Every third night Florentino Ventura can be found sleeping outdoors, guarding the large blue shrine that honors the belief in a lawless man.
His faith keeps him there.

The summer when Florentino was 23, he was working as an oyster diver in Mazatlan. One day he became tangled in his rope underwater. He wrestled with the cord and began to drown. Then suddenly the face of the bandit Jesus Malverde appeared to him. Florentino finally freed himself. He rose to the surface and came immediately to Malverde’s shrine to give thanks. From the way Florentino describes it, the experience led to the kind of spiritual catharsis that makes people change their lives. Florentino changed his. He’d been on track for what would have been at least a minor political career. He had been a PRI youth leader and won a scholarship to study political science in Mexico City. He was taking a break from studying law when the diving accident happened. But he gave it all up and, now 36, he’s been here ever since. “The Mexican political system is useless. It was false, pure lies,” he says. Florentino found more truth in Malverde.

Florentino Ventura is one of thousands of people who believe the bandit Jesus Malverde – “the Angel of the Poor,” “The Generous Bandit” — works miracles in their lives. And all year long they come to his shrine here in Culiacan, capital of the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, to ask Malverde for favors and thank him for those he’s granted. They leave behind photos and plaques with grateful inscriptions: “Thank you Malverde for saving me from drugs,” writes Isaias Valencia Miranda, from Agua Zarca Sinaloa; “Thank you Malverde for not having to lose my arm and leg,” reads the dedication on a photo of a man in sunglasses identifying himself as Lorenzo Salazar, from Guadalajara. There are plaques from the Guicho Rios family from Mexicali; the Leon family from Stockton; the Chaidez family from North Hollywood, and many more from the great Mexican diaspora in Los Angeles.

“Dear holy and miraculous Malverde,” reads one letter to the bandit left at the shrine. “I’m writing this letter so that you’ll help me with a problem I have with some friends I had, so that they won’t look for me any more. Make them forget the problems we had. Make them please leave my parents and my sister and me in peace. This is what I ask of you, Malverde, that you do this favor. I promise that when I go to Sinaloa I’ll go visit you and I’ll bring you what I can because I live in Los Angeles, California. Malverde. Your son, Angel Cortez. Sept 15, 1992.”

Sinaloa is one of those places in Mexico where justice isn’t blind and the lawless aren’t always the bad guys. Having the government as an enemy can improve a reputation. So maybe, then, it’s not such a stretch to understand how thousands of people could come to believe that Jesus Malverde, a renegade supposedly long dead, performs miracles in their lives.

Nor, for that reason, is it hard to understand how over the past two decades, Jesus Malverde has also become what he’s now best known as: “The Narco Saint,” the patron saint for the region’s many drug smugglers. Mexican drug smuggling began in Sinaloa. Here smugglers are folk heroes and a “narcoculture” has existed for some time. Faith in Malverde was always strongest among Sinaloa’s poor and highland residents, the classes from which Mexico’s drug traffickers emerged. As the narcos went from the hills to the front pages, they took Malverde with them. He is now the religious side to that narcoculture. Smugglers come ask Malverde for protection before sending a load north. If the trip goes well, they return to pay the shrine’s house band to serenade the bandit, or place a plaque thanking Malverde for “lighting the way”; increasingly plaques include the code words “From Sinaloa to California.”

The story of Jesus Malverde takes place during the reign of dictator Porfirio Diaz (1877-1911). The Porfiriato, as the era is known, was a time when big business, especially foreign-owned big business, was encouraged above all else. Diaz saw himself as the rest of the world saw him: as Mexico’s modernizer. Yet progress passed by millions of Mexicans, who remained as impoverished as ever. As the century turned, the country fermented with the social anarchy that would explode in the Mexican Revolution. The hills and back roads of Mexico were alive with banditry, some of whom would become folk heroes to the country’s poor.

The legend is that Jesus Malverde was one of these, a bandit who rode the hills near Culiacan. They say Malverde robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. A Mexican Robin Hood. It must have been true, for they say the government hung him and left him to rot in a tree. That was on May 3, 1909. Every year on that day there’s a great party at Malverde’s shrine.

Two movies and one play exist dealing with Malverde’s life. But historians have found no evidence he ever existed; a likelier prospect is that Malverde’s an amalgam of two bandits — Heraclio Bernal from Southern Sinaloa and Felipe Bachomo, from the north part of the state. “If he lived, faith in him is a remarkable thing,” says Sergio Lopez, a dramatist from Culiacan, who has also researched and written about Malverde. “If he never lived, it’s even more remarkable because people have created this thing to achieve the justice that is denied them.”

What does exist is a rich and fluid body of lore about Malverde’s life. Supposedly, his Christian name was Jesus Juarez Mazo, born sometime in 1870 near the town of Mocorito. In some versions he was a tailor. Others have him as a construction worker, or a railroad hand, who built the tracks that were just then extending through northern Mexico and that brought with them the opportunities that made some men wealthy and other men bandits.

Some say Malverde began a life of crime after his parents died of hunger. Some versions say he was finally betrayed by a friend, who cut off his feet and dragged him through the hills to the police to collect a 10,000 peso reward. Others have him betrayed and shot to death. His betrayer dies three days later, and the governor who wanted him, Francisco Canedo, dies 33 days later, from a cold contracted after going out at night without slippers.

Lopez believes Canedo may have invented the Malverde legend himself to keep the state’s hacienda owners thinking twice before indulging in the more extreme abuses of their peons. But there’s also a story that the governor challenged Malverde to rob him. Malverde, as a construction worker, slipped into the mansion, stole the governor’s sword and wrote on a wall, “Jesus M. was here.”

