#a newspaper clipping from 1991 described it as

[youre-where-i-wanna-go]

manifesting someone making a gif set of her 1989 allstate commercial too 🤭🤞🏻

[bremser]

Berenice Abbott at 18 rue Servandoni

The portrait on the cover of Julia Van Haaften's 2018 biography "Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography" and at the top of Abbott's wiki page is by an unknown photographer. It was taken for the small newspaper Paris-Midi, published June 14, 1928. Keystone France agency, and now Getty owns the rights and incorrectly dates it as 1927, while Wikipedia dates it as "1930s."

At the time, her studio was at 18 rue Servandoni in Paris, we see the fireplace and door in the background in other portraits, such as the portrait of James Joyce's daughter, Lucia. There's a classic Atget at 15 rue Servandoni, but it's from 1903-4. Atget died in 1927 and Abbott, along with Julien Levy, saved his archive. By 1930 she was in New York City, where Walker Evans made his great portrait of her.

Van Haaften writes that in search of lower rent, Abbott moved to the rue Servandoni studio in early 1928. Abbott kept a clipping of the newspaper, but there's no further detail about the portrait session in the biography.

I was curious about the photographer of the portrait and found Getty has a handful of other frames from the same session that I'd never seen.

Most interesting of those frames is this contemplative shot showing the windows of her studio, maybe some photo chemicals on the table. A puff of smoke emanates from Abbott's cigarette in the same place where someone has left their fingerprint on the negative or print. There's a strong reflection or light leak in the top left corner of the frame. Van Haaften describes the rue Servandoni studio offering "beautiful north light."

Looking at the building on Google Earth, there is one north-facing spot that has the large windows similar to the 1928 portrait, seen in the center of the screen grab below.

Another detail Van Haaften mentions is that it took Abbott months to install electricity. An electric spotlight is on a tripod behind Abbott in the standing portrait. In the alternate angle you can see a not-to-code wire dangling.

So, who made these portraits? The Keystone France agency was an off-shoot of a popular stereoview company based in Meadville, Pennsylvania, hence "keystone." If you've ever flipped through old stereoviews at a vintage shop, you recognize this brand. The French agency was founded by Alexandre Garai in 1927 (whose brother Bertram started a related Keystone in London in 1914). The Met has one photograph by Alexandre Garai, taken in 1927. The jpeg is tiny, but indicates a modern perspective. While it's possible Garai is the photographer, his brother's ethos seems to have been to be the boss ... and never touch a camera.

The identity could be buried deep in Getty's London warehouse, which stores 80 million photographs and negatives. When these frames were scanned and metadata added to Getty in 2010-2016, if there was a name on the back of the prints, it probably would have been added then.

From the photos themselves, it's difficult to say if Abbott had a rapport or was familiar with the photographer: her default intensity is remarkably consistent her entire life, up until the last portrait of her in 1991.

(left, rue Servandoni 1929, right: Hank O'Neal, Berenice Abbott, Last Portrait, Monson, Maine July 17, 1991)

From the resolution, the depth of field on the lens, these are probably shot with a 4x5 or larger camera. It looks like the photographer shot the lens wide open, the camera in the standing portraits looks very much in focus, while Abbott's face looks slightly out of focus.

Two of the four frames have similar damage, could be a development problem, but could be mold later while in storage. Abbott's Paris portraits of the period were shot on glass (as much of Atget's body of work was), though by the late 1920s glass plates had mostly been replaced by film. Annoyingly, Getty is one of the best places online to see her Paris portraits, but the Steidl book is highly recommended. Seen together, you realize why Man Ray felt threatened, or at least annoyed, by his former assistant.

The photographer was either challenged or in a challenging environment. Abbott was often a withering critic, one can imagine a green photographer shows up to make portraits and encounters a prickly subject. With the seated portrait above, at first glance, I thought maybe the print has a piece torn out of the left side? Or is it a modern lamp intruding on the composition?

It's difficult to tell with the window portrait how much of it is a metering mistake or the potential development issue, but it looks several stops overexposed to be of use in publication of that time. Today, with our phone cameras taking three frames and digitally merging exposure, we can romanticize the top half of her body dissolving into the light is as the "magic of film."

I'm calling this the "last" frame of the session, based only on the fact that her pose and facial expression has shifted from intensity to a mix of boredom and exasperation. The photographer told her to sit on the day bed with tea and a book, "look relaxed," but she wants nothing to do with it.

[songforeddiemunson]

Panic in Detroit

A Bartender!Eddie Munson x Fem!Reader fix-it fic series.

Series Summary: It's the year 1991. Reader is fleeing an unendurable life in an attempt to start anew. A dangerous man hunts her, and she finds herself in a seedy corner of Detroit, working in a dive bar under a false name. Unbeknownst to her, her whole world is about to be thrown into an even worse tailspin, further complicated by a mysterious and handsome bartender with a troubled past of his own.

Series Warnings: Angst, trauma; there will be references to past domestic violence but nothing explicitly described. Coarse language, stressful situations, eventual smut and fluff. Slow burn. Minors DNI. Reader's description is vague apart from being AFAB, in an attempt to remain inclusive.

**As always, if you like this, comments and reblogs are the lifeblood of any fic writer! Please let me know if you would like to be included in a taglist for this series.**

Chapter One: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Chapter warnings: a bit of angst and coarse language, brief mention of the sort of sexual harassment that a female working in a bar may experience, but nothing too crazy. We're only just now getting started darlings.

Word count: ~3k

October, 1991

Tom’s Tavern, a run down old watering hole on the fringes of the wrong side of Detroit, looked exactly like the sort of place people went to forget or be forgotten, which was precisely the reason you had walked through its creaky front door.

It had all been arranged in advance by the friend of a cousin of an acquaintance, deliberately convoluted and vague, in hopes of avoiding any obvious connection to yourself. It was a paying gig, and even though your nose wrinkled with distaste at the way the soles of your boots stuck to the tacky floor, you knew there was little chance you could find better in your position. 

The place was pretty empty, being only 4pm on a Wednesday, but there were still some figures hunched over their beers at the bar. Two guys who looked a bit like old bikers were shooting pool on the other side of the main room; the noise of the billiard balls clacking together sharply punctuating the hushed tones of the place, with the soft melody of what sounded like Don’t Cry by Guns n’ Roses emanating quietly from a jukebox in the corner.

As you approached the bar, a burly middle-aged man emerged from some double saloon-style doors behind the bar, and he punched open the cash register. He began pulling bills out of the drawer, counting them out. “Excuse me,” you started tentatively, but the man simply held up a finger, silently commanding you to wait as he counted the cash. Behind the bar was a large mirror that looked like it had been cleaned basically never, with nearly every surface covered with polaroids and newspaper clippings. Your eyes wandered over the bits and scraps of memorabilia as you waited. The place was undoubtedly past its prime, a seedy dive if there ever was one, but you got the fleeting impression that someone still cared about this dump.

“Sorry, honey. What can I get you?” the burly man asked, his eyes coming up to rest on your face. He raised his eyebrows in surprise when he saw you; you clearly were not the sort of patron he was used to seeing in there. Too young and too clean, you imagined.

“Hi, I’m actually supposed to start working here tonight,” you said. “Are you Tom?”

The man nodded. “That’s me. So you must be Cassidy,” he replied, using the false name you had chosen for yourself. You nodded.  “You ever work in a bar before, Cassidy?” 

“Yeah,” you replied. “My uncle had a bar in…” you hesitated, unsure if you should use your real city, and decided against it. “Chicago,” you said. If Tom sensed your hesitation, he gave no sign of it.

“Well then, welcome to Tom’s Tavern. We’ll have you bar-backing for a few weeks while you learn the ropes. Don’t let this quiet time fool you,” he warned, gesturing vaguely around the establishment. “It can get pretty rowdy around here. But don’t worry, I’m usually around, and our main bartender is here every night. He’s younger, like you. He’ll have your back. You have any trouble, just holler, and one of us will come help you.” You smiled and nodded, feeling somewhat reassured.

“Where is he, anyway,” Tom mused, looking around as if he’d misplaced his car keys. “Eddie!” He bellowed. “Where the hell’d you go, man?”

The double doors behind the bar flew open, and a slim man roughly half Tom’s age emerged, carrying three cases of beer stacked on top of each other in his arms. His flannel sleeves were rolled up enough for you to catch a glimpse of some tattoos, but the stacked cases of beer were tall enough to obscure his face.

“What, Tom, I’m right here,” the other man said, before adding, “fuck, a little help?”

Tom hurriedly took the top two cases and set them on the bar as the other man set down the final case with a thump, and he immediately ripped open the top and started pulling out bottles, stuffing them into the cooler below the bar.

“Jesus Ed,” Tom scolded. “I know you’re young but you’ll blow your fuckin’ back out trying to carry all that shit at once. Take two trips, man.”

“Thanks mom,” the younger man smirked, not looking up as he unloaded the beer.

So this is Eddie, you thought to yourself, and relief flooded you when you saw that he looked somewhat normal. Normal, and pretty damned good looking, actually. His long dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, a few stray curls framing his surprisingly handsome face. His dark eyes were hooded as he focused on his task of unloading the beer, and you could see that he was slim but strong, his lean muscles flexing beneath the t-shirt he wore under his unbuttoned flannel shirt.

“Ed,” Tom said, pointedly.

“Yeah?” Eddie replied, finally looking up. His eyes settled on you, and he paused in his task, pulling a bandanna out of his back pocket to dry the condensation from his hands. “Oh,” he said simply, as he registered your presence.

“This is the new girl. Cassidy. She’s starting today.”

“Hi,” you said, giving an awkward little wave.

“Hi,” Eddie replied, before turning to Tom. “Really?” he said, his tone one of mild incredulity. Your heart sank into your stomach. “Is she another runaway?” he asked.

“I’m right here,” you said, your voice monotone. His eyes flicked to yours. “Are you another runaway?” he repeated with the same inflection.

Tom rolled his eyes. “Jesus Eddie, you’re a real welcome wagon. This is Cassidy, she’s starting tonight, so show her the ropes will ya? And don’t be an asshole,” he said, before heading into the back room.

“Fine, fine,” Eddie replied in a conciliatory tone. “Sorry it’s just…everyone who comes here that looks…” he paused to look you up and down. “Well, like you… they don’t last long. They show up, give it a whirl for a week or two, and then disappear without a word.”

“Well…” you started, but he cut you off.

“Because nooobody,” he drawled, lengthening his words musically. “Nobody actually comes here to work on purpose, and they have nooo intention of staying very long. So little old me gets left in the lurch. A lot.” he resumed his task of putting away the beer, tearing open the second case. “So what’s your story?” he asked.

“I’m sure you have me pegged already,’ you said with a smirk, as you opened up the third case and started lining bottles up for him to easily access. “What about you, what’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?” you asked, deflecting.

“Nice try princess,” he said, “we’re not talking about me.”

“I’m in witness protection,” you deadpanned, making him look at you again. “I ratted on the Chicago mafia and now they’re gunning for me.”

“Nice,” Eddie replied, playing along. “So naturally they sent you to America’s asshole and not…some nice bungalow in Tampa?”

You huffed out a surprised laugh. “Maybe the government is punishing me a little. I’m no saint.”

“I would expect not,” he said, dryly. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“I just needed a change,” you said. “There’s no salacious tale. I just had to…” you broke off, unsure of what to say.

“Escape?” Eddie finished, looking at you expectantly.

“Something like that.” you nodded.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, his voice laced with what sounded almost like sadness. “We get a lot of that around here.”

A couple of hours had passed by without incident. Eddie showed you around the place, showed you the nooks, crannies and quirks. He told you the bar usually had live music on Friday and Saturday nights, the clientele was a cross between biker, urban redneck and sauced cougar, the latter of which regularly tried to get a piece of Eddie. “This one lady, Hazel. Once she downs her fifth whiskey, she tries to grab my junk. Often,” Eddie told you, making you laugh. “Oh she’s gonna hate you,” he said, before moving on to the next tidbit. He was hard not to like; you had known him so briefly and yet he had an easiness about him that helped you relax. You had been through so much stress and heartache and coming to Detroit, to this dive, had been no different. But maybe, just maybe, this experience would be a pleasant surprise.

“Man, what time is it?” Eddie asked absentmindedly, glancing at the watch on his wrist. “Oh shit, it’s six. Get ready for some motor city madness.”

“What?” you replied, half laughing, half confused.

“Any minute now, this place is gonna get crazy. Not friday night crazy, but it still gets pretty nuts.”

“Oh boy,” you replied. “What do you want me to do?”

“Tom just wants you bar-backing for a while, so just go around, pick up empty bottles and glasses, wipe down the tables, that kind of stuff.”

You nodded. “I can do that. How hard can it be?”

By eleven o’clock, you were beginning to wonder if you had been mistaken in your earlier impression that this place could be some sort of haven for you. You were only able to pick up half the empty bottles and glasses discarded by the clientele; the other half needed to be swept or gathered up in pieces. You had been leered at, nearly grabbed several times by grubby, calloused fingers, whistled at, almost knocked over several times by drunken men, and Tom had to come out and bellow at people several times to behave. And it’s only Wednesday?!

