L.E.o.R. - Fall ’10 - 80 to 40 - 1 of 5

ESTEVAN ORIOL vs. MIROSLAV TICHY
Estevan Oriol was the manager of Cypress Hill back in the day, and somehow stumbled through this into becoming a photographer of hip hop acts, but then took pictures of gang members in L.A. because he was considered an insider and not some asshole coming to take pictures of gang members.
Miroslav Tichy is some reclusive dude in eastern Europe who built these homemade cameras from scraps he found and went around taking pictures of women for years and years. A lot of times, they posed in ways they never would have had they known the chunk of trash he was holding actually took pictures. A pair of photographers, but far from normal photography.
I will admit that if there was one piece of art I could be given from my wife for a birthday or Christmas or something, it would be a print of this one picture that Oriol took of a Bloods dudes flannel shirts on hangers hanging on a clothesline in the back yard, with some rusty building behind it. It’s an amazing picture. But Tichy is a recluse who has suddenly found fame from his homemade camera photography of sexy women, and doesn’t even want the fame. He just wants to be left fucking alone. Meanwhile, or as chill a dude Estevan Oriol is, he’s trying to sell you t-shirts.
Advantage: Miroslav Tichy.
PRINCE PAUL vs. R.A. THE RUGGED MAN
Prince Paul has been involved in all sorts of great moments in hip hop history - the explosion of De La Soul (which had black dudes in my high school wearing their hair all sorts of off kilter), the Gravediggaz (ahh... the blending of boom bap and horror movies), Handsome Boy Modeling School, The Dino 5 (greatest kid rap album ever made)... he’s just a rock solid voice of hip hop that’s been around from the old school until the now.
R.A. the Rugged Man is just an obscure white rapper for most people, yet within hip hop, he’s an underground legend, whom Biggie Smalls himself glossed as one of the greatest he’d ever been in a booth with. He also does a good bit of freelance writing, for magazines like Mass Appeal (R.I.P.) and Vibe (god, what a terrible magazine), and has a book on boxing coming out at some point in the next year. His style, both in rhyme and written word, is wide open without restraint, and he tends to go for shock value over egotistical boasting. He’s a straight up dirt bag.
And while Prince Paul is one of only a handful of dudes you could say make up the spinal cord of hip hop, and one of the only people whose music I would steal from the internet without question because you know it's going to be at least interesting, R.A. is not limited by genre. The dude is a legend for being banned from playing clubs, and his knowledge of cinematic trash is amazing. I'm very interested to see what a scumbag Long Island white boy roughly my age makes of boxing in book format. And he has the single greatest verse in the past fifteen years of hip hip with his contribution to the Jedi Mind Tricks "Uncommon Valor" track.
Advantage: R.A. the Rugged Man.
DON CHERRY vs. TIGER WILLIAMS
A showdown between hockey legends. Hockey is a sport I never was witness to as a kid growing up, and while in college, had a friend who was the mascot for the minor league Richmond team, so we got comped in a lot of times, and I fell in love. Not too long after, I lucked into like two years of free NHL Pass on a satellite system, which was during the years of the Avs/Red Wings hate epitomized by that epic fight/game they had where the goalies were squaring up at center ice at one point. Fucking classic game.
I am a sort of Washington Capitals fan, although I'm no die-hard, but the Alexander Ovechkin era has really made it easy. Don't think I'd be into it so much if they had Sydney Crosby instead, but it's hard not to like Ovie. He's a knucklehead, and that's basically my favorite part of hockey - the whole "I'm just a big fucking bearded longhaired lunkhead from somewhere far off your normal 3rd grade American history class map" aspect. Plus, they are not afraid to get physical and throw some 'bows if need be.
Don Cherry is a color commentator who often says stupid things and is very entertaining, sort of like Bob Uecker just punch drunker. Tiger Williams is an old dude who holds the all-time NHL record for penalty minutes. He got in more shit than anybody ever, and was proud of it, and is still around to tell ice war stories.
And while I cannot deny that Don Cherry is a great ambassador for his sport to drunken degenerates like myself, when I first got into hockey watching those Richmond Renegades, one of the main reasons was Trevor Senn, who was their team enforcer. Watching an enforcer on the ice instead of simply following the puck like they do on TV is a great joy, especially with a 16 ounce beer in your hand, and maybe a touch of psilocybin in your brain. So really, it is that type of player I am impressed by more than anything else.
