time and painted in Harare, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, Eastern Cape, Johannesburg and Indonesia. It’s been a good year and next year looks equally, if not more, exciting.
7 – Your network of friends (we’re talking social media) are wonderfully supportive of everything you do – how have they helped you?
Yeah, it’s been unreal, incredibly helpful and such a boost of confidence having so many people backing me.
Collaboration has happened in so many forms because of social media, I feel a lot of that comes from being able to see what your contemporaries are doing consistently through online platforms.
Help has come in almost every form, from collaboration in video making, website design to help with a large group of kids. It’s been a powerful process to rope people from different backgrounds together, to watch little kids from Mitchells Plain and 20 somethings from the Southern Suburbs learning from each other and getting covered in paint.
Social media, for what I do, is incredibly helpful but it’s those who choose to use it for upliftment, for the spread of knowledge and a means to achieve collaboration and community that I feel are heading in the right direction and are generally the people who support me. I’m very grateful that they’re interested.
8 – You live a lifestyle with strong nomadic tendencies. This not only means you get to explore different parts of the world, but that your ideas of social structures are constantly challenged. Will you ever stop exploring or where do you hope it takes you?
Oh hell no. I want to go everywhere, paint everything. I spent almost 2 years missioning around North and Central America, working labour jobs, hitchhiking and sleeping in the woods, doing random crap to get by. The will to do that hasn’t changed, it’s just changed forms. I now have a van, a board for every wave and a paint for very surface. The options are endless.
I’m fitting that van out for maximum adventure potential and strive to push the boundaries of what is possible in terms of making a sustainable creative existence while living in the city for only half the year.
The city creeps me out after a while.
There are so many residencies, backpackers with walls, kids frothing to paint, creative retreats, psychedelics, towns with people who are intrigued by graffiti/street art, surf communities, villages, warm meals, brands, barrels and open spaces. I want to make the most and explore all of them.
The city creeps me out after a while.
9 – How’s your 2017 looking?
It’s looking full, full of projects and a strong will to not do too many projects. I’m intending to slow down a bit, do some more creative retreats and go down the rabbit hole a little. I want to figure out what I really, really want to be making. To get back on the canvasses with a strong arsenal of paint.
There’s a lot of commissions coming my way which is great but they tend to be quite distracting from the primary creative narrative. That said, it’s good to be making and living off my craft. 2017 going to be a gamechanger year. I am surrounded by such an incredible creative community and I want to say thanks to them in advance for all the rad shit we’re going to do.
10 – Now, for the fun part. Give me your favourite tracks / albums / artists you listen to while you paint, skate, live:
And that’s what Marti has to say for himself.
So, the next time you see him, say waddup, offer him some tea and have a chat. You will see him smile from cheek to cheek and get so super stoked with life, if he isn’t already.
1 – ’17
Every so often, there are a few things I’m reading that I find myself needing to remember share / have around / indulge in.
Here are a few. It should improve considerably once my brain is realigned with creating such a world.
– In case you missed it, John Berger passed away and this article was doing the rounds:
Why we still need John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
Here’s a link to a pdf version of Ways of Seeing and there’s even a four-part series:
– Remember the whole safety pin debacle last year? Here’s some much needed perspective (as well as some points on cultural appropriation):
The Safety Pin and the Swastika
– If you’re a Stidubio Ghilbli fan and have completed watching their creations, here’s a list of some other anime films that the authors actually watched:
The 20 Best Anime Movies Not Made By Studio Ghibli
–
Childish Gambino creates a beat on phone after concert and freestyles. He is accompanied by Steve G. Lover III, Chance the Rapper, & Gonage.
– It’s so imperfect, it’s perfect:
What goes into a KitKat has been revealed, and it’s probably not what you expected
fear less
You know Chet Faker? Of course you do.
Well, as he pointed out in a recent announcement, the Australian electronic producer has been creating music under the name for “half a decade.”
Yes, that’s five years, and he acknowledged the driving force behind his rise was, indeed, his fans.
Now, Chet Faker has decided to drop his moniker and go forth with his real name instead.
Introducing, Nick Murphy:
digging for windows
He is back!
Since Rage Against the Machine broke up in 2000, Zack de le Rocha has been working with trent Reznor to produce a new album.
Although the pair, along with DJ Shadow, El-P, Questlove, and others recorded over 20 tracks, Zack felt they were too similar to Rage and started again.
Earlier this year it was let slip that Zack was indeed working on some material and BAM! we have a track from him.
Still very RATM – but how can Zak not?
The album should be released sometime next year.
All About The Money
“Now it’s all about the money.” No, that’s definitely not why I dig this track, although definitely some #aspirations up in there.
Since I clicked the link set by Che, I have listened to this song no less than five times a day. I can’t get enough of the slow, deep bass.
Released nearly 10 days ago, All About The Money comes off the lastest mixtape offering from Spark Master Tape, Silhouette of a Sunkken City – their third mixtape release since 2012. Here’s what wiki says about unknown the rapper(s):
Spark Master Tape is an anonymous rapper of unknown origins.[1] He has released three mixtapes since 2012.[2] Nearly all of his beats are produced by Paper Platoon, which is also the name of his unique collective that includes visual artists and musicians.[3]
Download the full album HERE – which is pretty dope.
mapplethorpe
A while back I was lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of Just Kids and fell in love with the story of Patti and Robert. I had always had a crush on Patti: Her boyish style, the simplistic photographs in black and white that adorned Google Image Search and best of all, the cigarette she always had, limp in her hand (which I later found out was a mere prop).
Now, the life of her lover, Robert Mapplethorpe, will be getting some big screen treatment. A controversial black and white photographer (who took many of the snaps of Patti for her album covers and so on) Robert died of AIDS in 1989.
Acclaimed writer-director Ondi Timoner will be taking on the task of telling one of the most iconoclastic and mythologised artist’s story and has cast Girl’s Zosia Mamet as Patti and Dr Who‘s Matt Smith as Mapplethorpe himself. Known for producing thought-provoking documentaries, it will be interesting to see what Ondi’s take on Mapplethorpe’s story will entail. After all, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has fallen in love with the image of him.
Fluffpot 