KFC'S SECRET RECIPE

Not many of you know that I like to cook, even though I'm not very good. When I lived alone in Tucson I had the opportunity to experiment and I came up with some monstrosities that, fortunately, only I had to taste.

Now I share with you the eleven famous herbs and spices of KFC's secret recipe, which have escaped from KFC's vaults and made their way to the Interwebs, where nothing can be kept secret for long. Here they are, in case you want to make something tasty to eat.

1 teaspoon ground oregano.
1 teaspoon chili powder.
1 teaspoon ground sage.
1 teaspoon dried basil.
1 teaspoon dried marjoram.
1 teaspoon pepper.
2 teaspoons of salt.
2 teaspoons paprika.
1 teaspoon onion salt.
1 teaspoon garlic powder.
2 tablespoons monosodium glutamate (MSG).

Before frying, add the mixture to the chicken of to the bread crumbs mixture. I would add a teaspoon of cumin, my favorite spice, but that's up to you. Bon appétit.

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THE ADVENTURES OF CARLOS MAL IN THE CITY OF EVIL

I came to Mexico City because they told me that the French consulate was here. I live in Hermosillo, a town in northern Mexico lost amongst deserts, a city with no water and no law, with something close to one million inhabitants; the streets are narrow and traffic lights have their own life, a life in which they decided to not fucking work for the benefit of anybody.

Lately it seems that there are more cars than people in Hermosillo. A gallon of gasoline costs the same as a full meal, drivers do not know what the turn signal is and major streets are blocked forever because the government is building ugly and awkward bridges everywhere.

I had never been to Mexico City. I am 30 years old, so whenever I mentioned that fact, many looked at me incredulously. So when the paperwork people told me that if I wanted to see my wife again I had to go to Mexico City, my blood ran cold, but I them firmly grabbed my crotch (it really hurt) and said "Rock on, here we go".

The flight was a joke. Previously I had only taken a plane to Paris and back to the desert, so nobody could call me an expert on air travel. My common sense told me that the trip would be short, but I never imagined that it would take longer to go to the airport from my house. It tool me less time to go through three or more weather and two time zones. What Louis CK says is very true: everything is wonderful and nobody is happy, we can fly up in the sky, comfortably seated and reading magazines, and yet we complain that airline food is bad or that there is not enough space on the plane to stretch our legs.

"Carlos, we can take you to Paris in a single day without you having to go on a filthy boat, terrified, for weeks. But the trouble is that you'll have to travel inside a box with breathing holes. And we'll only give you a twinky and a box of juice for the entire trip."

I would immediately say: "Where do I sign. Let's go."

I arrived in the City of Evil at night. My uncle Mando came to pick me up and he took me to his house in a city in the State of Mexico. Apparently it is normal for each day of work or school to be considered tourism.

The Paris metro had prepared me a bit, I knew I had to buy tickets and I knew that I had to follow the signs by their colors. I could read the maps inside the cars. What I did not know was that taking the metro at eight o'clock in the morning in Tacubaya station was similar to the preparation of surimi.

After feeling like Indiana Jones (I had to avoid being crushed by the subway's door ) I arrived at the French consulate building in the Polanco neighborhood, which, they say, is one of the least ghetto parts of the city

But of course, since 2009 I have a mild Yaqui curse (I'll write about this in a later occasion), so at the time I got there a fire alarm rang, so the building was evacuated. I have photographic evidence of this: the people who are behind me in the picture below are the employees of the consulate.

It was just a fire drill. I told you, the curse is mild.

After waiting two hours I was face to face with the employee who was going to decide my fate. It was not hard to imagine this scenario: the guy has lived in Mexico City for years with a salary in euros, paid directly from France. Not bad, but he misses Paris a lot. His bad mood is derived, probably, from the fact that all day, every day, he must be behind a crystal wall giving everyone the keys to the place where he wants to return. It's like being the keeper of Monica Bellucci's bedchamber.

He reluctantly gave me, at the end of the brief proceedings, a paper and a promise that my visa would arrive in 15 days at my home in the desert.

After that it was time for me to enjoy my visit!

So, what I did was take a couple of pictures in front of the Auditorio Nacional, like this, one, standing next to the mausoleum where rest the remains of the great songwriter Joaquin Sabina.

Or this very lame picture , with just the National Auditorium in the background.

And that was all. With that ended my glorious promenade through the city. I did not see the Angel, the monument to the Revolution, did not go to Chapultepec, nor to the Museum of Anthropology and History (which was all that I have ever craved about Mexico City); I didn't even see the Zócalo, the supposed heart of the nation. There was nothing that spoke to me about pre-Hispanic past or of the dark glory of the Colonial times. Only glass and concrete buildings and streets that were not as crowded as I imagined.

