Too Fast, Too Furious Part Two: Disorder on the Border
Border Patrol. Narcos. Americanized AK-47s. Rio Bravo-style sieges.
Considering this testimony was obtained from a witness and includes information on operations from 2009, El Narco have managed to effectively quell the data flow going out as well as properly ‘suppress’ the Media.
OG post from Wired contributor and journalist Robert Beckhusen. @rbeckhusen
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/cartel/
Shane and Dan headed up to Anderson’s to pick up copies of their mini-comic preview for ComicCon.
Why am I writing this in third person?
Okay, we’ll redact the last but keep it in the post for posterity.
I picked up Dan at the airport. It was a total clusterfuck. Construction everywhere. I miss the days when it was just a bunch of concrete barriers and heavily armed National Guardsmen. Oh wait…
Here’s photographic documentation of Dan and Shane picking up the copies. Compa/surprised human awesome machine, Mike Spratley also pictured.
See you at San Diego Comic Con.
The kind folks at Andersons in Encinitas (thanks Mike!) sent the proof for the Caustic Soda – A Year Future Narco Romance. This 3-page, folded 8.5×11 mini-comic will be available at SMALL PRESS K14 at ComicCon this weekend. Also, illustrator Daniel Crosier will be hanging with Sideshow performers The Enigma (X-Files, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not) and Serana Rose, at the table Friday promoting their Show Devils comic book. Looks like I’ll be there on Saturday for a few illusive minutes. Stop by and pick up a copy!
We are all part of an interconnected network.
We occupy the between space.
The border.
Living and loving between bullets, walls, tax brackets and water-cooler TV episodes, environmental catastrophes and celebrity gossip.
Enamored by a million screens that promise everything and deliver nothing, our collective dream languishes in a stampede, a flight to the future. This dreaming America haunts our multi-story parking garages and cul-de-sacs.
- Nevona, A: Agility Sec Op 3
One of the key elements of this series is time. Linearity. Past and present. Can it bend? Is time malleable? The Ouroboros is a symbol I’ve used in the logo for the punk rock club, The InterZone and is also integrated into Anton’s ocular implant. His Ouro eye. Similarly, “Year Future” in the title’s subhead is based on the concept of another “now” or rather some parallel reality. A shortly lived punk band from Los Angeles of the same name, helmed by Sonny Kay, also inspired Year Future. Sonny is renown for his visual and album art for artists such as Omar Rodriguez Lopez, Glitch Mob, Le Butcherettes and respected for the work done with his indie record label Gold Standard Labs. I saw Sonny perform with Angel Hair (back when the Internets got birthed) in Denver and have been following each of his projects closely since. The VSS. Subpoena the Past and of course, Year Future. I wanted to have a better understanding of why he chose that name and why it still strikes me as particularly relevant, especially in relation to CS.
SR: What inspired the band name, “Year Future”?
Sonny Kay: I don’t remember now which came first, the band name or the song “Each Others Futures” which we came up with right around the same time. Time as a concept, as a linear mechanism, has always concerned me to one degree or another – before YF I was in a band called Subpoena the Past. Not entirely sure what it’s all about, but I think I just conceive of it as something more profound than a lot of other people.
I’m good with trivial dates, remembering the exact sequence of events in my family’s life 25 years ago, that kind of thing. My mom and sisters are constantly asking me how and why I remember half the shit I do.
Anyway, to answer your question, the band name came out of the desire for something that sounded less cynical and (hopefully) less cliché than the average punk band name. I as the lyricist, at least, was genuinely trying to focus the band’s attention (and that of whatever tiny audience we had) specifically on the future – on the consequences of all the bullshit going on [presently]. In that way, we were no more original than – take your pick – Crass, The Clash, Propagandhi…It was just, for me, the first time I’d felt OK with doing something overtly political – cryptic as it may admittedly have all been). I also thought the name was something that could deliver a pretty coherent idea of where we were coming from, at least lyrically, to people who wouldn’t ever be interested in ever actually hearing the band. In hindsight I can’t remember why that mattered! I also can’t remember the other name contenders, but I do remember saying the phrase out loud and Jim, our drummer and the other driving force in the band’s “aesthetic” early on, just kind of went “Yes”.
–
Thanks Sonny!
Sonny and his old band mates from the VSS will be hitting the road this fall for a bit of the ol’ in and out. Get your info on VSS here http://thevss.com/circuits.html
And check out all of Sonny’s art at http://sonnykay.com/
San Diego, CA, five-minutes in the future.
It begins with an escalation of cross-border violence, moving west from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific: headless bodies are found on the US side of the Tijuana estuary; a drug mule detonates explosives while being searched; police are ambushed paramilitary-style by a narco death squad.
It inevitably mutates from a border skirmish into a regional conflict and finally, a war. The Narco Insurgency adapts: El Paso Los Cruces and El Centro erupt in urban warfare. And grim images similar to those from half a world away, from Kandahar and Fallujah, are now broadcast from our front door.
The US Military is spread thin, fighting multiple wars across the globe. They contract the private security company, Agility International. Agility mobilizes the border (civilians caught in the crossfire), brokering a tenuous ceasefire.
We buy security. But at what price?
- Nevona, A: Agility Sec Op 3
In spring of 2008 I was at Mission Hills Bike Shop in San Diego talking to a bike mechanic who lived and commuted from Tijuana. He recounted his first hand experience of a massive gun battle that took place in his neighborhood. People were talking about it, mostly friends who had family or coworkers living in TJ. The mega chatter was on the street mostly, though at first it was top news, or maybe it was just top of mind. However, it ended up as short form ticker on the bottom of the screen. This was pre-KBPS Fronteras. Anyway, rival gangs from the Sinaloa and Tijuana cartels were fighting for control of the San Diego trafficking corridor after the Felix gang lost its band of brothers. Almost twenty people were killed during the melee and the narcos had used automatic weapons in residential neighborhoods. It was unfathomable. The thriving tourist market atrophied. No more Chickle or nick knacks for the culture vultures on shore leave from their cruise ships.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world the Mahdi army was engaged with Iraq and coalition forces for control of Basra. You’d assume that by turning on a television you’d get bombarded with images of war from another continent as some starched-collared, pasty anchor looked blankly at the teleprompter, reported morosely on the ongoing election year excitement; the audacity of hope in parallel trajectory of an incumbent president’s final yee-haw victory lap around the Oval office. Still, violence south of the line increased.
To hear of something like the shoot out actually happening twenty minutes away was startling to say the least. To know someone or hear from someone who was affected by the violence was uncanny.
The border is porous. Walls are superficial.
I began writing what would become the bulk of Caustic Soda (or at least most of the first book) after hearing about the arrest of Santiago Meza, AKA ‘El Pozolero’, in 2009. The ‘Stew Maker’ had reportedly disposed of over 300 bodies while in the employ of the Narco’s in Tijuana’s Zona Norte district. The media couldn’t have asked for and received a more sensational story. They called him the body dissolver and described in great detail, in that affect-less shark-eyed manner of theirs, about human remains, bones and skin, gnarly stuff, found in pits and barrels around his place.
I’ll continue writing this series of posts. Mostly because I find the process of writing and art endlessly fascinating and it’d be good to document the creation of this project.
