Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 9:20 am | By: Radical Russ
One of the highlights of the Aspen Legal Seminar is when attorney Gerry Goldstein opens up his home for our closing party on Saturday night. Chef Chris Lanter from Cache Cache caters the party (which features two versions of the famous apple crisp – NORML and abNORML) and there is weed, whiskey, and wine everywhere you look. Gerry turns up the salsa music and guests enjoy banging on the congas, while everybody mingles and enjoys fantastic food.
Here in the spectacular kitchen, NORML’s Executive Director Allen St. Pierre thanks Gerry, Chef Chris, and recognizes the 2009 winner of the Colorado NORML Hunter S. Thompson Scholarship, Tanya Burgess from Atlanta, Georgia, who found out she had just passed the bar and been admitted to practice in Gwinnett County (Georgia Stashers, call her up when you’ve got a need, she’s brilliant) that weekend. Tanya’s also a member of the board for NORML of Georgia as well.
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Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 6:16 pm | By: Radical Russ
Aspen Legal Seminar 2009
Our fourth year at the Gant Hotel in Aspen was fantastic. Read all about the lineup of speakers and subjects at the official NORML page – and since the Stash is the social home of NORML, check out the social photos here:
Sunday, June 7th, 2009 at 11:47 am | By: Radical Russ
I have the rare treat of rooming with Keith Stroup here in Aspen. Today since so many of the NORML Board are here for the conference, they have a quorum and are having a board meeting here in the room. I’m a fly on the wall as nine of the top marijuana law reformers in the country discuss the internal workings of NORML and our plans for the future.
How the hell did I get the job of my dreams? Four years I was a pot-smoking dude working in a cubicle wishing I could get more involved with ending prohibition.
I’ll post some of Dudemaster’s pending work as I can today. Here are some photos from the party last night at Gerry Goldstein’s to tide you over:
Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 9:21 pm | By: Radical Russ
Aside from my technical difficulties (see below), Aspen so far has been a blast. It is like a family reunion. You see people from all around the country that you see at every conference, and then you see some new faces who are invited into a very friendly circle… or two.
Jeff Steinborn (Seattle), Madeline Martinez (Portland), Steve Dillon (Indianapolis), Paul Kuhn (Nashville), George Rohrbacher (Eastern Washington), Bill Panzer (Los Angeles), Allen St. Pierre (DC), Keith Stroup (Virginia) were NORML Board Members in attendance, plus the amazing attorneys who continue to defend marijuana smokers and push the envelope of marijuana law reform, like Alan Silber (New Jersey), John Zwerling* (Alexandria, VA), Matthew Abel (Detroit), Doug Hiatt (Seattle), Lee Berger (Portland), Warren Edson (Denver), Robert Vaughn (Nashville), Matt Kumin (San Francisco) and probably others I’m forgetting (it was the cookie).
I also ran into “The Jersey Girls”, Anne Davis and Delia Pratico, who are working with NORML New Jersey. They’re very excited about their medical marijuana bill making it out of Assembly Committee. Delia’s moving to San Diego and I’m excited about adding her to the mix there.
David Clark, the Exec Director of the new NORML of Georgia is here and I also met up with Tanya Burgess, the Hunter S. Thompson Scholarship Winner from Atlanta. She just passed the bar and is a newly minted lawyer in Gwinnett (sp?) County, Georgia. What a sweetheart – she tells me that my interview of her on the Stash got her on the board of NORML of Georgia and she says I’m “a celebrity”. Great, just when I was starting to find hats that fit…
While talking to Tanya, I told her why I felt NORML was the right organization for me. There are many that are fighting various aspects of the war on drugs, and I applaud and welcome them all and think of them like other “branches”, like Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines (”what a great place, it’s a great place to start!” – dating myself). For me, NORML is the only one that stands for marijuana. Not policy, not drugs, not access, but marijuana itself. That it is good and its users are better.
So many people to mention here at the reception party, from the Colorado dispensary owners (you know there are thirty?) to the Boulder college chapter leader who’s going to fly me out to speak at the next 4/20. Rick Cusick was floating around a second ago. Then there’s Chandra and her daughter from Beverly Hills, who makes (swear to THC) eyeglasses for Hollywood movies – she discussed going to the Grammy’s and Emmy’s and MTV Awards and supplying contact lenses for Tom Cruise movies and so forth.
When you come to these events, you realize, We are Everybody.
One fine aspect of the event was our patio musical entertainment, which featured Reed Foehl. I managed to catch up with him for five minutes and score his last album and his next album. Thanks for waiting for new Stash, I hope this can tide you over until Monday.
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Meanwhile, the lawyer types have retreated to Cache Cache, which sounds exactly like how much money you’ll spend eating there. Thus your humble podcaster who works for a non-profit will be enjoying appetizers here. Besides, the chef from Cache Cache is catering the party at Gerry Goldstein’s tomorrow night, so I’ll have plenty of food above my pay grade. I’m wandering around the Gant, finding interesting people to talk with in a circular formation, if ya dig…
*People kept referring to a “J.Z.” and I’m like “Jay-Z is here?!? Is Beyoncé here, too?
Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 4:58 pm | By: Radical Russ
One of the problems I had recording Aspen last year was that the mics on a camcorder are awful. They record a lot of ambient noise, and while I can do some audio scrubbing with software, it takes more work and sounds a little weird (like that weird electronic effect Kanye West uses on the voice).
I worked to remedy that problem by getting another camera that’s been sitting at NORML in DC, which has a direct audio input. With my Stash recording gear getting the PA audio straight to the camera, we’ll have good audio. I set up the whole system at home and ran it for two different two-hours recording runs and it was fantastic.