My cousin's boyfriend, David Borchardt, was my Virgil, he accompanied me throughout the trip, He waited for me outside the consulate, and all for the juicy reward of nothing. He's a very nice guy.

Back in the State of Mexico, I noticed something interesting: the consulate had kept my Mexican passport, which was my only current photo identification. At that moment I knew I should have renewed my driver's license and that I should have gotten a new voter card, but I am a rockstar who believes that destiny is like a Roman chariot full of dynamite, so I went to the airport just like that, and as if it were a chrome, shiny FBI badge, I showed the airport authorities my expired driver's license and continued. At a second checkpoint I did the same and proceeded to sit in a comfortable place by the window. In two hours I arrived in the desert.

Fifteen days later I took this photo:

For those who do not want to click on the picture to enlarge it, I tell you that in my hand is my visa to go to France.

And surprise, readers. I write this from Paris. ;)

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LESLIE MALSEN

Leslie Nielsen died today. I can only think about taking him back form the cold clasp of the Hours in the most logical way: by giving him my thirty years of youth in a portrait that steals him to a fairer age.

This is a photograph composed by my face and his equally. That this blasphemous, repulsive chimera grants him life eternal.

Nah, just kidding. He was hilarious and for me he was one of the great names in comedy. May he rest in peace in the spherical corners of Nothingness.

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PAGAN FIRE: THE BOOK OF JOB

According to the Book of Job, why does a righteous man suffer?

"Because God's God and shut up, humankind". Really. Basically it says that you can't ask God to do what you want. God Himself says: "Would you condemn Me that you may be justified?" (Job 40:8). And then proceeds to mock our whining by saying things like: "Where were you when I created the world?... Oh yeah, I remember. NOWHERE. God is sort of a dick in the Book of Job. It is, no contest, my favorite book of the Bible. (Carlos Mal Pacheco in a Q&A forum).

Inception

The book of Job was written in India millenia ago; it probably was a pre-brahamanic folktale (this term must exist, brahamanic, pre-brahamanic, am I right?). As the Gnostic Christ in the theories of many a filthy hippie, the book that occupies us of traveled slowly from India to the Middle East around the years of the Egyptian or Babylonian diaspora of the Hebrews; I don't know, com, who's counting the Diasporas? Not I.

Why did the Hebrews include this Indian story to the body of their most sacred book? A reasonable explanation would be provided by the original tale's formative character. The dialogue as technique is most effective to establish a rhetorical preamble that eliminates how tedious a theoretical sermon is. The reader by feeling like the witness of a conversation. It is Plato's method and one that was used throughout the entire Middle fucking Ages.

The Book of Satan

Satan appears in Job for the first time as a concrete being, not as a lame-ass allegorical snake or a spirit diluted in ambiguity. In Job, Satan appears as an angel of the Host Celestial that struts and prances around God and around the world. This Devil is neither a devil nor the Prince of Darkness, nor the fallen angel; he is the primitive Satan of the Hebrews: an angel that puts itself in the way of the righteous to prove the serfs of Yahweh. It is God's tool, an angel just like that of Death, like the one of Revelation, like that of War.

I enjoy imagining a world parallel to ours in which the Archangel Michael, the warrior, becomes the Devil of a whole civilization instead of Luzbel. This monument to Saint Michel in Paris would be fucking way more heavy metal in that other world:


Justice Divine

Satan is fascinating in Job; he successfully tempts the Creator and causes him to have an identity crisis. It's as if we were dealing with a couple of immature youngsters. Satan and Yahweh bet on the faith of a man against the tragic loss of everything that he loved. These very goddamn bizarre events contradict our idea of a God that is omniscient and kind; it is true that the suffering of Job does echo the innocent who dies for no reason, it is reflected in the poor of the world, which in spite of honesty and hard work they can't escape the whirlwind of misery. It is also true that Job's tenacity is admirable: he refuses to curse God, even after all his losses.

But good ol' Job is not a stupid idiot. Although he indeed does not curse God, he does pose the question: "What have I done to deserve this?" Job and his sketchy friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, have this theory that Job did something that made Yahweh super-angry. This is an error that is in reality the very center of meaning of the whole book, and in the end, it has turned into the spiritual center of all my life, a center that I have turned into a catchphrase that I do not hesitate to use in any occasion, and those who meet me have undoubtedly heard me say it:

"How unfair is God!"

The voice of God

When I say that God is unfair I say it as someone who has read the Book of Job, not as someone who gets angry with their parents because they did not let them go out, then slams the door and lies down on the bed and throws an embarrassing tantrum.

