A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Creation of the World's Largest Bong
If youve decided to go about creating the worlds largest bong, Seattle is an obvious fit for a construction site.
Work on said bongwhich, when completed, will stand 24 feet tall and weigh 800 poundsbegan this past weekend as part of the citys 4/20 celebrations. The brainchild of Jason Harris and a handful of other renowned glassblowing artists, it will eventually be transported in pieces to Las Vegas, where it will be one of the attractions at Cannibition, an immersive cannabis museum thats set to open this summer.
But though Las Vegas (and the rest of Nevada) has had legal weed for the past six months, it doesnt have what Seattle has: The Pacific Northwest city isnt just home to a thriving cannabis culture, its also what Harris described as the birthplace of the American glassblowing movement.
Tacoma native Dale Chihuly, whose museum sits at the base of the Space Needle, is the figure who brought artistic glassblowing in the mainstream. His work has given rise to a collaborative glassblowing scene and a regional landscape dotted by schools and studios. Harris himself spent years at the Pilchuck glass school up in the northern suburb of Stanwood.
This all started in Seattle, Harris said. Seattle is the main hub. From that one person (Chihuly), it kind of flourished to thousands of people blowing glass Its kind of a cultish subculture inside Seattle. Its a rougher, Seattle look, and feel and smell.
A massive glass bong isnt just a manifestation of legal weed conquering the country (or at least most of the American West), its a technical challenge that requires 15 experienced artists working in tandem. There is something like a synchronized dance in their movementthey work mostly in concentrated silence but all know their roles, subtly shifting into exactly the right place in their own rhythms.
Working with glass as a medium requires extreme heat that turns it into a malleable material, a kind of liquid clay. (The ovens used by the team top out at 1,900 and 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit.) At those extreme, Harris told me, reaching a metal rod into the liquid inside is like dipping into honey.
Heat elongates the shape, so one artist goes to work with a blowtorch while others are stationed at the metal clasps on either end. Additional specialists blow into the mold to stretch it out further; once completed, sections of the future bong are carefully placed onto wet newspaper to cool and harden. The process really is mesmerizing, brilliant flashes of crimson flame and drippy gobs of glass.
By showing the public how we create the things, its such magic, Harris said. People have never seen anything like it before. They just get drawn in.
(For those out East who want to see this in action: Most of this crew is doing a similar exhibition in Brooklyn the third weekend of June.)
Harris has a colorful backstory, as you might expect from the guy who spent a four-day weekend overseeing the construction of a massive bong. Back in his 20s, he estimates he was selling $4 million in glass bongs per year. He had 70 employees, three product warehouses, the BMW, the house on the hill, and plenty of payments. Then I got shut down, big time.
In 2003, he was one of dozens of peopleincluding Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong famewere swept up by the feds in a sting operation known as Operation Pipe Dreams, which targeted the creators and distributors of paraphernalia.
The whole time we were doing it, we knew it was not legal to make a pipe to smoke marijuana, Harris admitted. We put on there that it was for tobacco use only. But reality is, thats acknowledging that they can be used for something else. There were a lot of busts in head shops. It was still shocking the day it happened.
Unlike Chong, who was eventually sentenced to nine months, Harris did not serve any prison time but his assets were seized. He moved to Maui and set up a studio making glass art for tourists. He was able to make a stable living, re-establishing himself on solid (and wholly legit) ground. In the back of his mind, though, remained an old and familiar itch. Sensing a shift in public opinion on marijuana toward the beginning of this decade, he again began to dabble in bong making.
I just really enjoy the shape of the bong, Harris said. I enjoy what it means to humans, to change and inspire thought, or to relax you, or whatever it is cannabis does for you. I believe that bong is a tool to make that happen.
That said, he emphasized that he wasnt going into any ...