I also arrived in Aspen early so I could set up this system and test it, since I’d be getting a signal from the hotel PA, and who knows what it would be. I brought every audio adapter I thought I could need. I hooked up the system and plugged in the hotel audio, and it was magnificent. I gave it another one hour test and all was good. Satisfied, I went to bed.
Naturally, then, this morning, as we’re powering up the system, the hotel’s PA power amp decides to die. It would stay on for five seconds, then switch off. The hotel called a local A/V guy, he brought a powered speaker and hooked up the feed from my board (now acting as the PA). It sounded great.
It also caused a ground loop hum on the camera audio input.
So all my work and preparation was for naught; I had to record the day with the crappy camcorder mics.
On top of that, a couple times during the day the laptop decides it needs to just crash and shut off fo no apparent reason. Never did that in testing, just today.
Sigh.
Fortunately I’ve worked out the bugs that caused the ground loop – a combination of a bad cord and an audio setting on the camcorder. Me and the A/V guy just tested it and it works perfectly.
Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 9:11 am | By: Radical Russ
Allen St. Pierre welcomes the people to the seminar. Jeff Steinborn, George Rohrbacher, Steven Dillon, and Madeline Martinez from the NORML Board are here, lawyers from all over the country, and a good number of activists from the Colorado area. The Hunter S. Thompson scholarship winner from Atlanta is here as well.
St. Pierre is discussing the recent speech by President Obama and summarizing the Obama Administration.
Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 6:47 am | By: Radical Russ
It’s 7am Mountain time and I’m alone in the conference room all set up for the Aspen Legal Seminar. The Wi-Fi here is beefy enough for a Ustream, but alas, I can’t stream and record at the same time with the setup I have here.
Dudemaster is your front pager for the day, with a new story every two hours on today’s feed. Good work, Dudemaster!
I will be chopping up portions of the Seminar for YouTube as well as playing some of the audio on future Stashes. The whole enchilada will be available on DVD by July 1 (I hope).
Last night was fun as everyone got checked in. I spent hours waiting in the lobby because I had no idea which room I would be staying in. While there I perused the local Aspen magazine and gasped at photo layouts of models in $3,000 dresses with $1,500 boots and $14,000 bracelets and $80,000 necklaces. You know, I don’t mind anyone getting rich and spending money, but its when the money seems to be just thrown away for no good purpose that I get bothered. Really, $3,000 for a dress? What’s the difference betwee a $300 dress and a $3,000 dress? Are they stitching it with rare silk thread found only in the deepest rainforest? Is the cloth infused with gold? I just can’t help thinking about how many people go hungry in America while Aspen tourists are spending $4,000 on a pair of Louis Vitton mittens.
Turns out, I’m rooming with the founder of NORML, Keith Stroup. Oh the stories! Last night I got a primer on Keith’s relationship with Hunter S. Thompson circa 1972-1975. The stories started off with Keith discovering Hunter smoking reefer underneath the bleachers at the George McGovern Democratic convention and just rolled on from there.
Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 9:16 am | By: Radical Russ
Hey, Stashers, did you notice we’ve become so popular that we tripped our bandwidth limit this weekend? Time for an upgrade, I suppose.
This week I’m doing the final test runs of my digital video studio for Aspen. Last year, I had to spend $200 to fly my home computer and audio gear to cover the seminar, and then my camera’s audio was so bad we couldn’t use the footage. But this year, I may be able to pull off the whole thing with a laptop and a small sound board – I may be able to pack the whole studio into my large double-laptop carry-on! Hooray for FireWire, Mackie, and portable terabyte hard drives! (I can’t believe I even say terabyte, much less have that much storage. My first PC didn’t even have a hard drive; it stored a few hundred kilobytes on a cassette tape!)
You’ll get three more “Best of” shows this week and then I’m off to Aspen. I will post as much as I can from the seminar, but I anticipate being very busy. If the Gant Hotel up in Aspen has fast enough wi-fi, I may be able to stream on Ustream, but no promises. Until then, light posting this week. — “R”R
RevRayGreen: I'll post a pic of me and my son....gimme a minute
Missippi Hippy: Guess what... I'm gonna be a new... ummmmm well, my pet piggie Ganja is in labor and they ain't mine in the same sense. See what your wife [...]
RevRayGreen: days they didn't talk back..or act disrespectful..
RevRayGreen: feel so lucky my son is 18 going 19 and my daughter 16 going on 17..relish the days that can't talk back
Urb Age: Congrats Spof thats awesome. My little Clara is about to hit 20 months. Im not the activist I used to be, but its made me a better man.
Urb Age: Heck I was gonna go up there, but just not feeling well this weekend..Dang it, I hate it when that happens..
RevRayGreen: wishing I was hanging at NORML cafe...
JohnH: Just a quick comment about tokin' and sperm motility....been tokin since age 14 and have 8 kids ranging in age from 30 to 9...(what can I say, I found 2 [...]
slash5city: really ..oprah 35 yr or more in the closet toker ...outed ....o my god !!
SneakerPimp: that would be huge news just imagen the headline
RevRayGreen: maybe Oprah smokes and keeps it on the DL...
SneakerPimp: and good afternoon
mr reuben: I could do without seeing Rob K. on tv. But Bruce and Eithan get a big thumbs up from me.
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Allen St. Pierre thanks at Aspen Party
Topics: Allen St. Pierre, Aspen, Chris Lanter, Colorado, NORML Aspen Legal Seminar, NORML of Georgia, Tanya Burgess
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