Malverde’s first miracle, according to one version, was returning a woman’s lost cow. Eligio Gonzalez, whose work to keep faith in the bandit alive has earned him the nickname “The Apostle of Malverde,” tells still another story. “The rural police shot him in the leg with a bow and arrow,” Gonzalez says. “He was dying of gangrene. He told his friend, ´Before I die, compadre, take me in to get the reward.’ His friend brought him in dead and got the reward. They hung Malverde from a mesquite tree as a warning to the people. “His first miracle was for a friend who lost some mules loaded with gold and silver,” is the way Gonzalez tells it. “He asked the bones of Malverde, which were still hanging from the tree, to find his mules again. He found them. So he put Malverde’s bones in the box and went to the cemetery where the governor is buried. He bribed the guard to let him bury Malverde there. He buried him like contraband. No one knows where.”

Malverde’s shrine stands near the railroad tracks on the west side of Culiacan, well-known to just about everybody in town. Nearby are Malverde Clutch & Breaks, Malverde Lumber and two Denny’s-like cafeterias: Coco’s Malverde and Chic’s Malverde. Outside the shrine people sell trinkets, candles, and pictures. Inside the shrine are two concrete busts of the man. Malverde, supposedly a poor man from the hills, turns out to look a lot like a matinee idol — dark eyes, sleek mustache, jet-black hair, resolute jaw. Near the main busts are stands of pendants, baseball hats, tapes with corridos to the bandit, countless picture cases with photographs of the bandit and a prayer to him in thanks, and rows of plaster busts wrapped in plastic. To one side sits Dona Tere, rocking the day away. She is a cheerful, plump woman, made up with bright red lipstick. She, too, has her tale of faith. Eight years ago, doctors diagnosed Dona Tere with cancer. She decided not to take medicine. “I said, ´Malverde, they say you do miracles. I’m going to ask you for a miracle. I don’t believe in you. I know I’m going to die.'” Dona Tere’s still around. “I have four Malverdes in my house,” she says. “One in the kitchen. One in the dining room. One going up the stairs and one in the bedroom. I bless myself every time I’m at the foot of the stairs.” Last time they operated on her, Dona Tere paid for two hours of music to be played to Malverde. “Rich, poor, sick, not sick — everyone comes here,” she says. “When they come here and pay for music to be played people here say it must have gone well for them on their trip (sending drugs to the U.S.). I don’t know. It’s their own private business. I don’t ask. But I’ll tell you. More people come here than go to church. If you go to church asking for food, the priest will give you advice, but if you come here asking for food, you’ll get food.”

There was a time not so long ago when the Malverde shrine was a funky thing, awash in the artifacts of Mexican working-class life. You’d see piles of baby pictures and faded out-of-focus Polaroids of men in cowboy hats, and poorly spelled thank-you notes in twisted handwriting. There’d be slats of cardboard warping under the weight of pasted plastic flowers and photo collages of extended families. One man had left a baggie of hair, thanking Malverde for allowing him to survive a term in San Quentin. There were artificial limbs, and corn cobs and a lot of photocopies of recently obtained passports. Fishermen would leave large jars containing enormous shrimp in formaldehyde — thanks for a successful catch. Gonzalez remembers two different men — one left a pistol, the other an AK-47 rifle. But that’s been changing lately. Families have built glass enclosures – essentially, shrines within a shrine. Malverde has gone a little more high-class. There isn’t as much room any more for all those piles of homemade thank-yous and photo collages.

Still, faith in Malverde remains above all a private affair. There is no ceremony here. A constant stream of people arrive, place a candle near one of the busts, sit for a while, bless themselves, touch Malverde’s head, and leave. Some are poor. Others arrive in shiny trucks and cars, looking very middle class. Jesus Gastelo, a rugged, aging farmer, enters in sandals and a shirt buttoned halfway up his plump torso. In his arms is his newborn son, Sergio, now 13 days old. Gastelo lights a candle. “I’m really old,” he says. “How old do you think I am?” Gastelo is 64, once widowed, and he’s just fathered his eighth child, this with his new wife, a woman of 31. A lot to thank Malverde for. “I’ve believed in Malverde since I was a little boy,” he says, dropping his index finger to his knees, as an indication of how tall he was at the time that faith began.

Back then, faith in Malverde didn’t get the press it gets today. It centered around a pile of stones and pebbles, which is now about 50 yards away and across two streets. “It was just a pile of rocks and stones, like a grave,” says Gastelo. “It was where they say he was hung.” Believers will tell you the reason there are so many of them is that Malverde answers faith like Jesus Gastelo’s. But there are other reasons. One of them is Eligio Gonzalez, a 50-year-old jack-of-all-trades who wears his “Apostle of Malverde” tag with pride. The other is a bright idea the state had in the late 1970s. Government officials decreed they would build new state offices where people congregated to pay tribute to Malverde. Opposition to the idea was fierce. Newspaper columnists opined over the idea. “The protest lasted two years,” says Gastelo. Finally, state officials were forced to provide land where the shrine now stands. They say all of Culiacan turned out for the demolition of the pile of stones and pebbles. They say, too, that stones began to jump like popcorn and that the bulldozer operator had to get drunk to have the guts to roll over it; they say the machine broke down when it touched the grave. Finally, though, the job got done. The massive state government building now sits over Malverde’s original tomb. The tomb itself was moved across the street from the shrine, at the corner of Insurgentes and 16 de Septiembre streets. Researchers say it was during these years that the media christened Malverde as The Narcosaint. In the late 1970s, Sinaloa was embroiled in the great military strike against the region’s drug smugglers that was known as Operation Condor, during which the army went through the hills attacking drug smugglers and innocent ranchers with equal vigor; the state lost an estimated 2,000 hamlets and villages during those years as people abandoned homes, land and livestock and streamed from the hills to the cities. “The press, sharing the same view as the authorities, or perhaps so as not to be left behind when the graft was being handed out, added their two cents,” says Luis Astorga, a researcher of the narcoculture who lived in Culiacan during this time. “They labeled Malverde as the ´Narcosaint.’ The drug smugglers, due to their social origin, had inherited the belief in Malverde. But the media gave it a kind of yellow slant. They were really the ones who made Malverde into the drug smuggler’s saint, forgetting how old the belief in him really was.”