Eddie handled all the drink orders with ease, deftly maneuvering his way up and down the bar and making it look simple. He never paused to take a break, but if he was tired he gave no sign of it. Nobody gave him a hard time though, and he traded greetings and playful barbs with the clients like a pro, clearly liked by the regulars.

By the time the last patron stumbled out the door, which was quickly shut and locked by Tom, you were nearly ready to collapse. Eddie’s hairline showed a light sheen of sweat but no other apparent sign of fatigue, and yet you were ready to curl up in the corner, mysterious sticky fluids be damned.

“How you doing, kid?” Tom asked you. “I barely had a chance to check up on you. You hang in there alright tonight?”

You could only nod and give a weak thumbs up.

“I’d say for her first day she did pretty well,’ Eddie said, smirking. “Clearly the young lady does have some experience. Look, she’s still standing and everything.”

You managed to huff out a tired laugh. “I can’t decide if I’m more tired or hungry right now.”

“You definitely need fuel,” Eddie said. “When’s the last time you ate?”

You had to think about it. “Shit. Lunch time, more than twelve hours ago.”

Eddie paused, thinking. “Where are you staying?”

“Um, near Sixth and Central? A few blocks from here.”

“Ok,” he nodded. “There’s a decent 24 hour diner around the corner from there. Grab yourself some grub and get some sleep. Come here,” he said.

You walked over to the bar that Eddie was in the process of wiping down. He stopped and turned to the register, pulling out some cash. He pushed three twenties across the bar to you. “After a little while, if you decide to stick around, I’ll cut you in on tips.”

“Sixty bucks? That’s a lot of money for cleaning up,” you said. 

“You earned it kid,” Tom said. “Hey Ed,” he continued. “You gonna let her walk home alone? It’s probably not a good idea.”

Eddie chewed his bottom lip, thinking. “Yeah, I can walk you over to the diner. Can you finish cleaning up, Tom?”

“Yeah yeah, get out of here,” Tom replied with a wave of his hand.

The October chill had definitely taken hold of Detroit, and at this late hour you really wished you had more than a light denim jacket. The cool late night breeze sent fallen leaves skittering down the deserted street. This part of town was adjacent to an industrial area and there were few residents. It felt desolate; the dark streets only occasionally lit by the headlights of a passing car, and you couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy.

“Do you usually walk home alone?” You asked Eddie, as he strolled quietly beside you, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his leather jacket.

“Yeah, not a lot of choice in the matter. It’s too close to call a cab.”

“Don’t you get scared?” you asked.

“Nah, this….this is not scary. Trust me.”

There was something about his tone that made you look up at him. He stared straight ahead, his expression unreadable. It spooked you.

“What– what do you mean by that?”

After a beat his dark eyes found yours. His lips twitched up into the faintest ghost of a smile. “Nothing,” he said, simply.

You started to wonder if you weren’t the only one who had a past they were trying to escape.

The rest of the walk was quiet. You didn’t really know what to say after that, and you were too tired to think up small talk anyway. Eddie seemed content to walk in companionable silence, and so were you.

It wasn’t long before you arrived at the diner, and you paused at the door before entering.

“Coming in?” you asked Eddie.

“Nah,” he replied, his breath visibly puffing out into the cold night air. “I’m good. I’m going to get home.”

“Oh,” you said, disappointed. “Alright then.”

Eddie seemed to notice your disappointment. “Listen,” he sighed. “You seem cool and everything. And I hope it works out with you at the bar and all that, I really do. But…but I’m not trying to make friends or anything.”

This took you by surprise. You seemed to be getting along earlier in the evening, and you would be lying if the idea of making a friend during this crazy time wasn’t comforting to you. Disappointment washed over you like a cold wave, leaving loneliness in its wake.

You had trouble coming up with something to say to that; part of you wanted to blurt out that you really needed a friend, that having someone to talk to right now would be incredible, but you could only slump your shoulders in defeat, “Ok, that’s cool,” you said lamely.

“It’s nothing personal,” Eddie said, leaning down a little to be closer to your level. “I’m honestly not trying to be a dick. But if you want friends, I’m not your guy, that’s all.” It seemed important to him somehow; that you understand it wasn’t personal. Weirdly enough, it did take away the sting a tiny bit, but not much.

“It’s cool, don’t worry about it,” you said, trying to force a smile, but honestly, you were too exhausted to give it more than the minimum effort.

“Ok. Well, take it easy. See you tomorrow,” Eddie said, and just like that, he turned and walked away from you.

You watched his departing figure for a minute, and realized that he was right. This was for the best; you weren’t there to make friends either. You were there because you needed to be as far from your hometown as you could get but you had no college degree, no resume, and you needed a place to live and money to earn. You could not form attachments to anyone. It was too dangerous.

You may have been joking about being in witness protection, but Eddie wasn’t too far from the mark when he judged you the moment he looked at you. You were escaping, but not in the metaphorical sense, you had literally barely escaped with your life, and you were planning on only being in town long enough to make some money before moving on to the next place. Eddie clearly sensed it, and you couldn’t fault him for being right.

What you couldn’t have possibly known, was that the young man who was so simultaneously endearing and disappointing had been through literal hell himself, and the two of you had more in common than either of you could guess. 

But for now, it was time to grab an egg sandwich before getting some much needed shuteye. Tomorrow was going to be another grueling day at Tom’s Tavern, after all.

Author's note: Thank you for reading. This is really just an introduction; there is a lot more drama coming for our heroine and our beloved Eddie, so stay tuned. Reblogs and feedback are so appreciated!

Tagged: @howdidyouallgetinmyroom @ms1oftheboys @perengrne

PART TWO

[aion-rsa]

The Little Things Reminds Us Why We’re Drawn to Charismatic Serial Killers

https://ift.tt/2MCEa7V

This The Little Things analysis contains spoilers. Read our spoiler-free review here.

The Little Things can be seen as a tainted police procedural with its murky ambiguity and troubling ending. But it’s also the story of a man for whom the allure of a charismatic serial killer goes too far. After all, serial killers make up less than one percent of homicides but they average a double-digit percentage of Hollywood crime films, and probably a majority of prison fan mail. What is it about these one-percenters we love so much?

Directed by John Lee Hancock, the supposed sociopath in The Little Things is Albert Sparma, a drifter who works as a repairman. Jared Leto is certainly magnetic in the part, serving Sparma up with a now-stereotypical “charismatic serial killer” vibe. But the Oscar-winning actor also brings an ambiguous energy to the part, suggesting he may merely be a serial killer groupie.

Albert Sparma is a self-identifying true crime afficionado and has taken his fanboy fancy so far as to actually confess to a murder he didn’t commit. That could be seen as some dangerous roleplay or surveying a battle ground for future maneuvers.

Sparma is perfectly thrilled when he’s pulled into the interrogation room to face off against Det. Jimmy Baxter (Rami Malek). He luxuriates in the tension, and loves the décor. He stands in vast contrast to Stan Peters (Frederick Koehler), quite possibly the actual murderer, who’d earlier responded to the room with an almost claustrophobic paranoid mania.

But Peters is not the charismatic type. Leto’s Albert, meanwhile, has a bad boy quality which is just irresistible. At least it is to Denzel Washington’s measured portrayal of Kern County Deputy Sheriff Joe “Deke” Deacon, who sees the makings of a young Ted Bundy in the suspect. Recall that in Joe Berlinger’s bloodless feature film, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Zac Efron plays Bundy with an abundance of charm. The film came out amid a glut of documentaries about one of the most well-known serial killers from the late 20th century, and Twitter exploded with posts about how attractive Bundy was. 

Albert Sparma could have been his biggest fan.

Leto doesn’t bring the clean-cut, all-American hunk to his serial killer. He’s the rebel. His hair hangs so long, he has to move it out the way when he cooks. Sparma goes to strip clubs before cruising the strip. He wins a drag race with Deke while still in park. He plays so many mind games with Baxter his head explodes.

Dennis Lynn Rader, aka the BTK Killer, taunted the police by sending letters describing the details of his crimes. That’s an old trick though, going all the way back to Jack the Ripper, who also wrote to Scotland Yard about his alleyway antics. Son of Sam, the Lipstick Killer, the Golden State Killer, even the Axeman of New Orleans dropped personal notes on current events to the authorities. The Zodiac Killer wrote his in code.

They also sent letters to the newspapers. Sparma collects clippings and is up on all the true crime literature. Some people are attracted to serial killers out of a necessity to understand their acts. It is outside their reality, and it is even a coping mechanism. News reports explain how, but they don’t explain why such unimaginable crimes can be committed. They want to know how someone can go so dark. If Sparma is truly just a “confessor,” as even Det. Baxter finally accepts, that confession shows one aspect of the depths of his kind of obsession.

Some serial killer followers might be drawn out of the curiosity of how it feels to take a human life.

The body count in The Little Things is only four when Deke first double parks at the station. It grows as the case draws attention. Real-life serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer became celebrity monsters because of the attention they got from law enforcement and the media, and a collective curiosity for the macabre makes them larger than life. John Wayne Gacy committed his atrocities in a Pogo the Clown suit. And Sparma’s repairman overalls are a little baggy.

While Bundy was on trial, representing himself, he proposed to a woman, who not only accepted but married the convicted murderer, and conceived a daughter with him. Even in prison, Bundy received marriage proposals and love letters, as did Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Chris Watts, and Charles Manson. Some may be drawn to the serial killer hoping to spark some transformation in an irredeemable beast; others might be prone to Hybristophilia, otherwise known as “Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome;” and some are just drawn toward the bright light of fame in any shade.

In Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, Woody Harrelson’s Mickey Knox is a mass murderer, not a serial killer, by strict definition. Nonetheless, when he and his wife Mallory (Juliette Lewis) are walked up the stone steps to the courthouse, they are surrounded by adoring fans waving signs like “Kill Me Mickey.” Stone was making pointed social commentary in a fictional film, but his scenario was all too real.

Read more

Movies

Best Serial Killer Movies of the ’90s Ranked

By David Crow

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Seven: The Brilliance of David Fincher’s Chase Scene

By Ryan Lambie

The Little Things is not based on a true story. It goes back to a screenplay Hancock wrote in 1993, which was too dark for Steven Spielberg. For inspiration, Hancock had to look no further than California serial killers in the 1980s like the Grim Sleeper and Randy Kraft.

Written before the glut of serial killer movies took hold in the 1990s, The Little Things is similar to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and the then-recent Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) in that they are psychological thrillers, as opposed to the proto-slasher Leatherface in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Yet all three of those films, from Norman Bates to Hannibal Lecter, were inspired by Ed Gein, who confessed to killing two people as well as digging up corpses from local cemeteries in the 1950s. Gein became internationally famous after being profiled in the book Psycho by Robert Bloch.

It’s no wonder an anonymous drifter might find comfortable skin to wear while traversing a sad, sick world. Sparma certainly walked the walk, and was up on his psychopathic patter.

“They are so friendly and so kind and very solicitous at the beginning of our work together,” forensic psychiatrist Helen Morrison wrote in her 2004 book My Life Among the Serial Killers. “They’re charming, almost unbelievably so, charismatic like a Cary Grant or a George Clooney.”

Sparma does everything short of asking Baxter for an autograph during their first meeting. Serial killer fans have been known to spend hundreds of dollars for a lock of a murderer’s hair. John Schwenk, a true crime afficionado from Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, has gotten follicles, false teeth, and even dental floss from serial killers on death row. He is a collector of murderabilia, and his portfolio includes a sketch of a skull by Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez and a portrait by John Wayne “The Killer Clown” Gacy.

A Texas senator named John Cornyn began pushing a bill to ban the sale of crime-related materials in 2007. It must have sounded like a good idea to the federal government. They pulled in $232,246 auctioning off the Unabomber’s belongings in 2011. Rodney Alcala, who was sentenced to death in California for five murders, put himself up for a romantic racket bid on a September 1978 installment of The Dating Game.

The Little Things reaches a satisfyingly ambiguous conclusion. The best evidence in the case is a boxful of newspaper clippings. Are they forensically clean trophies of past dark victories, or are they a scrapbook from one of the biggest true crime fanatics on the planet?

Charismatic serial killers are a movie stereotype now. Leto helps twist this trope by letting his character buy so completely into it we don’t know if he’s become one or is merely a victim.

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from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/36sg9aC

[beakmanfans-blog]

Paul Zaloom on PBS show titled "Profile" from 2004.

Lights... Camera... Bread & Puppets, and now a 2004 PBS Interview with Paul Zaloom... Sorry it has been so long since our last review. Here is a great interview of Paul, which he discusses his fascination with found objects, his inspirations, and even his thoughts on Beakman's World television show.

  This is a series of screenshots of a interview of Paul Zaloom on the PBS {Public Broadcasting Service}, television show "Profile" produced by Vermont Public Television. The show was originally broadcast on December 27, 2004. It was Season 4, Episode 413 {S4E413} in this series. In the interview, he and the hostess Fran Stoddard discuss his childhood, and fascination with found objects, pop culture, puppetry, and then his solo shows, the television show Beakman's World, and the two films he helped to make. The video is 26 minutes, and 40 seconds in length.

