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The Lordsburg Killings refers to the shooting of two elderly men named Toshiro Kobata and Hirota Isomura at an internment camp outside of Lordsburg, New Mexico, on July 27, 1942. The shooter, Private First Class Clarence Burleson, was charged with murder, but he was later acquitted after testifying that he was following military protocol.

Camp Lordsburg was originally an enemy alien camp managed by the Department of Justice. Construction began shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the site chosen for the facility was just outside of the small desert town of Lordsburg, in New Mexico's southwestern corner. The camp consisted of three compounds, each with a barracks, latrines, and so forth. The first group of internees, all men from California, arrived in the first week of June 1942, and others followed after them. They were considered to be "potentially dangerous" by the FBI and said that their "incarceration [was] essential for national security."

The incident on July 27 was not the first shooting to occur at Camp Lordsburg. Although the Department of Justice managed the camp, the United States Army was responsible for delivering the internees via the Southern Pacific Railroad. In order to keep from frightening the local civilian population, the army would offload the internees at a railroad station, known as Ulmoris Siding, about two-miles from the camp, and march the internees through the desert very late at night or early in the morning. A 1978 dispatch from New Mexico's Office of the State Historian describes one of these night marches: "One elderly internee broke into a run across the fields, and although his friends were cautioning him in Japanese and the guards were calling "Halt!," he kept running in apparent panic until he was shot and killed."

On the night of July 27, 1942, a group of 147 Japanese men were being transported to Camp Lordsburg from another camp at Fort Lincoln, North Dakota. After getting off the train at Ulmoris Siding, Toshiro Kobata and Hirota Isomura were walking down the road together and behind all the others. Both were in their late fifties and could not keep up with the pace. Kobata had suffered from tuberculosis for sixteen years according to his friend, Hiroshi Aisawa. Fukujiro Hoshiya, a good friend of Isomura, reported that "he hurt his spine... years ago, falling off a boat... At the Bismarck Camp [North Dakota], he walked with a very much stoop." It was also said that Hoshiya's "whole body would tremble" when he stood, and that he could not run.

The murders occurred sometime during the two-mile trek through the desert. Clarence Burleson saw the two internees wander off of the road. According to the official report, Burleson shouted "Halt!" twice before shooting both of the men with a shotgun at about thirty-yards away. The coroner later found nine pellets each in the middle left portion of their backs, and since the shot pattern was not very wide it was an indication that the shooting occurred at close range. It was also revealed that the two men had asked the guards to use a restroom, but they said no. This suggested that the victims may have walked off the road to relieve themselves.

A portion of the official government response follows:

“After Hirota Isomura and Toshiro Kobata entered the reservation but before they were within the camp enclosure, they suddenly made a break and started running toward the boundary of the reservation. The guard shouted to them twice to halt and when his order was not obeyed he fired in accordance with his standing instructions. Hirota Isomura died instantly and Toshiro Kobata a few hours later. An inquiry into the circumstances was conducted at once. The court-martial of the guard was vigorously prosecuted and all the facts were developed. An acquittal of the guard resulted.

At first, Burleson was treated as a hero for stopping an "escape attempt." An officer at the facility even collected the shotgun shells used in the killing as souvenirs and said that Burleson "deserved a medal." Army headquarters, on the other hand, did not take the incident so lightly and immediately launched an investigation of the affair. As result, Burleson was eventually arrested, charged with "willfully and lawfully" committing murder, and then sent to the Eighth Army's headquarters at Fort Bliss, Texas, for a court martial; however, because the court could not prosecute Burleson for "willfully and lawfully" committing murder, since, according to him, the prisoners were trying to run away and he was merely following standing orders, the murder charges were reduced to manslaughter and he was acquitted.

The result of the court martial was not accepted by everyone. A memo from the Department of State says: "Examination of the Army '​s reports on the shootings gives the impression that the Army '​s shooting rule comes close to making death, rather than up to 30 days arrest as provided in Article 54 of the Geneva Convention, the penalty for attempted escape." The Japanese government also protested the killing, after hearing about it from internees who had been expatriated, and lodged a formal complaint. The Japanese said that "it is inconceivable that aged [elderly] invalids hardly able to walk should while under military escort have attempted to escape."

A Japanese internee, Sematsu Ishizaki, claimed that the camp's commandant, Colonel Clyde Lundy, ordered the deaths of Kobata and Isomura. Apparently, the two men had been involved in a protest against the working conditions at the camp and Lundy wanted to make an example out of them for challenging his authority. Ishizaki said: "I don '​t think they were trying to run away because they were striking [protesting] here and [Lundy] had the internees shut up in the barracks for more than 10 days, and it [the shooting] was done just for an example." It was also noted that on the day after the shooting, Lundy released the internees from house arrest and the "forced labor" resumed. The prisoners knew the labor they had to do was illegal under the Geneva Convention and they pressed for fair treatment under that standard. Their suit eventually led Eighth Army headquarters at Fort Bliss to retire Lundy, close the camp at Lordsburg, and move everyone to Camp Santa Fe.

Presently, barracks, concrete, and foundations of some of the buildings at the camp can still be visited, in addition to a historical marker that is located near the site.

The marker reads as follows:

“Camp Lordsburg - Near this site the U.S. Army operated a camp during World War II. It opened as an internment camp for Japanese and Japanese-American civilians from 1942-43. It later reopened as the Lordsburg Prisoner of War Camp for Germans and Italians from 1943-45. This camp is one of the few sites in the U.S. to house Japanese, Germans and Italians during its operations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lordsburg_Killings

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Curiosity may have killed the cat, but maybe not this one....

If you're driving out west from the suburban fringes of Dallas, Texas with the destination of some sunny California beach in mind, the never-ending Interstate-40, or the famed Route 66, will lead you to the high desert mountain city of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Comfortably settled between point A and point B. Albuquerque could be a point B, except it really doesn't have a point. If it's known for anything, it's known for it's high flying hot-air balloons, blue meth, green chile glitteratis, lo-rider moms, and golf course hustlers. To make sense out of the senseless, we have Boutros Baca, a young charismatic buck fresh out of high school in the Northeast Heights. A young man whose energy and talents eerily resemble a Chicano Ferris Bueller. Unable to cope with the pressures his upper middle-class father inflicts upon him, he decides to take his lady Blue Sky Mauritia, a sweet but saucy legend of the famed "student ghetto", and his best pal Joe Buck Tallboy, a passionate screamo guitarist and vice-president for SEVER (Straight Edge and Vegan Eating Recruitment), out on the Great American Road Trip using his trusty '97 Toyota truck he dubs "The Hot Tamale" with no other destination in mind than the sweet beaches of Southern California. Along the way, they'll encounter some strangers and some dangers, with pit stops in Gallup, Sedona, Barstow, and maybe even a Las Vegas (that's Nevada) detour. There will be characters. You'll meet a hitch-hiking parody musician, a mythical female spirit said to appear in the backseats of station wagons traveling west between Flagstaff and Kingsman who is said to resemble a cross between La Llorona and 3 Women era Sissy Spacek, a commune of New England transplants with a collective turquoise and cold brew coffee fetish, a cholo lounge singer of undeniable talent but unfortunate perversity, a powerful and obese half Italian-American Albuquerque scene legend known as "The Don", and last but not least, the villain, former high school principle of Boutros and Libertarian maniac, Hermann O'Googley, a man so obsessed and repressed he hires himself to track the gang down. Hijinks will ensue. Tires will screech. Fun will be had. It will get wild, but tread lightly. America is a strange and scary place, but at least Boutros is ready to take you for a spin.  CABAZON A roadside story by Tyler Dunnahoo Coming soon....

