People have mixed feelings about Crumb. Some call him an asshole, a jerk, a purveyor of pornography and juvenile crap, a sexist pig, a curmudgeon, a nape, a loon, a gelatinous lifeform with an unbridled id, a sicko, a creep, and a con artist. He may be all those things. Still, he's the best cartoonist of the last century, perhaps forever. He is our Daumier, and he works with an unflinching eye, a steady hand and gently flowing nib. Crumb spills his unconscious directly to the page without regard for puritan mores, or even common decency, yet art critic Robert Hughes called him "the Breughel of the 20th century."
Q: When was the last time a work of art made you cry?
A: I don't cry too easily. It must have been a long, long time ago because I really don't remember. Aline, on the other hand -- she cries at almost every movie. They manipulate her very easily.
Q: Where do you feel most at home?
A: In my room. With my stuff. My record collection. My artwork. My desk. My letter files. My photo files. My photocopy machine. When we moved to France, I basically just moved my room to France. Wherever I am, I just want to be in my room. If we had to live in Peking, China, I'd still be in my room.
Q: When are you most happy?
A: When I'm fulfilling my sex fantasies. When I listen to music that makes me ecstatic. I won't go into details, but my old '78 records give me musical ecstasy. There are also moments I've had with loved ones, with Aline and my daughter, that make me very happy.
Here is a documentary called "The Confessions of Robert Crumb" that might give you some clues about the artist. This is not the Terry Zwigoff doc, "Crumb," but an earlier film. Warning: this contains language as it is spoken, and viewpoints some will find offensive. Be forewarned.
THE CONFESSIONS OF ROBERT CRUMB(1987)
Recently, Crumb finished illustrating Genesis, the first book of the Bible. According to his website, Genesis comes in at 201 pages. He also finished the cover, an introduction, the commentary (for the back sleeve) and a Map, which will be in the beginning of the book. The book is going to production and it's planned to be released this fall.
a sketch from the Genesis project
And what are his plans now that Genesis is complete? Catching up on his correspondence, he says, which has been building up for some time now. And then take a little break—a trip to the States. He and Aline are talking about collaborating on a book upon his return, but that's later this summer. For now, enjoy these clips. Heaven will have to wait.
Interview from March 2007, SF Gate. To read the complete chat click here.
When I arrived, it was dead-on winter. The cold was brutal and every artery of the city was snowpacked, but I'd started out from the frostbitten North Country, a little corner of the earth where the dark frozen woods and icy roads didn't faze me. I could transcend the limitations. It wasn't money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn't need any guarantee of validity. I didn't know a single soul in this dark freezing metropolis but that was all about to change -- and quick.
The Café Wha? was a club on MacDougal Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. The place was a subterranean cavern, liquorless, ill lit, low ceiling, like a wide dining hall with chairs and tables -- opened at noon, closed at four in the morning. Somebody had told me to go there and ask for a singer named Freddy Neil who ran the daytime show at the Wha?
New York City, midwinter, 1961. Whatever I was doing was working out okay and I intended to stay with it, felt like I was closing in on something. I was playing on the regular bill at the Village Gaslight, the premier club on the carnivalesque MacDougal Street. When I began working there, the Gaslight was owned by John Mitchell, a renegade and raconteur, a Brooklynite. I only saw him a few times. He was ornery and combatant, had an exotic looking girlfriend who Jack Kerouac had based a novel on. Mitchell was already legendary. The Village was heavily Italian, and Mitchell hadn’t taken even one step back from the local mafiosos. It was a known fact that he didn’t make payoffs out of principle. The fire marshals, the police and the health inspectors were routinely invading the place. Mitchell, though, had lawyers and he took his battles to city hall and somehow the place stayed open. Mitchell carried a pistol and a knife.
Lou Levy, top man of Leeds Music Publishing company, took me up in a taxi to the Pythian Temple on West 70th Street to show me the pocket sized recording studio where Bill Haley and His Comets had recorded "Rock Around the Clock" -- then down to Jack Dempsey's restaurant on 58th and Broadway, where we sat down in a red leather upholstered booth facing the front window.