Today the pile of pebbles signifying Malverde’s tomb now shares a vacant lot with Tianguis Malverde – Malverde Market — a consignment car lot where Victor Manuel Parra and Marco Antonio Osuna will try to sell your used vehicle in exchange for a commission for themselves. The pebbles sit in the middle of the lot, surrounded by weeds and Suburbans, Nissan pickups, Monte Carlos and dented Volkswagens. Atop the pile is an iron cross, a weather-beaten bust of Malverde, now for some reason encased in a rusty bird cage. Like many parts of Sinaloan life, the car-mart depends largely on drug money. In the fall, marijuana growers are tending their crop and about to harvest. So sales at the lot are slow, this being October. The men say they are biding their time until December and January, when the growers will have sent their loads north and have money to burn. So they have more than enough time to talk about Malverde and the tomb of stones they work around every day. “He’d rob from the rich and give to the poor. This is where they say he was hung,” says Parra. “(The owner) wanted to build on this site, but he couldn’t get rid of it. The soul of Malverde wouldn’t permit it. They brought in machinery, but the machines broke down.”

The truth, it turns out, is more mundane. Jose Carlos Aguilar, the lot’s owner, says he wants to build a high-rise hotel or office building on the sight, but hasn’t been able to find funding or a suitable partner. Still, if he did build on the site, Aguilar says he’d leave aside a corner of the building, or maybe a section of the hotel lobby, for the bandit’s tomb. “You can’t be inflaming people’s sensibilities,” he says.

The building dispute with the state government may have distressed many of Malverde’s believers. But the faith emerged from it energized and publicized. Eligio Gonzalez has built and added to the new shrine. Now it has what it lacked before: a true focal point. Gonzalez is protective of the faith’s image. “All this stuff about the narcosaint, they say it, but he’s for people from all walks of life,” he says. Gonzalez is a small man with leathery skin and sandals. He says the outlaw Malverde cured him of gunshot wounds in 1973. But he punctuates his speech with the words “God first,” so no one gets the wrong idea. “If it weren’t for God, Malverde couldn’t do anything,” he says.

He spends his days driving through outlying villages selling newspapers and Pepsi-Cola. Pepsi-Cola, in turns out, is a stalwart Malverde sponsor. Local distributors often give Gonzalez discounts so he can sell the soda at concerts and dances and keep the profits for Malverde. Once, during a large encampment of campesinos outside the state building that lasted two months, he sold 4,000 cases of Pepsi. Not surprisingly, Coke products are scarce at the shrine. With the money Gonzalez feeds his family and the leftovers go to Malverde. Money taken in donations and sales at the shrine go to help with burials – more than 9,500 so far — wheelchairs for the crippled and cots for the poor. Nor was faith in Malverde hurt when Gonzalez recently won a raffle recently — a Volkswagen Golf car was the prize — which he promptly sold. Proceeds, he says, went to buy more cots, coffins and blankets for poor families. (He’s said to have won the national lottery 12 times.)

Gonzalez is a controversial figure in Culiacan. Local reporters wonder slyly what else he might be doing with the money. There have been reports that Gonzalez hasn’t shared royalties from cassettes sold at the shrine with a crippled man who wrote ballads to Malverde. But if this is the case, Gonzalez doesn’t seem to be getting rich. He has no phone and his clothes are humble.

“Thanks to God and Malverde there’s something for everyone,” he says. “Not much, but something. Little by little we’ve built this. Before it was just tiny. People have put in a lot of faith. If there’s no faith, there’s no miracles.”

Malachi Ritscher’s apparent suicide
by Peter Margasak on November 7th – 4:06 p.m.
CHICAGO READER

On Saturday the Sun-Times ran a small item about a man who had set himself on fire during rush hour Friday morning near the Ohio Street exit on the Kennedy.

His identity has still not been officially determined, but members of the local jazz and improvised music community say they are certain it was Malachi Ritscher, a longtime supporter of the scene.

Bruno Johnson, who owns the free-jazz label Okka Disk, received a package yesterday from Ritscher that included a will, keys to his home, and instructions about what should be done with his belongings. Johnson, a former Chicagoan who now lives in Milwaukee, began making calls.

Police are still awaiting the results of dental tests, but Johnson says an officer told one of Ritscher’s sisters that all evidence pointed to the body being his; his car was found nearby and he hadn’t shown up for work since Thursday.

Buried on Ritscher’s web site Chicago Rash Audio Potential, a compendium of invaluable show postings, artwork, and photography, are a suicide note [see below] and an obituary.

Both indicate that he was deeply troubled by the war in Iraq and pinpoint it as a motive for suicide (no method is specified), though there are indications that he may have had other issues as well. “He had a son, from whom he was estranged (at the son’s request), and two grandchildren,” reads the obit. “He had many acquaintances, but few friends; and wrote his own obituary, because no one else really knew him.”

Ritscher was a familiar face at antiwar protests, and he was arrested more than once for his involvement, including this time this past May.

A note found at the scene of the immolation reportedly read “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”

Although Ritscher, who was in his early 50s, had played music off and on over the years, he was best known for his devotion to documenting other people’s shows. Several nights a week for at least the last decade he could be found at places like the Empty Bottle, the Velvet Lounge, and the Hungry Brain; by his own count he recorded more than 2,000 concerts. Over the years he invested more money in equipment and as his skills improved, many of his recordings went to be used on commerical releases–by Paul Rutherford, Gold Sparkle Band, Isotope 217, Irene Schweizer, and Ken Vandermark among others. Ritscher was fiercely modest about these pursuits–I once tried to do a piece on him for the Reader but he declined, saying he didn’t want publicity.
…

Photos courtesy of Joeff Davis

Click here for more information from the Chicago Reader blog.