Profile: Paul Zaloom, broadcast December 27, 2004 * https://www.pbs.org/video/paul-zaloom-dtvbvq/

#PaulZaloom #BeakmansWorld #ElMundoDeBeakman #Interview #PBS #TVshow #Profile #FranStoddard #BreadAndPuppetTheater #PeterSchumann #KingTutsWahWahHut #NewYork #PopCulture #MarcelDuchamp #Dada #Dadaism #ClaesOldenburg #AndyWarhol #MarcelDuchamp #AlexanderCalder #PeterLorre #LordBuckley #LordRichardBuckley #Humanism #SummerCamp #ThePutneySchool #GoddardCollege #NeoGermanExpressionist #Expressionism #StatueOfLiberty #Puppetry #PunchAndJudy #PunchAndJimmy #MightyNice #Cantastoria #ChildrensTelevisionAct  #InSmogAndThunder #DantesInferno #NormanCousins

The video begins with Vermont Public Television, PBS animated logo. It is a sun raising behind three hills, which are the 'P' face of the PBS logo. The shows hostess then talks about the various achievements that Paul Zaloom has accomplished. There is then the title sequence of the "Profile", it shows behind the scenes footage of how the show is created, and previous guests that this hostess has interviewed.

At 0:45 Fran Stoddard tells the viewer that Paul grew up in Garden City, New York, and he went to Goddard College. She then mentions his work with the Bread and Puppet Theater, and creating his own one man shows, he was then touring his 11th different show. She then mentions how he then moved from New York to California be on the show "Beakman's World. Next she tells about the awards, grants, fellowship he had earned. Lastly she talks about various locations he has preformed.

Paul at 1:32 then mentions another location that he has played, the "King Tut's Wah Wah Hut" in New York. She then apologizes for having missed mentioning that. Next they talk about how Paul comes to Vermont to perform at the Bread and Puppet Theater, doing solo performances, as well as being the ringmaster of "Our Domestic Resurrection Circus". He then mentions that his daughter also lives in Vermont.

Next at 2:08 Fran asks him about his early life. Saying he is the second of six children in his family. She asks if that was what caused him to want attention, and to be so funny. Paul says yes, he was always the class clown, and always trying hard to entertain people. She then asks if that is his real last name, Paul says yes, that it is a Syrian name. He then talks about the various ethnicities of his family, and his 22 year old daughter. And how those ethnic groups are usually fighting each other. Fran then mentions that it can also be seen as those groups joining together to produce their family, and that is good. "United as we all should be".

Fran then at 3:12 gives the quote, that Paul is a "Paganini {Niccolo Paganini a famous violinist, and composer} of found objects." The quote is from the L.A. Times newspaper. She then asks him if the objects that he finds always fascinated him. Paul says he always liked those things and was inspired by pop artists like {Claes} Oldenburg, {Andy} Warhol, {James} Rosenquist. He then tells about how when he was a child he had a museum of objects that he had found in the street. He then explain that most of those artists got their start from ideas of Marcel Duchamp. Paul then explains that it was a interviewer from the New York Times newspaper, that pointed this out to Paul.

At 4:50 Fran asks if there was a history of these found object performances before Duchamp. Paul then mentions the Dada movement of art, {known as Dadaism}. Paul says that he likes to use the objects to represent different things in culture, with double or triple meanings. He then shows some objects he brought to the interview, they are a cleaning close that he represents as a palm tree, in his show "Mighty Nice". He then shows a bottle of pink stomach ache medicine, and says that it represents the school lunchroom lady. He then places a hairnet on the bottle, to represent the worker's safety equipment. He then shows a oil funnel, as the Capitol Building, {Fran thinks it is a "oil can", while Paul says he thought it was a "oil syphon", but they were both wrong}.

Next at 6:34 they talk about a Summer Wilderness Camp in Vermont, that Paul went to when he was young. Saying it was the reason he went to Putney School,  collage in Vermont, joined the Bread and Puppet Theater, and eventually got the job on Beakman's World. And how it inspired him to become interested in humanism, and social type issues. They then talk about his time at the Bread and Puppet Theater, a photograph of Paul as their ringmaster. Paul then talks about the founder of the theater Peter Schumann, and how Paul was inspired by him, to create homemade entertainment. Fran then asks how it came to be that Peter created large puppets and stages, while Paul created smaller shows. Paul explains that he has always liked humor, and Peter was more a artist and poetic, in the "Neo-German Expressionist" style. "It's amazing, and revolutionary, and brilliant, and very influential, and quite profound." "That and the fun wilderness camps, like the greatest experiences that one could ever imagine having in life".

Fran at 10:22 then asks about Paul's solo shows. She mentions how he is visible in his puppet shows, and is a character in his own shows, {as compared to puppeteers that mostly hide themselves}. She mentions how it is a bit like performance artists. Paul says he does play a lot of locations which are known for having performance artists, but he likes to think of himself as a puppeteer.

At 11:50 there is then footage of Paul's show "Mighty Nice". Paul shows the raising of the ocean, {because of global warming}. He then shows a Statue of Liberty nearly drowning, then she reflects the views of some of the people of the U.S. by saying people to come to this country, but not those from a specific religion. He then shows that only one state is left in the U.S. {all the others seemingly flooded}. He then adds the gloves as palm trees, bottle as corporate companies, military as a trophy, feed buckets as food production, Wall Street stock market as a computer keyboard, and oil funnel as the capitol building. He then uses bubble wrap to show the smog of the city covering the buildings. The people are restroom signs. He then represents the different classes by a well dressed doll, and a naked troll.

The video then at 13:58 returns to the studio interview. Fran then mentions the various voices Paul used in the video. Paul explains that he keeps a list of interesting voices, such as Peter Lorre, and he also tried to perform similar to the comedian Lord Buckley. Fran then asks how he does the quick and silly craziness type performance. He says it is more like how a child plays, it might seem strange from the outside, but to the person playing, it makes perfect sense.

Next at 15:40 Fran asks in which order he comes up with the ideas, facts, objects, and then the story for the show? Paul says it can go any way, sometimes the object comes first, other times the facts, or idea will come first. He then compares objects as casting characters.

Then they begin to talk about Paul's show "Punch and Jimmy", {a retelling of the old Punch and Judy puppet story} Paul then shows two of the puppets he uses for that show. Fran mentions he made the puppets himself. He then tells how he thought the story was interesting and how the main character gets away with everything, and there are no consequences. He then says how it is satire, and how it represents freedom, and the authorities are represented as mean and dangerous.

At 18:06 Fran then mentions that Paul dresses up as a police officer, similar to the puppet. Paul then mentions that is from another show he does, in a style of Cantastoria. He tells of the USA's war on drugs. Which he describes as a war against black people, because they are the most people being arrested. She then asks how he can cover these serious topics, and cause people to laugh about them. Paul says he likes to think of a Lord Buckley quote about people dying of heart break before they are being killed by the governments. That people need to laugh, or the serious things they are dealing with could cause them to die from despair. And it helps people laugh, and encourages people to think about these problems.

Fran then at 19:48 mentions how Paul is educating people in Beakman's World, and that he still continues to perform as the character even after the show ended. There is then a video clip of Beakman's World, from Season 1, Episode 10, {1E10}. {They fast forward through the this segment of the episode, probably to avoid copyright restrictions.} Beakman and Lester are seen balancing forks on two toothpicks.

At 21:14 they return to the interview, Fran asked if he had fun on the show. Paul said everyone was able to contribute to the show, including the camera operator, and prop master. They then talk about how the show was a result of a congressional law that mandated children's educational television for each channel, called the "Children's Television Act" from 1990, {although Paul says 1991}. Paul then mentions that more children's educational television isn't being produced probably because the law isn't being enforced. However he says that the 91 episode of Beakman's World, is a pretty long duration for any show. And that it is still on TV, and he heard that it was on in India, Brazil, and China.

The subject then changes at 22:54 to the films that Paul helped to create. First they talk about "In Smog and Thunder", then "Dante's Inferno", both set in California. Paul explains that the Smog film is about a fictional war between to California cities, and he uses a Ken Burns, Walter Cronkite type voice for the narration of the movie. It was based on a series of paintings by the artist Sandow Birk, it was a parody of the United States Civil War. "We just did it, sort of as a lark, it ended up at 11 film festivals, and had quite a bit of success, and came out on DVD." He then jokes about being paid "$120 for 2 and a half years worth of work." He then mentions that they were still writing the script for the film "Dante's Inferno" which was going to be a toy/paper theater version of the story. Fran then jokes about with those materials, the filming is "somewhat affordable", Paul returns the joke by saying "Yeah, I guess, particularly if I don't get paid".

At 24:50 Jan then asks how he keeps Hope, in his work. Even though the subjects of his shows are "pretty grim". Paul says that laughter is a good way to keep hope, and references Norman Cousins laughter being healthy. Paul mentions some of these shows are his way of getting revenge on the politicians, because jumping up and down and complaining wouldn't help, "It's our 'Flea biting the Elephant' routine." Jan then mentions that they are running out of time, and gives the name of Paul's website. Paul then tells the viewers to "Visit me on the web. Have your life changed." Fran then says thank you to the viewers for watching.

The interview then ends at 26:10, but it shows them continuing to talk as the credits scroll, and their voices are replaced by music.

[caveartfair]

Why So Many Artists Are Reclaiming the New York Times

Dave Mckenzie, Yesterday’s Newspaper, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo by Dan Kvitka. Courtesy of the Flag Art Foundation.

In this age of alternative facts, we’re increasingly aware that the news can be manipulated like any other malleable material. FLAG Art Foundation’s latest exhibition, “The Times,” drives that point home in presenting the work of more than 80 artists who incorporate physical (and ideological) aspects of the New York Times. On view through August 11th, the show explores how the self-pronounced “paper of record” has shaped both the scope of world history and our own daily lives.

“We started planning this show two years ago with a shortlist of 12 to 15 artists who we knew had historically used newspapers in their practice,” says Jonathan Rider, associate director of FLAG. “But in the wake of the election, we decided to do it as soon as possible.” To be sure, the importance of—and contention around—news media has only grown since Trump moved into the Oval Office. The president took to Twitter in February to lambast his critical naysayers as the “enemy of the American people” and his administration has even gone so far as to bar major outlets (including the apparently “failing” New York Times) from a White House press briefing.

According to Rider, once he started putting plans for the show in motion, he was shocked to uncover more and more artists using the newspaper in their practices. By the time the list of artists had expanded to 50, he decided to announce an open call for submissions, which garnered over 400 responses that Rider and his team had to pare down within a few weeks. “We got submissions from artists living in the middle of the country who have never really shown anywhere before, as well as from artists living in New York who are showing at top galleries,” he says. (Roughly half of the works included in the exhibition are a result of the open call.)

Aliza Nisenbaum, Kayhan Reading the New York Times (Resistance Begins at Home), 2017. Courtesy of the Flag Art Foundation.

Michael Scoggins, Tic Tac Daddy (NY Times May 3rd, 2017), 2017. Courtesy of the Flag Art Foundation.

“The Times” opens with Ellsworth Kelly’s Ground Zero (2003), a simple collage of the paper’s front page bearing the headline “Picturing the New Ground Zero” on which the artist pasted a small green trapezoid indicating what he thought the memorial should be: open green space. The Kelly collage is joined by Dave McKenzie’s Yesterday’s Newspaper (2007)—which, like its name suggests, is a readymade, updated daily—and a new work by Rirkrit Tiravanija that is comprised of pages from the Times’s inauguration edition painted over with the words “tomorrow is the question.” Together, these three works reflect on how the news both documents the recent past and spurs considerations of the future.

Yet the Gray Lady can’t always be relied upon to be a faithful mirror of history or public opinion, a theme on which many of the works on view riff. Take, for example, The New York Crimes, a 1989 performance by the HIV/AIDS activist art collective Gran Fury. Group members removed the front page of the Times from as many papers as they could get their hands on and replaced it with their own that featured stories about the AIDS epidemic; these altered editions were distributed by hand at an AIDS rally outside of City Hall. “Things like women with AIDS, AIDS in prison, intravenous drug use—those were topics that, at that time, just weren’t being talked about, not even in the most major publication in the US,” says Gran Fury founding member Avram Finkelstein.

Gran Fury may have roguishly posed as Times writers, but artist David Colman was actually on staff with the paper, where he helmed a Style section column for a decade. His assemblage in the show, The Irony Hook (2017), includes a snippet of his writing, along with sundry other objects like an iron meat hook and old letterpress blocks spelling out the Latin phrase non verbis sed rebus (“not through words but through objects”). Colman describes his visual art practice as akin to writing. “Finding physical stuff and arranging it in a way that works to say something—I find it very analogous to amassing information for a story,” he says.

Paul Laster, Tracer, 1991. Courtesy of the artist and the Flag Art Foundation.

Gran Fury, New York Crimes, 1989. Courtesy of Avram Finkelstein and the Flag Art Foundation.