Lou introduced me to Jack Dempsey, the great boxer. Jack shook his fist at me.
"You look too light for a heavyweight kid, you'll have to put on a few pounds. You're gonna have to dress a little finer, look a little sharper -- not that you'll need much in the way of clothes when you're in the ring -- don't be afraid of hitting somebody too hard."
"He's not a boxer, Jack, he's a songwriter and we'll be publishing his songs."
"Oh, yeah, well I hope to hear 'em some of these days. Good luck to you, kid."
Outside the wind was blowing, straggling cloud wisps, snow whirling in the red lanterned streets, city types scuffling around, bundled up -- salesmen in rabbit fur earmuffs hawking gimmicks, chestnut vendors, steam rising out of manholes.
My perspective on all that was about to change. The air would soon shoot up in intensity and become more potent. My little shack in the universe was about to expand into some glorious cathedral, at least in songwriting terms. Suze had been working behind the scenes in a musical production at the Theatre de Lys on Christopher Street. It was a presentation of songs written by Bertolt Brecht, the antifascist Marxist German poet-playwright whose works were banned in Germany, and Kurt Weill, whose melodies were like a combination of both opera and jazz. Previously they had had a big hit with a ballad called “Mack the Knife” that Bobby Darin had made popular. You couldn’t call this a play, it was more like a stream of songs by actors who sang. I went there to wait for Suze and was aroused straight away by the raw intensity of the songs . . . “Morning Anthem,” “Wedding Song,” “The World Is Mean,” “Polly’s Song,” “Tango Ballad,” “Ballad of the Easy Life.” Songs with tough language. They were erratic, unrhythmical and herky-jerky-weird visions. The singers were thieves, scavengers or scallywags and they all roared and snarled. The entire world was narrowly confined between four streets. On the small stage, objects were barely discernible-lampposts, tables, stoops, windows, corners of buildings, moon shining through roofed-in courtyards-grim surroundings, creepy sensations. Every song seemed to come from some obscure tradition, seemed to have a pistol in its hip pocket, a club or a brickbat and they came at you in crutches, braces and wheelchairs. They were like folk songs in nature, but unlike folk songs, too, because they were sophisticated.
This is a wild song. Big medicine in the lyrics. Heavy action spread out. Each phrase comes at you from a ten-foot drop, scuttles across the road and then another one comes like a punch on the chin. And then there’s always that ghost chorus about the black ship that steps in, fences it all off and locks it up tighter than a drum.
(excerpts from Chronicles,Vol. 1, by Bob Dylan) to be continued...
ONE MORE THING:
The new Dylan album, Together Through Life, will be released April 28th.Beyond Here Lies Nothin' is the first single, a bluesy track with an old Chess Records feel. In case you missed the free download at bobdylan.com (it was up for one day only. That's right, 24 hours) here is a sneak preview:
David Lynch is a strange cat. Some worship him as a macabre genius while others hiss as he passes. Lynch's best work, offbeat mysteries like Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, Mullholland Drive, and the TV series Twin Peaks, are waking nightmares. They couldn't get any stranger. Well, they couldn't...until now.
First, here's an interview with Lynch from Film Threat in which he talks about inspiration, sex and death. The current issue of Stop Smiling also includes an interview with Lynch--as well as chats with Robert Crumb and Roberto Bolaño. Lynch is obviously busy with film but he just started a website dedicated to "consciousness-based education and world peace." The kick-off party included two surviving Beatles. He also films a daily blog at his old website. (Links below)
Anyway...Could Lynch get any stranger? What if you crossed him with Michael Jackson? You'd have to agree, anything is stranger with Jacko. That's like infinity plus one. Now I'm not a huge fan of "mash-ups." Most of these remixes are tedious exercises and barely listenable as music, but the music geeks over at "Mashed in Plastic" have come up with an album's worth of interesting graftings based on the Lynch oeuvre. Like Dr. Frankenstein, they've sewn parts together to make a monstrous unholy beast.