After the lamentations of Job and the theology-to-go that he and his friends practice in the street, God says "That's it, yo!" And it begins, in chapter 38: my favorite part of the Bible: Yahweh, pissed-off, tells us that we should stop being idiots: "Who has given Me anything so that I should give them back something?" God compares Himself with the Leviathan and the Behemot, two indomitable beasts (some interpreters compare these monsters with a crocodile and a hippopotamus, respectively; the two most lethal beasts of Africa). He asks us if we were there when he invented dew and the colors of the evening. What a dick.

YHVH is not a god of science and reason. The God who dictated the laws of the Pentateuch to Moses and the wandering Hebrews was the crafty and methodical Satan, according to Blake, the Gnostics and according to myself, Carlos Mal. God-Yahvéh, the most absurd, hyper-crazy God of Creation, the architect of the Big Bang and the one that spoke with Job, is like one of those old-school Haitian dictators of the 19th and 20th century: huge, powerful and fucking mental as a monkey in flames with scorpions made of broken glass running through its veins.

And that's why, kids, bad things happen to good people. Because God says that shut the hell up. It's not even necessary to obey God, not even to respect Him or to fear Him. There is no credit, bonuses, coupons for Him. Well, at least it was like this until a carpenter was born in a miserable shantytown in an equally miserable patch of desert on the middle of nowhere.

More than an avatar of God-Yahweh, this prophet in flip-flops, this Yoshua, a.k.a. Jesus "Christ" bin Yusuf, looks to me more like an anti-Yahweh, a Satan-Prometheus extracted from all the books of the East and spilt over the insipid salad that was the leftovers of the dying Hellenism... But this is for my next post, which will have the bad-ass title of "Pagan Fire: Jesus Christ".

MINI - COROLLARY:

The Dead Sea Scrolls give the Book of Job this ending:

...and he is the king of all reptiles. Job answered and said to God: I know that you can do anything, and you do not lack power or wisdom. I spoke once and I will not revoke it, twice, and I will not add to it. Listen then and I will say to you; I will question you and you will answer me. I knew of you only by word of mouth and now that I have seen you, for this I will be obliterated and destroyed and will turn into dust and ash.

Don Luis de Gongomal and Argote.

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CARLOS MAL DRAWS "AL GRITO"

I don't think anybody has asked me to make a tutorial on how to draw comics, much less ask me about the process of creating the comic strips that I publish on a weekly basis at algrito.com, (the Spanish language webcomic that my pal J.C. Soto and I begun back in January), but I don't give a shit. Here I leave you all with a step by step review of the manner in which my creative juices congeal into art.

1. Everything starts with a pencil drawing on a regular piece of regular white paper. José Carlos produces the idea and I draw it grosso modo, just to know how is everything is going to be arranged in the final product and so we're sure that J.C. is going to like it, because, after all, Al Grito is all about teamwork.


2. The drawing is scanned and saved in .JPG format; I open it in Photoshop and I start drawing the lines, which I call "base lines". For this I use an oval-shaped brush, because the lines produced by it change in width with every different angle; the result gives the impression that I used a felt pen or marker. I should mention that the first strips were drawn using Photoshop's "pen tool", but for due to the time it consumed I decided to use that method for drawings that were more complex, like this one I made of my wife, Bérénice. In the sample that's at the right of this paragraph (click on it to expand its size) you can see how I start the process of "inking" the base lines.

3. This is the way the comic looks once I finished tracing all the base lines.

4. The dialogue is something that I often leave for the end, but when the comic has many speech balloons or extensive phrases in it I like to know in advance how much space is going to be occupied by the lettering and balloons before continuing with more difficult parts of the process; this way I will know what parts of the comic I can skip (because they will be hidden behind a speech balloon anyways).

5. Speaking of knowing what space is going to be occupied, the next step consists in adding an outer frame in order to separate the panels. Very simple, actually.

6. I use the "pen tool" to make the speech balloons instead of working with custom shapes, like many do. After I eliminate the base pencils one notices that the comic has taken shape. Some would say that it's practically ready to be published. What a miserable error. I am anal when it comes to my comics, that's why I hardly meet deadlines.

7. The most difficult part of the process (it's tedious!) is base-coloring. A software that's so intelligent as to know perfectly which shape goes in what color dos not exist yet. One must paint first with a big brush and then with a fucking microscope in order to respect the borders, so the colors are not wrongly mixed or overlapped, so there are no unpainted corners, etc. It is a delicate task and what is more irritating about it it's probably that it is the least artistic phase of the whole process.


8. The good thing is that the next step is my favorite: shadows and highlights. I achieve this using Photoshop's "burn" and "dodge" brushes; the first one darkens the base colors (i.e. it's not a black-colored brush, but a brush that "scorches" colors towards black) and the second one over-exposes the base colors until they get to white.

