Sushi has taken on its own shape and form in the United States, but even before the first sushi restaurants opened up in California, America had an impact on the type of sushi eaten in Japan. During the American occupation after World War II, a food rationing program helped the rise of nigiri outside Tokyo.
Don't Mess With Texas' Chili. 'So when a cookbook author like Mark Bittman writes—in How to Cook Everything—that chili means "slow-cooked red beans seasoned with cumin and chiles," he betrays his ignorance of the dish and its history. When he writes that a true chili dish, one made with meat and no beans, has "entered the realm of cassoulet," he might confuse chili-heads who don't know what cassoulet means—but they'll always recognize when someone's messin' with Texas. It's when Bittman advises amateur cooks to make chili with tofu or espresso that he is doing something worse than disrespecting the dish—he is suggesting that the names of foods can mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean.'
Somehow the misguided folks at Cook's Country escape the criticism they deserve for their crimes against chili. For that matter their taste in salsa is also suspect. Get a rope.
Just after midnight on Tuesday, police in Hanoi
detained a truck smuggling
three tons of live cats into Vietnam. The driver, a 30-year-old
man named Hoang Van Hieu, admitted that the ill-begotten cats were bound
for restaurants in the country, where cat meat is, in fact, a delicacy, especially
in the provinces of Thai
Binh and Nam Dinh, not far from Hanoi.
"After receiving a tip, we searched the truck and discovered
the cats inside," Sky News
quoted Dong Da district
deputy chief of police Cao Van Loc as saying. "The owner, also the driver, said
he bought the cats at the [Chinese] border area of Quang Ninh province. All of the cats were from China."
With an average adult weight of
about ten pounds
for a healthy domestic feline, three tons means we're talking hundreds of cats. The animals, crammed on top of one another in bamboo
cages, were just the latest haul in a small
cat-trafficking market
that sources from nearby China, Laos, and Thailand to
satiate Vietnam's appetite for kitty flesh.
Of course, Vietnam isn't the only nation to enjoy the occasional cat. Feral cats, strays, and
captured pets have been
consumed with some regularity in the Canton (Guangdong) region of China, South Korea,
and parts of rural Taiwan. Some animal-protection publications
suggest the Asian cat market consumes up to 4 million
kittens a year. Whatever the number, a
fixation on unconventional meats in Asia looms in the American imagination—though there's evidence eating cats and dogs is relatively common in other places, notably Switzerland.
The reality is that in most regions of the world, the market for cat meat is
undergoing a mix of popular backlash and official clampdowns. Concerns
about disease transmission from unregulated meat, cruelty (many cats are
electrocuted, hung, beaten, or even cooked alive), and general sentiment toward kittens have led to outright (if poorly
enforced)
bans on the market in Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Taiwan. In
2010, animal rights groups in China
proposed (but failed to push through) a
ban on eating cat that would have fined consumers more than $700 (with a maximum 15-day jail sentence) and producers $1,500 to $75,000. Despite the failure of
the bill, massive ad campaigns have
emerged, playing on popular emotions and
morality to advocate some kind of overhaul in the government's policy toward cat consumption.
Despite
official government condemnation of unsanitary kitten meat and the promotion of the
use of cats to control urban rats, shop owners in Vietnam continue to sell cat for up to $50 to
$70 apiece—a rate that suggests high demand. Due to a lack of cat breeders who sell their charges for food and the
extreme caution of pet owners in Vietnam, this demand appears to be encouraging smuggling from neighboring countries like China. And
this most recent three-ton shipment far surpasses the 90-cat haul
that came over the border from Thailand, which
made regional headlines in 2013—a sign of the market's growth.
"A lot of people eat cat meat," Van Duang, a Hanoi restaurant
owner, told
AFP in 2014. "It's a novelty. They
want to try it."
Maybe the novelty of cat meat will wear off, or popular sentiment
will change as more locals keep cats as pets. But for now, the
government's efforts to rein in trafficking have fallen pretty flat.
Hoang Van Hieu's three-ton haul
earned him a $350 fine for carrying undocumented and illicit goods. But doing the
math suggests this was only a fraction of what the merchandise would have netted
him—potentially thousands of dollars. He may have lost one shipment, but a few
hundred bucks versus the potential final payoff for any successful shipment
is no real deterrent. It would be both easy and logical for him and
others to continue trafficking despite the high-profile bust.
Ironically, the losers in this sting may not have been the
cat smugglers or consumers, but the cats in Hoang Van Hieu's truck. Vietnamese
law maintains that any smuggled products must be destroyed. There's
some doubt as to whether or not the state will find a loophole for the cats given the sheer number of cats, but
according to Sky News, Chief Cao Van Loc has indicated the cats will likely be killed as per
protocol.
Y os quejabais de mis títulos cuando estaba en Libro de Notas. A este solo le ha faltado un “Mira, yo qué sé.”
Pero voy a lo que toca ahora, durante demasiado tiempo he querido ir escribiendo sobre películas de terror y misterio y todas esas cosas que me gustan a mí. Como siempre, ha sido imposible. Y ahora con el Ask no quiero ni pensar en lo que será de todas esas secciones abiertas. Pero aún y con eso he buscado un hueco para hablar de, al menos, las que más destacaría de 2014. Es decir, esa mezcla de las que más me gustaron y las que creo que merecen algún tipo de mención.
Quizá lo más interesante del año haya sido lo que yo llamo Nuevas Vampirinidades, distintas visiones de Lo Vampírico a través de cuatro películas con diferentes estilos, intenciones e incluso continentes.
En Only lovers left alive el vampirismo es poco menos que una excusa para hablar de la inmortalidad y las relaciones, también -y me parece casi lo más interesante- sobre el mundo artístico y sus influencias. De manera que podrían haber sido musas o dioses grecolatinos sin cambiar mucho. Aquí lo importante no es la alimentación o la lucha sino la reflexión sobre la eternidad.
Casi como una vuelta más humorística se presenta What we do in the shadows que ofrece un falsumental cómico sobre un grupo de vampiros que viven juntos en el mundo moderno. A medio camino entre La Familia Adams y The Office, logra ir mostrando el patetismo y, a la vez, la posible realidad adaptada de muchos de estos mitos en los que por encima de la historia de amistad contada está el choque y adaptación a las modernas tecnologías.
Por contra, A girl walks home alone at night es cine de vampiros como podría serlo expresionista, western o la versión más alocada de Persépolisque se os pueda ocurrir. Y es así tirando sobre todo por el lado más artístico sin por eso dejar de ser -para mí sorpresa- la que incluye momentos más propios del cine de terror. No sé si es mi película de terror favorita del año, entre otras cosas porque hay ratos en los que ni siquiera sé si la definiría dentro del género, pero desde luego sí que es la más original. Menos mal.
Más aún cuando la cuarta, Vampire Academy, funciona principalmente de una manera meta. Podríamos incluso considerarla reverso de la anterior en cuanto que establece un contacto claro con otros géneros, solo que aquí lo que hacen es reírse -a conciencia pero sin caer en la parodia directa- de todos esos libros adolescentes de Paranormal Romance, grupos secretos e internados femeninos. Con un estilo a veces tan impertérrito que uno podría llegar a creer que se están burlando no solo de sus tics sino también de los espectadores.
Vistas las cuatro películas, parece que la sobrexplotación vampírica que causó el éxito mundial de Crepúsculoha desparecido finalmente dando lugar a estas reinterpretaciones mitológicas. El mundo de Lo Vampírico en su resaca del éxito internacional.
En un segundo punto, siguió el desarrollo de documentales interesantes tras el éxito del formato en los últimos años con ejemplos que van del estilo más clásico como Never Sleep Again hace un par de años al más cautivador de Jodorowsky’s Dune en 2013. Cerca del primero se mueve Crystal Lake Memories, larguísima colección de testimonios sobre Viernes 13. Y cercano del segundo, aunque más aún de títulos como Rewind this!se encuentra la mirada a la Cannon de Electric Bogaloo, segundo documental sobre el mismo tema ese año tras el más normalito The Go-Go Boys. Lamento, eso sí, no haber sido capaz de encontrar de ninguna de las maneras Lost soul, que ya solo por su prometedor tema -la historia del rodaje de La isla del Doctor Moreau noventera que era del mejor material enThe greatest Sci-Fi movies never made de David Hughes- hace que salive mientras sigo a su espera.
Otro tema que tuvo un buen desarrollo el año fue Lo Paternofilial con aproximaciones que van del lío monstruoso de When animal dreams y sus historias de pubertad y muerte a tratamientos cercanos al como The Canal, que hacía un buen batiburrilo con este y otros temas como el de las casas encantadas o las grabaciones -por si alguien no creía que se podían mezclar referencias a Sinistery Ringuen la misma película- que sirve, además, como espejo deformado de la que ha sido una de las estrellas este año: The Babadook. Película sobre la maternidad o sobre la protección a los niños o a saber qué, con un par de partes separadas que contentan y descontentan a sus espectadores y un impacto que a quien esto escribe no deja de sorprender ante una cinta que calificaría como más que correcta, notable incluso, pero sin cohetes.
– Por su parte, A Touch Of Unseen hablaría de las relaciones entre hermanas en un año poco fructífero para mis visionados asiáticos recientes, con apenas la esforzadamente complicada historia de asesinato en serie A record of sweet murder y una variante de la siempre socorrida historia de clases hechizadas con Mourning Grave, entre aquello que logra superar un poco el listón para ser recordada al menos un par de meses después de haberlas visto.-
Hablando de películas celebradas que mal no me han parecido pero tampoco de entre lo mejor del año: The Guest, que es una reinterpretación de las películas de stalker con unas referencias muy claras a los ochenta -aunque habrá quien las una más a las sobremesas de Antena 3- y que vuelve a incluir todo tipo de guiños y referencias a varios géneros, autores y momentos. Para quien esto escribe sigue siendo una propuesta superior a la media -algo que no entiendo cómo no pasa más con la media como la tenemos- pero, a la vez, con algunos rasgos de autocomplacencia que, espero, director y guionista sepan quitarse de encima, ¡que son mejores que eso!
Es curioso como se acaba considerando como terror cosas que muchas veces se limitan a bordearlo o jugar con esas ideas de lo que podemos considerar las fronteras entre el fantástico (de la ciencia ficción a la fantasía épica pasando por el horror, como si no hubiera habido interacciones entre todas ellas) y los géneros propios del negro (fundamentalmente aquellos con una mayor carga de acción como el thriller o el psicológico) de forma que de cuando en cuando podemos discutir si entrarían o no. Pasa este año con la fallida Cold in July y con la muy notable Blue Ruin, film a medio camino entre la tragedia griega y un capítulo perdido de Justified, con su estructura de obra de venganza que podría valer en cualquiera de sus campos.
Del mismo modo me pregunto si tendría sentido meter aquí la película Edge of tomorrow, una suerte de Día de la Marmota con batallas alienígenas. Pero, claro, de no hacerlo… ¿Cómo podría justificar la inclusión de una de las mejores películas que he visto este pasado año?
Me refiero a Coherence, a la que llegué un año tarde -creo- pero que fue una de las experiencias más interesantes del año, con ese juego de cometas pasando cerca de la tierra y juegos con realidades alternativas… si es que son eso. Muy recomendable.
Un acercamiento al cruce de realidades diferente -y de una calidad menor, claro, pero es que la comparación es del todo injusta- se da en The Frame, otro buen film al que le pasa un poco como a The Guest, es bueno y sabe unir muchos géneros diferentes, pero acaba dejando cierta sensación de que falta algo por que no es tan bueno como el anterior. O quizá está pensado para que primero prueben este y luego ya vayan a por el anterior, quién sabe.
El caso es que conocer las referencias acaba siendo parte de las tendencias del año, aunque no llegue a convertirse en un asunto temático. Lo hemos visto ya en algunas de las mencionadas y podría decirse también de Late Phases, película más que sólida cuando sabe apartarse de hacer un Bubba Ho-tep, como si la loca energía de la cinta fuera repliclable. Mientras se centra en la problemática -*cof*- de ser un veterano ciego en una casa de retiro con hombres lobos por los alrededores todo va bien.