From Malachi Ritscher’s website:

mission statement

My actions should be self-explanatory, and since in our self-obsessed culture words seldom match the deed, writing a mission statement would seem questionable. So judge me by my actions. Maybe some will be scared enough to wake from their walking dream state – am I therefore a martyr or terrorist? I would prefer to be thought of as a ‘spiritual warrior’. Our so-called leaders are the real terrorists in the world today, responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden.

I have had a wonderful life, both full and full of wonder. I have experienced love and the joy and heartache of raising a child. I have jumped out of an airplane, and escaped a burning building. I have spent the night in jail, and dropped acid during the sixties. I have been privileged to have met many supremely talented musicians and writers, most of whom were extremely generous and gracious. Even during the hard times, I felt charmed. Even the difficult lessons have been like blessed gifts. When I hear about our young men and women who are sent off to war in the name of God and Country, and who give up their lives for no rational cause at all, my heart is crushed. What has happened to my country? we have become worse than the imagined enemy – killing civilians and calling it ‘collateral damage’, torturing and trampling human rights inside and outside our own borders, violating our own Constitution whenever it seems convenient, lying and stealing right and left, more concerned with sports on television and ring-tones on cell-phones than the future of the world…. half the population is taking medication because they cannot face the daily stress of living in the richest nation in the world.

I too love God and Country, and feel called upon to serve. I can only hope my sacrifice is worth more than those brave lives thrown away when we attacked an Arab nation under the deception of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. Our interference completely destroyed that country, and destabilized the entire region. Everyone who pays taxes has blood on their hands.

I have had one previous opportunity to serve my country in a meaningful way – at 8:05 one morning in 2002 I passed Donald Rumsfeld on Delaware Avenue and I was acutely aware that slashing his throat would spare the lives of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people. I had a knife clenched in my hand, and there were no bodyguards visible; to my deep shame I hesitated, and the moment was past.

The violent turmoil initiated by the United States military invasion of Iraq will beget future centuries of slaughter, if the human race lasts that long. First we spit on the United Nations, then we expect them to clean up our mess. Our elected representatives are supposed to find diplomatic and benevolent solutions to these situations. Anyone can lash out and retaliate, that is not leadership or vision. Where is the wisdom and honor of the people we delegate our trust to?

To the rest of the world we are cowards – demanding Iraq to disarm, and after they comply, we attack with remote-control high-tech video-game weapons. And then lie about our reasons for invading. We the people bear complete responsibility for all that will follow, and it won’t be pretty.

It is strange that most if not all of this destruction is instigated by people who claim to believe in God, or Allah. Many sane people turn away from religion, faced with the insanity of the ‘true believers’. There is a lot of confusion: many people think that God is like Santa Claus, rewarding good little girls with presents and punishing bad little boys with lumps of coal; actually God functions more like the Easter Bunny, hiding surprises in plain sight. God does not choose the Lottery numbers, God does not make the weather, God does not endorse military actions by the self-righteous, God does not sit on a cloud listening to your prayers for prosperity. God does not smite anybody. If God watches the sparrow fall, you notice that it continues to drop, even to its death. Face the truth folks, God doesn’t care, that’s not what God is or does. If the human race drives itself to extinction, God will be there for another couple million years, ‘watching’ as a new species rises and falls to replace us. It is time to let go of primitive and magical beliefs, and enter the age of personal responsibility. Not telling others what is right for them, but making our own choices, and accepting consequences.

“Who would Jesus bomb?” This question is primarily addressing a Christian audience, but the same issues face the Muslims and the Jews: God’s message is tolerance and love, not self-righteousness and hatred. Please consider “Thou shalt not kill” and “As ye sow, so shall ye reap”. Not a lot of ambiguity there.

What is God? God is the force of life – the spark of creation. We each carry it within us, we share it with each other. Whether we are conscious of the life-force is a choice we make, every minute of every day. If you choose to ignore it, nothing will happen – you are just ‘less conscious’. Maybe you are less happy (maybe not). Maybe you grow able to tap into the universal force, and increase the creativity in the universe. Love is anti-entropy. Please notice that ‘conscious’ and ‘conscience’ are related concepts.

Why God – what is the value? Whether committee consensus of a benevolent power that works through humans, or giant fungus under Oregon, the value of opening up to the concept of God is in coming to the realization that we are not alone, establishing a connection to the universe, the experience of finding completion. As individuals we may exist alone, but we are all alone together as a people. Faith is the answer to fear. Fear opposes love. To manipulate through fear is a betrayal of trust.

What does God want? No big mystery – simply that we try to help each other. We decide to make God-like decisions, rescuing falling sparrows, or putting the poor things out of their misery. Tolerance, giving, acceptance, forgiveness.

If this sounds a lot like pop psychology, that is my exact goal. Never underestimate the value of a pep-talk and a pat on the ass. That is basically all we give to our brave soldiers heading over to Iraq, and more than they receive when they return. I want to state these ideas in their simplest form, reducing all complexity, because each of us has to find our own answers anyway. Start from here…

I am amazed how many people think they know me, even people who I have never talked with. Many people will think that I should not be able to choose the time and manner of my own death. My position is that I only get one death, I want it to be a good one. Wouldn’t it be better to stand for something or make a statement, rather than a fiery collision with some drunk driver? Are not smokers choosing death by lung cancer? Where is the dignity there? Are not the people the people who disregard the environment killing themselves and future generations? Here is the statement I want to make: if I am required to pay for your barbaric war, I choose not to live in your world. I refuse to finance the mass murder of innocent civilians, who did nothing to threaten our country. I will not participate in your charade – my conscience will not allow me to be a part of your crusade. There might be some who say “it’s a coward’s way out” – that opinion is so idiotic that it requires no response. From my point of view, I am opening a new door.

