Shake N’ Bake
Just rented the Francis Bacon video. He was dark. His paintings are the closest thing to Satan’s aborted fetus. Yet, they are also beautiful. When people talk about Bacon, they talk about how he exposes us to our own ugliness. They also talk about photography being his primary source material. I remember my favorite part in the biopic they made of Bacon. He is watching Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin with a woman friend, and when the “Odessa Steps” sequence comes on, he starts to laugh with glee as the evil government forces gun down the proletariat. There is a particularly poignant shot with a baby carriage rolling down the stairs, the baby’s mother having already been killed, and I think Bacon is really laughing at this. So his friend, horrified, asks him: “How can you laugh at such a thing?” I know why he laughs. I do the exact same thing. This is why I can’t go to the movies with too many people. They get angry at me for laughing. I think it’s a nervous knee jerk reaction, but I also feel that it is pure glee at seeing the violence and death on the screen. Art is something that we can laugh about, even if it is about a violent, sensitive subject. As they say, “comedy is tragedy plus time”. I remember when I was twelve; I was sitting on top of a hill overlooking the street that run the perimeter of the Zoo in San Salvador. I was with some friends. We saw a man, of about fifty, running for dear life, and a huge mob of men running after him. There was construction going on the street, so there were stones everywhere, and these men threw stones at the running man. Some of the stones hit him. They finally caught up to him, and one of the men plunged his fist into the running man’s stomach. As I looked closer, I saw that his white shirt was turning bright red. As it turns out, the other man hadn’t punched the running man. He had stabbed him repeatedly. Just then a jeep pulled up, and soldiers got off. They exchanged a few words with the pursuers, grabbed the running man, threw him on the back of the jeep, sat on him and sped off.
We later found out that this man had been stealing from the payroll at a company up the street, and these men, the proletariat, took the law into their own hands. The cops didn’t seem to mind at all though. That was one of the most fascinating things I have seen my whole entire life. It made me realize that “law” is an arbitrary thing, that when people feel justified, they can get away with murder. “I’m lucky to be alive”, I thought. And of course I was right.
One More Word on The Proletariat
My uncle had gone to a very expensive school, and was a seminary dropout.
He was a celebrated architect and a terrific painter. He had done jobs for the United Nations in Nairobi and in The States. He lectured at the University in San Salvador. He owned a block of flats in the most exclusive neighborhood in town. It was so exclusive, in fact, that many of the mansions there had machine gun nests built into their high walls for protection.
My mother had worked really hard to send us to an okay nun’s elementary school, to get a good education. One day my uncle told my mother: “What are you doing sending the boys to a pansy bourgeois school? You ought to send them to a public school, a school of The People” so my mom took his advice and enrolled us in Escuela Brazil, one of the many public schools in San Salvador. The first day I went there, an older boy tried to screw me up the ass. It was hilarious. I had to watch out for this guy the whole time I went there. Every day we had to line up in the courtyard as the principal talked about how so and so had taken so and so’s eye out with a sling shot, or how the students were killing the animals in the zoo (the school was next door to it) by throwing stones over the walls. I remember one time a boy came in limping, and another student asked him: “What happened?” so the boy responded by saying that a hydraulic door on the bus had closed on his leg and tore up some ligaments. The other student said “really?” and he grabbed the injured guy in his arms, stood on a desk, lifted him over his head, and dropped him on the hard cement floor. The kid was howling in pain. I was dumbfounded. I asked this guy “Why did you do that?” and he lifted his shirt to reveal a long zigzag scar that almost ran the length of his stomach. Then he said “Last year this son of a bitch stabbed me with a compass, and he did this to me. So now the motherfucker’s gonna pay” It was a pretty interesting time for me.