Aunque sin duda la película que más necesita de haber visto antes otra es The town tha dreaded sundown, que juega con la película antigua quitándole sus interludios cómicos pero dejándole todo lo demás, de modo que es imposible de verla sin conocer la anterior. O quizá no imposible de ver pero sí de comprender. El diálogo que establece -explicitado en pantalla en muchas ocasiones- es tan directo que no creo que nadie que tenga fresca la antigua pueda llegar a gustar de esta, incluso sin contar ese pegote de final made in Hollywood que traiciona innecesariamente la memoria de la película que tanto se han ocupado de honrar.
Para un mejor acercamiento a lo hollywoodiense nada como Starry Eyes, mitad historia de secta satánica con claras resonancias cienciólogas, mitad explicación del hacer de todo para triunfar y, de la manera menos esperable dada la lenta cocción del espectador que emplea, una más que efectiva película sobre los deseos.
Aunque si ha habido una película que he disfrutado este año es la muy desprejuiciada Housebound, un divertimento que sabe que lo es y no le importa ir mezclando momementos más cómicos con otros de distintos géneros mientras cuenta la historia que realmente le interesa. No hay nada tan bueno como lograr que estas creaciones, que saben que no son una gran producción pero no por ello tienen que regodearse, se conviertan en una bomba autocontenida en marcha. Un año más, no es la mejor en lo técnico o artístico pero sí la que más me ha gustado.
Cierto es que me faltan películas por ver -Oculus, por ejemplo, convencido como estaba de que la estrenarían en cines- pero para hacer mi particular repaso al año creo que sirve. Y que ha quedado todo suficientemente claro.
Ahora ya que le sirva de algo a alguien, que es algo que dudo más.
[body_image width='717' height='538' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='25-things-you-should-start-doing-now-youre-25-205-body-image-1422622396.jpg' id='22803']The 25 is rusty. Apt, right? Photo via Lisbeth den Toom
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
As we
already told you, 25 is a hell of an age. Technically, you're still young—you're still an idiot, probably, you still wear skinny jeans, and it's still acceptable to spend Sundays eating cold pizza in your bed—but also you are not at all young. Maybe you found a gray hair. Maybe you have a wrinkle. Maybe you make a very slight, very quiet noise when you get up off a sofa. Either way: Death is getting closer. Can you hear that sound? That quiet, throbbing, gnawing sound?
That is the sound of oblivion, an oblivion you are staring directly into.
Despite your body aging—and your mind getting to the point where you're dancing in a club and you go, "What is this shit? What is this SHIT? I refuse to dance to this song. This isn't music, these are just
noises"—it's not all bad. While you will rightly mourn the lost first times of younger days—your first cigarette, your first drink, your first fuck—it would be totally illogical to think there is no novelty to growing up. And while no one's ever going to commission an entire series of articles based on people's first experiences of, say, enjoying ironing, the softer-focus novelties of your late 20s will come to fill in the gray areas of a life that to this stage has probably felt more like a series of flash grenades exploding in a nightclub than a meaningful journey.
Here are 25 things you'll genuinely start enjoying once you slam into the brick wall of 25.
1) Get Your Financial Shit Together
Hey, kids! It's your dad here, and today we're going to talk about why sometimes getting a loan to cover your debts is cheaper than constantly overdrafting your checking account and bitching about it! Later, I'm going to teach you the fine art of "actually opening bank statements to see if anything is fucked up with them," and in a bit we're going to closely watch some commercials for banks on TV to see if switching to another one might work out to be beneficial for you.
Then, to round off the day, we're going to have a serious chat about not owing our bank any loyalty just because we had a student account with them once. Doesn't that sound fun? Well, no: It sounds and is intensely boring, but the freedom from anxiety that results from the dull drudgery of the above can be fucking exhilarating. Having your financial shit together is way more fun than getting a text from your bank on the second day of the month telling you that your overdraft limit has been met.
2) Decide What Friends You Want to Have Some Memories With
At 25, you're about three years away from the infinite summer I like to call "The Summer Where Every Fucker You Know Gets Married." It is a summer of verandas and not swearing around elderly aunts and realizing that covertly doing coke around toddlers isn't a good idea. For you, it's going to be a tricky task, being around all that pleasantness and love, because look at you:
You are doomed to be alone.
Alone but for your friends, that is. At 25, you're straddling two sets of friends—those hazy, grew-up-with-them knuckleheads you used to hang around with at school, and actual adult friends you actually see every week and go to the pub with. You have a job now. You have shit to do. You have weddings to go to and banks to think about, and now that more than a quarter of your life has been dumped down the toilet, your time is a finite and precious resource. Do you really need to stay on especially good terms with your freshman college roommate?
The way I figure it, old people's homes in some distant floating space future in which we will all compost down into death are going to be
amazing: PlayStations, HBO shows beamed directly into our ocular nerves, endless Vines, us all remembering the 90s together until we die. When I am locked in the iron lung that will inevitably become my tomb, I want to be laughing and joking with my friends—my real friends, the ones it isn't a chore to be around—reminiscing about the cool shit we did in our 20s. So pick them now, and make some memories.
[body_image width='720' height='960' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='25-things-you-should-start-doing-now-youre-25-205-body-image-1422621801.jpg' id='22790']Tidy up when you take a shit, man. Photo via Flickr user Tony Newell
3) Learn Something New
In my early 20s, before I became a walking, moaning diabetes risk, I used to think the lamest thing in all of creation was grown-ass people picking up a new hobby via the medium of adult learning courses. What, you want to learn stuff? In your spare time? Neerrrrrrrrrrd.
But now I get it: I haven't learned anything new in a really long time, and it's fun to learn something on your own terms, without being lectured to from a podium. And here's another thing I do with every second of my fucking day:
look at a screen. So hell yeah I want to learn to, like, climb rocks, or keep butterflies, or play badminton. As long as I am looking at Twitter one less hour of my life, then maybe I will have a shot at being happy.
4) Listen to Your Parents
You're an adult now, and seeing as they can't ground you or chew you out for smoking, your parents are increasingly irrelevant—somewhere you go when you want a dinner, two old people who look a bit like you and keep calling to ask if you're eating your vegetables and making friends. And yeah: Your dad might be a bit boring on the surface ("There's only two things I like, son, and that's watching baseball and thinking about baseball"), but try getting him down to the bar and see how fun he is after three picklebacks. Not only will he be full of loads of stories about how he used to sleep around before he met your mom, he'll also be full of sage (if hokey) advice, plus he doesn't understand your world of Netflix and flash mobs and pen drives, so you'll feel way younger afterward. Get to know your parents. They're way cooler than you think.
5) Get Some Basic Home-Maintenance Skills
You know how the lights keep going off in your apartment? You know you can fix that yourself, right, without having to call the landlord? You just switch out the lightbulbs. Or replace a fuse, which is just swapping two very small things that you can buy from Home Depot. Assembling furniture without screwing a shelf on the wrong way around is so satisfying it might push you toward enlightenment—harps sound and angels sing when you put a plant pot on a small side table and the whole thing doesn't collapse and explode into flame.
6) Fucking Do Something You've Always Wanted to Do
I've always wanted to go to New York. "I've always wanted to go to New York," I tell people, wistfully, normally when they come back from New York. Do you know how modest and shitty a dream that is? I could do that right now. I could go to an airport right now and do this thing. It would cost, like, $2,000, and that's with excessive spending money for all the bagels I'm going to eat. If you've always wanted to do something, just fucking do it. You're 25. Who's going to stop you?
7) Be the Coolest Uncle or Auntie Possible
Maybe you have actually birthed a human child out of your body or that of another. If so, congratulations on having to be responsible for every remaining second of your life until you die. If not, just find the nearest younger cousin or kid nephew or something like that and be the absolute coolest uncle or auntie you can be.
Oh, what, your dad doesn't buy you Legos because you got a load for Christmas?
Well, guess who just got you some Legos, homie. Oh, what, your mom won't play Mario Kart with you because she's too busy doing everything else you require to stay alive? Well, guess who's about to beat you around Koopa Troopa Beach using Bowser, sucker. The goal is to make the kid like you more than he likes his actual parents, then breeze your way home as soon as he starts crying or taking a shit.
8) Do Something with Your Weekends
Netflix is kind of like smack if smack combined the not-having-to-move a whole lot with letting you watch all seven seasons of
The West Wing. The fact that Netflix programmed that "Are You Still There? You've Watched 100 Episodes of Prison Break in a Row and There Aren't Even That Many Episodes so You Must Have Looped Around and Watched Some Again" feature says it all: Soon, the streaming service will alert the authorities of your death if you log 60 continuous hours of The Office.
It's easy to lose a weekend to
Battlestar Galactica, and then another, and soon you'll be like, "Nah, I can't come out—I've got a season finale to get through," and then your friends stop calling, and then in five distant years people will mention your name and ask what happened to you and they will go, "Oh, you know. They just got really boring." This can happen, and your weekends are where it gets you. Go to art galleries. Go on a hike. Go anywhere you're not allowed to have your hideous, unwashed genitals just splayed out there like smashed ham.
9) Learn to Cook at Least One Decent Meal
If you can cook exactly one 8/10 meal, you can get people to sleep with you. (If you're good-looking, you can get away with that meal being 7/10—a decent steak, or a stir fry that isn't made with burger meat.) Here's how it works: Invite them to your house, open a bottle of wine, cook really flamboyantly in front of them, make like a pie or a tagine or guacamole—or an apple crumble:
People will fuck you for apple crumble—then just immediately have sex with them straight after. It is a basic human reaction to want to bone when you watch someone turn a pile of cooking apples, butter, and oats into a delicious crumble.
[body_image width='683' height='1024' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='25-things-you-should-start-doing-now-youre-25-205-body-image-1422621012.jpg' id='22786']Beer chicken is good because it requires you to drink a little bit of beer first. Photo via Flickr user James Savage
10) Learn How to Roast the Shit Out of a Chicken
Take a chicken. Rub some of that fancy salt that comes in a box on it. Probably some olive oil. Cut two lemons into quarters and shove them up the cavity where its ass used to be. A bit of thyme if you have it. Roast it for somewhere between an hour-and-a-half and two hours. Boom. You just roasted the shit out of a chicken. The skin is crispy and the meat is delicious. Flip it over and dig the
oysters out. Eat a thigh like you're a caveman. Shred some leftover breast meat and make Singapore noodles for your dinner tomorrow. You just roasted a chicken, dude! You're amazing!
11) Never Let Your Battery Die
When you are in your early 20s your dragged-through-a-hedge, late-to-work, I-went-out-on-a-Thursday-and-didn't-sleep-at-all unreliability is a cool personality trait. You're the quirky lead in the teen movie of your life! You're like Zooey Deschanel, if Zooey Deschanel woke up in some stranger's dorm and brushed her teeth with her finger to make the taste of asshole go away! You just ordered Domino's to the office! You're so fucking
young!
But when you slam into 25, bosses lose their sense of humor about you turning up at 11 AM smelling like rimming and Ouzo. Here's a tip: Charge your phone to full capacity before you go on a night out. To do that, you will need two chargers: one for home and one for work. This $10 investment means that when you wake up with a banging headache—and, like, you're on a beach—you can text your excuses to your boss, answer any where-the-fuck-are-you phone calls, get back to emails so your peers don't think you're a complete douche, and get a cab to take you to your apartment for clean pants and then immediately to work. You're so 25, man! You're still making the same terrible, irresponsible party decisions, but you're totally owning them!
12) Start Editing Your Past
By the time you've hit 25, you'll have done some stuff in your youth that will render you stiff and puce with embarrassment: You'll have been kicked out of a bar. You'll have genuinely liked Evanescence. You'll have been the worst.
