












Bahía de San Búho (Simon Hanselmann). Fulgencio Pimentel, 2015. Rústica. 19 x 26,5 cm. 176 págs. Color. 25€
En la primera historia de Bahía de San Búho, «Altered Beast», Megg busca a Mogg para que lo acompañe a una boda a la que ninguno de los dos tiene ganas o fuerza de asistir. Por supuesto, no lo hacen, pero acaban en la calle mirando una luna enorme bajo los efectos de la droga. Mogg le pide a Megg, con pasión de amante, no dejar nunca la droga. «Un año más», dice Megg.
En esta historia, que seguramente sea mi favorita de todas cuanto he leído de Simon Hanselmann, creo que se encuentra la clave de la serie: de la cochambre más decadente surge la más rara e inesperada poesía. Sucede más veces, en ocasiones gracias a las drogas y sus efectos alucinógenos, en otras a través de la introspección. Son momentos en los que Megg y Mogg son consciente de que están jodidos, pero no cambiarían su vida por nada, porque incluso en los momentos más negros hay un extraño vitalismo autodestructivo que lo impregna todo, incluso —o especialmente— las páginas más humorísticas.
Tengo la sensación que deliberadamente o no Hanselmann ha oscurecido un poco el tono de sus historias. Aún podemos encontrar páginas muy cafres y divertidas —«Romance» o «Laser Zone»—, por supuesto, pero todo se centra más en el lado oscuro de la juerga. Las vidas de Megg y Mogg, suspendidas en un vacío temporal, ancladas en torno al sofá de la casa en la que viven, no parecen tener horizonte. Por debajo del jarana estupefaciente y las gamberradas empiezan a asomar traumas y problemas mentales —Megg va a terapia, por ejemplo—, y empieza a quedar claro que no estan bien. Y sin embargo, hay una celebración de ese modo de vida que les permite vivir las cosas al límite, y que todo sea mucho más emocionante y excitante. No hay reivindicación, nunca la ha habido; todo es más complejo que eso. Es saber que algo te hace daño pero al mismo tiempo te proporciona lo único que hace que tu vida no sea una verdadera mierda. ¿Serían Megg y Mogg felices sin drogarse? ¿O serían tan grises como lo es Búho cuando está sobrio?
Búho me parece el personaje clave de este libro. Ya era importante en Hechizo total y ahora mantiene el papel de vínculo con el mundo real: es el que paga las facturas y el único que intenta integrarse, tener pareja normal y un buen curro. Vive en la mediocridad absoluta pero en ella sería feliz. Por eso es verdaderamente terrible el maltrato al que lo someten los demás personajes, que, no obstante, lo hacen por su bien. Hay una inversión de valores ahí complicada y difícil de asimilar, porque, de veras, lo paso fatal con capítulos como «Curros», donde Búho encuentra trabajo para él y para todos sus amigos y éstos acaban destrozando la tienda de deportes donde iban a trabajar. Búho pierde el nuevo empleo y no puede volver al antiguo, del que se despidió. Y a pesar de todo, son sus amigos, y le dan alcohol y drogas con los que pasarlo bien. La sensación de que Búho está atrapado es opresiva y asfixiante, pero, además, se agrava porque sabemos que si se alejara de sus colegas conseguiría reinsertarse y entonces se convertiría en un ser humano —bueno, nos entendemos— aburrido y triste. Felicidad pequeñoburguesa y tibia.
Pero, claro, la alternativa que vemos en Megg, Mogg y el resto de secundarios —con Werewolf Jones a la cabeza— no es mucho más atrayente, al menos a largo plazo. Quizás es por esto por lo que me fascina la serie de Simon Hanselmann: no se adscribe a ninguna opinión. Casi no hay opinión, en realidad. No nos dice cuál es el camino, ni siquiera si existe uno. Parece decirnos, simplemente, que «así es la vida». Es una serie de veinteañeros para los tiempos que corren, sin juicios morales. En este libro, además, Hanselmann va añadiendo matices a las relaciones de los personajes. Pero en lugar de hacerlo a través de conversaciones trascendentales o grandes revelaciones, lo hace mediante la acción y los detalles, como vemos en uno de los mejores episodios, el flashback «High School», donde vemos reunirse al grupo por primera vez y qué relaciones tenían entre ellos. Sabiendo eso, uno puede jugar a imaginar qué ha pasado por el camino hasta el presente, y por supuesto puede de paso releer todas las historias a la luz de ese pasado. Todo es muy sutil, muy poco subrayado; es norma en Hanselmann no darse aires como autor.
Tampoco lo hace como dibujante. Su talento es intuitivo y poco cerebral, y no parece muy interesado en revolucionar el lenguaje del cómic. Ni falta que le hace, claro. Todo eso no es óbice para que Simon Hanselmann pueda considerarse un dibujante de cómics extraordinario, personalísimo y con una gran habilidad para plasmar la cotidianidad con sencillez pero sin aburrir jamás. De él destacaría, al margen de su capacidad para dotar de vida a los personajes, esencial en una serie (más o menos) costumbrista, su dominio del ritmo, que maneja sobre todo jugando con las elipsis y con el tamaño de las viñetas en los momentos justos, lo cual produce necesariamente un efecto en la lectura, ya que por norma mantiene una plantilla de tres por cinco viñetas cuadradas muy sólida. Otro punto fantástico es su visión del color y cómo se divierte con él en algunos momentos, especialmente en lo que se refiere a la luz. Y por supuesto, en una serie así, es importante saber mostrar gráficamente los efectos de las drogas, y aquí también está fantástico y perturbador, sin llegar a ser morboso.
Bahía de San Búho es, al menos en buena parte de sus historias, aún mejor que Hechizo total. Simon Hanselmann está consiguiendo convertirse en uno de los autores esenciales para entender el cómic de vanguardia tras la era de la novela gráfica.

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This article originally appeared on VICE France.
Note: This article contains images with full-frontal nudity.
Alexandre Dupouy is a sex archaeologist. The French collector has spent his entire life collecting what he defines as "erotic and pornographic junk." His shop, the Tears of Eros—now open only by appointment—has been selling pictures, paintings, and sex objects for almost half a century. It's a sort of small museum that traces the history of sex in France.
In 1975, he received a call from a bookseller friend who said that he had an old gentleman with "something special to show him." What he had was a luxury car with a trunk full of black-and-white photographs of naked and smiling prostitutes from the 1930s. He explained that he took most of the pictures in a brothel on the Rue Pigalle. Given that he could feel his days were numbered, the old man agreed to part with the pictures as long as he could remain anonymous. That man became known as "Monsieur X."
Nearly four decades later, Dupouy has decided to reprint some of this impressive collection as a book called Bad Girls (La Manufacture Books, 2014). The book is co-authored by both Dupouy and Monsieur X. Given that the actual photographer is no longer alive, I decided to have a word with Depouy about the book.
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VICE: Can you try to describe a typical early-20th-century Parisian prostitute?
Alexandre Dupouy: The typical profile was a girl who came to Paris to make money so she could feed her family back on the farm somewhere in the countryside. Hungry and unemployed, the girl often stumbled across a madame who would promise her shelter and warmth. One would usually end up staying with ten or 15 girls in the same situation. At that time, a prostitute earned roughly ten times more than a regular worker. In 1900, a worker was earning two francs per day, whereas a street prostitute charged five francs per job—20 francs if she was in a brothel.
What were the working conditions for a prostitute of the time?
In a way, it was similar to sport. One could do the job for about two or three years before being totally damaged. Diseases were common, and the access to protection was really bad. Condoms existed but weren't mandatory. The girls cleaned themselves with something called "hygienic sponges." The sponges had, of course, absolutely no efficacy.
Some say that Paris used to be the prostitution capital of the world, right?
By the 1920s, it had calmed down a bit. But for a century before that, it certainly was. From Madeleine to the Bastille, there were red-light districts all over Paris.
In the early 20th century, the city was a hotspot for prostitution. In those days, men didn't have very exciting sex lives with their wives. Also, if you were a man in the middle class, you would get married by 35. There would always be some misbehaving uncle to show you the joys of a brothel once you hit puberty.
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How did you react to Monsieur X's collection?