9. As it can be seen in the previous drawing, I colored the skin of the characters first. In the following steps I colored each element on a different layer. Photoshop layers are edited independently; the good thing about this is that the effects I add are not mixed up and the overall experience is more organized.

10. I use a technique that I discovered myself in order to shade in different layers: I duplicate the base-color layers and apply shadows on the upper layer. Then I use the eraser (soft or hard) so the shade appears to be interrupted (as it can be seen in the shadow of the Bible in the first panel of the image after this paragraph). Afterwards I merge the two layers into one and I repeat the procedure as many times as necessary. I do this to every color layer onto which I intend to apply shadows or highlights.

11. I finally add the background. In strips like this one the background is not complex, rather a solid-colored backdrop to which I add some shadows or light effects. In other comic strips I have added dramatic textures or intricate drawings. This time I got it easy; the result is as follows. The comic strip is ready to be published... almost.

12. The last step is basically post-production, for the product is actually ready. What happens is that I like to feature effects that give the drawing uniqueness. I almost always add a texture to it (in this case it was a "halftone color" effect) and one or more color filters. The cherry on top of the cake is the webcomic's ID at the lower left corner and my signature on the opposite side.

Once the comic is ready I reduce its size considerably. I save the original-sized file (for the purpose of using it for prints or further editing) and said reduced file is published on algrito.com.

This is how the magic goes down, dear readers. Don't miss the comic each week. If you want to subscribe to algrito.com so each strip arrives automatically to your feed reader click here.

See you people in the next post, in 2014. See you on Facebook as well, losers.

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SUNDAYS OF OPUS: BACK IN MEXICO

I came back to Mexico in December of 2009 and I have been busy since then honing my drawing skills and exploring my love for photography + Photoshop. Here I present you what I like the most of what I have produced from December, 2009 to July, 2010.

Nick Cave

Bérénice entre Amapolas

Storybook Melissa

Le comte Gaston de Raousset Boulbon

Animal Hands Jones

Bérénice Fumaa

Tractatum Berenikeus

Bérénice Blanchenoire

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DO NOT PUNCH PEOPLE IN THE FACE

Do not punch people in the face. If at any given time you find yourself in the situation of being able to choose whether to punch somebody in the face and not doing it, please, choose option B: i.e. not doing it. It is not only because I want to be the ambassador of Peace and harmony, but also because there are a lot of disadvantages which we don't reflect upon on a daily basis.

Bad movies have taught us that it is hilarious when a character that feigns shyness (oftentimes a woman) punches the bad guy in the face ever so solidly, preferably before a TV crew. The sequence goes more or less like thus:

VILLAIN THAT HAS BEEN DEFEATED BUT WILL REMAIN FREE: That's right, Joe Adventure, this time you thwarted my plans, but you have got nothing against me! HAHAHAHA!

WOMAN (girlfriend or wife of our hero): Suck on this!

She punches the guy right in the fucking mug.

This incredibly tiring trope makes everyone feel satisfied, because it gives the "good guys" a form of primitive justice that the Law will never give them. There's a less violent variation of this sequence of events, it is very common in cheap movies targeted for children, I'm talking about the trope "a viscous, semi-liquid, repugnant substance falls over the villain as punishment for his sins". We all remember one or several Disney movies with a scene depicting this.

But the point here was not to talk about stupid tropes, but to beg you never to punch guys in the kisser. Not only you people are exposed to the very real risk of breaking your fingers or to suffer serious infections (it seems like human saliva is really nasty), but also it happens that movies and serialized TV fiction that we watch never show these acts as having realistic consequences. In these cases, a punch in the face is something from which one recovers calmly, like nothing just happened. Things break and tear inside one's face, an you need days or weeks to recover.

The only TV series that convinced me in regards to punches in the face was Lost, because since the beginning of the story we were told that the Island where the characters lived had healing powers.

What can I say about Bud Spencer and Terence Hill's classic film Double Trouble? Too many punches in faces. And we grew up watching this, with the idea of a ounch in the face as the highest deed of heroics. Batman punch people in the face, he didn't use no measly guns and bombs like his cowardly counterparts. Ergo, to pummel someone in the teeth was not only acceptable: it was heroic.

Well, we have to change our minds. Think about it. Think about all the things that happen to those who are subject to fist-punishing in the lips. Walk a mile in their shoes.

Do not punch people in the face. It is wrong.

Above you can watch a new comedy classic. Don't be fooled, dudes and dudettes. Punches in the goddamned face hurt a fucking lot.

