Thanks to @cwolffman for this gem.
Guns and Tacos
Subscirbe to the Guns and Tacos RSS FeedMaking Cold-Brewed Coffee at Home
Fun with WordFoto
Found a neat little app on my phone (WordFoto) that changes images to text. I chose an image of Rosalino “Chalino” Sánchez packing a Colt 45.
Seriously, this took about 30 seconds to do.
An interview with Ben Thompson: Badass of the Week
Maybe you’ve heard of Badass of the Week, maybe you haven’t. Either way, there’s this guy Ben Thompson that blogs about the baddest badasses in history, in a style that will make you laugh so hard you will drop kick a litter of newborn puppies just to get the grin off your face. The list is very diverse, and includes all types of historical characters, good and evil alike, from Harriet Tubman to The Predator.
He recently published a book titled Badass: A Relentless Onslaught of the Toughest Warlords, Vikings, Samurai, Pirates, Gunfighters, and Military Commanders to Ever Live. I enjoyed this book so much, I had no choice but to share it with you guys.
I had the opportunity to ask Ben a few questions, and he was nice enough to get back to me instead of sending ninja assassins to my house.
G&T: You’ve listed people dead and alive, male and female, ancient kings, pro wrestlers and General Zod from Superman II. Are there any minimum requirements for becoming a Badass of the Week?
BT: There are a lot of different types of badasses out there, but the main thing that unites a mad scientist badass like Nikola Tesla with an over-the-top face-wrecking badass like Leonidas is that neither of those guys put up with anyone else’s crap. It doesn’t matter what you’re really trying to accomplish — world conquest, nuclear fission, jumping a motorcycle over the Grand Canyon, etc. — as long as you go totally balls-out after it and don’t let anything get in your way, that’s badass.
G&T: I once watched a Kung Fu movie where this guy would punch three holes in the forehead of his enemies with his fingertips. I think he lived in a cave full of ventilated human skulls. Is there any truth to this?
BT: There was a Japanese-Korean dude named Mas Oyama who spent most of his life living on a mountain hardening his fists by punching trees into firewood. He would occasionally come down into town to kick the crap out of martial arts experts and kill bulls by punching them in the face. If this guy can do that, I don’t see why someone wouldn’t be able to punch his fingers through your skull and use it as a bowling ball.
G&T: What is the true “Breakfast of Champions”?
BT: Wheaties, dusted with metal shavings taken from a decommissioned Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile and sprinkled with two scoops of 9mm ammunition.
G&T: Has a featured Badass,or the family of a featured Badass, ever asked you to take down or correct an entry on your site?
BT: I once wrote a story about a 70 year-old man named Gene Moe, who killed a Grizzly with his bare hands while it was mauling him to death. Moe then crawled two miles to the car, drove himself to the hospital, and survived. He emailed me to tell me that he didn’t like my take on his story — the real reason he’d won the fight was because God guided his fist into the bear’s skull, and since I didn’t talk about Jesus coming down and helping this guy kick the crap out of a rampaging Grizzly my story was inaccurate (he much preferred the 700 Club version, naturally). I figured hey, this guy fistfought a bear and won, so I probably shouldn’t give him a hard time if he wants me to take my version of his story off my website.
G&T: Lee Marvin or Steve McQueen? Why?
BT: Can’t we have both?
G&T: How many swords do you own?
BT: I’ve got a set of samurai swords (the katana and wakizashi), an English longsword, a Confederate cavalry saber, and a letter-opener designed to look like Glamdring the Foe-Hammer.
G&T: Are there any authors that have influenced your writing style? I noticed you use a lot of long sentences and commas like you are Homer or something.
BT: Homer was epic poetry, though, and my rhyming and meter skills are really sub-par. As far as history goes, I always loved Gibbon and Plutarch, because those guys told the true stories, but they didn’t have a problem telling you if they thought someone in particular was awesome or a total douchebag. There was none of this middle-of-the-road, fake-objectivity crap. If the guy sucked balls, they came right out and said it rather than trying to rationalize for him.
For more modern authors, I’m a huge fan of Will Cuppy’s “Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody”, as well as a book called “1066 And All That”. I also love Douglas Adams, who was, of course, a genius, but not related to history in any appreciable way.
G&T: I understand if you hate this question, but I have to ask. Who is your favorite Badass?
BT: It’s impossible to pick a favorite, but when people talk to me about the whole Badass of the Week thing, the guy I like to point to is a guy named Wolf the Quarrelsome. Wolf was an Irish barbarian who fought the Vikings, defeated them in combat, and then killed their leader by cutting the guy’s torso open with an axe, tying one end of his intestines to a tree, and then making the guy walk around the tree until he was dead.