It was immediately obvious that it was unique in terms of both quality and quantity. There were hundreds of pictures. Taken one by one, they gave a real insight into the hell of life on the Rue Pigalle.
How did you work on these photographs without being able to verify dates, time, or basically any accurate information?
Given the amount of photographs, I assumed that this work took place over the course of a decade. Taking into account some of the car models that you can see in the photos, I estimated they were shot between 1925 and 1935. Finally, because a couple of images were shot on a distinctive balcony, I figured out that the brothel was located at 75 Rue Jean Baptiste Pigalle.
Was it hard to figure out more?
No, we found some more photos by him that weren't at all erotic. Photos of upper-class women taken in beautiful homes. Today when his prints are sold at the Rue Drouot auction they're labelled as "Monsieur X." The guy has definitely gained respect as a photographer posthumously.
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On the back of the photos Monsieur X wrote the name of each girl: Mado, Suzette, Gypsi, Mimi, Nono, Pepe, etc.
Monsieur X must have been close, friendly, and generous with the ladies. What is amazing is that the girls seem very relaxed in the pictures—they are actually having fun. There are even outdoor pictures taken on the banks of the Marne. He also directed two ten-minute short films, shot both outdoors and indoors. These two pieces really revealed his biggest fantasy: putting two girls together. One played a modest girl, while the other tried to be a stripper.
There's also a lot of similarities to Gustave Courbet's The Origin of the World. He also liked pretty exhibitionists. Or E. J. Bellocq—the New Orleans photographer who was also a regular customer of a local brothel, eventually making friends with the girls so that he could take any picture he wanted.
Were these brothels legal?
Brothels in Paris remained completely legal until 1946. Most of the bigger brothels had already closed by 1925, though. The Sphinx was a typical 1930s brothel: There was a bar and a restaurant and women were allowed to come too. These things were a bit different from the earlier brothels. These new small brothels were called "appointment houses" or "houses of tolerance." Politicians, both Gaullists and Communists, accused some brothel owners of working with the Germans during the occupation.
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Was that the case?
It depends. The One-Two-Two (122 Rue de Provence) was actually used by the Germans. The Sphinx was, according to the memoirs of its madam, far closer to the resistance networks. What most people actually considered the most serious charge was that the Germans gave many brothels champagne and good food. If a woman got plump while others starved, you knew she wasn't all that interested in liberation.
How do you see the current state of prostitution in France?
What I see is that prostitution has decreased by leaps and bounds—there's not that many prostitutes. I think this is due to marital relations. In the 19th century, if a bourgeoisie man asked [his wife] for fellatio, he would often be denied. And when it was accepted, it wasn't done properly—often women hurt their husbands.
That's why the role of the prostitute is dying. Today, the regular customers are also the most depressing: people who haven't had sex in ages, husbands who love to cheat on their wives, or erotomaniac millionaires—Dominique Strauss-Kahn's sort of vibe.
Otros blogs hablan hoy de las reediciones de Led Zeppelin, de la lujosa caja de Red House Painters o del avance de lo nuevo de Godspeed You! Black Emperor, asuntos que dan lustre y prestigio a una publicación digital sobre música. Pero el caso es que nosotros vamos a dedicar esta entrada a Chochos y Moscas, porque alguien tiene que centrarse en lo realmente importante. A lo mejor vuelvo a llegar tarde y todos ustedes conocen ya a Chochos y Moscas, a los que podríamos llamar C&M si no fuese porque nos hace una gracia pueril teclear repetidamente su nombre, pero yo no he tenido noción de la existencia del grupo gaditano hasta hace unos días. Y lo curioso es que los he conocido gracias a un sello inglés, Cruel Nature, que edita estos días una antología de su obra. Es en casete. Y lleva ochenta temas en quince minutos. El más largo, si no falla mi repaso rápido, dura quince segundos. Qué más se puede pedir.
Chochos y Moscas hacen algo así como grindcore minimalista con síndrome de atención dispersa, borbotones de caos sobre los que el vocalista grazna una frase. Sus temas son tan breves y son tantos que acaban causando un efecto de intermitencia, más cercano al drone hipnótico de cierta música experimental que al subidón enérgico del metal, como si fuesen un faro sonoro que cada pocos segundos nos barre con su haz de ruido, aunque reconozco que tiene narices ponerse poético para describir a Chochos y Moscas. Y luego, están los títulos, que supongo que en este caso equivale a decir las letras: el sello británico ha optado por versiones recortadas, pero el «mundo de fantasía e ironía» que habitan estos energúmenos queda reflejado en los delirantes bautismos de sus canciones. Cosas como Escucha, las croquetas están congeladas por dentro o Miguel Bosé, bandido, ojalá te quedes sordo por la boca o Yo los sudokus no los entiendo, si no lo digo reviento o Percebes. el fruto del diablo criado en acantilados o Macarena wassup? (qué te pasa, Macarena?), por citar cinco ejemplos de su inabarcable discografía. Podrían convertirse en los reyes de Last.fm, por pura acumulación de reproducciones, si no fuese porque sus canciones no alcanzan la duración mínima para quedar registradas: si se atreven a darle al play, en un minuto pueden escuchar las seis primeras.
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Eddie Redmayne and Julianne Moore in 'Savage Grace,' which tells the story of the incestuous relationship between an heir and his mother
When it comes to mind-fucks, few things top incest.
Inter-familial relations have become topical recently following a New York magazine article about genetic sexual attraction (GSA) and a detailed Q&A about consensual incest between a woman and her biological father. The general consensus was, "There's not enough :('s in the world for this," because incest is a phenomenon so taboo we barely have the language for it.
Naturally, as with pretty much any other sexual or societal taboo you can think of, there has long been a market for "incest" scenes in porn—"daddy-daughter" scenarios, for example, acted out between two perfect strangers for the titillation of masturbators who want to go a bit... darker. But that audience has—in certain areas of the US, at least—grown.
A report by leading multimedia-adult-content providers GameLink.com revealed a 178 percent average increase in the consumption of "family role-play porn" between October 2014 and January 2015. The stats show Utah had the highest increase with 765 percent; Michigan (698 percent), New York (669 percent), Alaska (524 percent), and Arkansas (452 percent) made up the five states where incest porn was growing in popularity the fastest.
According to GameLink, the ten most popular family role play porn titles are: Father's Forbidden Fantasies, Friends and Family 4, Mother's Indiscretions #3, Keep It in the Family, Brothers & Sisters 2, Mommy and Me #9, Lesbian Family Affairs, Father's Day, Digital Sin, Sibling Sex Stories, and, most sinister of all for some reason, Our Father.
That's an awful lot of studios making an awful lot of incest action. I reached out to Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals, author of forthcoming book Encore: A Sociologist Explores Sex, Society, and Adult Entertainment, for some kind of explanation.
Tibbals assured me that the stats don't show an increase in "incest porn," as such, but rather a "rapid growth" in "faux-cest porn"—content that casts two performers in a family scenes. She attributed the popularity of such porn in certain geographical areas to those "states that are a bit more on the sexually repressive side," marking New York as an anomaly.
She also suggests that the appeal of faux-cest pornography can be found in the "interesting mix of commonplace coupled with marked taboo."
"Intimacy between step-relations is very taboo in contemporary US culture, and yet many people live in step-blended families," she says. "There's something about stimuli for such a highly taboo topic simultaneously being so commonplace that may resonate with some people. In terms of 'why now,' certainly technology, accessibility, and the availability of the content itself all play a part."
A lot of "incest" porn takes great pains to make sure viewers know the sex may be real but the relationships aren't. Take Mommy and Me 9 (2014), for instance. At the start of each scene, the performers issue a disclaimer saying that they're not related. Before the first scene, Chasey Lain says, "This is in no way my daughter, we're not related in any way." Audrey Aguilera replies with, "And this is not my mother. I just met her today."
Lain ends the fourth-wall-breaking intro with the following words: "We're giving the fans what they want— Mommy and Me 9." But is incest really what the fans want? Or is it just what the porn industry is peddling?
In 2013, Jon Milward produced Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars and Their Careers, and his analysis threw up some interesting facts and figures. Out of the 20 "most common female roles that appear in film titles, ranked by frequency of use, the sixth-most common role for actresses is "daughter." The tenth is "sister."