Colman isn’t the only journalist with work in “The Times.” Longtime art critic Paul Laster dispenses with words entirely in his collage Tracer (1991) and focuses instead of the advertisements found in the New York Times Magazine, which he skillfully lifts and transfers using 3M Scotch tape. According to the artist, he was always attracted to how the pages were spatially laid out, if not what they said. “I would go around the West Village, where my wife and I were living at the time, on the night that everyone would put out their week's newspapers and magazines,” he says. “I’d find multiple issues of the NYT Magazine with pages of red, yellow, blue and other delightful colors.”

Ruby Sky Stiler initially started using the Times for its formal qualities as well, citing its thin weight and smooth texture as ideal for her woven paper works. March 23, 2017 (2017) included in the FLAG exhibition, is part of an ongoing series of abstract compositions resembling textiles, which are created by slicing and weaving together two twin pages of the New York Times. She started them just after Trump’s inauguration in January. “I view the project as a version of a diary,” she says. “Plus, it always struck me as cool how quickly the paper becomes a historical object.”

The objecthood of history is also embodied in Lauren Seiden’s sculpture, The Future is Lost in Yesterday’s News (2016) made up of Times papers that she sourced from her apartment building’s recycling bin over the course of eight months. She read them all, then glued the pages together, drew on them with graphite until they were completely effaced, and stacked them on top of each other to create an imposing grey monolith. “The cultural climate we are living in has made us all re-evaluate our lives,” says Seiden. “For me that meant really considering the idea of time and information as a navigation of our history, and what we choose to remember and what we select to forget in order to create our own narrative.” Towering over the average viewer, the work becomes a kind of monument that memorializes the idea of “yesterday.”

Lauren Seiden, The Future is Lost in Yesterday’s News, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and the Flag Art Foundation.

For Fred Tomaselli, who has been using New York Times pages in his practice since 2005, memorialization was top of mind when he created his new collage specifically for the FLAG exhibition. It features a blown-up version of the paper’s front page from January 11th of this year; the artist drew over the image of President Obama, adding colorful rays emanating from a pair of sharp, beady eyes (cut out from a photograph of a bird). “It was Obama’s last speech before the Trump turnover,” he says, “the last time for a long time that we would have a semblance of eloquence emanating from the Oval Office. It was a poignant moment worth commemorating.”

One curious oversight in “The Times” is that it barely addresses the growing digital presence of the illustrious paper it so robustly seeks to explore, especially since the overwhelming majority of the population now consumes its news online now. (Indeed, the Times has seen such an uptick in digital engagement that it recently announced a slew of buyouts and layoffs, including the elimination of a Public Editor in favor of a crowdsourced watchdog collective shaped by online readers and commenters.) William Powhida’s NY Times Review (After Büchel) (2017), a hand-drawn mockup of a fictional online review of his current show at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum by Times critic Roberta Smith, is one of the few works in the show that engage with the paper’s web presence. “The days of clipping out a Friday review for your press book are long gone, along with some of the prestige,” he says. “The Times isn’t what it once was.”

William Powhida, NY Times Review (After Büchel), 2017. Courtesy of the Flag Art Foundation.

Mark DeMuro, Lifeboats, 2012. Courtesy of the Flag Art Foundation.

A performance by PlayLab, however, manages to translate the online news experience into a physical one. Every Thursday afternoon for the run of the exhibition, a member of the collective will sit atop a stationary bike positioned near the gallery entryway from where they will chuck a rolled up copy of that day’s paper at visitors as they come in. “We’re playing on the idea that you’re getting shit thrown at you all day long, every day, digitally,” says PlayLab co-founder Archie Lee Coates IV. “It seems like it would be weird to have an exhibition about the New York Times and not have the news just flung at you.”

—Maggie Carrigan

from Artsy News

[yr-bed]

One of my “easy” pandemic reads has been Charles Fleming’s High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess, which included a reference to a “fact-based” drama about UFOs the producer and his partner had in development during the nineties, with Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunner tapped to write it. Per The Anomalist

While Simpson and Bruckheimer must have conceived of the idea sometime in 1991, it was only in late February of 1992 that Dunne and Didion were brought into the picture as potential scripters of a subject of which they knew little about. By way of background, however, they soon received from Simpson "a massive amount of material," according to Dunne, consisting of the following:

". . . back issues of the magazine UFO, a copy of the Encyclopedia of Personal Surveillance (Book II: 'How to Get Anything on Anybody'), a Nexis cache of newspaper and magazine clips, a tape of a '60 Minutes' segment about a cashiered U. S. Navy officer whose elite SEAL unit had tested the security of Air Force One and several nuclear submarines by trying to break into them, usually successfully. There were videotapes of possible U.F.O. sightings, a bibliography of two hundred U.F.O. books, the listed and unlisted telephone numbers of U.F.O. researchers, a Las Vegas TV interview with a scientist who claimed he had worked at a top-secret military facility near Mercury, Nevada, where he said he had seen evidence of a government-sponsored U.F.O. coverup (that the scientist was part owner of a legal Nevada brothel compromised his bona fides), catalogues of U.F.O. trade shows, and transcripts of U.F.O. symposia, featuring the arguments of both U.F.O. debunkers and the true believers, called Ufologists."

The outline of the script Dunne and Didion came up with is not exactly awe-inspiring. As described, it amounts to little less than a slightly more literate version of the execrable (and highly expendable) "Hangar 18" of a few years back. To make an already long story short, the Simpson-inspired version of Dharma Blue never made it to the silver screen--and hopefully never will. In its final terminal stages the project was renamed "Zone of Silence," presumably after the landlocked (and so-called) Mexican equivalent of the alleged Bermuda Triangle. Which is another story altogether.

[ciathyzareposts]

Game 368: The Legacy (1992)

I bought the GOG version, which says nothing about a Realm of Terror.

            The Legacy

United Kingdom

Magnetic Scrolls (developer); MicroProse (publisher)

Released 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 3 June 2020

    The Legacy is a rare horror-themed RPG. We’ve had a few, including Don’t Go Alone (1989), Elvira (1990), Elvira II (1991), and Waxworks (1992). I guess you could toss House of Usher (1980) in there, too. Most of these games are adventure-RPG hybrids and the one thing that they all have in common is that none of them are scary. They have horror themes, but none of them are truly horrifying the way a good Hitchcock movie is. I never screamed during any of them, the same way that no Dungeons and Dragons player ever screams at the appearance of a skeleton.       The reason, I think, is that the RPG enemy exists specifically to be fought, and usually in large numbers. The ghost, zombie, skeleton, demon, or whatever in a truly scary film or game is something of a mystery. It’s unclear whether the protagonist will be able to defeat him with conventional means, or indeed any means. And the protagonist probably isn’t even trying to defeat it–probably didn’t even want anything to do with all of this in the first place. When the ghost appears briefly in the mirror, it’s a viscerally scary moment because you don’t know what it is or what it can do. You didn’t even get a good look at it. The RPG ghost, on the other hand, has a fixed number of hit points and can be defeated with a variety of spells or magic weapons as it’s spelled out in the monster manual–and you’re probably going to fight 20 of them. The horror RPG faces the same problem as the zombie film: you can make the first one scary, maybe, but not the fiftieth.              

A shot from The Legacy’s opening cinematic. It’s a dark game.

          I think horror also requires a certain attention to location and story that the typical RPG hasn’t provided through the current era. You can set a good horror game in a gothic mansion with 15 rooms, each full of lore. It’s harder to do this in six 20 x 20 levels of similar wall textures. It is thus not surprising to me that most famous horror games have been adventure games. You can take time to craft more thorough stories and locations with adventure games. You don’t need to supply dozens of foes because you don’t need the character to build skills or earn experience points.

Horror games rely more heavily on graphics and sound than other genres. You could write a fantastic horror-themed text adventure, but I doubt you could make a player scream. The same goes for the primitive graphics of the 1980s. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that both graphics and sound (including music) advanced enough on the personal computer that developers could create true atmospheres in games and make a player really feel something in his gut. This is when we started to see an explosion of games that still define the genre: Alone in the Dark (1992), The 7th Guest (1993), Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet (1993), BloodNet (1993), The Dark Eye (1995), and others that you’ll undoubtedly fill me in on because this isn’t really my area.           

The character approaches the mansion.

         The Legacy comes out of this era, and the best I can say is that it’s about as scary as a horror adventure-RPG hybrid could be, which means not very scary. Sure, the first time you open a door and there’s a zombie, you maybe jump a little, but pretty soon zombies are just another thing to be killed so you can earn experience. The creators did a good job with the mansion except that, as with most RPGs, they made it a bit too big to plausibly be a mansion. The backstory is just a little too derivative of things you’ve already read or watched. It is horror-themed rather than horrifying.       If you can get past that, it’s not a bad game. I had a very enjoyable first session. Mechanically, it’s not unlike a first-person Quest for Glory. The adventure side of the game has a mystery to solve and a variety of puzzles necessary to solve it. The RPG side has a selection of skills and attributes that increase through use or through direct allocation of experience points. There’s enough “extra space” with wandering foes to satisfy the RPG need for combat and character growth. These are the types of features you need for a true hybrid, and not just an adventure game “with RPG elements.”       

The Winthrop Mansion, as given in the game manual.

           The Legacy comes from U.K. developer Magnetic Scrolls, a relatively long-lived creator of graphical adventures, including The Pawn (1985), Jinxter (1987), The Guild of Thieves (1987; I vaguely remember playing this one in the 1980s), Corruption (1988), Fish (1988), Myth (1989), and Wonderland (1990). The Legacy is the company’s first game with RPG aspirations, although it uses the same basic interface as Wonderland. The commonly-given subtitle, Realm of Terror, appears only on some boxes and not, as far as I can tell, on any manuals or title screens, so I’ve left it off as per my policy. A lot of sites give it as a 1993 game, but plenty of reviews attest to a 1992 release in Europe followed by a 1993 release in North America.

It took me a while to get a screenshot illuminated by lightning. You can clearly see this is not the same house as in the manual.

       The main character is the last surviving descendant of Elias Winthrop (1599-1662), who built the Winthrop Mansion in 1630. The style of house depicted in the manual was built nowhere in New England, probably nowhere in the world, until the mid-1800s. The manual tries to justify this with talk of “extensions,” as if it wouldn’t have been easier to just build a new house than to incorporate a First Period home into a Gothic Revival. Anyway, at some point, the mansion acquired some kind of supernatural curse; the manual claims that Edgar Allen Poe experienced it while visiting a friend, and that it clearly inspired his House of Usher. During his visit–in which the entire family had become sickly and insane–he saw an apparition that screamed, “Melchior! Free me! Perform the rite!”          

The family tree from the manual is also given in a piece of paper in-game.

           As the game begins, a newspaper clipping claims that three people are “missing” in some kind of undefined “tragedy.” These three are likely Robert Prentiss, his wife Catherine, and his mother Karen, as all of their dates of death are given in 1992 in the family tree included in the manual. Karen had married Nathan Prentiss (died 1964), a descendant of Elias Winthrop through his maternal grandmother. The game’s main character is given as a cousin of Robert, a descendant of Nathan’s sister Sarah, although a graphical “break” in Sarah’s line makes it difficult to determine how much of a descendant.       The game comes with eight pre-made characters from which you choose one. Each has different levels of strength, knowledge, dexterity, stamina, and willpower. Those first three attributes each come with five related skills, such as “Brawling” and “Lift” for strength, “Electronics” and “Mechanics” for knowledge, and “Firearms” and “Throw” for dexterity. Willpower determines your magic ability and whether you start with any spells. The language of the newspaper clipping is slightly modified for each:        

Brad Norris, a sophomore at New York University. Captain of the NYU ski team and member of the Debating Society, Norris is reportedly “planning a mondo party.” He has fairly even skills and attributes but no magic at all. I don’t have any theories to the origins of the name.

           Brad’s statistics.

         Charles Weiss of Bangor, Maine (yay!), a magician, astrologer, and student of the occult. He has a noodle incident called “the Arlington ‘sacrifice’ scandal” in his past. Balanced in most skills, comes with two spells. The name belongs to a founding employee at Oracle, but I’m not sure he would have been well-known in 1992. 

Charlotte Kane, a New York businesswoman who may be planning to turn the mansion into a luxury hotel and conference center. Strong in knowledge-based skills and comes with “Crimson Mists of Myamoto,” a protection spell. No idea on the name.

Lucy Weston, a sophomore at UCLA, sorority girl, tennis and volleyball champion. Heavy in strength, dexterity, and associated skills; has virtually no knowledge and no magic. Her name is taken from the character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Professor Henry Jones, head of the Department of American History at Pennsylvania State University, authority on the Salem Witch Trials. Strongest in knowledge and its skills; not so bad in dexterity; comes with “Sight of the Walker,” which seems to have something to do with dispelling illusions. Naturally named after Indiana Jones’s father.

Jane Olson, a New York daily Post reporter. Strong in all skills but has no magic. Probably an homage to James Olsen of Superman fame given her profession.

           Jane’s version of the newspaper clipping.

          Major Robert “Boomer” Kowalski, retired from the U.S. Marine Corps after decorated service in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf. Strongest in strength and dexterity skills; has no magic. No idea on the name.

Isobel Gowdie, the most mysterious of the characters, described only as a “widow” with an ancestor who lived in the area. Balanced but weak in all skills and attributes but comes with both “Flames of Desolation” and “Sight of the Dark Walker.” Her name comes from the famous Scottish self-confessed witch of the late 17th century.