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CINCO DE MAYO: WHAT YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT IT

"Las armas nacionales

se hán cubierto de gloria"
(The Nation's arms have
been covered in Glory)"

There's a commemorative bust of poor general Zaragoza at Hermosillo's Plaza Zaragoza. Every year, when Cinco de Mayo is around, the generous Government of the City renews the motto of the Battle of Puebla in golden-paint covered styrofoam letters. Each year, when I used to live there I went to visit the bust AND TORE OFF THE FUCKING SHIT OF AN ACCENT THAT FOR REASONS THAT ESCAPE MY INTELLIGENCE SOME STUPID IDIOTIC MOTHERFUCKERS ADDED TO THE WORD "HAN"!!!

Ignacio Zaragoza, evidently a nerd of his age (check out the glasses and hairdo), led a group of Mexicans to what would be known as the only battle The Mexican Army actually won against a foreign force in national territory.

The incredible feat of not being utterly devastated by invaders on the battlefield would happen only once, in Texas, in the shameful victory of The Alamo, where the army of Santa Anna fought a handful of gringos, cornered like rats in a lousy adobe house.

When I married a French woman I though "Cinco de Mayo is going to be aaaaawkwaaaard ♫". It's like if she had married a descendant of nobility and they had to celebrate La Prise de la Bastille together.

I, getting married forever to a French woman.

Interestingly, my wife turned Mexican immediately and change her colors; now her cheers go to us Mexicans and our many senseless, hopeless battles. Let me just tell you, dear readers, that that is very cute, and that makes of her not only the best secretary I've had, but also the best wife ever.

Did I already mention that she's French and sexy?

I bet you didn't know these facts

• Dude, you don't know shit about The Pastry War, do you?

A few decades before the Battle of Puebla, France and Mexico had been involved in the infamous "guerra de los pasteles" (Pastry War) The comical name of this war gave us, elementary school students, the impression of the opposing troops attacking each other with whipped cream pies, like in those goofy movies of yesteryear, and not with very real, hot, lead bullets or with sharp blades sunk inside everybody's intestines.

In reality this "pastry war" was a very tense naval conflict that was caused by some Mexicans treating very badly the French population of Mexico City. One time a group of Santa Anna's soldiers ate a bunch of pastries without paying for them and that was the last straw for the abused Frenchies. A French float obliterated San Juan de Ulúa and Veracruz until they forced the Mexicans to sign an I.O.U. An oldified and über-badass ex-president Guadalupe Fucking Victoria, first president of Mexico, was one of the diplomats involved in the matter, who, all Yoda-like, was in control of the situation at all times.

• You also didn't know that Benito Juarez is probably to blame for the French Intervention. But he's still cool, chill out, dudes.
  

Benito Juarez, the Motherfucker of the Americas, canceled the payments being made to France after the Pastry War. The War of Reform and the difficulties facing his term forced him to cut the spending budget and to cancel all foreign payments temporarily. England and Spain were cool, but France is no Payday Loans store, ladies: France was ready to fight the Mexicans and their debty manners.

• Fuck nay, you did not know that Napoleon III was a goddamn mega-crazy Confederate racist, like those guys in Alabama who have no teeth and play the banjo and marry their kin, but French and handsome.

The English and the Spaniards withdrew their ships; they had decided to play it cool and let the no-longer-paying Mexicans save a little money. The French stayed, but not because they wanted their million pesos, fuck no. Napoleon III wanted Mexico as a colony because he planned to support the Confederates (the bad guys) in the U.S. Civil War. He wanted the South to win. If Juarez, Porfirio Díaz and the bunch of undisciplined, angry Mexicans had not had posed resistance, Barack Obama would not be president today, because the Confederates were not planning on abolishing slavery in the USA, not even as a joke.

• You did not know how many Frenchmen were defeated by Zaragoza's.

There were more or less some six-thousand Frenchmen in the Battle of Puebla. Zaragoza had roughly the same number of men, but Porfirio Díaz had another five thousand, and who knows how many more soldiers and civilians participated during the whole conflict using guerrilla tactics. Napoleon III did not learn the lesson that we Mexicans fight dirty.

• Just like in the "Niños Héroes" ordeal, we all think that "Mexico won". I'm sorry dipshits, we didn't. You didn't know either which country in Latin America has the worst, most sucky army ever.

The Battle of Puebla looks like an isolated victory, but the war was very long, and to consider that we're such bad-asses because of Cinco de Mayo is a little bid depressing because, at the end of the French Intervention, Benito Juarez was exiled in the USA, half of Mexico welcomed the French with open arms and we had the Second Empire (with Maximilian of Habsburg). Another lost war for our sad country. At least we're not Paraguay, the worst soldiers in History: they lost two thirds of their adult population during the Triple-Alliance War in the 19th century, and the slaughter continued with The War of the Chaco and the civil wars.