One of the movies included in Milward's study would have been the 1980 classic, Taboo. The plot, in truly the loosest sense of the word, heavily features father-daughter and mother-son incest. Taboo is regarded as a classic and went on to be the first of many in a series spanning 27 years and knocking out—if you will—22 sequels.
It feels like quite a stretch to assume that someone just typing in the most taboo sexual scenario they can think of into a porn search engine actually wants to fuck a family member.
Evidently, incest porn is nothing new. But as with all modern day smut, its ubiquity goes beyond the usual channels of adult content. Search online for "incest" and you'll find tons of filth: Reddit forums with 44,000 readers (with the following disclaimer: "Owing to the general lack of ability to verify content, all stories should be assumed to be fictional unless proven otherwise"), incest erotica, even the portmanteau "wincest"—which refers to fan-fiction depicting "a romantic or sexual relationship between Sam and Dean Winchester," from the sci-fi series Supernatural.
The more you look, the deeper the rabbit warren goes. Could content of this kind really be reflecting our subconscious desires? If we think back to college psychology classes and consider Freud's Oedipus complex theories, you could argue that watching incest porn is simply an act of wish fulfillment. Still, it feels like quite a stretch to assume that someone just typing in the most taboo sexual scenario they can think of into a porn search engine actually wants to fuck a family member.
However, in his notorious Penthouse article from 1977, Incest: The Last Taboo, Philip Noble suggested that there's much more actual "untraumatic" incest happening than we care to accept. Yes, it was the 70s, and yes, he relied heavily on the idea of "previously suppressed material" from the original Kinsey interviews that "tells us that incest is prevalent and often positive," but he was right when he said that "incest will be a major social issue in the 80s"—the decade that spawned the Taboo series.
A sinister explanation for incest-themed porn was offered in psychologist Sharna Olfman's 2008 book The Sexualization of Childhood, in which she suggests that there could be a correlation between father-daughter gonzo and what she calls "pseudo child pornography" (PCP).
"We can explore," she writes, "how these sites may act as socializing agents for their users by constructing a particular set of ideologies that normalize children as legitimate sexual partners for adult men." The norms and values circulating in society that define adult-child sex as deviant and abusive are wholly absent in PCP, she argues, and in their place is a "cornucopia of sites that deliver the message that sex with children is hot fun for all."
Olfman's argument is gut-churning, but if we're talking specifically about the films readily accessible on PornHub/XHamster/YouPorn, etc., we are not talking about actual incest. That much is made clear in the disclaimers. But it doesn't make the titles or pseudo subject matter shocking. There's a base, primal curdling of the stomach that happens when you see any kind of mother-son or daughter-dad set-up, even if you know it's fictional, and it's precisely that reaction that an industry gorging itself on the extreme feeds upon. From rosebud to gokkun, incest-themed porn is just another obscenity to get customers through the doors.
Dan O'Connell, founder of Girlfriends Films—a company that produces one of incest-themed porn's most popular and successful series in Mother-Daughter Exchange Club (now on its 36th edition)—says it's all just about pushing boundaries.
"Producers of adult movies are among the greatest mavericks of society," he says, without a whiff of irony. "It is their nature to leave the realm of conventional sex and depict the very outer edges of sexual behavior. Today, every unsupervised kid with an online connection can look at all the sex they want."
That might be true. But what about the implications of those kids then going on to crave something more outrageous than the last thing they saw? Isn't that kind of one-upmanship precisely what the porn industry is feeding? How can it be right that they'll somehow end up viewing fictional scenarios between mothers and sons?
O'Connell is ambivalent. "The industry does these movies because that's what sells.," he says. "And, very simply, they sell for their taboo factor."
Follow Gareth on Twitter.
The last time we checked in with Swiss performance artist Milo Moiré, she was shocking the art world, and the entire internet, by pushing brightly colored eggs out of her vagina. By comparison, her latest stunt seems fairly tame, but it did manage to shock the unsuspecting patrons of the LWL Museum for Art and Culture in Munster, Germany when she strolled around the premises naked and clutching an infant.

The artist was filmed walking among an exhibition of paintings by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and David Hockney and looking at paintings of nudes.
“This direct confrontation with live nude art challenges others to reflect on familiar forms of perception.” Moiré said, via Daily Mail. “How close may a form of representation in art approach real life?”

Some people were totally stoked to get a glimpse of a real, live naked woman among depictions of the same subject.
“I must admit it was more interesting than the average art exhibition.” said 45-year-old Tobias Meyer.
Other more discriminating critics weren’t so impressed.
“I’m all for expression and alternatives in art, but this was just ridiculous,” said 30-year-old Anke Lange. “From what I gather, she thinks that getting her clothes off, looking at paintings of nude people and holding a naked baby makes her become part of the art.”
Unfortunately, Lange echoes the art world’s criticism of Moiré, as many critics panned her vaginal Plop-Egg stunt as intellectually dishonest, gratuitous and a desperate bid for attention. However, Moiré doesn’t seem to be letting any of that stop her, so good for her.
You’ve made the commitment and put in the time—you’re officially in it with your beau for the long haul. By now you know communication is the key to any successful relationship, so to avoid any surprises or disappointments, here are 150 questions you should ask your boyfriend RIGHT NOW:
Once you’ve asked all these questions, you’re bound to have a more secure and informed relationship, which is all you really want! So, what are you waiting for? Get asking!
150 Questions You Need to Ask Your Long-Term Boyfriend is a post from: Reductress

It’s the stuff of horror movies: A convoy of military vehicles rolls over a highly militarized border, through a blasted, burnt-out war zone, to the tomb of an ancient chieftan. They dig up his remains, but one soldier dies “in an accident” while they’re doing it. Then they bump their way back north, passing through the silent, wet streets of Kobane, and deposit the remains in a new tomb, a “temporary” resting place for the old Steppe conqueror. Then they pull back over the border and let the killing resume.
This weird sideshow actually happened a few days ago, in Northern Syria. The Turkish Army, which stood and watched while the Kurds held off Islamic State’s Army of Darkness, finally decided to send Turkish troops into Syria . . . to save a corpse.
Of course, this wasn’t just any corpse. This may (or may not) be the body of Suleyman, grandfather of Osman I, founder of the Ottoman (variation or “Osman”) Empire. When Osman took over the little Sultanate of Rum, on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, in 1299, he saw a Genghiz-scale opportunity. The Mongols had massacred the dominant Seljuk Turks, smashed the Arab caliphate and killed everyone in Baghdad. The Byzantines were too weak to move into the vacuum; in fact, they were ripe for the taking themselves, hanging on to a few fortified coastal towns. Before he died, Osman put in place all the features of the Ottoman Empire, dominant power of the 16th century.
So we’re talking about the grave of a patriarch here, a shrine to the man whose DNA powered the Empire so many Turks still miss. And Turkish nationalism is like no other nationalism in the world, not even American nationalism. I once wrote an article praising Turkish successes in battle. I got a lot of flak from survivors of the many ethnic groups the Turks exterminated on their way to power—Armenians, Assyrians, Anatolian Greeks, Alevi, Kurds (the list goes on, believe me)—but the real surprise for me was the dozens of comments by Turkish nationalists. Normally, when I write in praise of a military tradition not very well known in the West, the gratitude is almost embarrassing. So many martial histories are totally lost to us because we see it all through a dumbed-down Anglo filter.
But there was no gratitude from the Turkish nationalists. Not one “thank you” in the whole comment thread. Instead it was pure rage, that I didn’t mention this or that hero or victory. A lot of these ranting freaks were convinced that every omission was a plot, some ultra-sly diss aimed at glorious Turkey, by way of praising it.
It was odd, because the Turks I’d met before were very cool people, worldly and humorous. I started to get the idea that, like a Mormon Thanksgiving, there must be two Turkeys: One urbane and tolerant, the other pure redneck rage. Sorta like another country I could name, although the urbane coastal Turks seem cooler than their US versions, not as squirmy and apologetic.
That hypothesis was pretty well confirmed by the riots in Istanbul. That was classic coastal-elite vs. redneck fundie violence, though the fundies had the luxury of getting the riot police to play their hand for them, whereas the coastal kids had to fight and get gassed and concussed on their own.
