Grass (Animal Collective song)

"Grass" is the first single from Animal Collective's 2005 album, Feels. Upon its release, it was showered with critical praise for its delicate balance of melodic pop sensibilities and discordant yelping. Pitchfork Media listed the song at #31 on its list of Top 50 Singles of 2005, claiming it is "as infectious as anything on the pop charts this year, and lots more fun to scream along with". The song was subsequently placed at #73 in the same publication's list of "Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s". Stylus also placed it in its Top 50 Singles of 2005 (this time at #44), praising the band's ability to "play tug of war between typical pop dynamics and the skewed perspective of experimental music". The title track was included in the 2008 book The Pitchfork 500.

The single was released in the United Kingdom on both CD and 7" vinyl. On March 21, 2006, it was released in the U.S. and Canada (July 3, 2006 worldwide) with a bonus DVD; the DVD contains music videos for "Grass", "Who Could Win a Rabbit" and "Fickle Cycle", as well as a video and sound collage, "Lake Damage", made by Brian DeGaw of Gang Gang Dance.

Grass (1999 film)

Grass: History of Marijuana is a 1999 Canadian documentary film directed by Ron Mann, premiered in Toronto Film Festival, about the history of the United States government's war on marijuana in the 20th century. The film was narrated by actor Woody Harrelson.

Overview

The film follows the history of US federal policies and social attitudes towards marijuana, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century. The history presented is broken up into parts, approximately the length of a decade, each of which is introduced by paraphrasing the official attitude towards marijuana at the time (e.g. "Marijuana will make you insane" or "Marijuana will make you addicted to heroin"), and closed by providing a figure for the amount of money spent during that period on the "war on marijuana."

The film places much of the blame for marijuana criminalization on Harry Anslinger (the first American drug czar) who promoted false information about marijuana to the American public as a means towards abolition. It later shows how the federal approach to criminalization became more firmly entrenched after Richard Nixon declared a "War on Drugs" and created the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973, and even more so a decade later and on, as First Lady Nancy Reagan introduced the "Just Say No" campaign and President George H.W. Bush accelerated the War on Drugs. The film ends during the Bill Clinton administration, which had accelerated spending even further on the War on Drugs.

Grass (novel)

Grass is a 1989 science fiction novel by Sheri S. Tepper. Nominated for both the Hugo and Locus awards in 1990, in 2002 it was included in the SF Masterworks collection. It is the first novel in Tepper's Arbai trilogy.

Plot summary

Chief protagonist Marjorie Westriding-Yrarier juggles family issues and her conflicting religious beliefs as her family is sent to the little-understood world of Grass to seek a cure for the mysterious alien plague afflicting all of mankind. The first stage of this search will be to befriend the human aristocracy of the planet who have seemingly become obsessed with a localised variant of fox hunting using the planet’s native fauna in place of the horses, hounds and foxes found on Earth.

Background

In the distant future Terra (Earth) has become massively over-populated and its resources overstretched. Partially as a result of this, the human race has spread out across the galaxy and populated new worlds. One such world is the eponymous Grass, so named because almost its entire surface is covered in multi-coloured prairie.