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White privilege

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White privilege

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Boyhood (2014)

Movie reviews are tricky. You go to the Rotten Tomatoes website and all you see are the same adjectives thrown around with the same descriptions that will inevitably add up to the same grade done by the same professionals to the same audience who click on the same links. We at The Pipeline do not endorse Rotten Tomatoes, nor do we approve of the contemporary crop of lamestream film critics who are more invested in corporate swag and perks to give a reasoned opinion. Checking out Boyhood's Rotten Tomato page is kind of like having sex with a thesaurus that only has a dozen adjectives in it. Words like soulful, meaningful, epic (the most over-used word in the internet), important, mesmerizing, etc. are thrusted into you non-consensually until anyone like myself who wants to verbalize this moviegoing experience feels obligated to use those same words.  Boyhood is about growing up in Texas. Watching this film is the equivalent of having a 12 year subscription of Texas Monthly condensed into a 166 minute fictionalized memory. It is probably the best film of Richard Linklater's diverse and under-appreciated career and undeniably the best film to ever utilize Coldplay's hit song "Yellow" to such a shocking extent. It really isn't so much "epic" as it is a simple ode to the confusion and wonder of being alive. It is genre-less. It's much funnier than you expect. The dramatic moments are intense, but don't happen as often as you would think they would. It is a movie about (spoiler alert!) Game Boy Advances, scooters, Harry Potter, backyards, Houston Astros, camping, liberal enclaves, getting Bibles with your name inscribed on the cover as a birthday gift, finding out your first girlfriend is a doofus, getting bullied by dumb-dumbs, motherhood, wearing nail polish, bad step dads, graffiti, taking pot brownies in the Big Bend, queso, learning how to play golf, alcoholism, video games, shooting shotguns in the wilderness, pledging allegiance to two different flags, moving, sisterhood, dormitories, making out, putting up Barack Obama signs, suburban lawns, cool dads, and it is all shot under the blanket of the glorious expanse of the prismatic Texas sky.  America and Texas are two separate places. Like America, Texas offers us the best of people and the worst of people. Like America, Texas is a place that offers jobs and opportunity to the rest of the world. Like America, it is an inspiring place that has as much complexity and diversity within it that could only make a Texan like Richard Linklater create a film like this to convey the emotional state of maturing inside of it's state lines. What lamestream America will have you believe is that Texas is ultra-conservative, a place where freaks pray to their guns and create wild conspiracies about Barack Obama and his secret commitment to enslave white Americans. But this is a huge state with a huge number of people from diverse backgrounds. It's more complicated than that. I don't think a movie will ever capture Texas as accurately as this one.  5/5

-Tyler

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California

Since I was a child, California was a sacred place to me. It was a vast, unexplored land mass that was distant and separate from the mundanity of the rest of the United States. Inside of it, films were made, burgers were flipped, avocados were harvested, wine was drank, the coast was surfed, the forests were explored, and the cold tide from the Pacific was splashing up against its glorious coast. It was, and continues to be, mysterious. Mythical even. I could go on and on about it, and say some more bullshit cliches about it being some sort of place where "the past and the future come together", a place about "life, love, happiness", an "oasis of fear and suffering", but I refuse. California is not so much of a place as it is a situation. California is not universal, California is hyper-specific (Inland Empire, Orange County, Shasta Cascade, San Diego County, Central Valley, Central Coast, High Sierra, Bay Area, Los Angeles County, North Coast, Gold Country, Disneyland). Places that conjure specific images and sounds. Places that have it's own distinction. Most importantly to me, these are places that haunt.  What do I mean by that?? If we do an internet search for the word "haunt", the result we find would be something like "to keep coming back to the mind of (someone) especially in a way that makes the person sad or upset." California could easily be defined with this description. Surely the thought of California with it's coast, bright sun, rolling hills, orange trees, Golden Gates, etc. can relinquish someone in Dallas the stresses of everyday life and even make them melancholy for not being able to place their feet into the sands of Pismo Beach. But the definition of haunting and it's relationship to California is more than this. 

Why do dreams die?? Is it due to standards of value and work, the disinterest of people who surround you, aging, violence, hatred, disappointment, sadness?? The answer depends on the person who questions it. Personally speaking, when I visited the streets of San Francisco when I turned 21 I thought I would never forget the way the streets and it's buildings smelt. You could feel the presence of the nearby Pacific Ocean seeping into every crevice. I was overjoyed by the sights of neoliberal San Francisco 2006 and I thought I could never stop my obsession with it. Years would later pass. My focuses changed. San Francisco changed itself, and my dream of a life in San Francisco was exchanged for a life in Austin. Having visited the city recently, I was amazed at how much it had changed. Walking through the city, I missed seeing the crazies of San Francisco, the kind of people you'd see speaking to fire hydrants and talking gibberish to the men in suits who were afraid of them. Everywhere I looked I saw the relentless thrush of commerce consuming the city. It was like walking through the world's largest upscale outdoor mall albeit in the most beautiful American city around. I could even hear ukeleles played. Almost as important of a question as why dreams die is why do places end up becoming the opposite of what they used to be??

The California I know will always be dear to me. Thinking about it profusely, I can see the ancient sea captains of the 19th century yell, or the cholos from East L.A. blasting Kid Frost from their subwoofers, or smell the weed the Grateful Dead smoked, or feel the penny drenched water from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride dangling from my fingertips. I doubt any place could possibly be superior than the California I know. But the California I know is not the California it is.  -Tyler

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Haraki Murakami’s "Underground" (2001)

The religious cult has always been a fascinating topic for me. Generally revolving around a spiritual leader, or guru, and many times meeting with untimely or catastrophic endings, the cult as a subject is most certainly not a new one. Not necessarily relegated to any certain era of humanity, cults largely result from the weak or outcast of society being lured by a place or ideology where they feel safe and accepted. Many follow cult leaders because it’s easier, or more familiar, to give up their freedom than continue making their own decisions.

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche is Haruki Murakami’s Studs Turkel-influenced collection of interviews and short essays on the aftermath of Aum Shinrikyo’s strategic planting of sarin nerve gas on several Tokyo subway trains. It gives us not only a glimpse of the victims’ mindset but also explores the thought process of current and former members of the “new religious movement.” Truth be told, the first time I came across any Western mention of Aum Shinrikyo was in The Big Book of Bad, one in a series of popular history comics. Since then, I’ve always had an idea of Aum as some weird neo-Buddhist bastardization. This is partly true. Most higher level members apparently ascribed to something called Vajrayana, one of the three routes to enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhist belief, and something that can, in Aum’s case, be manipulated into rationalizing killing innocent people (I realize this definition does not do this particular Buddhist belief much justice, and I implore any of you who wish to seek a more detailed description of it to do so). Upon reading Underground, I discovered that the founder of Aum, Shoko Asahara, incorporated quite a few elements of Christianity as well, oftentimes referring to himself as “Christ.” He also had many of the typical characteristics of a wingnut, and enjoyed spouting millennial warnings of a World War III instigated by the US (probably not too far-fetched in my opinion) and of conspiracies involving Jews and Freemasons, among others. These kinds of conspiracy theories I would expect from the sovereign citizen militia types I encountered every so often in the U.S., but that a meditation-centered Japanese cult also propagated this garbage is pretty surprising.

The first half of Underground is largely comprised of Murakami’s personal interviews with victims or their family members, mostly recorded around a year after the 1995 incident. It is indeed interesting to read about their experience with this horrific event, if not a bit morbid. A majority of the victims, if they did not die, are left with, at best, neurological damage and PTSD. They are lucky if they ever lead a normal life again, with many out of work long-term due to sarin-related ailments. Many hold a lot of very justifiable anger towards the perpetrators, calling for their immediate execution at the hands of the state, but most just seem ready to let it go. An interesting position to take, but understandable when put in perspective. While moving, especially the meeting with an incapacitated female victim and her brother at a suburban Tokyo hospital, these interviews don’t really shed as much light on the “big picture” of the gas attack as I had expected.