Listen to "I'll Be There in Twin Peaks" and visit the spooky crossroads where Angelo Badalamenti meets the boy/man from Neverland. Have a nice day.
Visit David Lynch's new meditation website here. The old David Lynch website is here.
The Nixon Tapes provide a rare glimpse into the mind of a small, sweating "unindicted co-conspirator" whose paranoia proved his undoing. Some of the tapes are chilling, with Nixon railing like Captain Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny," while others yield unintentional humor.
In this clip, Nixon discusses homosexuality and the liberal bias of "All in the Family" with his henchmen John Erlichman and Bob Haldeman.
"All in the Family" was a situation comedy that was originally broadcast on CBS from January 12, 1971 to April 8, 1979. Produced by Norman Lear, the show broke ground depicting issues of class, race, politics, religion, homosexuality, rape and feminism. Carrol O'Conner played Archie Bunker, a conservative working stiff who despised the hippies and liberals and adored President Nixon.
a scene from the liberal situation comedy "All in the Family"
Spring is here, and travel is in the air. In spite of a troubled economy people are planning vacations. Last Saturday night, we drank beer with some friends. In our small group, one was leaving for Paris the next morning, another to London, and two were flying to the East Coast. We're planning a trip to Italy.
Travel is exciting and eye-opening, and the anticipation is half the fun. Everyone was in a great mood, comparing notes. One friend at the pub was Harriet Baskas, a travel writer who regularly reports on airports around the world. She was leaving for London early the next morning. You can read her weekly column on MSNBC.com (The Well-Mannered Traveler), her monthly column on USATODAY.com (At The Airport), and her daily blog, Stuck at the Airport.
I sent Harriet this travel warning about the Franz Kafka Airport. She joked that she was so jet-lagged she didn't realize it was a spoof at first. Let's hope it's a spoof!
"Pull My Daisy" (1959) is truly beat cinema. The film is based on the third act of a Jack Kerouac play, Beat Generation, and features an all-star lineup of 1950s hipsters, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, and artists Larry Rivers and Alice Neel. The film was directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. Kerouac narrates.
The Beats put their stock in spontaneity and distrusted post-inspiration tampering. They believed art and poetry should spring from the mind fully-formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. Sometimes this method delivered inspired work, and other times it produced a half-baked shambling mess. This falls somewhere between the two, but is worth a look.
The story originally came from Neil Cassady, and is supposedly based on an actual event though it sounds more like an episode of a situation comedy. A railway brakemen entertains a respectable bishop. The brakeman's weirdo friends come spilling in the door, ruining everything. You know the type--mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, never saying a commonplace thing. In other words, trouble. I keep expecting Fred and Ethel to drop by with a jug of wine and some bongos. Go, man, go!
So what's the deal with Krugman? He came out swinging at the Obama administration and the bill that passed the House taxing bonuses given to executives of bailed-out companies. "It's not the way you should make policy," Krugman said, "it's clumsy, and it will punish some innocent parties while letting the most guilty off scot-free."
Krugman added, "But -- there wasn't much alternative at this point. And for that I blame the Obama people." He goes on to call the Obama administration's handling of the American International Group scandal "bad analysis, bad policy, and terrible politics" that makes it seem as if the White House is "owned by the wheeler-dealers."
So...what's the deal with Krugman? I guess he's entitled to his opinion. So is this internet songsmith, who believes Paul should be part of the process. To paraphrase LBJ, "I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing outward than the other way around."
Don Delillo Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals. - Don Delillo
"Craft," says Norman Mailer, in The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing, "is a grab bag of procedures, tricks, lore, formal gymnastics, symbolic superstructures—methodology, in short." Craft is not in the same league as "a vision of experience," which is what the great writers all have, and can't be borrowed, mimicked, or faked. Craft is more like "a Saint Bernard with that little bottle of brandy under his neck. Whenever you get into trouble, craft can keep you warm long enough to be rescued."