And at the moment, Turkey is controlled by the AKP, a fundamentalist/Islamist party led by a populist big man out of central casting, Reccip Erdogan. Erdgoan’s party is very popular with the kind of voter Rick Perlstein profiled in Nixonland, the bitter lower-middle class, sick of being lectured by the suave elite, even when that elite happens to be right. Or rather, especially when it happens to be right.
So Erdogan pushes everything the Turkish elite hates, above all religion in government, but a whole bunch of other hot-button red-province issues like segregation in the schools and a big hug for Islamist parties and militias in the Arab world.
Erdogan’s victory in the elections was very convenient for Syrian Sunni Arab rebels, because the long and, as they say, “porous” border between Turkey and Syria can get a lot more porous (think sieve with a big hole punched in it) if the Turkish rulers are in the mood. And Erdgoan’s Islamists, preaching Sunni unity and nursing old grudges against Assad’s Alawite sect, basically installed a JO (“Jihadis Only”) lane along all 1200km of the Syrian border. Turkish border guards’ arms got tired, waving so many Toyota pickups full of heavily bearded young men through the border crossings. Their necks got cramped from nodding like they believed it when the young men in those trucks told them there was nothing but old scrap under the tarp in the truck bed. And, no doubt, their pants pockets got frayed from the wads of cash those well-financed jihadis slipped them to make sure no inconvenient inspections were carried out. After all, ideology isn’t everything, and a border guard without a few coffee cans of cash buried in his yard isn’t really a proper border guard at all.
The Turkish government’s idea was that all these bearded young men from London and Dusseldorf and Tunis and Marseille would overthrow the Alawites, install a friendly Sunni-Islamist Syrian government, a sort of kid brother to Erdogan’s AKP, and Turkey would be the proud owner of a Syrian puppet state without losing a single soldier.
It went about as well as those proxy plans usually do. Trouble is, proxies have their own agendas. Give them a gun and they get ideas. The Sunni fighters Turkey waved into Syria refused to be reasonable Islamists, a tricky concept at the best of times. They had to justify their presence in Syria, where the majority had been Muslim for 30 generations, so they went back to the book, by the book, destroying the compromises that local cultures always make with the rigid rules of these Abrahamic rule-bound religions.
And that’s how the Tomb of Suleyman came into play. The men of Islamic State looked at the Quran, and found that it was death on anything that smelled of tomb-worship. The rules are simple: Bury the dead quickly, keep it fast and simple, no elaborate tombs. If you want to get into the details, you can go to this Facebook page, with the straightforward title, “Grave Worship Is Haram in Islam,” where the appropriate quotations are supplied and the inevitable quibble threads go on and on. Personally, I always found religious debate to be pedantry for the ignorant, a chance to show off by people who’ve only read one book. I don’t even like multi-book pedants much, with the exception of my precious self. And I’ll be damned, as the one-book pedants would say, if I’ll listen to their one-volume encyclopedia of What Is Not.
But if you’re so inclined, there are hours, years, to be spent arguing over Scripture and exactly what it allows in the way of tombs.
Naturally, the Wahaabi took the Puritan view further than anybody. So in Saudi cemeteries, you’ll see nothing but one rock marking a grave. Not a worked stone, or a boulder, just a rock about two hands big. The first time I peeked through the locked steel gates into one of these cemeteries, I thought it was a vacant lot. That’s how far Wahaabism has gone, among a people who used to love their shrines and tombs. It’s kind of sad, the way sitting in on a Roundhead church service circa 1650 would be sad. Well, sad and boring, because you haven’t experienced boredom til you’ve heard the arguments issues like grave décor can ignite. I was sitting in a grading meeting once when a religious argument broke out—I know it sounds like the joke about boxing and hockey, but that’s what happened. 45 minutes later, my three colleagues were still arguing about whether you could eat while traveling during Ramadan.
One thing about these arguments: You’ll find that in every case, the nasty extremists have the Scripture on their side. That’s true in this case as well: If you go by the book, Islam forbids any reverence for tombs:
It is not permissible for graves to be left in mosques, whether that is the grave of a wali (“saint”) or of anyone else, because the Messenger (PBUH) forbade that and warned against that, and he cursed the Jews and Christians for doing that. It was narrated that he (PBUH) said: “May Allah curse the Jews and the Christians, for they took the graves of their Prophets as places of worship.” [Bukhaari, 1330, Muslim, 529]
And you’ll find, if you ever sit in on a debate between Fundamentalist, by-the-book types, and locals who object to the destruction of some local tradition, however heretical, that your sympathies go to the locals, even if the book is against them. That’s because the localists are always more human, more decent, more complex people. They understand, even if they can’t say it out loud, that cultures swallow one scripture or another, but then begin sanding it down to fit their traditions. In a few generations, a rule that scrapes uncomfortably against the tradition is ignored or forgotten, like the New Testament on divorce (Matthew 19:1-12) is ignored in the US.
So the Turks, and the Syrians, love their tombs, like every other culture in the world. You’ll go a long way before you find a culture that really ignores the dead the way the Wahaabi by-the-book interlopers demand. It’s easy, after all, for a 20-year old lunkhead convert from Rennes or London to point to the Quran and say, “No tombs allowed, see?” After all, the Syrian tomb he and his buddies are about to blow up never meant anything to him. It meant quite a lot to the Syrians who grew up near it. Syrian Islam has been evolving for more than a thousand years, adapting a supposedly universal cult to the inevitably local way of life, and tombs were a part of that landscape. So the locals were never happy about seeing tombs destroyed—but the newcomers from Islamic State had two arguments in their favor: The book, and the guns.
So Islamic State has been going around blowing up tombs all over Syria and Iraq. They started with Shia tombs, because that was a totally non-controversial move in this bitterly sectarian war. Tombs are hugely important to Shia, because Shi’ism has a beautifully mournful, almost defeatist or Manichean aspect, suggesting that the evil will always rule this fallen world and the best men who ever lived are martyrs. Wahaabism has no such nuances; it has about as much nuance as a 2×4 to the forehead, which is why Wahaabism is such a worldwide hit with males in the 15-20 years age range.
Then they went after tombs of Sufi saints, because although Sufism is nominally Sunni, it’s almost the opposite of Wahaabism, a softening, personalizing, introspective heresy as opposed to Wahaabism’s raw, cruel jihadism.
After blowing up the Shia and Sufi tombs on their turf, Islamic State went after a tomb revered by Sunni Arabs, the tomb of Yunnus (Jonah) near Mosul.
Islamic State was doing what foreign jihadis always do, proving their right to be on somebody else’s turf by showing they knew the Book and were following it better than the mere locals. As the leader of Islamic State, Al Baghdadi, is supposed to have said, “Syria is not for the Syrians and Iraq is not for the Iraqis.”
It was a good line for a by-the-book Muslim to take, because Islam borrowed that universalizing impulse from Christianity. But even people who think they’re following a universal creed actually stick to a very localized version, as you’ll have noticed if you ever dated a Baptist. And in Muslim contexts, tombs always raise this sort of universalist vs. localist friction because grief and the urge to remember and honor the dead always comes up against the hard, flat Scriptural prohibition on prolonged or elaborate grief.
Pretty soon, the only big, fancy tomb in Islamic-State controlled North-Central Syria was…yup, the tomb of the Ottomans’ granddad, Suleyman Shah.
You’d have expected Islamic State to waste no time blowing it up, except that this tomb was Turkish territory according to a 1921 treaty, guarded by Turkish soldiers. Turkey, even in its most Islamist phase, has no trouble with elaborate tombs. They’re part of the Nationalist tradition, and that means nobody would even think of talking about dismantling them. Osman 1, for instance; his tomb in Bursa is one of the more elaborate in the world.
So in October 2014, as Islamic State convoys pushed toward Suleyman Shah’s tomb on the Euphrates River southwest of Kobane, we had the conditions for a lab-quality experiment: Would IS’s ferocious Wahaabist intolerance for fancy tombs triumph over its sleazy alliance with Turkey? Would ideology trump realpolitik?