The last half was a bit more eye opening. Here, the author seeks out both current and former members of the Aum cult. His approach is very blunt at the beginning, it almost seems as if he is interrogating these poor saps, whose apparent inability to function in normal society led them to a very dark place that it seems most of them are trying to forget. Murakami appears to pick up on this pretty early on, and his tone changes quite a bit towards the end of the interviews. The interviewees are fascinating; despite the fact that none of them were directly involved in the sarin attack, reading their accounts, you really get a feel for the type of person who would join such a ridiculous movement. To be frank, it’s a pretty broad one, which encompasses loners, socialites, college dropouts, cartoonists, scientists, underachievers, overachievers, blue collar, white collar, and so on. Despite quite a bit testimony to the inefficiency of Tokyo’s emergency response sectors at that time, Murakami’s intention in Underground is not exposé, nor is it an attempt to further de-legitimize Aum, as if that were even possible. Murakami is a fiction writer at heart, and fiction generally requires some amount of emotional fluency. Underground shows him donning both the subjective hat of fiction writer and the more balanced, refined one of world-class journalist. He uses this to its fullest potential, making for a thought provoking and incredibly insightful read. -Jeremy

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Under The Skin (2013)

Sexuality is horrifying. When you consider everything we put ourselves through in order to get in bed with someone else, from the prowling, the obsession, the compliments, and the advances, the customs and norms of sexual endeavors border on the outskirts of insanity. Even the practice of sexuality is absurd. The thought of inserting another person's body parts inside your own is outlandish and creepy.  Jonathan Glazer -music video director turned filmmaker- obviously has similar views in regards to sexuality after watching his welcomingly disturbing latest film Under The Skin. Coming across like a remake of Ridley Scott's Alien as written by Charles Burns with touches of Kubrickian rigidity, this is the kind of film I suspect most people will dislike while 20% of it's audience will consider it a masterpiece. It certainly takes it's time and has a deliberate confrontational attitude that some people might mistake as an attempt to shock people. Indeed, Glazer really puts the audience under the knife with this new film, and casting Scarlett Johansson as his lead in this couldn't have made more sense. Very basically, the film follows an alien disguised as an attractive young woman who lurks the streets of Glasgow and the hills of rural Scotland looking for men to kill. Admittedly the plot has the kind of tone to it that would make Ed Wood blush. But it is treated with a somber, disquieting, unmerciful tone that has more in common with the bleakest Lars von Trier films than something Fangoria would go wild over. Much of it was filmed with real natives of Scotland, apparently without many of them knowing they were even being shot. Feminists will certainly be debating this film for years to come.  Under The Skin explores several themes: the struggles of survival, the lack of sincerity and alienation of sexuality, the question of what it means to be human, individualism, and disguise. Although the film ends with a glorious resolve (absolutely one of the most fantastic images ever conceived in the cinema, hyperbole notwithstanding), this picture comes along with very little to bite into, but much to ponder. At the end of the day, this is a film that is intended for people who have an appetite for nuance. For people who are intrigued by the extraterrestrial conflict represented by the nameless femme fatale played by Scarlett Johansson, the horrors of sex and what it does to people's minds, and the overwhelming power of nature on planet Earth. This is a film designed for an audience willing to peel back several layers. It may be challenging for some, but this is a film worth investing your time in. 

Rating: 4.5/5 buds. This has The Pipeline's seal of approval. 

-Tyler

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The Road That Forgot About Time: Interstate 10

Modernity grows like a tree. It's branches extend and meander out like vines into the periphery. There are no straight lines in nature. As such, there are no straight lines in technology either. Driving on a highway for an extended period of time can be a boring endeavor. You're bombarded by identical hamburger advertisements every 15 minutes and you realize that the country you pay taxes in is nothing more than a series of combination Subway/Chevron gas stations that have some of the most disparaging language on it's men's room walls. However, when driving along a highway you also get a sense of liberation. You are suddenly emancipated from the burden of time. You pass through towns you've never heard of that are fully functioning; they have workers doing construction jobs you will never see again, high school football players that will go on in their lives doing completely ordinary things, and so on. On a highway, you have escaped the mundanity of your everyday and you now get a passing glimpse of a United States that is changing. You are suddenly a witness to the ebb and flow of urbanization, suburbanization, ruralization, and, most importantly, alienation. Being on the road instills with you a pertinent sense of your own mortality. On a larger scale, you witness the fragility of society in a passing moment. Despite these fleeting seconds, the road somehow feels timeless in it's environment. In an urban setting, you can't avoid the trends and fashions of the current year. On the road, you are time traveling within a moment that seems to never come to an end.

The most American stretch of road has got to be Interstate 10. Stretching from the Pacific shorelines of Santa Monica, California to the Bible Belt's most powerful city of Jacksonville, Florida, Interstate 10 is a piece of highway that javelins through beach, deserts, mountains, plains, swamps, and beach once more. Interstate 10 is almost like a palindrome. If it wasn't for the Southwestern desert I-10 carries itself through, the road would be a mirage of itself. I would argue that the most fascinating and darkest aspects of American history have taken place all along I-10. Passing along it is deeply spiritual; you get a feeling that you're being watched by all of the cowboys, vaqueros, Cajun farmhands, African slaves, crooked sheriffs, syrup drenched gang bangers, and Southern Baptist preachers that haunt and inhabit the landscape that I-10 cuts through. Driving on any road you can see numerous patterns and messages. For instance, the same graffiti you see on a Hardee's billboard in Joplin, Missouri is pretty much interchangeable from the sharpie sketch you glanced at in the men's bathroom at the Roanoke Shell station. But on Interstate 10, you don't just see these things, you feel them too. 

The American South has seen it's share of neglect. Having a history as problematic as the one it has, the geographical region that we think of hasn't quite developed like the region north of the Mason-Dixon has. People there have struggled, and they struggle today and will continue to. Much of the landscape that I-10 touches on once you drive into Lake Charles, Louisiana is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. It doesn't help that the area of the Gulf is uniquely sensitive to damages that hurricanes and oil spills often give to it. But through this struggle comes a yearning for freedom, and in this freedom comes the capacity to create, and the American South has given us some exemplary things: blues, jazz, R&B, rock and roll, po' boys, Southern Gothic literature, etc. Being on this road can give you a glimpse where all of this has come from. It provides a vantage point that no other American road can bring to you. Most importantly, I think it awakens you with the sense that this country is not as developed and impenetrable as it seems. You will see a lot of poverty driving on this road. What comes to my mind most importantly about this road is it's ability to unify. Everyone who can afford the luxury of driving an automobile comes together on this road, whether they be wealthy Houston suburbanites or gas station clerks from Harrison County, Mississippi. It's nice and convenient to think that this represents the coming of a more integrated future. Sadly, I doubt this future will ever come. Modern technology and it's advances such as the American freeway can harbor progress to quite restrictive lines. It gives us an illusion of empowerment and romanticism while also removing any sense of liberty one might have. It is only about homogenizing the user base.  Although it's easy to fixate on a highway just like someone like Jack Kerouac did, the America he saw then and the America we see today are two different things that oppose each other. We can find something poetic on the road today, but it's easier to see something more savage. Interstate 10 is a reminder of this duality and I hope people will understand that there are destroyers that are unseen and more lethal because of their invisibility. 