           You can also edit one of the characters, change the name, and define your own. I turned Isobel into Irene, giving her enough willpower for “Flames of Desolation” and “Sight of the Dark Walker,” otherwise favoring knowledge skills but putting a few points into “Firearms.”       

My character.

         The game’s opening cinematic shows a car arriving at the mansion on a stormy night. Glyphs on the main gate posts glow as the gate opens to admit the car. As the approaches the front of the mansion, we see a light on in the cupola. (The mansion shown in the cinematic, it must be said, looks very little like the one in the manual except for the size and a certain dedication to symmetry.) The front door opens into an entry hall, and the view immediately goes up the split staircase and into a dead-end hall before the viewer is consumed by some tentacles coming out of the floor.     Gameplay itself begins in the entry hall, and right away we see that The Legacy features some excellent period graphics. There will be banal, repetitive textures in some of the hallways and less important rooms, but when the game really needs to convey a sense of place like an “entry hall” or a “study,” the artists are up to the challenge, and I find myself wondering again why more era titles (e.g., Wizardry, the Gold Box series) couldn’t have offered this blend of the generic and the specific when the occasion called for it.           

Gameplay begins in the entry hall.

         The engine, known as Magnetic Windows, brings an Amiga or Atari ST-style windows GUI into the game. The windows for the character portrait, exploration, messages, and automap can all be moved, overlapped, and re-sized. Most actions are accomplished with the mouse, in somewhat obvious ways, for instance clicking on an object and dragging into to an open inventory space in the character portrait, or double-clicking on an object to use it. Right-clicking on things brings up a contextual menu, and right-clicking on the “desktop” behind the windows lets you save the game and adjust settings. I wish there were more keyboard backups for some of the actions, such as the “Hit” and “Aim” buttons in combat, but one thing the developers did anticipate is the difficulty using the mouse with the right hand while moving (as in most games) with the numberpad or arrows. Instead, they mapped movement to the QWEASD cluster, which works relatively well.             

The various windows and game options.

           The game uses tiles in which you can turn and face any direction. Occasionally, for an especially detailed room, you transition to a single-screen view in which you can’t rotate, but that’s rare.     The entry hall is 3 x 3, and the game is spatially sophisticated enough to let you walk under the two upper parts of the split staircase. The front door is magically locked behind me. There are a couple of tables, a statue of a demonic creature behind a glass display case, and a painting from 1662 depicting “the burning of a warlock at the stake.” I am compelled by my history to note that if this was supposed to be a real event, it must have happened in continental Europe because there is no record of anyone accused of witchcraft having been burned in North America, and even England had stopped the practice well before 1662.           

The painting in question.

        There are also a couple of notes on the floor, and as I explored the ground floor of the mansion, I would continue to find more of them. The first, slipped under the front door, was from E. Croxley & Co. Realtors, welcoming me to the house and noting that some of the furniture had been sold to pay for the family’s debts. But the others are from a “Marcus Roberts of Boston,” who clearly preceded me in his explorations of the mansion and has presumably died there. His notes so far have conveyed the following:             

The mansion’s various historical owners have been given to “vile depravities.”

Every 50 years, disappearances have been recorded in nearby towns at the same time that “strange lights [were] reported in the skies above the house.” The last batch was in 1943.

Roberts believed the house is possessed by an “infernal entity that is preparing to break through to our world.”

As he explored, Roberts discovered portals to other planes through which “demons and other monstrous beings” enter the house, particularly on the second floor. I also have him to thank for all the zombies roaming the ground floor, as he apparently released them from the mausoleum.

At some point, Roberts decided that it was necessary to find something called the Golden Torc, apparently in the lower levels.

            One of the messages from the mysterious Marcus Roberts.

         I started exploring using my normal “right wall” approach and soon found a zombie in a corridor east of the entry hall. Irene had begun the game with no weapons, just a spellbook, so I tried out “Flames of Desolation.” It took three castings to kill the creature. There were more zombies later on, and I ran out of spell power after killing three of them. Spell power doesn’t regenerate on its own. Neither do hit points. The manual is a bit cagey on how exactly you do regenerate these bars. I eventually found a first aid kit that helps with health. Spell points are supposed to be regenerated with meditating, but you apparently have to find some special crystals first. You otherwise do occasionally need to rest and eat, but you can only rest in rooms with a special symbol that I haven’t found yet.              

I cast a fireball at a zombie.

           As I ran out of spell points, I tried attacking zombies with my fists. This worked out for a few of them. For physical attacks, you just have options to “hit” or “aim” and then hit. Hitting temporarily depletes an accuracy bar, so you can’t hit a bunch of times in a row without losing accuracy with each successive strike.    You can’t really do a “combat waltz” because enemies in melee range are in your square, not an adjacent one. Trying to side-step to another square requires passing a roll to escape combat first. But I did manage to somehow get one enemy stuck facing perpendicular to me, so I could beat him without retaliation. Later, I couldn’t replicate this. I’d really like to find a weapon, but I’ve got nothing so far. When you attack with no weapon, I’m not sure if the game treats whatever you’re holding as a weapon (e.g., a flashlight) or whether it assumes you’re temporarily dropping that object and using a fist.   I didn’t notice that my fist attacks increased my “Brawling” skill, but my experience bar did increase. It seems to increase a little bit with almost every successful action, including exploring new areas, finding objects, and defeating foes. You can then spend the experience directly on skills or spell power, but I’ve just let it accumulate for now, I guess waiting for the first time I try to use a skill like “Electronics” and it goes poorly.        I’ve been relying mostly on the auto-map so far. Based on it, I’m guessing that the main floor is 20 x 20. The automap annotates rooms and doors relatively well, but it doesn’t do anything with objects, stairs, or puzzles, so I’m probably going to restart and create my own maps, since I use the mapping process to annotate things like locked doors and unsolved puzzles.       You’ll be happy to know that I’ve left the music on. The main theme isn’t really very melodic or insistent. It basically consists of three lugubrious bass notes, a pause, and then either a succession of percussive beats or a non-melodic flutter in a higher register. It has a clear “haunted house” vibe and sets the atmosphere well.         I didn’t deliberately plan this, but it appears that I’m playing The Legacy along with my cousins at The Adventure Gamer. At least, I assume it’s still active. Voltgloss posted an introductory entry on 2 March 2020, but there hasn’t been a second one yet. Perhaps someone from there can clarify.         Time so far: 2 hours           *************          I had intended to return to Ultima VII for this entry, but it’s taking me longer to catch up to where the game glitched than I thought. I’m still devoting a portion of my playing hours to that game, so when I finally do catch up, I’ll stop introducing new titles and pick up where I left off.      

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-368-the-legacy-1992/

[sweatygardencollectorblr]