Amy Hempel
"I have stood a story on its head and started at the end. Galliano is shown putting a leather biker jacket on a pale blond Ukrainian bride. I have dressed a delicate subject in hard, tough prose. And the reverse: described in lyrical language something ugly, something bad. Used a genteel voice to describe violence, an angry voice to take on the harmless. I mix leather and lace on the page."- Amy Hempel
Tim O'Brien in Vietnam, 1969 "A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. " - Tim O'Brien
"Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years." -David Foster Wallace
"When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time." - Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we being to see images—a dog hunting through garbage cans, a plan circling above Alaskan mountains, an old lady furtively licking her napkin at a party. We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we’re sitting in, forgetting it’s lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again. If the dream is to be vivid the writer’s ‘language signals’—his words, rhythms, metaphors, and so on—must be sharp and sufficient: if they’re vague, careless, blurry, or if there aren’t enough of them to let us see clearly what is being presented, then the dream as we dream it will be cloudy, confusing, ultimately annoying and boring. And if the dream is to be continuous, we must not be roughly jerked from the dream back to the words on the page by language that’s distracting. Thus, for example, if the writer makes some grammatical mistake, the reader stops thinking about the old lady at the party and looks, instead, at the words on the page, seeing if the sentence really is, as it seems, ungrammatical. If it is, the reader thinks about the writer, or possibly about the editor—’How come they let him get away with a thing like that?’—not about the lady whose story has been interrupted.” - John Gardner
Barack Obama slams Dick Cheney on Sunday's 60 Minutes. Recently, Cheney said we are less safe without torture. In the clip, Obama remains the perfect gentlemen and makes his point without resorting to violence. Still, I'd love to see him punch Cheney in the nose. Cheney's face is just so punchable.
A singularly punchable face
In related news: Newsweek (March 21, 09) reports that more "torture memos" from the Bush Administration are soon to be released. "Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the "enhanced" interrogation techniques..."
locked in coffin-size boxes; swung by towels around their necks into plywood walls; and forced to stand naked for days
Newsweek continues: "The debate about torture ramped up again last week with an account in the New York Review of Books about a secret International Red Cross report that was delivered to the CIA in February 2007. The report, according to journalist Mark Danner, quotes detainees describing, often in gruesome detail, how they were locked in coffin-size boxes; swung by towels around their necks into plywood walls; and forced to stand naked for days while their arms were shackled above their heads."
Cheney would have loved these guys: Nazis practicing "enhanced" techniques for a "safer" Germany
"Rip it Up!" by Little Richard: "When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake." - Plato
Hell with easy listening, in the sleepy days of yore something strange and dangerous and downright insane crawled out of the dark swampy south, a devil brew of blues, country, and rhythm and blues, a crawling King snake moving through the night on radiowaves nationwide. Call it rock and roll. Where did it come from?
"Hell Hound on my Trail" by Robert Johnson:
They say Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads, shook his hand and an eerie light came across the sky. Nobody knows what transpired, but afterward he could play like nobody's business. Slide guitar. This wasn't church music, but something that made your skin crawl. Robert would have played forever but whiskey can be poisoned. They sang Danny Boy at his funeral and the Lord's Prayer, and the preacher talked about Christ betrayed. They say he loved a women named Dee or Miss Delilah who did wondrous works with his fate, fed him coconut bread and spice buns in bed, but a panderer named Red wasn't crazy about the arrangement and brought the curtain down with a fixed drink.
Murder and whiskey. Rock and roll came to town in a black Caddie with no plates. Birds fell silent when it passed. They carried the casket to the cemetery and were surprised when it turned up empty. Get a mojo hand. Light a candle. Turn the radio up.