-Tyler

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A Few Thoughts on Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"

There is a song that encapsulates the glory, the beauty, the excess, and the mayhem of the 1960's. It is not Like A Rolling Stone. It is not Good Vibrations. It is not A Day In The Life or Sympathy For The Devil. It is a song that hits you on the face like a cold splash of water. The kind of tune that may have been recorded at 9:45 in the morning but will forever feel like 3:30 AM. It is a song that comes from the outflow of a primeval flood, that which has emerged from the sea. From the mood of the song alone, it is a provider of spirits; a piece of music that encourages overindulgence and mocks mediocrity. It is hilarious, stupid, fearless, rich, ostentatious, and brilliant. Listening to it is similar to experiencing an alternate Animal House film on a Frenchmen Street DMT pursuit for super-consciousness. Speaking of Animal House, the sensuality of the song is pretty much like the scene where the Faber College Community Marching Band is misled by John Belushi into an acoustic-rich dead end alleyway made of brick and mortar. This is music to wear your stovepipe hat to. This is music set to a drunken Daffy Duck crawling home to his bed from a downtown barroom cellar. This is Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35".  I'm not even the hugest Bob Dylan fan. Although that period in the 70s where he wore eyeliner and started playing music that reminded people of Jamaica had some profoundly right-on moments, he often found himself in some musical cul-de-sacs. But his restless output and mummified legacy as the nasal-toned troubadour will always outweigh his more questionable advances, and this is why we will strap ourselves in, put our helmets on, and plunge into the bullseye of Uranus.  "They'll stone you when you're trying to be so good."  Who is they? Is it the military? Is it an okra-crazed George Wallace gestapo? Is it the Manson family? Who is they and why are they stoning? You're just hanging out, minding your own business, and these goons appear out of the distance and try to ruin your peaceful day on the porch? "They'll stone you just like they said they would." Okay, so you knew this was coming. They told you ahead of time. I sure hope you are prepared!  "They'll stone you when you're trying to go home." *Bob Dylan laughs* I don't understand why Bob thinks this is something to laugh at, but this is Bob's song and only he has real insight to the subject matter at hand. "They'll stone you when you're there all alone. But I would not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned." So clearly, getting stoned is something that everyone has to participate in. It's a cultural phenomenon sweeping the nation. Does it have a drug connotation to it? No way. As Bob said earlier, they will stone you when you're just trying to chill out, whether you're browsing the market for some avocados or walking your dog at the lake, you're going to get stoned no matter what. And suddenly, a magical burst of brass instruments fills the air, and you are lifted into a secret society of an infinite dartboard Mardi Gras party. Beers are spilt, the debutantes are laughing, and clowns are yelling at each other. This is music made for champagne handshakes and the consumption of artisanal meats. Frosh's need not apply.  It has a feeling like it was recorded inside of a hot sauce factory. Indeed, the rhythm and pulse of the tubas and snares is evocative of stirring a very vinegar-y Cajun sauce that Bob Dylan himself might very well be drowning himself in. Since revelry of this magnitude is often discouraged by our Flanders patented country sensibilities, it's no wonder why this was banned by radio stations. It was too much fun, too spicy, too hot. People thought it was a "drug song". Their loss. This was a pretty daring song to release in 1966. Keep in mind a year earlier in 1965 Bob's music narrowly avoided an axe swing from Pete Seeger after "abandoning" the confines of traditional folk music that he became bored with and went electric. Putting Dylan in a historical context, writing the kind of music he did put him in danger. He was too weird, too unconventional looking, and too daft for a mainstream audience that was just barely getting over the electroshock treatment of Elvis Presley's pelvis. I'm not saying this Bob Dylan was a real folk hero or some sort of 1960s saint, I'm saying that "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" was it's own zeitgeist. It is a primitive cyprus of a song that has the same byzantine architecture of a Medieval cathedral in southern France. To release this song to a militia of Pete Seeger folkies in 1966 is the artistic equivalent of the Haitian Revolution. This is the kind of song that makes music personal. We can give it it's own purpose. The best art is always opaque. We can think about it for a century and, still, the only person who really understands what it means is it's creator, and even then the creator probably just made it all up as he or she went along. Who cares? Analyzing pieces of art is a pastime that may be endangered with all of the superfluous technology we are surrounded by. Keep moving. 

-Tyler

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Spooky Places in Roswell, NM pt. II

Some of the most insane and hilarious news stories have always come out of Roswell. A group of townies once hijacked a Dollar General truck headed to Albuquerque just so they could score cough medicine that contained dextromethorphan. There was also a cholo circa 1998 who got arrested for targeting all of the would-be cowboys with a super soaker filled with urine while hiding behind an abandoned Sonic drive-in restaurant. It's this kind of mentality that I actually miss. There are nothing but the most depraved and hot-blooded maniacs living within the city limits of this town. If identity was something I'd optimistically latch onto, I'd be a proud Roswell native who happily found his way out of town. I suppose this is why I've decided to write more on the city. My sewer dump of a memory left out a few crucial pieces of abandoned property and ominous landscapes on the previous post as well. Growing up there and breathing in the basement dust and watching The Shining every year since I was 11 has given me this obsession with the idea that, I feel, distinguishes this city from just being a poor old dusty and lame excuse of a town with a declining tourist industry to actually being a crown jewel atop a mountainous heap of cow shit within the cesspit of New Mexico. 

To me, there is one corner of the city that serves as the nucleus of Haunted Roswell. That is near the intersection of North Virginia and East 2nd. If you face east, you will see a real treasure trove of battered, ramshackled, and beautifully fucked-up pieces of abandoned property. Being only two-three blocks away from the infamous "International UFO Museum and Research Center", I love how Roswell shows it's tourists that it does not care what they think of the town. It also shows you where things are at civically in the town. Preservation through neglect! Anyway, this part of town looks like a level you would play in a vintage Duke Nukem video game. If you look east of the intersection, you'll see a building with no roof, a couple walls, and what was left of a hallway. This building I think operated as some sort of rail-yard. After it was torn up, it had become the site that hundreds of Christian metalcore bands would hire professional photographers to shoot and upload filtered jpegs to their Myspace pages. More often than band photography, it's usually the place the town's homeless population will reside. For a town that barely has 50,000 citizens living in it, you'd be surprised by how frequently you see a homeless person there. The unemployment rate isn't even all that bad there either. Most distinctly in this part of town is the old triangular cotton dome that for years and years used to be the tallest building in Roswell. Looking like a 100 foot artistic rendering of Tin Man from the The Wizard of Oz's head, it has seen some things over the years. Located in a fairly rough neighborhood of Roswell, it isn't  uncommon to hear gunshots late at night or see fights break out in the alleyways. Since it was abandoned, it was said to be a place where members of the Roswell Police Department would go and beat every last ounce of body fluid out of people who may or may not have been guilty for whatever crime they may or may not have been responsible for. There is also the spiral staircase that surrounds the building. Teenagers have tried to climb it, but the stairs need serious repair work or else you could very easily fall to a very dusty death 80 feet below you if you aren't careful. Nearby is a Mexican Seafood buffet restaurant that has some pretty good margaritas. Be sure and get a designated driver though. New Mexico is not a state you want to be caught with a hint of anything remotely resembling alcohol in. The drunk tanks here are thinner than a can of green chile and the police officers tend to act more like Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men than John Wayne in McQ.

A few miles west of town is the vaguely sounding Bottomless Lakes. It got it's name from a band of vaqueros who had some trouble finding the bottom of the lakes after tying two or three ropes together to drop into the bottom. The greenish-blue colored sludge created by the algae and other aquatic plant forms also added to the illusion of depth. The largest of it's series of lakes, Lazy Lagoon, has a bottom of about 90 feet deep. Apparently it is connected by underground tunnels that go into the Carlsbad Caverns and all of the way out into the Gulf of Mexico. Scuba-divers, horses, and teens have been sucked into this tunnel. Apparently their remains end up in the parts of Carlsbad Caverns that tourists aren't allowed into. There is a family of enormous turtles. Not a lot of people have seen them, but apparently they're carnivorous and like the taste of teens. Not sure why teens have it so bad at the Bottomless Lakes, but so what it is is what it is. Other foreboding names of the lakes include: Devils Inkwell, Mirror Lake, Lost Lake, and Dimmitt Lake. 