• You definitely didn't know that Zaragoza did not buy in glorious battle, but amidst vomit, diarrhea and fever.

General Ignacio Zaragoza died only four months after the Battle of Puebla. He died of tiphoid fever, a kind of salmonella poisoning caused by ingesting contaminated food or water. What a nerdy way to kick it. Zaragoza left this world while Alice Lidell listened to a story that would become Alice in Wonderland; while Mrs. Lumière gave birth to the first of the fathers of cinema and during the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War.

• At least the French weren't left intact. What a measly consolation!

General (and Count) Lorencez, Zaragoza's rival caught himself the yellow fucking fever in Mexico! He went back to France and then died after a long, miserable convalescence. Also, because he got distracted in Mexico's war, Royal Shithead Napoleon III lost Austria in the Seven Weeks War against Germany. What an idiot. To be a cousin of Napoleon Bonaparte didn't count for shit.

I hope you have learned something. Read it to your children, ladies, so they know more about this date, which gringos think commemorates the Independence of Mexico. Bunch of ignorant shits.

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FATE OF BLOOD (SINO SANGRIENTO), A POEM BY MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ

From blood that comes from blood I come to be
I come, like oceans also come from water
the color of my soul is that of poppies,
my fate is just like poppies of misfortune
I come from crimson poppy-spawning poppies
My fate and I do crash, a grisly goring.

Some creatures came before
and came from lands of sand where nothing grows,
and more than one have come
with raging horoscopes,
under a moon that's turbulent and evil.

A stroke fell down to Earth
and set a bloody footprint in my life,
a planet of saffron in heat fell down,
as well as an angry crimson cloud,
a wounded sea fell down, a sky fell down.

I came to life pain-stabbed,
a knife was waiting for me to arrive,
a milk that was bad was given for me to suckle,
the juice of a sword that was mad, homicidal,
and in the sun I first opened my eye
And the very first thing I saw was a gash
and it was a sad one.

Blood is out to get me, so hungry and fierce,
since the day of my founding,
and even before I was
uttered, pronounced, shoved,
into this greedy wasteland by my mother.
It pulls me by my feet, and by my side,
hard and harder each time, towards the pit.

I fight against this blood, and I debate
against so many claws, so many veins,
and each body that I stumble upon
it is another splurt of blood, another chain.

Although they're light, the darts of oats
add to the ensigns of my chest:
on it I had the love of farming,
and my soul that is a fallow
has deeply furrowed
with irrevocable wounds my hope
with the death-wish of my plow.

All the tools are watching me:
the ax has left me
recondite marks;
the stones, days and desires
they dug springs in my body
that were swallowed only by sands
and melancholies.

The chains are bigger and bigger,
the snakes are bigger and bigger,
bigger and crueler is their power,
bigger are their rings around me,
bigger is their heart, bigger is mine.

In this bedroom filled with nothing,
where only visits meet,
the peck and the color of a crow,
a handful of letters and written passions,
a fistful of blood and a death I keep.

O fulminating blood,
O climbing roar of purple,
sentencing that sounds at all hours
under the suffering anvil of my temples!

Blood has given birth to me , it has imprisoned me
Blood reduces me and makes me larger,
a building of blood I am, of plaster,
that tears itself down and then it rises
on the scaffold of my bones.

A dead bricklayer made of blood,
rains and everyday he hangs his shirt
in the surroundings of my eye,
and every night with my soul,
or even with my eyelashes I carry him.

Blood is growing, it enlarges
the expansion of his foliage in my chest
that, overflowing poplar, gets out of hand
and in several grim rivers it falls undone.

I see myself suddenly
wrapped in its angry torrents,
and I swim against all desperately
like against a fatal stream of daggers.

His current drags me enraged,
it tears me to pieces, sinks me, runs me over;
I want to separate from it, I fight it,
but my arms are taken with it,
and my desire, it goes away with my arms.

I will allow myself to be washed away, in pieces,
since thus has been ordered to my life
by the blood and by its tide, and by the bodies
and by my own star of blood and gore.

I'll be a lonely, swollen wound
until in my swelling I am
a corpse of foam: just wind and nothing.

Miguel Hernández

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ALGRITO.COM

The first line of the Mexican National Anthem says: "Mexicanos al grito de guerra el acero aprestad y el bridón" (Mexicans, to the cry of war, take on your steel and your steed), which means something like: "Mexicans, when someone tells us there is a war going on we have to get our hands on a weapon and we have to also get a fine-ass horse."

After six years in Tucson, Arizona, after a Masters and a Ph.D., I can finally reap the fruit of so much hard work and study. Of course, after turning into an expert on Hispanic Literature the most logical thing I could do is to start my career as a comics artist.