What is one more life thrown away in this sad and useless national tragedy? If one death can atone for anything, in any small way, to say to the world: I apologize for what we have done to you, I am ashamed for the mayhem and turmoil caused by my country. I was alive when John F. Kennedy instilled hope into a generation, and I was a sorry witness to the final crushing of hope by Dick Cheney’s puppet, himself a pawn of the real rulers, the financial plunderers and looters who profit from every calamity; following the template of Reagan’s idiocracy.

The upcoming elections are not a solution – our two party system is a failure of democracy. Our government has lost its way since our founders tried to build a structure which allowed people to practice their own beliefs, as far as it did not negatively affect others. In this regard, the separation of church and state needs to be reviewed. This is a large part of the way that the world has gone wrong, the endless defining and dividing of things, micro-sub-categorization, sectarianism. The direction we need is a process of unification, integrating all people into a world body, respecting each individual. Business and industry have more power than ever before, and individuals have less. Clearly, the function of government is to protect the individual, from hardship and disease, from zealots, from the exploitation, from monopoly, even from itself. Our leaders are not wise persons with integrity and vision – they are actors reading from teleprompters, whose highest goal is to stir up the mob. Our country slaughters Arabs, abandons New Orleaneans, and ignores the dieing environment. Our economy is a house of cards, as hollow and fragile as our reputation around the world. We as a nation face the abyss of our own design.

A coalition system which includes a Green Party would be an obvious better approach than our winner-take-all system. Direct electronic debate and balloting would be an improvement over our non-representative congress. Consider that the French people actually have a voice, because they are willing to riot when the government doesn’t listen to them.

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government… ” – Abraham Lincoln

With regard to those few who crossed my path carrying the extreme and unnecessary weight of animosity: they seemed by their efforts to be punishing themselves. As they acted out the misery of their lives it is now difficult to feel anything other than pity for them.

Without fear I go now to God – your future is what you will choose today.

Donald Cammell, Dennis Hopper, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Kenneth Anger in London in 1971.

You brew a ground pound of coffee in cold water for 12 hours — then you’ve got six cups of the best-tasting coffee of all time, which stays fresh for up to 14 days if you keep it refrigerated. It’s got 67% less acidity than a normal cup of coffee; a whole lot less oil too.

Peter Coyote:

“Without provocative talk, coffeehouses and good meeting places, artistic friendships, and a supportive community, art cannot flourish. A second-rate poet may be a first rate critic of another’s work. While history tends to isolate and reward the luminaries of such milieus, it is the scene itself, the weltanschaung, from which the art is generated, which should receive equal credit. Something is in the wind, or entering people through the soles of their feet. Many feel it, but the artist gives it expression. Without comparable receptors in the form of an audience, the artists’ work would be an empty exercise, and so the milieu must be nourished and respect if art and culture are to flourish.”

Takeshi Murata – Untitled (Silver)

Nov 4th – Dec 3rd
Opening November 4th 8-10pm
Machine Project
1200 D North Alvarado Street
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Mario Bava’s classic 1960 Italian horror film, Mask of Satan is deconstructed pixel by pixel in Takeshi Murata’s hallucinatory new video, Untitled (Silver). Original soundtrack by Robert Beatty and Ellen Mollé

From ArtForum: “Mario Bava’s classic 1960 Italian horror film, Mask of Satan (aka Black Sunday) is the almost unrecognizable source for Takeshi Murata’s hallucinatory new video, Untitled (Silver), 2006. The sole work in the New York artist’s first solo show, this absorbing, ten-minute, black-and-white piece reveals Murata’s formidable skill at
wrangling pixels into swirling patterns that move at a poetically trippy pace. With the judicious eye of a film director, the artist finds moments in Bava’s film where ’60s goth queen Barbara Steele seemingly floats through ornate interiors, and, using sophisticated code-based image processing—the details of which may elude all but the most serious programmers—Murata veils her darkly
remote beauty with layers of visual distortion and digital degradation (all overlaid with an ambient electronic sound track composed by Robert Beatty and Ellen Mollé). At times, the images bring to mind Glenn Brown’s melting Old Master-style portraits, and the encoded randomness also has John Cage computer connections. But Murata’s particular genius is an almost alchemical ability to transform forgotten relics of pop culture into dazzling jewels. —Glen Helfand”

by Alexander Trocchi (1963?)

It is our contention that, for many years now, a change, which might be usefully regarded as evolutionary, has been taking place in the minds of men; they have been becoming aware of the implications of self-consciousness. And, here and there throughout the world, individuals are more or less purposively concerned with evolving techniques to inspire and sustain self-consciousness in all men [sic].

However imperfect, fragmentary, and inarticulate this new force may presently appear, it is now in the process of becoming conscious of itself in the sense that its individual components are beginning to recognize their involvement and consciously to concern themselves with the technical problems of mutual recognition and, ultimately, of concerted action.

History is [the history] of societies geared to and through their every institution affirmative of the past, which tends, whatever its complexion, to perpetuate itself. Thus there is a natural inertia in history. Conventions, and the institutions which lend them authority, crystallize. Change is resisted, particularly changes in ways of thinking. The change which concerns us here was first explicit in modern science; the same change has been announced for close on a century in modern art. A whole new way of thinking became possible with the 20th century. Just as the substantial, objective world was destroyed by modern science, so all modern art has turned on the conventional object and destroyed it. Modern art is expressive of the evolutionary change we are speaking about; modern science furnishes us with the methods and techniques in terms of which we can postulate and resolve the practical problems of adapting ourselves to history in a new, conscious and creative way.

In looking for a word to designate a possible international association of men who are concerned individually and in concert to articulate an effective strategy and tactics for this cultural revolution (cf. The Invisible Insurrection), it was thought necessary to find one which provoked no obvious responses. We chose the word “sigma.” Commonly used in mathematical practice to designate all, the sum, the whole, it seemed to fit very well with our notion that all men [sic] must eventually be included.