"Come On" by Chuck Berry:
What was the first rock 'n' roll record? A leading contender is "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (in fact, Ike Turner and his band The Kings of Rhythm), recorded by Sam Phillips for Sun Records in 1951. That was four years before Bill Haley recorded "Rock Around the Clock." Listen to Rocket 88:
Grand and vulgar, powerful and absurdly simple, before pills pills and cream pies and Hollywood and untold power slogged him down, this Tupelo truckdriver named Elvis became the King of Rock and Roll--or at least a King, along with Chuck and Richard and Buddy and Jerry Lee and those early rockers who slammed pianos and guitars and tore a hole in the fabric of the universe.
"Mystery Train" by Elvis Presley:
Okay, this is part one and three of rock and roll renegades. I know, I know, but part two has sound problems and until it's fixed I suggest you get non-linear and enjoy these two spots. Now let's get real gone.
Part 4 of the documentary is here. Part 5 is here. Part 6 is here.
After years of writing such great guides as "Europe Through the Back Door," and producing great videos for public television, Rick Steves has become a people-to-people diplomat. Lately, he's been lecturing about "Travel as a Political Act." It's no surprise he was just awarded the Citizen Diplomat Award from a huge gathering of the National Council for International Visitors.
Steves recently traveled to Iran "to build understanding between Iran and the U.S. and to defuse the tension that could be leading to war."
In case you missed his Iran travelogue, watch it now. Steves has a knack for connecting with people, and he sidesteps preconceptions (his and theirs) to explore Iran's rich and glorious past, as well as it's perplexing (to us) present. Will these prejudices lead us into a war with this nation? Let's hope Steves--and the new administration in Washington--are ushering in a new age of diplomacy, where we don't bomb first and ask questions later.
Rick Steves in Iran:
Visit Rick Steves' excellent travel site, Europe Through the Back Door," here Bread for the World, is located here.
Sheriff John Brown always hated me, For what, I dont know! Every time I plant a seed, He said kill it before it grow - He said kill them before they grow. I shot the sheriff But I didn't shoot no deputy
Feel that music? Can you feel that? The tiny island country of Jamaica is more than a playground for beachgoing Americans. Jamaica is the birthplace of reggae, ska, rocksteady, mento, dub, dancehall, ragga, toasting, and various other musical mutations. Jamaica also brought us the Rastafari movement--a group that reveres Haile Selassie as the black Messiah coming to take the Twelve Lost Tribes of Israel back to Mount Zion on the Black Star Liner.
Haile Selassie
One of the biggest reggae stars, Bob Marley, was a rasta who brought the philosophy of peace, love, justice, and ganja smoking to the rest of the world. He started with The Wailers, and soon his music was a cultural force. It urged people to get up and dance--and also to but get up, and stand up for their rights.
The Wailers--Marley in the middle
Reggae didn't catch on right away with the lumbering American public until Eric Clapton covered Marley's classic, "I Shot the Sheriff." Before that, you had to order reggae from Island Records. I did, anyway, since my local "hip" record store was still pushing Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles, and the wildest thing available was Tom Petty. Once Slowhand Clapton cleaned up the Kingston sound reggae started appearing in the racks. It took a white guy in a white suit to bring Trenchtown to the yacht rock crowd. Marley became a superstar. Them belly full but we hungry
A hungry mob is an angry mob
The music was danceable and political. The groove got you moving and the lyrics got you thinking about justice and peace and struggle and getting high. Each song was a communique from the Third World, a message in a bottle.
Before the reggae dam broke completely, I was working for a small newspaper in the wilds of Portland, an underground paper that followed offbeat music and lifestyles of what remained of "the counter-culture." Nobody was much interested in reggae, so I snatched up the assignment when I heard Bob Marley was coming to town. I made arrangements and scheduled an interview months in advance. To prepare, I played his records, took notes, watched "The Harder They Come," and even conducted some ganja research to catch the vibe. Total immersion. You rarely see this kind of investigative journalism. I was psyched. They put me on the guest list and arranged for a backstage pass. More important, we would talk. Me and Bob Marley.
Anyway, Marley injured his foot playing soccer and that leg of the tour was canceled. Ahhh!