The end came one fine morning in May, when the guerrillas took over the school, and divided up all the kids into groups and were teaching them how to use firearms. All the kids seemed to know who the masked Che Guevara and Fidel Castro clones were. I saw women with big G-3 rifles walking around giving orders. It was so funny. I think this is one of the few times that I feared for my life. My friend and I were walking around looking for ways to escape, but it was pretty unlikely that we’d get out of there alive. The “freedom fighters” were asking the kids what guerrilla group they’d like to join. I wanted to join the Kiss Army. I didn’t give a rat’s ass for Comunism or Marxist Leninism. Still don’t. Maybe I was nuts, I thought, since everyone was so keen on it. There was a certain romanticism that came with wearing army fatigues and green berets and covering your face with a bandana so that nobody knows what you look like. I didn’t know it at the time, but I think all these guys weren’t from “The People”, but middle class university types who have worn-out copies of “Das Kapital” under their pillows -It’s no surprise that sub commander Marcos smokes a pipe like he was a university professor. I’m sure that’s exactly what he is. A college lecturer, just like my uncle who got the electroshock up his rectum, but that’s another story- Anyway, the guerrilla people said that if the army stormed the school, a lot of “innocent people” were going to die. That didn’t make me feel good at all, as the army had surrounded the school. In the end, as if by a miracle, the guerrillas left. That night when I got home, my mother asked me how my day had gone, and I said “Great! The guerrillas took over the school and showed us how to shoot an Uzi”. The next day, we were back at the nun’s private school.
More on Dear Uncle
My Uncle did pay the price for his beliefs though, and I love the fact that he put his money where his mouth was. He ran electricity from his block of flats to the shantytown down the hill, and helped them get running water. Also, the army grabbed his son, my cousin Lalo, who was the sweetest boy in the world, and “disappeared” him. Luckily, my aunt, who was an extreme-right wing wealthy person and had ties with (i.e. Had probably had affairs with) all kinds of top brass in the Salvadorian army, got on the horn, and promptly located the “security center” where they were “holding” my cousin. When my uncle got to the undisclosed underground location, they had poor Lalo stripped down to his jockey shorts and were getting ready to cut off his balls.
By the way, I did love my aunt. Actually, come to think of it, I did not. She never let us touch the walls on her house, and one time they had us over for Christmas and totally ignored us the whole time (worst Christmas ever) as they gave each other huge wads of American dollars and giant bottles of Chanel No 5. And this led me to not like rich people very much either. They were just like the proletariat. One was proud and had a sense of entitlement due to the fact that they were poor, and the other was very patronizing, holier than thou, and proud of their wealth. I think the only “class” I was really into were the out of work Carneys that lived on the street and taught me dirty jokes and magic tricks. I liked them, and very old people who were full of ghost stories. Still, I really like my aunt, even to this day. Anyway, back to my uncle, we didn’t know this at the time, but he had built a tunnel from the University to the shantytowns, so that insurgents could travel safely from one to the other. One day I came home to find my uncle sitting in our modest living room, and he said that he’d stay with us for a few days. I thought this was strange. It turns out that someone had tipped my uncle that the army had already captured and tortured to death the young Guatemalan assistant who helped with the tunnel design. My uncle left the country a couple of days later, and the army broke down his door the same day that he got out. I didn’t see him again after that. He had gone into hiding in Nicaragua. If we wanted to get a hold of him on the phone, we had to call up a man at a certain time, and he’d call another person later on, and then they’d call someone else, and they’d call us with a number that we could call only once, and only at a very specific time.
One of my fondest memories of my uncle was that we were driving in the dark, and my mother was talking his ear off about “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”, and my uncle said to her “Stop talking to me about those faggoty birds! They’re just bullshit!” “What Bravura!” I thought, realizing that to him shock value was one of his intrinsic values. It was important to him to be shocking. To speak like a rogue even though he was an intellectual, to say things that were so nasty, especially about such a beautiful book as Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It was just as if somebody had raped Tinkerbelle.
The last conversation I had with my uncle, I hadn’t talked to him in two decades. And I said to him: “Uncle, remember those “faggoty birds” years ago when we were in the car?” he didn’t know what I was talking about. He must have thought I was nuts. And in a few weeks he died of a sudden heart attack. How sad, I thought, that the last conversation I had with my dear uncle wasn’t about the meaning of life, or about art or even his political beliefs, but about an inane conversation we had over twenty years ago. Gosh I love my uncle!
Don Beto’s Head
Don Beto owned a “Chalet” in the town square of the village of El Paraiso (“Paradise”) where I spent some of my childhood. He was going to buy some supplies and was riding on the side door of the bus when he slipped, fell, and the rear tire of the bus ran over his head. My grandmother told me that when they were cleaning the body for the open casket wake, as they moved Don Beto’s head, it looked like a balloon filled with water, and it felt like the mattress on a waterbed. A bulge would form on whatever side of the head was facing down. His brains had liquefied. When I went to the burial a few days later, Don Beto’s wife, overcome with grief, tried to throw herself inside the hole. It was very moving. I think they must have been in love.