In general, we prefer to use the word “sigma” with a small letter, as an adjective rather than as a noun, for there already exists a considerable number of individuals and groups whose ends, consciously or not, are near as dammit identical with our own, groups which are already called X and Y and Z and whose members may be somewhat reluctant to subsume their public identities under any other name. If these groups could be persuaded of the significance of linking themselves “adjectivally” to sigma, it would for the present be enough. Moreover, in the foreseeable future, we may very well judge it prudent to maintain multiple legal identities; doing so, we may avoid provoking the more obvious kinds of resistance.

Actually dispersed as we are, and will be until several self-conscious focal-points (sigma-centres) are established, effective communications are vital. All individuals and groups the world over must be contacted and henceforth invited to participate. People must be located and activated: we are confronted with the technical problem of elaborating the ways of gearing the power of all of us individuals to an effective flywheel. This must be solved without requiring anyone to sink his identity in anything noxiously metaphysical.

In The Invisible Insurrection we touched on the kind of situation we wish to bring about. We conceived it to be a kind of spontaneous university. But the term “university” has some unfortunate connotations and is, besides, too limited to include the entire complex of vital and infectious human processes we have in mind to detonate, first in England and subsequently throughout the world. The original spontaneous university (or sigma-centre) will be a fountainhead only. We are concerned with cities and civilizations, not with “classrooms” in the conventional sense, nevertheless, we are at the beginning of it all and must commence with certain practical considerations. Our experimental situation, our international conference, must be located so that our “cosmonauts” can either congregate or be in contact.

It is not simply a question of founding yet another publishing house, not another art gallery, nor another theater group, and of sending it on its high-minded way amongst the mammon-engines of its destruction. Such a firm (I am thinking in terms of the West for the moment), if it were successful in sustaining itself within the traditional cultural complex, would “do much good,” no doubt. But it is not the publishing industry alone that is in our view out of joint (and has no survival potential); to think almost exclusively in terms of publishing is to think in terms of yesterday’s abstractions. A softer bit and more resilient harness won’t keep the old nag out of the knackery. Of course sigma will publish. When we have something to publish. And we shall do it effectively, forgetting no technique evolved in yesterday’s publishing. (Or we may find it convenient to have this or that published by a traditional publisher.) But it is art too in which we are interested. With the leisure of tomorrow in mind, it is all the grids of expression we are concerned to seize.

That is what we mean when we say that “literature is dead”; not that some people won’t write (indeed, perhaps all people will), or even write a novel (although we feel this category has about outlived its usefulness), but the writing of anything in terms of capitalist economy, as an economic act, with reference to economic limits, it is not, in our view, interesting. It is business. It is a jungle talent. We also wish to paint and we also wish to sing. We have to think of a society in which leisure is a fact and in which a man’s very survival will depend upon his ability to cope with it. The conventional spectator-creator dichotomy must be broken down. The traditional “audience” must participate.

We might even say we don’t know what we wish to do; we wish, rather, continuously to consult with other intelligences on an international and experimental basis. Amongst other things, we believe in the vital importance of pamphlets and pamphleteering, but it is not that we shall bring out 12 (the round dozen!) pamphlets on the 14th of September to “launch” our imprint and proceed to send our private little ball spinning along the well-worn grooves of the cultural pinball-machine: that would be to invite the destruction of the intuition which drives us to articulate. Nor can we limit ourselves, as far as printed matter is concerned, to the traditional media. One interesting “publishing” project, for example, would be to rent an advertisement panel in (say) four of the London Underground stations for a trial period of one year, and to print our weekly (or monthly) magazine poster-size. Obviously, the weekly poster could be placed in other spots as well. A broadsheet, personal size, could be sent to sponsors and subscribers who might value a facsimile collection of the posters. And why stop at London? (Undergrounds of the World Unite!) The editorial job in such a project would be complex but not impractical. Thirty or forty writers sympathetic towards sigma could be solicited in advance. Other conventional projects, which we shall discuss in more detail later, are: advertising space in little magazines, in the personal columns of national newspapers, all manner of labels, matchboxes, etc., toilet paper (for the New Yorker reader who has everything), cigarette cards, the backs of playing cards, etc., Of course, we shall publish books as well: but the greater part of what we shall eventually decide to do will grow out of the conflux of creative ideas and goodwill that is sigma. To begin with, we must make a continuous, international, experimental conference possible; a permanent meeting of minds to articulate and promote the vast cultural change which U.N.E.S.C.O. is prevented by its origins from effecting.

We must say to our sponsors: while we can envisage sigma’s flourishing economically in the West, it is not primarily a business organization. We require a protected situation, a place to confer and corporately create. A great deal has already been done. But our strength lies not so much in what has so far been done purposively in our name [as] in the availibility of other intelligences to our trans-categorical inspiration. All over the world today are little conflagrations of intelligence, little pockets of “situation-making.” Some of the first theorists called themselves “Situationnistes.” Other individuals and groups who appear to us to have similar attitudes are presently being gathered into a comprehensive index which will serve as the basis for our communications. We have to evolve the mechanisms and techniques for a kind of supercategorical cultural organization. Some of its features we believe to be as follows:

(1) sigma as international index:

The first essential for those whose purpose it is to link mind with mind in a supernatural (transcategorical) process, is some kind of efficient expanding index, an international “who’s who.” It is a question of taking stock, of surveying the variety of talent and goodwill at our disposal. Who is with us? Who knows he [sic] is with us? Our general invitation might read something like this:

We should like to invite you to take part in an international conference about the future of things. The brief introductory statement enclosed (The Invisible Insurrection) should give you an idea of what we are about.
We have chosen the word sigma because as a symbol it is free of bothersome semantic accretions.
Actually dispersed as we are, and will be until several self-conscious focal points are established (in each of which an experimental situation is self-consciously in the process of articulating itself), effective communications are vital.
Now and in the future our centre is everywhere, our circumference nowhere. No one is in control. No one is excluded. A man [sic] will know when he is participating without offering him a badge.
We have decided that as far as it is economically possible, you should receive all our future informations. Sigma’s publications are in general given away free to those who participate in its activities.
The conference begins now and goes on indefinitely. We are particularly anxious to have your participation soon, as soon as possible.
sigma associates
We are writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, physicists, bio-chemists, philosophers, neurologists, engineers, and whatnots, of every race and nationality. The catalogue of such a reservoir of talent, intelligence, and power, is of itself a spur to our imagination.