CALI, Colombia—In Pablo Escobar’s day, in the 1980s and early 1990s, the erstwhile Cocaine King moved mass quantities of the drug out of Colombia. But his planes loaded with dope had to take off from small airstrips hacked out of the jungle. That limited the size of the aircraft and the amount of contraband they could carry.Why the Drug War Can’t Be Won—Cartel Corruption Goes All the Way to the TopAfter Escobar was killed in 1993, things started to change and by the mid-2000s his successor as kingpin-of-kingpins, Mexico’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, allegedly came up with a simple solution to that smuggling dilemma. Why muck around in the bush when you can use one of the biggest and busiest hubs in Latin America to ship your illicit cargo?According to multiple detailed reports in the Colombian and Mexican press, Guzmán turned flights out of Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport into his own cocaine delivery service for about two years using a now defunct company dubbed Air Cargo Lines. And he had plenty of help doing it.The central allegations in the story are sourced to an anonymous whistleblower who claims that the deal was done through a broad narco-trafficking conspiracy involving a former Colombian president, a Colombian senator, Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel cohorts, airport officials, right-wing paramilitaries—and an ICE agent working out of the U.S. Embassy.El Chapo himself already is serving a life sentence at America's supermax prison in Colorado. His lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. Other alleged ringleaders in this aviation scam deny the claims. But the informant reportedly stands by his statements, and independent researchers find his testimony credible. So, by this account, how did Chapo Air come to be? And since the whistleblower remains unavailable, apparently in hiding, what corroboration is there for this story that has sent shock waves through the Colombian political elite—and should shake up some American law enforcement officials as well?* * *Señor Pista* * *The charges come courtesy of Richard Maok, a former detective with Colombia’s treasury police (the fiscalía), who now lives in Canada. This isn’t the first time Maok has been a thorn in the side of Colombian government officials. In 2002, he uncovered a bloody nexus among military officers, right-wing politicians, and drug-trafficking paramilitaries. That scandal was widely covered by the New York Times and other international media, and resulted in a number of high-profile arrests. But it also led to death threats against Maok and, eventually, he sought asylum in Canada.Apparently not one to be deterred by exile and what he says are several attempts on his life, Maok has continued to launch scathing attacks on corruption from afar, using his popular website as a platform. And he makes no secret of his fierce antipathy to former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who remains one of the country’s most powerful politicians. (The headline on Maok's version of the story is a hashtag, ElFinalDeUribe, the end of Uribe.)A few weeks ago, Maok says, he was contacted by a man we’ll call Señor Pista who provided evidence that in the 2000s he had worked as the security director for a Colombian air cargo company—and that he had bombshell accusations to disclose. So, in early January, the whistle blew. Names were named. And a blow-by-blow description of an audacious drug trafficking scheme began to emerge, all of it catalogued in meticulous detail on Maok’s website. The most sensational accusation brought by Maok’s informant was that former president Uribe had been involved in the scam during his time in office. But perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise. As Maok notes, "Uribe and his family have been accused of links to trafficking and organized crime for years."Also unsurprisingly, Uribe denies all these allegations. * * *Escobar’s Friend* * *A declassified 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and published in 2004 by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in D.C., offered a damning assessment of Uribe and his Medellín Cartel connections.The document led with the caution that it was “an info report, not finally evaluated intel” and originally was classified CONFIDENTIAL NOFORN (not to be released to foreign nationals) WNINTEL (Warning Notice—Intelligence Sources or Methods Involved). It listed "Important Colombian Narco-Traffickers" and their associates. Escobar is cited as “the maximum chief of the Medellín Cartel who began as an assassin and now is in charge of the biggest multi-national criminal organization in the world.” Further down the same page we find “Alvaro Uribe Velez—a Colombian politician and senator dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin Cartel at high government levels. Uribe was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the U.S. His father was murdered in Colombia for his connection to the narcotic traffickers. Uribe has worked for the Medellin Cartel and is a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar Gaviria.”At the time, Uribe was governor of Antioquia department, which has Medellín as its capital.Despite these allegations in official Pentagon communications, when Uribe was president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010 he was able to position himself as a staunch U.S. ally in both the War on Drugs and the fight against Marxist guerrillas. Those postures made him something of a darling in D.C., and that fact granted him a certain amount of political immunity back home in Colombia.In the trenches of the War on Drugs, it’s sometimes hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Often, it’s more like “our” bad guys against other, maybe worse, bad guys. But the distinctions can get pretty subjective. A 1993 State Department cable released in 2018 notes allegations that Uribe’s early political campaigns were financed by the Medellín Cartel, but he had begun to fear for his life because he had failed to deliver sufficient political favors “for his Medellín Cartel mentors.” Escobar had escaped from jail. He was on the run, increasingly desperate, and Uribe began trying to reposition himself as a go-between with the U.S. embassy, talking to Escobar’s wife in an effort to get Escobar to surrender. The cable notes that when Uribe met with a U.S. diplomat, Uribe “constantly paced the small office; he was visibly agitated,” but insisted there could be no dialogue with Escobar about government concessions the kingpin had requested. “As far as I’m concerned, Escobar has three options—surrender unconditionally, be captured, or be killed.” Escobar died during a shootout with Colombian National Police in December 1993.Uribe has dismissed accounts of his ties to Escobar as “fake news,” but former U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette, who served from 1994 to 1997, gave an interview in 2015 for a book on his tenure in Bogotá in which he said Uribe had "no interest in being honest with me or other people. That's who Álvaro Uribe is." Frechette, a career diplomat, also called Uribe's use of U.S. funds to arm drug-trafficking right-wing militias a "setup that Washington swallowed."At the moment, ex-President Uribe is also under investigation by Colombia’s supreme court for attempting to bribe and manipulate witnesses who have linked him to widespread extrajudicial killings, including the massacre of 15 villagers in 1997, while he was still a governor. Nonprofit organizations from at least four countries, including the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and Lawyers Without Borders, have sent observers to monitor Uribe’s trial. According to the Colombian newspaper Vanguardia, Uribe is also the subject of 276 additional  pending investigations by the country’s Congressional Accusation Commission—from wrongful contract infractions to violations of international humanitarian law—although he declares himself innocent of all charges.  Uribe, now a senator, remains one of the most influential—and widely feared—men in Colombia. Current President Iván Duque is often described as Uribe’s protégé, or his puppet, depending on who you ask. * * *The Powder Elite* * *“Finally we have a survivor come forward to speak out against Uribe. Many people in Colombia were waiting for this moment,” says Maok, whose YouTube video on the air cargo scandal has racked up more than 370,000 hits since it was posted last month. Neither Uribe nor spokespersons for his Central Democratic Party responded to multiple interview requests for this article. But Senator Carlos Felipe Mejía, a member of the party, fired back the day after Maok’s report went viral. Mejía uploaded his own video to Twitter denying Maok's accusations and referring to the "supposed" trafficking plot as "Operation Liar." Mejía’s short clip also attacked Maok himself, calling him a fugitive from Colombian justice who had "escaped to Canada"—despite the Canadian decision that he should be granted asylum as a victim of death threats and political persecution. On January 24, during an interview with the magazine La Semana, Colombian senator and former mayor of Bogota Gustavo Petro also accused Uribe of having ties to the Sinaloa Cartel and specifically mentioned the El Dorado cocaine scandal."Doesn't this merit an investigation?" he said. "[Isn't it] terrible what this could mean?"Gonzalo Guillén, a Colombian journalist and director of the magazine La Nueva Prensa, also finds Maok’s reporting credible.“The relation between Chapo and Uribe is unmistakable,” Guillén says, and cites his own research to back up the connection. “I had already interviewed a pilot for Chapo Guzmán, who had all the information…. So this was no shock to me.”In that interview, Chapo's pilot claimed that the DEA had managed to catch at least one of the Sinaloa Cartel's flights into Bogotá. A Boeing 707 had been sent from Mexico full of cash and expected to return with "several tons" of cocaine, but ended up being sold for scrap after it was seized. Interestingly, that could imply the cartel was using other airlines, as Maok's whistleblower makes no mention of a Boeing jet being involved in the Air Cargo Lines scheme.Guillén also points out family ties between Uribe and Chapo, notably the fact that Uribe’s brother was married to the sister of a man named Alex Cifuentes, who just happened to be Chapo’s head of operations in Colombia. Both Cifuentes and his sister have since been extradited to the United States on charges of narcotics trafficking. Another of Uribe’s brothers has been charged by the Prosecutor General’s Office in Colombia with leading death squads to carry out “social cleansing” in the 1990s.  These allegations about Colombia follow on the heels of several similar and possibly related disclosures about drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America.In December, Genaro García Luna—Mexico’s former national security secretary and the architect of the nation’s long-running drug war—was arrested in the U.S. on charges of  taking bribes from Chapo’s Sinaloa outfit. In Honduras, the sitting president has been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a drug-trafficking case by U.S. prosecutors, as was a former president of that country. During Chapo’s New York trial last year, Mexico’s most recent commander in chief, Enrique Peña Nieto, also was accused by a witness of being on Chapo’s payroll. That same witness also alleged Chapo’s criminal organization had bribed the Colombian air force for information on aircraft flight routes and strategic installations, and bought off General Oscar Naranjo, the national police commissioner under Uribe. Those charges were denied. But the witness in question? None other than Uribe’s brother-in-law Cifuentes.Robert Bunker, a cartel specialist at the U.S. Army War College, describes the ongoing pattern of corruption as “structural in nature.”“In countries with traditions of authoritarian governance and impunity—such as Mexico, Honduras, Colombia—the elites have a tendency to profit when they can from illicit dealings,” Bunker said. “The entire system in such countries is skewed by elites and traffickers working together for mutual economic advantage.”         * * *Guns, Gems, and Cash* * *From 2006 to 2007, some 10 metric tons of cocaine were shipped from El Dorado airport to Sinaloa, using Air Cargo Lines as a shell company, according to Maok’s informant. Uribe, who allegedly was known to the traffickers by the alias “Gobierno” (Government), is supposed to have arranged for a special hangar to be built at El Dorado solely for the purpose of handling contraband for Chapo and his partners. “Uribe authorized the Aerocivil, or civil aviation authority, to build a cold storage facility close to the tarmac,” Maok says. “That’s where they kept the cocaine.” Most of it came from the Antioquia region, and allegedly was supplied by the same far-right paramilitaries Maok had exposed in 2002.From the cold-storage unit it was flown to Mexico in a DC-8 four-engine cargo plane. In return, Uribe is supposed to have received jewelry and cash from the Sinaloa Cartel, including an emerald presented to him in the presidential palace, and at least a million dollars in U.S. currency, which Maok’s informant claims he delivered personally. Uribe’s chief paramilitary ally, who is alleged by Maok’s informant to have delivered the cocaine to Bogotá, in turn is supposed to have received a shipment of high-powered 5.7 mm pistols, called “cop killers” because the rounds they fire can penetrate police body armor. The whistleblower named other major players, such as Chapo’s son, Jesús Guzmán, who allegedly entered Colombia without passing through customs in order to speed up Air Cargo’s delivery efforts. And Sinaloa Cartel co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who allegedly sent his own people to assist with logistics. All told, the operation involved scores of people, including airline officials, Air Cargo Lines personnel, and various paramilitaries and sicarios. Due to restrictions on flight manifests, and runway scheduling, “If top officials hadn’t been involved,” says journalist Guillén, “they couldn’t have shipped out a single gram.”One of the most eye-popping names on Señor Pista’s list of alleged conspirators is an American special agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who was serving in Colombia at the time Pista was working as security director for the airline and as an ICE asset. Pista says his handler went by the alias “Abastos” (Supplies).“By 2006 I was [working with] Abastos, an ICE official for Colombia, who received me at the American embassy,” the whistlerblower says in Maok’s published report. “There I told him about all the illegal activities of Mr. Raúl Jiménez Villamil.” Villamil was president of Air Cargo Lines at the time, and is now in prison in Spain after he was caught using the airline to ship some two tons of cocaine into that country.But to the informant’s dismay, he found that his handler at the embassy already knew all about the cargo runs out of El Dorado.  “After several meetings with [Abastos], he confirmed that there was no problem with Raúl Jiménez Villamil and that I could work for both of them,” that is, for Abastos and Jiménez Villamil, the source says.The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, ICE, and the DEA did not respond to interview requests for this article.“Sometimes special agents work undercover out of the embassy, pretending to aid cartel operations so as to capture an entire criminal network,” Maok says. “The curious thing about [Abastos] of ICE is that it appears he knew what was going on, yet didn’t bust anybody, even while tons of cocaine were being flown into Mexico.”* * *More Powerful Than Escobar* * *Colombia produces 80 percent of the world’s cocaine, notes Guillén at La Nueva Prensa, with much of it bound for the U.S. market. That profound, concentrated, and illicit wealth has resulted in a “narco-state with a narco-economy,” Guillén said. “Today’s traffickers aren’t like Pablo Escobar. They’re much more sophisticated and powerful. And they’ve learned they can’t operate without buying off the authorities.”Bunker says there are two primary factors that make a country prone to becoming a so-called narco-state. One is that “it is authoritarian in nature” meaning its weak judicial institutions are unable to hold ruling officials to account, and that “narcotics production and trafficking represents a high value industry [compared to] the rest of the country’s economic output.”Back in 2007, when Chapo Air shut down, it wasn’t because of a threat from ICE or the government, but because more than a ton of cocaine went missing in Mexico. After that, a couple of sicarios showed up at El Dorado aiming to kill the owner of the DC-8 transport used in the runs. A month later, says Maok’s informant, a video arrived at Air Cargo Lines HQ showing the beheaded corpse of the alleged thief.Today, more than a decade after the El Dorado Airport smuggling ring self-destructed, the Sinaloa cartel maintains a far stronger presence in Colombia than even Chapo could have foreseen. Chapo’s old syndicate, currently ruled by his partner Ismael Zambada and Guzmán’s own sons, has moved on from merely exporting, and now has “direct access to cocaine production for eventual distribution into the U.S.,” Bunker says.They’ve achieved that by working closely with the “network of operatives, supporting gangs and private armies, and Colombian governmental elites that they are colluding with.”Former prosecution agent Maok describes the growing power of Sinaloa and other cartels in Colombia as a threat to civic freedoms. "In the narco-state, real democracy doesn't exist. Instead of his constituents, the corrupt politician serves the criminals who have bought him off. Meanwhile, armed groups decide who will run for office and are free to kill anyone who challenges them," Maok says.“The people of Colombia deserve something better than this kind of domination,” he says. “They deserve justice.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/31Bodlu

[eurolinguiste]

When we hit that intermediate stage of our learning, we’re often told that now’s the time to start switching over to native source material and to step away from resources aimed at learners.

But how do you know just what native source material to choose?

Our hopes high, we take to Google hoping to find great French books or films, but lo and behold, the majority of the suggested material is what we politely call ‘classic’. In other words, it’s old.

You wanted recommendations for films, tv shows, books or songs in French that are fresh. Those that are relevant today.

And we’re here to help.

Today, I’m excited to share a post from Emily Handley of French Affliction. She’s worked hard to curate this list of 10 French movies, 10 French songs, 10 French books and 10 French tv shows that are not only interesting and relevant, but they also contain language that are suitable for those at the beginning level all the way up to the advanced level with straightforward vocabulary.

Thanks Emily!

Let’s dive right in.

11 French Books for French Language Learners

1. Le petit prince – Antoine Saint-Exupéry

The most famous of Saint-Exupéry’s books, Le petit prince (The Little Prince) is a philosophical fable presented as a children’s book. The narrator, a pilot who’s been forced to make an emergency landing in the Sahara Desert, hears a mysterious voice asking him to draw a sheep. This turns out to be the title character, a young prince who lives on an asteroid no bigger than a house in the company of a beautiful rose that he is in love with.

2. La petite fille de Monsieur Linh – Philippe Claudel

Published in 2005, Claudel’s novel centres on the title character Monsieur Linh, who has been forced into exile from his unnamed country of origin after a war. He begins a friendship with Monsieur Bark, a war veteran, after arriving in his new country. With Monsieur Linh having lost his family in his home country and Monsieur Bark having lost his wife, the bereavement experienced by the two men draws them closer. However, as the two men do not speak the same language, they communicate instead through gestures in this friendship based on their shared grief.

3. Bel-Ami – Guy de Maupassant

Social climber Georges Duroy mounts a ruthless seduction campaign in his quest for wealth and fame in this novel by Maupassant. After finding a job as a columnist for a Parisian newspaper, he takes on several mistresses in quick succession. When he gets married for the second time in a huge society wedding, it becomes clear that his days as a seducer are far from over. As he stands with his new wife on the steps of La Madeleine church in Paris, Duroy’s thoughts turn to one of his old flames and the possibility of rekindling their relationship.

4. Le silence de la mer – Vercors

Written during the Second World War, this novel by Vercors (the pseudonym of Jean Bruller) tells the story of a German officer who lives with an elderly Frenchman and his niece following the German invasion of France. The officer, who appreciates French culture, unsuccessfully attempts to establish a bond with his hosts, who express their patriotism and loyalty to France through silence and keeping their distance from him. The novel was the first to be printed by Les Editions de Minuit, a clandestine publishing house set up by Vercors and his friend Pierre de Lescure to bypass the literary censorship put in place in Occupied France during the Second World War.

5. La première gorgée de bière et d’autres plaisirs minuscules – Philippe Delerm

Divided up into thirty-five short essays with the longest coming in at three pages, this collection of short stories offers lots of little snapshots of different aspects of French life. In one story, Delerm writes about the ritual of reading the morning newspapers on the dining table surrounded by cups of coffee and pots of jam, and in another describes the pleasure of savouring a freshly baked and still-warm croissant while walking back from the bakery in the early morning.

6. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert’s account of an unhappy housewife who turns to adultery was considered so controversial when it was published in the 1840s that it was the subject of a trial.

Although the author’s descriptions of Emma Bovary’s extramarital affairs are no longer thought to be obscene or immoral, his insightful depiction of her dissatisfaction and boredom still resonates today.

Definitely a classic read.

7. L’Étranger – Albert Camus

L’Étranger (The Outsider) tells the story of Meursault, an emotionally detached French Algerian who is sentenced to death for shooting an Arab man. When Meusault is tried for the murder, the prosecution seize on the fact that he did not cry at his mother’s recent funeral. They claim that this lack of emotion must mean that he feels no remorse for killing the Arab man and that he therefore deserves the death penalty for his crime.

8. Thérèse Raquin – Émile Zola

Like Emma Bovary, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a marriage to a man whom she does not love. After being raised by her aunt, she has been forced to marry her cousin, the sickly Camille. Thérèse’s life of boredom and drudgery suddenly changes when she meets one of Camille’s childhood friends, Laurent. She starts a passionate affair with him, which leads to deceit, lies and, eventually, murder when she and Laurent hatch a plan to kill Camille so they can finally marry.

9. Un sac de billes – Joseph Joffo

Known in English under the title A Bag of Marbles, this novel is about Joffo’s own experiences of growing up in a Jewish household in Paris during the Second World War. The story starts in 1941 when the author is ten years old, a year after the Germans have invaded France. He then writes about his family’s escape from Paris, as they make arrangements to cross the demarcation line into the free zone in the south of France. The novel’s been adapted into a comic strip as well as into two films, with the most recent one having been released in early 2017.