Just rented the Francis Bacon video. He was dark. His paintings are the closest thing to Satan’s aborted fetus. Yet, they are also beautiful. When people talk about Bacon, they talk about how he exposes us to our own ugliness. They also talk about photography being his primary source material. I remember my favorite part in the biopic they made of Bacon. He is watching Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin with a woman friend, and when the “Odessa Steps” sequence comes on, he starts to laugh with glee as the evil government forces gun down the proletariat. There is a particularly poignant shot with a baby carriage rolling down the stairs, the baby’s mother having already been killed, and I think Bacon is really laughing at this. So his friend, horrified, asks him: “How can you laugh at such a thing?” I know why he laughs. I do the exact same thing. This is why I can’t go to the movies with too many people. They get angry at me for laughing. I think it’s a nervous knee jerk reaction, but I also feel that it is pure glee at seeing the violence and death on the screen. Art is something that we can laugh about, even if it is about a violent, sensitive subject. As they say, “comedy is tragedy plus time”. I remember when I was twelve; I was sitting on top of a hill overlooking the street that run the perimeter of the Zoo in San Salvador. I was with some friends. We saw a man, of about fifty, running for dear life, and a huge mob of men running after him. There was construction going on the street, so there were stones everywhere, and these men threw stones at the running man. Some of the stones hit him. They finally caught up to him, and one of the men plunged his fist into the running man’s stomach. As I looked closer, I saw that his white shirt was turning bright red. As it turns out, the other man hadn’t punched the running man. He had stabbed him repeatedly. Just then a jeep pulled up, and soldiers got off. They exchanged a few words with the pursuers, grabbed the running man, threw him on the back of the jeep, sat on him and sped off.
We later found out that this man had been stealing from the payroll at a company up the street, and these men, the proletariat, took the law into their own hands. The cops didn’t seem to mind at all though. That was one of the most fascinating things I have seen my whole entire life. It made me realize that “law” is an arbitrary thing, that when people feel justified, they can get away with murder. “I’m lucky to be alive”, I thought. And of course I was right.
One More Word on The Proletariat
My uncle had gone to a very expensive school, and was a seminary dropout.
He was a celebrated architect and a terrific painter. He had done jobs for the United Nations in Nairobi and in The States. He lectured at the University in San Salvador. He owned a block of flats in the most exclusive neighborhood in town. It was so exclusive, in fact, that many of the mansions there had machine gun nests built into their high walls for protection.
My mother had worked really hard to send us to an okay nun’s elementary school, to get a good education. One day my uncle told my mother: “What are you doing sending the boys to a pansy bourgeois school? You ought to send them to a public school, a school of The People” so my mom took his advice and enrolled us in Escuela Brazil, one of the many public schools in San Salvador. The first day I went there, an older boy tried to screw me up the ass. It was hilarious. I had to watch out for this guy the whole time I went there. Every day we had to line up in the courtyard as the principal talked about how so and so had taken so and so’s eye out with a sling shot, or how the students were killing the animals in the zoo (the school was next door to it) by throwing stones over the walls. I remember one time a boy came in limping, and another student asked him: “What happened?” so the boy responded by saying that a hydraulic door on the bus had closed on his leg and tore up some ligaments. The other student said “really?” and he grabbed the injured guy in his arms, stood on a desk, lifted him over his head, and dropped him on the hard cement floor. The kid was howling in pain. I was dumbfounded. I asked this guy “Why did you do that?” and he lifted his shirt to reveal a long zigzag scar that almost ran the length of his stomach. Then he said “Last year this son of a bitch stabbed me with a compass, and he did this to me. So now the motherfucker’s gonna pay” It was a pretty interesting time for me.