So start editing those bad bits out. You know that guy you knew from school who, every time you go to the bar, reminds everyone about that time you couldn't do a chin-up in PE class? Let's get rid of him. Love letters you wrote as a teenager? Burn them. The gap year you took? Erase it from your resume. All those shitty clothes you got a little bit too fat for two years ago but don't quite have the heart to throw away because they remind you of your lithe, knife-between-the-teeth youth? Fire them into the fucking sun.
13) ...But Go Back and Laugh at Your Youth
You used to have an eyebrow ring, for fuck's sake
. You would stay up until 4 AM writing a novel that you will never show anyone. You bought a crushed bouillon cube thinking it was hash. Dig out your old poetry journal or MySpace profile or something and laugh at the wreck you once were. In a way, it's a fucking marvel you made it this far.
14) Realize That Getting a Ton of Groceries Is Cool
Pre-25, most of my supermarket experiences involved getting one bag of supermarket cookies and four jars of those baby sweetcorn things. Maybe a multipack of Slim Jims? I don't know. Do we need ketchup?
Open your eyes to the fact that going on a food-shopping rampage is amazing. You know how you go to a grown-up's house and they have a bunch of different things in their fridge, not just two different kinds of mustard, Bloody Mary mix, and an onion? You could have that at home every day, if you just go to the supermarket once a week and get shitloads of food—a massive multipack of chicken, some stuff on sale that you might freeze, vegetables, a big pack of yogurt, toilet paper, spices, and some frozen fries you will forget to take out and will inevitably go as a soggy mass into the trash. A real big shopping trip can rock your world. Until you've bought three four-packs of tuna because "they are a really good price," you've not really lived.
[body_image width='768' height='1024' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='25-things-you-should-start-doing-now-youre-25-205-body-image-1422621158.jpg' id='22787']That's you, that is. Photo via Flickr istolethetv
15) Save Animals or Something
Even if you're just donating $5 a month to charity, you should start making your impact on the earth slightly less shitty than your previous 25 years have been. Like: Cocaine destroys swaths of rainforest. Every time you flush a toilet you piss away almost four gallons of clean water. You, personally, are worse than an old fridge full of aerosol cans, on fire, strapped to a nuclear submarine, in the Niger Delta. Rescue a cat or something. Volunteer. Find a charity you actually give a shit about and find the best way to donate your money or time to it. You've spent 25 years being a selfish fuckhead; treat yourself to a new type of happiness that can only be attained through not being an asshole.
16) Start Giving Change to the Homeless
Next time someone asks for a bit of change and you have a bit of change, just give them that change, dude. Don't think about what they are going to spend it on. Don't replay those scare stories you hear about the homeless scamming idiots like you at 50 cents a throw and then retiring to their villa in Grenada. There's a guy on the pavement with a shivering dog because he does not have a house with a chair in it that he can sit in instead. It costs about $1 to be briefly decent to him.
17) Learn How to Live with Someone Else
Wipe crumbs off your surfaces, do your washing up promptly, aim your piss into the actual toilet, and—as your office manager probably had to remind you with a passive-aggressive all-office email this week—
if you take a heinous shit in the toilet, flush it away. It is your shit. Who the fuck are you if you don't feel obligated to flush away your own shit?
18) Start Doing Your Weird Sex Stuff While Sober
Youthful doorway sex is all well and good, but until this point it's probably been fueled by the
kind of adrenaline that only really hits when you've been drinking like you've been fired face-first into the sea out of a cannon. Sex after 25 is great: You know
what you like, you know what you don't like, you know what you can get away with, you're really fucking good at it, and you've built up a
decent enough wad of bedding to relax on afterward.
[body_image width='1024' height='768' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='25-things-you-should-start-doing-now-youre-25-205-body-image-1422621324.jpg' id='22788']Damn, gurl, you got any room on that clothesline for me? Photo via Flickr user portogallo2007
19) Look After Your Body
You know how you're tired all the time and lethargic? There are vitamins that can help that. You know that weird clicky shoulder you have? A sort of dull click, the shoulder makes. A sort of
thup. Get a doctor to look at it! Maybe you just need a really good massage, or maybe you have a rare and undiagnosed shoulder disease. A doctor can tell you that thing.
Because it turns out that Hulk Hogan was right about taking your vitamins—in a way, wizened old men in leotards are the smartest dudes alive, which makes it so weird that they choose to dress like sex offenders. Anyway: Tighten up, catch a few Zs, eat a multivitamin now and again. You'll feel great for it.
20) Own One Nice Thing You Would Save from a Fire if Your House Burned Down
Pre-25, the only things I owned that were worth saving from a house fire were this one good pair of socks I had that have since developed a hole, and maybe, like, my passport? I don't know. My keys? Would I need my keys if my house burned down? I don't know. Now I own a really nice set of knives. There I'd be: no socks, no passport, house burning down in the back, walking away, smiling with my knives. (If I had to pick just one, I'd pick the big knife.)
21) Get a Job You Like
Obviously the world is in ruins and most people are lucky to have a job at
all, let alone one they like, but at 25 you are at that sweet spot of
not really having a lot of responsibility but also having remnants of
that youthful "Fuck it, I'm going to Thailand for six months"
attitude you once had. If you're ever thinking of switching careers, or
going back to school, or packing it all in and going freelance, or
moving countries, now is about the best time to do it.
22) Give a Shit About Politics
Even if you're wrong, it's good to push yourself out of the fog of ignorance and start, like, watching the news and understanding some of it. Maybe you've been interested in politics for years—if you have ever smoked a joint in the same room as a Che Guevara poster, then that counts—but it's time that you step up your game.
It's actually really buoying to have an informed opinion about something, especially when you win an argument in the bar just because you took the time to read an entire article in
the
New Yorker. So read some pamphlets. Get mad about stuff. Join a march, if you feel you have to. Give a shit.
[body_image width='922' height='1229' path='images/content-images/2015/01/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/30/' filename='25-things-you-should-start-doing-now-youre-25-205-body-image-1422621951.jpg' id='22793']Art. Photo via Flickr user Klovivi
23) Stop Trying to Be Your Heroes Doing a load of drugs and staying up late noticing things won't make you Hunter S Thompson. Talking really quickly about feet doesn't make you Quentin Tarantino. You're a fully formed person, now. You're locked in. Stop saving up to buy the exact same leather jacket Drake wore in the "Fuckin' Problems" video.
24) Brunch
You're going to get really into brunch. It's not a real meal, but as your nights out get shorter and your hangovers get longer, you're going to get really fucking into brunch. Then you'll complain about brunch later.
It's the cir-cle of liiiifffeeee...
25) Embrace the Novelty of Growing Up
There's that whole theory about how every cell in your body is replaced over each seven-year stretch of your life: all your bones, all your veins, that weird bump you have on your forehead. It's sort of true, sort of false, but the analogy is pretty neat: You are a different person, wholly, from that rail-thin 18-year-old you used to be, with that mop of hair, remember, blinking your fresh young eyes against the bright morning sun of hope.
Think about it like this: If you're 25 now, you were 18 the year the first iPhone came out. Now look at iPhones! You used to be an iPhone, and now you're an iPhone 6! You have a camera on the front
and the back now! You can capture slow-motion video! You are a lot wider than you used to be, but weirdly also flatter!
It's kind of good, that change. Unless you committed a series of murders or something, you are a better person now than you were then. You are fuller and better-rounded and more comfortable with who you are. You've probably got a better haircut or draw your eyebrows on better. There's a high chance also that you wear better jeans. That's something to be celebrated, right? You're not young-young any more—you'll never be the person who invents new slang ever again; nobody will ever refer to you as a "wunderkind" when you do something well, since you're just expected to be competent—but that's not a bad thing.
A lot of people fear age: They'll never do things for the first time again, fear that the urgent, butterfly-rush of love will never strike them in the stomach again, that they will fade into mediocrity, their life increasingly becoming one long trip to an IKEA.
But it's not like that. Aging is about finding new things you love rather than desperately clinging on to the old things you used to. Don't be one of those shitheads in the Cereal Café in their pajamas talking about how much they miss the old
Ghostbusters.
Wizards of the Coast has revealed one of the characters in the new Magic: the Gathering – Fate Reforged set is a trans woman. Alesha, Who Smiles at Death is the veryfirst trans woman in the game’s lore. In a story titled, “The Truth of Names,” Alesha leads her warriors into battle. Weaved into the tale between gory descriptions of death and combat is a subtle story about identity and finding who you are.
Alesha’s clan, the Mardu, believe that a name is something earned by battle and glory. If you amass enough tales of personal glory, then you earn the right to name yourself. Since the Mardu are principally made up of Orcs and Goblins, there are plenty of Backbreakers, Headsmashers, and Skullcleavers. When it came time for Alesha to choose her name, she went in a drastically different direction.
Some of them, mostly orcs, boasted of their ancestors’ deeds and spoke of their pride in adopting those ancestors’ names. She had been so different—only sixteen, a boy in everyone’s eyes but her own, about to choose and declare her name before the khan and all the Mardu.
The khan had walked among the warriors, hearing the tales of their glorious deeds. One by one, they declared their new war names, and each time, the khan shouted the names for all to hear. Each time, the horde shouted the name as one, shaking the earth.
Then the khan came to Alesha. She stood before him, snakes coiling in the pit of her stomach, and told how she had slain her first dragon. The khan nodded and asked her name.
“Alesha,” she said, as loudly as she could. Just Alesha, her grandmother’s name.
“Alesha!” the khan shouted, without a moment’s pause.
And the whole gathered horde shouted “Alesha!” in reply. The warriors of the Mardu shouted her name.
The way in which her name choice is presented in the story is understated, and refreshingly so. Alesha’s trans identity isn’t the focal point of the story. It isn’t made out to be a big deal. To her khan, and to the Mardu, they accept her for who she says she is, simply because she believes in her identity so much that she’d risk her life to demonstrate it.
Characters like Alesha are a welcome change to a genre of games which have a reputation for being problematic. While strong, empowered women have long been a staple of the Magic: the Gathering lore, it is definitely incredibly encouraging to see Wizards of the Coast trying to tackle diversity so matter-of-factly, which I believe suits a lot of the target demographic. As someone who adopted her chosen name from a Magic: the Gathering character, I am excited to see where Alesha, Who Smiles at Death goes from here.
Jessica “Who Smiles at Cats” Lachenal doesn’t like talking in the third person, so she hopes this has been as awkward for you as it has been for her. But, if you happen to like the words that she writes, check out her website at hipsterchick.net, or any of her writing on The Bold Italic, Autostraddle, Model View Culture, and here at The Mary Sue. She can also be found on Twitter: @jeslach.
The days of record collecting before the internet were days
when you knew what you knew and you had what you had. Music spread from dealer
to dealer by way of tapes—or it didn't, in the case of collectors who
considered themselves to be the
most
exalted
gatekeepers and holders of occult knowledge and therefore had less
fun and communicated with fewer people.
That's the way it was in the fall of 1982, when I started
buying 60s punk/garage compilations as a 17-year-old in Sweden. My friends and
I raided Ginza, the biggest of the Swedish
cut-out
mail order houses, for cheapo copies of compilations like Nuggets and the Pebbles series along with albums by the Seeds, the
Sonics, the Chocolate Watch Band, and the Standells. My friends, who were older
than me, provided context for the albums (So
you think you are a punk kid? You know nothing!
) and motivated us to form a
band playing Count Five, Seeds, and Kim Fowley covers.
Then, in 1984, the first two volumes of the Back from the
Grave comp series showed up in the local import record store, and they were so much better than anything we'd heard we were baffled by them. It was like the
first time you hear the Pagans or Pharoah Sanders or the Wipers. Me and my
snotty little pals hadn't heard of any of the records or bands on those compilations, and were blown away by this constant stream of what could only
be described as sacred sounds from the USA. Even to this day, most rock and
punk bands I've heard can't match the intensity of a BFTG track.
Every Back from the Grave record begins with its jacket art,
and it always tells the same sort of story: A bunch of zombie punks are reanimated
to rid the world of the squares and douchebags that have turned it into an ugly
place to live. It's a revenge fantasy, the cartoonish destruction of the last
few decades of American music and culture by the spirits of the past, and it's
hard not to take the side of the axe-wielding zombie punkers.