10. Les fourmis – Bernard Werber

The opening novel of a science-fiction trilogy, Bernard Werber’s Les Fourmis (The Ants) is set in the early twenty-first century, around a decade after the book was first published in 1991. Werber writes about two worlds, the world of the ants and the world of the humans, which come together during the novel. In the world of the humans, unemployed locksmith Jonathan moves with his family into a large house in Fontainebleau after inheriting it from his uncle. Shortly after settling in the house, Jonathan receives a mysterious letter from his uncle telling him never to go down into the house’s cellar, but he ignores this warning after the family dog falls into the cellar and he goes down to rescue it.

11. Dessine-moi un parisien – Olivier Magny

This book, which takes its title from one of the most famous passages in Le Petit Prince, is a witty and refreshingly unclichéd look at how Parisians see the world. Covering everything from Berthillon ice-cream and salted caramel to why wearing white socks is a cardinal sin in the City of Light, Magny’s book is a must-read for anyone in love with the French capital.

10 French Songs for French Language Learners

1. Formidable – Stromae

This became famous around the world in summer 2013 after Stromae filmed himself singing it in an apparently drunk state at a Brussels tram stop and uploaded the footage to YouTube. The clip’s now had over 160 million views.

2. Quand tu me prends la main – Joyce Jonathan

Featured on Joyce Jonathan’s second album Caractère, this song showcases her gentle vocals alongside a jaunty guitar accompaniment.

3. Paris – Camille

There’s lots of clever wordplay here, as Camille sings of falling out of love with Paris’s ‘picture-postcard stairways’ and ‘grey skies’. While she considers leaving France’s capital for Toulouse, Seville or even Rio, its charm proves in fact to be too strong to resist, and she can’t help but return to the City of Light.

4. Ma jeunesse – Carla Bruni

Before becoming Mrs Sarkozy and one half of France’s First Couple, Carla Bruni was best known for her music career. She sings here of youth and the passing of time, with a dynamic piano accompaniment contrasting with the melancholy lyrics.

5. Dernière danse – Indila

Paris-based singer Indila had a huge success with this song, which can be translated as ‘last dance’, from her debut album Mini World which came out in 2013.

6. Les Marquises – Jacques Brel

Following his decision to retire in 1966 at the height of his music career, Brel turned his hand to acting and directing before moving to the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia. He wrote this song about his island home for his last album, released in 1977.

7. La Parisienne – Christophe Maé

This song, from Maé’s 2016 album L’Attrape-Rêves (The Dream-Catcher), is about a woman who, since moving to Paris, has abandoned her old friends for brunching, Facebooking and having apéritifs by the Seine.

8. Paris – Marc Lavoine

In this duet with Algerian singer Souad Massi, Lavoine sings of this attachment to the City of the Light, from admiring the Eiffel Tower to toasting to the health of its lovers and drifting in and out of its metros.

9. La maison où j’ai grandi – Françoise Hardy

Hardy, who is known as much for her fashion icon status as for her singing, was part of the ‘yé-yé’ movement that became popular in France during the 1960s. Here, she sings of her memories of her childhood friends and the house that she grew up in as a young girl.

10. Les gens du nord – Enrico Macias

After emigrating to France from Algeria as a teenager, Macias quickly felt welcomed by his host country. The idea for this song came to him after a particularly enthusiastic welcome from the audience at a performance he was giving in northern France. He co-wrote it with lyricist Jacques Demarny, and since its release in 1967, it’s become a popular French musical standard.

10 French TV Shows for French Language Learners

1. Braquo

Braquo, which translates into English as ‘hold-up’, follows the attempts of four Paris police officers to clear their colleague’s name following his suicide after he is suspected of seriously harming a prisoner in custody.

If you enjoy many of the crime-based television series in your native language, watching this particular series is a great way to switch over an activity you enjoy into your target language.

  2. Un gars, une fille

This comedy series, which launched the career of French actor Jean Dujardin, centres on the lives of lovebirds Loulou (Dujardin) and Chouchou, played by Alexandra Lamy. Each episode starring the couple lasts around six minutes, and is made up of several sketches that can show anything from them relaxing together at home to attending a wedding, watching a show at the Moulin Rouge or even being stranded on a desert island.

3. Un village français

First shown in France in 2009, Un village français looks at the effects of the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War. It takes place in a fictional village in the Jura mountains, not far from the demarcation line that separated Occupied France from ‘free France’. Quite a few well-known French actors appear in the series, including Audrey Fleurot and Thierry Godard, who both have major roles in Engrenages.

4. Engrenages

Engrenages, a police and legal drama set in Paris, first became known in the UK after being shown on BBC4 under the translated title of Spiral.

The show, which prides itself on its realism, gives the viewer a thrilling snapshot of the French justice system through the eyes of an idealistic defence lawyer, a police chief inspector and their colleagues.

The title, Engrenages, carries interesting connotations in the language.

5. Les revenants

Set among the dramatic landscapes of the Haute-Savoie region in eastern France, Les Revenants (The Returned) is an eerie, exciting and original take on typical zombie horror fare. The residents of a quiet town in the mountains are left in a state of shock when former residents, many of who have been dead for years, come back to life and wanting to resume their lives as normal. Their reappearances in the town coincide with other strange events, from unexplained power shortages to the water in the local reservoir suddenly lowering to a worrying level.

6. Plus belle la vie

A long-running soap opera, which is something like the French version of Eastenders or Neighbours, follows the lives of a group of families in Le Mistral, an idyllic (fictional) neighbourhood somewhere in the coastal city of Marseille.

The show broadcast its three-thousandth episode in 2016, and is so popular that tourists visit Marseille just to visit its chocolate-box filming locations.

7. Disparue

Based on a Spanish crime drama, Disparue (The Disappearance) focuses on efforts to find a teenage girl when she goes missing after going to a concert with friends.

Although this thriller mini-series is only made up of eight episodes, it manages to be fast-moving as well as sustaining a satisfyingly complex storyline.

8. Fais pas ci, fais pas ça

The rather overbearing tone of the title (Don’t do this, don’t do that) reflects the differing views and attitudes of its main characters.

On one side, the laidback Bouley family. And on the other the Lepic family, their more conservative neighbours.

9. Clem

When sixteen-year-old Clem Boissier goes to the doctor’s to find out why she’s been feeling under the weather, the last thing she expects to hear is that she’s about to become a mother.

After telling her best friend and swearing her to secrecy, she then struggles to find the right moment to tell her family. At the time of writing, this popular series has been running for seven seasons in France, and an eighth series is due to start filming.

10. Chef’s Table: France

This Netflix-produced series Chef’s Table, which has been nominated for an Emmy, visits the land of wine and cheese to find out the secrets of the most respected French chefs.

We hear from Adeline Grattard, who’s behind the bao restaurant Yam’Tcha, and Alain Passard, who took a risk that paid off when he took red meat from the menu at L’Arpège in Paris and replaced it with fresh vegetables from his biodynamic farms.

12 French Films for French Language Learners

1. Hors de prix

This comedy, which translates into English as ‘priceless’, stars Audrey Tautou as Irène, a modern-day Holly Golightly. Whilst on holiday with her current lover, she meets hotel barman Jean (Gad Elmaleh) who falls in love with her and spends all of his savings on his seduction campaign. Luckily, a wealthy widow staying at the hotel takes a shine to him and, following in Irène’s footsteps, Jean becomes Madeline’s lover. When Jean and Irène see each other again by chance, they realise that they are still in love with each other. They try to spend as much together as possible while making sure that their lovers don’t suspect anything, which doesn’t quite go to plan…

2. Intouchable

After Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, this was the second highest grossing film ever in France. The film focuses on the bond between Philippe, a wealthy Parisian who becomes paralysed after a paragliding accident, and his live-in carer Driss.

Both Philippe and Driss are wary of each other when Driss starts to work for him, but this initial distrust leads to a close friendship between the two men.

3. Amélie

Featuring Audrey Tautou in the title role (along with Paris’s Montmartre district in a supporting role), Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film is about a young woman who spends her free time doing good deeds for strangers.

The Café des 2 Moulins, where Amélie works as a waitress in the film, has become a popular tourist attraction since appearing in the movie.

4. Jules et Jim

Based on Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel, Truffaut’s film centres on the love triangle that develops when best friends Jules and Jim both fall for the beautiful Catherine. Even though she later goes on to marry Jules, Catherine still seems undecided about which of the men she likes, even beginning an affair with Jim while she is married. Jeanne Moreau gives a wonderful performance as the charismatic and unpredictable Catherine, and Oskar Werner and Henri Serre star as Jules and Jim respectively.

5. Potiche

Catherine Deneuve appears here as Suzanne Pujol, and the ‘potiche’ (‘trophy wife’) of the film’s title.

It’s the mid-1970s, and everyone around Suzanne sees her as a mother and a housewife, while her factory owner husband Robert brings home the bacon. But when Robert’s employees rebel against him, it’s up to Suzanne to step up to the plate and sort out the situation.

6. La Haine

Filmed in black-and-white, La Haine (‘hate’) focuses on 24 hours in the life of three teenage friends, Vinz, Hubert and Saïd.

Living on a housing estate on the outskirts of Paris, they learn at the start of the film that a friend of theirs, Abdel, is in a coma after being beaten up by police. After hearing the news, Vinz promises himself that he will kill a policeman if Abdel dies from his injuries.

7. Populaire

Insurance agent Louis Échard (Romain Duris) is a man on a mission. Having just hired Rose Pamphyle as his secretary, he’s seen how fast she can type, and has the idea of entering her into a regional speed-typing contest. Although Rose is beaten at the competition, Louis continues to believe in her, and decides to take her under his wing to train her for the world speed-typing championships. Over time, Louis and Rose’s professional relationship develops into a romantic one, in this film inspired by My Fair Lady.

8. Entre les murs

François Bégaudeau stars in this film adaptation of his novel of the same name, where he writes about his experiences of teaching in an inner-city school in Paris in the 20th arrondisement.

It’s an interesting view into the French education system as well as the struggles of teens in France.

It received the Palme d’Or at the 2008 Cannes film festival.

9. Les parapluies de Cherbourg

The rainy port city of Cherbourg is given the Technicolour treatment by director Jacques Demy, who took his inspiration for the film from Hollywood musicals. Catherine Deneuve plays teenager Geneviève Emery, who falls head over heels in love with local car mechanic Guy. The young couple’s dreams of a future together are interrupted, however, when Guy is called up to fight in the Algerian War. Geneviève inadvertently breaks her promise to wait for his return when her family’s financial difficulties force her to accept a marriage proposal from a wealthy businessman.

10. La vie en rose

Marion Cotillard won an Oscar (a first for an actress in a French language film) for her portrayal of the singer Édith Piaf in this biopic, which takes its name from one of Piaf’s most famous songs.

The film recaps the main events in Piaf’s life, from her childhood in Paris and her early success as a singer to her meeting with Marcel Cerdan, who would later become her lover all the way to the events leading up to and surrounding her death.

11. Astérix et Obélix: Mission Cléopâtre

The most successful of all of the Astérix and Obélix films to date, this story was adapted from the comic Astérix et Cléopâtre by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. Astérix and Obélix are transported to Ancient Egypt for this adventure. Along with their friend Panoramix, they are asked to help the architect Numérobis with the seemingly impossible task of building a huge palace in the middle of the desert in three months.

12. Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis

Directed by French actor and comedian Dany Boon, who is himself a Ch’ti (someone who lives or comes from the area around Calais), this comedy follows post office manager Philippe (Kad Merad) as he’s transferred from his job in the south of France to Bergues, in the far north. His friends and family warn him that the north is freezing and inhospitable and, when he gets there, he’s unable to make head or tail of the Ch’ti dialiect. Will he live to regret his move?

What about you?

What are some French native materials you’ve used to up your ability in the language?

We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

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The post 10+ French Books, Songs, TV Shows, and Films to Improve Your French Language Skills appeared first on Eurolinguiste.