(2) sigma as spontaneous university:

We can write off existing universities. These lately illustrious institutions are almost hopelessly geared and sprocketted to the cultural-economic axles of the status quo; they have become a function of the context they came into being to inspire.

Of the American universities, Paul Goodman writes: “Therefore we see the paradox that, with so many centres of possible intellectual criticism and intellectual initiative, there is so much inane conformity, and the universities are little models of the Organized System itself.” Secession, the forming of new models: this is the traditional answer, and in our view the only one. So Oxford broke away from the Sorbonne and Cambridge from Oxford, and “the intellectual ferment was most vigorous, the teaching most brilliant, the monopoly of the highest education most complete, almost before a university existed at all” (Hastings Rashdall: The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages.) The bureaucracies of the universities mesh with the bureaucracy of the state, mirror it in little; and the specific disease of bureaucracy is that it tends to spawn more of itself and function as a parasitic organism, inventing “needs” to justify its existence, ultimately suffocating the host it was intended to nurture (cf. the satire of William Burroughs). The universities have become factories for the production of degreed technicians; the various governmental reports on them (particularly the Robbins Report), skating over the thick crust of centuries, call simply for more and more of the same.

The empty chapels of the Cambridge colleges are a significant symbol of the decline of the parent institution. Built originally to house the soul of the community of scholars, they are presently derelict. Quite recently, there was a newspaper report of a prize being offered to the student who wrote the best essay on what should be done with them. It was awarded to the student who suggested that they could be converted to laboratories for science, dining halls and residential quarters for the students, libraries, etc. In short, what was once the vital spiritual centre was to be turned over to material purposes; space is short, and imagination shorter. That something immaterial, something intangible, has been lost, was overlooked. There would have been more hope for Cambridge, certainly more evidence of spirituality, if it had been decided to turn them into brothels.

Meanwhile, those who (rightly or wrongly) are deeply distrustful of the statistical method, clamouring for the abolition of college examinations, tend to overlook the disastrous influence the examination-dominated curriculum has upon the attitudes and habits of the student population at our universities. The competitive system encourages the clever tactician, the glib, the plausible. It is certainly painful and perhaps even dangerous for a student to become deeply interested in his subject, or he is constantly having to get ready to demonstrate his virtuosity; the students at our universities are so busy practising appearances that one seldom meets one who is concerned with the realities. The entire system is a dangerous anarchronism. Secession by vital minds everywhere is the only answer.

The more imaginative university teachers all over the world are well aware of these things. But they can do nothing until they can see a possible alternative. Sigma as spontaneous university is such an alternative. It can only grow out of the combined effort of individuals and groups of individuals working unofficially at [a] supernational level. A large country house, not too far from London (and Edinburgh, and New York, and Paris, etc.), is being sought for the pilot project.

Those who saw the photographs of Lyn Chadwick’s personal “museum” in the color supplement of The Sunday Times some months ago, those who know something of the Louisiana Foundation in Denmark, of the “semantic city” at Canissy in France, about the cultural activities in Big Sur, California, about Black Mountain College in North Carolina, about various spontaneous cultural conglomerations in California and New York in the late ‘fifties, will have some idea of the vital significance of ambience.

While a great deal of lip-service is paid to the significance of a man’s environment (especially during the formative years), our societies push ahead willy-nilly boxing people into honeycomb apartment blocks to meet the immediate requirements of industry. For the moment, there is little we can do about this, but we can take care that the structural features of our sigma-centres are geared to and inspiring of the future as we imagine it can be, rather than the past and present out of which men must evolve. Our experimental sigma-centre must be in all its dimensions a model for the functions of the future rather than of the past. Our architects, arriving at the site with the first group of associates, will design the architecture of the spontaneous university for and around the participants.

The site should not be farther from London than Oxford or Cambridge, for we must be located within striking distance of the metropolis, since many of our undertakings will be in relation to cultural phenomena already established there, and so that those coming from abroad can travel back and forth from the capital without difficulty. Moreover, we have always envisaged our experimental situation as a kind of shadow reality of the future existing side by side with the present “establishment,” and the process as one of gradual “in(ex)filtration.” If we were to locate ourselves too far away from the centers of power, we should run the risk of being regarded by some of those we are concerned to attract as a group of utopian escapists, spiritual exiles, hellbent for Shangri-La on the bicycle of our frustration. Then, “the original building will stand deep within its own grounds, preferably on a riverbank. It should be large enough for a pilot-group (astronauts of inner space) to situate itself, orgasm and genius, and their tools and dream-machines and amazing apparatus and appurtenances; with outhouses for workshops large as could accommodate light industry, the entire site to allow for spontaneous architecture and eventual town-planning,” etc. (cf. The Invisible Insurrection.)

Here our “experimental laboratory” will locate itself, our community-as-art, and begin exploring the possible functions of a society in which leisure is a dominant fact, and universal community, in which the conventional assumptions about reality and the constraints which they imply are no longer operative, in which art and life are no longer divided. The “university,” which we suspect will have much in common with Joan Littlewood’s “leisuredrome” (if she will forgive my coining a word), will be operated by a “college” of teacher-practioners with no separate administration.