There is also the abandoned airport, or "Old Airport" as locals call it. This strip of property used to be called the Unity Center, a place created by the city for kids to hang out and skate and play music to stay away from the city's massive drug problem. Before that, it was a pretty run of the mill airport that had commercial flights connecting to Albuquerque, Lubbock, Dallas, and El Paso. I'm not sure what it is these days. One night I broke into the observation deck and stepped into guano. At the top of it was a ton of spray painted pentagrams and 666's and other pieces of redneck imagery. There was also pieces of used drug paraphernalia which is ironic considering what the city has used the building for downstairs. 

Finally there is Stanton Friedman, Roswell's most notable citizen. Well known and liked for his lectures on UFO investigations, alien conspiracies, and other extraterrestrial phenomena, you can count on seeing him participating at the UFO Museum during the Roswell UFO Festival every weekend surrounding the Fourth of July. A few years ago during this time I was lucky enough to attend the festivities. During my visit, I happened upon the UFO Museum's men's room. Inside I heard one of the most life-defining, apocalyptic craps I have ever heard. It made the room rattle in its volume and profundity. I ignored the noise and went for the sink. I looked into the mirror and saw Stanton Friedman himself come out of the stall. It was one of the more transcendent and spiritual encounters I've ever had the privilege to be a part of. Which is probably why I feel like Roswell is a special place. Sure, I've done my time there and hope to not have to live in a town so downtrodden and isolated from the rest of the planet, but it made me into the person I am today. I should be thankful for the city and having the great distinction of allowing me to hear Stanton Friedman destroy a Roswell, NM toilet on the Fourth of July. 

-Tyler

[thepipeline]

The Best Show on WFMU

Tom Scharpling knows what is best for us. The three things in life that should matter, mirth, music, and mayhem, are the three principal themes of his radio show. Tom Scharpling is, in my estimation, the funniest and most insightful media presence in a culture saturated with attention hungry social media pirates. I am 100% serious when I say this too. He throws zingers like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. He plays "What is Life" by George Harrison like that helicopter scene in Goodfellas. He also has two alter-egos who are puppets. The prog obsessed Vance and Gary the Squirrel, who is sort of like a hybrid between Don Rickles and an AV Club staff writer. I can't think of a Goodfellas reference that covers the puppets I'm afraid. His radio show The Best Show on WFMU was a combination music, comedy, and talk show that steadily became an unclassifiable work of art that defies every conceivable boundary in radio air time. Together with Jon Wurster and Mike Lisk, they have created a community vaster than The Wire, more colorful than The Simpsons, and more immersive than the city I live in. That probably sounds like hyperbole, but it's the fucking truth. Their imaginary city of Newbridge, New Jersey was rife with the greatest people. There was Philly Boy Roy, the hoagie loving, WaWa worshipping, Philadelphian perma-citizen is an obvious mention. But there's also Zachary Brimstead, Esq., a 499 lb. bass singer in various Barbershop quartets who has a cummerbund that operates as an integral sidekick. Roland "The Gorch" Gorchnik is the living inspiration for Fonzie and the world's oldest hoodlum. He claims to have drank over 400 beers on a barge in the Mississippi River while doing donuts in his rascal scooter. The collective minds of Scharpling and Wurster have both created a world that I can't stop thinking and obsessing over.

And it's awful because this is a show I have a really hard time describing to people who are unfamiliar with it. I wanted them so desperately to be involved! A lot people around my age aren't really into the radio format, much less a radio format that is 70-85% chatter, and I can sympathize with that. This is a show that takes time to grow on you. But when it hits you, it will be the most magical and fantastic thing that has ever happened to you. And, like a religion, you will have hours upon hours of insight to wash over you.

When I found out The Best Show was ending a few months ago, it felt like I was being dumped. Every week since I discovered the Best Show in the fall of 2004, I looked forward to hearing Tom's ingenious rants. They had quite a bit of variety, but they were mostly about movies. Particularly bad ones. Hearing this man talk about Olympus Has Fallen is the kind of thing I would want my children to listen to and recite. Not having his weekly presence on my iTunes account is like missing a sibling who left to go live on another continent. And I mean this when I say that lacking The Best Show in my life is completely devastating to me. Although there is plenty for me left to discover, they have been on the air since the fall of 2000, The Best Show was a vital component of my week-to-week shuffle. I genuinely feel like I need The Best Show to help me filter out all of the cruel and useless garbage that our culture always spews at us.

Tom Scharpling has written for Tom Goes To the Mayor and Tim and Eric, Awesome Show, Great Job!. He has executive produced the television series Monk and has directed music videos for Kurt Vile, The New Pornographers, Titus Andronicus, Ted Leo and The Pharmacists, Aimee Mann, Real Estate, and Wild Flag. Jon Wurster is a professional drummer who is a founding member of Superchunk and current drummer for The Mountain Goats, Bob Mould, Charlie Daniels, and Katy Perry. But, despite their respectable credits, their finest achievement is The Best Show and they will both attest to this. They have to feel both flattered and more than a little insulted that they created a network so rich, so vivid, and so special without getting paid a single dime for it. Although they generated record breaking money donations for the fantastic radio station they allowed them air time, to this day, they are continuing to search for a platform that will give them the necessary means to help them dedicate the hours of research, brainstorming, and structuring the show requires. I sincerely hope they will find this.  So, I encourage you to check out The Best Show by clicking on this link. Here you will find every single Best Show they've ever recorded. You can stream every single episode entirely for free. If you don't like what you're listening to, more power to you. But you clearly are missing out on a truly unique and awesome phenomenon. Let's get them back on the air.

-Tyler

[thepipeline]

If Only Cargo Shorts Held More Rage: APD, The Modern American Protest, and How To Make A Real Difference

Yesterday I watched a live-steam of the Albuquerque Police Department protest that was held as a means to express the outrage that has occurred in the wake of a viral video which showed a homeless man being shot in the back by a police officer in Albuquerque's foothills. Watching the video, it is very clear that the shooting which resulted in the man dying was completely unjustified.

In many ways, the footage that I saw from the live stream of the protest was just as disturbing as the video that inspired the protest. From what I could tell, the protest was basically a huge clusterfuck. What started out as a peaceful protest escalated into a giant shit show. Large mobs of what looked like mostly young people took over public streets. Some of them sprayed graffiti on walls, some of them banged on drums and some of them even attempted to take over a freeway overpass. Many of them even harassed drivers, who by no fault of theirs got caught up in the mess.

Some of them wore those tired 'V for Vendetta' masks that have been co-opted by the "hacktivist" group Anonymous. Others wore bandannas on their faces like the very prototypical anarcho-revolutionaries that are depicted by the media. Usually, during riot footage. Many of these same people were also wearing t-shirts that read TAP-OUT or the brand-name of various skate companies and pro-sports teams. Very radical! Almost all of them seemed to chant "fuck the police!" or FTP for short. Many of them carried longboards. It was all very embarrassing. I'm sure that types of the people who participated in the protest weren't limited to these immature "lets fuck shit up" knuckleheads, but I can't help but feel that the whole protest was misguided nonetheless. The misguidedness was perhaps best exemplified by the act of people Instagramming the event and even taking selfies of themselves in action. Clearly, there is no better way to undermine your cause than by indulging a narcissistic impulse to appear cool via social media because the truth is that most of these young people don't give a shit about causes or desire change, they just want to look cool and feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves.

How is a cop shooting and killing a homeless person in cold blood all that different from a civilian driving by passively while they freeze and risk death from exposure or go hungry? It's a crime of omission. If these people cared about the homeless they would feed them, they would clothe them, they would give them blankets or maybe even open their home to them. But they don't. They ignore them and maybe give them some spare change or let them bum a smoke, not because they care, because they want to be left alone.

Another truth to consider is not all cops are heartless thugs out for blood. They are working class people who have to deal with some of the most unsavory people and situations on a daily basis. It can be a jading experience. Unfortunately many of them are veterans who have been to hell and back and suffer from PTSD. They have been stripped of their identity, traumatized, and trained to demoralize and kill. Should we be surprised when they are involved in situations that escalate to the use of deadly force?