I'm still a fan of the island music. Listen. Feel it. Move your feet. This is roots, rock, reggae.
Watch Part 1 of The Story of Jamaican Music: From Ska to Reggae (Part 2 coming soon!):
You know about St. Patrick's Day, but do you know about St. Joseph's Day?
This feast day is as important to Italians as St. Paddy's is to the Irish. In Italy, and in neighborhoods with a population of Italian Americans, people celebrate the patron saint of Sicily. There won't be any green beer, but there are special pastas, fish, sweets, baked breads, and fava beans. Some Italian Catholics will prepare a St. Joseph's table, or Tavole di San Giuseppe, and provide a feast spread that is open to all. Special groups such as orphans, the elderly and the homeless are invited to attend. This is a day to remember the poor, so there will be no meat, and instead of cheese breadcrumbs are sprinkled over pasta. These traditions go back to the middle ages, when much of Sicily was wiped out by a famine. It is said that the humble fava bean helped them survive, and to this day favas will be included in the feast of St. Joseph.
zeppole
And of course zeppole. Don't forget the zeppole. A zeppola (plural zeppole, in southern dialects zeppoli) or St. Joseph's Day cake, also called sfinge and in Rome Bigne di San Giuseppe, is a delicious little fried pastry. They sell them on the streets of Rome, Naples, and Sicily. Sometimes they're filled with crema or custard. (Read about them here)
Italians in New Orleans celebrate St. Joseph's Day:
Like the Irish and St. Patrick's Day, this is a day for Italians to take pride in their culture and heritage. Even if you're not Italian, have something Italian today. Have a slice of pizza (invented in Naples) or some pasta (invented by the Romans) with a nice glass of chianti, or have a caffe latte (you guessed it) or maybe an ice cream (gelato was first created by the Sicilian-born Procopio dei Coltelli back to the 16th century). Won't you join me?
The Holy Trinity: Italian bread, Italian wine, and some extra virgin olive oil.
Oh, and use a fork. Knives go back to prehistoric times, but Catherine di Medici brought the first fork to France in 1533 when she married the future King Henry II. The French were slow to warm to the idea. She also influenced their cooking to a great degree by bringing a sophisticated palate and cuisine from Italy.
An Englishman named Thomas Coryate brought the first forks back to England after seeing them in Italy during his travels in 1608. The English ridiculed the forks as effeminate and unnecessary, and explained that they had two good hands to eat with. Gradually, they came around.
Finally, on a lighter note, everyone's favorite Italian American, Paulie Walnuts, comments on the Italian contribution to world cuisine. Ethnic pride? Fuggedaboudit.
British actress Natasha Richardson is reportedly brain dead after a skiing accident at the Mont Tremblant resort just outside Montreal. Initially the actress appeared unharmed, and walked away from the fall, but an hour later she began complaining of headaches and was rushed into intensive care at the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur in Montreal. Husband Liam Neeson immediately left the Toronto set of his latest film to be with his wife.
Richardson is best known for her performances on stage and film. She comes from the famous Redgrave family, and is the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave.
Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson talk about playwright Eugene O'Neill
"Hermano Dame tu Mano" (Brother Give Me Your Hand)
Los Guaraguao means a lot to many Salvadorans because its music became a symbol of resistance during the violent years of US backed right-wing dictatorships. Anyone caught listening to “Las Casas de Carton” (The Cardboard Homes) or “No Basta Rezar” (Praying is Not Enough), could get arrested and face violence from the Salvadoran State police and paramilitary including torture and even death.
Students caught listening to “Que vivan los estudiantes” (Long Live the Students) were accused of terrorism, and it was once used as an excuse for the Salvadoran military to invade the National University in El Salvador.
"For anyone who witnessed the horror show of El Salvador's 12-year civil war, the ballot-box victory of former leftist guerrillas there on Sunday was a stunning development. Though it took another 17 years after the war ended, the country now joins Northern Ireland in demonstrating that it is possible for a rebel group to effect political change and assume power through peaceful means. That's a gratifying development. We are especially pleased that the outgoing National Republican Alliance, or Arena party, chose to respect the results."