And yes, a friend of mine offered me the opportunity of doing what I always dreamed of doing: to earn money with my drawings.

And I have been doing that since January, when we started algrito.com, a weekly webcomic written by JC and drawn by me. We have slowly earned a number of visitors and each time this number grows.

Besides, during and after my trip to Paris in the Summer of 2009 I started also my other project, La República de Sonora, an ambitious graphic novel about Count Gaston de Raousset-Boulbon, something of which I will write in a later occasion.

Here I leave you with some examples of my artistic process for algrito.com. The complete , colored, versions are on the website. I invite you ladies to visit the website each week for a new comic. I salute you, faithful miladies.

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IDEA: MUSIC FOR A SHORT FILM I WILL NEVER SHOOT

Do not steal my idea, please. I came to me after watching the very entertaining Shoot 'Em Up, with Clive Owen and Monica Bellucci.

The short film will be named Park Chan Wook, in honor of a very bad-ass South Korean filmmaker. I might use Quentin Tarantino as the tagline.

Some bad-ass-looking dude who is also a good person at heart (like Johnny Cash or Nick Cave... alright, let's call him Johnny Cave or Nick Cash) wakes up one day to face the zombies that plague the world, and who have left him and a few others as sole survivors on Earth. This will be juxtaposed with people arguing, afterwards about the rampaging, murdersome slaughter that madman Johnny Cave has done believing that the world was full of zombies, when everything was in his head. I plan to make a cross between the typical zombie flick with the sadly commonplace school shootings in the USA. You see? I am controversial!

The original in this short film smothered in clichés is that my intention is never to show a firearm in it. Each time that Johnny lifts up his gun to blow a zombie's brains out a lightpost, a bush, a car, any thing will be covering up the gun. During the short Johnny and his colleagues will use all kinds of weaponry... that will never be seen on screen.

This is not only an effort to be original and absurdist, but also it is a measure of economy, because it is really expensive to buy prop guns. I have tried on ebay and I have failed. Well, my wallet has failed.

Anyhow, in this post I want to document the soundtrack of this short. I will leave here videos or mp3 links in case you ladies want to listen to something cool, but I am sorry to tell you that this entry is mainly a mnemonic resource for myself. If you do like awesome tunes you're more than invited to listen, and if you feel like it you can even share your opinion about this foul idea.

Have a great day.

Intro music:
Klaus Nomi - The Cold Song, from the Opera King Arthur by Henry Purcell.

Cool scenes with swords and guns:
Mado Robin - Sopra il sen la man mi possa from La sonnambula by Bellini.

Jussi Bjorlin & Robert Merrill - Au fond du temple saint, from Les pêcheurs de perles by Bizet.

Maria Callas - O mio babino caro from the Opera Gianni Schicchi, by Puccini.

And that is all.

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CENA (SUPPER)

by Baltazar de Alcázar (1530 – 1606)

In Ronda, where I live,
lives don Diego de Sosa,
and i'll tell you, Inés, the most
wild thing you've heard of him.

This gentleman used to have
a butler from Portugal,
but let's eat, Inés,
first, if you'd like.

We have set the table;
what will be for supper is ready;
the wine and cups and now:
what's left is to start the party.

Slice the bread. It is good
The salad tastes like Heaven
the meat, with its garlic,
can you see how stinky it is?

This Inés is by itself praised;
there is no need to praise it ourselves;
only one fault I find in it:
that it is swiftly over.

Pour the wine, and for your life,
bless it first:
I have this devotion
of blessing my drinks.

It was good, Inés, that sample;
it was frank, But what do I do?
A florin is worth each gulp
of this pink wine.

The tavern in the corner
sells it some times;
great consolation is to have
the tavern as a neighbor.

Bring it here again, make it two,
now that we can't help it.
Happy that who'd have the whole bottle
to better serve God!

The salad and the meat
is gone; what is next?
A sausage, O great lady,
worthy of veneration!

How plump and pretty it comes!
What elegant garb she has!
I suspect, Inés, she comes
so we end ourselves in it.

So there we go, make way and get to it,
the road is not wide, I tell you.
Don't pour water in the wine, Inés,
lest the belly gets upset,

Let the aged one join us,
so you can eat better;
God bless you, your intake,
is like the one that of advice take the Wise.

But tell me: Don't you love and value
this sausage, rich and famous?
How it is spicy the little traitor!
That much of spices it must have.

How it is full of pine nuts!
A sausage of courtesans
and roasted by those hands
made to fat pigs.

Om my God that you could put it
in front of the very King,
in the end, a lawful pig,
that swells its empty gut.

Let's taste what it's in the pitcher,
high, celestial liquor:
it is not like the rosy one,
and is not quite like it.

How smooth, how transparent!
What a rank, odorous body!
What a palate, what color,
all with such finesse!