Wolf only appears in like three lines in all of history, and he contributes very little to human history in any significant way, but this is a badass story, and it’s the sort of thing I love reading about. Badass of the Week was designed to tell stories like that.
G&T: I have always wanted to cut down a giant redwood tree with a giant chainsaw. Is this natural?
BT: I think the uncontrollable urge to cut things apart with a chainsaw is something that’s deeply embedded into human DNA. Anyone who claims otherwise is only denying their true nature.
……………………………………….
Ben Thompson is also the author of Badass: The Birth of a Legend: Spine-Crushing Tales of the Most Merciless Gods, Monsters, Heroes, Villains, and Mythical Creatures Ever Envisioned. You can find him on Twitter as @Badassoftheweek.
Sample Page
Vegan Black Metal Chef
Thanks to Ben Thompson over at Badass of the Week for sharing this video on Twitter.
Caucasian Guide to the Chingo Bling Concert
If you’re not familiar with Chingo Bling, this is probably your first time to this site, and you are adept at sewing images of dolphins onto sweaters and hanging out at craft shops. You pay good money for cable television, and you choose to watch Housewives of Orange County on purpose. You pay your taxes well ahead of the deadline. You’d like to visit Cozumel sometime, but you’re afraid of Mexican cartels that will throw you in jail and call your relatives and charge them for a $300 toothbrush because you saw that on 60 Minutes in 1995. Put down your BeDazzler.
Chances are, you are very much aware of Chingo Bling. Lucky for you, you can simply buy your tickets for his April 8 show at the House of Blues- you don’t have to stalk him like I did a while back. Since his appearance at the Houston Chowhound’s Taco Truck Crawl, he’s taken on a new batch of foodie fans in this town, who will likely be attending the show. Here are a few helpful tips.
1. Don’t try too hard.
Sure, you’ve got an XXL airbrushed Selena shirt in the back of your closet. We all do. Leave it in the closet. Just be yourself, unless you are a shirt-tucker.
2. You don’t have to know all the words.
Don’t be the starry-eyed black and white teenybopper in the front row mouthing all the lyrics like it’s your first Elvis concert. You will not impress Chingo Bling, Roxxi Jane, or Lucky Luciano.
Fat Tony. Photo by Marco Torres
3. Get there early.
Other than the obvious big acts, there are several openers. One of these is Fat Tony, who puts on an explosive live show. He blew up Free Press Summerfest last year, as well as opening for Wu-Tang in their rare Houston appearance at Numbers. Don’t be fashionably late to this one, or you’ll miss out.
4. Save a few bucks.
You can end up paying around $20 for parking around the House of Blues if you don’t know your way around. Catch a bus, ride a bike, or call Washington Wave unless you’ve got a good idea how parking works in the area. There’s not much of a beer selection, and the drinks are pricey. My solution? Get tanked before you go, or smuggle in your booze like a real vaquero.
“Walleyball”
I’ve been a huge fan of McSweeney’s Books for years, and they promote these Wholphin DVD’s on their site. These are collections of movie shorts from around the world, some of them extremely odd (or awful), and some extremely amazing. I picked up a few, and one of the short films blew my mind. It’s called “Walleyball”, and it shows US folks playing volleyball over the border fence with Mexican folks. I remember this fence very well- when living in Tijuana, we would frequently head to this beach. Young boys would bring coolers of Cerveza Sol and Dos Equis around and sell them for a buck or two (though no glass containers were allowed on the US side.) Try to ignore the annoying narrator, and enjoy the ironic beauty of a simple volleyball game among unlikely friends. (Music by Aesop Rock.)
A Retweet from Iron Mike
Calexico – Minas de Cobra
Profile: Chalino Sánchez
I first (knowingly) heard Mexico’s famous North Mexican supergroup Los Tigres del Norte in a taxicab in Tijuana. It sounded like some kind of German polka, heavy on the accordion, and it seemed fairly unremarkable until samples of automatic gunfire erupted throughout the song. “What kind of music is this?” I asked the driver.
“Ranchera”, he replied. “It’s Mexican gangster music”.
Growing up in Texas, it’s impossible not to be familiar with Tejano (Tex-Mex) music. Although somewhat similar to Tejano, ranchera was less refined in studio quality and entirely devoid of the North American “country music” sound. I eventually learned that ranchera is more “rural” than “gangster”.
Modern ranchera’s stepchild narcocorrido is gangster. The narcocorrido, or “drug ballad”, is a style of popular music throughout Texas and Mexico which generally focuses on aspects of the drug trade.