I am not saying that their impulses are justified. I am saying that there is much to be considered. Perhaps the recruitment and training process of the APD needs to be questioned more than the actual cops themselves. Change rarely occurs because it requires hard work and people don't like to work hard. It's much easier to reduce yourself to a walking bumper-sticker with a catchy slogan, take some pictures and post them online, and convince yourself that you are an activist than it is to actually engage in a meaningful and productive community wellness.

If you really care about homeless people volunteer at a shelter or soup kitchen or at least donate some money to one of the many organizations that can and will help them. If you really want to be radical give them shelter and food, or better yet, create facilities and resources for them. If you really hate the cops, form a cop-watch program. Follow them around with cameras. Document their shady tactics and ethics, inform the public. Hold them accountable in real time. Go to town hall meetings, write politicians and express your concern, not just about the cops, but the politics and policies that drive the police force.

OR if you really wanna go balls to wall radical, how about taking to an APD hub with a Ukrainian style tire fire? Even then, change is not guaranteed. Volunteer. Educate. Engage. That's how you make a difference. Anything else is just a childish tantrum.

Sadly, the modern protest has been subsumed by pseudo-hippy peacenik burnouts, social media attention whores, willfully ignorant collegiates, fauxhemian Anarchist posers, and dudebros who have read watched Fight Club too many times for their own good.

You are better than that.

-Armando

[thepipeline]

Spooky Places in Roswell, NM

Lately I have struggled to come up with a proper topic for The Pipeline. There have been some ideas brewing. I thought about doing some good old fashioned music writing on either the Grateful Dead or Professor Longhair, but music journalism destroyed music in the last ten years and the last thing I'd want to do is have some self-described "Steve Jobs of Trap" teenaged nerdo name drop Professor Longhair in conversation. I guess I probably had a bit of writers block too. Except I'm as much of a writer as these posts for The Pipeline are "articles" or "pieces". Which is to say they most definitely are not articles or pieces. This is not some fancy smancy online publication you read on your iPad at Houndstooth Coffee. We at The Pipeline are the sons and daughters of plumbers, longshoremen, foundry workers, electricians, bricklayers, and ditch diggers. We are not here to make names for ourselves. We are here to tell you our stories. We give to you our tired and our poor as huddled masses to breathe free in a world submerged in unbreathable air and sound pollution. These are our final last moans of truth in a society that is almost finished. So, having said that, it is only proper that my next topic be about spooky places in my hometown of Roswell, NM. I realize this is spring, and the last thing on your callous mind is haunted houses and things that go bump in the night, but here at The Pipeline every day is Halloween. So without further ado: Roswell, NM is a town in Southeastern New Mexico that people often laugh at. It is an aesthetically displeasing crime-ridden town in a ravaged old Wild West landscape that depends on oil, dairy, and alien tourism. To say this town is conservative is an understatement: it is pure Bible Belt country where every church is a faction of a faction of a faction of a non-denominational snake-pit that denounces vice while also enforcing it. Every single person who lives here owns a gun and will shoot it, either at you or at a plastic Mountain Dew bottle or at themselves. That smell in the air is either two things: dairy wind, that is the smell of cow shit blowing into your lungs, or the collective musk of pansexual Juggalo/ettes fresh from a three day methamphetamine binge at Hastings Entertainment. What was once a promising community built in a piece of land that had a couple of riches buried not too deep beneath it, it is now a place that isn't struggling or flourishing. It just is. And there are ghosts all over town. 

The spookiest place that immediately comes to mind in Roswell is the Pueblo Auditorium. Originally the former Roswell High School, this vaguely looking Art Deco building built near the center of town has seen neglect over the years. Although it would occasionally have some elementary school plays, it was basically left for prairie dust to collect. Kids would break in and graffiti the place. I think a homeless man lived somewhere in the top floor. Ultimately it became the center for the Roswell Independent School District, and it's remained that way for about fifteen years. But what I've heard about this place is somewhere on the top floor there's a room that is used as storage for unused musical instruments. The janitors who mopped the floor at night refused to go near it. Allegedly if you walked past it, you could hear a violin play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at 1:40 AM. My mother worked here as a physical therapist several years ago. One morning she took me inside her office and allowed me to wander around. At about 7:30 in the morning, right after she turned off the security alarm, I went outside the auditorium and heard, to my horror, some crazy specter playing piano inside the auditorium!!!!! It haunts me to this day, and it makes absolutely no sense how someone could have gotten in there so early to play whatever horrifying piano jam this phantom was playing (keep in mind my mom turned off the security alarm just a few seconds before this). It clearly was the Phantom of Pueblo Auditorium. 

Another presence in this town besides alien head street lights is the military. The New Mexico Military Institute (NMMI) has trained future military personnel since 1891. Having earned the distinction of being "The West Point of the West" by none other than former President George W. Bush, this ominous and disgusting playground of American fascism has seen its history. Ranging from violent hazing rituals that included broom sticks being shoved in places not worth mentioning to being a mecca of punishment for wealthy Mexican grandsons who sold ecstasy to Roswellian teens, there have been first hand accounts of amphibious creatures emerging from the NMMI swimming pool and a child's sinister cackle heard exactly at 3:33 AM every morning near the clock tower. The story that always got to me was the account of the lieutenant who had to enforce curfew on his cadets one night. He went from room to room with a flashlight making sure his boys were asleep. When he came to one room in the barracks he saw two grown men in a uniform from 1904 standing at full attention right next to the boys who were sound asleep. The lieutenant was so traumatized at what he saw he refused to enforce curfew ever again. Despite NMMI having had such cadets as Owen Wilson, Sam Donaldson, and Conrad Hilton JR and SR., the place is a mystery to most Roswell citizens and I should probably write about the hazing rituals some time. Who knows, I could save some poor kids life.

West of town are the Pecan Orchards. Crazy stuff goes in those orchards. Typically it is used as a place for teens to take LSD or have unprotected sex, it is also home to a man who was born with goat horns who lives in the trees to protect it's pecans from trespassing thieves. This Goat Man has been seen for decades. Like La Llorona, the weeping woman who you can hear screaming late at night in Cahoon Park, this Goat Man has a legacy. Pecan vendors can hear him bleating within the trees. He is loyal to the pecan men as the pecans are his only real form of sustenance (other than the flesh of trespassers of course). I myself went on a hunt for The Goat Man years ago. Having my flash light and Red Rider BB Gun handy, I went into the orchards ready for anything. Unfortunately for me, all I came across were hooves on the ground. However, his legacy remains and most recently a good buddy of mine swore he saw the Goat Man dangling in the trees while he drove on West Berrendo. The truth is out there, my friends. 

I should also mention the place of business of my father's. This place is called Fuller Plumbing Supply. It is a business on West Virginia that sells everything from toilets to air conditioning units chiefly to plumbers who are busy installing top of the line products at soon to be sushi restaurants out north of town. The building itself has a special history. It was built at the end of World War II, just right when the United States was developing a paranoid anxiety against the Soviet Union. As such, this building was used as a bomb shelter. It has two stories. It has an old freight elevator that you were required to use to get to the basement. It makes a real creepy sound that should be sampled. It kind of sounds like a Sunn O))) track. The place itself is special to me. For several years, my parents would turn it into a haunted house around my birthday (which coincided around Halloween). They would dress the place up and turn it into a full-on spookhouse with my father acting as the creepy caretaker and several members of my parents church acting as scarecrows, severed heads on plates, demons, ghosts, witches, Jason from Friday the 13th, etc. I also used it as a practice space for my high school funk-metal band Banjo Pussy Whistle. Though despite all of my memories there, there is one sinister memory the place does not want to share with you. That is the suicide of a former worker there by the name of Mack Oody. This man is said to linger around the place late at night, often frightening my dads employees by pulling weird pranks on them (turning out the lights, throwing down their brooms, patting them on their shoulders only for him to vanish into the dusty basement air). Although he is friendly to my dad (my dad has never met Mack), he is downright devious to my dad's employees. His life in the afterlife lingers on.....