Advantage: Tiger Williams (though I think it goes without saying that had Bob Probert not died this year, he would've smoked both of these dudes and pretty much anybody else in my stupid little Learned Elders internet hall of fame nonsense).
FIDEL CASTRO vs. KIM JONG IL
I have always been intrigued by dictators and fascists. The ability to have a cult of personality over a large group of people is quite an accomplishment in itself, but to then parlay that into a ruling position which shifts into authoritative domination that stifles all dissent, that's a serious ass parlay. You think about America and as fucked as we've been with our last few Presidents, all of whom have had the cult of personality, but no matter how much they secretly shift towards the authoritarian role, it never quite takes over. There's nothing special about America, except maybe we are a very diverse crop of humans, making it hard to get enough people in deified awe of someone to install them in absolute power over everybody else, fuck them if they disagree.
I think it is sad Kim Jong Il is not more hyped as some sort of alternative demented genius. I mean, I now the whole Might Could Start a Nuclear Confrontation thing is a drawback, and liberal hipster types, for as contrarian as they tend to be, don't necessarily like to endorse dictators. But the whole Kim Jong Il (and his father before him) saga in North Korea is crazy, regardless of the propaganda machine that might prop it. (Which can we trust that anyways since it is our propaganda machine that tells us this happens?) But the guy has giant stadium performances with thousands upon thousands of people, just for him. Like the seats are full of performers who turn over cards at the appropriate time to create giant pictures. And he kidnaps actresses and actors to force them to make films for him. I don't know if there has ever been an evil dictator type with such an artphag bent before, and frankly, I find it very very impressive.
Ol' Fidel on the other hand, is old school. He's a baseball player who decided to overthrow a government, and has never really stepped down ever since. A simple guy, no one can accuse him of squandering his country's wealth, as he's not kicking it in gold necklaces on yachts. Dude has worn nothing but olive drab military gear for decades, ever since he hung up the baseball spikes. He's rocked the utilitarian communist beard for that time as well, and although yeah, communism is evil, whatever, there are some things that make it not seem so bad. Cuba has the lowest illiteracy rate in the world (well it did at one time when I read that, so it just stays true in my brain) as well as a very low infant mortality rate. It's a beautiful Caribbean country, and no one I've ever read about going there outside of the tourist areas has not been overwhelmed with what a beautiful and simple place it is. Making lemonade out of lemons. They can't get new cars from America (embargoing assholes) so all those old 1950s bombers are still puttering down the streets.
Who's to say simple is bad? Think about the high tech modernization going on at Guatanamo, where American authorities have taken the Arabs they've kidnapped to torture and detain until they reveal whatever it is they are supposed to know. Not to mention the fact the U.S. government beams constant propaganda via radio waves from that little corner of Cuba as well at the Cuban people.
To be honest, I'd rather sit around a picnic table and listen to old men play guitars and we all drive ratty old cars and we all drink cheap gutrot liquor and we are poor but we are happy and all our wives have big asses that bounce in the moonlight when we do it from behind on our simple beds with no screens in the open windows so you might get a mosquito bite or two than fucking think about torture and detainment and idealogical wars and all that crap. I mean, we're storing prisoners of our current idealogical war on a carjacked corner of an island that we've had a long-running idealogical war with. It's fucking crazy. And I know I'm simplifying things somewhat, but still. The motherfuckers shooting the propaganda at me and you through Time magazine and the cable news and Executive Orders, they simplify it all far worse than I do.
Advantage: Fidel Castro.
VINCENTE PIERRE vs. WHITEY BULGER
A battle between the criminal element, though very different types.
Vincente Pierre is an accused black Muslim terrorist who started an Islamic trailer park community in Charlotte County, Virginia, not too far from where I grew up - between where my mom lives in Meherrin and my one sister lives in Clarksville. They got busted for some sort of weapons violations, and it turned out that Pierre had multiple wives, most likely, in his rural southside Virginia trailer park compound, plus underground tunnels and all sorts of other crazy militiaman stuff that would make my dead daddy proud, except that it was black Muslims. The crazy thing is right down the road from my mom's house, and actually now on land that I used to wander as a kid and was once owned by my grandfather, a second community linked to this first one has sprouted up. They first started building it when I was in high school, but now it's full-blown, and they have some weird security force with a website that provides bodyguard services and computer security and all sorts of nefarious shit that you normally don't associate with a bunch of people that live in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere.