Quick answer: Nah. Islamic State “threatened” to blow up the tomb, and could’ve done it easily, since the Turkish military assigned only 40 soldiers to the site. But threats are for suckers; what you watch for is whether they do it or not. And IS never touched that tomb in months of occupying the country around it.
That non-action, from a group like IS that’s pretty much non-stop mayhem everywhere else, is exhibit Z in the long list of indications that Islamic State and Turkey made a deal. They both deny it, but there’ve been too many videos of Turkish soldiers waving howdy to IS jihadis, investigative reporters killed in convenient car crashes, and outright confessions by IS vets about being smuggled back and forth across the Syrian border with full Turkish cooperation.
Turkish policy made sense, in a grim way, back in the Autumn of 2014, when everyone was looking forward to the fall of Kobane. The radical Kurds of PKK/YPG/J were a real threat to Turkish sovereignty in the East, while the Arabs and assorted war tourists of IS seemed like a joke, with no potential to cause trouble in Turkey proper.
It’s not that Turkey likes IS, or shares its attitudes. You won’t find a lot of real support for IS outside a particular demographic: Young, male, middle-class wannabe thugs. It’s the same demographic that supplied most recruits for the James brothers, Quantrill, and Anderson, and the appeal is the same: Rape, plunder, sectarian revenge, escape from the boredom of downwardly-mobile civilian existence.
Turkey’s ruling elite, obsessed with the Kurdish “threat,” just saw IS as a useful pest-control device, and made a deal with it—one that included a promise to make Suleyman Shah’s tomb the only one in IS territory that wouldn’t be touched. If Turkey had really been worried that IS might desecrate the tomb, it would have sent a convoy to recover the coffin back when IS had undisputed control, a few months ago. It didn’t. Instead, Turkey waited until YPG/J Kurdish militia, driving south after liberating Kobane, were about to take the area around Suleyman Shah’s tomb.
Only then, on February 22, 2015, did the Turkish Army decide to drive south and rescue the body of Suleyman. The timing makes their motive clear: Turkey didn’t want to be indebted to the Kurds, the socialist radicals of YPG/J, for protecting Suleyman’s body. There was no threat from the YPG/J; they make a point of respecting all religious beliefs and would never dream of desecrating a tomb. Erdogan and his bigoted hick constituency, which hates Kurds with an insane passion, just couldn’t stand the idea of owing them anything.
Most humiliating of all was the fact that the route to Suleyman’s tomb led south through…Kobane. Oooo, that had to hurt! Back in October ’14, Erdogan was “warning”—which is to say, hoping and praying—that Kobane would fall in hours.
Now the defenders of Kobane were tickling the banks of the Euphrates, after blasting IS’s demoralized amateurs out of hundreds of villages around Kobane. There hasn’t been an offensive like this from a socialist army since 1945, not that you’d know it if you asked queasy pampered first-world socialists.
Erdogan doesn’t like commies (Islamists rarely do, as Indonesia 1965 demonstrated) and he doesn’t like Kurds. And he has the same ol’ birth rate fears all old racists have—so Turkey didn’t take any chances when it sent its convoy south to get Suleyman’s bones. The convoy consisted of 39 tanks and 57 APCs, manned by 572 soldiers.
That’s got to be one of the largest armored advances since Iraq 2003. A little more than you’d need to pick up what’s left of a man who died almost 700 years ago. It’s like your friend asks you to help pick up his mom’s ashes and says, “Oh, and bring your 12-guage, and the Glock, and some friends who have carry permits.” You’d start to wonder if his mom came from the Carpathians, or her body is a prize in some gang war.
In a way, poor ol’ Suleyman Shah has become a dusty, smelly political football between Turkey and the YPG/J. Not that he cares. He’s either in Paradise, the lusty play-hard paradise that a guy like him would have liked, or he’s just nowhere, just dead. (My vote.) Either way, he’s not likely to stress much as he was craned out of his resting place on the Euphrates and trucked north, through the streets of Kobane, in the dark and rain.
Once through Kobane without incident—because the YPG/J is way too smart to start a war with Turkey right now—the giant convoy headed west, just inside Syria, to a spot called Esme, where Suleyman is now resting. With a nice M-60 tank making sure nobody wakes him.
As they say, “Funerals are for the living,” and this one definitely was. The final comment, summing up the Turkish point, was spoken by Davutoglu, Erdogan’s little mouthpiece, the Medvedev to his Putin. Davutoglu, boasting about the operation, said, “We didn’t ask anybody’s permission.” By “anybody,” he meant the people in control of the area, the YPG/J. And that was the point of the whole weird episode: Getting Suleyman’s body out of Kurdish control, avoiding an imaginary insult to the insanely sensitive traditions of Turkish nationalism.
So, weird as it sounds initially, the operation is easy to understand when you know who’s who. What I want to know is, how did that soldier die “in an accident” during the move? There’s a horror movie in that somewhere.

Redditor Toastedchilliesposted a story of lunch theft and revenge to Justice Porn subreddit. The poster explained that, since he loves to cook, he packs his wife a bag lunch every day for her to take to work. But after awhile, his wife informed him of her lunch being stolen once every couple of days. He writes,
"I’m a bit of a chilli head. Love my hot sauces. I also love to cook. I also cook my wife a delicious lunch each day, She kept complaining that someone was stealing her lunch every couple of days out of the fridge at work. So I made her some buffalo wings for lunch to put in the fridge. They are really popular with her colleagues, but I spiced them up just a little with some Blair’s 4am Reserve. (I note you are meant to dilute it with 1 drop per 5 litres of liquid.)
So I added a couple of drops of Blairs 4am Reserve per wing with nice dusting of Ghost chilli powder for good measure. I did eat a couple to make sure it didn’t kill anybody, they were real hot. Even cream doesn’t cut the heat: and Ghost chillies keep getting hotter for about 5 minutes.
Needless to say just before lunch, there was a shrill from the kitchen, a young male colleague decided to help himself the my wife’s lunch which was clearly marked with her name. He ran to the toilet and vomited over and over. Apparently the moans sounded like he was dying. My wife just sat there innocently pretending nothing was wrong. Needless to say she has not lost a single lunch since."
Read more about Blair’s 4am Reserve — which is more than 7,000 times spicier than Tabasco and one of the hottest substances that exists — here. See a video about Blair's below.






Si hace unos días se entregaban los Oscars para recompensar, en teoría, lo mejor que nos ha ofrecido el séptimo arte durante el último año, el anuncio de los Golden Geek Awards 2014 es igualmente esperado dentro del panorama lúdico. A diferencia de la élite acartonada de la Academia, los ganadores de estos premios a los juegos de mesa, rol y videojuegos son elegidos por los votos de los propios usuarios de BoardGameGeek, RPGGeek, y VideoGameGeek, en sus respectivas categorías. Son por ello un galardón que pueden ser un buen indicativo de las tendencias y juegos que gustan más… al menos al otro lado del charco, donde no son muy fans de los eurogames (y si no me creéis, a la vista de los resultados está).
Centrándonos en los juegos de mesa, este año, había muy buenos candidatos, y seguro que han estado muy reñidos los primeros puestos. Los grandes ganadores han sido Star Realms, ganador en la categoría de mejor juego para 2 jugadores y mejor juego de cartas. Y Splendor, como mejor juego del 2014, y además mejor juego familiar. Sorprende ver un juego de construcción de mazo como Star Realms, una mecánica que muchos pensaban estaba ya muy trillada, pero que con juegos como este se demuestra que haciendo las cosas bien, e incluso sin demasiados giros de rosca, pueden reconquistarnos de nuevo a todos los nostálgicos de Magic. Por su parte Splendor, es un juego que con un planteamiento sencillo para todos los públicos que logra atraparnos durante la partida dejándonos con ganas de repetir. Un juego que reseñaremos en Fancueva en breve.
El mejor juego abstracto, ha sido para Patchwork, del genial Uwe Rosenberg, demostrando que no solo se le da bien hacer juegos de granjas, sembrados y pasar hambre, mucha hambre. Abyss ha ganado el premio a mejor presentación y arte gráfico, algo que era de esperar con solo verlo. Un juego realmente precioso, con un diseño y portada geniales, y que además va más allá del clásico juego bonito y sobreproducido. Sus autores, Bruno Cathala y Charles Chevallier, respaldan el atractivo visual del juego con unas mecánicas frescas que se ha cobrado ya unas buenas partidas entre los editores de esta página.