While I could go on and on about the weird and the wild things that happen in Roswell, I am also a busy man. I work hard for the union and have dues to pay. I encourage you to go to Roswell, not for the alien bric-a-brac alone, but for the spooky stuff that goes on there. It is a full on Monster Mash that never ends. Although you can laugh at the shittiness of the city, it laughs right back at you because you do not understand. And the truth, my only friends, is out there. 

-Tyler

[thepipeline]

Badlands (1973)

I have, in the past month, watched Terrence Malick’s debut flick, Badlands, twice; the first try, about three quarters of the way through, I was distracted by a scooter accident on the street, always a lark when it happens (and it often does here). The second attempt was at a Monday movie night event set up by the guy that runs the art museum down the street from me. That night, I was not only treated to a big comfy velvet-upholstered chair, but also two large glasses of the owner’s homemade sangria (or “shangri-la”, as I like to say after I’ve had a few, in a fancy accent that betrays my utter crassness). Needless to say, I was woozy enough to sit through anything.

Loosely based on the interstate killing spree of Charles Starkweather and his underage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, Badlands stars a young and handsome Martin Sheen as Kit, a seemingly thick-witted and soft spoken bad boy, and a pre-pubescent Sissy Spacek as Holly, his future accomplice in the murder of several innocents. The plot pretty much ends there. Instead of extensive dialogue, we are provided with Holly’s gee-shucks, simple girl narration that often delves into a deeper, thoughtful pondering on her increasingly desperate situation as the girlfriend/hostage of a violent sociopath. This is at the same time beautiful and completely unrealistic, given that the thoughts of most sane people would probably read more like “SHIT! FUCK! OH MY GOD! MUST GET AWAY!”

Of course, since it’s a movie about a killing spree, a focal point of the movie is the murders themselves. In real life, Starkweather started the spree by killing his girlfriend, Fugate’s, parents while she was still at school. The movie’s script strays a bit from the real story, with Kit shooting Holly’s father as she watches from the top of the stairs of her Victorian-style house. The murders all happen on screen, with the exception of one, in which Kit fires two shots at a couple he’s locked in a detached cellar. They play out unceremoniously, with little to no blood and with each victim dying in a state of seemingly painless shock. It’s as if they’d never expected the crazed guy with the gun to shoot them, and now that it’s over, they’ve accepted the fact that they are going to die. This is especially so for Kit’s friend, Cato, who they, on the run from the law, ambush at a farmhouse in the South Dakotan plains. After being shot through the stomach and on his (literal) deathbed, Cato checks himself in a handheld mirror and answers Holly’s questions about his pet spider patiently as Kit thoughtlessly goes through some of his belongings. These scenes, coupled with the idyllic scenery of the sparsely populated American north, lend the movie a serene, slice-of-life quality that belies the incredibly intense, disturbing subject matter. It even ventures into whimsical, almost Winnie-the-Pooh-esque territory, specifically when the two find their first refuge in a tree house they build in the nearby woods. Holly reads and raises chickens as Kit, shirtless and sporting a white headband and jorts, practices military maneuvers in the adjacent meadow (a foreshadowing of his role in Apocalypse Now three years later, perhaps?). Being the director’s first, this film also contains less of the almost aggressive stylization of his later films, notably The Thin Red Line and Tree of Life. I’m mostly referring to the camera’s shadowing of characters as their thoughts play out in an almost too-poetic inner monologue and excessive camera swivels. Badlands, for its merit, is expertly filmed with each gorgeously crafted scene lasting just the right amount of time for the viewer to take it all in.

There is no doubt this movie is important. The Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry back in 1993. Besides the beautiful cinematography and excellent acting of both Sheen and Spacek, the film’s message and background are at the core of what makes Badlands great. Malick has striven to, and achieved, to give us a piece of true Americana. The real America is not sparkly and clean; it’s gritty and brutal. The real America is Charles Starkweather and Gary Gilmore and countless others who have had their story told time and time again. As Springsteen sings in the final verse of Nebraska, yet another ode to the Starkweather murders, “You wanna know why I did what I done/sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” It’s hard to rebut such a simplistic argument and it’s equally hard to deny that Badlands is a real classic of American cinema.

-Jeremy

[thepipeline]

A Brief Tour of Taipei

This is an advertisement I have seen in quite a few subways stations in Taipei recently. The translation basically reads: “take a picture first and then eat, makes it tastier”, a message and series of pictures that irks me to no end every time I pass it. Whether this is merely some sort of banal online competition or actually encouraging people to take part in this behavior, it feeds into a completely abhorrent trend of recent years: appreciating food through obscured sight rather than taste. Now, you might call me a food traditionalist, and I’m sure my friends who work as chefs throughout the US would consider my position on this as gauche or at the very least curmudgeonly, but seriously, you don’t eat a gloppy, messy cheeseburger because it looks good in a goofy sepia-toned Instagram photo; you eat it because it’s the best fucking thing you could find after getting off work at 11 PM when everything else in your neighborhood has closed down.

But I digress. Trendy food pic-snapping, while it can be hard to ignore her due to the sheer number of iPhone toting dumb-dumbs you have to share a table with every time you hit a night market for some Teppanyaki or street BBQ, is a very slight aspect of the overall awesome food culture here and in Mainland China. The amazing quantity of awesome food in Taiwan is never outweighed, but perfectly balanced, by the incredible variety. Whatever your Saturday night, drunk-as-a-skunk self is craving, you can generally find a hunchbacked old man with a mobile oven making it within walking distance the block from a night market, which is a large area cordoned off and chock full of what you readers in the US might call “micro-food truck” vendors. These places are an omnivores paradise, serving up fast, unhealthy snacks at super cheap prices. The people who go to these (as in, everyone, duh) walk around and eat and eat and laugh at stupid shit and eat and then find some place to sit and eat and then buy some things to eat, then eat and then go home, generally to finish eating. I don’t claim to know how the physics or biology of this works, since a majority of my friends weigh about 120 pounds or less, but I swear that I have seen it time and time again. And because I have seen it, I have also tried it, to no avail. My girlfriend, who seems to be consistently able to gorge herself without ever feeling the slightest bit uncomfortable, has accompanied me on these endeavors a few times, and has also been witness to me vomiting the majority of the fried squid I just stuffed down my gullet into a drainage grate. The only thing equal in number to the amount of restaurants and food stalls in Taipei, though, are the ubiquitous hair salons that occupy just about every other storefront in the city.

Which brings me to my next point: the abundance of shitty, stupid looking haircuts on Taiwanese guys. Now, I don’t claim to believe that this is a phenomenon restricted only to Taiwan. Hell knows the West has its fair share of derpy hairstyles (the retro flip-doo being not the least bit disgusting), but dear god man, these dudes go out and pay – a lot of money – to have someone who is probably half-blind shave chunks out of their hair, dye it some bland off-brown color, apply a liberal amount of styling gel, and send them out into the world, where people can see it. There are even booklets full of lame male pixie cuts to choose from at the hair salons. My favorites though are the off-center bowl cut (humorously Add to that a people who seem to love marathon eating. I live around termed “watermelon head” in Chinese) and the caterpillaresque and equally off center faux-hawk. It’s hard to say just how things got this bad for hair in Taiwan, but I feel that it’s a bit indicative of the idolization of both the frenetic and eccentric styles of Japan and Korea, and the more subdued fashion of Italy and the US. Taiwan landed somewhere in between, and I cannot say it looks good, at the same time both bland and outrageously awkward: it is not uncommon see things like classy maroon jackets from Zara getting paired with bright neon green pleated capris. Let’s hope things start looking up soon, my forehead’s starting to get really sore from face-palming so much.