--from the Los Angeles Times editorial, 3/17/09. For the rest of the editorial, click here.
We will continue to follow this story as news develops.
Gwyneth Paltrow, or a small brown country of no consequence
In case you missed it, Salvadorans voting in Sunday's election put Mauricio Funes of the FMLN, the former rebel party, in control for the first time, ending two decades of right wing Arena party rule.
The US media didn't highlight the story, and it figures. The U.S. should be ashamed of its history with the tiny Central American country. The U.S. isn't very good at finishing things (Afghanistan, Iraq, V...) but it sure jumps into bed with plenty of nasty people for expediency sake.
Jennifer Anniston, or the CIA secretly torturing prisoners at "black sites"
According to CNN ("Leftists Claim El Salvador Presidency," a nice value-laden header):
"Mauricio Funes, a member of a political party that waged guerrilla war against the government 17 years ago, claimed the presidency of El Salvador on Sunday night." It goes on, almost in passing. "The FMLN, which is the Spanish acronym for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, was formed in late 1980 as an umbrella group for five leftist guerrilla organizations fighting a U.S.-backed military dictatorship. The guerrillas and the government signed a peace pact in 1992 and the FMLN became a legitimate political party. By some estimates, 75,000 Salvadorans died during the war."
Mauricio Funes, or the cast of "Friends"
Bury that below the fold. A newsreader might stumble upon the phrase "U.S.-backed military dictatorship" in a country where "75,000 Salvadorans died." It's kind of messy and requires explanation, and we Americans (Norteamericanos, that is) are so busy, go, go, go. We don't have time for the follow-up story. Or the backstory, for that matter. Or history in general.
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, or thousands of "disappeared" dissidents
Dictatorships are depressing, and our attention span is short. News crews need to cover more important things, such as the ongoing love story of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and poor jilted Jennifer Aniston. Or the woman with octuplets. Or anything that affects our pocketbooks, and jostles our Comfort Zone. Besides, news needs to be flashy to compete with "America's Most Idle" and "Big Fat Loser." A few important stories slide.
Don't get me wrong. The El Salvador story is out there. But not nearly as prominently displayed as one would think considering our history propping up this quasi-fascist police state for so many years. I'm not naive; I don't expect the news to trumpet shameful episodes of our past, but I expect some sense of recognition and historical responsibility, especially regarding conditions we've helped create. We can be a force for great good, or we can continue to support convenient bullies, and we won't know the difference without a truly independent news media asking tough questions.
Julia Roberts or nameless Salvadoran exercising democracy
Jack Kennedy once said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. In this rare instance, the revolution was peaceful and that should be celebrated.
Tullio Pinelli passed away Saturday in Rome at age 100. You probably never heard of him, even if you're a film fanatic. Pinelli was responsible for co-writing several of Federico Fellini’s best films, including I Vitelloni, La Strada, La Dolce Vita, Nights Of Cabiria, Juliet Of The Spirits, and 8 ½.
Federico Fellini, actor Leopoldo Trieste, and Tullio Pinelli
Pinelli didn’t start writing until his late 30s, when he and Fellini met at a newspaper stand, reading two sides of the same newspaper clamped to the kiosk. They loved movies, and had similar ideas about the possibility of infusing life and energy into the grim neo-realism that dominated Italy’s post-war cinema. Drawing upon childhood memory, myth, and a boundless artistic imagination they created a cinema of fantasy, dreams, memory and desire.
Marcello Mastriani in "La Dolce Vita"
In "La Dolce Vita," Marcello is a gossip columnist who chronicles "the sweet life'' of fading aristocrats, second-string film stars, aging Romeos and working girls. Marcello is cynical and exhausted, and he navigates this decadent world in a rumpled suit and shades. He's torn between making something serious of himself, and drifting along in an empty stream of affairs and a profitible--yet meaningless--life as a hack. Sylvia, a giggling American actress, comes to town, and he's enchanted. They drive around Rome at night. In this classic scene, they come upon the Trevi Fountain. Is this his shot at redemption, or complete surrender?