The cultural atrophy endemic in conventional universities must be countered with an entirely new impulse. No pedagogical rearrangements, no further proliferation of staff or equipment or buildings, nor even the mere subtraction of administration of planning will help. What is essential is a new conscious sense of community-as-art-of-living; the experimental situation (laboratory) with its personnel is itself to be regarded as an artifact, a continuous making, a creative process, a community enacting itself in its individual members. Within our hypothetical context, many traditional historical problems will be recognized at once as artificial and contingent; simultaneously we shall realise our ability to outflank them by a new approach; and certain more vital problems which today receive scant attention or none at all, together with others which in a conventional context cannot even be articulated, will be recognized as more appropriate to any possible future of mankind on this planet.

We must choose our original associates widely from amongst the most brilliant creative talents in the arts and sciences.

They will be men and women [hic!] who understand that one of the most important achievements of the twentieth century is the widespread recognition of the essentially relative nature of all languages, who realise that most of our basic educational techniques have been inherited from a past in which almost all men were ignorant of the limitations inherent in any language. They will be men and women who are alive to the fact that a child’s first six years of schooling are still dedicated to providing him with the emotional furniture imposed on his [sic] father before him, and that from the beginning he is trained to respond in terms of a neuro-linguistic system utterly inadequate to the real problems with which he will have to contend in the modern world.

Our university must become a community of mind whose vital function is to discover and articulate the functions of tomorrow, an association of free men [sic] creating a fertile ambiance for new knowledge and understanding (men who don’t jump to the conclusion Kropotkin carried a bomb because he was an anarchist), who will create an independent moral climate in which the best of what is thought and imagined can flourish. The community which is the university must become a living model for society at large.

(3) sigma as international cultural engineering cooperative:

(a) The international pipeline:

When sigma-centres exist near the capitals of many countries, associate artists and scientists traveling abroad will be able to avail themselves of all the facilities of the local centre. They may choose simply to reside there or they may wish to participate. If the visitor is a celebrity, it would probably be to his [sic] advantage to do any “interview” work (audio or visual) in the sigma-centre where “angle” and editing can be his own. Sigma will then handle negotiations with local radio and television. The imaginative cultivation of this international pipeline would be a real contribution to international understanding.

(b) Cultural promotion:

This field is too vast to be treated fully here. It includes all the interesting cultural projects, conferences, international newspaper, publishing ventures, film and television projects, etc., which have been and will be suggested by associates during conferences. Many of these ideas, realized efficiently, would make a great deal of money. All this work would contribute to the sigma image.

(c) General cultural agents:

Some of the associates, especially the younger ones who are not previously committed elsewhere, will be glad to be handled by sigma. Obviously, we shall be in a position to recognize new talent long before the more conventional agencies, and, as our primary aim will not be to make money, we shall be able to cultivate a young talent, guarding the young person’s integrity.

(d) General cultural consultants:

The enormous pool of talent at our disposal places us in an incomparable position vis-a-vis providing expert counsel on cultural matters. We can advise on everything cultural, from producing a play to building a picture collection. A propos the latter, one of our proposed services is to offer an insurance policy to a buyer against the depreciation in value of any work or art recommended by sigma. It may frequently be advisable, economically or otherwise, for sigma to encourage some established company to undertake this or that cultural project: that is to say, sigma will not necessarily wait passively to be consulted. (Obviously, ideas ripe for commercial exploitation cannot be made public in this context.)

CONCLUSION

Perhaps the most striking example of the wrong-headed attitude towards art in official places is provided by the recent scuffle to keep the well-known Leonardo cartoon from leaving the United Kingdom. The official attitude has more in common with stamp-collecting than with aesthetics. The famous cartoon could have sold abroad for around one million pounds. For a small fraction of that sum, perfect replicas of it could have been made and distributed to every art gallery in the country. It is small wonder that the man in the street has such a confused attitude towards art. This confusion of value with money has infected everything. The conventional categories distinguishing the arts from each other, tending as they do to perpetuate the profitable institutions which have grown up around them, can for the moment only get in the way of creativity and our understanding of it.

The basic shift in attitude described in the foregoing pages must happen. IT IS HAPPENING. Our problem is to make men [sic] conscious of the fact, and to inspire them to participate in it. Man must seize control of his own future: only by doing so can he ever hope to inherit the earth.

ABC News

Nov. 3, 2006 — – An ABC News undercover investigation showed Army recruiters telling students that the war in Iraq was over, in an effort to get them to enlist.

ABC News and New York affiliate WABC equipped students with hidden video cameras before they visited 10 Army recruitment offices in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

“Nobody is going over to Iraq anymore?” one student asks a recruiter.

“No, we’re bringing people back,” he replies.

“We’re not at war. War ended a long time ago,” another recruiter says.

Last year, the Army suspended recruiting nationwide to retrain recruiters following hundreds of allegations of improprieties.

One Colorado student taped a recruiting session posing as a drug-addicted dropout.

“You mean I’m not going to get in trouble?” the student asked.

The recruiters told him no, and helped him cheat to sign up.

During the ABC News sessions, some recruiters told our students if they enlisted, there would be little chance they’d to go Iraq.

But Col. Robert Manning, who is in charge of U.S. Army recruiting for the entire Northeast, said that new recruits were likely to go to Iraq.

“I would not disagree with that,” Manning said. “We are a nation and Army at war still.”

Manning looked at the ABC News video of his recruiters.

“It’s hard to believe some of things they are telling prospective applicants,” Manning said. “I still believe that this is the exception more than the norm. … I’ve visited many stations myself, and I know that we have many wonderful Americans serving in uniform as recruiters.”

Yet ABC News found one recruiter who even claimed if you didn’t like the Army, you could just quit.

Manning, however, disagrees with the ease the recruiter describes.

“I would believe it’s not as easy as he would lead you to believe it is,” he said.

Sue Niederer, whose son, Seth, joined the Army in 2002, said she was all too familiar with recruiters’ lies.

Niederer said she was not surprised by what ABC News had found. She believes it’s still a widespread problem. She said that recruiters told Seth he wouldn’t be put into combat.

“Ninety percent [are] going to be putting their lives on the line for our country,” she said. “Tell them the truth. That’s all. Just tell them the truth.”