Nowadays, in an era when everything that has ever been sung,
spoken, ukuleled, painted, collaged, or crafted has been recycled,
recontextualized, cool-branded, and downloaded, I often feel that the old
world wants some sort of vengeance on the new. The mass market is full of the reverberations
of bits and pieces of the culture of the past that come to the present watered-down,
commodified, regurgitated. The Urban Outfitters version, the shmuckification of the
counterculture one retro T-shirt at a time. The garage punk zombie teens on the
Back from the Grave LP jackets know all this, and they are pissed off. Tim
Warren, the man who has been compiling these genius assemblages of primitive
American shit music for the last 30 years, is pissed off too.
Back from the Grave
Volume 1
came out in the fall of 1983. Tim and his label Crypt Records
have been pyromaniacs of garage punk enthusiasm ever since, preaching a
primitive mid-60s punk rock gospel around the globe, inspiring people to form
bands, collect records, get laid, and get drunk, all in a manner that runs
counter to the normal, hermeneutical traditions of record collecting. This month,
Tim is releasing Back from the Grave volumes nine and ten after a 17-year gap
since volume eight. After that last one Tim used to say that he didn't think there
were enough killer records out there for another volume. Well, he was wrong: The
two latest comps are some of the best collections of 60s garage punk I've ever
heard.
BFTG releases are like an amazing collage, a great gumbo, or your girlfriends' sexiest outfit. Or, for that matter, the best mixtape you ever made.
Now, I've listened to plenty of garage comps in my day. There are
some great ones, but BFTG is its own thing, like how the Cramps are their own
thing. When Tim puts the obscure tracks together in a sequence the sum is much
greater than the parts: Each consecutive crazed rock 'n' roll record hits the
garage-punk sweet spot of our collective frontal lobe more precisely. BFTG releases are like an amazing collage, a great gumbo, or your
girlfriends' sexiest outfit. Or, for that matter, the best mixtape you ever
made.
Some compilation albums
work,
and some don't, and it seems very difficult to discern which components direct
the work in one direction or another. I've been spilling a constant stream of
BFTG comps on the turntable for most of my adult life, and you just can't fuck with them. They're like Picasso's
Guernica or a perfect sausage and
peppers hero. They are art that is primeval and perfect. Compare them to
Jackson Pollock—it's in the
pour. If
you or I poured paint it would look like some asshole poured some paint. But
when Pollock poured paint it became amazing and beautiful. The
pour of Back from the Grave volumes nine
and ten is mind-boggling.
So, where do the tunes come from? It's an old story: In the
wake of the frenzy of Beatlemania and the British Invasion circa 1964, tens of
thousands of American teenagers formed bands, some of them rooted in previous
teenage frenzies like hot rod music or surf music or frat rock. (A parallel
history could no doubt be written on how the arrival of the Beatles prevented "
Surfin' Bird" by the
Trashmen from being a number-one record in the USA, but that's punk conspiracy
theory turf.) It was an act of cultural imitation that goes three layers deep:
A black blues guy had his jams imitated by foppy Brits in Carnaby Street
clothes who were then in turn imitated by white American teenagers draped in
Woolworths clobber (imitating the Carnaby Street fashion, natch).
This resulted in musical alchemy. American mid-60s teenage
garage punk has a primeval gut-wrench rev that blasts through your speakers,
proving once and for all that rock 'n' roll is a poignant art form blacksmithed
in the USA. There is some sort of oddly spiritual connection linking
the visceral sound blasts
directly to
black rock 'n' roll, blues, and R&B, even as the teen bands imitating the
Rolling Stones or the Pretty Things or the Dave Clark Five have no direct
knowledge of the artists imitated by said foppy Brits.
Some argue that the first
time the word
punk as a musical term
saw the light of day was in Dave Marsh's 1971 article in
Creem magazine. Well, the term was in frequent use in the late 1960s,
as a slew of collectors and rock fanzine writers were eagerly hoarding the
crude, primitive, and genius 45s left by the legions of American teen bands in
the wake of the British Invasion. This style was called punk rock: rock made by
teen punks.
The launch of the Back from the Grave series was the final
stage of a three-step rocket: In 1972, the illustrious rock thinker/rock feeler
Lenny Kaye convinced Elektra Records to let him compile and issue a double LP
compilation of American mid 60s one-hit and no-hit wonders. The comp was called
Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, and its cultural importance
is only now starting to be understood. Lenny was one of the first people to
realize that truly progressive (no, not in the hippie sense) rock 'n' roll gnosis
occurred on the margins, and would reverberate for decades to come.
Nuggets was not a commercial success,
but like the Velvet Underground, like the Stooges, like the Ramones, a cultural
landscape shifted in its wake, as the chain reaction resulting from the
ownership and blissful enjoyment of this cultural artifact came to resonate and
ripple in a myriad of ways. Mere months after the release of
Nuggets, bands from around the globe had
formed explicitly to explore this landscape, fumbling in the wilderness for
primitive American rock 'n' roll sounds to scratch an omnipresent itch. In
Australia, the Saints; in France, the Dogs; in the USA, the Droogs.
The significance of
Nuggets has to be understood in the
context of the past, because digital mass communication
has fucked up our notions of obscurity and how information is disseminated. Back
then, even the biggest singles didn't stay in the shops for long, albums,
except huge hits, went off shelves rather quickly, and the taste-maker
know-it-all record shop hadn't reared its Levi's 505–draped ass. For Lenny Kaye
to convince Elektra top banana Jac Holzman that it was a good idea to gather a
number of relatively obscure, mostly non-hit records and repackage them within
a context is a mind-boggling achievement. According to a pre-punk zine interview
with Kaye, there were numerous tracks that they wanted to include but couldn't
because it wasn't clear who owned the rights, but what ended up being
Nuggets is still awe-inspiring.
Nuggets begat the late and
great Greg Shaw's compilation series Pebbles, a series which wasn't
particularly worried about clearing rights. Shaw, who I'd argue is the Johnny
Appleseed of American punk, had published rock 'n' roll fanzines since the mid 1960s. His
Mojo Navigator appeared in the middle of the San Francisco rock
scene in 1966. By 1969 it had evolved into a retro-rock connoisseur bible,
exploring the lore and history of primitive American musics ranging from
rockabilly to garage punk, alongside lengthy and insightful excursions into
marginal British Invasion sounds. Bomp became a record label, a professional
rock zine, and a distribution outlet for the sounds that came to be called punk
rock. From 1978 on, Shaw compiled and released the Pebbles garage punk
anthology series.
The release of Pebbles was timed perfectly with the boost in
interest in all things 60s, a snacky side dish to the post-punk skinny tie
power-pop entree of 1979/1980. Punk-era ears had gotten people used to raunch,
and the avalanches of indie 45s had advanced the momentum of obscurity-seeking.
The musical language of 60s garage punk wasn't as familiar then as it is now,
either. To most, the 60s was pop and choruses and ringing Rickenbackers; there
wasn't a distinction between the cutesy stuff and gruntiest and most primitive.
This is certainly reflected in the Pebbles comps, as is Greg Shaw's personal
taste, with its baffling adoration of melody sitting in counterpoint to garage
punk raunch. Following Pebbles, numerous other
garage-punk/garage-psych compilations started mushrooming by the early 1980s.
These were mostly rudimentary in execution. Information
about the bands was limited, most of them were psychedelia-themed, and many of
the early 60s comps would mix in lighter Strawberry Alarm Clock-type bands with
the teen punks. Cue Tim:
I started putting together cassettes of
cool non-reissued 60s punk 45s and one day said, "Fuck it! Put out a
record!" I wanted to piss on all the lame-o comps that mixed together
psych noodling with garage and proto-bubblegum and I wanted to concentrate on
the primal teen-band gronk. My pal Mort Todd put together the cover art from my
pathetic scrawling "rough art," and then I'm about to put it out and
I needed a label name and I saw my Tales from the Crypt comics and said "OK!"
I'd been wanting to do
a 60s punk comp for a while, not that I had the greatest of collections as I'd
only just started finding original 45s two years prior thanks to Billy Miller
hipping me to Vic Figlar's auction lists and Goldmine magazine, but cos I'd
been buying just about EVERY 60s garage punk comp LP and been disappointed with
the bulk of them. You'd have two or three great tracks and 13 crap ones plus a
horrendous "Groovy 60s" sleeve. No attitude, no anger, no snot—and
attitude, anger and snot is PRECISELY what 60s punk is all about—so BOOM: HIRE
MORT!! So I scawled together this ruff sketch of a graveyard scene with the
gravestone and the zombie 60s punk kid shoveling dirt atop a bunch of CRAP
albums and handed it to Mort and he expanded upon it with the zombie guy and
gal crawling out of the ground, the bats, etc.!
Mort Todd:
I moved to New
York City at 17, right out of high school, and immediately got started in
producing comics and video. I got together with a few new friends, including Dan
Clowes and Rick Altergott, and started publishing comics. Our first release was
Psycho Comics #1. We had a launch party at the legendary Club 57 at St. Mark's
Place and I got Tim, who had recently moved to NYC, to DJ. I drew a poster to
promote the party featuring zombies dancing around a bonfire of burning Psycho
Comics, and that certainly inspired Tim for the Back from the Grave album
covers. For the first few covers he would give me a rough sketch with doodles
of all kinds of hateful things happening to hippies by the garage punk zombies.
I'd work from the sketches and amp them up a bit. I can only think of one time
he had me change something on the cover and that was Grave 4. I had a hippie chick skateboarding in front of the Batmobile, about
to get hit. Tim had me change it to a roller skater, which did make more sense
as skateboarding was cool while the kind of people who roller-boogied were more
worthy of ridicule.
"Attitude, anger and snot is PRECISELY what 60s punk is all about" –Tim Warren
It's been 33 years since the first Back from the Grave, and
five decades since these sounds were first etched on wax, but they still sound fresh,
the lyrical wounds still raw. For collectors and compilers, it seems like there
will always be gold in them thar hills of the 60s punk scene, always new bands
and songs to discover and digest.
There's something comforting about BFTG's enduring power.
The teenagers who made that music had tapped into something great, and my
teenaged self recognized that ineffable thing two decades later. Its power
endures, while the pop cultural dreck produced in the following decades is chugging
steadily toward oblivion. The 60s zombie punks on the comp covers will never
die, and they'll go on decapitating and burying their imitators and descendants
for a long, long time.
Video editor Joseph Rubino got the genius idea of stitching together 60 songs of different genres that all have “whoa-oh-oh” choruses, from 2006 to 2015. The result is depressing.
You might remember that earlier this month, someone did the same thing, but with country music. Collectively, this is the sound of music as a product, created to be sold, and to help lubricate the selling of other products.
Not to make too much of a pop music trope, but it’s interesting that it’s so crowd-focused. These whoa-oh-ohs are communal; it’s what a 13-year-old might imagine a party to sound like. Maybe this just makes it easier for the DJ playing them to get a crowd hyped — there’s already a party happening, you’re just joining in.
Or maybe [exhales doobie smoke] it’s music perfectly suited for our social media era. Much like the studio audience in television, it’s designed to create a false sense of company. It alleviates a certain type of loneliness. You get the feeling of participating without having to participate.
You can join a group of people by turning on Spotify, while sitting alone in your room and thumbing down through the infinite void of your Facebook feed, viewing photos of other people ostensibly having fun, while never actually needing to risk leaving your room.
When a breed becomes the latest doggy hotness they star in more mutt combos, like the semi-recent wave of Chihuahua and Corgi combos making the dog world a shorter and stockier place.
These mixes of popular breeds are sure to get noticed at the dog park, but what about those less popular or unfairly stigmatized breeds?
Apparently they look even more spectacular when they come together, and when the bully and the weenie combine the offspring is a thing of bizarre beauty.
Meet Rami, the Pit Bull Terrier-Dachshund combo, and one of the cutest/creepiest looking canines I’ve ever seen! Rami has a head that's probably caused more than a few faceplants, and with his interesting body shape and fascinating face it's not surprising that his story has gone viral.