El Salvador will elect a new president this weekend. And it looks like the revolutionaries--who gave up the bullet for the ballot box--will win fair and square. Abrazos all around.
For the first time since the civil war ended in 1992, a left-wing former rebel, Mauricio Funes, is leading in the prediction polls. Funes is a member of the FMLN, a revolutionary organization that became a political party after a ceasefire established by the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords.
President George W. Bush used economic strong arm tactics to influence the last election, in 2004. He was promoting a "pro-US business" Arena party. This time around, the Bush Doctrine is out, and with the US remaining neutral it looks like the FMLN will win. After years of struggle, the people of El Salvador will finally be able to vote for the revolution.
Mauricio Funes at May Day rally in 2008
The FMLN (The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) was named after the rebel leader Farabundo Marti, who led workers and peasants in an uprising to transform Salvadoran society after the devastation caused by the eruption of the volcano Izalco in 1932. In response, the military regime led by General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez, who had seized power in a 1931 coup, launched "La Matanza," ("The Massacre") killing some 30,000 people under the guise of being supporters of the insurgency. The price of rebellion was clear.
Violent repression in the streets of San Salvador; the weapons came from the USA.
In recent years, the FMLN fought a guerrilla war, going underground like the French Resistance. Ronald Reagan portrayed the rebellion as "communist," meaning Soviet-directed, which simply wasn't true but this pitch garnered the support of conservatives with a Cold War mindset. If not for the Russians, he seemed to say, why would peasants even think of revolting?
George Bush, wrong again
George W. Bush continued this mindset, supporting the right wing, Arena party, because it was pro-business and anti-communist. Arena was started by Roberto D'Aubuisson, the man who brought the term "death squads" into our vocabulary, and the man widely believed to be responsible for the assassination of Archbishop Romero while he served mass. A fascist in the true sense, he admired Hitler for his Final Solution, and once told the Washington Post of "the need to kill 200,000 to 300,000 people to restore peace to El Salvador." D'Aubuisson died of cancer in 1992, but his party has remained in power.
The rape and murder of four American nuns by the military helped cut off US military aid--for a time
The reason for rebellion wasn't a directive from Moscow. People were forced to fight a corrupt government after decades of extreme poverty, repression, military juntas, death squads, and the "disappearance" and torture of dissidents. The Salvadoran oligarchy--the infamous "fourteen families" that ran the country as a private plantation--gutted the poor with the help of the United States government. Their recent attempt to "privatize" water was the last straw.
Viva la revolucion.
Read a good article on the Salvadoran election from Frontline here.
What a line. How did I ever miss that? This cornball classic played on the radio all the time--you couldn't avoid it. Now I finally realize it was about Vietnam, and maybe even considered an anti-war song by country pop standards. Imagine that. Some sad sack soldier is cleaning his weapon and dreaming of his girl, and his shitty little Texas town. Sad. Did everyone else really get this? The sentimental song was written by Jimmy Webb, who wrote other cornball Campbell earworms like "Wichita Lineman" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix."
David Sedaris is a funny man. He writes hilarious books. Read his books and send him gifts. (read one of his stories here)
Humor, of course, is relative. You might not like Sedaris. Some people prefer jokes, puns, pratfalls, put-downs, and the same old familiar shtick. Some people like humor of the "take my wife, please," variety. I like that, too. But I applaud comics who surprise me. Ricky Gervais is just such a comic. The excruciating everyman of the now defunct television series, "The Office," (British version, of course) is absolutely painful to watch. Gervais makes you cringe. What's so funny about cringing, you ask. Oh, it's funny. I've seen you cringe. Ha.
Robert Crumb, American Artist
a sketch from the Genesis project