Whitey Bulger was a former boss of an Irish-American mob in Boston, and made hella money in all the normal mob ways - gambling, pussy, guns, and drugs. The thing that makes Whitey Bulger so awesome is he bolted in the mid-'90s when the DEA was about to come down on him, and has been a successful fugitive ever since. He's been on America's Most Wanted 15 times, and has often been seen around the world, though those sightings are not always verified. The last verified time anyone saw him was in London in 2002, though the FBI has chased after leads in Uruguay, Italy, and elsewhere since then. He is assumed to be alive and breathing still though, coming up on his 81st birthday next week. He is also considered the inspiration for Jack Nicholson's character in The Departed.
This is a hard one for me to choose. Pierre is more of a "protect your own" kind of guy who is building his own community separate from the world at large, while Bulger had that classic successful criminal Robin Hood element that had the poor people of Boston loving on him for how he protected the hood and gave out turkeys on Thanksgiving. And frankly, you have to wonder if Bulger is still alive, although I doubt the FBI would still be putting resources towards him if he weren't.
At the same time, I've been reading the 120 Questions from Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad a lot lately, although mostly to lead myself back to Clarence 13X and the Nations of Gods and Earths more than to get into Islam. The Nations of Gods and Earths really jibe me more than most religions, other than maybe Taoism, with a lot of mathematically based new age science and general wackiness that fucks with language and reality. I've been working on rewriting some texts to incorporate whiteys like myself into the whole 5% philosophy, because if you dig into what they're saying, and even a bit of what Clarence 13X preached, it wasn't black man as in literal black man so much as a black and white where the roles of good and evil were flipped off the standard Christian color scheme. You can be a black man in that sense but not have dark skin. But shit, in America we've complicated racial matters so goddamned much, I'd probably get stabbed if I tried to pull off some shit like that. Plus, Vincente Pierre and the other black Islamic trailer park down the road from my mom's, they're not Nation of Gods and Earths people, but straight up militant Muslim who are part of an Al-Fuqra anti-America campaign. Although I'm as anti-governmentarianism as anyone, so that's not an automatic x.
Advantage: Vincente Pierre (South Side Virginia, represent... and it is odd how Clarence 13X the founder of Nations of Gods and Earths was born in Danville, and this other stuff is happening in Charlotte and Prince Edward county... not to mention the first free black community in America was a place called Israel Hill just outside of Farmville; who knew I was born in the lap of so much culture? I thought it was just a rundown place where everybody became addicted to or sold different illicit things and had a hopeless outlook on the world).
DAVID SCHULTZ vs. TERRY FUNK
Ahh...the stupid professional wrestling. I got caught up in this nonsense too much as a kid, to the point now that I can have completely separate work and home personnas and it's not a problem for me compartmentalize it because it makes sense. That's been a big influence on my writing styles over the years too because I can very easily add a complete lie to something that's otherwise completely truthful so that there are people to this day who think I let a guy suck my dick in the bus station in St. Louis, Missouri, because I felt sorry for him.
David Schultz was basically Stone Cold Steve Austin back in the 1980s - a foul-minded, beer-drinking redneck dude who took no shit. Problem is, he was also an enforcer, and when John Stossel was doing a feature for 20/20 on how wrestling was fake (hard to believe that was actually a story, isn't it?), Vince McMahon told Schultz to rough him up or scare him or something, so Schultz, being the loveable guy he was, when asked if wrestling was fake, slapped the shit out of Stossel, asking him, "Does that feel fake?" Ultimately, John Stossel ended up deaf in that ear, sued WWF, and Schultz got blamed for it to cover their asses, fired, and blacklisted from wrestling. (Looking back though, what's really more sleazy - TV news programs like what Stossel does or pro wrestling? They're both so fucking nasty, and at least wrestling admits it's fake now. Having suffered through more than a few John Stossel pieces over the years where he throws out fear-inducing propaganda under the guise of actual information, I can't say I mind the fact he got deafened by David Schultz.) Post-wrestling, Schultz was a truck driver and then a bounty hunter, which when you think about some completely bad ass blonde afro having redneck dude from the '80s disappearing and then filling out his life through long hauling and hunting fugitives, that's a pretty tight storyline.