Rami is available for adoption through Georgia's Moultrie Colquitt County Humane Society, and his unique appearance has made him a big hit on their Facebook page, where you can see videos of Rami running around and pics of Rami getting a bath- just like a normal dog! -Via BuzzFeed
If you're Robert, chances are you're a hairstylist; Amy, a waiter. And if you always planned on becoming a songwriter, you're probably named Richie, Billy or Stella.
That's according to "Profession Vs. Names," an fascinating interactive web of relationships between names and jobs developed by Pittsburgh data-design company InfoCaptor. Based on app-maker Verdant Labs' analysis of public records, the visualization encompasses 2.5 million people and their listed jobs.
Click on the interactive below and point at a name, and the visualization displays connections to its related occupations — mousing over 'Hanna' links to 'journalist,' for example. Read More
How much difference can a lab coat make? How about a doctor's coat, or a painter's coat? They're all the same coat – or at least they were all the same coat during an experiment conducted in 2012. But researchers discovered the way we're dressed can change the way we act, or even the things we are able to do.
Suddenly everyone’s talking about Boko Haram and the massacres it’s committing in Northern Nigeria.
There are two reasons for this: First, Boko is making some genuinely scary gains, cleansing the flatlands south of Lake Chad of any community it suspects of disloyalty, burning Churches and killing Christian villagers on the Cameroon border, and pushing against the provincial capital, Maiduguri—not with suicide bombings or quick raids, but a sustained conventional assault.
They’ve withdrawn for now, but it won’t be their last attack on Maiduguri. Boko is getting stronger. The attacks will continue, increasing in scale and skill, and eventually, they may well take Maiduguri. Although it’s kind of naïve to talk about BK (I mean Boko, not the Home of the Whopper) “attacking” or “taking” Maiduguri. It’s their home turf, and there’s plenty of evidence that a lot of the people who count in that part of the world are backing BK all the way.
So yeah, the military situation is worth discussing. But that’s not the only reason Boko is suddenly being mentioned by people who couldn’t find Maiduguri on a map. This other reason is the old military/persuasive strategy called distraction. Boko turned out to be a very useful distraction, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. Suddenly a lot of Leftie bloggers used it, after their first strategy, which was “Pity the Poor Jihadis”, failed to win hearts and minds. When they realized the “poor, troubled mass murderers” take wasn’t the ticket, they switched to Boko as a way of diverting everyone’s attention: “Why, O whyyyy doesn’t anyone care as much about the victims of Boko Haram as they do about those dead (and ideologically suspect) Frenchies?”
The rest bring up what seems like a good question. But not an honest one. Nope, a very sleazy, disingenuous, belated question. I should know; I’ve been trying to get people interested in massacred Africans for what feels like half my life. And you know who was NEVER interested? Those same jihadi-sucking lefties who are now claiming to be so concerned with Boko’s victims.
I’ve been trying to get somebody to pay attention to black African victims of Sahel jihadi massacres day in day out, with about as much success as an English major standing on the corner waving a giant sign advertising a new furniture store. Here’s a sample—an article I did on Boko Haram back in March, 2013:
A few days ago, a suicide bomber got on a luxury commuter bus in Northern Nigeria and blew himself up, along with 60 people who were heading home from work.
It didn’t get much publicity. African casualties rarely do, especially when there’s a depressing religious angle. The suicide bomber came from the Northern Nigerian Islamist group “Boko Haram.” The name is interesting: “Boko” comes from the English word “book,” as pronounced by the Hausa, the biggest northern ethnic group. “Haram” (“forbidden”) is an Arabic word, the Wahhabis’ favorite word of all. When people talk about “Northern Nigeria” they mean “Muslim Nigeria.” There are three big divisions in the country: The Muslim/Hausa North, the Christian/Igbo South, and the Yoruba West. (The Yoruba are the only big group that’s mixed, with Christians and Muslims). Boko Haram blew up those buses because the people on them were going to an Igbo/Christian neighborhood of Kano, a Muslim/Northern city.
That’s already more than most squeamish Westerners want to know. “Ah, it’s religious…” is about all they need to hear before settling back into their comfy stances. Conservatives figure it’s just one more proof that all Muslims are crazy. The left mumbles “Islamophobia” and tries to change the subject to Palestine. So from left to right on your radio dial, there’s not a lot of what my social-studies teacher called “hunger for knowledge.”
Damn, I’m sick of being right. But that last paragraph of the quote really does sum up online attitudes, in 2015 as much as it did two years ago. My article got politely ignored by the same people who are whining now that nobody pays attention to those poor, poor Africans. I’ve been trying to get some attention for the bodies piling up along the southern edge of the Sahel for more than a decade, and if you ask me, there’s even less interest in murdered black Africans from the left than from the right. That may seem weird; you’d expect the Left to have more compassion, right? Yeah, but the thing is, they invested all their compassion capital in Islam and just plain don’t have any left over for Africans, especially the ones killed by…uh, Muslim jihadis. See, the US Left just recently got around to ditching Israel and hugging Muslims—all Muslims, including the Sunni jihadi assholes who have been murdering black Africans.
The big pivot was Israel/Palestine, so suddenly all Muslims were Palestinians—victims, in other words. Well, that’s crap. Palestine is a very unusual, atypical corner of the Muslim world. There’s a whole latitude, around ten degrees north, where Islam is the aggressor, and black Africans are the victims.
But asking people who’ve just made one big U-turn to make another, to care about black African victims of Muslim jihadi massacres of black Africans—well, that would be like asking a 1980 Chrysler LeBaron to make a two U-turns in a row, in a downtown alley: Hopeless.
I’ve tried writing about the pattern of Sahel/brown/Muslim aggression against Southern/black/”Kaffir” cultures—in Sudan, in Nigeria, in the Central African Republic, in Mali (oh God, don’t get me started on Glenn Greenwald and Mali), in Chad, in Cote d’Ivoire…and right across that line that wavers around ten degrees north of the Equator, right across Africa.
I can go on and on about the racism of Sahel Muslim raiding cultures, the Sudanese atrocities, the Janjaweed chanting “You are black, you are ugly” at the villagers they’re raping and burning; the way that “abeed” is used in many Sahel cultures to mean both “black” and “slave”; but none of America’s anti-Fox bloggers want to know. They committed to that turn down Anti-Islamophobia Alley, and they’re gonna gun it to the end. Careers are involved here, and that makes for a heavy foot on the gas and no turns.
The info is out there, if anybody wanted it. Has been for over a decade. It was back in 2004 that Amnesty published a report on the flat-out monstrous racism of Sahel Muslim militias against people they saw as “abeed,” black Africans fit only to be slaves:
“During an attack on the village of Disa in June last year, Arab women accompanied the attackers and sang in praise of the government and scorning black villagers. According to an African chief quoted in the report, the singers said, ‘The blood of the blacks runs like water, we take their goods and we chase them from our area and our cattle will be in their land…The power of (Sudanese President Omer Hassan) al-Bashir belongs to the Arabs and we will kill you until the end, you blacks, we have killed your God.
“The chief said that the Arab women also racially insulted women from the village, saying: ‘You are gorillas, you are black and you are badly dressed.’
“The Janjaweed have abducted women for use as sex slaves, in some cases breaking their limbs to prevent them escaping, as well as carrying out rapes in their home villages, the report said. The militiamen ‘are happy when they rape. They sing when they rape and they tell that we are just slaves and that they can do with us how they wish,’ a 37-year-old victim, identified as A, is quoted as saying in the report, which was based on over 100 statements from women in the refugee camps in neighboring Chad…”
And you can find similar accounts of Sahel/Muslim cruelty toward Southern black peoples dating back to 1870.
But as I’ve discovered, not many people want to know. If you look at the links to each of the African countries I named a few paragraphs up, you’ll see a sad record of all the times I tried to get people interested in what light-skinned Muslim invaders from warlike Sahel cultures were doing to non-warlike black farming cultures to the south. Know what I got? Crickets.
That’s one reason Boko Haram crept up so stealthily on what you might call mainstream consciousness. Easy to sneak up on someone when they’re going all out to pretend they can’t see you.
Boko has snuck up so successfully that they’re now the big power in the northeastern corner of Nigeria, and by the time this is published, they may own a chunk of Maiduguri. In a place as corrupt and cruel as Nigeria, the elite, the people who matter, could shrug as long as Boko was just killing villagers and burning little market towns. But when they threaten a place like Maiduguri, which is inhabited by real people—rich people, connected people—that’s a sign the sleazy string-pullers have lost control of their puppet, and this Frankenstein’s monster/Pinocchio is out of control.
Boko Haram is what you get, if you play sleazy games for centuries, keeping the people of Northern Nigeria poor, isolated, paranoid, and pious for the benefit of the local elite and their international sponsors. What we’re calling “Northern Nigeria” was a grim chunk of real estate long before the Brits came along—a world where slave raids were the favorite pastime, sometimes against other Sahel people but pursued with particular delight against the “blacks” to the South and toward the coasts.
The core of Boko Haram’s power comes from Borno province, dominated by a people called the Kanuri.
The Kanuri have always been considered a grim people, even by the other northern Nigerian tribes, the Hausa and Fulani (who are not exactly bleeding hearts themselves). The German explorer Heinrich Barth, who wandered all over this dry plain south of Lake Chad in the mid-19th century, found the Kanuri pretty tough going: “[Barth] preferred the dispositions of Hausas and Fulanis to Kanuris, calling the former cheerful and vivacious, the latter dour.”
The Kanuri sultanate of Bornu was among the few the Fulani jihadis couldn’t conquer. There was no mercy to be given or expected on either side in this long war:
“Early in the 19th century, when the Fulani scholar Usman dan Fodio led the jihad that brought much of central Sudan under his control, he was unable to conquer Bornu. His brilliant son, Muhammed Bello, fared no better. Nor had Bornu been able to overthrow dan Fodio. For much of the century, the two kingdoms alternated between tense détente and slave raids into each other’s territory. If either kingdom had managed to defeat the other, the vanquished would have become the conquerors’ slaves.”
In this part of the world, even the jokes are about enslavement: “You guys are MY slaves!” “Ha ha, no, YOU’RE all gonna be MY slaves!” It’s a Sahel sense of humor, very different from the warmer black people to the South. Bornu, like all the Sahel Islamic empires, was organized on strict top-down military lines I described in my article a few years back:
“The North, in Nigerian terms, is usually called “Hausa,” or “Hausa-Fulani,” but it includes the Kanuri of the Northeast, who are the most remote from the coast and the fiercest opponents of anything coastal, Christian, or modern. These were all war-forged Sahel caliphates, with no tradition of local loyalties like the Yoruba, or egalitarianism like the Igbo. They had the traditional Sahel-Muslim organization, top-down all the way: Sultan gives orders to Omda, Omda gives orders to Sheikh, Sheikh gives orders to commoners. And commoners obey.”
This was a hard, unforgiving world before the Brits came. But of course, they managed to make everything much worse—and then disappear, avoiding all blame, which is by far their most impressive skill. I swear to God, I don’t know how they managed to invade and maim just about every country on the planet, then show up with a shit-eating Hugh Grant grin and pretend to be harmless little…aw, what’s the use? I’ve said this before and no one listened. Here’s my summary of what happened:
“The British crushed the Northern caliphates early in the 20th Century, but found that they liked the North best of the three heads this Nigerian monster had. The second sons who were booted out of England to run the colonies always got on best with aristocratic, warlike desert people. They took to the Hausa-Fulani, with their cataphracts and caste system, like they were an unguarded tray of cucumber sandwiches. Most of all, the Empire appreciated the ease with which all of Northern Nigeria could be bought. Thanks to the strict, militarized hierarchy of the North, all the local British agent had to do was buy the Sultan and the whole people would fall into line.