Le seguían de cerca en este premio, la edición aniversario del veterano Aventureros al Tren y el Dead of Winter. Este último, ha ganado merecidamente el premio a juego más innovador llevándose también el gato al agua en la categoría de mejor juego temático.
En la categoría de party game, el premio ha sido para la segunda edición de Ca$h ‘n Guns, con las siempre simpáticas ilustraciones de John Kovalic. Y en la categoría de wargame, el ganador ha sido Fire in the Lake, juego de la misma serie de GMT (COIN Series) que el magnífico Andean Abyss.
Imperial Settlers se ha tenido que conformar con el premio de mejor juego en solitario. Y ni rastro de Alchemists, un juego que pienso que destacamos en nuestros propios premios debería haber ganado sí o sí en alguna categoría, pero que se ha quedado fuera. Otro ausente destacable es Sheriff of Nottingham, que se va de vacío pese a lo divertido que es.
En lo referente a juegos rol, el ganador como juego del año ha sido Dungeons & Dragons (5th Edition) mientras que en videojuegos ha sido el adictivo Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft el triunfador. Por último, las categorías de mejor juego indie y mejor juego de móvil/tablet tenemos de nuevo al Star Realms. Habrá que darle una oportunidad, ¿no?
Board Game of the Year
Ganador – Splendor
Finalista – Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game
Finalista – Five Tribes
2-Player Game
Ganador – Star Realms
Finalista – Imperial Settlers
Finalista – Marvel Dice Masters: Avengers vs. X-Men
Abstract Game
Ganador – Patchwork
Finalista – Medina (second edition)
Finalista – Lagoon: Land of Druids
Artwork & Presentation
Ganador – Abyss
Finalista – Ticket to Ride: 10th Anniversary
Finalista – Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game
Card Game
Ganador – Star Realms
Finalista – Imperial Settlers
Finalista – Sheriff of Nottingham
Children’s Game
Ganador – Tales & Games: The Hare & the Tortoise
Finalista – Doodle Quest
Finalista – Ivor the Engine
Expansion
Ganador – 7 Wonders: Babel
Finalista – Terra Mystica: Fire & Ice
Finalista – Tuscany: Expand the World of Viticulture
Family Game
Ganador – Splendor
Finalista – King of New York
Finalista – Ticket to Ride: 10th Anniversary
Innovative
Ganador – Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game
Finalista – Alchemists
Finalista – Five Tribes
Party Game
Ganador – Ca$h ‘n Guns (second edition)
Finalista – One Night Ultimate Werewolf
Finalista – Sheriff of Nottingham
Print & Play
Ganador – …and then we held hands…
Finalista – Elevenses for One
Finalista – 1066, Tears To Many Mothers
Solo Game
Ganador – Imperial Settlers
Finalista – Legendary Encounters: An Alien Deck Building Game
Finalista – Pandemic: The Cure
Strategy Game
Ganador – Five Tribes
Finalista – Imperial Settlers
Finalista – Castles of Mad King Ludwig
Thematic Game
Ganador – Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game
Finalista – Star Wars: Imperial Assault
Finalista – King of New York
Wargame
Ganador – Fire in the Lake
Finalista – The Battle of Five Armies
Finalista – 1944: Race to the Rhine
Best Podcast
Ganador – The Dice Tower
Finalista – The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast
Finalista – Shut Up & Sit Down: The Podcast!
Game of the Year
Ganador – Dungeons & Dragons (5th Edition)
Finalista – Call of Cthulhu (7th Edition)
Finalista – Firefly Role-Playing Game
Best Artwork & Pres.
Ganador – Player’s Handbook (D&D 5e)
Finalista – Dungeon Master’s Guide (D&D 5e)
Finalista – Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set
Best Supplement
Ganador – Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set
Finalista – Horror on the Orient Express
Finalista – Designers & Dragons: The 70s
Best Podcast
Ganador – Board with Life Radio
Finalista – Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff
Finalista – Fear the Boot
Game of the Year
Ganador – Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
Finalista – Star Realms
Finalista – Dragon Age: Inquisition
Best Visuals/Artwork
Ganador – The Banner Saga
Finalista – Dragon Age: Inquisition
Finalista – Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Best Indie Game
Ganador – Star Realms
Finalista – Galaxy Trucker
Finalista – The Banner Saga
Best Mobile/Handheld
Ganador – Star Realms
Finalista – Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
Finalista – Galaxy Trucker
Most Innovative Game
Ganador – Galaxy Trucker
Finalista – Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
Finalista – Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
En la Fancueva Lo mejor de 2014 sobre la mesa
IDW Games, publisher of games like The X-Files, Machi Koro, Yedo, and Diamonsters, will be publishing Chew: Cases of the FDA. This
Rock & roll exploded in the '50s onto a cultural landscape that was so uptight and repressed as to be unrecognizable today, even to those who lived through it. Everything -- from the clothes young people wore to the music they listened to to the money they spent -- was a hard-fought statement, because no youth group before those '50s teenagers ever had that kind of freedom and did something with it. Pop music was bland, bland, bland (just like it is now) and the bigger and badder and bolder rock & roll became, the more of a threat it was to the status-quo squares who banned it every chance they got. You couldn't listen to it, you couldn't dance to it at your school, concerts in public places were banned, and artists were often jailed for performing it in public.Un dos elementos que diferencia ó home do resto dos animais é o desenvolvemento dos alimentos cociñados. Mais por que nos afastamos dos alimentos crus? A ciencia ocupouse do asunto, con conclusións sorprendentes. Resulta que cociñar aumentou o tamaño do noso cerebro, ademais de asegurar a supervivencia da especie e facernos máis sociables. Tamén permitiu a migración a outros territorios e dotounos de identidade cultural. O desenvolvemento do home, sosteñen os expertos, disparouse cando un mono empezou a cociñar, segundo se […]
British retro-soul band the Mighty Sceptres deliver an eclectic range of old-school sounds on their debut album. Led by guitarist Nick Radford and vocalist Angeline Morrison (who previously collaborated in the groups Frootful and Angeline Morrison & the Ready Cats), the Mighty Sceptres make it their business to capture an authentic tone.
They don’t skimp on the details – from using period instruments and classic-style arrangements to hiring vintage recording equipment to replicate the timeless rhythm & blues sounds of the ’50s and soul grooves of the ’60s – and add a dash of Jamaican rhythms for flavor. The group’s singles earned them a reputation on the U.K. soul underground, and All Hail the Mighty Sceptres! offers a full dose of their passionate…
320 kbps | 110 MB UL | HF | MC ** FLAC
…take on R&B and soul, buffered by Morrison’s rich, sensuous vocals.
01. Siren Call
02. I Found The Letter
03. Shy As A Butterfly
04. Just Didn’t Mean It
05. Jerk Chicken
06. Nothing Seems To Work
07. Sting Like A Bee
08. You’re Nothing But A Pack of Cards
09. Gentle Refrain
10. Land Of Green Ginger
11. Krazy Kat (feat. Ian Dunlop)
12. That Ol’ Feelin’
13. We Got A Problem
On some digital downloads:
14. Shy As A Butterfly (Kenny Dope Extended Mix)
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Crypt Records dug up lost 45s from rock’n’roll’s fringes and assembled and released them on a series of Back From the Grave compilations. Adorned with album art depicting cartoon zombies wreaking havoc on the living, these sets promised crazed, frantic, bone-crunchin’ and raw blastin’ garage punk screamers from the mid-’60s.
They were the “unpsychedelic” alternative to Nuggets and Pebbles-shaggy-haired flower child types who had too much to dream last night need not apply. Back From the Grave was reserved for the bands that screamed a little harder, played with fuzzboxes (either store-bought or makeshift), and sought refuge in early Animals and Kinks records. The Gories cited the series as an influence…
320 kbps | 174 MB UL | HF | MC ** FLAC
…which makes a lot of sense (especially when you hear their cover of the Sloths’ Vol. 4 highlight “Makin’ Love”). By 1996, series curator Tim Warren was eight-for-eight in putting together albums full of forgotten but thrilling rock’n’roll.