Terry Funk, on the other hand, may be the most amazingly fucked up yet beautiful professional wrestler there ever was. He dabbled in Hollywood for a while, both acting and doing stunts, after his first run as a World champion wrestler was winding down in the 1980s, yet came back as an old man who would bloody himself up in barbed wire matches. And listening to the guy talk, he is an amazing man. And crazy as fucking bat shit. Really, I just wanted to expound a little bit more on David Schultz before I just chose the Funker.
Advantage: Terry Funk.
GLEN STEWART GODWIN vs. NAZARIO MORENO
A cocaine criminal element showdown this time. Glen Stewart Godwin is a guy who in the early 1980s had absolutely no criminal history whatsoever. But it is believed he and a friend had planned to rob a drug dealer, and ended up killing the guy and burning the body in a truck to try and hide the evidence. He got sent to Folsom Prison, where he escaped in 1987, never to be caught. He ended up in Mexico, where he started selling cocaine, as a white guy, and got put in Mexican jail. American authorities were working to extradite him when Godwin stabbed and killed a Mexican cartel member in jail, which slowed down extradition proceedings. During this time, he escaped Mexican jail. Sadly, I do not know of any narcocorridos about Glen Stewart Godwin, although I guess it's only a matter of time before a white rapper takes that name as his own. The FBI put him on their most wanted list in 1996, and he's believed to still be active in the drug trade somewhere in Latin America. Or he might be at the bottom of a Mexican well. Hard to say.
Speaking of Mexican drug cartels, Nazario Moreno is the leader of La Familia, which is the cartel that has members carry the Bible with them, although Moreno has made his own translations of many parts. Basically they are a Christian cult drug cartel that murders motherfuckers in the process of selling drugs. The thing is, when they first started up, it was more as a protection against other drug cartels as a sort of vigilante police force for the poor, and they actually have more control over many of the cities in the Michoacan state than the government does. Moreno preaches that they have divine right to kill their enemies, and no member of the cartel is allowed to use drugs. Their philosophy is part evangelism and part up-with-the-people sloganeering, and Moreno gives out books as required reading to cartel members and even pays rural school teachers and government agencies to teach those books in schools in Michoacan. (Really, Mexico is straight fucked.) His nickname is Mas Loco, and La Familia trained alongside Los Zetas to be the paramilitary branches of drug cartels in the '90s, although both of have split off to become their own, mega-violent cartels.
And while I am interested in both of these guys, I can't help but think Godwin hasn't bitten it somewhere and no one will ever know because his body's been decomposed in a vat of acid by now. Plus, the mixing of religion and organized criminal activity has always seemed really intriguing to me. Religion is some serious shit, and yet we always fall for it as humans, even if the falling for it is that there is none and science is the one true answer for science is the only true religion.
Advantage: Nazario Moreno.
BLOWFLY vs. GABRIEL DUENEZ
Boy, I had not expected to write 3500 words on this shit today, but here I am. This last match-up for today is between a pair of fringe musical influences. Blowfly was an R&B singer and made adult-oriented party tapes wearing crazy costumes. Basically, he was the Ol' Dirty Bastard before there was one, just he wasn't addicted to crack, so far as I know. To be honest, I've never really listened to too much Blowfly because it's novelty music and you can't really get into it. There's plenty of music that I can dig on for real and not just to be like, "haha, check out what I'm listening to."
Gabriel Duenez, at this point in his life, is an air conditioner repairman in Houston, Texas. But back in the day, he used to make slowed down cumbia mixes he sold at the flea market in Monterrey, single-handedly creating cumbia rebajada, which is essentially screwed and chopped cumbia music, which sounds fucking fresh as shit. I love screwed music, and the percussion of cumbia music screwed is so perfectly tweaked, and the bass gets down to a nice steady hum, with ghostly spic vocals... man I wish this shit was on 7-inches and my jukebox was fixed because I'd just sit in the dark drinking cough medicine listening to that shit all night long.
But beyond that, a guy creating a musical genre that in the internet age would have gotten him a lot of non-moneyed blogospheric love, who did the same in the 1960s and sold a bunch of mixtapes at the Monterrey flea market, but now is a broke ass old man fixing air conditioners. There's something noble and pure about that. And perfect.
Advantage: Gabriel Duenez.