“It was a very different matter when they tried to tell the argumentative Igbo and localist Yoruba what to do. If you remember Chinua Achebe’s great novel ‘Things Fall Apart,’ you’ll get an idea of what it was like when the Brits met the Igbo. And in a way, you can get a sense of what the Brit-Yoruba encounter was like from Amos Tutuola’s amazingly weird, cool books: ‘The Palm Wine Drunkard’ and ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.’ There weren’t any novels like that from the north, because the North didn’t take to Western education and books. The Hausa had walled off their world from the corrupt coasts.”
So the Northern Sultans just loved British rule, while the lively, democratic South wanted freedom. And the British loved the northern sultans in return—partly for being so conveniently bribe-able and docile, but it went deeper than that. There’s a pattern you see across the Empire at its peak in the early 20th century: British colonial officials loved Islamic absolutism, for all kinds of creepy reasons, and that love comes out in weird ways. I mean, we’ve all seen Lawrence of Arabia, but how many people know that Winston Churchill himself had to be talked out of converting to Islam by his family?
There was something these guys truly loved about desert autocrats, and their unforgiving, masculine God. The original pantheons of the Yoruba and Igbo were typically chaotic, democratic clans, deities of place and character; the god of the northern desert was like the Empire itself, unitary and unrelenting. They took to each other right off, and stuck together to the day the Empire was finally forced to withdraw from Nigeria: 1960, when all of Africa was pushing for independence.
But the Empire had a last evil little gift to bestow on Nigeria, dooming it for good. Sir James Robertson, the last Governor-General of Nigeria (described as “a thug” by a subordinate), decided to rig the first elections in independent Nigeria in favor of the Islamist sultanates of the north, making sure the uppity blacks from the Yoruba and Igbo regions would be denied power. It worked; and in a classic demonstration of the power of British officials’ code of silence, this didn’t come out ‘til Robertson’s former deputy, Harold Smith, was on his deathbed. I’m telling you, the Mafia in its prime had nothing on the Brits in keeping up Omerta.
The Brits hated the Igbo most of all, because they were not good, docile colonial subjects. On the contrary; the Igbo are the most assertive, democratic, annoying, uppity, inventive, and educated, impressive group in West Africa. If you’ve read Things Fall Apart by the Igbo novelist Chinua Achebe, you have a sense of the difficulties the British officials and their autocratic Northern sultan allies had with the uppity, thorny Igbo.
Thanks to their rigging of the first election, the Brits and the sultans were able to control the new country, keeping the Igbo out of power. But individual Igbo traders moved north to the new markets in Hausa and Kanuri territories, looking for commercial opportunities.
The northern peoples, especially the dour Kanuri of Borno, had no business skills of their own. The northern sultans preferred to keep their subjects isolated, uneducated, pious and obedient.
Sound familiar? Igbo peddlers were very much like Jewish peddlers in Tsarist Russia. And with the same results: Pogroms.
The biggest slaughter of Igbos in the North came in 1966, with something like 20,000 Igbo hacked or clubbed to death in northern cities and towns.
And just like in Tsarist pogroms, the cops and soldiers usually took a leading role in beating the alien peddlers to death. The Igbo, seeing their people slaughtered with the eager assistance of the Nigerian Army, decided they needed their own country, and seceded in 1967, forming a new country, Biafra. The 250,000-man Nigerian Army, run by generals from the Muslim north, adopted a simple strategy: Avoid battle (because the Igbo won every battle fought on anything like equal terms), isolate the Igbo areas, and starve the whole people to death.
The northern generals had help, of course, from their old friends, the British officer corps. The UK had a huge investment in Nigerian oil by this time, solidifying the old alliance with the northern Sultans. The PM, Harold Wilson, actually accused Biafra of “trying to win sympathy” from the world by, uh, pointing out that it was being starved to death. But British help for the Nigerian Army against the Igbo went way beyond public relations:
“In…1968, Britain approved the export of 15 million rounds of ammunition, 21,000 mortar bombs, 42,500 Howtizer rounds, 12 Oerlikon guns, 3 Bofors guns, 500 submachine guns, 12 Saladins with guns and spare parts, 30 Saracens and spare parts, 800 bayonets, 4,000 rifles and two other helicopters. At the same time Wilson was constantly reassuring Gowon of British support for a united Nigeria, saying in April 1968 that ‘I think we can fairly claim that we have not wavered in this support throughout the civil war’.”
With this imported weaponry offsetting the Igbo’s superior fighting skills the Nigerian Army managed to wall off and starve out the Igbo regions. It worked very well, horribly well. Starvation always works well, because it kills young men and children first. That means you’ve wiped out the first line of defense—but even better (from the sick perspective of the Nigerian army brass), you’ve killed most of the next generation of Igbo. And the Igbo kids who manage to survive will be crippled for life, because childhood starvation destroys people for the rest of their lives.
Talk about “attacking the second echelon”—this took out a whole generation before they could make trouble. Two million Igbo died. Or three. Or three-point-six. Nobody knows, because nobody cares except a few Igbo diehards, and nobody listens to them.
That’s what it is to be a REAL despised majority, meaning “not beloved of every progressive blogger on earth.” It feels mostly like being a nobody. Nobody counts your dead, most especially not the cool lefty bloggers who love to cuddle Sahel jihadis. They’d be the last people on earth to worry about dead Igbo. I wish people could see—better yet, could feel—this difference. I’ve seen it so many times, and it makes it real hard to keep…you know, not despising people, not wanting to puke on certain bloggers’ sanctimonious faces. But it’s got a limited social utility, you might say, the ability to feel that difference. It’s kind of the opposite of adaptive, in fact. Can’t blame people for not wanting to hang a jinx around their necks.
Much more adaptive not to remember Biafra at all, which is what nice, normal people all over the world decided to do. As Achebe, the great Igbo novelist, said in his very gloomy last book, There Was a Country:
“For over half a century the Federal [Nigerian] Government has turned a blind eye to waves of ferocious and savage massacres of its citizens — mainly Christian southerners, mostly Igbo.”
Achebe died a sad old man, appalled at the racism he saw in the West and horrified at what had been done to his people…while Ben Okri lives to commit further crimes. I’m telling you, don’t start researching Biafra; you’ll lose your sense of humor. It’s not funny, the way the world always lines up with the cruelest, against warmer and more humorous people. You’re much better off turning that ol’ blind eye on this stuff.
A blind eye was SOP not just for the Nigerian government, but for everyone who matters in this rotten world. Trouble is, that left Nigeria torn apart, with its most advanced people, the Igbo, disemboweled, and the very worst people in the country, the northern sultans, sheikhs, and army generals, in charge.
That’s where the country stands now. Same creeps in charge. And what those creeps want is for everything to stand still. They want the money from the oil being pumped out of the Niger Delta sent north to their accounts, sure. But they don’t want any social changes to accompany that money. So they’re quietly funding Boko Haram, because Boko ensures that nobody in their senses will invade these provinces. It’s the same old deal they made with the Brits: Isolation in return for collaboration.
You can see the consequences of that collaboration in Maiduguri today. All the alien modern stuff like the Maiduguri International Hotel is wrecked or deserted, but the palace of the sheikh (shehu) of Bornu is in fine shape, not worried at all about Boko Haram attacks. A suspicious person might think that the rumors of local rulers funding Boko are, as they say, “not unfounded.”
It’s that isolation that gives these old networks, sheikhs and generals, their power. And jihad fits very nicely into that design, because (like I’ve writtenseveraltimes) jihad is that it’s a defensive campaign—not intended to Islamize the whole world but to keep things as they are, or were, or were in a dreamworld that never existed.
The trouble is, fighting for reactionary dreamworlds is expensive, and the people who pay the price are always those outside the dream, the ones who aren’t entitled to any share in it. In Nigeria, that always means the people further south, of darker skin, who always turn out to be expendable, forgettable, born to be “abeed”—slaves, “even though they are free” for the moment. What’s going on with Boko now fits all too well into a pattern of reactionary rage from the Sahel raiders, asserting their traditional military power against a world in flux right across the continent from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.
And what’s saddest of all is the way the cool bloggers line up with these ultra-reactionary hierarchs, against the mere black Africans. I’ve seen that over the past few years, the way cool people always choose jihadis over mere kuffar black southerners, and it seemed like such surplus, gratuitous cruelty that I asked Mark Ames, who knows Western opinion way better than I do, why it always seems to work out that way. We were talking about Glenn Greenwald’s virtuous indifference to what happened to the peaceable riverine black people of Mali, which horrified me in a way not much does.
The usual explanation is that people just don’t care about poor Africans as much as famous white Europeans. Which is true, but something else is involved here, something much nastier. For years, after watching people get outraged at everything with an anti-Muslim or anti-Arab angle, while ignoring atrocities against Africans, I began to wonder if this was something more like bias than mere indifference—if there was an agenda to the policy of ignoring hundreds of thousands of black Africans killed by lighter-skinned jihadis from the Sahel.
Here’s what Ames said:
“Yup, in today’s inverted-neocon Left dumbery, it’s assumed you’re a *reactionary* if you care about sub-Saharan African victims of Arab/Muslim religious jihadis…It goes something like this: The US is the most powerful on the planet, and power is evil. So anything at all that is anti-American is good because it’s fighting Power; anything that distracts from that is evil; and anything that America professes to care about is even eviler, because of America’s monstrous hypocrisy.
“It makes you dumb just writing that down, but it’s Assange’s worldview and it’s pretty much the dominant Left’s as well.”
Yes, that makes a horrible kind of sense, but the worst part is the way it fits into a centuries-old pattern where the black Africans always lose.
Generation after generation, right or left, every time. Today’s reactionary-Islamist Left is just the latest incarnation of this demon-consensus. Achebe saw deep into it, I think. Too deep. He fled the West, after being offered fat professorships, said he couldn’t take the cruelty. I’m starting to see what he meant.
Dave's Mapper automatically generates tiled RPG/adventure game maps by recombining tiles submitted by artists, with a pile of customization map generation options. Have fun and be inspired, or submit your own tiles.
En España, limpiar escenas del crimenno es un oficio habitual. Sin embargo, los hay que han decidido, por influencia estadounidense, probar suerte en el sector e impulsar su propia empresa, en muchos casos viéndose abocados al pluriempleo. Es el caso de la compañía española Limpieza Extrema y de J.F.R., que se hace cargo, junto con su esposa, de entre cinco y siete encargos al año: desde suicidios hasta asesinatos o muertes desatendidas.
(Advertencia: este contenido puede remover las tripas)
J.F.R describe el olor de la muerte como «insoportable». Una mezcla de carne putrefacta y descomposición solo camuflada, a veces, por un intenso gel de menta que estos profesionales se untan debajo de la nariz. Más allá del hedor durante su labor de limpieza y aparte de eliminar secreciones diversas, su principal cometido es buscar todo tipo de restos: uñas, pelos, dientes y dentaduras, y hasta pedazos de carne y huesos perdidos debajo de sofás, mesas o detrás de estanterías. Vestigios de una muerte violenta que suelen pasar desapercibidos para una empresa de limpieza normal.
Explica J.F.R. a Yorokobu que los profesionales que se dedican a limpiar este tipo de escenarios suelen seguir protocolos de limpieza específicos, muy similares a los que se llevan a cabo en los quirófanos. Sin embargo, cada tipo de muerte necesita un tratamiento específico y entraña un coste diferente, en función del trabajo que requiera. Eso sí, antes de limpiar comprueban personalmente que la investigación ha llegado a su fin, «no vaya a ser que nos deshagamos de pruebas importantes».
Un suicidio apenas ensucia. Casi todos los restos se concentran en un mismo punto, así que en ocho horas (trabajando rápido), y por un precio que oscila entre 1.500 y 2.500 euros, los profesionales lo pueden tener listo.
Las muertes desatendidas (personas que fallecen sin que nadie se percate hasta después de varios días) suelen ser más sucias, y obligan a usar muchos productos químicos. Suele haber descomposición, gusanos, camas y sofás con la forma exacta de un cuerpo o sangre y fluidos que llegan a traspasar el parqué. Por eso su limpieza puede costar hasta 5.000 euros.