After Vol. 8 came silence; needless to say, it’s surprising to see a new Back From the Grave compilation nearly 20 years later. Even better, Crypt have shared two new installments at once (released separately on LP and packaged together as a single CD), more music for the self-anointed rebel and the kid who likes a dirty joke. On this 30-song totem of lost almost-hits, you’ll find an organ-heavy melody obscured by a Missouri teenager shouting “You’re gonna die!” (the Warlocks’ “Beware”), while “When I Feel Better” is a potent reminder that a song with lots of tambourine is still capable of being a complete jam. On “69”, the frontman of the Four shrieks a few times inside Sam Phillips’ Memphis studio before singing about his favorite sexual position and giggling with his bandmates as the song ends. These sets are time capsules, with liner notes filled with old photos and newspaper clippings, but even in 2015, Back From the Grave has something to teach us.
Those notes also share the frequently bizarre stories, expertly told by garage rock historian Chris Bishop, of the bands behind the music. The Orphans’ story deserves its own biopic: The Iowa teens got kicked out of high school for having long hair, ripped up a record contract (again, because they were told by an authority figure to cut their hair), and were robbed by their terrible manager. Nobody’s Children, a band of Las Vegas teens, wrote “Mother’s Tin Moustache” after smoking weed for the first time, and the lyrics are pure ’60s stoner humor. In a fantastically frantic old-coot voice, they shout “Keep that turtle out of my cabbage patch” and “That sure is a funny picture of your mother and me”.
Naturally, these bands weren’t reinventing the wheel. The “rock’n’roll wild man” archetype was perfected by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis a full decade earlier, and while it’s cool that some of these artists can scream as hard as the Sonics, Vol. 9 and 10 are about more than a “who’s the loudest” contest. In voice, tone, and narrative, there’s a lot going on across the comps’ 30 songs. “I’m Hurtin'” by the Classics, for example, is influenced by a very similar Animals song, but singer Richard Titlow’s voice is mousy and muffled—more Daniel Johnston than Eric Burdon. Elsewhere, you’ve got bands that cackle about witches and your imminent demise (GMC and the Arcells) and invoke Dickensian grave robbers (the Emeralds).
The gatefold of Vol. 10 shows rock, pop, and electronic music stars lining up to face their undead executioner. Illustrating this music with murderous zombies is appropriate—these records are artifacts, and yet here they are, walking among us, while screaming about mortality and lust. After 32 years of putting together Back From the Grave records, Warren has exhumed another big batch of wild-eyed gems from the unwitting fathers of punk and contemporary garage rock.
1. The Pastels – Circuit Breaker
2. The High Spirits – It’s Alright With Me
3. The Warlocks – Beware
4. The Emeralds – Like Father Like Son
5. The Why-Nots – Tambourine
6. The Turncoats – Something Better
7. The Classics – I’m Hurtin’
8. The Raevins – The Edge Of Time
9. Lord Charles & The Prophets – Ask Me No Questions
10. The Gentlemen – It’s A Cry’n Shame
11. The Shakles – Whizz #7
12. Unknown Group – When I Feel Better
13. Knoll Allen and The Noble Savages – Animal
14. The Donshires – Sad and Blue
15. The Starfyres – No Room For Your Love
16. James Bone & The Agents – Wild Angel
17. John English III and The Heathens – I Need You Near
18. The Four – 69
19. The Expressions – Return To Innocence
20. The Orphans – Without You
21. The Sires – Don’t Look Now
22. It’s Them/Tthhemm Baby (I Still Want Your Lovin’)
23. The Orphans – Hey Gyp
24. Nobody’s Children – Mother’s Tin Mustache
25. South’ Soul – Lost
26. The Hotbeats – Listen
27. The Hard Times – Mr. Rolling Stone
28. Four More – Problem Child
29. The Color – Young Mill Larsen
30. GMC and The Arcells – The Witch
Google has made the disconcerting decision to ban all porn from its Blogger platform in “the coming weeks.” According to its statement:
We’ll no longer allow blogs that contain sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video. We’ll still allow nudity presented in artistic, educational, documentary, or scientific contexts, or presented where there are other substantial benefits to the public from not taking action on the content.
The new policy will go into effect on the 23rd of March 2015. After this policy goes into effect, Google will restrict access to any blog identified as being in violation of our revised policy. No content will be deleted, but only blog authors and those with whom they have expressly shared the blog will be able to see the content we’ve made private.
This has happened before, in 2013. It is worrisome, whether or not you enjoy watching naked strangers with tribal tattoos writhe in mock-pleasure on camera. Google, a corporation whose original goal was to map/organize all of the information in the world, is transitioning to more explicitly evaluating/censoring it. This is an encroachment on free speech.
What are their motives? Who at Google is actually determining what is “artistic”? Why did they decide to essentially just delete these blogs, which show perfectly legal content and are a record of humanity at a specific moment in time and serve a seriously important historical purpose? What else will they decide they no longer need? We can’t know, because they are a very secretive corporation. We just have to trust that their selfish economic interests will somehow benefit us.
This is just another reminder that a) the need for net neutrality extends far beyond broadband companies fighting for bandwidth restrictions, to monopolistic software companies like Google and Facebook and b) most of the content we see is mediated through a few very large companies via mysterious algorithms that can make or vaporize your website on a whim and c) most of what we do online occurs on temporary rented space, and that at any moment a miserly landlord can change their mind and kick us out and then burn the whole fucking block down.
The internet is gradually becoming a boring, shitty suburban mall.
La ilustradora mexicana Almendra Sheira dice que nunca entendió ni por qué el sexo causa reparos al público ni por qué hemos de amoldarnos a «los tipos de belleza, cuerpos o prácticas sexuales que nos imponen». Ella, en vez a los clásicos griegos y romanos, ha estudiado y tomado como base para su trabajo las prácticas, ritos y creencias corpóreas que los pueblos prehispánicos de América vivían. Con esa materia prima elabora creaciones pictóricas capaces de violar ciertas pupilas. Para llevar a cabo su lucha contra la moralidad sexual creó un personaje en ella misma, un alter ego que se dedicaría a romper moldes, tabús y estereotipos a través del arte hasta que cualquier cosa derivada del sexo se naturalizase, «por muy rara o sucia que parezca». Ella es Rurru Mipanochia.
En tu presentación dices: Rurru es una niña-niño-cosa que le gusta mucho el penesito, la puchita, las nalguitas, los huevitos… En ocaciones se traviste de mujer, pero casi siempre es quimera. Le gusta mucho el helado de chocolate, el quesito, las palomitas de maíz, pero lo que más le gusta en TODA su vida es picarse la pucha, le encanta acariciarla y frotarse el clítoris hasta que éste le arde y hasta que poco a poco comienza a escurrirse pensando muchas veces en… TI, o en ella/él/eso comiéndotela o comiéndosela. Almendra, ¿qué es Rurru Mipanochia, y qué quiere decir todo esto?
Me gusta abordar la sexualidad con un poco de picaresca. Si de por sí el tema ya es como medio agresivo para la gente, quería buscar una manera más soft de que llegase al público. Me gusta por eso la visión de los niños de la sexualidad, que es muy inocente, en mi opinión, como se debería de abordar toda la vida. Porque es algo natural, normal. Esa es la inocencia que no deberíamos perder. En mis ilustraciones incluso utilizo colores pastel por eso, para que no parezca que quiero hacer cosas rudas. Son colores de cuentos de niño.
Pero lo que dibujas son personas amputadas, con ortopedias, obesas, muy delgadas… Son cuerpos que la sociedad generalmente aborrece. ¿Qué es lo que resaltas de cuerpos así, dónde encuentras su belleza?
Exactamente ese es el problema: nos bombardean todo el tiempo con un solo tipo de cuerpo. Creo que es importante sacar los monstruos, a esas personas que la misma sociedad rechaza. Hay mucho más allá del parámetro de belleza establecido, del tipo de cuerpo que nos imponen. Todos somos diferentes y es bonito encontrar la belleza en lo grotesco.
¿Qué es la belleza?