The end came one fine morning in May, when the guerrillas took over the school, and divided up all the kids into groups and were teaching them how to use firearms. All the kids seemed to know who the masked Che Guevara and Fidel Castro clones were. I saw women with big G-3 rifles walking around giving orders. It was so funny. I think this is one of the few times that I feared for my life. My friend and I were walking around looking for ways to escape, but it was pretty unlikely that we’d get out of there alive. The “freedom fighters” were asking the kids what guerrilla group they’d like to join. I wanted to join the Kiss Army. I didn’t give a rat’s ass for Comunism or Marxist Leninism. Still don’t. Maybe I was nuts, I thought, since everyone was so keen on it. There was a certain romanticism that came with wearing army fatigues and green berets and covering your face with a bandana so that nobody knows what you look like. I didn’t know it at the time, but I think all these guys weren’t from “The People”, but middle class university types who have worn-out copies of “Das Kapital” under their pillows -It’s no surprise that sub commander Marcos smokes a pipe like he was a university professor. I’m sure that’s exactly what he is. A college lecturer, just like my uncle who got the electroshock up his rectum, but that’s another story- Anyway, the guerrilla people said that if the army stormed the school, a lot of “innocent people” were going to die. That didn’t make me feel good at all, as the army had surrounded the school. In the end, as if by a miracle, the guerrillas left. That night when I got home, my mother asked me how my day had gone, and I said “Great! The guerrillas took over the school and showed us how to shoot an Uzi”. The next day, we were back at the nun’s private school.
More on Dear Uncle
My Uncle did pay the price for his beliefs though, and I love the fact that he put his money where his mouth was. He ran electricity from his block of flats to the shantytown down the hill, and helped them get running water. Also, the army grabbed his son, my cousin Lalo, who was the sweetest boy in the world, and “disappeared” him. Luckily, my aunt, who was an extreme-right wing wealthy person and had ties with (i.e. Had probably had affairs with) all kinds of top brass in the Salvadorian army, got on the horn, and promptly located the “security center” where they were “holding” my cousin. When my uncle got to the undisclosed underground location, they had poor Lalo stripped down to his jockey shorts and were getting ready to cut off his balls.
By the way, I did love my aunt. Actually, come to think of it, I did not. She never let us touch the walls on her house, and one time they had us over for Christmas and totally ignored us the whole time (worst Christmas ever) as they gave each other huge wads of American dollars and giant bottles of Chanel No 5. And this led me to not like rich people very much either. They were just like the proletariat. One was proud and had a sense of entitlement due to the fact that they were poor, and the other was very patronizing, holier than thou, and proud of their wealth. I think the only “class” I was really into were the out of work Carneys that lived on the street and taught me dirty jokes and magic tricks. I liked them, and very old people who were full of ghost stories. Still, I really like my aunt, even to this day. Anyway, back to my uncle, we didn’t know this at the time, but he had built a tunnel from the University to the shantytowns, so that insurgents could travel safely from one to the other. One day I came home to find my uncle sitting in our modest living room, and he said that he’d stay with us for a few days. I thought this was strange. It turns out that someone had tipped my uncle that the army had already captured and tortured to death the young Guatemalan assistant who helped with the tunnel design. My uncle left the country a couple of days later, and the army broke down his door the same day that he got out. I didn’t see him again after that. He had gone into hiding in Nicaragua. If we wanted to get a hold of him on the phone, we had to call up a man at a certain time, and he’d call another person later on, and then they’d call someone else, and they’d call us with a number that we could call only once, and only at a very specific time.
One of my fondest memories of my uncle was that we were driving in the dark, and my mother was talking his ear off about “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”, and my uncle said to her “Stop talking to me about those faggoty birds! They’re just bullshit!” “What Bravura!” I thought, realizing that to him shock value was one of his intrinsic values. It was important to him to be shocking. To speak like a rogue even though he was an intellectual, to say things that were so nasty, especially about such a beautiful book as Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It was just as if somebody had raped Tinkerbelle.
The last conversation I had with my uncle, I hadn’t talked to him in two decades. And I said to him: “Uncle, remember those “faggoty birds” years ago when we were in the car?” he didn’t know what I was talking about. He must have thought I was nuts. And in a few weeks he died of a sudden heart attack. How sad, I thought, that the last conversation I had with my dear uncle wasn’t about the meaning of life, or about art or even his political beliefs, but about an inane conversation we had over twenty years ago. Gosh I love my uncle!
Don Beto’s Head
Don Beto owned a “Chalet” in the town square of the village of El Paraiso (“Paradise”) where I spent some of my childhood. He was going to buy some supplies and was riding on the side door of the bus when he slipped, fell, and the rear tire of the bus ran over his head. My grandmother told me that when they were cleaning the body for the open casket wake, as they moved Don Beto’s head, it looked like a balloon filled with water, and it felt like the mattress on a waterbed. A bulge would form on whatever side of the head was facing down. His brains had liquefied. When I went to the burial a few days later, Don Beto’s wife, overcome with grief, tried to throw herself inside the hole. It was very moving. I think they must have been in love.
posted by I See A Darkness at 9:54 AM