Evidentemente, con esos precios, y teniendo en cuenta lo macabro del servicio, muchos son los que se asustan. J.F.R afirma que muchos clientes, tras ver su presupuesto, deciden encargarle la misión a empresas que hacen el mismo trabajo por 400 euros. ¿Las consecuencias? J.F.R las resume en una anécdota que tuvo lugar hace poco más de un año: en una nave industrial, falleció alguien que no fue encontrado hasta seis días después de la tragedia. La nave era de chapa, «estaría a unos 60 grados sin ventilarse», lo que provocó que el cuerpo empezara a deshacerse desde el primer día, la grasa se licuara, aparecieran larvas y la descomposición llegara al piso inferior ensuciando hasta la fachada y la puerta del edificio.
«Yo les hice un presupuesto por 4.700 euros, pero ellos prefirieron que lo limpiara una empresa normal por 1.500». Al final tardaron más de tres meses en poder alquilar la nave de nuevo, «porque no se había limpiado bien y olía muy mal», relata este profesional.
«Las empresas normales limpian por encima», sentencia. Por el contrario, J.F.R y su mujer llegan a levantar el suelo de una casa para eliminar la sangre que se haya filtrado, y después vuelven a ponerlo en su sitio; pican la pared si el fluido ha salpicado, vuelven a arreglarla, la pintan… «Para dejar las cosas como estaban antes de la muerte, como si allí no hubiera pasado nada». Incluso, cuando el escenario ya está más que limpio, J.F.R explica que repasan la escena dos veces más con vapor, «que desinfecta muchísimo y llega donde el cepillo no puede».
De no hacerlo así, se han dado casos de personas que han encontrado restos de sus familiares tiempo después del último adiós. Eso hace que vuelvas a «revivir la muerte de una persona querida». Un episodio verdaderamente desagradable.
Protección para evitar contagios
Para enfrentarse a una labor así, hay que tomar todas las medidas de protección posibles. No solo son necesarias las mezclas de productos que evitan que el profesional se contagie con enfermedades como sida o hepatitis, sino que cada lugar manchado debe limpiarse siguiendo reglas concretas, para evitar salpicaduras e incluso tocar o pisar donde no se debe.
«Llevamos trajes que nos cubren completamente», botas, doble guante de protección (uno de vinilo y otro de un plástico más duro pero flexible)… «Trabajamos con gafas porque siempre puede salpicarte algún producto de limpieza y restos humanos», describe J.F.R, y especialmente en el caso de muertes o asesinatos que se descubrieron pasado un tiempo, necesitan utilizar mascarillas con filtros especiales, «aunque incluso así el olor es insoportable».
El suyo es un oficio tan delicado que deben trabajar con cautela y secretismo. Lo hacen de noche o en fines de semana, y J.F.R. asegura que intentan pasar desapercibidos. «La gente ni siquiera sabe qué vamos a hacer en una casa», aunque todo el mundo esté al corriente de que allí alguien respiró por última vez. Por eso, cuando llegan al lugar de los hechos, lo hacen con su ropa habitual, de paisano, transportando sus herramientas en bolsas o cajas que no levanten sospecha alguna. Es dentro del recinto donde se transforman.
A sangre fría
Antes de salir a trabajar, este profesional cena tranquilamente, «e incluso como al volver de una limpieza», asegura. No son amigos ni familiares suyos, y asegura que en el momento de la limpieza piensa lo menos posible en lo que ha ocurrido. «A mí me da igual. Al principio te afecta un poco, pero pasado un tiempo deja de hacerlo. Ni me crea angustia ni me impide dormir», sentencia.
De primeras, parece un oficio delicado y no apto para escrupulosos pero J.F.R asegura que «los hay peores», como trabajar para funerarias o con equipos de emergencia. Al fin y al cabo, estos trabajadores de la limpieza no ven el cuerpo de los fallecidos. Aun así, «tienes que tener la cabeza en tu sitio, ser mentalmente fuerte y que no te den asco estas situaciones». Debes concienciarte pensando que estás dando un servicio a alguien que lo necesita, y que «cuanto antes pase el mal trago, mejor».
El capitalismo moderno es tan subversivo como el marxismo. (Julius Evola)
En 1980, Italia tenía una de las economías más fuertes del mundo. La lira, que por entonces aún era moneda nacional, se había asentado, y el llamado «milagro económico» se consumó por fin. Atrás quedaba una década marcada por gobiernos efímeros, protestas callejeras y lucha armada, que los partidos en el Gobierno zanjaron con un puñado de durísimas leyes antiterroristas que convirtieron a Italia en un Estado policial. Así acabaron los anni di piombo y empezó una nueva era de bonanza económica, estabilidad política y paz social. El clima que los Estados Unidos estaban esperando para acelerar el proceso de colonización cultural que venían desarrollando, sin prisa ni pausa, desde los años cincuenta.
No es casualidad que, también en 1980, eclosionara el proyecto televisivo que el magnate Silvio Berlusconi llevaba años gestando: Canale 5 se convirtió en la primera televisión privada italiana de alcance nacional, rompiendo el monopolio de la pública. Con la emisión de Dallas, Alf, Star Trek y otras series norteamericanas trufadas con decenas de spots publicitarios, el canal fue la principal puerta de entrada del american way of life a los hogares italianos, divulgando unos valores basados en el consumismo extremo y la autoafirmación a través de la adquisición de símbolos de estatus. No contento con esto, il Cavaliere abrió en 1982 otro canal, Italia 1, dirigido a un target de entre diez y veinticinco años, donde se emitían películas, series, dibujos animados, videoclips y telecomedias norteamericanas. Paralelamente, las pantallas de cine vomitaban películas propagandísticas para todos los públicos: por un lado, panfletos reaganianos como Rambo, Depredador o Top Gun, exhibían el poderío militar norteamericano. Por otro, teen movies como Todo en un día, Admiradora secreta o Papá Cadillac enseñaban a la juventud que no basta con ser: sobre todo, hay que tener.
Joven aunque sobradamente americanizado
Los paninari fueron una subcultura juvenil integrada por adolescentes de familias bien. Tenían unos quince o dieciséis años, estudiaban en colegios privados y recibían generosas pagas de sus padres, que en su mayoría eran profesionales acomodados. Vestidos con llamativas prendas de marca, los paninari empezaron a congregarse de forma espontánea en torno a Al Panino, una cafetería sita en el número 6 de la Via Agnello que dio nombre al movimiento. Pero, aunque despachaba sándwiches, el local era demasiado autóctono para estos cachorros hambrientos de todo lo que veían en las producciones audiovisuales yanquis. Así que en cuanto la cadena de comida rápida Burghy abrió su primer local, los paninari se trasladaron allí, donde podían emular a los ídolos zampando hamburguesas. Corría 1982 y, en Italia, comer genuina fast food no era ninguna guarrería, sino algo exótico y moderno. Casualidad o no, el Burghy estaba en la Piazza San Babila, tradicional lugar de encuentro de los grupos juveniles de extrema derecha desde los años sesenta. Otros céntricos locales frecuentados por los paninari fueron el gimnasio Doria y el salón de belleza Rino, símbolos del culto al cuerpo que profesaba esta subcultura.
Para diferenciarse aún más de «la masa», los paninari tenían su propio slang, construido con palabras sacadas del dialecto del norte de Italia, pero también del español, del latín y, por supuesto, del inglés. Por ejemplo, un gallo era un tío guay; una sfitinzia, una tía guay; un cucador era un tío guay que se ligaba a muchas tías guays; y los sapiens eran los viejos, o sea, los padres. También se estilaba mucho el italish, con frases tipo «Very original, il mio boy». Claro está que las conversaciones paninaras eran más dialécticas que sustanciales, evitando siempre temas políticos, sociales, filosóficos o culturales serios. Según un seminal manifiesto de la tribu publicado en la revista Paninaro, «el gallo debe manejar con soltura un amplio abanico de módulos expresivos divertidos e inmediatos». Así, en lugar de «mangiare avidamente un panino» (o sea, «zamparse un sándwich con gula») el paninaro de pro diría «sparare un paninzzo nel gargarozzo». Capisci?
Imagen: Paninaro.
Pero pese a la relativa complejidad de sus códigos, la rivoluzionepaninari era tremendamente simple. Consistía, básicamente, en vestir ropa de marca, comer hamburguesas, escuchar música pop y salir por ahí. Una vez forrado el estómago con comida basura, se iban de discotecas a bordo de sus lustrosas motos alemanas, modelo Zündapp 175. Los estudiantes de los sesenta y los setenta habían militado en la izquierda (o en la derecha), pero en los paninari el compromiso político brillaba por su ausencia. Como apunta el expaninaro Remo Ruffini, «en aquella época todo era colorista y feliz. La política ni se nos pasaba por la cabeza. Solo estaba el sueño de América y de un estilo de vida que pasaba por ir a hacer surf a California o visitar Nueva York». Pero ese apoliticismo reflejaba en el fondo una absoluta comunión con los intereses del Nuevo Orden Mundial. Recordemos que en 1981 los países anglosajones más importantes estaban regidos con mano de hierro por dos titanes del neoliberalismo: en Inglaterra, Margaret Thatcher llevaba más de dos años de demoledor mandato y, en los Estados Unidos, Ronald Reagan acababa de llegar a la Casa Blanca y ya hablaba de instalar escudos en el espacio para proteger a América de ataques nucleares. A los paninari todo esto les sonaba a chino: para ellos, el único escudo que existía era el del águila de Emporio Armani. Y mientras vivían una narcisista juventud que parecía eterna, el Gobierno italiano se sumía en unas cotas de corrupción que no se destaparían hasta 1993, año en el que se llevó a cabo la Operación Manos Limpias.
Enamorados de la moda juvenil
El principal signo de identidad del paninaro era, sin duda, su atuendo, que no dejaba de ser una versión italiana del estilo preppy yanqui. Enrico Pirondi, expaninaro e hijo del fundador de la firma Best Company, recuerda que «la ropa de los paninari era como un uniforme. Prendas muy brillantes, de muchos colores y cada una con su etiqueta, con la marca bien visible». Los elementos fundamentales que componían el lookpaninaro eran los jeans de marcas como Armani o El Charro, las botas Timberland y las bambas Superga, las camisas y polos de Best Company, los cinturones de hebilla grande de Levi’s, los relojes Swacht, mochilas Mistral, gafas de sol Ray-Ban Wayfarer (popularizadas por Tom Cruise en Risky Business), cazadoras de Stone Island, calcetines Burlington… Pero la prenda estrella de todo paninaro que se vistiera por los pies era un flamante plumas Moncler. Según Remo Ruffini, capo de la casa Moncler, «a mediados de los ochenta se vendieron unos cuarenta mil plumas en todo el mundo y, de ellos, treinta mil se despacharon en la ciudad de Milán». Y eso que el plumas no era una prenda precisamente cómoda: al estar diseñada para protegerse de la nieve, se empapaba cuando llovía, pudiendo llegar a pesar hasta diez kilos con el peso del agua. Pero molaba, y había que llevarlo aunque cayeran chuzos de punta.
Imagen: Paninaro.
En un momento en el que la industria de la moda italiana estaba en pleno auge, la aparición de los paninari dio lugar a decenas de colecciones de ropa deportiva juvenil. La artista plástica Ludovica Gioscia, responsable de una serie de collages y artefactos elaborados con parafernalia paninaro, explica que «los nombres de las marcas, por ejemplo CP Company, reflejaban una procedencia americana, pero la mitad de las prendas estaban fabricadas en pequeñas fábricas alrededor de Mantova, en el norte de Italia. Cualquiera que mirara con atención esas prendas se daría cuenta de que no podían estar producidas en un país de habla inglesa, porque tenían en sus etiquetas un montón de errores gramaticales».