With its anti-authoritative tone and stories of violent gunfights, peppered by samples of gunshots and sirens, I was sold. The more I learned about this style of music, the more Mexico seemed like the Old West, bolstering its appeal. In the bars and nightclubs of Tijuana, the most affluent patrons sported white cowboy hats and gold chains. Years later, I’d see the same type of crowd in massive Houston nightclubs such as El Rodeo and El Chaparral.
Arguably, Rosalino “Chalino” Sánchez is the ultimate badass of the narcocorrido style. Born in Sinaloa, Mexico, he had a nightmarish childhood. After the untimely death of his father that threw his family into poverty, his sister Juana was raped by “El Chapo” Perez, a member of a local crime syndicate. Chalino dedicated his young life to revenge, and at 15, legend says, he gunned down Perez at a party in public view. On the run from Mexican authorities, he eventually crossed the border into Southern California.
Chalino employed himself on the streets, assisting his brother Armando as a coyote, drug dealer and dishwasher. His brother was shot and killed in a Tijuana hotel in ’84, and Chalino wrote his first known ballad as a memorial to his brother. He continued writing music and promoting himself with cassette tapes for months, until he was catapulted into stardom on one eventful night.
That night, he was singing in a club in Coachella, California, just outside Palm Springs, when an unemployed mechanic came up to the stage to make a request, then pulled out a pistol and shot Chalino in the side. Living up to his reputation, Chalino pulled out his own gun and returned fire. By the time it was all over, the would-be assassin had been shot in the mouth with his own gun, Nacho Hernandez had been shot in the thigh, and at least five other people were wounded, including a young guy who bled to death as his friends drove him to the hospital. In Sinaloa, it is commonly said that the death toll was higher, but that most of the killed and wounded, being undocumented aliens with criminal connections, were spirited out of the club and over the border before the police arrived.
-Elijah Wald, Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas
Sanchez’ voice was raspy and often out of tune, which helped define his “tough guy” sound over multitudes of imitators. He would antagonize prominent cartel leaders and public figures. A prolific musician, he cranked out thousands of cassettes and sold them in the streets. In Mexico and California, Chalino was known (and feared) as the real deal. He wore his white hat cocked to the side, a big belt buckle, cowboy boots, gold chains, and packed a Colt 45 with pearl grips.
At the height of Chalino’s success, according to most accounts, his entourage was pulled over by a Chevy Suburban. A number of men displayed police identification and asked that he accompany them to the police station. He was found hours later on the side of the road, blindfolded, with rope marks around his wrists and two gunshots to the head. There is some confusion as to where this information regarding the Suburban was credited. In LA Weekly’s cover article on the subject it was reported that Chalino’s brother Esperidon was the surviving witness – but according to this fan site, Chalino didn’t have a brother by this name.
Violence in the narcocorrido culture has often been compared with rap culture in the US. Just like Tupac and Biggie, several groups scrambled to purchase Chalino’s music, mixing his voice with their album tracks. LA Weekly referred to it as a “Sinaloazation of L.A.” Chalino had recently sold off his rights to a record company for around $150,000, and his family would see no royalties to the fortune.
Chalino’s legacy didn’t end there. His son Adán Sánchez was a very popular and successful singer since the age of 10, eventually selling out the Kodak Theater in Hollywood (home of the Academy Awards). At the age of 19, while on tour in Mexico, he was killed in a car crash in his father’s home state of Sinaloa while on tour. Although there are rumors that the car was gunned down, there isn’t much evidence around to back it up.
At the funeral proceedings for Adán, over 10,000 mourning fans crowded the streets in Norwalk, CA. As they were turned away at the church doors and the police arrived with riot gear, groups of angry fans rocked cars and turned over portable toilets. Years later, a stage play was written regarding the events of that day.
As the violence in Mexico increases, the ballads of the drug trade live on- and so does the violence in the music world. According to Wikipedia, over a dozen prominent Mexican musicians have been murdered between 2006 and 2008, most notably Valentín Elizalde, Sergio Vega, Sergio Gómez, the lead singer of Chicago-based Duranguense band K-Paz de la Sierra, and Sergio Vega (El Shaka). Largely, most of these murders have gone unsolved.
Sure, some of this music does tend to glorify violence. As the Mexican government attempts to put a stop to this unique music, their efforts obviously promote the opposite effect. Artists will continue to immortalize these stories with music- a format that will never be forgotten, as the cartel wars and headlines continue.
This video showcases the banda style, a fusion of German polka and Northern Mexican music which originated in Sinaloa. Also, I bet nobody is telling him to take his foot off the couch.
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