Ahora mismo es una imposición de la institución, y en realidad debe depender de cada persona. Lo que para mí es bello, tal vez para ti no lo es. Pero de una u otra forma el sistema trata de imponernos un estereotipo. Sigue siendo la onda capitalista de siempre, les viene bien tener ese estereotipo, un cuerpo mainstream. Así lo tienen controlado.
Pero además de distintos a los estándares de belleza, otra característica de los personajes que dibujas es que siempre están practicando sexo o en alguna postura escatológica…
Me gusta mucho los distintos tipos de fetiche que tiene la gente, como la abasiofilia, que es las personas que les gusta follar con gente que es discapacitada, con gente que no se puede mover, en silla de ruedas o que tiene prótesis… Está bien chido que exista gente a la que en realidad sí le guste eso. O que les guste coger con ancianas. Hay gustos para todos. Es como con el asunto del porno. Encasillamos todo lo que es explícito en la palabra porno, y yo creo que no es eso, porque creo que el porno es mas bien lo que te excita, sea explícito o no. Puedes ver a dos personas follar que estén gordas, pero si a ti no te excita, no es porno para ti. Para quien sí le excite y le guste hacerse sus chaquetas (masturbación) viéndolo, sí es porno.
Dónde queda en todo esto la base de estudio de la cultura prehispánica
Todos mis personajes están inspirados en ella. Son evocaciones de personalidades prehispánicas. A mí siempre me gustó el arte erótico y el porno; mi tesis de licenciatura la hice sobre eso. Me gustaba mucho investigar sobre los griegos, los romanos y toda esa onda erótica. Me preguntaba, si hay este tipo de expresiones artísticas en griegos, romanos, la cultura hindú, la china, la japonesa… debe haber algo también aquí en mi país. Empecé a investigar por mi parte, me fui a la biblioteca de Históricas de la UNAM, busqué en internet… Artículos que hablaban de la sexualidad de los antiguos pobladores de Mesoamérica. Me leí libros como Pecar como Dios manda, o el Kamasutra de Barro, los textos de Noemí Quesada… Empecé a aprender de la cultura sexual de esos tiempos.
Cuenta algo de eso
¿Sabías que los aztecas eran como más mochos (recatados)? Aunque luego, en rituales como el de al cosecha del maíz hacían de todo. Los huastecos sí eran bien vivos, no usaban ropa e iban así por la vida. Eran como Trazoltéotl (diosa de la sexualidad). Los aztecas la empezaron a ver como la comedora de inmundicias, es decir, ya empezaron a relacionar la sexualidad con algo sucio. Y empezaron a creer que ella castigaba los excesos sexuales con ámpulas en el pene, o la vagina, u otras enfermedades de transmisión sexual. Siempre el concepto de la deidad que te da el bien pero también te hace el mal, como ahora aún existe.
¿Había cosas cosas que hacían ellos y nosotros ya no hacemos?
Siempre eran cosas de carácter ritual. En algunos rituales a los niños de entre ocho y diez años los ponían a beber con chicas adolescentes, se emborrachaban, y les empezaban a iniciar en las ondas sexuales. También se penetraban mucho con maíces. Un día antes de hacer la cosecha del maíz, el hombre penetraba a su mujer en el ano con una mazorca de maíz; y su pose favorita era la del perrito. Toda esta información se ha encontrado a partir de iconografías y de documentos de cronistas españoles, que lo escribieron cuando llegaron. Los frailes hacían las crónicas sobre esas costumbres que aún existían y trataban de erradicar.
¿También tienen que ver con los dioses prehispánicos las discapacidades de los personajes que representas? ¿Han representado estos pueblos el sexo con personas con discapacidades?
Empecé a interesarme por las discapacidades porque hay un textito que leí llamado Discapacidad y desorientación corporal como metáforas de la transgresión sexual entre los nahuas prehispánicos, de Miriam López Hernández y María J. Rodríguez Shadow, que habla sobre los nahuas, la visión prehispánica acerca de las deformidades de los cuerpos. Este es el libro que me inspiró. Ellos creían que las personas que tenían como un defecto físico tenían una trascendencia sexual, que eran más propensas a ser más sucias, así que les gustaba usar sus cuerpos. Dije, órale, hay un pasado nacional de todo esto.
Rurru, ¿se pude relacionar la libertad artística y la libertad sexual? ¿Hay tabús en el arte?
Yo creo que sí, empezando por esa eterna discusión entre lo que es erótico o es porno. Solamente dividir eso crea un tabú en el arte.
¿Qué te han dicho de tus colecciones en galerías? ¿Es difícil publicar trabajos como los tuyos?
A veces sí. Una revista me dijo, por ejemplo, que lo que yo mandaba estaba muy fuerte para el público y que no lo podían sacar. Y eran dibujos. También en una academia me pidieron una foto, como sensual, de la artista, pero a mí no me gusta posar sintiéndome sexy; quería representarme como soy y les mandé una foto enseñando mi ano y haciendo pipí. Otra vez que me dijeron que no podían publicarla. Si me estás diciendo que me tome una foto para representarme a mí misma como artista, ¿por qué me dices que no a la foto que te mando representándome?
Otra vez, con motivo de una exposición que hice (Erótica), hicimos una especie de performance. Estaban los dibujos expuestos, pero se me hacía divertido acompañarlo con un ejercicio con mi grupo de trabajo. Al lado de los dibujos, empezamos a improvisar. Hacíamos como que nos pegábamos. A mí me penetraban con unas burbujas largas…Se me hacía muy chistoso ver cómo la gente podía ver el sexo en objetos bidimensionales y el sexo real evitaban verlo; se malviajaban, volteaban la mirada o nos ignoraban. Me preguntaba: ¿por qué si vienen a ver una exposición de dibujos de sexo se malvibran por ver a unas personas que están teniendo sexo real? Algunas señoras incluso se enojaban. Al final acabé haciendo pipí allí mismo y la organización se sacó de onda ya del todo.
No sé qué puedes decirme de la educación sexual actual. En el siglo XXI, donde un niño puede acceder a todo tipo de materiales en la red, ¿qué le falta a la educación sexual?
El problema es que hay que dejar de ver a los niños como personas no sexuadas. Es que parece que los veamos como si fueran tontos. Yo creo que sí se les tiene que explicar cómo se tienen las relaciones sexuales, para empezar por el hecho de evitar violaciones y agresiones sexuales. Si a los niños les van explicando poco a poco, pueden evitarlo porque saben lo que les está ocurriendo en ese momento. Dirían, «ah, esta persona se quiere pasar de mala onda conmigo».
También siento que a las personas discapacitadas, con síndrome de Down, parálisis cerebrales u otras afecciones les niegan siempre tener sexo, y es necesario verlos como seres sexuados, porque el sexo va de sentir y de hacer sentir a otro.
Y tampoco estoy de acuerdo con ciertas cosas de la psicología, que te dicen que estás loco si te gusta algo diferente a lo común. Todos somos diferentes, con diferentes formas de pensar, y diferentes gustos, y diferentes formas de tener sexo. Ya se logró que la sociedad entendiera determinados gustos como usar esposas, pero hay otras muchas formas y quien las practica no está loco, quiere vivir así su sexualidad.
Almendra, ¿cuánto tienes que ver tú con Rurru?
Quizás quise plasmar un poquito de mí. Yo de niña usaba prótesis en las piernas como las que les pongo a mis personajes, y no puedo andar bien. Mis dibujos también son una manera de demostrar al mundo que soy así y no me importa.
¿Almendra es Rurru Mipanochia?
Sí.
Entonces todas las cosas que dices que le gustan a Rurru, mutilaciones, deformidades… ¿te gustan a ti?
Sí. Estoy enganchada por ejemplo con los travestis además, me encantan los trans. Y la gente de todo tipo de cuerpos. En realidad la perfección no me atrae mucho.
Para ti un video porno estaría mejor si sale una persona con ortopedias que si sale Brad Pitt.
Obvio. A mí es eso lo que me enciende.
(* Los artículos con las atrevidas ilustraciones de Rurru Mipanochia se pueden adquirir poniéndote en contacto con la artista a través de Facebook)
Este post El sexo duro prehispánico de Rurru Mipanochia, escrito por Jaled Abdelrahim, se publicó originalmente en Yorokobu.