El pop os hará libres
Si la base del Imperio romano era «pan y circo», el imperio anglosajón narcotizó a la juventud italiana con «burgers y videoclips». Eso sí, los paninari preferían los sofisticados hits del new pop británico a los más mostrencos soniquetes del pop-rock yanqui; y por encima de todo aborrecían la música italiana, de la que solo salvaban un puñado de canciones de Gazebo, Tracy Spencer o Taffy chapurreadas, cómo no, en inglés. Formaron parte de la banda sonora paninari éxitos como «Word up» de Cameo, «The edge of heaven» de Wham!, «Each time you break my heart» de Nick Kamen, «Don’t leave me this way» de los Communards, «Big in Japan» de Alphaville, «Der Kommissar» de Falco, «True» de Spandau Ballet y, muy especialmente, «Wild Boys» de Duran Duran, que se convirtió en su himno. Los paninari se volvían locos con estas canciones, cuyos videoclips eran repetidos ad nauseam en el programa Deejay Television de la cadena Italia 1 y en Videomusic, el primer canal europeo especializado en contenidos musicales.
La comunión de los paninari con el novísimo pop británico fue tan intensa que, en un momento dado, recibieron un inesperado feedback. En 1986, los Pet Shop Boys lanzaron una canción titulada, precisamente, «Paninaro», que celebraba el movimiento con no poca ironía. Al parecer, el dúo británico de techno-pop visitó Italia en 1986 para promocionar Please, su debut discográfico, y quedó profundamente fascinado con los paninari. Según confesó Neil Tennant, voz cantante del dúo, «lo que nos gustó de esa cultura juvenil es que era mainstream, en oposición a los góticos, que eran más underground. Los paninari se ponían pantalones remangados por el tobillo y jerseys de Armani. Era todo muy fashion». «Paninaro», la canción, es un disparo de synth pop hipnótico, lacónico, flemático y casi industrial que se editó como single de edición limitada para el mercado italiano, mientras en el resto del mundo se imprimió en la cara B de del eurohit «Suburbia». Promocionada por un videoclip en el que aparecían auténticos paninari, la canción fue un éxito a pesar de que no es Neil Tennant, sino Chris Lowe, quien canta o, mejor dicho, quien recita una serie de palabras y marcas, a modo de mantra posmoderno. Traduzco: «Pasión, amor, sexo, dinero, violencia, injusticia, muerte. Chicos, chicas, artes, placer. Comida, coches, viajes, comida, coches, viajes, viajes. Nueva York, Nueva York, Nueva York. Armani, Armani, Armani, Versace, Cinque». Como toda la obra de los Pet Shop Boys, «Paninaro» es muy ambigua: podría parecer una apología del consumismo juvenil, pero la inclusión de palabras como «violencia», «injusticia» o «muerte», de alguna manera, era como una advertencia de que ese inmenso mall en el que se estaba convirtiendo Italia llevaba implícita la semilla de su propia destrucción.
Morir de éxito
Fotografía: Paninaro.
A partir de 1986, los paninari brotaron como setas por toda Italia. Dada la variedad dialéctica del país, en cada localidad recibieron un apelativo diferente: en Bolonia, zanari; en Verona, bondolari; en Roma, tozzi; en Nápoles, chiatilli. La cosa se salía de madre. Y si hasta ahora los paninari habían imitado a la tele, ahora la tele empezaba a imitarlos a ellos. No en vano, en el programa Italian Fast Food, el cómico Enzo Braschi se hizo famoso gracias a su parodia de un paninaro. Fue el principio del fin: si todo el mundo llevaba plumas y comía hamburguesas, eso de ser paninaro ya no tenía ninguna gracia.
A rebufo de la masificación, salió de debajo de las piedras todo tipo de merchandising paninaro. Por ejemplo, Il Paninaro, un videojuego para Commodore 64, donde podías manejar muñequitos con plumas a bordo de motocicletas. O revistas como Zippo Sandwich, Wild Boys y, sobre todo, Paninaro, en cuyas viñetas se produjo un disparatado enfrentamiento entre punkis y paninaris. En 1987, un número de esta publicación llegó a despachar cien mil ejemplares. En ese momento, la tendencia explotó y, poco a poco, los paninari empezaron a desaparecer como por arte de birlibirloque. La mayoría, se reciclaron en fighettos, es decir, pijos corrientes y molientes, y tras moderar su look, se dejaron de gaitas y se embarcaron en prometedoras carreras.
La impronta de los paninari, sin embargo, se extendió por toda Europa, inspirando tendencias globales que han llegado hasta nuestros días: desde formas de ocio nocturno (y diurno) hasta colecciones casual. Como ocurre con todo lo referente a la dichosa década de los ochenta, cada cierto tiempo hay pequeños flashbacks paninari. ¿Algunos ejemplos? En 1995, los Pet Shop Boys sacaron una nueva remezcla y un nuevo videoclip de «Paninaro», ambos mucho más flojos que los originales. En 1996, McDonald’s compró todos los establecimientos de la cadena de fast food Burghy, incluido el antiguo cuartel general de los paninari. En 2005 se volvieron a reunir en Milán gran parte de los expaninari para celebrar el vigésimo aniversario de la extinta subcultura. Desde 2009, Princide Shop vende discos y accesorios vintage para nostálgicos de lo paninari. Y de un tiempo a esta parte, revistas como GQ, Vogue o Vanity Fair han anunciado varias veces el regreso del estilo paninaro. Sí, claro, su estilo podrá volver una y otra vez, pero, como subcultura, los paninari serían inviables en un país devastado por la crisis, con una tasa de paro juvenil que supera el 40 %. En los últimos tiempos, el clima en Italia se empieza a parecer al de los anni di piombo: disturbios juveniles, violencia política, fuego en las calles. Lo único que podría tomar la actual juventud italiana de los despreocupados y flamboyantespaninari es cierta frase del himno «Wild Boys» de Duran Duran: «Los chicos salvajes, temerarios y hambrientos, han caído lejos de la gloria».
First they tell you you have cancer. Fine, that sucks. Then they say you’re going to need chemo. OK, not fun. Oh, and you’re going to lose your hair. Whatever, it’s just hair. Anything else? Nothing? Oh wait, you’re also going to need to have a couple of teeth pulled. Wait, WTF?
I was sitting in the dentist chair getting a simple checkup before I started chemo a week later. This is just a checkup, I thought. I never imagined I would need anything serious done outside of a filling. Turns out, I needed a couple of things done.
“You have three options,” the dentist said. “You can treat the infections and delay chemo,” not an option, “do nothing and hope the infections don’t become worse because of the chemo,” like, lose all your teeth worse non-option, “or have the teeth pulled and replaced after chemo.”
Yeah, those aren’t options. Options are things that are equally feasible, rational and reasonable. I was offered a dental hygienic hit list.
Of course I went with the third and had the teeth pulled. As I sat in the chair, my mother sitting across from me, I began to cry. It was the first time I had cried since the surgery three weeks before that removed the cancery tumor. My mother took my hand, helpless before her 30-year-old weeping son, unable to fix this as she had fixed everything for so many years.
Cancer had taken so much from me, and now it was taking my teeth? I’m not a vain person, but I like having teeth. I’m a stand-up comic, so looking below average is basically a requirement in my business. Frankly, looking like total shit would probably help my career. But I wasn’t ready to give up my Hollywood dreams and become a headlining comic in Alabama—no offense if you’re reading this from Alabama. I’m talking about everyone else, not you.
The teeth were pulled, and I started chemo. As the months passed I lost my hair, gained weight and remained toothless. I was a young, single man living in Los Angeles. My fuckability rating dropped at a dramatic rate with each passing day. It’s as if I was losing myself, starting with the body that I used to work so hard to keep below average.
You’re thinking, “Yeah, but like, you had bigger things to deal with, so sex was probably the last thing on your mind.” You’re half right. I didn’t want to actually have sex, but I was horny as fuck. Physically being with someone was repulsive, but the idea of being with someone was Boner-Town: population one.
One day I stood up, took my IV pole into the restroom, locked the door, and jerked off like a giddy 14-year-old. It felt so good that I did it again the same day. Then again. And again. It became my new thing. Get to chemo, masturbate. Change chemo bag, masturbate. Hour five, masturbate. Someone said hello, masturbate.
I loved it so much that I started doing it everywhere I went (which was limited, because cancer). Target, gas stations, friends’ homes, gyms, medical buildings—you name it, I jerked off in it.
It gave me life, something that I was seriously lacking at that moment. Fat, bald and toothless, I felt like the person I used to be when I masturbated.
Eventually I finished chemo, grew my hair back, and slowly got back to my original weight. But the teeth, that’s been two years in the making. Soon my last fake tooth will be put in, and I’ll end a chapter of my life that contained (literally) so many gaps.
During chemo I wanted to get back to the person I had been, but that’s not possible. I’m not that person anymore. I might look like him, but behind the fake teeth and the long hair is a man changed by the reality of cancer. The reality that the cancer could come back—or might not. The reality that I’m mortal. The reality that, as masturbation so wonderfully illustrates, it’s essential to live every moment fully, even if it gives you carpal tunnel syndrome.
Every geek can be a little bit of a neckbeard. See how you fare on this quiz!
This is a tongue-in-cheek quiz and not to be taken seriously! If we geeks and gamers can't laugh at ourselves every once in a while, what do we have? Besides, everyone should be able to check at least one thing off of the list. Doritos are f'n tasty.
Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson are the two geniuses behind the web series turned beloved comedy show “Broad City.” Currently on its 2nd season the half-hour show features the girls as 20-something best friends trying to navigate life together in Brooklyn. At the surface it’s easy to want to compare them to any other female driven show but there’s a genuineness that comes across in their raunchy, slapstick kind of humor that’s different than what’s been done before. Here’s why everyone’s falling in love with these two.
1. They’re two down to earth, smart, and hilarious girls you want to be best friends with immediately. They aren’t afraid to be vulnerable, messy, strong, or completely silly at times. Whether it’s Ilana convincing Abbi to get out of work for the day or helping each other out in a sticky situation their friendship knows no bounds. They make you wish you could join them on their adventures.
2. From the beginning of the first season Ilana’s character immediately shows viewers she has no boundaries. We’re introduced to Ilana when she’s Skyping Abbi while having sex and in the same scene she tells the dude, Lincoln, she doesn’t want to a put a label on their relationship. The show does an awesome job at crushing gender stereotypes and giving both Ilana and Abbi’s characters emotional and sexual freedom rarely shown on television for women.
3. You can see yourself in their characters. While the girls do totally ridiculous stuff sometimes they have an ability to resonate with their audience because let’s be real, we ALL do ridiculous things from time to time. They aren’t afraid to reveal their character’s flaws to give them emotional depth.
4. It’s one of the best female friendships on television right now. You can tell they genuinely love each other. These aren’t just two actresses playing a role, Ilana and Abbi are playing self-based characters of former versions of themselves. The two became best friends when they were both at Upright Citizen’s Brigade, a comedy troupe known for being the stepping stone for Saturday Night Live stars like Amy Pohler.
5. They never take themselves too seriously. Their absurd and gross body humor is one of the best parts of the show. Whether it’s Ilana suffering through her seafood allergies to keep eating her favorite foods or Abbi making a total fool in front of her neighbor she’s (not so) secretly crushing on, the girls love taking things to the extreme and pushing boundaries for the sake of comedy.
At a fancy hotel like the Hotel Indigo along San Antonio’s Riverwalk, the concierge staff is there to ensure that your special (but legal) needs are tended to. Imgur member FreePsychicReadings decided to put them to the test. She asked a concierge to place on her bed a framed photo of actor Nicholas Cage as he appeared in the movie Con Air.
Ramon the concierge was prompt, efficient, and accurate.
Are You Internet Sexual?[NSFW]
Welcome to Chaturbate[NSFW], where live-cam performers engage in the wild and the weird. But watch it long enough and you realize that social media has created a whole new sexual persuasion. So, how "internet sexual" are you?
Wizards of the Coast has revealed one of the characters in the new Magic: the Gathering – Fate Reforged set is a trans woman. Alesha, Who Smiles at Death is the very first trans woman in the game’s lore. In a story titled, “The Truth of Names,” Alesha leads her warriors into battle. Weaved into the tale between gory descriptions of death and combat is a subtle story about identity and finding who you are.
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Gary Brecher is the War Nerd.