My heart is about to burst
with pleasure and I see you
and how you're doing. I consider
that you must be content.

But the cheese is finally here,
and the mushrooms come along,
and they both come in asking
for the pitcher and the cups.

Taste the cheese, it is extreme:
cheese from Pinto is no match;
and the olive is quite good:
it can row on its own worth.

So do, Inés, what you do;
give me that full leather.
Let's drink. Supper's done,
forgo of the table cloth.

Now that we have eaten
so well and with so much gusto,
it seems like it might be just
to go back to the story I was telling.

Well, you know, good Inés,
that the Portuguese fell ill...
It's eleven now, I'm very sleepy;
let's leave it for tomorrow.

---

Please, if you understand Spanish, consider reading this delicious poem in its original language.

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PAGAN FIRE - HAPPENINGS

Originally published on El Imparcial on May 30, 2004.

To Pablo Ayala

It is possible that everything that occurs around us is due to a will or our will trying to bring order to a sort of chaos. The opposite of the natural is the sophisticated: It happens when our intelligence plays God and pretends to shape the terrifying world that surrounds us.

Our history of hysteria is proof of the existence of a force in disorder that we haven't and we won't ever dominate. Everything is product of an exalted rationality that is unable to comprehend the essential designs of human nature. We are evil.

Our physical fate is decomposition, and our moral fate is degradation. But this is not necessarily terrible: our dignity and humanity reside in our struggle against the evil that enslaves us.

But it seems that we try to apply that code of salvation to all of our activities. In arts, anomalies have always been classified as ugly (the aesthetic version of evil).

After World War I, the artists of the world lost their last marble, and with it, the lat thing that united them to the machinery of classicism. A world of rationality was being torn apart in a barbaric turmoil sponsored by progress. And artists, whether they like it or not, more than members of society, they are a symptom of it.

A happening is a form of art that appeared in the middle of the 20th Century as an open attack towards the core of artistic appreciation. A happening consisted of an arbitrary act with aesthetic intentions that involved involuntary spectators: it was art in ephemeral display outside the art galleries. Here's an example.

More than thirty years ago, a truck parked in the middle of Madison Square Garden in New York. From it two naked women and an artist came out. He rolled out a very large roll of white paper over the asphalt. Then he sat down before a little toy piano.

The women painted themselves from head to toe with blue paint and, to the rhythm of a single note of the toy piano they started rolling over the paper on the floor. When the music was over, after being seen by hundreds of astonished witnesses, they took their materials and went away the same way they arrived without uttering a word.

The key of these strange acts is a desire of toppling the notion of reality, fiction appropriateness, time, space, everything. What an artist strives for through a happening is, in truth, to destroy the world, to reduce it to rubble. They are worshipers of chaos, of disorder, of the adverse. A happening is a beautiful, invisible crime.

In academic terms, (i.e. boring) a happening is the expression of some of the members of the artistic avant garde, which is long dead and buried. But the happening survived, even after cubism and the very terrible abstract impressionism died.

A few years ago a U.S. American Bulgarian artist put thousands of yellow umbrellas along a highway. Another one put his poetry on the colossal lights of Las Vegas. Modern happenings take advantage of the gullibility of mass media and commercial advertising. Our crazed times let everything work.

Artists nowadays shouldn't endure the notion the separation of the real world and the world of art. One doesn't abandon the planet by entering an art gallery. But many artists keep thinking that art in an angelic halo that sanctifies all of us. As long as art is a human activity, it can be as noble as carpentry or as abhorrent as the act of murder.

Happenings are rough impacts, kicks in the teeth of reason. They are a signal of the fact that the barrier between art and the world is false. Art is not that big of a deal. The world neither.

Protest against the death of Ronald Reagan,
a happening of El Club Chufa.

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MY PROVERBS OF HELL

THE VOICE OF THE DEVIL

Scary thoughts: A tattooist apprentice. The surgeon's first operation ever.

A MEMORABLE FANCY:

What if Jesus had a song released and we don't like it that much? Would we lie to Him and ourselves and consider it the best song ever? I think we would.

A MEMORABLE FANCY:

A single guy will receive a visit from his mother. He fears she will find his expensive, ultra-realistic latex sex doll, but he doesn't want to get rid of it. So he buries it in his backyard.

Does he feel like a murderer? And when he digs it up... is that like fucking a zombie? I think part of his soul would have died at this point.

A MEMORABLE FANCY / THE VOICE OF SATAN:

A circus acrobat, famous for his amazing feats on a tightrope high in the air goes shopping. He trips on the sidewalk and falls on his knees with his grocery bags tightly pressed against his sides.

He weeps. He weeps and cries like never before.

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