Ophelia Chong, driven to help shape the new conversation surrounding plant medicine, is the founder of StockPot Images and Asian Americans for Cannabis Education (AACE). StockPot is the first and only stock photo agency to specialize in cannabis, hemp and psilocybin. The executive producer for DoubleBlind Magazine’s series on growing mushrooms and an advisor to the DB community, Chong’s advocacy is guided by one mission: to advocate for the legalization of cannabis and psilocybin and offer truthful reflections of the faces and communities that embrace both.
She is also known as The Short Yellow Gnome, an educator and hobbyist using this time of Covid isolation to pursue her love of fungi. She sees this time as the “glass half-full,” using her collage and living arrangement skills to create art using mushrooms by combining them into new forms. Fascinated by this, we asked her to curate this week’s Weedsday Playlist with a psychedelic twist.
1. Gordon Lightfoot – Sundown
Sometimes I think it's a shame / When I get feelin' better when I'm feelin' no pain / Sometimes I think it's a shame / When I get feelin' better when I'm feelin' no pain. This song by Canadian Gordon Lightfoot speaks about loss and love, it is about all of us watching the sun go down on this past way of living to a new one, will “she” come back and make us lose ourselves in the past ways?
2. Roxy Music – More Than This
It was fun for a while / There was no way of knowing / Like dream in the night / Who can say where we're going / No care in the world / Maybe I'm learning. Another song by a balladeer with supreme pipes, smooth like a single malt, Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music is the man on the ship singing to us as we sail off into a new world.
3. Sam Smith – I Feel Love
Ooh, it's so good, it's so good / It's so good, it's so good / It's so good. Sam Smith covers Donna Summer. From disco to social distancing. I love this song because it harks back to an age of living only for the present, which has set us on this path of only caring about the world when it bites back. Dance away and while you do, plant seeds for a better tomorrow as you step through life.
4. Talking Heads – Take Me to the River
Take me to the river, drop me in the water / Take me to the river, dip me in the water / Washing me down, washing me down. Al Green covered by the Talking Heads. Ahhh, washing me down, dip me in the water, cleanse us of this world of selfishness, we need to move forward as a true community and end the fear of not having what your IG icon has. Let’s wash it away and become new.
5. Kathia Buniatishvili – Claude Debussy’s “Clair de lune”
This song was taken from a poem by French poet Paul Verlaine about a soul that is made alive by music, by the light of the moon. This piece is best listened to when you are outside looking up at the night sky, the moon watches us and asks us to be better, while the sun brings the light for that action.