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CALI, Colombia—In Pablo Escobar’s day, in the 1980s and early 1990s, the erstwhile Cocaine King moved mass quantities of the drug out of Colombia. But his planes loaded with dope had to take off from small airstrips hacked out of the jungle. That limited the size of the aircraft and the amount of contraband they could carry.Why the Drug War Can’t Be Won—Cartel Corruption Goes All the Way to the TopAfter Escobar was killed in 1993, things started to change and by the mid-2000s his successor as kingpin-of-kingpins, Mexico’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, allegedly came up with a simple solution to that smuggling dilemma. Why muck around in the bush when you can use one of the biggest and busiest hubs in Latin America to ship your illicit cargo?According to multiple detailed reports in the Colombian and Mexican press, Guzmán turned flights out of Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport into his own cocaine delivery service for about two years using a now defunct company dubbed Air Cargo Lines. And he had plenty of help doing it.The central allegations in the story are sourced to an anonymous whistleblower who claims that the deal was done through a broad narco-trafficking conspiracy involving a former Colombian president, a Colombian senator, Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel cohorts, airport officials, right-wing paramilitaries—and an ICE agent working out of the U.S. Embassy.El Chapo himself already is serving a life sentence at America's supermax prison in Colorado. His lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. Other alleged ringleaders in this aviation scam deny the claims. But the informant reportedly stands by his statements, and independent researchers find his testimony credible. So, by this account, how did Chapo Air come to be? And since the whistleblower remains unavailable, apparently in hiding, what corroboration is there for this story that has sent shock waves through the Colombian political elite—and should shake up some American law enforcement officials as well?* * *Señor Pista* * *The charges come courtesy of Richard Maok, a former detective with Colombia’s treasury police (the fiscalía), who now lives in Canada. This isn’t the first time Maok has been a thorn in the side of Colombian government officials. In 2002, he uncovered a bloody nexus among military officers, right-wing politicians, and drug-trafficking paramilitaries. That scandal was widely covered by the New York Times and other international media, and resulted in a number of high-profile arrests. But it also led to death threats against Maok and, eventually, he sought asylum in Canada.Apparently not one to be deterred by exile and what he says are several attempts on his life, Maok has continued to launch scathing attacks on corruption from afar, using his popular website as a platform. And he makes no secret of his fierce antipathy to former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who remains one of the country’s most powerful politicians. (The headline on Maok's version of the story is a hashtag, ElFinalDeUribe, the end of Uribe.)A few weeks ago, Maok says, he was contacted by a man we’ll call Señor Pista who provided evidence that in the 2000s he had worked as the security director for a Colombian air cargo company—and that he had bombshell accusations to disclose. So, in early January, the whistle blew. Names were named. And a blow-by-blow description of an audacious drug trafficking scheme began to emerge, all of it catalogued in meticulous detail on Maok’s website. The most sensational accusation brought by Maok’s informant was that former president Uribe had been involved in the scam during his time in office. But perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise. As Maok notes, "Uribe and his family have been accused of links to trafficking and organized crime for years."Also unsurprisingly, Uribe denies all these allegations. * * *Escobar’s Friend* * *A declassified 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and published in 2004 by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in D.C., offered a damning assessment of Uribe and his Medellín Cartel connections.The document led with the caution that it was “an info report, not finally evaluated intel” and originally was classified CONFIDENTIAL NOFORN (not to be released to foreign nationals) WNINTEL (Warning Notice—Intelligence Sources or Methods Involved). It listed "Important Colombian Narco-Traffickers" and their associates. Escobar is cited as “the maximum chief of the Medellín Cartel who began as an assassin and now is in charge of the biggest multi-national criminal organization in the world.” Further down the same page we find “Alvaro Uribe Velez—a Colombian politician and senator dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin Cartel at high government levels. Uribe was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the U.S. His father was murdered in Colombia for his connection to the narcotic traffickers. Uribe has worked for the Medellin Cartel and is a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar Gaviria.”At the time, Uribe was governor of Antioquia department, which has Medellín as its capital.Despite these allegations in official Pentagon communications, when Uribe was president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010 he was able to position himself as a staunch U.S. ally in both the War on Drugs and the fight against Marxist guerrillas. Those postures made him something of a darling in D.C., and that fact granted him a certain amount of political immunity back home in Colombia.In the trenches of the War on Drugs, it’s sometimes hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Often, it’s more like “our” bad guys against other, maybe worse, bad guys. But the distinctions can get pretty subjective. A 1993 State Department cable released in 2018 notes allegations that Uribe’s early political campaigns were financed by the Medellín Cartel, but he had begun to fear for his life because he had failed to deliver sufficient political favors “for his Medellín Cartel mentors.” Escobar had escaped from jail. He was on the run, increasingly desperate, and Uribe began trying to reposition himself as a go-between with the U.S. embassy, talking to Escobar’s wife in an effort to get Escobar to surrender. The cable notes that when Uribe met with a U.S. diplomat, Uribe “constantly paced the small office; he was visibly agitated,” but insisted there could be no dialogue with Escobar about government concessions the kingpin had requested. “As far as I’m concerned, Escobar has three options—surrender unconditionally, be captured, or be killed.” Escobar died during a shootout with Colombian National Police in December 1993.Uribe has dismissed accounts of his ties to Escobar as “fake news,” but former U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette, who served from 1994 to 1997, gave an interview in 2015 for a book on his tenure in Bogotá in which he said Uribe had "no interest in being honest with me or other people. That's who Álvaro Uribe is." Frechette, a career diplomat, also called Uribe's use of U.S. funds to arm drug-trafficking right-wing militias a "setup that Washington swallowed."At the moment, ex-President Uribe is also under investigation by Colombia’s supreme court for attempting to bribe and manipulate witnesses who have linked him to widespread extrajudicial killings, including the massacre of 15 villagers in 1997, while he was still a governor. Nonprofit organizations from at least four countries, including the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and Lawyers Without Borders, have sent observers to monitor Uribe’s trial. According to the Colombian newspaper Vanguardia, Uribe is also the subject of 276 additional  pending investigations by the country’s Congressional Accusation Commission—from wrongful contract infractions to violations of international humanitarian law—although he declares himself innocent of all charges.  Uribe, now a senator, remains one of the most influential—and widely feared—men in Colombia. Current President Iván Duque is often described as Uribe’s protégé, or his puppet, depending on who you ask. * * *The Powder Elite* * *“Finally we have a survivor come forward to speak out against Uribe. Many people in Colombia were waiting for this moment,” says Maok, whose YouTube video on the air cargo scandal has racked up more than 370,000 hits since it was posted last month. Neither Uribe nor spokespersons for his Central Democratic Party responded to multiple interview requests for this article. But Senator Carlos Felipe Mejía, a member of the party, fired back the day after Maok’s report went viral. Mejía uploaded his own video to Twitter denying Maok's accusations and referring to the "supposed" trafficking plot as "Operation Liar." Mejía’s short clip also attacked Maok himself, calling him a fugitive from Colombian justice who had "escaped to Canada"—despite the Canadian decision that he should be granted asylum as a victim of death threats and political persecution. On January 24, during an interview with the magazine La Semana, Colombian senator and former mayor of Bogota Gustavo Petro also accused Uribe of having ties to the Sinaloa Cartel and specifically mentioned the El Dorado cocaine scandal."Doesn't this merit an investigation?" he said. "[Isn't it] terrible what this could mean?"Gonzalo Guillén, a Colombian journalist and director of the magazine La Nueva Prensa, also finds Maok’s reporting credible.“The relation between Chapo and Uribe is unmistakable,” Guillén says, and cites his own research to back up the connection. “I had already interviewed a pilot for Chapo Guzmán, who had all the information…. So this was no shock to me.”In that interview, Chapo's pilot claimed that the DEA had managed to catch at least one of the Sinaloa Cartel's flights into Bogotá. A Boeing 707 had been sent from Mexico full of cash and expected to return with "several tons" of cocaine, but ended up being sold for scrap after it was seized. Interestingly, that could imply the cartel was using other airlines, as Maok's whistleblower makes no mention of a Boeing jet being involved in the Air Cargo Lines scheme.Guillén also points out family ties between Uribe and Chapo, notably the fact that Uribe’s brother was married to the sister of a man named Alex Cifuentes, who just happened to be Chapo’s head of operations in Colombia. Both Cifuentes and his sister have since been extradited to the United States on charges of narcotics trafficking. Another of Uribe’s brothers has been charged by the Prosecutor General’s Office in Colombia with leading death squads to carry out “social cleansing” in the 1990s.  These allegations about Colombia follow on the heels of several similar and possibly related disclosures about drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America.In December, Genaro García Luna—Mexico’s former national security secretary and the architect of the nation’s long-running drug war—was arrested in the U.S. on charges of  taking bribes from Chapo’s Sinaloa outfit. In Honduras, the sitting president has been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a drug-trafficking case by U.S. prosecutors, as was a former president of that country. During Chapo’s New York trial last year, Mexico’s most recent commander in chief, Enrique Peña Nieto, also was accused by a witness of being on Chapo’s payroll. That same witness also alleged Chapo’s criminal organization had bribed the Colombian air force for information on aircraft flight routes and strategic installations, and bought off General Oscar Naranjo, the national police commissioner under Uribe. Those charges were denied. But the witness in question? None other than Uribe’s brother-in-law Cifuentes.Robert Bunker, a cartel specialist at the U.S. Army War College, describes the ongoing pattern of corruption as “structural in nature.”“In countries with traditions of authoritarian governance and impunity—such as Mexico, Honduras, Colombia—the elites have a tendency to profit when they can from illicit dealings,” Bunker said. “The entire system in such countries is skewed by elites and traffickers working together for mutual economic advantage.”         * * *Guns, Gems, and Cash* * *From 2006 to 2007, some 10 metric tons of cocaine were shipped from El Dorado airport to Sinaloa, using Air Cargo Lines as a shell company, according to Maok’s informant. Uribe, who allegedly was known to the traffickers by the alias “Gobierno” (Government), is supposed to have arranged for a special hangar to be built at El Dorado solely for the purpose of handling contraband for Chapo and his partners. “Uribe authorized the Aerocivil, or civil aviation authority, to build a cold storage facility close to the tarmac,” Maok says. “That’s where they kept the cocaine.” Most of it came from the Antioquia region, and allegedly was supplied by the same far-right paramilitaries Maok had exposed in 2002.From the cold-storage unit it was flown to Mexico in a DC-8 four-engine cargo plane. In return, Uribe is supposed to have received jewelry and cash from the Sinaloa Cartel, including an emerald presented to him in the presidential palace, and at least a million dollars in U.S. currency, which Maok’s informant claims he delivered personally. Uribe’s chief paramilitary ally, who is alleged by Maok’s informant to have delivered the cocaine to Bogotá, in turn is supposed to have received a shipment of high-powered 5.7 mm pistols, called “cop killers” because the rounds they fire can penetrate police body armor. The whistleblower named other major players, such as Chapo’s son, Jesús Guzmán, who allegedly entered Colombia without passing through customs in order to speed up Air Cargo’s delivery efforts. And Sinaloa Cartel co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who allegedly sent his own people to assist with logistics. All told, the operation involved scores of people, including airline officials, Air Cargo Lines personnel, and various paramilitaries and sicarios. Due to restrictions on flight manifests, and runway scheduling, “If top officials hadn’t been involved,” says journalist Guillén, “they couldn’t have shipped out a single gram.”One of the most eye-popping names on Señor Pista’s list of alleged conspirators is an American special agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who was serving in Colombia at the time Pista was working as security director for the airline and as an ICE asset. Pista says his handler went by the alias “Abastos” (Supplies).“By 2006 I was [working with] Abastos, an ICE official for Colombia, who received me at the American embassy,” the whistlerblower says in Maok’s published report. “There I told him about all the illegal activities of Mr. Raúl Jiménez Villamil.” Villamil was president of Air Cargo Lines at the time, and is now in prison in Spain after he was caught using the airline to ship some two tons of cocaine into that country.But to the informant’s dismay, he found that his handler at the embassy already knew all about the cargo runs out of El Dorado.  “After several meetings with [Abastos], he confirmed that there was no problem with Raúl Jiménez Villamil and that I could work for both of them,” that is, for Abastos and Jiménez Villamil, the source says.The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, ICE, and the DEA did not respond to interview requests for this article.“Sometimes special agents work undercover out of the embassy, pretending to aid cartel operations so as to capture an entire criminal network,” Maok says. “The curious thing about [Abastos] of ICE is that it appears he knew what was going on, yet didn’t bust anybody, even while tons of cocaine were being flown into Mexico.”* * *More Powerful Than Escobar* * *Colombia produces 80 percent of the world’s cocaine, notes Guillén at La Nueva Prensa, with much of it bound for the U.S. market. That profound, concentrated, and illicit wealth has resulted in a “narco-state with a narco-economy,” Guillén said. “Today’s traffickers aren’t like Pablo Escobar. They’re much more sophisticated and powerful. And they’ve learned they can’t operate without buying off the authorities.”Bunker says there are two primary factors that make a country prone to becoming a so-called narco-state. One is that “it is authoritarian in nature” meaning its weak judicial institutions are unable to hold ruling officials to account, and that “narcotics production and trafficking represents a high value industry [compared to] the rest of the country’s economic output.”Back in 2007, when Chapo Air shut down, it wasn’t because of a threat from ICE or the government, but because more than a ton of cocaine went missing in Mexico. After that, a couple of sicarios showed up at El Dorado aiming to kill the owner of the DC-8 transport used in the runs. A month later, says Maok’s informant, a video arrived at Air Cargo Lines HQ showing the beheaded corpse of the alleged thief.Today, more than a decade after the El Dorado Airport smuggling ring self-destructed, the Sinaloa cartel maintains a far stronger presence in Colombia than even Chapo could have foreseen. Chapo’s old syndicate, currently ruled by his partner Ismael Zambada and Guzmán’s own sons, has moved on from merely exporting, and now has “direct access to cocaine production for eventual distribution into the U.S.,” Bunker says.They’ve achieved that by working closely with the “network of operatives, supporting gangs and private armies, and Colombian governmental elites that they are colluding with.”Former prosecution agent Maok describes the growing power of Sinaloa and other cartels in Colombia as a threat to civic freedoms. "In the narco-state, real democracy doesn't exist. Instead of his constituents, the corrupt politician serves the criminals who have bought him off. Meanwhile, armed groups decide who will run for office and are free to kill anyone who challenges them," Maok says.“The people of Colombia deserve something better than this kind of domination,” he says. “They deserve justice.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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