-Jeremy

[thepipeline]

New Orleans Cuisine and Can I Please, Please, Please Have Some More

We at The Pipeline refuse to adhere to narrowing our subject matter to a simple category in this paradisiacal corner of the internet that we at The Pipeline call "our home". If there is any sort of code we follow, it is this: we insist on undermining the prime institutions of the Man, the State, and everything it represents, but we also want to share with you the joys, the exultations, and the ecstasies of being alive in this fantastic planet we live in. Two expressions or phrases seem to sum up the city of New Orleans that I visited recently. They are joie de vivre and laissez-faire. We at The Pipeline believe first and foremost that life must be enjoyed. We want to remind ourselves that we are alive. In a consumer society, this is no easy task. Thank Jah for New Orleans.  Having been ignored and laughed at by the rest of the country, particularly the federal government, for nearly a decade, the city is back and alive and kicking fabulously. I never thought I'd be happier to see a traffic jam in my life. I realize I'm no more than a would-be carpetbagging starry eyed New Mexican, so making this statement from my end is something a lot of the locals would roll their eyes and laugh at, but: New Orleans is doing just fine. I say this because of a) being there felt like any other bustling metropolis but better, b) statistics, and c) the lines at places. Now we didn't stay strictly in the French Quarter area. We branched out all over town and we were happy to see the establishments locals venture to even busier than the spots the tourists tended to linger. This was three days after Mardi Gras mind you. I could probably write all night about the historical legacy, the traditions, the neighborhoods and the importance of this town, but I've decided to focus on one aspect of it that ties into the first paragraph of this blog post just like the rest of the city does. I'm talking about the food. How do you describe New Orleans food?? Some people say it's the kind of thing people elsewhere hire an exterminator for. I say eating it is more of an extermination of all the mundane garbage people generally consume on the day-to-day. Like the city itself, this cuisine is derived from French, West African, Spanish, Haitian, Italian, Irish, Jewish, Caribbean, and German customs. It primarily is seafood based, either caught in the Gulf or likely in Lake Pontchartrain. It is noted for being opulent in taste. Some will say it is too spicy. Others will argue that it is too provincial, an acquired taste in other words. I personally say "shenanigans" to those who would deem it as such. Since when did something provincial become a bad thing in this homogenized gluten-free piss factory?? I realize the vegan gestapo will probably hold a red flag to anything related to New Orleans food, but I ask them to consider one element of cooking that even they can relate to. This is called tradition.  Some might say tradition is too nostalgic; it is a stubborn disregard of the present that refuses to move forward and build something fresh and new. I disagree. It is more than just a reverence of the past. It is more than anything else a disappointment of the present.  Again, I could write about the importance of tradition in New Orleans all night, but I'll stick to it's relevance in cuisine. We like the things we grow up on. For me it's the sopapilla's I'd eat by the dozen at Popo's Mexican Food in Roswell. For those of us who aspire to move out of the small towns we grew up in this is called comfort food. Sometimes, you just crave this stuff. Therefore, it is essential to our well-being that we preserve it by passing these recipes on.

Speaking of craving, I really crave a po' boy. We went to Domilise's Po Boy Bar right after we breezed into town and waited in line for about 30 minutes and got the absolute best fried oyster po' boy I've ever eaten. It was $14 and reminded me of what winning the New Mexican lottery was like if it became some sort of flavor and it was the Louisiana lottery not New Mexico. Jeepers creepers. The cool thing about this place other than serving the most delicious sandwich you'll ever eat was the family that owned it. They have been in business for over 30 years. The photos you see on the walls, that are mostly of John Goodman, will prove this. The family looked a bit intense, but this was rush hour, and having a bit of experience on the line, you got to be intense to get over that kind of thing. They also spoke like they were from early 20th century Brooklyn, something that is very common in New Orleans but is sadly fading away as I've come to understand. For shame. 

The rest of the night was a belligerent, debauched experience that had me chasing a young hoodlum in the wild streets of the Marigny neighborhood. We did eat at Coop's Fried Chicken, which I've come to understand might be a bit of a tourist trap. Nevertheless, I ate jambalaya with the most ethereal coleslaw and fried chicken. Jambalaya is basically everything I like about flavor in one food. Smoky, spicy, and sexy. Good lord. Bury me in a mountain of jambalaya and I swear to the funny hats that I will come out on top and alive and ready to take on all that is wrong and pitiful in this world.

We woke up the next day seriously hungover and crawled from our house we were staying in the Treme 15 to Cafe du Monde. This dude blew a trumpet and I gave him three dollars. He persuaded me to buy his CD for $20 which I dumbfoundedly did. I still haven't listened to it. Now what can be said about Cafe du Monde that hasn't already been said by Yelp or the Travel Channel?? It's the required stop people make in New Orleans. I have a lot of friends who post a lot of pictures of their coffee on Instagram. I personally don't understand it. But hey, this place is candid Instagram coffee shot heaven. Chickory coffee, cafe au lait, all of this should be injected into my veins. I would do it. Also the beignets. God the beignets. Where did we as a culture go wrong when we decided to go after those round donut things when we could be eating one of these beignets in every American city?? I want to blow some of that powdered sugar onto your face now for making it this far in reading. Anyway, this is a New Orleans rite of passage. Come here and don't tip the trumpet playing musician unless you want to pay for his $20 album that may in fact rule. 

Later that night, we ate at Jacques-Imo's in Carrolton. This was easily the best restaurant experience of my life. We came in early, and got to listen to the head chef give the Jacques-Imo's crew a hilarious pep talk. It was weird seeing him too. He basically looks like Tyler Dunnahoo circa 2036:

Anyway, we were seated in a very unpretentious manner and treated ourselves to the complimentary cornbread and ordered a shrimp and alligator cheesecake as an appetizer. This was good. A friend of mine said it looked like cat puke. On further investigation, it really does, and I haven't thought of this plate the same way ever since. But still, this was so cheesy and delicious I felt like I was just hit in the head by the God of Cajon Flavors (who obviously is that chef dude above). Here's a photo! 

We went onto ordering crawfish etouffee with red beans and rice and collard greens, and I got BBQ shrimp with red beans and rich and coleslaw. Now BBQ shrimp in New Orleans is an institution unto itself. It's basically shrimp covered with a pepper based sauce. It's savory and obscenely delicious. Being a New Mexican, I hate seafood. But this is the kind of thing that helps me see the light. I actually picked the plate up and drank the sauce like one would cereal milk. I'd do it again too.

The following night we went to the Spotted Cat and ran into Davis Rogan, the local musician who inspired Steve Zahn's character on HBO's show I have written extensively about on here Treme. He was so drunk he made a joke about toilets in front of some French tourists/musicians. They weren't having it either. The band is actually an exceptional brass band who we danced to and I recommend you check them out. They are called L'usine à Canards

On our final day in the Crescent City we made our way to Lil Dizzy's. This place is basically holy ground for locals. They specialize in Louisiana Creole and Soul Food. We sat down after lovingly being called "babies" and tried the buffet. I'm not so big on buffets but this was different. We had all of the fried chicken, mac and cheese, andouille sausage, gumbo, collard greens, potatoes to our personal disposal and our own waitress even made us an omelette and french toast to go with the pile of treasure we were eating through(!!!!!!!!). Please come to this place if you ever find yourself in this town and go wild. It is a bit of sanity in a world gone mad. 

So here we are. It's been about a week and I miss New Orleans so much. Don't get me wrong, I love living in Austin and don't want to move. I'm just glad a city that amazing and special can continue to exist and continue to be itself in a drive that's less than seven hours away from me. On the off-chance that I receive some sort of career opportunity that would send me back for good, there are certainly worse places to be. 

-Tyler